The DRM in IMP is aimed at stopping people from outside the UK getting their hands on content funded by UK license payers' money, with out paying anything.
So how is this better than requiring the connection to come from an IP address in the UK, requiring proof of the user being a licence payer or both? Which would work perfectly well with any delivery protocol.
The BBCs in a bit of a sticky spot with this. The BBCs focus is the UK, and agrees with programme makers to show programme in the UK. Where the content is made available on the web, there are no geographical restrictions, so I understand that programme makers -- and not the BBC -- are the people who mandate that a programme should not be made available outside the UK.
They could restrict by IP address, as various websites do, or require a correct TV licence number and address combination.
I had an image of The Doctor using the TARDIS to file-share causing others to be amazed that they could download entire albums in no time by artists that had yet to born.
Not a good idea to let the ancestors of said artists hear them though:)
Offtopic : Is it illegal to share music that hasn't been written yet ?
If you have a time machine that is not a problem since it's easy to ensure that you are the copyright holder. Especially if you have a HHGTTG editor along for the ride.
He sums up his p.o.v., which I think every artist, be it writer or musician, or Spam carver should listen to before using DRM in their content. His greatest problem as an artist is not piracy, it's obscurity. 99.5% of all the people who never buy his books are doing so because they don't know about his work. The other.5% are people downloading his books, and not paying for them.
This highly applicable to probably the vast majority of "artists". Especially when you consider how highly sucessful authors, musicans, movies, etc got turned down by company after company.
DRM is fundamentally flawed because the recipient must be given the decryption key to view the DRMed information. At the same time, the copyright holder wants to keep the decryption key secret to prevent the recipient from copying the clear text.
Thus making it irrelevent how well secured the key is.
Current software DRM schemes rely on security through obscurity, i.e. secret algorithms, secret protocols, and secret source code.
It's rather difficult for the workings of these "cypher machines" to stay secret when they are then sold in huge quantities. With keys being either bundled with either the machine or the encrypted text.
That is the crux of the problem with content: Users do not buy content, they buy a license to use it. Arguing otherwise is simplistic and disingenuous.
Except that things are advertised with the likes of "own it on DVD". Rather than "Buy some rights to watch it in ways acceptable to us on DVD". The media (including some proprietary software) companies want to be able to sell a mass market product whilst at the same time having a contract which restricts what the customer can and can't do with the product. (Without customers being able to renegotiate that contract.) Effectivly they want to "have their cake and eat it".
Trying to treat IP "content" as a "real good" is a silly because there are no "real goods" that we can duplicate at no cost and then mass distribute an infinite number of flawless reproductions instantly, across the planet.
Whereas a couple of centuries it was possible to support this fiction, because any content was tighly bound to a physical piece of media.
If we had the capacity to do anything like that for cars, houses or other real property, then the business model for producing those real goods would instantly vanish.
These business models wouldn't vanish entirely. But would be shrink to only cover the custom/luxury markets. Effectivly physical artifacts would become like software, costs money to create/modify a design, but after that copies are free.
I see things like this all the time, and the first thing people do is jump all over the DA for filing charges. I can't believe it even has to be said, but I guess is bears repeating that it is the job of the D.A. to file charges whenever it appears that the law has been broken, REGARDLESS OF EXTENUATING CIRCUMSTANCES.
In which case should they not have also charged Diebold?
There is a legal thoery (similar to the original EULA theory) that goes as follows:
When you run and install a program, you make copies in RAM and on the hard disk. This requires a license from the copyright holder.
If you tried to make a similar argument about reading a book or playing an audio recording nobody would take you seriously. However the idea has started to creep into video recordings because it has been accepted as applicable to software.
A license grant from the seller can reasonably be implied from the purchase, as selling unusable copies doesn't make a whole lot of sense.
There is no requirement for laws to make sense however:)
I'm not sure what jurisdiction you are posting from, however, the validity of EULAs is entirely based on this not being true. If you do not agree to the EULA and run the program anyway, theoretically they come after you for copyright infringement for running the program. Otherwise EULAs would have no teeth, as nobody would ever need agree to it and we'd have a plethora of legally tight ways of disagreeing to the EULA and still running the program.
The question of the legal enforcability of EULAs is ambiguious enough to get people trying to pass laws to explicitally give them legal standing...
"we are too stupid to make a distinction between Free software and commercial software. We can't read nor do we understand licence agreements."
"free software" can easily be "commercial" and there is plenty of proprietary software which isn't in any way "commercial". What she did is know as "shoot first and ask questions later". The solution is simply to either ask the copyright holder before taking drastic action or only take such action when the copyright holder complains first.
Your analogy makes no sense. A lightbulb emits light from the UV to the IR range, and a laser emits a specific frequency which could fall anywhere in there.
The other difference is that an incandescent lamp is typically rated by the amount of electrical energy it consumes, whereas a laser is rated by the amount of light energy it emits.
How come when the property of regular citizens is siezed for investigation of a piracy or drug-related crime, you always hear the term "raid." I mean, surely when the Justice Department needs to take a look at Microsoft's paperwork, they send in in an elite squad of ATF agents to rappel down from above, crash through the roof, and storm the building with machineguns drawn.
The most likely explanation is that they don't want to offend Microsoft, but couldn't care less about offending a "regular Joe". Worst case senario is that governments actually fear big corporates.
I prefer the term revenus stream hijacking, because the people that download stuff would not have bought it anyway.
It's rather more complex than that, since there certainly are cases of people only buying stuff because they downloaded it. There's also a common complication that people may not be able to buy even if they wanted to. Either because of a distributor's wish to have arbitrary (sometimes even illegal) geographic restrictions or because the whatever is "out of print".
A Homo Sapiens with a pointy stick is about the most fearsome thing in existence and when going up against a lion the lion had better be a pretty sharp cookie to come out of it alive.
Most likely humans had most impact on the predator population when they started raising domesticated livestock. Since systematic extermination of predators has an obvious benefit.
But the technical term for an Australopithicine who has just had a leopard that outweighs him drop out of a tree onto his head is "lunch."
However if the Australopithicine is part of an organised group the leopard might not live long enough to enjoy his or her meal...
Evolution is a combination of natural selection, genetic (in)stability and mutations, environmental factors, and random chance (like natural disasters) all acting together to dictate that the organisms with the best traits for a given environment will have the best chance of survival and pass those traits on to their offspring.
Once humans developed language you also get evolution operating through mechanisms other than genetics. Since accumulated knowlage can be relevent to survival. Including knowlage of things which have not been seen firsthand by any member of a given group.
He was charged with exporting the munition - the problem wasn't so much that he'd created said encryption tool as that he'd put it on an ftp
Didn't he actually exporting in a book, with an OCR friendly font, which wasn't actually covered by the regulations in question
where $NASTY_REGIME could get it.
Since $NASTY_REGIME is a variable the list dosn't remain the same. Even if the regime in question remains the same the US Government's position towards it can change. That's before you consider the possibility of governments being replaced by a coup, revolution, even an election...
Terrorists in the UK have already gained access to our driving license database for a period of years thru a symathizer in the DVLA (our version of the DMV) and used it to target victims. http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/england/staffordshire/3 951945.stm for more details.
Yet he only gets a 5 month prison sentence and dosn't even appear to have been charged under anti-terror legislation. One of the fundermental problems with the "War on Terror" is that governments involved appear to be highly selective which terrorists they persue.
Here to identify myself I have to have a drivers license and a phone bill with my address (or something like that).
It's just stupid, why is a permit to operate a machine used to identify someone?
Makes no sense.
It gets even dafter when you consider that in some parts of the world that "permit" is required to purchase alcohol. Even though operating said machine is against the law when intoxicated with alcohol...
We use ID cards for all sorts of things today: proof of age, proof of license, proof of identity. For all the things we normally use an ID card for, a better (harder to fake, or harder to obtian on false pretenses) card is, well, better.
A single document for everthing isn't actually better. It's actually far less secure than having a set of documents each with a single specific purpose. One of the issues related to "ID theft" is feature creep in existing documents, e.g. using a document indicating competence to drive vehicles on the public roads as proof of identity (even requiring it to purchase alcohol) and the misuse of SSNs as identifiers in the USA.
Because having an identity card - that you have to carry with you at all times - is the sensible solution to the problem of identity theft. Because we all know that nothing you carry with you 24/7/365 can ever be stolen.
Even if the card couldn't be stolen it dosn't address the problem. Since the information stored on the card and the machinary to make a card is elsewhere. "Identity theft" does not require the theft of a physical object in the first place.
Slashdot Mirror
The DRM in IMP is aimed at stopping people from outside the UK getting their hands on content funded by UK license payers' money, with out paying anything.
So how is this better than requiring the connection to come from an IP address in the UK, requiring proof of the user being a licence payer or both?
Which would work perfectly well with any delivery protocol.
The BBCs in a bit of a sticky spot with this. The BBCs focus is the UK, and agrees with programme makers to show programme in the UK. Where the content is made available on the web, there are no geographical restrictions, so I understand that programme makers -- and not the BBC -- are the people who mandate that a programme should not be made available outside the UK.
They could restrict by IP address, as various websites do, or require a correct TV licence number and address combination.
I had an image of The Doctor using the TARDIS to file-share causing others to be amazed that they could download entire albums in no time by artists that had yet to born.
:)
Not a good idea to let the ancestors of said artists hear them though
Offtopic : Is it illegal to share music that hasn't been written yet ?
If you have a time machine that is not a problem since it's easy to ensure that you are the copyright holder. Especially if you have a HHGTTG editor along for the ride.
He sums up his p.o.v., which I think every artist, be it writer or musician, or Spam carver should listen to before using DRM in their content. His greatest problem as an artist is not piracy, it's obscurity. 99.5% of all the people who never buy his books are doing so because they don't know about his work. The other .5% are people downloading his books, and not paying for them.
This highly applicable to probably the vast majority of "artists". Especially when you consider how highly sucessful authors, musicans, movies, etc got turned down by company after company.
DRM is fundamentally flawed because the recipient must be given the decryption key to view the DRMed information. At the same time, the copyright holder wants to keep the decryption key secret to prevent the recipient from copying the clear text.
Thus making it irrelevent how well secured the key is.
Current software DRM schemes rely on security through obscurity, i.e. secret algorithms, secret protocols, and secret source code.
It's rather difficult for the workings of these "cypher machines" to stay secret when they are then sold in huge quantities. With keys being either bundled with either the machine or the encrypted text.
That is the crux of the problem with content: Users do not buy content, they buy a license to use it. Arguing otherwise is simplistic and disingenuous.
Except that things are advertised with the likes of "own it on DVD". Rather than "Buy some rights to watch it in ways acceptable to us on DVD". The media (including some proprietary software) companies want to be able to sell a mass market product whilst at the same time having a contract which restricts what the customer can and can't do with the product. (Without customers being able to renegotiate that contract.) Effectivly they want to "have their cake and eat it".
Trying to treat IP "content" as a "real good" is a silly because there are no "real goods" that we can duplicate at no cost and then mass distribute an infinite number of flawless reproductions instantly, across the planet.
Whereas a couple of centuries it was possible to support this fiction, because any content was tighly bound to a physical piece of media.
If we had the capacity to do anything like that for cars, houses or other real property, then the business model for producing those real goods would instantly vanish.
These business models wouldn't vanish entirely. But would be shrink to only cover the custom/luxury markets. Effectivly physical artifacts would become like software, costs money to create/modify a design, but after that copies are free.
I see things like this all the time, and the first thing people do is jump all over the DA for filing charges. I can't believe it even has to be said, but I guess is bears repeating that it is the job of the D.A. to file charges whenever it appears that the law has been broken, REGARDLESS OF EXTENUATING CIRCUMSTANCES.
In which case should they not have also charged Diebold?
no one sells water that has "fallen from the sky"; they sell purified water.
It need not be purified by them. Quite a few companies sell bottled tap water, at a quite huge markup.
There is a legal thoery (similar to the original EULA theory) that goes as follows:
:)
When you run and install a program, you make copies in RAM and on the hard disk. This requires a license from the copyright holder.
If you tried to make a similar argument about reading a book or playing an audio recording nobody would take you seriously.
However the idea has started to creep into video recordings because it has been accepted as applicable to software.
A license grant from the seller can reasonably be implied from the purchase, as selling unusable copies doesn't make a whole lot of sense.
There is no requirement for laws to make sense however
I'm not sure what jurisdiction you are posting from, however, the validity of EULAs is entirely based on this not being true. If you do not agree to the EULA and run the program anyway, theoretically they come after you for copyright infringement for running the program. Otherwise EULAs would have no teeth, as nobody would ever need agree to it and we'd have a plethora of legally tight ways of disagreeing to the EULA and still running the program.
The question of the legal enforcability of EULAs is ambiguious enough to get people trying to pass laws to explicitally give them legal standing...
"we are too stupid to make a distinction between Free software and commercial software. We can't read nor do we understand licence agreements."
"free software" can easily be "commercial" and there is plenty of proprietary software which isn't in any way "commercial".
What she did is know as "shoot first and ask questions later". The solution is simply to either ask the copyright holder before taking drastic action or only take such action when the copyright holder complains first.
Your analogy makes no sense. A lightbulb emits light from the UV to the IR range, and a laser emits a specific frequency which could fall anywhere in there.
The other difference is that an incandescent lamp is typically rated by the amount of electrical energy it consumes, whereas a laser is rated by the amount of light energy it emits.
How come when the property of regular citizens is siezed for investigation of a piracy or drug-related crime, you always hear the term "raid."
I mean, surely when the Justice Department needs to take a look at Microsoft's paperwork, they send in in an elite squad of ATF agents to rappel down from above, crash through the roof, and storm the building with machineguns drawn.
The most likely explanation is that they don't want to offend Microsoft, but couldn't care less about offending a "regular Joe". Worst case senario is that governments actually fear big corporates.
I prefer the term revenus stream hijacking, because the people that download stuff would not have bought it anyway.
It's rather more complex than that, since there certainly are cases of people only buying stuff because they downloaded it. There's also a common complication that people may not be able to buy even if they wanted to. Either because of a distributor's wish to have arbitrary (sometimes even illegal) geographic restrictions or because the whatever is "out of print".
From the article: ''The Motion Picture Association of America estimates that the movie industry lost $5.4 billion last year due to piracy.''
What is this expressed as a percentage of those same companies profits?
It's some dork who uploaded a video with the "play in all countries except the united states" option turned on. It's just a stupid google feature.
Maybe they were making a subtle comment about the Google "feature"...
A Homo Sapiens with a pointy stick is about the most fearsome thing in existence and when going up against a lion the lion had better be a pretty sharp cookie to come out of it alive.
Most likely humans had most impact on the predator population when they started raising domesticated livestock. Since systematic extermination of predators has an obvious benefit.
But the technical term for an Australopithicine who has just had a leopard that outweighs him drop out of a tree onto his head is "lunch."
However if the Australopithicine is part of an organised group the leopard might not live long enough to enjoy his or her meal...
Evolution is a combination of natural selection, genetic (in)stability and mutations, environmental factors, and random chance (like natural disasters) all acting together to dictate that the organisms with the best traits for a given environment will have the best chance of survival and pass those traits on to their offspring.
Once humans developed language you also get evolution operating through mechanisms other than genetics. Since accumulated knowlage can be relevent to survival. Including knowlage of things which have not been seen firsthand by any member of a given group.
I think that is kind of the point of the article, one human with a stick and a rock, "mmmm...mmmm good."
Especially given that lions typically hunt cooperativly.
Lots of humans with sticks and rocks, "hmmm...I think I feel like a gazelle today."
Or something else which dosn't cooperativly defend against predators.
Early man, I'll call him 'Harry', realized this. So Harry made a few hunting buddies.
A while later on Harry and co are enjoying lion cub kebab...
He was charged with exporting the munition - the problem wasn't so much that he'd created said encryption tool as that he'd put it on an ftp
Didn't he actually exporting in a book, with an OCR friendly font, which wasn't actually covered by the regulations in question
where $NASTY_REGIME could get it.
Since $NASTY_REGIME is a variable the list dosn't remain the same. Even if the regime in question remains the same the US Government's position towards it can change. That's before you consider the possibility of governments being replaced by a coup, revolution, even an election...
Terrorists in the UK have already gained access to our driving license database for a period of years thru a symathizer in the DVLA (our version of the DMV) and used it to target victims. http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/england/staffordshire/3 951945.stm for more details.
Yet he only gets a 5 month prison sentence and dosn't even appear to have been charged under anti-terror legislation.
One of the fundermental problems with the "War on Terror" is that governments involved appear to be highly selective which terrorists they persue.
Here to identify myself I have to have a drivers license and a phone bill with my address (or something like that). It's just stupid, why is a permit to operate a machine used to identify someone? Makes no sense.
It gets even dafter when you consider that in some parts of the world that "permit" is required to purchase alcohol. Even though operating said machine is against the law when intoxicated with alcohol...
My main objection to the ID cards is that they are next to useless (Even MI:5 has said this) and will cost *vast* amounts of money.
In some cases they may even be worst that useless.
We use ID cards for all sorts of things today: proof of age, proof of license, proof of identity. For all the things we normally use an ID card for, a better (harder to fake, or harder to obtian on false pretenses) card is, well, better.
A single document for everthing isn't actually better. It's actually far less secure than having a set of documents each with a single specific purpose.
One of the issues related to "ID theft" is feature creep in existing documents, e.g. using a document indicating competence to drive vehicles on the public roads as proof of identity (even requiring it to purchase alcohol) and the misuse of SSNs as identifiers in the USA.
Because having an identity card - that you have to carry with you at all times - is the sensible solution to the problem of identity theft. Because we all know that nothing you carry with you 24/7/365 can ever be stolen.
Even if the card couldn't be stolen it dosn't address the problem. Since the information stored on the card and the machinary to make a card is elsewhere. "Identity theft" does not require the theft of a physical object in the first place.