Here is the deal: the GPL is about sharing ; it is the opposite of a restrictive copyright law. It empowers individual and not some central entity. It helps spread creativity and not stifle it.
Indeed the GPL probably has more in common with the US Constitution than the more recent US copyright laws.
The way I see it is. The entire media industry was born when the media itself was invented (records, tapes) sometime about 80 years ago (correct me if I'm wrong). That is how that industry got its profit.
The roots of the business models involved go back a few centuries to the creation of the book publishing industry. It was the adoption of the printing press which created the concept of "copyright" in the first place.
Before that time, rather, before the invention of media, how did artists get money? Just concerts? Perhaps being paid by a king (in Mozarts time) to write a glorius musical to please him. Whatever. Their revenue came from elsewhere since there was no 'media' to sell.
The obvious alternatives are to have a "day job", some kind of patron (either individual or corporate) or to sell tickets for a public performance.
Remember, **the Supreme Court does NOT guarantee a profit margin!**
Or even a profit the US Constitution dosn't guarantee this either.
And god dammit, people need to realize this. That is a harsh fact of business. Once something becomes dated, then that industry needs to evolve with their market or die.
This is a basic principle of a capitalist economy. Protecting a business or a business model is more socialism or even communism.
The main reason is that in the past century, both law and technology happend to be in place to allow a handful of performers to amass wealth that no performer in the centuries before could ever hope to posess.
Whilst this system may have been good for a small proportion. It dosn't appear to have done much for those who have tried to "make it big" and failed. Even some of the supposedly "sucessful" group have wound up bankrupt, insane or even prematurely dead.
everyone thinks that politics is more corrupt today than in the days of yor...the truth is that after the founing fathers did their stints as president politics were more corrupt than today. the dead voted very often, gangs were hired to intimidate the opposition voters....corperations actualy had MORE power than the government.
The thing is that the modern US political scene is quite easy to corrupt. All a corporation needs to do is buy off two political parties. As opposed to having to "persuade" many (quite possibly non national) political parties and individuals.
In more contemporary usage, the term has been broadened to include also what the American Founding Fathers called a republic -- a governmental system in which the power of the people is normally exercised only indirectly, through freely elected representatives who are supposed to make government decisions according to the popular will, or at least according to the supposed values and interests of the population.
Does the modern US even meet that definition. Given the way in which US elections (at many levels) tend to be dominated by the same two political parties.
Even if they want to read what they're voting, often it's impossible. The staffers put together the final text of enormous bills, which appear on the legislators desks within hours, or even minutes, of the final vote. (I recall one that was a stack of paper several feet thick that showed up in just such a fashion.) I've yet to hear of a congresscritter voting against a bill because "I haven't had time to read it."
Sounds a bit like the US Patent Office. A default of passing anything without even bothering to understand it. As opposed to a default of throwing away anything not understood.
The "Firearm Owners Protection Act" was a bill to protect gunowners from the web of 30,000-ish conflicting state, county, and local firearms laws when traveling. A tiny bill that said ~"If it's legal where you start your trip, legal where you finish it, and locked up in between, it's ok to transport it no matter what the state and local laws say in the places you pass through"~. Much support from pro-firearms groups. In the minutes before the final vote it was amended to also ban the manufacture of new machine guns for sale to private citizens in the (already heavily regulated) private market. So the supply would be limited to those already papered - and thus become obsolete, expensive, and eventually disappear.
This appears to be the biggest problem with the US Congress, riders being added at a very late period.
Of course the Swiss don't have this problem. Their government REQUIRES them each to have a machine gun (or some other piece of large-scale military nastiness) handy.
What scares me more is the prospect of people being sued by the RIAA, MPAA, and the member corporations of those associations. Many people are unfamiliar with the court systems and civil litigation in general. Civil action is a much bigger stick for Hollywood to weild simply because of the likelihood of people to scoff at a summons and complaint, thus leading to an enforceable judgment against them.
Except that civil actions run the risk to those doing the suing that they could be counter sued.
Additionally, other people's reaction to civil litigation may be to delete the subject files from their computer. This is evidence, and attempting to delete it would also lead to an automatic loss of a civil case.
It's only evidence once the court decides it is evidence. Otherwise it's simply an unsubstatiated claim made by the plaintiff.
Actually, AFAIK, Kazaa does not have and has not had any part of its business in the United States. A judge in the RIAA vs. Kazaa suit ruled, however, that because Kazaa's software was "available in the United States" (translation: available on the internet, regardless of where in the world the business or server is), it can be sued in the United States.
After another US court decided the opposite in respect of Yahoo!
The best use I could think of for this would be for those drive-through beer and liquor stores. Every time a car drove through, you could record the ids' of its tires. Then, if the customer bought cigarettes, you could store the tire ids in a database of cigarette buyers.
Sure the cigarette companies would pay lots of money for this.
You could sell this database to health insurance companies for a fortune so they could bust people who made fraudulent claims about being a nonsmoker on their health insurance and deny them benefits.
Except that the tags only track the vehicle rather than the driver.
Yeah but people just can't secretly scan your VIN every time you go through a tollbooth, stop at a traffic light (You KNOW that those wires in the road don't really make the light green), or drive through McDonalds.
Also the people doing the scanning could potentially be anyone. Not just the police or whoever built the road.
Why does the US insist on having telephone numbers in a certain format?
The US likes doing things in a different way from the rest of the planet...
In Germany, telephone numbers are just handed out as needed, with small towns typically having shorter numbers that, say, Berlin.
This way, we simply cannot run out of numbers.
This also means that an area/city code will refer to a meaningful area. With out "overlay" codes which are so much of a problem within the NANP.
On the whole, the setup seems much more logical: dial a number (can be any length) to call within your city, dial a 0 + city code + telnumber for another city,
If this is well planned it's possible to have a system where big areas have short codes and small areas have long codes. Such that the number is always the same length. Which makes things simpler for machines.
nd 00 + country code + city code + telnumber for international.
Within the NANP to call another NANP country you have to use 1 XXX XXX XXXX you cannot use 011 1 XXX XXX XXXX. One strange consequence of this is that some toll free numbers have 2 area codes, one toll free, one which costs money to call.
Another thing that bothers me is that if you have a dial 7 area, you often can't dial 11. I should be able to dial the country code too!
In many parts of the world you can dial the full national number and get charged the correct amount. Dialing the full number, with the country code is actually part of the GSM spec.
I used to work for an telecoms equipment manufacturer, and you wouldn't believe how much BONE-HEADED CODING there was in their American products. Their products are split into "North American" and "International" code bases, and all the North American code without fail is hardwired to exactly 10 digits and a single routing/decoding algorithm.
The problem is probably more with the one routing/decoding algorithm with fixed width fields that the number of digits.
The international code has been totally rewritten, firstly to allow for the maximum of 24 digits,
Does this imply that various kludges are required in order to make IDD work within the NANP?
plus it allows for a variety of digit decoders, so the switches can be sold in any country and not just America.
To be honest, I'm really quite proud of the international products, it's just a shame that there needs to be this divide -- the American code should have been written properly in the first place. I blame the stagnation of the US phone numbering scheme as the #1 reason behind such lazy switch programming. It's good to see it being shaken up now and again.
First point: the inefficiencies of numbering schemes makes a lot of wastage. Your area code might cover a densely populated area (e.g. NY) or it may cover 1000 people in a large area of desert. The former requires a large number space (e.g. 1 million), meaning the latter has a large wastage. There's probably other issues, for example if you require 150 area codes, you allocate 3 digits, effectively wasting 85% of the namespace. Added together, you miss a lot.
The actual problem is using fixed width fields. It's quite possible to use variable width fields.
You could make this more efficient, but it becomes much more difficult to manage, both in terms of human understanding
ISBNs and EAN barcodes are used extensivly, the US is even adopting EAN.
and the complexity of exchanges.
Most if not all of the software is already there for handling DDI/DID PBX interconnects and parts of the world which have variable length numbers (e.g. Germany).
It has to do with the fact that service providers are assigned blocks of numbers, rather than individual numbers for their subscribers.
The problem is not that numbers are assigned in blocks, but they are fixed length blocks of 10,000 numbers. This method of doing things dates from the end of the 19th century. Modern (anything from the last 20-30 years) telephone hardware has no problem with a block of any power of 10. Indeed telephone companies routinely assign 10, 100, 1000 number blocks for PBX interconnection. Just that there are political reasons why it has to be 10,000 for an interconnection between 2 telcos.
Somebody help me get a clue: At first glance, it would seem that a seven digit number would be good for almost 10 million phone numbers,
You'd start with 10 million, then knock off anything starting with the digit one or zero, which is minus 2 million. Then you also have to knock off anything starting 555 or 911, which is another 20,000. Thus you actually will get at best 7,980,000. Plenty of cities which require rather more telephone numbers than that. There is another twist telephone numbers are assigned in blocks of 10,000 (the last 4 digits). This made sense about a century ago where the 4 digits actually refered to a specific piece of hardware, but it's just been continued.
those of us that are actually *aware* that there is a world outside of the US and Iraq know that the '1' is the country code for north america.
+1 is the country code for the NANP, which includes USA, Canada, Bermuda, assorted Carribean islands and Guam (for some strange reason). 1 also happens to be the trunk prefix within the NANP country. Most of the rest of the world prefers to use 0. The basic problem with the NANP is fixed width fields. A 3 digit area code, a 3 digit exchange code and a 4 digit number. Generally now treated as a 3 digit area code and a 7 digit local number. Problem is that a 7 digit number (even before you consider that anything of the form 0XX XXXX, 1XX XXXX, 555 XXXX and 911 XXXX is unusable, the original plan also had X0X XXXX and X1X XXXX as unusable) is simply too small for many cities.
In the case of copyright, Eldred makes my favorite point. That copyrights sould be renewable but for an exponentially higher fee every year. That way the pomposness of the Disney's of the world that still make millions off of 70 year old charectars
With an exponential system you'd be talking a lot more than millions for it to be worth keeping 70 year old material in copyright.
would not block out the rare but good old shows that have been abandoned.
Similarly, if a programme is freely available online then fewer people will watch it on TV or buy it on VHS or DVD. The reduced TV audience will mean a less valuable product in terms of TV rights (programme makers sell their shows to the channels and, again, the value of a show will increase if it attracts more viewers) and the VHS and DVD sales will take a hit as fewer people buy the programmes on those media because they can get it for free elsewhere.
So how did TV programmes ever get made before VHS & DVD, possibly even before it was considered "normal" to repeat them several times? (Even to the point of the US having a specific term for a process of repeats, sometimes with the content trimmed to allow for more commercials.)
What is truly shortsighted is using closed-source software. It may seem to get the job done now, but if it ties you down, if you're stuck with it, then you're in trouble in the long run.
A lot of data governments handle is long term, sometimes very long term.
Time and time again, people have tried this and failed again and again. When the primary goal is to simply have a good program to USE (not resell to others),
Which covers the vast majority of software written.
it just doesn't work not contributing back. Many have tried this and regretted it.
Either way, the lesson learned by an organization who's primary purpose is simply using the software is that it's in their own self interest to merge their improvements back into the public project, where they will be maintained and tested together with all future improvements contributed by others.
All government and education and the vast majority of commercial businesses are covered by this. In reality it's a tiny number of businesses which are actually simply selling software.
What's incredible is that more governments haven't switched to open source. There is excellent software out there being given away for free, but people are still using inferior software and paying money for it.
Especially when the money is going to a foreign corporation (run by crooks)...
Slashdot Mirror
Here is the deal: the GPL is about sharing ; it is the opposite of a restrictive copyright law. It empowers individual and not some central entity. It helps spread creativity and not stifle it.
Indeed the GPL probably has more in common with the US Constitution than the more recent US copyright laws.
The way I see it is. The entire media industry was born when the media itself was invented (records, tapes) sometime about 80 years ago (correct me if I'm wrong). That is how that industry got its profit.
The roots of the business models involved go back a few centuries to the creation of the book publishing industry. It was the adoption of the printing press which created the concept of "copyright" in the first place.
Before that time, rather, before the invention of media, how did artists get money? Just concerts? Perhaps being paid by a king (in Mozarts time) to write a glorius musical to please him. Whatever. Their revenue came from elsewhere since there was no 'media' to sell.
The obvious alternatives are to have a "day job", some kind of patron (either individual or corporate) or to sell tickets for a public performance.
Remember, **the Supreme Court does NOT guarantee a profit margin!**
Or even a profit the US Constitution dosn't guarantee this either.
And god dammit, people need to realize this. That is a harsh fact of business. Once something becomes dated, then that industry needs to evolve with their market or die.
This is a basic principle of a capitalist economy. Protecting a business or a business model is more socialism or even communism.
The main reason is that in the past century, both law and technology happend to be in place to allow a handful of performers to amass wealth that no performer in the centuries before could ever hope to posess.
Whilst this system may have been good for a small proportion. It dosn't appear to have done much for those who have tried to "make it big" and failed. Even some of the supposedly "sucessful" group have wound up bankrupt, insane or even prematurely dead.
Secondly, trading books with your mom isn't a violation of copyright, as you didn't make a copy. (duh.)
If the same arguments which are used with computers were applied here then there would be a copyright violation as soon as she looked at a page.
everyone thinks that politics is more corrupt today than in the days of yor...the truth is that after the founing fathers did their stints as president politics were more corrupt than today. the dead voted very often, gangs were hired to intimidate the opposition voters....corperations actualy had MORE power than the government.
The thing is that the modern US political scene is quite easy to corrupt. All a corporation needs to do is buy off two political parties. As opposed to having to "persuade" many (quite possibly non national) political parties and individuals.
In more contemporary usage, the term has been broadened to include also what the American Founding Fathers called a republic -- a governmental system in which the power of the people is normally exercised only indirectly, through freely elected representatives who are supposed to make government decisions according to the popular will, or at least according to the supposed values and interests of the population.
Does the modern US even meet that definition. Given the way in which US elections (at many levels) tend to be dominated by the same two political parties.
Even if they want to read what they're voting, often it's impossible. The staffers put together the final text of enormous bills, which appear on the legislators desks within hours, or even minutes, of the final vote. (I recall one that was a stack of paper several feet thick that showed up in just such a fashion.) I've yet to hear of a congresscritter voting against a bill because "I haven't had time to read it."
Sounds a bit like the US Patent Office. A default of passing anything without even bothering to understand it. As opposed to a default of throwing away anything not understood.
The "Firearm Owners Protection Act" was a bill to protect gunowners from the web of 30,000-ish conflicting state, county, and local firearms laws when traveling. A tiny bill that said ~"If it's legal where you start your trip, legal where you finish it, and locked up in between, it's ok to transport it no matter what the state and local laws say in the places you pass through"~. Much support from pro-firearms groups.
In the minutes before the final vote it was amended to also ban the manufacture of new machine guns for sale to private citizens in the (already heavily regulated) private market. So the supply would be limited to those already papered - and thus become obsolete, expensive, and eventually disappear.
This appears to be the biggest problem with the US Congress, riders being added at a very late period.
Of course the Swiss don't have this problem. Their government REQUIRES them each to have a machine gun (or some other piece of large-scale military nastiness) handy.
As well as knowing how to use whatever they have.
What scares me more is the prospect of people being sued by the RIAA, MPAA, and the member corporations of those associations. Many people are unfamiliar with the court systems and civil litigation in general. Civil action is a much bigger stick for Hollywood to weild simply because of the likelihood of people to scoff at a summons and complaint, thus leading to an enforceable judgment against them.
Except that civil actions run the risk to those doing the suing that they could be counter sued.
Additionally, other people's reaction to civil litigation may be to delete the subject files from their computer. This is evidence, and attempting to delete it would also lead to an automatic loss of a civil case.
It's only evidence once the court decides it is evidence. Otherwise it's simply an unsubstatiated claim made by the plaintiff.
Actually, AFAIK, Kazaa does not have and has not had any part of its business in the United States. A judge in the RIAA vs. Kazaa suit ruled, however, that because Kazaa's software was "available in the United States" (translation: available on the internet, regardless of where in the world the business or server is), it can be sued in the United States.
After another US court decided the opposite in respect of Yahoo!
The best use I could think of for this would be for those drive-through beer and liquor stores. Every time a car drove through, you could record the ids' of its tires. Then, if the customer bought cigarettes, you could store the tire ids in a database of cigarette buyers.
Sure the cigarette companies would pay lots of money for this.
You could sell this database to health insurance companies for a fortune so they could bust people who made fraudulent claims about being a nonsmoker on their health insurance and deny them benefits.
Except that the tags only track the vehicle rather than the driver.
RFID is not limited to 24 inches. It's capable of hundreds of meters.
Which would make it easy for someone to follow you. Including criminals and terrorists.
Yeah but people just can't secretly scan your VIN every time you go through a tollbooth, stop at a traffic light (You KNOW that those wires in the road don't really make the light green), or drive through McDonalds.
Also the people doing the scanning could potentially be anyone. Not just the police or whoever built the road.
Why does the US insist on having telephone numbers in a certain format?
The US likes doing things in a different way from the rest of the planet...
In Germany, telephone numbers are just handed out as needed, with small towns typically having shorter numbers that, say, Berlin.
This way, we simply cannot run out of numbers.
This also means that an area/city code will refer to a meaningful area. With out "overlay" codes which are so much of a problem within the NANP.
On the whole, the setup seems much more logical: dial a number (can be any length) to call within your city, dial a 0 + city code + telnumber for another city,
If this is well planned it's possible to have a system where big areas have short codes and small areas have long codes. Such that the number is always the same length. Which makes things simpler for machines.
nd 00 + country code + city code + telnumber for international.
Within the NANP to call another NANP country you have to use 1 XXX XXX XXXX you cannot use 011 1 XXX XXX XXXX. One strange consequence of this is that some toll free numbers have 2 area codes, one toll free, one which costs money to call.
Another thing that bothers me is that if you have a dial 7 area, you often can't dial 11. I should be able to dial the country code too!
In many parts of the world you can dial the full national number and get charged the correct amount. Dialing the full number, with the country code is actually part of the GSM spec.
I used to work for an telecoms equipment manufacturer, and you wouldn't believe how much BONE-HEADED CODING there was in their American products. Their products are split into "North American" and "International" code bases, and all the North American code without fail is hardwired to exactly 10 digits and a single routing/decoding algorithm.
The problem is probably more with the one routing/decoding algorithm with fixed width fields that the number of digits.
The international code has been totally rewritten, firstly to allow for the maximum of 24 digits,
Does this imply that various kludges are required in order to make IDD work within the NANP?
plus it allows for a variety of digit decoders, so the switches can be sold in any country and not just America.
To be honest, I'm really quite proud of the international products, it's just a shame that there needs to be this divide -- the American code should have been written properly in the first place. I blame the stagnation of the US phone numbering scheme as the #1 reason behind such lazy switch programming. It's good to see it being shaken up now and again.
Probably not often enough though...
First point: the inefficiencies of numbering schemes makes a lot of wastage. Your area code might cover a densely populated area (e.g. NY) or it may cover 1000 people in a large area of desert. The former requires a large number space (e.g. 1 million), meaning the latter has a large wastage. There's probably other issues, for example if you require 150 area codes, you allocate 3 digits, effectively wasting 85% of the namespace. Added together, you miss a lot.
The actual problem is using fixed width fields. It's quite possible to use variable width fields.
You could make this more efficient, but it becomes much more difficult to manage, both in terms of human understanding
ISBNs and EAN barcodes are used extensivly, the US is even adopting EAN.
and the complexity of exchanges.
Most if not all of the software is already there for handling DDI/DID PBX interconnects and parts of the world which have variable length numbers (e.g. Germany).
It has to do with the fact that service providers are assigned blocks of numbers, rather than individual numbers for their subscribers.
The problem is not that numbers are assigned in blocks, but they are fixed length blocks of 10,000 numbers.
This method of doing things dates from the end of the 19th century. Modern (anything from the last 20-30 years) telephone hardware has no problem with a block of any power of 10. Indeed telephone companies routinely assign 10, 100, 1000 number blocks for PBX interconnection. Just that there are political reasons why it has to be 10,000 for an interconnection between 2 telcos.
Somebody help me get a clue: At first glance, it would seem that a seven digit number would be good for almost 10 million phone numbers,
You'd start with 10 million, then knock off anything starting with the digit one or zero, which is minus 2 million. Then you also have to knock off anything starting 555 or 911, which is another 20,000. Thus you actually will get at best 7,980,000. Plenty of cities which require rather more telephone numbers than that.
There is another twist telephone numbers are assigned in blocks of 10,000 (the last 4 digits). This made sense about a century ago where the 4 digits actually refered to a specific piece of hardware, but it's just been continued.
those of us that are actually *aware* that there is a world outside of the US and Iraq know that the '1' is the country code for north america.
+1 is the country code for the NANP, which includes USA, Canada, Bermuda, assorted Carribean islands and Guam (for some strange reason). 1 also happens to be the trunk prefix within the NANP country. Most of the rest of the world prefers to use 0.
The basic problem with the NANP is fixed width fields. A 3 digit area code, a 3 digit exchange code and a 4 digit number. Generally now treated as a 3 digit area code and a 7 digit local number. Problem is that a 7 digit number (even before you consider that anything of the form 0XX XXXX, 1XX XXXX, 555 XXXX and 911 XXXX is unusable, the original plan also had X0X XXXX and X1X XXXX as unusable) is simply too small for many cities.
That fucks over the small-time media creator that can't afford to pay for the huge copyright fees.
With an exponential charging scheme the only way you get huge fees is by trying to hold onto a copyright for a long period of time.
In the case of copyright, Eldred makes my favorite point. That copyrights sould be renewable but for an exponentially higher fee every year. That way the pomposness of the Disney's of the world that still make millions off of 70 year old charectars
With an exponential system you'd be talking a lot more than millions for it to be worth keeping 70 year old material in copyright.
would not block out the rare but good old shows that have been abandoned.
The abandoned material is the vast majority...
Similarly, if a programme is freely available online then fewer people will watch it on TV or buy it on VHS or DVD. The reduced TV audience will mean a less valuable product in terms of TV rights (programme makers sell their shows to the channels and, again, the value of a show will increase if it attracts more viewers) and the VHS and DVD sales will take a hit as fewer people buy the programmes on those media because they can get it for free elsewhere.
So how did TV programmes ever get made before VHS & DVD, possibly even before it was considered "normal" to repeat them several times? (Even to the point of the US having a specific term for a process of repeats, sometimes with the content trimmed to allow for more commercials.)
What is truly shortsighted is using closed-source software. It may seem to get the job done now, but if it ties you down, if you're stuck with it, then you're in trouble in the long run.
A lot of data governments handle is long term, sometimes very long term.
Time and time again, people have tried this and failed again and again. When the primary goal is to simply have a good program to USE (not resell to others),
Which covers the vast majority of software written.
it just doesn't work not contributing back. Many have tried this and regretted it.
Either way, the lesson learned by an organization who's primary purpose is simply using the software is that it's in their own self interest to merge their improvements back into the public project, where they will be maintained and tested together with all future improvements contributed by others.
All government and education and the vast majority of commercial businesses are covered by this. In reality it's a tiny number of businesses which are actually simply selling software.
What's incredible is that more governments haven't switched to open source. There is excellent software out there being given away for free, but people are still using inferior software and paying money for it.
Especially when the money is going to a foreign corporation (run by crooks)...