The DMCA (arguably) forbids making, owning, or even discussing how to make mod chips.
The last one it cannot do. For the simple reason that passing a law abridging freedom of speach is something the US Constitution explicitally denys the US Congress the power to do. Problem is there is a loophole in the US legislative process which allows constitutional restrictions to be circumvented.
If you want your warrentee service, dont touch the hardware. If you dont care - then there isnt anything stopping you from modding.
That only affects a manufacturers warrentee. Which in most parts of the world is in addition to a whole host of statutory obligations of retailers. If the retailer were to make the mod then the whatever had generally better still work.
Now: There is such thing as an illegal modifiaction to hardware. You buy a car you can do almost anything you want to it. Add better intakes, add a turbocharger, etc. It is illegal, however, in most places to replace your muffler with a "Fart Pipe" so that it makes as much noise as possible. Doing that will get you fined.
Making such a mod isn't illegal. It's more that a vehicle so modified is no longer "street legal". So you can't drive it on public roads.
In short, the copyright holders become judge, jury, and executioner in regards to a section of Federal Law. And if you want to dispute the judgement, you can in some unspecified manner get a notification after the fact from a copyright holder that is unknown to you.
Except that it isn't something which applies to all copyright holders. Otherwise the likes of the RIAA & MPAA would disappear uttterly with the possibility of half a billion (a wild guess at the number of both real and corporate "people" in the US) suspect copyright infringments.
Congress needs cleaned out now. I've said it before, but incumbants need to go. All of them. It is quite obvious that the vast majority of people in our congress no longer represent the American people, but now represent whoever pays them the most. If voters can wake up and realize this, and voted their incumbants out, it would send the message to congress that they can't get away with selling us out. It would also send a message to corporations that they need to get back to running their businesses properly, rather than buying a law to protect them.
You'd also need some new candidates. At least one Congress full, ideally 3-4 times that many. Otherwise all that would happen would be that the names would change, but the things which happened would stay much the same.
Of course, this won't happen as long as both major parties are successful in duping voters into thinking that they "care" about issues important to voters.
It's very unlikely to happen unless the US gets a sensible number of political parties. Which would be something like 4-5 national parties and 70-130 state and regional parties.
Self preserving networks should have a node notify it's peers if it's going under due to a traffic spike ("Avenge me my comrades . . . *gasp*"). At which point that node would tell a friend (or ten) to ping (or request a file if the attacker itself is on the p2p network) the attacker just to make sure they weren't injured in their own attack.
But what would such a system do if the "attack" appears to come from a "friend"? The assumption made here is that the attacker is correctly identifiable.
In the movie script business there is a form of copyright protection of scripts. You register your work with the writers guild and nobody gets to see it except under court order. The point being one of protection against what is called innocent plagerism.......(someone reads a script, thinks nothing of it and then a year later they re-invent it as their own, maybe without realizing it)
It's just as possible that both script writers may have gotten their ideas from a third party source or group of sources. Especially since there are only a fairly small number of unique plot and character ideas.
The legislative branch has a big inherent problem. If their predecessors did their jobs right, then theirs is essentially a maintenance function.
This would include reviewing laws according to a published schedule. With ammendments or repealing of laws which were either obsolete or needed be somehow brought up to date, including changing the language to make them easier to understand. If things were working correctly the total ammount of in force legislation should not change that much. This function does not appear to be being performed. Anywhere on the planet. Including the passing of new laws which are utterly redundant.
These Congress clowns have institutionalized graft via campaign contributions and don't care that they aren't serving the common good, they even flaunt it in our faces with this kind of crap. Doesn't seem to matter if they're Dems or Pubs, we get the same results regardless. Almost every one of them has been bought by someone or another.
In many places limits are placed on how much money candidates can spend. Which can easily nullify any financial advantage a rich candidate or member of a rich political party might otherwise have. Problem is that this won't fly in the US (unless someone can get the Supreme Court to change their position.) Thus all attempts are on restricting "contributions" which dosn't appear to do much good in practice.
I'm fed up with this BS to the point of supporting publicly-funded campaigns. Anyone running for elected office who takes so much as a penny either directly or indirectly from anyone else (business or individual) while running for or serving in elected office wins a minimum ten year "office" with Jerome, the ButtBuddy from Hell, cell block#. This means hard time in a standard prison, not some cushy "Club Fed" type facility with golf courses, tennis courts, etc.
It's far easier to audit how much someone spends (and what assets they have) than to try and control how much they are being given by a third party. There are also further complications if the person in question is married.
They should also be prohibited by both law and severe penalty from going to work (directly or indirectly) for any company or in any industry which gained favor by a bill submitted, co-authored, co-sponsored, or voted favorably on.
If they favoured a bill which generally benefited the enconomy wouldn't that make them unemployable? At what point do you draw a line with an indirect connection.
Lastly, they should never, ever be allowed to work lobbying for any company or industry before the elected body in which they served.
Maybe less attention should be paid to full time lobbiests in the first place.
Anyway, the levy is pure shit. I agree that the artists should get payed for their music, but not like this. The thing I hate most about this is they are being complete assholes about this and just upping the rate and scope of the tax every year so that it will be seem to be less extreme. I call that sleaze.
How much of this money actually goes to artists. If it's anything like the regular record industry accounting they'll probably end up owing money to the people doing the collecting.
Personally, I will never buy any media with this new tax. I will get my stuff shipped from the US or any other country that doesn't have the tax. Even if the cost of shipping is more, I will still get it shipped over just out of principle. I refuse to pay such draconian taxes.
At least until those concerned have a word with Canadian customs.
P2P networks - "Can we have immunity to steal intellectual property, as long as we call it "sharing""?
Copyright infringment isn't "stealing", no matter how often corporate publishers might want it called that. Which is certainly something they don't want when (not if) they themselves infringe someone elses copyright or enguage in copyright fraud.
The bill requires you to notify the DOJ before you hack. The DOJ will serve an oversight role (translation: the DOJ will decide which criminal activity has donated sufficiently to the powers that be).
Sounds like it's more "get prior approval from". If it were simply a case of "notify" you could just send them a memo saying who and when you were going to attack. (Possibly also including details of the copyright work you suspected they might be infringing.)
Incorrect...perhaps that is not the "stated" purpose of the bill but those exceptionse refer to economic loss of any person other than the file trader OR economic loss of more than $50.00 per impairment..
Who would verify that figure. Considering that estimates for losses on computer systems vary from suspect estimates to complete fiction.
.other than economic loss involving computer files or data made available through a publically accessible peer-to-peer file trading network that contain works in which the owner has an exclusive right...
This appears to have a very big loophole. In that it would exempt any work where the copyright is held by more than one "person". A lot of material would fall into this catagory.
If the feelings of you and your senator are the norm for this (US) goverment, then why bother? Do we need to establish a new sub-set of english to speak with our elected officials, akin to "The Queen's English"?
Or even "Congress English", the actual "Queen's English" would likely fail on spelling, probably grammar and possibly idiom.
Too bad we can't go back and rewrite the Declaration of Independence to say "All men are created equal, as long as they know how to spell," then rewrite the First Amendement to the Constitution to say "The right to free speech shall not be infringed, as long as everything is spelled correctly."
What is the "correct" spelling of certain words. The US Consitution predates The Rev Webster, some of Webster's revised spellings didn't make it into print because his publisher didn't like them. The idea of a standard spelling is itself a relativly new idea. With some words having more than one "correct" spelling. especially proper nouns where original language does not use any derivative of the Roman alphabet.
Absolutely true. I work as an assistant to a senator (hence the anon. post), and stuff like this just gets discarded before any "important" people even read it. Grammar and spelling count almost as much as the ideas presented in the letter.
Maybe a similar "filter" should be applied to proposed legislation. Some bills might fail here just on their title:)
Selling chips should never be illegal. Putting them in might be a different story but thats for the poloticians to decide (god help us, can we revolt yet?).
But they really should have a good reason for this, the modification or workmanship involved makes the product unsafe or causes it to pollute in some way, such as RF emmission. Simply because if might harm the bottom line of some corporate entity, especially a foreign one, should not qualify. The job of government should be primarily to protect it's citizens, then the protection of other people present in their territory.
Any place where it IS void has seriously fucked up laws. There is no valid reason to void a contract that all parties involved willingly agreed to.
And before you say anything, let me point out that if two individuals make an agreement to murder a third party, the contract MUST be invalid because one of the parties involved (the murderer) did not make any agreement. Using this argument then a contract for slavery should be legal, since it dosn't involve any third parties. Anyway a contract of the form "All passengers in Ford cars must be Ford drivers" is likely to involve third parties...
Sony most certainly IS a party to the sale? Who do you think made it? The store is simply a middleman. Is Sony not getting part of the money you pay?
You must live somewhere with seriously messed up laws. The idea that in a retail sale your contract is with the merchant goes back to prehistory. Currently it's known as the "doctrine of first sale". If Sony want to claim that this dosn't apply then they had better have a very good reason. The only people Sony is involved with are those they directly sell to. When you buy something you generally deal with whoever owns it now, not whoever might have owned it previously or whoever might have made it originally. Claiming Sony is a party to the retail sale of a playstation makes as much sense as claiming that Ford is a party to the sale of a Ford car with 3 previous owners. When you buy a house you deal with the owner your not obliged to find out who built it, unless the builder is the current owner.
Sure, you *should* be keeping records, but a lack of records should not considered to be the equivalent of copyright fraud.
You probably mean copyright infringment. The term "copyright fraud" refers to someone claiming copyright over a work where they are not the copyright holder. Including claiming copyright over public domain materials.
Unless a system like Palladium were installed to prevent employees from messing with their computers, hence preventing any possible violations, there is no feasible way to handle the issue.
Actually you don't need anything like Palladium to do this. Simply an OS which has working file protection. Something Microsoft is still playing catchup on, plenty of other operating systems do this as standard. Indeed Palladium is probably a non starter, since it's to protect proprietary software manufactures and publishers of video and music. Rather than a tool for corporate system administrators to protect systems from end users.
I know not of one company that chould account 100% of it's assets. Sure they know where the buildings are, but can they accurately account for every chair, adding machine (calculator), etc..
Or even every pen and piece of paper. Let alone cables, pipes and ductwork, to the nearest metre.
Accounting for assets of less than $500 in most cases would cost them more than the theft.
Assuming it was stolen. Maybe someone forgot which storeroom it was in. Maybe it broke and just wasn't worth formally writing it off. Reminds me of the claim that Boeing does not know how much an airliner actually costs to build.
This is where I would place most software. It's easy when everything is new but as time goes by you tend to missplace things.
Does any business just make one purchase of a certain kind of thing? Typically things are bought when needed. Since proprietary software is effectivly an expensive perishable not many places will keep "spares". But they might well do for the likes of tables and chairs...
E.g., a contract requires an agreement between two parties. If I buy a computer from a third party, and it comes with software installed, then the only contract I have agreed to is the one with the company that sold me the computer.
There's also the question of who the parties actually are. Since it's quite easy to have a computer owned by a corporate entity, setup by one employee and used by a different employee. So which of these three, if any, is the EULA applicable to? What if the user changes?
Slashdot Mirror
The DMCA (arguably) forbids making, owning, or even discussing how to make mod chips.
The last one it cannot do. For the simple reason that passing a law abridging freedom of speach is something the US Constitution explicitally denys the US Congress the power to do. Problem is there is a loophole in the US legislative process which allows constitutional restrictions to be circumvented.
If you want your warrentee service, dont touch the hardware. If you dont care - then there isnt anything stopping you from modding.
That only affects a manufacturers warrentee. Which in most parts of the world is in addition to a whole host of statutory obligations of retailers. If the retailer were to make the mod then the whatever had generally better still work.
Now: There is such thing as an illegal modifiaction to hardware. You buy a car you can do almost anything you want to it. Add better intakes, add a turbocharger, etc. It is illegal, however, in most places to replace your muffler with a "Fart Pipe" so that it makes as much noise as possible. Doing that will get you fined.
Making such a mod isn't illegal. It's more that a vehicle so modified is no longer "street legal". So you can't drive it on public roads.
In short, the copyright holders become judge, jury, and executioner in regards to a section of Federal Law. And if you want to dispute the judgement, you can in some unspecified manner get a notification after the fact from a copyright holder that is unknown to you.
Except that it isn't something which applies to all copyright holders. Otherwise the likes of the RIAA & MPAA would disappear uttterly with the possibility of half a billion (a wild guess at the number of both real and corporate "people" in the US) suspect copyright infringments.
It isn't that they object to free promotion, they object to the idea that "just anybody" can upload to P2P or to an Internet Radio station.
Apparently, fundermentally, it's a case of what are basically overrated "middlemen" thinking they (and only they) should be in charge of the industry.
Congress needs cleaned out now. I've said it before, but incumbants need to go. All of them. It is quite obvious that the vast majority of people in our congress no longer represent the American people, but now represent whoever pays them the most.
If voters can wake up and realize this, and voted their incumbants out, it would send the message to congress that they can't get away with selling us out. It would also send a message to corporations that they need to get back to running their businesses properly, rather than buying a law to protect them.
You'd also need some new candidates. At least one Congress full, ideally 3-4 times that many. Otherwise all that would happen would be that the names would change, but the things which happened would stay much the same.
Of course, this won't happen as long as both major parties are successful in duping voters into thinking that they "care" about issues important to voters.
It's very unlikely to happen unless the US gets a sensible number of political parties. Which would be something like 4-5 national parties and 70-130 state and regional parties.
Self preserving networks should have a node notify it's peers if it's going under due to a traffic spike ("Avenge me my comrades . . . *gasp*"). At which point that node would tell a friend (or ten) to ping (or request a file if the attacker itself is on the p2p network) the attacker just to make sure they weren't injured in their own attack.
But what would such a system do if the "attack" appears to come from a "friend"? The assumption made here is that the attacker is correctly identifiable.
In the movie script business there is a form of copyright protection of scripts. You register your work with the writers guild and nobody gets to see it except under court order. The point being one of protection against what is called innocent plagerism.......(someone reads a script, thinks nothing of it and then a year later they re-invent it as their own, maybe without realizing it)
It's just as possible that both script writers may have gotten their ideas from a third party source or group of sources. Especially since there are only a fairly small number of unique plot and character ideas.
The legislative branch has a big inherent problem. If their predecessors did their jobs right, then theirs is essentially a maintenance function.
This would include reviewing laws according to a published schedule. With ammendments or repealing of laws which were either obsolete or needed be somehow brought up to date, including changing the language to make them easier to understand. If things were working correctly the total ammount of in force legislation should not change that much.
This function does not appear to be being performed. Anywhere on the planet. Including the passing of new laws which are utterly redundant.
These Congress clowns have institutionalized graft via campaign contributions and don't care that they aren't serving the common good, they even flaunt it in our faces with this kind of crap. Doesn't seem to matter if they're Dems or Pubs, we get the same results regardless. Almost every one of them has been bought by someone or another.
In many places limits are placed on how much money candidates can spend. Which can easily nullify any financial advantage a rich candidate or member of a rich political party might otherwise have. Problem is that this won't fly in the US (unless someone can get the Supreme Court to change their position.) Thus all attempts are on restricting "contributions" which dosn't appear to do much good in practice.
I'm fed up with this BS to the point of supporting publicly-funded campaigns. Anyone running for elected office who takes so much as a penny either directly or indirectly from anyone else (business or individual) while running for or serving in elected office wins a minimum ten year "office" with Jerome, the ButtBuddy from Hell, cell block#. This means hard time in a standard prison, not some cushy "Club Fed" type facility with golf courses, tennis courts, etc.
It's far easier to audit how much someone spends (and what assets they have) than to try and control how much they are being given by a third party. There are also further complications if the person in question is married.
They should also be prohibited by both law and severe penalty from going to work (directly or indirectly) for any company or in any industry which gained favor by a bill submitted, co-authored, co-sponsored, or voted favorably on.
If they favoured a bill which generally benefited the enconomy wouldn't that make them unemployable? At what point do you draw a line with an indirect connection.
Lastly, they should never, ever be allowed to work lobbying for any company or industry before the elected body in which they served.
Maybe less attention should be paid to full time lobbiests in the first place.
Anyway, the levy is pure shit. I agree that the artists should get payed for their music, but not like this. The thing I hate most about this is they are being complete assholes about this and just upping the rate and scope of the tax every year so that it will be seem to be less extreme. I call that sleaze.
How much of this money actually goes to artists. If it's anything like the regular record industry accounting they'll probably end up owing money to the people doing the collecting.
Personally, I will never buy any media with this new tax. I will get my stuff shipped from the US or any other country that doesn't have the tax. Even if the cost of shipping is more, I will still get it shipped over just out of principle. I refuse to pay such draconian taxes.
At least until those concerned have a word with Canadian customs.
P2P networks - "Can we have immunity to steal intellectual property, as long as we call it "sharing""?
Copyright infringment isn't "stealing", no matter how often corporate publishers might want it called that. Which is certainly something they don't want when (not if) they themselves infringe someone elses copyright or enguage in copyright fraud.
The bill requires you to notify the DOJ before you hack. The DOJ will serve an oversight role (translation: the DOJ will decide which criminal activity has donated sufficiently to the powers that be).
Sounds like it's more "get prior approval from". If it were simply a case of "notify" you could just send them a memo saying who and when you were going to attack. (Possibly also including details of the copyright work you suspected they might be infringing.)
Incorrect...perhaps that is not the "stated" purpose of the bill but those exceptionse refer to economic loss of any person other than the file trader OR economic loss of more than $50.00 per impairment..
.other than economic loss involving computer files or data made available through a publically accessible peer-to-peer file trading network that contain works in which the owner has an exclusive right...
Who would verify that figure. Considering that estimates for losses on computer systems vary from suspect estimates to complete fiction.
This appears to have a very big loophole. In that it would exempt any work where the copyright is held by more than one "person". A lot of material would fall into this catagory.
If the feelings of you and your senator are the norm for this (US) goverment, then why bother? Do we need to establish a new sub-set of english to speak with our elected officials, akin to "The Queen's English"?
Or even "Congress English", the actual "Queen's English" would likely fail on spelling, probably grammar and possibly idiom.
Too bad we can't go back and rewrite the Declaration of Independence to say "All men are created equal, as long as they know how to spell," then rewrite the First Amendement to the Constitution to say "The right to free speech shall not be infringed, as long as everything is spelled correctly."
What is the "correct" spelling of certain words. The US Consitution predates The Rev Webster, some of Webster's revised spellings didn't make it into print because his publisher didn't like them.
The idea of a standard spelling is itself a relativly new idea. With some words having more than one "correct" spelling. especially proper nouns where original language does not use any derivative of the Roman alphabet.
As a general rule, there is a correlation between spelling and grammer and the amount of thought and insight that goes into a letter.
Do you seriously consider this sentence an example of good grammar?
I don't usually defend senators but do you have any idea how much correspondence they get?
No one forced these people to stand for office, they can always resign, if they are not happy.
And do you know how much of that is coming from ignorant cranks with only the most delicate grasp on reality?
If your "ignorant crank" happens to be a full time lobbiest they might be taken very seriously. Especially if they throw some money around too.
Absolutely true. I work as an assistant to a senator (hence the anon. post), and stuff like this just gets discarded before any "important" people even read it. Grammar and spelling count almost as much as the ideas presented in the letter.
:)
Maybe a similar "filter" should be applied to proposed legislation. Some bills might fail here just on their title
Selling chips should never be illegal. Putting them in might be a different story but thats for the poloticians to decide (god help us, can we revolt yet?).
But they really should have a good reason for this, the modification or workmanship involved makes the product unsafe or causes it to pollute in some way, such as RF emmission. Simply because if might harm the bottom line of some corporate entity, especially a foreign one, should not qualify.
The job of government should be primarily to protect it's citizens, then the protection of other people present in their territory.
Any place where it IS void has seriously fucked up laws. There is no valid reason to void a contract that all parties involved willingly agreed to. And before you say anything, let me point out that if two individuals make an agreement to murder a third party, the contract MUST be invalid because one of the parties involved (the murderer) did not make any agreement.
Using this argument then a contract for slavery should be legal, since it dosn't involve any third parties. Anyway a contract of the form "All passengers in Ford cars must be Ford drivers" is likely to involve third parties...
Sony most certainly IS a party to the sale? Who do you think made it? The store is simply a middleman. Is Sony not getting part of the money you pay?
You must live somewhere with seriously messed up laws. The idea that in a retail sale your contract is with the merchant goes back to prehistory. Currently it's known as the "doctrine of first sale". If Sony want to claim that this dosn't apply then they had better have a very good reason.
The only people Sony is involved with are those they directly sell to. When you buy something you generally deal with whoever owns it now, not whoever might have owned it previously or whoever might have made it originally. Claiming Sony is a party to the retail sale of a playstation makes as much sense as claiming that Ford is a party to the sale of a Ford car with 3 previous owners. When you buy a house you deal with the owner your not obliged to find out who built it, unless the builder is the current owner.
That suggests there is salvageable grey matter there. Might I suggest a LART?
Or anonymous tips for a long list of military and paramilitary entities. Maybe that will thin out the BSA a bit.
Sure, you *should* be keeping records, but a lack of records should not considered to be the equivalent of copyright fraud.
You probably mean copyright infringment. The term "copyright fraud" refers to someone claiming copyright over a work where they are not the copyright holder. Including claiming copyright over public domain materials.
Unless a system like Palladium were installed to prevent employees from messing with their computers, hence preventing any possible violations, there is no feasible way to handle the issue.
Actually you don't need anything like Palladium to do this. Simply an OS which has working file protection. Something Microsoft is still playing catchup on, plenty of other operating systems do this as standard. Indeed Palladium is probably a non starter, since it's to protect proprietary software manufactures and publishers of video and music. Rather than a tool for corporate system administrators to protect systems from end users.
I know not of one company that chould account 100% of it's assets. Sure they know where the buildings are, but can they accurately account for every chair, adding machine (calculator), etc..
Or even every pen and piece of paper. Let alone cables, pipes and ductwork, to the nearest metre.
Accounting for assets of less than $500 in most cases would cost them more than the theft.
Assuming it was stolen. Maybe someone forgot which storeroom it was in. Maybe it broke and just wasn't worth formally writing it off. Reminds me of the claim that Boeing does not know how much an airliner actually costs to build.
This is where I would place most software. It's easy when everything is new but as time goes by you tend to missplace things.
Does any business just make one purchase of a certain kind of thing? Typically things are bought when needed. Since proprietary software is effectivly an expensive perishable not many places will keep "spares". But they might well do for the likes of tables and chairs...
E.g., a contract requires an agreement between two parties. If I buy a computer from a third party, and it comes with software installed, then the only contract I have agreed to is the one with the company that sold me the computer.
There's also the question of who the parties actually are. Since it's quite easy to have a computer owned by a corporate entity, setup by one employee and used by a different employee. So which of these three, if any, is the EULA applicable to? What if the user changes?