Good to see that a government will protect a company's rights with criminal prosecution when it comes to intellectual property. I wonder how much money I'd have to have to get someone arrested for violating my individual rights?
What if they were a corporate "person"? Ever heard of one of those getting arrested, for anything...
Well, if you went into a Ford dealership, and they told you up front, "you can only have Ford owners for passengers", then you agreed, bought the Ford, and took your Nissan-driving mother out for a spin, you'd be violating the contract.
Which may or may not mean anything. i.e. you can't violate a contract which is void...
That's what "...dictate the terms under which his product is offered" means. You could certainly opt not to buy a Ford, but if you agreed at the time of purchase, you'd be in legal hot water if you violated that agreement after the sale.
Assuming the agreement was allowable as a contractual obligation in the first place. If if wasn't then the dealer would be in "hot water".
In this case, SONY offers P/S2 systems to Americans on the stipulation that (A) it only plays games authorized to play on American P/S2s, and (B) you promise not to fuck with the innards.
This differs from the analogy in a few ways. 1) The party isn't well described 2) Sony isn't even a party to the sale.
In the case of the P/S2. the purchase agreement stipulates that you are not allowed to modify it. If you don't like that stipulation, the seller (SONY, in this case) has every right to tell you you can't buy a P/S2. Since you bought it, you (in a legal sense) agreed to be bound by that stipulation. If you then go home, shuck the case and chip it, you've violated that presale contract, and so you're liable for legal trouble.
This would only apply if you bought the thing directly from Sony. If you buy something from a shop then your contract is with the shop. The manufacturer can't place any conditions at all on the sale in this case, since they are not a party to the sale. They can only attempt to place conditions on parties they sell to. Which may not even be retailers. Where is the "presale contract"? All you typically have is a standard retail contract. The only entity empowered to place special conditions on the sale of goods is government. Certainly not foreign corporate entities.
The only thing that is reasonable is that the "artificial property" of the authors in question is not reproduced without their permission. Even this is only a special case rule that is put in place to further a particular (and well defined) public policy objective.
An objective which whilst it might be well defined appears to be quite often ignored.
This is why all contracts have boiler plate stating that if one part of a contract is found to be legally unenforceable (e.g., because that stipulation violates local law), the rest of the contract remains in force
Otherwise the whole thing would become void if any part of it was found to be invalid. It wouldn't suprise me if many contracts contain clauses which are at best known to be questionable by the people who draw up the contract. On the assumption that no-one is going to call their bluff. Especially in the case of a dispute between a large corporate and an individual.
Contracts are NOT iron-clad in all cases. If they were, you could have someone sign a contract making them an indentured servant... but indentured servitude and slavery are illegal in most countries these days.
Contracts are always subservient to the "law of the land" they cannot modify or circumvent that.
If a car vendor told you that modifications to your new car were specifically verbotten, you'd tell them that it was your private property and that they could go to Hell.
The difference here is that there is competition when it comes to buying cars. The way copyright is currently applied to games consoles means that specific games are tied to specific consoles. With the car analogy this would be like roads which only allowed a certain manufacturers car to drive on them.
If the guy who sells me a car says "Installing new air filters is illegal" I'm going to tell him to suck it long, and suck it hard.
It would be more like a car manufacturer saying that the retailer couldn't modify the car, including at the customer's request.
Once they've sold you the device, they have no say in what you do with it.
But computers in the eyes of too many people, especially legislators and judges, are magical things which somehow need different rules.
Can you imagine the outrage if Ford tried to shut down 'unauthorized' mechanics? "He put a performance clutch on the engine, which is clearly unauthorized mechanics."
No doubt they would try. Probably with some FUD about safety. The difference is that "bullshit alarms" have a lot lower setting when it comes to cars than computers.
First, the P/S2 is a proprietary machine, and SONY specifically states that modifications are verboten.
Does Canadian law explicitally recognise such an entity as "proprietary machine" and allow the supplier of such machines to dictate special conditions on their sale? If not then do Sony really have any kind of case here.
Well, I guess the problem is that Sony is selling the colsole very cheap, making almost nothing from hardware sales.
In a truely free market capitalist society that would be entirely Sony's problem. Why should customers (including retailers) be obliged to ensure that Sony's business model works?
For your analogy to be more accurate you would have to say that when you buy a Ford Ranger the company (Ford) doesn't make very much, if anything. Instead, they get their money from selling gas. So, if you (and about half of Ford's other customers) were to mod your Ford Ranger and install a nuclear reactor in it, I'm sure there would be similar reactions.
In which case people would be telling Ford that they were being foolish not to get into the nuclear fuel business, make reactor driven cars as a standard option and supply their own mod kits. The thing is when it comes to computers people think the rules of basic economics should be tossed out of the window. With laws created to enforce a corporate welfare model.
They don't want you buying games from Japan and playing them in the US. And, as the originators of said copyrighted media, and patented and trademarked and copyrighted console, they should have the right to say that you can't play import games on it.
Then maybe they should be consitent in their anti-globalisation stance. i.e. Make the games and consoles for Japan entirely in Japan, those for the US entirely within the US, etc.
When you get a P/S 1 (or 2) you agree (like it or not) not to reverse engineer or modify the device, and since it's a proprietary machine they can say that.
Simply being a "proprietary machine" is in itself meaningless. There needs to be an actual basis in law for such a condition.
When you put in the interop chip, you've violated their license agreement, and so you're no longer authorized to use the device.
The person doing the modification in this case was not using the device. Also we are talking about something which is sold as an appliance. Conceptually what's going on is little different from someone selling washing machines with the length of the spin cycle modified at the customers' request.
The mod chip allows users to play pirate games, but it also allows users to play games for which SONY has received no licensing fees. Imagine if FF9 had been written and published for P/S2, but SONY didn't get their piece of every disk's price to put their seal of approval on it. They're doing this to defend their revenue stream for the games.
This is a creative way to justify what amounts to corporate welfare. By this kind of argument every radio station should be paying Marconi's estate.
Driving a car? No. The gas is on the right and the brake is in the middle. The one on the left is the clutch. The big round thing in the middle is for turning. In front of you is a gauge that tells you how fast you're going.
Cars have different numbers of gears, complicated further on a 4 wheel drive. Automatics don't have a clutch, but may have a foot operated parking brake in its place. The indicators may be on the right or the left, no standard place for horn, lights and wipers. But somehow people manage to just get on with this. Maybe because, unlike with computers, no-one would take any moaning seriously.
I'm sure there are a few people in the UK that believe their language is being further bastardized by the amount of software being developed in the US and exported to the UK;)
Especially when the so called "British English" version of MS Windows is peppered with "Websterized" spellings, examples using US paper sizes (Amricans moan when the boot is on the other foot with the likes of SuSE) and various other Americanizms.
Tony Blair is a progressive, you know. Oh, he's a slick politico, of course, but he's managed to reach the top without completely selling his soul, which is an impressive achievement.
He has had plenty of critisism even from within his own party for following Bush. Indeed sections of the press call him "Bush's Poodle".
TCO for Linux might be too high if you plan on putting a PC on everyone's desk, but if you roll out Linux desktops intelligently (ie. using thin clients) then TCO is far lower than Windows,
It's likely to be lower than Windows even with regular workstations. Since (l)user fiddling with hardware and software settings is out. Something Windows is only just catching up on, but hampered by legarcy application support.
What research is necessary to show that people who are trained to use MS Office under Windows have to be re-trained to use some other application under Linux? This is blindingly obvious.
No more so than changing between different versions of MS Office, which also is blindingly obvious. This kind of thing would be laughed at were it applied to driving a car too.
No.. the straight ones are pretty mundane. Its the animals and birds and things that get wierd.. because they are only truly visible from the air.
The crop circle evidence does imply that these were not as difficult to make as might previously been thought. Similarly with the likes of figures of horses cut into chalk downs.
The other problem with pen and paper is that it potentially allows one's ballot to be trackable.
No more so that any other system. Indeed computerised systems could make vote tracking a lot easier.
For reasons which should be fairly obvious, one doesn't want a situation in which the way one votes can be determined, or in which one can make it known that one voted in a certain way by marking the ballot uniquely.
Having unique ballot papers, e.g. serial numbered, is not a problem so long as no-one records which voter used which ballot paper. But having serial (especially no sequential) serial numbers makes it very hard for someone to stuff in forged ballot papers or to "lose" ballots. Another way to make things less trackable is to not have multiple elections of the same ballot paper. IMHO the best solution would be ballot papers which can be read just as easily by either people or machines.
There is one thing I've heard about elections in the UK that Americans really need to grasp. If a ballot is incorrectly marked, be it a "hanging chad" or a illegable mark on a pen-and-paper ballot, then it's tossed. They don't try and argue what the voter intended, or anything stupid like that, they just ignore the vote and move on with their life
Final decision is up to the returning officer. Who is a civil servant who does not live in the area and is not a member of any political party contesting the election. In the case of a questionable ballot any of the candidates effectivly have a veto on its being counted.
For voting, it is very important to have a way to re-count the votes. I think a literal paper trail is best. I cannot imagine a better scheme than what Washington state is using now: When you go to vote, you get a piece of heavy paper (or maybe it's light cardstock) pre-printed with the ballot. Next to each item you can vote for is a bubble. They loan you a fine-point permanent marker (a Sharpie) and to vote you just fill in the bubble.
By the sound of it this method still involves putting multiple elections on the same physical ballot. Which IMHO is a bad idea since it allows data mining of the form X% of candidates always vote for the candidates of one party, Y% don't.
When you are done, you take the ballot over to the counting machine. You feed the ballot into the slot. (If this is too technically advanced for you, the nice person watching the machine helps you.)
Feeding directly into a machine may make things less anonyomous if details such as when the vote was cast wind up being recorded.
At the end of the day, the counting machine is plugged into a phone jack. It calls in to a computer and reports the votes it had counted all day. The votes can then be quickly summed and you find out how the election went quickly.
You need quite a bit of security to ensue that this is secure against a whole host of threats, including "man in the middle" and someone plugging something else into the phone line. Presumably the actual ballots only get looked at if the result is contested...
Having worked in a few Swedish elections I feel pretty confident saying that there are very few, if any, errors. Every vote is hand counted three times by independent teams. All the ballots are also available for inspection by any member of the public. I can't recall a single case of miscounting, though there probably are some.
One apparent difference between the US and Europe is that it appears that in the US it is possible for people closely connected with political parties to be involved in the process of running the election. Whereas in Europe elections tend to be run by civil servants with as few affiliations as possible to political parties.
Now having said that, another way to reduce voter fraud is to get rid of inactive voters from the lists. If you don't vote, you shouldn't be registered (the idea that people don't vote because they aren't registered is utter BS. When people are interested in an election, they will get themselves registered.
In which case it would be a very good idea to have every ballot paper carry both a "don't care" and a "none of these candidates" option. But this could upset too many established politicans...
In large countries like China, Canada, USA or Brazil, you'll take a substantial amount of time to know the results of an election in traditional voting systems.
With the exception of the 2000 US presidential elections Also "tradiitional voting systems" scale very easily.
OTOH, it introduces the problem of easy tampering. With voting cards, there needs to be a guy (or a gang of them) that steals the votes while nobody's watching and replaces the same number of votes with the result he wishes, and besides being risky, it does not guarantee a result that he wants.
In order to do this the counter would have to smuggle ballot papers in (also match the serial numbers with the
ones they removed) all the time being closely watched by representatives of all candidates...
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Good to see that a government will protect a company's rights with criminal prosecution when it comes to intellectual property. I wonder how much money I'd have to have to get someone arrested for violating my individual rights?
What if they were a corporate "person"? Ever heard of one of those getting arrested, for anything...
Well, if you went into a Ford dealership, and they told you up front, "you can only have Ford owners for passengers", then you agreed, bought the Ford, and took your Nissan-driving mother out for a spin, you'd be violating the contract.
Which may or may not mean anything. i.e. you can't violate a contract which is void...
That's what "...dictate the terms under which his product is offered" means. You could certainly opt not to buy a Ford, but if you agreed at the time of purchase, you'd be in legal hot water if you violated that agreement after the sale.
Assuming the agreement was allowable as a contractual obligation in the first place. If if wasn't then the dealer would be in "hot water".
In this case, SONY offers P/S2 systems to Americans on the stipulation that (A) it only plays games authorized to play on American P/S2s, and (B) you promise not to fuck with the innards.
This differs from the analogy in a few ways. 1) The party isn't well described 2) Sony isn't even a party to the sale.
In the case of the P/S2. the purchase agreement stipulates that you are not allowed to modify it. If you don't like that stipulation, the seller (SONY, in this case) has every right to tell you you can't buy a P/S2. Since you bought it, you (in a legal sense) agreed to be bound by that stipulation. If you then go home, shuck the case and chip it, you've violated that presale contract, and so you're liable for legal trouble.
This would only apply if you bought the thing directly from Sony. If you buy something from a shop then your contract is with the shop. The manufacturer can't place any conditions at all on the sale in this case, since they are not a party to the sale. They can only attempt to place conditions on parties they sell to. Which may not even be retailers.
Where is the "presale contract"? All you typically have is a standard retail contract. The only entity empowered to place special conditions on the sale of goods is government. Certainly not foreign corporate entities.
The only thing that is reasonable is that the "artificial property" of the authors in question is not reproduced without their permission. Even this is only a special case rule that is put in place to further a particular (and well defined) public policy objective.
An objective which whilst it might be well defined appears to be quite often ignored.
This is why all contracts have boiler plate stating that if one part of a contract is found to be legally unenforceable (e.g., because that stipulation violates local law), the rest of the contract remains in force
Otherwise the whole thing would become void if any part of it was found to be invalid. It wouldn't suprise me if many contracts contain clauses which are at best known to be questionable by the people who draw up the contract. On the assumption that no-one is going to call their bluff. Especially in the case of a dispute between a large corporate and an individual.
Contracts are NOT iron-clad in all cases. If they were, you could have someone sign a contract making them an indentured servant... but indentured servitude and slavery are illegal in most countries these days.
Contracts are always subservient to the "law of the land" they cannot modify or circumvent that.
If a car vendor told you that modifications to your new car were specifically verbotten, you'd tell them that it was your private property and that they could go to Hell.
The difference here is that there is competition when it comes to buying cars. The way copyright is currently applied to games consoles means that specific games are tied to specific consoles. With the car analogy this would be like roads which only allowed a certain manufacturers car to drive on them.
If the guy who sells me a car says "Installing new air filters is illegal" I'm going to tell him to suck it long, and suck it hard.
It would be more like a car manufacturer saying that the retailer couldn't modify the car, including at the customer's request.
Once they've sold you the device, they have no say in what you do with it.
But computers in the eyes of too many people, especially legislators and judges, are magical things which somehow need different rules.
Can you imagine the outrage if Ford tried to shut down 'unauthorized' mechanics? "He put a performance clutch on the engine, which is clearly unauthorized mechanics."
No doubt they would try. Probably with some FUD about safety. The difference is that "bullshit alarms" have a lot lower setting when it comes to cars than computers.
First, the P/S2 is a proprietary machine, and SONY specifically states that modifications are verboten.
Does Canadian law explicitally recognise such an entity as "proprietary machine" and allow the supplier of such machines to dictate special conditions on their sale? If not then do Sony really have any kind of case here.
Well, I guess the problem is that Sony is selling the colsole very cheap, making almost nothing from hardware sales.
In a truely free market capitalist society that would be entirely Sony's problem. Why should customers (including retailers) be obliged to ensure that Sony's business model works?
For your analogy to be more accurate you would have to say that when you buy a Ford Ranger the company (Ford) doesn't make very much, if anything. Instead, they get their money from selling gas. So, if you (and about half of Ford's other customers) were to mod your Ford Ranger and install a nuclear reactor in it, I'm sure there would be similar reactions.
In which case people would be telling Ford that they were being foolish not to get into the nuclear fuel business, make reactor driven cars as a standard option and supply their own mod kits.
The thing is when it comes to computers people think the rules of basic economics should be tossed out of the window. With laws created to enforce a corporate welfare model.
They don't want you buying games from Japan and playing them in the US. And, as the originators of said copyrighted media, and patented and trademarked and copyrighted console, they should have the right to say that you can't play import games on it.
Then maybe they should be consitent in their anti-globalisation stance. i.e. Make the games and consoles for Japan entirely in Japan, those for the US entirely within the US, etc.
Oh come on. If you buy a cable box, and hack it to decrypt content you haven't paid for, that's supposed to be OK?
Assuming it is actually your box and not one you rent.
When you get a P/S 1 (or 2) you agree (like it or not) not to reverse engineer or modify the device, and since it's a proprietary machine they can say that.
Simply being a "proprietary machine" is in itself meaningless. There needs to be an actual basis in law for such a condition.
When you put in the interop chip, you've violated their license agreement, and so you're no longer authorized to use the device.
The person doing the modification in this case was not using the device. Also we are talking about something which is sold as an appliance. Conceptually what's going on is little different from someone selling washing machines with the length of the spin cycle modified at the customers' request.
The mod chip allows users to play pirate games, but it also allows users to play games for which SONY has received no licensing fees. Imagine if FF9 had been written and published for P/S2, but SONY didn't get their piece of every disk's price to put their seal of approval on it. They're doing this to defend their revenue stream for the games.
This is a creative way to justify what amounts to corporate welfare. By this kind of argument every radio station should be paying Marconi's estate.
Driving a car? No. The gas is on the right and the brake is in the middle. The one on the left is the clutch. The big round thing in the middle is for turning. In front of you is a gauge that tells you how fast you're going.
Cars have different numbers of gears, complicated further on a 4 wheel drive. Automatics don't have a clutch, but may have a foot operated parking brake in its place. The indicators may be on the right or the left, no standard place for horn, lights and wipers. But somehow people manage to just get on with this. Maybe because, unlike with computers, no-one would take any moaning seriously.
I'm sure there are a few people in the UK that believe their language is being further bastardized by the amount of software being developed in the US and exported to the UK ;)
Especially when the so called "British English" version of MS Windows is peppered with "Websterized" spellings, examples using US paper sizes (Amricans moan when the boot is on the other foot with the likes of SuSE) and various other Americanizms.
Tony Blair is a progressive, you know. Oh, he's a slick politico, of course, but he's managed to reach the top without completely selling his soul, which is an impressive achievement.
He has had plenty of critisism even from within his own party for following Bush. Indeed sections of the press call him "Bush's Poodle".
TCO for Linux might be too high if you plan on putting a PC on everyone's desk, but if you roll out Linux desktops intelligently (ie. using thin clients) then TCO is far lower than Windows,
It's likely to be lower than Windows even with regular workstations. Since (l)user fiddling with hardware and software settings is out. Something Windows is only just catching up on, but hampered by legarcy application support.
What research is necessary to show that people who are trained to use MS Office under Windows have to be re-trained to use some other application under Linux? This is blindingly obvious.
No more so than changing between different versions of MS Office, which also is blindingly obvious.
This kind of thing would be laughed at were it applied to driving a car too.
No.. the straight ones are pretty mundane. Its the animals and birds and things that get wierd.. because they are only truly visible from the air.
The crop circle evidence does imply that these were not as difficult to make as might previously been thought. Similarly with the likes of figures of horses cut into chalk downs.
The other problem with pen and paper is that it potentially allows one's ballot to be trackable.
No more so that any other system. Indeed computerised systems could make vote tracking a lot easier.
For reasons which should be fairly obvious, one doesn't want a situation in which the way one votes can be determined, or in which one can make it known that one voted in a certain way by marking the ballot uniquely.
Having unique ballot papers, e.g. serial numbered, is not a problem so long as no-one records which voter used which ballot paper. But having serial (especially no sequential) serial numbers makes it very hard for someone to stuff in forged ballot papers or to "lose" ballots.
Another way to make things less trackable is to not have multiple elections of the same ballot paper.
IMHO the best solution would be ballot papers which can be read just as easily by either people or machines.
There is one thing I've heard about elections in the UK that Americans really need to grasp.
If a ballot is incorrectly marked, be it a "hanging chad" or a illegable mark on a pen-and-paper ballot, then it's tossed. They don't try and argue what the voter intended, or anything stupid like that, they just ignore the vote and move on with their life
Final decision is up to the returning officer. Who is a civil servant who does not live in the area and is not a member of any political party contesting the election. In the case of a questionable ballot any of the candidates effectivly have a veto on its being counted.
For voting, it is very important to have a way to re-count the votes. I think a literal paper trail is best.
I cannot imagine a better scheme than what Washington state is using now:
When you go to vote, you get a piece of heavy paper (or maybe it's light cardstock) pre-printed with the ballot. Next to each item you can vote for is a bubble. They loan you a fine-point permanent marker (a Sharpie) and to vote you just fill in the bubble.
By the sound of it this method still involves putting multiple elections on the same physical ballot. Which IMHO is a bad idea since it allows data mining of the form X% of candidates always vote for the candidates of one party, Y% don't.
When you are done, you take the ballot over to the counting machine. You feed the ballot into the slot. (If this is too technically advanced for you, the nice person watching the machine helps you.)
Feeding directly into a machine may make things less anonyomous if details such as when the vote was cast wind up being recorded.
At the end of the day, the counting machine is plugged into a phone jack. It calls in to a computer and reports the votes it had counted all day. The votes can then be quickly summed and you find out how the election went quickly.
You need quite a bit of security to ensue that this is secure against a whole host of threats, including "man in the middle" and someone plugging something else into the phone line. Presumably the actual ballots only get looked at if the result is contested...
Having worked in a few Swedish elections I feel pretty confident saying that there are very few, if any, errors.
Every vote is hand counted three times by independent teams. All the ballots are also available for inspection by any member of the public. I can't recall a single case of miscounting, though there probably are some.
One apparent difference between the US and Europe is that it appears that in the US it is possible for people closely connected with political parties to be involved in the process of running the election. Whereas in Europe elections tend to be run by civil servants with as few affiliations as possible to political parties.
Now having said that, another way to reduce voter fraud is to get rid of inactive voters from the lists. If you don't vote, you shouldn't be registered (the idea that people don't vote because they aren't registered is utter BS. When people are interested in an election, they will get themselves registered.
In which case it would be a very good idea to have every ballot paper carry both a "don't care" and a "none of these candidates" option. But this could upset too many established politicans...
Since the electoral college votes are based on number of representatives + number of senators, everyone starts of with a minimum of 3 electoral votes.
Are the states actually obliged to cast all their votes to the same candidate?
In large countries like China, Canada, USA or Brazil, you'll take a substantial amount of time to know the results of an election in traditional voting systems.
With the exception of the 2000 US presidential elections
Also "tradiitional voting systems" scale very easily.
OTOH, it introduces the problem of easy tampering. With voting cards, there needs to be a guy (or a gang of them) that steals the votes while nobody's watching and replaces the same number of votes with the result he wishes, and besides being risky, it does not guarantee a result that he wants.
In order to do this the counter would have to smuggle ballot papers in (also match the serial numbers with the ones they removed) all the time being closely watched by representatives of all candidates...