You cannot distribute millions upon millions of instances of copy-protected and/or encrypted data along with millions upon millions of devices capable of reading and/or decrypting that data worldwide to literally billions of people and not expect it to be reverse engineered and/or cracked in rather short order.
The whole exercise is rather pointless if you need the system to work for something like a century.
And the big offenders will be the pirates who don't care that DMCA or whatever has made the reverse engineering illegal. It's not like they are paying attention to the law anyway.
Assuming they even need to bother with reverse engineering anyway. Many "pirate" CDs originate from regular production lines.
The labeling of the CD in english that it is not intended for computer use, is insufficient. The city I live in has speakers of English, Spanish, Arabic, Hmong, and Viet in large quantities, including many who only speak that language. Any warning label at a minimum must cover all of these languages, and even that will not cover the significant portion of the population who does not know how to read, but can use a computer.
Thus you need a logo for "it will break your computer", similar to those to indicate poison, radioactive, biohazard, etc.
Next time you're in the store, look at the warning labels on any poisonous substance. They go well beyond "hey, don't drink this stuff". If anything, the warnings on these faux-CD discs need to be even stronger than those labels, because they address a danger that is completely unknown to the average consumer (as opposed to the danger of drinking something that everybody already knows is poison).
Typically such warnings are "warnings for dummies", including warnings against things no one in their right mind would do. These psudo-CDs need to carry warnings with the same kind of pitch, including a large "no computer" logo on both the packaging and the disc itself.
A lincense does not need to copyright law. It a business contract and bypass all protections of the copyright law, unless you can get them to agree to your changes.
Usually contracts rely on an agreement between parties and exchange of consideration. Selling something meets this kind of criteria, as does the GPL, when it comes to any kind of EULA it's hard to see how these could ever be considered "contracts". Indeed it's hard to see anyway they could be binding which would not be terrifying to software companies. Since any customer could change the terms simply by writing a letter.
The general rule is: add road capacity, and more people will drive.
Traffic increasing as more road space is added is something which has been known about for the last 70-80 years.
Living closer to work and using a bike or walking will.
One of the reasons people don't do this is that they have to use the same roads choked with traffic. So they risk injury from being hit by cars and having to breath the exhaust...
Unencrypted = x bytes per second
Encrypted = x bytes per second + y bits per second encryption overhead.
There is no reason for the cyphertext version to be larger than the plaintext. Also, assuming we are talking television here, you could use the undisplayed lines usually used for test signals, teletext, etc for sending out of band data.
If you look at the.ram-movie it becomes clear that everything is encrypted untill it reaches virginia, then it gets beamed back to the intelligence community in Europe over a public sattelite with no encryption.
This dosn't make sense, since the satellite dosn't need to handle any encryption. All it needs to do is receive a signal and rebroadcast it.
To borrow some statistics (source [fireshui.com]): 25% of US energy consumption and 10% of the average residential energy bill comes from lighting. Light bulbs are horribly inefficient - 90% of the electricity they suck up is wasted as heat. So from an infrastructure standpoint, a cheap energy-efficient bulb can make a huge economic and environmental difference.
It's not quite that simple. If the building needs heating anyway then the heat isn't really waste. It becomes waste heat where the building needs cooling, then not only is that energy wasted, but also energy can need to be expended on removing the heat.
The fee shouldn't even have to be that large at all -- it's just there to prove that someone actually cares enough about the work to keep up the copyright.
It needs to be large enough that it will not be worth holding on to an out of print work "just in case".
The constant extension of automatic copyright is becoming a serious problem. There are just too many works that are close to unavailable, the demand for a limited reprint etc. is there, but either the copyright holder will not either reprint themselves or license the copyright to someone else, or it's impossible to find the original copyright holder.
The more copyright is extended the worst these kind of problems will get. Not only can it be difficult to track down copyright holders that person (or more likely corporation) may not even know they hold a copyright. e.g. the copyright was owned by a company which went bankrupt 20 years ago, but wasn't considered a valuable asset at that time.
You can't make copies of a work because it's protected by copyright, but it's out of print because the publisher (and, make no mistake, the publisher has all of the rights in the current system) has decided that the market for that work isn't large enough to be able to keep it in print.
Maybe the current copyright holder does not know they even have the rights. Corporations merge, restructure, go bankrupt, etc.
The suggestion I once made, that copyright holders be required to periodically pay for copyright in order to keep it, was met with cries that I was trying to prevent people from becoming authors and that I was trying to starve current authors' grandchildren. This idea would allow works like "Peter Pan" to stay in copyright basically forever, (meaning "until the fees aren't paid,") and still become public domain as soon as interest flags sufficiently for it to fall out of print.
Note that the renewel fee cannot be too low, otherwise you can still get hording of out of print works. One possility would be an exponetial fee, which would also make perpetual copyright impossible anyway.
The only part of my idea that I have trouble defending is the fact that I'm spending a lot of time thinking about making sure that people can still have access to works that they didn't care enough about when they were first published to keep them in print.
They might have zero value as they are, but be valuable in helping to create new works.
Why should anyone care about a zillion B-movies that no one is ever going to re-release?
The copyright holder probably dosn't, so they have little interest in ensuring that whatever media they are on lasts until the copyright expires.
The Constitution states that copyrights may only be granted for a limited time. The Copyright clause speaks directly to the issue of the creators rights so how can there be any argument that a copyright term based on "life span plus years" of the creator is not in effect unlimited for the creator and thus in direct violation of the Constitution.
Which would in itself be a good reason for the US to ignore the Bern Convention. Indeed the US frequently ignores treaties for a lot more trivial reasons. Does anyone know exactly where relating copyright terms to the creator's life came from? It makes knowing where copyright expires on works difficult
as well as the possibility of author assasination.
The purpose of IP laws is to give inventors, artists, writers, and so forth an incentive to publish their findings, discoveries, works, and such. It is intended to give them a limited time period in which to recoup their expenses
Note that it is not intended as any guarentee that they will recoup their expenses. (Let alone that they will make a profit.) It's simply to give them "first refusal" on any money which may be made when the work is new.
There isn't a large practical difference between information that remains under copyright forever, and information that remains under copyright for a period of a century. Copyright law exists to create a situation where the information is available, whether or not you must pay for it. A world where everyone has to pay $15 to buy any book because Public Domain ceased to exist is a damn sight better than a world where those books don't exist.
However copyright still applies even to out of print books. With long term copyright it's quite possible that the abstract copyright will outlive any copy of the work. Whereas with short term copyright this is much less of a risk. Since the media would typically last several times the copyright term, we now have the situation where there is little media which will outlast the default length of copyright.
In short, the laws don't specifically say you can give up your copyright on a work and since the right to put something into the public domain before its natural expiration hasn't been challenged in court, its still a grey area.
Wouldn't preventing a copyright holder explicitally placing something into the public domain violate the WIPO treaty. Which recently passed copyright laws are allegedly ratifications of...
GPL prevents the part about companies being able to benefit,
The vast majority of companies arn't in the business of selling software. For the majority of companies open source is a verg good deal. It means no expensive to administer per seat/user/machine licencing and that they can get the same competition between their suppliers with software as they can with everything else. There may be issues for companies in the business of selling proprietary software. But they are a tiny minority, so the majority should not have to put up with furthering their busines model.
First off, there are tons of people who aren't going to want to give up their domains
And people never have addresses, postal codes and telephone numbers changed due to the actions of third parties?
I agree with an above poster: lets get rid of this trademark/copyright crap and make domains first come, first serve. Adding cc TLDs to everything would be confusing and would make the Internet more geographically fragmented.
When it comes to commercial entities trying to sell physical products having a clear identifier of where it actually is would be a good thing. There would also be things like sites reviewing movies and TV programmes, since these are "fragmented" by geography in the first place.
On top of which, the ITU is not an operations organization at all--it runs standards bodies, things like that. I'd be very hesitant to hand it control of such a crucial thing.
It manages telephone country codes perfectly well. (Apart from the obvious exception, which predates it.) Which is not that different from how how DNS root servers really should operate.
Our real problem is that DNS became the way to find web pages. That's not what it was designed for. It was designed as distributed, heirarchial system. You register a.com, you have authority to hand out names below that. Same for every single other domain
I really don't see how webpages make a difference one way or the other. URL's don't care what the DNS names actually are.
The idea was to give your organisation or network a name, and then use that heirarchy to organise all your resources.
Effectivly it's like an address or telephone number. Except that it is logical rather than physical, so you can quite easily have "Department X, Building Y, site Z".
When they find that the majority of people DO NOT VOTE (and the majority regularly do not), government no longer can state it reflects the majority; the majority has not spoken. The voters simply assume the non-speaking did not want to speak and hence can be cowed into a categorical corner, when if they don't speak, you don't know what they said at all.
The thing is that voting isn't exactly "speaking". It's endorsing a person to speak on your behalf. The smaller the number of candidates the more likely it is that voters will consider that none of these candidates are worth voting for. Maybe ballot papers should have a both "none of the above" and "no-one from the political parties of the above"....
Companies can't get away with imprisoning/killing you. The government can have you locked up with all of ten minutes notice-- Intel can't.
But where a company can get the government to do it there is little practical difference between the company doing it. Except that they don't need to accept any responsibility.
I agree wholeheartedly with your point about the corporate lobby-tanks. I ask myself the question, is this capitalism gone wrong? This question leads to my next point. I do not believe it is totally the people's fault that the corporations have grown so powerful. I think that the government, while trying to serve the corporations, forgets about everyone else.
There is actually a fundermental problem of how do you create a system which allows people to address concerns to government. But which cannot be hijacked by corporate lobbying, either big business or political/religious zealots . Once the latter happens the chances of most people being even heard are minimal to non existant. Once a lobby group has become extablished they will also defend their "turf", so even organising counter lobby groups may not work.
With due respect, of course the government is subject to our laws. That's what it means to live in a constitutional republic with rule of law and specific limitations on government.
Laws are only as good as their enforcement. Unless there is a credible threat of force then sooner or later laws will be ignored.
I'm not saying there aren't abuses, and we must always be vigilant to fight them.
So when was the last time the US government was fought?
By the way, take a look at what is required in order to ammend the constitution [cornell.edu]. This isn't something that government can `just do'.
The US federal government has managed to do quite a few things the US constitution would appear to prevent it doing. Including some things they are explicitally denyied the power to do. The way things are going why would they need to ammend a document they can just ignore anyway...
The constitution "holds water" because we, the people agree it does. The govmt has exactly the powers we as a people allow it.
Left to their own devices governments tend to attempt to gain power. The US constitution is a very nice document, but it assumes a population which is cynical about government and activly watches that government. Problem is that a great majority of the current US population appears to both blinding trust government and not ever know most of the things members of the US government get up to in their name. (Especially things which happen outside of the US.)
Like a developing nation where the interim rulers siezed power and refused to establish democracy as originally chartered, someone needs to step in.
Then what's stopping the US from presenting a resolution to the UN general assembly?
The US was both the country that originally granted ICANN its authority, and the US has the clout to demand ICANN's restructing.
A nation taking back a former colony would look very bad. It immediatly raises the issue of how sincere the idea of independance was in the first place
This abuse of power and refusal to transistion to democracy are inexcusable. The US would never tolerate it in a former territory (where there's an economic impact on the US at least)
In the case of an actual territory would the US allow independance in the first place? Considering that the US has an interesting interpretation of article 73 of the UN charter...
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You cannot distribute millions upon millions of instances of copy-protected and/or encrypted data along with millions upon millions of devices capable of reading and/or decrypting that data worldwide to literally billions of people and not expect it to be reverse engineered and/or cracked in rather short order.
The whole exercise is rather pointless if you need the system to work for something like a century.
And the big offenders will be the pirates who don't care that DMCA or whatever has made the reverse engineering illegal. It's not like they are paying attention to the law anyway.
Assuming they even need to bother with reverse engineering anyway. Many "pirate" CDs originate from regular production lines.
The labeling of the CD in english that it is not intended for computer use, is insufficient. The city I live in has speakers of English, Spanish, Arabic, Hmong, and Viet in large quantities, including many who only speak that language. Any warning label at a minimum must cover all of these languages, and even that will not cover the significant portion of the population who does not know how to read, but can use a computer.
Thus you need a logo for "it will break your computer", similar to those to indicate poison, radioactive, biohazard, etc.
Next time you're in the store, look at the warning labels on any poisonous substance. They go well beyond "hey, don't drink this stuff". If anything, the warnings on these faux-CD discs need to be even stronger than those labels, because they address a danger that is completely unknown to the average consumer (as opposed to the danger of drinking something that everybody already knows is poison).
Typically such warnings are "warnings for dummies", including warnings against things no one in their right mind would do. These psudo-CDs need to carry warnings with the same kind of pitch, including a large "no computer" logo on both the packaging and the disc itself.
A lincense does not need to copyright law. It a business contract and bypass all protections of the copyright law, unless you can get them to agree to your changes.
Usually contracts rely on an agreement between parties and exchange of consideration. Selling something meets this kind of criteria, as does the GPL, when it comes to any kind of EULA it's hard to see how these could ever be considered "contracts". Indeed it's hard to see anyway they could be binding which would not be terrifying to software companies. Since any customer could change the terms simply by writing a letter.
The general rule is: add road capacity, and more people will drive.
Traffic increasing as more road space is added is something which has been known about for the last 70-80 years.
Living closer to work and using a bike or walking will.
One of the reasons people don't do this is that they have to use the same roads choked with traffic. So they risk injury from being hit by cars and having to breath the exhaust...
Unencrypted = x bytes per second Encrypted = x bytes per second + y bits per second encryption overhead.
There is no reason for the cyphertext version to be larger than the plaintext. Also, assuming we are talking television here, you could use the undisplayed lines usually used for test signals, teletext, etc for sending out of band data.
If you look at the .ram-movie it becomes clear that everything is encrypted untill it reaches virginia, then it gets beamed back to the intelligence community in Europe over a public sattelite with no encryption.
This dosn't make sense, since the satellite dosn't need to handle any encryption. All it needs to do is receive a signal and rebroadcast it.
To borrow some statistics (source [fireshui.com]): 25% of US energy consumption and 10% of the average residential energy bill comes from lighting. Light bulbs are horribly inefficient - 90% of the electricity they suck up is wasted as heat. So from an infrastructure standpoint, a cheap energy-efficient bulb can make a huge economic and environmental difference.
It's not quite that simple. If the building needs heating anyway then the heat isn't really waste. It becomes waste heat where the building needs cooling, then not only is that energy wasted, but also energy can need to be expended on removing the heat.
The fee shouldn't even have to be that large at all -- it's just there to prove that someone actually cares enough about the work to keep up the copyright.
It needs to be large enough that it will not be worth holding on to an out of print work "just in case".
The constant extension of automatic copyright is becoming a serious problem. There are just too many works that are close to unavailable, the demand for a limited reprint etc. is there, but either the copyright holder will not either reprint themselves or license the copyright to someone else, or it's impossible to find the original copyright holder.
The more copyright is extended the worst these kind of problems will get. Not only can it be difficult to track down copyright holders that person (or more likely corporation) may not even know they hold a copyright. e.g. the copyright was owned by a company which went bankrupt 20 years ago, but wasn't considered a valuable asset at that time.
You can't make copies of a work because it's protected by copyright, but it's out of print because the publisher (and, make no mistake, the publisher has all of the rights in the current system) has decided that the market for that work isn't large enough to be able to keep it in print.
Maybe the current copyright holder does not know they even have the rights. Corporations merge, restructure, go bankrupt, etc.
The suggestion I once made, that copyright holders be required to periodically pay for copyright in order to keep it, was met with cries that I was trying to prevent people from becoming authors and that I was trying to starve current authors' grandchildren. This idea would allow works like "Peter Pan" to stay in copyright basically forever, (meaning "until the fees aren't paid,") and still become public domain as soon as interest flags sufficiently for it to fall out of print.
Note that the renewel fee cannot be too low, otherwise you can still get hording of out of print works. One possility would be an exponetial fee, which would also make perpetual copyright impossible anyway.
The only part of my idea that I have trouble defending is the fact that I'm spending a lot of time thinking about making sure that people can still have access to works that they didn't care enough about when they were first published to keep them in print.
They might have zero value as they are, but be valuable in helping to create new works.
Why should anyone care about a zillion B-movies that no one is ever going to re-release?
The copyright holder probably dosn't, so they have little interest in ensuring that whatever media they are on lasts until the copyright expires.
The Constitution states that copyrights may only be granted for a limited time. The Copyright clause speaks directly to the issue of the creators rights so how can there be any argument that a copyright term based on "life span plus years" of the creator is not in effect unlimited for the creator and thus in direct violation of the Constitution.
Which would in itself be a good reason for the US to ignore the Bern Convention. Indeed the US frequently ignores treaties for a lot more trivial reasons.
Does anyone know exactly where relating copyright terms to the creator's life came from?
It makes knowing where copyright expires on works difficult as well as the possibility of author assasination.
The purpose of IP laws is to give inventors, artists, writers, and so forth an incentive to publish their findings, discoveries, works, and such. It is intended to give them a limited time period in which to recoup their expenses
Note that it is not intended as any guarentee that they will recoup their expenses. (Let alone that they will make a profit.) It's simply to give them "first refusal" on any money which may be made when the work is new.
There isn't a large practical difference between information that remains under copyright forever, and information that remains under copyright for a period of a century. Copyright law exists to create a situation where the information is available, whether or not you must pay for it.
A world where everyone has to pay $15 to buy any book because Public Domain ceased to exist is a damn sight better than a world where those books don't exist.
However copyright still applies even to out of print books. With long term copyright it's quite possible that the abstract copyright will outlive any copy of the work. Whereas with short term copyright this is much less of a risk. Since the media would typically last several times the copyright term, we now have the situation where there is little media which will outlast the default length of copyright.
In short, the laws don't specifically say you can give up your copyright on a work and since the right to put something into the public domain before its natural expiration hasn't been challenged in court, its still a grey area.
Wouldn't preventing a copyright holder explicitally placing something into the public domain violate the WIPO treaty. Which recently passed copyright laws are allegedly ratifications of...
GPL prevents the part about companies being able to benefit,
The vast majority of companies arn't in the business of selling software. For the majority of companies open source is a verg good deal. It means no expensive to administer per seat/user/machine licencing and that they can get the same competition between their suppliers with software as they can with everything else.
There may be issues for companies in the business of selling proprietary software. But they are a tiny minority, so the majority should not have to put up with furthering their busines model.
First off, there are tons of people who aren't going to want to give up their domains
And people never have addresses, postal codes and telephone numbers changed due to the actions of third parties?
I agree with an above poster: lets get rid of this trademark/copyright crap and make domains first come, first serve. Adding cc TLDs to everything would be confusing and would make the Internet more geographically fragmented.
When it comes to commercial entities trying to sell physical products having a clear identifier of where it actually is would be a good thing.
There would also be things like sites reviewing movies and TV programmes, since these are "fragmented" by geography in the first place.
On top of which, the ITU is not an operations organization at all--it runs standards bodies, things like that. I'd be very hesitant to hand it control of such a crucial thing.
It manages telephone country codes perfectly well. (Apart from the obvious exception, which predates it.) Which is not that different from how how DNS root servers really should operate.
Our real problem is that DNS became the way to find web pages. That's not what it was designed for. It was designed as distributed, heirarchial system. You register a .com, you have authority to hand out names below that. Same for every single other domain
I really don't see how webpages make a difference one way or the other. URL's don't care what the DNS names actually are.
The idea was to give your organisation or network a name, and then use that heirarchy to organise all your resources.
Effectivly it's like an address or telephone number. Except that it is logical rather than physical, so you can quite easily have "Department X, Building Y, site Z".
When they find that the majority of people DO NOT VOTE (and the majority regularly do not), government no longer can state it reflects the majority; the majority has not spoken. The voters simply assume the non-speaking did not want to speak and hence can be cowed into a categorical corner, when if they don't speak, you don't know what they said at all.
The thing is that voting isn't exactly "speaking". It's endorsing a person to speak on your behalf. The smaller the number of candidates the more likely it is that voters will consider that none of these candidates are worth voting for. Maybe ballot papers should have a both "none of the above" and "no-one from the political parties of the above"....
Companies can't get away with imprisoning/killing you. The government can have you locked up with all of ten minutes notice-- Intel can't.
But where a company can get the government to do it there is little practical difference between the company doing it. Except that they don't need to accept any responsibility.
I agree wholeheartedly with your point about the corporate lobby-tanks. I ask myself the question, is this capitalism gone wrong? This question leads to my next point. I do not believe it is totally the people's fault that the corporations have grown so powerful. I think that the government, while trying to serve the corporations, forgets about everyone else.
There is actually a fundermental problem of how do you create a system which allows people to address concerns to government. But which cannot be hijacked by corporate lobbying, either big business or political/religious zealots . Once the latter happens the chances of most people being even heard are minimal to non existant. Once a lobby group has become extablished they will also defend their "turf", so even organising counter lobby groups may not work.
Well - hold on there! The US Government cannot summarily alter the Constitution - the government is defined and limited by that Constitution.
Do they need to? Consider what happens when the US congress passes a blatently unconstitutional law?
However, if the courts and people are prepared to turn a blind eye to abuses, then the Constitution becomes a worthless piece of paper.
Or worst it becomes a "religious" icon where the words can be quoted without understanding of the meaning.
With due respect, of course the government is subject to our laws. That's what it means to live in a constitutional republic with rule of law and specific limitations on government.
Laws are only as good as their enforcement. Unless there is a credible threat of force then sooner or later laws will be ignored.
I'm not saying there aren't abuses, and we must always be vigilant to fight them.
So when was the last time the US government was fought?
By the way, take a look at what is required in order to ammend the constitution [cornell.edu]. This isn't something that government can `just do'.
The US federal government has managed to do quite a few things the US constitution would appear to prevent it doing. Including some things they are explicitally denyied the power to do. The way things are going why would they need to ammend a document they can just ignore anyway...
The constitution "holds water" because we, the people agree it does. The govmt has exactly the powers we as a people allow it.
Left to their own devices governments tend to attempt to gain power. The US constitution is a very nice document, but it assumes a population which is cynical about government and activly watches that government. Problem is that a great majority of the current US population appears to both blinding trust government and not ever know most of the things members of the US government get up to in their name. (Especially things which happen outside of the US.)
Like a developing nation where the interim rulers siezed power and refused to establish democracy as originally chartered, someone needs to step in.
Then what's stopping the US from presenting a resolution to the UN general assembly?
The US was both the country that originally granted ICANN its authority, and the US has the clout to demand ICANN's restructing.
A nation taking back a former colony would look very bad. It immediatly raises the issue of how sincere the idea of independance was in the first place
This abuse of power and refusal to transistion to democracy are inexcusable. The US would never tolerate it in a former territory (where there's an economic impact on the US at least)
In the case of an actual territory would the US allow independance in the first place? Considering that the US has an interesting interpretation of article 73 of the UN charter...