they are committing copyright infringement and the developers have the right to complain.
They have considerably more rights than just complaining. They have the right to use all the appropriate tools for dealing with copyright infringement (piracy) and copyright infringers (pirates). This includes all the (draconian) laws the entertainments industry has sucessfully lobbied for.
I mean, there have been a few recent cases (BusyBox) where the company is making money off of it but I don't think SoThink is making a ton of cash off of their plugin.
Copyright law does not require an infringer to be making money off it. They could still be liable for huge "statutory damages".
I am not defending SoThink in any way and hope that FlashGot takes action
The most obvious action would be a DMCA takedown notice to mozilla.net and wherever else SoThink is hawking this software.
but instead of opting to sue SoThink, I hope he first tries to force them to open up their own tool under the GPL if it is tangled into his code or at least realease all the modifications they have done to his code.
According to the article he has already tried "asking nicely" (and been ignored) so taking some kind of legal action would appear to be approproiate.
I imagine it involves some process where you have to 'enroll' each physical number in to the service by dialing in from that location. If you can't get to Palin's line, for example, you can't mess with it.
This isn't entirely foolproof since it can be defeated using a "beige box" or someone working for the PTO providing the victim's line.
If the telcos can maintain the copper for a landline, rent it for 25$ a month and turn a profit, there is NO CHANCE IN HELL that killing the landline business will make the copper suddenly cost 100$ a month.
They'd probably claim that losing potential revenue from incoming and outgoing calls more than offsets the saving of having to maintain a small piece of electronics and the cost of electricity. In reality the major cost is likely to be the cable. With the longest runs containing the most joints having the highest potential cost. Thing is that telephone charges and actual costs havn't been closely related for a long time. It's quite possible for a "local" call to involve more hardware and travel a longer distance than some "long distance" calls. The topology of the hardware may have little relationship to either numbering or charging, even if it did at some point in the distant past.
In this context, Google Voice works just fine for a single independent user, has zero maintenance, and is free.
Except that it most likely isn't "free". The "cost" to the user being that Google has access to their calling details and sell these to all sorts of parties, just like any other telephone operator.
The trouble is, there is a large and growing portion of the government now which is non-elected and non-transparent to an apathetic and uninformed public
Though a lot of fuss is made about "unelected" people in government this may not actually be too much of a problem. Unelected can actually be a good thing. e.g. in the UK several times the (unelected)House of Lords has been responsible for stopping the (elected) House of Commons acting against the public interest.
My only concern is that the vaccine is developed against the H1N1 virus (likely neuraminidase) that is currently circulating. It does have high human-human transmission rate, but mortality is 0.5% so far, so most of the cases are mild. What is WHO scared of is this virus becoming more virulent, by say mixing with H5N1 - mortality rate 60%, thus mutating and rendering the vaccine ineffective.
If such a "hybrid" virus were to be so different from either of its parent strains that a vaccine would be ineffective could you easily tell how dangerous to humans it might be? Killing its host is completly against the interests of any virus.
You're right, maybe "incentive" was the wrong term. Let's say, how do we enable an artist to focus on creating art instead of forcing him to have a "mundane" job so he can fund his artistry? If people are really good artists, I'd call it a waste if they were forced to work a 9-5 job just to do what they're really good at. Think how much art he could produce if he wasn't distracted by mundane tasks!
Copyright, as it currently stands, wouldn't help much in that senario. Since this artist still needs to be able to have a roof over their head, eat, have whatever tools they need for their "art", etc before he/she has completed anything. Also separating them from the rest of humanity may mean that they produce a lot of "art" nobody wants or even rob them of the inspiration they need.
"Starving artist" is a cliche because many artists make an economic choice to do their art rather than do something much more economically sensible.
Or they do both. e.g. having a "regular job" and doing their "art" at other times. Even where people are paid to produce "creative works" they may divide their work into "what pays the rent" and "what pleases me".
It was never observed that there was a shortage of art, books, songs, movies, whatever. For as long as these things have existed they have existed in abundance.
Many of these having existed long before copyright was even thought of.
My suggestion would be, let's limit it to, say, 20 years and see if people stop creating content. My money is on "they won't stop".
In the 18th century the period was 14 years. In the 21st century we can send physical items anywhere on the planet within a day and information within a much shorter period of time. Three hundred years ago this was impossible. It could reasonably take months/years to get a book to a prospective customer. Thus if anything 21st century copyright should be more like 7-10 years than 20.
Microsoft is a huge American corporation, so the EC is basically using them as a source for extra funding. If Microsoft were based in Europe this wouldn't be happening.
They have been quite prepared in the past to take action against companies within the EU. Maybe it "wouldn't be happening" were Microsoft based in Europe because there would be more effective options available.
Fining a company for misbehaving is not the perfect solution.
Where said company is a monopoly supplier then at best fining them is pointless. Unless the fine is large enough to bankrupt the company in short order it'll be the customers who wind up paying the fine. (Plus any interest if the fine was big enough to cause short term cash flow problems.)
The best thing to do is to make it impossible for them to break the law in the first place.
Making it more difficult for a company to break the law in future is not the same as punishing them having been caught breaking the law in the past. A far more effective approach IMHO would be something like placing Windows XP in the public domain.
Flight 1549 hit the geese five miles from the runway, several thousand feet up.
One thing to remember is that bird strikes can happen at any altitude. Just because humans cannot breath above 10,000 feet does not mean that birds can't.
The plan is to fly a plane full of lawyers in formation in front of civilian passengers to take out the birds. I'd almost say, like a human shield, however, the lead plane is full of lawyers...
Wouldn't you also need a supply of lawyers who are also pilots though:)
A bug is something not working as intended. Slashdot's rendering on standards compliant browsers for example.
Bugs can be anything from trivially annoying to "show stopper".
A vulnerability is something that can be exploited by a third party for example to crash, hang or invade your machine.
This "third party" can include the end user. In the case of servers or where it is possible to elevate privileges of a thread/process/etc.
That in itself doesn't really tell you much, is it locally or remotely exploitable, do you need valid logins, user action etc. which means it can range from trivial to critical.
The severity can depend very much on the context. e.g. crashing a terminal server is likely to be a rather bigger issue than crashing an individual workstation. Even if exactly the same bug is involved.
At my last job, we had a constant problem of new staff turning up on their first day and their bosses ringing us to say that they need a new user setup straight away. For one-off cases, this wasn't a problem*, but for those that didn't learn, we took a good few days to do it. Paying to have staff sitting there with nothing to do usually teaches them quickly. * we usually left it a day anyway, firstly because some of the aspects of the setup did take time, and secondly, to allow us to stall if they become repeat offenders.
There's also the issues of telephone calls being a poor way to make sure that people's names don't get mis-spelled and whoever is telephoning in a great hurry may not actually know what resources the new member of staff needs access to.
Okay, then to compare apples to apples...Microsoft had one fix for IE in this patch, Apple had 50 for Safari. Again, where is the apple headline?
Except that this isn't "apples to apples". Since you don't know how many actual issues and their severity are involved. Since a "patch" can involve an arbitrary number of changes. Especially with Microsoft having a policy to only issuing patches once a month.
Nah, the ship would destroy itself in the process of landing. It's a colony ship; they wouldn't expect to be going back. The tanks which held the fuel would serve as a huge "crumble zone" and it could come down with parachutes or something.
Coating the outside with something like pykrete would provide good shielding both for interstellar flight and atmospheric entry.
There's no reason an android designed to simulate a human in every way would be super-strong.
If anything it would be daft, since such an android would have difficulty using things designed for humans. It might even wind up having to break down doors after applying too much force to the handle, etc...
Now that there is no reason for people to buy CDs, some other means has to be found to keep artists alive while they create,
There's a difference between keeping them alive and keeping them (plus a crowd of hangers on) rich.
or just accept that the era of the professional musician is over.
Plenty of musicians are not "professional musicians" in the first place. It's also perfectly possible for musicians to provide live entertainment as a sole means of income.
Copy protection is old and would only have worked 15-20 years ago, these day only ONE person needs to bypass the copy protection and everybody can download it.
Copy protection has been around and been ineffective for computer software for more like 30 years. With it being fairly easy to get hold of something pre-cracked being the case for 15-20 years. In the last 10-15 years it became utterly trivial. To the point where it is now even possible to get hold of things before their official release.
Basically, at least here in the EU, legislators are permitted to make exceptions to free speech as long as there are clear public interest grounds in doing so ("necessary in a democratic society [...] for the protection of public safety" being I think the phrasing involved here). So, yes, free speech isn't an automatic win in this case: we need to show, conclusively, that there isn't a (serious) public safety issue here.
Which would require proving a negative. Makes far more sense if those claiming there is such an issue have to prove their case.
Slashdot Mirror
they are committing copyright infringement and the developers have the right to complain.
They have considerably more rights than just complaining. They have the right to use all the appropriate tools for dealing with copyright infringement (piracy) and copyright infringers (pirates). This includes all the (draconian) laws the entertainments industry has sucessfully lobbied for.
Storming the building? Seriously?!
How would you describe the antics of the BSA? They appear to have "stormed" quite a few buildings in the name of opposing copyright infringement!
I mean, there have been a few recent cases (BusyBox) where the company is making money off of it but I don't think SoThink is making a ton of cash off of their plugin.
Copyright law does not require an infringer to be making money off it. They could still be liable for huge "statutory damages".
I am not defending SoThink in any way and hope that FlashGot takes action
The most obvious action would be a DMCA takedown notice to mozilla.net and wherever else SoThink is hawking this software.
but instead of opting to sue SoThink, I hope he first tries to force them to open up their own tool under the GPL if it is tangled into his code or at least realease all the modifications they have done to his code.
According to the article he has already tried "asking nicely" (and been ignored) so taking some kind of legal action would appear to be approproiate.
I imagine it involves some process where you have to 'enroll' each physical number in to the service by dialing in from that location. If you can't get to Palin's line, for example, you can't mess with it.
This isn't entirely foolproof since it can be defeated using a "beige box" or someone working for the PTO providing the victim's line.
If the telcos can maintain the copper for a landline, rent it for 25$ a month and turn a profit, there is NO CHANCE IN HELL that killing the landline business will make the copper suddenly cost 100$ a month.
They'd probably claim that losing potential revenue from incoming and outgoing calls more than offsets the saving of having to maintain a small piece of electronics and the cost of electricity. In reality the major cost is likely to be the cable. With the longest runs containing the most joints having the highest potential cost.
Thing is that telephone charges and actual costs havn't been closely related for a long time. It's quite possible for a "local" call to involve more hardware and travel a longer distance than some "long distance" calls. The topology of the hardware may have little relationship to either numbering or charging, even if it did at some point in the distant past.
In this context, Google Voice works just fine for a single independent user, has zero maintenance, and is free.
Except that it most likely isn't "free". The "cost" to the user being that Google has access to their calling details and sell these to all sorts of parties, just like any other telephone operator.
The trouble is, there is a large and growing portion of the government now which is non-elected and non-transparent to an apathetic and uninformed public
Though a lot of fuss is made about "unelected" people in government this may not actually be too much of a problem. Unelected can actually be a good thing. e.g. in the UK several times the (unelected)House of Lords has been responsible for stopping the (elected) House of Commons acting against the public interest.
My only concern is that the vaccine is developed against the H1N1 virus (likely neuraminidase) that is currently circulating. It does have high human-human transmission rate, but mortality is 0.5% so far, so most of the cases are mild. What is WHO scared of is this virus becoming more virulent, by say mixing with H5N1 - mortality rate 60%, thus mutating and rendering the vaccine ineffective.
If such a "hybrid" virus were to be so different from either of its parent strains that a vaccine would be ineffective could you easily tell how dangerous to humans it might be? Killing its host is completly against the interests of any virus.
You're right, maybe "incentive" was the wrong term. Let's say, how do we enable an artist to focus on creating art instead of forcing him to have a "mundane" job so he can fund his artistry? If people are really good artists, I'd call it a waste if they were forced to work a 9-5 job just to do what they're really good at. Think how much art he could produce if he wasn't distracted by mundane tasks!
Copyright, as it currently stands, wouldn't help much in that senario. Since this artist still needs to be able to have a roof over their head, eat, have whatever tools they need for their "art", etc before he/she has completed anything.
Also separating them from the rest of humanity may mean that they produce a lot of "art" nobody wants or even rob them of the inspiration they need.
"Starving artist" is a cliche because many artists make an economic choice to do their art rather than do something much more economically sensible.
Or they do both. e.g. having a "regular job" and doing their "art" at other times. Even where people are paid to produce "creative works" they may divide their work into "what pays the rent" and "what pleases me".
It was never observed that there was a shortage of art, books, songs, movies, whatever. For as long as these things have existed they have existed in abundance.
Many of these having existed long before copyright was even thought of.
My suggestion would be, let's limit it to, say, 20 years and see if people stop creating content. My money is on "they won't stop".
In the 18th century the period was 14 years. In the 21st century we can send physical items anywhere on the planet within a day and information within a much shorter period of time. Three hundred years ago this was impossible. It could reasonably take months/years to get a book to a prospective customer. Thus if anything 21st century copyright should be more like 7-10 years than 20.
Microsoft is a huge American corporation, so the EC is basically using them as a source for extra funding. If Microsoft were based in Europe this wouldn't be happening.
They have been quite prepared in the past to take action against companies within the EU. Maybe it "wouldn't be happening" were Microsoft based in Europe because there would be more effective options available.
Fining a company for misbehaving is not the perfect solution.
Where said company is a monopoly supplier then at best fining them is pointless. Unless the fine is large enough to bankrupt the company in short order it'll be the customers who wind up paying the fine. (Plus any interest if the fine was big enough to cause short term cash flow problems.)
The best thing to do is to make it impossible for them to break the law in the first place.
Making it more difficult for a company to break the law in future is not the same as punishing them having been caught breaking the law in the past.
A far more effective approach IMHO would be something like placing Windows XP in the public domain.
$375,000? That's petty change compared to how much they made out of it.
Exactly, should not this fine be in addition to repaying all the disputed amounts?
Flight 1549 hit the geese five miles from the runway, several thousand feet up.
One thing to remember is that bird strikes can happen at any altitude. Just because humans cannot breath above 10,000 feet does not mean that birds can't.
The plan is to fly a plane full of lawyers in formation in front of civilian passengers to take out the birds. I'd almost say, like a human shield, however, the lead plane is full of lawyers...
:)
Wouldn't you also need a supply of lawyers who are also pilots though
A bug is something not working as intended. Slashdot's rendering on standards compliant browsers for example.
Bugs can be anything from trivially annoying to "show stopper".
A vulnerability is something that can be exploited by a third party for example to crash, hang or invade your machine.
This "third party" can include the end user. In the case of servers or where it is possible to elevate privileges of a thread/process/etc.
That in itself doesn't really tell you much, is it locally or remotely exploitable, do you need valid logins, user action etc. which means it can range from trivial to critical.
The severity can depend very much on the context. e.g. crashing a terminal server is likely to be a rather bigger issue than crashing an individual workstation. Even if exactly the same bug is involved.
At my last job, we had a constant problem of new staff turning up on their first day and their bosses ringing us to say that they need a new user setup straight away. For one-off cases, this wasn't a problem*, but for those that didn't learn, we took a good few days to do it. Paying to have staff sitting there with nothing to do usually teaches them quickly. * we usually left it a day anyway, firstly because some of the aspects of the setup did take time, and secondly, to allow us to stall if they become repeat offenders.
There's also the issues of telephone calls being a poor way to make sure that people's names don't get mis-spelled and whoever is telephoning in a great hurry may not actually know what resources the new member of staff needs access to.
Okay, then to compare apples to apples...Microsoft had one fix for IE in this patch, Apple had 50 for Safari. Again, where is the apple headline?
Except that this isn't "apples to apples". Since you don't know how many actual issues and their severity are involved. Since a "patch" can involve an arbitrary number of changes. Especially with Microsoft having a policy to only issuing patches once a month.
All the same, I wouldn't want them knowing what weapons we have.
The only weapons they wouldn't know about would be "black weapons".
In all likelyhood, an alien civilization as advanced as us wouldn't be able to detect us from beyond 20 lightyears or so.
In which case it would be at least 40 years before they replied. Assuming they decided to at all.
Nah, the ship would destroy itself in the process of landing. It's a colony ship; they wouldn't expect to be going back. The tanks which held the fuel would serve as a huge "crumble zone" and it could come down with parachutes or something.
Coating the outside with something like pykrete would provide good shielding both for interstellar flight and atmospheric entry.
There's no reason an android designed to simulate a human in every way would be super-strong.
If anything it would be daft, since such an android would have difficulty using things designed for humans. It might even wind up having to break down doors after applying too much force to the handle, etc...
Now that there is no reason for people to buy CDs, some other means has to be found to keep artists alive while they create,
There's a difference between keeping them alive and keeping them (plus a crowd of hangers on) rich.
or just accept that the era of the professional musician is over.
Plenty of musicians are not "professional musicians" in the first place. It's also perfectly possible for musicians to provide live entertainment as a sole means of income.
Copy protection is old and would only have worked 15-20 years ago, these day only ONE person needs to bypass the copy protection and everybody can download it.
Copy protection has been around and been ineffective for computer software for more like 30 years. With it being fairly easy to get hold of something pre-cracked being the case for 15-20 years. In the last 10-15 years it became utterly trivial. To the point where it is now even possible to get hold of things before their official release.
Basically, at least here in the EU, legislators are permitted to make exceptions to free speech as long as there are clear public interest grounds in doing so ("necessary in a democratic society [...] for the protection of public safety" being I think the phrasing involved here). So, yes, free speech isn't an automatic win in this case: we need to show, conclusively, that there isn't a (serious) public safety issue here.
Which would require proving a negative. Makes far more sense if those claiming there is such an issue have to prove their case.