I expect that instead they'll just try to encode the magic bullet into the watermark of SDMI music. Play the wrong track in your player, and mp3 support takes a wrong turn at albuqurque
Well, I have a CDRW burner, so I'd like to stick with something along those lines - besides, it would be capable of functioning as a generic discman (why _wouldn't_ it?) and you could probably even evolve a standard for cds with mp3 and redbook tracks for extra fun.
besides, i don't want to have to get an optical out card for my mac. But a usb is more commonplace. Not that firewire wouldn't be better, but it's not sufficiently common on your side of the fence yet;)
Well, copyright is government granting you a monopoly on your creations in the first place (other than your ownership of the raw property - but a mass produced DVD is going to be peanuts then)
And I disagree with your statement that there would be very few movies to copy otherwise. Copyrights are pretty new things, and while there's certainly *more* pieces of art or scientific advances than there used to be, most serious artists and scientists are motivated by other concerns and have been for thousands of years.
Anyone could copy Michelangelo's "David" if they wanted to, and no one would likely care. But it didn't stop Michelangeo, or his backers, and it certainly wouldn't've diminished the value of the original. But try getting away with that now....
And just to head off those who complain that since the military could no longer be defeated by citizenry equipped with hunting rifles, etc. please do remember that guerilla tactics are still feasable. The US has been defeated by them before, and if it really comes down to it (hopefully it will not) they can be again.
What I've always been peeved about is the illegality of descrambling broadcasted tv (i.e. satellite tv)
It strikes me that if they're going to broadcast a signal into my property then I ought to have the ability to watch it. Not duplicate it - that's still verboten (unless it's a public domain signal or something)
Cable is not such a big deal, b/c you really do have to hook into their system and this can cause some degredation (e.g. if way way too many people are hooked in without sufficient infrastructure) but there's no similar argument with broadcasts.
Well... copyright is not an inalienable right, it is not a natural right. In fact, the ability to incorporate is not an inalienable or natural right either.
So if the govt. were to step out of those two issues altogether, the DVD CCA would no longer exist (not to mention that none of the movie studios would either), and anyone who wanted to copy a movie would have no prohibition from doing so.
It's a bit extreme, but I could live with it.;)
(Seriously, when you're talking about rights explicitly granted by the government there's no reason *not* to look to the government for recourse.)
The old way of doing it was (IIRC) that copyright lasted for ~10-20 years and then fell into the public domain unless the author explicitly renewed it. And when the author died, that was the end of that.
If we were to go back to something like that, it's unlikely that anyone would really give a crap about holding tightfistedly onto the copyright for fairly old software. And yeah, while source would also fall into the public domain, I don't know if it's reasonable to require it....
The only point I disagreed with in the article concerning "old" copyrights is that I have no problem with Disney wanting to retain the copyright on Mickey Mouse. Mickey is still used to promote the company and is important to their public image so for the sake of consistency in my personal opinion I say "more power to them".
I don't really agree. The purpose of the copyright is not to grant a monopoly just because something is still in use, but to promote advancement. Where has Disney advanced? They've let Mickey Mouse stagnate for some reason, they're clearly not letting anyone else write stories involving him (before Disney was as family-friendly as they are now, Mickey used to be a trickster character similar to Bugs Bunny - I'd like to see some of that again), and a great deal of the stuff that they are doing is either licensed from someone else (101 Dalmatians) or itself takes advantage of Public Domain material (Little Mermaid, Cinderella, etc).
Obviously the arts can be advanced by adapting public domain stuff as they themselves have proven. But what advancement is there in a permanent monopoly? What encouragement is there to be anything but a one-hit wonder, if it's your hit forever?
1. The laws MS is in court over have been around for over 50 years. They relate entirely to business practices, not software. The only reason they are coming together here is that many of MS's business practices are expressed through their products, which are the software. But it's hardly as though they couldn't afford lawyers ahead of time, or didn't know what they were doing.
2. The gov't is generally considered to have broad powers to regulate trade, business practices, etc. I'm not saying that I like it, but consider it like this: Most of the companies in this industry are pretty well-behaved. But if some make too much trouble (e.g. MS, IBM back in the old days), we all get saddled with rules. If people would prioritize keeping their damn noses clean instead of making money at the expense of everyone's future opportunites we'd be in better shape. Tragedy of the commons sort of thing, I think.
Of course the government can control and regulate the software industry. They can control and regulate virtually _any_ industry in one way or another. Most industries are, in fact, regulated.
Furthermore, I submit that regulation is frequently a good thing:
Would you like to travel on a plane in a country in which there was no FAA, maintenance was performed whenever it made sense economically (rather than on a basis of safety) and pilots took off and landed when and where they pleased?
How about chucking the FDA - who needs medicines to be carefully tested before being approved for use or foods to be inspected for quality and disease?
Naturally the SEC is useless, as insider trading actually promotes the economy.
You see Noke, we don't live in a free market. The government, acting on the authority of the people, passes laws for the general good, even if this might constrain some individual freedom (like man x's freedom to rob man y). If they go to far, it tends to get overturned. Often though, everyone agrees that it is well worth it.
America would be a very different, and probably very lousy place had the government not regulated various industries. Though it should be noted that regulation usually only comes after that industry has gone beyond the bounds of what decent people are willing to put up with.
MS is turning out to be one of the first, although I'm sure you already knew about IBM's famous antitrust suit in which they were nearly broken up. IBM's business practices had to be significantly altered to avoid that fate, and it has improved the industry greatly. Hell, there probably would never have been an MS (or an Apple, or a Sun, or a Compaq, or a Dell, or an SGI...) had it not been for the government stepping in.
You'd do well to remember that the US does not operate as a free market. The only well-known free-marketeers I can think of offhand - the only people who will sell, buy or trade absolutely anything - would be the Mafia. Heck, they'll sell you your life, and they don't take kindly to government regulation. But I don't think you want to do business with them all the same;)
What's really fun though is to build a functioning A-Bomb out of the Lego Town Uranium Processing Plant kit. (those uranium bricks are a collectors item now - wish I'd kept mine)
Jobs worked at Atari for a while, and during that time the Woz was at HP. Jobs had just talked his way into the job and while he had some technical skills, he's never been a hacker by any standard (unless you count social engineering).
So when the assignment came in for Breakout, Jobs told Bushnell no problem. Then he secretly got the Woz to do all the real work at night (after putting in a full day at HP - the man didn't sleep for days). Worse, Bushnell had promised Jobs a bonus if he minimized the number of chips on the board. Jobs offered to split it with the Woz 50-50, but when the $5000 bonus came in (a masterpiece of IC conservation) Jobs only gave the Woz $250.
The lessons of this story are: *Steve Jobs is an incredible jerk *The Woz is an incredible engineer *Atari had trouble figuring out how Breakout _worked, it was so tightly built *Apple might have used Intel chips if Woz had had more cash on hand when building the Apple I (who knows?)
My mistake. However there are still IIRC interoperability clauses in the DMCA. And that's ignoring the idea that all or part of the DMCA is in violation of the constitution.
I still have high hopes, though I'm rather disappointed in the defense lawyers....
Oh ho! If they copied the algorithm precisely, then it's a copyright violation. With a fair amount of documented clean room reverse engineering, it's considered legal (even if it's precisely the same? IANAL)
If it had been patented, DeCSS would be in violation of a patent, but the second the patent expired we'd be free to use their original code anyway.
DVD CCA decided to not protect their work beyond keeping mum. This has always been upheld as not being a legal protection unless someone they told blabbed. I think that the case would have been stronger if they had cleanly figured out the keys too, but I have no doubt that this idiot will get overridden in appeals.
This is kind of funny, b/c a lot of Woz's work on the Apple was done with pencil and paper. Two great hardware guys that that taste great together, I guess.;)
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Although it hurts libraries and other archivists when they need to preserve content but the original no longer exists or is unavailable.
(besides, as long as i bought it and haven't sold or given the music away, who cares what i copy from what? sounds boneheaded to me)
I expect that instead they'll just try to encode the magic bullet into the watermark of SDMI music. Play the wrong track in your player, and mp3 support takes a wrong turn at albuqurque
Well, I have a CDRW burner, so I'd like to stick with something along those lines - besides, it would be capable of functioning as a generic discman (why _wouldn't_ it?) and you could probably even evolve a standard for cds with mp3 and redbook tracks for extra fun.
;)
besides, i don't want to have to get an optical out card for my mac. But a usb is more commonplace. Not that firewire wouldn't be better, but it's not sufficiently common on your side of the fence yet
Duh.
Well, copyright is government granting you a monopoly on your creations in the first place (other than your ownership of the raw property - but a mass produced DVD is going to be peanuts then)
And I disagree with your statement that there would be very few movies to copy otherwise. Copyrights are pretty new things, and while there's certainly *more* pieces of art or scientific advances than there used to be, most serious artists and scientists are motivated by other concerns and have been for thousands of years.
Anyone could copy Michelangelo's "David" if they wanted to, and no one would likely care. But it didn't stop Michelangeo, or his backers, and it certainly wouldn't've diminished the value of the original. But try getting away with that now....
- USB interface
- Open CDROM format for storage
- 16MB RAM (copy the file from CD to RAM)
So maybe the best solution is a player which can operate either entirely on memory or with memory and a CD attached to it in some modular fashion.You are of course, hitting it right on the head.
And just to head off those who complain that since the military could no longer be defeated by citizenry equipped with hunting rifles, etc. please do remember that guerilla tactics are still feasable. The US has been defeated by them before, and if it really comes down to it (hopefully it will not) they can be again.
What I've always been peeved about is the illegality of descrambling broadcasted tv (i.e. satellite tv)
It strikes me that if they're going to broadcast a signal into my property then I ought to have the ability to watch it. Not duplicate it - that's still verboten (unless it's a public domain signal or something)
Cable is not such a big deal, b/c you really do have to hook into their system and this can cause some degredation (e.g. if way way too many people are hooked in without sufficient infrastructure) but there's no similar argument with broadcasts.
Anyone here willing to rebut?
Well... copyright is not an inalienable right, it is not a natural right. In fact, the ability to incorporate is not an inalienable or natural right either.
;)
So if the govt. were to step out of those two issues altogether, the DVD CCA would no longer exist (not to mention that none of the movie studios would either), and anyone who wanted to copy a movie would have no prohibition from doing so.
It's a bit extreme, but I could live with it.
(Seriously, when you're talking about rights explicitly granted by the government there's no reason *not* to look to the government for recourse.)
There was the mood-altering device right at the beginning of the book, which while not a drug per se, end up being the same in the end.
And Niven (possibly not the first) proposed that some current in the right spot in the brain could put most any pharmeceutical to shame.
It's good to know that there's something - anything - that can make the Dead sound better ;)
The old way of doing it was (IIRC) that copyright lasted for ~10-20 years and then fell into the public domain unless the author explicitly renewed it. And when the author died, that was the end of that.
If we were to go back to something like that, it's unlikely that anyone would really give a crap about holding tightfistedly onto the copyright for fairly old software. And yeah, while source would also fall into the public domain, I don't know if it's reasonable to require it....
I don't really agree. The purpose of the copyright is not to grant a monopoly just because something is still in use, but to promote advancement. Where has Disney advanced? They've let Mickey Mouse stagnate for some reason, they're clearly not letting anyone else write stories involving him (before Disney was as family-friendly as they are now, Mickey used to be a trickster character similar to Bugs Bunny - I'd like to see some of that again), and a great deal of the stuff that they are doing is either licensed from someone else (101 Dalmatians) or itself takes advantage of Public Domain material (Little Mermaid, Cinderella, etc).
Obviously the arts can be advanced by adapting public domain stuff as they themselves have proven. But what advancement is there in a permanent monopoly? What encouragement is there to be anything but a one-hit wonder, if it's your hit forever?
Heh.
1. The laws MS is in court over have been around for over 50 years. They relate entirely to business practices, not software. The only reason they are coming together here is that many of MS's business practices are expressed through their products, which are the software. But it's hardly as though they couldn't afford lawyers ahead of time, or didn't know what they were doing.
2. The gov't is generally considered to have broad powers to regulate trade, business practices, etc. I'm not saying that I like it, but consider it like this: Most of the companies in this industry are pretty well-behaved. But if some make too much trouble (e.g. MS, IBM back in the old days), we all get saddled with rules. If people would prioritize keeping their damn noses clean instead of making money at the expense of everyone's future opportunites we'd be in better shape. Tragedy of the commons sort of thing, I think.
Furthermore, I submit that regulation is frequently a good thing:
You see Noke, we don't live in a free market. The government, acting on the authority of the people, passes laws for the general good, even if this might constrain some individual freedom (like man x's freedom to rob man y). If they go to far, it tends to get overturned. Often though, everyone agrees that it is well worth it.
America would be a very different, and probably very lousy place had the government not regulated various industries. Though it should be noted that regulation usually only comes after that industry has gone beyond the bounds of what decent people are willing to put up with.
MS is turning out to be one of the first, although I'm sure you already knew about IBM's famous antitrust suit in which they were nearly broken up. IBM's business practices had to be significantly altered to avoid that fate, and it has improved the industry greatly. Hell, there probably would never have been an MS (or an Apple, or a Sun, or a Compaq, or a Dell, or an SGI...) had it not been for the government stepping in.
You'd do well to remember that the US does not operate as a free market. The only well-known free-marketeers I can think of offhand - the only people who will sell, buy or trade absolutely anything - would be the Mafia. Heck, they'll sell you your life, and they don't take kindly to government regulation. But I don't think you want to do business with them all the same
While he was trying to be funny, shoe stores really _did_ used to have x-ray machines for use in measuring your feet.
My mom told me once that when she was a kid she liked to look at her feet in the machine for pretty long amounts of time.
urg.
What's really fun though is to build a functioning A-Bomb out of the Lego Town Uranium Processing Plant kit. (those uranium bricks are a collectors item now - wish I'd kept mine)
;)
That's a sad thing to think.
Jobs worked at Atari for a while, and during that time the Woz was at HP. Jobs had just talked his way into the job and while he had some technical skills, he's never been a hacker by any standard (unless you count social engineering).
So when the assignment came in for Breakout, Jobs told Bushnell no problem. Then he secretly got the Woz to do all the real work at night (after putting in a full day at HP - the man didn't sleep for days). Worse, Bushnell had promised Jobs a bonus if he minimized the number of chips on the board. Jobs offered to split it with the Woz 50-50, but when the $5000 bonus came in (a masterpiece of IC conservation) Jobs only gave the Woz $250.
The lessons of this story are:
*Steve Jobs is an incredible jerk
*The Woz is an incredible engineer
*Atari had trouble figuring out how Breakout _worked, it was so tightly built
*Apple might have used Intel chips if Woz had had more cash on hand when building the Apple I (who knows?)
My mistake. However there are still IIRC interoperability clauses in the DMCA. And that's ignoring the idea that all or part of the DMCA is in violation of the constitution.
I still have high hopes, though I'm rather disappointed in the defense lawyers....
Oh ho! If they copied the algorithm precisely, then it's a copyright violation. With a fair amount of documented clean room reverse engineering, it's considered legal (even if it's precisely the same? IANAL)
If it had been patented, DeCSS would be in violation of a patent, but the second the patent expired we'd be free to use their original code anyway.
DVD CCA decided to not protect their work beyond keeping mum. This has always been upheld as not being a legal protection unless someone they told blabbed. I think that the case would have been stronger if they had cleanly figured out the keys too, but I have no doubt that this idiot will get overridden in appeals.
I scored an 1850 on the SAT, but I didn't do so well on math ;)
This one goes up to 11....
Well actually, it's much more hopeless than it seems. So they're right, technically. ;)
(proud to be an American, except for when we fuck up)
This is kind of funny, b/c a lot of Woz's work on the Apple was done with pencil and paper. Two great hardware guys that that taste great together, I guess. ;)
Technically it's supposed to be 'ten,' but i personally prefer 'ecks.' (year MM compliant too, oh boy ;)