> I know that we should have freedoms, but in a post 9-11 age, there is certain information that should not be released for the public to have. This is why we elect government officials. I love freedom, but I am willing to give some up if it means my wife and daughter are safer as a result.
This position is tenable only if you believe that freedom isn't worth dying for.
On the other hand, if freedom is worth dying for, then sometimes the life given isn't a soldier's, or your grand-dad's, or long dead patriots', it's yours, and your wife's and your daughter's.
If Americans and Iraqis aren't more free today then every death since September-11 was in vain.
> My memory of the invasion of Iraq was that the reason given was that Saddam had himself a heap of WOMADs, and could potentially supply them to anti-western terrorists, or just shoot them at Israel if pressed. It was known that he gassed an entire town of his own people, after all.
Take it for what you will... but the Pentagon (at least the pre-Rummy Pentagon) and the Strategic Studies Institute of the U.S. War College at Carlisle don't believe that Saddam gassed the Kurds -- as far as I can tell this is just oft-repeated propaganda.
The short version is... if anyone "gassed the Kurds" it was Iran (shelled Halabjah in 1988) prior to the end of the Iran-Iraq war and all claims that Saddam "gassed the Kurds" came later from Kurdish refugees in Turkey, i.e., the source is tainted and/or biased and as such hardly credible. Further, no evidence for these claims was ever found.
Don't take this excerpt to mean that you (or others) shouldn't take the time to explore the issue/meme completely:
Like all other Americans, in recent years I had assumed that what I read in the papers was true about Iraq gassing its own people. Once the war drums again began beating last November, I decided to read up on the history, and found Iraq denied having used gas against its own people. Furthermore, I heard that a Pentagon investigation at the time had also turned up no hard evidence of Saddam gassing his own people.
[...]
Now I have come across the 1990 Pentagon report, published just prior to the invasion of Kuwait. Its authors are Stephen C. Pelletiere, Douglas V. Johnson II, and Leif R. Rosenberger, of the Strategic Studies Institute of the U.S. War College at Carlisle, Pennsylvania. The report is 93 pages, but I append here only the passages having to do with the aforementioned issue:
Iraqi Power and U.S. Security in the Middle East
Excerpt, Chapter 5
U.S. SECURITY AND IRAQI POWER
Introduction. Throughout the war the United States practiced a fairly benign policy toward Iraq. Although initially disapproving of the invasion, Washington came slowly over to the side of Baghdad. Both wanted to restore the status quo ante to the Gulf and to reestablish the relative harmony that prevailed there before Khomeini began threatening the regional balance of power. Khomenini's revolutionary appeal was anathema to both Baghdad and Washington; hence they wanted to get rid of him.
United by a common interest, Iraq and the United States restored diplomatic relations in 1984, and the United States began to actively assist Iraq in ending the fighting. It mounted Operation Staunch, an attempt to stem the flow of arms to Iran. It also increased its purchases of Iraqi oil while cutting back on Iranian oil purchases, and it urged its allies to do likewise. All this had the effect of repairing relations between the two countries, which had been at a very low ebb.
In September 1988, however -- a month after the war had ended -- the State Department abruptly, and in what many viewed as a sensational manner, condemned Iraq for allegedly using chemicals against its Kurdish population. The incident cannot be understood without some background of Iraq's relations with the Kurds. It is beyond the scope of this study to go deeply into this matter; suffice it to say that throughout the war Iraq effectively faced two enemies -- Iran and the elements of its own Kurdish minority. Significant numbers of the Kurds had launched a revolt against Baghdad and in the process teamed up with Tehran. As soon as the war with Iran ended, Iraq ann
I have a G4 Mini, and use it to play WoW. It's not fill-rate or CPU limited. I get the same performance at 800x600 as 1024x768 (or >=1024 in a window). What hurts WoW performance on the Mini is the hard-drive. The drive is just too slow for Orgrimmar (so I get lag in Org and in large PVPs):)
If I wasn't lazy, I would reinstall WoW (6 discs! takes forever, and then the downloading and patching, ug) on a faster external firewire and upgrade to 2GB of ram, but the performance is "good enough" as it is now.
I imagine performance on a new Mini would be essentially the same regardless of the video, unless the new machines came with 7200 rpm drives and >1GB of ram.
It's all moot though, because I'm thinking of replacing my Windows box with a new iMac, the better video and drives memory (and dual-heading with my existing display), it's all gonna improve my WoW experience drastically.
> The core duo is plenty fast enough for real-time h.264 decoding. In fact, it should be fast enough for real time encoding.
The iMac core duo is --just a tiny bit faster than real-time when ripping from DVD with Handbrake. Since the new Minis are nearly as fast as the new iMacs, I expect your supposition is true.
As you say later, in addition to the above: > They're setting up considerable precedent in the future that the President doesn't have to abide by Congressional edicts, high court rulings, or indeed, international human rights treaties.
This is not surprising though, since ratified treaties carry the same/similar weight as the words of the Constitution itself (provided no part of the treaty is contrary to our Federal laws or Constitution (Article 6 and 1836's New Orleans v. U.S.? I'm sure someone will correct me)). If Bush can't be bothered to abide the Constitution he surely isn't going to be hung up over treaty obligations.
However, the President is not above the law. Ever. As Jefferson argued[1], if a President feels obliged (morally) to break the law in order to uphold his oath of office he must submit to the penalty of law (it is noble to fall on one's own sword in defense of the republic). If Bush has to (apparently) violate FISA and Amendment 4 to save the republic (from the terrorists!) then he must be willing to submit to us, under our laws. I might even go as far as claiming that if George Bush is not impeached, he must be arrested and tried in January of 2009. Don't worry though, innocent men are arrested all the time, even jailed pending trial (arguably in every case as they have not yet been proven guilty).
> The DRM could keep the contents encrypted, until the library system recognized that the copyright expired. This could be a different version of the DRM standard, designed only to keep the content secure until the copyright expires. Again, there are various possibilities here.
Various futile possibilities. E.g., how does the library system recognize that the copyright has expired? Does it get data from an external source? External sources can be comped; Does it have preprogrammed dates for the materials? The duration of copyright is variable depending on the life of the author and the whims of government, therefore hardcoded dates would either violate Article 1.8.8 by holding works too long or violate the copyright if not protected long enough; Location based DRM? Would it depend on one technology remaining static for 200 years or would it need to be adaptable to new technology? Adaptable systems can be comped by compromising the update or the update mechanism. And on and on and on...
If we can spit-ball techniques and their attacks ad hoc then it seems reasonable that the most committed criminals could do even better.
DRM is impossible until human eyes are replaced with digital eyes and human ears are replaced with digital ears (and even those inevitable systems will be circumvented by the criminals; until we have complete government coercion -- when human freedoms are replaced by digital freedoms, er, Rights Management -- concievably through psycological 'alignment' or 'programming' or quaintly, brainwashing).
You can go around and around with your location based schemes, or your server-mediated access, but the fact remains that electronic systems like this can and will be comped by criminals. We don't need DRM, we need monopoly-infringement-deterrents. E.g., even though murder is illegal we don't keep everyone in seperate impenetrable bubbles just to make it less likely; even though war is illegal we still keep nukes.
If there is no technological solution to murder, how can there ever be a technological solution to infringement? I think it's better to trust that citizens won't kill (rights-infringe) each other and punish those that do.
Your world without trust is a sad world, and again, I hope I am dead before the day it is implemented.
>> There is no compelling argument that Lawful Free Individuals need Coercion, but I invite you to continue trying.
>> - all this is great, if the vast majority of people were Lawful Individuals. The observation is that obviously they are not. Thus they do need some form of coercion (unfortunately at expense of those, who are in fact a Lawful Minority.) I can give you an example where this is happenning already:
Levies on blank CD, DVD, HD, tape and other media, said to go to the artists (I wonder if it does?)
These are not compelling arguments for coercion. These are examples of the futility of technological solutions (and of non-market solutions -- subsidies, ha!). What do criminals do when they get a car with a governor in it? They reprogram it. Is the levy on blank media working? If it were companies wouldn't continue with their hand-waving about infringement (they'd already be compensated from the tax subsidy, RIGHT?)
Governors don't stop speeding, locking up speeders does. If infringement was hurting the industry so badly that they need these subsidies they should increase prices (or lower them) until they recoup those costs without any further government aid. Anecdotally, Photoshop costs $1000 because of all the "pirates" (organized crime), so maybe CDs should cost $1000 too, unless the artist determines they make a larger profit from a lower price, infrigement and all.
I don't have any problem with communists and socialists, make no mistake. If you want government controlled prices for CDs that's fine. I'm just arguing that government subsidy and state-granted monopolies are without merit unless they are upholding Article 1.8.8, otherwise it's just wasteful/ineffecient (you know, and arguably unncessary). If it's not killing people (or otherwise abridging their rights) it's just a matter of opinion and I'm indifferent. (And really abstractly and pedanticly there's an arguement that ineffecient resource allocation does kill people, indirectly, through starvation and access to medicine, etc.)
I grant there's no moral imperative to be effecient. Society can progress at any pace it likes. If we want ineffecient markets and wasted effort, so be it.
So in addition to providing compelling arguments for cercion, and defining an unbeatable (because it's unnecessary unless it's unbeatable) DRM scheme that honors Article 1.8.8 and fair use, maybe you can find a compelling argument for market ineffeciency!
Finally, I assert the vast majority of people are Lawful Individuals. I've seen no evidence to the contrary despite your claim of "obviousness". It's almost absurb to claim the majority isn't lawful, since the rule of law reflects the "vast majority" view (we'd live in anarchy otherwise; we obviously don't).
> But you see, there is nothing wrong with killing an author only to get the copyright to expire.
Everything is wrong with killing an author to get the copyright to expire. If that's not an example of the farce that copyright terms of life+x are, then wtf will it take?!
> I would propose capital punishment for copyright violation [...]
Sure. That seems reasonable enough. Maybe the capital punishment should be tempered though. Let's see... how do we compare depriving some of their life with depriving someone of their time-limited state-granted monopoly on a single expression. Hmmm. I know -- let's deprive them of their freedom for the duration of the copyrights on the works infringed! Authors life plus seventy years or so!
This would be a great way to raise awareness of both: the absurd length of copyright terms, and the flippant attitude of some law breakers.
(Sadly, this might incite the murder of many authors depending on the number of people locked up for the duration of his life, and who the infringers "friends" are. On the plus side -- those works would reach the public domain that much sooner! Maybe the likelihood of murder would encourage more creators to release their work under less restrictive licenses. See also: Assassination Politics.)
What prevents criminals from taking the book. I know what keeps lawful citizens from taking the book -- the fact that they are lawful (i.e., we are not coerced, we follow laws willfully because they are written in our names by us).
Making water not wet is surely harder than sending a man to the moon.
> - how about stealing? How about copyright infringement? Is there a contract between say me and 1000,000,000 people on the internet not to copy a document that I provided for one specific person or a specific group of people? Is there a contract that can be enforced if data is stolen and let free on the internet? No, there is no contract between me and 1,000,000,000 people.
Stealing is already illegal. The penalties for stealing are thought to be a deterrent. Copyright infringement is already illegal. The penalties for copyright infringement are thought to be a deterrent. If that not true in either case the laws and penalties need to be changed (or we need to re-evaluate why we have the law and how we enforce it). Further, there is a contract that can be enforced if the data is stolen and let free on the Internet. It's your responsibility to present that contract and seal that contract before you give someone your data. You could easily have a contract between you and a billion people. It's hyperbole to be sure, but it is not impossible. In fact, license and license infringement suits rely on this kind of implicit agreement of terms. Anyway, with things like the Digital Signature laws and such, you could easily agree to a contract with a billion people through your website. The section of people that e-file their taxes agree to a contract online (but I don't think a billion people e-file).
> DRM is not about taking away your freedom to share data that can legally be shared, it is about takin away your freedom to take away my freedom.
Absurd on its face. Do you hear what you are saying? DRM is about taking away my freedom? That's exactly the problem. DRM is about taking away criminals' ability to undermine your state-granted, time-limited monopoly -- it has absolutely nothing to do with protecting my freedoms or yours. To frame it in terms of freedom is completely disingenuous. If it's not free by default it is taking away my freedom to share data that can legally be shared (e.g., fair use, expiry to the public domain). If it is free by default then DRM isn't necessary. There is no software solution to the criminal element. Ever. Period.
There is no compelling argument that Lawful Free Individuals need Coercion, but I invite you to continue trying.
> - but obviously we cannot trust people, we know that majority of people do not care about copyright laws, we also cannot jail everyone who brakes these laws, so it makes sense to use technology to enforce laws.
Then the laws are broken and the laws need to be fixed. The data does not require "rights management" it needs "recipients management". If "everyone" breaks these laws there is either a fundamental problem with the law or with its enforcement.
If your clients can't be trusted with data, it should not be given to them. We already have legal structures that cover this.
> DRM does not violate anything if the standard is done properly, and that is why we need these public domain discussions, user rights, author rights, copyrights etc.
There is no way to create a proper standard for DRM that doesn't obsolete its very existence. Viz. my prior example of trusted by default. If I let you borrow my car I would trust you to obey the law while driving it, I would trust you to return it undamaged. I don't need to use special technologies and envelopes to make sure that you cannot speed while using my car, that you can only drive on approved routes and roads, that the car will prevent any actions of your free will that will result in damage, etc. If I said, "you may drive my car as long as you return it to me undamaged within a week," and you chose not to do so, I would sue you for breech of contract (trust). If you chose to break the law while driving my car, you alone would be answer to the police (personal responsibility).
Will cars one day lawfully drive themselves without allowing drivers to speed or run red lights? I'm sure they will. Probably around the same time our houses will only let us out when we're allowed to be out and our stereo will only play when we're allowed to listen to it. I hope I'm dead by then.
> As I said, DRM can be a great tool for limiting access to sensitive information
Encryption -- which is currently lawful -- already does this, without "DRM".
> and it can be a great tool to help people not violate copyrights.
Just like Property Rights Management help people not violate property rights! Oh wait, Property Rights Management is called... obeying the law.
>> You may go around in circles trying to describe a mechanism, but the fact is that it cannot.
> The standard for DRM must include encryption of the actual useful data and the envelope that is more like a program itself that is capable of holding state, securily connect to servers for status updates and such.
This is why I said that you would go round and round describing a mechanism... but you and I both know that that a piece of data in an envelope that must contact a third-party for proof that copyright has now expired is not in compliance with Article 1.8.8. That mechanism is perpetual-by-default (what happens when the servers aren't there? What happens when the data reader isn't connected to a network? What happens with the data reader is no longer compatible with the server? (Because we both know that in the term of copyright, at least 95 years adding in the life of the author, that technology will change, while the artifact with the data does not.)
How does the data-envelope even know the time to determine an expiry date? Is it affixed to a tangible medium like a clock? Why do you need DRM if it's fixed in a tangible medium? If the data asks the time from the user, or the user's system isn't this vector obviously exploitable (falling back on trust; trusting the administrator to honestly set his clock).
Encrypted by default is incompatible with time-limited rights protection unless the key is also included with the caveat that it cannot be used until such time as the work is out of copyright.
> I'm surprised there hasn't been more of a shift away from lossy compression algorithms to lossless compression. As more and more of the market shifts away from the 650-700MB capacity constraint of traditional CDs, file sizes for songs are becoming less of an issue. As portable players get up to 60GB+ capacity, having files that are 6MB instead of 3MB starts to have less of an impact on people's ability to have the music they want at hand - since, if my math is correct, that's still enough memory for 10,000 songs.
Maybe I misunderstood your point, but file sizes are still an important issue. 60GB will not hold 10,000 lossless songs. The average size of a lossless track in my library is 40MB.
The napkin math is something like this:
60GB = 60,000MB; 60,000MB / 40MB = 1,500 songs.
Using lossless files would be like turning a iPod video into an iPod mini without the cute form factor.
Now, when we have 500GB iPods then the 10,000 song libraries will be portable without lossy compression (or you could keep lossy compression and carry around 100,000 songs, roughly an entire year's worth of uninterrupted music). Of course for a library like that you'd need to buy like 8,000 CDs -- and at RIAA prices that's no small investment.
My entire music collection would fit in 250GB using flac or lossless m4a, so I'd still have to buy a lot more to fill the half TB.
> All the more reason to not do your everyday work in an administrative account.
In this same vein, this exploit could never affect my wife even if Safari was "opening safe files" -- I have Terminal turned off for her account. She'd know better anyhow (Hi, honey!).
There you go again -- using system granularity to mitigate the attack surface. It's painfully easy to turn off Terminal for user accounts. If you are the sysadmin for your family you should be doing this. What interests me is if your tricky payload could be an Applescript. It's trivial to wrap a bash script in an Applescript (i.e., can you get applescripts past the safe-file filter with rename/metadata tricks).
(Anyhow, we all backup to offline storage, right?)
> am pro-DRM in the following sense: I want an ability to create a document (text/music/video/CAD drawing/object code/etc.) that I could trust to be moved around in the world as a limited resource.
We already have a mechanism for this form of trust. It is called a contract. When the recipient agrees to your contract to treat said document as a limited resource then they are obligated to do so under the law. Anything else would be coercion. Coercion is contrary to our inalienable freedom.
The only argument for DRM is that it makes recipients of data "trustworthier", which is a bullshit argument from the start. Either you can trust people to obey the law or you can't. If you can't, don't give them the fucking data.
> The corporations of-course want to release the data and then have the perpetual copyrights, well that is why I think the DRM schemas must have the time copyright time limiters built into them.
How do you time limit data? How does data know its expiration date? How does it know whether its author is alive or dead? How does it know whether 95 years have passed since death?
You may go around in circles trying to describe a mechanism, but the fact is that it cannot.
The only reasonable mechanism would be this: If I attempt to copy a piece of data, the system would ask me "is this file copyrighted or does its license permit this operation, yes or no?" I would answer the question honestly to the best of my knowledge. The process would continue or not. This is the only system that respects the sovereignty of individual freedom.
DRM (in essentially any form) violates the basic contract the constitution describes for copyright in the first place: In exchange for growing the public domain we the people grant artists and inventors time-limited monopolies. We the people agree to honor these monopolies, just like we agree to honor every other law. If we don't, we face the music, as we do whenever we commit a crime.
I don't see how anyone can expect software to enforce the law. Or at least, not until software systems can be fair and just and personally responsible. This seems like a huge distance into the future.
Finally, you used to have to kludge the shell to pipe text into an osascript, I don't know if this is still necessary (here's the proof of concept): #!/bin/bash #copy fd 0 (stdin) into a different fd... osascript 10<&0 <<EOF
set linefeed to ASCII character 10 set u to "/dev/fd/10" set p to POSIX file u open for access p copy result to stdin set u to "/dev/fd/1" set p to POSIX file u open for access p with write permission copy result to stdout
read stdin before linefeed as text copy result to linebuf set lp to POSIX file linebuf tell app "Finder" get comment of (lp as file) copy result to file_comment end tell write (file_comment & linefeed ) to stdout
Hehe, I had my threshhold set to high, I didn't notice that other posters had already pointed out that Microsoft never owened any part of Apple. Sorry. I hope you get this message before you take any time responding:-D
I didn't mean to pile on after others had already cleared it up. If anything, I hope my post clarifies a little the situation. Cheers!
and they are partly owned by MS (am I the only one who remembers that deal?)
Apple is not owned, not even a little bit by MS (and never has been). In fact, the non-voting stock deal has already been mentioned in a +5 rated comment further upthread (the deal was for Microsoft's investment of $150 million in non-voting Apple stock with a three year commitment before divestment). Google it, Microsoft no longer holds those shares in Apple (or to anyone's knowledge any meaningful investment in Apple common stock; maybe they should though).
Even when Microsoft made this token investment (to save face in their undisclosed settlement for stealing Quicktime to use in Video for Windows, remember that?) Apple had billions of cash in the bank.
I don't know why this meme persists. It's not even 10 years ago, how soon we forget. Or is it that we only remember events the way we want to remember them?
Precise discussion about law uses words defined in the letter of the law. The statute in question, 17 USC 101 et seq., defines and uses the phrase "copyright owner".
This important distinction bolsters the grand-parent's point (well regarding the term intellectual property at least). One may own the copyright to a piece of creative work, but one does not own the idea. (Of course one may own any expression fixed in a tangible medium, because then we are talking about property.)
There is no property in expressions and ideas. The term "intellectual property" is loaded in terms of public debate.
I'm not debating your valid point that copyrights can be owned and have owners in the same sense that any monopoly may be owned and traded.
Anyhow, if we're going to go with the language of the statute we're all going to stop saying "IP holders", "IP owners" and "music owners" and start saying "copyright holders" or "monopolists" (or "exclusive, time-limited rights holders"). Well that will never happen, because the moderators of public debate are the monopolists (i.e., corporate media). YAY!
Slashdot Mirror
> This is why we elect government officials. I love freedom, but I am willing to give some up if it means my wife and daughter are safer as a result.
d =14824868
I've replied to this point of view here: http://yro.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=178785&ci
> I know that we should have freedoms, but in a post 9-11 age, there is certain information that should not be released for the public to have. This is why we elect government officials. I love freedom, but I am willing to give some up if it means my wife and daughter are safer as a result.
This position is tenable only if you believe that freedom isn't worth dying for.
On the other hand, if freedom is worth dying for, then sometimes the life given isn't a soldier's, or your grand-dad's, or long dead patriots', it's yours, and your wife's and your daughter's.
If Americans and Iraqis aren't more free today then every death since September-11 was in vain.
"Give me liberty or give me death."
I have to check this assertion every time it comes up: http://yro.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=170322&cid =14237821...
Take it for what you will
The short version is
Don't take this excerpt to mean that you (or others) shouldn't take the time to explore the issue/meme completely:
(from http://www.polyconomics.com/searchbase/11-18-98.ht ml)
To chime in with Geekoid and Jcr:
:)
I have a G4 Mini, and use it to play WoW. It's not fill-rate or CPU limited. I get the same performance at 800x600 as 1024x768 (or >=1024 in a window). What hurts WoW performance on the Mini is the hard-drive. The drive is just too slow for Orgrimmar (so I get lag in Org and in large PVPs)
If I wasn't lazy, I would reinstall WoW (6 discs! takes forever, and then the downloading and patching, ug) on a faster external firewire and upgrade to 2GB of ram, but the performance is "good enough" as it is now.
I imagine performance on a new Mini would be essentially the same regardless of the video, unless the new machines came with 7200 rpm drives and >1GB of ram.
It's all moot though, because I'm thinking of replacing my Windows box with a new iMac, the better video and drives memory (and dual-heading with my existing display), it's all gonna improve my WoW experience drastically.
> The core duo is plenty fast enough for real-time h.264 decoding. In fact, it should be fast enough for real time encoding.
The iMac core duo is --just a tiny bit faster than real-time when ripping from DVD with Handbrake. Since the new Minis are nearly as fast as the new iMacs, I expect your supposition is true.
Just FYI, it's capiche. Don't worry, my spellchecker doesn't know it either.
http://www.etymonline.com/index.php?term=capiche
As you say later, in addition to the above:
4 6.php and http://scholar.google.com/scholar?q=cache:www.iwm. at/publ-jvc/jc-11-04.pdf+author:%22Bailey%22
> They're setting up considerable precedent in the future that the President doesn't have to abide by Congressional edicts, high court rulings, or indeed, international human rights treaties.
This is not surprising though, since ratified treaties carry the same/similar weight as the words of the Constitution itself (provided no part of the treaty is contrary to our Federal laws or Constitution (Article 6 and 1836's New Orleans v. U.S.? I'm sure someone will correct me)). If Bush can't be bothered to abide the Constitution he surely isn't going to be hung up over treaty obligations.
However, the President is not above the law. Ever. As Jefferson argued[1], if a President feels obliged (morally) to break the law in order to uphold his oath of office he must submit to the penalty of law (it is noble to fall on one's own sword in defense of the republic). If Bush has to (apparently) violate FISA and Amendment 4 to save the republic (from the terrorists!) then he must be willing to submit to us, under our laws. I might even go as far as claiming that if George Bush is not impeached, he must be arrested and tried in January of 2009. Don't worry though, innocent men are arrested all the time, even jailed pending trial (arguably in every case as they have not yet been proven guilty).
[1]http://www.talkingpointsmemo.com/archives/0030
I wonder when CATO will run one of these on Bush.
You may be interested in my further conversation with Roman.
7 66035
7 67275
The thread starting here: http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=178021&cid=14
And my sibling replies at: http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=178021&cid=14
Slashdot needs a mechanism for personal messaging, social-networking is so 'in' these days!
> The DRM could keep the contents encrypted, until the library system recognized that the copyright expired. This could be a different version of the DRM standard, designed only to keep the content secure until the copyright expires. Again, there are various possibilities here.
Various futile possibilities. E.g., how does the library system recognize that the copyright has expired? Does it get data from an external source? External sources can be comped; Does it have preprogrammed dates for the materials? The duration of copyright is variable depending on the life of the author and the whims of government, therefore hardcoded dates would either violate Article 1.8.8 by holding works too long or violate the copyright if not protected long enough; Location based DRM? Would it depend on one technology remaining static for 200 years or would it need to be adaptable to new technology? Adaptable systems can be comped by compromising the update or the update mechanism. And on and on and on...
If we can spit-ball techniques and their attacks ad hoc then it seems reasonable that the most committed criminals could do even better.
DRM is impossible until human eyes are replaced with digital eyes and human ears are replaced with digital ears (and even those inevitable systems will be circumvented by the criminals; until we have complete government coercion -- when human freedoms are replaced by digital freedoms, er, Rights Management -- concievably through psycological 'alignment' or 'programming' or quaintly, brainwashing).
You can go around and around with your location based schemes, or your server-mediated access, but the fact remains that electronic systems like this can and will be comped by criminals. We don't need DRM, we need monopoly-infringement-deterrents. E.g., even though murder is illegal we don't keep everyone in seperate impenetrable bubbles just to make it less likely; even though war is illegal we still keep nukes.
If there is no technological solution to murder, how can there ever be a technological solution to infringement? I think it's better to trust that citizens won't kill (rights-infringe) each other and punish those that do.
Your world without trust is a sad world, and again, I hope I am dead before the day it is implemented.
Where's the compelling argument?
>> There is no compelling argument that Lawful Free Individuals need Coercion, but I invite you to continue trying.
>> - all this is great, if the vast majority of people were Lawful Individuals. The observation is that obviously they are not. Thus they do need some form of coercion (unfortunately at expense of those, who are in fact a Lawful Minority.) I can give you an example where this is happenning already:
Levies on blank CD, DVD, HD, tape and other media, said to go to the artists (I wonder if it does?)
These are not compelling arguments for coercion. These are examples of the futility of technological solutions (and of non-market solutions -- subsidies, ha!). What do criminals do when they get a car with a governor in it? They reprogram it. Is the levy on blank media working? If it were companies wouldn't continue with their hand-waving about infringement (they'd already be compensated from the tax subsidy, RIGHT?)
Governors don't stop speeding, locking up speeders does. If infringement was hurting the industry so badly that they need these subsidies they should increase prices (or lower them) until they recoup those costs without any further government aid. Anecdotally, Photoshop costs $1000 because of all the "pirates" (organized crime), so maybe CDs should cost $1000 too, unless the artist determines they make a larger profit from a lower price, infrigement and all.
I don't have any problem with communists and socialists, make no mistake. If you want government controlled prices for CDs that's fine. I'm just arguing that government subsidy and state-granted monopolies are without merit unless they are upholding Article 1.8.8, otherwise it's just wasteful/ineffecient (you know, and arguably unncessary). If it's not killing people (or otherwise abridging their rights) it's just a matter of opinion and I'm indifferent. (And really abstractly and pedanticly there's an arguement that ineffecient resource allocation does kill people, indirectly, through starvation and access to medicine, etc.)
I grant there's no moral imperative to be effecient. Society can progress at any pace it likes. If we want ineffecient markets and wasted effort, so be it.
So in addition to providing compelling arguments for cercion, and defining an unbeatable (because it's unnecessary unless it's unbeatable) DRM scheme that honors Article 1.8.8 and fair use, maybe you can find a compelling argument for market ineffeciency!
Finally, I assert the vast majority of people are Lawful Individuals. I've seen no evidence to the contrary despite your claim of "obviousness". It's almost absurb to claim the majority isn't lawful, since the rule of law reflects the "vast majority" view (we'd live in anarchy otherwise; we obviously don't).
Anyhow, cheers.
Are you a sociopath?
> But you see, there is nothing wrong with killing an author only to get the copyright to expire.
Everything is wrong with killing an author to get the copyright to expire. If that's not an example of the farce that copyright terms of life+x are, then wtf will it take?!
> I would propose capital punishment for copyright violation [...]
Sure. That seems reasonable enough. Maybe the capital punishment should be tempered though. Let's see... how do we compare depriving some of their life with depriving someone of their time-limited state-granted monopoly on a single expression. Hmmm. I know -- let's deprive them of their freedom for the duration of the copyrights on the works infringed! Authors life plus seventy years or so!
This would be a great way to raise awareness of both: the absurd length of copyright terms, and the flippant attitude of some law breakers.
(Sadly, this might incite the murder of many authors depending on the number of people locked up for the duration of his life, and who the infringers "friends" are. On the plus side -- those works would reach the public domain that much sooner! Maybe the likelihood of murder would encourage more creators to release their work under less restrictive licenses. See also: Assassination Politics.)
Thanks for the tangent into the absurd.
What? Like a book?
What prevents criminals from taking the book. I know what keeps lawful citizens from taking the book -- the fact that they are lawful (i.e., we are not coerced, we follow laws willfully because they are written in our names by us).
Making water not wet is surely harder than sending a man to the moon.
> - how about stealing? How about copyright infringement? Is there a contract between say me and 1000,000,000 people on the internet not to copy a document that I provided for one specific person or a specific group of people? Is there a contract that can be enforced if data is stolen and let free on the internet? No, there is no contract between me and 1,000,000,000 people.
Stealing is already illegal. The penalties for stealing are thought to be a deterrent. Copyright infringement is already illegal. The penalties for copyright infringement are thought to be a deterrent. If that not true in either case the laws and penalties need to be changed (or we need to re-evaluate why we have the law and how we enforce it). Further, there is a contract that can be enforced if the data is stolen and let free on the Internet. It's your responsibility to present that contract and seal that contract before you give someone your data. You could easily have a contract between you and a billion people. It's hyperbole to be sure, but it is not impossible. In fact, license and license infringement suits rely on this kind of implicit agreement of terms. Anyway, with things like the Digital Signature laws and such, you could easily agree to a contract with a billion people through your website. The section of people that e-file their taxes agree to a contract online (but I don't think a billion people e-file).
> DRM is not about taking away your freedom to share data that can legally be shared, it is about takin away your freedom to take away my freedom.
Absurd on its face. Do you hear what you are saying? DRM is about taking away my freedom? That's exactly the problem. DRM is about taking away criminals' ability to undermine your state-granted, time-limited monopoly -- it has absolutely nothing to do with protecting my freedoms or yours. To frame it in terms of freedom is completely disingenuous. If it's not free by default it is taking away my freedom to share data that can legally be shared (e.g., fair use, expiry to the public domain). If it is free by default then DRM isn't necessary. There is no software solution to the criminal element. Ever. Period.
There is no compelling argument that Lawful Free Individuals need Coercion, but I invite you to continue trying.
> - but obviously we cannot trust people, we know that majority of people do not care about copyright laws, we also cannot jail everyone who brakes these laws, so it makes sense to use technology to enforce laws.
... obeying the law.
Then the laws are broken and the laws need to be fixed. The data does not require "rights management" it needs "recipients management". If "everyone" breaks these laws there is either a fundamental problem with the law or with its enforcement.
If your clients can't be trusted with data, it should not be given to them. We already have legal structures that cover this.
> DRM does not violate anything if the standard is done properly, and that is why we need these public domain discussions, user rights, author rights, copyrights etc.
There is no way to create a proper standard for DRM that doesn't obsolete its very existence. Viz. my prior example of trusted by default. If I let you borrow my car I would trust you to obey the law while driving it, I would trust you to return it undamaged. I don't need to use special technologies and envelopes to make sure that you cannot speed while using my car, that you can only drive on approved routes and roads, that the car will prevent any actions of your free will that will result in damage, etc. If I said, "you may drive my car as long as you return it to me undamaged within a week," and you chose not to do so, I would sue you for breech of contract (trust). If you chose to break the law while driving my car, you alone would be answer to the police (personal responsibility).
Will cars one day lawfully drive themselves without allowing drivers to speed or run red lights? I'm sure they will. Probably around the same time our houses will only let us out when we're allowed to be out and our stereo will only play when we're allowed to listen to it. I hope I'm dead by then.
> As I said, DRM can be a great tool for limiting access to sensitive information
Encryption -- which is currently lawful -- already does this, without "DRM".
> and it can be a great tool to help people not violate copyrights.
Just like Property Rights Management help people not violate property rights! Oh wait, Property Rights Management is called
>> You may go around in circles trying to describe a mechanism, but the fact is that it cannot.
> The standard for DRM must include encryption of the actual useful data and the envelope that is more like a program itself that is capable of holding state, securily connect to servers for status updates and such.
This is why I said that you would go round and round describing a mechanism... but you and I both know that that a piece of data in an envelope that must contact a third-party for proof that copyright has now expired is not in compliance with Article 1.8.8. That mechanism is perpetual-by-default (what happens when the servers aren't there? What happens when the data reader isn't connected to a network? What happens with the data reader is no longer compatible with the server? (Because we both know that in the term of copyright, at least 95 years adding in the life of the author, that technology will change, while the artifact with the data does not.)
How does the data-envelope even know the time to determine an expiry date? Is it affixed to a tangible medium like a clock? Why do you need DRM if it's fixed in a tangible medium? If the data asks the time from the user, or the user's system isn't this vector obviously exploitable (falling back on trust; trusting the administrator to honestly set his clock).
Encrypted by default is incompatible with time-limited rights protection unless the key is also included with the caveat that it cannot be used until such time as the work is out of copyright.
> I'm surprised there hasn't been more of a shift away from lossy compression algorithms to lossless compression. As more and more of the market shifts away from the 650-700MB capacity constraint of traditional CDs, file sizes for songs are becoming less of an issue. As portable players get up to 60GB+ capacity, having files that are 6MB instead of 3MB starts to have less of an impact on people's ability to have the music they want at hand - since, if my math is correct, that's still enough memory for 10,000 songs.
Maybe I misunderstood your point, but file sizes are still an important issue. 60GB will not hold 10,000 lossless songs. The average size of a lossless track in my library is 40MB.
The napkin math is something like this:
60GB = 60,000MB; 60,000MB / 40MB = 1,500 songs.
Using lossless files would be like turning a iPod video into an iPod mini without the cute form factor.
Now, when we have 500GB iPods then the 10,000 song libraries will be portable without lossy compression (or you could keep lossy compression and carry around 100,000 songs, roughly an entire year's worth of uninterrupted music). Of course for a library like that you'd need to buy like 8,000 CDs -- and at RIAA prices that's no small investment.
My entire music collection would fit in 250GB using flac or lossless m4a, so I'd still have to buy a lot more to fill the half TB.
> All the more reason to not do your everyday work in an administrative account.
In this same vein, this exploit could never affect my wife even if Safari was "opening safe files" -- I have Terminal turned off for her account. She'd know better anyhow (Hi, honey!).
There you go again -- using system granularity to mitigate the attack surface. It's painfully easy to turn off Terminal for user accounts. If you are the sysadmin for your family you should be doing this. What interests me is if your tricky payload could be an Applescript. It's trivial to wrap a bash script in an Applescript (i.e., can you get applescripts past the safe-file filter with rename/metadata tricks).
(Anyhow, we all backup to offline storage, right?)
Big error in this boolean: ""is this file copyrighted or does its license permit this operation, yes or no?""
:-D
This should have read "is the file copyrighted or does its license forbid this operation, yes or no?"
Hehe, otherwise the operation would always be forbidden.
> am pro-DRM in the following sense: I want an ability to create a document (text/music/video/CAD drawing/object code/etc.) that I could trust to be moved around in the world as a limited resource.
d =14766009
We already have a mechanism for this form of trust. It is called a contract. When the recipient agrees to your contract to treat said document as a limited resource then they are obligated to do so under the law. Anything else would be coercion. Coercion is contrary to our inalienable freedom.
The only argument for DRM is that it makes recipients of data "trustworthier", which is a bullshit argument from the start. Either you can trust people to obey the law or you can't. If you can't, don't give them the fucking data.
Further: data can't time-limit itself -> http://yro.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=178021&ci
> The corporations of-course want to release the data and then have the perpetual copyrights, well that is why I think the DRM schemas must have the time copyright time limiters built into them.
How do you time limit data? How does data know its expiration date? How does it know whether its author is alive or dead? How does it know whether 95 years have passed since death?
You may go around in circles trying to describe a mechanism, but the fact is that it cannot.
The only reasonable mechanism would be this: If I attempt to copy a piece of data, the system would ask me "is this file copyrighted or does its license permit this operation, yes or no?" I would answer the question honestly to the best of my knowledge. The process would continue or not. This is the only system that respects the sovereignty of individual freedom.
DRM (in essentially any form) violates the basic contract the constitution describes for copyright in the first place: In exchange for growing the public domain we the people grant artists and inventors time-limited monopolies. We the people agree to honor these monopolies, just like we agree to honor every other law. If we don't, we face the music, as we do whenever we commit a crime.
I don't see how anyone can expect software to enforce the law. Or at least, not until software systems can be fair and just and personally responsible. This seems like a huge distance into the future.
> Er...yes. Applescript is a legacy Mac feature and has nothing to do with the Unix shell. It can't even pipe text.
e ference/Manpages/man1/osascript.1.html
5 .html
Manual Page for osascript(1)
http://developer.apple.com/documentation/Darwin/R
Saying "[Applescript] can't even pipe text" as an argument is like saying "bash can't even manipulate the GUI controls!"
Anyhow, osascript can take scripts from std-in just like perl can.
Further, applescript can use the output of other shell scripts just like the backtick operator. http://developer.apple.com/technotes/tn2002/tn206
Finally, you used to have to kludge the shell to pipe text into an osascript, I don't know if this is still necessary (here's the proof of concept):
#!/bin/bash
#copy fd 0 (stdin) into a different fd...
osascript 10<&0 <<EOF
set linefeed to ASCII character 10
set u to "/dev/fd/10"
set p to POSIX file u
open for access p
copy result to stdin
set u to "/dev/fd/1"
set p to POSIX file u
open for access p with write permission
copy result to stdout
read stdin before linefeed as text
copy result to linebuf
set lp to POSIX file linebuf
tell app "Finder"
get comment of (lp as file)
copy result to file_comment
end tell
write (file_comment & linefeed ) to stdout
EOF
Hehe, I had my threshhold set to high, I didn't notice that other posters had already pointed out that Microsoft never owened any part of Apple. Sorry. I hope you get this message before you take any time responding :-D
I didn't mean to pile on after others had already cleared it up. If anything, I hope my post clarifies a little the situation. Cheers!
and they are partly owned by MS (am I the only one who remembers that deal?)
Apple is not owned, not even a little bit by MS (and never has been). In fact, the non-voting stock deal has already been mentioned in a +5 rated comment further upthread (the deal was for Microsoft's investment of $150 million in non-voting Apple stock with a three year commitment before divestment). Google it, Microsoft no longer holds those shares in Apple (or to anyone's knowledge any meaningful investment in Apple common stock; maybe they should though).
Even when Microsoft made this token investment (to save face in their undisclosed settlement for stealing Quicktime to use in Video for Windows, remember that?) Apple had billions of cash in the bank.
I don't know why this meme persists. It's not even 10 years ago, how soon we forget. Or is it that we only remember events the way we want to remember them?
Precise discussion about law uses words defined in the letter of the law. The statute in question, 17 USC 101 et seq., defines and uses the phrase "copyright owner".
This important distinction bolsters the grand-parent's point (well regarding the term intellectual property at least). One may own the copyright to a piece of creative work, but one does not own the idea. (Of course one may own any expression fixed in a tangible medium, because then we are talking about property.)
There is no property in expressions and ideas. The term "intellectual property" is loaded in terms of public debate.
I'm not debating your valid point that copyrights can be owned and have owners in the same sense that any monopoly may be owned and traded.
Anyhow, if we're going to go with the language of the statute we're all going to stop saying "IP holders", "IP owners" and "music owners" and start saying "copyright holders" or "monopolists" (or "exclusive, time-limited rights holders"). Well that will never happen, because the moderators of public debate are the monopolists (i.e., corporate media). YAY!