But they can not restrict someone, who gets the source, from re-releasing binaries of the packages...
GPL covers rights to source, not binaries. The original binaries *can* be restricted; *but* recreated binaries from the identical source cannot be restricted. If datestamps or some random seeds are part of the binary (is GCC strictly deterministic even on different systems?), then the recreated binaries may not pass a digital signature test. So they can charge for and restrict distribution of a signed and (at least claimedly) verified set of binaries; but not for work-alike binaries from identical sources. So you don't have to pay for an identical (recompiled) idea ("free speech"), but you do have to pay for a work of compilation (no "free beer" or free labor).
I guess the (absolutely or nearly) identical sets of bits are different under law, depending on who compiles them when.
Some judge or jury will be deciding whether your email to a long lost (but rich) cousin, to someone who's email address has a similar spelling to that of a business colleague who stutters on the phone, to a hot babe who somehow accidentally gave you her real email address (must have been *really* drunk) and then forgot, email from your local congress-critter, church or library, etc., is illegal UCE or not (since the sig contains a allusion to a reference to a link to a semi-commercial site...)
Without uniform global enforcement, spammers will just work thru agents in some country where they don't have any equivalent laws, or they do but the local sheriff can't find any of his cousins^H^H^H the spammers to serve papers on.
Without sender verification, spammers can tie up enforcement and prosecution resources by simply forging a sufficient percentage of UCE/SPAM from Cmdr. Taco or from you (thus using the legal system to help with klez-uce DDoS attacks).
My guess is increasing volumes of SPAM & UCE will add to the push towards some sort of protocol layered on top of the existing one, where most peoples mail transport agents will simply bit-bucket email either not on a white-list, or not digitally signed with a signature issued some really big agent (post office, major bank, big brother, etc. (e.g. an agent that knows where to find your body, bank account and hard drive)). Almost nobody will bother wading through terabytes of cruft to find one message from a old long lost school budd somewhere in Nigeria. Grandma may have to learn how to use a signed signing mail agent.
Re:Just read the Constitution, fer chrissakes.
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Fair IP Laws?
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No company should have the rights to your invention, regardless of how much money they pumped into it.
One of the purposes of IP law is to encourage greater investment in R "To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts...". Should only rich people be able to do costly art and invention? Assignment of patent and copyright is one of the things that allows non-rich individuals to try their hand at large scale invention and artistic performance. Bell, Edison and many others required significant outside investment to finish their inventions. This was also true of many important innovations in the computer world. Or do you think Bell Labs and Xerox PARC were public charities?
Re:Just read the Constitution, fer chrissakes.
on
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I'm saying that it's up to the artist to decide what is fair use of his recording.
Unfortunately, it's not "his" recording. Someone else owned the digital recorder and all the mikes. A corporation owned the sound studio. A producer and technician modified the recorded sounds, including the the voice of the headline artist. A software geek wrote some custom audio sound filters and effects. There were 3 backup singers. Some of the percussion was done by a session drummer. The backup bass player was sitting in because the usual one was in rehab, but he was the one who did the composition. The lyrics were partially "borrowed" from some unknown street poet. Some of the keyboard sounds were samples from another bands recording. And the owner of the recording is???
Re:One thing I've NEVER seen here....
on
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Oog becomes the richest man in the stone-age, with many wives. But he's not living in a mansion. He's still living in a... cave.
That's assuming Oog isn't smart enough to cross-license. Oog cross-licenses with the WHEEL guy, etc., and we still end up living in smog and urban traffic jams.
The purpose of IP is "To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries;"
The founders of the United States knew that in a large and diverse society there are a percentage of people who will create more, given the chance to make lots of money from the results. The "law" of supply and demands says that if the supply of something is artificially limited, the price should go up. IP law artificially limits the supply of the use of new technology and reproduction of artistic performances (because of the exclusive licensing rights) and thus increases the profits from successful inventions and creations.
Lets consider IP law a knob instead of a pushbutton. Set the knob too low and the benefits to society will decrease due to some lower rate of innovation. Set the knob too high and there will be a drain on society created by inefficient transfers of wealth and the limitations on freedom to use recent ideas. Given a little clairvoyance, one should be able to set the knob at some maxima in the sum of both new inventions and the social benefits from wider usage of recent inventions.
There are several ways the knob can be set: duration of copyrights and patents, limitations on royalties and the types of restrictions and penalties legally available, requirements to share or pool certain types of patents, expansion or contraction in fair use rights, etc., etc. Given the current state of technology, which requires the use of lots of interdependant, but independantly invented, ideas, the knob is probably set too high in some markets. Now where's the clairvoyant who knows how the knob should be set? (Make sure that you don't set the knob so low that the ubergeek who is about to figure out how to write some software which would accelerate a protein folding model required to cure cancer a year sooner doesn't get laid off from a mega-cuticle R&D boondoggle and decide to go hack on the linux kernel instead...)
Re:Just read the Constitution, fer chrissakes.
on
Fair IP Laws?
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How about making copywrites non-transferable.
And just who would own the copyright for any major motion picture (authors, screenwriters, directors, actors, editors, lyricists, composers, matte painters, lighting technicians, set designers, digital artists, etc. etc.)? The paperwork for you playing a video from the rental store would fill a legal office.
Anyway, the RIAA, et. al., would just change the contract. Instead of requiring assignment of copyright in exchange for promotion and royalties, etc.; they would just require an employment contract requiring the musicians/composers/authors to sue whomever the recording company chooses. Same result.
Re:Easy steps to unsubscribe...
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Disconnecting
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When asked why you want to cancel the service, reply... I'm sorry; I charge $xxx/hour for internet services analysis and review. If you want me to answer that question, please send a corporate invoice to... The prompness with which you cancel this account will be part of my review.
As a ballpark figure, 1 watt turned on all year costs you $1. Maybe double that if you are in a continuously air conditioned environment like a machine room. The problem isn't with the power per machine per year, but the power density (watts per volume). Above a certain number of kW per rack (5? 6?) the cost of cooling increases non-linearly because of the need for specialized AC equipment, plumbing, building reinforcement for heavy stuff on the roof, etc.
What would it take to produce a full and correct specification of the detailed behavior of gcc or emacs, including the expected bugs, side effects and every feature, bell and whistle; and without quoting a single line of source code or copylefted documentation?
Write Your Own Damn Code could well be an impossible red-herring. Complex enough copyrighted code might just be protected as well as if it were patented because of this.
The media industry wants to control information even after they have sold it, whereas as a consumer I don't even want to give out this information in the first place.
Of course your want to give out this information. You want your doctor to have your correct physical information so he/she can prescribe the correct dosages, your pharmacy to have the correct billing info and address so stuff gets shipped to the right place, etc. You want only the people you do business with to have access to some of your data, but not anyone else. Just like the corporations selling certains forms of media.
Don't CS programs require probability and statistics courses anymore?
A shareware/demoware author doesn't assume you're all thieves; just that a percentage of downloaders are thieves, a percentage are window shoppers, a percentage are honest customers, and a good percentage are "lazy" about paying for products they use. There's some pretty hard evidence for this.
There's almost nothing (cost effective) that one can do about the determined software pirates; and one doesn't want to annoy honest customers and window shoppers. But if one doesn't somehow encourage the "lazy" customers to think about registering and paying; that could easily represent more than half ones revenue out the window. Not good if a programmer is using this income to pay the mortgage. So demo time-limits are one of those necessary-evil business trade-off decisions, where the effect will annoy some customers, but as long as the number of people it annoys (including the exponential referrals) is less than the number of additional customers the scheme encourages to pay for the product, it's a good thing.
Anyway, a lot of shareware/demoware authors send the activation code to the given email address; if it's a bogus address, you don't get the code (or for opt-in purchasers, notices about new releases that fix serious bugs). I use one-time addresses when trying stuff, and then filter them if I'm no longer interested in the product, or if some bozo (there's a percentage of them on this end of the business also) sells the address to a spammer.
1.4 "IPR Impairing License" shall mean the GNU General Public License, the GNU Lesser/Library General Public License, and any license that requires in any instance that other software distributed with software subject to such license (a) be disclosed and distributed in source code form; (b) be licensed for purposes of making derivative works; or (c) be redistributable at no charge.
Note that because the Mozilla license does not subject "other software distributed" to any license requirements, the MPL is not "impared" according to this passage.
So the MPL might be preferable to the BSD license for people who don't want someone to "take" and use their source without also being required to disclose it.
Finding a fully graphical web browser that was written in 1975, like finding a massive city over 10000 years old would be a huge surprise- if not impossible.
Although some of Engleberts work is surprisingly prescient, given SRI's budget and the technology of the time.
So as long as I state it ahead of time I can charge a $50 unsolicited viewing fee for every advertisement broadcast to my television. Or for every piece of junk mail sent to my house (via post)?
Sure, I'm sure you can even bring criminal charges if they break into your house and wire your television so you can't change the channel or turn it off, or force you at gunpoint to not leave the room and go to the bathroom during their TV ads. Mail fraud laws probably apply to tricking you into accepting postage due letters.
Me, the TV set is rarely on; and when it is, it's usually tuned to PBS. And the ads in the mailbox are occasionally useful for lining the bottom of the birdcage (and according to the post office, even help subsidize the cost of my first class mail).
Neither of these require me to *pay* for a larger mail spool, or an ISP with more bandwidth to handle the junk.
There are many reasons to stop the spammers through legislation.
Legislation will never be completely effective regarding a communications protocol that trancends national, and almost all other jurisdictional, boundries. Spammers can just proxy through countries that have problems enforcing their current criminal laws, much less doing cyber-enforcement.
Please show me a mail filter that blocks spam but allows legit mail to pass.
a mail filter that only allows messages with a valid PGP (or other) signature that matches keys you've gotten from trusted sources. (perhaps you'll also need a "whitelist" for your aunt who can't figure out how to do this...)
Why are square pixels bad? What's better - _round_?!
Close. Slightly overlapping Gaussian blurs would probably be best at removing the jagged artifacts that square cornered pixels introduce. Square pixels are the visual equivalent of listening to an audio D/A without a proper low-pass filter.
Microsoft seems to have just banned any open source or even free (as in beer) CIFS implementations.
By Microsofts definition, neither the BSD license (doesn't require source distribution) nor the Mozilla public license (doesn't place requirements on other software) are impared. But they are open source licenses.
The CBDTPA could have the same negative impact that the former encryption software export restrictions had. Other countries will be able to develop and market technologies (open source software, open systems, academic research, etc.) that will be illegal in the US. The US will fall behind techologically and lose business to these competitive nations. Pretty soon the US mega-corporations will start complaining that they are getting locked out of big international technology deals.
>Murdering someone is already a crime, why do we need laws to ban assault rifles?
Because they have no other legitimate use. Contrast this with knives and piano strings, which also can be used to kill, but also have plenty of non-murderous applications.
The primary use of assult weapons is not to kill; 99% of rounds actually fired in warfare are to make the other guys duck so they won't get a clean shot at you.
unless you really buy that "home defense" stuff. Poopycock!
Depending on whose statistics you believe, communities with more private gun ownership do not have a significant greater violent death rate, or even have a lower death rate, even when including accidental home shootings and suicide by handgun.
You are paid for the time you write code -- as am I -- why do you expect to be paid again, and again, and again - see the plumber point again please.
You don't. But you only got paid in the first place because your employer took out a loan in expectation of, if your project was one of the successful ones, being paid back again and again in order to cover this loan, and all the other loans taken out for failed software projects as well.
Maybe instead of copyrights, employers should be be allow to escrow 100% of all programmers salaries until the project proves to be a market success? That would take the collateral value of copyrights to cover investment risk out of the issue.
Prohibit any corporation from owning a copyright. Corporations create nothing; they're consensual hallucinations and exist at our pleasure. I don't know about you, but I'm not much pleased any more.
Corporations are a legal veil for their owners, shareholders, you if your 401k has mutual funds, or perhaps your parents if they have a retirement fund. Corporations create by investing: salary for authors and engineers, most of whom create nothing of real value, but some who do. The corporations often do not own the copyrights and patents, just the assigned rights to all the profits and permissions. It's not much different from giving your brother a loan, and expecting to get paid back if/when he gets that big bonus.
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GPL covers rights to source, not binaries. The original binaries *can* be restricted; *but* recreated binaries from the identical source cannot be restricted. If datestamps or some random seeds are part of the binary (is GCC strictly deterministic even on different systems?), then the recreated binaries may not pass a digital signature test. So they can charge for and restrict distribution of a signed and (at least claimedly) verified set of binaries; but not for work-alike binaries from identical sources. So you don't have to pay for an identical (recompiled) idea ("free speech"), but you do have to pay for a work of compilation (no "free beer" or free labor).
I guess the (absolutely or nearly) identical sets of bits are different under law, depending on who compiles them when.
of course, IANAL.
Without uniform global enforcement, spammers will just work thru agents in some country where they don't have any equivalent laws, or they do but the local sheriff can't find any of his cousins^H^H^H the spammers to serve papers on.
Without sender verification, spammers can tie up enforcement and prosecution resources by simply forging a sufficient percentage of UCE/SPAM from Cmdr. Taco or from you (thus using the legal system to help with klez-uce DDoS attacks).
My guess is increasing volumes of SPAM & UCE will add to the push towards some sort of protocol layered on top of the existing one, where most peoples mail transport agents will simply bit-bucket email either not on a white-list, or not digitally signed with a signature issued some really big agent (post office, major bank, big brother, etc. (e.g. an agent that knows where to find your body, bank account and hard drive)). Almost nobody will bother wading through terabytes of cruft to find one message from a old long lost school budd somewhere in Nigeria. Grandma may have to learn how to use a signed signing mail agent.
One of the purposes of IP law is to encourage greater investment in R "To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts...". Should only rich people be able to do costly art and invention? Assignment of patent and copyright is one of the things that allows non-rich individuals to try their hand at large scale invention and artistic performance. Bell, Edison and many others required significant outside investment to finish their inventions. This was also true of many important innovations in the computer world. Or do you think Bell Labs and Xerox PARC were public charities?
Unfortunately, it's not "his" recording. Someone else owned the digital recorder and all the mikes. A corporation owned the sound studio. A producer and technician modified the recorded sounds, including the the voice of the headline artist. A software geek wrote some custom audio sound filters and effects. There were 3 backup singers. Some of the percussion was done by a session drummer. The backup bass player was sitting in because the usual one was in rehab, but he was the one who did the composition. The lyrics were partially "borrowed" from some unknown street poet. Some of the keyboard sounds were samples from another bands recording. And the owner of the recording is???
That's assuming Oog isn't smart enough to cross-license. Oog cross-licenses with the WHEEL guy, etc., and we still end up living in smog and urban traffic jams.
The founders of the United States knew that in a large and diverse society there are a percentage of people who will create more, given the chance to make lots of money from the results. The "law" of supply and demands says that if the supply of something is artificially limited, the price should go up. IP law artificially limits the supply of the use of new technology and reproduction of artistic performances (because of the exclusive licensing rights) and thus increases the profits from successful inventions and creations.
Lets consider IP law a knob instead of a pushbutton. Set the knob too low and the benefits to society will decrease due to some lower rate of innovation. Set the knob too high and there will be a drain on society created by inefficient transfers of wealth and the limitations on freedom to use recent ideas. Given a little clairvoyance, one should be able to set the knob at some maxima in the sum of both new inventions and the social benefits from wider usage of recent inventions.
There are several ways the knob can be set: duration of copyrights and patents, limitations on royalties and the types of restrictions and penalties legally available, requirements to share or pool certain types of patents, expansion or contraction in fair use rights, etc., etc. Given the current state of technology, which requires the use of lots of interdependant, but independantly invented, ideas, the knob is probably set too high in some markets. Now where's the clairvoyant who knows how the knob should be set? (Make sure that you don't set the knob so low that the ubergeek who is about to figure out how to write some software which would accelerate a protein folding model required to cure cancer a year sooner doesn't get laid off from a mega-cuticle R&D boondoggle and decide to go hack on the linux kernel instead...)
And just who would own the copyright for any major motion picture (authors, screenwriters, directors, actors, editors, lyricists, composers, matte painters, lighting technicians, set designers, digital artists, etc. etc.)? The paperwork for you playing a video from the rental store would fill a legal office.
Anyway, the RIAA, et. al., would just change the contract. Instead of requiring assignment of copyright in exchange for promotion and royalties, etc.; they would just require an employment contract requiring the musicians/composers/authors to sue whomever the recording company chooses. Same result.
When asked why you want to cancel the service, reply... ...
I'm sorry; I charge $xxx/hour for internet services analysis and review. If you want me to answer that question, please send a corporate invoice to
The prompness with which you cancel this account will be part of my review.
As a ballpark figure, 1 watt turned on all year costs you $1. Maybe double that if you are in a continuously air conditioned environment like a machine room.
The problem isn't with the power per machine per year, but the power density (watts per volume). Above a certain number of kW per rack (5? 6?) the cost of cooling increases non-linearly because of the need for specialized AC equipment, plumbing, building reinforcement for heavy stuff on the roof, etc.
Is this still possible?
What would it take to produce a full and correct specification of the detailed behavior of gcc or emacs, including the expected bugs, side effects and every feature, bell and whistle; and without quoting a single line of source code or copylefted documentation?
Write Your Own Damn Code could well be an impossible red-herring. Complex enough copyrighted code might just be protected as well as if it were patented because of this.
Of course your want to give out this information. You want your doctor to have your correct physical information so he/she can prescribe the correct dosages, your pharmacy to have the correct billing info and address so stuff gets shipped to the right place, etc. You want only the people you do business with to have access to some of your data, but not anyone else. Just like the corporations selling certains forms of media.
Don't CS programs require probability and statistics courses anymore?
A shareware/demoware author doesn't assume you're all thieves; just that a percentage of downloaders are thieves, a percentage are window shoppers, a percentage are honest customers, and a good percentage are "lazy" about paying for products they use. There's some pretty hard evidence for this.
There's almost nothing (cost effective) that one can do about the determined software pirates; and one doesn't want to annoy honest customers and window shoppers. But if one doesn't somehow encourage the "lazy" customers to think about registering and paying; that could easily represent more than half ones revenue out the window. Not good if a programmer is using this income to pay the mortgage. So demo time-limits are one of those necessary-evil business trade-off decisions, where the effect will annoy some customers, but as long as the number of people it annoys (including the exponential referrals) is less than the number of additional customers the scheme encourages to pay for the product, it's a good thing.
Anyway, a lot of shareware/demoware authors send the activation code to the given email address; if it's a bogus address, you don't get the code (or for opt-in purchasers, notices about new releases that fix serious bugs). I use one-time addresses when trying stuff, and then filter them if I'm no longer interested in the product, or if some bozo (there's a percentage of them on this end of the business also) sells the address to a spammer.
1.4 "IPR Impairing License" shall mean the GNU General Public License, the GNU Lesser/Library General Public License, and any license that requires in any instance that other software distributed with software subject to such license (a) be disclosed and distributed in source code form; (b) be licensed for purposes of making derivative works; or (c) be redistributable at no charge.
Note that because the Mozilla license does not subject "other software distributed" to any license requirements, the MPL is not "impared" according to this passage.
So the MPL might be preferable to the BSD license for people who don't want someone to "take" and use their source without also being required to disclose it.
Finding a fully graphical web browser that was written in 1975, like finding a massive city over 10000 years old would be a huge surprise- if not impossible.
Although some of Engleberts work is surprisingly prescient, given SRI's budget and the technology of the time.
So as long as I state it ahead of time I can charge a $50 unsolicited viewing fee for every advertisement broadcast to my television. Or for every piece of junk mail sent to my house (via post)?
Sure, I'm sure you can even bring criminal charges if they break into your house and wire your television so you can't change the channel or turn it off, or force you at gunpoint to not leave the room and go to the bathroom during their TV ads. Mail fraud laws probably apply to tricking you into accepting postage due letters.
Me, the TV set is rarely on; and when it is, it's usually tuned to PBS. And the ads in the mailbox are occasionally useful for lining the bottom of the birdcage (and according to the post office, even help subsidize the cost of my first class mail).
Neither of these require me to *pay* for a larger mail spool, or an ISP with more bandwidth to handle the junk.
There are many reasons to stop the spammers through legislation.
Legislation will never be completely effective regarding a communications protocol that trancends national, and almost all other jurisdictional, boundries. Spammers can just proxy through countries that have problems enforcing their current criminal laws, much less doing cyber-enforcement.
Please show me a mail filter that blocks spam but allows legit mail to pass.
a mail filter that only allows messages with a valid PGP (or other) signature that matches keys you've gotten from trusted sources. (perhaps you'll also need a "whitelist" for your aunt who can't figure out how to do this...)
Why are square pixels bad? What's better - _round_?!
Close. Slightly overlapping Gaussian blurs would probably be best at removing the jagged artifacts that square cornered pixels introduce. Square pixels are the visual equivalent of listening to an audio D/A without a proper low-pass filter.
Microsoft seems to have just banned any open source or even free (as in beer) CIFS implementations.
By Microsofts definition, neither the BSD license (doesn't require source distribution) nor the Mozilla public license (doesn't place requirements on other software) are impared. But they are open source licenses.
I can write my cat implementation under the GPL and my ls implementation under the BSD license, tar them up together, and release them.
Not if the implementations contained shared source code files, especially if you modified the shared files identically (as in source code control).
The CBDTPA could have the same negative impact that the former encryption software export restrictions had. Other countries will be able to develop and market technologies (open source software, open systems, academic research, etc.) that will be illegal in the US. The US will fall behind techologically and lose business to these competitive nations. Pretty soon the US mega-corporations will start complaining that they are getting locked out of big international technology deals.
>Murdering someone is already a crime, why do we need laws to ban assault rifles?
Because they have no other legitimate use. Contrast this with knives and piano strings, which also can be used to kill, but also have plenty of non-murderous applications.
The primary use of assult weapons is not to kill; 99% of rounds actually fired in warfare are to make the other guys duck so they won't get a clean shot at you.
unless you really buy that "home defense" stuff. Poopycock!
Depending on whose statistics you believe, communities with more private gun ownership do not have a significant greater violent death rate, or even have a lower death rate, even when including accidental home shootings and suicide by handgun.
You are paid for the time you write code -- as am I -- why do you expect to be paid again, and again, and again - see the plumber point again please.
You don't. But you only got paid in the first place because your employer took out a loan in expectation of, if your project was one of the successful ones, being paid back again and again in order to cover this loan, and all the other loans taken out for failed software projects as well.
Maybe instead of copyrights, employers should be be allow to escrow 100% of all programmers salaries until the project proves to be a market success? That would take the collateral value of copyrights to cover investment risk out of the issue.
> Revert the term of copyright to 14 years, immediately and retroactive to all existing works.
This would be a terrible idea to enact.
Not if it was done as a constitutional amendment.
Prohibit any corporation from owning a copyright. Corporations create nothing; they're consensual hallucinations and exist at our pleasure. I don't know about you, but I'm not much pleased any more.
Corporations are a legal veil for their owners, shareholders, you if your 401k has mutual funds, or perhaps your parents if they have a retirement fund. Corporations create by investing: salary for authors and engineers, most of whom create nothing of real value, but some who do. The corporations often do not own the copyrights and patents, just the assigned rights to all the profits and permissions. It's not much different from giving your brother a loan, and expecting to get paid back if/when he gets that big bonus.