Last time I checked mozilla was dual licensed, meaning you can get the code under the GPL if you want. The fact that mozilla contributors sign over the code has nothing to do with what license is used: all the GNU projects ask the developers to sign over the copyrights, they are obviously still GPLed.
Victories won't come in court.
on
Copyright Defeats?
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· Score: 4, Insightful
I think it is high time to realize how naive we were to ever think that the courts would straighten this out for us. The courts are the least democratic, most reactionary, and least progressive element of government - and while they have done good (especially in America due the fantastic foresight of the framers, which has unfortunately reached its tether now) trying to think that we can turn to them for deliverance of the Internet is insanity.
I think, however, that the widespread belief among many of the information freedom activists and supporters that the courts would work things out (in the Eldred case, the DeCSS case, the Napster case, etc) should be noted as very strong evidence to the fundamental honesty of their position. It is so clear and obvious to us that laws forbidding us from manipulating our own computers and lawsuits against networks for not controlling those that use them are an insanity and step all over our fundamental freedoms that the otherwise naive belief that the courts would side with us seemed not only logical but necessary.
So is not the case. The unconnected man, the information horder, and those who view computers with suspicion and fear simply do not see the same thing as we do when they look at these things. Fundamental shifts will occur when one group grows at the expense of the other, not sooner.
Which is cute, because it suggests that Microsoft's original plans to produce a secure PC that will protect the music companies' stuff from us have been spiked in favour of something much more positive and progressive.
What the hell are you smoking? You realize that the application to email is making messages that your computer won't allow you to quote, copy, filter, or print (spammers will love that - it has nothing to do with secure communication since that doesn't require anything user hostile) and that the application to documents is fixing the reverse engineering "problem" with the.doc format once and for all - MS Word Palladium files will not be readable with any other software, period. Positive and progressive my ass!
Palladium is not a technology, it is an application. The technology it uses are things like encryption and tamper resistance, which are not evil in an of themselves, the application is keeping people from controlling their own computers, which is.
There is no prior art for holding auctions in Antartica what so ever, so clearly this must be a better mouse trap!
"Auctions on the Internet" is NOT an invention. It doesn't matter whether it is obvious, or whether anybody had already thought of it, because it is simply taking an existing system and doing it somewhere else. It is absolutely no different then patenting auctions in Idaho, North Greensville, or Antartica should it happen that there haven't been any auctions in those places before.
Note that the reason that auctions in Antartica is not an invention is not because it is useless - if half the world was to have to move Antartica tomorrow because of global warming, then it doesn't make my patent the slightest bit more justified. With or without patents, the first person after the Antartica immigration who thought "how can I sell all this junk" is going to invent the Antartica Auction - they do not deserve a prize for it.
While I'm at it, I'm going to patent wheels on Venus, shoes on Mars, CD players on the moon, grocery stores on Titan, mineral water on Europa, springs anywhere in the vicinity of the asteroid belt, and any application of Newton's laws of gravity outside the solar system. Where would the world be without geniuses like me?
Browsers already such as Opera can fake the version that the browser is identifed as. How will DRM work in this case? Will there be an encrypted key or something else?
The TCPA chip in the computer povides a signed hash of the initial code loaded for the operating system. (Basically the boot sector to make it simple and not quite correct). This verifies that you are running an unmodified version of Microsoft FuckWare 200X - which then provides a signature of the application to the server.
Without hardware cracking the TCPA chip, or perhaps a buffer overflow on some trusted part of the OS (why do you think MS suddenly care about securing their applications!) there will be no way for an application to claim it is something it isn't.
Until iTunes loses its CD burning feature, it is not DRM in the sense you describe - it does not prevent, in any way, the fair use of the data you buy. It doesn't even prevent the illegal use of the data you buy.
In that case no music application is DRM because you can use line-in to re-record the music (an operation that is easier and cheaper than burn and rip). iTunes is user hostile, and attempts to make it difficult to convert the music into a transparent format that can be copied and accessed by any application. That is DRM.
My car chimes at me when the seatbelt isn't plugged in the way it expects it to be. Like the non-DRM DRM in iTunes, it's an intrusive but easily and deliberately ignorable mechanism to keep me on the right side of the law. But I suppose you'd argue that's like a totalitarian government or having state surveillance cameras in our homes too?
If it was illegal to circumvent and disable the warning, or if your seatbelt was a basic communications device, then yes I would.
Besides, it isn't similiar at all. The seatbelt warning would be closer to a warning dialog coming up when you copied or uploaded a file - a car analogy to DRM would be if the car refused to start unless the seatbelt was fastened.
Your body is not yours to do what you please with either - you can't use it to hit somebody, for instance. Would you be OK with an implant in your body, analogous to the DRM implant in your PC, that controls your ability to hit people?
Laws are one thing - we are responsible for not breaking them. But freedom comes before law, and to be free we require a basic modicum of self determination and control of the elements that make up our selves - in the information age that includes communication devices to almost the same extent it does our own bodies.
Digital Restrictions Management, as I use the term, is the use of encrypted data files that can only be played by certain user hostile applications that then control what the user can do with the data. Apples "protected" AAC files are most definitely a DRM system, regardless of what you think about the particular restrictions it imposes.
Why exactly is Apple's system not like Palladium? It does the exact same thing that Palladium is intended to do (run user hostile applications), and since Palladium isn't around yet we cannot comment on whether you would consider the restrictions it implements fair. Since Palladium is actually a platform that will support many services, I have no doubt some of the restrictions imposed will seem entirely fair.
People should object to DRM on a fundamental level, not because of what any particular implementation of it does. We should not accept a totalitarian government even if it promises to make good laws. We should not accept state surveillance cameras in our homes even if promised that they will only be used to "keep people honest". And we should not accept having our computers decide what we can and cannot do even if promised that it will be used only to "create a minimal set of hurdles that'll satisfy content producers and publishers". Period.
My point is that the issue is not what you can and cannot do now, the issue is who decides what you can and cannot do. If you have data in open formats that contain the actual information in plaintext, then you are in control of what can be done with it - if you accept DRM then you aren't.
Giving up this control is bad even if it doesn't immediately inpact your usage.
It would be naive to think that more changes like this are not coming as Mac users figure out how to do what they actually want by working around the "soft" restrictions that has been placed on the music service so far.
Personally, I find the general acceptance of Apple's DRM system, especially here, very frightening. When you accept DRM, you accept giving up control over your own computer, and ALL power to use the data in the manner that you see fit. Then you are the subject of the DRM system, which may grant you ability to do things, when and if it feels fit. It doesn't matter if the DRM system has been your friend up until today: tomorrow you could wake up and find that due to new terms from the music industry you can no longer make any copies of the music what so ever. Or that you have to pay per play for your entire music catalogue. Or that the DRM system has been discontinued and all its your... sorry... its encrypted files are useless.
This is exactly the old frog boiling analogy. The music company services like Pressplay and co. made the DRM too annoying, so the users jumped right out. By making the DRM initially quite lenient, the Apple strategy is to get users to accept the the concept that their computers decide what they can and cannot do, because it seems the cauldron actually isn't such a bad place for a swim. Expect the limitations to get tighter and tighter as the general acceptance grows...
What kind of a barberous place has America turned into, when people getting raped as part of their imprisonment is considered not only acceptable (a ha-ha-ha standing joke for Letterman and Leno) but desireable?
What other humiliating physical violence do we think criminals should be subjected to? Should the women get raped as well? Maybe this should be institutionalized, so we can be sure that all inmates get raped and violated in equal measure?
One may say so. You see, C# had all features mentioned in article excluding generics since Beta 2. I think this is more than a year.
It's more that C# includes a bunch of features that some java programmers had been asking for, and so does java 1.5. It's not like any of these features were out the blue in C#, they are mostly things people have been missing from other languages.
Remember the girl who Taki thought was a japanese school girl but was actually a bartender they took a picture of to get him to give Cayce the numbers? Later on this girl (Judy Tsuzuki) finds out about the whole scam and falls in love with Taki, or so she professes. Someone she has never met before.
Remember the story a year of so ago, here on Slashdot, about the guy on the (gaming I think) message board that made a female character, then made up his own relationship with her, and finally , when he got bored of the charade, wrote her out by having her die in a car crash. When the story came out much later (somebody recognized that the picture of the girl was from a porn movie) the people on the board were extremely upset, because they had felt real grief at the death of somebody who never existed in the first place. That anecdote asks questions a thousand times more profound about the nature of human identity and existence then anything in PR, and that actually happened.
The problem with Gibson's attempt at a Couplandesque contemporary commentary about the Internet is that it simply isn't profound. In "Iduro" it was supposed to be amazing that a character who claimed to be in a street gang on the Internet, turned out to be an invalid - I mean, can you believe that people don't know you're a dog! In Coupland's Microserfs, one of the characters falls in love with somebody in a chat room, and decides he wants to spend the rest of his life with them, without knowing anything about the person, not even the sex. That is an example of the way we define our relationships with others challenged and turned on it's head by this new form of connectivity - nothing in PR says anything new about life in the connected age.
And aside from the fact that the sensation of somebody's film fragments getting an online following is slightly less amazing then the flash success of "Am I Hot or Not!", PR reads like a Roberta Williams adventure game - Casey goes around "clicking" on random people which leads to conversations that solve puzzles in ridiculously convoluted ways. I and probably a thousand other people with me on this site alone could have done a better job tracing the source of uploads then what the characters in PR do. The reference to steganography seems thrown in for nothing other than to give an appropriate way for a bunch of random people to pop up and help Casey solve an easy problem backwards.
I still find Gibson's prose amazing, and that was enough for me to enjoy the better part of this book, but he either needs to go back to writing high paced exciting books set in worlds more interesting then advertising agencies, or he needs to actually start thinking about the true implications of the sociological shifts that he is trying to comment.
The top poster wrote: An open source security program would be exceptionally easy to bypass. The next guy responded to that. If the top guy wasn't, as you say, talking about security programs at all, but rather some silly fuckware, maybe he, and by extension you, are the idiots...
Re:Question about GNU...
on
Open Source DRM
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· Score: 2, Interesting
You are confusing secure with "secure".
The first is the actual meaning of the word, as in protecting computers and communicating parties from attack by malicious parties. By all accounts, open source software is at least as good as proprietary software at that (or maybe at worst as bad...).
The second, is the media industry "lets highjack a term that has a positive conotation" doublespake meaning of "secure". That is about making sure that users are not in control of their own computers, so that somebody else can make sure that media on their machines is only used in a manner deemed acceptable by a greater athority (the corporations). Open source software, by it's nature (1), cannot be used for this "secure", since it allows the user to modify it, and he will simply remove the part of the code that tells him what he can and can't do.
(1) This assumes it is running on open hardware. TCPA is an attempt to make sure that the their is closed hardware at the bottom layer that can validate the software, so even if the user can modify it, the modified version cannot read the media.
I can't speak for Austria, but the Swedish number is complete fiction. The Swedish government spends most of it's employment efforts shifting people between different "reeducation" programs and giving them state supported early retirements so as to keep them out of the statistics (more than 5% of the population is prematurely retired).
You are right, it is based on bad statistics. The previous poster's calculation only works if you assume that all drive failures have an exponential distribution: that is to say that the probability of failing at any given time (given that it is still working right before) is going to be the same. Of course, motor errors, head failures, bad sectors, etc etc don't have this distribution at all but get more likely as time goes by.
Spielberg could make the request because showing a movie in front of a large audicience is considered distribution, and thus under copyright, they would need a license from Spielberg to do it. It was then his choice not to allow the distribution of a derived work (kind of like with software licenses).
This, however, is not about that. There is no copying or distribution - the DVD player simply plays the movie, which is legally obtained, a little differently. In theory, it is no different then fast forwarding past the parts that are considered harmful (or maybe even closing your eyes) - do you think Hollywood should have the right to tell us that is illegal?
This is not copyright law as it was intended. This is yet another step in the media industry's battle to turn copyright from "I own the right to duplicate this information" to "I own YOU whenever you are in contact with this information". It is quite horrible that there are people like you who actually seem to support the latter definition.
If the the content industries are given "much of the legal backing which they are seeking for copy-protection technologies" then it does not matter if the term of copyright is shortened to 2 days. Since they can lock the data into DRM systems that are illegal to crack, they still have a "paracopyright" that never expires (remember that what they want involves getting rid of computers that do not obey DRM directives, and "closing the analog hole").
If you're file sharing, the ONLY things keeping you from a rather nasty civil suit are your obscurity and the time the RIAA would have to spend to take you down if they found you.
Yes, and those reasons are strong enough that you do not need to fear the civil suit.
It's like if they had to file suit against people who park illegally for "misuse of property" or something like that. Yes, it would cost a lot more money to mispark, but on the hand, the system could not possibly prosecute every person so the chance of being targetted would be slim.
A fine of ~ $100 would probably work. Most people would probably cough it up, and after a while it would be as accepted as a parking or speeding ticket. A much higher price would just result in everybody refusing to pay, at which point they would be back in the same boat.
(I don't know why I am tipping off the enemy - but I figure anything I can think up they have ought of a long time ago.)
Slashdot Mirror
Last time I checked mozilla was dual licensed, meaning you can get the code under the GPL if you want. The fact that mozilla contributors sign over the code has nothing to do with what license is used: all the GNU projects ask the developers to sign over the copyrights, they are obviously still GPLed.
I think it is high time to realize how naive we were to ever think that the courts would straighten this out for us. The courts are the least democratic, most reactionary, and least progressive element of government - and while they have done good (especially in America due the fantastic foresight of the framers, which has unfortunately reached its tether now) trying to think that we can turn to them for deliverance of the Internet is insanity.
I think, however, that the widespread belief among many of the information freedom activists and supporters that the courts would work things out (in the Eldred case, the DeCSS case, the Napster case, etc) should be noted as very strong evidence to the fundamental honesty of their position. It is so clear and obvious to us that laws forbidding us from manipulating our own computers and lawsuits against networks for not controlling those that use them are an insanity and step all over our fundamental freedoms that the otherwise naive belief that the courts would side with us seemed not only logical but necessary.
So is not the case. The unconnected man, the information horder, and those who view computers with suspicion and fear simply do not see the same thing as we do when they look at these things. Fundamental shifts will occur when one group grows at the expense of the other, not sooner.
Which is cute, because it suggests that Microsoft's original plans to produce a secure PC that will protect the music companies' stuff from us have been spiked in favour of something much more positive and progressive.
.doc format once and for all - MS Word Palladium files will not be readable with any other software, period. Positive and progressive my ass!
What the hell are you smoking? You realize that the application to email is making messages that your computer won't allow you to quote, copy, filter, or print (spammers will love that - it has nothing to do with secure communication since that doesn't require anything user hostile) and that the application to documents is fixing the reverse engineering "problem" with the
Palladium is not a technology, it is an application. The technology it uses are things like encryption and tamper resistance, which are not evil in an of themselves, the application is keeping people from controlling their own computers, which is.
There is no prior art for holding auctions in Antartica what so ever, so clearly this must be a better mouse trap!
"Auctions on the Internet" is NOT an invention. It doesn't matter whether it is obvious, or whether anybody had already thought of it, because it is simply taking an existing system and doing it somewhere else. It is absolutely no different then patenting auctions in Idaho, North Greensville, or Antartica should it happen that there haven't been any auctions in those places before.
Note that the reason that auctions in Antartica is not an invention is not because it is useless - if half the world was to have to move Antartica tomorrow because of global warming, then it doesn't make my patent the slightest bit more justified. With or without patents, the first person after the Antartica immigration who thought "how can I sell all this junk" is going to invent the Antartica Auction - they do not deserve a prize for it.
While I'm at it, I'm going to patent wheels on Venus, shoes on Mars, CD players on the moon, grocery stores on Titan, mineral water on Europa, springs anywhere in the vicinity of the asteroid belt, and any application of Newton's laws of gravity outside the solar system. Where would the world be without geniuses like me?
Browsers already such as Opera can fake the version that the browser is identifed as. How will DRM work in this case? Will there be an encrypted key or something else?
The TCPA chip in the computer povides a signed hash of the initial code loaded for the operating system. (Basically the boot sector to make it simple and not quite correct). This verifies that you are running an unmodified version of Microsoft FuckWare 200X - which then provides a signature of the application to the server.
Without hardware cracking the TCPA chip, or perhaps a buffer overflow on some trusted part of the OS (why do you think MS suddenly care about securing their applications!) there will be no way for an application to claim it is something it isn't.
Until iTunes loses its CD burning feature, it is not DRM in the sense you describe - it does not prevent, in any way, the fair use of the data you buy. It doesn't even prevent the illegal use of the data you buy.
In that case no music application is DRM because you can use line-in to re-record the music (an operation that is easier and cheaper than burn and rip). iTunes is user hostile, and attempts to make it difficult to convert the music into a transparent format that can be copied and accessed by any application. That is DRM.
My car chimes at me when the seatbelt isn't plugged in the way it expects it to be. Like the non-DRM DRM in iTunes, it's an intrusive but easily and deliberately ignorable mechanism to keep me on the right side of the law. But I suppose you'd argue that's like a totalitarian government or having state surveillance cameras in our homes too?
If it was illegal to circumvent and disable the warning, or if your seatbelt was a basic communications device, then yes I would.
Besides, it isn't similiar at all. The seatbelt warning would be closer to a warning dialog coming up when you copied or uploaded a file - a car analogy to DRM would be if the car refused to start unless the seatbelt was fastened.
Your body is not yours to do what you please with either - you can't use it to hit somebody, for instance. Would you be OK with an implant in your body, analogous to the DRM implant in your PC, that controls your ability to hit people?
Laws are one thing - we are responsible for not breaking them. But freedom comes before law, and to be free we require a basic modicum of self determination and control of the elements that make up our selves - in the information age that includes communication devices to almost the same extent it does our own bodies.
Digital Restrictions Management, as I use the term, is the use of encrypted data files that can only be played by certain user hostile applications that then control what the user can do with the data. Apples "protected" AAC files are most definitely a DRM system, regardless of what you think about the particular restrictions it imposes.
Why exactly is Apple's system not like Palladium? It does the exact same thing that Palladium is intended to do (run user hostile applications), and since Palladium isn't around yet we cannot comment on whether you would consider the restrictions it implements fair. Since Palladium is actually a platform that will support many services, I have no doubt some of the restrictions imposed will seem entirely fair.
People should object to DRM on a fundamental level, not because of what any particular implementation of it does. We should not accept a totalitarian government even if it promises to make good laws. We should not accept state surveillance cameras in our homes even if promised that they will only be used to "keep people honest". And we should not accept having our computers decide what we can and cannot do even if promised that it will be used only to "create a minimal set of hurdles that'll satisfy content producers and publishers". Period.
My point is that the issue is not what you can and cannot do now, the issue is who decides what you can and cannot do. If you have data in open formats that contain the actual information in plaintext, then you are in control of what can be done with it - if you accept DRM then you aren't.
Giving up this control is bad even if it doesn't immediately inpact your usage.
And how is playing the files you bought via the Apple music service working out with those?
It would be naive to think that more changes like this are not coming as Mac users figure out how to do what they actually want by working around the "soft" restrictions that has been placed on the music service so far.
:-(.
Personally, I find the general acceptance of Apple's DRM system, especially here, very frightening. When you accept DRM, you accept giving up control over your own computer, and ALL power to use the data in the manner that you see fit. Then you are the subject of the DRM system, which may grant you ability to do things, when and if it feels fit. It doesn't matter if the DRM system has been your friend up until today: tomorrow you could wake up and find that due to new terms from the music industry you can no longer make any copies of the music what so ever. Or that you have to pay per play for your entire music catalogue. Or that the DRM system has been discontinued and all its your... sorry... its encrypted files are useless.
This is exactly the old frog boiling analogy. The music company services like Pressplay and co. made the DRM too annoying, so the users jumped right out. By making the DRM initially quite lenient, the Apple strategy is to get users to accept the the concept that their computers decide what they can and cannot do, because it seems the cauldron actually isn't such a bad place for a swim. Expect the limitations to get tighter and tighter as the general acceptance grows...
And I, who was so fond of my ipod
Dog and wolf hybrids can produce offspring as well. Yet canis lupus and canis familiaris are considered different species.
What kind of a barberous place has America turned into, when people getting raped as part of their imprisonment is considered not only acceptable (a ha-ha-ha standing joke for Letterman and Leno) but desireable?
What other humiliating physical violence do we think criminals should be subjected to? Should the women get raped as well? Maybe this should be institutionalized, so we can be sure that all inmates get raped and violated in equal measure?
One may say so. You see, C# had all features mentioned in article excluding generics since Beta 2. I think this is more than a year.
It's more that C# includes a bunch of features that some java programmers had been asking for, and so does java 1.5. It's not like any of these features were out the blue in C#, they are mostly things people have been missing from other languages.
Um, no. The UK is very much a member of the EU:
t ml
http://europa.eu.int/abc/governments/index_en.h
Remember the girl who Taki thought was a japanese school girl but was actually a bartender they took a picture of to get him to give Cayce the numbers? Later on this girl (Judy Tsuzuki) finds out about the whole scam and falls in love with Taki, or so she professes. Someone she has never met before.
Remember the story a year of so ago, here on Slashdot, about the guy on the (gaming I think) message board that made a female character, then made up his own relationship with her, and finally , when he got bored of the charade, wrote her out by having her die in a car crash. When the story came out much later (somebody recognized that the picture of the girl was from a porn movie) the people on the board were extremely upset, because they had felt real grief at the death of somebody who never existed in the first place. That anecdote asks questions a thousand times more profound about the nature of human identity and existence then anything in PR, and that actually happened.
The problem with Gibson's attempt at a Couplandesque contemporary commentary about the Internet is that it simply isn't profound. In "Iduro" it was supposed to be amazing that a character who claimed to be in a street gang on the Internet, turned out to be an invalid - I mean, can you believe that people don't know you're a dog! In Coupland's Microserfs, one of the characters falls in love with somebody in a chat room, and decides he wants to spend the rest of his life with them, without knowing anything about the person, not even the sex. That is an example of the way we define our relationships with others challenged and turned on it's head by this new form of connectivity - nothing in PR says anything new about life in the connected age.
And aside from the fact that the sensation of somebody's film fragments getting an online following is slightly less amazing then the flash success of "Am I Hot or Not!", PR reads like a Roberta Williams adventure game - Casey goes around "clicking" on random people which leads to conversations that solve puzzles in ridiculously convoluted ways. I and probably a thousand other people with me on this site alone could have done a better job tracing the source of uploads then what the characters in PR do. The reference to steganography seems thrown in for nothing other than to give an appropriate way for a bunch of random people to pop up and help Casey solve an easy problem backwards.
I still find Gibson's prose amazing, and that was enough for me to enjoy the better part of this book, but he either needs to go back to writing high paced exciting books set in worlds more interesting then advertising agencies, or he needs to actually start thinking about the true implications of the sociological shifts that he is trying to comment.
The top poster wrote: An open source security program would be exceptionally easy to bypass. The next guy responded to that. If the top guy wasn't, as you say, talking about security programs at all, but rather some silly fuckware, maybe he, and by extension you, are the idiots...
You are confusing secure with "secure".
The first is the actual meaning of the word, as in protecting computers and communicating parties from attack by malicious parties. By all accounts, open source software is at least as good as proprietary software at that (or maybe at worst as bad...).
The second, is the media industry "lets highjack a term that has a positive conotation" doublespake meaning of "secure". That is about making sure that users are not in control of their own computers, so that somebody else can make sure that media on their machines is only used in a manner deemed acceptable by a greater athority (the corporations). Open source software, by it's nature (1), cannot be used for this "secure", since it allows the user to modify it, and he will simply remove the part of the code that tells him what he can and can't do.
(1) This assumes it is running on open hardware. TCPA is an attempt to make sure that the their is closed hardware at the bottom layer that can validate the software, so even if the user can modify it, the modified version cannot read the media.
The analogy I heard was that of being invited to a free dinner at someone's house and ending up demanding to supervise the cooking.
No, it is like buying food, taking it home, and then demanding to get to decide yourself how you are going to cook it.
Sounds pretty fair to me, but then my "you are a consumer not an individual" re-education is not completed yet...
I can't speak for Austria, but the Swedish number is complete fiction. The Swedish government spends most of it's employment efforts shifting people between different "reeducation" programs and giving them state supported early retirements so as to keep them out of the statistics (more than 5% of the population is prematurely retired).
You are right, it is based on bad statistics. The previous poster's calculation only works if you assume that all drive failures have an exponential distribution: that is to say that the probability of failing at any given time (given that it is still working right before) is going to be the same. Of course, motor errors, head failures, bad sectors, etc etc don't have this distribution at all but get more likely as time goes by.
Spielberg could make the request because showing a movie in front of a large audicience is considered distribution, and thus under copyright, they would need a license from Spielberg to do it. It was then his choice not to allow the distribution of a derived work (kind of like with software licenses).
This, however, is not about that. There is no copying or distribution - the DVD player simply plays the movie, which is legally obtained, a little differently. In theory, it is no different then fast forwarding past the parts that are considered harmful (or maybe even closing your eyes) - do you think Hollywood should have the right to tell us that is illegal?
This is not copyright law as it was intended. This is yet another step in the media industry's battle to turn copyright from "I own the right to duplicate this information" to "I own YOU whenever you are in contact with this information". It is quite horrible that there are people like you who actually seem to support the latter definition.
If the the content industries are given "much of the legal backing which they are seeking for copy-protection technologies" then it does not matter if the term of copyright is shortened to 2 days. Since they can lock the data into DRM systems that are illegal to crack, they still have a "paracopyright" that never expires (remember that what they want involves getting rid of computers that do not obey DRM directives, and "closing the analog hole").
If you're file sharing, the ONLY things keeping you from a rather nasty civil suit are your obscurity and the time the RIAA would have to spend to take you down if they found you.
Yes, and those reasons are strong enough that you do not need to fear the civil suit.
It's like if they had to file suit against people who park illegally for "misuse of property" or something like that. Yes, it would cost a lot more money to mispark, but on the hand, the system could not possibly prosecute every person so the chance of being targetted would be slim.
A fine of ~ $100 would probably work. Most people would probably cough it up, and after a while it would be as accepted as a parking or speeding ticket. A much higher price would just result in everybody refusing to pay, at which point they would be back in the same boat.
(I don't know why I am tipping off the enemy - but I figure anything I can think up they have ought of a long time ago.)