What is so terrible about directed marketing (NOT SPAM), but advertising targeted at a particular group of people? If no names are exchanged and there is no government conspiracy, is there really an issue?
Identifiers (names) have to be exchanged to keep track of which customers belong to which groups. The goal of these data gathering companies is to create profiles and sell them like a credit report.
Want to rent an apartment? Your land lord will buy a copy of your profile and make sure you haven't been visiting the 'wrong' sites. Want a job? Your employer will buy a copy of your profile and read a few of your Slashdot posts (comments like yours won't form any roadblocks). Witness for a trial? Lawyers for both sides will know your life story inside and out.
There is a huge market for personal profiles. Corporations are fighting to keep that market open.
It takes a couple weeks for your Opt-out to register, while your data is already sold.
Not only that, but opt-out plans generally expire after a year. If you forget to renew, the company can sell off your data.
I gave my email address to an e-retailer that someone recommended to me. I opted-out of their promotional marketing. I haven't purchased anything from them since, but one year after my first order, they started sending me junk mail. Since I forgot to renew the opt-out, they felt they could take my old data and start using it.
AOL does the same thing. If you forget to renew, it is as though you never opted out in the first place. If you want your data to remain private, you have to renew the opt-out every single year for the rest of your life! Even after you are no longer a customer.
I was just going to say "You want KMail!" but you already know this. The only thing it doesn't do so far is Exchange.
KMail won't let you compose mail with HTML either. Last time I tried, it also had trouble reading HTML mail sent from outlook (haven't tried it with KDE 3.0 though).
In the DeCSS case, 46 law professors argued that congress does not have the power to enact an anti-circumvention provision. The appellate court addressed a subset of that brief saying:
In a footnote to their brief, the Appellants appear to contend
that the DMCA, as construed by the District Court, exceeds the
constitutional authority of Congress to grant authors copyrights for
a "limited time," U.S. Const. art. I, 8, cl. 8, because it
"empower[s] copyright owners to effectively secure perpetual
protection by mixing public domain works with copyrighted materials,
then locking both up with technological protection measures."... For
two reasons, the argument provides no basis for disturbing the
judgment of the District Court.
First, we have repeatedly ruled that arguments presented to us
only in a footnote are not entitled to appellate consideration.
...
Second, to whatever extent the argument might have merit at some
future time in a case with a properly developed record, the argument
is entirely premature and speculative at this time on this record.
There is not even a claim, much less evidence, that any Plaintiff has
sought to prevent copying of public domain works, or that the
injunction prevents the Defendants from copying such works.
Yet right in the summary of her brief, Professor Cohen states that
the limited times provision is a separate ground for invalidity. The
court did not address the other grounds.
Cohen argues that the copyright clause only allows congress to ban
the infringing use of anti-circumvention technology, not the
technology itself. She further argues than congress may not restrict
the distribution of technology unless it meets the threshold for
patentability. The appellate court did not address either of these
issues.
Cohen details the history leading up to modern copyright law, then
finishes that history stating
History repeats itself. The anti-device provisions are the lineal
descendants of the royal licensing laws, and accomplish precisely the
result that the Framers sought to avoid.
Congress may not use the necessary and proper clause, nor the
interstate commerce clause, because doing so would require exercising
a power that the constitution already specifically limits.
When the appellate court dismissed the perpetual copyright argument, they said the point was moot because no one has protected public domain works with CSS. Yet, earlier in their ruling, the court claimed that DeCSS harmed the motion picture industry because
...even if there was only indirect evidence that DeCSS availability actually facilitated DVD piracy, the threat of piracy was very real...
How does the court get off with these double standards?
On a final note, I would also like to take issue with the appellate
court's claim that fair-use rights are still intact. The court said
we could point a camera at
the display. Apparently, the court never tried this, as they would
have ended up with a video of horrendous quality. To get a medium
quality picture from a CRT, you need to adjust the video signal,
which would require by-passing Macrovision. In other words, you
would have to violate the exact same law in a different manner.
Every time someone sponsors lunatic legislation, someone claims that it's DOA. People feel relieved, sit back, and wait for it to disappear. End result, congress passes the lunatic legislation thinking no one minds.
We really need to lobby for legislation that goes in the other direction. Copyright has been out of control for nearly two centuries now. The congress of 1790 got copyright correct. We need to lobby congress to revert to the 1790 copyright act.
Cool. So if I notify Google that the www.scientology.com website is infringing upon *my* copyrights, they'll delist it?
You have to make that claim under penalty of perjury. The Church of Scientology would then have the option of claiming, under penalty of perjury, that you are wrong and have their links reinstated.
Likewise, xenu.net can claim, under penalty of perjury, that the Church of Scientology is wrong, and Google would reinstate their links.
Yes these law doses have the potential to lead to other laws that "might" restrict more sites.
While you're correct, that wasn't the issue. The issue was that this law grants the executive branch the power to dictate which sites are viewable and which sites are censored. If the governer of Pennsylvania wanted to censor Slashdot, s/he could wait for some anonymous coward to post ASCII art child porn, and use it as an excuse to blacklist Slashdot for some indefinate period of time.
Furthermore, when dealing with freedom of speech, history has shown, time and time again, that the government is happy to censor anything that is unpopular. In the past, this was done by passing about a dozen speech infringing laws every year. Every year, those laws are challenged in court and thrown out. This law shifts the decision making to the executive branch. If the law is upheld, then censorship will have to be challenged on a case-by-case basis.
Suppose the government somehow places your site on the blacklist. If this law is anything like the civil seizure laws, you will have to sue the state and prove that your site is innocent in order to have it removed from the list. Furthermore, you may have to host your site in Pennsylvania just to have the right to sue.
Given the government's never-ending thirst for censorship, the idea of trusting it to stay within its discretion not a comforting thought. This is especially true when the government is not accountable for 'errors'.
Finally, this law will backfire. Pedophiles will simply browse the web through a proxy server outside Pennsylvania's jurisdiction. They will then take the list of blocked sites, and use it as an index of interesting material.
I am running Konqueror 2.2.2 with KDE 2.2.2 on Mandrake 8.1. This page screws up my mouse wheel. It took me forever to figure out what was wrong.
My first guess was that maybe one of the posters inserted a malformed tag that confused Konqueror. I saved the page, deleted all the posts, and loaded the modified page back into Konqueror. The problem persisted.
I changed every single character in the file (except the title), and the problem persisted. Note: I sometimes had to refresh the page using the contextual menu before the problem showed up.
Finally, I deleted the word "Netscape" from the title, and presto! the problem went away. Then I tried various combinations. It seems that when Konqueror 2.2.2 (I haven't tried other versions) sees a page with "Netscape" (case sensative) in the title, it frequently messes up the mouse wheel!
Copyright does not explain why IExplorer is a monopoly and Mozilla is not, nor why MSWord is and WordPerfect is not, nor why Windows is and BeOS is not.
I wouldn't consider IExplorer a monopoly. Users are free to switch to a whole host of alternatives. On the other hand, MSWord and Windows are, and the monopoly was created, in part, because there are no compatible alternatives. As discussed here such incompatibilities lead to a natural winner-take-all market.
If WordPerfect could read and write MSWord documents, there would be a whole lot more competition in the Office suite market. If BeOS could run Windows software, there would be a whole lot more competition in the OS market. I agree that other factors played a role in Microsoft's monopoly, but I wouldn't be so quick to dismiss the role of copyright.
If our copyright laws required disclosure of interfaces and/or source code
Actually they do. That's the whole philosophical purpose of copyright, to disclose the work to the public. But it doesn't cover unpublished works.
Could you cite a reference for that?
However one may debate the merits or evils of copyright, they didn't serve to create the Microsoft monopoly, because copyright was available and used by all of Microsoft's competitors, including IBM, Be Inc, Apple and GNU.
Once again, I refer to Mr. Economide's comment in the MS-DOJ antitrust settlement. Microsoft won the market, and thus became the monopolist. If Apple had won the market, Apple would be the monopolist. Just because the competition used copyrights doesn't nullify their role. I'm sure Microsoft's competitors also used exclusivity contracts and political lobbying.
If copyright law were changed, the natural outcome would be a competitive market rather than a winner-take-all market.
Microsoft is one of the few *natural* monopolies seen in the past few hundred years. Unlike the state-sponsored monopolies of the past
I disagree. Microsoft's "natural" monopoly developed because of our copyright laws. In my view, this makes Microsoft a state-sponsored monopoly. If our copyright laws required disclosure of interfaces and/or source code, others could develop software compatible with Microsoft's, thus destroying their customer lock-in strategy and the entire basis of their monopoly.
Isn't somebody that modifies the code and thereby improving it just as much of an author?
Yes. And they can release their code under any license they want (however useless their minor changes may be). However, if they distribute their code with the original author's code, then they must also license their code under the GPL. If they don't like this restriction, they can either start from scratch with their own gall darn code, or wait for the copyright to expire. Note that with closed source software, the latter choice is not even an option.
By enacting the GPL, the original coder declares himself first among equals in the new group of coders that work on the app. The original author then requires that you join this group as a subordinate before you are allowed to make and distribute any modifications.
If the group does not like the original author's license, they can rewrite the original author's code and license the new product under any license they choose.
Linux is growing exponentially because it requires anybody that does anything with the code to become part of the Linux group.
Linux is growing exponentially because people can contribute knowing that their code can not be 'hijacked'. As I noted above, if people who modified the code didn't like the GPL, they could dual license their portion of the code under both the GPL and BSD licenses.
Monopolies are perfectly legal. The problem with monopolies is that they tend to abuse their monopoly powers. For example, MS can require an OEM to either license Windows for every machine, or go without Windows.
The FSF does not have these powers. If the FSF were to say, "pay us $10,000,000 for every product you compile with gcc, or we won't let you have a copy", people would ignore them. GCC may have a monopoly on free C++ compilers (for the time being), but the FSF has no monopoly power.
If you don't like GCC, you can go off and make your own free C++ compiler. The FSF can not stop you. The FSF can not prohibit retailers from distributing your free C++ compiler. The FSF can not stop you from implementing GCC features in your free C++ compiler. The FSF can not even trap people into using a corrupted version of C++.
In short, the FSF does not have the power to abuse its monopoly. Microsoft, on the other hand, is eager to flex its monopoly muscle.
My home state of Minnesota was one of the holdouts. Our Attorney General is up for election this year. For some reason, his opponent is already getting plenty of press. It would not surprise me at all if his opponent wins the election and drops the case all together (and yes, I do think the case will go on that long).
Incidentally for the breathless Bush-haters out there: Microsoft's bribe of Gore was actually larger than their bribe of Bush. The two candidates got over 4 million EACH just from Microsoft!
It says: yes, "chief executives of IBM, Microsoft, Motorola, Intel and five other corporations said they were eager to work with Hollywood to find "technically feasible, cost effective solutions" for protecting entertainment delivered in digital form"
In other words, eight more companies are going to lobby for CPRM:(
Worst case is that everything stays the same and Linux can't run Windows-programs.
No. Worst case is, many major web sites start providing services that are only available to people who use.NET, and the public rabidly, and blindly adopts it. Linux (and any other non-MS OS) would be unable to utilize those services. Even if Linux developers were to reverse-engineer the.NET system, they would be unable to implement key aspects due to patents.
End result: Linux users are unable to utilize key services used all over the internet.
There is considerable case law regarding copyright on letters. The short story is, if you send someone a letter, they can do what they please with it.
I got email from The Center for the Moral Defense of Capitalism (they are one of the five groups that submitted public comments in Microsoft's favor). I posted it to Kuro5hin and invited them to join the discussion and respond. Instead of signing up at K5, they sent me email saying in part:
I never gave you permission to post my entire response to any public forum. On the advice of the Center's Chairman, and in accordance with copyright laws, I am now placing a copyright notice at the bottom of all my e-mails. Anyone who decides to post my responses, in their entirety, publicly, as you have, will have to get my permission to do so.
...
...
Copyright 2002, All Rights Reserved
I offered to ask the system administrator to remove the original email, but they didn't respond. They asked me to post the above email message so people could discuss my actions. I asked them if they (the CMDC rep) would like me to remove their name and contact info. They responded saying, on second thought, don't post it.
Lessig's proposal needs a name. How about the Internet Renaissance Act?
I would just like to recommend one little change. I think that a precondition to a copyright on software should be that the publisher either distribute it with the source code, or publish the communication interfaces (network protocols, file formats) and place the source code in escrow. Such a system would combat the winner take most result described by Nicholas S. Economides.
(3) The information acquired through the acts permitted under
paragraph (1), and the means permitted under paragraph (2), may be
made available to others if the person referred to in paragraph (1)
or (2), as the case may be, provides such information or means
solely for the purpose of enabling interoperability of an
independently created computer program with other programs, and to
the extent that doing so does not constitute infringement under
this title or violate applicable law other than this section.
Which basically says, as long as you are trying to make one program inter-operate with another, it is perfectly legal to circumvent a copy protection system if doing so does not violate any other part of title 17 (the copyright code) other than this section (the anti-circumvention section).
Even if bnetd did support Warcraft III, it is still legal to do so. It is not their fault that Blizzard was too stupid to make the beta expire by its self. With your line of thinking, any company could deliberately release non-expiring betas to prohibit competing services.
The idea is that the author should be entitled to his/her own work for the rest of their lives. The purpose of setting copyright to the life of the author plus some number of years, is to remove any incentive to murder the author.
Naturally, this copyright length is not limited, since the author might never die! Don't worry though. When congress realizes that Stephen King has discovered the fountain of youth, they will have no choice but to change the law:-0
I would argue that millions of people all over the world (including in third-world countries) are ALIVE today because of patents on drugs. Patents provide economic incentive for innovation, without which we'd all still be dying from the flu.
I have yet to see anyone rebut this, and I doubt anyone will be able to.
Innovation takes resources, I will not rebut that. However patents are not the only way to provide it. If there is demand for medical treatment, organizations such as the American Cancer Society or the American Lung Association, will gather donations to research the diseases and possible cures. If a social problem needs more financing, the government can fund research. If those two sources aren't sufficient, we still have universities to conduct research. Indeed, many patents are based on unpatented university research.
With that said, I don't think we should get rid of patents. But eliminating patents would be better than continuing with the patent system we have today.
it will cause substantial harm to the market for prerecorded DVD, videocassette and other copies of those episodes and films
Perhaps I'm off my rocker, but didn't the industry create that 'harm' by licensing their work to the broadcast networks in the first place? If they are so concerned about the prerecorded DVD market, they should stop licensing their works to broadcast networks. The fact that they continue to license their works is evidence that they know they are lying.
The law should not be crafted to maximize entertainment industry profits, it should be crafted to maximize public good.
Seems to me like the GPL is "feel free to drink from this well, but if you make pasta with the water everyone gets some."
This is blatently false. In much the same way you can write a paper with a GPL'd word processor, you can use water from the well without restriction. The GPL only kicks in when you A) modify the well, and B) distribute your modifications.
Furthermore, the well analogy doesn't even work. The well is physical property. The GPL applies to intellectual property. But I will humor the analogy. If someone were to hook a pump up to the well, and sell the water, the GPL still wouldn't apply. The GPL would only apply if the pump owner distributed the pump. This is a recognized limitation of the GPL.
If someone modifies a GPL'd web server, they may serve all the pages they want without releasing their changes. They only have to release changes if they distribute the server. Even then, they only have to release changes to the people that they distribute the server to. I believe there are plans to address this issue in the next version of the GPL.
Back to the well analogy, let's consider a situation where the GPL would kick in. Suppose you discover several places where the well is actually a spring. You decide you would like to make money selling aquaducts and maps to the springs. The GPL simply states that anyone who buys your aquaduct and map, may copy the map and sell their own aquaducts (and you have to tell them how you did it). The LGPL says, the people who buy your aquaducts and maps may copy the maps (and you have to tell them how you derived the maps), but you can still prohibit them from selling aquaducts. Furthermore, if you built the aquaduct for on a different well, the GPL won't even apply to your aquaduct.
Finally, if you don't like the terms of the GPL'd or LGPL'd well, you are free to find your own aquafer and start a new well under any terms you choose.
Slashdot Mirror
Identifiers (names) have to be exchanged to keep track of which customers belong to which groups. The goal of these data gathering companies is to create profiles and sell them like a credit report.
Want to rent an apartment? Your land lord will buy a copy of your profile and make sure you haven't been visiting the 'wrong' sites. Want a job? Your employer will buy a copy of your profile and read a few of your Slashdot posts (comments like yours won't form any roadblocks). Witness for a trial? Lawyers for both sides will know your life story inside and out.
There is a huge market for personal profiles. Corporations are fighting to keep that market open.
Not only that, but opt-out plans generally expire after a year. If you forget to renew, the company can sell off your data.
I gave my email address to an e-retailer that someone recommended to me. I opted-out of their promotional marketing. I haven't purchased anything from them since, but one year after my first order, they started sending me junk mail. Since I forgot to renew the opt-out, they felt they could take my old data and start using it.
AOL does the same thing. If you forget to renew, it is as though you never opted out in the first place. If you want your data to remain private, you have to renew the opt-out every single year for the rest of your life! Even after you are no longer a customer.
KMail won't let you compose mail with HTML either. Last time I tried, it also had trouble reading HTML mail sent from outlook (haven't tried it with KDE 3.0 though).
Yet right in the summary of her brief, Professor Cohen states that the limited times provision is a separate ground for invalidity. The court did not address the other grounds. Cohen argues that the copyright clause only allows congress to ban the infringing use of anti-circumvention technology, not the technology itself. She further argues than congress may not restrict the distribution of technology unless it meets the threshold for patentability. The appellate court did not address either of these issues.
Cohen details the history leading up to modern copyright law, then finishes that history stating
Congress may not use the necessary and proper clause, nor the interstate commerce clause, because doing so would require exercising a power that the constitution already specifically limits.
When the appellate court dismissed the perpetual copyright argument, they said the point was moot because no one has protected public domain works with CSS. Yet, earlier in their ruling, the court claimed that DeCSS harmed the motion picture industry because
How does the court get off with these double standards?
On a final note, I would also like to take issue with the appellate court's claim that fair-use rights are still intact. The court said we could point a camera at the display. Apparently, the court never tried this, as they would have ended up with a video of horrendous quality. To get a medium quality picture from a CRT, you need to adjust the video signal, which would require by-passing Macrovision. In other words, you would have to violate the exact same law in a different manner.
Every time someone sponsors lunatic legislation, someone claims that it's DOA. People feel relieved, sit back, and wait for it to disappear. End result, congress passes the lunatic legislation thinking no one minds.
We really need to lobby for legislation that goes in the other direction. Copyright has been out of control for nearly two centuries now. The congress of 1790 got copyright correct. We need to lobby congress to revert to the 1790 copyright act.
You have to make that claim under penalty of perjury. The Church of Scientology would then have the option of claiming, under penalty of perjury, that you are wrong and have their links reinstated.
Likewise, xenu.net can claim, under penalty of perjury, that the Church of Scientology is wrong, and Google would reinstate their links.
While you're correct, that wasn't the issue. The issue was that this law grants the executive branch the power to dictate which sites are viewable and which sites are censored. If the governer of Pennsylvania wanted to censor Slashdot, s/he could wait for some anonymous coward to post ASCII art child porn, and use it as an excuse to blacklist Slashdot for some indefinate period of time.
Furthermore, when dealing with freedom of speech, history has shown, time and time again, that the government is happy to censor anything that is unpopular. In the past, this was done by passing about a dozen speech infringing laws every year. Every year, those laws are challenged in court and thrown out. This law shifts the decision making to the executive branch. If the law is upheld, then censorship will have to be challenged on a case-by-case basis.
Suppose the government somehow places your site on the blacklist. If this law is anything like the civil seizure laws, you will have to sue the state and prove that your site is innocent in order to have it removed from the list. Furthermore, you may have to host your site in Pennsylvania just to have the right to sue.
Given the government's never-ending thirst for censorship, the idea of trusting it to stay within its discretion not a comforting thought. This is especially true when the government is not accountable for 'errors'.
Finally, this law will backfire. Pedophiles will simply browse the web through a proxy server outside Pennsylvania's jurisdiction. They will then take the list of blocked sites, and use it as an index of interesting material.
My first guess was that maybe one of the posters inserted a malformed tag that confused Konqueror. I saved the page, deleted all the posts, and loaded the modified page back into Konqueror. The problem persisted.
I changed every single character in the file (except the title), and the problem persisted. Note: I sometimes had to refresh the page using the contextual menu before the problem showed up.
Finally, I deleted the word "Netscape" from the title, and presto! the problem went away. Then I tried various combinations. It seems that when Konqueror 2.2.2 (I haven't tried other versions) sees a page with "Netscape" (case sensative) in the title, it frequently messes up the mouse wheel!
I wouldn't consider IExplorer a monopoly. Users are free to switch to a whole host of alternatives. On the other hand, MSWord and Windows are, and the monopoly was created, in part, because there are no compatible alternatives. As discussed here such incompatibilities lead to a natural winner-take-all market.
If WordPerfect could read and write MSWord documents, there would be a whole lot more competition in the Office suite market. If BeOS could run Windows software, there would be a whole lot more competition in the OS market. I agree that other factors played a role in Microsoft's monopoly, but I wouldn't be so quick to dismiss the role of copyright.
If our copyright laws required disclosure of interfaces and/or source code
Actually they do. That's the whole philosophical purpose of copyright, to disclose the work to the public. But it doesn't cover unpublished works.
Could you cite a reference for that?
However one may debate the merits or evils of copyright, they didn't serve to create the Microsoft monopoly, because copyright was available and used by all of Microsoft's competitors, including IBM, Be Inc, Apple and GNU.
Once again, I refer to Mr. Economide's comment in the MS-DOJ antitrust settlement. Microsoft won the market, and thus became the monopolist. If Apple had won the market, Apple would be the monopolist. Just because the competition used copyrights doesn't nullify their role. I'm sure Microsoft's competitors also used exclusivity contracts and political lobbying.
If copyright law were changed, the natural outcome would be a competitive market rather than a winner-take-all market.
I disagree. Microsoft's "natural" monopoly developed because of our copyright laws. In my view, this makes Microsoft a state-sponsored monopoly. If our copyright laws required disclosure of interfaces and/or source code, others could develop software compatible with Microsoft's, thus destroying their customer lock-in strategy and the entire basis of their monopoly.
Yes. And they can release their code under any license they want (however useless their minor changes may be). However, if they distribute their code with the original author's code, then they must also license their code under the GPL. If they don't like this restriction, they can either start from scratch with their own gall darn code, or wait for the copyright to expire. Note that with closed source software, the latter choice is not even an option.
By enacting the GPL, the original coder declares himself first among equals in the new group of coders that work on the app. The original author then requires that you join this group as a subordinate before you are allowed to make and distribute any modifications.
If the group does not like the original author's license, they can rewrite the original author's code and license the new product under any license they choose.
Linux is growing exponentially because it requires anybody that does anything with the code to become part of the Linux group.
Linux is growing exponentially because people can contribute knowing that their code can not be 'hijacked'. As I noted above, if people who modified the code didn't like the GPL, they could dual license their portion of the code under both the GPL and BSD licenses.
The FSF does not have these powers. If the FSF were to say, "pay us $10,000,000 for every product you compile with gcc, or we won't let you have a copy", people would ignore them. GCC may have a monopoly on free C++ compilers (for the time being), but the FSF has no monopoly power.
If you don't like GCC, you can go off and make your own free C++ compiler. The FSF can not stop you. The FSF can not prohibit retailers from distributing your free C++ compiler. The FSF can not stop you from implementing GCC features in your free C++ compiler. The FSF can not even trap people into using a corrupted version of C++.
In short, the FSF does not have the power to abuse its monopoly. Microsoft, on the other hand, is eager to flex its monopoly muscle.
My home state of Minnesota was one of the holdouts. Our Attorney General is up for election this year. For some reason, his opponent is already getting plenty of press. It would not surprise me at all if his opponent wins the election and drops the case all together (and yes, I do think the case will go on that long).
During the 2000 election cycle, Microsoft gave Bush:
$57,300.00
$100,000.00
$1,691,090.50
$19,250.00
And Gore:
$28,000.00
$1,300,892.00
As you can see, this isn't even $4,000,000 combined. Please stop making up numbers.
The remedy is supposed to:
In other words, eight more companies are going to lobby for CPRM :(
No. Worst case is, many major web sites start providing services that are only available to people who use .NET, and the public rabidly, and blindly adopts it. Linux (and any other non-MS OS) would be unable to utilize those services. Even if Linux developers were to reverse-engineer the .NET system, they would be unable to implement key aspects due to patents.
End result: Linux users are unable to utilize key services used all over the internet.
There is considerable case law regarding copyright on letters. The short story is, if you send someone a letter, they can do what they please with it.
I got email from The Center for the Moral Defense of Capitalism (they are one of the five groups that submitted public comments in Microsoft's favor). I posted it to Kuro5hin and invited them to join the discussion and respond. Instead of signing up at K5, they sent me email saying in part:
I offered to ask the system administrator to remove the original email, but they didn't respond. They asked me to post the above email message so people could discuss my actions. I asked them if they (the CMDC rep) would like me to remove their name and contact info. They responded saying, on second thought, don't post it.
I would just like to recommend one little change. I think that a precondition to a copyright on software should be that the publisher either distribute it with the source code, or publish the communication interfaces (network protocols, file formats) and place the source code in escrow. Such a system would combat the winner take most result described by Nicholas S. Economides.
(3) The information acquired through the acts permitted under
paragraph (1), and the means permitted under paragraph (2), may be
made available to others if the person referred to in paragraph (1)
or (2), as the case may be, provides such information or means
solely for the purpose of enabling interoperability of an
independently created computer program with other programs, and to
the extent that doing so does not constitute infringement under
this title or violate applicable law other than this section.
Which basically says, as long as you are trying to make one program inter-operate with another, it is perfectly legal to circumvent a copy protection system if doing so does not violate any other part of title 17 (the copyright code) other than this section (the anti-circumvention section).
Even if bnetd did support Warcraft III, it is still legal to do so. It is not their fault that Blizzard was too stupid to make the beta expire by its self. With your line of thinking, any company could deliberately release non-expiring betas to prohibit competing services.
Could you provide a link or citation for that case? I can't seem to find it anywhere.
Naturally, this copyright length is not limited, since the author might never die! Don't worry though. When congress realizes that Stephen King has discovered the fountain of youth, they will have no choice but to change the law :-0
I have yet to see anyone rebut this, and I doubt anyone will be able to.
Innovation takes resources, I will not rebut that. However patents are not the only way to provide it. If there is demand for medical treatment, organizations such as the American Cancer Society or the American Lung Association, will gather donations to research the diseases and possible cures. If a social problem needs more financing, the government can fund research. If those two sources aren't sufficient, we still have universities to conduct research. Indeed, many patents are based on unpatented university research.
With that said, I don't think we should get rid of patents. But eliminating patents would be better than continuing with the patent system we have today.
Perhaps I'm off my rocker, but didn't the industry create that 'harm' by licensing their work to the broadcast networks in the first place? If they are so concerned about the prerecorded DVD market, they should stop licensing their works to broadcast networks. The fact that they continue to license their works is evidence that they know they are lying.
The law should not be crafted to maximize entertainment industry profits, it should be crafted to maximize public good.
This is blatently false. In much the same way you can write a paper with a GPL'd word processor, you can use water from the well without restriction. The GPL only kicks in when you A) modify the well, and B) distribute your modifications.
Furthermore, the well analogy doesn't even work. The well is physical property. The GPL applies to intellectual property. But I will humor the analogy. If someone were to hook a pump up to the well, and sell the water, the GPL still wouldn't apply. The GPL would only apply if the pump owner distributed the pump. This is a recognized limitation of the GPL.
If someone modifies a GPL'd web server, they may serve all the pages they want without releasing their changes. They only have to release changes if they distribute the server. Even then, they only have to release changes to the people that they distribute the server to. I believe there are plans to address this issue in the next version of the GPL.
Back to the well analogy, let's consider a situation where the GPL would kick in. Suppose you discover several places where the well is actually a spring. You decide you would like to make money selling aquaducts and maps to the springs. The GPL simply states that anyone who buys your aquaduct and map, may copy the map and sell their own aquaducts (and you have to tell them how you did it). The LGPL says, the people who buy your aquaducts and maps may copy the maps (and you have to tell them how you derived the maps), but you can still prohibit them from selling aquaducts. Furthermore, if you built the aquaduct for on a different well, the GPL won't even apply to your aquaduct.
Finally, if you don't like the terms of the GPL'd or LGPL'd well, you are free to find your own aquafer and start a new well under any terms you choose.