They aren't saying modify the DMCA to ban Napster and peer-to-peer file sharing. What they're saying, if Slashdot's editors and the foaming-at-the-mouth crowd would bother to read for content, is that service providers whose services mean serious risk of copyright infringement (i.e. Napster) should be required to get solid identifying information for users, should have to respond to challenges in a timely manner, and that judges should have broad powers to grant injunctions against them - and that THOSE things should be written into DMCA.
Since the former is clearly implied by the latter, and much shorter, it is more effective for purposes of thumbnail summary.
(If you wish to question the assertion that the former is, in fact, implied by the latter, begin by explaining the practical, real-world difference between giving judges "broad powers to grant injunctions against" X and simply prohibiting X. For extra credit, explain why the established legal doctrine of "chilling effect" has no real validity.) /.
That's not a practical application, for obvious reasons. ("Excuse me, Mr. Rapist, sir; I need to clean off my fingers and try to get this thing to scan properly....") /.
WTF? All it would have to do is get out of the atmosphere, really, and keep enough velocity to overcome the microgravity Earth would exert on it at that point.
Earth's gravity just above the atmosphere (about 100 miles up) is about 95% of surface gravity. "Microgravity" is an effect of free fall: you aren't pressing against the floor because the floor is accellerating just as fast as you are.
The bottom line is that you need a delta vee of a few km/sec to drop something on the Godless Commies or the Yankee Imperialists from the other's territory, about 8 km/sec to put something in low earth orbit, or about 11 km/sec to reach the moon. /.
I think the recent federal law only requires that they give you a method of opting out.
There is no "recent federal law". The one the spamscum routinely put in their messages is a bill that did not pass (in part because people got wind of it via the Net and complained). /.
A friend of mine won a couple of free passes to Battlefield Earth. When it shows up on network TV, it will make great fodder for a MST3K party, but on no account pay money to see it. /.
If and when they catch the perpetrator of the "I Love You" virus, they ought to pipe the Barney theme song ("I love you... you love me...") into his cell around the clock.
Of course, this assumes that he's in a jurisdiction which doesn't have those pesky prohibitions against cruel and unusual punishment. /.
More fundamentally, each of the evils ascribed to corporations is possible only because they have purchased favors from the State. The politicians function as fences, selling off the booty to the highest bidder.
Corporations could not expand intellectual property rights beyond legitimate bounds without Congress. Corporations could not suppress labor organization without police who turned a selective blind eye. Corporations could not even enjoy their special limited liability status without laws defining them as a special class of "person". /.
So, Metallica has called Napster's bluff. Napster never expected to be handed such a huge pile of complaints, and has neither a mechanism nor the resources to process them.
Therein lies the one legitimate objection to Metallica's action. Yes, they have every right to file complaints or take legal action against people who illegally copy and distribute their works -- given legitimate grounds for suspicion in each individual case. I find it rather difficult to believe that a pile of a third of a million names was subjected to even the most cursory check to eliminate bogus hits on a "Metallica" word-search (e.g. descriptions of a song as resembling Metallica's style, clips short enough to qualify as legitimate fair-use excerpts).
If they've done a bonehead word search and identified every name that came up as an infringer on that basis alone, their lawyers had better understand defamation law as well as they understand IP law. /.
You don't have to stop buying the music, you can make the music. Here is an easy way to voice your opinion and protest. 1. Make a recording of yourself voicing your opinion on the Metallica-Napster issue. 2. Convert the recording to an mp3 file. 3. Name the mp3 file: Metallica_is_Wasting_My Hate.mp3, Metallica_is_Fading_to_black.mp3 or some other pun of a metallica song. 4. Share the newly created file on napster. Now you can't be banned for voicing your opinion. So, if Metallica wants these files off of Napster, they want to prevent Free Speech.
Added Bonus: If they list you as a "copyright violator" on their next list, you have a slam-dunk libel case. /.
The other thing is, why not just create two versions of the chip? For home users, we can get the version of the chip that does not have the serial number, and for those that want/need the serial number feature, they can create a version that has it.
All they would need to do is burn some of the batches with identical serial numbers (all zeros or something) for the former market. Hell, they could probably charge the PHBs extra for the serial number feature in the latter market. /.
I don't see any justification for linking that debate with Columbine. All those fascist school policies came down the pike immediately afterward, true, but that's just one of life's crazy coincidences. /.
Why should someone who sends some spam get a huge fine or prison sentence when all they did was waste a few seconds of a bunch of people's time
Let's see -- 250,000 recipients (a very lowball estimate) times 2 seconds each (ditto, considering that spam is usually disguised to look like legitimate e-mail, and is often long enough to take several seconds to download over a dial-up) times the minimum wage... OK, I'd be satisfied to see a spammer get the same penalty he'd get for lifting $715.27 from somebody's wallet. (Note that I have generously given the spammer a pass on the bandwidth costs.)
when someone who sends junkmail has used up millions of dollars worth of natural resources that cannot be replaced
Nonsense. Someone who sends paper mail bought the paper and paid the postage. The law in civilized nations treats private property differently from stolen goods. /.
"Will laws be written to combat such behavior? Can such laws be written?" No, no and no. "Congress shall make no law," the First Amendment tells us, to abridge the freedom of speech.
Freedom of speech does not include creation of a public nuisance or misappropriation of other people's property.
1. Content-Neutral -- The regulation must be independent of the message. For this reason, spam is properly defined as bulk
unsolicited e-mail, without regard to its possible "commercial" content.
2. Narrowly Tailored For Significant Government Interest -- The regulation must address a significant problem in the least restrictive available manner. The "significant problem" in the case of spamming is large-scale abuse of other people's e-mail bandwidth, to the point where if tolerated it would quickly render e-mail useless. The one major question is exactly what constitutes the "least restrictive" means to get the job done.
(The fact that private filtering may be able to stop spam carries some weight, but is not an overriding factor. By analogy, it is possible to chemically treat walls so that paint will not stick to them, but this does not invalidate anti-graffiti laws.)
3. Alternative Channels -- The regulation must not choke off all avenues of communication. This is easily met; someone prevented from spamming remains free to electronically disseminate his message to the Net via a Web page, for example.
I'm not an ISP administrator, but I suspect the marginal cost of junk email isn't that big a deal.
A rather clearer-than-usual version of "I don't know jack about this, but here's my opinion anyway". I'd rather pay attention to informed analysis, which doesn't support your position. /.
Further, what's the difference from junk snail mail and spam email?
The senders of junk snail mail pay their own postage. The senders of spam e-mail steal user bandwidth. Next question?
It is more environmentally conscious to send spam
You are not helping your credibility by parroting a standard spammer excuse. Paper is recyclable (if only via decaying and reentering the soil biomass); electrical energy isn't.
If there is a way to regulate commercial advertisements so that they are no longer an annoyance, it would require carefully defining commercial so that solicited literature can get through, but the loophole for this is not large enough for others to use.
"Commercial" is the wrong criterion. "Unsolicited Bulk" is the correct criterion. Sending political, religious, or just plain gibberish spam steals bandwidth just as effectively as commercial spam. The main difficulty is defining and proving "bulk" -- it's clearly unreasonable to treat somebody who forwards jokes to three or four uninterested people as if he'd blasted out millions of MAKE.MONEY.FAST spams.
Reduced rates are what you pay
In the case of spam email, increased rates are what you pay. The spammer doesn't pay for his bandwidth; the recipient ISPs do, and they don't get their reimbursement from the Tooth Fairy. /.
What if there were no crypto? What if all of our data could be accessed by anyone else with reasonable hacking skill?
The latter question does not follow from "What if there were no crypto?". It does follow from "What if air were not an insulator?"
If there were no other form of data security, secrecy would be available only to those who could afford to either keep them on dedicated and isolated computers or to have sensitive data processed manually by utterly trusted/cowed agents. /.
The author does not address libertarianism, but rather the common straw-man version of libertarianism. Admittedly, a disproportionate amount of libertarian evangelism comes from the rebellious teen-agers and Randroids who espouse the latter, so it's an understandable mistake.
Libertarianism does not reject social structures; quite the contrary. Individuals are left free to participate in various social institutions to a greater and lesser degree, and experience the benefits and drawbacks of these choices. It permits lone-wolfism as one of a range of personal lifestyle choices, but does not insist upon it. Most people inclined to lone-wolfism are libertarians (because other political doctrines regard them as bad citizens, or worse), but this does not mean that most libertarians are inclined to lone-wolfism. /.
Jim said the company hoped to set up anonymous toll-free "safety" and anti-violence hotlines across the country to relieve unnerved and overburdened school districts of the responsibility of monitoring students who might be disturbed or dangerous.
If the school system is going to claim to act in loco parentis, it cannot palm off these responsibilities, any more than parents can.
politicians like those in North Carolina were demanding some action, and so were parents, journalists and educators
Political logic:
1. Something must be done.
2. Plan X is something. 3. Therefore, Plan X must be done.
We know how, and if we don't do it, somebody else will.
I will not invoke Godwin's Law.... I will not invoke Godwin's Law.... I will not invoke Godwin's Law....
Pinkerton was unhappy with some of the media portrayal of some of WAVE America's more controversial features.
I'll just bet they were.
Let's see: no direct reward for turning in a classmate, but gifts and prizes encouraging kids to use a site that offers anonymous reporting. A fine line.
I haven't seen such a fine line drawn since Clinton's quibblings over the definitions of the words "alone", "sex", and "is". /.
America's freedom of speech is an aberration, most mature societies (including Germany)
You're holding up the nation that started the century by tearing down the balance-of-power system that had given Europe a century of peace, then followed up with a full-blown episode of national psychosis, as "mature"?
This is a definition of "mature" with which I am unfamiliar. /.
I never expected a ruling like this outside the United States.
It requires about three generations for a fundamental social concept (e.g. personal responsibility, freedom of speech) to fully "take". It hasn't been that long yet -- some of the soldiers who imposed a free Western state on one half of Germany are still alive, and some of the computers built when it came to the other half are still in use. /.
I've noticed that 85-90% of my Spam can be traced back to either PSI.NET or UU.NET.
Dunno about PSI, but SpewSpewNet has a reputation for spam-friendliness. They were subjected to the Usenet Death Penalty in August 1997, and responded with legal threats, obfuscation, and just about everything else except a committment to fix the problem. They eventually put a stronger policy in place, but establishing a policy is not equivalent to enforcing it. /.
Slashdot Mirror
Since the former is clearly implied by the latter, and much shorter, it is more effective for purposes of thumbnail summary.
(If you wish to question the assertion that the former is, in fact, implied by the latter, begin by explaining the practical, real-world difference between giving judges "broad powers to grant injunctions against" X and simply prohibiting X. For extra credit, explain why the established legal doctrine of "chilling effect" has no real validity.)
/.
That's not a practical application, for obvious reasons. ("Excuse me, Mr. Rapist, sir; I need to clean off my fingers and try to get this thing to scan properly....")
/.
I didn't know WinZip had such a sophisticated AI.
/.
Earth's gravity just above the atmosphere (about 100 miles up) is about 95% of surface gravity. "Microgravity" is an effect of free fall: you aren't pressing against the floor because the floor is accellerating just as fast as you are.
The bottom line is that you need a delta vee of a few km/sec to drop something on the Godless Commies or the Yankee Imperialists from the other's territory, about 8 km/sec to put something in low earth orbit, or about 11 km/sec to reach the moon.
/.
There is no "recent federal law". The one the spamscum routinely put in their messages is a bill that did not pass (in part because people got wind of it via the Net and complained).
/.
A friend of mine won a couple of free passes to Battlefield Earth. When it shows up on network TV, it will make great fodder for a MST3K party, but on no account pay money to see it.
/.
Of course, this assumes that he's in a jurisdiction which doesn't have those pesky prohibitions against cruel and unusual punishment.
/.
Corporations could not expand intellectual property rights beyond legitimate bounds without Congress. Corporations could not suppress labor organization without police who turned a selective blind eye. Corporations could not even enjoy their special limited liability status without laws defining them as a special class of "person".
/.
Therein lies the one legitimate objection to Metallica's action. Yes, they have every right to file complaints or take legal action against people who illegally copy and distribute their works -- given legitimate grounds for suspicion in each individual case. I find it rather difficult to believe that a pile of a third of a million names was subjected to even the most cursory check to eliminate bogus hits on a "Metallica" word-search (e.g. descriptions of a song as resembling Metallica's style, clips short enough to qualify as legitimate fair-use excerpts).
If they've done a bonehead word search and identified every name that came up as an infringer on that basis alone, their lawyers had better understand defamation law as well as they understand IP law.
/.
Added Bonus: If they list you as a "copyright violator" on their next list, you have a slam-dunk libel case.
/.
All they would need to do is burn some of the batches with identical serial numbers (all zeros or something) for the former market. Hell, they could probably charge the PHBs extra for the serial number feature in the latter market.
/.
Death toll caused by 3D Graphics Acceleration: in zero digits.
Case closed.
/.
I don't see any justification for linking that debate with Columbine. All those fascist school policies came down the pike immediately afterward, true, but that's just one of life's crazy coincidences.
/.
SURGEONS FIX BOY BORN WITH HIS HEAD ON BACKWARD Since they figured he'd never be able to get a date, anyway....
/.
Let's see -- 250,000 recipients (a very lowball estimate) times 2 seconds each (ditto, considering that spam is usually disguised to look like legitimate e-mail, and is often long enough to take several seconds to download over a dial-up) times the minimum wage... OK, I'd be satisfied to see a spammer get the same penalty he'd get for lifting $715.27 from somebody's wallet. (Note that I have generously given the spammer a pass on the bandwidth costs.)
when someone who sends junkmail has used up millions of dollars worth of natural resources that cannot be replaced
Nonsense. Someone who sends paper mail bought the paper and paid the postage. The law in civilized nations treats private property differently from stolen goods.
/.
No, no and no. "Congress shall make no law," the First Amendment tells us, to abridge the freedom of speech.
Freedom of speech does not include creation of a public nuisance or misappropriation of other people's property.
There is a large body of legal precedent supporting "time, place, and manner" regulations, provided they pass the following three-part test:
/.
A rather clearer-than-usual version of "I don't know jack about this, but here's my opinion anyway". I'd rather pay attention to informed analysis, which doesn't support your position.
/.
The senders of junk snail mail pay their own postage. The senders of spam e-mail steal user bandwidth. Next question?
It is more environmentally conscious to send spam
You are not helping your credibility by parroting a standard spammer excuse. Paper is recyclable (if only via decaying and reentering the soil biomass); electrical energy isn't.
If there is a way to regulate commercial advertisements so that they are no longer an annoyance, it would require carefully defining commercial so that solicited literature can get through, but the loophole for this is not large enough for others to use.
"Commercial" is the wrong criterion. "Unsolicited Bulk" is the correct criterion. Sending political, religious, or just plain gibberish spam steals bandwidth just as effectively as commercial spam. The main difficulty is defining and proving "bulk" -- it's clearly unreasonable to treat somebody who forwards jokes to three or four uninterested people as if he'd blasted out millions of MAKE.MONEY.FAST spams.
Reduced rates are what you pay
In the case of spam email, increased rates are what you pay. The spammer doesn't pay for his bandwidth; the recipient ISPs do, and they don't get their reimbursement from the Tooth Fairy.
/.
The latter question does not follow from "What if there were no crypto?". It does follow from "What if air were not an insulator?"
If there were no other form of data security, secrecy would be available only to those who could afford to either keep them on dedicated and isolated computers or to have sensitive data processed manually by utterly trusted/cowed agents.
/.
Libertarianism does not reject social structures; quite the contrary. Individuals are left free to participate in various social institutions to a greater and lesser degree, and experience the benefits and drawbacks of these choices. It permits lone-wolfism as one of a range of personal lifestyle choices, but does not insist upon it. Most people inclined to lone-wolfism are libertarians (because other political doctrines regard them as bad citizens, or worse), but this does not mean that most libertarians are inclined to lone-wolfism.
/.
If the school system is going to claim to act in loco parentis, it cannot palm off these responsibilities, any more than parents can.
politicians like those in North Carolina were demanding some action, and so were parents, journalists and educators
Political logic:
We know how, and if we don't do it, somebody else will.
I will not invoke Godwin's Law.... I will not invoke Godwin's Law.... I will not invoke Godwin's Law....
Pinkerton was unhappy with some of the media portrayal of some of WAVE America's more controversial features.
I'll just bet they were.
Let's see: no direct reward for turning in a classmate, but gifts and prizes encouraging kids to use a site that offers anonymous reporting. A fine line.
I haven't seen such a fine line drawn since Clinton's quibblings over the definitions of the words "alone", "sex", and "is".
/.
You're holding up the nation that started the century by tearing down the balance-of-power system that had given Europe a century of peace, then followed up with a full-blown episode of national psychosis, as "mature"?
This is a definition of "mature" with which I am unfamiliar.
/.
It requires about three generations for a fundamental social concept (e.g. personal responsibility, freedom of speech) to fully "take". It hasn't been that long yet -- some of the soldiers who imposed a free Western state on one half of Germany are still alive, and some of the computers built when it came to the other half are still in use.
/.
Dunno about PSI, but SpewSpewNet has a reputation for spam-friendliness. They were subjected to the Usenet Death Penalty in August 1997, and responded with legal threats, obfuscation, and just about everything else except a committment to fix the problem. They eventually put a stronger policy in place, but establishing a policy is not equivalent to enforcing it.
/.
There are wimmin on the Net, and not just nekkid ones. Be still, my beating heart....
/.