The first line of the ruling: "All of the parties have acquiesced to the exercise of magistrate judge jurisdiction, including the entry of final judgment."
For the most part your suggestions about the board membership are good, and in part one has already been implemented: He's one member out of five. As I said on my weblog, one of my goals is to help transition RSS 2.0 from a benevolent dictatorship towards a more public, participatory model.
Personally, though, I think it would be crazy to push Dave out of RSS. One of the biggest reasons it has succeeded is because there was an outspoken software developer championing the protocol and promoting it tirelessly in code and on his weblog.
Sure, there's some slight difference in the case of true ownership,...
There's no ownership at all. Dave doesn't own the format, the specification, or the name. He ceded control of the spec to Harvard's Berkman Center and an advisory board and released it under an open license. He's one member of five on the board.
Surely you recognize the model here: It's the same as any open source project led by an influential person who's been running it for years. Do people listen to Dave when it comes to RSS 2.0? Yes. Do we have to? No.
I'm a member of the RSS Advisory Board along with Dave Winer and several others. What do we have to do to convince people that it isn't controlled by Dave Winer or anyone else?
Read the license for RSS 2.0. The specification is released under a Creative Commons license and no ownership is claimed of the format embodied by the specification.
He should have been thinking of the people who'd been waiting almost 20 years for that film, not the 10 year olds the promotional tie-ins were designed for.
Big-budget thrillers like The Phantom Menace are made for kids, teens, and young adults, because those people spend a ridiculous amount of money on films and related products.
Producing a big-budget movie for us fossils who worshipped Star Wars as kids would be incredibly foolish. We can't be relied on to spend our money on pop-culture crap any more. Instead, we piss too much of it away on things like mortgages, SUVs, college funds, and children.
When I saw Phantom Menace, the saddest part was the disappointed reaction of 30-year-olds who expected to leave the theater with the same wide-eyed excitement they had at age 10. It's like going back to your childhood home and lamenting the fact that all the trees in your yard are a lot smaller than they used to be.
Face it -- the torch has been passed. If it's too dumb, you're too old.
It's hard to find worthy stories that aren't from publications that should have enough money to enter.
However, here's a few good examples of online journalism from the rest of the Web:
Commentary: Phil Agre's Election 2000 wrapup, which was sent Dec. 23, 2000, to subscribers to his Red Rock Eater Digest mailing list. No one tears into political jargon and other dissembling rhetoric the way Agre does, and this post-election contribution was widely forwarded around the Net after its publication.
Feature Journalism: The Bleat by James Lileks, a daily column that's among the best feature writing in any medium, which is more impressive because his subject matter is nothing -- more specifically, the minutiae of his daily life, like movies, moving and odd yearbook discoveries.
Commentary: Deb Weiss. Though her columns are hosted by the Drudge Report, Weiss is an amateur commentator who graduated from writing letters to the editor, not a professional. Though I disagree with her on every single political issue that matters, I have to admit that in columns like this Oct. 19, 2000, recap of the first Gore-Bush debate, Weiss rips into everyone to the left of Pat Buchanan with style, intelligence and savage wit.
Amazon sells a lot of technical books, especially for advanced computer topics that don't get a lot of shelf space (if any) at bookstores. If I were forming a Linux press, I would definitely make selling on Amazon a high priority.
Yes, California doesn't need to tally the absentee ballots in their race, since Gore won by over a million, but those ballots could put Bush into the lead in the POPULAR vote!
Now (gasp!) Gore doesn't think that the electoral system is fair.
That is not true. Gore said in a speech after the election that he supports the Electoral College and would not support electors choosing him when they were assigned by their state delegations to support Bush.
He won by a margin of somewhere in the vicinity of 200,000 votes.
Gore is ahead by 330,000 votes in the popular vote. (Source: AP).
However, several reliable sources have said that there've been "irregularities" in revenue recognition, something that the linked article also touches on.
This Slashdot news item, and the story it links to, relies too much on unnamed sources, "reliable" sources, and rumors. Maybe there's a reason no sources are willing to have their names associated with this information.
Is that if you have the CD, and you're too lazy to rip it to your hard drive and would rather drag it across the net at some arbitrary speed, with errors, and without knowing if the song is actually there, you've got issues.
You don't drag CD data "across the Net" with Beam-It... you drag a code on the CD that identifies what it is. MP3.COM looks for that code in its database of ripped CDs, and if it exists, the CD is added to your private listening area on http://my.mp3.com. The process requires no uploading or downloading -- I beamed a dozen CDs in 10 minutes on a 28.8 connection.
Most people are not freaks if they choose not to watch TV. My reasons to actually watch TV are decreasing every day.
Anyone who doesn't watch TV is a demographic freak. Next thing you'll be telling me is that you read books. Shudder.
> Television and digital video are better for sports if that's what you really want.
Radio is the command-line interface to baseball. Television puts a nice graphic user interface on the sport, but if you want direct access to the things that make baseball great, you either go to a game or turn on the radio.
Mr. Valenti has a good head on his shoulders, and all SORTS of clues.
Let's not get carried away about how clued-in Jack Valenti is. The guy's an unctious mouthpiece for the film industry who makes $1 million a year to speak for their interests. He's also the most public champion for ratings systems that prevent adults from seeing movies the way directors wanted us to see them, letting an anonymous panel of parents in the Los Angeles area impose ratings on films that greatly affect their commercial viability.
Case in point: Stanley Kubrick had to alter 65 seconds of the American release of Eyes Wide Shut to avoid an NC-17 rating. Because Valenti and his panel of MPAA censors took umbrage to nude adult bodies moving in "coital motion," they threatened to give the film an NC-17 rating unless a scene was altered.
Since NC-17 is widely viewed as commercial disaster for a film -- many newspapers won't run ads for pictures given that rating -- no director can get an R rating without passing muster with Valenti's MPAA goons.
In 1966, Valenti personally supervised the censorship of Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, insisting that filmmakers change Elizabeth Taylor's line "Screw you!" to "God damn you!" Is there a better example of the arbitrary and capricious work of a censor?
Valenti also is the champion of the TV ratings system, helping to usher in its quick passage into law.
If you want to change the man's mind, work on changing his assumptions.
Valenti is paid to take the position he does -- trying to change his mind about something is like begging a prostitute for a freebie.
I'm an avid radio listener when I'm in my car. Any other place I won't listen to the radio and I never watch TV or go to the movies. For the life of me, I can't see why anyone would buy such a device!
Because most people aren't freaks who never watch TV or go to the movies, and because local radio blows goats.
Most of us are sedentary couch and mouse potatoes, and the Kerbango Internet radio sounds like a great way to do a little more digital grazing. No longer will I have to sit at my computer and feign productivity while I listen to decent radio stations in other cities. I can sit on my couch and completely dispel any illusions of productivity, and there's even a possibility I can listen from the comfort of my porcelain couch.
Any technology that lets me listen to more baseball games on the radio is a good one. Is Vin Scully still doing Dodgers games?
There's nothing wrong with turning a profit on a resource that became valuable through no fault of your own.
If your company had purchased land and it became valuable because Disney planned a park there later on, no one would have any qualms about selling the land for a high price. (Do you hear a lot of complaints about "house-squatters" in Silicon Valley selling Brady Bunch-sized houses for ridiculous sums of money?)
The ethics of buying and selling virtual real estate are no different -- anti-cybersquatting claptrap to the contrary.
It sounds like your company did not acquire the domain in bad faith. My advice would be to sit on it and let interested buyers make offers until one is so high you can't bear to refuse it. Trying to actively sell the domain is going to be interpreted as a sign that someone can buy it below value -- deals like the Loans.Com auction notwithstanding.
Andover went public. They had bucket loads of cash that could have been used to beef up slashdot's boxes, connection, etc.... They didn't need to sign up with VA Linux.
I couldn't agree more. Andover.Net had all the money it needed to solidify its media properties and keep Slashdot independent of the companies it covers. The Andover.Net IPO was one of the most lucrative pure-content stock offerings in Internet history, raising millions more than Salon and other sites could achieve.
Instead of using those riches to pursue the company's vision outlined in its IPO, Andover.Net opted to cash in and hand over Slashdot to a company Rob Malda wouldn't sell to five months earlier.
Now, we're supposed to believe that Slashdot can be fair and objective in covering companies and products that compete with VA Linux.
Why? No one believes Time Magazine will objectively cover AOL Time Warner. No one watches an MSNBC report on Microsoft without skepticism.
Freedom of the press belongs to he who owns one. VA Linux owns the most lucrative press in the open-source community -- 1.2 million eyeballs a day, and counting. Do you honestly believe that Slashdot editors are going to trumpet the next VA Linux security flaw or poor benchmark with the same enthusiasm they do other companies? Do you really think Andover.Net employees are going to spend every week of their lives around VA Linux people, projects and propaganda without developing a rooting interest in their own company?
As much as I like Robin Miller and the work that Slashdot's creators have achieved in the past three years, I believe this merger is a disaster and a betrayal.
Andover.Net betrayed the people who believed its prospectus; it betrayed Slashdot's founders who did not want to sell to a Linux company; and it betrayed the open-source community.
Those of you who believe this site is still editorially independent should get back to me when Microsoft buys VA Linux.
I'll put up with no eBay for a couple of hours simply to preserve the last vestiges of the Net as we knew it once upon a time.
The Net of old was never about denial of service attacks -- it was about the free and open exchange of information. One of the reasons SMTP and other Net protocols are so open to abuse is that they were not designed with abusers in mind -- the community was the domain of a small academic, military and governmental community where abuse was extremely rare. I can remember when the Morris worm, Jake Baker incident, and green-card spam occured, and all three were big news because the Net had been so well-treated by the community of users.
Pine all you want for the old days, but don't credit these abusers with bringing them back. The distributed denial of service attack is symptomatic of today's Internet, where people do what they want and ignore the impact on the community as a whole.
Beam-It is software that reads the ID of audio CDs when you insert them in the drive and checks to see if that CD is present in MP3.Com's database. If it is, the tracks on that CD are added to your personal My.Mp3.Com account so you can listen to them in streaming MP3 and RealAudio format -- no file transfer is required, so you can "beam" a CD instantly. About 8 out of 10 CDs I own were known to Beam-It, so now I can listen to them anywhere through a Web browser.
Another feature I tried out is Instant Listening. If you buy a CD from a company participating with Mp3.Com, it is added to My.Mp3.Com the moment you purchase it. Instant Listening is a great excuse to buy an album over the Net -- there's nothing like receiving instant gratification while shopping in your pajamas.
The only downside to Instant Listening is that the MP3.Com partner I purchased from, Jungle Jeff, took 10 days to send the CD.
Instead of suing MP3.Com, the RIAA should be looking at how My.MP3.Com facilitates impulse purchasing at online music stores. The recording industry already has a monopoly on the artists most people want to hear. They can reap even more rapacious profits on CDs sold electronically without the overhead of distribution, packaging, store promotion, and other brick and mortar costs.
I don't know how it works in Norway, but if the hacker's a minor there in the eyes of the courts, arresting the father gives them someone who can face charges as an adult. Prosecutors could use this against the son to get him to plead guilty in exchange for charges being dropped against his dad.
It's a proud day when the megacorporations that make up the Motion Picture Association can use government officials to arrest a teen-ager for making them look bad.
But isn't this exactly what happened? Someone registered a bunch of domains with Linux in the name and put them up for auction.
Torvalds isn't just talking about SeriousDomains. He's saying that anyone who registers a domain with Linux in it, does not publish anything there and appears to be fielding for-sale offers is cybersquatting. He believes he has the legal right to take that domain away because the person is blocking the domain from being used by others.
I think Torvalds is overstating the strength of cybersquatting laws here. I've read a few of these laws because I didn't want to run afoul of them as a domain owner. In order to get in trouble, you have to prove a bad faith intent to profit from someone else's trademark.
How can I prove bad faith, as a domain owner?
1) Register a domain that includes someone else's trademark, then contact that person with an offer to sell the domain.
2) Register several domains that include the same trademark in different ways, as the owner of msdwonline.com did recently. Morgan Stanley Dean Witter is going after him in court as a result, and I wouldn't want to be him.
3) Publish something at the domain related to the trademark I don't own that creates confusion in the marketplace about whether I'm the trademark owner or not.
4) Publish something at the domain that is so scandalous or disreputable the trademark owner would fear damage to his reputation.
Avoid these four things and you have a much stronger hold on a domain. Torvalds seems to believe that merely owning or trying to sell a domain with Linux in it is sufficient proof of bad faith. From my desk miles away from the nearest lawyer, I don't think that's true.
Slashdot Mirror
Same guy.
The first line of the ruling: "All of the parties have acquiesced to the exercise of magistrate judge jurisdiction, including the entry of final
judgment."
A musing is simply a meditative thought.
For the most part your suggestions about the board membership are good, and in part one has already been implemented: He's one member out of five. As I said on my weblog, one of my goals is to help transition RSS 2.0 from a benevolent dictatorship towards a more public, participatory model. Personally, though, I think it would be crazy to push Dave out of RSS. One of the biggest reasons it has succeeded is because there was an outspoken software developer championing the protocol and promoting it tirelessly in code and on his weblog.
Sure, there's some slight difference in the case of true ownership, ...
There's no ownership at all. Dave doesn't own the format, the specification, or the name. He ceded control of the spec to Harvard's Berkman Center and an advisory board and released it under an open license. He's one member of five on the board.
Surely you recognize the model here: It's the same as any open source project led by an influential person who's been running it for years. Do people listen to Dave when it comes to RSS 2.0? Yes. Do we have to? No.
I'm a member of the RSS Advisory Board along with Dave Winer and several others. What do we have to do to convince people that it isn't controlled by Dave Winer or anyone else? Read the license for RSS 2.0. The specification is released under a Creative Commons license and no ownership is claimed of the format embodied by the specification.
He should have been thinking of the people who'd been waiting almost 20 years for that film, not the 10 year olds the promotional tie-ins were designed for.
Big-budget thrillers like The Phantom Menace are made for kids, teens, and young adults, because those people spend a ridiculous amount of money on films and related products.
Producing a big-budget movie for us fossils who worshipped Star Wars as kids would be incredibly foolish. We can't be relied on to spend our money on pop-culture crap any more. Instead, we piss too much of it away on things like mortgages, SUVs, college funds, and children.
When I saw Phantom Menace, the saddest part was the disappointed reaction of 30-year-olds who expected to leave the theater with the same wide-eyed excitement they had at age 10. It's like going back to your childhood home and lamenting the fact that all the trees in your yard are a lot smaller than they used to be.
Face it -- the torch has been passed. If it's too dumb, you're too old.
Yes, California doesn't need to tally the absentee ballots in their race, since Gore won by over a million, but those ballots could put Bush into the lead in the POPULAR vote!
California only has 110,000 absentee ballots left to count and Gore is now ahead by 330,000 votes in the national popular vote, according to AP.
Now (gasp!) Gore doesn't think that the electoral system is fair.
That is not true. Gore said in a speech after the election that he supports the Electoral College and would not support electors choosing him when they were assigned by their state delegations to support Bush.
He won by a margin of somewhere in the vicinity of 200,000 votes.
Gore is ahead by 330,000 votes in the popular vote. (Source: AP).
This Slashdot news item, and the story it links to, relies too much on unnamed sources, "reliable" sources, and rumors. Maybe there's a reason no sources are willing to have their names associated with this information.
Is that if you have the CD, and you're too lazy to rip it to your hard drive and would rather drag it across the net at some arbitrary speed, with errors, and without knowing if the song is actually there, you've got issues.
You don't drag CD data "across the Net" with Beam-It ... you drag a code on the CD that identifies what it is. MP3.COM looks for that code in its database of ripped CDs, and if it exists, the CD is added to your private listening area on http://my.mp3.com. The process requires no uploading or downloading -- I beamed a dozen CDs in 10 minutes on a 28.8 connection.
Most people are not freaks if they choose not to watch TV. My reasons to actually watch TV are decreasing every day.
Anyone who doesn't watch TV is a demographic freak. Next thing you'll be telling me is that you read books. Shudder.
> Television and digital video are better for sports if that's what you really want.
Radio is the command-line interface to baseball. Television puts a nice graphic user interface on the sport, but if you want direct access to the things that make baseball great, you either go to a game or turn on the radio.
Mr. Valenti has a good head on his shoulders, and all SORTS of clues.
Let's not get carried away about how clued-in Jack Valenti is. The guy's an unctious mouthpiece for the film industry who makes $1 million a year to speak for their interests. He's also the most public champion for ratings systems that prevent adults from seeing movies the way directors wanted us to see them, letting an anonymous panel of parents in the Los Angeles area impose ratings on films that greatly affect their commercial viability.
Case in point: Stanley Kubrick had to alter 65 seconds of the American release of Eyes Wide Shut to avoid an NC-17 rating. Because Valenti and his panel of MPAA censors took umbrage to nude adult bodies moving in "coital motion," they threatened to give the film an NC-17 rating unless a scene was altered.
Since NC-17 is widely viewed as commercial disaster for a film -- many newspapers won't run ads for pictures given that rating -- no director can get an R rating without passing muster with Valenti's MPAA goons.
In 1966, Valenti personally supervised the censorship of Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, insisting that filmmakers change Elizabeth Taylor's line "Screw you!" to "God damn you!" Is there a better example of the arbitrary and capricious work of a censor?
Valenti also is the champion of the TV ratings system, helping to usher in its quick passage into law.
If you want to change the man's mind, work on changing his assumptions.
Valenti is paid to take the position he does -- trying to change his mind about something is like begging a prostitute for a freebie.
I'm an avid radio listener when I'm in my car. Any other place I won't listen to the radio and I never watch TV or go to the movies. For the life of me, I can't see why anyone would buy such a device!
Because most people aren't freaks who never watch TV or go to the movies, and because local radio blows goats.
Most of us are sedentary couch and mouse potatoes, and the Kerbango Internet radio sounds like a great way to do a little more digital grazing. No longer will I have to sit at my computer and feign productivity while I listen to decent radio stations in other cities. I can sit on my couch and completely dispel any illusions of productivity, and there's even a possibility I can listen from the comfort of my porcelain couch.
Any technology that lets me listen to more baseball games on the radio is a good one. Is Vin Scully still doing Dodgers games?
There's nothing wrong with turning a profit on a resource that became valuable through no fault of your own.
If your company had purchased land and it became valuable because Disney planned a park there later on, no one would have any qualms about selling the land for a high price. (Do you hear a lot of complaints about "house-squatters" in Silicon Valley selling Brady Bunch-sized houses for ridiculous sums of money?)
The ethics of buying and selling virtual real estate are no different -- anti-cybersquatting claptrap to the contrary.
It sounds like your company did not acquire the domain in bad faith. My advice would be to sit on it and let interested buyers make offers until one is so high you can't bear to refuse it. Trying to actively sell the domain is going to be interpreted as a sign that someone can buy it below value -- deals like the Loans.Com auction notwithstanding.
Andover went public. They had bucket loads of cash that could have been used to beef up slashdot's boxes, connection, etc.... They didn't need to sign up with VA Linux.
I couldn't agree more. Andover.Net had all the money it needed to solidify its media properties and keep Slashdot independent of the companies it covers. The Andover.Net IPO was one of the most lucrative pure-content stock offerings in Internet history, raising millions more than Salon and other sites could achieve.
Instead of using those riches to pursue the company's vision outlined in its IPO, Andover.Net opted to cash in and hand over Slashdot to a company Rob Malda wouldn't sell to five months earlier.
Now, we're supposed to believe that Slashdot can be fair and objective in covering companies and products that compete with VA Linux.
Why? No one believes Time Magazine will objectively cover AOL Time Warner. No one watches an MSNBC report on Microsoft without skepticism.
Freedom of the press belongs to he who owns one. VA Linux owns the most lucrative press in the open-source community -- 1.2 million eyeballs a day, and counting. Do you honestly believe that Slashdot editors are going to trumpet the next VA Linux security flaw or poor benchmark with the same enthusiasm they do other companies? Do you really think Andover.Net employees are going to spend every week of their lives around VA Linux people, projects and propaganda without developing a rooting interest in their own company?
As much as I like Robin Miller and the work that Slashdot's creators have achieved in the past three years, I believe this merger is a disaster and a betrayal.
Andover.Net betrayed the people who believed its prospectus; it betrayed Slashdot's founders who did not want to sell to a Linux company; and it betrayed the open-source community.
Those of you who believe this site is still editorially independent should get back to me when Microsoft buys VA Linux.
I'll put up with no eBay for a couple of hours simply to preserve the last vestiges of the Net as we knew it once upon a time.
The Net of old was never about denial of service attacks -- it was about the free and open exchange of information. One of the reasons SMTP and other Net protocols are so open to abuse is that they were not designed with abusers in mind -- the community was the domain of a small academic, military and governmental community where abuse was extremely rare. I can remember when the Morris worm, Jake Baker incident, and green-card spam occured, and all three were big news because the Net had been so well-treated by the community of users.
Pine all you want for the old days, but don't credit these abusers with bringing them back. The distributed denial of service attack is symptomatic of today's Internet, where people do what they want and ignore the impact on the community as a whole.
Beam-It is software that reads the ID of audio CDs when you insert them in the drive and checks to see if that CD is present in MP3.Com's database. If it is, the tracks on that CD are added to your personal My.Mp3.Com account so you can listen to them in streaming MP3 and RealAudio format -- no file transfer is required, so you can "beam" a CD instantly. About 8 out of 10 CDs I own were known to Beam-It, so now I can listen to them anywhere through a Web browser.
Another feature I tried out is Instant Listening. If you buy a CD from a company participating with Mp3.Com, it is added to My.Mp3.Com the moment you purchase it. Instant Listening is a great excuse to buy an album over the Net -- there's nothing like receiving instant gratification while shopping in your pajamas.
The only downside to Instant Listening is that the MP3.Com partner I purchased from, Jungle Jeff, took 10 days to send the CD.
Instead of suing MP3.Com, the RIAA should be looking at how My.MP3.Com facilitates impulse purchasing at online music stores. The recording industry already has a monopoly on the artists most people want to hear. They can reap even more rapacious profits on CDs sold electronically without the overhead of distribution, packaging, store promotion, and other brick and mortar costs.
Why arrest his father though ?
I don't know how it works in Norway, but if the hacker's a minor there in the eyes of the courts, arresting the father gives them someone who can face charges as an adult. Prosecutors could use this against the son to get him to plead guilty in exchange for charges being dropped against his dad.
It's a proud day when the megacorporations that make up the Motion Picture Association can use government officials to arrest a teen-ager for making them look bad.
But isn't this exactly what happened? Someone registered a bunch of domains with Linux in the name and put them up for auction.
Torvalds isn't just talking about SeriousDomains. He's saying that anyone who registers a domain with Linux in it, does not publish anything there and appears to be fielding for-sale offers is cybersquatting. He believes he has the legal right to take that domain away because the person is blocking the domain from being used by others.
I think Torvalds is overstating the strength of cybersquatting laws here. I've read a few of these laws because I didn't want to run afoul of them as a domain owner. In order to get in trouble, you have to prove a bad faith intent to profit from someone else's trademark.
How can I prove bad faith, as a domain owner?
1) Register a domain that includes someone else's trademark, then contact that person with an offer to sell the domain.
2) Register several domains that include the same trademark in different ways, as the owner of msdwonline.com did recently. Morgan Stanley Dean Witter is going after him in court as a result, and I wouldn't want to be him.
3) Publish something at the domain related to the trademark I don't own that creates confusion in the marketplace about whether I'm the trademark owner or not.
4) Publish something at the domain that is so scandalous or disreputable the trademark owner would fear damage to his reputation.
Avoid these four things and you have a much stronger hold on a domain. Torvalds seems to believe that merely owning or trying to sell a domain with Linux in it is sufficient proof of bad faith. From my desk miles away from the nearest lawyer, I don't think that's true.