Code is not a standard. You can not point to code, and say that _this_ is how to do something. Code changes, code can be hard to understand. Code is only one way to do things.
IIRC, the human body basically schedules its sleep requirements according to two basic schedules, one related to daylight and one related to how long you've been awake and how active you've been. For most people, that combination puts the most effective melatonin processing in the early hours of the morning.
And yes, suddenly changing across several time zones does mess it up. Jet lag is basically the resulting shock to the system while the two stimuli seem to be contradictory.
I care that in absolute terms, there is far more good content available than I can consume. I have a huge reading backlog. I certainly would not trade the ability to get at documents that have gone missing... for even more content.
Fair enough, you're perfectly entitled to your own opinion. However, what you wrote above is only a personal preference. It's not necessarily in the best interests of society as a whole (or even yours, but we can never know that for sure without knowing what potential content you're turning down and how much value you might have put on it if you'd known about it).
My personal view is that older content that is really valuable is unlikely to disappear anyway, and that which does probably does so through "natural selection". I don't want the Internet to become so full of outdated, obsolete, irrelevant information that it becomes impossible to find the good stuff, and compared to even five years ago it's already heading that way fast.
If something has disappeared, IME there's often a good reason for it: usually it's either no longer relevant or replaced by something better. Occasionally it's not something that should ever have been out there in the first place, and I don't accept the black-and-white view that once some information is out there, it's always in society's interests to keep it so and make it widely available.
I tend to agree with you, but note that the court here was clear that the plaintiff was aware of the conventions around META, robots.txt, etc., knew that Google would check for them, and deliberately chose to set up a robots.txt file that invited robots to scan the site anyway. There's no issue here about whether these techniques are standard practice.
I'm not sure it would always be sufficient just to argue that robots.txt and the like are accepted standards these days, simply on the basis that if you took a random sample of people with web sites, I imagine the majority would never have heard of them. It's a bit like not top-posting: those who have been around a while often don't like it and even regard it as rude, but the Outlook generation couldn't care less.
And yet, somehow, there is far more content on the Internet than I could ever see in a lifetime of browsing.
Sure. But how much of it is good content, the kind that a skilled artist has worked hard on and it shows, and how much of it is the WWW equivalent of the latest teenie lip-synch group? Anyone can write a blog. Writing a blog worth reading is a whole different game.
[I'll mostly gloss over the anonymity thing. There are examples, though admittedly less serious than what I mentioned before when I was commenting on Internet anonymity in general, where even anonymising the browsing of a site can damage the site's providers. Think of people who use their site logs to help improve the UI, based on how many of their visitors are returning, or identifying that a lot of visitors from a particular country are coming and it would be worth investing in a local mirror. However, I'm not sure any of that is particularly relevant to this discussion.]
Huh? And using a heavily restricted site contributes to society how?
The things we're talking about are hardly heavily restricted. More to the point, the alternative isn't necessarily an unrestricted site; it could well be no site at all. This is the point a lot of people forget in their haste to tell us how information wants to be free, you can't stop distribution, etc: by default, only the author of the work has it. If society wants the author to share, it has to make it worth his while, or he'll simply keep it to himself and no-one will benefit under any circumstances.
Finding old information removed from the site is often invaluable. Don't you hate it when the site that seems to be just about the subject you need is down, or removed right the page you wanted? Thanks to google, often I still can have it.
On the other hand, consider an author who's willing to put up a draft of their book on a site, offering that version of the content to the public for a limited time in exchange for hopefully receiving constructive feedback before publishing. This benefits both parties. It probably also benefits both parties to withdraw that content when the final version is published: the author wants to make his return on investment, and the content in the final version will probably be better than in the draft so you don't want out-of-date information taking priority.
However, archives can screw this up: anyone who wants to fleece the author can (potentially to their own disadvantage as well) look up the draft and use that instead of paying the asking price for the final version, and anyone searching for the work might not even be aware that the final version exists, because they see an archived version of the draft page, not the announcement page that replaced it. And of course, many authors will no longer publish anything from any potentially publishable book, even a draft or a sample chapter, for fear of publishers turning them down (as many now routinely do). None of this helps anyone, and archives have to take some responsibility for the damage. (This isn't to say that they can't be useful for other purposes, of course, just that it's not an entirely one-sided argument and keeping old material on-line against the author's wishes can be damaging.)
I don't see anything wrong about anonymous access either, my ISP's transparent proxy already provides a degree of anonymity anyway.
That's a discussion for another time, perhaps, but just consider how many crimes, from the somewhat irritating to the seriously damaging, are possible only because of the effective anonymity the Internet provides. Again, that's not to say that some don't benefit, but IMHO most of the benefits are illusory, while the damage from spam, viruses, phishing and on-line fraud, and countless other things is very real.
You, with your liberal anything-goes views, contribute zero value to the society by using the web. The GPP, with his desire to prevent certain detrimental activities, is contributing content that is presumably of value to some people even allowing for his wishes to control certain behaviour. Which of you do you think the law should support here?
Your summary is rather misleading. The court also knew that the plaintiff was well aware of those preventative mechanisms and opted not to use them. In fact, he deliberately set up robots.txt so that his content would be considered. The same might not be true at all for Ma and Pa AOL's family homepage.
The Implied License is a stake in the ground for "This is the Internet. The rules are different here." IMO, that's a good thing -- there are a bunch of things that just couldn't happen if you had to get explicit permission from every content owner.
I'm not sure that's a good thing at all. Firstly, I don't think the Internet per se should receive any special treatment in law. The activities it facilitates -- such as making and distributing digital copies of works very quickly and cheaply -- may have dramatic implications, but then any applications of the law should be based on those activities, not on one particular medium.
Secondly, there are also a bunch of things that will go wrong if content providers have to play ball with anyone and everyone who wants to run any service that uses their site's content in any way based on this implicit permission. Unless there are a very small number of universal and legally enforceable mechanisms (which META or robots.txt could become, but aren't at present in any jursidiction AFAIK) the implied licence is a very dangerous precedent.
One thing I've noticed about Google Cache is it still loads the original images from the original server, so the ads are still there for those people
This is one of the ethical concerns I have for the whole Google Cache system. If the original site relies on advertising revenue, then caching it without generating the equivalent behaviour for the ads will be inherently damaging. Google's cache still hits the original site for ads, which might avoid this problem as long as the original site is up, but negates the argument made in this case that they essentially provide a socially useful service with no downside by making the content available if the original site is down. There's a pretty big downside if 90% of a site's market visits all at once because of a Slashdotting, no-one sees the ads because they're all using Google Cache, and then they don't bother to reread the same page later on the original site (why would they?) and generate the ad revenue that the number of visits should have provided.
We currently rely heavily on advertising-based financial models to support the web. You're reading a site that is funded significantly by ads, remember? Moreover, we will probably continue to do so until an effective micro-payment strategy becomes widespread. Hence adopting the position that it's too bad for web sites if their advertising models don't hold up may not be the most sensible plan here. (I have similar moral reservations about using universal ad-blockers.)
If the kind of damage you're talking about were actually happening here, I'd agree with you, but note that the judgement relies on (among other things) Google not displaying ads with the cached page or otherwise profiting from it, the originals not generating any income for the copyright holder, and the fact that the plaintiff was well aware of the conventions that could be used to prevent his site being copied and in fact used robots.txt to request quite the opposite.
This is good news for the Wayback Machine at archive.org.
I'm not sure about that. Although the result of this case seems fair and clearly indicated on several counts, there's a lot that might not apply to archives more generally, so I'm not sure how much of a precedent has been set.
In particular, the case was brought by someone who practically admitted trying to set Google up: he knew about mechanisms like META tags and robots.txt, knew that Google was caching his site, made no attempt to stop them, and indeed actually set up robots.txt explicitly to allow bots to crawl his site. This supports Google's first two defences here, having an implied licence and estoppel.
The most interesting discussion, IMHO, is on the fair use defence. The court considered in a lot of detail whether the use made by Google qualifies as fair use. On the first criteria (how the material is being used), it was found significant that the material was being used for different purposes in the cache than on the original site: the latter was presumed artistic, while the former allowed access to the material when the original site was down, historical comparisons of the site content, highlighting of search terms that made a page relevant to the user's search, etc. Hence the court concludes as follows:
Because Google serves different and socially important purposes in offering access to copyrighted works through "Cached" links and does not merely supersede the objectives of the original creations, the Court concludes that Google's alleged copying and distribution of Field's Web pages containing copyrighted works was transformative.
The court also noted that Google made no attempt to profit from the display of the material, did not attach advertisements, made clear that the copy could be out of date, and linked clearly to the original source. (I wonder whether that non-profit, no-ads observation will come back to kick Google later...)
The other fair use discussion is less interesting, although the fact that the plaintiff had made his works available for free and not made any other attempt to profit from them was important, because this meant the market value of the original hadn't been damaged. One interesting tidbit is that apparently the SCOTUS has ruled that the fourth fair use factor (any damage to the market/value of the original work) can't be used to argue that the copyright holder could have licensed an otherwise fair use (such as the caching here) and thus the use can't be fair.
Some of the DMCA defence stuff could have quite significant implications. In particular, the fact that Google caches material only for a fairly short time (14-20 days is mentioned) is relevant, since a prior ruling about Usenet servers could be used.
In summary, Google would basically have won out on four different defences here, even without the fact that the original use might not qualify as direct copyright infringement (since the plaintiff went after the downloading done automatically in response to users; he didn't go after GoogleBot's initial copying process that caches the site on Google's system). It doesn't seem at all clear that a lot of the arguments would apply to other caching services, though: amongst other things, Google's cache in this case is temporary; known to the plaintiff, who had not tried to stop it and actually encouraged it; not for direct profit nor carrying any advertising; and clearly not damaging the market value of the original works.
Speaking of interesting (but possibly useless) mentions, did anyone else read SD3 and immediately find themselves associating Microsoft with a similarly-named fictional agency that has plans for world domination, a penchant for wiping out the competition, and lots of fun HR issues?:-)
You've got to admire the way he ducked the issue of DRM-as-in-media on a technicality, though.
It's become all too clear in recent weeks that DRM-as-in-media technology is, by its nature, integrated rather deeply into a system. It's also become clear that when such a deeply-integrated technology has bugs, they can become major security flaws.
As the original question suggested, I doubt any average user really wants DRM technology supported by Microsoft and on their home PC. So you have an issue with Media Player supporting DRM, and potentially denying the ability to play content you've legitimately purchased if things go wrong. You also have the need to avoid third party software compromising a system a la Sony/XCP. That means there are at least two valid, DRM-as-in-media security concerns, which are completely independent of anything to do with secure documents and MS RMS (my new favourite abbreviation:-)).
The way he sidelined possibly the most damaging question in the entire interview like that was rather clever, IMHO. Blatant, not fooling anyone, and ultimately bad PR since he failed to tackle something that's going to be an increasingly important issue early, but still clever...
You miss my point. Perhaps you would argue that the use in question falls within your restrictions; I wasn't sure. In any case, other uses clearly wouldn't. To give a topical example around here, the GPL would be dramatically less effective: anyone could rip the code and use it in their own non-commercial product, without distributing the source.
The point is that copyright infringement isn't just about whether the copier is profiting, it's also (and probably more importantly) about whether the copyright holder is losing some benefit as a result of someone else making the copy. If not making a profit implied fair use, then the first person buying any CD could put it on P2P, everyone in the world could legally copy it from that seed within minutes, and any profit potential for the copyright holder would be dramatically reduced. I'm sure some of our members would support that view, but I'm betting not many of them know much about economics, nor rely entirely solely on art they produce to pay the rent.
They want this ruling in their favor so that they can legally assume that any file remotely named similar to a song an artist they represent recorded is in fact a copy of that artist's song. They can then go after the person that made that file available with pretty much no evidence whatsoever. They don't want to have to actually download anything, they want to nail you for names - which is extremely prone to error, as the many cease-and-desist letters telling people they will be sued for distributing their own programs, etc show. (do a search here, there have been plenty of examples)
Leaving aside the fact that you're putting words in their mouths, surely a simple defence to the above would be that the file named "Latest hit by $ARTIST" was in fact just random bits, and not the latest hit by that artist at all. The onus must remain on the prosecution to prove that it really was the material claimed, presumably by making that download.
Still, if you're advertising a file on a file-sharing network as being a dubious copy of someone else's copyright material, you really can't be surprised if the law suspects you of illegal activity and further investigation is expected. If that further investigation proves that the material you're offering for download really will breach copyright, don't be surprised if the law finds against you. If you don't like it, don't put a huge neon sign over your PC saying "I'm breaking the law, please sue me!"
Of course we could change the nature of copyright, but that doesn't really matter to this discussion. Right now, the copyright holder does have the right in law to prohibit copying without permission, and thus there is a strong case for at least the minimum measures required to effectively protect that right. Whether that right should be as it is or not is a different question.
As an aside, I strongly disagree with your suggested alternative. The copyright bargain, leaving aside quibbles about who it's really benefitting in some industries today, doesn't say anything about money. It's about giving the artist enough control to consider it worth releasing their material in public. Of course commercial exploitation is one possibility, but to give another, I've published articles on the web before. I'm happy for others to benefit from that material for free, but I would object to other sites ripping it off and putting on their site without attribution and covered in ads from which they profit. Copyright law would give me the right to prevent that, and indeed IIRC a site that was ripping Usenet archives and then adding those irritating automatic ads in the body of someone else's post was successfully sued, on the basis that regardless of any debatable implicit permission to archive a Usenet post in general, there was no implicit permission given to copy and modify a Usenet post.
One of the main problems with the RIAA and their tactics so far, is that they're suing people who had files "available".
Whatever anyone here may think of them, the RIAA do have a legal right to protect their copyright. So, in our perfectly rational legal world, how should they go about this?
The last Slashdot discussion I saw on this subject was full of people ranting about how unfair it was for the RIAA to seek the identity of someone, in court, when that person's system was known to be actively advertising that it was sharing copyright material that would be illegal to download.
Moreover, even if RIAA staff download such a file themselves, many here will pop up and tell us that since they own the copyright, that's not illegal and doesn't prove anything.
However, we all know (and let's face it, I'm not just saying that and we really do all know) that copyright infringement via P2P is widespread. If the offer to download, including an advertisement that the material really is the copyright material that can't legally be downloaded, deliberately being made available on a file-sharing system, and demonstrated by the RIAA to be downloadable because they made a copy, isn't sufficient to bring a case before a judge and expect some legal recourse, then what is?
Congratulations: you just made a pretty solid case that in order to preserve the clear legal rights of the RIAA, it's necessary for law enforcement agencies to monitor and log all Internet traffic routinely, for governments to ban any anonymous access to the Internet and require ISPs to make a serious effort to confirm the identity of anyone they allow to use their systems, and for draconian penalties to be available when someone is successfully prosecuted for making an illegal copy via the Internet.
Personally, I'd rather the RIAA could sue the pants of someone who is blatantly breaking the law, and that person couldn't weasel their way out of their deserved punishment using legal chicanery, and the rest of us didn't have to put up with the sort of crap I mentioned above.
I can't quite agree with that. Like frames and Flash, image maps have their place, and can be a useful tool in the right circumstances. It's just that those circumstances happen rather more rarely than image maps are used in practice, which gets them a rather unfair bad reputation. I've seen a couple of nicely presented graphical site maps that were much easier to understand than a big nested list, and relied on image maps to link through to the content pages, for example.
It's a wonder the record labels aren't all suing each other constantly for infringement. And yet, they're not. That can only be explained by the presence of commercial dealings clearly allowing the protection of an effective monopoly and preventing other parties from entering the competitive market. I'm pretty sure there are laws against that kind of thing.
In Britain the cops have much more extensive powers than they do here. They can stop and search anyone on suspicion that they may be carrying something harmful. They don't need a good reason.
I call bullshit. Cite the relevant law please. Stopping and searching without any reason at all is a recipe for a losing encounter with the PCA, and that sort of thing can break careers if it gets bad enough.
The result is that lots of people get searched for walking while black.
And some senior police figures are very concerned by that, particularly since the Met was publicly denounced as institutionally racist.
There is a problem, but it's rather unfair to pretend that everyone is ignoring it and no-one is trying to fix it.
Slashdot Mirror
Tell that to Larry Wall. :-)
IIRC, the human body basically schedules its sleep requirements according to two basic schedules, one related to daylight and one related to how long you've been awake and how active you've been. For most people, that combination puts the most effective melatonin processing in the early hours of the morning.
And yes, suddenly changing across several time zones does mess it up. Jet lag is basically the resulting shock to the system while the two stimuli seem to be contradictory.
I believe you spectacularly failed to get the point of my post, Mr AC. But thanks for the tip. :-)
Well, fair's fair. If the DoJ thinks it's part of the legislative branch, why can't judges appoint themselves part of the executive? ;-)
Fair enough, you're perfectly entitled to your own opinion. However, what you wrote above is only a personal preference. It's not necessarily in the best interests of society as a whole (or even yours, but we can never know that for sure without knowing what potential content you're turning down and how much value you might have put on it if you'd known about it).
My personal view is that older content that is really valuable is unlikely to disappear anyway, and that which does probably does so through "natural selection". I don't want the Internet to become so full of outdated, obsolete, irrelevant information that it becomes impossible to find the good stuff, and compared to even five years ago it's already heading that way fast.
If something has disappeared, IME there's often a good reason for it: usually it's either no longer relevant or replaced by something better. Occasionally it's not something that should ever have been out there in the first place, and I don't accept the black-and-white view that once some information is out there, it's always in society's interests to keep it so and make it widely available.
I tend to agree with you, but note that the court here was clear that the plaintiff was aware of the conventions around META, robots.txt, etc., knew that Google would check for them, and deliberately chose to set up a robots.txt file that invited robots to scan the site anyway. There's no issue here about whether these techniques are standard practice.
I'm not sure it would always be sufficient just to argue that robots.txt and the like are accepted standards these days, simply on the basis that if you took a random sample of people with web sites, I imagine the majority would never have heard of them. It's a bit like not top-posting: those who have been around a while often don't like it and even regard it as rude, but the Outlook generation couldn't care less.
Sure. But how much of it is good content, the kind that a skilled artist has worked hard on and it shows, and how much of it is the WWW equivalent of the latest teenie lip-synch group? Anyone can write a blog. Writing a blog worth reading is a whole different game.
[I'll mostly gloss over the anonymity thing. There are examples, though admittedly less serious than what I mentioned before when I was commenting on Internet anonymity in general, where even anonymising the browsing of a site can damage the site's providers. Think of people who use their site logs to help improve the UI, based on how many of their visitors are returning, or identifying that a lot of visitors from a particular country are coming and it would be worth investing in a local mirror. However, I'm not sure any of that is particularly relevant to this discussion.]
The things we're talking about are hardly heavily restricted. More to the point, the alternative isn't necessarily an unrestricted site; it could well be no site at all. This is the point a lot of people forget in their haste to tell us how information wants to be free, you can't stop distribution, etc: by default, only the author of the work has it. If society wants the author to share, it has to make it worth his while, or he'll simply keep it to himself and no-one will benefit under any circumstances.
On the other hand, consider an author who's willing to put up a draft of their book on a site, offering that version of the content to the public for a limited time in exchange for hopefully receiving constructive feedback before publishing. This benefits both parties. It probably also benefits both parties to withdraw that content when the final version is published: the author wants to make his return on investment, and the content in the final version will probably be better than in the draft so you don't want out-of-date information taking priority.
However, archives can screw this up: anyone who wants to fleece the author can (potentially to their own disadvantage as well) look up the draft and use that instead of paying the asking price for the final version, and anyone searching for the work might not even be aware that the final version exists, because they see an archived version of the draft page, not the announcement page that replaced it. And of course, many authors will no longer publish anything from any potentially publishable book, even a draft or a sample chapter, for fear of publishers turning them down (as many now routinely do). None of this helps anyone, and archives have to take some responsibility for the damage. (This isn't to say that they can't be useful for other purposes, of course, just that it's not an entirely one-sided argument and keeping old material on-line against the author's wishes can be damaging.)
That's a discussion for another time, perhaps, but just consider how many crimes, from the somewhat irritating to the seriously damaging, are possible only because of the effective anonymity the Internet provides. Again, that's not to say that some don't benefit, but IMHO most of the benefits are illusory, while the damage from spam, viruses, phishing and on-line fraud, and countless other things is very real.
You, with your liberal anything-goes views, contribute zero value to the society by using the web. The GPP, with his desire to prevent certain detrimental activities, is contributing content that is presumably of value to some people even allowing for his wishes to control certain behaviour. Which of you do you think the law should support here?
Your summary is rather misleading. The court also knew that the plaintiff was well aware of those preventative mechanisms and opted not to use them. In fact, he deliberately set up robots.txt so that his content would be considered. The same might not be true at all for Ma and Pa AOL's family homepage.
I'm not sure that's a good thing at all. Firstly, I don't think the Internet per se should receive any special treatment in law. The activities it facilitates -- such as making and distributing digital copies of works very quickly and cheaply -- may have dramatic implications, but then any applications of the law should be based on those activities, not on one particular medium.
Secondly, there are also a bunch of things that will go wrong if content providers have to play ball with anyone and everyone who wants to run any service that uses their site's content in any way based on this implicit permission. Unless there are a very small number of universal and legally enforceable mechanisms (which META or robots.txt could become, but aren't at present in any jursidiction AFAIK) the implied licence is a very dangerous precedent.
This is one of the ethical concerns I have for the whole Google Cache system. If the original site relies on advertising revenue, then caching it without generating the equivalent behaviour for the ads will be inherently damaging. Google's cache still hits the original site for ads, which might avoid this problem as long as the original site is up, but negates the argument made in this case that they essentially provide a socially useful service with no downside by making the content available if the original site is down. There's a pretty big downside if 90% of a site's market visits all at once because of a Slashdotting, no-one sees the ads because they're all using Google Cache, and then they don't bother to reread the same page later on the original site (why would they?) and generate the ad revenue that the number of visits should have provided.
We currently rely heavily on advertising-based financial models to support the web. You're reading a site that is funded significantly by ads, remember? Moreover, we will probably continue to do so until an effective micro-payment strategy becomes widespread. Hence adopting the position that it's too bad for web sites if their advertising models don't hold up may not be the most sensible plan here. (I have similar moral reservations about using universal ad-blockers.)
If the kind of damage you're talking about were actually happening here, I'd agree with you, but note that the judgement relies on (among other things) Google not displaying ads with the cached page or otherwise profiting from it, the originals not generating any income for the copyright holder, and the fact that the plaintiff was well aware of the conventions that could be used to prevent his site being copied and in fact used robots.txt to request quite the opposite.
I'm not sure about that. Although the result of this case seems fair and clearly indicated on several counts, there's a lot that might not apply to archives more generally, so I'm not sure how much of a precedent has been set.
In particular, the case was brought by someone who practically admitted trying to set Google up: he knew about mechanisms like META tags and robots.txt, knew that Google was caching his site, made no attempt to stop them, and indeed actually set up robots.txt explicitly to allow bots to crawl his site. This supports Google's first two defences here, having an implied licence and estoppel.
The most interesting discussion, IMHO, is on the fair use defence. The court considered in a lot of detail whether the use made by Google qualifies as fair use. On the first criteria (how the material is being used), it was found significant that the material was being used for different purposes in the cache than on the original site: the latter was presumed artistic, while the former allowed access to the material when the original site was down, historical comparisons of the site content, highlighting of search terms that made a page relevant to the user's search, etc. Hence the court concludes as follows:
The court also noted that Google made no attempt to profit from the display of the material, did not attach advertisements, made clear that the copy could be out of date, and linked clearly to the original source. (I wonder whether that non-profit, no-ads observation will come back to kick Google later...)
The other fair use discussion is less interesting, although the fact that the plaintiff had made his works available for free and not made any other attempt to profit from them was important, because this meant the market value of the original hadn't been damaged. One interesting tidbit is that apparently the SCOTUS has ruled that the fourth fair use factor (any damage to the market/value of the original work) can't be used to argue that the copyright holder could have licensed an otherwise fair use (such as the caching here) and thus the use can't be fair.
Some of the DMCA defence stuff could have quite significant implications. In particular, the fact that Google caches material only for a fairly short time (14-20 days is mentioned) is relevant, since a prior ruling about Usenet servers could be used.
In summary, Google would basically have won out on four different defences here, even without the fact that the original use might not qualify as direct copyright infringement (since the plaintiff went after the downloading done automatically in response to users; he didn't go after GoogleBot's initial copying process that caches the site on Google's system). It doesn't seem at all clear that a lot of the arguments would apply to other caching services, though: amongst other things, Google's cache in this case is temporary; known to the plaintiff, who had not tried to stop it and actually encouraged it; not for direct profit nor carrying any advertising; and clearly not damaging the market value of the original works.
Speaking of interesting (but possibly useless) mentions, did anyone else read SD3 and immediately find themselves associating Microsoft with a similarly-named fictional agency that has plans for world domination, a penchant for wiping out the competition, and lots of fun HR issues? :-)
You've got to admire the way he ducked the issue of DRM-as-in-media on a technicality, though.
It's become all too clear in recent weeks that DRM-as-in-media technology is, by its nature, integrated rather deeply into a system. It's also become clear that when such a deeply-integrated technology has bugs, they can become major security flaws.
As the original question suggested, I doubt any average user really wants DRM technology supported by Microsoft and on their home PC. So you have an issue with Media Player supporting DRM, and potentially denying the ability to play content you've legitimately purchased if things go wrong. You also have the need to avoid third party software compromising a system a la Sony/XCP. That means there are at least two valid, DRM-as-in-media security concerns, which are completely independent of anything to do with secure documents and MS RMS (my new favourite abbreviation :-)).
The way he sidelined possibly the most damaging question in the entire interview like that was rather clever, IMHO. Blatant, not fooling anyone, and ultimately bad PR since he failed to tackle something that's going to be an increasingly important issue early, but still clever...
You miss my point. Perhaps you would argue that the use in question falls within your restrictions; I wasn't sure. In any case, other uses clearly wouldn't. To give a topical example around here, the GPL would be dramatically less effective: anyone could rip the code and use it in their own non-commercial product, without distributing the source.
The point is that copyright infringement isn't just about whether the copier is profiting, it's also (and probably more importantly) about whether the copyright holder is losing some benefit as a result of someone else making the copy. If not making a profit implied fair use, then the first person buying any CD could put it on P2P, everyone in the world could legally copy it from that seed within minutes, and any profit potential for the copyright holder would be dramatically reduced. I'm sure some of our members would support that view, but I'm betting not many of them know much about economics, nor rely entirely solely on art they produce to pay the rent.
Blockquoth the AC:
Leaving aside the fact that you're putting words in their mouths, surely a simple defence to the above would be that the file named "Latest hit by $ARTIST" was in fact just random bits, and not the latest hit by that artist at all. The onus must remain on the prosecution to prove that it really was the material claimed, presumably by making that download.
Still, if you're advertising a file on a file-sharing network as being a dubious copy of someone else's copyright material, you really can't be surprised if the law suspects you of illegal activity and further investigation is expected. If that further investigation proves that the material you're offering for download really will breach copyright, don't be surprised if the law finds against you. If you don't like it, don't put a huge neon sign over your PC saying "I'm breaking the law, please sue me!"
Of course we could change the nature of copyright, but that doesn't really matter to this discussion. Right now, the copyright holder does have the right in law to prohibit copying without permission, and thus there is a strong case for at least the minimum measures required to effectively protect that right. Whether that right should be as it is or not is a different question.
As an aside, I strongly disagree with your suggested alternative. The copyright bargain, leaving aside quibbles about who it's really benefitting in some industries today, doesn't say anything about money. It's about giving the artist enough control to consider it worth releasing their material in public. Of course commercial exploitation is one possibility, but to give another, I've published articles on the web before. I'm happy for others to benefit from that material for free, but I would object to other sites ripping it off and putting on their site without attribution and covered in ads from which they profit. Copyright law would give me the right to prevent that, and indeed IIRC a site that was ripping Usenet archives and then adding those irritating automatic ads in the body of someone else's post was successfully sued, on the basis that regardless of any debatable implicit permission to archive a Usenet post in general, there was no implicit permission given to copy and modify a Usenet post.
Whatever anyone here may think of them, the RIAA do have a legal right to protect their copyright. So, in our perfectly rational legal world, how should they go about this?
The last Slashdot discussion I saw on this subject was full of people ranting about how unfair it was for the RIAA to seek the identity of someone, in court, when that person's system was known to be actively advertising that it was sharing copyright material that would be illegal to download.
Moreover, even if RIAA staff download such a file themselves, many here will pop up and tell us that since they own the copyright, that's not illegal and doesn't prove anything.
However, we all know (and let's face it, I'm not just saying that and we really do all know) that copyright infringement via P2P is widespread. If the offer to download, including an advertisement that the material really is the copyright material that can't legally be downloaded, deliberately being made available on a file-sharing system, and demonstrated by the RIAA to be downloadable because they made a copy, isn't sufficient to bring a case before a judge and expect some legal recourse, then what is?
Congratulations: you just made a pretty solid case that in order to preserve the clear legal rights of the RIAA, it's necessary for law enforcement agencies to monitor and log all Internet traffic routinely, for governments to ban any anonymous access to the Internet and require ISPs to make a serious effort to confirm the identity of anyone they allow to use their systems, and for draconian penalties to be available when someone is successfully prosecuted for making an illegal copy via the Internet.
Personally, I'd rather the RIAA could sue the pants of someone who is blatantly breaking the law, and that person couldn't weasel their way out of their deserved punishment using legal chicanery, and the rest of us didn't have to put up with the sort of crap I mentioned above.
I can't quite agree with that. Like frames and Flash, image maps have their place, and can be a useful tool in the right circumstances. It's just that those circumstances happen rather more rarely than image maps are used in practice, which gets them a rather unfair bad reputation. I've seen a couple of nicely presented graphical site maps that were much easier to understand than a big nested list, and relied on image maps to link through to the content pages, for example.
At last, someone buying Windows gets what they paid for... :o)
I think your explanation might be a bit complex...
Hey! Some of us are C++ programmers, you insensitive clod! :o)
It's a wonder the record labels aren't all suing each other constantly for infringement. And yet, they're not. That can only be explained by the presence of commercial dealings clearly allowing the protection of an effective monopoly and preventing other parties from entering the competitive market. I'm pretty sure there are laws against that kind of thing.
Oh, OK. I see your point. :-)
I call bullshit. Cite the relevant law please. Stopping and searching without any reason at all is a recipe for a losing encounter with the PCA, and that sort of thing can break careers if it gets bad enough.
And some senior police figures are very concerned by that, particularly since the Met was publicly denounced as institutionally racist.
There is a problem, but it's rather unfair to pretend that everyone is ignoring it and no-one is trying to fix it.