I have a number of friends who are working on high-quality audio and video apps. One of their ongoing problems is that, when installed on Windows, they tend to break.
Yeah, that can happen if you don't know how to program for Windows. Funnily enough, it doesn't much seem to happen to people who do, though. Which apps were these, again?
Personally, I've tried several of the usual suspects, including several versions of the dreaded WMP and RealPlayer. The closest they've got to fighting is associating file extensions with themselves rather than another app when they're installed and/or run. They're all pretty well-behaved in this regard now, and AFAIK the current versions of all the major packages at least prompt the user before changing these.
What specific problems did your friends' applications encounter?
The Moz/FF devs' stubborn insistence on absolute compliance with standards is a double-edged sword. IE wasn't perfect, but the Moz/FF approach means they won't display a lot of XML at all (due to servers not providing it with correct MIME types). Moreover, there were serious errors in Moz/FF's basic XSLT handling (count, anyone?) years after MS supported the equivalent behaviours in IE.
IOWs, while Moz/FF may stand up and say, hand on heart, that they're trying to implement open standards perfectly, IE is still more useful for a lot of people. Until someone breaks it, which just reflects badly on both parties.
If security is important to you, this demonstration should show that browsers that are redistributions of the official Mozilla releases are never going to give you security updates as quickly as Mozilla will itself for its supported products.
Unless, of course, the team developing the derivative find the security flaw (or get the notification from someone who did) first, and can fix it locally faster than the patching process can get it into a new official Moz/FF release.
This could cut both ways, and in any case coming across as arrogant and/or egotistical isn't exactly a good way to promote co-operation between sides that should be able to provide mutual benefits.
Google isn't some magic fairy company that is above copyright law
Indeed. And that, as I've pointed out here before amid cries of trolling, does make legal justification for other Google features -- Google Cache in particular, but also Google Groups and potentially things like Google Image Search -- uncertain at best.
If anything, it sounds like this project would be on much safer legal ground, as long as (a) they really are only reproducing content that's no longer covered by copyright, and (b) they pay suitable licensing fees for all the material they transfer to their database that's still covered by copyright.
Of course it worked. Sith is breaking box office records.
As have many movies before it, including those that never got distributed in advance via P2P.
It's widely regarded as a pretty good movie that followed two pretty bad movies by the same director.
In as much as "widely" applies there, I'd argue that generally positive reviews in mainstream channels and decent feedback from those who went to see it in the first couple of days did a lot more for this than any leaks over P2P.
You don't think there are people out there who were going to skip it in the theater but changed their minds because the infringing copy made it look better than expected?
No, I don't, at least not more than a handful of them.
I don't disagree (and never have) with the fact that the **AA are behaving unethically. I'm not convinced that what you say about their countermeasures being inevitable really follows, though. They've certainly been a lot more aggressive in the past few years, particularly following legal rather than technological avenues, since illegal uses of P2P became widespread. What we need is a change of legal framework to something where basic rights -- for example, the right to back-up your data or move it to different media formats for your own use after legitimately paying for it -- are paramount, but thereafter there are reasonable penalties for those who abuse the system -- for example, copying and then giving the copy away to others.
The sort of designed-in failures you talk about later on are already covered by laws in most places: you aren't allowed to knowingly misrepresent your product in advertising. The whole "consumer goods with built-in failure dates" scam is just a huge lawsuit waiting to happen. I expect one or another of the big consumer groups to bring it sooner rather than later, and I expect the big producers to learn an expensive lesson. The problem with this isn't so much the practice of making limited-lifespan goods: if someone's prepared to pay for such a thing at the asking price, that's fine, and indeed we've been doing it for years but calling it "rental". The problem is that the existing advertising standards laws aren't being enforced when they should be, which means consumers aren't able to make an informed choice and there isn't fair competition in the marketplace. That isn't in the interests of society as a whole, and thus those organisations doing it should be slapped down by the legal authorities.
I must state that [changing bad laws] becomes harder to do, if in fact the laws are "bought" then that means the corporations have tighter control over laws than we think, and civil disobedience is one way to change it when times are very dire.
There is no such thing in a democracy as a bought law. Money doesn't vote, voters do. If your population is collectively stupid enough to believe that it can only vote for one of two people, both of whom will do much the same thing that isn't in the interests of the people electing them, and to vote for them anyway, then that's the bigger problem I'm talking about, right there. If the American people don't want the unethical pro-big-business laws, well, they had an election a few months ago. Anyone who voted for the two big name parties other than for strong tactical reasons doesn't have any right to complain.
(The situation in the UK is somewhat different, since the vast majority of people didn't vote for the guy who "won" and more of us did vote for someone else; this is just one demonstration of why our electoral system itself is corrupt, which is a greater problem still.)
SURELY they are greedy for wanting to get something faster, possibly cheaper, but still legally?
No, they are greedy for taking something faster, cheaper and illegally.
I'd love to have my own house and watch the latest movie on a private world-class home cinema system in my front room the day it comes out. Unfortunately, the world does not revolve around me, so I have to play by the same rules as everyone else.
In my case, I chose to spend my hard-earned money on a nice car that I enjoy driving instead. In return I accept that if I want to see the latest film, I have to go buy a cinema ticket. If the movies had been more important to me, I'd have bought a great home cinema system and taken the bus.
My personal experience is that the overwhelming majority of software developers write software for private companies for internal use. The software is never released to the public.
OK, I don't have any good information either way, so let's accept that premise for now.
Copyright has absolutely zero effect on whether or not most companies write new software.
I'm afraid that doesn't follow at all. Copyright (or some contractual terms, NDAs, or other restrictions with similar intent) is precisely what stops someone who writes software for one company getting away with selling it to their rivals afterwards. I know; I've seen a court case where precisely this happened.
My personal experience is also that there are far more open source developers than there are developers working for companies that sell software.
Sorry, but you're going to need very solid statistics to convince me that that's even close to true. I suspect there are several orders of magnitude more people working for companies selling software than there are writing open source, even if you count all the guys who once contributed a five-line patch to a tool they happened to find and nothing else.
Moreover, what really counts here is how much useful software is actually produced, not how many people are working on it. A quick visit to SourceForge shows pretty clearly that the vast majority of downloads are for a relatively small number of apps (many of them geek tools like the P2P stuff we're discussing in this article), and that the vast majority of version numbers in the "Latest News" column start with "0.".
I do realise that most software projects "fail" in some sense of the word, but at least IME the vast majority of commercial projects ultimately produce something that's significantly useful to someone, even if it's late/over-budget/whatever. I'm no sure the OSS world can justifiably make the same claim.
In other words, if you want to argue that copyright does not incentivise the availability of useful software, you probably need a lot more freely available software than just OSS to make your case.
The US Supreme Court sort of likes the term copyright infringement too. What with it being the correct term and everything.
And what supreme arrogance leads you to think that anyone outside the US cares in the slightest what term the US Supreme Court uses, given that we've got our own laws predating your country's very existence? It's not like either side of the copyright debate in the US has exactly acquitted themselves well in recent years. Get over yourself already.
For one, copyright is a contract between the government and authors on their people's behalf. Since it's made without the individual's say-so, he might not consider himself bound by it.
I never agreed not to carry a firearm and shoot anyone who dislikes copyright. Can I go around and kill everyone in this thread who thinks ripping someone else's IP is OK? Of course not.
For another, copyright has only existed for a few centuries. The great ethical minds of the past never had a problem with appropriating the intellectual property of others.
The "great ethical minds of the past" operated in a completely different economic climate. The comparison is apples-to-oranges at best.
Another argument that could be used is that modern copyright terms have been manipulated by big business into lengths of time that violate their intended purpose. Therefore the law is unjust and should be disobeyed.
The manipulation is clear, and despite my pro-copyright-principle stance I don't like abuse of copyright any more than the next guy. However, the answer to bad laws is to get them changed. If a population in a country that claims to be democratic can't even work out how to do that, then it has far greater problems than abuse of the law to extend copyright. (This is, arguably, true of both the US and the UK in light of the recent actions of their governments and the recent election results. Of such things changes come, sooner or later.)
Another argument could be that copyright itself is a bad idea that stifles creation. In music, for example, the case could be made the copyright has killed live performance. Therefore the law is wrong and just be disobeyed.
I'm not sure you could make that case in any meaningful way, actually. I know more people who perform small live gigs now than I ever have, and at the same time the big name artists are busily playing gigs in ever larger venues to ever larger crowds. Live music is very much... alive.
As for stifling creation, well, we don't have a control group so we'll just have to trust to personal experience. My personal experience is that a hell of a lot more people write books, perform music, program software and make movies professionally and release those works under copyright than produce the same sorts of work for free and give them away.
I can imagine arguments in the other direction as well. But the point is that there is no universal morality on the subject.
There is no universal morality on any subject, almost by definition. Everyone has their own ethics: some things are worth breaking the rules of society over and risking the consequences if you wind up on the losing side, and other things aren't. In my world, copyright infringement isn't even close.
The MPAA is in no position to give me, or anyone else, ethics lessons.
At the risk of sounding like the schoolyard bully pleading with the teacher... who started it?
For years, we had an economy that was quite happy supporting both purchase and rental of videos. They didn't come with huge amounts of crap you couldn't skip at the start, they weren't copy protected, and no-one complained if you taped a programme off TV and kept it in your collection for another day.
Along comes Generation I-Want-It-So-I'll-Take-It, blatantly and offensively flouting the law and ripping people off, and now those of us who cough up the going rate when we want to buy something have to put up with all of the above rubbish, as the media industries defend their business the only way they know how.
People like you don't like DRM, or region-locked DVDs, and all that crap.
And if it weren't for people like you being so blatantly selfish, the rest of us wouldn't now have to put up with it.
an industry whose purpose is the distribution of media recordings has been obsolete since the late 1990's.
Is that why Silver Screen just opened up a new branch in my home town, and why I've filled two whole shelving units with DVDs of my favourite films and series in the 18 months or so since I bought a DVD player?
But what about "rape" and "murder"? When you copy a movie, you are metaphorically raping the director by taking something he considers precious, without consent, for your own pleasure. And you are metaphorically murdering his chance of making a profit out of you.
You forgot to mention terrorism. After all, accusing anyone whose actions you dislike of being a terrorist, regardless of whether they are in fact instilling fear into anyone, is the best way to prove that you're right and the other guy is wrong.
Or maybe we could, you know, use words which are actually descriptive of the real crimes being committed?
He used "theft" and "piracy", both words that are widely recognised in this context, albeit rather inflammatory in some quarters. You used "rape" and "murder". I think you're kinda losing the moral high ground here.
It's more than splitting hairs. Piracy is not a synonym for copyright infringement.
Actually, it is. It is listed as such in every dictionary in my home; I just checked. Most of those dictionaries predate the sort of P2P net we see today by several years, BTW, and at least one predates widespread use of the Internet at all.
On a related note, ISTR someone here on Slashdot citing a use of the word "theft" in this context dating back over 150 years in a previous discussion, and another noting that at least one US court has used the word in a formal ruling on copyright infringement. So "intellectual property theft" is a well-established and correct term as well.
There is indeed a lot of using words to generate emotional response by both sides here, but let's not kid ourselves: the guys who rip stuff illegally like to call it "copyright infringement" because that sounds something that fluffy bunnies might do that couldn't possibly hurt anyone. It's just as emotionally charged as the terms so beloved of the **AA and their ilk, just in the other direction.
Of course there will be OSS developers that get tired of donating huge chunks of their lives, but there will always be others who will step up and take their places.
Everyone is replacable (yeah, know, it sounds sad), but it's true (at least when it comes to OSS development).
I'm afraid that, one day, you'll eat those words.
I've been in a similar position to this guy, volunteering lots of my spare time to help a community I cared about but ultimately finding it too much. The one time I did say I'd like to stand down and pass the job on, no-one stepped up to take over, even among a group of very dedicated volunteers who each gave up a lot of their own time to help already. It was just too much at that time for anyone else to accept. It took a few more weeks of very hard work to clear up some of the bigger things and reduce the workload before I could find someone who was willing (though hardly enthusiastic) to take over, and I could hand the job on without feeling like I was dropping my friends and those I was supporting in the brown stuff.
"Everyone can be replaced" is a great sound-bite, until you're the one trying to find the replacement. Then it's simply wrong.
If the code is out there, free, someone else can pick it up and continue where the last person left off.
Sorry, but it really doesn't work that way. If the codebase is at all complicated, then even if it's pretty well-written and well-documented, you inevitably lose a lot if you bring in a new developer and don't have the old guy around to train him up. This is true whether your code is open source, closed source, shared source or tomato sauce. All you can do is hope that your code is well enough written and documented that the new guy can get the job done.
Slashdot Mirror
Yeah, that can happen if you don't know how to program for Windows. Funnily enough, it doesn't much seem to happen to people who do, though. Which apps were these, again?
Personally, I've tried several of the usual suspects, including several versions of the dreaded WMP and RealPlayer. The closest they've got to fighting is associating file extensions with themselves rather than another app when they're installed and/or run. They're all pretty well-behaved in this regard now, and AFAIK the current versions of all the major packages at least prompt the user before changing these.
What specific problems did your friends' applications encounter?
Shocking. The F/OSS community would never engage in such barbaric activity, I tell you!
I'm sure you'd say the same if installing Visual Studio rendered an old version of GCC unusable.
The Moz/FF devs' stubborn insistence on absolute compliance with standards is a double-edged sword. IE wasn't perfect, but the Moz/FF approach means they won't display a lot of XML at all (due to servers not providing it with correct MIME types). Moreover, there were serious errors in Moz/FF's basic XSLT handling (count, anyone?) years after MS supported the equivalent behaviours in IE.
IOWs, while Moz/FF may stand up and say, hand on heart, that they're trying to implement open standards perfectly, IE is still more useful for a lot of people. Until someone breaks it, which just reflects badly on both parties.
Unless, of course, the team developing the derivative find the security flaw (or get the notification from someone who did) first, and can fix it locally faster than the patching process can get it into a new official Moz/FF release.
This could cut both ways, and in any case coming across as arrogant and/or egotistical isn't exactly a good way to promote co-operation between sides that should be able to provide mutual benefits.
And probably still in beta in 18 years...
Indeed. And that, as I've pointed out here before amid cries of trolling, does make legal justification for other Google features -- Google Cache in particular, but also Google Groups and potentially things like Google Image Search -- uncertain at best.
If anything, it sounds like this project would be on much safer legal ground, as long as (a) they really are only reproducing content that's no longer covered by copyright, and (b) they pay suitable licensing fees for all the material they transfer to their database that's still covered by copyright.
My friends were out watching ROTS. I would have been there too, but oh no, I had to be at home watching Eurovision, didn't I?
Y'know, sometimes having a girlfriend isn't all it's cracked up to be. :o)
For a start, in both the US and the UK there is an explicit exemption when citing for criticism.
Moreover, there is an implied permission because the work is posted publicly on this board and quoting is common practice here.
How? There is an exemption that clearly covers this use in every jurisdiction I know about.
Sorry if this is a really daft question, but isn't that a pretty clear breach of the GPL?
If the official Mozilla releases don't follow the rules, it doesn't say much for the rules. :-(
As have many movies before it, including those that never got distributed in advance via P2P.
In as much as "widely" applies there, I'd argue that generally positive reviews in mainstream channels and decent feedback from those who went to see it in the first couple of days did a lot more for this than any leaks over P2P.
No, I don't, at least not more than a handful of them.
Thanks for an interesting reply.
I don't disagree (and never have) with the fact that the **AA are behaving unethically. I'm not convinced that what you say about their countermeasures being inevitable really follows, though. They've certainly been a lot more aggressive in the past few years, particularly following legal rather than technological avenues, since illegal uses of P2P became widespread. What we need is a change of legal framework to something where basic rights -- for example, the right to back-up your data or move it to different media formats for your own use after legitimately paying for it -- are paramount, but thereafter there are reasonable penalties for those who abuse the system -- for example, copying and then giving the copy away to others.
The sort of designed-in failures you talk about later on are already covered by laws in most places: you aren't allowed to knowingly misrepresent your product in advertising. The whole "consumer goods with built-in failure dates" scam is just a huge lawsuit waiting to happen. I expect one or another of the big consumer groups to bring it sooner rather than later, and I expect the big producers to learn an expensive lesson. The problem with this isn't so much the practice of making limited-lifespan goods: if someone's prepared to pay for such a thing at the asking price, that's fine, and indeed we've been doing it for years but calling it "rental". The problem is that the existing advertising standards laws aren't being enforced when they should be, which means consumers aren't able to make an informed choice and there isn't fair competition in the marketplace. That isn't in the interests of society as a whole, and thus those organisations doing it should be slapped down by the legal authorities.
There is no such thing in a democracy as a bought law. Money doesn't vote, voters do. If your population is collectively stupid enough to believe that it can only vote for one of two people, both of whom will do much the same thing that isn't in the interests of the people electing them, and to vote for them anyway, then that's the bigger problem I'm talking about, right there. If the American people don't want the unethical pro-big-business laws, well, they had an election a few months ago. Anyone who voted for the two big name parties other than for strong tactical reasons doesn't have any right to complain.
(The situation in the UK is somewhat different, since the vast majority of people didn't vote for the guy who "won" and more of us did vote for someone else; this is just one demonstration of why our electoral system itself is corrupt, which is a greater problem still.)
No, they are greedy for taking something faster, cheaper and illegally.
I'd love to have my own house and watch the latest movie on a private world-class home cinema system in my front room the day it comes out. Unfortunately, the world does not revolve around me, so I have to play by the same rules as everyone else.
In my case, I chose to spend my hard-earned money on a nice car that I enjoy driving instead. In return I accept that if I want to see the latest film, I have to go buy a cinema ticket. If the movies had been more important to me, I'd have bought a great home cinema system and taken the bus.
You can't always have what you want. That's life.
Blockquoth the AC:
OK, I don't have any good information either way, so let's accept that premise for now.
I'm afraid that doesn't follow at all. Copyright (or some contractual terms, NDAs, or other restrictions with similar intent) is precisely what stops someone who writes software for one company getting away with selling it to their rivals afterwards. I know; I've seen a court case where precisely this happened.
Sorry, but you're going to need very solid statistics to convince me that that's even close to true. I suspect there are several orders of magnitude more people working for companies selling software than there are writing open source, even if you count all the guys who once contributed a five-line patch to a tool they happened to find and nothing else.
Moreover, what really counts here is how much useful software is actually produced, not how many people are working on it. A quick visit to SourceForge shows pretty clearly that the vast majority of downloads are for a relatively small number of apps (many of them geek tools like the P2P stuff we're discussing in this article), and that the vast majority of version numbers in the "Latest News" column start with "0.".
I do realise that most software projects "fail" in some sense of the word, but at least IME the vast majority of commercial projects ultimately produce something that's significantly useful to someone, even if it's late/over-budget/whatever. I'm no sure the OSS world can justifiably make the same claim.
In other words, if you want to argue that copyright does not incentivise the availability of useful software, you probably need a lot more freely available software than just OSS to make your case.
Blockquoth the AC:
And what supreme arrogance leads you to think that anyone outside the US cares in the slightest what term the US Supreme Court uses, given that we've got our own laws predating your country's very existence? It's not like either side of the copyright debate in the US has exactly acquitted themselves well in recent years. Get over yourself already.
I never agreed not to carry a firearm and shoot anyone who dislikes copyright. Can I go around and kill everyone in this thread who thinks ripping someone else's IP is OK? Of course not.
The "great ethical minds of the past" operated in a completely different economic climate. The comparison is apples-to-oranges at best.
The manipulation is clear, and despite my pro-copyright-principle stance I don't like abuse of copyright any more than the next guy. However, the answer to bad laws is to get them changed. If a population in a country that claims to be democratic can't even work out how to do that, then it has far greater problems than abuse of the law to extend copyright. (This is, arguably, true of both the US and the UK in light of the recent actions of their governments and the recent election results. Of such things changes come, sooner or later.)
I'm not sure you could make that case in any meaningful way, actually. I know more people who perform small live gigs now than I ever have, and at the same time the big name artists are busily playing gigs in ever larger venues to ever larger crowds. Live music is very much... alive.
As for stifling creation, well, we don't have a control group so we'll just have to trust to personal experience. My personal experience is that a hell of a lot more people write books, perform music, program software and make movies professionally and release those works under copyright than produce the same sorts of work for free and give them away.
There is no universal morality on any subject, almost by definition. Everyone has their own ethics: some things are worth breaking the rules of society over and risking the consequences if you wind up on the losing side, and other things aren't. In my world, copyright infringement isn't even close.
At the risk of sounding like the schoolyard bully pleading with the teacher... who started it?
For years, we had an economy that was quite happy supporting both purchase and rental of videos. They didn't come with huge amounts of crap you couldn't skip at the start, they weren't copy protected, and no-one complained if you taped a programme off TV and kept it in your collection for another day.
Along comes Generation I-Want-It-So-I'll-Take-It, blatantly and offensively flouting the law and ripping people off, and now those of us who cough up the going rate when we want to buy something have to put up with all of the above rubbish, as the media industries defend their business the only way they know how.
People like you don't like DRM, or region-locked DVDs, and all that crap.
And if it weren't for people like you being so blatantly selfish, the rest of us wouldn't now have to put up with it.
Ethics class dismissed.
Is that why Silver Screen just opened up a new branch in my home town, and why I've filled two whole shelving units with DVDs of my favourite films and series in the 18 months or so since I bought a DVD player?
You forgot to mention terrorism. After all, accusing anyone whose actions you dislike of being a terrorist, regardless of whether they are in fact instilling fear into anyone, is the best way to prove that you're right and the other guy is wrong.
He used "theft" and "piracy", both words that are widely recognised in this context, albeit rather inflammatory in some quarters. You used "rape" and "murder". I think you're kinda losing the moral high ground here.
Actually, it is. It is listed as such in every dictionary in my home; I just checked. Most of those dictionaries predate the sort of P2P net we see today by several years, BTW, and at least one predates widespread use of the Internet at all.
On a related note, ISTR someone here on Slashdot citing a use of the word "theft" in this context dating back over 150 years in a previous discussion, and another noting that at least one US court has used the word in a formal ruling on copyright infringement. So "intellectual property theft" is a well-established and correct term as well.
There is indeed a lot of using words to generate emotional response by both sides here, but let's not kid ourselves: the guys who rip stuff illegally like to call it "copyright infringement" because that sounds something that fluffy bunnies might do that couldn't possibly hurt anyone. It's just as emotionally charged as the terms so beloved of the **AA and their ilk, just in the other direction.
Yeah! If I wanted to know what happened in the end, I'd have watched the sequels first!
Don't trouble yourself; George is a nice guy, and he'll send someone right over to collect it from you. What's your address?
Marbles
(At least their credit card sub-site doesn't work properly with Firefox.)
I'm afraid that, one day, you'll eat those words.
I've been in a similar position to this guy, volunteering lots of my spare time to help a community I cared about but ultimately finding it too much. The one time I did say I'd like to stand down and pass the job on, no-one stepped up to take over, even among a group of very dedicated volunteers who each gave up a lot of their own time to help already. It was just too much at that time for anyone else to accept. It took a few more weeks of very hard work to clear up some of the bigger things and reduce the workload before I could find someone who was willing (though hardly enthusiastic) to take over, and I could hand the job on without feeling like I was dropping my friends and those I was supporting in the brown stuff.
"Everyone can be replaced" is a great sound-bite, until you're the one trying to find the replacement. Then it's simply wrong.
Sorry, but it really doesn't work that way. If the codebase is at all complicated, then even if it's pretty well-written and well-documented, you inevitably lose a lot if you bring in a new developer and don't have the old guy around to train him up. This is true whether your code is open source, closed source, shared source or tomato sauce. All you can do is hope that your code is well enough written and documented that the new guy can get the job done.