It is only in our bizarre society that if a discovery that can help mankind is made, it is quickly surrounded by gun-wielding thugs to keep anyone else from learning about it
Is that the same bizarre society that gives so generously towards researching such discoveries?
You don't have to doubt, do you, that once the AIDS and Cancer cures are found, their formulae and/or methods won't be distributed publicly all around the globe, but will be held tightly by a few companies who charge $$$$ to US patients, $$$ to pacific rim patients, and $$ to Brazilian patients, each according to his ability to be raped.
Do you have any idea, any idea at all, about how much money is being invested into researching those subjects right now? Do you know how much time and effort will have been spent by the time cures are found and distributed? Why would any company invest such staggering sums in research if they were never going to see a return on that investment? How could they? They've only grown big enough to do it by selling off previous research.
If you don't like this capitalist attitude, feel free to lobby for tax rises so that all the research can be publicly funded. Hell, go out and donate £100 today to a major charity involved in the research. I make small donations to charities I consider worthwhile every month, because I'd like the results of their research to be publicly available. Do you make donations to support your beliefs?
There are lots of things which can be classified as "I want" such as [...]
Yep, and if people had followed the approach so many posters here propose -- breaking a law any time the general population think it's a bad law -- then you'd have none of those rights.
The problem with pure democracy ("one man, one vote") is that it only works in the presence of a universally informed and rational population. Most great advances in society don't come from that, they come from a small group of visionaries or a single inspirational person taking the lead, and convincing others to follow them. Putting such people in government and trusting to their judgement is, arguably, a smarter plan than pure democracy.
Of course, whether you're any good at choosing those visionaries to be your leaders... Well...;-)
As has been pointed out before, most file sharing, CD burning, etc. goes on because the public believes that they somehow have a *right* to a song or a movie without paying for it.
I don't think that's true. Most people who rip things known damn well that they have no right to do it. They do it because they think they can get away with it. There is no ethical dimension here, it's just pure greed.
I agree one has to be careful here, but let's not mince words. You know and I know that many of these suspects are guilty as hell.
I'm all for due process. As I've now said here on many occasions, I have grave reservations about whether the DMCA and its brethren are good law (which I define to be having the sole amibition of seeing justice done). I don't come from the US, so my understanding of your legal concepts is limited, but if a subpoena means what I think it does, I find the idea of having a subpoena issued other than by a court or similarly qualified body to be disconcerting, at best. I certainly find putting law enforcement into the hands of a commercial organisation to be a dubious move, at best.
I'm simply trying to keep a realistic perspective on this. The current wave of ueber-copyright legislation was triggered precisely because the existing due process for copyright enforcement could not cope with the new rules of the game. People knew that, and took advantage to break the law and get away with it. They hid behind overweight enforcement processes, lack of knowledge in the law enforcement community, and unrealistic but arguable defences about what things "might" be used for legitimately, in spite of the fact that everyone knew they weren't the vast majority of the time.
When you abuse the rules of the game, the rules will change to prevent that abuse. So, I agree with you that one must be careful not to presume guilt too readily. But when we all know damn well that most if not all of those people are criminals, that is what I will call them. The few who are not will have their day in court to defend themselves successfully, but I suspect that "few" is the operative word there.
Ah, yes, name-calling, exaggeration and patronising prose: the tools of defensive hypocrites everywhere. Why do you assume that because I disagree with you, I am stupid or ill-informed? I am neither.
And you seem to be one of those who assumes that whenever a law is passed, its sanctified by your deity of choice and becomes holy legal writ, not meant to be questioned.
On the contrary. If you had bothered to read any of my past posts before making assumptions about me, you'd have found that I wrote on the importance of constantly questioning laws just the other day. I also suggested that the way to see things changed for the better is to fix the broken laws, not to break the current ones.
It is wrong for the RIAA to be able to sue someone $750 all the way to $150,000 for "supposedly" sharing a song.
Oh, please. The hypocrisy around this whole debate is staggering, and your "supposedly" above does nothing to help your case. One minute, going after P2P is an abuse, and they should go after the perps. When they do that, everyone's up in arms about invasions of this or that. Now the perps aren't really perps, they just happened to leave illegal downloadable copies of current tracks lying around their systems? Who are you trying to kid?
And yes, the astronomical amounts they can theoretically sue for are "perceived" amounts disconnected with reality. And how often have the courts awarded them those amounts?
To put it in terms that you might be abe to understand, this is the legal equivalent of saying that if you own a gun, and someone on your street is murdered using a gun, you're guilty.
If you insist on using emotional and disconnected analogies, then at least be sensible. It is more akin to saying that if someone points a gun at me and I genuinely believe they're about to shoot me, I can shoot them first and it's reasonable self defence.
Instead of adopting the holier than thou attitude, consider that this is a democracy. We are, at least in theory, in charge of this country, not the lawmakers.
I'm adopting a holier than thou attitude? Now that is funny.
And no, you don't live in a democracy such as you describe. Think about it, and if necessary, check what the word "democracy" actually means.
And, from what I understand, the stance that MIT and BC are taking is that they're being polite right now, giving the RIAA a gracious way out, but if the RIAA still pursues the information, they will tell them to shove it.
That's an interesting understanding, which appears to differ from the understanding of almost everyone else here. What do you know that we all don't?
As for file sharing itself, I'm not saying its right and legal. I do it myself, and I acknowledge I'm breaking the law. [...] I imagine if the laws were changed to something somewhat sane, the universities would have no major issues with giving the RIAA the information.
Perhaps at some point you should consider that copyright laws used to be sane. Then people like you abused the system on a massive scale, and the system responded. You don't like the response? Maybe you should have thought of that before you were abusive, instead of naively believing that you could get away with it forever.
And no, I don't like the DMCA, nor did I say or even imply that I did. I simply look at it from an impartial outsider's point of view, and recognise why it was proposed and allowed to pass successfully into law.
I've noticed that people from the US usually cry "Unconstitutional!" under two circumstances. One is that a law has been passed that is a genuine violation of their rights or a real threat to their liberty. Another is that a law has been passed that prevents them personally from doing something out of line, a
Sure it is -- you're not paying anything for the software. The costs for investigation, support, training, etc are there no matter what solution you choose.
Sure, but those costs make up the vast majority of what is typically spent out of a software budget. To claim that open source is free compared to the major commercial alternatives is disingenuous.
Particularly considering the move to subscription based licensing that so many large companies seem to be moving toward these days.
I don't think very many large companies are moving towards it at all, based on my experience. A small number, notably including Microsoft, are doing so.
If that is a concern, why don't the government in question vote for the genuinely free option, by not upgrading their existing systems? If enough major players do that, you can pretty much guarantee the Microsofts of this world will react.
I've read the first few replies to this, and aside from the fact that a lot of people seem to have misunderstood the situation (the colleges will comply, they're basically just objecting to incorrectly filed paperwork) everyone thinks this is great.
It is not an abuse of the court system to take legal action against someone who is breaking the law. The fact that these kids may be at college doesn't excuse being criminals.
If, as you say, it is the responsibility of the colleges to manage their own networks, then what do you say about a college that condones breaking the law by taking no action to prevent it?
If colleges don't take reasonable action to prevent the users of their networks breaking the law using those networks, then whose place do you think it is? Clearly central government don't have the resources to combat this problem effectively, which is why they pushed through the DMCA in the first place.
As usual, this comes down to "me, too" bitching about how unfair the RIAA is, and as usual it's aiming at the wrong target. You have a legitimate complaint that the RIAA and those they represent abuse an effective monopoly position to overcharge for the goods they sell. You do not have a legitimate complaint when people who have broken the law get chased down for it.
If the colleges concerned actually were trying to prevent that, they wouldn't be heroes, they'd be accomplices. However, since they're not, they're simply being professional and not giving out private details until a properly filed order requires them to do so.
I understand your argument, and I agree that from your starting assumptions it makes sense. I just disagree with your starting assumptions.
The Internet is not a lawless place. Far from it. The kind of infrastructure that makes it up doesn't just happen. There are organising groups behind it, though it's easy to forget that.
Moreover, the Internet is not so wildly new and different to everything else that's gone before as some people make out. The same principles of law can apply here as elsewhere; with the exception of international issues, which obviously occur far more often on the Internet than otherwise, there's not much that needs to change. Fraud is still fraud. Defamation is still defamation. Copyright is still copyright. Same old story, and why shouldn't it be?
Now, granted the Internet throws up some different background to cases than you might otherwise see -- the culture of P2P for example, and the international dimension mentioned above. The legal system seems to recognise the similarities to the rest of the world better than your average geek, though it's been slow to adapt to the particular circumstances of Internet cases. But the framework is there. People are successfully prosecuted for committing crimes on the Internet, and have been for years.
Now, the traditional answer to resolving international problems is diplomacy. Your nation's representatives discuss your problems with the other guys, and hopefully you form some sort of treaty for mutual benefit that overcomes the problems. Where a nation is not prepared to co-operate, you can impose sanctions, restrict your business dealings with them. In this case, the sanction is obvious: someone not prepared to play by the same rules as everyone else gets cut out of the network.
There are groups in place that can do this, now, today. If there weren't, these places wouldn't be on the Internet in the first place. What's needed is to give those groups an incentive to get their act together, and the way to do that in a modern society is to contact your own representatives and impress on them the need for action. This is happening more and more every day, as problems like spam mails and viruses interfere more and more with the effective use of the Internet by individuals and businesses alike.
But what we need now is a calm, measured, systematic solution. This is the twenty-first century, not the eighteenth, and we have more powerful and sophisticated tools to resolve these issues than "Mine's bigger than yours is, so nah!" All the sort of vigilantism you're advocating does is get in the way, and distract from the real problems.
Just to be clear, no, I don't have a whole lot of sympathy for a spammer whose system gets fried by such an action, although I'm very wary of collateral damage.
It occurs to me that there's a fairly obvious parallel between condoning vigilantism here and letting the RIAA toast the machines of people illegally copying MP3s springs to mind at this point. Notice how many Slashdotters objected vehemently to that proposition when the subject came up a few weeks ago. Would you agree with letting the RIAA do that? Your argument thus far would support them, it seems.
Personally, I disagree with that as well, for just the same reasons that I disagree with e-vigilantism generally. I'd just prefer it if there were a more sensible punishment -- a significant fine to make it financially unattractive to spam, for example -- or, better still, reasonable punishments plus an Internet framework robust enough that such spam attacks were technically much harder in the first place as well.
I'm not saying affirmative action never has merit. I'm saying that it's a slippery slope, and one that frequently goes down further than you think when you first consider it.
As for this bit:
It is a good idea and I'm tired of hearing people badmouthing it because a biased newspaper report allows them to justify their small-minded racism.
I don't know where that came from in my post. I don't form my opinions on important subjects like this by reading crap in newspapers, I form them from my own personal experiences, and those of others I encounter.
In this particular case, I've met few people who've benefitted from affirmative action, but seen several blatant cases where "affirmative action" was just a pseudonym for another type of discrimination. I can give you plenty of concrete examples if you want.
As a starter, I find it hard to claim hiring a white man instead of a black woman is discriminatory when the black woman candidate for a job is far less qualified than several of the while male applicants. On the contrary, hiring the black woman because she's black and female is what is discriminatory. And this was for an equal opportunities officer of all things... (Yes, I can see the obvious argument that minorities might feel more comfortable talking to a black woman than a white man about discrimination, but no that argument doesn't go anywhere, as the few months after that hiring decision demonstrated all too clearly.)
Open source is not free (as in beer), particularly on this scale. There are support costs, retraining costs, costs of investigating solutions in the first place...
If we get a proposal that compares genuine TCO for Microsoft with "free" software then of course a mostly uninformed public will jump up and down and ill-informed lobbyists will start clamouring for the money to be saved. Then in five years' time, they'll turn around and wonder what went wrong.
And as we've discussed on Slashdot before, any legislation that mandates the "consideration" of any specific product(s) over others, whether that's Microsoft, open source things or otherwise, is deeply flawed. They should require that everything relevant will be given equal consideration, but since that would be a tacit admission that this doesn't happen at present, we're unlikely to see that any time soon. You'd hope that it didn't require a law for that to be the case anyway, since all such a law would do is open up the floodgates for legal action against the government by every losing product's supporters.
The last bit of the story really said it: it's just hi-tech affirmative action, and affirmative action is rarely as good an idea in the long run as it seems at first.
In the U.S. it is stated that we are born with these rights and that they come from God.
OK. So who states that? And who defends those rights? Is it:
the individual concerned?
God?
your government?
If you think governments can't revoke those rights, tune in to the discussion currently going on between the UK and the US over prisoners still held at Gitmo, where they've been held without trial and arguably in violation of numerous internationally accepted human rights since the previous war.
I've thought about it and I don't buy your argument. Considering the Wild West attitude of the way things currently are on the internet, I'm sorry but I think Vigilante Justice is not only warrented it's also needed.
If you take a look back through history, can you find many examples where vigilante justice ever achieved a good level of order for a prolonged period? Or do you find it tends to be followed by a more organised, recognised influence that brings the order with it?
Over here in the UK, we're all too familiar with vigilante justice right now. One of our popular newspapers "named and shamed" large numbers of paedophiles not long ago. As a result, many people who just happened to look similar (to any one of the dozens of people pictured) were attacked. Some had to leave their homes. One paediatrician -- someone who had spent their whole career looking after children -- was the subject of a serious abuse, because stupid people thinking they were right didn't understand the long words, and decided the paediatrician was a child abuser.
In a world where every criminal has guns, you don't take guns away from the law abiding citizens -else you end up with dead citizens and warlaords over throwing your government. - same is true for the internet.
I live in a country where guns are easily available to criminals if they want them, but illegal for the general population to carry. Most criminals don't bother with them, most people who get killed in gun crimes are themselves criminals, and although I'm no big fan of Tony Blair, claiming he's overthrown our government seems a bit excessive.
In this case the vigilanteism you are so afraid of may be the only means to get countries to enact the very laws you advocate. Think about it! If there's no reason for these countries to enact these laws, why will they?
You could try doing something sensible, like, say, having your top level infrastructure providers cut theirs out of the network until they agree the adhere to a common code of practice. The Internet was built by the West, particularly the US and a few places in Europe, and it wouldn't be so hard for a centralised administration and control structure -- something which is coming, like it or not -- to impose such a restriction (ahem... "condition of membership") and cut out places that don't comply. Bingo, many of the spam mails, viruses, inappropriate newsgroup ads, abusive web pages and such that are currently reducing the signal/noise ratio of the Internet daily disappear.
...And besides "everybody hates America" is a crock. Those who hate America, hate it because it's so great and usually right.
Or because it thinks it's better than everyone else, interferes unduly with affairs outside its own borders to promote its own best interests at the expense of others, and worst of all, is arrogant about it.
And please read my post again. I didn't say everbody hates America, contrary to what your quotes suggest. I implied that many people do, and now more than ever, you guys really need to wake up to that fact and ask yourselves why. Sticking your heads in the sand by modding down some anonymous guy on Slashdot to (-1, Don't Agree With You) isn't going to fix the problem.
Becareful what you wish for, you're probably going to get it! How would you like to be torn out of your home country and sued by an international organization which holds different values and morals than you? For an infringement that neither you, your government or most sane governments would call an offense?
Would that be in comparison to having someone over whom neither I, nor my government, nor even their own has any control coming to my home country and accidentally destroying my livelihood on a whim?
Rights aren't something the government decides you should have. They're something you have. Period. That's why they're rights.
And who or what gives you those rights?
Here's a little proposition for you to think about: the only rights you truly have are those you are prepared to die defending. Anything else can be taken from you.
This has come up in some famous consumerism cases, most notably one involving McDonalds, the fast food operation.
Ah, yes, that one. People were standing around outsides McDonalds restaurants giving out flyers that accused them of various unfortunate things. If memory serves, they took the flyer producers to court on defamation grounds, and successfully rebutted a couple of the points, notably including the fact that their food was found to be nutritious by the court. A few days later, the flyers were back, with the claims the court found against removed, and a big banner over the rest basically saying "PROVEN IN COURT!".
If ever there were an own goal in a legal case, that was probably it. Anyone have a link to detailed info any more? Makes fun reading if you've got a few minutes to kill.:-)
Incidentally, there is some legal protection for freedom of expression in the UK, including under the ECHR if memory serves. However, what's wrong with defamation law overriding freedom of expression? You want to be able to say anything you like with impunity, even if it's wrong and damaging to someone? I have no problem with a clear standard that if you want to say things negative things about someone else publicly then you have to be able to back them up. Why is that a problem, either in principle or in practice?
Fourth: Let's say this computer does belong to an "innocent" (read negligent) bystander. Crashing his computer might actually get him to fix the problem/alert him that someone else is controlling it.
It might also reboot a critical system belonging to a small business in a much harsher world than you or I will ever visit, and destroy a family's livelihood as a result.
Vigilante justice on the Internet is not something that should be encouraged. What he's talking about is immoral, pure and simple. It is also illegal in most Western countries, and trying to get away with it because you're doing it internationally is just taking the ****.
I hope one day in ten years' time, when there is an international governing body to regulate things like the Internet that can handle this sort of behaviour, this guy gets strung up by a family whose lives he ruined without a second thought, and sued for every cent he owns.
And you wonder why so many people in the world hate America...
I understand your point, but I don't think it's as black and white as your description implies. If I go onto a P2P network and request a copy of a file whose name matches Madonna's latest single, then I could reasonably be expected to know that it is probably an illegal copy. That is the kind of behaviour I'm suggesting is both unethical and probably illegal.
I'm not saying people should be committing a crime without having any way to know about it. That is clearly unreasonable. But your arguments are no excuse for someone who knowingly commits, or encourages commission of, a crime.
I don't think it's wise to compare P2P with web sites, BTW. The mechanisms in use are different, and the way they are typically used is different as well. I would suggest that just visiting the web site in your example isn't a problem, but if you stored all of the content after you visited, including the image, then you should fall foul of the same rules as we were discussing above. Normal browsing is a very different situation, though.
I usually have at least 27 new messages waiting for me when I get home from work: six offering me free degrees, three offering to enlarge my manhood, seven from various porn sites of dubious legality, four millionaires from Africa offering me "business deals", three with virus attachments from a mailing list I run, two forwarded stories that were funny when I first read them in 1996, one pointless message from my ISP and one message I want to read from someone I know.
Now, if I only had one message waiting for me, it would be the last one and that would really make my day, so clearly that's never going to happen. Thus to believe their "you have one new message" claim, I would have to be not just stupid, but Really, Really, Unutterably Stupid®... Does that qualify me to be part of the class?
We have the same card schemes here in the states. [...] They don't have my name or address or anything...it only tracks what I buy, not who I am.
That's not quite the same thing, then. The cards we have in the UK require name, address and often a small amount of background information (age group and the like) when you sign up. In other words, they very much are technically capable of monitoring individuals. There are various comments about this in the data protection policies that go with the schemes.
If you do something with a computer and you do the exact same same thing without a computer the legalality should be exactly the same.
I agree with you entirely on that point. I just place the responsibility differently, and see a different analogy between the on-line and physical worlds in this case.
As I see it, downloading an MP3 you know to be in breach of copyright is analogous to walking into a shop and asking them to make you an illegal copy of a CD right there, or perhaps more accurately, to walking in, asking for them to make it, and then helping them to do so.
As far as I'm concerned, asking someone else to commit a crime on your behalf, and knowingly allowing them to do so, makes you just as guilty as they are. The law may not regard you as committing the same crime (hence "conspiracy to murder", being an accomplice to things, contributory negligence and other similar legal concepts) but you sure as hell ain't innocent. This applies if you got into a shop and ask them to make you an illegal copy, and it applies equally if you download a file you know to be in breach of copyright.
Deep linking into an existing site and caching a site without its permission are two totally different things, technically, ethically and legally. Please try to stay on topic.
First of all if I ask for a free CD they are perfectly free to give me a legal copy.
Of course they are, but that's not the analogous case. If we accept, for the sake of argument, that the uploader makes the copy, then P2P downloading of material you know is illegal to copy is analogous to going in and explicitly asking for them to make an illegal copy just for you.
Suspect all you like, but I defy you to find a single refference to back it up. I have been reading through US copyright law and everything I've seen is directed at the SOURCE of a copy.
I've read the relevant US law on numerous occasions during debates like this, and also similar legislation from the UK and one or two other places. You're not going to impress me by repeatedly telling me that you've looked at the words, sorry.
More to the point, perhaps, is that I think you're twisting those words, possibly without noticing that you're doing it. Go back and read that law again. Does it refer explicitly to the "source" of the copy? Or do you mean that it applies to the person making the copy? If the latter case, note that it's not clear in the case of P2P distribution who is responsible for making the copy. As I noted before, there are cases where it must be the downloader (e.g., crackers), so it's not black and white. Find me a case that clarifies this issue, stating unambiguously that only the person uploading is ever responsible for the copy being made, and you'll have a good argument to defend the downloader.
In the meantime, I gave some reasons that they are currently going after "distributers" rather then "end users" before, and I see nothing to refute those arguments. This in itself explains the lack of cases so far.
However, the legal system is full of law that forbids being an accessory to X, an accomplice, etc. What makes you think nothing like that applies here?
Just because no-one's been screwed over it yet doesn't make it legal, or mean that no-one ever will be. Most people don't get done for doing 35 in a 30, but the law clearly says they can be. If the authorities wanted to make a point, they could prosecute. It just happens that they generally don't, because they're more concerned about the guy doing 60 in a 30.
Slashdot Mirror
Is that the same bizarre society that gives so generously towards researching such discoveries?
Do you have any idea, any idea at all, about how much money is being invested into researching those subjects right now? Do you know how much time and effort will have been spent by the time cures are found and distributed? Why would any company invest such staggering sums in research if they were never going to see a return on that investment? How could they? They've only grown big enough to do it by selling off previous research.
If you don't like this capitalist attitude, feel free to lobby for tax rises so that all the research can be publicly funded. Hell, go out and donate £100 today to a major charity involved in the research. I make small donations to charities I consider worthwhile every month, because I'd like the results of their research to be publicly available. Do you make donations to support your beliefs?
Yep, and if people had followed the approach so many posters here propose -- breaking a law any time the general population think it's a bad law -- then you'd have none of those rights.
The problem with pure democracy ("one man, one vote") is that it only works in the presence of a universally informed and rational population. Most great advances in society don't come from that, they come from a small group of visionaries or a single inspirational person taking the lead, and convincing others to follow them. Putting such people in government and trusting to their judgement is, arguably, a smarter plan than pure democracy.
Of course, whether you're any good at choosing those visionaries to be your leaders... Well... ;-)
I don't think that's true. Most people who rip things known damn well that they have no right to do it. They do it because they think they can get away with it. There is no ethical dimension here, it's just pure greed.
I agree one has to be careful here, but let's not mince words. You know and I know that many of these suspects are guilty as hell.
I'm all for due process. As I've now said here on many occasions, I have grave reservations about whether the DMCA and its brethren are good law (which I define to be having the sole amibition of seeing justice done). I don't come from the US, so my understanding of your legal concepts is limited, but if a subpoena means what I think it does, I find the idea of having a subpoena issued other than by a court or similarly qualified body to be disconcerting, at best. I certainly find putting law enforcement into the hands of a commercial organisation to be a dubious move, at best.
I'm simply trying to keep a realistic perspective on this. The current wave of ueber-copyright legislation was triggered precisely because the existing due process for copyright enforcement could not cope with the new rules of the game. People knew that, and took advantage to break the law and get away with it. They hid behind overweight enforcement processes, lack of knowledge in the law enforcement community, and unrealistic but arguable defences about what things "might" be used for legitimately, in spite of the fact that everyone knew they weren't the vast majority of the time.
When you abuse the rules of the game, the rules will change to prevent that abuse. So, I agree with you that one must be careful not to presume guilt too readily. But when we all know damn well that most if not all of those people are criminals, that is what I will call them. The few who are not will have their day in court to defend themselves successfully, but I suspect that "few" is the operative word there.
Ah, yes, name-calling, exaggeration and patronising prose: the tools of defensive hypocrites everywhere. Why do you assume that because I disagree with you, I am stupid or ill-informed? I am neither.
On the contrary. If you had bothered to read any of my past posts before making assumptions about me, you'd have found that I wrote on the importance of constantly questioning laws just the other day. I also suggested that the way to see things changed for the better is to fix the broken laws, not to break the current ones.
Oh, please. The hypocrisy around this whole debate is staggering, and your "supposedly" above does nothing to help your case. One minute, going after P2P is an abuse, and they should go after the perps. When they do that, everyone's up in arms about invasions of this or that. Now the perps aren't really perps, they just happened to leave illegal downloadable copies of current tracks lying around their systems? Who are you trying to kid?
And yes, the astronomical amounts they can theoretically sue for are "perceived" amounts disconnected with reality. And how often have the courts awarded them those amounts?
If you insist on using emotional and disconnected analogies, then at least be sensible. It is more akin to saying that if someone points a gun at me and I genuinely believe they're about to shoot me, I can shoot them first and it's reasonable self defence.
I'm adopting a holier than thou attitude? Now that is funny.
And no, you don't live in a democracy such as you describe. Think about it, and if necessary, check what the word "democracy" actually means.
That's an interesting understanding, which appears to differ from the understanding of almost everyone else here. What do you know that we all don't?
Perhaps at some point you should consider that copyright laws used to be sane. Then people like you abused the system on a massive scale, and the system responded. You don't like the response? Maybe you should have thought of that before you were abusive, instead of naively believing that you could get away with it forever.
And no, I don't like the DMCA, nor did I say or even imply that I did. I simply look at it from an impartial outsider's point of view, and recognise why it was proposed and allowed to pass successfully into law.
I've noticed that people from the US usually cry "Unconstitutional!" under two circumstances. One is that a law has been passed that is a genuine violation of their rights or a real threat to their liberty. Another is that a law has been passed that prevents them personally from doing something out of line, a
Sure, but those costs make up the vast majority of what is typically spent out of a software budget. To claim that open source is free compared to the major commercial alternatives is disingenuous.
I don't think very many large companies are moving towards it at all, based on my experience. A small number, notably including Microsoft, are doing so.
If that is a concern, why don't the government in question vote for the genuinely free option, by not upgrading their existing systems? If enough major players do that, you can pretty much guarantee the Microsofts of this world will react.
...the drivers for that hardware will actually work. :-)
I've read the first few replies to this, and aside from the fact that a lot of people seem to have misunderstood the situation (the colleges will comply, they're basically just objecting to incorrectly filed paperwork) everyone thinks this is great.
It is not an abuse of the court system to take legal action against someone who is breaking the law. The fact that these kids may be at college doesn't excuse being criminals.
If, as you say, it is the responsibility of the colleges to manage their own networks, then what do you say about a college that condones breaking the law by taking no action to prevent it?
If colleges don't take reasonable action to prevent the users of their networks breaking the law using those networks, then whose place do you think it is? Clearly central government don't have the resources to combat this problem effectively, which is why they pushed through the DMCA in the first place.
As usual, this comes down to "me, too" bitching about how unfair the RIAA is, and as usual it's aiming at the wrong target. You have a legitimate complaint that the RIAA and those they represent abuse an effective monopoly position to overcharge for the goods they sell. You do not have a legitimate complaint when people who have broken the law get chased down for it.
If the colleges concerned actually were trying to prevent that, they wouldn't be heroes, they'd be accomplices. However, since they're not, they're simply being professional and not giving out private details until a properly filed order requires them to do so.
I understand your argument, and I agree that from your starting assumptions it makes sense. I just disagree with your starting assumptions.
The Internet is not a lawless place. Far from it. The kind of infrastructure that makes it up doesn't just happen. There are organising groups behind it, though it's easy to forget that.
Moreover, the Internet is not so wildly new and different to everything else that's gone before as some people make out. The same principles of law can apply here as elsewhere; with the exception of international issues, which obviously occur far more often on the Internet than otherwise, there's not much that needs to change. Fraud is still fraud. Defamation is still defamation. Copyright is still copyright. Same old story, and why shouldn't it be?
Now, granted the Internet throws up some different background to cases than you might otherwise see -- the culture of P2P for example, and the international dimension mentioned above. The legal system seems to recognise the similarities to the rest of the world better than your average geek, though it's been slow to adapt to the particular circumstances of Internet cases. But the framework is there. People are successfully prosecuted for committing crimes on the Internet, and have been for years.
Now, the traditional answer to resolving international problems is diplomacy. Your nation's representatives discuss your problems with the other guys, and hopefully you form some sort of treaty for mutual benefit that overcomes the problems. Where a nation is not prepared to co-operate, you can impose sanctions, restrict your business dealings with them. In this case, the sanction is obvious: someone not prepared to play by the same rules as everyone else gets cut out of the network.
There are groups in place that can do this, now, today. If there weren't, these places wouldn't be on the Internet in the first place. What's needed is to give those groups an incentive to get their act together, and the way to do that in a modern society is to contact your own representatives and impress on them the need for action. This is happening more and more every day, as problems like spam mails and viruses interfere more and more with the effective use of the Internet by individuals and businesses alike.
But what we need now is a calm, measured, systematic solution. This is the twenty-first century, not the eighteenth, and we have more powerful and sophisticated tools to resolve these issues than "Mine's bigger than yours is, so nah!" All the sort of vigilantism you're advocating does is get in the way, and distract from the real problems.
Just to be clear, no, I don't have a whole lot of sympathy for a spammer whose system gets fried by such an action, although I'm very wary of collateral damage.
It occurs to me that there's a fairly obvious parallel between condoning vigilantism here and letting the RIAA toast the machines of people illegally copying MP3s springs to mind at this point. Notice how many Slashdotters objected vehemently to that proposition when the subject came up a few weeks ago. Would you agree with letting the RIAA do that? Your argument thus far would support them, it seems.
Personally, I disagree with that as well, for just the same reasons that I disagree with e-vigilantism generally. I'd just prefer it if there were a more sensible punishment -- a significant fine to make it financially unattractive to spam, for example -- or, better still, reasonable punishments plus an Internet framework robust enough that such spam attacks were technically much harder in the first place as well.
I'm not saying affirmative action never has merit. I'm saying that it's a slippery slope, and one that frequently goes down further than you think when you first consider it.
As for this bit:
I don't know where that came from in my post. I don't form my opinions on important subjects like this by reading crap in newspapers, I form them from my own personal experiences, and those of others I encounter.
In this particular case, I've met few people who've benefitted from affirmative action, but seen several blatant cases where "affirmative action" was just a pseudonym for another type of discrimination. I can give you plenty of concrete examples if you want.
As a starter, I find it hard to claim hiring a white man instead of a black woman is discriminatory when the black woman candidate for a job is far less qualified than several of the while male applicants. On the contrary, hiring the black woman because she's black and female is what is discriminatory. And this was for an equal opportunities officer of all things... (Yes, I can see the obvious argument that minorities might feel more comfortable talking to a black woman than a white man about discrimination, but no that argument doesn't go anywhere, as the few months after that hiring decision demonstrated all too clearly.)
Open source is not free (as in beer), particularly on this scale. There are support costs, retraining costs, costs of investigating solutions in the first place...
If we get a proposal that compares genuine TCO for Microsoft with "free" software then of course a mostly uninformed public will jump up and down and ill-informed lobbyists will start clamouring for the money to be saved. Then in five years' time, they'll turn around and wonder what went wrong.
And as we've discussed on Slashdot before, any legislation that mandates the "consideration" of any specific product(s) over others, whether that's Microsoft, open source things or otherwise, is deeply flawed. They should require that everything relevant will be given equal consideration, but since that would be a tacit admission that this doesn't happen at present, we're unlikely to see that any time soon. You'd hope that it didn't require a law for that to be the case anyway, since all such a law would do is open up the floodgates for legal action against the government by every losing product's supporters.
The last bit of the story really said it: it's just hi-tech affirmative action, and affirmative action is rarely as good an idea in the long run as it seems at first.
Even if those name-calling matches do irreparable damage to someone's hard-earned professional reputation, and thus to their livelihood?
OK. So who states that? And who defends those rights? Is it:
If you think governments can't revoke those rights, tune in to the discussion currently going on between the UK and the US over prisoners still held at Gitmo, where they've been held without trial and arguably in violation of numerous internationally accepted human rights since the previous war.
If you take a look back through history, can you find many examples where vigilante justice ever achieved a good level of order for a prolonged period? Or do you find it tends to be followed by a more organised, recognised influence that brings the order with it?
Over here in the UK, we're all too familiar with vigilante justice right now. One of our popular newspapers "named and shamed" large numbers of paedophiles not long ago. As a result, many people who just happened to look similar (to any one of the dozens of people pictured) were attacked. Some had to leave their homes. One paediatrician -- someone who had spent their whole career looking after children -- was the subject of a serious abuse, because stupid people thinking they were right didn't understand the long words, and decided the paediatrician was a child abuser.
I live in a country where guns are easily available to criminals if they want them, but illegal for the general population to carry. Most criminals don't bother with them, most people who get killed in gun crimes are themselves criminals, and although I'm no big fan of Tony Blair, claiming he's overthrown our government seems a bit excessive.
You could try doing something sensible, like, say, having your top level infrastructure providers cut theirs out of the network until they agree the adhere to a common code of practice. The Internet was built by the West, particularly the US and a few places in Europe, and it wouldn't be so hard for a centralised administration and control structure -- something which is coming, like it or not -- to impose such a restriction (ahem... "condition of membership") and cut out places that don't comply. Bingo, many of the spam mails, viruses, inappropriate newsgroup ads, abusive web pages and such that are currently reducing the signal/noise ratio of the Internet daily disappear.
Or because it thinks it's better than everyone else, interferes unduly with affairs outside its own borders to promote its own best interests at the expense of others, and worst of all, is arrogant about it.
And please read my post again. I didn't say everbody hates America, contrary to what your quotes suggest. I implied that many people do, and now more than ever, you guys really need to wake up to that fact and ask yourselves why. Sticking your heads in the sand by modding down some anonymous guy on Slashdot to (-1, Don't Agree With You) isn't going to fix the problem.
Would that be in comparison to having someone over whom neither I, nor my government, nor even their own has any control coming to my home country and accidentally destroying my livelihood on a whim?
And incidentally, your government (assu
And who or what gives you those rights?
Here's a little proposition for you to think about: the only rights you truly have are those you are prepared to die defending. Anything else can be taken from you.
Ah, yes, that one. People were standing around outsides McDonalds restaurants giving out flyers that accused them of various unfortunate things. If memory serves, they took the flyer producers to court on defamation grounds, and successfully rebutted a couple of the points, notably including the fact that their food was found to be nutritious by the court. A few days later, the flyers were back, with the claims the court found against removed, and a big banner over the rest basically saying "PROVEN IN COURT!".
If ever there were an own goal in a legal case, that was probably it. Anyone have a link to detailed info any more? Makes fun reading if you've got a few minutes to kill. :-)
Incidentally, there is some legal protection for freedom of expression in the UK, including under the ECHR if memory serves. However, what's wrong with defamation law overriding freedom of expression? You want to be able to say anything you like with impunity, even if it's wrong and damaging to someone? I have no problem with a clear standard that if you want to say things negative things about someone else publicly then you have to be able to back them up. Why is that a problem, either in principle or in practice?
You want Microsoft, the company behind Hotmail, to go after spammers? Um....
It might also reboot a critical system belonging to a small business in a much harsher world than you or I will ever visit, and destroy a family's livelihood as a result.
Vigilante justice on the Internet is not something that should be encouraged. What he's talking about is immoral, pure and simple. It is also illegal in most Western countries, and trying to get away with it because you're doing it internationally is just taking the ****.
I hope one day in ten years' time, when there is an international governing body to regulate things like the Internet that can handle this sort of behaviour, this guy gets strung up by a family whose lives he ruined without a second thought, and sued for every cent he owns.
And you wonder why so many people in the world hate America...
I understand your point, but I don't think it's as black and white as your description implies. If I go onto a P2P network and request a copy of a file whose name matches Madonna's latest single, then I could reasonably be expected to know that it is probably an illegal copy. That is the kind of behaviour I'm suggesting is both unethical and probably illegal.
I'm not saying people should be committing a crime without having any way to know about it. That is clearly unreasonable. But your arguments are no excuse for someone who knowingly commits, or encourages commission of, a crime.
I don't think it's wise to compare P2P with web sites, BTW. The mechanisms in use are different, and the way they are typically used is different as well. I would suggest that just visiting the web site in your example isn't a problem, but if you stored all of the content after you visited, including the image, then you should fall foul of the same rules as we were discussing above. Normal browsing is a very different situation, though.
Now what on earth makes you think the credit card company have my real name and address? ;-)
I usually have at least 27 new messages waiting for me when I get home from work: six offering me free degrees, three offering to enlarge my manhood, seven from various porn sites of dubious legality, four millionaires from Africa offering me "business deals", three with virus attachments from a mailing list I run, two forwarded stories that were funny when I first read them in 1996, one pointless message from my ISP and one message I want to read from someone I know.
Now, if I only had one message waiting for me, it would be the last one and that would really make my day, so clearly that's never going to happen. Thus to believe their "you have one new message" claim, I would have to be not just stupid, but Really, Really, Unutterably Stupid®... Does that qualify me to be part of the class?
That's not quite the same thing, then. The cards we have in the UK require name, address and often a small amount of background information (age group and the like) when you sign up. In other words, they very much are technically capable of monitoring individuals. There are various comments about this in the data protection policies that go with the schemes.
I agree with you entirely on that point. I just place the responsibility differently, and see a different analogy between the on-line and physical worlds in this case.
As I see it, downloading an MP3 you know to be in breach of copyright is analogous to walking into a shop and asking them to make you an illegal copy of a CD right there, or perhaps more accurately, to walking in, asking for them to make it, and then helping them to do so.
As far as I'm concerned, asking someone else to commit a crime on your behalf, and knowingly allowing them to do so, makes you just as guilty as they are. The law may not regard you as committing the same crime (hence "conspiracy to murder", being an accomplice to things, contributory negligence and other similar legal concepts) but you sure as hell ain't innocent. This applies if you got into a shop and ask them to make you an illegal copy, and it applies equally if you download a file you know to be in breach of copyright.
Deep linking into an existing site and caching a site without its permission are two totally different things, technically, ethically and legally. Please try to stay on topic.
Of course they are, but that's not the analogous case. If we accept, for the sake of argument, that the uploader makes the copy, then P2P downloading of material you know is illegal to copy is analogous to going in and explicitly asking for them to make an illegal copy just for you.
I've read the relevant US law on numerous occasions during debates like this, and also similar legislation from the UK and one or two other places. You're not going to impress me by repeatedly telling me that you've looked at the words, sorry.
More to the point, perhaps, is that I think you're twisting those words, possibly without noticing that you're doing it. Go back and read that law again. Does it refer explicitly to the "source" of the copy? Or do you mean that it applies to the person making the copy? If the latter case, note that it's not clear in the case of P2P distribution who is responsible for making the copy. As I noted before, there are cases where it must be the downloader (e.g., crackers), so it's not black and white. Find me a case that clarifies this issue, stating unambiguously that only the person uploading is ever responsible for the copy being made, and you'll have a good argument to defend the downloader.
In the meantime, I gave some reasons that they are currently going after "distributers" rather then "end users" before, and I see nothing to refute those arguments. This in itself explains the lack of cases so far. However, the legal system is full of law that forbids being an accessory to X, an accomplice, etc. What makes you think nothing like that applies here?
Just because no-one's been screwed over it yet doesn't make it legal, or mean that no-one ever will be. Most people don't get done for doing 35 in a 30, but the law clearly says they can be. If the authorities wanted to make a point, they could prosecute. It just happens that they generally don't, because they're more concerned about the guy doing 60 in a 30.