We're all above the law. The government derives its power from the people, not the other way around.
Those two statements aren't in any way equivalent.
Just to be clear, I do not volunteer my time just to toot my horn or make a profit. I have given thousands of hours over the past 5-6 years helping out in very technical forums (not just writing amusing anecdotes on Slashdot for my own entertainment, which is hardly the same thing) and never made a penny from it. I post here anonymously, and do you see me plugging anything I've done for commercial reasons? No.
However, what you're proposing would mean that I could no longer volunteer my time to help in some ways, because doing so would directly affect my ability to take part in other activities that are rent-paying. I'm not volunteering my time in the latter case, I'm doing a job, for which I expect to be given credit and paid. At present, publishers might be interested in my work, because it's not publicly available. I know that several major ones will refuse to publish material that has been previously available without pretty solid guarantees that the author has exclusive rights to it, etc.
Slashdot is not a volunteer organization. They make money off me, not the other way around.
How do they do that, if you're not paying subscription fees?
Damaged in what way? Aren't there archives of newspapers, journals, and magazines? And if time-sensitive information is present on a website, does the public have a right to see what was previously there?
If I put up information on a web site, for free, as a volunteer, then the public has no rights whatsoever, either legally or morally. Why the hell should they? They didn't do anything to earn them.
If you have a specific example related to this problem, I would love to hear it.
I'll give you a couple of examples where real damage can be done. There are certainly several other instances, but I hope these will suffice for now.
There have been cases where someone published some material on a subject that interested them on a web site, but later wanted to publish work based on it in something like a journal or a book. (Disclosure: I am currently in a similar position myself.)
Now, publishers get very nervous about publishing material that has previously been available in another form. If you're arguing that by putting it up on the web an author effectively forfeits all rights to control their work -- i.e., that the usual principles of copyright shouldn't apply for some reason in this medium -- then you're basically saying that anyone who might ever want to publish original material they wrote shouldn't ever make anything available on the web first. Given how much both the public and the author can potentially get out of that, provided that reasonable controls are in place -- there was a Slashdot story about a new programming book citing a preprint temporarily placed on the web just a few days ago -- this seems to be needlessly counterproductive to me.
Secondly, a bit closer to home, consider a company that has a critical story about it published on Slashdot. That company is likely to get a lot of traffic to its web site if the site is linked, and might well want to put up a rebuttal of any points made against it. It's only fair that visitors who go to check out the Slashdot story also see the company's response.
Now, we all know that Slashdot articles have seriously criticised businesses in the past, sometimes with justification, sometimes without. We all know that web sites get Slashdotted. We all know that people post links here to Google caches of sites, or just copy whole pages and post them here. In this sort of case, someone could suffer serious harm to their reputation because the audience of Slashdot only get to read things supporting a critical claim, without seeing (or even being aware of) a response from the criticised party in their defence.
Nicking someone's material and posting it here is blatant copyright infringement, and just because it's done by an AC and Slashdot claims that all posts are the responsibility of their authors doesn't necessarily make it legal. It amazes me, given a few of the things that get posted around here, that no-one has ever really attempted to sue Slashdot over this. Certainly things like circumventing the NYT's "free reg required" are very dicey, and given that everyone (including those running Slashdot) knows that it happens, I don't see how they'd have much of a defence.
In my personal opinion, and looking at the actual US law that's been quoted here, it seems that web sites caching material are also likely to be in breach of copyright laws for much the same reasons, doing much the same damage in some cases, and potentially subject to much the same penalties.
Right - just like WalMart has the right to pat down and run a credit check on everyone who walks through their doors.
No, it doesn't. But it has the right to refuse entry to anyone who doesn't provide the information it requires. Banks do this if you try to enter before removing your crash helmet. Bars do it if you look under-age and can't produce ID.
I was referring to the post where someone said there was an exemption under copyright law for web caches. I assumed the parts of the DMCA that were cited here were that exemption. In that case the validity of the original claim appears to be less clear than was suggested.
I don't think copyright is a reasonable law. I only respect it to the extent I think I might get caught.
Ah, I see. You're one of the people who, instead of discussing the issue on merits, decides unilaterally that he is above the law. So much for your credibility in any discussions around here, then.
So why don't you get a job?
It was a figure of speech.
I have a job, at which I work hard, and get paid fairly.
That remark was pretty crass considering the state of the industry and the number of good people who currently aren't in employment in spite of having useful skills.
If I were one of those people, and I went and flipped burgers rather than writing a book that will hopefully help thousands of newbies to improve their skills, who loses out? Everyone.
You're entitled to try, anyway. But I'm not going to feel sorry for you if you fail.
If people like me listened to people like you, open source and many other good things would be dead.
Tell me, how often do you volunteer 10+ hours of your spare time in a week, to help out others with your knowledge, experience or skills? 20+ hours? Do you run a high traffic information web site? Do you answer questions on bulletin boards or Usenet? Do you contribute to open projects? From the tone of your comments, it doesn't sound like it, or you might have a little more respect for those who do.
Now tell me how often you personally use those resources. (You do subscribe to Slashdot, right? And you don't run any free or open source software, nor visit freely available web sites run by volunteers to get some information you wanted?) I'm guessing honest answers to these questions would make you look more than a little selfish.
Obviously, if you mean 'having a similar sized development team', then I guess they probably do have about the same amount of peer review, don't they?
That depends on the organisation of the team of course, but yes, that is basically my point. The fact that open source can be read or changed by anyone interested doesn't imply that it will be read or changed.
Ah, yes, the witty comeback because you have nothing more solid to offer. How terribly original.
Can you think up a better response? Exactly what can Joe ServicPack achieve with XP, that cannot be done with '95??
You mean apart from
a reasonable level of stability,
much improved performance,
the use of much recent hardware,
something approximating security,
several much improved tools and accessories,
improved usability, particularly for systems with multiple users,
improved networking, and
playing pinball instead of minesweeper?
Yes, some of these things could have been done with 95 given enough effort. However, it would have required complete rewrites of several key subsystems, and a lot of effort to write the new tools. And the result of that work to improve Win95 would be... WinXP.
The problem is that while everything you say sounds good, it's mostly theoretical advantage that isn't borne out in practice.
If you feel it's not good enough, you can do something about it. But you can only do that if that you're a skilled software developer with enough free time to dedicate to getting up to speed on an existing project and then changing it to suit your needs, or if you have the resources to get somebody else qualified to do so.
Similarly, a code open to all does have some chance of being maintained after the original developers quit. But if it's something that took 50 developers to write originally, chances are that without a significant core of the original crew, no-one will ever get up to a high enough speed with it to do much useful maintenance. This is the same problem companies have when original team members leave established projects. Unless they were very good, so that their legacy includes clearly designed and implemented code with good supporting documentation, they are almost impossible to replace. Few people are that good.
This sort of thing is the big problem with the open source and free software advocacy today, IMHO. It's like the Great Code Reuse Myth(TM) of OO: great in theory, makes a very convincing argument, but somehow doesn't quite comes together in practice unless exceptional people are involved.
I'll have to take your word about the HTTP spec; I don't recall ever seeing what you describe, but I can't say I've read it in that much detail recently.
Regarding your other points...
Why do I give a shit about the UK?
Because if you're smart, you respect reasonable laws of other countries with which yours deals regularly, and not just your own.
Why do I give a shit about the US? Many of these sites aren't based there any more than they are in the UK.
Depends on the publisher. Maybe you should self-publish, using an open content license. I suggest you release your work into the public domain. That'll solve your problems.
Unfortunately, it won't pay my rent.
I spend a lot of my spare time helping out with free information and advice on-line, occasionally on this forum and frequently elsewhere. Mostly, I do it because people have helped me in the past, and I feel both a certain moral obligation to "return the favour" and a certain satisfaction knowing that I've helped someone out.
There comes a point, however, when I feel reasonably entitled to something more than a grateful newbie's "thank you", particularly when we're talking about the result of months of hard work. According to the law in my country and probably in yours, I'm entitled to do that without some freeloading commercial entity nicking my work and giving it away for free.
If the current version isn't available (for instance because you're offline), then you get whatever is in the cache.
Sorry, but I don't think this is reasonable. That caching is part of the browser software, and as I've noted repeatedly, that is a different issue to the web caches we're discussing here.
Nothing in the HTTP spec, or in any other relevant Internet standards, provides for any caching of old content and supplying it when a straightforward HTTP request for a file is sent. You get the current file, or a defined error code.
Archive.org is a different story. They'd probably have to rely at least in part on fair use, which is much less black and white.
That's lovely. Remind me again where in UK law there is any such provision? (For those who missed that, US copyright law provides for various "fair use" exemptions to the normal rule, while UK law provides far fewer.) If the Wayback Machine records content off my web site, and allows others to view it against my wishes when I have taken it down, then I think it is breaking UK copyright law, and this is completely black and white.
This is actually quite relevant to me, because I do run a web site on which I've put various technical articles in the past. There is a distinct possibility that a book will be published based significantly on the content of those articles. How do you think the publisher would feel if people could go and look up the articles that I used to make available publicly on my web site, although I no longer choose to do so?
Win95-->Win98-->WinME--->WinXP is a case in point.
No, it's not. Microsoft Office and Microsoft Windows are about the worst examples of "typical" closed source projects imaginable.
Nothing for a user in XP, that he can't do with Win95.
Ladies and gentlemen, please do not feed the troll.
OTOH, look at apache over the last 8 years!
Closed Source is sexy to start off, offers all the thrills, bells and whistles. When users get hooked, in come the lock-ins, lock-outs, bundling, viruses, spam, bloat, messing up of the UI, etc.
As a professional developer who works on closed source projects, I find your generalisations deeply offensive. We provide industry leading products where new features are added based on what our clients want, our new versions offer improved performance not backwards steps, we normally turn around critical bugs and get fixes out to our clients in a matter of hours, there is no open source software around that even comes close to what we can do, and our company has developed from humble beginnings to a successful group with several product offerings over the same decade or so as Apache. None of your accusations about viruses, bloat, messed up UI etc. could fairly be aimed at us.
And the thing is, while I have a lot of respect for my employer, I'm not just saying this because I think the company is great. I'm giving one of a million examples of good development that happens to be closed source. None of the problems you mentioned is implied by keeping the source closed. You are spreading FUD, pure and simple.
Of course code that is peer reviewed by a large group of coders will become better over time.
But is a typical OS project really peer reviewed properly by more people than a typical closed source project of a comparable size?
Conversly, Open Source projects have a huge interested user base who can continue to review, submit bugs and improve the code over time.
There's nothing inherent about open source that means it has a wider user base or that more people should report bugs.
Improving the code implies that your users are also developers, and that they are prepared to invest the time to fix it for you. In some cases, this is true, and the results can be great. It's hardly a universal truth, though.
Weren't Reasoning mentioned here before, and didn't several people note then that most of the defects they were looking for were actually the sort of thing that automated software (such as theirs, for example) could spot? Any good project, open- or closed-source, will routinely run tools to scan for such flaws, and no serious development should have any.
The more serious question, since the one they appear to be asking has such an obvious and easy answer, is whether open-source development leads to significantly fewer logic errors. These require human understanding to identify and fix, and the question of whether a typical open-source project really does that better, as some OS advocates suggest, is a more interesting one.
I don't think that posting the information on the website would be effective enough.
Agreed entirely. Passive notifications for important information are just pathetic.
It's like web sites or ISPs where you sign up, and they have a set of Ts&Cs and a privacy policy, and then a caveat that they may change these at any time by putting the changes on their web site, and the changes take effect immediately. If you don't visit the web site during the minutes after the policy changes, while every spammer in the universe is downloading the mailing list they just made available after amending their previous privacy policy, I guess that's just too bad for you, huh?
I'm not sure what the legal position would be on adjusting Ts&Cs like that (e.g., if an ISP changed its AUP and then kicked a paying subscriber without refund for violating a condition he didn't know existed). It's scummy either way, yet plenty of places seem to do it.
Can you just bury it somewhere on the website which is the equivalent of a disused lavatory in an unlit basement with no stairs and a sign on the door saying "Beware of the Leopard"?
While on holiday in the Lake District a while back, some friends and I were going up to the top of Scafell Pike, the highest point in England. One of the paths was particularly treacherous, very steep and with lots of stones that slipped under foot. (Not good for those of us uncomfortable with heights!) After a few hundred metres, we got to the top of the path, only to find a sign there, facing toward anyone who was about to go down it.
It said, "Danger of death! Path under reconstruction! Keep off!"
People should be responsible for poor security they implement.
People should be responsible if they are negligent, I agree. OTOH, expecting perfect security, as some on this thread seem to be doing, is wishful thinking. The world doesn't work like that. Bank robberies happen, and sometimes they get away with it. Cracks happen, and sometimes they get away with that, too. You should take reasonable steps to secure your facilities and have a sensible contingency plan for when that security fails.
OK, I've read the relevant parts of that. I fail to see how a web cache "...complies with rules concerning the refreshing, reloading, or other updating of the material when specified by the person making the material available online in accordance with a generally accepted industry standard data communications protocol for the system or network..."
The industry standard is that when you request information from a web site, you get the current version. (As I noted elsewhere, browser caching is quite different to web caching in this respect.) Web caches may not match that expectation.
Interestingly, the law cited makes explicit provision for several of the concerns I expressed in earlier posts in this thread, notably the issues of keeping the data up-to-date and of the information provider getting information from those visiting their site directly.
The normal Internet convention is that when I update my site, changes are immediately visible to everyone. (NB: browser caching is not equivalent to web caching here for several reasons.) Also, visitors to my site normally leave information about their browsing that I might use, for example, to bill sponsors for advertising revenue. In light of this, it seems to me that typical web caches are pretty clearly in breach of the above conditions for legal protection.
It also seems that if I make available some information, which gets cached, and I then password protect the same information on my own site, the cache is again breaking the rules, since it wouldn't require the same password to access the information.
All in all, if that is the exemption I was referred to earlier in this thread, it looks as though the web caches are skating on very thin ice. If they did something like cloning material on a web site that was later removed in order to publish it in a book, I imagine they could wind up having a serious dispute with the publisher, or perhaps the author himself, either of whom might have a strong case that they suffered financially because of the actions of the caching site.
I'm not sure what you mean by "an outright copy." It's always an outright copy. But if the archive continues after the original site is taken down, it's still a cache.
My point is that the term "cache", as commonly used in computing, carries an inference that the cached material is identical to the original but faster to access. If the original is no longer there, or has changed, then you are no longer caching it, you are simply keeping a copy of the old data.
The legally exception requires that you adhere to internet standards.
Can you give a reference for this, and tell us where it applies (which jurisdiction), please? I'd be interested to see the actual legal wording.
In other words, by your NOT including a robots.txt file, you are implicitly granting them permission to cache your content.
Riiiiight. See you in court.
As I've just posted elsewhere, it is quite feasible that a site owner could be damaged if caches maintain information after the original site has been changed or taken down. For example, if updated information is placed on the original, this leaves the "cached" versions out of date and misleading anyone who reads them thinking they're seeing a perfect copy of the real thing.
There is also the issue of a site owner's right to know who is visiting them. Many popular web sites can and do collect information about how visitors move around their sites, the browsers and resolutions they use, etc. If the information on the site is being offered according to the normal conventions of the Internet, it is only fair to provide them the feedback normally returned by the conventions of the Internet. This information is valuable to them when they come to revise the site. Ultimately it is also in the site visitors' best interests for the site owner to have accurate information available, so that if they want to make the effort to improve usability, support minority browsers that some of their visitors use or whatever, they can do so.
On a related note, there are questions of advertising revenue etc. if a site is supported by sponsors who pay per-hit. It's not at all guaranteed that they will get their fair amount of sponsorship if most of those hits are seeing a web cached version.
This whole issue isn't nearly as black and white as the "information should be free" crowd are inevitably shouting already.
As you correctly point out in another post, copyright law has an exception for caching Internet content.
That may be true in some places, I don't know. Regardless, if the archive continues after the original site is taken down, it is no longer a cache, it is an outright copy.
And yes, this could be damaging. To give a close-to-home example, consider a case where a site gets/.ed so only a few people can see the real content. If that site is then updated in some critical way, the numerous caches all over the web won't be (at least not immediately, and it is clearly unreasonable to expect anyone publishing a website to notify them all). This means all the people following the link posted on/. to the Google cache or whatever will be reading out of date information, which could easily be detrimental to whoever owns the site.
You just became the idiot described in the Register article, whose outright evangelism and hyperbole cause the politicians to ignore them and their viewpoint in favour of more reasoned replies.
All in all, he's a very good speaker, and I don't get where the idea he's a raving lunatic comes from.
The problem with RMS is that he's a wildcard.
He is capable, as you say, of putting together a very coherent argument to support his beliefs, and of presenting it very professionally. This is good.
However, he is also capable of launching into spontaneous rants that are totally one-sided. He will completely ignore the good points of things he disagrees with, while outright exaggerating the damage done by something, or the negative effects he thinks it will have. His extreme views as expressed in these rants are often incompatible with any realistic outcome. Such rants very much do more harm than good, yet he has indulged in them on numerous occasions, both in print and with a live audience.
Someone so unpredictable is simply not a good figurehead for a political movement hoping to see something changed. The first rant would convince the politicians that he was an extremist whose views were unrealistic and whose goals were unattainable, and thus someone who contributes nothing useful to a constructive debate.
I think the article went on to say that despite it being against the people's wishes, it was going to pass. It's what the US wants, and it's what the corps want. It doesn't matter what the people think.
In Europe, both at EU level and in many countries within it, it's quite normal for governments to come down heavily in favour of a particular piece of legislation to begin with, but then to back off rapidly if faced with a backlash of popular opinion. The fact that this has been brought up now doesn't mean it will automatically get passed as it stands.
As for what the US or its big corps want, you're obviously not very familiar with Europe. With the notable exception of Tony Blair supporting Bush's invasion of Iraq (and in that case, look how the rest of Europe acted), Europeans aren't exactly known for towing the US party line. Our legal systems and governing bodies don't seem to be nearly as susceptible to corporate influence and bribes as the US equivalents.
Personally, here in the UK, I put this down to having more than two political parties with significant power, and bizarrely enough to having the House of Lords (our unelected second chamber, whose members normally stay for life, which the government is currently trying to do away with) as a check and balance on the whims of any incumbent majority party. But I digress...
Getting back to the plot, it does matter what the people think here, and if enough people make reasoned, informed objections, the politicians' opinions are likely to change. The problem, as the linked article in el Reg so insightfully noted, is that the average person complaining about this gets up on his holier-than-thou high horse and starts ranting. That will have exactly the opposite effect to what the advocates want, and let's face it, it probably deserves to.
By the way, MEP = Member of the European Parliament, who are elected representatives from European member states. How much real power they have is debatable, because there are other bodies involved at Europe level besides the EP, but certainly they have a significant influence on European policy.
MP = Member of Parliament, an elected representative of a national government (in the UK, and possibly elsewhere, though I don't know of any other country that uses that specific term). These guys do have real power. However, under current international agreements, certain "guidance" from Europe is pretty much required to be incorporated into national law in its member states within a defined timescale after it is passed at Europe level.
Thus MPs must pass laws that respect the European direction, and under some circumstances cases within the UK can wind up being taken to Europe if the UK law is inadequate in this regard. Human rights issues have seen several such cases since Europe passed much stronger HR rules than the UK used to have not so long ago.
Slashdot Mirror
Those two statements aren't in any way equivalent.
Just to be clear, I do not volunteer my time just to toot my horn or make a profit. I have given thousands of hours over the past 5-6 years helping out in very technical forums (not just writing amusing anecdotes on Slashdot for my own entertainment, which is hardly the same thing) and never made a penny from it. I post here anonymously, and do you see me plugging anything I've done for commercial reasons? No.
However, what you're proposing would mean that I could no longer volunteer my time to help in some ways, because doing so would directly affect my ability to take part in other activities that are rent-paying. I'm not volunteering my time in the latter case, I'm doing a job, for which I expect to be given credit and paid. At present, publishers might be interested in my work, because it's not publicly available. I know that several major ones will refuse to publish material that has been previously available without pretty solid guarantees that the author has exclusive rights to it, etc.
How do they do that, if you're not paying subscription fees?
If I put up information on a web site, for free, as a volunteer, then the public has no rights whatsoever, either legally or morally. Why the hell should they? They didn't do anything to earn them.
I'll give you a couple of examples where real damage can be done. There are certainly several other instances, but I hope these will suffice for now.
There have been cases where someone published some material on a subject that interested them on a web site, but later wanted to publish work based on it in something like a journal or a book. (Disclosure: I am currently in a similar position myself.)
Now, publishers get very nervous about publishing material that has previously been available in another form. If you're arguing that by putting it up on the web an author effectively forfeits all rights to control their work -- i.e., that the usual principles of copyright shouldn't apply for some reason in this medium -- then you're basically saying that anyone who might ever want to publish original material they wrote shouldn't ever make anything available on the web first. Given how much both the public and the author can potentially get out of that, provided that reasonable controls are in place -- there was a Slashdot story about a new programming book citing a preprint temporarily placed on the web just a few days ago -- this seems to be needlessly counterproductive to me.
Secondly, a bit closer to home, consider a company that has a critical story about it published on Slashdot. That company is likely to get a lot of traffic to its web site if the site is linked, and might well want to put up a rebuttal of any points made against it. It's only fair that visitors who go to check out the Slashdot story also see the company's response.
Now, we all know that Slashdot articles have seriously criticised businesses in the past, sometimes with justification, sometimes without. We all know that web sites get Slashdotted. We all know that people post links here to Google caches of sites, or just copy whole pages and post them here. In this sort of case, someone could suffer serious harm to their reputation because the audience of Slashdot only get to read things supporting a critical claim, without seeing (or even being aware of) a response from the criticised party in their defence.
Nicking someone's material and posting it here is blatant copyright infringement, and just because it's done by an AC and Slashdot claims that all posts are the responsibility of their authors doesn't necessarily make it legal. It amazes me, given a few of the things that get posted around here, that no-one has ever really attempted to sue Slashdot over this. Certainly things like circumventing the NYT's "free reg required" are very dicey, and given that everyone (including those running Slashdot) knows that it happens, I don't see how they'd have much of a defence.
In my personal opinion, and looking at the actual US law that's been quoted here, it seems that web sites caching material are also likely to be in breach of copyright laws for much the same reasons, doing much the same damage in some cases, and potentially subject to much the same penalties.
No, it doesn't. But it has the right to refuse entry to anyone who doesn't provide the information it requires. Banks do this if you try to enter before removing your crash helmet. Bars do it if you look under-age and can't produce ID.
I was referring to the post where someone said there was an exemption under copyright law for web caches. I assumed the parts of the DMCA that were cited here were that exemption. In that case the validity of the original claim appears to be less clear than was suggested.
Ah, I see. You're one of the people who, instead of discussing the issue on merits, decides unilaterally that he is above the law. So much for your credibility in any discussions around here, then.
If people like me listened to people like you, open source and many other good things would be dead.
Tell me, how often do you volunteer 10+ hours of your spare time in a week, to help out others with your knowledge, experience or skills? 20+ hours? Do you run a high traffic information web site? Do you answer questions on bulletin boards or Usenet? Do you contribute to open projects? From the tone of your comments, it doesn't sound like it, or you might have a little more respect for those who do.
Now tell me how often you personally use those resources. (You do subscribe to Slashdot, right? And you don't run any free or open source software, nor visit freely available web sites run by volunteers to get some information you wanted?) I'm guessing honest answers to these questions would make you look more than a little selfish.
That depends on the organisation of the team of course, but yes, that is basically my point. The fact that open source can be read or changed by anyone interested doesn't imply that it will be read or changed.
Ah, yes, the witty comeback because you have nothing more solid to offer. How terribly original.
You mean apart from
Yes, some of these things could have been done with 95 given enough effort. However, it would have required complete rewrites of several key subsystems, and a lot of effort to write the new tools. And the result of that work to improve Win95 would be... WinXP.
The problem is that while everything you say sounds good, it's mostly theoretical advantage that isn't borne out in practice.
If you feel it's not good enough, you can do something about it. But you can only do that if that you're a skilled software developer with enough free time to dedicate to getting up to speed on an existing project and then changing it to suit your needs, or if you have the resources to get somebody else qualified to do so.
Similarly, a code open to all does have some chance of being maintained after the original developers quit. But if it's something that took 50 developers to write originally, chances are that without a significant core of the original crew, no-one will ever get up to a high enough speed with it to do much useful maintenance. This is the same problem companies have when original team members leave established projects. Unless they were very good, so that their legacy includes clearly designed and implemented code with good supporting documentation, they are almost impossible to replace. Few people are that good.
This sort of thing is the big problem with the open source and free software advocacy today, IMHO. It's like the Great Code Reuse Myth(TM) of OO: great in theory, makes a very convincing argument, but somehow doesn't quite comes together in practice unless exceptional people are involved.
I'll have to take your word about the HTTP spec; I don't recall ever seeing what you describe, but I can't say I've read it in that much detail recently.
Regarding your other points...
Unfortunately, it won't pay my rent.
I spend a lot of my spare time helping out with free information and advice on-line, occasionally on this forum and frequently elsewhere. Mostly, I do it because people have helped me in the past, and I feel both a certain moral obligation to "return the favour" and a certain satisfaction knowing that I've helped someone out.
There comes a point, however, when I feel reasonably entitled to something more than a grateful newbie's "thank you", particularly when we're talking about the result of months of hard work. According to the law in my country and probably in yours, I'm entitled to do that without some freeloading commercial entity nicking my work and giving it away for free.
Sorry, but I don't think this is reasonable. That caching is part of the browser software, and as I've noted repeatedly, that is a different issue to the web caches we're discussing here.
Nothing in the HTTP spec, or in any other relevant Internet standards, provides for any caching of old content and supplying it when a straightforward HTTP request for a file is sent. You get the current file, or a defined error code.
That's lovely. Remind me again where in UK law there is any such provision? (For those who missed that, US copyright law provides for various "fair use" exemptions to the normal rule, while UK law provides far fewer.) If the Wayback Machine records content off my web site, and allows others to view it against my wishes when I have taken it down, then I think it is breaking UK copyright law, and this is completely black and white.
This is actually quite relevant to me, because I do run a web site on which I've put various technical articles in the past. There is a distinct possibility that a book will be published based significantly on the content of those articles. How do you think the publisher would feel if people could go and look up the articles that I used to make available publicly on my web site, although I no longer choose to do so?
No, it's not. Microsoft Office and Microsoft Windows are about the worst examples of "typical" closed source projects imaginable.
Ladies and gentlemen, please do not feed the troll.
As a professional developer who works on closed source projects, I find your generalisations deeply offensive. We provide industry leading products where new features are added based on what our clients want, our new versions offer improved performance not backwards steps, we normally turn around critical bugs and get fixes out to our clients in a matter of hours, there is no open source software around that even comes close to what we can do, and our company has developed from humble beginnings to a successful group with several product offerings over the same decade or so as Apache. None of your accusations about viruses, bloat, messed up UI etc. could fairly be aimed at us.
And the thing is, while I have a lot of respect for my employer, I'm not just saying this because I think the company is great. I'm giving one of a million examples of good development that happens to be closed source. None of the problems you mentioned is implied by keeping the source closed. You are spreading FUD, pure and simple.
But is a typical OS project really peer reviewed properly by more people than a typical closed source project of a comparable size?
There's nothing inherent about open source that means it has a wider user base or that more people should report bugs.
Improving the code implies that your users are also developers, and that they are prepared to invest the time to fix it for you. In some cases, this is true, and the results can be great. It's hardly a universal truth, though.
Weren't Reasoning mentioned here before, and didn't several people note then that most of the defects they were looking for were actually the sort of thing that automated software (such as theirs, for example) could spot? Any good project, open- or closed-source, will routinely run tools to scan for such flaws, and no serious development should have any.
The more serious question, since the one they appear to be asking has such an obvious and easy answer, is whether open-source development leads to significantly fewer logic errors. These require human understanding to identify and fix, and the question of whether a typical open-source project really does that better, as some OS advocates suggest, is a more interesting one.
Agreed entirely. Passive notifications for important information are just pathetic.
It's like web sites or ISPs where you sign up, and they have a set of Ts&Cs and a privacy policy, and then a caveat that they may change these at any time by putting the changes on their web site, and the changes take effect immediately. If you don't visit the web site during the minutes after the policy changes, while every spammer in the universe is downloading the mailing list they just made available after amending their previous privacy policy, I guess that's just too bad for you, huh?
I'm not sure what the legal position would be on adjusting Ts&Cs like that (e.g., if an ISP changed its AUP and then kicked a paying subscriber without refund for violating a condition he didn't know existed). It's scummy either way, yet plenty of places seem to do it.
While on holiday in the Lake District a while back, some friends and I were going up to the top of Scafell Pike, the highest point in England. One of the paths was particularly treacherous, very steep and with lots of stones that slipped under foot. (Not good for those of us uncomfortable with heights!) After a few hundred metres, we got to the top of the path, only to find a sign there, facing toward anyone who was about to go down it.
It said, "Danger of death! Path under reconstruction! Keep off!"
We were suitably impressed. :-)
You do realise that Europe alone has a technology market much bigger than the US, right?
People should be responsible if they are negligent, I agree. OTOH, expecting perfect security, as some on this thread seem to be doing, is wishful thinking. The world doesn't work like that. Bank robberies happen, and sometimes they get away with it. Cracks happen, and sometimes they get away with that, too. You should take reasonable steps to secure your facilities and have a sensible contingency plan for when that security fails.
OK, I've read the relevant parts of that. I fail to see how a web cache "...complies with rules concerning the refreshing, reloading, or other updating of the material when specified by the person making the material available online in accordance with a generally accepted industry standard data communications protocol for the system or network..."
The industry standard is that when you request information from a web site, you get the current version. (As I noted elsewhere, browser caching is quite different to web caching in this respect.) Web caches may not match that expectation.
Interestingly, the law cited makes explicit provision for several of the concerns I expressed in earlier posts in this thread, notably the issues of keeping the data up-to-date and of the information provider getting information from those visiting their site directly.
The normal Internet convention is that when I update my site, changes are immediately visible to everyone. (NB: browser caching is not equivalent to web caching here for several reasons.) Also, visitors to my site normally leave information about their browsing that I might use, for example, to bill sponsors for advertising revenue. In light of this, it seems to me that typical web caches are pretty clearly in breach of the above conditions for legal protection.
It also seems that if I make available some information, which gets cached, and I then password protect the same information on my own site, the cache is again breaking the rules, since it wouldn't require the same password to access the information.
All in all, if that is the exemption I was referred to earlier in this thread, it looks as though the web caches are skating on very thin ice. If they did something like cloning material on a web site that was later removed in order to publish it in a book, I imagine they could wind up having a serious dispute with the publisher, or perhaps the author himself, either of whom might have a strong case that they suffered financially because of the actions of the caching site.
My point is that the term "cache", as commonly used in computing, carries an inference that the cached material is identical to the original but faster to access. If the original is no longer there, or has changed, then you are no longer caching it, you are simply keeping a copy of the old data.
Can you give a reference for this, and tell us where it applies (which jurisdiction), please? I'd be interested to see the actual legal wording.
Riiiiight. See you in court.
As I've just posted elsewhere, it is quite feasible that a site owner could be damaged if caches maintain information after the original site has been changed or taken down. For example, if updated information is placed on the original, this leaves the "cached" versions out of date and misleading anyone who reads them thinking they're seeing a perfect copy of the real thing.
There is also the issue of a site owner's right to know who is visiting them. Many popular web sites can and do collect information about how visitors move around their sites, the browsers and resolutions they use, etc. If the information on the site is being offered according to the normal conventions of the Internet, it is only fair to provide them the feedback normally returned by the conventions of the Internet. This information is valuable to them when they come to revise the site. Ultimately it is also in the site visitors' best interests for the site owner to have accurate information available, so that if they want to make the effort to improve usability, support minority browsers that some of their visitors use or whatever, they can do so.
On a related note, there are questions of advertising revenue etc. if a site is supported by sponsors who pay per-hit. It's not at all guaranteed that they will get their fair amount of sponsorship if most of those hits are seeing a web cached version.
This whole issue isn't nearly as black and white as the "information should be free" crowd are inevitably shouting already.
That may be true in some places, I don't know. Regardless, if the archive continues after the original site is taken down, it is no longer a cache, it is an outright copy.
And yes, this could be damaging. To give a close-to-home example, consider a case where a site gets /.ed so only a few people can see the real content. If that site is then updated in some critical way, the numerous caches all over the web won't be (at least not immediately, and it is clearly unreasonable to expect anyone publishing a website to notify them all). This means all the people following the link posted on /. to the Google cache or whatever will be reading out of date information, which could easily be detrimental to whoever owns the site.
Yep, was just agreeing with you. :-)
You just became the idiot described in the Register article, whose outright evangelism and hyperbole cause the politicians to ignore them and their viewpoint in favour of more reasoned replies.
The problem with RMS is that he's a wildcard.
He is capable, as you say, of putting together a very coherent argument to support his beliefs, and of presenting it very professionally. This is good.
However, he is also capable of launching into spontaneous rants that are totally one-sided. He will completely ignore the good points of things he disagrees with, while outright exaggerating the damage done by something, or the negative effects he thinks it will have. His extreme views as expressed in these rants are often incompatible with any realistic outcome. Such rants very much do more harm than good, yet he has indulged in them on numerous occasions, both in print and with a live audience.
Someone so unpredictable is simply not a good figurehead for a political movement hoping to see something changed. The first rant would convince the politicians that he was an extremist whose views were unrealistic and whose goals were unattainable, and thus someone who contributes nothing useful to a constructive debate.
In Europe, both at EU level and in many countries within it, it's quite normal for governments to come down heavily in favour of a particular piece of legislation to begin with, but then to back off rapidly if faced with a backlash of popular opinion. The fact that this has been brought up now doesn't mean it will automatically get passed as it stands.
As for what the US or its big corps want, you're obviously not very familiar with Europe. With the notable exception of Tony Blair supporting Bush's invasion of Iraq (and in that case, look how the rest of Europe acted), Europeans aren't exactly known for towing the US party line. Our legal systems and governing bodies don't seem to be nearly as susceptible to corporate influence and bribes as the US equivalents.
Personally, here in the UK, I put this down to having more than two political parties with significant power, and bizarrely enough to having the House of Lords (our unelected second chamber, whose members normally stay for life, which the government is currently trying to do away with) as a check and balance on the whims of any incumbent majority party. But I digress...
Getting back to the plot, it does matter what the people think here, and if enough people make reasoned, informed objections, the politicians' opinions are likely to change. The problem, as the linked article in el Reg so insightfully noted, is that the average person complaining about this gets up on his holier-than-thou high horse and starts ranting. That will have exactly the opposite effect to what the advocates want, and let's face it, it probably deserves to.
By the way, MEP = Member of the European Parliament, who are elected representatives from European member states. How much real power they have is debatable, because there are other bodies involved at Europe level besides the EP, but certainly they have a significant influence on European policy.
MP = Member of Parliament, an elected representative of a national government (in the UK, and possibly elsewhere, though I don't know of any other country that uses that specific term). These guys do have real power. However, under current international agreements, certain "guidance" from Europe is pretty much required to be incorporated into national law in its member states within a defined timescale after it is passed at Europe level.
Thus MPs must pass laws that respect the European direction, and under some circumstances cases within the UK can wind up being taken to Europe if the UK law is inadequate in this regard. Human rights issues have seen several such cases since Europe passed much stronger HR rules than the UK used to have not so long ago.