This idea of lighting the darkness is behind the original copyright laws. To get the most light we want as many books as possible. Copyright was an answer to how do we get the next Ulysses or Connecticut Yankee or A Brief History of Time.
Copyright is now being used to maximize the profit to be made from the latest J'Lo single or Pokemon episode.
Copyright isn't about light anymore, it's about noise. If I echo from your noise I don't need to buy my own noise and the noise makers make less money.
Copyright was invented with a balance, an attempt to maximize both the production and the distribution of new sources of material. The current balance restricts both the distribution (by maximizing the supply/demand curve in favour of the producer) and the production (a producer needs to produce less new stuff if they can milk more money out of the old).
The real problem is that the courts and law-makers have forgotten (or never knew or were paid to forget) that Copyright is about lighting the darkness, about lighting the most tapers, not about making the person who invents a new source of fire filthy, stinkin' rich.
It looks like Orwells ability to divine our political future was dead on but his predictions on when technology would actually enable it was about 40-50 years off:-(
Way back in 1986, I was a student working at a CAD/CAM company (the system was written in FORTRAN!). Two weeks before a major deadline, shipping the next version to our biggest customer, the construction guys finished the new computer room. The company decided to move the VAX, but to be safe they hired DEC Support to actually move the machine.
It never came back on line. Ever.
After 8 days of trying to get it working again, DEC shipped us a new VAX swapped in our disks and finally got it working the next week.
Hell, he's Canadian and if you don't drink at least two beers a day, they'll deport your ass faster than you can say "Hockey Night in Canada".
What the hell are you talking about I only drink one "Ex" a day and they haven't deported me yet!
Of course also I drink a micky of CC a day, I can hum the theme to "Hockey Night in Canada" and I know that it used to run opposite "The Tommy Hunter Show" so they might just be cutting me some slack...
The worst potential competition for any organism can come from its own kind. The species consumes necessities. Growth is limited by that necessity which is present in the least amount. The least favorable condition controls the rate of growth. (Law of the Minimum)
--From "Lessons of Arrakis"
All through the early 90's I cursed Sun and IBM and HP and SGI because they were back stabbing each other, fighting over market share, while Microsoft grew and grew and grew and the Unix market shrunk and shrunk. Microsoft was always there, always with shitty products but with incredible focus on features and marketing.
Then in the late 90's a beam of hope, Linux started gaining popularity with it's focus on "unix" for the masses and then suddenly Apple was running Unix.
Please let this not be a return to the bad old days!
The actual demo is really unnecessary to the states case. Simply by asking to show the demo they have "proven" that States claim that a modularized windows is possible, indeed it is possible by somebody other than Microsoft. Microsoft used a cheezy legal trick to prevent the demo, indicating they had no effective rebuttal to this claim.
I really, really, really hope this is a good judge. There is plenty of good signs, she allowed this demo, but she's been *really* careful to give Microsoft the benefit of the doubt and every turn. Microsoft has been convicted and that conviction has been upheld on appeal, so she has only to set a fair and reasonable sentence.
The real concern I have is that she's been so good there is not going to be much room for an appeal either way...
While this particular story if of no interest (it's a subsiderary they bought out but now no longer even own for heavens sake) it does hightlight a problem with closed source solutions -- what if the product you spent millions on turns out to be based on stolen technology?
If this is the stolen part is core technology or technology you have become dependent upon (let's say disk compression technology so you can buy smaller disks for all your employees) what happens to you when the company is caught, gets fined enough that they to go belly up or stop support of the technology, and suddenly the owner of the technology wants either license fees or for you to purchase their "disk stacker" software?
This could be crippling and/or exhorbinantly expensive.
Let's reword the editorial comment to get the heart of the matter:
Next week Time Magazine will require you to read
the ads on pages 1-36 before reading the article you want on page 37. Don't complain, its their copyright;)
Time Magazine would be at least twice as expensive if you didn't have to flip through all the got milk like mike! ads to get to that article on page 37.
If we want to continue to get free content were going to need on-line advertising to work. Otherwise we're going to have to pay.
That said, attempting to do this with legal channels is stupid -- don't put the content up there unless you can make money off the individual page views. What these guys are doing should be perfectly legal. The only time this should be illegal is if you take the content and put under your own ads -- now that is a copyright violation.
This sounds like a company in a really bad situation. Cash flow is so bad they can't even afford to lay people off (layoffs don't affect cash flow for at least a month -- especially for senior people). They are looking to reduce salary by at least 5% and they don't care how. As a tech company most of their expenses are probably in salary.
Of course I could be wrong, they might be on the up and up and they might really be 6 months from a complete turn around...
If you work at this company you'll have to decide for yourself.
However, if you are in a situation like this and decide not to accept the pay cut be very careful in how decline the offer. Be very clear upon the wording of your "no thanks". What ever your choice of action DO NOT threaten to quit or you may find the company graciously accepting your resignation and showing you to the door, terminating all benefits and salary effective immediately.
I would recommend you get a letter saying that you do not wish to change the details of your employment from a lawyer and give that to management. If they ask to discuss it simply inform them that the letter clearly expresses your position and do not discuss it.
This kind of thing is often a trick to get a bunch of people to "resign" by saying no in the wrong way.
LOL -- that was exactly my reaction at the time -- this was the best thing AOL could do for it's shareholders and the dumbest thing TW could do.
It's interesting to note that at the time there were literally dozens of analysts talking about how AOL and TW had all of these synergies that were going pay off big time.
Thanks for all the hard work and effort to date Jordan! Take all your time and energy and put it into Mac X -- the OS of my next computer!
To all the "See BSD IS dying" trolls -- seems Jordan is leaving in a large part because of the bureaucracy and management overhead. Correct me if I'm wrong but aren't those signs of too much growth?
At my last company one of our customers did a security audit, their auditor gave us a list of security concerns that we then had to resolve to the auditors satisfaction. This list was pretty much identical to the current vulnerabilities list from Microsofts IIS/NT web pages.
Our product was running on Solaris.
We had quite the time convincing the auditor that our application was not vulnerable and that we had removed various.dlls from the installation (I quite honestly claimed they would never find the dvwssr.dll on our server:-)
Put into the contract that the auditors will have extensive experience in your OS, your web application environment, your type of network and, if possible, type of business. Too many times I've been "audited" by people who knew far less than my junior sys-admins and my company paid top dollar for the privledge.
Then make sure that you get to stay close to the auditors and make sure the technology guys really do have the advertised skills. Be ready to pull the plug and have an agreed upon mechanism for pulling the plug.
How about instead of my blank media taxes (I'm Canadian) going to "copyright holders" it goes to pay for copyright enforcement!
Of course, ethically it would be better not to collect the blank media taxes at all... after all I don't pirate software or music why am I paying fines (I even paid for zip on my windows box:-)
Imagine I have a Windows box, now Imagine I just recently reinstalled the OS, ah, but I repeat myself.
Speaking of repeating...
The real problem is that if you install, for instance, Windows and Office, and patch them to current "safe" levels you will be asked to agree to about 20 different EULAs -- all slightly different. You have the original install, the patches (which can not be installed at the same time as any other patch), the upgrade of IE, etc. etc.
Now add in installing all the basic tools; zip,
adobe reader, netscape (:-), java ide, etc.
By the time your machine is installed and usable you've "read and agreed" to about 100 different licenses, sometimes dozens from a single company.
Reading and understanding 100 contracts of this nature is a full days job for a trained lawyer! It's an impossible task for the average consumer/programmer.
It's time for clear laws that specify software liabilities (or lack thereof!) and prevent this kind of EULA overload that essentially forces you to either agree to everything or don't use the technology. I think we can all agree that not using the technology is not really a viable option for the bulk of people in today's society.
It will be interesting to see the effect of all this testimony on the trial. Microsoft can't be doing itself any favours with abrupt turn-abouts like this.
I'm sure the way the judge will read things like AMD's CEO testifing on Microsoft's behalf and being rewarded with Microsoft support for AMD's new 64bit Hammer
processor a scant 8 days later will not be good.
You have to love it when a companies own testimony and witnesses show what that they are still willing to do all the things the were just convicted of.
My brother is a cop and he said one of the most important things you have to do as a cop is remember that you are sometimes seeing basically good people on the worst day of their entire lives; that not everybody you meet is criminal scum.
This is the same problem with the media; we are always seeing the culture at it's worst or only seeing the worst parts of it's culture. You don't see the bakers, clerks, teachers, nurses, doctors, scientists of a culture you see it's brutal armies and tyrannical leaders, it's terrorists and suicide bombers.
This is the real source of intolerance -- you never see anything from the bulk of foreign cultures that are worth saving.
Does somebody have a "registration free" link to the real article:-)
My kids love Neopets and Lego. These are great sites for kids and have great navigation -- the never get hung up at these sites. Don't get me started on Disney -- I have to practically navigate for them when they go to Disney.
One thing that kids do a lot (my sample is about 15 kids -- my 2, nephews and nieces and the kids friends) is click all over the webpage if the computer "gets slow" (this kills windows 95:-).
They also tend to get extremely frustrated if they can't figure out how something works. Really bad or complicated user interfaces at web sites that are important to them (Pokemon, Digimon, etc.) can start them crying. If they leave a web site for this reason they may never go back.
Teaching my 6 and 8 year olds about banner ads only took a couple of minutes. The 6 year old once asked if an ad for "increasing your internet speed" was something I wanted him to look into:-)
Of course my wife or I are almost always in the room with them when their surfing so they can ask for help if they get into trouble.
The 6 year old prefers Mac X, then Linux and then Windows 98. The 8 year old likes Windows and Mac X but doesn't like Linux. There's no accounting for taste I guess.
The authors are not against used books. They are not against libraries. They are not trying to force a "one reader one book" Big Brother society upon us.
If I go to a book signing an author I do not expect the author to tell me to check the book out of the library. I fully expect them to try to get me to buy a book from the book store they are signing in front of. I don't feel they are against libraries or used books for doing this.
This doesn't make them "anti-library" any more than the Toyota dealer not sending customers to Tony's Used Toyota Dealer makes them anti-car-rental-agencies or anti-used-cars. It's common business practice not to recommend customers shop somewhere else!
What the guild is saying is that Amazon by pushing used book sales on the same page as the new book sales for recently released books damages an authors sales by pushing customers to used books. Authors should consider linking to Barnes and Noble or some such site instead of referring potential readers to Amazon.
There is no slippery slope here, move along.
I think the guild is well within their rights to try to maximize their sales by referring potential customers to new book sellers (where they make money) rather than to used book sellers (where they don't). I think Amazon is well within their rights to push their used book sales.
Wow, when I read biometric data I had images of fingerprinting, retinal scanning and a dna sample.
Nope, just a picture and demographic data. Is this a slippery slope concern or just a massive over-reaction?
As licenses get used increasingly for proof of identity we can only expect this kind of increase in the security of the id cards.
Up here in Ontario we've been doing this for years for drivers licenses and government health cards. So far there hasn't been any use of the data (that I know of) for anything other than printing the photo id cards.
The battle to be fought here is not to prevent these cards from existing, it's going to happen. Work on ensuring that the cards are only proof of identity and are not connected in every which way to every database in existance. Fight for an internally consistent card that only proves you are who you claim to be, then every other database can just look you up. Fight against the shared databases not against the cards themselves.
For instance the Canadian Federal government put together a big database tracking all sorts of personal information about every Canadian tax payer -- they can do this with out without id cards.
The war for anonymity was lost on September 11th. Those of us concerned about privacy didn't get to the field. Fall back and fight for real privacy.
And remember folks, nobody listens to the people wearing the tin foil hats!
I too am willing to pay. I've filled in every yahoo survey and sent them several email saying so. (In fact I have paid -- I upgraded my mail box to 25Mb for $19.95).
And like you I don't want to see ads if I do pay.
Now, if only Slashdot would use something other than PayPal:-)
Slashdot Mirror
The Wizards link is here. Why didn't the submitter link to the original?
:-)
:-)
Very cool. I'm in the midst of documenting a campaign for 3rd edition -- I guess I'll submit the intro
Thanks for the link! News for nerds indeed
Copyright is now being used to maximize the profit to be made from the latest J'Lo single or Pokemon episode.
Copyright isn't about light anymore, it's about noise. If I echo from your noise I don't need to buy my own noise and the noise makers make less money.
Copyright was invented with a balance, an attempt to maximize both the production and the distribution of new sources of material. The current balance restricts both the distribution (by maximizing the supply/demand curve in favour of the producer) and the production (a producer needs to produce less new stuff if they can milk more money out of the old).
The real problem is that the courts and law-makers have forgotten (or never knew or were paid to forget) that Copyright is about lighting the darkness, about lighting the most tapers, not about making the person who invents a new source of fire filthy, stinkin' rich.
It looks like Orwells ability to divine our political future was dead on but his predictions on when technology would actually enable it was about 40-50 years off :-(
Way back in 1986, I was a student working at a CAD/CAM company (the system was written in FORTRAN!). Two weeks before a major deadline, shipping the next version to our biggest customer, the construction guys finished the new computer room. The company decided to move the VAX, but to be safe they hired DEC Support to actually move the machine.
It never came back on line. Ever.
After 8 days of trying to get it working again, DEC shipped us a new VAX swapped in our disks and finally got it working the next week.
2 days before our deadline.
What the hell are you talking about I only drink one "Ex" a day and they haven't deported me yet!
Of course also I drink a micky of CC a day, I can hum the theme to "Hockey Night in Canada" and I know that it used to run opposite "The Tommy Hunter Show" so they might just be cutting me some slack ...
All through the early 90's I cursed Sun and IBM and HP and SGI because they were back stabbing each other, fighting over market share, while Microsoft grew and grew and grew and the Unix market shrunk and shrunk. Microsoft was always there, always with shitty products but with incredible focus on features and marketing.
Then in the late 90's a beam of hope, Linux started gaining popularity with it's focus on "unix" for the masses and then suddenly Apple was running Unix.
Please let this not be a return to the bad old days!
I really, really, really hope this is a good judge. There is plenty of good signs, she allowed this demo, but she's been *really* careful to give Microsoft the benefit of the doubt and every turn. Microsoft has been convicted and that conviction has been upheld on appeal, so she has only to set a fair and reasonable sentence.
The real concern I have is that she's been so good there is not going to be much room for an appeal either way ...
If this is the stolen part is core technology or technology you have become dependent upon (let's say disk compression technology so you can buy smaller disks for all your employees) what happens to you when the company is caught, gets fined enough that they to go belly up or stop support of the technology, and suddenly the owner of the technology wants either license fees or for you to purchase their "disk stacker" software?
This could be crippling and/or exhorbinantly expensive.
Time Magazine would be at least twice as expensive if you didn't have to flip through all the got milk like mike! ads to get to that article on page 37.
If we want to continue to get free content were going to need on-line advertising to work. Otherwise we're going to have to pay.
That said, attempting to do this with legal channels is stupid -- don't put the content up there unless you can make money off the individual page views. What these guys are doing should be perfectly legal. The only time this should be illegal is if you take the content and put under your own ads -- now that is a copyright violation.
Of course I could be wrong, they might be on the up and up and they might really be 6 months from a complete turn around ...
If you work at this company you'll have to decide for yourself.
However, if you are in a situation like this and decide not to accept the pay cut be very careful in how decline the offer. Be very clear upon the wording of your "no thanks". What ever your choice of action DO NOT threaten to quit or you may find the company graciously accepting your resignation and showing you to the door, terminating all benefits and salary effective immediately.
I would recommend you get a letter saying that you do not wish to change the details of your employment from a lawyer and give that to management. If they ask to discuss it simply inform them that the letter clearly expresses your position and do not discuss it.
This kind of thing is often a trick to get a bunch of people to "resign" by saying no in the wrong way.
LOL -- that was exactly my reaction at the time -- this was the best thing AOL could do for it's shareholders and the dumbest thing TW could do.
It's interesting to note that at the time there were literally dozens of analysts talking about how AOL and TW had all of these synergies that were going pay off big time.
To all the "See BSD IS dying" trolls -- seems Jordan is leaving in a large part because of the bureaucracy and management overhead. Correct me if I'm wrong but aren't those signs of too much growth?
At least Compaq has some actual assets to offer HP -- so maybe, just maybe, Carly won't have to take up poetry in 2005 :-)
Sometimes they really do need to be thrown out -- let's recycle instead of landfilling!
Our product was running on Solaris.
We had quite the time convincing the auditor that our application was not vulnerable and that we had removed various .dlls from the installation (I quite honestly claimed they would never find the dvwssr.dll on our server :-)
Put into the contract that the auditors will have extensive experience in your OS, your web application environment, your type of network and, if possible, type of business. Too many times I've been "audited" by people who knew far less than my junior sys-admins and my company paid top dollar for the privledge.
Then make sure that you get to stay close to the auditors and make sure the technology guys really do have the advertised skills. Be ready to pull the plug and have an agreed upon mechanism for pulling the plug.
Of course, ethically it would be better not to collect the blank media taxes at all ... after all I don't pirate software or music why am I paying fines (I even paid for zip on my windows box :-)
Speaking of repeating ...
The real problem is that if you install, for instance, Windows and Office, and patch them to current "safe" levels you will be asked to agree to about 20 different EULAs -- all slightly different. You have the original install, the patches (which can not be installed at the same time as any other patch), the upgrade of IE, etc. etc.
Now add in installing all the basic tools; zip, adobe reader, netscape (:-), java ide, etc.
By the time your machine is installed and usable you've "read and agreed" to about 100 different licenses, sometimes dozens from a single company.
Reading and understanding 100 contracts of this nature is a full days job for a trained lawyer! It's an impossible task for the average consumer/programmer.
It's time for clear laws that specify software liabilities (or lack thereof!) and prevent this kind of EULA overload that essentially forces you to either agree to everything or don't use the technology. I think we can all agree that not using the technology is not really a viable option for the bulk of people in today's society.
I'm sure the way the judge will read things like AMD's CEO testifing on Microsoft's behalf and being rewarded with Microsoft support for AMD's new 64bit Hammer processor a scant 8 days later will not be good.
You have to love it when a companies own testimony and witnesses show what that they are still willing to do all the things the were just convicted of.
This is the same problem with the media; we are always seeing the culture at it's worst or only seeing the worst parts of it's culture. You don't see the bakers, clerks, teachers, nurses, doctors, scientists of a culture you see it's brutal armies and tyrannical leaders, it's terrorists and suicide bombers.
This is the real source of intolerance -- you never see anything from the bulk of foreign cultures that are worth saving.
My kids love Neopets and Lego. These are great sites for kids and have great navigation -- the never get hung up at these sites. Don't get me started on Disney -- I have to practically navigate for them when they go to Disney.
One thing that kids do a lot (my sample is about 15 kids -- my 2, nephews and nieces and the kids friends) is click all over the webpage if the computer "gets slow" (this kills windows 95 :-).
They also tend to get extremely frustrated if they can't figure out how something works. Really bad or complicated user interfaces at web sites that are important to them (Pokemon, Digimon, etc.) can start them crying. If they leave a web site for this reason they may never go back.
Teaching my 6 and 8 year olds about banner ads only took a couple of minutes. The 6 year old once asked if an ad for "increasing your internet speed" was something I wanted him to look into :-)
Of course my wife or I are almost always in the room with them when their surfing so they can ask for help if they get into trouble.
The 6 year old prefers Mac X, then Linux and then Windows 98. The 8 year old likes Windows and Mac X but doesn't like Linux. There's no accounting for taste I guess.
If I go to a book signing an author I do not expect the author to tell me to check the book out of the library. I fully expect them to try to get me to buy a book from the book store they are signing in front of. I don't feel they are against libraries or used books for doing this.
This doesn't make them "anti-library" any more than the Toyota dealer not sending customers to Tony's Used Toyota Dealer makes them anti-car-rental-agencies or anti-used-cars. It's common business practice not to recommend customers shop somewhere else!
What the guild is saying is that Amazon by pushing used book sales on the same page as the new book sales for recently released books damages an authors sales by pushing customers to used books. Authors should consider linking to Barnes and Noble or some such site instead of referring potential readers to Amazon.
There is no slippery slope here, move along.
I think the guild is well within their rights to try to maximize their sales by referring potential customers to new book sellers (where they make money) rather than to used book sellers (where they don't). I think Amazon is well within their rights to push their used book sales.
Frankly this whole thread is pretty stupid.
I, personally was terrified when I heard Peter Jackson was connected in ANY way with that project ...
Although "The Frightners" was pretty good ...
I hope Sony gets fees when this gets dismissed
As licenses get used increasingly for proof of identity we can only expect this kind of increase in the security of the id cards.
Up here in Ontario we've been doing this for years for drivers licenses and government health cards. So far there hasn't been any use of the data (that I know of) for anything other than printing the photo id cards.
The battle to be fought here is not to prevent these cards from existing, it's going to happen. Work on ensuring that the cards are only proof of identity and are not connected in every which way to every database in existance. Fight for an internally consistent card that only proves you are who you claim to be, then every other database can just look you up. Fight against the shared databases not against the cards themselves.
For instance the Canadian Federal government put together a big database tracking all sorts of personal information about every Canadian tax payer -- they can do this with out without id cards.
The war for anonymity was lost on September 11th. Those of us concerned about privacy didn't get to the field. Fall back and fight for real privacy.
And remember folks, nobody listens to the people wearing the tin foil hats!
And like you I don't want to see ads if I do pay.
Now, if only Slashdot would use something other than PayPal