I'm sorry if I misled you by suggesting I believed this would only apply to pirates... obviously, it will apply to ANY "distributor" of the information or crack, be that a research periodical, 2600, or your mom. I'm as pissed at the way the DMCA has been applied to researchers as anyone.
I was just pointing out that no one's going to say a copyright owner doesn't own their own copyright (for example), and that individual consumers shouldn't worry about cracking their devices if they're distributing or publishing their cracks.
As for the common sense of the recent applications of the DMCA... it's a blurred line. You can take either side. If you owned (for instance) a software company that produced Internet filters, and really your only substantial product was the list of sites that are blocked... you'd think it's just "common sense" to protect your list with all due legislation. I don't agree with that reasoning, but it's less certain where the line of "common sense" lies. Constitutional arguments are not always "common sense," though I'll side with the constitution any day of the week.
If I am to take your argument to its logical conclusion, I would have to ask how many "essential" conversations do you have at your MUCH more necessary home phone? Why do you even have a home phone? Why can't you wait until you SEE the person face to face to talk to them? Ask yourself, would you be as angry at those "morons" at the grocery store if they were talking to their spouse who was walking with them? What is your objection really?
It's all about convenience - hardly anything ever invented has been pure "necessity." The wheel and the aqueduct are convenient inventions, but are by no means necessary. They're at least as "annoying" as cell phones - lord, those wheels are noisy rumbling down the road... and those aqueducts! What an eye-sore!
But all of these things, cell phones included, improve our lives more than just superficially - cell phones can be used to call your sorority sisters... or to call for an ambulance. If the benefits, both for convenience and for improving quality of life, didn't outweigh the annoyances that accompany a technology, it wouldn't survive.
All that musing aside, the bottom line is that, while you're at home denying the march of technological progress, I'll be e-mailing and calling my friends using my portable hardware and meeting everyone at the movie theater. To each his own, I guess.
Regardless of how a very literal reading of this legislation looks, I find it unlikely that it would be enforced in ways that don't make any sense, like stopping a band from distributing its own material. I have some (small) amount of faith in the American justice system, and I can't believe that any court would fine or imprison an artist for trying to freely distribute their own material.
Additionally, it seems unlikely that the new laws would be enforced against anyone who wasn't distributing their cracked versions of a movie/mp3/program. Without that public activity, they don't really have any practical legal way of knowing that you've broken into their watermarking system. The "intent to distribute" language is there to catch people who put their cracks up on a website or P2P network, but who may not have had any actual hits yet.
So, should we be angry and afraid at the path this leads us down? Yes, certainly. But is this the "end of fair use" that everyone's been predicting for so long? Probably not. Have faith that common sense will prevail - if not in Congress, then in the courts and the enforcement agencies.
Is anyone else reminded of the discs they used on SeaQuest? Those were about this size, but they came in mini-disc style cases. I love it when technology catches up with SF predictions.
In some ways, we'll never catch up to SeaQuest, though. I don't imagine there are many hackers who look like Jonathan Brandis, for instance.
We've already got Disney characters cavorting with Final Fantasy characters in Square's next big game... now are we going to have Tux doing Stan Lee-style cameos in Disney movies?
I suppose Tux already got cast in Fight Club, so this wouldn't be much of a stretch.
Cloning is technically not equal to stem cell research - this is true. HOWEVER, constructing an organ, or even just a tissue, from ANY type of human stem cells IS cloning - it's known as therapeutic tissue cloning. That's what was done here. Language to ban therapeutic tissue cloning has been (and probably still is) in at least one bill that's somewhere in the legislative system. I haven't followed it for a while, but I read plenty about it a couple months ago. Look it up.
He banned public money because it was the only thing he had control over, and thus the only area where he had to straddle the fence in a vain attempt to appease his constituency on both sides. He actually appeased neither side - and if you follow the response of both sides of the debate after that announcement, you'll see that there were a great many stem cell proponents who were still very worried, and many opponents of the research who thought that GW had betrayed them.
His administration, however, has continued to fight, through congressional channels, to ban all kinds of cloning - tissue cloning included. As organs grown from ANY stem cells are the products of cloning, it would seem that Bush has continued working to undermine stem cell research, despite his apparent limited support of it. It's not a question of public funding - it's much more extreme than that.
Check the record of his administration - they've consistently pushed for the banning of ALL types of cloning, tissue or otherwise, which would include stem cells of all types. They don't want any genetic replicas of any human tissues, which is a completely unwarranted request. I never suggested that the stem cells in the article were embryonic.
This is only the first of innumerable successes to come... congratulations to the U.S. government for working tirelessly to push this sort of amazing work out of the country. Though this sort of research isn't completely impossible to undertake here in the U.S. (yet), the current administration has tried its hardest to make it impossible. I hope the same sort of knee-jerk conservative behavior isn't going on elsewhere around the globe.
The sweetest day will be when George W. Bush is the one who needs a new thymus (or any other organ which will follow this breakthrough). I hope he chokes on it... in a figurative sense, I guess.
-Ahem- They were both free, if you'll refer to my original reply to your post. And I wasn't suggesting that they "stole" anything but their OS - I was just saying that they didn't come up with anything new, but took someone else's idea and made their own product which was almost exactly the same.
It's more like if McDonald's, when it started, stole the menu ideas, building plans, and possible locations that Burger King, Wendy's, and White Castle were looking at... then, after they gained a foothold from that and made lots of money off of someone else's work... well, that's where the analogy falls apart. The point being, your statement is an absurd oversimplification. MS didn't "come out with a killer sandwich" - they copied someone else's sandwich, screwed with it for a while, and EVENTUALLY made it better. Not necessarily strictly illegal in and of itself... but then they threw a proverbial brick through the window of the restaurant that they stole the sandwich idea from! Which is why they went to court in the first place, like any immature teenager who doesn't respect other people's property.
I'm not saying they didn't ultimately make a better product, but the ends do not justify the means, and the path they took is much more complicated and less black and white than you seemed to indicate in your post.
... but wasn't there a time when both IE and Netscape charged for the install CDs? However, if memory serves, both were available to DOWNLOAD for free. I distinctly recall downloading Netscape, at least, back in the day. And for a long time in the beginning, IE wasn't nearly the best - it only really started eating into the Netscape market AFTER it got more stable and faster than the Netscape code... not to mention being bundled with Windoze. At first, it was neither more stable nor faster than Netscape.
IE outpaced Netscape merely because MS utilized their monopoly position to kill the company - not only by the whole bundling issue, but because they had an enormous amount of resources to throw at the problem, compared to Netscape. Those are the perks of cornering one market - you can use the capital gained therein to corner whatever other markets you want to. Call me crazy, but I think that's why we have anti-trust laws.
I have to try to start converting my friends. I think they'll be amenable to the idea. I actually just showed Mozilla to my dad... he said, "Where do I download that from?"
Andreessen has a point - the browser is, in probably 95% of cases, practically invisible to the user these days. The average user doesn't care enough to start another browser war. And really, what good would a browser war do at this point? It will be impossible to de-throne MS until someone comes up with a compelling new service or feature that MS doesn't and/or can't immediately offer. I don't know if that's even possible.
But the end of his article makes the most compelling argument to abandon Internet Explorer for Mozilla - form factor! I'm proud to proclaim that I, for one, love the Mozilla form factor. It beats IE hands down - skins, tabbed browsing... and the fact that it's open source doesn't hurt my opinion of it either. It's just more friendly - and that's where you really win users. It's not how you corner a market (MS never could have done it if they were friendly), but it's how you get a cult following. Props to the Mozilla team! And don't listen to the naysayers.
And here I thought I was the only one currently playing A Link to the Past. I just got to the fourth dungeon in the Dark World. Warcraft III will be good (I procured a copy of the beta), but you can't beat classic Zelda action. I'd rather play many an SNES game before Warcraft III.
This illustrates one of the main reasons I hate to call myself an American sometimes: I live in a country that claims to be the pillar of freedom and democracy in a world full of autocracies and downtrodden masses. And yet my illustrious government routinely violates what our founders called the most basic precept of any successful democracy - the freedom of expression, speech without fear of government suppression or intervention.
And what horrible conditions could force them (-ahem- reluctantly, of course) to override the very first Amendment ever placed on our Constitution? It's not the actions of hate groups, bordering on terrorism, which spark the courts and Congress into action. Last I heard, the KKK could still do basically whatever they wanted to, essentially unchecked. No, what our great government, the leaders of the free world, get up in arms about is -duhn duhn DUHN- Corporate Interests. Shocked faces all around, I know. But it makes me sick. I wish the folks in Washington would practice some of that integrity they so often laud on themselves and flaunt during elections. American government has done so many great things, for our country and for the world, but the level of hypocrisy and problems that they propagate is unacceptable in the light of the awesome potential representative democracy has to eliminate such things.
There's nothing new about this sort of input device... what we need is an OUTPUT device to use with fighting games. In other words, something that hooks your PlayStation up to the appendages (or perhaps the brain stems) of two people, and then stimulates their muscles with electric shocks. Thus, as you play Tekken 3, you can either watch and control the action on screen, or you can watch your little brother Sean and his annoying friend Kenny duke it out with you and your buddies controlling their every move. Watch in awe as spindly little Kenny unleashes a 9 hit combo on your little brother who, sadly, forgot to block. This thing would sell faster than a new dating sim in Japan. In fact, I think my new corporation... uh... Feedback Reality Gaming, will have it's IPO soon. I'll let you all know. And I want CowboyNeal as my Vice President.
I find it incredibly pretentious and ignorant on the part of any members of the big business community who assume it's even possible to remake the Internet in their own image. Creating a new business model with longevity and stability is one thing, but the broad restructuring that the article talks about would be nigh on impossible for any organization to carry out, even the government. The only plan that has any sort of credibility would be to start from scratch and create a new "super Internet." The existing infrastructure is simply too ingrained, in more ways than one, to uproot it, dust it off and polish it.
Thus, the real question we should be addressing is this: how would a newer, more censored, more expensive, but ultimately faster and "cleaner" Internet threaten the user-base and existing support for the current Internet? Even if our existing forum for the free exchange of ideas wasn't completely taken over by The Man, the existence of a more appealing alternative forces a long, painful period of stagnation on the first Internet. In the end, it could have the same effect as a violent restructuring of the Internet as we know it.
If you think I'm wrong about the probability of this trend, you need look no further than America Online. AOL has proved that people will jump at anything that is a) user friendly, b) well marketed, and c) has catch-phrases like "You've got mail!" The user-base AOL has garnered since its inception demonstrates how afraid many people are of the "raw" Internet, and how they cling to portals to hold their hand. Consider for a moment, what would have happened if AOL had, in addition to its superficial appeal, a stable, high speed network, with promises of security and support that were actually fulfilled? This is the specter we face in a new Corporate controlled Internet, and it will be very appealing to not only the public at large, but also to all the script kiddies, techies, haXors, and, yes, slash-dotters out there as well. Who wouldn't love to be connected to a network that has all the aforementioned features?
The price we'll pay is in the civil liberties of the medium. I don't think that we can achieve the Internet advancement that Big Business wants without the system being controlled BY THEM. There's always been a sort of give and take between technological advancement and personal freedom. You decide which is more important. I'm open to debate on this subject - let me know how you feel!
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I just wanted to express my exasperation at the two negative replies to your post - don't listen to them! If only I had mod points...
I'm by no means sure, but I have a feeling it wouldn't be difficult to get the ACLU to pick up such a ludicrous case.
Sorry, that should be "if they're NOT distributing or publishing their cracks."
I was just pointing out that no one's going to say a copyright owner doesn't own their own copyright (for example), and that individual consumers shouldn't worry about cracking their devices if they're distributing or publishing their cracks.
As for the common sense of the recent applications of the DMCA... it's a blurred line. You can take either side. If you owned (for instance) a software company that produced Internet filters, and really your only substantial product was the list of sites that are blocked... you'd think it's just "common sense" to protect your list with all due legislation. I don't agree with that reasoning, but it's less certain where the line of "common sense" lies. Constitutional arguments are not always "common sense," though I'll side with the constitution any day of the week.
It's all about convenience - hardly anything ever invented has been pure "necessity." The wheel and the aqueduct are convenient inventions, but are by no means necessary. They're at least as "annoying" as cell phones - lord, those wheels are noisy rumbling down the road... and those aqueducts! What an eye-sore!
But all of these things, cell phones included, improve our lives more than just superficially - cell phones can be used to call your sorority sisters... or to call for an ambulance. If the benefits, both for convenience and for improving quality of life, didn't outweigh the annoyances that accompany a technology, it wouldn't survive.
All that musing aside, the bottom line is that, while you're at home denying the march of technological progress, I'll be e-mailing and calling my friends using my portable hardware and meeting everyone at the movie theater. To each his own, I guess.
Additionally, it seems unlikely that the new laws would be enforced against anyone who wasn't distributing their cracked versions of a movie/mp3/program. Without that public activity, they don't really have any practical legal way of knowing that you've broken into their watermarking system. The "intent to distribute" language is there to catch people who put their cracks up on a website or P2P network, but who may not have had any actual hits yet.
So, should we be angry and afraid at the path this leads us down? Yes, certainly. But is this the "end of fair use" that everyone's been predicting for so long? Probably not. Have faith that common sense will prevail - if not in Congress, then in the courts and the enforcement agencies.
If DRM had been employed on all recordings of the original silent track, none of this ever would have happened. Obviously. ;-)
Is anyone else reminded of the discs they used on SeaQuest? Those were about this size, but they came in mini-disc style cases. I love it when technology catches up with SF predictions.
In some ways, we'll never catch up to SeaQuest, though. I don't imagine there are many hackers who look like Jonathan Brandis, for instance.
I'd hate to work in tech support after this technology starts proliferating...
Instead of: "The cup holder on my computer is broken!"
It will become: "The coin slot on my computer ate my quarter! I was just trying to pay for my Amazon order in cash..."
... I really hope you're joking.
We've already got Disney characters cavorting with Final Fantasy characters in Square's next big game... now are we going to have Tux doing Stan Lee-style cameos in Disney movies?
I suppose Tux already got cast in Fight Club, so this wouldn't be much of a stretch.
;-)
Cloning is technically not equal to stem cell research - this is true. HOWEVER, constructing an organ, or even just a tissue, from ANY type of human stem cells IS cloning - it's known as therapeutic tissue cloning. That's what was done here. Language to ban therapeutic tissue cloning has been (and probably still is) in at least one bill that's somewhere in the legislative system. I haven't followed it for a while, but I read plenty about it a couple months ago. Look it up.
He banned public money because it was the only thing he had control over, and thus the only area where he had to straddle the fence in a vain attempt to appease his constituency on both sides. He actually appeased neither side - and if you follow the response of both sides of the debate after that announcement, you'll see that there were a great many stem cell proponents who were still very worried, and many opponents of the research who thought that GW had betrayed them.
His administration, however, has continued to fight, through congressional channels, to ban all kinds of cloning - tissue cloning included. As organs grown from ANY stem cells are the products of cloning, it would seem that Bush has continued working to undermine stem cell research, despite his apparent limited support of it. It's not a question of public funding - it's much more extreme than that.
Check the record of his administration - they've consistently pushed for the banning of ALL types of cloning, tissue or otherwise, which would include stem cells of all types. They don't want any genetic replicas of any human tissues, which is a completely unwarranted request. I never suggested that the stem cells in the article were embryonic.
Who sounds stupid now? Don't be such a troll.
This is only the first of innumerable successes to come... congratulations to the U.S. government for working tirelessly to push this sort of amazing work out of the country. Though this sort of research isn't completely impossible to undertake here in the U.S. (yet), the current administration has tried its hardest to make it impossible. I hope the same sort of knee-jerk conservative behavior isn't going on elsewhere around the globe.
The sweetest day will be when George W. Bush is the one who needs a new thymus (or any other organ which will follow this breakthrough). I hope he chokes on it... in a figurative sense, I guess.
-Ahem- They were both free, if you'll refer to my original reply to your post. And I wasn't suggesting that they "stole" anything but their OS - I was just saying that they didn't come up with anything new, but took someone else's idea and made their own product which was almost exactly the same.
It's more like if McDonald's, when it started, stole the menu ideas, building plans, and possible locations that Burger King, Wendy's, and White Castle were looking at... then, after they gained a foothold from that and made lots of money off of someone else's work... well, that's where the analogy falls apart. The point being, your statement is an absurd oversimplification. MS didn't "come out with a killer sandwich" - they copied someone else's sandwich, screwed with it for a while, and EVENTUALLY made it better. Not necessarily strictly illegal in and of itself... but then they threw a proverbial brick through the window of the restaurant that they stole the sandwich idea from! Which is why they went to court in the first place, like any immature teenager who doesn't respect other people's property.
I'm not saying they didn't ultimately make a better product, but the ends do not justify the means, and the path they took is much more complicated and less black and white than you seemed to indicate in your post.
... but wasn't there a time when both IE and Netscape charged for the install CDs? However, if memory serves, both were available to DOWNLOAD for free. I distinctly recall downloading Netscape, at least, back in the day. And for a long time in the beginning, IE wasn't nearly the best - it only really started eating into the Netscape market AFTER it got more stable and faster than the Netscape code... not to mention being bundled with Windoze. At first, it was neither more stable nor faster than Netscape.
IE outpaced Netscape merely because MS utilized their monopoly position to kill the company - not only by the whole bundling issue, but because they had an enormous amount of resources to throw at the problem, compared to Netscape. Those are the perks of cornering one market - you can use the capital gained therein to corner whatever other markets you want to. Call me crazy, but I think that's why we have anti-trust laws.
I have to try to start converting my friends. I think they'll be amenable to the idea. I actually just showed Mozilla to my dad... he said, "Where do I download that from?"
My work here is done.
Andreessen has a point - the browser is, in probably 95% of cases, practically invisible to the user these days. The average user doesn't care enough to start another browser war. And really, what good would a browser war do at this point? It will be impossible to de-throne MS until someone comes up with a compelling new service or feature that MS doesn't and/or can't immediately offer. I don't know if that's even possible.
But the end of his article makes the most compelling argument to abandon Internet Explorer for Mozilla - form factor! I'm proud to proclaim that I, for one, love the Mozilla form factor. It beats IE hands down - skins, tabbed browsing... and the fact that it's open source doesn't hurt my opinion of it either. It's just more friendly - and that's where you really win users. It's not how you corner a market (MS never could have done it if they were friendly), but it's how you get a cult following. Props to the Mozilla team! And don't listen to the naysayers.
And here I thought I was the only one currently playing A Link to the Past. I just got to the fourth dungeon in the Dark World. Warcraft III will be good (I procured a copy of the beta), but you can't beat classic Zelda action. I'd rather play many an SNES game before Warcraft III.
And what horrible conditions could force them (-ahem- reluctantly, of course) to override the very first Amendment ever placed on our Constitution? It's not the actions of hate groups, bordering on terrorism, which spark the courts and Congress into action. Last I heard, the KKK could still do basically whatever they wanted to, essentially unchecked. No, what our great government, the leaders of the free world, get up in arms about is -duhn duhn DUHN- Corporate Interests. Shocked faces all around, I know. But it makes me sick. I wish the folks in Washington would practice some of that integrity they so often laud on themselves and flaunt during elections. American government has done so many great things, for our country and for the world, but the level of hypocrisy and problems that they propagate is unacceptable in the light of the awesome potential representative democracy has to eliminate such things.
------------------------------------
Thus, the real question we should be addressing is this: how would a newer, more censored, more expensive, but ultimately faster and "cleaner" Internet threaten the user-base and existing support for the current Internet? Even if our existing forum for the free exchange of ideas wasn't completely taken over by The Man, the existence of a more appealing alternative forces a long, painful period of stagnation on the first Internet. In the end, it could have the same effect as a violent restructuring of the Internet as we know it.
If you think I'm wrong about the probability of this trend, you need look no further than America Online. AOL has proved that people will jump at anything that is a) user friendly, b) well marketed, and c) has catch-phrases like "You've got mail!" The user-base AOL has garnered since its inception demonstrates how afraid many people are of the "raw" Internet, and how they cling to portals to hold their hand. Consider for a moment, what would have happened if AOL had, in addition to its superficial appeal, a stable, high speed network, with promises of security and support that were actually fulfilled? This is the specter we face in a new Corporate controlled Internet, and it will be very appealing to not only the public at large, but also to all the script kiddies, techies, haXors, and, yes, slash-dotters out there as well. Who wouldn't love to be connected to a network that has all the aforementioned features?
The price we'll pay is in the civil liberties of the medium. I don't think that we can achieve the Internet advancement that Big Business wants without the system being controlled BY THEM. There's always been a sort of give and take between technological advancement and personal freedom. You decide which is more important. I'm open to debate on this subject - let me know how you feel!
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