First, I'd refer you to my/. Moderation Aphorism #1. Second, I'll give a serious answer to your serious observation:
I use MS Office under Crossover Office because it gives me the features I want (admittedly, one of them is the ability to share identically functional documents with Windows users) so I definitely agree with your perspective. In the case of Mozilla, there has been a great ruckus around here about spam, and I kept telling people it didn't affect me because I used Mozilla w/ Bayesian filters. Additionally, Outlook's rotten record for relaying mail worms has been a problem to me as a sys admin. Independent of the calendar/groupware features, in my immediate area, most people use Outlook as a mail client out of inertia because it came with Office and refuse to switch because of fear of the unknown rather than out of a choice based on features.
You have made a really good point about the whole matter of treating digital as different from anything else. It's a point I've struggled to make to my congressman (R. Wexler, D, 16th FL) on numerous occassions, though I've found the more useful -- and critical -- distinction is that it is more sensible to pursue behavior under existing copyright protections than to legislate specifications for machinery.
I think the major "problem" posed by computers and high-speed networks is that it so far lowers the barrier of entry to copyright violation that just about anyone can do it at a huge magnitude. Suddenly, everyone has decided it's OK to engage in wholesale infringement just because it's technically possible and easy. It poses a dilemna for our present and future economy. So much of our output is tied up in "intellectual property" (please just recognize that I'm speaking collectively of copyrights, patents, etc and don't respond with one of those intellectual-property-is-a-fantasy-of-law arguments) that not protecting it like traditional property leaves huge industries open to major losses.
Some say the equivalent of, "well these industries deserve to fail if they can't compete with people giving away their stuff for free", but what the hell kind of argument is that? What, pray tell, do they propose for "promotion of the useful arts and science" if not guarantees of protection for creative works? I just don't see us thriving as a nation of whittlers and blacksmiths.
It is the uploader who is "forking" the file into two seperate chains.
Are you aware of any relevant law on this issue? I think from a systems point of view it would be very hard to find consensus on when and how copies are made. Send and receive are pretty tenuous terms in client-server programming. Network exchanges (at least with TCP/IP) are throttled, and without a downloader reading the data, the uploader will not be sending anything.
As another poster indicated, anytime you do pretty much anything with a computer you potentially make very many copies of the data inside the machine. Copyright law was recently ammended, in fact, to explicitly allow the ephemeral, in-memory image of an application and one backup to physical media. Anything else is verbotten by Title 17, Sec 106.
I very seriously doubt that anyone would successfully dodge accountability for downloading and saving (i.e. making an illicit copy) the files. This is largely moot in the current case, of course, because RIAA is explicitly targeting uploaders with "large" collections.
You're right that I missed that detail, and two other people called it out already. Ergo I'm guilty of sloppy research (I gave my IANAL disclaimer) and you're guilty of redundance. If there is no other section in Title 17 specifying equivalent protections about studio recordings, then I will delight in any successful defense based on its absence.
It is the uploader who makes the copy and sends it over the internet. You can't copy a file you don't have.
Here you're just wrong. If I make a client request that results in transmission of data over the network (and hang around to read those bytes) then I make at least one ephemeral copy in the memory of my computer. If I save the file to disk (I don't think many P2P apps omit this step) then I have made a persistent copy.
Agreed. It wasn't nearly large enough IMO either, but the point was that they did face the courts over the behavior cited in the original post, which seemed to imply that the *AAs were getting away with illegal behavior.
I fear the thinking of the judgement valued all those free discs at retail, instead of the actual industry investment of $0.25 plastic and paper (Of course, when they sue you, every CD you shared is worth $20, the illegally fixed price!) Microsoft got off their recent hook on a similar bullshit equation of "donated" digital copies to retail products. GAH!!!
The case against the search engine guy was barratry, pure and simple, and it's tragic it couldn't be taken to court.
The great majority of songs on the 'net are from and *authorized* fixation.:-)
Maybe if you were downloading directly from the uploader's CD drive, otherwise the source of the file shared on P2P is unauthorized (I don't think the space-shifting argument for fair use will hold up when it is published on a file-sharing network).
You are right about this covering bootleg recordings, of course. I have not yet been able to find definitions differentiating fixations of live musical performance from fixations of studio work. It would be hysterical if one could successfully argue that since this only applied to concert bootlegs, the same behavior applied to studio-recorded media was legitimate...
But as far as I know obtaining copyrighted material without knowing that the source is illegal is perfectly OK. If you think otherwise, quote some law.
U.S. Code, Title 17, Chapter 11, Sec 1101, (a)(1), Distilled:
Anyone who, without the consent of the performer or performers involved fixes the sounds or sounds and images of a live musical performance in a copy or phonorecord, or reproduces copies or phonorecords of such a performance from an unauthorized fixation shall be subject to the remedies provided in sections 502 through 505, to the same extent as an infringer of copyright.
Because downloading entails making a copy to your local machine, I expect this is the basis of the argument that downloaders may be treated as infringers.
Disclaimers: IANAL, RIAA Sucks, Linux Rocks, etc...
For Linux to maintain its place as the champion of server and desktop OSen, we must resist the temptation to dumb it down for ordinary "lusers."
Sputtering nonsense. Linux is powerful enough and flexible enough to handle desktop and server applications. What is lost by making desktop variants available for less elite users?
Well right, but are we to believe that every idea that is just slightly different than a current one is worthy of a patent?
That certainly wouldn't be my position. This whole business of obvious business + internet = patentable idea is infuriating to me also. I'm just trying to fathom the justification for award of these patents.
there can be no benefit to mankind by granting some of these patents with obvios prior art unless of course the part of mankind you want to benfit happens to be called lawyers.
Where is the obvious prior art?
Seriously, I've been trying to think of some. I think it's disgusting that this sort of patent gets awarded, but I've not yet thought of prior art and apparently the USPTO didn't either.
Back on point, after some contemplation I suspect that the relevant statutes that would be used to make a case that downloading was itself illegal would be that it involves making a digital copy that is not strictly protected by fair use in Title 17. Don't waste your lunch trying to find it for me...
Nice suggestions. They help with the visually-impaired dilemna, but the audio solution requires a multimedia workstation, which may not be available for someone running Lynx. Of course, it also just shifts the problem from one sense impairment to another.
The multiple choice suggestion is quite elegant. The Q&A would have to be self-contained, though, as it shouldn't rely on external knowledge to answer. All the information necessary to answer the question should be presented in the question, but in grammatical constructs that wouldn't be easily parsed by a machine.
How would you handle brute force attacks, if the account rustler just repeatedly submitted the series of answers under distinct requests? I guess one option would be to not repeat questions to the same IP address, but then there's the IP spoofing problem... yiyiyi...
BTW, you'll note that the Lynx-user above does have an account, though, so obviously he/she was crafty enough to load and read the graphic.:-)
The actions it would require are a total waste of my tax dollars. Isn't that enough?
Not really. There are plenty of things of which I don't approve that my tax dollars fund. It is part and parcel of our type of government that the individual taxpayer doesn't have say so over how their contribution is spent.
Do you really want a system where people vote with their money, rather than with their ballot?
So you see no difference between my right to free speech and the FBI's right to free speech? Do you have open access to the information these government agencies have on you? Sure, you can try to use the FOIA to get access to your FBI file, but they won't give it to you while you are under investigation.
There are issues with the existing systems, to be sure, and the question you pose is truly problematic. On the one hand I understand the desire for secrecy in criminal investigations, but denial of citizen access to data about themselves is very troubling. I guess I'd say that if the FBI has information sufficient to indict, they should indict, and if they don't have sufficient evidence, there should be no harm in them giving up information to the subjects of investigations. In any case, the individuals right to know what the governemt knows about him should trump any short-term investigative advantage gleaned by secrecy. This cop business of sitting and waiting, basically observing crimes in process in order to make a more compelling case, is ridiculous!
I suggest that when concerns of my privacy collide with government agencies ability to trade information about me, my right to privacy should win.
Well, first you'd have to enact a right to privacy, which currently does not exist in the U.S.
Does your failure to see an interest mean one does not exist?;-)
The existentialist in me says, well of course...
I suggest that one of the effective rules protecting my rights and privacy is the existing limitation on how freely law enforcement organizations may traffic in data about me.
On the other hand (and, boy, do I hate to go here) those same limitations might impede criminal investigations that could save your life and/or liberty. We do have an inalienable right to those, you'll recall. What a tangled web...
Copyright is basically a tax imposed on people by the government, except that the tax doesn't go to providing government services.
You completely lost me here. Copyright is a limited monopoly given to citizens or companies to collect payment for intellectual works. How is that a tax? I guess if you believe every idea given expression immediately becomes public domain, then I can understand how empowering someone to force payment for their ideas is like a tax, but that seems a pretty radical position. Star Trek utopias aside, how can you expect a modern, technological society to thrive without something like copyright protection for creative works (which emcompasses much more than just pop songs on P2P networks)?
I'll break my own rules and reply to the AC, because it is a thought-provoking question.
It seems to me, each of these law enforcement agencies has its own purpose and mission. I would hate to think that at some time in the future these disparate entities would be all rolled into one law enforcement behemoth.
Funny how free speech and open access to information are paramount until it's government agencies that are communicating amongst themselves...
I simply do not see what legitimate interest there is in blocking one division of the Federal system from the knowledge possessed by another so long, and this is critical, as all are bound by effective rules to protect the rights and privacy of the citizens. It seems to me there is more risk to the public good posed by the failure of interagency communication than there is protection in lack of it.
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First, I'd refer you to my /. Moderation Aphorism #1. Second, I'll give a serious answer to your serious observation:
I use MS Office under Crossover Office because it gives me the features I want (admittedly, one of them is the ability to share identically functional documents with Windows users) so I definitely agree with your perspective. In the case of Mozilla, there has been a great ruckus around here about spam, and I kept telling people it didn't affect me because I used Mozilla w/ Bayesian filters. Additionally, Outlook's rotten record for relaying mail worms has been a problem to me as a sys admin. Independent of the calendar/groupware features, in my immediate area, most people use Outlook as a mail client out of inertia because it came with Office and refuse to switch because of fear of the unknown rather than out of a choice based on features.
Er, wouldn't that first involve switching them to Linux? Come on, man, I have to take baby steps with people who need convincing to leave Outlook! :-)
I've now lost one of my primary arguments for switching my colleagues to Mozilla!
You have made a really good point about the whole matter of treating digital as different from anything else. It's a point I've struggled to make to my congressman (R. Wexler, D, 16th FL) on numerous occassions, though I've found the more useful -- and critical -- distinction is that it is more sensible to pursue behavior under existing copyright protections than to legislate specifications for machinery.
I think the major "problem" posed by computers and high-speed networks is that it so far lowers the barrier of entry to copyright violation that just about anyone can do it at a huge magnitude. Suddenly, everyone has decided it's OK to engage in wholesale infringement just because it's technically possible and easy. It poses a dilemna for our present and future economy. So much of our output is tied up in "intellectual property" (please just recognize that I'm speaking collectively of copyrights, patents, etc and don't respond with one of those intellectual-property-is-a-fantasy-of-law arguments) that not protecting it like traditional property leaves huge industries open to major losses.
Some say the equivalent of, "well these industries deserve to fail if they can't compete with people giving away their stuff for free", but what the hell kind of argument is that? What, pray tell, do they propose for "promotion of the useful arts and science" if not guarantees of protection for creative works? I just don't see us thriving as a nation of whittlers and blacksmiths.
No, but you can be a humorless pudknocker hiding behing the AC shield...
Yeah, the new one is "Who do you want to go to war with today?"
Point made. I've had it happen to me too...
Are you aware of any relevant law on this issue? I think from a systems point of view it would be very hard to find consensus on when and how copies are made. Send and receive are pretty tenuous terms in client-server programming. Network exchanges (at least with TCP/IP) are throttled, and without a downloader reading the data, the uploader will not be sending anything.
As another poster indicated, anytime you do pretty much anything with a computer you potentially make very many copies of the data inside the machine. Copyright law was recently ammended, in fact, to explicitly allow the ephemeral, in-memory image of an application and one backup to physical media. Anything else is verbotten by Title 17, Sec 106.
I very seriously doubt that anyone would successfully dodge accountability for downloading and saving (i.e. making an illicit copy) the files. This is largely moot in the current case, of course, because RIAA is explicitly targeting uploaders with "large" collections.
Here you're just wrong. If I make a client request that results in transmission of data over the network (and hang around to read those bytes) then I make at least one ephemeral copy in the memory of my computer. If I save the file to disk (I don't think many P2P apps omit this step) then I have made a persistent copy.
Agreed. It wasn't nearly large enough IMO either, but the point was that they did face the courts over the behavior cited in the original post, which seemed to imply that the *AAs were getting away with illegal behavior.
I fear the thinking of the judgement valued all those free discs at retail, instead of the actual industry investment of $0.25 plastic and paper (Of course, when they sue you, every CD you shared is worth $20, the illegally fixed price!) Microsoft got off their recent hook on a similar bullshit equation of "donated" digital copies to retail products. GAH!!!
The case against the search engine guy was barratry, pure and simple, and it's tragic it couldn't be taken to court.
Fiorella Torrenzi might be safe too. I doubt M33 will press charges...
Maybe if you were downloading directly from the uploader's CD drive, otherwise the source of the file shared on P2P is unauthorized (I don't think the space-shifting argument for fair use will hold up when it is published on a file-sharing network).
You are right about this covering bootleg recordings, of course. I have not yet been able to find definitions differentiating fixations of live musical performance from fixations of studio work. It would be hysterical if one could successfully argue that since this only applied to concert bootlegs, the same behavior applied to studio-recorded media was legitimate...
U.S. Code, Title 17, Chapter 11, Sec 1101, (a)(1), Distilled:
Anyone who, without the consent of the performer or performers involved fixes the sounds or sounds and images of a live musical performance in a copy or phonorecord, or reproduces copies or phonorecords of such a performance from an unauthorized fixation shall be subject to the remedies provided in sections 502 through 505, to the same extent as an infringer of copyright.
Because downloading entails making a copy to your local machine, I expect this is the basis of the argument that downloaders may be treated as infringers.
Disclaimers: IANAL, RIAA Sucks, Linux Rocks, etc...
And there has just been a large settlement over their use of such tactics.
That is too funny...
Sputtering nonsense. Linux is powerful enough and flexible enough to handle desktop and server applications. What is lost by making desktop variants available for less elite users?
Or have I just been trolled?
That certainly wouldn't be my position. This whole business of obvious business + internet = patentable idea is infuriating to me also. I'm just trying to fathom the justification for award of these patents.
You are correct, of course, but the poster didn't attack the patent based on obviousness, but on prior art.
The public library as an example seems pretty sound to me, except for the Internet and mail order components, which I assume are part of the patent.
Just a thought: if Netflix successfully defends this patent, you will still be paying them if you rent from anyone using their business method.
Where is the obvious prior art?
Seriously, I've been trying to think of some. I think it's disgusting that this sort of patent gets awarded, but I've not yet thought of prior art and apparently the USPTO didn't either.
I am no more a fan of RIAA's barratry or their legislative purchases than anyone else around here. I just believe that more understanding of the law and less principled whining will serve us all better.
Back on point, after some contemplation I suspect that the relevant statutes that would be used to make a case that downloading was itself illegal would be that it involves making a digital copy that is not strictly protected by fair use in Title 17. Don't waste your lunch trying to find it for me...
Nice suggestions. They help with the visually-impaired dilemna, but the audio solution requires a multimedia workstation, which may not be available for someone running Lynx. Of course, it also just shifts the problem from one sense impairment to another.
:-)
The multiple choice suggestion is quite elegant. The Q&A would have to be self-contained, though, as it shouldn't rely on external knowledge to answer. All the information necessary to answer the question should be presented in the question, but in grammatical constructs that wouldn't be easily parsed by a machine.
How would you handle brute force attacks, if the account rustler just repeatedly submitted the series of answers under distinct requests? I guess one option would be to not repeat questions to the same IP address, but then there's the IP spoofing problem... yiyiyi...
BTW, you'll note that the Lynx-user above does have an account, though, so obviously he/she was crafty enough to load and read the graphic.
Not really. There are plenty of things of which I don't approve that my tax dollars fund. It is part and parcel of our type of government that the individual taxpayer doesn't have say so over how their contribution is spent.
Do you really want a system where people vote with their money, rather than with their ballot?
I'd be interesting in hearing the law, rather than the statement of an RIAA flack, on this question. Can you provide a citation?
There are issues with the existing systems, to be sure, and the question you pose is truly problematic. On the one hand I understand the desire for secrecy in criminal investigations, but denial of citizen access to data about themselves is very troubling. I guess I'd say that if the FBI has information sufficient to indict, they should indict, and if they don't have sufficient evidence, there should be no harm in them giving up information to the subjects of investigations. In any case, the individuals right to know what the governemt knows about him should trump any short-term investigative advantage gleaned by secrecy. This cop business of sitting and waiting, basically observing crimes in process in order to make a more compelling case, is ridiculous!
Well, first you'd have to enact a right to privacy, which currently does not exist in the U.S.
The existentialist in me says, well of course...
On the other hand (and, boy, do I hate to go here) those same limitations might impede criminal investigations that could save your life and/or liberty. We do have an inalienable right to those, you'll recall. What a tangled web...
You completely lost me here. Copyright is a limited monopoly given to citizens or companies to collect payment for intellectual works. How is that a tax? I guess if you believe every idea given expression immediately becomes public domain, then I can understand how empowering someone to force payment for their ideas is like a tax, but that seems a pretty radical position. Star Trek utopias aside, how can you expect a modern, technological society to thrive without something like copyright protection for creative works (which emcompasses much more than just pop songs on P2P networks)?
Funny how free speech and open access to information are paramount until it's government agencies that are communicating amongst themselves...
I simply do not see what legitimate interest there is in blocking one division of the Federal system from the knowledge possessed by another so long, and this is critical, as all are bound by effective rules to protect the rights and privacy of the citizens. It seems to me there is more risk to the public good posed by the failure of interagency communication than there is protection in lack of it.