True. I suppose my comment should be something along the lines of, "Please don't use your user accounts to raise the awareness of something posted anonymously unless you, personally, have verified it and vouch for it."
Please don't feed the trolls. All the posts claiming a backdoor in Valgrind and supposedly responding to each other ("Hey, I found it too!" "Me too!" "Here's what I got!") were all posted by the same person.
Messing with your ability to transfer copyrighted material == denial of service. Participating in the internet is transferring data.
You seem to be looking at the little caveats written in and using them to swallow the main body of the law. It won't work that way in practice. Let us suppose that you are sharing ten files via Gnutella - five of which the MPAA believes are copies of "their" works. And let us assume that the MPAA has a big red button which causes your Gnutella client to die instantly. And they press it.
Now, on the one hand, they've done more than the "necessary" amount of damage - they've prevented you from sharing the five files which are pictures of you at your 8th birthday party.
On the other hand, they can easily claim that that was "reasonably necessary to impair the distribution" of "their" files. See the top of page 3 of the draft. And you have to ask permission from John Ashcroft to even file a lawsuit. And you have to prove, in court, tangible economic loss to yourself - how much money did you lose from not being able to share those five files? Do you have receipts for your losses?
I submit that John Ashcroft won't let you file suit. And that if he did, you wouldn't be able to prove any losses in court.
So it really doesn't matter. Instead of turning off Gnutella, they could have turned off your computer, or your internet connection. They'll claim it was reasonably necessary to stop you. You won't even be able to go to court. If you do make it to court, you'll have to prove real tangible losses.
Compare to the opposite case: if you DoS them, they just swear out a claim to local law enforcement, and a police officer near you comes and locks you up. They have no costs involved in filing a criminal complaint. They don't have to ask anyone's permission if they want to sue you in a civil suit.
FWIW, most (all?) European nations have this, typically called "moral rights" or "rights of the creator". The U.S. has no such provisions in its copyright laws.
It's actually even worse than that. There's a card game called Munchkin that plays on typical D&D antics (one of the cards is "Whine at the GM - go up one level"), and one of the monsters you can fight is the dreaded Gazebo, which includes the notation: "No one can help you. You must face the Gazebo alone."
Any company CAN use GPLed stuff in their closed source software without it being stealing.
Copyright infringement, perhaps. But not theft. The fact that we have different laws for "copyright infringement" and "stealing tangible objects" should make my point: they are different, and they are treated differently under the law.
I guess we could call all violations of the law "theft": we'll replace murder, rape, arson, assault, etc. with the generic "theft". I'm not sure what purpose that would serve, but I suppose it's possible.
The larger point I'm trying to make is that the reason *you* equate copyright infringement with theft (but not, say, rape with theft) is that you've been exposed to a PR campaign designed to equate the two. The copyright barons would prefer that the laws covering copyright infringement look more like the laws on theft: ownership of real property doesn't expire, for example, and so they want copyright not to expire. Ownership of real property doesn't permit others to use it without permission, while copyright does, and so they want copyright laws changed to restrict fair use.
Recognizing that it's a PR campaign, and that copyright infringement is about as similar to theft as rape is, is a necessary step in figuring out how copyright should really be treated.
Property law has an idea called "conversion". Essentially this is using someone's excludable property (real, tangible property) in some manner, but not stealing it. For instance, you take someone's car at midnight, joy-ride all night long, and return it, undamaged and with a full tank of gas, before they wake up in the morning. What harm have you done? Well, under the law, you have "converted" their property - made some use of it that you weren't entitled to.
So in the dollar bill analogy: you haven't stolen their money, you have perhaps converted it, but really you've committed an odd variety of crime against society because stability requires a predictable monetary system, and that's what you would be punished for.
Money is yet another ephemeral class of property. I think there's a reasonable societal interest in ensuring that the supply of money is limited. I'm not at all sure that there's a societal interest in trying to limit the supply of information in general.
And songs aren't property, and so cannot be stolen.
2: something owned; any tangible possession that is owned by
someone; "that hat is my property"; "he is a man of
property"; [syn: {belongings}, {holding}, {material
possession}]
Nope. There are 280 million people in the U.S. Approximately 260 million of those (just about everyone over the age of 2) people have written, or sung, or drawn. Maybe a million or so have ever been paid for it.
Most artists don't want to get paid.
Re:Are you a legal man, or a moral man?
on
Live from Iran, Film88
·
· Score: 3, Interesting
They're all information. Different types of information are valuable for different reasons - some may entertain, some may educate, and so on - but they're all information.
The key factor that distinguishes information from almost anything else is that it cannot be taken - sharing increases the world's pool of information, without bound. Economists call this "excludable" vs. "non-excludable" - my use of your car excludes you from using it, my use of your song does not. That's why using your song isn't theft - it isn't possible to "deprive the rightful owner of the same".
There are different ways to manage excludable resources. One way is to create the concept of ownership and enforce it through laws. Another way is to hold all property in common. There are blends, such as societies where mobile property is held privately but the land is held in common. None of these has really been proven to be better than others. Similarly there are different ways to manage non-excludable resources. But excludable and non-excludable resources are fundamentally very different, and making leaps of logic like "we do X for cars, therefore X is the best way to handle songs" is not a good argument.
It's a matter of opinion to say that creative works should be treated differently from facts. In the U.S., commercial database vendors [vendors of information, not vendors of database software] are trying to change U.S. copyright law to protect facts. If the law is changed so that saying "The Yankees won today's game, 6-5" is illegal - which is literally what they're trying to do - will you still feel that the law aligns with your moral feelings?
Most artists *don't* want to get paid. They want lots of people to experience and appreciate their work, which is rewarding beyond money. Most singers, most painters, most writers, never get paid a cent for their art and are perfectly happy with that situation.
I'll just close by noting that all intellectual property is recent - none of it existed before the 1700's. We did acceptably well without intellectual property - had the golden ages of Rome and Greece and China, had the Renaissance, etc. Last night I attended an Indigo Girls concert in Radio City Music Hall. Since my seat in the Hall is an excludable resource, I paid for the privilege of occupying it. The Indigo Girls will still be able to profit from concerts *no matter what* society does with non-excludable resources.
Re:Are you a legal man, or a moral man?
on
Live from Iran, Film88
·
· Score: 3, Insightful
You have this argument completely backwards.
Sharing information is clearly a moral and good thing to do. From the first monkey who let the other monkeys know about a tiger down by the river, humanity has *revered* the sharing of information. Only our system of laws makes it (sometimes) a bad thing to do.
In this case the moral man sees nothing wrong with distributing information or with receiving information. The legal man sees that distributing the information in this manner would be illegal in the U.S., who knows in Iran.
And both the moral and legal man know that there is no theft involved.
1. (Law) The act of stealing; specifically, the felonious
taking and removing of personal property, with an intent
to deprive the rightful owner of the same
Seth, you didn't have shit to do with it. A lot of smart people put a lot of hard hours into this case, but you weren't one of them, because you've stalked so many people at this point that no one wants to work with you. Having opinions that coincide with the opinions of the people who actually did the work is nice; trying to take credit for it is a symptom of your lunacy.
People in New Jersey and New York City might be interested in the Trenton Computer Festival next weekend. Lots of old junk to buy/sell/barter/gawk at. Recycling is good, but if someone wanted to pay for your old junk, that's even better.
This is a good flame, but my comment didn't really have anything to do with Windows(tm), only installing binary software from unknown sources.
In the days pre-Internet, it didn't make sense to send out fucked-up shareware. There was no way for you to receive any benefits from it, since the computer it would be installed upon was not part of a network, couldn't communicate back to you. That dynamic has now changed, and it isn't going to change back. Most binaries available for download used to be non-dangerous, with only a few dangerous ones. Now most are dangerous (at least judging by the number of installs - all of the "most-installed" shareware either is, or will become dangerous), and only a few are non-dangerous. Because the owner of the program can expect to have the dangerous program communicate back, sending information (=money) back up the wire.
This fact is operating system independent. Right now, Windows(tm) is far more affected than any other operating system, because most of the dangerous software is written for the dominant operating system. But there's no reason that has to remain true in the future.
The key is that they are light bulbs. Other resistors might have a lot of variability possible in how much power they consume. Here's what happens when you try to put a lot of current through a light bulb:
*pop*
<darkness>
If you can come up with a way to use three hundred-watt bulbs to absorb 4500 watts, I'd like to see it...
Of course I regretted nominating you. You're a certifibly insane nutcase who split apart a group of people working for free speech because of your paranoia and ego. You've been called insane by essentially everyone who has ever associated with you.
Last year, you amused yourself by spamming slashdot's comment forums with accusations against me with a handy perl script. Before that, you enjoyed yourself by accusing Mike Godwin, who had annoyed you, of sexual harassment. You've also harassed Declan McCullagh and Eric Grimm, two other pro-free-speech individuals who crossed your path. I've heard a nice account of the meeting between you, Godwin and Grimm at the CFP conference which pretty well cemented any doubt I might have had about lack of sanity.
Nut-Case.
It's a shame that people like you have keyboards. You've done far more harm than good to the free speech community, and it's a good thing that your reputation is finally preceding you, so that no one else will make the mistake of trying to work with you like I did.
No problem - the business version of the entertainment device is the "work device". It's got Microsoft Office and Microsoft Messenger and not a whole lot more - doesn't come with solitaire, can't install any games on it or any other non-productive applications. Most businesses would love to buy a fully locked down computer.
Re:Changes we need on Slashdot RIGHT NOW
on
Slashdot Code Update
·
· Score: 3, Informative
Secure login - we're thinking about that. Expect to see it sooner or later.
Slash 2.2.2 was just released (actually, the friend/foe stuff has been live for some time, though hidden because the icons weren't on comments). Slash 2.3 is likely to be released before Linuxworld (end of January).
Slashdot Mirror
True. I suppose my comment should be something along the lines of, "Please don't use your user accounts to raise the awareness of something posted anonymously unless you, personally, have verified it and vouch for it."
Please don't feed the trolls. All the posts claiming a backdoor in Valgrind and supposedly responding to each other ("Hey, I found it too!" "Me too!" "Here's what I got!") were all posted by the same person.
Other people have covered "notwithstanding".
Messing with your ability to transfer copyrighted material == denial of service. Participating in the internet is transferring data.
You seem to be looking at the little caveats written in and using them to swallow the main body of the law. It won't work that way in practice. Let us suppose that you are sharing ten files via Gnutella - five of which the MPAA believes are copies of "their" works. And let us assume that the MPAA has a big red button which causes your Gnutella client to die instantly. And they press it.
Now, on the one hand, they've done more than the "necessary" amount of damage - they've prevented you from sharing the five files which are pictures of you at your 8th birthday party.
On the other hand, they can easily claim that that was "reasonably necessary to impair the distribution" of "their" files. See the top of page 3 of the draft. And you have to ask permission from John Ashcroft to even file a lawsuit. And you have to prove, in court, tangible economic loss to yourself - how much money did you lose from not being able to share those five files? Do you have receipts for your losses?
I submit that John Ashcroft won't let you file suit. And that if he did, you wouldn't be able to prove any losses in court.
So it really doesn't matter. Instead of turning off Gnutella, they could have turned off your computer, or your internet connection. They'll claim it was reasonably necessary to stop you. You won't even be able to go to court. If you do make it to court, you'll have to prove real tangible losses.
Compare to the opposite case: if you DoS them, they just swear out a claim to local law enforcement, and a police officer near you comes and locks you up. They have no costs involved in filing a criminal complaint. They don't have to ask anyone's permission if they want to sue you in a civil suit.
FWIW, most (all?) European nations have this, typically called "moral rights" or "rights of the creator". The U.S. has no such provisions in its copyright laws.
It's actually even worse than that. There's a card game called Munchkin that plays on typical D&D antics (one of the cards is "Whine at the GM - go up one level"), and one of the monsters you can fight is the dreaded Gazebo, which includes the notation: "No one can help you. You must face the Gazebo alone."
Any company CAN use GPLed stuff in their closed source software without it being stealing.
Copyright infringement, perhaps. But not theft. The fact that we have different laws for "copyright infringement" and "stealing tangible objects" should make my point: they are different, and they are treated differently under the law.
I guess we could call all violations of the law "theft": we'll replace murder, rape, arson, assault, etc. with the generic "theft". I'm not sure what purpose that would serve, but I suppose it's possible.
The larger point I'm trying to make is that the reason *you* equate copyright infringement with theft (but not, say, rape with theft) is that you've been exposed to a PR campaign designed to equate the two. The copyright barons would prefer that the laws covering copyright infringement look more like the laws on theft: ownership of real property doesn't expire, for example, and so they want copyright not to expire. Ownership of real property doesn't permit others to use it without permission, while copyright does, and so they want copyright laws changed to restrict fair use.
Recognizing that it's a PR campaign, and that copyright infringement is about as similar to theft as rape is, is a necessary step in figuring out how copyright should really be treated.
This is actually an insightful analogy.
Property law has an idea called "conversion". Essentially this is using someone's excludable property (real, tangible property) in some manner, but not stealing it. For instance, you take someone's car at midnight, joy-ride all night long, and return it, undamaged and with a full tank of gas, before they wake up in the morning. What harm have you done? Well, under the law, you have "converted" their property - made some use of it that you weren't entitled to.
So in the dollar bill analogy: you haven't stolen their money, you have perhaps converted it, but really you've committed an odd variety of crime against society because stability requires a predictable monetary system, and that's what you would be punished for.
Money is yet another ephemeral class of property. I think there's a reasonable societal interest in ensuring that the supply of money is limited. I'm not at all sure that there's a societal interest in trying to limit the supply of information in general.
And songs aren't property, and so cannot be stolen.
2: something owned; any tangible possession that is owned by
someone; "that hat is my property"; "he is a man of
property"; [syn: {belongings}, {holding}, {material
possession}]
Nope. There are 280 million people in the U.S. Approximately 260 million of those (just about everyone over the age of 2) people have written, or sung, or drawn. Maybe a million or so have ever been paid for it.
Most artists don't want to get paid.
They're all information. Different types of information are valuable for different reasons - some may entertain, some may educate, and so on - but they're all information.
The key factor that distinguishes information from almost anything else is that it cannot be taken - sharing increases the world's pool of information, without bound. Economists call this "excludable" vs. "non-excludable" - my use of your car excludes you from using it, my use of your song does not. That's why using your song isn't theft - it isn't possible to "deprive the rightful owner of the same".
There are different ways to manage excludable resources. One way is to create the concept of ownership and enforce it through laws. Another way is to hold all property in common. There are blends, such as societies where mobile property is held privately but the land is held in common. None of these has really been proven to be better than others. Similarly there are different ways to manage non-excludable resources. But excludable and non-excludable resources are fundamentally very different, and making leaps of logic like "we do X for cars, therefore X is the best way to handle songs" is not a good argument.
It's a matter of opinion to say that creative works should be treated differently from facts. In the U.S., commercial database vendors [vendors of information, not vendors of database software] are trying to change U.S. copyright law to protect facts. If the law is changed so that saying "The Yankees won today's game, 6-5" is illegal - which is literally what they're trying to do - will you still feel that the law aligns with your moral feelings?
Most artists *don't* want to get paid. They want lots of people to experience and appreciate their work, which is rewarding beyond money. Most singers, most painters, most writers, never get paid a cent for their art and are perfectly happy with that situation.
I'll just close by noting that all intellectual property is recent - none of it existed before the 1700's. We did acceptably well without intellectual property - had the golden ages of Rome and Greece and China, had the Renaissance, etc. Last night I attended an Indigo Girls concert in Radio City Music Hall. Since my seat in the Hall is an excludable resource, I paid for the privilege of occupying it. The Indigo Girls will still be able to profit from concerts *no matter what* society does with non-excludable resources.
You have this argument completely backwards.
Sharing information is clearly a moral and good thing to do. From the first monkey who let the other monkeys know about a tiger down by the river, humanity has *revered* the sharing of information. Only our system of laws makes it (sometimes) a bad thing to do.
In this case the moral man sees nothing wrong with distributing information or with receiving information. The legal man sees that distributing the information in this manner would be illegal in the U.S., who knows in Iran.
And both the moral and legal man know that there is no theft involved.
1. (Law) The act of stealing; specifically, the felonious
taking and removing of personal property, with an intent
to deprive the rightful owner of the same
Seth, you didn't have shit to do with it. A lot of smart people put a lot of hard hours into this case, but you weren't one of them, because you've stalked so many people at this point that no one wants to work with you. Having opinions that coincide with the opinions of the people who actually did the work is nice; trying to take credit for it is a symptom of your lunacy.
*cough*
People in New Jersey and New York City might be interested in the Trenton Computer Festival next weekend. Lots of old junk to buy/sell/barter/gawk at. Recycling is good, but if someone wanted to pay for your old junk, that's even better.
You go by three years, the IRS' accepted depreciation schedule. :)
The really funny part of this is that Silverhammer isn't kidding.
This is a good flame, but my comment didn't really have anything to do with Windows(tm), only installing binary software from unknown sources.
In the days pre-Internet, it didn't make sense to send out fucked-up shareware. There was no way for you to receive any benefits from it, since the computer it would be installed upon was not part of a network, couldn't communicate back to you. That dynamic has now changed, and it isn't going to change back. Most binaries available for download used to be non-dangerous, with only a few dangerous ones. Now most are dangerous (at least judging by the number of installs - all of the "most-installed" shareware either is, or will become dangerous), and only a few are non-dangerous. Because the owner of the program can expect to have the dangerous program communicate back, sending information (=money) back up the wire.
This fact is operating system independent. Right now, Windows(tm) is far more affected than any other operating system, because most of the dangerous software is written for the dominant operating system. But there's no reason that has to remain true in the future.
If Microsoft put Windows 3.1 under the GPL, we'd run it. :)
The key is that they are light bulbs. Other resistors might have a lot of variability possible in how much power they consume. Here's what happens when you try to put a lot of current through a light bulb:
*pop*
<darkness>
If you can come up with a way to use three hundred-watt bulbs to absorb 4500 watts, I'd like to see it...
I think a test along these lines would be a good start. That was a link I was thinking about including in the story, maybe I should have.
Of course I regretted nominating you. You're a certifibly insane nutcase who split apart a group of people working for free speech because of your paranoia and ego. You've been called insane by essentially everyone who has ever associated with you.
Last year, you amused yourself by spamming slashdot's comment forums with accusations against me with a handy perl script. Before that, you enjoyed yourself by accusing Mike Godwin, who had annoyed you, of sexual harassment. You've also harassed Declan McCullagh and Eric Grimm, two other pro-free-speech individuals who crossed your path. I've heard a nice account of the meeting between you, Godwin and Grimm at the CFP conference which pretty well cemented any doubt I might have had about lack of sanity.
Nut-Case.
It's a shame that people like you have keyboards. You've done far more harm than good to the free speech community, and it's a good thing that your reputation is finally preceding you, so that no one else will make the mistake of trying to work with you like I did.
No problem - the business version of the entertainment device is the "work device". It's got Microsoft Office and Microsoft Messenger and not a whole lot more - doesn't come with solitaire, can't install any games on it or any other non-productive applications. Most businesses would love to buy a fully locked down computer.
Secure login - we're thinking about that. Expect to see it sooner or later.
Browser sniffing - not likely.
Slash 2.2.2 was just released (actually, the friend/foe stuff has been live for some time, though hidden because the icons weren't on comments). Slash 2.3 is likely to be released before Linuxworld (end of January).
Search for Counterfeit Deterrent Marking System.
Or see our old story, but several of the links are dead now.