Has Linus been heard from lately on this whole schomzle? He has resisted changing the kernel from GPL2 to GPL3. RMS and others (like PJ) are saying that GPL3 solves the problem going forward. Does Linus concur? Has he made any statement anywhere (like kernel.org) about how he sees the Novell/MS deal possibly changing his mind?
Am I the only one who would rather have higher quality content than a higher quality picture?
No, and I'm glad you put it in those terms. For most stuff, there really is no requirement for higher quality picture quality. Hell, most people who download stuff from P2P are satisfied with crap quality: its what's *in* the video file that matters. I know that TV is not important enough for me to invest in better quality. If mine were to die tonight, I'd go out and buy the cheapest 27-30" CRT I could find. Nothing I watch (even stuff I enjoy immensely) is worth more than that to me. I'll bet that the vast majority of people feel the same way.
Just because sales of HD-ready televisions are "booming", doesn't mean that there is a particularly high percentage of penetration of the sets in North American households. Anyone got any stats?
.. because personally I wouldn't want to do business with an outfit that would fall apart because of the absence of a single employee. That is what would happen, isn't it? Your presence is critical to the operation of the business, and if a "problem" occured while you were unavailable, the entire operation would crumble. Right?
No? You mean that you would, in fact, be able to leave for a week and come back to find the building still occupied by employees, phones still ringing, sales still being made, etc.?
Face it: you're not THAT important. If you were hit by a bus, you'd be replaced. Business would continue without you. If they can replace you in that circumstance, they can figure out a way for you to have a vacation. The fact that they are not indicates you like never having a vacation (you're a control freak), or you don't like it and your "executive director" and his coworkers are abusive dicks for not allowing you to arrange vacation time.
Either way, your company is being very shortsighted, and cannot see that they are going to be sorry when you *do* stop working there (regarless of the circumstances of your departure). True, you're not irreplacable, but they're still going to be hurt by your not having an effective team under you.
Does anyone know if Linus has commented on the whole GPL3 issue since the Novell-MS deal was announced? He has been opposed to the GPL3 in the past. Is the current climate going to change his mind?
By redefining our term, they have turned it into an evil thing, which no one wants.
This is exactly what the telcos / cable companies wanted to do. "Net Neutrality" was one of those terms that was created by a special interest group, an expression designed to be have a positive connotation, regardless of the content of the message. The "USA PATRIOT Act" is another such example: who could be opposed to an law that says "patriot" in it? Would support be so high for the law if it was called the "USA POLICE STATE Act"?
In the "net neutrality" debate, however, it was the non-evil party that managed to get the term for the discussion coined first, leaving the companies that want to prioritize network traffic in the position of arguing against something that seems so reasonable and fair, when you hear the term. What to do? Exactly what they did: attempt to co-opt the term to make people confused about its meaning. They appear to be doing a splendid job.
I've got about 40GB of absolutely irreplaceable data, mostly family photos, backed up every coupla months on a couple of hard drives. Will there be any way to read those drives in the near future?
Yes. Every time a new method of storing infomation comes along, there is always a transition period where computers have both methods of reading and writing the media supported.
If some cool optical storage medium comes along that makes magnetic hard drives obsolete, you can bet that there will be at least three years where every new piece of hardware supports both standards. Plus, there will be ways of adding the new technology to old computers, and ways of adding the old technology to new computers for a long time after that. You will have plenty of time to copy your information from one medium to the next.
It's the same with file formats. You will not be left instantaneously unable to transfer your data (particularly if they are openly documented, like JPEG or MP3) from one format to another.
The only thing that will prevent you from being able to read your data in the future will be your own neglect.
The whole point of copyright is money. Shouldn't anyone suing over a copyright issue have to show that their client suffered financial loss right up front before anything else?
Money is not the only reason that someone would want their work protected by copyright. Every piece of GPL'ed code that is out there is protected by copyright, but not for the purpose of making its holder any money. The purpose of the licence is to keep the code Free. You won't find Stallman claiming that the point of copyright is money.
The holder of the copyright can exercise whatever restrictions on copying (short of fair use) that they wish. The default behaviour is "All rights reserved," meaning that the holder retains all duplication rights, and grants none to any other party (again, excepting fair use). There does not need to be any financial motivation for restricting others' copying rights: holders can do it simply because they want to.
Yes there are things worth teaching. Is "DRM music bad" one of them? Not in my opinion
That's fine. But if your wife buys a shitload of music off of iTMS (a substantial investment of time and money) and her computer borks on her authentication big time, don't you think that your wife would have appreciated it if you, as the "tech savvy" one in the house, had told her about this risk?
Just because she's having no issues now, doesn't mean that she won't in the future. Any number of reasons could leave DRM'd content totally useless in the future. Just knowing this fact could cause a great number of people to think twice before ever purchasing anything infected with DRM.
MS Office is a separate product. I may buy it and run it under wine. If OGA stops updates for wine users, MS may face some other (legal) problems.
Is providing security updates and bug fixes an implicit right granted to you as the purchaser of MS Office? I doubt it. When you plunk down your money, you get the binary that exists at the moment you purchased it.
MS provides updates at no cost, and as far as I can tell they don't have to do diddly squat about providing a method for you to apply updates in any manner they don't see fit. I don't see how they would get into any troubles if you couldn't get OGA to work under WINE. It really isn't their problem.
Don't get me wrong: I'm a Linux user too. I just don't care that much about how well MS Office runs under Linux. The sooner the world weans itself off Office, the better!
I'd like to point out (again, and again) that most of this great music can be bought in FLAC or MP3 format from Zunior!
First of all, since your posting history shows that you haven't pointed out much of anything to Slashdot since March, it's pretty difficult for us to have been informed of Zunior "again, and again":-P
That said, thanks for the link to that site. I've been out of touch with music for awhile, and since I've always been partial to Canadian rock, Zunior looks like a great place to get reaquainted.
Also, thanks for the link to the Rheostatics on your ID bar. I haven't seen them live since a concert at the Bathurst Theatre in late 1993 (I think), and haven't heard them at all since "Introducing Happiness." Sad to see that they're soon going to doing their last concert at Massey Hall: I may have to go!
bingo, hit the nail on the head. This is what they are doing now anyway, sony says "hm, why aren't people buying our music... PIRACY! release the RIAA lawyers!"... they never seem to see the "our products are shit, you can't use them how everyone would think you should be able to and we rootkit your computer"
Oh, they get it just fine. They will sing from the top of their lungs that their sales are down due to piracy, while lobbying for laws outlawing all fair use. The content industry won't rest until they've implemented a legal stranglehold on distribution of their product, and to heck with users' rights.
"Pithy comments" are unfortunately a very common occurance here, and any discussion board. That's what the moderation system is for: if you change your preferences, you rarely see them again.
Seriously though, welcome to Slashdot. Some of us want intelligent discourse. Just ignore those who don't, and have fun!
(Oh, and by the way, if you're posting on Slashdot, you *are* in fact a geek! Try not to think of it as a bad thing!;-)
If you play a DVD and shoot the tv with a camera, is that violating the DMCA ?
The DMCA was an extension of copyright law in the USA, so you don't "voilate the DMCA", rather you violate the law. Even after the DMCA, there is nothing illegal about doing what you suggest (shooting the TV with a camera), but what you do with that copy afterwards may be illegal. Do it for yourself for your own non-commercial uses? Legal. Distribute the copy without permission from the copyright holder? Most likely illegal.
If they legally have a CSS key to read dvds and just transfer them to another support, is that against the DMCA ?
Same as above, holding a licence for the CSS key does not in itself give you any permission to distribute copies of a random DVD to someone else, whether for money or not.
Neither of your scenarios has anything to do with the DMCA at all. The only things potentially infringing in your examples were already infringing before 1998 when the DMCA was passed.
It's just crappy laws. Get Congress to fix these laws, and things will improve significantly.
I have to wonder if there is any chance whatsoever of this actually happening. Seriously, no sarcasm implied, is there any hope? I think that it is painfully obvious that both political parties are beholden to business interests, and that neither will voluntarily initiate any action toward legislation that will increase citizen rights at the expense of corporate power over information.
Even if this were ever to become a hot-button issue to the electorate, would the established political order ever bend on an issue as important to the business elite as the "ownership of knowledge"? Not that it ever will be that big an issue: the corporate interests who are concerned with owning information are the same interests that control all major media outlets, and as such the masses will never be galvanized by mass outrage over this issue as they will never hear that there is any outrage.
Sadly, it seems to me that sane IP laws will only come into being as the by-product of the total collapse of most western governments. But I would like to know if I am being too pessimistic. Do you have any faith that fixing the current laws is at all possible to occur?
Well, assuming by 'waste money' you mean 'Spends more than needed to keep the country from getting invaded', the rules are: If there are people hungry, you don't get to waste money on the military. If there are people homeless, you don't get to waste money on the military. If there are people without medical care, you don't get to waste money on the military. If there are people who can't safely walk down their street, you don't get to waste money on the military.
Well, by that metric I guess that worldwide there shouldn't be any money wasted on the military. The USA in particular qualifies on all four of these standards.
I don't mind it. It's a story about the Slashdot comments on a story (as f'ed up that sounds), but a summary of highly-modded comments within a long & detailed thread, on a story that has a lot of facets, is nice to see. Not much to comment on, mind you, but informative and a bonus nonetheless.
That said, the next thing I do after posting this comment is I'm going to my user prefs to take "Backslash" off my front page!
While it is true that the "mere guys-in-the-trenches" would not be killed directly by such a coordinated patent attack (we would quietly continue to use and develop the software), we would most certainly still be "crippled" by it. As in, severely disabled, but not quite dead.
A large number (majority? probably.) of OSS developers on significant projects do so as part of their jobs. If the jobs disappear because it's illegal, so do a lot of those developers (not all, but a good percentage will be forced into "honest" work). What happens to the quality of OSS when hundreds of high-profile, high-quality developers are no longer contributing?
Add to the fact that the usefullness of OSS is augmented *tremendously* if there is more than just a pittance of the population using it. Migration of users to Linux is imperitive: without a healthy user base, open protocols will continue to under fire, and soon you will find that the Windows way will be the only way (new hardware works only with Windows, ISP only connects with Windows, etc).
We have to prevent ourselves from becoming criminals. Otherwise, we'll not only be criminals, we'll be irrelevant criminals.
I read one columnist describe the difference between Americans and Canadians like this:
Americans are the most arrogant people on earth (ie. very loudly confident of their superiority)
Canadians are the smuggest people on earth (ie. somewhat quietly confident of their superiority)
I thought it was a very apt description of the differences in our nations. I have found few friends (both Canadians and Americans) who disagree with this general summary.
Look, we agree that TPB is shady as hell, and certainly has no right to claim a moral high ground as they obviously exist (and prosper? maybe) on the back of content that they should not have the right to help distribute. That is what they do: they facilitate parties to commit copyright violation.
But to have a functioning society of checks and balances, you simply cannot have a situation of police enforcing "laws" which do not exist on the books of the country that TPB is in. As I understand it, in Sweden, what TPB does in entirely *legal*. Ammoral, probably (depends upon one's own moral compass), but not illegal. If the law of the land is inadequate, make "the powers that be" change the laws.
BTW, we certainly haven't heard the entire story here. I don't know anything about Swedish law, but it is plausible that they have a system of searching and seizing with warrants, and a warrant for the seizures may have been granted based on evidence and testimony that pointed to an action that actually is illegal in Sweden (such as, perhaps, a locally stored copy of a movie on their servers that they downloaded themselves without purchasing a copy?). Yes, I'm just making this up, but my point is that the police could shut down the operation from serving its primary, legal purpose if TPB was also committing a minor, illegal offence.
Wow, I've been cycling through assorted bizarre VT quotes for months, and no one notices. Now, I've had two shout-outs in four days! (Here (at the bottom) is Friday's reply, just before I changed sigs on the weekend.
It is great to know that there are other VT fans out there in/. land, though.
Must of the space used on disks is stuff thats been instaled, as opposed to created.
Digital Video (like a Myth box)
Enough said.
(If it's not, look into how much storage an hour of high-quality video, even with a good codec, can require. Then imagine your video collection ripped to the media centre.)
It was in the subject, and the body. I was referring specifically to "media PCs" (as well as DVR/PVR boxes), where size, noise, and power DO matter! I don't have a data centre, I want a solution appropriate for my home.
Some keep saying that there's no point to ever-increasing drive storage numbers. I disagree. Huge drives will always be appreciated in media PCs, where good-quality video (even if compressed) takes up a good chunk of storage space. Since these devices are preferably low noise, low power, and small in size, you obviously can't just keep throwing more drives in the box: a single drive is the best solution.
Keep the size increases coming, I've got a mountain of content on DVD and VHS that I'd love to be able to rip to an online media library!
That would get in the way of their profits somewhat.
So would getting fined to the tune of $6000 per passenger if they were to remain subject to the US rules.
I suspect that the airlines will demand the information themselves as a precondition of flying with them. In other words no actual change at all in the situation, apart from the responsibility for collecting the data no longer being a governmental thing. Technically, it becomes voluntary... though the airline won't let you onto the plane if you don't give it.
I could be reading the article incorrectly, but it looks to me that the act of handing over this data to the US government violates the EU Data Protection Directive. So it makes no difference if the data is handed over to the US "voluntarily" by the airline, or by directive by an agreement between the US and EU: both are equally non-permissable by the above directive, and the data cannot be handed over (according to this ruling).
Slashdot Mirror
Has Linus been heard from lately on this whole schomzle? He has resisted changing the kernel from GPL2 to GPL3. RMS and others (like PJ) are saying that GPL3 solves the problem going forward. Does Linus concur? Has he made any statement anywhere (like kernel.org) about how he sees the Novell/MS deal possibly changing his mind?
Just wondering
No, and I'm glad you put it in those terms. For most stuff, there really is no requirement for higher quality picture quality. Hell, most people who download stuff from P2P are satisfied with crap quality: its what's *in* the video file that matters. I know that TV is not important enough for me to invest in better quality. If mine were to die tonight, I'd go out and buy the cheapest 27-30" CRT I could find. Nothing I watch (even stuff I enjoy immensely) is worth more than that to me. I'll bet that the vast majority of people feel the same way.
Just because sales of HD-ready televisions are "booming", doesn't mean that there is a particularly high percentage of penetration of the sets in North American households. Anyone got any stats?
.. because personally I wouldn't want to do business with an outfit that would fall apart because of the absence of a single employee. That is what would happen, isn't it? Your presence is critical to the operation of the business, and if a "problem" occured while you were unavailable, the entire operation would crumble. Right?
No? You mean that you would, in fact, be able to leave for a week and come back to find the building still occupied by employees, phones still ringing, sales still being made, etc.?
Face it: you're not THAT important. If you were hit by a bus, you'd be replaced. Business would continue without you. If they can replace you in that circumstance, they can figure out a way for you to have a vacation. The fact that they are not indicates you like never having a vacation (you're a control freak), or you don't like it and your "executive director" and his coworkers are abusive dicks for not allowing you to arrange vacation time.
Either way, your company is being very shortsighted, and cannot see that they are going to be sorry when you *do* stop working there (regarless of the circumstances of your departure). True, you're not irreplacable, but they're still going to be hurt by your not having an effective team under you.
Does anyone know if Linus has commented on the whole GPL3 issue since the Novell-MS deal was announced? He has been opposed to the GPL3 in the past. Is the current climate going to change his mind?
This is exactly what the telcos / cable companies wanted to do. "Net Neutrality" was one of those terms that was created by a special interest group, an expression designed to be have a positive connotation, regardless of the content of the message. The "USA PATRIOT Act" is another such example: who could be opposed to an law that says "patriot" in it? Would support be so high for the law if it was called the "USA POLICE STATE Act"?
In the "net neutrality" debate, however, it was the non-evil party that managed to get the term for the discussion coined first, leaving the companies that want to prioritize network traffic in the position of arguing against something that seems so reasonable and fair, when you hear the term. What to do? Exactly what they did: attempt to co-opt the term to make people confused about its meaning. They appear to be doing a splendid job.
Yes. Every time a new method of storing infomation comes along, there is always a transition period where computers have both methods of reading and writing the media supported.
If some cool optical storage medium comes along that makes magnetic hard drives obsolete, you can bet that there will be at least three years where every new piece of hardware supports both standards. Plus, there will be ways of adding the new technology to old computers, and ways of adding the old technology to new computers for a long time after that. You will have plenty of time to copy your information from one medium to the next.
It's the same with file formats. You will not be left instantaneously unable to transfer your data (particularly if they are openly documented, like JPEG or MP3) from one format to another.
The only thing that will prevent you from being able to read your data in the future will be your own neglect.
Money is not the only reason that someone would want their work protected by copyright. Every piece of GPL'ed code that is out there is protected by copyright, but not for the purpose of making its holder any money. The purpose of the licence is to keep the code Free. You won't find Stallman claiming that the point of copyright is money.
The holder of the copyright can exercise whatever restrictions on copying (short of fair use) that they wish. The default behaviour is "All rights reserved," meaning that the holder retains all duplication rights, and grants none to any other party (again, excepting fair use). There does not need to be any financial motivation for restricting others' copying rights: holders can do it simply because they want to.
That's fine. But if your wife buys a shitload of music off of iTMS (a substantial investment of time and money) and her computer borks on her authentication big time, don't you think that your wife would have appreciated it if you, as the "tech savvy" one in the house, had told her about this risk?
Just because she's having no issues now, doesn't mean that she won't in the future. Any number of reasons could leave DRM'd content totally useless in the future. Just knowing this fact could cause a great number of people to think twice before ever purchasing anything infected with DRM.
Is providing security updates and bug fixes an implicit right granted to you as the purchaser of MS Office? I doubt it. When you plunk down your money, you get the binary that exists at the moment you purchased it.
MS provides updates at no cost, and as far as I can tell they don't have to do diddly squat about providing a method for you to apply updates in any manner they don't see fit. I don't see how they would get into any troubles if you couldn't get OGA to work under WINE. It really isn't their problem.
Don't get me wrong: I'm a Linux user too. I just don't care that much about how well MS Office runs under Linux. The sooner the world weans itself off Office, the better!
First of all, since your posting history shows that you haven't pointed out much of anything to Slashdot since March, it's pretty difficult for us to have been informed of Zunior "again, and again"
That said, thanks for the link to that site. I've been out of touch with music for awhile, and since I've always been partial to Canadian rock, Zunior looks like a great place to get reaquainted.
Also, thanks for the link to the Rheostatics on your ID bar. I haven't seen them live since a concert at the Bathurst Theatre in late 1993 (I think), and haven't heard them at all since "Introducing Happiness." Sad to see that they're soon going to doing their last concert at Massey Hall: I may have to go!
Is this really the right catagory to post KDE news in?
Oh, they get it just fine. They will sing from the top of their lungs that their sales are down due to piracy, while lobbying for laws outlawing all fair use. The content industry won't rest until they've implemented a legal stranglehold on distribution of their product, and to heck with users' rights.
They aren't dumb, they're just sociopathic.
"Pithy comments" are unfortunately a very common occurance here, and any discussion board. That's what the moderation system is for: if you change your preferences, you rarely see them again.
;-)
Seriously though, welcome to Slashdot. Some of us want intelligent discourse. Just ignore those who don't, and have fun!
(Oh, and by the way, if you're posting on Slashdot, you *are* in fact a geek! Try not to think of it as a bad thing!
The DMCA was an extension of copyright law in the USA, so you don't "voilate the DMCA", rather you violate the law. Even after the DMCA, there is nothing illegal about doing what you suggest (shooting the TV with a camera), but what you do with that copy afterwards may be illegal. Do it for yourself for your own non-commercial uses? Legal. Distribute the copy without permission from the copyright holder? Most likely illegal.
Same as above, holding a licence for the CSS key does not in itself give you any permission to distribute copies of a random DVD to someone else, whether for money or not.
Neither of your scenarios has anything to do with the DMCA at all. The only things potentially infringing in your examples were already infringing before 1998 when the DMCA was passed.
I have to wonder if there is any chance whatsoever of this actually happening. Seriously, no sarcasm implied, is there any hope? I think that it is painfully obvious that both political parties are beholden to business interests, and that neither will voluntarily initiate any action toward legislation that will increase citizen rights at the expense of corporate power over information.
Even if this were ever to become a hot-button issue to the electorate, would the established political order ever bend on an issue as important to the business elite as the "ownership of knowledge"? Not that it ever will be that big an issue: the corporate interests who are concerned with owning information are the same interests that control all major media outlets, and as such the masses will never be galvanized by mass outrage over this issue as they will never hear that there is any outrage.
Sadly, it seems to me that sane IP laws will only come into being as the by-product of the total collapse of most western governments. But I would like to know if I am being too pessimistic. Do you have any faith that fixing the current laws is at all possible to occur?
Well, by that metric I guess that worldwide there shouldn't be any money wasted on the military. The USA in particular qualifies on all four of these standards.
I don't mind it. It's a story about the Slashdot comments on a story (as f'ed up that sounds), but a summary of highly-modded comments within a long & detailed thread, on a story that has a lot of facets, is nice to see. Not much to comment on, mind you, but informative and a bonus nonetheless.
That said, the next thing I do after posting this comment is I'm going to my user prefs to take "Backslash" off my front page!
While it is true that the "mere guys-in-the-trenches" would not be killed directly by such a coordinated patent attack (we would quietly continue to use and develop the software), we would most certainly still be "crippled" by it. As in, severely disabled, but not quite dead.
A large number (majority? probably.) of OSS developers on significant projects do so as part of their jobs. If the jobs disappear because it's illegal, so do a lot of those developers (not all, but a good percentage will be forced into "honest" work). What happens to the quality of OSS when hundreds of high-profile, high-quality developers are no longer contributing?
Add to the fact that the usefullness of OSS is augmented *tremendously* if there is more than just a pittance of the population using it. Migration of users to Linux is imperitive: without a healthy user base, open protocols will continue to under fire, and soon you will find that the Windows way will be the only way (new hardware works only with Windows, ISP only connects with Windows, etc).
We have to prevent ourselves from becoming criminals. Otherwise, we'll not only be criminals, we'll be irrelevant criminals.
I read one columnist describe the difference between Americans and Canadians like this:
I thought it was a very apt description of the differences in our nations. I have found few friends (both Canadians and Americans) who disagree with this general summary.
Look, we agree that TPB is shady as hell, and certainly has no right to claim a moral high ground as they obviously exist (and prosper? maybe) on the back of content that they should not have the right to help distribute. That is what they do: they facilitate parties to commit copyright violation.
But to have a functioning society of checks and balances, you simply cannot have a situation of police enforcing "laws" which do not exist on the books of the country that TPB is in. As I understand it, in Sweden, what TPB does in entirely *legal*. Ammoral, probably (depends upon one's own moral compass), but not illegal. If the law of the land is inadequate, make "the powers that be" change the laws.
BTW, we certainly haven't heard the entire story here. I don't know anything about Swedish law, but it is plausible that they have a system of searching and seizing with warrants, and a warrant for the seizures may have been granted based on evidence and testimony that pointed to an action that actually is illegal in Sweden (such as, perhaps, a locally stored copy of a movie on their servers that they downloaded themselves without purchasing a copy?). Yes, I'm just making this up, but my point is that the police could shut down the operation from serving its primary, legal purpose if TPB was also committing a minor, illegal offence.
Wow, I've been cycling through assorted bizarre VT quotes for months, and no one notices. Now, I've had two shout-outs in four days! (Here (at the bottom) is Friday's reply, just before I changed sigs on the weekend.
/. land, though.
It is great to know that there are other VT fans out there in
Ah, what the hey, I'll change it again!
Must of the space used on disks is stuff thats been instaled, as opposed to created.
Digital Video (like a Myth box)
Enough said.
(If it's not, look into how much storage an hour of high-quality video, even with a good codec, can require. Then imagine your video collection ripped to the media centre.)
It was in the subject, and the body. I was referring specifically to "media PCs" (as well as DVR/PVR boxes), where size, noise, and power DO matter! I don't have a data centre, I want a solution appropriate for my home.
Some keep saying that there's no point to ever-increasing drive storage numbers. I disagree. Huge drives will always be appreciated in media PCs, where good-quality video (even if compressed) takes up a good chunk of storage space. Since these devices are preferably low noise, low power, and small in size, you obviously can't just keep throwing more drives in the box: a single drive is the best solution.
Keep the size increases coming, I've got a mountain of content on DVD and VHS that I'd love to be able to rip to an online media library!
That would get in the way of their profits somewhat.
So would getting fined to the tune of $6000 per passenger if they were to remain subject to the US rules.
I suspect that the airlines will demand the information themselves as a precondition of flying with them. In other words no actual change at all in the situation, apart from the responsibility for collecting the data no longer being a governmental thing. Technically, it becomes voluntary... though the airline won't let you onto the plane if you don't give it.
I could be reading the article incorrectly, but it looks to me that the act of handing over this data to the US government violates the EU Data Protection Directive. So it makes no difference if the data is handed over to the US "voluntarily" by the airline, or by directive by an agreement between the US and EU: both are equally non-permissable by the above directive, and the data cannot be handed over (according to this ruling).