As the GP noted, Microsoft encourages others to distribute its programs, too, via resellers. Would it be fair to claim that "Microsoft is distributing infected software" if HP or Dells were shipped with viruses, and the viruses hadn't actually come from Microsoft?
The main point of these lawsuits is to rack up wins in the PR department. They want to point to "14,000 successful lawsuits" and say, "P2P is against the law, and it's dangerous! Look at the numbers of people who have paid already! You WILL get caught! Don't do it!".
Aside from the fact that your chance of getting sued is still on the order of your chance of accidental death from a number of causes, the RIAA's lawsuit activities have another flaw: in order to work, you have to sue a lot of people. That means the pressure's on to file lawsuits in the first place. And how are they getting the material for these lawsuits?
I would not be surprised at all (though I don't know this for sure) if the RIAA is basically paying a bounty to the likes of Media Sentry for IP Addresses. They may even pay a fee per IP address. If so, that's an incentive to crank out "offending" IP addresses on the part of the bounty hunters, and could lead to very sloppy work documenting offenses.
As the court documents in these cases show, this may be exactly what's happening. It's a practice that may bite the RIAA very hard in the ass.
This isn't just about the financial incentive to extort people out of cash. It's mostly about racking up numbers for PR purposes. Unfortunately, all it appears to have done thus far is encourage filesharing.
For the RIAA in particular, this fight has always been less about stopping illegal file sharing than it is about maintaining their business model. The legal use of P2P technology potentially spells the end of many (if not most) record companies, since they may not be needed anymore.
As I wrote above, The fact that they're going after BitTorrent and the fact that they're deliberately misinterpreting the Supreme Court's decision to say that "enabling" copyright violation is now taboo tells me that this is a true desperation move. They're trying to use the courts and use legislation to maintain their business when market forces say they're obsolete.
This is the "error" in RIAA's new campaign: they're claiming p2p networks have to stop "enabling" copyright violation. This isn't what the Supreme Court said, and I'd put money on the idea that RIAA knows it.
For this reason, and the fact that they're going after BitTorrent (a system in which the inventor specifically warned people off of copyright violation using the system, and which is routinely used for legal downloads), I think this is a true desperation move, and one that's not entirely about stopping illegal file sharing.
Both the RIAA/MPAA and I are talking about the versions were you do not have the right to distribute it.
So instead of going stupidly into a flamebait, just know what RIAA/MPAA are doing in these cases.
Bullshit. You were polemically sloppy, and got owned.
Moreover, at least some of your arguments, and those of the RIAA, depend upon this sloppiness. Of course, I assume, in your case, this isn't deliberate. In the case of the RIAA, I'm quite sure it's the opposite.
You see, for a while, the RIAA has engaged in a deliberate misinformation and fear campaign to paint all p2p distribution as illegal, immoral and punishable by definition. They're doing this not to protect their copyrights, but to protect their business: when artists no longer need the RIAA to distribute their works as a means to promote themselves, then the record companies (which have traditionally screwed artists, by the way) go out of business.
The RIAA is actively engaged in trying to prevent the legal distribution of artists music via the most efficient method the artists have available to them. They're trying to legislate their business model and misuse the legal system to maintain profits they don't deserve.
Yes, well, I guess it comes down to just how much weight Sony vs. Universal still carries with the judiciary. Apparently it doesn't mean much to the Supreme Court: ironic considering it was a Supreme Court decision in the first place.
That's what the RIAA's been running around saying. According to just about everyone else I've read, the only thing that happened in the Grokster case is that the Supremes said you can't go around advertising a program as being for copyright infringement.
To my knowledge, Kazaa's never been promoted in that way. But I suppose that's a matter for a court to decide.
It would be interesting to see, in light of recent court findings that file-sharing software in and of itself isn't illegal, whether the presence of file-sharing software would be sufficient.
Kazaa isn't exactly a rare program, nor is it only used to illegally traffic in copyrighted material (granted, that's probably what it's mostly used for, but still).
See, your brother wants to give his stuff away. That is his choice. Good for him. But plenty of artistes do not want to give their stuff away. I don't see why some Slashdotter's think it is their divine right to "sample" everything under the sun for free.
Frankly, it sounds to me like the real problem you have is with artists who "give their stuff away", enabling people to sample everything under the sun for free, as opposed to people who download it. To my mind, that is also the RIAA's real position.
And for the record, I don't think artists who give away recordings are "giving their stuff away". They're giving away recordings of their stuff. The actual stuff of value is experiencing the artists making the music--there's nothing like it. But hey, that's just my opinion.
Personally, I don't really think harm matters, I just think that morally a copyright holder, who has gone to the bother of creating music or other intellectual property (or paid someone else to make it) should have the right to limit the distribution of that work, since were it not for them it wouldn't exist. I don't really see why harm is essential.
They do have that right, within limits: evidence of harm is relevant to the discussion, both morally and legally. Copyright does not begin and end with who owns what. There's more to it than that, including public good.
Anyway, the difference now is that big-money copyright holders have set themselves up as para-law-enforcement agencies, and with very little evidence and no oversight are using their vast resources, new subpoena powers and draconian new laws to extort large sums of money from people regardless of guilt or evidence of actual harm to the copyright holder.
What's worse, they're using the alleged threat of piracy and their lawsuits to attempt to shut down file sharing in general, painting it as illegal, wrong and punishable in and of itself. They are doing this, of course, because legal file sharing is a direct threat to their business. Artists no longer need to use RIAA companies to distribute copies of their music (which can be used to promote tours, where artists make most of their money). The record companies know this, and they're trying to get Congress to legislate their business model. It's as corrupt a thing as I think I've ever seen.
By the way, for all everyone knows, the RIAA may be basically paying bounty hunters for IP addresses, which would create a huge incentive for the bounty hunters to generate IP addresses out of thin air. I'd be very interested in knowing whether or not stuff like this is happening, BTW--there's at least some indication that the RIAA is using contractors to "track down pirates". Anyone know what the terms are?
Moreover, they'd have to keep logs (several major Usenet service providers, such as Giganews, explicitly say they don't) and since the copyrighted material is being hosted on their servers en masse, it seems to me that their own liability would be quite a bit higher.
Of course, this could be used to leverage them into giving up any logs they do have. But I rather think that it would open a can of worms, especially for big ISP's: it's one thing to give up logs that show infringement by a customer or two upon being subpoenaed; it's quite another to get sued yourself. And if the **AA goes after Verizon, Comcast, Giganews, etc., they're going to have a fight on their hands. Thus far, the **AA's seem more interested in picking on those who can't defend themselves.
In any case, I disagree with your interpretation of section 1008, which says only that no civil action may be brought for noncommercial copying by a consumer. Obviously, the RIAA would argue that your providing copies to friends is not noncommercial, because it displaces copies that might otherwise be sold at retail, and I think that's a winning argument.
Since this argument can always be made (any copy you make, for yourself or others, can be said by definition to be "displacing" copies you could have bought otherwise), by this definition there's no such thing as "noncommercial copying". Since the law specifically allows for something called "noncommercial copying", this is an absurdity and your interpretation cannot be what Congress intended.
I would suspect that "noncommercial copying" is copying in which people don't sell the copies themselves.
I would love to see BPL work. I live out in the boonies and I can't even get cable, never mind DSL.
BPL would not be a solution for rural area access. BPL is not useable for long-haul communications: basically, providers need to get the signal almost there using fiber or ethernet (or some similar technology), then put it on the power lines.
This makes BPL a useable, cost-effective technology when you're talking about a subdivision with a bunch of houses. But it's unlikely that a BPL provider would string a fiber across the miles to 50 feet from a remote, rural home, then put the signal on the power line. You might as well string the fiber the rest of the way, from a cost standpoint. Which means you're pretty much back to square one.
One additional factor that needs to be added, though, is that as MOSFET transistors scale towards smaller and smaller features, leakage current becomes a larger and larger problem. Basically, at extremely small sizes, quantum effects start to become significant, and electrons randomly tunnel from one end to the other.
The larger the leakage current, the more is lost to heat.
It remains to be seen how large a problem leakage current is with the new tube transistors. If it's not a big problem, then one of the major obstacles towards reducing feature size on integrated circuits will have been addressed.
Since the inalienable right to maximum profits is found right there in the Constitution, anything that gets in the way of maximum profits (thereby denying you your riches without limits) must, by definition, be "theft". QED.
Why not modify Adblock and similar software such that they download the ads (putting them in the cache), but don't display them?
You could still have the option to simply not download the ads, too, for limited bandwidth users.
I can see Doubleclick's point (though I have little respect or sympathy for that particular aggressive company), and am looking forward to adblock incorporating a whitelist for sites one wishes to support.
It's good that stuff like this is reported, and people get upset about it. Frankly, there's a reason why the DOJ is trying to do this "quietly". Remember clipper?
But really, the number of bad, privacy-invading ideas that have been put forth by law enforcement and scrapped over the years is innumerable. I would imagine this one is heading for the same fate.
5: Ordinary citizens who don't want their private information viewed/used against them either by hackers or by law enforcement personnel who abuse their power
The more law enforcement is simply trusted to do the right thing, the more you will have bad apples who don't. The phrase "power corrupts" describes a very real phenomenon.
They released a fix a week after widespread hue and cry. This is not too dissimilair from Microsoft breaking its "patch Tuesday" policy for a critical fix.
True. But it is quite an improvement over Microsoft not fixing critical bugs for years at a time:
In my opinion, this is a critical difference between commercial (proprietary) and open-source products: open-source coders do what they do for acclaim and the personal satisfaction of having people use their code--likely a fairly constant incentive to fix bugs, at least until the coder dies or loses all interest in such acclaim.
By contrast, companies do what they do for the profit motive. When Microsoft gets its money regardless, there's really no incentive to devote resources towards fixing serious bugs.
Now that Microsoft has begun to experience some real competition (however small it is at this point), I would expect them to get more serious about security and bug fixes.
I've never made a claim of neutrality when it comes to Mozilla vs. Firefox, and I would imagine most people here are the same. So, once again, we're down to you complaining and moaning about the unfairness of people who are "unfair" by their own enthusiastic admission.
To my mind, that comes under the category of "deal with it"--as in that reality you purport to bring to this site.
No need. It's easy enough to find that sort of apologia elsewhere.
Seriously, this non-stop, defensive demand for "fairness" on Slashdot from MS apologists is pretty sad. When Mozilla gets the corporate/financial/monopolistic muscle to promote itself that MS has at its disposal, and when Firefox suffers from remotely the same number of critical/exploitable bugs that IE has displayed over the years, come back and complain. Until then, don't expect anyone to take this sort of "stop beating up on poor ol' defenseless MS" whining seriously.
Slashdot Mirror
The analogy is still not accurate.
As the GP noted, Microsoft encourages others to distribute its programs, too, via resellers. Would it be fair to claim that "Microsoft is distributing infected software" if HP or Dells were shipped with viruses, and the viruses hadn't actually come from Microsoft?
In my opinion, the reasonable answer is "no".
The main point of these lawsuits is to rack up wins in the PR department. They want to point to "14,000 successful lawsuits" and say, "P2P is against the law, and it's dangerous! Look at the numbers of people who have paid already! You WILL get caught! Don't do it!".
Aside from the fact that your chance of getting sued is still on the order of your chance of accidental death from a number of causes, the RIAA's lawsuit activities have another flaw: in order to work, you have to sue a lot of people. That means the pressure's on to file lawsuits in the first place. And how are they getting the material for these lawsuits?
I would not be surprised at all (though I don't know this for sure) if the RIAA is basically paying a bounty to the likes of Media Sentry for IP Addresses. They may even pay a fee per IP address. If so, that's an incentive to crank out "offending" IP addresses on the part of the bounty hunters, and could lead to very sloppy work documenting offenses.
As the court documents in these cases show, this may be exactly what's happening. It's a practice that may bite the RIAA very hard in the ass.
Well, then they'd be screwed, on several levels.
This isn't just about the financial incentive to extort people out of cash. It's mostly about racking up numbers for PR purposes. Unfortunately, all it appears to have done thus far is encourage filesharing.
For the RIAA in particular, this fight has always been less about stopping illegal file sharing than it is about maintaining their business model. The legal use of P2P technology potentially spells the end of many (if not most) record companies, since they may not be needed anymore.
As I wrote above, The fact that they're going after BitTorrent and the fact that they're deliberately misinterpreting the Supreme Court's decision to say that "enabling" copyright violation is now taboo tells me that this is a true desperation move. They're trying to use the courts and use legislation to maintain their business when market forces say they're obsolete.
This is the "error" in RIAA's new campaign: they're claiming p2p networks have to stop "enabling" copyright violation. This isn't what the Supreme Court said, and I'd put money on the idea that RIAA knows it.
For this reason, and the fact that they're going after BitTorrent (a system in which the inventor specifically warned people off of copyright violation using the system, and which is routinely used for legal downloads), I think this is a true desperation move, and one that's not entirely about stopping illegal file sharing.
Sounds like there's a market for a new type of recording company -- one that explicity and exclusively markets artists via p2p, iTunes, etc.
Though I think the recording industry as it stands won't survive for very long anyway, I think such a new service would hasten the fall.
Both the RIAA/MPAA and I are talking about the versions were you do not have the right to distribute it.
So instead of going stupidly into a flamebait, just know what RIAA/MPAA are doing in these cases.
Bullshit. You were polemically sloppy, and got owned.
Moreover, at least some of your arguments, and those of the RIAA, depend upon this sloppiness. Of course, I assume, in your case, this isn't deliberate. In the case of the RIAA, I'm quite sure it's the opposite.
You see, for a while, the RIAA has engaged in a deliberate misinformation and fear campaign to paint all p2p distribution as illegal, immoral and punishable by definition. They're doing this not to protect their copyrights, but to protect their business: when artists no longer need the RIAA to distribute their works as a means to promote themselves, then the record companies (which have traditionally screwed artists, by the way) go out of business.
The RIAA is actively engaged in trying to prevent the legal distribution of artists music via the most efficient method the artists have available to them. They're trying to legislate their business model and misuse the legal system to maintain profits they don't deserve.
Yes, well, I guess it comes down to just how much weight Sony vs. Universal still carries with the judiciary. Apparently it doesn't mean much to the Supreme Court: ironic considering it was a Supreme Court decision in the first place.
That's what the RIAA's been running around saying. According to just about everyone else I've read, the only thing that happened in the Grokster case is that the Supremes said you can't go around advertising a program as being for copyright infringement.
To my knowledge, Kazaa's never been promoted in that way. But I suppose that's a matter for a court to decide.
It would be interesting to see, in light of recent court findings that file-sharing software in and of itself isn't illegal, whether the presence of file-sharing software would be sufficient.
Kazaa isn't exactly a rare program, nor is it only used to illegally traffic in copyrighted material (granted, that's probably what it's mostly used for, but still).
See, your brother wants to give his stuff away. That is his choice. Good for him. But plenty of artistes do not want to give their stuff away. I don't see why some Slashdotter's think it is their divine right to "sample" everything under the sun for free.
Frankly, it sounds to me like the real problem you have is with artists who "give their stuff away", enabling people to sample everything under the sun for free, as opposed to people who download it. To my mind, that is also the RIAA's real position.
And for the record, I don't think artists who give away recordings are "giving their stuff away". They're giving away recordings of their stuff. The actual stuff of value is experiencing the artists making the music--there's nothing like it. But hey, that's just my opinion.
Personally, I don't really think harm matters, I just think that morally a copyright holder, who has gone to the bother of creating music or other intellectual property (or paid someone else to make it) should have the right to limit the distribution of that work, since were it not for them it wouldn't exist. I don't really see why harm is essential.
They do have that right, within limits: evidence of harm is relevant to the discussion, both morally and legally. Copyright does not begin and end with who owns what. There's more to it than that, including public good.
Anyway, the difference now is that big-money copyright holders have set themselves up as para-law-enforcement agencies, and with very little evidence and no oversight are using their vast resources, new subpoena powers and draconian new laws to extort large sums of money from people regardless of guilt or evidence of actual harm to the copyright holder.
What's worse, they're using the alleged threat of piracy and their lawsuits to attempt to shut down file sharing in general, painting it as illegal, wrong and punishable in and of itself. They are doing this, of course, because legal file sharing is a direct threat to their business. Artists no longer need to use RIAA companies to distribute copies of their music (which can be used to promote tours, where artists make most of their money). The record companies know this, and they're trying to get Congress to legislate their business model. It's as corrupt a thing as I think I've ever seen.
By the way, for all everyone knows, the RIAA may be basically paying bounty hunters for IP addresses, which would create a huge incentive for the bounty hunters to generate IP addresses out of thin air. I'd be very interested in knowing whether or not stuff like this is happening, BTW--there's at least some indication that the RIAA is using contractors to "track down pirates". Anyone know what the terms are?
Moreover, they'd have to keep logs (several major Usenet service providers, such as Giganews, explicitly say they don't) and since the copyrighted material is being hosted on their servers en masse, it seems to me that their own liability would be quite a bit higher.
Of course, this could be used to leverage them into giving up any logs they do have. But I rather think that it would open a can of worms, especially for big ISP's: it's one thing to give up logs that show infringement by a customer or two upon being subpoenaed; it's quite another to get sued yourself. And if the **AA goes after Verizon, Comcast, Giganews, etc., they're going to have a fight on their hands. Thus far, the **AA's seem more interested in picking on those who can't defend themselves.
In any case, I disagree with your interpretation of section 1008, which says only that no civil action may be brought for noncommercial copying by a consumer. Obviously, the RIAA would argue that your providing copies to friends is not noncommercial, because it displaces copies that might otherwise be sold at retail, and I think that's a winning argument.
Since this argument can always be made (any copy you make, for yourself or others, can be said by definition to be "displacing" copies you could have bought otherwise), by this definition there's no such thing as "noncommercial copying". Since the law specifically allows for something called "noncommercial copying", this is an absurdity and your interpretation cannot be what Congress intended.
I would suspect that "noncommercial copying" is copying in which people don't sell the copies themselves.
I would love to see BPL work. I live out in the boonies and I can't even get cable, never mind DSL.
BPL would not be a solution for rural area access. BPL is not useable for long-haul communications: basically, providers need to get the signal almost there using fiber or ethernet (or some similar technology), then put it on the power lines.
This makes BPL a useable, cost-effective technology when you're talking about a subdivision with a bunch of houses. But it's unlikely that a BPL provider would string a fiber across the miles to 50 feet from a remote, rural home, then put the signal on the power line. You might as well string the fiber the rest of the way, from a cost standpoint. Which means you're pretty much back to square one.
This is a very good summary.
One additional factor that needs to be added, though, is that as MOSFET transistors scale towards smaller and smaller features, leakage current becomes a larger and larger problem. Basically, at extremely small sizes, quantum effects start to become significant, and electrons randomly tunnel from one end to the other.
The larger the leakage current, the more is lost to heat.
It remains to be seen how large a problem leakage current is with the new tube transistors. If it's not a big problem, then one of the major obstacles towards reducing feature size on integrated circuits will have been addressed.
Since the inalienable right to maximum profits is found right there in the Constitution, anything that gets in the way of maximum profits (thereby denying you your riches without limits) must, by definition, be "theft". QED.
Not that you said that, mind you. Just a cynical observation on a certain mindset...
Don't you remmeber, this is Slashdot, News for People who Hate America, Stuff about Hating America.
And don't forget: George Bush = America
Why not modify Adblock and similar software such that they download the ads (putting them in the cache), but don't display them?
You could still have the option to simply not download the ads, too, for limited bandwidth users.
I can see Doubleclick's point (though I have little respect or sympathy for that particular aggressive company), and am looking forward to adblock incorporating a whitelist for sites one wishes to support.
It's good that stuff like this is reported, and people get upset about it. Frankly, there's a reason why the DOJ is trying to do this "quietly". Remember clipper?
But really, the number of bad, privacy-invading ideas that have been put forth by law enforcement and scrapped over the years is innumerable. I would imagine this one is heading for the same fate.
5: Ordinary citizens who don't want their private information viewed/used against them either by hackers or by law enforcement personnel who abuse their power
The more law enforcement is simply trusted to do the right thing, the more you will have bad apples who don't. The phrase "power corrupts" describes a very real phenomenon.
They released a fix a week after widespread hue and cry. This is not too dissimilair from Microsoft breaking its "patch Tuesday" policy for a critical fix.
True. But it is quite an improvement over Microsoft not fixing critical bugs for years at a time:
http://secunia.com/product/11/#advisories
In my opinion, this is a critical difference between commercial (proprietary) and open-source products: open-source coders do what they do for acclaim and the personal satisfaction of having people use their code--likely a fairly constant incentive to fix bugs, at least until the coder dies or loses all interest in such acclaim.
By contrast, companies do what they do for the profit motive. When Microsoft gets its money regardless, there's really no incentive to devote resources towards fixing serious bugs.
Now that Microsoft has begun to experience some real competition (however small it is at this point), I would expect them to get more serious about security and bug fixes.
And that's a good thing all around.
More whining.
I've never made a claim of neutrality when it comes to Mozilla vs. Firefox, and I would imagine most people here are the same. So, once again, we're down to you complaining and moaning about the unfairness of people who are "unfair" by their own enthusiastic admission.
To my mind, that comes under the category of "deal with it"--as in that reality you purport to bring to this site.
No need. It's easy enough to find that sort of apologia elsewhere.
Seriously, this non-stop, defensive demand for "fairness" on Slashdot from MS apologists is pretty sad. When Mozilla gets the corporate/financial/monopolistic muscle to promote itself that MS has at its disposal, and when Firefox suffers from remotely the same number of critical/exploitable bugs that IE has displayed over the years, come back and complain. Until then, don't expect anyone to take this sort of "stop beating up on poor ol' defenseless MS" whining seriously.
Just love the ever-defensive tone of MS apologists on /.
That, to me, says far more than any other argument that could be made regarding the relative quality of IE vs. FF...