I've already sent off my email of thanks, but if you really want to make the point- you want to go here and make out a check to the man. It doesn't have to be big- mine will probably only be 10 or 20 bucks. But you can bet that the RIAA will be bankrolling his next opponent- so the time to support him is now, not just with words, but by putting your money where your mouth is.
BTW... this isn't just for VA residents. Any American who cares for and agrees with what this guy thinks should send in at least a token donation, and make it clear exactly why you are donating. It is sort of sad that this is how the process works, but it is, and complaining about it is useful but not not change things until it is too late for this particular cause. So... go write that check, and write it now.
~luge
P.S. Hiro, this isn't aimed at you but at others. Make sure you vote for him in 2002, though:)
If I still had moderator points, I'd move this one up.
Every once in a while, politicians do actually take stands on things that they really believe in, especially when their constituencies don't really care one way or the other. (I mean, it's not like he is Sonny Bono and depends on entertainment industry votes for re-election.) I say kudos to Rep. Boucher... I'm sending his re-election campaign a check as soon as I can find an address to send it to:)
~luge
The CNET article said that they'd be using culturally appropriate iconography in the world-wide campaign. I.e., we'll get the four-sticks-in-a-circle peace symbol (no idea what else to call that) but other places might get doves or things like that. Marketing guys get paid the big bucks to thing of that type of thing... IBM wouldn't pull a Chevy and advertise the Nova in Latin America:)
Actually, the one article I read indicated that they would be providing tradtional DNS. However, for most people, if your ISP isn't open to using the "new" DNS, then you will never be able to reach those addresses. This is why all the other alternatives have failed- they've depended on ISPs and such to connect to their DNSs, and that hasn't happened, so only folks who know a great deal about their computers are able to use the alternatives.
Idealab's stroke of genius (IMHO) is that they are going to offer a way around this. Sure, they'll offer traditional DNS, but in the meantime they'll build market and mind-share by allowing folks to just download the plugin and do the name resolution that way. If they distribute enough of the plugins, they'll be able to demonstrate interest to the ISPs- and then the ISPs might get off their butts and incorporate the alternatives into their systems. It's a neat way around the chicken-and-egg problem that has plauged past alternatives.
Now, I'm not claiming that this will work; certainly all past attempts at this have failed miserably. But if any of them have had a chance, this appears to be the one. Now they just have to convince folks that it is worth their time to put up content on these new domains, and (as someone else wisely pointed out) you need to convince Google to index it. If those two things happen, they've figured out a work-around to the one other problem that has always plagued alternative registries, so it just might work.
~luge
Not necessarily. I mean, it is quite concievable that copyright could fall without a new spirit of cooperation taking it's place. (Look at Napster, for example.) In such a scenario, I'd argue* that a GPL-like structure is still necessary, to protect my code against those who would take without giving back. I'm fairly certain that you are correct that in Stallman's ideal world, copyright would die because we'd all "just get along." But failing that, my guess is that he'd prefer to keep copyright in order to protect those who do chose to cooperate.
~luge
About that last claim: I can't find anything to back it up. It may not have been in the DMCA, which may be why I can't find it, but I know I've read about it anyway. Regardless, DMCA stamps pretty squarely on the face of "common carrier": as an ISP, anytime you are served notice that a user has infringing content, you have to immediately (or as soon as possible) take that content off the net. This is the "big deal" at copyright.net- they've automated this process, so that for the big ISPs, instead of the occasional letter from a copyright owner, they can now be swamped by hundreds or thousands of these notifications. And there is nothing the ISP can do except notify the user and start taking the content down. Note that the burden of proof here is not on the copyright owner or the ISP; all the copyright owner has to do is "swear" (via copyright.net's automated tools) that the user has distributed copyrighted materials and the user then has the burden of proving otherwise. I'm still trying to find a good summary of the impact- most are either way, way too dense (this one) or a little too light weight. Grr.
My vote ends up with glorified, self-publishing TV network. It would still have some cool functionality, I guess (I mean, it isn't like I'm pushing warez at tieguy.org) but it would definitely destroy so much of the promise of the net. That's why I said in my original post that anyone who cares about the future should contribute to the EFF, and contribute now, and contribute as much as they can. If there are other groups doing similar work that anyone knows about, I'd love to hear about them- I just got my first "real" paycheck (for my book!) today, and I'm in a giving mood. And the slashdot community (of all places) should know about them too.
~luge
How exactly is that copyright infringement? In the US that I was born in, we have this concept called "parody" which is legally protected, even when it involves the use of trademarks.
~luge
How long is the idea of a "common carrier" going to hold up? Not long, I don't think. Two reasons:
1) With traditional notions of "common carrier", it was always easier to attack the source of the "problems" that were being transported. For example, you don't attack the USPS for mailing out Playboys because it is easier to shut down the Playboy printing presses. When everyone is a printing press, shutting down the press is hard, so attacking the carrier (i.e., the ISPs) will prove more practical, both for corporations looking for a pressure point and for legislators looking for an easy legal target.
2) The traditional common carriers (the mail and the phone service) have limited "criminal" impact, especially on large corporations. I mean, one guy with one phone or one mail box can only leak so many company secrets or transport so many stolen goods. The infinite copy powers and multiplication of distribution of the net radically change that equation. Imagine distributing the DeCSS code by a USPS letter, or the phone. The damage there is limited. You've seen what distributing it over the web has done- there are literally millions of copies of it floating around, and already there are multiple programs that use it. And/those/ can be distributed without problems. Much, much greater impact than the traditional notion of common carrier.
By the way, DMCA already has provisions that would force ISPs to install equipment that enforces copyright as soon as techniques to do it are invented. There hasn't yet been such a case, but you can guess from the fact that that provision has already been written and passed that Congress isn't going to come down on the side of the ISPs, no matter how badly they'd like to be common carriers.
~luge
Um, because they'd sue your ISP for allowing you to host the proxy? All these folks who keep arguing that "the net routes around damage" live in a fantasy world- they presume that ISPs will always allow all packets to pass unfiltered and untouched. The ISPs don't really have much business interest in our freedom, or in routing around damage to our rights. If we just leave things up to our programming skills and the myth of the invincibility of the net, we'll lose everything we've built here, and fast.
So... what can you do about that? First and foremost, join the EFF. Run, don't walk, to that website, and make out as big a chunk of cash as you can. Second, run like hell to a book store and pick up Code and Other Laws Of Cyberspace. It isn't the best book, but it does give some very cogent arguments as to why "the net will protect itself" just doesn't cut it anymore. After that... well, after that, keep coding, I guess, and write your congressman when the issues do come up. This is going to be a long and uphill battle, but until we all move to an island nation that isn't intimated by the US and has abundant bandwidth, we can't just bury our heads in the sand.
~luge
Well put. For example, he is very strongly pro-copyright- the GPL falls completely if there is no copyright. In fact, if I had to make a blanket statement about RMS on IP, I'd say that e isn't anti-IP- he's against the trend where IP is used by large corporations to control our computing lives, and in favor of individuals chosing to share their IP. He certainly can't be against IP in all it's forms- if that is the case, we live in a BSD-licensed* world, and $LARGE_CORPORATION could exploit RMS's code without giving two bits back to RMS and his community. And I think we can all agree on what he'd think about that.
~luge
*Note: this isn't to knock BSD folks. If you want to allow others to use your code without encumbrance, that's your bag- you have that choice. In an IP free world, there would be no choice- everything would be BSD-style, whether the coder liked it or not.
I knew that; sorry if it wasn't clear. I guess I just kvetched in his direction since he has clearly been working with the XMMS people to solve these problem, and so I thought that he might have some clue of their release schedule. Guess not:\
Ok, great... this still leaves the obvious question: "if what is in CVS is substantially better than the released packages, why aren't you doing a new release?" I know in my projects, that's the gold standard: when there are serious bugs, and the serious bugs are fixed, there is a release. Are there plans for a release any time soon? I really prefer my toys to be package-managed and not built from (difficult to remove cleanly) scratch.
~luge
BTW, I don't mean to knock either the XMMS or ogg folks- obviously, the work both of those teams have done is above and beyond what 99% of us could do. It would still be nice to have a release less than 3 months old, though...
I've got a large ogg library (about 2.5K songs) but playing it with xmms is painful- many times, I can't get all the way through one album without crashing. And as one friend put it "sure, they are accepting patches... or they would be, if they didn't think that their code was already perfect."
Are there decent GUI-driven alternatives out there for ogg + mp3?
Enlightenment has always been able to change the behavior of buttons based on the theme used. You could also change (for example) the ability to windowshade on a per-theme basis. Those abilities pre-date the filing of the patent by 6 months to a year.
As far as (2)- I was an early gnome adopter, switched back to Windowmaker, and only this school year switched back. It is vastly, vastly more stable than it used to be, and many fewer memory leaks. In my (admittedly very limited) experience with KDE 2.0, Gnome 1.2/1.4 has better "look/feel," some better apps (evo will shortly crush anything in it's path), and is generally much more configurable than KDE. That's my two cents...
~luge
The current AA patches are very hack-y, so they won't be on in 1.4. You'll have to update and re-compile it yourself, or wait for Gnome 2.0. Too bad, I know...
~luge
I'm not saying he's hard to answer- the BS about "freedom to innovate" was also easy to answer. But despite that it had a lot of impact. This could have the same impact, if we aren't careful.
The problem is that he is a lunatic with millions of dollars of lobbying and marketing behind him. Government support for opensource could be a huge boon to what we are doing, and MS could easily kill it. Rebuttals will be necessary, because MS and other threatened companies will start parroting this line to their congressmen and to others, and pretty soon it'll become conventional wisdom- just like "Freedom to Innovate." Sure, we all knew it was BS- but we don't matter. People who do matter (congressmen, an unfortunately deluded majority of the populace) believed it. If MS makes this a major theme, we'll need to deal with it, and deal with it often. In other words, ignoring MS because they are lunatics doesn't make their power go away.
~luge
When they control all the content, they'll have an incredibly easy time gaining control of the rest of the web. It is already a PITA to access tons of content without accepting cookies; Microsoft and the RIAA are working hard to ensure that you can't access movies and the rest of the content of the web without IDing yourself to them. The "collective behavior" that you posit isn't very collective- already the vast majority of internetizens are AOLers, with matching attitudes and ignorance, and that percentage is just going to get sure. Sure, we (the digerati) may bitch and moan but that really won't stop anything that big business wants to shove down our throats. Unless government can help us out.
That said- I'm not terribly sure that the very active role he posits for government is the solution. But something must occur. Otherwise, my Linux box will become a relic- because I'll need to buy a Windows box to rent a movie.:( And that is a self-sustaining kind of thing- once you've got that kind of lockin, and you've got 95% of the population, it doesn't matter what the 1337 of the 'net (basically us) think or do, because we don't matter in the large economic scale of things.
~luge
"If you don't like Linux, you have no business reading Slashdot." No shit. I've been here since very shortly after Malda bought the actual domain name, and it was definitely always mainly about Linux. Hell, it used to practically be freshmeat;) Sure, the type of Linux stories have changed- they are less "my friend wrote this cool Linux prog" and more "IBM wrote this big Linux prog" but they are Linux stories either way- and let's face it, Linux has changed, so it was inevitable that the nature of the stories would change. Either way, though, the volume of Linux stories really hasn't changed much, IMHO. (And BTW- isn't it ironic that someone is complaining that there is too much Linux in a thread about DVDs?)
Oops,/. swallowed some stuff since it thought it was a tag. What I was trying to say was that there are many people with very low IDs (such as myself) who constantly flame Rob for being too much like CNN, and there are newbies who flame Rob for being too little like CNN. Either way, I've attacked them both. Rob does a fine job, and what it all boils down to is it is his site. So the whining, either way, is irritating.
I have no problem with the new users- many of them contribute a great deal here; certainly more so than I've had time to lately. And there are certainly just as many whiners among the "old school" folks who complain that/. is too much like CNN. If you could see my history past a month or so, you'd see I've flamed those people just as hard. One way or the other, this is Rob's site- the people who complain so much about "the way it used to be" (both 100K) are equally as wrong.
Slashdot Mirror
I've already sent off my email of thanks, but if you really want to make the point- you want to go here and make out a check to the man. It doesn't have to be big- mine will probably only be 10 or 20 bucks. But you can bet that the RIAA will be bankrolling his next opponent- so the time to support him is now, not just with words, but by putting your money where your mouth is. :)
BTW... this isn't just for VA residents. Any American who cares for and agrees with what this guy thinks should send in at least a token donation, and make it clear exactly why you are donating. It is sort of sad that this is how the process works, but it is, and complaining about it is useful but not not change things until it is too late for this particular cause. So... go write that check, and write it now.
~luge
P.S. Hiro, this isn't aimed at you but at others. Make sure you vote for him in 2002, though
If I still had moderator points, I'd move this one up. :)
Every once in a while, politicians do actually take stands on things that they really believe in, especially when their constituencies don't really care one way or the other. (I mean, it's not like he is Sonny Bono and depends on entertainment industry votes for re-election.) I say kudos to Rep. Boucher... I'm sending his re-election campaign a check as soon as I can find an address to send it to
~luge
Now that is a great idea. Someone pass this on and/or mod it up...
The CNET article said that they'd be using culturally appropriate iconography in the world-wide campaign. I.e., we'll get the four-sticks-in-a-circle peace symbol (no idea what else to call that) but other places might get doves or things like that. Marketing guys get paid the big bucks to thing of that type of thing... IBM wouldn't pull a Chevy and advertise the Nova in Latin America :)
Actually, the one article I read indicated that they would be providing tradtional DNS. However, for most people, if your ISP isn't open to using the "new" DNS, then you will never be able to reach those addresses. This is why all the other alternatives have failed- they've depended on ISPs and such to connect to their DNSs, and that hasn't happened, so only folks who know a great deal about their computers are able to use the alternatives.
Idealab's stroke of genius (IMHO) is that they are going to offer a way around this. Sure, they'll offer traditional DNS, but in the meantime they'll build market and mind-share by allowing folks to just download the plugin and do the name resolution that way. If they distribute enough of the plugins, they'll be able to demonstrate interest to the ISPs- and then the ISPs might get off their butts and incorporate the alternatives into their systems. It's a neat way around the chicken-and-egg problem that has plauged past alternatives.
Now, I'm not claiming that this will work; certainly all past attempts at this have failed miserably. But if any of them have had a chance, this appears to be the one. Now they just have to convince folks that it is worth their time to put up content on these new domains, and (as someone else wisely pointed out) you need to convince Google to index it. If those two things happen, they've figured out a work-around to the one other problem that has always plagued alternative registries, so it just might work.
~luge
Not necessarily. I mean, it is quite concievable that copyright could fall without a new spirit of cooperation taking it's place. (Look at Napster, for example.) In such a scenario, I'd argue* that a GPL-like structure is still necessary, to protect my code against those who would take without giving back. I'm fairly certain that you are correct that in Stallman's ideal world, copyright would die because we'd all "just get along." But failing that, my guess is that he'd prefer to keep copyright in order to protect those who do chose to cooperate.
~luge
*I have no idea if RMS would agree here.
About that last claim: I can't find anything to back it up. It may not have been in the DMCA, which may be why I can't find it, but I know I've read about it anyway. Regardless, DMCA stamps pretty squarely on the face of "common carrier": as an ISP, anytime you are served notice that a user has infringing content, you have to immediately (or as soon as possible) take that content off the net. This is the "big deal" at copyright.net- they've automated this process, so that for the big ISPs, instead of the occasional letter from a copyright owner, they can now be swamped by hundreds or thousands of these notifications. And there is nothing the ISP can do except notify the user and start taking the content down. Note that the burden of proof here is not on the copyright owner or the ISP; all the copyright owner has to do is "swear" (via copyright.net's automated tools) that the user has distributed copyrighted materials and the user then has the burden of proving otherwise. I'm still trying to find a good summary of the impact- most are either way, way too dense (this one) or a little too light weight. Grr.
My vote ends up with glorified, self-publishing TV network. It would still have some cool functionality, I guess (I mean, it isn't like I'm pushing warez at tieguy.org) but it would definitely destroy so much of the promise of the net. That's why I said in my original post that anyone who cares about the future should contribute to the EFF, and contribute now, and contribute as much as they can. If there are other groups doing similar work that anyone knows about, I'd love to hear about them- I just got my first "real" paycheck (for my book!) today, and I'm in a giving mood. And the slashdot community (of all places) should know about them too.
~luge
How exactly is that copyright infringement? In the US that I was born in, we have this concept called "parody" which is legally protected, even when it involves the use of trademarks.
~luge
How long is the idea of a "common carrier" going to hold up? Not long, I don't think. Two reasons:
/those/ can be distributed without problems. Much, much greater impact than the traditional notion of common carrier.
1) With traditional notions of "common carrier", it was always easier to attack the source of the "problems" that were being transported. For example, you don't attack the USPS for mailing out Playboys because it is easier to shut down the Playboy printing presses. When everyone is a printing press, shutting down the press is hard, so attacking the carrier (i.e., the ISPs) will prove more practical, both for corporations looking for a pressure point and for legislators looking for an easy legal target.
2) The traditional common carriers (the mail and the phone service) have limited "criminal" impact, especially on large corporations. I mean, one guy with one phone or one mail box can only leak so many company secrets or transport so many stolen goods. The infinite copy powers and multiplication of distribution of the net radically change that equation. Imagine distributing the DeCSS code by a USPS letter, or the phone. The damage there is limited. You've seen what distributing it over the web has done- there are literally millions of copies of it floating around, and already there are multiple programs that use it. And
By the way, DMCA already has provisions that would force ISPs to install equipment that enforces copyright as soon as techniques to do it are invented. There hasn't yet been such a case, but you can guess from the fact that that provision has already been written and passed that Congress isn't going to come down on the side of the ISPs, no matter how badly they'd like to be common carriers.
~luge
Um, because they'd sue your ISP for allowing you to host the proxy? All these folks who keep arguing that "the net routes around damage" live in a fantasy world- they presume that ISPs will always allow all packets to pass unfiltered and untouched. The ISPs don't really have much business interest in our freedom, or in routing around damage to our rights. If we just leave things up to our programming skills and the myth of the invincibility of the net, we'll lose everything we've built here, and fast.
So... what can you do about that? First and foremost, join the EFF. Run, don't walk, to that website, and make out as big a chunk of cash as you can. Second, run like hell to a book store and pick up Code and Other Laws Of Cyberspace. It isn't the best book, but it does give some very cogent arguments as to why "the net will protect itself" just doesn't cut it anymore. After that... well, after that, keep coding, I guess, and write your congressman when the issues do come up. This is going to be a long and uphill battle, but until we all move to an island nation that isn't intimated by the US and has abundant bandwidth, we can't just bury our heads in the sand.
~luge
I wonder how many people actually get it?
Well put. For example, he is very strongly pro-copyright- the GPL falls completely if there is no copyright. In fact, if I had to make a blanket statement about RMS on IP, I'd say that e isn't anti-IP- he's against the trend where IP is used by large corporations to control our computing lives, and in favor of individuals chosing to share their IP. He certainly can't be against IP in all it's forms- if that is the case, we live in a BSD-licensed* world, and $LARGE_CORPORATION could exploit RMS's code without giving two bits back to RMS and his community. And I think we can all agree on what he'd think about that.
~luge
*Note: this isn't to knock BSD folks. If you want to allow others to use your code without encumbrance, that's your bag- you have that choice. In an IP free world, there would be no choice- everything would be BSD-style, whether the coder liked it or not.
I knew that; sorry if it wasn't clear. I guess I just kvetched in his direction since he has clearly been working with the XMMS people to solve these problem, and so I thought that he might have some clue of their release schedule. Guess not :\
Ok, great... this still leaves the obvious question: "if what is in CVS is substantially better than the released packages, why aren't you doing a new release?" I know in my projects, that's the gold standard: when there are serious bugs, and the serious bugs are fixed, there is a release. Are there plans for a release any time soon? I really prefer my toys to be package-managed and not built from (difficult to remove cleanly) scratch.
~luge
BTW, I don't mean to knock either the XMMS or ogg folks- obviously, the work both of those teams have done is above and beyond what 99% of us could do. It would still be nice to have a release less than 3 months old, though...
I've got a large ogg library (about 2.5K songs) but playing it with xmms is painful- many times, I can't get all the way through one album without crashing. And as one friend put it "sure, they are accepting patches... or they would be, if they didn't think that their code was already perfect."
Are there decent GUI-driven alternatives out there for ogg + mp3?
Enlightenment has always been able to change the behavior of buttons based on the theme used. You could also change (for example) the ability to windowshade on a per-theme basis. Those abilities pre-date the filing of the patent by 6 months to a year.
As far as (2)- I was an early gnome adopter, switched back to Windowmaker, and only this school year switched back. It is vastly, vastly more stable than it used to be, and many fewer memory leaks. In my (admittedly very limited) experience with KDE 2.0, Gnome 1.2/1.4 has better "look/feel," some better apps (evo will shortly crush anything in it's path), and is generally much more configurable than KDE. That's my two cents...
~luge
The current AA patches are very hack-y, so they won't be on in 1.4. You'll have to update and re-compile it yourself, or wait for Gnome 2.0. Too bad, I know...
~luge
I'm not saying he's hard to answer- the BS about "freedom to innovate" was also easy to answer. But despite that it had a lot of impact. This could have the same impact, if we aren't careful.
The problem is that he is a lunatic with millions of dollars of lobbying and marketing behind him. Government support for opensource could be a huge boon to what we are doing, and MS could easily kill it. Rebuttals will be necessary, because MS and other threatened companies will start parroting this line to their congressmen and to others, and pretty soon it'll become conventional wisdom- just like "Freedom to Innovate." Sure, we all knew it was BS- but we don't matter. People who do matter (congressmen, an unfortunately deluded majority of the populace) believed it. If MS makes this a major theme, we'll need to deal with it, and deal with it often. In other words, ignoring MS because they are lunatics doesn't make their power go away.
~luge
When they control all the content, they'll have an incredibly easy time gaining control of the rest of the web. It is already a PITA to access tons of content without accepting cookies; Microsoft and the RIAA are working hard to ensure that you can't access movies and the rest of the content of the web without IDing yourself to them. The "collective behavior" that you posit isn't very collective- already the vast majority of internetizens are AOLers, with matching attitudes and ignorance, and that percentage is just going to get sure. Sure, we (the digerati) may bitch and moan but that really won't stop anything that big business wants to shove down our throats. Unless government can help us out. :( And that is a self-sustaining kind of thing- once you've got that kind of lockin, and you've got 95% of the population, it doesn't matter what the 1337 of the 'net (basically us) think or do, because we don't matter in the large economic scale of things.
That said- I'm not terribly sure that the very active role he posits for government is the solution. But something must occur. Otherwise, my Linux box will become a relic- because I'll need to buy a Windows box to rent a movie.
~luge
"If you don't like Linux, you have no business reading Slashdot." No shit. I've been here since very shortly after Malda bought the actual domain name, and it was definitely always mainly about Linux. Hell, it used to practically be freshmeat ;) Sure, the type of Linux stories have changed- they are less "my friend wrote this cool Linux prog" and more "IBM wrote this big Linux prog" but they are Linux stories either way- and let's face it, Linux has changed, so it was inevitable that the nature of the stories would change. Either way, though, the volume of Linux stories really hasn't changed much, IMHO. (And BTW- isn't it ironic that someone is complaining that there is too much Linux in a thread about DVDs?)
Oops, /. swallowed some stuff since it thought it was a tag. What I was trying to say was that there are many people with very low IDs (such as myself) who constantly flame Rob for being too much like CNN, and there are newbies who flame Rob for being too little like CNN. Either way, I've attacked them both. Rob does a fine job, and what it all boils down to is it is his site. So the whining, either way, is irritating.
I have no problem with the new users- many of them contribute a great deal here; certainly more so than I've had time to lately. And there are certainly just as many whiners among the "old school" folks who complain that /. is too much like CNN. If you could see my history past a month or so, you'd see I've flamed those people just as hard. One way or the other, this is Rob's site- the people who complain so much about "the way it used to be" (both 100K) are equally as wrong.