What is being offered is search results. Google has never made their algorithims public knowledge, and we shouldn't expect them to do so now. We (at least I) have been using google for some time now not knowing definitivly how they rank their results.
On the other hand, google clearly displays information about what their algorithm does not do (see here):
Google's complex, automated search methods preclude human interference. Unlike other search engines, Google is structured so no one can purchase a higher PageRank or commercially alter results. A Google search is an honest and objective way to find high-quality websites, easily.
So, if indeed they're taking money from other sites, then they are clearly lying. (search for creative ethernet apartment and only 10% of the links on the first three pages will have all three words in them, the rest are corporate home pages).
Okay, it's mostly legal for a site to lie, but I find it exceedingly irritating when a company bases a large part of its image on being the only good one in the pack, builds a large customer base off of that, and then directly violates their image (lying is a definite way to do that).
Not illegal, but definitely hypocritical, especially for a company that asserts itself as a company that wouldn't do any funny business like be hypocritcal. --
Yeah, I've noticed a ton of cases of the latter point (root pages showing up).
Try searching for creative apartment ethernet, you'll see nearly 3 pages of links to root pages (with a few non-root-pages sprinkled throughout).
Or search for epinions latex, it'll come up with epinion's root page, even though google's cached version of epinion's root page contains no occurances of the word "latex".
These are possible explanations:
1) Sites are paying google to get their home pages, and google changed their code.
2) Google really really values root pages because most links are to root pages (pure speculation), so those get ranked first, and google's code sometimes ignore some of your search terms making an assumption that you messed up.
3) Similar to 2, the coders made an assumption that root pages are good, so they upped their scores artificially.
Then again, if you search for basking robbins ice cream, it doesn't give you www.baskinrobbins.com anywhere, but rather gives you epinions.com/ as the third link. How the search engine came up with that, I'll never know.
So yes, I think that google traded quality for profit. --
When I see RF frequencies on a giant wooden spool, then I'll agree that the FCC can regulate it.
Oh, wait a minute...
Anyway, I see what you're getting at. But I don't see any difference between mandating interoperability of IM protocols and mandating interoperability of telephone networks.
I think you're afraid of allowing the FCC to put any restrictions on the contents of a pipe for fear that they'll start saying things like "you can't send THOSE bits over those wires". I see forced-IM-interoperability as different:
Motive: force interopability
Number of people that benefit: tons
Terms: narrow and concrete (THIS protocol, THIS environment, etc...)
Complexity: simple terms
Length of time until FCC will have to make another similar mandate: 2 years
Because of all this, each such mandate will be very public and can easily be understood, and can be debated in public. If the FCC starts making vague mandates against small companies and it only benefits 5 people in unpredictiable ways, then you can start getting worried that they might pull some funny stuff. Right now, each mandate is too visible for a long period of time to let anything happen without it being glaringly obvious to a lot of people. --
That couldn't happen though... On one of google's pages that explains how it works, it says this:
Google's complex, automated search methods preclude human interference. Unlike other search engines, Google is structured so no one can purchase a higher PageRank or commercially alter results. A Google search is an honest and objective way to find high-quality websites, easily.
See? Google said they wouldn't, so it couldn't have happened. --
This is my personal not-too-in-depth opinion, but I've noticed that Google's search reults have changed a fair amount in the last couple months, mostly becoming less useful. I've noticed this happen on all sorts of searches, not just portals.
I still think Google's the best though. And this could be my imagination, so if someone else has noticed this, please post a reply. --
Since they said they might do the exact same thing in the future (random prices followed by refunds), it might be that they view the 2-step thing as a legitimate way to find the best spot on the price elasticity curve.
If that's true, then it doesn't seem to me that they were caught with their shorts down.
But maybe they planned to have their shorts down as long as possible, planning to pull them up as soon as enough people noticed.
--
Here's an analogy: many islands each with a small bridge to mainland. If the islands interconnect, then if one island wants to move lots of cargo to mainland and the other islands aren't shipping anything, then some of the trucks can first go to other islands and then go to mainland. This situation is even better when the islands are closer to each other than they are to mainland, making it economical to build faster & wider bridges between the islands, so overall latency isn't increased very much. --
This sounds like what I wanted to do in my dorm 6 years ago when we only had dial-in connections, but we had a fast local network. I wanted to combine the bandwidth of the modems to produce a bandwidth pool that local users could use. This assumes that the local network is faster than the dial-up connection, and that the dial-up link is the weakest link between you and the internet.
One of the benefits not mentioned in the article is that there's greater reliability since each computer has many ways of communicating with the 'net. --
Campus Pipeline is trying artificially reduce competition to their product. Students will be more likely to buy from their advertisers not because the products are better, but because they managed to trick the system. --
SonicNet seems to have good info about artists (including their label).
UMG owns the following labels: A&M Records, Decca Record Company, Deutsche Grammophon, Geffen Records, Interscope Records, Island Def Jam Music Group, Jimmy and Doug's Farmclub.com, MCA Nashville, MCA Records, Mercury Records, Motown Records, Philips, Polydor, Universal Records, and Verve Music Group.
Artists include: Bryan Adams, Aqua, Erykah Badu, Banda Eva, Cecilia Bartoli, Beck, Bee Gees, George Benson, BLACKstreet, Mary J. Blige, Andrea Bocelli, Bon Jovi, Marco Borsato, Boyz II Men, Boyzone, The Cardigans, Jacky Cheung, Claudinho & Buchecha, Counting Crows, The Cranberries, Sheryl Crow, DMX, E o Tchan, Melissa Etheridge, Mylene Farmer, Kirk Franklin, Peter Gabriel (North American rights only), Vince Gill, Guns'N'Roses, Johnny Hallyday, Herbie Hancock, Hanson, Dru Hill, Kyosuke Himuro, Hole, Enrique Iglesias, Al Jarreau, Jay-Z, Elton John, K-Ci & JoJo, B.B. King, Diana Krall, Patti LaBelle, Eric Levi (ERA), Limp Bizkit, Live, LL Cool J, Luna Sea, Marilyn Manson, Reba McEntire, Brian McKnight, Metallica (excluding US and Japan), Molotov, Nine Inch Nails, 98N , No Doubt, Joan Osborne, Florent Pagny, Luciano Pavarotti, Rammstein, Andre Rieu, Rosana, Spitz, Sting, George Strait, Texas, Shania Twain, U2, The Wallflowers, Caetano Veloso, Stevie Wonder, Trisha Yearwood, Zucchero, ABBA, Aerosmith, Louis Armstrong, Chuck Berry, James Brown, The Carpenters, Eric Clapton, Patsy Cline, John Coltrane, The Commodores, Bing Crosby, Count Basie, Bo Diddley, Bill Evans, Ella Fitzgerald, The Four Tops, Judy Garland, Marvin Gaye, Jimi Hendrix, Billie Holiday, Buddy Holly, The Jackson Five, George Jones, Brenda Lee, Loretta Lynn, The Mamas & The Papas, Bob Marley, Bill Monroe, Van Morrison, Nirvana, The Police, Smokey Robinson, Lynyrd Skynyrd, Cat Stevens, Rod Stewart, The Supremes, The Temptations, Conway Twitty, Muddy Waters, Hank Williams, and The Who.
--
But, you can't give it to anyone else. "the copy or phonorecord is retained and used solely by the
transmitting organization that made it, and no further copies or
phonorecords are reproduced from it" --
Filters won't work, you can encrypt in an infinite number of ways and throw away header so the stream isn't distinguishable from noise. Steganography then allows the noise to look like any normal traffic, to varying degrees of "normal".
If the bandwidth were capped, yes, that would slow communications down no matter what (legit and illicit). But it wouldn't stop communications cold, things could still get through. Then again, the US would never put an artificial bandwidth cap on the 'net, our economy is too reliant on it now.
Yes, new techs could be trained, but there are fundamental mathematical properties of encryption and steganography that requires O(c^n) time to figure out (for good forms of encryption) (even better for good forms of steganography? I dunno). So as long as the encryption-methods/keys/steganography-methods were kept secret, it would practically be impossible to find the transmissions, even for another geek/tech.
In terms of steganography, yes, it might turn into an arms race, but the cool thing about computer programs is that once a better one is written, it can be nearly instantly copied to everyone who needs it. So you might only be able to trade in illicit information 12 hours out of each day. But the trade would still go on.
Napster, Freenet, Gnutella, etc., etc., can all be stopped dead cold quite easily.
Yes, currently, they can be stopped fairly easily because they have easily recognizable headers. But wrappers could be written which encrypt/steganograph the stream on one side and decrypt/unsteganograph the stream on the other side so they couldn't be recognized to anyone who doesn't know the keys/encryption-method.
--
As far as I can tell, the DMCA is anti closed-source. As I understand it, the judge's beef with Streambox was that streambox could save files to disk rather than just playing them to screen and then discarding them.
If someone wrote realplayer in opensource that didn't save anything to disk, that might seem okay at first (it doesn't allow copyright infringement). But since it's open source, it might be next to trivial for someone else to modify the program to save to disk rather than display to screen.
So, at the very least, when dealing with programs that allow viewing of copyrighted material that would otherwise be locked, it seems like DMCA would require opensource programs to obfuscate the interface between the decoder and the displayer/player.
But then their copy protection mechanism would be downgraded to how well the OSS coder obfuscated the interface, and might make it illegal to untangle the interface.
But in the end, it doesn't seem like DMCA is very compatible with OSS. --
Bluetooth is intended to replace wires in small, personal communication devices; and does not support many of the features that a full-fledged wireless LAN technology needs in order to be used for corporate local area networks.
Bluetooth's advantages are its very low power requirements and cost (target price is $5 per device). Technologies like IEEE 802.11 are the better choice for corporate LANs (and perhaps WAN connectivity with future improvements of the standards) while Bluetooth will be the better technology for connectivity between computers and small PDAs, digital cameras, cell phones and the like.
Anyway, if you think today's wireless networks suck (with 10mbps at 300 feet), then I'd think that bluetooth would suck even more (700kbps at 30 - 100 feet).
--
As long as you can talk back some, you could still communicate. Even if you can't directly communicate with the other person, if you can affect a server's timing (eg. file and memory caches) in a way that the other person can read, then you can communicate.
One practical example is searching on google. Try searching for a string of words that takes a long time to search (try including some of these words: +a +i +when +where +how +why +what +are). The first time you search, you can get it to take 20 seconds or more. The second time you search, it'll take at most 10% of the original time because it's taking the data from its cache. If sender and receiver know which queries represent which bits, you can send a 0 by not querying and send a 1 by querying. Then the receiver queries all of them and a 0 is represented by a cache miss and 1 a cache hit.
There are almost an endless number of such ways to communicate on a complex network, even if tightly controlled. --
"We can't lose," the thinking goes... But that's dead wrong....nerd brains are woefully unprepared for the fuzzy gray shadings inherent in the legal system.... Lawyers and politicians and those who hold the reigns of real power are going to use that hubris to eat the medium alive, snapping off bits to chew on at their pleasure. And all the indignant, insular posts in the world will do nothing to stop them.
The author claims that Law will triumph over Technology. What about Napster or Freenet? These are only the begining.
Information truly wants to be free, and no law can stop it. Let me explain.
If you close off a person completely, no information can come in or out. But if you give them a slight hole to peek through, they can send anything. Muffle me with a gag, but still let me send ones and zeros with my grunts, and I can say anything. If I'm smart enough, I can scramble those bits in ways that outside listeners won't be able to figure out (encryption).
And if I'm not allowed to grunt, but someone can watch my cell, I can send information by doing things that seem normal to someone who doesn't know what to watch for: moving a cup around, scratching my head, etc. (steganography)
Why hasn't information been free before the internet? Because these sorts of bit contortions can be very complicated and require both the sender and the receiver to know what's going on. Computers allow bit scrambling and hiding schemes to be arbitrarily complex and arbitrarily effective, but still be just as easy to use.
Which leads to my assertion: Give me a small hole to send data through, and as long as I'm not blocked off, I can send anything through that hole. Legal measures can't stop me, not even technical measures can stop me. --
US Code Title 17, Section 106 lays out the sorts of things that a copyright holder is allowed to do, and no one else is. They're along the lines of exclusive right to reproduction, exhibition, and the like.
Nowhere in copyright law does it mention the exclusive right to profit from one's copyright.
For instance, copyright holders don't benefit from the lending or sale of used works.
--
In fact, each member of the public is legally allowed to copy the television shows to VHS tape, watch it many times, and transcribe the information they get there into a trivia book of their own.
AFAIK, the problem comes in when a company does it for the public and profits from it without compensating the copyright holders of the Seinfeld show.
So, you are allowed to listen to the music in any form you want to, but an outside company can't profit from helping you listen to the music, unless they have a deal with the RIAA. --
LET ME LISTEN TO MY MUSIC HOW I WANT, WHEN I WANT, WHERE I WANT so long as I have payed for the rights to listen to it.
Judge Rakoff referenced the lawsuit Castle Rock vs. Carol Publishing where a company produced a book of trivia from the Seinfeld show. The book had a lot of direct quotes from the show. Carol Publishing Group lost the case and had to stop publishing the trivia book.
But if you look at it, the public had already payed (through advertisements) for the right to view Seinfeld. Yet the public wasn't legally allowed to view the copyrighted works in another form (the trivia book) without Seinfeld being further compensated.
In this case, the judge decided that it's even worse that the copyrighted works weren't even slightly modified.
Copyright law gives the copyright holder the exclusive right to benefit from the copyrighted works. Since MP3.com was making money from the songs being in MP3 form even though the consumers had already bought the CD's, it was obvious that the MP3's have further financial value, and that the RIAA were the only ones who should have benefited from that additional demand since they still held the copyright. --
Actually, this is exactly the problem that Judge Rakoff had with MP3.com.
Here's a few lines from the comments he made on May 4th (full text here)
Defendant argues, however, that such copying is protected by the affirmative defense of "fair use." See
17 U.S.C. 107. In analyzing such a defense, the Copyright Act specifies four factors that must be considered...
Regarding the first factor -- "the purpose and character of the use" --... involves inquiring into whether the new use essentially repeats the old or whether, instead, it "transforms" it by infusing it with new meaning, new understandings, or the like.
See, e.g.,
Campbell v. Acuff-Rose Music, Inc., 510 U.S. 569, 579 (1994); Castle Rock, 150 F.3d at 142; see also Pierre N. Leval, "Toward a Fair Use Standard," 103 Harv. L. Rev. 1105, 1111 (1990). Here, although defendant recites that My.MP3.com provides a transformative "space shift" by which subscribers can enjoy the sound recordings contained on their CDs without lugging around the physical discs themselves, this is simply another way of saying that the unauthorized copies are being retransmitted in another medium -- an insufficient basis for any legitimate claim of transformation. See, e.g., Infinity Broadcast Corp. v. Kirkwood, 150 F.3d 104, 108 (2d Cir. 1998) (rejecting the fair use defense by operator of a service that retransmitted copyrighted radio broadcasts over telephone lines); Los Angeles News Serv. v. Reuters Television Int'l Ltd.. 149 F.3d 987 (9th Cir. 1998) (rejecting the fair use defense where television news agencies copied copyrighted news footage and retransmitted it to news organizations), cert. denied, 525 U.S. 1141 (1999); see also American Geophysical Union v. Texaco Inc., 60 F.3d 913, 923 (2d Cir.), cert. dismissed, 516 U.S. 1005 (1995); Basic Books, Inc. v. Kinko's Graphics Corp., 758 F. Supp. 1522, 1530-31 (S.D.N.Y. 1991); see generally Leval, supra, at 1111 (repetition of copyrighted material that "merely repackages or republishes the original" is unlikely to be deemed a fair use).
Regarding the fourth factor -- "the effect of the use upon the potential market for or value of the copyrighted work" -- defendant's activities on their face invade plaintiffs' statutory right to license their copyrighted sound recordings to others for reproduction. See 17 U.S.C. 106.... [The] defendant argues, its activities can only enhance plaintiffs' sales, since subscribers cannot gain access to particular recordings made available by MP3.com unless they have already "purchased" (actually or purportedly), or agreed to purchase, their own CD copies of those recordings.
Such arguments... are unpersuasive. Any allegedly positive impact of defendant's activities on plaintiffs' prior market in no way frees defendant to usurp a further market that directly derives from reproduction of the plaintiffs' copyrighted works. See Infinity Broadcast, 150 F.3d at 111. This would be so even if the copyrightholder had not yet entered the new market in issue, for a copyrightholder's "exclusive" rights, derived from the Constitution and the Copyright Act, include the right, within broad limits, to curb the development of such a derivative market by refusing to license a copyrighted work or by doing so only on terms the copyright owner finds acceptable.
That last paragraph doesn't seem right to me. The Infinity Broadcast case is very interesting though. --
And if the RIAA were to get wind of it, you'd have lawyers up your ass so fast you wouldn't have time to gasp. As long as it's digital transmission, the content providers want to squash it dead or demand that they get to "control the vertical and the horizontal".
They can growl and flex their muscles all they want, but would they be legally allowed to squash it? --
I wasn't arguing what the reality is, I was arguing what the law is. AFAIK, It's perfectly legal for me to manufacture a CD player and not give any money to the record companies. --
Slashdot Mirror
On the other hand, google clearly displays information about what their algorithm does not do (see here):
- Google's complex, automated search methods preclude human interference. Unlike other search engines, Google is structured so no one can purchase a higher PageRank or commercially alter results. A Google search is an honest and objective way to find high-quality websites, easily.
So, if indeed they're taking money from other sites, then they are clearly lying. (search for creative ethernet apartment and only 10% of the links on the first three pages will have all three words in them, the rest are corporate home pages).Okay, it's mostly legal for a site to lie, but I find it exceedingly irritating when a company bases a large part of its image on being the only good one in the pack, builds a large customer base off of that, and then directly violates their image (lying is a definite way to do that).
Not illegal, but definitely hypocritical, especially for a company that asserts itself as a company that wouldn't do any funny business like be hypocritcal.
--
Try searching for creative apartment ethernet, you'll see nearly 3 pages of links to root pages (with a few non-root-pages sprinkled throughout).
Or search for epinions latex, it'll come up with epinion's root page, even though google's cached version of epinion's root page contains no occurances of the word "latex".
These are possible explanations:
- 1) Sites are paying google to get their home pages, and google changed their code.
Then again, if you search for basking robbins ice cream, it doesn't give you www.baskinrobbins.com anywhere, but rather gives you epinions.com/ as the third link. How the search engine came up with that, I'll never know.2) Google really really values root pages because most links are to root pages (pure speculation), so those get ranked first, and google's code sometimes ignore some of your search terms making an assumption that you messed up.
3) Similar to 2, the coders made an assumption that root pages are good, so they upped their scores artificially.
So yes, I think that google traded quality for profit.
--
Oh, wait a minute...
Anyway, I see what you're getting at. But I don't see any difference between mandating interoperability of IM protocols and mandating interoperability of telephone networks.
I think you're afraid of allowing the FCC to put any restrictions on the contents of a pipe for fear that they'll start saying things like "you can't send THOSE bits over those wires". I see forced-IM-interoperability as different:
- Motive: force interopability
- Number of people that benefit: tons
- Terms: narrow and concrete (THIS protocol, THIS environment, etc...)
- Complexity: simple terms
- Length of time until FCC will have to make another similar mandate: 2 years
Because of all this, each such mandate will be very public and can easily be understood, and can be debated in public. If the FCC starts making vague mandates against small companies and it only benefits 5 people in unpredictiable ways, then you can start getting worried that they might pull some funny stuff. Right now, each mandate is too visible for a long period of time to let anything happen without it being glaringly obvious to a lot of people.--
- Google's complex, automated search methods preclude human interference. Unlike other search engines, Google is structured so no one can purchase a higher PageRank or commercially alter results. A Google search is an honest and objective way to find high-quality websites, easily.
See? Google said they wouldn't, so it couldn't have happened.--
I still think Google's the best though. And this could be my imagination, so if someone else has noticed this, please post a reply.
--
If that's true, then it doesn't seem to me that they were caught with their shorts down.
But maybe they planned to have their shorts down as long as possible, planning to pull them up as soon as enough people noticed.
--
Here's an analogy: many islands each with a small bridge to mainland. If the islands interconnect, then if one island wants to move lots of cargo to mainland and the other islands aren't shipping anything, then some of the trucks can first go to other islands and then go to mainland. This situation is even better when the islands are closer to each other than they are to mainland, making it economical to build faster & wider bridges between the islands, so overall latency isn't increased very much.
--
One of the benefits not mentioned in the article is that there's greater reliability since each computer has many ways of communicating with the 'net.
--
The issues raised include:
--
Campus Pipeline is trying artificially reduce competition to their product. Students will be more likely to buy from their advertisers not because the products are better, but because they managed to trick the system.
--
UMG owns the following labels: A&M Records, Decca Record Company, Deutsche Grammophon, Geffen Records, Interscope Records, Island Def Jam Music Group, Jimmy and Doug's Farmclub.com, MCA Nashville, MCA Records, Mercury Records, Motown Records, Philips, Polydor, Universal Records, and Verve Music Group.
Artists include: Bryan Adams, Aqua, Erykah Badu, Banda Eva, Cecilia Bartoli, Beck, Bee Gees, George Benson, BLACKstreet, Mary J. Blige, Andrea Bocelli, Bon Jovi, Marco Borsato, Boyz II Men, Boyzone, The Cardigans, Jacky Cheung, Claudinho & Buchecha, Counting Crows, The Cranberries, Sheryl Crow, DMX, E o Tchan, Melissa Etheridge, Mylene Farmer, Kirk Franklin, Peter Gabriel (North American rights only), Vince Gill, Guns'N'Roses, Johnny Hallyday, Herbie Hancock, Hanson, Dru Hill, Kyosuke Himuro, Hole, Enrique Iglesias, Al Jarreau, Jay-Z, Elton John, K-Ci & JoJo, B.B. King, Diana Krall, Patti LaBelle, Eric Levi (ERA), Limp Bizkit, Live, LL Cool J, Luna Sea, Marilyn Manson, Reba McEntire, Brian McKnight, Metallica (excluding US and Japan), Molotov, Nine Inch Nails, 98N , No Doubt, Joan Osborne, Florent Pagny, Luciano Pavarotti, Rammstein, Andre Rieu, Rosana, Spitz, Sting, George Strait, Texas, Shania Twain, U2, The Wallflowers, Caetano Veloso, Stevie Wonder, Trisha Yearwood, Zucchero, ABBA, Aerosmith, Louis Armstrong, Chuck Berry, James Brown, The Carpenters, Eric Clapton, Patsy Cline, John Coltrane, The Commodores, Bing Crosby, Count Basie, Bo Diddley, Bill Evans, Ella Fitzgerald, The Four Tops, Judy Garland, Marvin Gaye, Jimi Hendrix, Billie Holiday, Buddy Holly, The Jackson Five, George Jones, Brenda Lee, Loretta Lynn, The Mamas & The Papas, Bob Marley, Bill Monroe, Van Morrison, Nirvana, The Police, Smokey Robinson, Lynyrd Skynyrd, Cat Stevens, Rod Stewart, The Supremes, The Temptations, Conway Twitty, Muddy Waters, Hank Williams, and The Who.
--
But, you can't give it to anyone else. "the copy or phonorecord is retained and used solely by the transmitting organization that made it, and no further copies or phonorecords are reproduced from it"
--
Filters won't work, you can encrypt in an infinite number of ways and throw away header so the stream isn't distinguishable from noise. Steganography then allows the noise to look like any normal traffic, to varying degrees of "normal".
If the bandwidth were capped, yes, that would slow communications down no matter what (legit and illicit). But it wouldn't stop communications cold, things could still get through. Then again, the US would never put an artificial bandwidth cap on the 'net, our economy is too reliant on it now.
Yes, new techs could be trained, but there are fundamental mathematical properties of encryption and steganography that requires O(c^n) time to figure out (for good forms of encryption) (even better for good forms of steganography? I dunno). So as long as the encryption-methods/keys/steganography-methods were kept secret, it would practically be impossible to find the transmissions, even for another geek/tech.
In terms of steganography, yes, it might turn into an arms race, but the cool thing about computer programs is that once a better one is written, it can be nearly instantly copied to everyone who needs it. So you might only be able to trade in illicit information 12 hours out of each day. But the trade would still go on.
Napster, Freenet, Gnutella, etc., etc., can all be stopped dead cold quite easily.
Yes, currently, they can be stopped fairly easily because they have easily recognizable headers. But wrappers could be written which encrypt/steganograph the stream on one side and decrypt/unsteganograph the stream on the other side so they couldn't be recognized to anyone who doesn't know the keys/encryption-method.
--
Oops, the first sentance should be "DMCA is anti open-source"
--
If someone wrote realplayer in opensource that didn't save anything to disk, that might seem okay at first (it doesn't allow copyright infringement). But since it's open source, it might be next to trivial for someone else to modify the program to save to disk rather than display to screen.
So, at the very least, when dealing with programs that allow viewing of copyrighted material that would otherwise be locked, it seems like DMCA would require opensource programs to obfuscate the interface between the decoder and the displayer/player.
But then their copy protection mechanism would be downgraded to how well the OSS coder obfuscated the interface, and might make it illegal to untangle the interface.
But in the end, it doesn't seem like DMCA is very compatible with OSS.
--
As this bluetooth faq says:
- Bluetooth is intended to replace wires in small, personal communication devices; and does not support many of the features that a full-fledged wireless LAN technology needs in order to be used for corporate local area networks.
Anyway, if you think today's wireless networks suck (with 10mbps at 300 feet), then I'd think that bluetooth would suck even more (700kbps at 30 - 100 feet).Bluetooth's advantages are its very low power requirements and cost (target price is $5 per device). Technologies like IEEE 802.11 are the better choice for corporate LANs (and perhaps WAN connectivity with future improvements of the standards) while Bluetooth will be the better technology for connectivity between computers and small PDAs, digital cameras, cell phones and the like.
--
One practical example is searching on google. Try searching for a string of words that takes a long time to search (try including some of these words: +a +i +when +where +how +why +what +are). The first time you search, you can get it to take 20 seconds or more. The second time you search, it'll take at most 10% of the original time because it's taking the data from its cache. If sender and receiver know which queries represent which bits, you can send a 0 by not querying and send a 1 by querying. Then the receiver queries all of them and a 0 is represented by a cache miss and 1 a cache hit.
There are almost an endless number of such ways to communicate on a complex network, even if tightly controlled.
--
The author claims that Law will triumph over Technology. What about Napster or Freenet? These are only the begining.
Information truly wants to be free, and no law can stop it. Let me explain.
If you close off a person completely, no information can come in or out. But if you give them a slight hole to peek through, they can send anything. Muffle me with a gag, but still let me send ones and zeros with my grunts, and I can say anything. If I'm smart enough, I can scramble those bits in ways that outside listeners won't be able to figure out (encryption).
And if I'm not allowed to grunt, but someone can watch my cell, I can send information by doing things that seem normal to someone who doesn't know what to watch for: moving a cup around, scratching my head, etc. (steganography)
Why hasn't information been free before the internet? Because these sorts of bit contortions can be very complicated and require both the sender and the receiver to know what's going on. Computers allow bit scrambling and hiding schemes to be arbitrarily complex and arbitrarily effective, but still be just as easy to use.
Which leads to my assertion: Give me a small hole to send data through, and as long as I'm not blocked off, I can send anything through that hole. Legal measures can't stop me, not even technical measures can stop me.
--
US Code Title 17, Section 106 lays out the sorts of things that a copyright holder is allowed to do, and no one else is. They're along the lines of exclusive right to reproduction, exhibition, and the like.
Nowhere in copyright law does it mention the exclusive right to profit from one's copyright.
For instance, copyright holders don't benefit from the lending or sale of used works.
--
AFAIK, the problem comes in when a company does it for the public and profits from it without compensating the copyright holders of the Seinfeld show.
So, you are allowed to listen to the music in any form you want to, but an outside company can't profit from helping you listen to the music, unless they have a deal with the RIAA.
--
Judge Rakoff referenced the lawsuit Castle Rock vs. Carol Publishing where a company produced a book of trivia from the Seinfeld show. The book had a lot of direct quotes from the show. Carol Publishing Group lost the case and had to stop publishing the trivia book.
But if you look at it, the public had already payed (through advertisements) for the right to view Seinfeld. Yet the public wasn't legally allowed to view the copyrighted works in another form (the trivia book) without Seinfeld being further compensated.
In this case, the judge decided that it's even worse that the copyrighted works weren't even slightly modified.
Copyright law gives the copyright holder the exclusive right to benefit from the copyrighted works. Since MP3.com was making money from the songs being in MP3 form even though the consumers had already bought the CD's, it was obvious that the MP3's have further financial value, and that the RIAA were the only ones who should have benefited from that additional demand since they still held the copyright.
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Here's a few lines from the comments he made on May 4th (full text here)
- Defendant argues, however, that such copying is protected by the affirmative defense of "fair use." See
- 17 U.S.C. 107. In analyzing such a defense, the Copyright Act specifies four factors that must be considered...
- See, e.g.,
- Campbell v. Acuff-Rose Music, Inc., 510 U.S. 569, 579 (1994); Castle Rock, 150 F.3d at 142; see also Pierre N. Leval, "Toward a Fair Use Standard," 103 Harv. L. Rev. 1105, 1111 (1990). Here, although defendant recites that My.MP3.com provides a transformative "space shift" by which subscribers can enjoy the sound recordings contained on their CDs without lugging around the physical discs themselves, this is simply another way of saying that the unauthorized copies are being retransmitted in another medium -- an insufficient basis for any legitimate claim of transformation. See, e.g., Infinity Broadcast Corp. v. Kirkwood, 150 F.3d 104, 108 (2d Cir. 1998) (rejecting the fair use defense by operator of a service that retransmitted copyrighted radio broadcasts over telephone lines); Los Angeles News Serv. v. Reuters Television Int'l Ltd.. 149 F.3d 987 (9th Cir. 1998) (rejecting the fair use defense where television news agencies copied copyrighted news footage and retransmitted it to news organizations), cert. denied, 525 U.S. 1141 (1999); see also American Geophysical Union v. Texaco Inc., 60 F.3d 913, 923 (2d Cir.), cert. dismissed, 516 U.S. 1005 (1995); Basic Books, Inc. v. Kinko's Graphics Corp., 758 F. Supp. 1522, 1530-31 (S.D.N.Y. 1991); see generally Leval, supra, at 1111 (repetition of copyrighted material that "merely repackages or republishes the original" is unlikely to be deemed a fair use).
That last paragraph doesn't seem right to me. The Infinity Broadcast case is very interesting though.Regarding the first factor -- "the purpose and character of the use" -- ... involves inquiring into whether the new use essentially repeats the old or whether, instead, it "transforms" it by infusing it with new meaning, new understandings, or the like.
Regarding the fourth factor -- "the effect of the use upon the potential market for or value of the copyrighted work" -- defendant's activities on their face invade plaintiffs' statutory right to license their copyrighted sound recordings to others for reproduction. See 17 U.S.C. 106. ... [The] defendant argues, its activities can only enhance plaintiffs' sales, since subscribers cannot gain access to particular recordings made available by MP3.com unless they have already "purchased" (actually or purportedly), or agreed to purchase, their own CD copies of those recordings.
Such arguments ... are unpersuasive. Any allegedly positive impact of defendant's activities on plaintiffs' prior market in no way frees defendant to usurp a further market that directly derives from reproduction of the plaintiffs' copyrighted works. See Infinity Broadcast, 150 F.3d at 111. This would be so even if the copyrightholder had not yet entered the new market in issue, for a copyrightholder's "exclusive" rights, derived from the Constitution and the Copyright Act, include the right, within broad limits, to curb the development of such a derivative market by refusing to license a copyrighted work or by doing so only on terms the copyright owner finds acceptable.
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They can growl and flex their muscles all they want, but would they be legally allowed to squash it?
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I wasn't arguing what the reality is, I was arguing what the law is. AFAIK, It's perfectly legal for me to manufacture a CD player and not give any money to the record companies.
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Fun Facts about Happy Birthday to You
"Most Embarrassing Copyright" illegally registered
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