Whether or not the Linux crowd believes these allegations, someone within the community needs to take some serious time and legal effort to address these concerns. Ignoring or laughing at them won't make it go away, and I can easily imagine every corporate lawyer type calling up the CIO/CTO and saying "halt all linux deployments NOW!" As a BSD-ite I can sympathize and say that the sooner you get this over with the better.
Unfortunately, not very much can be done -- AND have it be taken seriously -- until someone's bottom line is threatened. Yes, perhaps individual Linux hackers and kernel maintainers can sue, but unless it can reach class-action status, it won't show up on the radar.
You can be sure that companies like Red Hat are keeping VERY careful track of the number of purchases their customers are making. And if a customer suddenly stops buying from them, or abruptly cancels deals with them, you can be damn sure they're going to investigate the reasons why, and if SCO's name comes up, expect them to start making legal noise.
And if IBM is the one that starts losing either Linux or AIX contracts, expect that noise to be deafening, thundering roar.
Monopolies created by the state are highly dubious in competitive markets. They tend to reduce efficiency and the general prosperity of the nation.
Mod this up, its a damn good counterpoint.
Yes, you're right about state-generated monopolies. My original post was confined to talking about non-state monopolies, but state-generated ones have to be considered in the equation as well.
So the issue is whether the public benefit from creating artifical monopolies outweighs the public loss from reducing competition. How much of the technology and development encouraged by monopolies would have occured anyway in a competitive market?
Also a good point. Most state-generated monopolies tend to be born out of technical or practical limitations. For example, it would be a nightmare trying to run lines from five different providers of electicity, or pipes from five different water companies. Even if they all agreed to share the same lines and pipes, someone is still responsible for them, and thus a monopoly still exists.
The danger of a state-generated monopoly is, in order to guarantee a minimal level of quality, it must be heavily regulated. Which is why I think politicos that try to deregulate most of the utility industries are out of their gourd.
That is completely inaccurate. Patents have their place. They are not completely worthless.
You're totally missing my point. I never said anywhere in my post that I said patents were worthless. I was making a comment about overly broad software patents and nothing more (looking back I see I omitted the words "overly broad", but I still said nothing about patents being worthless). Stop putting words into my mouth that I never said.
Thats the diff between this case and the SCO case./.ers are intelligent enough to know the difference.
Again, point missed. What I was referring to was the plethora of posts that say "IBM will crush SCO by digging into their patents and suing them into oblivion" from the same people that in the same breath claim patents are bad when applied to things that they like. My point was that if you, on the one hand, claim that software patents are bad because they hurt innovation/OSS/free software/fill-in-the-blank, then on the other say you hope IBM uses those very same patents just because the don't like SCO, then that's hypocritical.
Next time, take the time to actually read my post.
Monopolies are not inherently evil. It is not evil to have a monopoly.
What is evil is using anticompetitive practices to maintain your monopoly.
You have a monopoly simply by virtue of having no serious competition in your field. Say I make Widgets. I'm the only one who makes them, at least in terms of mass production and market penetration, so ergo I have a monopoly.
Now another company comes along and starts churning out widgets that they claim are better than mine. If I then turn around and improve my widgets to the point that mine are better than his, I have legally maintained my monopoly. If I instead do it by running smear campaigns, greasing the palms of politicians to enact restrictions on widget sale and manufacture that benefit me, strongarm retail stores to carry only my widgets, then that is illegal (or "evil" if you will).
Call it what you will, but this is not Good vs Evil, this is Evil vs Evil.
Then choose who you support on the basis of the principle of the matter and not who the lawyers work for.
The way I see it, if Microsoft fights the patent and wins, this is a win for everyone. A win by a highly prominent company like Microsoft will send a HUGE message about overly broad patents. It makes it less likely that any large company, including Microsoft can use the same tactic on anyone else, since a precedent has been set.
Any other outcome is a loss. Microsoft purchasing the patent or settling out of court is a minor loss. It sends the message that Microsoft thought the patent infringement case was credible. If Microsoft challenges and loses, this is a major loss. It more firmly entrenches broad software patents as a matter of policy.
While i would like to hammer M$ as much as anyone, this is just the tip of the iceberg for litigation and everyone will feel the pain sometime soon..
This is an excellent comment.
This is why I get sick of hearing the hyprocrites on/. who keep slavering for IBM to bludgeon SCO with its patent portfolio. You can't have it both ways. You either hate software patents in all cases or you don't, no matter who the defendant is.
Okay, I'm not a lawyer. But I don't know of ANY copyright infringment case where end users were held liable.
#include IANAL_disclaimer.h
The reason you haven't is because in the case of commercial/proprietary software, the manufacturer provides you protection with a clause in the license called indemnification.
This means the manufacturer takes responsibility for all litigation concerning copyright infringment, trade secret disclosure, etc. This is a blanket insurance policy that guarantees that you will never be involved in a lawsuit over the use of the software.
Linux has no such indemnification. Even IBM has not stated it will indemnify its customers (though this may change if SCO starts screwing with their Linux customers). Indemnification is not something to be taken lightly by a company. It places a very large responsibility on the company. Normally, providing this protection is a no-brainer as the company is both manufacturer and distributor and would be held liable in any case. For Linux, the major vendors are merely distributors. They provide no indemnification for their customers, which, in the aftermath of the SCO lawsuit, no matter what the outcome, will hurt Linux in the long run. After SCO, corporations using Linux will start to demand indemnification, and will hold suspect any company that refuses to provide it, since it will be seen as an unwillingness to stand behind the product.
Your examples of how people are not held responsible for copyright infringement with regards to published works are correct, but not apropos. Software is treated differently from other published works. Whether this is correct or not is another issue entirely, but it is still a fact.
This is my understanding of indemnification. Anyone who has more insight into it, please contribute and correct any mistakes I may have made.
Still, its ridiculous that SCO can try to take hostages here without actually showing any of the infringed on code!
SCO is hoping never to show the code. SCO hopes that if they make a loud enough noise, people will bow to them and take out their licenses just to keep SCO of their backs.
Wasn't it Hitler that said something like "Tell a lie long enough, confidently enough, and loudly enough, and people will believe it to be true". I'm sure I'm paraphrasing there, but it is unfortunately essentially correct.
Release dates for open source projects are more honest. They say beta or alpha when they really mean beta or alpha, and they say release when it actually works.
For commercial projects, its interesting to see what happens when you really REALLY make the projects adhere to schedule or don't release. I am now in my second organization where the group I work in has cracked down hard on release schedules. The bottom line was: you release on time, and according to established process, or you don't release. In other words, there are limited windows in which you're allowed to release and if you can't meet the window, you're out and you can't release until the next window.
Know what happens? The first set of release windows, half the projects drop out because they can't meet the window. Next time around, maybe about a quarter drop out. The others learned how to set more realistic targets and better assess the time and effort it takes to do the features they commit to.
OSS takes the other approach. They leave the deadline open ended and concentrate instead on what they really want to get done with the release regardless of how long it takes to get everything to work.
It's hard to say which is better than the other. Both has pros and cons. The former method above means more reliable release schedules, which helps IT plan their time for upgrades and potential downtimes, but you can lose functionality committed by overenthusiastic design and/or marketing. The latter means you get everything you want but have to wait longer for it.
Do any open source projects get audited for ISO 9001 compliance? They have a quality certification that many [enterprise] customers desire.
Interesting thing is, having been through the ISO 9001 rigamarole, I can tell you that it does NOT necessarily enhance quality. ISO 9001 has very little to do with quality, regardless of what their claims are to the contrary. ISO is all about process and repeatibility. It simply validates that you have a well-defined process. You can have a wonderful process, with everything down to the number of times the developers go to the bathroom and for how long documented and validated, and still have a product that's a piece of crap.
An organization I used to work for did the ISO thing. The software had no fewer problems after ISO than it did before. It's just a nice thing to put on my resume, really.
Scott Adams of Dilbert fame put it best: If you never went through an ISO audit, you probably don't know what ISO is about. If you did go through an ISO audit, you definitely don't know what it's about.
It's a pain to use that thing, too... wife actually broke out the pen to mail the president about the redesignation of overtime for professional occupations. She heard back from our congressman within a week but hasn't heard squat back from G.W.
And if I were president, she wouldn't hear back from me either.
It would have nothing to do with whether or not I consider your wife's views important or not. I would simply not have time. I'd be too busy making decisions that affect 270 million US citizens. I'd be worrying over whether the economic decisions I made are going to fail and put people on the street. I'd be worrying over whether decisions I made on foreign policy will result in US citizens being sent home in body bags. Oh, and if I get stressed out by all this, tough; I can't show it in public, or people start to worry.
The president simply cannot respond personally to every letter sent. It's impossible to do and still be able to do the job for which he was elected.
It's even hard to receive a reply from someone hired to read the president's mail. Unless your wife's letter was something that the administration has a very defined policy on and can thus return a fairly standard reply, the people lower down on the totem pole cannot interpret presidential policy, lest they send you erroneous information.
Your wife had the right idea in mailing your congressman. That's what they're there for. That's what a republic is all about. Your immediate representatives are your link to the government. You will get a lot further talking to your representatives, since they have a smaller consitutency and have a better shot at understanding your needs and your feelings. It's their job to make things happen for you.
We are not a democracy. Get it through your head. Democracy is a terrible for mof government where 51% of the people take rights away from the other 49%.
This is an excellent post, and I'd mod it up if I had mod points today.
You're right, of course. The idea behind a republic is that a set of representatives create law and manage government by balancing the will of the people with liberty. The ironic thing here is, this is why, in theory, lobbyists and special interests groups are actually good, since they insure that the will of majority does not trample on the legitimate concerns and interests of the minority.
And before anyone flames me and starts shoving the RIAA or MPAA in my face, note that I said legitimate concerns and interests. It is the job of Congress to give these groups their chance to air their concerns, but then balance those concerns with the will of the people and liberty and freedom. That is why neither **AA group has managed to get all of what they want. Individual members of Congress may be affected by money, but Congress taken as a whole tends to do better. No, the system is not perfect, and Congress still passes boneheaded laws, but that's where the judiciary branch kicks in.
So what I am saying as a corollary to all this is, special interest groups should never be universally shouted down, even the RIAA and MPAA. Otherwise, you don't have a republic either, you have a dictatorship. A dictatorship of the majority or a dictatorship of one person is still a dictatorship.
Despite urban legend, there was no budget surplus under the Clinton administration.
True. What Clinton had was a projected surplus set for some years after the end of the administration, provided that the spending cuts that he initiated were kept intact. No one can doubt that Bush gutted that with the increase in defense spending to support the war in Iraq and the big tax cut he pushed.
I can't be the only one sick to death of the "theft or not theft" argument that wastes bandwidth on this site.
Here's an idea, folks: Let's drop the stupid argument and agree to disagree, and actually discuss the merits of the issue itself. As several astute/. readers pointed out, there is no clear delineation between the two. The government is free to impose civil and/or criminal codes on either.
Both theft and infringement are crimes. What you call them beyond that, or how you group them together, or how you relate them to each other makes little difference in the eyes of law at this point. You can discuss the merits of a particular law or bill without devolving into an argument that reminds one of the inane "less filling!" "tastes great!" commercials.
...it will almost definitely be challenged in court. The final result will be A) nothing or B) a law that is quite a bit less dranconian and far reaching than this one.
The US Congress should appropriate some money to purchase big rubber stamps with the word "unconstitutional" on them and pass them out to federal court justices, seeing as how often they're being called on to do that with the assinine laws coming out of Congress lately.
As an earlier poster pointed out, the problem with this is that a user's home computer could be providing kiddie porn. It's one thing to steal songs and software, but it's another thing to host pictures of some 7 year old getting raped. I don't want to even have the possibility of that happening, so I think I'll stick with another distributed client.
Perhaps the biggest freedom of Freenet is the freedom not to use it.
I have no idea how this is going to turn out. Freenet sounds like a great idea, but it's so obviously useful for such horrible uses, and there are other tools that handle most of the useful uses... I don't see it surviving legally (I mean that it'll be outlawed anywhere it'll be useful).
Freenet may very well serve as the ultimate litmus test of America's continuing commitment to the tenets of freedom and liberty on which its founding was based. You simply cannot have a truly free society unless you allow a means for truly anonymous speech. In the days before the information age, it was easier to be anonymous. Now it's next to impossible. Something like freenet makes it possible to have that anonymity again.
Will Freenet be used for objectionable actions (this being relative to the perceiver of course)? Of course it will. I will have to accept the fact that it will be used for kiddie porn, and that it will be used for neo-nazi hate speech. Liberty is all or nothing. You cannot have degrees of liberty, for that is not liberty at all, it is privilege, and privileges by their very nature can be taken away.
should ISPs be allowed (or forced) to filter out content they're unhappy with on their routers and not pass it on because a request was made?
Unless the request was a valid court subpoena that was obtained by legal means, the answer is no.
Most ISPs don't. They do not set up filters to, say, block copyrighted material, but instead clearly state in their terms of use that you are not to use the network for that purpose and they will cooperate with authorities if you violate this. To do anything else is to increase costs and lose customers.
I always tend to use the telephone analogy. The telcos don't filter content. They don't even really post any "terms of service", other than paying your bill on time. You and I are free to plot overthrowing the US government on the telephone, and we can be reasonably sure that the telcos are not listening in or attempting to block us. If someone wants to listen in, they have to get a court order, and in the US, that generally means (ignoring the PATRIOT act madness for a moment) having to convince a judge you have enough evidence that you and I are up to no good. And if we're found out, WE'RE responsible, not the telco for providing the telephone service. This is why I think this crap about holding ISPs responsible for the content that crosses their networks to be bullshit and ultimately won't hold up if a case ever makes it to the supreme court.
So to bring this back to the topic at hand, when you're a member of Freenet, you are, in a way, a router of information. You are providing a service similar to that provided by an ISP or a telco. So if something illegal turns up on your hard drive, you should not be held responsible for it, so long as you had no prior knowledge of the content or that that specific content would be stored on your PC. If everything is encrypted, and you don't specifically go seeking the content that appears on your PC, then this test is satisfied.
Now, if YOU go seeking kiddie porn, or copyrighted songs, or whatever else may be considered illegal, then yes, you ARE responsible in that case because you made the conscious decision to go and get the offending material.
I thought he didn't care? As in "I don't want to know what we're putting in, don't tell me"? And now he was "extra careful"? Or is this some other type of IP he's referring to?
He was referring to two different things. The "I don't want to know" bit is about patents, which is a totally different animal from IP and copyright. Knowing about a patent ahead of time is tantamount to being tainted by the patent, and if the patented technology shows up in Linux, you're liable for triple damages because you knew about the patent and it went in anyway (under the US system anyway). You cannot check for patents because of this problem.
IP and copyright are treated differently under the law. There is a little more leeway in these cases. Simple copyright infringement can be handled by stopping the infringement, especially when it can be shown via an audit trail like the kinds that exist for the Linux kernel that the infringement was not malicious or with forethought on the kernel maintainers (i.e. they thought they were getting code whose use was free and clear).
Ron Hubbard has always struck me as a pretty good author
Certainly Scientology's teachings read like science fiction at any rate.
But you do have a point. I read Battlefield Earth some time ago, before I knew anything about the evils of Scientology. He's not the best author by far. Much of the book is a bit formulaic. But it kept me interested because I wanted to know how the story turned out. The physics in the book came up a bit short, but other than that, it was not bad.
Now unless I'm really dense (and it has been a long time since I read the book), I did not recall any Scientology tenets in the book. I think the book predated all that, but don't quote me on that. The movie, well... it reeked, but more because it had a stupid screenplay, awful acting, bad makeup/costumes and John Travolta.
They licensed the code back in February and we just learned about it from SCO regulatory filings. Remember, February was before SCO started making all of the crazy accusations against Linux
Also note that this is merely an expansion of already highly extensive rights that Sun already had for years before any of this latest madness started.
Sun doesn't want to be associated with SCO but wants to profit from the FUD.
Maybe. I work for Sun (standard disclaimer, these views are mine and not Sun's yadda yadda..) and while I am not privy to the details of Sun's financials (and wouldn't be able to post them if I were anyway), I don't see this being a huge profit machine for Sun. As a fellow Sun employee already pointed out, this would be a drop in the bucket compared to the company's capitalization. This may be a case of playing both sides of the issue so the company does well regardless of the outcome.
Slashdot Mirror
Unfortunately, not very much can be done -- AND have it be taken seriously -- until someone's bottom line is threatened. Yes, perhaps individual Linux hackers and kernel maintainers can sue, but unless it can reach class-action status, it won't show up on the radar.
You can be sure that companies like Red Hat are keeping VERY careful track of the number of purchases their customers are making. And if a customer suddenly stops buying from them, or abruptly cancels deals with them, you can be damn sure they're going to investigate the reasons why, and if SCO's name comes up, expect them to start making legal noise.
And if IBM is the one that starts losing either Linux or AIX contracts, expect that noise to be deafening, thundering roar.
Mod this up, its a damn good counterpoint.
Yes, you're right about state-generated monopolies. My original post was confined to talking about non-state monopolies, but state-generated ones have to be considered in the equation as well.
So the issue is whether the public benefit from creating artifical monopolies outweighs the public loss from reducing competition. How much of the technology and development encouraged by monopolies would have occured anyway in a competitive market?
Also a good point. Most state-generated monopolies tend to be born out of technical or practical limitations. For example, it would be a nightmare trying to run lines from five different providers of electicity, or pipes from five different water companies. Even if they all agreed to share the same lines and pipes, someone is still responsible for them, and thus a monopoly still exists.
The danger of a state-generated monopoly is, in order to guarantee a minimal level of quality, it must be heavily regulated. Which is why I think politicos that try to deregulate most of the utility industries are out of their gourd.
You're totally missing my point. I never said anywhere in my post that I said patents were worthless. I was making a comment about overly broad software patents and nothing more (looking back I see I omitted the words "overly broad", but I still said nothing about patents being worthless). Stop putting words into my mouth that I never said.
Thats the diff between this case and the SCO case. /.ers are intelligent enough to know the difference.
Again, point missed. What I was referring to was the plethora of posts that say "IBM will crush SCO by digging into their patents and suing them into oblivion" from the same people that in the same breath claim patents are bad when applied to things that they like. My point was that if you, on the one hand, claim that software patents are bad because they hurt innovation/OSS/free software/fill-in-the-blank, then on the other say you hope IBM uses those very same patents just because the don't like SCO, then that's hypocritical.
Next time, take the time to actually read my post.
Monopolies are not inherently evil. It is not evil to have a monopoly.
What is evil is using anticompetitive practices to maintain your monopoly.
You have a monopoly simply by virtue of having no serious competition in your field. Say I make Widgets. I'm the only one who makes them, at least in terms of mass production and market penetration, so ergo I have a monopoly.
Now another company comes along and starts churning out widgets that they claim are better than mine. If I then turn around and improve my widgets to the point that mine are better than his, I have legally maintained my monopoly. If I instead do it by running smear campaigns, greasing the palms of politicians to enact restrictions on widget sale and manufacture that benefit me, strongarm retail stores to carry only my widgets, then that is illegal (or "evil" if you will).
Then choose who you support on the basis of the principle of the matter and not who the lawyers work for.
The way I see it, if Microsoft fights the patent and wins, this is a win for everyone. A win by a highly prominent company like Microsoft will send a HUGE message about overly broad patents. It makes it less likely that any large company, including Microsoft can use the same tactic on anyone else, since a precedent has been set.
Any other outcome is a loss. Microsoft purchasing the patent or settling out of court is a minor loss. It sends the message that Microsoft thought the patent infringement case was credible. If Microsoft challenges and loses, this is a major loss. It more firmly entrenches broad software patents as a matter of policy.
This is an excellent comment.
This is why I get sick of hearing the hyprocrites on /. who keep slavering for IBM to bludgeon SCO with its patent portfolio. You can't have it both ways. You either hate software patents in all cases or you don't, no matter who the defendant is.
#include IANAL_disclaimer.h
The reason you haven't is because in the case of commercial/proprietary software, the manufacturer provides you protection with a clause in the license called indemnification.
This means the manufacturer takes responsibility for all litigation concerning copyright infringment, trade secret disclosure, etc. This is a blanket insurance policy that guarantees that you will never be involved in a lawsuit over the use of the software.
Linux has no such indemnification. Even IBM has not stated it will indemnify its customers (though this may change if SCO starts screwing with their Linux customers). Indemnification is not something to be taken lightly by a company. It places a very large responsibility on the company. Normally, providing this protection is a no-brainer as the company is both manufacturer and distributor and would be held liable in any case. For Linux, the major vendors are merely distributors. They provide no indemnification for their customers, which, in the aftermath of the SCO lawsuit, no matter what the outcome, will hurt Linux in the long run. After SCO, corporations using Linux will start to demand indemnification, and will hold suspect any company that refuses to provide it, since it will be seen as an unwillingness to stand behind the product.
Your examples of how people are not held responsible for copyright infringement with regards to published works are correct, but not apropos. Software is treated differently from other published works. Whether this is correct or not is another issue entirely, but it is still a fact.
This is my understanding of indemnification. Anyone who has more insight into it, please contribute and correct any mistakes I may have made.
SCO is hoping never to show the code. SCO hopes that if they make a loud enough noise, people will bow to them and take out their licenses just to keep SCO of their backs.
Wasn't it Hitler that said something like "Tell a lie long enough, confidently enough, and loudly enough, and people will believe it to be true". I'm sure I'm paraphrasing there, but it is unfortunately essentially correct.
You forgot an option between the last two:
(7.5) is my employer, you insensitive clod!
(Which it isn't, I'd like to clarify, but wanted to make the ObInsensitiveClod joke anyway)
For commercial projects, its interesting to see what happens when you really REALLY make the projects adhere to schedule or don't release. I am now in my second organization where the group I work in has cracked down hard on release schedules. The bottom line was: you release on time, and according to established process, or you don't release. In other words, there are limited windows in which you're allowed to release and if you can't meet the window, you're out and you can't release until the next window.
Know what happens? The first set of release windows, half the projects drop out because they can't meet the window. Next time around, maybe about a quarter drop out. The others learned how to set more realistic targets and better assess the time and effort it takes to do the features they commit to.
OSS takes the other approach. They leave the deadline open ended and concentrate instead on what they really want to get done with the release regardless of how long it takes to get everything to work.
It's hard to say which is better than the other. Both has pros and cons. The former method above means more reliable release schedules, which helps IT plan their time for upgrades and potential downtimes, but you can lose functionality committed by overenthusiastic design and/or marketing. The latter means you get everything you want but have to wait longer for it.
Yes, like, say, Duke Nukem Forever.
Interesting thing is, having been through the ISO 9001 rigamarole, I can tell you that it does NOT necessarily enhance quality. ISO 9001 has very little to do with quality, regardless of what their claims are to the contrary. ISO is all about process and repeatibility. It simply validates that you have a well-defined process. You can have a wonderful process, with everything down to the number of times the developers go to the bathroom and for how long documented and validated, and still have a product that's a piece of crap.
An organization I used to work for did the ISO thing. The software had no fewer problems after ISO than it did before. It's just a nice thing to put on my resume, really.
Scott Adams of Dilbert fame put it best: If you never went through an ISO audit, you probably don't know what ISO is about. If you did go through an ISO audit, you definitely don't know what it's about.
And if I were president, she wouldn't hear back from me either.
It would have nothing to do with whether or not I consider your wife's views important or not. I would simply not have time. I'd be too busy making decisions that affect 270 million US citizens. I'd be worrying over whether the economic decisions I made are going to fail and put people on the street. I'd be worrying over whether decisions I made on foreign policy will result in US citizens being sent home in body bags. Oh, and if I get stressed out by all this, tough; I can't show it in public, or people start to worry.
The president simply cannot respond personally to every letter sent. It's impossible to do and still be able to do the job for which he was elected.
It's even hard to receive a reply from someone hired to read the president's mail. Unless your wife's letter was something that the administration has a very defined policy on and can thus return a fairly standard reply, the people lower down on the totem pole cannot interpret presidential policy, lest they send you erroneous information.
Your wife had the right idea in mailing your congressman. That's what they're there for. That's what a republic is all about. Your immediate representatives are your link to the government. You will get a lot further talking to your representatives, since they have a smaller consitutency and have a better shot at understanding your needs and your feelings. It's their job to make things happen for you.
This is an excellent post, and I'd mod it up if I had mod points today.
You're right, of course. The idea behind a republic is that a set of representatives create law and manage government by balancing the will of the people with liberty. The ironic thing here is, this is why, in theory, lobbyists and special interests groups are actually good, since they insure that the will of majority does not trample on the legitimate concerns and interests of the minority.
And before anyone flames me and starts shoving the RIAA or MPAA in my face, note that I said legitimate concerns and interests. It is the job of Congress to give these groups their chance to air their concerns, but then balance those concerns with the will of the people and liberty and freedom. That is why neither **AA group has managed to get all of what they want. Individual members of Congress may be affected by money, but Congress taken as a whole tends to do better. No, the system is not perfect, and Congress still passes boneheaded laws, but that's where the judiciary branch kicks in.
So what I am saying as a corollary to all this is, special interest groups should never be universally shouted down, even the RIAA and MPAA. Otherwise, you don't have a republic either, you have a dictatorship. A dictatorship of the majority or a dictatorship of one person is still a dictatorship.
True. What Clinton had was a projected surplus set for some years after the end of the administration, provided that the spending cuts that he initiated were kept intact. No one can doubt that Bush gutted that with the increase in defense spending to support the war in Iraq and the big tax cut he pushed.
I can't be the only one sick to death of the "theft or not theft" argument that wastes bandwidth on this site.
Here's an idea, folks: Let's drop the stupid argument and agree to disagree, and actually discuss the merits of the issue itself. As several astute /. readers pointed out, there is no clear delineation between the two. The government is free to impose civil and/or criminal codes on either.
Both theft and infringement are crimes. What you call them beyond that, or how you group them together, or how you relate them to each other makes little difference in the eyes of law at this point. You can discuss the merits of a particular law or bill without devolving into an argument that reminds one of the inane "less filling!" "tastes great!" commercials.
The US Congress should appropriate some money to purchase big rubber stamps with the word "unconstitutional" on them and pass them out to federal court justices, seeing as how often they're being called on to do that with the assinine laws coming out of Congress lately.
Perhaps the biggest freedom of Freenet is the freedom not to use it.
Freenet may very well serve as the ultimate litmus test of America's continuing commitment to the tenets of freedom and liberty on which its founding was based. You simply cannot have a truly free society unless you allow a means for truly anonymous speech. In the days before the information age, it was easier to be anonymous. Now it's next to impossible. Something like freenet makes it possible to have that anonymity again.
Will Freenet be used for objectionable actions (this being relative to the perceiver of course)? Of course it will. I will have to accept the fact that it will be used for kiddie porn, and that it will be used for neo-nazi hate speech. Liberty is all or nothing. You cannot have degrees of liberty, for that is not liberty at all, it is privilege, and privileges by their very nature can be taken away.
Unless the request was a valid court subpoena that was obtained by legal means, the answer is no.
Most ISPs don't. They do not set up filters to, say, block copyrighted material, but instead clearly state in their terms of use that you are not to use the network for that purpose and they will cooperate with authorities if you violate this. To do anything else is to increase costs and lose customers.
I always tend to use the telephone analogy. The telcos don't filter content. They don't even really post any "terms of service", other than paying your bill on time. You and I are free to plot overthrowing the US government on the telephone, and we can be reasonably sure that the telcos are not listening in or attempting to block us. If someone wants to listen in, they have to get a court order, and in the US, that generally means (ignoring the PATRIOT act madness for a moment) having to convince a judge you have enough evidence that you and I are up to no good. And if we're found out, WE'RE responsible, not the telco for providing the telephone service. This is why I think this crap about holding ISPs responsible for the content that crosses their networks to be bullshit and ultimately won't hold up if a case ever makes it to the supreme court.
So to bring this back to the topic at hand, when you're a member of Freenet, you are, in a way, a router of information. You are providing a service similar to that provided by an ISP or a telco. So if something illegal turns up on your hard drive, you should not be held responsible for it, so long as you had no prior knowledge of the content or that that specific content would be stored on your PC. If everything is encrypted, and you don't specifically go seeking the content that appears on your PC, then this test is satisfied.
Now, if YOU go seeking kiddie porn, or copyrighted songs, or whatever else may be considered illegal, then yes, you ARE responsible in that case because you made the conscious decision to go and get the offending material.
He was referring to two different things. The "I don't want to know" bit is about patents, which is a totally different animal from IP and copyright. Knowing about a patent ahead of time is tantamount to being tainted by the patent, and if the patented technology shows up in Linux, you're liable for triple damages because you knew about the patent and it went in anyway (under the US system anyway). You cannot check for patents because of this problem.
IP and copyright are treated differently under the law. There is a little more leeway in these cases. Simple copyright infringement can be handled by stopping the infringement, especially when it can be shown via an audit trail like the kinds that exist for the Linux kernel that the infringement was not malicious or with forethought on the kernel maintainers (i.e. they thought they were getting code whose use was free and clear).
I thought RMS was Chewbacca.
You forgot a few:
7. The damn robot dog.
8. That goddamn robot dog. 9. Can we blow up the fucking robot dog? Please?
Certainly Scientology's teachings read like science fiction at any rate.
But you do have a point. I read Battlefield Earth some time ago, before I knew anything about the evils of Scientology. He's not the best author by far. Much of the book is a bit formulaic. But it kept me interested because I wanted to know how the story turned out. The physics in the book came up a bit short, but other than that, it was not bad.
Now unless I'm really dense (and it has been a long time since I read the book), I did not recall any Scientology tenets in the book. I think the book predated all that, but don't quote me on that. The movie, well ... it reeked, but more because it had a stupid screenplay, awful acting, bad makeup/costumes and John Travolta.
Also note that this is merely an expansion of already highly extensive rights that Sun already had for years before any of this latest madness started.
Sun doesn't want to be associated with SCO but wants to profit from the FUD.
Maybe. I work for Sun (standard disclaimer, these views are mine and not Sun's yadda yadda ..) and while I am not privy to the details of Sun's financials (and wouldn't be able to post them if I were anyway), I don't see this being a huge profit machine for Sun. As a fellow Sun employee already pointed out, this would be a drop in the bucket compared to the company's capitalization. This may be a case of playing both sides of the issue so the company does well regardless of the outcome.