Two of your examples cited "class discussions", but the question was specifically about "lectures". This post is off topic. If there were discussions, the student would have no incentive to skip class.
But can you explain why all math profs have a heavy foreign accent, poor grammar, and bad handwriting? Attending lecture is one thing. Understanding the words is quite another.
In this case, a podcast would be better. At least the student would have the chance to rewind parts of the lecture the student did not understand and review them until understood.
But are they learning if they are not part of the interaction between the teacher and the class?
No questions asked, none answered.
My initial reaction to this story was the same as (great?) grandparent post: Why should the students attend lectures at all? In fact, I did not understand this mentality even before podcasts. There is this really old technology that deprecates lectures entirely, it is called the "book". Books are lectures you can read at any time for any reason.
Now, if there were a discussion or a question and answer session, the student would have a reason to attend. The student could learn from the professor's vast experience, and the student could ask questions about specific things not covered in the "lecture" -- or textbook or video or podcast or whatever.
Lectures were made obsolete in Europe by Gutenberg in 1447. Why are "teachers" still using this method in the classroom? If universities want to make money, they should do so by answering student's questions, not subjecting students to boring lectures read a hundred times over from yellowed notes.
I wouldn't suggest music would entirely disappear, but honestly would you give money to artists as a promise of future results? A lot of people bootleg music from their favorite bands, both major-label and indie, fully knowing that doing so doesn't benefit the artist.
And where would be the infrastructure to support new artists? Even creating music requires an initial investment, not to mention TV or advertising. I quite enjoy the American "The Office" (to be fair, I download the episodes off bittorrent). I *might* be convinced to pay 50 cents an episode, but I certainly wouldn't have done than before I saw a single episode, or even after I had seen all of season 1.
You have switched the subject from music to television which, admittedly, is a more difficult fit for this idea.
Having said that, it is important to point out that in music, this model could work quite well. Let us say that the fans of a particular band want to pay the studio costs and living expenses of the band while the band makes an album. They have heard all the songs. They know what they are getting. Now, the only expense is the studio time to produce something that fans do not go to the concert hall to listen to.
This group of fans then decides on the cost, sets a finantial goal for production funding, sets up a donation system (on the Internet or wherever -- they could even collect at concerts), and starts collecting money. When the goal is met, the artists start putting their songs on record. More importantly, they start putting their songs on record with the aid of professional sound engineers and equipment.
This is good for everyone except the old producers, the **AAs of the world. The fans get to have a quality production of their favorite music whenever they want, the band gets money, and no one has to worry about whether or not they can share it with their SO or best friend or monkey.
TV and movies make this more complicated because the recording is the performance, but I am sure someone on Slashdot or somewhere else could come up with a solution to this problem.
The current model means that music nobody likes won't be funded
Music nobody likes will always be funded by Starbucks and McDonald's, as is much of the music that everybody likes -- at least when the artists get their start or are "waiting for their break". Are you saying that musicians need a 24/7 creation schedule to produce good music?
No, that is not what I am saying. I am saying that cultural expressions -- music, news, well-known opinions, political speech, etc. -- cannot be the "property" of any one person. Yes, these things have creators, and yes, those creators should be compensated in some cases (I say "in some cases" because you would hardly expect to get paid every time you spoke or did something to communicate. If you go to a night club and dance, nobody pays you for the show). The problem is that when news, movies, or music are widely distributed in a culture, people who are denied access are denied the ability to be knowledgable participants in their own culture. Other cultures are a separate issue. If you cannot afford to know what your friends know, should you be excluded from their conversations? Culture belongs to everyone. Claiming ownership of pieces of culture is stealing from everyone. Information is not land.
What you suggest basically amounts to "donate company to the money if you feel like it." It simply wouldn't be able to support large industries.
Who was talking about "support[ing] large industries"? Are we talking about supporting artists or businessmen here? I do not think anybody "honest", "moral", "dishonest", "immoral", or otherwise really cares at all for businessmen's needs. And if it comes down to only supporting some fat cats with suits, I doubt anybody would cough up a dime for "legitimate" music. If Jack Valenti's assets were confiscated and donated to the public, Net users worldwide would experience untold euphoria. This is a discussion about supporting artists. It is not a discussion about supporting businessmen.
I live in China, where DRM effectively doesn't exist and bootlegs are widely available, without much chance of getting sued by the RIAA. It has killed the CHinese entertainment and everybody knows it.
That is sort of odd. I live in China, too (Taiwan), and although there is a service here that allows downloading of all the un-DRMed MP3s anyone might want for a fee, and although nearly all college students have FTP repositories with thousands of MP3s, the record stores are typically packed. The only exception I can think of is Tower Records which went out of business -- rightly, in my opinion, because they were so bloody expensive. Many of my friends -- yes, they are real Chinese people -- often buy CDs even though I actively encourage them not to and regularly tell them how the Record Industry is evil and supporting it harms their freedom.
When I was a teenager, CDs were generally too expensive for me to buy. Here, kids spend all sorts of money on such things. This is even though nearly everybody has an Internet connection in their household and even though people do not care if brands are "legitimate" or not. I daily see T-shirts that would be the subject of lawsuits in any Western country. In the face of all this, the Record Industry survives and makes a profit. In fact, it gets bigger and uglier every year. Clearly, their whinings are purely speculative.
Not sure I agree with you here. Sure, the artist isn't actually losing existing money by your light fingered brother's purloining of the content, but had your brother purchased said items the artist (and the rest of the chain from shop keepers to recording labels/studios/etc) would have got a share of the monies.
So, then, in your opinion, he should have been forced to pay. This way the artists would have got whatever he had. Or he should have been excluded from participating in his culture until he came up with some money. This sounds dangerously like those schemes where people pay taxes for copyrighted materal. Such a system steals from everybody who does not or would not purchase those things.
Sure, the artists aren't fiscally worse off after your brother's shenanigans, but someone's lost something. Do you recall the case of the programmer working in a bank somewhere in the US who thought it'd be a blinder to take all the rounding errors, the 0.002's and 0.004's of cents, and transfer them to his own bank account. No one actually lost anything as those "roundings" were discarded right? His bank account very quickly had a very large amount of money in it (unless it was an urban myth of course!). It turns out it was someone's money after all, and he had been stealing it!
In this case, is it not a matter of claims? As soon as something is discovered, people tend to claim it. Bankers, being a greedy lot, were quick to claim that some money they formerly did not claim to own was suddenly theirs. The assumption goes in their favor because the money in question was generated by their money. However, it could just as easily been classified as trash which would make it available to any member of the public who claimed it.
I'm willing to bet many of you, by the way, would object to a professor not being able to get a copyright on books he wrote while working at a public university.
I would not object to that. In fact, I would go so far as to say that publicly funded institutions should be required to use only public domain works for text books in order to protect us from the current gross theft that the system of publishers, university book stores, and used book resellers has subjected students to. The prices are obnoxiously high for materials that students are required to buy by their professors and add greatly to the cost of an already exorbitantly expensive university system. Students are forced customers, and the publishers are collecting monopoly rents to boot.
If the works were public domain, they could be printed at the book store for a fraction of the cost or loaded to a disk for perusal at on a student's computer. A semester's worth of books could be carried around in one's pocket. The printed versions could be separated in any arbitrary fashion (anybody who has every carried around an $80 chemistry book would appreciate this). Further, this would facilitate commenting on or quoting the book in homework. Errors and or omissions in the book could be quickly corrected and distributed to all students.
Allowing university professors or anybody to copyright required study materials harms students by constraining them to a world of expensive, heavy, and less-functional materials. If people want to write books for profit, they should not draw a salary for teaching and/or research.
As much as I wholeheartedly agree with you that having federally funded research be fully open domain, I worry greatly about how capitalism would work around the system.
You are kidding, right? Have you forgotten that monopolies violate the entire concept of laissez faire capitalism? Monopolies, in the case of patents, are considered to have some benefits for society. However, the history of research and development long predates monopoly patent protection. Do you really think the inventor of the wheel went broke because he could not find enough customers?
Patents expire, and companies that produce formerly patented inventions do not go out of business. Benadryl Allergy is twice as expensive the generic brands. However, drug stores still carry both. This means that people are spending twice as much money as they need to in order to get essentially the same thing as the lower priced product. Aspirin has similarly had a long history of making lots of drug companies money, even as a commodity, which it has been for quite some time (if it was ever patented). Your post implies that this situation is impossible.
The assumption that monopolies are a part of capitalism because monopolies are a part of the current system in most, or even all, capitalist countries does not make monopolies a part of capitalism. Monopolies are socialism by nature. It is society granting one individual or group of individuals the right to produce a thing. This is not very different from the East India Company having monopoly rights on trade with East Asia or Soviet Russia monopolizing production of shoes. These monopolies stopped all other people that wanted to trade with East Asia or produce shoes in Soviet Russia from doing so. It is hardly capitalist to exclude people from the market.
In a true capitalist system, anybody could produce any invention. Companies would have to compete on price, on materials, on product quality, and on customer satisfaction and perception. Whenever the government artificially increases the prices of goods in the market through grants of monopoly privileges, the government is acting in a socialist manner in direct opposition to laissez faire capitalism.
Note: Do not construe this post to mean that I am anti-patent. The argument about whether or not patents are necessary is a separate one. I am merely arguing that patents are not "capitalist" in nature.
(2) The hardware company isn't to blame - sure, they only run software by a specific company, but they do NOT sell software - and therefore cannot be held to a software license (which the GPL is).
So, in this example, is there any software that runs on the computer? If the hardware does not run software, how would be sold or even classified as a computer? Devices that do not do anything are useless. If it is designed and manufactured to run Linux, for instance, then the manufacturer would have to provide the keys or have no software for the hardware.
(3) A retailer that sells the two products together at a discount also isn't to blame - they just give a discount for a certain type of purchase. They would also sell the two products separately.
This person is the most to blame. If the hardware and the software are separate, and the software does not run unless signed, the software will not run on the hardware, and the hardware will be useless. If the hardware manufacturer signs this distributor's software, the manufacturer must give the key to the distributor in order for the distributor to legally sell the bundle. No one would buy the hardware if software to run on it could not be purchased. Software that cannot be modified after it is sold cannot be legally sold with the hardware.
The bundler has two options: (a) He can obtain a valid key from the hardware manufacturer, (b) or he can not sell the hardware. Since no one would buy hardware with no possibility of putting software on it, the hardware manufacturer would have to give up his key or file for bankruptcy.
As it appears to me, the GPL makes even the situation you are talking about far fetched, if not impossible. It seems that there would be no way to sell the hardware without giving at least one key away to the public, and that key has to enable all the functionality that the distributed software does.
Maybe I am wrong, but I just cannot see that end run working without somebody getting burned.
Nice try. However, the books we are talking about are generally targeted at specialists, not at the general student body. If this were a discussion about history books in general, your reasoning would suffice. The truth is, most Western language texts about China that happen to contain Chinese characters have hand written characters (copied as images by the publisher). This points to the obvious conclusion that the only person with the expertise to produce the characters was the author. This also demonstrates the ignorance and inability Western of publishers.
That is not even mentioning the difference in the cost of books due to monopoly rents in Western countries. I was shocked, when I first bought text books in Asia, at how little they cost. The more copyrights are enforced, the more students are ripped off.
Now, the universities are starting to sell English text books, and the cost of education is going up dramatically.
A good example of this is Joseph Needham's Science and Civilization in China series. This book is like an encyclopedia of Chinese science. On Amazon, Science and Civilization in China volumes appear to go for prices between US$120 and US$210 per volume. When I bought the versions "licensed for sale in Taiwan", however, I only paid between NT$500 and NT$800 per volume. At the current exchange rate, according to XE.com (the first converter I found in a Google search), thats between about US$15 and US$25. These books are not pirated. They were legally produced by a publisher that has the exclusive rights to these volumes in Taiwan only.
During my college years, I was always shocked at the rip offs on campus. However, buying books in Asia changed my shock into indignation. Not only are books more expensive in the West, from the standpoint of someone who is interested in languages (especially those with scripts that are not Roman or alphabetic in nature), this is even worse. While books in China have always contained Chinese characters, and Asian publishers have no problem incorporating Roman characters into their books, the opposite is true of Western publishers. This is why most works dealing with China in Western languages lack Chinese characters. This means that books published by Western publishers are not only more expensive but also contain less information, less value for a higher price.
Books can cost up to 10 times as much. Teachers need higher salaries because of higher taxes. Bureaucracies waste more money. Yet it is assumed that spending more on education necessarily yields better results.
Considering the figures in the Slashdot post, one should come to the conclusion that Asians are less educated than their Western neighbors. However, India has the largest number of engineers in the world, and Chinese students consistently best other students at universities in the US and other countries. Are those Western students really getting their money's worth?
Post Post: I should add that government spending is also less relevant in Chinese cultural areas. Half of schooling is done after school at cram schools. These are private schools that make up for the deficiencies of public schools. Government spending is, therefore, only a fraction of per capita spending on education in Chinese cultural areas.
Company B is under a legal obligation to release the key with their software. In other words, if Company B cannot distribute Company A's key with Company B's software, but they do distribute a Company A signed version of Company B's software to anyone, Company B is in violation of the GPL. If Company B does not possess the key, Company B cannot legally distribute binaries signed with it.
Now, some retailer offers a 'special discount' if you buy Company A's hardware and Company B's software together. When you get home, all you need to do is stick a CD into the hardware device, and everything installs and is ready to run. But - you cannot modify the software and run it on the hardware.
Either Company B or the retailer are responsible. One of those two must possess some method (signing key, hidden script, information on the CD, etc.) of telling that hardware to run when other software cannot, and that method must be distributed by the company that possesses it. Someone has a method to run software -- otherwise it would not run -- on that computer, and that person or company has to distribute that method if they distribute GPLed software.
And the GPL can easily be extended to hardware- thats what the GPLv3 does. It ensures that if you use GPLed code in your hardware product, that the user must maintain the right to modify the code. It protects the principles of Free Software that the GPL was created for. If the hardware maker wants to take away my rights as a user, they can write their own damn software to do it with.
No, the GPLv3 does not extend to hardware. This incorrect way of stating your perceived rights is what is harming the GPLv3 in the minds of hardware manufacturers. If you value the new clarifications in the GPLv3, you should realize that the clarification still applies to software (or a piece of data, in this case) rather than hardware and frame your rights arguments in that context. Otherwise, the hardware manufacturers are going to get the wrong idea, pack up their kit, and leave the playroom.
I quote an earlier post of mine: All that is required, if and only if the hardware restricts the running of unsigned binaries, is a single key, that does not limit any functionality that any of the distributed software has, be distributed with the source code.
Further, by denying that GPLed software can constitute an "effective technological protection measure" in Title 17, the GPLv3 protects anyone modifying the code from the now infamous DMCA criminal prosecution for circumvention of technological protection measures and protecting the user's freedom to tinker.
These things are all about software and law. Hardware is not an issue. Try not to freak the hardware manufacturers out too much.
This concept is ludicrous. DRM is specifically technology based. DRM is hardware or software enforcing legal or illegal restrictions against the user. By this statement, all copyright licensing would be "DRM through license". The entire purpose of licenses is to define a user's (or consumer's, if you will) "rights" with respect to someone else's copyrights.
The concept that this puts any restrictions on the hardware manufacturer is also absurd. The hardware does not have to change. All that is required, if and only if the hardware restricts the running of unsigned binaries, is a single key, that does not limit any functionality that any of the distributed software has, be distributed with the source code. Is that so hard? One little key for the owner of the hardware to use?
Why is everybody always talking about this like there is one key? Could Tivo not just sign their binaries with one key and distribute a "general public key", if you will, that the hardware would accept for everybody else?
In this way, they could keep their key -- and their reputation -- and anybody else could create binaries that ran on the hardware -- assuming the key did not limit hardware functionality that the Tivo key provided. Tivo, or whoever, could then disavow responsibility for binaries signed with the "general public key". They could even create an irritating warning message every time the system booted with the public key (although I certainly hope someone sues them for harrassment if they do). This would comply with all versions of the GPL as I read it.
As for patents and other proprietary garbage on the computer, the vendor could claim that running binaries with the "general public key" would violate those licenses and users would do so at their own risk.
As for locking users out of physical functionality on devices that they have purchased, well, that is just downright dishonest. I do not think any legal system should permit it. Certainly, no legal system should prevent the owners of hardware from getting all the fuctionality they can out of their hardware, regardless of what the vendor thinks. There are tons of Windows hacks for nVidia cards that do this. Why should Linux users have to take that crap when Windows users do not?
I have gotten off track, but my point is that this clarification of the GPL should not force people to give up their private signing keys. All that it requires is that a key that does not limit fuctionality is distributed.
NOTE: This was also posted to Operawatch. I will probably also email it to Opera.
I am the author of a script that makes websites out of Project Gutenberg etexts (or virtually any text file that is similarly formatted), and I have been using Opera for years. Recently, my use of Opera has been confined to mobile devices. Opera is certainly the best browser for mobile devices I have ever used, and I have used a fair amount, including PocketIE, Netfront, and various other proprietary browsers.
My Feature Request
In testing these books in mobile devices and on the desktop, both I and my friends have been repeatedly frustrated by the granularity of bookmarking. While it is easy to create identifiable links to any paragraph in a given chapter or book, it is impossible to bookmark those paragraphs. I would like an item added to the right click menu that allows bookmarking for paragraphs or other text marked with the <a name=""> tag.
Such a tag would allow people to instantly return to the last paragraph they were reading when they turned the browser off. This sort of addition would not be difficult to code but would allow people to read longer webpages and books on their desktops or mobile devices. HTML ebooks would create a much greater demand for your webbrowser, and as everything is going mobile, increase the demand for your browser on multiple platforms.
A Fantastical Feature Request
Further, while I am asking for features, I might as well add a more difficult one. There is a program called Dr. Eye (Screenshot 1, Screenshot 2, Screenshot 3) for Windows the functionality of which would be extremely useful in a browser or desktop environment. Really, I would like to see such a thing added to Gnome and/or KDE, but having such functionality in a webbrowser would cover 90% of the uses for such a program. The way the program works is that it uses popup help messages to display dictionary definitions of words one is reading (the pointer is not visible because Windows makes taking good screenshots difficult -- among other things it makes difficult). This program was written for Chinese speakers, and it is really incredible. It displays Chinese definitions for any English word or phrase moused over or English definitions for any Chinese word or phrase moused over while it is running.
However, the possibility of doing something like this in a browser or OS environment where most commonly spoken languages are accessible makes the learning value nearly unlimited. Almost all desktop environments have dictionary systems included. As is obvious, this would make multiple languages readable to many more people than was before possible. Considering the fact that Opera is in the business of making reading easier and more enjoyable for people, this sort of system is desirable for both Opera and its users.
The aim of the new RIAA strategy is to give a name and face to a previously ho-hum lawsuit campaign. It's designed to summon a reaction that invokes a sense of relevance and vulnerability
Hmmm. This kind of sounds like, well, terrorism. I guess those guys are better funded than the news might have previously led one to believe.
Actually, the assumption makes a lot of sense. In order to allow the restrictions in the first place, the files have to be encrypted. This is the only way that authentication can be reliable or "trusted", as they would put it. All files must be "trusted" because the computer needs to differentiate the files by author. It needs to prove that all alterations come from a single author and that only that author has altered the document. Without encryption these things are possible, but more difficult. Especially proving unrefutably who altered a given document.
Unfortunately, I read the document that made that claim a few years ago, when NGSCB was still called "Palladium", so I cannot back up that claim with any hard documentation as of right now. For now, here is a link to the Wikipedia article about NGSCB:
You English are so predictably excited to talk about irrelevant subjects. My point: People who believe in freedom are not hippies. It is simple, really. The details of the Revolutionary War are an issue for another discussion.
I always find it interesting that the English are so incapable of understanding the language they were supposed to have invented.
It is only entertainment if you are referring to music and movies that do not contain politically or educationally important messages. If culturally significant information is embedded in these expressions, it may be necessary for me to access them in order to be a legitimate participant in whatever culture and time period I happen to live.
Further, things like the news and access to the Net and the ability to communicate with other people are not "entertainment" even by your standards. So, there is the problem when it comes to what people have access to and what they do not.
My perception of the world is governed by the information I have access to. This is true for everyone everywhere. The popularity of the World Wide Web and its popularization of the Internet have made this abundantly clear. When the old media controlled the news, people were sheep, passive recipients of whatever information government and large corporations wanted to feed them. People's worlds were shaped by a small group of interested parties. DRM is their way of getting that power back.
But if you enjoyed all of that ignorance and manipulation, then I suppose you should defend big media's "save the artists" ruse. I guess Morpheus was right:
You have to understand, most of these people are not ready to be unplugged. And many of them are so inert, so hopelessly dependant on the system, that they will fight to protect it.
No one is talking about preventing you from copying any file.
Actually, they are. The implementation of hardware DRM requires that all files on the computer's drives be encrypted. In a Microsoft world, this translates to you losing your files during and upgrade or if you lose your license for some reason or if you lose your password. This does not even consider marketing or political reasons for controlling what one writes.
It will never be used to limit what you can do with your own files.
Never say never. If someone had suggested to you in, say, 1990 that the record companies would sue thousands of individuals for trading music non-commercially, you would have said that it was absurd. The authors of the Constitution, with the exception of Jefferson, seemed to think that the concept of perpetual extensions to copyright was absurd. Both of these nightmares have come to pass despite a wealth of people who said "never".
I'm sick and tired of this post-modern crap where people fill in the void that religion used to occupy in their lives with whatever particular cause they decide to devote themselves to. It's software, not a religion!
Oh, I was unaware that the Constitution and it promise of rights and freedom were out of style nowadays. I did not realize the Constitution was a "post-modern" document. You are right. I should just go back to my TV and shut the fuck up. All these problems will be solved, the artists will be compensated, and I will not notice that I have to pay for every second of every program that I watch or of every song that I listen to. It will be convenient and easy, even though I will have to work well past retirement age to compensate for the debt I have incurred. It will all be for my own good of course.
Protecting my freedom is not a religious issue. It is a practical issue. Software has and will have a very large impact on how I communicate with other people. The richness of what I will be able to say will be directly affected by what I can or cannot quote in conversations. If DRM effectively eliminates my right to fair use, how will I be able to write essays or sing a serenade to my IM honey? If they can take away fair use, what else can they take away?
As the parent mentions, Google probably would not have been possible without Open Source software if not Linux specifically. However, Google was implemented on Linux, and it did change the world. So, my point is still valid.
Further, if it were not for Linux, BSD probably would not have developed to a state where it could have been used for such a purpose since Linux caused such a massive explosion in software development. The old pace of BSD development was kicked into gear by Linux. So, even the use of BSD would imply a dependence upon the existence of Linux.
Slashdot Mirror
Two of your examples cited "class discussions", but the question was specifically about "lectures". This post is off topic. If there were discussions, the student would have no incentive to skip class.
In this case, a podcast would be better. At least the student would have the chance to rewind parts of the lecture the student did not understand and review them until understood.
My initial reaction to this story was the same as (great?) grandparent post: Why should the students attend lectures at all? In fact, I did not understand this mentality even before podcasts. There is this really old technology that deprecates lectures entirely, it is called the "book". Books are lectures you can read at any time for any reason.
Now, if there were a discussion or a question and answer session, the student would have a reason to attend. The student could learn from the professor's vast experience, and the student could ask questions about specific things not covered in the "lecture" -- or textbook or video or podcast or whatever.
Lectures were made obsolete in Europe by Gutenberg in 1447. Why are "teachers" still using this method in the classroom? If universities want to make money, they should do so by answering student's questions, not subjecting students to boring lectures read a hundred times over from yellowed notes.
You have switched the subject from music to television which, admittedly, is a more difficult fit for this idea.
Having said that, it is important to point out that in music, this model could work quite well. Let us say that the fans of a particular band want to pay the studio costs and living expenses of the band while the band makes an album. They have heard all the songs. They know what they are getting. Now, the only expense is the studio time to produce something that fans do not go to the concert hall to listen to.
This group of fans then decides on the cost, sets a finantial goal for production funding, sets up a donation system (on the Internet or wherever -- they could even collect at concerts), and starts collecting money. When the goal is met, the artists start putting their songs on record. More importantly, they start putting their songs on record with the aid of professional sound engineers and equipment.
This is good for everyone except the old producers, the **AAs of the world. The fans get to have a quality production of their favorite music whenever they want, the band gets money, and no one has to worry about whether or not they can share it with their SO or best friend or monkey.
TV and movies make this more complicated because the recording is the performance, but I am sure someone on Slashdot or somewhere else could come up with a solution to this problem.
Music nobody likes will always be funded by Starbucks and McDonald's, as is much of the music that everybody likes -- at least when the artists get their start or are "waiting for their break". Are you saying that musicians need a 24/7 creation schedule to produce good music?
No, that is not what I am saying. I am saying that cultural expressions -- music, news, well-known opinions, political speech, etc. -- cannot be the "property" of any one person. Yes, these things have creators, and yes, those creators should be compensated in some cases (I say "in some cases" because you would hardly expect to get paid every time you spoke or did something to communicate. If you go to a night club and dance, nobody pays you for the show). The problem is that when news, movies, or music are widely distributed in a culture, people who are denied access are denied the ability to be knowledgable participants in their own culture. Other cultures are a separate issue. If you cannot afford to know what your friends know, should you be excluded from their conversations? Culture belongs to everyone. Claiming ownership of pieces of culture is stealing from everyone. Information is not land.
Who was talking about "support[ing] large industries"? Are we talking about supporting artists or businessmen here? I do not think anybody "honest", "moral", "dishonest", "immoral", or otherwise really cares at all for businessmen's needs. And if it comes down to only supporting some fat cats with suits, I doubt anybody would cough up a dime for "legitimate" music. If Jack Valenti's assets were confiscated and donated to the public, Net users worldwide would experience untold euphoria. This is a discussion about supporting artists. It is not a discussion about supporting businessmen.
That is sort of odd. I live in China, too (Taiwan), and although there is a service here that allows downloading of all the un-DRMed MP3s anyone might want for a fee, and although nearly all college students have FTP repositories with thousands of MP3s, the record stores are typically packed. The only exception I can think of is Tower Records which went out of business -- rightly, in my opinion, because they were so bloody expensive. Many of my friends -- yes, they are real Chinese people -- often buy CDs even though I actively encourage them not to and regularly tell them how the Record Industry is evil and supporting it harms their freedom.
When I was a teenager, CDs were generally too expensive for me to buy. Here, kids spend all sorts of money on such things. This is even though nearly everybody has an Internet connection in their household and even though people do not care if brands are "legitimate" or not. I daily see T-shirts that would be the subject of lawsuits in any Western country. In the face of all this, the Record Industry survives and makes a profit. In fact, it gets bigger and uglier every year. Clearly, their whinings are purely speculative.
So, then, in your opinion, he should have been forced to pay. This way the artists would have got whatever he had. Or he should have been excluded from participating in his culture until he came up with some money. This sounds dangerously like those schemes where people pay taxes for copyrighted materal. Such a system steals from everybody who does not or would not purchase those things.
In this case, is it not a matter of claims? As soon as something is discovered, people tend to claim it. Bankers, being a greedy lot, were quick to claim that some money they formerly did not claim to own was suddenly theirs. The assumption goes in their favor because the money in question was generated by their money. However, it could just as easily been classified as trash which would make it available to any member of the public who claimed it.
I would not object to that. In fact, I would go so far as to say that publicly funded institutions should be required to use only public domain works for text books in order to protect us from the current gross theft that the system of publishers, university book stores, and used book resellers has subjected students to. The prices are obnoxiously high for materials that students are required to buy by their professors and add greatly to the cost of an already exorbitantly expensive university system. Students are forced customers, and the publishers are collecting monopoly rents to boot.
If the works were public domain, they could be printed at the book store for a fraction of the cost or loaded to a disk for perusal at on a student's computer. A semester's worth of books could be carried around in one's pocket. The printed versions could be separated in any arbitrary fashion (anybody who has every carried around an $80 chemistry book would appreciate this). Further, this would facilitate commenting on or quoting the book in homework. Errors and or omissions in the book could be quickly corrected and distributed to all students.
Allowing university professors or anybody to copyright required study materials harms students by constraining them to a world of expensive, heavy, and less-functional materials. If people want to write books for profit, they should not draw a salary for teaching and/or research.
You are kidding, right? Have you forgotten that monopolies violate the entire concept of laissez faire capitalism? Monopolies, in the case of patents, are considered to have some benefits for society. However, the history of research and development long predates monopoly patent protection. Do you really think the inventor of the wheel went broke because he could not find enough customers?
Patents expire, and companies that produce formerly patented inventions do not go out of business. Benadryl Allergy is twice as expensive the generic brands. However, drug stores still carry both. This means that people are spending twice as much money as they need to in order to get essentially the same thing as the lower priced product. Aspirin has similarly had a long history of making lots of drug companies money, even as a commodity, which it has been for quite some time (if it was ever patented). Your post implies that this situation is impossible.
The assumption that monopolies are a part of capitalism because monopolies are a part of the current system in most, or even all, capitalist countries does not make monopolies a part of capitalism. Monopolies are socialism by nature. It is society granting one individual or group of individuals the right to produce a thing. This is not very different from the East India Company having monopoly rights on trade with East Asia or Soviet Russia monopolizing production of shoes. These monopolies stopped all other people that wanted to trade with East Asia or produce shoes in Soviet Russia from doing so. It is hardly capitalist to exclude people from the market.
In a true capitalist system, anybody could produce any invention. Companies would have to compete on price, on materials, on product quality, and on customer satisfaction and perception. Whenever the government artificially increases the prices of goods in the market through grants of monopoly privileges, the government is acting in a socialist manner in direct opposition to laissez faire capitalism.
Note: Do not construe this post to mean that I am anti-patent. The argument about whether or not patents are necessary is a separate one. I am merely arguing that patents are not "capitalist" in nature.
So, in this example, is there any software that runs on the computer? If the hardware does not run software, how would be sold or even classified as a computer? Devices that do not do anything are useless. If it is designed and manufactured to run Linux, for instance, then the manufacturer would have to provide the keys or have no software for the hardware.
This person is the most to blame. If the hardware and the software are separate, and the software does not run unless signed, the software will not run on the hardware, and the hardware will be useless. If the hardware manufacturer signs this distributor's software, the manufacturer must give the key to the distributor in order for the distributor to legally sell the bundle. No one would buy the hardware if software to run on it could not be purchased. Software that cannot be modified after it is sold cannot be legally sold with the hardware.
The bundler has two options: (a) He can obtain a valid key from the hardware manufacturer, (b) or he can not sell the hardware. Since no one would buy hardware with no possibility of putting software on it, the hardware manufacturer would have to give up his key or file for bankruptcy.
As it appears to me, the GPL makes even the situation you are talking about far fetched, if not impossible. It seems that there would be no way to sell the hardware without giving at least one key away to the public, and that key has to enable all the functionality that the distributed software does.
Maybe I am wrong, but I just cannot see that end run working without somebody getting burned.
Nice try. However, the books we are talking about are generally targeted at specialists, not at the general student body. If this were a discussion about history books in general, your reasoning would suffice. The truth is, most Western language texts about China that happen to contain Chinese characters have hand written characters (copied as images by the publisher). This points to the obvious conclusion that the only person with the expertise to produce the characters was the author. This also demonstrates the ignorance and inability Western of publishers.
That is not even mentioning the difference in the cost of books due to monopoly rents in Western countries. I was shocked, when I first bought text books in Asia, at how little they cost. The more copyrights are enforced, the more students are ripped off.
Now, the universities are starting to sell English text books, and the cost of education is going up dramatically.
A good example of this is Joseph Needham's Science and Civilization in China series. This book is like an encyclopedia of Chinese science. On Amazon, Science and Civilization in China volumes appear to go for prices between US$120 and US$210 per volume. When I bought the versions "licensed for sale in Taiwan", however, I only paid between NT$500 and NT$800 per volume. At the current exchange rate, according to XE.com (the first converter I found in a Google search), thats between about US$15 and US$25. These books are not pirated. They were legally produced by a publisher that has the exclusive rights to these volumes in Taiwan only.
During my college years, I was always shocked at the rip offs on campus. However, buying books in Asia changed my shock into indignation. Not only are books more expensive in the West, from the standpoint of someone who is interested in languages (especially those with scripts that are not Roman or alphabetic in nature), this is even worse. While books in China have always contained Chinese characters, and Asian publishers have no problem incorporating Roman characters into their books, the opposite is true of Western publishers. This is why most works dealing with China in Western languages lack Chinese characters. This means that books published by Western publishers are not only more expensive but also contain less information, less value for a higher price.
Books can cost up to 10 times as much. Teachers need higher salaries because of higher taxes. Bureaucracies waste more money. Yet it is assumed that spending more on education necessarily yields better results.
Considering the figures in the Slashdot post, one should come to the conclusion that Asians are less educated than their Western neighbors. However, India has the largest number of engineers in the world, and Chinese students consistently best other students at universities in the US and other countries. Are those Western students really getting their money's worth?
Post Post: I should add that government spending is also less relevant in Chinese cultural areas. Half of schooling is done after school at cram schools. These are private schools that make up for the deficiencies of public schools. Government spending is, therefore, only a fraction of per capita spending on education in Chinese cultural areas.
Company B is under a legal obligation to release the key with their software. In other words, if Company B cannot distribute Company A's key with Company B's software, but they do distribute a Company A signed version of Company B's software to anyone, Company B is in violation of the GPL. If Company B does not possess the key, Company B cannot legally distribute binaries signed with it.
Either Company B or the retailer are responsible. One of those two must possess some method (signing key, hidden script, information on the CD, etc.) of telling that hardware to run when other software cannot, and that method must be distributed by the company that possesses it. Someone has a method to run software -- otherwise it would not run -- on that computer, and that person or company has to distribute that method if they distribute GPLed software.
No, the GPLv3 does not extend to hardware. This incorrect way of stating your perceived rights is what is harming the GPLv3 in the minds of hardware manufacturers. If you value the new clarifications in the GPLv3, you should realize that the clarification still applies to software (or a piece of data, in this case) rather than hardware and frame your rights arguments in that context. Otherwise, the hardware manufacturers are going to get the wrong idea, pack up their kit, and leave the playroom.
I quote an earlier post of mine: All that is required, if and only if the hardware restricts the running of unsigned binaries, is a single key, that does not limit any functionality that any of the distributed software has, be distributed with the source code.
Further, by denying that GPLed software can constitute an "effective technological protection measure" in Title 17, the GPLv3 protects anyone modifying the code from the now infamous DMCA criminal prosecution for circumvention of technological protection measures and protecting the user's freedom to tinker.
These things are all about software and law. Hardware is not an issue. Try not to freak the hardware manufacturers out too much.
This concept is ludicrous. DRM is specifically technology based. DRM is hardware or software enforcing legal or illegal restrictions against the user. By this statement, all copyright licensing would be "DRM through license". The entire purpose of licenses is to define a user's (or consumer's, if you will) "rights" with respect to someone else's copyrights.
The concept that this puts any restrictions on the hardware manufacturer is also absurd. The hardware does not have to change. All that is required, if and only if the hardware restricts the running of unsigned binaries, is a single key, that does not limit any functionality that any of the distributed software has, be distributed with the source code. Is that so hard? One little key for the owner of the hardware to use?
Why is everybody always talking about this like there is one key? Could Tivo not just sign their binaries with one key and distribute a "general public key", if you will, that the hardware would accept for everybody else?
In this way, they could keep their key -- and their reputation -- and anybody else could create binaries that ran on the hardware -- assuming the key did not limit hardware functionality that the Tivo key provided. Tivo, or whoever, could then disavow responsibility for binaries signed with the "general public key". They could even create an irritating warning message every time the system booted with the public key (although I certainly hope someone sues them for harrassment if they do). This would comply with all versions of the GPL as I read it.
As for patents and other proprietary garbage on the computer, the vendor could claim that running binaries with the "general public key" would violate those licenses and users would do so at their own risk.
As for locking users out of physical functionality on devices that they have purchased, well, that is just downright dishonest. I do not think any legal system should permit it. Certainly, no legal system should prevent the owners of hardware from getting all the fuctionality they can out of their hardware, regardless of what the vendor thinks. There are tons of Windows hacks for nVidia cards that do this. Why should Linux users have to take that crap when Windows users do not?
I have gotten off track, but my point is that this clarification of the GPL should not force people to give up their private signing keys. All that it requires is that a key that does not limit fuctionality is distributed.
I am the author of a script that makes websites out of Project Gutenberg etexts (or virtually any text file that is similarly formatted), and I have been using Opera for years. Recently, my use of Opera has been confined to mobile devices. Opera is certainly the best browser for mobile devices I have ever used, and I have used a fair amount, including PocketIE, Netfront, and various other proprietary browsers.
My Feature Request
In testing these books in mobile devices and on the desktop, both I and my friends have been repeatedly frustrated by the granularity of bookmarking. While it is easy to create identifiable links to any paragraph in a given chapter or book, it is impossible to bookmark those paragraphs. I would like an item added to the right click menu that allows bookmarking for paragraphs or other text marked with the <a name=""> tag.
Such a tag would allow people to instantly return to the last paragraph they were reading when they turned the browser off. This sort of addition would not be difficult to code but would allow people to read longer webpages and books on their desktops or mobile devices. HTML ebooks would create a much greater demand for your webbrowser, and as everything is going mobile, increase the demand for your browser on multiple platforms.
A Fantastical Feature Request
Further, while I am asking for features, I might as well add a more difficult one. There is a program called Dr. Eye (Screenshot 1, Screenshot 2, Screenshot 3) for Windows the functionality of which would be extremely useful in a browser or desktop environment. Really, I would like to see such a thing added to Gnome and/or KDE, but having such functionality in a webbrowser would cover 90% of the uses for such a program. The way the program works is that it uses popup help messages to display dictionary definitions of words one is reading (the pointer is not visible because Windows makes taking good screenshots difficult -- among other things it makes difficult). This program was written for Chinese speakers, and it is really incredible. It displays Chinese definitions for any English word or phrase moused over or English definitions for any Chinese word or phrase moused over while it is running.
However, the possibility of doing something like this in a browser or OS environment where most commonly spoken languages are accessible makes the learning value nearly unlimited. Almost all desktop environments have dictionary systems included. As is obvious, this would make multiple languages readable to many more people than was before possible. Considering the fact that Opera is in the business of making reading easier and more enjoyable for people, this sort of system is desirable for both Opera and its users.
Hmmm. This kind of sounds like, well, terrorism. I guess those guys are better funded than the news might have previously led one to believe.
I cannot believe they made me use the "T" word.
Actually, the assumption makes a lot of sense. In order to allow the restrictions in the first place, the files have to be encrypted. This is the only way that authentication can be reliable or "trusted", as they would put it. All files must be "trusted" because the computer needs to differentiate the files by author. It needs to prove that all alterations come from a single author and that only that author has altered the document. Without encryption these things are possible, but more difficult. Especially proving unrefutably who altered a given document.
Unfortunately, I read the document that made that claim a few years ago, when NGSCB was still called "Palladium", so I cannot back up that claim with any hard documentation as of right now. For now, here is a link to the Wikipedia article about NGSCB:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Next-Generation_Secur e_Computing_Base
I will look into this more when I have more free time.
off topic?
You English are so predictably excited to talk about irrelevant subjects. My point: People who believe in freedom are not hippies. It is simple, really. The details of the Revolutionary War are an issue for another discussion.
I always find it interesting that the English are so incapable of understanding the language they were supposed to have invented.
It is only entertainment if you are referring to music and movies that do not contain politically or educationally important messages. If culturally significant information is embedded in these expressions, it may be necessary for me to access them in order to be a legitimate participant in whatever culture and time period I happen to live.
Further, things like the news and access to the Net and the ability to communicate with other people are not "entertainment" even by your standards. So, there is the problem when it comes to what people have access to and what they do not.
My perception of the world is governed by the information I have access to. This is true for everyone everywhere. The popularity of the World Wide Web and its popularization of the Internet have made this abundantly clear. When the old media controlled the news, people were sheep, passive recipients of whatever information government and large corporations wanted to feed them. People's worlds were shaped by a small group of interested parties. DRM is their way of getting that power back.
But if you enjoyed all of that ignorance and manipulation, then I suppose you should defend big media's "save the artists" ruse. I guess Morpheus was right:
Actually, they are. The implementation of hardware DRM requires that all files on the computer's drives be encrypted. In a Microsoft world, this translates to you losing your files during and upgrade or if you lose your license for some reason or if you lose your password. This does not even consider marketing or political reasons for controlling what one writes.
Never say never. If someone had suggested to you in, say, 1990 that the record companies would sue thousands of individuals for trading music non-commercially, you would have said that it was absurd. The authors of the Constitution, with the exception of Jefferson, seemed to think that the concept of perpetual extensions to copyright was absurd. Both of these nightmares have come to pass despite a wealth of people who said "never".
Oh, I was unaware that the Constitution and it promise of rights and freedom were out of style nowadays. I did not realize the Constitution was a "post-modern" document. You are right. I should just go back to my TV and shut the fuck up. All these problems will be solved, the artists will be compensated, and I will not notice that I have to pay for every second of every program that I watch or of every song that I listen to. It will be convenient and easy, even though I will have to work well past retirement age to compensate for the debt I have incurred. It will all be for my own good of course.
Protecting my freedom is not a religious issue. It is a practical issue. Software has and will have a very large impact on how I communicate with other people. The richness of what I will be able to say will be directly affected by what I can or cannot quote in conversations. If DRM effectively eliminates my right to fair use, how will I be able to write essays or sing a serenade to my IM honey? If they can take away fair use, what else can they take away?
As the parent mentions, Google probably would not have been possible without Open Source software if not Linux specifically. However, Google was implemented on Linux, and it did change the world. So, my point is still valid.
Further, if it were not for Linux, BSD probably would not have developed to a state where it could have been used for such a purpose since Linux caused such a massive explosion in software development. The old pace of BSD development was kicked into gear by Linux. So, even the use of BSD would imply a dependence upon the existence of Linux.