I have been doing this for over a year and a half on both my P800 and my A780. They both have Opera, and I just strip Project Gutenberg eTexts or other books down and break them into chapters. As long as the HTML formatting does not specify width, the page should display fine on any small screen.
(The script I use is at SourceForge).
This can be done on any phone or PDA that has any kind of web browser. Even PocketIE can handle simple pages (although it cannot use CSS and it loads pages slowly). This is not a technological advancement. Practically every cell phone with a color screen and web access can do this.
It is nice to be able to carry a library of 10 or more books in one's pocket, as well. It is too bad copyright limits the books one can carry to approximately 100 years old or older.
Although, we *do* need a way to prevent people from plain copying your stuff and mak[ing] money off of it.
Fine. Call it "saleright" then. Or "profitright". The digital technology makes the term "copyright" obsolete, anyway, since merely displaying or accessing a work loads it into memory creating an actionable copy (Mai v. Peak).
If you agree to a license that allows another party remote access to your personal property, that would be your own stupidity causing you a problem, not DRM.
Well, so if you, for instance, installed an OS on your computer that would allow "authorized" parties on the Internet to create or delete files on your computer, you would be stupid? Well, then, I hope you are not using Windows, because their plan is to do just this, and in order to install it, you must make just such an agreement. Currenly, XP can be disabled remotely if MS deems the installation or the registration key to be a copy or invalid (this is not the same as going to court for each instance of suspected "unauthorized use"). Further, their plan is to encrypt everything on the hard drive and allow you only to access information that the OS "authorizes". So, remote parties could conceivably have the power to limit or control your use of any information on your home system.
If you rent a movie, the movie store has no right to come to your house and break in to reclaim/edit it.
Exactly, they have no right. However, with DRM they will have the power without regard to the right. Here is a question: If someone enters your computer without your permission from the Internet, regardless of their intent, are they tresspassing? What you described cannot happen in the real world, but the Internet is quite different than the real world in many ways.
[Here is the PDF article from Dairy & Field Crops Digest in HTML]
Grass Management for Forage or Biofuel?
By: Jerry Cherney, Dept. of Crop & Soil Sciences
[Dairy & Field Crops Digest, July 2004]
Perennial grass management to produce high yields
of high quality fiber in the diets of lactating cows will
lower feed costs and may also
improve rumen health. Perennial
grass forage can deliver milk
production similar to that found
using alfalfa forage, but good
grass haylage is more difficult to
make than good alfalfa haylage.
Intensive, aggressive perennial
grass management and feeding is
essential for economic survival
on dairy farms with soils not
suited to alfalfa production. Are
there other potential uses for grass other than forage
for ruminants such as biofuels? Most alternative
energy sources suffer from the same problem, they
are not economical and require subsidies.
Converting biomass into a viable energy option for
widespread application requires an energetically
efficient, economical, and convenient energy
transformation pathway to meet consumer needs. The
recent development of "close coupled" gasifier pellet
stoves and furnaces with well designed ash removal
systems are capable of reliably burning moderately
high ash agricultural feedstocks. These advanced
pellet burning stoves and furnaces have fuel
conversion efficiencies and particulate emissions in
the same range as modern oil furnaces. With recent
increases in natural gas prices, this bioenergy fuel
system is lower cost than all conventional energy
forms for space heating buildings. It appears to be a
promising new alternative for biofuel development
that can economically displace high grade imported
energy forms such as electricity, oil and natural gas
for heat related energy applications. Recent studies in
Canada have proposed that grass can be economically
pelleted and burned as a biofuel in pellet stoves and
furnaces.
Upstate NY imports most of its energy needs from
outside the region. Any new method of producing
energy would create jobs and improve the economic
climate by reducing the amount of energy imported
from outside the region. Equally important is the
need to develop strategies to reduce greenhouse gas
emissions. Governments around the globe are setting
targets for reduced greenhouse gas emissions. Grass
pellets can provide home and small business heating
with the potential to reduce fuel costs about 30%
(unsubsidized), and also would reduce greenhouse
gas emissions by about 90% over conventional fuel sources.
Past efforts to produce a
renewable form of energy on
a local scale from
agricultural crops have been
futile because of no
economically viable,
energetically efficient
transformation into a
useable energy form.
Densification of grass into a pellet form appears
economically attractive and is essential to create
highly controlled combustion for space heating
applications. Combustion of pelletized grass is both
economically and environmentally feasible. Grass is
converted to useable heat at over 80% efficiency,
with an energy output:input ratio exceeding 10:1,
compared to other bioenergy sources with typical
system energy output:input ratios around 1:1. The
cost-effectiveness of pelletized grass as a fuel results
from:
efficient use of low cost marginal farmland for solar energy collection
minimal fossil fuel input use in field production and energy conversion
minimal biomass quality upgrading which limits energy loss from the feedstock
efficient combustion in advanced yet modestly priced and simple to use devices
replacement of expensive high-grade energy forms in space and water heating
Canadians have developed close-coupled gasifier
pellet stoves and tested them in homes using
pelletized switchgrass as a fuel source. They also
have developed high-ash pellet furnaces wi
A monopoly for any purpose is anti-capitalism. It is difficult to conceive of a concept that more precisely opposes the free market than that of a monopoly.
What if somebody uses it to change books or articles on your hard drive remotely? What if you wanted to refer to your legally purchased, digital copy of Free Culture in a paper you were writing you were writing, and you found that the section about Jesse Jordan had been changed to read that he was a file trader who had been legally prosecuted by the RIAA for various acts including terrorism and that he was currently serving three consecutive life sentences for his nefarious activities? Would that be okay?
DRM is not about piracy. DRM is about control. DRM gives remote parties the right to alter your data at any time for any reason without regard for the law.
So your proposal is to stop allowing people to profit from their creations?
How does not conferring a monopoly on someone "not allow" that person to "profit from [that person's] creations"? Was the grandparent proposing a law that imposed jail terms on those who profited from their creations? No, it was not. Not offering an arbitrary monopoly is a lot different than denying someone the right to profit.
Copyright is anti-capitalism: Get used to it.
Whether or not copyright is necessary is an argument for another thread.
You know, sometimes talking about Nazis is necessary. Like, say, when you have an evil monopolistic organization waging a campaign against free speech...
That sounds like "authorized distribution" to me. In that case, can somebody please post a list of the files on that server as they have deliberately been authorized for royalty free public use by the respective organizations that funded the APB.
Further, if their mole distributed files under copyrights owned by organizations that did not fund the APB, is the APB (or its funding organizations) liable for infingement? For instance, would the MPAA have to pay damages to the RIAA for not paying for the files the APB actively and admittedly [1] uploaded to the Internet for public distribution?
In short: Is this a case of the MPAA violating the RIAA's (or some similar organization's) copyrights?
MPAA Responsible for RIAA Woes... News at 11.
[1]:
From: peter@anti-piracy.se
Sent: Thursday, March 10, 2005 9:29
To: Tilbury, Chad; Seymour, Dan; Winter, Craig
Subject: Swedish pirates busted!
Hi guys!
After 2 years of infiltrations our work finally paid of today with a successful raid on Sweden's oldest and largest ISP named Bahnhof. Bahnhof has been a source for top level piracy for several years and hosting some of the biggest and fastest servers in Europe.
Looking deeper into this article, I cannot believe Mamatas has not looked more carefully into his rights and copyrights. He basically takes and supports the RIAA and the news media's standard position: that file sharing is "stealing".
This article needs to be put into the perspective of actual copyright law. I will attempt this below.
Of the millions of people who illegally download free music using
various peer-to-peer (P2P) networks, only about 8,400 have been sued by
the recording industry--including, last month, an 83-year-old dead woman
from West Virginia. Those odds seem pretty good, until it happens to
you. This past October, my former Internet provider alerted me that
they had been subpoenaed by the Recording Industry Association of
America (RIAA) on behalf of its member labels with the demand to turn
over the names and addresses of 100 "John Does" that the RIAA had
detected sharing music. The RIAA is now appealing an 8th Circuit Court
decision, which ruled that Internet services providers don't have to
reveal names of customers who have not yet been sued.
"We surf peer-to-peer music networks," Jonathan Lamy of the RIAA
communications office says. "We look for people who are offering songs,
and if they have a substantial number of songs, we take note of all the
songs they are offering for distribution and their IP addresses." Suits
are filed against the anonymous file-sharers in bulk and then the RIAA
goes to court to get names and addresses from ISPs. From there, the
RIAA offers downloaders[uploaders] a chance to settle the complaint, or they can
go to court and fight it.
For me, the experience of settling with the RIAA was almost
painless--except for the thousands I agreed to pay. Dragging my "shared"
folder to the trash icon, promising not to download anymore [so, you cannot download service packs for Windows or updates for your computer? You cannot download purchased software? You cannot download Free Software?], and
acknowledging that illegal downloading is wrongful [Interesting statement: "illegal downloading is wrongful". Unfortunately, you were not sued for downloading. You were sued for uploading. Copyright covers distribution and copying. If the RIAA were to sue you for making a copy, they would have to sue anybody with any mp3 files on any computer. In addition, they would have to sue your ISP and every ISP the file passed through because EVERY ONE of those groups made copies in violation of copyright. In effect, computers and the Internet have eliminated all possible policing of copying. That only leaves distribution to attack you with. Conclusion, you did not illegally download. You illegally allowed others to download from your computer.] were easy enough. I
happened to know an intellectual-property lawyer who agreed to handle
the negotiations pro bono. He was the one who called the RIAA
settlement center number and spoke not to a lawyer, but to a staffer
empowered and trained to negotiate. "It feels like they're doing a
volume business," my lawyer told me. [And this has not made you consider filing a counter suit? Extortion is a form of theft. It is true theft because someone takes something away from you.]
Lamy says that of the 8,400 suits filed (8,100 of which were
filed against John Does) there have been about 1,700 settlements to
date. The process, from detection to settlement, can take months, but
its critics believe the RIAA moves far too quickly. Annalee Newitz,
policy analyst for the civil liberties group the Electronic Frontier
Foundation, says the practice of suing not just a single anonymous
person but dozens at a time is called "spamigation." "That's one of the
slimier things that entertainment companies are doing," she says,
because mass lawsuits allow "companies to sue hundreds of
"We look for people who are offering songs, and if they have a substantial number of songs, we take note of all the songs they are offering for distribution and their IP addresses." Suits are filed against the anonymous file-sharers in bulk and then the RIAA goes to court to get names and addresses from ISPs. From there, the RIAA offers downloaders a chance to settle the complaint, or they can go to court and fight it.
It should read "uploaders" because copyright prohibits unauthorized distribution. I doubt the RIAA can even find a way to sue downloaders. It is probably impossible because there is no way to prove where a file comes from.
However, they try to make "downloading" appear to be criminal in their ad campaigns. It is interesting how great an effect this advertising has had. Even one of their victims cannot tell the difference.
I really like Mozilla. I was just thinking last night how irritating it is to use Firefox.
The configuration options suck.
That image minimizer thing is just incredibly annoying... and it cannot be disabled.
There is also the absence of a button to create new empty tabs.
Also, new empty windows always have that stupid "About:" address in the URL entry window.
Maybe this is good for Windoze users, but it sucks for those of us who are not under the influence of the Beast at Redmond. I hope something is done about this. In fact, I am using Mozilla right now to compose this.
I have used many browsers in the past (Firefox, Galeon, Opera, Konqueror, IE, Netscape, NetFront, Lynx... you name it), and I keep coming back to Mozilla. Every time I get frustrated with another browser, Moz has a way to solve the problem. Sure, it is not perfect, but it is way better than most I have used.
It is about damn time that Rambus got punished for this. They have been deceiving the court since the beginning. They also lied about pending patents. They should have all of their patents (even the ones unrelated to this case) revoked as punishment for their abuse of the patent system.
I had a friend who did that in high school, too. But RTFA:
"We plan to put a solar panel at the school with the base station, have the E-slates charge during the day when the children are in school, then they can take them home at night and continue working."
They would not be using the devices in class. They would be using the devices at home. Further, it would be simple to collect the devices before a test. Then that cheating avenue would be closed off.
There is also the possibility that in a society where grades do not directly affect the outcome of students lives, they will not have an incentive to cheat. Would you have cheated if your parents had not cared about your grades? Or if school officials had not repeatedly lied to you about how horrible your future life would be if you did not get good grades?
I totally agree with the fact that updates to text books are entirely based on publishers' need to sell more text books. However, would not removing the publishers from the whole picture be an even better proposal? If students in Africa, or even England, did not have to pay for text books at all, would that not be a great thing for schools? This seems like the perfect end run around the perpetual monopolies on information that the publishers have bought for themselves in the "developed" world.
Perhaps, but in Africa you are talking about going from no or few or outdated text books to hundreds or thousands of regularly updated text books. This is certainly an improvement. In fact, it is the equivalent of building a library in each town where these devices are distributed.
You should also consider that this is a perfect tool for children to practice writing. They can practice for hours without wasting paper and pencils and other materials.
Also, because they are battery powered and probably have backlights (this is of course a guess, but most TFT screens nowadays require backlights to be viewable), they will be usable in houses that do not have electricity or are not well lit at night.
A system like this would also give local teachers an opportunity to pool their resources. They could write their own "textbooks" and distribute them to neighboring base stations. That way local as well as national knowledge could be disseminated.
The cost of buying and transporting books is also dropped to near zero. Really, the only cost the schools would have to deal with is that of the devices themselves. After the distribution of the devices, all dissemination of learning materials would be free. Further, the schools would not have to be gouged by the monopoly rents charged by Western book publishers.
There are many reasons why digital texts are superior to paper ones. The benefits very likely outweigh the drawbacks.
To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for
limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries;
The emphasis on "their" is important because the people who are generally receiving the benefits of this system are clearly not the "Authors and Inventors". Further, as the parent noted, dead people certainly do not receive these benefits and would be unlikely to enjoy them much if they did.
Another question that should be asked is this: Should the "exclusive Right" be restricted to the "Authors and Inventors" themselves? And does the Constitution mandate this?
We will be happy to cancel our application and work with the M.A.M.E. team to assign it to its rightful owners; . . . I am available to work with the community to ensure that this happens,
This seems like the best solution. However, is he going to pay for it? If he does, he will have done a lot to improve his reputation which was only slightly salvaged by explaining his side of the story.
If I should be supposed to donate the amount I have spent on DVDs and movie tickets to this legal defense of my freedom, I will have to donate quite a bit.
I guess I had better tighten my belt as freedom is priceless.
It is too bad this is not a lawsuit to have the MPAA disbanded as an evil cabal seeking to destroy the First Amendment.
I think you covered things pretty well, but you seem to be under the impression that the mere thought of something being copyrighted is evil.
I did not say that "something being copyrighted is evil". I said copyright law is very broken and that it no longer conforms to the ideal. If this ideal is not closely adhered to, the benefits are outweighed by the costs (or the harms, as lawyers put it). Copyright, in US Constitutional law at least, was meant to guarantee a constant stream of invention for the benefit of the Citizens of the United States. It was not intended as a tool for censorship.
A couple of court cases clearly demonstrate how far copyright has come from its origins. The first is the Diebold case. You may know that a bunch of students posted some internal communications from the company on the Net. Diebold then sued the students claiming that they were illegally distributing copyrighted material. In fact, this information was just speech, but since the Copyright Act of 1976, any information "in fixed and tangible form" is copyrighted automatically. Therefore, even though this information was not created to be sold, and even though this information was just ordinary speech, by the law, it was copyrighted. Diebold used this to attack the students for distributing information about their criminally deficient products. Fortunately, the students won, but it could easily have gone the other way.
The second case is the Lexmark printer case. In this case, Lexmark claimed that the program contained in their printer cartriges was protected by copyright and that the DRM that protected that copyrighted material was being violated by another company that manufactured printer cartriges for Lexmark's printers. In effect, Lexmark was attempting to use the DMCA to create a monopoly on hardware. I think you would agree that copyright certainly should not be used to create monopolies in areas unrelated to information. Lexmark won the first round, but lost on appeal (if I recall correctly).
Now, let us add DRM to the mix. These two cases, which are only possible because of recent changes in copyright law, should never have gone to court. However, even in this environment, the reasonable heads of judges prevailed. We were protected from very extreme misuses of the law by intelligent people whose job it was to protect us from such things. With DRM, however, the judges are taken out of the equation. The only way you will see your day in court with DRM is if you are capable of violating the access controls. Otherwise, you just have to play by an arbitary set of rules that may or may not violate your rights.
If Diebold had DRM, and they could remotely delete those files, would the world know about what kind of company they were? Would we know that the President (or CEO or whatever he was) was partial to one Presidential candidate in the last election?
I am not against copyright. But like all things, it has to be kept in its pen. When copyright starts restricting political speech and free market competition, it is time to start asking some questions.
Slashdot Mirror
I have been doing this for over a year and a half on both my P800 and my A780. They both have Opera, and I just strip Project Gutenberg eTexts or other books down and break them into chapters. As long as the HTML formatting does not specify width, the page should display fine on any small screen. (The script I use is at SourceForge).
This can be done on any phone or PDA that has any kind of web browser. Even PocketIE can handle simple pages (although it cannot use CSS and it loads pages slowly). This is not a technological advancement. Practically every cell phone with a color screen and web access can do this.
It is nice to be able to carry a library of 10 or more books in one's pocket, as well. It is too bad copyright limits the books one can carry to approximately 100 years old or older.
Grass Management for Forage or Biofuel?
By: Jerry Cherney, Dept. of Crop & Soil Sciences
[Dairy & Field Crops Digest, July 2004]
Perennial grass management to produce high yields of high quality fiber in the diets of lactating cows will lower feed costs and may also improve rumen health. Perennial grass forage can deliver milk production similar to that found using alfalfa forage, but good grass haylage is more difficult to make than good alfalfa haylage. Intensive, aggressive perennial grass management and feeding is essential for economic survival on dairy farms with soils not suited to alfalfa production. Are there other potential uses for grass other than forage for ruminants such as biofuels? Most alternative energy sources suffer from the same problem, they are not economical and require subsidies.
Converting biomass into a viable energy option for widespread application requires an energetically efficient, economical, and convenient energy transformation pathway to meet consumer needs. The recent development of "close coupled" gasifier pellet stoves and furnaces with well designed ash removal systems are capable of reliably burning moderately high ash agricultural feedstocks. These advanced pellet burning stoves and furnaces have fuel conversion efficiencies and particulate emissions in the same range as modern oil furnaces. With recent increases in natural gas prices, this bioenergy fuel system is lower cost than all conventional energy forms for space heating buildings. It appears to be a promising new alternative for biofuel development that can economically displace high grade imported energy forms such as electricity, oil and natural gas for heat related energy applications. Recent studies in Canada have proposed that grass can be economically pelleted and burned as a biofuel in pellet stoves and furnaces.
Upstate NY imports most of its energy needs from outside the region. Any new method of producing energy would create jobs and improve the economic climate by reducing the amount of energy imported from outside the region. Equally important is the need to develop strategies to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. Governments around the globe are setting targets for reduced greenhouse gas emissions. Grass pellets can provide home and small business heating with the potential to reduce fuel costs about 30% (unsubsidized), and also would reduce greenhouse gas emissions by about 90% over conventional fuel sources.
Past efforts to produce a renewable form of energy on a local scale from agricultural crops have been futile because of no economically viable, energetically efficient transformation into a useable energy form. Densification of grass into a pellet form appears economically attractive and is essential to create highly controlled combustion for space heating applications. Combustion of pelletized grass is both economically and environmentally feasible. Grass is converted to useable heat at over 80% efficiency, with an energy output:input ratio exceeding 10:1, compared to other bioenergy sources with typical system energy output:input ratios around 1:1. The cost-effectiveness of pelletized grass as a fuel results from:
Canadians have developed close-coupled gasifier pellet stoves and tested them in homes using pelletized switchgrass as a fuel source. They also have developed high-ash pellet furnaces wi
That is where DRM comes in. DRM can force terms upon the buyer that would be illegal or unenforcable in a contract.
A monopoly for any purpose is anti-capitalism. It is difficult to conceive of a concept that more precisely opposes the free market than that of a monopoly.
What if somebody uses it to change books or articles on your hard drive remotely? What if you wanted to refer to your legally purchased, digital copy of Free Culture in a paper you were writing you were writing, and you found that the section about Jesse Jordan had been changed to read that he was a file trader who had been legally prosecuted by the RIAA for various acts including terrorism and that he was currently serving three consecutive life sentences for his nefarious activities? Would that be okay?
DRM is not about piracy. DRM is about control. DRM gives remote parties the right to alter your data at any time for any reason without regard for the law.
Copyright is anti-capitalism: Get used to it.
Whether or not copyright is necessary is an argument for another thread.
You know, sometimes talking about Nazis is necessary. Like, say, when you have an evil monopolistic organization waging a campaign against free speech...
When will I accept DRM?
Hmmm... Let me see...
That sounds like "authorized distribution" to me. In that case, can somebody please post a list of the files on that server as they have deliberately been authorized for royalty free public use by the respective organizations that funded the APB.
Further, if their mole distributed files under copyrights owned by organizations that did not fund the APB, is the APB (or its funding organizations) liable for infingement? For instance, would the MPAA have to pay damages to the RIAA for not paying for the files the APB actively and admittedly [1] uploaded to the Internet for public distribution?
In short: Is this a case of the MPAA violating the RIAA's (or some similar organization's) copyrights?
MPAA Responsible for RIAA Woes... News at 11.
[1]:
(Emphasis mine, of course)Looking deeper into this article, I cannot believe Mamatas has not looked more carefully into his rights and copyrights. He basically takes and supports the RIAA and the news media's standard position: that file sharing is "stealing".
This article needs to be put into the perspective of actual copyright law. I will attempt this below.
There is an error in the article:
It should read "uploaders" because copyright prohibits unauthorized distribution. I doubt the RIAA can even find a way to sue downloaders. It is probably impossible because there is no way to prove where a file comes from.However, they try to make "downloading" appear to be criminal in their ad campaigns. It is interesting how great an effect this advertising has had. Even one of their victims cannot tell the difference.
I really like Mozilla. I was just thinking last night how irritating it is to use Firefox.
- The configuration options suck.
- That image minimizer thing is just incredibly annoying... and it cannot be disabled.
- There is also the absence of a button to create new empty tabs.
- Also, new empty windows always have that stupid "About:" address in the URL entry window.
Maybe this is good for Windoze users, but it sucks for those of us who are not under the influence of the Beast at Redmond. I hope something is done about this. In fact, I am using Mozilla right now to compose this.I have used many browsers in the past (Firefox, Galeon, Opera, Konqueror, IE, Netscape, NetFront, Lynx... you name it), and I keep coming back to Mozilla. Every time I get frustrated with another browser, Moz has a way to solve the problem. Sure, it is not perfect, but it is way better than most I have used.
It is about damn time that Rambus got punished for this. They have been deceiving the court since the beginning. They also lied about pending patents. They should have all of their patents (even the ones unrelated to this case) revoked as punishment for their abuse of the patent system.
I had a friend who did that in high school, too. But RTFA:
They would not be using the devices in class. They would be using the devices at home. Further, it would be simple to collect the devices before a test. Then that cheating avenue would be closed off.There is also the possibility that in a society where grades do not directly affect the outcome of students lives, they will not have an incentive to cheat. Would you have cheated if your parents had not cared about your grades? Or if school officials had not repeatedly lied to you about how horrible your future life would be if you did not get good grades?
I totally agree with the fact that updates to text books are entirely based on publishers' need to sell more text books. However, would not removing the publishers from the whole picture be an even better proposal? If students in Africa, or even England, did not have to pay for text books at all, would that not be a great thing for schools? This seems like the perfect end run around the perpetual monopolies on information that the publishers have bought for themselves in the "developed" world.
Web-Surfing Indian Slum Kids Ask: "What's a Computer"
Hole in the Wall Story
Hole in the Wall Website
Perhaps, but in Africa you are talking about going from no or few or outdated text books to hundreds or thousands of regularly updated text books. This is certainly an improvement. In fact, it is the equivalent of building a library in each town where these devices are distributed.
You should also consider that this is a perfect tool for children to practice writing. They can practice for hours without wasting paper and pencils and other materials.
Also, because they are battery powered and probably have backlights (this is of course a guess, but most TFT screens nowadays require backlights to be viewable), they will be usable in houses that do not have electricity or are not well lit at night.
A system like this would also give local teachers an opportunity to pool their resources. They could write their own "textbooks" and distribute them to neighboring base stations. That way local as well as national knowledge could be disseminated.
The cost of buying and transporting books is also dropped to near zero. Really, the only cost the schools would have to deal with is that of the devices themselves. After the distribution of the devices, all dissemination of learning materials would be free. Further, the schools would not have to be gouged by the monopoly rents charged by Western book publishers.
There are many reasons why digital texts are superior to paper ones. The benefits very likely outweigh the drawbacks.
Better yet:
The emphasis on "their" is important because the people who are generally receiving the benefits of this system are clearly not the "Authors and Inventors". Further, as the parent noted, dead people certainly do not receive these benefits and would be unlikely to enjoy them much if they did.Another question that should be asked is this: Should the "exclusive Right" be restricted to the "Authors and Inventors" themselves? And does the Constitution mandate this?
If I should be supposed to donate the amount I have spent on DVDs and movie tickets to this legal defense of my freedom, I will have to donate quite a bit.
I guess I had better tighten my belt as freedom is priceless.
It is too bad this is not a lawsuit to have the MPAA disbanded as an evil cabal seeking to destroy the First Amendment.
A couple of court cases clearly demonstrate how far copyright has come from its origins. The first is the Diebold case. You may know that a bunch of students posted some internal communications from the company on the Net. Diebold then sued the students claiming that they were illegally distributing copyrighted material. In fact, this information was just speech, but since the Copyright Act of 1976, any information "in fixed and tangible form" is copyrighted automatically. Therefore, even though this information was not created to be sold, and even though this information was just ordinary speech, by the law, it was copyrighted. Diebold used this to attack the students for distributing information about their criminally deficient products. Fortunately, the students won, but it could easily have gone the other way.
The second case is the Lexmark printer case. In this case, Lexmark claimed that the program contained in their printer cartriges was protected by copyright and that the DRM that protected that copyrighted material was being violated by another company that manufactured printer cartriges for Lexmark's printers. In effect, Lexmark was attempting to use the DMCA to create a monopoly on hardware. I think you would agree that copyright certainly should not be used to create monopolies in areas unrelated to information. Lexmark won the first round, but lost on appeal (if I recall correctly).
Now, let us add DRM to the mix. These two cases, which are only possible because of recent changes in copyright law, should never have gone to court. However, even in this environment, the reasonable heads of judges prevailed. We were protected from very extreme misuses of the law by intelligent people whose job it was to protect us from such things. With DRM, however, the judges are taken out of the equation. The only way you will see your day in court with DRM is if you are capable of violating the access controls. Otherwise, you just have to play by an arbitary set of rules that may or may not violate your rights.
If Diebold had DRM, and they could remotely delete those files, would the world know about what kind of company they were? Would we know that the President (or CEO or whatever he was) was partial to one Presidential candidate in the last election?
I am not against copyright. But like all things, it has to be kept in its pen. When copyright starts restricting political speech and free market competition, it is time to start asking some questions.
If the parent's comment is not insightful, I do now know what is. Please mod the parent up.
Hahahahahahah!!
Mod the parent up... Please!