Do we not have enough problems with people calling ideas "property" in the real world?
What is to come of this? If you create a virtual T-shirt, will you be able to say that any avatar wearing a T-shirt is "stealing" your "intellectual property"? What if someone claims to be the first to create a character with wings and goes suing every avatar with wings?
The legal concept of "intellectual property" should be erradicated, not expanded. Ideas are not property! They never have been. They never will be.
What are possibilities to overcome this problem; to prove that the computer owner, without a doubt, is in fact responsible or not responsible for the crime?
You are asking the wrong question.
The question is not whether technological measures exist to identify who is using a particular computer at any given time, but whether or not we should want to identify the user at any given time.
Do we, as a society, want computer owners idenfied by their computers for every process they execute? Do you want someone to be able to remotely check your computer for politically unacceptable websites you might have visited? Do you want spyware programs to have proof that it was you that viewed some illicit pornography when Outlook automagically opened a spam message for you? Do you want the RIAA to have a biometric signature to identify that you were a) sharing MP3s and b) listening to MP3s that you downloaded and have c) proof of how many times you listened to those songs and for how long? Do you want them to argue in court that you are a social deviant because you listened to the Ghetto Boys or the Misfits or did not listen to Britany Spears?
If your identity is connected with every program execution on your computer, what would stop someone from compiling enough circumstantial "proof" that you were a terrorist to blackmail you with public humiliation.
The real criminals will always be able to defeat any technological identification scheme. However, the average joe will not. Who will lose by this? You will.
Amendment [IV] The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.
Computers keeping tabs on you will make this amendment null and void.
Punishing criminals is important, but criminalizing large portions or all of society should not be the goal of law. Crime will always exist (even in non-free societies). Get used to it.
"Now Fox has a new rule that we can't do those little fake news crawls on the bottom of the screen in a cartoon because it might confuse the viewers into thinking it's real news," [Groening] said.
Nonetheless, "The Simpsons" (the show, not the characters) issued an apology yesterday: "Matt was being satirical and certainly there was never any issue between the show and Fox News. We regret any confusion.'"
Gee, I did not realize I was stupid enough to believe a news ticker on a humorous cartoon was real. I guess I am too stupid to know how stupid I am. However, it looks like censorship has come to my rescue again! No more confusing cartoons with real life for me. Thank you FOX.
Might this not be FOX News' problem for issuing news that might be confused with a satyrical cartoon? Maybe FOX News' content is about as believeable as "Study: 92 per cent of Democrats are gay... JFK posthumously joins Republican Party... Oil slicks found to keep seals young, supple... Do Democrats Cause Cancer?"
(from
the Yahoo! article). Well, if they are anything like CNN, that sounds about right.
Copyright was originally used to protect printers from competition, and as a form of censorship, in the 1500s.
Copyright did not exist until 1710. While there were many legal precursors to the Statute of Anne, the term copyright was not used before that time. This is similar to arguing the Bill of Rights came into existence with the signing of the Magna Carta. Other laws leading up to copyright are not what I am arguing.
Copyright was not invented by the US Constitution, and Australia's Constitution says nothing about the purpose of copyright.
Refer to the above answer. To that must be added the fact that the Statute of Anne had quite a bit to say about the purpose of copyright. Australian law is as much a descendant of English law as US law is. In fact, it is probably more so, since Australia is still nominally a part of the British Empire, or whatever they call it now.
Remind me again why you'd expect a prosecutor to talk about this in court after the defendants pleaded guilty?
I never said I expected him to tell the truth or anything in relation to it. I was pointing out his misrepresentation of the truth. It is his job to misrepresent the truth. I disagree with his statement. That does not take away his right to make it. He has a right to lie. He has a right to say anything he wants. I have a right to disagree and make sure that not everybody buys his insidious colorings of reality.
If Ng had co-written an essay on "Microsoft Click-wrap Software Licensing", the lawyer would still have used this as evidence that Ng knew enough about copyright to know he was breaking the law.
I already pointed this out in my post. While it is pure speculation that this lawyer had an ulterior motive to attempt to attack OSS, it is also speculation on that lawyer's part to claim that an understanding of the GPL and software licensing implies an understanding of the copyright limitations with respect to file sharing which have been defined nowhere.
Would you call that an insidious attempt to vilify Microsoft Software ?
I would if I knew that there was some way in which MS was threatening the goals of the lawyer's employer. Linux directly threatens the music and movie industries' DRM initiatives. MS is excitedly working with them on this. Who do they have a motive to undermine?
Or do you only talk out of your arse when someone mentions open source?
I suppose if you call that talking out of one's ass, I could be accused of doing that whenever my freedom is threatened. Free Software is one of the few things in this world that is standing on the side of my freedom currently. I want the freedom to communicate. I want the freedom to show my friends things I know. I know this might be hard for someone from a country that has never been independent from the rule of a monarch, but you might be able to imagine it. Go on, strain your brain... It is possible, really.
What burns me about this article is the quote: 'Counsel for the Commonwealth, Paul Roberts, SC, said Ng was well aware he was acting illegally. Not only was the site camouflaged - the web space had been let to him by a teenage boy in Perth - but Ng had co-written an essay for his information technology law course on "open source software licensing."' Not entirely sure what OS licensing has to do with music piracy.
That burns me as well, but I can tell you why the lawyer said that. I think the lawyer is claiming that since Ng wrote an essay on a copyright subject, he must know enough about copyright to know what he was doing was illegal.
What the lawyer did not say:
There is no connection between OSS and piracy.
Most P2P applications that the record industry hates so much run on MSWindows.
The legality of file sharing remains in question.
Copyright was never intended to prevent people from sharing information. In fact, it was intended to create more information for people to share.
The lawyer was making an insidious attempt to vilify Free Software with his questionably legal attack on information sharing. That would be an added benefit for an industry that wishes to eliminate OSs that have the ability to disable DRM.
The record industry is steady on course to destroy all freedom on the Net for a few quarters of profit. This is the essence of greed.
I saw Trinity die, but I do not remembr Neo dying. I do not think unconsious is the same as dying. Revolutions was definitely open ended about Neo's death... if nothing else...
However, at least we know that these books are digitized somewhere. Now, all we need is a good samaritan to risk getting drawn and quartered and release them somewhere on the Net...
If that figure of 1/3 of people is correct, that obviously means they want it, and they might buy something if they got it.
I guess we should stop trying to make laws to stop spam. If it were something like 5% of responded to a spam message and 0.01% actually bought something, I could see the argument for illegalizing it. However, a figure this high suggests that people actually want these offers (I haven't a clue why, either, so don't ask).
Maybe this is better as I would much rather have spam than DRM, and it appears spam has been used as one of the arguments in favor of locking down the Net.
I would rather suffer the inconvenience of freedom than the frustrated meaninglessness of life under tyranny.
It sounds like all people who believe strongly in freedom are now zealots or terrorists according to the quoted statement. If that is the case, why not just toss the Constitution. It must have been written by a bunch of anti-British zealots anyway. I suppose it then follows that the Founding Fathers should not have waisted their blood, sweat, and anguish and instead accepted the benevolence of English rule.
People who believe in things are the only ones that make the world improve. Everyone else just does what they are told. These same people, who improve the quality of everybody's lives, are always ostracized by those who bask in the benevolence of these so-called zealots creations.
If everyone in the US is to be afraid of terrorists and zealots, the US is no longer the "home of the brave". This author is a bandwagon jumping pussy. He should be thanked for making the National Anthem a mockery of the value system the US once embodied. He is, after all, a mindless team player doing his part to rid the world of free thought.
This should have been predicted a long time ago. PDAs had to fail because their name is so stupid. People have always thought of Personal Digital Assitants as computerized address books and calendars. This is a short sighted way to look at devices that will one day be computers in our pockets. By limiting the devices name to a subset of its functions, the marketers in the US basically killed their future.
If the marketers had been smart enough, they would have promoted these devices as dumber but more portable computers. Something like:
Carry the Net in your pocket!
or:
Have the news at your fingertips wherever you are!
They then should have made sure there was software to facilitate reading anywhere at any time. Imagine businessmen able to update there skills when they are on the train or the bus. I think many companies would have gone for that. Even downloading the morning's stock quotes and reading them from a handheld would have been much more recent than the quotes in the newspaper.
People might pay to have the convenience of the Internet in their pocket. No one is going to pay US$700 for an address and/or schedule book. Especially since the paper variety starts at a few dollars. By calling these devices PDAs, they have relegated them to competition with paper items cheaper than books (and PDAs are often harder to use as there is a learning curve).
Therefore, the term "PDA" is had doomed a whole set of innovative devices.
Wow, the graphs from the article are kind of scary. The Windows Worries graph's first item is 80% of "business-technology professionals" are concerned with software quality issues or vulnerabilites in Windows. However, on the Linux Concerns graph, the first item is only 40% of "business-technology professionals" are concerned that Linux lacks "a complete and fully integrated software environment".
While anybody would agree that 40% is less than 80%, the two charts are the same width, and a casual glance would certainly give the impression that people are more concerned with Linux problems than with Windows problems. This is disturbing since there are no Linux concerns that exceed 50% with the interviewed "business-technology professionals" while there are three concerns that exceed 50% of the same group with Windows.
It appears that "business-technology professionals" are more concerned with Windows than Linux, but the graphs are set up to give the opposite impression. Is this another case of spin-doctoring? Or is Linux just a casualty of aestheticism?
Almost nine of 10 execs say Microsoft hasn't done enough to promote Windows-Linux compatibility...
Wow.
Maybe that is a statistically insignificant figure, but I am surprised that anybody expects MS to be compatible with anything (other than MS software, of course).
These managers are either stupid or way ahead of their time. I am hoping for the latter.
You already have a "real science channel". It is called the Internet. Defend the right to free speech so people can continue to post things like these well reasoned sites.
Ordinary people would change the channel if they saw such clear reasoning, so only free (I mean Internet) "broadcasting" will carry correct (as well as tons of bogus) information.
It also occurs to me that a sort of Open Science net stream show could be created. Maybe people could take turns creating programs with their own equipment and reviewed on a website for accuracy and content. You Slashdot guys are already doing the news: Why not Geek TV?
So if the local gas station start giving away free gas, we should all complain thats it's *not* free, as you really need a combustion engine to use make use of it?
Actually, gas would be analogous to electricity. I never said that paying for hardware and power would have anything to do with the equation. Software is another story. Software is not free if I have to buy more software to run it.
I have the hardware, and I have the power. This software does not run on my box. Therefore, it is not free.
Let's face it. Bill "The Devil" Gates knows he is lying. He knows that most people are too stupid to do anything but believe him. He is not in court. He is not going to pay for this lie. At worst, it would be publicly known that he lied. Even then, most people would still believe his lie. What does he have to lose? Nothing. What does he have to gain? More misplaced confidence in the "quality" of Windows.
Even if in some magical fantasy world justice came about and the majority of the computer users of the world came to know that he liked this time, MicroSuck's spin doctors would quickly convince the users that their mistrust was misplaced and that Mr. Gates had meant something else entirely.
This brings me to something that really irritates me about helping friends with Linux. This would be a good Ask Slashdot question: Why is it that when something gets messed up and one is running Linux, it is always blamed on Linux? But when something goes wrong and one is running Windows, it is just pawned off to the instability of computers in general? The general public sounds a lot like some girls I know: Every time they are lied to, they believe it, but every time they are told the truth, the think it is a lie (this is why jerks get all the girlfriends).
Maybe Linux needs a marketing department.
Then again, if we start lying, will we become as bad as MicroSuck?
This gives SCO a pretty big war chest to fight IBM. Before this investment SCO only had a few million in cash remaining. If you thought SCO was annoying before, this won't help.
This is true, but this also makes it more of a conspiracy against the Linux Community. Therefore, there is another well funded VC that owes its capital resources to the Linux Legal Defesnse Fund or the EFF ( Imagine the EFF with more than $100 Million;).
It sounds like both BayStar Capital and Canopy Group should surrender all of their assets to the Linux Community world wide or some designated organization for the defense of the freedom to run Linux and for Linux development. A class action suit involving Linux would involve millions of injured parties world wide.
BayStar and Canopy owe every single Linux user for this threat to our freedom and the emotional stress suffered when contemplating having to return to the torture of a Microsoft universe.
For a short while I considered the possibility that Pan T. Hose, PhD.'s comments could be a joke, but I guess I am a sucker for flame bait. Anyway, I think I made some valid points...
... Okay, okay, I will shut up and go nurse my wounded ego now. I wish this sort of thing would always turn out to be a joke. I can think of worse ways to be made a fool.:P
Dammit. I was hoping to get away with that. Yes, I am guilty. I mixed the Thought Police and the Ministry of Truth together to make a point. I really should not react to senseless comments on Slashdot when I am tired:/
Two years ago we were sued by a woman employee who saw pornography on the screen of one of our workers and she won.
Did you not think of ever blaming her? Why should some moron sue because they saw a pornographic image? Did it damage her eyes? Did it cause here to have a heart attack? Was there any physical evidence of harm at all whatsoever?
The answer, with a probabilitiy exceeding 99.99999%, is no. Bullshit lawsuits are a problem with the legal system, not employees looking at nudy pictures.
Therefore, while your argument is strong when adhering to the concept of employee productivity, it is ruined by your example of frivolous litigation.
Your argument contains another startling flaw: The original article was not talking about images. It was talking about text. Filtering images and text are two totally different things. For one thing, the employee whose screen you got sued for could have written "dirty" text during his time at the office. I doubt very much that he could be manufacturing "dirty" images during his hours at the office.
The real filtering danger this article is pointing out is the danger of filtering text. If you do not want your employees to look at porn images, make them use Lynx or block all images at the firewall. People would still be able to get the information they need. Changing the news, however, is censorship and an attempt at thought control. Are you working for the Ministry of Thought?
It is nice to know that there are people out there like you who think they have the right to decide what the rest of us think and know. Why don't you move to a totalitarian state? I think you would be happy there.
"When they find out they're not the only ones, it's like this weight has been lifted off their shoulders and they say, 'Really? I'm not the only one who doesn't know what the two mouse buttons are for?"'
Slashdot Mirror
Do we not have enough problems with people calling ideas "property" in the real world?
What is to come of this? If you create a virtual T-shirt, will you be able to say that any avatar wearing a T-shirt is "stealing" your "intellectual property"? What if someone claims to be the first to create a character with wings and goes suing every avatar with wings?
The legal concept of "intellectual property" should be erradicated, not expanded. Ideas are not property! They never have been. They never will be.
The question is not whether technological measures exist to identify who is using a particular computer at any given time, but whether or not we should want to identify the user at any given time.
Do we, as a society, want computer owners idenfied by their computers for every process they execute? Do you want someone to be able to remotely check your computer for politically unacceptable websites you might have visited? Do you want spyware programs to have proof that it was you that viewed some illicit pornography when Outlook automagically opened a spam message for you? Do you want the RIAA to have a biometric signature to identify that you were a) sharing MP3s and b) listening to MP3s that you downloaded and have c) proof of how many times you listened to those songs and for how long? Do you want them to argue in court that you are a social deviant because you listened to the Ghetto Boys or the Misfits or did not listen to Britany Spears?
If your identity is connected with every program execution on your computer, what would stop someone from compiling enough circumstantial "proof" that you were a terrorist to blackmail you with public humiliation.
The real criminals will always be able to defeat any technological identification scheme. However, the average joe will not. Who will lose by this? You will.
Computers keeping tabs on you will make this amendment null and void.Punishing criminals is important, but criminalizing large portions or all of society should not be the goal of law. Crime will always exist (even in non-free societies). Get used to it.
Might this not be FOX News' problem for issuing news that might be confused with a satyrical cartoon? Maybe FOX News' content is about as believeable as "Study: 92 per cent of Democrats are gay... JFK posthumously joins Republican Party... Oil slicks found to keep seals young, supple... Do Democrats Cause Cancer?" (from the Yahoo! article). Well, if they are anything like CNN, that sounds about right.
What the lawyer did not say:
The lawyer was making an insidious attempt to vilify Free Software with his questionably legal attack on information sharing. That would be an added benefit for an industry that wishes to eliminate OSs that have the ability to disable DRM.
The record industry is steady on course to destroy all freedom on the Net for a few quarters of profit. This is the essence of greed.
If there were justice in the world, that would happen...
Fat chance.
I saw Trinity die, but I do not remembr Neo dying. I do not think unconsious is the same as dying. Revolutions was definitely open ended about Neo's death... if nothing else...
Everyone should have seen this coming.
However, at least we know that these books are digitized somewhere. Now, all we need is a good samaritan to risk getting drawn and quartered and release them somewhere on the Net...
All citizens of the US have a right to access this information.
By denying us access, the publishers and authors are stealing from us, The People.
Knoppix 3.2 destroyed an older CD drive when I tried to demonstrate it to my friend. I had to replace the drive :(
What is it in CD images that can cause this?
Is there something that can be done to prevent this from happening in the future?
I guess we should stop trying to make laws to stop spam. If it were something like 5% of responded to a spam message and 0.01% actually bought something, I could see the argument for illegalizing it. However, a figure this high suggests that people actually want these offers (I haven't a clue why, either, so don't ask).
Maybe this is better as I would much rather have spam than DRM, and it appears spam has been used as one of the arguments in favor of locking down the Net.
I would rather suffer the inconvenience of freedom than the frustrated meaninglessness of life under tyranny.
It sounds like all people who believe strongly in freedom are now zealots or terrorists according to the quoted statement. If that is the case, why not just toss the Constitution. It must have been written by a bunch of anti-British zealots anyway. I suppose it then follows that the Founding Fathers should not have waisted their blood, sweat, and anguish and instead accepted the benevolence of English rule.
People who believe in things are the only ones that make the world improve. Everyone else just does what they are told. These same people, who improve the quality of everybody's lives, are always ostracized by those who bask in the benevolence of these so-called zealots creations.
If everyone in the US is to be afraid of terrorists and zealots, the US is no longer the "home of the brave". This author is a bandwagon jumping pussy. He should be thanked for making the National Anthem a mockery of the value system the US once embodied. He is, after all, a mindless team player doing his part to rid the world of free thought.
This should have been predicted a long time ago. PDAs had to fail because their name is so stupid. People have always thought of Personal Digital Assitants as computerized address books and calendars. This is a short sighted way to look at devices that will one day be computers in our pockets. By limiting the devices name to a subset of its functions, the marketers in the US basically killed their future.
If the marketers had been smart enough, they would have promoted these devices as dumber but more portable computers. Something like:
or:They then should have made sure there was software to facilitate reading anywhere at any time. Imagine businessmen able to update there skills when they are on the train or the bus. I think many companies would have gone for that. Even downloading the morning's stock quotes and reading them from a handheld would have been much more recent than the quotes in the newspaper.
People might pay to have the convenience of the Internet in their pocket. No one is going to pay US$700 for an address and/or schedule book. Especially since the paper variety starts at a few dollars. By calling these devices PDAs, they have relegated them to competition with paper items cheaper than books (and PDAs are often harder to use as there is a learning curve).
Therefore, the term "PDA" is had doomed a whole set of innovative devices.
One more thing:
"No concerns":
Wow, the graphs from the article are kind of scary. The Windows Worries graph's first item is 80% of "business-technology professionals" are concerned with software quality issues or vulnerabilites in Windows. However, on the Linux Concerns graph, the first item is only 40% of "business-technology professionals" are concerned that Linux lacks "a complete and fully integrated software environment".
While anybody would agree that 40% is less than 80%, the two charts are the same width, and a casual glance would certainly give the impression that people are more concerned with Linux problems than with Windows problems. This is disturbing since there are no Linux concerns that exceed 50% with the interviewed "business-technology professionals" while there are three concerns that exceed 50% of the same group with Windows.
It appears that "business-technology professionals" are more concerned with Windows than Linux, but the graphs are set up to give the opposite impression. Is this another case of spin-doctoring? Or is Linux just a casualty of aestheticism?
Maybe that is a statistically insignificant figure, but I am surprised that anybody expects MS to be compatible with anything (other than MS software, of course).
These managers are either stupid or way ahead of their time. I am hoping for the latter.
You already have a "real science channel". It is called the Internet. Defend the right to free speech so people can continue to post things like these well reasoned sites.
Ordinary people would change the channel if they saw such clear reasoning, so only free (I mean Internet) "broadcasting" will carry correct (as well as tons of bogus) information.
It also occurs to me that a sort of Open Science net stream show could be created. Maybe people could take turns creating programs with their own equipment and reviewed on a website for accuracy and content. You Slashdot guys are already doing the news: Why not Geek TV?
It is almost like religion. When something goes right, it is God's work. When something goes wrong, it is your own fault.
I guess I finally know who devil worshippers worship.
Let's face it. Bill "The Devil" Gates knows he is lying. He knows that most people are too stupid to do anything but believe him. He is not in court. He is not going to pay for this lie. At worst, it would be publicly known that he lied. Even then, most people would still believe his lie. What does he have to lose? Nothing. What does he have to gain? More misplaced confidence in the "quality" of Windows.
Even if in some magical fantasy world justice came about and the majority of the computer users of the world came to know that he liked this time, MicroSuck's spin doctors would quickly convince the users that their mistrust was misplaced and that Mr. Gates had meant something else entirely.
This brings me to something that really irritates me about helping friends with Linux. This would be a good Ask Slashdot question: Why is it that when something gets messed up and one is running Linux, it is always blamed on Linux? But when something goes wrong and one is running Windows, it is just pawned off to the instability of computers in general? The general public sounds a lot like some girls I know: Every time they are lied to, they believe it, but every time they are told the truth, the think it is a lie (this is why jerks get all the girlfriends).
Maybe Linux needs a marketing department.
Then again, if we start lying, will we become as bad as MicroSuck?
It sounds like both BayStar Capital and Canopy Group should surrender all of their assets to the Linux Community world wide or some designated organization for the defense of the freedom to run Linux and for Linux development. A class action suit involving Linux would involve millions of injured parties world wide.
BayStar and Canopy owe every single Linux user for this threat to our freedom and the emotional stress suffered when contemplating having to return to the torture of a Microsoft universe.
For a short while I considered the possibility that Pan T. Hose, PhD.'s comments could be a joke, but I guess I am a sucker for flame bait. Anyway, I think I made some valid points...
Dammit. I was hoping to get away with that. Yes, I am guilty. I mixed the Thought Police and the Ministry of Truth together to make a point. I really should not react to senseless comments on Slashdot when I am tired :/
I hate to flame... but you are an idiot.
You said:
Did you not think of ever blaming her? Why should some moron sue because they saw a pornographic image? Did it damage her eyes? Did it cause here to have a heart attack? Was there any physical evidence of harm at all whatsoever?The answer, with a probabilitiy exceeding 99.99999%, is no. Bullshit lawsuits are a problem with the legal system, not employees looking at nudy pictures.
Therefore, while your argument is strong when adhering to the concept of employee productivity, it is ruined by your example of frivolous litigation.
Your argument contains another startling flaw: The original article was not talking about images. It was talking about text. Filtering images and text are two totally different things. For one thing, the employee whose screen you got sued for could have written "dirty" text during his time at the office. I doubt very much that he could be manufacturing "dirty" images during his hours at the office.
The real filtering danger this article is pointing out is the danger of filtering text. If you do not want your employees to look at porn images, make them use Lynx or block all images at the firewall. People would still be able to get the information they need. Changing the news, however, is censorship and an attempt at thought control. Are you working for the Ministry of Thought?
It is nice to know that there are people out there like you who think they have the right to decide what the rest of us think and know. Why don't you move to a totalitarian state? I think you would be happy there.