it's not untrue to say that copyright infringement is "illegal".
If the assumption that all suspected or accused (not convicted) copyright infringement is illegal is made, then it is untrue. A fair way to think of Fair Use is as a form of "legal infringement". It is definitely infringement, but in some cases that infringement is deemed to be legal because the copyright holder would be unreasonable to make a claim against that activity or enforcement would be impossible or enforcement would be ludicrous or violate one's other rights (like the Right to Free Speech).
I'm not trying to be controversial here. I don't believe that copyright was intended to prevent private individuals from enjoying copyrighted material without a license. It was more to prevent professional publishers from poaching off of each others' work for profit.
I could not agree with you more, and if copyright was so limited (as it was intended to be), we would not be having this discussion.
I believe copying songs without buying them (outside of "fair use") is illegal.
Here is the question: How do you compensate artists without compensating the RIAA? Can caveat emptor work in a world where we are required to pay the middle man? I really do not want to monetarily contribute to an organization that actively extorts large amounts of money from ordinary and innocent people.
I guess NewYorkCountryLawyer has finally fallen completely under Slashdot's influence. He is now discussing water on Mars. This lawyer has become a certifiable geek.
I, for one, welcome you to our ranks.
And once again, I must also thank you for helping Free People everywhere battle the wickedness of the recording industry.
Now I'm not trying to excuse people who download music illegally. It's illegal. I don't do it.
I am so sick of this argument. The RIAA never (as in: not once) sued anybody for downloading music. No matter what they said to the press, 100% of their "filesharing" lawsuits were for uploading. Further, it has never been conclusively established that downloading songs is illegal. In the Napster case, the judge stated that people using a service like Napster had the "effect of piracy". Just because something has the same consequences does not mean it is the same thing. On top of that, it has since been argued -- rather convincingly -- that music sharing increases sales because the heaviest downloaders are also the biggest music buyers.
You can listen to the radio for free. Are you or the radio station doing something "illegal" when you tune in? Are radio audiences "pirates"?
This whole "downloading == theft" thing is merely the RIAA's creation.
... but if you actually give money to the record companies, most of it winds up in the hands of Columbian drug cartels! You don't think they get DJs to play the latest pop stars they are pushing by appealing to their musical tastes, do you? Nope, it's mostly nose candy under the table.
Ohhh. So that is why so many artists do drugs... It is a perk from their employers... Now I understand!
Or Sony's new Blu-CD [link removed] which should hold enough data to keep the tracks in their original quality.
Oh, yeah, that is a good idea, the RIAA is dying but instead of celebrating, we should all promote their sponsors' schemes to improve an antiquated distribution medium. That sounds like a good idea. Maybe Sony will come back and sue us directly now.
Why would anybody promote anything developed by a company that put rootkits on CDs, crippled its once innovative technology with DRM, and told Stan Lee that it did not make a profit on a record breaking movie (Spiderman)?
I am currently composing this on an Eee901 with Intrepid. On the #ubuntu channel at irc.freenode.net, they told me to add the repository for Ubuntu Eee which essentially only offers an Eee kernel and modules (with all the proprietary drivers -- yes, I know, yuck, but they are supposed to be replaced with Free Software soon).
Everything works, and you do not have to deal with that silly Ubuntu mobile interface. If you download EeeControl from the standard Ubuntu repos, you will be able to switch on and off the Wifi, Bluetooth, camera, and SD card reader. You will also be able to set the processor as with Asus' "super hybrid engine".
I have been using this setup for more than two months and find it is very responsive. It is easy to set up, too. Just make sure you always keep Grub pointing to the Eee kernel.
More importantly, they have no convenient method for average Joe Tinkerer to give it a try and help generate buzz.
When it's closer to release readiness, I'm sure they will.
That, in my mind, is the entire problem with Haiku. They have been working on this for close to a decade and still have not really made a release. If they had followed Linus' "release early, release often" philosophy, perhaps we would have something usable by now. I guess this announcement is the first attempt at something like that, but I think even the broken versions should have been distributed long ago.
That said, I hope as a result of this announcement Haiku begins to progress more rapidly. I have been hoping to use it for some time. I cannot see why anyone who used the original BeOS would not like such performance. Back in the late 90's, I could play 6 simultaneous video streams on a 450MHz processor with no visible performance problems. No OS that I am aware of can do that today even though processors are many times faster.
Why would Google want to license the most broken piece of software that MS has ever produced? ActiveSync is quite possibly the worst software that I have ever had to deal with. It is slow, unstable, and unreliable. It often has to be reinstalled. It fails for no reason. Why would Google want to be within a mile of this twisted mess?
Even a broken app that worked half the time would probably perform better over all than ActiveSync. Using ActiveSync was so painful, I just bought a CF card reader/writer for my HP PDA (compare 15 minutes to transfer an mp3 with ActiveSync to 10 seconds directly).
Not only that, but OpenSync is probably already better already -- and that is saying a lot. That money would be a lot better spent improving OpenSync.
I can honestly understand paying for really good apps -- but broken ones? Where is the value in that? It is like paying full price for a car that does not drive.
I thought about this when I first heard the news about RFIDs being included in passports -- and money. Now that there is a practical implementation, it is time for a bunch of privacy advocates to get a marquee style display and go to an international airport. They could stand outside of the arrivals customs area and scan and display people's personal information in order to demonstrate how completely these tags violate the passengers' Fourth Amendment rights.
The sign might look something like this:
Hello John Doe!
Your passport number is #########
Your SSN is ####-##-###
You are carrying two MasterCards, one Visa card, and one Diner's Club card.
You are carrying seven 100 dollar bills and ten 20 dollar bills. Say hello to Ben and Andy for us!
This information has all been made publicly available courtesy of Uncle Sam and your banks.
If you are offended by this sign, please contact your Congressmen as soon as possible.
If you would like further information, ask one of our friendly volunteers for an explanatory pamphlet!!
Have a Nice Day!
That should get people's attention. And it should be quite entertaining until the airport authorities figure it out. When they do, it would also be nice to point out that Freedom of Assembly is also an inalienable right!
This all sounds nice, but the real question is: Are these things going to be in an original EeePC case or one of the larger ones like the Eee1000? I mean, the appeal of the Eee was its small size. I bought a 901 specifically because the 1000 was too big and they were going to stop selling the 901. If I want a big clunky laptop, I can just go to all the usual vendors.
I am glad battery life will be better and that these computers will be more powerful, but fitting easily into a backpack is also an important factor (one that the S101 got totally wrong). I can have a huge display at home. When I am out of the house, I want my portable computer to be, well, portable.
What if the teacher was acting on an unwritten school policy? Maybe the school's lawyers know the school cannot legally enforce such a policy and rely on the teachers' authority and the students' ignorance to enrich the school?
Trust me, if there was a "but I didn't sign anything agreeing to the rules" defense a student would have used it years ago when they were getting booted out of school for drinking, streaking, urinating in the hall, swearing, cheating or some other stupid offense.
Yeah, but that is a lot different than the school claiming the rights to a student's work. Claiming that one is the author of one's own schoolwork would be only with utmost difficulty classified as "academic misconduct".
Are you implying that the teacher somehow has a copyright on the information taught in the classroom? The teacher was speaking, and since that speech is not "fixed in a tangible medium", the teacher has no copyright at all whatsoever. In fact, this is one of the few cases left where speech is still free of the evil spectre of copyright.
They also used the term "naked PCs" to daemonise whatever is not saddled with Windows.
We should refer to Windows computers as "promiscuous PCs" as they are very loose about security and have a lot of disgusting viruses. Windows is the dirty whore of the software world.
The desire for an unbiased news core came from an understanding that it was a lesser of two evils.
Whoa! Who are you? Spike Lee? You make a very well reasoned argument and then suddenly jump to an insane conclusion at the very end.
Who decided that news was objective? Not I, certainly, and not anybody I have ever met in my lifetime.
The most likely scenario is that the newspapers and other news outets have pushed the idea of objectivity as a marketing ploy to increase the value of their "products". It is yet another fairy tale told to us by the sellers of fairy tales. If the news is seen as objective, there is no point in investigating further. If the tale is "true" (ie. if the facts are correct), then the whole thing must be true and is therefore news. Hence, we have Rush Limbaugh and opinions presented as factual statements.
One thing is certain, though, however it happened, the news did not come to be seen as "truth" because of some discussion involving the Authors of the Constitution.
What specifically needs to be referenced in this argument is Amendment IX. Roughly paraphrasing, it means that just because some Rights are enumerated, that should in no way lead to the conculsion that the Rights of the people are limited to those in the list. This also means that Rights are not "granted" by the Constitution or the government. They have another source, and that source is above and beyond the power of government.
It may seem cool to get your news from bloggers but they aren't news sources they just voice opinions they aren't held to any standards.
I have two points about this. The first is a question: Why can bloggers -- or more appropriately, individuals -- not be "news sources"? In fact, when one thinks about it, is there any other "news source" in existence? Individuals are the best source of news. Their eyes are everywhere and they are not necessarily paid for their opinions (the newspapers' opinions are necessarily bought and paid for).
The second deals with censorship. The fact that any individual can voice their opinion and even "print" it online is precisely what the First Amendment was all about. Free Speech needs to be free of money as well as free of government regulation. When someone pays for your speech, you cannot very well criticize them. If someone pays you to compliment them, could you fail to do it and get paid? So, what "standards" are we talking about here? Or, more exactly, whose standards?
Objective news is a dying thing.
Objective news is a fiction. It never existed, and believing that human beings can write objectively is absurd.
This country would not exist as we know it without newspapers so they deserve more respect than to be viewed as bird cage filler.
In that case, it is too bad we did not start filling our bird cages with them earlier. Considering the current state of things and the culpability of the news services for many of the current "crises", it would have been prudent to have abandoned the "news" much earlier.
The founding fathers would be horrified and we should be as well.
The founding fathers would be horrified if they read the copyright notices on the New York Times website, or could not read old articles without first paying a fee. The founding fathers, Jefferson especially, would most probably rejoice at the current state of the internet and be very concerned at the possibility of losing this medium where everybody has a free soap box and an equal opportunity at getting public attention.
What you end up with in that future is a bunch porn, twiiter and trivial drool and nothing of substance.
And how, precisely, is that different from the newspapers of today? In reality, they are nothing more than works of fiction sprinkled with a few verified facts. Anything the advertisers, the government, or any well funded enemy disagrees with is generally hidden or framed as absurd. For instance, Slashdot readers know of tons of cases where the RIAA has lost or is losing in court. The newspaper reading public only knows about the US$222,000 judgement in the Thomas case. If that case is struck down on appeal, it will most likely not be reported in the newspapers at all.
In addition to that, the tabloids might as well be selling sex as they have naked but censored pictures of a different star every week. I think few people will think it would be horrible that a few peeping toms were out of a job.
Newspapers always were garbage rags for the education in further ignorance of the ignorant. Losing them can hardly be bad for society.
I am of course overjoyed at the fact that there is someone who managed not to be forced to pay for Windows, but I still have to ask this question: Did Dell take the loss or did MS?
Aside from saving money, refusing to grant an undesirable vendor money is another reason to refuse a purchase. If Dell still paid MS, then MS is still insulated from market forces. How can customers choose against MS if MS gets paid even when those customers do not purchase MS software?
I hope the next time this happens, Dell will supply a written document certifying that it has refused payment to MS for the copy in question.
Slashdot Mirror
it's not untrue to say that copyright infringement is "illegal".
If the assumption that all suspected or accused (not convicted) copyright infringement is illegal is made, then it is untrue. A fair way to think of Fair Use is as a form of "legal infringement". It is definitely infringement, but in some cases that infringement is deemed to be legal because the copyright holder would be unreasonable to make a claim against that activity or enforcement would be impossible or enforcement would be ludicrous or violate one's other rights (like the Right to Free Speech).
I'm not trying to be controversial here. I don't believe that copyright was intended to prevent private individuals from enjoying copyrighted material without a license. It was more to prevent professional publishers from poaching off of each others' work for profit.
I could not agree with you more, and if copyright was so limited (as it was intended to be), we would not be having this discussion.
I believe copying songs without buying them (outside of "fair use") is illegal.
Here is the question: How do you compensate artists without compensating the RIAA? Can caveat emptor work in a world where we are required to pay the middle man? I really do not want to monetarily contribute to an organization that actively extorts large amounts of money from ordinary and innocent people.
I guess NewYorkCountryLawyer has finally fallen completely under Slashdot's influence. He is now discussing water on Mars. This lawyer has become a certifiable geek.
I, for one, welcome you to our ranks.
And once again, I must also thank you for helping Free People everywhere battle the wickedness of the recording industry.
Now I'm not trying to excuse people who download music illegally. It's illegal. I don't do it.
I am so sick of this argument. The RIAA never (as in: not once) sued anybody for downloading music. No matter what they said to the press, 100% of their "filesharing" lawsuits were for uploading. Further, it has never been conclusively established that downloading songs is illegal. In the Napster case, the judge stated that people using a service like Napster had the "effect of piracy". Just because something has the same consequences does not mean it is the same thing. On top of that, it has since been argued -- rather convincingly -- that music sharing increases sales because the heaviest downloaders are also the biggest music buyers.
You can listen to the radio for free. Are you or the radio station doing something "illegal" when you tune in? Are radio audiences "pirates"?
This whole "downloading == theft" thing is merely the RIAA's creation.
... but if you actually give money to the record companies, most of it winds up in the hands of Columbian drug cartels! You don't think they get DJs to play the latest pop stars they are pushing by appealing to their musical tastes, do you? Nope, it's mostly nose candy under the table.
Ohhh. So that is why so many artists do drugs... It is a perk from their employers... Now I understand!
Or Sony's new Blu-CD [link removed] which should hold enough data to keep the tracks in their original quality.
Oh, yeah, that is a good idea, the RIAA is dying but instead of celebrating, we should all promote their sponsors' schemes to improve an antiquated distribution medium. That sounds like a good idea. Maybe Sony will come back and sue us directly now.
Why would anybody promote anything developed by a company that put rootkits on CDs, crippled its once innovative technology with DRM, and told Stan Lee that it did not make a profit on a record breaking movie (Spiderman)?
Sony.
sucks.like.no.other
Then, let us all hope for the sake of the families involved that the MafiAAs do not make them mysteriously disappear.
"The RIAA has announced a new severance package . . ."
The "microsoft tax" is unavoidable. Unless you can figure out a way to buy unformatted removable storage, you have already paid MS.
I am currently composing this on an Eee901 with Intrepid. On the #ubuntu channel at irc.freenode.net, they told me to add the repository for Ubuntu Eee which essentially only offers an Eee kernel and modules (with all the proprietary drivers -- yes, I know, yuck, but they are supposed to be replaced with Free Software soon).
The repo is:
deb http://www.array.org/ubuntu intrepid eeepc
Everything works, and you do not have to deal with that silly Ubuntu mobile interface. If you download EeeControl from the standard Ubuntu repos, you will be able to switch on and off the Wifi, Bluetooth, camera, and SD card reader. You will also be able to set the processor as with Asus' "super hybrid engine".
I have been using this setup for more than two months and find it is very responsive. It is easy to set up, too. Just make sure you always keep Grub pointing to the Eee kernel.
That, in my mind, is the entire problem with Haiku. They have been working on this for close to a decade and still have not really made a release. If they had followed Linus' "release early, release often" philosophy, perhaps we would have something usable by now. I guess this announcement is the first attempt at something like that, but I think even the broken versions should have been distributed long ago.
That said, I hope as a result of this announcement Haiku begins to progress more rapidly. I have been hoping to use it for some time. I cannot see why anyone who used the original BeOS would not like such performance. Back in the late 90's, I could play 6 simultaneous video streams on a 450MHz processor with no visible performance problems. No OS that I am aware of can do that today even though processors are many times faster.
How is Linux supposed to shed its very undeserved "communist" image if these commie countries keep using it? ;-P
Seriously, though, it is nice to know that even communist countries are starting to avoid the old MS 5 Year Plan.
Why would Google want to license the most broken piece of software that MS has ever produced? ActiveSync is quite possibly the worst software that I have ever had to deal with. It is slow, unstable, and unreliable. It often has to be reinstalled. It fails for no reason. Why would Google want to be within a mile of this twisted mess?
Even a broken app that worked half the time would probably perform better over all than ActiveSync. Using ActiveSync was so painful, I just bought a CF card reader/writer for my HP PDA (compare 15 minutes to transfer an mp3 with ActiveSync to 10 seconds directly).
Not only that, but OpenSync is probably already better already -- and that is saying a lot. That money would be a lot better spent improving OpenSync.
I can honestly understand paying for really good apps -- but broken ones? Where is the value in that? It is like paying full price for a car that does not drive.
I thought about this when I first heard the news about RFIDs being included in passports -- and money. Now that there is a practical implementation, it is time for a bunch of privacy advocates to get a marquee style display and go to an international airport. They could stand outside of the arrivals customs area and scan and display people's personal information in order to demonstrate how completely these tags violate the passengers' Fourth Amendment rights.
The sign might look something like this:
That should get people's attention. And it should be quite entertaining until the airport authorities figure it out. When they do, it would also be nice to point out that Freedom of Assembly is also an inalienable right!
This all sounds nice, but the real question is: Are these things going to be in an original EeePC case or one of the larger ones like the Eee1000? I mean, the appeal of the Eee was its small size. I bought a 901 specifically because the 1000 was too big and they were going to stop selling the 901. If I want a big clunky laptop, I can just go to all the usual vendors.
I am glad battery life will be better and that these computers will be more powerful, but fitting easily into a backpack is also an important factor (one that the S101 got totally wrong). I can have a huge display at home. When I am out of the house, I want my portable computer to be, well, portable.
What if the teacher was acting on an unwritten school policy? Maybe the school's lawyers know the school cannot legally enforce such a policy and rely on the teachers' authority and the students' ignorance to enrich the school?
Yeah, but that is a lot different than the school claiming the rights to a student's work. Claiming that one is the author of one's own schoolwork would be only with utmost difficulty classified as "academic misconduct".
You mean: Most schools claim to "own" everything you produce.
Are you implying that the teacher somehow has a copyright on the information taught in the classroom? The teacher was speaking, and since that speech is not "fixed in a tangible medium", the teacher has no copyright at all whatsoever. In fact, this is one of the few cases left where speech is still free of the evil spectre of copyright.
We should refer to Windows computers as "promiscuous PCs" as they are very loose about security and have a lot of disgusting viruses. Windows is the dirty whore of the software world.
. . . the lawyers.
This is surprising since the copyright fanatics spoke much more boldly 10 years ago than they do today.
How much of the truth of his predictions is the result of his predictions?
Whoa! Who are you? Spike Lee? You make a very well reasoned argument and then suddenly jump to an insane conclusion at the very end.
Who decided that news was objective? Not I, certainly, and not anybody I have ever met in my lifetime.
The most likely scenario is that the newspapers and other news outets have pushed the idea of objectivity as a marketing ploy to increase the value of their "products". It is yet another fairy tale told to us by the sellers of fairy tales. If the news is seen as objective, there is no point in investigating further. If the tale is "true" (ie. if the facts are correct), then the whole thing must be true and is therefore news. Hence, we have Rush Limbaugh and opinions presented as factual statements.
One thing is certain, though, however it happened, the news did not come to be seen as "truth" because of some discussion involving the Authors of the Constitution.
What specifically needs to be referenced in this argument is Amendment IX. Roughly paraphrasing, it means that just because some Rights are enumerated, that should in no way lead to the conculsion that the Rights of the people are limited to those in the list. This also means that Rights are not "granted" by the Constitution or the government. They have another source, and that source is above and beyond the power of government.
I have two points about this. The first is a question: Why can bloggers -- or more appropriately, individuals -- not be "news sources"? In fact, when one thinks about it, is there any other "news source" in existence? Individuals are the best source of news. Their eyes are everywhere and they are not necessarily paid for their opinions (the newspapers' opinions are necessarily bought and paid for).
The second deals with censorship. The fact that any individual can voice their opinion and even "print" it online is precisely what the First Amendment was all about. Free Speech needs to be free of money as well as free of government regulation. When someone pays for your speech, you cannot very well criticize them. If someone pays you to compliment them, could you fail to do it and get paid? So, what "standards" are we talking about here? Or, more exactly, whose standards?
Objective news is a fiction. It never existed, and believing that human beings can write objectively is absurd.
In that case, it is too bad we did not start filling our bird cages with them earlier. Considering the current state of things and the culpability of the news services for many of the current "crises", it would have been prudent to have abandoned the "news" much earlier.
The founding fathers would be horrified if they read the copyright notices on the New York Times website, or could not read old articles without first paying a fee. The founding fathers, Jefferson especially, would most probably rejoice at the current state of the internet and be very concerned at the possibility of losing this medium where everybody has a free soap box and an equal opportunity at getting public attention.
And how, precisely, is that different from the newspapers of today? In reality, they are nothing more than works of fiction sprinkled with a few verified facts. Anything the advertisers, the government, or any well funded enemy disagrees with is generally hidden or framed as absurd. For instance, Slashdot readers know of tons of cases where the RIAA has lost or is losing in court. The newspaper reading public only knows about the US$222,000 judgement in the Thomas case. If that case is struck down on appeal, it will most likely not be reported in the newspapers at all.
In addition to that, the tabloids might as well be selling sex as they have naked but censored pictures of a different star every week. I think few people will think it would be horrible that a few peeping toms were out of a job.
Newspapers always were garbage rags for the education in further ignorance of the ignorant. Losing them can hardly be bad for society.
Why not "XPstortion", then? The XP makes it compatible with "cool" MS marketing!
I am of course overjoyed at the fact that there is someone who managed not to be forced to pay for Windows, but I still have to ask this question: Did Dell take the loss or did MS?
Aside from saving money, refusing to grant an undesirable vendor money is another reason to refuse a purchase. If Dell still paid MS, then MS is still insulated from market forces. How can customers choose against MS if MS gets paid even when those customers do not purchase MS software?
I hope the next time this happens, Dell will supply a written document certifying that it has refused payment to MS for the copy in question.