I'm pretty sure that ESR was just getting pissy because Perens made his objections to the Apple Public Source License v1.0 public without contacting ESR or OSI first. OSI was working with Apple on the APSL at the time.
But as full-motion CGI, not as a still image. This could actually be quite interesting, and it just might work well because there are strong indications that we actually perceive reality this way.
I'm going to take this opportunity to pimp Godel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid, as it discusses how images of distorted and recursive perspective like this reflect the nature of our consciousness and perception of our environment, among many other related topics.
Who exactly, might you ask, gave the RIAA the right to be the "Ministry of Sound"? Where, after all, were they granted these broad powers of search and seizure of your personal information? It's not as if they hold copyright to all of the music, or even a majority of it. Will another large copyright holder decide to embrace this business model as well? Will there be competing (and incompatible) offers of Amnesty? Who would you rather get screwed by, when it comes to major media copyright holders? What, in short, is to blame for this mess?
That's right, it's the Digital Millenium Copyright Act. Disclosure: Link is to anti-dmca.org, and hence biased. But that's the problem with hypertext; links are particularly and exactly biased in that they take you to the one page on the internet that the linker wants you to visit. It's up to you, however, to click the link and learn about what just might be the greatest threat to our intellectual freedom today.
That's not the point. They won't even sue me if I'm not an infringer, but my privacy has already been violated, and that can't be taken back. I would have to sue the RIAA for damages at that point if I hoped for any remedy to the violation, but the burden of proof would be on me at that point.
And the effect of the DMCA is central to my point: In the 40's, the RIAA would have had to get a judge to approve this violation of my right to privacy; today, thanks to the DMCA, all they have to do is open up a document template and send form letters containing my username to a court clerk and my ISP. It's a subpeona mill and I feel like it is a violation of the due process rights of anyone so targeted.
I'm not saying that filesharing should be legal or that the RIAA is wrong to sue filesharers, or even that they are wrong to issue these subpeonas under the terms of the DMCA. What I am saying is that the DMCA is bad law that allows any corporate entity with enough money and copyrights to become essentially a private, unsupervised enforcement agency. There's no chain of accountability, and no impetus to responsibility in this process. It certainly doesn't help that the RIAA's "fear and awe" (BusinessWeek) strategy doesn't even remotely resemble a rational attempt to fix the societal problem we seem to have regarding respect to copyright.
It might be nice to have the opportunity to teach kids not to steal music because it's wrong to do so, but this whisper will not be heard over the thunder of the RIAA's lesson: Don't steal music because if a big company owns it they will make a good level go at wrecking at least the next ten years of your life.
Oh, but these models are being utilized. Have you seen what concert swag costs lately? They're just greedy, is all, and going after filesharers is simpler and easier than trying to bust the guy selling $10 bootleg shirts 200 yards from the venue, thanks to the DMCA
What I find to be so horrifically obnoxious about this is not that the RIAA is suing end users (i.e., their customer pool.) They certainly have the right to do so if the defendant was downloading copyrighted materials. It is the apparent lack of due process allowed by the DMCA that causes me worry. What if I am a P2P user, who shares and gets only non-infringing materials, and the RIAA selects me for a subpeona? As far as I know, there are no checks on this system; the only thing the RIAA has to do is attest that I am a P2P filesharer. They don't have to prove anything, much less demonstrate a reasonable suspicion that I am trading in material that they actually own. After I have been subpeona'd (spelling Nazis bugroff, I know it's wrong) and the RIAA has gone through every file I own, they will certainly not elect to sue, but my privacy has been irrevocably and severly compromised without any redress. This I find unreasonable.
If I had to pick one word to describe the DMCA, it would be "unfair". Copyrighted material has strong legal protections to guard against and provide redress to infringement, which I consider to be a good thing. I think that the notion of a strong personal copyright is necessarily the foundation of any healthy model of intellectual property. However, the DMCA takes the additional step of providing nearly airtight legal protection to technological methods used to control access to copyrighted materials. This means two things. First, I have to pay $25 for a decryption algorithm that can be printed on a T-Shirt to watch a copy of a movie I own. Second, content distributors are able to region-lock media and hence control pricing. I don't consider these to be beneficial effects, and I don't understand why this level of additional legal protection is necessary. I consider the DMCA to be bad, harmful law, and unless it is repealed, I see a future in which we are free to do less and less with media content that we have purchased.
Slashdot Mirror
I'm pretty sure that ESR was just getting pissy because Perens made his objections to the Apple Public Source License v1.0 public without contacting ESR or OSI first. OSI was working with Apple on the APSL at the time.
I'm going to take this opportunity to pimp Godel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid, as it discusses how images of distorted and recursive perspective like this reflect the nature of our consciousness and perception of our environment, among many other related topics.
Who exactly, might you ask, gave the RIAA the right to be the "Ministry of Sound"? Where, after all, were they granted these broad powers of search and seizure of your personal information? It's not as if they hold copyright to all of the music, or even a majority of it. Will another large copyright holder decide to embrace this business model as well? Will there be competing (and incompatible) offers of Amnesty? Who would you rather get screwed by, when it comes to major media copyright holders? What, in short, is to blame for this mess?
That's right, it's the Digital Millenium Copyright Act. Disclosure: Link is to anti-dmca.org, and hence biased. But that's the problem with hypertext; links are particularly and exactly biased in that they take you to the one page on the internet that the linker wants you to visit. It's up to you, however, to click the link and learn about what just might be the greatest threat to our intellectual freedom today.
And the effect of the DMCA is central to my point: In the 40's, the RIAA would have had to get a judge to approve this violation of my right to privacy; today, thanks to the DMCA, all they have to do is open up a document template and send form letters containing my username to a court clerk and my ISP. It's a subpeona mill and I feel like it is a violation of the due process rights of anyone so targeted.
I'm not saying that filesharing should be legal or that the RIAA is wrong to sue filesharers, or even that they are wrong to issue these subpeonas under the terms of the DMCA. What I am saying is that the DMCA is bad law that allows any corporate entity with enough money and copyrights to become essentially a private, unsupervised enforcement agency. There's no chain of accountability, and no impetus to responsibility in this process. It certainly doesn't help that the RIAA's "fear and awe" (BusinessWeek) strategy doesn't even remotely resemble a rational attempt to fix the societal problem we seem to have regarding respect to copyright.
It might be nice to have the opportunity to teach kids not to steal music because it's wrong to do so, but this whisper will not be heard over the thunder of the RIAA's lesson: Don't steal music because if a big company owns it they will make a good level go at wrecking at least the next ten years of your life.
Oh, but these models are being utilized. Have you seen what concert swag costs lately?
They're just greedy, is all, and going after filesharers is simpler and easier than trying to bust the guy selling $10 bootleg shirts 200 yards from the venue, thanks to the DMCA
What I find to be so horrifically obnoxious about this is not that the RIAA is suing end users (i.e., their customer pool.) They certainly have the right to do so if the defendant was downloading copyrighted materials. It is the apparent lack of due process allowed by the DMCA that causes me worry. What if I am a P2P user, who shares and gets only non-infringing materials, and the RIAA selects me for a subpeona? As far as I know, there are no checks on this system; the only thing the RIAA has to do is attest that I am a P2P filesharer. They don't have to prove anything, much less demonstrate a reasonable suspicion that I am trading in material that they actually own. After I have been subpeona'd (spelling Nazis bugroff, I know it's wrong) and the RIAA has gone through every file I own, they will certainly not elect to sue, but my privacy has been irrevocably and severly compromised without any redress. This I find unreasonable. If I had to pick one word to describe the DMCA, it would be "unfair". Copyrighted material has strong legal protections to guard against and provide redress to infringement, which I consider to be a good thing. I think that the notion of a strong personal copyright is necessarily the foundation of any healthy model of intellectual property. However, the DMCA takes the additional step of providing nearly airtight legal protection to technological methods used to control access to copyrighted materials. This means two things. First, I have to pay $25 for a decryption algorithm that can be printed on a T-Shirt to watch a copy of a movie I own. Second, content distributors are able to region-lock media and hence control pricing. I don't consider these to be beneficial effects, and I don't understand why this level of additional legal protection is necessary. I consider the DMCA to be bad, harmful law, and unless it is repealed, I see a future in which we are free to do less and less with media content that we have purchased.