Yep. Further refinements to your bill include "Chapter 12 of Title 17 of the United States Code, in its entirety, is hereby repealed." "Section 512 of Title 17 of the United States Code, in its entirety, is hereby repealed."
But this bill doesn't do anything like that, and isn't intended to pass. It's just an attempt to make it look like there's some sort of balance in Congress.
By my reading, TV tuner cards are NOT included in the mandate:
From 47 CFR 15.117:
The reference in this section to TV broadcast receivers also includes devices, such as TV interface devices and set-top devices that are intended to provide audio-video signals to a video monitor, that incorporate the tuner portion of a TV broadcast receiver, and that are equipped with an antenna or antenna terminals that can be used for off-the-air reception of TV broadcast signals...
PCI and USB TV tuner cards generally do not provide audio-video signals to a video monitor and thus are IMO not affected. Systems built around them which do provide signals to a video monitor would be; that is, it'll be illegal to sell an analog-only MythTV box.
The cost to get a single HD antanea and install it outside your house is worth almost 2 years of HDTV from your cable provider or sattlite service.
Make that less than two MONTHS. Comcast runs >$50 for standard service (no premium channels). A Channel Master CM4221 is $25, a CM7777 pre-amp about $30, add in a few bucks in shipping, installation hardware and cable and install it myself (as I did) and that's it. There's no need to get separate antennas for multiple TVs (that's why the pre-amp is there; it boosts the signal enough to survive splitting). DVRs are not a problem -- the ATSC broadcast contains program information and Zap2It is currently available for free for MythTV users.
It's _not_ available, and won't be until 2010. The threat of bans may have been a reason for the press release, though.
I'm glad someone's looking out for those of us who like decent products, even if it is for their own purposes. We're already stuck with multi-flush toilets, we don't need the equivalent in lighting.
Re:he Individual Sense of Fairplay is the Best DRM
on
DRM Causes Piracy
·
· Score: 1
I don't know where you heard all this pre-Napster quality discourse, but none of it got translated into anything the rest of us saw. All we saw was the WIPO Copyright Treaty, developed in your metaphorical (or perhaps actual) smoke-filled rooms, the DMCA (implementing the WIPO treaty, passed by voice vote in the House and unanimously in the Senate, without debate), the NET act (which put individual copyright violators on the same footing as mass for-profit violators), and the like. We saw DVD-CSS, developed mostly to prevent the export of CDs from one market to another. We saw the Sonny Bono Copyright Extension Act, continuing the trend of indefinite copyright. By the time Napster came around, there was no longer any balance -- the playing field was stacked entirely in favor of the copyright owner. That was the state of the law when Napster hit the scene, and that is the state of the law today. If the other side has been doing a lot of shouting since then, it's largely because it was ignored and steamrolled before.
You've got DRM exactly backwards, too. The motivation for DRM-style applications is a belief that if you found effective ways to restrict the use of a product, that you could sell it for MORE. Or sell it more often.
Re:he Individual Sense of Fairplay is the Best DRM
on
DRM Causes Piracy
·
· Score: 1
Again, your theories are destroyed by the timeline. DVD-CSS -- which counts as "really ugly stuff" -- pre-dates the DMCA and your so-called "piracy revolution". So does Macrovision -- a secondary purpose of the DMCA being to protect that scheme. The DMCA wasn't about the computer industry trying to find a way to curb the development of technology specifically for violating copyrights. It was about curbing the development of technology for disabling DRM schemes. And since it doesn't take a corporation to develop such technology, merely an individual, it doesn't make sense to claim the DMCA was aimed at corporations. Nor has it been used in practice as such -- e.g. while Elcomsoft is a (small) corporation, but it was the individual Dmitry Sklyarov who they went after first.
As for the "stomping", the "stomping" has been done largely using two laws passed prior to Napster. One, the DMCA, and two, the No Electronic Theft Act of 1997 -- the latter being the one which criminalizes copyright violation not done for profit, by counting the value of the copyrighted good as financial gain. You can't blame post-Napster pirates for that stomping.
You're right about one thing -- many people (if a "radical group", a rather large one consisting of everyone who has knowingly traded copyrighted work or used DVDShrink and its like) have effectively made the statement that they will not play by the rules passed. But why should they? The rules were bought and paid for by their opponents... are they supposed to just sit back and say "well, they bought those rules fair and square and now we should just quietly obey them?"
Since eBay's high fees would be deductible from income earned by selling items on eBay (yes, even if it doesn't qualify as a business), most sellers would have no additional tax burden to speak of.
Re:The Individual Sense of Fairplay is the Best DR
on
DRM Causes Piracy
·
· Score: 1
The major problem with your theory is the "massive effort to engage in automatic copyright infringement" -- the earliest possible example being Naptster -- not only post-dates DRM (by decades) but post-dates the Digital Millenium Copyright Act (which was pushed to give DRM the force of law).
College textbooks are a racket. In a reasonable copyright regime, there'd be so many perfectly good out-of-copyright calculus texts that you'd have a lot of trouble selling one for $50, let along $150. It shouldn't be surprising that models lacking DRM won't work for them; they're scams to begin with.
DRM -- originally called copy protection -- was created by the market. And it mostly died in the market. It took the DMCA to make DRM look viable again.
...did Microsoft pay for this "story"? Wake up with an evil Bond girl in your bed, you might enjoy your last few minutes on Earth. With Microsoft products, it's just torture for the rest of your life.
Without the shootings, with the disappearances. At least when I was in HS, kids too far from the norm might not come in one day, vanished to an "alternative" (i.e. reform) school.
Actually, America DID modernize its foreign policy. The old foreign policy was "Support non-communist dictators in third-world countries to counter the threat of Communism, never you mind how bad those dictators actually were". The new, enlightened modern foreign policy is "Knock down those bastard dictators and try to remake the world in the image of the United States thereby drying up the source of terrorism". The old one was evil but mostly effective despite spectacular failures like Iran and Cuba. The new one is both evil and ineffective.
The modern domestic policy which is apparently "facism, only gender-neutral (that is, Homeland instead of Fatherland)" is a bit worrisome as well. Fits right in with copyright policy, though.
Re:All of this is moot after Solaris/Unix goes GPL
on
SCO Vs. Groklaw
·
· Score: 1
Well, that IS one of their beefs -- that IBM put non-trivial real Unix stuff, that IBM developed and put into Unix, into Linux. This based on a System V license that SCO inherited which says that anything you add to Unix becomes owned by the System V licensor. Personally I don't think that one's going to fly, for any number of reasons, including that the prior licensor (Novell) says it's crap.
And if you think Linux is going to go "poof" in favor of Solaris, you've probably been smoking some of what Darl has been smoking...
No copy is "beamed" to you. You send a GET request, they make a copy (likely several, actually) and send it out their network port. It reaches a router, where it's copied AGAIN, and so on and so forth until it gets to your network, where your incoming router copies it again. Then it's copied yet again a few times inside your machine, until you finally see it.
Each of these ephemeral copies is potentially a violation of the copyright holder's reproduction right. As far as I know, no court or law in any Berne Convention country has said otherwise, and US courts have explicitly said that they are covered by the reproduction right (computer _programs_ have a specific exemption, but computerized news articles would not be covered). Which means the current copyright situation is pretty much completely untenable; either the reproduction right is violated millions upon times every day and the web is basically totally illegal, or there's an unwritten and unspoken set of implied licenses out there which no one really knows the exact terms of. It's a problem all parties have been basically tiptoeing around with cases like this (because all parties fear a resolution of the basic issue), but I doubt it can continue forever.
However if you start taking pictures of private property from public space, for example you take a picture of my house and then you start sharing these pictures with everyone while attaching ads to it, which are paid for by your sponsors (and thus you are making money from the image of my private property,) I may consider taking you to court because while I understand that the image of my property is visible from a public access road, I also understand that you did not ask my permission to use these images of my property for financial gain.
You might take him to court, but what grounds would you state? Copyright is out, at least in the US (don't know about Belgium), as pictures of buildings taken from public spaces are specifically exempt.
Unfortunately, the law they have bought and paid for allow them to go after Google for exactly this. It's called "vicarious copyright infringement". It's normally applied to a forum owner who allows copyright infringement to go on in his forum and thereby benefits (e.g. from rent of the space). However, it wouldn't be that much of a stretch to apply it here.
Note that I do not believe any of this will really happen. I do not believe we Americans will accept a totalitarian government. I don't even believe we'll accept small steps in that direction in the long run.
We're not even inching towards it any more. We're running towards it with joy in our hearts. In both the big issues (like surveillance) and the little (trans-fat bans, banning iPods while crossing the street), freedom has little constituency and no champion.
It's not that simple. It's possible to be eating enough to maintain or increase your weight, while still remaining hungry enough to interfere with activity. That's probably one of the mechanisms for the "set point" many people notice -- if your weight is below your body's set point, you're hungry despite eating enough calories to maintain your weight.
It's easy to say "eat less, exercise more". It's a lot harder when you start actually doing so and you're hungry all the time. Not just, "hmm, I feel a little hungry" but pounding headaches and a churning stomach that make the other activities hard to accomplish.
The law was intended to be abused, and the powerful groups behind it (many of whose names end in "AA") like it that way. The way it works is
1) Anyone can get anything they want taken down by invoking copyright 2) If you're fool enough to counter-notify, it's literally an invitation to be sued. 3) Even if you counter-notify, if they claim they're going to sue, they get to take it down again. Indefinitely. Even if they never actually sue. There's no real recourse here. 4) If they do sue, the takedown remains in place for the duration of the suit.
So the DMCA allows a private party to get the effect of both a temporary and a permanent restraining order without the formalities of actually making a prima facie case (let alone proving it). And because "copyright" is involved and because the DMCA doesn't actually require the information to be taken down but merely provides a major incentive (immunity from suit) to those who obey it, the First Amendment is bypassed.
The law should be found unconstitutional on its face, but the courts have pretty clearly indicated that they aren't going to do so.
Step one: Conclude that sprawl is bad and ant-cities are good Step two: Concoct a study to demonstrate it. Massage data as appropriate Step three: There is no profit because no matter how much you try, you're not shoehorning our oversized buttocks back into anthills.
Seriously, have these people seen the size of people in Philadelphia? The suburbs are MUCH less fat.
Slashdot Mirror
Yep. Further refinements to your bill include
"Chapter 12 of Title 17 of the United States Code, in its entirety, is hereby repealed."
"Section 512 of Title 17 of the United States Code, in its entirety, is hereby repealed."
But this bill doesn't do anything like that, and isn't intended to pass. It's just an attempt to make it look like there's some sort of balance in Congress.
From 47 CFR 15.117:
PCI and USB TV tuner cards generally do not provide audio-video signals to a video monitor and thus are IMO not affected. Systems built around them which do provide signals to a video monitor would be; that is, it'll be illegal to sell an analog-only MythTV box.It's _not_ available, and won't be until 2010. The threat of bans may have been a reason for the press release, though.
I'm glad someone's looking out for those of us who like decent products, even if it is for their own purposes. We're already stuck with multi-flush toilets, we don't need the equivalent in lighting.
I don't know where you heard all this pre-Napster quality discourse, but none of it got translated into anything the rest of us saw. All we saw was the WIPO Copyright Treaty, developed in your metaphorical (or perhaps actual) smoke-filled rooms, the DMCA (implementing the WIPO treaty, passed by voice vote in the House and unanimously in the Senate, without debate), the NET act (which put individual copyright violators on the same footing as mass for-profit violators), and the like. We saw DVD-CSS, developed mostly to prevent the export of CDs from one market to another. We saw the Sonny Bono Copyright Extension Act, continuing the trend of indefinite copyright. By the time Napster came around, there was no longer any balance -- the playing field was stacked entirely in favor of the copyright owner. That was the state of the law when Napster hit the scene, and that is the state of the law today. If the other side has been doing a lot of shouting since then, it's largely because it was ignored and steamrolled before.
You've got DRM exactly backwards, too. The motivation for DRM-style applications is a belief that if you found effective ways to restrict the use of a product, that you could sell it for MORE. Or sell it more often.
Again, your theories are destroyed by the timeline. DVD-CSS -- which counts as "really ugly stuff" -- pre-dates the DMCA and your so-called "piracy revolution". So does Macrovision -- a secondary purpose of the DMCA being to protect that scheme. The DMCA wasn't about the computer industry trying to find a way to curb the development of technology specifically for violating copyrights. It was about curbing the development of technology for disabling DRM schemes. And since it doesn't take a corporation to develop such technology, merely an individual, it doesn't make sense to claim the DMCA was aimed at corporations. Nor has it been used in practice as such -- e.g. while Elcomsoft is a (small) corporation, but it was the individual Dmitry Sklyarov who they went after first.
As for the "stomping", the "stomping" has been done largely using two laws passed prior to Napster. One, the DMCA, and two, the No Electronic Theft Act of 1997 -- the latter being the one which criminalizes copyright violation not done for profit, by counting the value of the copyrighted good as financial gain. You can't blame post-Napster pirates for that stomping.
You're right about one thing -- many people (if a "radical group", a rather large one consisting of everyone who has knowingly traded copyrighted work or used DVDShrink and its like) have effectively made the statement that they will not play by the rules passed. But why should they? The rules were bought and paid for by their opponents... are they supposed to just sit back and say "well, they bought those rules fair and square and now we should just quietly obey them?"
Since eBay's high fees would be deductible from income earned by selling items on eBay (yes, even if it doesn't qualify as a business), most sellers would have no additional tax burden to speak of.
The major problem with your theory is the "massive effort to engage in automatic copyright infringement" -- the earliest possible example being Naptster -- not only post-dates DRM (by decades) but post-dates the Digital Millenium Copyright Act (which was pushed to give DRM the force of law).
College textbooks are a racket. In a reasonable copyright regime, there'd be so many perfectly good out-of-copyright calculus texts that you'd have a lot of trouble selling one for $50, let along $150. It shouldn't be surprising that models lacking DRM won't work for them; they're scams to begin with.
DRM -- originally called copy protection -- was created by the market. And it mostly died in the market. It took the DMCA to make DRM look viable again.
...did Microsoft pay for this "story"? Wake up with an evil Bond girl in your bed, you might enjoy your last few minutes on Earth. With Microsoft products, it's just torture for the rest of your life.
Without the shootings, with the disappearances. At least when I was in HS, kids too far from the norm might not come in one day, vanished to an "alternative" (i.e. reform) school.
Actually, America DID modernize its foreign policy. The old foreign policy was "Support non-communist dictators in third-world countries to counter the threat of Communism, never you mind how bad those dictators actually were". The new, enlightened modern foreign policy is "Knock down those bastard dictators and try to remake the world in the image of the United States thereby drying up the source of terrorism". The old one was evil but mostly effective despite spectacular failures like Iran and Cuba. The new one is both evil and ineffective.
The modern domestic policy which is apparently "facism, only gender-neutral (that is, Homeland instead of Fatherland)" is a bit worrisome as well. Fits right in with copyright policy, though.
Well, that IS one of their beefs -- that IBM put non-trivial real Unix stuff, that IBM developed and put into Unix, into Linux. This based on a System V license that SCO inherited which says that anything you add to Unix becomes owned by the System V licensor. Personally I don't think that one's going to fly, for any number of reasons, including that the prior licensor (Novell) says it's crap.
And if you think Linux is going to go "poof" in favor of Solaris, you've probably been smoking some of what Darl has been smoking...
No copy is "beamed" to you. You send a GET request, they make a copy (likely several, actually) and send it out their network port. It reaches a router, where it's copied AGAIN, and so on and so forth until it gets to your network, where your incoming router copies it again. Then it's copied yet again a few times inside your machine, until you finally see it.
Each of these ephemeral copies is potentially a violation of the copyright holder's reproduction right. As far as I know, no court or law in any Berne Convention country has said otherwise, and US courts have explicitly said that they are covered by the reproduction right (computer _programs_ have a specific exemption, but computerized news articles would not be covered). Which means the current copyright situation is pretty much completely untenable; either the reproduction right is violated millions upon times every day and the web is basically totally illegal, or there's an unwritten and unspoken set of implied licenses out there which no one really knows the exact terms of. It's a problem all parties have been basically tiptoeing around with cases like this (because all parties fear a resolution of the basic issue), but I doubt it can continue forever.
Unfortunately, the law they have bought and paid for allow them to go after Google for exactly this. It's called "vicarious copyright infringement". It's normally applied to a forum owner who allows copyright infringement to go on in his forum and thereby benefits (e.g. from rent of the space). However, it wouldn't be that much of a stretch to apply it here.
...it was Dr. Fronk who said, "Well, I guess it pretty much can only be used for evil".
I think the actual required verbiage for an ungrounded 3-prong GFCI outlet is "No Equipment Ground".
It's not that simple. It's possible to be eating enough to maintain or increase your weight, while still remaining hungry enough to interfere with activity. That's probably one of the mechanisms for the "set point" many people notice -- if your weight is below your body's set point, you're hungry despite eating enough calories to maintain your weight.
It's easy to say "eat less, exercise more". It's a lot harder when you start actually doing so and you're hungry all the time. Not just, "hmm, I feel a little hungry" but pounding headaches and a churning stomach that make the other activities hard to accomplish.
That's not what your ex-best-friend says.
The law was intended to be abused, and the powerful groups behind it (many of whose names end in "AA") like it that way. The way it works is
1) Anyone can get anything they want taken down by invoking copyright
2) If you're fool enough to counter-notify, it's literally an invitation to be sued.
3) Even if you counter-notify, if they claim they're going to sue, they get to take it down again. Indefinitely. Even if they never actually sue. There's no real recourse here.
4) If they do sue, the takedown remains in place for the duration of the suit.
So the DMCA allows a private party to get the effect of both a temporary and a permanent restraining order without the formalities of actually making a prima facie case (let alone proving it). And because "copyright" is involved and because the DMCA doesn't actually require the information to be taken down but merely provides a major incentive (immunity from suit) to those who obey it, the First Amendment is bypassed.
The law should be found unconstitutional on its face, but the courts have pretty clearly indicated that they aren't going to do so.
Step one: Conclude that sprawl is bad and ant-cities are good
Step two: Concoct a study to demonstrate it. Massage data as appropriate
Step three: There is no profit because no matter how much you try, you're not shoehorning our oversized buttocks back into anthills.
Seriously, have these people seen the size of people in Philadelphia? The suburbs are MUCH less fat.