Yeah, judges tend to be a bit hypocritical when it comes to expressions against them. Still, there's a famous case where a jacket with "FUCK THE DRAFT" across the back was found to be protected speech, even in a courthouse.
They're trying to use the "minor" word to ward off the First Amendment; as every censor knows, the courts will give lots of latitude in restricting what minors hear and see.
But they inadvertantly invoked an opposite talisman, that of political speech. A restriction against violent games can be argued to be one of those permissable "time, place, and manner" restrictions, particularly when applied to minors. But a restriction against games with violence _against police officers_ is viewpoint restriction; the viewpoint that cops and other authority figures are scum who ought to be shot is obviously not one most people would want minors exposed to, but it IS a political viewpoint, and thus should be subject to full protection, even for minors.
Re:Buyouts (why MS or anyone hasn't done it yet)
on
My Visit to SCO
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
Well, SCOs IP might be worth SOMETHING. But it'll be a lot cheaper after SCO goes into Chapter 7 bankruptcy liquidation. I might put in a bid for their remaining unimapired copyright in Unix V7, which should consist of about three non-blank lines, two of them braces and one a comment:-)
Re:Interesting quote from ESR
on
My Visit to SCO
·
· Score: 1
Actually, that use of "stolen property" is perhaps one of the few justifiable ones in copyright law.
AT&T took the code from BSD, put its own copyright notices on it, and then sued BSD to prevent BSD from using it. That's not like typical copyright infringement; they actually tried to take the copyright itself from BSD.
You are making the common error of fence-sitters and moderates by assuming that, just because there are two sides to an issue, that the two sides have similar merit.
It ain't so. SCO is out in left field, off base, totally off their rocker, etc. The SCO code they claim to have been incorporated into Linux was not available to "a few wanna-bee coders"; it was available to IBM. SCO, unable to point to any of the copied code, has inflated their claims to the point where they now claim any code added to any derivative of System V by anyone belongs to SCO; there's zero merit in that claim.
(and of course copyright violation is not theft, copying a few lines is not necessarily infringement, there is such a thing as innocent infringement, and enforcement of copyright protection requires draconian measures in the modern world, rendering its desirability doubtful).
Patent license contracts which require payment beyond the term of the patent or otherwise effectively extend the term of the patent are generally not enforceable.
Believe me, I've read the DMCA plenty of times over. It says nothing about EULAs -- you may be thinking of UCITA.
If someone gives me a GPL program, hides it behind an access control device, and fails to give me (or offer me and the world at large) the unencumbered source to that program, they've pretty clearly violated the GPL. Nothing tricky about that. Furthermore, the DMCA does not in fact prevent me from bypassing the access control device they put on there? Why not? Because 17 USC 1201(a) defines "circumvent a technological measure" as to do a number of things "without the authority of the copyright owner"; the GPL gives you that authority.
There may be problems if the access control device controls access to both GPL and non-GPL works. But even in that case, they MUST give or offer you the source to the GPL works.
If you have any devices which contain GPL (not just open, but GPL) source code and they haven't given or offered you the source, they've violated the GPL. Again, not tricky.
A lawyer will always tell you to take the safe course, or to not take an action -- keeps them out of trouble if they advise you otherwise and you get sued. If you want a "yes, go ahead and do that", a lawyer is the wrong person to go to.
The DMCA does NOT restrict anyone's ability to reverse-engineer a GPLed program, except in the specific case that the program is a technological protection measure and reverse engineering it would somehow constitute bypassing it. This would be a very odd situation; people who write copy protection don't normally release it under the GPL.
There can be no license of a GPLed program which forbids reverse engineering -- the GPL doesn't forbid it, but the GPL does forbid additional restrictions.
If you write a patch to a common program it may be copyrighted by you only, by the original author only, or by both of you. The FSF requires patch-submitters to turn their rights over to the FSF (precisely in order to deal with this issue), so it would be the FSF which would have to sue in the case of an FSF program.
Aside from the DMCA (which is very unlikely to affect a GPLed program), copyright law has not changed significantly from a decade ago. Terms have gotten longer and penalties stricter, but there have been no other changes in _kind_.
Hmm. Suppose I'm Joe Corporate Bigwig and my company runs its critical products on AIX platforms. I hear SCO claims my license won't be valid after some deadline. IBM says otherwise. Do I
a) Rush to tear down my AIX platforms and switch to some other unencumbered product?
b) Approach SCO and offer to pay them for a bunch of licenses?
c) Call the legal department, have a good laugh with them, and otherwise do nothing while I wait for IBM to grind SCO to paste?
If I'm Sony, I pick b, because I'm dumb enough to pay millions for a license to a patent on RLE encoding. Otherwise, it's pretty clearly c.
I was loathe to read the RIAA response since its a given that the RIAA representative will lie like a spammer. But I was drawn to it anyway.
Every time the DMCA was brought up the RIAA guy said it was just fine because it promotes innovation, rental models, blah blah blah. And that there's that copyright office exemption thing that comes up every few years.
Of course, what he didn't mention is
1) The exemption doesn't do a damn thing for devices. Sure, you can break the copy protection mechanism... just don't build a device to do it.
2) The RIAA will lobby $trenuously against any proposed exemption which affects them.
Anyone else notice that when you surf the net for music files, you're messing with their intellectual property -- but when THEY surf the net looking for music files (and finding stuff which doesn't belong to them) it's not about property?
They train these 100 cybersoldiers, and then let 'em hook up to the real net. The cybersoldiers find/., Usenet, and pr0n, become hooked, and waste most of their time on those activities. Then they claim credit with their bosses for every defacement, bug, or virus to come down the pike, and everyone is happy.
Who modded this one "insightful"? I guess there's no "dumb".
Merely because two cases make slightly similar claims doesn't mean they have similar merit. SCO is getting righteously flamed because their suit is obviously baseless and several of the claims they make are not only false but obviously so -- see the Open Source Initiative's position paper to see some of the reasons why.
A long time ago, in a galaxy frighteningly near, Apple Computer did try to stop mail order sales of its machines. It still sets a minimum advertised price, though retailers have found all sorts of ways to get around it.
An attacker can take advantage of the quantum nature of reality to set this bit to an indeterminate/combined value influenced by the nature of the observer of the packet. An observer who knows the evil nature of the sender of the packet will see the "evil" bit set to one, as it should be. However, unsuspecting observers, including firewalls and potential victims, will see the bit set to zero and be fooled.
The inherent subtlety of this attack is revealed by considering what happens when a security expert attempts to analyze the attack. As soon as he recognizes the evil nature of the attacker, the packets appear to have the 'evil' bit set, and his firewalls start dropping the packets, depriving him of further packets for analysis. The attack is thus even more precisely targeted towards the naive than an attack on Microsoft IIS.
WoS tries to take the high ground and they look down their noses (in their section on copyright) at abandonware users who don't share their opinions on whether or not it is reasonable to enforce the abandonware copyrights. So what do they get? Same abuse the eyepatch-and-Jolly-Roger set gets. Just goes to show there's no reward for playing by the rules.
There's nothing inherently unreasonable about them keeping their discovery secret, but patents? The bacterium is a discovery, not an invention. And the process of "cultivate bacteria to get useful byproduct which is then used to treat infection" is not novel; changing the identity of the bacterium doesn't make it so. Neither are various ways of cultivating bacteria, unless there's something really special about this one. Besides, you aren't supposed to be able to both patent something and keep it a secret.
I have a new program which determines which songs are most likely to get a Grammy award. I call it Grammy Award Science (GAS). It's based on a neural network and it's been trained with recent data.
However, I think I need a larger dataset for training as at the moment, it simply tags any song which has "writer" or "performer" containing "Norah Jones"
The Faraday shopping bag is available at many grocery stores, cleverly described as a insulating bag to keep hot foods hot and cold foods cold for up to three hours.
From the article:
"I have the opportunity to meet a large number of employers of software developers. Invariably they are looking for graduates who socialize well in groups, are team players, are articulate, and are able to give coherent oral presentations."
Uh huh. And why are they looking for those traits? Answer: Because they are rare among programmers. And for good reason. Programming is for people who like to program; people who understand formal logic, who are comfortable with a machine that does exactly what you ask though rarely what you want. People like this rarely socialize well in groups (except in groups of similar people) because they simply don't think the same way. They don't give good oral presentations for the same reason. Articulate? Many are articulate -- it's just those claiming they are otherwise don't understand them, not when they are "talking shop".
There are vanishingly few people who can both code well and speak well about their code to non-programmers. These people will not be out there searching for jobs; you'll be bidding for them, if you want one.
There are many more who can speak in ordinary language and understand programmers -- however, these are not programmers but good technical writers. A good programmer can understand ordinary language, but asking for presentations is a bit much; programmers regard this as a waste of time, and it will be -- it'll piss the programmers off, and the targets won't understand them. Asking your programmers to talk directly to the customers... unless you're marketing to other developers, I hope you didn't need that customer.
Copyright is a bad thing. It has taken the DMCA to cause me to see this, but copyright cannot co-exist with free speech and modern technology. Copyright, at its heart, tells you that there are things you may not print, things you may not say in public, things you may not write, under penalty of fines and prison.
Before modern times when copying was so easy and copyright so extensive, there was a possibility of copyright co-existing (uneasily!) with free speech. Actually violating a copyright was difficult and took investment in a printing press (copying by hand was not a violation for most of that time, and certainly not prosecuted). Now thanks to photocopiers and computers you can violate it easily, even trivially.
To save copyright from becoming effectively unenforcable, it is necessary to restrict both free speech (via DMCA-like laws, as well as by copyright itself) and modern technology (via CBDTPA-like laws). If that's what it takes to enforce it, copyright should die. Unfortunately, it is not.
Murphy's Law of Immortal Code
on
Immortal Code
·
· Score: 3, Funny
That beautiful piece of elegant code you wrote will be lost in a system crash as soon as you move on, if not sooner.
That horrid inefficient kludge you wrote early in your career will be retained forever, and when through the vagaries of the world, you end up at the company which owns that code, you will end up responsible for maintaining it.
While the RIAA does demand such actions as severing your connection, they don't have the authority to do so.
In fact, the court in the Verizon case agreed that in P2P cases, the ISP is covered by DMCA 512(a). There is no takedown provision in 512(a); the ISP is not required to take ANY ACTION WHATSOEVER to retain its shield against liability. Further, YOU can sue THEM if they do; they are not shielded as 512(c) providers are.
The judge did (erroneously, IMO) decide that the 512(j) subpoena provision applied, but that doesn't mean they get to yank your access.
Slashdot Mirror
Yeah, judges tend to be a bit hypocritical when it comes to expressions against them. Still, there's a famous case where a jacket with "FUCK THE DRAFT" across the back was found to be protected speech, even in a courthouse.
They're trying to use the "minor" word to ward off the First Amendment; as every censor knows, the courts will give lots of latitude in restricting what minors hear and see.
But they inadvertantly invoked an opposite talisman, that of political speech. A restriction against violent games can be argued to be one of those permissable "time, place, and manner" restrictions, particularly when applied to minors. But a restriction against games with violence _against police officers_ is viewpoint restriction; the viewpoint that cops and other authority figures are scum who ought to be shot is obviously not one most people would want minors exposed to, but it IS a political viewpoint, and thus should be subject to full protection, even for minors.
Well, SCOs IP might be worth SOMETHING. But it'll be a lot cheaper after SCO goes into Chapter 7 bankruptcy liquidation. I might put in a bid for their remaining unimapired copyright in Unix V7, which should consist of about three non-blank lines, two of them braces and one a comment :-)
Actually, that use of "stolen property" is perhaps one of the few justifiable ones in copyright law.
AT&T took the code from BSD, put its own copyright notices on it, and then sued BSD to prevent BSD from using it. That's not like typical copyright infringement; they actually tried to take the copyright itself from BSD.
You are making the common error of fence-sitters and moderates by assuming that, just because there are two sides to an issue, that the two sides have similar merit.
It ain't so. SCO is out in left field, off base, totally off their rocker, etc. The SCO code they claim to have been incorporated into Linux was not available to "a few wanna-bee coders"; it was available to IBM. SCO, unable to point to any of the copied code, has inflated their claims to the point where they now claim any code added to any derivative of System V by anyone belongs to SCO; there's zero merit in that claim.
(and of course copyright violation is not theft, copying a few lines is not necessarily infringement, there is such a thing as innocent infringement, and enforcement of copyright protection requires draconian measures in the modern world, rendering its desirability doubtful).
Patent license contracts which require payment beyond the term of the patent or otherwise effectively extend the term of the patent are generally not enforceable.
Believe me, I've read the DMCA plenty of times over. It says nothing about EULAs -- you may be thinking of UCITA.
If someone gives me a GPL program, hides it behind an access control device, and fails to give me (or offer me and the world at large) the unencumbered source to that program, they've pretty clearly violated the GPL. Nothing tricky about that. Furthermore, the DMCA does not in fact prevent me from bypassing the access control device they put on there? Why not? Because 17 USC 1201(a) defines "circumvent a technological measure" as to do a number of things "without the authority of the copyright owner"; the GPL gives you that authority.
There may be problems if the access control device controls access to both GPL and non-GPL works. But even in that case, they MUST give or offer you the source to the GPL works.
If you have any devices which contain GPL (not just open, but GPL) source code and they haven't given or offered you the source, they've violated the GPL. Again, not tricky.
A lawyer will always tell you to take the safe course, or to not take an action -- keeps them out of trouble if they advise you otherwise and you get sued. If you want a "yes, go ahead and do that", a lawyer is the wrong person to go to.
Parent is wrong on so many levels.
The DMCA does NOT restrict anyone's ability to reverse-engineer a GPLed program, except in the specific case that the program is a technological protection measure and reverse engineering it would somehow constitute bypassing it. This would be a very odd situation; people who write copy protection don't normally release it under the GPL.
There can be no license of a GPLed program which forbids reverse engineering -- the GPL doesn't forbid it, but the GPL does forbid additional restrictions.
If you write a patch to a common program it may be copyrighted by you only, by the original author only, or by both of you. The FSF requires patch-submitters to turn their rights over to the FSF (precisely in order to deal with this issue), so it would be the FSF which would have to sue in the case of an FSF program.
Aside from the DMCA (which is very unlikely to affect a GPLed program), copyright law has not changed significantly from a decade ago. Terms have gotten longer and penalties stricter, but there have been no other changes in _kind_.
Hmm. Suppose I'm Joe Corporate Bigwig and my company runs its critical products on AIX platforms. I hear SCO claims my license won't be valid after some deadline. IBM says otherwise. Do I
a) Rush to tear down my AIX platforms and switch to some other unencumbered product?
b) Approach SCO and offer to pay them for a bunch of licenses?
c) Call the legal department, have a good laugh with them, and otherwise do nothing while I wait for IBM to grind SCO to paste?
If I'm Sony, I pick b, because I'm dumb enough to pay millions for a license to a patent on RLE encoding. Otherwise, it's pretty clearly c.
I was loathe to read the RIAA response since its a given that the RIAA representative will lie like a spammer. But I was drawn to it anyway.
Every time the DMCA was brought up the RIAA guy said it was just fine because it promotes innovation, rental models, blah blah blah. And that there's that copyright office exemption thing that comes up every few years.
Of course, what he didn't mention is
1) The exemption doesn't do a damn thing for devices. Sure, you can break the copy protection mechanism... just don't build a device to do it.
2) The RIAA will lobby $trenuously against any proposed exemption which affects them.
Anyone else notice that when you surf the net for music files, you're messing with their intellectual property -- but when THEY surf the net looking for music files (and finding stuff which doesn't belong to them) it's not about property?
If Apple wins, GNU can say "GNU's Now Unix". (For the record, I think Apple's dead-on here. Unix has become a generic term)
They train these 100 cybersoldiers, and then let 'em hook up to the real net. The cybersoldiers find /., Usenet, and pr0n, become hooked, and waste most of their time on those activities. Then they claim credit with their bosses for every defacement, bug, or virus to come down the pike, and everyone is happy.
Who modded this one "insightful"? I guess there's no "dumb". Merely because two cases make slightly similar claims doesn't mean they have similar merit. SCO is getting righteously flamed because their suit is obviously baseless and several of the claims they make are not only false but obviously so -- see the Open Source Initiative's position paper to see some of the reasons why.
Violating the GPL puts you in violation of copyright. The $100,000 statutory damages thus apply.
A long time ago, in a galaxy frighteningly near, Apple Computer did try to stop mail order sales of its machines. It still sets a minimum advertised price, though retailers have found all sorts of ways to get around it.
An attacker can take advantage of the quantum nature of reality to set this bit to an indeterminate/combined value influenced by the nature of the observer of the packet. An observer who knows the evil nature of the sender of the packet will see the "evil" bit set to one, as it should be. However, unsuspecting observers, including firewalls and potential victims, will see the bit set to zero and be fooled.
The inherent subtlety of this attack is revealed by considering what happens when a security expert attempts to analyze the attack. As soon as he recognizes the evil nature of the attacker, the packets appear to have the 'evil' bit set, and his firewalls start dropping the packets, depriving him of further packets for analysis. The attack is thus even more precisely targeted towards the naive than an attack on Microsoft IIS.
...because the standard of comparison is CSS. Now THAT sucks!
WoS tries to take the high ground and they look down their noses (in their section on copyright) at abandonware users who don't share their opinions on whether or not it is reasonable to enforce the abandonware copyrights. So what do they get? Same abuse the eyepatch-and-Jolly-Roger set gets. Just goes to show there's no reward for playing by the rules.
There's nothing inherently unreasonable about them keeping their discovery secret, but patents? The bacterium is a discovery, not an invention. And the process of "cultivate bacteria to get useful byproduct which is then used to treat infection" is not novel; changing the identity of the bacterium doesn't make it so. Neither are various ways of cultivating bacteria, unless there's something really special about this one. Besides, you aren't supposed to be able to both patent something and keep it a secret.
I have a new program which determines which songs are most likely to get a Grammy award. I call it Grammy Award Science (GAS). It's based on a neural network and it's been trained with recent data. However, I think I need a larger dataset for training as at the moment, it simply tags any song which has "writer" or "performer" containing "Norah Jones"
The Faraday shopping bag is available at many grocery stores, cleverly described as a insulating bag to keep hot foods hot and cold foods cold for up to three hours.
From the article: "I have the opportunity to meet a large number of employers of software developers. Invariably they are looking for graduates who socialize well in groups, are team players, are articulate, and are able to give coherent oral presentations." Uh huh. And why are they looking for those traits? Answer: Because they are rare among programmers. And for good reason. Programming is for people who like to program; people who understand formal logic, who are comfortable with a machine that does exactly what you ask though rarely what you want. People like this rarely socialize well in groups (except in groups of similar people) because they simply don't think the same way. They don't give good oral presentations for the same reason. Articulate? Many are articulate -- it's just those claiming they are otherwise don't understand them, not when they are "talking shop". There are vanishingly few people who can both code well and speak well about their code to non-programmers. These people will not be out there searching for jobs; you'll be bidding for them, if you want one. There are many more who can speak in ordinary language and understand programmers -- however, these are not programmers but good technical writers. A good programmer can understand ordinary language, but asking for presentations is a bit much; programmers regard this as a waste of time, and it will be -- it'll piss the programmers off, and the targets won't understand them. Asking your programmers to talk directly to the customers... unless you're marketing to other developers, I hope you didn't need that customer.
Copyright is a bad thing. It has taken the DMCA to cause me to see this, but copyright cannot co-exist with free speech and modern technology. Copyright, at its heart, tells you that there are things you may not print, things you may not say in public, things you may not write, under penalty of fines and prison.
Before modern times when copying was so easy and copyright so extensive, there was a possibility of copyright co-existing (uneasily!) with free speech. Actually violating a copyright was difficult and took investment in a printing press (copying by hand was not a violation for most of that time, and certainly not prosecuted). Now thanks to photocopiers and computers you can violate it easily, even trivially.
To save copyright from becoming effectively unenforcable, it is necessary to restrict both free speech (via DMCA-like laws, as well as by copyright itself) and modern technology (via CBDTPA-like laws). If that's what it takes to enforce it, copyright should die. Unfortunately, it is not.
That beautiful piece of elegant code you wrote will be lost in a system crash as soon as you move on, if not sooner. That horrid inefficient kludge you wrote early in your career will be retained forever, and when through the vagaries of the world, you end up at the company which owns that code, you will end up responsible for maintaining it.
While the RIAA does demand such actions as severing your connection, they don't have the authority to do so.
In fact, the court in the Verizon case agreed that in P2P cases, the ISP is covered by DMCA 512(a). There is no takedown provision in 512(a); the ISP is not required to take ANY ACTION WHATSOEVER to retain its shield against liability. Further, YOU can sue THEM if they do; they are not shielded as 512(c) providers are.
The judge did (erroneously, IMO) decide that the 512(j) subpoena provision applied, but that doesn't mean they get to yank your access.