However, the onus would be on Adobe to come after me if I did violate this 'contract'. I bet they woudln't bother.
They don't have to. If you want to get text out of the e-book in any way but hand-transcribing (or very time-consuming cracking), you're screwed. Adobe doesn't have to bother, the software does it for them. Note that the restrictions placed on the book are more comprehensive than just disabling the software's speech synthesis functionality.
I believe that simply re-printing the book does not constitute an original, copyrightable work. You cannot simply re-type something word for word or even simply change a couple things and say it's original.
I agree. The question here, however, is not whether or not the work is original, it's whether or not you or I have the financial and legal resources to challenge Adobe's implicit assertion that it is (I know I don't).
The big thing with these technological "content protection" measures is that the law doesn't matter much anyway -- you may be well within your legal rights to copy, lend, or loan the e-book version of "Alice in Wonderland", but the software doesn't see it that way. So you can't.
Likewise, SDMI-protected works aren't magically going to become unprotected when they go out of copyright.
Worse, that's probably a moot point, since copyright now lasts something like six to seven times the expected lifetime of e.g. CD media, the bits will have rotted and it'll be long gone (no backup copies, either... thanks SDMI!).
If SDMI and similar protection mechanisms become widespread, I have honestly no idea how contemporary works are going to survive past the next 25-50 years, let alone the next century.
Gutenburg has a standard header attached to their documents that places (some) GPL-esque restrictions on their use as long as it has that header -- but you are allowed to remove that header, and are left with a public domain work.
I think that this particular story is, in fact, a scam, but people should be aware that a work being "public domain" isn't like it being copyrighted. You can easily and legally take a public domain work, reformat it a little, and copyright the result.
You don't hold a copyright on the public domain material per se -- the copyright is on your particular expression/presentation of it.
Art galleries do this with photographs of paintings in their collections all the time. Another more "evil" example might be Bill Gates' Corbis and images of Leonardo Da Vinci's notebooks.
Just because something is public domain doesn't mean that you'll be able to get a copy without somebody's copyright restictions on it.
Besides, if I wanted to celebrate a fictitious character's birthday, I wouldn't choose one that was born on one of the darkest days of the year...
Actually the accounts[1] suggest late summer (given the sheep would be ranging in the hill country at the time, among other things), rather than late December. The celebration was moved to December 25th much later largely to supplant pagan celebrations at that time of year.
I can already see it! People using their 33.6kbps modems over VOIP, because the UDP packets get higher priority than the TCP connections flowing over the same pipe.
... and then the Internet collapses, because UDP doesn't have any sort of congestion control facility. TCP congestion control is one of the only things that keeps the whole mess from deadlocking in one big mass of overwhelmed routers.
This reminds me of the time someone here was screaming when they found out about TCP congestion control in the Linux kernel. They insisted that it was stupid that anything should be preventing their packets from getting full priority, and it should be ripped out. A lot of people seemed to agree.
The blocked anonymization and translation services mentioned in the paper are blocked by the service because they can both be used to bypass the URL-based filtering scheme.
If you're running a filtering service, you don't really have any choice if you want to have any sort of efficacy.
And, of course, that's precisely why filters cost more than their benefits. It would have been nice had the author addressed that angle, rather than writing a propaganda piece that does little more than thinly alluding to some sort of censorship conspiracy.
Anything that will take a little freedom away from the criminals and give it back to the law abiding people is a good thing.
Sounds great, except the law abiding folks aren't getting any back, and we're just giving any criminals in the FBI more power.
Yes, criminals. Corruption happens -- for example, the FBI did some things that were not exactly legal to Martin Luther King (illegal surveilance/wiretaps, as I recall). The people who broke the law in that case were in the FBI, and they were also, by definition, criminals.
Learn some recent history.
If, instead, you acknowledge this, but believe that that sort of thing can't or won't happen again, please be prepared to explain why in fifty words or less.[1]
---
[1] Other than "Martin Luther King is dead now"
This is true. It has only the authority granted it by the state to do so (through copyright law), and then only for those works (software) which it holds the copyright on (a minority of GPLed works).
The FSF, as a group, has no natural rights. Neither do corporations.
You start with a few rooms and puzzles, and let people from all over the word bang on it. Then you grow the thing organically.
I'm working on something along those lines in my spare time, actually. It'll be up on apiary.org (which right now just bounces you to my webhosting provider) if/when I get the core stuff together and stable.
Hilarious! Open Source produces another gigantic, stinking turd of a project.
Not really. This turd was formed in the bowels of proprietary software. It's only now that it's out in the open.
My personal experience with proprietary software vendors (and I've worked closely with their software engineers in some cases, trying to debug problems with their software that were creating major problems for my employer) has been that most proprietary software is complete shit, from an engineering perspective.
I mean that. There is an amazing lack of accountability for the quality of code in proprietary software.
Before I went to work in the "real world", I would never have imagined that large, well-funded companies would produce software with such egregious bugs and flawed engineering methedologies, much worse than any I have personally ever seen in any serious Open Source project (read: one with at least three active members).
Real world example (Windows), with a major EDA vendor (who will remain nameless):
Network performance is almost unusably bad
Vendor offers no helpful solutions
We start looking at network traces
It becomes plain that the software is polling all of the configured network printers in a tight loop whenever the app is active
We go to the vendor -- it turns out to be an "architectural issue"
We want a fix
They suggest we don't configure any network printers
Another fun (Unix+Windows) example:
2d application is complaining about GLX issues
We ask the vendor... they decided to use OpenGL instead of the 2d line-drawing primitives in Xlib (just for drawing un-transformed(!) 2d straight lines!!!)
Inquiring further, it turns out that they don't use Xlib at all; they wrote a custom (and very slow and badly implemented) X client library instead. Which uses interrupt-driven (SIGALRM) polling for mouse events.
Now we know why the app is so hideous to use, and why they never used any standard X widget toolkits.
I've also seen some other absolutely hair-raising things in network/system call traces, like:
seek(), ftell(), seek(), ftell(), ftell(), read(), seek()[back to same block], read()[same amount this time, but in 512k increments], seek(), ftell(), seek(), seek(), ftell(), read()
There was also the wonderful discovery that an app was using the NT equivalent of access() (GetSecurityInfo() + GetEffectiveRightsFromAcl(), which means about 40 lines of support code each time) instead of checking for failure on various operations (open file, etc)... why?
...because the lack of error handling in the application was so pervasive, they decided to cut their losses and just anticipate all possible errors by explicitly checking for the conditions that might cause them beforehand (never mind race conditions or incomplete coverage, or the fact that it broke some things...). Things were so bad that that was actually less work and less code.
I can go on and on with these real-world accounts if you like. I've come to believe that only with Open Source comes real software engineering accountablity.
...the thing about most big projects is that they are NOT fun, NOT particularly maintainable and WELL beyond the understanding of any one coder. That's why it is necessary to PAY programmers to work (with people they might not necessarily like) IN GROUPS under the direction of others (with whom they might not necessarily agree).
Actually my experience has been that those disagrements really fuck up a software project. The Open Source projects I've been involved with, if the disagreements are really serious they usually result in a fork which often means two healthy projects rather than just one. Or the old bastard leaders are deposed and go on to other things.
Very democratic, and usually works nicely.
And the necessity of income to pay those programmers dictates that the product must be sold and that IP laws must be used to protect that income.
Only as long as you try to treat a service industry like a manufacturing industry.
And if you anyone doesn't agree with that, explain how Sun could develop an Open Source Star Office without a thriving business based on proprietary hardware.
Pretty simple: buy the rights to a proprietary product from someone else and release the source code to that. Which is what they did, actually.
(Well, they actually bought the company, as I recall, but same thing)
Now, as far as your description of what you see as the "real world", I do software support for a Fortune 500 company, and have been involved with (and contributed code to) several major Open Source projects. What experience do you have?
I bought MP3Enc years ago from them, but was not notified that I owed them anything for every song that I ripped and encoded for myself. Or is that only applicable if you use it to distribute music?
Well, you're probably okay. If you purchased a legal copy of a licensed encoder, then the patent license is already covered there.
Most Free Software projects, however, cannot afford the $15,000/yr minimum, though, so the licensing fees fall on the individual user instead.
As for MP3 distribution, that's kind of complicated. Nonprofit distrbution should be okay... it depends on how you read it. Again, see mp3licensing.com for the exact details.
Slashdot Mirror
Then quite frankly, you really should not be sending your children to an institution where the government acts in loco parentis.
In other words, if you don't want the government dictating the way your kids are raised, don't let the government raise your kids.
That would be the reactor core.
They don't have to. If you want to get text out of the e-book in any way but hand-transcribing (or very time-consuming cracking), you're screwed. Adobe doesn't have to bother, the software does it for them. Note that the restrictions placed on the book are more comprehensive than just disabling the software's speech synthesis functionality.
I agree. The question here, however, is not whether or not the work is original, it's whether or not you or I have the financial and legal resources to challenge Adobe's implicit assertion that it is (I know I don't).
The big thing with these technological "content protection" measures is that the law doesn't matter much anyway -- you may be well within your legal rights to copy, lend, or loan the e-book version of "Alice in Wonderland", but the software doesn't see it that way. So you can't.
Likewise, SDMI-protected works aren't magically going to become unprotected when they go out of copyright.
Worse, that's probably a moot point, since copyright now lasts something like six to seven times the expected lifetime of e.g. CD media, the bits will have rotted and it'll be long gone (no backup copies, either... thanks SDMI!).
If SDMI and similar protection mechanisms become widespread, I have honestly no idea how contemporary works are going to survive past the next 25-50 years, let alone the next century.
Talk about cultural amnesia...
Gutenburg has a standard header attached to their documents that places (some) GPL-esque restrictions on their use as long as it has that header -- but you are allowed to remove that header, and are left with a public domain work.
I think that this particular story is, in fact, a scam, but people should be aware that a work being "public domain" isn't like it being copyrighted. You can easily and legally take a public domain work, reformat it a little, and copyright the result.
You don't hold a copyright on the public domain material per se -- the copyright is on your particular expression/presentation of it.
Art galleries do this with photographs of paintings in their collections all the time. Another more "evil" example might be Bill Gates' Corbis and images of Leonardo Da Vinci's notebooks.
Just because something is public domain doesn't mean that you'll be able to get a copy without somebody's copyright restictions on it.
Actually the accounts[1] suggest late summer (given the sheep would be ranging in the hill country at the time, among other things), rather than late December. The celebration was moved to December 25th much later largely to supplant pagan celebrations at that time of year.
---[1] we'll not argue about their veracity just now
Mud would be more ecologically sound.
... and then the Internet collapses, because UDP doesn't have any sort of congestion control facility. TCP congestion control is one of the only things that keeps the whole mess from deadlocking in one big mass of overwhelmed routers.
This reminds me of the time someone here was screaming when they found out about TCP congestion control in the Linux kernel. They insisted that it was stupid that anything should be preventing their packets from getting full priority, and it should be ripped out. A lot of people seemed to agree.
Man, can someone say "tragedy of the commons?"
DNS, for example. Which is not to say there aren't other means for limiting it. See swb's post for example.
Yes, in most states.
Honestly, I'm not sure mankind, as a whole, has advanced ethically at all. Ever. We've just gotten really good at euphamism.
Meet the new Man, same as the old Man.
Hell, just make one and keep copying that. :P
The blocked anonymization and translation services mentioned in the paper are blocked by the service because they can both be used to bypass the URL-based filtering scheme.
If you're running a filtering service, you don't really have any choice if you want to have any sort of efficacy.
And, of course, that's precisely why filters cost more than their benefits. It would have been nice had the author addressed that angle, rather than writing a propaganda piece that does little more than thinly alluding to some sort of censorship conspiracy.
That's what keystroke loggers are for.
Sounds great, except the law abiding folks aren't getting any back, and we're just giving any criminals in the FBI more power.
Yes, criminals. Corruption happens -- for example, the FBI did some things that were not exactly legal to Martin Luther King (illegal surveilance/wiretaps, as I recall). The people who broke the law in that case were in the FBI, and they were also, by definition, criminals.
Learn some recent history.
If, instead, you acknowledge this, but believe that that sort of thing can't or won't happen again, please be prepared to explain why in fifty words or less.[1]
---[1] Other than "Martin Luther King is dead now"
This is true. It has only the authority granted it by the state to do so (through copyright law), and then only for those works (software) which it holds the copyright on (a minority of GPLed works).
The FSF, as a group, has no natural rights. Neither do corporations.
I'm working on something along those lines in my spare time, actually. It'll be up on apiary.org (which right now just bounces you to my webhosting provider) if/when I get the core stuff together and stable.
Most people would disagree with you.
If you don't understand the difference, then I don't think we have much of value to say to each other.
My title is "assistant engineer", by the way.
Not really. This turd was formed in the bowels of proprietary software. It's only now that it's out in the open.
My personal experience with proprietary software vendors (and I've worked closely with their software engineers in some cases, trying to debug problems with their software that were creating major problems for my employer) has been that most proprietary software is complete shit, from an engineering perspective.
I mean that. There is an amazing lack of accountability for the quality of code in proprietary software.
Before I went to work in the "real world", I would never have imagined that large, well-funded companies would produce software with such egregious bugs and flawed engineering methedologies, much worse than any I have personally ever seen in any serious Open Source project (read: one with at least three active members).
Real world example (Windows), with a major EDA vendor (who will remain nameless):
Another fun (Unix+Windows) example:
I've also seen some other absolutely hair-raising things in network/system call traces, like:
seek(), ftell(), seek(), ftell(), ftell(), read(), seek()[back to same block], read()[same amount this time, but in 512k increments], seek(), ftell(), seek(), seek(), ftell(), read()
There was also the wonderful discovery that an app was using the NT equivalent of access() (GetSecurityInfo() + GetEffectiveRightsFromAcl(), which means about 40 lines of support code each time) instead of checking for failure on various operations (open file, etc) ... why?
...because the lack of error handling in the application was so pervasive, they decided to cut their losses and just anticipate all possible errors by explicitly checking for the conditions that might cause them beforehand (never mind race conditions or incomplete coverage, or the fact that it broke some things...). Things were so bad that that was actually less work and less code.
I can go on and on with these real-world accounts if you like. I've come to believe that only with Open Source comes real software engineering accountablity.
Actually my experience has been that those disagrements really fuck up a software project. The Open Source projects I've been involved with, if the disagreements are really serious they usually result in a fork which often means two healthy projects rather than just one. Or the old bastard leaders are deposed and go on to other things.
Very democratic, and usually works nicely.
Only as long as you try to treat a service industry like a manufacturing industry.
Pretty simple: buy the rights to a proprietary product from someone else and release the source code to that. Which is what they did, actually.
(Well, they actually bought the company, as I recall, but same thing)
Now, as far as your description of what you see as the "real world", I do software support for a Fortune 500 company, and have been involved with (and contributed code to) several major Open Source projects. What experience do you have?
Only if the material burned contained carbon to begin with. Carbon doesn't just magically appear when you burn something.
Well, you're probably okay. If you purchased a legal copy of a licensed encoder, then the patent license is already covered there.
Most Free Software projects, however, cannot afford the $15,000/yr minimum, though, so the licensing fees fall on the individual user instead.
As for MP3 distribution, that's kind of complicated. Nonprofit distrbution should be okay... it depends on how you read it. Again, see mp3licensing.com for the exact details.
WinAmp Plugin
OGG Vorbis
Actually, it really would have been common courtesy of me to include more links. Sorry.
Nope, sorry, reread the LAME page again:
"Personal and commercial use of compiled versions of LAME (or any other mp3 encoder) requires a patent license in some countries."
Still nailed by patents.