Defendants, on the other hand, are adherents of a movement that believes that information should be available without charge to anyone clever enough to break into the computer systems or data storage media in which it is located.
[emphasis mine]
Is this really the public perception of the Free Software/Open Content movements? Unfortunately, I fear this particular segment of the ruling is going to be bandied about a great deal in the media from now on. If it's not now, it may well be.
I can't say I was ever that comfortable having 2600 being the ones standing up for us in this case. This is exactly the impression I was afraid of them giving.
can't really say I like any of them that much...
on
ICANN Elections
·
· Score: 2
...although, that being said, Dr. Mhlaba and Mr. Beberg seem to have their heads screwed on pretty well.
Dr. Mhlaba might be my first choice, although I am still unsure of how well he would represent North America as a whole. While I largely agree with his views, I suspect most North Americans share little of his concern regarding the rampant Eurocentrism prevalent in global organizations like ICANN.
My other choice would be Mr. Beberg. I appreciated the terseness and honesty of his reply, and I feel that he has what I would call, for lack of a better term, a level of "healthy cynicism" that would be necessary to be an effective representative. Most of the rest of the candidates struck me as excessively naive or manipulative. I think Adam is running for the right reasons, even if I am not that comfortable with his apparently Objectivist (Randrite) personal philosophy.
When you think about carefully, the Spanish Empire rests upon a huge infrastructure, and this, unsuprisingly enough, costs a lot of money. How else are they going to obtain this money without sending mercenaries to rape and pillage in the New World
I've said it before and I'll say it again: Your wish to make money does not take precedence over my right to share information.
Let's also not forget that mercantilism eventually almost completely destroyed the Spanish economy through hyperinflation.
Steve Case: "We would prefer if you would call it AOL/Linux instead of just Linux because without AOL you really wouldn't have anything there at all.. just the kernel. Don't get me wrong, I respect that Linus Torvalds guy and all, but we feel that AOL should be part of the name to give credit where credit is due"
...for such a system as you describe, that wouldn't be unreasonable at all. Certainly no less appropriate than Tom Christianson's BSD/Linux.
Still, if I were the Lord and someone started shooting rockets at me, you can bet that there would be a little bit of wrath aimed at the responsible parties. I think that if we hit Jesus with a probe the entirety of humanity would be responsible in one way or another...
Well, considering he was willing to forgive us for deliberately torturing and killing him, I'd tend to think he'd be more or less understanding if we accidentally hit him with a Mars probe.
We are losing countless numbers of books each year simply because they were printed on acid paper, and I'd argue that loss is far more substantial in the long run than the loss of performace art, but that's simply because text has a much higher thought density. I dragged some books back from my mother-in-law's house last week, and there are a lot of things only 50-60 years old that are rapidly disintegrating.
Yeah, that's my point. 60+year copyrights are a relatively new thing. See When Works Pass Into the Public Domain-- I think it gives you rough dates of when the various legislation was enacted.
Also note that I said vastly exceed. If you're really careful with keeping books, even acidic paper will last you more than 60 years. You can't say the same for CDs -- 50 or 60 years, and you're most likely SOL no matter how careful you were. And the copyrights are now a LOT longer than 50 or 60 years. Try nearly 100, or possibly even more (see earlier link)!
I'm not talking about soley recorded performance art, either. A lot of materia go on CDs now that are more commonly associated with printed matter (encylopedias, novels, even some periodicals). Let's not forget software, either.
Some material is even more ephemeral -- for example, web pages. The reason my web site is licensed as a whole under the Open Publication license is so that if someone actually cares (well, unlikely for mysite, but...), they can (legally!) save material themselves, and preserve it, even if I get hit by a bus tomorrow and my account drops with nobody to pay the bills after I'm gone.
It would be nice if the Library of Congress or someplace else would archive everything, but that isn't likely to happen. (I'm not sure how things are *supposed* to get into the LoC - are publishers supposed to submit a copy? Are congressmen responsible? (For this, not in the general case, we know they're not generally responsible!)
It used to be, at least, the responsibility of the culture/civilization as a whole to preserve and pass on such things, not the mandate of particular organizations or individuals. The bigger the civilization, the more impossible a task it is for an individual or organization anyway.
Except for some works explicitly released into the public domain, nothing since about World War I, in fact...
From a cultural perspective, what happens when the most recent body of public domain work is more than 100 years old, and anything else over 30 years old starts dissapearing as publishers lose interest in publishing it?
Now that copying is trivial, we all of a sudden see it as our right and duty? Please.
It's more that for the first time copyright terms now vasty exceed the lifetime of the media the works are recorded on (e.g. audio CDs). Ease of third-party copying is incidental, if convenient.
This stuff will dissapear if second and third-generation copies aren't made, and if something's out of publication, the publisher is obviously not willing to do that.
Personally, I think anything that has been out of print for an extended period of time should be fair game, but that's not likely to happen.
Personally, I think copyright terms should be reduced to something more reasonable (less than the median lifetime of the media would be nice), so this would be a nonissue.
I don't actually have plans to be doing any copying of "abandoned media" myself at the moment, but I am seriously thinking about dropping my own work into the public domain after maybe 14 years (the original copyright term).
Here's an intersting (if only tangentially related) thought, actually: does the Library of Congress have copies of The Judys' albums? (they appear not to, from a cursory look at their catalog) If not, shouldn't they? Why wouldn't they?
Don't I have the right to privacy? Don't I have the right for you NOT to expose me?
Generally speaking, and this is already taken care of by other areas of civil and criminal law. You don't need copyright for this.
Are you proposing doing away with copyright entirely, or just returning it to a "founding-fathers" level?
Actually, some of the Founding Fathers were in fact completely opposed to the notion of copyrights and IP in general (the most notable of these being Thomas Jefferson, a prolific writer and inventor).
I'd personally just be happy to see it go back to the original ~14 year term, with limitations only on publication, rather than use.
So keep on to it untill the copyright has gone (thats after 30 years btw) and make sure you are the first one to claim the rights. After that you can do with the music whatever you want. Even sue others for violating the copyright on which you spended your hard earned money.
(emphasis mine)
This is just wrong on so many levels. Once a work is in the public domain, it's public domain. You shouldn't normally be able to copyright anything but your own derivatives of said public domain work.
If, on the other hand, you're suggesting holding onto the sole copy, and then leveraging copyright to extract licensing on copies of that, I think that's just morally reprehensible...
The fact that you reconize some is not allways because of the way the music is composed. In most cases its due to the fact that the company is using music which is more then 30 years old.
Usually that means that the music has been licensed from the original publisher, not that the copyright has expired.
... you know, I just realized you're in Norway. [Sorry, American arrogance strikes again:/] I may be completely off base, then, but I sincerely hope Norwegian copyright law isn't as twisted as you make it sound to me (although I daresay 30 year terms aren't bad)...
In any case, as regards copyright terms, international law is slowly serving to synchronize copyright terms in various countries (which was one of the contributing factors to the US extension). I'm not sure you will be able to rely on 30-year terms for long.
So keep on to it untill the copyright has gone (thats after 30 years btw) and make sure you are the first one to claim the rights.
If the works were published in 1964, say, the earliest they would go out of copyright would be 2059. That's more than 30 years.
For works published more recently, it's generally is the lifetime of the author + 70 years. Works of corporate authorship are under copyright for the shorter of 120 years from creation, or 96 years from publication[1].
A work published today will most likely not enter the public domain until sometime in the mid-22nd century...
...that is, assuming copyright terms are not retroactively extended again as they have been consistently over the past few decades (c.f. The Sonny Bono Copyright Extension Act).
Audio CDs have a lifetime of about 50 years. If people don't start making their own copies of things after they go out of distribution, very large chunks of our culture will begin dissapearing.
Excessively long copyright terms are producing the cultural equivalent of slash-and-burn agriculture[2].
[2] I am seriously considering voluntarily releasing my own works into the public domain after 14 years (the original term for copyrights) to combat this.
This is exactly one of the reasons UNIX is in so much trouble -- even something simple like the concept of shared libraries (at least in practice) is a relatively new thing in much of the UNIX world. It's not very well understood, let alone welcomed.
People bitch and moan about having to deal with getting a whole bunch of libraries because of runtime dependencies. Deal. It's the cost of componentizing software, and it's not like there aren't tools that can manage the complexity for you (e.g. apt-get).
And, for those of you who don't think you need shared libraries, try replacing all the binaries on your system with statically linked versions and see how much disk space you have left...
There is also a good deal of management flexibility and efficiency that you gain through using higher-level component systems, as well. I know the Unix pipeline has been offered as a viable model, but it's not really complete enough.
Unless you extend the role of the filesystem abstraction as in Plan 9, the UNIX file/pipeline metaphor is simply not a viable component model in and of itself -- if it were, every application could be written as a shell script (which you can mostly do in Plan 9, btw, even if it would be a bit slow).
There's a point where you just have to stop managing all of the complexity yourself, and delgate some of it to software. The untyped data streams of the Unix pipeline (without the additional policy/flexibility imposed by Plan 9) don't sufficiently allow that.
Failing a Plan 9-esque level of abstraction, you're going to have to settle for a higher-level layer like Bonobo to really function in a modern environment.
Then we'll go to Farmer Fred in his private garden and beg him to let us have some of his new, different Fine Fruit.
Farmer Fred will put up with this for a while, and then he'll kick us out, and we'll be without Fine Fruit ever again, except for those of us who are farmers.
That's when Farmer Jones (next door) realizes that... hey, wait a minute... there might be some money to be made here. So, he calls us over, and says, "Tell ya what, kids. I've got some new fruit here. $20 a head, all you can carry. Take it or leave it."
Some of us take him up on the offer. Clones of the new fruit invariably get passed around, and pretty soon, everyone gets tired of that, too. We come back to Farmer Jones...
A couple years later, he's President and CEO of Farmer Jones Novelty Fruit, incorporated.
Meanwhile, Farmer Fred wakes up one day and notices Farmer Jones' new fruit-funded ferrari. "Damn," he says, "I gotta get me some of that Fancy Fruit action..."
Farmer Fred pulls the tarp off his old freezer truck, and starts loading it with clones of Jones' newest products. He drives out to outlying areas, offering Farmer Fred's Fancy Fruit -- FRESH!
Other former farmers also start to get interested. Some of them go into competition with Jones, making custom fruit, trading seeds and rootstock with each other. Others go into competition with Fred.
Jones' revenues dip a little, but by this time, he's become a trusted name, and people like his new work. Reason enough to go to him instead of the competition, in most cases.
Fred just keeps on truckin', although he's now a subsidiary of Farmer Clark's Cool Cantaloupe Express Delivery Service.
Related service markets spring up, to, including bulk fruit duplication, while-you-wait, and people developing fruit theming kits.
Pretty soon, the farming industry explodes into a vibrant marketplace. THE END
And surely someone is eventually going to try to write his own program to arbitrarily generate music based on a mathematical level, thus depriving the music of any soul or feeling.
Mozart did this, actually. Well... not a program, since computers weren't invented yet, but still. What he designed was a set of algorithms -- a dice game -- that one could use to assemble compositions from thematic "primitives".
A number of people have since implemented it in software. I suspect Mozart would be a hacker if he were alive today.
Slashdot Mirror
...he would have given us instructions to send in a self-addressed stamped envelope with $20 for the personal helicopter kit.
It's really fucking cold and radioactive (still in Jupiter's magnetosphere, remember?).
We've got salty water; that's great. Doesn't say THAT much more for the possibilities of life, though.
It's like going downtown in a strange city and saying "Hey, we're downtown! There must be a good Chinese[-American] restaurant around here!"
You mean, Luke of Samba fame, don't you? Unless he has a background with the WINE project that I wasn't aware of...
(Mozilla M18-2000081415)
For example: The Right to Read: A Dystopian Short Story
Actually, .zip encryption is laughably weak...
Have you ever read 2600?
[emphasis mine]
Is this really the public perception of the Free Software/Open Content movements? Unfortunately, I fear this particular segment of the ruling is going to be bandied about a great deal in the media from now on. If it's not now, it may well be.
I can't say I was ever that comfortable having 2600 being the ones standing up for us in this case. This is exactly the impression I was afraid of them giving.
...although, that being said, Dr. Mhlaba and Mr. Beberg seem to have their heads screwed on pretty well.
Dr. Mhlaba might be my first choice, although I am still unsure of how well he would represent North America as a whole. While I largely agree with his views, I suspect most North Americans share little of his concern regarding the rampant Eurocentrism prevalent in global organizations like ICANN.
My other choice would be Mr. Beberg. I appreciated the terseness and honesty of his reply, and I feel that he has what I would call, for lack of a better term, a level of "healthy cynicism" that would be necessary to be an effective representative. Most of the rest of the candidates struck me as excessively naive or manipulative. I think Adam is running for the right reasons, even if I am not that comfortable with his apparently Objectivist (Randrite) personal philosophy.
Let's also not forget that mercantilism eventually almost completely destroyed the Spanish economy through hyperinflation.
...for such a system as you describe, that wouldn't be unreasonable at all. Certainly no less appropriate than Tom Christianson's BSD/Linux.
...do you have any conception of how Orwellian that is?
Well, considering he was willing to forgive us for deliberately torturing and killing him, I'd tend to think he'd be more or less understanding if we accidentally hit him with a Mars probe.
Yeah, that's my point. 60+year copyrights are a relatively new thing. See When Works Pass Into the Public Domain-- I think it gives you rough dates of when the various legislation was enacted.
Also note that I said vastly exceed. If you're really careful with keeping books, even acidic paper will last you more than 60 years. You can't say the same for CDs -- 50 or 60 years, and you're most likely SOL no matter how careful you were. And the copyrights are now a LOT longer than 50 or 60 years. Try nearly 100, or possibly even more (see earlier link)!
I'm not talking about soley recorded performance art, either. A lot of materia go on CDs now that are more commonly associated with printed matter (encylopedias, novels, even some periodicals). Let's not forget software, either.
Some material is even more ephemeral -- for example, web pages. The reason my web site is licensed as a whole under the Open Publication license is so that if someone actually cares (well, unlikely for mysite, but...), they can (legally!) save material themselves, and preserve it, even if I get hit by a bus tomorrow and my account drops with nobody to pay the bills after I'm gone.
It used to be, at least, the responsibility of the culture/civilization as a whole to preserve and pass on such things, not the mandate of particular organizations or individuals. The bigger the civilization, the more impossible a task it is for an individual or organization anyway.
Except for some works explicitly released into the public domain, nothing since about World War I, in fact...
From a cultural perspective, what happens when the most recent body of public domain work is more than 100 years old, and anything else over 30 years old starts dissapearing as publishers lose interest in publishing it?
It's more that for the first time copyright terms now vasty exceed the lifetime of the media the works are recorded on (e.g. audio CDs). Ease of third-party copying is incidental, if convenient.
This stuff will dissapear if second and third-generation copies aren't made, and if something's out of publication, the publisher is obviously not willing to do that.
Personally, I think copyright terms should be reduced to something more reasonable (less than the median lifetime of the media would be nice), so this would be a nonissue.
I don't actually have plans to be doing any copying of "abandoned media" myself at the moment, but I am seriously thinking about dropping my own work into the public domain after maybe 14 years (the original copyright term).
Here's an intersting (if only tangentially related) thought, actually: does the Library of Congress have copies of The Judys' albums? (they appear not to, from a cursory look at their catalog) If not, shouldn't they? Why wouldn't they?
Reduce copyrights back to the original 14 years. It'd have more or less the same effect.
Generally speaking, and this is already taken care of by other areas of civil and criminal law. You don't need copyright for this.
Actually, some of the Founding Fathers were in fact completely opposed to the notion of copyrights and IP in general (the most notable of these being Thomas Jefferson, a prolific writer and inventor).
I'd personally just be happy to see it go back to the original ~14 year term, with limitations only on publication, rather than use.
(emphasis mine)
This is just wrong on so many levels. Once a work is in the public domain, it's public domain. You shouldn't normally be able to copyright anything but your own derivatives of said public domain work.
If, on the other hand, you're suggesting holding onto the sole copy, and then leveraging copyright to extract licensing on copies of that, I think that's just morally reprehensible...
Usually that means that the music has been licensed from the original publisher, not that the copyright has expired.
... you know, I just realized you're in Norway. [Sorry, American arrogance strikes again :/] I may be completely off base, then, but I sincerely hope Norwegian copyright law isn't as twisted as you make it sound to me (although I daresay 30 year terms aren't bad)...
In any case, as regards copyright terms, international law is slowly serving to synchronize copyright terms in various countries (which was one of the contributing factors to the US extension). I'm not sure you will be able to rely on 30-year terms for long.
If the works were published in 1964, say, the earliest they would go out of copyright would be 2059. That's more than 30 years.
For works published more recently, it's generally is the lifetime of the author + 70 years. Works of corporate authorship are under copyright for the shorter of 120 years from creation, or 96 years from publication[1].
A work published today will most likely not enter the public domain until sometime in the mid-22nd century...
...that is, assuming copyright terms are not retroactively extended again as they have been consistently over the past few decades (c.f. The Sonny Bono Copyright Extension Act).
Audio CDs have a lifetime of about 50 years. If people don't start making their own copies of things after they go out of distribution, very large chunks of our culture will begin dissapearing.
Excessively long copyright terms are producing the cultural equivalent of slash-and-burn agriculture[2].
---[1] Gasaway, Lolly. When Works pass into the Public Domain. University of North Carolina. 1999.
[2] I am seriously considering voluntarily releasing my own works into the public domain after 14 years (the original term for copyrights) to combat this.
This is exactly one of the reasons UNIX is in so much trouble -- even something simple like the concept of shared libraries (at least in practice) is a relatively new thing in much of the UNIX world. It's not very well understood, let alone welcomed.
People bitch and moan about having to deal with getting a whole bunch of libraries because of runtime dependencies. Deal. It's the cost of componentizing software, and it's not like there aren't tools that can manage the complexity for you (e.g. apt-get).
And, for those of you who don't think you need shared libraries, try replacing all the binaries on your system with statically linked versions and see how much disk space you have left...
There is also a good deal of management flexibility and efficiency that you gain through using higher-level component systems, as well. I know the Unix pipeline has been offered as a viable model, but it's not really complete enough.
Unless you extend the role of the filesystem abstraction as in Plan 9, the UNIX file/pipeline metaphor is simply not a viable component model in and of itself -- if it were, every application could be written as a shell script (which you can mostly do in Plan 9, btw, even if it would be a bit slow).
There's a point where you just have to stop managing all of the complexity yourself, and delgate some of it to software. The untyped data streams of the Unix pipeline (without the additional policy/flexibility imposed by Plan 9) don't sufficiently allow that.
Failing a Plan 9-esque level of abstraction, you're going to have to settle for a higher-level layer like Bonobo to really function in a modern environment.
If you spend much time looking at .NET, you'd realize that it's essentially built on top of COM itself.
.NET, let alone transcending it.
You need something like DCOM implemented first before you can even think of implementing something like
That's when Farmer Jones (next door) realizes that ... hey, wait a minute ... there might be some money to be made here. So, he calls us over, and says, "Tell ya what, kids. I've got some new fruit here. $20 a head, all you can carry. Take it or leave it."
Some of us take him up on the offer. Clones of the new fruit invariably get passed around, and pretty soon, everyone gets tired of that, too. We come back to Farmer Jones...
A couple years later, he's President and CEO of Farmer Jones Novelty Fruit, incorporated.
Meanwhile, Farmer Fred wakes up one day and notices Farmer Jones' new fruit-funded ferrari. "Damn," he says, "I gotta get me some of that Fancy Fruit action..."
Farmer Fred pulls the tarp off his old freezer truck, and starts loading it with clones of Jones' newest products. He drives out to outlying areas, offering Farmer Fred's Fancy Fruit -- FRESH!
Other former farmers also start to get interested. Some of them go into competition with Jones, making custom fruit, trading seeds and rootstock with each other. Others go into competition with Fred.
Jones' revenues dip a little, but by this time, he's become a trusted name, and people like his new work. Reason enough to go to him instead of the competition, in most cases.
Fred just keeps on truckin', although he's now a subsidiary of Farmer Clark's Cool Cantaloupe Express Delivery Service.
Related service markets spring up, to, including bulk fruit duplication, while-you-wait, and people developing fruit theming kits.
Pretty soon, the farming industry explodes into a vibrant marketplace. THE END
You're right, this is a good metaphor...
Mozart did this, actually. Well... not a program, since computers weren't invented yet, but still. What he designed was a set of algorithms -- a dice game -- that one could use to assemble compositions from thematic "primitives".
A number of people have since implemented it in software. I suspect Mozart would be a hacker if he were alive today.