Articles like this often get written because the author doesn't really understand the law, and rather than really trying to understand what's going on they just guess. The claims made in this article are so wildly off-base, however, that it makes me question whether the author is just trolling people.
Contrary to what the article suggests, Federal Criminal Rule 41(b) does not have a thing to do with what evidence law enforcement agencies are required to show to get a warrant, nor does it authorize the FBI (or anyone else) to get any particular type of warrant. Rule 41(b) is about VENUE; e.g., if you've already got enough evidence to get a search warrant, what judge (in what federal District) is the judge that you are supposed to present that evidence to?
The basic rule it sets out is that, when you want a warrant, you ask a judge located within the District where the person/property you want to search is located. There are exceptions to that basic rule, much like any other rule, because it's not always a simple matter of "X is located here." Sometimes things are located across several different Districts, sometimes they're mobile and can be easily moved to another District, etc. This is why there are currently 5 subsections to 41(b), each dealing with slightly different semi-unusual factual scenarios. At the end of the day, each exception is there for a very simple reason: to clearly and unambiguously tell federal law enforcement agencies how to identify the judge they are supposed to go to if they want to get a search warrant.
What the DOJ is asking for is a scenario not currently covered by Rule 41(b). That being...what happens if you are dealing with someone you know to have committed a crime, you have enough evidence to get a search warrant, but the perpetrator of the crime is using some sort of technological means (like encryption, IP masking, etc.) to prevent you from finding the exact physical location of whatever you want to search? As of right now, it is not clear who the right judge would be to issue that warrant. The only thing the proposal would do is say that, if you can't identify the physical location of the computer to be searched (and therefore do not know which federal District it's located in), then you can go get your warrant from a judge in the District where the target of the crime was located.
Example: I'm an evil h@xx3r, and I hack some computers at the GooglePlex. I have masked my IP address, so the FBI does not know exactly where I'm at. Under current Rule 41(b), it's not clear who the right judge would be to try to get a warrant from. Under "new" Rule 41(b), they can go to a judge in California since that's where the GooglePlex is located.
That's literally the only thing this proposal would change. It says nothing about VPNs or TOR networks. It does not give the FBI (or any other law enforcement agency) the authority to hack your computer or your phone whenever they want. It doesn't even grant them the authority to do that with a warrant, because they already have the ability to do that with a warrant. It also doesn't say anything about how much evidence they have to present to get the warrant, because Rule 41(b) has nothing to do with that. The standards for search warrants are exactly the same as they have been for years; this proposal would only clarify who the right judge is to issue the warrant.
I don't know a whole heck of a lot about the "FEE" is, but if this article is representative of their work and/or legal abilities then color me unimpressed.
This is not exactly what I'd call a bad thing. IBM patents the process of running a patent extortion racket. Then they sue MS for patent infringement for trying to extort money from Red Hat and other Linux companies.
The "employee" doctrine is a default position. If the issue of IP/copyrights has not been resolved as between the parties, then the court will apply default rules (e.g. if made by an employee, the employer owns it; if made by an independent contractor, then the contractor owns it unless it is a "work for hire"). If the parties choose to contract out of the default position, they are entitled to do so.
Well, in all fairness I guess I should correct that point. It's not that the installer is "horrible" per se, it's just not "newbie friendly" at all. That's not just because it's text-based, either. I'm still fairly new to Linux, and I'm certain that I don't know all the modules that need to load or all of the ins and outs of my computer hardware to tell Debian what to install. If you're a Linux guru, you're probably fine with the Debian installer. For me and others like me, I'd never get through it.
Since buying my laptop last year, I've tried out 4 different Linux distros on it for various reasons. Here are the results of each one, from worst to best.
1. Mandrake 10.0 Download Edition Useless, as the installer just plain died. I've used Mandrake before with my desktop, where it did fine, but I could never get the installer to actually work on my laptop. Apparently, it didn't like something about my hardware configuration.
2. GamesKnoppix 3.7-0.2, LiveCD Booting from the CD went fine, although to be fair the installer did hang the first time I tried it. Hardware detection went well except for two issues. First, it didn't detect my wireless card AT ALL. Don't ask me why, I have no idea. As my only means of connecting to the Internet back here in my office, that means I couldn't get online at all. No real biggie, since I was only really using it to test out the games on it.
Second, my mouse. I have two pointer devices on my laptop, a Logitech USB MX-Laser Mouse and a Synaptics Touchpad. The installer seemed to get the touchpad working correctly, but I couldn't use the mouse at all. Again, it's only minor, but inconvenient nonetheless. My impression is that had I actually decided to install Knoppix on my hard drive, it would have taken some work but I could have made the system fully functional.
3. SuSE Linux 9.2 Professional After ditching Mandrake, I headed for SuSE. Installation was slightly better than GamesKnoppix. Same initial issue with the mice, but it correctly detected and installed drivers for my wireless card. It was easier to configure my wireless network with SuSE that it was with Mandrake 9.2 (which I used earlier on my desktop), but it ended up being a tug-of-war between YaST and KWifiManager. In the end, I had to scrap KWifiManager to get wireless to work at all.
The mouse was also hit or miss. Initially, it seemed to be using the same driver for both. This didn't really work, because I couldn't use the advanced features of the touchpad. I tried using the SuSE forums on the Novell website, but I never really got the problem fixed. It would fix for one boot, then it would revert back to using whatever drivers it had before. Sometimes I would boot and could only use the touchpad, sometimes the mouse would work as well. Sometimes the advanced features of the touchpad would be functional, sometimes not.
SuSE came with a "profile switcher" feature that I liked because I could use a different profile for my home network and the one at work. I was excited about this because I connect to the Internet differently at each. At home, it's exclusively wireless. This means I need to bring up ath0 on boot, but not eth0 (I found that if eth0 is active, even if not plugged in, SuSE will default to using it for the Internet and ignore ath0). Then, at work, it's exactly reversed. In practice, it wasn't as effective as it's advertised. I frequently required a reboot to bring up new services and get things configured correctly, and even then it didn't always work. Nice thought, bad execution.
I finally had to ditch SuSE when I ran into RPM Hell. I'm getting pretty fed up with this, because I experienced it with Mandrake on my desktop as well. I recall that once (when using Mandrake), I tried to install some Connect 4-esque game. In attempting to resolve dependencies, I ended up downloading about 50 Mandrake-specific RPM's of different packages, none of which would install. In the end, I had two RPM's that claimed they were dependencies of each other, but it wouldn't recognize that I had them both and so they never installed. I think I wasted about 5 hours that day. SuSE was a little better, but it still suffers from RPM Hell. So, I finally ditched it in favor of...
4. SimplyMEPIS 3.3, LiveCD -> HD Install I wanted to use Debian to get away from the RPM crap, but I knew perfectly well I'd never make it through that horrible installer. Someone suggested using SimplyMEPIS instead, since it's basically just Debian
There's a check box on the final screen of the setup program. The box says something like "Use Firefox Start as my home page." By default, the box is checked.
Not necessarily. Covers of songs are still copyright infringement. The reason so many covers come out is because most (if not all) commercial artists pay licensing fees for ASCAP (I think, it may be another similar organization in charge of song licensing). As long as you have the license, you get to cover pretty much anything without it being copyright infringement.
I've seen some people suggest that it was actually a "copy" of something AMD already made public, and not really a true attempt at reverse engineering. But even if it was reverse engineering, so what? Of course they haven't broken any laws! There's nothing wrong with reverse engineering. How many times has/. come out to defend reverse engineering (DeCSS, PlayFair, bleem!, Connectix's Virtual Game Station)?
If the little guys can do it, the big guys can do it, too. No double standards, please.
For this dispute, Mandrake is NOT a generic word. The term generic (or the other "categories" of trademarks, i.e. Descriptive, Suggestive, Arbitrary, and Fanciful) refers to the word in the context of the product which it is used to market. So, for example, if they were selling mandrake plants, the trademark "Mandrake" would be generic and not get any trademark protection. That's why MS lost in the states with "Windows." They were selling a computer product that makes windows. That's it, so the mark is generic and they don't get any protection under US trademark law.
However, things change drastically when you move into a different product area. The word mandrake is totally meaningless in the context of magicians and comic books. The court would probably decide that the trademark is "arbitrary", meaning a word that holds an understood meaning but applied to a product that bears no relation to its meaning. Arbitrary marks qualify for maximum protection under trademark law. That's why Mandrake Linux might be in trouble here, especially if their little star logo is similar to something used by Mandrake the Magician.
Discovery is usually the most important part of a legal case, and it's especially important in this one. SCO, thus far, has offered tons of wild accusations about IP violations, misappropriation, drunken debauchery, etc. against IBM and the Linux community generally. They have offered almost nothing to back it up with, and what little has leaked out has proved to cut heavily against their court cases.
The fact that Red Hat and IBM are both filing motions to compel discovery is proof that SCO taking the same track in their legal battles. They are trying to stall because they don't want to show the code; they don't have anything to show. They're just praying that IBM will put them out of their misery and buy them out. And, by the way, one more indication for the non-legal world that, in case you didn't already know, SCO is full of shit and going to lose. Badly.
That might be a nice possibility if all ES5 had was a P2P network, but they have one other thing on the table that makes the possibility of them being in league with either the RIAA or MPAA unlikely: they offer streaming copies of movies. If you have ES5 installed, you can go to an area that allows you to click on links to movies (many of which are in theaters right now) and watch them over the net for free. I have trouble believing that either cartel would allow millions to watch movies for free like that. Remember, free movies and music online like that costs all of them $60 billion-gazillion dollars a second!
Let's assume that SCO is right. Assume that the 80 lines of code from the kernal are from Unix, copied line by line. That doesn't prove their case. In order to win, they have to prove copying and that IBM did it. If they can't show that IBM is the company that copied the code, they aren't entitled to jack at trial. And I seem to remember a certain company called Caldera (you may know them better as SCO now) bragging to no end about how they were going to merge Unix and Linux into a single product. If you don't think IBM is going to harp on that like crazy at trial, then you obviously aren't paying attention.
Do the fine folks at Slashdot really have that short of memories? EMI isn't changing, give me a break. After all, we just found out that they are suing Napster's venture capital suppliers YESTERDAY. They haven't changed at all! I would be willing to bet serious money that if they actually are going to offer music online it certainly won't be in MP3 format. They aren't going to use.ogg, because it's open and communist, and we here at Slashdot know how impossible it is for open source software and standards to produce things that actually work. If they do put anything online, it's probably going to be in some worthless proprietary format (like Windows Media Format) that has a shitload of DRM on it.
"consumers will be able to make permanent copies of songs and transfer them to recordable CDs, portable music players and their computer hard drives."
Somehow, I doubt it. I'll believe it when I see it.
Pray, foul heathens! Thou hast been led astray by years of worshipping the golden calf, i.e. Linux. Your God, Bill, is an angry God, and he hath sent this virus to you as a warning. Thou art dependant upon thy God, thou art reliant upon thy God, and thou shalt not attempt to break up God's monopoly on your life.
So, give more money to God today by buying a new copy of MS SQL Server 2000, Version 2.0. It doesn't patch the vulnerability, but maybe if you continue to support God and pray for salvation he might send the "Divine Fix" your way in a few months or so.
Their copyrights aren't going to ever expire anyway. Valenti & Company will just keep running back to Congress every twenty years to get longer terms. And they now have the full blessing of the Supreme Court. The Eric Eldred Act won't change that, but it wouldn't be creating the problem.
Instead, it would solve the two problems that remain in all of this. Congress granted the extention to aid a few very powerful rich people like Disney, but at the same time they extend copyrights on works that are worthless now and have been for many, many years. By using the registration/tax method, those worthless works will pass into the public domain and give someone a chance to come along and make them worth something again. Also, it solves the problem of not being able to locate the owners/heirs of certain copyrights by creating a national database of exactly who you need to get in contact with for licensing.
To paraphrase Larry, we kill two birds with one stone while keeping the Hollywood Copyright Police happy.
"One of the ReplayTV lobbyists has said that the PVR is the greatest friend that the American film producer and cable company ever had.
I say to you that the PVR is to the American film producer, the American cable company, and the American public as the Boston strangler is to the woman home alone."
I agree, but that's what a lot of personal jurisdiction cases are about: tenuous logic and suspension of disbelief. The whole thing gets built up around the old International Shoe idea of purposeful availment, or the idea that a person has done something with the intention of getting the protections of the laws of the state. It's a complete farce, and I have a feeling every judge worth his/her salt is aware of it.
You're right that the movie studios might not be able to get him on the trade secret action (it's not, after all, really their secret to begin with), but that analysis really goes more to the merits of the case than whether or not they could get jurisdiction. I agree that the logic is tenuous, and it's certainly a closer case than many in this area, but I still think the movie studios could have sued him in CA because he posted DeCSS.
Now, as far as whether or not they should win, that's another story altogether.:)
This opinion really isn't very helpful. Others have pointed out that it only means the DVDCCA won't be able to sue in California, and that's correct so I'm not going to revisit the issue. However, there's a more important point that seems to be going unnoticed.
The Court went out of their way to note that it's only the DVDCCA that's being effected by the ruling; something that quite rightly should be done when the ruling is premised upon personal jurisdiction. In addition to saying that the DVDCCA probably can sue (just not in California), the opinion also says (although not quite as directly) that the movie studios probably could sue in California. And they could get not only Pavlovich, but pretty much anybody that posts DeCSS.
DVDCCA couldn't get jurisdiction because they couldn't prove that Pavlovich knew (or should have known) his actions might: 1.)hurt them, and 2.)hurt them in California. This is certainly right, as the DVDCCA didn't even exist as an entity when Pavlovich posted the code and they were never able to show that prior to the suit he had any idea where they were based. However, major movie studios in Hollywood did exist, and I doubt the Court would be willing to accept the notion that Pavlovich didn't know that Hollywood studios just happened to be located in Hollywood, CA. Had the plaintiff in the suit been a major studio (like Universal or Disney), you can bet the decision would have been the other way around.
Beats me. The problem doesn't really seem to be with my software. It's a fairly standard ad blocker; just adding known ad servers to your "hosts" file, redirecting them to localhost, and serving up a nifty "Blocked by Tweak-XP" graphic in its place. Apparently, there's something in the code on the Wired page that is detecting that the graphics aren't loading. It might be that it's interpretted as me browsing with Lynx or something like that and hence the redirection to the "Minus-Graphics" page. I'm really not sure.
The point of the whole thing seems to be to encourage people to use browsers that are up to date and can use standards like style sheets (which would be almost any recent version of a browser). That's why I suggested that the problem might be a side effect rather than intentional: i.e. the site thinks I'm using an old browser, but in reality I'm just trying to block their ads.
Slashdot Mirror
Articles like this often get written because the author doesn't really understand the law, and rather than really trying to understand what's going on they just guess. The claims made in this article are so wildly off-base, however, that it makes me question whether the author is just trolling people.
Contrary to what the article suggests, Federal Criminal Rule 41(b) does not have a thing to do with what evidence law enforcement agencies are required to show to get a warrant, nor does it authorize the FBI (or anyone else) to get any particular type of warrant. Rule 41(b) is about VENUE; e.g., if you've already got enough evidence to get a search warrant, what judge (in what federal District) is the judge that you are supposed to present that evidence to?
You can read Rule 41(b) here: http://www.law.cornell.edu/rul...
The basic rule it sets out is that, when you want a warrant, you ask a judge located within the District where the person/property you want to search is located. There are exceptions to that basic rule, much like any other rule, because it's not always a simple matter of "X is located here." Sometimes things are located across several different Districts, sometimes they're mobile and can be easily moved to another District, etc. This is why there are currently 5 subsections to 41(b), each dealing with slightly different semi-unusual factual scenarios. At the end of the day, each exception is there for a very simple reason: to clearly and unambiguously tell federal law enforcement agencies how to identify the judge they are supposed to go to if they want to get a search warrant.
The proposal for changing Rule 41(b) is located here: http://justsecurity.org/wp-con...
What the DOJ is asking for is a scenario not currently covered by Rule 41(b). That being...what happens if you are dealing with someone you know to have committed a crime, you have enough evidence to get a search warrant, but the perpetrator of the crime is using some sort of technological means (like encryption, IP masking, etc.) to prevent you from finding the exact physical location of whatever you want to search? As of right now, it is not clear who the right judge would be to issue that warrant. The only thing the proposal would do is say that, if you can't identify the physical location of the computer to be searched (and therefore do not know which federal District it's located in), then you can go get your warrant from a judge in the District where the target of the crime was located.
Example: I'm an evil h@xx3r, and I hack some computers at the GooglePlex. I have masked my IP address, so the FBI does not know exactly where I'm at. Under current Rule 41(b), it's not clear who the right judge would be to try to get a warrant from. Under "new" Rule 41(b), they can go to a judge in California since that's where the GooglePlex is located.
That's literally the only thing this proposal would change. It says nothing about VPNs or TOR networks. It does not give the FBI (or any other law enforcement agency) the authority to hack your computer or your phone whenever they want. It doesn't even grant them the authority to do that with a warrant, because they already have the ability to do that with a warrant. It also doesn't say anything about how much evidence they have to present to get the warrant, because Rule 41(b) has nothing to do with that. The standards for search warrants are exactly the same as they have been for years; this proposal would only clarify who the right judge is to issue the warrant.
I don't know a whole heck of a lot about the "FEE" is, but if this article is representative of their work and/or legal abilities then color me unimpressed.
This is not exactly what I'd call a bad thing. IBM patents the process of running a patent extortion racket. Then they sue MS for patent infringement for trying to extort money from Red Hat and other Linux companies.
Everybody wins! (prior art not withstanding...)
The "employee" doctrine is a default position. If the issue of IP/copyrights has not been resolved as between the parties, then the court will apply default rules (e.g. if made by an employee, the employer owns it; if made by an independent contractor, then the contractor owns it unless it is a "work for hire"). If the parties choose to contract out of the default position, they are entitled to do so.
Well, in all fairness I guess I should correct that point. It's not that the installer is "horrible" per se, it's just not "newbie friendly" at all. That's not just because it's text-based, either. I'm still fairly new to Linux, and I'm certain that I don't know all the modules that need to load or all of the ins and outs of my computer hardware to tell Debian what to install. If you're a Linux guru, you're probably fine with the Debian installer. For me and others like me, I'd never get through it.
Since buying my laptop last year, I've tried out 4 different Linux distros on it for various reasons. Here are the results of each one, from worst to best.
1. Mandrake 10.0 Download Edition
Useless, as the installer just plain died. I've used Mandrake before with my desktop, where it did fine, but I could never get the installer to actually work on my laptop. Apparently, it didn't like something about my hardware configuration.
2. GamesKnoppix 3.7-0.2, LiveCD
Booting from the CD went fine, although to be fair the installer did hang the first time I tried it. Hardware detection went well except for two issues. First, it didn't detect my wireless card AT ALL. Don't ask me why, I have no idea. As my only means of connecting to the Internet back here in my office, that means I couldn't get online at all. No real biggie, since I was only really using it to test out the games on it.
Second, my mouse. I have two pointer devices on my laptop, a Logitech USB MX-Laser Mouse and a Synaptics Touchpad. The installer seemed to get the touchpad working correctly, but I couldn't use the mouse at all. Again, it's only minor, but inconvenient nonetheless. My impression is that had I actually decided to install Knoppix on my hard drive, it would have taken some work but I could have made the system fully functional.
3. SuSE Linux 9.2 Professional
After ditching Mandrake, I headed for SuSE. Installation was slightly better than GamesKnoppix. Same initial issue with the mice, but it correctly detected and installed drivers for my wireless card. It was easier to configure my wireless network with SuSE that it was with Mandrake 9.2 (which I used earlier on my desktop), but it ended up being a tug-of-war between YaST and KWifiManager. In the end, I had to scrap KWifiManager to get wireless to work at all.
The mouse was also hit or miss. Initially, it seemed to be using the same driver for both. This didn't really work, because I couldn't use the advanced features of the touchpad. I tried using the SuSE forums on the Novell website, but I never really got the problem fixed. It would fix for one boot, then it would revert back to using whatever drivers it had before. Sometimes I would boot and could only use the touchpad, sometimes the mouse would work as well. Sometimes the advanced features of the touchpad would be functional, sometimes not.
SuSE came with a "profile switcher" feature that I liked because I could use a different profile for my home network and the one at work. I was excited about this because I connect to the Internet differently at each. At home, it's exclusively wireless. This means I need to bring up ath0 on boot, but not eth0 (I found that if eth0 is active, even if not plugged in, SuSE will default to using it for the Internet and ignore ath0). Then, at work, it's exactly reversed. In practice, it wasn't as effective as it's advertised. I frequently required a reboot to bring up new services and get things configured correctly, and even then it didn't always work. Nice thought, bad execution.
I finally had to ditch SuSE when I ran into RPM Hell. I'm getting pretty fed up with this, because I experienced it with Mandrake on my desktop as well. I recall that once (when using Mandrake), I tried to install some Connect 4-esque game. In attempting to resolve dependencies, I ended up downloading about 50 Mandrake-specific RPM's of different packages, none of which would install. In the end, I had two RPM's that claimed they were dependencies of each other, but it wouldn't recognize that I had them both and so they never installed. I think I wasted about 5 hours that day. SuSE was a little better, but it still suffers from RPM Hell. So, I finally ditched it in favor of...
4. SimplyMEPIS 3.3, LiveCD -> HD Install
I wanted to use Debian to get away from the RPM crap, but I knew perfectly well I'd never make it through that horrible installer. Someone suggested using SimplyMEPIS instead, since it's basically just Debian
There's a check box on the final screen of the setup program. The box says something like "Use Firefox Start as my home page." By default, the box is checked.
Maybe a problem during the upgrade process?
How much longer until "Netcraft confirms:" that Firefox (like *BSD, Linux, Windows, Solaris, MacOS, etc.) is DYING?
Not necessarily. Covers of songs are still copyright infringement. The reason so many covers come out is because most (if not all) commercial artists pay licensing fees for ASCAP (I think, it may be another similar organization in charge of song licensing). As long as you have the license, you get to cover pretty much anything without it being copyright infringement.
Yesterday, worked fine! Today, it crashes every single time I try to start it. Arg!
I've seen some people suggest that it was actually a "copy" of something AMD already made public, and not really a true attempt at reverse engineering. But even if it was reverse engineering, so what? Of course they haven't broken any laws! There's nothing wrong with reverse engineering. How many times has /. come out to defend reverse engineering (DeCSS, PlayFair, bleem!, Connectix's Virtual Game Station)?
If the little guys can do it, the big guys can do it, too. No double standards, please.
For this dispute, Mandrake is NOT a generic word. The term generic (or the other "categories" of trademarks, i.e. Descriptive, Suggestive, Arbitrary, and Fanciful) refers to the word in the context of the product which it is used to market. So, for example, if they were selling mandrake plants, the trademark "Mandrake" would be generic and not get any trademark protection. That's why MS lost in the states with "Windows." They were selling a computer product that makes windows. That's it, so the mark is generic and they don't get any protection under US trademark law.
However, things change drastically when you move into a different product area. The word mandrake is totally meaningless in the context of magicians and comic books. The court would probably decide that the trademark is "arbitrary", meaning a word that holds an understood meaning but applied to a product that bears no relation to its meaning. Arbitrary marks qualify for maximum protection under trademark law. That's why Mandrake Linux might be in trouble here, especially if their little star logo is similar to something used by Mandrake the Magician.
"If you go to mplayer's site, you'll see that there are direct download links from the USA."
So what? How does offering the product for download violate the GPL?
Discovery is usually the most important part of a legal case, and it's especially important in this one. SCO, thus far, has offered tons of wild accusations about IP violations, misappropriation, drunken debauchery, etc. against IBM and the Linux community generally. They have offered almost nothing to back it up with, and what little has leaked out has proved to cut heavily against their court cases.
The fact that Red Hat and IBM are both filing motions to compel discovery is proof that SCO taking the same track in their legal battles. They are trying to stall because they don't want to show the code; they don't have anything to show. They're just praying that IBM will put them out of their misery and buy them out. And, by the way, one more indication for the non-legal world that, in case you didn't already know, SCO is full of shit and going to lose. Badly.
That might be a nice possibility if all ES5 had was a P2P network, but they have one other thing on the table that makes the possibility of them being in league with either the RIAA or MPAA unlikely: they offer streaming copies of movies. If you have ES5 installed, you can go to an area that allows you to click on links to movies (many of which are in theaters right now) and watch them over the net for free. I have trouble believing that either cartel would allow millions to watch movies for free like that. Remember, free movies and music online like that costs all of them $60 billion-gazillion dollars a second!
I believe the Amazon patent was for "One-click Transfer to an Alternate HTML Document."
"The worm has turned and is now packing an uzi."
Let's assume that SCO is right. Assume that the 80 lines of code from the kernal are from Unix, copied line by line. That doesn't prove their case. In order to win, they have to prove copying and that IBM did it. If they can't show that IBM is the company that copied the code, they aren't entitled to jack at trial. And I seem to remember a certain company called Caldera (you may know them better as SCO now) bragging to no end about how they were going to merge Unix and Linux into a single product. If you don't think IBM is going to harp on that like crazy at trial, then you obviously aren't paying attention.
Do the fine folks at Slashdot really have that short of memories? EMI isn't changing, give me a break. After all, we just found out that they are suing Napster's venture capital suppliers YESTERDAY. They haven't changed at all! I would be willing to bet serious money that if they actually are going to offer music online it certainly won't be in MP3 format. They aren't going to use .ogg, because it's open and communist, and we here at Slashdot know how impossible it is for open source software and standards to produce things that actually work. If they do put anything online, it's probably going to be in some worthless proprietary format (like Windows Media Format) that has a shitload of DRM on it.
"consumers will be able to make permanent copies of songs and transfer them to recordable CDs, portable music players and their computer hard drives."
Somehow, I doubt it. I'll believe it when I see it.
Pray, foul heathens! Thou hast been led astray by years of worshipping the golden calf, i.e. Linux. Your God, Bill, is an angry God, and he hath sent this virus to you as a warning. Thou art dependant upon thy God, thou art reliant upon thy God, and thou shalt not attempt to break up God's monopoly on your life.
So, give more money to God today by buying a new copy of MS SQL Server 2000, Version 2.0. It doesn't patch the vulnerability, but maybe if you continue to support God and pray for salvation he might send the "Divine Fix" your way in a few months or so.
You have been warned.
Their copyrights aren't going to ever expire anyway. Valenti & Company will just keep running back to Congress every twenty years to get longer terms. And they now have the full blessing of the Supreme Court. The Eric Eldred Act won't change that, but it wouldn't be creating the problem.
Instead, it would solve the two problems that remain in all of this. Congress granted the extention to aid a few very powerful rich people like Disney, but at the same time they extend copyrights on works that are worthless now and have been for many, many years. By using the registration/tax method, those worthless works will pass into the public domain and give someone a chance to come along and make them worth something again. Also, it solves the problem of not being able to locate the owners/heirs of certain copyrights by creating a national database of exactly who you need to get in contact with for licensing.
To paraphrase Larry, we kill two birds with one stone while keeping the Hollywood Copyright Police happy.
"One of the ReplayTV lobbyists has said that the PVR is the greatest friend that the American film producer and cable company ever had.
I say to you that the PVR is to the American film producer, the American cable company, and the American public as the Boston strangler is to the woman home alone."
Oh, wait, that was the VCR. My bad.
That's a little difficult for me to swallow.
:)
I agree, but that's what a lot of personal jurisdiction cases are about: tenuous logic and suspension of disbelief. The whole thing gets built up around the old International Shoe idea of purposeful availment, or the idea that a person has done something with the intention of getting the protections of the laws of the state. It's a complete farce, and I have a feeling every judge worth his/her salt is aware of it.
You're right that the movie studios might not be able to get him on the trade secret action (it's not, after all, really their secret to begin with), but that analysis really goes more to the merits of the case than whether or not they could get jurisdiction. I agree that the logic is tenuous, and it's certainly a closer case than many in this area, but I still think the movie studios could have sued him in CA because he posted DeCSS.
Now, as far as whether or not they should win, that's another story altogether.
This opinion really isn't very helpful. Others have pointed out that it only means the DVDCCA won't be able to sue in California, and that's correct so I'm not going to revisit the issue. However, there's a more important point that seems to be going unnoticed.
The Court went out of their way to note that it's only the DVDCCA that's being effected by the ruling; something that quite rightly should be done when the ruling is premised upon personal jurisdiction. In addition to saying that the DVDCCA probably can sue (just not in California), the opinion also says (although not quite as directly) that the movie studios probably could sue in California. And they could get not only Pavlovich, but pretty much anybody that posts DeCSS.
DVDCCA couldn't get jurisdiction because they couldn't prove that Pavlovich knew (or should have known) his actions might: 1.)hurt them, and 2.)hurt them in California. This is certainly right, as the DVDCCA didn't even exist as an entity when Pavlovich posted the code and they were never able to show that prior to the suit he had any idea where they were based. However, major movie studios in Hollywood did exist, and I doubt the Court would be willing to accept the notion that Pavlovich didn't know that Hollywood studios just happened to be located in Hollywood, CA. Had the plaintiff in the suit been a major studio (like Universal or Disney), you can bet the decision would have been the other way around.
How do sites tell if you're using an ad blocker?
Beats me. The problem doesn't really seem to be with my software. It's a fairly standard ad blocker; just adding known ad servers to your "hosts" file, redirecting them to localhost, and serving up a nifty "Blocked by Tweak-XP" graphic in its place. Apparently, there's something in the code on the Wired page that is detecting that the graphics aren't loading. It might be that it's interpretted as me browsing with Lynx or something like that and hence the redirection to the "Minus-Graphics" page. I'm really not sure.
The point of the whole thing seems to be to encourage people to use browsers that are up to date and can use standards like style sheets (which would be almost any recent version of a browser). That's why I suggested that the problem might be a side effect rather than intentional: i.e. the site thinks I'm using an old browser, but in reality I'm just trying to block their ads.