Whenever we talk about the work we do to handle violations, we say over and over again that getting compliance with the licenses is always our top priority.
This cannot be said enough, particularly amongst a crowd that discusses the latest goings-on with the corporate media lobbyists they (justifiably) hate: Unlike the major corporate media copyright holders, the FSF sues and gets license compliance which is what they're really after. You'll notice that the FSF isn't seeking to bankrupt Cisco (even while recognizing that corporations aren't people). This is a far cry from what the MPAA, RIAA, and other corporate copyright holders pursue with the public—economic domination.
And, as I've said before, violating the GPL is not like violating other licenses and here's another way in which that is the case: GPLv3 has language which makes the situation better for violators who correct their behavior. As the plain language guide to the GPL explains, under GPLv2 a violator had to beg the copyright holder to have their rights under the GPL restored because those rights vanished instantly and permanently upon license violation. Under GPLv3 section 8 violators catch a break: "if you violate the license, you'll get your rights back once you stop the violation, unless a copyright holder contacts you within 60 days. After you receive such a notice, you can have your rights fully restored if you're a first-time violator and correct the violation within 30 days.". Other free software licenses have no similarly forgiving language; it appears that under the new BSD license if one violates any of the 3 conditions listed in the license one loses permission to "[redistribute] and use [the covered program] in source and binary forms" because the violator reverts to the default state of copyright: no permission to copy, share, or modify.
There's no good reason to be nervous. Adovcating for obscurity through secrecy is never wise, not in the short term nor in the long term. In your scenario the vague threat you point to always existed, it was a matter of time before it was fixed and (so long as the software was non-free) never under anyone's control to fix except the proprietor (who may have become uncooperative). Software freedom doesn't become a bad idea because it becomes real late in the process. Software freedom is always better than non-freedom.
People will download things they wouldn't buy for previewing, casual reading, to save money, or for sampling (perhaps copying something out of the work to include elsewhere, like a fair use copy). I'm sure there are plenty of reasons for downloading something gratis without paying and I've only scratched the surface here.
Exposure alone doesn't necessarily "put food on the table" but no financial endeavor is guaranteed to result in making enough money to consistently have food (and it doesn't matter at all how much time or work one puts into any such endeavor). Sadly we all too quickly buy into the bad reasoning that results in people believing that just because one chooses to be an artist of any kind that their work is owed compensation on which they can live. If that's the society we want, one where people don't have to worry about starvation, homelessness, and other social plight, we can have that. Erecting and defending that social safety net from privatization or dismantling is perfectly worthwhile but it won't be done with copyright policy (after all, you'd offer the same safety net to all Americans, not just writers). We can afford such a thing, but it will mean radical transformation from what America spends its trillions doing instead.
Infringing the GPL means treating someone badly who is being very nice to you. Under the GPL I can engage in endless commercial activity (therefore the GPL is a commercial license), I can share the software verbatim or modified, and I can run the program all I want for any purpose. I can't legally make that software proprietary; I can't restrict my users from doing what I was allowed to do because I must pass all those freedoms on to them when I distribute (GPL2) or convey (GPL3) the software.
Infringing proprietary software licenses doesn't work the same way. The proprietor isn't treating me nicely: they're offering to restrict what I can do with the software in many ways. Some proprietors even restrict my ability to run the covered program at all. With proprietary software when someone asks me for a copy, the proprietor puts me in a position of having to choose between alienating someone who has probably done me no wrong and breaking an agreement with the proprietor. As RMS points out, this is a tough choice because we shouldn't (in general) break agreements we have made and we have no justification for treating others unkindly when they've done nothing wrong to us. So breaking the license and sharing with one's fellows is the lesser of two wrongs here.
Ultimately the answer, therefore, is to never put oneself in that situation. One does this either by having no friends or by avoiding non-free software. Using only free software may mean doing some tasks differently or not being able to do some tasks until the software improves but it won't mean treating people unkindly and unfairly, nor will it involve breaking agreements we make via copyright licenses.
"On the one hand it advocates freedom [...]" is wrong. That movement's founders at the Open Source Initiative thought that dropping the freedom talk would make their movement more amenable to business which is their target audience. That movement's developmental methodology asks people to make choices not based on establishing and preserving user's freedom but short-term value to business.
The movement which focuses on user's freedoms is the Free Software movement which predates the Open Source movement by over a decade. The FSF, whose president Richard Stallman founded the Free Software movement, writes the most popular free software and free documentation licenses.
This difference in philosophy is why, despite both OSI and FSF agreeing to give their respective imprimateurs to various licenses, they reach radically different conclusions about proprietary software. Considering an example where one is faced with choosing to use or reject a powerful, reliable proprietary program, Stallman points out why the latter is better for society in his essay "Why Open Source misses the point of Free Software":
The idea of open source is that allowing users to change and redistribute the software will make it more powerful and reliable. But this is not guaranteed. Developers of proprietary software are not necessarily incompetent. Sometimes they produce a program which is powerful and reliable, even though it does not respect the users' freedom. How will free software activists and open source enthusiasts react to that?
A pure open source enthusiast, one that is not at all influenced by the ideals of free software, will say, "I am surprised you were able to make the program work so well without using our development model, but you did. How can I get a copy?" This attitude will reward schemes that take away our freedom, leading to its loss.
The free software activist will say, "Your program is very attractive, but not at the price of my freedom. So I have to do without it. Instead I will support a project to develop a free replacement." If we value our freedom, we can act to maintain and defend it.
If you look at this from outside the business-first religion and see how this affects society, you'd see this differently. Software patents are inherently bad for all software developers but software patents pose predictable and particular disadvantage for FOSS developers because they restrict the development of software that respects user's freedoms. DRM is always anti-social; DRM gets directly into the lives of users who are willing to work with some organization (do fair business with them, help them develop their goods and services) but that organization treats the users badly by default, targetting users who have not done anything wrong.
This is not bullshit. Compare this with having to compete against a secretive spec run by a convicted abuser of monopoly; a spec which nobody else is allowed to contribute to, debate, or discuss beforehand (which is how Microsoft arrived at its previous specs for Microsoft Office formats). As undesirable as ODF is, I'd rather use ODF and either wait for more maturity or help make it better. The fact that the specs are published and can be fixed through a process available to far more people is a better than what Microsoft did before ODF.
No, it's not the same complaint. Microsoft never fully documented all the variations of format changes they have used in their binary Microsoft Office formats. Users I've worked with show that even they got their own formats wrong (Microsoft Office 97 didn't do such a hot job of reading all previous variations of files made with previous versions of what are now called Microsoft Office programs). Microsoft also never documented why they changed these formats in the first place. While some of the changes may have had good technical reasons behind them, the antitrust trials have revealed that they were also changing format details to defeat interoperability and lock in their users. I don't see the similarity to what ODF is after in intent or implementation. After all, the article shows rather high cross-implementation compatibility over 6 other implementations.
I wish news organizations were failing because the most important issues to cover were covered so poorly. How many news agencies collaborated with the US government to sell us lies about the invasion and occupation of Iraq? We saw the multi-page spread mea culpa for Jayson Blair's lies but how about the far more important lies from the front pages of The New York Times by Judith Miller (included planted stories referenced by Vice President Cheney on the Sunday morning talk shows: "There's a story in The New York Times this morning [...] and I want to attribute The Times" he said).
John Nichols reminds us "It is important to remember that, at the same time The New York Times, The Washington Post and television network news programs were cheerleading the country toward war, European print and broadcast outlets were questioning President Bush's outrageous exaggerations and outright lies.". There was and is massive failure on the part of American establishment news organizations to properly report on the most important thing a government can do—go to war. Instead of challenging the powers that be, which is a journalist's job, journalists were lining up to become "embedded" with the government and thus never got around to questioning the case for war (remember Col. Powell's lies to the UN? Remember how many news programs said that that was a "slam dunk" case for war with Iraq? A lot of them did. Too bad so few of them could muster the intellectual courage to remind us of Powell's recent lies when Powell endorsed Obama for US President).
Basic journalistic principles are left out as media consolidates. "The Market" apparently isn't doing a good job making sure the investigative journalists are finding outlets to be heard and paid for their critical muckraking. We need independent audience-funded journalism now more than ever.
Sometimes you'll have to give up functionality for freedom. The question is what is your freedom worth to you? You should value software freedom for it's own sake and work to add the missing features or help others do so on your behalf (which is why it's better to prefer a less-functional free program than a more powerful proprietary program). If you value the ability to keep your documents from others without your permission, or keep your computer under your control and not someone stranger's control, you'll soon learn to value your freedom to share and modify programs whether you're a programmer or not.
Even if you look at this from a perspective that doesn't respect freedom (always unwise) you'll be compelled to choose free software--other mandates will force you to make decisions which naturally exclude proprietary software. For example, American educational organizations which must obey FERPA can't release student information willy-nilly. So they should not choose programs they know may allow unauthorized access to sensitive records, like the kinds you'll find on many educational workers' workstations. It's not hard to see how a Javascript program running under the authority of such a worker could grant an unauthorized party access to sensitive information. This necessarily guides what software these workers should run and how that software ought to be configured; inconveniences become side issues.
MSIE is still proprietary. Like any other proprietary program we have no idea how insecure the program is, nor are we allowed to fix those bugs, or share any fixes with others. Firefox can be free software (minus the bug reporter, which might also be free software now).
Regarding "Microsoft cannot slip a "fix" through, as they have to provide enough information for admins to take a decision whether to block or allow a given patch based on security against stability (like in fewer changes).": all proprietors can slip through any code to do anything by bundling it in a patch and not fully describing the patch, or by bundling it with an unrelated patch. It's not as if admins get source code patches and thus can make an informed decision about "whether to block or allow a given patch". Secret code is secret code regardless of the perceived depth of description accompanying the patch.
Foxit Reader is proprietary, no more inspectable or modifiable than Adobe's PDF reader and therefore no more trustworthy than any other proprietary software. No proprietary software is not a good solution to the problems faced with Adobe's proprietary PDF Reader. You are merely jumping from one proprietor to another.
A reasonable recommendation is a FLOSS PDF reader such as Sumatra, Skim, or one of the other fine PDF readers recommended by PDFReaders.org.
I believe The Public Domain Enhancement Act does a good job of addressing orphaned works: it requires a $1 fee be paid no earlier than 50 years after the work was published and it creates a searchable database of works and copyright holders. Legislators should be pushed to champion this bill again (and again) to get it through Congress. One-time trying doesn't do the job (as we've all seen the corporate copyright holders show us). I concur with proponents of the PDEA that most copyright holders will not find it important enough to send in the $1 fee to extend their copyright past 50 years (plus the grace period described in the proposed bill).
Ekiga announced encryption for the 3.0 release, but then quietly buried those plans
On the Ekiga wiki under the heading "Implementation started" one finds "ZRTP (encrypted communication)" suggesting that encryption is being worked on. What exactly were you referring to?
Foxit recently had a stack based buffer overflow that could lead to account exploitation. But the worst problem is that Foxit is proprietary software; uninspectable, unfixable by even the most technical user, and Foxit is unsharable to users "on mobile devices or embedded devices including cellular phones, PDA's, and all other handheld devices". Just like with Adobe's proprietary PDF reader, the secrecy means that there's no telling how many other security problems are waiting to be exploited with Foxit. As more problems are found you must wait for the proprietor to decide to fix the problem and distribute that fix. If the program spies on you (or allows others to do so) you can only turn that off if the proprietor decides to allow you to turn that off. Foxit is not a secure program because of the restrictions it imposes on the user regardless of its current or future implementation. Sumatra PDF overcomes all of these limitations and if you don't think something in it is secure, you are allowed to fix it yourself, hire someone to fix it for you, or ask someone for a fix and then share the improved version with anyone even commercially. Sumatra PDF is licensed under the GNU General Public License version 2.
An additional layer of encryption can't be bad. If it's a good implementation with no critical bugs and backdoors, great, you've just made it harder for someone to get your data. If it isn't, it's still no worse than storing plain text.
Proprietary encryption is always a bad idea. It doesn't matter what the proprietor's claims are (including what algorithm they claim to use). The only way to verify that there are "no critical bugs and [no] backdoors" is to either verify and compile source code yourself or have a trusted party do this on your behalf. Any software to do this job is complex and all complex software has bugs. You need the freedom to inspect, modify, share, and run the program any time you want. I doubt that software-based encryption is what slows people's read or write access to modern hard drives with modern computers.
Also, as for other people getting your data it really depends on who those other people are. Threats of physical harm or imprisonment (which aren't mutually exclusive) has been very good at getting people's security credentials from them.
Now I know it's unpopular on here to go against TPB guys here on slashdot, but they could be considered accessories.
Please do tell us how you come to this conclusion with regard to Swedish copyright law. Nothing you described is a legal analysis, let alone a legal analysis that takes into account Swedish copyright law. Also, nothing you said accounts for another seizure that occurred before the conclusion of TPB's trial.
As for the analysis you did give, you don't account for how we would simply have different art. Even if we have "No Star Wars, No Star Trek, No Family Guy, No Indiana Jones, No DailyShow, No SNL" and so on, we would have other art to enjoy. Perhaps we'd have other things to do that can be exploited commercially. The question is whether Star Wars, Star Trek, Family Guy, and other shows are worth an increasingly oppressive copyright regime and remarkably uneven commercial benefit even for those that participate in that system.
In any forseeable future commercial art can still exist but the particular commercial exploitative systems we have today might not exist (perhaps replaced by others no more ethical than what we have now, perhaps replaced by others which are far more reasonable like Magnatune). In other words, arguing that the current art goes away is not a serious argument for the status quo.
I had heard Dreamweaver was something interesting but I've found Dreamweaver to be remarkably sluggish and its regular expression support was lacking which surprised and aggravated me (given how many excellent non-copylefted free software regular expression libraries there are). Is most of Dreamweaver written in some interpreted language like Javascript? Also, it made no sense to me why I couldn't use any means of access, like SFTP, for both "local" and "remote" site definitions (or whatever they're called). I didn't get why I couldn't have as many site definitions as I wished and call them all what I wished. I'd much prefer to not have to export something via SMB or whatever protocol MacOS X allows (and last I looked it didn't let you use SFTP via the Finder's Go->Connect to Server... panel) just so one could edit a website synchronizing between two networked locations (one for testing, one for production). Dreamweaver only allowed one site definition ("remote" if I recall correctly) to use SFTP, not both "local" and "remote" and this seemed silly to me. Perhaps I missed a configuration detail but overall I was unimpressed and I ended up using SSI with far better free software text editors to edit the mostly static (X)HTML+CSS websites which are common in academia (meeting site needs and practically addressing website updater laborers). Then, from an admin perspective, knowing it came from Adobe (which is apparently quite slow with their security patches and has annoying licensing), is proprietary, and costly I found it significantly less than practical or attractive. My experience with Dreamweaver was simply not that good. Comparing Dreamweaver and Drupal, on the other hand, seems silly in an entirely different way as there is so much uncommon ground between what they can accomplish, and Drupal has plenty of annoyances all its own.
I'll bet you're right: there's simply too much source code in a modern-day free software OS for any one user to inspect it all, much less change it to suit their needs. But to jump from this perfectly reasonable conclusion to rejecting the freedoms of free software is illogical, ignores the lessons of history, and is therefore most unwise.
You're always better off with the freedoms of free software even if you don't leverage all of those freedoms yourself. This is one of the great differences between the "free software" movement and the "open source" movement: software freedom (what open source was designed to not talk about) is a good unto itself. I don't buy that the advantages of the open source development methodology are as uniform as I'd like because I know of plenty of programs licensed under OSI-approved licenses which are inferior to their proprietary alternatives or are simply poorly written in a way you can see without comparing to any other program. Instead I choose the software that respects my software freedom, even if it's not the most reliable or powerful, because I know if I need to inspect or improve that program myself, hire someone else to help me, or ask for help from the community I have the permission to do that. Proprietary software takes those possibilities off the table and leaves me to negotiate with a monopolist. Some proprietary software even denies me the freedom to run the program.
I'm not interested in "OSS" and I've demonstrated my willingness to pay money for my software freedom if need be (unlike some who want free-as-in-cost software, I'm for commercial software development and distribution). I'm interested in the freedom which lets me control my computer to the limits of my efforts, and the freedom to share any improvements I want to share (even commercially). I'm interested in building and defending the community that comes from valuing software freedom for its own sake, so I'm a free software activist.
How would I know if the company you work for is not your own company? Incorporation is easy to do and consultancies exist. Just more reason for us not to assume we understand the entire situation for every individual even if we understand the situation for most people.
It is good to boycott all the RIAA labels and artists to help send the right message. But we don't know what the grandparent poster really buys. But we do know that even if the grandparent poster is being hypocritical here they don't have anywhere near the publicity or market power Metallica does. It isn't news to learn that some otherwise unknown/. poster isn't acting in accordance with their stated dislike. It's quite a convenient PR blow to learn that a long-standing opponent of file sharing has likely committed copyright infringement. That admission poses a threat to the image record labels try to perpetuate when they have artists like Ulrich tell their tales of woe to the US Congress, the public, or continue to engage in propagandistic hyperbole like calling file sharers "pirates".
I'd rather give my money to distributors that treat their customers and the artists well. So I do just that.
So, my accessment is that I was freely 'given' the Album directly from Lars.
I doubt that's a correct assessment. Artists who sign with major labels often don't own the songs they will write or the recorded performances they will make during the time they're under contract. Without knowing the particulars of Ulrich's contract I can't be absolutely certain what legitimate copyright claim he has on "Death Magnetic". But there's a good chance Ulrich isn't a copyright holder on that album. Which means that contrary to the/. and Torrentfreak headline, this album is likely not "his own album" it's Metallica's label's album. And Ulrich cannot license works on which he isn't a copyright holder. So Ulrich is not licensed to upload a copy of those recorded performances to you or anyone else.
Jumping from one uninspectable, unmodifiable proprietary PDF reader to another is not wise. Better to run more free software, not less. Pick a free software PDF reader for all of your computers so you can see what it will do, change it to meet your needs, and share your improvements with the community. Better still, run a free software OS so you can enjoy the benefits of free software for all of your programs not just a PDF reader.
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If compensation was "what the lawsuit was really about" why bother with license compliance at all? Please justify the logic behind your post.
This cannot be said enough, particularly amongst a crowd that discusses the latest goings-on with the corporate media lobbyists they (justifiably) hate: Unlike the major corporate media copyright holders, the FSF sues and gets license compliance which is what they're really after. You'll notice that the FSF isn't seeking to bankrupt Cisco (even while recognizing that corporations aren't people). This is a far cry from what the MPAA, RIAA, and other corporate copyright holders pursue with the public—economic domination.
And, as I've said before, violating the GPL is not like violating other licenses and here's another way in which that is the case: GPLv3 has language which makes the situation better for violators who correct their behavior. As the plain language guide to the GPL explains, under GPLv2 a violator had to beg the copyright holder to have their rights under the GPL restored because those rights vanished instantly and permanently upon license violation. Under GPLv3 section 8 violators catch a break: "if you violate the license, you'll get your rights back once you stop the violation, unless a copyright holder contacts you within 60 days. After you receive such a notice, you can have your rights fully restored if you're a first-time violator and correct the violation within 30 days.". Other free software licenses have no similarly forgiving language; it appears that under the new BSD license if one violates any of the 3 conditions listed in the license one loses permission to "[redistribute] and use [the covered program] in source and binary forms" because the violator reverts to the default state of copyright: no permission to copy, share, or modify.
There's no good reason to be nervous. Adovcating for obscurity through secrecy is never wise, not in the short term nor in the long term. In your scenario the vague threat you point to always existed, it was a matter of time before it was fixed and (so long as the software was non-free) never under anyone's control to fix except the proprietor (who may have become uncooperative). Software freedom doesn't become a bad idea because it becomes real late in the process. Software freedom is always better than non-freedom.
People will download things they wouldn't buy for previewing, casual reading, to save money, or for sampling (perhaps copying something out of the work to include elsewhere, like a fair use copy). I'm sure there are plenty of reasons for downloading something gratis without paying and I've only scratched the surface here.
Exposure alone doesn't necessarily "put food on the table" but no financial endeavor is guaranteed to result in making enough money to consistently have food (and it doesn't matter at all how much time or work one puts into any such endeavor). Sadly we all too quickly buy into the bad reasoning that results in people believing that just because one chooses to be an artist of any kind that their work is owed compensation on which they can live. If that's the society we want, one where people don't have to worry about starvation, homelessness, and other social plight, we can have that. Erecting and defending that social safety net from privatization or dismantling is perfectly worthwhile but it won't be done with copyright policy (after all, you'd offer the same safety net to all Americans, not just writers). We can afford such a thing, but it will mean radical transformation from what America spends its trillions doing instead.
Infringing the GPL means treating someone badly who is being very nice to you. Under the GPL I can engage in endless commercial activity (therefore the GPL is a commercial license), I can share the software verbatim or modified, and I can run the program all I want for any purpose. I can't legally make that software proprietary; I can't restrict my users from doing what I was allowed to do because I must pass all those freedoms on to them when I distribute (GPL2) or convey (GPL3) the software.
Infringing proprietary software licenses doesn't work the same way. The proprietor isn't treating me nicely: they're offering to restrict what I can do with the software in many ways. Some proprietors even restrict my ability to run the covered program at all. With proprietary software when someone asks me for a copy, the proprietor puts me in a position of having to choose between alienating someone who has probably done me no wrong and breaking an agreement with the proprietor. As RMS points out, this is a tough choice because we shouldn't (in general) break agreements we have made and we have no justification for treating others unkindly when they've done nothing wrong to us. So breaking the license and sharing with one's fellows is the lesser of two wrongs here.
Ultimately the answer, therefore, is to never put oneself in that situation. One does this either by having no friends or by avoiding non-free software. Using only free software may mean doing some tasks differently or not being able to do some tasks until the software improves but it won't mean treating people unkindly and unfairly, nor will it involve breaking agreements we make via copyright licenses.
"On the one hand it advocates freedom [...]" is wrong. That movement's founders at the Open Source Initiative thought that dropping the freedom talk would make their movement more amenable to business which is their target audience. That movement's developmental methodology asks people to make choices not based on establishing and preserving user's freedom but short-term value to business.
The movement which focuses on user's freedoms is the Free Software movement which predates the Open Source movement by over a decade. The FSF, whose president Richard Stallman founded the Free Software movement, writes the most popular free software and free documentation licenses.
This difference in philosophy is why, despite both OSI and FSF agreeing to give their respective imprimateurs to various licenses, they reach radically different conclusions about proprietary software. Considering an example where one is faced with choosing to use or reject a powerful, reliable proprietary program, Stallman points out why the latter is better for society in his essay "Why Open Source misses the point of Free Software":
If you look at this from outside the business-first religion and see how this affects society, you'd see this differently. Software patents are inherently bad for all software developers but software patents pose predictable and particular disadvantage for FOSS developers because they restrict the development of software that respects user's freedoms. DRM is always anti-social; DRM gets directly into the lives of users who are willing to work with some organization (do fair business with them, help them develop their goods and services) but that organization treats the users badly by default, targetting users who have not done anything wrong.
This is not bullshit. Compare this with having to compete against a secretive spec run by a convicted abuser of monopoly; a spec which nobody else is allowed to contribute to, debate, or discuss beforehand (which is how Microsoft arrived at its previous specs for Microsoft Office formats). As undesirable as ODF is, I'd rather use ODF and either wait for more maturity or help make it better. The fact that the specs are published and can be fixed through a process available to far more people is a better than what Microsoft did before ODF.
No, it's not the same complaint. Microsoft never fully documented all the variations of format changes they have used in their binary Microsoft Office formats. Users I've worked with show that even they got their own formats wrong (Microsoft Office 97 didn't do such a hot job of reading all previous variations of files made with previous versions of what are now called Microsoft Office programs). Microsoft also never documented why they changed these formats in the first place. While some of the changes may have had good technical reasons behind them, the antitrust trials have revealed that they were also changing format details to defeat interoperability and lock in their users. I don't see the similarity to what ODF is after in intent or implementation. After all, the article shows rather high cross-implementation compatibility over 6 other implementations.
I wish news organizations were failing because the most important issues to cover were covered so poorly. How many news agencies collaborated with the US government to sell us lies about the invasion and occupation of Iraq? We saw the multi-page spread mea culpa for Jayson Blair's lies but how about the far more important lies from the front pages of The New York Times by Judith Miller (included planted stories referenced by Vice President Cheney on the Sunday morning talk shows: "There's a story in The New York Times this morning [...] and I want to attribute The Times" he said).
John Nichols reminds us "It is important to remember that, at the same time The New York Times, The Washington Post and television network news programs were cheerleading the country toward war, European print and broadcast outlets were questioning President Bush's outrageous exaggerations and outright lies.". There was and is massive failure on the part of American establishment news organizations to properly report on the most important thing a government can do—go to war. Instead of challenging the powers that be, which is a journalist's job, journalists were lining up to become "embedded" with the government and thus never got around to questioning the case for war (remember Col. Powell's lies to the UN? Remember how many news programs said that that was a "slam dunk" case for war with Iraq? A lot of them did. Too bad so few of them could muster the intellectual courage to remind us of Powell's recent lies when Powell endorsed Obama for US President).
Basic journalistic principles are left out as media consolidates. "The Market" apparently isn't doing a good job making sure the investigative journalists are finding outlets to be heard and paid for their critical muckraking. We need independent audience-funded journalism now more than ever.
Sometimes you'll have to give up functionality for freedom. The question is what is your freedom worth to you? You should value software freedom for it's own sake and work to add the missing features or help others do so on your behalf (which is why it's better to prefer a less-functional free program than a more powerful proprietary program). If you value the ability to keep your documents from others without your permission, or keep your computer under your control and not someone stranger's control, you'll soon learn to value your freedom to share and modify programs whether you're a programmer or not.
Even if you look at this from a perspective that doesn't respect freedom (always unwise) you'll be compelled to choose free software--other mandates will force you to make decisions which naturally exclude proprietary software. For example, American educational organizations which must obey FERPA can't release student information willy-nilly. So they should not choose programs they know may allow unauthorized access to sensitive records, like the kinds you'll find on many educational workers' workstations. It's not hard to see how a Javascript program running under the authority of such a worker could grant an unauthorized party access to sensitive information. This necessarily guides what software these workers should run and how that software ought to be configured; inconveniences become side issues.
MSIE is still proprietary. Like any other proprietary program we have no idea how insecure the program is, nor are we allowed to fix those bugs, or share any fixes with others. Firefox can be free software (minus the bug reporter, which might also be free software now).
Regarding "Microsoft cannot slip a "fix" through, as they have to provide enough information for admins to take a decision whether to block or allow a given patch based on security against stability (like in fewer changes).": all proprietors can slip through any code to do anything by bundling it in a patch and not fully describing the patch, or by bundling it with an unrelated patch. It's not as if admins get source code patches and thus can make an informed decision about "whether to block or allow a given patch". Secret code is secret code regardless of the perceived depth of description accompanying the patch.
Foxit Reader is proprietary, no more inspectable or modifiable than Adobe's PDF reader and therefore no more trustworthy than any other proprietary software. No proprietary software is not a good solution to the problems faced with Adobe's proprietary PDF Reader. You are merely jumping from one proprietor to another.
A reasonable recommendation is a FLOSS PDF reader such as Sumatra, Skim, or one of the other fine PDF readers recommended by PDFReaders.org.
I believe The Public Domain Enhancement Act does a good job of addressing orphaned works: it requires a $1 fee be paid no earlier than 50 years after the work was published and it creates a searchable database of works and copyright holders. Legislators should be pushed to champion this bill again (and again) to get it through Congress. One-time trying doesn't do the job (as we've all seen the corporate copyright holders show us). I concur with proponents of the PDEA that most copyright holders will not find it important enough to send in the $1 fee to extend their copyright past 50 years (plus the grace period described in the proposed bill).
On the Ekiga wiki under the heading "Implementation started" one finds "ZRTP (encrypted communication)" suggesting that encryption is being worked on. What exactly were you referring to?
The PRS doesn't control all recordings, regardless of the expansion of their acronym.
Foxit recently had a stack based buffer overflow that could lead to account exploitation. But the worst problem is that Foxit is proprietary software; uninspectable, unfixable by even the most technical user, and Foxit is unsharable to users "on mobile devices or embedded devices including cellular phones, PDA's, and all other handheld devices". Just like with Adobe's proprietary PDF reader, the secrecy means that there's no telling how many other security problems are waiting to be exploited with Foxit. As more problems are found you must wait for the proprietor to decide to fix the problem and distribute that fix. If the program spies on you (or allows others to do so) you can only turn that off if the proprietor decides to allow you to turn that off. Foxit is not a secure program because of the restrictions it imposes on the user regardless of its current or future implementation. Sumatra PDF overcomes all of these limitations and if you don't think something in it is secure, you are allowed to fix it yourself, hire someone to fix it for you, or ask someone for a fix and then share the improved version with anyone even commercially. Sumatra PDF is licensed under the GNU General Public License version 2.
Proprietary encryption is always a bad idea. It doesn't matter what the proprietor's claims are (including what algorithm they claim to use). The only way to verify that there are "no critical bugs and [no] backdoors" is to either verify and compile source code yourself or have a trusted party do this on your behalf. Any software to do this job is complex and all complex software has bugs. You need the freedom to inspect, modify, share, and run the program any time you want. I doubt that software-based encryption is what slows people's read or write access to modern hard drives with modern computers.
Also, as for other people getting your data it really depends on who those other people are. Threats of physical harm or imprisonment (which aren't mutually exclusive) has been very good at getting people's security credentials from them.
Please do tell us how you come to this conclusion with regard to Swedish copyright law. Nothing you described is a legal analysis, let alone a legal analysis that takes into account Swedish copyright law. Also, nothing you said accounts for another seizure that occurred before the conclusion of TPB's trial.
As for the analysis you did give, you don't account for how we would simply have different art. Even if we have "No Star Wars, No Star Trek, No Family Guy, No Indiana Jones, No DailyShow, No SNL" and so on, we would have other art to enjoy. Perhaps we'd have other things to do that can be exploited commercially. The question is whether Star Wars, Star Trek, Family Guy, and other shows are worth an increasingly oppressive copyright regime and remarkably uneven commercial benefit even for those that participate in that system.
In any forseeable future commercial art can still exist but the particular commercial exploitative systems we have today might not exist (perhaps replaced by others no more ethical than what we have now, perhaps replaced by others which are far more reasonable like Magnatune). In other words, arguing that the current art goes away is not a serious argument for the status quo.
I had heard Dreamweaver was something interesting but I've found Dreamweaver to be remarkably sluggish and its regular expression support was lacking which surprised and aggravated me (given how many excellent non-copylefted free software regular expression libraries there are). Is most of Dreamweaver written in some interpreted language like Javascript? Also, it made no sense to me why I couldn't use any means of access, like SFTP, for both "local" and "remote" site definitions (or whatever they're called). I didn't get why I couldn't have as many site definitions as I wished and call them all what I wished. I'd much prefer to not have to export something via SMB or whatever protocol MacOS X allows (and last I looked it didn't let you use SFTP via the Finder's Go->Connect to Server... panel) just so one could edit a website synchronizing between two networked locations (one for testing, one for production). Dreamweaver only allowed one site definition ("remote" if I recall correctly) to use SFTP, not both "local" and "remote" and this seemed silly to me. Perhaps I missed a configuration detail but overall I was unimpressed and I ended up using SSI with far better free software text editors to edit the mostly static (X)HTML+CSS websites which are common in academia (meeting site needs and practically addressing website updater laborers). Then, from an admin perspective, knowing it came from Adobe (which is apparently quite slow with their security patches and has annoying licensing), is proprietary, and costly I found it significantly less than practical or attractive. My experience with Dreamweaver was simply not that good. Comparing Dreamweaver and Drupal, on the other hand, seems silly in an entirely different way as there is so much uncommon ground between what they can accomplish, and Drupal has plenty of annoyances all its own.
I'll bet you're right: there's simply too much source code in a modern-day free software OS for any one user to inspect it all, much less change it to suit their needs. But to jump from this perfectly reasonable conclusion to rejecting the freedoms of free software is illogical, ignores the lessons of history, and is therefore most unwise.
You're always better off with the freedoms of free software even if you don't leverage all of those freedoms yourself. This is one of the great differences between the "free software" movement and the "open source" movement: software freedom (what open source was designed to not talk about) is a good unto itself. I don't buy that the advantages of the open source development methodology are as uniform as I'd like because I know of plenty of programs licensed under OSI-approved licenses which are inferior to their proprietary alternatives or are simply poorly written in a way you can see without comparing to any other program. Instead I choose the software that respects my software freedom, even if it's not the most reliable or powerful, because I know if I need to inspect or improve that program myself, hire someone else to help me, or ask for help from the community I have the permission to do that. Proprietary software takes those possibilities off the table and leaves me to negotiate with a monopolist. Some proprietary software even denies me the freedom to run the program.
I'm not interested in "OSS" and I've demonstrated my willingness to pay money for my software freedom if need be (unlike some who want free-as-in-cost software, I'm for commercial software development and distribution). I'm interested in the freedom which lets me control my computer to the limits of my efforts, and the freedom to share any improvements I want to share (even commercially). I'm interested in building and defending the community that comes from valuing software freedom for its own sake, so I'm a free software activist.
How would I know if the company you work for is not your own company? Incorporation is easy to do and consultancies exist. Just more reason for us not to assume we understand the entire situation for every individual even if we understand the situation for most people.
I oppose the RIAA's efforts because I don't think they approach copyright infringement wisely or in a manner that is socially defensible. I will not assist the RIAA in propagating the language of "piracy" nor conflating copyright infringement with theft.
It is good to boycott all the RIAA labels and artists to help send the right message. But we don't know what the grandparent poster really buys. But we do know that even if the grandparent poster is being hypocritical here they don't have anywhere near the publicity or market power Metallica does. It isn't news to learn that some otherwise unknown /. poster isn't acting in accordance with their stated dislike. It's quite a convenient PR blow to learn that a long-standing opponent of file sharing has likely committed copyright infringement. That admission poses a threat to the image record labels try to perpetuate when they have artists like Ulrich tell their tales of woe to the US Congress, the public, or continue to engage in propagandistic hyperbole like calling file sharers "pirates".
I'd rather give my money to distributors that treat their customers and the artists well. So I do just that.
I doubt that's a correct assessment. Artists who sign with major labels often don't own the songs they will write or the recorded performances they will make during the time they're under contract. Without knowing the particulars of Ulrich's contract I can't be absolutely certain what legitimate copyright claim he has on "Death Magnetic". But there's a good chance Ulrich isn't a copyright holder on that album. Which means that contrary to the /. and Torrentfreak headline, this album is likely not "his own album" it's Metallica's label's album. And Ulrich cannot license works on which he isn't a copyright holder. So Ulrich is not licensed to upload a copy of those recorded performances to you or anyone else.
Jumping from one uninspectable, unmodifiable proprietary PDF reader to another is not wise. Better to run more free software, not less. Pick a free software PDF reader for all of your computers so you can see what it will do, change it to meet your needs, and share your improvements with the community. Better still, run a free software OS so you can enjoy the benefits of free software for all of your programs not just a PDF reader.