The corporate studios don't sign that many artists and (according to a Chicago Tribune article I read some years ago) a lot of the artists they sign are indebted to the label for many albums. So long before the listener gets any chance to hear the artist, the label has them under their thumb. The RIAA's legal antics against listeners (often bringing cases before researching evidence against them) is covered here on/.. I'm left to wonder why I should write anyone in support of making it easier to help these labels by making it more likely that their music will be played.
I'm left to think that we should let them raise the rates as high as they think the market will bear. I'd rather work with artists who license their recordings to me so that I may non-commercially share them verbatim with others in any medium. I stopped listening to radio (online and over the air) because what I was hearing is only the "popular music that brings mainstream listeners" (in other words, as far as I can hear that's what they're playing now before any new fee schedule). This is not what I want to hear. Often the online stations I heard were merely retransmissions of what was being played over the air.
Contrary to what FreePress.net is claiming in their emails, I don't believe this means the end of Internet radio. I think it means the end of RIAA tracks on Internet radio and it opens the way for unsigned artists and tracks from labels that don't screw the artist (like Magnatune).
With rare exception, reliable and powerful proprietary software cannot be freed. Free software can be made more reliable and powerful. Thus your priorities should be reversed; help make free software better and we can secure our freedom without giving up power and reliability. The open source movement never teaches you to value software freedom, so you're led to believe that technical proficiency alone should be prioritized. This is one of the reasons why I'm not a member of that movement and I don't advocate on its behalf.
I generally think Microsoft provides solid products and I rarely stumble upon problems with aged products.
Regardless of age, proprietary software doesn't respect my freedom to be run it, inspect it, share it, or modify it. I don't inspect or modify most of my software but I trust others to do this work. Therefore I need to make sure they too have these freedoms so that I may benefit from their work. Thus, I need to make sure my software is free (presently that means running a free software OS with only free software installed on it; in the future a free BIOS will be a part of my system). No matter how powerful or reliable a proprietary program is, without these freedoms it simply costs too much.
What, then, is the point of maintaining a phone number and email address if one isn't interested in feedback? Why should someone's civil rights take a back seat to your assumption/.ers will be pointless?
Quite right, and an excellent opportunity for those who care about independent music and musicians to show their support by playing the stuff you won't hear on corporate radio. This is why I remain optimistic about Internet radio; it will change for those who can't afford/won't pay the rates for RIAA tracks. These ridiculously high rates could end up serving the interests of unsigned musicians in a way that the RIAA only talks about. This also means good things for those who want to play more non-music programming as the new rate schedule will open up time in their schedule. When the new fee schedule kicks in, smaller broadcasters will have a tough programming decisions to make.
Freedom matters.
on
AMD's New DRM
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· Score: 2, Interesting
Then/. readers should be taught the real value of "the freedom of choice" and myths about how the market will cater to our interests as users if there were fewer restrictions on it. Your freedom to control your computer as you see fit simply isn't adequately addressed by either. Richard Stallman reminds us in his talk about free software from Zagreb on 9 March 2006:
It's a mistake to equate freedom to "the freedom of choice". Freedom is something much bigger than having a choice between a few specific options. Freedom means having control of your own life. When people try to analyse freedom by reducing it to the freedom of choice, they've already thrown away nearly all of it and what's left is such a small fraction of real freedom, that they can easily prove it doesn't really matter very much. So that term is very often the first step in the fallacious argument that freedom is not important.
To be able to choose between proprietary software packages is to be able to choose your master. Freedom means not having a master.
We all accept that new OS=you need to upgrade your system.
Speak for yourself, I've been running GNU/Linux OSes and keeping up with upgrades for years on the same dual Pentium III 500MHz 768MB RAM system I built roughly a decade ago. The hardware is not impressive by today's standards, but it still works so I keep using it. Some things take a while (audio editing large audio files in Audacity, for instance), but this machine can do plenty at a perfectly reasonable clip: read/write email, browse the web, burn CD/DVDs, and watch videos (with VLC or Flash, if I installed a Flash player). I get perfectly functional OSes, I get my software freedom, and I can do what I believe most people want to do most of the time with their home computers.
That's quite a heavy qualification when ordinary users buying a brand new computer will expect the OS that comes with it to run at least as quickly as their previous computer did running Microsoft Windows XP. By all the standards thrown in the face of free software activists (all the while ignoring software freedom), Vista simply isn't worth it. These users won't know or care what "well supported hardware" is, they'll make the logical assumption that whatever they were sold should be "well supported".
On a new Compaq machine straight from Best Buy (purchased by someone else, not me), Microsoft Windows Vista felt slower to me in all respects: it took much longer to boot up, took far more time to do things than I could do on free software OSes, and it had far higher resource requirements than other operating systems (again, in particular free software OSes). I checked email, browsed the web, and watched a few videos with the machine and the machine was consistently sluggish to do everything. The UI (left on the default settings, of course) asked me if I really wanted to start some program which was constantly annoying. Installing a Linksys wireless card (WMP54G) was a huge hassle and ultimately required going back to the store to buy another wireless device that would work out of the box (I don't remember the make or model, but it was a USB-based device).
And all of this to lose one's software freedom in the process? No thanks.
First, there's no need to talk to other people here like that. We can all participate in a mutually interesting and informative conversation without the namecalling.
How long do you think it will be until Turnitin's database is published (even inadvertantly) and your papers are indexed by the world's search engines, giving your future employers something new to look at? Do you think other high school students are prepared for that kind of scrutiny?
While I'm sure grading a lot of papers is difficult work, I wonder if there aren't some adverse privacy consequences to a service like TurnItIn that outweigh the alleged advantages.
And that is an ahistorical non sequitur. Neither my age nor the first distribution date of NetWare matter. The freedoms to inspect, share, modify, and run the software anytime for any reason are necessary freedoms in and of themselves, particularly for assessing security and reaching the conclusion that you did about NetWare. So long as you use proprietary software, you can't fully assess the security of your software.
Incidentally, according to Wikipedia, "the first versions of NetWare were designed" in 1983. Even if we take that year to be the first year of distribution, NetWare started the same year as the GNU Project was first announced.
[NetWare] It's secure by design, it's secure by default, it's just secure.
NetWare is proprietary (perhaps built on some FLOSS, but with proprietary software mixed in) so you can't completely know how well the implementation you're running follows a design you favor. No proprietary software's security can be verified as completely as FLOSS. It's never wise to conclude that any proprietary software is "secure by default".
It's perfectly reasonable to make an open-source Office clone, but if it's a second-rate clone, then people are going to get the impression from it that OSS is always second-rate.
Microsoft Word doesn't handle large documents well. I find Gnumeric does many things better than Microsoft Excel. For years I've seen Microsoft Windows users needing to reboot their machines a lot for things I don't think they should have to. In Microsoft Windows 2000, I saw an app running with non-admin privileges crash the OS. Shall I conclude that proprietary software is always second-rate?
Overgeneralization is used against minorities to keep them down. It's sad to see that coming from a teacher. Better and more accurate to recognize that some proprietary software is reliable and powerful and some is not, and the same is true for FLOSS. For me, what separates OpenOffice.org from Microsoft Office is that OpenOffice.org gives me software freedom so it can be improved by anyone willing to take the time to do the work. Microsoft Office is proprietary and puts me into a monopoly for support. A long time ago I posted on/. about Microsoft's reaction to fixing bugs I spotted.
Today Gosling says the "immense amount of testing and design work" is not thought to be "anywhere near as good as having thousands of talented eyeballs just stare at it and think about it", but he didn't always say this and Sun didn't always license Java software in line with this sentiment. Gosling's claim might be true, but I think the freedom Sun's relicensing gives users is far more significant. Also important for the free software community is the lesson of free software pressure.
Not long ago, Gosling poo-pooed the idea of turning Java into an "open source project": "If Java turned into an open source project, the enterprise development community would go screaming into the hills.". In the same article, author Glen Kunene described Gosling as being "ambivalent about Apache's Harmony".
Taking all of these quotes and descriptions at face value, assuming nobody was lying, what explains the change in view? I believe that the competitive pressure created by free software Java implementations pushed Sun to stay relevant. As the free software Java implementations became more functional and more likely to replace Sun's Java software, Sun saw they could free their implementation and continue to compete. In so doing, Sun also became a top contributor to the free software community and got free software luminaries (Stallman and Eben Moglen) to speak in support of their relicensing.
Then this is no different than any other irrational horror story; we can point blame at both the teller and believer of the story, but we're better off educating people instead. A good educational campaign would ask these managers if they believe every report they write with Microsoft Office is co-owned by Microsoft, thus giving Microsoft the power to change or override anything they say in the report. Or if their proprietary OS from Apple compels them to get Apple's approval before distributing any file they make with it. Nobody actually behaves as if these things are true so it's a very hard argument to make that anyone believes these things to be true.
The manager's "fear" is obviously irrational and their issues don't seem to translate to the real problems of uninspectable, unmodifiable, and unsharable software which they have entrusted to run their business. Perhaps handing their business over to unaccountable monopolists (as all software proprietors are) should be more disturbing to them than software they can shape to meet their needs.
People are willing to buy copies of C-SPAN recordings, license them for commercial reuse, and countless programs air edited snippets of C-SPAN footage. So the works are in themselves valuable.
The government's unwillingness to make and distribute these recordings themselves means that the recordings aren't necessarily in the public domain and it also means that Americans have far less democratic control over the creation and dissemination of the recordings. It doesn't take much imagination to see how these could be reasons for outsourcing the work to a third party, such as C-SPAN.
Using an open source tool and modifying it are two deeply different things. No FOSS tool that I know of limits what you can do with its output. OS X is compiled with GCC, but it's a commercial OS, for instance.
I believe it's a function of copyright law, not free software particularly, that gives you copyright power over the work you make. In other words, what you're saying is true but the underlying principle has nothing to do with the GNU Compiler Collection being free software; that same principle applies to proprietary software as well. Apple could compile their OS with a proprietary compiler with no loss in copyright power. I'd imagine that Apple developers choose GCC for the freedoms GCC gives them (NeXT modified GCC to suit their needs), GCC's excellent developers, and GCC's technical merit.
The unusual situation with Bison has been explained elsewhere in this thread and Richard Stallman addressed this issue in one of his talks. I'd be wary of embedded DRM in saved files, but I don't think most computer users have that problem to face right now.
Finally, I think you meant to say "proprietary" and not "commercial". FOSS is commercial software when it is developed as a business activity. What differentiates free software from proprietary software is that users have freedoms with free software they don't get with proprietary software.
We all know that C-SPAN gets money from cable subscribers (which is why C-SPAN stumps for "cable internet"), not direct government payout, but there's more to it then that. Carl Malamud says that C-SPAN gets tax relief. So someone pays for the things C-SPAN would have to pay for with taxes. Perhaps this means city and state funds are paying for C-SPAN's water, waste treatment, and roads that service C-SPAN's studios. To find out how powerful this is in another context, that of Wal-Mart, I recommend you watch Wal-Mart: The High Cost of Low Price. Tax incentives help businesses decide where to set up shop; towns know this, so they give far more than they should in the hope the business will go there and won't screw them later.
C-SPAN saves considerably because they don't have the same costs as other broadcast firms when they set up an on-location shoot. Here the taxpayer helps C-SPAN again by paying for some of the things C-SPAN uses: cameras in the House and Senate, and building renovations to add more space for media, to name a couple.
C-SPAN is also making money by claiming copyright on the things it records, which allows to commercially license that footage. This copyright power also comes at a price for the public: C-SPAN bullies people out of using this footage without commercially licensing it. If there were no copyright on these works at all, C-SPAN wouldn't be have this bullying power.
So, it seems to me that Malamud's claim is not "flat out, one-hundred-percent, plain wrong" nor do you provide any evidence to refute what he says. Not receiving government funding doesn't acknowledge the myriad other ways in which the public helps C-SPAN pay their bills. Also, it's not a good idea to take a corporation's word at face value because sometimes businesses lie.
I'm not against paying for C-SPAN, but I don't want to pay into a private tyranny. I want them to work for me creating, recording, archiving, and distributing public affairs works that I can do as I like with later. I think this meets all the needs of everyone involved: they get a living wage doing what they do now, I get programming I want with no strings attached.
Finally, the question of who pays for C-SPAN is almost a distraction from a more important question: should C-SPAN be able to assert a copyright on these recordings in the first place? How much of a "public service" is it if we cable subscribers and taxpayers have to comply with restrictive licensing on top of paying C-SPAN's bills? Should we tolerate corporate welfare? Is it in the public's interest when a government official speaks in their official capacity on a copyrighted show?
It should, but we'll need to see the exact license C-SPAN picks to be sure. According to what C-SPAN promises, under the new license C-SPAN "will allow non-commercial copying, sharing, and posting of C-SPAN video on the Internet, with attribution" (quoted from their press release). If Metavid distributes the covered C-SPAN footage in compliance with these terms, Metavid will not get any more copyright harassment from C-SPAN.
C-SPAN is a publicly-supported charity. Your only shareholders are the American public. Your donors received considerable tax relief in making donations to you. You and your staff were well paid for your excellent work. Congressional hearings are of strikingly important public value, and aggressive moves to prevent any fair use of the material is double-dipping on your part. For C-SPAN and for the American public record, the right thing to do is to release all of that material back into the public domain where it belongs.
C-SPAN could regularly upload broadcast-quality raw footage to The Internet Archive (archive.org). Archive.org could transcode the material into a variety of formats (including Ogg Vorbis+Theora which they're now doing for videos) and we can all enjoy the works we're paying for through tax relief and cable TV subscription. Certainly C-SPAN is taking a step in the right direction, but if this footage should be in the public domain, a "liberal" copyright license (as C-SPAN puts it) isn't good enough.
So long as we, the American public, are covering C-SPAN's bills (more than that, actually, as Malamud points out in his letter), we should democratically decide what to do with C-SPAN's programming—all of it, not just the Congressional hearings and floor footage. Perhaps this could take the form of C-SPAN (or their parent corporation) working for hire, thus giving us the power of copyright in all of those works. We could then decide to forgo that power, place all of their work into the public domain, and relieve ourselves of ever having to read another embarrassing legalistic threat when anyone uses C-SPAN footage for any purpose (including commercial use). But certainly what C-SPAN is proposing simply doesn't go far enough down the path they're headed on.
Not only is there no real punishment for these corporations, the linked article is itself an indicator of a deeper problem: it is carefully written so as to avoid painting any of the businesses as illegal actors where adequate, democratically-arrived-at remedies ought to be applied. There is no simple and clear declaration akin to what one/. poster wrote: "The recording companies are illegally paying off radio broadcast networks to get exposure for their music." nor anything as short and simple as the/. headline in this thread, "Major Broadcasters Hit With $12M Payola Fine".
I'm not trying to suggest this is new; during the run-up to the Iraq war the stenographers at the New York Times repeated government propaganda to far worse effect (Common Dreams, PDF excerpt). I'm saying that we do ourselves a disservice by letting our contempt dull our shock because we need to point out when corporate leaders behave illegally and we need to tell the corporate reporters when punishment is minimized ($12M is referred to as a "large cash settlement" despite no single payout greater than $4M) and buried (the list of corporate settlements is buried in the piece).
It is unwise to try to reframe the debate toward what proprietors value instead of what freedoms users need.
Users freedoms are more important than lists of feature sets proprietors would have us focus on; letting some kind of popularity contest decide what format is "better" is also a bad idea because that boils down to spending more on advertising (which, of course, Microsoft would love to do because they can spend millions on ads that never discuss the shortcomings of their products). Microsoft's track record on their.doc formats (yes, plural, because there are more than one and they are not always upwardly-compatible) is bad. Many have analyzed OOXML and pointed out serious problems with it (Groklaw carries many pointers to these articles, from Linguists to more CS-oriented critique). We have a chance to liberate ourselves and preserve our documents for posterity by switching to open standards (one of which is ODF).
We can't afford to push aside the importance to citizens here: people need the freedom to print, copy, and publish documents whenever they want (even if some government or corporation deems it inappropriate) without overcoming digital restrictions. Governments shouldn't be allowed to spend taxpayer money on documents that deny users these freedoms.
But that's part of the problem with the USPTO and software patents in general: "the mp3 patent" doesn't exist, just as the LZW patent didn't exist. There were at least 2 patents covering something one would do with LZW compression (one held by Unisys, the other by IBM). This simultaneously points to the incompetence of the USPTO and the ridiculous difficulty of their task.
When you said "launched" I wasn't sure if you meant program execution or some organization beginning a service. Apparently you meant the latter; it looks like Click-and-Run isn't available yet. So if you want to play DVDs with free software now, this is not an option.
deCSS plus some DVD player is an option, but it might be censored software where you live. Will Click-and-Run's DVD player program be free software as in respecting a user's freedom to run, inspect, share, and modify the program at any time? Or is this just another deal to distribute proprietary software to GNU/Linux users?
In any event, I am left to believe that DVD CSS does indeed qualify as digital restrictions management. Thus DVDs aren't an example of DRM-free media. Perhaps most audio CDs would be a better example of DRM-free media.
You do not need these lock down schemes to part my money from my wallet. Just look at my DVD and CD shelf. Really, you don't need DRM.
I quite agree that DRM isn't good or necessary, but don't DVDs still ship with CSS encryption on them? I don't own many DVDs (a dozen, all were gifts), but as I understand it CSS encryption qualifies as a digital restriction despite being cracked. deCSS is still being passed around semi-secretly from servers in countries that don't have a DMCA equivalent, and no major free software OS distributes deCSS as part of the standard distribution, isn't that still the case?
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The corporate studios don't sign that many artists and (according to a Chicago Tribune article I read some years ago) a lot of the artists they sign are indebted to the label for many albums. So long before the listener gets any chance to hear the artist, the label has them under their thumb. The RIAA's legal antics against listeners (often bringing cases before researching evidence against them) is covered here on /.. I'm left to wonder why I should write anyone in support of making it easier to help these labels by making it more likely that their music will be played.
I'm left to think that we should let them raise the rates as high as they think the market will bear. I'd rather work with artists who license their recordings to me so that I may non-commercially share them verbatim with others in any medium. I stopped listening to radio (online and over the air) because what I was hearing is only the "popular music that brings mainstream listeners" (in other words, as far as I can hear that's what they're playing now before any new fee schedule). This is not what I want to hear. Often the online stations I heard were merely retransmissions of what was being played over the air.
Contrary to what FreePress.net is claiming in their emails, I don't believe this means the end of Internet radio. I think it means the end of RIAA tracks on Internet radio and it opens the way for unsigned artists and tracks from labels that don't screw the artist (like Magnatune).
With rare exception, reliable and powerful proprietary software cannot be freed. Free software can be made more reliable and powerful. Thus your priorities should be reversed; help make free software better and we can secure our freedom without giving up power and reliability. The open source movement never teaches you to value software freedom, so you're led to believe that technical proficiency alone should be prioritized. This is one of the reasons why I'm not a member of that movement and I don't advocate on its behalf.
Regardless of age, proprietary software doesn't respect my freedom to be run it, inspect it, share it, or modify it. I don't inspect or modify most of my software but I trust others to do this work. Therefore I need to make sure they too have these freedoms so that I may benefit from their work. Thus, I need to make sure my software is free (presently that means running a free software OS with only free software installed on it; in the future a free BIOS will be a part of my system). No matter how powerful or reliable a proprietary program is, without these freedoms it simply costs too much.
What, then, is the point of maintaining a phone number and email address if one isn't interested in feedback? Why should someone's civil rights take a back seat to your assumption /.ers will be pointless?
Quite right, and an excellent opportunity for those who care about independent music and musicians to show their support by playing the stuff you won't hear on corporate radio. This is why I remain optimistic about Internet radio; it will change for those who can't afford/won't pay the rates for RIAA tracks. These ridiculously high rates could end up serving the interests of unsigned musicians in a way that the RIAA only talks about. This also means good things for those who want to play more non-music programming as the new rate schedule will open up time in their schedule. When the new fee schedule kicks in, smaller broadcasters will have a tough programming decisions to make.
Then /. readers should be taught the real value of "the freedom of choice" and myths about how the market will cater to our interests as users if there were fewer restrictions on it. Your freedom to control your computer as you see fit simply isn't adequately addressed by either. Richard Stallman reminds us in his talk about free software from Zagreb on 9 March 2006:
Speak for yourself, I've been running GNU/Linux OSes and keeping up with upgrades for years on the same dual Pentium III 500MHz 768MB RAM system I built roughly a decade ago. The hardware is not impressive by today's standards, but it still works so I keep using it. Some things take a while (audio editing large audio files in Audacity, for instance), but this machine can do plenty at a perfectly reasonable clip: read/write email, browse the web, burn CD/DVDs, and watch videos (with VLC or Flash, if I installed a Flash player). I get perfectly functional OSes, I get my software freedom, and I can do what I believe most people want to do most of the time with their home computers.
That's quite a heavy qualification when ordinary users buying a brand new computer will expect the OS that comes with it to run at least as quickly as their previous computer did running Microsoft Windows XP. By all the standards thrown in the face of free software activists (all the while ignoring software freedom), Vista simply isn't worth it. These users won't know or care what "well supported hardware" is, they'll make the logical assumption that whatever they were sold should be "well supported".
On a new Compaq machine straight from Best Buy (purchased by someone else, not me), Microsoft Windows Vista felt slower to me in all respects: it took much longer to boot up, took far more time to do things than I could do on free software OSes, and it had far higher resource requirements than other operating systems (again, in particular free software OSes). I checked email, browsed the web, and watched a few videos with the machine and the machine was consistently sluggish to do everything. The UI (left on the default settings, of course) asked me if I really wanted to start some program which was constantly annoying. Installing a Linksys wireless card (WMP54G) was a huge hassle and ultimately required going back to the store to buy another wireless device that would work out of the box (I don't remember the make or model, but it was a USB-based device).
And all of this to lose one's software freedom in the process? No thanks.
First, there's no need to talk to other people here like that. We can all participate in a mutually interesting and informative conversation without the namecalling.
How long do you think it will be until Turnitin's database is published (even inadvertantly) and your papers are indexed by the world's search engines, giving your future employers something new to look at? Do you think other high school students are prepared for that kind of scrutiny?
While I'm sure grading a lot of papers is difficult work, I wonder if there aren't some adverse privacy consequences to a service like TurnItIn that outweigh the alleged advantages.
And that is an ahistorical non sequitur. Neither my age nor the first distribution date of NetWare matter. The freedoms to inspect, share, modify, and run the software anytime for any reason are necessary freedoms in and of themselves, particularly for assessing security and reaching the conclusion that you did about NetWare. So long as you use proprietary software, you can't fully assess the security of your software.
Incidentally, according to Wikipedia, "the first versions of NetWare were designed" in 1983. Even if we take that year to be the first year of distribution, NetWare started the same year as the GNU Project was first announced.
NetWare is proprietary (perhaps built on some FLOSS, but with proprietary software mixed in) so you can't completely know how well the implementation you're running follows a design you favor. No proprietary software's security can be verified as completely as FLOSS. It's never wise to conclude that any proprietary software is "secure by default".
Microsoft Word doesn't handle large documents well. I find Gnumeric does many things better than Microsoft Excel. For years I've seen Microsoft Windows users needing to reboot their machines a lot for things I don't think they should have to. In Microsoft Windows 2000, I saw an app running with non-admin privileges crash the OS. Shall I conclude that proprietary software is always second-rate?
Overgeneralization is used against minorities to keep them down. It's sad to see that coming from a teacher. Better and more accurate to recognize that some proprietary software is reliable and powerful and some is not, and the same is true for FLOSS. For me, what separates OpenOffice.org from Microsoft Office is that OpenOffice.org gives me software freedom so it can be improved by anyone willing to take the time to do the work. Microsoft Office is proprietary and puts me into a monopoly for support. A long time ago I posted on /. about Microsoft's reaction to fixing bugs I spotted.
Today Gosling says the "immense amount of testing and design work" is not thought to be "anywhere near as good as having thousands of talented eyeballs just stare at it and think about it", but he didn't always say this and Sun didn't always license Java software in line with this sentiment. Gosling's claim might be true, but I think the freedom Sun's relicensing gives users is far more significant. Also important for the free software community is the lesson of free software pressure.
Not long ago, Gosling poo-pooed the idea of turning Java into an "open source project": "If Java turned into an open source project, the enterprise development community would go screaming into the hills.". In the same article, author Glen Kunene described Gosling as being "ambivalent about Apache's Harmony".
Similarly, Richard Stallman once described Java as being a trap because one could write free software programs in Java that depended on features only non-free Java software provided. He also wrote about what a non-event it was that Sun allowed more people to distribute its then non-free Java software.
Taking all of these quotes and descriptions at face value, assuming nobody was lying, what explains the change in view? I believe that the competitive pressure created by free software Java implementations pushed Sun to stay relevant. As the free software Java implementations became more functional and more likely to replace Sun's Java software, Sun saw they could free their implementation and continue to compete. In so doing, Sun also became a top contributor to the free software community and got free software luminaries (Stallman and Eben Moglen) to speak in support of their relicensing.
Then this is no different than any other irrational horror story; we can point blame at both the teller and believer of the story, but we're better off educating people instead. A good educational campaign would ask these managers if they believe every report they write with Microsoft Office is co-owned by Microsoft, thus giving Microsoft the power to change or override anything they say in the report. Or if their proprietary OS from Apple compels them to get Apple's approval before distributing any file they make with it. Nobody actually behaves as if these things are true so it's a very hard argument to make that anyone believes these things to be true.
The manager's "fear" is obviously irrational and their issues don't seem to translate to the real problems of uninspectable, unmodifiable, and unsharable software which they have entrusted to run their business. Perhaps handing their business over to unaccountable monopolists (as all software proprietors are) should be more disturbing to them than software they can shape to meet their needs.
People are willing to buy copies of C-SPAN recordings, license them for commercial reuse, and countless programs air edited snippets of C-SPAN footage. So the works are in themselves valuable.
The government's unwillingness to make and distribute these recordings themselves means that the recordings aren't necessarily in the public domain and it also means that Americans have far less democratic control over the creation and dissemination of the recordings. It doesn't take much imagination to see how these could be reasons for outsourcing the work to a third party, such as C-SPAN.
I believe it's a function of copyright law, not free software particularly, that gives you copyright power over the work you make. In other words, what you're saying is true but the underlying principle has nothing to do with the GNU Compiler Collection being free software; that same principle applies to proprietary software as well. Apple could compile their OS with a proprietary compiler with no loss in copyright power. I'd imagine that Apple developers choose GCC for the freedoms GCC gives them (NeXT modified GCC to suit their needs), GCC's excellent developers, and GCC's technical merit.
The unusual situation with Bison has been explained elsewhere in this thread and Richard Stallman addressed this issue in one of his talks. I'd be wary of embedded DRM in saved files, but I don't think most computer users have that problem to face right now.
Finally, I think you meant to say "proprietary" and not "commercial". FOSS is commercial software when it is developed as a business activity. What differentiates free software from proprietary software is that users have freedoms with free software they don't get with proprietary software.
We all know that C-SPAN gets money from cable subscribers (which is why C-SPAN stumps for "cable internet"), not direct government payout, but there's more to it then that. Carl Malamud says that C-SPAN gets tax relief. So someone pays for the things C-SPAN would have to pay for with taxes. Perhaps this means city and state funds are paying for C-SPAN's water, waste treatment, and roads that service C-SPAN's studios. To find out how powerful this is in another context, that of Wal-Mart, I recommend you watch Wal-Mart: The High Cost of Low Price. Tax incentives help businesses decide where to set up shop; towns know this, so they give far more than they should in the hope the business will go there and won't screw them later.
C-SPAN saves considerably because they don't have the same costs as other broadcast firms when they set up an on-location shoot. Here the taxpayer helps C-SPAN again by paying for some of the things C-SPAN uses: cameras in the House and Senate, and building renovations to add more space for media, to name a couple.
C-SPAN is also making money by claiming copyright on the things it records, which allows to commercially license that footage. This copyright power also comes at a price for the public: C-SPAN bullies people out of using this footage without commercially licensing it. If there were no copyright on these works at all, C-SPAN wouldn't be have this bullying power.
So, it seems to me that Malamud's claim is not "flat out, one-hundred-percent, plain wrong" nor do you provide any evidence to refute what he says. Not receiving government funding doesn't acknowledge the myriad other ways in which the public helps C-SPAN pay their bills. Also, it's not a good idea to take a corporation's word at face value because sometimes businesses lie.
I'm not against paying for C-SPAN, but I don't want to pay into a private tyranny. I want them to work for me creating, recording, archiving, and distributing public affairs works that I can do as I like with later. I think this meets all the needs of everyone involved: they get a living wage doing what they do now, I get programming I want with no strings attached.
Finally, the question of who pays for C-SPAN is almost a distraction from a more important question: should C-SPAN be able to assert a copyright on these recordings in the first place? How much of a "public service" is it if we cable subscribers and taxpayers have to comply with restrictive licensing on top of paying C-SPAN's bills? Should we tolerate corporate welfare? Is it in the public's interest when a government official speaks in their official capacity on a copyrighted show?
It should, but we'll need to see the exact license C-SPAN picks to be sure. According to what C-SPAN promises, under the new license C-SPAN "will allow non-commercial copying, sharing, and posting of C-SPAN video on the Internet, with attribution" (quoted from their press release). If Metavid distributes the covered C-SPAN footage in compliance with these terms, Metavid will not get any more copyright harassment from C-SPAN.
Carl Malamud wrote an insightful letter which addresses this issue. Part of that letter reads:
C-SPAN could regularly upload broadcast-quality raw footage to The Internet Archive (archive.org). Archive.org could transcode the material into a variety of formats (including Ogg Vorbis+Theora which they're now doing for videos) and we can all enjoy the works we're paying for through tax relief and cable TV subscription. Certainly C-SPAN is taking a step in the right direction, but if this footage should be in the public domain, a "liberal" copyright license (as C-SPAN puts it) isn't good enough.
So long as we, the American public, are covering C-SPAN's bills (more than that, actually, as Malamud points out in his letter), we should democratically decide what to do with C-SPAN's programming—all of it, not just the Congressional hearings and floor footage. Perhaps this could take the form of C-SPAN (or their parent corporation) working for hire, thus giving us the power of copyright in all of those works. We could then decide to forgo that power, place all of their work into the public domain, and relieve ourselves of ever having to read another embarrassing legalistic threat when anyone uses C-SPAN footage for any purpose (including commercial use). But certainly what C-SPAN is proposing simply doesn't go far enough down the path they're headed on.
Not only is there no real punishment for these corporations, the linked article is itself an indicator of a deeper problem: it is carefully written so as to avoid painting any of the businesses as illegal actors where adequate, democratically-arrived-at remedies ought to be applied. There is no simple and clear declaration akin to what one /. poster wrote: "The recording companies are illegally paying off radio broadcast networks to get exposure for their music." nor anything as short and simple as the /. headline in this thread, "Major Broadcasters Hit With $12M Payola Fine".
I'm not trying to suggest this is new; during the run-up to the Iraq war the stenographers at the New York Times repeated government propaganda to far worse effect (Common Dreams, PDF excerpt). I'm saying that we do ourselves a disservice by letting our contempt dull our shock because we need to point out when corporate leaders behave illegally and we need to tell the corporate reporters when punishment is minimized ($12M is referred to as a "large cash settlement" despite no single payout greater than $4M) and buried (the list of corporate settlements is buried in the piece).
It is unwise to try to reframe the debate toward what proprietors value instead of what freedoms users need.
.doc formats (yes, plural, because there are more than one and they are not always upwardly-compatible) is bad. Many have analyzed OOXML and pointed out serious problems with it (Groklaw carries many pointers to these articles, from Linguists to more CS-oriented critique). We have a chance to liberate ourselves and preserve our documents for posterity by switching to open standards (one of which is ODF).
Users freedoms are more important than lists of feature sets proprietors would have us focus on; letting some kind of popularity contest decide what format is "better" is also a bad idea because that boils down to spending more on advertising (which, of course, Microsoft would love to do because they can spend millions on ads that never discuss the shortcomings of their products). Microsoft's track record on their
We can't afford to push aside the importance to citizens here: people need the freedom to print, copy, and publish documents whenever they want (even if some government or corporation deems it inappropriate) without overcoming digital restrictions. Governments shouldn't be allowed to spend taxpayer money on documents that deny users these freedoms.
But that's part of the problem with the USPTO and software patents in general: "the mp3 patent" doesn't exist, just as the LZW patent didn't exist. There were at least 2 patents covering something one would do with LZW compression (one held by Unisys, the other by IBM). This simultaneously points to the incompetence of the USPTO and the ridiculous difficulty of their task.
When you said "launched" I wasn't sure if you meant program execution or some organization beginning a service. Apparently you meant the latter; it looks like Click-and-Run isn't available yet. So if you want to play DVDs with free software now, this is not an option.
deCSS plus some DVD player is an option, but it might be censored software where you live. Will Click-and-Run's DVD player program be free software as in respecting a user's freedom to run, inspect, share, and modify the program at any time? Or is this just another deal to distribute proprietary software to GNU/Linux users?
In any event, I am left to believe that DVD CSS does indeed qualify as digital restrictions management. Thus DVDs aren't an example of DRM-free media. Perhaps most audio CDs would be a better example of DRM-free media.
I quite agree that DRM isn't good or necessary, but don't DVDs still ship with CSS encryption on them? I don't own many DVDs (a dozen, all were gifts), but as I understand it CSS encryption qualifies as a digital restriction despite being cracked. deCSS is still being passed around semi-secretly from servers in countries that don't have a DMCA equivalent, and no major free software OS distributes deCSS as part of the standard distribution, isn't that still the case?
...and replacing them with a different proprietor? That's, at best, just switching masters, not freedom.