He was refering to companies who were trying to destroy open source software by claiming IP rights over them. They are the "looters", not OSS users.
Did anyone notice that he basically called theft of IP "stealing"? Isn't this what we've been fighting in the music area, that it's breaking copyright etc, but not stealing?
No, this is not exactly a parallel example. A much better example would be Sun renaming Java 1.2 and greater "Java 2 Good" and renaming Java 1.1 "Java 2 Super". Having multiple standards with the same name can be deceptive, but it isn't necesarily illegal. Changing your old spec name to practically the same thing as your new spec for the sole purpose of selling old stuff as new stuff is illegal (IANAL, so don't quote me on it).
I'm not an economist, but it's frequently said that our economy (in the US) is built off of progress. The more progress we make, the better our economy gets. If the progress stops, then the economy starts to go down. One of the examples in the article was saying "there's going to be technical issues in making wireless any faster, let's find out solutions to them and patent them." If someone does this, and tries to extort massive royalties out of someone else for making faster wireless, then people aren't going to use their technology. That's kind a like the case with RAMBUS. Their stuff costed more, so people didn't use it. However, in that case, someone came up with DDR, so no one really cares about RAMBUS much any more. But if the only way to get something to work getter has huge patent fees, it's going to slow down innovation and the economy. However, under the US PATRIOT act, if they slow down the economy, we might be able to label them as terrorists, take away their patents, and send them to live with our good friends that we've locked up in Guantanmo Bay!
How much does this really matter? First of all, I bet most people are still using their unregestered shareware winzip from ages ago. Most people know that the zip encryption is pretty much worthless, so they don't bother. The people who want an encrypted zip file are probably going to encrypt it with a quality encryption program, such as gpg or pgp, AFTER they have it zipped. The person on the other end unencrypts it and then opens it. I know the article said "95% of the time it'll work", but I bet it will be more like "It'll work 99.9999% of the time". Also, the basic format isn't changing. It's just the encryption part, so zip files will still be usuable by nearly everyone.
I agree. We own the airwaves, we should do with them EXACTLY what we want. It's the same thing with the roads. They belong to the government, so don't they belong to us? That means we should be able to use them how we see fit. If that means blowing away speed limits, it's fine. I mean, can't everyone's car do 200? And if I don't like the busy rush of cars going in front of my house, I can demolish the road in front of my house. (if you needed that). I'm just trying to make a point: the "it's public property" claim is not valid argument. It's airwaves, but it needs to be regulated. And if you say "let's eliminate TV, everyone has cable or satelite", why not eliminate radio stations as well? I mean, doesn't everyone have XM or Sirus or some other satelite antenna? Not everyone wants to pay for cable TV. It doesn't matter how much money I make, I don't want to have to shell out $45 per month for cable, especially because I only watch TV for world news, which I get just fine without having a cable.
If you don't have permissions to use network connections other than SSH, are you going to have permissions to mount a filesystem on the computer? The computers at my school (a high school) won't let you access explorer (or at least you're not supposed to). I can see its use for machines at your job, though, because there you would be able to mount filesystems.
Where is the line between standalone and integrated? The IE component is used lots of places other than the web browser. I'm on Windows 95 (it runs suprisingly well), and there are quite a few places where programs other than IE use the IE HTML-rendering component. In Win98 and later versions, the operating system uses the IE component to render some stuff (the desktop can be a web page, for example). IE can then be seen a just a program that provides a couple of navigation buttons to the standard IE component, and it's already "integrated" into the OS, and there is no "standalone" IE. Microsoft is saying that from now on, they'll just release updates to IE as OS patches (service packs), and if they're not supporting your os anymore (win 95, win 98), then you won't get patches for IE. This means that if you have a version of windows that they're not releasing SPs for, then you're stuck with a browser with loads of security holes that you KNOW are never going to get fixed (although many would argue that even with a recent version of windows, you KNOW the security holes won't be fixed).
It all comes down to the fact that if you're watchign their signals, they're not getting paid for it, and that causes a loss of profits. I don't know how their profits are doing, but if a company is starting to lose money, their first choice is to blame someone else and sue (SCO anyone?). This is probably a gray area in the laws in the US. I'm sure some of the signals are copyrighted, so you're supposed to pay to use them. On the other hand, the signal's right there, so why not try to get at it? It's almost parallel to running Linux on the XBOX. It's there, why can't you do it? Because the company that created it doesn't want you to do it. That's why they want the DMCA. The DMCA basically says that "if a company wants your money, they have a right to it", and here, DirectTV thinks they have a right to some money. Outside of the DMCA, however, I don't think this is well-definied in law, but IANAL. On the other hand, don't go making a website devoted to cracking the signal. That's just asking for trouble. It'd be like if I started a website on how to pick car locks. It may be legal, but it may not be. It'd be different if they had made a name other than "Pirate's den", which is just asking for legal trouble.
Interesting comment... "...denial of suffrage to large portions of the black population". Ballots don't have your name on them. They don't have your race on them, either. If a majority of blacks don't know how to punch their ballot, how is that Bush's fault? Did he go in and make the ballot punching tools duller? If they didn't punch their ballots correctly, that's their fault, not Bush's fault. They were all allowed to go vote, and if they screwed up their oppertunity, that's their fault.
And for your comments about the head of the Electoral Office having a party membership? The head of the Electoral Office has to be appointed, and everyone in the government buisness has a bias towards one party or another. The head of the Electoral Office will be at least partly biased, because (s)he is probably appointed, and do you think a Democrat governor would appoint a Republican Electoral Office head?
Please note, I'm not racist, trolling, or trying to start a flame war. I'm just making some observations on your comments, and showing you a different view.
Windows is so full of holes, there will probably be many ways to defeat this. First of all, the names of all of text to be put around the screen has to be stored on the hard drive. I don't think Windows is psychic yet, so it's there somewhere. If it's there, it can be stolen. It'll just give windows another day before their first security bulletin comes out. Users will enter "normal" words in to be displayed around secure windows. If a copy of the file can be gotten, even if it's encrypted, it shouldn't be too hard to try a dictionary attack on it and crack the file quickly. It won't be that hard from there to put this text in the border. Only 1/2 hour after it's posted on slashdot, and possible hacks are already being thought out. By the time this stuff actually comes out, it'll probably have already been cracked for quite some time.
According to the article, they weren't constantly watching the projectors. They left the projectors running, probably with a system to notify them when they needed to change the bulb. At certain intervals, such as every couple of hours, they ran tests to determine how they projectors were holding up. Does anyone have a page that lists the technical details of how DLP works? The picture of the slide wasn't very technically detailed. I'd like to see how these work.
On the subject of other uses for this patent- Wouldn't sidebars in editors also be covered. I'm talking about the toolbars that show the file system so you can easily open a new file. That's pretty much independant of the document being opened. The people enforcing the patent don't even know what it covers. And besides, aren't frames part of a web page document? The web page author has to write the frames into the page for the site. This would seem to make the frames part of the document, so they're not not a part of the document, and that rules out that part of the patent.
That'd work great! Not. I'd have two options: pay for a subscription to get this stupid card in my computer to get me music, or I can download it free from KaZaA. It doesn't matter how painless you make pay-per-listen services, as long as you keep releasing hard copies of CD's, you'll have KaZaA and other services for people to download music from for free.
Let's say you stop selling CD's, and I can't copy any music from my computer. What happens if I want to listen to it in my car? I can't. And besides, we all know what the record of big industry vs. determined hackers is. It won't take long for someone to break the system, and then it only takes a few (relatively) people to get the music before it's spread all over.
In the US, you don't have to drive. If you want to drive, then you do need a driver's license, for a reason. They're trying to keep track of who's a bad boy on the road and shouldn't be allowed to drive. If you don't want to have to show a proof of ID, then don't drive. It's changing, though, you need a driver's license to get onto an airplane these days.
Wasn't April Fool's Day over two weeks ago? At my junior high, we had some novell stuff. It didn't work very well. At my high school now, we have a network of Win* boxes, with win98, win2k, and probably some win95. It runs much better than the junior high novell network ran. Who does the Novell CEO think he is?
Incorrect (about why people pirate stuff). It's not because the stuff is bad or overpriced necessarily, but if I want to listen to a new CD, I have two options: 1. Take the time to go to the store and buy it. Cost: 10-20. Time: >15 min. 2. Download it off of Kazaa or any other p2p program. Cost: 0. Time: (I don't know, haven't done it, it's definatly easier)
So, what one would you pick? And if it's a trashy product, then why are you trying to pirate it in the first place? If it's not worth anything, then why are you trying to use it?
The idea of a copy-protected CD won't work. The only feasible way would to have your computer control everything you do on it (kinda like Soviet Russia), which is what Pallidiam is trying to do.
If you can play a CD, you can get the raw sound data off of it. From that raw data, you can make an MP3. If the CD is playable anywhere, you can copy it. What's to say someone won't modify their PC CD-ROM drive so it reads the "normal" data that isn't copy-protected. Someone would figure it out sooner or later, and probably sooner rather than later. And if copy-protection is implemented in Pallidiam, then it probably won't be long before someone finds a way around it, knowing Microsoft's record on security.
I haven't read the article because it seems slashdotted (already?). It is legal for police to take garbage without a search warrant. IANAL, but from civics classes, trash falls under "abandoned property", so police can take it without a search warrant. It's kinda like if a police office thinks you're speeding, he doesn't need a search warrant to aim his radar gun at you to check your speed. Not exactly the same thing, but kinda in the same category.
I don't know if anyone has thought of this, but awhile ago there was an article about MS sales reps giving deep discounts to anyone considering Linux. The article was probably a month ago, but maybe that's why Home Depot suddenly ditched Linux, because they got a huge discount on Windows? Someone should go in and offer a 100% discount on Linux to them.
I know this sounds redundant, but how did they get 421? If one CD-R drive is 40x, does it count as 40 CD-R drives? If they did it that way, then it would seem like most of the drives being used were fairly slow, because otherwise the number would have been higher. It was a professional pirating business, so I'm guessing many of the drives would have been at least 24x. If each drive is at least 24x, then 156*24 = 3744. With the numbers they gave (and the speed of a CD player counts as many times), the average CD-R speed is just over 2. But that seems hard to believe, because these are (were) professionals, and they would have had the money to get faster CD-R drives.
The only reason the RIAA published this number is to make the media grab it more. This is the same thing they did with "Everyone using Napster is pirating music", which wasn't exactly true (many were, but not all). The media ate up the RIAA's headline, and ignored the real truth behind it.
Yes, that is true. You could just plug a computer into an ethernet port and look at some of the traffic. The difference is, for wired, you need access to a port! For wireless, you just need to be in the area. If you're random joe hacker, you probably can't just walk in and plug in your computer to a wired network. If it's a wireless network, you just hide in the bushes with your laptop.
I really don't know if they plan to go after people in court. It would be a tough case, because you could say -It wasn't my computer -You didn't listen to the song, it wasn't copyrighted... and I'm sure your lawyer could come up with plenty of other excuses. They're just hoping that a letter from your ISP, or them, will be enough to scare you into stopping it. I doubt that their robots will be able to tell if it's you a second time, because your IP will probably be different.
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He was refering to companies who were trying to destroy open source software by claiming IP rights over them. They are the "looters", not OSS users.
Did anyone notice that he basically called theft of IP "stealing"? Isn't this what we've been fighting in the music area, that it's breaking copyright etc, but not stealing?
No, this is not exactly a parallel example. A much better example would be Sun renaming Java 1.2 and greater "Java 2 Good" and renaming Java 1.1 "Java 2 Super". Having multiple standards with the same name can be deceptive, but it isn't necesarily illegal. Changing your old spec name to practically the same thing as your new spec for the sole purpose of selling old stuff as new stuff is illegal (IANAL, so don't quote me on it).
In SOVIET RUSSIA your virus scanner SCANS YOU!
I'm not an economist, but it's frequently said that our economy (in the US) is built off of progress. The more progress we make, the better our economy gets. If the progress stops, then the economy starts to go down.
One of the examples in the article was saying "there's going to be technical issues in making wireless any faster, let's find out solutions to them and patent them." If someone does this, and tries to extort massive royalties out of someone else for making faster wireless, then people aren't going to use their technology. That's kind a like the case with RAMBUS. Their stuff costed more, so people didn't use it. However, in that case, someone came up with DDR, so no one really cares about RAMBUS much any more. But if the only way to get something to work getter has huge patent fees, it's going to slow down innovation and the economy.
However, under the US PATRIOT act, if they slow down the economy, we might be able to label them as terrorists, take away their patents, and send them to live with our good friends that we've locked up in Guantanmo Bay!
How much does this really matter? First of all, I bet most people are still using their unregestered shareware winzip from ages ago. Most people know that the zip encryption is pretty much worthless, so they don't bother. The people who want an encrypted zip file are probably going to encrypt it with a quality encryption program, such as gpg or pgp, AFTER they have it zipped. The person on the other end unencrypts it and then opens it. I know the article said "95% of the time it'll work", but I bet it will be more like "It'll work 99.9999% of the time".
Also, the basic format isn't changing. It's just the encryption part, so zip files will still be usuable by nearly everyone.
I agree. We own the airwaves, we should do with them EXACTLY what we want. It's the same thing with the roads. They belong to the government, so don't they belong to us? That means we should be able to use them how we see fit. If that means blowing away speed limits, it's fine. I mean, can't everyone's car do 200? And if I don't like the busy rush of cars going in front of my house, I can demolish the road in front of my house. (if you needed that).
I'm just trying to make a point: the "it's public property" claim is not valid argument. It's airwaves, but it needs to be regulated. And if you say "let's eliminate TV, everyone has cable or satelite", why not eliminate radio stations as well? I mean, doesn't everyone have XM or Sirus or some other satelite antenna? Not everyone wants to pay for cable TV. It doesn't matter how much money I make, I don't want to have to shell out $45 per month for cable, especially because I only watch TV for world news, which I get just fine without having a cable.
If you don't have permissions to use network connections other than SSH, are you going to have permissions to mount a filesystem on the computer? The computers at my school (a high school) won't let you access explorer (or at least you're not supposed to). I can see its use for machines at your job, though, because there you would be able to mount filesystems.
Where is the line between standalone and integrated? The IE component is used lots of places other than the web browser. I'm on Windows 95 (it runs suprisingly well), and there are quite a few places where programs other than IE use the IE HTML-rendering component.
In Win98 and later versions, the operating system uses the IE component to render some stuff (the desktop can be a web page, for example). IE can then be seen a just a program that provides a couple of navigation buttons to the standard IE component, and it's already "integrated" into the OS, and there is no "standalone" IE.
Microsoft is saying that from now on, they'll just release updates to IE as OS patches (service packs), and if they're not supporting your os anymore (win 95, win 98), then you won't get patches for IE. This means that if you have a version of windows that they're not releasing SPs for, then you're stuck with a browser with loads of security holes that you KNOW are never going to get fixed (although many would argue that even with a recent version of windows, you KNOW the security holes won't be fixed).
It all comes down to the fact that if you're watchign their signals, they're not getting paid for it, and that causes a loss of profits. I don't know how their profits are doing, but if a company is starting to lose money, their first choice is to blame someone else and sue (SCO anyone?).
This is probably a gray area in the laws in the US. I'm sure some of the signals are copyrighted, so you're supposed to pay to use them. On the other hand, the signal's right there, so why not try to get at it? It's almost parallel to running Linux on the XBOX. It's there, why can't you do it? Because the company that created it doesn't want you to do it. That's why they want the DMCA.
The DMCA basically says that "if a company wants your money, they have a right to it", and here, DirectTV thinks they have a right to some money. Outside of the DMCA, however, I don't think this is well-definied in law, but IANAL.
On the other hand, don't go making a website devoted to cracking the signal. That's just asking for trouble. It'd be like if I started a website on how to pick car locks. It may be legal, but it may not be. It'd be different if they had made a name other than "Pirate's den", which is just asking for legal trouble.
Interesting comment... "...denial of suffrage to large portions of the black population".
Ballots don't have your name on them. They don't have your race on them, either. If a majority of blacks don't know how to punch their ballot, how is that Bush's fault? Did he go in and make the ballot punching tools duller? If they didn't punch their ballots correctly, that's their fault, not Bush's fault. They were all allowed to go vote, and if they screwed up their oppertunity, that's their fault.
And for your comments about the head of the Electoral Office having a party membership? The head of the Electoral Office has to be appointed, and everyone in the government buisness has a bias towards one party or another. The head of the Electoral Office will be at least partly biased, because (s)he is probably appointed, and do you think a Democrat governor would appoint a Republican Electoral Office head?
Please note, I'm not racist, trolling, or trying to start a flame war. I'm just making some observations on your comments, and showing you a different view.
Windows is so full of holes, there will probably be many ways to defeat this. First of all, the names of all of text to be put around the screen has to be stored on the hard drive. I don't think Windows is psychic yet, so it's there somewhere. If it's there, it can be stolen. It'll just give windows another day before their first security bulletin comes out.
Users will enter "normal" words in to be displayed around secure windows. If a copy of the file can be gotten, even if it's encrypted, it shouldn't be too hard to try a dictionary attack on it and crack the file quickly. It won't be that hard from there to put this text in the border.
Only 1/2 hour after it's posted on slashdot, and possible hacks are already being thought out. By the time this stuff actually comes out, it'll probably have already been cracked for quite some time.
According to the article, they weren't constantly watching the projectors. They left the projectors running, probably with a system to notify them when they needed to change the bulb. At certain intervals, such as every couple of hours, they ran tests to determine how they projectors were holding up.
Does anyone have a page that lists the technical details of how DLP works? The picture of the slide wasn't very technically detailed. I'd like to see how these work.
On the subject of other uses for this patent-
Wouldn't sidebars in editors also be covered. I'm talking about the toolbars that show the file system so you can easily open a new file. That's pretty much independant of the document being opened. The people enforcing the patent don't even know what it covers.
And besides, aren't frames part of a web page document? The web page author has to write the frames into the page for the site. This would seem to make the frames part of the document, so they're not not a part of the document, and that rules out that part of the patent.
That'd work great! Not. I'd have two options: pay for a subscription to get this stupid card in my computer to get me music, or I can download it free from KaZaA. It doesn't matter how painless you make pay-per-listen services, as long as you keep releasing hard copies of CD's, you'll have KaZaA and other services for people to download music from for free.
Let's say you stop selling CD's, and I can't copy any music from my computer. What happens if I want to listen to it in my car? I can't. And besides, we all know what the record of big industry vs. determined hackers is. It won't take long for someone to break the system, and then it only takes a few (relatively) people to get the music before it's spread all over.
In the US, you don't have to drive. If you want to drive, then you do need a driver's license, for a reason. They're trying to keep track of who's a bad boy on the road and shouldn't be allowed to drive. If you don't want to have to show a proof of ID, then don't drive.
It's changing, though, you need a driver's license to get onto an airplane these days.
Wasn't April Fool's Day over two weeks ago?
At my junior high, we had some novell stuff. It didn't work very well. At my high school now, we have a network of Win* boxes, with win98, win2k, and probably some win95. It runs much better than the junior high novell network ran.
Who does the Novell CEO think he is?
Incorrect (about why people pirate stuff).
It's not because the stuff is bad or overpriced necessarily, but if I want to listen to a new CD, I have two options:
1. Take the time to go to the store and buy it. Cost: 10-20. Time: >15 min.
2. Download it off of Kazaa or any other p2p program. Cost: 0. Time: (I don't know, haven't done it, it's definatly easier)
So, what one would you pick? And if it's a trashy product, then why are you trying to pirate it in the first place? If it's not worth anything, then why are you trying to use it?
The idea of a copy-protected CD won't work. The only feasible way would to have your computer control everything you do on it (kinda like Soviet Russia), which is what Pallidiam is trying to do.
If you can play a CD, you can get the raw sound data off of it. From that raw data, you can make an MP3. If the CD is playable anywhere, you can copy it. What's to say someone won't modify their PC CD-ROM drive so it reads the "normal" data that isn't copy-protected. Someone would figure it out sooner or later, and probably sooner rather than later. And if copy-protection is implemented in Pallidiam, then it probably won't be long before someone finds a way around it, knowing Microsoft's record on security.
I haven't read the article because it seems slashdotted (already?).
It is legal for police to take garbage without a search warrant. IANAL, but from civics classes, trash falls under "abandoned property", so police can take it without a search warrant. It's kinda like if a police office thinks you're speeding, he doesn't need a search warrant to aim his radar gun at you to check your speed. Not exactly the same thing, but kinda in the same category.
I don't know if anyone has thought of this, but awhile ago there was an article about MS sales reps giving deep discounts to anyone considering Linux. The article was probably a month ago, but maybe that's why Home Depot suddenly ditched Linux, because they got a huge discount on Windows? Someone should go in and offer a 100% discount on Linux to them.
I know this sounds redundant, but how did they get 421? If one CD-R drive is 40x, does it count as 40 CD-R drives? If they did it that way, then it would seem like most of the drives being used were fairly slow, because otherwise the number would have been higher. It was a professional pirating business, so I'm guessing many of the drives would have been at least 24x. If each drive is at least 24x, then 156*24 = 3744. With the numbers they gave (and the speed of a CD player counts as many times), the average CD-R speed is just over 2. But that seems hard to believe, because these are (were) professionals, and they would have had the money to get faster CD-R drives.
The only reason the RIAA published this number is to make the media grab it more. This is the same thing they did with "Everyone using Napster is pirating music", which wasn't exactly true (many were, but not all). The media ate up the RIAA's headline, and ignored the real truth behind it.
Yes, that is true. You could just plug a computer into an ethernet port and look at some of the traffic. The difference is, for wired, you need access to a port! For wireless, you just need to be in the area. If you're random joe hacker, you probably can't just walk in and plug in your computer to a wired network. If it's a wireless network, you just hide in the bushes with your laptop.
I really don't know if they plan to go after people in court. It would be a tough case, because you could say
-It wasn't my computer
-You didn't listen to the song, it wasn't copyrighted...
and I'm sure your lawyer could come up with plenty of other excuses. They're just hoping that a letter from your ISP, or them, will be enough to scare you into stopping it. I doubt that their robots will be able to tell if it's you a second time, because your IP will probably be different.