The decision of the court upholds the spirit of the first amendment: your speech is protected, even if I don't like what you say.
The philosophical side is that if just one item of protected speech is filtered out, then that violates the first amendment and is unconstitutional. My guess is that filtering software would probably keep you from reading the court's decision at the library!
The practical side includes: (a) libraries don't have a boatload of technical experts standing around waiting to configure filtering software; and (b) filtering software may be OK but it still filters out protected speech, and forcing someone to give up their anonymity in order to read/see/hear it violates their privacy.
Libraries have kids sections now. I recommend that communities that want "protected" internet stations for kids provide them in a separate area. This would not violate the constitution because non-filtered terminals would exist elsewhere in the facility. The libraries would not lose their federal funding. Adults would not lose their freedom to view legal materials anonymously. And kids would be protected from pr0n and slashdot (at least while at the library).
Keep in mind that the court did not outlaw filtering software at libraries; it merely said that the federal government can't take away library funding from libraries that don't use filtering software.
Where's a similar provision for dumb, useless laws that are blatantly in violation of the constitution?
That would be provided by the voters in the form of not re-electing the sponsors of the bills and the people who voted them into laws.
That said, it would be interesting to study all the laws that were ruled unconstitutional in, say, the last 15 years, what generally they were about (i.e. what part of the constitution they violated), who sponsored them, and who voted for them. Anyone know if such a list exists?
I thought write-only memory was Microsoft's solution to the problem of memory protection in Windows.
You know, misbehaving applications accidentally used to scribble on other apps' memory spaces. When Microsoft forced the PC industry to install banks of WOM, suddenly every crash became an application error--those applications were not conforming to the Windows API. Instead of scribbling on another application's memory, the app should have been scribbling to the WOM.
It was brilliant because overnight Microsoft foisted millions of dollars in OS support expenses on to application vendors.
If I have a mp3 of a song I've heard on the radio, what's the substantial difference?
Just playing devil's advocate here, but the difference is that someone else likely made the copy and gave it to you. It's the distribution aspect that is the sticky wicket.
"What we found is a disturbing behavioral trend that violates copyright laws and costs billions of dollars and hundreds of thousands of jobs every year," BSA CEO Robert Holleyman said in a statement.
HUNDREDS OF THOUSANDS OF JOBS EVERY YEAR?
Give me a break. Not only is that figure rediculously inflated even for the very imaginative, but I have yet to see any evidence, statistical or otherwise, that there is a NET job loss because of software piracy.
Much of the meaningful software piracy I've seen (beware the sample of one) is by people who need it to get a certain job done but who can not afford it at the moment. The intent is eventually to pay for it, most likely with a version upgrade, once there is money in the bank.
I think this is especially prevalent in software startups, which need the cash relief immediately but which intend to pay later. This type of "piracy" has probably generated more jobs in the past 10 years than it has cost. (Count up the new lawyers and lobbyists, for a start!)
But now that I know that hundreds of thousands of jobs are lost every year due to piracy... wow, that must mean that there was no internet crash and that all those failed dot-coms were actually pirated out of existence rather than going bankrupt due to mismanagement!
..StarOffice WAS free... but now its no longer free, so now it's free instead.
I'm telling you, Sun's "Insanity First!" initiative is REAL!
Actually, it's terrific. Here's why: The major barrier to adoption of free software in institutions is fear: fear of using something unsupported, fear of having to maintain it themselves, fear that it won't work, fear that it's got back doors in it... we've all heard that "no one ever got fired for buying IBM."
So Sun has this great product that they can't give away for free because it comes from free software roots. So what do they do? Start charging for it. This legitimizes the product in the minds of the PHBs, small as those minds are. Then they say they'll give it away for free if you qualify in some way. So the PHBs all scurry around to see whether they qualify, and when they figure out they do, they jump at this terrific discount from a well-known, strong company.
Having served time in the marketing end of software, I know that "Insanity First" is often the only way actually to succeed.
I thought it was Single Female. Funny how "Science Fiction" never even crossed my mind when I saw SF. I thought "adventures in single female wireless networking" sounded pretty interesting...
Infants are... all you shoot for - of course, they are the easiest to please and require the least amount of talent to amuse.
...and have the longest expected life span and therefore the greatest lifetime customer value. And the most likely to whine incessantly so grandma buys the new action figure and plastic light saber flashlight.
Speaking of incessant whining... let me get back to reading the other posts.
Disney will re-release Snow White to give Dopey a larger role and to make Snow White an Asian-American.
Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid will be re-released with five new scenes developing and exploring the poignant, touching love relationship between Butch and Sundance.
The entire Three Stooges collection will be rereleased to reduce the violence and focus more on the development of the characters based primarily on flashbacks to their childhood and their relationship with their parents.
The Sound of Music will be given three more musical scenes, including "Springtime for Hitler" performed by digital representations of a young Christopher Plummer and Julie Andrews.
And here's what MSN.com's current "photos" agreement says:
MSN Photos
In addition to the warranty and representation set forth in these Terms of Use, by Posting a Submission that contain images, photographs, pictures or that are otherwise graphical in whole or in part ("Pictures"), you warrant and represent that (a) you are the copyright owner of such Picture, or that the copyright owner of such Picture has granted you permission to use such Picture or any content and/or images contained in such Picture consistent with the manner and purpose of your use and as otherwise permitted by these Terms of Use and the MSN Site/Services, (b) you have the rights necessary to grant the licenses and sublicenses described in these Terms of Use, and (c) that each person depicted in such Picture, if any, has provided consent to the use of the Picture as set forth in these Terms of Use, including, by way of example, and not as a limitation, the distribution, public display and reproduction of such Picture. By Posting a Picture, you are granting (a) to all members of your private community (for each such Picture available to members of such private community), (b) to the general public (for each such Picture available anywhere on the MSN Web Site, other than a private community), and/or (c) to any person with whom whom you share Pictures through e-mail using the MSN Site/Services, permission to use your Picture in connection with the use, as permitted by these Terms of Use, of any MSN Site/Service, (including, by way of example, and not as a limitation, downloading, printing and making prints and gift items which include such Picture), and including, without limitation, a non-exclusive, world-wide, royalty-free license to: copy, distribute, transmit, publicly display, publicly perform, reproduce, edit, translate and reformat your Picture without having your name attached to such Picture, and the right to sublicense such rights to any supplier of such MSN Site/Service. The licenses granted in the preceding sentences for a Picture will terminate at the time you completely remove such Picture from the MSN Web Site, provided that, such termination shall not affect any licenses granted in connection with such Picture prior to the time you completely remove such Picture. No compensation will be paid with respect to the use of your Picture."
Not only are they conceding that the poster has the liability, but they are granting everyone else in the world the right to edit and re-publish your photo without your consent!
CYA has become a new art form in the Redmond law offices, I guess.
...M$ is claiming the rights for all stuff that is published in the MSN forum....
This is an interesting statement. It involves some esoteric ideas of publication rights, ownership, and online communities.
When you have a photo, story, or article published as a freelancer, typically you sell first publication rights or some limited publication rights, and you retain ownership and copyright of the content. There are exceptions such as work for hire. On line, the terms of such a deal become strained because unlike a printed magazine, the publication can live, universally accessible, forever. Thus, first publication rights amount to first-and-always-available publication rights.
Posting to a community web site further strains the idea of publication rights. In many community sites, the notion is that the site operator has no control over the content. But the statement above indicates that Microsoft set itself up as essentially having publication rights... by uploading the photo, the user implicitly entered into an agreement whereby they granted publication rights to Microsoft in return for... nothing, I suppose. Like a vanity press of sorts. Microsoft immediately, upon upload, became the publisher of the photo. Whether they took it down later or not, they published it just as if Time magazine had published it and later issued a recall of all those printed copies.
If this is the case, then Microsoft was officially a publisher of the photo, and they should be held completely liable for the content. Also, if this is the case, then they deserved to get burned--it is another example of Microsoft trying to grab as much as they can until someone bites them.
It's for this reason that anyone setting up a community always puts in acceptable use policies and disclaimers saying they don't own or control the content.
What I like about the fightcloud concept (that really is a terrible name) is that they look like they'll be rotating their artists and offerings fairly often.
All their pages say "limited time" on them. If they do it right, they'll act as an extremely good initial promotional vehicle for low-profile artists, and they'll offer the public an editorially filtered view into the "morass" of new artists.
This way, they'll always have fresh material, and not much to browse through. That's a site I would check regularly and would patronize often, if they had stuff I liked to listen to.
Unless our government is full of idiots or media cronies (and it is, unfortunately), then here's how I see this "problem" shaking out:
The "entertainment" industry, which has been bloated with crap and getting fatter and fatter every year as wannabes climb over each other to get something published, will stop making so much money indiscriminately. The cash cow of advertising, now getting old and sick, will die off, and "free" TV will disappear. (I have not had "free" TV since 1989, when I first signed myself up for cable.)
The money in TV will shift from the producers of shows to the companies that deliver those shows--the makers of the DVRs and the suppliers of the DVR services. These companies, in order to keep profits high and unable to make fortunes on advertising, will charge consumers for their services, and they will use that money to fund programs that consumers will actually watch.
These services will license their most popular programs to the other vendors, and those vendors will probably charge premiums (pay-per-record, premium fees for non-native shows, etc.) for them to their clients.
In this way, the services will compete on overall quality of ALL their content--they won't have 18 hours to fill with crap every day, so they won't have the burden of those costs.
This is a Very Good Thing because it actually democratizes the content industry. Independent producers will be able to produce and license their shows to the DVR service companies. Big studios will still produce and license content, but they won't have the overhead of providing all the crap they do now.
All this assumes that Congress and our courts manage to keep their heads out of their arses and don't play lackey to the Chicken Little studios.
The company also complained that the Pentagon is funding research on making free software more secure, which in effect subsidizes Microsoft's open-source competitors, Stenbit said.
Microsoft's push is a new front in a long-running company assault on the open-source movement, which company officials have called "a cancer" and un-American
What has me truly amazed is that Microsoft is now fighting against the world. Think about it... most companies battle their competitors. Microsoft has become so big and rich that they no longer have any individual competitors. The "competition" consists of people who do good things, often for free. God forbid the government give money to people who do good things.
And, of course open source is un-American! In the sense that "American" implies elitist, exclusive, arrogant, and imperialistic.
The obvious solution is to knock down all the walls and put in cubes. The kid gets the PC in his cube, and the parents get the constant ability to monitor.
After all, it has worked so well in an office environment.
So don't filter your 9-year-old's surfing. Don't restrict your child's access to anything. It's nice that you can trust your 9-year-old so completely. Why would you care if a.kids.us domain is established?
This is a great solution because it does not affect you yet it provides security to the people who want it.
I imagine that if/when I put a computer in my kid's room (not likely), I will have the filter on unless I am actively monitoring the usage somehow. If I'm around, I'll turn the filter off. No big deal.
WTF is with this "kids.us"? Are American children the only ones deserving of 'protection'?
I don't believe the US congress has the authority to create a new TLD without the consent of some other groups in the world... so they did what they could. Created.kids within the TLD that they do have authority over. Nothing's stopping other countries from doing the same.
I simply don't understand how something that is good for many people and bad for none can be so attacked.
It's time to stop sugar-coating reality for the kiddies. Tell 'em about real life early on, and they'll be more wary. They'll also be able to deal with all the information available on the web in the appropriate manner. Kids aren't as stupid as people like to think.
You're not a parent, are you?
The reason children in the US are not legally allowed to vote, drink, buy cigarettes, have sex, own a gun, drive a car, etc. is that they are too inexperienced to know the right path through any complex decision.
It's not because of "sugar-coating reality" that 12-year-old girls are lured, raped, and killed. And it's not because of bad parenting. In a few cases it may be because the parents themselves don't know how to monitor or discuss Internet technologies and how bad people can exploit them. In many cases it may be because the children, although having been told not to give out personal information, do so anyway because (a) they forget, (b) they think they really aren't vulnerable (it won't happen to THEM), (c) they don't realize the information makes them vulnerable, (d) they have come to trust the other party because they can't distinguish between lies and truth through chat rooms, or (e) all of the above.
That's not bad parenting. That's the reality of the vulnerability and gullibility of children.
Rather than having.kids.us, and then later.teens.us it would seem much more sensible to have.xxx, or.rude
This is already being proposed by Sen. Mary Landrieu of Louisiana. It is a bad idea because it allows the government to decide what is "harmful to minors" on the Web.
The bill proposing a.kids.us is much, much better because it is essentially a "kid-friendly" certification. It is essentially opt-in by the site owners (and regulated). A.xxx TLD would give us two options: (1) have the government shut down any non-xxx domain that the government thinks does not belong outside the red-light district, or (2) have only the legit xxx businesses move to the.xxx TLD and otherwise have the same situation we have today, with over 4,000 "regular" domain names pointing to a single web site.
Slashdot Mirror
The decision of the court upholds the spirit of the first amendment: your speech is protected, even if I don't like what you say.
The philosophical side is that if just one item of protected speech is filtered out, then that violates the first amendment and is unconstitutional. My guess is that filtering software would probably keep you from reading the court's decision at the library!
The practical side includes: (a) libraries don't have a boatload of technical experts standing around waiting to configure filtering software; and (b) filtering software may be OK but it still filters out protected speech, and forcing someone to give up their anonymity in order to read/see/hear it violates their privacy.
Libraries have kids sections now. I recommend that communities that want "protected" internet stations for kids provide them in a separate area. This would not violate the constitution because non-filtered terminals would exist elsewhere in the facility. The libraries would not lose their federal funding. Adults would not lose their freedom to view legal materials anonymously. And kids would be protected from pr0n and slashdot (at least while at the library).
Keep in mind that the court did not outlaw filtering software at libraries; it merely said that the federal government can't take away library funding from libraries that don't use filtering software.
That would be provided by the voters in the form of not re-electing the sponsors of the bills and the people who voted them into laws.
That said, it would be interesting to study all the laws that were ruled unconstitutional in, say, the last 15 years, what generally they were about (i.e. what part of the constitution they violated), who sponsored them, and who voted for them. Anyone know if such a list exists?
I thought write-only memory was Microsoft's solution to the problem of memory protection in Windows.
You know, misbehaving applications accidentally used to scribble on other apps' memory spaces. When Microsoft forced the PC industry to install banks of WOM, suddenly every crash became an application error--those applications were not conforming to the Windows API. Instead of scribbling on another application's memory, the app should have been scribbling to the WOM.
It was brilliant because overnight Microsoft foisted millions of dollars in OS support expenses on to application vendors.
Just playing devil's advocate here, but the difference is that someone else likely made the copy and gave it to you. It's the distribution aspect that is the sticky wicket.
HUNDREDS OF THOUSANDS OF JOBS EVERY YEAR?
Give me a break. Not only is that figure rediculously inflated even for the very imaginative, but I have yet to see any evidence, statistical or otherwise, that there is a NET job loss because of software piracy.
Much of the meaningful software piracy I've seen (beware the sample of one) is by people who need it to get a certain job done but who can not afford it at the moment. The intent is eventually to pay for it, most likely with a version upgrade, once there is money in the bank.
I think this is especially prevalent in software startups, which need the cash relief immediately but which intend to pay later. This type of "piracy" has probably generated more jobs in the past 10 years than it has cost. (Count up the new lawyers and lobbyists, for a start!)
But now that I know that hundreds of thousands of jobs are lost every year due to piracy... wow, that must mean that there was no internet crash and that all those failed dot-coms were actually pirated out of existence rather than going bankrupt due to mismanagement!
SHEESH.
that airplanes flying into/out of Iceland have to bring their own refill fuel?
Actually, it's terrific. Here's why: The major barrier to adoption of free software in institutions is fear: fear of using something unsupported, fear of having to maintain it themselves, fear that it won't work, fear that it's got back doors in it... we've all heard that "no one ever got fired for buying IBM."
So Sun has this great product that they can't give away for free because it comes from free software roots. So what do they do? Start charging for it. This legitimizes the product in the minds of the PHBs, small as those minds are. Then they say they'll give it away for free if you qualify in some way. So the PHBs all scurry around to see whether they qualify, and when they figure out they do, they jump at this terrific discount from a well-known, strong company.
Having served time in the marketing end of software, I know that "Insanity First" is often the only way actually to succeed.
I thought it was Single Female. Funny how "Science Fiction" never even crossed my mind when I saw SF. I thought "adventures in single female wireless networking" sounded pretty interesting...
Worst Case Scenario Survival Handbook and The Worst-Case Scenario Survival Handbook: Dating and Sex
prepaid phone cards
postage stamps
#10 security envelopes
potholder (for cooking, not a pipe)
but what I really wish I'd had in college:
a deluxe beer brewing kit
...and have the longest expected life span and therefore the greatest lifetime customer value. And the most likely to whine incessantly so grandma buys the new action figure and plastic light saber flashlight.
Speaking of incessant whining... let me get back to reading the other posts.
In other news...
"Because they can!"
Yes! Join the cultural revolution NOW!
And here's what MSN.com's current "photos" agreement says:
Not only are they conceding that the poster has the liability, but they are granting everyone else in the world the right to edit and re-publish your photo without your consent!
CYA has become a new art form in the Redmond law offices, I guess.
This is an interesting statement. It involves some esoteric ideas of publication rights, ownership, and online communities.
When you have a photo, story, or article published as a freelancer, typically you sell first publication rights or some limited publication rights, and you retain ownership and copyright of the content. There are exceptions such as work for hire. On line, the terms of such a deal become strained because unlike a printed magazine, the publication can live, universally accessible, forever. Thus, first publication rights amount to first-and-always-available publication rights.
Posting to a community web site further strains the idea of publication rights. In many community sites, the notion is that the site operator has no control over the content. But the statement above indicates that Microsoft set itself up as essentially having publication rights... by uploading the photo, the user implicitly entered into an agreement whereby they granted publication rights to Microsoft in return for... nothing, I suppose. Like a vanity press of sorts. Microsoft immediately, upon upload, became the publisher of the photo. Whether they took it down later or not, they published it just as if Time magazine had published it and later issued a recall of all those printed copies.
If this is the case, then Microsoft was officially a publisher of the photo, and they should be held completely liable for the content. Also, if this is the case, then they deserved to get burned--it is another example of Microsoft trying to grab as much as they can until someone bites them.
It's for this reason that anyone setting up a community always puts in acceptable use policies and disclaimers saying they don't own or control the content.
isn't that all this amounts to?
I saw the name and thought it was a flying version of the x-10 wireless camera...
Now I'd pay for that!
I'd even probably look at the pop-up ads.
What I like about the fightcloud concept (that really is a terrible name) is that they look like they'll be rotating their artists and offerings fairly often.
All their pages say "limited time" on them. If they do it right, they'll act as an extremely good initial promotional vehicle for low-profile artists, and they'll offer the public an editorially filtered view into the "morass" of new artists.
This way, they'll always have fresh material, and not much to browse through. That's a site I would check regularly and would patronize often, if they had stuff I liked to listen to.
Didn't you read your TV's EULA?
Unless our government is full of idiots or media cronies (and it is, unfortunately), then here's how I see this "problem" shaking out:
The "entertainment" industry, which has been bloated with crap and getting fatter and fatter every year as wannabes climb over each other to get something published, will stop making so much money indiscriminately. The cash cow of advertising, now getting old and sick, will die off, and "free" TV will disappear. (I have not had "free" TV since 1989, when I first signed myself up for cable.)
The money in TV will shift from the producers of shows to the companies that deliver those shows--the makers of the DVRs and the suppliers of the DVR services. These companies, in order to keep profits high and unable to make fortunes on advertising, will charge consumers for their services, and they will use that money to fund programs that consumers will actually watch.
These services will license their most popular programs to the other vendors, and those vendors will probably charge premiums (pay-per-record, premium fees for non-native shows, etc.) for them to their clients.
In this way, the services will compete on overall quality of ALL their content--they won't have 18 hours to fill with crap every day, so they won't have the burden of those costs.
This is a Very Good Thing because it actually democratizes the content industry. Independent producers will be able to produce and license their shows to the DVR service companies. Big studios will still produce and license content, but they won't have the overhead of providing all the crap they do now.
All this assumes that Congress and our courts manage to keep their heads out of their arses and don't play lackey to the Chicken Little studios.
What has me truly amazed is that Microsoft is now fighting against the world. Think about it... most companies battle their competitors. Microsoft has become so big and rich that they no longer have any individual competitors. The "competition" consists of people who do good things, often for free. God forbid the government give money to people who do good things.
And, of course open source is un-American! In the sense that "American" implies elitist, exclusive, arrogant, and imperialistic.
The obvious solution is to knock down all the walls and put in cubes. The kid gets the PC in his cube, and the parents get the constant ability to monitor.
After all, it has worked so well in an office environment.
So don't filter your 9-year-old's surfing. Don't restrict your child's access to anything. It's nice that you can trust your 9-year-old so completely. Why would you care if a .kids.us domain is established?
This is a great solution because it does not affect you yet it provides security to the people who want it.
I imagine that if/when I put a computer in my kid's room (not likely), I will have the filter on unless I am actively monitoring the usage somehow. If I'm around, I'll turn the filter off. No big deal.
I don't believe the US congress has the authority to create a new TLD without the consent of some other groups in the world... so they did what they could. Created .kids within the TLD that they do have authority over. Nothing's stopping other countries from doing the same.
I simply don't understand how something that is good for many people and bad for none can be so attacked.
You're not a parent, are you?
The reason children in the US are not legally allowed to vote, drink, buy cigarettes, have sex, own a gun, drive a car, etc. is that they are too inexperienced to know the right path through any complex decision.
It's not because of "sugar-coating reality" that 12-year-old girls are lured, raped, and killed. And it's not because of bad parenting. In a few cases it may be because the parents themselves don't know how to monitor or discuss Internet technologies and how bad people can exploit them. In many cases it may be because the children, although having been told not to give out personal information, do so anyway because (a) they forget, (b) they think they really aren't vulnerable (it won't happen to THEM), (c) they don't realize the information makes them vulnerable, (d) they have come to trust the other party because they can't distinguish between lies and truth through chat rooms, or (e) all of the above.
That's not bad parenting. That's the reality of the vulnerability and gullibility of children.
This is already being proposed by Sen. Mary Landrieu of Louisiana. It is a bad idea because it allows the government to decide what is "harmful to minors" on the Web.
The bill proposing a .kids.us is much, much better because it is essentially a "kid-friendly" certification. It is essentially opt-in by the site owners (and regulated). A .xxx TLD would give us two options: (1) have the government shut down any non-xxx domain that the government thinks does not belong outside the red-light district, or (2) have only the legit xxx businesses move to the .xxx TLD and otherwise have the same situation we have today, with over 4,000 "regular" domain names pointing to a single web site.