That is the law. It's a public performance. However, it is unclear to me why a bunch of software developers that play music, whether analog or MP3, are engaging in a public performance. There is nothing public about it, nor is it related to the business. As I was saying, I would like to see a more serious legal test.
And your point is what? That we should stop any activity that may lead to copyright violation? If that is illegal, then punish the people who made the CDs. Of course, it isn't even clear that making private copies for personal use is even a copyright violation.
IANAL, but as far as I can tell, it is still legal to have an MP3 jukebox in your home and let people use it there. Now, it would clearly be violation of current copyright law if a business played MP3s for customers (say, a restaurant). But if employees let friends and coworkers to their music over the network at work, what's the problem? Does the fact that this takes place at work all of a sudden make it commercial? It seems to me they went after IIS because they had deep pockets and caved in easily. I would have liked to see this play out in court. And we have to wonder what's next: is the RIAA going to raid our homes? Will we have to pay fees based on the number of people present when we play music?
I know of at least one major research lab that developed an audio codec because a couple of researchers wanted to put on-line. They ended up putting several thousand CDs on a network server. (The audio codec was spun out as part of a startup, but ultimately failed because MP3 had become too popular.)
Such RIAA actions send a chilling message to the world. It is hard to see how such non-profit-making activity as employees sharing music at work would constitute "piracy". But perhaps sending a chilling message is just what they want: if computer science professionals can't do anything interesting with media, then they won't have to deal with new developments like MP3 or Napster.
What type of "fair use" could possibly apply here?
Let's see: employees bring in their private CDs and let their colleagues listen to them over the network. I'm rather mystified by how you might think that that's not "fair use". If they played it in a restaurant for customers, that would be one thing, but this is private activity completely unrelated to the job. If you did the same thing within your home, it would be completely legal as far as I can tell.
Re:entry of new vendors
on
PVR For Linux
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· Score: 2
You seem to have trouble understanding terms like "lower the cost of entry". Look it up some time.
However, it is *not* competition to TiVo outside of the handful of geeks that may choose to do it themselves over buying the off the shelf solution provided by TiVo and ReplayTV. First, the Linux VDR based solution is not a no-brainer installation.
But hardware vendors could make pre-installed low-cost, no-subscription-required boxes. Of, they could in fact offer a subscription to their own service. This lowers the cost of entry and time-to-market for competing with TiVo and ReplayTV. I suspect, however, that a number of bogus patents stand in the way.
I seem to recall that there are various patents, both on PVRs and on downloading TV program information over the Internet. Stupid, yes. But they may stand up in court.
Yes, dependencies with RPMs can be kind of a pain, but there are a bunch of scripts and tools that help you resolve them automatically. The per-file dependencies in RPM also have their good sides compared to the alternatives. For ready-made distributions like RedHat, they work fine.
In any case, if you just download a bunch of RPMs, it is the supplier's responsibility to make sure you get a complete set. The KDE distributors should either put up all the RPMs in a single directory, or they should at least supply a script that tells you what packages you are still missing. So, in that sense, it perhaps belongs into the review, though it probably shouldn't take up most of a KDE3 review. After all, once this is part of distributions, the install will simply not be a problem anymore.
Yes, the MIPS has a nice architecture, while the Pentium is just an arcane mess. But that battle was fought years ago. It seems to me that a Pentium (even a basic Pentium, perhaps even missing some instructions) would give them more of an edge. I, at least, would be much happier if I could use the same compilers for my handheld as I can on for desktop. With ARM and MIPS, I'm restricted to gcc and a few others for which someone happens to have gone through the enormous trouble of writing a new backend. Is it really so hard to make a small, power-saving Pentium-compatible chip?
A many-billion dollar company faces security problems and its response is to do what the textbooks say to do about security: mostly lots of extremely dull code reviews.
Yes, they probably will do some good. Yes, they will probably help a little with the perennial problems with Microsoft software: that it is dumped on the market with way too many bugs, that it is dumped on the market with way too many features, and that it is dumped on the market much earlier than the software from more conscientious competitors, driving them out of business.
But it doesn't address the fundamental problems. Microsoft software is still closed source and it is still written and controlled by a small number of programmers up in Redmond, programmers who often have no experience of anything beyond Microsoft. Even if Microsoft made all their software "shared source", the economic incentives would favor the crackers (other developers don't have much interest in contributing fixed to Microsoft that they just have to pay for again in the next release).
Most importantly, however, Microsoft's goal of total market domination is their own worst enemy: an OS that runs on 95% of the machines is intrinsically and unavoidably not secure. We need operating system diversity. If no single OS or server software runs on more than 5-10% of desktops and servers, then security problems are automatically self-limiting. And, as a bonus, the increased competition would give us better products and more innovation. (And, yes, these comments apply to Apache as well.)
Within a year, the entire product line had Internet features. Now, 7 years later, people publicly lament that Microsoft has virtually taken the Internet over.
Yes, but they have taken a lot of it over not by better features but by pushing out competitors in various ways. And despite all their power and resources, IIS is still a minority web server.
The nice thing about the Telecommunications Act of 1996 is that others can "opt in" to the agreement that resulted from our litigation.
You can't seriously believe that local phone companies wouldn't fight this tooth and nail. Our phone company has been promising DSL for years and failed to deliver. But you can bet that they would come up with an endless stream of legal and technical obstacles for why we couldn't do what you did, and we wouldn't even begin to know how to challenge that. For that matter, without a lawyer, we wouldn't even know how to structure the cooperative that would be delivering service. We'd spend more money in legal fees just to set this up than you spent for all your equipment, assuming, of course, that we even could interest a lawyer in this.
I actually think of myself more as a "mere engineer" than as high powered or media savvy.
I'm not questioning your qualifications as an engineer. But the fact is that you are (also) a practicing lawyer, and a well-known one at that. That's great for you, because you have both the experience and resources to get your legal rights, when it comes to patents, dealing with telephone companies, dealing with traffic stops,
or the FCC. Other people don't have that choice. In fact, you yourself keep pointing out tirelessly that engineers just aren't qualified to assess the legal significance of patents.
I'm sorry that my previous message sounded a bit like a personal attack. But I just can't help being cynical about a small legalistic victory by a lawyer. The sad fact is that the US is a highly legalistic society in which most people just have to live with whatever governments or companies dole out to them. As other Western democracies show, it doesn't have to be that way, but as long as the entire US political system is completely dominated by lawyers, this won't change. In fact, as you seem to demonstrate, most of them probably don't even think anything is wrong.
Oppedahl added that the Patent Office has been unfairly criticized for issuing an unusually large number of bad Internet-age patents. While it may happen, he said, bad patents are no more of a problem now than they have ever been
Anyway, his opinions on patents are not directly relevant to getting your own DSL coop running. Just understand that the guy behind this one is a high-powered, media-savvy lawyer who knows how to deal with his counterparts in government agencies and corporations. Given the kinds of cases he appears to have been involved in, I suspect money is no problem either. Somehow I think mere engineers like us have no realistic prayer of getting nearly as far.
The co-op was apparently started by Carl Oppedahl. Unless I'm confusing him with another patent lawyer, I believe he's a guy who thinks that the current patent system is just swell and that it's great how much money everybody is making off it (including himself).
I'm sure his stunning interpersonal style will have greatly contributed to the ease with which the negotiations with Qwest were carried out.
Re:FUD through "positive assertions"
on
Unix Isn't Dead
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· Score: 2
Hmm, aren't you making the same types of claims that you accuse the others of?
I accused the poster of making spreading underhanded FUD in the form of praise. I, on the other hand, am quite up-front: Windows will not stick around.
Is Windows like this? I don't know, I just don't see it with all the excitement right now surrounding.Net development.
See, you make the point for me: Microsoft is, effectively, already giving up on Windows and moving to.NET. Oh, sure, the box still says "Windows", but if their.NET plans work out, it will be a completely different OS. Microsoft keeps changing directions radically every few years because they don't seem to be able to make good, long-term design decisions. UNIX, on the other hand, has evolved steadily and continuously over the last two decades. UNIX was created by competent people with long-range vision and long term experience, and they created a system that has been able to grow and evolve.
I don't see the same level of excitement surrounding cool technology and Unix as I did 10 years ago.
UNIX was never "cool". In fact, operating systems are not supposed to be cool. They are supposed to work quietly, reliably, efficiently, and in the background. The cool stuff is what happens on top of them: GUIs, graphics, and applications. And in that area, UNIX and its derivatives are more vibrant and more interesting than Windows has ever been or likely will ever be.
Re:FUD through "positive assertions"
on
Unix Isn't Dead
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· Score: 2
Commercial Unix has lost market after market to cheaper hardware running NT,
So what? I made no claims about relative numbers of installations. Of course, NT is popular, mostly due to Microsoft's excellent sales and marketing job. But UNIX is here, it's very widely used, it is absolutely crucial to just about every sector, and it's not going away.
recently, Linux/BSD.
Linux, BSD, Darwin, and others are all basically UNIX derivatives. They are what ensures the continued existence of UNIX.
For my part, I hope Sun and BEA will each strive to be the best and that the general state of the technology will thus improve
Upstream bandwidth is usually around 128k, 256k if you are really lucky. A decent video or music link will saturate that just as much as busy FTP site. Now, that wasn't so hard to figure out, was it?
I have no problem with companies charging by volume, as long as the volume charges are reasonable (at most a couple of bucks per Gbyte during peak, much cheaper or free free during off-peak). But stop judging what kind of traffic is valuable. FTP is no more or less valuable than video gaming or video conferencing with your grandma. Who knows? Maybe someone is distributing the great American novel from their personal web site.
FUD through "positive assertions"
on
Unix Isn't Dead
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· Score: 5, Insightful
That submission is rather like the underhanded question of "when did you stop beating your wife?". I can't quite tell whether the poster is deliberatly spreading FUD or whether he has just fallen too much for Microsoft propaganda.
Of course, UNIX isn't dead. A large part of our business and government infrastructure runs on it. Even more software is written using UNIX APIs, and this includes a lot of Windows software. UNIX isn't at risk: there is just too much of it, supported by too many vendors and on too many platforms.
The operating system perpetually at risk is Windows, which is a single vendor solution and stands and falls with Microsoft. When Microsoft abandons Windows, there won't be any more. If you want to know what the future of Windows holds, just look at VMS.
For now, let's ask the opposite question: how much of the supposed success of Windows is really hype? How many IT managers think that their infrastructure is running on Windows when it's kept together by UNIX machines? How many Windows-licenses does Microsoft double and triple count for machines that are running Linux or BSD?
First, for profits are able to offer benefits to investors and employees as well as users.
Right now, they are offering losses and a very uncertain future.
This enables a for profit entity to compete more effectively against other for profits.
That's funny, because for-profit corporations always complain about the unfair advantages non-profits enjoy.
It is true that without the promise of huge IPOs, you might not be able to get people to work long hours for nearly nothing, but I wouldn't consider that a fair deal for employees anyway. Beyond that, however, a non-profit gets tax advantages and other advantages. Doesn't seem so uncompetitive to me.
For profit has received a bad name because of managements focus on the bottom line and disregard for other responsiblities. This type of approach is needed more in the for profit world.
There are certain things that just don't make sense for a for-profit company, or that are downright illegal. For example, if I donate money to Mandrake, what fraction is going to end up as profits with investors eventually? Why should I donate money to investors, who entered into the deal with the expectation of making a profit? Are these people needy? Or, if the donations are just going to tie them over until they make a profit, that seems dangerously close to an unfair means of driving out competitors through artificially low prices.
If you are going to run a for-profit, you have to do it for real: deliver value in the form of a product. If you can't make it work out without donations, it's just not a good business.
I like the Mandrake distribution But Mandrake's commercial nature doesn't give me much confidence in their future. As a commercial company, they are ultimately out to make a profit, but they don't seem to be able to do so without donations. It seems odd, though, for people to donate money to a supposedly profit-making enterprise. I don't see a good path to profitability, despite their article.
Wouldn't it make more sense for Mandrake to become a non-profit? Employees would still get paid, they would have tax benefits, and people who donate money would be guaranteed that their money goes into making a better distribution.
While I think that efforts like BNetD that create a free component for a proprietary game should be legal, I don't think they are a good idea. Why not clone both the server and the game and make it all free software?
Is JPEG2000 an open standard, or is it encumbered by patents? Will open source implementations be possible or does someone need to be paid licensing fees?
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That is the law. It's a public performance. However, it is unclear to me why a bunch of software developers that play music, whether analog or MP3, are engaging in a public performance. There is nothing public about it, nor is it related to the business. As I was saying, I would like to see a more serious legal test.
And your point is what? That we should stop any activity that may lead to copyright violation? If that is illegal, then punish the people who made the CDs. Of course, it isn't even clear that making private copies for personal use is even a copyright violation.
IANAL, but as far as I can tell, it is still legal to have an MP3 jukebox in your home and let people use it there. Now, it would clearly be violation of current copyright law if a business played MP3s for customers (say, a restaurant). But if employees let friends and coworkers to their music over the network at work, what's the problem? Does the fact that this takes place at work all of a sudden make it commercial? It seems to me they went after IIS because they had deep pockets and caved in easily. I would have liked to see this play out in court. And we have to wonder what's next: is the RIAA going to raid our homes? Will we have to pay fees based on the number of people present when we play music?
Such RIAA actions send a chilling message to the world. It is hard to see how such non-profit-making activity as employees sharing music at work would constitute "piracy". But perhaps sending a chilling message is just what they want: if computer science professionals can't do anything interesting with media, then they won't have to deal with new developments like MP3 or Napster.
Let's see: employees bring in their private CDs and let their colleagues listen to them over the network. I'm rather mystified by how you might think that that's not "fair use". If they played it in a restaurant for customers, that would be one thing, but this is private activity completely unrelated to the job. If you did the same thing within your home, it would be completely legal as far as I can tell.
You seem to have trouble understanding terms like "lower the cost of entry". Look it up some time.
But hardware vendors could make pre-installed low-cost, no-subscription-required boxes. Of, they could in fact offer a subscription to their own service. This lowers the cost of entry and time-to-market for competing with TiVo and ReplayTV. I suspect, however, that a number of bogus patents stand in the way.
I seem to recall that there are various patents, both on PVRs and on downloading TV program information over the Internet. Stupid, yes. But they may stand up in court.
In any case, if you just download a bunch of RPMs, it is the supplier's responsibility to make sure you get a complete set. The KDE distributors should either put up all the RPMs in a single directory, or they should at least supply a script that tells you what packages you are still missing. So, in that sense, it perhaps belongs into the review, though it probably shouldn't take up most of a KDE3 review. After all, once this is part of distributions, the install will simply not be a problem anymore.
Yes, the MIPS has a nice architecture, while the Pentium is just an arcane mess. But that battle was fought years ago. It seems to me that a Pentium (even a basic Pentium, perhaps even missing some instructions) would give them more of an edge. I, at least, would be much happier if I could use the same compilers for my handheld as I can on for desktop. With ARM and MIPS, I'm restricted to gcc and a few others for which someone happens to have gone through the enormous trouble of writing a new backend. Is it really so hard to make a small, power-saving Pentium-compatible chip?
Yes, they probably will do some good. Yes, they will probably help a little with the perennial problems with Microsoft software: that it is dumped on the market with way too many bugs, that it is dumped on the market with way too many features, and that it is dumped on the market much earlier than the software from more conscientious competitors, driving them out of business.
But it doesn't address the fundamental problems. Microsoft software is still closed source and it is still written and controlled by a small number of programmers up in Redmond, programmers who often have no experience of anything beyond Microsoft. Even if Microsoft made all their software "shared source", the economic incentives would favor the crackers (other developers don't have much interest in contributing fixed to Microsoft that they just have to pay for again in the next release).
Most importantly, however, Microsoft's goal of total market domination is their own worst enemy: an OS that runs on 95% of the machines is intrinsically and unavoidably not secure. We need operating system diversity. If no single OS or server software runs on more than 5-10% of desktops and servers, then security problems are automatically self-limiting. And, as a bonus, the increased competition would give us better products and more innovation. (And, yes, these comments apply to Apache as well.)
Yes, but they have taken a lot of it over not by better features but by pushing out competitors in various ways. And despite all their power and resources, IIS is still a minority web server.
You can't seriously believe that local phone companies wouldn't fight this tooth and nail. Our phone company has been promising DSL for years and failed to deliver. But you can bet that they would come up with an endless stream of legal and technical obstacles for why we couldn't do what you did, and we wouldn't even begin to know how to challenge that. For that matter, without a lawyer, we wouldn't even know how to structure the cooperative that would be delivering service. We'd spend more money in legal fees just to set this up than you spent for all your equipment, assuming, of course, that we even could interest a lawyer in this.
I actually think of myself more as a "mere engineer" than as high powered or media savvy.
I'm not questioning your qualifications as an engineer. But the fact is that you are (also) a practicing lawyer, and a well-known one at that. That's great for you, because you have both the experience and resources to get your legal rights, when it comes to patents, dealing with telephone companies, dealing with traffic stops, or the FCC. Other people don't have that choice. In fact, you yourself keep pointing out tirelessly that engineers just aren't qualified to assess the legal significance of patents.
I'm sorry that my previous message sounded a bit like a personal attack. But I just can't help being cynical about a small legalistic victory by a lawyer. The sad fact is that the US is a highly legalistic society in which most people just have to live with whatever governments or companies dole out to them. As other Western democracies show, it doesn't have to be that way, but as long as the entire US political system is completely dominated by lawyers, this won't change. In fact, as you seem to demonstrate, most of them probably don't even think anything is wrong.
See my other response for a quote.
Anyway, his opinions on patents are not directly relevant to getting your own DSL coop running. Just understand that the guy behind this one is a high-powered, media-savvy lawyer who knows how to deal with his counterparts in government agencies and corporations. Given the kinds of cases he appears to have been involved in, I suspect money is no problem either. Somehow I think mere engineers like us have no realistic prayer of getting nearly as far.
I'm sure his stunning interpersonal style will have greatly contributed to the ease with which the negotiations with Qwest were carried out.
I accused the poster of making spreading underhanded FUD in the form of praise. I, on the other hand, am quite up-front: Windows will not stick around.
Is Windows like this? I don't know, I just don't see it with all the excitement right now surrounding .Net development.
See, you make the point for me: Microsoft is, effectively, already giving up on Windows and moving to .NET. Oh, sure, the box still says "Windows", but if their .NET plans work out, it will be a completely different OS. Microsoft keeps changing directions radically every few years because they don't seem to be able to make good, long-term design decisions. UNIX, on the other hand, has evolved steadily and continuously over the last two decades. UNIX was created by competent people with long-range vision and long term experience, and they created a system that has been able to grow and evolve.
I don't see the same level of excitement surrounding cool technology and Unix as I did 10 years ago.
UNIX was never "cool". In fact, operating systems are not supposed to be cool. They are supposed to work quietly, reliably, efficiently, and in the background. The cool stuff is what happens on top of them: GUIs, graphics, and applications. And in that area, UNIX and its derivatives are more vibrant and more interesting than Windows has ever been or likely will ever be.
So what? I made no claims about relative numbers of installations. Of course, NT is popular, mostly due to Microsoft's excellent sales and marketing job. But UNIX is here, it's very widely used, it is absolutely crucial to just about every sector, and it's not going away.
recently, Linux/BSD.
Linux, BSD, Darwin, and others are all basically UNIX derivatives. They are what ensures the continued existence of UNIX.
Streaming video, music, etc is *nothing* compared to the guy who runs a 100 gb 0-day ftp server from his cable modem
Upstream bandwidth is usually around 128k, 256k if you are really lucky. A decent video or music link will saturate that just as much as busy FTP site. Now, that wasn't so hard to figure out, was it?
I have no problem with companies charging by volume, as long as the volume charges are reasonable (at most a couple of bucks per Gbyte during peak, much cheaper or free free during off-peak). But stop judging what kind of traffic is valuable. FTP is no more or less valuable than video gaming or video conferencing with your grandma. Who knows? Maybe someone is distributing the great American novel from their personal web site.
Of course, UNIX isn't dead. A large part of our business and government infrastructure runs on it. Even more software is written using UNIX APIs, and this includes a lot of Windows software. UNIX isn't at risk: there is just too much of it, supported by too many vendors and on too many platforms.
The operating system perpetually at risk is Windows, which is a single vendor solution and stands and falls with Microsoft. When Microsoft abandons Windows, there won't be any more. If you want to know what the future of Windows holds, just look at VMS.
For now, let's ask the opposite question: how much of the supposed success of Windows is really hype? How many IT managers think that their infrastructure is running on Windows when it's kept together by UNIX machines? How many Windows-licenses does Microsoft double and triple count for machines that are running Linux or BSD?
Right now, they are offering losses and a very uncertain future.
This enables a for profit entity to compete more effectively against other for profits.
That's funny, because for-profit corporations always complain about the unfair advantages non-profits enjoy.
It is true that without the promise of huge IPOs, you might not be able to get people to work long hours for nearly nothing, but I wouldn't consider that a fair deal for employees anyway. Beyond that, however, a non-profit gets tax advantages and other advantages. Doesn't seem so uncompetitive to me.
For profit has received a bad name because of managements focus on the bottom line and disregard for other responsiblities. This type of approach is needed more in the for profit world.
There are certain things that just don't make sense for a for-profit company, or that are downright illegal. For example, if I donate money to Mandrake, what fraction is going to end up as profits with investors eventually? Why should I donate money to investors, who entered into the deal with the expectation of making a profit? Are these people needy? Or, if the donations are just going to tie them over until they make a profit, that seems dangerously close to an unfair means of driving out competitors through artificially low prices.
If you are going to run a for-profit, you have to do it for real: deliver value in the form of a product. If you can't make it work out without donations, it's just not a good business.
Wouldn't it make more sense for Mandrake to become a non-profit? Employees would still get paid, they would have tax benefits, and people who donate money would be guaranteed that their money goes into making a better distribution.
While I think that efforts like BNetD that create a free component for a proprietary game should be legal, I don't think they are a good idea. Why not clone both the server and the game and make it all free software?
Is JPEG2000 an open standard, or is it encumbered by patents? Will open source implementations be possible or does someone need to be paid licensing fees?