Remember that convicted felons cannot vote in most states in the United States. Making something a felony crime is an effective way of eliminating political opposition.
Ok, yea, sure. I can see it now. A grassroots movement in which thousands -- nay, millions -- of people flock to the theaters and begin setting up camcorders set to record, but with the lens caps on.
It doesn't take a whole lot of people doing it to make a manager stop. They don't have a whole lot of direct stake in nailing someone with a camera.
One theater manager is quoted as saying, "They're driving us NUTS!" Another mutters, "We'd have enforced that new law, if it weren't for those meddling kids..."
You know, just about any type of peaceful civil disobedience (which this is not; it's legal behavior used to protest a law, rather than illegal behavior) could be made to look absurd like this.
Finally, shamed into admitting that copyright-ism is wrong, the Congress passes a new Stealing Rights Bill, and the U.S. is the first nation in history to recognize the rights of the people to bilk anyone they want out of any money that can be stolen by electronically copying a given work that is sold for money and giving it away for free!!
Keep your hat on, cowboy. I have an issue with the degree of the criminal penalties (three years in federal prison for taping a movie with no intent for profit seems harsh to me) involved. I'm not upset about copyright law, or the legitimacy of using *civil* law, where the penalties fit the actual damages being caused by the infringer, being used.
The nations of the world rejoice, and the name of OxOdOa, referred to lovingly by groupies as "CR/LF", is praised as the saviour of all humanity!!!
Oh, that already happens.
Or not.
I'm obviously not sitting down trying to seriously organize a movement. If I were, I'd be setting up a website, talking to relevant organizations and folks, and so forth. However, it doesn't hurt to throw out a couple of ideas.
I, personally, would get a kick out of whipping out a camera and demonstrating that there's nothing on it, which is why I mentioned this. It's something that I'd be willing to do, because it's easy, legal, kinda fun, and combats a law (well, bill and likely to soon-be-law) that seems pretty awful.
Yeah, and they *could* confiscate your camcorder, which you'd have no valid use for in *their* theater in the first place. That would also be quite legal, even if it might drive the would-be "pankster" nuts.
No, it would not be legal. A private party cannot just confiscate another's property, even if they own the land that another person is on.
But here's a thought; how about trying to do the right thing inside of trying to irrationally defeat everyone's best intentions?
I believe that I am, and that I am being rational.
I do not have a problem with civil penalties.
What I do have a problem with is this particular bill. It introduces *criminal penalties* for taping a movie. Three *years* in prison for taping a movie with *no intent to profit* is astoundingly severe.
There are a lot of things that I'd like to see. For example, I really don't like people speeding. Heck, speeding actually endangers lives, which is a long shot from videotaping a movie. However, I also am not going to propose that someone who is deliberately cruising along five miles an hour over the speed limit be placed in federal prison for three years.
I don't really have a problem with a penalty for copying a movie. I do take serious issue with the degree of the penalties involved.
I've been watching Ontario's marijuana policy with some interest. I do not smoke marijuana -- I really would prefer that people do not use it at all. However, I also don't think that it causes a tremendous amount of harm; certainly no more than alcohol does. Ontario doesn't throw people who possess marijuana in jail, and this approach doesn't seem to have caused a massive degree of problems. We, on the other hand, have extremely harsh federal drug law, which has done very little to prevent anyone that I'm aware of from smoking marijuana if they decide to do so.
Finally, you could say "well, since someone *shouldn't* be doing this in the first place, why don't we just jack the penalties up to discourage them?" I'm just not comfortable with that. You *could* shoot someone in the forehead whenever they commit a crime; I think that this wouldn't produce a whole lot of social benefit. The point of a penalty is to discourage people from engaging in an activity while imposing a minimal amount of social damage. Throwing someone in prison for three years is a pretty significant cost, and I have a hard time figuring out why it's so crucial for society that movies not leak. In general, the media industry has enjoyed increasingly strong protection (both in length of copyright, penalties involved, and peripheral laws) for about a hundred years. There is exactly one reason to do this -- to encourage the production of more and better content. I do not think that the content that we have available today is so much mindblowingly better than the stuff that was produced in the years before it, and thus question the need for these laws, which penalize people and increasingly limit use.
I think that if Mark Twain had seen what his copyright internationalization efforts had led to (some of the first effort in strengthening IP) today, he'd write a cutting passage or two.
Illegally copying a movie isn't great. But, in the grand scheme of things, it's a piece of entertainment.
Illegally copying, say, Linux, is IMHO much more damaging. It's a crucial piece of software that is used all over the world in important systems. There are a lot many more dollars involved in the software industry than in movies.
As a later poster pointed out, what if violating the GPL license was criminalized, with three years in federal prison for a violation without intent to profit, and five years with intent to make profit? Linksys, for instance, used modified copies of Linux in some of their hardware products and deliberately kept back the source. What if their execs and engineers went to *jail* for doing so?
I'm curious as to why you would think that this is acceptable, but criminalizing GPL violations isn't. (Unless, of course, you don't -- I think that the idea of criminalizing either is quite disturbing.)
It doesn't have to do with whether you like pirates. It has to do with whether you dislike the new bill in question.
The sentences involved are *extreme*. They are not trivial (especially as it's made clear that deliberately taping the movie *with no intention of profiting*, such as to watch reruns at home) involves three *years* of prison time. You can get less prison time for deliberately stabbing someone.
We have civil copyright infringment law for a reason. I see no reason to criminalize an act like this one.
Why, why, why, why, why, why, why, why does Close Combat have to be such a fantastic series and *also* inextricably linked to Microsoft, without any chance whatsoever of ever seeing a Linux release? What gods did I *offend*?
If there are enough people downloading, and the company has capped their outbound BitTorrent rate, people's download rate will simply decrease to their upload rate as they trade blocks around.
Suppose they allow continuous outbound traffic of 20KiB/sec, for instance.
Re:Wrong, wrong, wrong. But...
on
Wired on McBride
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
Darl wasn't at the helm when Caldera was trying to be a legitimate Linux business. You're thinking of the famously-named Ransom Love, who was running Caldera at the time.
Darl is strictly a litigious bastard, and stuck with trying to extort money from the rest of the Linux world.
There are two kinds of people working in these IEEE groups.
1. Seasoned engineers; and 2. Twits.
You're not being nearly cynical enough.
This is a bunch of people from industry Businesses pay their engineers to go to these things so that they can advance their interests. These are networking hardware companies.
If the first spec is updated, all the companies involved get to enjoy the sublime pleasure of consumers re-purchasing all their hardware all over again (and if they get really lucky, to differentiate between "business" hardware and "home" hardware).
It *might* just be incompetence, but I'm more inclined to blame plain old cold-bloodedness.
Anything you send over their network cleartext is fair game, anyway.
Not unless they inform you -- doing otherwise is illegal wiretapping.
Most organizations get around this with a blanket clause in their usage policy saying "we may need to monitor the content of network traffice to ensure the continued proper operation of the network", or something along those lines.
but for an ISP to throw it away before it even gets to the intended recipient is fucking rediculous and should be illegal.
Thank Microsoft. ISPs could easily just add a header line and let the user filter on it, but Outlook Express is crippled from Outlook in that it can't match on arbitrary header lines, forcing ISPs to delete or leave alone.
I agree that SA is great client-side, which is how I use it. The problem is that it isn't plug-and-play on even *IX, and it's not trivial to set up on the client side on Windows.
And, do you really think that it's right when taxpayer money is spent on camcorder rule enforcement but not on GPL enforcement just because currently the movie industry pays more taxes than the Free Software industry?
Hmm. That's interestingly put. Yeah, good point...why *isn't* violation of the GPL criminalized, if we're going to be pulling this kind of stuff? Compared to some random entertainment content, the systems built with GPLed software are a whole hell of a lot more important.
Seriously, how do you think the European aristocracy came into being? It was rich and wealthy merchants using their money and power to buy themselves rights and more power.
Hmm. I'm not an expert on European history, but that isn't how the English aristocracy came into being -- it was from conquerors running around. I would venture to guess that most European aristocracy actually came up from conquest.
You *could* disable your camcorder (cover the lens or whatnot) and proceed to pretend to "film" the movie while watching it. It's quite legal, even if it might drive theater managers nuts. It also makes enforcement of this infeasible, if done widely enough.
Here is the bill text, which should really have been included in the story. (Actually, IMHO, Slashdot policy should be to require a link to bill text when submitting a story on new legislation.)
I really liked the early Fallout games (1 and 2), and it's a real shame to see this happening. I just can't see Fallout succeeding in an MMORPG market. Not enough people, serious capital is required for MMORPG creation, the Fallout "world" is largely spoofs and future views of the existing world -- it's not like, say, the Star Wars world, where you have a really unique and interesting world. Fallout was big because it did a *good implementation* of a post-apocalyptic world, not because nobody has done such a world before. Given that, and the fact that Fallout isn't *that* visible, I don't know why Fallout would be such a valuable piece of IP to build a game around.
The existing Fallout engine is, frankly, behind the times WRT MMORPGs -- I think that a new MMORPG is likely to have to be 3d. That means that just about everything has to go out the window. Instead of making a "Fallout MMORPG", it'd be just as easy for a company that wants to do an MMORPG to make a "Brand X Post-Apocalyptic MMORPG".
b) This is a good thing. Yes, some software may have to be changed. Red Hat and others have added NX as well, and the Linux world didn't crumble. This is not a bad thing; it's a very good thing. Please stop discouraging Microsoft from improving the security of the general computing environment.
Slashdot Mirror
How is Texas "safe"?
You expect Bush, Texas's Republican ex-governor has no chance of winning in his home state?
Remember that convicted felons cannot vote in most states in the United States. Making something a felony crime is an effective way of eliminating political opposition.
Ok, yea, sure. I can see it now. A grassroots movement in which thousands -- nay, millions -- of people flock to the theaters and begin setting up camcorders set to record, but with the lens caps on.
It doesn't take a whole lot of people doing it to make a manager stop. They don't have a whole lot of direct stake in nailing someone with a camera.
One theater manager is quoted as saying, "They're driving us NUTS!" Another mutters, "We'd have enforced that new law, if it weren't for those meddling kids..."
You know, just about any type of peaceful civil disobedience (which this is not; it's legal behavior used to protest a law, rather than illegal behavior) could be made to look absurd like this.
Finally, shamed into admitting that copyright-ism is wrong, the Congress passes a new Stealing Rights Bill, and the U.S. is the first nation in history to recognize the rights of the people to bilk anyone they want out of any money that can be stolen by electronically copying a given work that is sold for money and giving it away for free!!
Keep your hat on, cowboy. I have an issue with the degree of the criminal penalties (three years in federal prison for taping a movie with no intent for profit seems harsh to me) involved. I'm not upset about copyright law, or the legitimacy of using *civil* law, where the penalties fit the actual damages being caused by the infringer, being used.
The nations of the world rejoice, and the name of OxOdOa, referred to lovingly by groupies as "CR/LF", is praised as the saviour of all humanity!!!
Oh, that already happens.
Or not.
I'm obviously not sitting down trying to seriously organize a movement. If I were, I'd be setting up a website, talking to relevant organizations and folks, and so forth. However, it doesn't hurt to throw out a couple of ideas.
I, personally, would get a kick out of whipping out a camera and demonstrating that there's nothing on it, which is why I mentioned this. It's something that I'd be willing to do, because it's easy, legal, kinda fun, and combats a law (well, bill and likely to soon-be-law) that seems pretty awful.
Yeah, and they *could* confiscate your camcorder, which you'd have no valid use for in *their* theater in the first place. That would also be quite legal, even if it might drive the would-be "pankster" nuts.
No, it would not be legal. A private party cannot just confiscate another's property, even if they own the land that another person is on.
But here's a thought; how about trying to do the right thing inside of trying to irrationally defeat everyone's best intentions?
I believe that I am, and that I am being rational.
I do not have a problem with civil penalties.
What I do have a problem with is this particular bill. It introduces *criminal penalties* for taping a movie. Three *years* in prison for taping a movie with *no intent to profit* is astoundingly severe.
There are a lot of things that I'd like to see. For example, I really don't like people speeding. Heck, speeding actually endangers lives, which is a long shot from videotaping a movie. However, I also am not going to propose that someone who is deliberately cruising along five miles an hour over the speed limit be placed in federal prison for three years.
I don't really have a problem with a penalty for copying a movie. I do take serious issue with the degree of the penalties involved.
I've been watching Ontario's marijuana policy with some interest. I do not smoke marijuana -- I really would prefer that people do not use it at all. However, I also don't think that it causes a tremendous amount of harm; certainly no more than alcohol does. Ontario doesn't throw people who possess marijuana in jail, and this approach doesn't seem to have caused a massive degree of problems. We, on the other hand, have extremely harsh federal drug law, which has done very little to prevent anyone that I'm aware of from smoking marijuana if they decide to do so.
Finally, you could say "well, since someone *shouldn't* be doing this in the first place, why don't we just jack the penalties up to discourage them?" I'm just not comfortable with that. You *could* shoot someone in the forehead whenever they commit a crime; I think that this wouldn't produce a whole lot of social benefit. The point of a penalty is to discourage people from engaging in an activity while imposing a minimal amount of social damage. Throwing someone in prison for three years is a pretty significant cost, and I have a hard time figuring out why it's so crucial for society that movies not leak. In general, the media industry has enjoyed increasingly strong protection (both in length of copyright, penalties involved, and peripheral laws) for about a hundred years. There is exactly one reason to do this -- to encourage the production of more and better content. I do not think that the content that we have available today is so much mindblowingly better than the stuff that was produced in the years before it, and thus question the need for these laws, which penalize people and increasingly limit use.
I think that if Mark Twain had seen what his copyright internationalization efforts had led to (some of the first effort in strengthening IP) today, he'd write a cutting passage or two.
Okay, look.
Illegally copying a movie isn't great. But, in the grand scheme of things, it's a piece of entertainment.
Illegally copying, say, Linux, is IMHO much more damaging. It's a crucial piece of software that is used all over the world in important systems. There are a lot many more dollars involved in the software industry than in movies.
As a later poster pointed out, what if violating the GPL license was criminalized, with three years in federal prison for a violation without intent to profit, and five years with intent to make profit? Linksys, for instance, used modified copies of Linux in some of their hardware products and deliberately kept back the source. What if their execs and engineers went to *jail* for doing so?
I'm curious as to why you would think that this is acceptable, but criminalizing GPL violations isn't. (Unless, of course, you don't -- I think that the idea of criminalizing either is quite disturbing.)
It doesn't have to do with whether you like pirates. It has to do with whether you dislike the new bill in question.
The sentences involved are *extreme*. They are not trivial (especially as it's made clear that deliberately taping the movie *with no intention of profiting*, such as to watch reruns at home) involves three *years* of prison time. You can get less prison time for deliberately stabbing someone.
We have civil copyright infringment law for a reason. I see no reason to criminalize an act like this one.
So, I'm curious. If a campaign contribution isn't a bribe, what exactly do you call it?
Why, why, why, why, why, why, why, why does Close Combat have to be such a fantastic series and *also* inextricably linked to Microsoft, without any chance whatsoever of ever seeing a Linux release? What gods did I *offend*?
If there are enough people downloading, and the company has capped their outbound BitTorrent rate, people's download rate will simply decrease to their upload rate as they trade blocks around.
Suppose they allow continuous outbound traffic of 20KiB/sec, for instance.
Darl wasn't at the helm when Caldera was trying to be a legitimate Linux business. You're thinking of the famously-named Ransom Love, who was running Caldera at the time.
Darl is strictly a litigious bastard, and stuck with trying to extort money from the rest of the Linux world.
There are two kinds of people working in these IEEE groups.
1. Seasoned engineers; and
2. Twits.
You're not being nearly cynical enough.
This is a bunch of people from industry Businesses pay their engineers to go to these things so that they can advance their interests. These are networking hardware companies.
If the first spec is updated, all the companies involved get to enjoy the sublime pleasure of consumers re-purchasing all their hardware all over again (and if they get really lucky, to differentiate between "business" hardware and "home" hardware).
It *might* just be incompetence, but I'm more inclined to blame plain old cold-bloodedness.
Sorry, I should have italicized the quoted text "An iBook is $999".
An iBook is $999.
The lowest-end laptop at the Apple Store at the moment is $1099.
It has a 1Ghz G4 processor, a 12" screen, and no wireless card.
The lowest-end laptop at the Dell Store at the moment is $999.
It has a 2.66 Ghz P4, a 14.1" screen and a wireless card.
Anything you send over their network cleartext is fair game, anyway.
Not unless they inform you -- doing otherwise is illegal wiretapping.
Most organizations get around this with a blanket clause in their usage policy saying "we may need to monitor the content of network traffice to ensure the continued proper operation of the network", or something along those lines.
but for an ISP to throw it away before it even gets to the intended recipient is fucking rediculous and should be illegal.
Thank Microsoft. ISPs could easily just add a header line and let the user filter on it, but Outlook Express is crippled from Outlook in that it can't match on arbitrary header lines, forcing ISPs to delete or leave alone.
I agree that SA is great client-side, which is how I use it. The problem is that it isn't plug-and-play on even *IX, and it's not trivial to set up on the client side on Windows.
And, do you really think that it's right when taxpayer money is spent on camcorder rule enforcement but not on GPL enforcement just because currently the movie industry pays more taxes than the Free Software industry?
Hmm. That's interestingly put. Yeah, good point...why *isn't* violation of the GPL criminalized, if we're going to be pulling this kind of stuff? Compared to some random entertainment content, the systems built with GPLed software are a whole hell of a lot more important.
Seriously, how do you think the European aristocracy came into being? It was rich and wealthy merchants using their money and power to buy themselves rights and more power.
Hmm. I'm not an expert on European history, but that isn't how the English aristocracy came into being -- it was from conquerors running around. I would venture to guess that most European aristocracy actually came up from conquest.
You *could* disable your camcorder (cover the lens or whatnot) and proceed to pretend to "film" the movie while watching it. It's quite legal, even if it might drive theater managers nuts. It also makes enforcement of this infeasible, if done widely enough.
Here is the bill text, which should really have been included in the story. (Actually, IMHO, Slashdot policy should be to require a link to bill text when submitting a story on new legislation.)
I really liked the early Fallout games (1 and 2), and it's a real shame to see this happening. I just can't see Fallout succeeding in an MMORPG market. Not enough people, serious capital is required for MMORPG creation, the Fallout "world" is largely spoofs and future views of the existing world -- it's not like, say, the Star Wars world, where you have a really unique and interesting world. Fallout was big because it did a *good implementation* of a post-apocalyptic world, not because nobody has done such a world before. Given that, and the fact that Fallout isn't *that* visible, I don't know why Fallout would be such a valuable piece of IP to build a game around.
The existing Fallout engine is, frankly, behind the times WRT MMORPGs -- I think that a new MMORPG is likely to have to be 3d. That means that just about everything has to go out the window. Instead of making a "Fallout MMORPG", it'd be just as easy for a company that wants to do an MMORPG to make a "Brand X Post-Apocalyptic MMORPG".
No, it's not.
A contract is a specific legal term. It is not a license or an agreement or anything else of the sort that might be slapped on the back of a CD.
If you haven't signed anything, you aren't involved in a contract.
SPF has severe problems and is fairly easy for a spammer to break.
Virginia isn't all *that* badly off.
Rep. Rick Boucher has shown up on Slashdot before a lot.
:-(
He's pretty technically-oriented, and is probably the representative most oriented with the majority of Slashdot.
Unfortunately, he doesn't represent my state, so I can't vote for him.
Note that this is very unusual for the non-academic tech researchy community, par for the course for Google, and just makes us all love Google more.
a) This has been discussed before.
b) This is a good thing. Yes, some software may have to be changed. Red Hat and others have added NX as well, and the Linux world didn't crumble. This is not a bad thing; it's a very good thing. Please stop discouraging Microsoft from improving the security of the general computing environment.