Objections 1 - 5 (all of them) are accounted for in the article, which explicitly describes how, when, and why takedown decisions are made and what the verification process is. Please mod the parent post down, as he is throwing up FUD which clearly shows that he did not RTFA.
Let's be really really clear about what you are trying to say, since I think a lot of people will misinterpret.
What weierstrass is commenting on is the semantic difference between "unlawful" and "illegal." It's an important point in law theory, but quite unimportant with regards to the main discussion here, since regardless of whether it's "unlawful" or "illegal", the penalties are the same.
What some of you reading this may have gotten hung up on is "but does not forbid it whatsoever" to mean "so go ahead and download all you want without fear." This is simlpy not the case.
"unlawful" in this case means this: there is NO law that says "Thou art not allowed to tranfer KaiserChiefs-Ruby.mp3 via limewire." In fact, for the most part, "the law" says nothing about mp3 files, p2p networks, ipods, and so forth.
What the law does lay guidelines for, however, is what constitutes LEGAL IP distribution, redistribution, and fair use. Frankly, if you're reading this thread in 2008 and don't know the four or five US provisions for something to be classified as "Fair Use" off the top of your head, then you have no business being in this discussion - get thee to a wikipedia.
So, the law does not "forbid" transferring "KaiserChiefs-Ruby.mp3" via limewire - what it does, however, is state the principles and guidelines under which transferring such intellectual property could be considered legal. Since basically all interpretations have found that wantonly sharing this file on a P2P network does not fall under such guidelines, it is therefore "unlawful".
What does this mean for you? Not much. The penalties and the penalties are the penalties no matter whether it's "illegal" or "unlawful." "The law allows the copyright owner to seek reparations" basically means that if you do it, you can get sued for a lot of money. I'd add to this that it takes very little actual P2P use to cross into the line of CRIMINAL copyright infringement ($1000 worth of material in any 180 day period - I guesstimate that most p2p users exceed this by a considerable margin.)
If you're interested in reading more, please see http://www.copyright.gov/title17/92chap5.html . It's short reading, but worthwhile for anybody who participates in these threads other than to throw up more piracy-"justifying" obfuscation and FUD.
Oh wait - i said "piracy!" This gives green light for some of you to blather on (incorrectly) about the inappropriateness of the term for copyright infringement and its reservation for high seas crimes. Whew! That sure will get you out of actually confronting the issues.
thank you for the bland, predictible, obvious civics speech. now pay attention.
all of what you said is more or less correct.
NONE of what you said has much relevance here. I'd like to know why this should be enough in this case to dismiss the lawsuit. what ACTUAL, PRACTICAL BEARING would it have if, for example, the police officer was seeking a job at WB? If he brought up bad evidence, sure, but the judge exists there to see whether the evidence is bad and the defense can challnge it too. This is the way an advertsarial system works. Likewise, the defense attorneys may make preposterous claims because they are biased for their client. What the hell difference does it make? Did somebody claim that the OJ case should be thrown out because the defense proposed preposterous "mafia" arguments that were clearly biased towards its client?
in fact, mind you, we dont even have bias here. we have "the suspicion of potential of bias." There is BIG difference.
Let's assume for a moment that he managed evidence and/or interpretations to the benefit of WB. The defense will question it and provide reasonable counterarguments. The judge will oversee it. remember, folks - we're talking about a police officer here, not a judge. we expect bit players like police officers to have their own grudges, motivations, and the like. that's the whole point there is a court at all!
as for your contention that the mere idea that the police officer had a conflict of interest in and of itself is "reasonable doubt" is laughable, and please don't play lawyer in throwing about terms like "preponderance of evidence" when you clearly have the bar for reasonable doubt so poorly misread. To wit, there have been hundreds of murder cases (that is - criminal cases - a much tougher standard!) where the defendants have raised some theoretical conflict of interest (the accused is white - the officer is black, etc) and nowhere has this been seen as the absolute block against fair legal treatment (though it can be considered).
I'm confused. Why should this have any bearing on the case whatsoever? The merits of the case are independent of whether the officer was thinking about a job with WB, is a fan of ABBA, or wears five inch heels.
It's ok for scrabulous to copy scrabble because some slashdot users personally like scrabulous as compared to the "old economy" "dinosaur" company of Hasbro. it's not ok for china to copy this game because in this case china is the "old dinosaur bureaucracy" compared to the hip flash developer.
First, he tells us that there's not much of a chance that somebody would use his insecure domestic wi-fi. Then he tells us:
"And yes, if someone did commit a crime using my network the police might visit, but what better defense is there than the fact that I have an open wireless network?"
While I am just rolling my eyes at his attempt to amateurly guess at legal consequences, I am in shock as to how he doesn't see the obvious contradiction in his logic. This guy's whole theory of it being unlikely that anybody would steal his wi-fi is completely at odds with his theory that if somebody does actually do so he can just claim it was open and thus 'not him.' Right.
Will you and the rest of the people please understand that I am not talking about myself personally. I am rather pointing out the massive general problem with the GPL in that it is toothless. Stop focusing on any perceived ethical inadequacies on my part and focus on the larger issue.
That said, Mr. Holier Than Thou: let's say I *did* start a company based on FSF code. Let's say this company made medical equipment. My company employed a bunch of people and saved a bunch of lives. Tell me again why this is wrong and your downloading "Lord of the Rings" from eMule is OK? Let me be clear again, since these sort of things are lost on you, apparently: I'm not accusing you personally of being a movie downloader. I AM, however, suggesting that a lot of the slashdot communits seems to think that the copyright integrity of everything but OSS code is a matter of personal preference.
Well duh. But likewise there are a lot of real companies who take advantage of hippie code and count on the fact that their lawyers will make them a difficult target to sue. We are seeing a lot of this as companies first tried to bright-line the GPL, and more and more they just don't give a damn.
If I were starting a business, I'd just go on and bright-line and outright abuse the GPL. I would go into business (such as PS2 games or whatever) where any "outrage" by the OSS community would go unnoticed and would simply ignore the empty threats of lawsuits and what-have-you. Heck, many companies are doing this already. it's a very legitimate and none too risky business strategy. For all its good philosophical points that would encourage good hearted individuals to contribute to my bottom line, I would benefit from the fact that enforcement of the GPL is ultimately toothless.
Please, do go on and tell me how, exactly, I'm wrong in this.
ah yes, this is why we see all the 'flamebait' tags for the gratuitous "RIAA suxxx / m$ suxx" posts. Puh-leeze. He was raising legitimate ancillary issues.
Unfortunately, basically all cool youtube videos involving aerobatics and remote controlled aircraft are due primarily to the fact that the craft have ridiculous power to weight ratios. These same power to weight ratios are not realistic for craft with real-world payload and/or endurance requirements at this time.
More to the point, "the military" (by which I assume you mean "the US military") already has plenty of gadgets. We don't need more hardware dreamed up by middle-class SUV drivers in office parks in suburbs who are blissfully seperated from the realities of what their machines do. We need people (not necessarily in the military) who are more prepared to actually engage with the people of the world in a constructive way.
You fail Economics 101.
The rightholder can shop his invention to the manufacturer willing to pay the highest price for it. Or, he can sell non-exclusive licenses that will get him a higher aggregate sum. He can negotiate one-time licenses or he can negoatiate per-use licenses. The companies that enter into agreements with are competing for this resource, but the rightsholder can only provide the item at a price that the market will bear. as always, considerations of the life-limitedness of the patent as well as the fact that there is a possibility that a suitable alaternate technology may come into existence come into play.
This is about as close as you can get to a perfect market solution that does not require the heavy hand of regulation. ANY regulation in this matter would inevitably tip what is otherwise a competitive process where both sides have an incentive to find a fair price into some pointless advantage for one side or the other that artificially skews an otherwise fairly agreed upon price. In fact, you'd be hard pressed to find any model situation in the world that is actually better solved by pure market forces than this as a textbook example, even if you tried. Adding a second (alternate) rightsholder may lower the price to the 'company', but it doesnt change the fundamental market dynamic at work here.
Man, really. Read a basic economics book or something.
"It certainly harms the progress of useful arts to stop sales and/or development. Instead, patent violation should be assessed only in the amount of money owed from one party to another, calculated as a reasonable fraction of the profit earned from goods in violation of the patent."
would the inventor also have to pay a percentage for a loss if the item fails to make a profit?
/ SARCASM
Why of why do people like you not believe in the free market? This solves the situation far better than your assinine, ignorant-of-finance-and-economics socialist "profit splitting" suggestion which would basically rely on judges to determine what percentage who is owed... which would itself be insane and require precognition the sort of which is better left to the market.
Complicated things made up of a lot of complicated subsystems are expensive. Hard drives are a multi-billion dollar business. patents ensure that each person who does hard work for each small part gets a just reward. I don't quite unedrstand your point otherwise, unless you think that it's a good thing that giant companies with the ability to productize complex items should not have to pay the actual inventors.
As for your 'basic assumption', there is nothing stopping any given inventor for releasing his novel invention into the public domain.
the inventors are subject to the same laws of supply and demand as everybody else. they can ask a zillion jillion dollars and they won't get it. they can ask for a large some, commensurate with the amount the market values the hard drives buillt using their technologies by companies.
This isn't rocket science, people.
So, why exactly should dell care whether you buy ubuntu or vista? presumably it makes at least $1 on vista, so, really.. i mean really. why the hell should dell push ubuntu to people who would not have asked about it anyway? dell is not part of your evangelizing cult. they are a business. they will happily supply people who want linux with the opeating system if that keeps them from buying PCs elsewhere, but they aren't going to bend over backwards about this in order to reduce their own revenue from others who likely would have bought vista.
If you want to broadcast not-for-profit, i don't see any reason why rightsholders should have to subsidize your fantasy by giving you a lower rate. Can somebody who disagrees with me tell me why, exactly, they believe that I am wrong? I really see no other way around it. We don't insist that PBS be allowed to rebroadcast monday night football simply because it's not for profit. Why should some webcaster, no matter what his scale, be allowed to suck away listeners from people who pay a market value for the content if it's the *same* content, if not even better since we can assume that it would be without or with fewer ads?
For fark's sake people. A statement like "there is no technological fix for a social problem" is just important-sounding nonsense. Really? We seem, after all, to have prevented the problem of people physically reaching out across the internet and strangling people... I have yet to see anybody do this (as much as I'd like to sometimes). Parent poster completely ignores the obvious problem with his arguments: that ALL defense mechanisms are not about absolute defense, but about reducing the rate of successful attacks and/or increasing the barriers to entry (such as technical sophistication, equipment, time, etc) that an attacker must invest in to be successful. Security guards and alarm systems do not prevent all bank robberies - but it is safe to say that there would be more robberies if those things didn't exist. Same here. You may have technological issues as to exactly how much such a hardware defense would decrease the amount of cheating, but it seems fairly obvious that, if implemented, this figure would be greater than zero.
The thing is, it's not like slashdot has gotten worse about this. it's been the same bullshit ever since I started reading slashdot. the only thing that you no longer see as the "Linux will take over the desktop by Xmas!!!" posts any more. At best, you get the occasional glee of "Today the Friedrichshafen municicipal water department has switched to Linux, tomorrow the world!!!!"
How is the parent message "insightful?" He simply asserts that we have a right to privacy, and then goes on to say "we were given the right to have guns", so presumably he means "in the United States." In case he didn't notice, there is no "right to privacy" in the constution.
Folks, when you start modding up posts like the parent's rambling mess, complete with some nonsensical blather about the nature of the judiciary, all of slashdot loses.
Slashdot Mirror
Objections 1 - 5 (all of them) are accounted for in the article, which explicitly describes how, when, and why takedown decisions are made and what the verification process is. Please mod the parent post down, as he is throwing up FUD which clearly shows that he did not RTFA.
What weierstrass is commenting on is the semantic difference between "unlawful" and "illegal." It's an important point in law theory, but quite unimportant with regards to the main discussion here, since regardless of whether it's "unlawful" or "illegal", the penalties are the same.
What some of you reading this may have gotten hung up on is "but does not forbid it whatsoever" to mean "so go ahead and download all you want without fear." This is simlpy not the case.
"unlawful" in this case means this: there is NO law that says "Thou art not allowed to tranfer KaiserChiefs-Ruby.mp3 via limewire." In fact, for the most part, "the law" says nothing about mp3 files, p2p networks, ipods, and so forth.
What the law does lay guidelines for, however, is what constitutes LEGAL IP distribution, redistribution, and fair use. Frankly, if you're reading this thread in 2008 and don't know the four or five US provisions for something to be classified as "Fair Use" off the top of your head, then you have no business being in this discussion - get thee to a wikipedia.
So, the law does not "forbid" transferring "KaiserChiefs-Ruby.mp3" via limewire - what it does, however, is state the principles and guidelines under which transferring such intellectual property could be considered legal. Since basically all interpretations have found that wantonly sharing this file on a P2P network does not fall under such guidelines, it is therefore "unlawful".
What does this mean for you? Not much. The penalties and the penalties are the penalties no matter whether it's "illegal" or "unlawful." "The law allows the copyright owner to seek reparations" basically means that if you do it, you can get sued for a lot of money. I'd add to this that it takes very little actual P2P use to cross into the line of CRIMINAL copyright infringement ($1000 worth of material in any 180 day period - I guesstimate that most p2p users exceed this by a considerable margin.)
If you're interested in reading more, please see http://www.copyright.gov/title17/92chap5.html . It's short reading, but worthwhile for anybody who participates in these threads other than to throw up more piracy-"justifying" obfuscation and FUD.
Oh wait - i said "piracy!" This gives green light for some of you to blather on (incorrectly) about the inappropriateness of the term for copyright infringement and its reservation for high seas crimes. Whew! That sure will get you out of actually confronting the issues.
thank you for the bland, predictible, obvious civics speech. now pay attention. all of what you said is more or less correct. NONE of what you said has much relevance here. I'd like to know why this should be enough in this case to dismiss the lawsuit. what ACTUAL, PRACTICAL BEARING would it have if, for example, the police officer was seeking a job at WB? If he brought up bad evidence, sure, but the judge exists there to see whether the evidence is bad and the defense can challnge it too. This is the way an advertsarial system works. Likewise, the defense attorneys may make preposterous claims because they are biased for their client. What the hell difference does it make? Did somebody claim that the OJ case should be thrown out because the defense proposed preposterous "mafia" arguments that were clearly biased towards its client? in fact, mind you, we dont even have bias here. we have "the suspicion of potential of bias." There is BIG difference.
Let's assume for a moment that he managed evidence and/or interpretations to the benefit of WB. The defense will question it and provide reasonable counterarguments. The judge will oversee it. remember, folks - we're talking about a police officer here, not a judge. we expect bit players like police officers to have their own grudges, motivations, and the like. that's the whole point there is a court at all!
as for your contention that the mere idea that the police officer had a conflict of interest in and of itself is "reasonable doubt" is laughable, and please don't play lawyer in throwing about terms like "preponderance of evidence" when you clearly have the bar for reasonable doubt so poorly misread. To wit, there have been hundreds of murder cases (that is - criminal cases - a much tougher standard!) where the defendants have raised some theoretical conflict of interest (the accused is white - the officer is black, etc) and nowhere has this been seen as the absolute block against fair legal treatment (though it can be considered).
There is a difference between a judge and a police officer, you know. So, i'm going to mark your comment with a big FAIL.
I'm confused. Why should this have any bearing on the case whatsoever? The merits of the case are independent of whether the officer was thinking about a job with WB, is a fan of ABBA, or wears five inch heels.
Welcome to the world of slashdot "consistency."
It's ok for scrabulous to copy scrabble because some slashdot users personally like scrabulous as compared to the "old economy" "dinosaur" company of Hasbro. it's not ok for china to copy this game because in this case china is the "old dinosaur bureaucracy" compared to the hip flash developer.
slashdot: home of situational ethics.
What, expecting to be modded up for such "wisdom"?
While I am just rolling my eyes at his attempt to amateurly guess at legal consequences, I am in shock as to how he doesn't see the obvious contradiction in his logic. This guy's whole theory of it being unlikely that anybody would steal his wi-fi is completely at odds with his theory that if somebody does actually do so he can just claim it was open and thus 'not him.' Right.
That said, Mr. Holier Than Thou: let's say I *did* start a company based on FSF code. Let's say this company made medical equipment. My company employed a bunch of people and saved a bunch of lives. Tell me again why this is wrong and your downloading "Lord of the Rings" from eMule is OK? Let me be clear again, since these sort of things are lost on you, apparently: I'm not accusing you personally of being a movie downloader. I AM, however, suggesting that a lot of the slashdot communits seems to think that the copyright integrity of everything but OSS code is a matter of personal preference.
Well duh. But likewise there are a lot of real companies who take advantage of hippie code and count on the fact that their lawyers will make them a difficult target to sue. We are seeing a lot of this as companies first tried to bright-line the GPL, and more and more they just don't give a damn.
If I were starting a business, I'd just go on and bright-line and outright abuse the GPL. I would go into business (such as PS2 games or whatever) where any "outrage" by the OSS community would go unnoticed and would simply ignore the empty threats of lawsuits and what-have-you. Heck, many companies are doing this already. it's a very legitimate and none too risky business strategy. For all its good philosophical points that would encourage good hearted individuals to contribute to my bottom line, I would benefit from the fact that enforcement of the GPL is ultimately toothless.
Please, do go on and tell me how, exactly, I'm wrong in this.
Bullshit.
Read his initial post again. It was a short critique of what linus did say followed by a discussion of what he thought linux should have said.
entirely appropriate.
ah yes, this is why we see all the 'flamebait' tags for the gratuitous "RIAA suxxx / m$ suxx" posts. Puh-leeze. He was raising legitimate ancillary issues.
See, you were modded down for posting rational things critical of Linux. This is how slashdot works.
Unfortunately, basically all cool youtube videos involving aerobatics and remote controlled aircraft are due primarily to the fact that the craft have ridiculous power to weight ratios. These same power to weight ratios are not realistic for craft with real-world payload and/or endurance requirements at this time. More to the point, "the military" (by which I assume you mean "the US military") already has plenty of gadgets. We don't need more hardware dreamed up by middle-class SUV drivers in office parks in suburbs who are blissfully seperated from the realities of what their machines do. We need people (not necessarily in the military) who are more prepared to actually engage with the people of the world in a constructive way.
You fail Economics 101. The rightholder can shop his invention to the manufacturer willing to pay the highest price for it. Or, he can sell non-exclusive licenses that will get him a higher aggregate sum. He can negotiate one-time licenses or he can negoatiate per-use licenses. The companies that enter into agreements with are competing for this resource, but the rightsholder can only provide the item at a price that the market will bear. as always, considerations of the life-limitedness of the patent as well as the fact that there is a possibility that a suitable alaternate technology may come into existence come into play. This is about as close as you can get to a perfect market solution that does not require the heavy hand of regulation. ANY regulation in this matter would inevitably tip what is otherwise a competitive process where both sides have an incentive to find a fair price into some pointless advantage for one side or the other that artificially skews an otherwise fairly agreed upon price. In fact, you'd be hard pressed to find any model situation in the world that is actually better solved by pure market forces than this as a textbook example, even if you tried. Adding a second (alternate) rightsholder may lower the price to the 'company', but it doesnt change the fundamental market dynamic at work here. Man, really. Read a basic economics book or something.
would the inventor also have to pay a percentage for a loss if the item fails to make a profit?
/ SARCASM
Why of why do people like you not believe in the free market? This solves the situation far better than your assinine, ignorant-of-finance-and-economics socialist "profit splitting" suggestion which would basically rely on judges to determine what percentage who is owed... which would itself be insane and require precognition the sort of which is better left to the market.
As for your 'basic assumption', there is nothing stopping any given inventor for releasing his novel invention into the public domain.
the inventors are subject to the same laws of supply and demand as everybody else. they can ask a zillion jillion dollars and they won't get it. they can ask for a large some, commensurate with the amount the market values the hard drives buillt using their technologies by companies. This isn't rocket science, people.
So, why exactly should dell care whether you buy ubuntu or vista? presumably it makes at least $1 on vista, so, really.. i mean really. why the hell should dell push ubuntu to people who would not have asked about it anyway? dell is not part of your evangelizing cult. they are a business. they will happily supply people who want linux with the opeating system if that keeps them from buying PCs elsewhere, but they aren't going to bend over backwards about this in order to reduce their own revenue from others who likely would have bought vista.
If you want to broadcast not-for-profit, i don't see any reason why rightsholders should have to subsidize your fantasy by giving you a lower rate. Can somebody who disagrees with me tell me why, exactly, they believe that I am wrong? I really see no other way around it. We don't insist that PBS be allowed to rebroadcast monday night football simply because it's not for profit. Why should some webcaster, no matter what his scale, be allowed to suck away listeners from people who pay a market value for the content if it's the *same* content, if not even better since we can assume that it would be without or with fewer ads?
For fark's sake people. A statement like "there is no technological fix for a social problem" is just important-sounding nonsense. Really? We seem, after all, to have prevented the problem of people physically reaching out across the internet and strangling people... I have yet to see anybody do this (as much as I'd like to sometimes). Parent poster completely ignores the obvious problem with his arguments: that ALL defense mechanisms are not about absolute defense, but about reducing the rate of successful attacks and/or increasing the barriers to entry (such as technical sophistication, equipment, time, etc) that an attacker must invest in to be successful. Security guards and alarm systems do not prevent all bank robberies - but it is safe to say that there would be more robberies if those things didn't exist. Same here. You may have technological issues as to exactly how much such a hardware defense would decrease the amount of cheating, but it seems fairly obvious that, if implemented, this figure would be greater than zero.
MOD PARENT UP.
The thing is, it's not like slashdot has gotten worse about this. it's been the same bullshit ever since I started reading slashdot. the only thing that you no longer see as the "Linux will take over the desktop by Xmas!!!" posts any more. At best, you get the occasional glee of "Today the Friedrichshafen municicipal water department has switched to Linux, tomorrow the world!!!!"
Folks, when you start modding up posts like the parent's rambling mess, complete with some nonsensical blather about the nature of the judiciary, all of slashdot loses.