Some people seem to be confused about the patent filing. The JPEG compression technology was indeed a collaborative effort that would require a lot of audacity for someone to claim as their own. The issue is that at the heart of the JPEG compression technology at the time it was made was the algorithm here [uspto.gov] that was filed on October 27, 1986. The issue is that just now, after the JPEG compression standard has been in place for years, the patent owner chose to begin enforcement. I'm not sure if any "squatter's rights" hold for patents, but I doubt it considering Sony already paid Forgent off. I suppose that if someone wrote a way to make JPEGs work as they do without using this algorithm (a silly suggestion, I know, but to prove a point) that Forgent would have no claim on JPEG technology.
Well, yeah, we all will know the truth if the government lies to us, and we know that some of the laws they pass and actions they take are unjust, but does just knowing stop them?
We all know the DMCA essentially makes knowledge illegal, but I don't see anyone rioting on the streets. We knew that Americans were being held in detention centers with no charges brought against them, but no one brought that up on the 6:00 news. We know that the government has the capability to record our phone calls and communications in some cases without even a court order, but few encrypt their communications or cancel their phone bill for that. Maybe technology won't enslave us, but complacency works just as well.
In other news, elementary school students in affected countries may no longer learn to add and subtract, for addition and subtraction are essential in the intriguingly secure one-time pad.
I was upset when I could no longer do what I want with my ones and zeroes. Now I can't do what I want with a pen, paper and numbers.
As scary as this is, and for all the negative implications it has, I have to say that the research must continue, the reason being that it may lead to something positive in the future, such as a universal cure for virii. Remember what happened to Britain before WWII? They banned civilian explosives research and so when the time came Germany was massively far ahead. In the same way, the civilized world must continue their research so that hopefully the good guys have the answer before the bad guys have the problem.
I just hope I have the good guys and the bad guys straight. Deus Ex was a great game, but I sure don't want it to be real.
I'd like to point out that the fact that a law is in place may make something illegal, it doesn't make something wrong.
I disagree with IP laws, in that ideas should be protected only as much as the "owner" can with cryptology, fancy coding, merchandise, value-added services, etc. If you don't believe that people will support what they like, then you're wasting your time lobbying against human nature anyhow. I agree that plagarism is always wrong, but sharing is what IP is meant for, and if you are going to lobby against the nature of your product, then you should not be its "owner" anyhow.
Oh no! It seems that I've already pirated this song and that I've been listening to it for quite some time! I hope the RIAA doesn't find out. I guess I have to buy the CD if I want to listen to nothing now. Damn you RIAA!
~Ben
Technological Evolution
on
DRM Helmet
·
· Score: 1
It's really a shame that the xxAA feels the need to get so beaurucratic on this problem. Yeah, people aren't getting paid who might deserve to be and yes they are losing a lot of money, but buying off my rights to correct that shouldn't be the answer.
Society has constantly been going through a technological evolution. For a while, one group (in this case, corporations) has the upper hand, then for a while, the other (in this case, the consumer) gets it. It's just a question of who was the last to create the next better technology, and this is a positive cycle because in this cycle technology becomes progressively better.
I would fully support any clever encryption scheme, new format, advertising, value-added stuff, or new medium they came up with to extract their money from my pocket. It makes me angry, however, that they call in the lawyer army on the consumers rather than pay someone to come up with a new business model. It's pointless to fight such a change in consumer attitudes by forcing us to buy and pay what they think we should.
Until the MPAA and RIAA stop trying to buy our rights and start finding a new way to make money, I have stopped paying for music or movies. I'm sure that people will start calling me a thief and citing the old "what if someone stole/copied open source code?" example, but do you really think that giving these people more money by purchasing the CD that goes with your MP3 or buying your movies on DVD will make them any less greedy? They've been price gouging the consumer and the artists for decades, and don't think they'll stop now. I use open source code routinely and I'm sure to cite it and make code available properly, just like when I write a paper I cite my references properly. There is a difference between plagarism (creating something new from someone else's stuff and portraying it as your own) and violating a license (observing something you haven't paid to observe). By violating a license you haven't stolen anything or made it any less than it was before. You've chosen not to support it. By plagarizing, you have indeed stolen.
I used rc3 for a bit and went back to IE. It has a problem with its ftp (try saving something off of a web server... how very odd) and some plugins don't seem to be compatible. Compared to IE, it deserves a C-, no offense to those who have put so much work into it. It needs more work, and when it's clearly the superior choice, I'll use it.
I would think that it's not the foreign media giants they should be afraid of. You can tell me that all of the media giants here in the US are owned by huge companies bent on twisting my thoughts to something favorable to them, and maybe they are.
The point of the internet is that here anyone has a voice, giving you virtually unstoppable exposure to random people's opinions on their homepages, forums, etc. which are going to be almost impossible to block out every one of unless you were to block every page but the media giants. But that's not going to happen soon.
Everyone who posts here is playing a part in the liberation of the world vs. media giants simply by writing what you think and hitting submit.
There is indeed a lot of wasted energy as far as the Earth is concerned. We choose to use the most convenient and cheapest to harvest forms, i.e. fossil fuels. The big issue seems to be that we need some total amount of cost to do things. Therefore, I propose that
Cost = Entropy used + Energy Used
Saying that, for example, you could use a very fast process to extract oil from the ground that uses minimal energy (what you pay for) but increases entropy (makes a big environmental mess). At a greater energy cost, you could make it a lot cleaner. Fortunately, we have a saving grace:
The sun provides us with an almost unlimited amount of energy.
The problem here is that we choose to use the more inexpensive forms of energy, but if we did use forms that come from the sun rather than toxic entropy-increasing forms or non-renewable forms (possibly the same, considering the toxic by-products of fossil fuels, which I understand did come from the sun, but are toxic nonetheless. The sun's energy was expended so that these toxins could be trapped.)
What a lot of people whose posts I am reading are forgetting is this:
Plants (wood, food) = Solar, their energy to grow comes mostly from the sun, and what doesn't goes back to Earth Wind = Solar, pressure is due to heat from the sun And of course direct solar energy.
Therefore, it is not hypocritical to make a book with paper. Paper is solar energy. Considering the vast amount of this energy that goes unharvested and unused, it is therefore not impractical to harness a virtually unlimited and safe energy source.
"Ha ha ha! Foolish Americans. Surrender your country at once or I will activate the backdoor in all Windows operating systems and crash every computer on Earth!"
Even if this fails to get either some quality control standards into the industry or further the cause of open source, one important fact remains: As long as our congressmen and presidents are old men who remember when UNIVAC was a big deal, we will probably be dealing with technology rule by a mostly technologically unenlightened crowd. In a graph of knowledgeability vs. age right now, you'd notice that the younger crowd knows more, and in a graph of age frequency in government, you'd see an older bunch. I guarantee that in ten or twenty years when a group of politicians with more exposure to the electronic world is ruling, we'll see a lot fewer government blunders as far as their computer infrastructure goes and a more knowledgeable regulation of the industry (CBDTPA, for example, would be less accepted by those who understand its implications.) I know that this is why advisors exist, but let's face it, nothing beats firsthand experience.
Don't blame Verisign, they're merely complying with tne new regulations as required.
If you ask me, this wiretapping business is little more than a measure to make us feel safe at the expense of our privacy with little hope of actually capturing terrorists.
Looking back to 9/11, the feds obviously don't have too much trouble getting a hold of our phone conversations. How do you think that all of those cell phone transcripts were made availabe so rapidly, or evan at all? Someone constantly has the record button on, regardless. We've all read in the news about just how close US agents actually were to these guys using only their previously available methods. Now the US agencies are looking for deniability so they blame "limitations" placed on them. The terrorists aren't stupid, and they obviously know better than to speak in more than vague terms when they are in the presence of a possible rat, including unencrypted communications on the internet and on the phone. They're not using this technology to catch anything but small fish.
Personally, I'm not afraid of terrorists. I don't think they could ever launch an attack powerful enough to topple the institution that our belief (if hypocritically administered, looking at foreign policy) in individual rights and freedom stand for. What I am afraid of is our paranoid fear in terrorists destroying those rights that have made the free world great. Once our freedoms are gone, we may as well have let the terrorists kill every one of us. Death would be preferable to 1984.
Whereas the music industry defines what they own as a broad expanse of poorly defined signals, or numbers if you will, the linux development stuff is very well defined: the changing of just a few digits could result in a massive change in functionality.
I said that I would support their argument if they could tell me what it is that they own, without being so broad. Yeah, there are loopholes, but the RIAA seems to be targeting all of our rights to share information in their broadness whereas the code and publishing industries are not - in part because of the lack of ambiguity.
Great. I can finally write a defragmenting program for my office.
On a serious note, I disagree. There's a difference between giving numbers for a computer that would completely predict all events that ever happened on a causal basis and saying that causality's evolution itself is a computer. It's like saying, "I need X computer to find out where this mouse will be in the maze in 10 minutes, so the mouse in the maze must be the equivalent of X computer."
Sure, Napster has gone bankrupt because the efforts of a typically greedy industry, but don't side with their "moral" argument and accuse me or Napster of stealing MP3s. I never stole anything. I copied someone else's zeroes and ones, and zeroes and ones are not music until you interpret them. In fact, I could interpret them in any way I want to. Go ahead and argue that I was in fact always and exclusively interpreting them as musicm but the fact remains: they will never, ever be the music exactly, they will always be a digital approximation, however convincing it is. I will not agree with the stealing argument until the RIAA defines clearly what the music is and what is stealing them. By their argument, am I stealing the song if I sing it? That's an approximation too. You'd have to plug the analog hole in my head and stop me from thinking of the song after listening to it. How close to the song does the approximation have to be until it is considered to be the song? And what defines the song? Is the song zeroes and ones? No, it's a pattern of sound waves reaching my head, but the pattern is never the same as it was in the studio on a digital approximation. What if these zeroes and ones can be interpreted to be the music in mp3 format, but if I change the extension to.doc and open it in word, it's really an informative paper? If you allow people to copyright digital approximations of a song, you effectively allow people to own numbers, which are a natural phenomenon. Look at the case of the people who wanted to translate their DNA sequences into MP3 format for the same degree of copyright protection. You might as well copyright air if you are going to say, "This, and anything I decide is arbitrarily similar to this in a specific interpretation is mine!"
The fact is, stealing is a fuzzy line when you speak in terms of zeroes and ones, and what music is. I believe that due to this argument, the music industry has no choice but to adapt to use file sharing to its benefit, and the RIAA is working against consumer and its own interests in this case.
Slashdot Mirror
Some people seem to be confused about the patent filing. The JPEG compression technology was indeed a collaborative effort that would require a lot of audacity for someone to claim as their own. The issue is that at the heart of the JPEG compression technology at the time it was made was the algorithm here [uspto.gov] that was filed on October 27, 1986. The issue is that just now, after the JPEG compression standard has been in place for years, the patent owner chose to begin enforcement. I'm not sure if any "squatter's rights" hold for patents, but I doubt it considering Sony already paid Forgent off. I suppose that if someone wrote a way to make JPEGs work as they do without using this algorithm (a silly suggestion, I know, but to prove a point) that Forgent would have no claim on JPEG technology.
~Ben
Well, yeah, we all will know the truth if the government lies to us, and we know that some of the laws they pass and actions they take are unjust, but does just knowing stop them?
We all know the DMCA essentially makes knowledge illegal, but I don't see anyone rioting on the streets. We knew that Americans were being held in detention centers with no charges brought against them, but no one brought that up on the 6:00 news. We know that the government has the capability to record our phone calls and communications in some cases without even a court order, but few encrypt their communications or cancel their phone bill for that. Maybe technology won't enslave us, but complacency works just as well.
~Ben
In other news, elementary school students in affected countries may no longer learn to add and subtract, for addition and subtraction are essential in the intriguingly secure one-time pad.
I was upset when I could no longer do what I want with my ones and zeroes. Now I can't do what I want with a pen, paper and numbers.
~Ben
As scary as this is, and for all the negative implications it has, I have to say that the research must continue, the reason being that it may lead to something positive in the future, such as a universal cure for virii. Remember what happened to Britain before WWII? They banned civilian explosives research and so when the time came Germany was massively far ahead. In the same way, the civilized world must continue their research so that hopefully the good guys have the answer before the bad guys have the problem.
I just hope I have the good guys and the bad guys straight. Deus Ex was a great game, but I sure don't want it to be real.
~Ben
I'd like to point out that the fact that a law is in place may make something illegal, it doesn't make something wrong.
I disagree with IP laws, in that ideas should be protected only as much as the "owner" can with cryptology, fancy coding, merchandise, value-added services, etc. If you don't believe that people will support what they like, then you're wasting your time lobbying against human nature anyhow. I agree that plagarism is always wrong, but sharing is what IP is meant for, and if you are going to lobby against the nature of your product, then you should not be its "owner" anyhow.
~Ben
Oh no! It seems that I've already pirated this song and that I've been listening to it for quite some time! I hope the RIAA doesn't find out. I guess I have to buy the CD if I want to listen to nothing now. Damn you RIAA!
~Ben
It's really a shame that the xxAA feels the need to get so beaurucratic on this problem. Yeah, people aren't getting paid who might deserve to be and yes they are losing a lot of money, but buying off my rights to correct that shouldn't be the answer.
Society has constantly been going through a technological evolution. For a while, one group (in this case, corporations) has the upper hand, then for a while, the other (in this case, the consumer) gets it. It's just a question of who was the last to create the next better technology, and this is a positive cycle because in this cycle technology becomes progressively better.
I would fully support any clever encryption scheme, new format, advertising, value-added stuff, or new medium they came up with to extract their money from my pocket. It makes me angry, however, that they call in the lawyer army on the consumers rather than pay someone to come up with a new business model. It's pointless to fight such a change in consumer attitudes by forcing us to buy and pay what they think we should.
Until the MPAA and RIAA stop trying to buy our rights and start finding a new way to make money, I have stopped paying for music or movies. I'm sure that people will start calling me a thief and citing the old "what if someone stole/copied open source code?" example, but do you really think that giving these people more money by purchasing the CD that goes with your MP3 or buying your movies on DVD will make them any less greedy? They've been price gouging the consumer and the artists for decades, and don't think they'll stop now. I use open source code routinely and I'm sure to cite it and make code available properly, just like when I write a paper I cite my references properly. There is a difference between plagarism (creating something new from someone else's stuff and portraying it as your own) and violating a license (observing something you haven't paid to observe). By violating a license you haven't stolen anything or made it any less than it was before. You've chosen not to support it. By plagarizing, you have indeed stolen.
~Ben
I used rc3 for a bit and went back to IE. It has a problem with its ftp (try saving something off of a web server... how very odd) and some plugins don't seem to be compatible. Compared to IE, it deserves a C-, no offense to those who have put so much work into it. It needs more work, and when it's clearly the superior choice, I'll use it.
~Ben
I would think that it's not the foreign media giants they should be afraid of. You can tell me that all of the media giants here in the US are owned by huge companies bent on twisting my thoughts to something favorable to them, and maybe they are.
The point of the internet is that here anyone has a voice, giving you virtually unstoppable exposure to random people's opinions on their homepages, forums, etc. which are going to be almost impossible to block out every one of unless you were to block every page but the media giants. But that's not going to happen soon.
Everyone who posts here is playing a part in the liberation of the world vs. media giants simply by writing what you think and hitting submit.
I bow before you, defenders of freedom.
~Ben
There is indeed a lot of wasted energy as far as the Earth is concerned. We choose to use the most convenient and cheapest to harvest forms, i.e. fossil fuels. The big issue seems to be that we need some total amount of cost to do things. Therefore, I propose that
Cost = Entropy used + Energy Used
Saying that, for example, you could use a very fast process to extract oil from the ground that uses minimal energy (what you pay for) but increases entropy (makes a big environmental mess). At a greater energy cost, you could make it a lot cleaner. Fortunately, we have a saving grace:
The sun provides us with an almost unlimited amount of energy.
The problem here is that we choose to use the more inexpensive forms of energy, but if we did use forms that come from the sun rather than toxic entropy-increasing forms or non-renewable forms (possibly the same, considering the toxic by-products of fossil fuels, which I understand did come from the sun, but are toxic nonetheless. The sun's energy was expended so that these toxins could be trapped.)
What a lot of people whose posts I am reading are forgetting is this:
Plants (wood, food) = Solar, their energy to grow comes mostly from the sun, and what doesn't goes back to Earth
Wind = Solar, pressure is due to heat from the sun
And of course direct solar energy.
Therefore, it is not hypocritical to make a book with paper. Paper is solar energy. Considering the vast amount of this energy that goes unharvested and unused, it is therefore not impractical to harness a virtually unlimited and safe energy source.
~Ben
Bill Gates:
"Ha ha ha! Foolish Americans. Surrender your country at once or I will activate the backdoor in all Windows operating systems and crash every computer on Earth!"
Doesn't seem too far-fetched.
~Ben
Even if this fails to get either some quality control standards into the industry or further the cause of open source, one important fact remains: As long as our congressmen and presidents are old men who remember when UNIVAC was a big deal, we will probably be dealing with technology rule by a mostly technologically unenlightened crowd. In a graph of knowledgeability vs. age right now, you'd notice that the younger crowd knows more, and in a graph of age frequency in government, you'd see an older bunch. I guarantee that in ten or twenty years when a group of politicians with more exposure to the electronic world is ruling, we'll see a lot fewer government blunders as far as their computer infrastructure goes and a more knowledgeable regulation of the industry (CBDTPA, for example, would be less accepted by those who understand its implications.) I know that this is why advisors exist, but let's face it, nothing beats firsthand experience.
~Ben
Don't blame Verisign, they're merely complying with tne new regulations as required.
If you ask me, this wiretapping business is little more than a measure to make us feel safe at the expense of our privacy with little hope of actually capturing terrorists.
Looking back to 9/11, the feds obviously don't have too much trouble getting a hold of our phone conversations. How do you think that all of those cell phone transcripts were made availabe so rapidly, or evan at all? Someone constantly has the record button on, regardless. We've all read in the news about just how close US agents actually were to these guys using only their previously available methods. Now the US agencies are looking for deniability so they blame "limitations" placed on them. The terrorists aren't stupid, and they obviously know better than to speak in more than vague terms when they are in the presence of a possible rat, including unencrypted communications on the internet and on the phone. They're not using this technology to catch anything but small fish.
Personally, I'm not afraid of terrorists. I don't think they could ever launch an attack powerful enough to topple the institution that our belief (if hypocritically administered, looking at foreign policy) in individual rights and freedom stand for. What I am afraid of is our paranoid fear in terrorists destroying those rights that have made the free world great. Once our freedoms are gone, we may as well have let the terrorists kill every one of us. Death would be preferable to 1984.
~Ben
You've overlooked an important point I made:
Whereas the music industry defines what they own as a broad expanse of poorly defined signals, or numbers if you will, the linux development stuff is very well defined: the changing of just a few digits could result in a massive change in functionality.
I said that I would support their argument if they could tell me what it is that they own, without being so broad. Yeah, there are loopholes, but the RIAA seems to be targeting all of our rights to share information in their broadness whereas the code and publishing industries are not - in part because of the lack of ambiguity.
~Ben
Great. I can finally write a defragmenting program for my office.
On a serious note, I disagree. There's a difference between giving numbers for a computer that would completely predict all events that ever happened on a causal basis and saying that causality's evolution itself is a computer. It's like saying, "I need X computer to find out where this mouse will be in the maze in 10 minutes, so the mouse in the maze must be the equivalent of X computer."
~Ben
Sure, Napster has gone bankrupt because the efforts of a typically greedy industry, but don't side with their "moral" argument and accuse me or Napster of stealing MP3s. I never stole anything. I copied someone else's zeroes and ones, and zeroes and ones are not music until you interpret them. In fact, I could interpret them in any way I want to. Go ahead and argue that I was in fact always and exclusively interpreting them as musicm but the fact remains: they will never, ever be the music exactly, they will always be a digital approximation, however convincing it is. I will not agree with the stealing argument until the RIAA defines clearly what the music is and what is stealing them. By their argument, am I stealing the song if I sing it? That's an approximation too. You'd have to plug the analog hole in my head and stop me from thinking of the song after listening to it. How close to the song does the approximation have to be until it is considered to be the song? And what defines the song? Is the song zeroes and ones? No, it's a pattern of sound waves reaching my head, but the pattern is never the same as it was in the studio on a digital approximation. What if these zeroes and ones can be interpreted to be the music in mp3 format, but if I change the extension to .doc and open it in word, it's really an informative paper? If you allow people to copyright digital approximations of a song, you effectively allow people to own numbers, which are a natural phenomenon. Look at the case of the people who wanted to translate their DNA sequences into MP3 format for the same degree of copyright protection. You might as well copyright air if you are going to say, "This, and anything I decide is arbitrarily similar to this in a specific interpretation is mine!"
The fact is, stealing is a fuzzy line when you speak in terms of zeroes and ones, and what music is. I believe that due to this argument, the music industry has no choice but to adapt to use file sharing to its benefit, and the RIAA is working against consumer and its own interests in this case.
Hilary Rosen, shut your analog hole.
~Ben