i'm seeing a lot of comments about how IP is "good" and "bad", but what really strikes me in the realm of copyright law is how would reducing copyright terms effect the GPL?.
say we go back to the basics, set copyright back to the original 14 yrs. doesn't that mean that GPL'd code would be dumped unprotected into the public domain? doesn't that also mean that larger companies that manage to stay around for a while (ie Microsoft) would be able to take those 14 yr old projects and impliment them in closed source packages?
has anyone considered this? as the GPL is the darling of this here crowd, would it be worth letting go of the transparency of older projects? i'm thinking it would be, but how do those of you with more "zeal" think it would pan out?
That will leave the government in full control of my access to information.
I have no problem with government agencies providing free access in libraries,
I have a hard time understanding how these two sentences can be in the same post, arguing the same point. What do people without internet access do? I used to go to the public frickin' library..
The government runs a service, but they do NOT "control" what goes into the public libraries. Any book that was published in the US and is still in print can be gotten for you at any library in the country. All you have to do is fill out one of those handy little cards at the frontdesk, the ones that say Lending Library on them.
sure, if it is a popular book you'll be put on a waiting list, but you'll still get it. sure, if it's an obscure title that doesn't get much 'press time you'll wait a little longer, but you'll still get it.
I understand the idea behind not putting all one's eggs in the same basket, and I very much understand the inherent distrust of government that our country was founded on, but what I don't understand is the view that EVERYTHING the government does is bad, bad, bad.
internet pipelines are infrastructure, an area the government has proven themselves time and again to be good at managing. Water, sewege, electricity, roads. These are all things that Americans take for granted that would've been prohibitively costly had it been left to commercial hands. Libraries could not exist as a private moneymaking entity.
the government has done a pretty good job with libraries and resources, and what is the internet if not the biggest library in the world?
I have "SEE ID" written on the back of all my cards, and I am sad to say that maybe 2/3 of the purchases i make, i do not get ID'd. this is esp. annoying when the clerk actually looks at the back of the card and still doesn't ask. i've even taken to "signing" See ID when this happens.
being a sales person and dealing with large transactions all day, i am well aquainted with checking IDs. if it says check, i check. if it's not signed, i check. if it's smudged, i check. if there is ANY doubt in my mind, i make some excuse about being severely far sighted and not having my glasses with me...
usually the people offer up the ID without a fuss, some act pleasantly supprised that their credit is being taken seriously. I've only had a few that made a fuss (so far they've all been valid), but i "blame" it on store policy and joke about not wanting to lose my job, and they agree.
and to the GP poster, I work at Bestbuy, not all of us are dumb schmucks..:)
The GPL places legal restrictions on your rights to redistribute
Technically speaking, the GPL doesn't put restrictions on your rights to redistribute, those restrictions are already there. what it does is grant you the redistribution rights that you didn't have before if you follow certain criteria..
Nit-picky? check.. Semantic argument? yeppo.. however, i believe it is a distinction that is important to understand... (or maybe years of growing up with my brother - who is now a lawyer - warped my understanding of the English language:)
The real point, of course, is that the consensus on slashdot seems to favor defining digital rights in a way that abrogates the ability of music and movie copyright holders to restrict free copying, while at the same time pushing for vigorous enforcement of copyright law against GPL violators
As you said, apples to oranges. Corporations/People who are violating the GPL are violating the law, whereas the people who are violating DRM restrictions are (hopefully) doing so to excersize their rights granted by that law.
not that everyone who is against DRM is so for the betterment of mankind, surely many of them just want their free P.O.D. and Brittenay (however the hell you schpeel her name) downloads, but (to make an egregious analogy) just because the Mob goes to a certain resturant for dinner every week doesn't mean that everybody who goes there for dinner is in the Mob...
US copyright law forbids the distribution of content without the copyright holder's consent. the GPL is an implicit consent to allow redistribution IF, and only if, one distributes the source code for any modifications as well. basically, it says that if you're willing to share your mods, we'll wave the explicit reproduction rights granted us under copyright laws. if you're not willing to share, than copyright laws apply and you can't distribute.
DRM not only limits your ability to distribute (which is against the law anyway), it "forbids" you from doing what you want with the product you paid for.
there is no correlation between the GPL and DRM BECAUSE you can do whatever you want with GPL'd software, no holds barred, EXCEPT DISTRIBUTE. That's why Google et. al. can make modifications without giving up the source, because they DON'T DISTRIBUTE THE CHANGES. DRM is an entirely different beast, it restricts what you can do with your purchase aside from distribution.
making arguments of this fashion is not only side stepping the issue, it's blatantly ignoring the issue in the first place, it's misleading...
i work for a national electronics retail company that gets a lot of flack from people around here, and if there's one thing i've learned, it's that each store in a national chain is it's own story. i've worked at two different locations so far, and there are some glaring differences between how the GMs at each store care to run the business.
Company policy is to never take returns on open software, period. My GM says "don't take it, unless.." meaning, if we told someone it would work and it didn't, if we made a mistake in recommending it, or someone bought software with a computer and we didn't double check to see if it was compatible, we take it back.
the Company also has a standing policy that we never match internet prices, even if it's our own site! yet my department manager let us all know that if someone comes in with our internet price in hand, we double check and then match the price.
there are some really seedy/shitty stores out there that carry the company name, and i think that alot of the experiences i generally hear on/. are most likely inspired by the shitty managers or shitty salespeople at these locations (i've gone into stores in a few other states and been appauled by lack of concern over SOP), but i also understand that this sort of thing is bound to happen with ANY national retailer, no matter how reputable they might be.
my suggestion would be to find a regional HQ phone number and complain loudly that employee X at location Y did not inform you that the software package you purchased WITH YOUR APPLE COMPUTER would not be compatible, and that they were unhelpful when you returned to that store.
get complaints logged ABOUT THAT PARTICULAR STORE, and instead of telling people not to shop apple, tell them not to goto that location. if Apple HQ knows that your "passion" for their product was tarnished by one particular location, you can be damned sure that the GM at that store will hear about it.
are you saying that there was *never* a time when electric lighting was a luxury? in-door plumbing? these are things we take for granted now, but what did people think when they were first implemented?
Understand that I'm not saying you're wrong, but I'm curious as to how long a certain technology has to be available before it becomes an area "local governments need to step into"...
why aren't.pdfs as document previews in bundles a standard for apps these days?
why do.pdfs even exist these days? the latest HTML standards are capable of doing pretty much everything a.pdf can do, and they're viewable by anything running a standard-compliant web browser, my bloody coffee pot has a damned web browser.
there's nothing more annoying than searching the web only to run into a wall of pdfs that acrobat won't accurately utilize my scroll wheel to read(why the hell is the scroll wheel defaulted to zoom?!?)
a phone with decent, usable features that are added by an engineer rather than a fscking marketing department that wants more shit to put on the spec list.
a small pda-phone, good battery life, bluetooth and IR, and an SD or xD card reader. that's all i really care about.
my phone has an endless list of "Features" like 100 memory addresses and voice dial. but there are only 20 voice dial locations. which means that if i want to use voice dial, i've got to portion them out. well, since the voice dial option requires more effort than the speed dial, it's only redeeming value is that i don't have to remember the speed dial address. except that since i can't have voice dial with ALL the numbers, i've got to remember which numbers have voice dial and which are only speed dial. which means that (at least for my uses) having voice dial at all is superfluous...
I'm sick and tired of bastard marketing designers requesting half-assed features so they can have more to put on the sign, usability be damned.
i don't care how much it costs. aside from the few features i listed, i don't care what it's got in it. as long as the features it DOES have are well implemented, easy to use and not utterly pointless, i'd be willing to pay well more than "average."
You buy the new Toshiba Qosmio laptop with the 17 inch display, built in video capture card and instant on DVD and CD utilities, currently 3000 at bestbuy. you don't buy the service plan, instead putting that 300 in a savings account at 5% interest. 1.5 years later, the loose heatsink you didn't know about finally slips that extra quarter of an inch off the processor, causing the laptop to slowly over heat and burn up the motherboard over the next six months. the laptop, at two years old, is now dead AND well out of warranty.
how much has that 300 grown? enough to buy you a new 3000 dollar laptop? i don't think so.
same senario, this time with the service plan. you walk into bestbuy, the techs check it out, you're matched up with a Sales Clerk who helps you pick out a NEW 3000 DOLLAR LAPTOP.
I've been that clerk before. if it's a product we don't carry anymore and it's bad enough that it can't be fixed, you get a new computer. period.
i call bullshit. you don't need the actual paperwork for the service plan to get your service. nor do you need the receipt. if you bought it you're onfile, and we'll honor it as long as the problem is covered. i work in compsales and i see it all the time. goto Customer Service and they'll look it up for you...
Cheers to that! I had to fight off hundreds of bloodthristy Mongolian raiders to acquire my M-Series keyboard. (actually, it was in a box in my friend's basement. I grabbed it and shrieked so loudly everytime she tried to take it away from me, she ended up just telling me I could keep it. Anything for a keyboard that sounds like a damn Howitzer once you get upto ~30wpd....)
of the article, here. nowhere in his writing does the author advocate the dismissal of choice. I believe the intended message was not for "one gui to rule them all" but to come up with a basic set of standards so that in the event of a user, who is familiar with IceWM, sitting down in front of a gnome/kde setup, said user will be capable executing simple tasks, like (supposedly) installing a program. It also suggests that there should be a basic framework for the development of and/or for any given gui, so IF you decide upon an alternate gui, you are garunteed that the applications you prefer will just plan work. now, IANAP, at least not at the level of P'ing a window manager, but I would assume that this type of deal would include such things as a standard path for where documents should be saved as default, where menu items are to be placed, application look/feel, etc.
remember, the idea is not to limit choice, for that is the foundation of GNU/linux's greatness. the idea is to allow a user some amount of familiarity/interoperability across distro/GUI.
ok, this might seem a bit off-topic, but the parent comment started me thinking...
doesn't this ruling go against precedents set in past lawsuits concerning other industries? I seem to remember a class-action some time back against gunmakers, claiming that they *were* in fact responsible for the IRresponsible use of their products. I could be entirely wrong, but I was under the impression that the court's ruling was unfavorable to the likes of Smith & Wesson...
why are gun manufacturers responsible for the way their products are used by the public if software manufactures aren't?>/p>
Slashdot Mirror
say we go back to the basics, set copyright back to the original 14 yrs. doesn't that mean that GPL'd code would be dumped unprotected into the public domain? doesn't that also mean that larger companies that manage to stay around for a while (ie Microsoft) would be able to take those 14 yr old projects and impliment them in closed source packages?
has anyone considered this? as the GPL is the darling of this here crowd, would it be worth letting go of the transparency of older projects? i'm thinking it would be, but how do those of you with more "zeal" think it would pan out?
I have a hard time understanding how these two sentences can be in the same post, arguing the same point. What do people without internet access do? I used to go to the public frickin' library..
The government runs a service, but they do NOT "control" what goes into the public libraries. Any book that was published in the US and is still in print can be gotten for you at any library in the country. All you have to do is fill out one of those handy little cards at the frontdesk, the ones that say Lending Library on them.
sure, if it is a popular book you'll be put on a waiting list, but you'll still get it. sure, if it's an obscure title that doesn't get much 'press time you'll wait a little longer, but you'll still get it.
I understand the idea behind not putting all one's eggs in the same basket, and I very much understand the inherent distrust of government that our country was founded on, but what I don't understand is the view that EVERYTHING the government does is bad, bad, bad.
internet pipelines are infrastructure, an area the government has proven themselves time and again to be good at managing. Water, sewege, electricity, roads. These are all things that Americans take for granted that would've been prohibitively costly had it been left to commercial hands. Libraries could not exist as a private moneymaking entity.
the government has done a pretty good job with libraries and resources, and what is the internet if not the biggest library in the world?
that's one disfunctional fruit salad...
being a sales person and dealing with large transactions all day, i am well aquainted with checking IDs. if it says check, i check. if it's not signed, i check. if it's smudged, i check. if there is ANY doubt in my mind, i make some excuse about being severely far sighted and not having my glasses with me...
usually the people offer up the ID without a fuss, some act pleasantly supprised that their credit is being taken seriously. I've only had a few that made a fuss (so far they've all been valid), but i "blame" it on store policy and joke about not wanting to lose my job, and they agree.
and to the GP poster, I work at Bestbuy, not all of us are dumb schmucks.. :)
Nit-picky? check.. Semantic argument? yeppo.. however, i believe it is a distinction that is important to understand... (or maybe years of growing up with my brother - who is now a lawyer - warped my understanding of the English language :)
As you said, apples to oranges. Corporations/People who are violating the GPL are violating the law, whereas the people who are violating DRM restrictions are (hopefully) doing so to excersize their rights granted by that law.not that everyone who is against DRM is so for the betterment of mankind, surely many of them just want their free P.O.D. and Brittenay (however the hell you schpeel her name) downloads, but (to make an egregious analogy) just because the Mob goes to a certain resturant for dinner every week doesn't mean that everybody who goes there for dinner is in the Mob...
DRM not only limits your ability to distribute (which is against the law anyway), it "forbids" you from doing what you want with the product you paid for.
there is no correlation between the GPL and DRM BECAUSE you can do whatever you want with GPL'd software, no holds barred, EXCEPT DISTRIBUTE. That's why Google et. al. can make modifications without giving up the source, because they DON'T DISTRIBUTE THE CHANGES. DRM is an entirely different beast, it restricts what you can do with your purchase aside from distribution.
making arguments of this fashion is not only side stepping the issue, it's blatantly ignoring the issue in the first place, it's misleading...
the imaginary standard...
Company policy is to never take returns on open software, period. My GM says "don't take it, unless.." meaning, if we told someone it would work and it didn't, if we made a mistake in recommending it, or someone bought software with a computer and we didn't double check to see if it was compatible, we take it back.
the Company also has a standing policy that we never match internet prices, even if it's our own site! yet my department manager let us all know that if someone comes in with our internet price in hand, we double check and then match the price.
there are some really seedy/shitty stores out there that carry the company name, and i think that alot of the experiences i generally hear on /. are most likely inspired by the shitty managers or shitty salespeople at these locations (i've gone into stores in a few other states and been appauled by lack of concern over SOP), but i also understand that this sort of thing is bound to happen with ANY national retailer, no matter how reputable they might be.
my suggestion would be to find a regional HQ phone number and complain loudly that employee X at location Y did not inform you that the software package you purchased WITH YOUR APPLE COMPUTER would not be compatible, and that they were unhelpful when you returned to that store.
get complaints logged ABOUT THAT PARTICULAR STORE, and instead of telling people not to shop apple, tell them not to goto that location. if Apple HQ knows that your "passion" for their product was tarnished by one particular location, you can be damned sure that the GM at that store will hear about it.
at least that's the way it works at my company :)
are you saying that there was *never* a time when electric lighting was a luxury? in-door plumbing? these are things we take for granted now, but what did people think when they were first implemented?
Understand that I'm not saying you're wrong, but I'm curious as to how long a certain technology has to be available before it becomes an area "local governments need to step into"...
a phone with decent, usable features that are added by an engineer rather than a fscking marketing department that wants more shit to put on the spec list.
a small pda-phone, good battery life, bluetooth and IR, and an SD or xD card reader. that's all i really care about.
my phone has an endless list of "Features" like 100 memory addresses and voice dial. but there are only 20 voice dial locations. which means that if i want to use voice dial, i've got to portion them out. well, since the voice dial option requires more effort than the speed dial, it's only redeeming value is that i don't have to remember the speed dial address. except that since i can't have voice dial with ALL the numbers, i've got to remember which numbers have voice dial and which are only speed dial. which means that (at least for my uses) having voice dial at all is superfluous...
I'm sick and tired of bastard marketing designers requesting half-assed features so they can have more to put on the sign, usability be damned.
i don't care how much it costs. aside from the few features i listed, i don't care what it's got in it. as long as the features it DOES have are well implemented, easy to use and not utterly pointless, i'd be willing to pay well more than "average."
wow, now i'm exausted...
You buy the new Toshiba Qosmio laptop with the 17 inch display, built in video capture card and instant on DVD and CD utilities, currently 3000 at bestbuy. you don't buy the service plan, instead putting that 300 in a savings account at 5% interest. 1.5 years later, the loose heatsink you didn't know about finally slips that extra quarter of an inch off the processor, causing the laptop to slowly over heat and burn up the motherboard over the next six months. the laptop, at two years old, is now dead AND well out of warranty. how much has that 300 grown? enough to buy you a new 3000 dollar laptop? i don't think so. same senario, this time with the service plan. you walk into bestbuy, the techs check it out, you're matched up with a Sales Clerk who helps you pick out a NEW 3000 DOLLAR LAPTOP. I've been that clerk before. if it's a product we don't carry anymore and it's bad enough that it can't be fixed, you get a new computer. period.
it started off as 5 bucks back for every 125 you spend, it's every 150 now
i don't know why it posted me AC. i'm not.
Cheers to that! I had to fight off hundreds of bloodthristy Mongolian raiders to acquire my M-Series keyboard. (actually, it was in a box in my friend's basement. I grabbed it and shrieked so loudly everytime she tried to take it away from me, she ended up just telling me I could keep it. Anything for a keyboard that sounds like a damn Howitzer once you get upto ~30wpd....)
..get that quesy feeling when thinking about a surgeon named "Butch" ??
I want 3D pr0n movies dammit!!
soon as you move to utah!
Sometimes paying MORE ends up costing you LESS...
You work for MicroSoft, don't you?
TheJOsh!
of the article, here. nowhere in his writing does the author advocate the dismissal of choice. I believe the intended message was not for "one gui to rule them all" but to come up with a basic set of standards so that in the event of a user, who is familiar with IceWM, sitting down in front of a gnome/kde setup, said user will be capable executing simple tasks, like (supposedly) installing a program.
It also suggests that there should be a basic framework for the development of and/or for any given gui, so IF you decide upon an alternate gui, you are garunteed that the applications you prefer will just plan work. now, IANAP, at least not at the level of P'ing a window manager, but I would assume that this type of deal would include such things as a standard path for where documents should be saved as default, where menu items are to be placed, application look/feel, etc.
remember, the idea is not to limit choice, for that is the foundation of GNU/linux's greatness. the idea is to allow a user some amount of familiarity/interoperability across distro/GUI.
Always and Forever,
i think the point of the statement was that, on a "usefulness" scale, being able to use a computer for three years instead of two is a 50% gain.
:)
of course, there is the possibility that the author of the article failed 3rd grade mathmatics
ok, this might seem a bit off-topic, but the parent comment started me thinking...
doesn't this ruling go against precedents set in past lawsuits concerning other industries? I seem to remember a class-action some time back against gunmakers, claiming that they *were* in fact responsible for the IRresponsible use of their products. I could be entirely wrong, but I was under the impression that the court's ruling was unfavorable to the likes of Smith & Wesson...
why are gun manufacturers responsible for the way their products are used by the public if software manufactures aren't?>/p>
responders please, be kind. it's my first post...