Point taken. I guess at this juncture we're back to - in what way does Demonoid, as a tracker, publicly distribute the copyrighted material in question? But that is a much touchier - and technical - issue, I suppose.
A few assumptions, please correct if I am mistaken:
* Canada has a private copying levy, whereby a portion of the sales of most recording media goes to Canadian artists.
* In effect, Canadian courts have ruled this makes the private copying of music legal.
* The CRIA looks after the interest of Canadian recording artists.
* Demonoid supplies links which facilitates the download of, among other things, works produced by Canadian recording artists.
How can the CRIA legally threaten a webhost to shut down a site which is involved in activities which - for all intents and purposes - are legal in the nation which you represent? What am I missing?
FYI, I'm running XFCE4 under Slackware 10.1 on a ThinkPad 365XD - Pentium 120MHz, 40MB RAM, 1MB Trident video - and it still runs just fine. Takes a minute to load, but once it's loaded it's fully responsive. Coupled with X-Forwarding over SSH from my more powerful machine in the other room to run the real heavy-duty apps, it makes the little ThinkPad actually quite usable.
Re:Probably worth mentioning...
on
Hacking Mac OS X
·
· Score: 1
A poor fellow at work today accidentally rendered his Final Cut Pro project as jpegs to the desktop. Finder promptly tried to preview them all, and crashed. He rebooted and Finder would do the same thing, every time the system was booted.
Took single-user-mode and liberal use of 'rm' to get the system functional again. Even with plenty of horsepower (a G5 CPU and a gig of RAM in this case) it seems extremely easy to get Finder to crash, rendering the system unstable/unusable. It is sad that an instrumental, vendor-supplied app such as Finder can easily make the entire UNIX-based system unstable, even when only running with user privileges.
As opposed to Slackware, Gentoo, Debian, Trustix, Tiny Sofa etc. These are designed for making toast. Why they have everything required for an out-of-the-box LAMP installation is beyond me, I've never had to use PHP to make toast before. Maybe my toaster just has it integrated in firmware?
Corporations are not people, whatever the law may say in your country. Actions taken by corporations are decided on by several individuals and are generally deliberated over for a longer period of time. In theory, this makes it far more possible for a corporation to consistently make moral and ethical decisions than it is for your average, hot-headed individual.
In practice, of course, the situation always seem reversed, but that doesn't mean that corporate amorality is a natural law. I sincerely wish that Google will be one of the first of a new breed of corporations that actually do care enough about humanitity to "not be evil".
The issue with IGE is not that they are selling virtual goods and currency, be that legal or not according to the license agreement they signed. It is my belief that the majority of/.ers would be quite hypocritical if they started frantically pointing fingers at EULAs and calling witch (when was the last time you followed an EULA, or even bothered to read one?). The issue is that IGE and Thottbot may be connected at the hip. As the poster pointed out, having a 99% up-to-date database of EVERYTHING in the game (and I mean EVERYTHING - if you haven't visited thottbot.com, do so now, it is a truly amazing project) is a huge benefit to a virtual currency trader. Now, even that may very well be defended, as thottbot as well as the plugin for thottbot provides useful services that I wouldn't mind someone profiting from, BUT - there has been no transparency in this process. Users who use the thottbot plugin believes they are gathering information for a community of users, while in fact they are gathering information for a private company with a profit motive. They may be gathering more information than they believe. They are, in effect, deceived and taken advantage of.
If the allegations are true, then the guy will lose all credibility - people will stop using IGE and stop gathering intel for thottbot. If he had come out immediately and said "Feel free to use our UI plugin to gather intel for thottbot. If you like it, why don't you show your support by buying some gold at IGE?" this would not have been a problem.
http://hackingthexbox.com/
While not (yet) challenged in court, you can surely see how a publisher's unwillingness to publish a book specifically on the subject of "picking locks" due to fear of litigation might be an issue in a supposedly free society. As far as I can see, this book and others are a clear violation of the DMCA as it specifically deals with breaking cryptographic algorithms in specific commerical products - even modifying it to allow its use in an act of copyright violation (gasp!).
And no, the author is not confusing anything - you're just not grasping the connection between knowledge and product when applied to "intellectual property". In the case of "Hacking the X-Box" above, it would be censorship to ban the book - but the book disseminates knowledge, which in this case is a product of Microsoft's (or is called such in the language of the DMCA). In the case of MPAA vs. The World, it would IMHO be censorship to shut down websites that show you how and where you can gain access to materials which may or may not be copyright-infringing (depending on where you live, who you are, and what user licenses and contracts you have agreed to) - but the sites facilitate the dissemination of "intellectual property" which according to many nations' legislatures are called a product of the MPAA's members.
A website created to show how to get potentially copyright-infringing material does not itself infringe on copyright (and certainly does not "steal" or "facilitate stealing" - that's a ridiculous notion). You may want to group all this together into "doing bad things" and that's up to you, but courts tend to be more discriminatory and exact in their verdicts.
I agree in general, that people have been spoiled by the "user-friendliness" of just inserting a CD and clicking Next->Next->Next, but to claim that it's completely out of line to request that a user types "./configure && make && make install" to install a piece of software they downloaded off the 'net - well, if that is true, we may as well curl up and die as a species IMHO.
It is well within the average user's capability to follow these steps, and I must say that most times I have installed a common, well-documented, mature piece of software that I wanted a default configuration of, it was this easy. Alpha- and beta- software, or weird kernel modules, or anything written by ATI - well, that's a different story, but look at it from a Windows perspective. Would the people who can't manage to type "./configure && make && make install" be the types to try to install this type of software anyway, on Windows or Linux?
There's the issue of motive - if your motive is to rake in money from bundling your software with malware, you won't choose an open-source model to do so. There are plenty of companies which provide free-as-in-beer software - even for Linux - but do not provide access to source code, so a potential developer who wanted to build in backdoors or malware would simply choose not to use an open-source development model, since they have a choice.
In the case of a fringe-developer who attempts to sneak in his/her own code into a larger F/OSS project, hopefully the maintainers of said project will catch the attempt. As you say, it is not out of the question that such a thing could happen, but it is highly unlikely that a developer would bother with the F/OSS model if that was his/her intent.
Well, the subject at hand was a *nix environment. As you say, the core utilities (the GNU suite, et al) are pretty damn straightforward to install and basic operation is simple. I like the fact that I can install an entire Win32 compilation environment in 5 minutes if I find a source distribution of a tool I need. Sure beats the 2+ hours required to install MS Visual Studio or something.:)
I don't see why he wouldn't. "His" software is the GNU system environment - i.e. the system utilities that make [what most people call] "Linux" tick. Cygwin is, at its core, GNU on Windows. I don't think he would have more of a concern with that than GNU on Irix, GNU on Solaris, GNU on OS X etc.
As the big software companies races to collect the full set of software patents, software may actually be quantified to such a degree that an ingredient list may be feasible. I can see the label on a box of Windows XP in my mind's eye:
Contains: Method for visual representation of files as common house-hold items Method for executing commands by an external rodent-like device Method for not really deleting files, even though you said so, just in case you change your mind ... Method for integrating superfluous applications into the inner workings of the OS to increase complexity Method for integrating superfluous applications into the inner workings of the OS to lock out competitors Method for integrating superfluous applications into the inner workings of the OS to ensure a benficial user experience for virus writers [this section would just go on and on] ... Method for increasing hardware spending Method for ensuring future upgrades Method for continuous application failures Method for invoking a graphical blue robed wizard for no apparent reason Method for invoking a blue screen showing arbitrary numbers for no apparent reason ...
Contains 250% of recommended daily frustration. SURGEON GENERAL'S WARNING: Should not be used by people with heart conditions or IQ's about 80. May be hazardous to your health, as well as the health of others. Only for rectal use.
I can't really tell by your post whether you have a problem with this development or not, but let me remind you: what used to be a hobby turned into a profession before it once again morphed into a hobby. In the beginning of time, the only way to make money off of writing software was if you wrote specialized software for one or perhaps a couple of enterprise sites. All other software, including much of the software developed by IT giants, was free-as-in-beer. People thought the notion of paying for software was ridiculous, before it was commodified.
Now, finally, the hobbyists and enthusiasts have started to catch up with those who made billions by commodifying what's essentially nothing but pancake recipes, and get booed as by the masses as economy-shattering un-American commies. There was never a viable business model in cranking out fancy text editors in VB and charging $9.99 for each installation to begin with, no more than there was a viable business model in "developing web-driven eTailing and interactive marketing solutions" in the 90s.
I have nothing but respect for software developers, but if someone can do something as well as you - except for free, and in their spare time - you have no right to complain while you are in a market-driven economy. There are plenty of business that will pay good money for an in-house system developer, to do the sort of work that software people got paid to do before commodification took place.
The analogy was in reference to the adage that a law is legitimized by its years of precendence, so I see no bad analogy. I am well aware that in theory IP law is available to everyone, although it may not always work that way in practice.
You may not be aware of this, but copyright law is not a natural law created by a higher power - it was merely an invention to preserve some market force momentum after the printing press was invented and mass copying became feasible, and in its early stages it was a way to protect authors from predatory copiers and distributors who would profit off of works that were not their own. In its current incarnation however, it is a way for predatory printers and distributors to enforce their "right" to profit off of works that they "control" but did not ultimately create. At this point in time, IP law is achieving the opposite of that which is set out to do - it is ensuring the continuation of profiteering without production and is hindering the progress of new intellectual production by handing over total control of the raw materials to those who wish for nothing but total domination of the field. It is my belief that this bastardization of IP law is cause to revisit the legislation, keeping the original intent in mind and considering the purpose of "law" to begin with - to protect and further society for the good of all, not to protect and further the right of a few to rake in immense profits on the backs of others.
Whereever you may stand on the issue, it is foolish to claim that organizations that present an alternative view to conventional wisdom should just shut up because they're thieves. Stop the witch calling already.
If you're going to justify laws based on years of precedent, I'm sure I can find you an open position as a pyramid builder in ancient Egypt, or perhaps as a serf in feudal Europe. I'm sure you would enjoy these age-old forms of rule and government as well. Perhaps the pyramid builders should have just engaged in some lively debate with the priesthood, while pulling the rocks up the sloping planes?
I wonder what IP the witchhunters at/. has ever produced, to constantly chant these rabid, knee-jerk responses. The whole IP issue would be solved very quickly if people just expanded the acronym and realized that the 'I' in 'IP' stands for "Intellectual", and then classified whether the "property" should fall into that category or not. The producers of real "IP" seems to have no problems with sharing their intellectual wealth - the complaints always originates from those whose property would not qualify anyway.
Agreed. But riddle me this: if Microsoft carried centralized spam-and-virus filtering software, a reasonable firewall or MS-branded backbone switch/router and an ERP/MRP/Accounting suite - and all this automagically tied into a slick management console for Win2k3 Server, would you not buy it?
All I'm saying is, there are benefits to FOSS beyond functionality and technical superiority. I'm pleased to see that the Mozilla Foundation is working on a project like this and I would personally not be against rolling it out even before all of Outlook's features had been implemented - because I know that it will always be free-as-in-speech, it will always be free-as-in-beer, and it will always improve (or it will get forked, and the fork will improve).
When you come to rely on features that are proprietary - especially integration between applications - you are at the absolute mercy of your vendor. Even your attitude towards Thunderbird suggests that you have been cornered because of past software choices. IMHO, "seamless integration of processes" doesn't mean squat when you don't have control over your own purchasing decisions.
Your company uses Exchange.
Your company uses Sharepoint.
Your company uses MS Office.
Your company uses Pocket PCs.
Conclusion: Your company needs to seriously consider who they're actually working for - themselves or MS. Your company has managed to buy itself into a corner where it is so dependent on a single vendor that they are unable to consider anything but expensive proprietary black-boxed products.
You may want to ask your CIO/CFO if s/he ever heard of "putting all of one's eggs in one basket".
The Pirate Bay is run in parallel with Piratbyran ("the Pirate Company") which is a Swedish organization created to encourage new approaches to IP laws and media culture. They are probably Sweden's foremost champion of P2P file sharing, having participated in numerous national radio and TV interviews and debates, and organizing and sponsoring events related to P2P file sharing and internet media culture.
If you know Swedish, their site provides you among other things with P2P and IP related news, tutorials on ripping, compressing and distributing media on various P2P networks, papers on how various P2P protocols work, links to articles and research papers on P2P, internet media and Open Source, as well as an entire section on legal matters regarding P2P in Sweden and abroad.
This is not what I would consider typical "geek fare", although I must say that I would generally lend more credence to a well-informed geek's knowledge of IP law than, say, whatever FUD the **AA happens to be spouting on a particular day.
While Wal-Mart may be a symptom of capitalism, I would be hard pressed to hold it up as the shining example of our time. A healthy capitalist system relies on competition on all levels - from manufacturing to suppliers to retailers. This way the suppliers can have their pick of manufacturers, retailers can have their pick of suppliers and consumers can have their pick of retailers. The Wal-Mart phenomenon creates a virtual communism within a capitalist system - a sort of "Ministry of Plenty" run by a corporation with profit and market dominance as its only goals.
You may preach the gospel of free market liberalism as you will - and I will not be in contradiction - but the fact of the matter is that Wal-Mart is not a fair player. The irony of capitalism is that it's a system that only works well if there is competition, but where every player is supposed to attempt to achieve monopoly. Well, Wal-Mart won. As far as many market segments go they have no competition. They may have achieved this goal by fair competition, by being faster, better, leaner and meaner than their competitors. But however fair the method of achieving this dominance was (and I'm sure there are arguments, and possibly evidence, to the contrary) that doesn't make the end result to the economy and society any more appealing.
Since Wal-Mart maintains a dominant position in many fields of retail, and packs a considerable wallet to boost, they are able to manipulate the system just like a government entity can. A governmental body responsible for a plan-based economy could refuse to buy from a supplier and thereby put it out of business. Wal-Mart can threaten a supplier similarly, but also has the resources available to compete even with other monopolies and trusts by starting their own manufacturing of products they have problems acquiring at a "good value". When such a dominance has been achieved, Wal-Mart can (and have) start to play the meta-economy game of labour management, sales tax, logistics and surveillance, social behaviours and, let's not forget, globalisation.
When you control a small city's or county's workforce, you can maintain a "healthy" level of control by controlling the unemployment rate - since there are no employers to compete with you, you can ensure that your employees don't ask for higher wages and benefits, and you can ensure that they are sufficiently afraid to form unions to help them. This keeps costs down and allows you to maintain a "good value".
When you have expanded enough in an area that neighbouring counties is suffering because their residents don't shop (or work) locally, you can strike some nice deals with the local government for land and property to bring the business back. Of course, the county wouldn't have had to give these incentives to smaller retail businesses and thus its residents still lose out - except for the good value they'll be getting at Wal-Mart.
As you grow in the retail industry, total control / panopticon technologies such as RFID tags, international inventory and sales trend analysis and complete data warehousing become gradually more cost-effective. The detrimental effect of these technologies are well known and I need not go into detail for the/. crowd. Similarly, economies of scale and control of both production and retail mean that you can mass manufacture something centrally (with a large impact on the environment) and then ship it to every warehouse (with a large impact on the environment) cheaper than if you were to manufacture and sell the product locally in many different places. In Wal-Mart's case, the effect is truly extreme as entire cities spawn and crumble at the whims of Wal-Mart's procurement arm.
When you control the retail industry, you control the buying habits of consumers. When you control the buying habits of consumers, you control where and for what they shop. If consumers want a certain product that Wal-
As many have pointed out, the CPCC (CCCP, anyone?) has paid out $28M blah blah while they have collected $78M blah blah. As long as they are compensating the wrong people, who cares what the numbers are?
Just like in the case of the proposed Tariff 22 (SOCAN, RantRadio) which dealt with web radio broadcasting, the copyright board is misunderstanding (or is intentionally misleading) what the implications of the new technology is. Their payout mechanism is still based on the only two measurable quantities available to them: radio play and record sales. But the new music consuming generation, grown up on MP3s and P2P networks, cares little for such backwards technologies such as radio and CDs, or at least they care less and less as time goes by as indicated by increasingly dwindling CD sales.
Thus, the payout method is based on paying the artists who aren't even necessarily the ones being copied. With this generation, artists are more likely to be have their music downloaded by cause of word-of-mouth advertising, or rating and genre systems built into P2P clients, or similar-sounding-artists suggestion wizards than by what they hear on the FM band or what CD the record store is marketing at the time.
The CCPC is extorting money from users of the new technology and using it within the framework of the old. This is, of course, a method by which to ensure its own survival as a bureaucratic entity and grow ever bigger by ensuring that its corporate backers are not hurt by this new technology. Remember, the CCPC is not a government entity but a non-profit corporation "run by copyright holders" - copyright holders who are so intent on getting paid that they work a full-time job to collect royalties.
To those Canadians who say they would rather have the tariffs and be allowed to "pirate" music, remember that the tariffs only cover you for private copying, which is covered under Canadian Fair Use law. The courts are still deciding what "Private Copying" actually means, and it is still uncertain whether many digital distribution systems are actually covered under "Private Copying" or not - or what you can and cannot do on a P2P network.
Slashdot Mirror
Point taken. I guess at this juncture we're back to - in what way does Demonoid, as a tracker, publicly distribute the copyrighted material in question? But that is a much touchier - and technical - issue, I suppose.
A few assumptions, please correct if I am mistaken:
* Canada has a private copying levy, whereby a portion of the sales of most recording media goes to Canadian artists.
* In effect, Canadian courts have ruled this makes the private copying of music legal.
* The CRIA looks after the interest of Canadian recording artists.
* Demonoid supplies links which facilitates the download of, among other things, works produced by Canadian recording artists.
How can the CRIA legally threaten a webhost to shut down a site which is involved in activities which - for all intents and purposes - are legal in the nation which you represent? What am I missing?
FYI, I'm running XFCE4 under Slackware 10.1 on a ThinkPad 365XD - Pentium 120MHz, 40MB RAM, 1MB Trident video - and it still runs just fine. Takes a minute to load, but once it's loaded it's fully responsive. Coupled with X-Forwarding over SSH from my more powerful machine in the other room to run the real heavy-duty apps, it makes the little ThinkPad actually quite usable.
Took single-user-mode and liberal use of 'rm' to get the system functional again. Even with plenty of horsepower (a G5 CPU and a gig of RAM in this case) it seems extremely easy to get Finder to crash, rendering the system unstable/unusable. It is sad that an instrumental, vendor-supplied app such as Finder can easily make the entire UNIX-based system unstable, even when only running with user privileges.
As opposed to Slackware, Gentoo, Debian, Trustix, Tiny Sofa etc. These are designed for making toast. Why they have everything required for an out-of-the-box LAMP installation is beyond me, I've never had to use PHP to make toast before. Maybe my toaster just has it integrated in firmware?
In practice, of course, the situation always seem reversed, but that doesn't mean that corporate amorality is a natural law. I sincerely wish that Google will be one of the first of a new breed of corporations that actually do care enough about humanitity to "not be evil".
...but would this technology be compatible with the Microsoft Flying Car?
The issue with IGE is not that they are selling virtual goods and currency, be that legal or not according to the license agreement they signed. It is my belief that the majority of /.ers would be quite hypocritical if they started frantically pointing fingers at EULAs and calling witch (when was the last time you followed an EULA, or even bothered to read one?).
The issue is that IGE and Thottbot may be connected at the hip. As the poster pointed out, having a 99% up-to-date database of EVERYTHING in the game (and I mean EVERYTHING - if you haven't visited thottbot.com, do so now, it is a truly amazing project) is a huge benefit to a virtual currency trader. Now, even that may very well be defended, as thottbot as well as the plugin for thottbot provides useful services that I wouldn't mind someone profiting from, BUT -
there has been no transparency in this process. Users who use the thottbot plugin believes they are gathering information for a community of users, while in fact they are gathering information for a private company with a profit motive. They may be gathering more information than they believe. They are, in effect, deceived and taken advantage of.
If the allegations are true, then the guy will lose all credibility - people will stop using IGE and stop gathering intel for thottbot. If he had come out immediately and said "Feel free to use our UI plugin to gather intel for thottbot. If you like it, why don't you show your support by buying some gold at IGE?" this would not have been a problem.
While not (yet) challenged in court, you can surely see how a publisher's unwillingness to publish a book specifically on the subject of "picking locks" due to fear of litigation might be an issue in a supposedly free society. As far as I can see, this book and others are a clear violation of the DMCA as it specifically deals with breaking cryptographic algorithms in specific commerical products - even modifying it to allow its use in an act of copyright violation (gasp!).
And no, the author is not confusing anything - you're just not grasping the connection between knowledge and product when applied to "intellectual property". In the case of "Hacking the X-Box" above, it would be censorship to ban the book - but the book disseminates knowledge, which in this case is a product of Microsoft's (or is called such in the language of the DMCA). In the case of MPAA vs. The World, it would IMHO be censorship to shut down websites that show you how and where you can gain access to materials which may or may not be copyright-infringing (depending on where you live, who you are, and what user licenses and contracts you have agreed to) - but the sites facilitate the dissemination of "intellectual property" which according to many nations' legislatures are called a product of the MPAA's members.
A website created to show how to get potentially copyright-infringing material does not itself infringe on copyright (and certainly does not "steal" or "facilitate stealing" - that's a ridiculous notion). You may want to group all this together into "doing bad things" and that's up to you, but courts tend to be more discriminatory and exact in their verdicts.
It is well within the average user's capability to follow these steps, and I must say that most times I have installed a common, well-documented, mature piece of software that I wanted a default configuration of, it was this easy. Alpha- and beta- software, or weird kernel modules, or anything written by ATI - well, that's a different story, but look at it from a Windows perspective. Would the people who can't manage to type "./configure && make && make install" be the types to try to install this type of software anyway, on Windows or Linux?
1. Insert floppy in floppy drive
2. Click on "Start"
3. Click on "Run"
4. Type "A:\SETUP.EXE"
5. Follow the instructions on the screen
Or even worse, when software came on CD and wouldn't autorun - then they had to figure out which drive letter represented their CD-ROM drive!!
Yet they seemed capable of doing it, back then. What has changed, exactly? Are forward-slashes somehow harder to understand than backslashes?
In the case of a fringe-developer who attempts to sneak in his/her own code into a larger F/OSS project, hopefully the maintainers of said project will catch the attempt. As you say, it is not out of the question that such a thing could happen, but it is highly unlikely that a developer would bother with the F/OSS model if that was his/her intent.
Well, the subject at hand was a *nix environment. As you say, the core utilities (the GNU suite, et al) are pretty damn straightforward to install and basic operation is simple. I like the fact that I can install an entire Win32 compilation environment in 5 minutes if I find a source distribution of a tool I need. Sure beats the 2+ hours required to install MS Visual Studio or something. :)
SkyNet, is that you? :)
I don't see why he wouldn't. "His" software is the GNU system environment - i.e. the system utilities that make [what most people call] "Linux" tick. Cygwin is, at its core, GNU on Windows. I don't think he would have more of a concern with that than GNU on Irix, GNU on Solaris, GNU on OS X etc.
Contains:
Method for visual representation of files as common house-hold items
Method for executing commands by an external rodent-like device
Method for not really deleting files, even though you said so, just in case you change your mind
...
Method for integrating superfluous applications into the inner workings of the OS to increase complexity
Method for integrating superfluous applications into the inner workings of the OS to lock out competitors
Method for integrating superfluous applications into the inner workings of the OS to ensure a benficial user experience for virus writers
[this section would just go on and on]
...
Method for increasing hardware spending
Method for ensuring future upgrades
Method for continuous application failures
Method for invoking a graphical blue robed wizard for no apparent reason
Method for invoking a blue screen showing arbitrary numbers for no apparent reason
...
Contains 250% of recommended daily frustration.
SURGEON GENERAL'S WARNING: Should not be used by people with heart conditions or IQ's about 80. May be hazardous to your health, as well as the health of others. Only for rectal use.
Now, finally, the hobbyists and enthusiasts have started to catch up with those who made billions by commodifying what's essentially nothing but pancake recipes, and get booed as by the masses as economy-shattering un-American commies. There was never a viable business model in cranking out fancy text editors in VB and charging $9.99 for each installation to begin with, no more than there was a viable business model in "developing web-driven eTailing and interactive marketing solutions" in the 90s.
I have nothing but respect for software developers, but if someone can do something as well as you - except for free, and in their spare time - you have no right to complain while you are in a market-driven economy. There are plenty of business that will pay good money for an in-house system developer, to do the sort of work that software people got paid to do before commodification took place.
Done any Cygwin installs lately? Nowadays, it's easier than installing most Windows apps, and that's not supposed to be a funny.
You may not be aware of this, but copyright law is not a natural law created by a higher power - it was merely an invention to preserve some market force momentum after the printing press was invented and mass copying became feasible, and in its early stages it was a way to protect authors from predatory copiers and distributors who would profit off of works that were not their own. In its current incarnation however, it is a way for predatory printers and distributors to enforce their "right" to profit off of works that they "control" but did not ultimately create. At this point in time, IP law is achieving the opposite of that which is set out to do - it is ensuring the continuation of profiteering without production and is hindering the progress of new intellectual production by handing over total control of the raw materials to those who wish for nothing but total domination of the field. It is my belief that this bastardization of IP law is cause to revisit the legislation, keeping the original intent in mind and considering the purpose of "law" to begin with - to protect and further society for the good of all, not to protect and further the right of a few to rake in immense profits on the backs of others.
Whereever you may stand on the issue, it is foolish to claim that organizations that present an alternative view to conventional wisdom should just shut up because they're thieves. Stop the witch calling already.
I wonder what IP the witchhunters at /. has ever produced, to constantly chant these rabid, knee-jerk responses. The whole IP issue would be solved very quickly if people just expanded the acronym and realized that the 'I' in 'IP' stands for "Intellectual", and then classified whether the "property" should fall into that category or not. The producers of real "IP" seems to have no problems with sharing their intellectual wealth - the complaints always originates from those whose property would not qualify anyway.
All I'm saying is, there are benefits to FOSS beyond functionality and technical superiority. I'm pleased to see that the Mozilla Foundation is working on a project like this and I would personally not be against rolling it out even before all of Outlook's features had been implemented - because I know that it will always be free-as-in-speech, it will always be free-as-in-beer, and it will always improve (or it will get forked, and the fork will improve).
When you come to rely on features that are proprietary - especially integration between applications - you are at the absolute mercy of your vendor. Even your attitude towards Thunderbird suggests that you have been cornered because of past software choices. IMHO, "seamless integration of processes" doesn't mean squat when you don't have control over your own purchasing decisions.
Your company uses Sharepoint.
Your company uses MS Office.
Your company uses Pocket PCs.
Conclusion: Your company needs to seriously consider who they're actually working for - themselves or MS. Your company has managed to buy itself into a corner where it is so dependent on a single vendor that they are unable to consider anything but expensive proprietary black-boxed products.
You may want to ask your CIO/CFO if s/he ever heard of "putting all of one's eggs in one basket".
If you know Swedish, their site provides you among other things with P2P and IP related news, tutorials on ripping, compressing and distributing media on various P2P networks, papers on how various P2P protocols work, links to articles and research papers on P2P, internet media and Open Source, as well as an entire section on legal matters regarding P2P in Sweden and abroad.
This is not what I would consider typical "geek fare", although I must say that I would generally lend more credence to a well-informed geek's knowledge of IP law than, say, whatever FUD the **AA happens to be spouting on a particular day.
You may preach the gospel of free market liberalism as you will - and I will not be in contradiction - but the fact of the matter is that Wal-Mart is not a fair player. The irony of capitalism is that it's a system that only works well if there is competition, but where every player is supposed to attempt to achieve monopoly. Well, Wal-Mart won. As far as many market segments go they have no competition. They may have achieved this goal by fair competition, by being faster, better, leaner and meaner than their competitors. But however fair the method of achieving this dominance was (and I'm sure there are arguments, and possibly evidence, to the contrary) that doesn't make the end result to the economy and society any more appealing.
Since Wal-Mart maintains a dominant position in many fields of retail, and packs a considerable wallet to boost, they are able to manipulate the system just like a government entity can. A governmental body responsible for a plan-based economy could refuse to buy from a supplier and thereby put it out of business. Wal-Mart can threaten a supplier similarly, but also has the resources available to compete even with other monopolies and trusts by starting their own manufacturing of products they have problems acquiring at a "good value". When such a dominance has been achieved, Wal-Mart can (and have) start to play the meta-economy game of labour management, sales tax, logistics and surveillance, social behaviours and, let's not forget, globalisation.
When you control a small city's or county's workforce, you can maintain a "healthy" level of control by controlling the unemployment rate - since there are no employers to compete with you, you can ensure that your employees don't ask for higher wages and benefits, and you can ensure that they are sufficiently afraid to form unions to help them. This keeps costs down and allows you to maintain a "good value".
When you have expanded enough in an area that neighbouring counties is suffering because their residents don't shop (or work) locally, you can strike some nice deals with the local government for land and property to bring the business back. Of course, the county wouldn't have had to give these incentives to smaller retail businesses and thus its residents still lose out - except for the good value they'll be getting at Wal-Mart.
As you grow in the retail industry, total control / panopticon technologies such as RFID tags, international inventory and sales trend analysis and complete data warehousing become gradually more cost-effective. The detrimental effect of these technologies are well known and I need not go into detail for the /. crowd. Similarly, economies of scale and control of both production and retail mean that you can mass manufacture something centrally (with a large impact on the environment) and then ship it to every warehouse (with a large impact on the environment) cheaper than if you were to manufacture and sell the product locally in many different places. In Wal-Mart's case, the effect is truly extreme as entire cities spawn and crumble at the whims of Wal-Mart's procurement arm.
When you control the retail industry, you control the buying habits of consumers. When you control the buying habits of consumers, you control where and for what they shop. If consumers want a certain product that Wal-
Just like in the case of the proposed Tariff 22 (SOCAN, RantRadio) which dealt with web radio broadcasting, the copyright board is misunderstanding (or is intentionally misleading) what the implications of the new technology is. Their payout mechanism is still based on the only two measurable quantities available to them: radio play and record sales. But the new music consuming generation, grown up on MP3s and P2P networks, cares little for such backwards technologies such as radio and CDs, or at least they care less and less as time goes by as indicated by increasingly dwindling CD sales.
Thus, the payout method is based on paying the artists who aren't even necessarily the ones being copied. With this generation, artists are more likely to be have their music downloaded by cause of word-of-mouth advertising, or rating and genre systems built into P2P clients, or similar-sounding-artists suggestion wizards than by what they hear on the FM band or what CD the record store is marketing at the time.
The CCPC is extorting money from users of the new technology and using it within the framework of the old. This is, of course, a method by which to ensure its own survival as a bureaucratic entity and grow ever bigger by ensuring that its corporate backers are not hurt by this new technology. Remember, the CCPC is not a government entity but a non-profit corporation "run by copyright holders" - copyright holders who are so intent on getting paid that they work a full-time job to collect royalties.
To those Canadians who say they would rather have the tariffs and be allowed to "pirate" music, remember that the tariffs only cover you for private copying, which is covered under Canadian Fair Use law. The courts are still deciding what "Private Copying" actually means, and it is still uncertain whether many digital distribution systems are actually covered under "Private Copying" or not - or what you can and cannot do on a P2P network.