For example, there's no first-sale doctrine in France. They have the exact opposite: Copyright owners are expected to be paid every time a work changes owners.
Are you sure? AFAIK (and even though IANAL, I do think I keep myself well informed in this domain) your statement is simply false.
Pay attention too, to the fact that what the users are alerted about is *not* that they are counterfeiting works; it is that they have not secured their connection. And there lies the bigger rub: how exactly are users supposed to secure their access? The plain answer is that they can't, short of terminating said access. In practice, they can't avoid someone breaking in their DSL box Wifi (or any Wifi); so the law basically amounts to "shut your Wifi down, and so much for all those wireless gadgets". In practice, they can't ensure that their wired computer (or printer, or NAS) isn't compromised; so the law basically amounts to "don't use that". But the law does not define how one should secure an access; this was deferred the definition to a decree which is still to come -- and will not solve the question when it comes, I wager. That's the basic flaw, both in the law and its application by the Hadopi: the law defined the new offence ("not securing one's access") by indirect indication at most; and the Hadopi notices, which provide *no* details on the exact facts, amount to "you have done something bad, but we won't tell you what". I expect it won't take long before someone receives a notice and challenges it to court on the basis, at least, that the law imposes obligations which cannot be met.
Package manager for your router? Jesus christ man.
Package management for a router makes good sense for some reasons:
- I can remove functionalities I don't want and add those I want and still fit in the available (usually scarce) flash, all while running.
- it also allows easier, faster, and finer-grained upgrading of apps for bug and security fixes -- that's something one might also consider an important quality.
- bonus: removing unused functionalities reduces the exposition to attacks.
Run-time package management is way faster and efficient for getting an optimal config than build-time selection and configuration.
I would argue that at this time there are NO facts, only allegations. The details of a lawsuit filing are not exactly unbiased.
Granted there are only allegations, and they are most certainly biased. However, as the fact they allege is central to their claim, I would tend to think that they are factual regarding the capacity of defendants to control the webcam at least--and such a capacity is anything but ludicrous.
The point being that the behavior being alleged is so utterly ridiculous that there are far more plausible explanations. That doesn't mean the allegations aren't true, just that it would be VERY surprising if so.
It would seem ridiculous from the viewpoint of the family or students or observers with an objective grasp of the legal situation.
This does not mean that it seemed so to school PHBs who would probably tend to know, and take into consideration, school-related laws and regulations more than any other law. They may have considered that i) the school has authority on the kids and ii) the laptop is school property which the school has a right to retain control on. Doesn't make the school PHBs right, mind you; but they might well have simply missed the legal unsoundness of their idea because of the apparent soundness of the two arguments they relied on.
Well the class action complaint (yes, I did Read The Filed Material linked to by the boingboing page) explicitely talks about remotely activating cameras, so the hypothesis that it would only be the kid taking pics and then leaving them on the laptop clearly doesn't match the available facts at this time.
In TFA, Lennart P does explicitely explain that he does not pass blame, and details the causes and implications of his statement. But of course one needs to RTFA to realize that.
I don't think I've made a broad statement; rather, I gave a specific counter-example to the broad statement that 'a separate legislative power makes people less likely to be abused by the legal system' by showing that France, at least, was a case with a separate legislative power *and* abusive laws passed by this power.
I understand your point, but I'm afraid this is a false sense of safety you're relying upon. The question of translations aside (as translations are not a legal tool per se) the EUPL has indeed been carefully designed so as to be legal in any european country--or more precisely, as legal as it goes. As for the GPL, I fail to see how, as you seem to imply by comparison, it would "not consider the european legal systems", since it has been tested in French and German courts during actual trials, and found legal -- a feat that, ironically, EUPL cannot claim:)
Yes, they could, and then what? The fact that this license would be written or endorsed by the EU would not make people using it any safer than any other license on a legal standpoint.
As someone living in France, where law is created by representatives and not judges, I would like to respectfully disagreee on the 'people being less likely to get abused by the legal system' when law come fro the legislative power. You just look at what's going through our reps at this time, mostly dealing with intellectual property. Basically, the HADOPI laws are designed by the executive power, with tacit acceptance, if not approval, of the legislative power, to actually evade control by the judicial power; and this is not because the judicial power would be unfair to the citizen: that's because the judicial power would bar the administration (thus the executive power) from assuming citizen guilty and stamping on their right for fair trial, freedom of speech and privacy. And this is not a dangerous activist saying so; this is the Conseil Constitutionnel, the very institution whose mission is to ensure that french laws respect the french Constitution.
Er... I don't see how a license, even one backed by the EU, would change anything legally: it is not a law, and would not change a iota to the legal situation of anyone *not* using it. It *could* affect those using it, though, but its mere existence would not make it legal per se.
Joke aside, as for any rather absolute statement, there is only a part of truth both in the statement and in its opposite.
Granted, automation does not necessarily lead to a lesser [level of intelligence in] society.
However, not everything that automation can do must necessarily be done by automated means.
For instance, calculators have automated calculus. I for one, welcome our key-laden overlords from arctangent, because I rarely have to compute arctangent and find it handy to have a calculator to do it for me.
However, calculators can also do simple arithmetic like additions and multiplications ; and this can (and does, in the experience I can gather from my immediate vicinity) lead to a lessening of people's capability at doing additions and multiplications -- operations which are much more frequent than arctangents.
I don't think the ISP is necessarily in charge of handling its IP ranges at Spamhaus. Actually, it is kindly allowed to help, but if id it does not, then the Spamhaus team obligingly does the work alone.
And I do understand the reluctancy of my ISP to provide free workforce just to fix the ill effects of a blocking list's policy, not when this list could fix its policy and decide to go after the ISP only when the offending IP is dynamic and thus makes it impossible to retaliate against the real spammer (besides, I wasn't talking about "my" netblock; I'm only an observer on that topic.)
You are missing the whole point of the lists then.
They create collateral damage by design, to make it painful for the ISP or organization to have spammers using their stuff.
Which, in turn encourages policies of closing port 25 (a good thing IMHO) for end users, watching who they have as customers and well, not being spammers.
The frustration of some mail admins needs to be directed at their stupid virus-getting users and shitty network infrastructure that allows people on dynamic dial up lines to send mail directly. As a RBL user myself, I LIKE the collateral damage aspect. Take care with whom you do business with and you won't have a problem. It's that simple.
Relaying mail through your ISP is not a big deal, it's a cost of living in a society where people can't be trusted to do stuff properly, just like street lights, bike locks, and every other such device.
I have not missed the point of the lists, then; I disagree with it, which is a different thing.
One can indeed consider that an ISP should treat its customers as a parent should treat unruly chidren; or one can consider them as persons, responsible for their actions. Especially when they act from a fixed IP, I take the "responsible person" approach, and consider that retaliation agaist spamming, when there has to be, must be directed at the offender, and certainly not at considerable amounts of innocent bystanders "by design".
Plus, you can get off that list on a web page.
Wish it were that easy. My ISP provides its users with dynamic and static IPs, from different RIPE ranges, clearly identified, and there is no way a user can switch from one type to another, so users with a static IP will keep it no matter what. Yet, Spamhaus:
flags as wide as/16 ranges when blacklisting these static IPs, causing wide collateral damage
refuses to deal with users (regardless of whether these users are actual spammers or were just collateral damage), and
insists in dealing with the ISP and the ISP only,
... effectively ignoring the whole point of giving and advertising static IPs, which is putting responsibilityandresponsibility in the hands of the static IP user.
Misleading title and summary. The main point is not that the lawyer sued and challenges in Re Bilski, but that he lost on Appeal and that in Re Bilski was ruled dispositive...
... as Groklaw's link mentions right from their own title. Now, that Slashdot readers don't RTFA is usual, but submitters? Sheesh.:)
The three analogies you draw are correct, but they do not allow concluding to identity. As I pointed out, loads and stresses are necessarily based on experimentally measured input (e.g., IIRC, the Young modulus) while formal SW proof methods have no experimental pseudo-constants involved.
Apart from that, yes I do believe SW engineering is truly engineering, and at the same time, just as I would say "painting is an art, yet only few paintings are", I would partly agree that current software quality is awfully bad. But partly only.
While a fault in a bridge design will only affect the designed bridge, a single fault in some software will induce errors and misbehaviours in every instance of the software, more so if the software is in very common use, thus faults in somesoftware are more likely to get bad publicity.
Now software is not the only thing that gets mass-produced and therefore not the only kind of product for which a design flaw will induce a massive count of errors, yet it seems like it does actually fail much more than, for instance, TV sets.
One (among several) reasons is that, while only few bridges are engineered by people without a sound background in civil and mechanical engineering, software frequently gets done by people with less-than-perfect skills (you don't get a rookie to build a bridge, do you? Well, you can get a rookie to write code).
The SW engineering field is real engineering alright... but many SW designers are not engineers.
The key lies in the "specified values". For any "real" engineering, you'll have those arbitraries in formal methods. OTOH, formal methods in SW engineering do not suffer arbitrary matters. SW-related 'formal methods' carry a specific sense of *absolute* correctness while the 'formal' methods described here for, erm, 'concrete' engineering do not.
If you want a SW equivalent to what you name formal methods (and which I have been taught to call mathematical or analytical methods, but not formal), then you should look into SW metrics. They also have a mathematical structure, and also carry adequate arbitrary constraints, e.g. 'cyclomatic complexity should remain below 7' or whatever.
As a non-layman, highly SW-based, real enough engineer (and other than that an almost normal person), I would not parallel, for instance, structural analysis in civil engineering with formal methods in SW engineering. "Formal method" is the name of a specific kind of SW analysis tool, based on mathematically proving the software, not taking stress scenarios into account (stress simulation for SW is called "testing":) ).
Mikkeles did answer citing Structural engineering - analysis of components and connections based on the science of strength of materials, and Aeronautical engineering - design is based on computer simulation of air flows over wings and fuselage, then confirmed by testing, which is not antiethical to formal methods of physical components.
As I was suspecting, those are valid engineering examples, but neither exhibit formal methods as such. They use analytical methods, which are fine and efficient, but which are nowhere near formal methods as I know them. And neither are more "real engineering" than SW engineering; they are reality engineering if one so wishes to differentiate them from SW.
In fact, SW is the only engineering where formal methods might be considered, and SW engineering can be just as reality oriented as structural engineering. Indeed, structural engineering could barely be achieved today without SW.
However, I would venture that possible stresses on a bridge can indeed outnumber possible interactions with some SW. It just depends on how close to reality you want your real structural engineering to be. Finite elements, paradoxically, can always be broken in smaller pieces.:)
Sorry to ask, but can someone give an example of a field of "real engineering" which uses formal methods to ensure correctness, and of the formal methods used?
Am I the only one who read that as "non-pornagraphic" the first time?
I'm afraid you are. All the others read that as "non-pornographic".
Re:Freedom of Speech trumps DRM
on
DRM and Democracy
·
· Score: 5, Insightful
I guess the idea is that once DRM is generalized, it is a trivial matter to switch from a "non-DRMed content is allowed by default" to a "only DRMed content is allowed" stance, and then, to be able to produce content that anyone can actually see, any individual would depend on DRM providers. But surely no DRM "key holder" would even only think of deciding which content deserves being DRMed and which content should be banned, err, bared, from being viewed, or even known of.
Countries that don't allow you personal copies include UK, Australia and chunks of EU (not France or Portugal).
Count France out soon.
While DADVSI still says that right owners cannot prohibit copies made for the sole use of the copist, it also says that bypassing DRM to make such copies is an act of counterfeiting. copying DRM-protected CDs is not allowed.
Also, Pro Music has everything to gain from minimizing the number of countries that allow persola copying. They're patent (pun half intended) pro-copyright and anti-p2p people, as the left pane of their web site alone will demonstrate.
"The US is fairly unusual having a 'fair usage' clause on copyright", a clause almost, but not quite, entirely unlike UK's fair dealing, France's usage privé and many others.
Funny that every time I see a copyrights-related law being pushed through, it is "to harmonize [all countries'] copyright systems".
Personally, the red line is that when I buy a song, video, e-book... I get the right to read it, period. Not the right to be allowed to read it if I'm well-behaved and only where and when the rights owner (who incidentally was *not* the creator) says so.
And as for SIRA, while I couldn't care less as I am not American, I'm unfortunately seing a law similarly restrictive, DADVSI, being passed in France. Basically, it kills our usage privé.
However, if I'm forced by law to surrender to rights owners, at least I'm stil in position to choose who I'm surrendering to, and this is what I do more and more, by turning to indies (be it music, movies, comics, whatever) who 1) won't hammer DRMs at me and 2) are far more interested in content. The movie and comic book I am buying right now are direct from their creators--and as a hint to.*AAs out there, I shall add that I could have gotten these for free, yet I chose to pay.
Slashdot Mirror
For example, there's no first-sale doctrine in France. They have the exact opposite: Copyright owners are expected to be paid every time a work changes owners.
Are you sure? AFAIK (and even though IANAL, I do think I keep myself well informed in this domain) your statement is simply false.
Pay attention too, to the fact that what the users are alerted about is *not* that they are counterfeiting works; it is that they have not secured their connection. And there lies the bigger rub: how exactly are users supposed to secure their access? The plain answer is that they can't, short of terminating said access. In practice, they can't avoid someone breaking in their DSL box Wifi (or any Wifi); so the law basically amounts to "shut your Wifi down, and so much for all those wireless gadgets". In practice, they can't ensure that their wired computer (or printer, or NAS) isn't compromised; so the law basically amounts to "don't use that". But the law does not define how one should secure an access; this was deferred the definition to a decree which is still to come -- and will not solve the question when it comes, I wager.
That's the basic flaw, both in the law and its application by the Hadopi: the law defined the new offence ("not securing one's access") by indirect indication at most; and the Hadopi notices, which provide *no* details on the exact facts, amount to "you have done something bad, but we won't tell you what".
I expect it won't take long before someone receives a notice and challenges it to court on the basis, at least, that the law imposes obligations which cannot be met.
Package manager for your router? Jesus christ man.
Package management for a router makes good sense for some reasons:
- I can remove functionalities I don't want and add those I want and still fit in the available (usually scarce) flash, all while running.
- it also allows easier, faster, and finer-grained upgrading of apps for bug and security fixes -- that's something one might also consider an important quality.
- bonus: removing unused functionalities reduces the exposition to attacks.
Run-time package management is way faster and efficient for getting an optimal config than build-time selection and configuration.
I would argue that at this time there are NO facts, only allegations. The details of a lawsuit filing are not exactly unbiased.
Granted there are only allegations, and they are most certainly biased. However, as the fact they allege is central to their claim, I would tend to think that they are factual regarding the capacity of defendants to control the webcam at least--and such a capacity is anything but ludicrous.
The point being that the behavior being alleged is so utterly ridiculous that there are far more plausible explanations. That doesn't mean the allegations aren't true, just that it would be VERY surprising if so.
It would seem ridiculous from the viewpoint of the family or students or observers with an objective grasp of the legal situation. This does not mean that it seemed so to school PHBs who would probably tend to know, and take into consideration, school-related laws and regulations more than any other law. They may have considered that i) the school has authority on the kids and ii) the laptop is school property which the school has a right to retain control on. Doesn't make the school PHBs right, mind you; but they might well have simply missed the legal unsoundness of their idea because of the apparent soundness of the two arguments they relied on.
Well the class action complaint (yes, I did Read The Filed Material linked to by the boingboing page) explicitely talks about remotely activating cameras, so the hypothesis that it would only be the kid taking pics and then leaving them on the laptop clearly doesn't match the available facts at this time.
In TFA, Lennart P does explicitely explain that he does not pass blame, and details the causes and implications of his statement. But of course one needs to RTFA to realize that.
I don't think I've made a broad statement; rather, I gave a specific counter-example to the broad statement that 'a separate legislative power makes people less likely to be abused by the legal system' by showing that France, at least, was a case with a separate legislative power *and* abusive laws passed by this power.
I understand your point, but I'm afraid this is a false sense of safety you're relying upon. The question of translations aside (as translations are not a legal tool per se) the EUPL has indeed been carefully designed so as to be legal in any european country--or more precisely, as legal as it goes. As for the GPL, I fail to see how, as you seem to imply by comparison, it would "not consider the european legal systems", since it has been tested in French and German courts during actual trials, and found legal -- a feat that, ironically, EUPL cannot claim :)
Yes, they could, and then what? The fact that this license would be written or endorsed by the EU would not make people using it any safer than any other license on a legal standpoint.
As someone living in France, where law is created by representatives and not judges, I would like to respectfully disagreee on the 'people being less likely to get abused by the legal system' when law come fro the legislative power. You just look at what's going through our reps at this time, mostly dealing with intellectual property. Basically, the HADOPI laws are designed by the executive power, with tacit acceptance, if not approval, of the legislative power, to actually evade control by the judicial power; and this is not because the judicial power would be unfair to the citizen: that's because the judicial power would bar the administration (thus the executive power) from assuming citizen guilty and stamping on their right for fair trial, freedom of speech and privacy. And this is not a dangerous activist saying so; this is the Conseil Constitutionnel, the very institution whose mission is to ensure that french laws respect the french Constitution.
Er... I don't see how a license, even one backed by the EU, would change anything legally: it is not a law, and would not change a iota to the legal situation of anyone *not* using it. It *could* affect those using it, though, but its mere existence would not make it legal per se.
Joke aside, as for any rather absolute statement, there is only a part of truth both in the statement and in its opposite. Granted, automation does not necessarily lead to a lesser [level of intelligence in] society. However, not everything that automation can do must necessarily be done by automated means. For instance, calculators have automated calculus. I for one, welcome our key-laden overlords from arctangent, because I rarely have to compute arctangent and find it handy to have a calculator to do it for me. However, calculators can also do simple arithmetic like additions and multiplications ; and this can (and does, in the experience I can gather from my immediate vicinity) lead to a lessening of people's capability at doing additions and multiplications -- operations which are much more frequent than arctangents.
I don't think the ISP is necessarily in charge of handling its IP ranges at Spamhaus. Actually, it is kindly allowed to help, but if id it does not, then the Spamhaus team obligingly does the work alone. And I do understand the reluctancy of my ISP to provide free workforce just to fix the ill effects of a blocking list's policy, not when this list could fix its policy and decide to go after the ISP only when the offending IP is dynamic and thus makes it impossible to retaliate against the real spammer (besides, I wasn't talking about "my" netblock; I'm only an observer on that topic.)
You are missing the whole point of the lists then. They create collateral damage by design, to make it painful for the ISP or organization to have spammers using their stuff. Which, in turn encourages policies of closing port 25 (a good thing IMHO) for end users, watching who they have as customers and well, not being spammers. The frustration of some mail admins needs to be directed at their stupid virus-getting users and shitty network infrastructure that allows people on dynamic dial up lines to send mail directly. As a RBL user myself, I LIKE the collateral damage aspect. Take care with whom you do business with and you won't have a problem. It's that simple. Relaying mail through your ISP is not a big deal, it's a cost of living in a society where people can't be trusted to do stuff properly, just like street lights, bike locks, and every other such device.
I have not missed the point of the lists, then; I disagree with it, which is a different thing. One can indeed consider that an ISP should treat its customers as a parent should treat unruly chidren; or one can consider them as persons, responsible for their actions. Especially when they act from a fixed IP, I take the "responsible person" approach, and consider that retaliation agaist spamming, when there has to be, must be directed at the offender, and certainly not at considerable amounts of innocent bystanders "by design".
... effectively ignoring the whole point of giving and advertising static IPs, which is putting responsibility and responsibility in the hands of the static IP user.
Misleading title and summary. The main point is not that the lawyer sued and challenges in Re Bilski, but that he lost on Appeal and that in Re Bilski was ruled dispositive...
... as Groklaw's link mentions right from their own title. Now, that Slashdot readers don't RTFA is usual, but submitters? Sheesh. :)
The three analogies you draw are correct, but they do not allow concluding to identity. As I pointed out, loads and stresses are necessarily based on experimentally measured input (e.g., IIRC, the Young modulus) while formal SW proof methods have no experimental pseudo-constants involved.
Apart from that, yes I do believe SW engineering is truly engineering, and at the same time, just as I would say "painting is an art, yet only few paintings are", I would partly agree that current software quality is awfully bad. But partly only.
While a fault in a bridge design will only affect the designed bridge, a single fault in some software will induce errors and misbehaviours in every instance of the software, more so if the software is in very common use, thus faults in somesoftware are more likely to get bad publicity.
Now software is not the only thing that gets mass-produced and therefore not the only kind of product for which a design flaw will induce a massive count of errors, yet it seems like it does actually fail much more than, for instance, TV sets.
One (among several) reasons is that, while only few bridges are engineered by people without a sound background in civil and mechanical engineering, software frequently gets done by people with less-than-perfect skills (you don't get a rookie to build a bridge, do you? Well, you can get a rookie to write code).
The SW engineering field is real engineering alright... but many SW designers are not engineers.
The key lies in the "specified values". For any "real" engineering, you'll have those arbitraries in formal methods. OTOH, formal methods in SW engineering do not suffer arbitrary matters. SW-related 'formal methods' carry a specific sense of *absolute* correctness while the 'formal' methods described here for, erm, 'concrete' engineering do not.
If you want a SW equivalent to what you name formal methods (and which I have been taught to call mathematical or analytical methods, but not formal), then you should look into SW metrics. They also have a mathematical structure, and also carry adequate arbitrary constraints, e.g. 'cyclomatic complexity should remain below 7' or whatever.
As a non-layman, highly SW-based, real enough engineer (and other than that an almost normal person), I would not parallel, for instance, structural analysis in civil engineering with formal methods in SW engineering. "Formal method" is the name of a specific kind of SW analysis tool, based on mathematically proving the software, not taking stress scenarios into account (stress simulation for SW is called "testing" :) ).
E++99:
:)
Mikkeles did answer citing Structural engineering - analysis of components and connections based on the science of strength of materials, and Aeronautical engineering - design is based on computer simulation of air flows over wings and fuselage, then confirmed by testing, which is not antiethical to formal methods of physical components.
As I was suspecting, those are valid engineering examples, but neither exhibit formal methods as such. They use analytical methods, which are fine and efficient, but which are nowhere near formal methods as I know them. And neither are more "real engineering" than SW engineering; they are reality engineering if one so wishes to differentiate them from SW.
In fact, SW is the only engineering where formal methods might be considered, and SW engineering can be just as reality oriented as structural engineering. Indeed, structural engineering could barely be achieved today without SW.
However, I would venture that possible stresses on a bridge can indeed outnumber possible interactions with some SW. It just depends on how close to reality you want your real structural engineering to be. Finite elements, paradoxically, can always be broken in smaller pieces.
Sorry to ask, but can someone give an example of a field of "real engineering" which uses formal methods to ensure correctness, and of the formal methods used?
I guess the idea is that once DRM is generalized, it is a trivial matter to switch from a "non-DRMed content is allowed by default" to a "only DRMed content is allowed" stance, and then, to be able to produce content that anyone can actually see, any individual would depend on DRM providers. But surely no DRM "key holder" would even only think of deciding which content deserves being DRMed and which content should be banned, err, bared, from being viewed, or even known of.
Countries that don't allow you personal copies include UK, Australia and chunks of EU (not France or Portugal).
Count France out soon.
While DADVSI still says that right owners cannot prohibit copies made for the sole use of the copist, it also says that bypassing DRM to make such copies is an act of counterfeiting. copying DRM-protected CDs is not allowed.
Also, Pro Music has everything to gain from minimizing the number of countries that allow persola copying. They're patent (pun half intended) pro-copyright and anti-p2p people, as the left pane of their web site alone will demonstrate.
"The US is fairly unusual having a 'fair usage' clause on copyright", a clause almost, but not quite, entirely unlike UK's fair dealing, France's usage privé and many others.
.*AAs out there, I shall add that I could have gotten these for free, yet I chose to pay.
Funny that every time I see a copyrights-related law being pushed through, it is "to harmonize [all countries'] copyright systems".
Personally, the red line is that when I buy a song, video, e-book... I get the right to read it, period. Not the right to be allowed to read it if I'm well-behaved and only where and when the rights owner (who incidentally was *not* the creator) says so.
And as for SIRA, while I couldn't care less as I am not American, I'm unfortunately seing a law similarly restrictive, DADVSI, being passed in France. Basically, it kills our usage privé.
However, if I'm forced by law to surrender to rights owners, at least I'm stil in position to choose who I'm surrendering to, and this is what I do more and more, by turning to indies (be it music, movies, comics, whatever) who 1) won't hammer DRMs at me and 2) are far more interested in content. The movie and comic book I am buying right now are direct from their creators--and as a hint to