If you look at section b of the law you notice that they do not have legal protection for their 'active countermeasure' if it impedes access to files which the network owners do have the right to distribute. So if your server or P2P network includes a fair deal of public domain stuff or stuff for which you do own the copyright then the 'active countermeasures' would have to affect ONLY the files for which you did not have copyright and leave all the others alone. Your typical DOS attack, in fact most hacks, would be unprotected by the law because they would restrict access to both the legal and illegal content. In other words it would have to look, on a request by request (or maybe packet by packet) basis whether it was carrying their copyrighted content.
So if this law passes as proposed I suspect that the RIAA or MPAA will mostly use it as a threat (stop carrying this stuff or we will hack you) or they will get overeager, ignore section b, and land in hot water.
Yale seems to be acting like Princeton 'hacked' into their computer but in fact they set up a system that was 'secured' by information that just about anybody would have, particularly any other university that they student had also applied to. And who would think that students would apply to both Yale and Princeton? The ones who should REALLY be embarrased is the school that set up their admissions approvals so that just about anybody could see them and then reply only that they are 'considering' adding a PIN number. Sorry, but if you put your data on a billboard it is not 'hacking' if other people see it.
I think that you are misestimating the size of the data stream involved and the knowledge of those millions of eyes, Most of who will have no idea that $10,000 paid to company X wasn't really for capital equipment but for maintenance, or even if there was a transaction at all!
True, my proposal had more to do with economics than with technology. Frankly to make it work the tenth of a cent would have to be mandatory, more of a tax than a free-market charge
The smartest thing that M$ could do is just let Real do it.
Then all M$ has to do is to create a version of Media Player that includes ALL of Real's protocols (after all they have made it clear through their actions that they believe it is perfectly acceptable to reverse-engineer a protocol based on a data stream) give this new version a nice interface with less advertizing clutter and make it available as minor free update available as part of a service patch.
Not that we have never seen this done before, right? Do these companies ever learn?
You really have hit the nail on the head here. What makes spam potentially lucrative and such a nussiance for the recipient is that the sender does not pay the cost of sending his message, we do, in that our monthly fees to our ISPs pay for the infrastructure of bringing us all this unwanted spam.
So the solution to spam is simple. Have the sender pay the cost of sending e-mail. For example have sending an e-mail, based on the number of recipients, cost for example a tenth of a cent. The funds raised by the mail charge being used in a fund to reduce the cost of everyone's ISP service. So for example if you paid a tenth of a cent per e-mail recipient you sent to but your ISP cost three dollars less per month you would most likely be better off. However to a spammer a tenth of a cent per e-mail completely changes their profit picture. They would have to change to reasonably spaced and usefull messages to targeted lists of customers.
You presume compliance by the persons using the software, which is essentially where all the problems show up anyhow. Worldcom 'input' expenses for network maintenance as a captial expenditure rather than and expense. Enron 'input' losses so that they appeared to being taken by an unrelated partnership company rather than themselves.
Oversight is necessary, Oversight must also be impartial. And that is the problem. With both Enron and Worldcom and all these others there were entire floors of people at Andersen who had known nothing their entire careers other than auditing that one company. If Andersen lost that client their careers were finished. Under such circumstances can the terms 'impartial' and 'outside' really apply? Of course not. What there needs to be is a strong constant federal oversight combined with mandatory rotation of audit teams every four years of so. That way if someone sees something amiss they do not think that they will be screwing their entire career by reporting it.
If I give my CD to my friend to listen to on a trip and they give it back to me at the end THAT is 'sharing with a friend' and there is nobody saying that it is fair use.
When I put a song on gnutella or kazaa or wherever that the whole world can obtain it I am not sharing it with a friend, I am broadcasting it. I may be broadcasting using the internet as the media, but it otherwise is not particularly different, is it? In fact much of what we traditionally consider broadcasting is going over the same channels (cable systems, sattelite transmissions, microwave towers) that our internet bandwidth is going over. In fact the courts have ruled that personal recording of a broadcast in order to enjoy it at a different time is fair use.
Broadcasting is not piracy. It is not even illegal provided that you are paying royalties to the copyright holder. So if the whole matter was approached from the standpoint of broadcast royalties there would probably be a compromise that would allow internet distribution of music while providing a revenue stream for the artists and promoters and distributors.
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If you look at section b of the law you notice that they do not have legal protection for their 'active countermeasure' if it impedes access to files which the network owners do have the right to distribute. So if your server or P2P network includes a fair deal of public domain stuff or stuff for which you do own the copyright then the 'active countermeasures' would have to affect ONLY the files for which you did not have copyright and leave all the others alone. Your typical DOS attack, in fact most hacks, would be unprotected by the law because they would restrict access to both the legal and illegal content. In other words it would have to look, on a request by request (or maybe packet by packet) basis whether it was carrying their copyrighted content. So if this law passes as proposed I suspect that the RIAA or MPAA will mostly use it as a threat (stop carrying this stuff or we will hack you) or they will get overeager, ignore section b, and land in hot water.
Yale seems to be acting like Princeton 'hacked' into their computer but in fact they set up a system that was 'secured' by information that just about anybody would have, particularly any other university that they student had also applied to. And who would think that students would apply to both Yale and Princeton? The ones who should REALLY be embarrased is the school that set up their admissions approvals so that just about anybody could see them and then reply only that they are 'considering' adding a PIN number. Sorry, but if you put your data on a billboard it is not 'hacking' if other people see it.
I think that you are misestimating the size of the data stream involved and the knowledge of those millions of eyes, Most of who will have no idea that $10,000 paid to company X wasn't really for capital equipment but for maintenance, or even if there was a transaction at all!
True, my proposal had more to do with economics than with technology. Frankly to make it work the tenth of a cent would have to be mandatory, more of a tax than a free-market charge
The smartest thing that M$ could do is just let Real do it. Then all M$ has to do is to create a version of Media Player that includes ALL of Real's protocols (after all they have made it clear through their actions that they believe it is perfectly acceptable to reverse-engineer a protocol based on a data stream) give this new version a nice interface with less advertizing clutter and make it available as minor free update available as part of a service patch. Not that we have never seen this done before, right? Do these companies ever learn?
You really have hit the nail on the head here. What makes spam potentially lucrative and such a nussiance for the recipient is that the sender does not pay the cost of sending his message, we do, in that our monthly fees to our ISPs pay for the infrastructure of bringing us all this unwanted spam. So the solution to spam is simple. Have the sender pay the cost of sending e-mail. For example have sending an e-mail, based on the number of recipients, cost for example a tenth of a cent. The funds raised by the mail charge being used in a fund to reduce the cost of everyone's ISP service. So for example if you paid a tenth of a cent per e-mail recipient you sent to but your ISP cost three dollars less per month you would most likely be better off. However to a spammer a tenth of a cent per e-mail completely changes their profit picture. They would have to change to reasonably spaced and usefull messages to targeted lists of customers.
You presume compliance by the persons using the software, which is essentially where all the problems show up anyhow. Worldcom 'input' expenses for network maintenance as a captial expenditure rather than and expense. Enron 'input' losses so that they appeared to being taken by an unrelated partnership company rather than themselves. Oversight is necessary, Oversight must also be impartial. And that is the problem. With both Enron and Worldcom and all these others there were entire floors of people at Andersen who had known nothing their entire careers other than auditing that one company. If Andersen lost that client their careers were finished. Under such circumstances can the terms 'impartial' and 'outside' really apply? Of course not. What there needs to be is a strong constant federal oversight combined with mandatory rotation of audit teams every four years of so. That way if someone sees something amiss they do not think that they will be screwing their entire career by reporting it.
If I give my CD to my friend to listen to on a trip and they give it back to me at the end THAT is 'sharing with a friend' and there is nobody saying that it is fair use. When I put a song on gnutella or kazaa or wherever that the whole world can obtain it I am not sharing it with a friend, I am broadcasting it. I may be broadcasting using the internet as the media, but it otherwise is not particularly different, is it? In fact much of what we traditionally consider broadcasting is going over the same channels (cable systems, sattelite transmissions, microwave towers) that our internet bandwidth is going over. In fact the courts have ruled that personal recording of a broadcast in order to enjoy it at a different time is fair use. Broadcasting is not piracy. It is not even illegal provided that you are paying royalties to the copyright holder. So if the whole matter was approached from the standpoint of broadcast royalties there would probably be a compromise that would allow internet distribution of music while providing a revenue stream for the artists and promoters and distributors.