When asked about encryption technology, he thought it was great that a person could control who read his data. When asked about DRM, he said it was bad that a person could restrict who reads his data. Or does Zimmerman have a bias against companies? A person should be free to encrypt data, but not a company? Or is is, you should be able to encrypt data unless you're selling it? DRM is encryption. I don't see why this guy thinks some people have the right to use it while others don't, just because he thinks it's bad for society somehow when some people use it. He didn't care that terrorists were using PGP, but was concerned about the music industry using DRM. That I find disturbing.
The author of this piece spends a lot of time ranting about how copyright helps publishers, but doesn't do anything for artists. What he fails to understand is that by helping publishers, copyrights ARE helping artists. An artist is not necessarily a businessman, nor does he necessarily have any capital. Therefore, in order to make money on his work, he may need someone else to take a risk that his work is good and can be sold. Without copyright, the reward is negligible for the risk, and therefore, no one will invest in the author's work. That means only a few of the author's friends will read the work. In this case no one profits and the artist's work remains obscure. Everyone loses. Slashdot readers forget that although the artist creates the work, without someone taking a risk on it, the work may as well not have been created, as far as the public is concerned. That is the job of publishers and record labels. They take the risk, and therefore they deserve the reward. The artist gets whatever he is willing to agree to in order to let the publisher take the risk. He enters into this contract freely, and shouldn't complain he got screwed after the fact, if he's successful.
Your post is biased, although your motive is probably correct. If SCO is correct, they deserve compensation. That said, of course they'll milk it for all it's worth by making the time to fix the offending code as long as possible. Right now they don't even know if they'll get $1. Why would they make the situation worse by allowing Linux developers to fix the problem without fairly compensating SCO for the damage. If someone steals my ideas and people make money from it, I want more than just the cessation of the use of the ideas, I want a pice of the action for the money made. SCO wants the same.
If you haven't signed the NDA and looked at the evidence, you know nothing, like everyone else. The investors are taking a long shot that SCO'll get some money or be bought by IBM. Given that Cadence won a similar case against Avant!, it's not impossible for SCO to win, if they're telling the truth.
I agree with the 1st part of your comment. However, if they can show a few hundred identical lines of code, and that they wrote it 1st, based on your strategy, they don't really need to do much else. The probability that two sets of code use the exact spacing and variable names is low. However, if they're trying to prove that the code was altered to make it look original, the case becomes much tougher. The whole "knowledge and resources" argement certainly won't hold up in court.
Of course. Whether or not SCO is lying, you still shouldn't have the opportunity to post their code on the web. That's the point of an NDA. This is not a ploy. It's common sense. That said, of course anyone working on OSS should NOT sign this agreement. Once you do that, SCO can claim you saw their code and stole it, whther or not it's true.
Wait a minute. So in the Dr-DOS lawsuit, Caldera was the good guy, because they were going up against MS. Now their the bad guy because they're going up against Linux? People should sort good from bad based on principles, not the software running on their machines.
Yes. No one doing open source programming should sign this NDA. Once you see the SCO code, anything you write is tainted, and they can claim you got your ideas from them.
The insulating foam for the space shuttle that broke off and possibly destroyed the shuttle was a new formula since 1997 that has been problematic since it replaced a freon based foam. Although the freon-based foam worked better, the new foam was used instead rather than getting an exemption. So, if the foam is the root cause, it appears political correctness was more of a concern than using the best material for the job, possibly costing the lives in the process. Here's an article on the subject
Unlike their current business, Apple can't monopolize this business. They will continue to sell to their apple customers, plus some windows customers, while other players will undercut their prices and get most of the Windows market. Apple isn't used to playing in a competitive market. They simply kill competition by making their software incompatible with other hardware.
I don't know if these numbers are true, but if so, taking a third of the profit simply for distributing it seems like it screwing the artist far more than the record companies are, since the record companies actually made them successful.
Re:Well, what's good for the goose...
on
Copyright Defeats?
·
· Score: 1
The reason the MPAA can get away with it and you can't is the MPAA's accusation is credible, while yours is ludicrous. No sane person can deny massive copyright infringement on Kazaa, etc., while your claim sounds pretty infantile. Of course, the can and will make mistakes, but quibbling over search warrants and whether a judge has to sign each one when they're all based on the same information is simply trying to beat the system using beuracracy. It's not in the spirit of the law. You'll still get your day in court if they're wrong.
Re:Sure. As of yesterday even.
on
Copyright Defeats?
·
· Score: 4, Informative
Actually, the ruling against Fox encourages people NOT to release copyrighted material into the public domain. Fox did so and found out that the material could be used without even crediting them. In the future Fox will be less likely to release stuff into the public domain as a result of this ruling. Although I don't find anything wrong with the ruling, I don't see how this is a victory for anyone but those who want to take material without crediting the source.
Why is the court even bothering to worry about 1st amendment? That seems besides the point in this case. An NC-17 film is protected free speech. But a minor can't walk in and see that. That's because a minor doesn't share the basic rights of an adult in the US, but instead needs parental consent to obtain these rights. After reading the decision, it seems like the court didn't really see violence as a big deal, and therefore, weren't worried about restricting minor access based on violence. I think if a video games start depicting nudity or uses what is considered obscene language on a large scale, the rating systems will start being legally enforced.
I agree. If this type of law gets passed, the govt. will eventually abuse it by raising the amount to a nonotrivial sum. The govt. is always looking for new events to tax.
"Corporations will automate the process so they will never 'forget' to pay the buck."
The point isn't to trick people into losing their copyright, but instead to see if there's any interest at all in maintaining a particular copyright. The dolar is symbolic. The real issue is whether the copyright owner is interested in maintaining the copyright enough to fill out the paperwork.
The article points out that the cost of priacy is approaching $0. How do you make a multi-million dollar picture if you can't sell it for much more than $0? The entertainment industry should NOT have to change their prices to combat piracy. That is an endorsement of piracy as a legitimate means of obtaining media. That's like saying Nike should reduce the price of shoes to prevent people from mugging their customers to obtain them.
"like the RIAA and the big media companies today pool their copyrights."
The RIAA members do not pool their copyrights. If they did, you could buy Britney Spears from any number of labels for next to nothing. The RIAA members only pool resources to fight common problems, like piracy. In all other respects, they compete against eachother, label B trying to find the next Britney Spears to sell to the teens and take label A's profits. This is the way it should work. Without the ability to monopolize an artist, a label cannot make money, since all the cost to promote an artist and make him famous can't be recovered if anyone else can sell copies of the album or if people can download it for free.
If Thomas Edison patents a device, he has the right to refuse to licens the patent if he feels like it. He may be able to profit better from his invention himself, rather than by licensing it. That is and should be his choice to make. In the US, the goal of govt. should be to protect the rights of individuals, not to better society at the expense of these rights. In the end history has shown that societies that protect individual right end up with the best societies anyway. Patents are limited, and the inventor needs control through this period in order to get a reward for the financial risk involved. Otherwise there's no incentive to invent and get sponsorship to fund invention. Although the DMCA has problems, given the nature of digital copying, I'm not surprised at all with the RIAA's heavy handed tactics. If you want fair use, do your share to stop piracy and stop supporting companies and software whose main purpose is to trade copyrighted material. The RIAA would rather pocket money than spend it on high priced lawyers. They wouldn't be spending the money if they didn't think they were losing money.
Yes, the industry is converting to VoIP. However, most of this trafic will occur over fiber, with WiFi being one possibility for the "last mile". The telecom industry is also responsible for fiber. They are doing poorly because they spent a lot of money laying fiber, and there isn't currently as much demand for broadband as anticipated. Switching to WiFi from cellular won't hurt the telecom industry since by definition you're a telecom player for both systems.
In theory you may be correct, but it would be unfair to steal the network infrastructure from the companies that own it just because the govt. made bad decisions in the past. For better or worse, the baby bells own the current telephony infrastructure. The good news is that this network is obsolete. The bad news is their going to repeat the same mistake with fiber. The govt. will only allow one provider to send fiber to your home and that provider will have a govt. granted monopoly.
The same situation turned the phone company into a monopoly in the US. Cities only let Bell run phone cable, so the monopoly was govt. sanctioned. Without the ability of mutliple companies to run their own fiber to your home, there will be no free market system in broadband data either. If you're going to deregulate, you need to completely deregulate to provide the incentives for true comtetition.
Slashdot Mirror
When asked about encryption technology, he thought it was great that a person could control who read his data. When asked about DRM, he said it was bad that a person could restrict who reads his data. Or does Zimmerman have a bias against companies? A person should be free to encrypt data, but not a company? Or is is, you should be able to encrypt data unless you're selling it? DRM is encryption. I don't see why this guy thinks some people have the right to use it while others don't, just because he thinks it's bad for society somehow when some people use it. He didn't care that terrorists were using PGP, but was concerned about the music industry using DRM. That I find disturbing.
The author of this piece spends a lot of time ranting about how copyright helps publishers, but doesn't do anything for artists. What he fails to understand is that by helping publishers, copyrights ARE helping artists. An artist is not necessarily a businessman, nor does he necessarily have any capital. Therefore, in order to make money on his work, he may need someone else to take a risk that his work is good and can be sold. Without copyright, the reward is negligible for the risk, and therefore, no one will invest in the author's work. That means only a few of the author's friends will read the work. In this case no one profits and the artist's work remains obscure. Everyone loses. Slashdot readers forget that although the artist creates the work, without someone taking a risk on it, the work may as well not have been created, as far as the public is concerned. That is the job of publishers and record labels. They take the risk, and therefore they deserve the reward. The artist gets whatever he is willing to agree to in order to let the publisher take the risk. He enters into this contract freely, and shouldn't complain he got screwed after the fact, if he's successful.
Your post is biased, although your motive is probably correct. If SCO is correct, they deserve compensation. That said, of course they'll milk it for all it's worth by making the time to fix the offending code as long as possible. Right now they don't even know if they'll get $1. Why would they make the situation worse by allowing Linux developers to fix the problem without fairly compensating SCO for the damage. If someone steals my ideas and people make money from it, I want more than just the cessation of the use of the ideas, I want a pice of the action for the money made. SCO wants the same.
"Although we all know SCO doesn't have a case..."
If you haven't signed the NDA and looked at the evidence, you know nothing, like everyone else. The investors are taking a long shot that SCO'll get some money or be bought by IBM. Given that Cadence won a similar case against Avant!, it's not impossible for SCO to win, if they're telling the truth.
I agree with the 1st part of your comment. However, if they can show a few hundred identical lines of code, and that they wrote it 1st, based on your strategy, they don't really need to do much else. The probability that two sets of code use the exact spacing and variable names is low. However, if they're trying to prove that the code was altered to make it look original, the case becomes much tougher. The whole "knowledge and resources" argement certainly won't hold up in court.
Of course. Whether or not SCO is lying, you still shouldn't have the opportunity to post their code on the web. That's the point of an NDA. This is not a ploy. It's common sense. That said, of course anyone working on OSS should NOT sign this agreement. Once you do that, SCO can claim you saw their code and stole it, whther or not it's true.
Wait a minute. So in the Dr-DOS lawsuit, Caldera was the good guy, because they were going up against MS. Now their the bad guy because they're going up against Linux? People should sort good from bad based on principles, not the software running on their machines.
Yes. No one doing open source programming should sign this NDA. Once you see the SCO code, anything you write is tainted, and they can claim you got your ideas from them.
The insulating foam for the space shuttle that broke off and possibly destroyed the shuttle was a new formula since 1997 that has been problematic since it replaced a freon based foam. Although the freon-based foam worked better, the new foam was used instead rather than getting an exemption. So, if the foam is the root cause, it appears political correctness was more of a concern than using the best material for the job, possibly costing the lives in the process. Here's an article on the subject
Unlike their current business, Apple can't monopolize this business. They will continue to sell to their apple customers, plus some windows customers, while other players will undercut their prices and get most of the Windows market. Apple isn't used to playing in a competitive market. They simply kill competition by making their software incompatible with other hardware.
Isn't your solution already available from Real? They charge a monthly fee though.
I don't know if these numbers are true, but if so, taking a third of the profit simply for distributing it seems like it screwing the artist far more than the record companies are, since the record companies actually made them successful.
The reason the MPAA can get away with it and you can't is the MPAA's accusation is credible, while yours is ludicrous. No sane person can deny massive copyright infringement on Kazaa, etc., while your claim sounds pretty infantile. Of course, the can and will make mistakes, but quibbling over search warrants and whether a judge has to sign each one when they're all based on the same information is simply trying to beat the system using beuracracy. It's not in the spirit of the law. You'll still get your day in court if they're wrong.
Actually, the ruling against Fox encourages people NOT to release copyrighted material into the public domain. Fox did so and found out that the material could be used without even crediting them. In the future Fox will be less likely to release stuff into the public domain as a result of this ruling. Although I don't find anything wrong with the ruling, I don't see how this is a victory for anyone but those who want to take material without crediting the source.
Why is the court even bothering to worry about 1st amendment? That seems besides the point in this case. An NC-17 film is protected free speech. But a minor can't walk in and see that. That's because a minor doesn't share the basic rights of an adult in the US, but instead needs parental consent to obtain these rights. After reading the decision, it seems like the court didn't really see violence as a big deal, and therefore, weren't worried about restricting minor access based on violence. I think if a video games start depicting nudity or uses what is considered obscene language on a large scale, the rating systems will start being legally enforced.
I agree. If this type of law gets passed, the govt. will eventually abuse it by raising the amount to a nonotrivial sum. The govt. is always looking for new events to tax.
"Corporations will automate the process so they will never 'forget' to pay the buck."
The point isn't to trick people into losing their copyright, but instead to see if there's any interest at all in maintaining a particular copyright. The dolar is symbolic. The real issue is whether the copyright owner is interested in maintaining the copyright enough to fill out the paperwork.
Except that they'd probably charge trucks a special rate.
The article points out that the cost of priacy is approaching $0. How do you make a multi-million dollar picture if you can't sell it for much more than $0? The entertainment industry should NOT have to change their prices to combat piracy. That is an endorsement of piracy as a legitimate means of obtaining media. That's like saying Nike should reduce the price of shoes to prevent people from mugging their customers to obtain them.
Yes. Something like 1/3 of N. Korea's GNP is spent on military. That's why people are starving.
"like the RIAA and the big media companies today pool their copyrights."
The RIAA members do not pool their copyrights. If they did, you could buy Britney Spears from any number of labels for next to nothing. The RIAA members only pool resources to fight common problems, like piracy. In all other respects, they compete against eachother, label B trying to find the next Britney Spears to sell to the teens and take label A's profits. This is the way it should work. Without the ability to monopolize an artist, a label cannot make money, since all the cost to promote an artist and make him famous can't be recovered if anyone else can sell copies of the album or if people can download it for free.
If Thomas Edison patents a device, he has the right to refuse to licens the patent if he feels like it. He may be able to profit better from his invention himself, rather than by licensing it. That is and should be his choice to make. In the US, the goal of govt. should be to protect the rights of individuals, not to better society at the expense of these rights. In the end history has shown that societies that protect individual right end up with the best societies anyway. Patents are limited, and the inventor needs control through this period in order to get a reward for the financial risk involved. Otherwise there's no incentive to invent and get sponsorship to fund invention. Although the DMCA has problems, given the nature of digital copying, I'm not surprised at all with the RIAA's heavy handed tactics. If you want fair use, do your share to stop piracy and stop supporting companies and software whose main purpose is to trade copyrighted material. The RIAA would rather pocket money than spend it on high priced lawyers. They wouldn't be spending the money if they didn't think they were losing money.
Yes, the industry is converting to VoIP. However, most of this trafic will occur over fiber, with WiFi being one possibility for the "last mile". The telecom industry is also responsible for fiber. They are doing poorly because they spent a lot of money laying fiber, and there isn't currently as much demand for broadband as anticipated. Switching to WiFi from cellular won't hurt the telecom industry since by definition you're a telecom player for both systems.
In theory you may be correct, but it would be unfair to steal the network infrastructure from the companies that own it just because the govt. made bad decisions in the past. For better or worse, the baby bells own the current telephony infrastructure. The good news is that this network is obsolete. The bad news is their going to repeat the same mistake with fiber. The govt. will only allow one provider to send fiber to your home and that provider will have a govt. granted monopoly.
The same situation turned the phone company into a monopoly in the US. Cities only let Bell run phone cable, so the monopoly was govt. sanctioned. Without the ability of mutliple companies to run their own fiber to your home, there will be no free market system in broadband data either. If you're going to deregulate, you need to completely deregulate to provide the incentives for true comtetition.