Two weeks ago, Wolf's pro-bono lawyers argued a motion in federal court to quash the subpoena before Judge Maria-Elena James. They claimed that Wolf is protected by California's shield law, which allows journalists to maintain confidential unpublished information obtained during newsgathering. The law lets journalists cast a wide net in reporting, even though they may end up seeing or hearing actions that are illegal. Granting the government widespread power to request unused recordings, Wolf's lawyers argued, would turn journalists into an arm of the Justice Department, creating a chilling effect among citizens, thereby violating their First Amendment rights of free speech and assembly.
The biggest question here is what federal laws were violated. The case appears to be a simple assault of a police officer. But, federal journalist laws are weaker than state ones. So, it appears that the federal prosecutor is trying to help local law enforcement by claiming that the damaged police car was in part paid for by federal money, making this a federal case. Which seems really weak.
They're investigating a violent protest - a policeman (apparently) had his skull cracked, for goodness sake.
The police have a long history of abusing protesters. The Republican National Convention in 2004 is a recent example that comes to mind. Police arresting people on trumped up charges and detaining them in unsanitary conditions for excessive amounts of time.
It is hard to tell what the true details of this case are. Certainly, hitting a policeman over the head is unfortunate. But forcefully cuffing someone for placing a foam sign under a car (those charges were later dropped), and arresting someone for lighting a firecracker seems petty. I would have expected the police to deploy sufficient force to handle situations like this peacefully, and I would also expect policemen deployed to quell riots to wear helmets.
The biggest question raised here is exactly what federal laws were broken. Saying this was a federal crime for damaging a police vehicle that was partly paid for with federal funds seems very weak. But since the federal privilege laws offer fewer protections than the California journalist shield law, it is thought that the feds got involved to help local law enforcement.
I don't think that it's their business model that is failing...
Their business model is definitely failing. Their business model includes the following features:
Find up and coming artists.
Sign those artists to highly unfair contracts because there is no other way to get music distributed.
Front artists seed money to record albums, and spend lots of money on studio magic making things sound better, all of which is recouped before artists actually make any money off royalties.
Promote those artists through radio, which they control through payola.
Control the distribution channels. Distributors won't work with non RIAA music.
Sell full CDs even when people only want one song. Include three good songs and seven filler cuts.
Rotate media every 10 to 20 years and re-sell their back catalog over and over. They successfully did this with records, tapes, and CDs. They have been unsuccessful with products like eight track and minidisc. The jury is still out on SACD and DVD-audio, but it isn't looking good.
...
Profit!
This is failing in the following ways:
As you point out, they are not doing a good job of finding artists. They are trying to manufacture artists.
Unfortunately, the RIAA's monopoly on distribution is ending. The internet is now a better way to distribute music.
The cost of recording has been drastically reduced due to affordable computer recording software. The RIAA no longer has a monopoly on well recorded music.
Radio is no longer the only way to hear music. The internet is making inroads here as well.
Brick and mortar stores are no longer the easiest and cheapest way to distribute music. The internet is more convient. The RIAA resisted selling music on the internet, perhaps because their monopoly distribution system was threatened. So because convenient music wasn't available, people started sharing files.
People are fed up with having to buy an entire CD when they only want a song. The internet makes it possible to only buy the tracks people want.
People are fed up with rotating media. They are largely satisfied with the quality of CDs. They don't want to rebuy media.
Imagine what the movie industry would be like if Hollywood only made blockbuster action flicks.
Umm. ..
Wait a second here. My wife just made me see Dreamgirls. I had to watch 48 Hrs. for a week just to get Eddie Murphy singing in a musical out of my head.
When I started a job in a different city, I was told that I could only get a certain amount of relocation assistance. I needed to push the envelope of this because my wife couldn't relocate as fast, so I blew my budget on housing instead of on moving expenses. I was frugal with moving costs (I packed myself, etc), and I ended up having a small amount of moving expenses I paid out of pocket.
When the VP of our group heard I had additional expenses, he said "just continue submitting your receipts." So though I knocked myself out to fit what they said was my budget, they were willing to give me more. I guess the moral is that it never hurts to ask, and it is better to ask for forgiveness than permission.
I have been thinking about why google got into this business, and why they were offering ridiculous amounts off (I used the $20 off of orders over $50 myself) to use the service.
Clearly, there is money to be made in the third party credit card processing biz. Witness Yahoo and Paypal.
Also, I think there is an advantage for them to have their own ecomm facilities. They are starting to offer pay services (one of the earliest I have seen is charging for more space in Picassa's online web album), and having a well established ecomm service will allow them to charge for a variety of other things easily. And, the more credit card orders they process, the better rates they get from credit card companies.
Finally, once they associate your financial information with your google account, they can use it to target advertising. If you read their privacy policy, they admit to doing just that (sharing non-transactional data from Google Payment Corporation and Google), but there is a way to opt out, although you can only do that through email, which seems really lame.
SCO is essentially saying the following:
Your honor, since the trial date has been postponed to after Novell (September 2007), let us amend our "final" disclosure. IBM has lots of time to respond to this, so it causes no harm.
SCO obviously doesn't understand the word final. They also say (this is a quote):
There also is a public interest in disputes being resolved on their merits, which granting of the requested relief would advance.
The public interest is in having this matter resolved in a reasonable time frame. SCO had 3.8 years (from when they filed in March of 2003 until when final disclosure happened in December of 2006) to assemble their evidence. The longer this charade goes on, and that Linux is under SCO's cloud of FUD, the more damage SCO is doing.
SCO has tried to delay at every turn during this trial, so this comes as no surprise. It now seems obvious that this whole lawsuit was an attempt to delay Linux adoption by destroying Linux credibility in the marketplace. This whole thing was about delay.
Yes, this is a mod without an actual mod. All they do is show pictures of the hard drive, and pine for an extra 1.8" hard drive. On one hand, if you spend ~1000 on a camcorder, what's an extra $240 to more than double the recording time? On the other, do you really want to take a chance that you might destroy your ~1000 investment?
Hard drive camcorders might be the wave of the future. However, removable flash based memory is also interesting, and avoids mechanical parts all together. 8 gig SD cards are here, though still expensive. The question is, will the convenience of having no moving parts and removable media outweigh the inconvenience of smaller media? Ultimately, flash (or some successor) will probably win. But in the short term, hard drives look good.
The Sony HDR SR1 has a serious problem, in that it records using AVCHD, which is uneditable by third party products at this time. Things should be better come spring (when Sony Vegas will support AVCHD).
Re:Downloads page still stupid
on
Java SE 6 Released
·
· Score: 2, Informative
Except the version of Java on www.java.com is still Java 5 release 9. So it appears Java 6 is only partially released.
Sure, your average desktop will not handle 100G Ethernet, but what kind of content or traffic could possibly require that much desktop bandwidth? And since this is over fiber, there are very few desktop networks out there you could even plug the PC into.
This will certainly be a backbone technology, and a server technology. But this particual technology doesn't seem likely as a desktop technology in the near future.
"The US Free Trade Agreement does not require Australia to go down this path, and neither US nor European law contain such far reaching measures. We at a total loss to understand how this policy has developed, who is behind it and why there is such haste in enacting it into law - with little if any public debate."
One possible explanation for laws like these are that they are encouraged by the American cartels (RIAA, MPAA) as ways to eventually extend US copyright. A major justifaction for the Copyright Term Extension Act of 1998, which added 20 years to the term of copyrights in the US, was to harmonize US and European copyright laws.
Using this same logic, if other countries adopted more stringent copyright protection, the cartels could use it to try to create similar laws in other countries, and eventually the US. "We are only trying to reduce our costs of doing business by harmonizing laws in different countries", they could claim.
All you do is attack the [government|crown]! Instead of working with officials, you use [the internet|pamphlets] to anonymously attack the government. By [blogging|writing anonymous pamphlets] you are acting like teenagers. [Blogging|Anonymous pamphles] are not mature discourse!
The problem with companies like GM (and apparently Microsoft is starting to fall into this trap) is that they are dominated by their marketing departments. Marketing departments don't listen to the technical departments, and many bad decisions are made. For example, the marketing department at GM said everyone in America wanted an SUV (and this demand itself is fueled by non-stop marketing barrage telling people that bigger is better, safer, etc.), so the company cranked them out. Then the price of gas spiked.
Meanwhile, the good engineers see their efforts produce mediocrity, and that companies like Honda and Toyota are beating the pants off them. One reason is that engineering has more of a voice in product development. According to this, Honda uses an integrated team with sales (marketing), engineering, and research and development participating at the highest levels to create a product. Engineers produce better products when they have a voice in the requirements.
As has been pointed out, this particular case is covered by bars paying ASCAP fees.
But this brings up an excellent point. In a culture where all intellectual "property" is owned, can we be far from though crimes by just humming a song?
The problem is that the record companies that own the copyrights own monopolies on rights, and can conceivably charge as much as they want for these rights. The arms race has already started for movie licenses for songs. In the commentary for the Blues Brother's, John Landis comments that a movie of this type will probably never be made again, because the astronomical cost of music licensing.
The only conceivable long term solution is free culture. Society will still find ways to reward authors for their contributions without the current licensing nightmare. That is the only way culture will be able to keep evolving. The mix-ups, mash-downs, movies and cultural references in the future depend on having unencumbered source material. And the more the copyrights holders squeeze, the quicker this will happen.
Section 102(b) of Title 17 of the U.S. Code provides: "In no
case does copyright protection for an original work of authorship
extend to any idea, procedure, process, system, method of
operation, concept, principle, or discovery, regardless of the form
in which it is described, explained, illustrated, or embodied in
such work."
The legislative history of this provision indicates that Congress
had computer programs in mind when adopting it and meant for it to
limit the scope of copyright protection available for computer
programs. During legislative hearings leading up to enactment of
the Copyright Act of 1976, concerns had been expressed about the
need for such a provision so that copyright would not overprotect
computer programs.n2 Both the House and Senate Committee reports
plainly state:
Some concern has been expressed lest copyright in computer
programs should extend protection to the methodology or processes
adopted by the programmer, rather than merely to the 'writing'
expressing his ideas. Section 102(b) is intended, among other
things, to make clear that the expression adopted by the
programmer is the copyrightable element in a computer program,
and that the actual processes or methods embodied in the program
are not within the scope of copyright law.
The linked article talks about Arasor International. If you read carfully, the real company behind this innovation is US company Novalux. Arasor just makes one of the chips.
Novalux has an interesting history. They first wanted to target long haul telecom with their technology (laser on a chip). As of 2002, they were developing lower powered lasers for short haul markets. Their web site also claims a forey into bioinstrumentation.
Certainly, this seems like a technology looking for a market. Will this be the right market? Will the products live up to claims? We'll see.
Ah, the Microsoft whipping horse. Innovation will be hurt by these pesky open standards and open source software.
I can't think of a computing standards process that has hurt innovation. Certainly there are plenty examples of standards that have succeded versus their proprietary counterparts (TCP/IP instead of NetBEUI or AppleTalk, the HTTP and HTML instead of MSN or Rainman (AOL's proprietary page definition language)).
If someone has a great new idea, why can't they get it added to an existing open standard? Or even create a competing open standard. If it is innovative enough, it will be adopted. Standards aren't a monopoly. Standards still have to compete for mindshare.
The problem with open standards, for companies like Microsoft, is that they discourage lock in. If every word processor could edit all your files with full fidelity, you would have a lot less incentive to stick to Microsoft Word. If all server software worked perfectly with Microsoft Windows clients, there would be a lot less Microsoft server licences sold.
The "suggestion test" is not what patent law currently states. The "suggestion test" was made up by the Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit as a way of applying the obviousness test.
The law states this:
A patent may not be obtained though the invention... if the differences between the subject matter sought to be patented and the prior art are such that the subject matter as a whole would have been obvious at the time the invention was made to a person having ordinary skill in the art to which said subject matter pertains. Patentability shall not be negatived by the manner in which the invention was made. (35 U.S.C. 103 (A))
In the last twenty years, the Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit has dramatically limited the application of PHOSITA in its obviousness analysis. In a number of cases, the Federal Circuit only invalidated patents for obviousness when there was evidence in the prior art that presented a "suggestion or incentive" to combine the prior art. ACS Hospital Systems, Inc. v. Montefiore Hospital, 732 F.2d 1572, 1577 (Fed. Cir. 1984). This is known as the "suggestion test." Under the suggestion test, a PHOSITA's ability to reason two prior art references together does not matter. As a matter of law, the "suggestion test" finds no support in 103.
In fact, in an earlier Supreme Court decision, the court seemed to reject such a "suggestion test." In Graham v. John Deere Co., 383 U.S. 1, 9 (1966), the court rejected an argument that noted "nothing in the prior art suggest[s]" a "unique combination of these old features" in the claimed invention. However, since the Federal Circuit's invention of "suggestion test," the Supreme Court has yet to hear a case on obviousness.
And according to this article, "Reports from the Federal Trade Commission and the National Research Council and a pending petition for certiorari to the Supreme Court all conclude that the Federal Circuit has improperly relaxed the nonobviousness standard."
Given all this, I'd say this appeal has a pretty good chance.
The irony here is that by requiring signed binaries, TiVO is both restricting and protecting users.
Sure, by requiring signed binaries, you are restricted to run code only from TiVO. This restricts what users can do with their own hardware.
At the same time, since these devices are now on networks, there is a real possibility of them getting hacked. If TiVO ran untrusted binaries, this probably would have already happened. Of course, this happens now with Series 1 TiVO's, but you can't put them on the net without hacking, and if you are smart enough to do that, you probably have a firewall. So in some ways TiVO is doing a good thing by only running trusted code.
Slashdot Mirror
The biggest question here is what federal laws were violated. The case appears to be a simple assault of a police officer. But, federal journalist laws are weaker than state ones. So, it appears that the federal prosecutor is trying to help local law enforcement by claiming that the damaged police car was in part paid for by federal money, making this a federal case. Which seems really weak.
It is hard to tell what the true details of this case are. Certainly, hitting a policeman over the head is unfortunate. But forcefully cuffing someone for placing a foam sign under a car (those charges were later dropped), and arresting someone for lighting a firecracker seems petty. I would have expected the police to deploy sufficient force to handle situations like this peacefully, and I would also expect policemen deployed to quell riots to wear helmets.
The biggest question raised here is exactly what federal laws were broken. Saying this was a federal crime for damaging a police vehicle that was partly paid for with federal funds seems very weak. But since the federal privilege laws offer fewer protections than the California journalist shield law, it is thought that the feds got involved to help local law enforcement.
- Find up and coming artists.
- Sign those artists to highly unfair contracts because there is no other way to get music distributed.
- Front artists seed money to record albums, and spend lots of money on studio magic making things sound better, all of which is recouped before artists actually make any money off royalties.
- Promote those artists through radio, which they control through payola.
- Control the distribution channels. Distributors won't work with non RIAA music.
- Sell full CDs even when people only want one song. Include three good songs and seven filler cuts.
- Rotate media every 10 to 20 years and re-sell their back catalog over and over. They successfully did this with records, tapes, and CDs. They have been unsuccessful with products like eight track and minidisc. The jury is still out on SACD and DVD-audio, but it isn't looking good.
- ...
- Profit!
This is failing in the following ways:When I started a job in a different city, I was told that I could only get a certain amount of relocation assistance. I needed to push the envelope of this because my wife couldn't relocate as fast, so I blew my budget on housing instead of on moving expenses. I was frugal with moving costs (I packed myself, etc), and I ended up having a small amount of moving expenses I paid out of pocket.
When the VP of our group heard I had additional expenses, he said "just continue submitting your receipts." So though I knocked myself out to fit what they said was my budget, they were willing to give me more. I guess the moral is that it never hurts to ask, and it is better to ask for forgiveness than permission.
I have been thinking about why google got into this business, and why they were offering ridiculous amounts off (I used the $20 off of orders over $50 myself) to use the service.
Clearly, there is money to be made in the third party credit card processing biz. Witness Yahoo and Paypal.
Also, I think there is an advantage for them to have their own ecomm facilities. They are starting to offer pay services (one of the earliest I have seen is charging for more space in Picassa's online web album), and having a well established ecomm service will allow them to charge for a variety of other things easily. And, the more credit card orders they process, the better rates they get from credit card companies.
Finally, once they associate your financial information with your google account, they can use it to target advertising. If you read their privacy policy, they admit to doing just that (sharing non-transactional data from Google Payment Corporation and Google), but there is a way to opt out, although you can only do that through email, which seems really lame.
Uh...
1) GMail works great on BlackBerry's.
2) The BlackBerry 8700 supports UMTS and EVDO. While the IPhone, which isn't available until June, only supports the slower EDGE network.
Cingular already features the BlackBerry on their Edge network, and that allows installable apps.
Nope, this is about Jobs' control issues.
SCO is essentially saying the following:
Your honor, since the trial date has been postponed to after Novell (September 2007), let us amend our "final" disclosure. IBM has lots of time to respond to this, so it causes no harm.
SCO obviously doesn't understand the word final. They also say (this is a quote):
The public interest is in having this matter resolved in a reasonable time frame. SCO had 3.8 years (from when they filed in March of 2003 until when final disclosure happened in December of 2006) to assemble their evidence. The longer this charade goes on, and that Linux is under SCO's cloud of FUD, the more damage SCO is doing.
SCO has tried to delay at every turn during this trial, so this comes as no surprise. It now seems obvious that this whole lawsuit was an attempt to delay Linux adoption by destroying Linux credibility in the marketplace. This whole thing was about delay.
Yes, this is a mod without an actual mod. All they do is show pictures of the hard drive, and pine for an extra 1.8" hard drive. On one hand, if you spend ~1000 on a camcorder, what's an extra $240 to more than double the recording time? On the other, do you really want to take a chance that you might destroy your ~1000 investment?
Hard drive camcorders might be the wave of the future. However, removable flash based memory is also interesting, and avoids mechanical parts all together. 8 gig SD cards are here, though still expensive. The question is, will the convenience of having no moving parts and removable media outweigh the inconvenience of smaller media? Ultimately, flash (or some successor) will probably win. But in the short term, hard drives look good.
The Sony HDR SR1 has a serious problem, in that it records using AVCHD, which is uneditable by third party products at this time. Things should be better come spring (when Sony Vegas will support AVCHD).
Except the version of Java on www.java.com is still Java 5 release 9. So it appears Java 6 is only partially released.
Sure, your average desktop will not handle 100G Ethernet, but what kind of content or traffic could possibly require that much desktop bandwidth? And since this is over fiber, there are very few desktop networks out there you could even plug the PC into.
This will certainly be a backbone technology, and a server technology. But this particual technology doesn't seem likely as a desktop technology in the near future.
A site which suggests which Slashdot stories I won't like, including dupes?
Actually, there are already hand held optical bill readers for the blind.
One possible explanation for laws like these are that they are encouraged by the American cartels (RIAA, MPAA) as ways to eventually extend US copyright. A major justifaction for the Copyright Term Extension Act of 1998, which added 20 years to the term of copyrights in the US, was to harmonize US and European copyright laws.
Using this same logic, if other countries adopted more stringent copyright protection, the cartels could use it to try to create similar laws in other countries, and eventually the US. "We are only trying to reduce our costs of doing business by harmonizing laws in different countries", they could claim.
Dear Rabble,
All you do is attack the [government|crown]! Instead of working with officials, you use [the internet|pamphlets] to anonymously attack the government. By [blogging|writing anonymous pamphlets] you are acting like teenagers. [Blogging|Anonymous pamphles] are not mature discourse!
Signed,
Your patronizing British Government
The problem with companies like GM (and apparently Microsoft is starting to fall into this trap) is that they are dominated by their marketing departments. Marketing departments don't listen to the technical departments, and many bad decisions are made. For example, the marketing department at GM said everyone in America wanted an SUV (and this demand itself is fueled by non-stop marketing barrage telling people that bigger is better, safer, etc.), so the company cranked them out. Then the price of gas spiked.
Meanwhile, the good engineers see their efforts produce mediocrity, and that companies like Honda and Toyota are beating the pants off them. One reason is that engineering has more of a voice in product development. According to this, Honda uses an integrated team with sales (marketing), engineering, and research and development participating at the highest levels to create a product. Engineers produce better products when they have a voice in the requirements.
As has been pointed out, this particular case is covered by bars paying ASCAP fees.
But this brings up an excellent point. In a culture where all intellectual "property" is owned, can we be far from though crimes by just humming a song?
The irony is thick here. George Harrison, a member of the Beatles, was sued and lost for unintentionally copying "My Sweet Lord" from the Chiffons' song "He's So Fine". It was a major blow to Harrison.
The problem is that the record companies that own the copyrights own monopolies on rights, and can conceivably charge as much as they want for these rights. The arms race has already started for movie licenses for songs. In the commentary for the Blues Brother's, John Landis comments that a movie of this type will probably never be made again, because the astronomical cost of music licensing.
The only conceivable long term solution is free culture. Society will still find ways to reward authors for their contributions without the current licensing nightmare. That is the only way culture will be able to keep evolving. The mix-ups, mash-downs, movies and cultural references in the future depend on having unencumbered source material. And the more the copyrights holders squeeze, the quicker this will happen.
From this Supreme Court amicus brief:
According to this article, the Novalux TV is speckle-free.
The linked article talks about Arasor International. If you read carfully, the real company behind this innovation is US company Novalux. Arasor just makes one of the chips.
Novalux has an interesting history. They first wanted to target long haul telecom with their technology (laser on a chip). As of 2002, they were developing lower powered lasers for short haul markets. Their web site also claims a forey into bioinstrumentation.
Certainly, this seems like a technology looking for a market. Will this be the right market? Will the products live up to claims? We'll see.
I can't think of a computing standards process that has hurt innovation. Certainly there are plenty examples of standards that have succeded versus their proprietary counterparts (TCP/IP instead of NetBEUI or AppleTalk, the HTTP and HTML instead of MSN or Rainman (AOL's proprietary page definition language)).
If someone has a great new idea, why can't they get it added to an existing open standard? Or even create a competing open standard. If it is innovative enough, it will be adopted. Standards aren't a monopoly. Standards still have to compete for mindshare.
The problem with open standards, for companies like Microsoft, is that they discourage lock in. If every word processor could edit all your files with full fidelity, you would have a lot less incentive to stick to Microsoft Word. If all server software worked perfectly with Microsoft Windows clients, there would be a lot less Microsoft server licences sold.
You can speculate all you want, or you can read the 77 page report from the company who did the exit polls.
The law states this:
The problem is applying that.
According to wikipedia:
And according to this article, "Reports from the Federal Trade Commission and the National Research Council and a pending petition for certiorari to the Supreme Court all conclude that the Federal Circuit has improperly relaxed the nonobviousness standard."
Given all this, I'd say this appeal has a pretty good chance.
The irony here is that by requiring signed binaries, TiVO is both restricting and protecting users.
Sure, by requiring signed binaries, you are restricted to run code only from TiVO. This restricts what users can do with their own hardware.
At the same time, since these devices are now on networks, there is a real possibility of them getting hacked. If TiVO ran untrusted binaries, this probably would have already happened. Of course, this happens now with Series 1 TiVO's, but you can't put them on the net without hacking, and if you are smart enough to do that, you probably have a firewall. So in some ways TiVO is doing a good thing by only running trusted code.
It is an interesting tradeoff.