When the masses finally wake up to this fact, will people respect the law in the morning?
I don't think that they will.
Civilization is not possible without the rule of law. Bad law inevitably weakens the rule of law and thus, leads to anarchy.
Frankly, I don't think anyone would ever be convicted of P2P "crimes". I can't see a jury ever siding with a convicted corporate felon like the RIAA versus a 12 year old who used Kazaa.
This is why they settle these cases for whatever they can get.
That is, until the Digital Copyright Amendment is added to the Constitution and people accused of copyright infringement are denied trial by jury.
Think that's farfetched? Don't. All it will take is some miniskirt-clad cash toting IP Cartel lobbyist bimbo to whisper in some Senator's ear while doing other things for him that unless "Intellectual Property" is protected, the terrorists win...
Ten years ago, people who would have predicted the DMCA would have been called crazy, yet, within that time we got the 1996 Telecoms act, the DMCA, several attempts at banning free speech on the internet, a SUCCESSFUL attempt to ban political free speech (campaign finance reform, note it doesn't stop the RIAA from lobbying Congress, it just stops people like US from combining our money to pay for ads to expose Congress's actions in favor of the RIAA), among others.
I find it interesting that if you make any sort of political statement on/. the moderation reflects this.
Michael Moore is a kook. He's a radical.
He is biased by his views. If you don't recognize that a "documentary" by Michael Moore, who makes no bones about hating the President, that it's of no greater "objective" worth than a documentary produced by the White House, you truly have no ability to reason for yourself.
Does anyone find it coincidental, that Hollings, Berman (Microsoft), and others are trying to de-facto legislate away the PC as we know it?
The general purpose PC, which gets ever cheaper while getting ever more powerful will always be a match for any kind of static "copy protection" technology in the long run.
The MPAA can't impliment this kind of thing on consumer DVD's. People won't stand for replacing their player every year, or worse, not owning their player, paying "rent" and having to pay for upgrades constantly. Neither will they stand for discs that expire or degrade.
The MPAA/RIAA want to do away with the non-corporate owned PC, their main enemy.
It puts too much power in the hands of an individual.
Microsoft, being what they are, marches in lockstep with them. After all, they are more than happy to provide such a crippled PC, as it's in their own interests. Once something became law, you would never be allowed to own a PC that didn't have a closed OS on it, and you are denied the "root" or "admin" passwords to it. That password is in escrow with a third party, probably Microsoft.
You won't be able to run anything on your PC that Microsoft and their partners don't want you to be able to run. Don't want to pay $20/month to "license" Office, and want to run Open Office?
Tough, Microsoft wont' let you run it.
Busting the hardware and installing Linux or some other FOSS on it would be a felony under the DMCA II.
The MPAA/RIAA wins because they've taken away the power of the PC from the inndividual. Microsoft wins because such a legal climate would make open source software completely illegal, as you cannot have an open system that does not allow the system owner full root access.
Indeed, it may even become impossible to OWN PC hardware... You might have to rent THAT too, like a cable box, from your cable/satellite/phone company...
"Sheesh, if these industires would put 1/2 the funds they waste with this garbage into creating better products and lowering costs, their troubles would go away..."
The MPAA and RIAA are autocratic, tyrranical patrician institutions. The LAST thing they will ever do is give in to the plebians, even if it's in THEIR best interests to do so.
No, they'd rather waste money and effort to keep things as they are, with a patrician (IP cartel) ruled structure where the plebes have no freedom, and increasingly have to pay more for less.
This is why they are ultimately doomed to fail, as we plebes outnumber them 20 million to 1.
That is why they are passing laws like the DMCA that make certain skills illegal.
Unless they want to pay $millions and millions of dollars to constantly upgrade, re-engineer and upgrade this stuff on an annual (or even more frequent) basis, common PC computer technology will out accelerate it and eventually make it possible for Joe Hacker with his dual-core Athlon 64 PC that he has less than $1,000 in to crack the disc's encryption.
Since the RIAA seems to be willing to settle for pennies on the dollar, perhaps Congress needs to change the per-incident fine for copyright infringement to match.
To keep it this way is to deny individuals access to the courts.
They will accidently sue someone who has the money to hire a lawyer to fight them.
It's like a lottery. Now that they can't get the names before they sue, they have no idea who's "lottery number" they are picking.
I suspect that it would be difficult to get a jury to rule against a kid and for a (multiple) convicted monopolistic market price fixer.
There is also question of standing. The RIAA is a nonprofit trade organization (it's actually an illegal monopoly cartel but Congress and the President don't have the stones to take them out).
The RIAA DOES NOT OWN A SINGLE COPYRIGHT, the 5 record labels that make up the RIAA do.
Unless the copyrights are assigned to the RIAA, I wonder if they truly have any legal standing to file these lawsuits. We'll never know, because the RIAA has yet to allow any of them to go to trial.
Thanks to the fact that our Congress has passed penalties into law that makes losing such a suit tantamount to subjecting your next 7 generations to bankruptcy, there is little incentive (or likelyhood) for someone to fight them. This means that bad laws don't get challenged.
Indeed, however, I believe that the RIAA would likely NOT prevail in a jury trial. If someone insisted on one, it's likely they'd drop the suit or use their money to delay delay delay for years.
If someone threats to sue someone or asks for a settlement, that someone should be able to call "bullshit". And if they can't prove their case in a court of law, they must pay fines. I know one can countersue, but they actually have to sue you first."
How about a law that forces a corporation to pay the legal fees of a non-corporation defendant in civil matters (which then can be added to the judgement if the defendant wins)?
That would stop such harassment actions cold, as corps would be less liely to pursue meritless cases...
In criminal cases you are entitled to legal representation, whether you can afford it or not. That right does not exist in the civil courts. I think it should, and I think the initiator, if not an individual or a non-incorporated entity should have to bear the burden, not the state.
It's nice that DirecTV has agreed to restrain itself, but the REAL problem here is a legal system that allows a giant corporation to bankrupt and besmirch an individual without FIRST having to provide concrete proof that they have a case.
This is what DirecTV was doing, and it's what the RIAA is doing now. This has GOT to stop.
"It may be that Claria has a valid business model, in which case they have a strong case that their software shouldn't be lumped in with the likes of clientman, or other truly nasty spyware. Certainly, their business model is not illegal today. (Of course, I personally don't like it, and would never use their software.)"
Stealing someone's car (because they didnt' read the fine print and agreed to it in an obscure line where they signed a credit card slip when buying groceries) and turning the windshield into a big pop up ad might be a way to make money, but it does not make it desirable or necessarily legal.
"You can't assume the last three years have been safe because of the PATRIOT Act, that's an unfounded statement. The WTC was first attacked in 1993, and we changed NOTHING about our security policies; NOTHING. There was no other attack (I don't count Oklahoma City because it's a different group). There was no attack on our soil for 8 years, 2001."
From 1993-2001 we had an almost continuous stream of Al-Queida attacks. Not all against the US itself, but against the US.
Such as:
1. Kobar Towers 2. The embassy bombings 3. USS Cole
All of which were major attacks and took place between 1993-2001, most of them between 1998-2001...
"It's when I think about what I have in my encrypted files that I realise how much I am pissing off the NSA with the encrypted email which says: "Have fun at the party tonight? I still need to get the smoke out of my clothes."."
THAT is a good point... People need to use encryption for things they DONT CARE about someone being able to crack... If everyone did that, there would be no way for encryption itself to be a "tip" that there is something to hide there.
I don't have anything to hide on my server. But I hide it anyway. Why? It's mine. I don't want anyone else in there without my express permission.
"That is assuming their isn't some backdoor written into that encryption software that would let the gubermint easily decode your heroine habit with some "master key.""
There probably is... At least in commercial closed-sourced security software.
This is all the more reason for open source. DRM and government backdoors are not possible in peer-reviewed, open code.
I distrust a government that wants to keep secrets from me, it's EMPLOYER, that will not allow me to keep secrets from it in turn. Indeed, it makes it practically illegal to even try.
I'd imagine that the US is but one stealth law away from a UK style "turn over your encryption keys on request or go to jail" law.
First off, I'm no fan of the PATRIOT Act. I hate it. I'd have no problems with it being used against foreign born terrorists (as all but one in our history have been).
If "only applies to non US Citizens" were added to the PATRIOT Act, I'd be OK with it.
That said, I have to point out something the average/.er won't....
It's been almost three years since 9/11/01 without a terrorist attack against this country. If you or I had predicted that on 9/11, we'd have been called nuts.
So, obviously, what the government is doing is working. That is not to say that it doesn't need reform and more oversight (the secrecy scares the shit out of me), but you can't argue with the results.
However, I'm in a quandry. I am NOT an ends justifies the means person, but what if thousands of lives would be forefit if the PATRIOT Act went away?
Is NOT a true first tier company, no matter how much money they paid Gartner to say they are...
Only IBM and HP qualify as such to me in the PC based server world...
We recently had to scramble to do a firmware fix for a customer who had bought Dell servers rather than the HP ones we recommended...
The fault? A bug in Dell's RAID card firmware that would cause the card to eventually destroy the data beyond repair... A bug of the type that would NEVER get out the door in a HP or IBM product... Then there was the server that had the power supply defect that smoked and died... Dell does not do anywhere NEAR the quality control HP or IBM does.
Dell appeals to those who buy strictly on price.
You get what you pay for.... HP ProLiant is by far my favorite server line, and it's not really that much more expensive than Dell.
"Somebody with the class and educational background to get this sort of job in India speaks English well enough. Your problem is not that the foreign workers speak bad English, but rather that you're intolerant of anybody who speaks it with a foreign accent, and undisposed to listen to them in the first place. (Of course you're not going to understand what somebody says if you don't listen to them.)"
Foreign accents, I don't mind. I work with Iranians at my workplace.
But I can't understand half the words Indians use. Which makes it TWICE as hard when you are trying to fix a server.
If Microsoft, Cisco, etc are going to charge me an arm and a leg per incident, they should provide someone who speaks English I can understand.
It's not racist, it's a fact. If I can't understand you, you are no use to me.
"This may be overly idealistic, but there is a simple solution to the problem -- vote them out. This country (contrary to popular/. opinion) is not a dictatorship."
Unfortunately, the government long ago sold the majority on the idea of getting "bread and circuses" from the public treasury.
It's so bad that "YOUR CHILDREN WILL STARVE" is effective propoganda against proposed tax cuts...
Slashdot Mirror
When the masses finally wake up to this fact, will people respect the law in the morning?
I don't think that they will.
Civilization is not possible without the rule of law. Bad law inevitably weakens the rule of law and thus, leads to anarchy.
Frankly, I don't think anyone would ever be convicted of P2P "crimes". I can't see a jury ever siding with a convicted corporate felon like the RIAA versus a 12 year old who used Kazaa.
This is why they settle these cases for whatever they can get.
That is, until the Digital Copyright Amendment is added to the Constitution and people accused of copyright infringement are denied trial by jury.
Think that's farfetched? Don't. All it will take is some miniskirt-clad cash toting IP Cartel lobbyist bimbo to whisper in some Senator's ear while doing other things for him that unless "Intellectual Property" is protected, the terrorists win...
Ten years ago, people who would have predicted the DMCA would have been called crazy, yet, within that time we got the 1996 Telecoms act, the DMCA, several attempts at banning free speech on the internet, a SUCCESSFUL attempt to ban political free speech (campaign finance reform, note it doesn't stop the RIAA from lobbying Congress, it just stops people like US from combining our money to pay for ads to expose Congress's actions in favor of the RIAA), among others.
I find it interesting that if you make any sort of political statement on /. the moderation reflects this.
Michael Moore is a kook. He's a radical.
He is biased by his views. If you don't recognize that a "documentary" by Michael Moore, who makes no bones about hating the President, that it's of no greater "objective" worth than a documentary produced by the White House, you truly have no ability to reason for yourself.
This is a "documentary" only in the sense that Joseph Goebbels produced documentaries.
It's a propoganda film for one particular political point of view.
What facts that there are in this movie are colored through that prism.
Does anyone find it coincidental, that Hollings, Berman (Microsoft), and others are trying to de-facto legislate away the PC as we know it?
The general purpose PC, which gets ever cheaper while getting ever more powerful will always be a match for any kind of static "copy protection" technology in the long run.
The MPAA can't impliment this kind of thing on consumer DVD's. People won't stand for replacing their player every year, or worse, not owning their player, paying "rent" and having to pay for upgrades constantly. Neither will they stand for discs that expire or degrade.
The MPAA/RIAA want to do away with the non-corporate owned PC, their main enemy.
It puts too much power in the hands of an individual.
Microsoft, being what they are, marches in lockstep with them. After all, they are more than happy to provide such a crippled PC, as it's in their own interests. Once something became law, you would never be allowed to own a PC that didn't have a closed OS on it, and you are denied the "root" or "admin" passwords to it. That password is in escrow with a third party, probably Microsoft.
You won't be able to run anything on your PC that Microsoft and their partners don't want you to be able to run. Don't want to pay $20/month to "license" Office, and want to run Open Office?
Tough, Microsoft wont' let you run it.
Busting the hardware and installing Linux or some other FOSS on it would be a felony under the DMCA II.
The MPAA/RIAA wins because they've taken away the power of the PC from the inndividual. Microsoft wins because such a legal climate would make open source software completely illegal, as you cannot have an open system that does not allow the system owner full root access.
Indeed, it may even become impossible to OWN PC hardware... You might have to rent THAT too, like a cable box, from your cable/satellite/phone company...
"Sheesh, if these industires would put 1/2 the funds they waste with this garbage into creating better products and lowering costs, their troubles would go away..."
The MPAA and RIAA are autocratic, tyrranical patrician institutions. The LAST thing they will ever do is give in to the plebians, even if it's in THEIR best interests to do so.
No, they'd rather waste money and effort to keep things as they are, with a patrician (IP cartel) ruled structure where the plebes have no freedom, and increasingly have to pay more for less.
This is why they are ultimately doomed to fail, as we plebes outnumber them 20 million to 1.
That is why they are passing laws like the DMCA that make certain skills illegal.
Unless they want to pay $millions and millions of dollars to constantly upgrade, re-engineer and upgrade this stuff on an annual (or even more frequent) basis, common PC computer technology will out accelerate it and eventually make it possible for Joe Hacker with his dual-core Athlon 64 PC that he has less than $1,000 in to crack the disc's encryption.
Since the RIAA seems to be willing to settle for pennies on the dollar, perhaps Congress needs to change the per-incident fine for copyright infringement to match.
To keep it this way is to deny individuals access to the courts.
They will accidently sue someone who has the money to hire a lawyer to fight them.
It's like a lottery. Now that they can't get the names before they sue, they have no idea who's "lottery number" they are picking.
I suspect that it would be difficult to get a jury to rule against a kid and for a (multiple) convicted monopolistic market price fixer.
There is also question of standing. The RIAA is a nonprofit trade organization (it's actually an illegal monopoly cartel but Congress and the President don't have the stones to take them out).
The RIAA DOES NOT OWN A SINGLE COPYRIGHT, the 5 record labels that make up the RIAA do.
Unless the copyrights are assigned to the RIAA, I wonder if they truly have any legal standing to file these lawsuits. We'll never know, because the RIAA has yet to allow any of them to go to trial.
Thanks to the fact that our Congress has passed penalties into law that makes losing such a suit tantamount to subjecting your next 7 generations to bankruptcy, there is little incentive (or likelyhood) for someone to fight them. This means that bad laws don't get challenged.
Indeed, however, I believe that the RIAA would likely NOT prevail in a jury trial. If someone insisted on one, it's likely they'd drop the suit or use their money to delay delay delay for years.
Absolutely right.
If something catastrophic happens, the government will clamp down.
The future of space, if you want space settlements, moon bases, Mars settlements, etc is COMMERCIAL, not government.
" We need a no bs law.
If someone threats to sue someone or asks for a settlement, that someone should be able to call "bullshit". And if they can't prove their case in a court of law, they must pay fines. I know one can countersue, but they actually have to sue you first."
How about a law that forces a corporation to pay the legal fees of a non-corporation defendant in civil matters (which then can be added to the judgement if the defendant wins)?
That would stop such harassment actions cold, as corps would be less liely to pursue meritless cases...
In criminal cases you are entitled to legal representation, whether you can afford it or not. That right does not exist in the civil courts. I think it should, and I think the initiator, if not an individual or a non-incorporated entity should have to bear the burden, not the state.
It's nice that DirecTV has agreed to restrain itself, but the REAL problem here is a legal system that allows a giant corporation to bankrupt and besmirch an individual without FIRST having to provide concrete proof that they have a case.
This is what DirecTV was doing, and it's what the RIAA is doing now. This has GOT to stop.
"It may be that Claria has a valid business model, in which case they have a strong case that their software shouldn't be lumped in with the likes of clientman, or other truly nasty spyware. Certainly, their business model is not illegal today. (Of course, I personally don't like it, and would never use their software.)"
Stealing someone's car (because they didnt' read the fine print and agreed to it in an obscure line where they signed a credit card slip when buying groceries) and turning the windshield into a big pop up ad might be a way to make money, but it does not make it desirable or necessarily legal.
Now SCO has $13 million LESS to harass people with. This shortens their lifespan considerably.
Not to mention, they are unlikely to get ANY further investment...
I think, with the inevitability of certain doom, even imminent, Canopy does what Canopy does best:
Funnel the remaining cash into their own pockets and lets the SCaldera shell die.
This is what they've done time and time again. Think Caldera got the money from their DR-DOS lawsuit?
Nope. Canopy did. They formed a new Caldera corp, moved it's operations there and continued the lawsuit with the shell of the original corp.
Anyone investing in SCaldera should remember that...
They will be LIVID to not be getting their 50-60+ cents per gallon "cut" ;)
Hell hath no fury like government that sees something it isn't taxing (ie: getting it's "cut").
"You can't assume the last three years have been safe because of the PATRIOT Act, that's an unfounded statement. The WTC was first attacked in 1993, and we changed NOTHING about our security policies; NOTHING. There was no other attack (I don't count Oklahoma City because it's a different group). There was no attack on our soil for 8 years, 2001."
From 1993-2001 we had an almost continuous stream of Al-Queida attacks. Not all against the US itself, but against the US.
Such as:
1. Kobar Towers
2. The embassy bombings
3. USS Cole
All of which were major attacks and took place between 1993-2001, most of them between 1998-2001...
"It's when I think about what I have in my encrypted files that I realise how much I am pissing off the NSA with the encrypted email which says: "Have fun at the party tonight? I still need to get the smoke out of my clothes."."
THAT is a good point... People need to use encryption for things they DONT CARE about someone being able to crack... If everyone did that, there would be no way for encryption itself to be a "tip" that there is something to hide there.
I don't have anything to hide on my server. But I hide it anyway. Why? It's mine. I don't want anyone else in there without my express permission.
"That is assuming their isn't some backdoor written into that encryption software that would let the gubermint easily decode your heroine habit with some "master key.""
There probably is... At least in commercial closed-sourced security software.
This is all the more reason for open source. DRM and government backdoors are not possible in peer-reviewed, open code.
I distrust a government that wants to keep secrets from me, it's EMPLOYER, that will not allow me to keep secrets from it in turn. Indeed, it makes it practically illegal to even try.
I'd imagine that the US is but one stealth law away from a UK style "turn over your encryption keys on request or go to jail" law.
First off, I'm no fan of the PATRIOT Act. I hate it. I'd have no problems with it being used against foreign born terrorists (as all but one in our history have been).
/.er won't....
If "only applies to non US Citizens" were added to the PATRIOT Act, I'd be OK with it.
That said, I have to point out something the average
It's been almost three years since 9/11/01 without a terrorist attack against this country. If you or I had predicted that on 9/11, we'd have been called nuts.
So, obviously, what the government is doing is working. That is not to say that it doesn't need reform and more oversight (the secrecy scares the shit out of me), but you can't argue with the results.
However, I'm in a quandry. I am NOT an ends justifies the means person, but what if thousands of lives would be forefit if the PATRIOT Act went away?
No way the government can break into this secure box ;)
(Actually I just switched my desktop and notebook over to SuSE Linux 9.1)
Is NOT a true first tier company, no matter how much money they paid Gartner to say they are...
Only IBM and HP qualify as such to me in the PC based server world...
We recently had to scramble to do a firmware fix for a customer who had bought Dell servers rather than the HP ones we recommended...
The fault? A bug in Dell's RAID card firmware that would cause the card to eventually destroy the data beyond repair... A bug of the type that would NEVER get out the door in a HP or IBM product... Then there was the server that had the power supply defect that smoked and died... Dell does not do anywhere NEAR the quality control HP or IBM does.
Dell appeals to those who buy strictly on price.
You get what you pay for.... HP ProLiant is by far my favorite server line, and it's not really that much more expensive than Dell.
China is a communist state slavery country, the cheapest labor there is....
Their government could care less if some company killed a few thousand people, they'd probably like that.
Most of them learn English in school... Sure, you won't be able to understand them, but I can't understand the Indians we have to deal with now.
"Somebody with the class and educational background to get this sort of job in India speaks English well enough. Your problem is not that the foreign workers speak bad English, but rather that you're intolerant of anybody who speaks it with a foreign accent, and undisposed to listen to them in the first place. (Of course you're not going to understand what somebody says if you don't listen to them.)"
Foreign accents, I don't mind. I work with Iranians at my workplace.
But I can't understand half the words Indians use. Which makes it TWICE as hard when you are trying to fix a server.
If Microsoft, Cisco, etc are going to charge me an arm and a leg per incident, they should provide someone who speaks English I can understand.
It's not racist, it's a fact. If I can't understand you, you are no use to me.
"Unless the spammer is prepared personally to move overseas, sooner or later the matter comes into the FBI's jurisdiction."
And that is the point... Let Ralsky and his gang of criminals have to choose:
1. Live in the USA and work for a living
2. Live in China or some third world Krapistan
At some point, spam enters US jurisdiction:
The advertiser
The spam gang
If either of those parties are in the US, it doesn't matter where the server is.
"This may be overly idealistic, but there is a simple solution to the problem -- vote them out. This country (contrary to popular /. opinion) is not a dictatorship."
Unfortunately, the government long ago sold the majority on the idea of getting "bread and circuses" from the public treasury.
It's so bad that "YOUR CHILDREN WILL STARVE" is effective propoganda against proposed tax cuts...
Sad.
Hell hath no fury like government that thinks it's not getting it's "cut".
This is an attitude of our government that frankly, you and I shouldn't put up with, this thinking that government is entitled to tax EVERYTHING.