C'mon moderators, this guy is on to something! Imagine if MS was really the one to pull off the thin client network computer. They wouldn't even have to sell software, just charge per minute on the server end. Very little opportunity for piracy, and depending on how the computer is constructed, no opportunity for other software. We all think the NetPliance is neat because we can run linux on it, but what if every PC was a NetPliance? I'm fairly convinced that where MS leads, the desktop follows. I think MS has the clout to lead the market in the direction of thin clients running only MS provided software.
If MS announces that its next desktop operating system will be for thin clients, if I'm an OEM I get working on that kind of system. I certainly don't pay attention to the whiny linux user who wants a real PC. The only thing that I see standing in the way is the reluctance of desktop PC manufacturers to produce PCs that are any lower end than they already are.
I don't know how good their system is, but there is published research on this sort of thing. One of my former professors made a "naked people finder" that's based on finding cylinders in the picture and evaluating if they are skin tone, and if they make a reasonable human body. An interesting aspect is that bikini pictures are out, but maybe pictures that don't show caucasians are OK. For more info on finding naked people, see http://www.cs.hmc.edu/~fleck/naked.html
I am getting quite sick of people smashing Lars for wanting to protect his music. As Love said, "Let's pick on Lars Ulrich instead because he brought up an interesting point!" Even if you don't agree with him, mindless attacks are just that. Better to spend your time reading the entirety of Love's speech, which makes many good points and shows that she has done a huge amount of research. For instance, did you know that TLC's take on their US$175 million in record sales was 2%? That's right, 3.5 million for one of the most successful discs of the year. Even if you take Lars' view that a record label is a bank, it sure seems to be a shitty one.
I seriously doubt that Sega would use this to make bug fixes. First, they don't make most of the games, so they couldn't do it for those. Second, the games are so old that the coders are probably long gone from the company, if not the industry. And even if they could be contacted and were paid, there's always the fact that if you haven't seen code for 6 months, it's as if you had never written it.
And of course, we'd have to make sure that they were only collecting the gameplay data in aggregate...;)
The parent of this post is incorrect, as is the reply by Spectre. The DOE does a very large portion of the research into developing, testing, and maintaing nuclear weapons. For instance, the big project at the Lawrence Livermore Lab (a DOE national lab) right now is NIF, the National Ignition Facility. This will be the world's most powerful fusion testbed (500 terawatt laser!) and it's primary purpose is Stockpile Stewardship. That is, we have a lot of old nukes, and we want to make sure that they still work. Testing them is against the test ban, so we have to simulate with small-scale fusion. This is basically completely a DOD thing.
All (the vast majority) of the funding is provided by the DOD, but the DOE does the research. This is just an artifact of the way the federal budget is set up. There are two separate classifications, the function classification and the agency classification. As another example, the money for crop subsidies goes under the USDA, even though they don't really do much for the program.
Most of the budget is like this, actually. And by "this", you can take me to mean either split up into function and agency budgets, or incredibly obscure and confusing. As another little tidbit, Lawrence Livermore is administered by the UC Regents (benefits, etc.) of BSD fame.
It is amazing that despite the incredible efficiencies in todays mantufacturing processes people still continue to work their asses off. Anyone can go to Wal-Mart today and buy, say, clothes for a very small number of minutes worked. Even their Made in the USA clothes are dirt cheap, and not bad quality. They are certainly better quality and cheaper (relative to minutes worked) than making clothes oneself. And yet people still work 80 hour weeks in order to afford expensive cars or fancy vacations or (more and more frequently) to keep their credit card debt from overwhelming them. This is not the American dream, the American dream is to work hard and then become independent. Let's face it, once you own a home outright, your cost of living is quite low, and you can take most any job and be able to survive. That to me is the American Dream.
Capitalism makes it possible in the first place (how many serfs owned their own homes back in the middle ages?), but it also seems that capitalism has become a goal, not a means to an end. The end is to create the most efficient means of production so that prices drop. However, if the consolidation that efficient production requires really does have an inherently negative impact on the political process, we're in trouble.
I believe Microsoft would have to claim that the document is copyrighted and that they have a system in place to control access to it in order to engage the proctections of the DMCA. Since the problem is not obtaining a copy of the document, but rather the license it requires you to agree to in order to read it, it would seem that there is no problem here. You don't want to copy any part of the document, you just want to write some code that uses a description from the document. IANAL, so of course a court could rule that even if your intent was not to make copies, that you broke their access control system, as they ruled in the DeCSS case. So the question that it seems to come down to is, how incompetent can the protection be to be considered an actual control? This seems about the minimum level of protection even possible.
Not to be an apologist, because much of what Microsoft has done to remain "competetive" is excreble and at the expense of true innovation, but I still get a queasy feeling about this. Bill feels that he has an absolute right to run his company any way he wants so long as he doesn't violate anyone else's rights. Now, I will agree that the company has stolen from its competitors, and I think it should have been prosecuted for that. "Oh, you stole this company's code and ran them out of business? That'll be half your cash on hand, please." On the other hand, I have admire Bill for sticking to his libertarian principle, despite the fact that it is in service, as I said, to an anti-innovation company.
The non-insider shareholders own very little of the company. Microsoft still has gone from a split-adjusted US$.21 (?) at IPO to US$69.75 today, so quit your whining. If all you wanted to do was make money, you still did fine. Bill may be gambling that the gov't will not want to tank the economy as well as the pension funds of all those voters, and thus will let him off easy. For him, this gamble is a better solution than compromising his right to run his company any way he wants.
This was not a release, he is still on probation. I assume that, especially since he needs to check in with his probation officer, it is probably specified that he cannot leave the country until his sentence is over.
If i can have the freedom to use the music that I *bought*, then great. If i can't, well then i just might as well use Napster and poach it all.
This is perhaps the best statement of the moral standpoint of people like me. I have no problem buying music, although most contemporary music is crap so I end up buying mostly Bob Dylan and classical. I can deal with the fact that the studios are more interested in selling lots of copies of unoffensive, vapid music than they are in encouraging truly creative artists. That's fine. But by god, if they think for one second that I will sit by and tolerate their futile attempts to halt piracy at the expense of restricting my right to make use of my legal music, they are wrong. They are as wrong as the British were when they thought there was no way the colonists would ever reject King George, no matter how badly they were treated. RIAA is perverting the legal system to make it illegal for me to access music I paid for, and I will not stand for it! To introduce technical measures to control piracy is one thing, but to make something that is my right illegal is evil. I will not subsidize, encourage, assist, or condone evil, and anyone who does is my enemy, and the enemy of anyone who believes in property rights as sacred.
A 3? Has no moderator ever heard of licensing software? ViaVoice is an IBM product, and as such they want to sell it, producing revenue. In fact, if all you want is the underlying recognition / dictation engine, they'll sell licenses for less than US$20, IIRC. So unless he plans to pirate ViaVoice after announcing it on/. I think IBM would appreciate him selling a lot of devices.
It's not necessarily hypocrisy. Imagine a parent investigating a hate site like stoormfrunt.org; it is clearly inappropriate for a child to be viewing that site by themselves. Nonethless, it is appropriate for a parent to view it.
I still think that most parents underestimate the intelligence of their children anyway. For every parent who uses filters that the child doesn't know how to avoid, I bet there are 10 that either don't use filters or who have children who can get around them.
Don't forget that we have yet to reach the level of immersive 180 degree environments yet. While 1600x1200 with nice AA might be adequate for a 19" monitor taking up 40 degrees of your vision, it is decidedly inadequate for a 180 degree image. That is why real (e.g., NASA) flight simulators use several screens at once, each rendering a different scene. Now, when we have real-time anti-aliased raytracing of an immersive environment, then we can stop. And realistically, that'll be in ten years or less. Then I don't know what will happen.
My Waterman pen is made in France, as is a lot of my wine. But general consumer goods, almost never. Only stuff that can be made by small shops. Which, if you've been to Paris, is essentially all that there is. I kind of like it.
No, you have a democracy in the sense that it's commonly understood.
The only reason people think we have a democracy is that they don't understand the difference between a democracy and a republic. A democracy is where the majority votes its own government. A republic has some kind of intermediary, voted on by the public, that provides the government. However, a republic generally implies some sort of system to check the power of the elected, setting the boundaries of power, etc.
I agree that it is unlikely someone would go to the trouble of looking up/. usernames from the book and finding out the email addresses (although this could be automated easlily enough with the eBook release), but lots of the comments are emails, and have no identifying marks. It might be a good idea to assign each person an identifying mark to be used as a reference back to the original/. account or email, just to identify multiple comments from the same person, but I agree with the decision to not publish the emails.
Some of you who followed the Stephen King eBook events may have noticed that the Glassbook Reader allows you to lend your books to other people. This is a part of the eBook Exchange Standard, currently being worked on by the EBX Working group if you're interested.
Walt
P.S. Not affliated, etc. In fact, my current school project is to develop an eBook reader that is better!;)
I would say that there is a need for balance between the right of the public to be informed and the right of the accused not to be subject to undue harassment. C'mon, if you were unjustly accused of a crime, would you want to have your name and address and phone number given to anyone who is a member of the press? The rules aren't there to protect criminals (although they do have rights), if they are guilty their address will be widely known to be the county jail. If we truly believe in innocent til proven guilty, we won't jump all over people and ask them why did it before the trial.
My comment was a little more narrowly focussed on DVD's, but I thought it was pretty good, and not so excited as to be ignored by the staid bureaucrats. Who, I might add, showed some pretty good flexibility w.r.t revising their submission requirements in light of fairness and good sense.
Walt
I am writing in reply to the comment made by Bernard R. Sorkin regarding section 1201(a)(1) of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act. I found his reasoning to be highly suspect on many of the points he raised.
His metaphor on page 1 comparing unauthorized use of a system used to access copyrighted material to stealing a book is absolutely specious. He fails to acknowledge that many of the persons who would be circumventing access controls will already have a license to access the work in a non-infringing way. My metaphor for access control is the photograph changer device. This is a mechanical device that, when a lever is pulled, changes the photo being displayed in a picture frame on the front of the device. It is conceivable that a copyright holder might make available a collection of photographs contained in the device, selling it as a complete package. Now suppose a member of the public purchased this device legally, obtaining all rights under fair use. If they do not like the arrangement of photographs, they may take apart the device and re-arrange them. Furthermore, they may decide to remove the photographs from the device entirely and cut them up for use in a collage. Both of these are non-infringing, I think we can agree. However, if the copyrighted works are digitized photographs, and the picture changing device is a piece of software, both of these uses become illegal. In order to remove the contents of the pictures, one would have to violate section 1201(1)(a). Reverse-engineering the storage mechanism would be required to use all the rights granted under fair use.
Looking at the clause in this perspective makes Mr. Sorkin's statement in the last paragraph on the page that "the public would have continued access to engage in non-infringing uses of copyrighted works" at best questionable, and at worst an obvious falsehood.
I must therefore also object to Mr. Sorkin's claim in the final paragraph of page two that "technological and legal measures are intended to protect the copyrighted work against unauthorized uses. Anyone wanting to make 'fair use' of a copyrighted work need only follow the same steps as he or she would in the absense of technological protections." As noted above, access to the work in its underlying digital form is required to make fair use of a work. The essential problem with Mr. Sorkin's position is that he wants to equate unauthorized access with illegal access, and the two concepts are different and independent. It might be possible to use the access system provided by the copyright holder to make infringing use of the copyrighted work, for example printing out 500 copies of an electronic book and distributing them at a profit. This might be authorized by the access system, but would not be illegal. As noted above, there are cases where access to the underlying data (we assume it to be unauthorized) must not be illegal in order to have fair use.
I would like to refute Mr. Sorkin's claim on page four, response number four that he is "aware of no works or class of works that have, because of the implementation of technical protection measures, become unavailable to persons who desire to be lawful users." I personally have lawfully purchased five DVD movies on disc in the past year, to watch on my fiancee's lawfully purchased DVD player. One of these discs was the movie "The Matrix", which was unavailable on VHS for some time after its release on DVD. When I am not at my fiancee's house, from time to time I still want to watch these lawfully obtained copyrighted works. I do not myself own a DVD player, and yet desire access to the works that I may lawfully view. I do own a VCR, but as I noted the work in question was not available in a form that I could view on the VCR. I do own a computer, but I do not have the Windows or Macintosh operating systems installed on it. Therefore, I do not have access to an authorized player, at least so far as I am aware at this time. In short, without circumvention of the access controls, I would have no way to view the content of the content which I purchased a license to view. It is, in direct contradiction to Mr. Sorkin's statement, unavailable to me, a person who desires to be a lawful user. I would further state that DVD movies are an easily defined class of works, and that they are in general unavailable to those who desire to be lawful users. It may be that Mr. Sorkin is unaware of this class of works, but if he is, he should be regarded as so ill-informed as to be dismissable out of hand. His claim of being unaware is especially notable in light of his many references to DVD movies.
In short, Mr. Sorkin fallaciously tries to equate unauthorized use and illegal use in an attempt to restrict lawful owners from making fair use of the licenses they own for copyrighted works. I humbly request that you recognize the difference and reject Mr. Sorkin's claims that unauthorized use must be made illegal.
Kind Regards,
(signed)
Walter I Nissen III
Re:But is it because Linux is superior?
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Linux Appliances
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· Score: 2
Both the TiVo and i-Opener seem to appeal to the slashdot crowd, which in the latter case, seems to be a bad sign for retailers.
I would have to object that it's a bad thing. VCR's, as an example, would likely have been adopted by the 80s equivalent of/. readers before anyone else, even at their exorbitant prices. One of the great things about a capitalist system is that the early adopters subsidize the cost of the first few thousand units, and then the price comes down for the rest of us. The point is not that/. itself provides a market, but that it provides enough people with lots of disposable income to pay for the first units, and enables the manufacturer to make more at a reasonable price and take over the world.
They're only making thousands of dollars a year from each of these students.
Actually, this is in general untrue. Almost every college is a non-profit organization. Most students (like me) are on substantial financial aid packages, making the actual revenue stream smaller than you might think. Furthermore, the cost of providing education is quite high, and is thus subsidized to a large extent either by the state or by the donors to the institutions. At Harvey Mudd, for instance, the revenue line item for money from the endowment is about equal to that for the student revenue. Now, for a place like Harvard with an endowment approaching US$1B, it's a different story.
To get back on topic a bit, it's silly for colleges not to have wired rooms at this point. I realize that net access is expensive (cabling is the least of it, think millions of dollars a year for bandwidth), but so is hot water. When my grandfather went to college, they didn't have hot showers, but now it's expected. So shall net access be. All waiting and prosecuting the pioneers does is chase those who might have an original thought or be techinically inclined away from your school.
One thing I have always found interesting is that particularly distinctive colors can be trademarked. Coincidentally, IBM Blue is trademarked, as is Tiffany's Blue. The apparent rationale for this is that certain colors are so well-known and associated with a brand, it would be inherently confusing to allow them to be used by others. What I want to know is, how do you determine when a color is confusingly similar? This seems to be very subjective.
To get back on topic a bit, it's obvious from seeing a color how to imitate it, and it's almost as easy to imitate a design once you've seen it. But isn't it also quite easy to imitate a book? I agree, you couldn't reconstruct a book from memory the way you could reconstruct a piece of clothing or a color you saw in a store, but the potential is still there. So, what's the difference between the color and the book?
Sure. From the usually reliable UL Reference Pages: Moreover, at least one of the ingredients called for in the recipe would be next to impossible to secure in the U.S. (or to bring into the country): decocainized flavor essence of the coca leaf. As it now stands, only Stepan Co.'s New Jersey plant possesses the necessary DEA permit to import the leaves and remove the cocaine from them. Anyone looking to reproduce the drink would have to go to Stepan to get one of the key ingredients, and Stepan would refuse to sell to them.
From http://www.snopes.com/cokelore/formula.htm
I don't have any way of checking the sources they cite, but there is an article about "Things Go Better with Coca Extract." that sounds promising. I hope you have access to Lexis-Nexis.
Slashdot Mirror
C'mon moderators, this guy is on to something! Imagine if MS was really the one to pull off the thin client network computer. They wouldn't even have to sell software, just charge per minute on the server end. Very little opportunity for piracy, and depending on how the computer is constructed, no opportunity for other software. We all think the NetPliance is neat because we can run linux on it, but what if every PC was a NetPliance? I'm fairly convinced that where MS leads, the desktop follows. I think MS has the clout to lead the market in the direction of thin clients running only MS provided software.
If MS announces that its next desktop operating system will be for thin clients, if I'm an OEM I get working on that kind of system. I certainly don't pay attention to the whiny linux user who wants a real PC. The only thing that I see standing in the way is the reluctance of desktop PC manufacturers to produce PCs that are any lower end than they already are.
Walt
I don't know how good their system is, but there is published research on this sort of thing. One of my former professors made a "naked people finder" that's based on finding cylinders in the picture and evaluating if they are skin tone, and if they make a reasonable human body. An interesting aspect is that bikini pictures are out, but maybe pictures that don't show caucasians are OK. For more info on finding naked people, see http://www.cs.hmc.edu/~fleck/naked.html
Walt
I am getting quite sick of people smashing Lars for wanting to protect his music. As Love said, "Let's pick on Lars Ulrich instead because he brought up an interesting point!" Even if you don't agree with him, mindless attacks are just that. Better to spend your time reading the entirety of Love's speech, which makes many good points and shows that she has done a huge amount of research. For instance, did you know that TLC's take on their US$175 million in record sales was 2%? That's right, 3.5 million for one of the most successful discs of the year. Even if you take Lars' view that a record label is a bank, it sure seems to be a shitty one.
Walt
No, I'd say that's about right. If you value your time at US$45 / hour, that's 1.25 cents/second. 30K takes 6 seconds, so that's 7.5 cents.
Or, if you're wireless, then that could be the bandwidth cost.
Walt
I seriously doubt that Sega would use this to make bug fixes. First, they don't make most of the games, so they couldn't do it for those. Second, the games are so old that the coders are probably long gone from the company, if not the industry. And even if they could be contacted and were paid, there's always the fact that if you haven't seen code for 6 months, it's as if you had never written it.
;)
And of course, we'd have to make sure that they were only collecting the gameplay data in aggregate...
Walt
The parent of this post is incorrect, as is the reply by Spectre. The DOE does a very large portion of the research into developing, testing, and maintaing nuclear weapons. For instance, the big project at the Lawrence Livermore Lab (a DOE national lab) right now is NIF, the National Ignition Facility. This will be the world's most powerful fusion testbed (500 terawatt laser!) and it's primary purpose is Stockpile Stewardship. That is, we have a lot of old nukes, and we want to make sure that they still work. Testing them is against the test ban, so we have to simulate with small-scale fusion. This is basically completely a DOD thing.
All (the vast majority) of the funding is provided by the DOD, but the DOE does the research. This is just an artifact of the way the federal budget is set up. There are two separate classifications, the function classification and the agency classification. As another example, the money for crop subsidies goes under the USDA, even though they don't really do much for the program.
Most of the budget is like this, actually. And by "this", you can take me to mean either split up into function and agency budgets, or incredibly obscure and confusing. As another little tidbit, Lawrence Livermore is administered by the UC Regents (benefits, etc.) of BSD fame.
Walt
It is amazing that despite the incredible efficiencies in todays mantufacturing processes people still continue to work their asses off. Anyone can go to Wal-Mart today and buy, say, clothes for a very small number of minutes worked. Even their Made in the USA clothes are dirt cheap, and not bad quality. They are certainly better quality and cheaper (relative to minutes worked) than making clothes oneself. And yet people still work 80 hour weeks in order to afford expensive cars or fancy vacations or (more and more frequently) to keep their credit card debt from overwhelming them. This is not the American dream, the American dream is to work hard and then become independent. Let's face it, once you own a home outright, your cost of living is quite low, and you can take most any job and be able to survive. That to me is the American Dream.
Capitalism makes it possible in the first place (how many serfs owned their own homes back in the middle ages?), but it also seems that capitalism has become a goal, not a means to an end. The end is to create the most efficient means of production so that prices drop. However, if the consolidation that efficient production requires really does have an inherently negative impact on the political process, we're in trouble.
Walt
I believe Microsoft would have to claim that the document is copyrighted and that they have a system in place to control access to it in order to engage the proctections of the DMCA. Since the problem is not obtaining a copy of the document, but rather the license it requires you to agree to in order to read it, it would seem that there is no problem here. You don't want to copy any part of the document, you just want to write some code that uses a description from the document. IANAL, so of course a court could rule that even if your intent was not to make copies, that you broke their access control system, as they ruled in the DeCSS case. So the question that it seems to come down to is, how incompetent can the protection be to be considered an actual control? This seems about the minimum level of protection even possible.
Walt
Not to be an apologist, because much of what Microsoft has done to remain "competetive" is excreble and at the expense of true innovation, but I still get a queasy feeling about this. Bill feels that he has an absolute right to run his company any way he wants so long as he doesn't violate anyone else's rights. Now, I will agree that the company has stolen from its competitors, and I think it should have been prosecuted for that. "Oh, you stole this company's code and ran them out of business? That'll be half your cash on hand, please." On the other hand, I have admire Bill for sticking to his libertarian principle, despite the fact that it is in service, as I said, to an anti-innovation company.
The non-insider shareholders own very little of the company. Microsoft still has gone from a split-adjusted US$.21 (?) at IPO to US$69.75 today, so quit your whining. If all you wanted to do was make money, you still did fine. Bill may be gambling that the gov't will not want to tank the economy as well as the pension funds of all those voters, and thus will let him off easy. For him, this gamble is a better solution than compromising his right to run his company any way he wants.
Walt
This was not a release, he is still on probation. I assume that, especially since he needs to check in with his probation officer, it is probably specified that he cannot leave the country until his sentence is over.
Walt
If i can have the freedom to use the music that I *bought*, then great. If i can't, well then i just might as well use Napster and poach it all.
This is perhaps the best statement of the moral standpoint of people like me. I have no problem buying music, although most contemporary music is crap so I end up buying mostly Bob Dylan and classical. I can deal with the fact that the studios are more interested in selling lots of copies of unoffensive, vapid music than they are in encouraging truly creative artists. That's fine. But by god, if they think for one second that I will sit by and tolerate their futile attempts to halt piracy at the expense of restricting my right to make use of my legal music, they are wrong. They are as wrong as the British were when they thought there was no way the colonists would ever reject King George, no matter how badly they were treated. RIAA is perverting the legal system to make it illegal for me to access music I paid for, and I will not stand for it! To introduce technical measures to control piracy is one thing, but to make something that is my right illegal is evil. I will not subsidize, encourage, assist, or condone evil, and anyone who does is my enemy, and the enemy of anyone who believes in property rights as sacred.
Walt
A 3? Has no moderator ever heard of licensing software? ViaVoice is an IBM product, and as such they want to sell it, producing revenue. In fact, if all you want is the underlying recognition / dictation engine, they'll sell licenses for less than US$20, IIRC. So unless he plans to pirate ViaVoice after announcing it on /. I think IBM would appreciate him selling a lot of devices.
Walt
It's not necessarily hypocrisy. Imagine a parent investigating a hate site like stoormfrunt.org; it is clearly inappropriate for a child to be viewing that site by themselves. Nonethless, it is appropriate for a parent to view it.
I still think that most parents underestimate the intelligence of their children anyway. For every parent who uses filters that the child doesn't know how to avoid, I bet there are 10 that either don't use filters or who have children who can get around them.
Walt
Don't forget that we have yet to reach the level of immersive 180 degree environments yet. While 1600x1200 with nice AA might be adequate for a 19" monitor taking up 40 degrees of your vision, it is decidedly inadequate for a 180 degree image. That is why real (e.g., NASA) flight simulators use several screens at once, each rendering a different scene. Now, when we have real-time anti-aliased raytracing of an immersive environment, then we can stop. And realistically, that'll be in ten years or less. Then I don't know what will happen.
Walt
My Waterman pen is made in France, as is a lot of my wine. But general consumer goods, almost never. Only stuff that can be made by small shops. Which, if you've been to Paris, is essentially all that there is. I kind of like it.
Wa;t
No, you have a democracy in the sense that it's commonly understood.
The only reason people think we have a democracy is that they don't understand the difference between a democracy and a republic. A democracy is where the majority votes its own government. A republic has some kind of intermediary, voted on by the public, that provides the government. However, a republic generally implies some sort of system to check the power of the elected, setting the boundaries of power, etc.
Walt
I agree that it is unlikely someone would go to the trouble of looking up /. usernames from the book and finding out the email addresses (although this could be automated easlily enough with the eBook release), but lots of the comments are emails, and have no identifying marks. It might be a good idea to assign each person an identifying mark to be used as a reference back to the original /. account or email, just to identify multiple comments from the same person, but I agree with the decision to not publish the emails.
Walt
Some of you who followed the Stephen King eBook events may have noticed that the Glassbook Reader allows you to lend your books to other people. This is a part of the eBook Exchange Standard, currently being worked on by the EBX Working group if you're interested.
;)
Walt
P.S. Not affliated, etc. In fact, my current school project is to develop an eBook reader that is better!
I would say that there is a need for balance between the right of the public to be informed and the right of the accused not to be subject to undue harassment. C'mon, if you were unjustly accused of a crime, would you want to have your name and address and phone number given to anyone who is a member of the press? The rules aren't there to protect criminals (although they do have rights), if they are guilty their address will be widely known to be the county jail. If we truly believe in innocent til proven guilty, we won't jump all over people and ask them why did it before the trial.
Walt
My comment was a little more narrowly focussed on DVD's, but I thought it was pretty good, and not so excited as to be ignored by the staid bureaucrats. Who, I might add, showed some pretty good flexibility w.r.t revising their submission requirements in light of fairness and good sense.
Walt
I am writing in reply to the comment made by Bernard R. Sorkin regarding section 1201(a)(1) of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act. I found his reasoning to be highly suspect on many of the points he raised.
His metaphor on page 1 comparing unauthorized use of a system used to access copyrighted material to stealing a book is absolutely specious. He fails to acknowledge that many of the persons who would be circumventing access controls will already have a license to access the work in a non-infringing way. My metaphor for access control is the photograph changer device. This is a mechanical device that, when a lever is pulled, changes the photo being displayed in a picture frame on the front of the device. It is conceivable that a copyright holder might make available a collection of photographs contained in the device, selling it as a complete package. Now suppose a member of the public purchased this device legally, obtaining all rights under fair use. If they do not like the arrangement of photographs, they may take apart the device and re-arrange them. Furthermore, they may decide to remove the photographs from the device entirely and cut them up for use in a collage. Both of these are non-infringing, I think we can agree. However, if the copyrighted works are digitized photographs, and the picture changing device is a piece of software, both of these uses become illegal. In order to remove the contents of the pictures, one would have to violate section 1201(1)(a). Reverse-engineering the storage mechanism would be required to use all the rights granted under fair use.
Looking at the clause in this perspective makes Mr. Sorkin's statement in the last paragraph on the page that "the public would have continued access to engage in non-infringing uses of copyrighted works" at best questionable, and at worst an obvious falsehood.
I must therefore also object to Mr. Sorkin's claim in the final paragraph of page two that "technological and legal measures are intended to protect the copyrighted work against unauthorized uses. Anyone wanting to make 'fair use' of a copyrighted work need only follow the same steps as he or she would in the absense of technological protections." As noted above, access to the work in its underlying digital form is required to make fair use of a work. The essential problem with Mr. Sorkin's position is that he wants to equate unauthorized access with illegal access, and the two concepts are different and independent. It might be possible to use the access system provided by the copyright holder to make infringing use of the copyrighted work, for example printing out 500 copies of an electronic book and distributing them at a profit. This might be authorized by the access system, but would not be illegal. As noted above, there are cases where access to the underlying data (we assume it to be unauthorized) must not be illegal in order to have fair use.
I would like to refute Mr. Sorkin's claim on page four, response number four that he is "aware of no works or class of works that have, because of the implementation of technical protection measures, become unavailable to persons who desire to be lawful users." I personally have lawfully purchased five DVD movies on disc in the past year, to watch on my fiancee's lawfully purchased DVD player. One of these discs was the movie "The Matrix", which was unavailable on VHS for some time after its release on DVD. When I am not at my fiancee's house, from time to time I still want to watch these lawfully obtained copyrighted works. I do not myself own a DVD player, and yet desire access to the works that I may lawfully view. I do own a VCR, but as I noted the work in question was not available in a form that I could view on the VCR. I do own a computer, but I do not have the Windows or Macintosh operating systems installed on it. Therefore, I do not have access to an authorized player, at least so far as I am aware at this time. In short, without circumvention of the access controls, I would have no way to view the content of the content which I purchased a license to view. It is, in direct contradiction to Mr. Sorkin's statement, unavailable to me, a person who desires to be a lawful user. I would further state that DVD movies are an easily defined class of works, and that they are in general unavailable to those who desire to be lawful users. It may be that Mr. Sorkin is unaware of this class of works, but if he is, he should be regarded as so ill-informed as to be dismissable out of hand. His claim of being unaware is especially notable in light of his many references to DVD movies.
In short, Mr. Sorkin fallaciously tries to equate unauthorized use and illegal use in an attempt to restrict lawful owners from making fair use of the licenses they own for copyrighted works. I humbly request that you recognize the difference and reject Mr. Sorkin's claims that unauthorized use must be made illegal.
Kind Regards,
(signed)
Walter I Nissen III
Both the TiVo and i-Opener seem to appeal to the slashdot crowd, which in the latter case, seems to be a bad sign for retailers.
/. readers before anyone else, even at their exorbitant prices. One of the great things about a capitalist system is that the early adopters subsidize the cost of the first few thousand units, and then the price comes down for the rest of us. The point is not that /. itself provides a market, but that it provides enough people with lots of disposable income to pay for the first units, and enables the manufacturer to make more at a reasonable price and take over the world.
I would have to object that it's a bad thing. VCR's, as an example, would likely have been adopted by the 80s equivalent of
Walt
They're only making thousands of dollars a year from each of these students.
Actually, this is in general untrue. Almost every college is a non-profit organization. Most students (like me) are on substantial financial aid packages, making the actual revenue stream smaller than you might think. Furthermore, the cost of providing education is quite high, and is thus subsidized to a large extent either by the state or by the donors to the institutions. At Harvey Mudd, for instance, the revenue line item for money from the endowment is about equal to that for the student revenue. Now, for a place like Harvard with an endowment approaching US$1B, it's a different story.
To get back on topic a bit, it's silly for colleges not to have wired rooms at this point. I realize that net access is expensive (cabling is the least of it, think millions of dollars a year for bandwidth), but so is hot water. When my grandfather went to college, they didn't have hot showers, but now it's expected. So shall net access be. All waiting and prosecuting the pioneers does is chase those who might have an original thought or be techinically inclined away from your school.
Walt
Duh, of course books are protected by copyright! I don't know what I was smoking when I wrote that.
So, we're safe as long as no one is able to get a patent on a color...
Walt
One thing I have always found interesting is that particularly distinctive colors can be trademarked. Coincidentally, IBM Blue is trademarked, as is Tiffany's Blue. The apparent rationale for this is that certain colors are so well-known and associated with a brand, it would be inherently confusing to allow them to be used by others. What I want to know is, how do you determine when a color is confusingly similar? This seems to be very subjective.
To get back on topic a bit, it's obvious from seeing a color how to imitate it, and it's almost as easy to imitate a design once you've seen it. But isn't it also quite easy to imitate a book? I agree, you couldn't reconstruct a book from memory the way you could reconstruct a piece of clothing or a color you saw in a store, but the potential is still there. So, what's the difference between the color and the book?
Walt
Sure. From the usually reliable UL Reference Pages:
Moreover, at least one of the ingredients called for in the recipe would be next to impossible to secure in the U.S. (or to bring into the country): decocainized flavor essence of the coca leaf. As it now stands, only Stepan Co.'s New Jersey plant possesses the necessary DEA permit to import the leaves and remove the cocaine from them. Anyone looking to reproduce the drink would have to go to Stepan to get one of the key ingredients, and Stepan would refuse to sell to them.
From http://www.snopes.com/cokelore/formula.htm
I don't have any way of checking the sources they cite, but there is an article about "Things Go Better with Coca Extract." that sounds promising. I hope you have access to Lexis-Nexis.
Walt