At that point, slashdot and schneier.com are just trolling
Umm.... the schneier article is almost seven years old and discussing apparently discusses a release of the 2.2 kernel. I think the article was referenced purely as summary of security-through-obscurity issues, rather than an attack on Linus.
The license can claim whatever it wants about its purpose, but Stallman's oft-stated goal is to destroy proprietary closed source software by any means necessary
Well, the licence means what the licence says, regardless of Richard's long term political aims. But even conceding that much, I'd still have a hard time parsing "destroy proprietary closed source software" as "force people to share their work".
Getting back to the original point, I can't see how abolishing the notion of "intellectual properly" is incompatible with destroying proprietary software. I mean as long as we're mind reading RMS rather than going by the what the licence actually says.
If we're sharing opinions, then I think it's very difficult to take an "extreme" view of the GPL.
A valid opinion, even if I don't share it. How about if I said "an extreme interpretation of the wording of the GPL", instead? The word "force" appears exactly once in the document, and then it's talking about the licence remaining "in force" and not about coercion.
Artists should continue to receive compensation for their creations for as long as people are enjoying them
I can't argue with artists receiving recompense. On the other hand, there is some question as to the viability of copyright as a means of
compensating them.
On the one hand, as costs for reproduction and distribution tend towards zero, it's getting harder and harder to use control of distribution channels as a means of generating recompense.
On the other, with a small number of high profile exceptions, the artists don't seem to be the ones benefiting from existing copyright law, and I don't have much faith that this will change. The overhead of collecting copyright revenue would appear to favour large organisations rather than independent artists and bands, if only because lawsuits are expensive.
I don't think copyright is going to be a workable convention for very much longer, and even if it is, I don't think it's going to benefit the little guy, and I think the potential for abuse by cartels will remain. The sooner it dies, the better.
You betray your ignorance of the workings of copyright
I don't think the GP demonstrated any particular ignorance of the workings of copyright.
It's clear that you think the purpose of the GPL is at odds with his recounting of
the circumstances that led Stallman to draft the GPL in the first place. However, that would
not constitute ignorance of copyright, just of the GPL. Assuming your interpretation is correct,
of course.
without the GPL, you could not force people to share their work, which is the purpose of the GPL.
That's a bit of an extreme view of the GPL in my opinion. This is what the licence says:
Our General Public Licenses are designed to make sure that you have the freedom to distribute copies of free software (and charge for them if you wish), that you receive source code or can get it if you want it, that you can change the software or use pieces of it in new free programs, and that you know you can do these things.
So I'd have said the purpose of the GPL was the aim stated in the paragraph quoted above.
Forcing people to release changes made to GPL software is not an aim in itself, it's just one of the mechanisms used to help protect the freedoms that the GPL is designed to protect.
It's important to remember that the GPL is a means to an end, and not an end in itself.
Objecting to the abolition of copyright on the grounds that it breaks the GPL is a bit like
objecting to immortality on the grounds that it makes hospitals redundant. It's missing the
bigger picture.
The only reason I can't use your car or house when you aren't using it is because of artificial laws saying I can't and granting you protection from such actions - whats the difference?
I suspect the difference is that laws regarding physical property are strongly tied to
the human territorial imperative. Like many other creatures on this planet,
we have a strong urge to claim territory as our own, and territorial disputes
when they do occur are frequently violent and sometime bloody.
Having a legal structure that helps minimise such disputes makes sense, since it means
that we spend less time organising blood vendettas against our neighbours, and more time on constructive activities. Of course, that may depend on what you consider a constructive
activity.
On the other hand, there doesn't seem to be any similar deep root territoriality to ideas.
In fact, I would argue that converse seems to be true. Human beings have a strong urge to
propagate information in all its forms. From jokes and stories, to music, to software - sharing abstractions seems to be a part of our make up.
Which, in my opinion, is why the record labels and studios and software houses
are having such a hard time with this. They've coined the term "intellectual property" to
try and make it seem as if the human territorial response should apply to information
in the same way as it does to tangible assets. But it doesn't; not at the level of human
psychology.
And that, so far as I can see, is the major difference. Property laws for tangible assets
work with human psychology, and are respected for that reason.
Trying to apply those same principles to information is working against human psychology
which is why the practice is so widely opposed. Put another way, the first case has a basis in human behaviour, the second one lacks any such basis, and is more of an attempt at social engineering seeking to change human behaviour to suit a relatively small number of people.
Windows and its support of the newest and most obscure hardware is the benchmark for the term "lots".
And then
The only way you can say it does is to make up your own arbitrary definition of what "lots" means
Now, forgive me, but isn't that what you just did? You redefined "lots" away from the commonly accepted idea of "a large number" and in favour of "the exact same driver set as windows currently supports".
I understand that you're claiming popular support for the notion, but even so, I think you're on shaky ground with this one.
You know, I'm generally one of those who argue for using the proper term (as you just have).
On the whole though, I don't object to the word "piracy" used as a casual shorthand for copyright
infringement. It saves time, and on the whole, everyone understands what you're talking
about.
What I do object to though are the tossers who try to reason thus:
Copyright violation is often referred to by a term that strictly only applies to violent armed robbery upon the high seas
Armed robbery with violence is a very bad thing, generally deserving of the harshest punishment
Therefore, all downloaders are scum who should be shunned and locked up for a very long time
It's not the term itself, so much as the fallacious logic that invariably follows in its wake. I don't
mind discussing electronic piracy, so long as people don't try and use the term as the sole justification
for a moral stance
(That's not disagreeing with you in any way - just something I wanted to say, and it seemed to follow on well
from your post).
What if, for example, you would lose your job if you didn't vote a specific way?
Well, yes. But the problem there is coercion of voters, not vote selling per se.
And I'm not really suggesting that vote selling be legalised, encouraged, or
even tolerated.
That said, if party in power can use the voting machines to steal votes
wholesale, then the question becomes moot.
If we're ever going to have electronic voting (and long term I think the advantages
outweigh the pitfalls) then we need some way for voters to verify that their vote
has been recorded as cast. Otherwise the process will be subverted, and public confidence
in the electoral process will plummet.
So the question isn't so much whether or not vote selling
is undesirable - I agree it is not. The question is whether a validation system that could
potentially be used as part of a vote selling shakedown is sufficient reason not to allow
voters to confirm that their vote has not been falsely recorded.
One issue I rarely see address is that e-voting is susceptible to vote selling
Actually, this is an issue I see raised quite a lot; so much so that sets me to wondering: what's wrong with selling your vote? More to the point - what's so wrong with potentially being able to
do so that's worse than one party being able to disenfranchise you wholesale, and leaving you
with no possible way to prove it?
Because, personally, I'm coming to the opinion that I'd sooner see a small trade in black-market votes, with prison terms for those running scam if caught, than I would have my vote bought and sold by the people making the voting machine
I can't imagine it's significantly harder to rig a paper election than an electronic one.
Well, in the general case, the advantage of paper elections is that the attack vectors are by and large known and understood, and can be defended against fairly well. Neither scenario is foolproof,
but there's an established body of best practice surrounding paper ballots that just isn't there
yet for the electronic ones.
In the specific case of the current crop of electronic voting machines, a number of vulnerabilities have come to light that would seem to make it substantially easier to subvert the electronic systems. This is akin to using a box in a paper ballot with a trapdoor in the bottom so that one side or the other could tamper with the results more conveniently. Going back to my previous point, most people would recognise a trap-door in a ballot box as a bad thing, but not everyone realises that having a voting machine attached to a modem, or using an unsecured Access database is similarly a Bad Idea
Also, it's tempting, as some others have done, to apply the old notion of security as an absolute,
and from there to reason that since neither system can be completely proof against rigging,
both must be equally insecure, and therefore one must be as good as another. This is a bit like saying that since any bank vault can be opened, your valuables are just as secure under your mattress as they would be in a vault.
Really, until we have an open voting system, one that can be verified for hardware and software by all parties, and until the parties have the in house expertise to perform that verification, then electronic voting should remain suspect in my opinion. If you can't verify the integrity of the machine with the same confidence you would for a simple metal box, then we probably shouldn't be using them.
Strictly, RedHat charges for the support contract that goes with the software (and also you get
Red Hat branding, for those who care about such things).
If all you want is the software, you can get that for free, with RedHat's blessing.
CentOS would be
See how that could catch on? See how the worse OS fails, and gets replaced?
Right. But GP didn't say anything about the _worse_ OS failing. He said any OS that you noticed should be considered a failure.
Now, subsequent exchanges have clarified his point somewhat, and I don't take issue with the point he intended to make. But as originally expressed it still don't work because you wouldn't be able to notice any difference, good, bad or indifferent, without having to regard the O/S in question as a failure.
Which would rather condemn us all to the lowest common denominator hell of Windows, if we were to take the maxim at face value.
Hence, no, I don't think the proposition as stated is going to catch on.
Wait, are you calling me a debian newbie, or a human-geek-slashdot newbie?
Yes. No. Maybe. Umm... what was the question again?
In any case, I wouldn't know about Debian. I did do a search on the Gentoo bugzilla, and there's not so much as a request for an ebuild there. There's probably an overlay for it somewhere though.
My point was that the things that most people complain about on Linux or OSX seem to be applications (including Gnome/KDE etc) and what most people complain about on Windows is the actual system
Phrased like that, argument there from me - useful insight in fact.
So your concern of privatising the entire integer space isn't really valid
The thing is, with the right archiving algorithm, you could encrypt a given piece of data
into any integer desired. For instance, XOR an MS Office zip against a tar file of the
linux kernel. Take the output and go to the judge and ask for a Cease and Desist order,
on the grounds that the kernel tar is in fact a representation of MS Office.
You'd need to be a bit more subtle than that, but I expect you make a reasonably
convincing spoof encryption program without too much effort. You probably wouldn't
go after something with such a solid provenance as the kernel, either,
but you could probably shut down a lot of smaller legitimate online distributors.
Your post says that common sense isn't applied in a court of law
I think it's more a case of what looks like common sense to a layman often
misses the complexities of the case. It's the same in computer industry -
as witness any number of users who ask "why can't you just make it do what I want?"
as if a telepathic interface and natural language processor were the easiest things
in the world.
Trying to find a workaround for the law is just going to get the courts mad at you if you get caught.
Before we go any further with this one, could you quote me the line where I said "Hey, everybody! This is a workaround for copyright law - and I recommend that everybody try it!"
Because, you know, I really don't remember writing anything of the sort.
Don't get me wrong, I'm an opponent of copyright zealots as much as you, but in your example, yeah, you have a string of numbers, but what do those numbers represent?
I agree entirely, and I wasn't trying to suggest that this would be an effective way of avoiding copyright law. I think the OFF devs may be hoping it allows them to avoid being sued
when someone else uploads copyright material, and I'm not sure that will work either.
They're claiming copyright over what those numbers mean. Complaining about it like this is like saying "Authors are trying to copyright all the letters of the alphabet" when they hold and exercise their copyrights on novels, magazines, and the like.
I'm not complaining about anything, thank you very much. I'm just saying that, in an age when every possible from of IP legislation is being bent to in an attempt to claim a level of control never intended, when trademark law is used to silence criticism and when patents are granted on movie plots, it would be nice to see the law specifically say that the numbers were not subject to IP, even if the asset they might encode was so protected.
People act like this somehow new, too subjective, or breaks the "black and white"-ness of the law, but this is how the law has always been. It doesn't fit neatly into "if-then" boxes as INTPs would like to pretend it does.
Actually, my concern is more over the other side of the coin:
that some corporation or cartel will try use the same apparent novelty to try and claim ownership over the numbers. As in "we own 'The sound of Music' so therefore we own number 135678012456677787...."
I'm not trying to suggest (as some seem to assume) that this constitutes a way of evading copyright.
Well, I run Gentoo Linux myself, and I think my credentials as an MS skeptic are a matter of record by now. Still, I think the point stands, even if we take the strictest possible usage of operating system: "hey dood, this new scheduler feels way, way more responisve than the last release."
I mean, I take your point philosophically: the O/S's job should be to stay out of the user's way and having it impinge on user awareness any more than is strictly necessary is bad design. I just think that you take it a bit further than is strictly useful.
Outlook is not an operating system
No, but to be fair, I didn't mention any specific system feature, be it application, userspace driver, or kernel subsystem. And email was one of your examples from your previous post in this thread.
Attempting to abstract the law into mathematics is pointless.
Hmmm... I don't think that's the objective, exactly. I didn't read TFA as saying "material distributed in this way is not subject to copyright" but rather "none of the bits we're moving are copyrighted - go pester the people doing the uploading"
I also think there is a useful discussion to be had on the subject of numbers and the digital assets they may or not represent. If I zip up MS Office, for instance, I've turned it into a very long number. Is it reasonable to allow companies to claim ownership of such numbers? With the proper compression and/or encryption scheme, you could use any number (trivially in some cases) to represent a work over which you can claim copyright. Do we then let a corporation privatise the entire integer space? And if not, how do we distinguish between infringing and non-infringing uses of a large number?
If you notice which operating system you are on then it has failed
Interesting disincentive against improving an O/S:
"Hey cool! I just found out that SystemFoo does Bar better than Windows"
"Dude, you just noticed the operating system - that means it's failed!"
"Awww... you mean I got to get rid if it?"
Most people would not switch over "traffic shaping" either -- not even most slashdotters.
The trouble is this is not Bell penalizing Bell's customers. This is Bell penalizing Teksavvy's
customers. Switching ISP hurts Teksavvy for no reason, and rewards Bell by helping eliminate a
competitor. That hardly seems like a rational response.
This is the central issue to the whole net neutrality argument. It's not about
your ISP throttling you for doing things they don't like. It's about someone else's ISP
throttling you for their market advantage. It's difficult to address that by voting
with your feet.
Slashdot Mirror
Umm.... the schneier article is almost seven years old and discussing apparently discusses a release of the 2.2 kernel. I think the article was referenced purely as summary of security-through-obscurity issues, rather than an attack on Linus.
Well, the licence means what the licence says, regardless of Richard's long term political aims. But even conceding that much, I'd still have a hard time parsing "destroy proprietary closed source software" as "force people to share their work".
Getting back to the original point, I can't see how abolishing the notion of "intellectual properly" is incompatible with destroying proprietary software. I mean as long as we're mind reading RMS rather than going by the what the licence actually says.
A valid opinion, even if I don't share it. How about if I said "an extreme interpretation of the wording of the GPL", instead? The word "force" appears exactly once in the document, and then it's talking about the licence remaining "in force" and not about coercion.
I can't argue with artists receiving recompense. On the other hand, there is some question as to the viability of copyright as a means of compensating them.
On the one hand, as costs for reproduction and distribution tend towards zero, it's getting harder and harder to use control of distribution channels as a means of generating recompense. On the other, with a small number of high profile exceptions, the artists don't seem to be the ones benefiting from existing copyright law, and I don't have much faith that this will change. The overhead of collecting copyright revenue would appear to favour large organisations rather than independent artists and bands, if only because lawsuits are expensive.
I don't think copyright is going to be a workable convention for very much longer, and even if it is, I don't think it's going to benefit the little guy, and I think the potential for abuse by cartels will remain. The sooner it dies, the better.
I don't think the GP demonstrated any particular ignorance of the workings of copyright. It's clear that you think the purpose of the GPL is at odds with his recounting of the circumstances that led Stallman to draft the GPL in the first place. However, that would not constitute ignorance of copyright, just of the GPL. Assuming your interpretation is correct, of course.
That's a bit of an extreme view of the GPL in my opinion. This is what the licence says:
So I'd have said the purpose of the GPL was the aim stated in the paragraph quoted above. Forcing people to release changes made to GPL software is not an aim in itself, it's just one of the mechanisms used to help protect the freedoms that the GPL is designed to protect.
It's important to remember that the GPL is a means to an end, and not an end in itself. Objecting to the abolition of copyright on the grounds that it breaks the GPL is a bit like objecting to immortality on the grounds that it makes hospitals redundant. It's missing the bigger picture.
I suspect the difference is that laws regarding physical property are strongly tied to the human territorial imperative. Like many other creatures on this planet, we have a strong urge to claim territory as our own, and territorial disputes when they do occur are frequently violent and sometime bloody.
Having a legal structure that helps minimise such disputes makes sense, since it means that we spend less time organising blood vendettas against our neighbours, and more time on constructive activities. Of course, that may depend on what you consider a constructive activity.
On the other hand, there doesn't seem to be any similar deep root territoriality to ideas. In fact, I would argue that converse seems to be true. Human beings have a strong urge to propagate information in all its forms. From jokes and stories, to music, to software - sharing abstractions seems to be a part of our make up.
Which, in my opinion, is why the record labels and studios and software houses are having such a hard time with this. They've coined the term "intellectual property" to try and make it seem as if the human territorial response should apply to information in the same way as it does to tangible assets. But it doesn't; not at the level of human psychology.
And that, so far as I can see, is the major difference. Property laws for tangible assets work with human psychology, and are respected for that reason. Trying to apply those same principles to information is working against human psychology which is why the practice is so widely opposed. Put another way, the first case has a basis in human behaviour, the second one lacks any such basis, and is more of an attempt at social engineering seeking to change human behaviour to suit a relatively small number of people.
You said
And then
Now, forgive me, but isn't that what you just did? You redefined "lots" away from the commonly accepted idea of "a large number" and in favour of "the exact same driver set as windows currently supports".
I understand that you're claiming popular support for the notion, but even so, I think you're on shaky ground with this one.
You know, I'm generally one of those who argue for using the proper term (as you just have). On the whole though, I don't object to the word "piracy" used as a casual shorthand for copyright infringement. It saves time, and on the whole, everyone understands what you're talking about.
What I do object to though are the tossers who try to reason thus:
It's not the term itself, so much as the fallacious logic that invariably follows in its wake. I don't mind discussing electronic piracy, so long as people don't try and use the term as the sole justification for a moral stance
(That's not disagreeing with you in any way - just something I wanted to say, and it seemed to follow on well from your post).
Well, yes. But the problem there is coercion of voters, not vote selling per se. And I'm not really suggesting that vote selling be legalised, encouraged, or even tolerated.
That said, if party in power can use the voting machines to steal votes wholesale, then the question becomes moot.
If we're ever going to have electronic voting (and long term I think the advantages outweigh the pitfalls) then we need some way for voters to verify that their vote has been recorded as cast. Otherwise the process will be subverted, and public confidence in the electoral process will plummet.
So the question isn't so much whether or not vote selling is undesirable - I agree it is not. The question is whether a validation system that could potentially be used as part of a vote selling shakedown is sufficient reason not to allow voters to confirm that their vote has not been falsely recorded.
Actually, this is an issue I see raised quite a lot; so much so that sets me to wondering: what's wrong with selling your vote? More to the point - what's so wrong with potentially being able to do so that's worse than one party being able to disenfranchise you wholesale, and leaving you with no possible way to prove it?
Because, personally, I'm coming to the opinion that I'd sooner see a small trade in black-market votes, with prison terms for those running scam if caught, than I would have my vote bought and sold by the people making the voting machine
Well, in the general case, the advantage of paper elections is that the attack vectors are by and large known and understood, and can be defended against fairly well. Neither scenario is foolproof, but there's an established body of best practice surrounding paper ballots that just isn't there yet for the electronic ones.
In the specific case of the current crop of electronic voting machines, a number of vulnerabilities have come to light that would seem to make it substantially easier to subvert the electronic systems. This is akin to using a box in a paper ballot with a trapdoor in the bottom so that one side or the other could tamper with the results more conveniently. Going back to my previous point, most people would recognise a trap-door in a ballot box as a bad thing, but not everyone realises that having a voting machine attached to a modem, or using an unsecured Access database is similarly a Bad Idea
Also, it's tempting, as some others have done, to apply the old notion of security as an absolute, and from there to reason that since neither system can be completely proof against rigging, both must be equally insecure, and therefore one must be as good as another. This is a bit like saying that since any bank vault can be opened, your valuables are just as secure under your mattress as they would be in a vault.
Really, until we have an open voting system, one that can be verified for hardware and software by all parties, and until the parties have the in house expertise to perform that verification, then electronic voting should remain suspect in my opinion. If you can't verify the integrity of the machine with the same confidence you would for a simple metal box, then we probably shouldn't be using them.
Strictly, RedHat charges for the support contract that goes with the software (and also you get Red Hat branding, for those who care about such things).
If all you want is the software, you can get that for free, with RedHat's blessing. CentOS would be
Right. But GP didn't say anything about the _worse_ OS failing. He said any OS that you noticed should be considered a failure.
Now, subsequent exchanges have clarified his point somewhat, and I don't take issue with the point he intended to make. But as originally expressed it still don't work because you wouldn't be able to notice any difference, good, bad or indifferent, without having to regard the O/S in question as a failure.
Which would rather condemn us all to the lowest common denominator hell of Windows, if we were to take the maxim at face value.
Hence, no, I don't think the proposition as stated is going to catch on.
Yes. No. Maybe. Umm... what was the question again?
In any case, I wouldn't know about Debian. I did do a search on the Gentoo bugzilla, and there's not so much as a request for an ebuild there. There's probably an overlay for it somewhere though.
Phrased like that, argument there from me - useful insight in fact.
The thing is, with the right archiving algorithm, you could encrypt a given piece of data into any integer desired. For instance, XOR an MS Office zip against a tar file of the linux kernel. Take the output and go to the judge and ask for a Cease and Desist order, on the grounds that the kernel tar is in fact a representation of MS Office.
You'd need to be a bit more subtle than that, but I expect you make a reasonably convincing spoof encryption program without too much effort. You probably wouldn't go after something with such a solid provenance as the kernel, either, but you could probably shut down a lot of smaller legitimate online distributors.
I think it's more a case of what looks like common sense to a layman often misses the complexities of the case. It's the same in computer industry - as witness any number of users who ask "why can't you just make it do what I want?" as if a telepathic interface and natural language processor were the easiest things in the world.
Indeed.
Before we go any further with this one, could you quote me the line where I said "Hey, everybody! This is a workaround for copyright law - and I recommend that everybody try it!"
Because, you know, I really don't remember writing anything of the sort.
I agree entirely, and I wasn't trying to suggest that this would be an effective way of avoiding copyright law. I think the OFF devs may be hoping it allows them to avoid being sued when someone else uploads copyright material, and I'm not sure that will work either.
I'm not complaining about anything, thank you very much. I'm just saying that, in an age when every possible from of IP legislation is being bent to in an attempt to claim a level of control never intended, when trademark law is used to silence criticism and when patents are granted on movie plots, it would be nice to see the law specifically say that the numbers were not subject to IP, even if the asset they might encode was so protected.
Actually, my concern is more over the other side of the coin: that some corporation or cartel will try use the same apparent novelty to try and claim ownership over the numbers. As in "we own 'The sound of Music' so therefore we own number 135678012456677787...."
I'm not trying to suggest (as some seem to assume) that this constitutes a way of evading copyright.
The problem I have with that, is I that don't think those commands work in a court of law.
Come to think of it, but I'm fairly they wouldn't work under Ubuntu either. (I wouldn't know about Debian)
Well, I run Gentoo Linux myself, and I think my credentials as an MS skeptic are a matter of record by now. Still, I think the point stands, even if we take the strictest possible usage of operating system: "hey dood, this new scheduler feels way, way more responisve than the last release."
I mean, I take your point philosophically: the O/S's job should be to stay out of the user's way and having it impinge on user awareness any more than is strictly necessary is bad design. I just think that you take it a bit further than is strictly useful.
No, but to be fair, I didn't mention any specific system feature, be it application, userspace driver, or kernel subsystem. And email was one of your examples from your previous post in this thread.
Hmmm... I don't think that's the objective, exactly. I didn't read TFA as saying "material distributed in this way is not subject to copyright" but rather "none of the bits we're moving are copyrighted - go pester the people doing the uploading"
I also think there is a useful discussion to be had on the subject of numbers and the digital assets they may or not represent. If I zip up MS Office, for instance, I've turned it into a very long number. Is it reasonable to allow companies to claim ownership of such numbers? With the proper compression and/or encryption scheme, you could use any number (trivially in some cases) to represent a work over which you can claim copyright. Do we then let a corporation privatise the entire integer space? And if not, how do we distinguish between infringing and non-infringing uses of a large number?
Interesting disincentive against improving an O/S:
"Hey cool! I just found out that SystemFoo does Bar better than Windows"
"Dude, you just noticed the operating system - that means it's failed!"
"Awww... you mean I got to get rid if it?"
I can't see that catching on, myself.
Don't forget the pitchforks
The trouble is this is not Bell penalizing Bell's customers. This is Bell penalizing Teksavvy's customers. Switching ISP hurts Teksavvy for no reason, and rewards Bell by helping eliminate a competitor. That hardly seems like a rational response.
This is the central issue to the whole net neutrality argument. It's not about your ISP throttling you for doing things they don't like. It's about someone else's ISP throttling you for their market advantage. It's difficult to address that by voting with your feet.