Oh, I absolutely agree. The problem is that there are some 280,000,000 people in the United States, and every single one of 'em has a different idea of what their rights should be. That's why we have documents like the Bill of Rights that define some broad areas over which the government cannot pass laws. Personal privacy is not one of those areas.
You do not have a right to privacy. If you want to argue that you should, go right ahead. I doubt you'll get very far.
"Intellectual property" is a fiction along the lines of pretending that information is like a physical item.
See? Absurd.
Intellectual property is not a new idea. It can be traced back several thousand years on the American continent; the Haida and Tlingit peoples of the Pacific northwest have believed for millennia that it's theft to sing another clan's song without permission. The same basic principle is found in the aboriginal cultures of Australia, which have existed essentially unchanged for fifty thousand years or more.
The idea of intellectual property predates written history.
The argument for intellectual property has been repeated so often-- many times by myself-- that I won't bother restating it here. Short version: ideas are work products; exclusive ownership of an idea creates an idea economy; taking an idea without consideration to the idea's owner deprives the owner of value; ergo, ideas have value; value plus scarcity equals property.
No, rights are rights and come from the human condition (or from God if that is your belief). The U.S. constitution simply enumerates and guarantees protection from the infringement for some of the rights you have. Your rights are not created by law.
That's a nice sentiment. In the end, it's utterly useless. For example, I believe that the human condition, or God if you prefer, has granted me the right to a free lunch every Tuesday. But yesterday I went from restaurant to restaurant, and at every one they said they'd never heard of such a thing. I was sorely disappointed, but it was impossible to argue with them. I kept saying, "But rights are rights, and come from the human condition!" They all laughed at me.
We can argue philosophy all day and still not reach a useful conclusion. The fact is that, from a practical perspective, you have no natural rights. None. They simply don't exist. What we do have, however, is limits on government power that guarantee that we will not be subject to certain kinds of laws. We call these guarantees "rights."
Certain aspects of it are even guaranteed by the constitution.
Privacy? In the Constitution? No, sir. The Constitution says that you can expect to be free of unreasonable searches and seizures, but that's as far as it goes.
There are exceptions to this called "fair use" that allow this copying take place.
Right. Exceptions.
Copyright holders in the form of large media conglomerates seem to believe that copyright gives them absolute control over how their work is used. But this is false.
No, it's not. It's completely true. Except for a few very specific exceptions. That's why they're called "exceptions." Activities that are not specifically covered by Title 17 107 and other statues that define non-infringing use are not allowed.
However copyright holders don't recognize any of this as proper or legal.
Of course we (you do realize that everyone is a copyright holder, right?) recognize that these things are legal. We just don't care. There is no law on the books that says, "Copyright holders are hereby required to make sure that their licensees can make perfect digital reproductions of their works for non-infringing purposes." It's simply not a requirement. If you, the licensee, want to go making non-infringing copies of our, the licensors, works, that's fine with us. But if, in stopping the rampant piracy that has swept the country and the world since the mid-1990's, we hinder your ability to do so, that's just hard cheese. If you don't like it, don't buy the product.
But wrapping your dissatisfaction up in cries of "its bad policy for a free society" is disingenuous, dishonest, and wrong.
Of course, let us not forget that we could avoid this whole discussion if we would all, as a society, agree to stop pirating copyrighted works. We could voluntarily shut down Kazaa and Gnutella and all the other pirate-to-pirate (P2P) networks for a start; that in and of itself would probably take care of most of the casual piracy going on in the world.
What's that you say? You don't think people are likely to do that? Then cry havoc, and let slip the dogs of DRM. You've made your choice; now live with it.
However the DRM system that we are likely to get will not be that perfect implementation
Hee hee. So you're up in arms about how terrible DRM might be? Lordy, run for the hills, everybody! Society's a-teeterin' on the proverbial brink!
To let me utilise all my rights...
Which rights are those, exactly? I do so hope you're not talking about fair use. There's no such thing as a fair use right. There are fair use exceptions, but those aren't rights.
For example, let's say I came up with some kind of magical technology that prevented a person from playing back a music CD in a classroom. (This is just hypothetical, to prove the point.) Using a piece of copyrighted music for educational purposes is not an infringement; it's covered by the fair use exception. But I have invented a piece of technology that prevents people from doing it.
Which law have I broken? The answer is: none. Copyright holders are under absolutely no obligation to ensure that licensees can make fair use of their works. If copyright holders want to prevent fair use through technological means, that's their prerogative.
...or my fair use rights are subsatially infringed.
Your what use what? Remember, fair use is an exception, not a right.
This is without mentioning the tracking of use patterns (invasion of privacy)...
Privacy isn't a right, either. If a licensor wants to collect information about how many times you listen to the latest Britney Spears single, that's their prerogative.
This is good how?
Because it allows licensors to release digital copies of copyrighted works without fear of the kind of rampant casual piracy that's going on today.
If you don't like it, don't buy it. Keep listening to audio cassettes and watching VHS tapes. Nobody's going to stop you.
Well, gee, if that information hasn't been collected, then it would be a little hard for people to abuse it, wouldn't it?
Hardly a valid argument for prohibiting collection. If cars were illegal, there would be no speeding. If telephones were illegal, there would be no telemarketers. And so on.
Your account of your situation was understandably one-sided. Has the thought crossed your mind that perhaps the ethics committee hasn't done anything about this problem because they simply don't think it's a very big deal?
I have no way of knowing, from your post, whether your situation is actually significant or not. It may seem significant to you, but to others it may seem trivial at best. Before you go wasting anybody else's time on this, you might want to take a little time to consider whether it's really worth getting all up-in-arms about.
For all I know, you may have done this already. But if you haven't, please do so.
Just because it's not illegal to make note of purchases doesn't mean that you have the right to do so, necessarily.
Again, we're back to your gross overuse of the word "right" here. Is there a law against it? No. Is there a compelling case that there should be a law? No. The question of rights simply shouldn't come up.
The willy-nilly invocation of "rights" is a sign of the culture of entitlement, you know.
Where do you draw the line when it comes to tracking what people do?
You don't. Why should there be a line? If I want to follow you around all the time-- unbeknownst to you, of course-- and record all your comings and goings in a little book that I keep under my pillow, why should I be prevented by law?
Generally speaking, the line-- for lack of a better expression-- delineates harmful acts from harmless acts. Keeping track of what you bought and when and where is a fundamentally harmless act. Even using that information for marketing purposes, or for general business purposes, is fundamentally harmless.
In fact, I'm having a very difficult time imagining a scenario in which having your purchases recorded in various company databases somewhere could be twisted into something harmful. I just can't think of anything off the top of my head that would involve the collection or use of that information and that would cause you, the customer, any harm at all.
I feel it is an invasive technology that has the potential to cost you a bit of my freedom and anonymity.
Anonymity? Yes, but that's just an illusion anyway. Anybody who wants to can gather as much information about you as his heart desires.
Freedom? No. And don't dust off that old "slippery slope" argument, either. It's as bogus today as it was when it was first conceived, when one caveman used it against another caveman to argue that cave paintings were generally a bad idea.
I do care and they won't be getting my money from now on.
For the record: how much money has Benetton gotten from you in the past?
Whether or not the US Government respects privacy rights is another matter entirely, but to say we don't have them is incorrect.
What are rights? Rights are binding guarantees. We say that we have a right to free speech because the Constitution guarantees that Congress will not abridge our freedom of speech. Is there any such legal guarantee, in the Constitution or in the body of federal law, against generalized invasion of privacy by the government or by any other entity? No.
The Warren paper, while noteworthy, deals exclusively with the publication of personal information. The paper, written when my grandfather was my age and more than 110 years old now, provides no guidance on the question of whether it should be lawful for a company to collect information about its customers.
Let's reduce this to the degenerate case. Let's say I run a store. You come in to the store and buy a stick of gum. I make a note of this in a little book that I keep behind the register. A week later, you come in again and buy another stick of gum. I note this purchase also. A week after that, you come in and ask me for the same stick of gum, but I tell you it's out of stock. The week after that, you come in a fourth time, and I tell you without your asking that the gum you like is now back in stock.
You then cry, "Oh, my privacy!" and run screaming from the store.
Is it, at the present time, illegal for me to make a note of your purchases? Is it, at the present time, illegal for me to use technological means to accomplish same? Is there a reasonable, convincing argument that such activities should be illegal?
The answer to all three questions is no. The oft-mentioned "right to privacy" is a myth, a consensual lie.
I suppose a majority of people will be quite happy to give away their right to privacy...
Their what to what? Where do you live, friend, that you are guaranteed privacy? I know of a few places in the world where you are guaranteed to be free from unreasonable searches and seizures performed by the government, but that's as far as it goes.
Every time somebody says the phrase "right to privacy" in a sentence that doesn't begin with "I wish I had a," they lose credibility. There is no right to privacy. You could say that you want privacy, or that you demand privacy, or that you refuse to associate yourself with anyone that doesn't respect your privacy, but to say that you have a right to privacy is simply untrue.
For any given item, all it takes is one determined individual somewhere in the world, then the genie is out of the bottle.
Sure. So? We've already established that DRM isn't concerned with preventing determined miscreants from breaking the law. It's concerned with preventing those who wish to follow the rules from casually breaking them.
DRM is like a lock on your car door. A determined thief can break your window and swipe your stereo. And yet we put locks on our car doors anyway.
And with DRM, it probably won't be easy for you to turn your own CDs into MP3s for home use any more either.
I hate the jargon, but this statement is nothing more than FUD. You have no basis for making it. The net result of a properly implemented DRM system will be that law-abiding users will never know the difference, but those who wish to break the law will find it to be a royal pain in the ass.
Any DRM that is not mandatory and draconian will be trivially cracked.
So? DRM does not exist to prevent a determined individual from breaking the law. It exists to make it difficult for law-abiding citizens to inadvertently break the law. For example, right now it's easy to turn your own CD into MP3's for use in your own home, but it's just as easy to give those MP3's away to your friends. One of those is legal and other is illegal. DRM is intended to make it as inconvenient as possible for licensed users to inadvertently break the law.
DRM will, when properly implemented, effectively solve the problem of casual piracy.
Actually, it is. Making an unauthorized copy of copyrighted material is illegal. The law defines a number of exceptions based on the purpose of the copy, but in all other cases it's illegal. The presumption when it comes to copyright law is that copying without explicit authorization is illegal unless the user can demonstrate that the copy was non-infringing.
See where I'm going?
Nope.
Perhaps more, easy to read, information is needed about DRM.
Bits are cheap to move around. Business models need to adapt. How does this imply that we need to abolish intellectual property?
The question of how cheap they are to move around isn't relevant unless you want to talk about abolishing intellectual property. I don't care how easy or difficult it is to make a copy of a CD; it's illegal, and must not be done.
The only way that c current business models can survive (artificial scarcity) is to seriously invade my computing equipment and have draconian legislation.
Why do you keep saying this over and over when it (1) is not true, and (b) has been demonstrated to you not to be true?
DVT has been pimped around passenger flights as a problem lately. Personally I think it's just an excuse to sue.
You might be surprised. There was a case not too long ago, though I don't remember the details, where a 20-something-year-old woman on a flight from Singapore to London or vice-versa dropped dead from a DVT after she arrived.
DVT is definitely real; the question is, is the airline liable for the woman's death? There are very convincing arguments on both side of that equation.
Never mentioned?! Every time the subject of music delivery comes up, some shill or other posts a comment almost exactly like yours. I don't know whether this is part of an organized ad campaign or really, as you say, just a bunch of happy customers, but the net result is that this whatever-it-is is hardly "never mentioned."
I stand by my position. Business models need to adapt to technology.
Yeah, yeah. The only way your argument holds up is if you assume that we should abolish intellectual property. Which is as absurd as it is unlikely.
DRM will make my computer able to be controlled by someone else.
See? Giant straw man. DRM requires no such thing. DRM-- digital rights management-- gives users of licensed media tools to manage the various rights and clearances that they have purchased for that media. It can be something as simple as a database, or as complex as hardware-keyed encryption.
The idea of DRM-- back before there was a TLA for it-- has been in use for at least a decade; that's as far back as my experience goes. Ever heard of FlexLM? That's DRM. You can't use a piece of FlexLM-licensed software unless you have a license key for it, and license keys can be time-limited. That's a very simple form of DRM, and it doesn't require that anybody else control your computer.
On the subject of the two-button mouse: the Aqua human interface guidelines specifiy that a contextual menu should not be used for any feature that is not also accessible through another UI control. Assuming for sake of argument that all software everwhere follows the Aqua HIG, you never have to control-click on a Mac. Ever.
On the subject of the menu bar: google for Fitts's Law.
On the subject of quitting an application by closing its window: some Mac applications have this behavior, some don't. The virtual memory implementation in OS X works in such a way that having extra idle apps open has essentially no effect. One you hit your physical memory limit, those applications get paged out to disk and no longer occupy physical RAM until they're activated again.
Of course, this is just another one of those KDE vs. Gnome... things. It has no answer.
I think the purpose of this web site is to demonstrate that this is not merely a question of preference, but rather that which is the better OS can be quantified, and a conclusion reached thereby. All that's left is to argue about the methodology.
I want to be able to control the piece of text you copied-n-pasted from the e-mail I wrote to you yesterday. The only way this can happen is if I can trust your computer.
Demonstrably false. The whole "DRM will make your computer illegal" thing is a big, fat straw man argument.
The plain simple fact is that technology has now made it possible to cheaply copy bits to anyone on the planet. Business models need to adapt.
The plain simple fact is that the copying of bits to anyone on the planet without explicit authorization from the copyright holder is illegal. Users need to stop doing it.
Between SN74S181 and Planesdragon, this question has been answered. In short, (1) DRM will, when properly implemented, provide an effective means to curtail the rampant piracy that has swept the nation and the world since the advent of the MP3 and other media compression technologies, which will in turn result in (b) the more widespread availability of digital media.
I'd like to point out that your principles with regards to DRM are exactly the opposite of your principles with regards to war on Iraq.
The prevailing theory in the inner circles at this time is that those two men died from a DVT, a deep vein thrombosis. A common interrogation technique used by the United States is to catheterize a subject, tie him to a chair, and leave him there for as long as necessary. The subject is kept awake by interrogating agents working in shifts. Deprived of sleep and mobility, the word is that subjects crack inside a week.
The problem is that long-term immobility can cause blood clots to form in the deep veins, particularly in the legs. These show no symptoms until the subject stands up and moves around, at which time the clot releases from the wall of the vessel and goes to the lungs where it forms a pulmonary embolus. The lungs collapse and the heart and brain, starved of oxygen, die.
According to the Washington rumor mill, some have suggested making the use of a clot-dissolving drug, such as TPA, a part of the interrogation protocol, but that brings its own set of problems. TPA can dissolve minute blood clots in the vessels of the brain, causing intracranial bleeding and severe neurological distress or death. So the solution might be worse than the problem.
Slashdot Mirror
We should base the law on our morals.
Oh, I absolutely agree. The problem is that there are some 280,000,000 people in the United States, and every single one of 'em has a different idea of what their rights should be. That's why we have documents like the Bill of Rights that define some broad areas over which the government cannot pass laws. Personal privacy is not one of those areas.
You do not have a right to privacy. If you want to argue that you should, go right ahead. I doubt you'll get very far.
"Intellectual property" is a fiction along the lines of pretending that information is like a physical item.
See? Absurd.
Intellectual property is not a new idea. It can be traced back several thousand years on the American continent; the Haida and Tlingit peoples of the Pacific northwest have believed for millennia that it's theft to sing another clan's song without permission. The same basic principle is found in the aboriginal cultures of Australia, which have existed essentially unchanged for fifty thousand years or more.
The idea of intellectual property predates written history.
The argument for intellectual property has been repeated so often-- many times by myself-- that I won't bother restating it here. Short version: ideas are work products; exclusive ownership of an idea creates an idea economy; taking an idea without consideration to the idea's owner deprives the owner of value; ergo, ideas have value; value plus scarcity equals property.
No, rights are rights and come from the human condition (or from God if that is your belief). The U.S. constitution simply enumerates and guarantees protection from the infringement for some of the rights you have. Your rights are not created by law.
That's a nice sentiment. In the end, it's utterly useless. For example, I believe that the human condition, or God if you prefer, has granted me the right to a free lunch every Tuesday. But yesterday I went from restaurant to restaurant, and at every one they said they'd never heard of such a thing. I was sorely disappointed, but it was impossible to argue with them. I kept saying, "But rights are rights, and come from the human condition!" They all laughed at me.
We can argue philosophy all day and still not reach a useful conclusion. The fact is that, from a practical perspective, you have no natural rights. None. They simply don't exist. What we do have, however, is limits on government power that guarantee that we will not be subject to certain kinds of laws. We call these guarantees "rights."
Certain aspects of it are even guaranteed by the constitution.
Privacy? In the Constitution? No, sir. The Constitution says that you can expect to be free of unreasonable searches and seizures, but that's as far as it goes.
There are exceptions to this called "fair use" that allow this copying take place.
Right. Exceptions.
Copyright holders in the form of large media conglomerates seem to believe that copyright gives them absolute control over how their work is used. But this is false.
No, it's not. It's completely true. Except for a few very specific exceptions. That's why they're called "exceptions." Activities that are not specifically covered by Title 17 107 and other statues that define non-infringing use are not allowed.
However copyright holders don't recognize any of this as proper or legal.
Of course we (you do realize that everyone is a copyright holder, right?) recognize that these things are legal. We just don't care. There is no law on the books that says, "Copyright holders are hereby required to make sure that their licensees can make perfect digital reproductions of their works for non-infringing purposes." It's simply not a requirement. If you, the licensee, want to go making non-infringing copies of our, the licensors, works, that's fine with us. But if, in stopping the rampant piracy that has swept the country and the world since the mid-1990's, we hinder your ability to do so, that's just hard cheese. If you don't like it, don't buy the product.
But wrapping your dissatisfaction up in cries of "its bad policy for a free society" is disingenuous, dishonest, and wrong.
Of course, let us not forget that we could avoid this whole discussion if we would all, as a society, agree to stop pirating copyrighted works. We could voluntarily shut down Kazaa and Gnutella and all the other pirate-to-pirate (P2P) networks for a start; that in and of itself would probably take care of most of the casual piracy going on in the world.
What's that you say? You don't think people are likely to do that? Then cry havoc, and let slip the dogs of DRM. You've made your choice; now live with it.
Hee hee. So you're up in arms about how terrible DRM might be? Lordy, run for the hills, everybody! Society's a-teeterin' on the proverbial brink!
To let me utilise all my rights...
Which rights are those, exactly? I do so hope you're not talking about fair use. There's no such thing as a fair use right. There are fair use exceptions, but those aren't rights.
For example, let's say I came up with some kind of magical technology that prevented a person from playing back a music CD in a classroom. (This is just hypothetical, to prove the point.) Using a piece of copyrighted music for educational purposes is not an infringement; it's covered by the fair use exception. But I have invented a piece of technology that prevents people from doing it.
Which law have I broken? The answer is: none. Copyright holders are under absolutely no obligation to ensure that licensees can make fair use of their works. If copyright holders want to prevent fair use through technological means, that's their prerogative.
Your what use what? Remember, fair use is an exception, not a right.
This is without mentioning the tracking of use patterns (invasion of privacy)...
Privacy isn't a right, either. If a licensor wants to collect information about how many times you listen to the latest Britney Spears single, that's their prerogative.
This is good how?
Because it allows licensors to release digital copies of copyrighted works without fear of the kind of rampant casual piracy that's going on today.
If you don't like it, don't buy it. Keep listening to audio cassettes and watching VHS tapes. Nobody's going to stop you.
Well, gee, if that information hasn't been collected, then it would be a little hard for people to abuse it, wouldn't it?
Hardly a valid argument for prohibiting collection. If cars were illegal, there would be no speeding. If telephones were illegal, there would be no telemarketers. And so on.
Your account of your situation was understandably one-sided. Has the thought crossed your mind that perhaps the ethics committee hasn't done anything about this problem because they simply don't think it's a very big deal?
I have no way of knowing, from your post, whether your situation is actually significant or not. It may seem significant to you, but to others it may seem trivial at best. Before you go wasting anybody else's time on this, you might want to take a little time to consider whether it's really worth getting all up-in-arms about.
For all I know, you may have done this already. But if you haven't, please do so.
I don't even use those supermarket club cards, because of the tiny loss of privacy they cause.
And yet you post to Slashdot. Your IP address is being recorded at this very moment. How do you sleep at night?
I know I'm a bit at the fringe on this topic...
Jim, I say this with all due respect and the warmest of regards: on this topic you make the lunatic fringe look positively reasonable.
Just because it's not illegal to make note of purchases doesn't mean that you have the right to do so, necessarily.
Again, we're back to your gross overuse of the word "right" here. Is there a law against it? No. Is there a compelling case that there should be a law? No. The question of rights simply shouldn't come up.
The willy-nilly invocation of "rights" is a sign of the culture of entitlement, you know.
Where do you draw the line when it comes to tracking what people do?
You don't. Why should there be a line? If I want to follow you around all the time-- unbeknownst to you, of course-- and record all your comings and goings in a little book that I keep under my pillow, why should I be prevented by law?
Generally speaking, the line-- for lack of a better expression-- delineates harmful acts from harmless acts. Keeping track of what you bought and when and where is a fundamentally harmless act. Even using that information for marketing purposes, or for general business purposes, is fundamentally harmless.
In fact, I'm having a very difficult time imagining a scenario in which having your purchases recorded in various company databases somewhere could be twisted into something harmful. I just can't think of anything off the top of my head that would involve the collection or use of that information and that would cause you, the customer, any harm at all.
I feel it is an invasive technology that has the potential to cost you a bit of my freedom and anonymity.
Anonymity? Yes, but that's just an illusion anyway. Anybody who wants to can gather as much information about you as his heart desires.
Freedom? No. And don't dust off that old "slippery slope" argument, either. It's as bogus today as it was when it was first conceived, when one caveman used it against another caveman to argue that cave paintings were generally a bad idea.
I do care and they won't be getting my money from now on.
For the record: how much money has Benetton gotten from you in the past?
Whether or not the US Government respects privacy rights is another matter entirely, but to say we don't have them is incorrect.
What are rights? Rights are binding guarantees. We say that we have a right to free speech because the Constitution guarantees that Congress will not abridge our freedom of speech. Is there any such legal guarantee, in the Constitution or in the body of federal law, against generalized invasion of privacy by the government or by any other entity? No.
The Warren paper, while noteworthy, deals exclusively with the publication of personal information. The
paper, written when my grandfather was my age and more than 110 years old now, provides no guidance on the question of whether it should be lawful for a company to collect information about its customers.
Let's reduce this to the degenerate case. Let's say I run a store. You come in to the store and buy a stick of gum. I make a note of this in a little book that I keep behind the register. A week later, you come in again and buy another stick of gum. I note this purchase also. A week after that, you come in and ask me for the same stick of gum, but I tell you it's out of stock. The week after that, you come in a fourth time, and I tell you without your asking that the gum you like is now back in stock.
You then cry, "Oh, my privacy!" and run screaming from the store.
Is it, at the present time, illegal for me to make a note of your purchases? Is it, at the present time, illegal for me to use technological means to accomplish same? Is there a reasonable, convincing argument that such activities should be illegal?
The answer to all three questions is no. The oft-mentioned "right to privacy" is a myth, a consensual lie.
how the hell does IT know where it is?
RF triangulation.
I suppose a majority of people will be quite happy to give away their right to privacy...
Their what to what? Where do you live, friend, that you are guaranteed privacy? I know of a few places in the world where you are guaranteed to be free from unreasonable searches and seizures performed by the government, but that's as far as it goes.
Every time somebody says the phrase "right to privacy" in a sentence that doesn't begin with "I wish I had a," they lose credibility. There is no right to privacy. You could say that you want privacy, or that you demand privacy, or that you refuse to associate yourself with anyone that doesn't respect your privacy, but to say that you have a right to privacy is simply untrue.
For any given item, all it takes is one determined individual somewhere in the world, then the genie is out of the bottle.
Sure. So? We've already established that DRM isn't concerned with preventing determined miscreants from breaking the law. It's concerned with preventing those who wish to follow the rules from casually breaking them.
DRM is like a lock on your car door. A determined thief can break your window and swipe your stereo. And yet we put locks on our car doors anyway.
And with DRM, it probably won't be easy for you to turn your own CDs into MP3s for home use any more either.
I hate the jargon, but this statement is nothing more than FUD. You have no basis for making it. The net result of a properly implemented DRM system will be that law-abiding users will never know the difference, but those who wish to break the law will find it to be a royal pain in the ass.
Any DRM that is not mandatory and draconian will be trivially cracked.
So? DRM does not exist to prevent a determined individual from breaking the law. It exists to make it difficult for law-abiding citizens to inadvertently break the law. For example, right now it's easy to turn your own CD into MP3's for use in your own home, but it's just as easy to give those MP3's away to your friends. One of those is legal and other is illegal. DRM is intended to make it as inconvenient as possible for licensed users to inadvertently break the law.
DRM will, when properly implemented, effectively solve the problem of casual piracy.
Making your own copy is not illegal.
Actually, it is. Making an unauthorized copy of copyrighted material is illegal. The law defines a number of exceptions based on the purpose of the copy, but in all other cases it's illegal. The presumption when it comes to copyright law is that copying without explicit authorization is illegal unless the user can demonstrate that the copy was non-infringing.
See where I'm going?
Nope.
Perhaps more, easy to read, information is needed about DRM.
Why?
Bits are cheap to move around. Business models need to adapt. How does this imply that we need to abolish intellectual property?
The question of how cheap they are to move around isn't relevant unless you want to talk about abolishing intellectual property. I don't care how easy or difficult it is to make a copy of a CD; it's illegal, and must not be done.
The only way that c current business models can survive (artificial scarcity) is to seriously invade my computing equipment and have draconian legislation.
Why do you keep saying this over and over when it (1) is not true, and (b) has been demonstrated to you not to be true?
DVT has been pimped around passenger flights as a problem lately. Personally I think it's just an excuse to sue.
You might be surprised. There was a case not too long ago, though I don't remember the details, where a 20-something-year-old woman on a flight from Singapore to London or vice-versa dropped dead from a DVT after she arrived.
DVT is definitely real; the question is, is the airline liable for the woman's death? There are very convincing arguments on both side of that equation.
The never mentioned legal music download site.
Never mentioned?! Every time the subject of music delivery comes up, some shill or other posts a comment almost exactly like yours. I don't know whether this is part of an organized ad campaign or really, as you say, just a bunch of happy customers, but the net result is that this whatever-it-is is hardly "never mentioned."
I stand by my position. Business models need to adapt to technology.
Yeah, yeah. The only way your argument holds up is if you assume that we should abolish intellectual property. Which is as absurd as it is unlikely.
DRM will make my computer able to be controlled by someone else.
See? Giant straw man. DRM requires no such thing. DRM-- digital rights management-- gives users of licensed media tools to manage the various rights and clearances that they have purchased for that media. It can be something as simple as a database, or as complex as hardware-keyed encryption.
The idea of DRM-- back before there was a TLA for it-- has been in use for at least a decade; that's as far back as my experience goes. Ever heard of FlexLM? That's DRM. You can't use a piece of FlexLM-licensed software unless you have a license key for it, and license keys can be time-limited. That's a very simple form of DRM, and it doesn't require that anybody else control your computer.
that doesn't mean that the right to be treated with dignity isn't protected.
Um. That's actually exactly what it means. If it's not in the Constitution, then, no matter how widely held, it's merely an opinion.
On the subject of the two-button mouse: the Aqua human interface guidelines specifiy that a contextual menu should not be used for any feature that is not also accessible through another UI control. Assuming for sake of argument that all software everwhere follows the Aqua HIG, you never have to control-click on a Mac. Ever.
On the subject of the menu bar: google for Fitts's Law.
On the subject of quitting an application by closing its window: some Mac applications have this behavior, some don't. The virtual memory implementation in OS X works in such a way that having extra idle apps open has essentially no effect. One you hit your physical memory limit, those applications get paged out to disk and no longer occupy physical RAM until they're activated again.
Of course, this is just another one of those KDE vs. Gnome... things. It has no answer.
I think the purpose of this web site is to demonstrate that this is not merely a question of preference, but rather that which is the better OS can be quantified, and a conclusion reached thereby. All that's left is to argue about the methodology.
I want to be able to control the piece of text you copied-n-pasted from the e-mail I wrote to you yesterday. The only way this can happen is if I can trust your computer.
Demonstrably false. The whole "DRM will make your computer illegal" thing is a big, fat straw man argument.
The plain simple fact is that technology has now made it possible to cheaply copy bits to anyone on the planet. Business models need to adapt.
The plain simple fact is that the copying of bits to anyone on the planet without explicit authorization from the copyright holder is illegal. Users need to stop doing it.
In what way does DRM contribute to society?
Between SN74S181 and Planesdragon, this question has been answered. In short, (1) DRM will, when properly implemented, provide an effective means to curtail the rampant piracy that has swept the nation and the world since the advent of the MP3 and other media compression technologies, which will in turn result in (b) the more widespread availability of digital media.
I'd like to point out that your principles with regards to DRM are exactly the opposite of your principles with regards to war on Iraq.
Explain how?
The prevailing theory in the inner circles at this time is that those two men died from a DVT, a deep vein thrombosis. A common interrogation technique used by the United States is to catheterize a subject, tie him to a chair, and leave him there for as long as necessary. The subject is kept awake by interrogating agents working in shifts. Deprived of sleep and mobility, the word is that subjects crack inside a week.
The problem is that long-term immobility can cause blood clots to form in the deep veins, particularly in the legs. These show no symptoms until the subject stands up and moves around, at which time the clot releases from the wall of the vessel and goes to the lungs where it forms a pulmonary embolus. The lungs collapse and the heart and brain, starved of oxygen, die.
According to the Washington rumor mill, some have suggested making the use of a clot-dissolving drug, such as TPA, a part of the interrogation protocol, but that brings its own set of problems. TPA can dissolve minute blood clots in the vessels of the brain, causing intracranial bleeding and severe neurological distress or death. So the solution might be worse than the problem.