Trust me, if New Jersey legislators had been able to pass a worldwide law, they would have. But the New Jersey legislature only has jurisdiction over New Jersey, so they're doing the best they can.
If N guns are manufactured in New Jersey in 2006, there will be N guns on the market that have this kind of safety gizmo built in, which is better than the status quo.
And finally, this law has nothing at all to do with crime. It has to do with public safety. As a crime bill, this law will probably not do a very good job. As a safety bill, assuming the technology works, I imagine it'll be quite effective.
I feel sorry for anyone who fell for the parody site (after reading the whole thing), but I don't think it was out of line. If someone was misled by the parody site, then they're not careful readers.
Remember, this isn't just about the site. It's about the press release that these guys sent out with Dow's name all over it. There was absolutely nothing about this press release that even implied that it was a parody. It looked like a perfectly genuine, if insanely horrible, corporate statement. The only clue that it's not completely genuine is the fact that the press release refers to a past president of Dow as if he were the current president, and I only know that because I looked it up while fact-checking the release. The name "Panaline Boneril" sounds suspiciously like an anagram, but what the heck is "a plebeian or Lenin" supposed to mean?
This is clearly defamation and fraud. Have a look. (This copy was emailed to the BBC's "Breakfast" show, and was included in the lawyer's correspondence to Verio.)
From: Dow Chemical Corporation [SMTP:press@dow-chemical.com] Sent: Tuesday, December 03, 2002 9:49 AM To: Breakfast R5L <breakfast@bbc.co.uk> Subject: DOW ADDRESSES BHOPAL OUTRAGE, EXPLAINS POSITION
December 3, 2002
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE Contact: mailto:press@dow-chemical.com
DOW ADDRESSES BHOPAL OUTRAGE, EXPLAINS POSITION Company responds to activist concerns with concrete action points
In response to growing public outrage over its handling of the Bhopal disaster's legacy, Dow Chemical (http://www.dow-chemical.com) has issued a statement explaining why it is unable to more actively address the problem.
"We are being portrayed as a heartless giant which doesn't care about the 20,000 lives lost due to Bhopal over the years," said Dow President and CEO Michael D. Parker. "But this just isn't true. Many individuals within Dow feel tremendous sorrow about the Bhopal disaster, and many individuals within Dow would like the corporation to admit its responsibility, so that the public can then decide on the best course of action, as is appropriate in any democracy.
"Unfortunately, we have responsibilities to our shareholders and our industry colleagues that make action on Bhopal impossible. And being clear about this has been a very big step."
On December 3, 1984, Union Carbide--now part of Dow--accidentally killed 5,000 residents of Bhopal, India, when its pesticide plant sprung a leak. It abandoned the plant without cleaning it up, and since then, an estimated 15,000 more people have died from complications, most resulting from chemicals released into the groundwater.
Although legal investigations have consistently pinpointed Union Carbide as culprit, both Union Carbide and Dow have had to publicly deny these findings. After the accident, Union Carbide compensated victims' families between US$300 and US$500 per victim.
"We understand the anger and hurt," said Dow Spokesperson Bob Questra. "But Dow does not and cannot acknowledge responsibility. If we did, not only would we be required to expend many billions of dollars on cleanup and compensation--much worse, the public could then point to Dow as a precedent in other big cases. 'They took responsibility; why can't you?' Amoco, BP, Shell, and Exxon all have ongoing problems that would just get much worse. We are unable to set this precedent for ourselves and the industry, much as we would like to see the issue resolved in a humane and satisfying way."
Shareholders reacted to the Dow statement with enthusiasm. "I'm happy that Dow is being clear about its aims," said Panaline Boneril, who owns 10,000 shares, "because Bhopal is a recurrent problem that's clogging our value chain and ultimately keeping the share price from expressing its full potential. Although a real solution is not immediately possible because of Dow's commitments to the larger industry issues, there is new hope in management's exceptional new clarity on the matter."
"It's a slow process," said Questra. "We must learn bit by bit to meet this challenge head-on. For now, this means acknowledging that much as it pains us, our prime responsibilities are to the people who own Dow shares, and to the industry as a whole. We simply cannot do anything at this moment for the people of Bhopal."
Dow Chemical is a chemical products and services company devoted to bringing its customers a wide range of chemicals. It furnishes solutions for the agriculture, electronics, manufacturing, and oil and gas industries, including well-known products like Styrofoam, DDT, and Agent Orange, as well as lesser-known brands like Inspire, Retain, Eliminator, Quash, and Woodstalk. For more on the Bhopal catastrophe, please visit Dow at http://www.dow-chemical.com/.
Instead they choose to shut down the whole c-class net after leaving a message on our answering machine giving us 20 minutes to pull the plug on that machine.
According to Verio, Thing.net has been in violation of Verio's AUP for some time. Whether that's true or not is between you guys, but that's their opinion, and it explains why they shut you down.
And, in all fairness, after they restored your connectivity and you asked for 3-4 months to transition to another provider, they did agree to give you 90 days before shutting you down for good, right? I'm not trying to say that they're right and you're wrong, but it's not quite accurate to imply that they're being completely unreasonable, either.
Now, who is disrupting who here? Why is Verio cutting off service to 300 paying customers for 16 hours?
The difference between a denial of service attack against a company that some people find to be politically unacceptable and a company's cutting off a customer that they claim is in material breach of their AUP should be blindingly obvious. You can't really put the two situations on the same level.
As to your question about whether the DMCA was invoked: yes it was.
Yes, I heard. Early this morning I asked for independent confirmation of the DMCA part, and I got it from a couple of different sources, including from Dow's lawyers. I appreciate your mentioning it, though.
With a name like yours, you can't possibly expect to be taken seriously, can you?
If you don't believe what you're saying, then ha ha, very funny, go away now. If you do believe what you're saying, then kindly take your nihilism elsewhere. The things that you say mean absolutely nothing do, in fact, mean something, because people attach value to them.
Real Democrats (and us anti-Republicans) can tell the difference between an adjective and a noun and vote Democratic, not Democrat
Uh... seeing as how the only strictly grammatically correct word in that context would be an adverb-- "vote Democratically"-- we have to fall back to common idiom. When one is stumping, one says, "On November 4th, remember to vote McGuffin!" That's a noun, a proper noun to be precise. So saying "vote Democrat!" is the preferred idiom over "vote Democratic," unless you want to use the whole proper noun and say "vote Democratic Party!"
The artists here are making a valid point about Dow Chemicals' irresponsibility, and callousness.
That has nothing to do with it. They've produced a web site, and are sending out press releases, in the name of Dow Chemical. Whatever your purpose, that's misrepresentation, defamation, and, at worst, fraud.
If they'd created a web site for a fictitious chemical company that bears a striking resemblance to Dow, everything would be cool. But when they used the Dow name, and logo, and represented themselves as Dow to the press, they crossed the line.
I would also like to point out that Dow could have avoided the very negative publicity they hope to avoid by ignoring such political message sites.
Let me say it again. These guys sent a press release out through the newswire and through regular channels claiming to be Dow. It doesn't matter why they did it. They misrepresented themselves, and that's against the law.
Why? If you've got an Exchange server that you need to talk to, Microsoft gives Outlook for Mac away for free. And if you don't have an Exchange server, Mail, Address Book, and iCal make for a better set of personal information tools.
I don't think the Mac really needs Evolution right now.
Keep in mind that ALL computer geeks represent less than 5% of all the people in the world. They suck and the sooner they realize this and die off, the better.
This is a perfect example of a greedy corporation squashing free speech in the name of its lord and savior, the almighty dollar.
Actually, it appears to be a perfect example of misguided souls, despite their good intentions, making unauthorized use of a company's legally protected trademarks, and getting their pee pee's smacked because of it.
The artists, called the Yes Men, hosted by thing.net were making a valid point with their biting satire, and adding a "this is a joke, duh!" disclaimer would detract from the icky feeling their satire was intended to evoke.
Valid point or not, it is not okay to use somebody else's trademarks without their permission. The message would have been just as clear without the malicious intent to deceive.
If they can get a legal defense fund, this could be the test case to overturn the DMCA.
The DMCA claim is only one part of the complaint against these guys. The complaint also cites the Anti-cybersquatting Protection Act ("dow-chemical.com") and the Lanham Act (illegal use of trademarks). Also, these guys issued a false press release in Dow's name intended to defame Dow publicly. But most importantly, everything these guys did, practically, was in violation of Verio's AUP.
I would love to republish the materials in question, but I will use disclaimers if the Yes Men agree.
Go right ahead. Wonderful thing about freedom of speech. Even if you're kicked off of one podium, you can always climb onto another.
I just hope that they put all of the Matrix Movies and all of the LOTR movies in the IMAX theater after it's all said and done so that the die-hards can see the films the way they were meant to be seen.
Uh... you know IMAX uses a different aspect ratio from other cinematic presentations, right? IMAX is a 15-perf 70mm format with a 1.33:1 aspect ratio, same as an old-fashioned TV. All the movies you mentioned were meant to be shown in 2.35:1. To reformat those movies for IMAX will mean having to remove about 40% of the picture. They had to do this with Apollo 13, and later with Attack of the Clones.
These movies were not meant to be seen in IMAX. They were meant to be seen in a regular theater with a screen 2.35 times as wide as it is tall.
As an asside, 'private company' generally means...
Yeah, did you see the thing I wrote up there inside parentheses? Thanks.
Verio had already decided to do business with thing.net, and had written a contract to do so.
And, undoubtedly, that contract included plenty of clauses describing conditions under which either party could terminate.
However, if BillG was really after you, and if all the service providors followed your logic, then you would be silenced, in the medium of the internet.
So? Try as I might, I can't get a network TV show. I'm effectively silenced in the medium of network television. Is this a free speech issue? No, of course not.
As for the reference to the middle ages, it's something called an analogy.
Actually, it's something called hyperbole. And something called wildly inapplicable. And something called a waste of breath.
No, no! That's exactly the point. You're an otherwise entirely reasonable and sensible person, and yet at first glance you were fooled into believing that this page belonged to Dow, and served as an official corporate communication from them. There's no shame in being fooled here; the people who put up that page went to great lengths to make it look completely authentic, even going so far as to put a copyright notice on it.
This is precisely the point. Given that the parody nature of this page isn't remotely obvious, it seems that Dow has a very strong case against these guys. For defamation, at the very least, and possibly even for fraudulent representation.
Um. Verio is a private company. (Well, they're publicly traded, but they're owned by private individuals. You know what I mean.) They are entitled to do business with whomever they please.
Nobody went to these guys and said, "Hey, you can't say that." (At least, not yet.) Rather, Verio said, "If you wanna do that, get your connectivity somewhere else."
Verio is completely and totally free to do that. Just because these guys have a Constitutionally protected right to say (nearly) whatever they want doesn't mean that any particular provider of services is obligated to do business with them.
Let me give you a real-world for-instance. About six years ago I was working as a pre-sales engineer for a fairly major computer company. (You've heard of them.) Somebody came to us and said, "I want to build a web site, and I need a very powerful server to do it." I, along with the sales rep, talked to him, and he said, after some probing, that he wanted to get into the "adult entertainment" business. Basically he wanted to build a porn site.
That's entirely legal. Nothing wrong with it, as far as the law is concerned. But the sales rep I was working with said to me, after the meeting, that he simply didn't want to do business with this guy. He had an opinion on porn-- not necessarily the same as mine, but I respected it-- and he acted accordingly. We never called the guy back, and we never returned any of his subsequent calls.
Life is full of little decisions like that. Ours was made on moral grounds; the sales rep I was working with had a moral objection to porn. Verio's decision was probably made purely on business grounds. Everybody-- individual and corporation alike-- is entitled to make those decisions for themselves.
I stand by my statement that what Verio did was neither illegal, unethical, nor wrong.
Say you have a mindspring.com account. On your personal web page, you post that 'bill gates of borg' icon that he's reputed to hate so much. He causes a letter to be sent to mindspring, and your account is revoked, using the same logic you just called 'a business decision'.
Get an account with another service provider. If you can't find one that will give you an account, take out a bank loan and start your own. If you can't start your own, then get your message out through another medium. Public access television. Letters to the editor. Flyers under windshield wipers. Whatever.
Freedom of speech is not being affected here in any way.
Not held accountable, they could kill anyone they wished without repurcussions. This is just a modern day version of that.
Exaggerate much? Nobody has killed anybody. Let's get this back down to earth, okay?
My intent was to pick something so absurd that it would be obvious that it wasn't meant to be taken literally. Pick your own example. "I'm Mimekiller and I'm a six-foot-tall invisible rabbit." Whatever.
But the larger point still stands, I think. Does parody include some aesthetic value? If so, who identifies it as such? Because, to me, the stuff we're talking about this morning just isn't funny. It's absurd, but just barely so, and not at all funny. Does that mean it's not parody?
how many people actually consider an outlook-killer such a killer app as to be worth $5 million?
Listen, we're in the dark ages as far as collaboration software goes. The more money that gets thrown at this problem, the better.
It's not just that there's no good collaboration software out there. It's that nobody even knows how to do collaboration in a way that doesn't absolutely suck. Somebody needs to start at the beginning and ask the questions, "What does it need to do?" and "How does it need to do it?" Nobody has asked those questions in a comprehensive way yet, so we've ended up with glorified email applications like Outlook and Notes that rely on a store-and-forward message-passing system, built around a central server and a lot of caches. All the eggs in one basket, so to speak.
Somebody needs to take collaboration all the way back to the drawing board. Is Kapor the guy to do it? No idea. But it's good that somebody is trying.
It's still a parody site -- even though there aren't any disclaimers stating as much.
Where's the line between parody and fraud? If I said, "I'm Mimekiller and I think kiddie porn is awesome!" that could reasonably be construed as parody. It's fairly absurd, so only the most gullible person would believe it. But if I said, "I'm Mimekiller and I vote Democrat!" that's not obviously parody. It sounds perfectly reasonable, and if one didn't know that Mimekiller is a staunch Dewey Socialist, one might not think twice about that statement.
These guys could have saved themselves a lot of trouble by calling their site "Dowe Chemical" or something.
Can anybody dig up independent confirmation that this has anything at all to do with the DMCA? The RTMark press release mentions it in the context, "Dow was not amused, and sent a Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) complaint to Verio, which immediately cut Thing.net off the internet for fifteen hours." But that doesn't make a whole lot of sense.
More importantly, the New York Times article on the subject (here), makes no reference at all to the DMCA, instead saying that "Dow's lawyers contacted Verio to complain that the site infringed on its trademarks, among other sins." If the DMCA were involved, I'm reasonably sure that the NYT article would mention it.
If I had to take a wild-ass guess, I'd say that what probably happened is that Dow simply told Verio that they want the offending web site shut down, and possibly that the site was making unauthorized use of their trademarks or some such. Verio said to themselves, "On the one hand we have a bunch of activists who pay their bills, but who aren't a significant source of revenue for us. On the other hand we have Dow Chemical, a gigantic multinational corporation that could throw us a lot of money if we have a good relationship with them." And they made a business decision.
If that's what happened, I really don't see a reason to get all up-in-arms. Yes, this is an inconvenience for the activists. But, if it happened the way I'm guessing, nobody did anything illegal, or even unethical.
(Incidentally, the NYT article also says, "When [Staehle] called Verio to ask why his entire network had been unplugged instead of the sole offending site, he said, a Verio lawyer told him that the Thing had violated its policies repeatedly and that its contract would be terminated."
The article goes on: "Verio had shut down part of the Thing once before. In 1999 the online toy retailer eToys.com asked a California court to stop an online arts group from using its longtime Web address etoy.com. The Electronic Disturbance Theater, a Thing client, staged a virtual protest by overloading the retailer's site with traffic during the holiday season. Verio blocked access to one of the Thing's computers until the protest site's owners agreed to take it offline."
Sounds like Thing.net isn't merely the mild-mannered parody site it claims to be. Parody is one thing. Actual disruption is something else altogether. Though they're not commenting, maybe Verio had some really good reasons to do what they did.)
A broadcast is an act of copying...Thousands of televisions across the nation get a duplicate of the one show.
Broadcasting isn't copying. It's public performance. Broadcasting can result in copies being made today, what with VCRs and all, but back in the early days of television that wasn't true. There was no such thing as home recording equipment, so broadcasting and copying had nothing at all to do with each other. They don't really have anything to do with each other today, either, except to the extent that broadcasting and copying intersect when it comes to home recording.
So yeah. The idea that copyright holders get to determine more than simply who does and who does not get to copy their works has been around for nearly 100 years.
I agree with everything you said-- surprisingly, because we've had some pretty exciting arguments in the past-- except for one tiny thing. Your post kinda made it sound like the DMCA embodied a sudden shift in the way people think about these things. I don't think that's true. I think it's been, in fact, a very gradual change over the course of about a century. It really got started when radio became widespread, and the idea of "broadcasting" became known. It was immediately recognized that broadcasting is different from copying, but that the two share certain important characteristics. In general, the copyright holder gets to decide whether a work can be broadcast or not, and under what circumstance.
Think of it this way. If television station KBBL buys a copy of "Pokemon: The First Movie," are they allowed to broadcast that movie over the air? No, despite the fact that they own a legally purchased copy of the movie. If KBBL wants to broadcast that movie, they have to go to the copyright holder (or, more accurately, an agent thereof) and secure a license to do so. That license-- sometimes called a "clearance"-- will say something like, "KBBL can show 'Pokemon: The First Movie' up to three times during calendar year 2003, but only on Saturday afternoons between 1 and 4 PM." As long as KBBL follows those rules, they're okay. But if they show the movie a fourth time, on a Tuesday at 9 AM, they're in big trouble, and will probably have to pay a substantial penalty to the licensor.
So the idea that copyright holders get to determine more than simply who does and who does not get to copy their works has been around for nearly 100 years.
I'm not disagreeing with your main point at all; I'm just saying that the idea embodied and protected by the DMCA is not a new one at all, and its adoption by authors and legislators alike was not sudden.
Public Software Foundation is the most accurate name I think.
I can't say I like that one. Public makes me think of public domain, and software that's released under the GPL is far more tightly restricted than software that's in the public domain. But at this point we're just haggling over the price, if you get my meaning.
Of course they would never change the name because "Free" is such a powerful marketing word, and nonprofits market just like everybody else.
Exactly. It's all about marketing, and the FSF's marketing is so politically oriented that it crosses the line into actual propaganda.
You, Mr. Brett Glass, are my hero. I've spent the past several years thinking that there's something going on in Stallman's head that I can't quite get a grasp on. I'm excited to check out this book you mention.
I was surprised at how many results Google found for emacs video editing.
I was surprised that Google found 3,650 results for "emacs kitchen sink." Guess that just goes to show that counting Google hits is not, after all, a valid form of research.
Slashdot Mirror
Trust me, if New Jersey legislators had been able to pass a worldwide law, they would have. But the New Jersey legislature only has jurisdiction over New Jersey, so they're doing the best they can.
If N guns are manufactured in New Jersey in 2006, there will be N guns on the market that have this kind of safety gizmo built in, which is better than the status quo.
And finally, this law has nothing at all to do with crime. It has to do with public safety. As a crime bill, this law will probably not do a very good job. As a safety bill, assuming the technology works, I imagine it'll be quite effective.
I feel sorry for anyone who fell for the parody site (after reading the whole thing), but I don't think it was out of line. If someone was misled by the parody site, then they're not careful readers.
Remember, this isn't just about the site. It's about the press release that these guys sent out with Dow's name all over it. There was absolutely nothing about this press release that even implied that it was a parody. It looked like a perfectly genuine, if insanely horrible, corporate statement. The only clue that it's not completely genuine is the fact that the press release refers to a past president of Dow as if he were the current president, and I only know that because I looked it up while fact-checking the release. The name "Panaline Boneril" sounds suspiciously like an anagram, but what the heck is "a plebeian or Lenin" supposed to mean?
This is clearly defamation and fraud. Have a look. (This copy was emailed to the BBC's "Breakfast" show, and was included in the lawyer's correspondence to Verio.)
From: Dow Chemical Corporation [SMTP:press@dow-chemical.com]
Sent: Tuesday, December 03, 2002 9:49 AM
To: Breakfast R5L <breakfast@bbc.co.uk>
Subject: DOW ADDRESSES BHOPAL OUTRAGE, EXPLAINS POSITION
December 3, 2002
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
Contact: mailto:press@dow-chemical.com
DOW ADDRESSES BHOPAL OUTRAGE, EXPLAINS POSITION
Company responds to activist concerns with concrete action points
In response to growing public outrage over its handling of the Bhopal disaster's legacy, Dow Chemical (http://www.dow-chemical.com) has issued a statement explaining why it is unable to more actively address the problem.
"We are being portrayed as a heartless giant which doesn't care about the 20,000 lives lost due to Bhopal over the years," said Dow President and CEO Michael D. Parker. "But this just isn't true. Many individuals within Dow feel tremendous sorrow about the Bhopal disaster, and many individuals within Dow would like the corporation to admit its responsibility, so that the public can then decide on the best course of action, as is appropriate in any democracy.
"Unfortunately, we have responsibilities to our shareholders and our industry colleagues that make action on Bhopal impossible. And being clear about this has been a very big step."
On December 3, 1984, Union Carbide--now part of Dow--accidentally killed 5,000 residents of Bhopal, India, when its pesticide plant sprung a leak. It abandoned the plant without cleaning it up, and since then, an estimated 15,000 more people have died from complications, most resulting from chemicals released into the groundwater.
Although legal investigations have consistently pinpointed Union Carbide as culprit, both Union Carbide and Dow have had to publicly deny these findings. After the accident, Union Carbide compensated victims' families between US$300 and US$500 per victim.
"We understand the anger and hurt," said Dow Spokesperson Bob Questra. "But Dow does not and cannot acknowledge responsibility. If we did, not only would we be required to expend many billions of dollars on cleanup and compensation--much worse, the public could then point to Dow as a precedent in other big cases. 'They took responsibility; why can't you?' Amoco, BP, Shell, and Exxon all have ongoing problems that would just get much worse. We are unable to set this precedent for ourselves and the industry, much as we would like to see the issue resolved in a humane and satisfying way."
Shareholders reacted to the Dow statement with enthusiasm. "I'm happy that Dow is being clear about its aims," said Panaline Boneril, who owns 10,000 shares, "because Bhopal is a recurrent problem that's clogging our value chain and ultimately keeping the share price from expressing its full potential. Although a real solution is not immediately possible because of Dow's commitments to the larger industry issues, there is new hope in management's exceptional new clarity on the matter."
"It's a slow process," said Questra. "We must learn bit by bit to meet this challenge head-on. For now, this means acknowledging that much as it pains us, our prime responsibilities are to the people who own Dow shares, and to the industry as a whole. We simply cannot do anything at this moment for the people of Bhopal."
Dow Chemical is a chemical products and services company devoted to bringing its customers a wide range of chemicals. It furnishes solutions for the agriculture, electronics, manufacturing, and oil and gas industries, including well-known products like Styrofoam, DDT, and Agent Orange, as well as lesser-known brands like Inspire, Retain, Eliminator, Quash, and Woodstalk. For more on the Bhopal catastrophe, please visit Dow at http://www.dow-chemical.com/.
# 30 #
Instead they choose to shut down the whole c-class net after leaving a message on our answering machine giving us 20 minutes to pull the plug on that machine.
According to Verio, Thing.net has been in violation of Verio's AUP for some time. Whether that's true or not is between you guys, but that's their opinion, and it explains why they shut you down.
And, in all fairness, after they restored your connectivity and you asked for 3-4 months to transition to another provider, they did agree to give you 90 days before shutting you down for good, right? I'm not trying to say that they're right and you're wrong, but it's not quite accurate to imply that they're being completely unreasonable, either.
Now, who is disrupting who here? Why is Verio cutting off service to 300 paying customers for 16 hours?
The difference between a denial of service attack against a company that some people find to be politically unacceptable and a company's cutting off a customer that they claim is in material breach of their AUP should be blindingly obvious. You can't really put the two situations on the same level.
As to your question about whether the DMCA was invoked: yes it was.
Yes, I heard. Early this morning I asked for independent confirmation of the DMCA part, and I got it from a couple of different sources, including from Dow's lawyers. I appreciate your mentioning it, though.
With a name like yours, you can't possibly expect to be taken seriously, can you?
If you don't believe what you're saying, then ha ha, very funny, go away now. If you do believe what you're saying, then kindly take your nihilism elsewhere. The things that you say mean absolutely nothing do, in fact, mean something, because people attach value to them.
Either way, that's about enough out of you.
Real Democrats (and us anti-Republicans) can tell the difference between an adjective and a noun and vote Democratic, not Democrat
Uh... seeing as how the only strictly grammatically correct word in that context would be an adverb-- "vote Democratically"-- we have to fall back to common idiom. When one is stumping, one says, "On November 4th, remember to vote McGuffin!" That's a noun, a proper noun to be precise. So saying "vote Democrat!" is the preferred idiom over "vote Democratic," unless you want to use the whole proper noun and say "vote Democratic Party!"
In other words, you're wrong.
The artists here are making a valid point about Dow Chemicals' irresponsibility, and callousness.
That has nothing to do with it. They've produced a web site, and are sending out press releases, in the name of Dow Chemical. Whatever your purpose, that's misrepresentation, defamation, and, at worst, fraud.
If they'd created a web site for a fictitious chemical company that bears a striking resemblance to Dow, everything would be cool. But when they used the Dow name, and logo, and represented themselves as Dow to the press, they crossed the line.
I would also like to point out that Dow could have avoided the very negative publicity they hope to avoid by ignoring such political message sites.
Let me say it again. These guys sent a press release out through the newswire and through regular channels claiming to be Dow. It doesn't matter why they did it. They misrepresented themselves, and that's against the law.
Why? If you've got an Exchange server that you need to talk to, Microsoft gives Outlook for Mac away for free. And if you don't have an Exchange server, Mail, Address Book, and iCal make for a better set of personal information tools.
I don't think the Mac really needs Evolution right now.
In other words, "We can't win, so we'll just say we're playing by different rules."
;-)
Get your geek-girl an Open Source Thong!
How come they're only available in medium and large? Are all the smalls and extra smalls sold out or something?
Hello? Uh, hello?
Keep in mind that ALL computer geeks represent less than 5% of all the people in the world. They suck and the sooner they realize this and die off, the better.
This is a perfect example of a greedy corporation squashing free speech in the name of its lord and savior, the almighty dollar.
Actually, it appears to be a perfect example of misguided souls, despite their good intentions, making unauthorized use of a company's legally protected trademarks, and getting their pee pee's smacked because of it.
The artists, called the Yes Men, hosted by thing.net were making a valid point with their biting satire, and adding a "this is a joke, duh!" disclaimer would detract from the icky feeling their satire was intended to evoke.
Valid point or not, it is not okay to use somebody else's trademarks without their permission. The message would have been just as clear without the malicious intent to deceive.
If they can get a legal defense fund, this could be the test case to overturn the DMCA.
The DMCA claim is only one part of the complaint against these guys. The complaint also cites the Anti-cybersquatting Protection Act ("dow-chemical.com") and the Lanham Act (illegal use of trademarks). Also, these guys issued a false press release in Dow's name intended to defame Dow publicly. But most importantly, everything these guys did, practically, was in violation of Verio's AUP.
I would love to republish the materials in question, but I will use disclaimers if the Yes Men agree.
Go right ahead. Wonderful thing about freedom of speech. Even if you're kicked off of one podium, you can always climb onto another.
I just hope that they put all of the Matrix Movies and all of the LOTR movies in the IMAX theater after it's all said and done so that the die-hards can see the films the way they were meant to be seen.
Uh... you know IMAX uses a different aspect ratio from other cinematic presentations, right? IMAX is a 15-perf 70mm format with a 1.33:1 aspect ratio, same as an old-fashioned TV. All the movies you mentioned were meant to be shown in 2.35:1. To reformat those movies for IMAX will mean having to remove about 40% of the picture. They had to do this with Apollo 13, and later with Attack of the Clones.
These movies were not meant to be seen in IMAX. They were meant to be seen in a regular theater with a screen 2.35 times as wide as it is tall.
As an asside, 'private company' generally means...
Yeah, did you see the thing I wrote up there inside parentheses? Thanks.
Verio had already decided to do business with thing.net, and had written a contract to do so.
And, undoubtedly, that contract included plenty of clauses describing conditions under which either party could terminate.
However, if BillG was really after you, and if all the service providors followed your logic, then you would be silenced, in the medium of the internet.
So? Try as I might, I can't get a network TV show. I'm effectively silenced in the medium of network television. Is this a free speech issue? No, of course not.
As for the reference to the middle ages, it's something called an analogy.
Actually, it's something called hyperbole. And something called wildly inapplicable. And something called a waste of breath.
oops.... luser award right here
No, no! That's exactly the point. You're an otherwise entirely reasonable and sensible person, and yet at first glance you were fooled into believing that this page belonged to Dow, and served as an official corporate communication from them. There's no shame in being fooled here; the people who put up that page went to great lengths to make it look completely authentic, even going so far as to put a copyright notice on it.
This is precisely the point. Given that the parody nature of this page isn't remotely obvious, it seems that Dow has a very strong case against these guys. For defamation, at the very least, and possibly even for fraudulent representation.
Um. Verio is a private company. (Well, they're publicly traded, but they're owned by private individuals. You know what I mean.) They are entitled to do business with whomever they please.
Nobody went to these guys and said, "Hey, you can't say that." (At least, not yet.) Rather, Verio said, "If you wanna do that, get your connectivity somewhere else."
Verio is completely and totally free to do that. Just because these guys have a Constitutionally protected right to say (nearly) whatever they want doesn't mean that any particular provider of services is obligated to do business with them.
Let me give you a real-world for-instance. About six years ago I was working as a pre-sales engineer for a fairly major computer company. (You've heard of them.) Somebody came to us and said, "I want to build a web site, and I need a very powerful server to do it." I, along with the sales rep, talked to him, and he said, after some probing, that he wanted to get into the "adult entertainment" business. Basically he wanted to build a porn site.
That's entirely legal. Nothing wrong with it, as far as the law is concerned. But the sales rep I was working with said to me, after the meeting, that he simply didn't want to do business with this guy. He had an opinion on porn-- not necessarily the same as mine, but I respected it-- and he acted accordingly. We never called the guy back, and we never returned any of his subsequent calls.
Life is full of little decisions like that. Ours was made on moral grounds; the sales rep I was working with had a moral objection to porn. Verio's decision was probably made purely on business grounds. Everybody-- individual and corporation alike-- is entitled to make those decisions for themselves.
I stand by my statement that what Verio did was neither illegal, unethical, nor wrong.
Say you have a mindspring.com account. On your personal web page, you post that 'bill gates of borg' icon that he's reputed to hate so much. He causes a letter to be sent to mindspring, and your account is revoked, using the same logic you just called 'a business decision'.
Get an account with another service provider. If you can't find one that will give you an account, take out a bank loan and start your own. If you can't start your own, then get your message out through another medium. Public access television. Letters to the editor. Flyers under windshield wipers. Whatever.
Freedom of speech is not being affected here in any way.
Not held accountable, they could kill anyone they wished without repurcussions. This is just a modern day version of that.
Exaggerate much? Nobody has killed anybody. Let's get this back down to earth, okay?
Arg. You go this way, point go that way.
My intent was to pick something so absurd that it would be obvious that it wasn't meant to be taken literally. Pick your own example. "I'm Mimekiller and I'm a six-foot-tall invisible rabbit." Whatever.
But the larger point still stands, I think. Does parody include some aesthetic value? If so, who identifies it as such? Because, to me, the stuff we're talking about this morning just isn't funny. It's absurd, but just barely so, and not at all funny. Does that mean it's not parody?
how many people actually consider an outlook-killer such a killer app as to be worth $5 million?
Listen, we're in the dark ages as far as collaboration software goes. The more money that gets thrown at this problem, the better.
It's not just that there's no good collaboration software out there. It's that nobody even knows how to do collaboration in a way that doesn't absolutely suck. Somebody needs to start at the beginning and ask the questions, "What does it need to do?" and "How does it need to do it?" Nobody has asked those questions in a comprehensive way yet, so we've ended up with glorified email applications like Outlook and Notes that rely on a store-and-forward message-passing system, built around a central server and a lot of caches. All the eggs in one basket, so to speak.
Somebody needs to take collaboration all the way back to the drawing board. Is Kapor the guy to do it? No idea. But it's good that somebody is trying.
Read before posting. What you quoted is a "parody" site.
See the problem?
It's still a parody site -- even though there aren't any disclaimers stating as much.
Where's the line between parody and fraud? If I said, "I'm Mimekiller and I think kiddie porn is awesome!" that could reasonably be construed as parody. It's fairly absurd, so only the most gullible person would believe it. But if I said, "I'm Mimekiller and I vote Democrat!" that's not obviously parody. It sounds perfectly reasonable, and if one didn't know that Mimekiller is a staunch Dewey Socialist, one might not think twice about that statement.
These guys could have saved themselves a lot of trouble by calling their site "Dowe Chemical" or something.
Can anybody dig up independent confirmation that this has anything at all to do with the DMCA? The RTMark press release mentions it in the context, "Dow was not amused, and sent a Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) complaint to Verio, which immediately cut Thing.net off the internet for fifteen hours." But that doesn't make a whole lot of sense.
More importantly, the New York Times article on the subject (here), makes no reference at all to the DMCA, instead saying that "Dow's lawyers contacted Verio to complain that the site infringed on its trademarks, among other sins." If the DMCA were involved, I'm reasonably sure that the NYT article would mention it.
If I had to take a wild-ass guess, I'd say that what probably happened is that Dow simply told Verio that they want the offending web site shut down, and possibly that the site was making unauthorized use of their trademarks or some such. Verio said to themselves, "On the one hand we have a bunch of activists who pay their bills, but who aren't a significant source of revenue for us. On the other hand we have Dow Chemical, a gigantic multinational corporation that could throw us a lot of money if we have a good relationship with them." And they made a business decision.
If that's what happened, I really don't see a reason to get all up-in-arms. Yes, this is an inconvenience for the activists. But, if it happened the way I'm guessing, nobody did anything illegal, or even unethical.
(Incidentally, the NYT article also says, "When [Staehle] called Verio to ask why his entire network had been unplugged instead of the sole offending site, he said, a Verio lawyer told him that the Thing had violated its policies repeatedly and that its contract would be terminated."
The article goes on: "Verio had shut down part of the Thing once before. In 1999 the online toy retailer eToys.com asked a California court to stop an online arts group from using its longtime Web address etoy.com. The Electronic Disturbance Theater, a Thing client, staged a virtual protest by overloading the retailer's site with traffic during the holiday season. Verio blocked access to one of the Thing's computers until the protest site's owners agreed to take it offline."
Sounds like Thing.net isn't merely the mild-mannered parody site it claims to be. Parody is one thing. Actual disruption is something else altogether. Though they're not commenting, maybe Verio had some really good reasons to do what they did.)
A broadcast is an act of copying...Thousands of televisions across the nation get a duplicate of the one show.
Broadcasting isn't copying. It's public performance. Broadcasting can result in copies being made today, what with VCRs and all, but back in the early days of television that wasn't true. There was no such thing as home recording equipment, so broadcasting and copying had nothing at all to do with each other. They don't really have anything to do with each other today, either, except to the extent that broadcasting and copying intersect when it comes to home recording.
So yeah. The idea that copyright holders get to determine more than simply who does and who does not get to copy their works has been around for nearly 100 years.
I agree with everything you said-- surprisingly, because we've had some pretty exciting arguments in the past-- except for one tiny thing. Your post kinda made it sound like the DMCA embodied a sudden shift in the way people think about these things. I don't think that's true. I think it's been, in fact, a very gradual change over the course of about a century. It really got started when radio became widespread, and the idea of "broadcasting" became known. It was immediately recognized that broadcasting is different from copying, but that the two share certain important characteristics. In general, the copyright holder gets to decide whether a work can be broadcast or not, and under what circumstance.
Think of it this way. If television station KBBL buys a copy of "Pokemon: The First Movie," are they allowed to broadcast that movie over the air? No, despite the fact that they own a legally purchased copy of the movie. If KBBL wants to broadcast that movie, they have to go to the copyright holder (or, more accurately, an agent thereof) and secure a license to do so. That license-- sometimes called a "clearance"-- will say something like, "KBBL can show 'Pokemon: The First Movie' up to three times during calendar year 2003, but only on Saturday afternoons between 1 and 4 PM." As long as KBBL follows those rules, they're okay. But if they show the movie a fourth time, on a Tuesday at 9 AM, they're in big trouble, and will probably have to pay a substantial penalty to the licensor.
So the idea that copyright holders get to determine more than simply who does and who does not get to copy their works has been around for nearly 100 years.
I'm not disagreeing with your main point at all; I'm just saying that the idea embodied and protected by the DMCA is not a new one at all, and its adoption by authors and legislators alike was not sudden.
Public Software Foundation is the most accurate name I think.
I can't say I like that one. Public makes me think of public domain, and software that's released under the GPL is far more tightly restricted than software that's in the public domain. But at this point we're just haggling over the price, if you get my meaning.
Of course they would never change the name because "Free" is such a powerful marketing word, and nonprofits market just like everybody else.
Exactly. It's all about marketing, and the FSF's marketing is so politically oriented that it crosses the line into actual propaganda.
You, Mr. Brett Glass, are my hero. I've spent the past several years thinking that there's something going on in Stallman's head that I can't quite get a grasp on. I'm excited to check out this book you mention.
Thank you.
I was surprised at how many results Google found for emacs video editing.
I was surprised that Google found 3,650 results for "emacs kitchen sink." Guess that just goes to show that counting Google hits is not, after all, a valid form of research.