P2p networks have no obstacles to membership. And the traffic has to get decrypted on each end. Private detectives on RIAA payroll can join like anyone else, can provide zero-day copies of a few major albums, and can then log the destination address of everyone who requests a copy.
True, systems like freenet can obfuscate data and conceal user's addresses from each other, so
The RIAA will look for (and find!) ways to argue that freenet's primary purpose is as a copyright infringement device. They will get a researcher to sign up as users and construct a statistical analysis demonstrating that freenet's content is 10% MPAA movies, 20% BSA games, 30% RIAA music, and 40% porn. Then they'll have freenet nodes declared a DCMA circumvention device (or roll out other new laws if that fails), and start sending out a whole new wave of subpeonas.
PS. I suppose those statistics don't reflect freenet today. But if it becomes the successor to p2p swapping applications like Kazaa and Bearshare, then someday they will.
Re:Is finding the user really the point here?
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File-sharing and AOL
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· Score: 1
Yes, it smacks of vigilantism. But analogy to invasion of privacy in your home isn't correct.
The offender caused packets requesting the infringement to be send onto the public internet. In all likelihood, the RIAA didn't intercept these packets- they recieved them directly. It was probably an agent of the RIAA offering the files for download in the first place, so he could monitor where the files were sent to.
I also don't see how a user can tell whether a file is in fact an illegal download
A user can make a good guess. Copyrights in the US last a virtually infinite time, and all materials are automatically copyrighted as soon as written, so the only reasonable defense would be to claim "I thought the author had posted it herself- promotional, like". And by keeping the flow of anti-"piracy" advertising going, the RIAA can ensure that everyone knows hit songs aren't legally distributed like that.
(The humorous angle here is that if someone is caught downloading an RIAA song, it was probably because an RIAA investigator was running the server. In that case, the provider actually was an agent of the author, and was allowed to distribute it... A bold defense attorney might try this out someday.)
If I download the file, find it's illegal and then delete it, have I broken the law?
Well, yes. A sane jury shouldn't convict you (anymore than an undercover cop can be convicted of heroine possession), but if your lawyers get financially overwhelmed, it can happen. More probably, that single offense will be used as cause for a search. If more than a few dozen apparently infringing files are found on all your data storage, they'll press charges (otherwise offering a 'mild' settlement).
The RIAA doesn't plan to really incarcerate every copyright violator- they just want to pillory enough examples to invoke justified paranoia in everyone else. So they'll prefer to save the prosecutions for cases that (at least in terms of amount of evidence) are slam-dunks: 100s of gigabytes of MP3s. They do not want to pursue a case weak enough that they might lose.
This matter shouldn't even get as far as the RIAA trying to figure out who the user is. If they get to that point, my rights have already been violated.
Assuming that in the future somebody routinely tries to identify the user, it would be much better all around if the police handled it. P2p copyright violation as are a minor offense, much less worse than a traffic violation, and not at all akin to theft. Rather than allowed the RIAA to start up it's own investigative work, cops could just serve some obviously infringing files and fire off $50 tickets to the people who download them. Just like a traffic fine, someone who challenges the fee in court can often get (but habitual offenders will be more strongly investigated). The angry tirades from parents afraid of higher fines for future violations will be a sufficient "chilling effect" to keep a lot of copyright infringement under control.
Usually it's because they're worth 100 other coders.
I work for a megacorp, and have observed a team of two "cowboys" outperform a group of 40. With that kind of performance, the resources for an extra person to make the code conformant is an acceptable overhead. (And odds are that if the code doesn't conform, the standard is bad)
Computer programming is a rather unique field in that such productivity disparities are still a fact of life. (Acting and music are similar in that way). Brooks has examples of this phenomena.
That's where many analogy arguments come from, though.
A poster concludes with what he believes is a clever recapitulation of his argument. Then the readers come, glossing over the boring technical/legal details and fixating on the joke at the end. Someone decides to poke holes, "But it's as if the thief left your television behind in perfect condition!", and off we go again.
If you can't predict the effects of your software code on not just the rest of the project, but the economy and society as a whole, then I guess you've been slacking off.
(nobody flame me without reading the cartoon)
Re:Clark Kent: "This looks like a job for Man"
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NES PC
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· Score: 2, Interesting
The original is still part of the "Mario" series, though- not just as a matter of titling (in which case you're missing Dr.Mario and Mario Tennis too), but in major gameplay aspects.
Mario in DK was just a generic jumping hero- run, jump, climb ladders, that was his whole repetoire (hammer too).
But "Mario Brothers" introduced important tactical gameplay elements that remained with the series up til it went 3d. Most importantly, the "headbutt the floor your enemy is standing on" attack was introduced there. I'm not aware of any prior platformer using that concept.
(Attacking through a solid surface doesn't translate well to 3d, because it depends on the player aiming with a locally-omniscent view)
SMB was very much "Mario Brothers" + continuous scrolling + mushrooms.
Your interpretation of US copyright law is just wrong. Maybe you're confused because software publishers write EULAs forbidding behavior which is illegal anyway.
Copyright is about copying, not "distribution" (although it often occurs soon after the reproduction).
"the 1976 Copyright Act generally gives the owner of copyright the exclusive right... To reproduce the work in copies"
"Distribution" doesn't matter. You cannot make copies. Simply burning 10 CDROMs and hiding them in a shoebox is illegal.
(There are exceptions to the law, allowing you to reproduce a work in limited quantities, but none would permit you to execute a program twice. Two exceptions are: you may be able to create a single backup, but never use it unless the original is destroyed. And, creating temporary copies as necessary to view a work, such as loading software into RAM, doesn't count as "reproduction")
An additional confusing factor may be this GPL FAQ entry. It states that "copying within an organization is not distribution". Distinguishing beteen "distribution" and "copying" is irrelevant both to copyright law and the GPL, as both forbid "copying" as such.
By Game Theory (the field of research that creates chess solving programs), games do not have luck by definition.
Randomness doesn't increase the interest of games, except when both the players and game are poor (because a little luck hides the fact that the game sucks, and keeps the players interested).
Survey the non-athletic games which command significant audience interest. Chess and Go have hundreds of times more fans than Poker and Billiards.
(Even the popular Korean game, Starcraft, is intentionally nonrandom so that top-level players can interact fairly)
The fact of the matter is... when you introduce any kind of entropy into a game..
Entropy in game-like subjects can mean 2 things: either there is something influencing the game which the players cannot predict, or that the current state of the game is too complex for either player to fully understand where all the pieces are. Monopoly is an example of the first case, football of the second.
In the real world, taken to the limit, those two viewpoints are equivalent. But in game programming, they have very different effects. Injections of formalized randomness to the game (dice rolling, picking cards from a deck) are simple for a computer to deal with- just expand the event tree with new, weighted branches (of course interesting herustics can come in to keep the size from ballooning).
However if the game state is too large for the computer to input or store (the entropy comes from facts which are theoretically knowable, but aren't known), then the computer programmer is in real trouble. Classical game theory is out the window then, and you've got to try more Strong AI approaches.
Poker is a special case of the latter. (Although it includes simple random draws as well). The interesting skill in poker is psychological analysis of the other players, to deduce what random-draws they have been given. It'll be a long time before a computer can cope with that (although infrared cameras to collect autonomic reaction data will help a lot)
Lessig (the other famous free internet law professor) has answered this in his books. The reason is twofold (for most people, at least one of these reasons is blindingly obvious)
Idealist- Laws are supposed to be good. In a democracy, laws should reflect the will of the people. The most straightforward and honest course is fix laws that are broken. Not promot a disrepect for the law.
Pragmatic- The government can crush you. They have nigh absolute power of physical coercion, which can be translated into technical control of the internet. (Lessig put it more gently, paraphrase "The internet is an artificial place, governed by laws that are artificial and changeable, not natural and immutable. Given motivation, mankind will change those laws. Do not assume the internet will always look like it does today.")
If your "atacking dogs" use encryption and p2p to widely violate laws, legislatures will decide those technologies are dangerous criminal tools, and will ban them. (Note- widespread civil disobedience may be an effective tool to change laws, but it's more effective if done in public, unencrypted)
There's a 3rd reason which applies specifically to Moglen's ilk:
He's a lawyer- when the only tool you have is a hammer, every problem looks like a nail.
Well, you seem for the most part to have shifted from a technical argument to a legal one. More about the legal stuff later.
This is a litigation thread, it was always a legal argument. There is no technical dispute- Microsoft's Java changes are simply wrong. They've even acknowledged this, by ceasing changes to their Java fork and rolling out their.Net system which is more in tune with their own vision.
I believe that anyone capable of writing Java code, is capable of understanding what the implications are of using non-standard features.
Untrue. Even supposing they can tell what nonstandard features are. Any executive-level decision to use Java for internal work was probably based in part on becoming less dependent on Microsoft's erratic behavior in the future. But the front-line programmers who implement this stuff only sees a deadline to run the software on the boss's laptop in 5 weeks, and does whatever it takes to get there.
There's really no benifit to the company if their accounting program runs on Unix, Windows, and the Mac.
It hurts the company, and it hurts all of society. It pins users to one system, reinforces the Microsoft monopoly, and undermines the goals of Java. But, the damage isn't short term- it's not an immediate cash loss, so it doesn't figure into the company's planning. (Few companies look even 5 years ahead, none 10).
Macintosh or Linux alternatives for all major Microsoft-based applications already exist. For many organizations, the element pinning them down to stay on MS Windows is custom-built apps. Usually, these things have little need for high-speed display or tight OS integration. They're probably just database frontends- exactly the sort of thing Java's limpid GUI system could cope with.
My large corporation uses data-entry DB frontends written in Java. We can only run them on Microsoft Windows, though. All us engineers sit in front of Sun, Irix, or Linux workstations, but we still need Microsoft Windows licenses to run Java programs. The irony is nearly fatal.
The Java contract dispute between Sun and MS has already been settled out of court.
And then Microsoft immediately broke the agreement. They had a settlement in Jan01. After violating it, Microsoft was hauled back into court. They lost that case in Dec02, and were ordered to ship Sun's Java.
If this were a simple contract matter, the court could force MS to live up to the terms of the contract
IPv6 is an attempt to return to the principles that gave the internet it's growth and democracy in the beginning:
Dumb network, smart edges.
When IPv4 was designed, there was no plan for exponential user growth outside of military/R&D/education. If there had been, addresses would've been 48+ bits from 1980 onward.
The failing with pre-existing networks which IP was meant to surmount is that the interior of the network was too intelligent. That sounds like a good thing, but it means that the network as a whole is less flexible- the inner nodes (routers) cannot be easily upgraded to support new applications and features. Under IP, all interesting computers are into hosts on the edge of the network. Each can be upgraded by an end-user, without supplication to the network templars- be they Bell Atlantic frame relay technicians, or Novell NOS admins. Those smart edges are served by a dumb cloud- the rest of the network just passes data from one place to another, without translating or modifying it in anyway. In the past, network application growth was slowed because users couldn't easily tell what was going on inside the cloud. IP made the cloud's job boring, so that you were no longer interested in seeing what went on there.
That change triggered the explosive growth of computer networks until they combined into the shared entity we all know and love.
NAT betrays this heritage
NAT boxes move intelligence back into the cloud- instead of IP packets being routed to the desired host and no other, there are now entities hidden in the cloud which waylay your packets. They seize them, pull them apart, inspect their innards- then, maybe, they'll deign to alter the packet and send it along further.
The damage isn't just a theoretical one- real end-users are being held back by NAT and other violations of the IP promise. New applications which would be easier to deploy with real per-host addressing are difficult or impossible to install reliably. This is things like high-speed game servers, file/web servers, P2P clients, cheap VOIP, videoconferencing, VPN, and prehaps things that haven't been invented yet.
The internet should be about giving power to the users on its edges. IPv6 would encourage that, but NAT hinders it. There are forces who don't want to empower users- major content providers and big ISPs. (Which may be the samething). Fearful of losing control of mass audience's entertainment patterns, they want to keep mass creativity centralized. AOL doesn't want users to download ClickNRun IRC-like servers to create TeenTalkDaytonville chatrooms, they want to sell them as a value added service. Time Warner doesn't want 100s of cheap FTP servers passing out free copies of 56 year old TV shows (which by rights are public domain), they want you to wait for the DVD or PPV options.
The desire exists. A chicken in every pot, and permanent IP address in every study! The powers that be are fearful, though. The existing entertainment/datacomm oligopoly was harmed enough by the Internet. End-users sharing data amoung themselves could ruin them- but the exhaustion of IP addresses provided an excuse to keep end-users cordoned off from the real internet. They could download, but not serve files- as long as the people remain "consumers", the corporations can keep them under control.
NAT boxes bring the internet a tiny bit back towards the shape of traditional TV and telephone networks, which is just how big business likes it.
Standard can't forbid adding new libraries to environment.
A standard can forbid whatever it likes. I could argue that since "Java" meant not only a programming language (like C++), but also a runtime environment and a set of libraries (larger than what, say, "C standard libraries" provide), that extending those was violating the standard.
In comparison to other standards, we've known for a long time that Java isn't an "Open Standard" like C++ or TCP/IP. (Especially in the past, when Microsoft's offenses occured). There's no public committee to approve amendments to the standard- what Sun says goes. They had wide latitude to redefine the standard as it suited them.
Looking at it from this perspective, one might think Microsoft foolish to sign a contract agreeing to ship Java, when the definition of Java could change in the future. That may be, but they did sign.
(Apple might also be in violation on "nonstandard library extension terms"- but they probably don't have the same contract terms as Microsoft did, and Sun won't waste time targeting a small fish until the big one is taken)
However, I don't even need to discuss new libraries. Microsoft introduced incompatibilities to the language itself. Features like delegate (a new keyword!!) don't provide access to any underlying Windows(tm) functionality- they just change how program internals work.
When GNU C++ did this, they were punished, although by gentle community opposition, rather than lawsuits, as they had no contractual obligation to the standards holder. (And C++ was understood to be a platform-bound language anyhow)
Or if somebody ships a Linux claiming conformance to LSB, but adds some proprietary applications to it, he violates the standard?
The Linux Standard Base specifically mentions that extensions are allowed. Therefore they don't violate the standard. If a standard disallows them, then yes, that's in violation. If a standard is silent on the topic, it needs revision in version x.1.
By product developer, do you mean Microsoft making their J++ environment, or J.Random programmer making a corporate data-entry form? The latter is dependent on the former, as the ability of random "Java" programmers to create platform-specific software was enabled by incompatible features inserted by Microsoft.
Legally, Microsoft's goals for the product should've been the same as Sun's. They signed a contract stating they would ship "Java (tm)" with Windows. The trademark on "Java" belongs to Sun. Therefore they get to decide what Java is and isn't.
Adding new, incompatible features is inconsistent with what Sun had defined Java to be. Therefore Microsoft violated a contract, and the court is making them pay for it. Rather than trying to come up with a dollar value for Sun's loss, they're looking about simply enforcing the original terms.
This case is a fairly "simple" matter of contract law, not world-shaking antitrust violation. (Sun lawyers like to suggest monopoly abuse as a way to angle for more damages, but that's not the core of the complaint). As a contract matter, the court must aim for a solution that is fair for Sun, not "good for software users everywhere" (as was suggested far up this thread).
If cross-platform compatibility ("write once run anywhere") is a design goal for the product, then adding platform specific extensions means breaking that product.
In terms of programming languages/environments, what a standard forbids is as important as what it accepts.
Even if its not, you can still collect passwords, just more slowly. If it can't su, the trickster software can just display an "authentication failed" message and quit to the real login screen. The victim just assumes she mistyped on the first try, and the attacker has a single new password to play with.
Tricks like this is why Microsoft added the "Press Control+Alt+Delete to Log In" feature. (At the DoD's behest)
Supposedly, it would be impossible for any user-level program to trap that keystroke, so you always can be sure you're seeing the real OS login screen. (Of course, given how easy it is to compromise the OS itself, this protection means little).
you might drop the attitude. That's all part of the game.
Copyright law refers to chartered organizations and corporations as inviduals
Really? I doubt it. US law makes special mention of corporations as owners of copyright- allowing them to hold it for longer than a mortal could. But I've never heard of any exceptions for corporations as users of copyrighted materials.
If a corporation wants such an exception, it has to negotiate one with the copyright holder on a case-by-case basis. (This is called Volume Licensing).
any license that is binding under copyright law applies to such organizations as if they were individuals
Absolutely not. If a company buys a single Adobe Photoshop and installs it for 50 workstations, the BSA will be pleased to kick their door in and start auditing. They call this offense "piracy", but it's actually "copyright infringment" (not "violent crimes on or near the ocean") (Slashdot had a discussion of this yesterday. The official BSA site has a really funny page(flash).
The newspapers provide us with amble demonstration that a company making copies of software for internal use must get a license from the author to do so, or be violating copyright. Therefore, the same legal principles will apply to GPL-based software. "nothing else grants you permission to modify or distribute the Library or its derivative works. These actions are prohibited by law if you do not accept this License."
a U.S. court decision interpreted a copy in RAM as a "copy" for purposes of copyright law
Really? Do you have a reference? I've always been told that it was the UK that had that interpretation, and that US law permitted "incidental copying as required for normal use of the product".
charging you $40 for the binaries and $200 for the source is NOT acceptable, as the source fee is clearly not reasonable
What's reasonable is charging as much for the source as it costs for shipping and handling. If for some reason a company has been selling copies of the same binary CDs for 2 years, but has committed the source to an unlabelled DLT tape in distant offsite storage, then they are quite justifying in asking for enough to cover their retrieval costs.
There's many practical and public-relations reasons that a company won't want to behave this way, but comparing dollar signs on source vs binaries isn't valid. (A source-code price of greater than $30 is a strong sign they may be padding the expense, but consideration must be made only on the difficulty of delivering code, not the nominal product price)
GPL section 5: by modifying or distributing the Program, you indicate your acceptance of this License
So one can argue that they've agreed to it.
I don't usually like clauses of the form "by XYZ, you agree to this license". (XYZ is usually "clicking OK"). Allowing the means to enter someone into a contract to expand to include behaviors very different from "an adult signing her name".
If clicking the button means agreement, why stop there? Can a used-car salesman take my $7000, and then yell out "by turning the ignition key, you agree to give me $175 more dollars"? Of course not, even though that's a necessary part of operating my own property, just like clicking "Accept" in InstallShield. It doesn't make sense, and this is why (if the courts were competent), EULAs would be unenforcable.
However, back to topic, if the XYZ "activity which indicates agreement" is something that would normally be a criminal violation of the other party's rights (something that no law-abiding person would do without special permission), then the case for interpreting it as a willful indication of acceptance is much stronger.
It's unlikely, but a judge could decide to make the case about violation of contract, rather than copyright infringment.
That's a common myth. EULA users (like Microsoft) would like to see it encouraged, because it would lend some validity to EULAs, which aren't legal by the laws of most areas. (Those laws are in the process of being eroded)
The distinctions in a nutshell:
GPL gives you rights you didn't have. (Permission to pass out copies).
GPL publishers don't claim you need to agree to the license before installing the program.
EULA takes away rights you had. (Resale of the product, backup copies, reverse engineering, publication of critical reviews...).
EULA publishers claim that you're not allowed to install the program without agreeing to the license.
Some factors that make the difference more confusing:
EULAs also forbid things you never had the right to do: pass out copies. That was against copyright law anyway.
Recently, some authors of GPL software have dumped the GPL onscreen during installation, making it look like an EULA which must be "accepted". This primarily happens on Microsoft Windows(tm), where users have been trained to click through a license on the way to running a program. (I think this happens because the example code for writing an installer includes a place to paste in the EULA).
Function signatures by themselves mean little. They could always claim to have included them as "a standardized API, for compatibility reasons".
(Many people agree "dependency is not derivation", meaning that "header file" type details like function names and arguments are insufficiently creative to be worthy of copyright protection)
Slashdot Mirror
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P2p networks have no obstacles to membership. And the traffic has to get decrypted on each end. Private detectives on RIAA payroll can join like anyone else, can provide zero-day copies of a few major albums, and can then log the destination address of everyone who requests a copy.
- The RIAA will look for (and find!) ways to argue that freenet's primary purpose is as a copyright infringement device. They will get a researcher to sign up as users and construct a statistical analysis demonstrating that freenet's content is 10% MPAA movies, 20% BSA games, 30% RIAA music, and 40% porn. Then they'll have freenet nodes declared a DCMA circumvention device (or roll out other new laws if that fails), and start sending out a whole new wave of subpeonas.
PS. I suppose those statistics don't reflect freenet today. But if it becomes the successor to p2p swapping applications like Kazaa and Bearshare, then someday they will.True, systems like freenet can obfuscate data and conceal user's addresses from each other, so
Yes, it smacks of vigilantism. But analogy to invasion of privacy in your home isn't correct.
The offender caused packets requesting the infringement to be send onto the public internet. In all likelihood, the RIAA didn't intercept these packets- they recieved them directly. It was probably an agent of the RIAA offering the files for download in the first place, so he could monitor where the files were sent to.
I also don't see how a user can tell whether a file is in fact an illegal download
A user can make a good guess. Copyrights in the US last a virtually infinite time, and all materials are automatically copyrighted as soon as written, so the only reasonable defense would be to claim "I thought the author had posted it herself- promotional, like". And by keeping the flow of anti-"piracy" advertising going, the RIAA can ensure that everyone knows hit songs aren't legally distributed like that.
(The humorous angle here is that if someone is caught downloading an RIAA song, it was probably because an RIAA investigator was running the server. In that case, the provider actually was an agent of the author, and was allowed to distribute it... A bold defense attorney might try this out someday.)
If I download the file, find it's illegal and then delete it, have I broken the law?
Well, yes. A sane jury shouldn't convict you (anymore than an undercover cop can be convicted of heroine possession), but if your lawyers get financially overwhelmed, it can happen. More probably, that single offense will be used as cause for a search. If more than a few dozen apparently infringing files are found on all your data storage, they'll press charges (otherwise offering a 'mild' settlement).
The RIAA doesn't plan to really incarcerate every copyright violator- they just want to pillory enough examples to invoke justified paranoia in everyone else. So they'll prefer to save the prosecutions for cases that (at least in terms of amount of evidence) are slam-dunks: 100s of gigabytes of MP3s. They do not want to pursue a case weak enough that they might lose.
This matter shouldn't even get as far as the RIAA trying to figure out who the user is. If they get to that point, my rights have already been violated.
Assuming that in the future somebody routinely tries to identify the user, it would be much better all around if the police handled it. P2p copyright violation as are a minor offense, much less worse than a traffic violation, and not at all akin to theft. Rather than allowed the RIAA to start up it's own investigative work, cops could just serve some obviously infringing files and fire off $50 tickets to the people who download them. Just like a traffic fine, someone who challenges the fee in court can often get (but habitual offenders will be more strongly investigated). The angry tirades from parents afraid of higher fines for future violations will be a sufficient "chilling effect" to keep a lot of copyright infringement under control.
Why are they still employed?
Usually it's because they're worth 100 other coders.
I work for a megacorp, and have observed a team of two "cowboys" outperform a group of 40. With that kind of performance, the resources for an extra person to make the code conformant is an acceptable overhead. (And odds are that if the code doesn't conform, the standard is bad)
Computer programming is a rather unique field in that such productivity disparities are still a fact of life. (Acting and music are similar in that way). Brooks has examples of this phenomena.
That's where many analogy arguments come from, though.
A poster concludes with what he believes is a clever recapitulation of his argument. Then the readers come, glossing over the boring technical/legal details and fixating on the joke at the end. Someone decides to poke holes, "But it's as if the thief left your television behind in perfect condition!", and off we go again.
If you're really an engineer, then you shouldn't have any trouble seeing the big picture.
Unlike, say, managers or interns, Engineers are trained to think through all the consequences of an action.
If you can't predict the effects of your software code on not just the rest of the project, but the economy and society as a whole, then I guess you've been slacking off.
(nobody flame me without reading the cartoon)
The original is still part of the "Mario" series, though- not just as a matter of titling (in which case you're missing Dr.Mario and Mario Tennis too), but in major gameplay aspects.
Mario in DK was just a generic jumping hero- run, jump, climb ladders, that was his whole repetoire (hammer too).
But "Mario Brothers" introduced important tactical gameplay elements that remained with the series up til it went 3d. Most importantly, the "headbutt the floor your enemy is standing on" attack was introduced there. I'm not aware of any prior platformer using that concept.
(Attacking through a solid surface doesn't translate well to 3d, because it depends on the player aiming with a locally-omniscent view)
SMB was very much "Mario Brothers" + continuous scrolling + mushrooms.
How can you call that the "Mario series" when it omits the very first game?
(Hint- to create a SuperFoo, first you need a Foo)
Almost looks like you made an analogy...
Your interpretation of US copyright law is just wrong. Maybe you're confused because software publishers write EULAs forbidding behavior which is illegal anyway.
... To reproduce the work in copies"
Copyright is about copying, not "distribution" (although it often occurs soon after the reproduction).
You may check the government's page on the law. It says
"the 1976 Copyright Act generally gives the owner of copyright the exclusive right
"Distribution" doesn't matter. You cannot make copies. Simply burning 10 CDROMs and hiding them in a shoebox is illegal.
(There are exceptions to the law, allowing you to reproduce a work in limited quantities, but none would permit you to execute a program twice. Two exceptions are: you may be able to create a single backup, but never use it unless the original is destroyed. And, creating temporary copies as necessary to view a work, such as loading software into RAM, doesn't count as "reproduction")
An additional confusing factor may be this GPL FAQ entry. It states that "copying within an organization is not distribution". Distinguishing beteen "distribution" and "copying" is irrelevant both to copyright law and the GPL, as both forbid "copying" as such.
By Game Theory (the field of research that creates chess solving programs), games do not have luck by definition.
Randomness doesn't increase the interest of games, except when both the players and game are poor (because a little luck hides the fact that the game sucks, and keeps the players interested).
Survey the non-athletic games which command significant audience interest. Chess and Go have hundreds of times more fans than Poker and Billiards.
(Even the popular Korean game, Starcraft, is intentionally nonrandom so that top-level players can interact fairly)
The fact of the matter is... when you introduce any kind of entropy into a game..
Entropy in game-like subjects can mean 2 things: either there is something influencing the game which the players cannot predict, or that the current state of the game is too complex for either player to fully understand where all the pieces are. Monopoly is an example of the first case, football of the second.
In the real world, taken to the limit, those two viewpoints are equivalent. But in game programming, they have very different effects. Injections of formalized randomness to the game (dice rolling, picking cards from a deck) are simple for a computer to deal with- just expand the event tree with new, weighted branches (of course interesting herustics can come in to keep the size from ballooning).
However if the game state is too large for the computer to input or store (the entropy comes from facts which are theoretically knowable, but aren't known), then the computer programmer is in real trouble. Classical game theory is out the window then, and you've got to try more Strong AI approaches.
Poker is a special case of the latter. (Although it includes simple random draws as well). The interesting skill in poker is psychological analysis of the other players, to deduce what random-draws they have been given. It'll be a long time before a computer can cope with that (although infrared cameras to collect autonomic reaction data will help a lot)
- Idealist- Laws are supposed to be good. In a democracy, laws should reflect the will of the people. The most straightforward and honest course is fix laws that are broken. Not promot a disrepect for the law.
- Pragmatic- The government can crush you. They have nigh absolute power of physical coercion, which can be translated into technical control of the internet. (Lessig put it more gently, paraphrase "The internet is an artificial place, governed by laws that are artificial and changeable, not natural and immutable. Given motivation, mankind will change those laws. Do not assume the internet will always look like it does today.")
There's a 3rd reason which applies specifically to Moglen's ilk:If your "atacking dogs" use encryption and p2p to widely violate laws, legislatures will decide those technologies are dangerous criminal tools, and will ban them. (Note- widespread civil disobedience may be an effective tool to change laws, but it's more effective if done in public, unencrypted)
In order to hook up their networks, Management needs help from people who know what they are doing? Good!
In my personal experience, it's more like
In order to hook up their networks, Engineers need permission from people who don't know what they are doing?
Bad!
Well, you seem for the most part to have shifted from a technical argument to a legal one. More about the legal stuff later.
.Net system which is more in tune with their own vision.
This is a litigation thread, it was always a legal argument. There is no technical dispute- Microsoft's Java changes are simply wrong. They've even acknowledged this, by ceasing changes to their Java fork and rolling out their
I believe that anyone capable of writing Java code, is capable of understanding what the implications are of using non-standard features.
Untrue. Even supposing they can tell what nonstandard features are. Any executive-level decision to use Java for internal work was probably based in part on becoming less dependent on Microsoft's erratic behavior in the future. But the front-line programmers who implement this stuff only sees a deadline to run the software on the boss's laptop in 5 weeks, and does whatever it takes to get there.
There's really no benifit to the company if their accounting program runs on Unix, Windows, and the Mac.
It hurts the company, and it hurts all of society. It pins users to one system, reinforces the Microsoft monopoly, and undermines the goals of Java. But, the damage isn't short term- it's not an immediate cash loss, so it doesn't figure into the company's planning. (Few companies look even 5 years ahead, none 10).
Macintosh or Linux alternatives for all major Microsoft-based applications already exist. For many organizations, the element pinning them down to stay on MS Windows is custom-built apps. Usually, these things have little need for high-speed display or tight OS integration. They're probably just database frontends- exactly the sort of thing Java's limpid GUI system could cope with.
My large corporation uses data-entry DB frontends written in Java. We can only run them on Microsoft Windows, though. All us engineers sit in front of Sun, Irix, or Linux workstations, but we still need Microsoft Windows licenses to run Java programs. The irony is nearly fatal.
The Java contract dispute between Sun and MS has already been settled out of court.
And then Microsoft immediately broke the agreement. They had a settlement in Jan01. After violating it, Microsoft was hauled back into court. They lost that case in Dec02, and were ordered to ship Sun's Java.
If this were a simple contract matter, the court could force MS to live up to the terms of the contract
It is. They did.
IPv6 is an attempt to return to the principles that gave the internet it's growth and democracy in the beginning:
Dumb network, smart edges.
When IPv4 was designed, there was no plan for exponential user growth outside of military/R&D/education. If there had been, addresses would've been 48+ bits from 1980 onward.
The failing with pre-existing networks which IP was meant to surmount is that the interior of the network was too intelligent. That sounds like a good thing, but it means that the network as a whole is less flexible- the inner nodes (routers) cannot be easily upgraded to support new applications and features. Under IP, all interesting computers are into hosts on the edge of the network. Each can be upgraded by an end-user, without supplication to the network templars- be they Bell Atlantic frame relay technicians, or Novell NOS admins. Those smart edges are served by a dumb cloud- the rest of the network just passes data from one place to another, without translating or modifying it in anyway. In the past, network application growth was slowed because users couldn't easily tell what was going on inside the cloud. IP made the cloud's job boring, so that you were no longer interested in seeing what went on there.
That change triggered the explosive growth of computer networks until they combined into the shared entity we all know and love.
NAT betrays this heritage
NAT boxes move intelligence back into the cloud- instead of IP packets being routed to the desired host and no other, there are now entities hidden in the cloud which waylay your packets. They seize them, pull them apart, inspect their innards- then, maybe, they'll deign to alter the packet and send it along further.
The damage isn't just a theoretical one- real end-users are being held back by NAT and other violations of the IP promise. New applications which would be easier to deploy with real per-host addressing are difficult or impossible to install reliably. This is things like high-speed game servers, file/web servers, P2P clients, cheap VOIP, videoconferencing, VPN, and prehaps things that haven't been invented yet.
The internet should be about giving power to the users on its edges. IPv6 would encourage that, but NAT hinders it. There are forces who don't want to empower users- major content providers and big ISPs. (Which may be the same thing). Fearful of losing control of mass audience's entertainment patterns, they want to keep mass creativity centralized. AOL doesn't want users to download ClickNRun IRC-like servers to create TeenTalkDaytonville chatrooms, they want to sell them as a value added service. Time Warner doesn't want 100s of cheap FTP servers passing out free copies of 56 year old TV shows (which by rights are public domain), they want you to wait for the DVD or PPV options.
The desire exists. A chicken in every pot, and permanent IP address in every study! The powers that be are fearful, though. The existing entertainment/datacomm oligopoly was harmed enough by the Internet. End-users sharing data amoung themselves could ruin them- but the exhaustion of IP addresses provided an excuse to keep end-users cordoned off from the real internet. They could download, but not serve files- as long as the people remain "consumers", the corporations can keep them under control.
NAT boxes bring the internet a tiny bit back towards the shape of traditional TV and telephone networks, which is just how big business likes it.
Standard can't forbid adding new libraries to environment.
A standard can forbid whatever it likes. I could argue that since "Java" meant not only a programming language (like C++), but also a runtime environment and a set of libraries (larger than what, say, "C standard libraries" provide), that extending those was violating the standard.
In comparison to other standards, we've known for a long time that Java isn't an "Open Standard" like C++ or TCP/IP. (Especially in the past, when Microsoft's offenses occured). There's no public committee to approve amendments to the standard- what Sun says goes. They had wide latitude to redefine the standard as it suited them.
Looking at it from this perspective, one might think Microsoft foolish to sign a contract agreeing to ship Java, when the definition of Java could change in the future. That may be, but they did sign.
(Apple might also be in violation on "nonstandard library extension terms"- but they probably don't have the same contract terms as Microsoft did, and Sun won't waste time targeting a small fish until the big one is taken)
However, I don't even need to discuss new libraries. Microsoft introduced incompatibilities to the language itself. Features like delegate (a new keyword!!) don't provide access to any underlying Windows(tm) functionality- they just change how program internals work.
When GNU C++ did this, they were punished, although by gentle community opposition, rather than lawsuits, as they had no contractual obligation to the standards holder. (And C++ was understood to be a platform-bound language anyhow)
Or if somebody ships a Linux claiming conformance to LSB, but adds some proprietary applications to it, he violates the standard?
The Linux Standard Base specifically mentions that extensions are allowed. Therefore they don't violate the standard. If a standard disallows them, then yes, that's in violation. If a standard is silent on the topic, it needs revision in version x.1.
By product developer, do you mean Microsoft making their J++ environment, or J.Random programmer making a corporate data-entry form? The latter is dependent on the former, as the ability of random "Java" programmers to create platform-specific software was enabled by incompatible features inserted by Microsoft.
Legally, Microsoft's goals for the product should've been the same as Sun's. They signed a contract stating they would ship "Java (tm)" with Windows. The trademark on "Java" belongs to Sun. Therefore they get to decide what Java is and isn't.
Adding new, incompatible features is inconsistent with what Sun had defined Java to be. Therefore Microsoft violated a contract, and the court is making them pay for it. Rather than trying to come up with a dollar value for Sun's loss, they're looking about simply enforcing the original terms.
This case is a fairly "simple" matter of contract law, not world-shaking antitrust violation. (Sun lawyers like to suggest monopoly abuse as a way to angle for more damages, but that's not the core of the complaint). As a contract matter, the court must aim for a solution that is fair for Sun, not "good for software users everywhere" (as was suggested far up this thread).
If cross-platform compatibility ("write once run anywhere") is a design goal for the product, then adding platform specific extensions means breaking that product.
In terms of programming languages/environments, what a standard forbids is as important as what it accepts.
I guess it depends if su is installed
Even if its not, you can still collect passwords, just more slowly. If it can't su, the trickster software can just display an "authentication failed" message and quit to the real login screen. The victim just assumes she mistyped on the first try, and the attacker has a single new password to play with.
Tricks like this is why Microsoft added the "Press Control+Alt+Delete to Log In" feature. (At the DoD's behest)
Supposedly, it would be impossible for any user-level program to trap that keystroke, so you always can be sure you're seeing the real OS login screen. (Of course, given how easy it is to compromise the OS itself, this protection means little).
you might drop the attitude.
That's all part of the game.
Copyright law refers to chartered organizations and corporations as inviduals
Really? I doubt it. US law makes special mention of corporations as owners of copyright- allowing them to hold it for longer than a mortal could. But I've never heard of any exceptions for corporations as users of copyrighted materials.
If a corporation wants such an exception, it has to negotiate one with the copyright holder on a case-by-case basis. (This is called Volume Licensing).
any license that is binding under copyright law applies to such organizations as if they were individuals
Absolutely not. If a company buys a single Adobe Photoshop and installs it for 50 workstations, the BSA will be pleased to kick their door in and start auditing. They call this offense "piracy", but it's actually "copyright infringment" (not "violent crimes on or near the ocean") (Slashdot had a discussion of this yesterday. The official BSA site has a really funny page(flash).
The newspapers provide us with amble demonstration that a company making copies of software for internal use must get a license from the author to do so, or be violating copyright. Therefore, the same legal principles will apply to GPL-based software. "nothing else grants you permission to modify or distribute the Library or its derivative works. These actions are prohibited by law if you do not accept this License."
The Hobbit is more than 56 years old, so it's out of copyright anyway.
Oops, never mind.
a U.S. court decision interpreted a copy in RAM as a "copy" for purposes of copyright law
Really? Do you have a reference? I've always been told that it was the UK that had that interpretation, and that US law permitted "incidental copying as required for normal use of the product".
charging you $40 for the binaries and $200 for the source is NOT acceptable, as the source fee is clearly not reasonable
What's reasonable is charging as much for the source as it costs for shipping and handling. If for some reason a company has been selling copies of the same binary CDs for 2 years, but has committed the source to an unlabelled DLT tape in distant offsite storage, then they are quite justifying in asking for enough to cover their retrieval costs.
There's many practical and public-relations reasons that a company won't want to behave this way, but comparing dollar signs on source vs binaries isn't valid. (A source-code price of greater than $30 is a strong sign they may be padding the expense, but consideration must be made only on the difficulty of delivering code, not the nominal product price)
nowhere did they agree to a license.
GPL section 5:
by modifying or distributing the Program, you indicate your acceptance of this License
So one can argue that they've agreed to it.
I don't usually like clauses of the form "by XYZ, you agree to this license". (XYZ is usually "clicking OK"). Allowing the means to enter someone into a contract to expand to include behaviors very different from "an adult signing her name".
If clicking the button means agreement, why stop there? Can a used-car salesman take my $7000, and then yell out "by turning the ignition key, you agree to give me $175 more dollars"? Of course not, even though that's a necessary part of operating my own property, just like clicking "Accept" in InstallShield. It doesn't make sense, and this is why (if the courts were competent), EULAs would be unenforcable.
However, back to topic, if the XYZ "activity which indicates agreement" is something that would normally be a criminal violation of the other party's rights (something that no law-abiding person would do without special permission), then the case for interpreting it as a willful indication of acceptance is much stronger.
It's unlikely, but a judge could decide to make the case about violation of contract, rather than copyright infringment.
The distinctions in a nutshell:
- GPL gives you rights you didn't have. (Permission to pass out copies).
- EULA takes away rights you had. (Resale of the product, backup copies, reverse engineering, publication of critical reviews...).
Some factors that make the difference more confusing:GPL publishers don't claim you need to agree to the license before installing the program.
EULA publishers claim that you're not allowed to install the program without agreeing to the license.
Function signatures by themselves mean little. They could always claim to have included them as "a standardized API, for compatibility reasons".
(Many people agree "dependency is not derivation", meaning that "header file" type details like function names and arguments are insufficiently creative to be worthy of copyright protection)