This is a tried and true method in the business community: If you can't get a fair study to show the conclusions you want, hold an unfair study. More people will pay attention to the results than the retraction.
When an off-the-wall product such as a TiVo gets brought into such a store, they usually have some form of basic training for the reps in the department, or at least a cheat sheet of facts they can work from. These kids should at least be expected to read a one-page story of Linux if there's going to be a Linux box in their department, otherwise they come off clueless as seen here.
I think the theory is that it was the cheapest PC they could get into the store. Unfortunately, they seem to have cheapened it up so much that nobody knows what to do with it.
I seriously doubt it's any hardware company's intent to go looking for pirated copies of their router software, but they're basically slapping this $15,000 annoyance fee in there to try to make sales of their used equipment that much less attractive. Afterall, Cisco has already been hit hard once before by the dot-com colapse causing some of their biggest customers to turn into cut rate retailers of never-left-the-box equipment.
I don't think they can go forcing people who buy used routers to pay the $15,000 for the license in court, but they certainly can charge a $15,000 surcharge to start a service contract without buying the equipment as new. Saying "We'll do it, but you're gonna have to give us a boat load of money." is sometimes just an impolite way to say "No!" Cisco would rather you buy a new router than pick one up used, so they don't really want to support the old equipment. So, by putting the support cost off the charts, they'll get their profit from you either coming or going...
The key difference is that a library can only loan out as many copies of an item as it has bought, and has to insist that the book be returned in a timely manner so it can be loaned to someone else.
MySQL is making money right now selling its manual in a softcover form at BN.com. It's the same information word-for-word that's posted on its web site and downloadable in several formats. There's no need to pirate this book, it's already freely available in digital form, yet the book still sells.
Shakespeare's sonnets are in the public domain to begin with too, so those are posted in HTML all over the web just fine, yet books of his work sell anyway. It's the same story here too, people are willing to pay for the physical presentation of a book even if the content is available elsewhere.
Harry Potter was an exception, as the publisher deliberately created antisipation for the book, and then didn't release it around the world at the same time. That's why there was interest in downloading it, people wanted to know what happens next and didn't want to wait. I don't think this will apply to the next book in the..For Dummies series.
So, book publishers aren't immune to piracy, but they certainly have less to worry about than the video/audio publishers...
Which is to say the powerline broadband people are saying "Change the rules! We can't do what we want to do without breaking either the laws of physics or the laws of the land!"
Other way around... ever been on a city street with a horse drawn buggy on the road?
Cars have to put up with buggies, except on the specially marked car-only roads where other things like pedestrians are banned too. (Those would be called "highways".)
Horses and cars cause problems for each other, but they're expected to co-exist without killing each other.
The thing is, powerline data would have to be converted back to more typical networks somewhere. Afterall, you've gotta limit the collision domain somehow. So, just because there's power there won't promise there's networking there... kinda like the limits that make DSL useless in rural areas. This isn't a be-all fix, even if they do get it to work outside a lab.
There are only a limited number of connections to a typical house. In order of popularity: Power, water, phone, cable TV, natural gas.
Phone and cable TV wires nicely converted into data networks, and it has been done. Water and natural gas might have looked at the idea, but they've got physical things going through their pipes so they really didn't have much hope. Power owners at least have a few things that work in the lab, but they all seem to die in the real world. Afterall, a "powermodem" would likely have an unacceptable occasional failure rate where it fails to strip out the rest of the voltage and goes boom!
I think ham radio is a much safer thing to keep around...
The fact is, "pasty faced social misfits" who send spam don't make a product. They need to either buy something from some supplier, or be feeding into some sort of lead generation program like the article lays out. So, something does ripple through the economy...
Quite possibly right. If he really could play the whole nite on a single quarter, that machine would be showing with a revenue of $2 a week, and the machine owner would declare the game a flop and put another one in. Afterall, very high playing time is bad for a coin-operated game's business model.
The fact is, the classic video games aren't truely dead. There's devices like this one that are re-releasing retro games in smaller packages because now all the chips it takes to do everything the old Ataris do fit into the controler. Just hook up to RCA video/audio ports and go.
So, there's still a market, and an easier than ever ability to deliver the product... PROFIT!
I think this demonstrates one of the biggest problems in copyright law, that the 95 year expiration date assures that nothing released within our lifetimes will ever become part of the public domain.
If most software is becoming abandonware within 25 years of its release, wouldn't that say that the complete economic value of a computer program gets soaked out within that timeframe? Isn't that the point of having copyrights expire, or have we forgotten that already?
I think that is the best way to handle this. Approach a professor that you trust and who uses this system privately, and ask them for assistance in doing this the white-hat way.
Remember, the school is the customer of this software vendor, so if you've got proof that their security is not what they claim it to be, your school should be even more upset at the vendor than you are.
If it comes to the point of public disclosure, it should come through the official channels of your school. That is to say, your proffessor should be the one making the announcement after it being approved by whatever means your school has for validating research, but you deserve to be credited as the one who sparked the investigation. It's a really sad state of affairs if you have to hide after making a discovery such as this.
As long as you show to everybody around that your hands are clean, you should have nothing to be affaid of. Afterall, in order to charge you with a crime there first has to be something damaged. Secure either a private server that has no real class data on it, or at least get a fictional class set up on the production server, your professor should know who to talk to in order to make that happen. Afterall, as long as the university is on your side, the company's gonna have to stretch quite far to accuse you of anything.
Does too. If you're supposed to be at place X during company time, you've better be there. Say you're at place X but have a phone signal that says you're in place Y, you've got some explaining to do. Ask Jayson Blair.
Anyone want to crunch the numbers line-by-line to discover how much a boxed linux version should set you back if SCO's per-line cost is translated across the entire code?
We can't... we don't know exactly how many lines SCO is claiming.
No need. "Intellectual property" is a phrase we use to refer to the collection of property-like traits that come with copyrights, trademarks, and patents... it's not really property, its a set of rights that behave like property.
The government hath given rights, and the goverment can taketh away rights. It's not a bill of attender to void a copyright or trademark... it's not property or personal liberty we're talking about here. In fact, copyrights and patents are a limit on the liberty of everybody other than the holder.
There's no need to go through Emminent Domain, we just need a simple Act of Congress, and then SCO can fight for its life until the crushing "Yes, Congress can do that." ruling from the Supreme Court.
This is how a SCO gets created, only this version would be an outright winner...
Only the rightful holder of a copyright can choose to subject their IP to the GPL. If somebody falsely claims that they own the rights and are attaching the GPL to the IP, and it goes anywhere useful, the original owner of the copyright can come out of the woodwork can claim that it wasn't really licensed under the GPL and they'd like $695 for every processor its ever been used on now.
But there's a big question mark as to just who the "them" to buy it from is... or even if there still is one. If the company went bankrupt, then you can contact the bankruptcy court to get the records and chase the lines there. However, if they simply wound down and closed up shop, it's not so easy.
However, if people who should know what happened are saying "no one", get that answer in writing. Nobody owning a copyright on IP means that there's nobody left to sue you if you start using it... in two words: "public domain".:) If the people telling you that are in fact the owners, then they're too clueless to sue you anyway.
If nobody owns the IP rights to something, that means it's in the public domain. So, if the people who should know are responding "no one" owns the rights, and they're right, then it's public domain and you're free to do what you want with it. That's doubtful to be correct.
IANAL, but my understanding of the matter is that the IP of a dead company depends on how the company died:
If the company ended in bankruptcy... then the creditors of the deceased company that got left holding the bag still have the IP in their bag. At that point, this IP is hostage, waiting for somebody to pay off the debts of the forgotten company. Usually, that's more than it costs to do without it.
If the company got bought out at the end... whoever did the buying likely got all the IP rights the former company had, so that's the chain you've got to follow.
If the company wound down operations orderly: Well, they either transfered the IP assets to someone/something, or they weren't as orderly as they thought when they wound down. The net result here seems to be a back door into the public domain, since the only entity that could defend the copyright has already killed itself.
So, anybody wanna pick what I just said apart now?
I sure hope nobody takes this seriously. If people do actually "buy the right to use Linux" at that price, then SCO can claim that their price is the market value usage of "their property" and begin the overvalued copyright violation suits. Somebody should send them an offer to pay $1 for a license and see what they say to that...
The fact is, Disney's use of the term "magic" is exactly right. The company is a master at creating experiences that seem amazing to people, not just kids but adults as well.
Disney embraces whatever they need to embrace make the experience they're selling enjoyable. Family values one day, gay rights the next. They celebrate the spirit of creativity, yet don't want to let the copyrights on Mickey, Minnie, and their friends expire. The fact is, they're taking money from as many people as they can as fast as they can, but most people don't notice, and most of those who are smart enough to notice see that they are getting quite a fair value in return for the money they spend.
The Slashdot FAQ even adknowledges this problem. Corperations take our money, but they also provide us with the TV shows, movies, theme parks, and other things we enjoy in our free time. And besides, anybody who has a 401k accidently owns a few Disney, Viacom, Clear Channel, Microsoft.... shares through mutual funds. So, a sliver of those dollars they take from everybody is getting shoved into our back pockets anyway. Life is full of those contradictions. Don't dwell on them too long... they don't really make any sense anyway.
Slashdot Mirror
This is a tried and true method in the business community: If you can't get a fair study to show the conclusions you want, hold an unfair study. More people will pay attention to the results than the retraction.
When an off-the-wall product such as a TiVo gets brought into such a store, they usually have some form of basic training for the reps in the department, or at least a cheat sheet of facts they can work from. These kids should at least be expected to read a one-page story of Linux if there's going to be a Linux box in their department, otherwise they come off clueless as seen here.
I think the theory is that it was the cheapest PC they could get into the store. Unfortunately, they seem to have cheapened it up so much that nobody knows what to do with it.
I seriously doubt it's any hardware company's intent to go looking for pirated copies of their router software, but they're basically slapping this $15,000 annoyance fee in there to try to make sales of their used equipment that much less attractive. Afterall, Cisco has already been hit hard once before by the dot-com colapse causing some of their biggest customers to turn into cut rate retailers of never-left-the-box equipment.
I don't think they can go forcing people who buy used routers to pay the $15,000 for the license in court, but they certainly can charge a $15,000 surcharge to start a service contract without buying the equipment as new. Saying "We'll do it, but you're gonna have to give us a boat load of money." is sometimes just an impolite way to say "No!" Cisco would rather you buy a new router than pick one up used, so they don't really want to support the old equipment. So, by putting the support cost off the charts, they'll get their profit from you either coming or going...
The key difference is that a library can only loan out as many copies of an item as it has bought, and has to insist that the book be returned in a timely manner so it can be loaned to someone else.
MySQL is making money right now selling its manual in a softcover form at BN.com. It's the same information word-for-word that's posted on its web site and downloadable in several formats. There's no need to pirate this book, it's already freely available in digital form, yet the book still sells.
..For Dummies series.
Shakespeare's sonnets are in the public domain to begin with too, so those are posted in HTML all over the web just fine, yet books of his work sell anyway. It's the same story here too, people are willing to pay for the physical presentation of a book even if the content is available elsewhere.
Harry Potter was an exception, as the publisher deliberately created antisipation for the book, and then didn't release it around the world at the same time. That's why there was interest in downloading it, people wanted to know what happens next and didn't want to wait. I don't think this will apply to the next book in the
So, book publishers aren't immune to piracy, but they certainly have less to worry about than the video/audio publishers...
Which is to say the powerline broadband people are saying "Change the rules! We can't do what we want to do without breaking either the laws of physics or the laws of the land!"
Other way around... ever been on a city street with a horse drawn buggy on the road?
Cars have to put up with buggies, except on the specially marked car-only roads where other things like pedestrians are banned too. (Those would be called "highways".)
Horses and cars cause problems for each other, but they're expected to co-exist without killing each other.
The thing is, powerline data would have to be converted back to more typical networks somewhere. Afterall, you've gotta limit the collision domain somehow. So, just because there's power there won't promise there's networking there... kinda like the limits that make DSL useless in rural areas. This isn't a be-all fix, even if they do get it to work outside a lab.
There are only a limited number of connections to a typical house. In order of popularity: Power, water, phone, cable TV, natural gas.
Phone and cable TV wires nicely converted into data networks, and it has been done. Water and natural gas might have looked at the idea, but they've got physical things going through their pipes so they really didn't have much hope. Power owners at least have a few things that work in the lab, but they all seem to die in the real world. Afterall, a "powermodem" would likely have an unacceptable occasional failure rate where it fails to strip out the rest of the voltage and goes boom!
I think ham radio is a much safer thing to keep around...
The fact is, "pasty faced social misfits" who send spam don't make a product. They need to either buy something from some supplier, or be feeding into some sort of lead generation program like the article lays out. So, something does ripple through the economy...
Quite possibly right. If he really could play the whole nite on a single quarter, that machine would be showing with a revenue of $2 a week, and the machine owner would declare the game a flop and put another one in. Afterall, very high playing time is bad for a coin-operated game's business model.
The fact is, the classic video games aren't truely dead. There's devices like this one that are re-releasing retro games in smaller packages because now all the chips it takes to do everything the old Ataris do fit into the controler. Just hook up to RCA video/audio ports and go.
So, there's still a market, and an easier than ever ability to deliver the product... PROFIT!
I think this demonstrates one of the biggest problems in copyright law, that the 95 year expiration date assures that nothing released within our lifetimes will ever become part of the public domain.
If most software is becoming abandonware within 25 years of its release, wouldn't that say that the complete economic value of a computer program gets soaked out within that timeframe? Isn't that the point of having copyrights expire, or have we forgotten that already?
It's a matter of proper code I think. The prhase that they wanted to hear to indicate what you were trying to say was "Recipient not at this address."
I think that is the best way to handle this. Approach a professor that you trust and who uses this system privately, and ask them for assistance in doing this the white-hat way.
Remember, the school is the customer of this software vendor, so if you've got proof that their security is not what they claim it to be, your school should be even more upset at the vendor than you are.
If it comes to the point of public disclosure, it should come through the official channels of your school. That is to say, your proffessor should be the one making the announcement after it being approved by whatever means your school has for validating research, but you deserve to be credited as the one who sparked the investigation. It's a really sad state of affairs if you have to hide after making a discovery such as this.
As long as you show to everybody around that your hands are clean, you should have nothing to be affaid of. Afterall, in order to charge you with a crime there first has to be something damaged. Secure either a private server that has no real class data on it, or at least get a fictional class set up on the production server, your professor should know who to talk to in order to make that happen. Afterall, as long as the university is on your side, the company's gonna have to stretch quite far to accuse you of anything.
Does too. If you're supposed to be at place X during company time, you've better be there. Say you're at place X but have a phone signal that says you're in place Y, you've got some explaining to do. Ask Jayson Blair.
Anyone want to crunch the numbers line-by-line to discover how much a boxed linux version should set you back if SCO's per-line cost is translated across the entire code?
We can't... we don't know exactly how many lines SCO is claiming.
No need. "Intellectual property" is a phrase we use to refer to the collection of property-like traits that come with copyrights, trademarks, and patents... it's not really property, its a set of rights that behave like property.
The government hath given rights, and the goverment can taketh away rights. It's not a bill of attender to void a copyright or trademark... it's not property or personal liberty we're talking about here. In fact, copyrights and patents are a limit on the liberty of everybody other than the holder.
There's no need to go through Emminent Domain, we just need a simple Act of Congress, and then SCO can fight for its life until the crushing "Yes, Congress can do that." ruling from the Supreme Court.
This is how a SCO gets created, only this version would be an outright winner...
Only the rightful holder of a copyright can choose to subject their IP to the GPL. If somebody falsely claims that they own the rights and are attaching the GPL to the IP, and it goes anywhere useful, the original owner of the copyright can come out of the woodwork can claim that it wasn't really licensed under the GPL and they'd like $695 for every processor its ever been used on now.
But there's a big question mark as to just who the "them" to buy it from is... or even if there still is one. If the company went bankrupt, then you can contact the bankruptcy court to get the records and chase the lines there. However, if they simply wound down and closed up shop, it's not so easy.
:) If the people telling you that are in fact the owners, then they're too clueless to sue you anyway.
However, if people who should know what happened are saying "no one", get that answer in writing. Nobody owning a copyright on IP means that there's nobody left to sue you if you start using it... in two words: "public domain".
If nobody owns the IP rights to something, that means it's in the public domain. So, if the people who should know are responding "no one" owns the rights, and they're right, then it's public domain and you're free to do what you want with it. That's doubtful to be correct.
IANAL, but my understanding of the matter is that the IP of a dead company depends on how the company died:
If the company ended in bankruptcy... then the creditors of the deceased company that got left holding the bag still have the IP in their bag. At that point, this IP is hostage, waiting for somebody to pay off the debts of the forgotten company. Usually, that's more than it costs to do without it.
If the company got bought out at the end... whoever did the buying likely got all the IP rights the former company had, so that's the chain you've got to follow.
If the company wound down operations orderly: Well, they either transfered the IP assets to someone/something, or they weren't as orderly as they thought when they wound down. The net result here seems to be a back door into the public domain, since the only entity that could defend the copyright has already killed itself.
So, anybody wanna pick what I just said apart now?
I sure hope nobody takes this seriously. If people do actually "buy the right to use Linux" at that price, then SCO can claim that their price is the market value usage of "their property" and begin the overvalued copyright violation suits. Somebody should send them an offer to pay $1 for a license and see what they say to that...
WiFi's already easy to DOS... just put a bunch of 2.4 GHz spread-spectrim phones in the neighborhood and start yakking...
The fact is, Disney's use of the term "magic" is exactly right. The company is a master at creating experiences that seem amazing to people, not just kids but adults as well.
Disney embraces whatever they need to embrace make the experience they're selling enjoyable. Family values one day, gay rights the next. They celebrate the spirit of creativity, yet don't want to let the copyrights on Mickey, Minnie, and their friends expire. The fact is, they're taking money from as many people as they can as fast as they can, but most people don't notice, and most of those who are smart enough to notice see that they are getting quite a fair value in return for the money they spend.
The Slashdot FAQ even adknowledges this problem. Corperations take our money, but they also provide us with the TV shows, movies, theme parks, and other things we enjoy in our free time. And besides, anybody who has a 401k accidently owns a few Disney, Viacom, Clear Channel, Microsoft.... shares through mutual funds. So, a sliver of those dollars they take from everybody is getting shoved into our back pockets anyway. Life is full of those contradictions. Don't dwell on them too long... they don't really make any sense anyway.