Private companies are just as capable of engaging in censorship as government. Just because censorship by private organizations is legal does make it moral and does not change the fact that it IS censorship. People have every right to bitch about it, spread the word to others about it, and work against the interests of any organization that engages in it.
"The original legal case was about illegal use of the DMCA to take down material."
Ummm... yeah, like he said censorship. Anything covered under copyright is by definition speech and/or expression so someone taking down copyrighted material is ALWAYS censorship.
Why don't you leave the legal and technical discussions to the men who know what they are talking about instead of getting your pretty little head confused about such basic concepts?
"which by the way, means the GPL means nothing, because its entire existence is based on copyright law"
Since the GPL only NEEDS to exist because of copyright law that isn't saying much. Without copyright law everyone has the rights granted by the GPL by default.
"But the creative individuals creating these parodies, or even original material, have limited recourse"
Have limited practical recourse. Content distributor sites like youtube are required to respond to the take down notice which amounts to nothing more than an email. The person who posted the content can send a similar response (asserting ownership or fair use, etc) and the person and not the site is liable if they re-post the content. Unfortunately, they aren't required to restore the content automatically in the same way they are required to take it down and almost none of them do or even acknowledge the reply.
This story is dominated by more shills than I've seen in some time. The DMCA serves no legitimate function whatsoever. All uses of the DMCA represent abuse and there is MASS abuse across the board. Almost every content provider censors anything with a DMCA takedown request and almost all universally ignore legal reply by the content poster.
"And whilst measures like making circumvention systems illegal caused a lot of fuss, their impact was trivial - last time I checked this part of the law has neither prevented circumvention software being readily available"
So your argument in favor the law is that the illegal provisions are commonly broken anyway and most people who do so don't get caught?
"It has protected sites like YouTube and search engines."
Youtube and search engines were safe as common carriers before the DMCA created a "safe harbor" the only thing the DMCA has done for them is cause them to implement expensive procedures for taking down content, so expensive that they have built AI systems to detect content before a takedown request could be issued.
They pay better than the people... and even if they didn't, whatever they do pay is pure gravy. Also, try getting elected to a government office when the media cartels cut you off, news, radio and television are all part of the same cabal with movies and music.
"In this case though, the money laundering and other charges are pretty much always going to be felonies."
But its only money laundering if the first place if the civil copyright issues are treated as criminal issues. You can't 'launder' money that didn't come from criminal activities, even if that money was supposedly made from an activity which gave you civil liability.
If a US citizen had a server in China and shared copyrighted content on it I guarantee you US authorities would prosecute them in the US. So I call BS.
At the end of the day its just whatever argument serves the interests of the copyright cartel and that is almost always persecution in the US.
"It's funny that people always point out that The Pirate Bay and other torrent sites are hosted in Sweden and therefore it's Swedish law that applies to them"
The operators of said sites are also located in Sweden so it isn't exactly analogous.
Unless the customer wants to run fat pipes to all the residences in the wealthy neighborhoods. Bandwidth at a data center is dirt cheap, running miles of fiber, not so much.
I'd settle for some choice GPU optimized libraries. Most seem to be very specific and limited in scope. For instance I can find a million and one GPU accelerated libs to find a sub string but so far a basic PCRE lib for any language is completely elusive.
A GPU is just another computer. Coding for it in OpenCL isn't much different than writing C code that is just a wrapper around some assembly. There is no reason a MUCH more human friendly interface couldn't be made with the compiler taking care of using the appropriate memory and instructions to optimize for GPU usage.
Hell considering how many people are doing this its amazing there isn't even anything approaching a real comprehensive OpenCL tutorial on the web. Just because you CAN learn to use something almost entirely from spec sheets and api documentation doesn't mean there is anyone who learns something faster or better that way.
"Which means that Microsoft, Apple, and Google are now untouchable, because they can offer far higher salaries than any small local company"
For a little while. But before long their higher overhead will cause them to flop.
"Competing companies can offer a higher salary for a position, but it should be advertised, and open to anyone qualified."
Why? If a company wants to hire Linus Torvalds specifically who are you to tell them they have to put up some public posting? Employees seek out specific employers or subsets of employers what is wrong with companies soliciting talent? There is absolutely nothing wrong with seeking out say, Cisco support staff to be admins managing your Cisco gear. If you are willing to pay more than Cisco than what is wrong with that? We aren't talking about preferential hiring based on race, gender, or other protected classifications we are talking about companies hiring personal based upon specific experience they have that others don't. I see nothing wrong with the aforementioned company putting up an ad if they choose that lists having a year with Cisco as a specific requirement.
Companies have no problem with squeezing every dollar their clients and customers will tolerate out them. They call it supply and demand. Employees and prospective employees should be free to do the same thing. Who knows companies might begin treating their workers like people again instead of disposable drones so that when the time comes they actually feel like they are part of a team and have loyalty to that team.
I have a couple in-laws who are retired from the miami docks. They are (or were) run by the mafia and that's another animal entirely. Despite a couple major well known exceptions, most other unions aren't run by the mob.
How much worse does it have to get? Your agreement said that you couldn't perform the same job for six months after leaving. Working the same job when you switch from company to company is called a career. Fortunately that non-compete effectively prevents you from working in your chosen profession (software developer) and any non-compete that does so is null and void legally AFAIK.
BTW having now read TFA it clearly states that the anti-poaching agreements prevented the companies from hiring each others workers even if they voluntarily applied for the position.
"Initrode sent letters to everybody they could contact as Initech, trying to recruit Initech's talent as their own. To me, that's the bad part of poaching, because it's clearly intended to specifically hurt competitors, and it cuts the public out of the chance to apply."
I disagree. Competition is a good thing. When they are trying to recruit the talent from the other company they are also offering them a higher salary. This results in increasing average salaries in that profession. That is good for pretty much everyone. If Initech is paying their employees a generous wage and benefit package then Initrode won't have much luck.
The only reason for not wanting this is because companies don't want to have to offer and maintain generous wage and benefits packages. Companies want to cheat by hiring employees with less skill but raw potential at a low salary, encourage and sometimes even force those employees to develop their skills but keep them at a salary in the ballpark of their entry level skill set even though they now possess a skill set worth far more. Training in house is a valid strategy for having staff with a known skill set and competency and for minimizing the cost of those who don't work out. It isn't a valid strategy for avoiding paying competitive wages for their talent after it is developed.
I'm pretty sure that Fox News readers/watchers don't have the tech skills needed to deface the DOJ and if they did they wouldn't want to spend tax dollars to restore it after a defacing.
How do you define poaching. After all, regardless of who initiates the conversation it is always the corporation that extends the offer so you could say any hiring is poaching.
This kind of thing could make you unhirable to the best market for your skills. If you work for a vendor supporting their product that vendor will typically require a non-compete from you and a non-poaching agreement from all their partners... basically everyone who wants the skills you have. There will be a time limit on this, maybe 5 yrs but this is tech. 5yr old expertise is the same as not having any.
"If they want to make these "corporate unions" public they're welcome to have them. "
No they aren't. It's called collusion. Unions do not form an effective monopoly but corporate competitors colluding DO form such a monopoly and the law must prevent this. Not only for the anti-competitive aspects but because it tosses the HUMANS right to pursue happiness out the window.
Development cost would be expense. There is no reason LOTR NEEDED to cost hundreds of millions of dollars to produce. You are talking about the collective result of hundreds if not thousands of ridiculously overpaid individuals. With sane salaries and sane special effects and equipment costs (which would happen the minute the demand for these products wasn't driven by hundred million dollar budgets) this becomes a couple million dollar project. They had a system for this sort of thing before copyright called patronage. Under patronage one rich guy pays all these people a reasonable SALARY or lump sum for their work because he wants to see it and enjoy it. The rich guy can still recoup his costs by providing public performances (think movie theater).
Sorry, I don't see any reason for the movie industry to be a multi-billion dollar one. I don't see any reason for movies to cost what they do and as awesome as truly epic movies like LOTR are I find the amount of additional enjoyment that one gets out of them amounts to no more than the additional running time of the film. That is simply completely out of proportion to the resources spent on them. A MMORPG like WOW, a paintball arena, MMA competition, laser tag, real jousting tourney, Golden Dawn temple experience, or table top gaming tourney are all examples of things that provide at least as much enjoyment as watching LOTR. And they cost far far less than LOTR and they aren't one trick ponies, you can actually enjoy them more than once. There is even less justification for the music industry costs.
We can spend most of that portion of our nations wealth on something that retains inherent value rather than something that depends on us enforcing draconian monopolies and doing our best to strong arm the rest of the world into enforcing those monopolies as well. Even going as far to directly enforce the monopolies in other nations.
Even better would be getting rid of copyright altogether. Payment and rewards should be tied to expense. It costs a great deal in the form of labor to write a book but it effectively costs nothing to copy one. Thus one should charge for writing the book, not making copies of it.
"The Entertainment INDUSTRY can easily be put in its corner by bringing copyright terms"
That would be a ridiculously long term for software. You can't even run 20yr old software so that is the equivalent of saying nothing that has value should go into the public domain. For software 2yrs would be more appropriate with 5yrs as a lukewarm compromise.
But they were sharing it at the equivalent speed of 7000 computers! See a normal dial-up connection is 14.4kbps and they had 100mbps which is 100000kbps! That is 6944.44 14.4kbps connections, round that up to 7000 because there is at least one number over 5 there and it suits our agenda and you have the equivalent to 7000 normal computers!
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Private companies are just as capable of engaging in censorship as government. Just because censorship by private organizations is legal does make it moral and does not change the fact that it IS censorship. People have every right to bitch about it, spread the word to others about it, and work against the interests of any organization that engages in it.
You are feeding a troll. Thought I'd mention it even though I bit too. Have any pics? ;)
"The original legal case was about illegal use of the DMCA to take down material."
Ummm... yeah, like he said censorship. Anything covered under copyright is by definition speech and/or expression so someone taking down copyrighted material is ALWAYS censorship.
Why don't you leave the legal and technical discussions to the men who know what they are talking about instead of getting your pretty little head confused about such basic concepts?
"which by the way, means the GPL means nothing, because its entire existence is based on copyright law"
Since the GPL only NEEDS to exist because of copyright law that isn't saying much. Without copyright law everyone has the rights granted by the GPL by default.
"But the creative individuals creating these parodies, or even original material, have limited recourse"
Have limited practical recourse. Content distributor sites like youtube are required to respond to the take down notice which amounts to nothing more than an email. The person who posted the content can send a similar response (asserting ownership or fair use, etc) and the person and not the site is liable if they re-post the content. Unfortunately, they aren't required to restore the content automatically in the same way they are required to take it down and almost none of them do or even acknowledge the reply.
This story is dominated by more shills than I've seen in some time. The DMCA serves no legitimate function whatsoever. All uses of the DMCA represent abuse and there is MASS abuse across the board. Almost every content provider censors anything with a DMCA takedown request and almost all universally ignore legal reply by the content poster.
"And whilst measures like making circumvention systems illegal caused a lot of fuss, their impact was trivial - last time I checked this part of the law has neither prevented circumvention software being readily available"
So your argument in favor the law is that the illegal provisions are commonly broken anyway and most people who do so don't get caught?
"It has protected sites like YouTube and search engines."
Youtube and search engines were safe as common carriers before the DMCA created a "safe harbor" the only thing the DMCA has done for them is cause them to implement expensive procedures for taking down content, so expensive that they have built AI systems to detect content before a takedown request could be issued.
They pay better than the people... and even if they didn't, whatever they do pay is pure gravy. Also, try getting elected to a government office when the media cartels cut you off, news, radio and television are all part of the same cabal with movies and music.
"In this case though, the money laundering and other charges are pretty much always going to be felonies."
But its only money laundering if the first place if the civil copyright issues are treated as criminal issues. You can't 'launder' money that didn't come from criminal activities, even if that money was supposedly made from an activity which gave you civil liability.
If a US citizen had a server in China and shared copyrighted content on it I guarantee you US authorities would prosecute them in the US. So I call BS.
At the end of the day its just whatever argument serves the interests of the copyright cartel and that is almost always persecution in the US.
"It's funny that people always point out that The Pirate Bay and other torrent sites are hosted in Sweden and therefore it's Swedish law that applies to them"
The operators of said sites are also located in Sweden so it isn't exactly analogous.
Unless the customer wants to run fat pipes to all the residences in the wealthy neighborhoods. Bandwidth at a data center is dirt cheap, running miles of fiber, not so much.
I'd settle for some choice GPU optimized libraries. Most seem to be very specific and limited in scope. For instance I can find a million and one GPU accelerated libs to find a sub string but so far a basic PCRE lib for any language is completely elusive.
I don't want to build a bunch of GPU wheels.
A GPU is just another computer. Coding for it in OpenCL isn't much different than writing C code that is just a wrapper around some assembly. There is no reason a MUCH more human friendly interface couldn't be made with the compiler taking care of using the appropriate memory and instructions to optimize for GPU usage.
Hell considering how many people are doing this its amazing there isn't even anything approaching a real comprehensive OpenCL tutorial on the web. Just because you CAN learn to use something almost entirely from spec sheets and api documentation doesn't mean there is anyone who learns something faster or better that way.
"Which means that Microsoft, Apple, and Google are now untouchable, because they can offer far higher salaries than any small local company"
For a little while. But before long their higher overhead will cause them to flop.
"Competing companies can offer a higher salary for a position, but it should be advertised, and open to anyone qualified."
Why? If a company wants to hire Linus Torvalds specifically who are you to tell them they have to put up some public posting? Employees seek out specific employers or subsets of employers what is wrong with companies soliciting talent? There is absolutely nothing wrong with seeking out say, Cisco support staff to be admins managing your Cisco gear. If you are willing to pay more than Cisco than what is wrong with that? We aren't talking about preferential hiring based on race, gender, or other protected classifications we are talking about companies hiring personal based upon specific experience they have that others don't. I see nothing wrong with the aforementioned company putting up an ad if they choose that lists having a year with Cisco as a specific requirement.
Companies have no problem with squeezing every dollar their clients and customers will tolerate out them. They call it supply and demand. Employees and prospective employees should be free to do the same thing. Who knows companies might begin treating their workers like people again instead of disposable drones so that when the time comes they actually feel like they are part of a team and have loyalty to that team.
I have a couple in-laws who are retired from the miami docks. They are (or were) run by the mafia and that's another animal entirely. Despite a couple major well known exceptions, most other unions aren't run by the mob.
"Personally, I'm okay with contracts like that."
How much worse does it have to get? Your agreement said that you couldn't perform the same job for six months after leaving. Working the same job when you switch from company to company is called a career. Fortunately that non-compete effectively prevents you from working in your chosen profession (software developer) and any non-compete that does so is null and void legally AFAIK.
BTW having now read TFA it clearly states that the anti-poaching agreements prevented the companies from hiring each others workers even if they voluntarily applied for the position.
"Initrode sent letters to everybody they could contact as Initech, trying to recruit Initech's talent as their own. To me, that's the bad part of poaching, because it's clearly intended to specifically hurt competitors, and it cuts the public out of the chance to apply."
I disagree. Competition is a good thing. When they are trying to recruit the talent from the other company they are also offering them a higher salary. This results in increasing average salaries in that profession. That is good for pretty much everyone. If Initech is paying their employees a generous wage and benefit package then Initrode won't have much luck.
The only reason for not wanting this is because companies don't want to have to offer and maintain generous wage and benefits packages. Companies want to cheat by hiring employees with less skill but raw potential at a low salary, encourage and sometimes even force those employees to develop their skills but keep them at a salary in the ballpark of their entry level skill set even though they now possess a skill set worth far more. Training in house is a valid strategy for having staff with a known skill set and competency and for minimizing the cost of those who don't work out. It isn't a valid strategy for avoiding paying competitive wages for their talent after it is developed.
I'm pretty sure that Fox News readers/watchers don't have the tech skills needed to deface the DOJ and if they did they wouldn't want to spend tax dollars to restore it after a defacing.
How do you define poaching. After all, regardless of who initiates the conversation it is always the corporation that extends the offer so you could say any hiring is poaching.
This kind of thing could make you unhirable to the best market for your skills. If you work for a vendor supporting their product that vendor will typically require a non-compete from you and a non-poaching agreement from all their partners... basically everyone who wants the skills you have. There will be a time limit on this, maybe 5 yrs but this is tech. 5yr old expertise is the same as not having any.
"If they want to make these "corporate unions" public they're welcome to have them. "
No they aren't. It's called collusion. Unions do not form an effective monopoly but corporate competitors colluding DO form such a monopoly and the law must prevent this. Not only for the anti-competitive aspects but because it tosses the HUMANS right to pursue happiness out the window.
Development cost would be expense. There is no reason LOTR NEEDED to cost hundreds of millions of dollars to produce. You are talking about the collective result of hundreds if not thousands of ridiculously overpaid individuals. With sane salaries and sane special effects and equipment costs (which would happen the minute the demand for these products wasn't driven by hundred million dollar budgets) this becomes a couple million dollar project. They had a system for this sort of thing before copyright called patronage. Under patronage one rich guy pays all these people a reasonable SALARY or lump sum for their work because he wants to see it and enjoy it. The rich guy can still recoup his costs by providing public performances (think movie theater).
Sorry, I don't see any reason for the movie industry to be a multi-billion dollar one. I don't see any reason for movies to cost what they do and as awesome as truly epic movies like LOTR are I find the amount of additional enjoyment that one gets out of them amounts to no more than the additional running time of the film. That is simply completely out of proportion to the resources spent on them. A MMORPG like WOW, a paintball arena, MMA competition, laser tag, real jousting tourney, Golden Dawn temple experience, or table top gaming tourney are all examples of things that provide at least as much enjoyment as watching LOTR. And they cost far far less than LOTR and they aren't one trick ponies, you can actually enjoy them more than once. There is even less justification for the music industry costs.
We can spend most of that portion of our nations wealth on something that retains inherent value rather than something that depends on us enforcing draconian monopolies and doing our best to strong arm the rest of the world into enforcing those monopolies as well. Even going as far to directly enforce the monopolies in other nations.
Even better would be getting rid of copyright altogether. Payment and rewards should be tied to expense. It costs a great deal in the form of labor to write a book but it effectively costs nothing to copy one. Thus one should charge for writing the book, not making copies of it.
Which would be fine. If it were the result of a CIVIL suit by the people who claimed to lose money and occurred AFTER they won in court.
I had files on this service and can no longer access them. This hurt more than just one guy.
"The Entertainment INDUSTRY can easily be put in its corner by bringing copyright terms"
That would be a ridiculously long term for software. You can't even run 20yr old software so that is the equivalent of saying nothing that has value should go into the public domain. For software 2yrs would be more appropriate with 5yrs as a lukewarm compromise.
But they were sharing it at the equivalent speed of 7000 computers! See a normal dial-up connection is 14.4kbps and they had 100mbps which is 100000kbps! That is 6944.44 14.4kbps connections, round that up to 7000 because there is at least one number over 5 there and it suits our agenda and you have the equivalent to 7000 normal computers!
"Everybody agrees that we need to battle online piracy of movies, books, TV shows and such"
Since when? Most of us don't agree with this at all.