As I understand it, there never were protests in the US, because it was through case law and policy changes at the PTO that software patents gradually became legal, not because of legislation. In other words, we were slowly boiled frogs.
Obviously the DMCA shouldn't apply to links. But it won't work anyway, because to complain about the links you must identify them (unless you pull a SCO), so if the complaint is public, the links are easily seen anyway.
Now, instead of one click, it takes one click, one copy-n-paste, and one keystroke to view the sites. Just click on the complaint link.
Google doesn't just let you search for illegal tools (ugh! illegal tools?), I'm sure you can find illegal stuff there too. Just this morning I used Google to find and pirate a copy of nibbles.bas. It's the same as the SMB share indexer that got a bunch of college kids sued. It's a scary thought, but everyone seems to think the DMCA applies to indexing services.
A search engine would be completely impractical if it wasn't automated. It's not possible (as the BSA has shown) to censor copyright infringement in an automated fasion with no collateral damage. Search engines and indexes must not be made liable for the content they index, but do not serve.
I'm surprised Google isn't more against this than they seem to be. If I were them, I at least would have put the removal notice in bigger text at the top of the page. Don't they realize the huge legal liability they'd have if you were liable for the content you link to? Do they lobby against the DMCA?
It's amazing what lawyers must think passes for legally binding. Check out this
LKML posting. Somebody sent this guy an email with a 'confidentiality' agreement, and if he had scrolled down past it to read the rest of the message, he would have agreed to it.
The problem with the patent system isn't that the barrier of entry is too low, the problem is that it's too high. To file a patent, you need either a lawyer or more legal knowledge than most programmers have. It takes a long time. Individuals, especially in the software industry, don't file patents. And if you're sued for patent infringement, defence can cost thousands, even if you're clearly right.
Companies can afford this barrier of entry, so they can use patents as weapons. But individuals can't, so patents have only the power to restrain them, despite the fact that most real innovation comes from individuals.
Copyright works much better, because there is no barrier of entry. But copyrights can only protect an expression, not an idea. If patents were "fixed" by lowering the barrier of entry, everything actually would be patented, which would obviously be bad. If you raise the barrier, patents just become more exclusively the weapon of companies against people. The system simply cannot work.
The problem is that it represents a conflict in interest. To use your example, it's like asking a structural engineer whether or not a bridge is needed in a given place. An unethical engineer might say we need bridges every 15 meters, because he'll be paid to build them. You should ask a city planner or traffic engineer instead.
Excellent. Then the next time some prick wont stop waffling into his cellphone during the movie, I can just take matters into my own hands and blast it into a useless lump of plastic.
But then you'd be helping the MPAA, by stopping the flow of text messages complaining about the movie!
Here's an idea for GUI consistency and perhaps better design that I like. Let's move the widget drawing code and the window managing code into the server, and have the clients communicate with the server at a higher level. The window manager and widget drawer would still be replaceable and themeable, but such changes would affect the look-n-feel all clients attached to that server. Of course, let's keep the good parts of X, like complete network transparency. There are a few projects (PicoGUI, Fresco) that seem similar to this, and I hope they get popular.
I agree. I don't know what's best for the drug industry, or any other industry, but let them fight their own battle. Abolishing patents altogether is unrealistic, and we'd be opposing far too many people. Abolishing software patents, however, is exactly what we should be doing.
It would be possible to create a file with a given MD5 sum, in the same sense as it's possible to break strong encryption. But in both cases, your only option is brute force, the kind that would take thousands of years, even accounting for Moore's Law. In both cases, there are no known mathmatical shortcuts.
Without actually doing the math, I think MD5 sums are much less likely to give false positives than most forms of DNA matching are.
It depends on your CD drive. Some older drives, the ones that jitter with cdda2wav, don't seek exactly. You can get jitter-free recordings with cdparanoia from those drives, but the start position will vary by a few bytes. But most new drives I've seen don't jitter even with cdda2wav, and do consistently rip absolutely identical files.
Interestingly, two Vorbis encodings of the same file will be different, because of the randomly generated stream serial number. And with MP3 or Vorbis, you could easily add "salt" to your own music collection to make it look original. This would screw up swarming downloads, though.
I hear there's a lot of solar research McBride could do. (He claims to own the Sun, Moon, and stars; the Moon's been done and the stars are impractical.)
I agree with this. An interesting idea, however, would be to make drugs, and perhaps even DNA, copyrightable instead of patentable. So for example, the idea of inhibiting a certain enzyme would be unprotected, but the actual chemical that can do this would be. This would encourage people to find different chemicals that have similar effects, perhaps with fewer side effects. Natural DNA could be public domain, but you could own copyright (not patent) on modifications. Of course, when applied to drug companies, copyright and patent would be similar in practice.
I don't think it would need to be an entire system, because you can freely change the implementation within a component. Which gets used more becomes a circuit design issue more than anything.
Consider an adder. It's easy to make a binary adder. It's possible to make a base-n adder and convert bases on input and output. If the chip designers can make a more efficient (power use, speed) adder with trinary, doquaddecary, or magic smoke, I'm happy.
Consider that about the only thing we use boolean algebra for is bit-masking. I think those sections of the circuit would just be implemented in binary, as I can't see base-n being more efficient for that.
Windows and Linux do represent different ways of thinking. There are differently designed. Yes, they are just tools. But why shouldn't you be allowed to use whatever tool you want?
I think schools should go out of their way to expose students to a diverse toolset, so they can choose the best one for the job. This goes for computer science and everything else. Would you go to a school that required PaperMate(tm) pens, even when just taking notes? Suppose the pens were discounted? I still wouldn't. It's not that there's anything wrong with PaperMate(tm) pens (although I prefer Bic), it's that the school is making pointless rules and/or has sold out.
BTW, which school do you attend? If I had been considering Clayton, ashkar's story would have been a big con, and your schools friendliness would have been a pro.
This has already happened at least once. Check out this story about SCO's site being down:
[McBride:] "Terrorists do things designed to intimidate people, and we see a lot of that going on all the time -- people trying to attack us or people that we're associated with," he said at the time. "If you look at a DOS attack, that's a form of cyber-terrorism," he said. "when you're shutting people's Web sites down, you are impacting commerce. That's against the law."
It's just another example of "terrorist" changing to mean someone you don't like, whether their actions are vandalism, copyright infringement, or just speaking you. He has a point about DDoSing being illegal, though.
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As I understand it, there never were protests in the US, because it was through case law and policy changes at the PTO that software patents gradually became legal, not because of legislation. In other words, we were slowly boiled frogs.
Now, instead of one click, it takes one click, one copy-n-paste, and one keystroke to view the sites. Just click on the complaint link.
A search engine would be completely impractical if it wasn't automated. It's not possible (as the BSA has shown) to censor copyright infringement in an automated fasion with no collateral damage. Search engines and indexes must not be made liable for the content they index, but do not serve.
I'm surprised Google isn't more against this than they seem to be. If I were them, I at least would have put the removal notice in bigger text at the top of the page. Don't they realize the huge legal liability they'd have if you were liable for the content you link to? Do they lobby against the DMCA?
It's amazing what lawyers must think passes for legally binding. Check out this LKML posting. Somebody sent this guy an email with a 'confidentiality' agreement, and if he had scrolled down past it to read the rest of the message, he would have agreed to it.
So you're telling me there are people who close their Slashdot window?
Companies can afford this barrier of entry, so they can use patents as weapons. But individuals can't, so patents have only the power to restrain them, despite the fact that most real innovation comes from individuals.
Copyright works much better, because there is no barrier of entry. But copyrights can only protect an expression, not an idea. If patents were "fixed" by lowering the barrier of entry, everything actually would be patented, which would obviously be bad. If you raise the barrier, patents just become more exclusively the weapon of companies against people. The system simply cannot work.
The problem is that it represents a conflict in interest. To use your example, it's like asking a structural engineer whether or not a bridge is needed in a given place. An unethical engineer might say we need bridges every 15 meters, because he'll be paid to build them. You should ask a city planner or traffic engineer instead.
Just make damn sure your distro doesn't include DeCSS code.
But then you'd be helping the MPAA, by stopping the flow of text messages complaining about the movie!
Here's an idea for GUI consistency and perhaps better design that I like. Let's move the widget drawing code and the window managing code into the server, and have the clients communicate with the server at a higher level. The window manager and widget drawer would still be replaceable and themeable, but such changes would affect the look-n-feel all clients attached to that server. Of course, let's keep the good parts of X, like complete network transparency. There are a few projects (PicoGUI, Fresco) that seem similar to this, and I hope they get popular.
I agree. I don't know what's best for the drug industry, or any other industry, but let them fight their own battle. Abolishing patents altogether is unrealistic, and we'd be opposing far too many people. Abolishing software patents, however, is exactly what we should be doing.
Without actually doing the math, I think MD5 sums are much less likely to give false positives than most forms of DNA matching are.
Unlikely or not, it does happen consistently on 3 of my CD-ROM drives. Many newer drives can seek with perfect accuracy, even when doing CDDA.
Interestingly, two Vorbis encodings of the same file will be different, because of the randomly generated stream serial number. And with MP3 or Vorbis, you could easily add "salt" to your own music collection to make it look original. This would screw up swarming downloads, though.
Or better yet, doesn't give untrusted people physical access.
The solution is clear: the more you encourage them, the higher they climb, and the harder they fall.
Whatever happened to Will Hunting?
I hear there's a lot of solar research McBride could do. (He claims to own the Sun, Moon, and stars; the Moon's been done and the stars are impractical.)
I agree with this. An interesting idea, however, would be to make drugs, and perhaps even DNA, copyrightable instead of patentable. So for example, the idea of inhibiting a certain enzyme would be unprotected, but the actual chemical that can do this would be. This would encourage people to find different chemicals that have similar effects, perhaps with fewer side effects. Natural DNA could be public domain, but you could own copyright (not patent) on modifications. Of course, when applied to drug companies, copyright and patent would be similar in practice.
There's nothing wrong with controlling your expression of an idea (copyright). Just not the idea itself.
Consider an adder. It's easy to make a binary adder. It's possible to make a base-n adder and convert bases on input and output. If the chip designers can make a more efficient (power use, speed) adder with trinary, doquaddecary, or magic smoke, I'm happy.
Consider that about the only thing we use boolean algebra for is bit-masking. I think those sections of the circuit would just be implemented in binary, as I can't see base-n being more efficient for that.
I think schools should go out of their way to expose students to a diverse toolset, so they can choose the best one for the job. This goes for computer science and everything else. Would you go to a school that required PaperMate(tm) pens, even when just taking notes? Suppose the pens were discounted? I still wouldn't. It's not that there's anything wrong with PaperMate(tm) pens (although I prefer Bic), it's that the school is making pointless rules and/or has sold out.
BTW, which school do you attend? If I had been considering Clayton, ashkar's story would have been a big con, and your schools friendliness would have been a pro.
...quoth the Slashbot.