You bring up a good point: if he were to publically release this he might be liable. But what if he just "accidentally" left the back door open so somebody could come in and take it?
It would be nice to see the creators of these P2P networks put all of their efforts into adopting one of the many technologies available to filter out infringing music rather than arguing that the networks are being used for things like "speech."
Even if that were so, it would defeat the whole point. If the owner can use a filtering system to selectively remove copyrighted content, then what's to prevent the government from using the very same system to filter out political speech and anything else they'd like to keep under wraps?
In other words, once you start attacking one type of speech, all of the others are fair game.
No problem - I think the purpose served by RIAA marketing could easily be replaced by free (as in speech) & open online music recommendation services. People could use them to tell the world what they're listening to (and what they think of it) and at the same time find out what's hot right now. And this wouldn't be limited to RIAA-like propaganda; with enough statistics from users, the entire CDDB library could very well be ranked by popularity. Even better, such services could predict what you'll like by looking at other people with similar tastes in music.
This setup will serve the people far better than the RIAA ever did, without allowing a richer-than-thou monopoly to be created.
Let me ask you this: where else would you expect a product you've bought and paid for to gain new features for free just because the company that made it happens to release a newer version? If I buy a car and, the following day, the manufacturer releases an improved version for the same price, will I get the new one for free? Nope, but the one I bought will continue doing the exact same thing it was doing on the day I bought it for years to come - no more, no less. Why would you expect anything different with software?
Just as soon as he figures out how to delete the partition.
After all, the DOS FDISK program becomes confused when it sees more than 1 partition on a disk.
Q&A: SCO's Chris Sontag on Linux, Unix and brewing legal fights
'There is inappropriate intellectual property in Linux,' he says
In two weeks, The SCO Group Inc. intends to begin showing analysts where the Unix code it owns has been illegally copied into the Linux kernel. The source code will be made available to parties who agree not to disclose the Unix source code, but they will be able to share publicly their assessments of SCO's claim. SCO has filed a $1 billion lawsuit against IBM alleging misappropriation of trade secrets and other claims and has warned some 1,500 businesses that they may be using Linux at their legal peril.
In an interview with Computerworld reporter Patrick Thibodeau, SCO's Chris Sontag, a senior vice president and general manager of SCOsource Division, the group within SCO in charge of enforcing the company's intellectual property, discussed the company's position.
Why should Linux users take your claim seriously? Think about if I was the CIO of a company and I'm going to be running my business on an operating system that has an intellectual property foundation that, by almost everyone's admission, is built on quicksand. There is no mechanism in Linux to ensure [the legality of] that intellectual property of the source code being contributed by various people. We fully believe there are many contributions made by good, hard-working individuals into Linux that are not of issue. But based on the research that we have done, we have identified specific Unix System V code for which we have ownership rights that have ended up in Linux against our wishes. There is inappropriate intellectual property in Linux. The development process has no one that is ensuring that inappropriate code is not getting into Linux. All that's there is an honor system, and obviously there are a few, at least, that have broken that honor.
Your letter to 1,500 end-user companies outlining your claim was vague. What is it that you want from these companies? The one thing that we specifically want from those 1,500 companies that we directly sent those letters to is for them to not take our word on the warning that we sent... but to seek an opinion of their legal counsel as to the issues that we raised.
What do you see as a company's options in the face of your warning? I would suspend any new Linux-related activities until this is all sorted out. But first get that opinion of your legal counsel. If they say there is no problem and no issue, then you probably have nothing to worry about. But I doubt there is any attorney worth his salt that is going to say there is no potential of an issue here. There is a big issue.
Should companies remove Linux from their systems? We're not making any specific recommendations at this time. We're still getting our arms around the size of this problem. We're still identifying more and more code from Unix System V that is in Linux, and so we haven't even fully scoped the problem. It's hard to come up with solutions until you have the full problem identified, and as you may guess, it's a very big problem.
Are you considering suing Linux users that you notified? Anything is always a possibility. If you are going to enforce your contracts, claims and intellectual property, you have to be able to go to ultimately the endpoint of infringement.
You're claiming that Linux has been polluted with Unix code that you own, but you have not produced any evidence of that. Will you? We will actually be providing some of the evidence next month to various industry analysts, respected press people and other industry leaders so that they don't have to take our word for it or wait until we show some of that evidence in court. We will actually be showing the code, and the basis for why we have made the allegations that we have. We are very confident about our case. Because we are dealing with confidential source code that we have never released without confidentiality agreements, we will have to put in place nondisclosur
"Computer games don't affect kids; I mean if Pac-Man affected us as kids, we'd all be running around in darkened rooms, munching magic pills and listening to repetitive electronic music." -- Kristian Wilson, Nintendo, Inc, 1989
No problem, you can have this in absolutely any browser with Proxomitron. This personal proxy for Windows (runs just great in Wine, btw) lets you pull a wide variety of absolutely amazing tricks, making it an indespensible utility for enjoyable browsing.
To make it do what you're asking, install and run the program, and click on "Headers" and then on "New." For HTTP Header enter "URL: Auto FeelingLucky (out)" (without the quotes) and for URL Match enter the following:
..and leave the last 2 fields blank. Click OK and check "Out" for the filter you've created and click OK again.
And that's it. you can now type any word into the location bar and if it's not a URL, your I'm Feeling Lucky search will happen, as you requested. Oh, might wanna SAVE your settings in Prox now.
I grabbed a copy of this and was considering switching from musicmatch. The feature set was excellent and I just love how it lists your playlists in that left-side bar. However, musicmatch is built rock-solid (never crashed on me once, for one thing). More importantly, media jukebox has some fundamental design flaws that turned me away. Why does it have a seperate "now playing" playlist? This is really inconvenient - if I make modifications to a playlist that's currently playing, they won't take effect until the playlist is restarted. Also, if I double-click on a song in the library, the entire library is added to "Now playing" and played. What's up with that?
Stuff like this keeps me using musicmatch for now, but from what I've seen of iTunes, it has the best of both worlds: the featureset of media jukebox and the ease-of-use and solid build of musicmatch. I'm definitely excited about the upcoming Windows version.
I'm sure they will sell many times more music once iTunes for Windows comes out. Don't believe me? Go to jobs.apple.com, click Job Search, and enter job requisition number 1949938.
if Apple can win the Windows market as well, then they might eventually make more money off this than computer sales.
I'd sign up - but only if they made iTunes for windows part of the package.:)
That'd rock: great music and a great program to play it on (musicmatch just doesn't cut it).
The Proxomitron is a powerful web proxy that'll apply regular expression filters to HTML code. The program comes with a pretty well-made set of filters for blocking ads, and its fairly easy to make your own. One of the filters I made for myself is to block flash, except on sites that I've added to a list, to allow it's use. When I visit sites with this new ad type, I just see:
[flash disabled] [click here to enable flash on this site]
It's one of the best utilities I've ever used. And yes, it runs on Linux with Wine.
"Some 17-year-olds I know have vast music collections but have yet to purchase their first CD."
Look. Most 17-year-olds are still in high school and don't have jobs, and therefore don't have any money with which to buy CDs. Your losses due to their downloads are minimal, because they have no money to spend on CDs (or anything else, for that matter) anyway. Had downloading not been an option, they would have simply had to go without music.
It's pretty easy to arrange to get something posted to usenet
with a reasonable degree of anonymity, and there's absolutely no
way to suppress anything that has been posted to a big-8 or alt
group, short of destroying the whole planet.
No problem - just as soon as some hacker finds a way to steal the nuclear launch codes, and has to post it anonymously on usenet for fear of being thrown in a dungeon if he ever took it to the proper channels.
Just something to think about.. what kind of jury would allow this kind of absurd sentencing on a college student, for a crime that's not even theft, but copyright infringement? Could any member of that jury honestly say that they've never done it themselves?
I would expect him to get due process if he walked up to bin laden himself and handed him a check. Why? Let's connect the dots.. If some people will get due process, while others are simply thrown in the dungeon, then there must be a person in the position of deciding who goes where, right? And that person is probably to rich and powerful to be trustworthy.
Slashdot Mirror
You bring up a good point: if he were to publically release this he might be liable. But what if he just "accidentally" left the back door open so somebody could come in and take it?
Even if that were so, it would defeat the whole point. If the owner can use a filtering system to selectively remove copyrighted content, then what's to prevent the government from using the very same system to filter out political speech and anything else they'd like to keep under wraps?
In other words, once you start attacking one type of speech, all of the others are fair game.
No problem - I think the purpose served by RIAA marketing could easily be replaced by free (as in speech) & open online music recommendation services. People could use them to tell the world what they're listening to (and what they think of it) and at the same time find out what's hot right now. And this wouldn't be limited to RIAA-like propaganda; with enough statistics from users, the entire CDDB library could very well be ranked by popularity. Even better, such services could predict what you'll like by looking at other people with similar tastes in music.
This setup will serve the people far better than the RIAA ever did, without allowing a richer-than-thou monopoly to be created.
Let me ask you this: where else would you expect a product you've bought and paid for to gain new features for free just because the company that made it happens to release a newer version? If I buy a car and, the following day, the manufacturer releases an improved version for the same price, will I get the new one for free? Nope, but the one I bought will continue doing the exact same thing it was doing on the day I bought it for years to come - no more, no less. Why would you expect anything different with software?
Just as soon as he figures out how to delete the partition. After all, the DOS FDISK program becomes confused when it sees more than 1 partition on a disk.
Maybe you should, too.
No problem. Try Roger Wilco.
Q&A: SCO's Chris Sontag on Linux, Unix and brewing legal fights
... but to seek an opinion of their legal counsel as to the issues that we raised.
'There is inappropriate intellectual property in Linux,' he says
In two weeks, The SCO Group Inc. intends to begin showing analysts where the Unix code it owns has been illegally copied into the Linux kernel. The source code will be made available to parties who agree not to disclose the Unix source code, but they will be able to share publicly their assessments of SCO's claim. SCO has filed a $1 billion lawsuit against IBM alleging misappropriation of trade secrets and other claims and has warned some 1,500 businesses that they may be using Linux at their legal peril.
In an interview with Computerworld reporter Patrick Thibodeau, SCO's Chris Sontag, a senior vice president and general manager of SCOsource Division, the group within SCO in charge of enforcing the company's intellectual property, discussed the company's position.
Why should Linux users take your claim seriously? Think about if I was the CIO of a company and I'm going to be running my business on an operating system that has an intellectual property foundation that, by almost everyone's admission, is built on quicksand. There is no mechanism in Linux to ensure [the legality of] that intellectual property of the source code being contributed by various people. We fully believe there are many contributions made by good, hard-working individuals into Linux that are not of issue. But based on the research that we have done, we have identified specific Unix System V code for which we have ownership rights that have ended up in Linux against our wishes. There is inappropriate intellectual property in Linux. The development process has no one that is ensuring that inappropriate code is not getting into Linux. All that's there is an honor system, and obviously there are a few, at least, that have broken that honor.
Your letter to 1,500 end-user companies outlining your claim was vague. What is it that you want from these companies? The one thing that we specifically want from those 1,500 companies that we directly sent those letters to is for them to not take our word on the warning that we sent
What do you see as a company's options in the face of your warning? I would suspend any new Linux-related activities until this is all sorted out. But first get that opinion of your legal counsel. If they say there is no problem and no issue, then you probably have nothing to worry about. But I doubt there is any attorney worth his salt that is going to say there is no potential of an issue here. There is a big issue.
Should companies remove Linux from their systems? We're not making any specific recommendations at this time. We're still getting our arms around the size of this problem. We're still identifying more and more code from Unix System V that is in Linux, and so we haven't even fully scoped the problem. It's hard to come up with solutions until you have the full problem identified, and as you may guess, it's a very big problem.
Are you considering suing Linux users that you notified? Anything is always a possibility. If you are going to enforce your contracts, claims and intellectual property, you have to be able to go to ultimately the endpoint of infringement.
You're claiming that Linux has been polluted with Unix code that you own, but you have not produced any evidence of that. Will you? We will actually be providing some of the evidence next month to various industry analysts, respected press people and other industry leaders so that they don't have to take our word for it or wait until we show some of that evidence in court. We will actually be showing the code, and the basis for why we have made the allegations that we have. We are very confident about our case. Because we are dealing with confidential source code that we have never released without confidentiality agreements, we will have to put in place nondisclosur
"Computer games don't affect kids; I mean if Pac-Man affected us as kids, we'd all be running around in darkened rooms, munching magic pills and listening to repetitive electronic music." -- Kristian Wilson, Nintendo, Inc, 1989
To make it do what you're asking, install and run the program, and click on "Headers" and then on "New." For HTTP Header enter "URL: Auto FeelingLucky (out)" (without the quotes) and for URL Match enter the following:
[^./]+/(^?)&\w[a-z]&$JUMP(http://www.google.com/ search?btnI=1&q=\h)
..and leave the last 2 fields blank. Click OK and check "Out" for the filter you've created and click OK again.
And that's it. you can now type any word into the location bar and if it's not a URL, your I'm Feeling Lucky search will happen, as you requested. Oh, might wanna SAVE your settings in Prox now.
Here's the no-need-to-register version of the article, thanks to Google:s sspecial/06LOHR.html?ex=1052884800&en=ea31bf9e5b8a 61be&ei=5062&partner=GOOGLE
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/05/06/business/busine
Stuff like this keeps me using musicmatch for now, but from what I've seen of iTunes, it has the best of both worlds: the featureset of media jukebox and the ease-of-use and solid build of musicmatch. I'm definitely excited about the upcoming Windows version.
I'm sure they will sell many times more music once iTunes for Windows comes out. Don't believe me? Go to jobs.apple.com, click Job Search, and enter job requisition number 1949938.
I'd sign up - but only if they made iTunes for windows part of the package. :)
That'd rock: great music and a great program to play it on (musicmatch just doesn't cut it).
[flash disabled] [click here to enable flash on this site]
It's one of the best utilities I've ever used. And yes, it runs on Linux with Wine.
This site has an interesting article that fully explains how classic barcodes work, how you can decode the bars, etc. An interesting read.
..sayeth the people who still have jobs.
Phew..for a sec, I thought that was Jeff Bates' secret space-oriented company. Its like, gee, whats VA paying him these days?
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/04/20/fashion/20TIVO.h tml?ex=1051416000&en=a77422bb2a91649e&ei=5062&part ner=GOOGLE
Look. Most 17-year-olds are still in high school and don't have jobs, and therefore don't have any money with which to buy CDs. Your losses due to their downloads are minimal, because they have no money to spend on CDs (or anything else, for that matter) anyway. Had downloading not been an option, they would have simply had to go without music.
No problem - just as soon as some hacker finds a way to steal the nuclear launch codes, and has to post it anonymously on usenet for fear of being thrown in a dungeon if he ever took it to the proper channels.
GNU/Music? Ya know, free as in song..
Just something to think about.. what kind of jury would allow this kind of absurd sentencing on a college student, for a crime that's not even theft, but copyright infringement? Could any member of that jury honestly say that they've never done it themselves?
I would expect him to get due process if he walked up to bin laden himself and handed him a check. Why? Let's connect the dots.. If some people will get due process, while others are simply thrown in the dungeon, then there must be a person in the position of deciding who goes where, right? And that person is probably to rich and powerful to be trustworthy.
http://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=893
This is one bug you can easily close yourself, by applying this patch to your mozilla install. Works great for me.