Free is nice, but I still have the same amount of control, whether the cost is $50 or $0.
No you don't. Only one company can feasibly make changes to the software that you want (both for legal and technical reasons). If they don't want to make said change, you're screwed. With open source, you can hire anyone to make the change you desire and still have the option of learning to do it yourself.
Admins like to keep one app on one machine because in a production environment, we are afraid of borking things that are currently working.
We do? Speak for yourself. That isn't why I use virtualization and isn't why anyone I know uses it either. Sure, we're afraid of breaking things but most of us know how to keep more than one program running on a computer. We don't like to break things, but this is why we have development/staging/test environments, redundancy, backups, plan for rollback, script as much work as possible, etc.
Virtualization is nice because it makes all of those things incredibly easy. Right now I can clone a running, production VM, set it up on a test network and do whatever changes I want to do to test them against the production system. System image backups and rolling back to them is just as easy.
Look, it's simple: either you believe in the free market, in which case deregulation is a good thing as it will open up the market that regulation is currently closing off, or you believe in fascism.
What free market? There is no free market in the telecom industry. I can't go outside and dig up the streets and put poles and cable on people's treelawns. Only a couple companies can do that because the government gave them special rights that the rest of us don't have.
The root of the problem here seems to be your "head of IT", who apparently believes that a closet full of individual cable modems, one per user, is a fine way to provide Internet service to a few buildings of people on one campus.
Well, first, that's an article, and second, it's not the reference.
You stated that the Uniform Commercial Code is what makes a license binding. Article 2B was the portion of the UCC that covered that. If that's not the reference, exactly what are you referring to?
The terms included with a product are binding on the purchaser by virtue of perfecting the transaction where reasonable assent is given unequivocally. If you object to the terms, make a counteroffer and specify that your acceptance requires acceptance of your terms.
The transaction here completes without any terms relevant to the software ever having been presented. A buyer cannot unequivocally assent to terms that have not been presented.
One can take original software written by others (not containing Apple's software) which then modify one's own copy of the Apple software and achieve the desired result.
That scenario a) does not exist here
It certainly does (depending on exactly what you want to do with the iphone).
still does not get you past assumption of the risk. If you modify your software, it is not Apple's responsibility to ensure that their update will play nice
Once again, I never said it should be.
You are particularly confused here. The DMCA is not relevant here or in the context of the other examples given--the issue is not copy protection,
Yes I know that and said so. I only brought up the DMCA because you mentioned an applicable example.
You are not free to modify software to get on a cellular network unlawfully
I agree and never stated otherwise.
or to compromise restrictions put in place for a wide variety of reasons. In other words, the point is that you do not have complete autonomy in your modification, and more specifically do not have superior autonomy to Apple in that regard, and it is a basic truism that you cannot assert a right against one with superior rights to the same.
Yes, I understand, that's what you've been saying the whole thread. But I continue to ask you to back up your assertion - exactly what law forbids one from modifying one's own copy of a work? I'm not talking about making copies of or even distrubuting anything that is copyrighted by someone else.
I can go buy an iPhone right now, take it apart or exploit a vulnerability in the device as-is and modify the data contained in that iphone. What exactly makes this illegal?
Further, the DMCA does indeed prohibit the use of circumvention tools, but doesn't need to, considering there are a number of other avenues of enforcement available.
That would depend on what you mean by "circumvention tools". If you mean circumventing copy protection as I originally said, that is not illegal. From http://www.copyright.gov/legislation/dmca.pdf:
Section 1201 divides technological measures into two categories: measures that prevent unauthorized access to a copyrighted work and measures that prevent unauthorized copying of a copyrighted work. [...] As to the act of circumvention in itself, the provision prohibits circumventing the first category of technological measures, but not the second.
Your choice of verbs must be qualified. No software is conveyed to you in the sense of any legal property rights. Ownership of said software remains solely and fully in the hands of Apple.
Your ownership of a right to use, including a requisite copy of the compiled forms, does not itself confer any ownership over the software product.
Very well. But to qualify further, there is no "property". What Apple has is a copyright on a work. What the iPhone purchaser has is a copy of a copyrighted work.
Irrelevant. Under the Uniform Commercial Code, you gave assent to a Software License Agreement which covers those terms. Your copyright grant of use of the code is not solely controlling.
You're thinking of one section of the UCC (2B). That was removed from the UCC and reborn in the form of UCITA. UCITA is only law in Maryland and Virginia (as far as I can tell).
You do, in fact, need a license to prepare derivative works, which is precisely what occurs with software given its intangibility and ease of duplication,
To be copyrightable, a derivative work must be different enough from the original to be regarded as a "new work" or must contain a substantial amount of new material. Making minor changes or additions of little substance to a preexisting work will not qualify the work as a new version for copyright purposes. The new material must be original and copyrightable in itself.
You can modify software. That does not mean that you can take modifications made by others and apply them as you wish--such a position would be contrary to all holdings of law.
Define 'modifications'. One does not need to take modified versions of Apple software from others. One can take original software written by others (not containing Apple's software) which then modify one's own copy of the Apple software and achieve the desired result.
Given that "right" you would have no obligation not to bypass activation systems or payment processing systems or other functional restrictions built into software products to prohibit nefarious use.
That would be the anti-circumvention device part of the DMCA you're thinking of. We aren't talking about circumventing a copy prevention mechanism. Further more, the DMCA technically doesn't even outlaw the actual circumvention of copy protections, it outlaws trafficing devices or information which facilitate that. So if the software I described above were circumventing a copy protection mechanism that would be illegal under the DMCA.
No, your original post asserted that you owned the software on the phone. Your premise being faulty,
That isn't false. You do own that copy of the software on the phone. If you go out and buy an iPhone, do you only get hardware? Is software not given to you in the transaction?
You might next say that what I in fact got was a license - except you don't need a license to use or modify your copy of the software. You would only need a license if you required rights to the copyrighted work above and beyond those allowed by law itself (such as to make more copies, make derivative works, public performance, etc). Given that I do not need a license, I asked the original poster to substantiate his claim that I am prohibited from modifying the software anyway by stating where the law says so.
The right to "modify" hasn't been exercised by anyone hacking their phone, unless you've been digging around in some lines of code
That's not true. You can modify binaries. People who crack video games do so all the time. And there are also portions of software that you could modify that do not have source code - text, images, configuration files, various other data...
Yes, there was a point and you completely missed it.
The original poster said "However, you do _not_ have the right to modify the copy of the software on the phone". I asked him to substantiate his claim that we have no right to modify the software. I never said anything about it being apple's problem to ensure compatibility with modified copies. You pulled that right out of your ass.
None of that changes that you don't buy the software when you buy the phone.
That's nice handwaving, but what they're giving you when you give your money is a copy of a copyrighted work. Unless you agreed to a contract stating you wouldn't do otherwise, its yours do with to the extent copyright law will allow.
However, you do _not_ have the right to modify the copy of the software on the phone - just as you don't have the right to modify a copy of XP you bought or indeed any software where the copyright holder hasn't explicitly given you that right.
Where does it say that in copyright law that I can't modify my own copy of copyrighted work?
Copyright holders, particularly software companies like to dictate all kinds of ridiculous terms, but that doesn't make them law.
So can Nokia phones run unsigned apps at all if the user changes preferences / ignores warnings / etc? Or is it impossible to run anything not signed by nokia on one of those phones?
There is nothing grammatically incorrect or even illogical about that sentence. The subject is an event that occurred in the more distant past which would have caused the 6 year old burst.
The mainframe was literally designed for 99.999% uptime, I think that's about 3-7 minutes of downtime per year (if memory serves at all)
That's what everyone tells me, but none of the mainframes I ever interact with in any way have anywhere near that kid of uptime.
My bank is run by a mainframe, but I cannot log into my account due to "system maintenence" every sunday early AM.
When I was in college a couple years ago the administrative stuff related to scheduling had a mainframe behind it (running CICS or something like that). It had a similar outage schedule. I could never access any class scheduling stuff sunday mornings (nothing else was regularly down like that).
The company I work for works with a huge company and we receive email broadcasts from them. Every quarter they announce 12 hour mainframe outage windows on a weekend for mainframe IPLs.
I don't know anything about mainframes. I don't understand why they have such a legendary reliability reputation when every one I know that I indirectly interact with has less uptime over a month than the pentium 233 in my closet has had over years.
I'd be more suggestable to reading it if it weren't a PDF...
Re:Can't Start My Car After Mouthwash
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BioShock Review
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TSee a pattern here? The reason DRM and copy protection was created was to try and stop the pirates. So how is that the industry's fault?
Yes I do see a pattern: continued and endless failure in attempts to make water not wet at the expense of reduced value to paying customers. The software industry has tried to keep people from illegally copying the game and has failed, every single time. They've been failing for decades, continue to fail today, and will fail so long as we own and have control of our own computers and all they are selling are bits.
What is the industry's fault is that after their "protections" have been cracked and tens of thousdands of people are illegally downloading the game, they still continue to inconvenience paying customers and it is getting worse and worse. THAT is the industry's fault.
Re:Can't Start My Car After Mouthwash
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BioShock Review
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The more people pirate, crack games and download cracked version to "spite" the devs though, the more complex the DRM will be...but the onus will be on the pirates, not the devs.
Why? The "pirates" aren't the ones making the pointless DRM restrictions. The people who crack games free us from them. I don't blame anyone for DRM except the people making the DRM.
Wether or not someone out there is illegally downloading the game is not my problem and I don't appreciate software publishers creating problems for me, thinking it will stop the illegal downloads when clearly it doesn't, never has, and never will.
You are completely wrong. You don't have to agree to any license to use linux at all. You can do whatever you want with it within the bounds of copyright law without agreeing to anything at all. The only time the license applies is when you want to do something copyright law prohibits. That's COMPLETELY unlike the windows licensing situation.
It is completely accurate to say that your copy of linux is completely yours. So is your copy of windows for that matter, it is just a question of wether or not the creators of the software acknowledge it and try to restrict your usage later with extra license terms you are promted to agree to at install time.
Re:Can't Start My Car After Mouthwash
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BioShock Review
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For those who do not wish to deal with the annoyances involved with being legal, they choose to accept a less bothersome annoyance, that being the decision to enjoy the use of that software illegally.
Using purchased software with a crack is not illegal. I don't think it is illegal even in the US as the DMCA specifically restricts distribution of cracks ("trafficking of circumvention devices").
In the US, taxes have an effect on everyone.
Not a valid analogy. I directly derive benefit from taxes. As legitimate owner of a copy of something, I do not derive any benefit from any DRM on it. Quite the opposite.
Driving has an effect on everyone.
Not a valid analogy. Driving necessarily involves the use of public property and interaction with other drivers which is the reason for licensing and testing and such. You can drive all you want on private property without a license. The use of a game I purchased does not place others at risk or involve public property.
Do you know that that this precise moment, From more than a dozen sources, no less than thirty-three thousand (33,000) people are actively downloading what they believe to be (and most likely is) a Cracked version of Bioshock?
Exactly my point. All this inconvenience for paying customers when 33,000 people can STILL download the game for free. And this is how EVERY release of every computer game has ever gone.
Because trying to come up with something new that defeats piracy is not an easy thing.
It isn't just not an easy thing, it is an IMPOSSIBLE thing. You cannot prevent people from copying data on their own computers. The most they can possibly hope to accomplish with DRM is widening that small window of time between when the game is on store shelves and when the game is cracked. Obviously for bioshock, that window has long since passed.
People have a problem with this? Of Course. They want it for free, and they want it to get all the benefits of having paid for it.
No, the people bitching want to pay for it and get all the benefits that someone who pays for it ought to get rather than being presumed to be a criminal and having their time and computer resources devoted to a copyright violation battle that they are neither causing nor have any part in.
PART OF THE PRICE YOU PAY for having a legal copy, is the annoyance.
Exactly the problem. The people who pay for it should have NO annoyance. Software companies should be working to _eliminate_ annoyance for paying customers. Yet the game companies needlessly go out of their way to make things such that the people pay have MORE annoyance than those who ripped it off. And the people who ripped it off continue to rip it off.
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No you don't. Only one company can feasibly make changes to the software that you want (both for legal and technical reasons). If they don't want to make said change, you're screwed. With open source, you can hire anyone to make the change you desire and still have the option of learning to do it yourself.
We do? Speak for yourself. That isn't why I use virtualization and isn't why anyone I know uses it either. Sure, we're afraid of breaking things but most of us know how to keep more than one program running on a computer. We don't like to break things, but this is why we have development/staging/test environments, redundancy, backups, plan for rollback, script as much work as possible, etc.
Virtualization is nice because it makes all of those things incredibly easy. Right now I can clone a running, production VM, set it up on a test network and do whatever changes I want to do to test them against the production system. System image backups and rolling back to them is just as easy.
I don't really care what people use them for. Nintendo simply should not have the right to stop people from producing their own hardware.
What free market? There is no free market in the telecom industry. I can't go outside and dig up the streets and put poles and cable on people's treelawns. Only a couple companies can do that because the government gave them special rights that the rest of us don't have.
The root of the problem here seems to be your "head of IT", who apparently believes that a closet full of individual cable modems, one per user, is a fine way to provide Internet service to a few buildings of people on one campus.
No, it isn't property - it is a right that has some characteristics in common with property (and others not in common). See http://www.copyright.gov/circs/circ1.html#wci
You stated that the Uniform Commercial Code is what makes a license binding. Article 2B was the portion of the UCC that covered that. If that's not the reference, exactly what are you referring to?
The transaction here completes without any terms relevant to the software ever having been presented. A buyer cannot unequivocally assent to terms that have not been presented.
It certainly does (depending on exactly what you want to do with the iphone).
Once again, I never said it should be.
Yes I know that and said so. I only brought up the DMCA because you mentioned an applicable example.
I agree and never stated otherwise.
Yes, I understand, that's what you've been saying the whole thread. But I continue to ask you to back up your assertion - exactly what law forbids one from modifying one's own copy of a work? I'm not talking about making copies of or even distrubuting anything that is copyrighted by someone else.
I can go buy an iPhone right now, take it apart or exploit a vulnerability in the device as-is and modify the data contained in that iphone. What exactly makes this illegal?
That would depend on what you mean by "circumvention tools". If you mean circumventing copy protection as I originally said, that is not illegal. From http://www.copyright.gov/legislation/dmca.pdf:
Very well. But to qualify further, there is no "property". What Apple has is a copyright on a work. What the iPhone purchaser has is a copy of a copyrighted work.
You're thinking of one section of the UCC (2B). That was removed from the UCC and reborn in the form of UCITA. UCITA is only law in Maryland and Virginia (as far as I can tell).
Despite what I will mention below, I don't think the modifications in question even constitute a derivative work. From http://www.copyright.gov/circs/circ14.html#derivative/
Define 'modifications'. One does not need to take modified versions of Apple software from others. One can take original software written by others (not containing Apple's software) which then modify one's own copy of the Apple software and achieve the desired result.
That would be the anti-circumvention device part of the DMCA you're thinking of. We aren't talking about circumventing a copy prevention mechanism. Further more, the DMCA technically doesn't even outlaw the actual circumvention of copy protections, it outlaws trafficing devices or information which facilitate that. So if the software I described above were circumventing a copy protection mechanism that would be illegal under the DMCA.
That isn't false. You do own that copy of the software on the phone. If you go out and buy an iPhone, do you only get hardware? Is software not given to you in the transaction?
You might next say that what I in fact got was a license - except you don't need a license to use or modify your copy of the software. You would only need a license if you required rights to the copyrighted work above and beyond those allowed by law itself (such as to make more copies, make derivative works, public performance, etc). Given that I do not need a license, I asked the original poster to substantiate his claim that I am prohibited from modifying the software anyway by stating where the law says so.
That's not true. You can modify binaries. People who crack video games do so all the time. And there are also portions of software that you could modify that do not have source code - text, images, configuration files, various other data...
Yes, there was a point and you completely missed it.
The original poster said "However, you do _not_ have the right to modify the copy of the software on the phone". I asked him to substantiate his claim that we have no right to modify the software. I never said anything about it being apple's problem to ensure compatibility with modified copies. You pulled that right out of your ass.
I don't know where you're going with this. You completely missed the point of my original post.
That's nice handwaving, but what they're giving you when you give your money is a copy of a copyrighted work. Unless you agreed to a contract stating you wouldn't do otherwise, its yours do with to the extent copyright law will allow.
Where does it say that in copyright law that I can't modify my own copy of copyrighted work?
Copyright holders, particularly software companies like to dictate all kinds of ridiculous terms, but that doesn't make them law.
So can Nokia phones run unsigned apps at all if the user changes preferences / ignores warnings / etc? Or is it impossible to run anything not signed by nokia on one of those phones?
There is nothing grammatically incorrect or even illogical about that sentence. The subject is an event that occurred in the more distant past which would have caused the 6 year old burst.
As much as I trust the quality of Apple hardware, I could never replace my thinkpad T series with an Apple for a number of reasons:
Lack of high-resolution screens (>120dpi)
One button pointing device (as opposed to a true 3 button one on the T series)
No erasehead pointer in the keyboard
The page you linked to does not describe any such activity.
How would that work out for you if you decided to start coming in at noon every day and leave at 4?
SP2 of what? I know for a fact XP SP2 doesn't do that.
Which service pack was it that caused windows installations with invalid keys to stop working?
That's what everyone tells me, but none of the mainframes I ever interact with in any way have anywhere near that kid of uptime.
My bank is run by a mainframe, but I cannot log into my account due to "system maintenence" every sunday early AM.
When I was in college a couple years ago the administrative stuff related to scheduling had a mainframe behind it (running CICS or something like that). It had a similar outage schedule. I could never access any class scheduling stuff sunday mornings (nothing else was regularly down like that).
The company I work for works with a huge company and we receive email broadcasts from them. Every quarter they announce 12 hour mainframe outage windows on a weekend for mainframe IPLs.
I don't know anything about mainframes. I don't understand why they have such a legendary reliability reputation when every one I know that I indirectly interact with has less uptime over a month than the pentium 233 in my closet has had over years.
I'd be more suggestable to reading it if it weren't a PDF...
Yes I do see a pattern: continued and endless failure in attempts to make water not wet at the expense of reduced value to paying customers. The software industry has tried to keep people from illegally copying the game and has failed, every single time. They've been failing for decades, continue to fail today, and will fail so long as we own and have control of our own computers and all they are selling are bits.
What is the industry's fault is that after their "protections" have been cracked and tens of thousdands of people are illegally downloading the game, they still continue to inconvenience paying customers and it is getting worse and worse. THAT is the industry's fault.
Why? The "pirates" aren't the ones making the pointless DRM restrictions. The people who crack games free us from them. I don't blame anyone for DRM except the people making the DRM.
Wether or not someone out there is illegally downloading the game is not my problem and I don't appreciate software publishers creating problems for me, thinking it will stop the illegal downloads when clearly it doesn't, never has, and never will.
You are completely wrong. You don't have to agree to any license to use linux at all. You can do whatever you want with it within the bounds of copyright law without agreeing to anything at all. The only time the license applies is when you want to do something copyright law prohibits. That's COMPLETELY unlike the windows licensing situation.
It is completely accurate to say that your copy of linux is completely yours. So is your copy of windows for that matter, it is just a question of wether or not the creators of the software acknowledge it and try to restrict your usage later with extra license terms you are promted to agree to at install time.
Using purchased software with a crack is not illegal. I don't think it is illegal even in the US as the DMCA specifically restricts distribution of cracks ("trafficking of circumvention devices").
Not a valid analogy. I directly derive benefit from taxes. As legitimate owner of a copy of something, I do not derive any benefit from any DRM on it. Quite the opposite.
Not a valid analogy. Driving necessarily involves the use of public property and interaction with other drivers which is the reason for licensing and testing and such. You can drive all you want on private property without a license. The use of a game I purchased does not place others at risk or involve public property.
Exactly my point. All this inconvenience for paying customers when 33,000 people can STILL download the game for free. And this is how EVERY release of every computer game has ever gone.
It isn't just not an easy thing, it is an IMPOSSIBLE thing. You cannot prevent people from copying data on their own computers. The most they can possibly hope to accomplish with DRM is widening that small window of time between when the game is on store shelves and when the game is cracked. Obviously for bioshock, that window has long since passed.
No, the people bitching want to pay for it and get all the benefits that someone who pays for it ought to get rather than being presumed to be a criminal and having their time and computer resources devoted to a copyright violation battle that they are neither causing nor have any part in.
Exactly the problem. The people who pay for it should have NO annoyance. Software companies should be working to _eliminate_ annoyance for paying customers. Yet the game companies needlessly go out of their way to make things such that the people pay have MORE annoyance than those who ripped it off. And the people who ripped it off continue to rip it off.