Sudden policy changes that bankrupt businesses and create huge legal problems with tens (hundreds?) of thousands of existing contracts will destroy trust in the government to provide a workable business environment.
Hmm. Sounds like progress marching forward. Anyone investing heavily in software patents, which only started existing in the mid 1980s, should have known better. It's kind of like investing in soft drink companies because of prohibition being enacted. Oh wait, lots of companies did that and are quite successful now.
I think that what the disappearance of software patents will show is a lot of patent troll companies going under, and everyone with an actual *product* to sell doing just fine. Standards bodies will still come up with codecs. They'll just ask for R&D fees up front from movie/music studios, or companies like Apple and Microsoft (who already invented their own codecs to get around licensing MPEG Audio Layer 3) will do more of the R&D.
Businesses didn't set the rules for patents. Government did. As such, government has the duty to make the transition as smooth and non-disruptive as it can, even when they recognize that the old system was a mistake.
Probably few existing patents will be overturned, and the ones that do will be the obvious and stupid ones. That's pretty smooth and fair, I think. Retards who think that pushing email to a wireless device is patentable will hopefully die a well deserved death.
Declaring that software patents will no longer be approved is fine. But many smaller companies have invested much in the assumption that their current patents will continue to be valid.
And I've invested the last 20 years of my life assuming that if I hear or think of a neat idea for a program or algorithm, I'll actually be able to legally implement it and use it. So who gets to trump my right to do that, and why?
Should things that aeronautical engineers come up with not be patentable before aeronautical engineering is just an arbitrary subset of physics? I'll gladly agree that there is something seriously broken with software patents as they are currently implemented, but I certainly don't claim to know the best way to fix them. I don't think we should completely get rid of them though.
Should Bernoulli's equations be patentable? If not, then why should a specific wing shape derived from those equations be patentable? Most likely the wing shape was some local maxima of an equation relating Bernoulli's principle (and other basic physical forces) to some requirements (lift, wingspan, loadbearing capacity, cross section, air resistance, etc.) If anyone can derive the same optimal wing shape from straightforward mathematics, why should a wing shape be patentable?
By this point, software engineering is practiced very differently than abstract mathematics. It's much more akin to taking different building blocks and finding ways to put them together. In the same way that an aeronautical engineer would combine different hydraulics, flaps, bolts, fixtures, bearings and control surfaces, a software engineer will combine input routines, sorting functions, display functions and storage devices. We speak of software in terms of interconnected components that each preform a certain task and together perform a more complicated task, not in terms of mathematical proofs, even if you can express proofs as software and vice versa.
So copyright the combination of components. The problem with patents is that they generally refer to the entire problem space and not to a specific implementation of a general solution for a problem space. E.g. the patents on MPEG compression cover *every* possible algorithm for encoding or decoding an MPEG stream, because they are actually defined in an elementary mathematical way, not as a collection of specific physical components that do specific things. I think you'll find that every other software patent is similar; it covers the problem space and not a specific implementation that should be covered by copyright.
Furthermore, I'd argue that software is at one end of a spectrum that includes firmware and hardware. I think most readily agree that things on the hardware end of the spectrum are patentable. Where is the line that makes software exempt from these same protections. Imagine trying to patent an MP3 player. The software is an integral part of this invention. The MP3 player would be impossible without the software it runs.
I don't mind hardware patents too much, so long as they aren't obvious. For instance, U.S. patent #1 is, wait for it, a gear for a train wheel to let it go up hills on a toothed track. It has special retractable teeth or something. To me, it's fairly obvious that if you want to get a heavy train up a hill, you either use cables or gears. I don't actually see what good an MP3 player patent is. It's just a walkman (which is just a small tape player [which is just a small radio with a magnetic pickup and motors { etc... }]) with an MP3 decoder instead of a tape player. I don't think applying a DCT to an audio sample and huffman coding its quantized values should be patentable. It's just a linear operator and entropy encoder.
Something is absolutely broken with software patents in their current incarnation. The bar for "obviousness" seems far too low. The patent term seems rather long, given the speed at which the industry moves. The treble damages for knowingly infringing a patent, while it makes sense to a certain extent, leads to some braindead behavior, like never reading patents in fear that you might accidentally knowingly infringe someone else's patent. Despite these flaws, software is sufficiently similar to other types of inventions that there is a place for patents on software as well.
That brings up the question of what complexity should be required for patents. Should the four color theorem be patentable? W
Do you also favor patents for mathematical proofs? Because I can write a proof for any specific compression algorithm that there exists a function from one integer to another integer, with a partial inverse from any compressed integer back to the original. If someone were to verify that proof with a test integer, could (or should) they violate a patent by doing so? Is the mathematical function patented, or is it just the *use* of mathematics that a patent prevents?
Woo hoo!!! But I think that some patents should stand if they are truly innovative. If someone comes up with a killer compression technique that can compress a rar to 10% of it's size then they would deserve a patent. It is these "use a hyperlink to start a video" patents that need to go.
I think being able to personally violate the laws of entropy would be reward enough, don't you? That's the way I see it; all currently patentable ideas are worthless enough that if one chump doesn't patent them today, some other chump will think them up in a few years. Things like you describe, e.g. "a method of extracting free energy from the vacuum energy" style patents don't *need* a patent because the first person or group to invent it would have de-facto control of the world if they wanted it.
Ah, but here's some prior art called a "book" "shelf" which may have "text" inserted in an ordered fashion making it "easily searchable" via illumination by "electronic" lights.
Most mega-corporations would suffer but survive. Even if they lose IP, they have the size and strength to shrug it off. But for some smaller companies, their IP is a critical part of their business, and many could well fold.
Perhaps you mean the little patent troll companies?
If there really are tiny little companies whose only method of making money is a patent, what the hell do their long term financial forecasts look like? "Well, we're good for the next 20 years, but then our patent expires and we'll suddenly go belly-up."
I actually don't mind the purely mathematical or purely algorithmic patents. Phil Katz patented some efficient string matching algorithms [wikipedia.org] that became a well-known compression program.
Except that Katz didn't invent LZ77 or huffman coding. If both of those were patented, I doubt deflate or gzip would exist today. We'd still be doing run length encoding or something stupid because the patent owners would never get together to combine the best algorithms into one product. Similarly, the BWT relies on an efficient LRU encoding plus huffman coding, so if everyone was patent happy the BWT might be useless as well. The fact that arithmetic coding is more efficient than huffman coding, but is used almost nowhere (I think some voice codecs pay for it, but that's all I can think of), is easy proof that patents are harmful to just about everyone. That is one of the most fundamental flaws of patent licensing schemes; the best possible products require the cooperation of everyone, which rarely happens. Often the parts one would like to merge together overlap each other slightly, making the entire project unfeasible unless everyone licenses their patents. The patent system has a massive built-in DoS vulnerability.
In regard to your point 2), what's the difference between "If you take all the sentences formed by rotating a given sentence by every letter offset and sort them, their last letters have a repeating pattern more easily memorized" and the BWT? There are plenty of cases where sorting, searching, and other algorithms have close analogs in the real world.
Math, can represent what is happening, and it can be used to determine what will happen, but software isn't math.
Then show me a program that can't be perfectly expressed as a formal mathematical set. Software is merely a subset of finite mathematics. Physical machines can be built that derive results from software, but machines can be built to derive results from mathematical formulas just as easily. The machines are ultimately equivalent in function. See anything written by Turing, Church, Howard, or Curry.
Do you not agree that software is equivalent to mathematical formulas, or do you think that software patents (an arbitrary subset of mathematics) should be patentable for some reason?
In the latter case, do you believe that, say, Andrew Wiles proof of Fermat's last theorem could be translated to a typed lisp expression (or any equivalent in some other language) and patented as a method of proving a certain fact about integers, and then authors of any proofs using Fermat's last theorem as a lemma could be sued for violating the patent? What about the four-coloring theorem which requires a programmatic proof? In short, what criteria would you use to distinguish unpatentable mathematics from patentable software?
From the way cloud computing is implemented with EC2, my basic definition of cloud computing is that it is "On Demand" computing. Unlike the Internet, which is a series of tubes, cloud computing is like a bunch of trucks that you just dump stuff on. If your servers get too busy, just dump the work on more trucks.
For instance, it allows a small web site to survive the slashdot effect by starting up a dozen servers for a few hours or days, costing much less than having a dozen servers running 365.2425 days a year.
Additional benefits are much higher availability and connectivity. Anyone can sign up for a cloud computing account and have a virtual server colocated at an Amazon or Google datacenter.
If my car can run 6 or 7 hours at 70 MPH, it should not be that difficult to use the same car to run at 420 MPH for 1 hour.
Well, except for wind resistance and kinetic energy increasing geometrically instead of linearly, you can make basically the same argument. If you took 6 or 7 copies of your car, took all the engines out and mounted them in one beefed up car, you could probably get an incredible speed increase for an hour on one tank of gas. Sticking a bunch of parallel laptop batteries and an inverter on a server would run it just fine.
Honestly, who would want to go to the trouble of fighting his or her immediate supervisors in the presence of some higher-up who really doesn't give a shit? Any low level worker will simply be fired out of hand if things break the way you describe. It's expensive and time consuming to sue for wrongful termination.
So far, no one has torn down an entire Egyptian pyramid looking for treasure, so the solution is obvious. Bury the waste UNDER the pyramid, and then make some fake tombs with cheap plastic treasure that will last 10,000 years.
After the grave robbers get their valuable hydrocarbon polymers out, no one would even think of digging under the pyramids for anything else.
The solution is to take ion engines up on the rocket from earth, and use them (with solar power) to get the payloads into moon orbit. It even makes decelerating the payload back to earth orbit feasible so that the ion engines can be reused for the next payload, and potentially letting the payload capsule reenter the earth atmosphere for reuse.
Just getting the ISS into moon orbit would probably have to be done with ion engines or similar, otherwise the cost of lifting enough fuel to push the ISS into moon orbit would be as expensive as just launching the entire thing from the ground right to the moon (although technically the cost could be split with several shipments of rocket fuel, the total cost would be approximately the same, if not more, for multiple trips).
I don't think I was clear enough: it is not the copy-vis-a-vis-duplicate in RAM that is the problem, but rather the fact that you are "copying" data from storage to the RAM while at the same time violating the EULA that brings it within the purview of the statute.
I think you were perfectly clear. Does this ruling make running WoW on VMWare illegal? Unless there is a specific clause in the WoW license allowing virtualization, the answer seems to be yes. If the copy of WoW is licensed and not owned, then the "owner" has no rights whatsoever, except as granted by the EULA. That's how I interpret your post. Perhaps there's some looseness in the language of the EULA that allows "install this product on a computer" to mean "install this product inside a virtual machine", but I thought legal language was supposed to be pretty specific and narrowly interpreted.
In either case, a while back I thought of a fun way to screw with companies that tried the whole "you aren't licensed to copy the program into RAM" angle.
Just chop the CD the software comes on into tiny one-bit pieces, and use them in a mechanical computer that just shuffles the pieces around without making any copies. Voila. If that's too slow, implement the RAM as a list of pointers to bit locations on the CD, and the processor takes pointers as inputs and outputs new pointers to bits on the CD that match what would have happened if the pointers to bits interpreted as machine language were interpreted as instructions acting on the bits pointed to by the instruction's registers. The register store would be another list of pointers to the CD as well.
As far as I can tell, such a construction would never constitute a copy of the work or a derivative work because at no time is any part of the work modified; the only action that is performed is to shuffle pointers around. Without the CD, the pointers have no meaning. One could even send all the pointers to a friend without violating the distribution clause. If they had their own CD, they could pick up the computation where it was left off, otherwise it would be meaningless.
Now as a neat trick, it would be possible to sort an array of pointers to the RAM pointers based on their value. There would be two categories of pointers left; those pointing to a zero and those pointing to a one. At that point the array of sorted pointers is still completely independent of the original work, but the *number* of pointers pointing to a zero (or one) would be sufficient information to reconstruct a perfect copy of the work. Yet another way to make simple integers illegal to distribute!
Oh, boo hoo. I've made a binary patch to an executable we no longer had the compiler for and it worked fine. If you know what you're doing, it's perfectly safe. Thankfully in my case I just had to zero terminate a string early.
Modifying blobs in a database is only a problem if they're indexed. My guess is that no one would be foolish enough to build an index over a field full of executable code, much less figure out a way to use it.
The decision is relevant in the 9th Cir. only, but the reasoning appears substantially correct. The rule that copying in to RAM is copying under the terms of the Copyright Act is not unique to this case: it is in fact cited under previous authority. This case rather simply applies this standard and says that it is a violation of the EULA to use a bot like Glider, and that copying in violation of the EULA/TOU is sufficient to constitute a copyright infringement.
So is VMWare illegal? It not only copies software into RAM, it creates a derivative work of it in order to properly emulate it. Somehow, I doubt that VMWare's lawyers haven't gone down this line of thought and completely trumped any possibility of it being illegal.
If VMWare is legal, so is Glider and any other emulation software (so long as it doesn't break some other law).
You are allowed by the license to use one copy at a time.
Yeah, but which copy goes in RAM, which copy goes in the L2 cache, which copy goes in the L1 cache, and which copy gets loaded into the microcode decode logic?
Not to mention the game is probably copied onto the hard disk in a couple places (install and swap).
I thought other courts have said that "loading software into RAM" is an essential part of using it (not even an affirmative fair use defense, but simply a normal use).
In theory, none of those routers should need a UPS, just a better AC-DC converter perhaps with a bigger capacitor across the DC lines. I've never investigated the quality of the wall warts they supply with routers, but my guess is they are very cheap and simply don't handle voltage fluctuations as well as they should.
Shit fertilizes the ground, which plants are grown in and fed to cows, which produce milk, which is made into sherbet. There you go, sherbet-from-shit thanks to the sun.
I can't imagine why anyone paranoid enough to use Tor wouldn't use SSL to connect to their final endpoint. Do the anti-government freedom and revolution sites not bother setting up https or something?
Slashdot Mirror
Sudden policy changes that bankrupt businesses and create huge legal problems with tens (hundreds?) of thousands of existing contracts will destroy trust in the government to provide a workable business environment.
Hmm. Sounds like progress marching forward. Anyone investing heavily in software patents, which only started existing in the mid 1980s, should have known better. It's kind of like investing in soft drink companies because of prohibition being enacted. Oh wait, lots of companies did that and are quite successful now.
I think that what the disappearance of software patents will show is a lot of patent troll companies going under, and everyone with an actual *product* to sell doing just fine. Standards bodies will still come up with codecs. They'll just ask for R&D fees up front from movie/music studios, or companies like Apple and Microsoft (who already invented their own codecs to get around licensing MPEG Audio Layer 3) will do more of the R&D.
Businesses didn't set the rules for patents. Government did. As such, government has the duty to make the transition as smooth and non-disruptive as it can, even when they recognize that the old system was a mistake.
Probably few existing patents will be overturned, and the ones that do will be the obvious and stupid ones. That's pretty smooth and fair, I think. Retards who think that pushing email to a wireless device is patentable will hopefully die a well deserved death.
Declaring that software patents will no longer be approved is fine. But many smaller companies have invested much in the assumption that their current patents will continue to be valid.
And I've invested the last 20 years of my life assuming that if I hear or think of a neat idea for a program or algorithm, I'll actually be able to legally implement it and use it. So who gets to trump my right to do that, and why?
Should things that aeronautical engineers come up with not be patentable before aeronautical engineering is just an arbitrary subset of physics? I'll gladly agree that there is something seriously broken with software patents as they are currently implemented, but I certainly don't claim to know the best way to fix them. I don't think we should completely get rid of them though.
Should Bernoulli's equations be patentable? If not, then why should a specific wing shape derived from those equations be patentable? Most likely the wing shape was some local maxima of an equation relating Bernoulli's principle (and other basic physical forces) to some requirements (lift, wingspan, loadbearing capacity, cross section, air resistance, etc.) If anyone can derive the same optimal wing shape from straightforward mathematics, why should a wing shape be patentable?
By this point, software engineering is practiced very differently than abstract mathematics. It's much more akin to taking different building blocks and finding ways to put them together. In the same way that an aeronautical engineer would combine different hydraulics, flaps, bolts, fixtures, bearings and control surfaces, a software engineer will combine input routines, sorting functions, display functions and storage devices. We speak of software in terms of interconnected components that each preform a certain task and together perform a more complicated task, not in terms of mathematical proofs, even if you can express proofs as software and vice versa.
So copyright the combination of components. The problem with patents is that they generally refer to the entire problem space and not to a specific implementation of a general solution for a problem space. E.g. the patents on MPEG compression cover *every* possible algorithm for encoding or decoding an MPEG stream, because they are actually defined in an elementary mathematical way, not as a collection of specific physical components that do specific things. I think you'll find that every other software patent is similar; it covers the problem space and not a specific implementation that should be covered by copyright.
Furthermore, I'd argue that software is at one end of a spectrum that includes firmware and hardware. I think most readily agree that things on the hardware end of the spectrum are patentable. Where is the line that makes software exempt from these same protections. Imagine trying to patent an MP3 player. The software is an integral part of this invention. The MP3 player would be impossible without the software it runs.
I don't mind hardware patents too much, so long as they aren't obvious. For instance, U.S. patent #1 is, wait for it, a gear for a train wheel to let it go up hills on a toothed track. It has special retractable teeth or something. To me, it's fairly obvious that if you want to get a heavy train up a hill, you either use cables or gears. I don't actually see what good an MP3 player patent is. It's just a walkman (which is just a small tape player [which is just a small radio with a magnetic pickup and motors { etc... }]) with an MP3 decoder instead of a tape player. I don't think applying a DCT to an audio sample and huffman coding its quantized values should be patentable. It's just a linear operator and entropy encoder.
Something is absolutely broken with software patents in their current incarnation. The bar for "obviousness" seems far too low. The patent term seems rather long, given the speed at which the industry moves. The treble damages for knowingly infringing a patent, while it makes sense to a certain extent, leads to some braindead behavior, like never reading patents in fear that you might accidentally knowingly infringe someone else's patent. Despite these flaws, software is sufficiently similar to other types of inventions that there is a place for patents on software as well.
That brings up the question of what complexity should be required for patents. Should the four color theorem be patentable? W
Do you also favor patents for mathematical proofs? Because I can write a proof for any specific compression algorithm that there exists a function from one integer to another integer, with a partial inverse from any compressed integer back to the original. If someone were to verify that proof with a test integer, could (or should) they violate a patent by doing so? Is the mathematical function patented, or is it just the *use* of mathematics that a patent prevents?
Woo hoo!!! But I think that some patents should stand if they are truly innovative. If someone comes up with a killer compression technique that can compress a rar to 10% of it's size then they would deserve a patent. It is these "use a hyperlink to start a video" patents that need to go.
I think being able to personally violate the laws of entropy would be reward enough, don't you? That's the way I see it; all currently patentable ideas are worthless enough that if one chump doesn't patent them today, some other chump will think them up in a few years. Things like you describe, e.g. "a method of extracting free energy from the vacuum energy" style patents don't *need* a patent because the first person or group to invent it would have de-facto control of the world if they wanted it.
Ah, but here's some prior art called a "book" "shelf" which may have "text" inserted in an ordered fashion making it "easily searchable" via illumination by "electronic" lights.
Most mega-corporations would suffer but survive. Even if they lose IP, they have the size and strength to shrug it off. But for some smaller companies, their IP is a critical part of their business, and many could well fold.
Perhaps you mean the little patent troll companies?
If there really are tiny little companies whose only method of making money is a patent, what the hell do their long term financial forecasts look like? "Well, we're good for the next 20 years, but then our patent expires and we'll suddenly go belly-up."
I actually don't mind the purely mathematical or purely algorithmic patents. Phil Katz patented some efficient string matching algorithms [wikipedia.org] that became a well-known compression program.
Except that Katz didn't invent LZ77 or huffman coding. If both of those were patented, I doubt deflate or gzip would exist today. We'd still be doing run length encoding or something stupid because the patent owners would never get together to combine the best algorithms into one product. Similarly, the BWT relies on an efficient LRU encoding plus huffman coding, so if everyone was patent happy the BWT might be useless as well. The fact that arithmetic coding is more efficient than huffman coding, but is used almost nowhere (I think some voice codecs pay for it, but that's all I can think of), is easy proof that patents are harmful to just about everyone. That is one of the most fundamental flaws of patent licensing schemes; the best possible products require the cooperation of everyone, which rarely happens. Often the parts one would like to merge together overlap each other slightly, making the entire project unfeasible unless everyone licenses their patents. The patent system has a massive built-in DoS vulnerability.
In regard to your point 2), what's the difference between "If you take all the sentences formed by rotating a given sentence by every letter offset and sort them, their last letters have a repeating pattern more easily memorized" and the BWT? There are plenty of cases where sorting, searching, and other algorithms have close analogs in the real world.
Math, can represent what is happening, and it can be used to determine what will happen, but software isn't math.
Then show me a program that can't be perfectly expressed as a formal mathematical set. Software is merely a subset of finite mathematics. Physical machines can be built that derive results from software, but machines can be built to derive results from mathematical formulas just as easily. The machines are ultimately equivalent in function. See anything written by Turing, Church, Howard, or Curry.
Do you not agree that software is equivalent to mathematical formulas, or do you think that software patents (an arbitrary subset of mathematics) should be patentable for some reason?
In the latter case, do you believe that, say, Andrew Wiles proof of Fermat's last theorem could be translated to a typed lisp expression (or any equivalent in some other language) and patented as a method of proving a certain fact about integers, and then authors of any proofs using Fermat's last theorem as a lemma could be sued for violating the patent? What about the four-coloring theorem which requires a programmatic proof? In short, what criteria would you use to distinguish unpatentable mathematics from patentable software?
From the way cloud computing is implemented with EC2, my basic definition of cloud computing is that it is "On Demand" computing. Unlike the Internet, which is a series of tubes, cloud computing is like a bunch of trucks that you just dump stuff on. If your servers get too busy, just dump the work on more trucks.
For instance, it allows a small web site to survive the slashdot effect by starting up a dozen servers for a few hours or days, costing much less than having a dozen servers running 365.2425 days a year.
Additional benefits are much higher availability and connectivity. Anyone can sign up for a cloud computing account and have a virtual server colocated at an Amazon or Google datacenter.
If my car can run 6 or 7 hours at 70 MPH, it should not be that difficult to use the same car to run at 420 MPH for 1 hour.
Well, except for wind resistance and kinetic energy increasing geometrically instead of linearly, you can make basically the same argument. If you took 6 or 7 copies of your car, took all the engines out and mounted them in one beefed up car, you could probably get an incredible speed increase for an hour on one tank of gas. Sticking a bunch of parallel laptop batteries and an inverter on a server would run it just fine.
0. Quit and get a REAL job.
Honestly, who would want to go to the trouble of fighting his or her immediate supervisors in the presence of some higher-up who really doesn't give a shit? Any low level worker will simply be fired out of hand if things break the way you describe. It's expensive and time consuming to sue for wrongful termination.
You pay VAT, the U.S. doesn't.
So far, no one has torn down an entire Egyptian pyramid looking for treasure, so the solution is obvious. Bury the waste UNDER the pyramid, and then make some fake tombs with cheap plastic treasure that will last 10,000 years.
After the grave robbers get their valuable hydrocarbon polymers out, no one would even think of digging under the pyramids for anything else.
Who stores blobs in a database anymore? Why not just store the location of the file?
Why did they do it in the first place? My guess is the same kind of people are still doing it for the same kind of reasons.
The solution is to take ion engines up on the rocket from earth, and use them (with solar power) to get the payloads into moon orbit. It even makes decelerating the payload back to earth orbit feasible so that the ion engines can be reused for the next payload, and potentially letting the payload capsule reenter the earth atmosphere for reuse.
Just getting the ISS into moon orbit would probably have to be done with ion engines or similar, otherwise the cost of lifting enough fuel to push the ISS into moon orbit would be as expensive as just launching the entire thing from the ground right to the moon (although technically the cost could be split with several shipments of rocket fuel, the total cost would be approximately the same, if not more, for multiple trips).
Anyone who reads BoFH knows that the situation you describe is completely un-winnable by the company :)
I don't think I was clear enough: it is not the copy-vis-a-vis-duplicate in RAM that is the problem, but rather the fact that you are "copying" data from storage to the RAM while at the same time violating the EULA that brings it within the purview of the statute.
I think you were perfectly clear. Does this ruling make running WoW on VMWare illegal? Unless there is a specific clause in the WoW license allowing virtualization, the answer seems to be yes. If the copy of WoW is licensed and not owned, then the "owner" has no rights whatsoever, except as granted by the EULA. That's how I interpret your post. Perhaps there's some looseness in the language of the EULA that allows "install this product on a computer" to mean "install this product inside a virtual machine", but I thought legal language was supposed to be pretty specific and narrowly interpreted.
In either case, a while back I thought of a fun way to screw with companies that tried the whole "you aren't licensed to copy the program into RAM" angle.
Just chop the CD the software comes on into tiny one-bit pieces, and use them in a mechanical computer that just shuffles the pieces around without making any copies. Voila. If that's too slow, implement the RAM as a list of pointers to bit locations on the CD, and the processor takes pointers as inputs and outputs new pointers to bits on the CD that match what would have happened if the pointers to bits interpreted as machine language were interpreted as instructions acting on the bits pointed to by the instruction's registers. The register store would be another list of pointers to the CD as well.
As far as I can tell, such a construction would never constitute a copy of the work or a derivative work because at no time is any part of the work modified; the only action that is performed is to shuffle pointers around. Without the CD, the pointers have no meaning. One could even send all the pointers to a friend without violating the distribution clause. If they had their own CD, they could pick up the computation where it was left off, otherwise it would be meaningless.
Now as a neat trick, it would be possible to sort an array of pointers to the RAM pointers based on their value. There would be two categories of pointers left; those pointing to a zero and those pointing to a one. At that point the array of sorted pointers is still completely independent of the original work, but the *number* of pointers pointing to a zero (or one) would be sufficient information to reconstruct a perfect copy of the work. Yet another way to make simple integers illegal to distribute!
You should be ashamed of yourself, not proud.
Oh, boo hoo. I've made a binary patch to an executable we no longer had the compiler for and it worked fine. If you know what you're doing, it's perfectly safe. Thankfully in my case I just had to zero terminate a string early.
Modifying blobs in a database is only a problem if they're indexed. My guess is that no one would be foolish enough to build an index over a field full of executable code, much less figure out a way to use it.
The decision is relevant in the 9th Cir. only, but the reasoning appears substantially correct. The rule that copying in to RAM is copying under the terms of the Copyright Act is not unique to this case: it is in fact cited under previous authority. This case rather simply applies this standard and says that it is a violation of the EULA to use a bot like Glider, and that copying in violation of the EULA/TOU is sufficient to constitute a copyright infringement.
So is VMWare illegal? It not only copies software into RAM, it creates a derivative work of it in order to properly emulate it. Somehow, I doubt that VMWare's lawyers haven't gone down this line of thought and completely trumped any possibility of it being illegal.
If VMWare is legal, so is Glider and any other emulation software (so long as it doesn't break some other law).
You are allowed by the license to use one copy at a time.
Yeah, but which copy goes in RAM, which copy goes in the L2 cache, which copy goes in the L1 cache, and which copy gets loaded into the microcode decode logic?
Not to mention the game is probably copied onto the hard disk in a couple places (install and swap).
I thought other courts have said that "loading software into RAM" is an essential part of using it (not even an affirmative fair use defense, but simply a normal use).
In theory, none of those routers should need a UPS, just a better AC-DC converter perhaps with a bigger capacitor across the DC lines. I've never investigated the quality of the wall warts they supply with routers, but my guess is they are very cheap and simply don't handle voltage fluctuations as well as they should.
Shit fertilizes the ground, which plants are grown in and fed to cows, which produce milk, which is made into sherbet. There you go, sherbet-from-shit thanks to the sun.
I can't imagine why anyone paranoid enough to use Tor wouldn't use SSL to connect to their final endpoint. Do the anti-government freedom and revolution sites not bother setting up https or something?