The Copyright Office holds a large enough portion of any registered copyrighted work to check for cheating and plagarism. Why not just lobby the government to create a searchable database over the content of all the registered works and then have students send in a copyright registconcrete weightration on all the papers they write? That way the school doesn't even have to do anything, the copyright office can detect the infringement and the origical author can sue them for it. Problem solved.
That pretty much sums it up. The way companies like nvidia get away with shipping binary drivers is to not actually link their binary with any GPL code and let the user do that part. Since the FSF and the GPL both recognize the fair use right for people to do whatever they want with GPL software for their own use (without redistributing it), it's legal.
The problems are that not everyone likes version 3 of the GPL, and that code not licensed under "GPLv2 and any future version" can't easily be relicensed due to practical issues. One solution is for the FSF to specifically allow mixing GPLv2 and GPLv3 code in the same linked object without applying the terms of the GPLv3 to the entire binary or to the GPLv2 source code. That way things that really do need DRM and patent protections (like drivers for proprietary hardware, video and audio cards that would otherwise require DRM, etc.) can have them without impacting the rest of the kernel, which could still be used in projects without those drivers under the GPLv2. For instance, if a video card driver is licensed under GPLv3 to protect it from future DRM abuse, only that driver would be affected. Anyone could stick a DRM module into the kernel or do whatever they wanted to other GPLv2 parts, so long as those restrictions did not impact the GPLv3 portions. Obviously, it's still possible that the dominant Linux distributions would stay GPLv2, become DRM'd, and just kill off GPLv3 portions because they were incompatible, but theoretically that would happen in any case simply by forking the kernel and letting it become the dominant version. Basically, the argument comes down to whether Linux will attempt to retain user's freedom by limiting DRM as much as possible, but at least with the option to mix licenses the individual parts licensed under GPLv3 would outlive the DRM demise of this hypothetical Linux. The biggest advantage is that mixing licenses would allow the free market to select the best balance between GPLv2 and GPLv3 protections in practice.
I think a compromise like this is probably the only way to really settle the issue. Lots of people like the GPLv3, and most likely it will be necessary at some point to protect computer owners from DRM. On the other hand, the parts of Linux that are DRM (and even patent) neutral can still be licensed under the GPLv2 for use in embedded systems or other projects where the GPLv3 isn't appropriate. In the worst case forks would be necessary to support GPLv2 and GPLv3 versions of common hardware that everyone wants to use, but where some people don't want to prevent patents and DRM from interfering and others want them or don't care. However, if the FSF allows cross linking between GPLv2 and GPLv3 it won't be as bad as having to fork the entire kernel into a GPLv2 and GPLv3 branch.
I mean, a true genius would be eager to use his cognitive abilities for the advancement of mankind. Start an academic career, change the way we think about the world. Live in fancy old College rooms, sip on a glass of Port, write thoughtful books.
A *truly* brilliant mind would realize that the patent office is precisely where most of the advances in science show up, at some point. Especially pharmacueticals and nanotechnology, which will be the Next Big Thing. Being able to see a breadth of new inventions all together would also allow someone to notice connections between them that other people might not see.
Not only that, but who won the Nobel prize for work done on the photoelectric effect while a patent clerk? I thought so.
I can not get into the console unless I use a terminal in GNOME or boot into single user mode. Maybe a few other small problems, but nothing like mplayer not working with firefox. It runs fairly fast even using GNOME 2.14 with 198 MB memory.
It might be/etc/inittab, which determines how many ttys are started on virtual consoles in each runlevel. Sometimes the runlevel for X11 (usually 4 or 5) will have few or no virtual consoles with plain ttys. You should have a list of ttys in inittab:
The second field on each line contains the runlevels that the ttys will run on. If your default runlevel for X is not present for any of the ttys, just add the runlevel to one or more of the lines to start them next time init runs.
I've always kind of wondered if you could use cryptographic principles to enhance communication with a wider audience. Sort of anti-cryptography. Or is there some sort of entropy sort of thing - that you can decrease the understandability of a message, but you can't increase it.
Cryptographic hashes and public key signatures do exactly that. Hashes ensure the integrity of messages, and signatures authenticate them.
You really think a judge is going to listen to an arguement about retinas and memory?
If judges will hear cases about evolution and prayers in public buildings, I have no doubt that the arbitrary definition of copyright in contrast with technological reality will come up at some point. Judges ultimately have to issue decisions about reality, not the ideals espoused hundreds of years ago and tweaked by greedy lawyers and businesses.
There *is* a difference between that and a storable or hardcopy duplication, not that either should be disallowed when one owns the original media or license (iTunes/etc)
There is no difference, except for the arbitrary human sensory boundary. That will ultimately shift as genetic engineering and implants allow humans to integrate digital technology into their own minds. As it is now, what prevents someone from hearing a song, and singing it again (think Happy Birthday)? Humans are very efficient at memorizing and reproducing certain types of complex information. Many people can hear a tune, and sing or whistle it from that point on. There *exists* a copy of that tune in their brain, no matter how you look at it. Copyright law simply assumed that from the beginning. The problem is that now most digital works cannot be directly recognized by the brain, and instead must be translated and copied repeatedly in an electronic device before it's human understandable. Copyright has no notion of how to handle the necessary copies and modifications without simply subsuming them into a "decoding machine." Well, where do decoding machines end and copying mechanisms begin? CD players buffer several seconds of the song before playing it to prevent CD skips from interrupting playback, but is that a genuine copy or is that just part of the decoding device? If so, how *long* can a temporary copy be kept? Can it be temporarily kept in an MP3 file on an iPod? Apparently there are no court cases or laws regarding these situations, which is the major problem for future innovation. Tivo is in a questionable legal status, for instance. The de facto standard has been that Tivo is fair use, but how much fair use that's not directly supported by law will media companies tolerate? The problem is that everything new is being defined by arbitrary lawsuits instead of well thought out laws.
If making copies is a "natural process"? Then why do you all get huffy when the government spies on you? Or your personal information get's swiped, or leaked?
I don't really care. The main problem is that powerful people can afford privacy and secrecy, creating a power imbalance. The other problem is that my personal information is all that's necessary to incur debts that I'm liable for, and credit reporting agencies can issue libel to the effect that I didn't pay "my" bills without any recourse for me to sue them for it. If anything, free sharing of all information would prevent the need for protecting private information, because it wouldn't give anyone an advantage to know it.
Obviously, as long as we remain individuals with some competing goals, it will be necessary to keep secrets. However, secrets are much different than widely disseminated and useful information (software, music, etc.) with arbitrary legal controls. Secrets are just that, they are *only* known to certain entities, and in fact secrets are essentially what make us feel human. If there were no secrets, then humans would know each other's hopes, fears, thoughts, and desires in full, and it would be very difficult to draw distinctions between the self and the collective. I don't think a collective mind is anything to fight against in the future, however. It's probably one of the most likely outcomes; just like atoms gathered into cells, and cells gathered into animals, animals will eventually gather into minds that span the universe.
There has been some debate over how much involvement is required before one can be said to have accepted the contract. So-called "shrinkwrap" licenses, in which opening (and keeping) the product constitutes acceptance are pretty much universally upheld.
Perhaps you can clarify, but I have never seen a license agreement on a CD or DVD giving me the right to make copies for the purpose of decoding and using the media. Instead, I usually see "All Rights Reserved" along with "This product is licensed for home viewing only," neither of which actually address the basic issue that copying and transformation is required to actually use the product. Is there essentially a common law(ish) concept of minimal rights necessary to use a work that are granted by default? If so, it would be interesting to know how those minimal rights are decided, and how they can be extended when technology changes.
The key point to remember that often gets lost on people, and this is what the lawyer was referring to when he said he didn't know where the questioner was getting his/her preconception, is that copyright gives the copyright owner the right to control the making of *copies* of original works. All the questions of the questioner seem to be missing this fundamental point (although they do end up touching that important copyright issue of fair use). Unfortunately, I suspect that the idea of a license to copyrighted works -- particularly the way licenses are used with software -- has kind of screwed up people's understanding of copyrights.
Of course it's screwed up the debate about copyright, because without the ability to copy the data you can't play a DVD, MP3, or CD. Playing any digital media requires making copies of at least whole sectors from the optical media, otherwise error correction can't work (you need all the data in the hardware to correct the errors). Not only that, but decompressing MP3s or DVDs requires a buffer at least as large as the individual blocks of the media format, since the inverse huffman, quantization and DCT have to be performed on the entire block. So either it's legal to make copies of the work to play it, or it requires a license. If it requires a license, I sure haven't seen one on any CD or DVD I've bought. All it says is that it's licensed for home viewing, which doesn't exactly give me the right to make any copies, does it? That is precicely why everyone is talking in terms of rights or licenses to content, and not the original physical copyright definition. After all, when most of the copyright laws were written the only devices required to play back media did not need to make copies. Tape players directly amplified the signals coming off the tape, possibly after demodulating them. Record players were even simpler, and archives were stored on microfische which just required magnification. The digital age is completely, fundamentally different from the world copyright expects, and this is why copyright law seems so backwards today. It is. It's over 50 years old in its fundamental assumptions. The word "digital" has been tacked on to all the laws, but the basic fact is that almost every "use" of a copyrighted work today involves making multiple copies and translations of it every time it is viewed or listened to.
Believe it or not, CDs and DVDs can be "read" using the same basic mechanisms. You can shine a light on the disk, observe the arrangement of the bits with a microscope and "decode" it yourself. No CD or DVD "player" is required. All that is required are the instruments I mentioned and some determination, but hey, it took some determination to learn to read conventional media as well...
Well, technically you can't read a DVD because I doubt you're personally licensed to use the CSS algorithm. But that's just another wonder of our magnificent copyright and patent system.
In my essay I explicitly disclaim, albeit in a footnote, the issue of AI. That's not something we're ready to argue about yet, any more than an 19th century civil libertarian would really have been able to reasonably debate airline security procedures.
Well, it depends on how soon you think the singularity is coming, if at all. Even if it's only 50 years out, it's not too soon to come up with preliminary ideas. At best, I think the real argument will be about what subset (or superset) of human rights AIs have, and not about which laws should be made about them. At this point only futurists are considering it, and they probably won't be the ones writing the laws anyway.
Moreover, just in general, you seem to be reflexively taking a contrary position, even as you eventually talk yourself into total agreement with me. My position is that it doesn't matter if you buy a CD, download an MP3 (over any of a bazillion distinct ways of communicating an MP3 from one machine to another), or have a friend play a CD while you record it with your mic; they all amount to the same thing, and trying to legally slice whether or not "infringement" takes place based on the copying mechanism is doomed to failure. The fact that this has other implications is not lost on me; the page I linked to explicitly calls out "two friends watching a DVD" vs. "one friend giving a copy of the DVD to his friend which he watches once" as an example of a situation that already exists where my model says the same thing happened, but the current legal model is that one was legal and one was not.
When you take your argument to its logical conclusion, copyright evaporates. Lets look at the example of your web page, which you use. You list the html and pictures as concrete parts, but they really aren't. They are messages coming from another assembly which uses characters and pixels, which are in turn actually messages coming from an assembler that is the computer code that runs your graphics program and editor. The problem is you provide no base case for what a concrete object is versus a message. For instance, the message that your web server sends becomes a concrete element that Google assembles into the message containg search results that list your page, and on the other end your HTML document was a stream of concrete characters that were delivered as a message to your web server which then assembled it with your pictures and sent them to me as a new message. Who owns what, and who gets paid or gets infringed when each message is viewed by me or someone else?
In essence, you run into the current copyright problem as soon as you try to define what a concrete element is. We already use the model you have described, except we simply call the concrete parts a work, the message is a derivative work, and both are copyrighted separately.
In summation, I assert that a computer shouldn't have any legal or ethical standing anyhow, so who cares how many copies a computer makes of something? What matters is human experience. Under my model, "piracy" (skip the word debates, please) is not the act of downloading something, it's the act of actually viewing/hearing it. If you download something and immediately delete it, it's not piracy.
In practical terms, it matters a lot. People don't watch DVDs or listen to CDs, computers decode them and present them in human usable format, and they're generally the only way of recording such a fact. Not only that, but as AI grows it will be necessary to treat any information processing system at least as if it has the capacity for human experience. How does you model handle contributory infringement like someone broadcasting "pirated" music to everyone in the world? Who is guilty, and for how much? Is it dependant on who listens, who distributes, or a combination of the factors? Also, are individual experiences unique or once someone experiences some media can they experience it again in the future as if it's equivalent to the first time, or is that dependant on some contract? If it's dependant, what do you do about the copy of the information in their brain?
Despite that, I think I agree with you about the nature of information. Information is what matters, not any specific instantiation of it in energy or matter. After all, that's what the universe is really about: Spreading information via the material laws of physics. When AIs or brainscanners become widely available, it will be necessary to have laws in place to deal with copying, modifying, or simply viewing the information that an entity considers to be part of itself. In reality, the laws we have now are actually dealing with information as well, it's just abstracted behind the fact that so far we don't have the ability to directly manipulate the information stored in matter and energy, and we work with conglomerations of it known as people and property.
If the computer industry doesn't get into the fight of helping the RIAA victims, the copyright law is going to be expanded and twisted to such an extent that the internet as we know it will cease to exist.
The problem is that the computer industry relies on exactly the same overbroad copyright protections as the RIAA and MPAA. EULAs are essentially the mirror image of the restricted consumer rights the buyers of RIAA and MPAA media are thought to have. If you don't have the fair use right to copy your CDs or make them into MP3s, then obviously you don't have the right to run software you have purchased, and you need a EULA to even load it onto your hard drive. On the other hand, if fair use allows owners of CDs and DVDs to make personal copies and translate them into other formats, then what prevents owners of software CDs from doing the exact same thing? If you have bought a software CD and have the fair use right to transform or make personal copies of it, then you don't *need* a EULA to use it, you just copy it onto your computer and execute it, or disassemble it, or take off the silly CD copy protection it might have, all perfectly legally. The commercial software industry is probably more scared about fair use rights than the RIAA and MPAA. No one is going to buy CDs if you have to be 18 and sign a legal contract to use it, and the same is true of software. "IP" companies have relied on being able to apply the force of law against their customers without any true legal contract for long enough that most of their business models would collapse if the law changed overnight.
If they think they can win on it, I wouldn't put it past them to argue that personal copies are an infringement.
I posted about this earlier in the thread, but this requires a specific response. If the RIAA can get a court to agree that personal copies of a work are illegal (despite the existance of the fair use right to make a backup copy), they will be in a prime position to be sued on the legality of EULAs in general. If it is illegal to make a personal copy of a work, then it is also illegal to decode the work and listen to it because the decoding and possible decompression require making temporary copies in the memory or hardware registers of the decoder. Not only that, but there is a physical copy of the work either existing as sound waves in the air or an image on a video display. Not only that, but in the end the human brain translates and stores a copy of the work internally. The ears transform the work into frequency data, and the eyes make a copy on the retina, and then further transform it into internally meaningful thoughts and concepts. To make personal copies illegal would require the EULA From Hell(TM) to cover all the "allowed" paths that the media could enter the human brain, and in what form the copies could reside in the brain just so that someone could listen to a CD. At that point, it's quite likey that a judge with some common sense would invalidate EULAs in general. When I say EULA, I mean the legal "contract" that one "agrees" to by taking the plastic off a CD or software package or by clicking a button when installing software. Just see how much media the cartels can sell when each and every one of their customers must be over 18 and sign a legally binding contract just to purchase a CD.
The argument can be reduced to a simple one about books. To read a book, the reader must make a temporary copy of the work on their retinas, and then translate the words into internally meaningful thoughts which most likely will remain in the brain for some time. If fair use covers the human sensory system, why should it not extend to the devices the human sensory system uses to view the work? After all, the eyes and ears are merely tools the brain uses to interpret the world, and computers and CD and DVD players are merely the tools that the eyes and ears use to interpret digital media. If the human sensory system is chosen as the arbitrary limit for fair use, it just pushes the argument back a few years until genetic modification and implants allow the human sensory system to interpret and copy digital media directly. Making copies of information is a natural process, and trying to artifically regulate it to the point of authoritarian social control will simply fail.
I agree with the Attorney General that playing around with the definition of distribution is not helpful to anyone, either victims of RIAA cases or copyright owners. Instead, the courts or Congress needs to make a clear distinction between what is allowed in terms of copying and modifying works in order to view or listen to them, versus simply distributing copies.
Most basically, the problem is that CDs, DVDs, MP3s, and any other digital media format require the modification of the work before it is human usable. Any data stored on optical media is encoded as a series of error correcting codes that must be copied from the optical media into a decoding device and modified to retreive the original bit stream which must then be converted into aural or visual works. MP3s and DVDs are further encoded with compression algorithms so that the recovered bitstream must be further copied and modified before the entire work is in human usable format.
The problem as I see it is that copyright law provides for the owner of a copy of a work to use a machine to decode a work to use it, but does not clarify exactly what rights the owner has in transforming the work with a device in order to use it. For instance, CDs can be played by a common CD player or a computer with a CD drive, but the computer can just as easily convert the CD to an MP3 file before playing it. What are the limits on the owner's right to use a machine to decode their copy of the work? For instance, it is apparently perfectly legal for CD players to read ahead several seconds or even minutes and store a copy of the CD data in memory so that CD player skips will not impact playback. In this case, the owner seems to have the right to make a copy of the work for personal use, but where does this right come from? If the right comes from the fair use right to make a backup copy of a work, then is it legal that the backup is the work being played, and not the original CD? If it's legal, then it should clearly follow that creating an MP3 file from a CD is simply the same case, that it is a backup that can be used apart from the original work. I, and many other people, believe that this ability to translate or copy a work into a separate device for convenience should be a fundamental fair use right. The problem is that no law or court (that I'm aware of) has addressed this issue directly.
All of the cases that I have seen stem from people who are using a Fast Track sharing program such as Kazaa, Imesh, Gnutella, LimeWire, etc., having a shared files folder with copyrighted songs in it, even if the song files were obtained legally. So even making sure to pay for all of your downloads wouldn't protect you from a lawsuit. The only way I know to avoid the present litigation wave is to avoid having shared files of copyrighted songs.
I think that cinches it. If you don't want to get harassed by the RIAA, don't let other people download their music from your computer. That's been the common sense answer for quite some time, but it's interesting that he says all the cases have stemmed directly from sharing songs, not downloading them.
What I find more interesting is that the lawyers don't believe that buying a CD gives one the fair use right to rip it to MP3s for playing on another device. That, to most slashdotters, is a fundamental fair use right, but perhaps to the law it doesn't technically exist. I suppose it all comes down to whether EULAs are valid contracts or not. If not, then obviously everyone has the fair use right to copy the CD for their personal use because the data *has* to be copied into hardware registers, modified (especially during error correction), and then converted to analog audio at some point. If EULAs are valid, then I guess you can't buy used CDs because the imaginary EULA that comes with every new CD probably doesn't "allow" that. We definitely need a strong anti-EULA case to go through the courts, preferably one like this where it's blatantly obvious that the necessity of a EULA to play a CD or DVD is an undue burdon and against fair use rights.
Yes, this is legal. The reason it is legal is that they are asking you to do it. You have been authorized to do it.
AFAIK, it's legal because they're running a public (it's connected to the Internet) web server that doesn't return 403 Forbidden to unauthenticated requests. As long as only well formed HTTP messages are sent to the server, it's perfectly legal. Trying to exploit buffer overflows, DoSing it, or attempting to circumvent its authentication methods may be illegal depending on the laws in your country.
Sure, he deleted his cookies when he was done (I do too) but he never removed all his cache files which could be used to track you. Yes, this will increase the time it takes for a page to load but since apparently everyone but me uses a high-speed connection, waiting that extra half second doesn't seem to be that much of a hassle.
Couldn't the cahce and cookies just be located on a temporary encrypted filesystem? Just use your favorite harddisk/folder encryption utility, generate a cryptographically secure random key for each browsing session, mount the encrypted drive, format it, and use it for the browser cache. There's no reason to limit performance when cryptography can render the cache unrecoverable. There's no point in hiding the fact that you're using Tor by not leaving encrypted cache data on the disk, since anyone watching the network already knows that Tor is being used.
At the source of every error which is blamed on the computer you will find at least two human errors, including the error of blaming it on the computer.
Cosmic rays aren't human errors. I suppose you could claim that humans should build perfect computers that don't absorb random radiation, but at some point you just have to do the statistics and play the odds. The universe is chaotic, at some point it's just Murphy's fault.
Too bad I already posted. The parent is not a troll; better inherant security does in fact reduce or eliminate the need for antivirus and other "protective" software. Look at it this way: If viruses are prevented from infecting executable files by filesystem or policy security (like "Don't allow writing to existing executable files", which seems pretty reasonable) and personal data is protected by limited access to it until the user specifically grants access, then most malware is totally useless. Limit network connectivity to trusted applications, and zombie machines become useless.
One problem, of course, is that deciding which software to trust is a hard problem. The operating system has to be the initial root of any trust relationship. Adding things like email, document editors, and any other software requires the operating system to know what security should be applied to these applications. Things like Google Desktop and any other useful utility require broad permissions to access data, and are potentially difficult to secure. How do you specify that, say, Google Desktop is trustworthy but Gator/Claria isn't? To really secure personal data, you almost need an operating system that directly classifies data and protects access to it not only to applications but tracks the data through each application and prevents its use from being mixed with other classifications. For instance, personal credit or financial information should be classified such that it is only mixed with unclassified information (like the Internet, email, or any other way out of the computer) under controlled conditions that the user is made directly aware of by the OS. Otherwise, it's easy for rogue applications to spoof trusted applications to gain access to personal data and misuse it.
My basic point is that for a truly secure operating system, a very comprehensive model of all the data and applications that will use the OS is necessary to define the security policy. Microsoft is probably not able to create such a system simply due to the complexity versus ease of use, not to mention the monopoly issues. For instance, if Microsoft starts protecting personal data by not letting it be opened by untrusted applications, the Internet at large will cry out that they are abusing their power, despite the fact that such a step is necessary for true security. The problem is that Microsoft has wedged itself into complete gatekeeper of commodity PCs, and there is very little chance of a standard method for securely managing data and applications emerging on its own in the free market that works with the existing monoculture. Microsoft can neither be the initiator or the adoptor, and so general computer security suffers. I don't really see any solution until a lot of backward compatibility is dropped and a lot of work is done on a secure data model that isn't too difficult to use for normal people.
For example: I go to install Windows from scratch. On the installation screen, i get a list of components...
This already exists in the unattended install (SIF) files in the [Components] section, you just have to know which components to turn off. You can find a list of all the components in the registry at HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\Curr entVersion\Setup\Oc Manager\Subcomponents. We use this to not install games, MSN, and a few other odds and ends. It probably wouldn't be hard at all to just plug a GUI in front of the basic Windows installer (or before components are installed at least) that modifies the installer file. At the very least you can customize the installation CD to get rid of some garbage.
Only the rich and powerful can enjoy true anonymity.
I wonder if putting on a ski mask and robbing a bank is also equivalent to not telling all your friends (and significant other) when you hire a prostitute or have an affair? Most rich people do that at one time or another and try to keep it secret. Same with financial assets and business deals. Heaven forbid the government monitor confidential business communications!
Slashdot Mirror
The Copyright Office holds a large enough portion of any registered copyrighted work to check for cheating and plagarism. Why not just lobby the government to create a searchable database over the content of all the registered works and then have students send in a copyright registconcrete weightration on all the papers they write? That way the school doesn't even have to do anything, the copyright office can detect the infringement and the origical author can sue them for it. Problem solved.
If a library is released under the GPL (not the LGPL), does that mean that any program which uses it has to be under the GPL?
That pretty much sums it up. The way companies like nvidia get away with shipping binary drivers is to not actually link their binary with any GPL code and let the user do that part. Since the FSF and the GPL both recognize the fair use right for people to do whatever they want with GPL software for their own use (without redistributing it), it's legal.
The problems are that not everyone likes version 3 of the GPL, and that code not licensed under "GPLv2 and any future version" can't easily be relicensed due to practical issues. One solution is for the FSF to specifically allow mixing GPLv2 and GPLv3 code in the same linked object without applying the terms of the GPLv3 to the entire binary or to the GPLv2 source code. That way things that really do need DRM and patent protections (like drivers for proprietary hardware, video and audio cards that would otherwise require DRM, etc.) can have them without impacting the rest of the kernel, which could still be used in projects without those drivers under the GPLv2. For instance, if a video card driver is licensed under GPLv3 to protect it from future DRM abuse, only that driver would be affected. Anyone could stick a DRM module into the kernel or do whatever they wanted to other GPLv2 parts, so long as those restrictions did not impact the GPLv3 portions. Obviously, it's still possible that the dominant Linux distributions would stay GPLv2, become DRM'd, and just kill off GPLv3 portions because they were incompatible, but theoretically that would happen in any case simply by forking the kernel and letting it become the dominant version. Basically, the argument comes down to whether Linux will attempt to retain user's freedom by limiting DRM as much as possible, but at least with the option to mix licenses the individual parts licensed under GPLv3 would outlive the DRM demise of this hypothetical Linux. The biggest advantage is that mixing licenses would allow the free market to select the best balance between GPLv2 and GPLv3 protections in practice.
I think a compromise like this is probably the only way to really settle the issue. Lots of people like the GPLv3, and most likely it will be necessary at some point to protect computer owners from DRM. On the other hand, the parts of Linux that are DRM (and even patent) neutral can still be licensed under the GPLv2 for use in embedded systems or other projects where the GPLv3 isn't appropriate. In the worst case forks would be necessary to support GPLv2 and GPLv3 versions of common hardware that everyone wants to use, but where some people don't want to prevent patents and DRM from interfering and others want them or don't care. However, if the FSF allows cross linking between GPLv2 and GPLv3 it won't be as bad as having to fork the entire kernel into a GPLv2 and GPLv3 branch.
After all, "White and Nerdy".
Yup. That's Slashdot.
I'm just kind of pasty and geeky, you insensitive clod!
I mean, a true genius would be eager to use his cognitive abilities for the advancement of mankind. Start an academic career, change the way we think about the world. Live in fancy old College rooms, sip on a glass of Port, write thoughtful books.
A *truly* brilliant mind would realize that the patent office is precisely where most of the advances in science show up, at some point. Especially pharmacueticals and nanotechnology, which will be the Next Big Thing. Being able to see a breadth of new inventions all together would also allow someone to notice connections between them that other people might not see.
Not only that, but who won the Nobel prize for work done on the photoelectric effect while a patent clerk? I thought so.
It might be
The second field on each line contains the runlevels that the ttys will run on. If your default runlevel for X is not present for any of the ttys, just add the runlevel to one or more of the lines to start them next time init runs.
I've always kind of wondered if you could use cryptographic principles to enhance communication with a wider audience. Sort of anti-cryptography. Or is there some sort of entropy sort of thing - that you can decrease the understandability of a message, but you can't increase it.
Cryptographic hashes and public key signatures do exactly that. Hashes ensure the integrity of messages, and signatures authenticate them.
You really think a judge is going to listen to an arguement about retinas and memory?
If judges will hear cases about evolution and prayers in public buildings, I have no doubt that the arbitrary definition of copyright in contrast with technological reality will come up at some point. Judges ultimately have to issue decisions about reality, not the ideals espoused hundreds of years ago and tweaked by greedy lawyers and businesses.
There *is* a difference between that and a storable or hardcopy duplication, not that either should be disallowed when one owns the original media or license (iTunes/etc)
There is no difference, except for the arbitrary human sensory boundary. That will ultimately shift as genetic engineering and implants allow humans to integrate digital technology into their own minds. As it is now, what prevents someone from hearing a song, and singing it again (think Happy Birthday)? Humans are very efficient at memorizing and reproducing certain types of complex information. Many people can hear a tune, and sing or whistle it from that point on. There *exists* a copy of that tune in their brain, no matter how you look at it. Copyright law simply assumed that from the beginning. The problem is that now most digital works cannot be directly recognized by the brain, and instead must be translated and copied repeatedly in an electronic device before it's human understandable. Copyright has no notion of how to handle the necessary copies and modifications without simply subsuming them into a "decoding machine." Well, where do decoding machines end and copying mechanisms begin? CD players buffer several seconds of the song before playing it to prevent CD skips from interrupting playback, but is that a genuine copy or is that just part of the decoding device? If so, how *long* can a temporary copy be kept? Can it be temporarily kept in an MP3 file on an iPod? Apparently there are no court cases or laws regarding these situations, which is the major problem for future innovation. Tivo is in a questionable legal status, for instance. The de facto standard has been that Tivo is fair use, but how much fair use that's not directly supported by law will media companies tolerate? The problem is that everything new is being defined by arbitrary lawsuits instead of well thought out laws.
If making copies is a "natural process"? Then why do you all get huffy when the government spies on you? Or your personal information get's swiped, or leaked?
I don't really care. The main problem is that powerful people can afford privacy and secrecy, creating a power imbalance. The other problem is that my personal information is all that's necessary to incur debts that I'm liable for, and credit reporting agencies can issue libel to the effect that I didn't pay "my" bills without any recourse for me to sue them for it. If anything, free sharing of all information would prevent the need for protecting private information, because it wouldn't give anyone an advantage to know it.
Obviously, as long as we remain individuals with some competing goals, it will be necessary to keep secrets. However, secrets are much different than widely disseminated and useful information (software, music, etc.) with arbitrary legal controls. Secrets are just that, they are *only* known to certain entities, and in fact secrets are essentially what make us feel human. If there were no secrets, then humans would know each other's hopes, fears, thoughts, and desires in full, and it would be very difficult to draw distinctions between the self and the collective. I don't think a collective mind is anything to fight against in the future, however. It's probably one of the most likely outcomes; just like atoms gathered into cells, and cells gathered into animals, animals will eventually gather into minds that span the universe.
There has been some debate over how much involvement is required before one can be said to have accepted the contract. So-called "shrinkwrap" licenses, in which opening (and keeping) the product constitutes acceptance are pretty much universally upheld.
Perhaps you can clarify, but I have never seen a license agreement on a CD or DVD giving me the right to make copies for the purpose of decoding and using the media. Instead, I usually see "All Rights Reserved" along with "This product is licensed for home viewing only," neither of which actually address the basic issue that copying and transformation is required to actually use the product. Is there essentially a common law(ish) concept of minimal rights necessary to use a work that are granted by default? If so, it would be interesting to know how those minimal rights are decided, and how they can be extended when technology changes.
The issue about copies for personal use is an area in which the RIAA has flip flopped.
Have the courts flip flopped as well, or is it still untested?
The key point to remember that often gets lost on people, and this is what the lawyer was referring to when he said he didn't know where the questioner was getting his/her preconception, is that copyright gives the copyright owner the right to control the making of *copies* of original works. All the questions of the questioner seem to be missing this fundamental point (although they do end up touching that important copyright issue of fair use). Unfortunately, I suspect that the idea of a license to copyrighted works -- particularly the way licenses are used with software -- has kind of screwed up people's understanding of copyrights.
Of course it's screwed up the debate about copyright, because without the ability to copy the data you can't play a DVD, MP3, or CD. Playing any digital media requires making copies of at least whole sectors from the optical media, otherwise error correction can't work (you need all the data in the hardware to correct the errors). Not only that, but decompressing MP3s or DVDs requires a buffer at least as large as the individual blocks of the media format, since the inverse huffman, quantization and DCT have to be performed on the entire block. So either it's legal to make copies of the work to play it, or it requires a license. If it requires a license, I sure haven't seen one on any CD or DVD I've bought. All it says is that it's licensed for home viewing, which doesn't exactly give me the right to make any copies, does it? That is precicely why everyone is talking in terms of rights or licenses to content, and not the original physical copyright definition. After all, when most of the copyright laws were written the only devices required to play back media did not need to make copies. Tape players directly amplified the signals coming off the tape, possibly after demodulating them. Record players were even simpler, and archives were stored on microfische which just required magnification. The digital age is completely, fundamentally different from the world copyright expects, and this is why copyright law seems so backwards today. It is. It's over 50 years old in its fundamental assumptions. The word "digital" has been tacked on to all the laws, but the basic fact is that almost every "use" of a copyrighted work today involves making multiple copies and translations of it every time it is viewed or listened to.
Believe it or not, CDs and DVDs can be "read" using the same basic mechanisms. You can shine a light on the disk, observe the arrangement of the bits with a microscope and "decode" it yourself. No CD or DVD "player" is required. All that is required are the instruments I mentioned and some determination, but hey, it took some determination to learn to read conventional media as well...
Well, technically you can't read a DVD because I doubt you're personally licensed to use the CSS algorithm. But that's just another wonder of our magnificent copyright and patent system.
In my essay I explicitly disclaim, albeit in a footnote, the issue of AI. That's not something we're ready to argue about yet, any more than an 19th century civil libertarian would really have been able to reasonably debate airline security procedures.
Well, it depends on how soon you think the singularity is coming, if at all. Even if it's only 50 years out, it's not too soon to come up with preliminary ideas. At best, I think the real argument will be about what subset (or superset) of human rights AIs have, and not about which laws should be made about them. At this point only futurists are considering it, and they probably won't be the ones writing the laws anyway.
Moreover, just in general, you seem to be reflexively taking a contrary position, even as you eventually talk yourself into total agreement with me. My position is that it doesn't matter if you buy a CD, download an MP3 (over any of a bazillion distinct ways of communicating an MP3 from one machine to another), or have a friend play a CD while you record it with your mic; they all amount to the same thing, and trying to legally slice whether or not "infringement" takes place based on the copying mechanism is doomed to failure. The fact that this has other implications is not lost on me; the page I linked to explicitly calls out "two friends watching a DVD" vs. "one friend giving a copy of the DVD to his friend which he watches once" as an example of a situation that already exists where my model says the same thing happened, but the current legal model is that one was legal and one was not.
When you take your argument to its logical conclusion, copyright evaporates. Lets look at the example of your web page, which you use. You list the html and pictures as concrete parts, but they really aren't. They are messages coming from another assembly which uses characters and pixels, which are in turn actually messages coming from an assembler that is the computer code that runs your graphics program and editor. The problem is you provide no base case for what a concrete object is versus a message. For instance, the message that your web server sends becomes a concrete element that Google assembles into the message containg search results that list your page, and on the other end your HTML document was a stream of concrete characters that were delivered as a message to your web server which then assembled it with your pictures and sent them to me as a new message. Who owns what, and who gets paid or gets infringed when each message is viewed by me or someone else?
In essence, you run into the current copyright problem as soon as you try to define what a concrete element is. We already use the model you have described, except we simply call the concrete parts a work, the message is a derivative work, and both are copyrighted separately.
In summation, I assert that a computer shouldn't have any legal or ethical standing anyhow, so who cares how many copies a computer makes of something? What matters is human experience. Under my model, "piracy" (skip the word debates, please) is not the act of downloading something, it's the act of actually viewing/hearing it. If you download something and immediately delete it, it's not piracy.
In practical terms, it matters a lot. People don't watch DVDs or listen to CDs, computers decode them and present them in human usable format, and they're generally the only way of recording such a fact. Not only that, but as AI grows it will be necessary to treat any information processing system at least as if it has the capacity for human experience. How does you model handle contributory infringement like someone broadcasting "pirated" music to everyone in the world? Who is guilty, and for how much? Is it dependant on who listens, who distributes, or a combination of the factors? Also, are individual experiences unique or once someone experiences some media can they experience it again in the future as if it's equivalent to the first time, or is that dependant on some contract? If it's dependant, what do you do about the copy of the information in their brain?
Despite that, I think I agree with you about the nature of information. Information is what matters, not any specific instantiation of it in energy or matter. After all, that's what the universe is really about: Spreading information via the material laws of physics. When AIs or brainscanners become widely available, it will be necessary to have laws in place to deal with copying, modifying, or simply viewing the information that an entity considers to be part of itself. In reality, the laws we have now are actually dealing with information as well, it's just abstracted behind the fact that so far we don't have the ability to directly manipulate the information stored in matter and energy, and we work with conglomerations of it known as people and property.
If the computer industry doesn't get into the fight of helping the RIAA victims, the copyright law is going to be expanded and twisted to such an extent that the internet as we know it will cease to exist.
The problem is that the computer industry relies on exactly the same overbroad copyright protections as the RIAA and MPAA. EULAs are essentially the mirror image of the restricted consumer rights the buyers of RIAA and MPAA media are thought to have. If you don't have the fair use right to copy your CDs or make them into MP3s, then obviously you don't have the right to run software you have purchased, and you need a EULA to even load it onto your hard drive. On the other hand, if fair use allows owners of CDs and DVDs to make personal copies and translate them into other formats, then what prevents owners of software CDs from doing the exact same thing? If you have bought a software CD and have the fair use right to transform or make personal copies of it, then you don't *need* a EULA to use it, you just copy it onto your computer and execute it, or disassemble it, or take off the silly CD copy protection it might have, all perfectly legally. The commercial software industry is probably more scared about fair use rights than the RIAA and MPAA. No one is going to buy CDs if you have to be 18 and sign a legal contract to use it, and the same is true of software. "IP" companies have relied on being able to apply the force of law against their customers without any true legal contract for long enough that most of their business models would collapse if the law changed overnight.
If they think they can win on it, I wouldn't put it past them to argue that personal copies are an infringement.
I posted about this earlier in the thread, but this requires a specific response. If the RIAA can get a court to agree that personal copies of a work are illegal (despite the existance of the fair use right to make a backup copy), they will be in a prime position to be sued on the legality of EULAs in general. If it is illegal to make a personal copy of a work, then it is also illegal to decode the work and listen to it because the decoding and possible decompression require making temporary copies in the memory or hardware registers of the decoder. Not only that, but there is a physical copy of the work either existing as sound waves in the air or an image on a video display. Not only that, but in the end the human brain translates and stores a copy of the work internally. The ears transform the work into frequency data, and the eyes make a copy on the retina, and then further transform it into internally meaningful thoughts and concepts. To make personal copies illegal would require the EULA From Hell(TM) to cover all the "allowed" paths that the media could enter the human brain, and in what form the copies could reside in the brain just so that someone could listen to a CD. At that point, it's quite likey that a judge with some common sense would invalidate EULAs in general. When I say EULA, I mean the legal "contract" that one "agrees" to by taking the plastic off a CD or software package or by clicking a button when installing software. Just see how much media the cartels can sell when each and every one of their customers must be over 18 and sign a legally binding contract just to purchase a CD.
The argument can be reduced to a simple one about books. To read a book, the reader must make a temporary copy of the work on their retinas, and then translate the words into internally meaningful thoughts which most likely will remain in the brain for some time. If fair use covers the human sensory system, why should it not extend to the devices the human sensory system uses to view the work? After all, the eyes and ears are merely tools the brain uses to interpret the world, and computers and CD and DVD players are merely the tools that the eyes and ears use to interpret digital media. If the human sensory system is chosen as the arbitrary limit for fair use, it just pushes the argument back a few years until genetic modification and implants allow the human sensory system to interpret and copy digital media directly. Making copies of information is a natural process, and trying to artifically regulate it to the point of authoritarian social control will simply fail.
I agree with the Attorney General that playing around with the definition of distribution is not helpful to anyone, either victims of RIAA cases or copyright owners. Instead, the courts or Congress needs to make a clear distinction between what is allowed in terms of copying and modifying works in order to view or listen to them, versus simply distributing copies.
Most basically, the problem is that CDs, DVDs, MP3s, and any other digital media format require the modification of the work before it is human usable. Any data stored on optical media is encoded as a series of error correcting codes that must be copied from the optical media into a decoding device and modified to retreive the original bit stream which must then be converted into aural or visual works. MP3s and DVDs are further encoded with compression algorithms so that the recovered bitstream must be further copied and modified before the entire work is in human usable format.
The problem as I see it is that copyright law provides for the owner of a copy of a work to use a machine to decode a work to use it, but does not clarify exactly what rights the owner has in transforming the work with a device in order to use it. For instance, CDs can be played by a common CD player or a computer with a CD drive, but the computer can just as easily convert the CD to an MP3 file before playing it. What are the limits on the owner's right to use a machine to decode their copy of the work? For instance, it is apparently perfectly legal for CD players to read ahead several seconds or even minutes and store a copy of the CD data in memory so that CD player skips will not impact playback. In this case, the owner seems to have the right to make a copy of the work for personal use, but where does this right come from? If the right comes from the fair use right to make a backup copy of a work, then is it legal that the backup is the work being played, and not the original CD? If it's legal, then it should clearly follow that creating an MP3 file from a CD is simply the same case, that it is a backup that can be used apart from the original work. I, and many other people, believe that this ability to translate or copy a work into a separate device for convenience should be a fundamental fair use right. The problem is that no law or court (that I'm aware of) has addressed this issue directly.
All of the cases that I have seen stem from people who are using a Fast Track sharing program such as Kazaa, Imesh, Gnutella, LimeWire, etc., having a shared files folder with copyrighted songs in it, even if the song files were obtained legally. So even making sure to pay for all of your downloads wouldn't protect you from a lawsuit. The only way I know to avoid the present litigation wave is to avoid having shared files of copyrighted songs.
I think that cinches it. If you don't want to get harassed by the RIAA, don't let other people download their music from your computer. That's been the common sense answer for quite some time, but it's interesting that he says all the cases have stemmed directly from sharing songs, not downloading them.
What I find more interesting is that the lawyers don't believe that buying a CD gives one the fair use right to rip it to MP3s for playing on another device. That, to most slashdotters, is a fundamental fair use right, but perhaps to the law it doesn't technically exist. I suppose it all comes down to whether EULAs are valid contracts or not. If not, then obviously everyone has the fair use right to copy the CD for their personal use because the data *has* to be copied into hardware registers, modified (especially during error correction), and then converted to analog audio at some point. If EULAs are valid, then I guess you can't buy used CDs because the imaginary EULA that comes with every new CD probably doesn't "allow" that. We definitely need a strong anti-EULA case to go through the courts, preferably one like this where it's blatantly obvious that the necessity of a EULA to play a CD or DVD is an undue burdon and against fair use rights.
Yes, this is legal. The reason it is legal is that they are asking you to do it. You have been authorized to do it.
AFAIK, it's legal because they're running a public (it's connected to the Internet) web server that doesn't return 403 Forbidden to unauthenticated requests. As long as only well formed HTTP messages are sent to the server, it's perfectly legal. Trying to exploit buffer overflows, DoSing it, or attempting to circumvent its authentication methods may be illegal depending on the laws in your country.
Sure, he deleted his cookies when he was done (I do too) but he never removed all his cache files which could be used to track you. Yes, this will increase the time it takes for a page to load but since apparently everyone but me uses a high-speed connection, waiting that extra half second doesn't seem to be that much of a hassle.
Couldn't the cahce and cookies just be located on a temporary encrypted filesystem? Just use your favorite harddisk/folder encryption utility, generate a cryptographically secure random key for each browsing session, mount the encrypted drive, format it, and use it for the browser cache. There's no reason to limit performance when cryptography can render the cache unrecoverable. There's no point in hiding the fact that you're using Tor by not leaving encrypted cache data on the disk, since anyone watching the network already knows that Tor is being used.
At the source of every error which is blamed on the computer you will find at least two human errors, including the error of blaming it on the computer.
Cosmic rays aren't human errors. I suppose you could claim that humans should build perfect computers that don't absorb random radiation, but at some point you just have to do the statistics and play the odds. The universe is chaotic, at some point it's just Murphy's fault.
Too bad I already posted. The parent is not a troll; better inherant security does in fact reduce or eliminate the need for antivirus and other "protective" software. Look at it this way: If viruses are prevented from infecting executable files by filesystem or policy security (like "Don't allow writing to existing executable files", which seems pretty reasonable) and personal data is protected by limited access to it until the user specifically grants access, then most malware is totally useless. Limit network connectivity to trusted applications, and zombie machines become useless.
One problem, of course, is that deciding which software to trust is a hard problem. The operating system has to be the initial root of any trust relationship. Adding things like email, document editors, and any other software requires the operating system to know what security should be applied to these applications. Things like Google Desktop and any other useful utility require broad permissions to access data, and are potentially difficult to secure. How do you specify that, say, Google Desktop is trustworthy but Gator/Claria isn't? To really secure personal data, you almost need an operating system that directly classifies data and protects access to it not only to applications but tracks the data through each application and prevents its use from being mixed with other classifications. For instance, personal credit or financial information should be classified such that it is only mixed with unclassified information (like the Internet, email, or any other way out of the computer) under controlled conditions that the user is made directly aware of by the OS. Otherwise, it's easy for rogue applications to spoof trusted applications to gain access to personal data and misuse it.
My basic point is that for a truly secure operating system, a very comprehensive model of all the data and applications that will use the OS is necessary to define the security policy. Microsoft is probably not able to create such a system simply due to the complexity versus ease of use, not to mention the monopoly issues. For instance, if Microsoft starts protecting personal data by not letting it be opened by untrusted applications, the Internet at large will cry out that they are abusing their power, despite the fact that such a step is necessary for true security. The problem is that Microsoft has wedged itself into complete gatekeeper of commodity PCs, and there is very little chance of a standard method for securely managing data and applications emerging on its own in the free market that works with the existing monoculture. Microsoft can neither be the initiator or the adoptor, and so general computer security suffers. I don't really see any solution until a lot of backward compatibility is dropped and a lot of work is done on a secure data model that isn't too difficult to use for normal people.
For example: I go to install Windows from scratch. On the installation screen, i get a list of components...
r entVersion\Setup\Oc Manager\Subcomponents. We use this to not install games, MSN, and a few other odds and ends. It probably wouldn't be hard at all to just plug a GUI in front of the basic Windows installer (or before components are installed at least) that modifies the installer file. At the very least you can customize the installation CD to get rid of some garbage.
This already exists in the unattended install (SIF) files in the [Components] section, you just have to know which components to turn off. You can find a list of all the components in the registry at HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\Cur
Only the rich and powerful can enjoy true anonymity.
I wonder if putting on a ski mask and robbing a bank is also equivalent to not telling all your friends (and significant other) when you hire a prostitute or have an affair? Most rich people do that at one time or another and try to keep it secret. Same with financial assets and business deals. Heaven forbid the government monitor confidential business communications!