Well the topic of the article is intangible property rights, which in this case belong to the RIAA (under the current statutes). And as Sen. Hatch saw it (and as several congressmen in the Golden State saw it), the media giants should be exempt from criminal punishment for destroying the computers of people who steal music or movies. In the same vein, the guy was using his parking booth to sell bootlegs....maybe we should blow up the parking lot to keep him from selling bootlegs there. OR, if you break his legs, he's less likely to stand out there and sell CD's. So many solutions.....so little legality.....
Now let's apply your reasoning that it's okay to do "whatever it takes to protect your property". In this case, the "property right" belongs to the RIAA. It was given to them by Congress, and as originally envisioned it would belong to the rest of us someday, except that congressional pockets have been filled and that "future property right" we were going to end up with...hasn't materialized yet.
So for today, those songs on that kid's computer or on the bootleggers table, belong to the RIAA. When you burn a copy of that song, you're stealing the profits they would have made from you if you had bought the disc that only they are allowed to sell you, according to the law.
So, Mr. Hatch.....should the RIAA be allowed to kill people who download music or do "whatever it takes to protect your property"?
While they may characterize it as "in your face" copyright enforcement, this is nothing more than corporate thuggery. It wouldn't surprise me in the least if they WERE claiming that they were police and that they had a right under law to seize and/or destroy all the "bootlegs" they can squeeze out of whoever they are harassing.
The most aggregious part of this story is the people they are targeting: low-income individuals (read: people who can't afford an attorney to sue the RIAA for the series of torts they are committing). They are also likely targeting non-English-speaking minorities (who already have trouble getting legal representation in this country anyway). They are robbing these people while threatening to put them in jail (which is plain old vanilla extortion (using the threat of criminal prosecution to settle a civil dispute)). The RIAA's thinking "what bootlegger is going to go to the cops and report that we robbed him?" I guess, under this same reasoning, it should be okay to rob drug dealers (who're they going to report the stolen narcotics to)?
Just when I think I'm growing out of my civil libertarian phase, something like this happens. It's behavior like this that makes me really think it's past time to revoke all those nice little copyright interests they've been granted over the years. We need to raise the issue of "intellectual property right reform" in the presidential and congressional races, and see if there's a politician out there who's not eagerly bending over the table for the media giants.
Doesn't have to be criminal fraud. They can be sued for civil fraud by parties damaged by their misrepresentations (read: license holders) of existing material facts (read: the "rights" they claim to have and which they grant the license for). Nobody needs to perjure themselves for a civil fraud case. And unlike a shareholder derivative lawsuit, you don't have to deal with the surrounding securities issue. It's as simple as somebody selling you a bridge they knew they didn't own.
But if you bought a license based on their "representations", you can bypass the whole shareholder lawsuit issue and go directly after the personal assets of McBride and Boies. They might try to hide behind the "corporate shield", but fraud can pierce the corporate veil. On top of which, their actions were clearly outside the scope of just describing the features of their product (i.e. interpreting federal copyright law and the benefits imputed into their license products). Even if SCO went under in bankruptcy, to fully escape both McBride and Boies would have to declare bankruptcy as well.
I hate responding to my own post, but I can't help but think........ I WISH I HAD BOUGHT A LICENSE!! Licensees have been harmed by the knowing and willful deceptions of SCO and have a claim for damages.....PUNITIVE DAMAGES!!!
Moreover, considering how much Darl has been running at the mouth, there's an argument to be made that both he and Boies should be held individually liable for misrepresenting the scope of the rights SCO can grant in a license. And they've both got bank (at least, so long as they sell finish selling off all their shares before SCO tanks)!!!!
So if they knew, or should have known, that their rights were not as expansive as they represented, and they knowingly misrepresented the scale of those rights to the persons they offered licenses, and those persons bought those licenses based on those misrepresentations.....sounds like a big fat old prima facie fraud case to me.
Think of what the introduction of the automobile has done for bug populations. I'll bet that WAY more than 22,000 bugs have eaten it on the windshields of cars in the past 20 years. Now think of the environmental impact this must have had (by way of affecting the food source of larger animals).
Considering how all these things are supposed to trickle up the food chain, it's amazing that with this enormous loss of birds and bugs, we aren't all extinct!!!
BTW, my personal, deepest desire, is that some of those flying rats who have crapped on my car over the years catch a windmill blade as a sort of divine karma......is that wrong?
Even if the court orders that IBM not disclose the allegedly infringing code, IBM could always release a new set of "suggested fixes" to the Linux kernel.
Then it's just a matter of whether it's worth it to keep fighting for the right to use the existing code and the scope of SCO's rights in anything. But on a going-forward basis, at least Linux can become SCO-free.
Just because there hasn't been a Mac OS X virus YET doesn't mean that there WON'T be one. The functional part of the sentence (read it again) is that "Macs CAN [expressing potential] get viruses". Read my original posting above and think about it: You bought ENHANCED SECURITY, not COMPLETE SECURITY (currently not available on any market). True: the Mac OS is much more security conscious than Windows, but that doesn't mean that it doesn't have its own vulnerabilities. Mac Fan(atic)s and the assorted zealots need to recognize that their systems may still be vulnerable and that while they can probably sleep easier at night than Windows users, they shouldn't buy into the marketing hype of the Mac "image" and get complacent about OS security. Luckily for all of you, there are folks out there finding the Mac OS vulnerabilities and making sure that they are secured, so that you can have as little in common with Windows users as possible.
The author of the rebuttal article completely missed the point (or just wanted an excuse to make another Mac v. Windows comparison).
Alright, just so I don't get dubbed Troll by any Mac Fan(atic)s out there - THIS IS NOT A DEFENSE OF THE WINDOWS OPERATING SYSTEM OR A COMPARISON BETWEEN THE MAC OS AND WINDOWS. If you read Lance's original article, it's not saying "Windows rule, Macs drool" on the basis of the security flaw he mentions. It's about something bigger, which is an underlying issue in the Mac community: fixation on image.
No serious, knowledgeable Mac user is going to sit down and tell you that "their" OS is descended from heaven, perfect and secure in every facet. Albeit, it's a LOT better than Windows, but it's got a couple issues of its own. But I know a lot of guys who bought Macs because "My old computer got a virus, and a guy told me Macs don't get viruses" or "I don't know anything about computers, but I want something that can't break." These guys need to read Lance's article because Macs CAN get viruses and do have the occasional security holes (though still nothing like Windows, but again THIS IS NOT A COMPARISON).
For the educated Mac user, Lance's article was "much ado about nothing." But there is a faction in the Mac community which claims that they know their OS is not invulnerable, but any criticism or discussion of a flaw results in personal attacks against the original author, their OS, their family, friends and pets, followed by an extensive feature-by-feature OS comparison. For these people, the security of the Mac OS has not been attacked; instead, their worth as individuals has been smeared (by means of their personal investment of self-worth in the Mac "image").
Long story short - I think the rebuttal was over the top and completely missed the point. But it nicely drew attention to a real problem: the Mac community needs to do something about the association of the Mac "image" with the identities of Mac users.
In fairness to the author, I can't tell you how many times I've seen Mac users gloat whenever a Windows vulnerability is discovered. Seems as though turnabout (however stupid) is fair play. It's interesting how touchy the Mac community is about an article on a Mac vulnerability which, though true and though only demonstrating that the Mac OS is not flawless, has the "tone" that the two operating systems might even be comparable.
I can't help but think of Neal Stephenson's essay on operating systems in "In the Beginning was the Command Line." It seems to me that, for some people, a Mac is more than a personal computer and an operating system; it's an image, an identity. And when someone is critical of a feature or failure of the Mac, some people take that as an attack on their personal "image" or "identity".
All told, anybody who really counts knows that no operating system is invulnerable, no operating system is bug-free, and when making a comparison, you just try to match your needs against the capabilities of the system.
To draw on Neal Stephenson's car analogy from "In the Beginning Was the Command Line", is Mac OS X now the marriage of a sports car and a tank, is it is just a sports car which has the cockpit of a tank, or is it a tank with the cockpit of a sports car?
It's important to note that he explicitly stated in the article that he's not defending Windows by any stretch of the imagination (and who can blame him). The comparison is not that as a result of flaws in the Mac OS, Windows is the superior operating system. He is simply pointing out to Mac Fan(atic)s that their OS does not exist upon an untouchable pedestal of perfection.
In reality, I doubt there are many serious Mac users who ACTUALLY BELIEVE that the Mac OS is infallible. Now, someone who just bought a Mac because "Macs are cool, and totally safe and stuff" might have just gotten the dose of reality he sought to dispense. As for the rest of us, who had no such pretensions: big whoop. Warts and all, I'll agree that the Mac OS is superior to Windows, but would like to believe I know too much to have a false sense of security.
Let's see: threatening global commercial powers with ruin unless they succumb to his outrageous demands, central headquarters filled with an army of evil bodyguards and assorted henchmen......Darl's only a monocle and kitty cat away from true super villainy. Wonder where he's hiding the huge frickin laser? (hmmmmm)
I see Darl McBride is doing his best to quickly rising up the unpopularity ranks. Right now he's somewhere between Saddam Hussein, Osama bin Laden, and Satan.
In other news, it's sad how the open-source community has gone from being open-minded, creative, progressive innovators to drug-peddling terrorists since SCO decided to assert their intellectual property rights. Poor Darl....how does he sleep at night, knowing all those open-sourcers are out there, thirsting for his blood? (of course, maybe all the morphine and anti-psychotic drugs help)
"I tell you what, I'll give you the Linux community getting mad at us vs. shareholder value. That was the trade off. They were absolutely right, the Linux community got mad and we were right, shareholder value went up."
The problem with good ol Darl is that he confuses stock price with VALUE. SCO isn't any better off today VALUE-wise than it was two years ago. The price of their stock has inflated from $1 to $14 a share not because their IP suddenly became value-able (or because investors suddenly realized their IP was valuable as a result of their claims). SCO is selling lottery tickets now, hoping that if they can win over IBM (or even just hit an enormous settlement), the judgement or settlement will BRING value to SCO. But whether or not SCO can BRING value to itself as a result of this litigation depends on the strength of their legal claims, which from what I've seen are miserable. David Boies would be better off dumping their junk stock and going back to contesting "hanging chads." The theory that you can't assign or license copyrights (a la GPL) because the copyright law does not explicitly provide for it is one of the worst legal theories I've ever heard. I would love to see some state attorney generals start pursuing SCO for consumer fraud, based on its trumped up allegations that it "owns" Linux and users should pay them money for the privilege of using it. It's past time that the Department of Justice steps in and protects consumers from SCO's deceptive trade practices.
Darl's predictable reply: "Now the U.S. government is conspiring against us, because IBM is using mind control over the President. I've seen the satellites....you have to wear my special aluminum foil hat, but you too can see them (SCO official aluminum hats retail price: $799.00 per user). IBM bombed Iraq, and all those doped-up Linux users are selling crack to schoolchildren. Where are my shoes?"
I wonder if, when this is all over and SCO bites the dust, if they'll make some sort of corporate sale to Charmin. I'd buy at least one roll of the double-ply "SCO licensing-agreement" pattern (and maybe even a roll of the "SCO stock certificate" pattern). An even better idea: Darl McBride posing for a mugshot!!!
Hopefully, with the election less than a year away, David Boies will be getting really busy soon trying to sell his "contested-recount-prepaid-legal services" plan to the candidates
and find somebody else's time to waste. You'd think with all his gum-flapping last time, he'd be in the forefront of the fight against electronic voting (let's be honest: the hanging-chad is big business for him).
The solution is not "buying" our influence in the Capitol. There is no way that the open source/public domain movement will be able to match the RIAA or MPAA dollar for dollar. What we need is to get the college students who use peer-to-peer filesharing to register to vote and get out there to influence electing their local representatives. We need to get the public actively involved and make them feel like they have a stake in how their rights are diminishing in the shadow of legislation like the DMCA. We may not be able to offer a candidate a $50,000.00 check for his campaign, but we can give him a list of the 50,000 citizens who will vote for "the other guy" unless we see some reform in IP law.
It's tough to do, but the atmosphere is almost perfect to organize against these groups. The RIAA and the MPAA are getting plenty of bad press and are definitely not making friends among American youth. If there were ever a time to "Rock the Vote", that time is now!
The article doesn't say HANDWRITING is on its way out. It just says that the archaic "cursive" form is suffering because younger generations are discovering what their curmudgeony parents and teachers have refused to accept: that human beings today are more likely to spend their day in front of a computer screen than in front of a legal pad.
Cursive can become a "nearly-lost" artform, like its overly-ornate cousin: calligraphy. The world will still turn, the stars will hold their place in the sky, and dogs and cats will still express their differences openly as they ever have. It just means that fewer and fewer people will have the ability to torture others with horrible penmenship in "cursive" form (trying to read handwritten notes from my boss have definitely made my vocabulary "cursive").
Oh, and as to the question of whether a letter is more beautiful because it is handwritten over typed (thereby ignoring the CONTENT of the letter itself), are we not emphasizing to the adults of tomorrow that FORM is more important than SUBSTANCE?
I don't know if a boycott like that would work. I know that I used to buy CD's, but since the RIAA has gone after P2P, I won't buy CD's on principle. I have enough music for now and I own a radio. If they think P2P is biting into their sales, wait until they see what their bad PR does for them.
Maybe a decision by the high courts of Norway will point the way out of our current copyright monopoly nightmare, though things probably won't improve in the U.S. until Congress stops whoring itself to mass media ("Oh, you need another 100 year extension on that copyright. Just send me a copy of the bill you want (gratuities accepted and appreciated)").
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Well the topic of the article is intangible property rights, which in this case belong to the RIAA (under the current statutes). And as Sen. Hatch saw it (and as several congressmen in the Golden State saw it), the media giants should be exempt from criminal punishment for destroying the computers of people who steal music or movies. In the same vein, the guy was using his parking booth to sell bootlegs....maybe we should blow up the parking lot to keep him from selling bootlegs there. OR, if you break his legs, he's less likely to stand out there and sell CD's. So many solutions.....so little legality.....
So for today, those songs on that kid's computer or on the bootleggers table, belong to the RIAA. When you burn a copy of that song, you're stealing the profits they would have made from you if you had bought the disc that only they are allowed to sell you, according to the law.
So, Mr. Hatch.....should the RIAA be allowed to kill people who download music or do "whatever it takes to protect your property"?
The most aggregious part of this story is the people they are targeting: low-income individuals (read: people who can't afford an attorney to sue the RIAA for the series of torts they are committing). They are also likely targeting non-English-speaking minorities (who already have trouble getting legal representation in this country anyway). They are robbing these people while threatening to put them in jail (which is plain old vanilla extortion (using the threat of criminal prosecution to settle a civil dispute)). The RIAA's thinking "what bootlegger is going to go to the cops and report that we robbed him?" I guess, under this same reasoning, it should be okay to rob drug dealers (who're they going to report the stolen narcotics to)?
Just when I think I'm growing out of my civil libertarian phase, something like this happens. It's behavior like this that makes me really think it's past time to revoke all those nice little copyright interests they've been granted over the years. We need to raise the issue of "intellectual property right reform" in the presidential and congressional races, and see if there's a politician out there who's not eagerly bending over the table for the media giants.
Doesn't have to be criminal fraud. They can be sued for civil fraud by parties damaged by their misrepresentations (read: license holders) of existing material facts (read: the "rights" they claim to have and which they grant the license for). Nobody needs to perjure themselves for a civil fraud case. And unlike a shareholder derivative lawsuit, you don't have to deal with the surrounding securities issue. It's as simple as somebody selling you a bridge they knew they didn't own.
That's why you name Darl and some of the other officers as co-Defendants....
But if you bought a license based on their "representations", you can bypass the whole shareholder lawsuit issue and go directly after the personal assets of McBride and Boies. They might try to hide behind the "corporate shield", but fraud can pierce the corporate veil. On top of which, their actions were clearly outside the scope of just describing the features of their product (i.e. interpreting federal copyright law and the benefits imputed into their license products). Even if SCO went under in bankruptcy, to fully escape both McBride and Boies would have to declare bankruptcy as well.
Moreover, considering how much Darl has been running at the mouth, there's an argument to be made that both he and Boies should be held individually liable for misrepresenting the scope of the rights SCO can grant in a license. And they've both got bank (at least, so long as they sell finish selling off all their shares before SCO tanks)!!!!
So if they knew, or should have known, that their rights were not as expansive as they represented, and they knowingly misrepresented the scale of those rights to the persons they offered licenses, and those persons bought those licenses based on those misrepresentations.....sounds like a big fat old prima facie fraud case to me.
Considering how all these things are supposed to trickle up the food chain, it's amazing that with this enormous loss of birds and bugs, we aren't all extinct!!!
BTW, my personal, deepest desire, is that some of those flying rats who have crapped on my car over the years catch a windmill blade as a sort of divine karma......is that wrong?
Then it's just a matter of whether it's worth it to keep fighting for the right to use the existing code and the scope of SCO's rights in anything. But on a going-forward basis, at least Linux can become SCO-free.
Just because there hasn't been a Mac OS X virus YET doesn't mean that there WON'T be one. The functional part of the sentence (read it again) is that "Macs CAN [expressing potential] get viruses". Read my original posting above and think about it: You bought ENHANCED SECURITY, not COMPLETE SECURITY (currently not available on any market). True: the Mac OS is much more security conscious than Windows, but that doesn't mean that it doesn't have its own vulnerabilities. Mac Fan(atic)s and the assorted zealots need to recognize that their systems may still be vulnerable and that while they can probably sleep easier at night than Windows users, they shouldn't buy into the marketing hype of the Mac "image" and get complacent about OS security. Luckily for all of you, there are folks out there finding the Mac OS vulnerabilities and making sure that they are secured, so that you can have as little in common with Windows users as possible.
Alright, just so I don't get dubbed Troll by any Mac Fan(atic)s out there - THIS IS NOT A DEFENSE OF THE WINDOWS OPERATING SYSTEM OR A COMPARISON BETWEEN THE MAC OS AND WINDOWS. If you read Lance's original article, it's not saying "Windows rule, Macs drool" on the basis of the security flaw he mentions. It's about something bigger, which is an underlying issue in the Mac community: fixation on image.
No serious, knowledgeable Mac user is going to sit down and tell you that "their" OS is descended from heaven, perfect and secure in every facet. Albeit, it's a LOT better than Windows, but it's got a couple issues of its own. But I know a lot of guys who bought Macs because "My old computer got a virus, and a guy told me Macs don't get viruses" or "I don't know anything about computers, but I want something that can't break." These guys need to read Lance's article because Macs CAN get viruses and do have the occasional security holes (though still nothing like Windows, but again THIS IS NOT A COMPARISON).
For the educated Mac user, Lance's article was "much ado about nothing." But there is a faction in the Mac community which claims that they know their OS is not invulnerable, but any criticism or discussion of a flaw results in personal attacks against the original author, their OS, their family, friends and pets, followed by an extensive feature-by-feature OS comparison. For these people, the security of the Mac OS has not been attacked; instead, their worth as individuals has been smeared (by means of their personal investment of self-worth in the Mac "image").
Long story short - I think the rebuttal was over the top and completely missed the point. But it nicely drew attention to a real problem: the Mac community needs to do something about the association of the Mac "image" with the identities of Mac users.
Sadly, for most of the other bandwagons I'm on, I doubt that they ever WILL become "cool".
I can't help but think of Neal Stephenson's essay on operating systems in "In the Beginning was the Command Line." It seems to me that, for some people, a Mac is more than a personal computer and an operating system; it's an image, an identity. And when someone is critical of a feature or failure of the Mac, some people take that as an attack on their personal "image" or "identity".
All told, anybody who really counts knows that no operating system is invulnerable, no operating system is bug-free, and when making a comparison, you just try to match your needs against the capabilities of the system.
Me? I'll just take the tank, thank you very much.
In reality, I doubt there are many serious Mac users who ACTUALLY BELIEVE that the Mac OS is infallible. Now, someone who just bought a Mac because "Macs are cool, and totally safe and stuff" might have just gotten the dose of reality he sought to dispense. As for the rest of us, who had no such pretensions: big whoop. Warts and all, I'll agree that the Mac OS is superior to Windows, but would like to believe I know too much to have a false sense of security.
Let's see: threatening global commercial powers with ruin unless they succumb to his outrageous demands, central headquarters filled with an army of evil bodyguards and assorted henchmen......Darl's only a monocle and kitty cat away from true super villainy. Wonder where he's hiding the huge frickin laser? (hmmmmm)
In other news, it's sad how the open-source community has gone from being open-minded, creative, progressive innovators to drug-peddling terrorists since SCO decided to assert their intellectual property rights. Poor Darl....how does he sleep at night, knowing all those open-sourcers are out there, thirsting for his blood? (of course, maybe all the morphine and anti-psychotic drugs help)
"I tell you what, I'll give you the Linux community getting mad at us vs. shareholder value. That was the trade off. They were absolutely right, the Linux community got mad and we were right, shareholder value went up."
The problem with good ol Darl is that he confuses stock price with VALUE. SCO isn't any better off today VALUE-wise than it was two years ago. The price of their stock has inflated from $1 to $14 a share not because their IP suddenly became value-able (or because investors suddenly realized their IP was valuable as a result of their claims). SCO is selling lottery tickets now, hoping that if they can win over IBM (or even just hit an enormous settlement), the judgement or settlement will BRING value to SCO. But whether or not SCO can BRING value to itself as a result of this litigation depends on the strength of their legal claims, which from what I've seen are miserable. David Boies would be better off dumping their junk stock and going back to contesting "hanging chads." The theory that you can't assign or license copyrights (a la GPL) because the copyright law does not explicitly provide for it is one of the worst legal theories I've ever heard. I would love to see some state attorney generals start pursuing SCO for consumer fraud, based on its trumped up allegations that it "owns" Linux and users should pay them money for the privilege of using it. It's past time that the Department of Justice steps in and protects consumers from SCO's deceptive trade practices.
Darl's predictable reply: "Now the U.S. government is conspiring against us, because IBM is using mind control over the President. I've seen the satellites....you have to wear my special aluminum foil hat, but you too can see them (SCO official aluminum hats retail price: $799.00 per user). IBM bombed Iraq, and all those doped-up Linux users are selling crack to schoolchildren. Where are my shoes?"
I wonder if, when this is all over and SCO bites the dust, if they'll make some sort of corporate sale to Charmin. I'd buy at least one roll of the double-ply "SCO licensing-agreement" pattern (and maybe even a roll of the "SCO stock certificate" pattern). An even better idea: Darl McBride posing for a mugshot!!!
Hopefully, with the election less than a year away, David Boies will be getting really busy soon trying to sell his "contested-recount-prepaid-legal services" plan to the candidates and find somebody else's time to waste. You'd think with all his gum-flapping last time, he'd be in the forefront of the fight against electronic voting (let's be honest: the hanging-chad is big business for him).
It's tough to do, but the atmosphere is almost perfect to organize against these groups. The RIAA and the MPAA are getting plenty of bad press and are definitely not making friends among American youth. If there were ever a time to "Rock the Vote", that time is now!
Cursive can become a "nearly-lost" artform, like its overly-ornate cousin: calligraphy. The world will still turn, the stars will hold their place in the sky, and dogs and cats will still express their differences openly as they ever have. It just means that fewer and fewer people will have the ability to torture others with horrible penmenship in "cursive" form (trying to read handwritten notes from my boss have definitely made my vocabulary "cursive").
Oh, and as to the question of whether a letter is more beautiful because it is handwritten over typed (thereby ignoring the CONTENT of the letter itself), are we not emphasizing to the adults of tomorrow that FORM is more important than SUBSTANCE?
I don't know if a boycott like that would work. I know that I used to buy CD's, but since the RIAA has gone after P2P, I won't buy CD's on principle. I have enough music for now and I own a radio. If they think P2P is biting into their sales, wait until they see what their bad PR does for them.
Maybe a decision by the high courts of Norway will point the way out of our current copyright monopoly nightmare, though things probably won't improve in the U.S. until Congress stops whoring itself to mass media ("Oh, you need another 100 year extension on that copyright. Just send me a copy of the bill you want (gratuities accepted and appreciated)").