True. But at least paper is universally comprehensible. If everybody understands it, then everybody also knows exactly how it can be rigged, and can take appropriate precautions.
An electronic voting machine is not universally comprehensible. Even if the blueprints, schematics and software listings are published -- which would be the absolute minimum that anyone would expect in a democracy; the integrity of the democratic process is far more important than anyone's so-called "intellectual property" -- only a minority will be able to make sense of them (maybe even fewer people than you'd have to buy off to rig an election conducted using paper). And then there's still the problem of how to make sure the machine does actually match the published specification?
The simpler the system, the fewer potential failure modes. When one of the potential failure modes is the breakdown of democracy, you want to be sure that it isn't so likely.
This is a good start, but I would prefer to see the problem tackled from the other end. That is, I would like to see it made law that manufacturers must release specifications that would enable a competent programmer to create a driver for any hardware device they manufacture, if they want to be allowed to sell it at all. They shouldn't necessarily have to include a printed copy in the box if it would adversely affect the cost, but they should be obliged to supply it gratis to anyone who can prove that they own the hardware. Then you get it both ways. The purists get Free and Open Source drivers, and the "I don't care as long as it works" brigade (I bet they'd start caring pretty bloody quick, if the manufacturer suddenly stopped supporting the product with even closed binary-only drivers) get something that works.
And before someone whinges that this will lead to copying, allow me to say a big fat "screw you!" If what you make can be copied so easily and cheaply, then it's not so special. In a genuinely free market, it's the buyer who decides how much something is worth.
I believe this might even actually be the law in some parts of Europe. If so, perhaps they need to start enforcing it.
Well, I block all advertisements on general principle, and I am very aggressive about it. I don't go on the Internet without my faithful Squid proxy server, and I don't watch television without the aid of Sky Plus.
And if an advert slips through, I make a resolution never, ever to buy that product. I'm fussy what I do with my hard-earned, and I don't want any part of it spent on thrusting tacky images in people's faces instead of making a better product.
Oh, I'm not saying energy conservation measures are worthless; far from it. Saving energy is all well and good. But by themselves, it will never be enough; however much energy we have, we will always need more. We do need an additional energy source capable of completely replacing fossil fuels, though, and soon. Probably in the short term, that's going to have to be nuclear fission; we must hope that improvements will be made in various types of weather-power, more efficient ways to produce biomass or maybe even nuclear fusion which will eventually be able to replace fission.
But the problem is that there's a limit to how far you can take energy efficiency. It's like short-cuts; you might be able to shave a whole hour off a journey by taking a different route, and there might even be another short-cut that knocks off another ten minutes, but eventually you're going to be taking the most direct route possible and there is no quicker way to get there. Well, at some point you will have everything as efficient as it possibly can get -- then, there's no more saving to be had. For instance, if you replace a gravity-fed hot water system with fully-pumped, you increase efficiency. If you improve your home's insulation, so you aren't heating outdoors, you increase efficiency. If you replace the old permanent-pilot boiler with one using electronic ignition, you increase efficiency, and if it's a condensing boiler, you increase efficiency even more. If you replace the boiler and hot water cylinder with a condensing combination boiler, and you have perfect insulation, you now have the most efficient hot water and heating system that exists: every joule of potential energy that you can liberate from the gas is ending up in your hot water or your radiators.
Even if you can get the per-capita energy requirement as low as possible (and the trend over time is generally upward, with infrequent downward spikes as energy-saving technologies are invented), the population is still growing. Energy conservation is very much a game of diminishing returns.
What you really want is a reaction which progresses fully, leaving only non-radioactive elements. After all, if the waste product is radioactive, that means it's still got potential energy in it, has it not?
By increasing the engine kilowattage, you might potentially have driven the feedback control system outside of the designed linear region and into a state which potentially could not be corrected. Any braking system is only good up to a certain engine kW -- it can only convert kinetic energy to heat at a certain rate. And if the engine is supplying KE faster than (this rate plus losses due to friction), then the brakes will not be able to bring the car to a halt, even at 100% duty.
If I own a telephone which I bought and paid for with my own money, and someone sends a message over-the-air that my telephone receives, and the effect of that message is that my phone that I own is somehow damaged, then whoever sent that message is guilty of criminal damage. They broke my property. That is a matter for the police.
Unfortunately, I won't be able to dial 999 because my phone is broken.....
But you have no legal standing to enforce GPL no matter how many lawyers you throw at it.
Because noone gave the right to GPL licensers to restrict the usage of non-copyrighted material.
GPL-licenced material is copyrighted. Have a dekko at the files in/usr/local/src/ sometime.
And copyrighted material is already covered clearly by existing law with no consideration for GPL.
Of course there is consideration for the GPL. The Law of the Land forbids certain acts in the absence of specific written permission from the copyright holder (and also permits certain acts irrespective of what the copyright holder says). The GPL is exactly such permission.
Re:Case is: No loss of $ - case is a non-case - MO
on
GPL Lawsuit May Not Settle
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· Score: 2, Insightful
Except they weren't "giving it away". They were making it available subject to conditions, and Monsoon Multimedia defaulted on those conditions. Therefore, permission to copy the code was not granted and Monsoon Multimedia infringed copyright.
Just because you pay the bill for your land line in arrears, doesn't mean the telephone company can't take action if you go ringing people in India, Botswana and Malaysia and then decide not to pay for the calls! And taking a paper from the railway station newsagents and not using the honesty box is still shoplifting. The fact of the goods being offered before any obligation is fulfilled, in no way diminishes the obligation.
OK..... but suppose it was law that inventions, artistic works &c. had to be shared? Or suppose your arms race scenario ended with the "revealers" eventually and decisively beating the "concealers"?
Given that people will choose anything over being ignored, I'm suspecting that we'd still see plenty of good stuff. It would just be a lot more decentralised; instead of big corporations like Sony and Microsoft, there would be more local industry.
No, standards alone won't help in this case (unless they used CSS properly and indicated that smaller images were available specifically for mobile devices).
The problem with Vodafone's proxy method, is that there's no way for site owners to know in advance that their site is about to be (possibly) munged. At least if it sent a special browser ident, and the details of its munging processes were published, then savvy people could code properly against it.
Well, Flash is to all intents and purposes its own user agent. It can make HTTP requests and it can render HTML. Assuming it renders alike on all platforms, it's a quick-n-dirty (TM) way of getting everything to look "right" cross-platform.
The proper thing to do in this case would be for Vodafone's content-munging proxy to declare its own user-agent ident, so that it's at least obvious at the server end that pages might not be rendered exactly as sent -- and knowing exactly what alterations are being made wouldn't hurt web designers, either.
How so? Copyright law says there are certain circumstances under which certain acts in relation to copyright materials (here, making derivative works and distributing them generally) require permission from the copyright holders. The GPL is exactly that permission..... but it comes with conditions attached (you must make the Source Code available). Monsoon defaulted on the conditions under which permission for the acts they sought to perform would be granted, therefore permission was not granted. And therefore Monsoon are in violation of copyright law.
Most companies I've encountered that DRM their content claim that if they ever go out of business that they'll keep their activation servers going, transfer the activation to a third party, or better yet, release a key/patch to permanently "free" the content.
How about writing to your Elected Representative -- citing this as an example -- and asking that this sort of thing be made law? If and when the DRM-infested media company go out of business, they must make some provision for customers who have purchased from them to retain the material they have purchased; whether that be by permanently de-DRMing the content, passing on the activation functionality to another party (who then undertakes to maintain it for as long as copyright subsists), sending out DRM-free CDs, refunding all monies paid or some other method. Also that when DRM is used to protect a copyrighted work from unauthorised copying, some provision must be made for such a time as when copying becomes authorised (i.e. lapse of copyright, whether by expiry of time or enforced by a court order).
Beh. Easy one! You build a USB gadget that pretends as though it's a USB external sound card (shouldn't be too hard; there are Linux drivers for USB audio devices, so just work against that Source Code.) Except instead of playing any sounds, your gadget just stores the (decrypted and decompressed) data somewhere. Plug it in and tell your computer to use the new "USB external sound card" that the spiffy wizard just discovered. Play songs. Recover data later.
It ought even to be possible to recompress the decompressed data perfectly (i.e. so it decompresses to the same thing) if you have a very smart compression/decompression algorithm. But that's a bit secondary.
When you make a derivative work based on someone else's copyrighted work, you only hold copyright on the bits you changed / added: copyright on any recognisable portion of the original work still belongs to the copyright holder of the original work; whose consent is therefore required if you wish to distribute your derivative work. That's the Law of the Land, not part of the Licence. Without permission from the original copyright holder (and the GPL is one form of this permission), you can only distribute the changes you made -- and, under the doctrine of Fair Dealing, no more of the original work than is necessary to identify where properly to apply the changes to recreate your derivative work. For example, in a podcast of a radio show [where the presenter usually owns the copyright in their own contribution but not in any recorded music], you can play the opening bars of a song to enable someone who already has a copy of that song to know where to insert it..... assuming they have separately arranged any permission they may require for such an act, or that they do so in a way that in itself constitutes Fair Dealing.
If you altered something completely beyond recognition, you would of course have created a completely new work in its own right. But that's not what happened here.
Nobody I knew ever replaced records they already had with cassettes; when cassettes became the dominant medium, they just made cassettes from the records and listened to those instead. And they certainly didn't buy CDs of material they already owned on cassette. In fact, the only times I've ever known anyone buy a pre-recorded cassette have been when they were on holiday, didn't have access to a record or CD player, and wanted to listen to something right there and then. Other times, it was a case of buy it on disc and make your own cassette.
Also, cassette stuck around for a long time, because it had one advantage over records and CDs: it was home-recordable. (So was open-reel, but cassettes were more idiot-friendly.) That more than made up for the bollocks frequency response.
Microsoft publicly acknowledge that old Microsoft applications (e.g. Office 2000) represent a bigger threat to them than Open Source applications running on Microsoft OSes (e.g. OpenOffice.org). However, Open Source OSes represent a bigger threat to Microsoft than old Microsoft OSes (e.g. Windows 98).
Free Software asymptotically approaches perfection in a way that Caged Software never can. Only by having both the Source Code to the OS and the specifications of the hardware can anyone hope to write a driver. Windows drivers will always be buggy; truly i-tal Linux drivers can (theoretically be better than any Windows driver.
Microsoft know that one of their avenues of dirty tricks is bing closed down. But they don't know any other way of competing, so now they're trying a different dirty trick: make sure there are as few hardware drivers as possible for Linux.
Meanwhile, someone out there could come out with a FreeBSD derivative and guarantee the one thing Linux will never have, i.e. a stable kernel ABI. The hypothetical "StableBSD" would be able to run all the usual Open Source goodies, GNOME, KDE &c.; it could also have closed-source drivers that wouldn't need to be changed everytime the kernel was updated. Hey, I think I'll register that as a trademark. And it could have a leech for a mascot:)
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True. But at least paper is universally comprehensible. If everybody understands it, then everybody also knows exactly how it can be rigged, and can take appropriate precautions.
An electronic voting machine is not universally comprehensible. Even if the blueprints, schematics and software listings are published -- which would be the absolute minimum that anyone would expect in a democracy; the integrity of the democratic process is far more important than anyone's so-called "intellectual property" -- only a minority will be able to make sense of them (maybe even fewer people than you'd have to buy off to rig an election conducted using paper). And then there's still the problem of how to make sure the machine does actually match the published specification?
The simpler the system, the fewer potential failure modes. When one of the potential failure modes is the breakdown of democracy, you want to be sure that it isn't so likely.
The people who fitted oil lamps to horse-drawn carriages dealt with it. You can too.
This is a good start, but I would prefer to see the problem tackled from the other end. That is, I would like to see it made law that manufacturers must release specifications that would enable a competent programmer to create a driver for any hardware device they manufacture, if they want to be allowed to sell it at all. They shouldn't necessarily have to include a printed copy in the box if it would adversely affect the cost, but they should be obliged to supply it gratis to anyone who can prove that they own the hardware. Then you get it both ways. The purists get Free and Open Source drivers, and the "I don't care as long as it works" brigade (I bet they'd start caring pretty bloody quick, if the manufacturer suddenly stopped supporting the product with even closed binary-only drivers) get something that works.
And before someone whinges that this will lead to copying, allow me to say a big fat "screw you!" If what you make can be copied so easily and cheaply, then it's not so special. In a genuinely free market, it's the buyer who decides how much something is worth.
I believe this might even actually be the law in some parts of Europe. If so, perhaps they need to start enforcing it.
Well, I block all advertisements on general principle, and I am very aggressive about it. I don't go on the Internet without my faithful Squid proxy server, and I don't watch television without the aid of Sky Plus.
And if an advert slips through, I make a resolution never, ever to buy that product. I'm fussy what I do with my hard-earned, and I don't want any part of it spent on thrusting tacky images in people's faces instead of making a better product.
Because you have misconfigured your advertisement-blocker. Now, move back six spaces and miss a turn.
Oh, I'm not saying energy conservation measures are worthless; far from it. Saving energy is all well and good. But by themselves, it will never be enough; however much energy we have, we will always need more. We do need an additional energy source capable of completely replacing fossil fuels, though, and soon. Probably in the short term, that's going to have to be nuclear fission; we must hope that improvements will be made in various types of weather-power, more efficient ways to produce biomass or maybe even nuclear fusion which will eventually be able to replace fission.
But the problem is that there's a limit to how far you can take energy efficiency. It's like short-cuts; you might be able to shave a whole hour off a journey by taking a different route, and there might even be another short-cut that knocks off another ten minutes, but eventually you're going to be taking the most direct route possible and there is no quicker way to get there. Well, at some point you will have everything as efficient as it possibly can get -- then, there's no more saving to be had. For instance, if you replace a gravity-fed hot water system with fully-pumped, you increase efficiency. If you improve your home's insulation, so you aren't heating outdoors, you increase efficiency. If you replace the old permanent-pilot boiler with one using electronic ignition, you increase efficiency, and if it's a condensing boiler, you increase efficiency even more. If you replace the boiler and hot water cylinder with a condensing combination boiler, and you have perfect insulation, you now have the most efficient hot water and heating system that exists: every joule of potential energy that you can liberate from the gas is ending up in your hot water or your radiators.
Even if you can get the per-capita energy requirement as low as possible (and the trend over time is generally upward, with infrequent downward spikes as energy-saving technologies are invented), the population is still growing. Energy conservation is very much a game of diminishing returns.
What you really want is a reaction which progresses fully, leaving only non-radioactive elements. After all, if the waste product is radioactive, that means it's still got potential energy in it, has it not?
By increasing the engine kilowattage, you might potentially have driven the feedback control system outside of the designed linear region and into a state which potentially could not be corrected. Any braking system is only good up to a certain engine kW -- it can only convert kinetic energy to heat at a certain rate. And if the engine is supplying KE faster than (this rate plus losses due to friction), then the brakes will not be able to bring the car to a halt, even at 100% duty.
If I own a telephone which I bought and paid for with my own money, and someone sends a message over-the-air that my telephone receives, and the effect of that message is that my phone that I own is somehow damaged, then whoever sent that message is guilty of criminal damage. They broke my property. That is a matter for the police.
.....
Unfortunately, I won't be able to dial 999 because my phone is broken
Except they weren't "giving it away". They were making it available subject to conditions, and Monsoon Multimedia defaulted on those conditions. Therefore, permission to copy the code was not granted and Monsoon Multimedia infringed copyright.
Just because you pay the bill for your land line in arrears, doesn't mean the telephone company can't take action if you go ringing people in India, Botswana and Malaysia and then decide not to pay for the calls! And taking a paper from the railway station newsagents and not using the honesty box is still shoplifting. The fact of the goods being offered before any obligation is fulfilled, in no way diminishes the obligation.
OK ..... but suppose it was law that inventions, artistic works &c. had to be shared? Or suppose your arms race scenario ended with the "revealers" eventually and decisively beating the "concealers"?
Given that people will choose anything over being ignored, I'm suspecting that we'd still see plenty of good stuff. It would just be a lot more decentralised; instead of big corporations like Sony and Microsoft, there would be more local industry.
No, standards alone won't help in this case (unless they used CSS properly and indicated that smaller images were available specifically for mobile devices).
The problem with Vodafone's proxy method, is that there's no way for site owners to know in advance that their site is about to be (possibly) munged. At least if it sent a special browser ident, and the details of its munging processes were published, then savvy people could code properly against it.
Well, Flash is to all intents and purposes its own user agent. It can make HTTP requests and it can render HTML. Assuming it renders alike on all platforms, it's a quick-n-dirty (TM) way of getting everything to look "right" cross-platform.
The proper thing to do in this case would be for Vodafone's content-munging proxy to declare its own user-agent ident, so that it's at least obvious at the server end that pages might not be rendered exactly as sent -- and knowing exactly what alterations are being made wouldn't hurt web designers, either.
How so? Copyright law says there are certain circumstances under which certain acts in relation to copyright materials (here, making derivative works and distributing them generally) require permission from the copyright holders. The GPL is exactly that permission ..... but it comes with conditions attached (you must make the Source Code available). Monsoon defaulted on the conditions under which permission for the acts they sought to perform would be granted, therefore permission was not granted. And therefore Monsoon are in violation of copyright law.
If there was no copyright, then why would there be any need for the GPL anyway?
Why don't you just whip out the rotor arm every time you park up? It used to be law to do that in wartime .....
Granted, it won't stop the little scrotes from just smashing your car up when they find they can't start it.
And not even patent-encumbered in either the UK or EU, where mathematical operations are unpatentable.
Beh. Easy one! You build a USB gadget that pretends as though it's a USB external sound card (shouldn't be too hard; there are Linux drivers for USB audio devices, so just work against that Source Code.) Except instead of playing any sounds, your gadget just stores the (decrypted and decompressed) data somewhere. Plug it in and tell your computer to use the new "USB external sound card" that the spiffy wizard just discovered. Play songs. Recover data later.
It ought even to be possible to recompress the decompressed data perfectly (i.e. so it decompresses to the same thing) if you have a very smart compression/decompression algorithm. But that's a bit secondary.
When you make a derivative work based on someone else's copyrighted work, you only hold copyright on the bits you changed / added: copyright on any recognisable portion of the original work still belongs to the copyright holder of the original work; whose consent is therefore required if you wish to distribute your derivative work. That's the Law of the Land, not part of the Licence. Without permission from the original copyright holder (and the GPL is one form of this permission), you can only distribute the changes you made -- and, under the doctrine of Fair Dealing, no more of the original work than is necessary to identify where properly to apply the changes to recreate your derivative work. For example, in a podcast of a radio show [where the presenter usually owns the copyright in their own contribution but not in any recorded music], you can play the opening bars of a song to enable someone who already has a copy of that song to know where to insert it ..... assuming they have separately arranged any permission they may require for such an act, or that they do so in a way that in itself constitutes Fair Dealing.
If you altered something completely beyond recognition, you would of course have created a completely new work in its own right. But that's not what happened here.
Nobody I knew ever replaced records they already had with cassettes; when cassettes became the dominant medium, they just made cassettes from the records and listened to those instead. And they certainly didn't buy CDs of material they already owned on cassette. In fact, the only times I've ever known anyone buy a pre-recorded cassette have been when they were on holiday, didn't have access to a record or CD player, and wanted to listen to something right there and then. Other times, it was a case of buy it on disc and make your own cassette.
Also, cassette stuck around for a long time, because it had one advantage over records and CDs: it was home-recordable. (So was open-reel, but cassettes were more idiot-friendly.) That more than made up for the bollocks frequency response.
Microsoft publicly acknowledge that old Microsoft applications (e.g. Office 2000) represent a bigger threat to them than Open Source applications running on Microsoft OSes (e.g. OpenOffice.org). However, Open Source OSes represent a bigger threat to Microsoft than old Microsoft OSes (e.g. Windows 98).
:)
Free Software asymptotically approaches perfection in a way that Caged Software never can. Only by having both the Source Code to the OS and the specifications of the hardware can anyone hope to write a driver. Windows drivers will always be buggy; truly i-tal Linux drivers can (theoretically be better than any Windows driver.
Microsoft know that one of their avenues of dirty tricks is bing closed down. But they don't know any other way of competing, so now they're trying a different dirty trick: make sure there are as few hardware drivers as possible for Linux.
Meanwhile, someone out there could come out with a FreeBSD derivative and guarantee the one thing Linux will never have, i.e. a stable kernel ABI. The hypothetical "StableBSD" would be able to run all the usual Open Source goodies, GNOME, KDE &c.; it could also have closed-source drivers that wouldn't need to be changed everytime the kernel was updated. Hey, I think I'll register that as a trademark. And it could have a leech for a mascot
As long as I can block them, I really don't care.