Does something need to be published in a physical form, like a book or CD? Or does putting it on a web site count?
What if I put a copyrighted work (say a written work, in an HTML file) on a password-protected web server using HTTPS, and the password is known only to me? Then I certainly haven't published it. Now suppose there's no password, but only I know the URL and I haven't linked to it. Is it published yet? What if someone goes to http://www.mydomain.com/mystuff/menu.html, which is on search engines and linked from other sites, truncates it to http://www.mydomain.com/mystuff/, and gets a directory listing including my copyrighted work? What if there's no directory listing, but I tell the URL of the web site to one of my friends? What if the friend tells a bunch of other people and links to it; has he caused it to be "published"? What if I'm the only one who knows the URL and then I graffiti it on the wall of a public restroom (say a unisex one)? The general public can now access it if they want to, right? Suppose someone cracks my web server, finds the secret URL of my copyrighted work, and posts it on Slashdot where it can be seen by all; is it published yet?
Similar dilemmas occur with physical media, as well. What if I make a backup copy of my unreleased copyrighted work on CD, and then the CD is stolen? What if I leave a few such CD's in a public park where anyone could get them? What if I try to sell people my CD's but no one buys any?
And what if I make a great movie, but the only way anyone can see it is by coming to my house and paying admission. (Assume for the sake of simplicity that this doesn't violate zoning ordinances.) Is that publishing? What if I only let friends see it for free, but they decide to donate money?
Not everything is "published" by a huge company that issues a press release and starts advertising it everywhere. As someone who's been in a few of the above situations (let's not get into which ones), I think they need to be considered.
I intend to sign the petition anyway, because no copyrights will be lost before 50 years are up, which is too long anyway. (I believe an ideal copyright term would be somewhere from 15 to 20 years.) Still, I can see some ugly legal fights going on in the future if cases like the above aren't considered.
I believe the GPL has had the opposite effect, preventing adoption of numerous pieces of software because companies (rightfully so) refuse to adopt GPL'd software...
First, why is that rightfully so? Second, why is it so important for companies to adopt free software that you consider the free software movement a total failure if they don't?
...the very ideals of the FSF are flawed. They want you to believe that once all software is free, everyone will have great software. In reality, once software is no longer profitable, nobody will learn to program, and hardware companies will only pay to get the most necessary software written.
Wrong, wrong, wrong. You're obviously not one of them, but some people are motivated by things besides profit. Things like advancing technological progress and making the world a better place. If all you want to do in life is get money, maybe you deserve to stay poor.
...it's hard to listen to anything said by a foundation that has such obviously problematic principals.
Indeed, and you so thoroughly debunked them by
telling us that companies are right to avoid GPL'd software, with no justification at all.
ranting about how NFS uses the BSD license and is widely used, "after it therefore because of it."
assuming that there's no money to be made in free software, again with no justification.
assuming that the only reason anyone wants to do anything is to make money, yet again without justification.
using the above assumptions to paint a bleak (and completely bullshit) picture of the future after the FSF is successful.
You sure did a good job knocking some sense into those communist hippies, all right.
Let me point out to you that, if everyone were concerned only with money and there were none to be made in free software, the FSF would never have existed. It's true that many free software developers do not make a significant amount of money from their work. They do it anyway, because what they make helps them, helps others, and because programming is (often) fun. What makes you think no one else will be motivated by any of that?
The victim has commented on this happening elsewhere in the discussion (currently at -1). It's true that sdem was not exactly the smartest of trolls, and trolls can be annoying, but to suggest that as a justification of Fyodor's criminal acts is simply ludicrous.
Damn, I thought "IPv6 will never be widely adopted" jokes were still considered funny. Guess I jumped on the bandwagon a bit too late. (Or was it not obvious enough that I was joking?)
Funnier still, I tried it just now and the root of my local web server came up! Someone must have cracked the nameserver and, in an attempt to frame me, made bonzi.com resolve to the Internet IP address my computer is broadcasting!...oh, wait, never mind.
You seem to misunderstand BitTorrent's purpose. It's only intended for use in downloading things that you would download from a web server anyway. Just search the web as you would if BT didn't exist. If you find a place for downloading something you want, either it uses BT or it doesn't because the server can handle the bandwidth usage already. If the server clearly can't handle the bandwidth usage, and your download is very very slow, then write to the site owner and suggest that they use BT from now on; chances are they haven't heard of it.
This one doesn't have any links to any sites for downloading stuff with BT. I don't think the/. effect is such that even mentioning a particular subject will bring down related sites.
On one of the other BitTorrent stories, someone suggested making a module for Apache, mod_torrent, that would, when asked for files of a certain type (like ISOs, and they would contain only GPL'ed software of course) or over a certain size (1 MB? 5 MB? 20 MB?), would send a torrent of it, and if there were no seeds at the time, would seed the file itself.
That sounds like an awesome module. Do you see it happening? Would you assist someone who was trying to write such a thing?
Napster is a completely different case. Everything was happening on Napster's servers, and if there were legal uses for Napster, they sure weren't nearly as obvious as BT's are.
I usually don't do this, but the parent is a well-written and insightful post that deserves to be seen by everyone viewing at a threshold above 0.
I don't agree, however, that it's a pain in the ass to share things with BT, or that it would be a good thing if it were. Aside from that, great comment.
Searching for torrent files shouldn't have anything to do with BT itself. That simply is not what it's intended for. If you really want to find a torrent of some thing, try:
Every time a story like this comes out, there are always a few morons whining about how we're always critical of Microsoft, and we speak badly of them no matter what they do, blah blah blah. Some of them are even venturing to say that it's because we all know free software is inferior and can't match Microsoft products in quality.
So we don't like poor old Microsoft. No matter what they do, it has an evil motive. Where do you suppose we got that idea? Did we wake up one day and say to ourselves, "Let's find a company and try to make them look as bad as we can. Hmm, Microsoft sounds like a good choice"?
No! The reason we think Microsoft is always planning something evil is because history shows that Microsoft is always planning something evil! Well, that's certainly a funny reason to doubt their motives!
Those of you who keep coming to Microsoft's defense, who keep telling us to leave the innocent, misunderstood corporation alone, do you really think they've never done anything wrong? Do you truly believe in your hearts that Microsoft is doing something like this out of pure generosity?
And to those of you who keep calling it silly for Microsoft to compete with "free" software, what on earth don't you understand about "free speech, not free beer"?
Hey, that's true; the quote "Linux is a copy of Unix. There is very little new stuff in Linux." was actually said by Larry McVoy. The list archives are mirrored in several places; this one has the statement indented in RMS's reply, but this one makes it look as though it was said by RMS. Maybe whoever attributed the quote to RMS honestly thought he had said it.
By the way, the first paragraph of RMS's reply provides a good context for that statement:
This is no coincidence. GNU/Linux parallels Unix because I chose that
design in 1983. It is foolish to focus on innovation when you are starting a race with a multi-year handicap. The first task is to catch up.
SCO, of course, wants it to sound like "copy" as in "we ripped off SCO's trade secrets to make it." Some credibility they give themselves with pages like this!
Don't confuse commercial software with proprietary software! Proprietary software is non-free and bad, whereas commercial software is sometimes also free, and thus good in some cases.
You think it's ridiculous that the GNU project won't let proprietary software "coexist"? The GNU project and the FSF are all about making free software, promoting free software, and if there isn't already a good free program to do something, creating one. It's ridiculous that you expect them to have something with their name on it that promotes non-free software.
Posts like the parent are why I often read/. at a threshold of -1. That was hilarious given the context, and seeing as how the "*BSD is dying" troll gets posted here on at least a daily basis, I'd say it's more of an inside joke than a troll. Everyone knows, of course, that BSD isn't dying at all.
Wrong. Antidisestablishmentarianism is opposal to the separation of church and state, which doesn't have a damn thing to do with this. Nice try, though.
By the way, while the antidisestablishmentarianist movement has been dead for some time, someone recently brought it back with a movement called neoantidisestablishmentarianism. If, like me, you don't think neoantidisestablishmentarianism is a good philosophy at all, you can join my contraneoantidisestablishmentarianism movement and behave contraneoantidisestablishmentarianistically all the time.
But if you just want people to think you are a contraneoantidisestablishmentarianist, and you aren't really, then what you are doing is acting pseudocontraneoantidisestablishmentarianistically.
Re:All music is open source
on
Open Source Music
·
· Score: 2, Funny
"dunkin donuts screaming match" is awesome. I think I'll sample it heavily on my next 12" release.
Re:Open source artists need publicity!
on
Open Source Music
·
· Score: 1
Getting slashdotted? The sites (both Creative Comments and Opsound) are working fine for me. The sound files are all stored on other servers. If you're having trouble downloading them, try starting from an arbitrary position on the index instead of the beginning.
If you need music for a video or presentation and don't want to spend a lot of money or work on it, you might find Microsoft Music Producer, perhaps the only Microsoft program I recommend without reservation, to be useful. You basically select a style of music, a personality, a "band" to play it, and a length, and it makes a nice MIDI file for you to use. (You can also change the song's tempo and key if you're feeling adventurous.) Since the output is in the MIDI file format, songs can be easily edited or used for ideas and inspiration.
If the purpose of this stuff is to be sampled and remixed and whatnot, isn't a lossless format like FLAC preferable to MP3 or Vorbis?
Re:What does using Gator have to do with using IE?
on
Gator Examined
·
· Score: 1
Hmm, only for Windows Update? I've noticed that I can't log in to Hotmail using Mozilla; it goes to the "Please re-enter your password" screen whenever I try. Is it possible I just have my JavaScript settings too strict? (No other sites seem to be affected.)
I've heard about the tragedy of the commons before. I believe I saw it posted here as a comment on some article about problems with eDonkey. The BT protocol is designed specifically to avoid those kinds of problems. If you upload slower, you download slower; that's how it works.
The reason it's bad to/. these sites is because the indexes are dynamic, and generating them thousands of times a minute isn't cheap.
There's only one real way you can "abuse" BT, and that is by closing it as soon as a download completes instead of leaving it on for a while afterwards. It will still work, just not as well. And contrary to popular opinion, I don't believe every/. user is a cheat like that.
Slashdot Mirror
Does something need to be published in a physical form, like a book or CD? Or does putting it on a web site count?
What if I put a copyrighted work (say a written work, in an HTML file) on a password-protected web server using HTTPS, and the password is known only to me? Then I certainly haven't published it. Now suppose there's no password, but only I know the URL and I haven't linked to it. Is it published yet? What if someone goes to http://www.mydomain.com/mystuff/menu.html, which is on search engines and linked from other sites, truncates it to http://www.mydomain.com/mystuff/, and gets a directory listing including my copyrighted work? What if there's no directory listing, but I tell the URL of the web site to one of my friends? What if the friend tells a bunch of other people and links to it; has he caused it to be "published"? What if I'm the only one who knows the URL and then I graffiti it on the wall of a public restroom (say a unisex one)? The general public can now access it if they want to, right? Suppose someone cracks my web server, finds the secret URL of my copyrighted work, and posts it on Slashdot where it can be seen by all; is it published yet?
Similar dilemmas occur with physical media, as well. What if I make a backup copy of my unreleased copyrighted work on CD, and then the CD is stolen? What if I leave a few such CD's in a public park where anyone could get them? What if I try to sell people my CD's but no one buys any?
And what if I make a great movie, but the only way anyone can see it is by coming to my house and paying admission. (Assume for the sake of simplicity that this doesn't violate zoning ordinances.) Is that publishing? What if I only let friends see it for free, but they decide to donate money?
Not everything is "published" by a huge company that issues a press release and starts advertising it everywhere. As someone who's been in a few of the above situations (let's not get into which ones), I think they need to be considered.
I intend to sign the petition anyway, because no copyrights will be lost before 50 years are up, which is too long anyway. (I believe an ideal copyright term would be somewhere from 15 to 20 years.) Still, I can see some ugly legal fights going on in the future if cases like the above aren't considered.
First, why is that rightfully so? Second, why is it so important for companies to adopt free software that you consider the free software movement a total failure if they don't?
Wrong, wrong, wrong. You're obviously not one of them, but some people are motivated by things besides profit. Things like advancing technological progress and making the world a better place. If all you want to do in life is get money, maybe you deserve to stay poor.
Indeed, and you so thoroughly debunked them by
You sure did a good job knocking some sense into those communist hippies, all right.
Let me point out to you that, if everyone were concerned only with money and there were none to be made in free software, the FSF would never have existed. It's true that many free software developers do not make a significant amount of money from their work. They do it anyway, because what they make helps them, helps others, and because programming is (often) fun. What makes you think no one else will be motivated by any of that?
You're a whining idiot. Please read Selling Free Software and learn the real difference between Free Software and Open Source: namely, that Open Source is designed not to raise the issue of freedom. I think freedom is important, so I advocate Free Software, not Open Source.
Someone already thought of this joke.
The victim has commented on this happening elsewhere in the discussion (currently at -1). It's true that sdem was not exactly the smartest of trolls, and trolls can be annoying, but to suggest that as a justification of Fyodor's criminal acts is simply ludicrous.
Damn, I thought "IPv6 will never be widely adopted" jokes were still considered funny. Guess I jumped on the bandwagon a bit too late. (Or was it not obvious enough that I was joking?)
The "perhaps" is because by the time IPv6 is widely implemented, we may already be needing IPv8.
Funnier still, I tried it just now and the root of my local web server came up! Someone must have cracked the nameserver and, in an attempt to frame me, made bonzi.com resolve to the Internet IP address my computer is broadcasting! ...oh, wait, never mind.
You seem to misunderstand BitTorrent's purpose. It's only intended for use in downloading things that you would download from a web server anyway. Just search the web as you would if BT didn't exist. If you find a place for downloading something you want, either it uses BT or it doesn't because the server can handle the bandwidth usage already. If the server clearly can't handle the bandwidth usage, and your download is very very slow, then write to the site owner and suggest that they use BT from now on; chances are they haven't heard of it.
This one doesn't have any links to any sites for downloading stuff with BT. I don't think the /. effect is such that even mentioning a particular subject will bring down related sites.
On one of the other BitTorrent stories, someone suggested making a module for Apache, mod_torrent, that would, when asked for files of a certain type (like ISOs, and they would contain only GPL'ed software of course) or over a certain size (1 MB? 5 MB? 20 MB?), would send a torrent of it, and if there were no seeds at the time, would seed the file itself.
That sounds like an awesome module. Do you see it happening? Would you assist someone who was trying to write such a thing?
Napster is a completely different case. Everything was happening on Napster's servers, and if there were legal uses for Napster, they sure weren't nearly as obvious as BT's are.
I usually don't do this, but the parent is a well-written and insightful post that deserves to be seen by everyone viewing at a threshold above 0.
I don't agree, however, that it's a pain in the ass to share things with BT, or that it would be a good thing if it were. Aside from that, great comment.
Searching for torrent files shouldn't have anything to do with BT itself. That simply is not what it's intended for. If you really want to find a torrent of some thing, try:
http://google.com/search?q="some+thing"+torrent
Every time a story like this comes out, there are always a few morons whining about how we're always critical of Microsoft, and we speak badly of them no matter what they do, blah blah blah. Some of them are even venturing to say that it's because we all know free software is inferior and can't match Microsoft products in quality.
So we don't like poor old Microsoft. No matter what they do, it has an evil motive. Where do you suppose we got that idea? Did we wake up one day and say to ourselves, "Let's find a company and try to make them look as bad as we can. Hmm, Microsoft sounds like a good choice"?
No! The reason we think Microsoft is always planning something evil is because history shows that Microsoft is always planning something evil! Well, that's certainly a funny reason to doubt their motives!
Those of you who keep coming to Microsoft's defense, who keep telling us to leave the innocent, misunderstood corporation alone, do you really think they've never done anything wrong? Do you truly believe in your hearts that Microsoft is doing something like this out of pure generosity?
And to those of you who keep calling it silly for Microsoft to compete with "free" software, what on earth don't you understand about "free speech, not free beer"?
By the way, the first paragraph of RMS's reply provides a good context for that statement:
SCO, of course, wants it to sound like "copy" as in "we ripped off SCO's trade secrets to make it." Some credibility they give themselves with pages like this!
Selling free software is good! Indeed RMS makes a lot of money doing it. The issue here was the selling of non-free software.
Don't confuse commercial software with proprietary software! Proprietary software is non-free and bad, whereas commercial software is sometimes also free, and thus good in some cases.
You think it's ridiculous that the GNU project won't let proprietary software "coexist"? The GNU project and the FSF are all about making free software, promoting free software, and if there isn't already a good free program to do something, creating one. It's ridiculous that you expect them to have something with their name on it that promotes non-free software.
Posts like the parent are why I often read /. at a threshold of -1. That was hilarious given the context, and seeing as how the "*BSD is dying" troll gets posted here on at least a daily basis, I'd say it's more of an inside joke than a troll. Everyone knows, of course, that BSD isn't dying at all.
Wrong. Antidisestablishmentarianism is opposal to the separation of church and state, which doesn't have a damn thing to do with this. Nice try, though.
.
By the way, while the antidisestablishmentarianist movement has been dead for some time, someone recently brought it back with a movement called neoantidisestablishmentarianism. If, like me, you don't think neoantidisestablishmentarianism is a good philosophy at all, you can join my contraneoantidisestablishmentarianism movement and behave contraneoantidisestablishmentarianistically all the time.
But if you just want people to think you are a contraneoantidisestablishmentarianist, and you aren't really, then what you are doing is acting pseudocontraneoantidisestablishmentarianistically
"dunkin donuts screaming match" is awesome. I think I'll sample it heavily on my next 12" release.
Getting slashdotted? The sites (both Creative Comments and Opsound) are working fine for me. The sound files are all stored on other servers. If you're having trouble downloading them, try starting from an arbitrary position on the index instead of the beginning.
If you need music for a video or presentation and don't want to spend a lot of money or work on it, you might find Microsoft Music Producer, perhaps the only Microsoft program I recommend without reservation, to be useful. You basically select a style of music, a personality, a "band" to play it, and a length, and it makes a nice MIDI file for you to use. (You can also change the song's tempo and key if you're feeling adventurous.) Since the output is in the MIDI file format, songs can be easily edited or used for ideas and inspiration.
If the purpose of this stuff is to be sampled and remixed and whatnot, isn't a lossless format like FLAC preferable to MP3 or Vorbis?
Hmm, only for Windows Update? I've noticed that I can't log in to Hotmail using Mozilla; it goes to the "Please re-enter your password" screen whenever I try. Is it possible I just have my JavaScript settings too strict? (No other sites seem to be affected.)
I've heard about the tragedy of the commons before. I believe I saw it posted here as a comment on some article about problems with eDonkey. The BT protocol is designed specifically to avoid those kinds of problems. If you upload slower, you download slower; that's how it works.
/. these sites is because the indexes are dynamic, and generating them thousands of times a minute isn't cheap.
/. user is a cheat like that.
The reason it's bad to
There's only one real way you can "abuse" BT, and that is by closing it as soon as a download completes instead of leaving it on for a while afterwards. It will still work, just not as well. And contrary to popular opinion, I don't believe every