I've written a much longer article about a similar scheme. Rather than using "vouchers", each participant (a taxpayer or a tax creditee) gets electronic votes that they can use to reward artists.
There are lots of hurdles to be overcome -- computer security, "gaming the system", etc. But it still seems quite possible that these models would work better than DRM-based copyright.
See the article, Virtual Markets for Virtual Goods for more details. It's rather long, and aimed at an academic audience which spends a lot of its time thinking about copyright (hey, that's slashdot, right?) but addresses most of the immediate concerns and attacks which posters are thinking of.
You don't go screaming from granite buildings, do you?
You may not run screaming, but you do get cancer and die from living in a house on a granite deposit.
BTW, how much do you think it costs to vitrify nuclear waste? Anecdoteally, I've heard that it's very expensive even for concentrated waste, let alone material which is diluted enough to make toxicity the only problem.
Not to mention the fact that reactor products include lots of gamma emmiters (which, unlike radon from granite, do not need to be inhaled to be dangerous).
GPL doesn't "twist copyright inside out". There's no sense of "using copyright against itself". The GPL is simply a fairly straightforward list of some conditions under which you are licensed to use some copyrighted code -- most importantly that you make the source available.
Ok. I admit I was getting into the rhetoric:). But the clever thing about the GPL is that it's impossible to violate the license without also exercising an exclusive right (and thus, modulo exceptions, violating copyright law).
The GPL is thus always enforceable either by copyright or by contract law.
This is unlikely to be the case with a license designed to promote open access to hardware designs and specifications. The people who are designing hardware, and the people who are modifiying/redistributing various bits of free software, are not necessarily the same. So its kinda hard to write a license based around the latter, which affects the former.
This doesn't necessarily mean it isn't worth trying -- just that you would need a pretty clear idea of what you were trying to achieve and were going to achieve it.
That's not too much to ask. We can call it the "QPL." And when they are licensed under the QPL, they can follow the QPL's requirements.
This might be possible. But it may be very difficult to define "good specs and APIs", in the same elegant way that the GPL twists copyright inside out.
I can't find a disclaimer anywhere in the report saying that he wasn't representing @Stake, and yet he used it to back up his authoritarian position, and intentional or not it appear that he was speaking on behalf of the company he worked for.
From p.3 of the report:
CCIA and the report's authors have arrived at their conclusions independently. Indeed, the views of the authors are their views and theirs alone.
Unless they modified the report after it was first posted? The version I'm looking at says modified 24/09/2003, 7:03 EST
AFAIK, no other american government killed +30,000 of his own people for political reasons (not even Cuba). If you know somebody else who did, please tell me.
The military dictatorship in Gutaemala was worse. It was also installed with CIA support to replace a "dangerous", democratically elected progressive government.
Over a long period, they killed 200,000 people. The most intense period was during the 80s, under Efrain Rios Montt (I believe almost half of the deaths occurred during that period).
do you actually have a clear definition of the word "fair", which you are using to determine that market prices are "fair", but "fair trade" prices are not?
But, is sending a simple email without attachments via telnet easy enough to do?
You don't need to. It'd be much easier to install exim or postfix, and tweak configurations until there are no giveaways. You can test this by sending emails to yourself and examining the headers.
For situations requiring extreme caution, you should also find out something about 802.11b and ensure that your card doesn't have a unique ID (MAC address/equivalent) that will give you away. I don't know enough about 802.11b to answer this.
Just use your own computer as the mail server and send it on a random open wireless network
Before you assume that this gives you anonymity, you might want to take a close look at all of the headers your client and MTA puts in that outgoing email...
Yeah, "this title" is a reference to Title 17 of the US Code, which is the entirety of US copyright law. Slashdot articles copyrightable, so that covers them.
(a) 1 (A)No person shall circumvent a technological measure that effectively controls access to a work protected under this title. (snip)
(a) 3 (A)to ''circumvent a technological measure'' means to descramble a scrambled work, to decrypt an encrypted work, or otherwise to avoid, bypass, remove, deactivate, or impair a technological measure, without the authority of the copyright owner; and
(a) 3 (B)a technological measure ''effectively controls access to a work'' if the measure, in the ordinary course of its operation, requires the application of information, or a process or a treatment, with the authority of the copyright owner, to gain access to the work.
Suppose that all of the info-liberated Internet started blocking the MPAA/IFPI/BSA/Disney/friends' IP addesses, and placed licenses on their sites allowing access/reproduction only by individiuals not associated with these organisations.
Now imagine that Jack "forever less one day" Valenti, who needs his daily dose of slashdot, organises a proxy server to hide his IP address. This is certainly "avoid or bypass" under 1201 (a) 3 (A).
But does an IP address filter "effectively control access to a work" (Thomson-Reed-Elsevier would certainly hope so:)? A court would have to read "application of information, or a process or a treatment" broadly, to include an IP address transmitted over the net. I imagine there is a good, but not 100%, chance that this would fly.
If you were to add a click-through wrapper page, which says "you must certify that you're not from one of these organisations...", then you've got a slam dunk case for both DMCA violation and copyright infringement.
In order to win any real damages in a case like that, I believe you need to register your works with the US Copyright Office, so that you can apply for statutory damages. In that case, the defendant must pay at least $750 per work for wilful, or at least $200 per work for unintentional, copyright infringement. A/. article would certainly be a work, but getting them to the Copyright Office fast enough would be hard.
But all the readers need to do now is convince CmdrTaco to block the MPAA. One infringing proxy server and Hollywood could save us from banner ads for a few years!:)
What makes software so special? Is he also against people getting paid for painting, drawing, making movies, music, or writing books?
In economic terms, software is quite different to artistic & literary works. It is predominantly functional, rather than artistic. But it is also subject to "network externalities" -- if everyone else is using a proprietary app, then I experience economic pressure to start using the same app. This strengthens the case against allowing private monopoly rights over software.
I believe RMS' view on literary & artistic copyright is that it should be massively reduced in scope -- so that it only lasts a couple of years, for example -- to balance the interests of authors and the interests of society as a whole.
I certainly wouldn't ever say that nobody has any rights to give away any their creations, but I don't think anybody has any rights to dictate whether or not someone else should be allowed to seek financial compensation for their endeavors. Stallman is perfectly within his rights, IMO, to encourage, however strongly, the creation of free alternatives to commercial software, but he doesn't have any business to keep telling particular commercial software authors to stop doing what they do after they've already told him thanks but no thanks.
On an individual level, what you are saying is reasonable. But at a social level, you have to understand that people "seek financial compensation for their endeavours" by using copyright laws which have been written by special interest groups.
RMS, and many others, want to change those laws so that they are actually in the public interest. On that level, we have every right to oppose the system which information producers use to obtain "financial compensation".
ps -- get back to me if you don't understand what I'm getting at, or would like some references to more detailed constructions of this argument...
That is not entirely correct. If you put your Linux install far enough back on the disk it will still be there. The Toshiba recovery program only makes the filesystem, it does not destructively format the disk, so only the first couple of gigs get overwritten.
...snip...
I don't know if this will still work with the newer recovery DVDs, but I don't see why it wouldn't.
This behaviour will depend on the filesystem in question. VFAT probably doesn't require any metadata beyond the start of the partition, while
NTFS almost certainly does (and will thus damage data allover your disk).
1991 was around the time Berne took effect. Registration was no longer necessary. Of course they dropped off.
Yep. Although it's interesting to note that in the US, registration still makes a big difference to the damages you can be awarded for copyright infringement (I don't think there is a situation like that anywhere else in the world).
Those numbers are still very low, of course. Wonder if they include deployments of carnivore/"magic lantern"... I recall hearing much higher per-country figures for Europe. Wonder if they include deployments of carnivore/"magic lantern".
The FDL doesn't cancel existing fair use doctrine--in general short excerpting or commenting on a copyrighted work is fine, just as you can quote a book in a review of it.
IANAL, but this is legal advice:) --
The "fair use" doctrine of exceptions to copyright is not international. There might be a few countries outside the US which have something comparable, but not many.
Extracting parts of a work to review it is more likely to qualify for fair use (or its weaker cousin, fair dealing, which is common in the former British empire), than using it for some other purpose (such as writing new documentation).
The GFDL should definitely have a section explicitly allowing small excerpts (without invariant sections), regardless of local copyright law. It should possibly even allow large excerpts on the condition that the final document isn't really trying to achieve the same purpose as the original.
The case against Digital Restrictions Management
on
Open Source DRM
·
· Score: 1
(in almost all of its forms)
I'm writing a (rather long, rather detailed) article arguing against DRM-enforced copyright, as a matter of public policy.
Sure there is. PGP/GPG sign everything, and do an exchange of newly-generated keypairs for each site.
The question I was addressing was, is it possible to tell if someone else on gnutella is running LimeWire (for example)? Of course, you can demand a secure hash of the peer's code, but someone trying to create a "fake LimeWire" can do so by copying LimeWire's hash.
Incorrect. The rules of thumb are:
If you would have brought it anyway, you owe the "owners" money.
If you would not have brought it, you owe the "owners" money.
I presume you're being humourous (I wouldn't assume anyone is a deluded ethical absolutist without more solid evidence;)
Slashdot Mirror
Kelsey and Schneier's Street Performer Protocol article has priority, however, and the fact that the patent does not cite it, could be significant.
I can't believe that the First Monday peer review process accepted that article without pointing out another piece they published a couple of years ago, entitled The Wall Street Performer Protocol: Using Software Completion Bonds to Fund Open Source Software Development.
There are also some additional references to related market-forms here. Google Answers also works on a somewhat related principle.
There are lots of hurdles to be overcome -- computer security, "gaming the system", etc. But it still seems quite possible that these models would work better than DRM-based copyright.
See the article, Virtual Markets for Virtual Goods for more details. It's rather long, and aimed at an academic audience which spends a lot of its time thinking about copyright (hey, that's slashdot, right?) but addresses most of the immediate concerns and attacks which posters are thinking of.
What comes out of these reactors is much less radioactive, for a much shorter period of time.
Are you suggesting that yellowcake (uranium ore) is in any way comparable to this stuff? Are you trolling?
You may not run screaming, but you do get cancer and die from living in a house on a granite deposit.
BTW, how much do you think it costs to vitrify nuclear waste? Anecdoteally, I've heard that it's very expensive even for concentrated waste, let alone material which is diluted enough to make toxicity the only problem.
Not to mention the fact that reactor products include lots of gamma emmiters (which, unlike radon from granite, do not need to be inhaled to be dangerous).
Ok. I admit I was getting into the rhetoric :). But the clever thing about the GPL is that it's impossible to violate the license without also exercising an exclusive right (and thus, modulo exceptions, violating copyright law).
The GPL is thus always enforceable either by copyright or by contract law.
This is unlikely to be the case with a license designed to promote open access to hardware designs and specifications. The people who are designing hardware, and the people who are modifiying/redistributing various bits of free software, are not necessarily the same. So its kinda hard to write a license based around the latter, which affects the former.
This doesn't necessarily mean it isn't worth trying -- just that you would need a pretty clear idea of what you were trying to achieve and were going to achieve it.
This might be possible. But it may be very difficult to define "good specs and APIs", in the same elegant way that the GPL twists copyright inside out.
Oh, and "QPL" is already taken.
From p.3 of the report:
Unless they modified the report after it was first posted? The version I'm looking at says modified 24/09/2003, 7:03 EST
The government was democratically elected, even if the second paragraph is wrong.
The military dictatorship in Gutaemala was worse. It was also installed with CIA support to replace a "dangerous", democratically elected progressive government.
Over a long period, they killed 200,000 people. The most intense period was during the 80s, under Efrain Rios Montt (I believe almost half of the deaths occurred during that period).
Oh, and Montt is running the show again now!
do you actually have a clear definition of the word "fair", which you are using to determine that market prices are "fair", but "fair trade" prices are not?
You don't need to. It'd be much easier to install exim or postfix, and tweak configurations until there are no giveaways. You can test this by sending emails to yourself and examining the headers.
For situations requiring extreme caution, you should also find out something about 802.11b and ensure that your card doesn't have a unique ID (MAC address/equivalent) that will give you away. I don't know enough about 802.11b to answer this.
Before you assume that this gives you anonymity, you might want to take a close look at all of the headers your client and MTA puts in that outgoing email...
Congratulations, you just discovered the racist undertones in LoTR, the roundabout way :)
Yeah, "this title" is a reference to Title 17 of the US Code, which is the entirety of US copyright law. Slashdot articles copyrightable, so that covers them.
Within 17 USC 1201, we find:
(a) 1 (A) No person shall circumvent a technological measure that effectively controls access to a work protected under this title. (snip)
(a) 3 (A) to ''circumvent a technological measure'' means to descramble a scrambled work, to decrypt an encrypted work, or otherwise to avoid, bypass, remove, deactivate, or impair a technological measure, without the authority of the copyright owner; and
(a) 3 (B) a technological measure ''effectively controls access to a work'' if the measure, in the ordinary course of its operation, requires the application of information, or a process or a treatment, with the authority of the copyright owner, to gain access to the work.
Suppose that all of the info-liberated Internet started blocking the MPAA/IFPI/BSA/Disney/friends' IP addesses, and placed licenses on their sites allowing access/reproduction only by individiuals not associated with these organisations.
Now imagine that Jack "forever less one day" Valenti, who needs his daily dose of slashdot, organises a proxy server to hide his IP address. This is certainly "avoid or bypass" under 1201 (a) 3 (A).
But does an IP address filter "effectively control access to a work" (Thomson-Reed-Elsevier would certainly hope so :)? A court would have to read "application of information, or a process or a treatment" broadly, to include an IP address transmitted over the net. I imagine there is a good, but not 100%, chance that this would fly.
If you were to add a click-through wrapper page, which says "you must certify that you're not from one of these organisations...", then you've got a slam dunk case for both DMCA violation and copyright infringement.
In order to win any real damages in a case like that, I believe you need to register your works with the US Copyright Office, so that you can apply for statutory damages. In that case, the defendant must pay at least $750 per work for wilful, or at least $200 per work for unintentional, copyright infringement. A /. article would certainly be a work, but getting them to the Copyright Office fast enough would be hard.
But all the readers need to do now is convince CmdrTaco to block the MPAA. One infringing proxy server and Hollywood could save us from banner ads for a few years! :)
In economic terms, software is quite different to artistic & literary works. It is predominantly functional, rather than artistic. But it is also subject to "network externalities" -- if everyone else is using a proprietary app, then I experience economic pressure to start using the same app. This strengthens the case against allowing private monopoly rights over software.
I believe RMS' view on literary & artistic copyright is that it should be massively reduced in scope -- so that it only lasts a couple of years, for example -- to balance the interests of authors and the interests of society as a whole.
I certainly wouldn't ever say that nobody has any rights to give away any their creations, but I don't think anybody has any rights to dictate whether or not someone else should be allowed to seek financial compensation for their endeavors. Stallman is perfectly within his rights, IMO, to encourage, however strongly, the creation of free alternatives to commercial software, but he doesn't have any business to keep telling particular commercial software authors to stop doing what they do after they've already told him thanks but no thanks.
On an individual level, what you are saying is reasonable. But at a social level, you have to understand that people "seek financial compensation for their endeavours" by using copyright laws which have been written by special interest groups.
RMS, and many others, want to change those laws so that they are actually in the public interest. On that level, we have every right to oppose the system which information producers use to obtain "financial compensation".
ps -- get back to me if you don't understand what I'm getting at, or would like some references to more detailed constructions of this argument...
I don't know if this will still work with the newer recovery DVDs, but I don't see why it wouldn't.
This behaviour will depend on the filesystem in question. VFAT probably doesn't require any metadata beyond the start of the partition, while NTFS almost certainly does (and will thus damage data allover your disk).
Yep. Although it's interesting to note that in the US, registration still makes a big difference to the damages you can be awarded for copyright infringement (I don't think there is a situation like that anywhere else in the world).
Well, you could always post to a bug report or feature request offering a $1000 donation if the improvement you want made is completed...
These guys have already started (slashdot coverage) .
It appears you didn't look at the report.
Intercept applications requested: 1359 Intercept applications authorized: 1358
Those numbers are still very low, of course. Wonder if they include deployments of carnivore/"magic lantern"... I recall hearing much higher per-country figures for Europe. Wonder if they include deployments of carnivore/"magic lantern".
IANAL, but this is legal advice :) --
The "fair use" doctrine of exceptions to copyright is not international. There might be a few countries outside the US which have something comparable, but not many.
Extracting parts of a work to review it is more likely to qualify for fair use (or its weaker cousin, fair dealing, which is common in the former British empire), than using it for some other purpose (such as writing new documentation).
The GFDL should definitely have a section explicitly allowing small excerpts (without invariant sections), regardless of local copyright law. It should possibly even allow large excerpts on the condition that the final document isn't really trying to achieve the same purpose as the original.
I'm writing a (rather long, rather detailed) article arguing against DRM-enforced copyright, as a matter of public policy.
It's available here in workping-paper form.
The question I was addressing was, is it possible to tell if someone else on gnutella is running LimeWire (for example)? Of course, you can demand a secure hash of the peer's code, but someone trying to create a "fake LimeWire" can do so by copying LimeWire's hash.
Incorrect. The rules of thumb are:
If you would have brought it anyway, you owe the "owners" money.
If you would not have brought it, you owe the "owners" money.
I presume you're being humourous (I wouldn't assume anyone is a deluded ethical absolutist without more solid evidence ;)