"This leaves me curious: does anyone here know if the EU patent office is better at following the letter of their law than the US seems to be?"
Yes...No!
They have already granted around 30000 patents contrary to their own rules and the current law. One of the main motives for the directive about to be voted on is to save the EPO from the embarassment of having to admit and amend their appalling (deliberate?) mistakes.
A quick google search reveals that Viterbi most likely didn't patent his algorithm because he knew it wasn't new, having been described - in a more general form - by R. Bellman in his book "Dynamic Programming", published in 1957.
As expected, since the algorithm applies to such a general class of data (data generated by a HMM process) I also found that the Viterbi algorithm is used in other fields such as molecular biology and speech recognition.
It is dangerous and foolish to assert that some mathematical scheme is not a representation of any natural phenomenon. Logic dictates that in order to make such an assertion one would need to know every mathematical description of all natural phenomena.
This is typical of the (often deliberate) short-sightedness used in the arguments of those who advocate patentability of mathematical algorithms.
"The former Congressman is to be applauded for his insight into these matters - despite not being a technophile himself"
Offtopic ? Hardly.
"...but I really think he needs the assistance of some medical technology to help him with his smoking habit before he gets himself arrested for trying to destroy an airplane."
Ahh! - of course - I forgot to suffix a suitable emoticon in order that the illiterati who are inexplicably charged with the powers of moderation in these lofty fora, might thereby be assisted with the ability to recognize a touch of gentle humour when it slaps them in the face with a wet mackerel.
..."And it would be impossible for you (the consumer) to remove, decrypt or disable (just like the lavatory smoke detectors on airplanes)."
The former Congressman is to be applauded for his insight into these matters - despite not being a technophile himself - but I really think he needs the assistance of some medical technology to help him with his smoking habit before he gets himself arrested for trying to destroy an airplane.
Well there's the EUCD (~= DMCA), although decss may well qualify under a fair use exemption. I think - hope - the fair use principle will be taken more seriously in Europe than it has been in the U.S.
Re:But how does it stand up to the comeptition?
on
MPlayer 1.0Pre1 Is Here
·
· Score: 3, Interesting
I have tried Xine,Ogle,Videolan and Mplayer and found Ogle to be too primitive as yet. Xine has always worked extremely well for me (no instability) and is technically very proficient, plus it supports all the file formats I've ever needed it to. Videolan is pretty much equivalent to Xine but I don't like it's gui and it was annoying to have to build yet another gui toolkit (wxWindows) just for one app. Mplayer is in many ways technically superior to all the others and I would use it all the time except it doesn't support DVD navigation. If it ever does it would be a no-brainer, for me anyway.
If you have had stability problems with Xine, that's unlucky because I would rate it just ahead of Videolan, usability wise. My advice would be to set aside a day or a Weekend just for building and testing Mplayer, Xine and Videolan, reading all the documentation and trying different optimizations and runtime configurations until you find the one which suits you best.
If your research into software patents began long before 1978 then you have the experiential advantage but that does not make your (counter) arguments any more convincing or coherent. Nor does my failure to provide alternatives imply that such do not exist.
I am even less inclined to reiterate the primary and most powerful arguments against software patents now that I know of your research, since it follows that you must in fact be fully cognizant of them and yet you consider them worthless. That being so your reasoning is utterly alien to me.
The idea that my posting should be considered 'pro-patent' further confirms my suspicion that logic and meaning are, in your world, different concepts to that which they are in mine.
"Actually I've never seen a good explanation why software patents shouldn't be allowed."
I'm not very well informed and I can't be bothered to read even the previous/. posts let alone the large body of literature on the matter.
"They usually boil to one of three arguments:"
So I'll just choose three of the weakest arguments I've seen and knock them down with some glib sophistry.
"At the same time, anti-patent rants rarely address the imbalance between inventing some clever device that uses gears which is patentable and some equally clever device that uses a computer to run on which according to anti-patent advocates should not be patentable. In other words, the mechanical engineer gets a patent, the computer engineer doesn't."
While I'm at it, I'll reveal the depth of my ignorance by falsely claiming a rarity when there exists in fact a wealth.
"There is no reason why should two equally creative, similar, useful discoveries, should be granted fundamentally different protection under the law."
Finally, I'll conflate discovery with creation and ignore the fact that there are already two fundamentally different kinds of legal protection for I.P.
Think music rather than literature. The realisation or expression of the plans for a piece of hardware is an expensive and difficult task involving the manipulation of physical materials but to play a tune from the notes written on a musical score is easy. You can hum the notes or learn to play the piano.
If a musical score can be described as the representation of human artistic, emotional and spiritual thought in a form communicable to others and expressible by means of the playing of musical instruments, then likewise a computer programme can be described as the representation of human rational, logical and mathematical thought in a form communicable to others and expressible by means of execution on a computer and associated devices.
Just how do you distinguish between 'maths' and 'algorithms'? Who decides what is trivial and what is not? No doubt the satellite based GPS systems use 'non-trivial' 'algorithms' to make the corrections to their calculations that are necessary due to G.R.
Suppose Albert Einstein hadn't gotten around to the G.R. theory yet, but the GPS satellite people had - and had patented every algorithm they could think of that might possibly be of use to them, constituting in effect a statement of the theory. Then for starters you could kiss goodbye to modern cosmology and G.R. textbooks and if Professor Einstein had tried to publish his theory, he would have spent his last days in prison, courtesy of the DMCA.
You may be happy to live in a foul dystopia in which maths and science - ideas - are owned by commercial interests but I for one will fight to the last drop of my blood to prevent the realisation of such a monstrous vision.
While designing your standards compliant sites if you have netscape/mozilla a really useful sidebar to have is the devedge multibar. Along the same lines, here's an interesting site about css design.
Ah but this is Sci-Fi so maybe the circuitry was based on magnetic monopole currents instead of electron currents - iirc Blas Cabrera found a monopole once but lost it again, which was a shame since it was probably the only one in the Universe;)
The BBC has never stopped radio broadcasts - if you check out this you will find several channels including an excellent serious music station (radio 3). Click on any audio stream link and you get a BBC gui wrapper for the realplayer streams with lots of links to tons of archived stuff too including the superb Reith Lectures 2003 featuring V.S. Ramachandran.
By the way, many of us Brits have pressured them to give us Ogg streams in the past and they even actually did so for a while but they have been very stuffy about I.P. issues.
Sadly they tend to commission much of the new stuff from external companies which insist on the use of Real streams to protect their I.P. So not only do we suffer this but whatever turns up in these archive releases is not likely to be added to significantly in the future.
It wouldn't surprise me if the Helix/Real stuff gets released around the time this archive comes online either. Then they'll have an excuse never to provide decent Ogg streams. I don't know about anyone else but I am not so easily fooled by a few coins thrown into the crowd by the benevolent panjandrums at the BBC. Everyone seems to think they're just going to dump the whole archive on a server and say "Help yourselves chaps and chappesses" - more likely they'll turn it into a number of managed channels. Anyway, the BBC should be making the programmes itself or using it's vast power to demand the I.P. rights of the stuff it commissions.
Maybe to most/. readers a story about obscure machinations in the bureaucracies of far off lands is a little too dull. I'd suggest spicing it up a bit with some catchier headlines:
"Patent War in Europe: Brussels to be razed to the ground" "Evil tyrant McCarthy to face wrath of the people" "World faces patent doom - Heroes march on Brussels"
When I submitted something on the same topic a while back I just used the old trick of mentioning RMS - works every time;-) What really bothers me though is the lack of interest in the mainstream press. If it was literature, art or music facing this nightmare the likes of John Humphries of BBC Radio 4's Today programme would haul in the senior cabinet ministers and McCarthy would be MEP in charge of banana curvature the very next day.
If any fellow Brits are still reading this, I'd be interested to know if anyone has any experience of approaching the media. I mean the Today prog. people for example who aren't stupid and could surely be made to understand the issues. Considering the power they wield I'm wondering if any efforts have been made to get them on side.
I'm almost moved to tears thinking about the Enlightenment (E16) WM. It has got to be the greatest lost opportunity there has ever been in the World of WM's. It is beautiful, fast and slick and so full of potential but it has been in a neglected, half finished state for years now while development attention is concentrated on E17.
I cannot understand why it has happened that way, all it needs is some modernising and cleaning up and some decent configuration tools. But who's going to bother contributing new themes,epplets or tools to E16 now with E17 sitting there? How many years will it be before E17 reaches the same level of maturity or beyond, I wonder?
I like(d) OpenBox too but the same thing seems to have happened there; 2.x approaching serious usability and then it's just dropped and a new 3.x series is written almost from scratch.
As for KDE, it's development has been based on an essentially commercial widget set so I guess there never was much danger of it being ripped up and rewritten. Yes it is clunky and I often wonder why the hell I'm using it when I see that it takes 14MB to paint a yellow square with a bit of text in it on my display but it's so well put together and there's so much stuff written for it now, I can't seem to get away from it. At least it looks prettier than most other WM's do when building it with colorgcc.;)
Your characterization of the denizens of our brave new cyber-world is persuasive, it probably is too easy to gain access to material to which one has no rights. I am convinced though that there are better ways of dealing with this situation than with scatter-gun legislation and intrusive, disabling technology of the DRM variety.
In the U.K. for example, the BBC, once the only provider of terrestrial broadcast television, is funded by what is known as a T.V. licence. Everyone who uses a T.V. in the U.K. must buy a copy of said licence annually.
So how do they ensure that a reasonable proportion of all T.V. users buy a license? They have snooper vans driving around the towns and cities finding out who is watching what programs on T.V. and checking this information against their database of license holders. Of course they don't even try to catch everyone, it would be too expensive but the fear of being caught is enough.
Perhaps a simple modification of this idea could be used to the same effect for enforcement of the rights of publishers and producers of DVD movies. Few people if any in the U.K. have as yet taken to living in Faraday cages.
Music and books are a knottier problem but it seems to me that a more direct relationship between artist and consumer is the way forward and I believe this has already begun to happen. It may not have been successful for the author Stephen King but it is early days and as far as I know, little experimentation has yet been done.
The desire of big business to ensure that there are exactly zero unauthorised copies of their products in circulation and the way they are going about achieving this, is likely if satisfied to leave us all living in a bland, homogeneous, manufactured teen pop music and supermarket pot-boiler infested cultural desert.
Well this is all very depressing. As if we didn't have enough to worry about with the software patent nightmare.
Well it's very sad that you have such a jaded opinion of your fellow/.er;) Sure there are unscrupulous people and more to the point, always have been, so why was the music recording industry not destroyed years ago when cassette tapes made it easy to pirate music from other tapes or from the radio? How much courage does a tape to tape copy take? It's just as anonymous too.
What the large companies are worried about is not the level of piracy in the west where it has never been an uncontrollable threat but in the 'developing' countries where piracy is rife due to different economic circumstances, ineffective laws, poor law enforcement and corruption. It is in these markets that they are really interested because they represent opportunities for phenomenal growth.
I don't see why I should lose my rights to fair use of their products just because they find the enormity of their ambitions of global market domination difficult to administer. Throughout history, industries have grown and declined, responded well or poorly to changing circumstance and new technologies, adapted or died. They have often tried to use legislation to protect themselves when in trouble and have generally failed. Why should I feel sorry for them if their outmoded business models and cumbersome bureaucracy ill equips them for today's marketplace?
Those companies stand to lose nothing whereas I and others like me stand to lose a very great deal by their actions. As for politicians, they should be protecting society by encouraging and if necessary enforcing freedom and diversity in the marketplace and in the public domain. Instead they pander to the desires of the richest lobbyist organizations at every turn. It doesn't help that the vast community of lawyers invariably benefit from floods of restrictive and protectionist legislation too.
I share your fears but I think the real problem is not the theft of copyright material by the public from the corporations but the theft of democracy by the corporations from the people.
At least that's what the MPAA and CCA among others like to think and that's because people tend to imagine that others are minimally dissimilar to themselves.
I use and only ever have used OSS because it has always been the only choice for software development, mathematical and scientific software that I can reasonably afford.
I bought a DVD drive some years ago and have since spent a lot of money on DVD movies. I have no intention of turning my PC into an industrial scale pirating machine, I don't even copy DVDs to hard drive - why would I bother?
None of my friends has ever asked me to copy a DVD for them and I don't expect they ever will since they know I'd just say "Buy your own you tight fisted git!"
Do I sound like a normal consumer of entertainment media? Aren't almost all people who buy DVDs like me? I hope so because I might be afraid to go outside if the streets are full of the kind of people the MPAA/CCA thinks they are. If they want to catch pirates then they can use something like unique watermarking together with investigative, forensic and epidemiological methods and cease trying to gain absolute control over each and every individual consumer from within their steel and concrete fortresses.
If the entertainment and publishing industries succeed in their Orwellian objectives and make it impossible for me to watch DVD movies on my GNU/Linux box I'll no longer be buying 3 or 4 movies a month, I might even be so angry I don't go to the cinema any more. But one thing I'll never do is castrate and lobotomize my PC by installing software on it that suits not my interests but the interests of the corporate megalomaniacs.
Yes I did read the article and my words may seem harsh but her Guardian contribution was Arlene McCarthy's first public response to her critics on these matters. She is a competent politician and is hardly likely to expose herself as an arrogant, duplicitous and venal harridan in full public view. The impression I have formed of her from following her (non-)communications with the ffii is rather less favourable than that which the Guardian piece alone might have conveyed.
When I made my posting, in the heat of the moment I erroneously assumed of the readership a familiarity with the subject, which I concede was journalistically very inept. Sorry about the logorrhoea too;)
It is tautological to say that the justification for Q.M. is experimental. The justification for any scientific theory is experimental. Q.M. was introduced and is best understood as a set of principles from which a mathematical scheme can be derived which is capable of predicting the outcomes of experiments. The results of those experiments are inexplicable from the classical point of view. Without an understanding of what those principles are, why they were necessary to the development of modern science and how they are used to build the mathematical scheme that is Q.M. one would be faced with an unintuitive and mathematically complex fait accompli.
Just as there are simple principles and ideas at the heart of special and general relativity so are there simple ideas underlying Q.M. I'd imagine that it would be rather comforting for a student to bear this in mind when first confronted with such a mathematically sophisticated theory. "The Principles of Quantum Mechanics" by P.A.M Dirac is a jolly good book and is not erroneously entitled !
Slashdot Mirror
Yes...No!
They have already granted around 30000 patents contrary to their own rules and the current law. One of the main motives for the directive about to be voted on is to save the EPO from the embarassment of having to admit and amend their appalling (deliberate?) mistakes.
A quick google search reveals that Viterbi most likely didn't patent his algorithm because he knew it wasn't new, having been described - in a more general form - by R. Bellman in his book "Dynamic Programming", published in 1957.
As expected, since the algorithm applies to such a general class of data (data generated by a HMM process) I also found that the Viterbi algorithm is used in other fields such as molecular biology and speech recognition.
It is dangerous and foolish to assert that some mathematical scheme is not a representation of any natural phenomenon. Logic dictates that in order to make such an assertion one would need to know every mathematical description of all natural phenomena.
This is typical of the (often deliberate) short-sightedness used in the arguments of those who advocate patentability of mathematical algorithms.
Offtopic ? Hardly.
"...but I really think he needs the assistance of some medical technology to help him with his smoking habit before he gets himself arrested for trying to destroy an airplane."
Ahh! - of course - I forgot to suffix a suitable emoticon in order that the illiterati who are inexplicably charged with the powers of moderation in these lofty fora, might thereby be assisted with the ability to recognize a touch of gentle humour when it slaps them in the face with a wet mackerel.
Grow up and get yourself an education, moderator.
The former Congressman is to be applauded for his insight into these matters - despite not being a technophile himself - but I really think he needs the assistance of some medical technology to help him with his smoking habit before he gets himself arrested for trying to destroy an airplane.
Well there's the EUCD (~= DMCA), although decss may well qualify under a fair use exemption. I think - hope - the fair use principle will be taken more seriously in Europe than it has been in the U.S.
I have tried Xine,Ogle,Videolan and Mplayer and found Ogle to be too primitive as yet. Xine has always worked extremely well for me (no instability) and is technically very proficient, plus it supports all the file formats I've ever needed it to. Videolan is pretty much equivalent to Xine but I don't like it's gui and it was annoying to have to build yet another gui toolkit (wxWindows) just for one app. Mplayer is in many ways technically superior to all the others and I would use it all the time except it doesn't support DVD navigation. If it ever does it would be a no-brainer, for me anyway.
If you have had stability problems with Xine, that's unlucky because I would rate it just ahead of Videolan, usability wise. My advice would be to set aside a day or a Weekend just for building and testing Mplayer, Xine and Videolan, reading all the documentation and trying different optimizations and runtime configurations until you find the one which suits you best.
If your research into software patents began long before 1978 then you have the experiential advantage but that does not make your (counter) arguments any more convincing or coherent. Nor does my failure to provide alternatives imply that such do not exist.
I am even less inclined to reiterate the primary and most powerful arguments against software patents now that I know of your research, since it follows that you must in fact be fully cognizant of them and yet you consider them worthless. That being so your reasoning is utterly alien to me.
The idea that my posting should be considered 'pro-patent' further confirms my suspicion that logic and meaning are, in your world, different concepts to that which they are in mine.
"Actually I've never seen a good explanation why software patents shouldn't be allowed."
/. posts let alone the large body of literature on the matter.
I'm not very well informed and I can't be bothered to read even the previous
"They usually boil to one of three arguments:"
So I'll just choose three of the weakest arguments I've seen and knock them down with some glib sophistry.
"At the same time, anti-patent rants rarely address the imbalance between inventing some clever device that uses gears which is patentable and some equally clever device that uses a computer to run on which according to anti-patent advocates should not be patentable. In other words, the mechanical engineer gets a patent, the computer engineer doesn't."
While I'm at it, I'll reveal the depth of my ignorance by falsely claiming a rarity when there exists in fact a wealth.
"There is no reason why should two equally creative, similar, useful discoveries, should be granted fundamentally different protection under the law."
Finally, I'll conflate discovery with creation and ignore the fact that there are already two fundamentally different kinds of legal protection for I.P.
Think music rather than literature. The realisation or expression of the plans for a piece of hardware is an expensive and difficult task involving the manipulation of physical materials but to play a tune from the notes written on a musical score is easy. You can hum the notes or learn to play the piano.
If a musical score can be described as the representation of human artistic, emotional and spiritual thought in a form communicable to others and expressible by means of the playing of musical instruments, then likewise a computer programme can be described as the representation of human rational, logical and mathematical thought in a form communicable to others and expressible by means of execution on a computer and associated devices.
You can get help by emailing europarl-se@ffii.org - show them the letter you got.
Just how do you distinguish between 'maths' and 'algorithms'? Who decides what is trivial and what is not? No doubt the satellite based GPS systems use 'non-trivial' 'algorithms' to make the corrections to their calculations that are necessary due to G.R.
Suppose Albert Einstein hadn't gotten around to the G.R. theory yet, but the GPS satellite people had - and had patented every algorithm they could think of that might possibly be of use to them, constituting in effect a statement of the theory. Then for starters you could kiss goodbye to modern cosmology and G.R. textbooks and if Professor Einstein had tried to publish his theory, he would have spent his last days in prison, courtesy of the DMCA.
You may be happy to live in a foul dystopia in which maths and science - ideas - are owned by commercial interests but I for one will fight to the last drop of my blood to prevent the realisation of such a monstrous vision.
While designing your standards compliant sites if you have netscape/mozilla a really useful sidebar to have is the devedge multibar. Along the same lines, here's an interesting site about css design.
Ah but this is Sci-Fi so maybe the circuitry was based on magnetic monopole currents instead of electron currents - iirc Blas Cabrera found a monopole once but lost it again, which was a shame since it was probably the only one in the Universe ;)
By the way, many of us Brits have pressured them to give us Ogg streams in the past and they even actually did so for a while but they have been very stuffy about I.P. issues.
Sadly they tend to commission much of the new stuff from external companies which insist on the use of Real streams to protect their I.P. So not only do we suffer this but whatever turns up in these archive releases is not likely to be added to significantly in the future.
It wouldn't surprise me if the Helix/Real stuff gets released around the time this archive comes online either. Then they'll have an excuse never to provide decent Ogg streams. I don't know about anyone else but I am not so easily fooled by a few coins thrown into the crowd by the benevolent panjandrums at the BBC. Everyone seems to think they're just going to dump the whole archive on a server and say "Help yourselves chaps and chappesses" - more likely they'll turn it into a number of managed channels. Anyway, the BBC should be making the programmes itself or using it's vast power to demand the I.P. rights of the stuff it commissions.
Maybe to most /. readers a story about obscure machinations in the bureaucracies of far off lands is a little too dull. I'd suggest spicing it up a bit with some catchier headlines:
;-) What really bothers me though is the lack of interest in the mainstream press. If it was literature, art or music facing this nightmare the likes of John Humphries of BBC Radio 4's Today programme would haul in the senior cabinet ministers and McCarthy would be MEP in charge of banana curvature the very next day.
"Patent War in Europe: Brussels to be razed to the ground"
"Evil tyrant McCarthy to face wrath of the people"
"World faces patent doom - Heroes march on Brussels"
When I submitted something on the same topic a while back I just used the old trick of mentioning RMS - works every time
If any fellow Brits are still reading this, I'd be interested to know if anyone has any experience of approaching the media. I mean the Today prog. people for example who aren't stupid and could surely be made to understand the issues. Considering the power they wield I'm wondering if any efforts have been made to get them on side.
Yeah - How can anyone lose a game of tic-tac-toe even once? It's impossible to lose unless you do so deliberately or are very, very stupid.
Interesting, I'll have a closer look at this later and it reminded me of the Berlin project (renamed to Fresco).
I'm almost moved to tears thinking about the Enlightenment (E16) WM. It has got to be the greatest lost opportunity there has ever been in the World of WM's. It is beautiful, fast and slick and so full of potential but it has been in a neglected, half finished state for years now while development attention is concentrated on E17.
;)
I cannot understand why it has happened that way, all it needs is some modernising and cleaning up and some decent configuration tools. But who's going to bother contributing new themes,epplets or tools to E16 now with E17 sitting there? How many years will it be before E17 reaches the same level of maturity or beyond, I wonder?
I like(d) OpenBox too but the same thing seems to have happened there; 2.x approaching serious usability and then it's just dropped and a new 3.x series is written almost from scratch.
As for KDE, it's development has been based on an essentially commercial widget set so I guess there never was much danger of it being ripped up and rewritten. Yes it is clunky and I often wonder why the hell I'm using it when I see that it takes 14MB to paint a yellow square with a bit of text in it on my display but it's so well put together and there's so much stuff written for it now, I can't seem to get away from it. At least it looks prettier than most other WM's do when building it with colorgcc.
Your characterization of the denizens of our brave new cyber-world is persuasive, it probably is too easy to gain access to material to which one has no rights. I am convinced though that there are better ways of dealing with this situation than with scatter-gun legislation and intrusive, disabling technology of the DRM variety.
In the U.K. for example, the BBC, once the only provider of terrestrial broadcast television, is funded by what is known as a T.V. licence. Everyone who uses a T.V. in the U.K. must buy a copy of said licence annually.
So how do they ensure that a reasonable proportion of all T.V. users buy a license? They have snooper vans driving around the towns and cities finding out who is watching what programs on T.V. and checking this information against their database of license holders. Of course they don't even try to catch everyone, it would be too expensive but the fear of being caught is enough.
Perhaps a simple modification of this idea could be used to the same effect for enforcement of the rights of publishers and producers of DVD movies. Few people if any in the U.K. have as yet taken to living in Faraday cages.
Music and books are a knottier problem but it seems to me that a more direct relationship between artist and consumer is the way forward and I believe this has already begun to happen. It may not have been successful for the author Stephen King but it is early days and as far as I know, little experimentation has yet been done.
The desire of big business to ensure that there are exactly zero unauthorised copies of their products in circulation and the way they are going about achieving this, is likely if satisfied to leave us all living in a bland, homogeneous, manufactured teen pop music and supermarket pot-boiler infested cultural desert.
Well this is all very depressing. As if we didn't have enough to worry about with the software patent nightmare.
Well it's very sad that you have such a jaded opinion of your fellow /.er ;) Sure there are unscrupulous people and more to the point, always have been, so why was the music recording industry not destroyed years ago when cassette tapes made it easy to pirate music from other tapes or from the radio? How much courage does a tape to tape copy take? It's just as anonymous too.
What the large companies are worried about is not the level of piracy in the west where it has never been an uncontrollable threat but in the 'developing' countries where piracy is rife due to different economic circumstances, ineffective laws, poor law enforcement and corruption. It is in these markets that they are really interested because they represent opportunities for phenomenal growth.
I don't see why I should lose my rights to fair use of their products just because they find the enormity of their ambitions of global market domination difficult to administer. Throughout history, industries have grown and declined, responded well or poorly to changing circumstance and new technologies, adapted or died. They have often tried to use legislation to protect themselves when in trouble and have generally failed. Why should I feel sorry for them if their outmoded business models and cumbersome bureaucracy ill equips them for today's marketplace?
Those companies stand to lose nothing whereas I and others like me stand to lose a very great deal by their actions. As for politicians, they should be protecting society by encouraging and if necessary enforcing freedom and diversity in the marketplace and in the public domain. Instead they pander to the desires of the richest lobbyist organizations at every turn. It doesn't help that the vast community of lawyers invariably benefit from floods of restrictive and protectionist legislation too.
I share your fears but I think the real problem is not the theft of copyright material by the public from the corporations but the theft of democracy by the corporations from the people.
At least that's what the MPAA and CCA among others like to think and that's because people tend to imagine that others are minimally dissimilar to themselves.
I use and only ever have used OSS because it has always been the only choice for software development, mathematical and scientific software that I can reasonably afford.
I bought a DVD drive some years ago and have since spent a lot of money on DVD movies. I have no intention of turning my PC into an industrial scale pirating machine, I don't even copy DVDs to hard drive - why would I bother?
None of my friends has ever asked me to copy a DVD for them and I don't expect they ever will since they know I'd just say "Buy your own you tight fisted git!"
Do I sound like a normal consumer of entertainment media? Aren't almost all people who buy DVDs like me? I hope so because I might be afraid to go outside if the streets are full of the kind of people the MPAA/CCA thinks they are. If they want to catch pirates then they can use something like unique watermarking together with investigative, forensic and epidemiological methods and cease trying to gain absolute control over each and every individual consumer from within their steel and concrete fortresses.
If the entertainment and publishing industries succeed in their Orwellian objectives and make it impossible for me to watch DVD movies on my GNU/Linux box I'll no longer be buying 3 or 4 movies a month, I might even be so angry I don't go to the cinema any more. But one thing I'll never do is castrate and lobotomize my PC by installing software on it that suits not my interests but the interests of the corporate megalomaniacs.
Yes I did read the article and my words may seem harsh but her Guardian contribution was Arlene McCarthy's first public response to her critics on these matters. She is a competent politician and is hardly likely to expose herself as an arrogant, duplicitous and venal harridan in full public view. The impression I have formed of her from following her (non-)communications with the ffii is rather less favourable than that which the Guardian piece alone might have conveyed.
;)
When I made my posting, in the heat of the moment I erroneously assumed of the readership a familiarity with the subject, which I concede was journalistically very inept. Sorry about the logorrhoea too
It is tautological to say that the justification for Q.M. is experimental. The justification for any scientific theory is experimental. Q.M. was introduced and is best understood as a set of principles from which a mathematical scheme can be derived which is capable of predicting the outcomes of experiments. The results of those experiments are inexplicable from the classical point of view. Without an understanding of what those principles are, why they were necessary to the development of modern science and how they are used to build the mathematical scheme that is Q.M. one would be faced with an unintuitive and mathematically complex fait accompli. Just as there are simple principles and ideas at the heart of special and general relativity so are there simple ideas underlying Q.M. I'd imagine that it would be rather comforting for a student to bear this in mind when first confronted with such a mathematically sophisticated theory. "The Principles of Quantum Mechanics" by P.A.M Dirac is a jolly good book and is not erroneously entitled !