Generally, you are right that "business logic" should be in the middle tier. A middle tier should have business logic, but there are a LOT of tasks that use SQL besides business logic.
For the data intensive operations used within the business logic, it is often helpful to encapsilate the data access using an API that resides in the database. This stops large amount of data going across the network. For example, an order fulfilment system might have a middle tier that decided whether an order could be shipped. It might call a "get_backordered_part_count" function and make a series of decisions based on the result.
Implementing that function in the middle tier accomplishes nothing because the same SQL hits the DB either way. If the logic in the function is complicated and can only be coded with several SQL statements, the extra network traffic and server round trips can be unacceptable.
A lot of other situations call for Stored procedures and triggers. For example, they are appropriate for writing a data integrity layer: if you denormalize your data model for performance, you need to write triggers to enforce the data integrity. Similarly, if you have raw data processing operations as is common for external system interfaces, data load and transformation operations, periodic jobs etc then it is good to write these in the data layer unless you'd rather push lots of extra data across the network for no identifiable reason.
I'll add a few more... - better monitoring capabilities, specifically
+ IO, memory, CPU, stats for all cached SQL statements
+ system and per-session stats on wait events
+ some way to check io balance per table, tablespace, disk level (need tablespaces first, of course)
+ list all SQL currently executing, with runtime - use archived logs and data files to do backup and recovery - log mining capabilities, including redo and undo SQL reconstruction - fast raw data loading, (compare oracle sql*loader) - multi-CPU parallel query capability - something akin to oracle's CONNECT BY queries on self-referential tables - bitmap indexes - job scheduling - queueing/messaging - sql optimizer hints
I don't think it is. Perl, Python, and TCL all run under UNIX and Windows. Hell, they're even compiled at runtime. And somehow they still use much less CPU and memory.
All of the languages you just named are slower than Java. This is common knowledge, but if you need proof, go to Bagley's language shootout. I think you should check your facts instead of making them up.
Don't get me wrong, I like Perl and Python and have used each of them for various tasks. Python's java implementation Jython is quite a nice way to fully mix java and python. I also like Ruby which you didn't mention.
I have 128M of memory. If that's not enough, then that's ridiculous. XNap, a Java napster client, takes ~20 seconds to start up. Java applets in Netscape take 15-30 seconds to start. Oh, and Sun's java plugin likes to crash Mozilla constantly, so I don't even bother enabling it in the first place.
I just downloaded XNap to have a look. I got the splash screen in 6 seconds on my P2 300 with 384 MB. I've never had mozilla 1.1 crash on me, and I often play a java/jython net game called wyvern that is a graphical 2D mud with real time combat.
I think you would do well to get more memory. No amound of memeory is "enough" -- memory always makes things go faster by avoiding swapping, especially if you like to have a lot of apps open at once.
And they're all boring enterprise level applications. While you may consider that a success, Java didn't change anything. Had it never been invented, though would have been written just the same, in C++.
Enterprise applications are boring, huh. I think that says a lot about the your perspective.
Most of those apps are likely written so poorly they only run on Windows anyway. I've heard Java's cross platformness is mostly a myth.
I think it is becoming clear that you are making assertions based on hearsay. My experience is exactly the opposite. In fact, it sounds more like you are describing VB than Java. Java's strongest point is that it really does steer you towards good programming practices. That was the biggest selling point for enterprise development, and the main reason C++ was mostly abandoned for enterprise apps.
Most of the hard parts of enterprise apps in java are written by specialists and offered to the world to reuse. Take a look at the Apache Jakarta project. The open source tools there are the driving force behind most of the enterprise apps out there.
It was invented before Flash. It has Netscape's backing. And it still has less market penetration.
Huh? I'll wait for the citation on that amazing claim. But in the meantime, go and do a job posting count at monster.com by keyword. I did and the results were as follows: flash 652 java 3518 Frankly, flash is about to find itself completely outdated when SVG takes over.
Java is a very nice OO language. Because of this, there is an extremely large body of existing class libraries that have names that are often abbreviated to acronyms. If you think the "learning curve" is too big, then by all means, use another language and start from scatch.
Java's slowness is often maligned, but java actually stacks up pretty well if you look at objective benchmarks. In Bagley's Language Shootout, java was 9th of 30 languages tested on linux. It does use a lot of memory, but only because of the overhead associated with the JVM runtime. Of course this is the price for writing code that work on windows, linux, mac, and random unix, so it is a tradeoff many accept. If this really bothers you, get a native java compiler and then you'll have smaller footprints but no portability.
I use several java apps on my P2 300, so I think you are exagerating. Odds are that you don't have much memory and that is what is slowing you down.
Java can only be considered a failure Really? Java was invented a few years ago. There are now more jobs programming java than any other language. I really don't see how that is a failure.
I currently use 1.1 at work under windows and at home under linux. I use it quite heavily and often have 10 to 15 tabs open. I have NEVER seen 1.1 crash, lock, or freeze.
I have had to kill IE at least twice during the same period, on the same machine, even though I use it maybe 5% of the time.
Patent Craziness Patents should protect "inventions", which have to be truly novel and non-obvious. The PTO has repeatedly been granting patents to things which do not deserve patent protection. An undeserved patent stifles innovation and creativity. Business process patents, software patents, and patents for computerizing otherwise ordinary activities are all stifling innovation.
Copyright Congress is fundamentally off track. I can only echo Justice O'Connor from the Eldred oral argument: "If the overall purpose of the Copyright Clause is to encourage creative work,... one wonders what was in the minds of the Congress". - Copyright is way too long. The Constitution authorizes Congress to protect "authors", not their children and grandchildren. Repeal the Sonny Bono Copyright Extension. - DMCA. It puts a locked safe around fair use, destroys first sale (which is NOT just the right to resell, but the beginning of full property rights for the purchaser), and creates a very nasty chilling affect for white-hat security research. When applied to software it violates the first amendment. Section 1201 is not a valid exercise of any enumerated Congressional power. Repeal the anti-circumvention provisions now. - Digital Restrictions Management (DRM) This does not need legislative assistence. NO! - Clickwrap/Shrinkwrap EULAs: these are not valid contracts, and any attempts to make them so using state law should be preempted by the Federal Copyright Act if the terms seek to unilaterily deny consumers the benefits of the Copyright Act, such as fair use, first sale rights, etc. In particular, reverse engineering clauses should NEVER be enforcable.
Privacy - Pass comprehensive spam legislation immediately - Stop companies from sharing data about me unless I explicitly "opt-in". This is especially important with phone records and financial records. This is a commerce power question, not a free speech question. Consumers have a right not to speak. The government can speak for it's citizens to say that they do not want to "opt in" by default. If they can "opt in" manually, there is no free speech issue. Outlaw pricing differently based on the choice.
That claim is made with respect to software, but not with respect to DVD's. There is no "licence" on a DVD.
The current state of EULA enforcement is very evenly divided. The 5th and 3rd Circuits have ruled EULAs are not enforcable. The 7th and Federal Circuits have ruled they are enforcable (the Fed Circuit case is being appealed -- we'll see). The 9th Circuit hasn't squarely addressed the issue, but "good" precedent exists there to draw from -- a bankruptcy case there says "manifest assent" is required to form a contract, and the recent Adobe v Softman district court case ruled that the transactions to retailers are "sales". This doesn't settle the issue, but it certainly puts clouds in the "licence" crowds sky.
It does not prevent the Plaintiff from trying again in TX.
On the other hand in TX, which is governed by the 5th Circuit, they would not get very far. Vault v. Quaid ruled that no-reverse engineering shrinkwrap clauses are not enforcable because (1) shrinkwraps are not valid contracts and (2) even when state law specifically says they are enforcable (as LA law did), that state law is preempted by Federal copyright law.
The judges didn't mention those issues (except to say DeCSS's aiming at the movie industry is a copyright issue, not a trade secret issue), because they are not germane to the single isolated jursidictional question that Pavlovich raised separately from "the merits". When a question of jurisdiction arises, the analysis is done by assuming that the plaintiff will have their day in court to prove the facts they allege. This results in a lot of factual assumptions that might not pan out.
"The merits" are going to be decided separately in another appeal to the CA SC. The case name for that is "DVDCCA v Bunner". Bunner has, in fact, already won at the appellate level, where they ruled that trade secret law would violate the First Amendment if it prevented 3rd parties from posting trade secrets to the internet when those 3rd parties have no independent duty to keep the secret.
Frankly, I do not think you should obey an immoral law, so long as you sincerely believe that your actions do not harm the legitimate rights that the Copyright owner should have. As a practical matter, your chances of getting caught watching your own DVD on your own laptop with an unlicenced player are about 1 in 10^-23.
As a separate issue, it isn't clear that a player program using "unauthorized" decryption is illegal if it doesn't actually expose the cleartext. The act of viewing the movie is not what is illegal, but rather the act of converting it into a form where the decrypted work can be captured is what creates the problem. DeCSS, as far as the DMCA goes, did expose the cleartext, so the fact that it has been ruled illegal does not answer the question.
Umm, this was a 4-3 decision. That pretty much defines groundbreaking. Your statement that state law cannot govern what is posted outside of their state is just flat wrong, and THIS court in fact gave the standard for when exactly that can happen, and carefully went over several different arguments that would have exposed Pavlovich's out of state conduct to CA law, but in each case was unable to find the critical elements.
In a nutshell, Pavlovich didn't "target" his action at California. He didn't target DVD-CCA because he didn't know they were in CA when his site posted DeCSS. He didn't target the movie industry, because they were copyright, not trade secret owners and it has to be the tort in question that was targeted at CA. He didn't target CA business clients because he wasn't in business and his website was "passive" and was therefore not aimed in any particular direction.
Had any one of those elements gone the other way, this case would have been decided differently. This is a very groundbreaking case because it really finds the absolute boundary of long arm jurisdiction statutes with regard to the internet, and (thank god) it found it stopped just short of where it would have had to be to hobble the internet.
The key to winning the case was that Pavlovich did not know that DVD CCA is based out of California (until after they sued him), and because he did not know this, certain legal tests fail, and he cannot be pursued as the suit was filed.
I think you overemphasize the importance of this element of the decision. Him not knowing the DVDCCA was in California was simply the batting down of one of the lame arguments made by the DVDCCA.
The real thrust of the matter is that you have to "target" your activity towards a state in order to be sued there. Pavlovich didn't and his Indiana/Texas based activity wasn't governed by California law. That is not a technicality, it is a very important result that says that passive posting on the internet will not be governed by the least common denominator laws.
Keep in mind that this decision is not the main decision on the merits -- that will come down when the "Bunner" appeal is decided. Here Pavlovich specifically argued that he shouldn't be lumped in to the California lawsuit because it wasn't California's place to decide if what he did in TX/IN was illegal because he didn't have any relationship with California.
Sure, everybody knows that. The litigation however was about DeCSS, which happened to be the first.
The decision today isn't even on the merits of DeCSS with respect to trade secret law. It is just a matter of who gets to decide. If you post something on the net in Texas/Indiana that allegedly causes damage to a trade secret in California, can you be taken to court there. The Court said "yes, but only if you target the damage toward California, and knowledge of the general industry that might be affected is not sufficient to meet this criteria".
So Pavlovich can defend his action in the 5th Circuit where the DVD-CCA can suck on Vault v Quaid which says even if state law prohibited reverse engineering, reverse engineering is legal because Federal copyight law preempts state law.
I began brainstorming for the comment I will submit. Here's some of my ideas. Feedback is welcome.
class of works 1: player device software or firmware designed to impede interoperability of the player with independent 3rd party works. Examples: "mod chips" for game consoles
class of works 2: digital works sold to the public for which no analogue TPM-free analogue version is published, "in print", and generally available for sale [if fair use is not raped b/c analogue is available then require it to be available for that reason]
class of works 3: Works published or owned by companies or authors that engage in anticompetitive business practices, antitrust violations, and/or deceptive trade practices involving their copyrighted products. The period of exception shall begin upon the rendering of a final judgement or legal settlement against the company and shall last until three years pass without a judicial or settlement finding of continued improper behavior. Examples: MS for antitrust, RIAA for price fixing
class of works 4: data sets, lists, databases, or other collections whose individual elements are public domain facts, not the original expression of the data set creator or licensing contributor thereto, or otherwise not copyrightable by the data set creator. Examples: the CDDB thing, the recent price list thing
class of works 5: a work or compilations containing a work whose copyright has expired Examples: DVD's of the really old movies
Well, actually that case only applied the equal protection clause of the 14th Amendment to corporations.
The completely odd thing is that corporations are undisputably property, which means that if they have the full rights given to a "person" under the Constitution, then corporations are an illegal form of slavery.
I also wonder if corporate personhood could be used to declare tax laws illegal. There is clearly a discrimination between people and corporations. Does this violate the equal protection clause?
No, I did not leave the "C" out. The DMCA creates anticircumvention provisions that apply to TPMs that protect copyrighted works. One a TPM is so "qualified" under the DMCA, circumventing it is illegal per se, meaning it doesn't matter what you do after your circumvention.
17 USC 1201(a)(1)(A) provides "No person shall circumvent a technological measure that effectively controls access to a work protected under this title."
17 USC 1201(a)(3)(A) defines this: " 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"
Your argument If you have a technological protection on something that is NOT COPYRIGHTABLE, circumventing it does NOT fall under the DM*C*A. has a logic error, because a TPM can protect multiple things. The question is not whether there exists something protected which is not copyrightable, but whether there exists something protected which IS copyrightable. If so, then NO bypassing of the TPM is allowed, even if the resulting access is used for fair use, non-infringing use, or to non-copyrightable or public domain elements.
Is this stupid/unfair/outrageous? yes. Should it be unconstitutional? I say yes, the 2nd Circuit said no. Is it the correct interpretation of the statute, notwithstanding whether or not that makes it Unconstitutional? yes.
A pricelist as a whole is copyrightable even if the individual prices as data elements are not. The descriptions of the items and their classification/ordering are copyrightable elements. Extracting the prices is a quintessential example of non-infringing use of facts. However the access circumvention that occured before this non-infringing activity is already in violation of 1201(a)(1) even if no data was copied. For example, the DMCA would prohibt such access even if it was used to do nothing other than eyeball the data. It sucks, but it is the law and it seems to be being enforced.
The article is about creating an **open standard** file format. It happens to use XML. There are a lot of tools that do various things with XML, so it offers a good base format to start an open standard document type from, but the thing that keeps you honest is the open standards approach, not XML.
Frankly, all XML really does is explode a file's size by encapsulating data with tags.
XML usually compresses very well, so this is really not much of an issue.
The clause prohibits circumvention without regard to whether the access so achieved is used for non-infringing purposes such as retreiving non-copyrightable elements.
To read the prices you must have some kind of access, authorized or not. If that access is non-circumventing, then you are in the clear. If it is via a circumvention, then it doesn't even matter if you do write the prices down -- you've already broken the law.
Prices are facts and cannot be copyrighted because they are not original works of authorship. See the Feist case, where an alphabetical listing of phone numbers was unanimously ruled to not be copyrightable.
However, a price sheet may involve some originality in selection, layout, graphics, descriptions, etc... and thus an exact reproduction of this might be infringing.
The interesting DMCA question is whether an access TPM to a copyrighted price sheet could be circumvented if the only thing extracted was the price data. I actually think the DMCA as written says such access IS illegal but that Congress has no Constutitional authority to pass such a law.
Then again, I think the 2nd Circuit's opinion upholding the DMCA was deeply flawed.
Is there a possible way to make a message be decrypted in two different ways with two different keys?
Yes, and there is even a stronger result. The one time pad has this property, because it is essentially just an XOR with random (known) bits. In fact, there exists a key that will produce ANY message (of proper length) from the cyphertext.
The problem, of course is that the one-time pad is impractical for mass use.
Slashdot Mirror
Generally, you are right that "business logic" should be in the middle tier. A middle tier should have business logic, but there are a LOT of tasks that use SQL besides business logic.
For the data intensive operations used within the business logic, it is often helpful to encapsilate the data access using an API that resides in the database. This stops large amount of data going across the network. For example, an order fulfilment system might have a middle tier that decided whether an order could be shipped. It might call a "get_backordered_part_count" function and make a series of decisions based on the result.
Implementing that function in the middle tier accomplishes nothing because the same SQL hits the DB either way. If the logic in the function is complicated and can only be coded with several SQL statements, the extra network traffic and server round trips can be unacceptable.
A lot of other situations call for Stored procedures and triggers. For example, they are appropriate for writing a data integrity layer: if you denormalize your data model for performance, you need to write triggers to enforce the data integrity. Similarly, if you have raw data processing operations as is common for external system interfaces, data load and transformation operations, periodic jobs etc then it is good to write these in the data layer unless you'd rather push lots of extra data across the network for no identifiable reason.
I'll add a few more...
- better monitoring capabilities, specifically
+ IO, memory, CPU, stats for all cached SQL statements
+ system and per-session stats on wait events
+ some way to check io balance per table, tablespace, disk level (need tablespaces first, of course)
+ list all SQL currently executing, with runtime
- use archived logs and data files to do backup and recovery
- log mining capabilities, including redo and undo SQL reconstruction
- fast raw data loading, (compare oracle sql*loader)
- multi-CPU parallel query capability
- something akin to oracle's CONNECT BY queries on self-referential tables
- bitmap indexes
- job scheduling
- queueing/messaging
- sql optimizer hints
I don't think it is. Perl, Python, and TCL all run under UNIX and Windows. Hell, they're even compiled at runtime. And somehow they still use much less CPU and memory.
All of the languages you just named are slower than Java. This is common knowledge, but if you need proof, go to Bagley's language shootout. I think you should check your facts instead of making them up.
Don't get me wrong, I like Perl and Python and have used each of them for various tasks. Python's java implementation Jython is quite a nice way to fully mix java and python. I also like Ruby which you didn't mention.
I have 128M of memory. If that's not enough, then that's ridiculous. XNap, a Java napster client, takes ~20 seconds to start up. Java applets in Netscape take 15-30 seconds to start. Oh, and Sun's java plugin likes to crash Mozilla constantly, so I don't even bother enabling it in the first place.
I just downloaded XNap to have a look. I got the splash screen in 6 seconds on my P2 300 with 384 MB. I've never had mozilla 1.1 crash on me, and I often play a java/jython net game called wyvern that is a graphical 2D mud with real time combat.
I think you would do well to get more memory. No amound of memeory is "enough" -- memory always makes things go faster by avoiding swapping, especially if you like to have a lot of apps open at once.
And they're all boring enterprise level applications. While you may consider that a success, Java didn't change anything. Had it never been invented, though would have been written just the same, in C++.
Enterprise applications are boring, huh. I think that says a lot about the your perspective.
Most of those apps are likely written so poorly they only run on Windows anyway. I've heard Java's cross platformness is mostly a myth.
I think it is becoming clear that you are making assertions based on hearsay. My experience is exactly the opposite. In fact, it sounds more like you are describing VB than Java. Java's strongest point is that it really does steer you towards good programming practices. That was the biggest selling point for enterprise development, and the main reason C++ was mostly abandoned for enterprise apps.
Most of the hard parts of enterprise apps in java are written by specialists and offered to the world to reuse. Take a look at the Apache Jakarta project. The open source tools there are the driving force behind most of the enterprise apps out there.
It was invented before Flash. It has Netscape's backing. And it still has less market penetration.
Huh? I'll wait for the citation on that amazing claim. But in the meantime, go and do a job posting count at monster.com by keyword. I did and the results were as follows:
flash 652
java 3518
Frankly, flash is about to find itself completely outdated when SVG takes over.
Java is a very nice OO language. Because of this, there is an extremely large body of existing class libraries that have names that are often abbreviated to acronyms. If you think the "learning curve" is too big, then by all means, use another language and start from scatch.
Java's slowness is often maligned, but java actually stacks up pretty well if you look at objective benchmarks. In Bagley's Language Shootout, java was 9th of 30 languages tested on linux. It does use a lot of memory, but only because of the overhead associated with the JVM runtime. Of course this is the price for writing code that work on windows, linux, mac, and random unix, so it is a tradeoff many accept. If this really bothers you, get a native java compiler and then you'll have smaller footprints but no portability.
I use several java apps on my P2 300, so I think you are exagerating. Odds are that you don't have much memory and that is what is slowing you down.
Java can only be considered a failure
Really? Java was invented a few years ago. There are now more jobs programming java than any other language. I really don't see how that is a failure.
If Markov Models have been used to classify text, then the only potentially novel part of this invention is the following two ideas:
1) email is text
2) the classification of email into "wanted" and "unwanted" is usefull
Both are obvious.
Check out what airforce.com runs.
The military is no exception, but there are also a lot of good admins out there too.
I currently use 1.1 at work under windows and at home under linux. I use it quite heavily and often have 10 to 15 tabs open. I have NEVER seen 1.1 crash, lock, or freeze.
I have had to kill IE at least twice during the same period, on the same machine, even though I use it maybe 5% of the time.
Outlaw spyware.
How comfortably did Boucher win by?
Patent Craziness
... one wonders what was in the minds of the Congress".
Patents should protect "inventions", which have to be truly novel and non-obvious. The PTO has repeatedly been granting patents to things which do not deserve patent protection. An undeserved patent stifles innovation and creativity. Business process patents, software patents, and patents for computerizing otherwise ordinary activities are all stifling innovation.
Copyright
Congress is fundamentally off track. I can only echo Justice O'Connor from the Eldred oral argument: "If the overall purpose of the Copyright Clause is to encourage creative work,
- Copyright is way too long. The Constitution authorizes Congress to protect "authors", not their children and grandchildren. Repeal the Sonny Bono Copyright Extension.
- DMCA. It puts a locked safe around fair use, destroys first sale (which is NOT just the right to resell, but the beginning of full property rights for the purchaser), and creates a very nasty chilling affect for white-hat security research. When applied to software it violates the first amendment. Section 1201 is not a valid exercise of any enumerated Congressional power. Repeal the anti-circumvention provisions now.
- Digital Restrictions Management (DRM) This does not need legislative assistence. NO!
- Clickwrap/Shrinkwrap EULAs: these are not valid contracts, and any attempts to make them so using state law should be preempted by the Federal Copyright Act if the terms seek to unilaterily deny consumers the benefits of the Copyright Act, such as fair use, first sale rights, etc. In particular, reverse engineering clauses should NEVER be enforcable.
Privacy
- Pass comprehensive spam legislation immediately
- Stop companies from sharing data about me unless I explicitly "opt-in". This is especially important with phone records and financial records. This is a commerce power question, not a free speech question. Consumers have a right not to speak. The government can speak for it's citizens to say that they do not want to "opt in" by default. If they can "opt in" manually, there is no free speech issue. Outlaw pricing differently based on the choice.
That claim is made with respect to software, but not with respect to DVD's. There is no "licence" on a DVD.
The current state of EULA enforcement is very evenly divided. The 5th and 3rd Circuits have ruled EULAs are not enforcable. The 7th and Federal Circuits have ruled they are enforcable (the Fed Circuit case is being appealed -- we'll see). The 9th Circuit hasn't squarely addressed the issue, but "good" precedent exists there to draw from -- a bankruptcy case there says "manifest assent" is required to form a contract, and the recent Adobe v Softman district court case ruled that the transactions to retailers are "sales". This doesn't settle the issue, but it certainly puts clouds in the "licence" crowds sky.
It does not prevent the Plaintiff from trying again in TX.
On the other hand in TX, which is governed by the 5th Circuit, they would not get very far. Vault v. Quaid ruled that no-reverse engineering shrinkwrap clauses are not enforcable because (1) shrinkwraps are not valid contracts and (2) even when state law specifically says they are enforcable (as LA law did), that state law is preempted by Federal copyright law.
The judges didn't mention those issues (except to say DeCSS's aiming at the movie industry is a copyright issue, not a trade secret issue), because they are not germane to the single isolated jursidictional question that Pavlovich raised separately from "the merits". When a question of jurisdiction arises, the analysis is done by assuming that the plaintiff will have their day in court to prove the facts they allege. This results in a lot of factual assumptions that might not pan out.
"The merits" are going to be decided separately in another appeal to the CA SC. The case name for that is "DVDCCA v Bunner". Bunner has, in fact, already won at the appellate level, where they ruled that trade secret law would violate the First Amendment if it prevented 3rd parties from posting trade secrets to the internet when those 3rd parties have no independent duty to keep the secret.
Nice summary. Thanks.
Frankly, I do not think you should obey an immoral law, so long as you sincerely believe that your actions do not harm the legitimate rights that the Copyright owner should have. As a practical matter, your chances of getting caught watching your own DVD on your own laptop with an unlicenced player are about 1 in 10^-23.
As a separate issue, it isn't clear that a player program using "unauthorized" decryption is illegal if it doesn't actually expose the cleartext. The act of viewing the movie is not what is illegal, but rather the act of converting it into a form where the decrypted work can be captured is what creates the problem. DeCSS, as far as the DMCA goes, did expose the cleartext, so the fact that it has been ruled illegal does not answer the question.
Umm, this was a 4-3 decision. That pretty much defines groundbreaking. Your statement that state law cannot govern what is posted outside of their state is just flat wrong, and THIS court in fact gave the standard for when exactly that can happen, and carefully went over several different arguments that would have exposed Pavlovich's out of state conduct to CA law, but in each case was unable to find the critical elements.
In a nutshell, Pavlovich didn't "target" his action at California. He didn't target DVD-CCA because he didn't know they were in CA when his site posted DeCSS. He didn't target the movie industry, because they were copyright, not trade secret owners and it has to be the tort in question that was targeted at CA. He didn't target CA business clients because he wasn't in business and his website was "passive" and was therefore not aimed in any particular direction.
Had any one of those elements gone the other way, this case would have been decided differently. This is a very groundbreaking case because it really finds the absolute boundary of long arm jurisdiction statutes with regard to the internet, and (thank god) it found it stopped just short of where it would have had to be to hobble the internet.
The key to winning the case was that Pavlovich did not know that DVD CCA is based out of California (until after they sued him), and because he did not know this, certain legal tests fail, and he cannot be pursued as the suit was filed.
I think you overemphasize the importance of this element of the decision. Him not knowing the DVDCCA was in California was simply the batting down of one of the lame arguments made by the DVDCCA.
The real thrust of the matter is that you have to "target" your activity towards a state in order to be sued there. Pavlovich didn't and his Indiana/Texas based activity wasn't governed by California law. That is not a technicality, it is a very important result that says that passive posting on the internet will not be governed by the least common denominator laws.
Keep in mind that this decision is not the main decision on the merits -- that will come down when the "Bunner" appeal is decided. Here Pavlovich specifically argued that he shouldn't be lumped in to the California lawsuit because it wasn't California's place to decide if what he did in TX/IN was illegal because he didn't have any relationship with California.
Sure, everybody knows that. The litigation however was about DeCSS, which happened to be the first.
The decision today isn't even on the merits of DeCSS with respect to trade secret law. It is just a matter of who gets to decide. If you post something on the net in Texas/Indiana that allegedly causes damage to a trade secret in California, can you be taken to court there. The Court said "yes, but only if you target the damage toward California, and knowledge of the general industry that might be affected is not sufficient to meet this criteria".
So Pavlovich can defend his action in the 5th Circuit where the DVD-CCA can suck on Vault v Quaid which says even if state law prohibited reverse engineering, reverse engineering is legal because Federal copyight law preempts state law.
I began brainstorming for the comment I will submit. Here's some of my ideas. Feedback is welcome.
class of works 1: player device software or firmware designed to impede
interoperability of the player with independent 3rd party works. Examples: "mod chips" for game consoles
class of works 2: digital works sold to the public for which no analogue TPM-free
analogue version is published, "in print", and generally available for sale [if fair use is not raped b/c analogue is available then require it to be available for that reason]
class of works 3: Works published or owned by companies or authors that engage in
anticompetitive business practices, antitrust violations, and/or deceptive trade practices
involving their copyrighted products. The period of exception shall begin upon the
rendering of a final judgement or legal settlement against the company and shall last
until three years pass without a judicial or settlement finding of continued improper
behavior. Examples: MS for antitrust, RIAA for price fixing
class of works 4: data sets, lists, databases, or other collections whose individual
elements are public domain facts, not the original expression of the data set creator or
licensing contributor thereto, or otherwise not copyrightable by the data set creator. Examples: the CDDB thing, the recent price list thing
class of works 5: a work or compilations containing a work whose copyright has expired Examples: DVD's of the really old movies
Well, actually that case only applied the equal protection clause of the 14th Amendment to corporations.
The completely odd thing is that corporations are undisputably property, which means that if they have the full rights given to a "person" under the Constitution, then corporations are an illegal form of slavery.
I also wonder if corporate personhood could be used to declare tax laws illegal. There is clearly a discrimination between people and corporations. Does this violate the equal protection clause?
I'm amazed this got moderated up to 4.
No, I did not leave the "C" out. The DMCA creates anticircumvention provisions that apply to TPMs that protect copyrighted works. One a TPM is so "qualified" under the DMCA, circumventing it is illegal per se, meaning it doesn't matter what you do after your circumvention.
17 USC 1201(a)(1)(A) provides "No person shall circumvent a technological measure that effectively controls access to a work protected under this title."
17 USC 1201(a)(3)(A) defines this: " 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"
Your argument If you have a technological protection on something that is NOT COPYRIGHTABLE, circumventing it does NOT fall under the DM*C*A. has a logic error, because a TPM can protect multiple things. The question is not whether there exists something protected which is not copyrightable, but whether there exists something protected which IS copyrightable. If so, then NO bypassing of the TPM is allowed, even if the resulting access is used for fair use, non-infringing use, or to non-copyrightable or public domain elements.
Is this stupid/unfair/outrageous? yes. Should it be unconstitutional? I say yes, the 2nd Circuit said no. Is it the correct interpretation of the statute, notwithstanding whether or not that makes it Unconstitutional? yes.
A pricelist as a whole is copyrightable even if the individual prices as data elements are not. The descriptions of the items and their classification/ordering are copyrightable elements. Extracting the prices is a quintessential example of non-infringing use of facts. However the access circumvention that occured before this non-infringing activity is already in violation of 1201(a)(1) even if no data was copied. For example, the DMCA would prohibt such access even if it was used to do nothing other than eyeball the data. It sucks, but it is the law and it seems to be being enforced.
The article is about creating an **open standard** file format. It happens to use XML. There are a lot of tools that do various things with XML, so it offers a good base format to start an open standard document type from, but the thing that keeps you honest is the open standards approach, not XML.
Frankly, all XML really does is explode a file's size by encapsulating data with tags.
XML usually compresses very well, so this is really not much of an issue.
The clause prohibits circumvention without regard to whether the access so achieved is used for non-infringing purposes such as retreiving non-copyrightable elements.
To read the prices you must have some kind of access, authorized or not. If that access is non-circumventing, then you are in the clear. If it is via a circumvention, then it doesn't even matter if you do write the prices down -- you've already broken the law.
Prices are facts and cannot be copyrighted because they are not original works of authorship. See the Feist case, where an alphabetical listing of phone numbers was unanimously ruled to not be copyrightable.
However, a price sheet may involve some originality in selection, layout, graphics, descriptions, etc... and thus an exact reproduction of this might be infringing.
The interesting DMCA question is whether an access TPM to a copyrighted price sheet could be circumvented if the only thing extracted was the price data. I actually think the DMCA as written says such access IS illegal but that Congress has no Constutitional authority to pass such a law.
Then again, I think the 2nd Circuit's opinion upholding the DMCA was deeply flawed.
Is there a possible way to make a message be decrypted in two different ways with two different keys?
Yes, and there is even a stronger result. The one time pad has this property, because it is essentially just an XOR with random (known) bits. In fact, there exists a key that will produce ANY message (of proper length) from the cyphertext.
The problem, of course is that the one-time pad is impractical for mass use.