That's essentially the point of trademark protection. The point of trademark protection is (or, at least, should be) to enable people to be able to find out who, exactly, manufactured a given item that they are considering to buy. This is so they can reliably be able to obtain (or avoid) products manufactured by that particular party. This fosters competition because well-informed consumers are better able to cull poor manufacturers than what poorly-informed consumers would be.
Unsurprisingly, commercial interests have managed to transform trademarks into something that is rather more valuable to them than this simple interepretation would suggest. But the point of trademarks is not to be of value to manufacturers - the point is to be of value to the consumers. It is therefore not particularly important for us to hang on to these new aspects of trademarks and if they have become a serious impediment to free competition, we probably shouldn't.
The point is, these people are making a profit off of someone else's hard work. Is that right or wrong? That rather depends on how much one values progress. If we could not do this, we'd still be in the stone age somewhere. This may or may not have been a good thing, of course, depending on your point of view.
It's still trademark infringement. The question I am raising isn't whether it is trademark infringment. The question is whether it should be trademark infringement. I don't think that it should and I also don't think we should permit trademarks to be used in such a way that they effectively convey a copyright-like protection to a product that would otherwise not be eligible for copyright.
One could always argue that people who see you wearing the fake article may be misled to think you're wearing the genuine one, and so if the fake one is of inferior quality, they may decide not to buy that brand. Hypothethically speaking. I do not find this particular argument very compelling. The problem it describes is either very marginal (i.e. there aren't very many copies around) in which case the negative impact on the trademark is negligible, or else it is relatively common in which case people will tend to know about it and know to make sure to get the "real thing" if that is what they want. (And trademark law protects their ability to go to a shop and be able to distinguish original from knockoff.)
The argument I most commonly see in the media etc. to outlaw honest knockoffs is this: "counterfeit medicine can kill you and so it is obvious that we must outlaw knockoff sneakers". I don't know why people are buying this but I suppose I can always blame the schools . . .
I've heard of the cops raiding flea markets to bust people selling counterfeit clothes (think fake Tommy Hilfiger stuff - non-Tommy stuff with the Tommy logo on it). In my book, selling knockoffs, bootlegs, etc, as the real thing is Piracy. How about if you do not sell it as the real thing. I.e., you have a sign that says "Tommy Hilfiger knockoffs - almost indistinguishable from the real thing" or somesuch.
This is basically what is getting at me - if a customer wants to buy a fake shirt or purse or whatever then he should be free to do so. This doesn't really appear to be the case anymore - it seems to be a case of trademarks gone bad.
I wondered who'd be the first to launch an ad hominem attack - and look, right in the first comment. That is hardly an ad hominem attack - it's simply an insult. An ad hominem attack is one that is used in an attempt to weaken the other side's arguments by attacking the person that is making them. There is nothing to suggest that the OP is trying to convince us that the weakness which is described does not exist. In fact, his message implies that he acknowledges that the weakness does exist (because if it didn't, then not reporting it would hardly be worthy of criticism), but that he thinks the guy who found it is an asshole all the same.
What makes you thinkthe small island of Britain has a right to push cultural influence outside of its own borders? This question puzzles me. Why should they not have this right? If freedom of speech is important on a domestic level, why would it not be equally important on an international one? If the content turns out of be of no interest to the world at large, they'll just ignore it. (Although my opinion is that the BBC produces content of sufficiently high quality that it will not, in fact, be totally ignored.)
I think it would be far more valuable to Britain to venture out looking for cultural influence from outside. This seems to be a false dilemma. Surely, it is possible both to export culture and to import it at the same time.
Don't get me wrong I am not attacking Britain, but we are long past the days of the British Empire and there is too much naval gazing and self congratulation in nations throughout the world without more pushing of their own views. Countries would have more benefit if they looked beyond themselves for their own growth. It will be difficult to look beyond oneself for cultural input if everyone around you is jealously guarding all of their goods. My suggestion is basically that Britain not prevent others from looking to it should they so choose.
Is it better than mandating into your national broadcaster that they should be pushing "the British way/view" as you put it? I am not sure where, or how, I "put" that. I am suggesting that Britain should spend money to make their cultural production available to the world at large. How they go about doing this is certainly an interesting question, but I don't think that I even hinted that the solution might be "force Brazilians at gunpoint to watch Shooting Stars". If I suggested anything then it might have been, considering the context of this debate, "make BBC content available on the internet without DRM".
As a license fee payer myself, I do not care if third parties have access. Good for them! One minor question that has been bugging me for a while is this: has Britain totally given up any attempt at cultural influence beyond its own borders? I have for long time considered that the cultural value inherent in BBC's very high quality of programming could be a most potent tool in gendering understanding for "the British way/view" abroad if only the world at large were given ready access to it. Surely, such an effect would have considerably more value to Britain than whatever it is they would be spending (or losing) in making it available.
What first had me wondering about this was when I heard (a couple of years back I think) that BBC would stop some international broadcasts it was doing, apparantly because it would save them money to do so. It just seems so very short-sighted.
They have to do all they can to ensure license payers get the content for free, and those without licenses don't. That's why as DRM exists, they're forced to use it, as without it, they'd be in breach of their charter. But, certainly, it is sufficiently easy to make an argument that DRM is ineffective (and, additionally, that it inconveniences the license payers) that if they had wanted to they could easily have neutralized that particular line of reasoning.
Under "6.[3] Conveying Non-Source Forms.", there appears to be considerable freedom granted to manufacturers of non-"User Products". While it is unclear to me exactly what that language means, it appears to be saying that if IBM wants to coopt GPLv3 code and sell it as (part of) a proprietary solution to their business customers (i.e. not as a "User Product"), they are quite free to do so and there is nothing anyone can do about it.
I still have some hope that I am wrong in this regard - I expect the answer will fall out of the debate up till and immediately after the final v3 release.
From what little I have seen of US domestic debates from this side of the pond, it appears to me that pretty much all US presidents the last 20 years (at least) have come under severe criticism for willfully ignoring the law. It may very well be that the characterisation holds for the office of the president in general - that is, it has become a tradition - rather than just apply to its current occupant. This would also be a problem.
If similar criticism were to be fielded by serious political opponents here (in Norway) against a sitting government it would pretty much be a tremendous political scandal the likes of which has scarcely been seen in sixty years and heads would roll on one side or the other. But then, in Taiwan MPs throw shoes at eachother as a matter of course... foreigners are just weird I suppose...:-)
Not quite - it's designed so that any contributions to it, if the result is distributed, are given back to the community. To my disappointment and surprise, I am coming to the conclusion that GPLv3 may be too open to coopting (via the much debated IBM exception) to be of interest to me. It's basically becoming a "BSD lite" license. This, of course, is a vindication for the "GPLv2 only, none of that GPLv2 or later crap" crowd. (Of which I have been a proud but silent member.)
Here's for hoping that Someone will eventually write a proper Free license that does not have an IBM exception clause - but which does address the googlification and tivoization issues.
While I don't know enough of domestic US politics to be any kind of final judge, the following word seems interesting in this context (emphasis is mine).
From The Collaborative International Dictionary of English v.0.48 [gcide]: Tyrant (...)
1. An absolute ruler; a sovereign unrestrained by law or constitution; a usurper of sovereignty. [1913 Webster]
2. Specifically, a monarch, or other ruler or master, who uses power to oppress his subjects; a person who exercises unlawful authority, or lawful authority in an unlawful manner; one who by taxation, injustice, or cruel punishment, or the demand of unreasonable services, imposes burdens and hardships on those under his control, which law and humanity do not authorize, or which the purposes of government do not require; a cruel master; an oppressor. "This false tyrant, this Nero." --Chaucer. [1913 Webster]
No, my response is not a non-sequitur. I was responding to the claim that "I wouldn't pirate if they sold [licenced] it for cheaper." I did so through a comparison to the claim "I wouldn't shoplift if they sold it for cheaper." Such an argument does not depend on the wrongness of shoplifting, or any underlying justification for shoplifting being wrong. It merely depends on the tenuousness of a person's claim that he would stop violating someone's legal rights, if that person sold those legal rights for less. In this case, I do not see what point you were trying to convey with your response. Was it purely rhetorical? After all, "I wouldn't steal food if I could actually afford to feed my family" would be an equally valid comparison but it wouldn't have much meaningful content in relation to the debate. Neither does yours if you remove any underlying consideration of wrongness in the response. Or is your point that the law shall always be followed as written regardless of any other considerations?
Oh, sure, I'd quit shoplifting too if the man weren't exploiting me with his high prices. I promise. You seem to have a warped view of why shoplifting is wrong. Shoplifting is wrong not because you end up with a product. It is wrong not because you end up with a product that you haven't paid for. It is wrong because you took that product away from whoever owned it before without their permission and now they no longer have it.
With this in mind, your response is a non sequitur.
It is absolutely true that 40,000 people die in traffic accidents. But these are a) accidents I'm not sure about the US, but here in Norway there is a hugely underreported tendency for people to commit suicide by smashing into oncoming traffic. It also wouldn't surprise me if some sick individuals like to use their vehicles to "accidentally" kill for sport.
Both of these are likely to remain underreported, in part because people love their cars and don't care much to hear stories about how this love affair has all sorts of tragic consequences.
b) not food products sold in a supermarket. Oh, I am quite sure many of them involve people that are transporting food either to or from a supermarket. The point is that we are prepared to accept a great many things that we might otherwise think are unfortunate, in the name of convenience and luxury. The relative media silence on these topics is not some sort of censorship campaign, it's just a natural consequence of people not being generally interested in hearing about them.
Or to put it another way, if a media channel were to start reporting heavily on these topics, no one would care to watch them, they wouldn't get any ad revenue, and they would either go out or business or else have to continue on as some sort of charity project financed by a wealthy patron.
It's delayed-censored or trimmed down significantly to make it seem minor. You seem to be confusing censorship with disinterest. Most people wouldn't really care about this even if you told them about it. This being the case, there's not much point in telling them and so the media chooses not to do too much of it.
It's the same sort of thing with traffic accidents. It kills about 40,000 people in the US every year and so in actual fact, they are a complete disaster. People don't care, however, so you rarely see this on the front page. Lose 100 people in a plane crash, on the other hand, and it'll be all over the media for weeks on end. It's not censorship so much as it's apathy.
Yeah, according to the BBC report, censorship is spreading. It is probably more accurate to say that the internet is spreading. And when it spreads to a state that censors all its information, of course they will also censor the internet.
The only channels that will not be censored in such states are those that are too small or obscure to end up on the information departments' bulleted lists. Internet used to be one of these, but that time is fast coming to an end.
They are still using a Microsoft product. Well, yes, but I would tend to reserve the classification of "customer" to someone who actually bought it from them.
The point of Express is to provide a coding environment for beginners and hope they upgrade, which I'm sure some eventually do. Indeed, which is why Microsoft doesn't want Express to be particularly useful. If it is, then that reduces the incentive to upgrade it.
Besides, anyone interested in the products is probably already a Windows customer at the very least. If nothing else, chances are they're running it on a Microsoft OS I suppose. Of course, that doesn't necessarily mean they paid for it:-)
What's ironic is that the dev's users are MICROSOFT CUSTOMERS. Those of the developer's users that are affected by this are users of the Express product, and this makes them not actual Microsoft customers since Express is available for free download.
This is the crux of the matter: Microsoft doesn't want its free Express line to become too useful because then it will start competing with its non-free brethren.
On the other hand, the developer presumably wants to be able to sell his plugin to Express users because that increases the potential market for his product.
This is taking advantage of a technical limitation, which the EULA does say it is not permitted. I feel that the language of the EULA is simply too vague to be of any use whatsoever. A "technical limitation" can be anything and unless they are specific about what is and is not permitted, it's simply not a useful description. If you cannot add plugins into the IDE out of the box, is this a technical limitation? If you cannot trade stocks with the IDE out of the box, is this a technical limitation? If you cannot connect to your favourite online game with the IDE out of the box, is this a technical limitation? Strictly, they all are but at least two of them are clearly the sort of programming challenges the user of the IDE is supposed solve using the IDE. It is not clear why the third is not also.
The entire point of a programming language is to overcome some technical limitation (e.g. I can't access my ethernet card) so distributing an IDE and then saying you can't use it to overcome "technical limitations" is vacuous at best.
It seems to me that MS simply couldn't decide at the time exactly what they did and did not want the Express users to be able to do and so they just put in some wildcard clauses in the EULA and left the decision for later. It's not as if it would have cost them many calories to write "you cannot write plugins that work with Express" in the EULA, if they had actually known at the time that they didn't want people to be doing this.
If you make the device flashable then you open it up to the same problem that has plagued AACS - namely that it becomes possible to reflash the device with a modified firmware. Presumably, the reflashing procedure is protected by a secret key which may be unique for each device so not just anyone can do it (e.g. each owner receives a patch from the vendor that has been customised with his own specific device's license key and the patch is signed so that the hardware knows it's ok to write it to flash). This protection would need to be hardcoded in order to protect it from tampering (so if that breaks, one would have the problem you originally outlined). This will tend to be such a tight piece of code, however, that it shouldn't take many iterations to make it bullet proof. If a license key should get out in the wild, that key will be invalidated. This will affect one single (legitimate) device and so isn't much of a problem for the vendor.
The only real problem with this scheme, I expect, is the insider threat. Large organisations are notoriously bad at keeping secrets and with a database of a million unique device keys, who's going to miss one single one? The opportunity for and temptation to leak keys will just be too great. And when it comes to entertainment, you only really need to obtain a new key every few months or so in order to de-DRM all the new products that have hit the market since your last leaked key got invalidated.
As for satellite providers, I expect that once DRM matures, the real question becomes how feasible it is to break (or social engineer your way) into the hardware-based key materiel (whether smartcard based or other), hence my comparison. I do agree that the attacks on smartcards et al are likely to greatly intensify should DRM start to make use of them. Which should be interesting to watch:-)
Here in the states, for Presidential elections then whoever gets the most votes in a state wins the entire state... This is definitely a problem, as it means that the minority gets completely overrun by whoever managed to get the most votes. Now, when you're voting for one single person this practically has to be the case, hence my comments about moving power over to congress. If members of congress(*) tend to be elected in much the same manner, however, this is a fundamental problem with the system.
* - I can sort of understand this for the senate as theres's simply too few senators per state (two?) for the representatives to be proportionately distributed along the percentages of the votes, but it should be doable for the house of representatives?
Explain how this non-proportional voting system works. In Norway, we are worried that people that live far away from the capital receive less influence over government because they're so far removed from it and it from them. We therefore tend to give more seats in parliament (per capita) to far-off regions. This effectively means that if you live in northern Norway, your vote has more direct political impact than if you live in the capital. Likewise, we are worried that regions with low population counts will have their concerns overrun by the more urbanised regions and so we tend to give them more seats per capita also.
It's called "gerrymandering". I never quite understood why politicans in the US can get away with this. It might just be the extreme political polarization that leads to an "anything goes" type of political climate I suppose. The opposition party becomes the enemy and you'll basically do anything to defeat an enemy.
You can't expect people to upgrade their computers every year when the latest DRM gets broken (and lets face it, the firmware in HD-DVD players is getting reverse engineered and cracked at a spectacular rate at the moment). If you implement the salient bits in flashable firmware, you can issue firmware updates when you need to plug a hole in the algorithm. You will probably also need to issue new keys, which is a bit of a drag when they're on smartcards, but that's just the price you pay for control.
So long as you put the final decryption very close to the analog output (i.e. in the speaker), the number of vulnerable components should be small enough that it might be managable.
DRM is fundamentally doomed - you're putting both the encrypted content and decryption system in the hands of a very large group of technically capable people who have plenty of motivation to break the system. Doing it in hardware makes things harder for the code breakers, but it also makes it harder to replace the system once it's broken. Anyone who wants to know how this is likely to pan out should probably be watching the ongoing war between satellite TV providers and the consumers who don't want to pay for satellite. They tend to have high-tech solutions and resourceful hackers working to thwart them, much like the situation should/will be for DRM.
In a non-proportional voting system, because they are a minority and thus unable to win any singe election they get 0% of the representation. It seems to me that this comment is based on some antiquated winner-takes-all type election system. If so, then that is your problem, not the distribution of the votes.
A non-proportional voting system means that even if your ethnic group constitutes only 1% of the population, their political voting power is larger than that - say 2%. By the same token, then another ethnic group that constitutes 20% of the population may only have 19% of the political voting power. (The fine tuning is left as an exercise for parliament:-)
From top to bottom the system is designed such that it supports only two deeply entrenched political parties. Winner-takes-all voting of Presidents and Representatives means that only the Encumbant and a single Challenger have any mathematical hope of winning. By having only a single alternative, an alternative from the same party that was kicked out in the previous election and is part of the same power structure, means that we have lost our ability to be represented because we don't really have choice. You probably need to move a lot of power from the president over to congress. It then becomes less of a winner-takes-all situation and even smaller parties can jockey for power within the committees and whatnot.
Slashdot Mirror
Unsurprisingly, commercial interests have managed to transform trademarks into something that is rather more valuable to them than this simple interepretation would suggest. But the point of trademarks is not to be of value to manufacturers - the point is to be of value to the consumers. It is therefore not particularly important for us to hang on to these new aspects of trademarks and if they have become a serious impediment to free competition, we probably shouldn't. The point is, these people are making a profit off of someone else's hard work. Is that right or wrong? That rather depends on how much one values progress. If we could not do this, we'd still be in the stone age somewhere. This may or may not have been a good thing, of course, depending on your point of view.
The argument I most commonly see in the media etc. to outlaw honest knockoffs is this: "counterfeit medicine can kill you and so it is obvious that we must outlaw knockoff sneakers". I don't know why people are buying this but I suppose I can always blame the schools . . .
This is basically what is getting at me - if a customer wants to buy a fake shirt or purse or whatever then he should be free to do so. This doesn't really appear to be the case anymore - it seems to be a case of trademarks gone bad.
What first had me wondering about this was when I heard (a couple of years back I think) that BBC would stop some international broadcasts it was doing, apparantly because it would save them money to do so. It just seems so very short-sighted.
Under "6.[3] Conveying Non-Source Forms.", there appears to be considerable freedom granted to manufacturers of non-"User Products". While it is unclear to me exactly what that language means, it appears to be saying that if IBM wants to coopt GPLv3 code and sell it as (part of) a proprietary solution to their business customers (i.e. not as a "User Product"), they are quite free to do so and there is nothing anyone can do about it.
I still have some hope that I am wrong in this regard - I expect the answer will fall out of the debate up till and immediately after the final v3 release.
From what little I have seen of US domestic debates from this side of the pond, it appears to me that pretty much all US presidents the last 20 years (at least) have come under severe criticism for willfully ignoring the law. It may very well be that the characterisation holds for the office of the president in general - that is, it has become a tradition - rather than just apply to its current occupant. This would also be a problem.
... foreigners are just weird I suppose ... :-)
If similar criticism were to be fielded by serious political opponents here (in Norway) against a sitting government it would pretty much be a tremendous political scandal the likes of which has scarcely been seen in sixty years and heads would roll on one side or the other. But then, in Taiwan MPs throw shoes at eachother as a matter of course
Here's for hoping that Someone will eventually write a proper Free license that does not have an IBM exception clause - but which does address the googlification and tivoization issues.
Well, a man can hope
0) an analogy 1) a car analogy
2) a car analogy on Slashdot.
While I don't know enough of domestic US politics to be any kind of final judge, the following word seems interesting in this context (emphasis is mine).
From The Collaborative International Dictionary of English v.0.48 [gcide]:
Tyrant (...)
1. An absolute ruler; a sovereign unrestrained by law or constitution; a usurper of sovereignty. [1913 Webster]
2. Specifically, a monarch, or other ruler or master, who uses power to oppress his subjects; a person who exercises unlawful authority, or lawful authority in an unlawful manner; one who by taxation, injustice, or cruel punishment, or the demand of unreasonable services, imposes burdens and hardships on those under his control, which law and humanity do not authorize, or which the purposes of government do not require; a cruel master; an oppressor. "This false tyrant, this Nero." --Chaucer. [1913 Webster]
With this in mind, your response is a non sequitur.
a) accidents I'm not sure about the US, but here in Norway there is a hugely underreported tendency for people to commit suicide by smashing into oncoming traffic. It also wouldn't surprise me if some sick individuals like to use their vehicles to "accidentally" kill for sport.
Both of these are likely to remain underreported, in part because people love their cars and don't care much to hear stories about how this love affair has all sorts of tragic consequences. b) not food products sold in a supermarket. Oh, I am quite sure many of them involve people that are transporting food either to or from a supermarket. The point is that we are prepared to accept a great many things that we might otherwise think are unfortunate, in the name of convenience and luxury. The relative media silence on these topics is not some sort of censorship campaign, it's just a natural consequence of people not being generally interested in hearing about them.
Or to put it another way, if a media channel were to start reporting heavily on these topics, no one would care to watch them, they wouldn't get any ad revenue, and they would either go out or business or else have to continue on as some sort of charity project financed by a wealthy patron.
It's the same sort of thing with traffic accidents. It kills about 40,000 people in the US every year and so in actual fact, they are a complete disaster. People don't care, however, so you rarely see this on the front page. Lose 100 people in a plane crash, on the other hand, and it'll be all over the media for weeks on end. It's not censorship so much as it's apathy.
The only channels that will not be censored in such states are those that are too small or obscure to end up on the information departments' bulleted lists. Internet used to be one of these, but that time is fast coming to an end.
This is the crux of the matter: Microsoft doesn't want its free Express line to become too useful because then it will start competing with its non-free brethren.
On the other hand, the developer presumably wants to be able to sell his plugin to Express users because that increases the potential market for his product.
The entire point of a programming language is to overcome some technical limitation (e.g. I can't access my ethernet card) so distributing an IDE and then saying you can't use it to overcome "technical limitations" is vacuous at best.
It seems to me that MS simply couldn't decide at the time exactly what they did and did not want the Express users to be able to do and so they just put in some wildcard clauses in the EULA and left the decision for later. It's not as if it would have cost them many calories to write "you cannot write plugins that work with Express" in the EULA, if they had actually known at the time that they didn't want people to be doing this.
The only real problem with this scheme, I expect, is the insider threat. Large organisations are notoriously bad at keeping secrets and with a database of a million unique device keys, who's going to miss one single one? The opportunity for and temptation to leak keys will just be too great. And when it comes to entertainment, you only really need to obtain a new key every few months or so in order to de-DRM all the new products that have hit the market since your last leaked key got invalidated.
As for satellite providers, I expect that once DRM matures, the real question becomes how feasible it is to break (or social engineer your way) into the hardware-based key materiel (whether smartcard based or other), hence my comparison. I do agree that the attacks on smartcards et al are likely to greatly intensify should DRM start to make use of them. Which should be interesting to watch
* - I can sort of understand this for the senate as theres's simply too few senators per state (two?) for the representatives to be proportionately distributed along the percentages of the votes, but it should be doable for the house of representatives? Explain how this non-proportional voting system works. In Norway, we are worried that people that live far away from the capital receive less influence over government because they're so far removed from it and it from them. We therefore tend to give more seats in parliament (per capita) to far-off regions. This effectively means that if you live in northern Norway, your vote has more direct political impact than if you live in the capital. Likewise, we are worried that regions with low population counts will have their concerns overrun by the more urbanised regions and so we tend to give them more seats per capita also. It's called "gerrymandering". I never quite understood why politicans in the US can get away with this. It might just be the extreme political polarization that leads to an "anything goes" type of political climate I suppose. The opposition party becomes the enemy and you'll basically do anything to defeat an enemy.
So long as you put the final decryption very close to the analog output (i.e. in the speaker), the number of vulnerable components should be small enough that it might be managable. DRM is fundamentally doomed - you're putting both the encrypted content and decryption system in the hands of a very large group of technically capable people who have plenty of motivation to break the system. Doing it in hardware makes things harder for the code breakers, but it also makes it harder to replace the system once it's broken. Anyone who wants to know how this is likely to pan out should probably be watching the ongoing war between satellite TV providers and the consumers who don't want to pay for satellite. They tend to have high-tech solutions and resourceful hackers working to thwart them, much like the situation should/will be for DRM.
A non-proportional voting system means that even if your ethnic group constitutes only 1% of the population, their political voting power is larger than that - say 2%. By the same token, then another ethnic group that constitutes 20% of the population may only have 19% of the political voting power. (The fine tuning is left as an exercise for parliament