The initial release of DeCSS was a Windows-only binary, clearly intended only for copying, using code supplied by a major Windows piracy group (DoD)
Let me make an analogy, if I may (those who've seen my other post where I make a similar point, feel free to skip this).
In The Begining...(TM)... there were no compilers that ran on the PalmPilot. But people wanted to write programs that ran on the Palm. So PC compilers were written which generated files (in this case machine code) which worked on the Palm. The compilers themselves ran on a PC, but their sole purpose was to allow them to achive interoperability with their PalmPilot.
Fast forward to DeCSS. In The Begining, Linux couldn't read the UDF filesystem. Therefore, a program which worked under Windows (which could), which would generate a file which worked in Linux could have as its sole purpose achieving interoperability with Linux, without DeCSS itself ever running on Linux.
That may or may not have been its original intent, but the fact that it was originally Windows-only at a time when such a program couldn't be written under Linux is irrelevant to that.
Well, DeCSS was written first for Windows, and then ported to Linux. I've heard that this was because of a lack of UDF (DVD filesystem) support in the linux kernel until recently, although I don't know that for a fact.
If that is true, then that definitely negates Judge K's assertion that the fact that DeCSS runs on Windows means that it was designed to do other things other than achieve interoperability with Linux.
That wasn't clear, was it? How about an analogy: There didn't used to be C compilers that ran on PalmPilots. Therefore PC C compilers were written which would generate a file (machine code) which could be used on the Palm. The sole purpose of those compilers was to achieve interoperability with the Palm. In the DeCSS case, something was written in Windows that generated a file which could be used on Linux, whose sole purpose may have been to achieve interoperability with Linux, without the software itself running on Linux.
Of course, Judge K then goes on to say that even if the only purpose was to view DVDs under Linux, it would still be illegal, so this is all a moot point.
You've still got the problem of people with Linux on StrongARM, MIPS, PPC, Alpha, Sparc, etc. And also the problem of NetBSD, FreeBSD and OpenBSD people.
You cannot release the player advocated above in source form. To do so just plain invalidates what the industry people are defending.
That's not the majority, though... to be more specific, most of the people who are upset are x86 Linux users who would be placated by a binary full-featured DVD player. The FreeBSD folk might even be able to deal with that. The only other platform where DVD players are common that Linux runs is PPC, so a PPC binary would placate a lot of the rest of the community.
I'm sure if they did that, a number of their defendents would melt away and be happy, making it easier for the MPAA to win. Unless the judge notices that the simple fact that a lot of defendents were now happy proved that people were using DeCSS to watch their own DVDs, not to copy them.;-)
If the MPAA really wants the DeCSS code to stop being propogated, there's one thing they should do:
Write (or get someone to write) a full-featured Linux DVD player.
That's it. A large fraction of the people who are up in arms over this issue don't really care about free speech, constitutional rights, etc, they just are Linux users who want to be able to watch their DVDs. There will still be some smaller fraction of us who will stick it to them, but I suspect the majority would be placated.
Of course, it may be too late... if they'd been able to get something released back when DeCSS first was created, it wouldn't have exploded everywhere the way it did. Hell, if something had been available before DeCSS was created, it might not have even been created. But now that everyone's really upset and wants to prove to the MPAA how wrong they are, that might not even save them.
You take a DVD, which costs $2 to produce. You spend $0.33 to coat it with Magical Degradation Coating. Then instead of selling it for $20, you sell it for $3. It seems to me the manufacturers are paying for the ability to charge less... doesn't make much sense.
Or to put it in other terms, the margin on a normal DVD is about $18, and the margin on one of these will be $0.66. You need to sell over 25 of these for every normal DVD sale you lose to break even, never mind to make money from this.
When you see that, this is how I'd recommend responding:
"My name is Alex Fiennes [ed: I'm assuming that from your email address]. Let's say that I decide to get the domain alexfiennes.com, since that is my name, and make a website at www.alexfiennes.com that has whatever I want on it, which happens to include profanity, nudity, and/or whatever else you find offensive. I have this website for 3 years happily, and the website is well-known in the community. Then one day some guy named Alex Fienne (no S) creates a toy company, gets the website www.alexfienne.com, and sues me to prevent me using www.alexfiennes.com despite the fact that I've been using alexfiennes.com (which is my name) for 3 years before the toy company was even created. Who is in the right?"
Once they say that yes, you are in the right and the toy company isn't, point out that the only change you've made in this entire story is substitute "alexfienne" for "etoy" (well, and flipped around which one has the S).
I think this is important because it's probably people like you're talking about who are the most important people to influence. All the/. regulars know how stupid etoys is being. All the business traders see is "someone going to etoys, a business site, can accidentally see something I find offensive", and so they line up behind etoys. But I don't think most of them are so stupid that they won't realize what's really going on when it's presented properly.
I just wandered through the selector's briefs on all of the candidates, and I was a little shocked when I came across David McReynolds page, read through his views, and then noticed that he's the candidate from the Socialist Party.
Now I knew that the political spectrum in the USA was a little skewed, but after reading his brief, he strikes me as the poster boy of moderate liberals, ie. just left of centre. And in the US, he's a socialist.
That would be really funny if it weren't such a frightening statement about American politics.
3)As a result of lack of knowledge about FreeBSD not much commercial software is available for it. Linux has a growing amount of commercial software for it.
Since FreeBSD and Linux both use ELF binaries, any well-written application written for one should work on the other, shouldn't it? Mind you, I've seen some commercial software that isn't entirely happy outside the distribution it was written on, never mind on a different OS.:-b
4)As a result of a smaller user base, FreeBSD is less likely to have drivers for brand-new boards than linux.
Often true (and self feeding), but it's a two-way street. For example, USB support is much better on FreeBSD than on Linux at this point.
The FoF points out a multitude of nasty things MS has done over the years. However it struck me that only about a third of them seemed to be truly anti-trust issues (ie. unfairly leveraging their monopoly to take over competition in other venues). Which of the Judge's facts do you think will actually be deemed illegal, and which are just run-of-the-mill business nastiness?
I don't think anyone off-line didn't think that MS had a monopoly. I think what they're shocked at (and I haven't talked to any non-techies about it yet, so take this with appropriate amounts of NaCl) is how MS leveraged their monopoly in nasty ways.
Actually, there are genres that are completely full of computer geeks. Mainly industrial and electronica.
Sure, they're not mainstream (as much as the record labels recently tried to push electronica as The Next Big Thing - they're still trying to find the next grunge), but they are a fairly significant music market, and are way over-represented online largely because they're created by geeks.
I dare anyone to say that Kraftwerk aren't perceived as computer geeks.;-)
Actually he had a complete monopoly from the very begining of the age of PC's. You do remember a little thing called DOS don't you?
Of course, back in those days Apple was a serious competitor. Plus there were 3 different companies making DOSes (MS did stomp on Caldera, but the only sneaky anti-IBM thing they did was release 6.2 after 6.0 so it would appear to be better than PC-DOS 6.1)
It wasn't until Win95 exploded that they had enough of a monopoly that it was worth leveraging.
MS should be free to innovate, as should all companies.
Ah, and therein lies the problem. I don't think anyone will argue that MS should be free to innovate (or if they do, they're letting anti-MS emotions get in the way of their rationality). And everyone will say on paper that other companies should be able to innovate as well.
But whether other companies can innovate when MS bullies them is the question. Specifically, the FoF talks at great length about OEMs who tried to make the Win95 installation procedure easier to end users (innovation). MS told them to stop (since it was a way of installing Navigator instead of IE) or MS would revoke their Win95 licenses.
If Win95 at the time was indeed a monopoly on PC OSes, then this constitutes MS preventing the OEM from innovating.
My favourite quote so far is on page 75, talking about direct-mailing of CD-ROMs with browser software (emphasis is mine):
A large percentage of the unsolicited disks distributed through "carpet bombing" reach individuals who do not have PCs, who already have pre-installed browsing software, or who have no interest in browsing the Web. In practice, less than two percent of CD-ROM disks disseminated in mass-distribution campaigns are
used in the way the distributor intended.
Anyone else think the judge is just itching to make some sort of comment about coasters, but can't bring himself to?:)
Of course, now/. has a web forum with a title XXXX For Dummies. Which, unlike the original archive message, really is something set up consciously by the web site owners with a title which infringes on the trademark yadda yadda yadda. Of course, it's still not commercial, so it's legal. But if the IDG lawyers were overzealous enough to go after that, they'll definitely be overzealous enough to go after this. [TMB]
There are chemical engineers in the rest of the (metric) world too, who have presumably figured out the appropriate constants. It's just a matter of using them.
As long as the big record labels control the supply of most popular music, they will still sit fat, whether the format is CD, MP3, DVD, or telepathically transmitted aural stimulation.;-)
What's really interesting about the record labels this decade is that they're trying to re-create the big music boom of the early 90s when record sales skyrocketed. However, there were a bunch of different factors that all came together to create the original boom:
CDs became the popular medium, which had the advantages of being portable like cassettes, with the sound quality of LPs; this change was so great that not only was it a great format to buy new music on, but people went and bought on CD music that they already owned on other media
the grunge/alternative and rap scenes went mainstream (rap at the end of the 80s, grunge at the begining of the 90s)
A lot of good music was released within a small period of time
Now record labels have been trying to find "the next grunge" for about 4 years (so far they've tried ska, electronica, 80s band greatest hits/comebacks, and Celtic rock), not realizing that the other factors were just as important.
So how does that relate to MP3s? As soon as the record execs get their heads out of various bits of their anatomy about MP3s being too easy to pirate, they'll notice strong parallels between MP3s and radio. When popular music stations exploded in the 50s, the record companies were dead set against them; if you could hear popular music on the radio without paying for it, how could they make money from selling music recordings? Now, of course, we know how specious this argument was... in fact, radio has helped record companies more than any other phenomenon because they can dictate playlists and manufacture popularity for their artists.
As long as the record companies can find a way of becoming the main distribution centre for MP3s of the artists who they want to be popular, nothing much will change.
And, of course, I get a great tan just driving to and from work. I'll bet those of us techno babes living in the Silicon Valley could get a great tan in the 1+ hours traffic each way on 101...
Unfortunately, you tend to get the ever-popular one-sided tan unless you commute both ways at the same time of day...;-)
crit.org has had universal web annotation for a while now... but that didn't stop Third Voice from claiming they were the first earlier this year. The first proprietary one, perhaps.
Slashdot Mirror
Let me make an analogy, if I may (those who've seen my other post where I make a similar point, feel free to skip this).
In The Begining...(TM)... there were no compilers that ran on the PalmPilot. But people wanted to write programs that ran on the Palm. So PC compilers were written which generated files (in this case machine code) which worked on the Palm. The compilers themselves ran on a PC, but their sole purpose was to allow them to achive interoperability with their PalmPilot.
Fast forward to DeCSS. In The Begining, Linux couldn't read the UDF filesystem. Therefore, a program which worked under Windows (which could), which would generate a file which worked in Linux could have as its sole purpose achieving interoperability with Linux, without DeCSS itself ever running on Linux.
That may or may not have been its original intent, but the fact that it was originally Windows-only at a time when such a program couldn't be written under Linux is irrelevant to that.
[TMB]
If that is true, then that definitely negates Judge K's assertion that the fact that DeCSS runs on Windows means that it was designed to do other things other than achieve interoperability with Linux.
That wasn't clear, was it? How about an analogy: There didn't used to be C compilers that ran on PalmPilots. Therefore PC C compilers were written which would generate a file (machine code) which could be used on the Palm. The sole purpose of those compilers was to achieve interoperability with the Palm. In the DeCSS case, something was written in Windows that generated a file which could be used on Linux, whose sole purpose may have been to achieve interoperability with Linux, without the software itself running on Linux.
Of course, Judge K then goes on to say that even if the only purpose was to view DVDs under Linux, it would still be illegal, so this is all a moot point.
[TMB]
The mirrors, yes. But gyros fail and were fully expected to.
On the other hand, the decaying CCD on Chandra was a big "oops", though they've stabilized it.
[TMB]
"If I could kill without guilt or sin, there'd soon be a few less record executives"
;-)
Come on everyone, join in with your favourite anti-record-company song lyric!
[TMB]
That's not the majority, though... to be more specific, most of the people who are upset are x86 Linux users who would be placated by a binary full-featured DVD player. The FreeBSD folk might even be able to deal with that. The only other platform where DVD players are common that Linux runs is PPC, so a PPC binary would placate a lot of the rest of the community.
I'm sure if they did that, a number of their defendents would melt away and be happy, making it easier for the MPAA to win. Unless the judge notices that the simple fact that a lot of defendents were now happy proved that people were using DeCSS to watch their own DVDs, not to copy them. ;-)
[TMB]
If the MPAA really wants the DeCSS code to stop being propogated, there's one thing they should do:
Write (or get someone to write) a full-featured Linux DVD player.
That's it. A large fraction of the people who are up in arms over this issue don't really care about free speech, constitutional rights, etc, they just are Linux users who want to be able to watch their DVDs. There will still be some smaller fraction of us who will stick it to them, but I suspect the majority would be placated.
Of course, it may be too late... if they'd been able to get something released back when DeCSS first was created, it wouldn't have exploded everywhere the way it did. Hell, if something had been available before DeCSS was created, it might not have even been created. But now that everyone's really upset and wants to prove to the MPAA how wrong they are, that might not even save them.
[TMB]
Okay, let me see if I get this right...
You take a DVD, which costs $2 to produce. You spend $0.33 to coat it with Magical Degradation Coating. Then instead of selling it for $20, you sell it for $3. It seems to me the manufacturers are paying for the ability to charge less... doesn't make much sense.
Or to put it in other terms, the margin on a normal DVD is about $18, and the margin on one of these will be $0.66. You need to sell over 25 of these for every normal DVD sale you lose to break even, never mind to make money from this.
I don't see the manufacturers hopping on board.
[TMB]
Is there someone who was there who could give an outline of the MPAA argument? I'm curious.
[TMB]
... right here. Written with an attitude. ;-)
[TMB]
It's meta-slashdot-drinking game! ;-)
[TMB]
When you see that, this is how I'd recommend responding:
/. regulars know how stupid etoys is being. All the business traders see is "someone going to etoys, a business site, can accidentally see something I find offensive", and so they line up behind etoys. But I don't think most of them are so stupid that they won't realize what's really going on when it's presented properly.
"My name is Alex Fiennes [ed: I'm assuming that from your email address]. Let's say that I decide to get the domain alexfiennes.com, since that is my name, and make a website at www.alexfiennes.com that has whatever I want on it, which happens to include profanity, nudity, and/or whatever else you find offensive. I have this website for 3 years happily, and the website is well-known in the community. Then one day some guy named Alex Fienne (no S) creates a toy company, gets the website www.alexfienne.com, and sues me to prevent me using www.alexfiennes.com despite the fact that I've been using alexfiennes.com (which is my name) for 3 years before the toy company was even created. Who is in the right?"
Once they say that yes, you are in the right and the toy company isn't, point out that the only change you've made in this entire story is substitute "alexfienne" for "etoy" (well, and flipped around which one has the S).
I think this is important because it's probably people like you're talking about who are the most important people to influence. All the
[TMB]
I just wandered through the selector's briefs on all of the candidates, and I was a little shocked when I came across David McReynolds page, read through his views, and then noticed that he's the candidate from the Socialist Party.
Now I knew that the political spectrum in the USA was a little skewed, but after reading his brief, he strikes me as the poster boy of moderate liberals, ie. just left of centre. And in the US, he's a socialist.
That would be really funny if it weren't such a frightening statement about American politics.
[TMB]
Since FreeBSD and Linux both use ELF binaries, any well-written application written for one should work on the other, shouldn't it? Mind you, I've seen some commercial software that isn't entirely happy outside the distribution it was written on, never mind on a different OS. :-b
Often true (and self feeding), but it's a two-way street. For example, USB support is much better on FreeBSD than on Linux at this point.
[TMB]
The FoF points out a multitude of nasty things MS has done over the years. However it struck me that only about a third of them seemed to be truly anti-trust issues (ie. unfairly leveraging their monopoly to take over competition in other venues). Which of the Judge's facts do you think will actually be deemed illegal, and which are just run-of-the-mill business nastiness?
[TMB]
I don't think anyone off-line didn't think that MS had a monopoly. I think what they're shocked at (and I haven't talked to any non-techies about it yet, so take this with appropriate amounts of NaCl) is how MS leveraged their monopoly in nasty ways.
[TMB]
Actually, there are genres that are completely full of computer geeks. Mainly industrial and electronica.
;-)
Sure, they're not mainstream (as much as the record labels recently tried to push electronica as The Next Big Thing - they're still trying to find the next grunge), but they are a fairly significant music market, and are way over-represented online largely because they're created by geeks.
I dare anyone to say that Kraftwerk aren't perceived as computer geeks.
[TMB]
Of course, back in those days Apple was a serious competitor. Plus there were 3 different companies making DOSes (MS did stomp on Caldera, but the only sneaky anti-IBM thing they did was release 6.2 after 6.0 so it would appear to be better than PC-DOS 6.1)
It wasn't until Win95 exploded that they had enough of a monopoly that it was worth leveraging.
[TMB]
I love how the MS response only quotes the one paragraph in the entire 412-paragraph finding which is pro-MS. ;-)
[TMB]
Ah, and therein lies the problem. I don't think anyone will argue that MS should be free to innovate (or if they do, they're letting anti-MS emotions get in the way of their rationality). And everyone will say on paper that other companies should be able to innovate as well.
But whether other companies can innovate when MS bullies them is the question. Specifically, the FoF talks at great length about OEMs who tried to make the Win95 installation procedure easier to end users (innovation). MS told them to stop (since it was a way of installing Navigator instead of IE) or MS would revoke their Win95 licenses.
If Win95 at the time was indeed a monopoly on PC OSes, then this constitutes MS preventing the OEM from innovating.
[TMB]
My favourite quote so far is on page 75, talking about direct-mailing of CD-ROMs with browser software (emphasis is mine):
Anyone else think the judge is just itching to make some sort of comment about coasters, but can't bring himself to? :)
[TMB]Of course, now /. has a web forum with a title XXXX For Dummies. Which, unlike the original archive message, really is something set up consciously by the web site owners with a title which infringes on the trademark yadda yadda yadda. Of course, it's still not commercial, so it's legal. But if the IDG lawyers were overzealous enough to go after that, they'll definitely be overzealous enough to go after this. [TMB]
There are chemical engineers in the rest of the (metric) world too, who have presumably figured out the appropriate constants. It's just a matter of using them.
[TMB]
What's really interesting about the record labels this decade is that they're trying to re-create the big music boom of the early 90s when record sales skyrocketed. However, there were a bunch of different factors that all came together to create the original boom:
Now record labels have been trying to find "the next grunge" for about 4 years (so far they've tried ska, electronica, 80s band greatest hits/comebacks, and Celtic rock), not realizing that the other factors were just as important.
So how does that relate to MP3s? As soon as the record execs get their heads out of various bits of their anatomy about MP3s being too easy to pirate, they'll notice strong parallels between MP3s and radio. When popular music stations exploded in the 50s, the record companies were dead set against them; if you could hear popular music on the radio without paying for it, how could they make money from selling music recordings? Now, of course, we know how specious this argument was... in fact, radio has helped record companies more than any other phenomenon because they can dictate playlists and manufacture popularity for their artists.
As long as the record companies can find a way of becoming the main distribution centre for MP3s of the artists who they want to be popular, nothing much will change.
[TMB]
Unfortunately, you tend to get the ever-popular one-sided tan unless you commute both ways at the same time of day...
[TMB]
crit.org has had universal web annotation for a while now... but that didn't stop Third Voice from claiming they were the first earlier this year. The first proprietary one, perhaps.
[TMB]