"Er, no, the natural thing to do is not to buy intentionally crippled devices."
That would be a great idea if you could actually do it. Unfortunately, the national cell phone providers all cripple their phones to some degree. Only new laws will help to adjust this anti competitive behavior. The first law should be state laws banning year long service contracts. Cell phones would cost more but users would be more likely to switch carriers when the service is poor and make the carriers really compete. Yes, phones would "cost" more upfront, but you are paying that cost right now as higher prices in your cell phone bill anyway.
"So basically your saying here, that Child pornography is fine and dandy,"
No! For goodness sake no! Child pornography is not dandy. Please show where I said that. Wait--I'll save you the trouble! I didn't. Please try your straw argument with someone else.
Nope. They think porn is illegal. Check out the Frontline documentary "American Porn." You'll find that the Administration is ramping up the obscenity prosecutions and have said that "nobody" is safe. They are federally prosecuting people as we speak, starting with extreme porn producers with the intent of working their way down to ordinary porn, anything that includes any of the "three E's": Erection, Emission or Entry.
Remember that this is the Administration that put a drape over the bare breast on the statue of "Lady Justice." Although anti-porn crusader John Ashcroft has left, the mantle has been taken up by Alberto "Torture is OK" Gonzales.
Clearly you underestimate the Bush Administration.
It does, but most wedding photographers make their clients sign a contract that says the work for hire is not work for hire!
However, the presumption of copyright law is that work you commission is owned by you.
This mess is due, in large part, to the change in copyright law that presumes everything is copyright even though there is no copyright attribution. This mess has to change and it will take new laws to do it.
In Canada, photographers were pushing for a law that would have presumed copyright in favor of the photographer instead of the client. Photographers should change their pricing models from selling reprints to charging for their expertise when they take the photos.
A stipulation where? Not in copyright law. Copyright does not allow you rights to reproduce "orphan" works such as wedding photographers--at least in the US.
This problem is much bigger than Walmart. Ironically copyright law *presumes* that the person who commissioned the work owns the copyright, therefore if you or your relatives are in the photos it is reasonable to assume that the copyright belongs to you regardless of who took the pictures. Professional photographers try to turn copyright law on its head and make clients sign contracts saying that the work for hire is not work for hire and that the photographer owns all rights to your photographs.
The first thing is to never agree to give up copyright to a photographer. Remember, if there is no written contract to the contrary, any photography you commission is copyright by *you*, regardless of whether the photographer tries to write "proof" or copyright by so and so. If this wasn't' the case, those pictures you ask strangers to take of you on vacation wouldn't belong to you either.
At least one European country has a law saying that you have a right to reproduce pictures of yourself or of dead relatives. We need such a law to make sure that our heritage isn't locked up by silly copyrights.
Fair Tax is an interesting idea, but you'll have to document all of your purchases to qualify for the "spending up to the poverty level" rebate. "Fair Tax" also ignores wholesale spending, unlike a VAT tax and encourages consumption by the rich while out of the country.
I think we are going to disagree on this issue. I'm more interested in the principle than the individual in this case.
The principle is that Walker County can charge you with possession even if you have never requested the images or viewed them. The images could be preloads, popups, or even downloaded via mal-ware. They don't care. They will charge you with a count for every image that your computer viewed--and pop-ups or mal-ware could download images for four hours.
Given that the Bush Administration believes that even pr0n that features consenting adults is illegal, this prosecution should be seen as extremely dangerous to your civil rights. It won't take vile child porn to get you thrown in jail--just anything the Administration doesn't approve of. It is guilt by association. Guilt for seeing. Guilty knowledge. And we are talking big time jail.
You are very impressed that he viewed the images for four hours. If that is what impresses you so, then the law should just state that viewing the images is illegal rather than possession. But laws don't do that because we know that we shouldn't throw people in jail for having seen something--hence the reason we require possession. If he had seen the images on TV we wouldn't be talking right now, but web browsers keep a temporary cache that is meant to be *temporary* and should not be considered possession anymore than the fact you could type in a URL and get the images should be considered possession.
Mind you, child molesters need to go to jail, but thought crimes and laws that presume guilt are a danger to us all.
PS, Orwellian *is* capitalized since it is based on Orwell's name.
Dude, he is getting 20 years not 20 hours! The man may be scum, but he is going to get longer for 4 hours of web browsing than most murders or actual child molesters get. He is being charged with a separate count for every image that his web browser displayed.
This is very, very dangerous. With typosquatting domains that make money of of pr0n pop ups and use endless "on exit" java script loops, anybody could wind up with illegal pr0n on their computer--and Walker County could prosecute you for each and every image as a separate count, regardless of whether you meant to download it.
This case is much, much bigger than the one person charge here. Charging people with possession for the mere act of seeing something is positively Orwellian.
You don't have to win a law suit to ruin someone. You only have to out spend them--which is easy to do if you are going up against a group of volunteers. Microsoft could demand all communications with anybody, and they could halt the development and distribution of Samba with an injunction, even if they had a near nonexistent case.
Microsoft has a history of using lawsuits to its advantage. They even are so blatant as to use what are supposed to be losing settlements to actually increase their monopoly power, as they have done in this case.
Why would you want to underestimate Microsoft's malice? You must know and admit your enemies strengths if you ever hope to win against them--and yes, Microsoft is the enemy.
I doesn't matter if Samba reverse engineered the protocols or not. What matters is that Microsoft can *say* that any future functionality to Samba came from Microsoft's specs and use that to sue Samba out of existence, ala SCO. (Sure, SCO hasn't won, but only because IBM has deep pockets, unlike the Samba team...)
Well, Slashdoter's know that Copyright Infringement != Terrorism, but for those who don't I have an answer.
If terrorists make money of of copyright infringement the answer is not to crackdown on copyright infringement because that only makes the infringement *more* valuable. I think we can all see how well the War on Drugs has gone. No, the solution is to take away the value of the infringement and the terrorists alleged profits by creating more balanced copyright laws.
If anything would push unwary citizens "into the hands of terrorists" it will be the broadcast flag. Soon, the only way to record "American Idol" in HD will be to have an al Qaeda terrorist come to your house and set them up with a Broadcast Flag-free Tivo.
If copyrights holders had their way, there would be no libraries. Libraries usually buy one copy of a book and let multiple read it without paying additional royalties to the copyright holder.
It is only through the Doctrine of First Sale that libraries are even allowed to do this.
Although some academic publishers do make much of their money selling books to libraries, there has always been a somewhat conflicting relationship between libraries and book sellers, who would rather sell lots of copies to individuals than a few to libraries.
It is interesting to see reaction as Google moves it's search technology into printed matter. The copyright issues are actually somewhat similar. To create a search engine for the internet or for printed matter Google has to *copy* copyrighted material to their servers and the same goes for printed matter.
Technically, to my non-lawyers knowledge, what Google does with the internet is illegal but is granted a free pass, in part because the material on the internet has to be copied via the internet to be viewed at all. Copying the content of books is only slightly different. Unlike the internet, there is no printed equivalent of a "norobots" or "nofollow" tag to automatically ask Google to skip printed matter.
"From the article: "In order to authenticate, the player would also need to link to some type of online network, similar to the EPCglobal Network, that would associate the DVD with a legal sale. Through this system, the copyright owners (the film production company and any other license-holders of the content) would have digital rights management over the work.""
This is very unlikey to be implemented on the current generation of Standard Definition DVDs. This is Divx version 2. The consumer gets no additional features from this lock down and thus nobody is going to buy RFID locked DVDs or players. The public already soundly rejected the Divx DVD player that required the player to authenticate the DVD via a phone line. Under this new idea, the DVD player will have to connect to the internet...like that isn't going to cause problems.
This authentication system means the studios can keep a realtime database of every movie you watch, whether purchased or rented. It also means the studios could prevent the rental of DVDs by limiting the number of machines you can authorize to play a DVD, or even limiting the number of plays.
This is DRM of the very worst kind--so bad even Joe Consumer won't fall for it.
...and any information found on the "anti-terrorism" search info will automatically classify the info as "terrorism" related and subject to secret, warrentless Patriot Act searches.
Be afraid...
I'm wondering if this "hidden information" they are referring to isn't just the pages that have a no robots tag. I sure hope the Fed isn't trying to create an internet spider that ignores the no robots or no follow tags.
Or this could be an IRC search engine.
Either way, a new Big Brother sponsored search engine can't be good for civil rights.
The idea that this Government funded search program will have great civilian benefits sounds like spin.
Oh, but what do I care? I've just read that the government has increased the chocolate ration!
The only use for this search engine is find things to censor. Otherwise, as the parent says, it is just a *terrorism* search engine, not an anti-terrorism search engine.
I"d be worried that this will be used as a way to identify subjects for federal Patriot act "National Security Letter" searches--the kind that the victim is prohibited by law to revealing to anyone, even a lawyer!
So is iTunes, but that doesn't mean that iTunes Music Store purchases aren't DRM'd.
There is no excuse for encrypting the data. In fact, if they have a poor implementation it may be possible to replace the data with altered encrypted data.
What the data needs is a hash signature to prove the data hasn't been altered, but the data should still be in clear text.
It would seem that JPI is using data integrity as an excuse for DMCA lock in. All they really need for integrity is a signature. Since their are federal regulations about engine overhauls for aircraft, I would think that there is a state interest in the data being accessible, but signed.
This is a clear case of the miss-use of encryption.
"Remember kids, if you can't currently explain a discrepancy, you need to stop looking and ascribe the phenomenon to supernatural powers. "
Why should this only apply in biology class? I think this would be great for any field of study. Can't figure out a math problem? Well, now there is a universal answer to every question! Just write in the Kansas School Board-approved supernatural answer, "God," to every calculation you can't figure out. If your teacher argues with this, then simply point out that they are an anti-Christian bigot who hates America.
I have to disagree. Science only deals with "natural' explanations. That is what science is, it is a way to understand the natural world with natural explanations. In addition, science has ways of testing these natural explanations to see if they hold up to scrutiny.
God and religion are *supernatural* and beyond scientific explanation.
There is no reason to think Kerry would bump technical experts from a telecom delegation because of party affiliation. Bush is the man know for valuing loyalty above competence not Kerry. Just look at Bush's nomination of John Bolton as UN Ambassador, or elevating Condi Rice to Secretary of State...etc, ad nauseam.
This is just another example of the Bush administration's partisan extremism. It is really, really hard to believe Bush hasn't been taken to task to live up to his "I'm a uniter not a divider" claim. While the parent can debate if Kerry might have done the same thing to the delegation, one point is not debatable: This was clearly not a move to "unite" the US.
The press release notes that if you use the SDK: "a NEF file can be opened, edited in either TIFF or JPEG format, and then saved in formats available in the developers' software."
This seems to mean that you aren't allowed to edit the NEF file directly, which is the whole point of a raw format. This press release really doesn't clear anything up or give a reasonable explanation of why Nikon saw fit to encrypt the white balance data anyways. Surely the white balance data is derivative of the photographer's image and not the other way around.
Nikon should allow photographers to access their own images anyway they want. Nikon shouldn't try and limit how a photographer can work, especially one who has shelled out big bucks for a high-end camera.
Slashdot Mirror
"Er, no, the natural thing to do is not to buy intentionally crippled devices."
That would be a great idea if you could actually do it. Unfortunately, the national cell phone providers all cripple their phones to some degree. Only new laws will help to adjust this anti competitive behavior. The first law should be state laws banning year long service contracts. Cell phones would cost more but users would be more likely to switch carriers when the service is poor and make the carriers really compete. Yes, phones would "cost" more upfront, but you are paying that cost right now as higher prices in your cell phone bill anyway.
No! For goodness sake no! Child pornography is not dandy. Please show where I said that. Wait--I'll save you the trouble! I didn't. Please try your straw argument with someone else.
Nope. They think porn is illegal. Check out the Frontline documentary "American Porn." You'll find that the Administration is ramping up the obscenity prosecutions and have said that "nobody" is safe. They are federally prosecuting people as we speak, starting with extreme porn producers with the intent of working their way down to ordinary porn, anything that includes any of the "three E's": Erection, Emission or Entry. Remember that this is the Administration that put a drape over the bare breast on the statue of "Lady Justice." Although anti-porn crusader John Ashcroft has left, the mantle has been taken up by Alberto "Torture is OK" Gonzales. Clearly you underestimate the Bush Administration.
It does, but most wedding photographers make their clients sign a contract that says the work for hire is not work for hire!
However, the presumption of copyright law is that work you commission is owned by you.
This mess is due, in large part, to the change in copyright law that presumes everything is copyright even though there is no copyright attribution. This mess has to change and it will take new laws to do it.
In Canada, photographers were pushing for a law that would have presumed copyright in favor of the photographer instead of the client. Photographers should change their pricing models from selling reprints to charging for their expertise when they take the photos.
A stipulation where? Not in copyright law. Copyright does not allow you rights to reproduce "orphan" works such as wedding photographers--at least in the US. This problem is much bigger than Walmart. Ironically copyright law *presumes* that the person who commissioned the work owns the copyright, therefore if you or your relatives are in the photos it is reasonable to assume that the copyright belongs to you regardless of who took the pictures. Professional photographers try to turn copyright law on its head and make clients sign contracts saying that the work for hire is not work for hire and that the photographer owns all rights to your photographs. The first thing is to never agree to give up copyright to a photographer. Remember, if there is no written contract to the contrary, any photography you commission is copyright by *you*, regardless of whether the photographer tries to write "proof" or copyright by so and so. If this wasn't' the case, those pictures you ask strangers to take of you on vacation wouldn't belong to you either. At least one European country has a law saying that you have a right to reproduce pictures of yourself or of dead relatives. We need such a law to make sure that our heritage isn't locked up by silly copyrights.
Fair Tax is an interesting idea, but you'll have to document all of your purchases to qualify for the "spending up to the poverty level" rebate. "Fair Tax" also ignores wholesale spending, unlike a VAT tax and encourages consumption by the rich while out of the country.
I think we are going to disagree on this issue. I'm more interested in the principle than the individual in this case.
The principle is that Walker County can charge you with possession even if you have never requested the images or viewed them. The images could be preloads, popups, or even downloaded via mal-ware. They don't care. They will charge you with a count for every image that your computer viewed--and pop-ups or mal-ware could download images for four hours.
Given that the Bush Administration believes that even pr0n that features consenting adults is illegal, this prosecution should be seen as extremely dangerous to your civil rights. It won't take vile child porn to get you thrown in jail--just anything the Administration doesn't approve of. It is guilt by association. Guilt for seeing. Guilty knowledge. And we are talking big time jail.
You are very impressed that he viewed the images for four hours. If that is what impresses you so, then the law should just state that viewing the images is illegal rather than possession. But laws don't do that because we know that we shouldn't throw people in jail for having seen something--hence the reason we require possession. If he had seen the images on TV we wouldn't be talking right now, but web browsers keep a temporary cache that is meant to be *temporary* and should not be considered possession anymore than the fact you could type in a URL and get the images should be considered possession.
Mind you, child molesters need to go to jail, but thought crimes and laws that presume guilt are a danger to us all.
PS, Orwellian *is* capitalized since it is based on Orwell's name.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orwellian
Dude, he is getting 20 years not 20 hours! The man may be scum, but he is going to get longer for 4 hours of web browsing than most murders or actual child molesters get. He is being charged with a separate count for every image that his web browser displayed.
This is very, very dangerous. With typosquatting domains that make money of of pr0n pop ups and use endless "on exit" java script loops, anybody could wind up with illegal pr0n on their computer--and Walker County could prosecute you for each and every image as a separate count, regardless of whether you meant to download it.
This case is much, much bigger than the one person charge here. Charging people with possession for the mere act of seeing something is positively Orwellian.
You don't have to win a law suit to ruin someone. You only have to out spend them--which is easy to do if you are going up against a group of volunteers. Microsoft could demand all communications with anybody, and they could halt the development and distribution of Samba with an injunction, even if they had a near nonexistent case.
Microsoft has a history of using lawsuits to its advantage. They even are so blatant as to use what are supposed to be losing settlements to actually increase their monopoly power, as they have done in this case.
Why would you want to underestimate Microsoft's malice? You must know and admit your enemies strengths if you ever hope to win against them--and yes, Microsoft is the enemy.
I doesn't matter if Samba reverse engineered the protocols or not. What matters is that Microsoft can *say* that any future functionality to Samba came from Microsoft's specs and use that to sue Samba out of existence, ala SCO. (Sure, SCO hasn't won, but only because IBM has deep pockets, unlike the Samba team...)
Well, Slashdoter's know that Copyright Infringement != Terrorism, but for those who don't I have an answer.
If terrorists make money of of copyright infringement the answer is not to crackdown on copyright infringement because that only makes the infringement *more* valuable. I think we can all see how well the War on Drugs has gone. No, the solution is to take away the value of the infringement and the terrorists alleged profits by creating more balanced copyright laws.
If anything would push unwary citizens "into the hands of terrorists" it will be the broadcast flag. Soon, the only way to record "American Idol" in HD will be to have an al Qaeda terrorist come to your house and set them up with a Broadcast Flag-free Tivo.
If copyrights holders had their way, there would be no libraries. Libraries usually buy one copy of a book and let multiple read it without paying additional royalties to the copyright holder. It is only through the Doctrine of First Sale that libraries are even allowed to do this. Although some academic publishers do make much of their money selling books to libraries, there has always been a somewhat conflicting relationship between libraries and book sellers, who would rather sell lots of copies to individuals than a few to libraries.
It is interesting to see reaction as Google moves it's search technology into printed matter. The copyright issues are actually somewhat similar. To create a search engine for the internet or for printed matter Google has to *copy* copyrighted material to their servers and the same goes for printed matter.
Technically, to my non-lawyers knowledge, what Google does with the internet is illegal but is granted a free pass, in part because the material on the internet has to be copied via the internet to be viewed at all. Copying the content of books is only slightly different. Unlike the internet, there is no printed equivalent of a "norobots" or "nofollow" tag to automatically ask Google to skip printed matter.
"From the article: "In order to authenticate, the player would also need to link to some type of online network, similar to the EPCglobal Network, that would associate the DVD with a legal sale. Through this system, the copyright owners (the film production company and any other license-holders of the content) would have digital rights management over the work.""
This is very unlikey to be implemented on the current generation of Standard Definition DVDs. This is Divx version 2. The consumer gets no additional features from this lock down and thus nobody is going to buy RFID locked DVDs or players. The public already soundly rejected the Divx DVD player that required the player to authenticate the DVD via a phone line. Under this new idea, the DVD player will have to connect to the internet...like that isn't going to cause problems.
This authentication system means the studios can keep a realtime database of every movie you watch, whether purchased or rented. It also means the studios could prevent the rental of DVDs by limiting the number of machines you can authorize to play a DVD, or even limiting the number of plays.
This is DRM of the very worst kind--so bad even Joe Consumer won't fall for it.
...and any information found on the "anti-terrorism" search info will automatically classify the info as "terrorism" related and subject to secret, warrentless Patriot Act searches. Be afraid...
I'm wondering if this "hidden information" they are referring to isn't just the pages that have a no robots tag. I sure hope the Fed isn't trying to create an internet spider that ignores the no robots or no follow tags.
Or this could be an IRC search engine.
Either way, a new Big Brother sponsored search engine can't be good for civil rights.
The idea that this Government funded search program will have great civilian benefits sounds like spin.
Oh, but what do I care? I've just read that the government has increased the chocolate ration!
The only use for this search engine is find things to censor. Otherwise, as the parent says, it is just a *terrorism* search engine, not an anti-terrorism search engine.
I"d be worried that this will be used as a way to identify subjects for federal Patriot act "National Security Letter" searches--the kind that the victim is prohibited by law to revealing to anyone, even a lawyer!
This is not a good thing.
...And I'm sure Gates said that iPods wouldn't be successful in the first place.
So is iTunes, but that doesn't mean that iTunes Music Store purchases aren't DRM'd.
There is no excuse for encrypting the data. In fact, if they have a poor implementation it may be possible to replace the data with altered encrypted data.
What the data needs is a hash signature to prove the data hasn't been altered, but the data should still be in clear text.
It would seem that JPI is using data integrity as an excuse for DMCA lock in. All they really need for integrity is a signature. Since their are federal regulations about engine overhauls for aircraft, I would think that there is a state interest in the data being accessible, but signed. This is a clear case of the miss-use of encryption.
"Remember kids, if you can't currently explain a discrepancy, you need to stop looking and ascribe the phenomenon to supernatural powers. "
Why should this only apply in biology class? I think this would be great for any field of study. Can't figure out a math problem? Well, now there is a universal answer to every question! Just write in the Kansas School Board-approved supernatural answer, "God," to every calculation you can't figure out. If your teacher argues with this, then simply point out that they are an anti-Christian bigot who hates America.
I have to disagree. Science only deals with "natural' explanations. That is what science is, it is a way to understand the natural world with natural explanations. In addition, science has ways of testing these natural explanations to see if they hold up to scrutiny.
God and religion are *supernatural* and beyond scientific explanation.
"That Kerry wouldn't have done the same? "
There is no reason to think Kerry would bump technical experts from a telecom delegation because of party affiliation. Bush is the man know for valuing loyalty above competence not Kerry. Just look at Bush's nomination of John Bolton as UN Ambassador, or elevating Condi Rice to Secretary of State...etc, ad nauseam.
This is just another example of the Bush administration's partisan extremism. It is really, really hard to believe Bush hasn't been taken to task to live up to his "I'm a uniter not a divider" claim. While the parent can debate if Kerry might have done the same thing to the delegation, one point is not debatable: This was clearly not a move to "unite" the US.
The press release notes that if you use the SDK:
"a NEF file can be opened, edited in either TIFF or JPEG format, and then saved in formats available in the developers' software."
This seems to mean that you aren't allowed to edit the NEF file directly, which is the whole point of a raw format. This press release really doesn't clear anything up or give a reasonable explanation of why Nikon saw fit to encrypt the white balance data anyways. Surely the white balance data is derivative of the photographer's image and not the other way around.
Nikon should allow photographers to access their own images anyway they want. Nikon shouldn't try and limit how a photographer can work, especially one who has shelled out big bucks for a high-end camera.
Yes, you have it right. That kind of threat should really keep licensees in line.