Avalon Hill's "Incunabula" must have been in compiled BASIC, given that if you stalled long enough amassing resources you got an "Overflow in line foo" error... mmm, a language limited to 64K code+data. I'd be surprised if Hasbro still has the source code, however.
There were actually a pretty large number of game-programming-in-BASIC books out at the time, as well, including those featuring very primitive graphics. Small source code if you don't care about being fancy.
Most of the rest, 'tho, probably C, Pascal or assembly I'd guess. Mmmm. If "The Ancient Art of War" was done in C and the code were ever released, I'd be curious to see whether it would be feasible to reduce the update speed so it would be playable on a PII...
Giving somebody the opportunity to do wrong IS wrong if that is the primary intent. If I were to toss a loaded 9mm handgun, safety off, into a preschool playground loaded with kids, a prosecutor could make a very strong case that my intent clearly was to see if any toddler would pick up the handgun and "play" with it. Arguably my action is just as morally wrong even if the handgun is completely ignored, or -- more extreme still -- if a toddler picked it up and shoots a perp to stop a violent crime in progress, because the former is so much more plausibly my intent. Note that it's an action that's still taking the blame, not the inanimate object.
On the other hand, if I toss in a stack of comic book, and a kid picks it up and starts swinging them at other kids, I could simply argue that I was simply trying to improve their day, and that the gift was misused.
Intent matters. The people running Napster have to ask themselves how serious they are about obeying copyright law, and whether they are doing enough to prevent it. Are they being dilligent about banning people -- not throwaway mail, but people -- who infringe? Are they taking reasonable measures to prevent? These actions and inactions are what is being questioned.
It'd be interesting, given that the site has gotten some decent publicity in mainstream publications like _Forbes Magazine_, if memory serves.
*snort*
Bush's campaign staff might not be that responsive, 'tho. They ignored my dangerous questions[*] on constitutional views, 'tho.
[*] Dangerous in the sense that there was no way to answer while pleasing everybody, heh. Like asking whether he was a strict or loose constructionist, and whether the "will of the people" should ever override the Constitution.
More precisely, those large contributions have to go to parties as soft money, not to individual candidates, nor to parties as hard money for redistribution.
ISTR that the largest contribution from any PAC to an individual candidate, browsing opensecrets.org was $25,000 for a single campaign year. It would be blatantly illegal, for instance, for Microsoft to give $100,000 to the campaign of George W. Bush, or to give that same money to the GOP for the party to give to that candidate.
The large donations you're thinking of are almost certainly soft money, or possibly simply the total contributions from a PAC to the specific candidates of a party plus the soft money.
It's not yet gotten quite as dramatic as the drug war. AFAIK, nobody has yet banned the MP3 file format, or threatened confiscation of computers.
Some fundamental questions here are --
* How responsible must Napster be for attempting to prevent copyright infractions? Would, say, disallowing a file from being shared if it's MD5 signature matches that on a prohibited list count? Is it necessary?
* Can Napster allow anonymous usage (only relatively useless data like IPs, which should by bypassable via proxies I'd think), or must it require verifiable data like the PPI desires? The latter would allow for banning users permanently, but raises the issue of when such data would be released (court order, but with how strong evidence?).
* Once notified of possible infractions, what actions, if any, must Napster take -- and how strong must the evidence be? Must a user be suspended if somebody simply makes the accusation, or must there actually be a verified transfer of copyrighted material? And must the user be identified to a plaintiff, if such information is kept?
That, plus the fact that they have pretty much established that it was their intent to do this. It's not a general search engine ala AltaVista, in as much as Lycos's image search engine is also not a particularly generic service.
Newspapers can be used to swat flies, but that's not their primary purpose. They're meant to be read. Napster could be fooled into sharing other content, but again, that's not its primary purpose, and they should not pretend that they are of the same nature as, say, AOL or Netcom.
They can fight the RIAA, but they should do so on stronger grounds than the safe-harbor clause.
If they wanted to, the RIAA could probably start its own little service where you pay by the MB. Allow selecting various songs, total up the MB, pay and then download as much as you like, storing info about your selections online. If you wanted to download to an entirely different machine, fine -- it should be able to remember your previous selections. For a premium service, burn one or more custom CD[s] for delivery.
If they provided a GOOD search engine and pointers to extras (videos and other merchandise? lyrics files? Official band sites, touring calendars...), then it might have enough of an advantage that at least some people would actually use it. But it might have to be basically full-service in order to get actual paying customers...
Many FTP servers with, say, writable incoming directories have these same directories non-readable in much the same way that BBSes typically did not make uploaded files downloadable until the sysop had the time to check them, presumably for viruses and, (if the sysop cared), copyright violations. With this system, there's not that much risk for violations, particularly as most w4r3z d00dz probably will not be terribly creative in naming files ("Hmm, somebody uploaded total_annihilation.rar, and it's roughly CD-sized...").
Slashdot could achieve something approaching equivalency by banning accounts using freemail systems which are known to NOT use verifiable information. In a case of blatant violations, court orders could likely be obtained to force divulgence of said info -- for instance, with a valid AOL account, AOL will certainly have such info around, and Slashdot can point to that as long as AOL is not known to be crackable to the degree that random schmos can create mailboxes on AOL without that service's knowledge.
It's the small ones that'll suffer more. A big publishing house -- be it software or music -- can have a much larger product line with far more revenue coming in, so a limited level of infractions does not cripple them.
A tiny new publishing house with only a couple of products, that gets them duplicated by w4r3z d00dz, might die if this means that they don't get enough revenue to pay the rent.
The proposed "tightening" is merely clarifying the ISP exemption.
The probable INTENT behind the safe harbor provision is that ISPs have no practical means of monitoring all the traffic that their customers generate, since all the ISP provides is the infrastructure. Hence, most ISPs will be at worst innocent bystanders.
Napster is different.
It's not an ISP.
It's not a generic service that is used for anything the customer desires.
It is designed explicitly as a music exchange service. Therefore, logically it does NOT fall under that provision -- except that legally, we must adhere to the letter of the law, and it has not codified that exact intent. Therefore, they request that the law be changed, since under Napster's interpretation, they could advertise a "W4r3z N3tW0rK" searchable by publisher and title and claim safe-harbor.
Or start mostly local, DON'T go in for RIAA contracts yet, and distribute particular tracks of their choice for free, digitally. THEN if they're good enough to attract a fan base, negotiate from a stronger position, if they really want to sell CDs en masse. Under current law, that's legal.
Hardly. Recall the Katz book controversy, which used Slashdot posts without requesting permission?
They apparently act like they have full copyright. That disclaimer might be about as legally meaningful as one that requires all readers to dye their hair blue.
Disclaimers do not have the force of law, you know. I just pulled the trigger. Victims bear all responsibility for dodging and consequences resulting from failure to dodge.
You can disclaim all you want, but that might NOT release you from responsibility by itself, barring some kind of contract with whomever might hold you responsible.
On price fixing, I could've sworn that the morning news on a local radio station (WWSW, Pittsburgh PA for folks in the area... not syndicated news, AFAIK), briefly mentioned that the FTC is going to make some news tomorrow regarding allegations of music CD price fixing. The news item speculated that prices might be lowered, but declined to specify further -- i.e. no details leaked.
Intent and compelling state interests have an impact.
Cars, for instance, maybe be used to maim and kill quite successfully. However, most folk do not intend that with their cars, and they were never designed with this purpose in mind.
However, if you design a pipe bomb and use it as a paperweight, that does not make its possession OK. In this case, pipe bombs generally are designed solely for maiming, and not in the case of self-defense, either.
Likewise, there's a pretty compelling state interest in denying private citizens nuclear missiles, even if they could be retrofitted with, say, bird houses.
Napster seems to be reasonably *trying* to crack down on illegitmate use (intent), and there's no real national-security or other massively compelling interest in banning it outright.
Feasibility's hardly the issue. If you're next to somebody, there's pretty much nothing the law can do to prevent that chap from smacking you with a nearby heavy object. And as one fellow noted, bodyguards only tend to finish what somebody else started...
But that doesn't mean it's legal, or right, to go 'round smackin' people with random objects. Or that the judicial system would have any less responsibility to nail you if you try.
They've got a responsibility to do this. On the other hand, they've also seemingly met their obligations by allowing users to contests this, setting the stage for legal battles if Metallica chooses to sue users who insist, in fact, that they are not infringing.
The decision comes after Napster conceded last week that it was required to bar users who were proven to be infringing on copyrights.
Given that they already conceded that point -- does this latest bit mean that Napster is liable for the behavior of users that it has not yet noticed, even if it were not negligent?
That is, is the law demanding 100% prevention here? Or is some level of enforcement effort "enough"? If the former... unless they maintained a database of, say, MD5 sums of MP3s they had explicit permission to transfer, and they somehow prevented sharing of other files, then this might be impossible.
Well, if implemented as the DoJ proposal specifies, intellectual property that both the OS and applications parts use gets shared, with the exception of IE. Other IP gets allocated between the two with strong restrictions on licensing or other forms of sharing...
1). Representative democracy ain't too bad. Constitutional monarchies are still not that unusual. And the modern world is pretty tolerant of the occasional military junta/dictatorship, as well...
2). Is it justified? If you're asking whether all races are equal, that's a silly question. Statistically, there are observable differences. Why? It's uncertain. Some are cultural. Some are genetic. Some are purely fiscal. You'll find, for instance, that in the US, those of African descent are far more likely to have at least one gene for sickle-cell anemia -- but it make sense, because that same gene also helps against malaria, IIRC. You'll also find that they are somewhat more likely to believe that the CIA is responsible for spreading AIDS in Africa (cultural; propagated by Line PR of KGB, and spread by anti-establishment folks), and disproportionately likely to be professional basketball players (although the probability is still extremely low on an individual basis). They are less likely to desire membership in the KKK, and more likely to join the Nation of Islam. Are you claiming that most folk, if they think about it, consider everybody equal in every aspect?
And would you call affirmative action racism? I certainly would, and indeed find the entire idea disagreeable, but obviously many have found it to be a helpful evil.
3) Arguably, yes, depending on your metric. If, for instance, diplomacy is an issue, I'm almost certainly not your chap given how uncompromising I can be. And it would be silly to claim mental and physical supremacy over the bulk of humanity. The case would be more clear-cut if I were an anencephalitic paraplegic, but that happens not to be the case. So with probability approaching 1 (over 6 billion people)... of course.
Or, for that matter, to claim to understand how everybody thinks.
Slashdot Mirror
Avalon Hill's "Incunabula" must have been in compiled BASIC, given that if you stalled long enough amassing resources you got an "Overflow in line foo" error... mmm, a language limited to 64K code+data. I'd be surprised if Hasbro still has the source code, however.
There were actually a pretty large number of game-programming-in-BASIC books out at the time, as well, including those featuring very primitive graphics. Small source code if you don't care about being fancy.
Most of the rest, 'tho, probably C, Pascal or assembly I'd guess. Mmmm. If "The Ancient Art of War" was done in C and the code were ever released, I'd be curious to see whether it would be feasible to reduce the update speed so it would be playable on a PII...
Giving somebody the opportunity to do wrong IS wrong if that is the primary intent. If I were to toss a loaded 9mm handgun, safety off, into a preschool playground loaded with kids, a prosecutor could make a very strong case that my intent clearly was to see if any toddler would pick up the handgun and "play" with it. Arguably my action is just as morally wrong even if the handgun is completely ignored, or -- more extreme still -- if a toddler picked it up and shoots a perp to stop a violent crime in progress, because the former is so much more plausibly my intent. Note that it's an action that's still taking the blame, not the inanimate object.
On the other hand, if I toss in a stack of comic book, and a kid picks it up and starts swinging them at other kids, I could simply argue that I was simply trying to improve their day, and that the gift was misused.
Intent matters. The people running Napster have to ask themselves how serious they are about obeying copyright law, and whether they are doing enough to prevent it. Are they being dilligent about banning people -- not throwaway mail, but people -- who infringe? Are they taking reasonable measures to prevent? These actions and inactions are what is being questioned.
It'd be interesting, given that the site has gotten some decent publicity in mainstream publications like _Forbes Magazine_, if memory serves.
*snort*
Bush's campaign staff might not be that responsive, 'tho. They ignored my dangerous questions[*] on constitutional views, 'tho.
[*] Dangerous in the sense that there was no way to answer while pleasing everybody, heh. Like asking whether he was a strict or loose constructionist, and whether the "will of the people" should ever override the Constitution.
More precisely, those large contributions have to go to parties as soft money, not to individual candidates, nor to parties as hard money for redistribution.
ISTR that the largest contribution from any PAC to an individual candidate, browsing opensecrets.org was $25,000 for a single campaign year. It would be blatantly illegal, for instance, for Microsoft to give $100,000 to the campaign of George W. Bush, or to give that same money to the GOP for the party to give to that candidate.
The large donations you're thinking of are almost certainly soft money, or possibly simply the total contributions from a PAC to the specific candidates of a party plus the soft money.
It's not yet gotten quite as dramatic as the drug war. AFAIK, nobody has yet banned the MP3 file format, or threatened confiscation of computers.
Some fundamental questions here are --
* How responsible must Napster be for attempting to prevent copyright infractions? Would, say, disallowing a file from being shared if it's MD5 signature matches that on a prohibited list count? Is it necessary?
* Can Napster allow anonymous usage (only relatively useless data like IPs, which should by bypassable via proxies I'd think), or must it require verifiable data like the PPI desires? The latter would allow for banning users permanently, but raises the issue of when such data would be released (court order, but with how strong evidence?).
* Once notified of possible infractions, what actions, if any, must Napster take -- and how strong must the evidence be? Must a user be suspended if somebody simply makes the accusation, or must there actually be a verified transfer of copyrighted material? And must the user be identified to a plaintiff, if such information is kept?
That, plus the fact that they have pretty much established that it was their intent to do this. It's not a general search engine ala AltaVista, in as much as Lycos's image search engine is also not a particularly generic service.
Newspapers can be used to swat flies, but that's not their primary purpose. They're meant to be read. Napster could be fooled into sharing other content, but again, that's not its primary purpose, and they should not pretend that they are of the same nature as, say, AOL or Netcom.
They can fight the RIAA, but they should do so on stronger grounds than the safe-harbor clause.
If they wanted to, the RIAA could probably start its own little service where you pay by the MB. Allow selecting various songs, total up the MB, pay and then download as much as you like, storing info about your selections online. If you wanted to download to an entirely different machine, fine -- it should be able to remember your previous selections. For a premium service, burn one or more custom CD[s] for delivery.
If they provided a GOOD search engine and pointers to extras (videos and other merchandise? lyrics files? Official band sites, touring calendars...), then it might have enough of an advantage that at least some people would actually use it. But it might have to be basically full-service in order to get actual paying customers...
Many FTP servers with, say, writable incoming directories have these same directories non-readable in much the same way that BBSes typically did not make uploaded files downloadable until the sysop had the time to check them, presumably for viruses and, (if the sysop cared), copyright violations. With this system, there's not that much risk for violations, particularly as most w4r3z d00dz probably will not be terribly creative in naming files ("Hmm, somebody uploaded total_annihilation.rar, and it's roughly CD-sized...").
Slashdot could achieve something approaching equivalency by banning accounts using freemail systems which are known to NOT use verifiable information. In a case of blatant violations, court orders could likely be obtained to force divulgence of said info -- for instance, with a valid AOL account, AOL will certainly have such info around, and Slashdot can point to that as long as AOL is not known to be crackable to the degree that random schmos can create mailboxes on AOL without that service's knowledge.
Just the Slashdot Mantra.
MP3s are good.
Napster is good.
Corporations are bad.
Government is bad.
Facts are irrelevant.
Recite several dozen times and, apparently, you'll be qualified to post stories here.
Credit card numbers and addresses. You'll note that many ISPs like AOL actually do this already, since they're interested in being paid.
That's collect, which is largely already done, not distribute wantonly.
It's the small ones that'll suffer more. A big publishing house -- be it software or music -- can have a much larger product line with far more revenue coming in, so a limited level of infractions does not cripple them.
A tiny new publishing house with only a couple of products, that gets them duplicated by w4r3z d00dz, might die if this means that they don't get enough revenue to pay the rent.
The proposed "tightening" is merely clarifying the ISP exemption.
The probable INTENT behind the safe harbor provision is that ISPs have no practical means of monitoring all the traffic that their customers generate, since all the ISP provides is the infrastructure. Hence, most ISPs will be at worst innocent bystanders.
Napster is different.
It's not an ISP.
It's not a generic service that is used for anything the customer desires.
It is designed explicitly as a music exchange service. Therefore, logically it does NOT fall under that provision -- except that legally, we must adhere to the letter of the law, and it has not codified that exact intent. Therefore, they request that the law be changed, since under Napster's interpretation, they could advertise a "W4r3z N3tW0rK" searchable by publisher and title and claim safe-harbor.
*shrug*
Or start mostly local, DON'T go in for RIAA contracts yet, and distribute particular tracks of their choice for free, digitally. THEN if they're good enough to attract a fan base, negotiate from a stronger position, if they really want to sell CDs en masse. Under current law, that's legal.
Hardly. Recall the Katz book controversy, which used Slashdot posts without requesting permission?
They apparently act like they have full copyright. That disclaimer might be about as legally meaningful as one that requires all readers to dye their hair blue.
They still have an obligation under the DMCA, it appears, to remove the posts within 48 hours of notification.
You hardly need the DMCA for this -- I would think that ordinary copyright law suffices for criminalizing non-fair-use.
Keep in mind that Slashdot is a business as well -- or rather, it's owner is, and one that I'm pretty sure is for-profit.
Fair use does not include simple duplication of entire texts, even for non-commercial folks. Try asking Kinko's to photocopy an entire dictionary.
Disclaimers do not have the force of law, you know. I just pulled the trigger. Victims bear all responsibility for dodging and consequences resulting from failure to dodge.
You can disclaim all you want, but that might NOT release you from responsibility by itself, barring some kind of contract with whomever might hold you responsible.
On price fixing, I could've sworn that the morning news on a local radio station (WWSW, Pittsburgh PA for folks in the area... not syndicated news, AFAIK), briefly mentioned that the FTC is going to make some news tomorrow regarding allegations of music CD price fixing. The news item speculated that prices might be lowered, but declined to specify further -- i.e. no details leaked.
Anybody know more 'bout this?
Intent and compelling state interests have an impact.
Cars, for instance, maybe be used to maim and kill quite successfully. However, most folk do not intend that with their cars, and they were never designed with this purpose in mind.
However, if you design a pipe bomb and use it as a paperweight, that does not make its possession OK. In this case, pipe bombs generally are designed solely for maiming, and not in the case of self-defense, either.
Likewise, there's a pretty compelling state interest in denying private citizens nuclear missiles, even if they could be retrofitted with, say, bird houses.
Napster seems to be reasonably *trying* to crack down on illegitmate use (intent), and there's no real national-security or other massively compelling interest in banning it outright.
Feasibility's hardly the issue. If you're next to somebody, there's pretty much nothing the law can do to prevent that chap from smacking you with a nearby heavy object. And as one fellow noted, bodyguards only tend to finish what somebody else started...
But that doesn't mean it's legal, or right, to go 'round smackin' people with random objects. Or that the judicial system would have any less responsibility to nail you if you try.
They've got a responsibility to do this. On the other hand, they've also seemingly met their obligations by allowing users to contests this, setting the stage for legal battles if Metallica chooses to sue users who insist, in fact, that they are not infringing.
Hrmmm. Since when does a civil lawsuit need the defendant's consent? This seems... odd.
The decision comes after Napster conceded last week that it was required to bar users who were proven to be infringing on copyrights.
Given that they already conceded that point -- does this latest bit mean that Napster is liable for the behavior of users that it has not yet noticed, even if it were not negligent?
That is, is the law demanding 100% prevention here? Or is some level of enforcement effort "enough"? If the former... unless they maintained a database of, say, MD5 sums of MP3s they had explicit permission to transfer, and they somehow prevented sharing of other files, then this might be impossible.
Stupider things have happened.
Remember the World Trade Center bombing? One of the conspirators returned to the place he rented the truck, to demand a refund of his deposit...
Well, if implemented as the DoJ proposal specifies, intellectual property that both the OS and applications parts use gets shared, with the exception of IE. Other IP gets allocated between the two with strong restrictions on licensing or other forms of sharing...
Surely you're joking.
1). Representative democracy ain't too bad. Constitutional monarchies are still not that unusual. And the modern world is pretty tolerant of the occasional military junta/dictatorship, as well...
2). Is it justified? If you're asking whether all races are equal, that's a silly question. Statistically, there are observable differences. Why? It's uncertain. Some are cultural. Some are genetic. Some are purely fiscal. You'll find, for instance, that in the US, those of African descent are far more likely to have at least one gene for sickle-cell anemia -- but it make sense, because that same gene also helps against malaria, IIRC. You'll also find that they are somewhat more likely to believe that the CIA is responsible for spreading AIDS in Africa (cultural; propagated by Line PR of KGB, and spread by anti-establishment folks), and disproportionately likely to be professional basketball players (although the probability is still extremely low on an individual basis). They are less likely to desire membership in the KKK, and more likely to join the Nation of Islam. Are you claiming that most folk, if they think about it, consider everybody equal in every aspect?
And would you call affirmative action racism? I certainly would, and indeed find the entire idea disagreeable, but obviously many have found it to be a helpful evil.
3) Arguably, yes, depending on your metric. If, for instance, diplomacy is an issue, I'm almost certainly not your chap given how uncompromising I can be. And it would be silly to claim mental and physical supremacy over the bulk of humanity. The case would be more clear-cut if I were an anencephalitic paraplegic, but that happens not to be the case. So with probability approaching 1 (over 6 billion people)... of course.
Or, for that matter, to claim to understand how everybody thinks.