Interestingly, Google already rebranded GMail in Germany as Googlemail
All Google needs to do is close its subsidiaries in the EU (or just Germany and UK; and Spain?). They can still offer all their services to EU people from within the US, without having to bother with EU trademark or other regulations.
And since Google induces German/UK residents per IP-Geolocation to use different services (google.de, google.co.uk, instead of google.com, googlemail.com instead of gmail.com) and probably also different servers; than those in the US, they brought all this trademark hassle/nightmare upon themselves.
Frankly, is there ANY real compelling reason for Google to set up a business entity outside the US? They already had to comply with Chinese laws, getting quite some heat for that; and the more foreign laws they expose themselves to, the harder will they have to fight to keep a consistant uniform brand globablly.
And apropos Germany: hasn't Google recently announced that they intended to fight the planned german data retention laws w.r.t. Googlemail, if necessary by pulling this service out of Germany completely?
Does it really limit the scope of the problem? Many bi- or multilingual editors translate stuff to or from "the other Wikipedia".
But is all this really a problem? What's the difference between a government-founded expert, and any other random editor? Both are on exactly the same footing here. Whenever an article is edited by an expert, it will sooner than later be reedited by an expert with opposing views (and by hordes of non-experts as well). This is already happening all over the Wikipedia, and it doesn't really harm her.
So if the German government wants to fund some experts to contribute to Wikipedia, so what? If other experts think those German experts' contributions were biased, they would very quickly point it out and get involved in discussions (good for science!), or edit-wars (more work for admins). I see no problem here. Everyone is free to contribute, and the system works because no single opinion remains unchallenged for too long; esp. not opinions that are politically-laden.
Binary Windows applications, as a "standard", aren't really that big a deal.
Perhaps the parent poster is thinking of some ABI-compat layer like the Linuxulator on BSD. After all, that's the only way to run e.g. Maple-for-Linux on FreeBSD.
While it does sound like a good idea to add kernel support for PE-linked Windows binaries to Linux (and BSD), that's not where the real difficulty lies. Extending the dynamic linker to support ELF, COFF, PE-COFF (DLL) etc. at the same time is the easiest part. All you need to know is how dynamic linking works in the Windows world, and that is widely documented and trivially reimplemented.
The real difficulty is, as has already been said previously, that the Win32 API is a moving target. Not really Win32 proper, but all the additional APIs that Microsoft keeps releasing: NET 2.0, NET 3.0 etc, etc, etc..., which are not always strictly on top of Win32 API (or it wouldn't have been such a headache to port). It will ultimately boil down to the problems that the Wine project are constantly facing: tracking Microsoft's continual stream of changes being a very time consuming, thankless job.
But perhaps it's not such a bad thing. The moment we have binary compatibility with some software, it effectively stifles the drive to write an OSS replacement. Just look at the binary blobs for video card drivers, wireless card drivers etc... that haunt both Linux and BSD: if we didn't have the possibility to run a binary driver, however crappy, for that brand new 3D graphics adapter, the OSS community would already have invested much more hacking and reverse-engineering energy to come up with the required open source drivers; irrespective of the hardware vendors' cooperation or non-cooperation on publishing their specs. Same for FreeBSD's native NDIS support: very neat and useful, but how likely are we do get native drivers for some network adapter, if we could natively run their ndis (binary) driver instead?
Perhaps God is the programmer who defined the diverse physical constants before bootstrapping our instance of the universe? And Meta-God is the programmer who defined God's universe's metaphysical constants before metabootstrapping it? And Meta-Meta-God is...
That's not the solution. Germany has jurisdiction over DeNIC, the.de registry. So they could have them pull the DNS records for any reasons. The solution is for privacy-aware Germans to use a generic gTLD domain like, say,.net,.org or.com.
If Google closed shop in Germany, so what? All what Germans need to do is to use google.com, over which Germany has no influence whatsoever. Actually, it's Google that's pushing Germans to google.de and force them use googlemail.com instead of gmail.com for GMail, with some kind of geo-based IP detection, even if they go to google.com. Crazy! Now would be good time for Google to stop this country-specific nonsense and let users choose (without forcing them to set cookies, use proxies to sign up for gmail.com addresses and what not).
it is wrong/unwise for the **IA to be selective in their pursuits of 'violators'
It may be wrong from an ethical point of view, but it's definitely not unwise from their business point of view. Biting the hands that feed them (all those "wonderful" copyright laws), now that would be unwise. They've got much more to loose should the politicians start realizing the silliness of their laws and therefore retracting them to some degree, than to gain from the publicity of a high-profile case. Within their own twisted logic, the *AAs/IFPI/... are acting as is expected: thankful and accomodating towards the powers that be, and harshly vindictive towards 10 year olds from needy backgrounds.
I had to implement a security auditing program for a government agency (don't ask which one: NDA) that would probe their whole network from a set of strategically placed boxes. Being familiar with both FreeBSD and Gentoo, I couldn't care less which platform those boxes would run on. The program itself was a somewhat convoluted big program in C++ that ran as a process and the dependencies on libraries (except libc or glibc and, of course, STL) were near zero.
The interesting bits here were:
The program itself had to be released (only) to the agency under the 2-clauses BSD license.
The source code had to remain secret because it exploited specific weaknesses of their infrastructure.
The box had to run a variant of BSD, to steer clear of every licensing risk.
The C++ STL had to be non-GPLed and non-LGPLed to prevent inadvertant "viral licensing"
Programming this had been easy as pie, of course, but the licensing discussions went on and on and on. In a nutshell, their lawyers were first afraid that releasing the code under GPL would force them to disclose the source (a big no-no), so they insisted on a custom license first. This wouldn't have solved their problem, if the code were accidentally GPLed through some careless linking etc... After some thinking, they finally agreed on a BSD-license for the code with the extra provisions to be extra-careful to avoid any external GPL and LGPL code dependencies.
Then there was the problem of the platform itself. Specifically FreeBSD or Gentoo? Here again, their lawyers were totally nervous that this program would, by dynamically linking to glibc, get "virally license-infected" (their quote) so that it would magically become at least LGPLed, or at worst GPLed too. The assumed (wrongly) that they were under the obligation to automatically release the source code if it were GPL; while in reality, they were not planning to distribute the program at all! Without distribution, there were not under any obligation to release the source code to the public either! They had no qualms about BSD-licensed libc on FreeBSD though.
Now, all this is pretty silly, and showed a big confusion about the scope of the GPL and LGPL; even among lawyers who should've know better. This special application was never intended to be released to the outside world; so licensing it under GPL wouldn't have been a real problem anyway (no distribution == no accompanying source code).
To wrap up: what should you do? Since you're planning to sell (distribute) the software, you should definitively consult a good lawyer before going the LGPL/GPL route. You can't distribute closed-source software that is [L]GPLed (be it intentionally, or unintentially). The BSD route is less risky, but beware: there are some GPL and LGPL bits in BSD systems as well!, so you want to be careful what you link against and what you include in your code.
But better yet: why won't you give back to the community? Is there any special reason for not disclosing your source code? Esp. under Linux and the BSDs, binary-only programs are a nightmare to maintain! Every new release of some dependent libraries, every ABI change across major release versions could break your binary app; and you'll have a lot of angry customers to care about, who would scream at you for newly compiled versions. You really want to save yourself all this hassle and sell them the source code directly. That's the only really sensible and reasonable thing to do.
Most people believe they won't get caught. If you start catching and jailing 100s of spammers for even sentences of a few months AND fine them so they end up with a significant net loss, then spammers will stop spamming - because they start noticing that spammers ARE getting caught.
The problem is that lion's share of spam can be traced back to very few individuals. Sentencing one of them to 10+ years in jail certainly sends a message to the rest of them. BUT I agree: it's still not enough. Once they sentenced, say, 10 or 20 of the top spammers 10+ years each, THEN it will start to show. Right now, it's nothing more than a blip on the radar of those ROKSO criminals. But now, not even this one has been sentenced yet. It's still to be seen how many year's he'll finally get (probation? 2 to 5?)
When will we learn to elect only smart politicians?
After all, laws are nothing but formalized wishes of people who don't know exactly what they'd like for Christmas. And as far as wishes go, we seldom get that what we wished for; especially when we've been sloppy or overly broad. Or, put another way: garbage in, garbage out.
Fortunately, silly laws are seldom obeyed; not even by ubercorrect Germans. They're just putting in some catch-all clauses in case they need to get rid of a few talented hackers, that would get too smart and identify spying tools like the planned "Bundestrojaner" (a planned state-sponsored/-pushed malware/keylogger/... that would infect "suspects'" Windows machines - "suspect" meaning there the whole population). I'm not expecting this paragraph to be actively enforced in any way other than to prevent detection or even hacking of this kind of malware.
Germany's high tech industries' IT security becomes permeable like swiss cheese.
CIA, NSA and all the other lovely bunch breaks into german computers, stealing trade secrets en masse.
ElInt harvest is then donated/spread to local companies.
???
Profit!
A great way to enhance German-US relations! And German-Chinese relations, and German-Russian relations, and German-French relations... Danke, Frau Merkel! That was your most brilliant idea so far.
To me, "The music industry" seems to have become the bane of civil and modern life.
Seen from an oblique angle, this pesky MAFIAA/IFPI outfit is perhaps doing democracy a service. How so? We all know that eternal vigilance is the price of freedom. And those lobbyists are actually exposing a flaw in the democracies of most countries: a blatant lack of vigilance! The more they buy off civil liberties [*] away from the People, and the more draconian the laws become that they buy from those all too easily corruptible legislators; the more apparent this lack of vigilance becomes.
Ultimately, democracy is not threatened by the content mafia, nor by corrupt politicians, but by the apathy of its citizens. By twisting the legal framework well beyond what it once was conceived to be (serving as an equalizer to protect the weak from the unchecked power of the mighty), MAFIAA/IFPI is just highlighting a big flaw in our contemporary democracies; a flaw I hope is not fatal if timely patched. And it's not just the content mafia. If it's not them, then it's overzealous politicians using FUD to push their "security" agenda (cf. Amnesty International's latest report). Here too, it's the apathy of the population that's killing freedom. The perpetrators are only filling in a void that our societies allowed to remain unwatched and uncared for.
IFPI's and their regional branches like the *AA's self-serving rabid behavior serves as an effective advertisement to make this lack of vigilance visible to mostly young people, who would never have given a second thought on lobbyists and the nasty way politics are run behind the curtains. And in every society, the less apathetic people are young people. By alienating them the way the MAFIAA does, IFPI et. al. are currently teaching them a lesson in applied democracy. The more they tighten their grip, the more young people will rebel (they're doing it daily by the millions on all those P2P networks), and the more they'll slip through their clutches.
If nothing else came out of the current phase of history, then it's at least a classic example of the dangers our democracies face when we fail to actively care to fight and preserve our freedom. Perhaps it's already too late for people to wake up and smell the napalm burning away the last remnants of freedom we used to enjoy and always took for granted, and maybe we'll be just sliding faster into the mud... and it's not impossible that we won't be able to pull ourselves out of the current and future mess anymore... But if this serves as a deterrent to future generations of all things we've done wrong, then all this would not have been in vain.
[*] One may argue that the right to listen to music, the right to read a book etc... are not civil liberties per se. That's right in the current state of the law, where ideas have become merchandises. But things were not so in the past. Entire civilizations emerged and flourished before without all this new-fangled "intellectual property" legal apparatus that's waving thousands and thousands of spider nets, which would finally lead to entirely blocking creativity in the long run. Perhaps it's a sign of a civilizations' decline, when all kinds of innovation get tied up by bureaucratic red tape?
Well, yes, somewhat creative, but the last "Rasterfahndung" was definitely ethnic profiling, and was later struck down as unconstitutional by the Supreme Court on behalf of a Moroccan student, whose constitutional complaint was financially backed by the general student organization ASTA.
What is stopping Homeland Security [...] from raiding their offices and imprisoning everybody in site without trial for 'enemy combatant terrorist activities' or something.?
Who would then provide them with the passwords to access spyware's backdoors?
If you don't like his policies, just vote next time.
What for? His predecessor from the other side of the political spectrum, Otto Schily, was just as bad as Wolfgang Schaeuble.
In theory, you're right, but in the prevalent climate of fear since 9/11 and the massive shift away from civil rights towards security, monitoring, using confessions extracted through torture by foreign governments, ethnic profiling ("Rasterfahndung")... there ain't much you can do about it anyway. The only party in Germany that's quite skeptical of all this was the FDP (they had a minister who resigned over this when they were still in power; though it was before 9/11), but even they finally caved in to the security doctrine and are just paying dishonest lip service w.r.t. civil rights.
So voting yes, but there's no real political alternative to pick from. Boycotting LinuxTag is the only way for some people to show that they disapprove of all this. It's not LinuxTag's fault however, just an unfortunate mishap and PR fiasco.
Well, I would, but only if it's the kind of software that saves lives. Like most programmers, I'm working at night and alone. Should I get a heart attack or stroke, I'd highly appreciate it if monitoring software were to set off some alarm or calls 911.
They need to look smart, they need to look scary, they need to look like someone you don't want to play with.
Not necessarily the best approach in Iraq. Those leaks just make them look more human, and therefore less of a danger that the locals would otherwise need to fight. What's fueling the hatred down in Iraq is exactly this kind of menacing posturing (looking scary) that generates a lot of defiance among a mostly juvenile and very young population. Looking scary doesn't go down well with young people, neither in Iraq nor elsewhere in the world.
Looking silly and incompetent makes them more sympathetic in the eyes of the normal population; the menacing posturing didn't impress the armed insurgents anyway, so what's the point in needlessly enraging the regular population?
And instead of looking smart, being and acting smart would be much more useful.
Copyright infringement is a violation of civil law.
May be true or not... depending on the country and legislation you're in. The real question is how long until the content mafia is able to buy new laws that make copyright infringement a criminal offense?. Isn't it in the pipelines already? E.g. in the US?
But no matter of criminal vs. civil law: illegal copying is still not theft, because it's not depriving the owner of its own original work. Copying is an entirely different beast that can be declared illegal under some circumstances. But it's not (repeat: not) theft; it's duplication.
Well, I was joking, of course. But using dummy traffic generation to foil traffic analysis has been taken seriously. Add to this that inbound spam is ubiquitous, and that outbound spam botnet traffic is likely to get accepted as a valid excuse for something that's all too common ("what? me? must've been a virus on my PC!"), is it really so unrealistic to hide in the swarm? Damn, I should have filed a patent "An apparatus for piggy-backing secret communications on top of ubiquitous unsolicited commercial e-mail"!
It's funny how much people take things for granted. Do you sincerely believe that spam (and image spam) is about selling stuff? Come on! Spam is the covert channel used by terrorists to control their extensive network of sleeper cells. Why?
All the gobbledygook in the text portion of image spam is a complex code. In fact, it's steganography (some of this stuff may be hiding in the image itself - even terrorists need more bandwidth nowadays)!
By using botnets, they effectively annihilate any attempt at traffic analysis. The constant widespread stream of messages is the best way to hide real messages; and to hide any rise in control messages.
Now let's send this to the Government, and see how fast CAN SPAM ACT will get revoked, and the spammers sent to Gitmo for "questioning"!
SCO already tried to DOS (denial of service) Linux by sucking away CPU/brain cycles from all those developers who kept reading the stories about this supposedly epic bureaucratic battle of the lawyers, instead of coding and making Linux more user-friendly. Now, Microsoft is doing more of the same. Fortunately, the most prolific coders aren't really interested in all those lame stories about legal gobbledygook. So sorry, Microsoft, your DOS-attack on us is doomed to fail once again.
Imagine Bin Laden (or his family, up to 70 or 120 years after his death) suing members of the US government for unlawfully attempting to pirate his copyrighted movies...
Slashdot Mirror
Interestingly, Google already rebranded GMail in Germany as Googlemail
All Google needs to do is close its subsidiaries in the EU (or just Germany and UK; and Spain?). They can still offer all their services to EU people from within the US, without having to bother with EU trademark or other regulations.
And since Google induces German/UK residents per IP-Geolocation to use different services (google.de, google.co.uk, instead of google.com, googlemail.com instead of gmail.com) and probably also different servers; than those in the US, they brought all this trademark hassle/nightmare upon themselves.
Frankly, is there ANY real compelling reason for Google to set up a business entity outside the US? They already had to comply with Chinese laws, getting quite some heat for that; and the more foreign laws they expose themselves to, the harder will they have to fight to keep a consistant uniform brand globablly.
And apropos Germany: hasn't Google recently announced that they intended to fight the planned german data retention laws w.r.t. Googlemail, if necessary by pulling this service out of Germany completely?
Does it really limit the scope of the problem? Many bi- or multilingual editors translate stuff to or from "the other Wikipedia".
But is all this really a problem? What's the difference between a government-founded expert, and any other random editor? Both are on exactly the same footing here. Whenever an article is edited by an expert, it will sooner than later be reedited by an expert with opposing views (and by hordes of non-experts as well). This is already happening all over the Wikipedia, and it doesn't really harm her.
So if the German government wants to fund some experts to contribute to Wikipedia, so what? If other experts think those German experts' contributions were biased, they would very quickly point it out and get involved in discussions (good for science!), or edit-wars (more work for admins). I see no problem here. Everyone is free to contribute, and the system works because no single opinion remains unchallenged for too long; esp. not opinions that are politically-laden.
Binary Windows applications, as a "standard", aren't really that big a deal.
Perhaps the parent poster is thinking of some ABI-compat layer like the Linuxulator on BSD. After all, that's the only way to run e.g. Maple-for-Linux on FreeBSD.
While it does sound like a good idea to add kernel support for PE-linked Windows binaries to Linux (and BSD), that's not where the real difficulty lies. Extending the dynamic linker to support ELF, COFF, PE-COFF (DLL) etc. at the same time is the easiest part. All you need to know is how dynamic linking works in the Windows world, and that is widely documented and trivially reimplemented.
The real difficulty is, as has already been said previously, that the Win32 API is a moving target. Not really Win32 proper, but all the additional APIs that Microsoft keeps releasing: NET 2.0, NET 3.0 etc, etc, etc..., which are not always strictly on top of Win32 API (or it wouldn't have been such a headache to port). It will ultimately boil down to the problems that the Wine project are constantly facing: tracking Microsoft's continual stream of changes being a very time consuming, thankless job.
But perhaps it's not such a bad thing. The moment we have binary compatibility with some software, it effectively stifles the drive to write an OSS replacement. Just look at the binary blobs for video card drivers, wireless card drivers etc... that haunt both Linux and BSD: if we didn't have the possibility to run a binary driver, however crappy, for that brand new 3D graphics adapter, the OSS community would already have invested much more hacking and reverse-engineering energy to come up with the required open source drivers; irrespective of the hardware vendors' cooperation or non-cooperation on publishing their specs. Same for FreeBSD's native NDIS support: very neat and useful, but how likely are we do get native drivers for some network adapter, if we could natively run their ndis (binary) driver instead?
Perhaps God is the programmer who defined the diverse physical constants before bootstrapping our instance of the universe? And Meta-God is the programmer who defined God's universe's metaphysical constants before metabootstrapping it? And Meta-Meta-God is...
That's not the solution. Germany has jurisdiction over DeNIC, the .de registry. So they could have them pull the DNS records for any reasons. The solution is for privacy-aware Germans to use a generic gTLD domain like, say, .net, .org or .com.
If Google closed shop in Germany, so what? All what Germans need to do is to use google.com, over which Germany has no influence whatsoever. Actually, it's Google that's pushing Germans to google.de and force them use googlemail.com instead of gmail.com for GMail, with some kind of geo-based IP detection, even if they go to google.com. Crazy! Now would be good time for Google to stop this country-specific nonsense and let users choose (without forcing them to set cookies, use proxies to sign up for gmail.com addresses and what not).
it is wrong/unwise for the **IA to be selective in their pursuits of 'violators'
It may be wrong from an ethical point of view, but it's definitely not unwise from their business point of view. Biting the hands that feed them (all those "wonderful" copyright laws), now that would be unwise. They've got much more to loose should the politicians start realizing the silliness of their laws and therefore retracting them to some degree, than to gain from the publicity of a high-profile case. Within their own twisted logic, the *AAs/IFPI/... are acting as is expected: thankful and accomodating towards the powers that be, and harshly vindictive towards 10 year olds from needy backgrounds.
I had to implement a security auditing program for a government agency (don't ask which one: NDA) that would probe their whole network from a set of strategically placed boxes. Being familiar with both FreeBSD and Gentoo, I couldn't care less which platform those boxes would run on. The program itself was a somewhat convoluted big program in C++ that ran as a process and the dependencies on libraries (except libc or glibc and, of course, STL) were near zero.
The interesting bits here were:
Programming this had been easy as pie, of course, but the licensing discussions went on and on and on. In a nutshell, their lawyers were first afraid that releasing the code under GPL would force them to disclose the source (a big no-no), so they insisted on a custom license first. This wouldn't have solved their problem, if the code were accidentally GPLed through some careless linking etc... After some thinking, they finally agreed on a BSD-license for the code with the extra provisions to be extra-careful to avoid any external GPL and LGPL code dependencies.
Then there was the problem of the platform itself. Specifically FreeBSD or Gentoo? Here again, their lawyers were totally nervous that this program would, by dynamically linking to glibc, get "virally license-infected" (their quote) so that it would magically become at least LGPLed, or at worst GPLed too. The assumed (wrongly) that they were under the obligation to automatically release the source code if it were GPL; while in reality, they were not planning to distribute the program at all! Without distribution, there were not under any obligation to release the source code to the public either! They had no qualms about BSD-licensed libc on FreeBSD though.
Now, all this is pretty silly, and showed a big confusion about the scope of the GPL and LGPL; even among lawyers who should've know better. This special application was never intended to be released to the outside world; so licensing it under GPL wouldn't have been a real problem anyway (no distribution == no accompanying source code).
To wrap up: what should you do? Since you're planning to sell (distribute) the software, you should definitively consult a good lawyer before going the LGPL/GPL route. You can't distribute closed-source software that is [L]GPLed (be it intentionally, or unintentially). The BSD route is less risky, but beware: there are some GPL and LGPL bits in BSD systems as well!, so you want to be careful what you link against and what you include in your code.
But better yet: why won't you give back to the community? Is there any special reason for not disclosing your source code? Esp. under Linux and the BSDs, binary-only programs are a nightmare to maintain! Every new release of some dependent libraries, every ABI change across major release versions could break your binary app; and you'll have a lot of angry customers to care about, who would scream at you for newly compiled versions. You really want to save yourself all this hassle and sell them the source code directly. That's the only really sensible and reasonable thing to do.
Most people believe they won't get caught. If you start catching and jailing 100s of spammers for even sentences of a few months AND fine them so they end up with a significant net loss, then spammers will stop spamming - because they start noticing that spammers ARE getting caught.
The problem is that lion's share of spam can be traced back to very few individuals. Sentencing one of them to 10+ years in jail certainly sends a message to the rest of them. BUT I agree: it's still not enough. Once they sentenced, say, 10 or 20 of the top spammers 10+ years each, THEN it will start to show. Right now, it's nothing more than a blip on the radar of those ROKSO criminals. But now, not even this one has been sentenced yet. It's still to be seen how many year's he'll finally get (probation? 2 to 5?)
When will politicians ever learn? sigh...
When will we learn to elect only smart politicians?
After all, laws are nothing but formalized wishes of people who don't know exactly what they'd like for Christmas. And as far as wishes go, we seldom get that what we wished for; especially when we've been sloppy or overly broad. Or, put another way: garbage in, garbage out.
Fortunately, silly laws are seldom obeyed; not even by ubercorrect Germans. They're just putting in some catch-all clauses in case they need to get rid of a few talented hackers, that would get too smart and identify spying tools like the planned "Bundestrojaner" (a planned state-sponsored/-pushed malware/keylogger/... that would infect "suspects'" Windows machines - "suspect" meaning there the whole population). I'm not expecting this paragraph to be actively enforced in any way other than to prevent detection or even hacking of this kind of malware.
There's a brilliant plan here:
A great way to enhance German-US relations! And German-Chinese relations, and German-Russian relations, and German-French relations... Danke, Frau Merkel! That was your most brilliant idea so far.
Or, better yet,
at a big mail hub. Let him filter out that stuff manually for a couple of years; after all, he's quite familiar with it...To me, "The music industry" seems to have become the bane of civil and modern life.
Seen from an oblique angle, this pesky MAFIAA/IFPI outfit is perhaps doing democracy a service. How so? We all know that eternal vigilance is the price of freedom. And those lobbyists are actually exposing a flaw in the democracies of most countries: a blatant lack of vigilance! The more they buy off civil liberties [*] away from the People, and the more draconian the laws become that they buy from those all too easily corruptible legislators; the more apparent this lack of vigilance becomes.
Ultimately, democracy is not threatened by the content mafia, nor by corrupt politicians, but by the apathy of its citizens. By twisting the legal framework well beyond what it once was conceived to be (serving as an equalizer to protect the weak from the unchecked power of the mighty), MAFIAA/IFPI is just highlighting a big flaw in our contemporary democracies; a flaw I hope is not fatal if timely patched. And it's not just the content mafia. If it's not them, then it's overzealous politicians using FUD to push their "security" agenda (cf. Amnesty International's latest report). Here too, it's the apathy of the population that's killing freedom. The perpetrators are only filling in a void that our societies allowed to remain unwatched and uncared for.
IFPI's and their regional branches like the *AA's self-serving rabid behavior serves as an effective advertisement to make this lack of vigilance visible to mostly young people, who would never have given a second thought on lobbyists and the nasty way politics are run behind the curtains. And in every society, the less apathetic people are young people. By alienating them the way the MAFIAA does, IFPI et. al. are currently teaching them a lesson in applied democracy. The more they tighten their grip, the more young people will rebel (they're doing it daily by the millions on all those P2P networks), and the more they'll slip through their clutches.
If nothing else came out of the current phase of history, then it's at least a classic example of the dangers our democracies face when we fail to actively care to fight and preserve our freedom. Perhaps it's already too late for people to wake up and smell the napalm burning away the last remnants of freedom we used to enjoy and always took for granted, and maybe we'll be just sliding faster into the mud... and it's not impossible that we won't be able to pull ourselves out of the current and future mess anymore... But if this serves as a deterrent to future generations of all things we've done wrong, then all this would not have been in vain.
[*] One may argue that the right to listen to music, the right to read a book etc... are not civil liberties per se. That's right in the current state of the law, where ideas have become merchandises. But things were not so in the past. Entire civilizations emerged and flourished before without all this new-fangled "intellectual property" legal apparatus that's waving thousands and thousands of spider nets, which would finally lead to entirely blocking creativity in the long run. Perhaps it's a sign of a civilizations' decline, when all kinds of innovation get tied up by bureaucratic red tape?
Well, yes, somewhat creative, but the last "Rasterfahndung" was definitely ethnic profiling, and was later struck down as unconstitutional by the Supreme Court on behalf of a Moroccan student, whose constitutional complaint was financially backed by the general student organization ASTA.
What is stopping Homeland Security [...] from raiding their offices and imprisoning everybody in site without trial for 'enemy combatant terrorist activities' or something.?
Who would then provide them with the passwords to access spyware's backdoors?
Apparently .li is open for everyone. Are ubuntu.li, gentoo.li etc... taken?
One time they tried to infect a suspects PC with a Trojan on a CD-ROM.
What's wrong with distributing genuine Windows XP install media?
If you don't like his policies, just vote next time.
What for? His predecessor from the other side of the political spectrum, Otto Schily, was just as bad as Wolfgang Schaeuble.
In theory, you're right, but in the prevalent climate of fear since 9/11 and the massive shift away from civil rights towards security, monitoring, using confessions extracted through torture by foreign governments, ethnic profiling ("Rasterfahndung")... there ain't much you can do about it anyway. The only party in Germany that's quite skeptical of all this was the FDP (they had a minister who resigned over this when they were still in power; though it was before 9/11), but even they finally caved in to the security doctrine and are just paying dishonest lip service w.r.t. civil rights.
So voting yes, but there's no real political alternative to pick from. Boycotting LinuxTag is the only way for some people to show that they disapprove of all this. It's not LinuxTag's fault however, just an unfortunate mishap and PR fiasco.
I'd rather not have any software monitor me
Well, I would, but only if it's the kind of software that saves lives. Like most programmers, I'm working at night and alone. Should I get a heart attack or stroke, I'd highly appreciate it if monitoring software were to set off some alarm or calls 911.
They need to look smart, they need to look scary, they need to look like someone you don't want to play with.
Not necessarily the best approach in Iraq. Those leaks just make them look more human, and therefore less of a danger that the locals would otherwise need to fight. What's fueling the hatred down in Iraq is exactly this kind of menacing posturing (looking scary) that generates a lot of defiance among a mostly juvenile and very young population. Looking scary doesn't go down well with young people, neither in Iraq nor elsewhere in the world.
Looking silly and incompetent makes them more sympathetic in the eyes of the normal population; the menacing posturing didn't impress the armed insurgents anyway, so what's the point in needlessly enraging the regular population?
And instead of looking smart, being and acting smart would be much more useful.
Copyright infringement is a violation of civil law.
May be true or not... depending on the country and legislation you're in. The real question is how long until the content mafia is able to buy new laws that make copyright infringement a criminal offense?. Isn't it in the pipelines already? E.g. in the US?
But no matter of criminal vs. civil law: illegal copying is still not theft, because it's not depriving the owner of its own original work. Copying is an entirely different beast that can be declared illegal under some circumstances. But it's not (repeat: not) theft; it's duplication.
Well, I was joking, of course. But using dummy traffic generation to foil traffic analysis has been taken seriously. Add to this that inbound spam is ubiquitous, and that outbound spam botnet traffic is likely to get accepted as a valid excuse for something that's all too common ("what? me? must've been a virus on my PC!"), is it really so unrealistic to hide in the swarm? Damn, I should have filed a patent "An apparatus for piggy-backing secret communications on top of ubiquitous unsolicited commercial e-mail"!
It's funny how much people take things for granted. Do you sincerely believe that spam (and image spam) is about selling stuff? Come on! Spam is the covert channel used by terrorists to control their extensive network of sleeper cells. Why?
Now let's send this to the Government, and see how fast CAN SPAM ACT will get revoked, and the spammers sent to Gitmo for "questioning"!
Why? Follow the money trail...
SCO already tried to DOS (denial of service) Linux by sucking away CPU/brain cycles from all those developers who kept reading the stories about this supposedly epic bureaucratic battle of the lawyers, instead of coding and making Linux more user-friendly. Now, Microsoft is doing more of the same. Fortunately, the most prolific coders aren't really interested in all those lame stories about legal gobbledygook. So sorry, Microsoft, your DOS-attack on us is doomed to fail once again.
Imagine Bin Laden (or his family, up to 70 or 120 years after his death) suing members of the US government for unlawfully attempting to pirate his copyrighted movies...