No, silly laws like these are just the attempt to patch dikes that have already broken down. You can't retrofit the water into the ocean just by painting a "do not flow in" sign in big threatening letters on the remnants of the broken dike.
The real solution to this is not more repression, it's legalizing copying of copyrighted material, by imposing a music/movie flat tax on the population; or perhaps just on HDD and DVD media. Everyone is sharing files nowadays, and that's not going away. So let's legalize it, and compensate the copyright holders collectively. That's the only decent thing to do. Criminalizing the whole population for something everyone does is so typical of dictatorships, let's not copy their ruthless style of governance anymore.
I expect to see authoring tools require registration and be prohibited from the general public
In Soviet Russia, copying machines and offset presses were prohibited for the general public, yet samizdat flourished nonetheless. And was the more popular for that! Even the "almighty" US government won't be able to stop people from being creative, and creatively spreading their (and others') works. Culture will remain free, even if spreading it may become a federal offense.
Microsoft has made the error of tying itself to x86 architecture to much, and that is now limiting its ability to add true functionality (like virtualization),
AFAIK, they run on top of a microkernel; and the amount of x86-specific code in their OS is very small. The real issue with Windows is its closed-source model; or, more precisely, the closed-source model of those gazillions of third-party software and driver providers. It's their job to support the multiple platforms that Windows could run on top of; and that, of course, won't happen. What makes GNU/Linux, *BSD etc... superior, is that most third party apps can just be recompiled from source for nearly any damn platform there is. Microsoft's ecosystem of closed-source software providers just can't provide this level of flexibility by design.
But patents are a (lawful) monopoly... It's the lawmaker that's granting the patent holder exclusive right to use and license his inventions any way he likes for the whole duration of the patent.
Can someone explain why copyrights and patents should expire? I'm being serious.
Don't worry: they'd be non-expirable by now, if lawmakers thought they could get away with it... As soon as people start perceiving a law as excessive, they stop abiding by it. That's the one thing that is preventing lawmakers from getting too eager here. The other being that every extension of copyrights and patent terms can be negotiated and would provide them with a nice and constant stream of revenue... which would be much smaller otherwise.
The official answer is, of course, not as cynical: Patents and copyrights are no birthrights, neither are they natural to human societies. In the history of mankind, they're a recent invention made in order to boost creativity by granting extra privileges to the inventors; privileges they never enjoyed in the past. That a whole ecosystem started growing on this so called "intellectual property" turf is not a legitimation of such laws.
Big civilizations existed before without the need for copyright or patents; and artificially preventing widespread adoption of inventions may be the prelude to the decline of our own culture and civilization. As humans, we always learned and grew by copying and enhancing what our competitors have come up with. That's what civilization is really all about: it's not one giant market where people hoard ideas to themselves, it's about people getting more creative than others.
In a world where patents and copyrights were non-expirable, nobody would EVER be able to build upon the common knowledge of men. We'd be forced to reinvent the wheel again and again, just to circumvent silly bureaucratic regulations. Instead of building up a pyramid of ideas ("standing on the shoulders of giants"), we'd be reduced to staying at the bottom with the most basic level of ideas, because stacking up two stones one on top of the other would be illegal. That's not what copyright and patent laws were originally intended to be. Once they've been stretched beyond recognition, that would have sealed the decline of our civilization.
Maybe today they mean it, but what about next tomorrow?
The way to hell is paved with good intentions. Eventually, the pendulum will swing back towards more freedom; but for now, we're still heading in the wrong direction... faster than ever before. Perhaps we're witnessing the birth of the first high-tech dictatorial regime of the world? It's certainly (trans-)forming fast, and the few people who are aware of it have not enough weight to warn the general populace. And those in the executive and legislative branches who are actively performing this transformation are not aware of this negative cumulative effect either. That's what makes it so dangerous.
I go to movies. I pay to go to the movies. Why do I have to sit through a 5 minute sermon on how evil piracy is when I paid to get there?
Why? Because you paid for it! "Pirated" copies of the movies are often unencumbered and have this crud removed (unless the guys doing the ripping kept it in for laughs)...
If you keep feeding the beast, the beast will keep growing... All this MAFIAA circus that's going on is being paid in full by paying consumers. Every time you go to a movie, or buy a DVD, or a song etc...; a small amount of your money gets diverted to sue 14 years olds or penniless grannies, and a bigger amount of that to keep feeding the same politicians who brought you DMCA/WIPO-like laws with more and worse of the same already in the pipeline.
Pirate bay has said that if they are sued they'll move to a country that will allow them to exist with out being accused of wrong doing.
Yes, but which country would that be? Even Russia caved in and bowed to MAFIAA/US pressure regarding allofmp3.com, to be part of the WTO. DMCA/WIPO like laws are spreading worldwide like the plague. Wouldn't it be the ultimate irony if TPB found asylum, not in "free" countries, but in countries like Cuba, Iran, North Korea..., who would oppose the US government's IP-bullying on a matter of principle? Hey, even Venezuela could be possible; that's the best way for Chavez to irk his friend Bush!
But seriously, the solution here is, of course, trackerless bittorrent, or, even better, a totally distributed, anonymizing and encrypting network; something like GNUnet once it's ready. The more they target the trackers now, the more it'll spread everywhere. Just like mercury.
France's highly regarded mainstream paper Le Monde also published the key, repeating it on purpose in their article. Now imagine how those AACS-LA lawyers will get laughed out of french courts should they try to curb Le Monde's freedom of press! C'est trop tard messieurs, get over it.
Saying "Crookes is a crook" just 'cause I don't like him would constitute that.
But what if you said: "I think Crookes is a crook"? You're not saying that he's a crook, but only that's your personal opinion. And opinions are still not facts. Or even more subtle: "It's being said on the Net that Crooks is a crook." (add links). Again: you're not saying that he's a crook, only that others are saying it. You could even ask the question: "Is Crookes a crook?" or asking "The blogosphere is debating wether Crookes is a crook. Is there some truth to it?" Would all this be slander?
Well, it depends. Courts are free to see it one way or the other. Depending on context, it may be construed as slander, or it may not. If, for instance, you were running a blog with a multitude of topics, and Crookes were only mentioned in one of them in the way stated above, courts would be inclined to see this as news reporting and drop the case. But if you set up a "Crookes sucks" website full of the same stuff, judges won't be amused and you may be convicted of deliberate libel or slander provided you can't prove that you were telling the truth.
What's relevant here is something else: the stronger free speech is restricted (even if it's good intentioned as in slander and libel laws), the more people will word around it. Back in time, when free speech was even more restricted than it is today, people used to invent fairy tales (literally) to criticize people in power, who could have sued them into oblivion (or much worse!) had they spoken out openly. Ironically, everyone back then knew and understood who was meant. Perhaps someone just wants to promote creativity on the Net this way?
Then imagine reading a german website where a lots of Germans would say: "Well capturing foreigners and holding them without trial is not such a bad thing. At least we're not torturing them... well at least not so brutal... and giving them food. And bibles.
There's no need to imagine anything here: German interior minister Wolfang Schaeuble is currently advocating to turn the presumption of innocence into presumption of guilt for terrorist-related stuff (which could be construed to be pretty much anything: you spent your holidays in Tunesia instead of Mallorca? You've got to be a terrorist! Now prove otherwise!), and he doesn't see anything wrong with using confessions extracted through torture by foreign governments... That's not just some right-wing weirdos posting comments on a website, it's official government policy; backed by the conservative CDU party, and tolerated by the socialist SPD party; both currently sharing power.
Thankfully, there has been some protest there, mostly in the press which is very sensitive to those abuses, but nothing really strong enough politically to effectively stop the downward spiral. Sooner or later, there will be internment camps in Europe too; not because people there
are evil, but because they don't care: "It doesn't affect me, right? So where's the problem?"
EU has invented similar laws under the acronym RoHS. Those too are driving manufacturers of embedded devices nuts: without Pb., solder points corrode much faster - which is bad for equipment designed to be put in remote areas with extreme weather conditions... of course: far away from population centers where people could get hurt. RoHS compliant equipment can't last as long as current gear; and guess who's paying the price of replacing that stuff much faster than needed? And this replacement comes at a cost for the environment too...
In fact, it's measurable. Setting and reporting cookies (one line of HTTP per cookie) itself doesn't really influence bandwidth. It's not even a blip on the radar. BUT if websites generate different content based on the cookies (new user content, returning visitor content), and if the content size is significantly different in both cases, then bandwidth usage could go up (or down)... quite measurably sometimes.
That's right. Considering that each of setting and reporting a cookie takes exactly one line of HTTP per page request/response, it's really not that much - even if sites set multiple cookies (yuck!).
But the parent poster is right w.r.t. javascript/bandwidth relation: just blocking out javascript won't reduce bandwith per se, because it still has to get to the browser; but it would cut everything javascript downloads on its own, so it's not such a bad deal. NoScript is your friend...
You're absolutely right! But perhaps the terrorists didn't care that much about reality. In their blind hatred, they picked a prominent target that (in their eyes!) represented America's power. Those people aren't known for thinking rationally after all.
The Al Qaeda attack on the WTC was not against the American government, it was just against an easily targetable private building.
Perhaps the WTC targetting was meant to be against US Government's real employers? Those guys know just like all of us who's wielding real power in the US - and that's no longer We, The People, but big greedy megacorps who were being traded at WTC. When the modus operandi of megacorps is to drag 10 year old kids to court for something as harmless as copying a few music files (calling this "piracy"! What a joke, compared to high-seas real piracy where real people get killed), is the violent over-reaction of this government which went as far as to circumvent and bypass its own laws (Gitmo, rendition flights,...) really surprising anymore?
However, I think the key difference was that Freedom of the Press meant the government could not suppress your literature. He wasn't as much as being prevented from publishing as much as he was resisting court subpoena from giving information on it.
But by putting him in jail, the government effectively prevented him from publishing further, therefore curtailing Freedom of Press. Perhaps this was this judge's (and those who pay him?) main motivation here? To silence someone until the topic they talked about cooled down a bit?
After all, how is this different from any 3rd world country? Someone there writes something their government won't like; government throws him in jail for whatever reason (not necessarily related to his journalistic activities) - end of journalistic criticism; and this journalist is furthermore discredited as a criminal, should he ever try to criticize the government again.
Undoubtedly they'll find other projects to amuse themselves with.
Like... making wars between themselves?
While I generally agree (a LOT of people are working day-in, day-out without generating anything useful to survival), it's not as easy as that. According to Maslow's pyramid of needs, there's more to life than mere survival. And that's the point where this "indirect economy" starts.
The Microsoft vs. Government analogy is not quite right: Using Microsoft products (and agreeing to their EULAs) is like granting cops access to your home on your own free will. Cops don't need warrants if you invite them to come in! Government needs special authorization (search warrant) to enter, because we have no way of escaping their power, so a safeguard is needed to prevent abuse. But Microsoft doesn't need a warrant or something similar, because, basically, you're free NOT to use their software, and can therefore legally get out of their snooping reach.
Remember that all laws previous to the DMCA were to protect against piracy, (bootlegging, distribution, etc). But now the DMCA actually limits your freedom of use, even for personal use.
MPAA could easily respond by stating that the DMCA is not their fault, but the brainchild of corrupt politicians they had to buy... all from the consumer's money. So, the consumer is to be blamed for DMCA: they not only elected the politicians to vote it in, they also paid for it with every commercial DVD they bought in a store.
You know, once upon a time... images were (*gasp*) free to see for everyone using a browser. They were not DRM-ed. Anybody could look at them, without having to pay royalties to the website offering them (with the exception of some pr0n sites). There were no identifiers, no crypto... heck, you could even surf the web anonymously without having to identify.
"Their government required that a certain percentage of films shown in French cinemas had to be French. U.S. production companies were financing cheap films just to boost the overall French market so they could release more films in France!"
In France, it made sense. Unfortunately, the French persuaded Germans to do the same in recent years (no, not to show more french movies, most of which were quite good, but to cut the amount of US movies in favor of locally produced crap). So the amount of US-made movies in german TV and cinema dropped significantly, and German's anti-americanism has been on the rise for quite some time now.
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No, silly laws like these are just the attempt to patch dikes that have already broken down. You can't retrofit the water into the ocean just by painting a "do not flow in" sign in big threatening letters on the remnants of the broken dike.
The real solution to this is not more repression, it's legalizing copying of copyrighted material, by imposing a music/movie flat tax on the population; or perhaps just on HDD and DVD media. Everyone is sharing files nowadays, and that's not going away. So let's legalize it, and compensate the copyright holders collectively. That's the only decent thing to do. Criminalizing the whole population for something everyone does is so typical of dictatorships, let's not copy their ruthless style of governance anymore.
I expect to see authoring tools require registration and be prohibited from the general public
In Soviet Russia, copying machines and offset presses were prohibited for the general public, yet samizdat flourished nonetheless. And was the more popular for that! Even the "almighty" US government won't be able to stop people from being creative, and creatively spreading their (and others') works. Culture will remain free, even if spreading it may become a federal offense.
Microsoft has made the error of tying itself to x86 architecture to much, and that is now limiting its ability to add true functionality (like virtualization),
AFAIK, they run on top of a microkernel; and the amount of x86-specific code in their OS is very small. The real issue with Windows is its closed-source model; or, more precisely, the closed-source model of those gazillions of third-party software and driver providers. It's their job to support the multiple platforms that Windows could run on top of; and that, of course, won't happen. What makes GNU/Linux, *BSD etc... superior, is that most third party apps can just be recompiled from source for nearly any damn platform there is. Microsoft's ecosystem of closed-source software providers just can't provide this level of flexibility by design.
But patents are a (lawful) monopoly... It's the lawmaker that's granting the patent holder exclusive right to use and license his inventions any way he likes for the whole duration of the patent.
Can someone explain why copyrights and patents should expire? I'm being serious.
Don't worry: they'd be non-expirable by now, if lawmakers thought they could get away with it... As soon as people start perceiving a law as excessive, they stop abiding by it. That's the one thing that is preventing lawmakers from getting too eager here. The other being that every extension of copyrights and patent terms can be negotiated and would provide them with a nice and constant stream of revenue... which would be much smaller otherwise.
The official answer is, of course, not as cynical: Patents and copyrights are no birthrights, neither are they natural to human societies. In the history of mankind, they're a recent invention made in order to boost creativity by granting extra privileges to the inventors; privileges they never enjoyed in the past. That a whole ecosystem started growing on this so called "intellectual property" turf is not a legitimation of such laws.
Big civilizations existed before without the need for copyright or patents; and artificially preventing widespread adoption of inventions may be the prelude to the decline of our own culture and civilization. As humans, we always learned and grew by copying and enhancing what our competitors have come up with. That's what civilization is really all about: it's not one giant market where people hoard ideas to themselves, it's about people getting more creative than others.
In a world where patents and copyrights were non-expirable, nobody would EVER be able to build upon the common knowledge of men. We'd be forced to reinvent the wheel again and again, just to circumvent silly bureaucratic regulations. Instead of building up a pyramid of ideas ("standing on the shoulders of giants"), we'd be reduced to staying at the bottom with the most basic level of ideas, because stacking up two stones one on top of the other would be illegal. That's not what copyright and patent laws were originally intended to be. Once they've been stretched beyond recognition, that would have sealed the decline of our civilization.
Maybe today they mean it, but what about next tomorrow?
The way to hell is paved with good intentions. Eventually, the pendulum will swing back towards more freedom; but for now, we're still heading in the wrong direction... faster than ever before. Perhaps we're witnessing the birth of the first high-tech dictatorial regime of the world? It's certainly (trans-)forming fast, and the few people who are aware of it have not enough weight to warn the general populace. And those in the executive and legislative branches who are actively performing this transformation are not aware of this negative cumulative effect either. That's what makes it so dangerous.
I go to movies. I pay to go to the movies. Why do I have to sit through a 5 minute sermon on how evil piracy is when I paid to get there?
Why? Because you paid for it! "Pirated" copies of the movies are often unencumbered and have this crud removed (unless the guys doing the ripping kept it in for laughs)...
If you keep feeding the beast, the beast will keep growing... All this MAFIAA circus that's going on is being paid in full by paying consumers. Every time you go to a movie, or buy a DVD, or a song etc...; a small amount of your money gets diverted to sue 14 years olds or penniless grannies, and a bigger amount of that to keep feeding the same politicians who brought you DMCA/WIPO-like laws with more and worse of the same already in the pipeline.
Pirate bay has said that if they are sued they'll move to a country that will allow them to exist with out being accused of wrong doing.
Yes, but which country would that be? Even Russia caved in and bowed to MAFIAA/US pressure regarding allofmp3.com, to be part of the WTO. DMCA/WIPO like laws are spreading worldwide like the plague. Wouldn't it be the ultimate irony if TPB found asylum, not in "free" countries, but in countries like Cuba, Iran, North Korea..., who would oppose the US government's IP-bullying on a matter of principle? Hey, even Venezuela could be possible; that's the best way for Chavez to irk his friend Bush!
But seriously, the solution here is, of course, trackerless bittorrent, or, even better, a totally distributed, anonymizing and encrypting network; something like GNUnet once it's ready. The more they target the trackers now, the more it'll spread everywhere. Just like mercury.
France's highly regarded mainstream paper Le Monde also published the key, repeating it on purpose in their article. Now imagine how those AACS-LA lawyers will get laughed out of french courts should they try to curb Le Monde's freedom of press! C'est trop tard messieurs, get over it.
Saying "Crookes is a crook" just 'cause I don't like him would constitute that.
But what if you said: "I think Crookes is a crook"? You're not saying that he's a crook, but only that's your personal opinion. And opinions are still not facts. Or even more subtle: "It's being said on the Net that Crooks is a crook." (add links). Again: you're not saying that he's a crook, only that others are saying it. You could even ask the question: "Is Crookes a crook?" or asking "The blogosphere is debating wether Crookes is a crook. Is there some truth to it?" Would all this be slander?
Well, it depends. Courts are free to see it one way or the other. Depending on context, it may be construed as slander, or it may not. If, for instance, you were running a blog with a multitude of topics, and Crookes were only mentioned in one of them in the way stated above, courts would be inclined to see this as news reporting and drop the case. But if you set up a "Crookes sucks" website full of the same stuff, judges won't be amused and you may be convicted of deliberate libel or slander provided you can't prove that you were telling the truth.
What's relevant here is something else: the stronger free speech is restricted (even if it's good intentioned as in slander and libel laws), the more people will word around it. Back in time, when free speech was even more restricted than it is today, people used to invent fairy tales (literally) to criticize people in power, who could have sued them into oblivion (or much worse!) had they spoken out openly. Ironically, everyone back then knew and understood who was meant. Perhaps someone just wants to promote creativity on the Net this way?
Expect the questionnaire to be "enhanced" soon: "Have you ever indulged in music/movie piracy? Have you ever downloaded music from allofmp3.com?"
Then imagine reading a german website where a lots of Germans would say: "Well capturing foreigners and holding them without trial is not such a bad thing. At least we're not torturing them... well at least not so brutal... and giving them food. And bibles.
There's no need to imagine anything here: German interior minister Wolfang Schaeuble is currently advocating to turn the presumption of innocence into presumption of guilt for terrorist-related stuff (which could be construed to be pretty much anything: you spent your holidays in Tunesia instead of Mallorca? You've got to be a terrorist! Now prove otherwise!), and he doesn't see anything wrong with using confessions extracted through torture by foreign governments... That's not just some right-wing weirdos posting comments on a website, it's official government policy; backed by the conservative CDU party, and tolerated by the socialist SPD party; both currently sharing power.
Thankfully, there has been some protest there, mostly in the press which is very sensitive to those abuses, but nothing really strong enough politically to effectively stop the downward spiral. Sooner or later, there will be internment camps in Europe too; not because people there are evil, but because they don't care: "It doesn't affect me, right? So where's the problem?"
Ouch, my mistake: RoHS.
EU has invented similar laws under the acronym RoHS. Those too are driving manufacturers of embedded devices nuts: without Pb., solder points corrode much faster - which is bad for equipment designed to be put in remote areas with extreme weather conditions... of course: far away from population centers where people could get hurt. RoHS compliant equipment can't last as long as current gear; and guess who's paying the price of replacing that stuff much faster than needed? And this replacement comes at a cost for the environment too...
In fact, it's measurable. Setting and reporting cookies (one line of HTTP per cookie) itself doesn't really influence bandwidth. It's not even a blip on the radar. BUT if websites generate different content based on the cookies (new user content, returning visitor content), and if the content size is significantly different in both cases, then bandwidth usage could go up (or down)... quite measurably sometimes.
That's right. Considering that each of setting and reporting a cookie takes exactly one line of HTTP per page request/response, it's really not that much - even if sites set multiple cookies (yuck!).
But the parent poster is right w.r.t. javascript/bandwidth relation: just blocking out javascript won't reduce bandwith per se, because it still has to get to the browser; but it would cut everything javascript downloads on its own, so it's not such a bad deal. NoScript is your friend...
You're absolutely right! But perhaps the terrorists didn't care that much about reality. In their blind hatred, they picked a prominent target that (in their eyes!) represented America's power. Those people aren't known for thinking rationally after all.
The Al Qaeda attack on the WTC was not against the American government, it was just against an easily targetable private building.
Perhaps the WTC targetting was meant to be against US Government's real employers? Those guys know just like all of us who's wielding real power in the US - and that's no longer We, The People, but big greedy megacorps who were being traded at WTC. When the modus operandi of megacorps is to drag 10 year old kids to court for something as harmless as copying a few music files (calling this "piracy"! What a joke, compared to high-seas real piracy where real people get killed), is the violent over-reaction of this government which went as far as to circumvent and bypass its own laws (Gitmo, rendition flights, ...) really surprising anymore?
However, I think the key difference was that Freedom of the Press meant the government could not suppress your literature. He wasn't as much as being prevented from publishing as much as he was resisting court subpoena from giving information on it.
But by putting him in jail, the government effectively prevented him from publishing further, therefore curtailing Freedom of Press. Perhaps this was this judge's (and those who pay him?) main motivation here? To silence someone until the topic they talked about cooled down a bit?
After all, how is this different from any 3rd world country? Someone there writes something their government won't like; government throws him in jail for whatever reason (not necessarily related to his journalistic activities) - end of journalistic criticism; and this journalist is furthermore discredited as a criminal, should he ever try to criticize the government again.
Undoubtedly they'll find other projects to amuse themselves with.
Like... making wars between themselves?
While I generally agree (a LOT of people are working day-in, day-out without generating anything useful to survival), it's not as easy as that. According to Maslow's pyramid of needs, there's more to life than mere survival. And that's the point where this "indirect economy" starts.
The Microsoft vs. Government analogy is not quite right: Using Microsoft products (and agreeing to their EULAs) is like granting cops access to your home on your own free will. Cops don't need warrants if you invite them to come in! Government needs special authorization (search warrant) to enter, because we have no way of escaping their power, so a safeguard is needed to prevent abuse. But Microsoft doesn't need a warrant or something similar, because, basically, you're free NOT to use their software, and can therefore legally get out of their snooping reach.
Remember that all laws previous to the DMCA were to protect against piracy, (bootlegging, distribution, etc). But now the DMCA actually limits your freedom of use, even for personal use.
MPAA could easily respond by stating that the DMCA is not their fault, but the brainchild of corrupt politicians they had to buy... all from the consumer's money. So, the consumer is to be blamed for DMCA: they not only elected the politicians to vote it in, they also paid for it with every commercial DVD they bought in a store.
You know, once upon a time... images were (*gasp*) free to see for everyone using a browser. They were not DRM-ed. Anybody could look at them, without having to pay royalties to the website offering them (with the exception of some pr0n sites). There were no identifiers, no crypto... heck, you could even surf the web anonymously without having to identify.
Was there any trade involved at all? Or does "selling an idea" already count as trade in the minds of American prosecutors?
"Their government required that a certain percentage of films shown in French cinemas had to be French. U.S. production companies were financing cheap films just to boost the overall French market so they could release more films in France!"
In France, it made sense. Unfortunately, the French persuaded Germans to do the same in recent years (no, not to show more french movies, most of which were quite good, but to cut the amount of US movies in favor of locally produced crap). So the amount of US-made movies in german TV and cinema dropped significantly, and German's anti-americanism has been on the rise for quite some time now.