This is a completely ridiculous notion, how do you think the money gets to the "serious research" in the first place? Right, investment banks and the financial services industry! You'd have a far lower amount of research if you can't get money to do that research!
So the question is, if you compare: Money => Banking System => Research
With
Money => Other System => Research
does "Research" end up with more or less Money in the latter system. It obviously depends on what "Other System" is. But given that a large bulk of the existing banking system just diverted vast amounts of money into profitless financial packages that then collapsed, it's natural to assume that "Other System" which puts the money to better use might not be too hard to find.
Anyway, this is a bit of a sideshow. The issue under discussion isn't whether or not banks invest in research (that's an important, but different discussion). It's whether moving all those clever people into investment banking increases the amount of money that goes into research enough to counter-balance the lack of contribution they would have made if they went into it. And I think it's again reasonable to guess that this doesn't happen. Because all the research and cleverness they're doing in the field of Investment Banking isn't about giving loans to research organizations, but about finding clever loopholes that let the banks turn large numbers into even larger numbers in some impenetrable perversion of economics.
And I said that there are geographical restrictions, not that there is no downloadable music for sale.
Yes, and I was talking about the availability of online digitial music in the context of excuses for piracy. All the way through, that is what I have been talking about. You say "if you didn't think that Spotify was a good example, you needn't have brought it up" but it is a perfectly good example. I never at any stage started talking exclusively about Spotify, but you took the list of places Spotify is available as your starting point to try and argue against my original point. I'll re-state that point now: People on Slashdot claiming that they can't get music legitimately online only make themselves look either (a) dirt poor or (b) deluded. As the vast majority of people on Slashdot are either in the USA (more than 50%) or in Europe (where in most of the European countries music is available for sale online), that's not an outrageous thing to say and I don't get why you are determined to pick an argument over it. You say that I'm talking about the "non-existent general case", but actually the general case perfectly well exists - it's the case that the vast majority of Slashdotters have such music available for purchase to them online. Which you seem to agree with. So there you have it - a "general case" which you claim not to exist.
Okay, hang on. This started really poorly, and that's my fault, and I'm sorry. The culture of Slashdot really encourages argument, but I've got no call to be hostile with you. I'm sorry. Let me start again, because I do have some issues with some of the things you said,
No problem. Slashdot does lead people into confrontational dialogue. I'll just respond to this post that you want me to and no offense is taken. I actually respect that you've re-posted taking a different tack and I'm fine with actual debate. It may be that we never agree with each other, but so long as we both understand each other's point, there's value in that. I think some of our disagreement is misunderstanding. Anyway...
My issue with your statements is that they seem to carry with them a couple implicit assumptions that I find really harmful. First, that femininity is a negative thing, I think I've already covered.
This is a misunderstanding. I don't think femininity is a negative thing. LOL! At all!:D Nor do I consider masculinity, a particular ethnicity, profession or having a Texas accent (random example) a negative thing. The negative thing is in suggesting that any of those things are what someone is like before you know them. It would be like someone saying 'gay people are mostly hair-dressers' and when you object, their claiming that your objection is because you think hair-dressing is something shameful. That's not the reason for the criticism, it's about the assumption.
I regard pre-judgement of people as a negative thing. I don't like it at all and I think it impedes society a lot as a whole, whether that's racial stereotyping, gender stereotyping or, to a lesser extent, sexual orientation stereotyping.
But secondly, and just as important to me, is the assumption that queer people are weak and need defending. I find that much more offensive than somebody's jokes about furniture.
This is where we differ. I do think gay people should be defended. But then I think everyone should be defended. None of us are superman, gay or straight. As you are so heavily into this subject, I assume you know plenty of gay people and I'm therefore guessing, like me, that you've seen people hurt because of their sexuality. Physically. Badly. In parts of the world, people are routinely killed or imprisoned for their sexuality. You may say "don't mess with a drag queen, they'll rip your balls off", but as far as I'm concerned, based on my experiences, we're all at risk of violence or prejudice and I don't think it's offensive to want to protect people. It applies to everyone, gay, straight or anything else. You can object to my defending my friends if you wish (or even a stranger if I choose), but I'm still going to do so whether it offends you or not. I don't like stereotypes. Hate them in fact as damaging things. It may suit your attitude to say that 'queers don't need protection', but everybody does for one reason or another. I want a society where people are just people, not their gender or their orientation or their ethnicity and I'll keep on shooting down the bad statistics behind stereotypes every chance I get. I do that because I believe it's the right thing to do and no-one has demonstrated to me how reducing stereotypes isn't a good thing.
I don't really get how you move from my attitude above to my saying "gay people are weak and need defending".
There are all kinds of queer people. Truck drivers and hackers and construction workers and, yes, interior designers, drag queens, dancers, and lots and lots of fantastic hair.
But you won't find any sissies here. Even the sissies aren't sissies. Hell, some of the gay men I know who portray themselves as the most feminine are some of the stone cold toughest people I've ever met, and real role models to me, both in their effectiveness as agents for change and as how they comport themselves as human beings in a mean o
Finland, Netherlands, Sweden, France, Norway, Spain and the UK.
6 out of 27 EU members. 41 percent of the population (EU + Norway and Switzerland, generously excluding all of the Balkan republics, Ukraine or Belorussia). I don't think there is any need to examine any of the conclusions from the faulty premise of Spotify being available in "Europe".
I said (if you go back and check what you're arguing against) "digital music being available to purchase." That's a lot more than just Spotify. I don't get what your aim is here. You seem to have an agenda to try and say that I think Europe is just one country and are going to some effort to do that, despite evidence to the contrary. I just don't understand what your issue is.
You are lumping these two scenarios together. In reality they are totally different.
Yes I agree I should return bolts made from stolen materials, but the second scenario is nothing at all like that.
"Totally" different? "Nothing" alike? In your first scenario, your supplier has used materials that they didn't pay for. In the second scenario, your supplier has used software they didn't pay for. In both cases, someone has lost out on money they would have been paid. I don't think the words "totally" and "nothing" are appropriate here. There are clear and relevant similarities in the cases.
If you are the legal owner of said stock tracking software and you come to me demanding redress for the actions of the manufacturer, with whom my only relationship is buying bolts to use in my product, I think you can guess where I'd tell you to go. Any law that lets you go after me in the second scenario is lacking in common sense.
There exist a considerable number of laws to prevent people from paying others to engage in certain behaviour. These don't necessarily lack "common sense". The law is designed to prevent foreign countries from (a) using US Intellectual Property without redress and (b) from doing so giving foreign countries an unjust competitive advantage over US companies and (c) preventing US companies from off-shoring behaviour that would be illegal domestically. If those principles are not against common sense (which I don't think they are), then how is a law that accomplishes those ends against common sense?
I'm a little puzzled as to why you are against a law such as this?
Purchasing products made by a company that is out of compliance with their software licences is not the same as purchasing stolen goods.
I think there are similarities, namely the ones that I highlighted: firstly, if someone sells you stolen goods and you then lose them when the legal owner shows up, you can seek redress from the seller. Just as in this case, any contract you sign would include a declaration by the supplier that they were up to date with any licences used in providing you what you bought, meaning if they'd turned out to have lied about their part of the contractm they've broken terms of the contract and that opens the doors to several methods of redress. The other similarity is that if you knowingly purchase stolen goods, then you have potentially put yourself in trouble, just as you may with this where you might face an injunction. These similarities are why I raised it in response to your statement that purchasing in good faith would get a company off the hook. In practice, any contract signed is going to have a provision about this if such a law were passed, meaning the company would have options if they purchased in good faith.
I'm not sure if your lack of comprehension is deliberate, so I'll give you the benefit of the doubt.
I'm saying that if Microsoft is going to sponsor a law protecting copyright holders, then there should not be exceptions in that law for certain classes of copyright holders.
I am not saying that Microsoft should sue GPL violators. I am saying that a Microsoft sponsored law change should not exclude GPL vendors from suing under the same circumstances that Microsoft can sue.
I pretty much agree with you there. But I think given the different nature of GPL software, it might require a separate, differently crafted law. For example, the main GPL violations I am aware of, are not cases of someone using the software without a licence (if company X in China tweaks Open Office to make it a little more to their liking that's fine - they don't have to provide people with the source code unless they are re-distributing binaries outside their company), but of products containing GPL'd code being sold on. That's different to using the software without a licence to create a product which is what this law is about. It's a case of selling a product that contains someone else's IP. And in that case, it's actually already covered by existing law. If MS use GPL code in their Windows 7 phone and that is sold in the USA without a copy of the source code being made available, they can be prosecuted for that already.
Heh. Bless her! Well to be fair, she owned up to not knowing something and congratulated someone else on being right. That's a lot more than most people on Slashdot are willing to do.;)
GP and I discovered a new element yesterday and named it Adhomineum. Of course, I have no proof of this, as, while experimenting to determine of the stuff could get me high, I ingested all of it.
Actually, I hate to break it to you, but Adhomineum has been know about since 1997. Slashdot is 80% built out of the stuff.;)
A business out sources to another country to get around minimum wage. They it may be illegal in the USA to pay $1/hour, but not in another country.
It's illegal to allow certain pollutants into the environment in the USA, but not other countries, so companies outsource.
It's illegal to use child labor in the USA, but not in other countries, and companies out source.
So yes, you can get away with illegal behavior by shifting it over seas.
To an ethical person, those all sound like reasons to try and stop such behaviour, rather than to allow further such behaviour along the same principle. And you're actually wrong in a number of areas. US companies increasingly put a lot of checks in place to avoid more serious abuses of worker exploitation and pollution these days.
Next thing is to allow one state to apply it's laws to another state. So I gave a beer to my under 21 wife. It's not illegal in Wisconsin, but suddenly I get charged in Illinois because now the location of where a crime happened doesn't matter? Great Idea.
Your scenario isn't analoguous. You're describing a situation where you are prosecuted under the laws of one State where both the incident and the state you live in, are in a different State. I.e. one State applies its judicial powers on those outside of its citizenship and domain. But in this case, we're talking about a US law, that encompasses US companies. And there are precedents for this. You picked for your example the deliberately harmless example of giving beer to your under 21 years old wife, but there exist laws of this nature to do with sex tourism, in which a US citizen who goes abroad and abuses a child, is liable to prosecution in the US. At least there are such laws in the EU and I'm pretty certain that the USA has equivalent ones. That's a more accurate analogy than your State example because the jurisdiction (US law about US companies / people) is correct whereas in your State example, you had State A making laws about people living in State B doing things in State B which isn't what is happening here.
And if the non-US supplier provides fake software audit certs, that should let the US company off the hook, because the US company has then acted in good faith.
It would probably afford some possibilities for suing / reneging on payments to those foreign suppliers. If I purchase stolen goods, I still have to give them back when the police show up, but I can seek redress from the person that sold me those goods. If I were knowingly receiving stolen goods, then I am liable myself however.
And of course the law should apply to all licence violations, including GPL violations. If Microsoft is doing this for the right reasons, surely they would extend the same protection to software vendors who choose to use Open Source licencing models. No? Ah, I see, Microsoft give their true motives away.
You seem to be suggesting that MS should go out and sue companies that violate GPL licences. What has that got to do with them? Do you go across town and sue people for actions they commit against people you don't even know and have nothing to do with you?
One possibility, and quite a good one, is that it helps the USA to spy. After all, a US spy can't just use the local authorities tools, but they can sniff the wireless traffic of the people in an apartment block.
Presumably the US could just ask MS nicely for a neat digest of accounts of interest, delivered from their US-located datacenters, rather than asking them nicely to turn off SSL, and then having to MITM a whole bunch of people in a variety of largely hostile locales...
They could but there is more hassle in this and it also shows who they're interested in. I actually suspect that GP is correct in that this is something MS is doing for the US govt. rather than for the local governments. Reason being that those local governments control the ISPs and telecoms services there and probably don't need something like this to spy, or would even find it that helpful. But foreign spies who aren't affiliated with the local government would find it useful when they're trying to eavesdrop on Internet traffic via intercept methods.
Well it certainly doesn't appear to be a good thing, but let's at least clean up the usual more-incendiary-than-it-needs-to-be summary (TUMITINTBFS). A few months ago, MS added a setting to it's Live accounts, where you could set it to use HTTPS automatically.What appears to have happened is that this has been provided for some countries, e.g. the USA, but not for some Middle Eastern and Eastern European countries (including Iran). So this isn't some long-standing feautre that has suddenly been removed. Also, it seems that HTTPS is still available, but can't be set to be automatically enabled. So the feature is not prevented, merely not as convenient.
So not a good thing on MS's part, apparently, but at least lets have some decent information.
and GM, for example, is not doing that. They are not picking parts suppliers with renegade copies of excel on their PCs specifically to avoid anything. It is simply not an issue and not their concern, and it shouldn't be. Only microsoft should be concerned with companies who pirate from microsoft. Mandating that the rest of us ensure that people aren't stealing from microsoft is wrong.
It's interesting to think about how it would work in practice. US companies already keep an eye on foreign suppliers for ethics violations, health and safety and working time abuses. Is illegal use of resources particularly different? I think it isn't. Whether or not you think companies should be culpable for such violations is debatable, but as the ultimate funder of such activities, it is certainly a good thing for companies to keep an eye out for such things. And in practice, it might not prove too difficult to do. Monitoring of supply chain ethics is a rapidly growing market for services. Checking whether a company has passed a software audit or not would probably become a routine check, easily and cheaply done. But yes, how this law is implemented and works in practice is a serious question. That's true of most laws, though.
do not make this preference known too widely -- US banks are required by law not to do business with individuals, businesses or countries with known boycotts of israel
What the fuck? I believe you, I'm just shocked. Which takes quite a bit, these days.
Well elsewhere in this article, I've already given a country by country list of where Spotify is available in Europe. I'm well aware that it is a "bunch of countries". The point is that it's a bunch of countries where such services are, or are rapidly becoming, available. Sure, exceptions here and there, but I don't think it was unreasonable of me to talk in the general case about such services to a population that is predominantly in areas where these services are available - i.e. the US and most of Europe. True, if you're in Africa or India or South America, you're going to have more trouble. But I was talking to Slashdot which doesn't (as far as I'm aware) have a large audience in those regions.
The context of my comment about the services was a discussion about people justifying piracy - something I come across on Slashdot and few other US / Europe-based echo chambers, but not many other places. That's why I felt it acceptable to respond to you pointing out that most of the audience here are in the US or Europe. No offence was meant. Your earlier statement about Europe not being one place, I wasn't 100% certain what you were getting at as for purposes of these services, Europe is rapidly being provided with them.
Anyway, that's what I was getting at with my posts.
H.
Their supplier is competing unfairly with US suppliers, though. I think we already have similar regulations for environmentally damaging suppliers? To my mind this is no different.
Yes. It's similar to safety standards and workers rights. If a clothing manufacturer for example, can outsource production to a country where workers can be denied decent health and safety or normal workers' rights, whilst a company that uses workers in the US does not, then the former company is essentially doing an end-run around the US laws. Now (more thanks to public pressure than anything else), US companies selling products to people in the US, have to be more careful about adhering to standards abroad that are set at home. The principle behind this proposed law isn't unique to this law. It's the same principle that underlies sex tourism, employee health and safety and working hours and various security laws. It's the principle that if you're a US business or citizen, selling to US citizens or business, you can't get away with illegal behaviour by just shifting the illegal part of the process to another country.
If you're not, I'll thank you to stop getting all affronted on my behalf. I'm a big boy and can speak up for myself.
Oh, so you think you get to speak for other homosexual people because you're homosexual? That's as bad as stereotyping. I'm not "getting affronted on your behalf", I don't even know you. Just because you personally don't have a problem with something, doesn't mean it's not a problem for others. So why try to shut down those who do object?
Just because not every member of a group conforms to a certain stereotype doesn't make that steotype totally invalid, nor does it, by itself, make it offesnive.
Yes, actually. It does make it invalid. For a stereotype to be a useful thing, it would have to be overwhelmingly accurate. When 98% of gay men are mincing, effeminate people obsessed with the colour of their sofa, then you can start generalising. When 2% are, then it just means you're judging 98 out of a 100 gay people you meet before you even know them. Judging someone based on some arbitrary grouping you assign to them is offensive to me. Whether that's race, gender, sexual orientation or something else.
That you are gay gives you no greater or lesser authority to speak on another gay person's behalf or say whether or not other people should mind being pre-judged.
Don't you think that's an artificial benefit? Paying not to have adverts? I hate when they say 'buy premium to get rid of adverts'. They put the adverts there!
No, I don't see it as an artificial benefit. It's not like they put ads into the music stream out of some perverse desire to reduce my enjoyment. They have two payment models you can use for purchasing their service. You can either pay for the service, or you can have the service paid for you by advertisers in return for listening to their ads. To me, the enjoyment of the music uninterrupted is worth a fiver a month (I actually pay for the premium service for other reasons, but the ad-free version is £5 per month in the UK).
Your question seems to presuppose that they're artificially lowering the value of their product so that they can charge more for some level of value that it is 'supposed' to be. I don't think that's the case at all. Ads are just a way they can make money from people who can't or wont pay for the service themselves. I am actually sick of ads appearing in everything (especially on DVDs when I've already bought them) and really like that the good old fashioned model of paying for something with cash, not my eyeballs, is still available.
Anthony Mouse was taking about the RIAA trying to make the oldschool distribution model more necessary. One thing that would allow them to do is screw musicians on patent-licensing for DRM schemes
Is there any basis for suspicion that the RIAA are going to somehow force all musicians to use some patented DRM system that they'll licence to the musicians? I've never heard of such a plan and it would hardly make sense when people are selling non-DRM'd music all over the place. RIAA doesn't have the power to force a musician to use any particular DRM scheme.
The Asus Xonar D2X is exceptionally good at this and comes with a special doohickey for piping the optical out straight into its optical in and software to cancel out any interference whilst you're doing that. It's a selling feature of the card apparently, though I have no idea why. It's a great card for recording and quality output, but I don't get why anyone would bother with the hassle of this legal loophole when ethically it's no different to pirating or bypassing DRM. Good for backing getting sound tracks of movies and such without fiddling around with mplayer, I guess. Anyway, a number of soundcards can do this sort of loopback just by whacking a cable from the out to the in. But if you were really wanting to do this for some reason, look at a card like this one that was designed with it in mind.
Slashdot Mirror
This is a completely ridiculous notion, how do you think the money gets to the "serious research" in the first place? Right, investment banks and the financial services industry! You'd have a far lower amount of research if you can't get money to do that research!
So the question is, if you compare:
Money => Banking System => Research
With Money => Other System => Research
does "Research" end up with more or less Money in the latter system. It obviously depends on what "Other System" is. But given that a large bulk of the existing banking system just diverted vast amounts of money into profitless financial packages that then collapsed, it's natural to assume that "Other System" which puts the money to better use might not be too hard to find.
Anyway, this is a bit of a sideshow. The issue under discussion isn't whether or not banks invest in research (that's an important, but different discussion). It's whether moving all those clever people into investment banking increases the amount of money that goes into research enough to counter-balance the lack of contribution they would have made if they went into it. And I think it's again reasonable to guess that this doesn't happen. Because all the research and cleverness they're doing in the field of Investment Banking isn't about giving loans to research organizations, but about finding clever loopholes that let the banks turn large numbers into even larger numbers in some impenetrable perversion of economics.
And I said that there are geographical restrictions, not that there is no downloadable music for sale.
Yes, and I was talking about the availability of online digitial music in the context of excuses for piracy. All the way through, that is what I have been talking about. You say "if you didn't think that Spotify was a good example, you needn't have brought it up" but it is a perfectly good example. I never at any stage started talking exclusively about Spotify, but you took the list of places Spotify is available as your starting point to try and argue against my original point. I'll re-state that point now: People on Slashdot claiming that they can't get music legitimately online only make themselves look either (a) dirt poor or (b) deluded. As the vast majority of people on Slashdot are either in the USA (more than 50%) or in Europe (where in most of the European countries music is available for sale online), that's not an outrageous thing to say and I don't get why you are determined to pick an argument over it. You say that I'm talking about the "non-existent general case", but actually the general case perfectly well exists - it's the case that the vast majority of Slashdotters have such music available for purchase to them online. Which you seem to agree with. So there you have it - a "general case" which you claim not to exist.
Okay, hang on. This started really poorly, and that's my fault, and I'm sorry. The culture of Slashdot really encourages argument, but I've got no call to be hostile with you. I'm sorry. Let me start again, because I do have some issues with some of the things you said,
No problem. Slashdot does lead people into confrontational dialogue. I'll just respond to this post that you want me to and no offense is taken. I actually respect that you've re-posted taking a different tack and I'm fine with actual debate. It may be that we never agree with each other, but so long as we both understand each other's point, there's value in that. I think some of our disagreement is misunderstanding. Anyway...
My issue with your statements is that they seem to carry with them a couple implicit assumptions that I find really harmful. First, that femininity is a negative thing, I think I've already covered.
This is a misunderstanding. I don't think femininity is a negative thing. LOL! At all! :D Nor do I consider masculinity, a particular ethnicity, profession or having a Texas accent (random example) a negative thing. The negative thing is in suggesting that any of those things are what someone is like before you know them. It would be like someone saying 'gay people are mostly hair-dressers' and when you object, their claiming that your objection is because you think hair-dressing is something shameful. That's not the reason for the criticism, it's about the assumption.
I regard pre-judgement of people as a negative thing. I don't like it at all and I think it impedes society a lot as a whole, whether that's racial stereotyping, gender stereotyping or, to a lesser extent, sexual orientation stereotyping.
But secondly, and just as important to me, is the assumption that queer people are weak and need defending. I find that much more offensive than somebody's jokes about furniture.
This is where we differ. I do think gay people should be defended. But then I think everyone should be defended. None of us are superman, gay or straight. As you are so heavily into this subject, I assume you know plenty of gay people and I'm therefore guessing, like me, that you've seen people hurt because of their sexuality. Physically. Badly. In parts of the world, people are routinely killed or imprisoned for their sexuality. You may say "don't mess with a drag queen, they'll rip your balls off", but as far as I'm concerned, based on my experiences, we're all at risk of violence or prejudice and I don't think it's offensive to want to protect people. It applies to everyone, gay, straight or anything else. You can object to my defending my friends if you wish (or even a stranger if I choose), but I'm still going to do so whether it offends you or not. I don't like stereotypes. Hate them in fact as damaging things. It may suit your attitude to say that 'queers don't need protection', but everybody does for one reason or another. I want a society where people are just people, not their gender or their orientation or their ethnicity and I'll keep on shooting down the bad statistics behind stereotypes every chance I get. I do that because I believe it's the right thing to do and no-one has demonstrated to me how reducing stereotypes isn't a good thing.
I don't really get how you move from my attitude above to my saying "gay people are weak and need defending".
There are all kinds of queer people. Truck drivers and hackers and construction workers and, yes, interior designers, drag queens, dancers, and lots and lots of fantastic hair.
But you won't find any sissies here. Even the sissies aren't sissies. Hell, some of the gay men I know who portray themselves as the most feminine are some of the stone cold toughest people I've ever met, and real role models to me, both in their effectiveness as agents for change and as how they comport themselves as human beings in a mean o
Finland, Netherlands, Sweden, France, Norway, Spain and the UK. 6 out of 27 EU members. 41 percent of the population (EU + Norway and Switzerland, generously excluding all of the Balkan republics, Ukraine or Belorussia). I don't think there is any need to examine any of the conclusions from the faulty premise of Spotify being available in "Europe".
I said (if you go back and check what you're arguing against) "digital music being available to purchase." That's a lot more than just Spotify. I don't get what your aim is here. You seem to have an agenda to try and say that I think Europe is just one country and are going to some effort to do that, despite evidence to the contrary. I just don't understand what your issue is.
You are lumping these two scenarios together. In reality they are totally different.
Yes I agree I should return bolts made from stolen materials, but the second scenario is nothing at all like that.
"Totally" different? "Nothing" alike? In your first scenario, your supplier has used materials that they didn't pay for. In the second scenario, your supplier has used software they didn't pay for. In both cases, someone has lost out on money they would have been paid. I don't think the words "totally" and "nothing" are appropriate here. There are clear and relevant similarities in the cases.
If you are the legal owner of said stock tracking software and you come to me demanding redress for the actions of the manufacturer, with whom my only relationship is buying bolts to use in my product, I think you can guess where I'd tell you to go. Any law that lets you go after me in the second scenario is lacking in common sense.
There exist a considerable number of laws to prevent people from paying others to engage in certain behaviour. These don't necessarily lack "common sense". The law is designed to prevent foreign countries from (a) using US Intellectual Property without redress and (b) from doing so giving foreign countries an unjust competitive advantage over US companies and (c) preventing US companies from off-shoring behaviour that would be illegal domestically. If those principles are not against common sense (which I don't think they are), then how is a law that accomplishes those ends against common sense?
I'm a little puzzled as to why you are against a law such as this?
Purchasing products made by a company that is out of compliance with their software licences is not the same as purchasing stolen goods.
I think there are similarities, namely the ones that I highlighted: firstly, if someone sells you stolen goods and you then lose them when the legal owner shows up, you can seek redress from the seller. Just as in this case, any contract you sign would include a declaration by the supplier that they were up to date with any licences used in providing you what you bought, meaning if they'd turned out to have lied about their part of the contractm they've broken terms of the contract and that opens the doors to several methods of redress. The other similarity is that if you knowingly purchase stolen goods, then you have potentially put yourself in trouble, just as you may with this where you might face an injunction. These similarities are why I raised it in response to your statement that purchasing in good faith would get a company off the hook. In practice, any contract signed is going to have a provision about this if such a law were passed, meaning the company would have options if they purchased in good faith.
I'm not sure if your lack of comprehension is deliberate, so I'll give you the benefit of the doubt. I'm saying that if Microsoft is going to sponsor a law protecting copyright holders, then there should not be exceptions in that law for certain classes of copyright holders. I am not saying that Microsoft should sue GPL violators. I am saying that a Microsoft sponsored law change should not exclude GPL vendors from suing under the same circumstances that Microsoft can sue.
I pretty much agree with you there. But I think given the different nature of GPL software, it might require a separate, differently crafted law. For example, the main GPL violations I am aware of, are not cases of someone using the software without a licence (if company X in China tweaks Open Office to make it a little more to their liking that's fine - they don't have to provide people with the source code unless they are re-distributing binaries outside their company), but of products containing GPL'd code being sold on. That's different to using the software without a licence to create a product which is what this law is about. It's a case of selling a product that contains someone else's IP. And in that case, it's actually already covered by existing law. If MS use GPL code in their Windows 7 phone and that is sold in the USA without a copy of the source code being made available, they can be prosecuted for that already.
Heh. Bless her! Well to be fair, she owned up to not knowing something and congratulated someone else on being right. That's a lot more than most people on Slashdot are willing to do. ;)
GP and I discovered a new element yesterday and named it Adhomineum. Of course, I have no proof of this, as, while experimenting to determine of the stuff could get me high, I ingested all of it.
Actually, I hate to break it to you, but Adhomineum has been know about since 1997. Slashdot is 80% built out of the stuff. ;)
A business out sources to another country to get around minimum wage. They it may be illegal in the USA to pay $1/hour, but not in another country.
It's illegal to allow certain pollutants into the environment in the USA, but not other countries, so companies outsource.
It's illegal to use child labor in the USA, but not in other countries, and companies out source.
So yes, you can get away with illegal behavior by shifting it over seas.
To an ethical person, those all sound like reasons to try and stop such behaviour, rather than to allow further such behaviour along the same principle. And you're actually wrong in a number of areas. US companies increasingly put a lot of checks in place to avoid more serious abuses of worker exploitation and pollution these days.
Next thing is to allow one state to apply it's laws to another state. So I gave a beer to my under 21 wife. It's not illegal in Wisconsin, but suddenly I get charged in Illinois because now the location of where a crime happened doesn't matter? Great Idea.
Your scenario isn't analoguous. You're describing a situation where you are prosecuted under the laws of one State where both the incident and the state you live in, are in a different State. I.e. one State applies its judicial powers on those outside of its citizenship and domain. But in this case, we're talking about a US law, that encompasses US companies. And there are precedents for this. You picked for your example the deliberately harmless example of giving beer to your under 21 years old wife, but there exist laws of this nature to do with sex tourism, in which a US citizen who goes abroad and abuses a child, is liable to prosecution in the US. At least there are such laws in the EU and I'm pretty certain that the USA has equivalent ones. That's a more accurate analogy than your State example because the jurisdiction (US law about US companies / people) is correct whereas in your State example, you had State A making laws about people living in State B doing things in State B which isn't what is happening here.
And if the non-US supplier provides fake software audit certs, that should let the US company off the hook, because the US company has then acted in good faith.
It would probably afford some possibilities for suing / reneging on payments to those foreign suppliers. If I purchase stolen goods, I still have to give them back when the police show up, but I can seek redress from the person that sold me those goods. If I were knowingly receiving stolen goods, then I am liable myself however.
And of course the law should apply to all licence violations, including GPL violations. If Microsoft is doing this for the right reasons, surely they would extend the same protection to software vendors who choose to use Open Source licencing models. No? Ah, I see, Microsoft give their true motives away.
You seem to be suggesting that MS should go out and sue companies that violate GPL licences. What has that got to do with them? Do you go across town and sue people for actions they commit against people you don't even know and have nothing to do with you?
One possibility, and quite a good one, is that it helps the USA to spy. After all, a US spy can't just use the local authorities tools, but they can sniff the wireless traffic of the people in an apartment block.
IGNORE MY COMMENT ABOVE - AM NOT AWAKE YET.
(edit: stupid lamness filter. Yes I know "using all caps is like yelling". That's why I'm using all caps!).
If the login page isn't HTTPS, then you know.
Presumably the US could just ask MS nicely for a neat digest of accounts of interest, delivered from their US-located datacenters, rather than asking them nicely to turn off SSL, and then having to MITM a whole bunch of people in a variety of largely hostile locales...
They could but there is more hassle in this and it also shows who they're interested in. I actually suspect that GP is correct in that this is something MS is doing for the US govt. rather than for the local governments. Reason being that those local governments control the ISPs and telecoms services there and probably don't need something like this to spy, or would even find it that helpful. But foreign spies who aren't affiliated with the local government would find it useful when they're trying to eavesdrop on Internet traffic via intercept methods.
Well it certainly doesn't appear to be a good thing, but let's at least clean up the usual more-incendiary-than-it-needs-to-be summary (TUMITINTBFS). A few months ago, MS added a setting to it's Live accounts, where you could set it to use HTTPS automatically.What appears to have happened is that this has been provided for some countries, e.g. the USA, but not for some Middle Eastern and Eastern European countries (including Iran). So this isn't some long-standing feautre that has suddenly been removed. Also, it seems that HTTPS is still available, but can't be set to be automatically enabled. So the feature is not prevented, merely not as convenient.
So not a good thing on MS's part, apparently, but at least lets have some decent information.
and GM, for example, is not doing that. They are not picking parts suppliers with renegade copies of excel on their PCs specifically to avoid anything. It is simply not an issue and not their concern, and it shouldn't be. Only microsoft should be concerned with companies who pirate from microsoft. Mandating that the rest of us ensure that people aren't stealing from microsoft is wrong.
It's interesting to think about how it would work in practice. US companies already keep an eye on foreign suppliers for ethics violations, health and safety and working time abuses. Is illegal use of resources particularly different? I think it isn't. Whether or not you think companies should be culpable for such violations is debatable, but as the ultimate funder of such activities, it is certainly a good thing for companies to keep an eye out for such things. And in practice, it might not prove too difficult to do. Monitoring of supply chain ethics is a rapidly growing market for services. Checking whether a company has passed a software audit or not would probably become a routine check, easily and cheaply done. But yes, how this law is implemented and works in practice is a serious question. That's true of most laws, though.
do not make this preference known too widely -- US banks are required by law not to do business with individuals, businesses or countries with known boycotts of israel
What the fuck? I believe you, I'm just shocked. Which takes quite a bit, these days.
Well elsewhere in this article, I've already given a country by country list of where Spotify is available in Europe. I'm well aware that it is a "bunch of countries". The point is that it's a bunch of countries where such services are, or are rapidly becoming, available. Sure, exceptions here and there, but I don't think it was unreasonable of me to talk in the general case about such services to a population that is predominantly in areas where these services are available - i.e. the US and most of Europe. True, if you're in Africa or India or South America, you're going to have more trouble. But I was talking to Slashdot which doesn't (as far as I'm aware) have a large audience in those regions.
The context of my comment about the services was a discussion about people justifying piracy - something I come across on Slashdot and few other US / Europe-based echo chambers, but not many other places. That's why I felt it acceptable to respond to you pointing out that most of the audience here are in the US or Europe. No offence was meant. Your earlier statement about Europe not being one place, I wasn't 100% certain what you were getting at as for purposes of these services, Europe is rapidly being provided with them.
Anyway, that's what I was getting at with my posts.
H.
Their supplier is competing unfairly with US suppliers, though. I think we already have similar regulations for environmentally damaging suppliers? To my mind this is no different.
Yes. It's similar to safety standards and workers rights. If a clothing manufacturer for example, can outsource production to a country where workers can be denied decent health and safety or normal workers' rights, whilst a company that uses workers in the US does not, then the former company is essentially doing an end-run around the US laws. Now (more thanks to public pressure than anything else), US companies selling products to people in the US, have to be more careful about adhering to standards abroad that are set at home. The principle behind this proposed law isn't unique to this law. It's the same principle that underlies sex tourism, employee health and safety and working hours and various security laws. It's the principle that if you're a US business or citizen, selling to US citizens or business, you can't get away with illegal behaviour by just shifting the illegal part of the process to another country.
Europe is not one country...
??? Is this some sort of Zen thing?
If you're not, I'll thank you to stop getting all affronted on my behalf. I'm a big boy and can speak up for myself.
Oh, so you think you get to speak for other homosexual people because you're homosexual? That's as bad as stereotyping. I'm not "getting affronted on your behalf", I don't even know you. Just because you personally don't have a problem with something, doesn't mean it's not a problem for others. So why try to shut down those who do object?
Just because not every member of a group conforms to a certain stereotype doesn't make that steotype totally invalid, nor does it, by itself, make it offesnive.
Yes, actually. It does make it invalid. For a stereotype to be a useful thing, it would have to be overwhelmingly accurate. When 98% of gay men are mincing, effeminate people obsessed with the colour of their sofa, then you can start generalising. When 2% are, then it just means you're judging 98 out of a 100 gay people you meet before you even know them. Judging someone based on some arbitrary grouping you assign to them is offensive to me. Whether that's race, gender, sexual orientation or something else.
That you are gay gives you no greater or lesser authority to speak on another gay person's behalf or say whether or not other people should mind being pre-judged.
Assuming you don't want anything from the Beatles back catalogue...
Spotify has The Beatles in their catalogue, though you are correct, I don't want to listen to it anyway. Can't stand the Beatles.
Don't you think that's an artificial benefit? Paying not to have adverts? I hate when they say 'buy premium to get rid of adverts'. They put the adverts there!
No, I don't see it as an artificial benefit. It's not like they put ads into the music stream out of some perverse desire to reduce my enjoyment. They have two payment models you can use for purchasing their service. You can either pay for the service, or you can have the service paid for you by advertisers in return for listening to their ads. To me, the enjoyment of the music uninterrupted is worth a fiver a month (I actually pay for the premium service for other reasons, but the ad-free version is £5 per month in the UK).
Your question seems to presuppose that they're artificially lowering the value of their product so that they can charge more for some level of value that it is 'supposed' to be. I don't think that's the case at all. Ads are just a way they can make money from people who can't or wont pay for the service themselves. I am actually sick of ads appearing in everything (especially on DVDs when I've already bought them) and really like that the good old fashioned model of paying for something with cash, not my eyeballs, is still available.
Anthony Mouse was taking about the RIAA trying to make the oldschool distribution model more necessary. One thing that would allow them to do is screw musicians on patent-licensing for DRM schemes
Is there any basis for suspicion that the RIAA are going to somehow force all musicians to use some patented DRM system that they'll licence to the musicians? I've never heard of such a plan and it would hardly make sense when people are selling non-DRM'd music all over the place. RIAA doesn't have the power to force a musician to use any particular DRM scheme.
The Asus Xonar D2X is exceptionally good at this and comes with a special doohickey for piping the optical out straight into its optical in and software to cancel out any interference whilst you're doing that. It's a selling feature of the card apparently, though I have no idea why. It's a great card for recording and quality output, but I don't get why anyone would bother with the hassle of this legal loophole when ethically it's no different to pirating or bypassing DRM. Good for backing getting sound tracks of movies and such without fiddling around with mplayer, I guess. Anyway, a number of soundcards can do this sort of loopback just by whacking a cable from the out to the in. But if you were really wanting to do this for some reason, look at a card like this one that was designed with it in mind.