Whoo hoo! Apparently there are suits pending in MI and AZ... I bought windows pre-installed in each of these states. So, how do I join one suit or the other? Didn't see any links in the c|net story; does anyone know?
Oh, jesus. Now besides all that time wasted rebooting, reinstalling, and upgrading all your MS products, you have to waste even more time proving you have a license to do those things?
What to do about Monsanto owning the "rights" to a huge majority of the crops we eat? In the southwest U.S., at least, there is a real alternative: Native Seed/SEARCH. Basically, this is a nonprofit cooperative that aims to cultivate plants native to the Sonoran desert region, as well as the cultivation techniques used by Native Americans for centuries.
Why is this not just a Luddite anachronism? Because of exactly the kind of thing Monsanto is doing. There is a wealth of genuine knowledge accumulated by Native Americans regarding how to raise the crops native to their area. There are strains of crops which have been passed down through generations which are tremendously sturdy and hardy.
Besides maintaining viable seeds of particular species, Native Seed/SEARCH also recognizes another facet that gets glossed over in a lot of these discussions: the importance of biodiversity. Monsanto et al, besides controlling a lot of farmers, are essentially working to homogenize the agricultural world. Anyone who's heard of the Irish potato famine can tell you why this is a bad, bad thing.
Anyway, they're doing some great stuff. The nature of the project kind of contains any particular effort to its immediate geographical area, but there's no reason this kind of coop couldn't be set up elsewhere with that region's native species. Anyway, check it out.
Hmm, that little blurb had less info than the slashdot intro, even. This doesn't make clear whether the fee is supposed to apply to fans directly, or rebroadcasters like radio stations. Since the fee is so low, I'm guessing it's supposed to be the fans paying. Which leaves unanswered the question about radio stations which broadcast online: do they have to black out the games, or pay more, or what?
Lemme tell ya, the shift to interstitials is not going to make web advertising more effective. I've already learned to blow away other invasive web ads, like popup ads, before they even load. If anything, this makes them less effective than banners, since I usually at least load those, even if I don't click on them.
As far as interstitials in particular are concerned, I already browse with at least 2 windows open, because most sites are so slow that I want something else to read while they're loading... and I'm going to interpret a 5-second interstitial as yet another delay, I can tell you right now.
Furthermore, it's a bit deceptive to say that interstitials "have worked just fine on TV." With an unprecedented amount of channel variety and choice, many people don't even SEE interstitial TV ads anymore... we just flip to the cooking channel. The direction TV is headed is product integration, like in "Survivor" when they got the Target(TM) gift pack or the Doritos(TM) and Pepsi(TM) picnic (which would have made me puke, incidentally, if I was starving in the middle of the desert). We've seen this in sports for a long time, but now it's to the point where they're working brands into the plot of TV shows.
Unfortunately, I'd say we're going to see more of this kind of thing in web content. Except the problem is, the web isn't as entertainment rich as TV; it's more about communication and news. How are we going to get brands integrated?
I very heartily second this advice, and add the following based on my understanding of the question:
First of all, never ever ever work on this personal thing when you're on your employer's clock or equipment. It will most likely be legally theirs if you do.
Second, you make it sound as if you have 2 or more clients of your own lined up to take advantage of this thing. Call them A and B. Now, your employer is getting Client C, who could also benefit from what you're doing.
My advice would be to excersize some vacation time so you hear nothing about client C. Focus your energy on clients A and B, if you really are a week or so from completion. After some discussion with them, you may find it prudent to leave your employer and just forget client C.
Or, you might be able to work out a licencing agreement with your current employer, where C pretty much gets your solution with your employer's "brand," and you get a fatty check for this agreement. Of course, your original employment contract might not allow for this, and you might have to either leave your current employer or never speak to C. Speak to a lawyer, for sure.
Gah! Too many copy control stories lately; as soon as I saw "access control," I though someone was going to try and install "copyright protection mechanisms" into Linux!
mean that the operator/programmer should make some sort of blather about what their service should *really* be used for, then that's at least practical, even if it is completely meaningless...
Yeah, that's what I mean, and even if it is meaningless architecturally, it's important legally. I mean, that's what the sony case and the napster case have shown us - a technology is legal if and only if it has substantial non-infringing uses. Unfortunately the definition of "substantial" is quite arbitrary, but anything we could do from the very beginning of a project to help sway this definition, would help.
Right on. Personally, I think Sean Fanning shot himself in the foot a long time ago when he said (in writing) "this is piracy and we're going to take down the RIAA." Okay, that's a paraphrase, not a quote, but you get the point.
Of course, that's when he was about 2 steps beyond messing around with his friends in the dorm; they didn't know it was going to bite them in the ass so significantly later on. But any viable replacement for Napster (and there will be one) must stress NON-INFRINGING uses from the beginning. Ideally, there would even be a company who would deal with some musicians directly, getting them to put their songs up on purpose... we want to show people that this is a viable distribution system, no matter what the RIAA whines.
Of course, I think the system should also make it difficult (nay, impossible!) to track who's doing what, so we won't have this problem in the future. Probably the focus should be on anonymity for privacy's sake, though, and not to concientiously protect "pirating" like Fanning intended to do all along.
Use one of the zillions of NYTimes ID's people have posted here before. Try cyberpunk/cyberpunk and slashdot/slashdot for starters; I myself registered so I lost track of the shared ones a while ago.
The NYTimes is good! I haven't gotten any spam from them yet, either, so go ahead and sign up.
The trouble is is that VA is a hardware company at the end of the day. And their selling point was their Linux expertise. But who were they selling to? The geek market is more likely to be making their own computers and installing their own distros. The large corporate market is likely to have their own staff that can deal with installing and configuring Linux...
Right. This is why Sun should just acquire VA and spin off all the cruft. Goes nicely with their cobalt acquisition, and it would harness the VA linux expertise as well as slapping a well known brand on it that businesses could "trust" to build a system.
So, what's "cruft" under that plan? Most everything cool, is the problem; OSDN would almost certainly go. And the thing is, I don't know if it can survive as a corporate entity without a benevolent behemoth sponsor (personally i think ibm would be better for that than sun). Maybe it should reform as a non-profit and charge a minimal hosting fee from the project coordinators? That would get rid of the script kiddies real quick!
The federal law treats all internet content as film, and requires material to be rated by the Office of Film and Literature Classification accordingly...
They refuse to see the internet as a new medium. In fact, look at the name of that government department: the office of film and literature. Sounds kind of like they did the same thing with film a few decades ago.
The main problem as I see it is that the internet, more than either film or literature, breaks down the producer/consumer wall - for a low low cost, we can all be both producers AND consumers of web content. Which makes it almost more like one big phone call, rather than one big film.
But the thing is, I don't want to use that metaphor, either. The internet is something new, and should be recognized as such. As Dr. Lessig said at BayFF earlier this month, the whole point of the internet is that it's smart at the ends and dumb in the middle; the protocols can be used for anything that people think to do with them, unlike the phone, where it's centrally switched and you do exactly what they say with it, or film, where the barrier to entry is so high that it's just not practical to make your own movies.
The internet gives people the capability to figure out new ways to use it, ways that never would have worked with older media. Central control would only ruin this, and this censorship plan would pretty much necessitate central control. It may be too late for southern australia, but everyone else should be ringing up your congresspeople or MPs right now to tell them what you think and help them understand the real issues at hand.
It's hard to tell without seeing the agreement itself (can you post it, or did you have to sign an NDA just to see the contract? heh), but the ones I've been asked to sign in the past were actually designed to protect both the company and myself.
Here's how: the first part is the prior inventions section. The fine print said I was to specify those there because then they would be immune to being signed over to the company. Did this agreement actually ask you to sign over stuff you'd invented before working there? If so, run screaming!
The reason that clause was necessary is because it was immediately followed by the "Assignment of Inventions" clause. This is the part where you say that "anything you invent during your term with Employer you do hereby assign all rights thereof unto them," or whatever the proper legal-ese is. This makes sense, really; if you do some applications programming and they pay you, they don't want you to run off with the source saying "I wrote it, so it's mine!" That would cause all kinds of headaches when you leave.
And, on my contracts, there has always been a catch after the "Assignment of Inventions" clause that says things you do off the clock and with your own equipment don't count - ie, if you're working on an open-source widget in your spare time, the company can't touch it, as long as you don't use company equipment or time. Did your contract have one of those?
These things seem pretty standard to me - I've run into them all 3 times I've really read my contract closely. Read it again. If the company really is trying to take stuff they don't deserve, you were right to run; but many times it's a mutual ass-covering thing.
While this doesn't sound like that good of a deal to most lazy Americans, who like to sit in their cubicles and eat donuts all day, if you were a starving Vietnamese kid, you'd probably be pretty grateful that someone would offer you a job...
Oh please. Alright then, what if you were an "unskilled" American laborer, not a "lazy" cube-sitter, who wanted an assembly-line job with this stable, reputable American company?
Oh, sorry, you can't, because there aren't any Nike factories in the US. Because the workers there would demand a decent wage, medical benefits, the whole nine yards. They might even -gasp! - organize into unions to demand these concessions. So, thanks Nike for taking these jobs out of the US. Great corporate citizen.
And if you're going to come back with "well, Americans should work as cheap as the East Asians," then tell me: why? When the executives of the company are making millions per year, why should ANYONE be satisfied with a few hundred (or less!) per week? These are the laborers who are physically MAKING the fortune that Nike executives live on. The fact that they receive such a miserably small portion of the compensation is unforgivable, no matter what side of the Pacific they're on. The difference is that here, they'd make some noise about it.
(Incidentally, Nike was targetted by a sketch on "TV Nation" a couple of years ago; Michael Moore went to Phil Knight's office and asked why there are NO Nike factories in the US, and he had the gaul to say that "People in America don't want to make shoes"! Seriously! So this "make your own shoe" promotion is really ironic on that level, too)
This idea, if true, is just shocking. It WILL destroy music.
Dude, no it won't, you didn't read the article. It's not about demanding that people be allowed to give music away, it's about *selling* music on the internet. So you can go to CDNOW.com and pay whatever price for them to send the mp3'd album to you in an encrypted stream, so you have it in 20 minutes instead of 3 days.
That's all this is about!! Not taking music away from the artists and making it free! The term "compulsory license" just means there's a set fee for the medium of distribution (in this case, internet), instead of each individual company (eg, cdnow) negotiating with the RIAA seperately.
Okay, I think I agree with you on a lot of principles, but I'm totally on the other side of this issue. To begin with:
In a free society, compulsion should be reserved for extraordinary circumstances.
I agree. But the way I see it, the RIAA at the moment is COMPELLING music retailers to only use RIAA-approved formats for music distribution. Why do they get to do that? Retailers should be free to sell to people a format they desire! From the article, here's what they're trying to do and why the record industry opposes it:
Under a compulsory license, a Web site would have to make a royalty payment to the music labels for each song or album sold. The fees would be set by either Congress or the U.S. Copyright Office.
Entertainment industry executives are vehemently opposed to such a license, saying the government should not have role in setting the prices paid for music.
Reading between the lines, it seems clear that the RIAA would rather reserve the right to gouge people however they want for online distribution, kind of like they used to fix retail prices in stores. The government intervention here would (presumably) set a realistic fee for internet distribution. The money itself would of course still go to the artists. Okay, who am I fooling, it would go to Sony and BMG executives. But that's nothing new.
Also:
copyright exists and is a Good Thing. People should have blanket copyright protection over their creations.
Okay, why exactly? This is a relatively new interpretation of copyright protection, which was originally intended to protect an author's ability to profit from his books for a few years after publication. Now, it's this gargantuan thing that enables Disney Inc. to profit from the Mickey logo decades after Walt Disney died - hardly a protection of the creator.
Copyright was never intended as a "blanket protection." Non-authors still had a lot of rights with the material. This isn't about protecting the rights of artists, this is about the RIAA trying to lock out an entire medium that they - gasp! - might not be able to monopolize. I hope the government goes forward with all reasonable speed.
Wait a minute. Microsoft says that creating software that does the same job as a market leader, then giving that software away for free to undermine the market leader, stifles innovation?
... nor is it illegal to write a book telling people how to make pipe bombs...
Hey, that gives me a good idea -- why doesn't napster just publish a daily bulletin of which computers are hosting which files? That would be printed on paper, so it must be covered by the first amendment!! Get this much assured in court, so they know they have a right to do it.
Then, just for convenience, you can also publish this same list online once a day. Then, why not have a dynamically updated list of who's hosting which files at any given moment? Why not throw in some search capability? Then, why not make people register to use it, for marketing purposes? Hey, it's just a "music swapping" newspaper with an interesting companion website!
Well, I haven't conducted a thorough study throughout the organization, but we *just* got hit by the Anna Kournikova virus, and here's about what happened:
I saw 10 messages with the same subject arrive from 10 different people, and said "hmm, a virus, I think I'll delete them."
A bunch of other people noticed the same thing, and started yelling over the cubes, "Hey, there's a virus going around, delete it and don't open it!"
Everyone did.
So, I guess you could call that a loss of 10 or 15 minutes of "productivity" for everyone in the company. Oh no, 10 man-hours lost! And at our billing rate...!
But frankly, not everyone was working anyway. There's at least as much time lost every day to reading online news and talking to friends, not to mention waiting for conference calls, etc etc. The impact was totally negligible, unless this virus had some nasty side effect of deleting all the files on someone's harddrive.
Slashdot Mirror
Whoo hoo! Apparently there are suits pending in MI and AZ... I bought windows pre-installed in each of these states. So, how do I join one suit or the other? Didn't see any links in the c|net story; does anyone know?
So, did you turn up that CID yet?
Ugh...
Why is this not just a Luddite anachronism? Because of exactly the kind of thing Monsanto is doing. There is a wealth of genuine knowledge accumulated by Native Americans regarding how to raise the crops native to their area. There are strains of crops which have been passed down through generations which are tremendously sturdy and hardy.
Besides maintaining viable seeds of particular species, Native Seed/SEARCH also recognizes another facet that gets glossed over in a lot of these discussions: the importance of biodiversity. Monsanto et al, besides controlling a lot of farmers, are essentially working to homogenize the agricultural world. Anyone who's heard of the Irish potato famine can tell you why this is a bad, bad thing.
Anyway, they're doing some great stuff. The nature of the project kind of contains any particular effort to its immediate geographical area, but there's no reason this kind of coop couldn't be set up elsewhere with that region's native species. Anyway, check it out.
Um... that Word file tried to change my normal.dot template. Did anyone else encounter this? Is NASA spreading infected Word files?
Hmm, that little blurb had less info than the slashdot intro, even. This doesn't make clear whether the fee is supposed to apply to fans directly, or rebroadcasters like radio stations. Since the fee is so low, I'm guessing it's supposed to be the fans paying. Which leaves unanswered the question about radio stations which broadcast online: do they have to black out the games, or pay more, or what?
As far as interstitials in particular are concerned, I already browse with at least 2 windows open, because most sites are so slow that I want something else to read while they're loading... and I'm going to interpret a 5-second interstitial as yet another delay, I can tell you right now.
Furthermore, it's a bit deceptive to say that interstitials "have worked just fine on TV." With an unprecedented amount of channel variety and choice, many people don't even SEE interstitial TV ads anymore... we just flip to the cooking channel. The direction TV is headed is product integration, like in "Survivor" when they got the Target(TM) gift pack or the Doritos(TM) and Pepsi(TM) picnic (which would have made me puke, incidentally, if I was starving in the middle of the desert). We've seen this in sports for a long time, but now it's to the point where they're working brands into the plot of TV shows.
Unfortunately, I'd say we're going to see more of this kind of thing in web content. Except the problem is, the web isn't as entertainment rich as TV; it's more about communication and news. How are we going to get brands integrated?
First of all, never ever ever work on this personal thing when you're on your employer's clock or equipment. It will most likely be legally theirs if you do.
Second, you make it sound as if you have 2 or more clients of your own lined up to take advantage of this thing. Call them A and B. Now, your employer is getting Client C, who could also benefit from what you're doing.
My advice would be to excersize some vacation time so you hear nothing about client C. Focus your energy on clients A and B, if you really are a week or so from completion. After some discussion with them, you may find it prudent to leave your employer and just forget client C.
Or, you might be able to work out a licencing agreement with your current employer, where C pretty much gets your solution with your employer's "brand," and you get a fatty check for this agreement. Of course, your original employment contract might not allow for this, and you might have to either leave your current employer or never speak to C. Speak to a lawyer, for sure.
*sigh*... long night.
Yeah, that's what I mean, and even if it is meaningless architecturally, it's important legally. I mean, that's what the sony case and the napster case have shown us - a technology is legal if and only if it has substantial non-infringing uses. Unfortunately the definition of "substantial" is quite arbitrary, but anything we could do from the very beginning of a project to help sway this definition, would help.
Of course, that's when he was about 2 steps beyond messing around with his friends in the dorm; they didn't know it was going to bite them in the ass so significantly later on. But any viable replacement for Napster (and there will be one) must stress NON-INFRINGING uses from the beginning. Ideally, there would even be a company who would deal with some musicians directly, getting them to put their songs up on purpose... we want to show people that this is a viable distribution system, no matter what the RIAA whines.
Of course, I think the system should also make it difficult (nay, impossible!) to track who's doing what, so we won't have this problem in the future. Probably the focus should be on anonymity for privacy's sake, though, and not to concientiously protect "pirating" like Fanning intended to do all along.
- Try this: http://archives.nytimes.com/2001/02/23/technology
/ 23CYBERLAW.html
- Use one of the zillions of NYTimes ID's people have posted here before. Try cyberpunk/cyberpunk and slashdot/slashdot for starters; I myself registered so I lost track of the shared ones a while ago.
The NYTimes is good! I haven't gotten any spam from them yet, either, so go ahead and sign up.No way, the EULA's bundled inside the toaster so by the time you read it, you're already screwed.
Right. This is why Sun should just acquire VA and spin off all the cruft. Goes nicely with their cobalt acquisition, and it would harness the VA linux expertise as well as slapping a well known brand on it that businesses could "trust" to build a system.
So, what's "cruft" under that plan? Most everything cool, is the problem; OSDN would almost certainly go. And the thing is, I don't know if it can survive as a corporate entity without a benevolent behemoth sponsor (personally i think ibm would be better for that than sun). Maybe it should reform as a non-profit and charge a minimal hosting fee from the project coordinators? That would get rid of the script kiddies real quick!
The federal law treats all internet content as film, and requires material to be rated by the Office of Film and Literature Classification accordingly...
They refuse to see the internet as a new medium. In fact, look at the name of that government department: the office of film and literature. Sounds kind of like they did the same thing with film a few decades ago.
The main problem as I see it is that the internet, more than either film or literature, breaks down the producer/consumer wall - for a low low cost, we can all be both producers AND consumers of web content. Which makes it almost more like one big phone call, rather than one big film.
But the thing is, I don't want to use that metaphor, either. The internet is something new, and should be recognized as such. As Dr. Lessig said at BayFF earlier this month, the whole point of the internet is that it's smart at the ends and dumb in the middle; the protocols can be used for anything that people think to do with them, unlike the phone, where it's centrally switched and you do exactly what they say with it, or film, where the barrier to entry is so high that it's just not practical to make your own movies.
The internet gives people the capability to figure out new ways to use it, ways that never would have worked with older media. Central control would only ruin this, and this censorship plan would pretty much necessitate central control. It may be too late for southern australia, but everyone else should be ringing up your congresspeople or MPs right now to tell them what you think and help them understand the real issues at hand.
Not saying this to contradict you so much as help you get a classic game cheap... ;)
Here's how: the first part is the prior inventions section. The fine print said I was to specify those there because then they would be immune to being signed over to the company. Did this agreement actually ask you to sign over stuff you'd invented before working there? If so, run screaming!
The reason that clause was necessary is because it was immediately followed by the "Assignment of Inventions" clause. This is the part where you say that "anything you invent during your term with Employer you do hereby assign all rights thereof unto them," or whatever the proper legal-ese is. This makes sense, really; if you do some applications programming and they pay you, they don't want you to run off with the source saying "I wrote it, so it's mine!" That would cause all kinds of headaches when you leave.
And, on my contracts, there has always been a catch after the "Assignment of Inventions" clause that says things you do off the clock and with your own equipment don't count - ie, if you're working on an open-source widget in your spare time, the company can't touch it, as long as you don't use company equipment or time. Did your contract have one of those?
These things seem pretty standard to me - I've run into them all 3 times I've really read my contract closely. Read it again. If the company really is trying to take stuff they don't deserve, you were right to run; but many times it's a mutual ass-covering thing.
Oh please. Alright then, what if you were an "unskilled" American laborer, not a "lazy" cube-sitter, who wanted an assembly-line job with this stable, reputable American company?
Oh, sorry, you can't, because there aren't any Nike factories in the US. Because the workers there would demand a decent wage, medical benefits, the whole nine yards. They might even -gasp! - organize into unions to demand these concessions. So, thanks Nike for taking these jobs out of the US. Great corporate citizen.
And if you're going to come back with "well, Americans should work as cheap as the East Asians," then tell me: why? When the executives of the company are making millions per year, why should ANYONE be satisfied with a few hundred (or less!) per week? These are the laborers who are physically MAKING the fortune that Nike executives live on. The fact that they receive such a miserably small portion of the compensation is unforgivable, no matter what side of the Pacific they're on. The difference is that here, they'd make some noise about it.
(Incidentally, Nike was targetted by a sketch on "TV Nation" a couple of years ago; Michael Moore went to Phil Knight's office and asked why there are NO Nike factories in the US, and he had the gaul to say that "People in America don't want to make shoes"! Seriously! So this "make your own shoe" promotion is really ironic on that level, too)
Um... just burn a copy, and I'll buy one for a few bucks (then it's used in commerce). Anyone else?
Dude, no it won't, you didn't read the article. It's not about demanding that people be allowed to give music away, it's about *selling* music on the internet. So you can go to CDNOW.com and pay whatever price for them to send the mp3'd album to you in an encrypted stream, so you have it in 20 minutes instead of 3 days.
That's all this is about!! Not taking music away from the artists and making it free! The term "compulsory license" just means there's a set fee for the medium of distribution (in this case, internet), instead of each individual company (eg, cdnow) negotiating with the RIAA seperately.
In a free society, compulsion should be reserved for extraordinary circumstances.
I agree. But the way I see it, the RIAA at the moment is COMPELLING music retailers to only use RIAA-approved formats for music distribution. Why do they get to do that? Retailers should be free to sell to people a format they desire! From the article, here's what they're trying to do and why the record industry opposes it:
Under a compulsory license, a Web site would have to make a royalty payment to the music labels for each song or album sold. The fees would be set by either Congress or the U.S. Copyright Office.
Entertainment industry executives are vehemently opposed to such a license, saying the government should not have role in setting the prices paid for music.
Reading between the lines, it seems clear that the RIAA would rather reserve the right to gouge people however they want for online distribution, kind of like they used to fix retail prices in stores. The government intervention here would (presumably) set a realistic fee for internet distribution. The money itself would of course still go to the artists. Okay, who am I fooling, it would go to Sony and BMG executives. But that's nothing new.
Also:
copyright exists and is a Good Thing. People should have blanket copyright protection over their creations.
Okay, why exactly? This is a relatively new interpretation of copyright protection, which was originally intended to protect an author's ability to profit from his books for a few years after publication. Now, it's this gargantuan thing that enables Disney Inc. to profit from the Mickey logo decades after Walt Disney died - hardly a protection of the creator.
Copyright was never intended as a "blanket protection." Non-authors still had a lot of rights with the material. This isn't about protecting the rights of artists, this is about the RIAA trying to lock out an entire medium that they - gasp! - might not be able to monopolize. I hope the government goes forward with all reasonable speed.
Hm.
Hey, that gives me a good idea -- why doesn't napster just publish a daily bulletin of which computers are hosting which files? That would be printed on paper, so it must be covered by the first amendment!! Get this much assured in court, so they know they have a right to do it.
Then, just for convenience, you can also publish this same list online once a day. Then, why not have a dynamically updated list of who's hosting which files at any given moment? Why not throw in some search capability? Then, why not make people register to use it, for marketing purposes? Hey, it's just a "music swapping" newspaper with an interesting companion website!
So, I guess you could call that a loss of 10 or 15 minutes of "productivity" for everyone in the company. Oh no, 10 man-hours lost! And at our billing rate...!
But frankly, not everyone was working anyway. There's at least as much time lost every day to reading online news and talking to friends, not to mention waiting for conference calls, etc etc. The impact was totally negligible, unless this virus had some nasty side effect of deleting all the files on someone's harddrive.
I'm going too, and if anyone wants a ride from the san mateo / redwood city / menlo park area, just email me.