Our legal advisors felt that it might be wise for us to settle, but we decided to press them further for details of the infringement and refused to yield...
So your legal advisors advised you to settle without further details? Something is not right about this story.
Of the six senators introducing this bill (HATCH, LEAHY, FRIST, DASCHLE, GRAHAM, and BOXER), four of them are Democrats.
You must not be from here. In the US bills originate in the either the House of Representatives or the Senate. The office of the presidency is a separate power and has no authority over what bills are introduced. And if a bill gets a majority vote, the president usually signs it into law. The infamous DMCA was signed into law by Clinton.
Liberals tend to value the needs of society above those of the individual.
Apparently not when it comes to pushing legislation in exchange for campaign contributions.
It was senior Democrats like Diane Feinstein who helped pass the DMCA. During the period the DMCA was up for debate, the Democtrats actually received more financial contributions from the entertainment industry than the Republicans. Checkout open secrets for details.
I think it mostly comes down to who contributes the gratest amount gets their pet legislation favored more.
The judge is probably referring to Article I, Section 8 of the US Constitution which grants Congress the power to grant exclusive rights for a
limited time, i.e. there has to be some limit, even if it's a thousand years.
Here's the text:
Congress shall have the power...[t]o promote the progress of science and useful arts, by securing for limited times to authors and inventors the exclusive right to their respective writings and discoveries;
Has he offered to purchase the information, or is he expecting to kick start his business with free information paid for by the city?
This doesn't seem to be about payment. Read the article again. The town has claimed that the materials' release presented an immediate danger to the community.
The program, based on proprietary AT&T specifications...
The last thing we need is for VOIP specs to be owned by
a company that will charge us $30/month for what should be free.
AT&T Labs... is working closely with silicon providers, equipment designers and manufacturers.
Strike working closely with for conspiring to ensure a piece of the pie.
These are the folks that have for years been charging inflated prices for POTS
while claiming it's too expensive to increase bandwidth for consumer Internet access
and all the while spending billions on marketing and pumping consumer money into
pyramid type questionable schemes with airline and credit card companies that have
nothing to do with providing communications services.
VOIP will develop just fine without AT&T patents. Let the OEMs, (Broadcom, D-Link, Linksys, etc.)
manufacture equipment
to IEEE standards and let software vendors compete for platforms.
It's worked for 802.11 and we don't need anybody to own VOIP.
Spyware can sap computing power, crash machines and bury users under a blizzard of unwanted ads. It can ca
pture passwords, credit-card numbers and other sensitive data.
And this law is going to stop it?
And further,
Violators could face millions of dollars in fines.
If you're using spyware to steal credit card info the only millions you're likely
to have are those you stole.
I hate to use the slippery slope argument, but that's seems to be what's
happening here. Whether it's a law against spam, hacking, or illegal file sharing,
it would appear to have little or no effect.
There's no doubt that this bill is noble and good, and its authors have the best intentions,
And if this bill makes it to the floor of the Senate, of course it will pass.
But the legislation is basically futile.
It's already illegal to write and distribute viruses but that hasn't done anything to
stop them. Ultimately it's up to the end user to protect his own computer.
I build access points and donate bandwidth for the
sflan project with the hope of bringing
low to zero cost Internet access for everyone in San Francisco.
One of our problems is the ridiculously low FCC imposed power restrictions
on our trancievers while phone companies who paid millions to buy their
part of the spectrum are allowed to use thousands of times the power we are.
I don't want to come off as a pessimist but my concern is that
the furture of wireless be look more like the control-and-toll
method of owning the spectrum and charging what you like for, spending
nothing on R&D yet billions on marketing to create a lockdown system
of over priced mediocre service.
I hope you're right but there's no competition. If you live in California you have to deal with
SBC, if you live in New York it's Verizon.
These comapnies are sitting on a lot of money and spending almost zit on R&D.
Notice the marketing self-propagting junk you get with your phone bill.
I get visa applications and frequent flyer offers with mine.
Why in the name of progress is a phone involed with a credit lender and an airline company?
They'll sell me a lousy T1 for $800/month when it should be $10/month. The Internet is just
a bunch of wires and switches, anyone who runs a LAN will know this. It doesn't cost big bucks.
How do they do it? The answer, I believe, is one of complacency and inertia.
There's no doubt that these companies are full of innovative next-generation
engineers with a view for progress. But the current idea of cheap/free Internet
access for everyone would require too many changes to what is already a self suffient
revence-generating machine.
And for many politicians the idea of super highspeed Internet access in every home is great,
but the realistic threat to jobs, local economy, and tax revenue from the existing inefficient
telcos is
just not worth the price.
There's already a plethora of shells out there, -- korn, bash, csh, zsh, and way more.
And combined with ultilies like find, sed, grep, awk and with the added availablity of languages like
perl, python, 'c' and all the lexical mulitude of routines
that go with,... what problem is Microsoft proposing to sovle here?
Microsoft should consider cooperating and improving what's already out there instead
going it alone and reinventing the wheel. Unless, of course, all those old school
Unix developers were really all wrong and now Microsoft's is taking the opportunity
to show us how it's really done.
But many communications companies also provide cable television and phone service as well as Internet access. Plus they mostly own the copper and fiber which would be needed for VOIP. There's a conflict of interests here which is partly the reason Moore's law is not readily apparent in Internet bandwidth.
Why would Verizon, for example, provide customers with the infrastructure for free VOIP and television over IP when they'd be slicing into their own revenue source?
We can all be reminded of just how much these companies reap from the public when we consider Verizon's recent $60B bid to buy Disney. Yes folks, that's was $60,000,000,000. Although you could wire the whole country with super highspeed access with that kind of money it's better from a business point of view to uphold that status quo of keeping the services separate and chaging thusly.
Look for lots of lobbying and litigation as VOIP becomes a reality. With the kind of money that's at stake, Congress is sure to be involved.
How willing would you be to work for free? That's essentially what you're suggesting when you say that the IP rights of a 'few' be ignored for the benefit of others.
That's not what I'm suggesting.
Sharing digital media is unstoppable and as bandwidth increases and it becomes easier
to find what you want on line, artists will find it harder to earn a living from their products
under the current "exclusive rights" mechanism of control. This is especially so
for moviemakers and it's been suggested by some that in the next 5-10 years we may
see a sugre in low budget movies and a return to the grants system of old.
I've heard a lot of arguments about this and I think I agree with those who
say that not only will artists of the furture have to live with that fact that
what they produce will be out of their control but also that in the long term
this will have little affect productivity, people will still write, produce, record, etc.,
they'll just be funded in a different way.
Shouldn't the bigger picture here center around freedom?
Why should anyone be prohibited from copying and distributing
any information that comes into his possession? Is it not more
important to live in a free society than it is to uphold the IP rights
of a few.
IMHO, sharing information should be a basic right of human existence.
A truly free people should be able to parse, manipulate, duplicate, and disseminate
any information that comes into their possession,
except, of course where it concerns public safety of national security.
Remember, artists are under no obligation to write of produce anything.
And when information is truly free the world will change in ways we
can not possibly imagine.
Click here
to practice non violent civil disobedience today.
Microsoft is anti competitive because they violate the anti trust laws, namely the Clayton and Sherman Acts of the US Code.
Microsoft was sued by 20 states and they lost.
One of the complaints against Microsoft was that they intimidated computer Manufacturers into installing only Windows on their products or face MS licensing restrictions.
The court found this practice unlawful and ordered MS to offer the same licensing agreements to all manufacturers regardless of wether or not they install Windows on all their products.
An example of where this is still happening is if you buy an IPAQ Pocket PC and install Linux on it. You still pay for the MS license for Windows and neither HP nor MS will give you a refund.
With the excising of three not-so-little terms -- "s --," "f -- "....
I wonder why sfgate is itself censoring the facts of this story?
"s -- "= shit (I think)"
"f -- "= fuck (I would definetly say so)
If there are any childern present I'd suggest you learn these words. Not that they should be overused but they are definitely part of our linguistic culture. Don't watch too much television. The quality stuff is elsewhere.
You may be right. If the copyright laws were abolished, would there still be Pimsleur?
I like to think yes, there would. But if there would not, then I would agree with you and say that people should encourage talent and creativity (as Pimsleur obviously is) and do the right thing and go out and buy Pimsluer and support the source that provides it.
But if the copyright laws were recinded, do you think there would be no Pimsleur? Is that your argument?
Would somebody fill the void? What would Pimsleur have done if he had not been able to make the high return afforded him on the investment of his idea?
I believe, and I may be wrong, he would have promoted his langauge method anyway and accepted less money.
Shakespeare, Mozart, Newton, Einstein, Charlie Parker, The Beatles, Feynmann, (and evidendtly Michael Moore) did not and do not do it for the money.
Would you perhaps agree that the GNP is more significant when goods and services exclude entertaintment as a standard of living factor.
If you're going to be living in the Middle East and are more interested in conversation than writing, try Pimsleur.
I've used the "Living Language", "Berlitz", and a few others but always found the Pimsluer method to be more effective. Evan for a guy like me who considers himself hopeless at learning languages.
I used Pimsleur for German, French, Russian, Spanish, Herbrew, and "Eypptian Arabic" and was quite surprised at how much I'd learned when conversing with native speakers.
The Pimsleur method is based on immediate feedback. Within a about a minute of the first lesson you're asked questions to which you have a few seconds in which to respond. The other methods I found boring, almost like leaning by rote.
You can find plenty of Pimsleur MP3s on the gnutella network. Get the gnutella software here.
If you've ever listened to any Senate Committee hearings you may have noticed that the ones who get to testify are often the industry execs who made campaign contributions to the very committee members they're testifying before.
Entertainment execs who got to testify at the DMCA hearings after giving $18,000,000 is just one example. Happens all the time.
See whose
funding Hatch. Notice how the funding increases to match the bills being considered.
Slashdot Mirror
Our legal advisors felt that it might be wise for us to settle, but we decided to press them further for details of the infringement and refused to yield...
So your legal advisors advised you to settle without further details? Something is not right about this story.
Of the six senators introducing this bill (HATCH, LEAHY, FRIST, DASCHLE, GRAHAM, and BOXER), four of them are Democrats.
You must not be from here. In the US bills originate in the either the House of Representatives or the Senate. The office of the presidency is a separate power and has no authority over what bills are introduced. And if a bill gets a majority vote, the president usually signs it into law. The infamous DMCA was signed into law by Clinton.
Liberals tend to value the needs of society above those of the individual.
Apparently not when it comes to pushing legislation in exchange for campaign contributions.
It was senior Democrats like Diane Feinstein who helped pass the DMCA. During the period the DMCA was up for debate, the Democtrats actually received more financial contributions from the entertainment industry than the Republicans. Checkout open secrets for details.
I think it mostly comes down to who contributes the gratest amount gets their pet legislation favored more.
Exactly, it says "limited times to auhtors". How can a dead person have exclusive rights?
The judge is probably referring to Article I, Section 8 of the US Constitution which grants Congress the power to grant exclusive rights for a limited time, i.e. there has to be some limit, even if it's a thousand years.
...[t]o promote the progress of science and useful arts, by securing for limited times to authors and inventors the exclusive right to their respective writings and discoveries;
Here's the text:
Congress shall have the power
Has he offered to purchase the information, or is he expecting to kick start his business with free information paid for by the city?
This doesn't seem to be about payment. Read the article again. The town has claimed that the materials' release presented an immediate danger to the community.
The program, based on proprietary AT&T specifications...
... is working closely with silicon providers, equipment designers and manufacturers.
The last thing we need is for VOIP specs to be owned by a company that will charge us $30/month for what should be free.
AT&T Labs
Strike working closely with for conspiring to ensure a piece of the pie.
These are the folks that have for years been charging inflated prices for POTS while claiming it's too expensive to increase bandwidth for consumer Internet access and all the while spending billions on marketing and pumping consumer money into pyramid type questionable schemes with airline and credit card companies that have nothing to do with providing communications services. VOIP will develop just fine without AT&T patents. Let the OEMs, (Broadcom, D-Link, Linksys, etc.) manufacture equipment to IEEE standards and let software vendors compete for platforms. It's worked for 802.11 and we don't need anybody to own VOIP.
Let's hope my worst fears won't come true.
From the article:
Spyware can sap computing power, crash machines and bury users under a blizzard of unwanted ads. It can ca pture passwords, credit-card numbers and other sensitive data.
And this law is going to stop it?
And further,
Violators could face millions of dollars in fines.
If you're using spyware to steal credit card info the only millions you're likely to have are those you stole.
I hate to use the slippery slope argument, but that's seems to be what's happening here. Whether it's a law against spam, hacking, or illegal file sharing, it would appear to have little or no effect.
There's no doubt that this bill is noble and good, and its authors have the best intentions, And if this bill makes it to the floor of the Senate, of course it will pass. But the legislation is basically futile. It's already illegal to write and distribute viruses but that hasn't done anything to stop them. Ultimately it's up to the end user to protect his own computer.
I build access points and donate bandwidth for the sflan project with the hope of bringing low to zero cost Internet access for everyone in San Francisco. One of our problems is the ridiculously low FCC imposed power restrictions on our trancievers while phone companies who paid millions to buy their part of the spectrum are allowed to use thousands of times the power we are.
I don't want to come off as a pessimist but my concern is that the furture of wireless be look more like the control-and-toll method of owning the spectrum and charging what you like for, spending nothing on R&D yet billions on marketing to create a lockdown system of over priced mediocre service.
I hope you're right but there's no competition. If you live in California you have to deal with SBC, if you live in New York it's Verizon.
These comapnies are sitting on a lot of money and spending almost zit on R&D. Notice the marketing self-propagting junk you get with your phone bill. I get visa applications and frequent flyer offers with mine. Why in the name of progress is a phone involed with a credit lender and an airline company?
They'll sell me a lousy T1 for $800/month when it should be $10/month. The Internet is just a bunch of wires and switches, anyone who runs a LAN will know this. It doesn't cost big bucks.
How do they do it? The answer, I believe, is one of complacency and inertia. There's no doubt that these companies are full of innovative next-generation engineers with a view for progress. But the current idea of cheap/free Internet access for everyone would require too many changes to what is already a self suffient revence-generating machine.
And for many politicians the idea of super highspeed Internet access in every home is great, but the realistic threat to jobs, local economy, and tax revenue from the existing inefficient telcos is just not worth the price.
There's already a plethora of shells out there, -- korn, bash, csh, zsh, and way more. And combined with ultilies like find, sed, grep, awk and with the added availablity of languages like perl, python, 'c' and all the lexical mulitude of routines that go with,
Microsoft should consider cooperating and improving what's already out there instead going it alone and reinventing the wheel. Unless, of course, all those old school Unix developers were really all wrong and now Microsoft's is taking the opportunity to show us how it's really done.
But many communications companies also provide cable television and phone service as well as Internet access. Plus they mostly own the copper and fiber which would be needed for VOIP. There's a conflict of interests here which is partly the reason Moore's law is not readily apparent in Internet bandwidth.
Why would Verizon, for example, provide customers with the infrastructure for free VOIP and television over IP when they'd be slicing into their own revenue source?
We can all be reminded of just how much these companies reap from the public when we consider Verizon's recent $60B bid to buy Disney. Yes folks, that's was $60,000,000,000. Although you could wire the whole country with super highspeed
access with that kind of money it's better from a business point of view to uphold that status quo of keeping the services separate and chaging thusly.
Look for lots of lobbying and litigation as VOIP becomes a reality. With the kind of money that's at stake, Congress is sure to be involved.
How willing would you be to work for free? That's essentially what you're suggesting when you say that the IP rights of a 'few' be ignored for the benefit of others.
That's not what I'm suggesting.
Sharing digital media is unstoppable and as bandwidth increases and it becomes easier to find what you want on line, artists will find it harder to earn a living from their products under the current "exclusive rights" mechanism of control. This is especially so for moviemakers and it's been suggested by some that in the next 5-10 years we may see a sugre in low budget movies and a return to the grants system of old.
I've heard a lot of arguments about this and I think I agree with those who say that not only will artists of the furture have to live with that fact that what they produce will be out of their control but also that in the long term this will have little affect productivity, people will still write, produce, record, etc., they'll just be funded in a different way.
Shouldn't the bigger picture here center around freedom?
Why should anyone be prohibited from copying and distributing any information that comes into his possession? Is it not more important to live in a free society than it is to uphold the IP rights of a few.
IMHO, sharing information should be a basic right of human existence.
A truly free people should be able to parse, manipulate, duplicate, and disseminate any information that comes into their possession, except, of course where it concerns public safety of national security.
Remember, artists are under no obligation to write of produce anything. And when information is truly free the world will change in ways we can not possibly imagine.
Click here to practice non violent civil disobedience today.
Microsoft is anti competitive because they violate the anti trust laws, namely the Clayton and Sherman Acts of the US Code.
Microsoft was sued by 20 states and they lost.
One of the complaints against Microsoft was that they intimidated computer Manufacturers into installing only Windows on their products or face MS licensing restrictions.
The court found this practice unlawful and ordered MS to offer the same licensing agreements to all manufacturers regardless of wether or not they install Windows on all their products.
An example of where this is still happening is if you buy an IPAQ Pocket PC and install Linux on it. You still pay for the MS license for Windows and neither HP nor MS will give you a refund.
I'd like to take this opportunity to induce you to share all your movies and music with this software.
Follow this graph and see the campaign contributions increase as S2560 approaches a vote. Shameful.
I hope the Department of Homeland Security is spending an equal amount of its resources on developing more reliable networks.
Maybe they should propose more competition and diversity as a way of ensuring redundancy.
With the excising of three not-so-little terms -- "s -- ," "f -- "....
I wonder why sfgate is itself censoring the facts of this story?
"s -- "= shit (I think)"
"f -- "= fuck (I would definetly say so)
If there are any childern present I'd suggest you learn these words. Not that they should be overused but they are definitely part of our linguistic culture. Don't watch too much television. The quality stuff is elsewhere.
Pardon my ignorance but why are not all DNS updates instantaneous?
Nice idea, Michael, but why would I want this?
What problem does it solve?
I already do online banking, shopping, bill paying, etc.. What additional service could I get from registering with you?
You may be right. If the copyright laws were abolished, would there still be Pimsleur?
I like to think yes, there would. But if there would not, then I would agree with you
and say that people should encourage talent and creativity (as Pimsleur obviously is)
and do the right thing and go out and buy Pimsluer and support the source that provides it.
But if the copyright laws were recinded, do you think there would be no Pimsleur? Is that your argument?
Would somebody fill the void? What would Pimsleur have done if he had not been able to make the high return afforded him on the investment of his idea?
I believe, and I may be wrong, he would have promoted his langauge method anyway and accepted less money.
Shakespeare, Mozart, Newton, Einstein, Charlie Parker, The Beatles, Feynmann, (and evidendtly Michael Moore) did not and do not do it for the money.
Would you perhaps agree that the GNP is more significant when goods and services exclude entertaintment as a standard of living factor.
Then again, I could be completely wrong.
If you're going to be living in the Middle East and are more interested in conversation than writing, try Pimsleur.
I've used the "Living Language", "Berlitz", and a few others but always found the Pimsluer method to be more effective. Evan for a guy like me who considers himself hopeless at learning languages. I used Pimsleur for German, French, Russian, Spanish, Herbrew, and "Eypptian Arabic" and was quite surprised at how much I'd learned when conversing with native speakers.
The Pimsleur method is based on immediate feedback. Within a about a minute of the first lesson you're asked questions to which you have a few seconds in which to respond. The other methods I found boring, almost like leaning by rote.
You can find plenty of Pimsleur MP3s on the gnutella network. Get the gnutella software here.
If you've ever listened to any Senate Committee hearings you may have noticed that the ones who get to testify are often the industry execs who made campaign contributions to the very committee members they're testifying before.
Entertainment execs who got to testify at the DMCA hearings after giving $18,000,000 is just one example. Happens all the time.
See whose funding Hatch. Notice how the funding increases to match the bills being considered.
You're quite right for the "next door" situation, of course.
Unfortunately WEP is broken and easily cracked. This guy told me how to crack WEP.