I can see patents forbidding reverse engineering (which is another issue)
To call that "an issue" is a bit of an understatement. Patents, like copyrights, are supposed to further the Sciences and Useful Arts. The very basis of patents is that in exchange for the monopoly, you tell everyone how it works. Without the reward, everybody would keep it a secret. So prohibiting reverse engineering is exactly the nightmare patents are disigned to avert, and since it clearly wouldn't help science or the useful arts, it absolutely cannot be constitutionally justified by that clause.
I assume you agree, but I just wanted to make it clear. The freedom to tinker is very, very important.
The difference in both your and your parent's example is derivation. Mozilla clearly isn't a derivative work of Explorer, and the ink cartridge's ROM isn't a derivative of the printer ROM. Under current legal theory, a kernel module probably derives from the kernel, unless it was originally intended for a different kernel and was later ported.
I don't think modules should be derivative works, but that's for a judge, not for me, or even for Linus, to decide.
Temperature is the average kinetic energy of the particles you're considering. So if you average the kinetic energy over all the liquid, it's cool. But if you average the kinetic energy of, say, the 50 particles right where the bubble imploded, it's really hot. With the cavitation, you have a bajillion particles at room temperature and a few going really really fast (so the average temperature is still cool), and hopefully the fast ones fuse and transfer energy to the cool ones.
That's not really the case with copyrights. If you give someone a license to a copyright, and the license didn't specify a way for you to revoke it, then you or future owners of the copyright can't turn around and revoke it. (I remember hearing of some exception to this designed to allow musicians to renegotiate after a number of years, but in general...).
When this gets to court, it may come down to the defendants saying, "We were told this was OK, no fair changing your mind." And hopefully the court will agree with that. Yes, it's too bad you can't easily disclaim a subset of your patent rights in a more binding way.
Two problems. One, that only applies to trademarks and trade secrets, not patents and copyrights, except for the more general doctrine of estoppel. Besides which, the whole reason we're angry is because they didn't enforce their rights until now, after the company changed ownership. So if what you say is true, then they have, by years of inactivity, waived their ability to assert their rights against us.
The second problem is, why can't they just say, "We notice you are using our patented algorithm. Would you like to license it from us, compatibly with the GPL, for $0.02?"? There's nothing (besides maybe shareholders) forcing them to be assholes, certainly not the law.
No. So the important question is, will your university continue to allow you to use SSH? You'd like to think so, but unfortunately it's not an inalienable right.
Just like how Apple tried to be relaxed with their AAC DRM, but people just had to crack it. Sure, there are valid reasons for this, but once again people will use a valid, legal technology for piracy and ruin it for the rest of us.
Why, praytell, would anyone buy iTunes songs, break the DRM, and put it on P2P networks, when they could just as easily rip the songs from a CD they bought, or borrowed from the library?
Those problems could easily be overcome. Privately mirror the article, publish the story with the original link, email the webmaster. If he wants, publish the mirror and point the link in the article to it.
Both Windows and Linux have problems playing sounds concurrently with cheap cards, and no problems with good cards. You happen to have a good card which does hardware mixing. Most onboard cards don't, so only one sound can be played at a time, unless you use software mixers like esd, arts, or dmix, or on Windows, DirectX.
How can you possibly expect people to have to try 9 different distros just for them to get the music working?
Nobody asked to do that, he did it of his own accord. He also tried several reinstalls, even after the point that he got it to work once. These are really stupid and inneficient ways to solve the problem.
If he had specifically described the problem, and done what people asked, he could have solved the problem in a few days waiting and a few minutes work. This would work on usenet, the alsa mailing lists, any online forum, including Slashdot, or even in his own discussion forum.
Instead, becaule he's so damn convinced he knows everything that he never even bothered to seek advice.
It should be possible. The program would have to go to great lengths to keep sync between the two recordings, however, because while you can't hear a hundredth of an rpm difference, it would cause the waveforms to get out of sync quickly. This wouldn't be as much of an issue if it was done optically.
The person in that article isn't quite right about the stereo encoding. The groove is shaped like a V with a 90 degree angle. Each face of the V wiggles perpendicularly to its plane to encode that channel. This way, the channels are encoded symetrically, they are independent, and on a mono player, you get the sum of the channels. This wouldn't be an issue for 78's, which I don't think are stereo.
You'd need a higher DPI scanner, and to get the best quality, try scanning the record in various orientations and adding them together - if the light angle isn't right, you'll see nothing even if there is a deep groove. You could also try coating the record with something reflective and squeegeeing it off so it stays in the grooves. Then the depth of the groove would control how bright it looks more reliably. You could still do stereo by looking at the inner and outer edges independantly.
Even if iTunes were profitable, PlayFair wouldn't affect their bottom line. It certainly won't lose them money (you can only unlock music you bought), and it has the potential to get them more customers - those who want to be legal, but, for whatever reason, can't abide by the DRM, and don't mind breaking an unenforcable and unethical clause in the contract.
So anyone using PlayFair to overcome the DRMs is essentially in breach of contract.
Absolutely. Thus, Apple would be perfectly justified to sue people who use PlayFair for breach of contract. But that's not what they're doing, and that argument doesn't justify what they're doing.
They seriously don't give a shit about a bunch of geeks running around proclaiming 'civil disobediance' by not paying for a $1 song.
The whole point is that these particular geeks are paying the $1 for the song, and are getting screwed anyway.
Also, DRM will continue to get more restrictive, but this has nothing to do with the public being stupid. The RIAA controls all the popular music, and they can choose to only offer it to resellers with increasingly restrictive DRM. Yes, this will hurt sales. The RIAA will then blame piracy and get the politicians, who are as stupid (or as paid off) as Slashdotters think, to make still more draconian copyright laws.
I will agree that iTunes license (which isn't a EULA) is valid. However, there are some things you cannot sign away, no matter how hard you try. For example, you can't sign yourself into slavery.
I think that the right to make personal copies ought to be one you can't sign away. I consider this to be an important right, but given current market conditions, it will certainly be lost, unless the courts decide that it can't be.
I'm tired of this "you're breaking the contract" defense. Suppose I sign up for iTunes and sign their legally binding contract. Then I use PlayFair. Yes, I would have violated the contract. Apple would be justified in suing me. But that does not affect the legality of PlayFair in any way. Only the DMCA makes it illegal, and the DMCA is wrong.
Two things here. One, the source code probably is GPL. Two, it doesn't matter, it still makes perfect sense that VIA would pull it.
Finkel wrote the code while working for AOL, so depending on the terms of a contract we can't see, the code may be AOLs. But, there is some evidence that Finkel was able to release code in his capacity as an agent of AOL. (This may also be contingent on a contract we don't have.) So it's likely that the code is actually under the GPL.
But I said likely, not certain. AOL disagrees. So, some VIA developers convince their legal department, possibly without telling the whole story, that WASTE is GPL'd, and legal gives them the thumbs up. They write Padlock, put it on the web, and it gets Slashdotted. But now AOL finds out, and they send a threatening letter to VIA's legal department. What does VIA do?
Obviously, they withdraw it. Yes, it's GPL (though nobody is trying to convince them of that), but AOL can still sue them. Since Padlock is of no real importance to VIA, it's financially smarter for them to just drop it.
I think it's safer for someone to just re-implement it, possibly in a better way. I doubt AOL has patents on it, because why would they have gone to the trouble to obtain patents if they weren't going to release the software, and probably didn't know it was being written?
Violating thermodynamics would be an efficiency of 1 or more, not infinity. This motor is either storing more energy in the magnets (which would be cool, but I'm not sure if it's possible) or else he measured something wrong.
If they were the ones who uploaded it, they would know her IP address, which, with the DMCA, is sufficient to finger her. (Then the courts would have to decide whether it's illegal if the plaintiff did the uploading.) Alternately, they could find some way to spy on a known uploader, or perhaps sue an uploader and get his logs as a settlement, and use the logs to discover her. Or easiest by far, it's possible that for some period of time, she was uploading, or at least advertising that she had the file.
If it reached court and took her computer, it would be easy. Deleting the file only clobbers metadata, most of the file is still on the disk. Even when data is overwritten by normal use of the disk, it is possible to extract. (It's recoverable until about 7 overwrites.) If they found even one block of the movie on her disk, they could tell the court there was only a 1 in 1.318x10^1204 chance she didn't do it.
Slashdot Mirror
To call that "an issue" is a bit of an understatement. Patents, like copyrights, are supposed to further the Sciences and Useful Arts. The very basis of patents is that in exchange for the monopoly, you tell everyone how it works. Without the reward, everybody would keep it a secret. So prohibiting reverse engineering is exactly the nightmare patents are disigned to avert, and since it clearly wouldn't help science or the useful arts, it absolutely cannot be constitutionally justified by that clause.
I assume you agree, but I just wanted to make it clear. The freedom to tinker is very, very important.
I don't think modules should be derivative works, but that's for a judge, not for me, or even for Linus, to decide.
Temperature is the average kinetic energy of the particles you're considering. So if you average the kinetic energy over all the liquid, it's cool. But if you average the kinetic energy of, say, the 50 particles right where the bubble imploded, it's really hot. With the cavitation, you have a bajillion particles at room temperature and a few going really really fast (so the average temperature is still cool), and hopefully the fast ones fuse and transfer energy to the cool ones.
When this gets to court, it may come down to the defendants saying, "We were told this was OK, no fair changing your mind." And hopefully the court will agree with that. Yes, it's too bad you can't easily disclaim a subset of your patent rights in a more binding way.
The second problem is, why can't they just say, "We notice you are using our patented algorithm. Would you like to license it from us, compatibly with the GPL, for $0.02?"? There's nothing (besides maybe shareholders) forcing them to be assholes, certainly not the law.
No. So the important question is, will your university continue to allow you to use SSH? You'd like to think so, but unfortunately it's not an inalienable right.
In that article, PCBs refers to polychlorinated biphenyls, a poison, not printed circuit boards. I'm not aware of any connection between the two.
Why, praytell, would anyone buy iTunes songs, break the DRM, and put it on P2P networks, when they could just as easily rip the songs from a CD they bought, or borrowed from the library?
Those problems could easily be overcome. Privately mirror the article, publish the story with the original link, email the webmaster. If he wants, publish the mirror and point the link in the article to it.
Both Windows and Linux have problems playing sounds concurrently with cheap cards, and no problems with good cards. You happen to have a good card which does hardware mixing. Most onboard cards don't, so only one sound can be played at a time, unless you use software mixers like esd, arts, or dmix, or on Windows, DirectX.
Nobody asked to do that, he did it of his own accord. He also tried several reinstalls, even after the point that he got it to work once. These are really stupid and inneficient ways to solve the problem.
If he had specifically described the problem, and done what people asked, he could have solved the problem in a few days waiting and a few minutes work. This would work on usenet, the alsa mailing lists, any online forum, including Slashdot, or even in his own discussion forum.
Instead, becaule he's so damn convinced he knows everything that he never even bothered to seek advice.
The person in that article isn't quite right about the stereo encoding. The groove is shaped like a V with a 90 degree angle. Each face of the V wiggles perpendicularly to its plane to encode that channel. This way, the channels are encoded symetrically, they are independent, and on a mono player, you get the sum of the channels. This wouldn't be an issue for 78's, which I don't think are stereo.
You'd need a higher DPI scanner, and to get the best quality, try scanning the record in various orientations and adding them together - if the light angle isn't right, you'll see nothing even if there is a deep groove. You could also try coating the record with something reflective and squeegeeing it off so it stays in the grooves. Then the depth of the groove would control how bright it looks more reliably. You could still do stereo by looking at the inner and outer edges independantly.
Well, it is readable, even for a non-programmer. Don't know who would have both the knowledge and the tolerance to write it, though.
Even if iTunes were profitable, PlayFair wouldn't affect their bottom line. It certainly won't lose them money (you can only unlock music you bought), and it has the potential to get them more customers - those who want to be legal, but, for whatever reason, can't abide by the DRM, and don't mind breaking an unenforcable and unethical clause in the contract.
Absolutely. Thus, Apple would be perfectly justified to sue people who use PlayFair for breach of contract. But that's not what they're doing, and that argument doesn't justify what they're doing.
The whole point is that these particular geeks are paying the $1 for the song, and are getting screwed anyway.
Also, DRM will continue to get more restrictive, but this has nothing to do with the public being stupid. The RIAA controls all the popular music, and they can choose to only offer it to resellers with increasingly restrictive DRM. Yes, this will hurt sales. The RIAA will then blame piracy and get the politicians, who are as stupid (or as paid off) as Slashdotters think, to make still more draconian copyright laws.
I think that the right to make personal copies ought to be one you can't sign away. I consider this to be an important right, but given current market conditions, it will certainly be lost, unless the courts decide that it can't be.
I'm tired of this "you're breaking the contract" defense. Suppose I sign up for iTunes and sign their legally binding contract. Then I use PlayFair. Yes, I would have violated the contract. Apple would be justified in suing me. But that does not affect the legality of PlayFair in any way. Only the DMCA makes it illegal, and the DMCA is wrong.
Finkel wrote the code while working for AOL, so depending on the terms of a contract we can't see, the code may be AOLs. But, there is some evidence that Finkel was able to release code in his capacity as an agent of AOL. (This may also be contingent on a contract we don't have.) So it's likely that the code is actually under the GPL.
But I said likely, not certain. AOL disagrees. So, some VIA developers convince their legal department, possibly without telling the whole story, that WASTE is GPL'd, and legal gives them the thumbs up. They write Padlock, put it on the web, and it gets Slashdotted. But now AOL finds out, and they send a threatening letter to VIA's legal department. What does VIA do?
Obviously, they withdraw it. Yes, it's GPL (though nobody is trying to convince them of that), but AOL can still sue them. Since Padlock is of no real importance to VIA, it's financially smarter for them to just drop it.
I think it's safer for someone to just re-implement it, possibly in a better way. I doubt AOL has patents on it, because why would they have gone to the trouble to obtain patents if they weren't going to release the software, and probably didn't know it was being written?
In a thousand years, DeCSS and PlayFair will be remebered with the same reverence as the Rosetta Stone. You heard it here first.
Actually, there is a tax on most hardware that goes to software development and to the government. Most of us don't like it, though.
Illegal, yes, but do you have free access to the tools? In America, and Australia too if you pass this, you won't.
Violating thermodynamics would be an efficiency of 1 or more, not infinity. This motor is either storing more energy in the magnets (which would be cool, but I'm not sure if it's possible) or else he measured something wrong.
How do you use this imaginary power? Does running big engines push it off phase or something?
If it reached court and took her computer, it would be easy. Deleting the file only clobbers metadata, most of the file is still on the disk. Even when data is overwritten by normal use of the disk, it is possible to extract. (It's recoverable until about 7 overwrites.) If they found even one block of the movie on her disk, they could tell the court there was only a 1 in 1.318x10^1204 chance she didn't do it.