Just do the same test with any suspect email and see if the domain name is what you expect it should be. It's that simple!
Well, it does raise the bar a little bit, but it is not very difficult to obtain a block of IP numbers and run your own reverse dns or alternatively, hack the reverse dns for some ip range.
and even if you did have (say) a smart card reader to use with a bank-issued smart card, there's nothing saying that phishers couldn't haxor your smart card reader and make a copy of it.
There are 3 things preventing this:
1. Usually, the 'secret' is in a part of the card that is not readable from a smartcard reader. It can be used from inside the card for signing, encryption and validation. 2. The actual intelligence is in the smartcard, not the reader. 3. The smartcard reader is something you obtain at your bank, it would have to be hacked beforehand or by someone taking physical posession of it, and would need a communications channel to do something with the data.
So, someone must steal the reader, hack it and implement some way to retrieve the data. Even then, with all implementations of this scheme that I have seen so far, the data is useless after max 60 secs.
Just stealing the smartcard seems a lot more practical to me..
I.E. https that REQUIRES the ip address as well as domain name be present in the certificate and validated at a authintication server.
Hmm, that just asks for spoofing or compromising the authentication server...
The whole trick with regards to SSL is that you do not need an authentication server, rather, you use a chain of certificates, starting with one that is widely known and preferably included with your browser, this certificate is from a so called CA. This CA certificate has been used to sign the actual site certificate, and by checking the site certificate's signature against it, you can verify that it is indeed a 'real' certificate.
This means that noone depends on the CA's servers to be available at any given time, but you do rely on already having the CA certificate in your browser, or having a reliable way to get it.
The 2 reasons for this are of course to prevent having a single point of failure (the authentication server) and to prevent compromise of the certificate.
Cookies will also not stop MITM attacks - to do that, you need to verify who the other party really is.
Well, your browser is supposed to be doing exactly that before sending a cookie, provided that cookie contains the proper domain/path info.
This will not prevent situations where the 'real' URL is being used together with a fake website, but it will prevent situations with 'lookalike' URLs since the cookie is not sent by the client in that case.
SiteKey has been available in my state for several weeks. It works like a charm and is as quick as checking the SSL certificate each time I log in. (You DO check SSL certs, don't you)
So the question is what does it provde that SSL does not provide for already..
The most important thing it provides for is yet another human check on if the site is really the website of the bank.
Currently people have to carefully check the url (in the address bar and on the SSL certificate), which we know to not work very well due to end-user sloppyness and possibly some nasty tricks with unicode.
The problem with this approach is that it is not very likely to make people do the right thing, first of all because it is just inconvinient and second because people often get sloppy when having to do the same check again and again.
The bank I use (like most banks overhere) uses a one time password system, based on a small calculator like device and my bankcard. They give out the calculators for free so as long as you have a bankcard from them, you can walk into any of their offices to get one just in case you need one and forgot yours.
Extending this with a challance/response based verification of the website by means of this same device seems a workable extention of this that would address this problem in a much better way.
Yes, it is still more inconvinient, but the actual check is done by a machine instead of a human, and that machine won't get tired of doing such a check again and again and hence won't get sloppy.
SiteKey seems to use a cookie, which seems to be an attempt to prevent having to do this check each time you use the website, which basicly works untill someone uses some cookie cleaner and does not want to bother figuring out which cookies to preserve (and many people don't even if they know where to look and what it means to begin with)
As a result, those who know they have to 'secure' their computer but lack the knowledge or time to do it in a 'fine grained' way, will likely be confronted with this check each time they restart their browser.
In other words.. good idea, bad implementation for as far as I can see.
But they're always playing catch-up. Works for a while, not forever. We'll see if they can overturn google and iPod+iTunes.
If past experience tells us anything, they have a decent chance.
They have the resources to try a few times untill they have something that is good enough and integrated into what people already have, and imho they have always managed to buy pretty decent hardware for rebranding.. Their software is another matter, but for the consumer 'good enough' will do.
Pile of shit? What are you talking about. I've bought plenty of DVDs from there and they've been top quality. No faults, no mistakes, what on earth are you talking abuot?
I never said they are actually selling you a pile of shit, just that they could as long as they hide it from you initially.
What price do I pay? Are they going to come round asking for more money?
It never occured to you that the price for companies having to pay eachother substantial amounts of money for 'the right' to use something obvious is going to be payed for by you as a consumer? The consequence is that you pay more for a product then needed. You just don't get to see this without looking a bit further.
That has nothing to do with conspiracy theories, it is simple economics.
They provide a quality service and good prices. I couldn't care less about the patent business, I'm not interested in the legal and technical background to the places I shop. I'm a customer not a lawyer.
You are a customer of the type that many businesses love. Ignorant of what is behind the product you buy, only interested in the things you can see easily. Means they can sell you whatever they like as long as they hide that its just a pile of shit.
In case you did not get it yet, you DO pay a price for all those things in one way or another, regardless of how uninterested you are in them. It is just not included in the price you see initially.
Heh, I got a 128k (2 channel) isdn connection when 14k4 modems where still the thing...
The throughput and latency of it were just mindboggling at the time..
Now that I think of it, there are probably quite a few places on the planet where that would still qualify as broadband.
Seems isdn was rather expensive in many places back then.. here it was about twice as expensive as a normal analog line, and my isp back then was just starting experimental support for it, and did not charge anything on top of a normal subscription for it. It was however about 8 times as fast as the fastest analog dialup connection, not to mention the latency decrease due to eliminating modems and their buffering (was very relevant for me as a big time telnet user... muds and such ruled:)
n any event, the example given is quite different from the case at hand, and is irrelevant. If everyone on earth had a photographic memory, could memorize the newspaper article just by glancing at it in the window, and could instantly transmit their memory-copy of a newspaper article they saw to anyone else they walked by, I suspect the law might be a bit different.
I already pointed that part out, but also pointed out that the shop is in such a situation performing a public display of a copyrighted work, which in itself is covered by copyright. Go see if there is any example of a newspaper succesfully suing a shop over this.
In other words, no redistribution rights are being violated, implicitly or otherwise, when you surf to a web page.
Because those have been declared non infringing, not because no redistribution is taking place.
Participating in a torrent is not the same as hosting your own torrent. "Redistribution" as it occurs in a torrent is necessary for the file to be distributed at all; but running your own torrent of the file is not. But if you open a torrent of file X, and then I download it and start a separate torrent, unless you explicitly permitted me to do so, I am violating copyright law. It's possible for a court to find that since the entire intent of torrents is to widely disseminate material, having someone secondarily redistribute the file via a separate torrent might not be infringing.
Well, 'hosting a torrent' is a matter of definition, but as soon as I participate in a torrent, I am redistributing a copyrighted work. It gets stored on my computer and is made available to others for downloading. That is redistribution.
You are right I believe that this is non infringing because of how the torrent system works. While having only one 'source' in the form of the initial publisher, a torrent already works, so you do not strictly need this, but it is the inherent consequence of using the medium that this will happen, as you say, this is the intention of the bittorrent system.
And when you put something on the web, you use a medium where the intention is to have a 'hyperlinked web' that is indexed and navigatable. The simple consequence will be that there may be copies of your content in specific cases that will be made available to people 'surfing' the web. It is a direct result of the intention of the web.
You can have an argument about if archiving belongs in there, I believe it does.
In the specific case of the web, its first of all not possible to use the medium while enforcing all your 'redistribution' rights. Technically, your publication cannot be displayed without there existing a local copy of it at the viewer's end. It gets cached by browsers as well as proxy servers in many cases as well. All those make new copies of your publication.
Besides this technicality, there is the example you provided yourself of the newspaper in the storefront. While I cannot provide case aw, I am pretty sure a newspaper trying to sue a shop without having made prior agreements about not being shown, will not stand a chance in court, despite the also very important provisions with regards to public display in copyright law.
If you look around there are many cases where you cannot enforce certain aspects of copyright law, often confirmed by court, sometimes so obvious that that never had to happen, and at times simply because it works in everyones advantage so there was no reason so far.
With regards to copyright law itself, see the fair-use provision.
None of this all suggests that you lose all rights or anything like that.
What it does mean is that by publishing to a specific medium, you get to deal with both technical and cultural aspects of it, and those may cause some parts of copyright law to not be enforcable in all situations.
I don't think that means you lose all protection or anything like that.
The argument should imho be about which aspects wont work in which cases, any other discussion is not going to work imho.
To use a somewhat more clear situation that involves digital (re)distribution:
Don't complain about people resdistributing your work when you make public a torrent of it yourself (on purpose), it is inherent to the medium and by publishing on it you do accept that consequence.
The following is purely my opinion:
When publishing to the web, don't complain when people cache, link to, index or archive your content, and make the result available again to the public. Other ways of republication should not happen without permission however. Those things make that the medium as a whole works and is somewhat usable. By publishing on it you should accept the consequence that those things will happen.
Interestingly enough, virtually all of my C64 era 5 1/4" floppies (many dating back to pre 1985), both 170kb 1541 format and 1mb sfd1001 format, are still working perfectly fine (and so are the drives btw, amazingly enough)
I do have backups of many of them, but am still using the originals regularely.
The same can not be said about the early 90s 5 1/4" PC floppies I have around, and I won't even go into 3 1/2" floppies at all.
Just to clarify one thing, I do not believe that publishing to the web automatically voids copyright. It does however make specific aspects of it unenforcable imho.
We'll have to agree to disagree.
I'm afraid so:)
THat is no big issue to me, I do discuss things to gain and provide understanding first of all. If one side convinces the other, well, that can be nice of course but should imho not be the primary reason for a discussion.
After thinking a bit more about your examples, let me try to correct them with regards to the current discussion:
Do newspapers and magazines give up the copyright on their front page because they display it in storefronts?
Of course they don't. However, unless a newspaper makes specific agreements beforehand with regards to this, they can reasonably expect stores to display the frontpage in their storefronts, and have no standing arguing that this is a form of republication despite the fact that copyright law does grant exclusive rights with regards to public display.
Do billboards fall outside the protections of copyright law?
I have yet to hear about a case of a newspaper or magazine being sued succesfully for publishing a picture that happens to include a billboard. Again, copyright has provisions for public display but that does not help here.
What about books in libraries?
THere are special provisions in law for those, so they cannot be used as an example I think. Regardless, they allow public access to copyrighted works which again is somethign that would be covered by the exclusive rights copyright grants, yet they cannot be sued for doing so.
In many cases copyright itself already contains a provision for allowing this, called 'fair use', which is just a specific application of the more general principe I am trying to demonstrate.
The bottomline is that depending on how you publish something, certain exclusive rights granted by copyright may not be enforcable. That does not void the remaining provisions of copyright.
Do newspapers and magazines give up the copyright on their front page because they display it in storefronts? Do billboards fall outside the protections of copyright law? What about books in libraries?
None of your examples is comparable to publishing it on a webpage.
In case of privacy, the reasonable expectation happens to depend (in part at least) on you showing it in a public place.
Publication already implies making the information known to others, and that is not what copyright deals with, hence putting the info in a public place in itself does not change the 'reasonable expectations'. Publishing it to a medium that has a different and very well known set of 'rules' does change reasonable expectation.
So sorry, your examples simply make no sense.
THe one thing you can compare this to is sending an aticle to a newspaper that has a logn history of publishing such articles without compensation, and then go complain about that. If you could know beforehand what the result would be, then you had a reasonable expectation that your article would be published without compensation as well and have no standing to claim that compensation anyway.
Copyright is why you have such control over paper publications. Copyright also applies to whatever you publish on the web. What is more, it even applies to the graphity you spray on a wall.
There are laws that guarantee your privacy, yet, when you are on the street and show protected information to all to see, then you lose a lot of that protection as a simple consequence of what is called reasonable expectation.
The same principe should apply to publishing things on the web.
That does not in itself remove your rights under copyright, but it does make them unenforcable in specific cases.
Yes, linking is a big part, but it is completely possible to have a web page with no links.
You can have a page, but not a 'web' without linking.
Caching? I'm not sure where you got this idea. Caching is completely unnecessary for operation of the web. It's merely an optimization tool. And sharing.. that's just naieve. Yes, the web is a medium for transmitting information and makes it easy for the masses to reach the masses, but that doesn't mean that we all have to play nice and share.
You are right that sharing and caching are indeed not required for the web to function, but both were very much a part of it, helped it to grow to what it is now, and were there before people started to try to make money from publishing on the web.
And yes, participating in a shared medium like the WWW does indeed mean you have to play nice and share, else you undermine the medium you are trying to proffit from, and to speak in "RIAA' terminology, that is 'stealing', in this case from those who do support the medium by playing nice.
Your comment just makes me wonder, what do publishers think when arguing that everyone has to play nice with them, but they don't have to play nice with anyone themselves?
This is just a fancy way of saying "tough titties" or "you snooze you lose". Simply put, it's not a very sound argument.
If you publish something to a specific medium where things like sharing, caching and linking are the norm and are things that make that medium work as well as it does in the first place, then you can reasonably expect those things to happen to your publication as well and should not come back and whine about it.
Does that remove your rights under copyright? not as such.
I have heard that in Germany the widespread insurance led to problems at one time with neighbour suing neighbour over trivial matters, rather than seeking a negotiated solution. Don't know if that's still the case.
I have heard the same thing but from what I understand that is no longer a real issue, first of all because the insurance does not automatically cover you sueing someone, it only automatically covers you having to defend yourself, and second, because judges will rule against you or force you to try to negotiate a proper solution, and can become somewhat nasty about you not seriously trying that first.
At any rate, this is indeed an aspect that you have to deal with when such insurance becomes common.
It is not a perfect solution, and something like the small claims court would be a very welcome addition here indeed.
What such insurance does tho is remove the legal inequality between huge rich corporations and private individuals to a very large extend, regardless of what the conflict is about, and my personal experience with that is that it actually works very well for that.
It is an inherent consequence of the medium being used. The concepts of sharing, linking and caching were there before anyone ever did anything commercial with the WWW, and only became an issue when people wanted to start making money from publishing on the WWW regardless of those aspects.
By your standard, there is a reasonable expectation that any good software I release will be copied illegally and distributed on P2P, so I have no right to take action against those who do it.
You indeed can have that reasonable expectation depending on how you publish your work (software).
This is one of the reasons why the software industry is nowadays making more and more money from services and money made from direct product sales is becomming less and less important. Adapt or die, its very simple.
THis does not deny you the right to go sue someoen over distributing software illegally that you happen to have published on a CD or set of floppies or tape that was sold to the customer in the clear understanding that they were buying a non exclusive usage right, but it does indeed bar you from doing the same after having published your software freely and publicly on the WWW for example.
The medium and the understanding at initial transfer determine what can be called reasonable expectations in those cases. Regardless of how much you may hate that, those are different for the WWW then for example for a boxed set of floppies or CDs, simply because the nature as well as the history of those media are very different.
Also keep in mind that 'reasonable expectations' here are not determined by what technically feasable, tho they will be influenced by it.
Lets keep in mind that the UK legal system and the one used in a substantial part of continental Europe are far from identical (tho they have certain things in common of course)
Insurance is available for businesses I guess but not many private individuals would have that sort of cover here,
Maybe not in the UK, I would not know that.
In the Netherlands it is pretty common, easily available and as said, not very expensive. It is way more expensive to get similar insurance as a business (I happen to have both, they are seperate products and the business insurance is substantially more then a few euro/year)
What is more, for many people in the Netherlands, it comes for free with union membership (or at least used to).
From what my girlfriend tells me, this is a little bit more expensive in for example Germany, but still pretty easy to come by, and definitely available to private civilians, not just businesses.
I would not know about France, but from what I have read, legal cost usually does not seem to be a major issue in deciding to 'stand and fight' when you have a good case there either.
What is still a major concern in all cases is the amount of time you'll have to invest into it, and from what I have seen, that is in the end what makes people give up a lot more then financial issues.
At any rate, didn't know about the UK, hope that it becomes more common there as well as it helps quite a bit against 'schoolyard bully behavior' from larger organisations to just shrug at a legal thread and mention you can afford fighting it. THe few cases I had to deal with so far myself all resulted in them comming back with a more reasonable proposal to solve an outstanding issue.
Slashdot Mirror
Just do the same test with any suspect email and see if the domain name is what you expect it should be. It's that simple!
Well, it does raise the bar a little bit, but it is not very difficult to obtain a block of IP numbers and run your own reverse dns or alternatively, hack the reverse dns for some ip range.
Just a small correction, the number unlocks the card, not so much the generator.
and even if you did have (say) a smart card reader to use with a bank-issued smart card, there's nothing saying that phishers couldn't haxor your smart card reader and make a copy of it.
There are 3 things preventing this:
1. Usually, the 'secret' is in a part of the card that is not readable from a smartcard reader. It can be used from inside the card for signing, encryption and validation.
2. The actual intelligence is in the smartcard, not the reader.
3. The smartcard reader is something you obtain at your bank, it would have to be hacked beforehand or by someone taking physical posession of it, and would need a communications channel to do something with the data.
So, someone must steal the reader, hack it and implement some way to retrieve the data. Even then, with all implementations of this scheme that I have seen so far, the data is useless after max 60 secs.
Just stealing the smartcard seems a lot more practical to me..
I.E. https that REQUIRES the ip address as well as domain name be present in the certificate and validated at a authintication server.
Hmm, that just asks for spoofing or compromising the authentication server...
The whole trick with regards to SSL is that you do not need an authentication server, rather, you use a chain of certificates, starting with one that is widely known and preferably included with your browser, this certificate is from a so called CA. This CA certificate has been used to sign the actual site certificate, and by checking the site certificate's signature against it, you can verify that it is indeed a 'real' certificate.
This means that noone depends on the CA's servers to be available at any given time, but you do rely on already having the CA certificate in your browser, or having a reliable way to get it.
The 2 reasons for this are of course to prevent having a single point of failure (the authentication server) and to prevent compromise of the certificate.
Cookies will also not stop MITM attacks - to do that, you need to verify who the other party really is.
Well, your browser is supposed to be doing exactly that before sending a cookie, provided that cookie contains the proper domain/path info.
This will not prevent situations where the 'real' URL is being used together with a fake website, but it will prevent situations with 'lookalike' URLs since the cookie is not sent by the client in that case.
Could also do it by IP Address,
No, Too many internet providers on this planet are using dynamic IPs for their customer.
or possibly MAC address too.
No. Your MAC address is only visible to directly connected machines and is definitely not visible to a 'remote' machine on the internet.
So, IP address is extremely unreliable and MAC address is simply not visible to them.
SiteKey has been available in my state for several weeks. It works like a charm and is as quick as checking the SSL certificate each time I log in. (You DO check SSL certs, don't you)
So the question is what does it provde that SSL does not provide for already..
The most important thing it provides for is yet another human check on if the site is really the website of the bank.
Currently people have to carefully check the url (in the address bar and on the SSL certificate), which we know to not work very well due to end-user sloppyness and possibly some nasty tricks with unicode.
The problem with this approach is that it is not very likely to make people do the right thing, first of all because it is just inconvinient and second because people often get sloppy when having to do the same check again and again.
The bank I use (like most banks overhere) uses a one time password system, based on a small calculator like device and my bankcard. They give out the calculators for free so as long as you have a bankcard from them, you can walk into any of their offices to get one just in case you need one and forgot yours.
Extending this with a challance/response based verification of the website by means of this same device seems a workable extention of this that would address this problem in a much better way.
Yes, it is still more inconvinient, but the actual check is done by a machine instead of a human, and that machine won't get tired of doing such a check again and again and hence won't get sloppy.
SiteKey seems to use a cookie, which seems to be an attempt to prevent having to do this check each time you use the website, which basicly works untill someone uses some cookie cleaner and does not want to bother figuring out which cookies to preserve (and many people don't even if they know where to look and what it means to begin with)
As a result, those who know they have to 'secure' their computer but lack the knowledge or time to do it in a 'fine grained' way, will likely be confronted with this check each time they restart their browser.
In other words.. good idea, bad implementation for as far as I can see.
But they're always playing catch-up. Works for a while, not forever. We'll see if they can overturn google and iPod+iTunes.
If past experience tells us anything, they have a decent chance.
They have the resources to try a few times untill they have something that is good enough and integrated into what people already have, and imho they have always managed to buy pretty decent hardware for rebranding.. Their software is another matter, but for the consumer 'good enough' will do.
Pile of shit? What are you talking about. I've bought plenty of DVDs from there and they've been top quality. No faults, no mistakes, what on earth are you talking abuot?
I never said they are actually selling you a pile of shit, just that they could as long as they hide it from you initially.
What price do I pay? Are they going to come round asking for more money?
It never occured to you that the price for companies having to pay eachother substantial amounts of money for 'the right' to use something obvious is going to be payed for by you as a consumer? The consequence is that you pay more for a product then needed. You just don't get to see this without looking a bit further.
That has nothing to do with conspiracy theories, it is simple economics.
They provide a quality service and good prices. I couldn't care less about the patent business, I'm not interested in the legal and technical background to the places I shop. I'm a customer not a lawyer.
You are a customer of the type that many businesses love. Ignorant of what is behind the product you buy, only interested in the things you can see easily. Means they can sell you whatever they like as long as they hide that its just a pile of shit.
In case you did not get it yet, you DO pay a price for all those things in one way or another, regardless of how uninterested you are in them. It is just not included in the price you see initially.
Heh, I got a 128k (2 channel) isdn connection when 14k4 modems where still the thing...
:)
The throughput and latency of it were just mindboggling at the time..
Now that I think of it, there are probably quite a few places on the planet where that would still qualify as broadband.
Seems isdn was rather expensive in many places back then.. here it was about twice as expensive as a normal analog line, and my isp back then was just starting experimental support for it, and did not charge anything on top of a normal subscription for it. It was however about 8 times as fast as the fastest analog dialup connection, not to mention the latency decrease due to eliminating modems and their buffering (was very relevant for me as a big time telnet user... muds and such ruled
That's what MS has never gotten. Make it part of a person's lifestyle first, then they'll make it part of their work.
Hmm.. seems to me they get it quite well, but have an all improved version of it..
Let others put the efford into making something a part of a person's lifestyle, and then have the 'right' product available once that happened..
What this guy did seems more akin to someone linking linking to napster then to what napster did itself.
If these people don't want Google indexing their stuff, Google better not index it.
Wrong.
If you don't want it to be indexed, do not post it to a medium where being indexed is an important part of what makes that medium work to begin with.
When a company is worth $80 billion, it has to be sued for SOMETHING.
I'm sure some lawyers believe that. It provides excelent job security.
To the rest of society this is absurd and a big waste of time and money.
n any event, the example given is quite different from the case at hand, and is irrelevant. If everyone on earth had a photographic memory, could memorize the newspaper article just by glancing at it in the window, and could instantly transmit their memory-copy of a newspaper article they saw to anyone else they walked by, I suspect the law might be a bit different.
I already pointed that part out, but also pointed out that the shop is in such a situation performing a public display of a copyrighted work, which in itself is covered by copyright. Go see if there is any example of a newspaper succesfully suing a shop over this.
In other words, no redistribution rights are being violated, implicitly or otherwise, when you surf to a web page.
Because those have been declared non infringing, not because no redistribution is taking place.
Participating in a torrent is not the same as hosting your own torrent. "Redistribution" as it occurs in a torrent is necessary for the file to be distributed at all; but running your own torrent of the file is not. But if you open a torrent of file X, and then I download it and start a separate torrent, unless you explicitly permitted me to do so, I am violating copyright law. It's possible for a court to find that since the entire intent of torrents is to widely disseminate material, having someone secondarily redistribute the file via a separate torrent might not be infringing.
Well, 'hosting a torrent' is a matter of definition, but as soon as I participate in a torrent, I am redistributing a copyrighted work. It gets stored on my computer and is made available to others for downloading. That is redistribution.
You are right I believe that this is non infringing because of how the torrent system works. While having only one 'source' in the form of the initial publisher, a torrent already works, so you do not strictly need this, but it is the inherent consequence of using the medium that this will happen, as you say, this is the intention of the bittorrent system.
And when you put something on the web, you use a medium where the intention is to have a 'hyperlinked web' that is indexed and navigatable.
The simple consequence will be that there may be copies of your content in specific cases that will be made available to people 'surfing' the web. It is a direct result of the intention of the web.
You can have an argument about if archiving belongs in there, I believe it does.
In the specific case of the web, its first of all not possible to use the medium while enforcing all your 'redistribution' rights. Technically, your publication cannot be displayed without there existing a local copy of it at the viewer's end. It gets cached by browsers as well as proxy servers in many cases as well. All those make new copies of your publication.
Besides this technicality, there is the example you provided yourself of the newspaper in the storefront. While I cannot provide case aw, I am pretty sure a newspaper trying to sue a shop without having made prior agreements about not being shown, will not stand a chance in court, despite the also very important provisions with regards to public display in copyright law.
If you look around there are many cases where you cannot enforce certain aspects of copyright law, often confirmed by court, sometimes so obvious that that never had to happen, and at times simply because it works in everyones advantage so there was no reason so far.
With regards to copyright law itself, see the fair-use provision.
None of this all suggests that you lose all rights or anything like that.
What it does mean is that by publishing to a specific medium, you get to deal with both technical and cultural aspects of it, and those may cause some parts of copyright law to not be enforcable in all situations.
I don't think that means you lose all protection or anything like that.
The argument should imho be about which aspects wont work in which cases, any other discussion is not going to work imho.
To use a somewhat more clear situation that involves digital (re)distribution:
Don't complain about people resdistributing your work when you make public a torrent of it yourself (on purpose), it is inherent to the medium and by publishing on it you do accept that consequence.
The following is purely my opinion:
When publishing to the web, don't complain when people cache, link to, index or archive your content, and make the result available again to the public. Other ways of republication should not happen without permission however. Those things make that the medium as a whole works and is somewhat usable. By publishing on it you should accept the consequence that those things will happen.
Interestingly enough, virtually all of my C64 era 5 1/4" floppies (many dating back to pre 1985), both 170kb 1541 format and 1mb sfd1001 format, are still working perfectly fine (and so are the drives btw, amazingly enough)
I do have backups of many of them, but am still using the originals regularely.
The same can not be said about the early 90s 5 1/4" PC floppies I have around, and I won't even go into 3 1/2" floppies at all.
Just to clarify one thing, I do not believe that publishing to the web automatically voids copyright. It does however make specific aspects of it unenforcable imho.
:)
We'll have to agree to disagree.
I'm afraid so
THat is no big issue to me, I do discuss things to gain and provide understanding first of all. If one side convinces the other, well, that can be nice of course but should imho not be the primary reason for a discussion.
After thinking a bit more about your examples, let me try to correct them with regards to the current discussion:
Of course they don't. However, unless a newspaper makes specific agreements beforehand with regards to this, they can reasonably expect stores to display the frontpage in their storefronts, and have no standing arguing that this is a form of republication despite the fact that copyright law does grant exclusive rights with regards to public display.
I have yet to hear about a case of a newspaper or magazine being sued succesfully for publishing a picture that happens to include a billboard. Again, copyright has provisions for public display but that does not help here.
THere are special provisions in law for those, so they cannot be used as an example I think. Regardless, they allow public access to copyrighted works which again is somethign that would be covered by the exclusive rights copyright grants, yet they cannot be sued for doing so.
In many cases copyright itself already contains a provision for allowing this, called 'fair use', which is just a specific application of the more general principe I am trying to demonstrate.
The bottomline is that depending on how you publish something, certain exclusive rights granted by copyright may not be enforcable. That does not void the remaining provisions of copyright.
Do newspapers and magazines give up the copyright on their front page because they display it in storefronts? Do billboards fall outside the protections of copyright law? What about books in libraries?
None of your examples is comparable to publishing it on a webpage.
In case of privacy, the reasonable expectation happens to depend (in part at least) on you showing it in a public place.
Publication already implies making the information known to others, and that is not what copyright deals with, hence putting the info in a public place in itself does not change the 'reasonable expectations'. Publishing it to a medium that has a different and very well known set of 'rules' does change reasonable expectation.
So sorry, your examples simply make no sense.
THe one thing you can compare this to is sending an aticle to a newspaper that has a logn history of publishing such articles without compensation, and then go complain about that. If you could know beforehand what the result would be, then you had a reasonable expectation that your article would be published without compensation as well and have no standing to claim that compensation anyway.
Copyright is why you have such control over paper publications. Copyright also applies to whatever you publish on the web. What is more, it even applies to the graphity you spray on a wall.
There are laws that guarantee your privacy, yet, when you are on the street and show protected information to all to see, then you lose a lot of that protection as a simple consequence of what is called reasonable expectation.
The same principe should apply to publishing things on the web.
That does not in itself remove your rights under copyright, but it does make them unenforcable in specific cases.
Yes, linking is a big part, but it is completely possible to have a web page with no links.
You can have a page, but not a 'web' without linking.
Caching? I'm not sure where you got this idea. Caching is completely unnecessary for operation of the web. It's merely an optimization tool. And sharing.. that's just naieve. Yes, the web is a medium for transmitting information and makes it easy for the masses to reach the masses, but that doesn't mean that we all have to play nice and share.
You are right that sharing and caching are indeed not required for the web to function, but both were very much a part of it, helped it to grow to what it is now, and were there before people started to try to make money from publishing on the web.
And yes, participating in a shared medium like the WWW does indeed mean you have to play nice and share, else you undermine the medium you are trying to proffit from, and to speak in "RIAA' terminology, that is 'stealing', in this case from those who do support the medium by playing nice.
Your comment just makes me wonder, what do publishers think when arguing that everyone has to play nice with them, but they don't have to play nice with anyone themselves?
This is just a fancy way of saying "tough titties" or "you snooze you lose". Simply put, it's not a very sound argument.
If you publish something to a specific medium where things like sharing, caching and linking are the norm and are things that make that medium work as well as it does in the first place, then you can reasonably expect those things to happen to your publication as well and should not come back and whine about it.
Does that remove your rights under copyright? not as such.
I have heard that in Germany the widespread insurance led to problems at one time with neighbour suing neighbour over trivial matters, rather than seeking a negotiated solution. Don't know if that's still the case.
I have heard the same thing but from what I understand that is no longer a real issue, first of all because the insurance does not automatically cover you sueing someone, it only automatically covers you having to defend yourself, and second, because judges will rule against you or force you to try to negotiate a proper solution, and can become somewhat nasty about you not seriously trying that first.
At any rate, this is indeed an aspect that you have to deal with when such insurance becomes common.
It is not a perfect solution, and something like the small claims court would be a very welcome addition here indeed.
What such insurance does tho is remove the legal inequality between huge rich corporations and private individuals to a very large extend, regardless of what the conflict is about, and my personal experience with that is that it actually works very well for that.
Says who?
It is an inherent consequence of the medium being used. The concepts of sharing, linking and caching were there before anyone ever did anything commercial with the WWW, and only became an issue when people wanted to start making money from publishing on the WWW regardless of those aspects.
By your standard, there is a reasonable expectation that any good software I release will be copied illegally and distributed on P2P, so I have no right to take action against those who do it.
You indeed can have that reasonable expectation depending on how you publish your work (software).
This is one of the reasons why the software industry is nowadays making more and more money from services and money made from direct product sales is becomming less and less important. Adapt or die, its very simple.
THis does not deny you the right to go sue someoen over distributing software illegally that you happen to have published on a CD or set of floppies or tape that was sold to the customer in the clear understanding that they were buying a non exclusive usage right, but it does indeed bar you from doing the same after having published your software freely and publicly on the WWW for example.
The medium and the understanding at initial transfer determine what can be called reasonable expectations in those cases. Regardless of how much you may hate that, those are different for the WWW then for example for a boxed set of floppies or CDs, simply because the nature as well as the history of those media are very different.
Also keep in mind that 'reasonable expectations' here are not determined by what technically feasable, tho they will be influenced by it.
Lets keep in mind that the UK legal system and the one used in a substantial part of continental Europe are far from identical (tho they have certain things in common of course)
Insurance is available for businesses I guess but not many private individuals would have that sort of cover here,
Maybe not in the UK, I would not know that.
In the Netherlands it is pretty common, easily available and as said, not very expensive. It is way more expensive to get similar insurance as a business (I happen to have both, they are seperate products and the business insurance is substantially more then a few euro/year)
What is more, for many people in the Netherlands, it comes for free with union membership (or at least used to).
From what my girlfriend tells me, this is a little bit more expensive in for example Germany, but still pretty easy to come by, and definitely available to private civilians, not just businesses.
I would not know about France, but from what I have read, legal cost usually does not seem to be a major issue in deciding to 'stand and fight' when you have a good case there either.
What is still a major concern in all cases is the amount of time you'll have to invest into it, and from what I have seen, that is in the end what makes people give up a lot more then financial issues.
At any rate, didn't know about the UK, hope that it becomes more common there as well as it helps quite a bit against 'schoolyard bully behavior' from larger organisations to just shrug at a legal thread and mention you can afford fighting it. THe few cases I had to deal with so far myself all resulted in them comming back with a more reasonable proposal to solve an outstanding issue.