The irony being, Klein just proposed a provincial budget that is under no definition of the word, "conservative". Double-digit spending increases in various domestic programs, an increase in the amount of oil revenue the province is allowed to spend, no tax break anywhere in sight. I've read a number of editorials in the Edmonton & Calgary papers calling Klein a Liberal over it. In Alberta, that's a pretty harsh insult;).
There are no patches for Firefox. Fixes to security issues are released with new versions.
Well, let's contrast with Internet Explorer on Windows 2000 then: no new versions since version 6 came out, what, four years ago now? And security patches are available only on Microsoft's release schedule, which is once a month.
The bar that Mozilla has to jump over hasn't been set very high.
The way Mandriva handles their torrents makes it pretty well impossible for non-club members (I am one and downloaded the DVD iso last night). Each club user gets a dynamically generated username and IP-specific torrent to link to, which I'm guessing is symlinked back at the server to the real torrent. The real torrent is never exposed to the public. Even if I gave you the link to my torrent, it might not do you any good as I think you'd have to IP-spoof to get at it.
Interesting -- there's good news and bad news in there if you're Canadian. The good news is that Canada seems to be among the countries that have issued the fewest patents to these guys. The bad news is the ones they did issue tend to be the newest; the applications look like they sat in the system for a long, long time before approval. The one for "Process for reducing frequency interlacing during acoustic or optical signal transmission and/or recording" (Canadian patent no. 2,118,915) went unapproved for ten years before being issued! (Application in 1992, issuance in 2002).
Also, given the latest sponsorship scandal (biggest scandal in Canadian politics in the last 10, maybe 20 years) the opposition parties will be looking for publically popular positions to use to 'gang up' on the ruling party.
And the Heritage Minister is tied into that fiasco -- her chief of staff, John Welch, was named in the Brault testimony, and has temporarily stepped down.
I don't think she, or anyone in the Liberal party, is going to have the time of day for anything other than trying to save their thieving, corrupt necks from electoral oblivion for the next six months or so. Copyright reform could very likely get shoved onto a back burner.
There's a lot of small towns near the border, on both sides with businesses have become dependant on the very easy and quick ability for people to pass back and forth across the border without the slightest hassle.
Indeed. I'm reminded of the story of a New Brunswick couple who had their mail stopped for a while. They're Canadian citizens living on Canadian soil, but the only road to their home curves through American territory. One of those sleepy little border communities; they've lived there for over 50 years. In 2003 the American customs agents started "cracking down" on the couple -- in addition to stopping their mail and their newspaper, they also refused permission for any of their family to cross the border to visit them and even threatened to arrest the man for illegally crossing the border. Story #1Story #2.
One can only dread the kind of hassles people like that will go through now.
This is different from Linux packages how, though? RPM doesn't do deltas. DEB doesn't do deltas. Every time there's a patch to one piece of the kernel, you have to download the entire kernel package again. Mandrake 10.1 has gone through at least three full RPM releases of KDE 3.2 for bugfixes -- that's not a fun set of downloads, let me tell you.
The purpose of copyright is to make sure than an author is able to profit from their creation during their life and (their estate) somewhat beyond their life. The only purpose it serves is to reward and protect the creator.
Ye gads, I have to punt the mod points on this one. Where did you get this shit? Certainly not the constitution. Read it. Here's what it says in section 8:
"The Congress shall have Power (...) To 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;"
Ergo, the purpose of copyright is, as written, To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts. Not, as you say, for the author to earn a fast buck. That's only the means to the end. Congress could decide tomorrow (shyeah, right) that the "limited Times" be shortened to a single day and there'd be nothing the authors could do about it (aside from that pesky Berne convention). The authors' estates certainly weren't a consideration in the first copyright laws, which granted copyright for a whopping 14 years.
Hell, you even said that copyright doesn't do a good job at promoting the arts -- so by your own statement and the constitutional wording, copyright, at least in its current form, doesn't work! It's not serving its constitutional purpose! Now that I'm sure many/.'ers would get behind!:)
For the ultimate example of this "tying up inconsistencies" trait, look no further than this season's episode titled Divergence. They actually gave an in-story explanation for the make-up change from TOS Klingons to TNG and later Klingons (something to do with genetic manipulation, I think). By contrast, when DS9 had to deal with it, they just joked about it.
If you're claiming you own the intangible music encoded on that CD or DVD, you're a hypocrite. You just claimed that it can't be owned.
He's not a hyprocrite; he's exactly right. You can't own music. You can't own the words in a book. You can't own a movie. You can own copies of all those things, and/or you can own the copyright on all those things. When I buy a DVD, I own the DVD, and I own the copy of the content on that DVD. What I do not own is the copyright on that content. The ownership of the two is distinct, and an interest in one does not in any way affect an interest in the other. Just read section 202 of US copyright law:
202. Ownership of copyright as distinct from ownership of material object
Ownership of a copyright, or of any of the exclusive rights under a copyright, is distinct from ownership of any material object in which the work is embodied. Transfer of ownership of any material object, including the copy or phonorecord in which the work is first fixed, does not of itself convey any rights in the copyrighted work embodied in the object; nor, in the absence of an agreement, does transfer of ownership of a copyright or of any exclusive rights under a copyright convey property rights in any material object.
So is this when they finally cut off ( and piss off ) all the *millions* of users that still have 98/NT/2000?
To be fair to MS, 98 and NT are already past their mainstream support phases if you look at their support site Linky. However, in the case of 2000, you're dead-on; it's really taken the shaft compared to XP, even though it's still in its mainstream support phase until the end of June. No back-port of any of the XP security changes made for SP2, and of course no back-port for this either. Puts the lie to that "mainstream support" claim, doesn't it?
And those rules, by contrast, are incredibly simple: Pay for what you take, and don't give people copies. But any time somebody like the RIAA or the MPAA try to enforce those rules, you guys go positively batshit over it.
Maybe if the law didn't mandate things like statutory damages in the order of thousands of dollars per infringement people wouldn't be quite so critical of RIAA's tactics? When I can potentially be sued for 20 counts of copyright infringement for sharing 20 songs with a combined retail value of maybe $20 and be potentially on the hook for a minimum of $15,000 and a maximum of $3,000,000 (!) in damages it doesn't take very long for us mere peons to cry, "FOUL!"
So, is this GPL-violator guy asking for/threatening thousands of dollars in damages each time he sends out a letter?
I would think it must be something akin to Windows Indexing Service -- which is always among the first services I kill on any new Windows install, FWIW.
I'm not sure you realize just how deep M$'s pockets really are.
To try and put it in some sort of context, Microsoft has enough cash in the bank that they could buy up all of the outstanding stock of both Ford (market cap approx. $23 billion) and General Motors (market cap approx. $20 billion) and still have an ungodly sum left.
Good catch. It might be a stretch, but it's an argument worth putting before a judge sometime. One snag might be similar to the Canadian example -- would the third-party you authorize to make a copy for you have to have your copy in his possession to make the copy from?
Still doesn't get you anywhere with music, but that that's OT for this thread anyway.
(2) Secondly, what if someone owns a particular movie on DVD but does not have the ability to convert it to avi or mpg format for his computer...he then downloads it from the internet so he can view it on his trips, etc....does he not already own the movie? How can they sue him for downloading it since he already has it, he just needed a different medium of it!!!
Call it distribution or call it a derivative work, it's still covered by copyright law. You can't legally download a copy of a movie offered for distribution by someone other than the copyright holder or an authorized agent thereof. The server/network you're downloading it from either has to be legit or it's copyright infringement. Full stop, the end. (At least under American law; European/Canadian laws may differ -- I do know of the "private copying" exemption under Canadian law but it requires you to possess, though not necessarily own, the legitimate copy and for you to make the copy from it. That chain gets broken with the internet involved, in my non-lawyer opinion.)
Turn the question around -- why doesn't the MPAA offer the ability for you to pop your DVD in your DVD-ROM, read the info off of it, and give you access to a good-quality digital copy of it for download? That would be reasonable and legal -- but of course, unprofitable for the MPAA. They would much rather you go and buy additional/replacement copies from the store.
provided they can prove that their copy is legitimate by answering a series of questions.
What do you mean, "Not quite as bad as it sounds"? Why the fuck should I, or anyone else, have to prove that I'm legit? That ain't how this is supposed to work; if Microsoft thinks I'm guilty of infringing their copyright, they're the ones who are supposed to prove it. Innocent-until-proven-guilty, and all that. My refusal to answer where or when or from who I bought my computer is not evidence of infringement, either; that's simply none of Microsoft's damn business. (I'm making a small jump here in assuming where you bought your system is going to be one of the questions; if MS knows your OEM key was a Dell key, they'll presumably want to hear that you bought it from Dell and not from a dealer that they've already got reports as being "suspicious")
Oh, wait, I forgot -- such arcane legal concepts don't apply when you have $60-odd billion in the bank and are a convicted predatory monopolist. Silly me.
A quick google revealed this article, the original of which this article is an effective dupe (along with a bunch of other slashdot stories about the long-standing axis of evil print cartridges that is Lexmark/HP/Epson.
Yeah, but that article's past its expiry date, dontcha know?;)
Look to the state of Utah for your answer. The state claimed an uninsured drivers rate circa 1999 of anywhere between 18 and 25 percent depending on what source you read. That year, state legislators voted to drop the SSN requirement for a drivers license, effectively opening the door for illegals to get licenses. Now that same figure is less than 10 percent. Utah decided it was more important to let the thousands of immigrants who aren't a security risk to buy car insurance (for which a valid drivers license is required) than to club them all for the sake of "cracking down" on the few who might be legitimate security problems.
Utah dropped the Social Security number requirement in 1999, and asked license applicants to provide an IRS-issued tax identification number. That year, 5,700 licenses were granted to motorists who used the numbers. Most were in the state illegally, said Derek Jensen, spokesman for the Utah Department of Public Safety. By 2002 the number had soared to 14,255. This year officials expect that about 15,000 more licenses will go to drivers with no Social Security numbers.
"When we started an uninsured motorists database in the mid-1990s, we had an 18 percent rate of uninsured motorists in the state. Now, it's down to 6 or 8 percent," Jensen said. "It's really hard to say clearly if those two are related. There is no data."
Yes, correlation != causation, but the correlation does appear very strong. And isn't this exactly the sort of decision a state should be able to make for itself without the heavy hand of Washington coming down on it?
When you pay a restaurant money in exchange Coke, there's an implicit contract, and that imposes a requirement on the restaurant to bring you what you ask for (or agree to settle for). If they bring you a Pepsi, Coke isn't the "victim" here -- you are. The restaurant's wrong-doing is fraud (misrepresentation of goods) or a violation of the implicit contract or something like that. Not trademark infringement.
But Coca-Cola's argument is going to be that I asked for their product by their name and instead the store sold a different product trading on that name. I think it's very much trademark infringement the way you describe it. That's why the instant response of any Pepsi-carrying restaurant when you ask for a Coke is, and must be, "Is Pepsi OK?"
I think it puts Google in a bit of a dicey spot if that's akin to what they've been doing -- selling Pepsi advertising space on search results when a user specifically searches for "Coca-Cola". I'm nowhere near versed enough in trademark law (nor am I a lawyer) to know how that would be handled on this side of the ocean, though.
It's pretty damned obvious that it was bittorrent/irc/etc. and it's being aired on the often-unavailable UPN that killed Enterprise's ratings.
Yeah, the fact that Enterprise was a great cure for insomnia in the first couple of years, and even stooped so low as to feature the Ferengi in a first season episode had nothing to do with it.
I was wondering if there were any other Canadian engineers reading this sub-thread (I am a P.Eng., for the record, electrical, and the improper use of the word does grate on me).
And for all you MCSE's out there, be aware that if you use the term "Engineer" north of the border, the provincial engineering associations can pursue you for breaking the law regulating the practice of engineering and use of the term "Engineer" according to the relevant statutes. In fact, the Canadian Council of Professional Engineers pursued the issue directly with Microsoft in 2001 and got an agreement that Microsoft would advise Canadian MCSE's not to use the term, but MS reversed itself a year later. Quebec's engineering regulatory body then went to court to force the issue, and won a symbolic fine against Microsoft ($1000) for misuse of the term. I can't find anything more recent than that.
Longer report on the ongoing issues w.r.t. software "engineering", authored by Ontario's engineering association, here.
I live in Halifax, N.S. Canada for 10 years. In the 10 years since I've left, there's been record snowfalls for 3 years... so much I never would have imagined.
You don't know the half of it. We've had three blizzards in the last seven days. The winds are still howling outside right now.
Days like this I wouldn't mind a little of that global warming;).
The relatively warm period (compared to a full glacial period, anyway) we've experienced over the past 10-15,000 years is only an interglacial period of the current Ice Age.
Pick your link (Umm, except that one about the Genesis flood...)
Slashdot Mirror
The irony being, Klein just proposed a provincial budget that is under no definition of the word, "conservative". Double-digit spending increases in various domestic programs, an increase in the amount of oil revenue the province is allowed to spend, no tax break anywhere in sight. I've read a number of editorials in the Edmonton & Calgary papers calling Klein a Liberal over it. In Alberta, that's a pretty harsh insult ;).
Well, let's contrast with Internet Explorer on Windows 2000 then: no new versions since version 6 came out, what, four years ago now? And security patches are available only on Microsoft's release schedule, which is once a month.
The bar that Mozilla has to jump over hasn't been set very high.
The way Mandriva handles their torrents makes it pretty well impossible for non-club members (I am one and downloaded the DVD iso last night). Each club user gets a dynamically generated username and IP-specific torrent to link to, which I'm guessing is symlinked back at the server to the real torrent. The real torrent is never exposed to the public. Even if I gave you the link to my torrent, it might not do you any good as I think you'd have to IP-spoof to get at it.
Just wait a month.
Interesting -- there's good news and bad news in there if you're Canadian. The good news is that Canada seems to be among the countries that have issued the fewest patents to these guys. The bad news is the ones they did issue tend to be the newest; the applications look like they sat in the system for a long, long time before approval. The one for "Process for reducing frequency interlacing during acoustic or optical signal transmission and/or recording" (Canadian patent no. 2,118,915) went unapproved for ten years before being issued! (Application in 1992, issuance in 2002).
And the Heritage Minister is tied into that fiasco -- her chief of staff, John Welch, was named in the Brault testimony, and has temporarily stepped down.
I don't think she, or anyone in the Liberal party, is going to have the time of day for anything other than trying to save their thieving, corrupt necks from electoral oblivion for the next six months or so. Copyright reform could very likely get shoved onto a back burner.
Indeed. I'm reminded of the story of a New Brunswick couple who had their mail stopped for a while. They're Canadian citizens living on Canadian soil, but the only road to their home curves through American territory. One of those sleepy little border communities; they've lived there for over 50 years. In 2003 the American customs agents started "cracking down" on the couple -- in addition to stopping their mail and their newspaper, they also refused permission for any of their family to cross the border to visit them and even threatened to arrest the man for illegally crossing the border. Story #1 Story #2.
One can only dread the kind of hassles people like that will go through now.
This is different from Linux packages how, though? RPM doesn't do deltas. DEB doesn't do deltas. Every time there's a patch to one piece of the kernel, you have to download the entire kernel package again. Mandrake 10.1 has gone through at least three full RPM releases of KDE 3.2 for bugfixes -- that's not a fun set of downloads, let me tell you.
It's a valid criticism for everyone, not just MS.
Ye gads, I have to punt the mod points on this one. Where did you get this shit? Certainly not the constitution. Read it. Here's what it says in section 8:
"The Congress shall have Power (...) To 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;"
Ergo, the purpose of copyright is, as written, To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts. Not, as you say, for the author to earn a fast buck. That's only the means to the end. Congress could decide tomorrow (shyeah, right) that the "limited Times" be shortened to a single day and there'd be nothing the authors could do about it (aside from that pesky Berne convention). The authors' estates certainly weren't a consideration in the first copyright laws, which granted copyright for a whopping 14 years.
Hell, you even said that copyright doesn't do a good job at promoting the arts -- so by your own statement and the constitutional wording, copyright, at least in its current form, doesn't work! It's not serving its constitutional purpose! Now that I'm sure many /.'ers would get behind! :)
For the ultimate example of this "tying up inconsistencies" trait, look no further than this season's episode titled Divergence. They actually gave an in-story explanation for the make-up change from TOS Klingons to TNG and later Klingons (something to do with genetic manipulation, I think). By contrast, when DS9 had to deal with it, they just joked about it.
He's not a hyprocrite; he's exactly right. You can't own music. You can't own the words in a book. You can't own a movie. You can own copies of all those things, and/or you can own the copyright on all those things. When I buy a DVD, I own the DVD, and I own the copy of the content on that DVD. What I do not own is the copyright on that content. The ownership of the two is distinct, and an interest in one does not in any way affect an interest in the other. Just read section 202 of US copyright law:
To be fair to MS, 98 and NT are already past their mainstream support phases if you look at their support site Linky. However, in the case of 2000, you're dead-on; it's really taken the shaft compared to XP, even though it's still in its mainstream support phase until the end of June. No back-port of any of the XP security changes made for SP2, and of course no back-port for this either. Puts the lie to that "mainstream support" claim, doesn't it?
Maybe if the law didn't mandate things like statutory damages in the order of thousands of dollars per infringement people wouldn't be quite so critical of RIAA's tactics? When I can potentially be sued for 20 counts of copyright infringement for sharing 20 songs with a combined retail value of maybe $20 and be potentially on the hook for a minimum of $15,000 and a maximum of $3,000,000 (!) in damages it doesn't take very long for us mere peons to cry, "FOUL!"
So, is this GPL-violator guy asking for/threatening thousands of dollars in damages each time he sends out a letter?
I would think it must be something akin to Windows Indexing Service -- which is always among the first services I kill on any new Windows install, FWIW.
Still doesn't get you anywhere with music, but that that's OT for this thread anyway.
Call it distribution or call it a derivative work, it's still covered by copyright law. You can't legally download a copy of a movie offered for distribution by someone other than the copyright holder or an authorized agent thereof. The server/network you're downloading it from either has to be legit or it's copyright infringement. Full stop, the end. (At least under American law; European/Canadian laws may differ -- I do know of the "private copying" exemption under Canadian law but it requires you to possess, though not necessarily own, the legitimate copy and for you to make the copy from it. That chain gets broken with the internet involved, in my non-lawyer opinion.)
Turn the question around -- why doesn't the MPAA offer the ability for you to pop your DVD in your DVD-ROM, read the info off of it, and give you access to a good-quality digital copy of it for download? That would be reasonable and legal -- but of course, unprofitable for the MPAA. They would much rather you go and buy additional/replacement copies from the store.
What do you mean, "Not quite as bad as it sounds"? Why the fuck should I, or anyone else, have to prove that I'm legit? That ain't how this is supposed to work; if Microsoft thinks I'm guilty of infringing their copyright, they're the ones who are supposed to prove it. Innocent-until-proven-guilty, and all that. My refusal to answer where or when or from who I bought my computer is not evidence of infringement, either; that's simply none of Microsoft's damn business. (I'm making a small jump here in assuming where you bought your system is going to be one of the questions; if MS knows your OEM key was a Dell key, they'll presumably want to hear that you bought it from Dell and not from a dealer that they've already got reports as being "suspicious")
Oh, wait, I forgot -- such arcane legal concepts don't apply when you have $60-odd billion in the bank and are a convicted predatory monopolist. Silly me.
Yeah, but that article's past its expiry date, dontcha know? ;)
Link
Yes, correlation != causation, but the correlation does appear very strong. And isn't this exactly the sort of decision a state should be able to make for itself without the heavy hand of Washington coming down on it?
I think it puts Google in a bit of a dicey spot if that's akin to what they've been doing -- selling Pepsi advertising space on search results when a user specifically searches for "Coca-Cola". I'm nowhere near versed enough in trademark law (nor am I a lawyer) to know how that would be handled on this side of the ocean, though.
Go to a restaurant that only sells Coke and ask for a Pepsi (or vice versa). Listen to the answer you get. There's a reason for it.
Yeah, the fact that Enterprise was a great cure for insomnia in the first couple of years, and even stooped so low as to feature the Ferengi in a first season episode had nothing to do with it.
And for all you MCSE's out there, be aware that if you use the term "Engineer" north of the border, the provincial engineering associations can pursue you for breaking the law regulating the practice of engineering and use of the term "Engineer" according to the relevant statutes. In fact, the Canadian Council of Professional Engineers pursued the issue directly with Microsoft in 2001 and got an agreement that Microsoft would advise Canadian MCSE's not to use the term, but MS reversed itself a year later. Quebec's engineering regulatory body then went to court to force the issue, and won a symbolic fine against Microsoft ($1000) for misuse of the term. I can't find anything more recent than that.
Longer report on the ongoing issues w.r.t. software "engineering", authored by Ontario's engineering association, here.
You don't know the half of it. We've had three blizzards in the last seven days. The winds are still howling outside right now.
Days like this I wouldn't mind a little of that global warming ;).
Pick your link (Umm, except that one about the Genesis flood...)