If you're not an architect or an engineer, why would you want Autocad at any price? If you are, $700 is peanuts for the tools of the trade.
That's $700 per seat, mind you, and Autodesk is getting in the habit of releasing a new version every year with incremental feature changes and slightly incompatible file formats (we went from 2002 to 2004 and I can't see any difference in features). At least the new versions will still open & save in old file formats going back about three releases, but it does get aggrivating when you get emailed something in a new format. You can almost hear Autodesk whispering, "Psst.. upgrade time!" when it happens.
The disconnect between a cryptographic program processing every one of your emails, and a license clause that says the author of same basically gives himself carte blanche to sniff whatever they damn well please should be enough to put anyone off this thing.
Indeed; look at Judge Wells's discovery ruling in the IBM/SCO case. She even refers to SCO's tantrums as a reason to grant the discovery! ("By requiring this, the court seeks to circumvent future complaints by SCO alleging that IBM failed to provide all CMVC and RCS information.")
Grokster does not allow you to make a copy, it allows you to distribute copies to a theoretically unlimited amount of people.
So does FTP.
So does a web page.
So does NNTP.
So does a mailing list.
That Grokster et al make it easier than the other choices does not change the underlying legal principle (in my non-lawyer opinion). I could fire off an email with an MP3 of a copyrighted song attached to it to everyone in my address book. That's copyright infringement, no question. Why should the maker of my email program be in any way liable for that?
Not to mention the older stuff. I was at a site the last two days where I worked on two older computers running human-machine interface (HMI) software on the plant floor. The first was a Win95 box, and they had a spare in stores also set up with Win95 on it as a drop-in replacement if that one ever dies.
Then the real kicker: the second system I worked on ran an older version of that same HMI software. Under the hood was good old Windows 3.1! Short file names, a hard drive less than 500 MB, only 8 MB RAM IIRC -- I was scared to do anything to it;-). They know it's seriously overdue for replacement, but -- it still runs.
(I.T. doesn't control the plant-floor computers as they aren't on the LAN. The rest of their network looks like it's all XP.)
I can't speak on the Prime Minister, but my cousin is a top aide to the Minister of National Revenue. He (my cousin) carries his Blackberry everywhere he goes, and says that the things are ubiquitous in the upper echelons of the federal government these days.
Accordingly, methinks the federal government is involved in this case as much out of self-interest as about helping out a Canadian tech firm.
They can pass the law, but it will be struck down in the courts once they try to enforce it.
Well -- I've got one reason to be hesitant on this point. The Supreme Court is going to hear the **AA appeal of the Grokster decision later this year. The (9th?) Circuit ruled that Grokster wasn't liable for copyright infringement committed by users of its software, following the Betamax precedent almost to the letter. That the Supreme Court chose to hear the appeal suggests they may be willing to modify Betamax in the internet age. A sobering and not particularly encouraging thought.
.its a bit hard to reverse-engineer something without it being derivative, is it not?
You just keep digging yourself in deeper, you know. Reverse-engineering is a well-established fair use of copyrighted material under copyright law. IBM PC clones came to market in large part due to Compaq (IIRC) reverse-engineering the IBM BIOS and creating their own implementation of the functionality they observed through that process. IBM couldn't touch them, because the functionality wasn't and can't be protected under copyright law, only IBM's implementation (or "expression" to use the term in copyright law) of that functionality.
Reverse-engineering an anti-virus program and describing the functionality thereof is exactly the same thing. Under the law, 100% legal. Under stupid draconian EULAs that the courts are all too likely to uphold (see Blizzard v. bnetd), you're up shit creek, though. Which is different from what the law is.
These sites don't have any repository of any pirate material. They are a repository of LINKS... What the links are, ore are not, is not their responsibility. As is how you use them. In court, the *AA would loose
You forget that MPAA won a similar case against 2600 over DeCSS. 2600 was barred from even linking to DeCSS. By then the genie was long out of the bottle, but the legal precedent is in place.
From January 1st 2005 any recordings made on or prior to December 31 1954 will no longer be protected by UK copyright law. Record companies, artists and performers whose work falls into the public domain will no longer have the right to earn income from their work.
What sort of hack journalist wrote this tripe? Record companies, artists, and performers can still earn income for their work! They will just no longer possess the exclusive right to do so! They may very well earn less income than they used to, but, hey, you had your fifty years to make as much money as you could. If that isn't long enough for you, make something new and get yourself a fresh copyright.
Do you suppose this journalist thinks that nobody earns income from performing Shakespearian plays or Beethoven concerts? Those works aren't copyrighted any more.
How do you plan on tieing the graduating record to the enroling record without a unique number. I guess they could come up with some other number and make the schools track that, but SSN would probobly work just as well.
Are you kidding? I first enrolled in university over 10 years ago (gads, I'm getting old..) and my university already had unique numbers for all students, called - what else? - student ID numbers. I even still remember mine - pretty easy to when you're writing it on every test & assignment for five years. They still use it on my address label for the alumni magazine. If I were to ever ask the university for a copy of my transcript, that's how they'd look me up. I'm sure they could probably attach a note or a field in their database to identify what high school I came from.
The privacy threat from that list of student ID numbers is a hell of a lot smaller than using the SSN.
Considering the raft of stupid patent applications in the system, it is a wonder that only the MS ones get play. Oh, wait, this is/. ! Silly me.
Take the number of MS's application and subtract two, for instance. What do you get?
System and method for generating and providing educational exercises. From the sounds of the legalese, basically a program (sorry, "method":vomit:) that will spit out multiple-choice tests from a bunch of preprogrammed questions and answers. One of the "inventors" is a CS professor at Stanford university.
So it ain't just MS, or even just the big corps, who play this stupid game. The whole system's broken.
I did that once -- 15 minutes later when I picked the phone back up the TM hadn't hung up yet. Figured that was enough so I hung up without another word.
Have you tried using Windows recently? It works like a charm: install, and make sure things like printers are on, and everything is available as soon as you boot up: the internet, the printer, the sound, etc. Whereas on my Linux laptop everytime I install on it I have to spend hours getting my bloody soundcard to work.
It must depend on the hardware you have. My experiences with WinXP Home and Mandrake 9.2 are exactly the opposite of yours, when I did a complete reinstall of everything earlier this year. WinXP did not recognize my sound card (no-name piece of junk, I admit), my printer (HP), or my modem (AOpen -- don't use it any more anyway), and put in crappy drivers for the video card (ATI). Mandrake got the first three all right, and also put in crappy drivers for the video card. Both had some trouble with the ethernet card, too.
What surprised me was how many of the Windows drivers still required reboots. With those added in, I figured I was finished with Mandrake in about 1/3 the time that it took me to finish with Windows.
Say it as much as you want, but you're still wrong. For all practical purposes they are completely different. In one case, a person has been deprived of the possession and use of an object. In the other case, they have not. How you can say that for "all practical purposes" these two are equivalent, I can't understand.
Blame, of course, lies on the "IP" industries for blurring the lines between copyright/trademark/patent and tangible property with the wretched kludge-term "intellectual property", and their whores in government who blow the seriousness of "IP" infringement all out of proportion. But never mind that for now.
I've got a good example that should drive the distinction home. There is a CD-ROM just being released that contains complete scans of the first 500 issues of the Amazing Spider-Man comic book from Marvel. The CD sells for about $50. So if you burn an copy of that CD, infringing the copyright, what's the publisher out? $50 or so. Less if you argue that all the publisher really lost was the profit margin on that $50, as the publisher incurred no costs due to that infringement. Anyway, you broke a law, you caused some financial harm, but really not that much.
Now, walk into a comic shop and steal a copy of Amazing Spider-Man #1. What's the shop out? A book worth over ten thousand dollars in anything over very fine condition. Now you've done some serious financial harm to somebody, and could very well be looking at a charge of grand theft and some significant jail time.
they have been starting to feel (at least compared to what they're used to) a rather nasty profit pinch over the last year or two.
Reality check: operating profit in every profitable Microsoft division was up this quarter over the same quarter last year -- Windows profits were up 6%, Office up 18%. All the money-losing divisions saw their losses decrease, as well.
I read bnetd as being primarily about the enforceability of Blizzard's EULA, which was a resounding win for Blizzard (in part because the defendants stipulated that they had agreed to it, meaning it was an uncontestable fact -- they tied the judge's hands! I can't help but question the quality of their legal representation). DMCA was less of an issue there; Blizzard was just throwing a number of things at bnetd to hope at least one of them would stick (if they couldn't string bnet up on EULA-violation they'd go after them for DMCA-circumvention, or vice-versa). That they got all of them to stick was just wonderfully good fortune for them.
Anyway, it's the EULA-related parts of that ruling that are truly scary (i.e. "You don't buy software, only a license to use."), and need to be overturned if bnetd can stick it out to appeal.
When the copyright board here in Canada was hearing proposals from the industry about seriously ramping up those levies, I actually took the time to write to the Minister of Heritage (at the time, Shiela Copps, that spend-happy windbag) to express my opposition to the increases in specific and the levies in general. I raised the points you did, about making everyone pay into this system even if they have nothing to do with copying music, using my own situation as an engineer needing to make backups of files to CD-R on a regular basis.
I can't say I was surprised by the reply I got back. It hit on every recording industry talking point you can name -- "file-sharing hurting the artists", "fairly compensate recording artists", etc, and didn't even touch the points I had raised. I just chucked it at that point.
Fortunately the board did see some sanity and denied a bunch of the levies the recording industry wanted (like the 0.8cents per MB of flash memory) -- this time, anyway.
True, but his ruling was based on the user's acceptance of the EULA which has terms saying you only bought a license to use.
I know. I can't help but wonder about the quality of bnetd's lawyers here. It doesn't make any sense to my admittedly non-legalthink mind that Blizzard could've won this argument. Consider: I walk into the store, I pick up the game off the shelf, I pay the clerk, transaction completed, I walk out. At this point I have not agreed to any EULA; I haven't even seen it yet, and there's a chance I don't even know there is an EULA, if it isn't on the box and the clerk doesn't tell me. So what did I just buy if not a copy of the software? How did the judge get from that state to "you only bought the license"?
If any other industry tried to get away with a stunt like that, I would think a judge would tell them to get bent, and the attorney general might very well haul them into court for false advertising or somesuch.
I'm sure there's plenty of prior art (although none of these articles actually mentioned the date of the patent itself).
I quickly perused one of the patents (and got completely lost in the legalspeak; how the hell is anyone supposed to know if they're infringing a patent when you can't even understand WTF the patent means?!); it was dated 1993.
And Sun tried to demonstrate prior art; one comment on Groklaw says they introduced 77 boxes full of exhibits of prior art. And they still lost.
What a week. First EULAs are ruled enforceable, and now this. If we all want to be legally safe, we may as well just shut off all our computers at this point, because you can be damn sure that we're all probably infringing some stupid term in a EULA or some vague claim in a patent. All hail the United States legal system!
They don't have to be fair use. They're not infringing. Or at least they weren't -- I think the judge in this case just completely gutted Section 117 of copyright law by saying end-users don't actually own their (copies of the) software. Anyway, the relevant text is this:
(a) Making of Additional Copy or Adaptation by Owner of Copy. -- Notwithstanding the provisions of section 106, it is not an infringement for the owner of a copy of a computer program to make or authorize the making of another copy or adaptation of that computer program provided:
(2) that such new copy or adaptation is for archival purposes only and that all archival copies are destroyed in the event that continued possession of the computer program should cease to be rightful.
(Open question as to whether or not possession of the archival copy remains "rightful" in event of the loss of the original copy, but if it isn't what's the point of declaring the archival copy non-infringing in the first place?)
What we need is a case brought on the grounds "I bought this software.
Part of why this ruling is so devastating, as has been pointed out elsewhere in this discussion by now, is that this judge said, flat-out, that you don't buy software; you buy a license to use software.
He essentially gutted the entirety of Section 117 of copyright law, by taking out the entire underpinning of it. Since nobody actually owns copies of programs any more, by this inept judge's reasoning, nothing in 117 applies the way I see it.
They even made some remixes of old Elvis songs and used the fact that they managed to top some charts to argument that "old" music could still be "fresh" and generate money. This (according to lobbyists) was an argument when lobbying European politicians to prolong the copyright.
Fuck, what a red herring. Stupid politicians will probably buy it, though.
Putting those Elvis recordings in the public domain does not pose any barrier to either activity described. The record company could still put out "Best Of"s or remixes at will and sell them. A remix even earns them a fresh copyright on the new version of the song. What does putting them in the public domain actually do? Lets anyone else do the same thing.
(Record company voice): But.. But.. That would be.. *GASP* COMPETITION! We don't know how to deal with that! Give us more copyrights!
It's a coin flip between them and the lawyers as to who goes up against the wall first...
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That's $700 per seat, mind you, and Autodesk is getting in the habit of releasing a new version every year with incremental feature changes and slightly incompatible file formats (we went from 2002 to 2004 and I can't see any difference in features). At least the new versions will still open & save in old file formats going back about three releases, but it does get aggrivating when you get emailed something in a new format. You can almost hear Autodesk whispering, "Psst.. upgrade time!" when it happens.
The disconnect between a cryptographic program processing every one of your emails, and a license clause that says the author of same basically gives himself carte blanche to sniff whatever they damn well please should be enough to put anyone off this thing.
Indeed; look at Judge Wells's discovery ruling in the IBM/SCO case. She even refers to SCO's tantrums as a reason to grant the discovery! ("By requiring this, the court seeks to circumvent future complaints by SCO alleging that IBM failed to provide all CMVC and RCS information.")
So does FTP.
So does a web page.
So does NNTP.
So does a mailing list.
That Grokster et al make it easier than the other choices does not change the underlying legal principle (in my non-lawyer opinion). I could fire off an email with an MP3 of a copyrighted song attached to it to everyone in my address book. That's copyright infringement, no question. Why should the maker of my email program be in any way liable for that?
Not to mention the older stuff. I was at a site the last two days where I worked on two older computers running human-machine interface (HMI) software on the plant floor. The first was a Win95 box, and they had a spare in stores also set up with Win95 on it as a drop-in replacement if that one ever dies.
Then the real kicker: the second system I worked on ran an older version of that same HMI software. Under the hood was good old Windows 3.1! Short file names, a hard drive less than 500 MB, only 8 MB RAM IIRC -- I was scared to do anything to it ;-). They know it's seriously overdue for replacement, but -- it still runs.
(I.T. doesn't control the plant-floor computers as they aren't on the LAN. The rest of their network looks like it's all XP.)
Accordingly, methinks the federal government is involved in this case as much out of self-interest as about helping out a Canadian tech firm.
Well -- I've got one reason to be hesitant on this point. The Supreme Court is going to hear the **AA appeal of the Grokster decision later this year. The (9th?) Circuit ruled that Grokster wasn't liable for copyright infringement committed by users of its software, following the Betamax precedent almost to the letter. That the Supreme Court chose to hear the appeal suggests they may be willing to modify Betamax in the internet age. A sobering and not particularly encouraging thought.
You're only getting 29.25 fps in Quake 3? Dude, time for a new video card. (Come on, this is /. You had to know somebody would check your math)
You just keep digging yourself in deeper, you know. Reverse-engineering is a well-established fair use of copyrighted material under copyright law. IBM PC clones came to market in large part due to Compaq (IIRC) reverse-engineering the IBM BIOS and creating their own implementation of the functionality they observed through that process. IBM couldn't touch them, because the functionality wasn't and can't be protected under copyright law, only IBM's implementation (or "expression" to use the term in copyright law) of that functionality.
Reverse-engineering an anti-virus program and describing the functionality thereof is exactly the same thing. Under the law, 100% legal. Under stupid draconian EULAs that the courts are all too likely to uphold (see Blizzard v. bnetd), you're up shit creek, though. Which is different from what the law is.
You forget that MPAA won a similar case against 2600 over DeCSS. 2600 was barred from even linking to DeCSS. By then the genie was long out of the bottle, but the legal precedent is in place.
What sort of hack journalist wrote this tripe? Record companies, artists, and performers can still earn income for their work! They will just no longer possess the exclusive right to do so! They may very well earn less income than they used to, but, hey, you had your fifty years to make as much money as you could. If that isn't long enough for you, make something new and get yourself a fresh copyright.
Do you suppose this journalist thinks that nobody earns income from performing Shakespearian plays or Beethoven concerts? Those works aren't copyrighted any more.
Are you kidding? I first enrolled in university over 10 years ago (gads, I'm getting old..) and my university already had unique numbers for all students, called - what else? - student ID numbers. I even still remember mine - pretty easy to when you're writing it on every test & assignment for five years. They still use it on my address label for the alumni magazine. If I were to ever ask the university for a copy of my transcript, that's how they'd look me up. I'm sure they could probably attach a note or a field in their database to identify what high school I came from.
The privacy threat from that list of student ID numbers is a hell of a lot smaller than using the SSN.
Considering the raft of stupid patent applications in the system, it is a wonder that only the MS ones get play. Oh, wait, this is /. ! Silly me.
Take the number of MS's application and subtract two, for instance. What do you get?
System and method for generating and providing educational exercises. From the sounds of the legalese, basically a program (sorry, "method" :vomit:) that will spit out multiple-choice tests from a bunch of preprogrammed questions and answers. One of the "inventors" is a CS professor at Stanford university.
So it ain't just MS, or even just the big corps, who play this stupid game. The whole system's broken.
In other news, daytime sky is blue, film at 11.
I did that once -- 15 minutes later when I picked the phone back up the TM hadn't hung up yet. Figured that was enough so I hung up without another word.
It must depend on the hardware you have. My experiences with WinXP Home and Mandrake 9.2 are exactly the opposite of yours, when I did a complete reinstall of everything earlier this year. WinXP did not recognize my sound card (no-name piece of junk, I admit), my printer (HP), or my modem (AOpen -- don't use it any more anyway), and put in crappy drivers for the video card (ATI). Mandrake got the first three all right, and also put in crappy drivers for the video card. Both had some trouble with the ethernet card, too.
What surprised me was how many of the Windows drivers still required reboots. With those added in, I figured I was finished with Mandrake in about 1/3 the time that it took me to finish with Windows.
Blame, of course, lies on the "IP" industries for blurring the lines between copyright/trademark/patent and tangible property with the wretched kludge-term "intellectual property", and their whores in government who blow the seriousness of "IP" infringement all out of proportion. But never mind that for now.
I've got a good example that should drive the distinction home. There is a CD-ROM just being released that contains complete scans of the first 500 issues of the Amazing Spider-Man comic book from Marvel. The CD sells for about $50. So if you burn an copy of that CD, infringing the copyright, what's the publisher out? $50 or so. Less if you argue that all the publisher really lost was the profit margin on that $50, as the publisher incurred no costs due to that infringement. Anyway, you broke a law, you caused some financial harm, but really not that much.
Now, walk into a comic shop and steal a copy of Amazing Spider-Man #1. What's the shop out? A book worth over ten thousand dollars in anything over very fine condition. Now you've done some serious financial harm to somebody, and could very well be looking at a charge of grand theft and some significant jail time.
Reality check: operating profit in every profitable Microsoft division was up this quarter over the same quarter last year -- Windows profits were up 6%, Office up 18%. All the money-losing divisions saw their losses decrease, as well.
Anyway, it's the EULA-related parts of that ruling that are truly scary (i.e. "You don't buy software, only a license to use."), and need to be overturned if bnetd can stick it out to appeal.
*crickets chirp*
Right.
I can't say I was surprised by the reply I got back. It hit on every recording industry talking point you can name -- "file-sharing hurting the artists", "fairly compensate recording artists", etc, and didn't even touch the points I had raised. I just chucked it at that point.
Fortunately the board did see some sanity and denied a bunch of the levies the recording industry wanted (like the 0.8cents per MB of flash memory) -- this time, anyway.
I know. I can't help but wonder about the quality of bnetd's lawyers here. It doesn't make any sense to my admittedly non-legalthink mind that Blizzard could've won this argument. Consider: I walk into the store, I pick up the game off the shelf, I pay the clerk, transaction completed, I walk out. At this point I have not agreed to any EULA; I haven't even seen it yet, and there's a chance I don't even know there is an EULA, if it isn't on the box and the clerk doesn't tell me. So what did I just buy if not a copy of the software? How did the judge get from that state to "you only bought the license"?
If any other industry tried to get away with a stunt like that, I would think a judge would tell them to get bent, and the attorney general might very well haul them into court for false advertising or somesuch.
I quickly perused one of the patents (and got completely lost in the legalspeak; how the hell is anyone supposed to know if they're infringing a patent when you can't even understand WTF the patent means?!); it was dated 1993.
And Sun tried to demonstrate prior art; one comment on Groklaw says they introduced 77 boxes full of exhibits of prior art. And they still lost.
What a week. First EULAs are ruled enforceable, and now this. If we all want to be legally safe, we may as well just shut off all our computers at this point, because you can be damn sure that we're all probably infringing some stupid term in a EULA or some vague claim in a patent. All hail the United States legal system!
Excuse me while I go vomit.
They don't have to be fair use. They're not infringing. Or at least they weren't -- I think the judge in this case just completely gutted Section 117 of copyright law by saying end-users don't actually own their (copies of the) software. Anyway, the relevant text is this:
(Open question as to whether or not possession of the archival copy remains "rightful" in event of the loss of the original copy, but if it isn't what's the point of declaring the archival copy non-infringing in the first place?)Part of why this ruling is so devastating, as has been pointed out elsewhere in this discussion by now, is that this judge said, flat-out, that you don't buy software; you buy a license to use software.
He essentially gutted the entirety of Section 117 of copyright law, by taking out the entire underpinning of it. Since nobody actually owns copies of programs any more, by this inept judge's reasoning, nothing in 117 applies the way I see it.
Fuck, what a red herring. Stupid politicians will probably buy it, though.
Putting those Elvis recordings in the public domain does not pose any barrier to either activity described. The record company could still put out "Best Of"s or remixes at will and sell them. A remix even earns them a fresh copyright on the new version of the song. What does putting them in the public domain actually do? Lets anyone else do the same thing.
(Record company voice): But.. But.. That would be.. *GASP* COMPETITION! We don't know how to deal with that! Give us more copyrights!
It's a coin flip between them and the lawyers as to who goes up against the wall first...