The actual argument we have been having is this: Is a crime actually occurring with what Google is doing or not? The question of how illegal activity intersects with use of technology, and who is the one at fault for it, is secondary and totally irrelevant if no actual illegal activity is occurring in the first place.
Your bait-and-switch was your attempt to make it sound like it was already an agreed-upon fact that illegal activity has occurred, and it's just an argument over whether it can be prosecuted.
it might well be expected that cases like the Google technologies we are discussing would go the same way.
I agree, assuming illegal activity has actually occurred. The fact that it has not is where your analogy fails.
Nice bait-and-switch. You didn't start talking about the general case until this post. Before that is was the specific case of Dejanews and Google archiving usenet posts and showing them through a publilc web interface. In the general case you are right that there will be changes to the laws to cover cases where computers are used indirectly for crimes. In the specific case where you claim that the usenet archive of google is an example of such a crime, you are still incorrect.
Lesser negligence that doesn't meet the standard of "depraved indifference"
Like, for example, operating a dangerous chemical plant in a situation where the government promised the neighboring area would be free of housing when in fact it was not... may be prosecuted as manslaughter instead
Okay. I already did the first time, but I'll do it again. There. Done. I thought about it a second time. The punishments are still not equal. People's lives are not ruined just because they lose money (and losing a career is the same thing). They are inconvenienced a lot, but not to the same degree as someone who gets killed is.
You just (presumably unknowningly) said that every single patent is an apalling idea, from Patent #1 filed in 1790 all the way up to today. All patents are patents on processes, not patents on the end result of that process (if you make the same widget in a different way than the way that was patented, you have not infringed the patent.)
Your complaint isn't about software patents. It's about ALL patents. Would you agree that, in theory, software patents are not any *worse* than other sorts of patents (assuming the two points I mentioned are adressed)?
If so, then I don't see as big a problem as you since I see valid reasons for patents (to allow the little guy a chance - without them if you invent something, the big boys will crush you by just copying your idea in precise detail and using their marketplace leverage to shove you out of business.) The problem stems entirely from the fact that patents are being allowed to have too wide a scope. Instead of patenting one specific way of implementing something, as the patent system was designed to be used they are patenting vague generic concepts, which is an instance of problem #2 that I mentioned above.
How much does the "person" called a corporation care about its "life", when compared to how much a real person cares about his life? The punishments are not equal.
If I post an article on my site, do you think it is OK for Joe Rip-Off to copy it verbatim onto his own site without permission, just because he attributes the original to me?
If a website worked inherently by making thousands of distributed archive copies all over the place the way usenet did, then yes. But it doesn't, and you know that. For example, Joe is not required by any law to clear his web browser's cache. If he then sells his computer to someone else, guess what - if he didn't delete his cache then he just redistributed your work.
expecting the legal system not to act when a technology is being distributed in the full knowledge that it will lead to large amounts of crime being committed is naive.
True. When that starts happening somewhere other than the imaginary world in which you apparently live, I'll worry about it then.
"There never was any ruling that publicly stated a maximum time that the archive is allowed to keep posts."
It's implicit though. You know your articles might be around for as much as months for some text groups and service providers, but not forever. The point is moot however, since a) NNTP is not meant for archival, Google Groups etc. however are built for that explicit purpose and b) *you* put your article on NNTP, but you didn't on Google, they copy/archive/republish your content without prior consent. Major difference.
1 - The difference between an archive and a cache is undefined. Neither has to last forever (If your usenet posts are no longer visible via Google by your descendants in 300 years, does that mean it was never an archive because it was not permanent?). And, both last for some period of time. There is no point at which it stops being one and starts being the other.
2 - I have posts in the usenet archive from back when dejanews first started. At the time, those posts were intended to be read by text-only readers like TIN or RN. Now they are being read by all sorts of different newsreaders that present them in different formats. Do I get to complain because that's not what I had in mind? Of course not. So why is it any different when it switches from NNTP to HTTP? That is the only discrete difference between what google's usenet archive is doing and what a news server does. Every other difference is a matter of amount, not of type. There existed NNTP servers that did not check for people being logged in being authorized, and were thus just as public as Google is. There existed some NNTP servers that only cache for a few days, some that cache for years. The change of protocol is really the only difference of type that exists here between them and Google.
In fact you establish copyright by publishing.
Yes, and you also establish an implicit permission to copy in a manner consistent with that publishing format (i.e. if the format works by having a paperback publisher duplicate your work on a printing press, then by publishing with them you give them the right to make that duplication, and if you publish in a forum that you know works by making thousands of copies of your work in thousands of buffer files on other servers, that last an unspecified duration, and allow any random individual to retrieve them, then you've given them permission to do just that, which is precisely what Google is doing.)
Software patents are not an inherently bad idea. What makes them bad in practice, and in the way they've been used in our legal system is two things:
1 - Software should NOT be simultaneously closed source and patented. They are two different protection schemes that are incompatable. Patents requires that you make your design and plans public and openly copyable so others can search on the patent archive and see what you're doing (and so that when you right to exclusivity ends, your idea is now in a public registry). In the case of software, that would be the source code, although pseudocode that doesn't actually compile, but merely teaches somoene how to write the software would probably fit the legal requirement (more akin to a blueprint than a cad/cam file)). The practice of allowing people to patent things based on vague fuzzy descriptions of algorithms should never have started.
2 - Patents in general (not just software) should not be allowed for ideas that are already known within the community of inventors (or programmers in this case). The Patent office doesn't bother checking this requirement anymore (or at least if they are attempting to do so they are obviously failing at it). When this isn't done, the owner of an idea ends up being the one with no scruples who decided to usurp ownership of the public idea first, rather than the one that thought of the idea first.
Fix those two problems first, and then you can talk about supporting software patents.
India isn't asking for extradition - individuals WITHIN India are, but the government is not, and you can only extradite someone to a government, not to a collection of concerned citizens staging a protest The protesters are talking to the wrong audience. FIRST they need to convince the Indian government to call for an extradition before they ask the US to comply with such a call that doesn't exist yet.
And they might have a lot of trouble doing that, since the Indian government itself is just as much to blame in the disaster as is Union Carbide was. (Union Carbide got the agreement from the government that the area around the plant would be zoned such that no residences would be allowed to exist in the vacinity. The shanty town where the majority of the deaths occurred was built close to the plant in violation of that agreement.)
Given the current situation in the USA, where corporations have the same rights as people then they should bear the same responsibilities.
Which is a physical impossiblity, which is what is wrong with the legal definition that a corporation is a seperate entity from the people that make it up. It gets all the same rights, but it is physically impossible for it to get the same responsibilities. It can't serve out half its life in a prison. It can't "get the chair". Thus individuals who commit crimes on their own that have these sorts of punishments are taking a much larger risk than individuals who do it through a corporation. It's no surprise then, that corporations tend to push the envelope of laws more than individuals do - for them it's not as risky.
The UN can no longer legally pay rent. It is not possible. That question could have been raised back when it was first formed, but it cannot be raised anymore. It's a done deal now. Why? Because the land it sits on is no longer part of the USA, in precisely the same way that Washington DC isn't part of either Virginia or Maryland anymore. The land was ceeded, and now it's a done deal.
When you neglect security to a point where accidents are bound to happen sooner or later, do you still not think we should hold the responsible accountable?
Of course they should be held accountable - but only for what they actually did, not some made up version of what they did that has been inflated for bullshit political reasons (.i.e. calling it terrorism when it was actually negligent homicide).
The person you responded to didn't say Union Carbide is without blame. All that was said is that the analogy to 9/11 doesn't work because one was a deliberately planned act and the other was not. Just because some entity is in the wrong doesn't mean it is identical to all other incidents in which some entity was in the wrong. It is still useful to point out the differences between criminal situations, otherwise you'd end up with jaywalking, murder, fraud, and theft all being treated with the exact same punishment under the exact same statute, and that would be absurd.
You'd have an easier time getting your hands on the CEO of Union Carbide if you levied charges against him that actually legally apply - there are some, like massive negligence. Murder, however, is not what occured. Uncaring negligence is.
In the US, A "Good Samaritan Law" means, not a law that forces people to help out, but a law that holds them blameless if they do so. These types of laws were passed in reaction to some very nasty lawsuits where the good samaritan got sued afterward because his attempts to help were not well-informed and ended up causing damage. (i.e. giving someone CPR incorrectly and breaking a rib, when it turned out the person's problem required a heimlich maneuver instead of CPR, so the risk of breaking ribs that comes with CPR was unnecessary in the first place.)
Anyway, that kind of Good Samaritan law I agree with, but the kind you talk aobut, to make it *mandatory* that you do a good deed seems to be treading on dangerously thin ethical ice - it's a bit like mandatory tithing.
If it's illegal, then show me the court case to prove it. (There is one pending right now, and I firmly believe the prosecution will lose.)
Until then, I'm not buying it. If you put something up in public where anyone can access it and you INTEND for them to access it, that is implicit permission to have people propigate it. At most you can demand that you be accreddited with it (else it's plagerism), but you can no longer demand that it be kept to yourself. You gave permission by making it public to everybody. And if you didn't put it in a public place like usenet or a no-password, no-login web site, Google would never have seen it to index it.
In the case where someone reposts a private work to a public forum (like the current pending case against google with the porn site), then the one who broke the law is the one who moved it from the private world to the public world, not the one who automatically propigated what was made public.
Posting to Slashdot would be implicit permission for them to reproduce my comments on their discussion forum.
How insightful of you. Now wake up and realize that Usenet is the same way - even more so because the technology ONLY works by publicy distributing your article to archives the world over.
indeed the very purpose of copyright is to preserve your right to control it after you've let some people see it.
True, but in this case, "some people" is "any random person on the internet". That right was already implicitly given by choosing to post to usenet.
I've still got a few saved usenet posts I liked in old folders from back in 1996. Am I violating those author's copyrights by not deleting them? Hardly.
You opted in to google's usenet archive because that's how usenet WORKS. Any usenet post you make is archived by thousands of ISPs the world over, that in turn let their users access it. Why do you think Google doing something more legally wrong than what an ISP is doing? If you think what they are doing should be stopped, then you've just argued for the death of usenet because that's exactly how the technology WORKS.
Usenet *works* by archiving. That's what it does, and always has done. Whenever you connect via NNTP to some newsfeed site, guess what - that's a usenet archive you're connecting to. There never was any ruling that publicly stated a maximum time that the archive is allowed to keep posts. Most delete them after a while to save disk space, but nowhere was that specified as a legal requirement. Therefore, even before dejanews came around, you were ALREADY knowingly releasing your words into a public forum, and allowing thousands of newsfeeds all over the world to archive it.
Posting to Usenet IS giving permision to copy your posts. If it wasn't there would be no usenet.
because they will have to live with whatever position they took for the rest of their life.
Which is a good thing. If someone changes their mind, that's fine, but the honest thing to say is "Yes, I used to think that way but I don't anymore." To say that the record of what was said should be erased is simply historical revisionism carried out on a small scale.
I do not like the fact that modern web forums allow moderators to edit the content of previous posts. It allows the moderator to lie about what someone said, and essentially put words in their mouth. For example, if the moderator finds something offensive, and deletes it an d replaces it with the string "[offensive slur removed]", then the original poster has no recourse and no proof that the comment was not in fact offensive in the slightest, and others reading the post no longer have the ability to form their own opinion on what was said. If something is offensive, at most delete the whole thing, but don't put words in someone's mouth.
Historical revisionism in public posts is a bad, bad, bad idea.
There is an implicit permission for something you post to Usenet to propagate and stay around for a few days. Whether there's an implicit permission for others to archive those posts
Unless you have some hard legal definition for how long "a few days" is supposed to be, you *do* in fact give implicit permission to archive those posts.
Slashdot Mirror
The actual argument we have been having is this: Is a crime actually occurring with what Google is doing or not? The question of how illegal activity intersects with use of technology, and who is the one at fault for it, is secondary and totally irrelevant if no actual illegal activity is occurring in the first place.
Your bait-and-switch was your attempt to make it sound like it was already an agreed-upon fact that illegal activity has occurred, and it's just an argument over whether it can be prosecuted.
it might well be expected that cases like the Google technologies we are discussing would go the same way.
I agree, assuming illegal activity has actually occurred. The fact that it has not is where your analogy fails.
Nice bait-and-switch. You didn't start talking about the general case until this post. Before that is was the specific case of Dejanews and Google archiving usenet posts and showing them through a publilc web interface. In the general case you are right that there will be changes to the laws to cover cases where computers are used indirectly for crimes. In the specific case where you claim that the usenet archive of google is an example of such a crime, you are still incorrect.
Lesser negligence that doesn't meet the standard of "depraved indifference"
Like, for example, operating a dangerous chemical plant in a situation where the government promised the neighboring area would be free of housing when in fact it was not...
may be prosecuted as manslaughter instead
Okay. I already did the first time, but I'll do it again.
There. Done. I thought about it a second time.
The punishments are still not equal.
People's lives are not ruined just because they lose money (and losing a career is the same thing). They are inconvenienced a lot, but not to the same degree as someone who gets killed is.
To patent a process is an appalling idea.
You just (presumably unknowningly) said that every single patent is an apalling idea, from Patent #1 filed in 1790 all the way up to today. All patents are patents on processes, not patents on the end result of that process (if you make the same widget in a different way than the way that was patented, you have not infringed the patent.)
Your complaint isn't about software patents. It's about ALL patents. Would you agree that, in theory, software patents are not any *worse* than other sorts of patents (assuming the two points I mentioned are adressed)?
If so, then I don't see as big a problem as you since I see valid reasons for patents (to allow the little guy a chance - without them if you invent something, the big boys will crush you by just copying your idea in precise detail and using their marketplace leverage to shove you out of business.) The problem stems entirely from the fact that patents are being allowed to have too wide a scope. Instead of patenting one specific way of implementing something, as the patent system was designed to be used they are patenting vague generic concepts, which is an instance of problem #2 that I mentioned above.
How much does the "person" called a corporation care about its "life", when compared to how much a real person cares about his life?
The punishments are not equal.
Depraved indifference that leads to death is, in fact, murder.
No it's not. It's called negligent homicide. Not all homicides are murder. "Murder" refers to the deliberate kind.
If I post an article on my site, do you think it is OK for Joe Rip-Off to copy it verbatim onto his own site without permission, just because he attributes the original to me?
If a website worked inherently by making thousands of distributed archive copies all over the place the way usenet did, then yes. But it doesn't, and you know that. For example, Joe is not required by any law to clear his web browser's cache. If he then sells his computer to someone else, guess what - if he didn't delete his cache then he just redistributed your work.
expecting the legal system not to act when a technology is being distributed in the full knowledge that it will lead to large amounts of crime being committed is naive.
True. When that starts happening somewhere other than the imaginary world in which you apparently live, I'll worry about it then.
1 - The difference between an archive and a cache is undefined. Neither has to last forever (If your usenet posts are no longer visible via Google by your descendants in 300 years, does that mean it was never an archive because it was not permanent?). And, both last for some period of time. There is no point at which it stops being one and starts being the other.
2 - I have posts in the usenet archive from back when dejanews first started. At the time, those posts were intended to be read by text-only readers like TIN or RN. Now they are being read by all sorts of different newsreaders that present them in different formats. Do I get to complain because that's not what I had in mind? Of course not. So why is it any different when it switches from NNTP to HTTP? That is the only discrete difference between what google's usenet archive is doing and what a news server does. Every other difference is a matter of amount, not of type. There existed NNTP servers that did not check for people being logged in being authorized, and were thus just as public as Google is. There existed some NNTP servers that only cache for a few days, some that cache for years. The change of protocol is really the only difference of type that exists here between them and Google.
Yes, and you also establish an implicit permission to copy in a manner consistent with that publishing format (i.e. if the format works by having a paperback publisher duplicate your work on a printing press, then by publishing with them you give them the right to make that duplication, and if you publish in a forum that you know works by making thousands of copies of your work in thousands of buffer files on other servers, that last an unspecified duration, and allow any random individual to retrieve them, then you've given them permission to do just that, which is precisely what Google is doing.)
Software patents are not an inherently bad idea. What makes them bad in practice, and in the way they've been used in our legal system is two things:
1 - Software should NOT be simultaneously closed source and patented. They are two different protection schemes that are incompatable. Patents requires that you make your design and plans public and openly copyable so others can search on the patent archive and see what you're doing (and so that when you right to exclusivity ends, your idea is now in a public registry). In the case of software, that would be the source code, although pseudocode that doesn't actually compile, but merely teaches somoene how to write the software would probably fit the legal requirement (more akin to a blueprint than a cad/cam file)). The practice of allowing people to patent things based on vague fuzzy descriptions of algorithms should never have started.
2 - Patents in general (not just software) should not be allowed for ideas that are already known within the community of inventors (or programmers in this case). The Patent office doesn't bother checking this requirement anymore (or at least if they are attempting to do so they are obviously failing at it). When this isn't done, the owner of an idea ends up being the one with no scruples who decided to usurp ownership of the public idea first, rather than the one that thought of the idea first.
Fix those two problems first, and then you can talk about supporting software patents.
India isn't asking for extradition - individuals WITHIN India are, but the government is not, and you can only extradite someone to a government, not to a collection of concerned citizens staging a protest The protesters are talking to the wrong audience. FIRST they need to convince the Indian government to call for an extradition before they ask the US to comply with such a call that doesn't exist yet.
And they might have a lot of trouble doing that, since the Indian government itself is just as much to blame in the disaster as is Union Carbide was. (Union Carbide got the agreement from the government that the area around the plant would be zoned such that no residences would be allowed to exist in the vacinity. The shanty town where the majority of the deaths occurred was built close to the plant in violation of that agreement.)
Given the current situation in the USA, where corporations have the same rights as people then they should bear the same responsibilities.
Which is a physical impossiblity, which is what is wrong with the legal definition that a corporation is a seperate entity from the people that make it up. It gets all the same rights, but it is physically impossible for it to get the same responsibilities. It can't serve out half its life in a prison. It can't "get the chair". Thus individuals who commit crimes on their own that have these sorts of punishments are taking a much larger risk than individuals who do it through a corporation. It's no surprise then, that corporations tend to push the envelope of laws more than individuals do - for them it's not as risky.
The UN can no longer legally pay rent. It is not possible. That question could have been raised back when it was first formed, but it cannot be raised anymore. It's a done deal now. Why? Because the land it sits on is no longer part of the USA, in precisely the same way that Washington DC isn't part of either Virginia or Maryland anymore. The land was ceeded, and now it's a done deal.
When you neglect security to a point where accidents are bound to happen sooner or later, do you still not think we should hold the responsible accountable?
Of course they should be held accountable - but only for what they actually did, not some made up version of what they did that has been inflated for bullshit political reasons (.i.e. calling it terrorism when it was actually negligent homicide).
The person you responded to didn't say Union Carbide is without blame. All that was said is that the analogy to 9/11 doesn't work because one was a deliberately planned act and the other was not. Just because some entity is in the wrong doesn't mean it is identical to all other incidents in which some entity was in the wrong. It is still useful to point out the differences between criminal situations, otherwise you'd end up with jaywalking, murder, fraud, and theft all being treated with the exact same punishment under the exact same statute, and that would be absurd.
You'd have an easier time getting your hands on the CEO of Union Carbide if you levied charges against him that actually legally apply - there are some, like massive negligence. Murder, however, is not what occured. Uncaring negligence is.
In the US, A "Good Samaritan Law" means, not a law that forces people to help out, but a law that holds them blameless if they do so. These types of laws were passed in reaction to some very nasty lawsuits where the good samaritan got sued afterward because his attempts to help were not well-informed and ended up causing damage. (i.e. giving someone CPR incorrectly and breaking a rib, when it turned out the person's problem required a heimlich maneuver instead of CPR, so the risk of breaking ribs that comes with CPR was unnecessary in the first place.)
Anyway, that kind of Good Samaritan law I agree with, but the kind you talk aobut, to make it *mandatory* that you do a good deed seems to be treading on dangerously thin ethical ice - it's a bit like mandatory tithing.
If it's illegal, then show me the court case to prove it. (There is one pending right now, and I firmly believe the prosecution will lose.)
Until then, I'm not buying it. If you put something up in public where anyone can access it and you INTEND for them to access it, that is implicit permission to have people propigate it. At most you can demand that you be accreddited with it (else it's plagerism), but you can no longer demand that it be kept to yourself. You gave permission by making it public to everybody. And if you didn't put it in a public place like usenet or a no-password, no-login web site, Google would never have seen it to index it.
In the case where someone reposts a private work to a public forum (like the current pending case against google with the porn site), then the one who broke the law is the one who moved it from the private world to the public world, not the one who automatically propigated what was made public.
You have it backward. They kept SORT by date and took away SEARCH by date. That is odd if what they are trying to do is reduce workload.
(The "advanced search options" page is still using the old engine - for now. It hasn't been moved to the new beta system.)
Posting to Slashdot would be implicit permission for them to reproduce my comments on their discussion forum.
How insightful of you. Now wake up and realize that Usenet is the same way - even more so because the technology ONLY works by publicy distributing your article to archives the world over.
indeed the very purpose of copyright is to preserve your right to control it after you've let some people see it.
True, but in this case, "some people" is "any random person on the internet". That right was already implicitly given by choosing to post to usenet.
I've still got a few saved usenet posts I liked in old folders from back in 1996. Am I violating those author's copyrights by not deleting them? Hardly.
You opted in to google's usenet archive because that's how usenet WORKS. Any usenet post you make is archived by thousands of ISPs the world over, that in turn let their users access it. Why do you think Google doing something more legally wrong than what an ISP is doing? If you think what they are doing should be stopped, then you've just argued for the death of usenet because that's exactly how the technology WORKS.
Usenet *works* by archiving. That's what it does, and always has done. Whenever you connect via NNTP to some newsfeed site, guess what - that's a usenet archive you're connecting to. There never was any ruling that publicly stated a maximum time that the archive is allowed to keep posts. Most delete them after a while to save disk space, but nowhere was that specified as a legal requirement. Therefore, even before dejanews came around, you were ALREADY knowingly releasing your words into a public forum, and allowing thousands of newsfeeds all over the world to archive it.
Posting to Usenet IS giving permision to copy your posts. If it wasn't there would be no usenet.
because they will have to live with whatever position they took for the rest of their life.
Which is a good thing. If someone changes their mind, that's fine, but the honest thing to say is "Yes, I used to think that way but I don't anymore." To say that the record of what was said should be erased is simply historical revisionism carried out on a small scale.
I do not like the fact that modern web forums allow moderators to edit the content of previous posts. It allows the moderator to lie about what someone said, and essentially put words in their mouth. For example, if the moderator finds something offensive, and deletes it an d replaces it with the string "[offensive slur removed]", then the original poster has no recourse and no proof that the comment was not in fact offensive in the slightest, and others reading the post no longer have the ability to form their own opinion on what was said. If something is offensive, at most delete the whole thing, but don't put words in someone's mouth.
Historical revisionism in public posts is a bad, bad, bad idea.
There is an implicit permission for something you post to Usenet to propagate and stay around for a few days. Whether there's an implicit permission for others to archive those posts
Unless you have some hard legal definition for how long "a few days" is supposed to be, you *do* in fact give implicit permission to archive those posts.