Most computer/IT corporations are pro software patents because they are in the same situation as Microsoft. They want to be able to lock small competition (= not so powerful, but more agile and innovative companies) out of their markets. Siemens is a major proponent and has recently struck an extensive cross-licensing deal with Microsoft. The big ones, though in competition with each other, just cross-license, they have huge legal departments, and don't need to worry. It's the small companies that suffer because in the world of software it is practically impossible to avoid unintentionally infringing on at least one patent, but more realistic figures go into the dozens. This means if you have an innovative product or service that threatens a big competitor - or just looks tasty to them, then that corporation can just pull a handful of patents from their drawer and start "negotiating". A typical outcome is that you sell them your company/product for a $100 credit note at your favorite department store (I'm exaggerating slightly, but you should get the idea) and you're glad that they didn't sue your ass off. Repeat from start. The next corporation is standing in line to get a nice discount on your innovations.
Helix is GPL'ed, so anyone can fork it at will. How long will it take until there are inofficial patched "DVD-Helix" versions for free download in source and binaries? Can't be such a long time. Although e.g. Linux distributors will of course stick to the official versions out of legal and maybe business-political considerations.
AFAIK, the only relevant tech here is WMV, which is merely an implementation of the MPEG-4 standard, and as such cannot be patented or otherwise encumbered.
Nope, WMV is not MPEG-4-compatible, though there are similarities. I've heard claims (though only gossip) that WMA is very similar to Ogg Vorbis, and that's why Microsoft could put a superior MP3 competitor together in that short amount of time, but I'll leave this to the conspiracy theorists. In case it's true, it would have been immoral to the bone to take this free-as-in-speech audio codec and transform it into a closed-source proprietary format, but due to the liberal licensing of Ogg Vorbis it would probably have been legal.
Society strives to create an environment whereby you will be better off by putting energies into playing the game and getting ahead.
But when did this ever work satisfyingly? How much can a society do when the ruling caste has the power to shape the laws almost arbitrarily to their favor?
As the process continues, those who are doing well will make laws to allow them to continue to do well, thus further fostering the environment.
No, thus further fostering themselves. These laws, created by special interest groups, tend to benefit those who want to take the corruption game further. This does not necessarily mean that their average reproductive success would be enhanced because people are by no means (in the Darwinian sense) perfectly adapted to modern living conditions. We're still somewhat optimized for stone age societies, though with a completely different set of memes. How many politicians or CEOs do you know that do not have a single child? How many store clerks that have 3 or more? In evolutionary terms (wrt to maximizing your reproductive success), it's rather pointless to take baths in champagne or, as a woman, to have your breasts filled with a sticky substance that may seriously get in the way of your job of breast-feeding your offspring (in case you have any). There's no equivalent to mother's milk in terms of survival chances and developmental benefits.
There simply is no evidence that social success and reproductive success are closely related, nor is it obvious that they should in today's class societies. The theory of evolution describes an undirected, thoughtless, myopic and chaotic natural process that causes lifeforms - in the long term - to adapt to their environment. In no way is this a "good thing", since ethics are based on the subjective judgement of men. Nature isn't good or bad, it just is. What you describe isn't any more good or bad than the fact that rain falls downwards or that the Earth revolves around the sun.
Btw, social status, professional success and even high intelligence in your usual job by no means guarantee that you will not star the Darwin Awards. I know of another rather (in-)famous German lawyer who's barely able to get the grammar right when writing a moderately long sentence, and certainly not without making at least two severe spelling mistakes. It's no problem for him though because most certainly his secretary does all the paperwork, and he's definitely earning a lot of money. There's nothing inherently good about that. He knows how to play the game, and he does, but there's no evidence that this helps society, even though the laws usually are meant to help society (there's no indication that most of them regularily do, and all have exceptions).
This turns into a class system and accelerates until revolution and then socialism.
First, every society has different classes. Even men and women are two seperate classes in most societies, in one way or the other. Classes are not necessarily strictly separated. Second, "prevent their competitors"... competitors in which respect? If I skew the competition for social status in my favor, I have to fear less and less competition. But does this prevent my competitors, or just change the kind of competition? You don't tell. What should people compete for, anyway? What kind of competition helps society, what kind of competition hurts it? And as for point three, I mostly agree. I would say revolution is the outcome of skewing competition in a way that grossly defrauds the masses. This process starts from day one when you give the ruling caste(s) too much power in setting national policies, and it gets worse over time, until eventually it may be so obvious a
But on the other hand, employees have to pay income tax on their stock options while the employer may deduct their value from its profit as expenses. Why not force companies to label the same (hypothesized, I agree) sum as expenses in their business reports? I mean, they have them taxed as expenses as well, for tax breaks. Does it make sense to allow a company to make use of the benefits (tax reduction) while at the same time pretending to their stock holders that these options are essentially free and do not affect profit in the least?
And then, isn't the argument that stock options may turn out cheaper than anticipated an admission that the stock value may develop worse than expected? In any case, things should be consistent. SO expenses should be taxed and reported to stockholders at the same time. Whether the optimal time to do this is when granting the stock options, or only later when they are realized, is certainly debatable. But the situation where a company may get immediate tax breaks without reporting SO expenses to stock holders is IMHO questionable - that sounds like an undue free lunch.
not all bulk mail is spam. spam assassin gives 2.4 points if it finds anything that looks like a unique identifier for X-Sender, and another 1.4 points for anything that looks like a tracking image or tracked link.
that plus the points for any non-safe html colors or any html at all, SA effectively tags ANY bulk mail as spam!
I don't agree with all of its default settings either, but then, it's simple to adjust the scores in any way you like.
By definition, no competition can apply in this circumstance. Copyright is a legally sanctioned monopoly. There's no way to make "P2P" legal unless you abolish copyright law entirely.
Since P2P was legal in Germany, this sounds rather weird.
Property includes both tangible and intangible assets, whether you like this fact or not.
Property was invented because some things are scarce. But others aren't and that's why they weren't handled in the same manner as property. Copyright is centuries old, whereas the term "intellectual property" originates from the second half of the 1900s. But then, what am I talking to you? Pearls before the swine.
Property includes both tangible and intangible assets
Yes, that's why I'm talking scare/not scarce, not tangible/intangible. By definition, all tangible things are naturally scarce, but intangible things are either:
Not scarce. Example: basic memes, works in the public domain, open source software (not in all aspects) etc.
Artificially scarce, e.g. money, copyrighted works, patent implementations. All of these have to be well justified. Scarceness of money is certainly well-justified (required to keep inflation under control), the same goes for copyright and patent law in general, but IMO not in all aspects. It is those insufficiently justified aspects of scarcity which I oppose.
Locke specifically considered and rejected the economic theory of property.
I'll take a look at that, thx, sounds interesting.
But have you ever looked at the box a DVD comes in? Or, for that matter, watched it? There's a message right there that says, in essence, that unauthorized reproduction or distribution is prohibited.
A message on a box doesn't make for a valid contract, and it never did. An attempt to enforce it would result in the judge laughing you out of the courtroom. The message at the beginning does not and cannot initiate a contract either and it's just a legal reminder (which is not necessarily correct, depending on what specifically it says) that certain usages are prohibited by copyright.
You know, you could have made your position much more tenable simply by saying "There should not be" instead of "There is no."
Oh my, WIPO (founded in 1974) took some pre-existing concepts (copyright, patents, trademark, trade secrets) and re-branded them "intellectual property", and now you think that the whole purpose behind them was IP. That's nonsense - they just call something different "intellectual property". It's like renaming Dolly the Sheep "Dolly the Buffalo". There was no such thing. Just because you would start calling your president "Santa Claus" doesn't mean that Santa Claus actually exists.
It was never legal.
US maybe. It was legal in Germany (German page, the author IAL as in IANAL).
I think you might have something useful to say someday.
As I said, I'm still learning, and I definitely learned something from this discussion, which is probably surprising after the insults.;)
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The courts have found (twice, I think, but don't quote me on that point) that Macrovision is not an effective access control mechanism, and therefore is not covered by the relevant parts of Title 17.
Again, no references. Learn to use Google, pal.
That's not the case. Go read the statue. There is a clear definition in there for "access control mechanism."
Yes, and it does not require the technology to be waterproof, just like I said:
a technological measure ''effectively controls access to a work'' if the measure, in the ordinary course of its operation, requires the application of information, or a process or a treatment, with the authority of the copyright owner, to gain access to the work.
Because I do not like the idea of individual citizens deciding for themselves which laws they'll obey and which they won't.
Granted, but I did not say that I break the law or encourage anyone else to do it. Still, I hold that it's a bad law all in all, and should be repealed.
To call them "rights" implies that they have some basis in natural law, which you seem to believe is true but actually is not.
And for very good reasons, reasons which you refuse to acknowledge.
No, for completely bogus reasons since all those copy-protected songs are found to the dozen in any file sharing network of your preference and since professional plagiarists have no problem at all circumventing those measures. The only one who's really restricted in his possibilities is the law-abiding customer.
Because you are free to make other kinds of copies, fair use doesn't even come into it.
You mean there are still legal ways to do it, although they are working hard on banning those, too. Ever heard of TCPA? They hope to base unbreakable DRM schemes on it. There goes your fair use, and this does affect your freedom of speech dramatically. Just imagine that a rights holder or law enforcement agency could "undo" a song which is somehow found to be politically dangerous, simply by revoking everyone's right to make use of it (of course, people would get their money back...). Sure, they need to make all copying of copyrighted music impossible for this to be effective, but that's exactly what some of the corporations are up to. The most difficult part for now is to close the "analog hole" and particularily the transportation of audio and video signals through air in the form of visual light rsp. sound waves. They're working on watermark recognition software to prevent this form of copying, and as soon as this works reliably, the next phase of what NET Act started and DMCA continued will be to prohibit manufacture and sale of devices that do not obey this type of "access control mechanism". It's a technical problem now, not one of legal implementation, which will most definitely go almost unopposed because hardly anybody of influence in the US seems to care. Your repress^Hentatives certainly don't. And hell, it's for the artists. And even the children. Who wouldn't agree that it's worthwhile to protect the artists, and the children? Your problem is exactly that the plot is too 1984esque to acknowledge, because you still think the US was the land of the free. I'm not trying to imply that this will turn the USA into a sort of Oceania, but still, civil rights will suffer a lot just to give rights holders (i.e. not artists, but corporations) more control, more profit, and less competition. It's something worth to be fought.
They are, in fact, illegal, aren't they?
Learn to read, fool. That's exactly what I complained about.
<irony> It doesn't matter if it's child abuse or not. Everything crime may be called child abuse.</irony>
It's still a CRIME.
Um, now, they're just making it a crime. It's not a crime yet.
Arguing that copyright piracy isn't stealing is right up there with arguing that America isn't a democracy because it's a republic. The two things are not mutually exclusive.
Actually, it's the other way round, the MPAA and RIAA claim that all copyright infringement is the same as theft, because all the people who infringe on it would have bought everything they copied illegaly. This is bullshit.
In the legal field they have terms for several things : theft, burglary, larceny, embezzlment, extortion, piracy. They all describe the same basic thing, taking something from someone else that isn't yours.
Nope. Burglary means breaking into somebody's house. When you do that, and then commit a murder, you're guilty of 2 crimes, but none of them was an act of stealing. The same goes for piracy. That most acts of burglary/piracy are committed in coincidence with acts of stealing is irrelevant.
But the point you're completely missing is that theft is not about taking something that belongs to another, but taking something AWAY from another. The crucial point is that thereafter, the owner doesn't have it any more. Otherwise, there would be no reason to prohibit this in the first.
The congress and law makers have just chosen to call them different things and proscribe differing sanctions for them.
The very reason why the law makers chose to give them different names is that they are not the same as stealing. Get this in your thick head, or don't. Everytime the MPAA or RIAA talk about "intellectual property", they are lying, simple as that. And stop whining how this is (going to be) a crime anyway. If I go over to your house and shoot you in the head, it's a horrible crime (murder), but it's not "theft of life essence". Only a madman would claim that since I am "taking your life" although I have no right to do so, it ought to be called stealing. And actually, this argument would make more sense than yours, since I would be taking your life away.
And just before the likes of you start bitching again about how these evil persons who point out the MPAA/RIAA/WIPO/IFPI/whatever lies would belittle copyright infringement: I have no problem at all with this law, since I don't think this kind of activity should be covered by fair use. It's just stupid to call it theft, because it isn't.
Here's how I see it: you really, really want the latest Britney Spears single,
Uhm, not really, I'm more into gothic and industrial rock/metal, and I don't crave for superficial and utterly uninteresting teenage bi^W girls who know how to jump when the choreographer tells them to. Instead, for example, Funker Vogt, Diva Destruction, Lacuna Coil, Nightwish are bands that I learned about using P2P or (mostly) on mp3.com, and of which I bought CDs later (one each from every band but Nightwish, of which I bought 4 or 5, would have to count 'em). Didn't hear about one of these on mainstream promotion channels (LC and NW have had guest appearances on those channels later, but that's all).
but you don't want to shell out your hard-earned milk money for it.
I heard the music and I liked it, so I bought it. Sorry to disappoint you.
So you fell in love with the idea of ubiquitous digital piracy back in the bad old days of the 1990's when it was unregulated and unopposed.
Actually, I first used P2P in like 1999, and didn't make much use of it until early last year.
When the people who sell Britney's music took a look around and realized that they were getting robbed blind,
Sure, the people that produced BS (<- nice ambivalent abbreviation, eh?) were mad about the fact that I didn't pay them to make more of this crap.
they pointed out this fact to lawmakers, and lawmakers rightly leapt into action to protect natural property rights, rights which with which we are endowed by our creator and which teenagers like yourself were stomping all over.
Funny that you talk about God-given copyright in the context of Britney Spears. Do you think she actually has any copyright over the songs she wro, oh no, wait, performed? I would like to believe you, but X-files is way more credible than that.
That's my theory.
Actually, that's called a hypothesis, and I think I proved you dead wrong.
I think there might be one or two of the standard radical leftist pseudo-intellectual insults that you haven't rolled out yet. Wouldn't want to leave any out, would you?
It's just that you seem to enjoy having your rights shorn off one by one. Baa baaaa.
Sure, whatever. You won't have any trouble finding people who think that property rights don't exist and that they're just a fiction of the bourgeoisie constructed over centuries to maintain control over the masses.
Oh, wow, now you portrait me as a communist. The main reason why I'm pro P2P is that it promotes competition in a market-place tightly controlled using pay for play on limited airwaves by an oligopoly found guilty of price fixing. Have you seen KoRn's "Fuck that" video yet? There are 5 big companies, soon to be only 4, which are abusive towards both their customers and their artists and rip both of them off, and the only reason why they get through with it is that they're in control over promotion (they are now moving to shut down internet radio by making royalties unaffordable!). Is that healthy competition, a free market-place? Doesn't look like it to me.
But back to your question: Private property is a-ok, why do you ask? But property in the traditional sense is either something material (e.g. a TV set, or a house, or a pack of razorblades), or to something immaterial that shall not be copied by anyone but a governmental agency, and the scarceness of which is benefitial (if it's not too scarce, but that's another issue). Money would be a fine example. It is often traded in material form, but in principle it's immaterial anyway - a right, if you want so.
But then, there are immaterial items that can legally be reproduced at will by the owner and the scarceness of which principally has a detrimental, not a beneficial effect on the lives o
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Yes. But they do not obliterate it. You can still exercise your "fair use rights" (ugh) without circumventing digital access controls to make perfect copies.
Not with macrovision in place, unless, let's say, you would use a camcorder. Oh wait, that's probably going to be outlawed, too.
Is it also below your dignity to understand what you read? There is no analog process or system yet known that can effectively control access to a work. That entire portion of the statute refers only to circumventing access control measures, which can only apply in a digital context.
Macrovision is now mandatory (because of the DMCA) in the US for DVD players and VCRs, and I think even PC video cards if they have a TV out. This makes it kind of hard to copy even parts of a video, so yes, these measures are effective. No less effective than CSS anyway - the law does not require them to be waterproof in any manner - if you circumvent them, you're in violation of copyright.
Ah, yes. I knew something was out of place. The fucking idiot hadn't accused me of being a fascist Nazi yet. Now I feel much better.
Oh well, if I didn't even know the historical difference between East Germany and the Third Reich, I'd be careful not to call others fucking idiots.
Of course there are circumstances where it's necessary to oppose an unjust law.
You said if it's illegal, it's always illegitimate, and I pointed out that there should be exceptions. It seems you finally got it.
This is nothing more or less than a case where you want to do something that you have ABSOLUTELY NO right to do, and it's pissing you off.
I have no right to make fair use of e.g. the music I bought? Oh well, go figure.
Then what are you complaining about? How can it be illegal if fine licensed products exist to do it?
I'll just assume that you only pretend to be obtuse, and that you actually know full well that I didn't claim these to have a DVD-CCA license. You know, I'm an incorrectible optimist.
That's your problem. It's not a legal problem. If you're unwilling to accept the terms that DVD-CCA offers, then you cannot use their technology. Period.
Right, if I'm unwilling to accept their copyright, oh, one moment. They never claimed copyright over e.g. libdvdcss. Ok, so if I'm unwilling to accept their patents, no, wait, they do not hold CSS patents. One last try: If I'm unwilling to accept their "DMCA anti-circumvention IP thingy license" (it's not my fault that noone's named the baby yet!) then it's illegal for me to use it. Ok, that makes sense, and I'll comply with that. But I think it's legitimate for me to oppose this law, and it's introduction of "DMCAACIPT licenses" even if content industry fanboys like you say that in a democracy, laws should never be criticized.
"Without any public debate?" We have a Senate and a House of Representatives, you know. They're on TV and everything.
That's a publicized debate, not a public one. A public debate, in my eyes, is one that involves the public as an active party.
The United States of America, incidentally, is not a democracy. Never was. It's a republic. Do you know the difference?
The difference between apples and the color green? Sure I do. There are green apples, but also red apples, and green things that aren't apples, and things that are neither green nor apples (ok, that was a bit exhaustive, I guess). The US is a federal republic which happens to have elements of representative democracy. Not that federal law would require states to offer democratic elections to their citizens, but de facto, all of them do.
Tthere have been and still are lots of undemocratic republics, and technically, Great Britain is still a monarchy that just smacks like a representative democracy.
Does anyone know if you can make a bulleted list within PlanMaker without too much trouble? Yes, I know that this feature doesn't make much sense, but it's one of the major factors preventing my father from switching to Linux and from regularly using open-source office software. My dad gave up on Open Office in short order.
PlanMaker is not open source. There's no bulleted list feature in OOo Calc, but you can manually begin each line with a bullet symbol, e.g. Unicode 2022 (Insert -> Special Character). You can speed this up if you want to insert many points by concatenating text from a hidden column, e.g. by inserting =IF(A1 <> ""; CONCATENATE("* "; A1); ""), where * is your bullet symbol, into cells B1 downwards. You can then just type text into A1 downwards and later hide the column. An ordered list would look somewhat like =IF(A1 <> ""; CONCATENATE(ROW(A1); ". "; A1); "").
Actually, the fair use clause doesn't even guarantee the right to make analog copies.
Yes, it does. It says that making copies for such-n-such purposes is not infringement. Therefore copyright laws do not apply to those sorts of copies. Therefore the right to make those sorts of copies is not abridged by law.
It's a matter of interpretation whether e.g. a full, high-quality analog copy of a music CD is covered by the fair use guidelines. The courts decide. Until now, they've decided (I assume) that it is fair use if done for personal, non-profit purposes. But the law doesn't precisely force them to come to this conclusion.
Your tin-foil hat is on too tight. Or possibly you're just a dumbass.
I hate to brag about my IQ, but 159 is definitely more than that of the average dumbass. And as for the tin-foil hat meme of yours, I'm not suggesting that they are the Illuminati or responsible for alien abductions. But they're perfectly willing and determined to drastically cut down on fair use rights, in order to strengthen their power (and thus oligopoly position) and for profit.
Spoken like a true guy-who-doesn't-understand-basic-property-rights.
Intellectual property is a lie since the analogy is terminally flawed. See the Wikipedia link I posted. If you really need a catch-it-all phrase for copyright, patents, trademarks and trade secrets, call them immaterial monopoly rights, or some other term that makes sense, but isn't actually as sexy for propagandist purposes.
Copyright law exists for one purpose and one purpose only: to protect those rights that people already have. As long as those rights aren't being sufficiently protected by law, there will be more and better laws.
US copyright is (originally) based on section 8, clause 8 of the US constitution, which reads "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". You'll also note that the original constitution does not mention private property at all and especially not "intellectual property".
But these objections are still lightyears away from the greatest irony in your statement. The irony is that US musicians in 90%+ of cases no longer have any rights to their own works, because the record labels impose "work for hire" clauses on them. Should corporations which make profit by selling pieces of art have inborn rights over those works that the very creators do not? Why don't you:
Make a list of your 10 favorite artists that have released a CD lately.
Go to their websites and contact them via E-Mail, or a forum, or whatever.
Ask them whether they actually own the copyright to their songs. Or at least part of the copyright.
Post the results here.
It would be interesting to see how many artists actually enjoy the "protection" that you suppose they would.
The purpose of law is not to "give power."
This directly contradicts US Constitution section 8.
It's to protect the "power" we already have by virtue of nature.
And this contradicts your rejection of my "what isn't forbidden is allowed" proposal.
Sure, you're in control of your whitelist... until the worm hits your machine.
It won't, I'm running Gentoo Linux.;)
Besides, if you say, the worm/zombies go into "collect whitelisted addresses" mode.... you'd never be able to whitelist poor Aunt Bertha again.
Point taken. She would have to use a different sender address then, but this is technically doable.
In effect, we have to look at this without any whitelisting at all. Is the scheme as viable now?
Not really because each stamp requires about 15 seconds of CPU time on a modern machine. Affordable for the casual sender, but way too expensive for legitimate bulk mailers such as mailing lists and web forums (with E-Mail notification). An interesting approach might be to whitelist certain addresses only in conjunction with a public key and use the secret key for signing messages. Aunt Bertha's key might be compromised, still, but it would be trivial to create a new one, so she wouldn't need a different sender address in order to contact me. Plus, the addresses alone would be useless to spammers.
Yeah. Try applying that universally and without exception and see how far it gets you.
Oh, well. Just like I thought - you don't have the faintest clue what you're talking about. Or maybe you're confused about the word "explicitely" (no, no need to mention butcher knifes explicitely in the law which prohibits murder). I could use an ACL analogy, but that would be wasted on you.
You're missing the point. Title 17 says that you're not in violation of copyright if you make a copy for fair use purposes.
Yes, and the anti-circumvention provisions restrict that right, don't they?
Since the other stipulations of Title 17 do not prohibit you from making copies period, but rather merely from making perfect digital copies by circumventing access controls, the other parts of Title 17 (the stuff you guys insist on referring to by its legislative name, the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, even though the act became law years ago) are not in conflict with section 107.
It's below my dignity to point out to such an obstinate person that Section 1201 nowhere mentions such a thing as "perfect digital copies", which means that the anti-circumvention provisions are universal.
I have absolutely no intention of digging through the writings of Locke, Bentham, Rousseau, and countless other great minds who expressed learned opinions on the rule of law and its primacy in civilized society just to convince you of something that is self-evident! If you don't accept it as an axiom, that's your problem. When and if you catch up to the rest of the modern world, come on back for another go-round. Until then, nuts to you.
You would've made for a good East German "Mauerschütze" - the soldiers who shot their compatriots in the back for trying to flee to West Germany. It was the law that any fugitive be shot, thus it was illegitimate not to shoot, right? In defense of the philosophers you mention above, none of these would back up your ridiculous equation of the legitimate with the legal, they would only say that it's a moral obligation to follow the law. The difference is subtle, and you're too dim, so I won't take the pains of explaining it to you.
No, it of course is not. All you have to do is get your hands on a licensed DVD player. Can't find one you like? Then write your own.
There are fine DVD players for Linux, Mr. Clueless.
The DVD-CCA is happy to provide you with a license for their encoding system for an entirely reasonable fee. All you have to do is come up with a sound business case and I'm sure you'll have no trouble securing the funding you need.
No one gives a shit about the fee (which is actually $15000/yr), it's the licensing conditions. The DVD-CCA is in a monopoly position and can impose whatever licensing restrictions it wants, and their current ones are harsh to say the least. Most importantly, they are fundamentally incompatible with the concept of FOSS. That is the problem.
Another interesting aspect is how, in a purported democracy, a section of copyright law manages to introduce a whole new category of "intellectual property" without any public debate.
What's that? You can't build a business case because Linux users, rather than simply buying the products they want, prefer instead to do things illegally for no other reason than simply to be perverse?
Exactly, kid. Let's tell it like it is: Freedom is perverse. Plus, ignorance is strength and war is peace. There you go.
Well, that says a hell of a lot more about Linux users than it does about the law, doesn't it?
Actually, I noticed that the "PowerDVD" player for Linux is approved by the DVD-CCA. And of course, it's closed source to boot. If they force me to install CSS where OSS would be just fine just to view a DVD, then my choice is simple: I won't buy anyt
Uh... how about the fact that nothing even remotely like that is in the statute?
You're right and I noticed after posting this. Since the german copyright explicitely contains such a provision (par. 53(1) UrhG), I assumed that Americans had the same freedom. Obviously they don't.
Copies, yes. Perfect digital reproductions, no.
Actually, the fair use clause doesn't even guarantee the right to make analog copies. Neither does it explicitely prohibit perfect reproductions so it all boils down to a matter of interpretation.
Yes, that's right: it's a big conspiracy.
Just because you're paranoid doesn't mean they're not after you. Now that digital broadcasting is gaining momentum, they want legislation to make hometaping technically impossible. The copyright flag is just one step among others. E.g., the DMCA (1201 k) already requires manufacturers of analog recording devices to obey to copy control (i.e. prevention) mechanisms. The ultimate aim is that there will be no way to record a digital TV/radio broadcast if it has the copy control bit set, apart from building your own recorder. Note that the RIAA is lying again: Digital radio is - for bandwidth reasons - far from CD quality[1]. VCRs will go extinct and be replaced with devices like DVD players which aren't capable of any recording, and can be subjected to any DRM scheme from region code over expiring keys to the right to unilaterally terminate your license upon any activity which the MPAA disapproves of (this will probably be used rarely, but not be unheard of). Just take a look at the legislation, the RIAA and MPAA have pushed through in the recent years, and are now trying to establish. Here's an incomplete list:
More laws are waiting where these are coming from (well, that would be Hell, I guess). The goal is to give copyright holders (which are only rarely nowadays the actual artists) enormous power even beyond that which they already wield. Unfortunately, there are a lot of people that are too lazy, gullible or indifferent to defend their freedom.
Nonsense. Macrovision doesn't even come close to meeting the definition of "access control mechanism" given in Title 17. The courts have so held, despite civil suits alleging differently.
Before you can "recompress" you must "decompress," which is the same as making a perfect digital copy of the original work.
Yes, that's why even viewing a DVD is illegal. D'oh! Seriously though, at least German courts have ruled that making a transient copy of copyrighted material in order to exercise fair use rights is fair use itself. So of course this is a BS argument.
You're seriously confusing things here. First of all, the receiver is in control of his whitelist. Aunt Bertha can do sh** to change my whitelist, no matter how many trojans and worms are on her PC. Second, sender addresses are so easily forged that there is no point at all to hijack somebody's machine just to be able to use his/her e-mail addy. The only thing that the malware on her PC can do is find out addresses of people who have her whitelisted. But in the worst case, this means I get as much spam as currently usual under Aunt Bertha's address, which I can simply blacklist. She'll need to use one stamp per email, a digital signature or a new address if she wants to contact me again, which may sound harsh, but it wasn't me who had his computer infected. Of course I couldn't do the same with the address of my boss, but then, the admin can just process mails directed to me (and other spam victims) to use a different sender address, which I can manually whitelist, or which will be whitelisted automatically after sending one valid stamp.
Long story short: It's certainly not waterproof, but it's a great improvement.
but with (false positives) / (false positives plus true negatives) = 100%, your spam filter would definitely suck. This happens to be the probability that a legitimate mail gets marked as spam.
Maybe it's one of the 17.8361548928847326% of statistics that give a false sense of precision. Or one of the 42000% of statistics that are grossly exaggerated.
Slashdot Mirror
PS: LZW - wasn't that Unisys?
Helix is GPL'ed, so anyone can fork it at will. How long will it take until there are inofficial patched "DVD-Helix" versions for free download in source and binaries? Can't be such a long time. Although e.g. Linux distributors will of course stick to the official versions out of legal and maybe business-political considerations.
AFAIK, the only relevant tech here is WMV, which is merely an implementation of the MPEG-4 standard, and as such cannot be patented or otherwise encumbered.
Nope, WMV is not MPEG-4-compatible, though there are similarities. I've heard claims (though only gossip) that WMA is very similar to Ogg Vorbis, and that's why Microsoft could put a superior MP3 competitor together in that short amount of time, but I'll leave this to the conspiracy theorists. In case it's true, it would have been immoral to the bone to take this free-as-in-speech audio codec and transform it into a closed-source proprietary format, but due to the liberal licensing of Ogg Vorbis it would probably have been legal.
Only complete idiots use composite words that consist of Greek and Latin parts. Like "automobile" or "television".
It's not just a good thing, its the only way.
Nice simplistic defense of Social Darwinism.
Society strives to create an environment whereby you will be better off by putting energies into playing the game and getting ahead.
But when did this ever work satisfyingly? How much can a society do when the ruling caste has the power to shape the laws almost arbitrarily to their favor?
As the process continues, those who are doing well will make laws to allow them to continue to do well, thus further fostering the environment.
No, thus further fostering themselves. These laws, created by special interest groups, tend to benefit those who want to take the corruption game further. This does not necessarily mean that their average reproductive success would be enhanced because people are by no means (in the Darwinian sense) perfectly adapted to modern living conditions. We're still somewhat optimized for stone age societies, though with a completely different set of memes. How many politicians or CEOs do you know that do not have a single child? How many store clerks that have 3 or more? In evolutionary terms (wrt to maximizing your reproductive success), it's rather pointless to take baths in champagne or, as a woman, to have your breasts filled with a sticky substance that may seriously get in the way of your job of breast-feeding your offspring (in case you have any). There's no equivalent to mother's milk in terms of survival chances and developmental benefits.
There simply is no evidence that social success and reproductive success are closely related, nor is it obvious that they should in today's class societies. The theory of evolution describes an undirected, thoughtless, myopic and chaotic natural process that causes lifeforms - in the long term - to adapt to their environment. In no way is this a "good thing", since ethics are based on the subjective judgement of men. Nature isn't good or bad, it just is. What you describe isn't any more good or bad than the fact that rain falls downwards or that the Earth revolves around the sun.
Btw, social status, professional success and even high intelligence in your usual job by no means guarantee that you will not star the Darwin Awards. I know of another rather (in-)famous German lawyer who's barely able to get the grammar right when writing a moderately long sentence, and certainly not without making at least two severe spelling mistakes. It's no problem for him though because most certainly his secretary does all the paperwork, and he's definitely earning a lot of money. There's nothing inherently good about that. He knows how to play the game, and he does, but there's no evidence that this helps society, even though the laws usually are meant to help society (there's no indication that most of them regularily do, and all have exceptions).
This turns into a class system and accelerates until revolution and then socialism.
First, every society has different classes. Even men and women are two seperate classes in most societies, in one way or the other. Classes are not necessarily strictly separated. Second, "prevent their competitors"... competitors in which respect? If I skew the competition for social status in my favor, I have to fear less and less competition. But does this prevent my competitors, or just change the kind of competition? You don't tell. What should people compete for, anyway? What kind of competition helps society, what kind of competition hurts it? And as for point three, I mostly agree. I would say revolution is the outcome of skewing competition in a way that grossly defrauds the masses. This process starts from day one when you give the ruling caste(s) too much power in setting national policies, and it gets worse over time, until eventually it may be so obvious a
The authorities don't even know the smart criminals are committing crimes, let alone catching them.
Not always, think Kevin Mitnick. Sure, it's easier to catch the idiots, but even geniuses make mistakes.
But on the other hand, employees have to pay income tax on their stock options while the employer may deduct their value from its profit as expenses. Why not force companies to label the same (hypothesized, I agree) sum as expenses in their business reports? I mean, they have them taxed as expenses as well, for tax breaks. Does it make sense to allow a company to make use of the benefits (tax reduction) while at the same time pretending to their stock holders that these options are essentially free and do not affect profit in the least?
And then, isn't the argument that stock options may turn out cheaper than anticipated an admission that the stock value may develop worse than expected? In any case, things should be consistent. SO expenses should be taxed and reported to stockholders at the same time. Whether the optimal time to do this is when granting the stock options, or only later when they are realized, is certainly debatable. But the situation where a company may get immediate tax breaks without reporting SO expenses to stock holders is IMHO questionable - that sounds like an undue free lunch.
(This post was subversively written using Mozilla 1.7 on Gentoo Linux.)
not all bulk mail is spam. spam assassin gives 2.4 points if it finds anything that looks like a unique identifier for X-Sender, and another 1.4 points for anything that looks like a tracking image or tracked link.
that plus the points for any non-safe html colors or any html at all, SA effectively tags ANY bulk mail as spam!
I don't agree with all of its default settings either, but then, it's simple to adjust the scores in any way you like.
Joe Jobs
When I heard that my favorite cinema is introducing electrical seats, I thought they were talking about heating.
By definition, no competition can apply in this circumstance. Copyright is a legally sanctioned monopoly. There's no way to make "P2P" legal unless you abolish copyright law entirely.
Since P2P was legal in Germany, this sounds rather weird.
Property includes both tangible and intangible assets, whether you like this fact or not.
Property was invented because some things are scarce. But others aren't and that's why they weren't handled in the same manner as property. Copyright is centuries old, whereas the term "intellectual property" originates from the second half of the 1900s. But then, what am I talking to you? Pearls before the swine.
Property includes both tangible and intangible assets
Yes, that's why I'm talking scare/not scarce, not tangible/intangible. By definition, all tangible things are naturally scarce, but intangible things are either:
Locke specifically considered and rejected the economic theory of property.
I'll take a look at that, thx, sounds interesting.
But have you ever looked at the box a DVD comes in? Or, for that matter, watched it? There's a message right there that says, in essence, that unauthorized reproduction or distribution is prohibited.
A message on a box doesn't make for a valid contract, and it never did. An attempt to enforce it would result in the judge laughing you out of the courtroom. The message at the beginning does not and cannot initiate a contract either and it's just a legal reminder (which is not necessarily correct, depending on what specifically it says) that certain usages are prohibited by copyright.
You know, you could have made your position much more tenable simply by saying "There should not be" instead of "There is no."
Oh my, WIPO (founded in 1974) took some pre-existing concepts (copyright, patents, trademark, trade secrets) and re-branded them "intellectual property", and now you think that the whole purpose behind them was IP. That's nonsense - they just call something different "intellectual property". It's like renaming Dolly the Sheep "Dolly the Buffalo". There was no such thing. Just because you would start calling your president "Santa Claus" doesn't mean that Santa Claus actually exists.
It was never legal.
US maybe. It was legal in Germany (German page, the author IAL as in IANAL).
I think you might have something useful to say someday.
As I said, I'm still learning, and I definitely learned something from this discussion, which is probably surprising after the insults. ;)
The courts have found (twice, I think, but don't quote me on that point) that Macrovision is not an effective access control mechanism, and therefore is not covered by the relevant parts of Title 17.
Again, no references. Learn to use Google, pal.
That's not the case. Go read the statue. There is a clear definition in there for "access control mechanism."
Yes, and it does not require the technology to be waterproof, just like I said:
Because I do not like the idea of individual citizens deciding for themselves which laws they'll obey and which they won't.
Granted, but I did not say that I break the law or encourage anyone else to do it. Still, I hold that it's a bad law all in all, and should be repealed.
To call them "rights" implies that they have some basis in natural law, which you seem to believe is true but actually is not.
They have - freedom of speech and article 19 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.
And for very good reasons, reasons which you refuse to acknowledge.
No, for completely bogus reasons since all those copy-protected songs are found to the dozen in any file sharing network of your preference and since professional plagiarists have no problem at all circumventing those measures. The only one who's really restricted in his possibilities is the law-abiding customer.
Because you are free to make other kinds of copies, fair use doesn't even come into it.
You mean there are still legal ways to do it, although they are working hard on banning those, too. Ever heard of TCPA? They hope to base unbreakable DRM schemes on it. There goes your fair use, and this does affect your freedom of speech dramatically. Just imagine that a rights holder or law enforcement agency could "undo" a song which is somehow found to be politically dangerous, simply by revoking everyone's right to make use of it (of course, people would get their money back...). Sure, they need to make all copying of copyrighted music impossible for this to be effective, but that's exactly what some of the corporations are up to. The most difficult part for now is to close the "analog hole" and particularily the transportation of audio and video signals through air in the form of visual light rsp. sound waves. They're working on watermark recognition software to prevent this form of copying, and as soon as this works reliably, the next phase of what NET Act started and DMCA continued will be to prohibit manufacture and sale of devices that do not obey this type of "access control mechanism". It's a technical problem now, not one of legal implementation, which will most definitely go almost unopposed because hardly anybody of influence in the US seems to care. Your repress^Hentatives certainly don't. And hell, it's for the artists. And even the children. Who wouldn't agree that it's worthwhile to protect the artists, and the children? Your problem is exactly that the plot is too 1984esque to acknowledge, because you still think the US was the land of the free. I'm not trying to imply that this will turn the USA into a sort of Oceania, but still, civil rights will suffer a lot just to give rights holders (i.e. not artists, but corporations) more control, more profit, and less competition. It's something worth to be fought.
They are, in fact, illegal, aren't they?
Learn to read, fool. That's exactly what I complained about.
It doesn't matter if it isn't stealing or not.
<irony> It doesn't matter if it's child abuse or not. Everything crime may be called child abuse.</irony>
It's still a CRIME.
Um, now, they're just making it a crime. It's not a crime yet.
Arguing that copyright piracy isn't stealing is right up there with arguing that America isn't a democracy because it's a republic. The two things are not mutually exclusive.
Actually, it's the other way round, the MPAA and RIAA claim that all copyright infringement is the same as theft, because all the people who infringe on it would have bought everything they copied illegaly. This is bullshit.
In the legal field they have terms for several things : theft, burglary, larceny, embezzlment, extortion, piracy. They all describe the same basic thing, taking something from someone else that isn't yours.
Nope. Burglary means breaking into somebody's house. When you do that, and then commit a murder, you're guilty of 2 crimes, but none of them was an act of stealing. The same goes for piracy. That most acts of burglary/piracy are committed in coincidence with acts of stealing is irrelevant.
But the point you're completely missing is that theft is not about taking something that belongs to another, but taking something AWAY from another. The crucial point is that thereafter, the owner doesn't have it any more. Otherwise, there would be no reason to prohibit this in the first.
The congress and law makers have just chosen to call them different things and proscribe differing sanctions for them.
The very reason why the law makers chose to give them different names is that they are not the same as stealing. Get this in your thick head, or don't. Everytime the MPAA or RIAA talk about "intellectual property", they are lying, simple as that. And stop whining how this is (going to be) a crime anyway. If I go over to your house and shoot you in the head, it's a horrible crime (murder), but it's not "theft of life essence". Only a madman would claim that since I am "taking your life" although I have no right to do so, it ought to be called stealing. And actually, this argument would make more sense than yours, since I would be taking your life away.
And just before the likes of you start bitching again about how these evil persons who point out the MPAA/RIAA/WIPO/IFPI/whatever lies would belittle copyright infringement: I have no problem at all with this law, since I don't think this kind of activity should be covered by fair use. It's just stupid to call it theft, because it isn't.
Here's how I see it: you really, really want the latest Britney Spears single,
Uhm, not really, I'm more into gothic and industrial rock/metal, and I don't crave for superficial and utterly uninteresting teenage bi^W girls who know how to jump when the choreographer tells them to. Instead, for example, Funker Vogt, Diva Destruction, Lacuna Coil, Nightwish are bands that I learned about using P2P or (mostly) on mp3.com, and of which I bought CDs later (one each from every band but Nightwish, of which I bought 4 or 5, would have to count 'em). Didn't hear about one of these on mainstream promotion channels (LC and NW have had guest appearances on those channels later, but that's all).
but you don't want to shell out your hard-earned milk money for it.
I heard the music and I liked it, so I bought it. Sorry to disappoint you.
So you fell in love with the idea of ubiquitous digital piracy back in the bad old days of the 1990's when it was unregulated and unopposed.
Actually, I first used P2P in like 1999, and didn't make much use of it until early last year.
When the people who sell Britney's music took a look around and realized that they were getting robbed blind,
Sure, the people that produced BS (<- nice ambivalent abbreviation, eh?) were mad about the fact that I didn't pay them to make more of this crap.
they pointed out this fact to lawmakers, and lawmakers rightly leapt into action to protect natural property rights, rights which with which we are endowed by our creator and which teenagers like yourself were stomping all over.
Funny that you talk about God-given copyright in the context of Britney Spears. Do you think she actually has any copyright over the songs she wro, oh no, wait, performed? I would like to believe you, but X-files is way more credible than that.
That's my theory.
Actually, that's called a hypothesis, and I think I proved you dead wrong.
I think there might be one or two of the standard radical leftist pseudo-intellectual insults that you haven't rolled out yet. Wouldn't want to leave any out, would you?
It's just that you seem to enjoy having your rights shorn off one by one. Baa baaaa.
Sure, whatever. You won't have any trouble finding people who think that property rights don't exist and that they're just a fiction of the bourgeoisie constructed over centuries to maintain control over the masses.
Oh, wow, now you portrait me as a communist. The main reason why I'm pro P2P is that it promotes competition in a market-place tightly controlled using pay for play on limited airwaves by an oligopoly found guilty of price fixing. Have you seen KoRn's "Fuck that" video yet? There are 5 big companies, soon to be only 4, which are abusive towards both their customers and their artists and rip both of them off, and the only reason why they get through with it is that they're in control over promotion (they are now moving to shut down internet radio by making royalties unaffordable!). Is that healthy competition, a free market-place? Doesn't look like it to me.
But back to your question: Private property is a-ok, why do you ask? But property in the traditional sense is either something material (e.g. a TV set, or a house, or a pack of razorblades), or to something immaterial that shall not be copied by anyone but a governmental agency, and the scarceness of which is benefitial (if it's not too scarce, but that's another issue). Money would be a fine example. It is often traded in material form, but in principle it's immaterial anyway - a right, if you want so.
But then, there are immaterial items that can legally be reproduced at will by the owner and the scarceness of which principally has a detrimental, not a beneficial effect on the lives o
Yes. But they do not obliterate it. You can still exercise your "fair use rights" (ugh) without circumventing digital access controls to make perfect copies.
Not with macrovision in place, unless, let's say, you would use a camcorder. Oh wait, that's probably going to be outlawed, too.
Is it also below your dignity to understand what you read? There is no analog process or system yet known that can effectively control access to a work. That entire portion of the statute refers only to circumventing access control measures, which can only apply in a digital context.
Macrovision is now mandatory (because of the DMCA) in the US for DVD players and VCRs, and I think even PC video cards if they have a TV out. This makes it kind of hard to copy even parts of a video, so yes, these measures are effective. No less effective than CSS anyway - the law does not require them to be waterproof in any manner - if you circumvent them, you're in violation of copyright.
Ah, yes. I knew something was out of place. The fucking idiot hadn't accused me of being a fascist Nazi yet. Now I feel much better.
Oh well, if I didn't even know the historical difference between East Germany and the Third Reich, I'd be careful not to call others fucking idiots.
Of course there are circumstances where it's necessary to oppose an unjust law.
You said if it's illegal, it's always illegitimate, and I pointed out that there should be exceptions. It seems you finally got it.
This is nothing more or less than a case where you want to do something that you have ABSOLUTELY NO right to do, and it's pissing you off.
I have no right to make fair use of e.g. the music I bought? Oh well, go figure.
Then what are you complaining about? How can it be illegal if fine licensed products exist to do it?
I'll just assume that you only pretend to be obtuse, and that you actually know full well that I didn't claim these to have a DVD-CCA license. You know, I'm an incorrectible optimist.
That's your problem. It's not a legal problem. If you're unwilling to accept the terms that DVD-CCA offers, then you cannot use their technology. Period.
Right, if I'm unwilling to accept their copyright, oh, one moment. They never claimed copyright over e.g. libdvdcss. Ok, so if I'm unwilling to accept their patents, no, wait, they do not hold CSS patents. One last try: If I'm unwilling to accept their "DMCA anti-circumvention IP thingy license" (it's not my fault that noone's named the baby yet!) then it's illegal for me to use it. Ok, that makes sense, and I'll comply with that. But I think it's legitimate for me to oppose this law, and it's introduction of "DMCAACIPT licenses" even if content industry fanboys like you say that in a democracy, laws should never be criticized.
"Without any public debate?" We have a Senate and a House of Representatives, you know. They're on TV and everything.
That's a publicized debate, not a public one. A public debate, in my eyes, is one that involves the public as an active party.
The United States of America, incidentally, is not a democracy. Never was. It's a republic. Do you know the difference?
The difference between apples and the color green? Sure I do. There are green apples, but also red apples, and green things that aren't apples, and things that are neither green nor apples (ok, that was a bit exhaustive, I guess). The US is a federal republic which happens to have elements of representative democracy. Not that federal law would require states to offer democratic elections to their citizens, but de facto, all of them do.
Tthere have been and still are lots of undemocratic republics, and technically, Great Britain is still a monarchy that just smacks like a representative democracy.
Does anyone know if you can make a bulleted list within PlanMaker without too much trouble? Yes, I know that this feature doesn't make much sense, but it's one of the major factors preventing my father from switching to Linux and from regularly using open-source office software. My dad gave up on Open Office in short order.
PlanMaker is not open source. There's no bulleted list feature in OOo Calc, but you can manually begin each line with a bullet symbol, e.g. Unicode 2022 (Insert -> Special Character). You can speed this up if you want to insert many points by concatenating text from a hidden column, e.g. by inserting =IF(A1 <> ""; CONCATENATE("* "; A1); ""), where * is your bullet symbol, into cells B1 downwards. You can then just type text into A1 downwards and later hide the column. An ordered list would look somewhat like =IF(A1 <> ""; CONCATENATE(ROW(A1); ". "; A1); "").
Well, that's better than Excel's 50 bugs per buck.
Yes, it does. It says that making copies for such-n-such purposes is not infringement. Therefore copyright laws do not apply to those sorts of copies. Therefore the right to make those sorts of copies is not abridged by law.
It's a matter of interpretation whether e.g. a full, high-quality analog copy of a music CD is covered by the fair use guidelines. The courts decide. Until now, they've decided (I assume) that it is fair use if done for personal, non-profit purposes. But the law doesn't precisely force them to come to this conclusion.
Your tin-foil hat is on too tight. Or possibly you're just a dumbass.
I hate to brag about my IQ, but 159 is definitely more than that of the average dumbass. And as for the tin-foil hat meme of yours, I'm not suggesting that they are the Illuminati or responsible for alien abductions. But they're perfectly willing and determined to drastically cut down on fair use rights, in order to strengthen their power (and thus oligopoly position) and for profit.
Spoken like a true guy-who-doesn't-understand-basic-property-rights.
Intellectual property is a lie since the analogy is terminally flawed. See the Wikipedia link I posted. If you really need a catch-it-all phrase for copyright, patents, trademarks and trade secrets, call them immaterial monopoly rights, or some other term that makes sense, but isn't actually as sexy for propagandist purposes.
Copyright law exists for one purpose and one purpose only: to protect those rights that people already have. As long as those rights aren't being sufficiently protected by law, there will be more and better laws.
US copyright is (originally) based on section 8, clause 8 of the US constitution, which reads "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". You'll also note that the original constitution does not mention private property at all and especially not "intellectual property".
But these objections are still lightyears away from the greatest irony in your statement. The irony is that US musicians in 90%+ of cases no longer have any rights to their own works, because the record labels impose "work for hire" clauses on them. Should corporations which make profit by selling pieces of art have inborn rights over those works that the very creators do not? Why don't you:
It would be interesting to see how many artists actually enjoy the "protection" that you suppose they would.
The purpose of law is not to "give power."
This directly contradicts US Constitution section 8.
It's to protect the "power" we already have by virtue of nature.
And this contradicts your rejection of my "what isn't forbidden is allowed" proposal.
Sure, you're in control of your whitelist... until the worm hits your machine.
It won't, I'm running Gentoo Linux. ;)
Besides, if you say, the worm/zombies go into "collect whitelisted addresses" mode.... you'd never be able to whitelist poor Aunt Bertha again.
Point taken. She would have to use a different sender address then, but this is technically doable.
In effect, we have to look at this without any whitelisting at all. Is the scheme as viable now?
Not really because each stamp requires about 15 seconds of CPU time on a modern machine. Affordable for the casual sender, but way too expensive for legitimate bulk mailers such as mailing lists and web forums (with E-Mail notification). An interesting approach might be to whitelist certain addresses only in conjunction with a public key and use the secret key for signing messages. Aunt Bertha's key might be compromised, still, but it would be trivial to create a new one, so she wouldn't need a different sender address in order to contact me. Plus, the addresses alone would be useless to spammers.
Yeah. Try applying that universally and without exception and see how far it gets you.
Oh, well. Just like I thought - you don't have the faintest clue what you're talking about. Or maybe you're confused about the word "explicitely" (no, no need to mention butcher knifes explicitely in the law which prohibits murder). I could use an ACL analogy, but that would be wasted on you.
You're missing the point. Title 17 says that you're not in violation of copyright if you make a copy for fair use purposes.
Yes, and the anti-circumvention provisions restrict that right, don't they?
Since the other stipulations of Title 17 do not prohibit you from making copies period, but rather merely from making perfect digital copies by circumventing access controls, the other parts of Title 17 (the stuff you guys insist on referring to by its legislative name, the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, even though the act became law years ago) are not in conflict with section 107.
It's below my dignity to point out to such an obstinate person that Section 1201 nowhere mentions such a thing as "perfect digital copies", which means that the anti-circumvention provisions are universal.
I have absolutely no intention of digging through the writings of Locke, Bentham, Rousseau, and countless other great minds who expressed learned opinions on the rule of law and its primacy in civilized society just to convince you of something that is self-evident! If you don't accept it as an axiom, that's your problem. When and if you catch up to the rest of the modern world, come on back for another go-round. Until then, nuts to you.
You would've made for a good East German "Mauerschütze" - the soldiers who shot their compatriots in the back for trying to flee to West Germany. It was the law that any fugitive be shot, thus it was illegitimate not to shoot, right? In defense of the philosophers you mention above, none of these would back up your ridiculous equation of the legitimate with the legal, they would only say that it's a moral obligation to follow the law. The difference is subtle, and you're too dim, so I won't take the pains of explaining it to you.
No, it of course is not. All you have to do is get your hands on a licensed DVD player. Can't find one you like? Then write your own.
There are fine DVD players for Linux, Mr. Clueless.
The DVD-CCA is happy to provide you with a license for their encoding system for an entirely reasonable fee. All you have to do is come up with a sound business case and I'm sure you'll have no trouble securing the funding you need.
No one gives a shit about the fee (which is actually $15000/yr), it's the licensing conditions. The DVD-CCA is in a monopoly position and can impose whatever licensing restrictions it wants, and their current ones are harsh to say the least. Most importantly, they are fundamentally incompatible with the concept of FOSS. That is the problem.
Another interesting aspect is how, in a purported democracy, a section of copyright law manages to introduce a whole new category of "intellectual property" without any public debate.
What's that? You can't build a business case because Linux users, rather than simply buying the products they want, prefer instead to do things illegally for no other reason than simply to be perverse?
Exactly, kid. Let's tell it like it is: Freedom is perverse. Plus, ignorance is strength and war is peace. There you go.
Well, that says a hell of a lot more about Linux users than it does about the law, doesn't it?
Actually, I noticed that the "PowerDVD" player for Linux is approved by the DVD-CCA. And of course, it's closed source to boot. If they force me to install CSS where OSS would be just fine just to view a DVD, then my choice is simple: I won't buy anyt
Uh... how about the fact that nothing even remotely like that is in the statute?
You're right and I noticed after posting this. Since the german copyright explicitely contains such a provision (par. 53(1) UrhG), I assumed that Americans had the same freedom. Obviously they don't.
Copies, yes. Perfect digital reproductions, no.
Actually, the fair use clause doesn't even guarantee the right to make analog copies. Neither does it explicitely prohibit perfect reproductions so it all boils down to a matter of interpretation.
Yes, that's right: it's a big conspiracy.
Just because you're paranoid doesn't mean they're not after you. Now that digital broadcasting is gaining momentum, they want legislation to make hometaping technically impossible. The copyright flag is just one step among others. E.g., the DMCA (1201 k) already requires manufacturers of analog recording devices to obey to copy control (i.e. prevention) mechanisms. The ultimate aim is that there will be no way to record a digital TV/radio broadcast if it has the copy control bit set, apart from building your own recorder. Note that the RIAA is lying again: Digital radio is - for bandwidth reasons - far from CD quality[1]. VCRs will go extinct and be replaced with devices like DVD players which aren't capable of any recording, and can be subjected to any DRM scheme from region code over expiring keys to the right to unilaterally terminate your license upon any activity which the MPAA disapproves of (this will probably be used rarely, but not be unheard of). Just take a look at the legislation, the RIAA and MPAA have pushed through in the recent years, and are now trying to establish. Here's an incomplete list:
Succeeded:
In progress:
More laws are waiting where these are coming from (well, that would be Hell, I guess). The goal is to give copyright holders (which are only rarely nowadays the actual artists) enormous power even beyond that which they already wield. Unfortunately, there are a lot of people that are too lazy, gullible or indifferent to defend their freedom.
Nonsense. Macrovision doesn't even come close to meeting the definition of "access control mechanism" given in Title 17. The courts have so held, despite civil suits alleging differently.
You haven't got references? I have.
Before you can "recompress" you must "decompress," which is the same as making a perfect digital copy of the original work.
Yes, that's why even viewing a DVD is illegal. D'oh! Seriously though, at least German courts have ruled that making a transient copy of copyrighted material in order to exercise fair use rights is fair use itself. So of course this is a BS argument.
You're seriously confusing things here. First of all, the receiver is in control of his whitelist. Aunt Bertha can do sh** to change my whitelist, no matter how many trojans and worms are on her PC. Second, sender addresses are so easily forged that there is no point at all to hijack somebody's machine just to be able to use his/her e-mail addy. The only thing that the malware on her PC can do is find out addresses of people who have her whitelisted. But in the worst case, this means I get as much spam as currently usual under Aunt Bertha's address, which I can simply blacklist. She'll need to use one stamp per email, a digital signature or a new address if she wants to contact me again, which may sound harsh, but it wasn't me who had his computer infected. Of course I couldn't do the same with the address of my boss, but then, the admin can just process mails directed to me (and other spam victims) to use a different sender address, which I can manually whitelist, or which will be whitelisted automatically after sending one valid stamp.
Long story short: It's certainly not waterproof, but it's a great improvement.
but with (false positives) / (false positives plus true negatives) = 100%, your spam filter would definitely suck. This happens to be the probability that a legitimate mail gets marked as spam.
Maybe it's one of the 17.8361548928847326% of statistics that give a false sense of precision. Or one of the 42000% of statistics that are grossly exaggerated.