>IANAL but I think that smashing up your own home is illegal in the UK.
IANAL, but I've had builders round often enough without being prosecuted. If you don't own your home it's generally illegal. If you do it's generally legal.
>Courts do not need the Hague Treaty today to enforce foreign judgments, in every legal system there is allready mechanisms peculiar to the system that allow for enforcement of a foreign court decision.
This is true, but the Hague treaty is about jurisdiction. At the moment, US courts do not recognise Chinese courts' jurisdiction over political speech in the US which undermines the Chinese government. The Hague treaty would force them to do so (Article 10, torts). There are several potential opt-outs in Article 28. 'inconsistent with a judgment rendered... in the State addressed' and 'manifestly incompatible with the public policy' are good ones. But 'the US interest' is not one of them.
I don't think that Americans have very much to worry about this treaty, because they are lucky enough to enjoy an almost unique constitutional protection for political speech and unlucky enough to already suffer from most of the odious commercial laws which the treaty would propagate. It was therefore misguided (not to mention very rude) of RMS to address his comments only to US residents, but apart from that I think his warning was well-founded.
Re:sweeping, cross-border laws already enforced
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Harm From The Hague
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>It might be a good idea to learn the difference between "legal" and "tolerated thus seldom prosecuted". Very few countries and states actually allow prostitution, in practice.
Prostitution is legal in most African, Asian and European countries, and I believe some US states. Prostitution is allowed in practice in many more states, including most of the Americas and some comparatively moralist Muslim countries ('temporary marriage').
Re:"same treaty process that gave us the DMCA dept
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Most of it was written to comply with the WIPO treaty. The unreasonable bits were written to comply with the MPAA's lobbyists.
I have been unable to decide exactly what parts of your comment were in earnest and which were ironic.
>The US will use that as a way to strongarm all nations into becoming Starbucks-drinking SUV-driving commercial-centric (read corporate-capitalistic) satellite-states of the US, ensuring basic human rights, work rights, and voting rights.
How on Earth does buying US products provide one with human rights? When the US government has intervened to protect the interests of American companies (very often) it has infringed and destroyed human rights more often than it has upheld and bolstered them. Do you think bug US corporations are going to lobby for better employment rights for their third world workers? Currently they are fighting tooth and nail at the WTO against such rights.
>Many (most? All?) The major news outlets are owned by the companies that are trying to push these sorts of restrictions through...
Are you sure? (Quotes, please.) These companies won't be allowed to publish anything other than the Koran without being sued by the Taliban. (Well, they will because the Taliban isn't internationally recognised, but you get the point.)
I don't think the Swedes have much to fear. The US government can already rewrite their constitution at the whim of the Church of Scientology. How much worse could it get?
The most notorious features of the Holocause, such as the extermination camps, were unknown to the Allies at the time the USA entered the war. This was because they had not happened at that point.
However, it was known in 1941 from Enigma decrypts that German forces were massacring huge numbers of Jews (and others) in the Soviet Union. Churchill publicised these crimes by describing them on the BBC World Service, although this risked exposing the success of his cryptanalysts. He judged that warning European Jews, and playing his strongest propaganda card, justified the gamble. Whether the average American believed these stories, or even listened to them, I cannot say.
I thought it was somewhere in Algeria. Malta was part of the British Empire.
>But before the French fleet was destroyed, it had one battle success (it's only one). This was against the naval forces supplying Patton who attempted to cut off Rommel's North Africa corp...
Are you referring to General Patton of the USA? What was he doing fighting Rommel more than two years before America entered the war?
Yahoo! could spin off yahoo.fr, like it did with yahoo.co.uk. I expect it will do so, once market conditions are more favourable (yahoo.co.uk went public when the dotcom bubble was still swelling). If the French courts go on attacking yahoo.com, they might do it sooner.
Yahoo! said it was impossible to do. The court named experts to decide if it could be done or not. A few months later, the experts proposed techniques that permitted Yahoo! to block French citizens from accessing the Nazi stuff. The court ruled that Yahoo! then had to do it.
Not quite correct. The court appointed a panel of three experts, one French, one American and one British. I don't know how they were picked, but neither of the Anglophone witnesses was fluent in French. The experts discussed the case, and decided it was possible to block most people in France from accessing selected pages, although it would be very easy for interested people to circumvent these barriers.
The report shown to the court was written only by the French expert, and neither of the other two agreed with it. The disagreement was more legal than technical - the French witness thought that a ruling ordering Yahoo! to do all it reasonably could would be enough to enforce the law, but the other two felt that it was pointless to require Yahoo! to spend such effort on measures which can be bypassed in a few seconds (say, through www.safeweb.com).
Having read the optimistic report from the dissenting expert, Judge Gomez decided to repeat his original ruling. This required Yahoo! to block any Nazi memorabilia advertisments from absolutely everyone in France, and all French citzens overseas. Not to take the measures the report proposed, but to set up the magic filter which everyone agreed was impossible.
The second judgement of 20th November 2000 is translated at the Center For Democracy & Technology. It orders Yahoo! to comply with the original order (p20):
We reject the plea of incompetence reiterated by YAHOO Inc.;
We order YAHOO Inc. to comply within 3 months... with the injunctions contained in our order of 22nd May 2000...
The original order is translated at Juriscom. Note in particular the paragraph near the bottom:
Orders the pursuit of this proceeding at the hearing of Monday July 24, 200 at 14:00 (Chambers of Deputy Chief Justice Gomez), during to which Yahoo! Inc. shall submit to the measures that they shall take to put an end to the damage and the nuisance suffered by the plaintiffs and to prevent any new incidences of nuisance.
Said 'damage and nuisance' being the sale of Nazi material (or anything resembling it) at yahoo.com. It is interesting to note that the ruling orders much greater restrictions on yahoo.com than it does on yahoo.fr.
The swastika traditionally has either chirality, and both had the same meaning. Hitler settled on one mirror image over the other, for no discernable reason.
It's up to the U.S. to decide whether it wants laws against purchasing kiddie porn. Which I believe it has, just as France has laws against purchasing a wide range of Nazi-realted material.
The order was slightly ambiguous, at least in translation. What judge Gomez says he really meant was that Yahoo had to either stop people from auctioning Nazi-related items in California, or prevent anyone in France and French citizens abroad from accessing yahoo.com. Faced with the choice between the very difficult and the absolutely impossible, Yahoo made the choice to do the former.
The fact that Yahoo! has a French subsidiary serves merely to confuse the issue. It confused Yahoo!, who like everyone else (except the judge) thought the original order applied to yahoo.fr. Yahoo! could close down its subsidiary tomorrow, but that would make no difference to this case, which concerns English language web content hosted in California.
If Napster advertised 'Master Of Puppets' as their own material, and charged customers for the 'right' to download it, then yes, it would be a Napster-like issue.
>I think it is reasonable for a domain name that contains a trademarked word within X levels of a TLD to be reserved for that trademark holder. Why not?
I think it is very unreasonable. A domain name like 'oxford' should not be banned because it contains the word 'ford'. Even for domain names which are trademarks, it is common for several entities to register the same trademark. And trademark registries are national, so this would not be relevant to crucial domains like.com,.org, and.net, not to mention the proposed new TLDs.
"First come, first serve" is the fundamental principle of trademark law in every country (that has it), so it is quite ironic to claim that the two are in conflict.
You can put a big sign on your shop saying 'Nissan', but that doesn't mean signwriting is fundamentally in conflict with trademark law in most countries. You can put ads in your local newspaper calling your business 'Nissan', but that doesn't mean a free press is fundamentally in conflict with trademark law in most countries. You can put a up a website which describes itself as 'The official Nissan Home Page', but that doesn't mean the world wide web is fundamentally in conflict with trademark law in most countries.
The purpose of trademark law is to prevent counterfeiters passing themselves off as, say, 'Nissan Cars'. The purpose of the DNS system is to ensure the same domain always points to the same organisation, so if you go to www.linux.com you can expect to read about an operating system and not a washing powder. These functions are quite different and should remain separate. Merging them, as you propose, would be impossible precisely because of international differences in trademark law.
On a technical note, those are parts of the proposal, not provisi0ns of the directive. More seriously, some of these paraphrases are very misleading.
Section 26 does not specify that personal backups should be legal or illegal, either in analogue or digital form. It says that member states may decide to treat them differently. For example, they may choose to allow unlimited personal taping of music, and compensate copyright holders through a tax on blank media, but place stricter limits on MP3 copying.
Section 27 of the proposal explicitly deals only with copying. The directive explains in many places that it is only concerned with protecting copyright and associated rights, as the WIPO copyright treaty requires. Mind you, I haven't researched the sui generis right in 96/9/EC, and see below for confusion about 'access'.
Your paraphrase of 28 is reasonable, except that libraries will not be forbidden to transmit digital works internally.
Other interesting sections are:
30bis, which endorses unlicensed DVD players and cryptographic research:
(30bis) Whereas such a legal protection should be provided to technological measures that
effectively inhibit and/or prevent the infringement of any copyright, rights related
to copyright or
sui generis rights provided by law, without, however, preventing
the normal operation of electronic equipment and its technological development;
whereas such legal protection implies no obligation to design devices, products,
components or services to correspond to technological measures; whereas such
legal protection should respect proportionality and should not prohibit those
devices or activities which have a commercially significant purpose or use other
than to circumvent the technical protection; whereas, in particular, this protection
should not hinder research into cryptography;
Article 5.1, which allows, for example, decrypting a DVD in order to play it.
1. Temporary acts of reproduction referred to in Article 2, such as transient and
incidental acts of reproduction which are an integral and essential part of a
technological process, including those which facilitate effective functioning of
transmission systems, whose sole purpose is to enable use to be made of a work
or other subject matter, and which have no independent economic significance,
shall be exempted from the right set out in Article 2.
The truly bizarre Article 6.3:
3. The expression "technological measures", as used in this Article, means any
technology, device or component that, in the normal course of its operation, is
designed to prevent or inhibit the infringement of any copyright or any right
related to copyright as provided by law or the
sui generis right provided for in
Chapter III of European Parliament and Council Directive 96/9/EC.
Technological measures shall be deemed "effective" where the access to or use
of a protected work or other subject matter is controlled through application of
an access code or any other type of protection process which achieves the
protection objective in an operational and reliable manner with the authority of
the rightholders. Such measures may include decryption, descrambling or other
transformation of the work or other subject matter.
So a "technological measure" is a system to protect copyright and other legal rights (like a watermark but unlike CSS, for example). This accords with the WIPO copyright treaty and the recent South Australian law, whereas the DMCA and the original draft directive sought to protect access controls which media companies could use to grant themselves arbitrary 'rights'. However, a measure is only deemed "effective", and thus worthy of legal protection, if it also prevents "access... or use". So anti-copying technology is not legally protected. Anti-use technology is protected, but only if copyright is infringed - and using a work you own in normal ways does not infringe anyone's rights. It looks like you have to restrict both copying and
25 to 30 random printable characters will contain about 256 bits of entropy, about the same as 2 limericks. Ordinary English text is reckoned to contain about 1 bit per letter in theory (an attack by some sophisticated AI which understands English perfectly), but I guess about 2 bits per letter against state-of-the art passphrase crackers.
The following passphrases have about the same theoretical entropy. I don't know about you, but I would find the second much easier to recall, and in practice it should be considerably stronger.
f8Ikz\o%0F
Should tepid raths odiferously rush
Spring thy lemon henchdog from a busch
Avoid obscenities, because every script kiddie knows that they are used MUCH more frequently than most words. Some years ago dirty passwords were recommended by the US government on the grounds that they are not found in dictionaries, and users would be ashamed to write them down. Both these considerations are demonstrably false.
This needs to change. There needs to be a
grade of software that its programmers will
stand behind. It should be governed
by slow and laborious reviews, written by
programmers certified for it. In other words,
we need a software version of the rigors of
civil engineering.
Other people had exactly the same idea 25 years ago. Just add precise specifications and rigorous testing and you have software engineering. Software engineering is responsible for the very large amounts of highly reliable software used in applications like avionics.
BAe and Boeing are not in the business of rushing out beta code to the masses, littered with disclaimers. This system would have been developed to a precise specification, with a careful methodology including strict programming rules, rigorous reviews and intensive testing. It failed nevertheless. No doubt the reason will be revealed.
Re:Highly dubious idea.
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NSA Inside?
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Yes, I can see the NSA allowing a bunch of freelance anarchists, Libertarians, conspiracy theorists and potential hacktivists write mission-critical code for them.
You mean the people who wrote the rest of the Linux kernel?
More pertinently, what about the hundred years' war? There was the usual hypocritical pious propaganda spouted by both sides, particularly pro and anti Joan of Arc. But religion had little direct influence on the war.
Slashdot Mirror
>IANAL but I think that smashing up your own home is illegal in the UK.
IANAL, but I've had builders round often enough without being prosecuted. If you don't own your home it's generally illegal. If you do it's generally legal.
>Courts do not need the Hague Treaty today to enforce foreign judgments, in every legal system there is allready mechanisms peculiar to the system that allow for enforcement of a foreign court decision.
... in the State addressed' and 'manifestly incompatible with the public policy' are good ones. But 'the US interest' is not one of them.
This is true, but the Hague treaty is about jurisdiction. At the moment, US courts do not recognise Chinese courts' jurisdiction over political speech in the US which undermines the Chinese government. The Hague treaty would force them to do so (Article 10, torts). There are several potential opt-outs in Article 28. 'inconsistent with a judgment rendered
I don't think that Americans have very much to worry about this treaty, because they are lucky enough to enjoy an almost unique constitutional protection for political speech and unlucky enough to already suffer from most of the odious commercial laws which the treaty would propagate. It was therefore misguided (not to mention very rude) of RMS to address his comments only to US residents, but apart from that I think his warning was well-founded.
>It might be a good idea to learn the difference between "legal" and "tolerated thus seldom prosecuted". Very few countries and states actually allow prostitution, in practice.
Prostitution is legal in most African, Asian and European countries, and I believe some US states. Prostitution is allowed in practice in many more states, including most of the Americas and some comparatively moralist Muslim countries ('temporary marriage').
Most of it was written to comply with the WIPO treaty. The unreasonable bits were written to comply with the MPAA's lobbyists.
>The judge never asked for an impossibility: to block all potential French customers from the Nazi sites
Yes he did. Twice. Read the judgements.
I have been unable to decide exactly what parts of your comment were in earnest and which were ironic.
>The US will use that as a way to strongarm all nations into becoming Starbucks-drinking SUV-driving commercial-centric (read corporate-capitalistic) satellite-states of the US, ensuring basic human rights, work rights, and voting rights.
How on Earth does buying US products provide one with human rights? When the US government has intervened to protect the interests of American companies (very often) it has infringed and destroyed human rights more often than it has upheld and bolstered them. Do you think bug US corporations are going to lobby for better employment rights for their third world workers? Currently they are fighting tooth and nail at the WTO against such rights.
>Many (most? All?) The major news outlets are owned by the companies that are trying to push these sorts of restrictions through...
Are you sure? (Quotes, please.) These companies won't be allowed to publish anything other than the Koran without being sued by the Taliban. (Well, they will because the Taliban isn't internationally recognised, but you get the point.)
I don't think the Swedes have much to fear. The US government can already rewrite their constitution at the whim of the Church of Scientology. How much worse could it get?
However, it was known in 1941 from Enigma decrypts that German forces were massacring huge numbers of Jews (and others) in the Soviet Union. Churchill publicised these crimes by describing them on the BBC World Service, although this risked exposing the success of his cryptanalysts. He judged that warning European Jews, and playing his strongest propaganda card, justified the gamble. Whether the average American believed these stories, or even listened to them, I cannot say.
>Remember the French fleet at Malta...
I thought it was somewhere in Algeria. Malta was part of the British Empire.
>But before the French fleet was destroyed, it had one battle success (it's only one). This was against the naval forces supplying Patton who attempted to cut off Rommel's North Africa corp...
Are you referring to General Patton of the USA? What was he doing fighting Rommel more than two years before America entered the war?
Yahoo! could spin off yahoo.fr, like it did with yahoo.co.uk. I expect it will do so, once market conditions are more favourable (yahoo.co.uk went public when the dotcom bubble was still swelling). If the French courts go on attacking yahoo.com, they might do it sooner.
The report shown to the court was written only by the French expert, and neither of the other two agreed with it. The disagreement was more legal than technical - the French witness thought that a ruling ordering Yahoo! to do all it reasonably could would be enough to enforce the law, but the other two felt that it was pointless to require Yahoo! to spend such effort on measures which can be bypassed in a few seconds (say, through www.safeweb.com).
Having read the optimistic report from the dissenting expert, Judge Gomez decided to repeat his original ruling. This required Yahoo! to block any Nazi memorabilia advertisments from absolutely everyone in France, and all French citzens overseas. Not to take the measures the report proposed, but to set up the magic filter which everyone agreed was impossible.
The second judgement of 20th November 2000 is translated at the Center For Democracy & Technology. It orders Yahoo! to comply with the original order (p20):
The original order is translated at Juriscom. Note in particular the paragraph near the bottom: Said 'damage and nuisance' being the sale of Nazi material (or anything resembling it) at yahoo.com. It is interesting to note that the ruling orders much greater restrictions on yahoo.com than it does on yahoo.fr.The swastika traditionally has either chirality, and both had the same meaning. Hitler settled on one mirror image over the other, for no discernable reason.
It's up to the U.S. to decide whether it wants laws against purchasing kiddie porn. Which I believe it has, just as France has laws against purchasing a wide range of Nazi-realted material.
The order was slightly ambiguous, at least in translation. What judge Gomez says he really meant was that Yahoo had to either stop people from auctioning Nazi-related items in California, or prevent anyone in France and French citizens abroad from accessing yahoo.com. Faced with the choice between the very difficult and the absolutely impossible, Yahoo made the choice to do the former.
The fact that Yahoo! has a French subsidiary serves merely to confuse the issue. It confused Yahoo!, who like everyone else (except the judge) thought the original order applied to yahoo.fr. Yahoo! could close down its subsidiary tomorrow, but that would make no difference to this case, which concerns English language web content hosted in California.
He is refusing to licence his work, mainly on the grounds that he believes Vidomi is illegal.
If Napster advertised 'Master Of Puppets' as their own material, and charged customers for the 'right' to download it, then yes, it would be a Napster-like issue.
>I think it is reasonable for a domain name that contains a trademarked word within X levels of a TLD to be reserved for that trademark holder. Why not?
.com, .org, and .net, not to mention the proposed new TLDs.
I think it is very unreasonable. A domain name like 'oxford' should not be banned because it contains the word 'ford'. Even for domain names which are trademarks, it is common for several entities to register the same trademark. And trademark registries are national, so this would not be relevant to crucial domains like
"First come, first serve" is the fundamental principle of trademark law in every country (that has it), so it is quite ironic to claim that the two are in conflict.
You can put a big sign on your shop saying 'Nissan', but that doesn't mean signwriting is fundamentally in conflict with trademark law in most countries. You can put ads in your local newspaper calling your business 'Nissan', but that doesn't mean a free press is fundamentally in conflict with trademark law in most countries. You can put a up a website which describes itself as 'The official Nissan Home Page', but that doesn't mean the world wide web is fundamentally in conflict with trademark law in most countries.
The purpose of trademark law is to prevent counterfeiters passing themselves off as, say, 'Nissan Cars'. The purpose of the DNS system is to ensure the same domain always points to the same organisation, so if you go to www.linux.com you can expect to read about an operating system and not a washing powder. These functions are quite different and should remain separate. Merging them, as you propose, would be impossible precisely because of international differences in trademark law.
Section 26 does not specify that personal backups should be legal or illegal, either in analogue or digital form. It says that member states may decide to treat them differently. For example, they may choose to allow unlimited personal taping of music, and compensate copyright holders through a tax on blank media, but place stricter limits on MP3 copying.
Section 27 of the proposal explicitly deals only with copying. The directive explains in many places that it is only concerned with protecting copyright and associated rights, as the WIPO copyright treaty requires. Mind you, I haven't researched the sui generis right in 96/9/EC, and see below for confusion about 'access'.
Your paraphrase of 28 is reasonable, except that libraries will not be forbidden to transmit digital works internally.
Other interesting sections are:
I'm glad that someone knows the meaning of the term 'voluntarily'.
25 to 30 random printable characters will contain about 256 bits of entropy, about the same as 2 limericks. Ordinary English text is reckoned to contain about 1 bit per letter in theory (an attack by some sophisticated AI which understands English perfectly), but I guess about 2 bits per letter against state-of-the art passphrase crackers.
The following passphrases have about the same theoretical entropy. I don't know about you, but I would find the second much easier to recall, and in practice it should be considerably stronger.
f8Ikz\o%0F
Should tepid raths odiferously rush
Spring thy lemon henchdog from a busch
Avoid obscenities, because every script kiddie knows that they are used MUCH more frequently than most words. Some years ago dirty passwords were recommended by the US government on the grounds that they are not found in dictionaries, and users would be ashamed to write them down. Both these considerations are demonstrably false.
Other people had exactly the same idea 25 years ago. Just add precise specifications and rigorous testing and you have software engineering. Software engineering is responsible for the very large amounts of highly reliable software used in applications like avionics.
BAe and Boeing are not in the business of rushing out beta code to the masses, littered with disclaimers. This system would have been developed to a precise specification, with a careful methodology including strict programming rules, rigorous reviews and intensive testing. It failed nevertheless. No doubt the reason will be revealed.
You mean the people who wrote the rest of the Linux kernel?
>How about the 100 years war?
More pertinently, what about the hundred years' war? There was the usual hypocritical pious propaganda spouted by both sides, particularly pro and anti Joan of Arc. But religion had little direct influence on the war.