* Simply stopping the infringement at this point might be enough to resolve the matter * You should re-enforce your organizations computer/network use policies (and ensure that you have one) * You might consider disciplining the responsible person if you don't think a word in their ear will be enough to prevent this re-occurring
The text in TFS although written in a very legal style does not seem to imply further action is being taken, yet.
Make sure this gets mainstream press coverage. Be sure to sensationalize it and compare it to the RIAA. Watch them back down quickly.
Wow, an alleged victim of piracy has informed an organization that one of their members is causing them harm. Quite an outrage! What would you have them do?
As far as I can see they informed the org of the problem and provided enough information so that the problem could be rectified. Seems quite reasonable. Are they suing or demanding settlements? The summary does not indicate so. If they've received notice and continue to do nothing about it and the infringement continues then it probably becomes a case of negligent or willful infringement (IANAL).
At some point people uploading copyright works may have to face the consequences of doing so. It appears that the only consequence facing these guys so far is that they might have to investigate why their network is being used for P2P, and that's hardly the fault of the ESA (whoever they are). If someone is inside your network transferring all kinds of things to anyone and you don't know about it or ignore the situation you could have big problems on your hands.
"The whole idea of prison" is a bit messed up though, let's be honest. It's basically a society of people enforcing its rules on every individual, yet if you're an individual who doesn't particularly wish to abide by the rules of society you don't exactly have a choice to not be a part of society and be free from "the law".
Prison has a couple of purposes: * Remove people who would endanger a society from it * Punishment
The latter doesn't necessarily have to mean locking someone up for years of their life in a tiny concrete room. The latter, well this is really just the punishment we've created.
And when you try to place societies punishment on those who have already been outcast and didn't even play by "the rules" beforehand, well.. what do you expect?
I wouldn't call prison "fair" in any sense of the word. "Cruel" in many cases certainly.
Unless they're actually using cell phones to do harm the ability to communicate is something that I would think improves their rehabilitation. Inmates are afterall human beings.
On the other hand maybe we should just chain them all to the wall, feed them gruel and have them shit in a bucket. Afterall, the whole idea of prison is you do not get to do whatever you want, right?
wget and curl may store cookies, but how would you perform the opt-out procedure in these clients anyway?;)
My understanding is that you have to opt-out in every client that you use on every system that you own and ensure that the opt-out cookie does not expire and is never cleared. Ironically it's likely that certain pro-privacy software will clear cookies, including the option in Firefox to clear private data on exit.
It's certainly an interesting solution from the good folks at Phorm and BT for giving subscribers a "choice", wouldn't you agree?
DRM is bad, I do not want to support a company that buys into the whole attempt to control what I can and can not do on my computer.
Technically they're controlling what you can and cannot do with content and they've already been doing that for years with FairPlay. If you don't want to support them over HDCP then you shouldn't want to support them anyway because of FairPlay. The recording industry might tell them that they need DRM but I doubt they tell them not to license it to anyone else.
When are you liable for what your software does? I can't really think of a single, even anecdotical, incident where a software company could have been held liable for whatever their product barfed.
Sure, but most products, even completely broken ones, don't go around calling other peoples products malware:)
If some AV company keeps identifying you as malware, get into contact with them and provide them with samples to whitelist.
On this point, you'd think that MS would make it easier on the AV's in order to prevent this kind of thing by digitally signing their libraries but I just found that user32.dll is not digitally signed. As far as getting in touch with two-dozen AV vendors any time you update any one of your libraries: yeah, right! IMHO all vendors should be required to provide a means of contact dedicated to parties suffering false positives and there should be an industry standard response time for addressing such problems. If you're going to create/distribute/sell software that potentially alerts against and disables other vendors products the onus is on you to provide reasonable remediation.
Although this has a funny side, the impact of anti-virus software these days can be quite nasty. I'm personally an advocate of anti-virus software for the vast majority of people out there who are not specialists in computer security and really don't have much reason to keep track of all the latest exploits (technical or people-based). Good anti-virus software strikes an appropriate balance between a low impact on user experience and providing a reasonable level of protection.
However, count yourself lucky if you don't end up on the wrong end of today's anti-virus products. Here we have a story about one product warning users about an essential file for their OS and warning them to remove it. I've seen similar problems with other legitimate software on my system and my vendor doesn't provide any clear way of submitting a file for analysis to have their defintions corrected unless I take action in the software to quarantine it first, which obviously, knowing the file is fine, I don't want to do.
I also work at a company that distributes software to millions of people every month. It is rare that we can go more than a couple of months these days without some anti-virus package telling users that some component of our software or installers contains a virus, which is completely untrue. And when this happens there is no solution to the problem. I have spent hours on the phone trying to reach several different vendors on behalf of our users before trying to get them to fix their products. It's usually impossible to get through to anyone who can actually help. You can submit a file for analysis to have it verified as clean and hope that the vendor will correct their definitions. This can take 24-48 hours, meanwhile hundreds of thousands of your customers are being falsely informed that there is a virus in your product. And no matter your reputation people tend to lose trust when there is a big red box on their screen warning them about viruses.
After dealing with this time and time again I've come to the conclusion that it's simply best to wait for end-users themselves to complain in enough volume to their AV vendors to have these problems corrected. Certainly I have never found any other solution that works faster. And still, the same vendor may falsely flag the same software just months later. You can't even QA against every anti-virus package out there, some packages update their definitions every three hours, so you can only ever know if you'll flag an AV detection at the instant of testing and even if you do know you're getting flagged you have the same problem - no way to resolve the issue with the vendor.
Imagine the consequences to a person who kept falsely telling millions of people your product would infect their computers. It would surely be grounds for libel.
Again, I believe that AV software can be both useful and valuable. But the AV industry itself is a menace and vendors are often unaccountable for their actions.
Let's all compare the price of bandwidth technology and services to South Africa, which is clearly similar in terms of technology, development, architecture, services, service density, e-tailers, and so forth. Makes a whole lot of sense. Maybe in 10-15 years time when you've got used to unlimited broadband and cable and your ISPs start throttling your traffic, dropping packets, killing connections, imposing caps and raising prices someone from another developing nation can ask you to cry them a river.
Back to the US: It's ridiculous that the ISPs can't/won't upgrade their infrastructure to cope with rising demand for bandwidth and instead degrade service and (likely) increase prices. $1/GB is unreasonable. I hope the government investigates the cost to industry growth and development in terms of limiting the adoption of services like Netflix online and other high bandwidth services. Of course, some of these ISPs have a vested interested in making services like Netflix less likely to succeed, just as they had an interest in shutting down their usenet services completely unrelated to protecting children.
In the interest of protecting competition and consumer choice I'd like to see regulation preventing these kind of caps and/or charges in areas where two or fewer ISPs constitute a regional monopoly on internet services.
He copied people's private info to his personal computer. Who knows where it could end up from there?
Yes, and who knows where it might end up being accessible to "thousands of students, faculty and employees" if nobody ever reported the problem?
Fair enough, the law is the law. If you use someone else's password you've accessed a system in an unauthorized manner whether you copy a file or not. In fact if there is any doubt that you *were* authorized to use that password then you could argue whoever made the file accessible inherently granted you authorization to access it. But let's have some common sense here: by shooting the messenger they're essentially making fear/obscurity their main security measure, and that's exactly what landed them in this situation in the first place.
Does anyone know if the school is facing charges or a suit for breaking data protection laws btw?
* C & C++ * DirectX & OpenGL, Pixel shader programming * Physics, Matrix transformations, quaternions * Collision detection for various types of primitives and response * Audio programming * Game level design, storyboarding * 3D object design and animation * Performance optimization techniques including spatial partitioning, level of detail objects, fast motion blur, fast shadow mapping, and more * World auto-generation, map editors and scripting * Using game engine SDKs * Writing for portability * Developing for constrained systems (consoles) incl. fixed point maths.. and more.
"Game-related" courses can be very involved and just as valid as any other CS degree teaching many of the same concepts and APIs. It's a shame that some people hear the word "game" and become dismissive.
The same way that distributing a program under the GPL is legitimate if you provide the source, but it violates the license if you don't provide the source.
That's not what the GPL says. It says you must provide the source if it is requested.
The GPL says, "You can only distribute the program if you provide the source."
And there is the important consideration. In that case you have actually distributed a copy to another person. In the case of WoWGlyder you have not.
That clear it up for you?
No, it does not, because loading something into memory on the same system should not violate copyright. Distributing it to a third party should be a violation. Separately, if you can load something into memory once without violating copyright you should be able to load it into memory a dozen times without violating copyright.
None of this provides an actual copy of the software to anyone.
Can you explain how loading a copy of your software into memory infringes on your copyright? If I load a million copies of your software into my computers memory have I infringed your copyright a million times? Can you estimate the damages I would need to pay you for loading a copy of World of Warcraft into my computers memory a million times using an unauthorized method?
The size difference of the data files from 480p to 720p to 1080p shouldn't be discounted.
I really doubt the Blu-Ray player is going to be downloading additional high quality 1080p content. For that to work you would need every Blu-Ray owner to have a reliable high speed internet connection or the experience would be ass.
All of the "essential" video content should be on the disc, storage is not really an issue. Blu-Ray titles seem to be encoded at exorbitant data rates, which is great for quality, but there is headroom for plenty of extra features.
Maybe there are protected features on the disc that are unlocked by accessing a DRM key online? I could also see galleries, music, directors commentary, and additional 480 streaming content (e.g. trailers) working just fine in most cases.
The details of what's being downloaded must be out there somewhere..
It would be easier for more story submitters to do the same thing in future if comments carried over from submissions to stories, and if you had a reasonable chance to review what the Slashdot editors did to your summary before it went live, or if you even knew in how many hours it might actually go live once it's modded up into a story.
This does not sound like a subscription issue to me. Download once does not imply subscription.
What it does sound like is more apps/functionality being secured by Genuine Advantage. I wonder if these apps will also become part of the top pricing tier SKUs after MS failed to deliver much of interest to Vista Ultimate users.
For the most part, the only thing DRM accomplishes is that, forcing the 'legitimate' consumer to purchase ever more copies of a work they already own copies.
You don't own it. It's hard to argue that you even own a license to it.
It is quite a funny concept that anything protected by authentication-based DRM can ever be "sold", since your use of what you "bought" is entirely controlled by someone else.
All that you really "buy" when you pay for DRM'd content is the right to keep asking, "dear rights holder, can you please tell my device it's okay for me to watch this?", and after that you have to cross your fingers. In most cases the answer is going to be "yes", or the economy of the system will fail massively. However, nothing guarantees that the answer will be "yes", and here we are discussing just one instance where perhaps it should be but isn't.
I agree with the OP, nobody should be allowed to misrepresent a DRM-encumbered transaction as a sale. You don't have most of the rights, use-wise or other, that are normally associated with a sale.
I know some companies have protocols for handling FOSS software, but this should have never have happened if the employee had just turned to his company's legal department for obtaining software licenses.
Sometimes the process for purchase requests can be anal, as can be managers who are running a department on an overstretched budget. I'm not at all surprised employees find easier and more timely solutions to their problems.
That said, I agree with you. If you can't afford WinRAR there are other solutions that don't involve piracy.
Now how about you show us some information which proves your one data point reflects the entire US economy. You know, something tangible to refute the Labor Dept and TFA's quote from the VP & Principal Analyst of Forrester Research.
Sure, it's a bail out, but AIG's going to spend some big bucks paying it back or lose big time.
P:
Not only is the interest rate over 11%, but the Feds took a 79.9% equity stake in AIG. The US Taxpayer now owns 80 percent of AIG.
That's great. Let's hope it turns out to be worth something. AIG's stock price 52 week high was $70.13, and it's now trading for $2.69. It seems that investors didn't have too much confidence in it. Anyway, I suppose the feds won't let it go bust, but buying 80% of something is not a good deal if it's value continues to fall or it collapses altogether and defaults on that loan.
Slashdot Mirror
There is no reason for this crap to be on the Steam version.
There is no reason for this crap to be on any version.
TFA:
On the plus side, Rockstar says you can install the game as many times as you want, and on any number of PCs.
So what is it there for then? Something smells.
Get a lawyer and ask them for legal advice.
I'm no lawyer, but it seems to me that:
* Simply stopping the infringement at this point might be enough to resolve the matter
* You should re-enforce your organizations computer/network use policies (and ensure that you have one)
* You might consider disciplining the responsible person if you don't think a word in their ear will be enough to prevent this re-occurring
The text in TFS although written in a very legal style does not seem to imply further action is being taken, yet.
Make sure this gets mainstream press coverage. Be sure to sensationalize it and compare it to the RIAA. Watch them back down quickly.
Wow, an alleged victim of piracy has informed an organization that one of their members is causing them harm. Quite an outrage! What would you have them do?
As far as I can see they informed the org of the problem and provided enough information so that the problem could be rectified. Seems quite reasonable. Are they suing or demanding settlements? The summary does not indicate so. If they've received notice and continue to do nothing about it and the infringement continues then it probably becomes a case of negligent or willful infringement (IANAL).
At some point people uploading copyright works may have to face the consequences of doing so. It appears that the only consequence facing these guys so far is that they might have to investigate why their network is being used for P2P, and that's hardly the fault of the ESA (whoever they are). If someone is inside your network transferring all kinds of things to anyone and you don't know about it or ignore the situation you could have big problems on your hands.
"The whole idea of prison" is a bit messed up though, let's be honest. It's basically a society of people enforcing its rules on every individual, yet if you're an individual who doesn't particularly wish to abide by the rules of society you don't exactly have a choice to not be a part of society and be free from "the law".
Prison has a couple of purposes:
* Remove people who would endanger a society from it
* Punishment
The latter doesn't necessarily have to mean locking someone up for years of their life in a tiny concrete room. The latter, well this is really just the punishment we've created.
And when you try to place societies punishment on those who have already been outcast and didn't even play by "the rules" beforehand, well.. what do you expect?
I wouldn't call prison "fair" in any sense of the word. "Cruel" in many cases certainly.
Unless they're actually using cell phones to do harm the ability to communicate is something that I would think improves their rehabilitation. Inmates are afterall human beings.
On the other hand maybe we should just chain them all to the wall, feed them gruel and have them shit in a bucket. Afterall, the whole idea of prison is you do not get to do whatever you want, right?
wget and curl may store cookies, but how would you perform the opt-out procedure in these clients anyway? ;)
My understanding is that you have to opt-out in every client that you use on every system that you own and ensure that the opt-out cookie does not expire and is never cleared. Ironically it's likely that certain pro-privacy software will clear cookies, including the option in Firefox to clear private data on exit.
It's certainly an interesting solution from the good folks at Phorm and BT for giving subscribers a "choice", wouldn't you agree?
DRM is bad, I do not want to support a company that buys into the whole attempt to control what I can and can not do on my computer.
Technically they're controlling what you can and cannot do with content and they've already been doing that for years with FairPlay. If you don't want to support them over HDCP then you shouldn't want to support them anyway because of FairPlay. The recording industry might tell them that they need DRM but I doubt they tell them not to license it to anyone else.
According to the headline they do ;)
When are you liable for what your software does? I can't really think of a single, even anecdotical, incident where a software company could have been held liable for whatever their product barfed.
Sure, but most products, even completely broken ones, don't go around calling other peoples products malware :)
If some AV company keeps identifying you as malware, get into contact with them and provide them with samples to whitelist.
On this point, you'd think that MS would make it easier on the AV's in order to prevent this kind of thing by digitally signing their libraries but I just found that user32.dll is not digitally signed. As far as getting in touch with two-dozen AV vendors any time you update any one of your libraries: yeah, right! IMHO all vendors should be required to provide a means of contact dedicated to parties suffering false positives and there should be an industry standard response time for addressing such problems. If you're going to create/distribute/sell software that potentially alerts against and disables other vendors products the onus is on you to provide reasonable remediation.
Although this has a funny side, the impact of anti-virus software these days can be quite nasty. I'm personally an advocate of anti-virus software for the vast majority of people out there who are not specialists in computer security and really don't have much reason to keep track of all the latest exploits (technical or people-based). Good anti-virus software strikes an appropriate balance between a low impact on user experience and providing a reasonable level of protection.
However, count yourself lucky if you don't end up on the wrong end of today's anti-virus products. Here we have a story about one product warning users about an essential file for their OS and warning them to remove it. I've seen similar problems with other legitimate software on my system and my vendor doesn't provide any clear way of submitting a file for analysis to have their defintions corrected unless I take action in the software to quarantine it first, which obviously, knowing the file is fine, I don't want to do.
I also work at a company that distributes software to millions of people every month. It is rare that we can go more than a couple of months these days without some anti-virus package telling users that some component of our software or installers contains a virus, which is completely untrue. And when this happens there is no solution to the problem. I have spent hours on the phone trying to reach several different vendors on behalf of our users before trying to get them to fix their products. It's usually impossible to get through to anyone who can actually help. You can submit a file for analysis to have it verified as clean and hope that the vendor will correct their definitions. This can take 24-48 hours, meanwhile hundreds of thousands of your customers are being falsely informed that there is a virus in your product. And no matter your reputation people tend to lose trust when there is a big red box on their screen warning them about viruses.
After dealing with this time and time again I've come to the conclusion that it's simply best to wait for end-users themselves to complain in enough volume to their AV vendors to have these problems corrected. Certainly I have never found any other solution that works faster. And still, the same vendor may falsely flag the same software just months later. You can't even QA against every anti-virus package out there, some packages update their definitions every three hours, so you can only ever know if you'll flag an AV detection at the instant of testing and even if you do know you're getting flagged you have the same problem - no way to resolve the issue with the vendor.
Imagine the consequences to a person who kept falsely telling millions of people your product would infect their computers. It would surely be grounds for libel.
Again, I believe that AV software can be both useful and valuable. But the AV industry itself is a menace and vendors are often unaccountable for their actions.
Sure, it's old, but it was designed for remote administration back when dialup was popular. Nowadays it's open-source and still highly extensible:
http://bo2k.sourceforge.net/whatis.html
There are plenty of encryption and authentication plug-ins and it does some of what you ask.
DivX 7 uses MKV as its container will help promote MKV interoperability.
Yes,
Let's all compare the price of bandwidth technology and services to South Africa, which is clearly similar in terms of technology, development, architecture, services, service density, e-tailers, and so forth. Makes a whole lot of sense. Maybe in 10-15 years time when you've got used to unlimited broadband and cable and your ISPs start throttling your traffic, dropping packets, killing connections, imposing caps and raising prices someone from another developing nation can ask you to cry them a river.
Back to the US: It's ridiculous that the ISPs can't/won't upgrade their infrastructure to cope with rising demand for bandwidth and instead degrade service and (likely) increase prices. $1/GB is unreasonable. I hope the government investigates the cost to industry growth and development in terms of limiting the adoption of services like Netflix online and other high bandwidth services. Of course, some of these ISPs have a vested interested in making services like Netflix less likely to succeed, just as they had an interest in shutting down their usenet services completely unrelated to protecting children.
In the interest of protecting competition and consumer choice I'd like to see regulation preventing these kind of caps and/or charges in areas where two or fewer ISPs constitute a regional monopoly on internet services.
He copied people's private info to his personal computer. Who knows where it could end up from there?
Yes, and who knows where it might end up being accessible to "thousands of students, faculty and employees" if nobody ever reported the problem?
Fair enough, the law is the law. If you use someone else's password you've accessed a system in an unauthorized manner whether you copy a file or not. In fact if there is any doubt that you *were* authorized to use that password then you could argue whoever made the file accessible inherently granted you authorization to access it. But let's have some common sense here: by shooting the messenger they're essentially making fear/obscurity their main security measure, and that's exactly what landed them in this situation in the first place.
Does anyone know if the school is facing charges or a suit for breaking data protection laws btw?
A good game-related course may cover things like:
* C & C++ .. and more.
* DirectX & OpenGL, Pixel shader programming
* Physics, Matrix transformations, quaternions
* Collision detection for various types of primitives and response
* Audio programming
* Game level design, storyboarding
* 3D object design and animation
* Performance optimization techniques including spatial partitioning, level of detail objects, fast motion blur, fast shadow mapping, and more
* World auto-generation, map editors and scripting
* Using game engine SDKs
* Writing for portability
* Developing for constrained systems (consoles) incl. fixed point maths
"Game-related" courses can be very involved and just as valid as any other CS degree teaching many of the same concepts and APIs. It's a shame that some people hear the word "game" and become dismissive.
The same way that distributing a program under the GPL is legitimate if you provide the source, but it violates the license if you don't provide the source.
That's not what the GPL says. It says you must provide the source if it is requested.
The GPL says, "You can only distribute the program if you provide the source."
And there is the important consideration. In that case you have actually distributed a copy to another person. In the case of WoWGlyder you have not.
That clear it up for you?
No, it does not, because loading something into memory on the same system should not violate copyright. Distributing it to a third party should be a violation. Separately, if you can load something into memory once without violating copyright you should be able to load it into memory a dozen times without violating copyright.
None of this provides an actual copy of the software to anyone.
Can you explain how loading a copy of your software into memory infringes on your copyright? If I load a million copies of your software into my computers memory have I infringed your copyright a million times? Can you estimate the damages I would need to pay you for loading a copy of World of Warcraft into my computers memory a million times using an unauthorized method?
Thanks.
The size difference of the data files from 480p to 720p to 1080p shouldn't be discounted.
I really doubt the Blu-Ray player is going to be downloading additional high quality 1080p content. For that to work you would need every Blu-Ray owner to have a reliable high speed internet connection or the experience would be ass.
All of the "essential" video content should be on the disc, storage is not really an issue. Blu-Ray titles seem to be encoded at exorbitant data rates, which is great for quality, but there is headroom for plenty of extra features.
Maybe there are protected features on the disc that are unlocked by accessing a DRM key online? I could also see galleries, music, directors commentary, and additional 480 streaming content (e.g. trailers) working just fine in most cases.
The details of what's being downloaded must be out there somewhere..
Goto's aren't always bad.
You had wood? .. wait, on second thoughts I don't like where this is going ..
It would be easier for more story submitters to do the same thing in future if comments carried over from submissions to stories, and if you had a reasonable chance to review what the Slashdot editors did to your summary before it went live, or if you even knew in how many hours it might actually go live once it's modded up into a story.
This does not sound like a subscription issue to me. Download once does not imply subscription.
What it does sound like is more apps/functionality being secured by Genuine Advantage. I wonder if these apps will also become part of the top pricing tier SKUs after MS failed to deliver much of interest to Vista Ultimate users.
For the most part, the only thing DRM accomplishes is that, forcing the 'legitimate' consumer to purchase ever more copies of a work they already own copies.
You don't own it. It's hard to argue that you even own a license to it.
It is quite a funny concept that anything protected by authentication-based DRM can ever be "sold", since your use of what you "bought" is entirely controlled by someone else.
All that you really "buy" when you pay for DRM'd content is the right to keep asking, "dear rights holder, can you please tell my device it's okay for me to watch this?", and after that you have to cross your fingers. In most cases the answer is going to be "yes", or the economy of the system will fail massively. However, nothing guarantees that the answer will be "yes", and here we are discussing just one instance where perhaps it should be but isn't.
I agree with the OP, nobody should be allowed to misrepresent a DRM-encumbered transaction as a sale. You don't have most of the rights, use-wise or other, that are normally associated with a sale.
I know some companies have protocols for handling FOSS software, but this should have never have happened if the employee had just turned to his company's legal department for obtaining software licenses.
Sometimes the process for purchase requests can be anal, as can be managers who are running a department on an overstretched budget. I'm not at all surprised employees find easier and more timely solutions to their problems.
That said, I agree with you. If you can't afford WinRAR there are other solutions that don't involve piracy.
Now how about you show us some information which proves your one data point reflects the entire US economy.
You know, something tangible to refute the Labor Dept and TFA's quote from the VP & Principal Analyst of Forrester Research.
Put a ticket in.
GP:
Sure, it's a bail out, but AIG's going to spend some big bucks paying it back or lose big time.
P:
Not only is the interest rate over 11%, but the Feds took a 79.9% equity stake in AIG. The US Taxpayer now owns 80 percent of AIG.
That's great. Let's hope it turns out to be worth something. AIG's stock price 52 week high was $70.13, and it's now trading for $2.69. It seems that investors didn't have too much confidence in it. Anyway, I suppose the feds won't let it go bust, but buying 80% of something is not a good deal if it's value continues to fall or it collapses altogether and defaults on that loan.
Anyway, it was a joke, lighten up guys :)