I am not a lawyer, though I work with them and we work on this specific aspect in our jobs. Still, don't take this as legal advice or the absolute truth.
The real issue is that "Fair Use" is an affirmative defense the way it is written. This means that you can make that copy or excerpt that passage, and when the copyright owner's lawyer hunts you down, it's up to you to show the the court that your use is covered under fair use.
There exists no law requiring companies to make this easy on you. If they implement DRM, then even under the DMCA you should be able to circumvent a DRM mechanism for the purpose of fair use. However, if you distribute this tool, you may be liable for contributory copyright infringement that others commit, although this may be a hard case for the copyright owner to prove if the Morpheus case gets upheld.
Also note that there could be constitutional (1st Amendment) support for uses that are not covered under the fair use statute. However, this still does not prevent a company from attempting to prevent you from making copies through any technological means.
Inductive charging has been done. It would be nice to have 1 charger for all my devices, but it's no great innovation. I want to see a wireless device powered by radio waves.
There is such a thing as truely secure digital system, or at least secure enough that only a few governments can break in. Systems can be tamperproof through booby-trapping, shielding, etc. It's just ridiculously expensive to the point of being irrelavant in this context.
Your analog impossibility argument still holds, though.
They do have tons of non-infringing uses. As you suspected, they are simply high-pass filters, typically at 54Mhz. However, the people selling them as "get PPV for free" and the people using them for this purpose are clearly in the wrong.
In order to do a good job on your module, you need a solid understanding of how the components you directly interact with function. In addition, a superficial understanding of other components is useful.
For example, let's say you are working on the software for automatic transmission control in the car. You need an intimate understanding of the hardware you are running on, that's directly related to your job.
However, you also need a solid understanding of how the automatic transmission works. Understanding the mechanics of the gear change is important to understanding timing issues, errors that can occur, and how to deal with them.
It is very useful to have a good understanding of how a car works in general, to get an idea of how your product will be used. This allows you to optomize your product for likely scenarios.
Sometimes, for personal satisfaction, it is nice to know how the windshield wiper mechanism works, but it doesn't help you in any way to make your automatic transmission control better.
That problem can still be fixed fairly cheaply. Assuming the PCO has unoccupied channels, which is a pretty fair assumption, they can leave the adjacent channels to the DOCSIS downstream unoccupied. Then they can use any crappy bandpass filter for the upstream. $5 was a lowball assumption, I admit, but it's still significantly cheaper than setting up their own ISP.
Band pass filters are cheap... that's the $5 part I was talking about. You can even do it as a lowpass filter that cuts above 54Mhz. That will give you all of the DOCSIS channels without any of the video channels.
I don't see why a cable company wouldn't do that, since they would still be able to charge each customer individually for their connection. It's just a matter of working out the details with the people in charge. Of course, the people in charge have a way of being hesitant to try new things, but this one seems like it's incredibly easy for them.
yes, but he said that what he really wants to do is buy cable internet from his cable company. This is prohibited by his building.
A CMTS is very expensive (around $80k) and this solution is very cheap (around $5). Sure you have to buy connectivity from the cable company on top of that equipment cost, but we are still almost certainly ahead of the game buying from the cable company.
The only reason they would need a CMTS is if they wanted to get their own OC3 or DS3 or whatever and provide their own access. The poster simply wants to get cable internet from the local cable company. This cable company may be willing to feed them the DOCSIS portion of the cable spectrum, which the apartment complex could then do a reverse split into their own system.
The only problem with this scenario is that most PCOs (private cable operators) use the bare minimum amount of amplification needed for a decent signal and don't control signal leakage well. This means that the signal strength an carrier to noise ratio in the apartment may be insufficient. But this would be a problem whether or not the PCO installed their own CMTS.
You are misreading that circular. You are replacing the word author for copyright holder. If a work is copyrighted, the copyright holder is the only person who may authorize derivative works. If a work has fallen into the public domain, there is no copyright holder and anyone may produce a derivative work.
The other thing that circular says is that making small changes, such as adding a chaper, does not make your derivative work a new copyrightable work. However, if you take the plot and adapt it in a new manner, it is now a copyrightable derivative work. If the original work was still copyrighted, you would be at the mercy of the copyright holder still.
This is not the important question in their minds. The question is how much will their current profits suffer if much material is released into the public domain. This seems at first glance to be the same question, but think about it for a moment. If you could watch, for free, movies from the 1930's, would you pay to watch fewer movies from the 80's and 90's? Would you buy as new movies from '01 and '02? If people could make derivative works featuring the early Disney characters, would you necessarily watch the new ones produced by Disney?
The reasons that the public domain is valuable to us are the very same reasons why the new content producers fear it.
I have no contempt for humanity. Our goal is never security for security's sake. We could theoretically make a security system that was completely free of any holes, but it would undoubtedly be far to complex to actually accomplish the true goal of our organization. So we let security be a little more lax than that by means of calculated risks.
It is true that organizations that are very security conscious will have security guards who memorize everyone's face, name, and purpose, rather than using IDs that can be defeated. However, for most organizations security by this method is too expensive, and either there would be a way to bypass this security or communicating from this organization would be too cumbersome to accomplish one's job.
The point of this book is to make us aware of the potential security holes around us, not necessarily to eliminate them. The final part of the book focuses on how to identify information that demands a higher level of security and implement appropriate security procedures. It establishes a 4-level classification scheme (although 3 or 5 would be okay too). At the highest levels of security, a face-to-face or other strong identification method would be required. At the lower levels, something as simple as verifying a name would be acceptable. In the middle, one may verify a story by a third trusted party, for example.
The point is not that humanity is bad, just that one of our best qualities, desire to help others, can be turned into a weakness.
One log in is enough to create a backdoor. Furthermore, chances are the attacker knows exactly what they want to do and needs only one login to get the information they need. Finally, in the book, the caller had the combined excuse of a snowstorm and a weekend. That gives him 3 days to call up and request the combination on the SecurID of the operator, which is more than sufficient.
He wasn't allowed to talk about his own exploits, as part of his probation. So all of the stories are either fiction or someone else's story. Not to mention that he didn't cover any actual security holes except in passing. The point was to cover the human element, nothing else.
One of the anecdotes in this book exploits a SecurID, using a well-meaning 3rd party. Basically a caller poses as an employee when talking to an operator during a snowstorm. He says he needs to get some work done, but he left his SecurID on his desk. The operator doesn't want to go to the desk to get it, so instead he gives his own SecurID number and PIN to the caller. This was probably one of the most clever manipulations in the book.
Fundamentally, any time you have a human involved in a process, you have a potential security hole.
If you want to use it like a VCR, you can do so without a subscription. Just buy the TiVo and turn it on. But I really recommend the program guide - I love being able to say "record all the new Law&Orders" and then it also picks out all of the similar series to record if there is extra space on the hard drive.
Right, which was the point I was trying to make without beating anyone's head over it. Our "health care" costs are higher because their "taxes" are higher. Well, not entirely because of that, but it's one contributing factor.
That one is easy - malpractice suits. I'm going to be lazy and not look up the stats, but the majority of our health care costs in the US come from malpractice and insurance fraud. A family doctor who does no surgery and has no incidents that would cause him to be considered a risk for malpractice pays around $50,000/year for insurance. Surgeons will pay many hundreds of thousands.
Another difference is that we end up paying for medical research out of our health care costs, whereas in much of Europe, medical research is subsidized separately from the socialized health care system.
Porno is a little different from mainstream movies, though. People are unlikely to share videos because they don't want to admit to the world that they are into it. Few people would be ashamed to be seen in posession of the typical hollywood movie. You might get some ridicule from people over liking a chick flick, but that's not the same as having your mother find out you like chick-on-chick flicks.
With Firewire you won't get video overlays from your cable provider, though. For example, you will not get their program guide that appears on the bottom of the screen. The plus side is that you won't get their ads either. This is because they can't uncompress the signal, add the overlay, and recompress it because real-time compression is very expensive.
So in some ways firewire is better, but DVI really is ideal for a display-only device.
Regarding the integrated tuner phase-in, putting the demodulator and decompressor on the same chip is still cheaper than putting both of them together, so DVI will continue to be cheaper than firewire to implement on a display. Perhaps not by much though.
The cable companies agreed to put firewire on the boxes they provide to customers after a certain date. The also agreed that they will provide DVI after a certain later date, however it is in the cable company's interest to provide DVI as early as possible.
In turn, TV manufacturers agreed to put DVI on all HDTV sets they manufacture (subject to phase-in).
Generally speaking, you want DVI on the set because it's uncompressed and allows the set to be a little more dumb. However, you absolutely want firewire on a recorder because it is compressed, removing the requirement for a real-time HDTV MPEG-2 compressor on the recorder.
It is in violation of this license to have analog outputs on a display device. That is, a device which has the capability of recieving, decrypting, and visually displaying HDCP content. This is not a requirement on a source device. The cable box would be a source device, as it recieves its content through a means other than HDCP and transmits them via HDCP.
You would not be able to pass the signal through the TV to make it analog (except with a camcorder or some soldering), but you can certainly make a device that has both an HDCP output and an analog output.
Actually, being used to reading their Daily Digest, I just know it's available in all three. Personally, I tend to read the PDFs because they look the best and load fastest (even though I have a Windows PC with Office).
I'm not positive, but I heard somewhere that the FCC was entirely self-sufficient - deriving all of its money from regulatory fees and spectrum licensing. In fact, it gives money back to the federal government.
You could argue you are paying for this in your phone, cable, etc bills, but it's not from tax money.
Contrary to what other posters have said, DTV uses the same spectrum as ordinary VHF/UHF TV. However, the important part to note is that DTV allows for adjacent channels to be used and for channels used in neighboring towns to be used in your town too. This is very different than NTSC where there are lots of technical reasons why you can't use all of the channels at once.
These spaces in the middle could be used for more DTV stations in the future, or for more unlicensed bands. The FCC, realizing that we don't need more over-the-air stations, is considering opening that spectrum up for unlicensed uses.
Note that 6Mhz isn't a whole lot, it's smaller than one 802.11b channel, and much smaller than one 802.11a channel, but it's in a very good range.
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I am not a lawyer, though I work with them and we work on this specific aspect in our jobs. Still, don't take this as legal advice or the absolute truth.
The real issue is that "Fair Use" is an affirmative defense the way it is written. This means that you can make that copy or excerpt that passage, and when the copyright owner's lawyer hunts you down, it's up to you to show the the court that your use is covered under fair use.
There exists no law requiring companies to make this easy on you. If they implement DRM, then even under the DMCA you should be able to circumvent a DRM mechanism for the purpose of fair use. However, if you distribute this tool, you may be liable for contributory copyright infringement that others commit, although this may be a hard case for the copyright owner to prove if the Morpheus case gets upheld.
Also note that there could be constitutional (1st Amendment) support for uses that are not covered under the fair use statute. However, this still does not prevent a company from attempting to prevent you from making copies through any technological means.
-Alison
Inductive charging has been done. It would be nice to have 1 charger for all my devices, but it's no great innovation. I want to see a wireless device powered by radio waves.
-Alison
There is such a thing as truely secure digital system, or at least secure enough that only a few governments can break in. Systems can be tamperproof through booby-trapping, shielding, etc. It's just ridiculously expensive to the point of being irrelavant in this context.
Your analog impossibility argument still holds, though.
-Alison
They do have tons of non-infringing uses. As you suspected, they are simply high-pass filters, typically at 54Mhz. However, the people selling them as "get PPV for free" and the people using them for this purpose are clearly in the wrong.
In this case, it is exactly the same as P2P.
-Alison
In order to do a good job on your module, you need a solid understanding of how the components you directly interact with function. In addition, a superficial understanding of other components is useful.
For example, let's say you are working on the software for automatic transmission control in the car. You need an intimate understanding of the hardware you are running on, that's directly related to your job.
However, you also need a solid understanding of how the automatic transmission works. Understanding the mechanics of the gear change is important to understanding timing issues, errors that can occur, and how to deal with them.
It is very useful to have a good understanding of how a car works in general, to get an idea of how your product will be used. This allows you to optomize your product for likely scenarios.
Sometimes, for personal satisfaction, it is nice to know how the windshield wiper mechanism works, but it doesn't help you in any way to make your automatic transmission control better.
-Alison
That problem can still be fixed fairly cheaply. Assuming the PCO has unoccupied channels, which is a pretty fair assumption, they can leave the adjacent channels to the DOCSIS downstream unoccupied. Then they can use any crappy bandpass filter for the upstream. $5 was a lowball assumption, I admit, but it's still significantly cheaper than setting up their own ISP.
-Alison
Band pass filters are cheap... that's the $5 part I was talking about. You can even do it as a lowpass filter that cuts above 54Mhz. That will give you all of the DOCSIS channels without any of the video channels.
I don't see why a cable company wouldn't do that, since they would still be able to charge each customer individually for their connection. It's just a matter of working out the details with the people in charge. Of course, the people in charge have a way of being hesitant to try new things, but this one seems like it's incredibly easy for them.
-Alison
yes, but he said that what he really wants to do is buy cable internet from his cable company. This is prohibited by his building.
A CMTS is very expensive (around $80k) and this solution is very cheap (around $5). Sure you have to buy connectivity from the cable company on top of that equipment cost, but we are still almost certainly ahead of the game buying from the cable company.
-Alison
The only reason they would need a CMTS is if they wanted to get their own OC3 or DS3 or whatever and provide their own access. The poster simply wants to get cable internet from the local cable company. This cable company may be willing to feed them the DOCSIS portion of the cable spectrum, which the apartment complex could then do a reverse split into their own system.
The only problem with this scenario is that most PCOs (private cable operators) use the bare minimum amount of amplification needed for a decent signal and don't control signal leakage well. This means that the signal strength an carrier to noise ratio in the apartment may be insufficient. But this would be a problem whether or not the PCO installed their own CMTS.
-Alison
You are misreading that circular. You are replacing the word author for copyright holder. If a work is copyrighted, the copyright holder is the only person who may authorize derivative works. If a work has fallen into the public domain, there is no copyright holder and anyone may produce a derivative work.
The other thing that circular says is that making small changes, such as adding a chaper, does not make your derivative work a new copyrightable work. However, if you take the plot and adapt it in a new manner, it is now a copyrightable derivative work. If the original work was still copyrighted, you would be at the mercy of the copyright holder still.
-Alison
This is not the important question in their minds. The question is how much will their current profits suffer if much material is released into the public domain. This seems at first glance to be the same question, but think about it for a moment. If you could watch, for free, movies from the 1930's, would you pay to watch fewer movies from the 80's and 90's? Would you buy as new movies from '01 and '02? If people could make derivative works featuring the early Disney characters, would you necessarily watch the new ones produced by Disney?
The reasons that the public domain is valuable to us are the very same reasons why the new content producers fear it.
-Alison
I have no contempt for humanity. Our goal is never security for security's sake. We could theoretically make a security system that was completely free of any holes, but it would undoubtedly be far to complex to actually accomplish the true goal of our organization. So we let security be a little more lax than that by means of calculated risks.
It is true that organizations that are very security conscious will have security guards who memorize everyone's face, name, and purpose, rather than using IDs that can be defeated. However, for most organizations security by this method is too expensive, and either there would be a way to bypass this security or communicating from this organization would be too cumbersome to accomplish one's job.
The point of this book is to make us aware of the potential security holes around us, not necessarily to eliminate them. The final part of the book focuses on how to identify information that demands a higher level of security and implement appropriate security procedures. It establishes a 4-level classification scheme (although 3 or 5 would be okay too). At the highest levels of security, a face-to-face or other strong identification method would be required. At the lower levels, something as simple as verifying a name would be acceptable. In the middle, one may verify a story by a third trusted party, for example.
The point is not that humanity is bad, just that one of our best qualities, desire to help others, can be turned into a weakness.
-Alison
One log in is enough to create a backdoor. Furthermore, chances are the attacker knows exactly what they want to do and needs only one login to get the information they need. Finally, in the book, the caller had the combined excuse of a snowstorm and a weekend. That gives him 3 days to call up and request the combination on the SecurID of the operator, which is more than sufficient.
-Alison
He wasn't allowed to talk about his own exploits, as part of his probation. So all of the stories are either fiction or someone else's story. Not to mention that he didn't cover any actual security holes except in passing. The point was to cover the human element, nothing else.
-Alison
One of the anecdotes in this book exploits a SecurID, using a well-meaning 3rd party. Basically a caller poses as an employee when talking to an operator during a snowstorm. He says he needs to get some work done, but he left his SecurID on his desk. The operator doesn't want to go to the desk to get it, so instead he gives his own SecurID number and PIN to the caller. This was probably one of the most clever manipulations in the book.
Fundamentally, any time you have a human involved in a process, you have a potential security hole.
-Alison
If you want to use it like a VCR, you can do so without a subscription. Just buy the TiVo and turn it on. But I really recommend the program guide - I love being able to say "record all the new Law&Orders" and then it also picks out all of the similar series to record if there is extra space on the hard drive.
-Alison
Right, which was the point I was trying to make without beating anyone's head over it. Our "health care" costs are higher because their "taxes" are higher. Well, not entirely because of that, but it's one contributing factor.
-Alison
That one is easy - malpractice suits. I'm going to be lazy and not look up the stats, but the majority of our health care costs in the US come from malpractice and insurance fraud. A family doctor who does no surgery and has no incidents that would cause him to be considered a risk for malpractice pays around $50,000/year for insurance. Surgeons will pay many hundreds of thousands.
Another difference is that we end up paying for medical research out of our health care costs, whereas in much of Europe, medical research is subsidized separately from the socialized health care system.
-Alison
Porno is a little different from mainstream movies, though. People are unlikely to share videos because they don't want to admit to the world that they are into it. Few people would be ashamed to be seen in posession of the typical hollywood movie. You might get some ridicule from people over liking a chick flick, but that's not the same as having your mother find out you like chick-on-chick flicks.
-Alison
With Firewire you won't get video overlays from your cable provider, though. For example, you will not get their program guide that appears on the bottom of the screen. The plus side is that you won't get their ads either. This is because they can't uncompress the signal, add the overlay, and recompress it because real-time compression is very expensive.
So in some ways firewire is better, but DVI really is ideal for a display-only device.
Regarding the integrated tuner phase-in, putting the demodulator and decompressor on the same chip is still cheaper than putting both of them together, so DVI will continue to be cheaper than firewire to implement on a display. Perhaps not by much though.
-Alison
Both.
The cable companies agreed to put firewire on the boxes they provide to customers after a certain date. The also agreed that they will provide DVI after a certain later date, however it is in the cable company's interest to provide DVI as early as possible.
In turn, TV manufacturers agreed to put DVI on all HDTV sets they manufacture (subject to phase-in).
Generally speaking, you want DVI on the set because it's uncompressed and allows the set to be a little more dumb. However, you absolutely want firewire on a recorder because it is compressed, removing the requirement for a real-time HDTV MPEG-2 compressor on the recorder.
-Alison
It is in violation of this license to have analog outputs on a display device. That is, a device which has the capability of recieving, decrypting, and visually displaying HDCP content. This is not a requirement on a source device. The cable box would be a source device, as it recieves its content through a means other than HDCP and transmits them via HDCP.
You would not be able to pass the signal through the TV to make it analog (except with a camcorder or some soldering), but you can certainly make a device that has both an HDCP output and an analog output.
-Alison
Actually, being used to reading their Daily Digest, I just know it's available in all three. Personally, I tend to read the PDFs because they look the best and load fastest (even though I have a Windows PC with Office).
-Alison
I'm not positive, but I heard somewhere that the FCC was entirely self-sufficient - deriving all of its money from regulatory fees and spectrum licensing. In fact, it gives money back to the federal government.
You could argue you are paying for this in your phone, cable, etc bills, but it's not from tax money.
-Alison
Contrary to what other posters have said, DTV uses the same spectrum as ordinary VHF/UHF TV. However, the important part to note is that DTV allows for adjacent channels to be used and for channels used in neighboring towns to be used in your town too. This is very different than NTSC where there are lots of technical reasons why you can't use all of the channels at once.
These spaces in the middle could be used for more DTV stations in the future, or for more unlicensed bands. The FCC, realizing that we don't need more over-the-air stations, is considering opening that spectrum up for unlicensed uses.
Note that 6Mhz isn't a whole lot, it's smaller than one 802.11b channel, and much smaller than one 802.11a channel, but it's in a very good range.
-Alison