I want to make a living filing bug reports for Debian, posting on slashdot, and doing other things I do in the normal course of my day. Why should I be forced to get a second job because I have no hope of making a living from my work that others clearly enjoy?
Essentially you are arguing that you have some abstract right to make a living from your creative works. If I can't make enough money at something I feel like doing, why is it that I can't demand laws to keep cash flowing in my direction? Maybe I don't think it's particularly fair that slashdot makes money off my posts, money I never see. Maybe I'll lobby for a copyright law change that rewards the posters a part of slashdot's revenue. It's only fair, right?
Perhaps it's time we recognize that simply making creative works and distributing them is thought of as a means of supporting oneself. Certainly posting here isn't a career. Why is it that making music is? I have friends who play music in bars and clubs. They don't make enough money doing it, so they have other jobs to support themselves. You seem to be saying it's somehow unfair that they need a real job because their music making isn't cutting it.
I really don't think cable companies should have to open up their lines. AFAIK, all their investment was private. The public telephone networks were largely built with government money. If Verizon, AT&T, and Qwest want to take their lines private, they can buy the infrastructure from us.
Company A doesn't even need to lower their prices. They can just tell the CLECs to take a hike. DSL will be provided by your local phone monopoly (AT&T, Qwest, Verizon) or your local cable monopoly (Comcast, TWC, Adelphia, etc.). If you're lucky enough to live in an area served by several cable companies, you might have enough competition to get slightly-better-than-subpar prices and performance.
What really makes me chuckle is that in the name of deregulation, we're getting monopolies.
Better write to your representatives. The FCC is accountable to the President and Congress as far as their oversight role. The FCC don't give a shit what you think of them.
Based on current jurisprudence the feds could do this in a heartbeat as people engage in interstate commerce over the lines. Whether or not you agree with that is another issue altogether. If the SCOTUS says that the feds can prosecute someone who grows marijuana for their own private use because it is related to interstate commerce, then this is a cinch.
I'm not one for having the feds do everything either, but I think that'd be the only reasonable way to regulate access to an interstate network.
As others have commented, the gentleman in the article is using TC in a way that isn't the same as we have come to know it. It seems like he's talking about your admin having root access on your box, rather than the DRM controls. Since he's speaking about the former, this really isn't anything new. Most business users don't have admin access to their own PCs. This is standard practice.
In principle, there is nothing wrong with TC, so long as the owner of the PC has the private keys. But this scenario is little more than having root access to one's own box, which is the standard for most home users.
I'll switch to Deluge once the damn thing works. UPnP doesn't work for me, which is a major deal breaker. The latest version in Debian Sid segfaults when I start it up.
They've got awhile to go before I switch away from Azureus.
The thing about their model is that I don't yet know how much I want to pay for the music since I've never heard it. I'm willing to pay what I think is fair, but since I don't know if I like it or not, I don't know what that is. I'm not going to pay $10 for something I don't like, and I similarly don't want to pay $1 for something I do. I'll be happy to give them more money after the fact if they'd let me. Right now, I believe that requires me to pay another surcharge to download the songs.
I know Road Runner made a significant upgrade to their NNTP services by outsourcing it to someone. Apparently, they did it because a few connections to a single, fast server was better than 100 connections to all over the world in terms of the load on their hardware.
And as many others have said, why does it have to be the threat of physical violence? Isn't threatening financial ruin just as bad? Guido might break your knee caps if you don't pay The Don tomorrow, but Corporation X can screw with your credit report and other financials as well as sue you into oblivion if you don't pay up. Financial "violence" is just as damaging as physical violence, especially when some people won't hire you if you have a bad credit history.
Congress wrote the law with organized crime in mind. If businesses are running afoul of RICO statutes, then they are most likely acting like organized criminals -- at least close enough to acting like them that the language describes their activities closely.
The Fair Tax plan isn't too bad. The only problem with it is that it's not progressive enough for my tastes. Tweak it here and there and you might have a deal.
Linus can say anything he wants. Copyright law (at least in the US) doesn't allow for people to post notices that a 3rd party is changing the license on a work. He might have gotten away with it in that no one objected to the change. That doesn't mean he's on solid legal footing if he did such a thing. You need the explicit permission of the copyright holder (not some sort of opt-out hocus pocus) to change the way their work will be distributed.
I guarantee you that if you talked to any copyright lawyer, they'd say that posting a notice on a mailing list that the license on a work will change without the copyright owner's explicit permission would be a blatant violation of the copyright.
I'd drop OO.o for "GNOME Office" (if a general collection of programs can be called an office suite), but the functionality is lacking. The PDF output plugin for Abiword created docs that were readable only by Abiword. I'm sure I missed out on a few job opportunities there.
OO.o does what I need for now. Until KOffice is released with GTK+ widgets, then I'm afraid that I'm going to keep away from it. I simply can't stand KDE anything.
I fear for all of the smaller business voip/ISP outfits now that the first domino has fallen.
This is an immediate consequence of allowing people who own the infrastructure to sell services on that infrastructure. The current state of affairs with respect to the ILECs/CLECs is an obvious example. I know that AT&T put my Speakeasy service on low priority because they weren't seeing much money from it. My line problem went unfixed for about a week before they got around to it.
A strict separation between the owners of infrastructure and those who sell services on it is a prerequisite for free market competition. I'd be for the Feds owning the entirety of the Internet infrastructure (contracting out maintenance if need be) and then allowing for anyone to provide services in a non-discriminatory fashion. Prices would come down quickly, and quality of services would improve dramatically.
My uncle's computer was having all sorts of problems with slowness and other performance issues. I uninstalled Norton and installed AVG. It was running fine after that.
Instruction 15 looks suspicious. "Making available" isn't distribution, at least it isn't settled law that it is. In effect, the judge is saying that the defendant is liable of infringement by simply having a shared folder available, regardless if they sent any copies to peers.
Essentially the judge is saying that if I simply offer to make you an unauthorized copy, I've committed infringement regardless of whether or not I actually make you the copy.
In civil court, the idea isn't to deter certain conduct, but to equalize a wrong. Punitive damages are to deter future behavior.
The penalties in copyright law are compensatory, not punitive. Further evidence of this is that you can still be held liable for infringement to the tune of a minimum of $200 per infringement even if you had no reason to believe that the work was copyrighted. In your scenario, that'd be like reducing the littering fine to $500 even if you had no reason to believe littering was prohibited where you littered.
I made a mistake in my previous post by declaring there should be a deterrent. What I should have said is that there needs to be an additional penalty for violating the rights of the copyright holder over and above the market cost of the work.
You have been caught uploading the files to ten million of your closest friends on Kazaa. You should expect to pay some significant fraction of the wholesale value of the distribution.
Sure. Have fun proving how many unauthorized copies were made.
As Ray Beckerman points out on his blog, there was "zero evidence" that any actual infringement occurred.
No, not under the 8th, but it may be a violation of due process under the 14th.
As I hinted upthread, this defense is being used in UMG v. Lindor. I was correct that Ray Beckerman (aka NewYorkCountryLawyer) is the counsel for the defense.
Slashdot Mirror
I want to make a living filing bug reports for Debian, posting on slashdot, and doing other things I do in the normal course of my day. Why should I be forced to get a second job because I have no hope of making a living from my work that others clearly enjoy?
Essentially you are arguing that you have some abstract right to make a living from your creative works. If I can't make enough money at something I feel like doing, why is it that I can't demand laws to keep cash flowing in my direction? Maybe I don't think it's particularly fair that slashdot makes money off my posts, money I never see. Maybe I'll lobby for a copyright law change that rewards the posters a part of slashdot's revenue. It's only fair, right?
Perhaps it's time we recognize that simply making creative works and distributing them is thought of as a means of supporting oneself. Certainly posting here isn't a career. Why is it that making music is? I have friends who play music in bars and clubs. They don't make enough money doing it, so they have other jobs to support themselves. You seem to be saying it's somehow unfair that they need a real job because their music making isn't cutting it.
I'd pay more than $5 for that!
You aren't misinterpreting anything, but the immediate consequence of decreased competition is that neutrality will more likely go by the wayside.
I really don't think cable companies should have to open up their lines. AFAIK, all their investment was private. The public telephone networks were largely built with government money. If Verizon, AT&T, and Qwest want to take their lines private, they can buy the infrastructure from us.
Obviously you wouldn't get DSL through your cable company; you'd get cable Internet service.
Company A doesn't even need to lower their prices. They can just tell the CLECs to take a hike. DSL will be provided by your local phone monopoly (AT&T, Qwest, Verizon) or your local cable monopoly (Comcast, TWC, Adelphia, etc.). If you're lucky enough to live in an area served by several cable companies, you might have enough competition to get slightly-better-than-subpar prices and performance.
What really makes me chuckle is that in the name of deregulation, we're getting monopolies.
Better write to your representatives. The FCC is accountable to the President and Congress as far as their oversight role. The FCC don't give a shit what you think of them.
Based on current jurisprudence the feds could do this in a heartbeat as people engage in interstate commerce over the lines. Whether or not you agree with that is another issue altogether. If the SCOTUS says that the feds can prosecute someone who grows marijuana for their own private use because it is related to interstate commerce, then this is a cinch.
I'm not one for having the feds do everything either, but I think that'd be the only reasonable way to regulate access to an interstate network.
As others have commented, the gentleman in the article is using TC in a way that isn't the same as we have come to know it. It seems like he's talking about your admin having root access on your box, rather than the DRM controls. Since he's speaking about the former, this really isn't anything new. Most business users don't have admin access to their own PCs. This is standard practice.
In principle, there is nothing wrong with TC, so long as the owner of the PC has the private keys. But this scenario is little more than having root access to one's own box, which is the standard for most home users.
I'll switch to Deluge once the damn thing works. UPnP doesn't work for me, which is a major deal breaker. The latest version in Debian Sid segfaults when I start it up.
They've got awhile to go before I switch away from Azureus.
Thanks for the correction. I'll probably check it out later this week then.
The thing about their model is that I don't yet know how much I want to pay for the music since I've never heard it. I'm willing to pay what I think is fair, but since I don't know if I like it or not, I don't know what that is. I'm not going to pay $10 for something I don't like, and I similarly don't want to pay $1 for something I do. I'll be happy to give them more money after the fact if they'd let me. Right now, I believe that requires me to pay another surcharge to download the songs.
I know Road Runner made a significant upgrade to their NNTP services by outsourcing it to someone. Apparently, they did it because a few connections to a single, fast server was better than 100 connections to all over the world in terms of the load on their hardware.
Nope.
She's citing the 14th. The penalty runs afoul of due process. See BMW v. Gore.
And as many others have said, why does it have to be the threat of physical violence? Isn't threatening financial ruin just as bad? Guido might break your knee caps if you don't pay The Don tomorrow, but Corporation X can screw with your credit report and other financials as well as sue you into oblivion if you don't pay up. Financial "violence" is just as damaging as physical violence, especially when some people won't hire you if you have a bad credit history.
Congress wrote the law with organized crime in mind. If businesses are running afoul of RICO statutes, then they are most likely acting like organized criminals -- at least close enough to acting like them that the language describes their activities closely.
The Fair Tax plan isn't too bad. The only problem with it is that it's not progressive enough for my tastes. Tweak it here and there and you might have a deal.
Granted, if he really, really wanted to, he probably could end up doing it. It's not impossible, but it'd be hard.
I think that it'd be more trouble than what it's worth, especially because Linus is so well known for hating the politics behind FOSS, licensing, etc.
Linus can say anything he wants. Copyright law (at least in the US) doesn't allow for people to post notices that a 3rd party is changing the license on a work. He might have gotten away with it in that no one objected to the change. That doesn't mean he's on solid legal footing if he did such a thing. You need the explicit permission of the copyright holder (not some sort of opt-out hocus pocus) to change the way their work will be distributed.
I guarantee you that if you talked to any copyright lawyer, they'd say that posting a notice on a mailing list that the license on a work will change without the copyright owner's explicit permission would be a blatant violation of the copyright.
I'd drop OO.o for "GNOME Office" (if a general collection of programs can be called an office suite), but the functionality is lacking. The PDF output plugin for Abiword created docs that were readable only by Abiword. I'm sure I missed out on a few job opportunities there.
OO.o does what I need for now. Until KOffice is released with GTK+ widgets, then I'm afraid that I'm going to keep away from it. I simply can't stand KDE anything.
A strict separation between the owners of infrastructure and those who sell services on it is a prerequisite for free market competition. I'd be for the Feds owning the entirety of the Internet infrastructure (contracting out maintenance if need be) and then allowing for anyone to provide services in a non-discriminatory fashion. Prices would come down quickly, and quality of services would improve dramatically.
+1
My uncle's computer was having all sorts of problems with slowness and other performance issues. I uninstalled Norton and installed AVG. It was running fine after that.
Instruction 15 looks suspicious. "Making available" isn't distribution, at least it isn't settled law that it is. In effect, the judge is saying that the defendant is liable of infringement by simply having a shared folder available, regardless if they sent any copies to peers.
Essentially the judge is saying that if I simply offer to make you an unauthorized copy, I've committed infringement regardless of whether or not I actually make you the copy.
In civil court, the idea isn't to deter certain conduct, but to equalize a wrong. Punitive damages are to deter future behavior.
The penalties in copyright law are compensatory, not punitive. Further evidence of this is that you can still be held liable for infringement to the tune of a minimum of $200 per infringement even if you had no reason to believe that the work was copyrighted. In your scenario, that'd be like reducing the littering fine to $500 even if you had no reason to believe littering was prohibited where you littered.
I made a mistake in my previous post by declaring there should be a deterrent. What I should have said is that there needs to be an additional penalty for violating the rights of the copyright holder over and above the market cost of the work.
As Ray Beckerman points out on his blog, there was "zero evidence" that any actual infringement occurred.
No, not under the 8th, but it may be a violation of due process under the 14th.
As I hinted upthread, this defense is being used in UMG v. Lindor. I was correct that Ray Beckerman (aka NewYorkCountryLawyer) is the counsel for the defense.