What will apple do when they run out of felines to name their OSes after?
I think there are at least 40 species of felines, so given the current release rate I think in the year 2075 or so, when it becomes an issue, they will have to think of something new.
Sue individual GPL infringers. Yay! Sue individual P2P downloaders. Boo!
Your logic assumes that the law is ethical as it now stands and that all copyright infringement is the same. Neither is true. Copyright law is broken, unfair, detrimental to our society in its current form, and unethical. The GPL is an attempt to "hack" copyright law using purely legal means, to allow copyright holders to make copyright work in the manner that it should. Basically it is enforcing a fair and ethical subset of copyright while removing all of the unfair restrictions. Both the GPL and the RIAA's copyrights are legal. Only one is ethical or good for society.
The article talks of sharing the "fingerprints" of the abuse, which seems to indicate that one of the design goals is to anticipate and provide for a constantly-changing pattern of abuse rather than assume a fixed pattern.
It is true that you can fingerprint traffic on a variety of criteria, and recognize particular types of use. The problem is that their are only a limited number of traffic characteristics that can be easily gathered an analyzed on a macroscopic scale. You can evaluate the ports, packet sizes and characteristics, regular use intervals and times, changes in behavior, etc. Without inspecting the contents of packets, however, their is nothing to prevent spam bots from imitating normal traffic patterns, or even just typical traffic patterns. If a host begins talking on port 25 did a worm just start spamming or did the user sign up for a new e-mail account?
The easiest traffic to spot is the worm propagation traffic that compromises machines in the first place. The trick is making it cost effective for ISPs to notify users. Some countries are starting government agencies to deal with spam and worms. ISPs can easily provide them with a list of infected hosts that they can contact with the appropriate worm remedy. The problem is mostly logistics and funding, the technical part has been solved for a long time. I see this as the most realistic solution to spam zombies.
That is not an option for most people, myself included. I'm typing this on an OS X box, but their is a windows machine right next to it. I need it for compatibility testing. Other people need it because software they require is only available for that platform. Many people don't need Windows, but get it because it comes bundled with their hardware and they don't know their is any way to get a machine with something else, or even that anything else exists.
My analogy was the electric company. Some people just go without electricity too you know. Some people have fuel cells, or a generator, or solar, or wind power. Those people are in a very small minority. Most people need electricity and cannot afford to implement an alternative energy source. The same goes for Windows.
The great anti-spam opportunity is still at the intermediate level (where distinguishing spam from valid email isn't necessary - no valid email follows the path spam takes.) At the intemediate level anti-spam actions can easily be 100% effective, 100% accurate. No spam delivered, no valid email (of which there is none using that path) wrongly stopped.
Spam currently follows a pretty recognizable pattern on the internet. That does not mean zombies could not be programmed to send spam in a less recognizable way, or in a way that mimics normal e-mail usage. This could slow down spam, but I doubt it is a good long term solution.
In fact, it's all not much more than clever marketing for overpriced Arbor devices; without the initiative, you can easily look toward other products (Cisco GuardXT, ex-Riverhead, many others).
A system like this relies upon two factors; intelligence and filtering horsepower. One nice benefit to Arbor's offering (as opposed to riverhead/cisco) is that while Arbor provides the intelligent part of the system, they will interoperate with any vendor's filtering horsepower. If Cisco's system ever actually starts working, you can bet it will only work with their own offering.
You are probably right about multiple fingerprint repositories appearing in the next couple of years.
The sooner ISPs take a proactive(shudder jargon word) stand against offenders and start to disalow the traffic or manage problems (im aware many people are victums , but this gives them an alert that they have an infected PC )
I doubt that the fingerprint sharing alliance will have much direct effect upon this problem. It will help ISPs better manage traffic generated by DoS attacks launched by infected home computers, but most of the ISPs have had a list of infected hosts for a while now (one is provided by the same software that is used to share fingerprints). I think most ISPs don't alert home user's when their machine is compromised because it is not cost effective for them.
As for the revealing competitive information I dont care revealing anything these bastards could have, you know, they keep pissing people so, why have any consideration ??
Keeping the information non-specific protects ISPs sharing fingerprints from any privacy concerns or laws and also from giving out too much information about their own network to possible competitors. Think traffic jump X on ports Y and Z, through border router Q, with additional criteria A, B, C. It describes a type of traffic and calls it DDoS or Nimda Worm.
When another service provider connected to border router Q sees the same type of traffic they know what it is already and have a bigger picture of the event.
just do what I do - get a console and save hundreds on CPU and GPU upgrades.
I'm not a big gamer and primarily use my powerbook to get work done. I do, however, enjoy playing the occasional game. I also prefer playing games on my computer to a console. Games on PC's can be much more complex and interesting due to the increased number of controls, customization, and networking. I also don't feel like blowing a few hundred bucks on a dedicated gaming box.
I can play a decent number of games on OS X, but what I'd really like Apple to do is partner with Nintendo or Sony to build in media compatibility and a good emulator for their next generation gaming console. If I could drop a Playstation 3 game into my next powerbook and play it without any hassle I'd be happy camper. It would also put an end to all the "there are no mac games" rants you hear all the time and probably motivate some people to switch.
I use my powerbook for work, but that does not mean I don't ever want to play.
It jives with my experience
on
Return of the Mac
·
· Score: 5, Interesting
I work at a development house that makes network security products. Three years ago there were a couple people with powerbooks running OS X. Today it is about half of the company. Last week a senior developer was talking to me about our latest hire. He's an experienced, professional coder. It had taken him a week to get the thinkpad we gave him up and running the Linux distro of his choice and configured to work with all our servers and testbeds. Thats 40-60 hours of work gone. How many powerbooks could we have bought him with a corresponding amount of cash. He was considering mandating powerbooks for all new hires unless they had a good reason to use something else.
OS X is making some huge inroads into the computer security field. It has certainly gained a huge amount of penetration here in just 3 years. Even some of the the managers have switched after looking over a developer's shoulder for a bit. You'd never guess Apple had a 5% market share from a walk around this office.
There are two important lessons to be learned from the rise and fall of Tivo. First, don't lock yourself into any pay subscriptions. There is no guarantee they won't turn into ad machines. By subscribing for short periods of time or by using a free or ad supported scheduling service you can demand quality service or walk.
Lesson two, any company can be bought or can partner with one that does not have your best interests at heart. I would not buy a encryption service from the government. I won't buy a garage door opener from a car thief. I won't buy a device to remove ads from TV from someone partnered with those ad providers. It is important to buy products and services from someone motivated to make you happy as their business model. That is no longer Tivo's business model. They make money by making Comcast happy first, and users second. It makes me glad I bought a device without a subscription from someone who does not work with the cable companies. It is also why I don't have to view ads and why I can record what I want, burn DVDs of what I want, and skip 30 seconds without a hack.
Tivo has made a huge mistake, and a very big potential competitor here is MS. I don't trust them at all, but right now they are motivated to making their customers happy with a media center. RIP Tivo.
Last time I bought a car, it came with a stereo already in it, yet, this wasn't an antitrust or monopoly concern.
Please do tell... who has a monopoly on car manufacture?
Now lets try your analogy with an actual monopoly on something people pretty much need, like computers. In most cases there is only one electric company in a given area. You can buy a generator and make your own power, but most people don't have the know how or money to do it right. Now imagine if the electric company gave out a free "electric co." brand stereo to all of their customers, and raised everyone's electric bill by $200 a year to cover the costs. That is pretty much what is going on with MS.
The artists owned their rights in the first place. The studios didn't forcibly seize those rights; the artists transferred them through completely voluntary contracts.
In some cases that was their intent, in others they were misled. For some reason not that many artists are experts in contract law.
find a different distribution method
Many artists do. Most TV and radio stations are controlled by big media companies. The same goes for newspapers. There is always the internet and underground publications. There are even some popular indy music publishers.
But that does not matter. The problem is copyrights now extend to non-commercial uses, last forever, take away additional rights via law enforced technological measures, and fail to promote the spread of knowledge, art, and science as was intended.
I never agreed not to copy anything I want. There is no reason for me to agree not to do so. The law says I can't because it has been corrupted by corporate interests. The law is wrong. I would support a fair copyright system, but I don't have that option.
Here's a little story for you. Have you ever heard of the classic Christmas film "It's a Wonderful Life." It tanked at the box office. It was shelved and thrown in a back room. Just before copyrights were extended in perpetuity it entered the public domain. PBS aired it (since it now was free to all) and it was very well received. If not for that you would never have heard of it. Due to some weird legal trickery on the part of the studios, when copyrights were extended it became re-copyrighted and you now have to pay for it again. There are probably thousands of books, songs, movies, and other art that would be beloved and important parts of our heritage if not for the perversion of copyright that extended it forever. Now they are where that movie was, sitting in a box. Much of it was burned, or rotted away. It will never again be seen by anyone.
The Disney corporation, several other media houses, some book publishers, and a lot of corrupt politicians have done this. And I say "screw them." If I am not given a fair copyright system, I will certainly not feel ethically or morally bound to play by the rules of an unfair one.
Hmmm, MS and the person agreeing to the MS Word license. That sounds like two parties to me. If someone wants to use MS Word, and agrees to the user license which says they won't do something, well that is exactly what I was talking about.
Of course, since that time it has come to light that the original article was not talking about the Word EULA. It was talking about MS licensing it's patents on it's XML wrappers for.doc files, which is something else altogether.
Most artists that anyone has ever heard of, do not own the rights to their own music and cannot give permission.
It's always "the evil RIAA" with no mention of the human beings whose music you're actually taking and depriving revenue for because you want it for free.
Many artists get very little or none of the money collected for their record sales. They usually do better with t-shirt or concert ticket sales.
But the copyright holders who don't give permission also have the right not to, and if people want to pretend they have a moral ground to stand on, they'd respect the wishes of those people.
I don't violate copyrights as far as I know. I also have no ethical problem with those people who do. I'll tell you why. Copyright is not a natural right like the right to free speech or the right to freely exercise one's religion. Copyright is a special government sponsored monopoly that was supposed to be half of a two sided bargain. Artists were given a limited monopoly on commercial copying so that they could make money. The public was given the assurance that copies would then be made, thus making books, songs, and art forms more widespread and available. Also, it insured that our children would be able to freely read older works, which would be preserved for them.
That agreement was destroyed after big business began bribing (lobbying) the government to change the laws. They have removed their half of the bargain and left the public with jack shit. Copyright is broken. As a result of the current laws the majority of copyrighted materials are gone forever. No one can read them, hear them, or view them. Hundreds of thousands of works that are our artistic heritage are buried in the name of making a few more bucks and removing them as competition for whatever is being pushed today. If they could, corporations would retroactively gain copyrights on all the classic works and bury them forever too. It is a travesty and is helping to dumb down our culture. Most people don't know that things used to be different, or that the laws were originally designed to do exactly the opposite of what they do now. Copyright was supposed to help us preserve works, now it removes them for all time. Many of these works are owned by companies that don't know they own them, or no one at all, yet still they are denied to the public.
In light of this legal, but horribly unethical situation, I have no problem at all with anyone who wants to steal works, copy works, hack into big media's bank accounts, slash their tires, or kick them in the testicles or some other tender body part.
In yet another critical test case, prosecutors say that anything less than a prison sentence would make future prosecutions of people exceeding the speed limit by 16 km/h(10mph) unlikely.
Not quite. It says they won't tap your phone and listen to your phone calls to see if you tell a friend you were speeding 16 kph over, because that is not a serious enough offense to justify suspending the privacy act. It makes a lot of sense, maybe I'll move to Sweden.
People can't just keep running around breaking laws they don't like and then expecting to not be punished because they don't like the law.
All those black people should just sit in the back of the bus like the law says they have to. If they sit in the front then it is right and just for the police to handcuff them and toss them in jail. I mean that's the law, right?
Continuing down the path of breakign[sic] the law and complaining about the consequences doesn't convince anyone that you have a better idea.
Believe it or not, not all the laws accurately reflect the values of the governed. Sometimes the only way to get a law overturned is via civil disobedience. Change occurs when those in power realize they just can't fit that many people in jail. If you ever read a U.S. history class you'd know the country is founded on that principal, from the boston tea party to pretty much every civil rights movement.
This is the classic Robin Hood defense, and under American law, essentially worthless in court.
You mean it is worthless in American courts now. It was not so 20 years ago. That was when non-commercial copyright infringement became a crime. Since copyright is intended to encourage artists to create useful works by granting them a limited monopoly, there was no reason to prohibit non-commercial distribution and it was not a crime. Since then copyright has turned into a "how much money can we get from them" series of laws written by lobbyists. There is no longer a limit, it applies to all distribution, technologic restrictions are enforced via a very indirect series of laws, and works are lost to the public as they vanish into the archives of big publishing houses and companies that no longer even exist. New copyright laws are about sucking every last penny from popular older works and removing all access to the others so there is less competition. If Disney had its way all the classic literature from the past would be copyrighted and locked in a box in the basement so that it did not distract us from their latest crappy musical cartoon. Hopefully the rest of the world's governments will not be so easily bribed into destroying our literary, musical, and theatrical heritage.
You choose to Open it in Word and you have agreed to Microsoft's license. But, like I said, I can't tell if thats what he meant.
No.
OK, there seems to be a lot of confusion here. I have heard, but do not have confirmation that the MS Word license includes a clause that says you will not open/modify any files you create in anything but Word. The Mass. government agreed to the license and have been using Word. Legally, they want to be able to use other clients to open/modify their Word files. They have negotiated MS into agreeing to let them open them, but not modify them.
If you create a document in Word and send it to me, nothing prevents me from opening/modifying it in OpenOffice. Nothing prevents you from opening/modifying documents I create in OpenOffice with Word.
Further, there is a great deal of question as to whether the license is enforceable. Just to reiterate my main point, the license only applies to people who are running Word and have agreed to the license. It applies to no one else.
omeone who reads a file you send them is not bound by any license you might have clicked.
I don't recall asserting that they were. The Mass. government is interested in being able to open their own documents in the future. They have agreed (nominally) to the user agreement. It has nothing to do with organizations that have not agreed to the terms.
You still can't read each and every PDF document with xpdf
I installed Acrobat Reader 7 on OS X for compatibility testing not that long ago. Let me tell you, it can't read each and every PDF either. It silently fails on about 10%. It also installs a plug-in to make it open all PDFs in your browser without asking. It is slow, somehow keeps Safari from working while it is loading, and does not even work all the time. I killed the plug-in pronto and went back to using Preview.app as my every day viewer. It has opened every PDF I tried, does not bring my browser to a halt, and is much faster.
.DOC format, why can't other programs? Am I missing the picture completely?
I believe the licensing for Word forbids you from opening the files it creates in anything other than Word. I'm not certain though, having never read it myself. Also, MS has some bogus patents on their.doc format and we all know how many years they can tie things up in the courts for. Mass. probably does not have the money to fight a court battle against MS.
No, governments have no place telling businesses how to operate. We need to get government out of our cozy relationships with corporations, and go it alone, human to artificial human.
Without governments, corporations don't exist. They are legal entities. So I guess I agree with you.
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What will apple do when they run out of felines to name their OSes after?
I think there are at least 40 species of felines, so given the current release rate I think in the year 2075 or so, when it becomes an issue, they will have to think of something new.
Sue individual GPL infringers. Yay! Sue individual P2P downloaders. Boo!
Your logic assumes that the law is ethical as it now stands and that all copyright infringement is the same. Neither is true. Copyright law is broken, unfair, detrimental to our society in its current form, and unethical. The GPL is an attempt to "hack" copyright law using purely legal means, to allow copyright holders to make copyright work in the manner that it should. Basically it is enforcing a fair and ethical subset of copyright while removing all of the unfair restrictions. Both the GPL and the RIAA's copyrights are legal. Only one is ethical or good for society.
The article talks of sharing the "fingerprints" of the abuse, which seems to indicate that one of the design goals is to anticipate and provide for a constantly-changing pattern of abuse rather than assume a fixed pattern.
It is true that you can fingerprint traffic on a variety of criteria, and recognize particular types of use. The problem is that their are only a limited number of traffic characteristics that can be easily gathered an analyzed on a macroscopic scale. You can evaluate the ports, packet sizes and characteristics, regular use intervals and times, changes in behavior, etc. Without inspecting the contents of packets, however, their is nothing to prevent spam bots from imitating normal traffic patterns, or even just typical traffic patterns. If a host begins talking on port 25 did a worm just start spamming or did the user sign up for a new e-mail account?
The easiest traffic to spot is the worm propagation traffic that compromises machines in the first place. The trick is making it cost effective for ISPs to notify users. Some countries are starting government agencies to deal with spam and worms. ISPs can easily provide them with a list of infected hosts that they can contact with the appropriate worm remedy. The problem is mostly logistics and funding, the technical part has been solved for a long time. I see this as the most realistic solution to spam zombies.
You could just not run Windows. I don't.
That is not an option for most people, myself included. I'm typing this on an OS X box, but their is a windows machine right next to it. I need it for compatibility testing. Other people need it because software they require is only available for that platform. Many people don't need Windows, but get it because it comes bundled with their hardware and they don't know their is any way to get a machine with something else, or even that anything else exists.
My analogy was the electric company. Some people just go without electricity too you know. Some people have fuel cells, or a generator, or solar, or wind power. Those people are in a very small minority. Most people need electricity and cannot afford to implement an alternative energy source. The same goes for Windows.
The great anti-spam opportunity is still at the intermediate level (where distinguishing spam from valid email isn't necessary - no valid email follows the path spam takes.) At the intemediate level anti-spam actions can easily be 100% effective, 100% accurate. No spam delivered, no valid email (of which there is none using that path) wrongly stopped.
Spam currently follows a pretty recognizable pattern on the internet. That does not mean zombies could not be programmed to send spam in a less recognizable way, or in a way that mimics normal e-mail usage. This could slow down spam, but I doubt it is a good long term solution.
In fact, it's all not much more than clever marketing for overpriced Arbor devices; without the initiative, you can easily look toward other products (Cisco GuardXT, ex-Riverhead, many others).
A system like this relies upon two factors; intelligence and filtering horsepower. One nice benefit to Arbor's offering (as opposed to riverhead/cisco) is that while Arbor provides the intelligent part of the system, they will interoperate with any vendor's filtering horsepower. If Cisco's system ever actually starts working, you can bet it will only work with their own offering.
You are probably right about multiple fingerprint repositories appearing in the next couple of years.
The sooner ISPs take a proactive(shudder jargon word) stand against offenders and start to disalow the traffic or manage problems (im aware many people are victums , but this gives them an alert that they have an infected PC )
I doubt that the fingerprint sharing alliance will have much direct effect upon this problem. It will help ISPs better manage traffic generated by DoS attacks launched by infected home computers, but most of the ISPs have had a list of infected hosts for a while now (one is provided by the same software that is used to share fingerprints). I think most ISPs don't alert home user's when their machine is compromised because it is not cost effective for them.
As for the revealing competitive information I dont care revealing anything these bastards could have, you know, they keep pissing people so, why have any consideration ??
Keeping the information non-specific protects ISPs sharing fingerprints from any privacy concerns or laws and also from giving out too much information about their own network to possible competitors. Think traffic jump X on ports Y and Z, through border router Q, with additional criteria A, B, C. It describes a type of traffic and calls it DDoS or Nimda Worm.
When another service provider connected to border router Q sees the same type of traffic they know what it is already and have a bigger picture of the event.
Perhaps you mean "jibes."
It was a joke.
just do what I do - get a console and save hundreds on CPU and GPU upgrades.
I'm not a big gamer and primarily use my powerbook to get work done. I do, however, enjoy playing the occasional game. I also prefer playing games on my computer to a console. Games on PC's can be much more complex and interesting due to the increased number of controls, customization, and networking. I also don't feel like blowing a few hundred bucks on a dedicated gaming box.
I can play a decent number of games on OS X, but what I'd really like Apple to do is partner with Nintendo or Sony to build in media compatibility and a good emulator for their next generation gaming console. If I could drop a Playstation 3 game into my next powerbook and play it without any hassle I'd be happy camper. It would also put an end to all the "there are no mac games" rants you hear all the time and probably motivate some people to switch.
I use my powerbook for work, but that does not mean I don't ever want to play.
I work at a development house that makes network security products. Three years ago there were a couple people with powerbooks running OS X. Today it is about half of the company. Last week a senior developer was talking to me about our latest hire. He's an experienced, professional coder. It had taken him a week to get the thinkpad we gave him up and running the Linux distro of his choice and configured to work with all our servers and testbeds. Thats 40-60 hours of work gone. How many powerbooks could we have bought him with a corresponding amount of cash. He was considering mandating powerbooks for all new hires unless they had a good reason to use something else.
OS X is making some huge inroads into the computer security field. It has certainly gained a huge amount of penetration here in just 3 years. Even some of the the managers have switched after looking over a developer's shoulder for a bit. You'd never guess Apple had a 5% market share from a walk around this office.
There are two important lessons to be learned from the rise and fall of Tivo. First, don't lock yourself into any pay subscriptions. There is no guarantee they won't turn into ad machines. By subscribing for short periods of time or by using a free or ad supported scheduling service you can demand quality service or walk.
Lesson two, any company can be bought or can partner with one that does not have your best interests at heart. I would not buy a encryption service from the government. I won't buy a garage door opener from a car thief. I won't buy a device to remove ads from TV from someone partnered with those ad providers. It is important to buy products and services from someone motivated to make you happy as their business model. That is no longer Tivo's business model. They make money by making Comcast happy first, and users second. It makes me glad I bought a device without a subscription from someone who does not work with the cable companies. It is also why I don't have to view ads and why I can record what I want, burn DVDs of what I want, and skip 30 seconds without a hack.
Tivo has made a huge mistake, and a very big potential competitor here is MS. I don't trust them at all, but right now they are motivated to making their customers happy with a media center. RIP Tivo.
Last time I bought a car, it came with a stereo already in it, yet, this wasn't an antitrust or monopoly concern.
Please do tell... who has a monopoly on car manufacture?
Now lets try your analogy with an actual monopoly on something people pretty much need, like computers. In most cases there is only one electric company in a given area. You can buy a generator and make your own power, but most people don't have the know how or money to do it right. Now imagine if the electric company gave out a free "electric co." brand stereo to all of their customers, and raised everyone's electric bill by $200 a year to cover the costs. That is pretty much what is going on with MS.
The artists owned their rights in the first place. The studios didn't forcibly seize those rights; the artists transferred them through completely voluntary contracts.
In some cases that was their intent, in others they were misled. For some reason not that many artists are experts in contract law.
find a different distribution method
Many artists do. Most TV and radio stations are controlled by big media companies. The same goes for newspapers. There is always the internet and underground publications. There are even some popular indy music publishers.
But that does not matter. The problem is copyrights now extend to non-commercial uses, last forever, take away additional rights via law enforced technological measures, and fail to promote the spread of knowledge, art, and science as was intended.
I never agreed not to copy anything I want. There is no reason for me to agree not to do so. The law says I can't because it has been corrupted by corporate interests. The law is wrong. I would support a fair copyright system, but I don't have that option.
Here's a little story for you. Have you ever heard of the classic Christmas film "It's a Wonderful Life." It tanked at the box office. It was shelved and thrown in a back room. Just before copyrights were extended in perpetuity it entered the public domain. PBS aired it (since it now was free to all) and it was very well received. If not for that you would never have heard of it. Due to some weird legal trickery on the part of the studios, when copyrights were extended it became re-copyrighted and you now have to pay for it again. There are probably thousands of books, songs, movies, and other art that would be beloved and important parts of our heritage if not for the perversion of copyright that extended it forever. Now they are where that movie was, sitting in a box. Much of it was burned, or rotted away. It will never again be seen by anyone.
The Disney corporation, several other media houses, some book publishers, and a lot of corrupt politicians have done this. And I say "screw them." If I am not given a fair copyright system, I will certainly not feel ethically or morally bound to play by the rules of an unfair one.
A formal agreement between 2 parties
Hmmm, MS and the person agreeing to the MS Word license. That sounds like two parties to me. If someone wants to use MS Word, and agrees to the user license which says they won't do something, well that is exactly what I was talking about.
Of course, since that time it has come to light that the original article was not talking about the Word EULA. It was talking about MS licensing it's patents on it's XML wrappers for .doc files, which is something else altogether.
Most artists have not given that permission.
Most artists that anyone has ever heard of, do not own the rights to their own music and cannot give permission.
It's always "the evil RIAA" with no mention of the human beings whose music you're actually taking and depriving revenue for because you want it for free.
Many artists get very little or none of the money collected for their record sales. They usually do better with t-shirt or concert ticket sales.
But the copyright holders who don't give permission also have the right not to, and if people want to pretend they have a moral ground to stand on, they'd respect the wishes of those people.
I don't violate copyrights as far as I know. I also have no ethical problem with those people who do. I'll tell you why. Copyright is not a natural right like the right to free speech or the right to freely exercise one's religion. Copyright is a special government sponsored monopoly that was supposed to be half of a two sided bargain. Artists were given a limited monopoly on commercial copying so that they could make money. The public was given the assurance that copies would then be made, thus making books, songs, and art forms more widespread and available. Also, it insured that our children would be able to freely read older works, which would be preserved for them.
That agreement was destroyed after big business began bribing (lobbying) the government to change the laws. They have removed their half of the bargain and left the public with jack shit. Copyright is broken. As a result of the current laws the majority of copyrighted materials are gone forever. No one can read them, hear them, or view them. Hundreds of thousands of works that are our artistic heritage are buried in the name of making a few more bucks and removing them as competition for whatever is being pushed today. If they could, corporations would retroactively gain copyrights on all the classic works and bury them forever too. It is a travesty and is helping to dumb down our culture. Most people don't know that things used to be different, or that the laws were originally designed to do exactly the opposite of what they do now. Copyright was supposed to help us preserve works, now it removes them for all time. Many of these works are owned by companies that don't know they own them, or no one at all, yet still they are denied to the public.
In light of this legal, but horribly unethical situation, I have no problem at all with anyone who wants to steal works, copy works, hack into big media's bank accounts, slash their tires, or kick them in the testicles or some other tender body part.
there's no way that kind of licence is legal because it tries to govern your ACTIONS, something only government can demand.
Ummmm. What is all of contract law then?
In yet another critical test case, prosecutors say that anything less than a prison sentence would make future prosecutions of people exceeding the speed limit by 16 km/h(10mph) unlikely.
Not quite. It says they won't tap your phone and listen to your phone calls to see if you tell a friend you were speeding 16 kph over, because that is not a serious enough offense to justify suspending the privacy act. It makes a lot of sense, maybe I'll move to Sweden.
People can't just keep running around breaking laws they don't like and then expecting to not be punished because they don't like the law.
All those black people should just sit in the back of the bus like the law says they have to. If they sit in the front then it is right and just for the police to handcuff them and toss them in jail. I mean that's the law, right?
Continuing down the path of breakign[sic] the law and complaining about the consequences doesn't convince anyone that you have a better idea.
Believe it or not, not all the laws accurately reflect the values of the governed. Sometimes the only way to get a law overturned is via civil disobedience. Change occurs when those in power realize they just can't fit that many people in jail. If you ever read a U.S. history class you'd know the country is founded on that principal, from the boston tea party to pretty much every civil rights movement.
This is the classic Robin Hood defense, and under American law, essentially worthless in court.
You mean it is worthless in American courts now. It was not so 20 years ago. That was when non-commercial copyright infringement became a crime. Since copyright is intended to encourage artists to create useful works by granting them a limited monopoly, there was no reason to prohibit non-commercial distribution and it was not a crime. Since then copyright has turned into a "how much money can we get from them" series of laws written by lobbyists. There is no longer a limit, it applies to all distribution, technologic restrictions are enforced via a very indirect series of laws, and works are lost to the public as they vanish into the archives of big publishing houses and companies that no longer even exist. New copyright laws are about sucking every last penny from popular older works and removing all access to the others so there is less competition. If Disney had its way all the classic literature from the past would be copyrighted and locked in a box in the basement so that it did not distract us from their latest crappy musical cartoon. Hopefully the rest of the world's governments will not be so easily bribed into destroying our literary, musical, and theatrical heritage.
You choose to Open it in Word and you have agreed to Microsoft's license. But, like I said, I can't tell if thats what he meant.
No.
OK, there seems to be a lot of confusion here. I have heard, but do not have confirmation that the MS Word license includes a clause that says you will not open/modify any files you create in anything but Word. The Mass. government agreed to the license and have been using Word. Legally, they want to be able to use other clients to open/modify their Word files. They have negotiated MS into agreeing to let them open them, but not modify them.
If you create a document in Word and send it to me, nothing prevents me from opening/modifying it in OpenOffice. Nothing prevents you from opening/modifying documents I create in OpenOffice with Word.
Further, there is a great deal of question as to whether the license is enforceable. Just to reiterate my main point, the license only applies to people who are running Word and have agreed to the license. It applies to no one else.
omeone who reads a file you send them is not bound by any license you might have clicked.
I don't recall asserting that they were. The Mass. government is interested in being able to open their own documents in the future. They have agreed (nominally) to the user agreement. It has nothing to do with organizations that have not agreed to the terms.
You still can't read each and every PDF document with xpdf
I installed Acrobat Reader 7 on OS X for compatibility testing not that long ago. Let me tell you, it can't read each and every PDF either. It silently fails on about 10%. It also installs a plug-in to make it open all PDFs in your browser without asking. It is slow, somehow keeps Safari from working while it is loading, and does not even work all the time. I killed the plug-in pronto and went back to using Preview.app as my every day viewer. It has opened every PDF I tried, does not bring my browser to a halt, and is much faster.
I believe the licensing for Word forbids you from opening the files it creates in anything other than Word. I'm not certain though, having never read it myself. Also, MS has some bogus patents on their .doc format and we all know how many years they can tie things up in the courts for. Mass. probably does not have the money to fight a court battle against MS.
No, governments have no place telling businesses how to operate. We need to get government out of our cozy relationships with corporations, and go it alone, human to artificial human.
Without governments, corporations don't exist. They are legal entities. So I guess I agree with you.