Eminent domain has to do with real, not intellectual, property, since it is a "taking", and as is incessantly pointed out on Slashdot you can't "take" intellectual property.
Too bad, because then we could have some precendence for squatters rights wrt intellectual property. Like say, if you provide a bittorrent seed of a copyright work for 2 years without any legal intervention from the copyright owner, you could then claim copyright over the work yourself as an ip squatter.
Practically speaking I guess this means we should all stay away from questionable (*cough*pr0n*cough*) sites for a few days. Seriously, we all know where these exploits are likely to show up first...
Ah yes! Pr0n is always on the technological leading edge - first vhs, then 900-numbers, then pay-perv-view, dvds and web-commerce and now browser exploits! You can always count on pr0n to lead the way to innovation.
once you buy an Ipod you are locked into Itunes and Itunes alone.
What a bizarre way of looking at it. If you insist on buying crippled music, then yeah, you are locked into Itunes. Other than short-sighted suckers, no one should be buying crippled music. That's not to say that new suckers aren't born every minute.
I don't think that sticking it in a database is transformative...
Then we disagree. As long as the act of "sticking it in a database" includes the building of indices and cross-references, then I say it is transformative - you can now do creative things that with it that were effectively impossible beforehand.
Where do you get that my.mp3.com was about intent at all? Read the decision. Which part of the 4-part fair-use exemptions are different between my.mp3.com and google?
The part about, "new aesthetics, new insights and understandings." Adding full-text search and cross-referencing can and does enable new insights and understandings.
That's what Google is doing externally. Internally, is it possible that the courts will see the initial act of copying the books into their computers as the same as running thousands of books through Google's photocopiers (which would be obviously illegal, if done to books in their entirety).
Not necessarily. In fact, they probably have to do the equivalent - scan the entire text of each book into their database. Otherwise they could not do full-text searches on the content of the books.
The difference here is the intent. mp3.com's intent in making those copies was to distribute the copies to customers who had purchased original copies. Google's intent is to build a searchable database - not to redistribute the contents of the database.
Law is super stupid about things like that, read this for a genearl treatise on such things: What Colour are your Bits?
I don't pirate very often, but when I do, at least I acknowledge that I do it to save money, rather than taking the approach that many Slashdotters do of flying the "information wants to be free" banner and trying to elevate it to a social protest that's akin to the Montgomery Freedom March.
But, you do have to admit that the reason you can do it to save money is because information wants to be free. It's no more a social cause than gravity is.
About six months back my girlfriend gave me a Chinese bootleg copy of "Kung Fu Hustle."
Are you so sure it was a bootleg? Kung-Fu Hustle, like all the recent big asian theatrical releases in the US (Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, Hero, House of Flying Daggers, Oldboy) had been legitimately available on DVD in Hong Kong and other asian countries long before they opened in the US.
It is not just Asia either, Brit films too - Shaun of the Dead and Bend it Like Beckham were released to DVD in the UK and Europe before they even opened in the US.
David Puttnam (Born February 25, 1941) - a well known hollywood producer known for his outspoken nature was found in his home in Ventura dead of a drug overdose at 6:30am on May 2nd --Obituary Section, Los Angeles Times May 3rd, 1987.
If the investment needs protecting to be financially viable in the future, then they should go nuts.
Why? Will the government pass a law to protect all the people paying ridiculously sky-high prices for houses today will be able to sell their houses in a financially viable fashion after the bubble bursts? The internet has burst the bubble of current movie industry, why should they get special protection and other industries don't?
If it thwarts you and your false-moral belief that you have some sort of God given right to free Olsen twins movies, well that's too bad for you.
Ever consider the possibibility that it is an immoral belief that information should be hoarded? And puh-lease, don't give me that claptrap about hoarding being the only way to assure that $300M blockbusters get made. That's just the way it has been done - before the internet changed the world, not the only way to do it.
Because the current business model is how many of those tickets can you sell in the first two weeks (or so, that is what the movie studio gets all of the ticket sales, and then a greatly reduced amount after that).
No, they only take about 80% of the box office on the first week, and it is a slow, steady decline each week after that until it levels off around 35% a couple of months in - if the movie is even still showing at that point.
Furthermore, the DVD divisions of the big distributors are generating about 5x as much revenue per quarter than the theaterical divisions are.
Also, being that most theaters have multiple movies showing at the same time, I doubt they want to compete over price for viewing.
Why not? If it brings in more people, even if the average selling price is less, it could still be more profitable.
You need to be reeducated. China is communist in name only and has been for decades now. What they are today is the closest thing to Mussolini's fascist state as has ever been realized. I suspect you will want to read up on the real definition of fascism in order to understand the distinction.
I didn't take it that way at all, and didn't intend any return of rudeness if I came off that way. Bluntness and the occasional teasing strawman is par for the course around here, so don't worry about it either way.
Anyhow- can we agree that voter fraud is an institution, whether electronic or paper?
Indeed, there will always be those who will try to game the vote in order to realize their own goals. The price of freedom is vigilance and all that rot.
But with the looming US debt owed to China, how long before they say, "No, Yankee, we don't feel like it. What are you going to do about it" and grin the grin of one who knows they hold the other by the short hairs?
It is a two way street and will be for quite some time. China buys a lot of US bonds. But the US is China's largest market by far and for the forseeable future. They need the US to keep buying from them (remember the whole brohaha over most-favored-nation trading status). Additionally, China has a couple of looming problems - the double-digit economic growth rates are unstustainble for the long run, their economy will slow, at which point they will need the US market even more. Secondly, the one-child policy has produced a major age inversion - it is going to get harder to support the aging population with less able-bodied people entering the workforce than are retiring from it.
Over the past year, China has made a show of cracking down on flagrant IP violators. My impression (and that's all it is, an impression) is that big crackdowns have had no long-term effects on the 'market' as a whole.
This case is different in that Baidu is in the top-5 websites with the most page-hits in all of the world, I suspect that the Chinese goverment has "pride" in Baidu and a big punishment would be considered a loss of face. But, big show-punishments seems to be how they've handled similar complaints recently. So there is probably some level of internal conflict here. Just my occidental analysis of the situation.
Vote tampering is almost an institution in the US. From the very dawn of America
Never said it wasn't - just that electronic tampering has the potential to be even easier to pull off than the physical kind. On the other hand - well designed and implemented electronic voting systems can greatly assist in preventing the physical tampering you are talking about.
It is basically a situation where if you implement electronic balloting poorly, then you greately increase the risks compared to paper balloting. But implement it robustly and you greatly decrease the risks instead.
So far, we've had way too much of the poor implementations.
Many would say it is much easier to tamper with a paper ballot election. Ballots dissapear, ballots materialize out of nowhere etc.
Perhaps you are unfamiliar with the law of conservation of energy? Physical ballots do not spontaneously materialize and disappear. Electronic ballots, on the other hand, can do just that.
Burning boxes of ballots in fields is nothing new. One could postulate that tampering with computer ballots leave much more of a trail than traditional tampering.
The difference is that if you want to burn ballots in the field, you have to physically go get the ballots, physically transport them, and physically destroy them. All of which carries some amount of risk of being caught by widely-understood, traditional methods of security.
Electronic voting systems are pure voodoo to 99.99% of the population. Remotely tampering with them, especially when the security on them is made of swiss cheese, involves much less risk of being caught and can be done on a muchc broader scale -- one person can only haul of and destroy so many physical ballots, but one professional electronic vote-rigger can conceivably modify every single ballot cast.
every year a greater percentage of the engineers that I work with are Indian or Asian. A few decades ago, we were world technology leaders, all with home grown talent.
Now we're less educated than ever before.
Almost all of those immigrant engineers have degrees from American universities and as long as the majority continue to settle here and become permanent residents, then they are us.
I didn't realize that news providers are looking at the referer when deciding whether they should show the article or not.
Interesting.
I use the refcontrol plugin for firefox. I just added "http://google.com/" as the referrer for all access to mercurynews.com and now your original link works for me, as well as all the other news articles on the site that I tried.
It used to be you could spoof your user-agent and set it to the googlebot to get into a lot of sites, but that's becoming less and less useful as they wise up. So this is kind of a riff on that old trick.
That will change, as this stuff becomes more workable for the big chunks of data that a high-def "1492" would require.
No, being able to toss hdtv editions of movies around the net will not make a difference. The problem is contractual and movie (and music) distributors are showing no signs of changing the way the parcel out distribution rights based on geography. By the use of DRM, they are trying to enforce those distribution limitations even further - see the DVD release of Terminator2 that includes a hi-def WM9 encoding on the second disc. It has phone-home DRM that will not authorize playback if it thinks you are 'phoning' from outside of the USA.
There are similar limitations with online music vendors where they are trying to restrict the locale from which you can purchase the downloaded music. For example, if you live in Japan, you can't use the USA Itunes store, only the Japanese Itunes store and vice versa, because the inventory of the stores is different, they are restricting customer access - trying to enforce geographical distribution rights in the virtual world.
So, do not think that the technological improvement, by itself is going to change the way the big copyright holders do business.
and it's a needless waste, all over the insistence on sticking to a rather childish name.
No, it is a needless waste, all over the insistence on sticking to inoffensive names.
You don't seem to have caught on to the idea that by using a politically incorrect name, that the developers are putting a cost on being politcally correct or otherwise "thin skinned" as the other post said.
You may perceive that as a waste while they may perceive that they are doing society a benefit by making the cost of being PC for PC's sake quite explicit.
Now I don't speak for the developers of the GIMP, they may have no social agenda at all. But if I were in their shoes, I would think such a position would be entirely rational.
Because every recording imaginable is available to buy online.
I'm going to ignore the rest of your post because I've heard it all before and I don't care to talk about it. But this claim is demonstrably false.
There are a large number of out of print recordings that are rare-to-impossible to buy online and completely impossible to find a the local B&M stores. At best you can do something like set up a daily search of ebay in the hope that they will pop up there. For example, the fairly recent and really top-notch album "Reunification" by Black Uhuru was extremely difficult to find until about a year ago (it took me over 6 months of searching ebay before I found a seller, and he was in a foreign country) as are most of the original Juluka albums (amazing south african pop/protest music). There are probably tens, if not hundreds of thousands of other such out of print albums that are either completely unavailable or only available at "collector's prices" for $100+.
Furthermore, when you include video, there are movies that are in print, but only in foreign countries and you still can't legally watch them because of region locking. Ridley Scott's 1492 comes to mind as one of the tens of thousands of such movies unavailable in the USA.
So whether you think lack of availability is justification for piracy or not, it is not legitimate to dismiss it as a solved problem.
So, what I want to know is, what punitive measures were taken against T-mobile for having such poor security processes that a teenager could pull this off for so long without being stopped?
It is easy to send one kid, who probably couldn't afford more than a public defender, to jail. But what does it do to fix the problem? There are thousands more kids who could do the same thing, there are probably tens of professionals who are doing it right now and are smart enough to say under the radar.
Other than the fact that T-mobile has the big gun lawyers, big gun lobbyists and big gun 'campaign contributions' - why haven't they been prosecuted for negligence?
Slashdot Mirror
Eminent domain has to do with real, not intellectual, property, since it is a "taking", and as is incessantly pointed out on Slashdot you can't "take" intellectual property.
Too bad, because then we could have some precendence for squatters rights wrt intellectual property. Like say, if you provide a bittorrent seed of a copyright work for 2 years without any legal intervention from the copyright owner, you could then claim copyright over the work yourself as an ip squatter.
Practically speaking I guess this means we should all stay away from questionable (*cough*pr0n*cough*) sites for a few days. Seriously, we all know where these exploits are likely to show up first...
Ah yes! Pr0n is always on the technological leading edge - first vhs, then 900-numbers, then pay-perv-view, dvds and web-commerce and now browser exploits! You can always count on pr0n to lead the way to innovation.
once you buy an Ipod you are locked into Itunes and Itunes alone.
What a bizarre way of looking at it. If you insist on buying crippled music, then yeah, you are locked into Itunes. Other than short-sighted suckers, no one should be buying crippled music. That's not to say that new suckers aren't born every minute.
it makes quite a difference when exercising.
What's that?
I don't think that sticking it in a database is transformative...
Then we disagree. As long as the act of "sticking it in a database" includes the building of indices and cross-references, then I say it is transformative - you can now do creative things that with it that were effectively impossible beforehand.
Where do you get that my.mp3.com was about intent at all? Read the decision. Which part of the 4-part fair-use exemptions are different between my.mp3.com and google?
The part about, "new aesthetics, new insights and understandings." Adding full-text search and cross-referencing can and does enable new insights and understandings.
That's what Google is doing externally. Internally, is it possible that the courts will see the initial act of copying the books into their computers as the same as running thousands of books through Google's photocopiers (which would be obviously illegal, if done to books in their entirety).
Not necessarily. In fact, they probably have to do the equivalent - scan the entire text of each book into their database. Otherwise they could not do full-text searches on the content of the books.
The difference here is the intent. mp3.com's intent in making those copies was to distribute the copies to customers who had purchased original copies. Google's intent is to build a searchable database - not to redistribute the contents of the database.
Law is super stupid about things like that, read this for a genearl treatise on such things: What Colour are your Bits?
Because Web search engines existed before today's copyright madness, they've been effectively grandfathered in.
LoL! Today's "copyright madness" began long before the web even existed. The public has been gradually losing its rights in the area for centuries.
I don't pirate very often, but when I do, at least I acknowledge that I do it to save money, rather than taking the approach that many Slashdotters do of flying the "information wants to be free" banner and trying to elevate it to a social protest that's akin to the Montgomery Freedom March.
But, you do have to admit that the reason you can do it to save money is because information wants to be free. It's no more a social cause than gravity is.
About six months back my girlfriend gave me a Chinese bootleg copy of "Kung Fu Hustle."
Are you so sure it was a bootleg? Kung-Fu Hustle, like all the recent big asian theatrical releases in the US (Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, Hero, House of Flying Daggers, Oldboy) had been legitimately available on DVD in Hong Kong and other asian countries long before they opened in the US.
It is not just Asia either, Brit films too - Shaun of the Dead and Bend it Like Beckham were released to DVD in the UK and Europe before they even opened in the US.
David Puttnam (Born February 25, 1941) - a well known hollywood producer known for his outspoken nature was found in his home in Ventura dead of a drug overdose at 6:30am on May 2nd --Obituary Section, Los Angeles Times May 3rd, 1987.
If the investment needs protecting to be financially viable in the future, then they should go nuts.
Why? Will the government pass a law to protect all the people paying ridiculously sky-high prices for houses today will be able to sell their houses in a financially viable fashion after the bubble bursts? The internet has burst the bubble of current movie industry, why should they get special protection and other industries don't?
If it thwarts you and your false-moral belief that you have some sort of God given right to free Olsen twins movies, well that's too bad for you.
Ever consider the possibibility that it is an immoral belief that information should be hoarded? And puh-lease, don't give me that claptrap about hoarding being the only way to assure that $300M blockbusters get made. That's just the way it has been done - before the internet changed the world, not the only way to do it.
Because the current business model is how many of those tickets can you sell in the first two weeks (or so, that is what the movie studio gets all of the ticket sales, and then a greatly reduced amount after that).
No, they only take about 80% of the box office on the first week, and it is a slow, steady decline each week after that until it levels off around 35% a couple of months in - if the movie is even still showing at that point.
Furthermore, the DVD divisions of the big distributors are generating about 5x as much revenue per quarter than the theaterical divisions are.
Also, being that most theaters have multiple movies showing at the same time, I doubt they want to compete over price for viewing.
Why not? If it brings in more people, even if the average selling price is less, it could still be more profitable.
What you seem to miss is that China is communist
You need to be reeducated. China is communist in name only and has been for decades now. What they are today is the closest thing to Mussolini's fascist state as has ever been realized. I suspect you will want to read up on the real definition of fascism in order to understand the distinction.
The EU is not a single country,and as for Japan, being a larger trading partner than the US, you are just wrong.
My tone in my earlier reply was rude.
I didn't take it that way at all, and didn't intend any return of rudeness if I came off that way. Bluntness and the occasional teasing strawman is par for the course around here, so don't worry about it either way.
Anyhow- can we agree that voter fraud is an institution, whether electronic or paper?
Indeed, there will always be those who will try to game the vote in order to realize their own goals. The price of freedom is vigilance and all that rot.
But with the looming US debt owed to China, how long before they say, "No, Yankee, we don't feel like it. What are you going to do about it" and grin the grin of one who knows they hold the other by the short hairs?
It is a two way street and will be for quite some time. China buys a lot of US bonds. But the US is China's largest market by far and for the forseeable future. They need the US to keep buying from them (remember the whole brohaha over most-favored-nation trading status). Additionally, China has a couple of looming problems - the double-digit economic growth rates are unstustainble for the long run, their economy will slow, at which point they will need the US market even more. Secondly, the one-child policy has produced a major age inversion - it is going to get harder to support the aging population with less able-bodied people entering the workforce than are retiring from it.
Over the past year, China has made a show of cracking down on flagrant IP violators. My impression (and that's all it is, an impression) is that big crackdowns have had no long-term effects on the 'market' as a whole.
This case is different in that Baidu is in the top-5 websites with the most page-hits in all of the world, I suspect that the Chinese goverment has "pride" in Baidu and a big punishment would be considered a loss of face. But, big show-punishments seems to be how they've handled similar complaints recently. So there is probably some level of internal conflict here. Just my occidental analysis of the situation.
And yet Google isn't [overvalued]?
Not the way Baidu is, see this analysis.
Vote tampering is almost an institution in the US. From the very dawn of America
Never said it wasn't - just that electronic tampering has the potential to be even easier to pull off than the physical kind. On the other hand - well designed and implemented electronic voting systems can greatly assist in preventing the physical tampering you are talking about.
It is basically a situation where if you implement electronic balloting poorly, then you greately increase the risks compared to paper balloting. But implement it robustly and you greatly decrease the risks instead.
So far, we've had way too much of the poor implementations.
Many would say it is much easier to tamper with a paper ballot election. Ballots dissapear, ballots materialize out of nowhere etc.
Perhaps you are unfamiliar with the law of conservation of energy?
Physical ballots do not spontaneously materialize and disappear. Electronic ballots, on the other hand, can do just that.
Burning boxes of ballots in fields is nothing new. One could postulate that tampering with computer ballots leave much more of a trail than traditional tampering.
The difference is that if you want to burn ballots in the field, you have to physically go get the ballots, physically transport them, and physically destroy them. All of which carries some amount of risk of being caught by widely-understood, traditional methods of security.
Electronic voting systems are pure voodoo to 99.99% of the population. Remotely tampering with them, especially when the security on them is made of swiss cheese, involves much less risk of being caught and can be done on a muchc broader scale -- one person can only haul of and destroy so many physical ballots, but one professional electronic vote-rigger can conceivably modify every single ballot cast.
every year a greater percentage of the engineers that I work with are Indian or Asian. A few decades ago, we were world technology leaders, all with home grown talent.
Now we're less educated than ever before.
Almost all of those immigrant engineers have degrees from American universities and as long as the majority continue to settle here and become permanent residents, then they are us.
I didn't realize that news providers are looking at the referer when deciding whether they should show the article or not.
Interesting.
I use the refcontrol plugin for firefox. I just added "http://google.com/" as the referrer for all access to mercurynews.com and now your original link works for me, as well as all the other news articles on the site that I tried.
It used to be you could spoof your user-agent and set it to the googlebot to get into a lot of sites, but that's becoming less and less useful as they wise up. So this is kind of a riff on that old trick.
That will change, as this stuff becomes more workable for the big chunks of data that a high-def "1492" would require.
No, being able to toss hdtv editions of movies around the net will not make a difference. The problem is contractual and movie (and music) distributors are showing no signs of changing the way the parcel out distribution rights based on geography. By the use of DRM, they are trying to enforce those distribution limitations even further - see the DVD release of Terminator2 that includes a hi-def WM9 encoding on the second disc. It has phone-home DRM that will not authorize playback if it thinks you are 'phoning' from outside of the USA.
There are similar limitations with online music vendors where they are trying to restrict the locale from which you can purchase the downloaded music. For example, if you live in Japan, you can't use the USA Itunes store, only the Japanese Itunes store and vice versa, because the inventory of the stores is different, they are restricting customer access - trying to enforce geographical distribution rights in the virtual world.
So, do not think that the technological improvement, by itself is going to change the way the big copyright holders do business.
and it's a needless waste, all over the insistence on sticking to a rather childish name.
No, it is a needless waste, all over the insistence on sticking to inoffensive names.
You don't seem to have caught on to the idea that by using a politically incorrect name, that the developers are putting a cost on being politcally correct or otherwise "thin skinned" as the other post said.
You may perceive that as a waste while they may perceive that they are doing society a benefit by making the cost of being PC for PC's sake quite explicit.
Now I don't speak for the developers of the GIMP, they may have no social agenda at all. But if I were in their shoes, I would think such a position would be entirely rational.
Because every recording imaginable is available to buy online.
I'm going to ignore the rest of your post because I've heard it all before and I don't care to talk about it. But this claim is demonstrably false.
There are a large number of out of print recordings that are rare-to-impossible to buy online and completely impossible to find a the local B&M stores. At best you can do something like set up a daily search of ebay in the hope that they will pop up there.
For example, the fairly recent and really top-notch album "Reunification" by Black Uhuru was extremely difficult to find until about a year ago (it took me over 6 months of searching ebay before I found a seller, and he was in a foreign country) as are most of the original Juluka albums (amazing south african pop/protest music). There are probably tens, if not hundreds of thousands of other such out of print albums that are either completely unavailable or only available at "collector's prices" for $100+.
Furthermore, when you include video, there are movies that are in print, but only in foreign countries and you still can't legally watch them because of region locking. Ridley Scott's 1492 comes to mind as one of the tens of thousands of such movies unavailable in the USA.
So whether you think lack of availability is justification for piracy or not, it is not legitimate to dismiss it as a solved problem.
So, what I want to know is, what punitive measures were taken against T-mobile for having such poor security processes that a teenager could pull this off for so long without being stopped?
It is easy to send one kid, who probably couldn't afford more than a public defender, to jail. But what does it do to fix the problem? There are thousands more kids who could do the same thing, there are probably tens of professionals who are doing it right now and are smart enough to say under the radar.
Other than the fact that T-mobile has the big gun lawyers, big gun lobbyists and big gun 'campaign contributions' - why haven't they been prosecuted for negligence?