It's a shame that Slashdot linked to an article about the Jornada's problem that didn't mention HP's awesome response: Offering a full refund to anyone who bought one....
From the linked HP article: "AlexanderOgilvy also confirmed that H-P would refund the full purchase price of any dissatisfied Jornada 540 series Pocket PC buyer."
The OP quotes a definition of theft to 'prove' that copyright infringement isn't theft:
...every part of the property stolen must be removed, however slightly, from its former position...
First, dictionary definitions are not legal definitions for a reason--they usually aren't rigorous enough. Even granting that, you've missed the object of copyright.
When someone has a copyright, they do not own the paper, the ink, the bits, the magnetic patterns on a disk, or any other physical item. They own the limited right to control distribution of a work. (See a lawyer for what that entails, exactly, in your country.)
And when you distribute the work to others without authorization or specific exemption in law (such as fair use, satire, etc) you are violating their right to control distribution.
Not all property is physical; many rights are not rights to physical things. This is because many valuable things people produce or need to live a civilised life are not physical (i.e., privacy).
How do you stay in business when no one sees a direct reason to pay you for the information they can readily get for free?
I'm with you. I keep hearing about the "outdated business model" that the RIAA are using. Ok, I'll stipulate that, so what's a model that works?
I'd like to see someone start a label that signs artists, gets music recorded, books tours, and gives away mp3s without worrying who copies what. If there is a business model in there somewhere that takes mp3 copying and makes it remunerative, then the first guy to do it will be well rewarded.
Plus, it'll end all this bickering as the RIAA members fall over themselves to be the first to copy it.
Once you've accepted the EULA that allows them to install/uninstall software at will and disable software you installed, you're caught.
Lots of people at work have been asking me about desktop unices since the latest crap from MSFT. I just hope that open source software is legal in most countries in a couple of years when MSFT springs enforced DRM on the populace.
Is it ? If these companies have paid for advertising space in Times Sq., they must be factoring in the fact that Times Sq. is a well known location, and likely to feature in films/TV etc. Consequently a percentage of the ad cost would reflect this ?
It's totally unreasonable. While they might have paid someone more for the ability to put adverts in Times Square because they thought they'd free ride in movies &c., they sure as hell didn't contract with the Spidey movie to reproduce the ads.
The spidey movie made no contracts or promises to display the ads, so why should they? The billboard owners want something for nothing.
From the article: '"Sherwood has not authorized defendants or anyone to distort the appearance" of the area' [...]
Since when does a person taking a picture of something not allowed to futz with the image? Especially in the movies, where the whole point of taking the picture is to make the audience believe that something which isn't real actually happened.
I'm glad they highlight the budget system. As a software developer, I find most of my desktop cycles are spare. Even builds I do on a server. Budget systems can do more now than supercomputers a few years ago.
What the computer industry really needs are some breakthroughs in software development to enhance stability and usability.
Booked a private matinee screening for your team?!?!?! Damn i need to talk my boss into that. Sure it might be overkill for 4 guys bit it would be cool.
There is a theatre near us with 24-26-seat VIP rooms (comfy chairs, endtables, lots of legroom, etc.) We're not reserving a large theatre just for 30 people.:-)
Plus, I won't mind the smaller screen for this showing--you're closer to it so it looks fine. Plus, I'll probably see the movie three more times in normal theatres anyway.
What does it mean that the action scenes were described thusly:
"distinctive vision" — "distinctive" is often used as a euphemism for "screwy."
"edited frenetically in the modern style" — frenetic? modern? I hope this isn't describing the string of 1/10 sec cuts that films like Tomb Raider called an action sequence.
"such jittery vision" — This is worrisome. I'd rather not see LOTR with "jittery" anything.
I've loved the trailers so far, and even booked a private matinee screening for myself and my programming team in advance, so you know I'm a booster of this film. But these descriptions make me wonder what the Salon writer was trying to get across.
The tax we have here (aside from various compound sales taxes) is only on the CDR media specifically for audio. (read: the kind that works with those near-useless standalone CD copying whizmos). ...
There is no tax on the vanilla CDRs because those have business uses.
Bullshit. The levy (not "tax, but levy", sounds less like ripping you off) is on all kinds of blank media. Even audio tapes and CD-RWs.
The Canadian tax is actually a good thing. It recognizes that people use CD-R's to copy CD's, and makes that legal. You pay the tax, suddenly you're allowed to make copies.
No, it recognizes that you use CD-Rs to copy CDs, and makes me pay for part of your copyright infringement.
So I end up paying for people who were infringing on copyright. That's not justice.
The government probably couldn't actually outlaw a license, but they could make all the provisions that make the license what it is "unenforceable."
That takes care of the silly things that UCITA allows, like not reviewing the product, or only suing in Ireland.
But there's still the issue of the developer who just doesn't distribute code, period. You can get rid of the entire history of copyright law if you want, but a guy who refuses to release the code has to be physically forced if you want to get it.
This guy wouldn't be offerring his program in a form sanctioned by RMS, and RMS may very well want this guy hauled into jail. Maybe to cool his heels in a cell until he comes up with the passphrase for the encrypted source on his hard drive.
This is a substantial reduction in flerbage. And I respect ESR for framing the issue in these terms.
Frankly, most people would rather have stuff free than have to pay for it.
Frankly, I don't encounter this attitude in the OSS community near me. We buy linux distributions; we spend our spare time promoting products we like (and also fit our software philosophy); we buy endless numbers of books.
Most of the linux-oriented people I hang with bought one or two titles from Loki. I personally have two. I am not aware of a huge warez scene for Loki titles. It's just that there are so very few of us compared to Windows gamers. This will change eventually.
But I'm sick and tired of hearing that Open Source enthusiasts will just not pay for things. Sure, I won't pay for something when there's a better alternative available. But that's simply not the case with Loki's stuff. I think they earned every penny with their attention to detail in porting and packaging (not to mention the SDL library).
But it looks like Stallman just copied and pasted some boilerplate.
Well, he wasn't asked a question he hasn't answered five hundred times. I'll bet I could find decent answers to every question in that interview on the fsf website.
If you want novel and thoughtful responses, ask novel and thoughtful questions.
We've had PPPoE in Ontario, Canada for some time with 1MBit ADSL
modems. My experience is not as bad as some, and there seems to be a
lot of FUD out there.
When we got it, the RFC was six to eight
months old. No kernel support. No HOWTOs.
There was a userland program that fed packets in stdin and out stdout
and took 30% of a decent CPU, or 80% of a 486 firewall machine. And there was a great kernel patch for
2.2.x that actually did the job (mostly) properly. To get a good
connection, you had to apply the patch (horrors!).
But six months later, the software had matured. Now pppoe support is
in the main branch for 2.2.x and 2.4.x, and all the big distros are set up
to use it.
It was a couple of days of pain as I got all the necessary stuff
together and prepared the gateway/firewall linux box so it would
reconnect if the connection went down. But since then, the gateway has had hundreds of days uptime, and I don't notice the pppoe at all.
There's no "dialup" like some
people are complaining about. Sure, the connection takes about ten
seconds to occur, but my box only restores its connection once a week,
and usually at 3am. No inconvenience there.
We all bitched and moaned at the time, but it's hard to bitch now
that it's even a normal config option in the floppy-firewall distros!
When I was a kid, we had to scribe the pppoe discovery packets by hand!
Uphill! In the rain!
By the number of people on #slashdot, I thought the whole thing was a clever ruse intended to see if they could bring down slashnet (as six thousand trolls go to see why they couldn't get their fix).
This story bears a common thread with several recent stories, f'rinstance:
A judge recently asked an attourney defending 2600 against the DMCA what previously-held "fair use" that new law makes impossible. He wanted to know what daily activity was being made impossible. She didn't have a great answer for him.
But I think that's not the right question. DVD's haven't been around very long to have established a very large set of uses: the problem is that the DMCA helps the DVD CCA to market a product that is functionally useless for convenient "unauthorized fair use" of it's contents. So it's hard for normal (but unauthorized) other uses to develop.
If a bookseller marketed a product that made fair use really difficult, judges would instantly see the effect of the law. Say the book's ink disappears if the fingers of the person opening it aren't detected to be the owner's fingers. It's easy to see the effect. But for a judge who has no use for manipulating multimedia content, the only "use" for a DVD is to hit "play" and watch.
I don't know the semantics of this video "Digital Content Protection" spec well at all, but it seems to follow the pattern. We'll argue that circumventing it for the "fair use" of the content going over the wire is fine; but the judge won't see why, since we never had good access to that data before, so why should we be entitled to it now?
It's disappointing. Maybe someone should start a company that sells a book like the one I've described who wouldn't mind seeing this go to court.
I don't use passport, and now I won't. I don't care if it helps me achieve something I need; I'll find a different way.
This has come up before--I've given up some online business because they required me to have a passport account; I've written the vendor and told them why I will not threaten my own privacy for any reason.
The best we can do is not to use these services, and intelligently evangelize more privacy-friendly alternatives.
Slashdot Mirror
From the linked HP article: "AlexanderOgilvy also confirmed that H-P would refund the full purchase price of any dissatisfied Jornada 540 series Pocket PC buyer."
The OP quotes a definition of theft to 'prove' that copyright infringement isn't theft:
First, dictionary definitions are not legal definitions for a reason--they usually aren't rigorous enough. Even granting that, you've missed the object of copyright.
When someone has a copyright, they do not own the paper, the ink, the bits, the magnetic patterns on a disk, or any other physical item. They own the limited right to control distribution of a work. (See a lawyer for what that entails, exactly, in your country.)
And when you distribute the work to others without authorization or specific exemption in law (such as fair use, satire, etc) you are violating their right to control distribution.
Not all property is physical; many rights are not rights to physical things. This is because many valuable things people produce or need to live a civilised life are not physical (i.e., privacy).
Blockquoth the poster:
I'm with you. I keep hearing about the "outdated business model" that the RIAA are using. Ok, I'll stipulate that, so what's a model that works?
I'd like to see someone start a label that signs artists, gets music recorded, books tours, and gives away mp3s without worrying who copies what. If there is a business model in there somewhere that takes mp3 copying and makes it remunerative, then the first guy to do it will be well rewarded.
Plus, it'll end all this bickering as the RIAA members fall over themselves to be the first to copy it.
Once you've accepted the EULA that allows them to install/uninstall software at will and disable software you installed, you're caught.
Lots of people at work have been asking me about desktop unices since the latest crap from MSFT. I just hope that open source software is legal in most countries in a couple of years when MSFT springs enforced DRM on the populace.
<disclaimer>IANAL</disclaimer>
It's totally unreasonable. While they might have paid someone more for the ability to put adverts in Times Square because they thought they'd free ride in movies &c., they sure as hell didn't contract with the Spidey movie to reproduce the ads.
The spidey movie made no contracts or promises to display the ads, so why should they? The billboard owners want something for nothing.
From the article: '"Sherwood has not authorized defendants or anyone to distort the appearance" of the area' [...]
Since when does a person taking a picture of something not allowed to futz with the image? Especially in the movies, where the whole point of taking the picture is to make the audience believe that something which isn't real actually happened.
This kind of litigiousness makes me fume.
I'm glad they highlight the budget system. As a software developer, I find most of my desktop cycles are spare. Even builds I do on a server. Budget systems can do more now than supercomputers a few years ago.
What the computer industry really needs are some breakthroughs in software development to enhance stability and usability.
Wow. In just a few short years they'll have implemented....usenet!
Just kidding, I know there are differences. Still, an nntp gateway would allow people to use their own clients, and those killfiles.
There is a theatre near us with 24-26-seat VIP rooms (comfy chairs, endtables, lots of legroom, etc.) We're not reserving a large theatre just for 30 people. :-)
Plus, I won't mind the smaller screen for this showing--you're closer to it so it looks fine. Plus, I'll probably see the movie three more times in normal theatres anyway.
What does it mean that the action scenes were described thusly:
I've loved the trailers so far, and even booked a private matinee screening for myself and my programming team in advance, so you know I'm a booster of this film. But these descriptions make me wonder what the Salon writer was trying to get across.
RTFM. The ide-scsi module in the kernel makes your ATAPI CD-RW drive look like a scsi drive. cdrecord will work great with it.
This advice is in every article, HOWTO, and doc I read about writing CDs on linux.
Bullshit. The levy (not "tax, but levy", sounds less like ripping you off) is on all kinds of blank media. Even audio tapes and CD-RWs.
No, it recognizes that you use CD-Rs to copy CDs, and makes me pay for part of your copyright infringement.
So I end up paying for people who were infringing on copyright. That's not justice.
That takes care of the silly things that UCITA allows, like not reviewing the product, or only suing in Ireland.
But there's still the issue of the developer who just doesn't distribute code, period. You can get rid of the entire history of copyright law if you want, but a guy who refuses to release the code has to be physically forced if you want to get it.
This guy wouldn't be offerring his program in a form sanctioned by RMS, and RMS may very well want this guy hauled into jail. Maybe to cool his heels in a cell until he comes up with the passphrase for the encrypted source on his hard drive.
This is a substantial reduction in flerbage. And I respect ESR for framing the issue in these terms.
Frankly, I don't encounter this attitude in the OSS community near me. We buy linux distributions; we spend our spare time promoting products we like (and also fit our software philosophy); we buy endless numbers of books.
Most of the linux-oriented people I hang with bought one or two titles from Loki. I personally have two. I am not aware of a huge warez scene for Loki titles. It's just that there are so very few of us compared to Windows gamers. This will change eventually.
But I'm sick and tired of hearing that Open Source enthusiasts will just not pay for things. Sure, I won't pay for something when there's a better alternative available. But that's simply not the case with Loki's stuff. I think they earned every penny with their attention to detail in porting and packaging (not to mention the SDL library).
Well, he wasn't asked a question he hasn't answered five hundred times. I'll bet I could find decent answers to every question in that interview on the fsf website.
If you want novel and thoughtful responses, ask novel and thoughtful questions.
We've had PPPoE in Ontario, Canada for some time with 1MBit ADSL modems. My experience is not as bad as some, and there seems to be a lot of FUD out there.
When we got it, the RFC was six to eight months old. No kernel support. No HOWTOs.
There was a userland program that fed packets in stdin and out stdout and took 30% of a decent CPU, or 80% of a 486 firewall machine. And there was a great kernel patch for 2.2.x that actually did the job (mostly) properly. To get a good connection, you had to apply the patch (horrors!).
But six months later, the software had matured. Now pppoe support is in the main branch for 2.2.x and 2.4.x, and all the big distros are set up to use it.
It was a couple of days of pain as I got all the necessary stuff together and prepared the gateway/firewall linux box so it would reconnect if the connection went down. But since then, the gateway has had hundreds of days uptime, and I don't notice the pppoe at all.
There's no "dialup" like some people are complaining about. Sure, the connection takes about ten seconds to occur, but my box only restores its connection once a week, and usually at 3am. No inconvenience there.
We all bitched and moaned at the time, but it's hard to bitch now that it's even a normal config option in the floppy-firewall distros! When I was a kid, we had to scribe the pppoe discovery packets by hand! Uphill! In the rain!
IANA Astronomer/Geologist/whatever, but why, when evidence of erosion patterns is found, do they always assume it was water that made them?
Why couldn't it have been some other fluid? Why don't they say it's evidence of some sort of luquid or fluid?
Can any knowledgable geologists help me out?
By the number of people on #slashdot, I thought the whole thing was a clever ruse intended to see if they could bring down slashnet (as six thousand trolls go to see why they couldn't get their fix).
Steve
...but the reaction to it will surprise me. I expect it, and it will still surprise me: I predict this makes absolutely no dent in MSFT server sales.
You see, I think that most of the people who could learn from this sort of thing have already learned several times over.
I don't know what sort of catastrophe it will take for the rest of these people to learn...
This story bears a common thread with several recent stories, f'rinstance:
A judge recently asked an attourney defending 2600 against the DMCA what previously-held "fair use" that new law makes impossible. He wanted to know what daily activity was being made impossible. She didn't have a great answer for him.
But I think that's not the right question. DVD's haven't been around very long to have established a very large set of uses: the problem is that the DMCA helps the DVD CCA to market a product that is functionally useless for convenient "unauthorized fair use" of it's contents. So it's hard for normal (but unauthorized) other uses to develop.
If a bookseller marketed a product that made fair use really difficult, judges would instantly see the effect of the law. Say the book's ink disappears if the fingers of the person opening it aren't detected to be the owner's fingers. It's easy to see the effect. But for a judge who has no use for manipulating multimedia content, the only "use" for a DVD is to hit "play" and watch.
I don't know the semantics of this video "Digital Content Protection" spec well at all, but it seems to follow the pattern. We'll argue that circumventing it for the "fair use" of the content going over the wire is fine; but the judge won't see why, since we never had good access to that data before, so why should we be entitled to it now?
It's disappointing. Maybe someone should start a company that sells a book like the one I've described who wouldn't mind seeing this go to court.
Does anyone else care? All they did was change a single default setting. They didn't get rid of the paperclip, they just defaulted it to 'off'.
I don't use passport, and now I won't. I don't care if it helps me achieve something I need; I'll find a different way.
This has come up before--I've given up some online business because they required me to have a passport account; I've written the vendor and told them why I will not threaten my own privacy for any reason.
The best we can do is not to use these services, and intelligently evangelize more privacy-friendly alternatives.
SteveAbiword runs on just about any platform you can use on a PC and reads MS Word files pretty well. It reads this press release just fine.
SteveI hate the name. It's like they're asking us to adopt pronunciation mistakes made by non-fluent English speakers.
Come on, "advance" isn't an adjective, it's a verb. It should be "Game Boy Advanced" if anything.
And if they wanted to be funny while misusing the language, it should be "All your game boy are belong to us." :-)
Does the Australian government know they're quickly making their country into a laughingstock?
Given how future prosperity will depend on technology to an increasing extent, why are they trying to ensure the emigration of all their geeks?
Can any Australians here offer insight on the political climate that has created this shortsightedness? Why are they doing this?