... an authorised publication by the patent office copyright section. One of the processes undertaken prior to enacting much UK legislation is this public consulation process, the results of which are made available to the UK public.
Your point is valid as far as it goes: the UK & Europe have plenty of companies, lawyers & politicans who are as bad as those in the US. However the UK was legally compelled to implement this law as a result of European union directive 2001/29/EC. In turn the Directive had to be implemented because of the WIPO Copyright Treaty. Who was responsible for the WIPO Copyright Treaty? Yes you guessed - it was created as a result of ultra heavy lobbying and smoozing by the US IP rights holders groups: *IAA etc. So he is right, ultimately it is US corporate interests aided by for-rent US politicians that are responsible.
"This implies that one must be a lawyer to understand legality.." IAAL & I do litigation. I occasionally see people in court with a similar modality. Their argument in support of defending/litigating for themselves,when not cost based, often is something along the lines of; "I understand the context and domain of this legislation. Hell, it's written in English & I speak English etc. etc.". Formally such people are known as "litigants in person". Informally, lawyers call them "easy meat". The reason, as others have alluded, is that to be able to argue ones point, convincingly or otherwise, requires an understanding of the point. What the point is requires a thorough understanding of the law, court procedure, statutory interpretation & the general issue. As for understanding 'legality' whatever that is, Yes you may understand the words in the statute but in a legal context they may not mean quite what you think they do. Even if they do
what are the strategic considerations of that point? are you fucking up by making the point at that time, or at all? How will the court approach and interpret this statutory language? what are the policy objectives here? yada yada.
I understand the desire of FOS people to fight bad law and thuggish corporations. As a GNU/linux user I support it and have helped in the past & will in future. But most geeks havent a clue. This guy is a law student and probably a bright one. In that respect he is better equipped than many geeks but he is still only taking a knife to a gunfight. Litigating is for professionals.
It was fun. Disorganised fun. But what else would you expect with FOS people!
seriously, next time:
1) lets not choose a yuppie wine bar
2) some people need to wear a slashdot/tux t-shirt so we can find each other
3) we need a host!
4) if dave green comes along he must bring more NTK t-shirts or pay a drinking forfeit!
1) get bad PR on F/OS people. Imagine the PR effect of a photo of a 'linux zealot' taking a swing at one of the MS suits.
2)From the antitrust perspective - showing that they are not 'hostile' to Linux by exhibiting at a linux expo.
3) genuinely attempting to turn waverers/gullible to the dark side.
4) Intercepting any curious neutrals and diverting them from the competition - e.g. educational bodies, corporates, people interested in OpenOffice etc..
Fair point in relation to much commercial use of data. But the DPA provides that data must be properly acquired and for a proportionate purpose. Additionally there are get-out clauses covering this type of useage. I would have little difficulty persuading a court that hunting CP infringers was such a proper use.
Most large music retailers also have DPA compliance policies for use in relation to loyalty cards and such-like, it wouldnt require much extra work to use it for this purpose and in my view (IAAL) I think it would be permissible.
I agree, these are very good reasons why such a strategy wouldn't work effectively. However much of the technology relating to copyright protection mechanisms will only achieve this degree of specificity and the *IAA etc are pressing for the right to acquire this information. Probably because while not perfect it will be accurate enough. similarly if you want to harass casual rippers this may be enough to supress significant amounts of it.
"A cd pirate goes to Virgin records, buys a cd, and pays in cash. He goes home and starts making copies... I really don't see what putting an ID code is going to do here. Sony music traces pirated CD key to Virgin records... what then?"
You are assuming that your transaction is anonymous. If you are paying cash thats probably true. But id you are paying by credit card the transaction is date stamped etc, Its not hard to correlate the sale with a particular credit card. And thats just with current techniques, it would not require much to add the SID code to the barcodeand that gets tagged with crdit card number and you have to do almost no work to find out who bought the CD. Then add a watermark to each track which has the SID and voila if a track is ripped and put on your fave p2p network they know who ripped it. Whhich is the real goal here. If they were just interested in finding manufacturers they would not need a SID just a manufacturere number.
I hate to inject any rationality into an empty jibe but I am not evil or dubious, for the most part. Most lawyers are merely professionals paid to represent the interests of their employers, whoever they may be. Some employers [fill in your favourite hate figures here] are aggressive cynical corrupt and manipulative and they will use the law to enforce those objectives. Lawyers are the merely the tools for doing that and any lawyer who takes his job seriously will do it to the best of his ability, I do.
Equally of course lawyers like everyone else have a moral framework and lawyers values differ. Many lawyers do their training and do not ever get the opportunity to see the wider picture. This happens because you are trained in your discipline and get a job with a partnership or a firm and become inculcated in the traditions and value of your industrial sector. Certain things become a given because they become a habit: "patents are useful to us so they must be generally good." "Trademarks are very valuable so we must prevent anyone useing them in ways we dislike lest they become less valuable" etc., etc. Most IP lawyers are taught policy issues and legal history but they are not, in my experience, given much academic prominence. I tend to think also they are too inclined to be implicity pro- rights holders but without seeing the wider social context. This is a failing of universities and to some extent,through a lack of introspection in the profession itself. Lawyers like all members of society vary in their integrity: at the bottom of the market you will find the ambulance chaser and the mafia conciliere(sp?) but even these fellows are just trying to make a living in a cut throat difficult world, by contrast geeks have been know to accept jobs with Microsoft and the *IAA. Many American lawyers I know will not act improperly and will not lie and twist the truth for clients. And even those unethical lawyers with dubious morals will know that there can be a market value in acting ethically.
It should also be said that it is a peculiarly American thing to hate lawyers so much, in my country, England, and I belive Europe it is a high prestige and entirely respectable job. The difference arises in part because of the different charging structure of the professions. In America there is the contingency fee which often gives lawyers a personal stake in the case and this has distorted the ethics of some classes of practitioner. In the UK and Europe we are more likely to be disspationate advisors, although regretably UK practise is being polluted by American values and in some respects we may be slowly sliding into the American cesspool.
There are also certainly double standards here: I have helped a number of free/OpenSource groups on some high profile IP issues such as the DMCA, p2p,IP, libel, etc. and everyone just loves my free advice. But the moment I act for a corporate group against warez groups or a legitimate IP issue I am slime. IP is, with the exception of patents, a useful and proper asset to industry providing it is reasonably constrained and not distorted in favour of any one group
if you really must carp at least choose the most suitable target: vested interests such as corporate groups and corrupt government. They provide the source of almost all the abberant behaviour you hate.
Taking a dig at lawyers is just cheap.
[nik removed due to DMCA violation]
this cretin is a troll. Since when is the ability to talk with others or to read what they say, whatever the media, a privilege granted as an act of largesse by an indulgant state.
'nothing is being censored': so what exactly is the Chinese goverment doing when it prevents its citzens reading disident's web pages?
I would take the time to demolish the rest of your imbecilic arguments but there are so many fundamental logical and semantic flaws its hard to know where to start. It is frightening that half-wits like you roam the World unsedated and presumably with the voting franchise (assuming you are not a Chinese Government stooge).
EROS certainly has the potential to be the best of breed "niche" OS and I'd recommend everyone to check it out. I'm interested to hear you talk about real-time and I wonder if/how this is related to multimedia and if that features in the plans?
Another thing I'd like to know is what the state of play is as far as native compilation goes? I tried to install it but I couldnt get cross compilation to work.
For a lot of these projects it is so important to maintain external interest with a current webpage. Projects build through community involvement and if the webpage looks dead few people will take the effort to join. Moving EROS to GPL was a good move in this respect but a page mainter really does matter of there can be a downward spiral.
(BTW with persistent state what happens if you have decrypted docs? are these flushed to the disk unencrypted?)
IAAL also. It amuses me as well. Funny how the IANAL's always get moderated up though, even when they spout crap about basics. I long ago learnt it was pointless correcting things on/. as no-one here is interested in a real lawyer's opinion.
Users that previously used the free Linux version will need to purchase Freedom and upgrade their operating system to Windows 98, 2000, or ME...
I tried to upgrade but I couldnt find a Windows.rpm anywhere. Pity, I really wanted an OS that's stable flexible powerful and free instead of this Linux crap....
yea too right.
Everyone says "is it POSIX compliant"? well unix is great and I take nothing away from it but times roll and ACL and capabilities based OS's plus Plan9 style stuff comes along. W can do better then *nix.
This is great news. Zope is an excellent product and Python has to be the best scripting language for Web Servers. I hope this encourages Zope to get down to issues it has largely ignored like documentation (which cause me to ditch it for the nascent but excellent Webware).
Abstract
Each year much valuable property is lost as a consequence of dimensional/conciousness discontinuities. Further much economic inefficiency and excess physical exertion results from ineffective transport methods.
therefore this patent present a new and novel method for effectively transporting items in a cost effective and reliable method hitherto unknown.
description
Folds of suitable material are selected by any appropriate method by those skilled in the art. The said material is modified or manilpulated in any manner suitable to the properties of the selected material so as to form a a cavity or enclosure. The cavity or enclosure is then attached to any appropriate clothing and/or fixture point of any transportation device. Optionally the said cavity or enclosure may be fastened by means of zips and or buttons to prevent the unintentional egress of material enclosed by said enclosure.
Examples of use may be, but are not confined to, the carrying of objects such as coins, weapons, mobile phones, pens and the like within the said fabric enclosure. Either about the person or within clothing.
Claims
Accordingly the patentee claims;
enclosures and/or containers. Further or alternatively;
materials folded or manipulate, as aforesaid, so as to fully or partially enclose an n-dimensional space. Further or alternatively;
any form of boxes, bag carrier, container or pocket
Given that the NSA compromises effective keylengths by twisting implementors arms to introduce 'bugs' (see cryptome article: nsa sabotage), my question is; what can the NSA do to ensure a compromised choice? or can they only rely on implementation errors and back doors?
In brief thats right. Many countires that are WIPO members are suposed to bring in laws to protect digital content. That includes stuff thats been encrypted. The DMCA however has used this a a trojan horse to introduce legislation that exceeds even that agreed by WIPO.
And WIO is an organisation with zero consumer input input, and is essentially a Worldwide club of megacorp content providers, like the MPAA/RIAA except not as easygoing. The resolutions passed therefore refelct the will of those people paying the bills and the expenses of the UN members involved.
(IAAL and i would give a fuller answer this but since I always get low karma points for slashdot replies i can be bothered to write long answers anymore -/. moderation sucks)
Slashdot Mirror
new ferrari: approx. $200,000.
$1,000,000 - $200,000 = $800,000
These guys are cryptographers?
I'll take the million dollars and buy 5 ferraris thanks.
seriously useful links
Many thanks Doolin Technologies!!! Couldnt have read /. or picked up email w/out you. A geek without connectivity is a sad sight indeed.
as for Eircom - bah.
... an authorised publication by the patent office copyright section.
One of the processes undertaken prior to enacting much UK legislation is this public consulation process, the results of which are made available to the UK public.
Your point is valid as far as it goes: the UK & Europe have plenty of companies, lawyers & politicans who are as bad as those in the US. However the UK was legally compelled to implement this law as a result of European union directive 2001/29/EC. In turn the Directive had to be implemented because of the WIPO Copyright Treaty. Who was responsible for the WIPO Copyright Treaty?
Yes you guessed - it was created as a result of ultra heavy lobbying and smoozing by the US IP rights holders groups: *IAA etc. So he is right, ultimately it is US corporate interests aided by for-rent US politicians that are responsible.
IAAL & I do litigation.
I occasionally see people in court with a similar modality. Their argument in support of defending/litigating for themselves,when not cost based, often is something along the lines of; "I understand the context and domain of this legislation. Hell, it's written in English & I speak English etc. etc.". Formally such people are known as "litigants in person". Informally, lawyers call them "easy meat". The reason, as others have alluded, is that to be able to argue ones point, convincingly or otherwise, requires an understanding of the point. What the point is requires a thorough understanding of the law, court procedure, statutory interpretation & the general issue. As for understanding 'legality' whatever that is, Yes you may understand the words in the statute but in a legal context they may not mean quite what you think they do. Even if they do what are the strategic considerations of that point? are you fucking up by making the point at that time, or at all? How will the court approach and interpret this statutory language? what are the policy objectives here? yada yada.
I understand the desire of FOS people to fight bad law and thuggish corporations. As a GNU/linux user I support it and have helped in the past & will in future. But most geeks havent a clue. This guy is a law student and probably a bright one. In that respect he is better equipped than many geeks but he is still only taking a knife to a gunfight. Litigating is for professionals.
have a couple of ideas for venues - will post as suggested
It was fun. Disorganised fun. But what else would you expect with FOS people!
seriously, next time:
1) lets not choose a yuppie wine bar
2) some people need to wear a slashdot/tux t-shirt so we can find each other
3) we need a host!
4) if dave green comes along he must bring more NTK t-shirts or pay a drinking forfeit!
1) get bad PR on F/OS people. Imagine the PR effect of a photo of a 'linux zealot' taking a swing at one of the MS suits.
2)From the antitrust perspective - showing that they are not 'hostile' to Linux by exhibiting at a linux expo.
3) genuinely attempting to turn waverers/gullible to the dark side.
4) Intercepting any curious neutrals and diverting them from the competition - e.g. educational bodies, corporates, people interested in OpenOffice etc..
5) sheer fucking chutzpah...
Most large music retailers also have DPA compliance policies for use in relation to loyalty cards and such-like, it wouldnt require much extra work to use it for this purpose and in my view (IAAL) I think it would be permissible.
I agree, these are very good reasons why such a strategy wouldn't work effectively. However much of the technology relating to copyright protection mechanisms will only achieve this degree of specificity and the *IAA etc are pressing for the right to acquire this information. Probably because while not perfect it will be accurate enough. similarly if you want to harass casual rippers this may be enough to supress significant amounts of it.
I really don't see what putting an ID code is going to do here. Sony music traces pirated CD key to Virgin records... what then?"
You are assuming that your transaction is anonymous.
If you are paying cash thats probably true. But id you are paying by credit card the transaction is date stamped etc, Its not hard to correlate the sale with a particular credit card. And thats just with current techniques, it would not require much to add the SID code to the barcodeand that gets tagged with crdit card number and you
have to do almost no work to find out who bought the CD. Then add a watermark to each track which has the SID and voila if a track is ripped and
put on your fave p2p network they know who ripped it. Whhich is the real
goal here. If they were just interested in finding manufacturers they would not need a SID just a manufacturere number.
oooh!! do you think they may be lying?
I hate to inject any rationality into an empty jibe but I am not evil or dubious, for the most part. Most lawyers are merely professionals paid to represent the interests of their employers, whoever they may be. Some employers [fill in your favourite hate figures here] are aggressive cynical corrupt and manipulative and they will use the law to enforce those objectives. Lawyers are the merely the tools for doing that and any lawyer who takes his job seriously will do it to the best of his ability, I do.
Equally of course lawyers like everyone else have a moral framework and lawyers values differ. Many lawyers do their training and do not ever get the opportunity to see the wider picture. This happens because you are trained in your discipline and get a job with a partnership or a firm and become inculcated in the traditions and value of your industrial sector. Certain things become a given because they become a habit: "patents are useful to us so they must be generally good." "Trademarks are very valuable so we must prevent anyone useing them in ways we dislike lest they become less valuable" etc., etc. Most IP lawyers are taught policy issues and legal history but they are not, in my experience, given much academic prominence. I tend to think also they are too inclined to be implicity pro- rights holders but without seeing the wider social context. This is a failing of universities and to some extent,through a lack of introspection in the profession itself.
Lawyers like all members of society vary in their integrity: at the bottom of the market you will find the ambulance chaser and the mafia conciliere(sp?) but even these fellows are just trying to make a living in a cut throat difficult world, by contrast geeks have been know to accept jobs with Microsoft and the *IAA. Many American lawyers I know will not act improperly and will not lie and twist the truth for clients. And even those unethical lawyers with dubious morals will know that there can be a market value in acting ethically.
It should also be said that it is a peculiarly American thing to hate lawyers so much, in my country, England, and I belive Europe it is a high prestige and entirely respectable job. The difference arises in part because of the different charging structure of the professions. In America there is the contingency fee which often gives lawyers a personal stake in the case and this has distorted the ethics of some classes of practitioner. In the UK and Europe we are more likely to be disspationate advisors, although regretably UK practise is being polluted by American values and in some respects we may be slowly sliding into the American cesspool.
There are also certainly double standards here: I have helped a number of free/OpenSource groups on some high profile IP issues such as the DMCA, p2p ,IP, libel, etc. and everyone just loves my free advice. But the moment I act for a corporate group against warez groups or a legitimate IP issue I am slime. IP is, with the exception of patents, a useful and proper asset to industry providing it is reasonably constrained and not distorted in favour of any one group
if you really must carp at least choose the most suitable target: vested interests such as corporate groups and corrupt government. They provide the source of almost all the abberant behaviour you hate.
Taking a dig at lawyers is just cheap. [nik removed due to DMCA violation]
this cretin is a troll. Since when is the ability to talk with others or to read what they say, whatever the media, a privilege granted as an act of largesse by an indulgant state.
'nothing is being censored': so what exactly is the Chinese goverment doing when it prevents its citzens reading disident's web pages?
I would take the time to demolish the rest of your imbecilic arguments but there are so many fundamental logical and semantic flaws its hard to know where to start. It is frightening that half-wits like you roam the World unsedated and presumably with the voting franchise (assuming you are not a Chinese Government stooge).
Then we can start declare Jihad against those heretic of the FSF. Burn them, burn them all
Another thing I'd like to know is what the state of play is as far as native compilation goes? I tried to install it but I couldnt get cross compilation to work.
For a lot of these projects it is so important to maintain external interest with a current webpage. Projects build through community involvement and if the webpage looks dead few people will take the effort to join. Moving EROS to GPL was a good move in this respect but a page mainter really does matter of there can be a downward spiral.
(BTW with persistent state what happens if you have decrypted docs? are these flushed to the disk unencrypted?)
IAAL also. It amuses me as well. Funny how the IANAL's always get moderated up though, even when they spout crap about basics. I long ago learnt it was pointless correcting things on /. as no-one here is interested in a real lawyer's opinion.
Check it out this looks kinda interesting...
Users that previously used the free Linux version will need to purchase Freedom and upgrade their operating system to Windows 98, 2000, or ME...
I tried to upgrade but I couldnt find a Windows.rpm anywhere. Pity, I really wanted an OS that's stable flexible powerful and free instead of this Linux crap....
I'd like to flirt with it but I dont want it to have a permanent relationship with my partions. I one-nighter if you will...
yea too right.
Everyone says "is it POSIX compliant"? well unix is great and I take nothing away from it but times roll and ACL and capabilities based OS's plus Plan9 style stuff comes along. W can do better then *nix.
This is great news. Zope is an excellent product and Python has to be the best scripting language for Web Servers. I hope this encourages Zope to get down to issues it has largely ignored like documentation (which cause me to ditch it for the nascent but excellent Webware).
Each year much valuable property is lost as a consequence of dimensional/conciousness discontinuities. Further much economic inefficiency and excess physical exertion results from ineffective transport methods. therefore this patent present a new and novel method for effectively transporting items in a cost effective and reliable method hitherto unknown.
description
Folds of suitable material are selected by any appropriate method by those skilled in the art. The said material is modified or manilpulated in any manner suitable to the properties of the selected material so as to form a a cavity or enclosure. The cavity or enclosure is then attached to any appropriate clothing and/or fixture point of any transportation device.
Optionally the said cavity or enclosure may be fastened by means of zips and or buttons to prevent the unintentional egress of material enclosed by said enclosure.
Examples of use may be, but are not confined to, the carrying of objects such as coins, weapons, mobile phones, pens and the like within the said fabric enclosure. Either about the person or within clothing.
Claims Accordingly the patentee claims;
enclosures and/or containers. Further or alternatively;
materials folded or manipulate, as aforesaid, so as to fully or partially enclose an n-dimensional space. Further or alternatively;
any form of boxes, bag carrier, container or pocket
Given that the NSA compromises effective keylengths by twisting implementors arms to introduce 'bugs' (see cryptome article: nsa sabotage), my question is; what can the NSA do to ensure a compromised choice? or can they only rely on implementation errors and back doors?
In brief thats right. Many countires that are WIPO members are suposed to bring in laws to protect digital content. That includes stuff thats been encrypted. The DMCA however has used this a a trojan horse to introduce legislation that exceeds even that agreed by WIPO. /. moderation sucks)
And WIO is an organisation with zero consumer input input, and is essentially a Worldwide club of megacorp content providers, like the MPAA/RIAA except not as easygoing. The resolutions passed therefore refelct the will of those people paying the bills and the expenses of the UN members involved.
(IAAL and i would give a fuller answer this but since I always get low karma points for slashdot replies i can be bothered to write long answers anymore -