First, we're not talking about songs or stories; we're talking about methods and processes.
What's the difference? Both are things that people think up.
The Statute of Anne was early 1700s
Exactly. It was only in the 18th century that European tradition diverged from absolute legal protection of property rights.
while the Greeks and Romans recognized the identity of their works' authors, said ownership conferred no economic rights.
Well, that's not true. I don't even know what "economic rights" is supposed to mean. I know what an economy is, and I know what rights are, but the phrase "economic rights" carries no meaning at all.
But to heck with the Greeks or the Romans. They're very recent in historic terms. Go back to the pre-literate traditions of indigenous peoples. In those cultures, we find that the ownership of thoughts and ideas was absolute. The Native Americans still, to this day, consider it a crime to sing somebody else's song. Not our legal nicety based on equity law; an actual crime. That tradition goes back 40,000 years. Same with the aboriginal people of Australia and east Asia. There we're talking 50,000 or even 60,000 years.
It was only in the last few minutes, relatively speaking, that the idea emerged that thinks people think up should be anything other than their own personal property.
And speaking for myself, I'm not wild about this recent trend of chipping away at property rights in the name of some all-powerful State. That seems like the wrong approach to me.
Yeah. It is. That puts every single thing you wrote squarely in the realm of the hypothetical. If information weren't property, then blah-de-blah-blah-blah. But it is. So your comment doesn't really say anything at all.
A written specification of a file format is protected by copyright, but that has nothing to do with the format itself.
My head's spinning.
Are you trying to somehow draw a distinction between the documentation that defines a format and... something else? Some Platonic ideal of that format?
A format is a structure for data. Such structure doesn't exist at all except as a specification. And of course the specification is property. Duh.
Or are you trying to cloud the issue by blurring the line between the format of a file and the data that file contains? Because that's just lame, you know?
"Intellectual property" is a legally meaningless concept
They make other products. I won't recommend those OTHER products.
Why? You have no reason not to. Saying "Don't buy product X because I don't like product Y" is not really being honest, is it?
I said I could lie to people about it and they'd never know, but I don't need to
First of all, you said that you might not tell people the real reason for your complaint. That's lying. And second, you're sort of ignoring the fact that people make up their own minds. They don't just follow you around like happy little sheep. The fact that your objection is patently absurd will make it difficult for people to swallow it without question.
At least two dozen people have asked me which $300-$500 camera to buy.
Wow. Two dozen, huh? You're a real opinion-maker, aren't you?
Yes, it has grown rather difficult to find companies that don't completely screw over their customers.
Let's see here. Nikon produces two professional camera bodies that do exactly what photographers want them to do at a price point that seems frankly astonishing compared to their capabilities, everybody uses them happily for upwards of six months (for one, since February for the other), then along comes somebody who discovers, only by looking deep under the hood, that the data format these bodies produce isn't politically correct, and suddenly Nikon is "completely screwing over their customers?"
Tell me again why those two dozen people give a damn what you think? Be honest. They're all family members, right?
Those Jews? Just cooking bread.
And now you think this situation is tantamount to the Holocaust?
Friend, you are dangerously insane. Please seek help. Seriously, you are out of your mind. I'm seriously worried about you now.
You do realize that that's not even remotely true, right? The world is full of terms and exceptions because other people have rights too. Simply sticking your fingers in your ears and denying that these rights exist isn't a good way of dealing with the world.
That sounds like a consumer specifying what they want from a product and expressing why they aren't happy with a particular option.
Read it again. The "consumer" -- remember, we're talking about somebody here who never in a zillion years would buy one of these two cameras, so the term "consumer" has to be used very loosely -- is asking Nikon to sign over the perpetual rights of their property. It's tantamount to asking Nikon for the deed to their corporate headquarters. It's absurd, patently absurd.
Maybe I didn't make my point. iTunes is not a Microsoft program. It's an Apple program. We're not going to follow somebody else's branding guidelines. We're going to follow our own.
However, if they then make it impossible to read it by prohibiting and encryption, they are basically selling a camera that does NOT have usuable white information the picture
That's demonstrably false. Professional photographers have been shooting with the D2HS since Februaryish and the D2X since last fall. They haven't had any problems at all. In fact, this whole mess only emerged last week, after months of heavy use of both camera bodies by pro photographers.
So empirically we know that these cameras do produce usable white-balance data.
I'm pretty sure your whole objection is based on a big misunderstanding fed by poorly written and sensationalist blog articles. (Gee, does that sound familiar?)
The "slippery slope" argument is inherently fallacious and must be disregarded. Long story short: If your argument is that bad things might happen in some hypothetical future, make the argument then, not now.
Anything Nikon does to obstruct my natural right as an Author is wrong.
Do you not see the obvious logical contradiction there? You, as an author can do whatever you see fit, but Nikon, also as an author, shouldn't be allowed to do certain things? Don't think so. Freedom cuts both ways.
Nikon reserves the right to deny any "third party", including the Author, access to that SDK.
Right... because of that inconvenient "freedom" thing again.
The idea that songs and stories were the properties of the individuals and clans that composed them goes back tens of thousands of years. What's relatively recent -- since only the 18th century -- is the idea that some property should be more equal than others.
Except that Nikon's provided software accesses the data just fine. Nothing is hidden from you. You can get at every bit in that file via Nikon's software.
And any third party can also get at that data, as we all know now, by using Nikon's SDK.
So my analogy is apt but yours is not, I'm afraid.
(I would give practically anything if you would abide by the most basic rules of English spelling. Your comment was almost physically painful to read, which was a shame because it contained some worthy thoughts. They were just obscured by the horrible injustices you perpetrated against the language.)
Does Nikon make any digital cameras other than those two high-end ones?
Not that have this feature, no.
Assuming I bother explaining the "real" reason
In other words, you're planning to lie to people in order to carry out your own brand of anti-business revenge? That's pretty lame, I think we'd all agree.
More importantly, in my experience, most people ask me for positive, not negative, recommendations.
How many times has somebody asked you which $5,000 DSLR they should buy? I'm guessing zero, because anybody who would buy such a product already knows exactly what they need and exactly where to find it.
In good faith, I cannot recomment a company known to deliberately limit the options available to its consumers
Good for you. I trust you'll immediately cease recommending any company to anybody for any purpose. Because they all do things that you, in your infinite wisdom, would describe as "deliberately limiting the options available to its consumers." Every last one of them. And if you think I'm mistaken, you're just kidding yourself.
Bottom line: You are completely off the handle here about something of no consequence to anybody, ever. Calm yourself down. First take a deep breath and realize that you've flown completely off the radar, and then see if you can't do something about getting rid of those delusions of grandeur. They're really unappealing.
Encrypting it? Yes. Refusing to let you access it? No. The necessary software comes, for free, with the camera, bundled right inside the box on its own CD-ROM.
As for your lack of endorsement... be honest now. How big a deal is that? How many Nikon products do you buy in a year? How much influence do you really think you have? Let's not kid ourselves. The net effect of this whole incident on Nikon's bottom line is going to be a big fat zero.
This is some lame "encryption" (like rot13) that should never have been implemented
It really doesn't matter whether you think it should have been done or not. See, Nikon, just like any other company or person, has the freedom to encrypt their data even if you think doing so is dumb.
Let's turn the tables around here. Let's say you were to create an encrypted file on your computer. "That data never should have been encrypted," says the government. "He, as a law-abiding citizen, has nothing to hide. Therefore we're taking away his right to encrypt his files."
Obviously that would be bad. You'd make a big stink.
Here's the thing... how can you grant everybody the right to encrypt whatever they want, subject to nobody's approval at all, while denying Nikon the right to encrypt white balance data?
Can't be done. There's no way to do it that's not arbitrary and capricious, two things we don't let our legal system be.
The simple and sane thing is public domain though, along with a great big apology.
The simple and sane thing is that Nikon, just like everybody else, gets to do whatever the hell they want, and if you don't like it, you can blow it out your ass. How many $5,000 cameras were you planning to buy this year anyway?
My nikon camera (I own a D100 and a coolpix 5700) is my property, not nikon.
Right. (Nikon, being a proper name, should be capitalized, by the way.)
If I want to take a little bit of driver code that they provide it, and debug it, fix it to work on 64 bit, or just audit it for security, I should be able to do so.
Wrong. You bought the camera. You did not buy the rights to computer software that interfaces with the camera. They're two different things. Just like when you buy a DVD, you don't get the rights to the movie contained on it.
If the drivers were freely available, and people could write new and interesting software based on it
First of all, we're not talking about a driver here. We're talking about the computer code necessary to read and write a particular file format.
Secondly, Nikon's customers don't want new and interesting software for their cameras. They want to depress the shutter and get photos out. They can do that now, admirably, with the software Nikon already provides.
You say that. The law, and our tradition, says different.
Like I said before, I understand that you really, really wish certain types of property weren't really property. But you do understand, don't you, that by declaring that some property isn't really property, you're effectively taking stuff away from people? And that taking stuff away from people en masse and without due process is one of the things that we specifically don't want our government to do?
Of course a format is property. They thought it up, they defined the specfication. Their property.
While I totally respect that you think it ought not be that way, there's simply no way to get from here to there that doesn't involve basically abolishing a whole class of property rights. There are countries in the world where that sort of thing could be done legally, but just FYI the United States is not one of them. Any such law that sought to just plain abolish ownership rights would be struck down as unconstitutional whether it be passed at the state or federal level.
Um. Maybe there's a language-barrier problem here.
Nikon has File Format X. Along with File Format X comes Software Kit Y.
Guy says, "I don't want Software Kit Y, because Nikon refuses to give me permission to change it, give it away, tell other people they can give it away, whatever." He says this with much righteous indignation.
Nikon has both property and moral rights over their software. (In Europe, the moral rights are protected explicitly by law. In short, an author can decide who can and can't have a copy of his work. In the US, this is implied by all our laws, so we've never made it explicit.)
Guy is asking Nikon to waive all their property and moral rights. Why? Because he just wants them to, I guess.
Which is why I asked my question. I was hoping somebody could explain it to me in terms that don't boil down to "Gimme gimme gimme!"
Your comment was very confusing. (Maybe just to me.) Let me clarify.
Circumventing access control mechanisms is against the law in the United States. Period. There are, however, some affirmative defenses that can be offered. One of those defenses is that you only circumvented access controls in order to make noninfringing use of the protected data. If you did that, you would not be breaking the law.
However, when a third party circumvents access controls, they are not doing it just to make noninfringing use. They're doing it to make a profit. Which is not something that the law protects.
So if you wanted to reverse engineer Nikon's format, you'd be fine. But if somebody else did it and then sold their program to you, they'd be breaking the law.
You've missed a very important detail. The only cameras that do this are the D2HS and the D2X, both of which are professional photojournalism cameras and either of which costs more than a brand new Power Mac G5 with all the trimmings.
Nikon makes something like ten DSLRs. Exactly two have this feature.
Slashdot Mirror
1. No, I'm not wrong. Amazingly, it is your previously infallible self that got it wrong.
2. I have no idea what your second paragraph is all about. Must refer to something that I never heard of.
The typical Slashdot reader, ladies and gentlemen.
Remember this the next time you feel compelled to whine that Company X isn't bending over backwards to satisfy your political demands.
First, we're not talking about songs or stories; we're talking about methods and processes.
What's the difference? Both are things that people think up.
The Statute of Anne was early 1700s
Exactly. It was only in the 18th century that European tradition diverged from absolute legal protection of property rights.
while the Greeks and Romans recognized the identity of their works' authors, said ownership conferred no economic rights.
Well, that's not true. I don't even know what "economic rights" is supposed to mean. I know what an economy is, and I know what rights are, but the phrase "economic rights" carries no meaning at all.
But to heck with the Greeks or the Romans. They're very recent in historic terms. Go back to the pre-literate traditions of indigenous peoples. In those cultures, we find that the ownership of thoughts and ideas was absolute. The Native Americans still, to this day, consider it a crime to sing somebody else's song. Not our legal nicety based on equity law; an actual crime. That tradition goes back 40,000 years. Same with the aboriginal people of Australia and east Asia. There we're talking 50,000 or even 60,000 years.
It was only in the last few minutes, relatively speaking, that the idea emerged that thinks people think up should be anything other than their own personal property.
And speaking for myself, I'm not wild about this recent trend of chipping away at property rights in the name of some all-powerful State. That seems like the wrong approach to me.
You whole, long comment falls apart right here:
Information is NOT property.
Yeah. It is. That puts every single thing you wrote squarely in the realm of the hypothetical. If information weren't property, then blah-de-blah-blah-blah. But it is. So your comment doesn't really say anything at all.
A written specification of a file format is protected by copyright, but that has nothing to do with the format itself.
... something else? Some Platonic ideal of that format?
My head's spinning.
Are you trying to somehow draw a distinction between the documentation that defines a format and
A format is a structure for data. Such structure doesn't exist at all except as a specification. And of course the specification is property. Duh.
Or are you trying to cloud the issue by blurring the line between the format of a file and the data that file contains? Because that's just lame, you know?
"Intellectual property" is a legally meaningless concept
Sigh. And you say I'm misinformed.
Yes, we should all rest assured that you were on the Internet within moments registering your disgust throughout the world.
There's a word you should look up. You'll find it in any dictionary. This word can change your life. The word is "humility."
Applying a little of that will go a long way toward making you less unbearable.
They make other products. I won't recommend those OTHER products.
Why? You have no reason not to. Saying "Don't buy product X because I don't like product Y" is not really being honest, is it?
I said I could lie to people about it and they'd never know, but I don't need to
First of all, you said that you might not tell people the real reason for your complaint. That's lying. And second, you're sort of ignoring the fact that people make up their own minds. They don't just follow you around like happy little sheep. The fact that your objection is patently absurd will make it difficult for people to swallow it without question.
At least two dozen people have asked me which $300-$500 camera to buy.
Wow. Two dozen, huh? You're a real opinion-maker, aren't you?
Yes, it has grown rather difficult to find companies that don't completely screw over their customers.
Let's see here. Nikon produces two professional camera bodies that do exactly what photographers want them to do at a price point that seems frankly astonishing compared to their capabilities, everybody uses them happily for upwards of six months (for one, since February for the other), then along comes somebody who discovers, only by looking deep under the hood, that the data format these bodies produce isn't politically correct, and suddenly Nikon is "completely screwing over their customers?"
Tell me again why those two dozen people give a damn what you think? Be honest. They're all family members, right?
Those Jews? Just cooking bread.
And now you think this situation is tantamount to the Holocaust?
Friend, you are dangerously insane. Please seek help. Seriously, you are out of your mind. I'm seriously worried about you now.
You do realize that that's not even remotely true, right? The world is full of terms and exceptions because other people have rights too. Simply sticking your fingers in your ears and denying that these rights exist isn't a good way of dealing with the world.
That sounds like a consumer specifying what they want from a product and expressing why they aren't happy with a particular option.
Read it again. The "consumer" -- remember, we're talking about somebody here who never in a zillion years would buy one of these two cameras, so the term "consumer" has to be used very loosely -- is asking Nikon to sign over the perpetual rights of their property. It's tantamount to asking Nikon for the deed to their corporate headquarters. It's absurd, patently absurd.
Maybe I didn't make my point. iTunes is not a Microsoft program. It's an Apple program. We're not going to follow somebody else's branding guidelines. We're going to follow our own.
However, if they then make it impossible to read it by prohibiting and encryption, they are basically selling a camera that does NOT have usuable white information the picture
That's demonstrably false. Professional photographers have been shooting with the D2HS since Februaryish and the D2X since last fall. They haven't had any problems at all. In fact, this whole mess only emerged last week, after months of heavy use of both camera bodies by pro photographers.
So empirically we know that these cameras do produce usable white-balance data.
I'm pretty sure your whole objection is based on a big misunderstanding fed by poorly written and sensationalist blog articles. (Gee, does that sound familiar?)
The "slippery slope" argument is inherently fallacious and must be disregarded. Long story short: If your argument is that bad things might happen in some hypothetical future, make the argument then, not now.
Anything Nikon does to obstruct my natural right as an Author is wrong.
... because of that inconvenient "freedom" thing again.
Do you not see the obvious logical contradiction there? You, as an author can do whatever you see fit, but Nikon, also as an author, shouldn't be allowed to do certain things? Don't think so. Freedom cuts both ways.
Nikon reserves the right to deny any "third party", including the Author, access to that SDK.
Right
If, that is, they're on a Nikon-supported software platform.
Nikon ships software for Windows and the Mac. Nobody, statistically speaking, uses anything else.
Go to hell.
Such language. You should be ashamed.
The idea that songs and stories were the properties of the individuals and clans that composed them goes back tens of thousands of years. What's relatively recent -- since only the 18th century -- is the idea that some property should be more equal than others.
Except that Nikon's provided software accesses the data just fine. Nothing is hidden from you. You can get at every bit in that file via Nikon's software.
And any third party can also get at that data, as we all know now, by using Nikon's SDK.
So my analogy is apt but yours is not, I'm afraid.
(I would give practically anything if you would abide by the most basic rules of English spelling. Your comment was almost physically painful to read, which was a shame because it contained some worthy thoughts. They were just obscured by the horrible injustices you perpetrated against the language.)
Does Nikon make any digital cameras other than those two high-end ones?
Not that have this feature, no.
Assuming I bother explaining the "real" reason
In other words, you're planning to lie to people in order to carry out your own brand of anti-business revenge? That's pretty lame, I think we'd all agree.
More importantly, in my experience, most people ask me for positive, not negative, recommendations.
How many times has somebody asked you which $5,000 DSLR they should buy? I'm guessing zero, because anybody who would buy such a product already knows exactly what they need and exactly where to find it.
In good faith, I cannot recomment a company known to deliberately limit the options available to its consumers
Good for you. I trust you'll immediately cease recommending any company to anybody for any purpose. Because they all do things that you, in your infinite wisdom, would describe as "deliberately limiting the options available to its consumers." Every last one of them. And if you think I'm mistaken, you're just kidding yourself.
Bottom line: You are completely off the handle here about something of no consequence to anybody, ever. Calm yourself down. First take a deep breath and realize that you've flown completely off the radar, and then see if you can't do something about getting rid of those delusions of grandeur. They're really unappealing.
Encrypting it? Yes. Refusing to let you access it? No. The necessary software comes, for free, with the camera, bundled right inside the box on its own CD-ROM.
... be honest now. How big a deal is that? How many Nikon products do you buy in a year? How much influence do you really think you have? Let's not kid ourselves. The net effect of this whole incident on Nikon's bottom line is going to be a big fat zero.
As for your lack of endorsement
This is some lame "encryption" (like rot13) that should never have been implemented
... how can you grant everybody the right to encrypt whatever they want, subject to nobody's approval at all, while denying Nikon the right to encrypt white balance data?
It really doesn't matter whether you think it should have been done or not. See, Nikon, just like any other company or person, has the freedom to encrypt their data even if you think doing so is dumb.
Let's turn the tables around here. Let's say you were to create an encrypted file on your computer. "That data never should have been encrypted," says the government. "He, as a law-abiding citizen, has nothing to hide. Therefore we're taking away his right to encrypt his files."
Obviously that would be bad. You'd make a big stink.
Here's the thing
Can't be done. There's no way to do it that's not arbitrary and capricious, two things we don't let our legal system be.
The simple and sane thing is public domain though, along with a great big apology.
The simple and sane thing is that Nikon, just like everybody else, gets to do whatever the hell they want, and if you don't like it, you can blow it out your ass. How many $5,000 cameras were you planning to buy this year anyway?
My nikon camera (I own a D100 and a coolpix 5700) is my property, not nikon.
Right. (Nikon, being a proper name, should be capitalized, by the way.)
If I want to take a little bit of driver code that they provide it, and debug it, fix it to work on 64 bit, or just audit it for security, I should be able to do so.
Wrong. You bought the camera. You did not buy the rights to computer software that interfaces with the camera. They're two different things. Just like when you buy a DVD, you don't get the rights to the movie contained on it.
If the drivers were freely available, and people could write new and interesting software based on it
First of all, we're not talking about a driver here. We're talking about the computer code necessary to read and write a particular file format.
Secondly, Nikon's customers don't want new and interesting software for their cameras. They want to depress the shutter and get photos out. They can do that now, admirably, with the software Nikon already provides.
You say that. The law, and our tradition, says different.
Like I said before, I understand that you really, really wish certain types of property weren't really property. But you do understand, don't you, that by declaring that some property isn't really property, you're effectively taking stuff away from people? And that taking stuff away from people en masse and without due process is one of the things that we specifically don't want our government to do?
Of course a format is property. They thought it up, they defined the specfication. Their property.
While I totally respect that you think it ought not be that way, there's simply no way to get from here to there that doesn't involve basically abolishing a whole class of property rights. There are countries in the world where that sort of thing could be done legally, but just FYI the United States is not one of them. Any such law that sought to just plain abolish ownership rights would be struck down as unconstitutional whether it be passed at the state or federal level.
Um. Maybe there's a language-barrier problem here.
Nikon has File Format X. Along with File Format X comes Software Kit Y.
Guy says, "I don't want Software Kit Y, because Nikon refuses to give me permission to change it, give it away, tell other people they can give it away, whatever." He says this with much righteous indignation.
Nikon has both property and moral rights over their software. (In Europe, the moral rights are protected explicitly by law. In short, an author can decide who can and can't have a copy of his work. In the US, this is implied by all our laws, so we've never made it explicit.)
Guy is asking Nikon to waive all their property and moral rights. Why? Because he just wants them to, I guess.
Which is why I asked my question. I was hoping somebody could explain it to me in terms that don't boil down to "Gimme gimme gimme!"
Your comment was very confusing. (Maybe just to me.) Let me clarify.
Circumventing access control mechanisms is against the law in the United States. Period. There are, however, some affirmative defenses that can be offered. One of those defenses is that you only circumvented access controls in order to make noninfringing use of the protected data. If you did that, you would not be breaking the law.
However, when a third party circumvents access controls, they are not doing it just to make noninfringing use. They're doing it to make a profit. Which is not something that the law protects.
So if you wanted to reverse engineer Nikon's format, you'd be fine. But if somebody else did it and then sold their program to you, they'd be breaking the law.
You've missed a very important detail. The only cameras that do this are the D2HS and the D2X, both of which are professional photojournalism cameras and either of which costs more than a brand new Power Mac G5 with all the trimmings.
Nikon makes something like ten DSLRs. Exactly two have this feature.
Molehill.