After the story with the scientology papers in the Swedish parliament, the Secrecy Act was amended to cover also claims of copyright coupled with substantial financial damage to the copyright holder as a reason for not providing the document in question. That hole is therefore closed.
However, as I understand it, the amendment only covers documents which themselves are subject to those copyright claims.
I suppose the copyright to the DeCSS code belongs to Jon Johansen, and it would be up to him to file a complaint with Swedish authorities for disclosing his unpublished software and therefore causing him substantial financial damage.
The Secrecy Act still offers secrecy to documents the contents of which may assist in committing certain crimes (such as documents detailing security arrangements being used in preparation for burglary). It remains to be seen whether these clauses would apply to DVD region coding circumvention techniques.
But please don't bug the Swedish parliament with this, unless you want to trigger another amendment to the Secrecy Act. They have had enough of this insanity. Send it to the Consumer Ombudsman instead, as part of a very valid complaint regarding the marketing methods of certain corporate entities within the international music industry (though it would be best if you are a Swedish resident or national to make it look right).
When the complaint has been filed, take out a copy (anonymously, to make sure that no secrecy clause applies) and have someone publish it as well. In order to really play safe in Sweden, have it published in print rather than on the Internet, and it will be pretty much impossible for the MPAA to act against you.
I think many of the law-tech disputes boil down to issues of terminology and context. While both sides may be guilty of underestimating the competence of the other, comparing the faults of each is hardly meaningful. Lawyers being ignorant of technology is no excuse for hackers being ignorant of the legal profession.
For one thing, many (if not all) of the laws under dispute today emanate from the business sector, where things like million-dollar trademark lawsuits are well-known and accepted. If someone is indeed making money off somebody else's trademark, be it on the Internet or elsewhere, the trademark owner is justified to sue. However, if the trademark is used in a non-commercial context, any lawsuit would appear to be a mistake.
It used to be easy to tell commercial operations apart from non-commercial ones, since the latter seldom could afford to pay for visibility. The Internet has drastically cut the cost of visibility, though this may be a temporary state of things as the commercial players find new ways of exposing themselves in proportion to their wallets. In the meantime, we routinely find not-for-profit operations outperforming commercial namesakes by mere accident or ingenuity. Depending on your legal system, you now have to either teach the lawyers new criteria for differing between the two, or you may have to change the law itself. Complaining that trademarks are unfair to you isn't going to get you anywhere, as long as you haven't made your point that they shouldn't apply in your particular sector of life at all, while they may well apply in other sectors.
To take a more specific example, consider the word "use" in a copyright context: How does the phrase "to use a photo for a book" relate to "to use a computer program for fun"? In the first phrase, "use" implies reproduction and publication in a legal sense, while the same word in the latter phrase has a more earthly and commonly understood meaning. To "use" a photo or a novel in the latter sense would mean simply enjoying a copy of it, not making numerous copies of it for distribution. Copyright law isn't concerned with people reading novels, but with people using novels and other works of art for (usually) commercial gain. Now, how many lawyers will consider that running a computer program may be equivalent to reading a book, when even the hackers consistently refer to their loading and running of programs as "using software"? Thus we have "end-user license agreements".
Legal terminology can be tricky. When the prosecutor asks whether you knowingly "accessed" the "device", you'd better request an interpreter who speaks your native tongue.
Taxi cabs are equipped with this to control their speed and location.
Really? - "Look, that cab ought to be at the railway station picking up travellers right now." - "No problem! Energizing..." - >Zzap< - "Good thing, location control!"
No, you are probably referring to monitoring of taxi cabs, which is an entirely different (albeit related) thing. I have no privacy problem with the ability to tell where a particular taxi cab is located or what its current speed is, as long as the taxi driver accepts it. Mandatory tracking devices for private cars constitute an invasion of privacy though, and having someone interfere with the operation of a moving vehicle by remote control against the wishes of the driver is sheer madness. In case of an accident, who will be responsible for driving the car?
Ultimately, the government will send one of its own agents to drive your car, it will be converted to run on rails only, and several cars going in the same direction will be hooked up together to form a "train" for reasons of economy.
Most (if not all) censorware seems to be closed source, meaning that neither the parent nor the kid can directly examine the filtering mechanisms, but rather have to trust the vendor with respect to what is being filtered. Of course, a knowledgeable kid with access to the source and a compiler can defeat the filtering, but is this really a problem?
Taking the above into account, do you see a future for open source censorware, enabling parents to obtain independent assistance with tuning their filters to their preference, rather than simply buying some vendor's obscure notion of "objectionable"?
If the kid finds out that he is explicitely disallowed to view a particular website (as may easily be the case with open source censorware), is this worse than him finding out that he isn't allowed to watch a particular X-rated movie?
2. Someone at the first post office in the path looks up (if they don't know it already) & adds the ZIP.
The Swedish postal service is rumoured to have (or maybe they had in the past) a kind of detective agency of its own to decipher the most unintelligible addresses. Locating a named person at "the yellow terrace houses" (rather than a specific street address) in a small town of 9,000 is no big deal, if you consider that postal workers probably know how to use a phone directory.
However, I was quite amazed when some students on vacation wrote an e-mail address on a postcard and had it correctly delivered to our university department! This was around 1992, when "Internet" and "e-mail" weren't yet household words...
What makes using robots.txt interesting is that it's just a request to follow a set of standards, not a demand. And that, I think, is what's so unsettling about creating a law around that. That turns an optional standard into a mandatory one.
Exactly! I came to the same conclusion and just described that in another comment above; sorry for the redundancy. Technical specifications and protocols are seldom good templates for legislation. You could use legal measures to establish who should be the authority on a particular specification such as the robot exclusion standard, but no protocol should be unilaterally mandated by law; it would be like saying you must always use TCP, or you can't use NNTP anywhere.
eBay can specify that they only want this or that search engine to index them.
Problem is, robots.txt is designed to stem ongoing or anticipated robot roaming, not to provide advance legal notice of any policy with respect to use of the information found there. You can't use it to say "/auction/* is off limits to anybody intending to index the data found for redistribution in connection with advertising", but instead you have to say "/auction/* is off limits to the robot named Auction-Indexer", which is hardly sufficient.
Let's assume that obeying robots.txt is made into law, and that eBay creates such a file explicitely banning "Auction-Indexer" from accessing their site, but allowing all other robots. All you now have to do is set up a robot with a different name, say "Super-Duper-Auction-Indexer", and start all over. While it runs contrary to eBay's wishes, and can probably be challenged in court just like the previous behaviour, it's in full compliance with the robots.txt policy. The defendant could even argue that they are trying to comply with eBay's wishes, since they have now changed the robot name per eBay's request!
No, I'm now convinced that lawyers should be kept away from interpreting the robots.txt file at all. If you want to make robot exclusion a law, please pick another filename for that purpose. Being a webmaster myself, my legal requirements are different from my technical requirements. Saying "please don't use robots to access this site" is one thing, saying "robots accessing this site may face criminal charges" is quite another.
The robots.txt file is meant to prevent a crawler from going through certain directories and files, and not to prevent access to a single file.
I think this stresses my point even more. You and I may disagree on what exactly is meant by "going through certain directories and files", and any judge is likely to disagree with both of us, should he ever get to read those words. Now, this is hardly how an actual law would be worded, but it doesn't really matter; any wording describing a novel or abstract concept is prone to conflicting interpretations by different people.
As for me, I think robots.txt should be used only to prevent abuse of server resources, not to control access to information that a human user would be allowed to access anyway, even if the information comes in the form of a directory tree.
Let's say that I design a proxy server which tries to anticipate the user's future moves and preloads pages referenced by the page that was just requested (and delivered), in order to speed up browsing. I want it to be very careful about how often it bothers a particular server; I'd suggest not retrieving more than one document per minute, and adjusting the pause upwards if the documents are large. It should not go retrieving documents unlikely to be retrieved soon by a human user, say those referenced by pages already preloaded but not yet requested. I don't think it would place enough load on any server to worry about; it may rather diminish the load by serving multiple users. Still, it looks pretty much like a robot to me, and I believe the current robot policy would expect it to obey the robots.txt file. So, if some server disallows all robots, does it mean my proxy will have to turn off cache preloading for that server, or even refuse to connect to that server at all, telling the user to go get those pages himself?
On the other hand, if I have a server generating a theoretically unlimited number of hypertext documents on the fly as the users request them, I don't want a robot to go requesting those pages all by itself, even if it only makes one request per hour, since it may keep doing so for months and years, and I don't want to waste server CPU cycles and disk space to generate and cache obscure pages for the amusement of a machine, especially when I also try to gather statistics on what data the users find most interesting!
By the way, the Ebay lawsuit seems to be about information access and possibly copyright, not server load or skewed server statistics. It doesn't take a robot to access information without permission or violate someone's copyright. I therefore doubt robots.txt is the proper solution in their case.
Well, maybe it *should* be illegal. I suppose that constitutes an unauthorised access of a network, despite explicit instructions through a known standard to stay off of that network.
Perhaps, but when that policy is enacted into law, we need to be extra careful as to what constitutes a "robot". We all know the reason for discriminating against automated HTTP clients; they can easily monopolize server resources for no good reason at all, due to unfortunate circumstances or pure incompetence on the part of the client designer.
But does the judge know this? What if some company claims that robots.txt is an information access control mechanism rather than a server usage policy document, and accuses a human of bypassing that file to gain unauthorized access to semi-restricted information placed on the server without any real access control (say, they try the "secret URL" trick)? Ok, the human isn't a robot, but maybe his browser could be considered an automated client? Perhaps a single HTTP request doesn't count, but they can probably check their logs and come up with a number of accesses in a row (they were for inline images; who cares really), not one of them is for robots.txt, and the guy is fried.
It's just one scenario out of several possible. What about proxy search engines, sending user queries in parallel to the search facilities of several servers; are they supposed to obey robots.txt too? What about document processing facilities such as the Babelfish or an HTML syntax verifier?
As a good citizen, you should not try to do such a thing, it is the equivalent of calling 911 and telling them you are about to kill your wife, and when the cops come and arrest you, you sue them for false arrest. Totally Bull.:-) The only difference here is that you spoke with actions instead of words.
No, the mode of communication isn't the only (or even the most important) difference. Calling 911 is undisputably a specific act the only purpose of which is to sound the alarm and get attention, and making verbal threats against someone is intentional in a similar way. On the other hand, merely behaving like a criminal doesn't mean you intend to send any such message.
Of course, the police may (and probably should) question such behaviour in order to determine the true circumstances, and they may advise you not to act like that in the future, but unless there is a law saying that sneaking around in a strange outfit amounts to calling the police, I doubt you can be charged with false alarm.
The idea with the surveillance cameras is that they are to be used for one-way monitoring of what people actually do, not serve as public "videophoneboots" for people wishing to get in touch with the authorities. The surveillance system is to be tuned to the normal behaviour of people, not the other way around. Having a sign saying "Area under automatic surveillance - Please confine your actions to the statistical norm, unless you have criminal intent" would be plain silly.
There are of course special cases, such as a bank, where entering wearing a mask and wielding a gun is a sure way to get the attention of security staff and everybody else. Don't do that, unless you really intend to rob the bank and face the consequences.
I recall someone mentioning a few years back that school kids in some U.S. cities were ordered not to wear certain necklaces or Disney t-shirts to school, simply because those items were closely related with either drug trafficking or gang wars. I would probably agree that the kids shouldn't put themselves at risk by wearing odd outfits in the wrong environment, but it's not like you can prevent people in general from messing with your statistical notion of what different kinds of criminals look like.
Re:There already are multiple root nameservers
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No EToy for Christmas
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In fact, there are many root nameservers; one for each country out there (.de,.uk,.ie,.au, etc) and the US government and military do their own thing too.
Well, not exactly right. The top-level domains, including the two-letter ones for individual countries as well as the generic three-letter ones, usually correspond to zones of DNS records, but each zone is normally served by at least two servers, which may or may not reside in the zones they serve (for instance, the zone SE is served by three servers in Sweden, three in the USA, and one in the Netherlands).
On the other hand, root nameservers serve the root (".") zone, and there are currently 13 of them spread out across the Internet (many of them are in the USA).
I'm assuming that either NSI points requests to them, or local nameservers know to ask them (based on the top-level of the request). So this kind of this
is already happening, it's just that alternic.org is not in the 'official list' or whatever. Maybe ICANN has something to do with it.
The root zone (i.e. physically the records originating with A.ROOT-SERVERS.NET, the master root server) delegates authority over the top-level domains to their respective servers, and you are correct that AlterNIC isn't among them (unless they have obtained a country of their own or something). While you as a network manager have to manually feed your local name server or resolver with some root server addresses to begin with, they are normally discarded as soon as your client software gets access to the real data. Sometimes people set up their own root servers inside firewalls, but they are merely intended to act as DNS gateways to the external world, plus optionally add some local domain name (the latter not a good idea, in my opinion).
While this is a good idea in principle, I'm afraid it won't work out very well in practice. For one thing, only a tiny minority of sysadmins (weighted by the number of users they can influence) will likely bother to switch root servers just to thumb their noses at the likes of ebays.com, and that's assuming that the alternative servers are just as reliable with respect to all those other domains that haven't become a matter of dispute. Is somebody really willing to take on the task of replicating the 5 million (or whatever) domain.COM zone, or would the idea be to simply perform recursive look-ups after catching queries pertaining to the "banned" domains? Also, with history already including AlterNIC, I wonder if a successful effort could avoid DNS forking when people start disagreeing on what the real domain rules should be.
Instead, how about adding some dissenting voices to the web browser, similar to Slashdot moderation (i.e. don't delete the junk, but rather moderate it down to render it invisible to most users)? When looking up a particular domain or URL, the browser could check for alternative opinions on that particular address (using some distributed database scheme), and act on them according to the user's preferences. For example, a host look-up for ebay.com could be accompanied by a PTR or TXT look-up for ebay.com.dissent.net, and if some records are found, they may refer the browser to comments, criticism, spoofs, overlay graffitti or something else of relevance to the target address.
Compare it to asking your local librarian for a copy of Dante's Inferno, which she gladly provides, while saying "by the way, you may also want to read Gary Larson's hilariously funny spoof of Dante's Inferno", since she knows you appreciate a good laugh now and then. Your browser should be your librarian. In this way, if you ridicule a commercial site according to the given protocol, and the users agree to read your satire, it should be a lot more difficult than it is today for lawyers to cry "trademark dilution".
Sure, developing another browser isn't done in an afternoon, but neither is supplanting the present domain hierarchy, and it would be really neat to be able to support dozens or even hundreds of alternate, independent pages associated with a single domain name or URL. Also, fewer users would be dependent on their sysadmins to install such a browser for them, than would have to file requests for an alternate set of root servers to be considered.
IP laws ill-suited for non-commercial activities
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New Patent Treaty
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I've seen a number of appearant misconceptions here about IP law in general, and patents in particular. I say "appearant" since law isn't natural science, but rather social (or political) science, and thus isn't universal. Therefore, I can't say for sure that a particular law doesn't exist or has some specific, stupid interpretation anywhere on the planet, but instead I have to base my arguments on my own assumptions as to what is the most reasonable or common interpretation of a particular kind of law in a number of countries. If you are aware of a law in your country or an international treaty being sufficiently different from my "norm" to contradict my arguments, please tell me so. It probably won't convince me that I'm wrong, but rather that the law or treaty in question ought to be changed. However, please don't ask me to read up on all those laws or international treaties myself, because I don't have the time for that and I doubt it would do either of us any good.
"You can't patent what's already happening in nature." Correct; you can't. I doubt anybody is doing it. They are, however, patenting the use of biological processes for commercial or industrial purposes, including the processes of DNA replication and protein production. You can't simply patent the existance of some genetically engineered bacteria just because you made it; you rather patent the use of said bacteria for some purpose, say processing of chemical waste, a highly industrial activity. I have no problem with this, whether legal or moral.
The important point here is that "just any" purpose doesn't count. The method must be commercially useful, in that it helps you to perform your task in a cheaper or otherwise better way than would be possible without the invention. This assumes that the purpose must be of commercial interest in the first place. The cleaning of toxic waste certainly has a business potential. Human reproduction hasn't, at least not until we have legalized slavery or cannibalism (so that there would be a commercial incentive for someone to produce more or bigger humans). Therefore, you shouldn't worry that some big corporation is going to take away your freedom to reproduce, just because they have patented the use of some miniscule part of the human genome for an entirely different purpose, say transplant engineering. A patent in this field is supposed to prevent one company from using the industrial method developed by another, without contributing to the development costs. It doesn't prevent nature from doing more or less the same thing, since Mother Nature isn't a legal subject.
There are valid concerns against big corporations using the patent system to interfere with the freedom of farmers to continue producing the same crops they have produced for years without any thoughts on patents, but the fact that the patents relate to biotechnology is irrelevant to those concerns.
"You can't patent mere information." Correct again. Who said you could?
"It's illegal to publish source code implementing patented methods." Well, I'd say that's at least debatable. I know there are cases of lawyers bullying people to stop distributing software "infringing" on some patents, but has any of those cases been tested in court? As long as there is no clear verdict on the issue, I don't think it's a good idea to help the IP lawyers promote what may be nothing but a legal myth.
By analogy with earlier patents, the monopoly granted by a software patent should apply to the use of said software in a commercial application, say a business web server, and not to the mere distribution of the software itself, i.e. a particular technical description of the patent. As long as I don't run the code myself, but merely write it for others to run, how can I be found guilty of infringement if I can't even tell whether the code will be used commercially? If it's used on a solely non-commercial basis, what grounds are there to claim infringement by anybody?
That said, I still think software patents are a bad idea, because the patent system seems to be incompatible with the way the software industry works (which is not the way software industry lawyers believe it works). I just don't want software patents to infringe upon my right to free speech in non-commercial contexts, should they ever be accepted.
As usual, IANAL.
Pedestrians should have a license, too?
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License to Surf
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Even if we accept the analogy with road traffic, not everyone needs a license there either, say the passengers in your car or any pedestrians moving around among the vehicles. If you passively access information on the Web, do you really risk hurting someone? Isn't it more a risk of you being hurt by someone else, say an ISP or a distributor of poor software, much like a pedestrian isn't very likely to hurt or kill a car driver by accident?
At least give the pedestrians on the Web the freedom to walk around without the need for a license. Otherwise, what should we do about underage surfers? Constant supervision?
If I go into a shop and buy a bar of chocolate I'm entering into a contract, I doubt there are many jurisdictions that bar all minors from such transactions.
The issue here is parental consent. Such consent need not be in written form. At least in my jurisdiction (Sweden), a minor entering a shop and buying a bar of chocolate is presumed to have parental consent to that. On the other hand, if a 13-year old wants to buy an expensive mountain bike (and even if he shows he has the money in cash), the retailer should probably contact the kid's mother to verify that the transaction will be ok with her, or he will risk having the sale undone as soon as the parents find out about it.
Nicely stated, but it's already the case. The GPL does not restrict use. It grants you the right to use as a copyright permission, without the actual requirement that you be able to enter into a contract.
Ah, good. I must admit that I don't keep the text of the GPL in fresh memory (I know where I can find it if necessary). To me, a unilateral statement of granted permissions and associated conditions is the appropriate way to implement something like the GPL. Now, upon reading it I found the following (emphasis mine):
Therefore, by modifying or distributing the Program (or any work based on the Program), you
indicate your acceptance of this License to do so, and all its terms and conditions for copying, distributing or modifying the Program or works based on it.
Granted, it probably doesn't mean much in reality, but "indicating your acceptance" looks pretty close to the kind of implied contracts being discussed here. Also, it doesn't apply at all to the act of merely running the program, but rather to acts such as copying.
That aside, I'm still somewhat concerned about the word "license", since I tend to interpret that as indicating the presence of a contractual relationship (as in "a license to produce Coca-Cola"); such a license is usually considered revokeable. Also a "license to hold a TV set" or a "license to use a gun" (European concepts) can be revoked, even though they are intended for "end users" rather than some contractually bound producer in the middle. One aspect of free software is that nobody should be able to revoke the freedoms already given. A "non-revokeable license" is probably our best option for now, but I'm not entirely satisfied with that language. The "License" in the GPL should probably be associated with expressions such as "artistic license", but there doesn't seem to be very many of those expressions.
So, could this solution solve the problem also for Corel (if there is a problem at all)? If people are simply permitted to download Corel's distribution without them having to agree to anything, will their age and legal capability still matter?
However, any minor wishing to contribute free code to some software project (GPL'ed or not) would still need parental consent for that, unless I have overlooked another legal loophole.
A more troubling question is if the minors who've contributed code can even license it at all without their parent's consent.
Indeed an important question. I'd think the same thing applies here; if you aren't capable of committing yourself to the terms written by the software vendor, then you can hardly be on the side which is supposed to deliver the goods either. Normally, any reasonable parent would probably be happy to give his or her consent, but how many parents are likely to understand the implications of the GPL as well as their teenage whiz kids do?
Kids actually produce "intellectual property" throughout their childhood, from the point when they begin making simple crayon drawings. These early works of art seldom get any publicity outside direct family and friends, and licensing terms thus aren't an issue.
Things may change in school, as they start writing essays that are read in class, or even submitted to various contests where they may find a wider audience. Legally speaking, their parents must consent to any public use of their work, but for practical purposes I believe parents are presumed to have given implicit permission for most creative activities that normally take place in school. At least my parents were never asked to sign a contract before I, at the age of 16, performed the traditional piano piece for a full aula at summer break-up (in Sweden, age of consent is 18). We even produced a musical and performed for a paying audience. Those who were still under 18 at the time we went to Denmark for a visiting performance (1980) were required to obtain parental permission in order to spend a late evening in Copenhagen, but nobody ever questioned their freedom to show off their artistic abilities for no monetary compensation at all...
As for contributing to the GNU project, I think parental consent is an acceptable inconvenience. In case some parents explicitely disallow their kid from writing free software on the grounds that they want him to profit from his skills instead, I'm sure slashdotters will be the first to hear about it, and then we can discuss what to do about it.
Then again, maybe someone will interpret the prohibitions against child labour in an innovative way, and compare the FSF with some Asian textile producer taking advantage of slave labour... After all, weren't the Wiener Sängerknaben prohibited from giving performances during christmas and other major holidays? I'd like to see someone collect and distribute software that has been designed and implemented by minors exclusively (of course with parental consent)! A quality mark, sort of.
Actually, I just thought of something that is interesting: look at the "Not for public performance" and "Not for rental" agreements on most Video/DVD/audio products. Now, normally, if I buy a DVD, I'm licensed to only use the product in my home. However, if the store sells it to my 13-year-old, legally, the kid should be able to set up a movie theater, and charge admission. He's not violating the copyright of the DVD, he's just not bound to the License restriction. And if he sells the DVD to an adult, well, the adult hasn't agreed to any contract, either, so...
This argument may be valid if the restrictions against public performance and rental are given by a license agreement only, and not by copyright law. Is that so?
In Sweden, public performance and rental of artistic works are among the things you need the artist's approval to do. It doesn't matter whether the copy you have was obtained under a legally binding contract; normally you can't put any video recording in a VCR and show it to an audience beyond your direct family and friends without permission from the copyright holder.
If a label on the copy says "Not for rental", it's first and foremost a statement of fact and a reminder of what the law implies, failing a license or a permission to the contrary. It may optionally form part of the text of a license agreement, but even if there is no agreement, copyright law still holds.
I've hardly ever bought or rented a video. I don't think I've ever seen a DVD product. Are you saying they come with an explicit "end-user license agreement" which you are considered bound by when you buy or open the product, or are you merely inferring this from those restrictive labels you have seen?
Or, could it be that U.S. copyright legislation is actually extremely weak, meaning that you can take any audio recording and play it for the thousands listening to your private radio station, simply because your copy was legally bought in an ordinary record store? Somehow I doubt it...
And no, I'm not a lawyer either; I cannot provide legal advice. All my advice is strictly illegal!
That's why everything that belongs to you until you're 18 is legally the property of your parents.
Is that really so (in the USA, or somewhere else)? In Sweden, minors are perfectly capable of owning property. They just can't dispose of it as they see fit, since their parents are responsible for managing said property for them. Neither can they enter legally binding contracts without parental consent, and it's the responsibility of the other (presumably adult) party to verify that a minor indeed has parental consent before selling him a bike or whatever. However, a mother cannot empty her 7-year old son's personal bank account and buy herself a new coat without his explicit permission; that's either mismanagement of property or plain theft.
For instance, a child creating a piece of art or literature owns the copyright to it, just like any other author. If someone finds the kid's collected works suitable for publication, the parents get to negotiate the contractual terms with the publisher, but they cannot allow publication against the wish of the child, nor can they dispose of the royalties as they see fit.
It happens that people register cars and other property as owned by their under-age children, as a form of tax evasion (it's generally frowned upon). I have no idea what the kids themselves think of this practice...
If they contain no such clause, then might they be non-binding on minors ? So minors can legally break the EULA terms and copy the game ?
The license may become non-binding, but that doesn't mean the kids can make copies of the game for their friends, since that's prohibited by copyright law. Many "license agreements" spell out at great length what is already stated in law, so invalidating the agreement doesn't necessarily mean that everything said in it suddenly becomes contrafactual. Copyright law and contractual law are two different things, although they often interfere with each other when it comes to computer software.
See my other comment below regarding the over-use of "license agreements" with respect to mass-market software.
To copy anything under GPL involves acceptance of the license, so my guess is that minors already need parental permission to copy GPL licensed (or any free) software.
It would seem so, presuming that any "license" (whether commercial or the GPL) is considered to imply that a mutual agreement has been made.
But minors don't need parental permission (legally speaking) to read a book that is covered by copyright. Merely reading the book doesn't mean that the reader enters a contractual relationship with the author or the publisher. The reader, whether a minor or an adult, is still subject to the copyright laws, which are unilateral (i.e. you don't get to argue the terms of the law with the lawmaker each time it applies to you). There is no need to bring in contractual law and discuss whether the minor has obtained a valid license to read the published book. Why should published source code be any different?
The whole idea of the need for end-user software licenses seems to be based on the notion that the software isn't published, but rather developed for a very limited number of users, as was common practice in the early days of commercial software development. But when you ship millions of copies of the same computer program to be sold over the counter, can you still claim that those binary files aren't in fact published (i.e. made available to the general public), and that anyone buying a copy thus has to enter a contractual relationship not only with the supplier by paying for the copy, but also with the publisher over access to the information stored on it? If so, why doesn't every printed book or aired broadcast come with an end-user license agreement?
In order for kids to be able to live in the society of the future, will they have to obtain blanket permissions en masse from their parents, so that they can enter those 500+ license agreements per day required to surf the Web, play computer games, or watch television? When "license agreements" become as omnipresent as air, will we still respect the legal ramifications of violating one or two of them?
The GPL maintainers could begin making things a little more sensible by not requiring end-users to enter a license agreement merely to download and run published software. The "licensing" verbiage should be limited to those wishing to distribute the code or modifications of it to others. This would still require under-age hackers to obtain parental permission in order to take part in software development or distribution, but this is the case for pretty much any media work that kids get involved in today.
I've often wondered why every CPU didn't have a software addressable serial number from the very beginning.
But they did. Well, maybe not every CPU, but serial numbers were indeed around long before anybody cared about software license management systems or electronic privacy.
At least the DEC KL10 had a serial number, and probably the entire PDP-10 line of processors. Ours were 2777 and 3159, if I remember correctly. We used 2777 as the entrance code for the student computer labs (don't bother trying to use it; we moved out of that lab in 1987). It used to be printed on the console during boot. I think it wasn't until TOPS-20 version 6 (1985) that the serial number could be read by user software, however (via the CONFG% system call), since the APRID instruction wasn't available from user mode.
I don't know about the rest of the DEC PDP family, but it seems reasonable that the PDP-11 had a readable serial number, and most certainly the VAX. Anybody who knows more? The PDP-8, which was the world's first mass-produced computer, most likely had a serial number, but it was probably only found on a bolted metal plate on the chassis, and not on some particular Flip Chip of the kind that made up the CPU...
So, why didn't serial numbers make it into the 4004 and other early microprocessors from the very beginning? Probably because the designers didn't consider them meaningful on individual chips that were to be produced by the millions. After all, the primary reason for having a serial number on any item was for the producer to be able to track malfunctioning devices back to their origin (quality control). For something as small and cheap as integrated circuits, a printed timestamp on the casing was found sufficient.
To a hacker, the ability to examine anything via software (including the serial number of the processor itself) is a nice feature, even if it's useless for any practical purpose. Therefore I don't mind serial numbers in processors.
The problem is with application software that makes use of such features in undocumented and perhaps unwanted ways. A word processor shouldn't add hidden data about me or my computer to every document I write, any more than a typewriter should stamp its serial number using invisible ink on every sheet of paper that passes through it (under Ceaucescu, Romanian secret police kept a type sample for every licensed typewriter in the country, to help them identify the origin of any illegal leaflets).
So, the EU (which I happen to live in) should make sure they aren't barking up the wrong tree when they start investigating Intel rather than software industry practices. As for the talk of sanctions, I very much agree that this issue should be a matter for consumers to decide. However, I'm all for investigating, if it leads to consumers becoming informed about the issues. I mean, the EU could try to stop me from ftp'ing any free software I like...
As I've been told, during the Gulf War, a group of Iraqi tanks in Kuwait signalled "we surrender", but when approaching allied troops came within firing distance, the Iraqis instead turned their guns at them. According to the story, there was little left of the Iraqi tanks afterwards. After all, if they had decided to surrender for real the next time, how would they have communicated that statement to the allies?
But then again, it's only a rumor I heard. Could be part of the desinformation as well.
Are there user groups (either formal or informal) established specifically for government users such as yourself, where you can trade ideas and experiences with your colleagues in, say, local governments, separate branches of the national govenment, or even foreign governments or public administration?
In short, when you have a technical problem, where do you turn for help with the solution: to fellow government computing operations managers, to the GNU/Linux community, or to a paid consultant?
What challenges does public administration and government pose to computer operations, that are different from the challenges typically found in commercial or other non-governmental environments? Do you have specific requirements with respect to availability, performance, standards-compliancy, archiving for future access etc, that are perhaps less often heard from commercial users?
How well do you think those challenges are met by the proprietary software model and by the open source model, respectively? Does either side have any particular advantage in your area, either today or in the foreseeable future?
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However, as I understand it, the amendment only covers documents which themselves are subject to those copyright claims. I suppose the copyright to the DeCSS code belongs to Jon Johansen, and it would be up to him to file a complaint with Swedish authorities for disclosing his unpublished software and therefore causing him substantial financial damage.
The Secrecy Act still offers secrecy to documents the contents of which may assist in committing certain crimes (such as documents detailing security arrangements being used in preparation for burglary). It remains to be seen whether these clauses would apply to DVD region coding circumvention techniques.
But please don't bug the Swedish parliament with this, unless you want to trigger another amendment to the Secrecy Act. They have had enough of this insanity. Send it to the Consumer Ombudsman instead, as part of a very valid complaint regarding the marketing methods of certain corporate entities within the international music industry (though it would be best if you are a Swedish resident or national to make it look right).
When the complaint has been filed, take out a copy (anonymously, to make sure that no secrecy clause applies) and have someone publish it as well. In order to really play safe in Sweden, have it published in print rather than on the Internet, and it will be pretty much impossible for the MPAA to act against you.
IANAL. Your mileage will vary.
I think many of the law-tech disputes boil down to issues of terminology and context. While both sides may be guilty of underestimating the competence of the other, comparing the faults of each is hardly meaningful. Lawyers being ignorant of technology is no excuse for hackers being ignorant of the legal profession.
For one thing, many (if not all) of the laws under dispute today emanate from the business sector, where things like million-dollar trademark lawsuits are well-known and accepted. If someone is indeed making money off somebody else's trademark, be it on the Internet or elsewhere, the trademark owner is justified to sue. However, if the trademark is used in a non-commercial context, any lawsuit would appear to be a mistake.
It used to be easy to tell commercial operations apart from non-commercial ones, since the latter seldom could afford to pay for visibility. The Internet has drastically cut the cost of visibility, though this may be a temporary state of things as the commercial players find new ways of exposing themselves in proportion to their wallets. In the meantime, we routinely find not-for-profit operations outperforming commercial namesakes by mere accident or ingenuity. Depending on your legal system, you now have to either teach the lawyers new criteria for differing between the two, or you may have to change the law itself. Complaining that trademarks are unfair to you isn't going to get you anywhere, as long as you haven't made your point that they shouldn't apply in your particular sector of life at all, while they may well apply in other sectors.
To take a more specific example, consider the word "use" in a copyright context: How does the phrase "to use a photo for a book" relate to "to use a computer program for fun"? In the first phrase, "use" implies reproduction and publication in a legal sense, while the same word in the latter phrase has a more earthly and commonly understood meaning. To "use" a photo or a novel in the latter sense would mean simply enjoying a copy of it, not making numerous copies of it for distribution. Copyright law isn't concerned with people reading novels, but with people using novels and other works of art for (usually) commercial gain. Now, how many lawyers will consider that running a computer program may be equivalent to reading a book, when even the hackers consistently refer to their loading and running of programs as "using software"? Thus we have "end-user license agreements".
Legal terminology can be tricky. When the prosecutor asks whether you knowingly "accessed" the "device", you'd better request an interpreter who speaks your native tongue.
No, you are probably referring to monitoring of taxi cabs, which is an entirely different (albeit related) thing. I have no privacy problem with the ability to tell where a particular taxi cab is located or what its current speed is, as long as the taxi driver accepts it. Mandatory tracking devices for private cars constitute an invasion of privacy though, and having someone interfere with the operation of a moving vehicle by remote control against the wishes of the driver is sheer madness. In case of an accident, who will be responsible for driving the car?
Ultimately, the government will send one of its own agents to drive your car, it will be converted to run on rails only, and several cars going in the same direction will be hooked up together to form a "train" for reasons of economy.
Taking the above into account, do you see a future for open source censorware, enabling parents to obtain independent assistance with tuning their filters to their preference, rather than simply buying some vendor's obscure notion of "objectionable"?
If the kid finds out that he is explicitely disallowed to view a particular website (as may easily be the case with open source censorware), is this worse than him finding out that he isn't allowed to watch a particular X-rated movie?
However, I was quite amazed when some students on vacation wrote an e-mail address on a postcard and had it correctly delivered to our university department! This was around 1992, when "Internet" and "e-mail" weren't yet household words...
Let's assume that obeying robots.txt is made into law, and that eBay creates such a file explicitely banning "Auction-Indexer" from accessing their site, but allowing all other robots. All you now have to do is set up a robot with a different name, say "Super-Duper-Auction-Indexer", and start all over. While it runs contrary to eBay's wishes, and can probably be challenged in court just like the previous behaviour, it's in full compliance with the robots.txt policy. The defendant could even argue that they are trying to comply with eBay's wishes, since they have now changed the robot name per eBay's request!
No, I'm now convinced that lawyers should be kept away from interpreting the robots.txt file at all. If you want to make robot exclusion a law, please pick another filename for that purpose. Being a webmaster myself, my legal requirements are different from my technical requirements. Saying "please don't use robots to access this site" is one thing, saying "robots accessing this site may face criminal charges" is quite another.
As for me, I think robots.txt should be used only to prevent abuse of server resources, not to control access to information that a human user would be allowed to access anyway, even if the information comes in the form of a directory tree.
Let's say that I design a proxy server which tries to anticipate the user's future moves and preloads pages referenced by the page that was just requested (and delivered), in order to speed up browsing. I want it to be very careful about how often it bothers a particular server; I'd suggest not retrieving more than one document per minute, and adjusting the pause upwards if the documents are large. It should not go retrieving documents unlikely to be retrieved soon by a human user, say those referenced by pages already preloaded but not yet requested. I don't think it would place enough load on any server to worry about; it may rather diminish the load by serving multiple users. Still, it looks pretty much like a robot to me, and I believe the current robot policy would expect it to obey the robots.txt file. So, if some server disallows all robots, does it mean my proxy will have to turn off cache preloading for that server, or even refuse to connect to that server at all, telling the user to go get those pages himself?
On the other hand, if I have a server generating a theoretically unlimited number of hypertext documents on the fly as the users request them, I don't want a robot to go requesting those pages all by itself, even if it only makes one request per hour, since it may keep doing so for months and years, and I don't want to waste server CPU cycles and disk space to generate and cache obscure pages for the amusement of a machine, especially when I also try to gather statistics on what data the users find most interesting!
By the way, the Ebay lawsuit seems to be about information access and possibly copyright, not server load or skewed server statistics. It doesn't take a robot to access information without permission or violate someone's copyright. I therefore doubt robots.txt is the proper solution in their case.
But does the judge know this? What if some company claims that robots.txt is an information access control mechanism rather than a server usage policy document, and accuses a human of bypassing that file to gain unauthorized access to semi-restricted information placed on the server without any real access control (say, they try the "secret URL" trick)? Ok, the human isn't a robot, but maybe his browser could be considered an automated client? Perhaps a single HTTP request doesn't count, but they can probably check their logs and come up with a number of accesses in a row (they were for inline images; who cares really), not one of them is for robots.txt, and the guy is fried.
It's just one scenario out of several possible. What about proxy search engines, sending user queries in parallel to the search facilities of several servers; are they supposed to obey robots.txt too? What about document processing facilities such as the Babelfish or an HTML syntax verifier?
Be careful about what you say in those laws.
Of course, the police may (and probably should) question such behaviour in order to determine the true circumstances, and they may advise you not to act like that in the future, but unless there is a law saying that sneaking around in a strange outfit amounts to calling the police, I doubt you can be charged with false alarm.
The idea with the surveillance cameras is that they are to be used for one-way monitoring of what people actually do, not serve as public "videophoneboots" for people wishing to get in touch with the authorities. The surveillance system is to be tuned to the normal behaviour of people, not the other way around. Having a sign saying "Area under automatic surveillance - Please confine your actions to the statistical norm, unless you have criminal intent" would be plain silly.
There are of course special cases, such as a bank, where entering wearing a mask and wielding a gun is a sure way to get the attention of security staff and everybody else. Don't do that, unless you really intend to rob the bank and face the consequences.
I recall someone mentioning a few years back that school kids in some U.S. cities were ordered not to wear certain necklaces or Disney t-shirts to school, simply because those items were closely related with either drug trafficking or gang wars. I would probably agree that the kids shouldn't put themselves at risk by wearing odd outfits in the wrong environment, but it's not like you can prevent people in general from messing with your statistical notion of what different kinds of criminals look like.
On the other hand, root nameservers serve the root (".") zone, and there are currently 13 of them spread out across the Internet (many of them are in the USA).
The root zone (i.e. physically the records originating with A.ROOT-SERVERS.NET, the master root server) delegates authority over the top-level domains to their respective servers, and you are correct that AlterNIC isn't among them (unless they have obtained a country of their own or something). While you as a network manager have to manually feed your local name server or resolver with some root server addresses to begin with, they are normally discarded as soon as your client software gets access to the real data. Sometimes people set up their own root servers inside firewalls, but they are merely intended to act as DNS gateways to the external world, plus optionally add some local domain name (the latter not a good idea, in my opinion).Instead, how about adding some dissenting voices to the web browser, similar to Slashdot moderation (i.e. don't delete the junk, but rather moderate it down to render it invisible to most users)? When looking up a particular domain or URL, the browser could check for alternative opinions on that particular address (using some distributed database scheme), and act on them according to the user's preferences. For example, a host look-up for ebay.com could be accompanied by a PTR or TXT look-up for ebay.com.dissent.net, and if some records are found, they may refer the browser to comments, criticism, spoofs, overlay graffitti or something else of relevance to the target address.
Compare it to asking your local librarian for a copy of Dante's Inferno, which she gladly provides, while saying "by the way, you may also want to read Gary Larson's hilariously funny spoof of Dante's Inferno", since she knows you appreciate a good laugh now and then. Your browser should be your librarian. In this way, if you ridicule a commercial site according to the given protocol, and the users agree to read your satire, it should be a lot more difficult than it is today for lawyers to cry "trademark dilution".
Sure, developing another browser isn't done in an afternoon, but neither is supplanting the present domain hierarchy, and it would be really neat to be able to support dozens or even hundreds of alternate, independent pages associated with a single domain name or URL. Also, fewer users would be dependent on their sysadmins to install such a browser for them, than would have to file requests for an alternate set of root servers to be considered.
"You can't patent what's already happening in nature." Correct; you can't. I doubt anybody is doing it. They are, however, patenting the use of biological processes for commercial or industrial purposes, including the processes of DNA replication and protein production. You can't simply patent the existance of some genetically engineered bacteria just because you made it; you rather patent the use of said bacteria for some purpose, say processing of chemical waste, a highly industrial activity. I have no problem with this, whether legal or moral.
The important point here is that "just any" purpose doesn't count. The method must be commercially useful, in that it helps you to perform your task in a cheaper or otherwise better way than would be possible without the invention. This assumes that the purpose must be of commercial interest in the first place. The cleaning of toxic waste certainly has a business potential. Human reproduction hasn't, at least not until we have legalized slavery or cannibalism (so that there would be a commercial incentive for someone to produce more or bigger humans). Therefore, you shouldn't worry that some big corporation is going to take away your freedom to reproduce, just because they have patented the use of some miniscule part of the human genome for an entirely different purpose, say transplant engineering. A patent in this field is supposed to prevent one company from using the industrial method developed by another, without contributing to the development costs. It doesn't prevent nature from doing more or less the same thing, since Mother Nature isn't a legal subject.
There are valid concerns against big corporations using the patent system to interfere with the freedom of farmers to continue producing the same crops they have produced for years without any thoughts on patents, but the fact that the patents relate to biotechnology is irrelevant to those concerns.
"You can't patent mere information." Correct again. Who said you could?
"It's illegal to publish source code implementing patented methods." Well, I'd say that's at least debatable. I know there are cases of lawyers bullying people to stop distributing software "infringing" on some patents, but has any of those cases been tested in court? As long as there is no clear verdict on the issue, I don't think it's a good idea to help the IP lawyers promote what may be nothing but a legal myth.
By analogy with earlier patents, the monopoly granted by a software patent should apply to the use of said software in a commercial application, say a business web server, and not to the mere distribution of the software itself, i.e. a particular technical description of the patent. As long as I don't run the code myself, but merely write it for others to run, how can I be found guilty of infringement if I can't even tell whether the code will be used commercially? If it's used on a solely non-commercial basis, what grounds are there to claim infringement by anybody?
That said, I still think software patents are a bad idea, because the patent system seems to be incompatible with the way the software industry works (which is not the way software industry lawyers believe it works). I just don't want software patents to infringe upon my right to free speech in non-commercial contexts, should they ever be accepted.
As usual, IANAL.
At least give the pedestrians on the Web the freedom to walk around without the need for a license. Otherwise, what should we do about underage surfers? Constant supervision?
That aside, I'm still somewhat concerned about the word "license", since I tend to interpret that as indicating the presence of a contractual relationship (as in "a license to produce Coca-Cola"); such a license is usually considered revokeable. Also a "license to hold a TV set" or a "license to use a gun" (European concepts) can be revoked, even though they are intended for "end users" rather than some contractually bound producer in the middle. One aspect of free software is that nobody should be able to revoke the freedoms already given. A "non-revokeable license" is probably our best option for now, but I'm not entirely satisfied with that language. The "License" in the GPL should probably be associated with expressions such as "artistic license", but there doesn't seem to be very many of those expressions.
So, could this solution solve the problem also for Corel (if there is a problem at all)? If people are simply permitted to download Corel's distribution without them having to agree to anything, will their age and legal capability still matter?
However, any minor wishing to contribute free code to some software project (GPL'ed or not) would still need parental consent for that, unless I have overlooked another legal loophole.
Kids actually produce "intellectual property" throughout their childhood, from the point when they begin making simple crayon drawings. These early works of art seldom get any publicity outside direct family and friends, and licensing terms thus aren't an issue.
Things may change in school, as they start writing essays that are read in class, or even submitted to various contests where they may find a wider audience. Legally speaking, their parents must consent to any public use of their work, but for practical purposes I believe parents are presumed to have given implicit permission for most creative activities that normally take place in school. At least my parents were never asked to sign a contract before I, at the age of 16, performed the traditional piano piece for a full aula at summer break-up (in Sweden, age of consent is 18). We even produced a musical and performed for a paying audience. Those who were still under 18 at the time we went to Denmark for a visiting performance (1980) were required to obtain parental permission in order to spend a late evening in Copenhagen, but nobody ever questioned their freedom to show off their artistic abilities for no monetary compensation at all...
As for contributing to the GNU project, I think parental consent is an acceptable inconvenience. In case some parents explicitely disallow their kid from writing free software on the grounds that they want him to profit from his skills instead, I'm sure slashdotters will be the first to hear about it, and then we can discuss what to do about it.
Then again, maybe someone will interpret the prohibitions against child labour in an innovative way, and compare the FSF with some Asian textile producer taking advantage of slave labour... After all, weren't the Wiener Sängerknaben prohibited from giving performances during christmas and other major holidays? I'd like to see someone collect and distribute software that has been designed and implemented by minors exclusively (of course with parental consent)! A quality mark, sort of.
In Sweden, public performance and rental of artistic works are among the things you need the artist's approval to do. It doesn't matter whether the copy you have was obtained under a legally binding contract; normally you can't put any video recording in a VCR and show it to an audience beyond your direct family and friends without permission from the copyright holder.
If a label on the copy says "Not for rental", it's first and foremost a statement of fact and a reminder of what the law implies, failing a license or a permission to the contrary. It may optionally form part of the text of a license agreement, but even if there is no agreement, copyright law still holds.
I've hardly ever bought or rented a video. I don't think I've ever seen a DVD product. Are you saying they come with an explicit "end-user license agreement" which you are considered bound by when you buy or open the product, or are you merely inferring this from those restrictive labels you have seen?
Or, could it be that U.S. copyright legislation is actually extremely weak, meaning that you can take any audio recording and play it for the thousands listening to your private radio station, simply because your copy was legally bought in an ordinary record store? Somehow I doubt it...
And no, I'm not a lawyer either; I cannot provide legal advice. All my advice is strictly illegal!
For instance, a child creating a piece of art or literature owns the copyright to it, just like any other author. If someone finds the kid's collected works suitable for publication, the parents get to negotiate the contractual terms with the publisher, but they cannot allow publication against the wish of the child, nor can they dispose of the royalties as they see fit.
It happens that people register cars and other property as owned by their under-age children, as a form of tax evasion (it's generally frowned upon). I have no idea what the kids themselves think of this practice...
See my other comment below regarding the over-use of "license agreements" with respect to mass-market software.
But minors don't need parental permission (legally speaking) to read a book that is covered by copyright. Merely reading the book doesn't mean that the reader enters a contractual relationship with the author or the publisher. The reader, whether a minor or an adult, is still subject to the copyright laws, which are unilateral (i.e. you don't get to argue the terms of the law with the lawmaker each time it applies to you). There is no need to bring in contractual law and discuss whether the minor has obtained a valid license to read the published book. Why should published source code be any different?
The whole idea of the need for end-user software licenses seems to be based on the notion that the software isn't published, but rather developed for a very limited number of users, as was common practice in the early days of commercial software development. But when you ship millions of copies of the same computer program to be sold over the counter, can you still claim that those binary files aren't in fact published (i.e. made available to the general public), and that anyone buying a copy thus has to enter a contractual relationship not only with the supplier by paying for the copy, but also with the publisher over access to the information stored on it? If so, why doesn't every printed book or aired broadcast come with an end-user license agreement?
In order for kids to be able to live in the society of the future, will they have to obtain blanket permissions en masse from their parents, so that they can enter those 500+ license agreements per day required to surf the Web, play computer games, or watch television? When "license agreements" become as omnipresent as air, will we still respect the legal ramifications of violating one or two of them?
The GPL maintainers could begin making things a little more sensible by not requiring end-users to enter a license agreement merely to download and run published software. The "licensing" verbiage should be limited to those wishing to distribute the code or modifications of it to others. This would still require under-age hackers to obtain parental permission in order to take part in software development or distribution, but this is the case for pretty much any media work that kids get involved in today.
At least the DEC KL10 had a serial number, and probably the entire PDP-10 line of processors. Ours were 2777 and 3159, if I remember correctly. We used 2777 as the entrance code for the student computer labs (don't bother trying to use it; we moved out of that lab in 1987). It used to be printed on the console during boot. I think it wasn't until TOPS-20 version 6 (1985) that the serial number could be read by user software, however (via the CONFG% system call), since the APRID instruction wasn't available from user mode.
I don't know about the rest of the DEC PDP family, but it seems reasonable that the PDP-11 had a readable serial number, and most certainly the VAX. Anybody who knows more? The PDP-8, which was the world's first mass-produced computer, most likely had a serial number, but it was probably only found on a bolted metal plate on the chassis, and not on some particular Flip Chip of the kind that made up the CPU...
So, why didn't serial numbers make it into the 4004 and other early microprocessors from the very beginning? Probably because the designers didn't consider them meaningful on individual chips that were to be produced by the millions. After all, the primary reason for having a serial number on any item was for the producer to be able to track malfunctioning devices back to their origin (quality control). For something as small and cheap as integrated circuits, a printed timestamp on the casing was found sufficient.
To a hacker, the ability to examine anything via software (including the serial number of the processor itself) is a nice feature, even if it's useless for any practical purpose. Therefore I don't mind serial numbers in processors.
The problem is with application software that makes use of such features in undocumented and perhaps unwanted ways. A word processor shouldn't add hidden data about me or my computer to every document I write, any more than a typewriter should stamp its serial number using invisible ink on every sheet of paper that passes through it (under Ceaucescu, Romanian secret police kept a type sample for every licensed typewriter in the country, to help them identify the origin of any illegal leaflets).
So, the EU (which I happen to live in) should make sure they aren't barking up the wrong tree when they start investigating Intel rather than software industry practices. As for the talk of sanctions, I very much agree that this issue should be a matter for consumers to decide. However, I'm all for investigating, if it leads to consumers becoming informed about the issues. I mean, the EU could try to stop me from ftp'ing any free software I like...
But then again, it's only a rumor I heard. Could be part of the desinformation as well.
In short, when you have a technical problem, where do you turn for help with the solution: to fellow government computing operations managers, to the GNU/Linux community, or to a paid consultant?
How well do you think those challenges are met by the proprietary software model and by the open source model, respectively? Does either side have any particular advantage in your area, either today or in the foreseeable future?