So the Constitution says "yes, Congress is allowed to give authors exclusivity to their original works for a limited time, and allow them to control who has access to it, to promote the progress of science and useful arts."
The constitution is not a code of laws, it's a definition of our system of government, and a document definition what the government can not do. Our legal code is an entire other matter, and history has shown that the letter of the law is far, far more important than the literal meaning of the Constitution.
How, precisely, is it "promoting the progress of science and useful arts" to have copyright extended indefinitely?
It may or may not be, but the question is not germaine to the discussion.
Note also that it says "authors" - not "decendants of authors" or "corporations of which the author is affiliated."
The Copyright Act has clearly established how copyright as an incident of authorship can be transferred to another legal entity. See the Copy right Act (I believe 1972, but could be mistaken).
The Constitution spells out very clearly that the reason for copyright is to promote science and the arts.
The Constitution spells out a number of things very clearly that are still interpretted in law, and that interpretation doesn't necessarily match the literal meaning of the Constitution. For example, Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof was a reference to state religion. There's an official Church of England, for example. There's no official Church of the United States. But this simple statement has been interpretted to mean that there can be no relics or artifacts of religion in any aspect of the government, from schools to public property, to courthouses, to the pledge of allegience. These things are interpretted as being tantamount to an establishment of religion or a restirction on the free exercise of it, although no law has literally been passed in this regard in any of these cases.
Speaking of which, it's funny that stuff like prayer in school is abolished as a First Amendment violation, but the President wants to pass a law that codifies the Christian definition of marriage. That one'll get tossed out on its head pretty quickly if it ever comes to fruition. Well, we hope so, anyway.
Do I have a right to copyrighted works? Yes, once protecting them has stopped advancing arts and science, they should no longer fall under Congress's ability to legislate.
Not according to the Legal Code of the United States, nor international copyright law.
So yes, too much protection is being given to pieces of paper - copyrighted works.
I agree with you, but I think your post demonstrates a fundamental misunderstanding of the difference between the Constitution of the United States and the US Code. The former is a document that frames and limits government. The latter is a collection of laws under which our society operates.
I have a right to use those works once they've stopped "promoting the Progress of Science and useful Arts", and that right is being slowly eroded.
No, you don't.
The medicine argument would be even more apt if we were talking about patents, but we're not, so I won't go there.
Look, I agree with you guys that intellectual property right laws are screwed up and need examination. I agree that this new law is crap. But I agree based on my ideology for how it should work, not some warped idea of what my rights are and aren't. That's why I keep getting into these bickerfests on here, you guys are on the right side of this but I wish you'd take more time to research the laws and understand how and why things are the way they are. We're not going to have much luck effecting change until more people in "the movement" aren't reciting tired mantras of half-truths and misinformation.
United States law recognizes no universal right to limit the distribution of information. (Rights like "life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness", or those enumerated in the Bill of Rights; though it's important to note that when the constitution was framed, many opposed specifically enumerating any rights in the Bill of Rights because it was considered that everybody naturally had the right to do ANYTHING unless specifically disallowed, and enumerating them could lead people to limit themselves to JUST those rights).
United States Code, Title XVII, Chapter 1, Section 106, subheading (3) is titled "Exclusive Rights in Copyrighted Work". Subheading (1) specifically grants the copyright owner the exclusive right to produce copies. Subheading (3) specifically grants the copyright owner the exclusive right to distribute copies, either by sale or lease (this means you can't rent movies to your friends without the copyright holder's permission).
Despite its poor name, "copyright" laws grant a limited exclusive PRIVILEGE to copy information. In other words, they are restricting the natural way of things in hopes of achieving some greater good. (Anyone can copy anything, naturally, as per the assumed right to do whatever you like unless otherwise limited; copyright law is the limit, not the right).
If you refer to it this way, I expect you to start talking about your Fair Use Privileges in future posts.
Infringing on copyright law is *not theft*. You have not deprived the original owner of any property, and thus have violated no property rights. You have infringed on a law, sure, but that law is not based on any universal right.
You can violate somebody's property rights without stealing property. For example, by damaging it, defacing it, or otherwise compromising its value to the owner of that property.
You have infringed on a law, sure, but that law is not based on any universal right.
You'll have to define universal right before I can really interpret what you mean by this statement.
No natural rights violations are being violated in either case.
Again, I'm stumbling over your use of the term right. I think you're adopted a conveniently naive definition. If you think "life" is a right, then you must be in favor of abolishing abortion, no? If you think "the pursuit of happiness" is a right, then at what point does one man's happiness end and another begins? I'm not happy unless I can download my movies for free. The owners of the copyrights on those movies aren't happy unless they get material compensation for my copy. Who wins? This is why we have laws, and the law says that the copyright owner's right here wins.
I believe the GP poster was merely expressing his disdain that things are being regulated in favor of the corporations, instead of in favor of the people.
I agree, he was, and I specifically made mention of that, and admitted that I was quibbling with his choice of example more than his point, which I agree with.
Then lump the loss of due process with the DMCA and you start to see a middle ages picture being drawn here. Isn't this what the founding fathers of our country came here to escape?
No. They did not come to America to escape a sociey that punishes people who break the law.
When my insurance rates go down and my prescription medicines no longer cost as much as they do then I feel Congress is free to explore some other avenues.
You don't have a right to cheap insurance and drugs. However, private property rights are well-established. I don't like crap laws like this either, but your comparison is naive.
Somebody's rights are clearly being violated when people download software, music, and movies illegally.
Your rights are not being violated because your insurance and drugs are expensive.
There are plenty of rights violations of individuals going on, so your point about the little guy getting bashed over the head while laws are being enacted to protect big business stands, but your examples are poor, and I wanted to make a distinction between protecting rights and stuff costing too much.
The submission uses the term "user" and the article (yes, I did RTFA) doesn't clarify what happens if the offending data is placed on a public web site - i.e. uploaded to a forum.
Existing copyright law covers this. That's a violation of the exclusive right of the owner to distribute the music, and if you are caught uploading (distributing) material that does not belong to you, and your upload is not for "home use" (and thus covered under the "Home Use" clause of the Fair Use Doctrine), then you are in violation.
Specifically, United States Code, Title 17, Chapter 1, Section 106, Subheading (3). This is already illegal and it has been for ages.
Copyright infringement already carries with it a maximum penalty of $250,000 and possible prison time. 3 years in jail is nothing, it's a bone thrown to campaign contributors to make them thing the Bush White House gives a crap about file sharing.
How is it unstoppable? Unless you're going to pay for stuff by stuffing cash into an envelope and posting it abroad, then you're going to get caught before you can say Mastercard.
How is it stoppable? How do you stop people from doing it? How do you prove that when User A gives User B an item, the two people involved in real life have exchanged currency for it? Not every transaction involves a credit card. Long before people were selling their Wyrmslayers for $30 on EQ, players on my MUD were buying each other's characters, and there was no PayPal and no eBay at the time. Yes, they mailed each other checks.
How do you show that somebody is in violation of the EULA? How do you prove that they've paid for something they were given? Or do you just start banning suspicious accounts? That's going to nab some honest people who've done nothing wrong and drive away business.
Or you can set up a marketplace, legitimize and regulate the activity, and make some extra money, drive away some business, but compensate for the loss with a new revenue stream.
I'm not going to argue about whether or not it's ethical or right or whatever, only that there's a solid business cause for it.
And before somebody blasts me, I'm not saying that I approve of this decision, but it makes sense from a business perspective for Sony. It may drive away some EQ2 customers, but the lost revenue from those people is likely to be more than compensated for by the increased revenue from these sales.
It's like on-line poker. People are going to do this and it's completely unregulatable and unstoppable, they may as well insert themselves into the process, give people a legitimate and legal way to do it, and make some money off it.
I didn't RTFA but I'm guessing Sony gets a percentage cut of all items traded on the Station. And even if they don't, it's generating traffic and thus ad revenue.
I mean, WHOA! RIAA! Look at this! Somebody had customers doing illegal things with their property in violation of their license agreement and found a way to make a profit off it instead of sueing their own customers! What a novel friggen concept.
My point stands. We complain about ideas that Microsoft has which would be lauded if pioneered by anybody else. I'm talking about the merit of the idea, not the company implementing it. If this idea was Google's, it'd be celebrated here as genius.
In the immediate aftermath of 9/11, MS execs were already thinking "how can we profit from this"? Google execs weren't.
You don't know that, you're assuming that. You're assuming that Microsoft did not start any work on this idea until after 9/11. You're assuming that they had not already begun some work on it, and accelerated their plans after 9/11. You're assuming that this patent is only a response to 9/11, and hadn't been brewing in Microsoft's think tanks prior to it.
You're also assuming that Google had no ideas or intentions of responding to (or profiting by) 9/11 simply because they filed no patents.
This patent was filed in October of 2001. It's approaching May of 2005. It's been three and a half years and I'm having trouble accounting for the profits Microsoft has made off this patent. I'm having trouble identifying where it fits into Longhorn or any of their future products. I've seen no news, no mention, not a whisper about this evil Microsoft 911 technology that is apparantly going to handcuff us all to a proprietary system and place our lives in the hands of Bill Gate's benevolence.
That is my point. Take idea and slap from Microsoft on it and it's immediately a bad idea. I dislike proprietary systems too. I don't like big corporations, and I especially don't like or trust Microsoft, but the response of this crowd to everything they do, say, or think is emotional, reactionary, and paranoid. If there was ever a Big Evil Empire of American Business, the Emperor has to be W.R. Hearst, but Microsoft is at least part of the court. That doesn't mean all their ideas are necessarily bad.
And note that I'm not defending this particular idea or patent, I'm commenting on the tendancy of this specific group of people to decry all things that come out of Redmond on the grounds that it came out of the Redmond, rather than on the merit of the idea. Somebody in this thread actually read the patent and posted an excellent criticism of the shortcomings of the idea. Serveral people did, in fact. The majority, however, saw, "MICROSOFT PATENTS 911" (which isn't even true) and immediately started to bitch about it.
My experience has been that men on the internet are generally poor judges of who is and is not a legitimate female in real life.
We're only bithcing because it's Microsoft
on
Microsoft's 911 Patent
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· Score: 4, Informative
Other companies have proposed patents, also since 9/11, in an effort to improve the reliability of the emergency response system. Some have been extensions of existing technology, some have been replacements for existing technology, some have been efforts to bolster the reliability of existing technology.
One of the more well-known was the one that VoIP filed, meant to stabilize the usability of internet phones for emergency calls by rerouting VoIP calls to emergency numbers through the conventional phone system.
Microsoft's patent isn't quite like VoIPs but my point is that if this was, say, a patent being filed by Google, a number of you who decry this move would be celebrating their the foresight and genius.
This PR blows for Nikon, who is marketing a high-end camera to elite users. That's a fickle market of people who weigh purchasing decisions carefully. I bet Adobe and Nikkon resolve this problem within 3 weeks. Save this post so you can see if I'm right!
I'm sure some people here will now question my sanity, but for every Borg in TNG, there was an episode featuring Troy and her mother doing something stupid.
I TiVo the Next Gen and DS9 episodes on Spike, they show two of each every day. I can't watch the next gen episodes any more. The writing is so god-awful. In fact, it really improved after Roddenberry was gone, in my opinion. I enjoy DS9 much better, the writing is far more polished, to say nothing of the acting. Too bad it turned into Dungeons and Dragons for the last season.
Well around 25 years ago there was a show called Space 1999. In that tv show they predicted that in 25 or so years people would be living on the moon. Most predictions made 20-30 years out generally are way too extreeme.
I mostly agree, but there's always exceptions. Read any computer predictions from the days before the transistor. Nobody saw that coming. So basic a piece of technology caused a revolution that changed the face of computing within 20-40 years, and changed it radically.
One hundred years ago (or so), it was believed to be an impossibility of physics for man to go to the moon. It happened in 1969. Not 20-30 years, granted, but still.
Revolutionary science materializes within 20-30 years, but it rarely sees application for another 10-20. There's also practical considerations. We have and have had the technology for flying "cars" for a long time. What we don't have is a financial or social impetus to switch to them.
I wonder if anyone's thought about the effects if the asteroid doesn't directly strike earth. Could it cut a swath through the geosynchronous satellites, destroying one, two or dozens directly? Might it perturb their orbits enough to destabilize the whole lot of them?
That's a lot of space. Geosynch orbit is 22,000 miles. Tack on 4,000 miles for the earth's radius, and it's a shell of space with a surface area of 8.5 billion square miles. Let's pretend we've got 50,000 satellites in that area by 2030. That means 1 sallite per 170,000 square miles. That suggests one satellite occupying a square of space 500 miles x 500 miles, and this thing is under a half mile across, probably less than a quarter-mile. The chances of it impacting anything in that orbit is incredibly tiny.
Caveat: my math may be off, but the point stands. This object occupies a TINY region of space, and satellits occupy an even TINIER region of space. There's no cloud of buzzing satellites around the planet, they're sparsely populating a huge shell around the planet.
We not only have the technology, it's hard to predict what our situation will be as 2030 approaches.
We all could be gone by then.
For all we know, the United States of Arabia, formed in 2013, will be the world's lone superpower, we will be driving around in our fuel efficient hydorgen-powered Sayyarrah Ansar 4-doors, created by the Sayyarrah Motor Co in response to rising fuel costs after the world's industrial nations burned through most of the cheaply-accessible Arabian oil, leaving the United States sitting on top of the largest intact oil reserves in the world, which it stubbornly refuses to share. The USA (the Arabian states, I mean) will work with the Brazilians space program and the Federal Chinese States (formed after the Chinese Civil War in 2018) to launch an "asteroid-killer" probe at this thing from the secondary pad at Artemis International Station in the north polar region of the moon.
Or it'll just, like, Africa, or Canada, or some other place nobody cares about, and we'll just live with it. Or the environmentalists will protest that it likely contains spaceborne elementary life forms and that it's an immoral sin of human arrogance to attempt to save our species by eliminating theirs.
Print this post out now and re-read it in 20 years, it'll be fun!
As anybody who reads Slashdot knows, perfectly legal and legitimate downloading comprises the majority of internet downloading, and actually bolsters profits to member organizations of such content ownership cartels as the RIAA.
"This, according to the company, can altogether stop the sharing of copywritten files by flooding p2p networks with corrupt/junk data"
Slashdot should rejoice at this! Since none of us download illegal material and nobody that any of us knows downloads illegal material, this technology might allow us to continue our legal, legitimate downloading of media and only target those handful of ruffians who engage in illegal filesharing. I'm all in favor of this!
It's the substance, and not the form, that counts. That's my major point.
To quote somebody else's characterization of my original post, that's naive and idealistic.
Distributing, say, a bank statement in PDF to make it "look the same" as a "real" bank statement is inherently silly.
Why is it "inherently silly"? I think it makes inherent good sense to have a single, unified method of distributing official statements, whether it's in PDF or not. The end of the monthly statement cycle comes, you run a process that gathers everybody's records and creates a PDF file. That's printed, mailed to the customer, then stored. If I call in 12 months and want a copy of it, they just load and print that PDF. If I want a copy off the web site, they link me to it. You have one authoratative source for knowledge, which is a pretty basic fundamental principle of software engineering. The merits of PDFs aside, having one document serve as your authoratative data source isn't inherently silly, especially if one of the side effects is consistant look and feel. Americans are confounded by old Yield signs that are yellow instead of red and white, don't ask them to interpret two different-looking bank statements. It's bad business.
What makes the PDF more "real" then an HTML presentation?
You answered this below, but I'll play along: the fact that the underwriter will accept it as an official bankstatement whereas the HTML version generated on-the-fly isn't an official statement.
What does having the same format of another document make something I print myself "more real"?
It gives people in charge of major decisions that affect my life warm fuzzies that I'm legit. That's real enough for me. Your complaint is with the underwriter, not the bank. Or, alternatively, if you can convince the bank to make their HTML web page version of my statement count as an official statement, you've got something.
Look at stlhawkeye's reply, where he says the HTML version of his bank statement wasn't accepted. Now, that justifies a demand for his bank to make "look alike" data available as a PDF, but let's look beyond that. Why the hell does anyone care the source of the print out was HTML?
The part that says, "This is not an official statement." I don't know the intricacies of bank politics, but the PDF document has most likely gone through consistancy checks, quality control, verification, etc, and the bank is willing to stake their reputation on its accuracy and say, "This is official."
The web page? Not so much. The PDF is a fixed document (to them), the web page is not.
Now, if they were to distribute their statements as HTML instead of PDF, well, ok, I see your point in that light. But they already have processes and programming in place to generate the PDF version, why develop a parallel process for HTML?
That might beg the question of why they went with PDF over HTML in the first place, and there I can only guess that it boils down to elementary marketing. The last thing the bank wants is people wasting their customer service talk time on problems were Old Man Johnson is calling up to bitch that their web page sucks because his on-line statement doesn't have his balance on it! He fails to mention that he's blind in one eye and runs his browser in 620x480 mode with 28pt fonts and the statement looks like shit and the balance is off-screen or has been moved to the next line down by his browser. He's not savvy to say, "it's my browser settings", he's going to say, "it's this crappy bank and their crappy website." And not just him, tons of people, the majority of internet users who don't understand how this technology really works. You could probably get your HTML set up so that the look is relatively consistant, but then you're throwing out all the benefits of HTML that are thematic to your argument.
The bottom line is that when most people (remember: the majority of the
No offense, but that's just stupid and impractical.
Heh. In the same breath... "no offense, but you're an idiot!" Stupid I can accept as being your opinion, but not impractical. I don't have a Flash player installed for my web browser, and very rarely do I run into a web site that requires it. In fact, the only one I can think of lately was the Battlestar Galactica web site, which I can live without. No, I didn't stop watching the show. I mispoke, really, I don't boycott the company, I just refuse to visit the web site. If someday the company that manufactures my car installs flash on their web site, I'm not going to sell it. I just won't use their web sites. My original statement makes my take on this sound far more extremist than it actually is, and that's just my bad for not thinking through my choice of words.
My wife and I were recently in need of a new vehicle. We did our research and found that virtually every car maker uses Flash on their websites.
When I bought my car, Edmunds.com and a number of other consumer-oriented car web sites did not, and those are the resources I relied upon, rather than marketing literature from the company that wants me to buy its products.
Nevertheless, we navigated around, priced out some configurations, and set up some test drives. In the end, we went with a Mazda 3 Sport GT, and we're very happy with it. However, Mazda's site happens to be one that employs Flash for the menus.
Menus are exactly the kind of thing for which there is no legitimate need for flash. Or any kind of graphics (in my opinion).
Had we subscribed to your naive, idealistic world view and boycotted them,
..."no offense"....
we would have had our choices substantially limited, and would have ended up far less satisfied with our purchase.
No, see, I still would have bought a Mazda if that's what I really decided I wanted. I drive a Honda, and for all I know Honda's web site could be chock-full of Flash. I have no idea, I've only ever been to the Honda Finance web site back when my car was financed through them and they didn't use Flash at the time. Anyway, I was unclear in my view here. I made it sound like I wouldn't buy something from a company that used Flash on their web site. I won't visit or use their web site, and if it's an on-line only type place, then they just don't get my business. Sometimes this policy does affect my purchasing decision. When I was going to buy new hockey skates, one of the major skate companies, CCM, had a page that was full of ridiculous flash JUST to navigate around. Every time I clicked on something there was a pointless little animation, kind of like DVD menu transitions. I just wanted some price and feature information, and it was hopelessly buried in a mire of Flash animated menus.
When I finally dug it up, they didn't even have prices on their web site. I ended up buying from a competitor, not specifically because of the Flash, but just because their web site was a hopeless mess that offered no meaningful information and hid what little data they had behind a massive mess of animated menus. After three or four similar experiences with other companies employing gratuitous use of Flash (and graphics in general) I started to just avoid those web sites.
And for what? To make a stupid point about some web technology that you don't like?
But "no offense" intended. No, I avoid them because web sites that depend heavily on Flash tend to irritate me. Chalk it up to me having some kind of personality disorder if you like.
I'm kind old school I guess, I think of the web as being primarily a form of information and knowledge distribution, and PDFs aren't necessary to present most types of information or knowledge.
Like the other two guys, you missed the point. PDF (or another fixed-presentation format) are necessary for the examples I quoted, because HTML versions are often not accepted by government agencies and the various private organizations with whom I need to interact.
If I show up at the DMV with my Personal Property Tax Form looking like I typed it into notepad and hit "print", they won't accept it. You have to either go to the Department of Revenue and take a number and wait for your turn so you can pay $1 for a copy of the PPT form, or you can download the PDF off their web site. That's the two things they accept. Again, maybe another technology can do this too, and if it does it cheaper/better, then these organizations need to get with the times.
I can't count the number of times that co-workers, classmates, and myself have lost Firefox sessions thanks to Adobe's PDF plugin.
Agreed. It's terrible on Linux, especially. Trying to print from it is a mess, which is really annoying because printing out a PDF is the primary reason that I'd ever need to download one (instead of, say, putting the same information in HTML).
Both formats have their time and place.
That is exactly my point. That's why I picked out examples where there's a legitimate need for a PDF or other format in which the author can guarantee the "look" of the final printed document. Why do I always have to spell these things out in such basic terms on Slashdot? You guys are mostly pretty bright and it should have been obvious why a PDF has value for bank statements and W2s, and why I picked those examples and not, "I love getting a PDF receipt for my BestBuy.com purchase!"
Personally I think your problem is more with the content providers than those that would develop the tools.
I dislike Flash in general simply because I hate going to a web site just to find out something simple, like a phone number, or hours of operation, or whatever, and seeing this:
Loading Flash Presentation (49%)
I guess you have a point - you can make a bloated and unnecessarily graphic-intensive page without Flash, but mostly I see Flash used for...er.. flashy menu animations and other stuff that just slows down use of the web site. I guess it's a personal preference.
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The constitution is not a code of laws, it's a definition of our system of government, and a document definition what the government can not do. Our legal code is an entire other matter, and history has shown that the letter of the law is far, far more important than the literal meaning of the Constitution.
How, precisely, is it "promoting the progress of science and useful arts" to have copyright extended indefinitely?
It may or may not be, but the question is not germaine to the discussion.
Note also that it says "authors" - not "decendants of authors" or "corporations of which the author is affiliated."
The Copyright Act has clearly established how copyright as an incident of authorship can be transferred to another legal entity. See the Copy right Act (I believe 1972, but could be mistaken).
The Constitution spells out very clearly that the reason for copyright is to promote science and the arts.
The Constitution spells out a number of things very clearly that are still interpretted in law, and that interpretation doesn't necessarily match the literal meaning of the Constitution. For example, Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof was a reference to state religion. There's an official Church of England, for example. There's no official Church of the United States. But this simple statement has been interpretted to mean that there can be no relics or artifacts of religion in any aspect of the government, from schools to public property, to courthouses, to the pledge of allegience. These things are interpretted as being tantamount to an establishment of religion or a restirction on the free exercise of it, although no law has literally been passed in this regard in any of these cases.
Speaking of which, it's funny that stuff like prayer in school is abolished as a First Amendment violation, but the President wants to pass a law that codifies the Christian definition of marriage. That one'll get tossed out on its head pretty quickly if it ever comes to fruition. Well, we hope so, anyway.
Do I have a right to copyrighted works? Yes, once protecting them has stopped advancing arts and science, they should no longer fall under Congress's ability to legislate.
Not according to the Legal Code of the United States, nor international copyright law.
So yes, too much protection is being given to pieces of paper - copyrighted works.
I agree with you, but I think your post demonstrates a fundamental misunderstanding of the difference between the Constitution of the United States and the US Code. The former is a document that frames and limits government. The latter is a collection of laws under which our society operates.
I have a right to use those works once they've stopped "promoting the Progress of Science and useful Arts", and that right is being slowly eroded.
No, you don't.
The medicine argument would be even more apt if we were talking about patents, but we're not, so I won't go there.
Look, I agree with you guys that intellectual property right laws are screwed up and need examination. I agree that this new law is crap. But I agree based on my ideology for how it should work, not some warped idea of what my rights are and aren't. That's why I keep getting into these bickerfests on here, you guys are on the right side of this but I wish you'd take more time to research the laws and understand how and why things are the way they are. We're not going to have much luck effecting change until more people in "the movement" aren't reciting tired mantras of half-truths and misinformation.
United States Code, Title XVII, Chapter 1, Section 106, subheading (3) is titled "Exclusive Rights in Copyrighted Work". Subheading (1) specifically grants the copyright owner the exclusive right to produce copies. Subheading (3) specifically grants the copyright owner the exclusive right to distribute copies, either by sale or lease (this means you can't rent movies to your friends without the copyright holder's permission).
Despite its poor name, "copyright" laws grant a limited exclusive PRIVILEGE to copy information. In other words, they are restricting the natural way of things in hopes of achieving some greater good. (Anyone can copy anything, naturally, as per the assumed right to do whatever you like unless otherwise limited; copyright law is the limit, not the right).
If you refer to it this way, I expect you to start talking about your Fair Use Privileges in future posts.
Infringing on copyright law is *not theft*. You have not deprived the original owner of any property, and thus have violated no property rights. You have infringed on a law, sure, but that law is not based on any universal right.
You can violate somebody's property rights without stealing property. For example, by damaging it, defacing it, or otherwise compromising its value to the owner of that property.
You have infringed on a law, sure, but that law is not based on any universal right.
You'll have to define universal right before I can really interpret what you mean by this statement.
No natural rights violations are being violated in either case.
Again, I'm stumbling over your use of the term right. I think you're adopted a conveniently naive definition. If you think "life" is a right, then you must be in favor of abolishing abortion, no? If you think "the pursuit of happiness" is a right, then at what point does one man's happiness end and another begins? I'm not happy unless I can download my movies for free. The owners of the copyrights on those movies aren't happy unless they get material compensation for my copy. Who wins? This is why we have laws, and the law says that the copyright owner's right here wins.
I believe the GP poster was merely expressing his disdain that things are being regulated in favor of the corporations, instead of in favor of the people.
I agree, he was, and I specifically made mention of that, and admitted that I was quibbling with his choice of example more than his point, which I agree with.
No. They did not come to America to escape a sociey that punishes people who break the law.
You don't have a right to cheap insurance and drugs. However, private property rights are well-established. I don't like crap laws like this either, but your comparison is naive.
Somebody's rights are clearly being violated when people download software, music, and movies illegally.
Your rights are not being violated because your insurance and drugs are expensive.
There are plenty of rights violations of individuals going on, so your point about the little guy getting bashed over the head while laws are being enacted to protect big business stands, but your examples are poor, and I wanted to make a distinction between protecting rights and stuff costing too much.
Existing copyright law covers this. That's a violation of the exclusive right of the owner to distribute the music, and if you are caught uploading (distributing) material that does not belong to you, and your upload is not for "home use" (and thus covered under the "Home Use" clause of the Fair Use Doctrine), then you are in violation.
Specifically, United States Code, Title 17, Chapter 1, Section 106, Subheading (3). This is already illegal and it has been for ages.
Copyright infringement already carries with it a maximum penalty of $250,000 and possible prison time. 3 years in jail is nothing, it's a bone thrown to campaign contributors to make them thing the Bush White House gives a crap about file sharing.
How is it stoppable? How do you stop people from doing it? How do you prove that when User A gives User B an item, the two people involved in real life have exchanged currency for it? Not every transaction involves a credit card. Long before people were selling their Wyrmslayers for $30 on EQ, players on my MUD were buying each other's characters, and there was no PayPal and no eBay at the time. Yes, they mailed each other checks.
How do you show that somebody is in violation of the EULA? How do you prove that they've paid for something they were given? Or do you just start banning suspicious accounts? That's going to nab some honest people who've done nothing wrong and drive away business.
Or you can set up a marketplace, legitimize and regulate the activity, and make some extra money, drive away some business, but compensate for the loss with a new revenue stream.
I'm not going to argue about whether or not it's ethical or right or whatever, only that there's a solid business cause for it.
And before somebody blasts me, I'm not saying that I approve of this decision, but it makes sense from a business perspective for Sony. It may drive away some EQ2 customers, but the lost revenue from those people is likely to be more than compensated for by the increased revenue from these sales.
I didn't RTFA but I'm guessing Sony gets a percentage cut of all items traded on the Station. And even if they don't, it's generating traffic and thus ad revenue.
I mean, WHOA! RIAA! Look at this! Somebody had customers doing illegal things with their property in violation of their license agreement and found a way to make a profit off it instead of sueing their own customers! What a novel friggen concept.
My point stands. We complain about ideas that Microsoft has which would be lauded if pioneered by anybody else. I'm talking about the merit of the idea, not the company implementing it. If this idea was Google's, it'd be celebrated here as genius.
In the immediate aftermath of 9/11, MS execs were already thinking "how can we profit from this"? Google execs weren't.
You don't know that, you're assuming that. You're assuming that Microsoft did not start any work on this idea until after 9/11. You're assuming that they had not already begun some work on it, and accelerated their plans after 9/11. You're assuming that this patent is only a response to 9/11, and hadn't been brewing in Microsoft's think tanks prior to it.
You're also assuming that Google had no ideas or intentions of responding to (or profiting by) 9/11 simply because they filed no patents.
This patent was filed in October of 2001. It's approaching May of 2005. It's been three and a half years and I'm having trouble accounting for the profits Microsoft has made off this patent. I'm having trouble identifying where it fits into Longhorn or any of their future products. I've seen no news, no mention, not a whisper about this evil Microsoft 911 technology that is apparantly going to handcuff us all to a proprietary system and place our lives in the hands of Bill Gate's benevolence.
That is my point. Take idea and slap from Microsoft on it and it's immediately a bad idea. I dislike proprietary systems too. I don't like big corporations, and I especially don't like or trust Microsoft, but the response of this crowd to everything they do, say, or think is emotional, reactionary, and paranoid. If there was ever a Big Evil Empire of American Business, the Emperor has to be W.R. Hearst, but Microsoft is at least part of the court. That doesn't mean all their ideas are necessarily bad.
And note that I'm not defending this particular idea or patent, I'm commenting on the tendancy of this specific group of people to decry all things that come out of Redmond on the grounds that it came out of the Redmond, rather than on the merit of the idea. Somebody in this thread actually read the patent and posted an excellent criticism of the shortcomings of the idea. Serveral people did, in fact. The majority, however, saw, "MICROSOFT PATENTS 911" (which isn't even true) and immediately started to bitch about it.
My experience has been that men on the internet are generally poor judges of who is and is not a legitimate female in real life.
One of the more well-known was the one that VoIP filed, meant to stabilize the usability of internet phones for emergency calls by rerouting VoIP calls to emergency numbers through the conventional phone system.
Microsoft's patent isn't quite like VoIPs but my point is that if this was, say, a patent being filed by Google, a number of you who decry this move would be celebrating their the foresight and genius.
You must be one of those humorless clods that everybody hates so much. What you read was irony, genius.
No, I didn't. Hence, I was making fun of the obvious self-serving nature of the article. I mod you -1 Oblivious.
Ha! This "history" article is a subtle form of advertising for Doubleclick. Where's my tin foil hat?
This PR blows for Nikon, who is marketing a high-end camera to elite users. That's a fickle market of people who weigh purchasing decisions carefully. I bet Adobe and Nikkon resolve this problem within 3 weeks. Save this post so you can see if I'm right!
I TiVo the Next Gen and DS9 episodes on Spike, they show two of each every day. I can't watch the next gen episodes any more. The writing is so god-awful. In fact, it really improved after Roddenberry was gone, in my opinion. I enjoy DS9 much better, the writing is far more polished, to say nothing of the acting. Too bad it turned into Dungeons and Dragons for the last season.
I mostly agree, but there's always exceptions. Read any computer predictions from the days before the transistor. Nobody saw that coming. So basic a piece of technology caused a revolution that changed the face of computing within 20-40 years, and changed it radically.
One hundred years ago (or so), it was believed to be an impossibility of physics for man to go to the moon. It happened in 1969. Not 20-30 years, granted, but still.
Revolutionary science materializes within 20-30 years, but it rarely sees application for another 10-20. There's also practical considerations. We have and have had the technology for flying "cars" for a long time. What we don't have is a financial or social impetus to switch to them.
So it's a ring of space. Aply the circumference formula, calculate satellite density and ... come to the same conclusion.
That's a lot of space. Geosynch orbit is 22,000 miles. Tack on 4,000 miles for the earth's radius, and it's a shell of space with a surface area of 8.5 billion square miles. Let's pretend we've got 50,000 satellites in that area by 2030. That means 1 sallite per 170,000 square miles. That suggests one satellite occupying a square of space 500 miles x 500 miles, and this thing is under a half mile across, probably less than a quarter-mile. The chances of it impacting anything in that orbit is incredibly tiny.
Caveat: my math may be off, but the point stands. This object occupies a TINY region of space, and satellits occupy an even TINIER region of space. There's no cloud of buzzing satellites around the planet, they're sparsely populating a huge shell around the planet.
We all could be gone by then.
For all we know, the United States of Arabia, formed in 2013, will be the world's lone superpower, we will be driving around in our fuel efficient hydorgen-powered Sayyarrah Ansar 4-doors, created by the Sayyarrah Motor Co in response to rising fuel costs after the world's industrial nations burned through most of the cheaply-accessible Arabian oil, leaving the United States sitting on top of the largest intact oil reserves in the world, which it stubbornly refuses to share. The USA (the Arabian states, I mean) will work with the Brazilians space program and the Federal Chinese States (formed after the Chinese Civil War in 2018) to launch an "asteroid-killer" probe at this thing from the secondary pad at Artemis International Station in the north polar region of the moon.
Or it'll just, like, Africa, or Canada, or some other place nobody cares about, and we'll just live with it. Or the environmentalists will protest that it likely contains spaceborne elementary life forms and that it's an immoral sin of human arrogance to attempt to save our species by eliminating theirs.
Print this post out now and re-read it in 20 years, it'll be fun!
"This, according to the company, can altogether stop the sharing of copywritten files by flooding p2p networks with corrupt/junk data"
Slashdot should rejoice at this! Since none of us download illegal material and nobody that any of us knows downloads illegal material, this technology might allow us to continue our legal, legitimate downloading of media and only target those handful of ruffians who engage in illegal filesharing. I'm all in favor of this!
To quote somebody else's characterization of my original post, that's naive and idealistic.
Distributing, say, a bank statement in PDF to make it "look the same" as a "real" bank statement is inherently silly.
Why is it "inherently silly"? I think it makes inherent good sense to have a single, unified method of distributing official statements, whether it's in PDF or not. The end of the monthly statement cycle comes, you run a process that gathers everybody's records and creates a PDF file. That's printed, mailed to the customer, then stored. If I call in 12 months and want a copy of it, they just load and print that PDF. If I want a copy off the web site, they link me to it. You have one authoratative source for knowledge, which is a pretty basic fundamental principle of software engineering. The merits of PDFs aside, having one document serve as your authoratative data source isn't inherently silly, especially if one of the side effects is consistant look and feel. Americans are confounded by old Yield signs that are yellow instead of red and white, don't ask them to interpret two different-looking bank statements. It's bad business.
What makes the PDF more "real" then an HTML presentation?
You answered this below, but I'll play along: the fact that the underwriter will accept it as an official bankstatement whereas the HTML version generated on-the-fly isn't an official statement.
What does having the same format of another document make something I print myself "more real"?
It gives people in charge of major decisions that affect my life warm fuzzies that I'm legit. That's real enough for me. Your complaint is with the underwriter, not the bank. Or, alternatively, if you can convince the bank to make their HTML web page version of my statement count as an official statement, you've got something.
Look at stlhawkeye's reply, where he says the HTML version of his bank statement wasn't accepted. Now, that justifies a demand for his bank to make "look alike" data available as a PDF, but let's look beyond that. Why the hell does anyone care the source of the print out was HTML?
The part that says, "This is not an official statement." I don't know the intricacies of bank politics, but the PDF document has most likely gone through consistancy checks, quality control, verification, etc, and the bank is willing to stake their reputation on its accuracy and say, "This is official."
The web page? Not so much. The PDF is a fixed document (to them), the web page is not.
Now, if they were to distribute their statements as HTML instead of PDF, well, ok, I see your point in that light. But they already have processes and programming in place to generate the PDF version, why develop a parallel process for HTML?
That might beg the question of why they went with PDF over HTML in the first place, and there I can only guess that it boils down to elementary marketing. The last thing the bank wants is people wasting their customer service talk time on problems were Old Man Johnson is calling up to bitch that their web page sucks because his on-line statement doesn't have his balance on it! He fails to mention that he's blind in one eye and runs his browser in 620x480 mode with 28pt fonts and the statement looks like shit and the balance is off-screen or has been moved to the next line down by his browser. He's not savvy to say, "it's my browser settings", he's going to say, "it's this crappy bank and their crappy website." And not just him, tons of people, the majority of internet users who don't understand how this technology really works. You could probably get your HTML set up so that the look is relatively consistant, but then you're throwing out all the benefits of HTML that are thematic to your argument.
The bottom line is that when most people (remember: the majority of the
Heh. In the same breath... "no offense, but you're an idiot!" Stupid I can accept as being your opinion, but not impractical. I don't have a Flash player installed for my web browser, and very rarely do I run into a web site that requires it. In fact, the only one I can think of lately was the Battlestar Galactica web site, which I can live without. No, I didn't stop watching the show. I mispoke, really, I don't boycott the company, I just refuse to visit the web site. If someday the company that manufactures my car installs flash on their web site, I'm not going to sell it. I just won't use their web sites. My original statement makes my take on this sound far more extremist than it actually is, and that's just my bad for not thinking through my choice of words.
My wife and I were recently in need of a new vehicle. We did our research and found that virtually every car maker uses Flash on their websites.
When I bought my car, Edmunds.com and a number of other consumer-oriented car web sites did not, and those are the resources I relied upon, rather than marketing literature from the company that wants me to buy its products.
Nevertheless, we navigated around, priced out some configurations, and set up some test drives. In the end, we went with a Mazda 3 Sport GT, and we're very happy with it. However, Mazda's site happens to be one that employs Flash for the menus.
Menus are exactly the kind of thing for which there is no legitimate need for flash. Or any kind of graphics (in my opinion).
Had we subscribed to your naive, idealistic world view and boycotted them,
we would have had our choices substantially limited, and would have ended up far less satisfied with our purchase.
No, see, I still would have bought a Mazda if that's what I really decided I wanted. I drive a Honda, and for all I know Honda's web site could be chock-full of Flash. I have no idea, I've only ever been to the Honda Finance web site back when my car was financed through them and they didn't use Flash at the time. Anyway, I was unclear in my view here. I made it sound like I wouldn't buy something from a company that used Flash on their web site. I won't visit or use their web site, and if it's an on-line only type place, then they just don't get my business. Sometimes this policy does affect my purchasing decision. When I was going to buy new hockey skates, one of the major skate companies, CCM, had a page that was full of ridiculous flash JUST to navigate around. Every time I clicked on something there was a pointless little animation, kind of like DVD menu transitions. I just wanted some price and feature information, and it was hopelessly buried in a mire of Flash animated menus.
When I finally dug it up, they didn't even have prices on their web site. I ended up buying from a competitor, not specifically because of the Flash, but just because their web site was a hopeless mess that offered no meaningful information and hid what little data they had behind a massive mess of animated menus. After three or four similar experiences with other companies employing gratuitous use of Flash (and graphics in general) I started to just avoid those web sites.
And for what? To make a stupid point about some web technology that you don't like?
But "no offense" intended. No, I avoid them because web sites that depend heavily on Flash tend to irritate me. Chalk it up to me having some kind of personality disorder if you like.
Like the other two guys, you missed the point. PDF (or another fixed-presentation format) are necessary for the examples I quoted, because HTML versions are often not accepted by government agencies and the various private organizations with whom I need to interact.
If I show up at the DMV with my Personal Property Tax Form looking like I typed it into notepad and hit "print", they won't accept it. You have to either go to the Department of Revenue and take a number and wait for your turn so you can pay $1 for a copy of the PPT form, or you can download the PDF off their web site. That's the two things they accept. Again, maybe another technology can do this too, and if it does it cheaper/better, then these organizations need to get with the times.
I can't count the number of times that co-workers, classmates, and myself have lost Firefox sessions thanks to Adobe's PDF plugin.
Agreed. It's terrible on Linux, especially. Trying to print from it is a mess, which is really annoying because printing out a PDF is the primary reason that I'd ever need to download one (instead of, say, putting the same information in HTML).
Both formats have their time and place.
That is exactly my point. That's why I picked out examples where there's a legitimate need for a PDF or other format in which the author can guarantee the "look" of the final printed document. Why do I always have to spell these things out in such basic terms on Slashdot? You guys are mostly pretty bright and it should have been obvious why a PDF has value for bank statements and W2s, and why I picked those examples and not, "I love getting a PDF receipt for my BestBuy.com purchase!"
Personally I think your problem is more with the content providers than those that would develop the tools.
I dislike Flash in general simply because I hate going to a web site just to find out something simple, like a phone number, or hours of operation, or whatever, and seeing this:
I guess you have a point - you can make a bloated and unnecessarily graphic-intensive page without Flash, but mostly I see Flash used for ...er.. flashy menu animations and other stuff that just slows down use of the web site. I guess it's a personal preference.