I already replied to this once, but slashdot seems to have eaten that post -- whatever.
"In many countries there is a legal difference, a bit like the difference between a user who shares with friends and a pusher that sells on the street."
In the United States, the difference is like the difference between stealing something and not stealing something. One is against the law, the other is not. If you don't charge money to copy files, or don't do it as part of a business, it is completely legal. You don't have to believe an unknown poster on slashdot; you can download Title 17 of the United States code and read it for yourself. It is available from the House of Representatives web site, amoung other places.
". . . no difference to the fact that you have a copy of Douglas Adams' work and he hasn't been paid for it."
You are simply wrong here, and you have to go read the law for yourself and see. Copyright law simply doesn't guarantee that Douglas Adams gets paid for every copy of his work that comes into existence; it gives him other, more limited, and more enforceable, rights.
I agree with your opinions. (You might be thinking of the wrong salon -- www.beautynet.com versus www.salon.com -- but your opinions still apply. They are both trash.) But I have a problem with one statement:
"I steal files all the time."
I highly fuckin' doubt it. How do you steal a computer file ? Copy it, and then delete it from the other guy's computer ? Don't you mean that you just copy it and don't pay anything, with consent of person from whom you are copying it?
Because copying a file off the net without paying for it isn't stealing anything. Not only is it not stealing, it is not even against the law.
Some powerful people, who don't have your interests at heart, would love to have everyone think copying a copyrighted file was illegal. Don't help them spread their lies.
There are a couple of good quotes in that. I've bookmarked it for a more complete persual later, but consider these:
" . . . the simple reason that what LaMacchia is alleged to have done is not criminal conduct
under s 506(a) of the Copyright Act."
" . . . the copyright holder owns only a bundle of intangible rights which can be infringed, but not stolen or converted."
" . . . requiring prosecutors to prove that the defendant infringed a copyright 'willfully and for purpose of commercial advantage or private financial gain.'"
Wow. Lots of stuff to quote against the knee-jerk corporate defenders here.
What the government was trying to do with LaMacchia was claim that interstate wire fraud laws could be applied to LaMachia's actions, and the court ruled against them. I think I'll have to search down the decisions quoted as precedent in this one to understand everything. Looks like I've found some more stuff to print out and leave by the toilet.
What the hell is the difference between an "amature pirate" and a "professional pirate" ?
While your observation that the compensation aspect of this makes a big difference, you shouldn't imply that uncompensated file copying is in anyway illegal. The big copyright holding interests out there would certainly like to spread that idea, but let them spread their lies on their dollar, don't help them out for free.
"File sharing has occupied the high moral, if not legal, ground only because no money has been involved"
Actually, if no money is involved, it is most definitely legal. It is precisely because there is no way to pay someone using napster or gnutella that it is protected.
You can download Title 17 of the US code and read it yourself. http://uscode.house.gov/download.htm is the site I used. I printed it out using star office and left it on my toilet for a while, and read more of it each time I took a shit. It's not as hard to read as, say, the C++ standard, or something.
Anyway, it is legal to make copies of copyrighted works if you are not selling them or using them in a business. This applies to software also.
There was a huge propaganda campaign against the fair use of software, which managed to subtlely imply that this type of copying was illegal. Remember the "Just Say No to Software Piracy" posters in school computer labs in the 80s and early 90s ? Remember the ads in magazines ?
If you actually go and read about the cases which came to court, almost no one has ever been sued for non-compensated software copying. All the big cases that were won in court were against people selling software, or against businesses that were using copied software. (Ok, there were a few cases were they brought charges against someone running a distribution site, and then dropped them once they had run them out of money and closed the site -- any one remember that kid at MIT who set up a server on an athena machine in W20 ? His name began with an "M" I think ?)
This effort was pretty successful. Most people today have some sneaky feeling of guilt when they copy commercial software, even if it is for a legitimate use. This type of "thought advertisement" through propaganda and the repeated use of newspeak catch phrases (like "software piracy") was incredibly profitable -- when you think of the amounts of unneeded software purchases this dwarfs Ponzi or Teapot Dome or the russian privitazation or any of those other great ripoffs.
But the dangerous part is that it allows laws to be made, in effect, though TV commercials instead of through our government. The idea that the artificial priviledges provided by Title 17 and Title 35 constitute "property" instead of an entitlement like social security or welfare or crop subsidies is dangerous, but the fact that such attitudes can be manufactured in the populous is more threatening.
So I just want to urge you to refrain from casually suggesting or implying that uncompensated file sharing can be illegal. When you do that you are being used as the tool of those who would enslave you.
That's a good point. And yet if you allow no connection to the outside at all, then it damages the system because it is not very likely that all the songs desired are already somewhere inside the campus.
What you want to do is prioritize the download site by whether or not the download will travel through the bottleneck. It is in the interests of the user to do this also, because then they get a faster download; so all you have to do is give the user the opportunity to select the fastest download site. To a limited extent, your interests coincide.
Maybe you could write a napster client that would allow a configurable list of IP addresses to prefer. Does the client have access to the IP addresses of the other clients ?
But what you want to do in general is have the information available to do some kind of optimization, maybe based on the speed of previous file transfers. It is kind of like what Akamai (www.akamai.com) does, keeping track of some sort of network topology for efficiency.
Because of the huge difference between speeds when you are within campus and off campus, this akamai-like system doesn't have to work that well to acheive what you want -- unclogging the campus-to-internet bottleneck.
So suppose you distributed a new napster client that kept track of the IP addresses it downloaded from, and it's own IP address, and the file size and time, and whether it was canceled -- etc. It could then connect to a server (doesn't have to be the napster server, this is just the network calculation server) and upload that information into a database, where it can be analyzed, and then the clients can somehow use that information to select the right download target. (You could make the ability in the napster client to sort by network connection, sort instead by this estimated download speed.)
So then the algorithm to estimate the download speed should always wait anything in campus higher.
But that calculation is pretty tricky. It would be nice if you could just take in IP addresses and speeds, and do everything from there; but some knowledge of the network topology would surely help.
I think the best solution is to install a local napster server and advertise it around campus as faster than any other. Convince people to connect to that first when looking for music, and then to go outside to other servers only if they don't find what they want. Maybe identifying who is local once you get outside the university isn't worth it. Because some people have the mistaken impression that distributing copies of copyrighted works is illegal, they might feel nervous about what could be interpreted as an attempt to identify them.
If stricter measures such as port-blocking, bandwidth shaping, banning use during certian hours, or whatever, become necessary, then you can at least leave the local server as active to apease the download addicted.
One thing that I've wondered about these napster bandwidth issues -- is it possible to direct traffic within your network instead of through the internet ?
The napster users should be on your side for this, as it would be faster for them also. Of course, they may be able to saturate that network also.
Could you hold a dorm meeting and convince everyone to get a napster user name with the same prefix or suffix, and prefer those names when selecting who to download from. It would be kind of like a distributed web proxy cache for the music -- check first to see if someone already pulled it through the T1, and if not, get it from the internet but make it available from your machine so it doesn't have to come through again.
Would gnutella do this automatically ? Could you get some dorm techie in each dorm to set up his machine in the manner of www.gnute.com, so that those people without systems that have a gnutella client could connect to it ? The napster and gnutella clients I have used on linux don't seem to allow uploads from my machine; this was a while ago, but of course you would need clients that worked in both directions for everybody.
Both you, and AC responding to you, are off the mark.
What if you don't own Bubba Jones's Greatest Hits CD, and neither does your friend, but you have mp3's you found on the net and you give copies of those files to your friend ? Is that illegal ?
What if I own a CD, and I rip it into mp3's, or heck, just burn a straight copy with my cdrw, and then give that to a friend who never has and never will buy that CD ? Is that legal ?
You can download Title 17 and read it for yourself. The truth is, it is legal so long as you don't take any money for it, or otherwise do anything commercial with it.
MP3.com's requirement that you have the CD is just confusing the issue. I think that they were trying to insert some air of legitimacy, or buy off the RIAA in someway, because they are actually a commercial entity, and so they fall under much stricter rules. Napster got it right by just distributing the software to do it with, but in this day and age you can't actually make money writing software. ( That's a bit of an overstatement, but you can non-commercially copy software like napster or windows also; even better, if you tried to sell napster, the free linux versions would be ported to windows and offered for free. )
If you think about it, it is certainly legal to do what MP3.com is doing, and not charge money. You can set up a server and allow people to upload their songs and download them from other places later. It's when you charge for it that you get on the shaky ground.
So if you join this campaign to legalize what MP3.com is doing, realize what you are arguing for. Your current rights may be extensive enough that you shouldn't feel threatened by a judgement that MP3.com has to pay royalties. Do you really care if MP3.com goes out of business, as long as no one challenges your right to gnutella ?
That's right. If you don't pay money for them, then it is legal. If you don't believe me, go download title 17 and read it for yourself. It takes a while to work through, but it is understandable by someone of average intelligence (after all it was written by congressmen). You might devote your first attention to the section on fair use.
The law reserves to the copyright holder pretty much any type of action that makes money. You can't rip mp3's and sell them. But the kind of massive, uncompensated copying that napster and gnutella make easy is not restricted.
This applies to copyrighted software as well. You can make copies of commercial software and give them to your friends, or use them on machines at home, as long as you aren't using them to do consulting work or stuff for your employer or anything besides enthusiast/hobbiest type stuff.
The big software copyright holders had a very successful propaganda campaign to convience people otherwise. Remember all those "Just Say No to Software Piracy!" posters in school computer labs back in the late 80s and early 90s ? There were ads in magazines and even on TV as well. But Microsoft and the enforcers they funded were too smart to ever take anyone to court for giving away software; the court cases were all legitimate cases of people copying and selling, or using a copied version in a company or other commercial enterprise. ( Ok, there are a few cases in which someone running a server with commercial software on it was legally harassed just to shut it down; usually after running them out of legal fees, some secrete out-of-court settlement would be agreed upon. ) This adertising and propaganda campaign resulted in enormous numbers of people like you buying software that they didn't need to. Ponzi had nothing on these guys; immagine the amount of money involved here.
So the RIAA and MPAA are going for the same move. And thanks to dupes like you, it's working. We probably live in the age with the most unfettered access to and desimination of information ever. The fact that you can download the law in question off of the web and read it for yourself is amazing. But you didn't do it, you just used the internet to parrot your enemies' propaganda. Hey, I got an idea -- why don't you go tell every one to send ME ten bucks ? And when am I getting a check from you ? Cause that's what I'm charging to read this message, and you little post-pirate! Feel guilty and send me a check!
Ok, back to serious mode. When you download that thing, the fair use section is going to be very vague and loose. (It definitely includes napsterizing mp3's though.) This is why:
Congress wanted to give the copyright holders the ability to profit from their work beyound the first sale. So they gave them the right to be the only one's to sell it. But they said that you had to really sell it, you couldn't license it for a particular purpose. (Of course that is exactly what the RIAA and friends want to do -- they'll sell you a copy for each position of the volume knob, or make you pay each time you play it, if they can.) The reasons for that, from Congress's point of view, are probably well thought out and pretty clever. The whole copyright structure is pretty much self-administering, in that the remedies for breaking the rules are usually enforced by the copyright holder in a suit, so we don't need to have the BATF of copyrights soaking up the budget, and copyrights which aren't worth anything are not enforced. If we start allowing use-based control, then we get away from that lean, efficient self-administering system, because we have to support a lot of monitoring of people, a lot more legal actions, etc. Remember, Congress is allowed to give away our rights to copy things only for the "advancement of the Arts and Sciences", and a use-based control system would probably retard things as much as it encouraged people to make more music or whatever.
So that's why you have the fair use exemption. So why didn't Congress spell it out and take away all this uncertainty ? Well, if you think about it, it is pretty hard to do. If you make an itemized list of fair use activities, then the big copyright businesses will invent some medium or method of distribution so that you pay for something, and then have to pay again to use it. If you make an itemized list of things a copyright holder can charge for, some new technology will present a new medium which can't benefit from the copyright system (and the copyright system is a very beneficial setup, over all), and this new medium will languish until congress notices it and adds it to the list. Obviously, it is better to use the gray words "fair use", simply saying that you can use what you buy, and let the courts sort out the details as they arise. And then you get some dinosaur-brain like Kaplan, but hey, no system is perfect.
So stop worrying about legal mp3s. I don't think you could find someone charging for mp3's, other than the legitimate artist or publisher, if you had to to save your Mom's life. I have other good news also. That guy named Lars who said you have to come over to his house and clean his toilet ? You only have to do that if you want to be his serf. The same goes for taking out Jack Valenti's garbage tonight. But if you just feel less morally anguished by being a slave, go ahead.
Damn. Somebody understands fair use! On slashdot ! Amazing. Normally even the rabid anti-corporate types are admitting "law breaking" by copying and sharing music files and whatnot.
The rough purpose of the fair use law is to limit the copyright privileges to having a monopoly and control of the commercial exploitation of the work. Congress didn't want to take away our right to make copies of music and video; they only chose to restrict our selling or other commercial exploitation of the works.
This kind of massive file sharing that napster makes possible, and hopefully this codec and faster connections will make possible with video, is actually legal as long as you don't receive any compensation.
You don't have to trust me on this. If you are smart enough to read slashdot, then you are smart enough to go here and download Title 17 of the US code and read it for yourself. It's kind of thick. I printed my copy out and left it in the bathroom, and read a few pages everytime I took a shit. I read it carefully and marked all over it the interesting parts, but I never found where it said that non-commercial uncompensated duplication and distribution of music or video was illegal.
You see, Congress wanted to make very sure that copyright was not an ability to control how people used things. They didn't want the copyright holders to be able to sell one copy for listening in the car and another copy for listening in the house and special copy for listening on weekends. (Which is exactly what the MPAA, the RIAA, and other big copyright holders dream of.) If Congress had wanted to do that, they could have written it into the law; where is it ?
Of course, this same principle of non-money-making copies being normal use of the medium you purchased also extends to software. Holy Shit! you say. Can I make a copy of that windows NT disk at work and install it on my machine at home ? As long as you are not using that machine to do consulting, work from home, or anything beyound home "hobbiest" type use, yes. (I'd advise against it. There are much better hobbiest OSs.)
But the big copyright holders of programs had a massively successful campaign to convince the average slashbot that this was illegal. Remember all those ads in magazines and posters in school computer clusters in the '80s ? They managed to shame huge numbers of people into buying things they didn't need to. The 700 club, usenet get rich yesterday schemes, Scientology, Albanian pyramid schemes, the Russian bailout . . . it all pales in compairison to the anti-piracy campaign.
The RIAA and MPAA are going for a repeat move on their copyright material. Ironically, inspite of the Jon Katzian "the world will change because small people have a voice on slashdot" theory, all you automatons just help them out by parroting Hollywood's false legal propaganda.
It just goes to show that you can give everybody a voice on the internet, and they'll still just repeat what they hear in TV commercials.
You are right that a prepaid service should be cheaper, and that the market may be largely people with bad credit. And if they want a way of getting out of the service, then they should announce a certain period of time in advance that they are canceling it, and pay you cash for all your unused minutes.
So it is a rip-off, but you know in advance the maximum amount you can be ripped off for -- the price you paid.
Consider also that other plans, when you really look at them, usually are more expensive than advertised. If you get a monthly-fee based phone, add up your actual minutes used, and the whole price you pay, for a few months. The un-advertised taxes, "FCC connection fees" (a note on that beauty below), unused minutes which expire every month, etc, add up quickly. Before I got this one, I looked over two months of a friend's cell phone bill -- I think that sample was a little anomalous, but it's worse than you think.
As a side note, all of this pretty much extends to the land-line side of telephone service too. Where I live in Texas they claim to allowed competition in the local telephone market, but it hasn't made a difference. You can look here if you care about the details, but it basically boils down to the new competition going after businesses and people with poor credit ratings; they do charge more for a pre-paid land phone than for a non-prepaid land phone, simply because those people looking for a pre-paid deal simply have no choice. A lot of the pre-paid phone service deals are something along the lines of a very low setup fee and $20 for the first month, then $40 or $50 a month after that; so they are definitely trying to rip off the desparate and ill-informed.
And finally, that little FCC Connection Fee fraud -- it isn't a tax imposed by the FCC, it is simply an additional itemized charge from the service provider; it's presence on your bill but not on the flier or brochure you saw about the service represents false advertising. The FCC "authorizes" the fee in that the carrier is allowed to charge it, but it has to be negotiated with the consumer -- that is, the carrier charges as much as they think the market will bear. Because the FCC has allowed their good name to be plastered on this, the carriers subtract off four dollars from the cost they advertise to look cheaper, and then put the money back in a form that makes it look like a government tax. The money from that doesn't go to the FCC. If you stick to your guns and don't pay it, carefully paying every bill except for that charge, and call and complain that the charge wasn't listed on the advertised service that you signed up for, then eventually they will cut off your service. I don't think they have the balls to actually go after your credit record or anything. It should be entirely illegal for them to masquerade a charge as a tax in that manner.
The sad part about this, is that one of the solutions to this situation may be disappearing. I use AT&T's National PrePaid Wireless plan. This plan is great because it can be purchased completely anonymously, leaving the corporation with no name and billing account to screw up with.
Basically, you pay $80 down for a slightly clunky but prefectly accceptable phone, and some initial starter minutes. After that you can add minutes to the phone using a plastic card you purchase with cash. It is a little expensive, I think the per minute cost comes out to around 40 cents a minute for the largest block. The biggest missing features of the plan are no voice mail, no text messaging. It works nationwide, and all calls are at that minute rate, no matter where in the country you are calling; your number is a 1-888 number with an extension.
But the most you can be ripped off for is the amount you put down up front. If AT&T stops it from working, I'm out for only the minutes I have on my account.
The cost is actually less than that of a subscription based phone for small numbers of minutes. If I don't use the phone at all for a month, I pay nothing. There are very few plans like that available in the US; most of them have you buy minutes that expire in 30, 45 or 90 days, forcing you to buy more minutes than you will use and then have them expire. But the AT&T National Prepaid minutes only expire every 6 months, and they will roll over to the next 6 months as long as you add some amount of minutes to the account. This is there to provide them with an exit from providing the service -- they can just stop selling the cards, wait six months, and then stop providing the dial tone to those phones.
Which brings me to the point that AT&T may be about to do just that. I was told by the clerks at the AT&T storefront where I go to to buy new minutes that AT&T is bringing out a new prepaid plan, and this one sounds as junky as the other prepaid plans offered in the US. The minutes expire in 90 days, you are charged a varying amount based on where you are calling, etc.
I've read in a number of places lamintations about the US "lagging behind" Europe and Japan in cell phone usage. I've also heard that in those areas most of the phones are sold in the pre-paid style; many have a place to insert a card or chip that activates the phone for a certain number of minutes. This insulates you from the telephone company's incompetent billing department, and when you buy the chips and phone with cash, provides more privacy. I think this different style of service is a major reason why the cellular phone hasn't penetrated the US market as deeply. As long as fools like most cell phone users are willing to keep putting out $100 and more a month on a plan, why should the wireless providers bother with actually billing for what they provide ?
It's a shame, really. I'm sure this area comes under the interest of more than one congressional committee, and if I were a congressman I'd have some executives on the stand and I'd be (verbally) beating the shit out of them over it. The fact that they can focus on a small segment of the population willing to be suckers means that the general advancement in that market and industry is being retarded. Since I'm not a congressman, I guess I'm limited to verbally abusing my friends who fall into the sucker class.
I have been making some windier posts to the same effect. No one seems to get your completely valid point, which I'll repeat (you are much more succinct than I):
"It's yet to be established that this noncommercial vastlyexpanded fair use copying is illegal."
However, I think you should get some balls and exercise your rights to the fullest while you can. This philosophy of "I'll stop now not to piss off the people who are going to win anyway" is pathetic, more suited to some European peasant a few centuries ago than a high-tech modern person like yourself. If I had that opinion, I certainly wouldn't advertise it -- Jesus, aren't you afraid that your Mother or other family members might read this one day and see what a spineless little bend-over you are ? Why don't you at least pretend to have some character, so your children don't have to be ashamed ?
However, I think that making and distributing copies in order demonstrate the quality of a commercial recording facility is probably not non-commercial use. So you can't post high-quality sound recordings of copyrighted vinyl as avertisement for your business (if that is indeed what you were suggesting). I think the slightest taint of commercialism would be fatal. What you could do is make the cuts and post them on gnutella/napster without any reference to your self or your enterpise, as a hobbiest's effort. This anonymous strategy has two good qualities:
"Completely false? Copyright law explicitly recognizes the right of a copyright holder to sell, license or transfer their various rights. Anything US law recognizes can be done with property, the copyright code recognizes can be done with rights to a work."
No. Copyright law doesn't "create property." Lars Ulrich's privilege, that he has complete control over the making of money from the song "One", is simply created wholesale by Congress, just like the right to pick up a welfare check under certain circumstances, or the right to pick up a check for not planting tobacco if you are one of a certain class of farmers.
If Congress takes my real property, they have to pay me. But Congress can declare that they won't pay people not to plant tobacco, or that they are canceling patents and copyrights, and they don't owe anyone anything. Just because a bunch of people who were making a lot of money off of the copyright/patent system started using the words "intellectual property", doesn't mean it is property.
After all, how can I buy a CD, which then becomes mine, and do anything with it that results in stealling from some guy I never met ? I can copy that a thousand times, and sell it, I'm not taking any real property from Lars Ulrich. What I am doing is analogous to starting a mail delivery service in competition with the US Postal Service; the Federal Government took away my right to do that, so that the US Postal Service could make enough money to guarantee delivery to remote areas and better service everywhere. (I think it was a great trade.) We used to do the same thing with Ma Bell and the telephone service -- that wasn't such a good deal, so we canceled it, and we didn't own Ma Bell anything for taking away her monopoly "property" any more than we'd owe Lars money if we quit dealing with him. (Personally I think the current trade of thousands of peoples individual, and largely unexercised, rights to copy things and sell them for extra reward to those who create new stuff is working out great.)
So US law doesn't treat the privileges that copyright gives you the same as real property. If you steal real property, that is covered under Title 18, in the criminal code. But if you operate a business that Congress has reserved for someone else, that is a different matter. The way Congress dealt with it (pretty clever, I think) is to get the US Attorneys and prosecutors largely out of it, and allow the people who wrote the work to seek money in court. This way only those copyright privileges which are worth it are enforced, which is efficient.
"I said nothing about transfers of a single copy of a single work. But let's be clear: making a copy and transferring the copy is not a "transfer", it's making and distributing an unauthorized copy. So ripping MP3s from a CD and making those MP3s available on Napster (or MP3.com) doesn't fall under the exemptions in section 109."
I'll say something about transfers of many copies of a CD from one person to another: it is completely legal so long as I received no compensation. I can buy a Metallica CD at Tower Records, rip it to mp3's, and email, ftp, or otherwise give those files to thousands of people, as long as I don't do it for money. Congress has never (yet) given away my right to do that. You correctly note that in some places a "transfer" refers directly to a transfer of the copyright, as in when a musician sells the copyright the studio, while I was using "tranfer" as in the middle initial of "ftp". So ?
The copyright holders have to show that I am violating the privileges congress gave them; I don't have prove that every file I transfer, or every photocopy I make, is legal. That's why the fact that you found one exemption which didn't apply to non-commercial mp3 trading doesn't really mean anything. The burden of proof is on them.
Here's a hint: look at section 107. I'll quote verbatim the first half a paragraph (all emphaisis is mine):
"-STATUTE-
Notwithstanding the provisions of sections 106 and 106A, the fair use of a copyrighted work, including such use by reproduction in copies or phonorecords or by any other means specified by that section, for purposes such as criticism, comment, news reporting, teaching (including multiple copies for classroom use), scholarship, or research, is not an infringement of copyright. In determining whether the use made of a work in any particular case is a fair use the factors to be considered shall include -
(1) the purpose and character of the use, including whether such use is of a commercial nature . .."
Wow. By the second sentence they already got that commercial nature thing in !
Now what follows is vague and difficult to interpret. There is a reason for that: congress wants the "fair use" provision to allow you do to all the normal things you would do with something you bought, and not allow the copyright holder to charge you once to get it and then again to use it. They are afraid that if they explicitly spell out what fair use is, the big copyright holdrs will invent a medium where the normally accepted use falls legalistically outside fair use, then congress will have accidently granted them the right to control how the works are used instead of how money is made from them. And the essential conflict of this whole napster/mp3 thing is that that is exactly what the RIAA and friends want to do; they want to sell you something for a limited use, so you have to buy more of them, like a company making cars that break after 80,000 miles.
You say "No fair citing "fair use" either -- wholesale reproduction of a work is generally not accepted as fair use."
Come on OMK! "Generally accepted" ? Microsoft Windows is generally accepted. The point of my post is, screw the "general acceptance" that says mp3's are illegal -- show me the law! Where is it? Are you claiming that steak dinner ?
Here's my summary to my longest slashdot post ever:
Copyright holders of music have not yet bribed out of congress a restriction on the non-commercial sharing of music files. But they want it. They have before them an example of how copyright holders of computer code mostly succeeded in getting privileges not granted to them by congress -- this is the software piracy wars of the late 80s. It is legal to make a copy of your windows95 disk and give it to friend to use, so long as he is not using the OS to make money, as in for a job or at a company. The big code copyright holders launched a huge campaign against this. All of the court cases that went to trial always dealt with a company having multiple copies to make money with, or someone selling copies of the code, but with a big publicity campaign they managed to convince the average American to buy more copies of software than they needed to. So the big music copyright holders are going for a repeat play.
But you can help me stop them, OMK ! Challenge people who say that mp3's are illegal. Post responses to those stupid slashdot napster defenders who make the argument "It's illegal but justified because . .." Fight this insidious piece of marketing propaganda aimed at scaring us into giving huge amounts of money to the copyright holders, as well as giving up rights without going through the channel of our representatives in the government. We can stop them.
Old Man Kensey says "Like it or not, current US law treats intellectual property as property, with penalties for theft, illegal use, etc."
This is completely false. Separate Titles of the US code lay out remedies and penalties associated with patents and copyright, and they differ considerably from the remedies and penalties for crimes such as vandalism or theft.
Why don't you go read the code in question ? It's on the web. The site I use is:
Today 600 people are going to post an uninformed post to this story. That's because all of them think the US Congress actually gave Metallica and those other artists a complete monopoly on what is done with a song they record. None of them read Title 17, Chapter 1, sections 106 through 115, especially the various secions whose titles begin with the phrase "Limitations on Exclusive Rights:", and looked very carefully at the different privileges a copyright of a sound recording gives you over a written work.
But you can be the first, Old Man Kensey!
And if you can show me where it says that I am violating any privileges the US government has handed out, when I transfer a copy of a sound recording to another individual and don't receive any money for it, then I will buy you a steak dinner (or equivalent, if steak isn't your thing). I'm serious about this. Be careful, because all the places where it says that you can't do something, it generally says "as allowed in secions 106 through 115" or something similar, and those sections include the "Limitations on Exclusive Rights" parts.
You can't do an identical twin brith-separation study to disprove a sex as an effect on anything.
Identical twins have the same sex.
The "nuturing" and "Myers-Briggs" nonsense that follows is also utterly without meaning.
What you do is start out with the presumption that "the born hacker type is Myers-Briggs INTP". This turns out to be another word for "mostly male". The intervening word exercises are only that.
This whole Myers-Briggs scam is very interesting to me. I love it. You make a bunch of questions to ask people; you encode the answers; then you re-describe the answers to the questions next to each code. People -- I mean smart people, not 700 club members -- fucking fall out of their chairs in amazement that it matches up. Of course it is usually a two hour seminar with an "expert" who does the smoke and mirrors and patter as well as Houdini making you look the other way.
I gotta invent something like this.
But I've been told that the real kings of this whole business are the Scientologists. One day I'm going to go to one of their "free personality test" sucker-traps and check it out. I don't care about the test at all, I just want to watch these guys in action, and carefully watch the faces of the suckers so I can see who is buying it.
Come on, you know it can't be that simple; if this quote was really all that mattered, then it wouldn't be legal to tranform your legally purchased cd into a tape so you could listen in your car, or make a "backup" cd of the music to protect against scratched CDs. Both of those are obviously legal.
You have to trace back through the chain of references. What does "actionable as an act of infringement under section 501" mean ? Well, read title 17 501. It applies to "the exclusive rights of the copyright owner as provided by sections 106 through 118" among other things; I think that 501 is defining how you can sue and what remedies you can seek if your copyright privilidges are violated, not what those privilidges are.
Look at those sections 106 through 118. Immediately you see all kinds of limitations on the copyright holders exclusive privilidges. Some of these even apply specifically to sound recordings, and not other types of material.
Basically read the definitions of copyright privildges (106), which sounds pretty tough; then read section 107:
" Sec. 107. Limitations on exclusive rights: Fair use
-STATUTE-
Notwithstanding the provisions of sections 106 and 106A, the fair use of a copyrighted work, including such use by reproduction in copies or phonorecords or by any other means specified by that section, for purposes such as criticism, comment, news reporting, teaching (including multiple copies for classroom use), scholarship, or research, is not an infringement of copyright. In determining whether the use made of a work in any particular case is a fair use the factors to be considered shall include -
(1) the purpose and character of the use, including whether such use is of a commercial nature . .."
If you want to make an argument that buying a Metallica CD, copying it and posting it on the web, is illegal, I think you have some serious work to do. Check out the whole of Title 17 -- there is commentary in there on the lack of definition of the term "fair use", and stuff like that, but I haven't seen where it made exchanging MP3 files (or any other files) illegal.
I'm not a lawyer, or even a law student, or even a law hobbiest. I haven't even read the whole of Title 17, although I plan to sometime. (I printed out a copy and left it by my toilet for thoughtful perusal.) But I just haven't seen the chapter-verse-line number quotation.
Napster has made this argument, but they don't seem to pushing it too hard anymore. Go to
http://www.napster.com/pressroom/
and scroll down to the date of about July 5. The news links that are there refer to Napster's brief filed about then on the fair use of copying music files.
You repeatedly talk about violating copyright, and attack common justifications for it.
But what both you and the people you complain about are missing is that copying a file is not a violation of copyright; getting paid for copying that file is. In fact it is completely legal to copy a Metallica song off of a CD you bought at a store, and allow people to copy it off of your machine. You can't charge them for it, though.
If you don't believe this, post a link to the law that makes it illegal. I suggest you go to http://uscode.house.gov/home.htm, in the frame on the left click on "search the US code", and start reading some law. When you find the law, post it here.
Because I signed up for them. At one point many of the polls offered chances to win something if you completed the poll, and that was why I signed up. I learned about it through a web page, not unsolicited messages. I haven't bothered to fill out a poll in while, and most of them don't even offer prizes anymore, so it's probably time to save some bandwidth and drop that list.
But I would be pretty annoyed if my ISP blocked those emails. If I can't get email I request, then my ISP is not providing the service I'm paying for.
An ISP should not apply the MAPS blocking list to any user who hasn't requested it -- you should have to opt-in, just like for the emails.
If you are copying content to a local disk, then an NFS server failure just means no updates for a while, you can still serve pages out of the local directory. No biggie for many jobs.
Of course you would never have a cluster of webservers serving pages off of the same harddisk via NFS -- would you ? That would still bottleneck everything through the NFS server's disk and ethernet card, thus making the whole clustering thing pointless, right ? Unless maybe you were dynamically generating pages and just wanted to spread the cpu load.
Whatever. This question is too vague. The asker should explain what they want to build.
The reason why your question has brought out only trolls and other meaningless posts is that it is so vague that it could be classified as a troll itself.
How big are these content directories you want to replicate, and how often to they change ?
If they only change every few hours or so, you can use nfs and a script that does cp -r with no problem. Or rdist. Or CVS. Or ftp. Don't worry about "real time", just take the machine that is being updated out of the pool that might serve requests - don't even bother with that if a briefly half-updated web page doesn't matter.
Does it matter if a few of the machines are out of date, or should of the machines have the exact same thing ?
I think if you explain what you are trying to do, you'll get a number of sugestions.
Why is this good ? In perl they aren't required, and then you have to keep doing use:strict to find bugs, so you end up just declaring them anyway. Making things easy for people is only good if you are making it easy for them to do the right thing, not if you are making it easy for them to screw up.
> 10) ANSI standardized
I understand from some people that one of the big problems with lisp is that not enough of it is standardized, and important parts like the foreign function interface are implementation dependent.
> 11) no pointers
Why is this good ? Why shouldn't one of the primitive types of a language be that of an address ? It allows you to do some cool stuff like pointer-pushing which speeds things up.
Ok, well I don't really know, that's just what I wanted to try out next. I
thought I'd share my reasons and see what other people had to say.
Basically, I've observed the following characteristics about the best code I've
worked with:
Code generates code.
A good example of this is the
Fastest Fourier
Transform in the West. You can re-run the code generator to generate code
optimized for the size of transforms you will be using. The other common use of
this is in interfaces. Most programming shops have a set of code in house that
generates reader code for ascii parameter files ( like.rc files or.ini
files). The one I worked with used lex and yacc; it would parse a C struct
definition and generate an example file and the reader code which would create
the struct. The macros that any complecated cross-platform program seems to end
up needing are another example.
Small chunks of "interpreted" instructions are generated at runtime.
I think the "plan" that fftw makes you generate for a given transform and size,
and then pass in with the data, is like this but I'm not sure. Some of the
stuff I wrote was "generators" for certain classes, that essentially stored the arguments to a constructor, to be called (perhaps repeatedly) at another time. I think a lot of CORBA based interfaces
basically pass along the code to interpret the data along with the data.
It seems to me that a lot of the modern buzzwords essentially boil down to these issues once you figure out what they are really doing. I think the most useful part of C++ lies with the template machanism, not object oriented or inheritence or whatever other buzzword you pick; and templates are essentially just a macro on type. This CORBA stuff seems to be to be just generating interface code on the fly and passing it around. (The Component Oriented Programming stuff seems to be to be just shell scripting, sorry.)
My experience with lisp is limited; scheme was my language of choice for any
projects I did as an undergrad, and I haven't really dabbled in it much since.
The reasons why I think lisp (well, common lisp in particular) might address
these issues well is the relative ease of generating code on the fly, and the
good reputation of the macro system.
From a little bit of reading newsgroups, and from talking to older lisp hacker
types, it seems that one of the problems that lisp suffers from is that the
commercial lisp implementations are too expensive and not compatable with each
other, so people get locked into using one lisp because the effort to port to
another is too expensive, and once these companies had you by the balls they
will essentially calculate your profit margin and charge that. So I plan to
only use one of the GPL'd versions, probably CMU. Is the CMU version so bad
that I'm dooming myself from the start by doing this ?
I didn't bother to say this when the question was first posted because I thought it would be everyone's answer. Whatever flavor of emacs/XEmacs/ntemacs works best for you, and whatever email reader seems good.
I would try a recent version of XEmacs or emacs, and vm. Gnus should also work, and might be a better mail reader for high volume people.
( If you use vm and you received a huge amount of email, then you may want a good way of auto-archiving mail. I have some elisp that will save off the first 1000 messages in an archive folder, when the number of messages reaches 2000. It names the archive folder with the date of the first and last messages in the file name, to assist in finding stuff. If somebody wants it they can email me at rgristroph@yahoo.com. )
Of course, looking on the practical side, you may have trouble convincing some windows people to use it. I think the fact that it works pretty much the same on windows and unix should help convince people to fight their way up the learning curve. Keep in mind that windows people are used to learning a new tool or application not by reading documentation, but by pulling down the menus to see what is there. So XEmacs in the default configration with those buttons and menus might be a good idea.
Slashdot Mirror
"In many countries there is a legal difference, a bit like the difference between a user who shares with friends and a pusher that sells on the street."
In the United States, the difference is like the difference between stealing something and not stealing something. One is against the law, the other is not. If you don't charge money to copy files, or don't do it as part of a business, it is completely legal. You don't have to believe an unknown poster on slashdot; you can download Title 17 of the United States code and read it for yourself. It is available from the House of Representatives web site, amoung other places.
". . . no difference to the fact that you have a copy of Douglas Adams' work and he hasn't been paid for it."
You are simply wrong here, and you have to go read the law for yourself and see. Copyright law simply doesn't guarantee that Douglas Adams gets paid for every copy of his work that comes into existence; it gives him other, more limited, and more enforceable, rights.
I agree with your opinions. (You might be thinking of the wrong salon -- www.beautynet.com versus www.salon.com -- but your opinions still apply. They are both trash.) But I have a problem with one statement:
"I steal files all the time."
I highly fuckin' doubt it. How do you steal a computer file ? Copy it, and then delete it from the other guy's computer ? Don't you mean that you just copy it and don't pay anything, with consent of person from whom you are copying it?
Because copying a file off the net without paying for it isn't stealing anything. Not only is it not stealing, it is not even against the law.
Some powerful people, who don't have your interests at heart, would love to have everyone think copying a copyrighted file was illegal. Don't help them spread their lies.
Thanks. It was my freshman year also.
I did a search on the name. I found the ruling.
There are a couple of good quotes in that. I've bookmarked it for a more complete persual later, but consider these:
" . . . the simple reason that what LaMacchia is alleged to have done is not criminal conduct
under s 506(a) of the Copyright Act."
" . . . the copyright holder owns only a bundle of intangible rights which can be infringed, but not stolen or converted."
" . . . requiring prosecutors to prove that the defendant infringed a copyright 'willfully and for purpose of commercial advantage or private financial gain.'"
Wow. Lots of stuff to quote against the knee-jerk corporate defenders here.
What the government was trying to do with LaMacchia was claim that interstate wire fraud laws could be applied to LaMachia's actions, and the court ruled against them. I think I'll have to search down the decisions quoted as precedent in this one to understand everything. Looks like I've found some more stuff to print out and leave by the toilet.
What the hell is the difference between an "amature pirate" and a "professional pirate" ?
While your observation that the compensation aspect of this makes a big difference, you shouldn't imply that uncompensated file copying is in anyway illegal. The big copyright holding interests out there would certainly like to spread that idea, but let them spread their lies on their dollar, don't help them out for free.
Actually, if no money is involved, it is most definitely legal. It is precisely because there is no way to pay someone using napster or gnutella that it is protected.
You can download Title 17 of the US code and read it yourself. http://uscode.house.gov/download.htm is the site I used. I printed it out using star office and left it on my toilet for a while, and read more of it each time I took a shit. It's not as hard to read as, say, the C++ standard, or something.
Anyway, it is legal to make copies of copyrighted works if you are not selling them or using them in a business. This applies to software also.
There was a huge propaganda campaign against the fair use of software, which managed to subtlely imply that this type of copying was illegal. Remember the "Just Say No to Software Piracy" posters in school computer labs in the 80s and early 90s ? Remember the ads in magazines ?
If you actually go and read about the cases which came to court, almost no one has ever been sued for non-compensated software copying. All the big cases that were won in court were against people selling software, or against businesses that were using copied software. (Ok, there were a few cases were they brought charges against someone running a distribution site, and then dropped them once they had run them out of money and closed the site -- any one remember that kid at MIT who set up a server on an athena machine in W20 ? His name began with an "M" I think ?)
This effort was pretty successful. Most people today have some sneaky feeling of guilt when they copy commercial software, even if it is for a legitimate use. This type of "thought advertisement" through propaganda and the repeated use of newspeak catch phrases (like "software piracy") was incredibly profitable -- when you think of the amounts of unneeded software purchases this dwarfs Ponzi or Teapot Dome or the russian privitazation or any of those other great ripoffs.
But the dangerous part is that it allows laws to be made, in effect, though TV commercials instead of through our government. The idea that the artificial priviledges provided by Title 17 and Title 35 constitute "property" instead of an entitlement like social security or welfare or crop subsidies is dangerous, but the fact that such attitudes can be manufactured in the populous is more threatening.
So I just want to urge you to refrain from casually suggesting or implying that uncompensated file sharing can be illegal. When you do that you are being used as the tool of those who would enslave you.
That's a good point. And yet if you allow no connection to the outside at all, then it damages the system because it is not very likely that all the songs desired are already somewhere inside the campus.
What you want to do is prioritize the download site by whether or not the download will travel through the bottleneck. It is in the interests of the user to do this also, because then they get a faster download; so all you have to do is give the user the opportunity to select the fastest download site. To a limited extent, your interests coincide.
Maybe you could write a napster client that would allow a configurable list of IP addresses to prefer. Does the client have access to the IP addresses of the other clients ?
But what you want to do in general is have the information available to do some kind of optimization, maybe based on the speed of previous file transfers. It is kind of like what Akamai (www.akamai.com) does, keeping track of some sort of network topology for efficiency.
Because of the huge difference between speeds when you are within campus and off campus, this akamai-like system doesn't have to work that well to acheive what you want -- unclogging the campus-to-internet bottleneck.
So suppose you distributed a new napster client that kept track of the IP addresses it downloaded from, and it's own IP address, and the file size and time, and whether it was canceled -- etc. It could then connect to a server (doesn't have to be the napster server, this is just the network calculation server) and upload that information into a database, where it can be analyzed, and then the clients can somehow use that information to select the right download target. (You could make the ability in the napster client to sort by network connection, sort instead by this estimated download speed.)
So then the algorithm to estimate the download speed should always wait anything in campus higher.
But that calculation is pretty tricky. It would be nice if you could just take in IP addresses and speeds, and do everything from there; but some knowledge of the network topology would surely help.
I think the best solution is to install a local napster server and advertise it around campus as faster than any other. Convince people to connect to that first when looking for music, and then to go outside to other servers only if they don't find what they want. Maybe identifying who is local once you get outside the university isn't worth it. Because some people have the mistaken impression that distributing copies of copyrighted works is illegal, they might feel nervous about what could be interpreted as an attempt to identify them.
If stricter measures such as port-blocking, bandwidth shaping, banning use during certian hours, or whatever, become necessary, then you can at least leave the local server as active to apease the download addicted.
One thing that I've wondered about these napster bandwidth issues -- is it possible to direct traffic within your network instead of through the internet ?
The napster users should be on your side for this, as it would be faster for them also. Of course, they may be able to saturate that network also.
Could you hold a dorm meeting and convince everyone to get a napster user name with the same prefix or suffix, and prefer those names when selecting who to download from. It would be kind of like a distributed web proxy cache for the music -- check first to see if someone already pulled it through the T1, and if not, get it from the internet but make it available from your machine so it doesn't have to come through again.
Would gnutella do this automatically ? Could you get some dorm techie in each dorm to set up his machine in the manner of www.gnute.com, so that those people without systems that have a gnutella client could connect to it ? The napster and gnutella clients I have used on linux don't seem to allow uploads from my machine; this was a while ago, but of course you would need clients that worked in both directions for everybody.
What if you don't own Bubba Jones's Greatest Hits CD, and neither does your friend, but you have mp3's you found on the net and you give copies of those files to your friend ? Is that illegal ?
What if I own a CD, and I rip it into mp3's, or heck, just burn a straight copy with my cdrw, and then give that to a friend who never has and never will buy that CD ? Is that legal ?
You can download Title 17 and read it for yourself. The truth is, it is legal so long as you don't take any money for it, or otherwise do anything commercial with it.
MP3.com's requirement that you have the CD is just confusing the issue. I think that they were trying to insert some air of legitimacy, or buy off the RIAA in someway, because they are actually a commercial entity, and so they fall under much stricter rules. Napster got it right by just distributing the software to do it with, but in this day and age you can't actually make money writing software. ( That's a bit of an overstatement, but you can non-commercially copy software like napster or windows also; even better, if you tried to sell napster, the free linux versions would be ported to windows and offered for free. )
If you think about it, it is certainly legal to do what MP3.com is doing, and not charge money. You can set up a server and allow people to upload their songs and download them from other places later. It's when you charge for it that you get on the shaky ground.
So if you join this campaign to legalize what MP3.com is doing, realize what you are arguing for. Your current rights may be extensive enough that you shouldn't feel threatened by a judgement that MP3.com has to pay royalties. Do you really care if MP3.com goes out of business, as long as no one challenges your right to gnutella ?
The law reserves to the copyright holder pretty much any type of action that makes money. You can't rip mp3's and sell them. But the kind of massive, uncompensated copying that napster and gnutella make easy is not restricted.
This applies to copyrighted software as well. You can make copies of commercial software and give them to your friends, or use them on machines at home, as long as you aren't using them to do consulting work or stuff for your employer or anything besides enthusiast/hobbiest type stuff.
The big software copyright holders had a very successful propaganda campaign to convience people otherwise. Remember all those "Just Say No to Software Piracy!" posters in school computer labs back in the late 80s and early 90s ? There were ads in magazines and even on TV as well. But Microsoft and the enforcers they funded were too smart to ever take anyone to court for giving away software; the court cases were all legitimate cases of people copying and selling, or using a copied version in a company or other commercial enterprise. ( Ok, there are a few cases in which someone running a server with commercial software on it was legally harassed just to shut it down; usually after running them out of legal fees, some secrete out-of-court settlement would be agreed upon. ) This adertising and propaganda campaign resulted in enormous numbers of people like you buying software that they didn't need to. Ponzi had nothing on these guys; immagine the amount of money involved here.
So the RIAA and MPAA are going for the same move. And thanks to dupes like you, it's working. We probably live in the age with the most unfettered access to and desimination of information ever. The fact that you can download the law in question off of the web and read it for yourself is amazing. But you didn't do it, you just used the internet to parrot your enemies' propaganda. Hey, I got an idea -- why don't you go tell every one to send ME ten bucks ? And when am I getting a check from you ? Cause that's what I'm charging to read this message, and you little post-pirate! Feel guilty and send me a check!
Ok, back to serious mode. When you download that thing, the fair use section is going to be very vague and loose. (It definitely includes napsterizing mp3's though.) This is why:
Congress wanted to give the copyright holders the ability to profit from their work beyound the first sale. So they gave them the right to be the only one's to sell it. But they said that you had to really sell it, you couldn't license it for a particular purpose. (Of course that is exactly what the RIAA and friends want to do -- they'll sell you a copy for each position of the volume knob, or make you pay each time you play it, if they can.) The reasons for that, from Congress's point of view, are probably well thought out and pretty clever. The whole copyright structure is pretty much self-administering, in that the remedies for breaking the rules are usually enforced by the copyright holder in a suit, so we don't need to have the BATF of copyrights soaking up the budget, and copyrights which aren't worth anything are not enforced. If we start allowing use-based control, then we get away from that lean, efficient self-administering system, because we have to support a lot of monitoring of people, a lot more legal actions, etc. Remember, Congress is allowed to give away our rights to copy things only for the "advancement of the Arts and Sciences", and a use-based control system would probably retard things as much as it encouraged people to make more music or whatever.
So that's why you have the fair use exemption. So why didn't Congress spell it out and take away all this uncertainty ? Well, if you think about it, it is pretty hard to do. If you make an itemized list of fair use activities, then the big copyright businesses will invent some medium or method of distribution so that you pay for something, and then have to pay again to use it. If you make an itemized list of things a copyright holder can charge for, some new technology will present a new medium which can't benefit from the copyright system (and the copyright system is a very beneficial setup, over all), and this new medium will languish until congress notices it and adds it to the list. Obviously, it is better to use the gray words "fair use", simply saying that you can use what you buy, and let the courts sort out the details as they arise. And then you get some dinosaur-brain like Kaplan, but hey, no system is perfect.
So stop worrying about legal mp3s. I don't think you could find someone charging for mp3's, other than the legitimate artist or publisher, if you had to to save your Mom's life. I have other good news also. That guy named Lars who said you have to come over to his house and clean his toilet ? You only have to do that if you want to be his serf. The same goes for taking out Jack Valenti's garbage tonight. But if you just feel less morally anguished by being a slave, go ahead.
The rough purpose of the fair use law is to limit the copyright privileges to having a monopoly and control of the commercial exploitation of the work. Congress didn't want to take away our right to make copies of music and video; they only chose to restrict our selling or other commercial exploitation of the works.
This kind of massive file sharing that napster makes possible, and hopefully this codec and faster connections will make possible with video, is actually legal as long as you don't receive any compensation.
You don't have to trust me on this. If you are smart enough to read slashdot, then you are smart enough to go here and download Title 17 of the US code and read it for yourself. It's kind of thick. I printed my copy out and left it in the bathroom, and read a few pages everytime I took a shit. I read it carefully and marked all over it the interesting parts, but I never found where it said that non-commercial uncompensated duplication and distribution of music or video was illegal.
You see, Congress wanted to make very sure that copyright was not an ability to control how people used things. They didn't want the copyright holders to be able to sell one copy for listening in the car and another copy for listening in the house and special copy for listening on weekends. (Which is exactly what the MPAA, the RIAA, and other big copyright holders dream of.) If Congress had wanted to do that, they could have written it into the law; where is it ?
Of course, this same principle of non-money-making copies being normal use of the medium you purchased also extends to software. Holy Shit! you say. Can I make a copy of that windows NT disk at work and install it on my machine at home ? As long as you are not using that machine to do consulting, work from home, or anything beyound home "hobbiest" type use, yes. (I'd advise against it. There are much better hobbiest OSs.)
But the big copyright holders of programs had a massively successful campaign to convince the average slashbot that this was illegal. Remember all those ads in magazines and posters in school computer clusters in the '80s ? They managed to shame huge numbers of people into buying things they didn't need to. The 700 club, usenet get rich yesterday schemes, Scientology, Albanian pyramid schemes, the Russian bailout . . . it all pales in compairison to the anti-piracy campaign.
The RIAA and MPAA are going for a repeat move on their copyright material. Ironically, inspite of the Jon Katzian "the world will change because small people have a voice on slashdot" theory, all you automatons just help them out by parroting Hollywood's false legal propaganda.
It just goes to show that you can give everybody a voice on the internet, and they'll still just repeat what they hear in TV commercials.
So it is a rip-off, but you know in advance the maximum amount you can be ripped off for -- the price you paid.
Consider also that other plans, when you really look at them, usually are more expensive than advertised. If you get a monthly-fee based phone, add up your actual minutes used, and the whole price you pay, for a few months. The un-advertised taxes, "FCC connection fees" (a note on that beauty below), unused minutes which expire every month, etc, add up quickly. Before I got this one, I looked over two months of a friend's cell phone bill -- I think that sample was a little anomalous, but it's worse than you think.
As a side note, all of this pretty much extends to the land-line side of telephone service too. Where I live in Texas they claim to allowed competition in the local telephone market, but it hasn't made a difference. You can look here if you care about the details, but it basically boils down to the new competition going after businesses and people with poor credit ratings; they do charge more for a pre-paid land phone than for a non-prepaid land phone, simply because those people looking for a pre-paid deal simply have no choice. A lot of the pre-paid phone service deals are something along the lines of a very low setup fee and $20 for the first month, then $40 or $50 a month after that; so they are definitely trying to rip off the desparate and ill-informed.
And finally, that little FCC Connection Fee fraud -- it isn't a tax imposed by the FCC, it is simply an additional itemized charge from the service provider; it's presence on your bill but not on the flier or brochure you saw about the service represents false advertising. The FCC "authorizes" the fee in that the carrier is allowed to charge it, but it has to be negotiated with the consumer -- that is, the carrier charges as much as they think the market will bear. Because the FCC has allowed their good name to be plastered on this, the carriers subtract off four dollars from the cost they advertise to look cheaper, and then put the money back in a form that makes it look like a government tax. The money from that doesn't go to the FCC. If you stick to your guns and don't pay it, carefully paying every bill except for that charge, and call and complain that the charge wasn't listed on the advertised service that you signed up for, then eventually they will cut off your service. I don't think they have the balls to actually go after your credit record or anything. It should be entirely illegal for them to masquerade a charge as a tax in that manner.
Basically, you pay $80 down for a slightly clunky but prefectly accceptable phone, and some initial starter minutes. After that you can add minutes to the phone using a plastic card you purchase with cash. It is a little expensive, I think the per minute cost comes out to around 40 cents a minute for the largest block. The biggest missing features of the plan are no voice mail, no text messaging. It works nationwide, and all calls are at that minute rate, no matter where in the country you are calling; your number is a 1-888 number with an extension.
But the most you can be ripped off for is the amount you put down up front. If AT&T stops it from working, I'm out for only the minutes I have on my account.
The cost is actually less than that of a subscription based phone for small numbers of minutes. If I don't use the phone at all for a month, I pay nothing. There are very few plans like that available in the US; most of them have you buy minutes that expire in 30, 45 or 90 days, forcing you to buy more minutes than you will use and then have them expire. But the AT&T National Prepaid minutes only expire every 6 months, and they will roll over to the next 6 months as long as you add some amount of minutes to the account. This is there to provide them with an exit from providing the service -- they can just stop selling the cards, wait six months, and then stop providing the dial tone to those phones.
Which brings me to the point that AT&T may be about to do just that. I was told by the clerks at the AT&T storefront where I go to to buy new minutes that AT&T is bringing out a new prepaid plan, and this one sounds as junky as the other prepaid plans offered in the US. The minutes expire in 90 days, you are charged a varying amount based on where you are calling, etc.
I've read in a number of places lamintations about the US "lagging behind" Europe and Japan in cell phone usage. I've also heard that in those areas most of the phones are sold in the pre-paid style; many have a place to insert a card or chip that activates the phone for a certain number of minutes. This insulates you from the telephone company's incompetent billing department, and when you buy the chips and phone with cash, provides more privacy. I think this different style of service is a major reason why the cellular phone hasn't penetrated the US market as deeply. As long as fools like most cell phone users are willing to keep putting out $100 and more a month on a plan, why should the wireless providers bother with actually billing for what they provide ?
It's a shame, really. I'm sure this area comes under the interest of more than one congressional committee, and if I were a congressman I'd have some executives on the stand and I'd be (verbally) beating the shit out of them over it. The fact that they can focus on a small segment of the population willing to be suckers means that the general advancement in that market and industry is being retarded. Since I'm not a congressman, I guess I'm limited to verbally abusing my friends who fall into the sucker class.
"It's yet to be established that this noncommercial vastly expanded fair use copying is illegal."
However, I think you should get some balls and exercise your rights to the fullest while you can. This philosophy of "I'll stop now not to piss off the people who are going to win anyway" is pathetic, more suited to some European peasant a few centuries ago than a high-tech modern person like yourself. If I had that opinion, I certainly wouldn't advertise it -- Jesus, aren't you afraid that your Mother or other family members might read this one day and see what a spineless little bend-over you are ? Why don't you at least pretend to have some character, so your children don't have to be ashamed ?
However, I think that making and distributing copies in order demonstrate the quality of a commercial recording facility is probably not non-commercial use. So you can't post high-quality sound recordings of copyrighted vinyl as avertisement for your business (if that is indeed what you were suggesting). I think the slightest taint of commercialism would be fatal. What you could do is make the cuts and post them on gnutella/napster without any reference to your self or your enterpise, as a hobbiest's effort. This anonymous strategy has two good qualities:
"Completely false? Copyright law explicitly recognizes the right of a copyright holder to sell, license or transfer their various rights. Anything US law recognizes can be done with property, the copyright code recognizes can be done with rights to a work." ." ." Fight this insidious piece of marketing propaganda aimed at scaring us into giving huge amounts of money to the copyright holders, as well as giving up rights without going through the channel of our representatives in the government. We can stop them.
No. Copyright law doesn't "create property." Lars Ulrich's privilege, that he has complete control over the making of money from the song "One", is simply created wholesale by Congress, just like the right to pick up a welfare check under certain circumstances, or the right to pick up a check for not planting tobacco if you are one of a certain class of farmers.
If Congress takes my real property, they have to pay me. But Congress can declare that they won't pay people not to plant tobacco, or that they are canceling patents and copyrights, and they don't owe anyone anything. Just because a bunch of people who were making a lot of money off of the copyright/patent system started using the words "intellectual property", doesn't mean it is property.
After all, how can I buy a CD, which then becomes mine, and do anything with it that results in stealling from some guy I never met ? I can copy that a thousand times, and sell it, I'm not taking any real property from Lars Ulrich. What I am doing is analogous to starting a mail delivery service in competition with the US Postal Service; the Federal Government took away my right to do that, so that the US Postal Service could make enough money to guarantee delivery to remote areas and better service everywhere. (I think it was a great trade.) We used to do the same thing with Ma Bell and the telephone service -- that wasn't such a good deal, so we canceled it, and we didn't own Ma Bell anything for taking away her monopoly "property" any more than we'd owe Lars money if we quit dealing with him. (Personally I think the current trade of thousands of peoples individual, and largely unexercised, rights to copy things and sell them for extra reward to those who create new stuff is working out great.)
So US law doesn't treat the privileges that copyright gives you the same as real property. If you steal real property, that is covered under Title 18, in the criminal code. But if you operate a business that Congress has reserved for someone else, that is a different matter. The way Congress dealt with it (pretty clever, I think) is to get the US Attorneys and prosecutors largely out of it, and allow the people who wrote the work to seek money in court. This way only those copyright privileges which are worth it are enforced, which is efficient.
"I said nothing about transfers of a single copy of a single work. But let's be clear: making a copy and transferring the copy is not a "transfer", it's making and distributing an unauthorized copy. So ripping MP3s from a CD and making those MP3s available on Napster (or MP3.com) doesn't fall under the exemptions in section 109."
I'll say something about transfers of many copies of a CD from one person to another: it is completely legal so long as I received no compensation. I can buy a Metallica CD at Tower Records, rip it to mp3's, and email, ftp, or otherwise give those files to thousands of people, as long as I don't do it for money. Congress has never (yet) given away my right to do that. You correctly note that in some places a "transfer" refers directly to a transfer of the copyright, as in when a musician sells the copyright the studio, while I was using "tranfer" as in the middle initial of "ftp". So ?
The copyright holders have to show that I am violating the privileges congress gave them; I don't have prove that every file I transfer, or every photocopy I make, is legal. That's why the fact that you found one exemption which didn't apply to non-commercial mp3 trading doesn't really mean anything. The burden of proof is on them.
Here's a hint: look at section 107. I'll quote verbatim the first half a paragraph (all emphaisis is mine): "-STATUTE-
Notwithstanding the provisions of sections 106 and 106A, the fair use of a copyrighted work, including such use by reproduction in copies or phonorecords or by any other means specified by that section, for purposes such as criticism, comment, news reporting, teaching (including multiple copies for classroom use), scholarship, or research, is not an infringement of copyright. In determining whether the use made of a work in any particular case is a fair use the factors to be considered shall include -
(1) the purpose and character of the use, including whether such use is of a commercial nature . .
Wow. By the second sentence they already got that commercial nature thing in !
Now what follows is vague and difficult to interpret. There is a reason for that: congress wants the "fair use" provision to allow you do to all the normal things you would do with something you bought, and not allow the copyright holder to charge you once to get it and then again to use it. They are afraid that if they explicitly spell out what fair use is, the big copyright holdrs will invent a medium where the normally accepted use falls legalistically outside fair use, then congress will have accidently granted them the right to control how the works are used instead of how money is made from them. And the essential conflict of this whole napster/mp3 thing is that that is exactly what the RIAA and friends want to do; they want to sell you something for a limited use, so you have to buy more of them, like a company making cars that break after 80,000 miles.
You say "No fair citing "fair use" either -- wholesale reproduction of a work is generally not accepted as fair use."
Come on OMK! "Generally accepted" ? Microsoft Windows is generally accepted. The point of my post is, screw the "general acceptance" that says mp3's are illegal -- show me the law! Where is it? Are you claiming that steak dinner ?
Here's my summary to my longest slashdot post ever:
Copyright holders of music have not yet bribed out of congress a restriction on the non-commercial sharing of music files. But they want it. They have before them an example of how copyright holders of computer code mostly succeeded in getting privileges not granted to them by congress -- this is the software piracy wars of the late 80s. It is legal to make a copy of your windows95 disk and give it to friend to use, so long as he is not using the OS to make money, as in for a job or at a company. The big code copyright holders launched a huge campaign against this. All of the court cases that went to trial always dealt with a company having multiple copies to make money with, or someone selling copies of the code, but with a big publicity campaign they managed to convince the average American to buy more copies of software than they needed to. So the big music copyright holders are going for a repeat play.
But you can help me stop them, OMK ! Challenge people who say that mp3's are illegal. Post responses to those stupid slashdot napster defenders who make the argument "It's illegal but justified because . .
This is completely false. Separate Titles of the US code lay out remedies and penalties associated with patents and copyright, and they differ considerably from the remedies and penalties for crimes such as vandalism or theft.
Why don't you go read the code in question ? It's on the web. The site I use is:
uscode.house.gov
You might want to download the entire document of Title 17, in which case this page is the best:
uscode.house.gov/download.htm
Today 600 people are going to post an uninformed post to this story. That's because all of them think the US Congress actually gave Metallica and those other artists a complete monopoly on what is done with a song they record. None of them read Title 17, Chapter 1, sections 106 through 115, especially the various secions whose titles begin with the phrase "Limitations on Exclusive Rights:", and looked very carefully at the different privileges a copyright of a sound recording gives you over a written work.
But you can be the first, Old Man Kensey!
And if you can show me where it says that I am violating any privileges the US government has handed out, when I transfer a copy of a sound recording to another individual and don't receive any money for it, then I will buy you a steak dinner (or equivalent, if steak isn't your thing). I'm serious about this. Be careful, because all the places where it says that you can't do something, it generally says "as allowed in secions 106 through 115" or something similar, and those sections include the "Limitations on Exclusive Rights" parts.
You can't do an identical twin brith-separation study to disprove a sex as an effect on anything.
Identical twins have the same sex.
The "nuturing" and "Myers-Briggs" nonsense that follows is also utterly without meaning.
What you do is start out with the presumption that "the born hacker type is Myers-Briggs INTP". This turns out to be another word for "mostly male". The intervening word exercises are only that.
This whole Myers-Briggs scam is very interesting to me. I love it. You make a bunch of questions to ask people; you encode the answers; then you re-describe the answers to the questions next to each code. People -- I mean smart people, not 700 club members -- fucking fall out of their chairs in amazement that it matches up. Of course it is usually a two hour seminar with an "expert" who does the smoke and mirrors and patter as well as Houdini making you look the other way.
I gotta invent something like this.
But I've been told that the real kings of this whole business are the Scientologists. One day I'm going to go to one of their "free personality test" sucker-traps and check it out. I don't care about the test at all, I just want to watch these guys in action, and carefully watch the faces of the suckers so I can see who is buying it.
Come on, you know it can't be that simple; if this quote was really all that mattered, then it wouldn't be legal to tranform your legally purchased cd into a tape so you could listen in your car, or make a "backup" cd of the music to protect against scratched CDs. Both of those are obviously legal.
."
You have to trace back through the chain of references. What does "actionable as an act of infringement under section 501" mean ? Well, read title 17 501. It applies to "the exclusive rights of the copyright owner as provided by sections 106 through 118" among other things; I think that 501 is defining how you can sue and what remedies you can seek if your copyright privilidges are violated, not what those privilidges are.
Look at those sections 106 through 118. Immediately you see all kinds of limitations on the copyright holders exclusive privilidges. Some of these even apply specifically to sound recordings, and not other types of material.
Basically read the definitions of copyright privildges (106), which sounds pretty tough; then read section 107:
" Sec. 107. Limitations on exclusive rights: Fair use
-STATUTE-
Notwithstanding the provisions of sections 106 and 106A, the fair use of a copyrighted work, including such use by reproduction in copies or phonorecords or by any other means specified by that section, for purposes such as criticism, comment, news reporting, teaching (including multiple copies for classroom use), scholarship, or research, is not an infringement of copyright. In determining whether the use made of a work in any particular case is a fair use the factors to be considered shall include -
(1) the purpose and character of the use, including whether such use is of a commercial nature . .
If you want to make an argument that buying a Metallica CD, copying it and posting it on the web, is illegal, I think you have some serious work to do. Check out the whole of Title 17 -- there is commentary in there on the lack of definition of the term "fair use", and stuff like that, but I haven't seen where it made exchanging MP3 files (or any other files) illegal.
I'm not a lawyer, or even a law student, or even a law hobbiest. I haven't even read the whole of Title 17, although I plan to sometime. (I printed out a copy and left it by my toilet for thoughtful perusal.) But I just haven't seen the chapter-verse-line number quotation.
Napster has made this argument, but they don't seem to pushing it too hard anymore. Go to
http://www.napster.com/pressroom/
and scroll down to the date of about July 5. The news links that are there refer to Napster's brief filed about then on the fair use of copying music files.
You repeatedly talk about violating copyright, and attack common justifications for it.
But what both you and the people you complain about are missing is that copying a file is not a violation of copyright; getting paid for copying that file is. In fact it is completely legal to copy a Metallica song off of a CD you bought at a store, and allow people to copy it off of your machine. You can't charge them for it, though.
If you don't believe this, post a link to the law that makes it illegal. I suggest you go to http://uscode.house.gov/home.htm, in the frame on the left click on "search the US code", and start reading some law. When you find the law, post it here.
Because I signed up for them. At one point many of the polls offered chances to win something if you completed the poll, and that was why I signed up. I learned about it through a web page, not unsolicited messages. I haven't bothered to fill out a poll in while, and most of them don't even offer prizes anymore, so it's probably time to save some bandwidth and drop that list.
But I would be pretty annoyed if my ISP blocked those emails. If I can't get email I request, then my ISP is not providing the service I'm paying for.
An ISP should not apply the MAPS blocking list to any user who hasn't requested it -- you should have to opt-in, just like for the emails.
If you are copying content to a local disk, then an NFS server failure just means no updates for a while, you can still serve pages out of the local directory. No biggie for many jobs.
Of course you would never have a cluster of webservers serving pages off of the same harddisk via NFS -- would you ? That would still bottleneck everything through the NFS server's disk and ethernet card, thus making the whole clustering thing pointless, right ? Unless maybe you were dynamically generating pages and just wanted to spread the cpu load.
Whatever. This question is too vague. The asker should explain what they want to build.
What are you really trying to do ?
The reason why your question has brought out only trolls and other meaningless posts is that it is so vague that it could be classified as a troll itself.
How big are these content directories you want to replicate, and how often to they change ?
If they only change every few hours or so, you can use nfs and a script that does cp -r with no problem. Or rdist. Or CVS. Or ftp. Don't worry about "real time", just take the machine that is being updated out of the pool that might serve requests - don't even bother with that if a briefly half-updated web page doesn't matter.
Does it matter if a few of the machines are out of date, or should of the machines have the exact same thing ?
I think if you explain what you are trying to do, you'll get a number of sugestions.
> 4) no _required_ type declarations
Why is this good ? In perl they aren't required, and then you have to keep doing use:strict to find bugs, so you end up just declaring them anyway. Making things easy for people is only good if you are making it easy for them to do the right thing, not if you are making it easy for them to screw up.
> 10) ANSI standardized
I understand from some people that one of the big problems with lisp is that not enough of it is standardized, and important parts like the foreign function interface are implementation dependent.
> 11) no pointers
Why is this good ? Why shouldn't one of the primitive types of a language be that of an address ? It allows you to do some cool stuff like pointer-pushing which speeds things up.
Ok, well I don't really know, that's just what I wanted to try out next. I thought I'd share my reasons and see what other people had to say.
Basically, I've observed the following characteristics about the best code I've worked with:
- Code generates code.
- A good example of this is the
- Fastest Fourier
Transform in the West. You can re-run the code generator to generate code
optimized for the size of transforms you will be using. The other common use of
this is in interfaces. Most programming shops have a set of code in house that
generates reader code for ascii parameter files ( like
.rc files or .ini
files). The one I worked with used lex and yacc; it would parse a C struct
definition and generate an example file and the reader code which would create
the struct. The macros that any complecated cross-platform program seems to end
up needing are another example.
- Small chunks of "interpreted" instructions are generated at runtime.
I think the "plan" that fftw makes you generate for a given transform and size,
and then pass in with the data, is like this but I'm not sure. Some of the
stuff I wrote was "generators" for certain classes, that essentially stored the arguments to a constructor, to be called (perhaps repeatedly) at another time. I think a lot of CORBA based interfaces
basically pass along the code to interpret the data along with the data.
It seems to me that a lot of the modern buzzwords essentially boil down to these issues once you figure out what they are really doing. I think the most useful part of C++ lies with the template machanism, not object oriented or inheritence or whatever other buzzword you pick; and templates are essentially just a macro on type. This CORBA stuff seems to be to be just generating interface code on the fly and passing it around. (The Component Oriented Programming stuff seems to be to be just shell scripting, sorry.)My experience with lisp is limited; scheme was my language of choice for any projects I did as an undergrad, and I haven't really dabbled in it much since. The reasons why I think lisp (well, common lisp in particular) might address these issues well is the relative ease of generating code on the fly, and the good reputation of the macro system.
From a little bit of reading newsgroups, and from talking to older lisp hacker types, it seems that one of the problems that lisp suffers from is that the commercial lisp implementations are too expensive and not compatable with each other, so people get locked into using one lisp because the effort to port to another is too expensive, and once these companies had you by the balls they will essentially calculate your profit margin and charge that. So I plan to only use one of the GPL'd versions, probably CMU. Is the CMU version so bad that I'm dooming myself from the start by doing this ?
I didn't bother to say this when the question was first posted because I thought it would be everyone's answer. Whatever flavor of emacs/XEmacs/ntemacs works best for you, and whatever email reader seems good.
I would try a recent version of XEmacs or emacs, and vm. Gnus should also work, and might be a better mail reader for high volume people.
( If you use vm and you received a huge amount of email, then you may want a good way of auto-archiving mail. I have some elisp that will save off the first 1000 messages in an archive folder, when the number of messages reaches 2000. It names the archive folder with the date of the first and last messages in the file name, to assist in finding stuff. If somebody wants it they can email me at rgristroph@yahoo.com. )
Of course, looking on the practical side, you may have trouble convincing some windows people to use it. I think the fact that it works pretty much the same on windows and unix should help convince people to fight their way up the learning curve. Keep in mind that windows people are used to learning a new tool or application not by reading documentation, but by pulling down the menus to see what is there. So XEmacs in the default configration with those buttons and menus might be a good idea.