"Changing" the copyrighted carrier code doesn't seem to violate copyright, as I understand it
There are two exclusive rights that copyright law gives the copyright holder: The right to distribute, and the right to create derivative work (in other words, modifying the code).
What strikes me even more is the fact that it was the Librarian of Library of Congress who made this a crime. Seriously? The Librarian?
Makes total sense. Unlocking a phone was _always_ a DMCA violation. The Librarian was tasked to find cases where doing something should be legal, even though it was a DMCA violation; found it necessary to make an exception for phone unlocking three years ago, but not anymore. The Librarian didn't _make_ it a crime. The Librarian made an exemption three years ago so it wasn't a crime and removed that exemption.
Why would it be anti-competitive? If unlocking is illegal, then any company should be able to get a huge competitive advantage by selling unlocked phones.
That would be $150 000 per infringement times 6 million viewers, but it might just be per track not per downloaded copy. That single mom [msn.com] had to pay ~$35 000 per track, and it mention that people settle at $3 500 per track.
Idiot. The statutory damages that a copyright holder can ask for are up to $150,000 per protected work, no matter how many copies are made. If there are 6 million viewers, and someone thinks the damages exceed $150,000 then they can ask for _actual_ damages. When you ask for actual damages you have to actually _proof_ what money you lost.
The "single mom" was ordered to pay $35,000 per track, no matter how many copies of that track she provided to others. Whether it was 1 copy, 10 copies, or ten million copies. Each track is a "work". That's what "statutory" damages means; you don't have to prove actual damages.
It's worth pointing out that this was released under Creative Commons "Attribution-NonCommercial [creativecommons.org]" license, which means anyone can adapt (remix, sing over, etc.) and distribute it, but must give due credit to the original author and must not use it for any commercial purpose.
And it's worth pointing out that there has been precedent recently that if there is such a license that would allow you to copy _if_ you adhered to the terms of the license, but you don't, this is not a case of breach of license, but copyright infringement. Up to $150,000 per work in statutory damages, alternatively actually proven damages.
IANAL, but if you believe your IP is being violated, wouldn't it look pretty bad in court if you just let damages accrue, and only filed a case after the defendant had made a bunch of money? Especially since this guy is on the books as having noticed his IP is being violated.
You can always ask for $150,000 in statutory damages, so it doesn't matter anyway what the actual damages are.
There's another added benefit as well...not only is it easier to fill up the RAM of a 32-bit memory space, but in a 64-bit environment you won't be as likely to slog the machine down overall while you do so.
Quite the opposite. With 64 bit, the logical address space is many orders of magnitude bigger than available RAM. So you end up thrashing your virtual memory quite soon. However, the logical address space is still orders of magnitude bigger than your swapspace (4 TB if we are generous), so it's quite impossible to fill the 64 bit address space.
If that were true, then why is the cell phone contract not lower if I bring my own phone, since there is no subsidy?
Because your service provider is a greedy bastard?
In the UK, you can get cheap contracts or pay-as-you-go if you bring your own phone, but usually with very few minutes or very little data included. For contracts with more minutes and data, they are intentionally confusing, and there is substantial difference between good and bad contracts even from the same provider.
The DMCA says unlocking is illegal. The (soon to be expired) exemption says that unlocking is legal. There is nothing in the exemption or in the DMCA about a contract.
The DMCA says nothing about unlocking; it talks about circumventing measures that are used to prevent copying. An exemption to the DMCA was made to allow such circumvention in order to unlock a phone. So there was no question that unlocking a phone is perfectly legal, the only problem was that to do something perfectly legal you had to do something illegal as well, and the exemption was there because huge numbers of users wanted to make use of their legal right to unlock a phone.
Now it seems that the situation has changed to the point (that's the reasoning) that people can unlock their phones without any circumvention of copy protection, and therefore the exemption isn't needed anymore. If that's the case then fair enough. On the other hand, if your service provider refuses to unlock your phone, then you should complain.
Too bad Lego responded to this nonsense and even offered an apology
Responding is not bad; you said yourself that the company would have responded if you were in charge. And there was no apology either, the reply was "We regret that the product has caused the members of the Turkish cultural community to come to a wrong interpretation. " That's not an apology. That's saying these people are wrong.
If Google was fined $1,000,000 every time one of their employees gets caught speeding, they'd pretty soon figure out how to prevent their employees speeding (or at least getting caught)
On the other hand, Microsoft and Apple would hand over a bit of cash to 100 or so drivers, and next day Google would be bankrupt.
Maybe it's time to start enforcing corporate fines as a percentage of current market cap, payable by newly issued stock to the regulatory agencies. That would deflate the value of the existing stock, getting the shareholders to whip the company into line (hopefully). Also, too many repeat offenses would give the regulators increasing control over the company itself. After 5-10 years, allow the company to buy the stock back.
That's quite nonsensical since many big companies are in many different businesses. Take Samsung. They build ships. I assume that they are not better or worse than other companies building ships, so sometimes they will be fined. Except according to your plan, ten times more than other ship builders, because they are in many more businesses. Samsung also builds tractors. Again, I assume they are not better or worse than other companies building tractors, but if something goes wrong you want to fine them ten times more.
There are Google employees driving around in little cars taking photos of all kinds of places. Sometimes they are speeding. Do you think Google should pay a million dollar fine every time one of their cars gets caught speeding? There's a truck company owning 3 trucks. And another one owning 3,000. Statistically, the one with 3,000 trucks will get 1000 times more speeding tickets, parking tickets, and so on. Do you think they should pay 1,000 times more per ticket because they are bigger?
You know, we blame civil engineers when their buildings collapse, maybe it's time to start blaming computer "engineers" when their systems do. Now, I know first-hand how hard it is to design secure computer systems, and I'm well aware there's a fine line between "holding to account" and a witchhunt, but we're nowhere near that line as it stands.
That's no problem. Absolutely fine with it. As long as you convince my boss that it's not shipping until I declare that it's fine. And as long as you convince my boss that my productivity will be about one LOC per day.
In my 23-year career I've worked on all sorts of codebases, open and closed. My experience is that horrible code is common everywhere and great code is rare everywhere, but on average open source code is significantly better than closed code.
Maybe authors of horrible code are too ashamed to let anyone see it? Maybe open source is totally pointless if nobody can actually _read_ the source code, even if they have a copy, so if your code is truly bad, making it open source is just a waste of time? (Obviously if you take GPL'd code and add your own horrible code to it, open sourcing it can be a legal requirement; it is still pointless).
It should not be Google's problem that Joe Sixpack is to deeply retarded to understand that if he types "Bob's Construction" and auto-complete suggests he adds "collapse" it does not imply Bob builds things that collapse.
It's not Google's fault that people are stupid. But it is Google's fault if Google sends out some text which incorrectly reflects badly on Bob. It's Google who sent the text "Bob's Construction collapse" to the user's computer, so that is most certainly their fault.
Nope. Writing better code generally requires more time. People will try to tell you otherwise, but either they're just off base, or they're confused by the fact that the amortized time of writing good code is less than of writing code as quickly as possible. That is, if you write all quick+dirty code, you reach a point each new feature you add takes much longer than if you had written all good code. However, at any given stage, it's quicker to write the quick+dirty code.
Absolutely true. By making the decision that is more profitable _right now_ you get yourself into a hole and eventually you lose out. But since it's code, your managers may not understand.
Now ask them to compare Dell and Apple. One company did all the right things to make more money, and now it looks like they are up for sale. The other never listened to customers, never listened to stock analysts, never cared about money but only about making great products, and ended up having about $100bn in the bank.
It seems like a self-perpetuating problem... every time we talk about fixing things, it's always "after we catch up on our current projects."
How do you eat an elephant? One byte at a time.
Make it a rule: Whenever you make a change, improve _one_ thing. Depending on how bad the mess is, it may actually safe time each time you do it. Remove one static variable. Or one public member. Or one warning that the compiler gives you. Create one header file that should have always been there. And so on, and so on.
Based on the fact that this stopped being true a long while ago, yes, if the number is actualy big, I'd be amazed.
If you look closely, he or she posted an expression where the result of a comparison was compared to 4. Comparisons produce a value of 0 or 1, so the result is never equal to 4, so the expression was always 0.
Strange. Where I went to school (which was most definitely not the USA), QUESTION AUTHORITY was the thing that our class teacher drilled into us. BTW. When I started at the school as a pupil, he had started there fresh from university. When I left, he was the head of the school.
Additionally, while 52% US citizens believe that downloading free music is some sort of crime, 59% of Germans surveyed believe this too. By leaving this point off the summary,/. does not present the whole story in TFA.
These numbers would firstly depend an awful lot on the exact wording of the question asked. Obviously downloading free music is not a crime at all. I've downloaded plenty of free music, directly from the musicians, some from iTunes, all completely legally. Downloading music that isn't free without paying may be a crime, but what answer you get depends on the question asked.
And translating a term like "some sort of crime" accurately is very, very difficult. A word like "crime" is one on a long chain of words describing objectionable behaviour, and it is quite common that another language has a similar chain, but the various words don't match exactly. So German might have one word that is slightly weaker than "crime" and one that is slightly stronger. Which one you choose again changes the percentage.
Because not all systems can handle Unicode, and Unicode itself has multiple internal representations (UTF-8, UTF-16.) Furthermore, there are multiple valid Unicode encodings for the same character stream.
Just take whatever is given into canonically pre-decomposed UTF8. I mean there are people using Unicode in their file system and they have no problems with this.
I looked at the link that you offered and stopped reading when I found the first gross stupidity. The claim that Switzerland is a country with high "availability of weapons". While it is a fact that every male citizen at the right age has a gone and ammunition in case it is needed to defend their country, these guns are in no way available. There will be regular checks that these guns are _very_ safely looked away, that they haven't been used, and that all ammunition is there. Using one of these guns to commit a crime makes it guaranteed to be caught. Using one of these guns for "sport" or "entertainment" will put you into jail as well.
If I were a criminal in spe and wanted to burgle a store or home at night to steal valuables, and lived in, say, England, I would be unarmed. If I lived in the US, I would carry a gun to protect my own life.
In Germany, carrying a weapon while committing any kind of theft automatically turns it into "armed robbery". Very, very good reason not to carry a weapon during a burglary. And it caught out one or two policemen who were stupid enough to get caught shoplifting while carrying their gun. And in England, if there is a gun in sight during a crime you'll get an armed response unit after you. Which means your chances of getting caught just went up from close to 0 to close to 100%.
Slashdot Mirror
"Changing" the copyrighted carrier code doesn't seem to violate copyright, as I understand it
There are two exclusive rights that copyright law gives the copyright holder: The right to distribute, and the right to create derivative work (in other words, modifying the code).
What strikes me even more is the fact that it was the Librarian of Library of Congress who made this a crime. Seriously? The Librarian?
Makes total sense. Unlocking a phone was _always_ a DMCA violation. The Librarian was tasked to find cases where doing something should be legal, even though it was a DMCA violation; found it necessary to make an exception for phone unlocking three years ago, but not anymore. The Librarian didn't _make_ it a crime. The Librarian made an exemption three years ago so it wasn't a crime and removed that exemption.
Why would it be anti-competitive? If unlocking is illegal, then any company should be able to get a huge competitive advantage by selling unlocked phones.
It shouldn't sell, period. Jobs did nothing that deserves a book or movie. Only the Apple fanatics think he walks on water.
If he walked on water, you would complain that he can't swim.
That would be $150 000 per infringement times 6 million viewers, but it might just be per track not per downloaded copy. That single mom [msn.com] had to pay ~$35 000 per track, and it mention that people settle at $3 500 per track.
Idiot. The statutory damages that a copyright holder can ask for are up to $150,000 per protected work, no matter how many copies are made. If there are 6 million viewers, and someone thinks the damages exceed $150,000 then they can ask for _actual_ damages. When you ask for actual damages you have to actually _proof_ what money you lost.
The "single mom" was ordered to pay $35,000 per track, no matter how many copies of that track she provided to others. Whether it was 1 copy, 10 copies, or ten million copies. Each track is a "work". That's what "statutory" damages means; you don't have to prove actual damages.
It's worth pointing out that this was released under Creative Commons "Attribution-NonCommercial [creativecommons.org]" license, which means anyone can adapt (remix, sing over, etc.) and distribute it, but must give due credit to the original author and must not use it for any commercial purpose.
And it's worth pointing out that there has been precedent recently that if there is such a license that would allow you to copy _if_ you adhered to the terms of the license, but you don't, this is not a case of breach of license, but copyright infringement. Up to $150,000 per work in statutory damages, alternatively actually proven damages.
IANAL, but if you believe your IP is being violated, wouldn't it look pretty bad in court if you just let damages accrue, and only filed a case after the defendant had made a bunch of money? Especially since this guy is on the books as having noticed his IP is being violated.
You can always ask for $150,000 in statutory damages, so it doesn't matter anyway what the actual damages are.
There's another added benefit as well...not only is it easier to fill up the RAM of a 32-bit memory space, but in a 64-bit environment you won't be as likely to slog the machine down overall while you do so.
Quite the opposite. With 64 bit, the logical address space is many orders of magnitude bigger than available RAM. So you end up thrashing your virtual memory quite soon. However, the logical address space is still orders of magnitude bigger than your swapspace (4 TB if we are generous), so it's quite impossible to fill the 64 bit address space.
Fill up memory, then free some until enough is free to load the DLL.
Which works fine with a 32 bit operating system. With 64 bit, filling up memory looks like a hard job to me.
If that were true, then why is the cell phone contract not lower if I bring my own phone, since there is no subsidy?
Because your service provider is a greedy bastard?
In the UK, you can get cheap contracts or pay-as-you-go if you bring your own phone, but usually with very few minutes or very little data included. For contracts with more minutes and data, they are intentionally confusing, and there is substantial difference between good and bad contracts even from the same provider.
The DMCA says unlocking is illegal. The (soon to be expired) exemption says that unlocking is legal. There is nothing in the exemption or in the DMCA about a contract.
The DMCA says nothing about unlocking; it talks about circumventing measures that are used to prevent copying. An exemption to the DMCA was made to allow such circumvention in order to unlock a phone. So there was no question that unlocking a phone is perfectly legal, the only problem was that to do something perfectly legal you had to do something illegal as well, and the exemption was there because huge numbers of users wanted to make use of their legal right to unlock a phone.
Now it seems that the situation has changed to the point (that's the reasoning) that people can unlock their phones without any circumvention of copy protection, and therefore the exemption isn't needed anymore. If that's the case then fair enough. On the other hand, if your service provider refuses to unlock your phone, then you should complain.
Too bad Lego responded to this nonsense and even offered an apology
Responding is not bad; you said yourself that the company would have responded if you were in charge. And there was no apology either, the reply was "We regret that the product has caused the members of the Turkish cultural community to come to a wrong interpretation. " That's not an apology. That's saying these people are wrong.
If Google was fined $1,000,000 every time one of their employees gets caught speeding, they'd pretty soon figure out how to prevent their employees speeding (or at least getting caught)
On the other hand, Microsoft and Apple would hand over a bit of cash to 100 or so drivers, and next day Google would be bankrupt.
Maybe it's time to start enforcing corporate fines as a percentage of current market cap, payable by newly issued stock to the regulatory agencies. That would deflate the value of the existing stock, getting the shareholders to whip the company into line (hopefully). Also, too many repeat offenses would give the regulators increasing control over the company itself. After 5-10 years, allow the company to buy the stock back.
That's quite nonsensical since many big companies are in many different businesses. Take Samsung. They build ships. I assume that they are not better or worse than other companies building ships, so sometimes they will be fined. Except according to your plan, ten times more than other ship builders, because they are in many more businesses. Samsung also builds tractors. Again, I assume they are not better or worse than other companies building tractors, but if something goes wrong you want to fine them ten times more.
There are Google employees driving around in little cars taking photos of all kinds of places. Sometimes they are speeding. Do you think Google should pay a million dollar fine every time one of their cars gets caught speeding? There's a truck company owning 3 trucks. And another one owning 3,000. Statistically, the one with 3,000 trucks will get 1000 times more speeding tickets, parking tickets, and so on. Do you think they should pay 1,000 times more per ticket because they are bigger?
You know, we blame civil engineers when their buildings collapse, maybe it's time to start blaming computer "engineers" when their systems do. Now, I know first-hand how hard it is to design secure computer systems, and I'm well aware there's a fine line between "holding to account" and a witchhunt, but we're nowhere near that line as it stands.
That's no problem. Absolutely fine with it. As long as you convince my boss that it's not shipping until I declare that it's fine. And as long as you convince my boss that my productivity will be about one LOC per day.
In my 23-year career I've worked on all sorts of codebases, open and closed. My experience is that horrible code is common everywhere and great code is rare everywhere, but on average open source code is significantly better than closed code.
Maybe authors of horrible code are too ashamed to let anyone see it? Maybe open source is totally pointless if nobody can actually _read_ the source code, even if they have a copy, so if your code is truly bad, making it open source is just a waste of time? (Obviously if you take GPL'd code and add your own horrible code to it, open sourcing it can be a legal requirement; it is still pointless).
It should not be Google's problem that Joe Sixpack is to deeply retarded to understand that if he types "Bob's Construction" and auto-complete suggests he adds "collapse" it does not imply Bob builds things that collapse.
It's not Google's fault that people are stupid. But it is Google's fault if Google sends out some text which incorrectly reflects badly on Bob. It's Google who sent the text "Bob's Construction collapse" to the user's computer, so that is most certainly their fault.
Nope. Writing better code generally requires more time. People will try to tell you otherwise, but either they're just off base, or they're confused by the fact that the amortized time of writing good code is less than of writing code as quickly as possible. That is, if you write all quick+dirty code, you reach a point each new feature you add takes much longer than if you had written all good code. However, at any given stage, it's quicker to write the quick+dirty code.
Absolutely true. By making the decision that is more profitable _right now_ you get yourself into a hole and eventually you lose out. But since it's code, your managers may not understand.
Now ask them to compare Dell and Apple. One company did all the right things to make more money, and now it looks like they are up for sale. The other never listened to customers, never listened to stock analysts, never cared about money but only about making great products, and ended up having about $100bn in the bank.
It seems like a self-perpetuating problem... every time we talk about fixing things, it's always "after we catch up on our current projects."
How do you eat an elephant? One byte at a time.
Make it a rule: Whenever you make a change, improve _one_ thing. Depending on how bad the mess is, it may actually safe time each time you do it. Remove one static variable. Or one public member. Or one warning that the compiler gives you. Create one header file that should have always been there. And so on, and so on.
Based on the fact that this stopped being true a long while ago, yes, if the number is actualy big, I'd be amazed.
If you look closely, he or she posted an expression where the result of a comparison was compared to 4. Comparisons produce a value of 0 or 1, so the result is never equal to 4, so the expression was always 0.
Strange. Where I went to school (which was most definitely not the USA), QUESTION AUTHORITY was the thing that our class teacher drilled into us. BTW. When I started at the school as a pupil, he had started there fresh from university. When I left, he was the head of the school.
Additionally, while 52% US citizens believe that downloading free music is some sort of crime, 59% of Germans surveyed believe this too. By leaving this point off the summary, /. does not present the whole story in TFA.
These numbers would firstly depend an awful lot on the exact wording of the question asked. Obviously downloading free music is not a crime at all. I've downloaded plenty of free music, directly from the musicians, some from iTunes, all completely legally. Downloading music that isn't free without paying may be a crime, but what answer you get depends on the question asked.
And translating a term like "some sort of crime" accurately is very, very difficult. A word like "crime" is one on a long chain of words describing objectionable behaviour, and it is quite common that another language has a similar chain, but the various words don't match exactly. So German might have one word that is slightly weaker than "crime" and one that is slightly stronger. Which one you choose again changes the percentage.
Because not all systems can handle Unicode, and Unicode itself has multiple internal representations (UTF-8, UTF-16.) Furthermore, there are multiple valid Unicode encodings for the same character stream.
Just take whatever is given into canonically pre-decomposed UTF8. I mean there are people using Unicode in their file system and they have no problems with this.
I looked at the link that you offered and stopped reading when I found the first gross stupidity. The claim that Switzerland is a country with high "availability of weapons". While it is a fact that every male citizen at the right age has a gone and ammunition in case it is needed to defend their country, these guns are in no way available. There will be regular checks that these guns are _very_ safely looked away, that they haven't been used, and that all ammunition is there. Using one of these guns to commit a crime makes it guaranteed to be caught. Using one of these guns for "sport" or "entertainment" will put you into jail as well.
If I were a criminal in spe and wanted to burgle a store or home at night to steal valuables, and lived in, say, England, I would be unarmed. If I lived in the US, I would carry a gun to protect my own life.
In Germany, carrying a weapon while committing any kind of theft automatically turns it into "armed robbery". Very, very good reason not to carry a weapon during a burglary. And it caught out one or two policemen who were stupid enough to get caught shoplifting while carrying their gun. And in England, if there is a gun in sight during a crime you'll get an armed response unit after you. Which means your chances of getting caught just went up from close to 0 to close to 100%.