Too late. Reporting game scores in certain
commerical circumstances is already
illegal, and has been for decades. Search
for the term hot news misappropriation. For example:
Morris Communications Corp v. PGA Tour Inc (MD Fla 10/23/2000)
PGA Tour invested millions of dollars in an electronic relay system called Real-Time Scoring System
(RTSS) that facilitated the transmission of the real-time golf scores to an on-site media center. PGA Tour
granted Morris Communications the right to gather scores from the media center on the condition that the
information was not to be syndicated. Morris Communications claimed that in conditioning the use of the
media center, PGA Tour was acting as an illegal monopolist. In response, PGA Tour contended that it had
a right to condition access to the media center, and thus the scores the RTSS compiled in order to protect
its property interest.
The court held that PGA Tour was entitled to condition access to information gathered by the RTSS.
"Plaintiff cannot point to a sufficient reason why Defendant's uniformly applied rules represent anything other
than a legitimate business decision intended to allow it to reap the benefits of its investment."
International News Service v. Associated Press, 248 US 215 (1918), was the first case to set forth the "hot
news" theory of intellectual property. In that case, the Supreme Court stated that a newspaper publisher
had a property right in time-sensitive information when the publisher had expended resources to collect the
news. The court allowed the PGA Tour to assert the hot news theory to protect its investment in the RTSS
system. "It appears in this case that Plaintiff wants to capitalize not just on the golf scores themselves, but
also on Defendant's mechanism for simultaneously gathering and generating the scoring information."
And with database treaties, this will
probably become even more of an issue
Disclaimer: I'm not a lawyer, just interested
in the topic.
Let's look at it a different way. For
some reasons, people are buying new CD-players.
The market isn't saturated. Smaller, faster,
different color, whatever. Lots of new players
are made and sold. In the future, every single
one of these players may have SDMI. Either
people are going to stop buying new CD players,
or through attrition, the huge, vast, overwhelming
majority will be SDMI-restricted players.
There will always be a few oldies around, just
like eight-track players and reel-to-reel
players are still around. But unless people stop
buying new players, which isn't going to happen,
SDMI-possesed players will spread.
When the issue is settled,
you will buy a SDMI CD player or
you will never buy a new CD player again.
Eventually, your old CD players will break.
They aren't built to last for eternity. Yes,
there may be the odd one which lasts a long
time, but unless you're going to turn them
into family heirlooms, new CD players will
be bought
The
DMCA text, part (g),
does define "Permissible acts of encryption research", with
a laundry-list of factors which are used to determine the
permissibility.
The important thing to understand is that these are defenses.
This means the RIAA still gets to drag someone into court and wage a
legal war of attrition, while the defense are argued. That's very,
very, expen$$$ive.
Protesting like this does nothing except isolating them from the mainstream
By definition, by its very concept, supporting
free speech means one is in favor of
protecting the rights of that which
is contrary to mainstream acceptability.
This is not posturing. This is not bragging.
This is an inherent aspect of the concept itself.
As the saying goes, inoffensive speech needs
no protection, because no-one tries to censor it.
He has re-invented the replay
cryptographic attack. In technical terms,
he proposes to store the challenges and
the responses, and if a matching
challenge is found, then
replay the correct response.
The technical flaw is that it's possible that
the number of different challenges is large
enough so that there will not have a matching
stored response, or one will
be unable to store all
the challenge and response data.
(I don't know if this size problem is the
case with AIM, but it's the standard
way of dealing with this system)
Consider this: $10,000, at $250/hour, is
one work week for a skilled patent
lawyer. Compare this to the amount of money
and time Amazon must have spent litigating
the patent.
And how much would a killer prior art be worth
to Barnes and Noble?
Essentially, they offered a prize which is
very much peanuts compared to the cost and
value of this patent. And not a lot to
motivate a professional patent person to
take it on (except just for the challenge)
What they did was to wager that an amateur
would not find something that their lawyers
hadn't already found. And they could make
great publicity out of the offer.
That's not a bad bet.
E-gold is nice packaging, no doubt about that.
But there is nothing especially revolutionary, global, anonymous,
or e-commerce world-changing about it.
It's a gold-metal mutual fund. That's all it is.
You pay dollars (or something else) to buy shares of the fund.
The fund uses those dollars (or other) to buy gold. You redeem
your shares. The fund sells some gold.
This happens every day. Calling the shares grams doesn't
change this. But there is nothing earth-shaking about it. The
mutual-fund industry has existed for decades (and gets along quite
nicely with the Feds, and even other governments).
E-gold will allow you to buy or redeem small amounts of shares,
electronically. That's nice. It's even useful. More power to them.
It's a service that other mutual fund companies would
do well to adopt.
But this doesn't change the world, or even matter dramatically for
privacy
Argh! Declan McCullagh is at it again. It's important to
understand why it matters that e-gold the company wasn't
raided. One company which used the services of E-gold was
raided. When the article states:
One possibility is a broader investigation directed at some
users of e-gold, which is less anonymous than cash but more
anonymous than credit cards.
This is a complete speculation based on the politics of the
reporter. There's absolutely no
evidence to support it at all. It's
just used to insert a generic biolerplate to insinuate about how
... it's possible that the feds don't exactly approve of a system
that's more privacy-protective than the heavily regulated banking
system.
But it's utterly certain that there was no
evidence to support claim. In fact, the evidence argues against it,
because E-gold the company wasn't raided.
ONE service company ("Gold-Age"),
a single solitary company that resells
e-gold, was raided, for alleged fraud. Hyping this up into a federal
attack on anonymity is sensationalism at its worst.
Congress has required, for instance, that schools and libraries who
want to take advantage of lucrative e-Rate funding for their
networking projects employ content-filtering software.
The same basic
mechanism (content is chosen before it reaches the viewer),
but with very different motivations. [emphasis added]
I think there's a reasoning error here, caused by the
problematic usage of the word filtering to mean both
censorware and what I'd call personalization.
There aren't the "same basic mechanism". They are fundamentally
different mechanisms, because they are trying to solve different
problems. I don't think that I will lose my innocence, that I
will be scarred for life, that civilization will be corrupted... if
I see an article by Jon Katz when I don't want to. Finding
information which one wants (personalization) involves
dramatically different trade-offs than being prevented by an
authority from reading information that the authority thinks
is mentally harmful (censorware). It's in fact a
different mechanism, with only superficial similarity.
To see this, note that NONE of the personalization programs require
banning anonymizers so that you can't escape the control of the program.
The first thing you must do is to
read your employment contract very carefully.
Pay particular attention to the "Inventions"
clause. I cannot stress this enough.
Very often, you will have signed away all
intellectual rights to inventions which
could be useful to your employer
if developed on company time.
I say: DO NOT TOUCH THIS CLIENT PROJECT. DO NOT.
The potential legal entanglement is frightening.
Do not hear about it, do not get mail about it,
don't share a pizza with the people
working on it.
If you're about to be finished yourself, and
you say you are just about one work-week
from completion, take a two-week vacation and
get it done. Surely that's not too
much to do for your long-term project.
"entertainment center for the dolphins"???
on
Uplifting Dolphins
·
· Score: 2
The underwater touchscreen is the first of its kind. It's made up of
an infrared beam grid mounted onto the tank window and a monitor
screen that faces the dolphins....
"The touchscreen is a kind of entertainment center for the dolphins,"...
Remember the web-browser for the birds, literally, from
the Slashdot story:
The Internet For Parrots ?
Now we have a touchscreen
entertainment center for the dolphins.
Things are getting out of hand. What's next? Using computer-controlled
motors on arctic ice-blocks so penguins can play Tetris?
The District Court concluded that noncommercial home
use recording of material broadcast over the public airwaves was a
fair use of copyrighted works and did not constitute copyright
infringement. It emphasized the fact that the material was broadcast
free to the public at large, the noncommercial character of the use,
and the private character of the activity conducted entirely within
the home. Moreover, the court found that the purpose of this use
served the public interest in increasing access to television
programming, an interest that "is consistent with the First Amendment
policy of providing the fullest possible access to information through
the public airwaves.... Even when an entire copyrighted work was
recorded, [464 U.S. 417, 426] the District Court regarded the copying
as fair use "because there is no accompanying reduction in the market
for `plaintiff's original work.'"
Honestly, the same can't easily be said about Napster-based exchanges.
This decision discusses Napster and
contributory and vicarious copyright infringement. A key part:
We observe that Napster's actual, specific knowledge of direct
infringement renders Sony's holding of limited assistance to
Napster. We are compelled to make a clear distinction between the
architecture of the Napster system and Napster's conduct in relation
to the operational capacity of the system.
The censorware-makers are aware of anonymizers. Thus,
censorware often blacklists them too, in all categories.
The same holds for sites which offer language-translation services.
(though your point about using secure connections is a good
work-around, until it gets plugged too...).
See my report
And you won't find any censorware reports on
censorware.org these days.
Michael Sims (yes, that Michael Sims, Slashdot YRO editor)
shut-down the
censorware.org site, in a failed
coup d'etat to control Censorware Project.
Some of the material is now on a different site,
censorware.NET.
The history is given in my essay below. Michael Sims has taken to
abusing his Slashdot editorial position, to downgrade my postings
whenever I mention what he did. Maybe this'll slip through. It's worth
burning the karma over it.
Note censorware.NET
would also like Michael Sims to stop confusing people over the domain names.
No luck so far.
The problem is the size of the blacklist.
Think of how many items have to be
on it. Hundreds of thousands.
Maybe millions. That's a major database
project, and no existing censorware
company has been able to run such a thing
even nearly successfully.
Slashdot Mirror
http://www.lawmemo.com/ip/sum/iplm/i20001107.htm
And with database treaties, this will probably become even more of an issueDisclaimer: I'm not a lawyer, just interested in the topic.
This is the site set up by SDMI for the challenge, not the researcher's paper.
It's a general miror site, part of http://diddl.firehead.org/censor/
There will always be a few oldies around, just like eight-track players and reel-to-reel players are still around. But unless people stop buying new players, which isn't going to happen, SDMI-possesed players will spread.
Eventually, your old CD players will break. They aren't built to last for eternity. Yes, there may be the odd one which lasts a long time, but unless you're going to turn them into family heirlooms, new CD players will be bought
And every single one of them will have SDMI.
The important thing to understand is that these are defenses. This means the RIAA still gets to drag someone into court and wage a legal war of attrition, while the defense are argued. That's very, very, expen$$$ive.
This is not posturing. This is not bragging. This is an inherent aspect of the concept itself.
As the saying goes, inoffensive speech needs no protection, because no-one tries to censor it.
The technical flaw is that it's possible that the number of different challenges is large enough so that there will not have a matching stored response, or one will be unable to store all the challenge and response data. (I don't know if this size problem is the case with AIM, but it's the standard way of dealing with this system)
Reading the Fine Print on the Cybercrime Treaty
That was the exact same article
And how much would a killer prior art be worth to Barnes and Noble?
Essentially, they offered a prize which is very much peanuts compared to the cost and value of this patent. And not a lot to motivate a professional patent person to take it on (except just for the challenge)
What they did was to wager that an amateur would not find something that their lawyers hadn't already found. And they could make great publicity out of the offer.
That's not a bad bet.
The story that Al Gore claimed to have invented the Internet has been thoroughly debunked by Phil Agre in http://commons.somewhere.com/rre/2000/RRE.Al.Gore. and.the.Inte.html
and
rebutted further later
That meme was a creation of Declan McCullagh, a "reporter" for Wired News who is a fanatical Libertarian so extreme that he managed to have a chapter of a book using him as a poster-boy for Libertarian ideologues If you think I'm just flaming, this aspect of his fabricated story being a Liberatarian hit-piece was extensively discussed in a debunking by Salon
After Declan McCullagh was repeatedly taken to task for his hatchet-job, over more than year, by everyone who was there, from Dave Farber to Robert Kahn and Vinton Cerf he finally grudgingly retracted
But people still repeat it, because urban legends never die.
C jokes are about pointers to structures of arrays of arrays of pointers to structures.
Perl jokes are, as we just saw, /(?!\A)x/m
"a\nxb\n" =~
The regexps are much more useful in day-to-day life.
It's a gold-metal mutual fund. That's all it is. You pay dollars (or something else) to buy shares of the fund. The fund uses those dollars (or other) to buy gold. You redeem your shares. The fund sells some gold.
This happens every day. Calling the shares grams doesn't change this. But there is nothing earth-shaking about it. The mutual-fund industry has existed for decades (and gets along quite nicely with the Feds, and even other governments).
E-gold will allow you to buy or redeem small amounts of shares, electronically. That's nice. It's even useful. More power to them. It's a service that other mutual fund companies would do well to adopt.
But this doesn't change the world, or even matter dramatically for privacy
But it's utterly certain that there was no evidence to support claim. In fact, the evidence argues against it, because E-gold the company wasn't raided. ONE service company ("Gold-Age"), a single solitary company that resells e-gold, was raided, for alleged fraud. Hyping this up into a federal attack on anonymity is sensationalism at its worst.
The Internet is not television, no matter how much advertisers are trying to make it that way.
To see this, note that NONE of the personalization programs require banning anonymizers so that you can't escape the control of the program.
Very often, you will have signed away all intellectual rights to inventions which could be useful to your employer if developed on company time.
I say: DO NOT TOUCH THIS CLIENT PROJECT. DO NOT. The potential legal entanglement is frightening.
Do not hear about it, do not get mail about it, don't share a pizza with the people working on it.
If you're about to be finished yourself, and you say you are just about one work-week from completion, take a two-week vacation and get it done. Surely that's not too much to do for your long-term project.
Sig: My Latest Censorware Essay:
What Happened To The Censorware Project (censorware.org)
Things are getting out of hand. What's next? Using computer-controlled motors on arctic ice-blocks so penguins can play Tetris?
Sig: My Latest Censorware Essay:
What Happened To The Censorware Project (censorware.org)
More seriously, for the pragmatic reason that the decision SONY CORP. v. UNIVERSAL CITY STUDIOS, INC doesn't apply, I think it has more to do with:
Honestly, the same can't easily be said about Napster-based exchanges.
Sig: My Latest Censorware Essay:
What Happened To The Censorware Project (censorware.org)
It's important to read The Appeals Court decision on Napster
This decision discusses Napster and contributory and vicarious copyright infringement. A key part:
Sig: My Latest Censorware Essay:What Happened To The Censorware Project (censorware.org)
See my report
SmartFilter's Greatest Evils - censorware and privacy/anonymity
Sig: My Latest Censorware Essay:
What Happened To The Censorware Project (censorware.org)
And you won't find any censorware reports on censorware.org these days. Michael Sims (yes, that Michael Sims, Slashdot YRO editor) shut-down the censorware.org site, in a failed coup d'etat to control Censorware Project. Some of the material is now on a different site, censorware.NET.
The history is given in my essay below. Michael Sims has taken to abusing his Slashdot editorial position, to downgrade my postings whenever I mention what he did. Maybe this'll slip through. It's worth burning the karma over it.
Note censorware.NET would also like Michael Sims to stop confusing people over the domain names. No luck so far.
Sig: My Latest Censorware Essay:
What Happened To The Censorware Project (censorware.org)
Web-Filter Data From Schools Is Put Up for Sale by Company
Sig: My Latest Censorware Essay:
What Happened To The Censorware Project (censorware.org)
SmartFilter's Greatest Evils - censorware and privacy/anonymity
Latest Censorware Essay:
What Happened To The Censorware Project (censorware.org)
The problem is the size of the blacklist. Think of how many items have to be on it. Hundreds of thousands. Maybe millions. That's a major database project, and no existing censorware company has been able to run such a thing even nearly successfully.