That's true, but the distinction is between the public and the private.
People, as private citizens, are violating rights when they pirate. That is government's responsibility to fight in whatever ways it can. But the critical bit is, the government's hands must be tied in the rights it violates in the pursuit of its law enforcement goals. That is why the Betamax suit failed.
RIAA companies do not have a right to profit from their work. They have a right to try and profit from it, but their profit motive cannot possibly trump someone's rights.
I, on the other hand, have a right to transfer arbitrary IP packets with as many friends as I like, provided that our packets don't directly contravene my ISP's TOS.
That is why "legitimate use" is the litmus test. The idea is not to decide whether the good of torrents outweighs the bad, but to decide whether anyone's rights are violated by banning them, either in law or in code. If the answer is yes, then all the money in the world can't make such a ban legitimate.
Weeeeeell, you might have to be a supar leet haxor.
You're quite right though. The filter could just be all "If there's any artistic merit (or hell, any dynamic range even) then it's ok to play."
A real-time media player might not be implementable in JavaScript, but a format converter certainly can. If the output stream has a filter which somehow "recognizes" copyrighted content, then the filter must either a: look for some sort of watermark that all RIAA music carries, or b: contain some exhaustive catalogue of "signatures" for all RIAA music. If (a), then the watermark must be removable by turning the output stream into some different output stream which is indistinguishable from the original by a human, or else the watermarking process itself must entail some noticeable degradation or modification of the stream. And I think everyone can agree that (b) would be a pipe dream.
If there is 1% of the voting public who cares enough to mail in letters, what, if anything, does that imply about the number of people who won't write a letter but will simply vote for the other guy?
Your analysis is suspect.
We don't need to tamper with hardware. There are two possibilities:
a) some subsystem of the computer (natively running code, code in a VM, hell, even a reasonable text editor macro language...) provides enough functionality to implement a Turing machine (or any VM, as they're all computationally equivalent)
or
b) no subsystem of the computer provides enough functionality.
if (a), then it's inevitable that the DRM-restricted computer can be manipulated into running a virtualization of a DRM-free computer. If (b), then the computer is not able to run 'arbitrary code', and it can't possibly function as much more than a standalone media player and Internet appliance (with no scriptable languages in the web browser!) because it will be impossible to write 'software' for it in any meaningful sense of the word.
Then the computer is no longer able to perform arbitrary or "general-purpose" computing.
Either the computer can virtualize its computation and obfuscate its output enough to get around such a filter, or it must be unable to perform general computation. As far as I know, the Incompleteness theorem guarantees this.
It doesn't matter. The DRM can go as deep as they like but they will never be able to escape virtualization.
Alan Turing has already explained, better than any of us ever could, why their goals are impossible.
a free market has no responsibility to provide for people's needs in the first place. Nor has it any responsibility to explore space.
Would you prefer, then, to compare the achievements of the Soviet space program against the achievements of those American space flights which were strictly entrepreneurial in nature and did not receive any federal funding? If not, we're still talking apples and oranges.
You've never met me, but you know what planet I live on?
My point (hyperbole and all) is that the human sacrifices that command economies make are easily counted, because they all come out of one big portfolio. A free market is quite capable of failing to provide for people's needs, but to compare the two is very apples-to-oranges because the shortcomings of a market are taken a priori to be externalities.
Most simply, if we're going to count the Soviets' mistreatment of their citizens as part of the price of their space program, then we should count the fact that homelessness exists as part of the price of ours. Is that totally unreasonable?
The Soviets had many firsts in the space race, but in return other parts of the economy suffered tremendously and people went without a lot of things, some of them necessities, so that additional resources could be poured into the government run space program. People go without necessities in a free market all the time. The difference is that in a market economy, they can be blamed for their own plight. We starved plenty of kids in order to beat the Russians to the moon, it just wasn't so obviously the government's fault.
"it will always be cheaper and easier to send lots of data across a small distance than to send lots of data across a long distance."
That depends. I frequently stream media between my machines at home, and they have separate public IPs from the same cable modem. So the data goes out the PC, through the modem, up to the cableco's CMTS, back down the coax, through the modem again, and into the Wii, where I watch the cartoons on the big TV. I could replace my home switch with a proper router, but meh.
As bandwidth gets cheaper, you'll see more and more people trading efficiency for convenience.
Well observed. The less attractive the RIAA makes their product by harrassing its consumers, the more of a competitive advantage Creative Commons and Copyleft materials will have.
Larry Lessig takes the same position here: www.youtube.com/watch?v=7Q25-S7jzgs
and draws a parallel here to how ASCAP lost against BMI.
getting a working self-replicating program by slamming on the keyboard randomly, well, that's a lot of slamming and what is more likely, that it happened randomly, or that it was created? If you look at what's in range of the Hubble telescope and make a guesstimate at the number of planets out there, well, that's a lot of slamming.
But if Donald Trump can trakemark "You're fired!" under a specific context, I'm pretty sure that "cyberlaw" can also be trademarked. Only if he plans on trademarking 'cyberlaw' as a word for something *other* than what we've been using the word to mean for the past 15 years.
Basically: if he's going to claim it as his word, he'd better have his own definition for it.
Slashdot Mirror
Does this mean we can squeeze a few more useful years out of Stephen Hawking?
lol.
But the pre-existing Fair Drinking law guarantees me the right to pour my Coke wherever I like, right?
8. ???
9. Profit!
People, as private citizens, are violating rights when they pirate. That is government's responsibility to fight in whatever ways it can. But the critical bit is, the government's hands must be tied in the rights it violates in the pursuit of its law enforcement goals. That is why the Betamax suit failed.
RIAA companies do not have a right to profit from their work. They have a right to try and profit from it, but their profit motive cannot possibly trump someone's rights. I, on the other hand, have a right to transfer arbitrary IP packets with as many friends as I like, provided that our packets don't directly contravene my ISP's TOS. That is why "legitimate use" is the litmus test. The idea is not to decide whether the good of torrents outweighs the bad, but to decide whether anyone's rights are violated by banning them, either in law or in code. If the answer is yes, then all the money in the world can't make such a ban legitimate.
You could probably accomplish all this with an HC-11 microcontroller. No need to throw anything nearly that fast at it.
So, does it run Android?
OH CRAP I LOST THE GAME!
Weeeeeell, you might have to be a supar leet haxor. You're quite right though. The filter could just be all "If there's any artistic merit (or hell, any dynamic range even) then it's ok to play."
A real-time media player might not be implementable in JavaScript, but a format converter certainly can. If the output stream has a filter which somehow "recognizes" copyrighted content, then the filter must either a: look for some sort of watermark that all RIAA music carries, or b: contain some exhaustive catalogue of "signatures" for all RIAA music. If (a), then the watermark must be removable by turning the output stream into some different output stream which is indistinguishable from the original by a human, or else the watermarking process itself must entail some noticeable degradation or modification of the stream. And I think everyone can agree that (b) would be a pipe dream.
http://www.internet2.edu/
Accuses others of trolling... check. ...Test results are ready. It's an AC!
Uses words like "newfag"... check.
If there is 1% of the voting public who cares enough to mail in letters, what, if anything, does that imply about the number of people who won't write a letter but will simply vote for the other guy? Your analysis is suspect.
We don't need to tamper with hardware. There are two possibilities:
a) some subsystem of the computer (natively running code, code in a VM, hell, even a reasonable text editor macro language...) provides enough functionality to implement a Turing machine (or any VM, as they're all computationally equivalent)
or
b) no subsystem of the computer provides enough functionality.
if (a), then it's inevitable that the DRM-restricted computer can be manipulated into running a virtualization of a DRM-free computer. If (b), then the computer is not able to run 'arbitrary code', and it can't possibly function as much more than a standalone media player and Internet appliance (with no scriptable languages in the web browser!) because it will be impossible to write 'software' for it in any meaningful sense of the word.
Then the computer is no longer able to perform arbitrary or "general-purpose" computing. Either the computer can virtualize its computation and obfuscate its output enough to get around such a filter, or it must be unable to perform general computation. As far as I know, the Incompleteness theorem guarantees this.
It doesn't matter. The DRM can go as deep as they like but they will never be able to escape virtualization. Alan Turing has already explained, better than any of us ever could, why their goals are impossible.
Would you prefer, then, to compare the achievements of the Soviet space program against the achievements of those American space flights which were strictly entrepreneurial in nature and did not receive any federal funding? If not, we're still talking apples and oranges.
You've never met me, but you know what planet I live on?
My point (hyperbole and all) is that the human sacrifices that command economies make are easily counted, because they all come out of one big portfolio. A free market is quite capable of failing to provide for people's needs, but to compare the two is very apples-to-oranges because the shortcomings of a market are taken a priori to be externalities.
Most simply, if we're going to count the Soviets' mistreatment of their citizens as part of the price of their space program, then we should count the fact that homelessness exists as part of the price of ours. Is that totally unreasonable?
An ISP has to be pretty vigilant in policing its own users, or it's liable to get its SMTP servers blacklisted, or even blackholed.
As far as I know, most major email providers will at least pull some Bayesian filtering on their outbounds.
"it will always be cheaper and easier to send lots of data across a small distance than to send lots of data across a long distance." That depends. I frequently stream media between my machines at home, and they have separate public IPs from the same cable modem. So the data goes out the PC, through the modem, up to the cableco's CMTS, back down the coax, through the modem again, and into the Wii, where I watch the cartoons on the big TV. I could replace my home switch with a proper router, but meh. As bandwidth gets cheaper, you'll see more and more people trading efficiency for convenience.
Well observed. The less attractive the RIAA makes their product by harrassing its consumers, the more of a competitive advantage Creative Commons and Copyleft materials will have. Larry Lessig takes the same position here: www.youtube.com/watch?v=7Q25-S7jzgs and draws a parallel here to how ASCAP lost against BMI.