Even in the event that the "less than 400K subscribers" loophole doesn't manage to give people enough freedom, there's always the various darknets. And if the freedom is for copyright infringement, actual physical "sharing parties".
Really, if you don't have enough freedom to break the law, you probably don't have enough freedom. (And before the comprehension-disabled jump on me for encouraging crime, I did not imply that people should break the law --- just that they should have enough personal freedom that they could.)
Most academic journals are well-known within the fields they serve. They don't need additional "reputation points" by being cited in some student's footnotes.
Most proprietary software which is pirated is also well-known. So what? Your post doesn't seem to address anything which I said.
And now I take the opportunity to produce, as an example, the propensity of these large well-known software companies for producing free "lite" editions of their software. If your comment was 100% correct, they wouldn't bother to do this, would they? (BTW, journals do this also. Nature, for example, will occasionally distribute a hot article for free.)
> How does the publisher earn anything on that transaction?
In a way similar to the way that commercial software companies would prefer that the student pirate their software if he wouldn't have bought it anyway (and therefore the software will be on the student's resume, and presumably bought/used by businesses who employ the student).
In the case of a journal, even from pirated copies the publisher gains citations which increase the reputation of the journal (and therefore the likelihood it will be bought by a library).
They can't have knowledge of infringement because only the rightsholder knows what licenses he has given. The ISP doesn't know that. Oh, and real infringement can only be decided in a court of law because of those pesky exceptions like fair use/dealing.
> or notice of infringement
Great, so we're in the DMCA-mode, where it's trivially easy to game the system because there is no real penalty for delivering a mistaken notice of infringement?
Ah, but there are some fair uses which require the original quality --- for example, if you wanted to comment on how much better the HD experience was compared to lower resolutions. In this case, it would be possible to use a small portion of the whole frame of the movie for fair use ("See how much better that sword looks?"). See my previous post.
> with a "degradation signature"... a list of the "guilty".
Watermarking schemes have an even worse record of success than DRM schemes. I don't buy it, sorry. And it wouldn't even be a list of the guilty, because every one would have been legally authorized (by "fair use") to distribute his little part of the work. The guilty party is the person who strings the parts together, not the people who used them for "fair use" (I am assuming a scenario where every person actually bothers to do the work to make a real fair use of his small part of the work).
And anyway, as was said above, this is all more or less an academic exercise.
Not end to anything, rather, start of rapid change
on
The End of Free
·
· Score: 1
> But now, it seems, things are changing all over again....
If anything, the quoted material in the summary just emphasizes what we all probably understand (except, perhaps, for the youngest among us): that the rhythm of change is beating faster and faster as time goes on.
> Yet lack of uptake by young people will hardly stop the rush to apps.
And so, it seems that there will be yet another change --- when those young people become older.
This isn't the end of anything, especially of "free", rather, it's the start of ever more rapid changes.
I think you're confusing the technical ability to break encryption with its legality. It seems that the new proposed legislation would allow you to legally break the DRM encryption to use something under fair use. It doesn't say that whoever put DRM must tell you how to break it or give you keys.
Besides, I don't see the point of your scheme. According to Article 46, paragraph II of the proposed law, fair use allows you to make a whole copy of a protected work to "ensure its portability or interoperability", so you wouldn't even need a lot of people, you could do the whole thing yourself (say, to encode in a different format).
I based my post on the following from Doctorow's post:
And what's more, any rightsholder who adds a DRM that restricts things that are allowed by Brazilian copyright laws ("fair dealing" or "fair use") faces a fine.
This probably makes things clearer to you --- although you might have a much better understanding of the proposed law than Doctorow, himself, if you understand the original language.
Your reply seems to misunderstand the thrust of my post(s): the reasonableness of "fair use" in a particular case is independent of what other parts of the work have been used for "fair use" in other cases. The content owners would have to justify to the court why they don't have to release every single segment --- to different individuals (i.e., they'd have to prove to the court that this was a conspiracy to copy the whole work).
There is no serious fear of a "secure" DRM ever existing - the companies aren't skilled enough to fix trivial flaws, so there's not the slightest possibility of them even reaching the point of making things difficult.
The DRM for the Playstation 3 proves you wrong. DRM can never be made absolutely secure, however, it certainly can be made secure against opponents with limited enough resources. I do agree, however, that the vast majority of "companies aren't skilled enough", and therefore, my observation is most likely academic rather than practical.
It's "at odds" with the concept of DRM, itself, actually, because the DRM system has to enable limited copying (for fair use --- see my comment above).
This is just a proposal for the law, because of its incompatibility with the status quo of global commerce (as you point out one of many problems) I think it has very, very little possibility of actually becoming law in its proposed form. Unfortunately....
Ah, before anyone jumps on me about the "resolution issue" --- that the "fair use" might be limited to X seconds at a lower resolution --- my impression is that fair use can also cover the case where only a small part of a visual work (e.g., 1/25 of the full frame of a movie) is used at the original resolution. I.e., my original comment is valid, just that the piecing together might have to be both in the time and the space domain.
This is a masterful inversion of the motivation behind the treaty which more or less makes it impossible to implement any kind of reasonable (in the eyes of the likes of **AAs) DRM --- because the DRM has to enable at least limited copying since fair use/dealing is one of the exceptions the DRM has to enable. If everyone can copy X seconds out of of a work (X > 0), then if enough people join forces, they can copy a work of any finite length.
I find it interesting that this is another, alternative, way that spam encourages the development of AI --- just think of the fun of having a reply-bot which could string these guys out for as long as the bot passes the Turing test!
Do you usually spout off without actually trying to figure out the facts, basing your opinion on how you like / dislike the parties involved ("a decent company")?
If you'd have read the previous posts, you'd have easily found a link to how Netapp vs. Sun/Oracle is going in court. It seems that the Patent Office and the courts seem to think that NetApp's patents are mainly invalid because of prior art. Oooops!
On the other hand, I'm basing this on Sun/Oracle's info page about the lawsuit. Perhaps you'd like to show us the other side?
Okay, so I publish the raw database online (in non-copyrightable form), then let people individually "sample" the database to build their own "creative" sequences to publish under CC. Crowdsource'd.
This was exactly what I was thinking about when I wrote my post, which is why I specifically used the term "organize".
Would that work?
Only the gods of the legal system know that. One supposes that it wouldn't be an easy fight, especially since we wouldn't be a large, rich corporation.
> laugh you out of court... and the intent of the law is that you can't do that.
As I previously stated, I understand that. But this still doesn't address the point I was making, which is that that law, as stated, is stupidly stated. It requires a lot of input from the judge/jury to make it "work" the way it is intended.
> The law system in general frowns heavily on people that try to trick it.
I don't know. It's taking a really long time for the US legal system to react against the spamming of RIAA. E.g., I'm waiting impatiently to see what happens in the third Thomas trial, if it comes to that.
> the only thing you can't do is claim copyright on > the sum of all outputs like the geniuses here on > Slashdot keep proposing
So if I pick and choose only 50% of the outputs, using my human "creativity", I'm OK, then.
Somehow I don't think this works, at least not the way you think it does. And if you are thinking of replying that there are too many outputs for me to claim I looked at all of them, what happens if I decide to split the work with a million other people?
It's not at all clear to me that in this day and age, I couldn't manage to organize the CC licensing of most listenable music sequences. Especially since there is precedent for even very short music sequences (5 notes comes to mind) being given copyright protection.
Oh, so if I invent an algorithm which inputs (non-copyrightable) facts like measurements of people's tonal preferences and use it to transform random white noise into a nice musical composition (i.e., every different random input give me a different nice musical output), if I reveal that a particular composition was created in this way it cannot be copyrightable, but if I would have presented that composition as my own creative work it would be copyrightable?
Don't you find that strange?
Another example: I invent an algorithm which manages to select pleasantly colored subregions of the Mandelbrot set (based on random color maps and a search algorithm + simulated-human-preference rating algorithm).
Yes, and as we know, solid state disks lose performance when files are fragmented, because, when the disk spins, err, i mean the electrons, the heat goes around, ah, fuck it.
Your reply was witty, but all of the EEs here on Slashdot will tell you that, for example, trying to write to random addresses in, for example, DDR2 memory when you could have written the same data to contiguous addresses, is a very bad idea. The only reason programmers don't feel this difference quite so much is that the cache hierarchy of the CPU is babying them.
Slashdot Mirror
Even in the event that the "less than 400K subscribers" loophole doesn't manage to give people enough freedom, there's always the various darknets. And if the freedom is for copyright infringement, actual physical "sharing parties".
Really, if you don't have enough freedom to break the law, you probably don't have enough freedom. (And before the comprehension-disabled jump on me for encouraging crime, I did not imply that people should break the law --- just that they should have enough personal freedom that they could.)
Most academic journals are well-known within the fields they serve. They don't need additional "reputation points" by being cited in some student's footnotes.
Most proprietary software which is pirated is also well-known. So what? Your post doesn't seem to address anything which I said.
And now I take the opportunity to produce, as an example, the propensity of these large well-known software companies for producing free "lite" editions of their software. If your comment was 100% correct, they wouldn't bother to do this, would they? (BTW, journals do this also. Nature, for example, will occasionally distribute a hot article for free.)
Somehow, I don't think you work in marketing.
> How does the publisher earn anything on that transaction?
In a way similar to the way that commercial software companies would prefer that the student pirate their software if he wouldn't have bought it anyway (and therefore the software will be on the student's resume, and presumably bought/used by businesses who employ the student).
In the case of a journal, even from pirated copies the publisher gains citations which increase the reputation of the journal (and therefore the likelihood it will be bought by a library).
Your post and the GP have almost made me regret posting in this discussion, so I can't mod you both Funny.
Thanks for brightening up my day!
> ISPs that have knowledge
They can't have knowledge of infringement because only the rightsholder knows what licenses he has given. The ISP doesn't know that. Oh, and real infringement can only be decided in a court of law because of those pesky exceptions like fair use/dealing.
> or notice of infringement
Great, so we're in the DMCA-mode, where it's trivially easy to game the system because there is no real penalty for delivering a mistaken notice of infringement?
Geez, the Slashdot editors couldn't even spell "anal" when it was even on-topic.
> with "fair use" degraded quality
Ah, but there are some fair uses which require the original quality --- for example, if you wanted to comment on how much better the HD experience was compared to lower resolutions. In this case, it would be possible to use a small portion of the whole frame of the movie for fair use ("See how much better that sword looks?"). See my previous post.
> with a "degradation signature" ... a list of the "guilty".
Watermarking schemes have an even worse record of success than DRM schemes. I don't buy it, sorry. And it wouldn't even be a list of the guilty, because every one would have been legally authorized (by "fair use") to distribute his little part of the work. The guilty party is the person who strings the parts together, not the people who used them for "fair use" (I am assuming a scenario where every person actually bothers to do the work to make a real fair use of his small part of the work).
And anyway, as was said above, this is all more or less an academic exercise.
> But now, it seems, things are changing all over again. ...
If anything, the quoted material in the summary just emphasizes what we all probably understand (except, perhaps, for the youngest among us): that the rhythm of change is beating faster and faster as time goes on.
> Yet lack of uptake by young people will hardly stop the rush to apps.
And so, it seems that there will be yet another change --- when those young people become older.
This isn't the end of anything, especially of "free", rather, it's the start of ever more rapid changes.
(and yes, I didn't read TFA)...
> reasonable (in the eyes of the likes of **AAs) DRM
>> Oxymoron detected
But we all knew already that the **AAs are morons!
I think you're confusing the technical ability to break encryption with its legality. It seems that the new proposed legislation would allow you to legally break the DRM encryption to use something under fair use. It doesn't say that whoever put DRM must tell you how to break it or give you keys.
Besides, I don't see the point of your scheme. According to Article 46, paragraph II of the proposed law, fair use allows you to make a whole copy of a protected work to "ensure its portability or interoperability", so you wouldn't even need a lot of people, you could do the whole thing yourself (say, to encode in a different format).
I based my post on the following from Doctorow's post:
And what's more, any rightsholder who adds a DRM that restricts things that are allowed by Brazilian copyright laws ("fair dealing" or "fair use") faces a fine.
This probably makes things clearer to you --- although you might have a much better understanding of the proposed law than Doctorow, himself, if you understand the original language.
Your reply seems to misunderstand the thrust of my post(s): the reasonableness of "fair use" in a particular case is independent of what other parts of the work have been used for "fair use" in other cases. The content owners would have to justify to the court why they don't have to release every single segment --- to different individuals (i.e., they'd have to prove to the court that this was a conspiracy to copy the whole work).
There is no serious fear of a "secure" DRM ever existing - the companies aren't skilled enough to fix trivial flaws, so there's not the slightest possibility of them even reaching the point of making things difficult.
The DRM for the Playstation 3 proves you wrong. DRM can never be made absolutely secure, however, it certainly can be made secure against opponents with limited enough resources. I do agree, however, that the vast majority of "companies aren't skilled enough", and therefore, my observation is most likely academic rather than practical.
> but isn't it at odds with modern hardware?
It's "at odds" with the concept of DRM, itself, actually, because the DRM system has to enable limited copying (for fair use --- see my comment above).
This is just a proposal for the law, because of its incompatibility with the status quo of global commerce (as you point out one of many problems) I think it has very, very little possibility of actually becoming law in its proposed form. Unfortunately....
Ah, before anyone jumps on me about the "resolution issue" --- that the "fair use" might be limited to X seconds at a lower resolution --- my impression is that fair use can also cover the case where only a small part of a visual work (e.g., 1/25 of the full frame of a movie) is used at the original resolution. I.e., my original comment is valid, just that the piecing together might have to be both in the time and the space domain.
This is a masterful inversion of the motivation behind the treaty which more or less makes it impossible to implement any kind of reasonable (in the eyes of the likes of **AAs) DRM --- because the DRM has to enable at least limited copying since fair use/dealing is one of the exceptions the DRM has to enable. If everyone can copy X seconds out of of a work (X > 0), then if enough people join forces, they can copy a work of any finite length.
That which is not dead may eternal lie
And in strange eons even death may die
Burma Shave!
I find it interesting that this is another, alternative, way that spam encourages the development of AI --- just think of the fun of having a reply-bot which could string these guys out for as long as the bot passes the Turing test!
Do you usually spout off without actually trying to figure out the facts, basing your opinion on how you like / dislike the parties involved ("a decent company")?
If you'd have read the previous posts, you'd have easily found a link to how Netapp vs. Sun/Oracle is going in court. It seems that the Patent Office and the courts seem to think that NetApp's patents are mainly invalid because of prior art. Oooops!
On the other hand, I'm basing this on Sun/Oracle's info page about the lawsuit. Perhaps you'd like to show us the other side?
Okay, so I publish the raw database online (in non-copyrightable form), then let people individually "sample" the database to build their own "creative" sequences to publish under CC. Crowdsource'd.
This was exactly what I was thinking about when I wrote my post, which is why I specifically used the term "organize".
Would that work?
Only the gods of the legal system know that. One supposes that it wouldn't be an easy fight, especially since we wouldn't be a large, rich corporation.
> laugh you out of court ... and the intent of the law is that you can't do that.
As I previously stated, I understand that. But this still doesn't address the point I was making, which is that that law, as stated, is stupidly stated. It requires a lot of input from the judge/jury to make it "work" the way it is intended.
> The law system in general frowns heavily on people that try to trick it.
I don't know. It's taking a really long time for the US legal system to react against the spamming of RIAA. E.g., I'm waiting impatiently to see what happens in the third Thomas trial, if it comes to that.
> the only thing you can't do is claim copyright on
> the sum of all outputs like the geniuses here on
> Slashdot keep proposing
So if I pick and choose only 50% of the outputs, using my human "creativity", I'm OK, then.
Somehow I don't think this works, at least not the way you think it does. And if you are thinking of replying that there are too many outputs for me to claim I looked at all of them, what happens if I decide to split the work with a million other people?
It's not at all clear to me that in this day and age, I couldn't manage to organize the CC licensing of most listenable music sequences. Especially since there is precedent for even very short music sequences (5 notes comes to mind) being given copyright protection.
Oh, so if I invent an algorithm which inputs (non-copyrightable) facts like measurements of people's tonal preferences and use it to transform random white noise into a nice musical composition (i.e., every different random input give me a different nice musical output), if I reveal that a particular composition was created in this way it cannot be copyrightable, but if I would have presented that composition as my own creative work it would be copyrightable?
Don't you find that strange?
Another example: I invent an algorithm which manages to select pleasantly colored subregions of the Mandelbrot set (based on random color maps and a search algorithm + simulated-human-preference rating algorithm).
> Swedish copyright law states explicitly that machine generated things can't be copyrighted because they're not creative
I, for one, have never come across a piece of music which was generated by a machine without any intervention of human creative force.
By strict definition, either nothing comes under that classification, or most modern 3-D animated movies do come under that classification.
Yes, I know, the legal system doesn't work that way. Still, it seems to be a stupid law as you state it.
The author of this article should watch out that he doesn't start to be classed with, e.g., Randy Thornhill. Thornhill just loves publishing sensational stuff about various correlations.
Oh, yeah, and before I forget... there's an xkcd for that....
Yes, and as we know, solid state disks lose performance when files are fragmented, because, when the disk spins, err, i mean the electrons, the heat goes around, ah, fuck it.
Your reply was witty, but all of the EEs here on Slashdot will tell you that, for example, trying to write to random addresses in, for example, DDR2 memory when you could have written the same data to contiguous addresses, is a very bad idea. The only reason programmers don't feel this difference quite so much is that the cache hierarchy of the CPU is babying them.
> if the point of the process was to get a little self promotion
He really didn't plan very well about the server load, then, did he?
His score: Mobile technologies: +3; Web technologies: -5