I've done the same thing myself writing a lot of code. Debugging was not easy and keeping it current is a constant struggle. I tell you what, after I did all that work tracking down bugs, doing QA, removing obsolete features, adding new ones, I don't want anyone taking my hard work and applying it to their product. Fuck them, they can pay me. A lot. Would it be nice if everyone cooperated and shared and it was caring time all day long? Sure. Is it going to happen? No.
Yet some businesses, in certain circumstances, believe it is beneficial to them to publish their work as open-source. You should make a better argument than "in my personal case I didn't think it was worthwhile". It's obvious in your case that there wasn't any upside to you. Wouldn't you have reconsidered sharing your data with someone who had the capability of publishing in a way you couldn't (easily, at least; perhaps, say, on the iPhone?) and having him share profits with you?
The cooperation proposed by the poster you replied to wasn't necessarily based on businesses getting in touch with their spiritual/sharing/whatever side. If you wanted to refute his argument, you should have said that "maintaining the data is much harder than generating better interfaces or hardware devices, so there is little incentive for the companies to cooperate in this way". That's actually what you meant, right?
> Whereas with human astronaut, you're ethically limited to blood samples
I can't for the life of me see why it would be unethical to let the astronaut agree to have a muscle tissue biopsy. Or at least why it would be less ethical than blood sampling. Do you know something I don't?
> You also need to be careful what you say on the phone at work, or who you talk to.
IIRC, the US courts ruled that you do have an expectation of privacy for your telephone conversations from your workplace, even though it is "company equipment". And at the same time they ruled that you don't have any expectation of privacy for anything you do with a computer owned by your workplace (like sending email to a friend criticizing the boss).
This always struck me as totally bizarre. However, I think it was during an era where the use of (desktop) computers for (ephemeral) communication was much less ubiquitous. I'm waiting for someone to get fired for criticizing the boss over VoIP (or even IM) to see if the legal system will eventually fix this mess....
I don't think you should lose hope for at least another 11 months and probably more. I broke my wrist and its functionality improved for many months after I was free of the immobilization framework. Of course, it probably would be best if you continue doing physiotheraputic exercises even after the period which is usually believed to be the window of opportunity by conventional medicine (if your physiotherapy is anything like the one I got for my wrist, you have been given exercises to do by yourself). I don't have any problem with that, because I study aikido, so I get free "physiotherapy" for my wrist with every practice session.
I understand that my case is a bit different in that my problem was more joint flexibility rather than muscle strength, but I still think you are being premature. And of course, I wish you the best of luck with your recovery!
To bring in a different slant on your post, do you realize that most of the jurisdictions in which TPB is currently being pursued are civil, rather than common, law venues? Is your concern about precedent flavored with your being from a common law environment (Slashdot being US-centric, blah, blah...)?
OTOH the distinctions between common and civil seem to be slowly blurring as time progresses....
> that TPB will be setting the precedent for every other site.
You missed the whole point there. Given what I meant, they would only be setting precedent for sites which violently refused to cooperate to prevent copyright infringement (since that is the reason "nothing can save them").
The post I replied to is actually correct, technology will undermine every effort to regulate copyright infringement (except for the most draconian ones which would strip us of so many freedoms that getting the torrent we want would probably become uninteresting). For example, one could create a torrent for an encrypted file with the description "this might be BlockBusterMovieAvailableInStores or it might be a personal video I made of a speech about BoringPoliticalIssue". And then release the key only after a certain period. Bingo! Your tracker has been used for copyright infringement.
Anyway, if you are only running a tracker, there is no way you can really know what is the content of the files in the torrent unless you download them yourself. Your tracker can be used by people without regard to your attempts at regulation, unless you're going to dedicate a lot of effort and bandwidth to download everything and check it.
We can build fusion machines right now that can produce enough neutrons to make a hybrid reactor practical.
Very true, and this kind of makes me a bit skeptical about the statement that "we know enough about fusion that we know it will never work". If recent history has taught us anything, it's that "never" is a very big word in the modern era, especially when applied to technology.
There's no need to get into technical jargon about "md5 hashes of a file", ".torrent file just links to peers" in The Pirate Bay's case because it's so blatantly clear their main purpose is to enable users to spread copyrighted material.
The whole purpose of the net is to spread copyrighted material, considering that practically everything is copyrighted upon creation because of the Berne convention. What you meant was, to spread other people's copyrighted material without a proper license to do so. The difference is very significant, because when you phrase it properly, you see that it is not trivial for such a site to know what is in that class, considering that they don't know who is posting the torrents, or what kind of licensing might have been granted by the rightsholder.
Your emphasis on "Pirate" is also not a trivial cut-and-dry issue. If I start a site at "get-away-with-murder.com" which is officially for fictional accounts of murderers who don't get caught, it probably wouldn't be illegal (in the US) even if some of the content actually could aid people to murder others (I'm not talking about particular others).
> where people post advertisements on where to buy drugs.
X% of which are for legal OTC drugs sold in drugstores and 100-X% of which are for illegal drugs. You're probably right that if X is small enough, the legal system will rule against the site. But if X is large enough, probably not.
All this is academic in the case of TPB, because of the "in your face" way they reacted to takedown requests. Nothing will save them.
However, a site which is polite, officially bars illegal torrents, but errs in favor of accuracy vs. efficiency about reacting to takedown requests could very well replace TPB in functionality while making it a lot harder for the courts to effectively deal with them.
If they overprice their wares, their market will find substitutes, either legal or illegal, elsewhere. And if they stupidly decide that they want to start suing file sharers, they are in a much worse position than RIAA, since RIAA saves tons of money by using a single contracted "media investigator", and by sharing expert witnesses and other info between all of their legal cases.
> The teacher owns the material, it is they who develops it and
AFAIK, the legal issue of who owns the rights to materials developed by paid employees is complex and varies between jurisdictions. Are you talking about a particular jurisdiction for which you are familiar with the law and the terms of employment of public school teachers?
Or are you just shooting off your opinion as to "moral rights" in this situation in general?
From my almost 7-digit standpoint, your feuding looks a lot like cyber-mythology! Is there a deeper story here? Were you both swallowed and subsequently regurgitated by a 3-digit UID?
(I think it was Longyear who, when asked from where he got all the ideas for his science fiction stories, replied that he would send money to a P.O. box in Schenectady and that the ideas got sent to him by reply mail.)
Welcome to government, where you don't have to be responsible for your own mistakes, because you make the rules.
The judge sounds like an idiot, and probably is. Does he realize what kind of funding the state's DMV would need if every state resident took him seriously, and contacted the DMV four or more times a year to make sure his/her license hasn't been suspended and to check that they don't have any outstanding tickets? And how much economic damage that might cause the state because of lost work?
Well, most of the sources I can find define fact differently. More on the order of "absolute truth", or "amenable to pragmatic confirmation", as opposed to "alleged".
> you are ignorant and pathetic
I don't know about that, but I am as OCD about losing arguments as my brother is about having his books in new condition.
OTOH, this isn't an argument, this is abuse.... LOL
I'm even more curious now. How can the statement "You are pathetic" be a fact? There are objective criteria for being pathetic?
Our discussion begins to remind me of Phillip K. Dick's novel "Eye in the Sky" where the protagonist finds out exactly how bizarre are the belief frameworks of other people who seem, on the exterior, totally normal. Either that, or this.
So if I buy one, but have two or more Kindles, I can read it on all of them?
Yes, you can. You just have to log out of one kindle and log in on another, and you have access to your entire library of purchased kindle books and documents on your personal server space.
Ah, so after I buy two (different) ebooks, I can read one on my Kindle and at the same time my wife can read the second one on her Kindle?
Similiarly, you can indefinately lend a kindle book to a friend in Brazil, but only in the same example (log out on kindle 1, log in on kindle 2). Just like a dead tree book, if your friend in Brazil is reading it at the time, you can't.
The impression you give of the user experience is that while my friend reads this book in Brazil, I have no access to any of the other books I've bought under that login. That doesn't sound "just like a dead tree book". Am I missing something? Oh, and BTW, are you sure that the terms of use of the Kindle actually allow me to give my login details to my friend in Brazil? I'd double check that.
No, you can't sell a kindle book to a used kindle bookstore. Obviously not, there is no difference between a new or used kindle book.
There is no practical difference between a diamond when I buy it and when I resell it, yet I can still resell it on a free market. In fact, in most cases there is no discernible difference between a new (dead tree) book and a book which my brother has read (he's really OCD about his books). Maybe you should find a better justification?
While you can't print out a chapter of a kindle book to take to read at the beach, you can do order of magnitude better. You can take your kindle to the beach,
I have the feeling that at least some owners of Kindles don't use them while in the tub, in saunas, and perhaps they even might think twice about taking them to the beach. Of course, in the long run, the reader hardware will probably become really inexpensive, perhaps as inexpensive as a paper book. But that isn't the case now. Kindle users who don't take their Kindles to the beach might miss having the opportunity to print a part of their ebook so they could read it there. The fact that you, personally, are willing to use your Kindle in every situation where a paper book could be used does not convince me that everyone is like you.
and read any book ever....
I am sure there are lots of advantages of ebooks, even the DRMed Kindle ones. I also like (non DRMed) ebooks. My post wasn't about their advantages. If your point is that the advantages far outweigh the disadvantages for all reasonable people, you should say that. Because of your intense projection of user satisfaction on the general public, I'm sure you're very happy about being a Kindle owner, and I'm happy for you. You should be aware, however, that your personal satisfaction is not a good argument for this being the case in general.
> That is pathetic, and it makes you a pathetic person.
I'm intensely curious about what you believe about people who judge others' worth based upon their beliefs about consumer products, DRM, or copyright law?
What do these things have to do with user friendly?
I suppose you might be right for some definitions of "user friendliness", but I was just "going with the flow" by using the same term as the post to which I replied. It's obvious he wasn't talking about user interface friendliness.
I'd posit that people buying digital media have no expectation of being able to do these things in the first place.
Why (except that they would be thinking about the interests of the publisher)?
So if I buy one, but have two or more Kindles, I can read it on all of them?
After I'm finished reading, I can indefinitely lend a Kindle book to a friend of mine in Brazil who also owns a Kindle by sending him something over the net?
After I'm finished reading, I can sell my Kindle book back to a used Kindle bookstore?
I can print out a chapter of a Kindle book to take to read at the beach?
I doubt this (well, maybe the first one is doable, I don't have any Kindles, myself).
All of this functionality might be expected by a reasonable consumer who isn't already thinking about why the publisher wouldn't want him to be able to do it.
I also had the impression that he recently has been recovering from some sort of physical problem, but it wasn't clear to me if it was just an illness or he had been attacked. Since you managed to read the blog more accurately than I, mind giving me more info if you have it?
Slashdot Mirror
I've done the same thing myself writing a lot of code. Debugging was not easy and keeping it current is a constant struggle. I tell you what, after I did all that work tracking down bugs, doing QA, removing obsolete features, adding new ones, I don't want anyone taking my hard work and applying it to their product. Fuck them, they can pay me. A lot. Would it be nice if everyone cooperated and shared and it was caring time all day long? Sure. Is it going to happen? No.
Yet some businesses, in certain circumstances, believe it is beneficial to them to publish their work as open-source. You should make a better argument than "in my personal case I didn't think it was worthwhile". It's obvious in your case that there wasn't any upside to you. Wouldn't you have reconsidered sharing your data with someone who had the capability of publishing in a way you couldn't (easily, at least; perhaps, say, on the iPhone?) and having him share profits with you?
The cooperation proposed by the poster you replied to wasn't necessarily based on businesses getting in touch with their spiritual/sharing/whatever side. If you wanted to refute his argument, you should have said that "maintaining the data is much harder than generating better interfaces or hardware devices, so there is little incentive for the companies to cooperate in this way". That's actually what you meant, right?
> Whereas with human astronaut, you're ethically limited to blood samples
I can't for the life of me see why it would be unethical to let the astronaut agree to have a muscle tissue biopsy. Or at least why it would be less ethical than blood sampling. Do you know something I don't?
> You also need to be careful what you say on the phone at work, or who you talk to.
IIRC, the US courts ruled that you do have an expectation of privacy for your telephone conversations from your workplace, even though it is "company equipment". And at the same time they ruled that you don't have any expectation of privacy for anything you do with a computer owned by your workplace (like sending email to a friend criticizing the boss).
This always struck me as totally bizarre. However, I think it was during an era where the use of (desktop) computers for (ephemeral) communication was much less ubiquitous. I'm waiting for someone to get fired for criticizing the boss over VoIP (or even IM) to see if the legal system will eventually fix this mess....
> I have had about a month of physiotherapy now
I don't think you should lose hope for at least another 11 months and probably more. I broke my wrist and its functionality improved for many months after I was free of the immobilization framework. Of course, it probably would be best if you continue doing physiotheraputic exercises even after the period which is usually believed to be the window of opportunity by conventional medicine (if your physiotherapy is anything like the one I got for my wrist, you have been given exercises to do by yourself). I don't have any problem with that, because I study aikido, so I get free "physiotherapy" for my wrist with every practice session.
I understand that my case is a bit different in that my problem was more joint flexibility rather than muscle strength, but I still think you are being premature. And of course, I wish you the best of luck with your recovery!
To bring in a different slant on your post, do you realize that most of the jurisdictions in which TPB is currently being pursued are civil, rather than common, law venues? Is your concern about precedent flavored with your being from a common law environment (Slashdot being US-centric, blah, blah...)?
OTOH the distinctions between common and civil seem to be slowly blurring as time progresses....
> that TPB will be setting the precedent for every other site.
You missed the whole point there. Given what I meant, they would only be setting precedent for sites which violently refused to cooperate to prevent copyright infringement (since that is the reason "nothing can save them").
The post I replied to is actually correct, technology will undermine every effort to regulate copyright infringement (except for the most draconian ones which would strip us of so many freedoms that getting the torrent we want would probably become uninteresting). For example, one could create a torrent for an encrypted file with the description "this might be BlockBusterMovieAvailableInStores or it might be a personal video I made of a speech about BoringPoliticalIssue". And then release the key only after a certain period. Bingo! Your tracker has been used for copyright infringement.
Anyway, if you are only running a tracker, there is no way you can really know what is the content of the files in the torrent unless you download them yourself. Your tracker can be used by people without regard to your attempts at regulation, unless you're going to dedicate a lot of effort and bandwidth to download everything and check it.
We can build fusion machines right now that can produce enough neutrons to make a hybrid reactor practical.
Very true, and this kind of makes me a bit skeptical about the statement that "we know enough about fusion that we know it will never work". If recent history has taught us anything, it's that "never" is a very big word in the modern era, especially when applied to technology.
I think you misunderstand. The point of TPB, as far as I can see, is martyrdom, in the name of awakening public awareness to their political agenda.
The thing is, you get more awareness if you go down as slowly and as painfully as possible. Thus the machinations.
There's no need to get into technical jargon about "md5 hashes of a file", ".torrent file just links to peers" in The Pirate Bay's case because it's so blatantly clear their main purpose is to enable users to spread copyrighted material.
> where people post advertisements on where to buy drugs.
X% of which are for legal OTC drugs sold in drugstores and 100-X% of which are for illegal drugs. You're probably right that if X is small enough, the legal system will rule against the site. But if X is large enough, probably not.
All this is academic in the case of TPB, because of the "in your face" way they reacted to takedown requests. Nothing will save them.
However, a site which is polite, officially bars illegal torrents, but errs in favor of accuracy vs. efficiency about reacting to takedown requests could very well replace TPB in functionality while making it a lot harder for the courts to effectively deal with them.
If they overprice their wares, their market will find substitutes, either legal or illegal, elsewhere. And if they stupidly decide that they want to start suing file sharers, they are in a much worse position than RIAA, since RIAA saves tons of money by using a single contracted "media investigator", and by sharing expert witnesses and other info between all of their legal cases.
> The teacher owns the material, it is they who develops it and
AFAIK, the legal issue of who owns the rights to materials developed by paid employees is complex and varies between jurisdictions. Are you talking about a particular jurisdiction for which you are familiar with the law and the terms of employment of public school teachers?
Or are you just shooting off your opinion as to "moral rights" in this situation in general?
UID 3706 replies to UID 6544:
> No! I hate everything you stand for.
From my almost 7-digit standpoint, your feuding looks a lot like cyber-mythology! Is there a deeper story here? Were you both swallowed and subsequently regurgitated by a 3-digit UID?
It came from Schenectady (buyable from Amazon)
(I think it was Longyear who, when asked from where he got all the ideas for his science fiction stories, replied that he would send money to a P.O. box in Schenectady and that the ideas got sent to him by reply mail.)
Welcome to government, where you don't have to be responsible for your own mistakes, because you make the rules.
The judge sounds like an idiot, and probably is. Does he realize what kind of funding the state's DMV would need if every state resident took him seriously, and contacted the DMV four or more times a year to make sure his/her license hasn't been suspended and to check that they don't have any outstanding tickets? And how much economic damage that might cause the state because of lost work?
It's called "density", you know, dense...
Oh, wait, maybe you're already quite familiar with it...
Well, most of the sources I can find define fact differently. More on the order of "absolute truth", or "amenable to pragmatic confirmation", as opposed to "alleged".
> you are ignorant and pathetic
I don't know about that, but I am as OCD about losing arguments as my brother is about having his books in new condition.
OTOH, this isn't an argument, this is abuse.... LOL
> I wasn't judging. I was simply stating a fact.
I'm even more curious now. How can the statement "You are pathetic" be a fact? There are objective criteria for being pathetic?
Our discussion begins to remind me of Phillip K. Dick's novel "Eye in the Sky" where the protagonist finds out exactly how bizarre are the belief frameworks of other people who seem, on the exterior, totally normal. Either that, or this.
So if I buy one, but have two or more Kindles, I can read it on all of them?
Yes, you can. You just have to log out of one kindle and log in on another, and you have access to your entire library of purchased kindle books and documents on your personal server space.
Ah, so after I buy two (different) ebooks, I can read one on my Kindle and at the same time my wife can read the second one on her Kindle?
Similiarly, you can indefinately lend a kindle book to a friend in Brazil, but only in the same example (log out on kindle 1, log in on kindle 2). Just like a dead tree book, if your friend in Brazil is reading it at the time, you can't.
The impression you give of the user experience is that while my friend reads this book in Brazil, I have no access to any of the other books I've bought under that login. That doesn't sound "just like a dead tree book". Am I missing something? Oh, and BTW, are you sure that the terms of use of the Kindle actually allow me to give my login details to my friend in Brazil? I'd double check that.
No, you can't sell a kindle book to a used kindle bookstore. Obviously not, there is no difference between a new or used kindle book.
There is no practical difference between a diamond when I buy it and when I resell it, yet I can still resell it on a free market. In fact, in most cases there is no discernible difference between a new (dead tree) book and a book which my brother has read (he's really OCD about his books). Maybe you should find a better justification?
While you can't print out a chapter of a kindle book to take to read at the beach, you can do order of magnitude better. You can take your kindle to the beach,
I have the feeling that at least some owners of Kindles don't use them while in the tub, in saunas, and perhaps they even might think twice about taking them to the beach. Of course, in the long run, the reader hardware will probably become really inexpensive, perhaps as inexpensive as a paper book. But that isn't the case now. Kindle users who don't take their Kindles to the beach might miss having the opportunity to print a part of their ebook so they could read it there. The fact that you, personally, are willing to use your Kindle in every situation where a paper book could be used does not convince me that everyone is like you.
and read any book ever. ...
I am sure there are lots of advantages of ebooks, even the DRMed Kindle ones. I also like (non DRMed) ebooks. My post wasn't about their advantages. If your point is that the advantages far outweigh the disadvantages for all reasonable people, you should say that. Because of your intense projection of user satisfaction on the general public, I'm sure you're very happy about being a Kindle owner, and I'm happy for you. You should be aware, however, that your personal satisfaction is not a good argument for this being the case in general.
> That is pathetic, and it makes you a pathetic person.
I'm intensely curious about what you believe about people who judge others' worth based upon their beliefs about consumer products, DRM, or copyright law?
LOL
What do these things have to do with user friendly?
I suppose you might be right for some definitions of "user friendliness", but I was just "going with the flow" by using the same term as the post to which I replied. It's obvious he wasn't talking about user interface friendliness.
I'd posit that people buying digital media have no expectation of being able to do these things in the first place.
Why (except that they would be thinking about the interests of the publisher)?
> Kindle books are actually very user friendly
I doubt this (well, maybe the first one is doable, I don't have any Kindles, myself).
All of this functionality might be expected by a reasonable consumer who isn't already thinking about why the publisher wouldn't want him to be able to do it.
Thanks to Cory Doctorow from whom most of these examples/ideas have been lifted.
Which is kind of why I am posting a reply!
Maybe this post was gunning for "Funny"?
Well, I guess I read it too quickly. Sorry.
I also had the impression that he recently has been recovering from some sort of physical problem, but it wasn't clear to me if it was just an illness or he had been attacked. Since you managed to read the blog more accurately than I, mind giving me more info if you have it?