> blogs, tweets, youtube video's, vanity sites, even professional authors/musicians/film makers > giving away their art for free. There is no way that the content industry's can stop this on their own
In the US, anyway, there is practically no way to stop this via legislation because of the First Amendment.
They might try to make an end-run around our rights and cut deals with the ISP's. I doubt it would work, but MSM seems to control radio, so perhaps they might manage to do it with the net also. BTW, this is one of the reasons why net neutrality is a very important issue (i.e., non-discrimination based on endpoints; QoS being less important, perhaps).
A few weeks ago, I tried to fill out a marketing poll from Macmillan about ebooks.
I couldn't answer most of the questions because DRM was just not even mentioned, so I couldn't guess if I'd want to buy or no.
I ended up sending them a separate email explaining my anti-DRM position. They didn't send any reply.
In terms of effectiveness, DRM for ebooks is even sillier than for music. I can't wait until the revolution manages to convince eBook publishers, also. It probably won't happen until the price of readers drops enough that a family will have several of them, possibly of different brands, and then they figure out that they can't transfer ebooks between them, and everyone starts to look for, er, "alternate" solutions....
I think you are confused. The creativity you are thinking about is in the invention of a method for making the photograph, not in the photograph itself.
In other words, you might very well be able to apply for a patent for your ingenious and creative method, but as innumerable others have replied to you, since the photograph which is the result is designed to be as "unoriginal" as possible, it is unlikely to be judged to be eligible for copyright.
Yes, there is also a section that tries to answer the question whether in 1000 years there will be any DVD readers available.
Considering that the article reassures us that
"Optical disks are the most widely adopted storage medium in the history of the world - more widely adopted than vinyl LPs, than cassette tapes, or anything in history," Lunt said. "That means there are billions of readers out there, and hundreds of billions of disks. So it's likely that the ability to read those will persist."
Uh, reality check here? You just convinced us that those disks (which don't use your terrific new technology) won't last more than a few years until they will have to be rearchived on new disks? Why on earth would anyone need to keep DVD readers around for more than 2 to 3 times the lifetime of a DVD after a newer technology was widely adopted (I'm talking about non-DRM'ed DVD data)?
The article also cites a "digital preservation officer" from BYU who, er, doesn't seem to understand the necessity for making multiple backups of important data, and is willing to be presented as someone who is losing "1 to 2 percent" of his important data per year! Either they're misrepresenting him in the article, or someone should put him out of his misery already and fire him (OK, he might be able to justify it based on budget limitations, but, really)?
The article smells very, very fishy. Oh, it's a local newspaper covering a local startup? Ah, I begin to understand....
Besides the fact that he had had a great userid ("ged") when he first emailed me for info about a then-unknown version, I always thought he had the ultimately geeky hobby.
The link is to the BBC coverage of the California court decision. I found out about it after reading a Slashdot post panning one of the movies which was pushed this way.
> then they're the ones who end up paying your court costs.
Theoretically, that might be true, but don't forget that the court still reviews the documentation of costs incurred and has full liberty to award less than the amount claimed.
The U.S. federal law allows recording of phone calls and other electronic communications with the consent of at least one party to the call. A majority of the states and territories have adopted wiretapping statutes based on the federal law, although most have also extended the law to cover in-person conversations. 38 states and the D.C. permit recording telephone conversations to which they are a party without informing the other parties that they are doing so.
12 states require, under most circumstances, the consent of all parties to a conversation. Those jurisdictions are California, Connecticut, Florida, Illinois, Maryland, Massachusetts, Michigan, Montana, Nevada, New Hampshire, Pennsylvania and Washington.
In the vast majority of the US, what he has done is perfectly acceptable, at least with regards to letting the other party know or not know about the conversation being recorded. Just because your personal ethical framework doesn't agree, this doesn't make Nesson a douchebag.
A lot of people think RIAA is "slimy" for all of the collateral damage they are causing to society while trying to preserve their dying business model. Personally, I'm undecided whether their actions are actually unethical --- but I'm certain that they are dangerous and detrimental to society.
Other large corporations, Google, for example, keep all kinds of records of people's web preferences, credit card purchases, and tons of other "information that individuals consider private", and if anyone is protected by IP rights in those cases, it's the corporations, not the individuals!
IP rights only extend to "creative works", and there has yet to be a court system which defines "deciding to buy something" or "deciding to click a particular ad" as "creative".
Your demands seem to be mainly met by running the browser of your choice inside a VM (and restoring to a fixed, virus/trojan/keylogger-free configuration either every time or just periodically).
You just have to figure out what is important to backup from that VM before rolling everything back. For most people, that might only be their bookmarks (easy to backup) and/or saved passwords (which might be tricky to backup, don't know).
(Of course, this isn't the most memory-efficient solution I can think of. It's actually one of the worst from that point of view.)
You mean the huge oil companies who'd found the oil, drilled the wells to extract it, built the refineries etc? Why should they not get at the oil?
Maybe because it isn't theirs? I do not claim that they shouldn't expect a reasonable return on the investment of their efforts, but why would it necessarily give them ownership rights on the resource itself?
> The newer (September 2008) editions have a total of $20,580
That wouldn't go far to pay off $1.9M. Perhaps if you had the most valuable set ever:
> The Guinness Book of World Records states that a set worth $2,000,000 and made of > 23-carat gold, with rubies and sapphires atop the chimneys of the houses and hotels, > is the most expensive Monopoly set ever produced.
> For depriving us in many cases, of the benefits of Trial by Jury:
You claim
> You have jury trials because we already had them.
which is partially correct, but you also seem to have been missing some historical significance, eh? The significance here is the enshrinement of the right to a trial by jury in the Bill of Rights. Not whether we "created it by ourselves". And it's really not clear to me, based on the long and varied history of the function of the jury trial in British law, that it had the same significance in the British legal system around the time of US independence as it took on in the US legal system during the same period.
> Or there's another way to look at it. Thomas was caught with her > pants down, she's clearly guilty, and she did everything she could > to antagonize the system.
You're doing exactly the same thing that everyone is wrongly blaming NYCL et. al for: claiming a slam dunk for one side or the other.
> Now, put aside your views on copyright law and the "evil" the RIAA, > was anything other than a pissed jury increasing the damages award ever > likely to be the outcome of this case?
Your use of the work "increasing" leads me to believe that you are missing a possible scenario where Jammie eventually gets off with no damages awarded whatsoever. Unless I am missing something, the current jury members, when being selected, were asked whether they were familiar with the case in question and anyone answering "yes" was automatically disqualified. So if this verdict hits the front pages but later gets thrown out again because of some arcane legal reason which the judge missed during the running of the trial, my guess is that the case might be dismissed, next time around, if it is found to be impossible to find enough jury members who didn't hear about it.
Ah, so the next time you break any law whatsoever, you think it would be perfectly OK that you should pay arbitrarily large sums of money? Either you are very, very rich (so the penalty wouldn't affect you), or very, very, very careful about never breaking any laws, nor even being put in a position where it even appears that you have broken the law.
> The RIAA lawyers were able to convince two juries that she was distributing > 24 unauthorized mp3 files.
And they were also able to convince most reasonable people that copyright law is in a terrible state, currently.
> How would she (or anyone) be better off if her lawyer told her that they had a > strong case, that she had a weak defense, and that it would be cheaper to settle?
It's not exactly clear what you mean here, but I will assume your question is against my position, that it was good she didn't settle. Let me clear it up for you: I obviously didn't mean it was personally good for her. But it is obviously good for society in general to be shown the consequences of the bad laws which are currently in place, so that there is some small chance they will be changed (or overruled, or something).
> And what, if the law as given by the judge obliterates common sense?
The whole point of jury trials, when they were established after independence, was to prevent a corrupt legal system or judge from victimizing an innocent public. They were a reaction by the Founding Fathers against Americans having been jailed by British courts with no posibility of defense.
It's a pity that that isn't the first instruction which is given a jury in every trial --- a reminder of the real reason for their being the last word, and the information that, yes, they can totally ignore the letter of the law if they so desire. Or at least, they used to be able to do it. The legal system has been eroding that power slowly but surely, as we get further and further removed from the spirit which freed all Americans from tyranny, more than 200 years ago.
Since I'm sure that Kazaa doesn't exchange entire files but rather does it in small blocks, when Kazaa is actively sharing a file under copyright it must be distributing blocks of copyrighted information hundreds of thousands of times per minute.
Actually you can notice that the actual lawyers here like NYCL never, ever say things like "... couldn't possibly win". That's probably because they're quite familiar with the fact that the legal system often coughs up ridiculous outcomes (in their eyes).
In my eyes, these outcomes just show that even judges often don't actually understand what the law says. And juries for sure don't. It will be interesting to see if this decision will be thrown out again.
In my eyes the moral is: don't let large corporations twist the law into an distorted abomination....
The most ironic part of this whole mess is that the jury system was designed to exactly defend against this kind of abuse of the legal system, but because big government and big corporations have gotten so good at controlling the public's behavior, it is actually working out in reverse....
> Any lawyer could have looked at the facts of the case and come to the > conclusion that she didn't have sufficient evidence to prove her innocence
Ah, so in other words, society should let large corporations extort money from the public because, actually, it is hard for an average citizen to prove his innocence given any kind of evidence of wrongdoing. This is why, in my opinion, in criminal cases the trial is supposed to start out biased in the defendant's favor ("innocent until proven guilty", "beyond a reasonable doubt").
I prefer that our justice system actually serve, well, justice!
I hope that the third time around, either she gets off with a really small penalty, or that the absolute maximum penalty is awarded against her. In the second case, for all practical purposes, the exact sum won't greatly matter in how this affair affects her life, and the staggering amount should either start a media blitz over how ridiculous the state of copyright law has become, or at least some kind of reaction in the legal system. Or perhaps people will stop being interested in RIAA's clients product, since having it on your computer could end up becoming evidence of wrongdoing, even if it's just being shared out by your friendly bot-net controller rather than you (or your neighbor via your wireless router, or whatever)....
Ghandi proposed non-violent civil disobedience as an effective weapon against injustice.
No matter how bad the rhetoric of the **AA's gets, almost no one considers file sharing violent.
But it is civil disobedience.
And yes, you are correct that Jammie hasn't reached Ghandi's spiritual level yet. But that was already clear to, er, most of us, even the poster to whom you replied.
Of course, if RIAA crucifies her enough times, who knows what might happen.
Slashdot Mirror
> blogs, tweets, youtube video's, vanity sites, even professional authors/musicians/film makers
> giving away their art for free. There is no way that the content industry's can stop this on their own
In the US, anyway, there is practically no way to stop this via legislation because of the First Amendment.
They might try to make an end-run around our rights and cut deals with the ISP's. I doubt it would work, but MSM seems to control radio, so perhaps they might manage to do it with the net also. BTW, this is one of the reasons why net neutrality is a very important issue (i.e., non-discrimination based on endpoints; QoS being less important, perhaps).
A few weeks ago, I tried to fill out a marketing poll from Macmillan about ebooks.
I couldn't answer most of the questions because DRM was just not even mentioned, so I couldn't guess if I'd want to buy or no.
I ended up sending them a separate email explaining my anti-DRM position. They didn't send any reply.
In terms of effectiveness, DRM for ebooks is even sillier than for music. I can't wait until the revolution manages to convince eBook publishers, also. It probably won't happen until the price of readers drops enough that a family will have several of them, possibly of different brands, and then they figure out that they can't transfer ebooks between them, and everyone starts to look for, er, "alternate" solutions....
I think you are confused. The creativity you are thinking about is in the invention of a method for making the photograph, not in the photograph itself.
In other words, you might very well be able to apply for a patent for your ingenious and creative method, but as innumerable others have replied to you, since the photograph which is the result is designed to be as "unoriginal" as possible, it is unlikely to be judged to be eligible for copyright.
Yes, there is also a section that tries to answer the question whether in 1000 years there will be any DVD readers available.
Considering that the article reassures us that
Uh, reality check here? You just convinced us that those disks (which don't use your terrific new technology) won't last more than a few years until they will have to be rearchived on new disks? Why on earth would anyone need to keep DVD readers around for more than 2 to 3 times the lifetime of a DVD after a newer technology was widely adopted (I'm talking about non-DRM'ed DVD data)?
The article also cites a "digital preservation officer" from BYU who, er, doesn't seem to understand the necessity for making multiple backups of important data, and is willing to be presented as someone who is losing "1 to 2 percent" of his important data per year! Either they're misrepresenting him in the article, or someone should put him out of his misery already and fire him (OK, he might be able to justify it based on budget limitations, but, really)?
The article smells very, very fishy. Oh, it's a local newspaper covering a local startup? Ah, I begin to understand....
There's a guy, Russel Dalenberg, who deals with the "archeology" of the original Adventure game.
Besides the fact that he had had a great userid ("ged") when he first emailed me for info about a then-unknown version, I always thought he had the ultimately geeky hobby.
Sony got caught doing this a while back:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/entertainment/4741259.stm
The link is to the BBC coverage of the California court decision.
I found out about it after reading a Slashdot post panning one of the movies which was pushed this way.
> then they're the ones who end up paying your court costs.
Theoretically, that might be true, but don't forget that the court still reviews the documentation of costs incurred and has full liberty to award less than the amount claimed.
FYI, only 12 out of 50 states forbid recording a conversation you have without the other party knowing. From URL http://www.callcorder.com/phone-recording-law-america.htm :
In the vast majority of the US, what he has done is perfectly acceptable, at least with regards to letting the other party know or not know about the conversation being recorded. Just because your personal ethical framework doesn't agree, this doesn't make Nesson a douchebag.
A lot of people think RIAA is "slimy" for all of the collateral damage they are causing to society while trying to preserve their dying business model. Personally, I'm undecided whether their actions are actually unethical --- but I'm certain that they are dangerous and detrimental to society.
> intellectual property protects our DNA code, purchases, travel habits, and
> other information individuals consider private.
What universe do you live in? You have it exactly reversed (or, I really didn't understand what you meant to say). Large corporations have patented the human DNA of individuals for their own gain. They haven't started to sue the children of the people whose genes they sequenced, but if Monsanto can succeed in suing an organic farmer whose crops were contaminated by their patented genes (the link is for a more recent Canadian case, but they already won a similar case in the US!), it isn't unthinkable that it could happen in the future.
Other large corporations, Google, for example, keep all kinds of records of people's web preferences, credit card purchases, and tons of other "information that individuals consider private", and if anyone is protected by IP rights in those cases, it's the corporations, not the individuals!
IP rights only extend to "creative works", and there has yet to be a court system which defines "deciding to buy something" or "deciding to click a particular ad" as "creative".
Your demands seem to be mainly met by running the browser of your choice inside a VM (and restoring to a fixed, virus/trojan/keylogger-free configuration either every time or just periodically).
You just have to figure out what is important to backup from that VM before rolling everything back. For most people, that might only be their bookmarks (easy to backup) and/or saved passwords (which might be tricky to backup, don't know).
(Of course, this isn't the most memory-efficient solution I can think of. It's actually one of the worst from that point of view.)
> That means he'll be eligible for parol in 2136.
Nah, he's betting on an overflow error in 2038 to spring him early!
Reading the comments on that article I just couldn't help being reminded.....
Any company greedy enough to cut a deal like that shouldn't be surprised at all when they discover that governments can be greedy bastards also....
You mean the huge oil companies who'd found the oil, drilled the wells to extract it, built the refineries etc? Why should they not get at the oil?
Maybe because it isn't theirs? I do not claim that they shouldn't expect a reasonable return on the investment of their efforts, but why would it necessarily give them ownership rights on the resource itself?
> But he was wrong about this. Plain and simple
How could he be "wrong" about this? He predicted the outcome?
All he claims is that in his opinion the law reads in a certain way; he's much too smart to assume that the court system is going to agree with him.
You, on the other hand, seem to have a knee-jerk between your ears. Get over it, and start to tolerate other people's opinions.
From Wikipedia, the source of all knowledge:
> The newer (September 2008) editions have a total of $20,580
That wouldn't go far to pay off $1.9M. Perhaps if you had the most valuable set ever:
> The Guinness Book of World Records states that a set worth $2,000,000 and made of
> 23-carat gold, with rubies and sapphires atop the chimneys of the houses and hotels,
> is the most expensive Monopoly set ever produced.
but just barely!
From the US Declaration of Independence:
> For depriving us in many cases, of the benefits of Trial by Jury:
You claim
> You have jury trials because we already had them.
which is partially correct, but you also seem to have been missing some historical significance, eh? The significance here is the enshrinement of the right to a trial by jury in the Bill of Rights. Not whether we "created it by ourselves". And it's really not clear to me, based on the long and varied history of the function of the jury trial in British law, that it had the same significance in the British legal system around the time of US independence as it took on in the US legal system during the same period.
> Or there's another way to look at it. Thomas was caught with her
> pants down, she's clearly guilty, and she did everything she could
> to antagonize the system.
You're doing exactly the same thing that everyone is wrongly blaming NYCL et. al for: claiming a slam dunk for one side or the other.
> Now, put aside your views on copyright law and the "evil" the RIAA,
> was anything other than a pissed jury increasing the damages award ever
> likely to be the outcome of this case?
Your use of the work "increasing" leads me to believe that you are missing a possible scenario where Jammie eventually gets off with no damages awarded whatsoever. Unless I am missing something, the current jury members, when being selected, were asked whether they were familiar with the case in question and anyone answering "yes" was automatically disqualified. So if this verdict hits the front pages but later gets thrown out again because of some arcane legal reason which the judge missed during the running of the trial, my guess is that the case might be dismissed, next time around, if it is found to be impossible to find enough jury members who didn't hear about it.
> The justice system did serve justice. Twice.
Ah, so the next time you break any law whatsoever, you think it would be perfectly OK that you should pay arbitrarily large sums of money? Either you are very, very rich (so the penalty wouldn't affect you), or very, very, very careful about never breaking any laws, nor even being put in a position where it even appears that you have broken the law.
> The RIAA lawyers were able to convince two juries that she was distributing
> 24 unauthorized mp3 files.
And they were also able to convince most reasonable people that copyright law is in a terrible state, currently.
> How would she (or anyone) be better off if her lawyer told her that they had a
> strong case, that she had a weak defense, and that it would be cheaper to settle?
It's not exactly clear what you mean here, but I will assume your question is against my position, that it was good she didn't settle. Let me clear it up for you: I obviously didn't mean it was personally good for her. But it is obviously good for society in general to be shown the consequences of the bad laws which are currently in place, so that there is some small chance they will be changed (or overruled, or something).
> And what, if the law as given by the judge obliterates common sense?
The whole point of jury trials, when they were established after independence, was to prevent a corrupt legal system or judge from victimizing an innocent public. They were a reaction by the Founding Fathers against Americans having been jailed by British courts with no posibility of defense.
It's a pity that that isn't the first instruction which is given a jury in every trial --- a reminder of the real reason for their being the last word, and the information that, yes, they can totally ignore the letter of the law if they so desire. Or at least, they used to be able to do it. The legal system has been eroding that power slowly but surely, as we get further and further removed from the spirit which freed all Americans from tyranny, more than 200 years ago.
Since I'm sure that Kazaa doesn't exchange entire files but rather does it in small blocks, when Kazaa is actively sharing a file under copyright it must be distributing blocks of copyrighted information hundreds of thousands of times per minute.
Now award $150K for each block distributed....
Actually you can notice that the actual lawyers here like NYCL never, ever say things like "... couldn't possibly win". That's probably because they're quite familiar with the fact that the legal system often coughs up ridiculous outcomes (in their eyes).
In my eyes, these outcomes just show that even judges often don't actually understand what the law says. And juries for sure don't. It will be interesting to see if this decision will be thrown out again.
> Moral of the story: don't break the law
In my eyes the moral is: don't let large corporations twist the law into an distorted abomination....
The most ironic part of this whole mess is that the jury system was designed to exactly defend against this kind of abuse of the legal system, but because big government and big corporations have gotten so good at controlling the public's behavior, it is actually working out in reverse....
> Any lawyer could have looked at the facts of the case and come to the
> conclusion that she didn't have sufficient evidence to prove her innocence
Ah, so in other words, society should let large corporations extort money from the public because, actually, it is hard for an average citizen to prove his innocence given any kind of evidence of wrongdoing. This is why, in my opinion, in criminal cases the trial is supposed to start out biased in the defendant's favor ("innocent until proven guilty", "beyond a reasonable doubt").
I prefer that our justice system actually serve, well, justice!
I hope that the third time around, either she gets off with a really small penalty, or that the absolute maximum penalty is awarded against her. In the second case, for all practical purposes, the exact sum won't greatly matter in how this affair affects her life, and the staggering amount should either start a media blitz over how ridiculous the state of copyright law has become, or at least some kind of reaction in the legal system. Or perhaps people will stop being interested in RIAA's clients product, since having it on your computer could end up becoming evidence of wrongdoing, even if it's just being shared out by your friendly bot-net controller rather than you (or your neighbor via your wireless router, or whatever)....
Ghandi proposed non-violent civil disobedience as an effective weapon against injustice.
No matter how bad the rhetoric of the **AA's gets, almost no one considers file sharing violent.
But it is civil disobedience.
And yes, you are correct that Jammie hasn't reached Ghandi's spiritual level yet. But that was already clear to, er, most of us, even the poster to whom you replied.
Of course, if RIAA crucifies her enough times, who knows what might happen.