You should propose that Slashdot open a poll about the question of Jammie's guilt/innocence (and what exact "infractions": downloading, making available, and uploading).
> most commentators here
No such thing, here. See recent post by QuantumG. Oh, darn, I don't find it, and it doesn't seem to have hit Google yet (or I'm forgetting his exact phrasing).
Or by commentators you mean the editors? Yes, I get the impression they are more uniformly in the anti-RIAA camp, but not that they are in the "it's OK if you can do it and get away with it" camp.
Well, well, that was an interesting post. Just when I had started to more or less believe the "she must be guilty of making available at least" opinion which runs around here.
Too bad I just finished my mod points and have already posted here.
> Where is the problem with the judge adjudicating that $500 is the penalty? It's stiff > enough that Jammie will feel the pinch yet not so much she faces eternal punishment > for what is, after all, a minor offence.
Considering that she's $130K in debt to her last lawyer, even if the judge let her off with $0.01 of damages she's still faces the "eternal punishment" of having to deal with a lawyer for as long as he wants her to try to pay off the debt (I get the impression that her ability to do that would mean that might be "for the rest of her life").
> The purpose of a liberal democracy (every democracy based on either the US or > British model) is to protect the rights of citizens from transgression by the government.
When I read that, I just couldn't help thinking of a famous Arthur C. Clarke quote: "It has yet to be proven that intelligence has any survival value".
Given the current trends in Britain and the US, it similarly remains to be shown that liberal democracy has any chance of attaining what you state are its goals.
> Why are transcripts not "freely" available to the public? (I have no objection > to a reasonable fee for printing.) After all, public money was spent on the case.
If you look at the Wikipedia article for "Court reporter" you will find out that most (all?) forms of court reporting do not directly generate a text transcript. Even if the court reporter is using a stenomask, what the reporter actually says/types should include notes of significant non-verbal courtroom actions, including facial expressions, gestures, "the defendant attacked his guard", etc., which could be recorded in idiosyncratic ways (and even with errors which are corrected later, from memory).
The official court transcript is currently generated in a second pass. From Ray's reply, I'm guessing it isn't actually generated in many cases, and someone has to pop up extra money for the second pass if they want it (or if a governmental official wants it, the government pays the court reporter extra money).
Thanks, Ray, now I have plenty of bedtime reading!
BTW, I notice that those transcripts were posted on your blog more than a year after the trial itself. We Slashdotters are used to practically instant access to everything, so I'm curious: what takes so long for such transcripts to become available? Could the transparency of the court system improve in the future because of technological advances, or are there lots of legal issues involved which impede this?
> a lot of tech savvy people, myself included, thinks the evidence shows she's guilty.
I can understand that, but you do realize that AFAIK the evidence merely shows she was (possibly) guilty of "making available" and doesn't really show that she did actual distribution (or if you want to assume that putting up the files for sharing means at least some distribution occurred, it at least doesn't show that significant numbers of copies of the works in question were distributed)?
After following more and more of these cases, I regret that I haven't been able to actually see what goes on in the courtroom. (That's my curiosity talking. I also have a feeling that after seeing the first one, I won't be so regretful if I don't see a second one.:-) )
Any chance that at least a transcript or audio recording will become available, eventually?
In the very long-term (barring global catastrophes) humanity will have to start to settle the oceans, and this experiment will give us information as to how we might be able to do that in the far future.
I've always been fascinated if it might be practical to build a floating ocean settlement which could also submerge to a relatively shallow depth for relatively short periods to avoid the dangers of ocean storms.
If "to think like me" is actually "to actively try to not think like others want me to, but rather find my own way", what is the real meaning of your problem with my suggestion? Interesting.
But you are right. There is no real way to define what I would like people to "think like", by definition, I'd like them to be able to think independently to a much larger extent than is currently accepted. But that's too hard (and dangerous) for Joe Average, so it's not going to happen.
Actually, TV stations currently do need to use some kind of percentage of their advertising power for "public service announcements", don't they? These announcements, however, often end up showing media figures doing "good deeds". They never try to warn Joe Average that he's being manipulated by the media, and should go off to try to think for himself.
Actually, in human society, not thinking "like everyone else" isn't typically a good survival trait, so there might be significant evolutionary pressure causing the status quo.
If I come to your house with a gun and generate a desire in you to exchange money for my not shooting you, it's not called commerce.
Similarly, the practice of hiring workers to work in remote locations and then charging them a lot of money for basic necessities to virtually enslave them in debt bondage is now considered an illegal coercive labor practice. Previously, this was called "commerce".
But don't worry. What you have just called commerce isn't going to be redefined as anything else in the near future, barring some kind of global catastrophe. Joe Average likes it just the way it is.
I agree that the moderator probably just disagreed, having been around here for quite a while; however, since the post really is just a restatement of what is supposed to be the status quo, there is a certain amount of justification for it being modded Redundant.
There is only one problem with your glib idea. The people who are supposed to choose not to watch the movie are being manipulated into wanting to watch it.
I would totally agree with you if there were laws which required the media cartels to spend even 10% of their advertising budget on educating the Average Joe how he could actually enjoy spending his time not watching their product.
Yes, it isn't going to happen. The same Average Joes are also manipulated into supporting (or at least not actively dissenting to ) governments which also aren't interested in them being less manipulatable.
You are an expert profiler for the police or some spy agency, I understand?
Personally, I try to avoid armchair psychoanalysis of third parties I've only met through the filter of the media.
I have no idea why she didn't settle for the several grand which the RIAA offers everyone in the fishnet, but has it occurred to you that once she is $130K in debt, it might not make any difference to her if she loses and goes even further in debt? I'm quite sure that any settlement which RIAA proposed didn't include their paying her outstanding lawyer bills.
BTW, it's really not clear that RIAA still has a case for the original claims, since they were for distribution and the previous judge ruled that "making available" is not "distribution". It's much harder to prove actual distribution occurred. I'm not sure if RIAA has or is even able to modify their case to claim damages for mere illegal copying or downloading. And it might seem less likely to her, given this big change, that the damages the jury arrives at will remain so enormous.
And tell me, what if she really is guilty? She's not supposed to try to defend herself to the best of her abilities? Maybe she's hoping that there will be fewer jurors this time who will be willing to line RIAA's pockets just because they think she really is guilty? IMO, that juror was a real jerk. He's supposed to set damages based on the claims of the plaintiffs in light of the evidence presented, not based on what he thinks is the defendant's moral stature, or perhaps that he's pissed off that he has to do stupid jury duty because this "guilty woman" didn't cave in and is willing to lie to protect herself.
Geez, I wonder what kind of damages this juror would have set if the defendant happened to also be a convicted serial murderer. And with this we see the downside of the right to a trial by jury (although to be honest, in such a case the judge would probably explicitly instruct the jury that they need to ignore that when deciding the damages).
From Wikipedia about IPv6 private addresses: "The addresses include a 40-bit pseudorandom number that minimizes the risk of address collisions if sites merge or packets are misrouted."
So you are technically correct that the exploit is still possible --- but it isn't practical unless the attacker knows most of the bits of that 40-bit salt. And even then, since subnets are 64-bits wide in IPv6, it looks to me like the probability of the attacker guessing the IP address of some resource in the private network is vanishingly small.
Or am I missing something? I'm far from being an expert on networking.
The point is the authors guild acting as if they were the authors. Even for authors that they do not represent. And then making deals. With money.
There are lots of legal precedents for this; to list a few:
RIAA getting paid a tax on audio cassettes and "audio" CD-R disks.
ASCAP/BMI collecting licensing fees from businesses which play music and distributing the fees based on what they believe was played.
The collection of fees from Internet radio by SoundExchange.
In all of those cases, licensing fees for (or compensation for copying of) music of independent artists (or even associated artists!) gets paid to someone else.
Personally, I think they all should be thrown out. But the DOJ has thought differently in the past, and might very well think differently here. In fact, if I were to be even more cynical than usual, I'd guess that the DOJ will do a 180 and nix this deal, since it actually helps the public somewhat in that they could get legal access to orphaned books, even if they would have to pay arbitrary people for that right.
> Sure you can, as long as you consider "less" to be a fuzzy measurement
I guess I'll just consider "wrong-er" a fuzzy measurement as well and call it a tie. Once everything becomes all warm and fuzzy, there's not all that much left for a mathematician like me to talk about.
My understanding of the post I replied to proposed the following justification of Occam's Razor:
Each assumption has a non-zero probability of being incorrect. Therefore, the total probability of N such assumptions being incorrect is less than that of M such assumptions, if N is less than M.
You can't compare two non-zero qualitative probabilities in that way; therefore, he's either incorrect in doing so, or was assuming some kind of arbitrary quantitative (and identical, it seems) probability for each assumption (which is also silly). (Not to even start to try to address the problem of the independence of the probabilities in question).
> Only if you assume Occam's Razor was meant to be a quantitative > measure in the first place
If you look at the reasoning in the post I replied to, you see that Ginger Unicorn is trying to justify Occam's Razor as being quantitative:
>> since each extra assumption has a non zero chance of being wrong
I understand that it does apply in mathematical/logical situations like the example you give. But the post I replied to was just justifying it incorrectly. And it's obvious that in this particular situation where we are trying to decide the likelihood of human actions and not celestial motion or mathematical proof, Occam's Razor doesn't apply in the way Ginger Unicorn claims it does.
Lets look at possible explanations of why there are dinosaur fossils:
Hypothesis 1
God exists and is omnipotent.
God created the world 5 minutes ago with the fossils inside the rocks.
Hypothesis 2
Dinosaurs were real animals which lived a long time in the past and were the ancestors of some animals currently living.
Some dinosaurs died and their dead bodies were buried.
Geological processes caused their bones to change to different types of rock than the surrounding rock matrix.
The second hypothesis has more assumptions, so it must be less likely than the first, by your reasoning.
Unfortunately, your reasoning assumes there is some kind of "quantum" of assumption, but there isn't. Practically every assumption can be decomposed into several other assumptions, in arbitrary ways.
> Actually it is illegal to record a person's voice without their consent in > some states. You may record video, but not the audio.
Makes me wonder if its a crime for someone to use lipreading skills on the video to decipher what was said.
I love the weird geek-logical inconsistency of law. For example, what if I record a video of a reflective membrane with a laser interference pattern on it, would I break the law if I then, at a later time, analyzed the video to accurately reproduce the sound waves which made the membrane vibrate? Or did I break the law when recording the video (the actual data of the crime might be important because of the statue of limitations)?
> The mobile phone market moves so fast that investment is needed to keep up with the market
Eventually, this will change, when phone functionality starts to saturate and no one actually needs shiny new features. But that time, I think, is quite far in the future.
Slashdot Mirror
You should propose that Slashdot open a poll about the question of Jammie's guilt/innocence (and what exact "infractions": downloading, making available, and uploading).
> most commentators here
No such thing, here. See recent post by QuantumG. Oh, darn, I don't find it, and it doesn't seem to have hit Google yet (or I'm forgetting his exact phrasing).
Or by commentators you mean the editors? Yes, I get the impression they are more uniformly in the anti-RIAA camp, but not that they are in the "it's OK if you can do it and get away with it" camp.
Well, well, that was an interesting post. Just when I had started to more or less believe the "she must be guilty of making available at least" opinion which runs around here.
Too bad I just finished my mod points and have already posted here.
> Where is the problem with the judge adjudicating that $500 is the penalty? It's stiff
> enough that Jammie will feel the pinch yet not so much she faces eternal punishment
> for what is, after all, a minor offence.
Considering that she's $130K in debt to her last lawyer, even if the judge let her off with $0.01 of damages she's still faces the "eternal punishment" of having to deal with a lawyer for as long as he wants her to try to pay off the debt (I get the impression that her ability to do that would mean that might be "for the rest of her life").
> Copyright infringement isn't a criminal offense.
Of course it is. If the volume is enough, and/or it's for profit, or pre-release then maybe the state/federal prosecutor's office will go after you.
Slashdot has had several stories about people facing jail time in criminal copyright cases.
> The purpose of a liberal democracy (every democracy based on either the US or
> British model) is to protect the rights of citizens from transgression by the government.
When I read that, I just couldn't help thinking of a famous Arthur C. Clarke quote: "It has yet to be proven that intelligence has any survival value".
Given the current trends in Britain and the US, it similarly remains to be shown that liberal democracy has any chance of attaining what you state are its goals.
> Why are transcripts not "freely" available to the public? (I have no objection
> to a reasonable fee for printing.) After all, public money was spent on the case.
If you look at the Wikipedia article for "Court reporter" you will find out that most (all?) forms of court reporting do not directly generate a text transcript. Even if the court reporter is using a stenomask, what the reporter actually says/types should include notes of significant non-verbal courtroom actions, including facial expressions, gestures, "the defendant attacked his guard", etc., which could be recorded in idiosyncratic ways (and even with errors which are corrected later, from memory).
The official court transcript is currently generated in a second pass. From Ray's reply, I'm guessing it isn't actually generated in many cases, and someone has to pop up extra money for the second pass if they want it (or if a governmental official wants it, the government pays the court reporter extra money).
Thanks, Ray, now I have plenty of bedtime reading!
BTW, I notice that those transcripts were posted on your blog more than a year after the trial itself. We Slashdotters are used to practically instant access to everything, so I'm curious: what takes so long for such transcripts to become available? Could the transparency of the court system improve in the future because of technological advances, or are there lots of legal issues involved which impede this?
> a lot of tech savvy people, myself included, thinks the evidence shows she's guilty.
I can understand that, but you do realize that AFAIK the evidence merely shows she was (possibly) guilty of "making available" and doesn't really show that she did actual distribution (or if you want to assume that putting up the files for sharing means at least some distribution occurred, it at least doesn't show that significant numbers of copies of the works in question were distributed)?
Or am I missing something here?
> but I prefer journalism to at least have a pretense of being unbiased
You must be new here.
You also don't seem to be able to read and understand summaries.
>> This should be interesting.
That's far from saying "this should be a cut-and-dry loss", like you claim, eh?
<sigh> Why do I feed the shills....
After following more and more of these cases, I regret that I haven't been able to actually see what goes on in the courtroom. (That's my curiosity talking. I also have a feeling that after seeing the first one, I won't be so regretful if I don't see a second one. :-) )
Any chance that at least a transcript or audio recording will become available, eventually?
In the very long-term (barring global catastrophes) humanity will have to start to settle the oceans, and this experiment will give us information as to how we might be able to do that in the far future.
I've always been fascinated if it might be practical to build a floating ocean settlement which could also submerge to a relatively shallow depth for relatively short periods to avoid the dangers of ocean storms.
If "to think like me" is actually "to actively try to not think like others want me to, but rather find my own way", what is the real meaning of your problem with my suggestion? Interesting.
But you are right. There is no real way to define what I would like people to "think like", by definition, I'd like them to be able to think independently to a much larger extent than is currently accepted. But that's too hard (and dangerous) for Joe Average, so it's not going to happen.
Actually, TV stations currently do need to use some kind of percentage of their advertising power for "public service announcements", don't they? These announcements, however, often end up showing media figures doing "good deeds". They never try to warn Joe Average that he's being manipulated by the media, and should go off to try to think for himself.
Actually, in human society, not thinking "like everyone else" isn't typically a good survival trait, so there might be significant evolutionary pressure causing the status quo.
If I come to your house with a gun and generate a desire in you to exchange money for my not shooting you, it's not called commerce.
Similarly, the practice of hiring workers to work in remote locations and then charging them a lot of money for basic necessities to virtually enslave them in debt bondage is now considered an illegal coercive labor practice. Previously, this was called "commerce".
But don't worry. What you have just called commerce isn't going to be redefined as anything else in the near future, barring some kind of global catastrophe. Joe Average likes it just the way it is.
I agree that the moderator probably just disagreed, having been around here for quite a while; however, since the post really is just a restatement of what is supposed to be the status quo, there is a certain amount of justification for it being modded Redundant.
There is only one problem with your glib idea. The people who are supposed to choose not to watch the movie are being manipulated into wanting to watch it.
I would totally agree with you if there were laws which required the media cartels to spend even 10% of their advertising budget on educating the Average Joe how he could actually enjoy spending his time not watching their product.
Yes, it isn't going to happen. The same Average Joes are also manipulated into supporting (or at least not actively dissenting to ) governments which also aren't interested in them being less manipulatable.
You are an expert profiler for the police or some spy agency, I understand?
Personally, I try to avoid armchair psychoanalysis of third parties I've only met through the filter of the media.
I have no idea why she didn't settle for the several grand which the RIAA offers everyone in the fishnet, but has it occurred to you that once she is $130K in debt, it might not make any difference to her if she loses and goes even further in debt? I'm quite sure that any settlement which RIAA proposed didn't include their paying her outstanding lawyer bills.
BTW, it's really not clear that RIAA still has a case for the original claims, since they were for distribution and the previous judge ruled that "making available" is not "distribution". It's much harder to prove actual distribution occurred. I'm not sure if RIAA has or is even able to modify their case to claim damages for mere illegal copying or downloading. And it might seem less likely to her, given this big change, that the damages the jury arrives at will remain so enormous.
And tell me, what if she really is guilty? She's not supposed to try to defend herself to the best of her abilities?
Maybe she's hoping that there will be fewer jurors this time who will be willing to line RIAA's pockets just because they think she really is guilty? IMO, that juror was a real jerk. He's supposed to set damages based on the claims of the plaintiffs in light of the evidence presented, not based on what he thinks is the defendant's moral stature, or perhaps that he's pissed off that he has to do stupid jury duty because this "guilty woman" didn't cave in and is willing to lie to protect herself.
Geez, I wonder what kind of damages this juror would have set if the defendant happened to also be a convicted serial murderer. And with this we see the downside of the right to a trial by jury (although to be honest, in such a case the judge would probably explicitly instruct the jury that they need to ignore that when deciding the damages).
From Wikipedia about IPv6 private addresses: "The addresses include a 40-bit pseudorandom number that minimizes the risk of address collisions if sites merge or packets are misrouted."
So you are technically correct that the exploit is still possible --- but it isn't practical unless the attacker knows most of the bits of that 40-bit salt. And even then, since subnets are 64-bits wide in IPv6, it looks to me like the probability of the attacker guessing the IP address of some resource in the private network is vanishingly small.
Or am I missing something? I'm far from being an expert on networking.
The point is the authors guild acting as if they were the authors. Even for authors that they do not represent. And then making deals. With money.
There are lots of legal precedents for this; to list a few:
In all of those cases, licensing fees for (or compensation for copying of) music of independent artists (or even associated artists!) gets paid to someone else.
Personally, I think they all should be thrown out. But the DOJ has thought differently in the past, and might very well think differently here. In fact, if I were to be even more cynical than usual, I'd guess that the DOJ will do a 180 and nix this deal, since it actually helps the public somewhat in that they could get legal access to orphaned books, even if they would have to pay arbitrary people for that right.
> Sure you can, as long as you consider "less" to be a fuzzy measurement
I guess I'll just consider "wrong-er" a fuzzy measurement as well and call it a tie. Once everything becomes all warm and fuzzy, there's not all that much left for a mathematician like me to talk about.
My understanding of the post I replied to proposed the following justification of Occam's Razor:
Each assumption has a non-zero probability of being incorrect. Therefore, the total probability of N such assumptions being incorrect is less than that of M such assumptions, if N is less than M.
You can't compare two non-zero qualitative probabilities in that way; therefore, he's either incorrect in doing so, or was assuming some kind of arbitrary quantitative (and identical, it seems) probability for each assumption (which is also silly). (Not to even start to try to address the problem of the independence of the probabilities in question).
> Only if you assume Occam's Razor was meant to be a quantitative
> measure in the first place
If you look at the reasoning in the post I replied to, you see that Ginger Unicorn is trying to justify Occam's Razor as being quantitative:
>> since each extra assumption has a non zero chance of being wrong
I understand that it does apply in mathematical/logical situations like the example you give. But the post I replied to was just justifying it incorrectly. And it's obvious that in this particular situation where we are trying to decide the likelihood of human actions and not celestial motion or mathematical proof, Occam's Razor doesn't apply in the way Ginger Unicorn claims it does.
Lets look at possible explanations of why there are dinosaur fossils:
Hypothesis 1
Hypothesis 2
The second hypothesis has more assumptions, so it must be less likely than the first, by your reasoning.
Unfortunately, your reasoning assumes there is some kind of "quantum" of assumption, but there isn't. Practically every assumption can be decomposed into several other assumptions, in arbitrary ways.
Oooops!
And now I see that I also mistyped "date" as "data"....
> Actually it is illegal to record a person's voice without their consent in
> some states. You may record video, but not the audio.
Makes me wonder if its a crime for someone to use lipreading skills on the video to decipher what was said.
I love the weird geek-logical inconsistency of law. For example, what if I record a video of a reflective membrane with a laser interference pattern on it, would I break the law if I then, at a later time, analyzed the video to accurately reproduce the sound waves which made the membrane vibrate? Or did I break the law when recording the video (the actual data of the crime might be important because of the statue of limitations)?
> The mobile phone market moves so fast that investment is needed to keep up with the market
Eventually, this will change, when phone functionality starts to saturate and no one actually needs shiny new features. But that time, I think, is quite far in the future.