Your analogy ignores the fact that the court system, in this case, is recognizing the Authors' Guild as the default representative of all authors, regardless if these authors actually have any formal relationship to it. Because of the court is granting this special right to the Authors' Guild, it might very well be the case that the court has the ability, or even an obligation, to regulate how the Authors' Guild does business.
A better analogy would be to compare the Authors' Guild to a local telecom monopoly (but the monopoly of the Authors' Guild is less strong, it only monopolizes the representation of authors who choose to not represent themselves).
The NSA is unlikely to volunteer evidence, even for the **AA's, which would expose something about the extent of its monitoring.
My understanding is that they were totally livid when President Carter, in the name of justifying American action in Iran, exposed the fact that they could decipher "secret" Iranian messages. I find it hard to imagine they're going to give out any info just so the content industry can sue copyright infringers.
I like Pink Floyd's music as much as the next man, but quoting them, out of context, in a forum which is supposed to be for informed debate won't get you brownie points, at least with me. The opposite, in fact.
> Common sense approaches to system security tell me that if I was in charge of > these systems they would be secured by every means possible.
OMG, I'm glad that you aren't in charge of things. Do you have any idea how much it would cost to secure them "by every means possible"? That would include large vaults and armed guards, eh? Like with everything else, you have to evaluate advantages and disadvantages and make a decision. Not fly off the handle like you're doing. This doesn't mean I disagree that connecting the systems to the Internet might be a bad idea. Assuming the systems do need communications, you'll still need to connect them to some other network, and you'd have to secure that network instead. BTW, if you want that network to be hermetically isolated from attack, you'd probably have to build it from scratch, at an enormous cost.
Frankly, I'd guess that using specially certified VPNs running between specialized embedded endpoints which run off of non-writable memories might be secure enough, even if it used the Internet as a communications medium.
What about if he actually bought another EA game several times, and it didn't even work for him under XP because of a crappy DRM scheme (or possibly just insufficient QA on the port of the game from W98 to XP)? I could understand him feeling justified in pirating what he felt was equivalent value for the value he didn't get for the money he spent.
This scenario is at least self-limiting, as opposed to the "I wouldn't have bought it" justification.
I personally have been in the above situation (except for the pirating, and it wasn't EA), and I could see myself downloading a working cracked version if I had already paid for something which just didn't work...
Perhaps the Wikimedia Foundation and/or the FSF are also concerned about what you're talking about?
(BTW, when I first read your post, I thought you were just misunderstanding something about the GFDL and that there had to be a way that it would be legal to add public domain works without violating the license, but now that I have bothered to read the latest version, I totally agree with you. That is one epically convoluted and unfriendly license. Ugh!)
What we really need are machines which can prevent viruses and/or worms BY DESIGN and IN ADVANCE, instead of reacting by means of virus scanners, patches and removal tools AFTER something went wrong.
As long as you let give the user freedom to install and run what he wants, you cannot possibly prevent him from running/installing malicious code which can take over as many functions as the user himself has (i.e., if he can send email, so can the code, etc.)
> but realize secrets are needed because our enemies have no qualms > about using secrets
I daresay that any information which has hit Wikileaks is 99.9% likely to previously already be known to any intelligence agencies which would be interested in it. All Wikileaks is doing is letting us see it also. Security through obscurity is usually bad security.
> or using our knowledge against us.
So it's good that we remain as uninformed as possible? Yes, I understand that you probably didn't mean it that way. Just couldn't resist.
There is a fine balance which needs to be maintained between secrecy which protects the public interest and secrecy which is against the public interest. It's not clear to me that this raid, or rather, having secret Internet censorship lists, falls in the "protects the public interest" side. Even if I think people producing, selling, or distributing child pornography should have their own special corner in a Hell which I don't even believe in.
I believe I have a copyright on the phrase "DMCA notice", and I file to take down your post. I submit only accurate information on the DMCA notice, except in that it is unlikely any court would rule that I have rights on that phrase. Your post gets taken down. I will not be prosecuted for perjury.
Face it, the DMCA should have included fines, which grow exponentially for each offense, for repeatedly submitting notices which are procedurally valid but found to be baseless by a court.
Given the contents of those lists, be careful to keep them encrypted and without obvious names linking them to the original files (e.g., first pack them up in an archive with other random files to thwart attempts to match file sizes or other meta-information).
Personally, I wouldn't go near those lists, even if they do contain non-child-porn sites which might be interesting to find. I'm sure that even if I tried to filter out the real child-porn sites using cross-validation, I'd still end up with a lot of more-disgusting-than-goatse stuff which I wouldn't want to wade through.
> Organizations like the CIA tend to do things like find out information > to help save lives.
Organizations like the CIA tend to do whatever the US government wants them to do. This may include trying to save lives (but, most probably that would be in actuality, lives of citizens of the US and, to some extent, its allies), but it most likely also includes things like toppling foreign governments which the US dislikes, irrespective if this would likely make Americans safer. It is really not clear, and actually rather unlikely, that the CIA is able to accurately predict the consequences of its present-day actions on the future safety of US. Kind of like what happened with the banking system.
The reality, if you would take off your glasses, is that as long as everything the CIA really does is kept secret from you, you have no idea whatsoever if what they do is actually what you believe they do. After living for a while in an Internet-enabled world, I, for one, become less and less willing to blindly believe whatever the US government tells me "the CIA is doing for me".
I think, as long as the link isn't advertised as "click here to go to a site with a link to the questions" (as opposed to "click here for a site with lots of information about the MMPI-2 - wink, wink"), and it only links to a site which links to the content in question, it would be difficult for a court to decide in the copyright holder's favor.
It still wouldn't be difficult for "large evil corporation" to waste a lot of this guy's money and time by bringing the matter to court.
> People making false DMCA requests are simply idiots
If in your opinion all criminals are idiots, I agree. Otherwise, they are just gaming the system, so they might be better classified as "smart assholes", assuming they're doing a good job of gaming the system.
My understanding of the DMCA is that filing a false notice is only perjury if it can be shown to have been done intentionally. Having a different opinion about what is fair use, no matter how stupid it is, is certainly not covered by that. Only a court can decide what is fair use, which is why it is a lousy way to protect the public's rights versus the copyright holder's rights.
To be guilty of perjury, the DA would have to show, for example, that you sent a notice about something on which it was clear you didn't even have rights, and that you knew that beforehand. AFAIK, this has never come to prosecution.
If this is a combined suit, wouldn't including the Guild as a defendent make it possible for the court to award legal fees to Ellison, which would (assuming he is correct) be "poetic" justice, since the Guild, who was supposed to be suing for him in the first place so he wouldn't need to pay legal fees, would end up paying (at least in part) his legal fees?
This might be problematic if his work contract has a non-competition clause. It is also fairly likely that his new business venture would fail (most do).
And not everyone is cut out to be an independent businessman.
You answered his first question OK, but your reply to his second argument totally misses his point. You rebut with lots of examples of how devoutly religious people can be great scientists. He made no statement which would contradict that, he was instead proposing something along the lines of Steven J. Gould's Non-Overlapping Magisteria, that science deals with statements which need to be testable and refutable, and religion doesn't, and therefore they are "perpendicular" to each other and in this sense the term "Christian science" is nonsense. Like, e.g., "chartreuse idea".
NOMA being true does not prevent a devoutly religious person from being a good scientist. He just has to be careful to make the same separation of "playing rules" as Gould proposes.
I agree with you, and want to point out a slightly OT analogous (in an opposing sense) and relative ubiquitous meme, which is: "we've killed the mad scientist/erased the research documents/etc. and now THE WORLD IS SAFE, because no one will ever be able to recreate the whatever-bad-technology-was-threatening-the-world".
That meme has always rubbed me wrong, considering that just knowing you can do something is a big part of scientific discovery.
Governments deal in laws, and laws mostly ignore the preferences of the governed and their personal situation, leaving fine tuning like that up to the court system. Unfortunately that fine tuning is expensive, which is why bad laws can be very costly. One often sees in situations where the "governed" have fewer options for recourse, like in schools, "zero tolerance" rules --- these rules, both seem to be "tougher", and solve the problem for the body enforcing them that actually making any rule work well in all situations is expensive.
Google does give you a preference ("SafeSearch") which you can set at three different levels. And yes, I understand that it probably fails sometimes. But I believe that can happen even if you didn't search for porn the previous night. Ergo, children's use of the net needs to be supervised in some way, IMO. (Appropriate to the parents' beliefs and the situation of the child, of course.)
> who cares about the library shutting an hour earlier on Thursdays and the > graffiti on the bus shelter, except the people living there?
It might be fun to troll even if you don't live there. If only local access were allowed, then the population of possible trolls would be much smaller.
Like everything else it's a tradeoff between the benefits, and the disadvantages (in this case, probably the main disadvantage is blocking access to some people who should have it).
By then, people might be running VM's within VM's to avoid this kind of... stuff.
Or perhaps, there will be 5 different lightweight sandboxes like Plash, with each sandbox scanning for attempts to exploit known vulnerabilities of the other sandboxes (this wouldn't prevent some people from getting owned, but it would expose malware quicker).
Slashdot Mirror
It does, if what they want to express happens to be a derived work based on an orphaned work.
See The Wind Done Gone as a case in point where copyright was used in an attempt to limit artistic (and political) expression.
It obviously doesn't limit expression of pure ideas, per se. Was that what you meant?
Your analogy ignores the fact that the court system, in this case, is recognizing the Authors' Guild as the default representative of all authors, regardless if these authors actually have any formal relationship to it. Because of the court is granting this special right to the Authors' Guild, it might very well be the case that the court has the ability, or even an obligation, to regulate how the Authors' Guild does business.
A better analogy would be to compare the Authors' Guild to a local telecom monopoly (but the monopoly of the Authors' Guild is less strong, it only monopolizes the representation of authors who choose to not represent themselves).
The NSA is unlikely to volunteer evidence, even for the **AA's, which would expose something about the extent of its monitoring.
My understanding is that they were totally livid when President Carter, in the name of justifying American action in Iran, exposed the fact that they could decipher "secret" Iranian messages. I find it hard to imagine they're going to give out any info just so the content industry can sue copyright infringers.
> I don't need no education
I like Pink Floyd's music as much as the next man, but quoting them, out of context, in a forum which is supposed to be for informed debate won't get you brownie points, at least with me. The opposite, in fact.
> Common sense approaches to system security tell me that if I was in charge of
> these systems they would be secured by every means possible.
OMG, I'm glad that you aren't in charge of things. Do you have any idea how much it would cost to secure them "by every means possible"? That would include large vaults and armed guards, eh? Like with everything else, you have to evaluate advantages and disadvantages and make a decision. Not fly off the handle like you're doing. This doesn't mean I disagree that connecting the systems to the Internet might be a bad idea. Assuming the systems do need communications, you'll still need to connect them to some other network, and you'd have to secure that network instead. BTW, if you want that network to be hermetically isolated from attack, you'd probably have to build it from scratch, at an enormous cost.
Frankly, I'd guess that using specially certified VPNs running between specialized embedded endpoints which run off of non-writable memories might be secure enough, even if it used the Internet as a communications medium.
What about if he actually bought another EA game several times, and it didn't even work for him under XP because of a crappy DRM scheme (or possibly just insufficient QA on the port of the game from W98 to XP)? I could understand him feeling justified in pirating what he felt was equivalent value for the value he didn't get for the money he spent.
This scenario is at least self-limiting, as opposed to the "I wouldn't have bought it" justification.
I personally have been in the above situation (except for the pirating, and it wasn't EA), and I could see myself downloading a working cracked version if I had already paid for something which just didn't work...
FYI, until August 2009 there is a window of opportunity for Wikipedia to move to dual-licensing of their text as both GFDL and CC-SA.
Perhaps the Wikimedia Foundation and/or the FSF are also concerned about what you're talking about?
(BTW, when I first read your post, I thought you were just misunderstanding something about the GFDL and that there had to be a way that it would be legal to add public domain works without violating the license, but now that I have bothered to read the latest version, I totally agree with you. That is one epically convoluted and unfriendly license. Ugh!)
> The solution to the "sexting" problem is common sense and prosecutorial
> discretion. Hopefully we'll see more of both!
Unlikely, since in many electoral districts neither is likely to get the DA elected to a higher office.
What we really need are machines which can prevent viruses and/or worms BY DESIGN and IN ADVANCE, instead of reacting by means of virus scanners, patches and removal tools AFTER something went wrong.
As long as you let give the user freedom to install and run what he wants, you cannot possibly prevent him from running/installing malicious code which can take over as many functions as the user himself has (i.e., if he can send email, so can the code, etc.)
If you have a counter-example which shows that I'm wrong, I'd be greatly interested.
Until then, we're both armchair posters.
> but realize secrets are needed because our enemies have no qualms
> about using secrets
I daresay that any information which has hit Wikileaks is 99.9% likely to previously already be known to any intelligence agencies which would be interested in it. All Wikileaks is doing is letting us see it also. Security through obscurity is usually bad security.
> or using our knowledge against us.
So it's good that we remain as uninformed as possible? Yes, I understand that you probably didn't mean it that way. Just couldn't resist.
There is a fine balance which needs to be maintained between secrecy which protects the public interest and secrecy which is against the public interest. It's not clear to me that this raid, or rather, having secret Internet censorship lists, falls in the "protects the public interest" side. Even if I think people producing, selling, or distributing child pornography should have their own special corner in a Hell which I don't even believe in.
I believe I have a copyright on the phrase "DMCA notice", and I file to take down your post. I submit only accurate information on the DMCA notice, except in that it is unlikely any court would rule that I have rights on that phrase. Your post gets taken down. I will not be prosecuted for perjury.
Face it, the DMCA should have included fines, which grow exponentially for each offense, for repeatedly submitting notices which are procedurally valid but found to be baseless by a court.
Given the contents of those lists, be careful to keep them encrypted and without obvious names linking them to the original files (e.g., first pack them up in an archive with other random files to thwart attempts to match file sizes or other meta-information).
Personally, I wouldn't go near those lists, even if they do contain non-child-porn sites which might be interesting to find. I'm sure that even if I tried to filter out the real child-porn sites using cross-validation, I'd still end up with a lot of more-disgusting-than-goatse stuff which I wouldn't want to wade through.
> Organizations like the CIA tend to do things like find out information
> to help save lives.
Organizations like the CIA tend to do whatever the US government wants them to do. This may include trying to save lives (but, most probably that would be in actuality, lives of citizens of the US and, to some extent, its allies), but it most likely also includes things like toppling foreign governments which the US dislikes, irrespective if this would likely make Americans safer. It is really not clear, and actually rather unlikely, that the CIA is able to accurately predict the consequences of its present-day actions on the future safety of US. Kind of like what happened with the banking system.
The reality, if you would take off your glasses, is that as long as everything the CIA really does is kept secret from you, you have no idea whatsoever if what they do is actually what you believe they do. After living for a while in an Internet-enabled world, I, for one, become less and less willing to blindly believe whatever the US government tells me "the CIA is doing for me".
I think, as long as the link isn't advertised as "click here to go to a site with a link to the questions" (as opposed to "click here for a site with lots of information about the MMPI-2 - wink, wink"), and it only links to a site which links to the content in question, it would be difficult for a court to decide in the copyright holder's favor.
It still wouldn't be difficult for "large evil corporation" to waste a lot of this guy's money and time by bringing the matter to court.
> People making false DMCA requests are simply idiots
If in your opinion all criminals are idiots, I agree. Otherwise, they are just gaming the system, so they might be better classified as "smart assholes", assuming they're doing a good job of gaming the system.
My understanding of the DMCA is that filing a false notice is only perjury if it can be shown to have been done intentionally. Having a different opinion about what is fair use, no matter how stupid it is, is certainly not covered by that. Only a court can decide what is fair use, which is why it is a lousy way to protect the public's rights versus the copyright holder's rights.
To be guilty of perjury, the DA would have to show, for example, that you sent a notice about something on which it was clear you didn't even have rights, and that you knew that beforehand. AFAIK, this has never come to prosecution.
Suing the Guild for $1 could be justified as advancing the cause of justice in this case, in the case that the court awards legal fees to Ellison.
If this is a combined suit, wouldn't including the Guild as a defendent make it possible for the court to award legal fees to Ellison, which would (assuming he is correct) be "poetic" justice, since the Guild, who was supposed to be suing for him in the first place so he wouldn't need to pay legal fees, would end up paying (at least in part) his legal fees?
This might be problematic if his work contract has a non-competition clause. It is also fairly likely that his new business venture would fail (most do).
And not everyone is cut out to be an independent businessman.
You answered his first question OK, but your reply to his second argument totally misses his point. You rebut with lots of examples of how devoutly religious people can be great scientists. He made no statement which would contradict that, he was instead proposing something along the lines of Steven J. Gould's Non-Overlapping Magisteria, that science deals with statements which need to be testable and refutable, and religion doesn't, and therefore they are "perpendicular" to each other and in this sense the term "Christian science" is nonsense. Like, e.g., "chartreuse idea".
NOMA being true does not prevent a devoutly religious person from being a good scientist. He just has to be careful to make the same separation of "playing rules" as Gould proposes.
I agree with you, and want to point out a slightly OT analogous (in an opposing sense) and relative ubiquitous meme, which is: "we've killed the mad scientist/erased the research documents/etc. and now THE WORLD IS SAFE, because no one will ever be able to recreate the whatever-bad-technology-was-threatening-the-world".
That meme has always rubbed me wrong, considering that just knowing you can do something is a big part of scientific discovery.
Governments deal in laws, and laws mostly ignore the preferences of the governed and their personal situation, leaving fine tuning like that up to the court system. Unfortunately that fine tuning is expensive, which is why bad laws can be very costly. One often sees in situations where the "governed" have fewer options for recourse, like in schools, "zero tolerance" rules --- these rules, both seem to be "tougher", and solve the problem for the body enforcing them that actually making any rule work well in all situations is expensive.
Google does give you a preference ("SafeSearch") which you can set at three different levels. And yes, I understand that it probably fails sometimes. But I believe that can happen even if you didn't search for porn the previous night. Ergo, children's use of the net needs to be supervised in some way, IMO. (Appropriate to the parents' beliefs and the situation of the child, of course.)
> who cares about the library shutting an hour earlier on Thursdays and the
> graffiti on the bus shelter, except the people living there?
It might be fun to troll even if you don't live there. If only local access were allowed, then the population of possible trolls would be much smaller.
Like everything else it's a tradeoff between the benefits, and the disadvantages (in this case, probably the main disadvantage is blocking access to some people who should have it).
By then, people might be running VM's within VM's to avoid this kind of ... stuff.
Or perhaps, there will be 5 different lightweight sandboxes like Plash, with each sandbox scanning for attempts to exploit known vulnerabilities of the other sandboxes (this wouldn't prevent some people from getting owned, but it would expose malware quicker).