Everytime I see this company mentioned on Slashdot, they're still referred to as 'MediaSentry (now SafeNet)'. Why? Is it because the MediaSentry name is still so evocative?
It's because the name change is just a cynical attempt to try and get rid of a name that has 'negative connotations' attached to it, like Palladium becoming the Next-Generation Secure Computing Base [wikipedia.org], or the Security Systems and Standards Certification Act becoming the Consumer Broadband and Digital Television Promotion Act [wikipedia.org]. The new name is just designed to confuse people, so we list it alongside the old name to emphasize to everyone that nothing has changed, SafeNet is MediaSentry.
Well spoken. I'm not as eloquent. So I just say that a crook shouldn't be able to clean up his reputation by changing his name.
Everytime I see this company mentioned on Slashdot, they're still referred to as 'MediaSentry (now SafeNet)'. Why? Is it because the MediaSentry name is still so evocative? Just call them what they are and reference the fact that they are in fact that company that used to be called MediaSentry.
Mea culpa. I refer to them as MediaSentry. I don't think a crook should just be able to change its name and clean up its reputation that way.
First, apologies for the delay in my reply. Work has been hell for the last couple of days.
No problem. It's been hell for me too. It's not like I didn't have enough work to keep me busy while I was waiting.
But... on to the topic at hand:
My opinions are just that - my opinions. I guess I can understand where you think I have an ulterior motive, but I don't -- I'm just sounding off with my opinions when it's topically appropriate, the same as everyone else here.
Good.
My replies are without exception on-topic to the post I reply to. When they are not, I label them as "OT" in the subject.
This post was about an erroneous instruction on the distribution right; your statement of your opinion related to the reproduction right, not the distribution right. You didn't label it off topic.
Further, I challenge you to find any instance in which I make an incorrect statement of law
Your offtopic statement was an incorrect statement of the law. You said : "downloading copyrighted content without permissions is stealing". (In addition, it was offtopic, since it related to the reproduction right, not the distribution right.)
The closest thing I have to ulterior motive is my tangental involvement in the games industry, where the same casual attitude about downloading not being equal to stealing is killing indy game developers, and is moving the industry as a whole towards console games.
Thank you for disclosing that. It's not so tangential as you think. It permeates many of your posts. You have leapt to the RIAA's defense on many issues, including things which are not related directly to copyright at all, such as their collusive conduct, etc.
Cite my authority to hold an opinion and be vocal about it? Why should I have to do that? I'm not stating these things as points of law, I'm stating them as a product of my own value system. I need no more authority than anyone else to do that.
Thanks for clarifying that. So please clarify it when you post it, because you state things as though they are the law, when they are not. If it is your personal feeling that 'downloading things without permission is morally wrong', say so; don't incorrectly say that 'downloading things without permission is stealing'.
So you're now calling me "intellectually dishonest" because it's unfathomable that my posts have no ulterior motive?
No, the reason I felt your posts were 'intellectually dishonest' because (a) you weren't disclosing your personal reasons for having an axe to grind, and (b) you were making statements of legal opinion that were wrong and you were not supporting them with any authority.
You've done a good job of diverting this away from my original point, which is that there are other reasons besides being a RIAA shill for someone to say "I hate the RIAA as much as the next guy, but..."
Yes well I think we've exhausted that subject. Your continued defense of apparent RIAA-shill posts is at least now explainable in view of your 'tangential' involvement in gaming and anger at people who download games without paying for them.
I rather thought we were on the same side here:
Well we've made some progress, at least in terms of being clear with each other, and you at least profess to agree with me that the RIAA's tactics are improper. But it seems to me that we are on different sides, in that you often look for opportunities to leap to their defense. I find their conduct to be indefensible, and I loathe the very ground they walk on. My sympathies are with the victims of these cruel bullies. And those you so often defend can rot in hell.
Not that I have strong feelings about it.
Go in peace, PowerOfGraySkull, I mean you no harm, but please (a) be cautious in your pronouncements which sound like statements of law, and (b) think twice before being the "devil's advocate", because this devil has a legion of highly paid advocates already.
.. Hey, RIAA, you guys must be pretty stupid if you don't realize that a MAC address can be changed with trivial ease. Therefore, even if we could dredge up the DHCP logs, the IP address to MAC address mapping you are so interested in wouldn't tell you anything anyway.
They don't care. They just want to have someone to sue.
For reasons which are unclear, the IT department then suggested that the RIAA next time send them 'notices to preserve information,' in response to which they would preserve, rather than overwrite, the DHCP data, for the RIAA's forensic benefit.
Why? The RIAA is not a court of law or even a government agency. Surely the university would have no obligation to comply with its requests? Talking about the RIAA in these terms ("notices", "forensic") lends it unwarranted legitimacy and authority.
The act of downloading, without copyright holder's approval is illegal.
Incorrect statement of law.
The judge in this case is deciding whether the RIAA has to prove anybody downloaded any music.
Incorrect statement of law.
From the "Wired" article: "At issue is whether the RIAA needs to prove that copyrighted music offered by a defendant on a peer-to-peer network was actually downloaded by anyone."
Incorrect statement of law.
If the RIAA can't prove anyone downloaded music
Incorrect statement of the issue
he may vacate the defendant's conviction.
There is no "conviction", and his decision to set aside the jury verdict has nothing to do with what the RIAA can "prove" it has to do with whether the jury instruction was wrong.
Further it says the "judge said that the Copyright Act appears to outlaw only an actual transfer of copyrighted material."
Incorrect statement of law.
For an accurate statement of the law applicable to yesterday's argument, please go to Section 3 here.
I felt that I made an intelligent and reasonable set of arguments which would be responded to in kind; but instead I get an emotion-based reply
Sorry you're so "intelligent and reasonable" and I'm so "emotional". I guess your points must have been intelligent and reasonable if you think they are, and I guess my "emotion-based reply" is unworthy of you.
I've been reading your comments for several years, and I believe there is some reason which you are not disclosing why you continually take the position, unsupported by any citation to legal precedent, that "downloading copyrighted content without permissions is stealing". Yes you have been open about that being your position, but you have not been open about your personal reasons for repeatedly espousing that incorrect statement of law at every juncture, when it is almost invariably offtopic.
The entire subject of the oral argument in Capitol v. Thomas is the distribution right, not the reproduction right; the erroneous jury instruction had to do with the distribution right, not the reproduction right; the reason a new trial is needed is because of the a mistake regarding the distribution right, not the reproduction right. Yet you insist on using this post as a platform to repeat, over and over again, your misstatement of law regarding the reproduction right, one which you have previously uttered probably several hundred times before on Slashdot, always without benefit of citation to legal authority.
Is it really so odd that your defense of an obvious RIAA shill posting various posts under an "AC" designation attracts attention? Sorry if I'm too "emotional" for your "intelligent and reasonable" highness.
If you want to have a "reasonable" and "intelligent" dialogue you need to do 2 things:
1. disclose the real reason that you keep looking for a platform to spout your opinion on downloading, and
2. either cite your authority for it, or admit you have none.
See, the way I look at things, there is no contradiction between being "emotional" and being "intelligent and reasonable", but there is a contradiction between "intelligent and reasonable" on the hand, and "intellectually dishonest" on the other.
I can understand why people do -- a futile attempt to have the content of their post actually read, without the poster being automatically disregarded as being a RIAA shill.
Which honest people don't worry themselves about. Honest people just say what's on their minds. Shills, however, are "bent on attempt[ing] to have the content of their post actually read" because they are being paid to have their content read.
Aren't you making the same judgments-without-proof here that OP was? Surely it's possible that those honest people are tired of getting modded troll, and so make a pre-emptive attempt to differentiate their stance from an association with or condoning of RIAA's actions.
Yeah, it's possible, just like it's possible you don't have an agenda either.
I can understand why people do -- a futile attempt to have the content of their post actually read, without the poster being automatically disregarded as being a RIAA shill.
Which honest people don't worry themselves about. Honest people just say what's on their minds. Shills, however, are "bent on attempt[ing] to have the content of their post actually read" because they are being paid to have their content read.
You're certainly entitled to your opinion, SirShmoopie, I just want to make sure you recited the correct facts.
There was no evidence that she had done it, and there was her sworn testimony that she had not. If you equate her sworn testimony to no evidence at all, that is your prerogative, but in my view your doing so betrays a certain bias.
since she was found to have used the same username for her file sharing app as she did for email and other websites, I think anyone who thinks she wasn't guilty of filesharing is being silly
I guess you're not familiar with the facts. There was ZERO evidence that she had used the "file sharing app". There was evidence that(a) her computer had been malfunctioning, and (b) someone had used a "file sharing app", and (c) that someone had used defendant's frequent user name. The techie from Best Buy testified that the computer was irretrievably corrupted and infected. I.e., all of the facts were completely consistent with a 'zombie' situation.
That's perhaps the fourth time I've seen that in this thread. RIAA trolls sure do have a lot of free time.
Dear easyTree, I hope you get modded up for your astute RIAA troll-detection skills. I've noticed that this shill who writes these things always loves to start off with something like that. "Nobody hates the RIAA more than me, but......" "I'm no fan of the RIAA, but..." "Sure I don't like their heavy handed methods, but...." I've seen a million of them. It's the surest tip-off. The saving grace of these guys is their bottomless stupidity.
Lawyers are officers of the court. They must act within the bounds of the court process. To give purposefully misleading information to the judge is outside what they are supposed to do. The judge is not and can not be an expert in everything. The lawyers in the case are supposed to bring up everything relevant, and the judge decides points of law and the juries points of fact. But, the judge decided a point of law incorrectly, essentially because the lawyers on one side lied to the judge. That is a violation of the process and should require a mistrial. The jury made a decision based on incorrect instructions. Thus the decision they made may have been correct based on their information, but may not have been correct if they were properly instructed. The judge gave them one last chance to convince him that the information provided to the judge was correct, and he indicated that he does not believe the instructions he gave the jury were correct, and thus he should declare a mistrial.
As for whether that's right or wrong or whatever, that's what's happening here, and well within the rules of order. It was started because the lawyers on one side misinformed the judge. And that's simply not allowed.
The term of a copyright ought to be reasonable in length.
In my opinion, it not only "ought" to be reasonable in length, it has to be reasonable in length, as a matter of constitutional law. And in my view the present duration is unreasonable, hence unconstitutional.
Dear AC and Grolaw. AC is right. An authorization is not a direction. The Constitution is quite clearly written. There is not the slightest ambiguity about this.
They may figure they have a better chance with this particular judge if they don't put those self-same bullyboys back in his courtroom ("Fool me once..."). Probably they're right in that.
Slashdot Mirror
available, reports Jon Newton at p2pnet.net
Was that an example of Godwin's Law in action?
A good movie which deals in part with some of the shenanigans that go on in Ohio is Stealing America : Vote by Vote by Dorothy Fadiman.
Everytime I see this company mentioned on Slashdot, they're still referred to as 'MediaSentry (now SafeNet)'. Why? Is it because the MediaSentry name is still so evocative?
It's because the name change is just a cynical attempt to try and get rid of a name that has 'negative connotations' attached to it, like Palladium becoming the Next-Generation Secure Computing Base [wikipedia.org], or the Security Systems and Standards Certification Act becoming the Consumer Broadband and Digital Television Promotion Act [wikipedia.org]. The new name is just designed to confuse people, so we list it alongside the old name to emphasize to everyone that nothing has changed, SafeNet is MediaSentry.
Well spoken. I'm not as eloquent. So I just say that a crook shouldn't be able to clean up his reputation by changing his name.
Everytime I see this company mentioned on Slashdot, they're still referred to as 'MediaSentry (now SafeNet)'. Why? Is it because the MediaSentry name is still so evocative? Just call them what they are and reference the fact that they are in fact that company that used to be called MediaSentry.
Mea culpa. I refer to them as MediaSentry. I don't think a crook should just be able to change its name and clean up its reputation that way.
First, apologies for the delay in my reply. Work has been hell for the last couple of days.
No problem. It's been hell for me too. It's not like I didn't have enough work to keep me busy while I was waiting.
But... on to the topic at hand: My opinions are just that - my opinions. I guess I can understand where you think I have an ulterior motive, but I don't -- I'm just sounding off with my opinions when it's topically appropriate, the same as everyone else here.
Good.
My replies are without exception on-topic to the post I reply to. When they are not, I label them as "OT" in the subject.
This post was about an erroneous instruction on the distribution right; your statement of your opinion related to the reproduction right, not the distribution right. You didn't label it off topic.
Further, I challenge you to find any instance in which I make an incorrect statement of law
Your offtopic statement was an incorrect statement of the law. You said : "downloading copyrighted content without permissions is stealing". (In addition, it was offtopic, since it related to the reproduction right, not the distribution right.)
The closest thing I have to ulterior motive is my tangental involvement in the games industry, where the same casual attitude about downloading not being equal to stealing is killing indy game developers, and is moving the industry as a whole towards console games.
Thank you for disclosing that. It's not so tangential as you think. It permeates many of your posts. You have leapt to the RIAA's defense on many issues, including things which are not related directly to copyright at all, such as their collusive conduct, etc.
Cite my authority to hold an opinion and be vocal about it? Why should I have to do that? I'm not stating these things as points of law, I'm stating them as a product of my own value system. I need no more authority than anyone else to do that.
Thanks for clarifying that. So please clarify it when you post it, because you state things as though they are the law, when they are not. If it is your personal feeling that 'downloading things without permission is morally wrong', say so; don't incorrectly say that 'downloading things without permission is stealing'.
So you're now calling me "intellectually dishonest" because it's unfathomable that my posts have no ulterior motive?
No, the reason I felt your posts were 'intellectually dishonest' because (a) you weren't disclosing your personal reasons for having an axe to grind, and (b) you were making statements of legal opinion that were wrong and you were not supporting them with any authority.
You've done a good job of diverting this away from my original point, which is that there are other reasons besides being a RIAA shill for someone to say "I hate the RIAA as much as the next guy, but..."
Yes well I think we've exhausted that subject. Your continued defense of apparent RIAA-shill posts is at least now explainable in view of your 'tangential' involvement in gaming and anger at people who download games without paying for them.
I rather thought we were on the same side here:
Well we've made some progress, at least in terms of being clear with each other, and you at least profess to agree with me that the RIAA's tactics are improper. But it seems to me that we are on different sides, in that you often look for opportunities to leap to their defense. I find their conduct to be indefensible, and I loathe the very ground they walk on. My sympathies are with the victims of these cruel bullies. And those you so often defend can rot in hell.
Not that I have strong feelings about it.
Go in peace, PowerOfGraySkull, I mean you no harm, but please (a) be cautious in your pronouncements which sound like statements of law, and (b) think twice before being the "devil's advocate", because this devil has a legion of highly paid advocates already.
I have this vision of the RIAA lawyers as a group of seals clapping their fins and barking, "arp, arp, arp, arp". not sure why.
I think of them more as hyenas, vultures, or wild dogs.
If you have equipment that don't include TNP, you might be funding terrorism! *gasp* You're not a terrorist, are you?
No, it's my adversaries who are the terrorists. I'm with the good guys.
I was only asking rhetorically. I know the reason they did it. It's because they're sissies.
.. Hey, RIAA, you guys must be pretty stupid if you don't realize that a MAC address can be changed with trivial ease. Therefore, even if we could dredge up the DHCP logs, the IP address to MAC address mapping you are so interested in wouldn't tell you anything anyway.
They don't care. They just want to have someone to sue.
For reasons which are unclear, the IT department then suggested that the RIAA next time send them 'notices to preserve information,' in response to which they would preserve, rather than overwrite, the DHCP data, for the RIAA's forensic benefit.
Why? The RIAA is not a court of law or even a government agency. Surely the university would have no obligation to comply with its requests? Talking about the RIAA in these terms ("notices", "forensic") lends it unwarranted legitimacy and authority.
That's what I want to know. Why?
Next hot network thing: RIAA approved DHCP ;)
Scary, isn't it?
The act of downloading, without copyright holder's approval is illegal.
Incorrect statement of law.
The judge in this case is deciding whether the RIAA has to prove anybody downloaded any music.
Incorrect statement of law.
From the "Wired" article: "At issue is whether the RIAA needs to prove that copyrighted music offered by a defendant on a peer-to-peer network was actually downloaded by anyone."
Incorrect statement of law.
If the RIAA can't prove anyone downloaded music
Incorrect statement of the issue
he may vacate the defendant's conviction.
There is no "conviction", and his decision to set aside the jury verdict has nothing to do with what the RIAA can "prove" it has to do with whether the jury instruction was wrong.
Further it says the "judge said that the Copyright Act appears to outlaw only an actual transfer of copyrighted material."
Incorrect statement of law.
For an accurate statement of the law applicable to yesterday's argument, please go to Section 3 here.
I felt that I made an intelligent and reasonable set of arguments which would be responded to in kind; but instead I get an emotion-based reply
Sorry you're so "intelligent and reasonable" and I'm so "emotional". I guess your points must have been intelligent and reasonable if you think they are, and I guess my "emotion-based reply" is unworthy of you.
I've been reading your comments for several years, and I believe there is some reason which you are not disclosing why you continually take the position, unsupported by any citation to legal precedent, that "downloading copyrighted content without permissions is stealing". Yes you have been open about that being your position, but you have not been open about your personal reasons for repeatedly espousing that incorrect statement of law at every juncture, when it is almost invariably offtopic.
The entire subject of the oral argument in Capitol v. Thomas is the distribution right, not the reproduction right; the erroneous jury instruction had to do with the distribution right, not the reproduction right; the reason a new trial is needed is because of the a mistake regarding the distribution right, not the reproduction right. Yet you insist on using this post as a platform to repeat, over and over again, your misstatement of law regarding the reproduction right, one which you have previously uttered probably several hundred times before on Slashdot, always without benefit of citation to legal authority.
Is it really so odd that your defense of an obvious RIAA shill posting various posts under an "AC" designation attracts attention? Sorry if I'm too "emotional" for your "intelligent and reasonable" highness.
If you want to have a "reasonable" and "intelligent" dialogue you need to do 2 things:
1. disclose the real reason that you keep looking for a platform to spout your opinion on downloading, and
2. either cite your authority for it, or admit you have none.
See, the way I look at things, there is no contradiction between being "emotional" and being "intelligent and reasonable", but there is a contradiction between "intelligent and reasonable" on the hand, and "intellectually dishonest" on the other.
I can understand why people do -- a futile attempt to have the content of their post actually read, without the poster being automatically disregarded as being a RIAA shill.
Which honest people don't worry themselves about. Honest people just say what's on their minds. Shills, however, are "bent on attempt[ing] to have the content of their post actually read" because they are being paid to have their content read.
Aren't you making the same judgments-without-proof here that OP was? Surely it's possible that those honest people are tired of getting modded troll, and so make a pre-emptive attempt to differentiate their stance from an association with or condoning of RIAA's actions.
Yeah, it's possible, just like it's possible you don't have an agenda either.
I can understand why people do -- a futile attempt to have the content of their post actually read, without the poster being automatically disregarded as being a RIAA shill.
Which honest people don't worry themselves about. Honest people just say what's on their minds. Shills, however, are "bent on attempt[ing] to have the content of their post actually read" because they are being paid to have their content read.
You're certainly entitled to your opinion, SirShmoopie, I just want to make sure you recited the correct facts.
There was no evidence that she had done it, and there was her sworn testimony that she had not. If you equate her sworn testimony to no evidence at all, that is your prerogative, but in my view your doing so betrays a certain bias.
since she was found to have used the same username for her file sharing app as she did for email and other websites, I think anyone who thinks she wasn't guilty of filesharing is being silly
I guess you're not familiar with the facts. There was ZERO evidence that she had used the "file sharing app". There was evidence that(a) her computer had been malfunctioning, and (b) someone had used a "file sharing app", and (c) that someone had used defendant's frequent user name. The techie from Best Buy testified that the computer was irretrievably corrupted and infected. I.e., all of the facts were completely consistent with a 'zombie' situation.
I suggest that their PR-dollars would be better spent by trying to compete within their purported area of expertise.
Did you say "compete"? What's that? That's not a word they're familiar with.
"Judge, let's just forget about this little part of the law, because it's very inconvenient for us..."
Yeah, we can't prove it. Therefor that part of the statute should not be counted.
I'm not siding with the RIAA..
That's perhaps the fourth time I've seen that in this thread. RIAA trolls sure do have a lot of free time.
Dear easyTree, I hope you get modded up for your astute RIAA troll-detection skills. I've noticed that this shill who writes these things always loves to start off with something like that. "Nobody hates the RIAA more than me, but......" "I'm no fan of the RIAA, but..." "Sure I don't like their heavy handed methods, but...." I've seen a million of them. It's the surest tip-off. The saving grace of these guys is their bottomless stupidity.
Lawyers are officers of the court. They must act within the bounds of the court process. To give purposefully misleading information to the judge is outside what they are supposed to do. The judge is not and can not be an expert in everything. The lawyers in the case are supposed to bring up everything relevant, and the judge decides points of law and the juries points of fact. But, the judge decided a point of law incorrectly, essentially because the lawyers on one side lied to the judge. That is a violation of the process and should require a mistrial. The jury made a decision based on incorrect instructions. Thus the decision they made may have been correct based on their information, but may not have been correct if they were properly instructed. The judge gave them one last chance to convince him that the information provided to the judge was correct, and he indicated that he does not believe the instructions he gave the jury were correct, and thus he should declare a mistrial. As for whether that's right or wrong or whatever, that's what's happening here, and well within the rules of order. It was started because the lawyers on one side misinformed the judge. And that's simply not allowed.
Well spoken, AK.
The term of a copyright ought to be reasonable in length.
In my opinion, it not only "ought" to be reasonable in length, it has to be reasonable in length, as a matter of constitutional law. And in my view the present duration is unreasonable, hence unconstitutional.
Grolaw, you're wrong. Give it up.
Dear AC and Grolaw. AC is right. An authorization is not a direction. The Constitution is quite clearly written. There is not the slightest ambiguity about this.
They may figure they have a better chance with this particular judge if they don't put those self-same bullyboys back in his courtroom ("Fool me once ..."). Probably they're right in that.
Agreed.