> "Well, yeah, she was pretty clearly guilty (e.g. wiping the hard drive after she got in trouble)."
I agree that she was very likely guilty, but I don't understand what all the commotion was with the harddrive.
Correct me if I'm wrong, but I believe she had the harddrive replaced due to a technical malfunction after the infringing activity but before the lawsuit was filed. Thus, there was no way this action could signify that she was trying to hide a crime, unless you want to argue that she went on a one-time sharing spree with the intent to transfer as much as possible in a certain timeframe and spill coffee on her drive the next day.
For whatever reason, the lawyers seemed to be arguing over how quickly one could rip songs from CD to harddrive, and whether or not it was fast enough to account for the close timestamps found on the new drive's filesystem, or if the only explanation was that she copied those files from the previous drive. I don't understand that argument at all, because it seems to imply that it was acceptable for her to rip files from CD, but that she either could not have possibly ripped to the old harddrive for some reason, or that copying ripped files from the old to the new is somehow unacceptable.
Nonetheless, it seems obvious that she did copy the files directly from HD to HD, and wanted to mask this fact: notice that the argument in court was phrased in hypotheticals ("Isn't it possible to rip at these speeds"), rather than just having the defendant testify as to what she did. Why this works against her I do not know.
Funny how they specifically advise against that as part of the standard briefing during jury duty. I'm not saying that's right or wrong, just inconsistent.
> "They purposefully picked an amount that had absolutely no relationship, whatsoever, to the financial damages that may have been incurred."
They had a choice in the amount of financial damages she would pay, but any valid amount (the minimum was $750 per infringing song) was well beyond the actual financial damages. So by your logic you could argue that they decided to ruin her life by voting guilty in the first place.
And that's the jury's fault? The maximum was, according to TFA, $150,000 a song, and the minimum $750. They settled on less than $10,000. The law screwed her over long before the jury became involved (at least on damages; she seems to have screwed herself on the facts of the case and her defense).
> "But why? People don't really think hierarchically. When I visit a website, I usually don't care where it's located. Why should I have to type 'slashdot.org.us' in the browser?"
There's no need for the hierarchy to be that visible to the user. Simply have the browser, localized for the us, append that to the query. Or do it at the nameserver. The point is that the catagorization exists, not that it be ever present in the user's mind.
> "What about companies or other entities that change their national location (I would imagine this sort of thing might be more common in Europe than in the US)? Do they lose their country-specific domain?"
Why not? If you change physical locations, there's a ton of paperwork and you have to let everyone who cares know your new address. Why should it be different if you move from one jurisdiction to another? If you require a more permanent registration, choose a subdomain that is not bound to your residence.
The only problem would be entities that underplay or have no national affiliation, for example global online communities like open source projects, forums, etc. Still, I think assigning a geographical/jurisdictional label to the domain is preferable to the system we have now.
As screwed up as the US is with regards to intellectual property, at least we have government works in the public domain by default, so this wouldn't even be an issue here. One shouldn't have to defend the use of the English language as public domain.
TLDs aren't about solving problems, they're about raking in money on nitch domain names and creating artificial markets. A real solution - or rather, since this is unworkable from the state we're currently in, I'll call it the lost alternative - would be to only allow ccTLDs since they reflect jurisdictions, and then make individual countries responsible for providing all the usual TLDs as subdomains. That way, you don't have as much head-banging about things like a global.xxx domain, and registration of a.com name could be tied to a business entity registered in that particular country. It'd also be nice to have a graceful way for users to select what root nameservers they use for what kinds of domains, and some sort of conventional but not enforced aliasing system, so it wouldn't be necessary to always add.us if you're located in the US.
Basically, make the whole damn thing more hierarchical than ever before, so when someone screws up on a policy decision, it doesn't clog the global namespace.
That was.. the point. It was patently false, yet still makes it into reviews (or at least, print publications: I'm looking at you, PC Magazine). Although in retrospect, the GGP's mock review contained only true, accurate information that was merely blown out of proportion, so maybe my point wasn't well placed.
If you truly wanted to imitate crappy magazine reviews, you'd throw in something about a gigabit being 100 times faster than a megabit and 1000 times faster than a kilobit.
I think of them every time I hear one of these stories. Magnatune is one of the very few labels you can do business with and not feel like you have to take a shower afterwards. I discovered them while investigating online DRM-free labels with a conscience, after realizing that eMusic didn't have the (quite idealistic) philosophy I was looking for.
I really, really, REALLY want to mod you troll for claiming that you'll get modded troll, as if you're somehow unique by liking open source solutions on slashdot. You like linux. You like hardware that lets you run linux. We know. That's why you're here. Don't claim you're a martyr.
The part I don't understand is how it's a choice between real-time apps and other traffic. Somehow, on my university's network, we're able to play first-person shooters without causing any performance issues for other users or feeling more limited than if we were on a home connection. Do we have more bandwidth than the submitter's university? We've got a gigabit/s connection between buildings, and 10 megabit/s per switch port (which I despise, as it means I can't get 100 mb/s speed within the campus network, but it makes their QoS easier).
Ah, you beat me to it. Yes, we need only wait 47 years. But that wouldn't be necessary if, before every city was founded, the people implored the hand of god to create a giant pyramid of waterfalls at no cost so we would have an easy source of hydroelectric power.
My understanding is that nuclear power plants never go supercritical, at worse they go critical and meltdown. Although, as I read on the wikipedia article on Chernobyl, a thermal explosion can be much worse than a thermonuclear one, and spread radiation for hundreds of miles.
Even better, instead of suing over the attribution not being quintuple stamped and formatted properly, just revoke their license after they become dependent on it, and reinstate it for a hefty fee. It remains to be seen whether this kind of strategy can hold up in court, but it is true that licenses can generally be revoked at will.
I'm taking a course on Open Source Software development and we just completed a section on licensing (although the lecturer was not a lawyer). Thank you for making the point that the summary was technically entirely wrong in saying that CC licensed anything. At best, the plaintiff could attempt to claim that CC put someone at harm by making the license available; since that is extreme bullshit, there is nothing for the case to stand on, and I think it's safe to say that we'll see the case against CC dropped soon. I don't have specific knowledge of the law concerning model releases, but it seems reasonable to me that this burden would be on Virgin. As for the counselor, a licensor can only license the work to the extent that they own the copyright; that the work inherently entails rights besides copyright (in this case, to the likeness of the subject) is none of his concern, unless there's a case to be made that he misrepresented his ability and willingness to license that right as well.
That's where your point about the difference between v1.0 and v1.1 comes in. That was news to me, I was unaware of that change between the CC licenses. However, after a lecture on contract law (which included readings from Lawrence Rosen's "Open Source Licensing", available here (http://www.rosenlaw.com/Rosen_Ch04.pdf), it seems that this change was meaningless.
A license (at least, a license like the GPL or CC, as opposed to a EULA) is a grant of permission, not a contract. A license can be revoked at will, whereas a contract cannot be arbitrarily ignored. Such a license does not put the licensor under any sort of obligation or increase his liability. Therefore, the licensor can make claims as to the warranty or lack thereof, but these claims are just statements like any other. The fact that they're located in the license doesn't add anything to their worth. A contract on the other hand, contains an offer from the licenser, an acceptance from the licensee, and some form of consideration that is payment for the offer. If the counselor used a license that implied a warranty, and received something in return, then it's perfectly conceivable that he could be held liable.
There is some gray area on what can be considered consideration. In fact, there is considerable gray area cast on the entire area of law concerning licensing - it is an oddity compared to well-established contract law. But I think the bottom line here is that neither the person who uploaded the picture, nor the CC, has anything to be worried about in this case. The CC is certainly not even rightfully a party to this case. The counselor is not liable as far as licensing goes, and probably safe in general, unless there's some complication owing to the fact that the image was of a minor and posted online without (probably) parental permission? (I wonder if that does require permission these days, anyway?)
As a thought experiment, suppose that the counselor is indeed liable (discarding the part about the subject being a minor). It would be another devastating blow to free expression, yet another means by which society refuses to allow people to share and disclaim exclusive rights. It's bad enough that there is no proven way to put something in the public domain (people claim to do this all the time, but the concept of releasing a copyright in such a way is implied, not explicitly stated in copyright law), and that it's appropriate for individuals to explicitly disclaim warranty on non-commercial materials. But this would add to the already considerable mess that is the law, making it even more difficult for us to share without getting sued.
I agree, what I'm stuck with now sucks ass and I demand more. But the difference between you and me is that I get around 7-9 megabits (cable) at home, and roughly the same at school (they limit us to 10 mb/s on the switch so they don't have to do QoS or other real management). I suppose unless you're living in one of those lucky cities in Europe or Japan, there's always someone to be jealous of.
That said, even if you get the bandwidth you seek, if you're a geek then you still won't be satisfied by the Terms of Service and Acceptible Use Policy that all home ISPs throw at you. For all FiOS's bandwidth, they still require windows (or at least they claim to - I know, it's retarded, I hear from my friend it has to do with marketing bloatware), prohibit servers and by extension bittorrenting, and place other ridiculous restrictions on their customers. But this is an academic objection. As a practical matter, I'm sure they and Cablevision are loads better than Comcast and DSL providers; it's nice when a company has enough bandwidth to not be asinine about enforcing the ToS.
I guess the only thing I'd be happy with is community fiber.
Fiber is simply the gold standard. A single thread of fiber, with suitably expensive terminal equipment, has more bandwidth than the entire world's wireless devices. Once the infrastructure is in place, it can be upgraded at the end points with relative ease compared to the enormous cost of laying the fiber in the first place.
> "This is kind of like saying that if the NY Giants are playing a football game against the Podunk County Pee Wee League's Hometown Hornets that we should say that the game should be over in the first 10 seconds."
Against the Giants? I dunno, they might be able to take 'em.
In the 90s the term "nerd" was the positive (at least less derogatory) way of saying "geek". Somewhere along the line it changed. Was there a reason for that? Maybe it had to do with the emergence of the web and widespread personal computing - suddenly knowing technology made the common person think of you a wizard of sorts and not a freak in a basement, so they needed to reuse another less-used word. *shrug* Just like several years ago, if you said you were going to a LAN party you got beat up.
As a nitpick, there's a difference between relicensing and sublicenseing. Someone please correct me if I get this wrong: Relicensing is placing a new license on a piece of software (or other work), which is a right that only the copyright holder has; whereas sublicensing is a non-copyright holder applying additional terms on a work that do not conflict with the license he received it under. So I think the GP meant to say sublicense. Additionally, he claimed
> "it's unfair to take others' free work and glob it together with restrictions the original author didn't intend."
Neglecting, of course, that if the author didn't intend this, there's a perfectly usable and relatively mature copyleft license available.
The binary alternatives to the SI prefixes - Gi, Mi, etc., - make me cry. It's like we're *trying* to obfuscate the pronunciation of technical terms. It's bad enough we have to deal with "www". On a separate note, I dare you to walk into a computer store or any other public place, and engage in a casual loud conversation that includes the word "Mebibyte", and see how many looks you get.
Obsolete? Obsolete? My current phone is a Nokia that's at least 5 years old. It's been dropped many times and thrown in a pool. It still makes calls and does very little else (that I know of, although I never cared to look). I have never owned any other phone, and I have never used wifi or gps on a phone.
That's what I like about living in the Stone Age - it makes the Bronze Age look nice and gilded.
Slashdot Mirror
> "Well, yeah, she was pretty clearly guilty (e.g. wiping the hard drive after she got in trouble)."
I agree that she was very likely guilty, but I don't understand what all the commotion was with the harddrive.
Correct me if I'm wrong, but I believe she had the harddrive replaced due to a technical malfunction after the infringing activity but before the lawsuit was filed. Thus, there was no way this action could signify that she was trying to hide a crime, unless you want to argue that she went on a one-time sharing spree with the intent to transfer as much as possible in a certain timeframe and spill coffee on her drive the next day.
For whatever reason, the lawyers seemed to be arguing over how quickly one could rip songs from CD to harddrive, and whether or not it was fast enough to account for the close timestamps found on the new drive's filesystem, or if the only explanation was that she copied those files from the previous drive. I don't understand that argument at all, because it seems to imply that it was acceptable for her to rip files from CD, but that she either could not have possibly ripped to the old harddrive for some reason, or that copying ripped files from the old to the new is somehow unacceptable.
Nonetheless, it seems obvious that she did copy the files directly from HD to HD, and wanted to mask this fact: notice that the argument in court was phrased in hypotheticals ("Isn't it possible to rip at these speeds"), rather than just having the defendant testify as to what she did. Why this works against her I do not know.
Funny how they specifically advise against that as part of the standard briefing during jury duty. I'm not saying that's right or wrong, just inconsistent.
> "They purposefully picked an amount that had absolutely no relationship, whatsoever, to the financial damages that may have been incurred."
They had a choice in the amount of financial damages she would pay, but any valid amount (the minimum was $750 per infringing song) was well beyond the actual financial damages. So by your logic you could argue that they decided to ruin her life by voting guilty in the first place.
And that's the jury's fault? The maximum was, according to TFA, $150,000 a song, and the minimum $750. They settled on less than $10,000. The law screwed her over long before the jury became involved (at least on damages; she seems to have screwed herself on the facts of the case and her defense).
> "But why? People don't really think hierarchically. When I visit a website, I usually don't care where it's located. Why should I have to type 'slashdot.org.us' in the browser?"
There's no need for the hierarchy to be that visible to the user. Simply have the browser, localized for the us, append that to the query. Or do it at the nameserver. The point is that the catagorization exists, not that it be ever present in the user's mind.
> "What about companies or other entities that change their national location (I would imagine this sort of thing might be more common in Europe than in the US)? Do they lose their country-specific domain?"
Why not? If you change physical locations, there's a ton of paperwork and you have to let everyone who cares know your new address. Why should it be different if you move from one jurisdiction to another? If you require a more permanent registration, choose a subdomain that is not bound to your residence.
The only problem would be entities that underplay or have no national affiliation, for example global online communities like open source projects, forums, etc. Still, I think assigning a geographical/jurisdictional label to the domain is preferable to the system we have now.
As screwed up as the US is with regards to intellectual property, at least we have government works in the public domain by default, so this wouldn't even be an issue here. One shouldn't have to defend the use of the English language as public domain.
TLDs aren't about solving problems, they're about raking in money on nitch domain names and creating artificial markets. A real solution - or rather, since this is unworkable from the state we're currently in, I'll call it the lost alternative - would be to only allow ccTLDs since they reflect jurisdictions, and then make individual countries responsible for providing all the usual TLDs as subdomains. That way, you don't have as much head-banging about things like a global .xxx domain, and registration of a .com name could be tied to a business entity registered in that particular country. It'd also be nice to have a graceful way for users to select what root nameservers they use for what kinds of domains, and some sort of conventional but not enforced aliasing system, so it wouldn't be necessary to always add .us if you're located in the US.
Basically, make the whole damn thing more hierarchical than ever before, so when someone screws up on a policy decision, it doesn't clog the global namespace.
That was.. the point. It was patently false, yet still makes it into reviews (or at least, print publications: I'm looking at you, PC Magazine). Although in retrospect, the GGP's mock review contained only true, accurate information that was merely blown out of proportion, so maybe my point wasn't well placed.
If you truly wanted to imitate crappy magazine reviews, you'd throw in something about a gigabit being 100 times faster than a megabit and 1000 times faster than a kilobit.
I think of them every time I hear one of these stories. Magnatune is one of the very few labels you can do business with and not feel like you have to take a shower afterwards. I discovered them while investigating online DRM-free labels with a conscience, after realizing that eMusic didn't have the (quite idealistic) philosophy I was looking for.
I was wondering why I felt a breeze over my hair. Cue sheepishness.
I really, really, REALLY want to mod you troll for claiming that you'll get modded troll, as if you're somehow unique by liking open source solutions on slashdot. You like linux. You like hardware that lets you run linux. We know. That's why you're here. Don't claim you're a martyr.
The part I don't understand is how it's a choice between real-time apps and other traffic. Somehow, on my university's network, we're able to play first-person shooters without causing any performance issues for other users or feeling more limited than if we were on a home connection. Do we have more bandwidth than the submitter's university? We've got a gigabit/s connection between buildings, and 10 megabit/s per switch port (which I despise, as it means I can't get 100 mb/s speed within the campus network, but it makes their QoS easier).
Ah, you beat me to it. Yes, we need only wait 47 years. But that wouldn't be necessary if, before every city was founded, the people implored the hand of god to create a giant pyramid of waterfalls at no cost so we would have an easy source of hydroelectric power.
Arcologies can't be too far off either.
My understanding is that nuclear power plants never go supercritical, at worse they go critical and meltdown. Although, as I read on the wikipedia article on Chernobyl, a thermal explosion can be much worse than a thermonuclear one, and spread radiation for hundreds of miles.
Even better, instead of suing over the attribution not being quintuple stamped and formatted properly, just revoke their license after they become dependent on it, and reinstate it for a hefty fee. It remains to be seen whether this kind of strategy can hold up in court, but it is true that licenses can generally be revoked at will.
I'm taking a course on Open Source Software development and we just completed a section on licensing (although the lecturer was not a lawyer). Thank you for making the point that the summary was technically entirely wrong in saying that CC licensed anything. At best, the plaintiff could attempt to claim that CC put someone at harm by making the license available; since that is extreme bullshit, there is nothing for the case to stand on, and I think it's safe to say that we'll see the case against CC dropped soon. I don't have specific knowledge of the law concerning model releases, but it seems reasonable to me that this burden would be on Virgin. As for the counselor, a licensor can only license the work to the extent that they own the copyright; that the work inherently entails rights besides copyright (in this case, to the likeness of the subject) is none of his concern, unless there's a case to be made that he misrepresented his ability and willingness to license that right as well.
That's where your point about the difference between v1.0 and v1.1 comes in. That was news to me, I was unaware of that change between the CC licenses. However, after a lecture on contract law (which included readings from Lawrence Rosen's "Open Source Licensing", available here (http://www.rosenlaw.com/Rosen_Ch04.pdf), it seems that this change was meaningless.
A license (at least, a license like the GPL or CC, as opposed to a EULA) is a grant of permission, not a contract. A license can be revoked at will, whereas a contract cannot be arbitrarily ignored. Such a license does not put the licensor under any sort of obligation or increase his liability. Therefore, the licensor can make claims as to the warranty or lack thereof, but these claims are just statements like any other. The fact that they're located in the license doesn't add anything to their worth. A contract on the other hand, contains an offer from the licenser, an acceptance from the licensee, and some form of consideration that is payment for the offer. If the counselor used a license that implied a warranty, and received something in return, then it's perfectly conceivable that he could be held liable.
There is some gray area on what can be considered consideration. In fact, there is considerable gray area cast on the entire area of law concerning licensing - it is an oddity compared to well-established contract law. But I think the bottom line here is that neither the person who uploaded the picture, nor the CC, has anything to be worried about in this case. The CC is certainly not even rightfully a party to this case. The counselor is not liable as far as licensing goes, and probably safe in general, unless there's some complication owing to the fact that the image was of a minor and posted online without (probably) parental permission? (I wonder if that does require permission these days, anyway?)
As a thought experiment, suppose that the counselor is indeed liable (discarding the part about the subject being a minor). It would be another devastating blow to free expression, yet another means by which society refuses to allow people to share and disclaim exclusive rights. It's bad enough that there is no proven way to put something in the public domain (people claim to do this all the time, but the concept of releasing a copyright in such a way is implied, not explicitly stated in copyright law), and that it's appropriate for individuals to explicitly disclaim warranty on non-commercial materials. But this would add to the already considerable mess that is the law, making it even more difficult for us to share without getting sued.
I agree, what I'm stuck with now sucks ass and I demand more. But the difference between you and me is that I get around 7-9 megabits (cable) at home, and roughly the same at school (they limit us to 10 mb/s on the switch so they don't have to do QoS or other real management). I suppose unless you're living in one of those lucky cities in Europe or Japan, there's always someone to be jealous of.
That said, even if you get the bandwidth you seek, if you're a geek then you still won't be satisfied by the Terms of Service and Acceptible Use Policy that all home ISPs throw at you. For all FiOS's bandwidth, they still require windows (or at least they claim to - I know, it's retarded, I hear from my friend it has to do with marketing bloatware), prohibit servers and by extension bittorrenting, and place other ridiculous restrictions on their customers. But this is an academic objection. As a practical matter, I'm sure they and Cablevision are loads better than Comcast and DSL providers; it's nice when a company has enough bandwidth to not be asinine about enforcing the ToS.
I guess the only thing I'd be happy with is community fiber.
Fiber is simply the gold standard. A single thread of fiber, with suitably expensive terminal equipment, has more bandwidth than the entire world's wireless devices. Once the infrastructure is in place, it can be upgraded at the end points with relative ease compared to the enormous cost of laying the fiber in the first place.
> "This is kind of like saying that if the NY Giants are playing a football game against the Podunk County Pee Wee League's Hometown Hornets that we should say that the game should be over in the first 10 seconds."
Against the Giants? I dunno, they might be able to take 'em.
In the 90s the term "nerd" was the positive (at least less derogatory) way of saying "geek". Somewhere along the line it changed. Was there a reason for that? Maybe it had to do with the emergence of the web and widespread personal computing - suddenly knowing technology made the common person think of you a wizard of sorts and not a freak in a basement, so they needed to reuse another less-used word. *shrug* Just like several years ago, if you said you were going to a LAN party you got beat up.
As a nitpick, there's a difference between relicensing and sublicenseing. Someone please correct me if I get this wrong: Relicensing is placing a new license on a piece of software (or other work), which is a right that only the copyright holder has; whereas sublicensing is a non-copyright holder applying additional terms on a work that do not conflict with the license he received it under. So I think the GP meant to say sublicense. Additionally, he claimed
> "it's unfair to take others' free work and glob it together with restrictions the original author didn't intend."
Neglecting, of course, that if the author didn't intend this, there's a perfectly usable and relatively mature copyleft license available.
The binary alternatives to the SI prefixes - Gi, Mi, etc., - make me cry. It's like we're *trying* to obfuscate the pronunciation of technical terms. It's bad enough we have to deal with "www". On a separate note, I dare you to walk into a computer store or any other public place, and engage in a casual loud conversation that includes the word "Mebibyte", and see how many looks you get.
I know you were trying to be funny, but what on Earth makes you think it doesn't have a CLI? It *IS* Linux after all.
http://wiki.openmoko.org/wiki/Manually_using_GSM
Obsolete? Obsolete? My current phone is a Nokia that's at least 5 years old. It's been dropped many times and thrown in a pool. It still makes calls and does very little else (that I know of, although I never cared to look). I have never owned any other phone, and I have never used wifi or gps on a phone.
That's what I like about living in the Stone Age - it makes the Bronze Age look nice and gilded.