There exist linux users who insist on the GNU prefix and loathe Novell. There exist linux users who abide proprietary lockin products like Flash. I do not believe that there is any serious overlap between the two extremes. Most people who are idealistic about the GPL and Free Software know enough to stay away from closed source if they want to avoid being hypocritical.
Careful when you argue against Jackson using Wikipeida. The last time I checked that article, it was one of Wiki's worst in terms of apparent reliability - the bias was so overpowering I felt like the wind was knocked out of me. Although that may have been from laughing.
Anyway, remember to use a better source when explaining to your friends and family why Everyone Hates Jack Thompson.
Definitely. The last thing we need is for more proprietary platforms to become de facto requirements for some websites. I'm sure I don't need to convince anyone on slashdot how much inefficient java code and flash portals suck.
Wow. Just fucking wow. I wish I were caught up on my slashdot reading when this article was posted so I could have responded in a timely manner, but as it is I still have four days left to go through. (Spring break'll do that to you, I guess.)
I find the whole situation among the most comical I've seen in months.
> "Who knew you can't control your own image?"
I like this part, and how the camera shot changes during this sentence - it's a brief window into his outrage and disbelief that the law does not function the way he wanted it to. Whereas the rest of the speech is forced by the settlement, this is where he gets to mitigate the damage it did to his ego.
After I watched the full apology video (by the way, I am particularly disgusted at the first commenter in this article and the people who modded him funny), I watched the Hannity and Colmes video and couldn't stop laughing. I honestly do not understand why Crook was embarassed by this video, since Hannity easily overpowered him in his bid to be the King Bastard. I knew political shows were full of crap, but I was always under the belief that they were required to maintain a baseline of decency and abstraction from the core name-calling. I guess modern America doesn't have the capacity to appreciate a well-formed insult. It's rather sad that a man can invite scum onto his show and end up still looking worse by comparison.
I also liked how Crook argues against free speech while employing its ideals. I don't mean in terms of the rhetoric of "Support our troops or give up your rights" - I mean how he is against all forms of fair use and commented that a world full of IP censorship would be utopia.
No one's worried that a DMCA abuser's ability to find vulnerabilities in the law will result in a nuclear strike. The best they can do is a simple denial of service.
Thank you for interrupting the love fest. I was getting a bit sick of the smell.
I enjoyed reading the deposition (although I cannot say why). Ray, I have to say that I am on your side - it's required of me as a Slashdotter, and I'm not nearly old enough to have lost enough of my soul to favor the RIAA, especially when the evidence is this weak. That said, I'm not particularly fond of the way you argue. There are enough legitimate points in this csae that you do not need to resort to attacking the witness's vocabulary. More importantly, throughout most of the transcript I felt very favorable towards Mr. Jacobson and agreed with most of what he said. I understand that you were trying to corner him, but he was very good about staying within the bounds of his knowledge and correcting you when the question contained technical inaccuracies, except for a few scattered instances. (He was also good at dodging the few head-on yes or no questions that hurt the RIAA's case. Those ones are pretty obvious.)
I was going to make a point by point list of my reactions to the transcript, but the volume of responses by now is just too huge (guess I shouldn't have put this off for a week), and reading some of the layman emotional comments (more common of your blog's users than Slashdot's of course) makes my blood boil.
Good luck to you and Ms. Lindor, I hope you stick it to them in court, but I do like the way Jacobson handled himself in this deposition.
There was little in that man's testimony to make me doubt his technical abilities. I found almost all his answers to be adequate - when Mr. Beckerman made a generalization or tried to push him towards a particular answer with a question that contained incorrect technical details, he pointed it out and was as precise in his answers as was required in that setting. There were a few parts, however, where it was clear that the expert just was not going to answer a legitimate question.
The whole conversation on MACs was irrelevant to the case, unless Verizon held onto logs of Ms. Lindor's router's or computer's MAC in addition to her assigned IP address. It also looked like Ray and Jacobson were not on the same page when discussing MACs.
The discussion on MAC addresses is irrelevant to this case entirely, unless Verizon has records of what MAC was hooked up to their line on the defendant's side - in which case it becomes very relevant because, so long as it's not forged, it can be used to identify a router or computer's NIC taken from the defendant's residence. Ray was the one pursuing the issue, and it seemed like he was confusing it with an IP address, which is of course very understandable for a layman. The expert witness was incorrect/imprecise in a couple of areas, in particular when he agreed to Ray's prompting that the MAC is contained in the packet. I would label this a failure to clarify rather than a mistake on Jacobson's part, and given the number of clarifications he already made throughout the deposition, I do not fault him for it.
I too noticed the IPv4/IPv6 slipup, which was obviously a misspeak. Again, I feel you're picking at straws.
Also, I think you misunderstood the point of comparing the internal address and external address in the packet sniffer log. They wanted to determine the presence or absence of a wireless router, and they proved its absence to my satisfaction.
The logic:
1. If a wireless router is present, NAT/PAT is running. (True, I would guess, of almost all consumer routers. I know I can't disable it on my Netgear.)
2. If NAT/PAT is running, then the IP address reported by KaZaA's protocol in the data payload of the IP packet will be an internal RFC1918 IP address, and moreover it will be different from the external IP address assigned by Verizon.
a. For the first part of this statement to be false, the router would have to be configured specifically by an administrator to use an alternative block of addresses for DHCP instead of 192.168.x.x. According to Mr. Beckerman, Ms. Lindor has next to zero knowledge of computers. Furthermore, there is no rational reason why someone would want to do this - it would very likely make some real public destinations on the Internet unroutable from her network.
b. For the second part of this statement to be false, that is, for NAT to be running but doing no IP translation - well, I'm no NAT expert so I'm not familiar with what sort of configuration would employ such a redundant transformation, or whether it could be configured on a consumer router.
c. It's also possible that KaZaA was modified to operate with a false internal IP reported (I don't know how that would affect the protocol, so maybe not). A lot of things are possible, but it would take an expert to do this kind of stuff. Assume that Ms. Lindor is actually only a health care professional by day - by night she dresses up in a ridiculous outfit and fights crime with her leet networking skills, reflashing router firmware and changing MAC addresses and so on. Why would she change the address range to hide the presence of the router, and weaken her own defense? Or why would she modify the KaZaA packets to make it look like she was not behind NAT? It's not in her interest. Unless you're suggesting that someone specifically tried to frame her.
3. Because the IP addresses were the same (and public), NAT was not running, and therefore there was no wireless router.
I hardly think the exception you mentioned is relevant to Jacobson's testimony. He's trying to dumb it down for the laymen, and I think he captured the important parts.
> "If there is no patent on the algorithm itself, then creating an implementation of the algorithm is perfectly legal and the only item that should be restricted by the DMCA are the keys used for decryption."
I don't believe that's the case. The DMCA prohibits circumvention of technological measures (or is it the distribution of the means to do so?). This includes the unauthorized program that implements the decryption algorithm, because of its purpose and functionality. The fact that the implementation is not illegal under patent law doesn't prevent it from being illegal under the DMCA.
> "Otherwise the DMCA has a much broader effect than originally intended, and makes it illegal for any form of encryption or decryption to be used other than that provided by a vendor.
Well, that is sort of the situation we have now, and the intended purpose of the DMCA. No decryption of a CSS or AACS encrypted disc is allowed except by implementations that conform to the standards, license appropriate keys, etc. However, control over CSS/AACS is not in the hands of any single vendor, so licensing is relatively non-discriminatory.
> "It wouldn't just be illegal to crack any DRM, but illegal to use a non-endorsed player, and that flies in the face of so much precedence it's not even funny."
When Real bypassed Apple's DRM, wasn't that of questionable legality under the DMCA? I was under the impression that the DMCA blocked out rival companies and not just consumers.
Perhaps I need to find the text in question: bypassing technology is not allowed when it's for what purpose? Unrestricted access? Unintended access?
When looking for a place to find non-DRM'd music, I considered eMusic, but decided against it because their decision to sell unrestricted music was merely a technical business maneuver. I had no indication (at least at a glance) that they wouldn't immediately change that policy if Apple were to license FairPlay, nor did I trust them as a company any more than the RIAA players. The fact that their interface didn't support linux also seemed to be a warning sign.
Then I found Magnatune, and I must say, it truly feels good to be able to do business with a label and not feel like I have to take a shower afterwards. Their policies run much, much deeper than merely distributing music in free formats. As already mentioned, the consumer can select a price for a download or shipped CD after listening to full length decent-quality previews, and the artist gets 50% instead of a fraction of that. But more importantly, I get that warm fuzzy feeling from this company that they're not out there to screw me over.
Their business model relies on exposure rather than limitations. They encourage you to share your purchased music with up to three friends, confident that massive piracy is a non-issue since the mid-quality versions are already available to everyone. (Indeed, you can redistribute those versions yourself if you choose, and if you're like me then you can't even tell the difference.) All their music is put under a Creative Commons (Attribution NonCommercial ShareAlike) license, which means derivative works are explicitly encouraged. Licensing accounts for a large portion of their income and is made exceptionally easy through a web interface.
Finally, the website is well designed. They host a number of streams, offer both an embedded flash audio player and plain hyperlinks, and there even exists a plugin for Amarok for purchasing albums. How's that for linux-friendly?
Disclaimer: I have no affiliation with Magnatune except as a satisfied customer who truly believes in what they are trying to achieve.
It'd be nice if we had application-based permissions instead of trusting all programs run by a particular user equally. A recent article said that OLPC was doing that, but I wonder how long it'll be until that makes it to the rest of us to protect us from assholes like this man.
Eighteen occurrences of some variation of the word "criticise". Eighteen. Insert jokes about DRM'd thesauruses.
"I say, Jeremy, isn't that Reginald B. Stiffworth, the young, upstart chap who's been touting the merits of the Recording Industry's Failed Digital Strategy?" "Why, yes, I dare say that's the fellow." "Oh, let's criticise him!" "Oh Reginald... I disagree!"
> "It's fucking ridiculous what some people will use as justification for not voting for a person. Seriously, I hope those people don't breed."
Unfortunately, they are breeding, and currently outnumber us. Perhaps it's because we're all sitting on computers reading slashdot, that we've fallen so far behind reproductively.
Re:Clippy did its job... Unfortunatly.
on
The Death of Clippy
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
> "I think the general annoyance of clippy was the fact it kept popping up whenever you did something."
It's more than just that. For instance, the chief annoyance I have with the dog in XP searches is that it takes a context menu and a few seconds to go away, rather than just disappearing as quickly as an open window.
Clippy represented everything terrible with Microsoft's UI design - the overbearing "Use your computer in just the ways we enumerate" mentality, combined with "Look at me! Look at me! See what I can do?!". I find it very consistent that the same company to produce such an abomination also decided to add integrated popup spam as an operating system feature: "Help make office better" in the middle of your powerpoint presentation. And god help you if you miss when you click the X, as there's no titlebar to protect you from accidently responding to the popup. Nor can you press a precise key combination to eliminate the offending content.
I know its cliche to get modded flamebait for daring to draw breath, but I feel that I have to have some record of the stupidity of my peers, hence this post.
Gee, maybe next time I'll think twice before daring to ask for clarification regarding someone's rant.
> "Yes, let's protect potential future damage to their lives or careers by ending them early! What the fuck???? I can't believe that this was an actual reasoning."
We're all pretty much screwed. Might as well get it over with early. Saves these kids the suspense of thinking they can succeed in life.
> "This is unbelievable on so many levels. As the monitory opinion states, it's ok to have sex, as long as you don't document it."
Oh don't worry about that bit of hypocracy. Sooner or later the powers that be will outlaw sex in all forms.
> "I mean, it seems as if they view the mere possibility of this picture surfacing as being more damaging to these kids than being labeled as sex offenders for the rest of their lives?"
I don't remember anything in the article referring to registered sex-offender status. Speculation or source?
And because Manhattan-ers can't segregate people and traffic, I shouldn't be allowed to walk between my student union and academic campus while listening to music, some three hours north of NYC?
And here I thought I had a right to lend or resell my possessions to my friends and family. Guess it turns out they'll have to buy their own pencils, video games, and books. Oh well, we may be turning into a permission society, but at least it'll be good for the economy.
Er, that's not what it says. Like the guy above me said, this statement identifies the person responding with a letter of good faith, that is, the submitter.
The sentence reads: Any person who (knowingly materially misrepresents that (material or activity was removed or disabled by (mistake or misidentification))) may be subject to liability.
As you put it: Any person who (knowingly materially misrepresents that (material or activity was removed or disabled) by (mistake or misidentification)) may be subject to liability.
What we need is some sort of public defender that will file all sorts of nuisance suits against the industry for this sort of thing, the cost be damned. Someone who will just strive to be a thorn in their side, and if need be, a total asshat. Basically, a geek variant of Jack Thompson.
While you're right to put things in perspective as far as there being worse problems with the DMCA, this is indeed a blip on the radar, and the solution is not as simple as an email. According to the protocol stated in the email (and I presume by the law), the submitter is required to send a response with snail mail, not email, in order to argue a good faith belief that the content is non-infringing. So thanks to the DMCA, any copyright owner can send notice to any hosting provider that so-and-so is violating their intellectual property, and if the hosting provider doesn't want to become liable then it must react right away. Meanwhile, the submitter is penalized a few days while the mess gets cleared up. That can be just enough time for a major corporation to control a leak or a publicity disaster. It also provides a means to, in a limited way, DoS anyone you choose to.
Are such abuses of the DMCA prosecutable? In theory, probably. But it's not as if the owner of the Irrlicht video can afford to fight a corporation over this kind of thing - not that I'd recommend it anyway for something so small. The point is that this clause of the DMCA shifts the balance too far towards the copyright owners rather than, well, everyone else.
Slashdot Mirror
There exist linux users who insist on the GNU prefix and loathe Novell. There exist linux users who abide proprietary lockin products like Flash. I do not believe that there is any serious overlap between the two extremes. Most people who are idealistic about the GPL and Free Software know enough to stay away from closed source if they want to avoid being hypocritical.
Careful when you argue against Jackson using Wikipeida. The last time I checked that article, it was one of Wiki's worst in terms of apparent reliability - the bias was so overpowering I felt like the wind was knocked out of me. Although that may have been from laughing.
Anyway, remember to use a better source when explaining to your friends and family why Everyone Hates Jack Thompson.
Definitely. The last thing we need is for more proprietary platforms to become de facto requirements for some websites. I'm sure I don't need to convince anyone on slashdot how much inefficient java code and flash portals suck.
Wow. Just fucking wow. I wish I were caught up on my slashdot reading when this article was posted so I could have responded in a timely manner, but as it is I still have four days left to go through. (Spring break'll do that to you, I guess.)
I find the whole situation among the most comical I've seen in months.
> "Who knew you can't control your own image?"
I like this part, and how the camera shot changes during this sentence - it's a brief window into his outrage and disbelief that the law does not function the way he wanted it to. Whereas the rest of the speech is forced by the settlement, this is where he gets to mitigate the damage it did to his ego.
After I watched the full apology video (by the way, I am particularly disgusted at the first commenter in this article and the people who modded him funny), I watched the Hannity and Colmes video and couldn't stop laughing. I honestly do not understand why Crook was embarassed by this video, since Hannity easily overpowered him in his bid to be the King Bastard. I knew political shows were full of crap, but I was always under the belief that they were required to maintain a baseline of decency and abstraction from the core name-calling. I guess modern America doesn't have the capacity to appreciate a well-formed insult. It's rather sad that a man can invite scum onto his show and end up still looking worse by comparison.
I also liked how Crook argues against free speech while employing its ideals. I don't mean in terms of the rhetoric of "Support our troops or give up your rights" - I mean how he is against all forms of fair use and commented that a world full of IP censorship would be utopia.
Well, I had better stop laughing and eat dinner.
No one's worried that a DMCA abuser's ability to find vulnerabilities in the law will result in a nuclear strike. The best they can do is a simple denial of service.
Yes, and after one year it would be 145200000%. That's assuming, of course, that the number of customers stays the same.
Thank you for interrupting the love fest. I was getting a bit sick of the smell.
I enjoyed reading the deposition (although I cannot say why). Ray, I have to say that I am on your side - it's required of me as a Slashdotter, and I'm not nearly old enough to have lost enough of my soul to favor the RIAA, especially when the evidence is this weak. That said, I'm not particularly fond of the way you argue. There are enough legitimate points in this csae that you do not need to resort to attacking the witness's vocabulary. More importantly, throughout most of the transcript I felt very favorable towards Mr. Jacobson and agreed with most of what he said. I understand that you were trying to corner him, but he was very good about staying within the bounds of his knowledge and correcting you when the question contained technical inaccuracies, except for a few scattered instances. (He was also good at dodging the few head-on yes or no questions that hurt the RIAA's case. Those ones are pretty obvious.)
I was going to make a point by point list of my reactions to the transcript, but the volume of responses by now is just too huge (guess I shouldn't have put this off for a week), and reading some of the layman emotional comments (more common of your blog's users than Slashdot's of course) makes my blood boil.
Good luck to you and Ms. Lindor, I hope you stick it to them in court, but I do like the way Jacobson handled himself in this deposition.
There was little in that man's testimony to make me doubt his technical abilities. I found almost all his answers to be adequate - when Mr. Beckerman made a generalization or tried to push him towards a particular answer with a question that contained incorrect technical details, he pointed it out and was as precise in his answers as was required in that setting. There were a few parts, however, where it was clear that the expert just was not going to answer a legitimate question.
The whole conversation on MACs was irrelevant to the case, unless Verizon held onto logs of Ms. Lindor's router's or computer's MAC in addition to her assigned IP address. It also looked like Ray and Jacobson were not on the same page when discussing MACs.
The discussion on MAC addresses is irrelevant to this case entirely, unless Verizon has records of what MAC was hooked up to their line on the defendant's side - in which case it becomes very relevant because, so long as it's not forged, it can be used to identify a router or computer's NIC taken from the defendant's residence. Ray was the one pursuing the issue, and it seemed like he was confusing it with an IP address, which is of course very understandable for a layman. The expert witness was incorrect/imprecise in a couple of areas, in particular when he agreed to Ray's prompting that the MAC is contained in the packet. I would label this a failure to clarify rather than a mistake on Jacobson's part, and given the number of clarifications he already made throughout the deposition, I do not fault him for it.
I too noticed the IPv4/IPv6 slipup, which was obviously a misspeak. Again, I feel you're picking at straws.
Also, I think you misunderstood the point of comparing the internal address and external address in the packet sniffer log. They wanted to determine the presence or absence of a wireless router, and they proved its absence to my satisfaction.
The logic:
1. If a wireless router is present, NAT/PAT is running. (True, I would guess, of almost all consumer routers. I know I can't disable it on my Netgear.)
2. If NAT/PAT is running, then the IP address reported by KaZaA's protocol in the data payload of the IP packet will be an internal RFC1918 IP address, and moreover it will be different from the external IP address assigned by Verizon.
a. For the first part of this statement to be false, the router would have to be configured specifically by an administrator to use an alternative block of addresses for DHCP instead of 192.168.x.x. According to Mr. Beckerman, Ms. Lindor has next to zero knowledge of computers. Furthermore, there is no rational reason why someone would want to do this - it would very likely make some real public destinations on the Internet unroutable from her network.
b. For the second part of this statement to be false, that is, for NAT to be running but doing no IP translation - well, I'm no NAT expert so I'm not familiar with what sort of configuration would employ such a redundant transformation, or whether it could be configured on a consumer router.
c. It's also possible that KaZaA was modified to operate with a false internal IP reported (I don't know how that would affect the protocol, so maybe not). A lot of things are possible, but it would take an expert to do this kind of stuff. Assume that Ms. Lindor is actually only a health care professional by day - by night she dresses up in a ridiculous outfit and fights crime with her leet networking skills, reflashing router firmware and changing MAC addresses and so on. Why would she change the address range to hide the presence of the router, and weaken her own defense? Or why would she modify the KaZaA packets to make it look like she was not behind NAT? It's not in her interest. Unless you're suggesting that someone specifically tried to frame her.
3. Because the IP addresses were the same (and public), NAT was not running, and therefore there was no wireless router.
I hardly think the exception you mentioned is relevant to Jacobson's testimony. He's trying to dumb it down for the laymen, and I think he captured the important parts.
> "If there is no patent on the algorithm itself, then creating an implementation of the algorithm is perfectly legal and the only item that should be restricted by the DMCA are the keys used for decryption."
I don't believe that's the case. The DMCA prohibits circumvention of technological measures (or is it the distribution of the means to do so?). This includes the unauthorized program that implements the decryption algorithm, because of its purpose and functionality. The fact that the implementation is not illegal under patent law doesn't prevent it from being illegal under the DMCA.
> "Otherwise the DMCA has a much broader effect than originally intended, and makes it illegal for any form of encryption or decryption to be used other than that provided by a vendor.
Well, that is sort of the situation we have now, and the intended purpose of the DMCA. No decryption of a CSS or AACS encrypted disc is allowed except by implementations that conform to the standards, license appropriate keys, etc. However, control over CSS/AACS is not in the hands of any single vendor, so licensing is relatively non-discriminatory.
> "It wouldn't just be illegal to crack any DRM, but illegal to use a non-endorsed player, and that flies in the face of so much precedence it's not even funny."
When Real bypassed Apple's DRM, wasn't that of questionable legality under the DMCA? I was under the impression that the DMCA blocked out rival companies and not just consumers.
Perhaps I need to find the text in question: bypassing technology is not allowed when it's for what purpose? Unrestricted access? Unintended access?
When looking for a place to find non-DRM'd music, I considered eMusic, but decided against it because their decision to sell unrestricted music was merely a technical business maneuver. I had no indication (at least at a glance) that they wouldn't immediately change that policy if Apple were to license FairPlay, nor did I trust them as a company any more than the RIAA players. The fact that their interface didn't support linux also seemed to be a warning sign.
Then I found Magnatune, and I must say, it truly feels good to be able to do business with a label and not feel like I have to take a shower afterwards. Their policies run much, much deeper than merely distributing music in free formats. As already mentioned, the consumer can select a price for a download or shipped CD after listening to full length decent-quality previews, and the artist gets 50% instead of a fraction of that. But more importantly, I get that warm fuzzy feeling from this company that they're not out there to screw me over.
Their business model relies on exposure rather than limitations. They encourage you to share your purchased music with up to three friends, confident that massive piracy is a non-issue since the mid-quality versions are already available to everyone. (Indeed, you can redistribute those versions yourself if you choose, and if you're like me then you can't even tell the difference.) All their music is put under a Creative Commons (Attribution NonCommercial ShareAlike) license, which means derivative works are explicitly encouraged. Licensing accounts for a large portion of their income and is made exceptionally easy through a web interface.
Finally, the website is well designed. They host a number of streams, offer both an embedded flash audio player and plain hyperlinks, and there even exists a plugin for Amarok for purchasing albums. How's that for linux-friendly?
Disclaimer: I have no affiliation with Magnatune except as a satisfied customer who truly believes in what they are trying to achieve.
I purchased and recommend the following groups in particular: Drop Trio, Thursday Group, Liquid Zen
It'd be nice if we had application-based permissions instead of trusting all programs run by a particular user equally. A recent article said that OLPC was doing that, but I wonder how long it'll be until that makes it to the rest of us to protect us from assholes like this man.
Eighteen occurrences of some variation of the word "criticise". Eighteen. Insert jokes about DRM'd thesauruses.
"I say, Jeremy, isn't that Reginald B. Stiffworth, the young, upstart chap who's been touting the merits of the Recording Industry's Failed Digital Strategy?"
"Why, yes, I dare say that's the fellow."
"Oh, let's criticise him!"
"Oh Reginald... I disagree!"
> "Of course, if these hip-hop artists are really "gangstas" and are as hard as they claim"
TFA mentions that one of them gets up at 8 AM to take his kindergartener to private school.
> "It's fucking ridiculous what some people will use as justification for not voting for a person. Seriously, I hope those people don't breed."
Unfortunately, they are breeding, and currently outnumber us. Perhaps it's because we're all sitting on computers reading slashdot, that we've fallen so far behind reproductively.
> "I think the general annoyance of clippy was the fact it kept popping up whenever you did something."
It's more than just that. For instance, the chief annoyance I have with the dog in XP searches is that it takes a context menu and a few seconds to go away, rather than just disappearing as quickly as an open window.
Clippy represented everything terrible with Microsoft's UI design - the overbearing "Use your computer in just the ways we enumerate" mentality, combined with "Look at me! Look at me! See what I can do?!". I find it very consistent that the same company to produce such an abomination also decided to add integrated popup spam as an operating system feature: "Help make office better" in the middle of your powerpoint presentation. And god help you if you miss when you click the X, as there's no titlebar to protect you from accidently responding to the popup. Nor can you press a precise key combination to eliminate the offending content.
I know its cliche to get modded flamebait for daring to draw breath, but I feel that I have to have some record of the stupidity of my peers, hence this post.
Gee, maybe next time I'll think twice before daring to ask for clarification regarding someone's rant.
> "Yes, let's protect potential future damage to their lives or careers by ending them early! What the fuck???? I can't believe that this was an actual reasoning."
We're all pretty much screwed. Might as well get it over with early. Saves these kids the suspense of thinking they can succeed in life.
> "This is unbelievable on so many levels. As the monitory opinion states, it's ok to have sex, as long as you don't document it."
Oh don't worry about that bit of hypocracy. Sooner or later the powers that be will outlaw sex in all forms.
> "I mean, it seems as if they view the mere possibility of this picture surfacing as being more damaging to these kids than being labeled as sex offenders for the rest of their lives?"
I don't remember anything in the article referring to registered sex-offender status. Speculation or source?
And because Manhattan-ers can't segregate people and traffic, I shouldn't be allowed to walk between my student union and academic campus while listening to music, some three hours north of NYC?
And here I thought I had a right to lend or resell my possessions to my friends and family. Guess it turns out they'll have to buy their own pencils, video games, and books. Oh well, we may be turning into a permission society, but at least it'll be good for the economy.
Er, that's not what it says. Like the guy above me said, this statement identifies the person responding with a letter of good faith, that is, the submitter.
The sentence reads:
Any person who (knowingly materially misrepresents that (material or activity was removed or disabled by (mistake or misidentification))) may be subject to liability.
As you put it:
Any person who (knowingly materially misrepresents that (material or activity was removed or disabled) by (mistake or misidentification)) may be subject to liability.
What we need is some sort of public defender that will file all sorts of nuisance suits against the industry for this sort of thing, the cost be damned. Someone who will just strive to be a thorn in their side, and if need be, a total asshat. Basically, a geek variant of Jack Thompson.
No, no, no. In capitalist America, Big studios Gang-Bang YOU!
While you're right to put things in perspective as far as there being worse problems with the DMCA, this is indeed a blip on the radar, and the solution is not as simple as an email. According to the protocol stated in the email (and I presume by the law), the submitter is required to send a response with snail mail, not email, in order to argue a good faith belief that the content is non-infringing. So thanks to the DMCA, any copyright owner can send notice to any hosting provider that so-and-so is violating their intellectual property, and if the hosting provider doesn't want to become liable then it must react right away. Meanwhile, the submitter is penalized a few days while the mess gets cleared up. That can be just enough time for a major corporation to control a leak or a publicity disaster. It also provides a means to, in a limited way, DoS anyone you choose to.
Are such abuses of the DMCA prosecutable? In theory, probably. But it's not as if the owner of the Irrlicht video can afford to fight a corporation over this kind of thing - not that I'd recommend it anyway for something so small. The point is that this clause of the DMCA shifts the balance too far towards the copyright owners rather than, well, everyone else.