I think this is the key to fixing the courts system, the patent system, and probably some other systems. If people have a patent that gets disqualified on prior art or simple and obvious, there should be a penalty. If someone takes a person to court with a specious case - whether they actually thought they could win, or just wanted to rack up legal expenses for someone they don't like - there should be significant penalties for both the plaintiff and the lawyer who took the case. I'm not saying every time someone loses a case it should be penalized, but there should be some legal definition outlining such a case.
Also, the penalties should consider the wealth and size of the entity being penalized. Charging a startup company $100,000 may bankrupt it, charging a behemoth Microsoft $100,000 is a cost of doing business.
Practically 100% of the files on your computer are copyrighted. Even if those files are music or movies, their mere presence doesn't indicate a breach of copyright.
That was my first thought. I have well over 300 GB of "copyrighted material" on my disks. I have about 2,000 songs - all ripped from my extensive CD collection, and over 400 TV shows and movies that I've recorded with MythTV. The MPAA may not be happy that I have a bunch of movies on my hard drive, but they're legal because I recorded them when they were shown on television.
All of the media on my computer was legally obtained, and I'm not distributing it, but a system scan wouldn't know the difference. I fail to see how the mere possession of copyrighted works is even incriminating, much less how they'd be able to make a decent legal case with the data they're collecting.
Some years ago I saw a screen cap of Homer's driver's license. The abbrieviation for the state was something like "MK", or something else that isn't associated with any state.
Ever heard of Lojack for laptops? It works on the same basic principle, and increases the chances of your laptop being returned from about 3% to about 75%. My method doesn't have a team to follow up, but I'd have more evidence for taking action.
It's certainly true that most if not all media commentators are trying to rally support for their own causes, my point was that Michael Moore tends to rally as many people against his cause as he does for them.
It's their obligation to do whatever legally allowed to protect their client's interests. That includes stalling until other departments figure out what _they_ could or should do.
They're not legally allowed to stall. They're distributing binaries from LGPL'd code - the license requires that they also distribute the source, making no exception for stalling as your legal department tries to find a way not to have to distribute the code. They should have taken care of this before the release. Now they're infringing.
His Documentaries are not anywhere near neutral. He's the founding father of the new stream of Documentaries that don't let the subject speak for itself but ram home opinions. I think it hurts the causes as much as it helps.
Michael Moore in a nutshell. All he does is polarize subjects. I watched part of Fahrenheit 9/11 some months after it came out, and while people who wanted to believe what he said could take it as gospel, it was clearly biased and misleading to anyone of a neutral or opposing views on the subject. I suspect Farenheit 9/11 raised as much support for the Bush administration as it did opposition. If Moore had been less one sided with his documentary, he might have swayed a few neutral people to his side - as it were, he only managed to push them away.
I'll be honest - I don't know much about the state of health care in the United States. If I ever decide I ought to learn about the subject, I'm not going to go to Michael Moore's "documentary" for my "facts". Anyone who refers to it for facts made up their mind ahead of time. Quite likely, Moore's film will rally opposition to his cause, and it may even lead to a strong opposition of socialized medicine.
I put my money on the non-respectable thieves. I have a laptop that I take every where with me. I keep it close, and I have a lock for it when I leave it unattended (usually just in my apartment). But on the off chance that it ever gets stolen, I also have a daemon installed that will register it's IP address with a remote server as soon as it finds it has a new IP address. While I hope it never comes down to it, I suspect it would be much easier to track down my laptop if it ever got stolen than it would be if I weren't running that daemon.
A "respectable thief" would boot with a Live CD to collect my personal information before formatting the drive, but a typical thief would more likely just boot it up.
Like I say, I keep my laptop close, and lock it up when I can't, but I feel a bit more secure knowing my laptop phones home.
Likewise, my Tivo is my computer. It's running in my house. It's connected to my network. I have a right to know what it's doing. Would you be as forgiving of a builder who wouldn't let you keep a copy of the plans to your house? Would you tolerate a car dealer who's welded your hood shut? It's your house. It's your car. You have a right to know where the plumbing goes. You have a right to look at the engine.
Really bad analogy. First, Tivo does release their source as required by the GPL version 2, what they don't allow is putting modified (unsigned) versions of the software on the TiVo. While I understand this is an unpopular viewpoint with the open source community, I think it makes sense economically. TiVo sells their units below cost, so that they will be able to sell their service along with it. If people could put whatever software they wanted on it, it would be a below-cost computer, and there would be people who would sign up for the shortest TiVo subscription so that they could get a cheap computer. Most Tivo users don't care about modifying their firmware, and if it makes their Tivo less expensive, they're not going to complain.
So following the chef analogy - the chef is telling you what's in your food. You could go home and make your own derivative of the recipe in your own kitchen, but when you're at this chef's restaurant, you get the chef's version. Likewise, Tivo is giving you the Linux kernel that they use, and on your own hardware, you can do whatever you want with it, but on Tivo hardware, you only get to use the Tivo kernel. Some may say this is a circumvention of the intent of the GPL. I think it's perfectly valid. Tivo is making contributions to Linux - everything they've done can be adopted back in to the main kernel - you just can't use their hardware with derivative works.
I agree with respect to travel, but there are practical reasons to carry shampoo on a plane, there aren't many reasons to misrepresent yourself on the phone aside from illegal acts (they phrased the law to allow
I think laws that supposedly provide security by making something illegal, without an effective mechanism for enforcement, are dangerous and waste well-meaning people's time.
Laws against murder don't keep it from happening, nor do laws against theft or rape. What they do is make it so if you get caught, there's a significant punishment, and consequently people are often deterred from doing it in the first place. If someone gets caught using the bank's caller ID to defraud people, that's an additional charge, so it may be an additional deterrent.
Lastly, lots of people have heard about this issue because of the passage of this law. My mother (prime example of the techno-illiterate) got a chain e-mail warning her not to trust caller ID. My girlfriend's mother (slightly more technically literate) heard about it from someone at work, and has been telling everyone she knows. Granted, this last part could have happened without the law if the conditions had been right, but it's still helped get the word out.
NannyState is when the government overregulates something that's really none of its business. Like privately-owned telecommunications companies.
I'm no fan of over-regulation, but I was glad to see this one pass. Lot's of people are completely unaware that caller ID even can be spoofed. If they got a call that appeared to be from someone at their bank, they'd give their account number to get some issue straightened out.
Aside from prank phone calls, the only use for Caller ID spoofing is fraud, which is definitely a government issue.
I was thrilled to see Google desktop was available for Linux. It was one of the few things I missed from Windows. I've tried Beagle, but I found it to be a horrible resource hog, and it wasn't particularly useful.
As far as Linux files being plain text, searching plain text files barely brushes the surface. Google Desktop indexes pictures, web history, Gmail (for the rare occasion I don't have web access to read my e-mail), OpenOffice and MS Office documents, the list goes on. Plus the results show up in your typical Google search, making them quickly and easily available. It's not a resource hog, and it's results show up without even having to look for them.
Lastly, I've never been overly concerned about binary programs. I avoid binary kernel drivers, but I use flash, VMWare, and a few other proprietary user-space apps. If I have any reason to suspect foul play, it's easy enough to get rid of.
Anyone who's paranoid about binary blobs or having their desktop searched is welcome not to install it, but I for one am quite pleased that Google decided to make a Linux version.
This is where the plan fails. At this moment, I have exactly 2,000 tracks on my music library. I would guess I bought about 10% of this music after hearing it in a musical, 20% after on the recommendation of a friend, and the remaining 70% I heard the artist on the radio and decided to buy one of their albums (and often more than one from an artist). If the RIAA put broadcasters out of business, nobody knows what music to buy anymore. I don't know anyone who buys an album from an artist they've never heard of without hearing at least one of their songs first, and the radio (be it broadcast or internet) is still the best way to get music out there.
I think the RIAA is trying to assert their claim that they can collect fees for all internet radio, including non-signed artists. Then they kill the advertising for independent artists, effectively killing their competition.
Killing radio would be suicide. Killing internet radio would be shooting themselves in the toe while killing the competition.
Same here. My biggest gripes are when people are simply too lazy to type a couple of letters. While I am one of the faster typists around, it just seems incredibly lazy to write "wat" or "wut" instead of "what". I don't mind (and occasionally use) abbreviations such as "lol" (though Ha ha generally seems appropriate and is only 2 characters longer), and WTF - which is generally used to tone down language.
It also bothers me when people use abbreviations I've never heard of. It took me for ever to figure out what IANAL stood for (for those who still don't know, "I Am Not A Lawyer").
To the contrary I am an American, and I am fairly familiar with our IP laws. While a registered trademark isn't necessary to defend a trademark, it would hold a lot more weight if OSI wanted to take this to court. Regardless of whether or not the trademark has been registered, it has gone unenforced for years, so I can't imagine it's still valid.
On the second point, I never thought the law was everything, but the point is that OSI can do very little to keep a company from claiming to be open source. While consumers may get irritated and look for OSI certified software instead, a company is not inaccurate to claim their product is open source if, for example, they make the source available to the end user under a non-disclosure agreement.
Similar to the problem Google faces with people using the word "google" as another way to say "search", the phrase "open source" is widely accepted as meaning "source code available for use". The only difference is that "Google" is widely known as a company while "open source" has no meaning beyond the concept described above.
"Google" is a registered trademark. "Open Source" is not.
It bothers me when people (OSI and FSF) try to redefine words to further their agenda. I'm a huge fan of Free and Open Source software, but it bothers me when RMS tries to claim he gets to define "Free". Opera is "free", Trillian is "free", Adobe Reader and Flash are "free". It doesn't cost a dime to get any of them. They may not be FSF approved "Free", but RMS can't tell their vendors not to call them free.
Same goes with Open Source. VBulletin is "Open Source" in that anyone who buys it gets the source along with a non-disclosure agreement (that said, I don't believe they advertise themselves as open source). While it may not be OSI certified, one group can't declare that "Open source" means everyone and their mother has access to the source.
Nobody gets to arbitrarily redefine words that have been around for generations. Claim that something is not "OSI Certified" or "FSF Approved" rather than claiming "it's not open source" or "it's not free". We'd be furious if Microsoft tried to redefine "secure" to include something about being proprietary and went around telling free software projects they couldn't claim to be "secure". Microsoft is welcome to create their own seal of approval, but they don't get to arbitrarily redefine words, and neither should we.
For that matter, someone who simply provides the source to their paying clients might claim to be open source - and while I'm sure that's not OSI's definition of Open Source, I don't see where OSI has any legal standing to prevent someone from using the term.
I don't particularly dislike the idea of Edward Norton as Bruce Banner, but they just did a Hulk movie in 2003. It seems odd that they'd change actors so soon.
As I said on the Ars Technica discussion board the day this came out, I want to be on the content creators side and support the people who entertain me, but crap like this makes it nearly impossible. I'm not a pirate, and I don't like the mentality "it costs nothing to reproduce, so I shouldn't have to pay anything for it," but I can't side with the content producers who suggest it would better to let banks be robbed than let people pirate movies.
I particularly have a hard time defending the content producers when the pirates provide a better product - ignoring price. If I want a particular song, the music industry will sell me a CD with that song along with several others I don't want, or I can buy a fairly low quality digital copy, probably with DRM in a format I don't like. Pirates offer a variety of formats and quality levels, and you can play their versions on anything you want.
Movies aren't much different. You can buy a DVD, which can only be played legally in authorized devices, or you can download a heavily DRMed copy that - unless you have a media center PC - you're stuck playing on your computer monitor. Pirates offer a variety of quality levels, you can burn them to DVD's if you have the proper software, and play them on anything capable of playing them.
Like I said, I'm not a pirate. I have an older taste in music, so I get most of my CD's used for a couple of bucks. I rent movies and go to the theater on occasion. If the content industry starts offering the same quality of product the pirates offer, but they can't compete in price, then they will have my sympathy. But so long as the content industry refuses to match the pirates' level of quality, and keeping making specious claims like the ones in this article, they get no sympathy from me.
It sounded to me like they approached MS for cross licensing, and got the patent deal thrown in. What concerns me is that if the patent dispute ever goes to court, Microsoft will say "We have half a dozen Linux vendors who have agreed that Linux violates these patents - the rest should have to pay as well." Despite the fact that several of the signed vendors have specifically said they don't believe Linux is in violation of those patents.
When I'm home or traveling in populated areas I have a phone that goes everywhere with me, and a laptop that goes with me anywhere I might have some down time. But a couple of times a year I like to go on lengthy camping trips in places where the phone has no reception and the laptop has no where to charge. I enjoy being removed from society to the point where there is no use for my gadgets. Gadgets make keeping up with society easier, but I don't find them to be crucial for survival or happiness.
Cross-licensing in business is the norm and, if, like Linspire, you want a piece of home market, some accommodation with reality, the proprietary DVD codec, Windows 95% share, etc., is necessary.
Cross licensing is one thing, submitting to Microsoft's demands when they claim Linux violates 237 unnamed patents is hanging yourself (and other Linux distributors). Until somebody (probably a group of distributors) stands up to Microsoft, MS can make whatever claims they want to scare people into sticking with Windows. Plus I suspect the list of distributions who would have a legal leg to stand on against Microsofts claims gets smaller every time one makes such a deal with Microsoft.
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Also, the penalties should consider the wealth and size of the entity being penalized. Charging a startup company $100,000 may bankrupt it, charging a behemoth Microsoft $100,000 is a cost of doing business.
That was my first thought. I have well over 300 GB of "copyrighted material" on my disks. I have about 2,000 songs - all ripped from my extensive CD collection, and over 400 TV shows and movies that I've recorded with MythTV. The MPAA may not be happy that I have a bunch of movies on my hard drive, but they're legal because I recorded them when they were shown on television.
All of the media on my computer was legally obtained, and I'm not distributing it, but a system scan wouldn't know the difference. I fail to see how the mere possession of copyrighted works is even incriminating, much less how they'd be able to make a decent legal case with the data they're collecting.
Some years ago I saw a screen cap of Homer's driver's license. The abbrieviation for the state was something like "MK", or something else that isn't associated with any state.
Ever heard of Lojack for laptops? It works on the same basic principle, and increases the chances of your laptop being returned from about 3% to about 75%. My method doesn't have a team to follow up, but I'd have more evidence for taking action.
It's certainly true that most if not all media commentators are trying to rally support for their own causes, my point was that Michael Moore tends to rally as many people against his cause as he does for them.
They're not legally allowed to stall. They're distributing binaries from LGPL'd code - the license requires that they also distribute the source, making no exception for stalling as your legal department tries to find a way not to have to distribute the code. They should have taken care of this before the release. Now they're infringing.
Michael Moore in a nutshell. All he does is polarize subjects. I watched part of Fahrenheit 9/11 some months after it came out, and while people who wanted to believe what he said could take it as gospel, it was clearly biased and misleading to anyone of a neutral or opposing views on the subject. I suspect Farenheit 9/11 raised as much support for the Bush administration as it did opposition. If Moore had been less one sided with his documentary, he might have swayed a few neutral people to his side - as it were, he only managed to push them away.
I'll be honest - I don't know much about the state of health care in the United States. If I ever decide I ought to learn about the subject, I'm not going to go to Michael Moore's "documentary" for my "facts". Anyone who refers to it for facts made up their mind ahead of time. Quite likely, Moore's film will rally opposition to his cause, and it may even lead to a strong opposition of socialized medicine.
A "respectable thief" would boot with a Live CD to collect my personal information before formatting the drive, but a typical thief would more likely just boot it up.
Like I say, I keep my laptop close, and lock it up when I can't, but I feel a bit more secure knowing my laptop phones home.
Really bad analogy. First, Tivo does release their source as required by the GPL version 2, what they don't allow is putting modified (unsigned) versions of the software on the TiVo. While I understand this is an unpopular viewpoint with the open source community, I think it makes sense economically. TiVo sells their units below cost, so that they will be able to sell their service along with it. If people could put whatever software they wanted on it, it would be a below-cost computer, and there would be people who would sign up for the shortest TiVo subscription so that they could get a cheap computer. Most Tivo users don't care about modifying their firmware, and if it makes their Tivo less expensive, they're not going to complain.
So following the chef analogy - the chef is telling you what's in your food. You could go home and make your own derivative of the recipe in your own kitchen, but when you're at this chef's restaurant, you get the chef's version. Likewise, Tivo is giving you the Linux kernel that they use, and on your own hardware, you can do whatever you want with it, but on Tivo hardware, you only get to use the Tivo kernel. Some may say this is a circumvention of the intent of the GPL. I think it's perfectly valid. Tivo is making contributions to Linux - everything they've done can be adopted back in to the main kernel - you just can't use their hardware with derivative works.
Laws against murder don't keep it from happening, nor do laws against theft or rape. What they do is make it so if you get caught, there's a significant punishment, and consequently people are often deterred from doing it in the first place. If someone gets caught using the bank's caller ID to defraud people, that's an additional charge, so it may be an additional deterrent.
Lastly, lots of people have heard about this issue because of the passage of this law. My mother (prime example of the techno-illiterate) got a chain e-mail warning her not to trust caller ID. My girlfriend's mother (slightly more technically literate) heard about it from someone at work, and has been telling everyone she knows. Granted, this last part could have happened without the law if the conditions had been right, but it's still helped get the word out.
I'm no fan of over-regulation, but I was glad to see this one pass. Lot's of people are completely unaware that caller ID even can be spoofed. If they got a call that appeared to be from someone at their bank, they'd give their account number to get some issue straightened out.
Aside from prank phone calls, the only use for Caller ID spoofing is fraud, which is definitely a government issue.
As far as Linux files being plain text, searching plain text files barely brushes the surface. Google Desktop indexes pictures, web history, Gmail (for the rare occasion I don't have web access to read my e-mail), OpenOffice and MS Office documents, the list goes on. Plus the results show up in your typical Google search, making them quickly and easily available. It's not a resource hog, and it's results show up without even having to look for them.
Lastly, I've never been overly concerned about binary programs. I avoid binary kernel drivers, but I use flash, VMWare, and a few other proprietary user-space apps. If I have any reason to suspect foul play, it's easy enough to get rid of.
Anyone who's paranoid about binary blobs or having their desktop searched is welcome not to install it, but I for one am quite pleased that Google decided to make a Linux version.
This is where the plan fails. At this moment, I have exactly 2,000 tracks on my music library. I would guess I bought about 10% of this music after hearing it in a musical, 20% after on the recommendation of a friend, and the remaining 70% I heard the artist on the radio and decided to buy one of their albums (and often more than one from an artist). If the RIAA put broadcasters out of business, nobody knows what music to buy anymore. I don't know anyone who buys an album from an artist they've never heard of without hearing at least one of their songs first, and the radio (be it broadcast or internet) is still the best way to get music out there.
I think the RIAA is trying to assert their claim that they can collect fees for all internet radio, including non-signed artists. Then they kill the advertising for independent artists, effectively killing their competition.
Killing radio would be suicide. Killing internet radio would be shooting themselves in the toe while killing the competition.
It also bothers me when people use abbreviations I've never heard of. It took me for ever to figure out what IANAL stood for (for those who still don't know, "I Am Not A Lawyer").
On the second point, I never thought the law was everything, but the point is that OSI can do very little to keep a company from claiming to be open source. While consumers may get irritated and look for OSI certified software instead, a company is not inaccurate to claim their product is open source if, for example, they make the source available to the end user under a non-disclosure agreement.
Same goes with Open Source. VBulletin is "Open Source" in that anyone who buys it gets the source along with a non-disclosure agreement (that said, I don't believe they advertise themselves as open source). While it may not be OSI certified, one group can't declare that "Open source" means everyone and their mother has access to the source.
Nobody gets to arbitrarily redefine words that have been around for generations. Claim that something is not "OSI Certified" or "FSF Approved" rather than claiming "it's not open source" or "it's not free". We'd be furious if Microsoft tried to redefine "secure" to include something about being proprietary and went around telling free software projects they couldn't claim to be "secure". Microsoft is welcome to create their own seal of approval, but they don't get to arbitrarily redefine words, and neither should we.
For that matter, someone who simply provides the source to their paying clients might claim to be open source - and while I'm sure that's not OSI's definition of Open Source, I don't see where OSI has any legal standing to prevent someone from using the term.
Is "Open Source" a registered trademark? If not, I don't think the OSI gets to decide which licenses are open source and which aren't.
I don't particularly dislike the idea of Edward Norton as Bruce Banner, but they just did a Hulk movie in 2003. It seems odd that they'd change actors so soon.
I'd misquote you too, but all you said was "?".
I particularly have a hard time defending the content producers when the pirates provide a better product - ignoring price. If I want a particular song, the music industry will sell me a CD with that song along with several others I don't want, or I can buy a fairly low quality digital copy, probably with DRM in a format I don't like. Pirates offer a variety of formats and quality levels, and you can play their versions on anything you want.
Movies aren't much different. You can buy a DVD, which can only be played legally in authorized devices, or you can download a heavily DRMed copy that - unless you have a media center PC - you're stuck playing on your computer monitor. Pirates offer a variety of quality levels, you can burn them to DVD's if you have the proper software, and play them on anything capable of playing them.
Like I said, I'm not a pirate. I have an older taste in music, so I get most of my CD's used for a couple of bucks. I rent movies and go to the theater on occasion. If the content industry starts offering the same quality of product the pirates offer, but they can't compete in price, then they will have my sympathy. But so long as the content industry refuses to match the pirates' level of quality, and keeping making specious claims like the ones in this article, they get no sympathy from me.
It sounded to me like they approached MS for cross licensing, and got the patent deal thrown in. What concerns me is that if the patent dispute ever goes to court, Microsoft will say "We have half a dozen Linux vendors who have agreed that Linux violates these patents - the rest should have to pay as well." Despite the fact that several of the signed vendors have specifically said they don't believe Linux is in violation of those patents.
When I'm home or traveling in populated areas I have a phone that goes everywhere with me, and a laptop that goes with me anywhere I might have some down time. But a couple of times a year I like to go on lengthy camping trips in places where the phone has no reception and the laptop has no where to charge. I enjoy being removed from society to the point where there is no use for my gadgets. Gadgets make keeping up with society easier, but I don't find them to be crucial for survival or happiness.