Suppose a Universal Studios pays a writer to come up with a script, pays a director to turn it into a movie, actors to act, technicians to make it happen, etc. Who owns the copyright if not the company that paid for the creation of the work?
Suppose Microsoft pays a software engineer to design a program, and a bunch of programmers to code the necessary components. Does the Microsoft, who commissioned the work, own copyright to the program they paid to have created? Does the designer own the copyright? Do each of the programmers own their respective lines of code?
Suppose Ford commissions a jingle about tough trucks to be used in their commercials. They have an exclusive license to the song. After 5 years, the guy who wrote the jingle dies, so the jingle falls into public domain. GM swoops in and changes the word Ford to Chevy and now has a great little song about tough trucks because Ford hired a musician with heart trouble.
No passing on to heirs presents another problem, still on the subject of commissioned works. Suppose a writer is on her deathbed and writes memoirs to help cover medical expenses. No company would pay to license the work for publication, because as soon as the writer dies the memoirs fall into public domain and competing companies could publish the book without paying any license. If the copyright at least fell to an heir for a few years the work still might be worth licensing for a publishing company. If you don't have some consideration like this, nobody would license works from anyone who is ill, elderly, or has a life threatening condition.
I certainly agree that if an author writes a book, the publisher should only be able to get a license (perhaps an exclusive license) to publish the book, rather than having the copyright turned over to them. But if the work never would have existed had someone not paid for its creation, is the "creator" the person who put the work together, or is it the person who paid them to do it?
A much simpler solution is to limit copyright terms to 10-20 years. Let a creator sell the copyright to a corporation, pass it on to their heirs, or do whatever they please. As far as I'm concerned, let companies renew copyrights for geometrically increasing sums. If Disney wants to pay a couple million dollars every few years to keep Steamboat Willie from expiring, let them, but at least we won't have people retaining copyright on works that might possibly someday bring in a few bucks.
Exactly. When I first heard about this, I thought it was ridiculous that tax payer dollars would go towards paying so people could keep watching TV. I could see a little justification that the FCC is forcing the antequation of millions if not billions of dollars worth of televisions, and the people using bunny ears are the least likely to be able to afford to replace their televisions.
But now that I realize this funding is coming from the sale of the 700 mhz spectrum (of which bidding is expected to start in the $4 billion range), I feel that any expenses endured due to the sale of the spectrum ought to be covered by the sale of the spectrum. If the sale of the 700 mhz spectrum can't cover the costs of selling the 700 mhz spectrum, then we shouldn't be selling it. While I am looking forward to the new services that will (hopefully) become available on the spectrum, it seems like the FCC is getting ready to profit by selling millions of televisions that they don't own. They're selling America short by not covering all of the costs of the transition.
Please stop associating ODF with Open Office / Open Source as its one of the main reasons Microsoft will never implement it in it's products.
[...]
ODF is a file format specification and has nothing to do with open source software.
Uh, no. The Open Document Format may not directly be open source, but the two have a lot in common. The association of ODF with Open Source has nothing to do with why Microsoft will never implement it. It's not like Microsoft thinks that by implementing ODF, they'll somehow have to release their source code. Microsoft will never implement ODF (or at least will resist implementing it) because it's an open standard. If people decide they're tired of Microsoft products, they can take their ODF documents and go elsewhere. If documents are in a proprietary format, users can only hope that they'll find some other software that will read their documents. Microsoft wants to make it as difficult as possible for people to take their documents and go to another office suite.
ODF may not be open source software, but it does have a lot to do with the principles of open source software. By using an open standard, vendors can't lock users into a specific file format. It doesn't give quite as much power to the consumer as having the source code does, but it gives them a lot more choice than they'd have with a proprietary format.
I'm rather fond of the Expo plugin (not to be mistaken for Scale, which is the expose-ripoff you refer to). Expo lets you view all of your virtual desktops simultaneously, and drag windows from one workspace to another. I never really used virtual desktops until compiz-fusion made it easy to visualize.
I also like the Put plugin, which lets you use the Super key with the number pad to put windows in specific places on the screen. CF offers a variety of window switchers, all of which let you see the details of a window, rather than just a little, non-descript icon.
I'm not a fan of the purely flash stuff, but I doubt anyone who says Compiz-fusion is a waste of resources really knows what it has to offer.
OpenOffice may be a poor attempt at cloning MS Office, but it offers something MS Office doesn't: An open standard. Personally I'm not a fan of word processors in general: I use LaTeX (another open standard) whenever I can. But when I do need to use an office suite, I appreciate knowing that the future of my documents doesn't depend on one company making affordable, compatible software. When I switched from Office 95 to Office 97, I spent hours correcting document formatting for several documents that didn't translate correctly. Office 97 to XP transitioned much more smoothly, but I still hear people complaining as they try and collaborate with people using a different version of Office.
OpenDocument doesn't seem to have these problems. I've been using OpenOffice.org since 1.1.5, and I've never had a document's formatting change. I can exchange documents with someone using KOffice or Abiword, and they just work. If Sun quits developing OpenOffice, or starts making future releases proprietary, someone else might pick it up, but if not I can take my documents to another word processor. On the other hand if Microsoft decides to raise the price on MS Office, you can keep running an old version, hope an alternative suite can read your old files, or fork over increasing amounts of money to read your files.
Now, I don't really expect Microsoft to hold your files hostage and keep raising the price of their Office Suite knowing users will have to pay up to read their own files, but I definitely prefer not having to trust a single entity to give me access to my files.
First off, if the internet were a desirable business model for the traditional 22-48 minutes TV program, someone would already have monetized it.
That reminds me of the quote by 1899 patent commissioner Charles H. Duell "everything that can be invented has been invented." Just because something could be a viable business model doesn't mean it already is. Plus, there's never been a better time for Web based programming: the major networks have lost their writers and have been reduced to showing reruns. Now is the perfect time to compete with them.
Second, if the writers could pull their shit together and own their own studios and then sell the product to the major networks, all of this would be moot.
Historically, this has never been a good business model. Historically it has made more sense for the writers to work directly for the networks. Only very recently has bandwidth gotten cheap enough for the web to be a viable distribution outlet for video, so it's the first time in history that the studios can exist without the networks.
Third, the networks are owned by serious people with serious attorneys. They're not going to bow to some moronic argument made up by some dipshit who decides he's gonna take his football and go home.
The writers contracts have expired, and they're refusing to renew until they get a better deal. It's the networks' own faults that the contracts expired mid-season, and you can't force someone to sign a contract if they're willing not to work for you. If the networks' lawyers could prevent the writers from quitting or going to do something else, they'd have done it by now.
You're (deliberately?) misquoting me. I was talking about a company that sets out to release public domain works. They never release their circumvention program, only the public domain works. Perhaps they sell them as a hard copy (perfectly legal and profitable, you can pick up a copy of Shakespeare's works [for example] from any of at least half a dozen publishers), or perhaps they make them available online with advertising. Either way, they could profit by distributing a public domain work without ever making a circumvention tool available to the public. They would also be capable of having an adequate legal team to defend claims that they were operating on works not covered by the DMCA.
Even supposing this were a case of one man vs a legal team from hell, that would hardly be the DMCA covering public domain works, that would be abuses of the legal system covering public domain works. Not that I approve of such legal system abuses, but the DMCA is hardly necessary for that to happen.
As far as criminal vs civil, you're slightly right, but a prosecutor wouldn't have any better case than the groups I outlined in my last post, and they'd almost certainly have less to gain.
And my crystal ball is more like a history book. Nothing written since 1923 has fallen into public domain unless the copyright owner specifically released it. Every time Disney's copyright comes up for expiration, the legislature has extended copyright for them. No copyrights are set to expire for another 12 years, and history leads me to believe that there will be another extension before that comes up. The public doesn't really seem to care, which is the only way a change will ever come about. I figure my predictions are win-win. If I'm right, and no copyrights expire in my lifetime, I can say "I told you so!" and if not, some great works fall into public domain.
I agree (except for your spelling of 'ads'). There have been several occasions that I've purchased/used something based on a Google advertisements. Off the top of my head, I bought an IR receiver for my MythTV box after sending my dad an e-mail about homebrew IR receivers, and I found the wireless card in my desktop based on an ad after searching for linux compatible wireless cards. Now, if anyone thinks they're selling me something I'm not already looking for they're an idiot, but ads have helped me narrow down a search on a few occasions.
Now, if an ad is obnoxious (flashing, sound) or slows down the page load noticeably, its entire subdomain gets adblocked. But if an ad is subtle, reaching out only to people who are looking for the product, I don't block it because I might find something interesting from that advertiser at a later time.
Nice try to you too, but since possessing the tools to infringe copyright is criminal, presumably as long as the same copy protection is used (or still could be used) on products that still are within their copyright period, the DMCA still has you nailed.
I assume you're referring to this section:
`(b) ADDITIONAL VIOLATIONS- (1) No person shall manufacture, import, offer to the public, provide, or otherwise traffic in any technology, product, service, device, component, or part thereof, that--
`(A) is primarily designed or produced for the purpose of circumventing protection afforded by a technological measure that effectively protects a right of a copyright owner under this title in a work or a portion thereof;
`(B) has only limited commercially significant purpose or use other than to circumvent protection afforded by a technological measure that effectively protects a right of a copyright owner under this title in a work or a portion thereof; or ...
This would probably prohibit companies from manufacturing a decryption utility for distribution (assuming copyrighted works are covered by the same DRM scheme). However, if a company were to use it internally, solely for the decryption of works that fall into the public domain, part A could be satisfied by the claim that the product is designed primarily for circumventing technological measures for public domain works (works not covered by the title). And if this company is able to make a profit by making public domain works available, it could easily be argued that the product has plenty of 'commercially significant purpose or use other than to circumvent protection afforded by a technological measure that effectively protects a right of a copyright owner'.
The other point to consider is, who could bring a suit against a company circumventing copyright on public domain works? The former copyright owner might try, but considering the copyright had expired, the DMCA wouldn't protect them. A company which holds copyrights on works still covered by the same DRM scheme might try bringing a suit, but if there's no evidence that their copyright had been violated, they'd have a pretty weak case as well. I wouldn't be surprised to see a court case on this issue, but I suspect if a company were careful about decrypting only public domain works, they'd come out on top.
All this said, I expect copyright terms to keep being extended (effectively making them indefinite) until the public has had enough and demands an overhaul of the copyright system, at which point the DMCA will be made irrelevant. Ultimately, I don't really expect to see any copyrights expire in my life time, and I figure I've got another 65-70 years ahead of me.
See, legally the copyright expires, of course. But technically it doesn't. If a copyright holder places "technological measures" to prevent someone from copying/accessing a work, then as long as the measures continue to function, you are legally prevented from using the material once is has entered the public domain, because the "technological measures" are given force of law.
Nice try, but:
a technological measure `effectively protects a right of a copyright owner under this title' if the measure, in the ordinary course of its operation, prevents, restricts, or otherwise limits the exercise of a right of a copyright owner under this title.
(Empahsis mine)
Once something has slipped into public domain, it no longer has a copyright owner to protect the rights of. The technical measures would still be in place, but they would not be given the force of law after the expiration. CSS, Fairplay, PlaysForSure, and to an extent AACS and BD+ have all been broken by groups working underground. If commercial entities would be able to reproduce public domain works for profit, the force behind the cracks would increase tenfold.
As much as I hate the DMCA, it doesn't give an indefinite term to copyright. I suppose it's possible that an unbreakable DRM could be created (though I doubt it), but that's not the force of law.
But does it accommodate for applications that make use of the inefficiencies of bulbs? My girlfriend's brother has a couple of lizards and keeps a lamp with an incandescent bulb next to them to keep their body temperatures up. My sister is getting an easy bake oven for Christmas: Try baking a cake with an energy efficient bulb.
My other concern is that in some other applications, CFs just aren't up to par yet. A few years ago, my dad replaced all the bulbs in his house with CFs. This was fine everywhere except the bathroom, because the bulbs would take 45 seconds to reach full brightness. Generally, that's acceptable, but when you have to pee and can't hit the toilet because the light is too dim, you need a bulb that turns on faster. The bathrooms in my dad's house are the only rooms with incandescent bulbs.
My mom's house has dimmable bulbs in the kitchen. I know there are dimable CFs available, but right now they're hard to find and the price is a bit excessive. Hopefully the lack of availability of incandescents will fix that problem though.
Bill Gates might not have said it outright, but by putting a 640K limit on his operating system, he clearly thought it would be sufficient for quite a bit longer than it actually was.
That was my thought. By claiming pirated CD's sound atrocious, they're paving the way for the argument "Well, it sounded good, so I assumed it couldn't be pirated." Not a valid legal defense, certainly, but it won't help their case any.
For several months, the BBC has only offered iPlayer support to Windows users. In doing so, they reached ~95% of the population. You and I wouldn't like it, but they'd have been within their rights to keep serving that 95% of the population.
People say "But we paid for that service with our TV tax!" Which is true, but I'm sure there are people who pay the TV tax and don't own computers? Is the BBC obligated to provide iPlayer support to people who don't have computers? Your operating system is your choice. I use Linux, and while I certainly appreciate it when companies support my choice in OS, I recognize that it's their option to do so.
With respect to not complaining when you can't offer an alternative:
I'm not saying you need to code the answer yourself, or even draw out specifics about how it should be done, but to sit around and say "Flash is proprietary, nobody should use it because I choose not to run proprietary software" is selfish. However, if you said "Flash is proprietary, ProgramX also offers a solution and is able to reach a wider audience," you would be addressing the problem. If ProgramX doesn't exist, at least lay out a criteria for what would be an acceptable solution.
If you don't describe an acceptable solution, all anyone can do is take shots in the dark and hope they find something that satisfies you.
Now that Sun's Java is open source, wouldn't it be great if there was an open source Java applet that could download streaming video and audio in an open format that could then be used by everyone, without forcing the poor windows users to install anything new?
Oh, look there already is.
Awesome. That or something like it definitely constitutes offering an alternative.
Your biggest mistake is in over-generalizing. You forget that the open source "zealots" are a HUGE group and have a wide range of different reasons for their opinions. You have simply picked on a few easy targets to attack, and the pretended that they somehow represent the whole group.
Perhaps I should have been more clear, but in my mind there is a difference bet rather than demanding that the profit-seeking company enter into an unprofitable sector simply so I can use my hardwareween open source advocates and open source zealots. I consider myself a member of the first group. I use open source software wherever viable, but run a few proprietary applications to fill in the gaps. I buy hardware from companies that provide open source drivers, and have made contributions of money and code to some projects that I use regularly. I accept that it may not be economically feasible for some companies to support my choice of operating system, and hope that the open source community will fill in the gaps.
An open source zealot is one who seems to believe that everyone has an obligation to support their decision to use an obscure system. Rather than support Intel for releasing open source drivers for their graphics chipset, they bitch and moan that Nvidia and ATI won't do the same. They (try to) demand that profit-seeking companies enter into unprofitable ventures creating software for a very small portion of their potential consumers. In this case, they refuse to run Flash because running a proprietary application would be "below them."
If I'm working on a project and have half a dozen tabs open and the teacher tells me to close them immediately, that may set me back 15 minutes of redoing all my searches and finding the sites again in IE. If closing my browser means I'm not going to get a class project done (and subsequently hurt my grade), I'm going to raise an objection now, not wait until after class when it may be too late to get the assignment done.
can you suggest an open source solution that the BBC can use instead of iPlayer that is not proprietary and works on Windows/Mac and Linux???
Exactly. Flash is probably on at least 95% of PC's, and probably 99% of the people who don't have flash can install it with a few clicks. The BBC could have used something like Ogg Theora, but then 95% of users would have had to download and install something to play it.
The thing that always gets me about open source zealots who complain "Flash is proprietary" is that they offer no solution. There's Gnash, which is a re-implementation of Flash, but people complain about disseminating documents in MS Office formats even though they can read them with open source suites, so I can't imagine Gnash being full featured would stop the complaints about Flash. If people in the open source community want to complain about websites using flash for various reasons, they need to offer up an alternative that would be acceptable to them.
For what it's worth, I'm a Linux user and avoid proprietary software wherever possible, but I've been taught not to look a gift horse in the mouth, and not to complain when you can't offer an alternative.
My financial information is stored in a Truecrypt volume that is 630 MB. Every few months, I write the data to a CD. I chose 630 MB because it just about fills a CD. I have 50 GB of free space on my laptop, so the extra 625 MB not being used by my financial data isn't much of a loss.
The unnecessarily large container masks the nature of the content to anyone who might get their hands on a CD. Somebody might see that they have a CD full of random bits, and they'd have no idea whether they had video, music, pictures, documents, financial data, etc. If they found a 5 MB chunk of random data, they could rule out video, more than one mp3 or a few dozen pictures.
I don't know that this ambiguity gives me any real advantage, but it doesn't cost more than a few pennies for the space it takes up, so I figure it's worthwhile.
The only concern I have is that someday I could be investigated for god knows what and be ordered to turn over the password to a hidden volume that doesn't exist because I'm using Truecrypt and the hidden volume is a possibility.
According to RSA security, a 2048-bit RSA key is equivalent in security to a 112-bit symmetric key. This means that there are 2^112, or about 5,200,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 possible combinations. Assuming we could attempt 100 keys per second (a lofty goal in its own right), it would still take roughly 6 x 10^26 (600,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000) days. The universe is an roughly 5,110,000,000,000 days old.
I intend to look around some more after the release of 4.0. Also, my primary complaints (NetworkManager and the power manager) were happening to a friend who ran OpenSuSe as well. They've likely been fixed by now, but I'm fairly certain those problems weren't Kubuntu specific.
I'd have to back you up there: when I first installed Ubuntu I went with KDE because it seemed less foreign than GNOME. (And I'm quite happy.)
Back during the days of Breezy Badger, I made the same decision. I stuck with it through Edgy Eft, but then I found KDE to be increasingly unusable.
The network manager would freeze up inexplicably at a 28% connection. I'd have to suspend and resume to get it working again. After returning from hibernate or suspend, the power manager would have no idea whether there was a battery plugged into my laptop, whether it was on AC power - it completely lacked ACPI information, and consequently it couldn't use any power saving techniques.
I assumed these things had to do with the backend components: NetworkManager and ACPI. Turns out, Gnome's NetworkManager frontend and Gnome's power manager didn't have these problems. So for now, my desktop (on which NetworkManager and Power management are rarely an issue) I continue to use KDE, but my laptop has gotten to be much more dependable since I started using Gnome.
I like KDE's ideas better than those of Gnome, but I've found that Gnome's execution tends to be more reliable.
Best Buy has been on my list for a while. The original site is down, but the web archive still reflects bestbuysux.org. I haven't personally run into service quite that bad, but I've seen employees do some pretty stupid stuff.
MS will make some drastic changes to boost Vista. Like remove DRM
The DRM is on the content, not the operating system. Windows Vista enforces restrictions required by the content owners. If MS removed DRM, that means the content would no longer be available, and I can hardly see "You won't be able to watch HD-DVD or BluRay Disks!" as a selling point.
As much as I'd like to see OGG gain momentum over proprietary formats, I think specifying a format is beyond the scope of HTML. If being HTML compliant meant that you had to use Theora and Vorbis for video and audio respectively, I could see that somewhat stifling innovation. If someone comes up with a new concept for delivering web based video or audio more efficiently than can be done with OGG, they'd have to disregard HTML standards in order to implement it. This means that either the standard largely gets ignored, or people forgo progress in favor of the standard.
Slashdot Mirror
Suppose a Universal Studios pays a writer to come up with a script, pays a director to turn it into a movie, actors to act, technicians to make it happen, etc. Who owns the copyright if not the company that paid for the creation of the work?
Suppose Microsoft pays a software engineer to design a program, and a bunch of programmers to code the necessary components. Does the Microsoft, who commissioned the work, own copyright to the program they paid to have created? Does the designer own the copyright? Do each of the programmers own their respective lines of code?
Suppose Ford commissions a jingle about tough trucks to be used in their commercials. They have an exclusive license to the song. After 5 years, the guy who wrote the jingle dies, so the jingle falls into public domain. GM swoops in and changes the word Ford to Chevy and now has a great little song about tough trucks because Ford hired a musician with heart trouble.
No passing on to heirs presents another problem, still on the subject of commissioned works. Suppose a writer is on her deathbed and writes memoirs to help cover medical expenses. No company would pay to license the work for publication, because as soon as the writer dies the memoirs fall into public domain and competing companies could publish the book without paying any license. If the copyright at least fell to an heir for a few years the work still might be worth licensing for a publishing company. If you don't have some consideration like this, nobody would license works from anyone who is ill, elderly, or has a life threatening condition.
I certainly agree that if an author writes a book, the publisher should only be able to get a license (perhaps an exclusive license) to publish the book, rather than having the copyright turned over to them. But if the work never would have existed had someone not paid for its creation, is the "creator" the person who put the work together, or is it the person who paid them to do it?
A much simpler solution is to limit copyright terms to 10-20 years. Let a creator sell the copyright to a corporation, pass it on to their heirs, or do whatever they please. As far as I'm concerned, let companies renew copyrights for geometrically increasing sums. If Disney wants to pay a couple million dollars every few years to keep Steamboat Willie from expiring, let them, but at least we won't have people retaining copyright on works that might possibly someday bring in a few bucks.
But now that I realize this funding is coming from the sale of the 700 mhz spectrum (of which bidding is expected to start in the $4 billion range), I feel that any expenses endured due to the sale of the spectrum ought to be covered by the sale of the spectrum. If the sale of the 700 mhz spectrum can't cover the costs of selling the 700 mhz spectrum, then we shouldn't be selling it. While I am looking forward to the new services that will (hopefully) become available on the spectrum, it seems like the FCC is getting ready to profit by selling millions of televisions that they don't own. They're selling America short by not covering all of the costs of the transition.
Uh, no. The Open Document Format may not directly be open source, but the two have a lot in common. The association of ODF with Open Source has nothing to do with why Microsoft will never implement it. It's not like Microsoft thinks that by implementing ODF, they'll somehow have to release their source code. Microsoft will never implement ODF (or at least will resist implementing it) because it's an open standard. If people decide they're tired of Microsoft products, they can take their ODF documents and go elsewhere. If documents are in a proprietary format, users can only hope that they'll find some other software that will read their documents. Microsoft wants to make it as difficult as possible for people to take their documents and go to another office suite.
ODF may not be open source software, but it does have a lot to do with the principles of open source software. By using an open standard, vendors can't lock users into a specific file format. It doesn't give quite as much power to the consumer as having the source code does, but it gives them a lot more choice than they'd have with a proprietary format.
I also like the Put plugin, which lets you use the Super key with the number pad to put windows in specific places on the screen. CF offers a variety of window switchers, all of which let you see the details of a window, rather than just a little, non-descript icon.
I'm not a fan of the purely flash stuff, but I doubt anyone who says Compiz-fusion is a waste of resources really knows what it has to offer.
OpenDocument doesn't seem to have these problems. I've been using OpenOffice.org since 1.1.5, and I've never had a document's formatting change. I can exchange documents with someone using KOffice or Abiword, and they just work. If Sun quits developing OpenOffice, or starts making future releases proprietary, someone else might pick it up, but if not I can take my documents to another word processor. On the other hand if Microsoft decides to raise the price on MS Office, you can keep running an old version, hope an alternative suite can read your old files, or fork over increasing amounts of money to read your files.
Now, I don't really expect Microsoft to hold your files hostage and keep raising the price of their Office Suite knowing users will have to pay up to read their own files, but I definitely prefer not having to trust a single entity to give me access to my files.
That reminds me of the quote by 1899 patent commissioner Charles H. Duell "everything that can be invented has been invented." Just because something could be a viable business model doesn't mean it already is. Plus, there's never been a better time for Web based programming: the major networks have lost their writers and have been reduced to showing reruns. Now is the perfect time to compete with them.
Historically, this has never been a good business model. Historically it has made more sense for the writers to work directly for the networks. Only very recently has bandwidth gotten cheap enough for the web to be a viable distribution outlet for video, so it's the first time in history that the studios can exist without the networks.
The writers contracts have expired, and they're refusing to renew until they get a better deal. It's the networks' own faults that the contracts expired mid-season, and you can't force someone to sign a contract if they're willing not to work for you. If the networks' lawyers could prevent the writers from quitting or going to do something else, they'd have done it by now.
Even supposing this were a case of one man vs a legal team from hell, that would hardly be the DMCA covering public domain works, that would be abuses of the legal system covering public domain works. Not that I approve of such legal system abuses, but the DMCA is hardly necessary for that to happen.
As far as criminal vs civil, you're slightly right, but a prosecutor wouldn't have any better case than the groups I outlined in my last post, and they'd almost certainly have less to gain.
And my crystal ball is more like a history book. Nothing written since 1923 has fallen into public domain unless the copyright owner specifically released it. Every time Disney's copyright comes up for expiration, the legislature has extended copyright for them. No copyrights are set to expire for another 12 years, and history leads me to believe that there will be another extension before that comes up. The public doesn't really seem to care, which is the only way a change will ever come about. I figure my predictions are win-win. If I'm right, and no copyrights expire in my lifetime, I can say "I told you so!" and if not, some great works fall into public domain.
Now, if an ad is obnoxious (flashing, sound) or slows down the page load noticeably, its entire subdomain gets adblocked. But if an ad is subtle, reaching out only to people who are looking for the product, I don't block it because I might find something interesting from that advertiser at a later time.
I assume you're referring to this section:
This would probably prohibit companies from manufacturing a decryption utility for distribution (assuming copyrighted works are covered by the same DRM scheme). However, if a company were to use it internally, solely for the decryption of works that fall into the public domain, part A could be satisfied by the claim that the product is designed primarily for circumventing technological measures for public domain works (works not covered by the title). And if this company is able to make a profit by making public domain works available, it could easily be argued that the product has plenty of 'commercially significant purpose or use other than to circumvent protection afforded by a technological measure that effectively protects a right of a copyright owner'.
The other point to consider is, who could bring a suit against a company circumventing copyright on public domain works? The former copyright owner might try, but considering the copyright had expired, the DMCA wouldn't protect them. A company which holds copyrights on works still covered by the same DRM scheme might try bringing a suit, but if there's no evidence that their copyright had been violated, they'd have a pretty weak case as well. I wouldn't be surprised to see a court case on this issue, but I suspect if a company were careful about decrypting only public domain works, they'd come out on top.
All this said, I expect copyright terms to keep being extended (effectively making them indefinite) until the public has had enough and demands an overhaul of the copyright system, at which point the DMCA will be made irrelevant. Ultimately, I don't really expect to see any copyrights expire in my life time, and I figure I've got another 65-70 years ahead of me.
Nice try, but:
(Empahsis mine)Once something has slipped into public domain, it no longer has a copyright owner to protect the rights of. The technical measures would still be in place, but they would not be given the force of law after the expiration. CSS, Fairplay, PlaysForSure, and to an extent AACS and BD+ have all been broken by groups working underground. If commercial entities would be able to reproduce public domain works for profit, the force behind the cracks would increase tenfold.
As much as I hate the DMCA, it doesn't give an indefinite term to copyright. I suppose it's possible that an unbreakable DRM could be created (though I doubt it), but that's not the force of law.
My other concern is that in some other applications, CFs just aren't up to par yet. A few years ago, my dad replaced all the bulbs in his house with CFs. This was fine everywhere except the bathroom, because the bulbs would take 45 seconds to reach full brightness. Generally, that's acceptable, but when you have to pee and can't hit the toilet because the light is too dim, you need a bulb that turns on faster. The bathrooms in my dad's house are the only rooms with incandescent bulbs.
My mom's house has dimmable bulbs in the kitchen. I know there are dimable CFs available, but right now they're hard to find and the price is a bit excessive. Hopefully the lack of availability of incandescents will fix that problem though.
Bill Gates might not have said it outright, but by putting a 640K limit on his operating system, he clearly thought it would be sufficient for quite a bit longer than it actually was.
That was my thought. By claiming pirated CD's sound atrocious, they're paving the way for the argument "Well, it sounded good, so I assumed it couldn't be pirated." Not a valid legal defense, certainly, but it won't help their case any.
For several months, the BBC has only offered iPlayer support to Windows users. In doing so, they reached ~95% of the population. You and I wouldn't like it, but they'd have been within their rights to keep serving that 95% of the population.
People say "But we paid for that service with our TV tax!" Which is true, but I'm sure there are people who pay the TV tax and don't own computers? Is the BBC obligated to provide iPlayer support to people who don't have computers? Your operating system is your choice. I use Linux, and while I certainly appreciate it when companies support my choice in OS, I recognize that it's their option to do so.
With respect to not complaining when you can't offer an alternative:
I'm not saying you need to code the answer yourself, or even draw out specifics about how it should be done, but to sit around and say "Flash is proprietary, nobody should use it because I choose not to run proprietary software" is selfish. However, if you said "Flash is proprietary, ProgramX also offers a solution and is able to reach a wider audience," you would be addressing the problem. If ProgramX doesn't exist, at least lay out a criteria for what would be an acceptable solution.
If you don't describe an acceptable solution, all anyone can do is take shots in the dark and hope they find something that satisfies you.
Perhaps I should have been more clear, but in my mind there is a difference bet rather than demanding that the profit-seeking company enter into an unprofitable sector simply so I can use my hardwareween open source advocates and open source zealots. I consider myself a member of the first group. I use open source software wherever viable, but run a few proprietary applications to fill in the gaps. I buy hardware from companies that provide open source drivers, and have made contributions of money and code to some projects that I use regularly. I accept that it may not be economically feasible for some companies to support my choice of operating system, and hope that the open source community will fill in the gaps.
An open source zealot is one who seems to believe that everyone has an obligation to support their decision to use an obscure system. Rather than support Intel for releasing open source drivers for their graphics chipset, they bitch and moan that Nvidia and ATI won't do the same. They (try to) demand that profit-seeking companies enter into unprofitable ventures creating software for a very small portion of their potential consumers. In this case, they refuse to run Flash because running a proprietary application would be "below them."
If I'm working on a project and have half a dozen tabs open and the teacher tells me to close them immediately, that may set me back 15 minutes of redoing all my searches and finding the sites again in IE. If closing my browser means I'm not going to get a class project done (and subsequently hurt my grade), I'm going to raise an objection now, not wait until after class when it may be too late to get the assignment done.
Exactly. Flash is probably on at least 95% of PC's, and probably 99% of the people who don't have flash can install it with a few clicks. The BBC could have used something like Ogg Theora, but then 95% of users would have had to download and install something to play it.
The thing that always gets me about open source zealots who complain "Flash is proprietary" is that they offer no solution. There's Gnash, which is a re-implementation of Flash, but people complain about disseminating documents in MS Office formats even though they can read them with open source suites, so I can't imagine Gnash being full featured would stop the complaints about Flash. If people in the open source community want to complain about websites using flash for various reasons, they need to offer up an alternative that would be acceptable to them.
For what it's worth, I'm a Linux user and avoid proprietary software wherever possible, but I've been taught not to look a gift horse in the mouth, and not to complain when you can't offer an alternative.
The unnecessarily large container masks the nature of the content to anyone who might get their hands on a CD. Somebody might see that they have a CD full of random bits, and they'd have no idea whether they had video, music, pictures, documents, financial data, etc. If they found a 5 MB chunk of random data, they could rule out video, more than one mp3 or a few dozen pictures.
I don't know that this ambiguity gives me any real advantage, but it doesn't cost more than a few pennies for the space it takes up, so I figure it's worthwhile.
The only concern I have is that someday I could be investigated for god knows what and be ordered to turn over the password to a hidden volume that doesn't exist because I'm using Truecrypt and the hidden volume is a possibility.
According to RSA security, a 2048-bit RSA key is equivalent in security to a 112-bit symmetric key. This means that there are 2^112, or about 5,200,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 possible combinations. Assuming we could attempt 100 keys per second (a lofty goal in its own right), it would still take roughly 6 x 10^26 (600,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000) days. The universe is an roughly 5,110,000,000,000 days old.
I intend to look around some more after the release of 4.0. Also, my primary complaints (NetworkManager and the power manager) were happening to a friend who ran OpenSuSe as well. They've likely been fixed by now, but I'm fairly certain those problems weren't Kubuntu specific.
My thoughts exactly? A splashdown on land just doesn't make sense.
Back during the days of Breezy Badger, I made the same decision. I stuck with it through Edgy Eft, but then I found KDE to be increasingly unusable.
The network manager would freeze up inexplicably at a 28% connection. I'd have to suspend and resume to get it working again. After returning from hibernate or suspend, the power manager would have no idea whether there was a battery plugged into my laptop, whether it was on AC power - it completely lacked ACPI information, and consequently it couldn't use any power saving techniques.
I assumed these things had to do with the backend components: NetworkManager and ACPI. Turns out, Gnome's NetworkManager frontend and Gnome's power manager didn't have these problems. So for now, my desktop (on which NetworkManager and Power management are rarely an issue) I continue to use KDE, but my laptop has gotten to be much more dependable since I started using Gnome.
I like KDE's ideas better than those of Gnome, but I've found that Gnome's execution tends to be more reliable.
Best Buy has been on my list for a while. The original site is down, but the web archive still reflects bestbuysux.org. I haven't personally run into service quite that bad, but I've seen employees do some pretty stupid stuff.
The DRM is on the content, not the operating system. Windows Vista enforces restrictions required by the content owners. If MS removed DRM, that means the content would no longer be available, and I can hardly see "You won't be able to watch HD-DVD or BluRay Disks!" as a selling point.
As much as I'd like to see OGG gain momentum over proprietary formats, I think specifying a format is beyond the scope of HTML. If being HTML compliant meant that you had to use Theora and Vorbis for video and audio respectively, I could see that somewhat stifling innovation. If someone comes up with a new concept for delivering web based video or audio more efficiently than can be done with OGG, they'd have to disregard HTML standards in order to implement it. This means that either the standard largely gets ignored, or people forgo progress in favor of the standard.