I did not succeed in unsubscribing from andy@horsetrainingandtips.com Andy's claim to fame is that he found a copy of an old book and has republished it. He does not attribute his source. The help email inbox is full and bounces. Eventually I was putting the mail in my google spam and it has stopped. www.SuperStarsOfHorseTraining.com
Both sites would send messages which were primarly teasers for paid content or products rather than useful content. That kind of hype is about as much fun as subscribing to your own feed of yellow flashing buy now TV ads.
The dog and pony are similarly persistent folk particularly about the feed.
The material is only illegal if you download it without asking the owner. So it is your act of downloading without authority which is the illegal act. This same kind of thinking threatens to shut down emering technologies and open source software projects because it is possible to use tools which enable you to move information from one format to another to infringe copyright. It is deemed that the tool is a circumvention device and that the developer is a felon if a third party(perhaps someone encouraged by the group wishing to sue for example) is able to use the tool to infringe. In the US DMCA the only defence for a tool is that it has a significant commercial value. Given that free software has a functional value rather than a commercial value the DMCA is prejudiced for large existing companies which major market share because small emerging and open source technologies will not be able to argue that they have significant commercial value. It is a way to shut down new competition in technology and media. It is not about crime and justice, it is about control of markets. When people can be deemed a felon because it is easier to find the developer of a tool than the person who committed the crime the legal system is admitting failure and compromising legitimate development and innovation in order not to face the realities of distributed networks.
Try putting up a link to the Olympic Games website sometime. For an event which is supposed to be about inclusion of all people in sport it has some bizarre ideas about the website. The olympic group sent take down notices to all kinds of people for linking to the site, that is well before this decision and I doubt that their perspective on linking would only be intra Australian.
I think this is the interesting thing about the engine is that it was designed for the players to be able to have impact on the story most MMORPGs have a fixed route that everyone plays through and there is not a sense of changing the world youre a part of. think of this as a framework for an open secondlife? Janet
Is the issue of who is running the show relevant? US govt and others just seem to be the marketing/acquisition/enforcement arms for franchise groups anyway? Admittedly most lobby groups just buy puppets. Is there a real difference in the lobby groups buying an external person or in them annointing their own? If nations do overtly become franchises, what franchise would yours become?
Is anyone looking for a change to the model that would make a monopoly baron an inappropriate choice which would not satisfy the goal of government as representing needs of humanity and our habitat? Ive seen people suggesting to send care parcels to people in Iraq as a way to break down the hate but it looks to me like an apology for a system of governance which has lost its connection to responsibility to its people. Land of the free needs custom torture laws? DMCA deems books are first published in the US if youre not a signatory? Fair use rights for other nations is against the free trade agreement?
If geeks want to change politics its a full system engineering change that's required not just a matter of changing the personality on the desktop. What would it feel like to have a government where your choices and actions do directly have implications for war, peace, health, tax, environment, diversity, freedom. What if instead of suggesting a politician, a quiz http://www.stemwijzer.nl/english_version had direct effect. What other kinds of models are there for being responsible? If the current model is the extension of Microsoft marketing what does an extension of distributed geekdom look like?
carbon tax is a way for centralised power broadcasters which are producing polution to effectively be paid to further their activities. fuel, car, power industries are resisting change and using doublethink to persuade people that a carbon tax is an investment in change.
i would be far more interested in a carbon free tax which invested in distributed power generation (with less loss of power over distance to deliver) which provided people with investment in developing and applying better technologies for contributing to the power grid themselves. solar, wind, tidal.
it might take a while for these distributed meshes of power to be self sufficient for all purposes, but thats where the investment should be. a distributed powergrid has less single point of failure issues less wastage as power is used closer to where it is generated, and uses energy which naturally persists.
Which perhaps highlights that there are wider patterns in the way that broken laws/treaties/politics are being crafted to suit specific interests while basically breaking democratic systems overall.
This conception is both atomistic and unrelational. It takes the form of individual security-seeking practices that are self-defeating and in a profound sense oxymoronic (Loader 1997b), an 'expression of the desire for sovereign agency' (Markell 2003: 22) that depends upon and projects a semblance of security produced by lifting oneself out of co-existence with others in order to render one's own existence less contingently vulnerable and the future more predictable. These practices are often at the same time exercises of private power. They eschew democratic political life in order to achieve 'distributive outcomes according to one's assets, skills and preferences' (Offe 2003: 450) in a manner corrosive of the forms of trust and solidarity upon which any sustainable notion of the public good of security draws and, in its turn, replenishes. Neo-liberalism remains committed, in other words, to forms of security that 'organize the world in ways that make it possible for certain people to enjoy an imperfect simulation of the invulnerability they desire, leaving others to bear a disproportionate share of the costs and burdens involved in social life' (Markell 2003: 22). http://libertysecurity.org/article232.html
[A]n indiscriminate creation of exclusive privileges tends rather to obstruct than to stimulate invention. It creates a class of speculative schemers who make it their business to watch the advancing wave of improvement, and gather its foam in the form of patented monopolies, which enable them to lay a heavy tax upon the industry of the country, without contributing anything to the real advancement of the arts. It embarrasses the honest pursuit of business with fears and apprehensions of concealed liens and unknown liabilities to lawsuits and vexatious accountings for profits made in good faith. Atlantic Works v. Brady, 107 U.S. 192, 200 (1882) (Bradley, J.).
Under the patent agreement, both companies will make up-front payments in exchange for a release from any potential liability for use of each others patented intellectual property, with a net balancing payment from Microsoft to Novell reflecting the larger applicable volume of Microsoft's product shipments. Novell will also make running royalty payments based on a percentage of its revenues from open source products.
MSNovell seem to think so. You code for us. Free. Not for profit. We keep the patents. If you code FOSS, make a profit and are not a partner. Then we sue.
Sort of nice for them really they dont need to hire devs anymore, just lawyers. Dont have to worry about any of that messy innovation stuff, just fence it off and sue. Litigation as a business model. How far can you bend patent and DMCA law before it looks so broken that no one wants to go near any of it. I hope the EU are watching.
Yes lawyers acting in the public interest. Think about some of the lawyers active in the foss community. The people who lobby for public rights and against the broadcast treaty at WIPO. Debates about law are hitting the internet and we are able to participate. Debates about DMCA and international implications of FTA. I am not surprised that this is being suggested. I'm surprised to read so far in the comments before finding someone who thinks about public legal dialogue as something which we are all participating in and how that is a part of our distributed means of developing technologies, communities and businesses.
The DRM is not just about copying it is also about access. Actually accessing the material youve bought or are browsing in a library can be restricted or disallowed by a TPM technological protection measure.
If you think you should be able to see the file and the TPM has made a bad call, tough luck, it is illegal to circumvent the TPM. If you develop a technology which is handy for changing files from one format to another, someone else might use that to circumvent a TPM. That makes the developer a felon. How crazy is that! And yet its a set of laws being exported around the world.
Alternatives to DMCA
on
30 Days of DRM
·
· Score: 2, Informative
This is one of those issues which pokes pretty close to home. Its also an issue which is best understood by people with some technical background who can unpack the difference between content and the DRM or TPM around it. This means its not easy for non tech consumer groups to defend people's rights on these issues without support and explanations from their local geeky community.
There are plenty of different things we can do - from an email only approach to face to face talking to people. Tell people and politicians about the kinds of access rights that make invention, creativity, research, humour, exploration, tinkering, critique, reverse engineering, remixing, adapting and restoring possible.
Check out the Access to Knowledge Treaty developed by creators and users: http://www.cptech.org/a2k/ (link on left Draft Treaty)
Don't be afraid to lobby at the UN level. These things are being promoted through international trade organisations so do check out what is happening at WIPO and other international forums. http://www.intgovforum.org/contributions_for_1st_I GF.htm
This is a digital rights treaty being developed by both creators and users of information http://www.cptech.org/a2k/ (link on the left for draft of treaty)
Re:If I am the copyright owner
on
30 Days of DRM
·
· Score: 1
If you are the music composer you have a very tenuous hold on your asset with DRM. If you want your music to be played on a DRM player you will very likely need to sign over your copyright to the company that owns the copyright of the DRM system on the player.
DRM is not a means for protecting composers, it is a means of devising a booby trapped package or mousetrap on music so that the distributors could make more money from each variant of use instead of selling the song to the person once.
The composer could well end up having trouble removing their own music from these formats legally, particularly if they decide to change distributors after the music has been locked into the DRM format.
So unless you compose and develop the hardware, software and distribution channel DRM is not safe for composers.
BBC dumped a whole lot of its old programs a few years back. I bet theyd like to still have the old episodes of Dr Who now but they dont.
Most organisations keep paperwork for a statutory length of time and then ditch it. If they have a digital copy paper stuff is likely to be ditched even sooner especially if the stat requirement is met by having the material retained in a digital form. Why keep the paper form as a large unweildy pile of stuff that is expesnive to store when they have their nifty DRM digital version anyway.
There is no sunset clause on the DRM or on TPM technological protection measures. So presumably if I was confident that I was the only entity with paper copies I could stop things from reaching the public domain at the same time as reducing storage costs...
Think about this in terms of hardware. If there is a TPM on hardware it will be forever illegal to interact with that technology without the manufacturers permission. Makes recycling and rewangling old tech a bit more sporting. It will be tech with a halflife. Out of license for the original purchaser - ie not useable in its originally purchased sense, but illegal to do anything else with.
DMCA is a folly, but it seems to be one that is being adopted world wide. With that much momentum you can be sure there will be plenty of DRMers looking to test out their new found mousetraps on user and developer fingers.
We need to define the responsibilities that companies need to comply with to make their DRM defensible/compliant. eg - responsible sunset clause - not to be used for storage of public data such as medical records - not to be used on digital voting systems or any systems where transparency is required - not to be used on critical systems where someone could need to decide between risk to life or becoming a criminal - not to be used in space where people need to do on site repairs - clear branding indicating what drm is applied and what actions are not permitted. - drm is void if it gets used to squash competitors rather than to address piracy - and the list goes on - will be looking out for the rest of the 30 days. =)
Wiretapping is happening in the USA and UK so pop UK isnt the full scope. I fully expect other nations are being wiretapped as well. At no point have we been told that the people arrested did anything. All reports say that it is possible to make liquid bombs and info is available online. People have been arrested. A neighbour/relative reported them. There is no inherent value in wiretapping re this case.
Sceptics could argue that the case is *all* about media and *all* about proposing tighter control on media/internet and our own private comms. Get ready for the next stage which will be that the UK and USA propose that broadcasters must have 'parity' laws which allow them to be the sole channels to broadcast and then publish online. This would then save us from terrorists, but make the internet just like television. lots of market control for a few vested interests. lots of civil rights costs for the rest of us.
Not hard to see why the media would be loud on this issue, even when the actual threat is dubious.
There are many cooperatively own organisations worldwide. I think the Basques have pushed the concept the furthest, their employee run company Mondragon supported child care centres and a university as part of the profits. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mondrag%C3%B3n_Cooper ative_Corporation
Why not start one. A lot of communities have done that. They incorporate a group so there is a not for profit entity to carry it and give it a goal and ways of looking after members, and then people start to build it and share information about building nodes and hooking up.
The not for profit bit means the profits can be built into the infrastructure. Privatisation has not done much for power infrastructure. There are a number of successful existing community wireless networks around the world.
There are other groups running community wireless networks all around the world. Air-Stream.org is one in Adelaide Australia, but yay for Bostonians starting a new project. http://air-stream.org/
Well your first step for the US to move to open source is to drop the DMCA. It is drafted to compromise independent innovation in the interests of old broadcast firms. Your next step after that is to realise that you do not need to trash other nations to do well. The challenge of course is to find a way to make that happen. =)
Slashdot Mirror
http://www.linux.org.au/conf/2007/talk/55.html
Michael Carden explains it well
I did not succeed in unsubscribing from andy@horsetrainingandtips.com
m /
Andy's claim to fame is that he found a copy of an old book and
has republished it. He does not attribute his source.
The help email inbox is full and bounces.
Eventually I was putting the mail in my google spam and it has stopped.
www.SuperStarsOfHorseTraining.com
This Rhodesian ridgeback site also sent mail afer I had unsubscribed
info@dogtraininginstitute.org
http://rhodesianridgeback.dogtraininginstitute.co
Both sites would send messages which were primarly teasers for paid content or products
rather than useful content. That kind of hype is about as much fun as subscribing to your
own feed of yellow flashing buy now TV ads.
The dog and pony are similarly persistent folk particularly about the feed.
Janet
The material is only illegal if you download it without asking the owner. So it is your act of downloading without authority which is the illegal act.
This same kind of thinking threatens to shut down emering technologies and open source software projects because it is possible to use tools which enable you to move information from one format to another to infringe copyright. It is deemed that the tool is a circumvention device and that the developer is a felon if a third party(perhaps someone encouraged by the group wishing to sue for example) is able to use the tool to infringe. In the US DMCA the only defence for a tool is that it has a significant commercial value. Given that free software has a functional value rather than a commercial value the DMCA is prejudiced for large existing companies which major market share because small emerging and open source technologies will not be able to argue that they have significant commercial value. It is a way to shut down new competition in technology and media. It is not about crime and justice, it is about control of markets. When people can be deemed a felon because it is easier to find the developer of a tool than the person who committed the crime the legal system is admitting failure and compromising legitimate development and innovation in order not to face the realities of distributed networks.
Try putting up a link to the Olympic Games website sometime. For an event which is supposed to be about inclusion of all people in sport it has some bizarre ideas about the website. The olympic group sent take down notices to all kinds of people for linking to the site, that is well before this decision and I doubt that their perspective on linking would only be intra Australian.
I think this is the interesting thing about the engine is that it was designed for the players to be able to have impact on the story
most MMORPGs have a fixed route that everyone plays through and there is not a sense of changing the world youre a part of.
think of this as a framework for an open secondlife? Janet
Is the issue of who is running the show relevant? US govt and others just seem to be the marketing/acquisition/enforcement arms for franchise groups anyway? Admittedly most lobby groups just buy puppets. Is there a real difference in the lobby groups buying an external person or in them annointing their own? If nations do overtly become franchises, what franchise would yours become?
Is anyone looking for a change to the model that would make a monopoly baron an inappropriate choice which would not satisfy the goal of government as representing needs of humanity and our habitat? Ive seen people suggesting to send care parcels to people in Iraq as a way to break down the hate but it looks to me like an apology for a system of governance which has lost its connection to responsibility to its people. Land of the free needs custom torture laws? DMCA deems books are first published in the US if youre not a signatory? Fair use rights for other nations is against the free trade agreement?
If geeks want to change politics its a full system engineering change that's required not just a matter of changing the personality on the desktop. What would it feel like to have a government where your choices and actions do directly have implications for war, peace, health, tax, environment, diversity, freedom. What if instead of suggesting a politician, a quiz http://www.stemwijzer.nl/english_version had direct effect. What other kinds of models are there for being responsible?
If the current model is the extension of Microsoft marketing what does an extension of distributed geekdom look like?
or..
he is investing in collecting health patents with the kind of entity that doesnt attract taxes.
carbon tax is a way for centralised power broadcasters which are producing polution to effectively be paid to further their activities. fuel, car, power industries are resisting change and using doublethink to persuade people that a carbon tax is an investment in change.
i would be far more interested in a carbon free tax which invested in distributed power generation (with less loss of power over distance to deliver) which provided people with investment in developing and applying better technologies for contributing to the power grid themselves. solar, wind, tidal.
it might take a while for these distributed meshes of power to be self sufficient for all purposes, but thats where the investment should be. a distributed powergrid has less single point of failure issues
less wastage as power is used closer to where it is generated, and uses energy which naturally persists.
Which perhaps highlights that there are wider patterns in the way that broken laws/treaties/politics are being
crafted to suit specific interests while basically breaking democratic systems overall.
This conception is both atomistic and unrelational. It takes the form of individual security-seeking practices that are self-defeating and in a profound sense oxymoronic (Loader 1997b), an 'expression of the desire for sovereign agency' (Markell 2003: 22) that depends upon and projects a semblance of security produced by lifting oneself out of co-existence with others in order to render one's own existence less contingently vulnerable and the future more predictable. These practices are often at the same time exercises of private power. They eschew democratic political life in order to achieve 'distributive outcomes according to one's assets, skills and preferences' (Offe 2003: 450) in a manner corrosive of the forms of trust and solidarity upon which any sustainable notion of the public good of security draws and, in its turn, replenishes. Neo-liberalism remains committed, in other words, to forms of security that 'organize the world in ways that make it possible for certain people to enjoy an imperfect simulation of the invulnerability they desire, leaving others to bear a disproportionate share of the costs and burdens involved in social life' (Markell 2003: 22).
http://libertysecurity.org/article232.html
[A]n indiscriminate creation of exclusive privileges tends rather to obstruct
than to stimulate invention. It creates a class of speculative schemers who
make it their business to watch the advancing wave of improvement, and
gather its foam in the form of patented monopolies, which enable them to
lay a heavy tax upon the industry of the country, without contributing
anything to the real advancement of the arts. It embarrasses the honest
pursuit of business with fears and apprehensions of concealed liens and
unknown liabilities to lawsuits and vexatious accountings for profits made
in good faith. Atlantic Works v. Brady, 107 U.S. 192, 200 (1882) (Bradley, J.).
Under the patent agreement, both companies will make up-front payments in exchange for a release from any potential liability for use of each others patented intellectual property, with a net balancing payment from Microsoft to Novell reflecting the larger applicable volume of Microsoft's product shipments. Novell will also make running royalty payments based on a percentage of its revenues from open source products.
MSNovell seem to think so. You code for us. Free. Not for profit.
We keep the patents. If you code FOSS, make a profit and are not a partner.
Then we sue.
Sort of nice for them really they dont need to hire devs anymore, just lawyers.
Dont have to worry about any of that messy innovation stuff, just fence it off and sue.
Litigation as a business model. How far can you bend patent and DMCA law before it
looks so broken that no one wants to go near any of it.
I hope the EU are watching.
Yes lawyers acting in the public interest.
Think about some of the lawyers active in the foss community.
The people who lobby for public rights and against the broadcast treaty at WIPO.
Debates about law are hitting the internet and we are able to participate.
Debates about DMCA and international implications of FTA.
I am not surprised that this is being suggested.
I'm surprised to read so far in the comments before finding someone who
thinks about public legal dialogue as something which we are all participating in
and how that is a part of our distributed means of developing technologies, communities and businesses.
Janet
The DRM is not just about copying it is also about access.
Actually accessing the material youve bought or are browsing in a library can be restricted or disallowed by a TPM technological protection measure.
If you think you should be able to see the file and the TPM has made a bad call, tough luck, it is illegal to circumvent the TPM.
If you develop a technology which is handy for changing files from one format to another, someone else might use that to circumvent a TPM. That makes the developer a felon.
How crazy is that! And yet its a set of laws being exported around the world.
This is one of those issues which pokes pretty close to home. Its also an issue which is best understood by people with some technical background who can unpack the difference between content and the DRM or TPM around it. This means its not easy for non tech consumer groups to defend people's rights on these issues without support and explanations from their local geeky community.
I GF.htm
There are plenty of different things we can do - from an email only approach to face to face talking to people.
Tell people and politicians about the kinds of access rights that make invention, creativity, research, humour,
exploration, tinkering, critique, reverse engineering, remixing, adapting and restoring possible.
Get into promoting digital access rights like these:
http://www.adelphicharter.org/
Check out the Access to Knowledge Treaty developed by creators and users:
http://www.cptech.org/a2k/ (link on left Draft Treaty)
Don't be afraid to lobby at the UN level. These things are being promoted through international trade organisations so do check out
what is happening at WIPO and other international forums.
http://www.intgovforum.org/contributions_for_1st_
And Software Freedom Day is on 16 September
http://softwarefreedomday.org/
There are some people working on alternatives.
This is a digital access rights charter
http://www.adelphicharter.org/
This is a digital rights treaty being developed by both creators and users of information
http://www.cptech.org/a2k/
(link on the left for draft of treaty)
If you are the music composer you have a very tenuous hold on your asset with DRM.
If you want your music to be played on a DRM player you will very likely need to sign over your copyright to the company that owns the copyright of the DRM system on the player.
DRM is not a means for protecting composers, it is a means of devising a booby trapped package or mousetrap on music so that the
distributors could make more money from each variant of use instead of selling the song to the person once.
The composer could well end up having trouble removing their own music from these formats legally, particularly if they decide to change distributors after the music has been locked into the DRM format.
So unless you compose and develop the hardware, software and distribution channel DRM is not safe for composers.
BBC dumped a whole lot of its old programs a few years back.
I bet theyd like to still have the old episodes of Dr Who now but they dont.
Most organisations keep paperwork for a statutory length of time and then ditch it.
If they have a digital copy paper stuff is likely to be ditched even sooner especially if the stat requirement is met by having the material retained in a digital form.
Why keep the paper form as a large unweildy pile of stuff that is expesnive to store when they have their nifty DRM digital version anyway.
There is no sunset clause on the DRM or on TPM technological protection measures.
So presumably if I was confident that I was the only entity with paper copies I could stop things from reaching the public domain at the same time as reducing storage costs...
Think about this in terms of hardware. If there is a TPM on hardware it will be forever illegal to interact with that technology without the manufacturers permission. Makes recycling and rewangling old tech a bit more sporting. It will be tech with a halflife. Out of license for the original purchaser - ie not useable in its originally purchased sense, but illegal to do anything else with.
DMCA is a folly, but it seems to be one that is being adopted world wide.
With that much momentum you can be sure there will be plenty of DRMers looking to test out their new found mousetraps on user and developer fingers.
We need to define the responsibilities that companies need to comply with to make their DRM defensible/compliant.
eg
- responsible sunset clause
- not to be used for storage of public data such as medical records
- not to be used on digital voting systems or any systems where transparency is required
- not to be used on critical systems where someone could need to decide between risk to life or becoming a criminal
- not to be used in space where people need to do on site repairs
- clear branding indicating what drm is applied and what actions are not permitted.
- drm is void if it gets used to squash competitors rather than to address piracy
- and the list goes on - will be looking out for the rest of the 30 days. =)
Wiretapping is happening in the USA and UK so pop UK isnt the full scope.
I fully expect other nations are being wiretapped as well.
At no point have we been told that the people arrested did anything.
All reports say that it is possible to make liquid bombs and info is available online. People have been arrested.
A neighbour/relative reported them. There is no inherent value in wiretapping re this case.
Sceptics could argue that the case is *all* about media and *all* about proposing tighter control on media/internet and our own private comms.
Get ready for the next stage which will be that the UK and USA propose that broadcasters must have 'parity' laws
which allow them to be the sole channels to broadcast and then publish online.
This would then save us from terrorists, but make the internet just like television.
lots of market control for a few vested interests. lots of civil rights costs for the rest of us.
Not hard to see why the media would be loud on this issue, even when the actual threat is dubious.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Unaipon
There are many cooperatively own organisations worldwide.r ative_Corporation
I think the Basques have pushed the concept the furthest, their employee
run company Mondragon supported child care centres and a university as part of the profits.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mondrag%C3%B3n_Coope
Why not start one.
A lot of communities have done that.
They incorporate a group so there is a not for profit entity to carry it and give it a goal and ways of looking after members,
and then people start to build it and share information about building nodes and hooking up.
The not for profit bit means the profits can be built into the infrastructure.
Privatisation has not done much for power infrastructure.
There are a number of successful existing community wireless networks around the world.
There are other groups running community wireless networks all around the world.
Air-Stream.org is one in Adelaide Australia, but yay for Bostonians starting a new project.
http://air-stream.org/
Well your first step for the US to move to open source is to drop the DMCA.
It is drafted to compromise independent innovation in the interests of old broadcast firms.
Your next step after that is to realise that you do not need to trash other nations to do well.
The challenge of course is to find a way to make that happen. =)