When are these corporate thugs going to get a good infusion of Cloo(tm) about such matters?
When porcine quadrupeds aviate.
Seriously, look at the history of "media meets the net". If the RIAA and the big music publishers had been on the ball, they would have been the ones with the mp3.com idea. They'd be making massive profits off people's desire to listen to music. They'd be in a position to charge royalties for every song downloaded or played, and most people would be glad to pay them. They'd be raking in big bucks. Look at what they're doing instead.
Look at on-demand video. How many people would be willing to pay for a movie to play on their home computer hooked up to their 21" monitor or big-screen TV? Do you see the MPAA rushing to bring this concept to market? Don't make me laugh. They'll sue the first person who tries.
And look at iCraveTV. If the networks were on the ball, they'd have thought of this first. They'd have sold the ad space for bigger bucks, justifying it on the basis that more people are watching. They'd have tied the ads into "instant-buy" buttons in the browser, enabling them to charge still bigger bucks for commercial time.
None of this even requires much imagination. But do these media behemoths pursue these promising profit-making opportunities? They're too busy lobbying for the DMCA to gain a stranglehold on tangible media. They're too busy running PR campaigns to get MP3 rejected as a "pirate music format". They're spending too much time on corporate strategy sessions aimed at keeping down the people who actually do have innovative ideas on distributing mass media.
Pathetic. Just pathetic. As someone said in one or another of the DeCSS topics, the history of media conglomerates and new technology is a history of the public having to beat media companies up until they're forced to take our money.
If you're writing software manuals and you can't get your head around LaTeX, texinfo or simple HTML then you have no business being a technical writer.
It's not a problem of being unable to "get your head around" formatting languages; it's a question of what's usable for revision and what isn't.
When you revise an existing document, you generally don't want to be looking at formatting codes inline with the text while you're actually working on it; it makes it too hard to read, to see the organization, and to make easy sense of the information. Obviously you can read around the codes, if you're sufficiently motivated. You can read MS Word documents into a text editor and read around its formatting too, but no one sane would want to.
Encouraging or requiring documentation to be in a form that's inaccessible to document-processing software works against the stated purpose of the license: to make the documentation easy to modify. If it's got formatting crap scattered throughout, the only practical way to deal with it is to delete the formatting crap, do your reading, reorganizing, and rewriting, then reformat the whole damn document. Either that, or you read it into a document processor that understands the formatting, do your reading etc., then more than likely have to reformat the result by hand.
Few writers will bother, if this is the only way. And if few writers bother, a free documentation license isn't going to accomplish much, is it?
The license seems to imply that a transparent format is one that can be easily modified by a writer - analogous to source.
But looking at the list of suggested transparent formats, I see things like LaTeX and raw HTML. Does RMS seriously think most writers work directly in formatting languages instead of using document processors? Really, for practical purposes, a document distributed in M*cros*ft Word format is much more likely to be easily modifiable by a writer than one in LaTeX input.
(Word may not be the best example, being unquestionably proprietary... but it's a common format and been reverse-engineered enough times that you don't need to patronize MS to read it. Or take RTF, which is also proprietary but whose definition is publicly available last I checked.)
Maybe RMS finds it easier to type in formatting codes than to work in a document processor, but most writers don't. Many writers, in fact, can't. If the point of the transparent-format verbiage is to make sure documents are distributed in a form that writers can modify and improve, I think it's missing the target by a wide margin.
Personally I think that it would be good to create some sort of arrangement where the exact text and arrangement of a document may or may not be free, but it and all its derivatives must allow the technical information in them to be free to use in any other document using either of the pair of licenses.
Vanilla copyright law does that. Copyright covers the specific expression, but not the ideas. If you've got a copyrighted technical reference in front of you, you can't copy the exact wording, arrangement of information, and so on, but you can copy the technical information itself all you want. That may be plagiarism, if you fail to give the author credit and if your new book doesn't add clarity or value, but it doesn't violate the copyright to express technical facts in a new form.
Then why is he being a jerk about it? If he really just wanted to avoid abuse, he'd have gotten it and ignored it.
So far, that's exactly what he's done. The only company Amazon has sued for patent infringement is Barnes & Noble (who as far as I'm concerned deserve whatever they get and then some, for filing a cynical lawsuit against Amazon at a time when Amazon was vulnerable, strictly as a crush-the-competitor business strategy).
In March 1999, I implemented a whole damn CGI application in C++ to do the whole damn affiliate registration, tracking, crediting and administration process! And now, what do I see? Amazon.com patenting this process, which I don't know how many, perhaps hundreds and hundreds of merchant sites online have implemented!
You did that two years after Amazon filed for the patent. (Remember that patents normally take several years to grant.)
The whole idea of business process patents is very dubious as far as I'm concerned (and I think this one fails on obviousness), but as far as I remember, Amazon was the only online business with an affiliate program at the time they filed this patent. There was a lot of talk at the time about what an innovative idea it was. Subsequent uses do not count as prior art.
As for the rest of it, if you all think Amazon's the only company that files defensive patents in order to prevent their inventions from being patented out from under them by someone else, think again. It's common business practice. If Amazon hadn't gotten this patent, it is entirely possible that one of their competitors would have filed, been granted the patent, and then threatened to sue Amazon for infringement. All the bitching in the world about the Evil Amazon will not fix the problems that make that possible, nor do anything about the thousands of companies that do this sort of thing or worse.
(Remember Geoworks' submarine patent on HDML? Remember how they threatened to hold any company using HDML over a barrel until they paid up? Amazon has done nothing even remotely close to that. Do I see a similar level of indignation around here over Geoworks? Hardly.)
Maybe they could take on interns...people who they could give notes to who could cobble together some human-readable docs for the rest of the world.
As long as that attitude toward documentation prevails among Linux users and Linux programmers, the quality of the documentation won't improve much.
Really, think about what you're saying here. You suggest getting "interns" to "cobble together" something. How would you feel about taking any other kind of skilled work and recommending that you just get a few cheap interns to slap something together? Do you think the people who are skilled at that work would appreciate that? Do you think they'd be eager to use their skills for the benefit of a community that derogates those skills?
(And don't think programmers can do it, either. The programmer is obviously one of the best sources of information about how the program works, and most programmers can write reasonably well...but most don't know much about indexing or data chunking or the distinctions between task-based and conceptual documentation. Reasonable, since it's not their field or area of interest. But it means the best documentation doesn't usually come from the programmer, even if the programmer can write well and decides to take the time to do documentation. Neither of which is a sure shot. And of course there's the problem that the programmer's viewpoint is hopelessly "contaminated" when it comes to seeing the program through a new user's eyes.)
ESR talks a lot about the reward of prestige. If you want to see why some areas of Linux development excel while others lag behind, look at the prestige given to working in those areas. Are technical writers given deference for their skills? Can anyone here even imagine anyone getting remotely the respect for writing and organizing documentation that you do for writing a device driver? (Can anyone here imagine someone whose contribution was writing kick-ass, open source user documentation getting stock options in an IPO for that contribution?)
Before the state of documentation changes much, I think the attitude will have to change. When excellent writers who can untangle complicated procedures are rewarded with prestige to match their contribution then we'll see consistently improved documentation.
(And don't even get me started about the parallels to user interface design. At least you don't hear people saying they don't want to "lower" Linux by having it well-documented.)
DVD players not only have the capability of viewing movies that use CSS, they require that the movie uses CSS.
Are you sure this is true? My understanding is that consumer DVD players will play non-CSS-encrypted DVDs.
(Of course, the dark thought has occurred to me that there's nothing stopping the studios from demanding, via the DVD-CCA, that all future players require CSS encoding, the same way they've demanded Macrovision and the ability to disable fast-forward. The structure of the DVD player market is such that all the DVD-CCA needs to do is threaten to remove a manufacturer's key, making that manufacturer's players unable to play any future CSS-encrypted disks. If they want to use CSS for "artist control", they have the power and the structure in place to do so.)
Re:Why does Aqua look so much better than GNOME?
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New Desktop for Linux
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We've all seen these before, but compare them and think, "What is Aqua doing that GNOME is not?" Nothing! Both screenshots are simple desktop+explorer shots. Yet somehow the Aqua screen looks like da bomb and GNOME looks like shite.
Look again. Look at the details.
Look at the use of fonts: The Aqua fonts are antialiased, the GNOME fonts aren't. The Aqua font was designed by someone who knows what they're doing aesthetically; the GNOME font looks ugly and unbalanced at screen resolution. There are two sizes of the font on the Aqua screen, and they're different enough to contrast well; the GNOME screen has at least three sizes, and they're close enough that it's not obvious at first glance that they're actually different sizes. It adds up to a cluttered look where Aqua's use of fonts looks smooth and slick.
Look at the use of color: the GNOME screenshot shows colors from the horrible garish 16-color Windows palette; the Aqua colors are subtle and harmonize well.
Look at the use of icons: the GNOME screen has a huge number of little icons, and most of them are not obvious at first glance. The spreadsheet window has two whole rows of these things, and they're not even designed to go well together with a consistent style. Again, the look is cluttered. The icons visible in the Aqua screenshot have some technical advantages (more colors, larger size), but more than that, they look like they were all designed by the same person with the same sense of color and shape. They look like they belong together. Again, the impression is of slickness versus confusing clutter.
Look even at the smallest details. On the GNOME screenshot, notice how the white boxes around the desktop icon names are a little too large, and not quite balanced top to bottom? Notice how the background pattern is so garish that it's not easy to see the icons themselves, and it would be distracting if the windows were small enough that you could see more of the desktop? Notice how the menus with accelerator underlines sit a bit higher than those without, in the PDF window?
People don't necessarily see these details explicitly. They might not even be able to point them out in a screenshot. But they notice them, all right.
I believe the point is that you pay for content by purchasing the DVD. You are licensed to view the content indefinitely for non-commercial use solely on a reader licensed to decode the DVD format.
Where's this alleged license agreement, then? There's not even the dubious hook of a shrinkwrap license to hook this argument on - DVD packages dont' say anything about a requirement to view the DVD on a cartel-approved player. They just say it's for home viewing only - same as any other copyrighted video content.
The DNS TLD scheme wasn't designed to discriminate between kinds of content - in fact, when DNS was designed, the Web wasn't around, and "serving a particular kind of content" wasn't a primary purpose of holding a domain. Sites provide all sorts of services.
If you look at the current TLDs - gov, com, mil, edu, org, and net - and their definitions, you'll see that they describe, not content, but the organization holding the domain name. (At least that was the intent, before NSI started babbling about "dot com domains" and companies started hogging the.net and.org counterparts to their.com.) gov is for government agencies, com is for companies, mil is for military units, edu is for educational institutions, org is for nonprofit organizations, and net is for network service providers.
This scheme has been abused so long that it may well be irretrievable, and it's not complete. It was devised in the days before it was plausible for an individual to hold a domain; and there's been so much abuse allowed (corporations registering.net domains despite not offering any network services, etc.) alternating with so many arbitrary restrictions (for a long time ISPs couldn't register as.net because they weren't *top-level* network providers) that the problems can only be solved by forcing a lot of people to switch domain names. Which would be horribly disruptive to "e-commerce" and therefore won't happen.
But it is workable in ways that the proposed schemes based on content are not.
For one thing, suppose a domain doesn't "offer" any "content" at all? How do you categorize it? (Note to the little net-newbies among us: it is possible to use a 2LD for something other than a web site.)
For another, suppose a domain does offer content, and the content crosses the arbitrary categories? Most domains do, when you look at them.
For a third, creating categories based on content makes content-based censorship easy and simple. Some people may consider this a good thing. I do not.
Almost every time I've seen a proposal to create TLDs based on content, it's assumed that all sites do precisely one thing and it's been touted on the grounds that it allows easy suppression of content a government doesn't like. That's enough to question the basic concept behind such proposals.
I On January 20, 2000, the United States District Court for the Southern District of New York granted a Preliminary Injunction prohibiting the Internet posting or other provision of DeCSS[...]If you are bound by an injunction, maintaining the DeCSS utility on your system or network violates the above injunction[s] and risks court sanctions for contempt.
Now that's pretty disgusting and as close to a lie as you can get without actually lying, since the injunction in New York applies specifically to the defendants in that case (and I'm sure whoever wrote this knows that). Hmnmm, court sanctions for inappropriate behavior by party to litigation? If I were the EFF I'd certainly raise this game-playing before the court and ask that the plaintiffs be properly spanked.
The 9th Circuit court is right in saying reverse engineering of a copyrighted piece of code is "fair use" under the statute. In this case, Sony charged copyright infringement because Connectix had to make copies of the Gamestation bios in order to develop its emulator.
It seems like DeCSS would be a similar case: MoRE et al was developing an emulator for (a part of) Xing's software, namely the part that decrypts CSS.
Here's the problem: the defendants aren't being charged with violating Xing's copyright to its player software. They're being charged under the DMCA with circumventing an access protection on the DVD *content*. If the charge had to do with copyright infringement on Xing's software, you'd be right, it would be fair use.
But Judge Kaplan seems to feel that there's no fair use defense possible under the DMCA, because what's being charged isn't copyright infringement (of the DVD contents) - it's providing a method to circumvent the access control. His opinion implies that doing so is illegal even if there isn't any copying going on at all.
This is why we've got a problem in the New York case: the judge interprets the DMCA in such a way as to conclude that *any* hardware or software DVD player that's not authorized by DVD-CCA is ipso facto illegal. In this analysis the details of how the player was constructed, whether it can be used for piracy, etc. don't matter. The only thing that matters is whether it circumvents an access-control measure put there by the owner of copyrighted content, and in his view that's illegal even if its only/main purpose is to enable fair use.
this has no relevance to either the FIRST (free speech) or FOURTH (search and seizure) amendments, since this is a CIVIL lawsuit.
Eh? So I suppose the MPAA's suit agianst 2600 has no first amendment relevance, since it's a CIVIL lawsuit?
Most of the bill of rights applies as much to civil defendants as to criminal defendants. Orders of a court in a civil case are just as much government action as orders in a criminal case and they are subject to the same constitutional scrutiny with respect to violation of rights.
Some of the commentary so far has been overheated, yes, and much of it is more about the morality of this action than the legality of it, but the question of the legal rights of these defendants doesn't become irrelevant just because it's a CIVIL case.
Their homes were not searched and the police did not show up on their doorsteps demanding their computers. Most likely, as part of the discovery process, subpoenas were issued
Nope. Read the story again. The plaintiffs showed up in their doorstep and searched their computers. This is apparently permitted in civil suits. And the plaintiffs themselves do the search and seizure (accompanied by deputies). It isn't the same thing as a subpoena, which is a court order to turn over evidence to the court - it's a search conducted by the plaintiffs.
It surprised me too when I first learned this was possible - during the Scientology raids. I'd always thought that searches were only done in criminal cases and always by the police. But not so, a civil plaintiff can get permission to seize the personal property, business records, personal correspondence, etc. of defendants. In some of the Scientology cases, head members of the CoS showed up at people's houses and conducted the searches personally. The judge can limit the scope of the search but is not required to. Scary but true.
No one is saying you can't look at porn, or bombs, or anything else you want, they are saying you can't look at it on a system the government is providing for use
You seem a bit unclear on the law. The fact that it's a government system is precisely why preventing its use to read Unapproved Content, for no reason other than the desire to suppress access to that content, is unconstitutional.
A library may buy or not buy a book. A library may not, without violating the law, tear out certain pages of a book it's bought to prevent people from seeing what's on those pages.
A library may choose to subscribe to Newsweek (or for that matter Playboy), or not. It may not subscribe to the magazine, then hire someone to rip out stores that are considered "detrimental to our community standards." Doing so is, for a government-run library, in violation of law and it is not allowed.
And a library may choose to buy a computer and set up an Internet connection, or not. But it may not set up such a connection and then spend money to have someone else censor some of the content. Regardless of the library staff's motives in doing so, and regardless of how the local politicians feel about it, for a government-run library to do so is in violation of law.
It's been said that the worldwide nature of the Internet is a potential weakness, in that any site can be subjected (in theory) to any country's laws. But we see in this case, the net's worldwide nature is one of its strengths, because in practice, you can choose your jurisdiction.
If your content is explicitly sexual, have it hosted in a country that has a relaxed attitude about these matters (I wouldn't exactly describe the US that way, but seemingly it's better than Australia). If it's politically controversial, have it hosted in a country with a strong tradition of free expression in political matters. If it's DeCSS, host it in a country that takes the fair-use doctrine seriously.
We don't need a single data-haven country that accepts everything, as long as there's at least one country that accepts any given kind of content.
[comments to the effect that unencrypted disks won't play in consumer DVD players]
Is that true? Do you have a technical reference or personal experience?
The reason I ask is that if it's true, the MPAA's position suddenly makes sense in terms of "artist control". If unencrypted DVDs aren't compatible with players, then independent artists without access to CSS can't make playable DVDs, hence the studios' continued control of CSS is essential for retention of an oligopoly on DVD production. If they don't control the player market, players can be made which will read unencrypted as well as studio-produced disks.
I had thought of this a while back, but it was my impression that unencrypted DVDs would play in DVD players, so I dropped that theory. But if I was wrong about that, I may have to re-think...
Does this mean that if the MPAA decides that e.g. Panasonic had broken their licensing agreement, then newly released DVDs would simply stop working on their players?
This is technically possible, yes. Each DVD includes the 408(?) defined player keys, so the studios could in theory simply omit the key belonging to a "deprecated" player from all future pressings, and those DVDs wouldn't work on that player. (There might be limits on their right to do this in the DVD-CCA license agreement, I'm not sure. But it is technically possible.)
Surely this level of market controll is ridiculous.
My understanding was that mp3.com was beaming other music too, which they didn't have the distribution rights too.
That's not quite right. The idea is that you buy a CD (from mp3 or one of its marketing partners), and mp3, upon receiving the information that you've legitimately purchased this CD, will allow you to access the contents of the CD in their database.
The RIAA's position is that they're "rebroadcasting" the CD to you. mp3.com's position is that you own the CD and have the right therefore to listen to it in whatever format you want, they're just acting as a proxy/storage farm for the mp3 version of your legally owned CD.
To register sld.com, sld must be a form of your company name or a trademarked product name. This tld is restricted to legally recognized businesses.
I figure this kind of scheme to close up the domain name space will be the next method for "controlling the vast, unregulated Internet": domain names to be held only by "legitimate corporations", and laws against mere "individuals" holding a domain name of their own.
It will be argued that the mere individuals can always use part of the directory structure of a hosting provider, and that this is good enough for these mere individuals. It will also be argued that the limited namespace is too precious for any domain name to be "wasted" on a purpose that isn't corporate.
We saw a preview of this with the law recently passed to make reverse domain piracy easier. Corporate marketing execs testified as to the difficulty of marketing when they couldn't get the domain name they wanted because some "mere individual" happened to be using it. Much was made of the monetary impact on the "new information economy".
Look for more of the same. The movement to narrow the ability of individuals to publish on the Internet continues apace, and domain name registration is the most promising place to apply pressure on it, because DNS is centralized and therefore vulnerable.
I sincerely hope that you and every single person who ever screamed "Free Kevin!" has your credit card information stolen and used by him and that he hijacks your cell phone and sticks you with the $2k bill that he accumulated while emptying out your bank account.
Erm.Been listening to a wee bit too much teevee news? Mitnick grabbed credit-card numbers, but he never used any of them or showed any intent to do so. This is trespass, it's a criminal offense, and the kindest thing that can be said about it is that it makes for a pain in the butt for a lot of people who have to deal with it...but the original poster is correct, it's not theft.
(And yes, like seemingly half the western world. I have been in the position of having had an account on a system Mitnick cracked. I have, as they say, been there. It was a pain in the ass, and it wasn't the same as having something actually stolen from me.)
I have said all along that copyright infringment was the strongest case the DVD CCA has. People keep claiming that the CSS encryption wasn't copyrighted. 30 years ago this *might* have been true. It certainly isn't now.
You misunderstand copyright. Copyright protects instantiation of ideas, not the ideas themselves. A computer program can be copyrighted, but the way it works cannot be copyrighted. CSS is an algorithm and is not copyrightable.
As a method, CSS is eligible for trade secret protection or, if it meets the obviousness and prior art criteria, patent protection. [elide standard rant about PTO policies].
(The specific code CCA hands out is eligible for copyright protection, and so is the code used by Xing in its player. But no one has alleged that DeCSS used this code or that the author had access to it. Copyright, as far as the actual code is concerned, simply doesn't come into the picture.)
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When are these corporate thugs going to get a good infusion of Cloo(tm) about such matters?
When porcine quadrupeds aviate.
Seriously, look at the history of "media meets the net". If the RIAA and the big music publishers had been on the ball, they would have been the ones with the mp3.com idea. They'd be making massive profits off people's desire to listen to music. They'd be in a position to charge royalties for every song downloaded or played, and most people would be glad to pay them. They'd be raking in big bucks. Look at what they're doing instead.
Look at on-demand video. How many people would be willing to pay for a movie to play on their home computer hooked up to their 21" monitor or big-screen TV? Do you see the MPAA rushing to bring this concept to market? Don't make me laugh. They'll sue the first person who tries.
And look at iCraveTV. If the networks were on the ball, they'd have thought of this first. They'd have sold the ad space for bigger bucks, justifying it on the basis that more people are watching. They'd have tied the ads into "instant-buy" buttons in the browser, enabling them to charge still bigger bucks for commercial time.
None of this even requires much imagination. But do these media behemoths pursue these promising profit-making opportunities? They're too busy lobbying for the DMCA to gain a stranglehold on tangible media. They're too busy running PR campaigns to get MP3 rejected as a "pirate music format". They're spending too much time on corporate strategy sessions aimed at keeping down the people who actually do have innovative ideas on distributing mass media.
Pathetic. Just pathetic. As someone said in one or another of the DeCSS topics, the history of media conglomerates and new technology is a history of the public having to beat media companies up until they're forced to take our money.
If you're writing software manuals and you can't get your head around LaTeX, texinfo or simple HTML then you have no business being a technical writer.
It's not a problem of being unable to "get your head around" formatting languages; it's a question of what's usable for revision and what isn't.
When you revise an existing document, you generally don't want to be looking at formatting codes inline with the text while you're actually working on it; it makes it too hard to read, to see the organization, and to make easy sense of the information. Obviously you can read around the codes, if you're sufficiently motivated. You can read MS Word documents into a text editor and read around its formatting too, but no one sane would want to.
Encouraging or requiring documentation to be in a form that's inaccessible to document-processing software works against the stated purpose of the license: to make the documentation easy to modify. If it's got formatting crap scattered throughout, the only practical way to deal with it is to delete the formatting crap, do your reading, reorganizing, and rewriting, then reformat the whole damn document. Either that, or you read it into a document processor that understands the formatting, do your reading etc., then more than likely have to reformat the result by hand.
Few writers will bother, if this is the only way. And if few writers bother, a free documentation license isn't going to accomplish much, is it?
The license seems to imply that a transparent format is one that can be easily modified by a writer - analogous to source.
But looking at the list of suggested transparent formats, I see things like LaTeX and raw HTML. Does RMS seriously think most writers work directly in formatting languages instead of using document processors? Really, for practical purposes, a document distributed in M*cros*ft Word format is much more likely to be easily modifiable by a writer than one in LaTeX input.
(Word may not be the best example, being unquestionably proprietary... but it's a common format and been reverse-engineered enough times that you don't need to patronize MS to read it. Or take RTF, which is also proprietary but whose definition is publicly available last I checked.)
Maybe RMS finds it easier to type in formatting codes than to work in a document processor, but most writers don't. Many writers, in fact, can't. If the point of the transparent-format verbiage is to make sure documents are distributed in a form that writers can modify and improve, I think it's missing the target by a wide margin.
Personally I think that it would be good to create some sort of arrangement where the exact text and arrangement of a document may or may not be free, but it and all its derivatives must allow the technical information in them to be free to use in any other document using either of the pair of licenses.
Vanilla copyright law does that. Copyright covers the specific expression, but not the ideas. If you've got a copyrighted technical reference in front of you, you can't copy the exact wording, arrangement of information, and so on, but you can copy the technical information itself all you want. That may be plagiarism, if you fail to give the author credit and if your new book doesn't add clarity or value, but it doesn't violate the copyright to express technical facts in a new form.
Then why is he being a jerk about it? If he really just wanted to avoid abuse, he'd have gotten it and ignored it.
So far, that's exactly what he's done. The only company Amazon has sued for patent infringement is Barnes & Noble (who as far as I'm concerned deserve whatever they get and then some, for filing a cynical lawsuit against Amazon at a time when Amazon was vulnerable, strictly as a crush-the-competitor business strategy).
In March 1999, I implemented a whole damn CGI application in C++ to do the whole damn affiliate registration, tracking, crediting and administration process! And now, what do I see? Amazon.com patenting this process, which I don't know how many, perhaps hundreds and hundreds of merchant sites online have implemented!
You did that two years after Amazon filed for the patent. (Remember that patents normally take several years to grant.)
The whole idea of business process patents is very dubious as far as I'm concerned (and I think this one fails on obviousness), but as far as I remember, Amazon was the only online business with an affiliate program at the time they filed this patent. There was a lot of talk at the time about what an innovative idea it was. Subsequent uses do not count as prior art.
As for the rest of it, if you all think Amazon's the only company that files defensive patents in order to prevent their inventions from being patented out from under them by someone else, think again. It's common business practice. If Amazon hadn't gotten this patent, it is entirely possible that one of their competitors would have filed, been granted the patent, and then threatened to sue Amazon for infringement. All the bitching in the world about the Evil Amazon will not fix the problems that make that possible, nor do anything about the thousands of companies that do this sort of thing or worse.
(Remember Geoworks' submarine patent on HDML? Remember how they threatened to hold any company using HDML over a barrel until they paid up? Amazon has done nothing even remotely close to that. Do I see a similar level of indignation around here over Geoworks? Hardly.)
Maybe they could take on interns...people who they could give notes to who could cobble together some human-readable docs for the rest of the world.
As long as that attitude toward documentation prevails among Linux users and Linux programmers, the quality of the documentation won't improve much.
Really, think about what you're saying here. You suggest getting "interns" to "cobble together" something. How would you feel about taking any other kind of skilled work and recommending that you just get a few cheap interns to slap something together? Do you think the people who are skilled at that work would appreciate that? Do you think they'd be eager to use their skills for the benefit of a community that derogates those skills?
(And don't think programmers can do it, either. The programmer is obviously one of the best sources of information about how the program works, and most programmers can write reasonably well...but most don't know much about indexing or data chunking or the distinctions between task-based and conceptual documentation. Reasonable, since it's not their field or area of interest. But it means the best documentation doesn't usually come from the programmer, even if the programmer can write well and decides to take the time to do documentation. Neither of which is a sure shot. And of course there's the problem that the programmer's viewpoint is hopelessly "contaminated" when it comes to seeing the program through a new user's eyes.)
ESR talks a lot about the reward of prestige. If you want to see why some areas of Linux development excel while others lag behind, look at the prestige given to working in those areas. Are technical writers given deference for their skills? Can anyone here even imagine anyone getting remotely the respect for writing and organizing documentation that you do for writing a device driver? (Can anyone here imagine someone whose contribution was writing kick-ass, open source user documentation getting stock options in an IPO for that contribution?)
Before the state of documentation changes much, I think the attitude will have to change. When excellent writers who can untangle complicated procedures are rewarded with prestige to match their contribution then we'll see consistently improved documentation.
(And don't even get me started about the parallels to user interface design. At least you don't hear people saying they don't want to "lower" Linux by having it well-documented.)
DVD players not only have the capability of viewing movies that use CSS, they require that the movie uses CSS.
Are you sure this is true? My understanding is that consumer DVD players will play non-CSS-encrypted DVDs.
(Of course, the dark thought has occurred to me that there's nothing stopping the studios from demanding, via the DVD-CCA, that all future players require CSS encoding, the same way they've demanded Macrovision and the ability to disable fast-forward. The structure of the DVD player market is such that all the DVD-CCA needs to do is threaten to remove a manufacturer's key, making that manufacturer's players unable to play any future CSS-encrypted disks. If they want to use CSS for "artist control", they have the power and the structure in place to do so.)
We've all seen these before, but compare them and think, "What is Aqua doing that GNOME is not?" Nothing! Both screenshots are simple desktop+explorer shots. Yet somehow the Aqua screen looks like da bomb and GNOME looks like shite.
Look again. Look at the details.
Look at the use of fonts: The Aqua fonts are antialiased, the GNOME fonts aren't. The Aqua font was designed by someone who knows what they're doing aesthetically; the GNOME font looks ugly and unbalanced at screen resolution. There are two sizes of the font on the Aqua screen, and they're different enough to contrast well; the GNOME screen has at least three sizes, and they're close enough that it's not obvious at first glance that they're actually different sizes. It adds up to a cluttered look where Aqua's use of fonts looks smooth and slick.
Look at the use of color: the GNOME screenshot shows colors from the horrible garish 16-color Windows palette; the Aqua colors are subtle and harmonize well.
Look at the use of icons: the GNOME screen has a huge number of little icons, and most of them are not obvious at first glance. The spreadsheet window has two whole rows of these things, and they're not even designed to go well together with a consistent style. Again, the look is cluttered. The icons visible in the Aqua screenshot have some technical advantages (more colors, larger size), but more than that, they look like they were all designed by the same person with the same sense of color and shape. They look like they belong together. Again, the impression is of slickness versus confusing clutter.
Look even at the smallest details. On the GNOME screenshot, notice how the white boxes around the desktop icon names are a little too large, and not quite balanced top to bottom? Notice how the background pattern is so garish that it's not easy to see the icons themselves, and it would be distracting if the windows were small enough that you could see more of the desktop? Notice how the menus with accelerator underlines sit a bit higher than those without, in the PDF window?
People don't necessarily see these details explicitly. They might not even be able to point them out in a screenshot. But they notice them, all right.
I believe the point is that you pay for content by purchasing the DVD. You are licensed to view the content indefinitely for non-commercial use solely on a reader licensed to decode the DVD format.
Where's this alleged license agreement, then? There's not even the dubious hook of a shrinkwrap license to hook this argument on - DVD packages dont' say anything about a requirement to view the DVD on a cartel-approved player. They just say it's for home viewing only - same as any other copyrighted video content.
The DNS TLD scheme wasn't designed to discriminate between kinds of content - in fact, when DNS was designed, the Web wasn't around, and "serving a particular kind of content" wasn't a primary purpose of holding a domain. Sites provide all sorts of services.
.net and .org counterparts to their .com.) gov is for government agencies, com is for companies, mil is for military units, edu is for educational institutions, org is for nonprofit organizations, and net is for network service providers.
.net domains despite not offering any network services, etc.) alternating with so many arbitrary restrictions (for a long time ISPs couldn't register as .net because they weren't *top-level* network providers) that the problems can only be solved by forcing a lot of people to switch domain names. Which would be horribly disruptive to "e-commerce" and therefore won't happen.
If you look at the current TLDs - gov, com, mil, edu, org, and net - and their definitions, you'll see that they describe, not content, but the organization holding the domain name. (At least that was the intent, before NSI started babbling about "dot com domains" and companies started hogging the
This scheme has been abused so long that it may well be irretrievable, and it's not complete. It was devised in the days before it was plausible for an individual to hold a domain; and there's been so much abuse allowed (corporations registering
But it is workable in ways that the proposed schemes based on content are not.
For one thing, suppose a domain doesn't "offer" any "content" at all? How do you categorize it? (Note to the little net-newbies among us: it is possible to use a 2LD for something other than a web site.)
For another, suppose a domain does offer content, and the content crosses the arbitrary categories? Most domains do, when you look at them.
For a third, creating categories based on content makes content-based censorship easy and simple. Some people may consider this a good thing. I do not.
Almost every time I've seen a proposal to create TLDs based on content, it's assumed that all sites do precisely one thing and it's been touted on the grounds that it allows easy suppression of content a government doesn't like. That's enough to question the basic concept behind such proposals.
I On January 20, 2000, the United States District Court for the Southern District of New York granted a Preliminary Injunction prohibiting the Internet posting or other provision of DeCSS[...]If you are bound by an injunction, maintaining the DeCSS utility on your system or network violates the above injunction[s] and risks court sanctions for contempt.
Now that's pretty disgusting and as close to a lie as you can get without actually lying, since the injunction in New York applies specifically to the defendants in that case (and I'm sure whoever wrote this knows that). Hmnmm, court sanctions for inappropriate behavior by party to litigation? If I were the EFF I'd certainly raise this game-playing before the court and ask that the plaintiffs be properly spanked.
The 9th Circuit court is right in saying reverse engineering of a copyrighted piece of code is "fair use" under the statute. In this case, Sony charged copyright infringement because Connectix had to make copies of the Gamestation bios in order to develop its emulator.
It seems like DeCSS would be a similar case: MoRE et al was developing an emulator for (a part of) Xing's software, namely the part that decrypts CSS.
Here's the problem: the defendants aren't being charged with violating Xing's copyright to its player software. They're being charged under the DMCA with circumventing an access protection on the DVD *content*. If the charge had to do with copyright infringement on Xing's software, you'd be right, it would be fair use.
But Judge Kaplan seems to feel that there's no fair use defense possible under the DMCA, because what's being charged isn't copyright infringement (of the DVD contents) - it's providing a method to circumvent the access control. His opinion implies that doing so is illegal even if there isn't any copying going on at all.
This is why we've got a problem in the New York case: the judge interprets the DMCA in such a way as to conclude that *any* hardware or software DVD player that's not authorized by DVD-CCA is ipso facto illegal. In this analysis the details of how the player was constructed, whether it can be used for piracy, etc. don't matter. The only thing that matters is whether it circumvents an access-control measure put there by the owner of copyrighted content, and in his view that's illegal even if its only/main purpose is to enable fair use.
this has no relevance to either the FIRST (free speech) or FOURTH (search and seizure) amendments, since this is a CIVIL lawsuit.
Eh? So I suppose the MPAA's suit agianst 2600 has no first amendment relevance, since it's a CIVIL lawsuit?
Most of the bill of rights applies as much to civil defendants as to criminal defendants. Orders of a court in a civil case are just as much government action as orders in a criminal case and they are subject to the same constitutional scrutiny with respect to violation of rights.
Some of the commentary so far has been overheated, yes, and much of it is more about the morality of this action than the legality of it, but the question of the legal rights of these defendants doesn't become irrelevant just because it's a CIVIL case.
Their homes were not searched and the police did not show up on their doorsteps demanding their computers. Most likely, as part of the discovery process, subpoenas were issued
Nope. Read the story again. The plaintiffs showed up in their doorstep and searched their computers. This is apparently permitted in civil suits. And the plaintiffs themselves do the search and seizure (accompanied by deputies). It isn't the same thing as a subpoena, which is a court order to turn over evidence to the court - it's a search conducted by the plaintiffs.
It surprised me too when I first learned this was possible - during the Scientology raids. I'd always thought that searches were only done in criminal cases and always by the police. But not so, a civil plaintiff can get permission to seize the personal property, business records, personal correspondence, etc. of defendants. In some of the Scientology cases, head members of the CoS showed up at people's houses and conducted the searches personally. The judge can limit the scope of the search but is not required to. Scary but true.
No one is saying you can't look at porn, or bombs, or anything else you want, they are saying you can't look at it on a system the government is providing for use
You seem a bit unclear on the law. The fact that it's a government system is precisely why preventing its use to read Unapproved Content, for no reason other than the desire to suppress access to that content, is unconstitutional.
A library may buy or not buy a book. A library may not, without violating the law, tear out certain pages of a book it's bought to prevent people from seeing what's on those pages.
A library may choose to subscribe to Newsweek (or for that matter Playboy), or not. It may not subscribe to the magazine, then hire someone to rip out stores that are considered "detrimental to our community standards." Doing so is, for a government-run library, in violation of law and it is not allowed.
And a library may choose to buy a computer and set up an Internet connection, or not. But it may not set up such a connection and then spend money to have someone else censor some of the content. Regardless of the library staff's motives in doing so, and regardless of how the local politicians feel about it, for a government-run library to do so is in violation of law.
For once it really is as simple as that.
It's been said that the worldwide nature of the Internet is a potential weakness, in that any site can be subjected (in theory) to any country's laws. But we see in this case, the net's worldwide nature is one of its strengths, because in practice, you can choose your jurisdiction.
If your content is explicitly sexual, have it hosted in a country that has a relaxed attitude about these matters (I wouldn't exactly describe the US that way, but seemingly it's better than Australia). If it's politically controversial, have it hosted in a country with a strong tradition of free expression in political matters. If it's DeCSS, host it in a country that takes the fair-use doctrine seriously.
We don't need a single data-haven country that accepts everything, as long as there's at least one country that accepts any given kind of content.
If you could go back and change your miund about posting it, would you?
He already answered a similar question in the LinuxWorld interview:
[comments to the effect that unencrypted disks won't play in consumer DVD players]
Is that true? Do you have a technical reference or personal experience?
The reason I ask is that if it's true, the MPAA's position suddenly makes sense in terms of "artist control". If unencrypted DVDs aren't compatible with players, then independent artists without access to CSS can't make playable DVDs, hence the studios' continued control of CSS is essential for retention of an oligopoly on DVD production. If they don't control the player market, players can be made which will read unencrypted as well as studio-produced disks.
I had thought of this a while back, but it was my impression that unencrypted DVDs would play in DVD players, so I dropped that theory. But if I was wrong about that, I may have to re-think...
Does this mean that if the MPAA decides that e.g. Panasonic had broken their licensing agreement, then newly released DVDs would simply stop working on their players?
This is technically possible, yes. Each DVD includes the 408(?) defined player keys, so the studios could in theory simply omit the key belonging to a "deprecated" player from all future pressings, and those DVDs wouldn't work on that player. (There might be limits on their right to do this in the DVD-CCA license agreement, I'm not sure. But it is technically possible.)
Surely this level of market controll is ridiculous.
No argument from me...
My understanding was that mp3.com was beaming other music too, which they didn't have the distribution rights too.
That's not quite right. The idea is that you buy a CD (from mp3 or one of its marketing partners), and mp3, upon receiving the information that you've legitimately purchased this CD, will allow you to access the contents of the CD in their database.
The RIAA's position is that they're "rebroadcasting" the CD to you. mp3.com's position is that you own the CD and have the right therefore to listen to it in whatever format you want, they're just acting as a proxy/storage farm for the mp3 version of your legally owned CD.
To register sld.com, sld must be a form of your company name or a trademarked product name. This tld is restricted to legally recognized businesses.
I figure this kind of scheme to close up the domain name space will be the next method for "controlling the vast, unregulated Internet": domain names to be held only by "legitimate corporations", and laws against mere "individuals" holding a domain name of their own.
It will be argued that the mere individuals can always use part of the directory structure of a hosting provider, and that this is good enough for these mere individuals. It will also be argued that the limited namespace is too precious for any domain name to be "wasted" on a purpose that isn't corporate.
We saw a preview of this with the law recently passed to make reverse domain piracy easier. Corporate marketing execs testified as to the difficulty of marketing when they couldn't get the domain name they wanted because some "mere individual" happened to be using it. Much was made of the monetary impact on the "new information economy".
Look for more of the same. The movement to narrow the ability of individuals to publish on the Internet continues apace, and domain name registration is the most promising place to apply pressure on it, because DNS is centralized and therefore vulnerable.
Isn't the LiViD code under the GPL? Doesn't this make it qualify as a public document, as anyone who asks can get the source?
Public document -> available to anyone, but it doesn't work the other way.
I sincerely hope that you and every single person who ever screamed "Free Kevin!" has your credit card information stolen and used by him and that he hijacks your cell phone and sticks you with the $2k bill that he accumulated while emptying out your bank account.
Erm.Been listening to a wee bit too much teevee news? Mitnick grabbed credit-card numbers, but he never used any of them or showed any intent to do so. This is trespass, it's a criminal offense, and the kindest thing that can be said about it is that it makes for a pain in the butt for a lot of people who have to deal with it...but the original poster is correct, it's not theft.
(And yes, like seemingly half the western world. I have been in the position of having had an account on a system Mitnick cracked. I have, as they say, been there. It was a pain in the ass, and it wasn't the same as having something actually stolen from me.)
I have said all along that copyright infringment was the strongest case the DVD CCA has. People keep claiming that the CSS encryption wasn't copyrighted. 30 years ago this *might* have been true. It certainly isn't now.
You misunderstand copyright. Copyright protects instantiation of ideas, not the ideas themselves. A computer program can be copyrighted, but the way it works cannot be copyrighted. CSS is an algorithm and is not copyrightable.
As a method, CSS is eligible for trade secret protection or, if it meets the obviousness and prior art criteria, patent protection. [elide standard rant about PTO policies].
(The specific code CCA hands out is eligible for copyright protection, and so is the code used by Xing in its player. But no one has alleged that DeCSS used this code or that the author had access to it. Copyright, as far as the actual code is concerned, simply doesn't come into the picture.)