US ISPs become 'copyright cops' starting July 12

夜神 岩男 supergiantpotato at yahoo.co.jp
Sat Mar 17 18:59:38 UTC 2012



--- On Sun, 2012/3/18, Temlakos <temlakos at gmail.com> wrote:

>                   On 03/17/2012 02:03 PM, Reindl Harald wrote:          Am 17.03.2012 18:45, schrieb Dave Ihnat:              On Sat, Mar 17, 2012 at 06:24:08PM +0100, Reindl Harald wrote:                  what exactly let you imagine taht this has ANYTHING to do with OpenSource?                Well, playing _Advocatus Diaboli_, what if some moneyed software companyclaims Open Source software being hosted for download is violating theircopyrights, and uses this excuse to shut down archives?            sorry, but this is simply bullshit in any context        
>     Actually, it's been done. Remember SCO v. IBM? The only    reason that failed was that SCO went bankrupt, the investors    grew outraged, and they went out looking for a new company    president. But not before SCO tried to extort licensing fees    from everyone using Linux. Darl McBride even went to Congress to try    to suggest that the GPL was unconstitutional, because it somehow    defied the power of the United States Congress to grant patents and    copyrights.

This, unfortunately, is the truth. But the problem isn't just copyright, it affects the concept of whether mathematical architecture is governable or not, because that is at the root of the idea of copying circa 2012. This is the next legal battle, and its (more Fun 1000) compared to the copyright one.

Those of us who decline study of architecture and instead focus on high-level programming and/or user-end functionality (IOW the overwhelming majority) will continue to dismiss this, until the next legal battle isn't over the semantics of moving bits, but is over legal architecture stricture governing whether or not the processes you coded to debug the force/balance algorithm in your artificial knee replacement or the V/O2 program you put in your pacemaker are legal or not (regardless of whether you own the physical pacemaker or whether such processes are beneficial to you as a person). Actually, we already have a template for this with the protected I/O laws in some countries governing whether it is legal to watch a "protected media stream" with a device other than your organic eyeballs (despite this being impossible for some already, a situation destined to expand in the future for fundamental reasons).

Humanity 2.0 is going to be dominated by such legal subjects, and reality will continue to be dominated (and self-conflicted) by itself in such matters. Why give up an ounce of your freedom today? This doesn't even impact the viability of any single natural/enforceable commercial concept -- which is perhaps the most frightening of all angles to consider.


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