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Netcom has been hosting one of my domains for about the past 18 months, so when I finally called them for customer service, I guess I shouldn't have been too surprised to find that the old number I had had been changed. Calling the second number, I ended up going through a couple of levels of menus before hitting an announcement to the effect that, for customer service (which is what I had indicated by my keypad entry at the start of the call) I'd have to hang up and call yet another number. Just for laughs, I called the third number and ended up speaking to some clueless numbskull who was having trouble understanding complicated concepts such as "account" and "user." There's only so much of this I can take, people, plus these bozos don't support PHP scripting, so I think I'm in the market for a new ISP. I know I've seen better deals in passing; now I suppose I'll have to pay closer attention.
The news from New York is that the judge hearing the case against `2600' magazine has ruled that computer code is not protected speech. Reasoning that computer programs can cause harm, Judge Lewis Kaplan said that "society must be able to regulate the use and dissemination of code in appropriate circumstances." The suit had been brought by some of the biggest studios in Hollywood (including Universal, MGM, and Warner Bros.), who had asked for a permanent injunction; what they got was a preliminary injunction. The Motion Picture Association of America, wouldn't you guess, applauded the ruling as a victory for intellectual property rights.
At issue was the publication of code that would allow programs to unscramble the data on DVD disks. This code could be used to create programs that would allow DVDs to be played on systems (such as Linux) for which `official' players didn't exist. The studios argued that the same code could (and would) be used to unscramble DVD data for purposes of piracy. Each side has a point, but the danger I see is that eventually, control of virtually all data will rest in the hands of a few entities (there is already agitation to confer copyright protection to compilers of data, such as law archives and archives of academic theses), and that these entities will further have the power to dictate how and when and with what equipment the rest of us will be allowed to access - for a fee, natch - their precious data.
Look to see this issue escalate up to the highest levels.
Cheers...
The news from New York is that the judge hearing the case against `2600' magazine has ruled that computer code is not protected speech. Reasoning that computer programs can cause harm, Judge Lewis Kaplan said that "society must be able to regulate the use and dissemination of code in appropriate circumstances." The suit had been brought by some of the biggest studios in Hollywood (including Universal, MGM, and Warner Bros.), who had asked for a permanent injunction; what they got was a preliminary injunction. The Motion Picture Association of America, wouldn't you guess, applauded the ruling as a victory for intellectual property rights.
At issue was the publication of code that would allow programs to unscramble the data on DVD disks. This code could be used to create programs that would allow DVDs to be played on systems (such as Linux) for which `official' players didn't exist. The studios argued that the same code could (and would) be used to unscramble DVD data for purposes of piracy. Each side has a point, but the danger I see is that eventually, control of virtually all data will rest in the hands of a few entities (there is already agitation to confer copyright protection to compilers of data, such as law archives and archives of academic theses), and that these entities will further have the power to dictate how and when and with what equipment the rest of us will be allowed to access - for a fee, natch - their precious data.
Look to see this issue escalate up to the highest levels.
Cheers...
