It occurred to me today that I very very rarely need a physical mailbox. I wonder if someday it will be common to not bother putting one up. That is, much like nowadays where fewer and fewer people are bothering to get a physical land phone line in favor of cell phones; maybe someday physical mail will get phased out in favor of electronic mail (especially when it has authentication and encryption in common usage). Of course, package deliveries and such would still need to occur, but I’m not so sure about “normal” mail.
Which brings up another interesting question: Whom does one need to notify when creating a new address? Do we need to tell the Post Office to start delivering mail at our new house once it’s built? Does that all happen automatically somehow?
I’ve also been wondering about the future of Digital Rights and Copyright. Other companies want to control what you can do with particular blocks of bytes that you “possess”, or at least possess in the sense that they are on a hard drive that you own. This is quite a logical thing for a company to want to do. This has been the case with software for quite some time, although in recent times the discussion has focused more on music files. However, I’m not sure how such restrictions can be implemented in practice. It’s odd that other company could put restrictions on what manipulations I can do to particular bytes on my hard disk. Let me give an odd scenario that I came up with. Suppose that I have purchased and “own” a chunk of bytes called song.mp3. One of the constraints that the seller of that file gave me is that I cannot distribute that file to other people. So, suppose that I construct some arbitrary file file1.bin, which contains arbitrary bytes that I came up with myself. (And thus, I own all the rights to it.) Now, suppose that I also construct a compression program pccompress.exe using an algorithm I designed myself. (I own all the rights to this chunk of bytes too.) Suppose that if you compress file1.bin with my program, the output file file2.bin just so happens to consist of exactly the same byte sequence as song.mp3. (And suppose that I designed my compression algorithm to try to get this to happen.) That is, you can use the two files I created completely on my own to construct the same sequence of bytes as the copyrighted song.mp3. Can I distribute my two files to others? Can I tell them this particular interesting fact that I happen to know about my algorithm? What if my compression algorithm had this behavior completely on accident, and someone else discovers it and tells people about it? I’m not even asking about what the law actually is here, but more what the law should be (although I’m kind of curious about current law as well). Other random thoughts or contrived scenarios?
Well, the answer to paragraph 2 is easy — you file a change of address in Worcester, and give the post office your new address in Charlton. The postmaster in Charlton sorts your mail for Berry Corner Road, and the post man assigned to your road travels down the road until he sees your house (postmen are rather observant, and if they see a new house going up and suddenly mail arrive for a previously nonexistant address, they’ll put 2 and 2 together).
In terms of your copyright questions, in my view the answer boils down to a simple question of compression. Is a zipped MP3 still an MP3? User-level logic says yes, of course. System-level logic says No, dummy. Lawyer-level logic says it depends on precedence. EE level logic says its a software problem.
Suppose you write a program that compresses the binary block of a WAV file using Huffman Compression. Suppose I, being a clever bugger, write a program that decompresses said block. Since the algorithm is Well Known ™, and in The Literature ™, and we both own our particular blocks of code, and the file between compression and decompression is rather useless to anybody not possessing the decoder, is that compressed file still valid media? I think licensing agreements catch this with the “stored in electronic form” umbrella clause, but its fun to think about.
I’m not sure if one would be able to see our new house from the paved road.
And as to your last two paragraphs, I think that that’s what I was trying to say without wording it as well.
If software were patented and not copyrighted, all this crap would go away.
Actually, I’m kind of in the camp that suggests that both the patenting and the copyrighting of software are useful.
It’d help some things, certainly, but there would likely be other problems. At the very least, it currently takes several years to get a patent, and the livespan of most software isn’t that long.
It’s not that any of these Intellectual Property questions are really new… It’s just that new technology has made it much easier to duplicate content.
The whole paradigm of ‘software as writing’ is just too flawed for copyright to work. Patents were designed from the start to work with processes. And that’s precisely what software is. A process.
In my untrained mind, the idea of copyright is to allow the model of discrete sales to apply to readily copiable works. Writing was just the first applicable class of material.
If I write a tool that does nothing revolutionary, but does it better than the other guy, why shouldn’t I get compensated? Give it a discrete sale model under copyright and let the market decide the value of my work.
This is the problem with untrained minds. ;) Your “idea of copyright” applies with equal accuracy to patents: allow people to sell machines and processes without copycats coming along and stealing their ideas.
And if you innovated a new way of doing something rather mundane, it’s patentable. Crypto is as old as the Roman Empire, but RSA was still patentable.
But to answer your question about your weird compression program, I’ll answer how I think it should work (which is oddly close to how it does work).
If you created this algorithm with the intent of duplicating the music inside the file, then you would be in flagrant violation of copyright. It would be akin to your trying to transcribe a song you heard on the radio, record yourself playing it, and distribute copies of your own recording.
If you recreate the music file by accident (ideally without having heard the original), it would be more akin to you just deciding to sit down and write a song without realizing someone else already has written it. In which case you’re in technical violation of copyright, but it wouldn’t be nearly as serious an issue.
Hey, I’m being self-deprecating enough. I don’t need help. :)
Patents operate on clauses. Make a clause narrow enough, and you’ve got something original.
So if I implement a word processing program, and I’m very particular about mentioning my menu arrangement, button place, GUI toolkit, and sounds in a single clause (or as a series of dependent clauses), I should be able to get my word processing program patented (assuming basic word processing concepts aren’t patented).
Great, that prevents unrestrained copying of my work.
Oh, look. A competitor decompiled and changed enough stuff around to escape my clauses.
What you’re telling me is that once I have my patent, there is no real value in time I invested in writing the actual code that implements the patent. People can take that, and do what they will with it, as long as the final result doesn’t conflict with the patent.
Under copyright, people can’t fool around with my work outside of fair use. Software really is a malleable, “sample-able,” modifiable work, very much analogous to music or writing.
But I’ll agree that there definitely is a process element to software as well, which is why patents are applicable to software in many circumstances.
Actually, in large systems like complex software applications, it’s quite common for the creator to apply for patents for all the components, and then patent the way in which you arrange them as the final product itself. That typically handles the scenario you’re discussing.
Hrm, I’ll have to back off my hardline stance then. While I’m still think that there’s some elegance in separating process (patent) from implementation (copyrighted work) and reserving patents for genuinely novel ideas, I’ll have to conceed that it’s not an essential approach.
My proofreading skills have gone to pot.
And deciding whether or not I knew what I was doing would be up to a jury?
unless you stipulated to it, but I can’t imagine why you would…
still, I imagine it’s quite hard for anyone to claim that they wrote a custom compression program and didn’t know that it would result in file X becoming file Y when they already had access to file Y.
actually, I can imagine why. Because clients are idiots. Here’s a story you might appreciate.
A religious group bought a peice of property. One of the renters asked for permission to assign his lease to Planned Parenthood. the religious group refused for obvious reasons. The tenant sued to make the group accept the assignment. The group had a winning argument in “the costs of maintaining the security for the building would be too high.” But they didnt want to argue that, they wanted to argue that forcing them to assign violated their Freedom of Religion. Which is USDA-choice bullshit. The court said that landlords needs a solid business reason to refuse a sublease, and if the religious group didn’t like that then they should stick to religion and stop being landlords.
Ha! The last time I saw something in law could be called elegant it was Greta Van Susteren during the OJ Simpson Trial.
That is quite interesting.
Campus Ambassadors, a Christan College ministry that’s at WSC and QCC among other places, is trying to buy a house in the Worcester area to rent to students to form a Christian community as well as provide income for other parts of their ministry. I wonder if they might run in legal trouble when there’s somebody trying to make trouble for them.
But obviously, landlords must be able to put some restrictions on whom they allow as tenants. After all, colleges, for instance, will only allow their students to live in the dorms. Is it just that there must be a justifiable business reason for each such exclusion? Even when the owner is a non-profit org.?
To answer the question you asked directly, landlords are landlords and their status as a non-profit is totally and utterly irrelevant to anything.
Dorms are provided for members of an organization. If CA only wants to allow dues-paying members access to the apartments, that’s probably acceptable. But if CA wants to rent to the public in general, there are a whole series of complications that CA might want to consider before mkaing the final decision.
Yeah, they really need to talk to a real estate lawyer before they do anything. I’m willing to do some preliminary research for your group if you think they need it. However, I must refer you to my email sig / disclaimer.
Hi Pete. Just guessing that you’d check your LJ more often than Jessi? I emailed her at her WSC address — will that work? Anyway, I’d love to hear from her.
Jason
It’s quite possible that they’ve already done so… I’m not involved in any role with the project; I merely know of its existence.
I’ll check with the leader of the project and see, though.
Yes, her email at WSC should work just fine.