Tristan, so because you won’t get caught or there may be no consequences, that makes it OK?
Fair use covers excerpts of material, not the whole thing. That’s why it’s OK for us to quote a rule from the manual when answering a question here on CD.
It could be fair use for the purpose of scholarship. In terms of the factors to be weighed, the use is noncommercial, the work is technical rather than literary, the amount is the work in its entirety and the effect on the potential market is nil.
I’d say the TechnoKats have a strong fair use defence. Furthermore, I’d say FIRST will never sue them over it, so it will never be resolved officially (unless the law changes).
Every year, FIRST sets forth a challenge for FRC Teams to complete. That challenge has rules limiting what materials we are allowed to use, how long we get to design and build that robot. How we can transport that robot and many other things. Downloading the rules for that challenge is not supposed to be part of the challenge itself (at least it hasn’t been in previous years :p). As such I hope to make it easier for other teams to acquire the manual and begin their build season.
Also, others have also posted that they will be breaking the law. Maybe you should ask them their feelings on breaking the law also.
Not exactly. It’s more like (in some hypothetical scenario), you’re unlikely to get caught or suffer consequences, and it’s OK. They’re related, but not causally in the way that you propose.
The big question is whether it’s right—and that’s not the question that the law tries to answer directly. Instead, the law proposes a series of requirements that—given certain assumptions—balance the private and social costs and benefits. It then tries to come to a compromise that can be understood and enforced.
It’s fundamentally different from the FIRST rules mindset, because there isn’t even the remotest attempt to cover every scenario with a definitive answer as to what’s right. Instead, the law intentionally defers to the courts to sort out tough cases. (It’s much easier to be definitive when the scope is narrow, you update the rules every year, and you don’t have a thousand years of common law precedent to consider.)
Furthermore, copyright law has evolved to rely upon the lack of economic benefit in pursuing de minimis infringement as a way limiting the number of infringement suits in a way that is acceptable to the public. In effect, if every possible infringement were prosecuted fully, we’d make tortfeasors of us all—and I suspect we’d be much less willing to allow a monopoly on the rights to creative works under those circumstances. Copyright as we know it would not be sustainable in that scenario. More to the point, society supports this limiting effect because it does not view every infringement as wrong, even though they are inherently illegal.
Fair use is an affirmative defence: you employ it when you’re accused of infringement. (In other words, you’ve been caught, and consequence #1 is that you’re on trial.) In effect, by claiming fair use, you’re articulating why some alleged infringements are not wrong, and are instead justified by their benefits to society. Strip away all the legalese, and that’s what you’ve got: a belief that something is OK because it’s better for society than an alternative. If your belief is correct, then that makes it right.1 If your belief is incorrect (particularly in the eyes of the judge)…prepare for more consequences.
Excerpts are generally much easier to justify as fair use than whole works, but sometimes the whole work can be used.
1 That’s not to say it’s necessarily optimal; just better than the alternative.
The encrypted manual was just released. You can get it here:
http://www.usfirst.org/roboticsprograms/frc/competition-manual-and-related-documents?id=452
Oddly enough, it is illegal to make an improper fair use claim, something you can’t know if you did until you’ve made it.
I downloaded the ENTIRE encrypted manual to my desktop in under 5 minutes just now. Now all I have to do is note the password on January 7 (preferably an a .txt on my computer so I can copy+paste) and I’m all set until I can get to the unencrypted ones.
Yep, that’s a better alternative than fighting the traffic on the FIRST servers (or even the CD servers, or mirror servers) to get the Manual, when that traffic has been known to shut down FIRST for 2 days and slow down CD for one. It’s 100% legal, it’s MY fault if I don’t update it (and I know this), and I’m sure it’s the right one.
I think that applies when you misrepresent your position (such as with a patently false fair use claim) in the counternotice you provide in response to a DMCA takedown request (17 U.S.C. § 512(f)).
I don’t believe there’s any such penalty in litigation (where fair use is usually raised). You’re free (legally, maybe not ethically) to offer a false defence, as long as you don’t suborn/commit perjury.
Anybody have access to a super computer? My quad core laptop will take more than a year to brute force the PDF open. Haha
26 lowercase + 26 uppercase + 10 digits + about 20 common symbols = a set of 82 characters from which to choose. Assume that the password is between 10 and 20 characters long. That makes 8210 + 8211 + … + 8220 = 1.9 × 1038 unique passwords to check to be sure of success.
How many cores did you say you have?
(There’s no practical brute force attack on the encrypted manual. It would be much easier to hijack a helicopter, land on top of FIRST HQ, cut a hole in the ceiling, steal all of their computers, and decrypt those.)
Someone says they already have, but I think they’re joking. http://www.chiefdelphi.com/forums/showpost.php?p=1095979&postcount=13 I said it before, and I’ll say it again: The US government uses this encryption to protect Top Secret classified information. You’re not going to get it.
They also said they’re computer did it today while they were at work, but the documents weren’t even released until 5:39 pm EST tonight ::rtm::
Tristan,
In most cases, ‘Fair use’ indicates use of and not republishing copywrited material.
Also, the issue is not just Fair Use. FIRST could convieveably (sp?) lose its copywrite if it does not defend it.
I.E. It becomes very difficult to tell the 31st republisher that he cannot republish a coptwrited piece of material when you did not instruct the first 30 republishers that they cannot do so.
And now you have crossed into that grey area of cracking. Please refrain from doing this as this is a good thread for teaching about copywrites, publication of copywrited material, and encryption.
Make no mistake: I’m not arguing that republishing the FIRST manual on kickoff day is likely a fair use—that’s a tough case to make, and I’d say it would probably be losing argument in court. (Morally, it’s less clear that this would be wrong on balance. Practically, as noted by myself and others, there’s no likelihood of a suit.) I was responding to Dave’s position that copyright was absolute by offering statutory and precedential reasons why it is not.
By contrast, I think that the TechnoKat history project, if it were sued and became a test case for fair use, would have a strong defence—because I think people, courts included, see the value of an express commitment to preserving seminal documents to understand the movement behind them. (Organizations themselves cannot be counted upon to preserve their own history—valuable content is lost all the time when websites are refurbished.) But that’s far from a guarantee that they’d prevail, or a statement that the situation is clear-cut. Indeed, the only way I can rationalize their method of distributing the works (publicly to any visitor to their site) is that there’s no commercial purpose or value in doing so—and as such, economic harm would not be a countervailing factor in determining fair use. (That’s very distinct from most fair use law, which deals with commerce. Although untested in court, this non-commercial stance is part of the reason that the Internet Archive thinks it can get away with archiving essentially the entire public Web.)
Also, you’re correct when you say most fair uses upheld by the courts are limited to use rather than public distribution (because there is a strong presumption in favour of the author’s right to control distribution). There are exceptions for when a work is transformative—it adds something new and useful—that allow this principle to be suspended. For example, Google won a case allowing them to distribute thumbnailed images (derivative works) freely, because they were using the images in a transformative way as part of a service for finding the originals.
You’re thinking of trademark. There’s no such dilution possible in copyright (as a matter of law). A copyright is presumed valid until it expires, or until it is expressly relinquished into the public domain by its owner. (As a practical matter, I suppose it might make for an awkward conversation—but it doesn’t change FIRST’s legal rights.)
There is nothing wrong with posting a back-of-the-envelope calculation demonstrating that there are more possible passwords than could be cracked in the days until kickoff. In fact, there are hundreds of trillions of times more possible passwords than there are stars in the observable universe.
A discussion of this fact poses no legal risk to any of us, nor to ChiefDelphi. It certainly is not immoral or unwise.
The encrypted 2012 Game Manual is available here:
http://www.usfirst.org/roboticsprograms/frc/competition-manual-and-related-documents
Guys this came to me in a dream and I believe it is part of the new game animation. Quoting from said dream:
"****** is played on a 27x54 ft carpeted field. Alliances of three teams each, operate their robots from behind alliance walls, on the ends of the field.
O.O I think I’m on to something. :yikes:
How many alliances 
No, it’s a water game.
How do I download the encrypted files so I don’t have to download them the day of kickoff?
Right-click and hit “Save link as” (Firefox) or “Save target as” (IE), then put the file where you’ll find it easily.