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In any case, my point is only salient to music in the PD

This set of music is limited and will not become larger. The major source of additions to the public domain has previously been expirations of copyright terms. However, since the late 1970s, effectively NOTHING has expired into the public domain. The only significant thing that can potentially stop this is the death of the Walt Disney Company, as all senators and representatives have a price, and DisneyCo has enough money to buy them.

Morlocks eat Eloi

Not after the conclusion of The Time Machine . Extrapolating from the events of the story, the Eloi (who look like Precious Moments figurines) rediscover fire and kick the Morlocks to high heck.

shouldn't your high school's filtering software have kept you from slashdot?

Schools are starting to drop censorware because they're finding that it just doesn't work as advertised.

then the laws stick around forever and are selectively enforced by the authorities whenever they feel like

Except authorities who enforce forgotten laws end up on DumbLaws.com and are embarrassed out of their... Next point?

there's nothing in the Constitution which says that laws which can't be enforced consistently will automatically expire.

In fact, there's nothing in the Constitution that requires copyright itself to expire. The "for limited times" in U.S. Const. 1.8.8 is relatively meaningless in the face of the Eldred v. Reno^H^H^H^HAshcroft decision, setting a precedent allowing for already nearly perpetual copyright to be extended even longer. This is a bad thing.

apparently you never downloaded the hack for SC2K...

The impatient can always install their own stuff on the day it comes out from the source code. If you don't have GNOME 1.4 running on your system at this point in time, that really is a result of the choices you have made.

Or a result of choices that others have made, such as telcos not providing broadband in the area where your family lives and making it hard to download the latest GNOME releases every single day. Quite a bit of software written for GNOME required GNOME 1.4 components before GNOME 1.4 was even released.

So, where can I get those OSX themes

If you remove the parts with copyright and trademark restrictions (i.e. remove any Apple and Mac logos and make the pills look slightly different), you get the newer crop of aqua-like themes. But while you're waiting for them to show up, you can play Vitamins, a Dr. Mario clone that makes fun of Aqua.

There are at least 41 versions of Tetris for Linux.

Not accurate. TETRIS® is a registered trademark of The Tetris Company LLC, which has not yet licensed any official conversions for the LINUX® system. But that didn't stop cloners from converting the game and calling it something other than TETRIS.

These are hextris clones, with a hexagonal grid instead of a square grid.

Columns XJewel

These are Columns clones.

Gno3dtet IFRAc VRtris

These are apparently 3D Block clones. Xpuyopuyo Vitamins 2

These are Puyo clones.

ksame same-gnome Xinsane FPA Insane

These are SameGame clones.

XTrojka

A bad Klax knockoff.

CrystalSpace

What? That's not a puzzle game; that's a 3D engine.

Here are some tetris clones that don't have the annoying "floating blocks after clearing a line" bug: Quadra | TOD | FPA Tetanus

Oh, by the way, next time use an HTML list (<ul> <li>foo</li> <li>bar</li> </ul>) to separate games in a long list.

There are at least 41 versions of Tetris for Linux.

Not accurate. TETRIS® is a registered trademark of The Tetris Company LLC, which has not yet licensed any official conversions for the LINUX® system. But that didn't stop cloners from converting the game and calling it something other than TETRIS.

These are hextris clones, with a hexagonal grid instead of a square grid.

Columns XJewel

These are Columns clones.

Gno3dtet IFRAc VRtris

These are apparently 3D Block clones. Xpuyopuyo Vitamins 2

These are Puyo clones.

ksame same-gnome Xinsane FPA Insane

These are SameGame clones.

XTrojka

A bad Klax knockoff.

CrystalSpace

What? That's not a puzzle game; that's a 3D engine.

Here are some tetris clones that don't have the annoying "floating blocks after clearing a line" bug: Quadra | TOD | FPA Tetanus

Oh, by the way, next time use an HTML list (<ul> <li>foo</li> <li>bar</li> </ul>) to separate games in a long list.

There are at least 41 versions of Tetris for Linux.

Not accurate. TETRIS® is a registered trademark of The Tetris Company LLC, which has not yet licensed any official conversions for the LINUX® system. But that didn't stop cloners from converting the game and calling it something other than TETRIS.

These are hextris clones, with a hexagonal grid instead of a square grid.

Columns XJewel

These are Columns clones.

Gno3dtet IFRAc VRtris

These are apparently 3D Block clones. Xpuyopuyo Vitamins 2

These are Puyo clones.

ksame same-gnome Xinsane FPA Insane

These are SameGame clones.

XTrojka

A bad Klax knockoff.

CrystalSpace

What? That's not a puzzle game; that's a 3D engine.

Here are some tetris clones that don't have the annoying "floating blocks after clearing a line" bug: Quadra | TOD | FPA Tetanus

Oh, by the way, next time use an HTML list (<ul> <li>foo</li> <li>bar</li> </ul>) to separate games in a long list.

There are at least 41 versions of Tetris for Linux.

Not accurate. TETRIS® is a registered trademark of The Tetris Company LLC, which has not yet licensed any official conversions for the LINUX® system. But that didn't stop cloners from converting the game and calling it something other than TETRIS.

These are hextris clones, with a hexagonal grid instead of a square grid.

Columns XJewel

These are Columns clones.

Gno3dtet IFRAc VRtris

These are apparently 3D Block clones. Xpuyopuyo Vitamins 2

These are Puyo clones.

ksame same-gnome Xinsane FPA Insane

These are SameGame clones.

XTrojka

A bad Klax knockoff.

CrystalSpace

What? That's not a puzzle game; that's a 3D engine.

Here are some tetris clones that don't have the annoying "floating blocks after clearing a line" bug: Quadra | TOD | FPA Tetanus

Oh, by the way, next time use an HTML list (<ul> <li>foo</li> <li>bar</li> </ul>) to separate games in a long list.

There are at least 41 versions of Tetris for Linux.

Not accurate. TETRIS® is a registered trademark of The Tetris Company LLC, which has not yet licensed any official conversions for the LINUX® system. But that didn't stop cloners from converting the game and calling it something other than TETRIS.

These are hextris clones, with a hexagonal grid instead of a square grid.

Columns XJewel

These are Columns clones.

Gno3dtet IFRAc VRtris

These are apparently 3D Block clones. Xpuyopuyo Vitamins 2

These are Puyo clones.

ksame same-gnome Xinsane FPA Insane

These are SameGame clones.

XTrojka

A bad Klax knockoff.

CrystalSpace

What? That's not a puzzle game; that's a 3D engine.

Here are some tetris clones that don't have the annoying "floating blocks after clearing a line" bug: Quadra | TOD | FPA Tetanus

Oh, by the way, next time use an HTML list (<ul> <li>foo</li> <li>bar</li> </ul>) to separate games in a long list.

why I can never download Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon successfully.

The copyright gods look down on infringers. Simply wait 95 years, and you'll be able to download it for free from your local film preservation society.

Oh wait, you're a human. I keep forgetting that mortal humans don't live more than 85 years in most cases, which makes the copyright term quite pointless for implementing the "for limited Times" language of the U.S. Constitution.

Actually, I kinda wish somebody would implement something like DirectX for Linux

Have you ever tried coding in SDL? It's a cross-platform 2D game library with graphics, input, and sound support.

What about Allegro? It's another cross-platform 2D game library, used by scores of free games such as Tetanus On Drugs. It also has a 3D addon that uses your platform's existing OpenGL support.

Bayer tried to protect its trademark on "aspirin" too late in the U.S.

Not exactly. Bayer used to own trademarks on ASPIRIN® and HEROIN® but lost them in the Treaty of Versailles in 1919.

In Europe, it's still in vigor (in several forms -- Aspirin, Aspirina, etc.), making it harder for the competition, which must bill themselves as acetylsalicylic acid....

Here's a map showing places where Bayer still owns the ASPIRIN® trademark.

a paltry 160x120

160x144. Eighteen rows of twenty tiles each. Count the lines of text on the original Tetris®'s copyright screen (including the blank lines). Picky, but when you use numbers, you should use the correct ones.

If Sony ever decided to make a handheld device that could play PS One games (which has been rumored for years now)

Then they would need to invent shock protection like I've never seen. Kids. Drop. Game. Boys. And they use them in moving vehicles, where vibration and ever-changing effective-g directions are big concerns.

and a tinny sounding speaker to hear the grunts

Assuming you don't have it hooked up to the car stereo (with the big thumping 12" subwoofer; all your bass are belong to us) or Sennheiser headphones.

What I really want to see is a port of Zero Wing.

FYI, 'Mode 7' doesn't exist on the GBA, only a better implemenation that results in the same, but better effect

Mode 7 is rotation and scaling of background scanlines to produce planar 3D effects. See a demo of Mode 7-style effects here.

I suppose that it is once the terms of the original copyright run out, don't you?

Copyrights expire? Where'd you get that idea? Anything copyrightable first published on or after January 1, 1923, is under perpetual copyright in the United States.

Yes, X only takes 30MB. But your GNOME session adds another 30MB, and your window manager adds anywhere from 10MB (for FVWM, the Fuckingugly Virtual Window Manager) to 512BM (for Enlightenment; the window manager which proves that enough eye candy can make up for any lack of usefulness).

Provided you believe top, which double- and triple-counts shared memory. For example, when some drivers map video card memory three times, top counts it three times. GNOME isn't as bloated as you think; a lot of the memory that GNOME programs appear to use is in .so (shared library) files (which also are multi-counted). Mozilla isn't a hog either; top overcounts any multithreaded app.

If you think a WM is ugly, design a new color scheme and post it somewhere. You bash GNOME for being bloated, but is KDE any better? (Please take this flamewar to the NES if you must continue it.)

>>GNOME bashing
>KDE bashing
This flamewar is over. If you wish to continue fighting about GNOME vs. KDE, I suggest you look at Battle of the Desktops.
All your hallucinogen are belong to us.

LINUX IS NOT READY FOR GAMES, not yet. Name a game that you can just install and start playing without touching any config files.

Once you have the Allegro library installed from source tarball (./configure; make depend; make; su -c make install), you can run any free Allegro game such as freepuzzlearena, TOD, or scores of others. There are also emulators to run other platforms' games (such as TuxNES and SNES9x).

LINUX IS NOT READY FOR GAMES, not yet. Name a game that you can just install and start playing without touching any config files.

Once you have the Allegro library installed from source tarball (./configure; make depend; make; su -c make install), you can run any free Allegro game such as freepuzzlearena, TOD, or scores of others. There are also emulators to run other platforms' games (such as TuxNES and SNES9x).

-tetris, and galaaxia are all there for the taking off the internet if you wanna do something a little more "usefull" with your calculator

It may have been a falling tetramino game, but it wasn't Tetris, as that's a trademark of The Tetris Company LLC.

The snake game sucks

While we're on the topic of Nintendo consoles, you can get a version of the snake game for NES here.

Still, I'd rather play Tetris.

Do you want generic falling tetraminoes, or do you want to pay through your no$e for the Tetris brand?

The snake game sucks

While we're on the topic of Nintendo consoles, you can get a version of the snake game for NES here.

Still, I'd rather play Tetris.

Do you want generic falling tetraminoes, or do you want to pay through your no$e for the Tetris brand?

These are quite a good (and funny) read.

http://www.primeline-america.com/moon-ldg/
http://www.angelfire.com/ut/aylett/eth69.html
http://batesmotel.8m.com/
http://www.forteantimes.com/artic/97/moon.html

Some people are crazy too, like this guy, who says the MOON is a fake.
------------

most of your "rights" don't mature until you're 18

But if even 10% of the high school seniors in the district sign the petition, that's a lot of names.

you'll get the equivalent of "those kids are so cute"

Human children are not cute. Eloi children (depicted in Precious Moments drawings and figurines) are.

In fact, this is exactly equivalent to the GIF trick

Not necessarily. There's a difference between trademarks and patents. Open*** can comply by simply changing its name to FreSH (free shell). (The same thing happened when The Tetris Company tried to sue Tetris cloners; the cloners simply changed the name of their products.) GIF writer developers have to completely abandon GIF, as LZW compression (a necessary and irreplaceable part of the GIF87 and GIF89 standard) is patented.

Long after Descent and Quake have been forgotten, Marathon will live on via its source code.

Except a quick Google search tells me that Quake is released under GNU GPL and so are Descent, Descent 2, and a Tetris clone that gives you motion sickness like Descent. But the mission pack in many games (required for the game to run) is written by artists and level designers and is not GPL'd. This is why open source is thought not to be able to produce professional quality games: how do the artists and level designers eat?

I was (about 10 years ago) a would-be author. I wrote a bunch of science-fiction, fantasy, etc., short stories, and about half of a novel. Writing was easy, selling was not. I "sold" three or four stories, some to magazines that pay in copies, and my biggest sale was $17. Eventually I got tired and stopped, but the stories were all archived on my computer, and on diskettes.

Suddenly, a month ago, I had a brilliant idea! I am now "publishing" a web-magazine with my stories. Maybe somebody will read them, maybe not. Steven King can get away with charging, I can't (if I could, I would :-) ). And maybe now that I've found something to do with the stories, rather than just accumulating them in my computer, I'll go back and start writing some more.

But in the long run, this kind of thing (me and Steven King) is the way of the future. Just tell that AAP publisher's bitch to go fsck herself!

We will write a tux vs daemon fighting game

You could do a mod for GNOME vs KDE: Battle of the Desktops with Tux and the BSD daemon. Or you could just try XTux.

Oh, come on! Everyone knows the moon landings were faked .

If Apple wants to sue somebody, they should sue the makers of Vitamins, a game that takes the Aqua "pill" buttons and drops them into a bottle on top of viruses, as in Nintendo's Dr. Mario.
Like Tetris? Like drugs? Ever try combining them?

Also, people are WRITING software for it because the protection can be beaten

The boot sector of all Dreamcast discs contains an access control measure under the DMCA: it contains 14 KB of data that must match data in ROM bit-for-bit, or the disc won't boot. And this 14 KB of data contains code that displays trademarks (renewable perpetually in the USA) and is copyrighted (also perpetual in the USA).

I agree that the Bono Act has gone too far. Imagine if patent terms were as long: we wouldn't have generic drugs at all. IMHO, 25 years is more than enough to cover an author's expenses and provide a decent profit. If 17 to 20 years for a patent is enough to keep the drug industry running, why wouldn't a similar time period also work for the copyright industry?

It appears copyright has been continuously extended on everything produced since 1917 (not sure that's the right year, the copyright office website has it somewhere).

The correct year (in the US at least) is 1923. To me, a copyright date provides only one bit of information: before 1923 or on-or-after 1923. Read my short essay on the Sonny Bono Copyright Term Extension Act, the root source of DisneyCo's power.

I would gladly donate to an organization doing copyright law reform.

You could start at the Eldred v. Reno page. Also consider joining the Electronic Frontier Foundation.

And now for Something Completely Different in Goat Sex.

if you walk into an emergency room and say "I need to see a doctor" it doesn't matter how much money it costs to treat you, there in no hospital in the US that can legally turn you away.

Have you seen The Confession? That film explores this very issue. Oh wait, you're boycotting Hollywood because of the DMCA that turns perpetual copyright into a perpetual patent on DVD.

The term should be long enough to make the design work to create the invention a profitable investment, and no longer.

Too bad Congress doesn't apply this logic to copyrights also. Does it really take 95 years for Disney to recoup its investment in creating Mickey Mouse?

That's why we pay the estate of Alan Turing a percentage when we use a computer, or Alexander Graham Bell's descendants own the IP on the telephone.

Unlike copyrights, which are perpetual in the USA and WIPO states because DisneyCo owns Congress, patents expire 20 years after they're filed or 17 years after they're granted, but it doesn't matter because the USPTO takes three years to process a patent. And in those three years, a company (except for drug companies that also deal with FDA induced lag) can start selling the products and building a market. Because the patent is "pending," it's still not illegal to clone the product. But after the patent is granted, the company can "pull a Unisys" and make a killing in the courtroom.

there's plenty of strategical thinking in that game

Only for newbies. Once you're good at it (> 20 hours of play), Tetris does not involve all that much strategy. Eventually, placing the next tetramino becomes almost a reflex action. Some newer versions of Tetris try to break this up by adding bonuses for forming 4x4 squares (The New Tetris), chain reactions (Tetanus, Quadra, The Next Tetris), "magic" items (TetriNET; DuelTris for Apple IIGS; Tetris Jr.), or distracting display effects (TOD; Tetripz).

there's plenty of strategical thinking in that game

Only for newbies. Once you're good at it (> 20 hours of play), Tetris does not involve all that much strategy. Eventually, placing the next tetramino becomes almost a reflex action. Some newer versions of Tetris try to break this up by adding bonuses for forming 4x4 squares (The New Tetris), chain reactions (Tetanus, Quadra, The Next Tetris), "magic" items (TetriNET; DuelTris for Apple IIGS; Tetris Jr.), or distracting display effects (TOD; Tetripz).

Martin Hock, who sent in the Godzilla MAME sighting, wrote a TI calculator game called Insane Game a while back. A(n unofficial) pixel-perfect PC port of Insane Game is available here (press the T key in game to turn off candy graphics and turn on pixel-perfect mode).
Like Tetris? Like drugs? Ever try combining them?

If proprietary formats are going to "prevent" people from copyright their own creations (such as the example "birthday party" video)

<IANAL>
At most birthday parties, the copyrighted musical work "Happy Birthday to You"[?] is performed. Thus, Warner-Chappell Music (a division of AOL Time Warner and the "Happy Birthday" copyright owner) has the right to claim your birthday party video (which includes a performance of "Happy Birthday") as a "derivative work" under copyright law. And no, the copyright on "Happy Birthday" hasn't expired; because it was copyrighted on or after January 1, 1923, it's under perpetual copyright in the US and WIPO states.
</IANAL>

I guess I'll have to connect my NES to it (yes, the old-school, 8-bit NES).

NES games look just as good or better on a VGA monitor. Here are some Free (as in speech) NES-compatible ROMs to play on a Free (as in speech) NES emulator.

I'll be perfectly happy with my Coltranes & Tetrises & games written for Palm Pilots

If you like Tetris®, you might like a Tetris clone I wrote that simulates the effect of hallucinogens(no, Tetripz is that other one) called TOD. It runs on my 486 under DOS, my PII laptop under Wintendo 98, and my PIII tower under Linux.

I'll be perfectly happy with my Coltranes & Tetrises & games written for Palm Pilots

If you like Tetris®, you might like a Tetris clone I wrote that simulates the effect of hallucinogens(no, Tetripz is that other one) called TOD. It runs on my 486 under DOS, my PII laptop under Wintendo 98, and my PIII tower under Linux.

If I ever get into game programming, my mantra will be this: the bounding box is the tris, the tris is the bounding box.

But tris games are supposed to do their collisions with rectilinear bounding boxes; that's the shape of the blocks in Tetris pieces. Even in games such as Dr. Mario, pixel-perfect collision detection is overkill, as pieces move in tile-sized units anyway.

If I ever get into game programming, my mantra will be this: the bounding box is the tris, the tris is the bounding box.

But tris games are supposed to do their collisions with rectilinear bounding boxes; that's the shape of the blocks in Tetris pieces. Even in games such as Dr. Mario, pixel-perfect collision detection is overkill, as pieces move in tile-sized units anyway.

GNUPedia looks a bit like Everything. Everything is a flexible web database run by the people who used to run Slashdot and written and edited by the world. (Ever wonder what those [?]s are on /. articles? That's E2.) Copyright doesn't stop people from adding song lyrics to the database.

All information generated outside of the free software community is under perpetual copyright anyway.

• VMWare costs $300 per seat and eats RAM like Pac-Man.
• Windows 2000 Professional costs $300 per seat and eats RAM like Pac-Man.
• Wine lets you go the other way (95% Windows binary compatibility on GNU/Linux) and is both free and Free.

Any questions?