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I don't mean to sound too condescending, but really, the centrifugal force of earth's rotation makes that impossible. I would have been humoured if you would have stated imagine a 100,000 km cable being hurtled at the moon when I move there. For it to fall to earth would mean the earth would stop spinning...highly unlikely given what we know.

You might be able to argue that inertia from the atmosphere would allow it to operate like a whip, but even that is farfetched. I doubt they would implement such a system without properly addressing such an issue.

Be more afraid of Near Earth Objects. Of course those things fall from roughly 4.7E17 km. Why the hell don't people imagine that?

This is an obvious attempt by RIAA blackhats to get everyone to buy new CDs while simultaneously destroying computer CD-RW. Time to grep for a good lawyer.

Check chandra images:

http://chandra.harvard.edu/photo/chronological.htm l

File downloading is legal, sharing or uploading is not. It's that simple. See my analysis at greplaw for more info.

You are confusing Mr Ian Clarke with Mr John Gilmore. I guess you need to read Greplaw more frequently .-)

The Gilmore flight stunt has been extensively debated. Mr John Gilmore and Professor Lawrence Lessig have issued replies to the debate on Mr John Gilmore's flight-stunt. Mr John Gilmore was rejected from a flight because Mr Gilmore wore a badge saying "Suspected Terrorist". Should the flight captain have ejected Mr Gilmore because of the button or not? The discussion has been heated, not least since Mr Seth Finkelstein suggested that Mr Gilmore's behaviour was 'a millionaire's version of trolling.' Mr Gilmore counter-trolled Mr Finkelstein and got an endorsement from Professor Lessig.

Read Mr John Gilmore's reply.

Read Professor Lessig's comment.

Read Mr Seth Finkelstein's comment on the comments above.

Best regards,

Mikael

You are confusing Mr Ian Clarke with Mr John Gilmore. I guess you need to read Greplaw more frequently .-)

The Gilmore flight stunt has been extensively debated. Mr John Gilmore and Professor Lawrence Lessig have issued replies to the debate on Mr John Gilmore's flight-stunt. Mr John Gilmore was rejected from a flight because Mr Gilmore wore a badge saying "Suspected Terrorist". Should the flight captain have ejected Mr Gilmore because of the button or not? The discussion has been heated, not least since Mr Seth Finkelstein suggested that Mr Gilmore's behaviour was 'a millionaire's version of trolling.' Mr Gilmore counter-trolled Mr Finkelstein and got an endorsement from Professor Lessig.

Read Mr John Gilmore's reply.

Read Professor Lessig's comment.

Read Mr Seth Finkelstein's comment on the comments above.

Best regards,

Mikael

Wrong! ... Since an office file opener could be used to open your own documents, or documents that others want you to open, there exists a substantial non-infringing use, so the software would not be a circumvention device.

Yes, he is partly wrong, but so are you. It may be true that the circumvention device clauses are satisfied. Unfortunately, we don't have to look far to see how companies and projects that fit that exception are still prosecuted/persecuted and even killed.

This would be a good target for a bunch of SLAPP suits against the developers -- if they chose to implement it. The potential gain for Microsoft and others ("We bankrupted 30 contributers to OpenOffice for DMCA violations. We're sending you a DMCA notice. You wanna be bankrupt next?") far outweighs their potential cost ("We paid $250,000,000 in the cases we lost, but it's just an investment for product lock-in and extra FUD against developers.") .

Just being on the right side of the law does not mean that you will survive a massive legal attack from a multi-billion dollar company. Anti-SLAPP laws are in effect in most states but the DMCA altered the USC, which is the federal law, so those state laws could be carefully avoided.

Examples:

• DeCSS (multiple cases, some still in appeal)
• kazaa (in court and dying)
• napster (dead)
• CopyWrite (alive, after expensive years in court and an expensive appeal)
• Lessig about Fox fair use problems, MyMP3, Napster (in court & private settlements, dead, dead)
• DRM Conference transcrpt (discusses dead & dying, but legal, projects)
• Embedded fonts (alive, but at a big cost and avoidance of court)
• A student's paper with summaries of other cases (United States v. Sklyarov, Lexmark v. Static Control Components , Felton v. Recording Industry Ass'n of America) and several interesting hypothetical physical-world comparisons to the law (locking keys out of your car == loss of ownership of car until you present the Automobile Protection Assocaition with a proper court orders allowing you to jimmy the lock).

The unfortunate fact is that just because it is legal, and even if it is right, both StarOffice (Sun) and the contributors to OpenOffice (including Sun) could both face deadly lawsuits from Microsoft if they attempt compatability.

Strategic lawsuits (gray-area, predatory lawsuits), "death by lawsuit", and even Google's lists of Allegedly Unethical Firms, Corporate Accountability, and corporate criminals show how corporations are attacking and killing projects, even when the projects or public participation are the right and legal thing.

So while you are right that such a project would be legal, you are wrong in your implied statement that it would be a safe thing to do.

frob

Reading this thread (which of course I found via my aggregator (RSS Bandit) from the Slashdot Feed, there seems to be a lot of confusion about what RSS actually IS. The beauty of RSS, IMHO, is that is is Really Simple. The Creative Commons licensed spec for RSS 2 shows that there's a tiny core of mandatory information and reasonable extensibility through the use of XML namespaces. I use RSS to locate new articles from here, from The Register, BBC News, The Guardian, ITN news (yes, I'm a news junkie), kuro5hin, InfoWorld, Wired, for product update news from various SourceForge projects I use, for tracking a bunch of techie blogs I read without having to visit every one of them regularly, for recently-posted-article lists from thirty or so sites that I couldn't possibly keep track of by visiting them individually. I figure that if you've had a look at the examples I've given, and optionally the spec, you ALREADY have enough to successfully expose and consume RSS.

But the thing is, RSS is Really Simple. Simple to consume, simple to produce. So, since I already have my reader in place, I've also got a bunch of private feeds - an RSS file that shows me login/logout events from my server logs, an RSS feed that shows me the last 25 orders valued over 250 placed by our customers, an RSS feed that lists the 25 most recent software releases we've done, outstanding Service Requests and Change requests.

All of this could be achieved in other ways - what makes it a winner for me is that, for anything that's a series of events, it's pretty much trivial to expose those events as RSS <item>s, and then I can monitor all those items, from their diverse sources, in one place.

But then, I'm already somewhat smitten with RSS, obviously.

TomV

... along with some good background info.

it took me to that god damned all your base site. damn big red button ;\

Where does the line get drawn between physical property and intellectual property, and what rights do you have if you HAD purchased it, but it's gone now?

Here is some more background information on our new fighter:

Her BLOG
Her homepage
Her Harvard homepage
and her Picture

Er, that's Reimerdes as in Universal City Studios, Inc. v. Reimerdes. The mailing list archives might also be of interest.

Er, that's Reimerdes as in Universal City Studios, Inc. v. Reimerdes. The mailing list archives might also be of interest.

Please don't clone her

Ick!

Sun gives away a lot of its softwar to students, for free.

And MIT is certainly not the Microsoft Institute of Technology. The Harvard-MIT Data Center is an all Java project, whose faculty are contributors to some of the Apache Jakarta open source projects.

It's no mystery why water spiders can walk on water. All the engineers had to do was ask these 3rd graders a question.

Absolutely correct, and that's why invoking preemption isn't so crazy as many seem to think. The federal courts, in Vault Corp. v. Quaid Software, held that Title 17 Sec. 117 of the U.S. Code preempted terms in Vault's shrink-wrap licensing, so there's precedent for applying the preemption doctrine to private contracts in copyright litigation.

Without knowing more about SCO's argument, we certainly can't argue on the merits of it, but there's always the possibility that some enterprising copyright lawyer has found a potential incompatibility between the GPL and copyright law. (Offhand, though, any argument based on Title 17 Sec. 117(a) seems specious to me, since I don't see how it could possibly affect the right to authorize copies and derivative works in Sec. 106 -- but IANA(IP)L.)

And, actually, *I* say :x!, but who's keeping track?

Really? Interesting. I would figure it could never be as fast as native x86, it's all still emulation.

Instead of doing this translation in hardware, Transmeta does this in software, and it enables a lot of optimization while (at the same time) vastly reducing the amount of hardware resources required to do wide, out-of-order execution.

They get varied results -- some things go much, much faster on the Transmeta, but it's very bad at doing other things (especially things like self-modifying code).

The internal architecture is also very geared towards translation and running translated code. There are features that allow it to run a bunch of code in a translation that is fast, but not safe. If there is a problem with this unsafe translation (memory exception or something) the execution can be rewinded (rewound?) into a known-good state and a slower translation or interpretation can be used.

Transmeta has released some good papers on this whole thing. If you're interested in this kind of thing, you might want to also check out HP's Dynamo and Intel's DAISY.

Yay, clever computer architecture!

There's no such thing as intellectual property. There's copyright law, trademark law, and patent law, but "IP" is an empty concept.

Someone arguing that "It has nothing to do with brain chemistry", when challenged to back that up writes:

MY own experience, and from most other introverts I've spoken to.

How splendid for you. Meanwhile, Dr. Jerome Kagan at Harvard University is busily doing studies which link brain chemistry to temperament, in particular introversion. In some of the most compelling recent news, infants identified as more socially timid, and then discovered to have brain chemistry and respiratory traits in common, have been followed in a longitudinal study; the subjects are now in their teens, and still temperamentally distinct.

CNet is running a peice on the Open Source And Industry Alliance an advocacy and lobbying group sponsored by the Computer & Communications Industry Association.

This is indeed great news. Now perhaps the OpenSource community can get behind this effort to politicise itself and vigorously advocate where it most counts, the halls of the U.S. Congress.

In its statment of principles and purpose, the OSAIA states:

Business, government and private individuals must be free to choose software and technologies that best suit their needs, independent of the methodologies or licenses used in their development.

The marketplace must be free of prejudice against open source software, whether through law, regulation, defamation or other means. OSAIA will act to achieve this goal."

This is a good start. The CCIA boasts a formidable stable of memebers including AOL, Kodak, Oracle, Fujitsu, Verizon, Yahoo and others.

There are several good resources on the web that are acting as clearinghouses for information that can be drawn upon as resources in this fight. Notably are TWikIWeThey , the Open Source Initiative , the Free Software Foundation.

Numerous weblogs are available as resources most notably Groklaw.
Pam has amassed an incredible wealth of links and facts surrounding the SCO v IBM issue. Another good site for legal info is the Daily Whirl which is a legal blog site index devoted to lawyers for lawyers covering among other subjects, copyright. GrepLaw and A Copy Fighter's Musings are two good places to start.

Finally, for those of you who want to develop good arguments against intellectual monopolies visit Boldrin and Levine's, Intellectual Property Page .

CNet is running a peice on the Open Source And Industry Alliance an advocacy and lobbying group sponsored by the Computer & Communications Industry Association.

This is indeed great news. Now perhaps the OpenSource community can get behind this effort to politicise itself and vigorously advocate where it most counts, the halls of the U.S. Congress.

In its statment of principles and purpose, the OSAIA states:

Business, government and private individuals must be free to choose software and technologies that best suit their needs, independent of the methodologies or licenses used in their development.

The marketplace must be free of prejudice against open source software, whether through law, regulation, defamation or other means. OSAIA will act to achieve this goal."

This is a good start. The CCIA boasts a formidable stable of memebers including AOL, Kodak, Oracle, Fujitsu, Verizon, Yahoo and others.

There are several good resources on the web that are acting as clearinghouses for information that can be drawn upon as resources in this fight. Notably are TWikIWeThey , the Open Source Initiative , the Free Software Foundation.

Numerous weblogs are available as resources most notably Groklaw.
Pam has amassed an incredible wealth of links and facts surrounding the SCO v IBM issue. Another good site for legal info is the Daily Whirl which is a legal blog site index devoted to lawyers for lawyers covering among other subjects, copyright. GrepLaw and A Copy Fighter's Musings are two good places to start.

Finally, for those of you who want to develop good arguments against intellectual monopolies visit Boldrin and Levine's, Intellectual Property Page .

CNet is running a peice on the Open Source And Industry Alliance an advocacy and lobbying group sponsored by the Computer & Communications Industry Association.

This is indeed great news. Now perhaps the OpenSource community can get behind this effort to politicise itself and vigorously advocate where it most counts, the halls of the U.S. Congress.

In its statment of principles and purpose, the OSAIA states:

Business, government and private individuals must be free to choose software and technologies that best suit their needs, independent of the methodologies or licenses used in their development.

The marketplace must be free of prejudice against open source software, whether through law, regulation, defamation or other means. OSAIA will act to achieve this goal."

This is a good start. The CCIA boasts a formidable stable of memebers including AOL, Kodak, Oracle, Fujitsu, Verizon, Yahoo and others.

There are several good resources on the web that are acting as clearinghouses for information that can be drawn upon as resources in this fight. Notably are TWikIWeThey , the Open Source Initiative , the Free Software Foundation.

Numerous weblogs are available as resources most notably Groklaw.
Pam has amassed an incredible wealth of links and facts surrounding the SCO v IBM issue. Another good site for legal info is the Daily Whirl which is a legal blog site index devoted to lawyers for lawyers covering among other subjects, copyright. GrepLaw and A Copy Fighter's Musings are two good places to start.

Finally, for those of you who want to develop good arguments against intellectual monopolies visit Boldrin and Levine's, Intellectual Property Page .

Just a few other mentions of sealand from other sources:

When asked about the status of Sealand, the British Home Office (Britain's equivalent to the Department of Internal Affairs) has, for thirty years, referred people to the Foreign Office as Sealand wasn't considered part of the United Kingdom. Until the HavenCo announcement on June 5 last year.

Free radical

A paper discussing jurisdiction as it pertains to sealand.

This all goes back to jurisdiction. If you go by the ruling in the 25 November 1968 case, in which shots were fired from Sealand in warning towards ships of the British navy, then Sealand has a good case for sovereignty.

The court declared that it was not competent in Roy of Sealand's case as it could not exert any jurisdiction outside of British national territory

A paper concerning abortion laws as they pertain to the EU. From 2000, but it does contain an interesting line.

For Home Office spokesman Tim Watkinson, the situation is clear: "The [United Kingdom] does not recognize Sealand as an independent state, it is within our territorial waters and as such subject to UK law."

As was laid out earlier, the island sits 7-10 miles off shore. It's "declaration of sovereignty" came in 1967, When territorial waters extended only to 3 miles. England would have had no authority until October 1st, 1987, when they moved their border to 12 miles. If we go by the 1968 ruling, England still has no rights over the island.

The fort itself was considered derilect, and as such open to claim.

This would have been prior to england extending it's territorial waters claim from 3 to 12 miles. International law forbids territory of another nation from being claimed simply by extending waters. I believe, though i have no links to back it, that the decision to move England's territorial waters out to 12 miles was based in part on preventing any further claims to small coastal islands, man made or otherwise. I'd be glad to be proven wrong.

Overall this is a unique situation. Any legal preceedings would have to face an uphill climb to establish jurisdiction. If they can indeed prove, beyond a shadow of a doubt, that Sealand does fall under English law, everything else becomes a mute point. Until such time as they can prove Sealand doesn't fit criteria as an independand nation, they have no jurisdiction.

For stealing gateway.com from the original owner. Don't forget!

I have a longterm project to solve this, generally: [theory]

"Just by knowing the birth date and ZIP code of the governor of Massachusetts, Latanya Sweeney, a computer-privacy researcher at Carnegie Mellon University, was able to retrieve his health records from a supposedly anonymous database of state employee health-insurance claims. Sweeney also demonstrated that she could do the same for 69 percent of the 54,805 people on the voting list of Cambridge, Mass."

"...don't get complacent: anonymity is hard to achieve. Where once a company needed a name, address, phone number, or Social Security number to identify a person, database technology has made that unnecessary. "Eighty-seven percent of the population of the US can be uniquely identified [only] by their date of birth, gender, and five-digit zip code," says Latanya Sweeney, ALB '95 assistant professor of computer science and public policy at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh."

"Recent work includes:

* Identifiability server -- a computational system that determines the identifiability of given data sets and/or of individuals in the United States based on either field descriptions of the data set or on actual data values. For example, combinations of values such as {date of birth, gender, 5-digit ZIP} combine to uniquely identify 87% of the population in the United States."

Java is not more scalable than PHP by its own because it shares memory. Java enables/simplifies the design of scalable applications, which is not exactely the same. If there is nothing to share, then the execution model doesn't matter. If you can capilize on stuff created once for all, or at least reusable several times, then being able to share memory has a big impact.

"Java-based SEDA Web server outperforms Apache and Flash (sld12)" because of a design aimed at limiting object reinstantiations and context switching. These two pains obviously occur when you do the same things on many concurrent threads: you'd better do it once and share the result.

There is really nothing special with Java and multi-threading about that. The same is true for multi-process Apache C modules programmed to use shared memory.
In fact all four components of the LAMP architecture internally make extensive usage of shared memory (for i in linux apache mysql php; do google "shared memory" $i ; done) simply because cpu cycles and memory allocations are expensive and high performance objectives imply not to waste them. If PHP had a higher level API than its existing one for managing shared memory, web programmers would be able to easily prolong the benefit of using shared memory to the application itself.

I shouldn't end my post with a flamebait but I believe that if a web developer suffers from Java's drawbacks (bytecode/JVM, performance cost of native UTF-16 strings, garbage collection, ...), he's 99% likely to under-use its strengths (great thread API, servlet model, great librairies, ...). Well used, they enable really performant designs. I've seen so many times applications refactored from C to Java performing several times faster, just because it was easy to do things smarter in Java, while very risky in C (Never had a SIGSEGV in a large multi-threaded C application ? Happy debugging and next time you'll keep it stupid!).

Sorry, but cepstral techniques don't do what the SETI people need them to do. The de-chirping needs to happen coherently (i.e. without any loss of the phase information from the original data and signals that it might contain). The reason for this is that the signal-to-noise of a detected periodic signal is much less if you use an incoherent technique like the cepstrum rather than a coherent one. And since they are looking for very weak signals, they need every bit of S/N that they can get.

OTOH, I have developed a cepstral-like technique to detect binary pulsars in data almost identical to the SETI@home data. You can read about it here or here if you are interested.

haven't you heard of the case of blue bus? it directly targets the thought that over 50% probability it was your fault means you have liability:

Harvard Law

NASA ADS is a great place for searching for articles in many journals (not just astronomy and astrophysics). There are also mirrors located around the world.

NASA ADS is a great place for searching for articles in many journals (not just astronomy and astrophysics). There are also mirrors located around the world.

I don't - it's right outside my window :-)

265 Massachusetts Ave Cambridge, MA

http://web.mit.edu/museum/

And while you're at it, come walk around the MIT campus. I hear tell there's also some kind of finishing school farther up Massachusetts Ave, but it's not really worth visiting.

Boston, Massachusetts and its environs are filled with incredibly geeky things. Boston is the home of the Free Software Foundation, Ximian, and OSDN. Just across the river, Cambridge is the home of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, undeniably a geek Mecca. Next door to MIT is Harvard University (as the MIT t-shirts say, "Harvard: Because not everybody can get in to MIT"). Plus we've got the Big Dig, which despite its infamy for budget overruns, corruption, and defacement of the city landscape, is also home to some incredibly geeky marvels of engineering! And of course, many other geeks of note live and work in and around Boston.

We might imagine "counsel" for MIT comes from one of the less technically adept Universities. After a couple of years at MIT, they might even get it. In the mean time, you don't have to be much of a tech guru to understand the Family Education Rights and Privacy Act requirements to notify students before the release of personal information such as names and addresses. Nor do you have to be much a lawyer to understand jusritictional issues. Hell, they could get someone from LSU to do that much. What's up with these RIAA clowns? OK, extortionists and music pimps are not well known for their legal prowess either.

You should drink more than twice a week, at least moderately, its for your heart: look

Apollo DOMAIN File System

* Developed by Apollo Computers, Inc. in the early eighties.
* Peer based system.
* Typed files stored in an Object Storage System (OSS).
* A system-wide Single Level Store provides a mapped VM interface to objects built on top of the OSS. The Domain FS is layered on top of SLS and provides a Unix-like file interface to apps.
* Each object has a dynamic home node associated with it. The OSS maps objects to homes using a hint server that uses heuristics to do the mapping. The hint server is updated by system operations.
* Each object has a unique UID, and a distributed naming server provides mappings from strings to UIDs. This server provides a hierarchical, Unix-like, location-transparent name space for all files and directories in the system
* Domain transparently caches data and object attributes at the usage node (a.k.a. the client). Accesses can go both through the mapped VM system, and though the file system interface. Both end up as object references at the OSS level.
* OSS manages a page-level cache of objects and provides consistency in a manner similar to NFS (timestamps). Read-ahead is used to increase performance
* Domain provides a built-in concurrency control mechanism using a lock manager at each node that provides a home to objects. This lock manager is integrated with the cache mangement system, ensuring cache updates when locks are released.

and the white dwarf will never explode as supernova.

Well, that depends. If the white dwarf is close enough to the Chandrasekhar limit, and somehow manages to accrete enough matter to actually pass it, it would go supernova. Becoming overwheight can be dangerous even for old, retired stars.
Marlon Brando should take notice :)

Actually a white dwarf can explode as a classical nova but it has to have a normal companion star. When this occurs, the white dwarf's gravity strips gas off the companion which builds up on the white dwarf's surface until it explodes.

Going slightly off-topic, this was a plot point in an episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation.

Language drifts and changes. Pick up a copy Beowulf, circle AD 800. Chances are you won't understand a whole lot, it's written in old english. What with the great vowel shift, the meanings of most of those words have significantly changed. Now, instead of 1200 years, imagine what 100,000 years of language evolution would do to such a warning. That's why ANY warning they choose will probably be pictoral, not script.

Well, if Hedy Lamarr can invent spread-spectrum radio, I guess Pam Anderson can code. (VIP is rather wry on occaison...)

The same way Kazaa, Grokster, Napster and others make money off consumers distribution. Advertisements and other little things.

Do the calculations, artists would actually make more money off this system than the current system because they'd still own their copyrights and would take in 100% of the profits made.

Example1
Example2

Currently artists dont profit at all off distirbution and record sales unless they sell 500,000 records, in the new system even if you sell 1000 records you'd get something because you'd still own the copyright.

The story goes that the pirate Pugg (who has a PhD) wants to collect all the information in the universe, and happens to have trapped the constructors. So, the constructors build him a machine containing a thermodynamic demon of the second kind, which filters true statements out of all the data created by some brownian motion (a demon of the first kind is simply Maxwell's demon). The pirate, who obviously suffers from information addiction, just starts reading the output and never stops, so the constructors are free to go!

If you haven't read the Cyberiad, you should give it a try. It's intelligent, beautifully written, and quite nerdy too.

Here's the definition from the Harvard Medical School Division on Addictions:

Addiction is the compulsive use of a substance or activity resulting in physical, psychological, or social harm to the user; the user continues in this pattern of behavior despite the harms that result. Addiction is differentiated from psychological dependence and physical dependence. Psychological dependence is the feeling that someone has when they think that drugs or activities are necessary to achieve a feeling of well-being. Physical dependence is marked by the development of tolerance to a drug or activity's effects so that increased amounts of a drug or activity are needed to obtain the desired effect. Tolerance also reveals its presence by the development of withdrawal symptoms when the drug or activity is stopped for a sufficient time. These matters are more complex than often thought.

And here's the definition of addiction from the National Institutes of Health's MedLine.

Drug dependence (addiction) is compulsive use of a substance despite negative consequences which can be severe; drug abuse is simply excessive use of a drug or use of a drug for purposes for which it was not medically intended. Physical dependence on a substance (needing a drug to function) is not necessary or sufficient to define addiction. There are some substances which don't cause addiction but do cause physical dependence (for example, some blood pressure medications) and substances which cause addiction but not classic physical dependence (cocaine withdrawal, for example, doesn't have symptoms like vomiting and chills; it is mainly characterized by depression).

What you described is a voluntary lack of self-control. I think that's called gluttony.

This is MGH.

Also photons and subatomic particles impacting on gas clouds around the star cause the glow (the impact transfers energy to the gas, heating it).

Sure makes for pretty pictures! :-) here's a page with some good animations on it.

SB

the folks at Tengen had a look at the patent, and figured out how to make a chip that would allow their games to work in the NES without paying for the license. Tengen lost the case because it was not a clean room reverse engineering with virgins and all that, but based on actual knowledge of the technical details of Nintendo's patent.

Wrong. The Atari Games v. Nintendo case was a fraud case. Tengen (Atari Games's console division) defrauded the Copyright Office to obtain information beyond what was published in the patent, namely the source code of the "10NES" program on the lockout chips. The court tossed out the fair use defense because of Tengen's dirty hands.

I can't find a Web source to back up the details.

Atari Games v. Nintendo opinion

" Henson's use of the name "Spa'am" is simply another in a long line of Muppet lampoons. Moreover, this Muppet brand of humor is widely recognized and enjoyed. Thus, consumers of Henson's merchandise, all of which will display the words "Muppet Treasure Island," are likely to see the name "Spa'am" as the joke it was intended to be."

It all goes back to the nature of copyright, "To promote the Progress of Science and the useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries." This balances the benefit to the public of having a work in the public domain. I would argue that when a copyright holder is not using their copyright "To promote the Progress of Science and the useful Arts" (i.e., suppressing knowledge instead of making it available) then they are violating that original copyright agreement, and therefore should not get the benefits of its protection.

Note that this would not be as big a deal if other parts of that language were actually enforced as well, such as the "for limited times" part, or the "exclusive right to their respective inventions and discoveries" (emphasis mine) part. This would imply that a person could reasonably expect a copyright (on, say, the song "Happy Birthday") to expire sometime, perhaps not too long after the death of the original author(s). It would also imply that copyrights can't be transferred or sold. But that isn't the world we live in, sadly.

> Too bad that a very long perspective in economics is non-existent. Too bad you have no idea what you're talking about. Thank god a good number of economists do. And are pushing the arguement forward. Kalin