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It wasn't mentioned in the Chandra release or the CNN spot, but RX J1856.5-3754 is apparently the closest known neutron star. The Chandra site states it's distance at ~400 lyr and the APOD site cites 180 lyr, practically in our back yard!(in cosmological distances anyway)

I'm not a lawyer. But, careful, that argument has actually lost (by 2-1) in the Appeals Decision

Well, I am under the impression that arguments which lost in the Appeals Decision are the only arguments which can be used in the Supreme Court anyway. The whole point of a Supreme Court Appeal is that the Appeals Court made a mistake.

Specifically, the Supreme Court is going to answer two questions (from the petition, the third question was denied appeal):

Did the D.C. Circuit err in holding that Congress has the power under the Copyright Clause to extend retrospectively the term of existing copyrights?
Is a law that extends the term of existing and future copy-rights "categorically immune from challenge[] under the First Amendment"?

Unfortunately, the second question alone I believe will at best get the case remanded back to the Appeals Court, with the ruling that the Appeals Court was "categorically wrong" in that regard.

It's all actually much more complicated than that. Apparently Eldred made a stipulation "that the preamble of the Copyright Clause is not a substantive limit on Congress' legislative power." This contradicted an amicus filed by Schnapper, on which much of the dissent was based. Due to a rule that an amicus "generally cannot expand the scope of an appeal to implicate issues that have not been presented by the parties to the appeal", the majority opinion essentially threw out that amicus.

Hopefully this angle will be reopened in the Supreme Court case. It seems that there would be a new discovery (?) process, and that the government could not argue that it was unprepared to respond. Now the SC did reject hearing the question "May a circuit court consider arguments raised by amici, different from arguments raised by a party, on a claim properly raised by a party?", but I don't think that is tantamount to rejecting the amicus for its own use.

I'd love to hear from someone following this case more closely than I, if I've misconstrued any of it. I've read it a few times, and I have followed other supreme court cases, but I've never taken any formal classes in constitutional law, so I very well may be missing the point.

High sounding language, but the intent of such escape clauses is to allow Congress to normalize laws to reflect changes in the rest of the world.

Judge Sentelle concludes otherwise only because he sees a categorical distinction between extending the term of a subsisting copyright and extending that of a prospective copyright. This distinction is not to be found in the Constitution itself, however. The dissent identifies nothing in text or in history that suggests that a term of years for a copyright is not a "limited Time" if it may later be extended for another "limited Time." Instead, the dissent suggests that the Congress -- or rather, many successive Congresses -- might in effect confer a perpetual copyright by stringing together an unlimited number of "limited Times," although that clearly is not the situation before us. The temporal thrust of the CTEA is a good deal more modest: The Act matches United States copyrights to the terms of copyrights granted by the European Union, see Council Directive 93/98, art. 7, 1993 O.J. (L 290) 9; in an era of multinational publishers and instantaneous electronic transmission, harmonization in this regard has obvious practical benefits for the exploitation of copyrights. This is a powerful indication that the CTEA is a "necessary and proper" measure to meet contemporary circumstances rather than a step on the way to making copy rights perpetual; the force of that evidence is hardly diminished because, as the dissent correctly points out, the EU is not bound by the Copyright Clause of our Constitutionn. As for the dissent's objection that extending a subsisting copyright does nothing to "promote Progress," we think that implies a rather crabbed view of progress: Preserving access to works that would otherwise disappear -- not enter the public domain but disappear -- "promotes Progress" as surely as does stimulating the creation of new works.

Sig: What Happened To The Censorware Project (censorware.org)

I think the best argument they have going for them is that extending the copyright of already created works cannot possibly meet the constitutional requirement that copyright law "promote the progress of science and useful arts".

Such guidance as the Supreme Court has given further confirms us in this view of the matter. The Court has made plain that the same Clause permits the Congress to amplify the terms of an existing patent. As early as 1843 it established that the status of a particular invention and its protections must depend on the law as it stood at the emanation of the patent, together with such changes as have been since made; for though they may be retrospective in their operation, that is not a sound objection to their validity; the powers of Congress to legislate upon the subject of patents is plenary by the terms of the Constitution, and as there are no restraints on its exercise, there can be no limitation of their right to modify them at their pleasure, so that they do not take away the rights of property in existing patents.

McClurg v. Kingsland, 42 U.S. 202, 206.

Within the realm of copyright, the Court has to the present era been similarly deferential to the judgment of the Congress. "As the text of the Constitution makes plain, it is Congress that has been assigned the task of defining the scope of the limited monopoly that should be granted to authors or to inventors in order to give the appropriate public access to their work product;" that "task involves a difficult balance between [competing interests]" as reflected in the frequent modifications of the relevant statutes. ...

Sig: What Happened To The Censorware Project (censorware.org)

The Growth Rate of the Public Domain

This chart is a visual representation of amici's understanding of the decline of the growth of public domain as a result of repeated copyright term extensions.

Sig: What Happened To The Censorware Project (censorware.org)

Well, CSS is patented

What documentation can you find for that? When I searched for css patent, Google only gave me information on Microsoft's patent on cascading stylesheets. Searching for css scrambling patent, on the other hand, revealed mostly pages about Digimarc's patents on watermarks along with a few pages denying existence of any patent on the Content Scrambling System here. However, this page lists a couple patents; which one are you talking about?

The only thing about copyright, and hence fair use indirectly, is in section eight which reads: "To promote the progress of science and useful arts, by securing for limited times to authors and inventors the exclusive right to their respective writings and discoveries;"

This article in the constitution does not grant people any "natural right ownership" of their inventions and writings... in fact, it it only grants "exclusive right" for a limited time in such a manner as to promote the progress of science and the useful arts. If time limits and fair use doctrine wasn't there in the law, then copyright would fail to pass constitutional muster.

If you want to learn more about copyright, visit the Copyright's Commons.

There's an explanation of why stopping light could lead to advances in quantum computing here.

There's also some news about it here at Harvard's site. Also, there's an article here in Scientific American about this.

Didn't this all happen last year, too? Why is it just news now?

I draw slashdot's attention to the fact that the story was originally broken by Keith Cowing's excellent NASA Watch web page. I expect that they will get the bird to GEO, although Space Command doesn't seem to have issued any new orbital data for it in several days.

Home Planet does a good job, and has an orrery display as well as a sky view. you'll also want the orbital elements, which can be put into the cometnew.csv file so you know where all the latest comets are (including Ikeya-Zhang)

From many of the comments here I can see that almost no one understands what Free Media is about. Not surprising, as numerous people posting the other threads don't understand what Free Software is about, and the two philosophies share a lot in common.

First, Free Media is not a new concept. Many of us have been kicking around the idea for some time. My own work, Autonomy is going to be licensed under a free license (you can see a draft of one possible license here), and there are numerous other projects as well (OpenContent and Copyright's Commons to name just two).

Free Media is about creating a public commons of content that others can use, modify, copy, redistribute, and incorporate into their own projects freely. There are caveates (like you have to make clear the end product is different from what the original creator may have intended), but the idea is that you could, for example, take an old Gilligan's Island rerun, colorize it, do some digital overlays, change the soundtrack, and add some more creative editing to create Alien Island ... and let everyone watch the Skipper and Gilligan get hunted by Sigorny Weaver's Nemesis.

adamy writes "A ditital Camera, and A Website [is all you need]", adding "I don't think anyone would want the Raw footage, just the edited stuff." Again, this completely misses the point. Maybe you'd like to redo the special effects of an old movie and the original green-screen (or blue screen) footage is exactly what you want. Maybe you want to do a documentary on how documentaries slant information ... in which case the raw footage, particularly that which isn't part of the final cut, is what interests you.

Free Media is about empowering artists to build upon the works of others, and to stop having to reinvent the wheel for every project (which really only the big studios can afford to do ... and they can cross-license copyrighted works anyway). The idea that consumers get the product for little or no cost is completely irrelevant ... a nice side effect of the Freedom being offered perhaps, but by no means the point of it.

As for 'Open Source' television already existing ... not in any reasonable or analogous sense that we mean when we say 'open source' software. Shows on local access are copyrighted ... you can't take them and incorporate them into your work, or rebroadcast them, or copy them, without express permission of the author. The are not free. The same goes for Zed by all accounts ... they're happy to take your content (and pay you a nominal fee), then subject it to the same onerous copyright restrictions that plague the rest of the mass media offerings. Aside from a novel way of trolling for content it, too, is neither free nor open in the sense that slashdotters understand the word. That is not to say it isn't innovative (it is), but so long as others cannot take and build upon the work freely it is not free (as in freedom), and has nothing to do with Free Media and Cringley's flirtation with it.

From many of the comments here I can see that almost no one understands what Free Media is about. Not surprising, as numerous people posting the other threads don't understand what Free Software is about, and the two philosophies share a lot in common.

First, Free Media is not a new concept. Many of us have been kicking around the idea for some time. My own work, Autonomy is going to be licensed under a free license (you can see a draft of one possible license here), and there are numerous other projects as well (OpenContent and Copyright's Commons to name just two).

Free Media is about creating a public commons of content that others can use, modify, copy, redistribute, and incorporate into their own projects freely. There are caveates (like you have to make clear the end product is different from what the original creator may have intended), but the idea is that you could, for example, take an old Gilligan's Island rerun, colorize it, do some digital overlays, change the soundtrack, and add some more creative editing to create Alien Island ... and let everyone watch the Skipper and Gilligan get hunted by Sigorny Weaver's Nemesis.

adamy writes "A ditital Camera, and A Website [is all you need]", adding "I don't think anyone would want the Raw footage, just the edited stuff." Again, this completely misses the point. Maybe you'd like to redo the special effects of an old movie and the original green-screen (or blue screen) footage is exactly what you want. Maybe you want to do a documentary on how documentaries slant information ... in which case the raw footage, particularly that which isn't part of the final cut, is what interests you.

Free Media is about empowering artists to build upon the works of others, and to stop having to reinvent the wheel for every project (which really only the big studios can afford to do ... and they can cross-license copyrighted works anyway). The idea that consumers get the product for little or no cost is completely irrelevant ... a nice side effect of the Freedom being offered perhaps, but by no means the point of it.

As for 'Open Source' television already existing ... not in any reasonable or analogous sense that we mean when we say 'open source' software. Shows on local access are copyrighted ... you can't take them and incorporate them into your work, or rebroadcast them, or copy them, without express permission of the author. The are not free. The same goes for Zed by all accounts ... they're happy to take your content (and pay you a nominal fee), then subject it to the same onerous copyright restrictions that plague the rest of the mass media offerings. Aside from a novel way of trolling for content it, too, is neither free nor open in the sense that slashdotters understand the word. That is not to say it isn't innovative (it is), but so long as others cannot take and build upon the work freely it is not free (as in freedom), and has nothing to do with Free Media and Cringley's flirtation with it.

(2) The determination of the conditions under which these rights shall be exercised is reserved for the national legislation of the countries of the Union. The means of redress for safeguarding these rights shall be regulated by the legislation of the country where protection is claimed.

Here are a couple of links from Google to good overviews of "moral rights" in the U.S.

http://cyber.law.harvard.edu/property/library/mora lprimer.html
http://www.rbs2.com/moral.htm

Wolf wrote:
There's absolutely no way that Earth can turn into Venus. For one thing there isn't enough carbon to make the carbon dioxide to push up the greenhouse effect to that degree. For another Venus is simply closer to the Sun.
And further, the amount of carbon dioxide that is produced by man is dwarfed by the amount produced by volcanoes; by more than ten times. Even if we deliberately tried we can't influence the environment that much. Some, but nothing like you are implying.

Whoever wrote this obviously is too young to have been in a classroom where they used... chalk. Ever looked around you? The earth is layered in calcium carbonate and other retentive materials (wood, coal, oil, coral, krill) that extract carbon from the atmosphere and keep it locked up. Yes, volcanoes and other factors churn it out, but our biosphere has evolved processes for packing it away again... processes that we are increasingly interfering with.

The carbon cycle. Look it up. If you're some sort of computer weenie with no chemistry skills think of it as a finely balanced recursive algorithm with hundreds of inputs and outputs that somehow maintains environmental homeostasis. Knock this out of whack and you've got hell to pay. You can easily get Venus, or Mars (Snowball Earth).

Your supposition about Venus is also plain wrong. The incident stellar energy per square metre on the upper atmosphere of Venus is only incrementally higher than Earth's. If the Earth as currently constituted was at .72 AU (ie, Venus), there would be higher temperatures but not runaway greenhouse. -- at least not until the CO2 levels reached critical and the hydroxyls started boiling away into space. Keep CO2 levels low and you're okay.

Alone of all the planets the earth does not exist in physical equilibrium. It's the only planet so far discovered with a strong biosphere that resists change and maintains temperature and humidity levels. Dismissing that unique gift is dangerous and absurd. Have you heard of chicken little?

Try this on for size.

Environmentalism is something more central and vastly more important. Its essence has been defined by science in the following way. Earth, unlike the other solar planets, is not in physical equilibrium. It depends on its living shell to create the special conditions on which life is sustainable. The soil, water, and atmosphere of its surface have evolved over hundreds of millions of years to their present condition by the activity of the biosphere, a stupendously complex layer of living creatures whose activities are locked together in precise but tenuous global cycles of energy and transformed organic matter. The biosphere creates our special world anew every day, every minute, and holds it in a unique, shimmering physical disequilibrium. On that disequilibrium the human species is in total thrall. When we alter the biosphere in any direction, we move the environment away from the delicate dance of biology. When we destroy ecosystems and extinguish species, we degrade the greatest heritage this planet has to offer and thereby threaten our own existence.

The relative indifference to the environment springs, I believe, from deep within human nature. The human brain evidently evolved to commit itself emotionally only to a small piece of geography, a limited band of kinsmen, and two or three generations into the future. To look neither far ahead nor far afield is elemental in a Darwinian sense. We are innately inclined to ignore any distant possibility not yet requiring examination. It is, people say, just good common sense.

Some here, here, here, and here to name a few, for a large listing try here.

It's only a matter of time before other fields catch up. Remember, the web was invented for the purpose of high energy physicists at the CERN and SLAC labs being able to look up citations online, so we've got a ten year head start on, say, historians or economists.

In the case you refer to, FormGen claims that Micro Star is creating derivative works, not that Micro Star is enabling the players to create derivative works.

Yes, on further examination, I guess you're right. I guess Galoob v. Nintendo is the best I can come up with, and Galoob won that case, so it's surely not the best. In both cases the ninth circuit appeals court implies that it is willing to consider preparation of derivitive works to be infringement without distribution of that derivitive work, so long as that derivitive work is in "concrete or permanent form".

You're mistaken. Copyright law says you cannot prepare a derivitive work, regardless of whether or not you distribute that derivitive work. See for example Micro Star v. Formgen. In this case, Micro Star distributed MAP files for Duke Nukem. The MAP files were not derivitive works, but they allowed the end-user to create derivititive works.

as long as your product has zero bits of their data they have nothing to say in the issue

Napster has zero bits of the RIAA's data in it, but they're still liable for contributory copyright infringement. See Galoob v. Nintendo for some of the intricacies of the situation. Unlike Galoob, the derivitive work created by the library is in fixed form.

• In the US at least there is the fair use clause of the copyright laws.

Largely irrelevant. The Audio Home recording act 1992 and the Digital Millenium Copyright Act 1998 between them tie fair use rights up in a Gordian knot, where you are technically allowed fair usage, but you are technologically prevented from doing it, if you see what I mean.

Case law - not confused and contraditory copyright law and fair use defence - has held that burning MP3's is explicitely fair use, see RIAA versus Rio 1999

However, fair use (as another poster asserts) is a post facto defence. If you can make a copy, then fair use allows you to do so in many cases. It does not give leverage to demand copyable media. In fact, the 1992 Audio Home Recording act actually mandates copy prevention technology, it's just that RIAA vs Rio rules that computers and the Rio aren't "digital audio recorders"; the computer is a general purpose device, the Rio doesn't actually make the copy from the original source, it receives the pre-copied data from the computer. That was a contraversial technical ruling though, and it could be ignored in future.

But really, your opinion can be countered with one word: Macrovision.

Game Theory.

It's a matter of which snitch rolls over first.

There's also an index of the Government's papers analyzing and responding to the comments at http://cyber.law.harvard.edu/msdoj/ (along with the revised proposed final judgment and most of the other filings in the case)

Here's an improved alphabetical index that prevents the annoyance of having to cross reference manually:

http://eon.law.harvard.edu/mscomment/

I'm amazed at how many ways the lawyers and big corporations have found to abuse the DMCA. The list seems to grow on a weekly basis. You can read more about this at the Chilling Effects Clearinghouse.

Although neutral anti-atoms do not have an electric charge, the electric charge of the antiproten and the positron 'circling' around it is not evenly distributed. It is still not affected by an electric field, but it may be deflected or contained by a magnetic field.

Also look at the home page of theATRAP experiment.

The aforementioned site either hosts or distributes software which illegally modifies and/or alters Blizzard Entertainment copyrighted software or bypasses anti-circumvention technology, thereby infringing upon Blizzard Entertainment copyrights.

• Modifies or alters Blizzard software. Nope, it's entirely independent. Users choose to connect of their own accord, by their own means. We only run our own software.
• Bypasses anti-circumvention technology. What, the CDkey system for Blizzard games? We don't enable users to pirate software, we only provide gaming servers for people who already own the games.

The orbital elements are available for download into many popular astronomy programs, including xephem, the open source x-windows program.

The wonderful folks at the International Astronomical Union (Smithsonian Observatory) have published orbital elements and an ephemeris for Ikeya-Zhang.

This is most useful stuff! (Doesn't look like it will be much fun for binoc/naked eye until late March.)

The wonderful folks at the International Astronomical Union (Smithsonian Observatory) have published orbital elements and an ephemeris for Ikeya-Zhang.

This is most useful stuff! (Doesn't look like it will be much fun for binoc/naked eye until late March.)

Why not check out education? I've worked at a Boston-area uni for the last two years, and we've doubled our IT staff since I started (the oracle db team alone tripled in the last year).

For the last year I've heard about the lack of jobs, and while I've seen it myself from talking to people and seaching around monster/hotjobs/dice/etc, education seems to always be hiring. For instance, since you're searching for Boston, why not check out Harvard? I just did a search and they have 25-30 IT jobs currently open, 3/4 of which were posted in the last 3 months.

Probably not long, now that the bastards at Nintendo and Sega have the DMCA hammer. Before the DMCA, the NOA scumbags sued Galoob over the Game Genie and had their head handed to them in court. If the Game Genie were introduced today, Nintendo would invoke the DMCA's magical powers of purchased legislation and prevail.

We also applied some game theory to the game 301 and to a game we invented called 30-Block, which you can read about here. We can solve 301 fairly easily, but 30-Block turns out to be quite intractable.

The more interesting part of this paper discusses probability models we use to predict where players will hit based on where they aim. It's interesting: if you are a perfect player, you have the highest expected value when aiming for Triple-20 (obviously), but the worse you get, the best place to aim in the boards spirals inward until it gets to double bulls-eye (which minimizes how often you miss the board).

Ok, so I've known a number of people in my life, but this is the first time any of them have ever did anything which warranted their appearance on the infamous slashdot. So, with my knowledge of a grand total of TWO of the players, I want to ask you, what do you think this guy is up to?

Ok, sure, it's a cool hack... blah blah blah, but you're all missing the most important point of discussion, does or does not Marco Carbone look like Jon Favreau (of Swingers fame):

Picture of Marco Carbone: here.
Picture of Jon Favreau: here.

There's almost certainly some sort of conspiracy afoot.

PS. I attempted to find a picture of Marco Carbone as a dog, but alas the wayback machine failed me.

Ok, so I've known a number of people in my life, but this is the first time any of them have ever did anything which warranted their appearance on the infamous slashdot. So, with my knowledge of a grand total of TWO of the players, I want to ask you, what do you think this guy is up to?

Ok, sure, it's a cool hack... blah blah blah, but you're all missing the most important point of discussion, does or does not Marco Carbone look like Jon Favreau (of Swingers fame):

Picture of Marco Carbone: here.
Picture of Jon Favreau: here.

There's almost certainly some sort of conspiracy afoot.

PS. I attempted to find a picture of Marco Carbone as a dog, but alas the wayback machine failed me.

Ok, so I've known a number of people in my life, but this is the first time any of them have ever did anything which warranted their appearance on the infamous slashdot. So, with my knowledge of a grand total of TWO of the players, I want to ask you, what do you think this guy is up to?

Ok, sure, it's a cool hack... blah blah blah, but you're all missing the most important point of discussion, does or does not Marco Carbone look like Jon Favreau (of Swingers fame):

Picture of Marco Carbone: here.
Picture of Jon Favreau: here.

There's almost certainly some sort of conspiracy afoot.

PS. I attempted to find a picture of Marco Carbone as a dog, but alas the wayback machine failed me.

It actually does do this. If you look at this image, you'll see a box that says "Aim for Triple 20" in the bottom right corner. When playing 301, the computer calculates the best next move using a simple dynamic programming algorithm and displays it there (assuming perfect players -- we are working on a version that considers a player's probability distribution).

I'd prefer if Yana were wearing a bikini :-)

I remember that some foreign works, which fell into the public domain due to technical reasons, were returned to full copyright by one act

They fell into the public domain because at the time, foreign works were not eligible for copyright protection.

The last extension did not remove stuff from the public domain

The Sonny Bono act didn't remove anything from the public domain, but Sec. 514 of the Uruguay Round Agreements Act (URAA), a treaty signed by the U.S. did. The URAA allowed the authors, or the remote descendents of those authors, of foreign works that were not eligible for copyright to obtain a new copyright on those long-public domain works.

The URAA has had a devestating impact on small, community performing orchestras. Prior to the retroactive copyright land-grab, orchestras were able to purchase inexpensive scores for such famous works as Peter and the Wolf. Now, instead of being able to purchase the scores at a low, one-time cost, orchestras are forced to rent the music from the "restored copyright" holder, at the cost of several hundred dollars per performance. As a result, many orchestras have been forced to drop virtually their entire repetoire of foreign classical music.

The same legal team that has brought the Eldred V Reno case this far is also working on overturning the URAA provisions for copyright "restoration." The complaint is interesting and illuminating. It's online here

This is a cool chart showing what could happen to the amount of public domain work available if Public Domain is unrestricted by term extension.

That's an awful graph. What exactly is it measuring? Copyright extensions don't take stuff out of the public domain, so why does the unrestrained line keep climbing while the hindered line drops to zero. Why is it linear? I'm unhappy it's being used for my side - it's obviously meaningless.

This is a cool chart showing what could happen to the amount of public domain work available if Public Domain is unrestricted by term extension. It really shows how we (as a people) are crippling ourselves and restricting knowledge.

Pretty interesting concept. Is a greater public domain worth the cost of less restrictive copytights? I think so. You may not, and that is fine. But just think of the possibilites.

Petitioners are various individuals and businesses that rely upon the public domain for their livelihood. Some, such as the lead plaintiff Eric Eldred, build free Internet libraries based upon public domain works; others, such as Dover Press, publish public domain works in high-quality commercial editions. All depend upon a rich public domain to support their work, and many make their work freely available to others.

Isn't this about another group of people that thinks it needs to make a profit? Sure, the current handling of copyrite is absurd, but do we want to see a case won in this way? Couldn't a case be made for the enhancememt of society as a whole -- not some company -- that would justify the taming of current copyrite practices?

I guess my question is, in the fight against bad laws, do the ends justify the means if we're to score a trule moral victory in court?

You and your joe sixpack mates are not only part of the problem, you're a major part of the problem. The corrupt media and the corrupt politicians are relying on your attitude to keep their trough full and the swill tasting sweet.

Don't chew glass
HA! I can eat glass, it doesn't hurt me.

Routers.
Scientology links.
Open protocols.
Free music.
Post-9/11 web responses.
Chat hosts and BBS admins.
Ancient packet switchers.
Executive buzzwords.
Open Source.
Online directories.
Cyber greed.
That guy who just fragged you in Wolfenstein.
The Imperial Domain Droids.
Well-meaning POW/MIA industry dupes.
The Hamster Dance.
Paranoid cartoon fantasy diagrams.
War, damnation and hypertext.
Swedish fiber stations.
Statutory IRC.
Beepstalkers.
Geeks.

We've had computers pass the Turing test already, in a limited subject discussion. We've also had humans fail it. I don't think there is anything which could stop us creating a general Turing test program today. However, I don't think that the Turing test is going to be a good indicator of useful AI, because just like the page I quoted says, "People are easily fooled".

At the AAS meeting a few weeks ago, a Chandra (X-Ray observatory) team produced this stunning mosiac of the Galactic Center.
It's amazing. Also, apparently the supposed massive black hole in our galaxy's center is 'off', so there's not a lot of emission from it, instead we see remnants of earlier activity (such as Sagittarius A).

While we might at one time have thought the law well-settled concerning the copyright issues of parody as fair use, the truth is far more interesting.

Clearly, we know that a rap reworking of O Pretty Woman, parodizing the song as an unrealisticly romanticized account of the horrific life of a prostitute on the street is fair use, for the Supremes told us so in Campbell v. Acuff Rose.

Alas, the Courts in infinite wisdom have distinguished with a fine hair the parodizing of a work of authorship with the satirizing of a societal issue by reference to a work, for example the Dr. Seuss-esque storybook about the O.J. Simpson Trial, the "Cat NOT in the hat, which was held NOT to be fair use. There was an interesting article about this case in the Cardozo Law Journal. (big pdf file)

Finally, we have the recent reworking of the civil war epic "The Wind Done Gone," which led to one of the more important recent copyright and parody decisions, and an excellent Eleventh Circuit opinion.

And that's just the Copyright issues. There remain the trademark parody cases, which have an even odder range of uncertainty. Certainly, there are a host of cases where trademark parodies have been found permissible and protected (I think "Off the wall-street journal" was an example of one that passed), but apparently there is an invisible (or at least very gray at the fringe) line of cases where the use is so offensive to the trademark that it borders on unfair competition. (I think Jordache with a depicted butt and Cocaine with the Coca-cola commercial style failed, but again, I may be misremembering).

I had a case not too long ago when I analyzed these issues and this absolutely murky hunk of case law. The best I could approximate is the SDR&R standard: "it is ok to parody a trademark, unless you make reference to sex, drugs or rock & roll."

Interestingly, these standards (trademark and copyright) are NOT consistent. The Campbell Copyright case was a fact pattern as egregiously offensive to the Orbison estate as Cocaine was to the Coca Cola Company. Yet there, it was protected expression.

It would be interesting to see a case well-resolved that addresses these conflicting areas of law clearly. But at any rate, I wouldn't presume without seeing ALL the facts and ALL the arguments that either side has a clear win. This is one of the truly gray margins of the law, except in the few arenas where the conduct has already been litigated. Unless your case lies foursquare on the facts of an existing, controlling case, this is as uncertain an area as it gets.

"SPAM"(tm) in all caps is a trademark of Hormel, who has good humor and grace regarding the term used for bulk-email.

Perhaps, but they definitely don't approve of using it for domains or muppets.

In order to resolve the copyright issues, and in order to preserve the public domain on the Internet, the Internet Archive has filed a friend of the court brief in our court case against the Sonny Bono Copyright Term Extension Act. See http://openlaw.org/eldredvreno

As of today, the Supreme Court hasn't decided what to do with the appeal. Stay tuned to openlaw.

1. Convince TiVo to make there device a truly 100% open programmable device with the ability to store content unencrypted and to be able to transfer the content onto your computer. Such a device will be 100% legal but you bet they will get sued beyond belief which is probably the number one reason isn't right now. So, in order to prevent this from being a reason convince EFF to provide them with legal assistance and funding to fight the battle in court.
2. We, the open source community can develop such a device ourself. I am in fact planning on doing just that. For more details see This Message that I posted to the livid-user mailing list. If you are interested fell free to email me at kevin at atkinson dhs org.

Choice number 1 will defiantly be preferable as it will get more public attention, however, choice number 2 is something we as geeks can defiantly do.

Problem is, no one at school wants to hear about the problem; they just accept the collateral damage.

Does anyone know why/if this must be the case? i don't really understand why the software (perhaps Packetshaper as mentioned above) ruins the ping times

shouldn't it just drop enough packets so a TCP connection stays at a slow transfer rate?

Not knowing much about the software, would it be possible to shape TCP connections and not UDP? (this would require reading the header)

Anyway, some background/historical info:
The undergraduate dorms get their connections through the FAS (Faculty of Arts and Sciences) network, which in turn gets its connection through UIS (University Information Services), which provides networking for all of Harvard. Back in the good old days of 2000, before the file-sharing people went crazy, UIS had just upgraded its internet connection (to a 155MB/s OC-3, IIRC) -- oh what heady and naieve days those were. Now, however, the situation is this: file-sharing programs seem to act as a gas that consumes all available bandwidth. That first started happening, IIRC, the weekend when Napster was going to be shut down. Suddenly, the undergraduates doing file-sharing shut down the connection for the entire university (which is much larger than the undergrads).

This is a classic "tragedy of the commons" scenario. The file-sharing folks abused a shared resource and ruined it for everyone else. What the traffic shaping essentially does, since it limits the student network to some portion of the FAS-UIS feed, is allow the file-sharing programs to ruin only the undergraduate dorm commons. Now, it's easy to blame the shaping for the bad performance, but the real truth of the matter is that if the file-sharing programs weren't trying to consume essentially infinite traffic, your games wouldn't have a problem. The router doesn't slow things down just to mess with you. Gamers are getting "scrood" by the other undergraduates doing file sharing, not the traffic shaping. Incidentally, the shaping is similar to the sometimes-raised suggestion of giving the students their own internet connection and fighting it out amongst themselves, except that traffic shaping makes it easier for people to complain about "the Man" and that a separate feed would be stepping on UIS's toes a bit. Also, a student-only connection would have to be much bigger than an OC-3, because it has already been demonstrated that an OC-3 can't handle the file-sharing traffic.

What most people want is for the file-sharing people to be moved out of their commons and into someone else's. That's what you're suggesting when you want TCP but not UDP to be limited. As an off-campus user, the file-sharing people are already out of my commons, so I'm happy that I can access Harvard websites and mail and login servers again. Most of the users of Harvard's network aren't on-campus undergraduates, either. Perhaps you can understand, then, why I'm defending the shaping. I like the network to be actually usable instead of the packet-dropping mess that it is when shaping isn't there.

There's also the option of getting rid of the commons, which is the shaping-per-user suggestion, but that has some disadvantages, too. Even if the undergrad dorms get one third of that university-wide OC-3, that's only 7.5kb/s per undergrad, which is not too great. Up the per-user bandwidth to something reasonable and now a certain number of file-sharing people can take everything over again.

Then there's the get-a-bigger-commons option. There are several problems with this. First, it's not clear that there exists a pipe fat enough for the number of file-sharing users among the undergraduates plus the other uses from the university at large. Second, of course, is what someone else has already mentioned -- try to imagine the FAS network admins justifying to UIS the need for the university to get a bigger feed, and UIS in turn having to justify that budget item, just for undergraduate file-sharing.

Everything I have said is based on what limited stuff I have seen and heard, but it seems to me that it's all really complicated, and if there were an easy solution, I'm sure it would already have been adopted.