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That's not quite correct. If your use of the clip falls under fair use, you are free to decrypt the video to obtain the clip. The DMCA specifically says, "Nothing in this section shall affect rights, remedies, limitations, or defenses to copyright infringement, including fair use, under this title." So the DMCA provisions and punishments do not apply if your use of copyrighted materials is fair use.

What the DMCA has done is make creation and distribution of the tools needed decrypt the video illegal. You still have the right, but you no longer the means to exercise it.

Neither is copyright an absolute. It exists for a specific purpose. Applications of copyright that do not advance that purpose are not permitted by the constitution. Since copyright is now mainly used as an impediment to the progress of science and the useful arts, it should be abolished.

When the pressure in the pressurizer dropped to a prescribed value, the PORV was suppose to close; it did not. The accident was now underway. The control panel had an indicator that showed the valve to be closed, (i.e., power was going to the valve to close it) but there was no way to determine that the valve was actually closed.

“the valve [was] closed” and “power was going to the valve to close it” are two COMPLETELY different things for an indicator to be showing. Only a complete moron would assume that the latter always implied the former. In reality the light in question actually showed if power was going to the valve to open it. The light being dark showed that power wasn’t being applied which if the valve was functioning properly would have closed the valve. However the operators had reasons to suspect that the valve was not functioning properly before the incident happened, one of which included the high downstream temperatures being indicated (which suggest the valve was leaking). In addition during the actual incident things like a higher then average containment building pressure and temperature, and the containment building sump filling with water should have indicated that there was a loss of coolant incident occurring.

In case of an accident, a nuclear power plant has tanks of water with pumps that can quickly introduce water to cool the reactor. One of these automatically started. This was noted by the operators, but then they looked at the indicators for the pressurizer, these indicators were telling them that the pressurizer was full of water (which it was because of the steam in the reactor core area).

Again a pressure indicator does not indicate water level, it indicates pressure. I’m not sure why you and your source have such a hard time with this concept. Beyond that if the operator in question had looked at

That's bad data. had the indicator actually read the valve was open rather then closed, I corrective action might have been able to be taken. Had they known the pressurizer was filled with steam, rather then liquid-water, different actions might have been taken.

If the data was bad then how come the next shift of workers in the control room was able to figure out what was going on shortly after they started? The problem was that the TMI operators made some shitty assumptions, if their instruments disagreed with their assumptions they ignored the instruments, or if their readings could be explained by their assumptions they didn’t consider any alternative explanations. When new operators arrived who weren’t invested into these shitty assumptions they had no difficulty in coming up with a good grasp of what was happening.

I've backed my point with what appears to me to be a authoritative source, care to back yours?

Your “authoritative source” can’t even agree with it self over a single sentence as to what a light means (and with two chances doesn't get the lights meaning correct), and you expect me to believe it can explain the cause of a nuclear meltdown?

If you want a good “authoritative source” on the TMI incident I recommend the commission report: http://www.pddoc.com/tmi2/kemeny/ Particualry their writeup of the actual incident: http://www.pddoc.com/tmi2/kemeny/wednesday_march_28_1979.htm

Beyond that: The instant the main pumps failed, three auxiliary coolant pumps kicked on. That would have been enough to prevent the whole incident from occulting, if (completely counter to NRC regulations) the valves to the auxiliary feed-water system were closed, making the pumps useless. You seem fond of lights, so it’s worth pointing out there were lights indicating these valves were closed, these lights were ignored.

When the pressure in the pressurizer dropped to a prescribed value, the PORV was suppose to close; it did not. The accident was now underway. The control panel had an indicator that showed the valve to be closed, (i.e., power was going to the valve to close it) but there was no way to determine that the valve was actually closed.

“the valve [was] closed” and “power was going to the valve to close it” are two COMPLETELY different things for an indicator to be showing. Only a complete moron would assume that the latter always implied the former. In reality the light in question actually showed if power was going to the valve to open it. The light being dark showed that power wasn’t being applied which if the valve was functioning properly would have closed the valve. However the operators had reasons to suspect that the valve was not functioning properly before the incident happened, one of which included the high downstream temperatures being indicated (which suggest the valve was leaking). In addition during the actual incident things like a higher then average containment building pressure and temperature, and the containment building sump filling with water should have indicated that there was a loss of coolant incident occurring.

In case of an accident, a nuclear power plant has tanks of water with pumps that can quickly introduce water to cool the reactor. One of these automatically started. This was noted by the operators, but then they looked at the indicators for the pressurizer, these indicators were telling them that the pressurizer was full of water (which it was because of the steam in the reactor core area).

Again a pressure indicator does not indicate water level, it indicates pressure. I’m not sure why you and your source have such a hard time with this concept. Beyond that if the operator in question had looked at

That's bad data. had the indicator actually read the valve was open rather then closed, I corrective action might have been able to be taken. Had they known the pressurizer was filled with steam, rather then liquid-water, different actions might have been taken.

If the data was bad then how come the next shift of workers in the control room was able to figure out what was going on shortly after they started? The problem was that the TMI operators made some shitty assumptions, if their instruments disagreed with their assumptions they ignored the instruments, or if their readings could be explained by their assumptions they didn’t consider any alternative explanations. When new operators arrived who weren’t invested into these shitty assumptions they had no difficulty in coming up with a good grasp of what was happening.

I've backed my point with what appears to me to be a authoritative source, care to back yours?

Your “authoritative source” can’t even agree with it self over a single sentence as to what a light means (and with two chances doesn't get the lights meaning correct), and you expect me to believe it can explain the cause of a nuclear meltdown?

If you want a good “authoritative source” on the TMI incident I recommend the commission report: http://www.pddoc.com/tmi2/kemeny/ Particualry their writeup of the actual incident: http://www.pddoc.com/tmi2/kemeny/wednesday_march_28_1979.htm

Beyond that: The instant the main pumps failed, three auxiliary coolant pumps kicked on. That would have been enough to prevent the whole incident from occulting, if (completely counter to NRC regulations) the valves to the auxiliary feed-water system were closed, making the pumps useless. You seem fond of lights, so it’s worth pointing out there were lights indicating these valves were closed, these lights were ignored.

Part of the problem is that lobbyists for various trade groups have gotten California to adopt existing books of industry standards as state code.

The State and the authors of the code are SOL. Per the US Court of Appeals For The 5th Circuit in the matter of Veerck v. SBCCI, No. 99-40632, to wit:

Based on the foregoing discussion, I would hold that once a "model code" is adopted into law by the government, a private entity, such as SBCCI, may no longer assert a copyright over the law's content, for the law enters the public domain and should be readily available for access by all citizens. Further, upon enactment, the law transforms into an "idea" that is no longer distinguishable from its expression, causing SBCCI's codes to lose their copyright protection. For these reasons, I would reverse the judgment of the district court.

California may think they'll get a better hearing in the 9th Circuit, but given the 9th's reputation, I wouldn't count on it.

This case concerns the interaction of two well-established propositions. The first is that facts are not copyrightable; the other, that compilations of facts generally are.

7:45 a.m. By now there are at least 20, perhaps as many as 60, operators, supervisors, and other persons in the control room. Although none is yet ready to believe that the core had been uncovered, radiation levels in the power plant buildings are so high that Nuclear Regulatory Commission regulations require the declaration of a general emergency. While state and federal officials are being informed of elevated radiation levels, unbeknown to all, a molten mass of metal and fuel--some twenty tons in all--is spilling into the bottom of the reactor vessel. The bottom of the reactor vessel is steel, five inches (13 cm) thick. But even that thickness of steel would not be expected to hold up for more than a few hours against such heat.

Note that the information presented here comes *after* they discovered the true magnitude of the molten blob years later. It took INEEL a good while to chisel out twenty tons of highly radioactive material with a remote-controlled jackhammer.

From the rather tame Kemeny report

e. There is no indication that any core material made contact with the steel pressure vessel at a temperature above the melting point of steel (2,800F).

Well, they later discovered that twenty tons of material well above that temperature was puddling in that vicinity at an alarming rate: perhaps no longer than episode in the series 24.

The story of TMI is not what was actually released, but how clueless they all were for a long time afterward about how close it came to dumping a Chernobyl-unit of molten goo into the Pennsylvania water table.

Concerning Chernobyl:

All remaining dosimeters had limits of 0.001 R/s and therefore read "off scale". Thus, the reactor crew could ascertain only that the radiation levels were somewhere above 0.001 R/s (3.6 R/h), while the true levels were 5,600 times higher in some areas.

Because of the fallacious low readings, the reactor crew chief Alexander Akimov assumed that the reactor was intact. The evidence of pieces of graphite and reactor fuel lying around the building was ignored, and the readings of another dosimeter brought in by 4:30 a.m. were dismissed under the assumption that the new dosimeter must have been defective. Akimov stayed with his crew in the reactor building until morning, trying to pump water into the reactor. None of them wore any protective gear. Most of them, including Akimov, died from radiation exposure within three weeks.

I suspect he took one look at that reading and thought to himself, "if that reading is correct, my goose is cooked". The Soviet Union never established much of a track record in encouraging the self-preservation of men poured into the breech. Typically, your reward for survival was being shot.

Back in America, the debate centers around 0.5 cancers in the aftermath, rather than the one or two hour window between what actually happened and the China syndrome. I wonder if they made an explicit political calculation: let's rush through publication of the Kemeny report before we learn anything more frightening we'd be obligated to disclose. Under the Bush administration, those obligations have mostly been terminated. They could probably write the accident report today for a future accident that hasn't even happened yet.

• There is handwriting on at least one of the scanned documents. It's questionable whether that means that sufficient additional creative content has been added to the non-protected derivative work.
  Personally, I think it doesn't. Comments might but we're talking about markings here. This is just my personal opinion though. This still doesn't rise beyond mechanical duplication, IMHO.
• It could be argued that putting together individual filings, and organizing them qualifies as a copyrightable compilation. (For those who are interested, here's a good basic introduction to get you started).
• This could also be a license violation as Groklaw's articles are covered by the Creative Commons License which requires attribution with republication.

I think it's questionable whether the PDF files count as a transcript which would be necessary since you would have to have a copyrightable work in the first place.

If memory serves me correctly, there was also a general consensus that

a) SCO sucks b) C&D'ing SCO could prove to be a very interesting publicity stunt c) SCO sucks.