Slashdot Mirror

Here's the problem:
"COPYRIGHT NOTICE
© 2008, STATE OF CALIFORNIA.
This material may not be commercially reproduced or sold in print or electronic forms without
written permission of ThomsonlWest."

http://bulk.resource.org/codes.gov/ccr/ca.ccr.01.pdf page 2

Here's the link, in case no one has posted it yet - http://bulk.resource.org/codes.gov/ccr/

Stay away from lion-ev. Haven't seen any good results from people dealing with lionev or Ken Curry

http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=Ken+Curry+fraud&btnG=Google+Search
http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=lionev+scam&btnG=Search

http://www.diyelectriccar.com/forums/showthread.php/evdl-lionev-7699.html
http://austinfarm.org/homegrown/downloads/lionev.txt
http://bulk.resource.org/courts.gov/c/F3/461/461.F3d.452.05-5173.05-5090.html

Also stay away from Spark-EV
http://www.autobloggreen.com/tag/spark-ev/

You can't copyright a game. Hasbro is suing them over the trademark. Scrabulous should have used a name that doesn't sound like Scrabble, then there would be nothing Hasbro could do. Perhaps Scrabulous could change their name to Crapple.

Well, according to the written law you can't trademark a game in general either. All you can protect with trademark law is a mark that enables the general public to identify a single source or manufacturer of products versus others of a similar type. If Scrabulous can successfully prove in court (once and for all) that the general public identifies the name "Scrabble" with the game in general (that is, its functional, non-copyrightable, game mechanics, the kind of stuff that could be/has been patented) and not with Hasbro's particular brand of Scrabble, then they can win their case. I'm not sure if there has ever been a case where this has been clearly tested in court one way or the other, since the big IP owners always seem to end up 'settling' with the little guys before it's ever fully decided.

See for example Anti-Monopoly, Inc. v. General Mills Fun Group for some intelligent legal discussion regarding the "monopoly" trademark and how the genericness test for game trademarks could be applied in general. Read the fictitious example on "EN PASSANT". (The Anti-Monopoly case went all the way to the Supreme Court, but then Parker Brothers bought out their opponents before they lost their precious trademark.)

See also this earlier Scrabble trademark case, where the dubious legal grounds of the trademark is suggested, but never fully tested. From the ruling: "The extent to which [SCRABBLE] has come into general use to describe a game or games rather than their origin or source of supply is fairly open to proof." And finally: "We express no opinion on the merits of S&R's claims."

Basically, if these guys find some lawyers who actually have a clue about the relevant law they might have a chance, but chances are they'll just buckle like most other small companies in the face of corporate behemoths. I mean come on, the combined legal weight of Hasbro AND EA coming down on them? These guys wouldn't stand a chance in hell even if their game was named "zzyzx".

Don't lawyers generally have to comply with their client's wishes? Even without constitutional rights being involved, I don't think a lawyer can just go off and present a defense that the defendant doesn't approve of.

The lawyer is the agent of the client, and so the lawyer generally must abide by the client's decisions concerning the objectives of representation. But, the lawyer is also a professional with independent ethical and professional obligations. Thus, the lawyer is responsible for establishing the means of representation, in reasonable consultation with the client.

For example, the lawyer cannot ethically use dilatory tactics (e.g., groundless motions and unwarranted requests for delay) or support the client in committing perjury (if the client insists on lying on the stand, the lawyer may be obliged to tell the court that the testimony given was false). For example, "[w]hatever the scope of a constitutional right to testify, it is elementary that such a right does not extend to testifying falsely." See Nix v. Whiteside, 475 U.S. 157, para. 51. Of course, presenting a defense that the client does not want presented is different from refusing to present a particular defense.

That being said, there might be some circumstances where a lawyer could present a particular defense that the client did not want presented. If the defense attorney can show that the client is not competent to decide which defenses to use, then the defense attorney may ask the court to appoint a guardian to represent the client's interests. The court-appointed guardian may approve of a defense that the client disapproves of, enabling to the lawyer to put forth a particular defense against the client's wishes.

Personally I am blown away by the incompetence of the defense attorney. Clearly he must have understood Reiser (guilty or not) would not help his case by testifying. He should never have been put on the stand.

In all likelihood, Reiser's lawyer did not want to put Reiser on the stand. However, it is generally accepted "[i]n a criminal case, [a] lawyer shall abide by the client's decision, after consultation with the lawyer...whether the client will testify." It is assumed that the right of a client to testify in criminal cases is a constitutional right. See Nix v. Whiteside, 475 U.S. 157, para. 16. Even if the client's testimony can only hurt the defense, the lawyer must allow the client to testify if the client so insists. To do otherwise would be unethical and impair the client's rights.

That O'Reilly story is over a year old; the REAL news is much more recent. As Lawrence Lessig reports, Malmud's resource.org and Lessig's CC have together purchased a database with a substantial portion of all federal cases. The group has made the data available xml format free for developers to use as they wish. See the resource.org press release at http://bulk.resource.org/courts.gov/0_Press_20080211.pdf

...from Thomson, the provider of Westlaw services:

http://bulk.resource.org/courts.gov/letter_to_west_response.pdf

Seems a pretty reasonable response to his initial query:

http://bulk.resource.org/courts.gov/letter_to_west.pdf

Thus, Thomson is justified in asserting copyright on materials which represent unique, original, or significant contributions to the content, and does not assert any copyright whatever on material which is in the public domain.

And if this work helps provide greater access information which is already publicly, but not easily, available, then it's a Good Thing.

But Westlaw and LexisNexis do a lot more than just make case law available online. There is a lot of editorial work, summarizing, organization, not to mention costs often imposed by the courts themselves, and Carl Malamud correctly acknowledges that.

...from Thomson, the provider of Westlaw services:

http://bulk.resource.org/courts.gov/letter_to_west_response.pdf

Seems a pretty reasonable response to his initial query:

http://bulk.resource.org/courts.gov/letter_to_west.pdf

Thus, Thomson is justified in asserting copyright on materials which represent unique, original, or significant contributions to the content, and does not assert any copyright whatever on material which is in the public domain.

And if this work helps provide greater access information which is already publicly, but not easily, available, then it's a Good Thing.

But Westlaw and LexisNexis do a lot more than just make case law available online. There is a lot of editorial work, summarizing, organization, not to mention costs often imposed by the courts themselves, and Carl Malamud correctly acknowledges that.

Actually they shouldn't be trying too hard. Knowingly infringing on a patent is triple damages. So do it unknowingly if you must.

This was actual legal advice given to me, so it's sound. In so many words he said it's far better given the current system to stick your head in the sand and pretend patents don't exist, because it's nearly impossible to write anything withing infringing something and it's better to wait for them to come after you.. and when they do being ignorant of the patent is much cheaper than knowing about it.

Not all lawyers give sound legal advice anymore than all programmers write sound software code. The advice you received was probably based on an interpretation of Underwater Devices, Inc. v. Morrison-Knudsen Co. 717 F.2d 1380 (Fed. Cir. 1984), where a company received two letters from the patent holder giving actual notice of the patent but did not assess the validity of the patent or ascertain whether the company was likely to infringe on the patent. There have been multiple opinions since then that have made it harder for a patent holder to prove willful infringement.

Is it better to stick your head in the sand so that if you get hit with a patent lawsuit you only have to pay damages instead of treble damages? Or is it better to take a look around a bit to see what's out there, identifying the patents that are easy to find, and avoiding infringement in the first place?

There can be a lot of low-hanging fruit out there. If you are mimicking someone's features, check to see if they received any patents or have filed an application. Try to identify patent classes that relate to your core technology, then skim through the abstracts to see if anything troublesome catches your eye. If you think the risk of infringement is high, get a lawyer involved (it'll probably be cheaper since you did the ground work of identifying the risk in the first place). If you don't think the risk is high, write a memo saying why you don't think it's a high risk. At least then you have evidence that you were being careful, and you may be able to avoid infringement altogether, which is even better.

There's nothing whatsoever limiting you from going to the source, just as they did. Nothing at all. The original material still exists.

at this point in time C-SPAN & the low quality government webcasts are all we have access to as individuals...

Carl Malamud wrote an insightful letter which addresses this issue. Part of that letter reads:

C-SPAN is a publicly-supported charity. Your only shareholders are the American public. Your donors received considerable tax relief in making donations to you. You and your staff were well paid for your excellent work. Congressional hearings are of strikingly important public value, and aggressive moves to prevent any fair use of the material is double-dipping on your part. For C-SPAN and for the American public record, the right thing to do is to release all of that material back into the public domain where it belongs.

C-SPAN could regularly upload broadcast-quality raw footage to The Internet Archive (archive.org). Archive.org could transcode the material into a variety of formats (including Ogg Vorbis+Theora which they're now doing for videos) and we can all enjoy the works we're paying for through tax relief and cable TV subscription. Certainly C-SPAN is taking a step in the right direction, but if this footage should be in the public domain, a "liberal" copyright license (as C-SPAN puts it) isn't good enough.

So long as we, the American public, are covering C-SPAN's bills (more than that, actually, as Malamud points out in his letter), we should democratically decide what to do with C-SPAN's programming—all of it, not just the Congressional hearings and floor footage. Perhaps this could take the form of C-SPAN (or their parent corporation) working for hire, thus giving us the power of copyright in all of those works. We could then decide to forgo that power, place all of their work into the public domain, and relieve ourselves of ever having to read another embarrassing legalistic threat when anyone uses C-SPAN footage for any purpose (including commercial use). But certainly what C-SPAN is proposing simply doesn't go far enough down the path they're headed on.

http://public.resource.org/main.html

Notice Al Gore was VP when this proposal was made.

RSS 1.0 is extensible in a standard way via namespaces. RSS 2.0 is extended via ad-hoc additions. Atom is extensible via namespaces.

The backbone on RSS1.0 extensibility is namespaces _and_ RDF, in that it can be merged with any other RDF vocabularies.

RSS2.0 is extensible via namespaces. For example, Microsoft's Simple List Extension to RSS 2.0.

Atom is more complicated than RSS 1.0, which is more complicated than RSS 2.0.

I don't know how you've come to the conclusion that Atom is more complicated than RSS1.0, other than to say that you'd be the first person I've ever seen saying that.

RSS2.0 is simple up to a point - for instance if you are publishing plain text entries with no angle brackets then you should be okay (or if you don't mind silent data loss). If you want to mark up your content with XHTML, with RSS2.0 you are out of luck unless you define an extension, and then hope aggregator developers pick up on it and implement it.

Atom cleanly specifies how to have content as plain text, HTML, XHTML, XML, or even a different media format altogether. RSS2.0 leaves you with plain text, or HTML.

This wiki misses the fact that RSS 1.0 and RSS 2.0 are competing formats, not progressive versions of the same standard.

RSS 1.0 is RDF-based like the original Netscape version of RSS, and is more extensible and structured than RSS 2.0 or Atom.

Annoyingly, neither camp wants to let go of the name "RSS" because they both lay claim to it, but it does actually stand for different things ("RDF Site Summary" / "Really Simple Syndication").

Readers would get more value from pages such as these:
http://www.xml.com/pub/a/2003/07/23/rssone.html
http://www.burningdoor.com/eric/archives/000239.ht ml
http://www.oreillynet.com/pub/a/network/2000/08/25 /magazine/rss_tut.html
http://web.resource.org/rss/1.0/

That's because RSS 9.x (which should include "2.0") has a very similar design philosophy to Perl. It's not supposed to be elegant, it's supposed to do whatever needs to be done to work ASAP. It's also writer-friendly over reader-friendly.

RSS 1.0 is slightly more complex but a gajillion times more elegant. It has actual standards for metadata.

I don't see how this breaks anything. If your RSS parser is correct it will just ignore tags from namespaces it does not support. You don't need to support the extensions to read the feeds.

Basically there are 4 situations.
1. You have an existing aggregator and don't care about the extensions. -- Do Nothing, your aggregator will go on working regardless of wether the feeds you read contain the extensions.

2. You produce feeds from your site/service and don't care about the extensions. -- Do Nothing, IE users will be able to read all your feeds, be they RSS 0.92, 1.0, 2.0 or Atom.

3. You produce feeds from your site/service and you want IE users to be able to use the extended features to sort and filter lists. -- Add a couple of extra tags to your feeds using the freely implementable standard Microsoft has defined.

4. You have an aggregator and want to add extra functionality to support sorting and filtering lists defined with the Microsoft extension. -- This requires the most work, but you have a specification to go by and a reference implementation in IE7. Its an entirely optional feature you might want to add to benifit your users.

Are the W3C channels for adding extensions to RSS? Apparently all you need to do is choose a unique namespace identifier, and place a standard specification document at that URL.

Slashdot alreadt has its own extension defined here, http://web.resource.org/rss/1.0/modules/slash/
should that have gone through the W3C?

I just don't see how these extensions can have a negative effect on existing RSS users or developers.

Copyright Durations
...the copyright term began on the date of publication or registration, and originally lasted 28 years...
http://www.bromsun.com/practice/copyrights/copyrig ht_durations.html

bulk.resource.org
Data rescued by media.org.
http://bulk.resource.org/copyright/

Copyright Clearance Center
http://www.copyright.com/

Copyright in Cyberspace
http://www.albion.com/netiquette/book/0963702513p1 33.html

Copyright Management Center
http://copyright.iupui.edu/

Copyright Website
http://www.benedict.com/

FAIRCOPY
http://www.faircopy.com/

Janis Ian
The Internet Debacle - An Alternative View
http://www.janisian.com/article-internet_debacle.h tml
FALLOUT - a follow up to The Internet Debacle
http://www.janisian.com/article-fallout.html

Musicians Against Copyrighting Of Samples
http://www.icomm.ca/macos/

Stanford University Libraries
http://fairuse.stanford.edu/

U.S. Copyright Office - Fair Use
http://www.copyright.gov/fls/fl102.html

What is Copyright Protection
http://www.whatiscopyright.org/

RDF (Resource Description Framework) is a meta-language, like XML. Except it's not even really a language, it's a model. Extra confusing because there are different syntaxes available, one of which is XML.

RSS 2.0 (Really Simple Syndication, I think) is what most people are talking about when they say RSS these days. Based on the original RSS 0.9x format, some people complain it's underspecified.

RSS 1.0 (RDF Site Summary) is a completely different specification, using the same basic concept & elements but all in the RDF model. Its detractors claim that RDF is too damned confusing (I won't argue there) and make the usual comments about ivory-tower intellectuals.

Atom's (not an acronym) the new kid, it hasn't actually been released yet but should be coming very soon - within weeks/months. Difficult to say anything about it until it's finalised, but it's got some nice stuff. I particularly like the Atom API. Clean & RESTful, mmm-mmm good. In my opinion (Atom ~= RSS 1.0) > RSS 2.0, but don't take my word for it as I'm fairly new to all this.

1. patent examiners are rated and promoted based on volume
2. it takes more work to deny a patent than accept it
3. patent applications have accelerated through the roof
4. trivial, obvious patents are granted every week
5. it has been over 50 years since SCOTUS properly slapped down USPTO for doing so
6. such patents are used to STIFLE competition and innovation rather than spur it

Marking up Hilton as <motel> or <celebrity> is all very well. This is what XML is for.

One of the key points behind the semantic web is to define meanings to your meta tags. My system has a <partnumber> tag and so does yours, but that doesn't mean they're the same. I can publish my definition of <partnumber> so that other apps can know how to interpret my partnumbers. Complex definitions can be provided in computer-readable format, which can then be looked up, referenced, shared etc. with other systems.

Take Dublin Core, for example. A standard set of tags to describe document attributes, such as title and author. Why should I write my own <author> tag when I can simply pull-in part of Dublin Core's vocabulary. Not only does that save me (the developer) time, but it means any app that knows about Dublin Core will know what I mean when I say "author". Or, if an app doesn't know about a particular term it can simply go look it up.

Sharing vocabularies is time-saving, but also helps computers process information automatically. Mr Berners-Lee and some colleagues had a good article published in Scientific American a while ago which explains their vision of intelligent software agents doing the sorts of things computers should be doing with the information the web has to offer. Such as automatically adjusting your schedule if your gym's online timetable has changed and your squash game needs to be moved. OK, that's a very basic example, but the point is that although the information needed to do this sort of stuff is already on the web, it is currently only readable by humans.

If anyone is interested in learning more about this stuff then have a look at the Resource Description Framework (RDF) which is a foundation technology of the Semantic Web (There's more to it than HTML META tags!). There's a lot of activity involving RDF-based technologies such as OWL, FOAF and the popular RSS.

Get your mailserver set up to support authenticated SMTP on port 587. It's been an RFC since 1998

as already mentioned, HTTP/1.1's If-Modified-Since header field would be a first hint

another way of minimizing the DDoS would be to use the Syndication module, which informs client programs when to update the feed - this would still mean that everyone tries to GET the RSS at the same time, but what about randomizing updateBase?

..but it doesn't help if the clients don't support either vanilla RSS syndication tags (ttl, skipDays, skipHours) or the tags defined by the optional syndication module (updatePeriod, updateFrequency, updateBase).

But even if every client obeyed these and used and respected appropiate HTTP headers (If-Modified-Since, Last-Modified, Expires), it would only make the request flood more synchronized. On the other hand, if the RSS generator randomized the syndication settings, it could distribute the load better and even premptively shift load off the peak times.

Plus, quite a few aggregators coming out these days are based on Mark Pilgrim's Universal Feed Parser, which is one of the most well-behaved aggregator backends out there.

And finally, for aggregators which understand certain of the namespaced extensions developed for RSS 1.0, there are the <sy:updatePeriod> and <sy:updateFrequency> elements from the syndication module, which allow you to tell the aggregator how often it should poll your feed.

The specs also state that it stands for RDF Site Summary.

What you need to remember is that RSS 1.0 and RSS 2.0 are two different formats, with a shared heritage (RSS 2.0 isn't the successor to RSS 1.0), it's more like how Netscape and Internet Explorer were both based upon Mosaic).

Anyone who followed the .Org bidding process knew this day was coming. ICANN's summary dismissal of the IMS/ISC bid as being too technical ("Internet is hard", says ICANN) in favor of 2-bit registrars who "white washed" their record by getting a major NGO to sit on the board made it inevitable.

Untill there is a standard calendar protocol, and that protocol is supported by exchange, you won't be able to get rid of it.

What ever happened to iCalendar, sometimes known as vCalendar?

Aren't there any LDAP-based solutions or proposals?

Mod the parent up! These are the good guys.

As one of the official supplicants, I naturally read the profiles (and even read the full proposals). So, it was with some bemusement that I noted a continued strain of ".org has to go to a for-profit registry provider because that is the only way the system will be stable."

We posted a few choice words on this subject. The "trust us because we're a .com and will run a stable argument" argument just doesn't wash.

Carl Malamud
Internet Muticasting Service

Last session there was a bill, the Artists' Contribution to American Heritage Act, that would have allowed the picture painting scenario you describe, see Sen. Leahy's letter. It seems likely that it would have applied to software but its not clear how it would be applied to Open Source software because it is unclear how to appraise Open Source software. See the thread on the Union for the Public Domain's mailing list.

In the discussion, according to RMS companies (not individuals) can already claim a credit for donations of proprietary software to FSF (which would presumably "free" it) or other such organization, but that he was not aware of any such situation where that had occured. It would surprise me if no companies would take advantage of this as companies like IBM are donating copyrights on code to FSF. I believe that patches to GCC must have copyright assigned to FSF.

The bill didn't pass, it will probably be reintroduced this session.

Of course, any discussion of taxes and free software would be incomplete w/o mentioning the Hacker Tax Credit.

Check out a draft of bxxp at:
http://xml.resource.org/profiles/BXXP/bxxp.html