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Students have been suspended and expelled with shame from universities for their blogs for some time now. Too bad for them they don't live in an English-speaking countries.

Students have been suspended and expelled with shame from universities for their blogs for some time now. Too bad for them they don't live in an English-speaking countries.

...this message is: please notice, that the current topic has had a quite deep coverage in Russian science fiction, here is a link to a recent and, presumably interesting for an international audience, example (in an automatized English translation). (or just use a URL, that has been previously created: http://tinyurl.com/c6grb )

Check the correct option. :) It is often argued by file-sharing advocates that P2P apps, such as KaZaA have a lot of non-infringing uses. Their opponents respond by claiming that despite that 90%+ of the traffic on KaZaA is illegal. But that certainly depends on the point of view.

Most people here on Slashdot subconsciously assume that US laws define the picture, but that is not true. Copyright laws in different countries are different (that is probably one of the reasons for KaZaA's complex legal structure). You've heard about DeCSS case in Norway, you've heard about Denmark P2P users getting bills for downloaded files, but have you heard about the place where half of the Hollywood movies in in the public domain? :)

Here is the breaking news. The Ministry of Culture of Russian Federation has published a long list of movies that are now in the public domain (automated translation of the list> by Translate.Ru). Titles include Bambi, Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, Godfather, 2001: A Space Odyssey, Casablanca, Citizen Kane, Lawrence of Arabia, Monty Python and hundreds of other brilliant films.

This is not the first time when opposition to copyright comes from Russia and probably not the last. Now that these movies officially belong to the public (in Russia), what implications, do you think, this has for the rest of the world and for file-sharing?

And hosting in Russia would probably cost just a few cents per movie uploaded abroad... And the best thing is that would really be 100% legal.

P.S. You may think this is too good to be true, but believe me, it is true. It seems that most movies more than 30 years old really are in public domain now (called obschestvennoe dostoyanie in Russian.

Check the correct option. :) It is often argued by file-sharing advocates that P2P apps, such as KaZaA have a lot of non-infringing uses. Their opponents respond by claiming that despite that 90%+ of the traffic on KaZaA is illegal. But that certainly depends on the point of view.

Most people here on Slashdot subconsciously assume that US laws define the picture, but that is not true. Copyright laws in different countries are different (that is probably one of the reasons for KaZaA's complex legal structure). You've heard about DeCSS case in Norway, you've heard about Denmark P2P users getting bills for downloaded files, but have you heard about the place where half of the Hollywood movies in in the public domain? :)

Here is the breaking news. The Ministry of Culture of Russian Federation has published a long list of movies that are now in the public domain (automated translation of the list> by Translate.Ru). Titles include Bambi, Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, Godfather, 2001: A Space Odyssey, Casablanca, Citizen Kane, Lawrence of Arabia, Monty Python and hundreds of other brilliant films.

This is not the first time when opposition to copyright comes from Russia and probably not the last. Now that these movies officially belong to the public (in Russia), what implications, do you think, this has for the rest of the world and for file-sharing?

And hosting in Russia would probably cost just a few cents per movie uploaded abroad... And the best thing is that would really be 100% legal.

P.S. You may think this is too good to be true, but believe me, it is true. It seems that most movies more than 30 years old really are in public domain now (called obschestvennoe dostoyanie in Russian.

This implies that either MT has improved drastically in the past few years, or was never that bad in the first place.

Well, Socrates (Arsenal, Inc), PROMT and others have had IM translation for some time. The Socrates/ARS web site even has one that works with MSN! I've been using another package for over two years. This sounds fishy to me. We use IM translation with AIM, ICQ and MSN all the time. Reading the Patent Application, I don't see anything that isn't prior art here.

Someone from the Russian space centre revealed this right after the landing, and later the story was changed to a "software glitch". It is always easier to blame a computer than human error, which happens more often.

Here is the link to the Russian site that describes this, translated by www.translate.ru. Check the last paragraph.

Chris

Also, I'm noticing more and more German borrowing in the hacker world. Is it just me? If it's not, any speculation on why?

The Jargon File has something about Jewish (Ashkhenazi?) hackers, and there are some traditional terms there from German. Maybe.

But I don't see it apart from Slashdot stories. Maybe German-speaking editors?

And now that Altavista's owners are certifiably evil (having patented things like web crawlers), are there any other places we can go for translation needs?

Check translate.ru. I don't know if it's better but it translates to/from Russian as well.
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