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Project Gutenburg [gutenberg.org] put up free ASCII versions of out-of-copyright books.

So what if by 2050, OCR technology has progressed so far that PG has put every significant piece of pre-1923 literature into electronic form, and the copyright term has been extended to 150 years or longer? What will they do then?

The upshot is that every time I use my Philips CDR765 to record music composed 300 years ago

Watch out! That composition might be copyrighted in the European Union if the next retroactive copyright term extension bill passes. Unlike the USA, where once it's expired, it's expired, EU copyright term extensions typically re-copyright works whose copyright has expired.

you'll be the last person picked to play in a dodge ball game

Only because most geeks are sedentary. At my school, dodgeball players were picked based on the performance that they had demonstrated, not on any character stereotype. Sure, the agile geek might get picked near the end before the first couple games, but that can change quickly.

See also "Recess." (Yes, I know Di$ney is evil, but still...)

Will Creative Commons maintain a staff of lawyers to work license infringment cases pro-bono?

Be careful! If you use the term "pro bono" instead of "for free," you appear to support the 95-plus year copyright term granted by the Sonny Bono Copyright Term Extension Act. (No U2 jokes please.)

At my College we still learn RPG and COBOL in computer programming, languages very much based on punch cards. We are "lucky" enough, though, to have an AS/400 minicomputer to log into that supports 5250 emulation, so we only have to live with the effects of programming in a punch card language.

Unfortunately I've never actually been shown a punch card, making RPGs very strange limitations and stringent requirements all that much more frustrating.

Umm, if there were no copyright law, there wouldn't be any proprietary products in the first place.

Yes there would; they'd just be protected under trade secret + contract law rather than copyright law. Copyright infringement cases are generally civil cases, and damages usually don't top five figures per work infringed. Trade secret cases, on the other hand, carry even bigger damages, plus jail time for all involved.

Being against this ruling and against copyright law is not hypocritical. Being for the ruling and against copyright law is.

I agree with many of the general principles of copyright, and I agree with this ruling, but I don't agree with the specifics of the implementation of copyright in the United States. For instance, I don't agree with the anti-circumvention provisions of the DMCA as interpreted in recent cases (the courts have flatly ignored many of the exceptions), and I don't agree with life+70 copyright terms. I also don't like companies whose products teach a message of sharing but who do not themselves share (i.e. license to individual webmasters under reasonable terms) their own IP. Does that make me a hypocrite?

If I decided to stop using that software, is that EULA still binding?

Some clauses in the EULA for AOL Instant Messenger 4.0 and later are labeled to "survive termination of this License." Because one of those terms said that I couldn't use third party software to access AOL's servers, I clicked "Disagree." My winbox still runs AIM 3.0, whose EULA doesn't have such restrictions.

If it is still binding, for how long?

In perpetuity, unless you believe in reincarnation.

Fact: EULAs can last longer than the copyright on the software (which is nearly perpetual anyway).

Thank you for putting things into perspective. I have never been to Poland, so can hardly picture what life is like there. Was in USSR in the eighties, and if that was any indication...

Most of the 20th century meant wars or occupation for Poland (I personally know people who were prisoners of the extermination camps in Oswiecim (Auschwitz), so I've heard a lot of really terrible stories), but there were times, where we had an empire that reached from the Baltic to the Black Sea, being a very important power in Europe, not only as a military power, but also in the terms of culture and science. Those were times of the great Aztecs civilisation in America.

Living in the exact centre of Europe is nice, but being exactly between the Germany and USSR used to be very unfortunate.

Now we're part of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization and soon we'll join the European Union. I do hope that things will change for better, and that the 21st century will mean, unlike the 20th century, first of all peace and freedom, but also a fast economical and technological growth for Poland.

A good introduction to Polish history is the History of Poland on Encyclopedia.com and the History of Poland on Wikipedia.

You can find more general info on Encyclopedia.com, on Wikipedia and on Britannica.com. If you're interested, there are lots of links to information about Poland on Polska.pl (Polska means Poland in Polish).

If you are ever on the West Coast of the US, drop me a line. Email is the last bit of my URL at the domain name in front of it. I'd be happy to show you one way of providing bandwidth to a community.

Thank you for putting things into perspective. I have never been to Poland, so can hardly picture what life is like there. Was in USSR in the eighties, and if that was any indication...

Most of the 20th century meant wars or occupation for Poland (I personally know people who were prisoners of the extermination camps in Oswiecim (Auschwitz), so I've heard a lot of really terrible stories), but there were times, where we had an empire that reached from the Baltic to the Black Sea, being a very important power in Europe, not only as a military power, but also in the terms of culture and science. Those were times of the great Aztecs civilisation in America.

Living in the exact centre of Europe is nice, but being exactly between the Germany and USSR used to be very unfortunate.

Now we're part of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization and soon we'll join the European Union. I do hope that things will change for better, and that the 21st century will mean, unlike the 20th century, first of all peace and freedom, but also a fast economical and technological growth for Poland.

A good introduction to Polish history is the History of Poland on Encyclopedia.com and the History of Poland on Wikipedia.

You can find more general info on Encyclopedia.com, on Wikipedia and on Britannica.com. If you're interested, there are lots of links to information about Poland on Polska.pl (Polska means Poland in Polish).

If you are ever on the West Coast of the US, drop me a line. Email is the last bit of my URL at the domain name in front of it. I'd be happy to show you one way of providing bandwidth to a community.

Mozilla .999999843 released!

Are you implying that Mozilla will use an "asymptotic fraction of 1" version numbering system similar to TeX's "asymptotic fraction of " system?

Speaking of TeX, it appears that if a new bug pops up in TeX the day after Knuth dies, it won't get fixed for 70 years (or longer if Disney's Congress continues to extend the copyright term) because Knuth's last will and testament includes freezing TeX.

...Common Lisp's macro facility, itself one of the prime features that make Common Lisp ... the most powerful language on the planet.

I'm reminded of a story involving Bill Gates and a certain law suit he filed years ago, in which he discussed how difficult it was for two programs to operate in the same way to achieve the same objective. The difference here, is the code is often Mickey Mouse

By "Mickey Mouse," do you imply that it's such valuable intellectual property that a publisher will buy senators to keep extending the term of the monopoly?

This is a non issue: Save documents for the period of time dealing with the Statute of Limitations dealing in your area. I work for an architecture firm. We archive documents for 7 years on site, then move them off site for another 13 years. That way in 20 total years, our statute of limitations is over and we can do what we wnat with the documents.

No, [moving to Hong Kong to produce region busters] would be in violation of international copyright laws.

"International law" does not exist except in the implementation of treaties by contracting states. There's no treaty (except possibly a stretched interpretation of the WIPO Copyright Treaty) that prohibits circumventing region lockouts. The anti-circumvention language of the WIPO treaty is also apparently a bit weaker than that of 17 USC 1201.

In fact, New Zealand has already outlawed region coding as an unfair restraint of trade, and Australia is moving in that direction.

A couple of points (from a Wikipedian):

1. Wikipedia currently uses the GNU Free Documentation License; we didn't formulate our own.

2. Wikipedia isn't a general content repository, but an encyclopedia project. The project welcomes articles on all topics under the sun, but entire books aren't our mandate.

That being said, anyone can set up a wiki and develop any type of content. All you need is a webserver and some software. Wikipedia uses UseModWiki, which is written in Perl and is under the GPL. --Stephen Gilbert

Many people create valuable content and then insist on hosting or publishing the content themselves.

Instead consider contributing your content to a public content repository like Wikipedia.

This allows other people to easily contribute to and update your work, even if you lose interest or something happens to you. Additionally, your work will be redundantly stored and likely accessible for the far future.

The rest of them can have the surface of this planet we will send up fruit baskets every once in awhile and we will be sure to visit when we are hungry after a long day's work.

Oh, The Time Machine by H. G. Wells. How precious (yes, the Eloi from The Time Machine look like Precious Moments). You do know that you'll have to spray drugs on the food to keep the Eloi from learning everything you do and revolting against you? You do know that in the forthcoming sequel, the Eloi rise up and pull an Animal Farm on your asses?

The rest of them can have the surface of this planet we will send up fruit baskets every once in awhile and we will be sure to visit when we are hungry after a long day's work.

Oh, The Time Machine by H. G. Wells. How precious (yes, the Eloi from The Time Machine look like Precious Moments). You do know that you'll have to spray drugs on the food to keep the Eloi from learning everything you do and revolting against you? You do know that in the forthcoming sequel, the Eloi rise up and pull an Animal Farm on your asses?

[separation of church and state is]

From the first amendment to the U.S. Constitution: "Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof."

We write a free (GNU) encyclopedia using the wiki paradigm at Wikipedia.com. So far, we have produced over 20,000 articles in one year. Quality varies, of course.

The idea to combine wikis and weblogs is very promising. The sequential nature of weblogs is great for news, but not for acting on these news in a sustained fashion. If Slashdot writes about some political issue, if actions are taken they are usually short-lived, or move to other mailing lists. Similarly, wikis can combine sites which host both a lot of persistent knowledge (e.g. papers, essays) with the dynamic, community-creating nature of a weblog. I plan to eventually run violence.de as a wiki-weblog, with the wiki (access-restricted) storing the papers, film pages etc., and the weblog reporting about current issues (sexual repression, censorship, new studies etc.) -- mail me if you want to help.

Wikis, when properly deployed, are the missing component to make weblogs truly useful. With properly deployed, I mean that typical wiki idiosyncrasies need to be avoided: Nobody really wants to use WikiStyleLinks, they make text harder to read and are difficult to get rid of once you have decided to use them. Choose E2 or Wikipedia style links instead. Also, access restrictions are necessary in many contexts. See the article for some further design details.

Slashbots drone on about the virtues of Pro Bono Programming

Never capitalize "pro bono" unless you support the Copyright Term Extension Act of 1998.

I see that you know the stuff, and you are happy to answer people's questions on slashdot.

Would it be too much to ask you to drop on wikipedia and add some of this knowledge to the physics section?

A fellow physicist and wikipedian.

Now that Be has gone chapter 11, can I finally get a free copy _FULL_ of Be?

Yes. In ninety-five years.

Is this simply a coincidence?

"For its part, Cisco released last fall Open Conditional Content Access Management (Occam), an end-to-end content encryption and access control technology specification, designed for implementation in hardware for interactive television and portable network devices."

Occams razor: "Pluralitas non est ponenda sine necessitate" or "Pluralities should not be posited without necessity." Source: Occam's razor

- GoatBeard

you're trusting everything2 for accurate data [on the Bono Act]?

You mean like this?

Sonny Bono Copyright Extension Act (idea) by yerricde
Wikipedia article covering the Bono Act to which I contributed heavily

Yes. I'm trusting myself and my sources (which include the Library of Congress web site and Open Secrets) for accurate data.

Virus writers are terrorists.

"Unlike acts of terrorism, acts of sabotage do not have a primary objective of causing casualties". They're not terrorists but mere saboteurs.

Yes it did, the r3000 was the baseline proc and everything after that was 64 bit in mips land.

Human societies the world over have emerged from the caves by their ability and willingness to share information freely, and use this information to better their lives.

This is totally against known history. Even mythological sources from the dawn of civilization embrace the concept of not sharing information. Why do you think Vulcan and Waylan are lame? It's so they can't leave their place of employment and share trade secrets with competitors.

Face it, from the early days of the caves survival often depended on an advantage over the neighbors - and that advantage was often in the form of information - where the best water source was, how to make the best bowstring, etc.

Human society coexisted with a nature red in tooth and claw. Intellectual property was often a life or death matter in an environment where nothing was abundant.

The notion of 'ownable intellectual property' was an artificial construct used initially to protect the incomes of publishers (who faced the large costs of typesetting and production),

Again totally ignoring actual history. The concept of intellectual property related to written works arose during Greek times in order to preserve the claim of origin by the original author. The first copyright law "Statute of Anne" arose with the spread of the printing press to codify what was common law long before the printing press was common. This law was designed to prevent piracy since the wide availability of the press made it easy to print something without the author's permission. If you take the time to read the Statute of Anne you will see that the fact of the matter is that copyrights were originally designed to protect authors - and it is still true today.

Do you think Sony would pay one nickel to any musician is they didn't have to???

The practice of giving gifts on Christmas comes from an older, more magical tradition. From "The Magikal Year" (ISBN: 0877288828), in the pagan world, the person who did not give generously during this time of year would not have good luck in the coming new year. (Could this be the true origin of, "It is more blessed to give than to receive" and other seasonal aphorisms?). Later, Christians adopted the practice in order to remember and honor "God's great gift to mankind" or something like that.

For some more informative Christmas and pre-Christmas links, check out the Wikipedia's Christmas entry.

Merry Holy Days to my fellow /.ers!! May Health, wealth, Peace, Goodwill, and lots of nifty gadgets be yours now and always ;).

The practice of giving gifts on Christmas comes from an older, more magical tradition. From "The Magikal Year" (ISBN: 0877288828), in the pagan world, the person who did not give generously during this time of year would not have good luck in the coming new year. (Could this be the true origin of, "It is more blessed to give than to receive" and other seasonal aphorisms?). Later, Christians adopted the practice in order to remember and honor "God's great gift to mankind" or something like that.

For some more informative Christmas and pre-Christmas links, check out the Wikipedia's Christmas entry.

Merry Holy Days to my fellow /.ers!! May Health, wealth, Peace, Goodwill, and lots of nifty gadgets be yours now and always ;).

Yup, it was Clarke in the Rama books. It is the third of Clarke's Three Laws that makes the Indistinguishable From Magic statement.

Of course, there have been more than a few variations on that theme.

John Brunner would have loved this.

• The open textbook project
• open mind publishing
• The Wikipedia

Here's the text of 17 USC 1201 (the part of the DMCA that slashdotters care about). Subsections (c)(1) and (c)(2) does not provide that fair use is a defence to "circumvention" but instead establishes that the offence of "circumvention" is completely orthogonal to "infringement." Subsection (c)(3) says "This is not the SSSCA... yet." Subsection (c)(4), which protects free speech/press, makes it clear that the RIAA cannot use the DMCA against Felten.

Our biggest shot at making the DMCA moot may lie with subsection (a)(2)(B): "a technological measure 'effectively protects a right of a copyright owner under this title' if the measure, in the ordinary course of its operation, prevents, restricts, or otherwise limits the exercise of a right of a copyright owner under this title." The right to restrict fair use is not "a right of a copyright holder under this title" without some heavy circular logic.

Another way is to attack "a work protected under this title" by making a CSS'd DVD containing a film whose copyright has expired. Public domain works are not "work[s] protected under this title." The DMCA is nothing without repeated copyright term extensions to keep copyrighted works copyrighted. Then we can release a device marketed for playing this public-domain DVD that just "happens to work" on copyrighted DVDs and thus satisfy the substantial non-infringing purpose requirement of 1201(a)(2).

You have a choice, you can buy the product or not buy the product. Copyrights and patents protect the creator from you stealing their hard efforts without just compensation.

You don't always have a choice. Before AT&T was split up, did you have a choice as to what telephone provider you could use? It was either AT&T or use a pay phone. It's the same in most areas with electric power: either the local energy monopoly or live like the Amish.

If anything like the the SSSCA passes: "You must buy computers with a DRM OS. Microsoft has a patent on DRM OS technology. Therefore, you must buy Microsoft software or never buy another computer for twenty years, until the patent expires." Then Microsoft goes and pulls a Sonny Bono trying to get its monopoly on computers extended.

Narrow government-granted monopolies are OK (to replace patented GIF LZW use PNG Deflate; to replace patented MP3 use Ogg Vorbis; to replace Win2k use FreeBSD). Broad government-granted monopolies (such as one-click shopping, hyperlinks, topological sorting of computation in a functional program, pause function on DVR, etc.) are not.

Most Photoshop users will never switch to the GIMP, not ever, for any reason.

Most Photoshop users who work in prepress use Photoshop for prepress, and all known methods of doing prepress on a computer are patented. Most Photoshop Elements users (PS Elements is PS minus prepress for only $100) don't. This situation will change 20 years after the day Photoshop introduced prepress, when the patents expire. Just thank God that Sonny Bono never got to patents.

You should not discount that in considering the future of Windows. It is the preferred development platform for games.

You don't need Windows to make a Game Boy Advance game. You need only a text editor (Emacs), a compiler (GCC targeted for ARM), a paint program (GIMP), a graphics converter (several exist), a compression tool (gzip), a build tool (GNU make), and a way to flash a cartridge or transfer a 256 KB netboot image. Software included with Linux or freely downloadable provides all of the above.

Maybe what is needed is a wikipedia for documentation. Usually programmers are not very good at documentation, and users find difficult to get into docbook and stuff.

Wikipedia have got about 20000 articles in just one year, some of them of very good quality.

If we were to give users the ability to do the documentation themselves, I bet they would use the oportunity.

The teaching from wikipedia is that you get good quality writing if enough people works on it. Something like code peer review.

Wikipedia.

http://www.wikipedia.com if you're frightened of links.

Its interesting, though, that apparently the binary image can be posted w/o fear of copyright infringement.

Wrong. Much abandonware falls under the "no suitor, no judge" rule. For example, it's OK to distribute the "Zero Wing" ROM because Toaplan, its publisher, no longer exists and therefore can't sue. However, in this case, both Hasbro (Parker Bros parent) and Tolkien's estate (licensor of LotR franchise) still exist and still maintain legal departments.

Are all 2600 games 'free' now?

Copyright on corporate-authored works lasts ninety-five years plus the rest of the calendar year. Blame Sonny Bono and Di$ney for such a counterproductively long copyprivilege term.

I recall that for SNES games and the like the ROMs are still considered warez or bootlegged.

You're probably thinking of mask work copyright, which Nintendo claims prohibits even fair-use backups of software that happens to be stored on a semiconductor ROM chip. (A careful reading may show that it prohibits only burning the data back onto a ROM chip; however, this depends on how the courts interpret "reproduction" of a mask work and whether or not ROM is a "commonplace design" that goes unprotected.) Such copyright lasts only ten years plus December 31.

Its interesting, though, that apparently the binary image can be posted w/o fear of copyright infringement.

Wrong. Much abandonware falls under the "no suitor, no judge" rule. For example, it's OK to distribute the "Zero Wing" ROM because Toaplan, its publisher, no longer exists and therefore can't sue. However, in this case, both Hasbro (Parker Bros parent) and Tolkien's estate (licensor of LotR franchise) still exist and still maintain legal departments.

Are all 2600 games 'free' now?

Copyright on corporate-authored works lasts ninety-five years plus the rest of the calendar year. Blame Sonny Bono and Di$ney for such a counterproductively long copyprivilege term.

I recall that for SNES games and the like the ROMs are still considered warez or bootlegged.

You're probably thinking of mask work copyright, which Nintendo claims prohibits even fair-use backups of software that happens to be stored on a semiconductor ROM chip. (A careful reading may show that it prohibits only burning the data back onto a ROM chip; however, this depends on how the courts interpret "reproduction" of a mask work and whether or not ROM is a "commonplace design" that goes unprotected.) Such copyright lasts only ten years plus December 31.

Do I have to be running a server to download linux ISOs, pr0n videos and public domain (50-year-old) movies?

Sorry, but the only public domain movies are those first published on or before December 31, 1922. Almost anything first published on or after January 1, 1923, is under effectively perpetual copyright in the United States, under a precedent set by the Sonny Bono Copyright Term Extension Act and the Eldred v. Ashcroft decision that gives Congress the power to set arbitrarily long terms on copyright.

Guess when the first Technicolor movie was made? 1923.

I'd love to see a Wikipedia-like effort devoted to this.

• Wikipedia article to which I contributed
• Everything 2 article that I wrote
• Eldred v. Ashcroft, a lawsuit to overturn the Bono Act
• House directory and Senate directory: whom to fax if you want this law repealed. Yes, fax. E-mail is assumed to be spam, while paper mail is assumed to carry anthrax.

The question is, would you still have made the Quake mod if you'd known absolutely that it wouldn't land you a job-- or if you already had a great job waiting for you?

And to go further, having contemplated that question, do you think the majority of Open Source coders would answer as you did? If the answer to both questions is yes, or the answer to both questions is no, then I think Open Source would do just fine without financial incentives to back it up.

For a great example of people contributing their time with just about 0 expectation of reward, check out collaborative projects like Wikipedia (or even Slashdot, for that matter!) People spend hundreds of hours posting to these things with little to no realistic expectation that they'll get a resume boost out of it. We coders are lucky in that we can haul out the old "it'll gain me work experience" excuse to justify our own concerns about the time we spend.

I think the system we have, with copyright expiring after a while, is the correct system: that way the artist knows his immediate family profit from his work and not faceless corporations.

Immediate family, immediate profit. Copyright should last life plus TEN years (long enough for the family members to learn to produce more works), not life plus 70. However, Constitution 1.8.8 as interpreted by the Eldred v. Ashcroft court recognizes the lifetime of the Universe less a day as an adequate "limited time."

Americans: please write your representative and senators, asking them to repeal the Sonny Bono Copyright Term Extension Act.

Is the US Constitution strictly relevant to a book by a British author?

Yes. The Berne Convention establishes international copyright law, but United States Constitution 6.2 (This constutition, and statutes and treaties thereunder, "shall be the supreme law of the land") requires that all treaties be constitutional, and US Constitution 1.8.8. This is why the United States does not recognize the statutory perpetual copyright that the UK has passed on some of JM Barrie's work.

Is the US Constitution strictly relevant to a book by a British author?

Yes. The Berne Convention establishes international copyright law, but United States Constitution 6.2 (This constutition, and statutes and treaties thereunder, "shall be the supreme law of the land") requires that all treaties be constitutional, and US Constitution 1.8.8. This is why the United States does not recognize the statutory perpetual copyright that the UK has passed on some of JM Barrie's work.

Is the US Constitution strictly relevant to a book by a British author?

Yes. The Berne Convention establishes international copyright law, but United States Constitution 6.2 (This constutition, and statutes and treaties thereunder, "shall be the supreme law of the land") requires that all treaties be constitutional, and US Constitution 1.8.8. This is why the United States does not recognize the statutory perpetual copyright that the UK has passed on some of JM Barrie's work.

If, in a fit of altruism, I transcoded popular movie trailers from Sorenson and put them on the web would I be guilty of something?

Guilty of something, but it probably wouldn't be copyright infringement. United States copyright law, 17 USC 107, provides exceptions for "fair use" of a copyrighted work. As ichimunki pointed out, because you would normally post the trailers for the purpose of promoting the movie (criterion 1), because the trailer is expressly designed for such use (criterion 2), and because the trailers were free anyway (no economic market; criterion 4), a judge with sense would find that transcoding and posting the trailers does not infringe on the studio's bottom line.

However, to cover your @$$, please ask first. Tell the studio that millions of users of BSD and Linux operating systems cannot run QuickTime Player and will have more of a chance of seeing the film if they can see the trailer, and that your mirror of the trailer will help save on their Akamai mirroring bill. If you ask, and the studio declines, then you can post your "Disney Sucks!" or "AOL Pictures Sucks!" page explaining exactly why the trailers are not available.

DMCA Disclaimer: Current interpretations of 17 USC 1201 treat circumvention and infringement as orthogonal offences. Whether a work is eligible for Section 1201 restrictions against circumvention depends only on if a copyright exists (term determined by the Bono Act), not on whether the circumvention is also an act of infringement.