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Slashback: Nerves, Unis, Subtitles
Yes, does that come with insurance? An anonymous reader writes "Channel 4 news has a small report on the way that financial institutions are moving their computer systems and data backup out of central London to establishments such as The Bunker and Sealand."
Suddenly, those places seem a bit like less of a novelty and more good plain sense.
Copyright vs. Presumptive Scanning, part VXIIIXIX AnElder writes "The SMH (Sydney Morning Herald) now reports that 'Recording companies have asked the Federal Court to allow their computer experts to scan all computers at the University of Melbourne for sound files and email accounts, so they can gather evidence of claimed widespread breaches of copyright.' Are libraries next? "Counsel for the companies, Mr Tony Bannon SC, said industry studies of piracy had found public institutions such as universities and libraries were the biggest repositories of unlawful sound recordings."
Speaking of brand integrity. increment writes "The Engrish TTT Captions Site that was mentioned earlier here has apparently received a cease and desist order from AOL/Warner Bros and taken down their hilarious bootleg screenshots of The Two Towers. You did know that AOL is the parent company of New Line Cinema, right? AOL probably contends that humorous captions 'degrade their brand integrity,' though they should be grateful for such a vivid illustration of the poor quality of bootlegs. A few mirrors of the site can still be found around the net."
What about robotic juicers for the home? CallNElvis writes "Here's another interesting (translate that to "Cool! I want one") site lazydrinker.com showing a tabletop automatic drink pouring machine. It seems to be a little more polished than the last one posted here. The site includes a pretty cool mpeg of it in action."
Blend it into Knoppix, please :) 3-D modeling program Blender was converted from a proprietary license to the GPL last October. What's been going on since then? An anonymous reader writes "A couple of days ago, Blender 2.26 was released. This is the first open source version, and has all the features of the previous proprietary version, except physics support in the gamekit, which was not owned by NaN, and could thus not be opened.
Blender is 'the vi of 3d-modeling,' and was Freed by the community, when NaN (the company creating blender) went broke. It is platform independent (with roots in Unix), scriptable, has a steep but rewarding learning curve, ingenious but nonstandard user interface, and can be used to make games, 3d-web-thingies (there exists a browser plugin) and of course images, animations and models (which among others, can be exported to POV-ray)."
Mandrake keeps moving -- give it a whirl.
An anonymous reader writes "The Mandrake 9.1 testing cycle is coming to an end. I haven't noticed any big fan-fare for testing this version, but I noticed that RC-1 is now on many of the ftp mirrors found here.
If you like the distro, don't forget to join MandrakeClub where you can help the company and have a say in what packages they include in their user-friendly distro."
They want to scan their email too?
We all have seen the clauses in the Terms of Service that say that email is not private, that this is univerisity owned equipment and such. I can understand if they were going to scan incoming email for attachments, but it would appear that they want to scan the student's personal computer too!
My bet is that if they scan the student's computers that they are going to find more porn than music...
No Not Again! Its whats for dinner.
Erm... no.
How do I know? I got a copy when I went to China. Hey don't bitch - The movie won't be in Japan for another two monthes (maybe one and half), and if you don't make it available when I am WILLING to pay and see it - you'd bet your ass I'm gonna buy the 1USD copy off a street-stall when it's available.
So anyway - the bootleg was actually for submission to the academy awards - so the quality was definitely not bad. You can imagine academy awards copies are better than the "sit in the theatre w/ a camera" copies, by a far margin. If I ever decide to choke up the cash for a real copy (probably after all three are out), I'll let y'all know. but by that time I wonder if anyone still cares =)
But, this really means that the academy awards ppl is leaking films. so... why arn't you guys (MPAA) looking harder at your OWN PEOPLE? like, the academy, for one?
My life in the land of the rising sun.
Isn't that the same excuse many use to burn books?
They are legal for one reason: journalistic interest in illustrating what the bootlegs look like. The First Amendment trumps copyright.
Warning: this article may contain humor, sarcasm, parody, and perhaps even irony. Read at your own risk.
I think that that whole incident with AOL Time Warner losing $98,000,000,000 just last year does a bit more to "degrade their brand integrity", not to mention that at least once a week they are in the news because a board member is fired or leaves the company because the whole entity hit the fan a while back.
The screenshots from the two towers bootleg are illegal for two reasons:
a) They are not authorized pictures from the movie and could possibly spoil the movie for someone who hasn't seen it and that can result in lost sales
I guess I have to see a piece of legislation that bans movie spoilers, descriptions, opinions, etc. That piece of legislation doesn't exist in the U.S., nor do I think it exists in Norway. In fact, using parts of copyrighted work for fair use, including speech, opinions, caricatures is perfectly legal and done daily almost everywhere around the world.
b) Showing pictures of a "bootleg" of a movie could potentially promote the art of bootlegging (which already is responsible for millions in lost/stolen sales)
What a ridiculous statement! Also, showing murders, mass killings, drug use, rape, etc. in many AOL/Time Warner movies could potentially promote the art (?) of such actions. So, those movies should be censored and deemed illegal too. Censor everything?
Aol/Time Warner is within their rights and has a duty to protect their copywritten work. Sorry folks.
Sorry man, everyone else is also within their full rights to use copyrighted works within the fair use guidelines. Seems like AOL/Time Warner should go after people who copy and sell their work, rather than consumers.
the First Ammendment is not relevant to this discussion. However, fair use is.
They're the same thing. The "Fair" part about the use is that it is in support of freedom of speech.
Duplicating an author's work is against copyright law. But duplicating parts of the work may be necessary to produce other kinds of original, protected speech (like journalistic review and academic analysis), and is allowed.
"Fair Use" is basically the courts' established interpretation of the boundaries between the First Amendment and Section 8.8.
Lot's of parents plot their kids in front of the household baby sitter the good ole' T.V. Imagine walking in to the room and seeing some cartoon say "Sweet Zombie Jesus!".
Except that this is during their "Adult Swim" cartoon time, throughout which parents are "strongly cautioned" about the adult content of the programs.
There's lots of material during these shows that could be considered offensive, why single out "taking the Lord's name in vain?"
Yes but the issue is not whether you can PLAY mp3s.
The issue is whether you can create MP3s from CDs you have purchased.
As the Australian copyright law is written, this may constitute creating a "derivative work". Our university (Monash) has taken that stance.
But I've been told that case law may not support this. As Deborah noted in her original post, it is legal to sell solid-state mp3 players, which are most obviously used to carry around all the music on your stack of CDs left at home.
Temporarily encrypting everything was too difficult? Well I guess I can't argue with people who'd rather spend money than take time fiddling with computers, but I would've done tar | gpg > backup.tar, (nice innocuous name, no way anyone would get suspicious unless they actively suspected me of something, rather than just doing fascist inspections.)
#define X(x,y) x##y
Peter Cordes ; e-mail: X(peter@cordes ,
How much use would a firewall be vs. a University? I would assume it would keep them out, but they'd just call you and demand you disable it or have your connection turned off. But then, that would give you warning and time to delete any files they wouldn't like (legal or illegal).
But couldn't you argue that turning off your firewall would open you up to nasty hackers? I suppose it's no win, but the warning time would be nice (wouldn't take too long to put it all onto CD-Rs or Zip disks, anyway).
GL
Sadly, universities are being forced to get more and more funding from the business world, as the federal government cuts more and more away from tertiary education spending - so when big business comes along and makes demands it's harder for unviersities to retain their independence or integrity.
Scanning for "mp3" might catch downloaders of mp3 files but what about commercial pir8s who are ripping many .wav files off CDs? Or simply ripping from CD to CD without storing files?
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