The iBook format is a "modified" version of ePub. I don't know how modified, exactly. Calibre did not seem to have any trouble reading one, once the file extension was changed from ".ibook" to ".epub".
"In this case we got a sane ruling but in Citizens United we got what most consider a really bad ruling that is too broad."
Citizens United was not just an overly-broad decision, it was just plain a BAD decision all around, as it relies on a number of unjustified assumptions (e.g., "corporations are people") while at the same time ignoring centuries of other court precedent.
The court ignored far too many precedents and the reasoning behind them, as well as the consequences of their decision, completely aside from precedent.
Eventually, Citizens United will go down in history as one of the all-time great blunders of the U.S. Supreme Court.
"I would challenge that the majority view would be that it isn't moral to steal from Bob even if he stole from you since in general, people favor law being the resolution of such issues."
No, because now you are using the law to inform moral values, when if anything it should be the other way around.
For the most part, laws are in place to enforce the Golden Rule, and similar ideas. Not to define them.
"The theft is still immoral either way, "
No, again you are confusing law with morality. In many parts of the world it would be considered completely moral. Indeed, people in the United States who sincerely believe in the Biblical "an eye for an eye" passage, would say it is completely moral. But it is still illegal. Two different things.
"Though in the US I would argue if something is moral, it should be legal, the converse (something being immoral, yet still legal) however is frequently not the case, nor should it be in many cases where it does no legal harm."
I think there is a typo there, because the latter part of the sentence says that something that is immoral should not be legal, where it does no harm. Isn't that the opposite of what you meant?
Regardless, I recommend that all who are reading this conversation also read Vices Are Not Crimes by Lysander Spooner (1875). Spooner discusses this topic at length and concludes, for a number of reasons, that laws against acts that do no harm to others are bad laws, no matter how immoral one perceives those acts to be.
"Look up "induced infringement." It absolutely is a matter of intention."
Perhaps, but that is only part of the point. If you are going to use intent as the basis for enforcing a law, then you have to demonstrate that the intent actually existed.
But unfortunately for that argument, the fact is that all of MegaUpload's inducements apply equally well to perfectly legal, legitimate uses. So it is not valid to claim that they were "inducing" illegal activity.
Who gives a damn? Not only is that "moving the goalposts", it is completely irrelevant, because Okuda did not start working there until the 1980s! He did NOT write any of the original shows, he did NOT come up with the original ideas or background, and he CANNOT be considered an authority on them.
You are talking about somebody who came on the scene 20 years after the origination of the show, and well after the original ideas had already been written and articulated by others.
Get your head out of your "if it didn't happen after I was 10 years old it didn't happen" ass and read some history, dimwit.
When will the average American (or, perhaps more importantly, politicians) learn to distinguish punishment for illegal activity from prior restraint?
Hint: in general terms, it is not permissible in this country to prevent people from performing a certain act simply because some of them might commit a crime.
Laws exist to punish actual criminals, not to prevent people from committing innocent acts just because their neighbor might be a criminal. The former represents justice, the latter unconstitutional government oppression.
"Faking compliance with DMCA requests, on the other hand..."
Even the DMCA goes too far, however, by forcing acts based on mere accusations, before there can be any "due process".
Pardon me, I will correct myself to the extent of saying that Roddenberry did do some writing for the show, but his shows were never the more popular episodes.
Most of the authors were then-famous science fiction and/or horror writers, like Robert Block, Theordore Sturgeon, Harlan Ellison, etc. More than you can shake a stick at. And those people did not write the "manuals".
"This just shows you're an idiot. The manuals were written by the very people who wrote the show."
No, you are simply demonstrating that YOU are an idiot. The show (or the early series at the very least) was written by many authors, typically a different writer for each episode. Gene Roddenberry might have had the concept. But he (and the producers and directors) did not WRITE the show, at all. And the later "manuals" were NOT written by those authors.
This very much shows that you know absolutely nothing about what you are talking about.
"But from easily-frightened handwringing 'ethicists'... "
No, it will begin with MORONS like you who are too stupid to know what to be genuinely afraid of. When all the cavemen are busy stampeding buffalo over a cliff in order to get some food, you'd be the one standing at the bottom so you could look up and see the pretty buffalo rain.
Do you really understand what they did? They created a superflu, in laboratories. In settings that are fallible. We know they can have accidents. How do we know this? Because they have had accidents!
So, you create a pathogen that had the serious potential to wipe out humanity, and not in just one place, but in several labs. Multiplying the chances of a mistake.
It doesn't take a genius to figure out that this is one very seriously and very badly f**ed up scenario. It should never have been allowed. It has absolutely nothing to do with being a Luddite. It has everything to do with protecting ourselves from Goddamned Idiots.
"No, obviously you didn't read any of the technical manuals."
Obviously I did not. I got those explanations from THE SHOW ITSELF. You can't say stuff from the after-market "technical manuals" is authoritative about the TV show. That's dumb.
Whoever wrote the technical manuals just as obviously got it wrong: the transporters also worked on converting matter to energy and vice-versa. BUT there is only one slight difference: the replicators were not locked into creating the same matter from that energy, as the transporters were.
It makes perfect sense, man, and is more consistent with the actual story line. As you, yourself, pointed out.
"While obviously fictional, anyone with any knowledge of physics knows that the amount of energy needed for such a hypothetical device would be far, far less than the energy needed for a hypothetical device that could transmute elements (i.e., working at the subatomic level)."
And that sentence was (I so hate to use the word "obvious" again so I won't) written by someone with only a shallow understanding of physics.
Direct matter to energy conversion, which they claimed (many times in the series) to have achieved, depends only on the MASS of the matter. On the flip side, the matter you make from that energy is dependent, again, only on the MASS of the matter you are making. Not its chemical makeup. You could create a gram of gold, or a gram of water, and it f**ing DOESN'T MATTER. If you assume energy-matter transformation in the first place, your "transmutation" argument is completely moot. It makes absolutely no sense at all.
"Yes, that's easy. We could do it today if we really wanted to. It's called "solar power"."
Oh, Jesus H. Christ. I didn't see that until I was almost done here. OBVIOUSLY, you're one of those few Trekkies who is also a dumbshit.
Obviously you were only half-paying attention when you watched Star Trek.
The replicators worked on conversion of energy to matter, so in fact they did in NOT need raw materials.
However, nobody every made the claim that they could make anything. Maybe dilithium crystals were something that replicators had particular difficulty in synthesizing.
You also missed that about their economy. This is the way it worked (according to explanations that were given more than once during the life of the show):
At some point, humanity found a way to get massive amounts of nearly free energy. (Above a certain point, if you're not talking about some very limited, unrenewable limiting resource, then energy does become free because you can use an excess to generate even more.) Unlimited energy effectively meant no more scarcity, because any resource that was available could be put to use. Our current economy is based on scarcity of goods. When there is no more scarcity, a money economy doesn't make much sense.
So the unlimited energy in turn meant freedom from want. Now, only people who WANTED to work, had to work. If they didn't, they could improve themselves in other ways, like getting educations and volunteering for Starfleet (which was ostensibly a scientific, exploratory organization, remember).
So... yeah, in a few episodes they did seem to forget about all that. But that was still supposed to be the background story.
"I figured you'd write this. Gasoline with ethanol has to be shipped in sealed containers because, if exposed to the atmosphere, the ethanol in the gasoline will dissolve water from the atmosphere."
Sure, I don't dispute that... if it's shipped IN the gasoline, rather than being used as an additive in the gasoline tank.
I don't dispute that, at all. But that wasn't what we were talking about.
"Just think through the physics a bit. The ethanol in your gasoline absorbs water from the atmosphere. Think about it."
Right. That's what it is for! (In the context of this discussion, which you so blithely took out of context.)
So, one more time, just in case you still insist on misunderstanding: I was referring to ethanol, not for fuel, but being used specifically for the purpose of removing water from the tank in winter. This is typically done via additives (like HEET, to mention one specific brand, which is about 90% ethanol).
Hahaha! Are you serious? Thank you for proving my point!
"Hygroscopic" means alcohol attaches itself to water. (Hmmm... seems I read about that somewhere before. Where could it be? Wait! It was my own earlier comment! Imagine that.)
"Because absorbed water dilutes the fuel value of the ethanol..."
For large amounts of alcohol and large amounts of water, no doubt. But the issue under discussion, at least in this sub-thread, was not ethanol fuel at all. It was small amounts of alcohol being used to remove small amounts of water from a GASOLINE tank. Its fuel value in this context is pretty much insignificant to start with.
"... containers of ethanol fuels must be kept tightly sealed."
But we were not talking about ethanol fuel here! We were talking about small amounts of alcohol being used to sweep water out of gasoline tanks! I think maybe you weren't paying attention.
"This high miscibility with water means that ethanol cannot be efficiently shipped through modern pipelines, like liquid hydrocarbons, over long distances."
From your tank to your carburetor or injectors is hardly the same as "shipping long distance through a pipeline".
"Mechanics also have seen increased cases of damage to small engines, in particular, the carburetor, attributable to the increased water retention by ethanol in fuel."
Sure! But guess what? Follow up that citation (which it seems you did not bother to do before making a fool of yourself here), and what is it about? High-ethanol fuels, like E85. Which, once again, was NOT what this little sub-discussion was about. It was about mere additives to gasoline, used to dry the tank. Like maybe two or three percent. Not 85% f*ing ethanol fuels.
If you honestly think that the Wikipedia article on ethanol fuels is even a little bit relevant to this, you need to go take a chemistry course or two. And physics while you're at it.
I responded to your early post before it went "live" here.
Keep in mind that the following answer only applies if you're not doing a full-blown GIS application, but only calculations like "find all the X that are there within Y miles of location Z," and "How far is it from point X to point Y?"
And if that is the case, there are software libraries (I know of some in Ruby, I know there are others) that, in conjunction with Google Maps (or Yahoo Maps and even a couple of other services), mean YOU DO NOT NEED COMPLEX DATABASE INTERACTION. So unless you're doing a complex GIS operation of some kind, database performance per se is almost completely irrelevant.
All you need to do is store two floating-point numbers: latitude and longitude. And you get these numbers in the first place (the first time you do a lookup) from Google Maps itself... even that does not need sophisticated math or database operations. You just get the numbers from Google and store them.
I did an application like this for another site not long ago, and I could do another one (stand-alone) in under 2 hours, using MySQL, with performance that is perfectly acceptable.
But if you are also truly concerned about Oracle having control of MySQL (and I would not blame you if you did), you can use MariaDB instead, which is a drop-in replacement for MySQL, written by some of the same developers who originally wrote the MySQL software, apparently because of the same concerns you have. For most purposes it is 100% compatible with MySQL, except for some performance enhancements.
"Ethanol in fuel is what CAUSES the condensation..."
Nonsense. Ethanol has been used as an additive to dry gasoline tanks since LONG before it was ever forced upon us for other reasons.
Ethanol forms a permanent bond with water... up until the point where it is actually combusted. That is precisely why you can't distill 100% alcohol... you simply can't separate it from the water that way. It is possible to separate it chemically, but you really don't want to do that to your booze.
You are just plain incorrect. Alcohol works fine in the winter to dry your gas tank. As others have pointed out, though, too much of it is not good for your gas mileage.
I should add (just gratis, you can thank me later) that this whole issue has to do with a balance of freedoms, or rights, if you prefer.
Your right to make a profit may NOT, under any circumstances, curtail what I honestly say. This is a large part of the "fair use" exemption that has so often come up in recent years.
Further, at least in this country, before you may order the compliance of other parties you must first demonstrate that you have standing to do so; quite the opposite of "copyright lawsuits" that have happened here so far. The DMCA contains provisions that will WITHOUT ANY DOUBT fail to pass Constitution muster, if and when those laws are challenged in court. It just happened yet.
We know what the current standard is. My poing -- which you did not address at all -- was that the new standard does not work in the U.S. At the very least, it is easily provable that it works nowhere near as well as our old system did.
So the hell with your Berne Convention. If it is not an improvement, (and it most definitely, and provably, is not), then who gives a shit? We don't need it.
If you hadn't claimed the copyright up front, you could not enforce it. Which was fine with most people because they didn't want to bother with copyrighting everything in sight anyway.
Copyright registration is not a "copyright". You own the copyright anyway. That's why it's called a "right". Registration is nothing more than "official" evidence that you own the copyright on a work. It is neither proof per se (because it's possible you could have registered something from someone else), or any kind of stamp of Government approval or anything. In the same way that legally, a signed piece of paper is not a "contract". An agreement of any kind that is otherwise legal is a contract. The piece of paper is just evidence of that agreement. Copyright registration works pretty much the same way.
There were exceptions, for situations like photographers and artists who sold original works for profit. They did not have to carry a copyright notice in order for the copyright to be enforced.
An even better solution, which would eliminate most of these kinds of problems before they even start, would be to go back to the old Copyright standard of a few years ago (and for centuries before that): for most things you have to first DECLARE a copyright before you can enforce it.
It is this new "automatic" copyright for almost all works that has caused most of the mischief. The old way worked just fine for many generations. But less than one generation into this scheme, and it has caused all kinds of very serious problems for society.
Slashdot Mirror
The iBook format is a "modified" version of ePub. I don't know how modified, exactly. Calibre did not seem to have any trouble reading one, once the file extension was changed from ".ibook" to ".epub".
"In this case we got a sane ruling but in Citizens United we got what most consider a really bad ruling that is too broad."
Citizens United was not just an overly-broad decision, it was just plain a BAD decision all around, as it relies on a number of unjustified assumptions (e.g., "corporations are people") while at the same time ignoring centuries of other court precedent.
The court ignored far too many precedents and the reasoning behind them, as well as the consequences of their decision, completely aside from precedent.
Eventually, Citizens United will go down in history as one of the all-time great blunders of the U.S. Supreme Court.
"I would challenge that the majority view would be that it isn't moral to steal from Bob even if he stole from you since in general, people favor law being the resolution of such issues."
No, because now you are using the law to inform moral values, when if anything it should be the other way around.
For the most part, laws are in place to enforce the Golden Rule, and similar ideas. Not to define them.
"The theft is still immoral either way, "
No, again you are confusing law with morality. In many parts of the world it would be considered completely moral. Indeed, people in the United States who sincerely believe in the Biblical "an eye for an eye" passage, would say it is completely moral. But it is still illegal. Two different things.
"Though in the US I would argue if something is moral, it should be legal, the converse (something being immoral, yet still legal) however is frequently not the case, nor should it be in many cases where it does no legal harm."
I think there is a typo there, because the latter part of the sentence says that something that is immoral should not be legal, where it does no harm. Isn't that the opposite of what you meant?
Regardless, I recommend that all who are reading this conversation also read Vices Are Not Crimes by Lysander Spooner (1875). Spooner discusses this topic at length and concludes, for a number of reasons, that laws against acts that do no harm to others are bad laws, no matter how immoral one perceives those acts to be.
As an avid and long-time student of American political and legal history, I have to disagree with you and sympathize with GP.
They haven't been getting many right in recent years. Not many at all.
But we can always hope that this decision is a turning point.
"Pretty much. Even if you see someone stealing your car, you're not allowed to shoot or taser or hit them in order to prevent the act."
What state do you live in? If I were you, I would protest to my State legislators.
Here, if somebody tries to steal your car, you can shoot them dead. And no, I do not live in Texas.
"Look up "induced infringement." It absolutely is a matter of intention."
Perhaps, but that is only part of the point. If you are going to use intent as the basis for enforcing a law, then you have to demonstrate that the intent actually existed.
But unfortunately for that argument, the fact is that all of MegaUpload's inducements apply equally well to perfectly legal, legitimate uses. So it is not valid to claim that they were "inducing" illegal activity.
Who gives a damn? Not only is that "moving the goalposts", it is completely irrelevant, because Okuda did not start working there until the 1980s! He did NOT write any of the original shows, he did NOT come up with the original ideas or background, and he CANNOT be considered an authority on them.
You are talking about somebody who came on the scene 20 years after the origination of the show, and well after the original ideas had already been written and articulated by others.
Get your head out of your "if it didn't happen after I was 10 years old it didn't happen" ass and read some history, dimwit.
When will the average American (or, perhaps more importantly, politicians) learn to distinguish punishment for illegal activity from prior restraint?
Hint: in general terms, it is not permissible in this country to prevent people from performing a certain act simply because some of them might commit a crime.
Laws exist to punish actual criminals, not to prevent people from committing innocent acts just because their neighbor might be a criminal. The former represents justice, the latter unconstitutional government oppression.
"Faking compliance with DMCA requests, on the other hand..."
Even the DMCA goes too far, however, by forcing acts based on mere accusations, before there can be any "due process".
You leave my sysdir out of this. She's due to get out in another year; she doesn't need any more trouble.
Pardon me, I will correct myself to the extent of saying that Roddenberry did do some writing for the show, but his shows were never the more popular episodes.
Most of the authors were then-famous science fiction and/or horror writers, like Robert Block, Theordore Sturgeon, Harlan Ellison, etc. More than you can shake a stick at. And those people did not write the "manuals".
"This just shows you're an idiot. The manuals were written by the very people who wrote the show."
No, you are simply demonstrating that YOU are an idiot. The show (or the early series at the very least) was written by many authors, typically a different writer for each episode. Gene Roddenberry might have had the concept. But he (and the producers and directors) did not WRITE the show, at all. And the later "manuals" were NOT written by those authors.
This very much shows that you know absolutely nothing about what you are talking about.
"Fuck off."
Moron.
"But from easily-frightened handwringing 'ethicists'... "
No, it will begin with MORONS like you who are too stupid to know what to be genuinely afraid of. When all the cavemen are busy stampeding buffalo over a cliff in order to get some food, you'd be the one standing at the bottom so you could look up and see the pretty buffalo rain.
Do you really understand what they did? They created a superflu, in laboratories. In settings that are fallible. We know they can have accidents. How do we know this? Because they have had accidents!
So, you create a pathogen that had the serious potential to wipe out humanity, and not in just one place, but in several labs. Multiplying the chances of a mistake.
It doesn't take a genius to figure out that this is one very seriously and very badly f**ed up scenario. It should never have been allowed. It has absolutely nothing to do with being a Luddite. It has everything to do with protecting ourselves from Goddamned Idiots.
"No, obviously you didn't read any of the technical manuals."
Obviously I did not. I got those explanations from THE SHOW ITSELF. You can't say stuff from the after-market "technical manuals" is authoritative about the TV show. That's dumb.
Whoever wrote the technical manuals just as obviously got it wrong: the transporters also worked on converting matter to energy and vice-versa. BUT there is only one slight difference: the replicators were not locked into creating the same matter from that energy, as the transporters were.
It makes perfect sense, man, and is more consistent with the actual story line. As you, yourself, pointed out.
"While obviously fictional, anyone with any knowledge of physics knows that the amount of energy needed for such a hypothetical device would be far, far less than the energy needed for a hypothetical device that could transmute elements (i.e., working at the subatomic level)."
And that sentence was (I so hate to use the word "obvious" again so I won't) written by someone with only a shallow understanding of physics.
Direct matter to energy conversion, which they claimed (many times in the series) to have achieved, depends only on the MASS of the matter. On the flip side, the matter you make from that energy is dependent, again, only on the MASS of the matter you are making. Not its chemical makeup. You could create a gram of gold, or a gram of water, and it f**ing DOESN'T MATTER. If you assume energy-matter transformation in the first place, your "transmutation" argument is completely moot. It makes absolutely no sense at all.
"Yes, that's easy. We could do it today if we really wanted to. It's called "solar power"."
Oh, Jesus H. Christ. I didn't see that until I was almost done here. OBVIOUSLY, you're one of those few Trekkies who is also a dumbshit.
Obviously you were only half-paying attention when you watched Star Trek.
The replicators worked on conversion of energy to matter, so in fact they did in NOT need raw materials.
However, nobody every made the claim that they could make anything. Maybe dilithium crystals were something that replicators had particular difficulty in synthesizing.
You also missed that about their economy. This is the way it worked (according to explanations that were given more than once during the life of the show):
At some point, humanity found a way to get massive amounts of nearly free energy. (Above a certain point, if you're not talking about some very limited, unrenewable limiting resource, then energy does become free because you can use an excess to generate even more.) Unlimited energy effectively meant no more scarcity, because any resource that was available could be put to use. Our current economy is based on scarcity of goods. When there is no more scarcity, a money economy doesn't make much sense.
So the unlimited energy in turn meant freedom from want. Now, only people who WANTED to work, had to work. If they didn't, they could improve themselves in other ways, like getting educations and volunteering for Starfleet (which was ostensibly a scientific, exploratory organization, remember).
So... yeah, in a few episodes they did seem to forget about all that. But that was still supposed to be the background story.
"I figured you'd write this. Gasoline with ethanol has to be shipped in sealed containers because, if exposed to the atmosphere, the ethanol in the gasoline will dissolve water from the atmosphere."
Sure, I don't dispute that... if it's shipped IN the gasoline, rather than being used as an additive in the gasoline tank.
I don't dispute that, at all. But that wasn't what we were talking about.
"Just think through the physics a bit. The ethanol in your gasoline absorbs water from the atmosphere. Think about it."
Right. That's what it is for! (In the context of this discussion, which you so blithely took out of context.)
So, one more time, just in case you still insist on misunderstanding: I was referring to ethanol, not for fuel, but being used specifically for the purpose of removing water from the tank in winter. This is typically done via additives (like HEET, to mention one specific brand, which is about 90% ethanol).
"Hygroscopic" means alcohol attaches itself to water. (Hmmm... seems I read about that somewhere before. Where could it be? Wait! It was my own earlier comment! Imagine that.)
"Because absorbed water dilutes the fuel value of the ethanol..."
For large amounts of alcohol and large amounts of water, no doubt. But the issue under discussion, at least in this sub-thread, was not ethanol fuel at all. It was small amounts of alcohol being used to remove small amounts of water from a GASOLINE tank. Its fuel value in this context is pretty much insignificant to start with.
"... containers of ethanol fuels must be kept tightly sealed."
But we were not talking about ethanol fuel here! We were talking about small amounts of alcohol being used to sweep water out of gasoline tanks! I think maybe you weren't paying attention.
"This high miscibility with water means that ethanol cannot be efficiently shipped through modern pipelines, like liquid hydrocarbons, over long distances."
From your tank to your carburetor or injectors is hardly the same as "shipping long distance through a pipeline".
"Mechanics also have seen increased cases of damage to small engines, in particular, the carburetor, attributable to the increased water retention by ethanol in fuel."
Sure! But guess what? Follow up that citation (which it seems you did not bother to do before making a fool of yourself here), and what is it about? High-ethanol fuels, like E85. Which, once again, was NOT what this little sub-discussion was about. It was about mere additives to gasoline, used to dry the tank. Like maybe two or three percent. Not 85% f*ing ethanol fuels.
If you honestly think that the Wikipedia article on ethanol fuels is even a little bit relevant to this, you need to go take a chemistry course or two. And physics while you're at it.
I responded to your early post before it went "live" here.
Keep in mind that the following answer only applies if you're not doing a full-blown GIS application, but only calculations like "find all the X that are there within Y miles of location Z," and "How far is it from point X to point Y?"
And if that is the case, there are software libraries (I know of some in Ruby, I know there are others) that, in conjunction with Google Maps (or Yahoo Maps and even a couple of other services), mean YOU DO NOT NEED COMPLEX DATABASE INTERACTION. So unless you're doing a complex GIS operation of some kind, database performance per se is almost completely irrelevant.
All you need to do is store two floating-point numbers: latitude and longitude. And you get these numbers in the first place (the first time you do a lookup) from Google Maps itself... even that does not need sophisticated math or database operations. You just get the numbers from Google and store them.
I did an application like this for another site not long ago, and I could do another one (stand-alone) in under 2 hours, using MySQL, with performance that is perfectly acceptable.
But if you are also truly concerned about Oracle having control of MySQL (and I would not blame you if you did), you can use MariaDB instead, which is a drop-in replacement for MySQL, written by some of the same developers who originally wrote the MySQL software, apparently because of the same concerns you have. For most purposes it is 100% compatible with MySQL, except for some performance enhancements.
"Ethanol in fuel is what CAUSES the condensation..."
Nonsense. Ethanol has been used as an additive to dry gasoline tanks since LONG before it was ever forced upon us for other reasons.
Ethanol forms a permanent bond with water... up until the point where it is actually combusted. That is precisely why you can't distill 100% alcohol... you simply can't separate it from the water that way. It is possible to separate it chemically, but you really don't want to do that to your booze.
You are just plain incorrect. Alcohol works fine in the winter to dry your gas tank. As others have pointed out, though, too much of it is not good for your gas mileage.
It just HASN'T happened yet.
I should add (just gratis, you can thank me later) that this whole issue has to do with a balance of freedoms, or rights, if you prefer.
Your right to make a profit may NOT, under any circumstances, curtail what I honestly say. This is a large part of the "fair use" exemption that has so often come up in recent years.
Further, at least in this country, before you may order the compliance of other parties you must first demonstrate that you have standing to do so; quite the opposite of "copyright lawsuits" that have happened here so far. The DMCA contains provisions that will WITHOUT ANY DOUBT fail to pass Constitution muster, if and when those laws are challenged in court. It just happened yet.
And your point is?
We know what the current standard is. My poing -- which you did not address at all -- was that the new standard does not work in the U.S. At the very least, it is easily provable that it works nowhere near as well as our old system did.
So the hell with your Berne Convention. If it is not an improvement, (and it most definitely, and provably, is not), then who gives a shit? We don't need it.
No, just a claim.
According to the old rules, which were in effect for a very long time (and pretty much everybody seemed to think worked just great), you had to CLAIM a copyright in order to enforce it. In other words, one of those notices that looked typically like "Copyright © MyCompany 2011". (I don't know if the circled "C" will come through properly on Slashdot.)
If you hadn't claimed the copyright up front, you could not enforce it. Which was fine with most people because they didn't want to bother with copyrighting everything in sight anyway.
Copyright registration is not a "copyright". You own the copyright anyway. That's why it's called a "right". Registration is nothing more than "official" evidence that you own the copyright on a work. It is neither proof per se (because it's possible you could have registered something from someone else), or any kind of stamp of Government approval or anything. In the same way that legally, a signed piece of paper is not a "contract". An agreement of any kind that is otherwise legal is a contract. The piece of paper is just evidence of that agreement. Copyright registration works pretty much the same way.
There were exceptions, for situations like photographers and artists who sold original works for profit. They did not have to carry a copyright notice in order for the copyright to be enforced.
Yes, I understand. I was referring to MOST such problems, not this one specifically.
An even better solution, which would eliminate most of these kinds of problems before they even start, would be to go back to the old Copyright standard of a few years ago (and for centuries before that): for most things you have to first DECLARE a copyright before you can enforce it.
It is this new "automatic" copyright for almost all works that has caused most of the mischief. The old way worked just fine for many generations. But less than one generation into this scheme, and it has caused all kinds of very serious problems for society.