They do, in fact, look inside shoes. They make you take them off and x-ray them. However you are correct that belts or anything can hide an SD card, as they don't have anywhere near enough ferrous metal to set off a metal-detector. Or alternately you can hide it behind some metal that does go through the x-ray machine, like a metal belt-buckle or steel toe boots or cellphone.
Now there's an interesting idea. Some cellphones let you expand memory with microsd cards, and it's possible they copy those when copying data off cellphones, but if they copy it via the cellphone you could easily make an SD card with a shortened file system, or just use part of the filesystem without allocating it, and have hidden files the phone cannot see.
Of course, all this is completely stupid, as sending data encrypted over the internet is trivial and untraceable. You just get a webmail account that lets you use SSL, upload the encrypted file, email it to another account on the same service, and download it once in the US. Without the cooperation of the webmail provider, people, even people watch watching both connections and the webmail provider's connections, wouldn't even know the two people communicated at all. Even with the cooperation of the webmail provider, it's nearly impossible to notice, and even if you do notice it you can't arrest people for it or do anything about it, as it's not actually that suspicious.
Meanwhile, I'm tempted to try to make it though customs while carrying two gymbags full of CD-ROMs on spindles. About 4000 of them. Open packages but nothing burned on them.
Have fun copying, or at least attempting to copy, all those.
I'd be sure to declare them and pay whatever taxes they want so they can't assert I was smuggling them.
If you give me your television, and a piece of paper saying that "I give you my television" then legally, you have given me your television - no doubt about it. Not many courts in any jurisdiction would say, "No, you didn't really give him your television".
If, however, I gave you the piece of paper and not my television, no court would uphold that 'contract'. Whereas if I just gave you my television without any paper that would stand up in court.
So I'm not sure what your point is. Clearly the piece of paper is irrelevant, and obviously not a valid contract.
You do not need a consideration to give someone a gift. Unless, of course, you are no fun at birthdays, Christmas and other similar times.
You do not need consideration to give someone a gift, except for things that must be transfer via contract like real estate. You do need consideration to promise to give someone a gift and that promise to be legally actionable if you change your mind.
I can give anyone anything I want to, at all, and that holds up in court. What cannot hold up in court is my promise to give anyone anything, either via oral or written 'contract', because it's not a contract, because it doesn't have consideration both sides. But if I promise to give something to them in exchange for a dollar, it will hold up in court. (As long as they are willing to pay me that dollar.)
If you publish something under the GPL, then it was your intention to let me use it. Giving away rights (including ownership or a licence to use something) requires intent, not consideration.
Promising to give away rights, which is what the GPL, and all real licenses are, does, in fact, require consideration. (I'm talking about real licenses, like the right to use a song in a movie or the right to translate a work into an other language and sell it, not pretend licenses like EULAs.)
Luckily, there's consideration built into the GPL. You are granted the right to make copies, and in return you must provide the source on request. You get to do X, and in return you must do Y. Granted, you're doing Y for someone completely different, but contract law has no problem with that.
It's even possible to write a perfectly valid contract where I do something for an unrelated third party if you do something for an unrelated fourth party, which is why 'consideration' is actually a fairly stupid term. What lawyers really mean by that is that each party to the contract has to agree to do something, one side will do something if the other side will do something else. Otherwise it is not a contract.
Or, to look at it another way, in a contract, you do not have to do your part if the other party does not do theirs...and if they don't have a part, they are, in a sense, 'not doing their part', because they don't have one, so you don't have to do your part either. They cannot demand you do your part by pointing out they did theirs, as they didn't. Yes, nerds here will nitpick that 'nothing' is, indeed, something to do, and they actually instantly finished and have no promised obligations left, but the law doesn't work like a computer. (Or perhaps it does, and you just tried to pass a single parameter to a function that requires two, which crashed you out of 'contract law'.)
Except, as has been pointed out, their email client would happily encrypt, or fail to encrypt if they didn't have a key for, the message to the person it was addressed to.
That's not actually new, and it's used for a lot of fraud. When people see domain names about to expire, they'll do quick searches for email addresses that at those names. Some use spam lists, some just search on the net.
Then they'll buy them, and wait for mail to come in. They'll go to various places and request passwords for said email addresses. They'll get spam, and make requests using add those addresses.
Contracts not only require consent, they require considerations from both sides. If I write on a piece of paper that I give you my television and sign it, alone, that will never hold up in court. I must exchange the television for something. That is why many 'gift' contracts sell things for 'one dollar and other valuable considerations'. A signed-by-two-parties piece of paper where one party agrees to do something and the other parent does not is not, in any legal sense, a contract.(1)
So what, exactly, are they paying me to agree to their stupid contract?
This is on top of the obvious problem of consent. The courts wouldn't agree there was retroactive 'consent' from 'reading a message you've already read', but even if they did, it's still not a fricking contract unless the two parties agree to exchange something.
1) It might be a promissory note, but that's not the same thing at all, and those are restricted in much more interesting ways, and only apply to money anyway. (Or, very rarely, goods or service, in informal IOUs, which will hold up in court if used in lieu of payment.) But you can't write a promissory note 'promising' not to disclose something, or not to do anything at all, you can't owe people 'the absence of doing something', you can only do that through contracts.
Okay, I was wondering where this dumbass 'Nelson rating' argument was coming from, I hadn't realized the broadcasts were itself claiming it.
It is the stupidest argument in history, because of the simple fact that Nelson familes are supposed to write down shows they see elsewhere and turn that in also. An argument can be made that this isn't 100% accurate, and it's not when it comes to sitcoms people might half-watch at a friends house, but I assure you that people are going to remember they went to a damn superbowl party and write it down.
Incidentally, isn't this demanding less people see the game so more people are counted as seeing the game? If 300 people go home, and 200 of them watch the game, one of them a Nelson family, the stats are higher and the viewers lower. (Although not in practice, as the Nelson family will, in fact, write it down anyway.)
Shouldn't the advertisers have something to say about that?
Interviewer: So you guys managed to come back from behind in an exciting game. Tell me, why do you think you won?
Winning football player: Well, first of all, I'd like to thank Jesus. With him all things are possible. And secondly I think we've really improved...
Interviewer: So, you we doing strong in the first half, ahead by 7, but faltered in the second, letting way too many long passes through. What do you think went wrong?
Losing football player: Well, first of all, I'd like to blame that asshole Jesus. Thanks a lot, jerk.
Natural law is a perfectly valid form and basis of copyright. It, indeed, is hundreds, although possibly not thousands, of years old.
However, it is not the model the US uses. The US has copyright for the sole purpose of encouraging creation of works, and not because people have an inherent right to stop others from copying their work. It does not, and has never had, the idea of 'natural law' copyright letting creators restrict copying.
This has, in fact, been explicitly and repeatedly confirmed by the courts. It could have gone the other way, citizens in the US have unstated rights and one of those could have been determined to be a right to control their own works, but it wasn't, and at this point the precedent is so strong it is unlikely to ever change without an amendment. (This does actually make sense, none of the other 'inalienable rights we have been granted by our creator' in the US let us stop other citizens from doing things over in a corner, just the government, and just to ourselves.)
But here for a discussion, and note that the US, to join Berne, had to come up with a law allowing artists to stop their public sculptures from being altered. Because they were not natural law, the idea that artists had any sort of protection of their work except blocking copies made had never shown up. So they wedged it in, because it's required in Berne, but that does not signify any sort of change in the philosophy basis of anything...they actually wedged it in under the same concept of slander and trademark law, that modifying sculpture that is attributable to someone else is harming their reputation. Then the courts actually went on to gut most of that with the requirement it be a widely-known work of the author.
Or read here, here which argues that the US is wrong for discounting natural law, but at least knows enough to know that it has.
The Napoleonic system of law has quite a long history too, but you'd be insane if you insisted that was applicable to Federal law.
No, the theory is that you can provoke them by firing a few missiles at them, wait until they haul out one of their missiles and sink one of our superdestroyers we have anchored off their coast, claim they attacked us, and then start bombing.
You couldn't hide a war, you could easily hide a tiny attack to start a war.
I don't know what's actually going on, and I doubt it's anything. Within a week or two, everything will be back to normal and a lot of people will look paranoid.
But if Iran suddenly mysteriously 'decides to attack us' while we're out of contact with them, that's what happened.
Ha, don't claim you forgot when you put it. Claim you put it with a bunch of incriminating evidence, and you're refusing to reveal that location to the government.
And, so you're not lying, actually put some incriminating evidence with it, and actually hide it somewhere. A picture of yourself jaywalking should do the trick. (That, of course, would not be enough to actually convict you of jaywalking, but it doesn't have to be 100% proof of a crime to be incriminating.)
Of course, the proper answer is actually: I don't have to help you investigate me. At all. I can't do anything to hinder the investigation, but I don't have to help it in any way.
For people saying the police can force you to give blood samples and stuff...no, they can't. The courts authorize them to take a blood sample, and they will do it by force if necessary. You are in no way legally required to cooperate with them, although you'll end up fairly bruised by the end if you do not.
It's exactly like searching your house...you are not required to unlock doors for them. But they'll just break all of them if you don't.
They cannot imprison you for failing to cooperate, although with blood samples that's a dangerous game to try...they can manhandle you, and you cannot lay a hand on them at all or it's assault. But if you were, say, The Flash, and could continually move your body fast enough to avoid the needle, there's nothing they could do.
That's what the right of avoiding self-incrimination means. The police and courts can force you to help with investigations of other people. They cannot force you to help with your own, at all, ever. (Or, rather, they cannot punish you for refusing to help.) If the courts do not understand this, we need new courts.
The solution that is, apparently, for the fascists to be Republicans, and then all the people who are supposed to say something just go 'Eh, whatever'.
Really, though, how can you have any faith whatsoever that the Federal Government will do anything but make things worse?
Mainly because we plan to elect Democrats instead of Republicans. You know, people who actually think the government can function correctly, and aren't there to stab it in the back.
You know, of all the analogies here, you found made one that was non-stupid. But think of it more this way:
A store obviously has every thing labeled with a price, but that requires a lot of work to record and will only tell you the prices for things in stock, on the shelves, at that specific store.
The store also has a lookup sheet of all prices that employees get, printed on paper for some reason, in case employees need to answer questions. He walked up to one of the employees and asked to borrow a copy, got a copy, took pictures of it with his camera phone, and handed the original back.
He then went and put all those prices in a comparison shopper website.
They're now trying to sue him for asking for a copy, claiming he was impersonating an employee or something. When in actuality the store had no policy against letting anyone see the list, so the clerkdroid let him do so, and he did absolutely nothing that would vaguely be an attempt to fake people out.
If there was a policy of only allow access to certain people, and he had deliberately pretended to be someone who needed access but wasn't on the list, like saying 'I'm here with the Citizens for Fair Pricing, we've had complains of miscanned prices, and if you don't let me copy the list this second you're looking at lawsuits.', where he had invented that organization himself, a case could be made that maybe should be illegal. But computers can't be lied to in that way, so it's rather moot here.
If he had deliberately pretending to be someone who was allowed access, by claiming to be an off-duty employee or somehow spoofing the IP of the zone transfer request (Yea, I know you can't do that.), that certainly should be illegal. In fact, I suspect it is.
He didn't do either, though, he just walked up as a totally anonymous person and asked for the list. If they don't want random people to read the list, they need to make an employee policy against it.
In both cases you're connecting to a server and saying 'Tell me about X'.
It's not even a matter of multiple domains or single, because of extra records sent on each request. If I look up www.example.com, I have a very good chance of being told, in that request, that www.example.com is a CNAME for example.com, which is what I asked, and being told the IP of example.com, the MX server of example.com, and the IP of the MX server, the name server of example.com, and the IP of the name servers.
They do this because, basically, UDP packets cost the same regardless if they're full or not, you don't get 'half price' for half a packet, so the DNS server might as well send information you might be about to look up next.
In other words, any DNS request is actually 'send me this information, and any other random pieces of information you think I might be going for next'. (Incidentally, this is how DNS poisoning works...sending records about domains that you do not, in fact, control, inside of legit responses for domains you do.)
I fail to see how this differ from a zone transfer.
Seriously, people, there is a hard and fast rule that all computer access must be subject to, or the entire system breaks down: Any access is authorized unless it is marked as private.
I don't want to hear whining about how fucktards can't secure their DNS zones or their wireless or think 'secret' filenames on websites should work. Tough. Unlike all the dumb analogies here about doors, this isn't the real world, and all computer services can be secured behind passwords and encryption.
If they are behind any password and/or encryption, they are illegal to access without permission, no matter how crappy the password or encryption.
If not, they are not. Otherwise, there is no internet. If there is no automatic permission to try to access things, no one can ever visit any website again.
Okay, I don't know if everyone's enter some alternate universe or something, but residues on computer games are extremely stupid to talk about. At all.
Residues are what you get from later sales. With movies, it's TV and DVDs, with TV, it's syndication and DVDs (and not the internet, apparently).
TV and movie writers are either on a flat salary, or paid per episode/for the movie, which covers them for the original airing. (And with movie writers, often they get a cut of the net.) And then they have residues to cover additional uses, which are mainly just in case their show is popular so the TV networks can't make infinite money off it forever without handing some back.
With video games,'residues' would be...what, exactly? How do you rerun a game? An emulator?
What people here apparently think video game writers should get is a cut of the net profit, like many movie writers get, not 'residues'.
And I'm all for that, but I have no idea why we're specifically want game writers singled out. People producing computer software should be paid more if the software does well. (Microsoft, and don't think I'm a fan, pays workers in stock options for exactly this reason, although that obviously averages it across the company.)
OTOH, the reason that Hollywood writers and actors and directors forced a residue system is that, unlike most companies of the time, they were entirely contractual workers and had no job security or retirement. Originally, TV and movie studios just tended to discard people, even the really famous ones, people who had a million viewings of their reruns every day, and they were living out of dumpsters. (Of course, nowadays, no job security is the norm, but not back them.)
Video game writers really aren't in the same boat.
This is not correct. Copyrights don't disappear just because copying is easy. Copyrights never prevented copying.
I don't see how I implied they did. I said difficulty in copying prevented copying. (I am confused by how you're disagreeing with me here.) Copyrights are just preventing people from setting up large scale operations to overcome said difficulties.
From the very beginning, you could copy by hand any copyrighted book.
Not practically you couldn't.
What copyrights allow is to seek damages against those who violate them. Only the copyright holder may freely sell their work for money in the open market. Others who try with unauthorized copies face civil penalties.
As the other responder said, that is a valid point. Companies will continue to follow copyright amongst themselves, so it clearly still exists in some sense. So it's more correct to say the idea of things handed to normal people being subject to copyright is has vanished.
So just because you can copy something doesn't mean that the idea of copyright has suddenly vanished.
No, the fact that people are distributing TV shows and MP3s and movies continually on the internet means copyright is has suddenly vanished. Or is in the process of vanishing.
You are correct about copyright still being useful between distributors and artists, so in a sense there is still functioning copyright. That has nothing to do with difficultly of copying. So amend what I said to end-user copyright no long existing with copying is infinitely easy.
Or, to put it less confusingly: Difficulties in copying made copying restricted to large companies instead of random people. Large companies tend to follow the letter of the law, at least contractually.
Easy in copying unrestricts copying by random people, who follow the law only sometimes, if it's not something they feel like breaking, and especially not if no one else is following it and it's 'victimless', aka, unnoticeable without the police looking for it. (re: Speeding.) As they clearly don't feel like following copyright, copyright for them snaps in half.
Obviously, large companies will still follow any existing law.
is needed for copyright to work at all. There must be some barrier to copying, or copyright vanishes magically into thin air. Barriers to copying, as is pointed out by many comments here, are like locks, keep 'your friends' from copying, even if they don't stop your enemies.
The problem is, of course, at a certain point, it doesn't matter. If people can infinitely copy the work with the lock broken, copyrighted works do not have a barrier to copying beyond a trivial investment of time. (And the tools can be near-completely automated.)
And, without this barrier to copying, copyright does not exist. I don't mean in a moral sense, or a legal sense, I mean in a practical sense. There is no such thing, in society, right now, as copyrights on music. The laws involving them might still exist, but the concept itself exists more in absence.
As DVD copying gets more practical, there will soon be no such things as copyrights on DVDs. Right now it's at the edge, and has been delayed by the lack of a Napster designed to share DVDs to launch the idea into the public mind, enough bandwidth, and the fact you'd have to burn them, on double-density DVDs even. I give it another five years.
Note to people who are about to argue why we, morally or practically, need copyright: I didn't say this was a good thing. I'm just stating facts.
So, 'copy protection', as in, actual difficulty in copying, is needed for copyright. OTOH, all 'copy protection' and DRM schemes on computers, do not actually provide that, so they are rather pointless.
Boot sector viruses did not spread because people attempted to boot from floppies.
Boot sector viruses spread for a single reason: Computers by default tried to boot from the floppy first. People would leave floppies in the drive, and get infected.
Just exactly how stupid are you? Your boss is not the government. Children in schools are not in the employ of schools.
And, more the point, schools may, indeed, have an additional right to punish people, just like employers have an additional right to punish students...after they are found guilty in a court of law. If you think a employers can accuse someone of stealing and fire them because of that, without involving the police, you have another think coming...that is, indeed, slander. (In an 'at will' state, they can fire them for no reason at all, so would just do that without publicly accusing them of theft, but if you think the government can punish students 'at will' for no reason, you're a fascist asshole.)
I have a simple way of dealing with change doesn't require change machines: I keep a big pile of it in my car. Before I go anywhere, I make sure I have at least four pennies, and preferably three quarters also, in my pocket. And then I actually use the change.
The trick is to keep from having nickels and dimes (And spending a lot of time annoying others in line as you use them.) is to use vending machines as reverse change machines. Walk up to them, dump in five nickels, pull the change return and get back a quarter. The vending machine people don't mind, it's all sorted automatically for practically nothing when it gets back to them. If it's a 65 cents machine or something, they actually need nickels and dimes, as almost everyone people comes up and stick in three quarters or a dollar. The refill guys have to load in dimes and nickels. (Some very old vending machines do not do this, they give you back the exact coins you put in, but even ones built in the early 90s just keep a running tab and know you put in '25 cents', not 'two dimes and nickel'.)
All this sounds like a lot of work, but it's honestly just a tiny amount of planning ahead plus a tiny amount of time at vending machines occasionally. (I'm sure you walk past a vending machine once a month.)
Once you set it up, you just grab three quarters and four pennies when you pick up your cellphone on the way out of the car. You go into Taco Bell with change, and walk out with less change, instead of having no change and always walking out with change. You don't have to pay a stupid fee to turn unusable money into usable money, nor do you have to annoy other in line by paying in tiny change. You just set it up where you spend the change, which means starting with change.
Slashdot Mirror
They do, in fact, look inside shoes. They make you take them off and x-ray them. However you are correct that belts or anything can hide an SD card, as they don't have anywhere near enough ferrous metal to set off a metal-detector. Or alternately you can hide it behind some metal that does go through the x-ray machine, like a metal belt-buckle or steel toe boots or cellphone.
Now there's an interesting idea. Some cellphones let you expand memory with microsd cards, and it's possible they copy those when copying data off cellphones, but if they copy it via the cellphone you could easily make an SD card with a shortened file system, or just use part of the filesystem without allocating it, and have hidden files the phone cannot see.
Of course, all this is completely stupid, as sending data encrypted over the internet is trivial and untraceable. You just get a webmail account that lets you use SSL, upload the encrypted file, email it to another account on the same service, and download it once in the US. Without the cooperation of the webmail provider, people, even people watch watching both connections and the webmail provider's connections, wouldn't even know the two people communicated at all. Even with the cooperation of the webmail provider, it's nearly impossible to notice, and even if you do notice it you can't arrest people for it or do anything about it, as it's not actually that suspicious.
Meanwhile, I'm tempted to try to make it though customs while carrying two gymbags full of CD-ROMs on spindles. About 4000 of them. Open packages but nothing burned on them.
Have fun copying, or at least attempting to copy, all those.
I'd be sure to declare them and pay whatever taxes they want so they can't assert I was smuggling them.
If you give me your television, and a piece of paper saying that "I give you my television" then legally, you have given me your television - no doubt about it. Not many courts in any jurisdiction would say, "No, you didn't really give him your television".
If, however, I gave you the piece of paper and not my television, no court would uphold that 'contract'. Whereas if I just gave you my television without any paper that would stand up in court.
So I'm not sure what your point is. Clearly the piece of paper is irrelevant, and obviously not a valid contract.
You do not need a consideration to give someone a gift. Unless, of course, you are no fun at birthdays, Christmas and other similar times.
You do not need consideration to give someone a gift, except for things that must be transfer via contract like real estate. You do need consideration to promise to give someone a gift and that promise to be legally actionable if you change your mind.
I can give anyone anything I want to, at all, and that holds up in court. What cannot hold up in court is my promise to give anyone anything, either via oral or written 'contract', because it's not a contract, because it doesn't have consideration both sides. But if I promise to give something to them in exchange for a dollar, it will hold up in court. (As long as they are willing to pay me that dollar.)
If you publish something under the GPL, then it was your intention to let me use it. Giving away rights (including ownership or a licence to use something) requires intent, not consideration.
Promising to give away rights, which is what the GPL, and all real licenses are, does, in fact, require consideration. (I'm talking about real licenses, like the right to use a song in a movie or the right to translate a work into an other language and sell it, not pretend licenses like EULAs.)
Luckily, there's consideration built into the GPL. You are granted the right to make copies, and in return you must provide the source on request. You get to do X, and in return you must do Y. Granted, you're doing Y for someone completely different, but contract law has no problem with that.
It's even possible to write a perfectly valid contract where I do something for an unrelated third party if you do something for an unrelated fourth party, which is why 'consideration' is actually a fairly stupid term. What lawyers really mean by that is that each party to the contract has to agree to do something, one side will do something if the other side will do something else. Otherwise it is not a contract.
Or, to look at it another way, in a contract, you do not have to do your part if the other party does not do theirs...and if they don't have a part, they are, in a sense, 'not doing their part', because they don't have one, so you don't have to do your part either. They cannot demand you do your part by pointing out they did theirs, as they didn't. Yes, nerds here will nitpick that 'nothing' is, indeed, something to do, and they actually instantly finished and have no promised obligations left, but the law doesn't work like a computer. (Or perhaps it does, and you just tried to pass a single parameter to a function that requires two, which crashed you out of 'contract law'.)
Except, as has been pointed out, their email client would happily encrypt, or fail to encrypt if they didn't have a key for, the message to the person it was addressed to.
That's not actually new, and it's used for a lot of fraud. When people see domain names about to expire, they'll do quick searches for email addresses that at those names. Some use spam lists, some just search on the net.
Then they'll buy them, and wait for mail to come in. They'll go to various places and request passwords for said email addresses. They'll get spam, and make requests using add those addresses.
How could they be a contact, anyway?
Contracts not only require consent, they require considerations from both sides. If I write on a piece of paper that I give you my television and sign it, alone, that will never hold up in court. I must exchange the television for something. That is why many 'gift' contracts sell things for 'one dollar and other valuable considerations'. A signed-by-two-parties piece of paper where one party agrees to do something and the other parent does not is not, in any legal sense, a contract.(1)
So what, exactly, are they paying me to agree to their stupid contract?
This is on top of the obvious problem of consent. The courts wouldn't agree there was retroactive 'consent' from 'reading a message you've already read', but even if they did, it's still not a fricking contract unless the two parties agree to exchange something.
1) It might be a promissory note, but that's not the same thing at all, and those are restricted in much more interesting ways, and only apply to money anyway. (Or, very rarely, goods or service, in informal IOUs, which will hold up in court if used in lieu of payment.) But you can't write a promissory note 'promising' not to disclose something, or not to do anything at all, you can't owe people 'the absence of doing something', you can only do that through contracts.
Okay, I was wondering where this dumbass 'Nelson rating' argument was coming from, I hadn't realized the broadcasts were itself claiming it.
It is the stupidest argument in history, because of the simple fact that Nelson familes are supposed to write down shows they see elsewhere and turn that in also. An argument can be made that this isn't 100% accurate, and it's not when it comes to sitcoms people might half-watch at a friends house, but I assure you that people are going to remember they went to a damn superbowl party and write it down.
Incidentally, isn't this demanding less people see the game so more people are counted as seeing the game? If 300 people go home, and 200 of them watch the game, one of them a Nelson family, the stats are higher and the viewers lower. (Although not in practice, as the Nelson family will, in fact, write it down anyway.)
Shouldn't the advertisers have something to say about that?
NO SPOILERS
The damn show hasn't even aired yet, and here people go spoiling it.
I'm just imagining it.
Interviewer: So you guys managed to come back from behind in an exciting game. Tell me, why do you think you won?
Winning football player: Well, first of all, I'd like to thank Jesus. With him all things are possible. And secondly I think we've really improved...
Interviewer: So, you we doing strong in the first half, ahead by 7, but faltered in the second, letting way too many long passes through. What do you think went wrong?
Losing football player: Well, first of all, I'd like to blame that asshole Jesus. Thanks a lot, jerk.
Natural law is a perfectly valid form and basis of copyright. It, indeed, is hundreds, although possibly not thousands, of years old.
However, it is not the model the US uses. The US has copyright for the sole purpose of encouraging creation of works, and not because people have an inherent right to stop others from copying their work. It does not, and has never had, the idea of 'natural law' copyright letting creators restrict copying.
This has, in fact, been explicitly and repeatedly confirmed by the courts. It could have gone the other way, citizens in the US have unstated rights and one of those could have been determined to be a right to control their own works, but it wasn't, and at this point the precedent is so strong it is unlikely to ever change without an amendment. (This does actually make sense, none of the other 'inalienable rights we have been granted by our creator' in the US let us stop other citizens from doing things over in a corner, just the government, and just to ourselves.)
But here for a discussion, and note that the US, to join Berne, had to come up with a law allowing artists to stop their public sculptures from being altered. Because they were not natural law, the idea that artists had any sort of protection of their work except blocking copies made had never shown up. So they wedged it in, because it's required in Berne, but that does not signify any sort of change in the philosophy basis of anything...they actually wedged it in under the same concept of slander and trademark law, that modifying sculpture that is attributable to someone else is harming their reputation. Then the courts actually went on to gut most of that with the requirement it be a widely-known work of the author.
Or read here, here which argues that the US is wrong for discounting natural law, but at least knows enough to know that it has.
The Napoleonic system of law has quite a long history too, but you'd be insane if you insisted that was applicable to Federal law.
No, the theory is that you can provoke them by firing a few missiles at them, wait until they haul out one of their missiles and sink one of our superdestroyers we have anchored off their coast, claim they attacked us, and then start bombing.
You couldn't hide a war, you could easily hide a tiny attack to start a war.
I don't know what's actually going on, and I doubt it's anything. Within a week or two, everything will be back to normal and a lot of people will look paranoid.
But if Iran suddenly mysteriously 'decides to attack us' while we're out of contact with them, that's what happened.
Ha, don't claim you forgot when you put it. Claim you put it with a bunch of incriminating evidence, and you're refusing to reveal that location to the government.
And, so you're not lying, actually put some incriminating evidence with it, and actually hide it somewhere. A picture of yourself jaywalking should do the trick. (That, of course, would not be enough to actually convict you of jaywalking, but it doesn't have to be 100% proof of a crime to be incriminating.)
Of course, the proper answer is actually: I don't have to help you investigate me. At all. I can't do anything to hinder the investigation, but I don't have to help it in any way.
For people saying the police can force you to give blood samples and stuff...no, they can't. The courts authorize them to take a blood sample, and they will do it by force if necessary. You are in no way legally required to cooperate with them, although you'll end up fairly bruised by the end if you do not.
It's exactly like searching your house...you are not required to unlock doors for them. But they'll just break all of them if you don't.
They cannot imprison you for failing to cooperate, although with blood samples that's a dangerous game to try...they can manhandle you, and you cannot lay a hand on them at all or it's assault. But if you were, say, The Flash, and could continually move your body fast enough to avoid the needle, there's nothing they could do.
That's what the right of avoiding self-incrimination means. The police and courts can force you to help with investigations of other people. They cannot force you to help with your own, at all, ever. (Or, rather, they cannot punish you for refusing to help.) If the courts do not understand this, we need new courts.
The solution that is, apparently, for the fascists to be Republicans, and then all the people who are supposed to say something just go 'Eh, whatever'.
Who the fuck hates someone for their freedom? What sort of insane world do you live in?
Really, though, how can you have any faith whatsoever that the Federal Government will do anything but make things worse?
Mainly because we plan to elect Democrats instead of Republicans. You know, people who actually think the government can function correctly, and aren't there to stab it in the back.
You know, of all the analogies here, you found made one that was non-stupid. But think of it more this way:
A store obviously has every thing labeled with a price, but that requires a lot of work to record and will only tell you the prices for things in stock, on the shelves, at that specific store.
The store also has a lookup sheet of all prices that employees get, printed on paper for some reason, in case employees need to answer questions. He walked up to one of the employees and asked to borrow a copy, got a copy, took pictures of it with his camera phone, and handed the original back.
He then went and put all those prices in a comparison shopper website.
They're now trying to sue him for asking for a copy, claiming he was impersonating an employee or something. When in actuality the store had no policy against letting anyone see the list, so the clerkdroid let him do so, and he did absolutely nothing that would vaguely be an attempt to fake people out.
If there was a policy of only allow access to certain people, and he had deliberately pretended to be someone who needed access but wasn't on the list, like saying 'I'm here with the Citizens for Fair Pricing, we've had complains of miscanned prices, and if you don't let me copy the list this second you're looking at lawsuits.', where he had invented that organization himself, a case could be made that maybe should be illegal. But computers can't be lied to in that way, so it's rather moot here.
If he had deliberately pretending to be someone who was allowed access, by claiming to be an off-duty employee or somehow spoofing the IP of the zone transfer request (Yea, I know you can't do that.), that certainly should be illegal. In fact, I suspect it is.
He didn't do either, though, he just walked up as a totally anonymous person and asked for the list. If they don't want random people to read the list, they need to make an employee policy against it.
Howso?
In both cases you're connecting to a server and saying 'Tell me about X'.
It's not even a matter of multiple domains or single, because of extra records sent on each request. If I look up www.example.com, I have a very good chance of being told, in that request, that www.example.com is a CNAME for example.com, which is what I asked, and being told the IP of example.com, the MX server of example.com, and the IP of the MX server, the name server of example.com, and the IP of the name servers.
They do this because, basically, UDP packets cost the same regardless if they're full or not, you don't get 'half price' for half a packet, so the DNS server might as well send information you might be about to look up next.
In other words, any DNS request is actually 'send me this information, and any other random pieces of information you think I might be going for next'. (Incidentally, this is how DNS poisoning works...sending records about domains that you do not, in fact, control, inside of legit responses for domains you do.)
I fail to see how this differ from a zone transfer.
Seriously, people, there is a hard and fast rule that all computer access must be subject to, or the entire system breaks down: Any access is authorized unless it is marked as private.
I don't want to hear whining about how fucktards can't secure their DNS zones or their wireless or think 'secret' filenames on websites should work. Tough. Unlike all the dumb analogies here about doors, this isn't the real world, and all computer services can be secured behind passwords and encryption.
If they are behind any password and/or encryption, they are illegal to access without permission, no matter how crappy the password or encryption.
If not, they are not. Otherwise, there is no internet. If there is no automatic permission to try to access things, no one can ever visit any website again.
What if you get sued by you and you alleges that you forced your signature?
Okay, I don't know if everyone's enter some alternate universe or something, but residues on computer games are extremely stupid to talk about. At all.
Residues are what you get from later sales. With movies, it's TV and DVDs, with TV, it's syndication and DVDs (and not the internet, apparently).
TV and movie writers are either on a flat salary, or paid per episode/for the movie, which covers them for the original airing. (And with movie writers, often they get a cut of the net.) And then they have residues to cover additional uses, which are mainly just in case their show is popular so the TV networks can't make infinite money off it forever without handing some back.
With video games,'residues' would be...what, exactly? How do you rerun a game? An emulator?
What people here apparently think video game writers should get is a cut of the net profit, like many movie writers get, not 'residues'.
And I'm all for that, but I have no idea why we're specifically want game writers singled out. People producing computer software should be paid more if the software does well. (Microsoft, and don't think I'm a fan, pays workers in stock options for exactly this reason, although that obviously averages it across the company.)
OTOH, the reason that Hollywood writers and actors and directors forced a residue system is that, unlike most companies of the time, they were entirely contractual workers and had no job security or retirement. Originally, TV and movie studios just tended to discard people, even the really famous ones, people who had a million viewings of their reruns every day, and they were living out of dumpsters. (Of course, nowadays, no job security is the norm, but not back them.)
Video game writers really aren't in the same boat.
This is not correct. Copyrights don't disappear just because copying is easy. Copyrights never prevented copying.
I don't see how I implied they did. I said difficulty in copying prevented copying. (I am confused by how you're disagreeing with me here.) Copyrights are just preventing people from setting up large scale operations to overcome said difficulties.
From the very beginning, you could copy by hand any copyrighted book.
Not practically you couldn't.
What copyrights allow is to seek damages against those who violate them. Only the copyright holder may freely sell their work for money in the open market. Others who try with unauthorized copies face civil penalties.
As the other responder said, that is a valid point. Companies will continue to follow copyright amongst themselves, so it clearly still exists in some sense. So it's more correct to say the idea of things handed to normal people being subject to copyright is has vanished.
So just because you can copy something doesn't mean that the idea of copyright has suddenly vanished.
No, the fact that people are distributing TV shows and MP3s and movies continually on the internet means copyright is has suddenly vanished. Or is in the process of vanishing.
You are correct about copyright still being useful between distributors and artists, so in a sense there is still functioning copyright. That has nothing to do with difficultly of copying. So amend what I said to end-user copyright no long existing with copying is infinitely easy.
Or, to put it less confusingly: Difficulties in copying made copying restricted to large companies instead of random people. Large companies tend to follow the letter of the law, at least contractually.
Easy in copying unrestricts copying by random people, who follow the law only sometimes, if it's not something they feel like breaking, and especially not if no one else is following it and it's 'victimless', aka, unnoticeable without the police looking for it. (re: Speeding.) As they clearly don't feel like following copyright, copyright for them snaps in half.
Obviously, large companies will still follow any existing law.
It doesn't.
is needed for copyright to work at all. There must be some barrier to copying, or copyright vanishes magically into thin air. Barriers to copying, as is pointed out by many comments here, are like locks, keep 'your friends' from copying, even if they don't stop your enemies.
The problem is, of course, at a certain point, it doesn't matter. If people can infinitely copy the work with the lock broken, copyrighted works do not have a barrier to copying beyond a trivial investment of time. (And the tools can be near-completely automated.)
And, without this barrier to copying, copyright does not exist. I don't mean in a moral sense, or a legal sense, I mean in a practical sense. There is no such thing, in society, right now, as copyrights on music. The laws involving them might still exist, but the concept itself exists more in absence.
As DVD copying gets more practical, there will soon be no such things as copyrights on DVDs. Right now it's at the edge, and has been delayed by the lack of a Napster designed to share DVDs to launch the idea into the public mind, enough bandwidth, and the fact you'd have to burn them, on double-density DVDs even. I give it another five years.
Note to people who are about to argue why we, morally or practically, need copyright: I didn't say this was a good thing. I'm just stating facts.
So, 'copy protection', as in, actual difficulty in copying, is needed for copyright. OTOH, all 'copy protection' and DRM schemes on computers, do not actually provide that, so they are rather pointless.
Boot sector viruses did not spread because people attempted to boot from floppies.
Boot sector viruses spread for a single reason: Computers by default tried to boot from the floppy first. People would leave floppies in the drive, and get infected.
Just exactly how stupid are you? Your boss is not the government. Children in schools are not in the employ of schools.
And, more the point, schools may, indeed, have an additional right to punish people, just like employers have an additional right to punish students...after they are found guilty in a court of law. If you think a employers can accuse someone of stealing and fire them because of that, without involving the police, you have another think coming...that is, indeed, slander. (In an 'at will' state, they can fire them for no reason at all, so would just do that without publicly accusing them of theft, but if you think the government can punish students 'at will' for no reason, you're a fascist asshole.)
I have a simple way of dealing with change doesn't require change machines: I keep a big pile of it in my car. Before I go anywhere, I make sure I have at least four pennies, and preferably three quarters also, in my pocket. And then I actually use the change.
The trick is to keep from having nickels and dimes (And spending a lot of time annoying others in line as you use them.) is to use vending machines as reverse change machines. Walk up to them, dump in five nickels, pull the change return and get back a quarter. The vending machine people don't mind, it's all sorted automatically for practically nothing when it gets back to them. If it's a 65 cents machine or something, they actually need nickels and dimes, as almost everyone people comes up and stick in three quarters or a dollar. The refill guys have to load in dimes and nickels. (Some very old vending machines do not do this, they give you back the exact coins you put in, but even ones built in the early 90s just keep a running tab and know you put in '25 cents', not 'two dimes and nickel'.)
All this sounds like a lot of work, but it's honestly just a tiny amount of planning ahead plus a tiny amount of time at vending machines occasionally. (I'm sure you walk past a vending machine once a month.)
Once you set it up, you just grab three quarters and four pennies when you pick up your cellphone on the way out of the car. You go into Taco Bell with change, and walk out with less change, instead of having no change and always walking out with change. You don't have to pay a stupid fee to turn unusable money into usable money, nor do you have to annoy other in line by paying in tiny change. You just set it up where you spend the change, which means starting with change.