You are aware that water does not under any circumstances cause a hangover, right?
By your logic, you can't drink 100% pure anything, because you can't help but swallow air and saliva when you drink. In the real world, even in biology, air and water are completely ignored...you can have pure substances at 50% concentation with water as the other half. Water does not count as an impurity.
That's still a very iffy treatment, because everyone's body processes ethanol in different amounts.
So, basically, they just keep giving you booze and asking how woozy you are. I think they want you before 'completely smashed', but after 'not okay to drive'.
WRT to #1, it appears the car behind them will actually push the one in front into the next station.
And the great thing about this system is that you just need to build stopping positions. If the ballgame lets out, you can have a station full of cars right there, and even have some at the station before that ready to come in the second those cars leave. But you only need those cars there at that time, at other times, they can be elsewhere.
So you just need enough cars to handle total peak traffic, and each station needs to be big enough to handle it's own peak. You probably can trivially add length, too, since they're not inline.
Some subway systems handle this by having stations that only every other car stops at except during peak, but just having two cars there 90% of the time and sixteen cars there at peak is a lot more elegant. And subways don't let you add more capability to a single station, you have to add more trains going up and down.
I think this system wouldn't work incredibly well for moving large amounts of people in the same direction. Which is about 20% of the time in a subway.
However, it would work fine for everything else, and you could always use it to get to the subway station. (Or, heck, get to a subway station. It can send people to the least busy one.)
And when the company has built a huge transaction system based on Java? And has to stop using it?
Oh, yeah, I'm sure the company will be really happy it didn't get sued for damages. Now if they just had a functioning company...
Oh, wait! The company that sued them is offering to license the patent at a few million dollars. They could just pay!
Like I've said before being unable to sue for damages is a red herring. It might work for a media player patent that was distributed with Windows and the company doesn't actually use anyway. But it's going to fuck them if there's a core business built around it, though. They'll either have to pay whatever the patent hold wants, or die. (And, interestingly, with Microsoft 'indemnification', they have to do whatever MS says, period. They don't have the choice of licensing the patent themselves.)
Re:From the memory hole...
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Sun-isms Debunked
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· Score: 2, Insightful
The money, did, in fact, help the lawsuits. It's money, and it ended up with SCO. It helped.
It doesn't really matter if it's for legitimate purposes. Everyone would have understood if Sun said 'Well, we could open source Solaris, but we'd have to pay SCO'. Everyone would have said 'Hey, no, that can wait. In fact, it will be a good deal cheaper when we get done with SCO...'.
But no, Sun walked up to people who were paying people to assault other people, and bought a car from them. The people who are getting assaulted with Sun's money are not feeling very nice towards them. It doesn't matter why they did so, it was incredibly stupid at least.
And, when you add in the public attacks on Linux by Sun, it stops looking like random chance.
Sun can't live on hardware, even with support. For the mainframe market, IBM has it beat utterly, and SGI's in there also if you are weilded to Unix.
Even if that wasn't true, Sun is not about to become a mainframe-only manufacturer. Because the only reason people buy those machines is to run Solaris from top to bottom. Once there stops being standalone Solaris boxes, there will stop being mainframe Solaris boxes.
I hope your boss fires you for making technical decisions based on your opinions of the users of a product.
Re:What day of the week is it?
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Sun-isms Debunked
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· Score: 3, Insightful
And I'll add to your list of companies that get it: Microsoft gets it. They don't like it, but they get it, and they're coming up with strageties that will allow them to win anyway. Like FUD about legal liablity and patent wars. By trying to coop open source's many eyes with 'shared source', and the developers with free compilers. I don't know if it will work, I don't know if they think it will work or if it's just a delaying action, but they get it.
And, yeah, Sun certainly does not get it. They think their competitor is Red Hat. They think they need to outclever Red Hat. They're staring in bafflement as people continue to use an OS that's technologically inferior to their own, even after they've lowered their prices to free. They don't understand what's going on.
They're thrashing around randomly, not sure if Linux is a friend or foe. Logically, in their universe, Linux should take the desktops, breaking the Windows monopoly, and Sun (And the other Real Unixes(TM)) should take the servers. But that's not happening. Linux is taking the servers faster than the desktops!
This is why they can use Linux on their Java desktop. They don't care about the desktop, as long as it's not MS anymore, because MS uses their monopoly position there to take the servers. But Linux taking the servers is just screwing with their head.
Yes, the Solaris user community pokes fun at Solaris, just like the AIX community pokes fun at AIX, and the Tru64 community...well, there isn't one, so nevermind there.
Pretending it's the Linux community is stupid. People in the Linux community are wary of Sun for good reasons, like the constant 'We're better than Linux' talk and the fact they gave an assload of money to SCO after SCO started 'suing Linux', right next to Microsoft. They claim there was a good reason for this, but considering what was going on is still a secret, that oculd just be one of the many lies Sun tells.
As for their OS...no one has any problems with their OS. It's a very nice OS. I think it, probably, is going to die..they ignored Linux too long, and there's really not a need for it. Linux will kill by getting more and more enterprise features and eat it away from below.
But I have no ill will towards their OS or its users, as does no normal Linux user. Although there are always idiots here...this is slashdot, after all.
Nitpit: I don't think it's accurate to called the Tollan people a 'race'. They're humans. They're just one of the few human populations more advanced than us instead of the other way around, way up at the Nox and Asgard level of technology.
But, yeah, they're pretty much toast. They relied too much on a few automated, 'unbeatable' weapons, and it turns out that no weapon is unbeatable forever. It's too bad, I liked the Tollan...I was laughing when they explained that altering government records was a worse crime than murder.;)
You know, it's funny. Of the System Lords, the Asgard, the Nox, and Tollan, only the Nox haven't come up against a stronger enemy and been seriously crippled, if not entirely defeated. The Tollan and the System Lords came up against Anubis, and the Asgard came up against the replicators.
The Nox have managed to escape all this, mainly because no one can figure out a useful reason to attack them.
Oh, I know, I was just laughing at the concept that what Microsoft is offering is somehow wanted.
Think about it...they infringe patents, and they indemnify you by reserving the right to make you stop using that software.
Um...okay. That's incredibly not useful. You could stop using the software anyway. It's just, this way, if they want you to, you have to, instead of taking the patent owners to court on the grounds the patent is invalid, or simply purchasing a license.
So, the next time that Microsoft steals another patent, like Stacker's, they're reserving the right to cripple their software so it can't read your files anymore?
Um...yay?
Re:Disconnect and motivation
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The Music Man
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· Score: 1
The 117 exemption isn't a fair use, it's a statutory exemption. Fair use is the exemption that depends entirely on the circumstances.
I didn't say 117 was fair use, I said 'Creating an archive copy and using that instead of an original is generally considered fair use'. 117 is just codifying that fair use into law for computers.
Honestly, that's getting a little nice picky, isn't it? Creating an archive copy and using that is generally fair use. Except under software, where it's stopped being fair use because it was explicitly written into law. (And, like I said, possibly under other categories, too.) I don't know what your problem is with my statement there.
As for your point about 106 and 109, you're right. It's not legal to give away copies made onto music CD-Rs. I see what you're saying there.
However...it's still legal for you to make copies onto other people's blank media. It's still legal for you to make copies from borrowed originals. It's just not legal to transfer these copies.
Netcom didn't say that the activity there was not infringing. It said that the ISP wasn't to blame for it. The distinction is one of passivity; ISPs are not actively involved in what their users are doing, and therefore might escape liability. The same cannot be said of the end users of a P2P network. You need to reread Netcom.
Damn, you're right. I was remembering Netcom as the ISP, but in reality they were a Usenet provider, weren't they? But my point is, copying through anything, be it a network, memory, whatever, is legal. Despite the rather nonsensical precedent we have about copies in RAM being fixed, which is basically a misinterpetation of CONTU, absolutely no one has claimed that copying a file over a network makes more than one copy of it, despite the entire file hitting the sender's memory, the wire, and your memory, because it's only there in tiny pieces at once.
It's the same reason that photocopying a book results in one copy of it, despite the fact the copier had, at various times, the entire book in its memory. Those copies last a very short period of time, and hence are not fixed, and aren't retrievable anyway.
It only has to last long enough to be perceived, reproduced, etc. And when the user listens to audio on a computer, he is perceiving, via the computer, as a device, the contents of the memory.
Except that before, it was encoded as an MP3. The copying was only done as needed to turn it into audio the computer could play.
By your interpetation, all decoding of anything is illegal, because you're making a copy of it as you do so. I can't square this with the concept that transitory and incidental copies are legal. No court has ever ruled CD players illegal, which they logically would be under what you're saying.
If there's some reason CD players would be legal under your interpetation, please explain. (And note my CD player, like most of them, has a several second buffer to protect against skips. Data is copied there, and copied out.) If not, I must conclude copying things around within a device to turn something human preceivable is legal.
See, that's what's getting me. You're arguing downloading MP3s is illegal, and I can actually understand some arguments that it is so. However, the fact your computer makes transitory copies when it plays them is not one of these arguments. By that logic, every DVD player, CD player, web browser...they all make illegal copies. As this is clearly not the case, you can't use that reasoning to argue that downloading MP3s is illegal.
And like I said...that would still make downloading them legal. It would just make playing them illegal.
And while such assumptions as you make might be commonplace, remember that direct infringement is a matter of strict liability. It doesn't matter whether you lacked intent or knowledge. Merely infringing, no matter what your state of mind, is actionable.
The problem is, I think that helps my position. If I walk up and pick up a newspaper, I do not have to check if it is a legal copy. I haven't infringed no matter what. Likewise, I say if I click on a file to download, I do not have to check if it's a legal copy. Even if I am aware that it is more than likely an illegal copy, I am still okay, because copyright infringement doesn't care about intent. Purchasing illegally copied material is legal, whether you know it or not.
Which, oddly enough, you appear to agree with. You're just arguing that once it gets into my machine, I have to do additional copying to listen to it, which I don't think is held up by law anywhere, except in that rather absurd Intellectual Reserve case, which, like I said, was a preliminary injunction, and thus rather unimportant. If we required permission to download and display something, the whole internet would break, as would all DVD and CD players. (And before you point out that some web sites have EULA that allow downloading, I will point out that you w
That's the thing about e-voting, or, as I like to call it, faith-based ballot counting.
What people don't understand, and it's not their fault because they're never taught it, is that vote manipulation is easy. It's trivial.
And thus, we do everything in the open.
We have ballots sitting out in the open where everyone can watch them given out. We have ballot boxes locked with keys that have known locations, and we have the boxs sitting in the middle of the floor. We have voter registration rolls sitting on the table, open, and we watch workers making marks next to the names as people get their ballot.
It's a secret ballot, but almost every single aspect of the process is completely open and transparent.
You can sit there and watch the blank ballots get unsealed from the box. You can watch the ballot box, set up, empty, and yes they really will show the public that it's empty. You can watch each ballot get handed off to someone on the list who identifies themselves get crossed off, you can watch them take their ballot, you can't watch them mark it, you can watch them put it in the locked ballot box, you can sit there and stare at that ballot box until the polls close, and they crack it open. Then you can watch each ballot get counted. You can watch them add up the totals, and post them on the door. Then you can watch the news and see the totals from your precinct.
Hey, you're right. I'd never heard of NTP v. Beck. Well, no, you're wrong, they still aren't copyrightable in general.
To clarify, costumes aren't supposed to be copyrightable, and, in general, are not. By costumes, I was thinking of things like Cyclop's visor, or Batman's cowl and cape, etc. Those aren't copyrightable. You can't claim to own the idea of wearing a certain outfit. You can't claim to own the idea of wearing a visor over your eyes. You can't claim a Starfleet uniform is yours.
However, in a few cases, the courts have apparently upheld that graphics and whatnot that could be separated from the costume could be copyrighted.
I presume they're talking about, for example, Superman's S logo, which is a normally copyrightable work that is simply draw on his costume. You don't lose copyright protection that would exist if it wasn't on a costume. It doesn't stop someone from wearing a blue and red costume with a yellow M logo, though. Blue and red, obviously, are not copyrightable, nor is the concept of a letter in a shape.
Likewise, it doesn't stop a Spiderman knockoff, because the concept of 'spiderwebbing on red' is not copyrightable...a specific pattern may be, but the odds of someone drawing that same pattern is rather low. (As the pattern can't be separated from the costume anyway, they might even be in the clear in that case. How do you flatten out a full body pattern? It has to be part of a costume!)
I actually think this is a bit silly, as it's rather obvious you that have copyright protection on logos and graphics even if they're on a piece of clothing, and it's presented in an overly confusing way by the court.
If you start reading to much into 'an intrinsic utilitarian function' you could come away with the quite correct idea that, for example, a color scheme does not have 'an intrinsic utilitarian function' and thus you can't copy it, which is clearly not what was intended, and they've managed to disclaim that by some handwaving about fashion being a function, which is silly.
But if there are people walking around with character logos on CoH, they need to stop. In addition to copyright infringement, that more than likely is trademark infringement.
Hrm. You know...very few popular Marvel heroes even have logos. The X-Men don't, except they usually have some sort of X on their costume somewhere. Spiderman has a spider on his chest, but it's easy enough to draw a different type spider. The Incredibly Hulk barely wears clothes. The Fantastic Four have a logo, I guess, but I couldn't recognize it. But generally, DC's superheroes are the people with the logos, not Marvel's.
First of all, I'd really like it if you didn't set up strawmen. I know that sound recordings are goofily called phonorecords, and I even know why.
And both Intellectual Reserve and the Napster case were contribitory actions. No one was actually going after said 'memory copiers' for real. (And Intellectual Reserve was an injunction Courts are willing to grant preliminary injunctions for arguments that, ultimately, do not hold up in court.)
Intellectual Reserve is complete gibberish anyway. If any copy isn't transitory, it would be the one in the cache, not the one displaying in memory. That court knew nothing about copyright, and no one even put up a realistic defense to that injunction, because it was about having to take three hyperlinks off a web page. Bringing that case up is just crazy...that precedent isn't going to stand long.
If someone actually went after memory copiers, they'd fail. You would be in violation of copyright by copying this post into memory.
And all this is stupid, because when you download something from a P2P network you don't copy it into memory, you copy it though memory, which is legal. Check RTC v. Netcom if you don't believe me. Bringing up memory copying is just silly.
And Napster's, while more realistic about what happens in a computer, was incidental to the case. It didn't matter a damn if downloaders were violating copyright and Napster was helping, as uploaders certainly were violating copyright and Napster was helping. As it was the same copyright violation anyway, it didn't really matter even damages-wise.
However, the actual question is: Is asking them to make a copy of something they possess a violation of copyright law? Traditionally, no. If I see a copy of Tarzan in the store, I'm allowed to purchase it without checking copyright ownership. I can just assume the producer of the copy has the right to copy it.
Then A&M vs. Napster offhandly reversed 100 years of precendent in an unimportant comment about just how illegal Napster is. Suddenly, it's illegal for me to purchase illegal copies of things? It's illegal to purchase a ticket to a movie that is illegally showing a movie?
Nope. That would never hold up in court. And it hasn't been tried in court in any important circumstance, i.e., when someone needs to defend themselves against the charge.
When it does, then you can crow about how it's illegal. And how we now have to spend months checking ownership of every single story before purchasing a newpaper.
Re:Disconnect and motivation
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The Music Man
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· Score: 1
Um...are you in some sort of universe where copying your own CDs isn't legal? It would normally be legal to copy a CD onto a CD-R for your own purposes anyway. Creating an archive copy and using that instead of an original is generally considered fair use, although I don't think it's explicited stated for anywhere but software.
And it's rather difficult to imagine how you could make copies for yourself for commercial purposes, anyway. Maybe DJs, but DJs already need public performace licenses.
And I don't know in what universe there's a difference between a legal copy, and a copy that no one can say is illegal. No one can shop up in court claiming infringement, and thus, since I haven't infringed copyrights until proven so in court, I haven't infringed copyrights. Duh.
You're trying to invent a category where I've broken the law, but it's impossible to take me to court. Well...no such legal category exists. If I haven't been to court, I haven't broken the law, legally. There's no middle ground. And that's not come crazy loophole, that's the intent of the law. It's a shield to protect noncommerical copiers. They can argue they're explicitly protected from even being in court.
As for giving away copies...hey, you're already allowed to do that, it's called the doctrine of First Sale. You don't need permission to give away a legal copy of a Beatles' CD, otherwise, you couldn't resells CDs, which you rather obviously can. You just can't use Section 1008 if you made the copies with commerical intent. (And like I pointed out somewhere else, it's legal to sell illegal copies. It's the copying that illega, not the selling.)
Tell me, Mr. Copyright Expert...exactly what law would be broken if I gave away a copy legally made under 1008?
In fact, in 'There but the Grace of God', a season two episode, we learned destroying Ra, which happened in the movie, causes a retalitory strike on earth. It caused it in an alternate universe, it almost happened here but was prevented via the fact we used the stargate
If we hadn't had allies, or hadn't been out in the universe poking around, we would have been toast. With no warning. Huge ships would have appeared in orbit and destroyed us.
I think you missed the fact that one of the mandates of the SGC is to bring back alien technology, and they, being a combat team, don't sit around building stuff.
They capture alien tech, and then, amazingly, don't sit around going 'Well, is that ship finished yet? Nope? Ah well.' every week. They hand it off to Area 51 and those guys build it. Then we, the audience, are told about it. And we aren't told about it as a deus ex machina either.
The Wraiths are in most of the episodes? Are you even watching the show? We just had the two part mid-season arc about a hurricane that almost destroyed Atlantis, and, in the middle for the evacuation, the Jenii took over. It wasn't about the Wraith at all.
No Wraith in '38 minutes', no Wraith in 'Hide and Seek', no Wraith in 'Home'...
That means slightly less than half the episodes could have taken place without the Wraith at all.
Of the other six, half those just had the Wraith as a long term enemy that had effected society: the Jenii, the 'Don't trust anyone over 25' world, and the world that was poisoning itself and thus the Wraith. It was 'How would the Wraith affect society', not 'Let's go and fight us some Wraith'. You know...the kind of questions science fiction asks?
One remaining was about a spy, and would have literally worked in a non-scifi enviroment.
And the other two were the opening of the series, where, duh, they needed to explain the Wraith.
I have no idea how someone could watch that series and think it was all about the Wraith.
No, Anubis attacked them by coming up with a new shield against their defense system when they failed to nuke us. (Using their patented 'walk through walls' technology to get the nuke through our iris.)
Anubis, at that point, didn't want to violate the protected planet treaty with the Asgard. Apparently, extorting other people into attacking people you are not allowed to attack is legal under the treaty.
He attacked them, as far as we know, with traditional bombardment and ground troups. Probably hoping to get their technology.
Slashdot Mirror
By your logic, you can't drink 100% pure anything, because you can't help but swallow air and saliva when you drink. In the real world, even in biology, air and water are completely ignored...you can have pure substances at 50% concentation with water as the other half. Water does not count as an impurity.
However, yes, pure ethanol can cause a hangover.
So, basically, they just keep giving you booze and asking how woozy you are. I think they want you before 'completely smashed', but after 'not okay to drive'.
I like when he talks about 'non-stop' flights. He much rather prefers his planes actually stop, preferably at the destination.
And he doesn't like to fly on airplanes anymore, he'd much rather fly in the airplane.
And the great thing about this system is that you just need to build stopping positions. If the ballgame lets out, you can have a station full of cars right there, and even have some at the station before that ready to come in the second those cars leave. But you only need those cars there at that time, at other times, they can be elsewhere.
So you just need enough cars to handle total peak traffic, and each station needs to be big enough to handle it's own peak. You probably can trivially add length, too, since they're not inline.
Some subway systems handle this by having stations that only every other car stops at except during peak, but just having two cars there 90% of the time and sixteen cars there at peak is a lot more elegant. And subways don't let you add more capability to a single station, you have to add more trains going up and down.
However, it would work fine for everything else, and you could always use it to get to the subway station. (Or, heck, get to a subway station. It can send people to the least busy one.)
Oh, yeah, I'm sure the company will be really happy it didn't get sued for damages. Now if they just had a functioning company...
Oh, wait! The company that sued them is offering to license the patent at a few million dollars. They could just pay!
Like I've said before being unable to sue for damages is a red herring. It might work for a media player patent that was distributed with Windows and the company doesn't actually use anyway. But it's going to fuck them if there's a core business built around it, though. They'll either have to pay whatever the patent hold wants, or die. (And, interestingly, with Microsoft 'indemnification', they have to do whatever MS says, period. They don't have the choice of licensing the patent themselves.)
It doesn't really matter if it's for legitimate purposes. Everyone would have understood if Sun said 'Well, we could open source Solaris, but we'd have to pay SCO'. Everyone would have said 'Hey, no, that can wait. In fact, it will be a good deal cheaper when we get done with SCO...'.
But no, Sun walked up to people who were paying people to assault other people, and bought a car from them. The people who are getting assaulted with Sun's money are not feeling very nice towards them. It doesn't matter why they did so, it was incredibly stupid at least.
And, when you add in the public attacks on Linux by Sun, it stops looking like random chance.
Even if that wasn't true, Sun is not about to become a mainframe-only manufacturer. Because the only reason people buy those machines is to run Solaris from top to bottom. Once there stops being standalone Solaris boxes, there will stop being mainframe Solaris boxes.
I hope your boss fires you for making technical decisions based on your opinions of the users of a product.
And, yeah, Sun certainly does not get it. They think their competitor is Red Hat. They think they need to outclever Red Hat. They're staring in bafflement as people continue to use an OS that's technologically inferior to their own, even after they've lowered their prices to free. They don't understand what's going on.
They're thrashing around randomly, not sure if Linux is a friend or foe. Logically, in their universe, Linux should take the desktops, breaking the Windows monopoly, and Sun (And the other Real Unixes(TM)) should take the servers. But that's not happening. Linux is taking the servers faster than the desktops!
This is why they can use Linux on their Java desktop. They don't care about the desktop, as long as it's not MS anymore, because MS uses their monopoly position there to take the servers. But Linux taking the servers is just screwing with their head.
Yes, the Solaris user community pokes fun at Solaris, just like the AIX community pokes fun at AIX, and the Tru64 community...well, there isn't one, so nevermind there.
Pretending it's the Linux community is stupid. People in the Linux community are wary of Sun for good reasons, like the constant 'We're better than Linux' talk and the fact they gave an assload of money to SCO after SCO started 'suing Linux', right next to Microsoft. They claim there was a good reason for this, but considering what was going on is still a secret, that oculd just be one of the many lies Sun tells.
As for their OS...no one has any problems with their OS. It's a very nice OS. I think it, probably, is going to die..they ignored Linux too long, and there's really not a need for it. Linux will kill by getting more and more enterprise features and eat it away from below.
But I have no ill will towards their OS or its users, as does no normal Linux user. Although there are always idiots here...this is slashdot, after all.
But, yeah, they're pretty much toast. They relied too much on a few automated, 'unbeatable' weapons, and it turns out that no weapon is unbeatable forever. It's too bad, I liked the Tollan...I was laughing when they explained that altering government records was a worse crime than murder. ;)
You know, it's funny. Of the System Lords, the Asgard, the Nox, and Tollan, only the Nox haven't come up against a stronger enemy and been seriously crippled, if not entirely defeated. The Tollan and the System Lords came up against Anubis, and the Asgard came up against the replicators.
The Nox have managed to escape all this, mainly because no one can figure out a useful reason to attack them.
Think about it...they infringe patents, and they indemnify you by reserving the right to make you stop using that software.
Um...okay. That's incredibly not useful. You could stop using the software anyway. It's just, this way, if they want you to, you have to, instead of taking the patent owners to court on the grounds the patent is invalid, or simply purchasing a license.
Um...yay?
I didn't say 117 was fair use, I said 'Creating an archive copy and using that instead of an original is generally considered fair use'. 117 is just codifying that fair use into law for computers.
Honestly, that's getting a little nice picky, isn't it? Creating an archive copy and using that is generally fair use. Except under software, where it's stopped being fair use because it was explicitly written into law. (And, like I said, possibly under other categories, too.) I don't know what your problem is with my statement there.
As for your point about 106 and 109, you're right. It's not legal to give away copies made onto music CD-Rs. I see what you're saying there.
However...it's still legal for you to make copies onto other people's blank media. It's still legal for you to make copies from borrowed originals. It's just not legal to transfer these copies.
Damn, you're right. I was remembering Netcom as the ISP, but in reality they were a Usenet provider, weren't they? But my point is, copying through anything, be it a network, memory, whatever, is legal. Despite the rather nonsensical precedent we have about copies in RAM being fixed, which is basically a misinterpetation of CONTU, absolutely no one has claimed that copying a file over a network makes more than one copy of it, despite the entire file hitting the sender's memory, the wire, and your memory, because it's only there in tiny pieces at once.
It's the same reason that photocopying a book results in one copy of it, despite the fact the copier had, at various times, the entire book in its memory. Those copies last a very short period of time, and hence are not fixed, and aren't retrievable anyway.
It only has to last long enough to be perceived, reproduced, etc. And when the user listens to audio on a computer, he is perceiving, via the computer, as a device, the contents of the memory.
Except that before, it was encoded as an MP3. The copying was only done as needed to turn it into audio the computer could play.
By your interpetation, all decoding of anything is illegal, because you're making a copy of it as you do so. I can't square this with the concept that transitory and incidental copies are legal. No court has ever ruled CD players illegal, which they logically would be under what you're saying.
If there's some reason CD players would be legal under your interpetation, please explain. (And note my CD player, like most of them, has a several second buffer to protect against skips. Data is copied there, and copied out.) If not, I must conclude copying things around within a device to turn something human preceivable is legal.
See, that's what's getting me. You're arguing downloading MP3s is illegal, and I can actually understand some arguments that it is so. However, the fact your computer makes transitory copies when it plays them is not one of these arguments. By that logic, every DVD player, CD player, web browser...they all make illegal copies. As this is clearly not the case, you can't use that reasoning to argue that downloading MP3s is illegal.
And like I said...that would still make downloading them legal. It would just make playing them illegal.
And while such assumptions as you make might be commonplace, remember that direct infringement is a matter of strict liability. It doesn't matter whether you lacked intent or knowledge. Merely infringing, no matter what your state of mind, is actionable.
The problem is, I think that helps my position. If I walk up and pick up a newspaper, I do not have to check if it is a legal copy. I haven't infringed no matter what. Likewise, I say if I click on a file to download, I do not have to check if it's a legal copy. Even if I am aware that it is more than likely an illegal copy, I am still okay, because copyright infringement doesn't care about intent. Purchasing illegally copied material is legal, whether you know it or not.
Which, oddly enough, you appear to agree with. You're just arguing that once it gets into my machine, I have to do additional copying to listen to it, which I don't think is held up by law anywhere, except in that rather absurd Intellectual Reserve case, which, like I said, was a preliminary injunction, and thus rather unimportant. If we required permission to download and display something, the whole internet would break, as would all DVD and CD players. (And before you point out that some web sites have EULA that allow downloading, I will point out that you w
I think making people wear clothes during voting is a violation of the equal protection clause of the constitution. ;)
What people don't understand, and it's not their fault because they're never taught it, is that vote manipulation is easy. It's trivial.
And thus, we do everything in the open.
We have ballots sitting out in the open where everyone can watch them given out. We have ballot boxes locked with keys that have known locations, and we have the boxs sitting in the middle of the floor. We have voter registration rolls sitting on the table, open, and we watch workers making marks next to the names as people get their ballot.
It's a secret ballot, but almost every single aspect of the process is completely open and transparent.
You can sit there and watch the blank ballots get unsealed from the box. You can watch the ballot box, set up, empty, and yes they really will show the public that it's empty. You can watch each ballot get handed off to someone on the list who identifies themselves get crossed off, you can watch them take their ballot, you can't watch them mark it, you can watch them put it in the locked ballot box, you can sit there and stare at that ballot box until the polls close, and they crack it open. Then you can watch each ballot get counted. You can watch them add up the totals, and post them on the door. Then you can watch the news and see the totals from your precinct.
Or, at least, you used to be able to do all that.
To clarify, costumes aren't supposed to be copyrightable, and, in general, are not. By costumes, I was thinking of things like Cyclop's visor, or Batman's cowl and cape, etc. Those aren't copyrightable. You can't claim to own the idea of wearing a certain outfit. You can't claim to own the idea of wearing a visor over your eyes. You can't claim a Starfleet uniform is yours.
However, in a few cases, the courts have apparently upheld that graphics and whatnot that could be separated from the costume could be copyrighted.
I presume they're talking about, for example, Superman's S logo, which is a normally copyrightable work that is simply draw on his costume. You don't lose copyright protection that would exist if it wasn't on a costume. It doesn't stop someone from wearing a blue and red costume with a yellow M logo, though. Blue and red, obviously, are not copyrightable, nor is the concept of a letter in a shape.
Likewise, it doesn't stop a Spiderman knockoff, because the concept of 'spiderwebbing on red' is not copyrightable...a specific pattern may be, but the odds of someone drawing that same pattern is rather low. (As the pattern can't be separated from the costume anyway, they might even be in the clear in that case. How do you flatten out a full body pattern? It has to be part of a costume!)
I actually think this is a bit silly, as it's rather obvious you that have copyright protection on logos and graphics even if they're on a piece of clothing, and it's presented in an overly confusing way by the court.
If you start reading to much into 'an intrinsic utilitarian function' you could come away with the quite correct idea that, for example, a color scheme does not have 'an intrinsic utilitarian function' and thus you can't copy it, which is clearly not what was intended, and they've managed to disclaim that by some handwaving about fashion being a function, which is silly.
But if there are people walking around with character logos on CoH, they need to stop. In addition to copyright infringement, that more than likely is trademark infringement.
Hrm. You know...very few popular Marvel heroes even have logos. The X-Men don't, except they usually have some sort of X on their costume somewhere. Spiderman has a spider on his chest, but it's easy enough to draw a different type spider. The Incredibly Hulk barely wears clothes. The Fantastic Four have a logo, I guess, but I couldn't recognize it. But generally, DC's superheroes are the people with the logos, not Marvel's.
And both Intellectual Reserve and the Napster case were contribitory actions. No one was actually going after said 'memory copiers' for real. (And Intellectual Reserve was an injunction Courts are willing to grant preliminary injunctions for arguments that, ultimately, do not hold up in court.)
Intellectual Reserve is complete gibberish anyway. If any copy isn't transitory, it would be the one in the cache, not the one displaying in memory. That court knew nothing about copyright, and no one even put up a realistic defense to that injunction, because it was about having to take three hyperlinks off a web page. Bringing that case up is just crazy...that precedent isn't going to stand long.
If someone actually went after memory copiers, they'd fail. You would be in violation of copyright by copying this post into memory.
And all this is stupid, because when you download something from a P2P network you don't copy it into memory, you copy it though memory, which is legal. Check RTC v. Netcom if you don't believe me. Bringing up memory copying is just silly.
And Napster's, while more realistic about what happens in a computer, was incidental to the case. It didn't matter a damn if downloaders were violating copyright and Napster was helping, as uploaders certainly were violating copyright and Napster was helping. As it was the same copyright violation anyway, it didn't really matter even damages-wise.
However, the actual question is: Is asking them to make a copy of something they possess a violation of copyright law? Traditionally, no. If I see a copy of Tarzan in the store, I'm allowed to purchase it without checking copyright ownership. I can just assume the producer of the copy has the right to copy it.
Then A&M vs. Napster offhandly reversed 100 years of precendent in an unimportant comment about just how illegal Napster is. Suddenly, it's illegal for me to purchase illegal copies of things? It's illegal to purchase a ticket to a movie that is illegally showing a movie?
Nope. That would never hold up in court. And it hasn't been tried in court in any important circumstance, i.e., when someone needs to defend themselves against the charge.
When it does, then you can crow about how it's illegal. And how we now have to spend months checking ownership of every single story before purchasing a newpaper.
And it's rather difficult to imagine how you could make copies for yourself for commercial purposes, anyway. Maybe DJs, but DJs already need public performace licenses.
And I don't know in what universe there's a difference between a legal copy, and a copy that no one can say is illegal. No one can shop up in court claiming infringement, and thus, since I haven't infringed copyrights until proven so in court, I haven't infringed copyrights. Duh.
You're trying to invent a category where I've broken the law, but it's impossible to take me to court. Well...no such legal category exists. If I haven't been to court, I haven't broken the law, legally. There's no middle ground. And that's not come crazy loophole, that's the intent of the law. It's a shield to protect noncommerical copiers. They can argue they're explicitly protected from even being in court.
As for giving away copies...hey, you're already allowed to do that, it's called the doctrine of First Sale. You don't need permission to give away a legal copy of a Beatles' CD, otherwise, you couldn't resells CDs, which you rather obviously can. You just can't use Section 1008 if you made the copies with commerical intent. (And like I pointed out somewhere else, it's legal to sell illegal copies. It's the copying that illega, not the selling.)
Tell me, Mr. Copyright Expert...exactly what law would be broken if I gave away a copy legally made under 1008?
If we hadn't had allies, or hadn't been out in the universe poking around, we would have been toast. With no warning. Huge ships would have appeared in orbit and destroyed us.
They capture alien tech, and then, amazingly, don't sit around going 'Well, is that ship finished yet? Nope? Ah well.' every week. They hand it off to Area 51 and those guys build it. Then we, the audience, are told about it. And we aren't told about it as a deus ex machina either.
No Wraith in '38 minutes', no Wraith in 'Hide and Seek', no Wraith in 'Home'...
That means slightly less than half the episodes could have taken place without the Wraith at all.
Of the other six, half those just had the Wraith as a long term enemy that had effected society: the Jenii, the 'Don't trust anyone over 25' world, and the world that was poisoning itself and thus the Wraith. It was 'How would the Wraith affect society', not 'Let's go and fight us some Wraith'. You know...the kind of questions science fiction asks?
One remaining was about a spy, and would have literally worked in a non-scifi enviroment.
And the other two were the opening of the series, where, duh, they needed to explain the Wraith.
I have no idea how someone could watch that series and think it was all about the Wraith.
Anubis, at that point, didn't want to violate the protected planet treaty with the Asgard. Apparently, extorting other people into attacking people you are not allowed to attack is legal under the treaty.
He attacked them, as far as we know, with traditional bombardment and ground troups. Probably hoping to get their technology.