Used CD sales have already been targeted and already won their cases in court. From what I understand, this is due to what's known as the "first sale doctrine." It basically says that once you buy something, like a cd, it's yours and you can sell it to someone else if you want, as long as you're not keeping a copy for yourself.
Perhaps that wasn't the best choice of words on my part. In my defense, I was trying to be brief enough that the story would have some chance of being posted:)
I agree with what you're saying though. I've been saying the same thing. Regardless of whether they understand why people use Napster or not (and I'm not really sure whether they understand and are in denial, or if they just plain don't get it) they will do whatever they feel is necessary to retain control of the industry.
You go write that script. Then I'll write one that will assemble blocks from the even more numerous Katz-bashing posts so that we can handle all the Katz-posting and Katz-bashing automatically.
I don't think that causing fatal auto accidents is the real world equivalent of crashing some corporation's webserver. It's more like keying a car or something. Yes, script kiddies are annoying and they can cause quite a bit of damage, but let's try to keep a little perspective on it instead of equating them with murderers, ok?
I know what you're saying. Read my post again. I didn't say that they did sue under trademark law. I'm saying there's no way they could have defended their trademark because there was no infringement taking place. Therefore, saying the Metallica shoud be defending their trademark is incorrect. There was no infringement to defend against.
I seem to remember an episode where there were stickers being put on game software boxes that implied that you needed a 3dfx card to run that game even though that wasn't true. Anyone remember who ended up being responsible for that?
Ok, let's drop trademark laws, and copyright laws for a moment.
This is stupid. You can't take the situation out of the context that the participants are acting in. You're trying to ignore the very thing that compelled them to send the cease and desist letter in the first place.
But when someone starts facilitating the exchange of material owned by Napster, they get pissed off, and throw a fit.
How do you know they were pissed off or that anyone threw a fit? Did you just make that up or what? Napster's attornies sent a cease and desist letter, which they are required to send in order to retain control of their trademark. As a corporation, they are obligated to take such measures to protect their shareholders' investments. Judging from the outcome, in which Napster agreed to license their logo to the Offspring for use on tshirts and other merchandise, with the earnings donated to charity, they weren't pissed off at all. They just had to take the measures they did because they were obligated to by law.
Using a trademark to identify work or creations by the trademark holder is not illegal, which is why Metallica was sueing under copyright law and not trademark law.
If you really want to insure your freedom, support the gnutella or freenet efforts instead, and trade your material there (and please respect copyrights when doing so).
This is probably a waste of breath... err.. typing. Copyright is losing a lot of respect. This seems right given that the value that it once held for the public has been missing for quite some time. The public sees no return for their granting of a monopoly on some creation or information. It seems to me that given that the original bargain between the public and the creators has been broken, multiple times, and retroactively, it's no wonder that people often simply ignore copyrights now. I think this is as it should be. Perhaps it will provide the incentive needed for a reevaluation and renegotiation of the terms to something that will once again benefit the public.
Email me a link to a ripped copy of The Matrix so I can verify that DeCSS is being used for piracy. I promise I won't watch it much. It's really just for educational purposes anyway.
Tinkering with things we don't quite understand and learning about them can lead to all sorts of breakthroughs and new understanding that can help in many other areas. Look at all the cool stuff that has come out of NASA's research. A lot of it really has helped people. It's not just screwing around.
Besides, there are many people researching cancer and other such things. But it would be silly to have everybody doing that sort of research. Then once it's cured, we're stuck with a bunch of biologists and such with nothing to do and then we have to send them back to school to learn how to be computer help-desk workers or something. It would be a sad, sad world.
There are apparently several versions of the ORB drive. SCSI, IDE, USB, AND FireWire. I've heard that the speed is pretty good on this thing, and the price is hard to beat too. $30 for a 2.2GB disk. $199 for the drive with a disk. So, does anyone know if there are or will be Linux drivers for it?
Jeez.. aside from the last 2 paragraphs, the whole thing was ripped almost directly from a real review of Episode I by an extremely conservative religious group.
I'm not sure where the rest of it came from, or if he just made it up, but since this is obviously either an attempt at humor or an attempt at trolling, we should all just read it, and either snicker or shake our heads and be on our way.
It's just a graphical MUD, and not even a very good MUD. You spend all your time waiting around monster spawn points trying to build up your character so that you can go wait around bigger monster spawn points. What's the point?
That kinda sucks. I'd test it for free. Course they would probably have some issues with that, but there must be something that could be done. Neverwinter Nights sounds like it could be an incredible game. It would be tragic if it wasn't released for Linux as well.
It doesn't have to be tolerated, and in most instances, CD is not tolerated. Witness the events in Seattle recently. But the demonstrations do get attention and that is what those people want. They may get arrested, tear gassed, shot with rubber bullets, or in some cases shot with real bullets or severely beaten. This is the risk they take to get attention for their views.
Rebels in Afghanistan were taking out Russian helicopters without modern weapons. Had they been better armed, they could have put up a much better fight still. I would assume that the guns come out after the government pulls its guns out. By doing that, it has declared war on at least a group of its citizens. They should have the ability to fight back. There will always be those who don't want to be involved, and will go along with any outcome, but the rest should not have to suffer under a tyrannical government. History seems to show that virtually all governments that last for any good length of time eventually get to such a point. I think that's one of the reasons that the founders of this country wanted us to have the right to keep and bear arms. Of course they probably didn't forsee such advances as nuclear weapons, Cobra gunships, F-117 Stealth Fighters, etc. But those weapons will probably not be suited to the sort of conflict that would result. It would mostly be a war of information, with guerillas that only fight when forced to. They would probably much rather run and continue to wage an information war to unseat the government.
I have to agree with you on this. Copyrights are a good thing. But as the saying goes, all good things in moderation. Since copyright was first instituted in this country in 1790, the production of just about everything has increased and change has happened at a more and more rapid pace. These changes are not the result of copyright. They are the result of many people building on the ideas of others. The areas where change was greatest and fastest were the areas where patents and copyrights held the least sway.
We need to repeal the last couple of copyright extensions and go back to a much shorter term. 28 years is still a long time to profit from a creation. Patents get less than that today, and should probably get less still in some cases (and the patent system is a whole other argument). I don't think we'd see any shortage of new works if copyright terms were shortened. No, the studios and publishers would scream bloody murder about it, but in the end, they've been the one's trying to screw the rest of us over in the name of "the poor authors." Copyright is a deal between the public and the authors. The public has been getting the shaft for years though. That needs to change.
The truth is, copyright was limited in effectiveness to the time in our history between the invention of mass publishing and the time that mass publishing became so cheap anybody could do it.
He's right, you know. Copyright was created in response to the invention of the printing press. The English government (a monarchy at the time) needed a way to control what was printed. Censorship was the original intent of copyright. Later, in 1710 with the Statute of Anne it was changed to reflect new goals, namely that of ensuring that the publishing industry could prosper while not giving them complete or perpetual control.
The statute was challenged later, several times in fact, by the publishers. They hoped to regain the perpetual ownership rights that they had before the Statute of Anne came along. They failed in every attempt. The US used the Statute of Anne as a guideline for our own copyright as it's described in the Constitution and as it was originally made into law in 1790. It granted a 14 year term, renewable for 14 more years, just as the Statute of Anne granted English publishers and authors.
Since copyright originally came about because mass copying became much easier, so should a new method be created now. The problem, as always, is still the publishers. They are still pursuing the goal of complete and perpetual control. This is not in the artist's interest, and it is certainly not in the interests of the vast majority of the citizens of this country. There is supposed to be a balance struck between providing the incentive for creators to create and paying back the people of this country for their granting of a limited monopoly to the creator by adding the work to the public domain once its term has expired. I believe that that balance was completely destroyed about 24 years ago with the Copyright Act of 1976 which extended the copyright term to life+50. That meant that copyrighted materials would probably not fall into the public domain until at least a few generations after they were created. A minimum of 50 years, but conceivably much longer. This throws the whole arrangement out of whack and (through the publishing industry's whining of "It's for the poor authors.") has created a sense in the American public that authors weren't being rewarded for their work, when, in fact, prior to the extension, author's were protected for up to 56 years. That's a very long time to have a monopoly on the publishing of a creative work. The term has since been extended to life+70 years, or 95 years for "works for hire," (i.e. anything created by a corporation). I suppose the 95 years would apply to most music now since the record industry got music created while under contract to a record company declared a "work for hire."
Read the background material in the Eldred v. Reno case to get a better explanation than I could provide here.
The thing is, they won't be prosecuting anyone for breaking an ex post facto law. Since they extended the term before the original term ran out, the copyrighted works will always be covered by current law. That's not the reason this is so disgusting. The reason is that it doesn't follow the intentions of copyright, which are:
"To promote the Progress of Science and the useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries."
If the works are already created, then extending their copyright term cannot provide anymore incentive to create them. The authors created the works under the copyright laws at the time, which obviously provided sufficient incentive. To extend the copyright term on them does not serve any useful purpose to the public, and therefore should not have been done. Additionally, Congress provided no evidence or justification for extending the copyright term. Why was it needed? Do they have evidence that the current laws weren't providing enough incentive? The US has long been the leading creator of copyrighted works. I think Congress would have had a very difficult time justifying their law with the intent of copyright as written in the Constitution. So they just decided to claim that it was done in order to harmonize US copyright law with the international community. This doesn't fly either. They aren't allowed to do whatever they want just because other countries are doing it. I'd love to see the justifications for ANY of the copyright extensions that have become law.
Slashdot Mirror
Used CD sales have already been targeted and already won their cases in court. From what I understand, this is due to what's known as the "first sale doctrine." It basically says that once you buy something, like a cd, it's yours and you can sell it to someone else if you want, as long as you're not keeping a copy for yourself.
Because within a week everyone would have Stripster, the automatic ad stripping software.
No, they have made money, just not enough to offset their debt, which is why they are in the red.
Perhaps that wasn't the best choice of words on my part. In my defense, I was trying to be brief enough that the story would have some chance of being posted :)
I agree with what you're saying though. I've been saying the same thing. Regardless of whether they understand why people use Napster or not (and I'm not really sure whether they understand and are in denial, or if they just plain don't get it) they will do whatever they feel is necessary to retain control of the industry.
You go write that script. Then I'll write one that will assemble blocks from the even more numerous Katz-bashing posts so that we can handle all the Katz-posting and Katz-bashing automatically.
I don't think that causing fatal auto accidents is the real world equivalent of crashing some corporation's webserver. It's more like keying a car or something. Yes, script kiddies are annoying and they can cause quite a bit of damage, but let's try to keep a little perspective on it instead of equating them with murderers, ok?
I know what you're saying. Read my post again. I didn't say that they did sue under trademark law. I'm saying there's no way they could have defended their trademark because there was no infringement taking place. Therefore, saying the Metallica shoud be defending their trademark is incorrect. There was no infringement to defend against.
Sure, they produced a better piece of hardware. That doesn't give them the right to bully reviewers into changing their reviews or review methods.
I seem to remember an episode where there were stickers being put on game software boxes that implied that you needed a 3dfx card to run that game even though that wasn't true. Anyone remember who ended up being responsible for that?
Ok, let's drop trademark laws, and copyright laws for a moment.
This is stupid. You can't take the situation out of the context that the participants are acting in. You're trying to ignore the very thing that compelled them to send the cease and desist letter in the first place.
But when someone starts facilitating the exchange of material owned by Napster, they get pissed off, and throw a fit.
How do you know they were pissed off or that anyone threw a fit? Did you just make that up or what? Napster's attornies sent a cease and desist letter, which they are required to send in order to retain control of their trademark. As a corporation, they are obligated to take such measures to protect their shareholders' investments. Judging from the outcome, in which Napster agreed to license their logo to the Offspring for use on tshirts and other merchandise, with the earnings donated to charity, they weren't pissed off at all. They just had to take the measures they did because they were obligated to by law.
Using a trademark to identify work or creations by the trademark holder is not illegal, which is why Metallica was sueing under copyright law and not trademark law.
If you really want to insure your freedom, support the gnutella or freenet efforts instead, and trade your material there (and please respect copyrights when doing so).
This is probably a waste of breath... err.. typing. Copyright is losing a lot of respect. This seems right given that the value that it once held for the public has been missing for quite some time. The public sees no return for their granting of a monopoly on some creation or information. It seems to me that given that the original bargain between the public and the creators has been broken, multiple times, and retroactively, it's no wonder that people often simply ignore copyrights now. I think this is as it should be. Perhaps it will provide the incentive needed for a reevaluation and renegotiation of the terms to something that will once again benefit the public.
Email me a link to a ripped copy of The Matrix so I can verify that DeCSS is being used for piracy. I promise I won't watch it much. It's really just for educational purposes anyway.
Hmm.. I always use equal parts water and rice. Seems to come out perfect. Although I have burnt the bottom on occaision too.
Tinkering with things we don't quite understand and learning about them can lead to all sorts of breakthroughs and new understanding that can help in many other areas. Look at all the cool stuff that has come out of NASA's research. A lot of it really has helped people. It's not just screwing around.
Besides, there are many people researching cancer and other such things. But it would be silly to have everybody doing that sort of research. Then once it's cured, we're stuck with a bunch of biologists and such with nothing to do and then we have to send them back to school to learn how to be computer help-desk workers or something. It would be a sad, sad world.
Let me know when I can get my own personal force-field. Hmm.. if they get thin enough and are not hot, we could have plasma condoms.
Remember kids. You shouldn't be having sex out of wedlock. But if you do end up doing it, remember to play it safe. Shields Up!
Ok.. I already doffed my extra point. That's one less that you moderators will get from me! Ha Ha Ha!
There are apparently several versions of the ORB drive. SCSI, IDE, USB, AND FireWire. I've heard that the speed is pretty good on this thing, and the price is hard to beat too. $30 for a 2.2GB disk. $199 for the drive with a disk. So, does anyone know if there are or will be Linux drivers for it?
Jeez.. aside from the last 2 paragraphs, the whole thing was ripped almost directly from a real review of Episode I by an extremely conservative religious group.
I'm not sure where the rest of it came from, or if he just made it up, but since this is obviously either an attempt at humor or an attempt at trolling, we should all just read it, and either snicker or shake our heads and be on our way.
It's just a graphical MUD, and not even a very good MUD. You spend all your time waiting around monster spawn points trying to build up your character so that you can go wait around bigger monster spawn points. What's the point?
That kinda sucks. I'd test it for free. Course they would probably have some issues with that, but there must be something that could be done. Neverwinter Nights sounds like it could be an incredible game. It would be tragic if it wasn't released for Linux as well.
It doesn't have to be tolerated, and in most instances, CD is not tolerated. Witness the events in Seattle recently. But the demonstrations do get attention and that is what those people want. They may get arrested, tear gassed, shot with rubber bullets, or in some cases shot with real bullets or severely beaten. This is the risk they take to get attention for their views.
Rebels in Afghanistan were taking out Russian helicopters without modern weapons. Had they been better armed, they could have put up a much better fight still. I would assume that the guns come out after the government pulls its guns out. By doing that, it has declared war on at least a group of its citizens. They should have the ability to fight back. There will always be those who don't want to be involved, and will go along with any outcome, but the rest should not have to suffer under a tyrannical government. History seems to show that virtually all governments that last for any good length of time eventually get to such a point. I think that's one of the reasons that the founders of this country wanted us to have the right to keep and bear arms. Of course they probably didn't forsee such advances as nuclear weapons, Cobra gunships, F-117 Stealth Fighters, etc. But those weapons will probably not be suited to the sort of conflict that would result. It would mostly be a war of information, with guerillas that only fight when forced to. They would probably much rather run and continue to wage an information war to unseat the government.
I have to agree with you on this. Copyrights are a good thing. But as the saying goes, all good things in moderation. Since copyright was first instituted in this country in 1790, the production of just about everything has increased and change has happened at a more and more rapid pace. These changes are not the result of copyright. They are the result of many people building on the ideas of others. The areas where change was greatest and fastest were the areas where patents and copyrights held the least sway.
We need to repeal the last couple of copyright extensions and go back to a much shorter term. 28 years is still a long time to profit from a creation. Patents get less than that today, and should probably get less still in some cases (and the patent system is a whole other argument). I don't think we'd see any shortage of new works if copyright terms were shortened. No, the studios and publishers would scream bloody murder about it, but in the end, they've been the one's trying to screw the rest of us over in the name of "the poor authors." Copyright is a deal between the public and the authors. The public has been getting the shaft for years though. That needs to change.
The truth is, copyright was limited in effectiveness to the time in our history between the invention of mass publishing and the time that mass publishing became so cheap anybody could do it.
He's right, you know. Copyright was created in response to the invention of the printing press. The English government (a monarchy at the time) needed a way to control what was printed. Censorship was the original intent of copyright. Later, in 1710 with the Statute of Anne it was changed to reflect new goals, namely that of ensuring that the publishing industry could prosper while not giving them complete or perpetual control.
The statute was challenged later, several times in fact, by the publishers. They hoped to regain the perpetual ownership rights that they had before the Statute of Anne came along. They failed in every attempt. The US used the Statute of Anne as a guideline for our own copyright as it's described in the Constitution and as it was originally made into law in 1790. It granted a 14 year term, renewable for 14 more years, just as the Statute of Anne granted English publishers and authors.
Since copyright originally came about because mass copying became much easier, so should a new method be created now. The problem, as always, is still the publishers. They are still pursuing the goal of complete and perpetual control. This is not in the artist's interest, and it is certainly not in the interests of the vast majority of the citizens of this country. There is supposed to be a balance struck between providing the incentive for creators to create and paying back the people of this country for their granting of a limited monopoly to the creator by adding the work to the public domain once its term has expired. I believe that that balance was completely destroyed about 24 years ago with the Copyright Act of 1976 which extended the copyright term to life+50. That meant that copyrighted materials would probably not fall into the public domain until at least a few generations after they were created. A minimum of 50 years, but conceivably much longer. This throws the whole arrangement out of whack and (through the publishing industry's whining of "It's for the poor authors.") has created a sense in the American public that authors weren't being rewarded for their work, when, in fact, prior to the extension, author's were protected for up to 56 years. That's a very long time to have a monopoly on the publishing of a creative work. The term has since been extended to life+70 years, or 95 years for "works for hire," (i.e. anything created by a corporation). I suppose the 95 years would apply to most music now since the record industry got music created while under contract to a record company declared a "work for hire."
Read the background material in the Eldred v. Reno case to get a better explanation than I could provide here.
http://cyber.law.harvard.edu/eldredvreno/
The thing is, they won't be prosecuting anyone for breaking an ex post facto law. Since they extended the term before the original term ran out, the copyrighted works will always be covered by current law. That's not the reason this is so disgusting. The reason is that it doesn't follow the intentions of copyright, which are:
"To promote the Progress of Science and the useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries."
If the works are already created, then extending their copyright term cannot provide anymore incentive to create them. The authors created the works under the copyright laws at the time, which obviously provided sufficient incentive. To extend the copyright term on them does not serve any useful purpose to the public, and therefore should not have been done. Additionally, Congress provided no evidence or justification for extending the copyright term. Why was it needed? Do they have evidence that the current laws weren't providing enough incentive? The US has long been the leading creator of copyrighted works. I think Congress would have had a very difficult time justifying their law with the intent of copyright as written in the Constitution. So they just decided to claim that it was done in order to harmonize US copyright law with the international community. This doesn't fly either. They aren't allowed to do whatever they want just because other countries are doing it. I'd love to see the justifications for ANY of the copyright extensions that have become law.
If anyone is interested, here's a couple links:
http://cyber.law.harvard.edu/eldredvreno/
http://eon.law.harvard.edu/openlaw/ eldredvreno/