They are also being pretty ridiculous on their list of free software projects harmed by patents. They list Fedora as being harmed for not being able to include Moonlight due to patents. Note that both Debian and Ubuntu have not had this problem. Fedora is being harmed not by patents, but by their reliance on inexpert legal advice (Groklaw and SFLC).
That list of free software distributors is stretching quite a bit to include companies like TomTom. TomTom makes proprietary software, and just uses free software for some of the components, or as the host upon which to run their proprietary software.
It would depend, I would expect, on what layer they are encrypting. If N channels consist of N encrypted streams, being multiplexed onto the cable, then you could pull out and save a single encrypted string, for offline decryption.
However, if the encrypted is done after the multiplexing, you might not be able to pull out individual channels. You'd have to grab the whole stream, getting all N channels, decrypt it offline, and then pull out the channel you want. That space requirements for that could be prohibitive.
I'm going to go onto a solid wooden deck capable of withstanding a magnitude 9 earthquake and guess that you know little about Perl data structures.:-)
One thing I've noticed at the App Store is that a lot of perfectly fine apps get a lot of 1 star reviews for ridiculous reasons. For instance, a review might state that the app does what it claimed to do flawlessly, that it is useful, and the best app in the category--but the reviewer also wish it had feature X (which no other app has), and the reviewer then gives it just 1 star, apparently for this "missing" feature.
This doesn't appear to be an isolated problem. Nearly every very good app I've downloaded has had a lot of these kind of negative reviews.
I wonder if anyone is purposefully trying to game the store by posting negative reviews on competitors, too?
As long as we maintain the ability to run 32-bit programs on those 64-bit operating systems. I have Perl programs that parse and analyze very large log files. Their memory usage went up by a factor of about 1.5 when I switched to a 64-bit system. This was not good, since they were running at about 90% of RAM on the 32-bit system. On the 64-bit system, they swapped heavily, and my nice 10 minute report became a not so nice all day report.
I now pick the 32-bit version of Linux distributions, even on 64-bit capable hardware, unless I actually need 64-bit.
You've slightly misstated the precedent. Lists of facts or data CAN be copyrighted under Feist, but the selection or arrangement has to be sufficiently creative. If the selection or arrangement isn't sufficiently creative, you don't have a work of authorship, and so no copyright.
In Feist, the selection was "all people in the area with telephones" and the arrangement was "alphabetical by name", neither of which is creative. No copyright. I'd expect that transit schedules would similarly fail, assuming they are complete an ordered in some logical way, such as by route number.
The submitted article cites the patent owner saying it doesn't apply to ODF. Why would I care what someone who says about himself, "I am not a lawyer, and specifically not a patent lawyer. I have never spent a lot of time on learning about the intricacies of patent law" has to say on the matter at this point? In fact, why would I care even what experienced patent lawyers have to say now? Hasn't it been definitively settled by i4i's statement?
Why did you pad your list by listing both TV and payment handling twice?
Also, I'm skeptical of your claims that all Japanese phones have HD video playing. Are you serious claiming that every phone offered in Japan has a screen with enough pixels for HD? Or are you using HD in some sense that I am unfamiliar with?
One big difference is that its easy to rationalize stealing music by saying that the record companies get most of the money from your CD purchase, with only a pittance going to the artist (assuming that the label's creative book keeping ever actually shows the disc in the black so that the artist is supposed to get royalties). Rip off music, and you are just hurting the evil record labels that ripped off the artist.
With software, when you buy a copy of Office or Photoshop or Final Cut Studio, there isn't some "software label" standing between the company that wrote the software and you taking most of the money. You can't rationalize that pirating the software is OK because buying it wouldn't get significant money back to the developers.
are you sure it wasn't MS's own internal legal staff that represented them?
Defendant attorneys: Norma N Bennett, Fish & Richardson PC, Houston, Texas; Cabrach J Connor, Weil Gotshal & Manges, Austin, Texas; Eric Hugh Findlay and Roger Brian Craft, Findlay Craft, Tyler, Texas; Steven Kalogeras, David Jason Lender, Lucy Muzzy, Ariane Nicole Newell, Todd S Patterson Matthew, Douglas Powers, and Kevin Sean Kudlac, Weil Gotshal & Manges LLP, New York, New York; and Andrew Culbert and Isabella Fu, Microsoft Corporation, Redmond, Washington
The Weil attorneys are the ones that had the speaking roles in court.
Everything which you distribute which is GPL licensed puts an obligation on you to distribute the source code
Not quite correct. For example, I bought a router that includes GPL code. If I sell that router on eBay, I am not obligated to provide source code, even though I am distributing the binary code that is in the router.
Only if your distribution requires permission from the copyright owner do you have worry about distributing source code. When you buy a product that contains copyrighted code, and then simply redistribute that particular copy, you do not need the copyright owner's permission.
Although is is actually illegal to use a SSN for identification...
That myth stems from what used to be printed on the cards themselves, which was something along the lines of "not to be used for identification purposes".
However, that just meant that the card was not to be used for identification, because it was not a photo ID, like, say a driver's license. It didn't mean the number couldn't be used. As Albanach already noted, if someone wants to make the number itself a key in their database, and require it as a condition of doing business with you, that's fine from a legal point of view.
If you tell me it's legal to rake my lawn, but you then say it's illegal for anyone to give me gardening tools, do you really think that your position is just and logical
Except that's not the situation here. Copyright law says it is not a violation of copyright law to do the things covered by fair use. Nowhere does copyright law say that you can do those things. It just says copyright won't stop you. There is nothing illogical about some OTHER law stopping you from doing specific things that copyright does not stop you from doing.
In terms of your lawn, it would be like having a law regulating runoff having an exception that exempts watering residential lawns under 10000 sq. ft. (so its OK to water your lawn under that law), and another law regulating water consumption that says you can't water your lawn in the summer.
Whether or not something is a derivative work of something else is determined by the tests laid out in copyright statutes and case law, and none of those consider whether or not one work is useful with or without another work as a factor.
I find that the most important dimension when it comes to whether or not a computer is comfortable or is awkward and annoying when I'm carrying it loose is thickness, not length or width.
Same when it is in a backpack, as I use a backpack that has a padded divider to separate the computer from the other items in the backpack. The thickness of the computer is the only dimension that determines how much space the computer takes up in the backpack.
As is all too often the case here on Slashdot, the summary has seized upon the title of the patent, which has no legal effect whatsoever, while ignoring the actual patent claims, which are all important
For reference, here is claim 1:
A method for creating a document in XML ("Extensible Markup Language") in a computing device that is understandable by many applications, comprising: accessing a published XSD ("XML Schema Definition") in said computing device, wherein the XSD defines rules relating to the XML file format for documents associated with an application having a rich set of features; determining an element to create in an XML file in said computing device, wherein the element is selected from a set of elements, including: a style element; a hints element that includes information to assist an external application in displaying text of the of the document; a bookmark element; wherein the bookmark element includes an identifier attribute that associates a start bookmark with an end bookmark element wherein two bookmark elements are used in book marking a portion of the document; wherein each of the two bookmark elements include an opening tag and an ending tag; a document properties element; a text element that contains text of the document; wherein all of the text of the document is stored within text elements such that only the text of the document is contained between start text tags and end text tags; wherein there are no intervening tags between each of the start text tags and each of the corresponding end text tags and wherein each of the start text tags do not include formatting information for the text between each of the start text tags and the end text tags; a text run element that includes the formatting information for the text within text elements; a font element; a formatting element; a section element; a table element; an outline element; and a proofing element; creating the document including the element in said computing device; and storing the document in said computing device.
Besides the claims, it is also important to read the description, because the description is used to figure out what the terms in the claims mean.
Open source supporters argue there has to be real political will for open source projects to succeed in the public sector
In the article, it was one person who said that--an official of the Munich LiMux project. I can see why one might want to just attribute it to "open source supporters" rather than associating with that ongoing clusterfuck of a mismanaged Linux migration.
Slashdot Mirror
They are also being pretty ridiculous on their list of free software projects harmed by patents. They list Fedora as being harmed for not being able to include Moonlight due to patents. Note that both Debian and Ubuntu have not had this problem. Fedora is being harmed not by patents, but by their reliance on inexpert legal advice (Groklaw and SFLC).
That list of free software distributors is stretching quite a bit to include companies like TomTom. TomTom makes proprietary software, and just uses free software for some of the components, or as the host upon which to run their proprietary software.
Yeah, it almost makes me wonder if this is a bit of astro-turf done by someone from AT&T or Verizon.
Regardless of where the anonymous submission came from, the idiot Slashdot editor should have done his job and rejected it.
It would depend, I would expect, on what layer they are encrypting. If N channels consist of N encrypted streams, being multiplexed onto the cable, then you could pull out and save a single encrypted string, for offline decryption.
However, if the encrypted is done after the multiplexing, you might not be able to pull out individual channels. You'd have to grab the whole stream, getting all N channels, decrypt it offline, and then pull out the channel you want. That space requirements for that could be prohibitive.
I'm going to go onto a solid wooden deck capable of withstanding a magnitude 9 earthquake and guess that you know little about Perl data structures. :-)
One thing I've noticed at the App Store is that a lot of perfectly fine apps get a lot of 1 star reviews for ridiculous reasons. For instance, a review might state that the app does what it claimed to do flawlessly, that it is useful, and the best app in the category--but the reviewer also wish it had feature X (which no other app has), and the reviewer then gives it just 1 star, apparently for this "missing" feature.
This doesn't appear to be an isolated problem. Nearly every very good app I've downloaded has had a lot of these kind of negative reviews.
I wonder if anyone is purposefully trying to game the store by posting negative reviews on competitors, too?
As long as we maintain the ability to run 32-bit programs on those 64-bit operating systems. I have Perl programs that parse and analyze very large log files. Their memory usage went up by a factor of about 1.5 when I switched to a 64-bit system. This was not good, since they were running at about 90% of RAM on the 32-bit system. On the 64-bit system, they swapped heavily, and my nice 10 minute report became a not so nice all day report.
I now pick the 32-bit version of Linux distributions, even on 64-bit capable hardware, unless I actually need 64-bit.
You've slightly misstated the precedent. Lists of facts or data CAN be copyrighted under Feist, but the selection or arrangement has to be sufficiently creative. If the selection or arrangement isn't sufficiently creative, you don't have a work of authorship, and so no copyright.
In Feist, the selection was "all people in the area with telephones" and the arrangement was "alphabetical by name", neither of which is creative. No copyright. I'd expect that transit schedules would similarly fail, assuming they are complete an ordered in some logical way, such as by route number.
The submitted article cites the patent owner saying it doesn't apply to ODF. Why would I care what someone who says about himself, "I am not a lawyer, and specifically not a patent lawyer. I have never spent a lot of time on learning about the intricacies of patent law" has to say on the matter at this point? In fact, why would I care even what experienced patent lawyers have to say now? Hasn't it been definitively settled by i4i's statement?
A Patent Troll is a Patent Troll and nothing they do benefits us in the long run
What does that have to do with the i4i suit?
Why did you pad your list by listing both TV and payment handling twice? Also, I'm skeptical of your claims that all Japanese phones have HD video playing. Are you serious claiming that every phone offered in Japan has a screen with enough pixels for HD? Or are you using HD in some sense that I am unfamiliar with?
One big difference is that its easy to rationalize stealing music by saying that the record companies get most of the money from your CD purchase, with only a pittance going to the artist (assuming that the label's creative book keeping ever actually shows the disc in the black so that the artist is supposed to get royalties). Rip off music, and you are just hurting the evil record labels that ripped off the artist.
With software, when you buy a copy of Office or Photoshop or Final Cut Studio, there isn't some "software label" standing between the company that wrote the software and you taking most of the money. You can't rationalize that pirating the software is OK because buying it wouldn't get significant money back to the developers.
are you sure it wasn't MS's own internal legal staff that represented them?
Defendant attorneys: Norma N Bennett, Fish & Richardson PC, Houston, Texas; Cabrach J Connor, Weil Gotshal & Manges, Austin, Texas; Eric Hugh Findlay and Roger Brian Craft, Findlay Craft, Tyler, Texas; Steven Kalogeras, David Jason Lender, Lucy Muzzy, Ariane Nicole Newell, Todd S Patterson Matthew, Douglas Powers, and Kevin Sean Kudlac, Weil Gotshal & Manges LLP, New York, New York; and Andrew Culbert and Isabella Fu, Microsoft Corporation, Redmond, Washington
The Weil attorneys are the ones that had the speaking roles in court.
Quite a few errors in your post.
1. Most of the jury was college educated. A couple of the jurors had math degrees, and around 3 had computer science degrees.
2. The judge has a degree in mathematics, and prior to entering law school was a programmer and a systems analyst.
3. Defendants have been winning more than Plaintiffs in EDT patent cases for the last few years.
4. i4i is not a patent troll. They make products covered by their patent.
I don't understand why the embedded systems world hasn't embraced one of the *BSDs, to avoid this kind of thing?
Everything which you distribute which is GPL licensed puts an obligation on you to distribute the source code
Not quite correct. For example, I bought a router that includes GPL code. If I sell that router on eBay, I am not obligated to provide source code, even though I am distributing the binary code that is in the router.
Only if your distribution requires permission from the copyright owner do you have worry about distributing source code. When you buy a product that contains copyrighted code, and then simply redistribute that particular copy, you do not need the copyright owner's permission.
Although is is actually illegal to use a SSN for identification...
That myth stems from what used to be printed on the cards themselves, which was something along the lines of "not to be used for identification purposes".
However, that just meant that the card was not to be used for identification, because it was not a photo ID, like, say a driver's license. It didn't mean the number couldn't be used. As Albanach already noted, if someone wants to make the number itself a key in their database, and require it as a condition of doing business with you, that's fine from a legal point of view.
You didn't think this through. If all the lines are out, then there won't be HF interference, so the radios will work.
If you tell me it's legal to rake my lawn, but you then say it's illegal for anyone to give me gardening tools, do you really think that your position is just and logical
Except that's not the situation here. Copyright law says it is not a violation of copyright law to do the things covered by fair use. Nowhere does copyright law say that you can do those things. It just says copyright won't stop you. There is nothing illogical about some OTHER law stopping you from doing specific things that copyright does not stop you from doing.
In terms of your lawn, it would be like having a law regulating runoff having an exception that exempts watering residential lawns under 10000 sq. ft. (so its OK to water your lawn under that law), and another law regulating water consumption that says you can't water your lawn in the summer.
Whether or not something is a derivative work of something else is determined by the tests laid out in copyright statutes and case law, and none of those consider whether or not one work is useful with or without another work as a factor.
[...] but isn't 12" just too big for a netbook?
I find that the most important dimension when it comes to whether or not a computer is comfortable or is awkward and annoying when I'm carrying it loose is thickness, not length or width.
Same when it is in a backpack, as I use a backpack that has a padded divider to separate the computer from the other items in the backpack. The thickness of the computer is the only dimension that determines how much space the computer takes up in the backpack.
As is all too often the case here on Slashdot, the summary has seized upon the title of the patent, which has no legal effect whatsoever, while ignoring the actual patent claims, which are all important
For reference, here is claim 1:
A method for creating a document in XML ("Extensible Markup Language") in a computing device that is understandable by many applications, comprising: accessing a published XSD ("XML Schema Definition") in said computing device, wherein the XSD defines rules relating to the XML file format for documents associated with an application having a rich set of features; determining an element to create in an XML file in said computing device, wherein the element is selected from a set of elements, including: a style element; a hints element that includes information to assist an external application in displaying text of the of the document; a bookmark element; wherein the bookmark element includes an identifier attribute that associates a start bookmark with an end bookmark element wherein two bookmark elements are used in book marking a portion of the document; wherein each of the two bookmark elements include an opening tag and an ending tag; a document properties element; a text element that contains text of the document; wherein all of the text of the document is stored within text elements such that only the text of the document is contained between start text tags and end text tags; wherein there are no intervening tags between each of the start text tags and each of the corresponding end text tags and wherein each of the start text tags do not include formatting information for the text between each of the start text tags and the end text tags; a text run element that includes the formatting information for the text within text elements; a font element; a formatting element; a section element; a table element; an outline element; and a proofing element; creating the document including the element in said computing device; and storing the document in said computing device.
Besides the claims, it is also important to read the description, because the description is used to figure out what the terms in the claims mean.
Neither novel nor non-obvious apply since SGML has been around for decades
How can you tell that without reading the claims?
Like nearly every patent story on Slashdot, this one is worthless because the submitter didn't look at the claims.
Open source supporters argue there has to be real political will for open source projects to succeed in the public sector
In the article, it was one person who said that--an official of the Munich LiMux project. I can see why one might want to just attribute it to "open source supporters" rather than associating with that ongoing clusterfuck of a mismanaged Linux migration.