In court, we require people to testify in person, and if they cannot for some good reason, we take a video deposition and show that. This is because we want the jury to see the person, to be better able to judge from their demeanor whether or not to believe them. Witnesses often have a strong incentive to lie, so this is important.
What are the chances Lessig is going to lie about his position on McCain's platform? Seems pretty damned low to me--I think we could trust him if a textual form of his analysis were available. So why present this in a cumbersome video format?
Under blanket licensing, how do I reward artists with good music preferentially to those who suck?
Under the various proposals I've seen, it would work the way current blanket licenses work. The use of the licensed works would be tracked, and the money split based on that.
I wonder if Groklaw can find something useful to do after SCO? So far, when it is ventured into other areas, its record has been spotty. There was a lot of inaccuracies in its coverage of OOXML standardization, for instance--I'd often read things there, and then follow the references to the original sources, and find out that the Groklaw reporting was just plain wrong.
I hope Groklaw can turn into an accurate site for legal issues beyond SCO, and not just degenerate into another anti-MS site where accuracy is not important as long as the story is anti-MS.
I missed the part about the judge reading Groklaw
on
Grokking SCO's Demise
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
I seemed to have missed the part about the judge reading Groklaw. What Groklaw did was useful and interesting, but to say they had a hand in the demise of SCO seems a bit over the top.
You've confused patents with copyrights. A copyrighted work created by an employee in the scope of his employment counts as being authored by the company for copyright purposes.
Not so for patents. The employee is still the inventor, and that is who must appear on the patent application. No doubt his employment contract will require assigning the patent to the company, and the appropriate assignment documents will be filed with the application.
If your work contributed to or is a piece of code or software that your company relies on for revenue, what happens if he doesn't patent it? Someone else does.
Patents are not like blueberries on a bush. If someone fails to pick one, that doesn't meant the next person who comes along can get it.
For someone else to patent it, that someone else would have to invent it independently.
You'll be fired, and they'll file the patent anyway.
How will they file the patent without the cooperation of the inventor? My recollection is that the inventor has to sign the application.
And even if they can file without the inventor's cooperation, I doubt they would. In any litigation over the patent, the defendant could bring in the inventor, who could easily torpedo the plaintiff's case. He's got many ways to do so. If he tells the jury he didn't consider the invention to be non-obvious, or novel, they will probably believe him. Or he could say that the list of inventors on the patent is wrong--if the list omits any inventors, or includes anyone who wasn't really an inventor, the patent is invalid.
Companies who might become plaintiffs in patent cases really need to stay on good terms with the inventors.
Antitrust law doesn't prohibit monopolies. It prohibits monopolization. To run into antitrust problems, you don't have to have 100% of a market. Google is powerful enough in some segments of search that antitrust issues would not be surprising.
It's not just the social aspects. Many of the old games have gameplay aspects that they are still the best at.
In EQ1, I played a soloing Wizard. The variety of spells and tools I had to use to make that work well (jboots, staff of temperate flux, my AOE nukes, roots, stuns, snares, AOE rain spells, direct nukes, invisibility, levitation) all worked together in a way to make it interesting and challenging. I've not found any other game that matched that. EQ1 had a great balance between all those spells and tools, requiring careful matching to the situation at hand. Later games usually have less variety of tools for whatever their equivalent of the EQ Wizard class is, and so solo Wizard combat just isn't as interesting. The later games are just as fun, or more fun, but in this particular aspect, EQ1 was more fun, and I still occasionally miss that.
Another example: DAoC realm vs. realm combat. Nothing else has come close. It was, I think, the first MMORPG to have a heavy PvP component that didn't turn into a pointless playground for griefers. DAoC also did an outstanding job of making the classes in the different realms differ, yet remain balanced, and the way you used your spec points to specialize your character was excellent. I don't think any of the newer MMORPGs has handled this as well, and, like EQ1, I still miss this on occasion.
Could this be used as a form of video compression? Shoot your video at high resolution. Extract a few high resolution stills from the video, and then convert the video to low resolution. Save the low res video and the stills. When you want to play the video, use their algorithm, with the stills taking the role of the photos, to enhance the low res video.
At the same time European law is quite clear that software, being mathematical formulas, can never be encumbered with patent claims.
That's also the law in the US, and it doesn't stop software patents for similar reasons. The European Patent Convention, article 52, paragraph 2, excludes from patentability, among other things:
discoveries, scientific theories and mathematical methods
schemes, rules and methods for performing mental acts, playing games or doing business, and programs for computers
You might think that would settle the question, but then paragraph 3 qualifies paragraph 2:
The provisions of paragraph 2 shall exclude patentability of the subject-matter or activities referred to in that provision only to the extent to which a European patent application or European patent relates to such subject-matter or activities as such.
That's been taken by some (including the Board of Appeal of the EPO) to mean that if an invention is a new and non-obvious solution to a technical problem, it can be patentable, even if it resides entirely in a computer and is implemented entirely in software.
That little distinction between the program and the technical problem the program solves might not seem like much, but it provides an opening big enough to drive a patent through. There are currently over 30000 software patents in Europe.
This is getting really close to being something that every straight male porn viewer (which means every straight male on Slashdot...) would pay a lot for.
Combine the ability to remove items from a video, like they showed with the lamppost and sign in the flower shop, with the ability to insert new things into the video, and you could turn a boring man on woman porn movie into a lesbian twin incest movie.
You are presuming, for some strange reason, that the EU does not have software patents. Reality disagrees with your theory. Reality is that EU (and UK) law is very confused over this, with courts going all over the place. A large number of software patents have been issued there, and many have been successfully enforced. There's a pretty good article on software patents in the EU on Wikipedia, and a pretty good one on the situation in the UK. (Both are very confusing, but that is because the underlying legal situation is confused).
Note that this is a copyright decision, by the CAFC, which normally does not handle copyright cases. They had subject jurisdiction here because it was also a patent case, and that is something they have jurisdiction over.
So how does this fit in as precedent? In future copyright cases, that do NOT have that patent component that gives CAFC jurisdiction for the appeal, does the district court follow the precedent of the appeals court for the circuit it is in, or this CAFC decision?
Plus there's that whole "information wants to be free" ethos to follow along with
Ripping off indie game developers is not an 'ethos'.
When I meet an 'information wants to be free' person who will freely give me his social security number, bank account number, credit card number, and home address, then I'll believe that it is an ethos, at least for that person.
There are OOXML implementations whose deviations from the spec (ECMA or ISO) are as small as the deviations of OpenOffice from the ODF spec.
So, it's your choice: either there are no working OOXML implementations but also no working ODF implementations, or there are working OOXML and ODF implementations.
There was an interesting study recently published on word processor interoperability. Here's a link to the abstact.. A download link for the full paper is there.
They found serious interoperability issues among open source programs, and serious interoperability issues among closed source programs. The best interoperability was between OpenOffice an MS Office, ironically.
This study tested two things. One test was to make a basic ODF word processing document in OpenOffice, and then check how well other programs (free and non-free) could handle that document. The other test was similar, but using an OOXML document generated by Word 2007.
Here is the conclusion from the paper:
This study sought to investigate interoperability for various implementations
of ODF and OOXML. After all, to receive the perceived economic and
technological benefits, there is a need for multiple independent,
interoperable implementations. The results clearly indicate that both ODF and
OOXML implementations need to improve interoperability.
This study only tested a small subset, basic word processing features, of what
is needed for multiple interoperable implementations. Additionally, this test
did not consider the writing performance of implementations, only the read or
import function was tested. Nevertheless, the only implementations of ODF that
provided good compatibility with OpenOffice were the Microsoft Office
plug-ins. Similarly, the only implementation of OOXML that can provide good
compatibility with Microsoft Office 2007 was OpenOffice with the Novell
plug-in. A number of other implementations of ODF and OOXML such as
Wordperfect, Google Docs, and KOffice lacked good compatibility.
It is surprising and ironic that the best implementations of ODF are when
using Microsoft Office. Similarly, the best implementation of OOXML is
OpenOffice. (Pages provided similar results but lacks the ability to write
OOXML, a needed feature for an interoperable implementation.) The domination
of Microsoft Office and OpenOffice is especially troubling for users of other
operating systems, such as Mac OS and Linux. These users do not have a choice
when using ODF or OOXML. The results here show that developers need to work
together to improve this situation.
Our results show that while the best implementations may result in formatting
problems, the worst implementations actually lose information found in
pictures, footnotes, comments, tracking changes, and tables.
Supporters of both ODF and OOXML have suggested improved conformance and
interoperability testing, there has been little progress on this front.
Governments and other interested organizations need to encourage this testing.
Without more pressure and funding for testing, the promise of ODF and OOXML
will be lost. Instead, users of these standards will be locked into the
dominant implementations of OpenOffice for ODF and Microsoft Office for OOXML.
There is still much research and testing to be done. Each of these
implementations is continually being improved and needs to be continually
reassessed. Future research needs to expand the tests to spreadsheets and
presentations. Research also needs to test both reading and writing documents
to determine if features such as styles and tracking comments are working
properly. This work serves as a first step in providing empirical data on
interoperability for ODF and OOXML. It is hoped that this will serve as a
wake-up call to governments and developers to improve the current state of
interoperability for document formats.
My hope is that whatever comes out of that lab will be released under the GPL
Why? Don't you think it would be good for BSD and Apache and many other free software projects to benefit, rather than just those free software projects that are under GPL?
Slashdot Mirror
Learn to read, idiot. I did not imply he would lie. I implied just the opposite.
In court, we require people to testify in person, and if they cannot for some good reason, we take a video deposition and show that. This is because we want the jury to see the person, to be better able to judge from their demeanor whether or not to believe them. Witnesses often have a strong incentive to lie, so this is important.
What are the chances Lessig is going to lie about his position on McCain's platform? Seems pretty damned low to me--I think we could trust him if a textual form of his analysis were available. So why present this in a cumbersome video format?
It wasn't an invalid order.
Under the various proposals I've seen, it would work the way current blanket licenses work. The use of the licensed works would be tracked, and the money split based on that.
I wonder if Groklaw can find something useful to do after SCO? So far, when it is ventured into other areas, its record has been spotty. There was a lot of inaccuracies in its coverage of OOXML standardization, for instance--I'd often read things there, and then follow the references to the original sources, and find out that the Groklaw reporting was just plain wrong.
I hope Groklaw can turn into an accurate site for legal issues beyond SCO, and not just degenerate into another anti-MS site where accuracy is not important as long as the story is anti-MS.
I seemed to have missed the part about the judge reading Groklaw. What Groklaw did was useful and interesting, but to say they had a hand in the demise of SCO seems a bit over the top.
It's supported on Windows (2000, XP, Vista) and Mac OS X. That covers around 98+%.
You've confused patents with copyrights. A copyrighted work created by an employee in the scope of his employment counts as being authored by the company for copyright purposes.
Not so for patents. The employee is still the inventor, and that is who must appear on the patent application. No doubt his employment contract will require assigning the patent to the company, and the appropriate assignment documents will be filed with the application.
Patents are not like blueberries on a bush. If someone fails to pick one, that doesn't meant the next person who comes along can get it.
For someone else to patent it, that someone else would have to invent it independently.
That won't work in the US. You have one year from public disclosure of the inventor to file for your patent.
How will they file the patent without the cooperation of the inventor? My recollection is that the inventor has to sign the application.
And even if they can file without the inventor's cooperation, I doubt they would. In any litigation over the patent, the defendant could bring in the inventor, who could easily torpedo the plaintiff's case. He's got many ways to do so. If he tells the jury he didn't consider the invention to be non-obvious, or novel, they will probably believe him. Or he could say that the list of inventors on the patent is wrong--if the list omits any inventors, or includes anyone who wasn't really an inventor, the patent is invalid.
Companies who might become plaintiffs in patent cases really need to stay on good terms with the inventors.
You could/can program the 48 series in assembly language. No sandbox.
Antitrust law doesn't prohibit monopolies. It prohibits monopolization. To run into antitrust problems, you don't have to have 100% of a market. Google is powerful enough in some segments of search that antitrust issues would not be surprising.
It's not just the social aspects. Many of the old games have gameplay aspects that they are still the best at.
In EQ1, I played a soloing Wizard. The variety of spells and tools I had to use to make that work well (jboots, staff of temperate flux, my AOE nukes, roots, stuns, snares, AOE rain spells, direct nukes, invisibility, levitation) all worked together in a way to make it interesting and challenging. I've not found any other game that matched that. EQ1 had a great balance between all those spells and tools, requiring careful matching to the situation at hand. Later games usually have less variety of tools for whatever their equivalent of the EQ Wizard class is, and so solo Wizard combat just isn't as interesting. The later games are just as fun, or more fun, but in this particular aspect, EQ1 was more fun, and I still occasionally miss that.
Another example: DAoC realm vs. realm combat. Nothing else has come close. It was, I think, the first MMORPG to have a heavy PvP component that didn't turn into a pointless playground for griefers. DAoC also did an outstanding job of making the classes in the different realms differ, yet remain balanced, and the way you used your spec points to specialize your character was excellent. I don't think any of the newer MMORPGs has handled this as well, and, like EQ1, I still miss this on occasion.
Nope.
You would lose that bet. Most people know malls are private property.
Read the summary of photographer's rights that jonnythan linked to. It pretty explicitly mentions that malls are private property.
Could this be used as a form of video compression? Shoot your video at high resolution. Extract a few high resolution stills from the video, and then convert the video to low resolution. Save the low res video and the stills. When you want to play the video, use their algorithm, with the stills taking the role of the photos, to enhance the low res video.
That's also the law in the US, and it doesn't stop software patents for similar reasons. The European Patent Convention, article 52, paragraph 2, excludes from patentability, among other things:
You might think that would settle the question, but then paragraph 3 qualifies paragraph 2:
The provisions of paragraph 2 shall exclude patentability of the subject-matter or activities referred to in that provision only to the extent to which a European patent application or European patent relates to such subject-matter or activities as such.
That's been taken by some (including the Board of Appeal of the EPO) to mean that if an invention is a new and non-obvious solution to a technical problem, it can be patentable, even if it resides entirely in a computer and is implemented entirely in software.
That little distinction between the program and the technical problem the program solves might not seem like much, but it provides an opening big enough to drive a patent through. There are currently over 30000 software patents in Europe.
This is getting really close to being something that every straight male porn viewer (which means every straight male on Slashdot...) would pay a lot for.
Combine the ability to remove items from a video, like they showed with the lamppost and sign in the flower shop, with the ability to insert new things into the video, and you could turn a boring man on woman porn movie into a lesbian twin incest movie.
You are presuming, for some strange reason, that the EU does not have software patents. Reality disagrees with your theory. Reality is that EU (and UK) law is very confused over this, with courts going all over the place. A large number of software patents have been issued there, and many have been successfully enforced. There's a pretty good article on software patents in the EU on Wikipedia, and a pretty good one on the situation in the UK. (Both are very confusing, but that is because the underlying legal situation is confused).
Note that this is a copyright decision, by the CAFC, which normally does not handle copyright cases. They had subject jurisdiction here because it was also a patent case, and that is something they have jurisdiction over.
So how does this fit in as precedent? In future copyright cases, that do NOT have that patent component that gives CAFC jurisdiction for the appeal, does the district court follow the precedent of the appeals court for the circuit it is in, or this CAFC decision?
Ripping off indie game developers is not an 'ethos'.
When I meet an 'information wants to be free' person who will freely give me his social security number, bank account number, credit card number, and home address, then I'll believe that it is an ethos, at least for that person.
There are OOXML implementations whose deviations from the spec (ECMA or ISO) are as small as the deviations of OpenOffice from the ODF spec.
So, it's your choice: either there are no working OOXML implementations but also no working ODF implementations, or there are working OOXML and ODF implementations.
There was an interesting study recently published on word processor interoperability. Here's a link to the abstact.. A download link for the full paper is there.
They found serious interoperability issues among open source programs, and serious interoperability issues among closed source programs. The best interoperability was between OpenOffice an MS Office, ironically.
This study tested two things. One test was to make a basic ODF word processing document in OpenOffice, and then check how well other programs (free and non-free) could handle that document. The other test was similar, but using an OOXML document generated by Word 2007.
Here is the conclusion from the paper:
Why? Don't you think it would be good for BSD and Apache and many other free software projects to benefit, rather than just those free software projects that are under GPL?