You just told me that it was not part of your normal work duties. Furthermore, it was not specifically commissioned in writing by them. You have a copyright infringement case against them. Get out the BSA (used to be SPA) precedents and show them what you could do to them in a copyright action against them... starting by confiscating and examining at your leisure every computer in the place.
(1) a work prepared by an employee within the scope of his or her employment; or
(2) a work specially ordered or commissioned for use as a contribution to a collective work, as a part of a motion picture or other audiovisual work, as a sound recording, as a translation, as a supplementary work, as a compilation, as an instructional text, as a test, as answer material for a test, or as an atlas, if the parties expressly agree in a written instrument signed by them that the work shall be considered a work made for hire. For the purpose of the foregoing sentence, a ''supplementary work'' is a work prepared for publication as a secondary adjunct to a work by another author for the purpose of introducing, concluding, illustrating, explaining, revising, commenting upon, or assisting in the use of the other work, such as forewords, afterwords, pictorial illustrations, maps, charts, tables, editorial notes, musical arrangements, answer material for tests, bibliographies, appendixes, and indexes, and an ''instructional text'' is a literary, pictorial, or graphic work prepared for publication and with the purpose of use in systematic instructional activities.
IANAL, but
Is that homework, is that other code, "prepared by an employee within the scope of his or her employment"?? (Homework certainly is not, or so Federal precedent says.) Is it "specially ordered or commissioned...in a written instrument signed by them that the work shall be considered a work made for hire"? (Is there a specific agreement
signed by both sides for each specific work?)
Note that patent law does not have this kind of definition with regard to "work for hire."
No, IBM has stretched things in this regard beyond what the law allows. So have the universities of "gherehmee" and "feydakin".
I think it would be an interesting exercise pour encourager les autres for a student to aggressively pursue copyright infringement action against such a university, to the full extent of the example provided by the BSA and by Scientology: ex parte orders and all that (show up with a Federal marshall and an 18-wheeler, confiscate every computer in the place for your own infringement-examination at your leisure in the place of your choosing...)
fwiw, I note that Carnegie Mellon's CS department has started doing the "right thing" for class projects, etc., which as it notes are properly considered works of joint authorship, both the students and the university being the authors.
If they want to get my business, then
they damned well should NOT use nonstandard proprietary HTML qualifiers like
onload in their main page's
body construct!
I intend to vote for Libertarian Party presidential candidate Harry Browne. Many say I waste my vote. You've heard the argument -- vote the lesser of two evils. But at his brother
Robert's funeral, Ted Kennedy quoted his late brother: "Some men see things as they are and say 'why.' I dream things that never were, and say 'why not.'"
You wouldn't happen to have any statistics on what happens to their rates of single victim shootings, would you?
Just ask him where he got his stats and be done with it.
Single-victim shootings down 9%.
Where? Prof John Lott's (UChicago) exhaustive study of the topic.
fwiw, violent crimes involving personal contact (murder, rape, mugging, assault, etc.) down by about that amount generally; burglaries and similar crimes NOT involving personal contact up about 5%.
IBM POWER3 already has dual multiply/add units per CPU and dual load/store units -- this sounds like just upping the clock speed and multiprocessor integration. What I want to know is this: How will it perform on real apps instead of just LINPACK. I've benchmarked POWER3 on serious scientific apps, and seen the following performance gaps:
MM5 is a big sloppy vectorish code for meteorology modeling; POWER3 delivers about 25% of the performance I would have expected from its LINPACK numbers and given MM5 benchmark performance on known SGI's and Alphas.
MAQSIP is a big air quality modeling code highly optimized for general microprocessor/parallel; POWER3 delivers about half the expected performance.
Does POWER4 have a similar gap between performance on a very simple and regular app (LINPACK) and real-world ones ??
NOTE: for what it's worth, Sun SPARCs give excellent MAQSIP performance, but even more miserable MM5 performance (as compared to processor-peak) than POWER3.
You people don't understand the
importance of copyright laws and intellectual property
Nor do you!
DISCLAIMER: I am not a Napster user. Nor am I much of a movie
viewer -- and don't have a DVD player nor do I watch them, so do
not have a direct interest in that mess, but rather see it as part
of a larger pattern. My hobbies -- ballroom dancing, choral singing,
reading SF -- keep me busy enough that I rarely even look at TV.
The Founding Fathers did not regard
"intellectual property" as a natural right, but rather as an
artificial, legislated right which was of benefit to society as a whole, only if
managed properly. The compromise they decided upon, and wrote
into the Constitution dictated that
"authors and inventors" might be granted for a limited time
copyright or patent protection, with the consideration that after
that limited time the work must pass into the public domain.
I contend that the present regime does not fit under these
Constitutional conditions and limitations. In the music industry,
it is rare for the true authors to have title to the copyright of
their works (there has been rather a bit of commentary lately about
impoverished artists, from whose work the big music houses have
made fortunes). Nor -- and this is my most critical point -- is
the present copyright term anything that can be considered
"limited" at least from my point of view.
Under the present copyright law, works written a generation before
I was born (I was born in 1953) are not scheduled to be released
into the public domain until at least a generation after I die.
This is not what the authors of the Constitution meant by
"limited".
And even when works pass into the public domain, the publishing
industry claims that they have not! As an example (I am an avid
singer of classical music), my copy of Vivaldi's Gloria claims
"Copyright Walton Publishing Co. 1988 All rights reserved No copy
whether in whole or in part may be made without written permission
of the publisher." (A quick survey of my
pre-1800 music collection shows that this
behavior by the publishers is pervasive.) This is not a claim "editorial markings
copyright..." as case law would suggest, but of copyright in
totality for a work first published more than two centuries ago!
This kind of claim is widespread in the classical-music publishing
business -- Kalmus (New York, Berlin) being the primary exception
that comes to mind in this matter.
Some will claim that such protection is appropriate reward for the
(mechanical! -- music-typesetting is a mathematical algorithm,
described as such in the IEEE's journal Computer in the
mid-Eighties) job of typesetting. Kalmus success as a publisher
that does not make this kind of copyright-fraud sets the lie to
this claim that copyright is necessary as a protection for the job
of type-setting.
The publishing industry have hijacked copyright law in a way that
seriously conflicts with the Constitution. After due thought, it is
my considered, reasoned belief that they are (by and large) a bunch
of thieves, robbers, and extortionists.
In the matter of "Two wrongs do not make a right," it is well worth
writing about this first and primary wrong as well as the second
("music pirating") one.
I want a quarter-cylindrical display for my computer -- 72 inches long, 30 inches high,
300 dpi@ 32bpp, bent a quarter of the way around a vertical cylinder.
And then a 1GB graphics card to drive it:-)
Can this give me that? (it sort of looks that way!)
How does this ("locked" DVD-disk "textbooks" that require a Mac Powerbook) fit with the requirements of the Americans with Disabilities Act of 1990? Not everyone can deal with 72dpi on-screen text!
Maybe this is an idea to use attacking the DMCA:
Encourage your congresscritter to amend ADA1990
to include the following provisions:
Reproduction/enhancement of an already-owned
copy for purposes of dealing with an impairment
shall be construed as fair use under copyright law.
Any one who sells works with embedded technical copy-prevention measures (as described under the DMCA) shall be required to offer under the same terms and for the same prices copies enhanced appropriately for the use of impaired or handicapped customers.
The following is from comp.arch, by Craig Burley,
a brilliant C programmer and compiler writerwho has probably written more C than any other three of us -- and open-sourced it!! -- the primary author of "g77" and one of the "gcc" team:
C is a great *tool*. It's *such* a great tool that
because it, like awk, sed, perl, make, tar, and so on,
necessarily defines an input "language" in the comp.sci (formal
language) sense, the inexperienced conclude that it is a great
*language*.
Fortran comes from an older tradition when formal languages were
less understood, and artificial languages (my term for true languages
designed to meet artificial, e.g. technological, needs, covering
computer languages and stuff like GUIs) even less so. As such,
it didn't show the benefits of good formal-language design (e.g.
nobody can say what "X(Y)=Z" really means in Fortran without
knowing the context, and this does confuse programmers in practice),
but it also didn't show the disadvantages of formal-language
design techniques (e.g. the arrogance that says "if I can write a
small-enough yacc input file for my language, it is therefore a
Good Language").
Yet, despite my long decades of distate for Fortran, the more I've
learned about what constitutes good *language* design, the more I've
had to conclude that, for scientific/numeric processing, Fortran
not only *was* a better language in its day than C in *its*, but it
(Fortran 90) is *today* a better language than C *today*. (And C++
is even worse a language than C. At least programmers know what
`a = b + c;' means in C.)
The essential lesson I finally learned was:
Formal languages are to languages what mathematics is to music.
I think the creation of the term "formal language" itself was a
mistake, because it misleads the audience into thinking that *some*
kind of language is being described, in a useful sense, but in fact
"formal language" encompasses much more than the tiny portion of the
generally useful term "language" than is connoted by the term, in
much the same sense that "formal music" would have been a poor term
instead of "mathematics".
So we end up with "brilliant" C programmers who assume that, because
C is (mistakenly) called a "language", and because C is a great *tool*,
it is a good language, and since Fortran isn't such a great tool,
it must be a lesser language, when the opposite is true....
...and he continues on for a couple of more pages,
in news article reference y67mbmu7wr.fsf@tweedledumb.cygnus.com
...I can see it being useful in a consulting office where people spend most of their time at customer sites...
But it's a dumb idea for people who actually have to work there...
Agreed!
I'm a monitor-bigot (I want at least a 21-incher; ideally, I'd like at least 72-inch by 30-inch at
200 DPI, in the shape of a quarter-cylinder (with
focus-follows-eyeballs:-) ); I hate working on those dinky little laptop-screens and keyboards.
In flat-screens, I wouldn't mind having a 42-inch
one cut from the "motherglass" made by Samsung's new LCD fab, described at http://www.eetimes.com/story/OEG20000 817S0010
If there were decent network latency for DSL, then as you say
Working from home is my ideal office environment.
But as it stands, I see ping times to one of the SGI Origin servers at the office around 65 ms on a good day.
Running an interactive visualization tool over that kind of link is hell.
I'm an environmental modeling researcher, and I need insight, not numbers!
Why don't you ask the respective companies to fix the security holes...
<RANT>
Idiot.
The web is too-much taken over by those who
want to display their pages' flash and lack of content, and who take over my screen with hundreds of their damned popups. Frame-bombs and popup-bombs are inherently a problem in Java and Javascript pages.
I'm going to buy a new home system soon.
I run Linux both at home and at work, and I will probably buy a moderately "heavy" system -- 512 MB, 800+ MHZ, 40+ GB fast disk, 21-inch monitor, top-end graphics. etc., and I want it to be running Linux.
As a matter of fact, I tried to look at your web-site yesterday. But not only did it not
have any obvious Linux-system links, it was
configured to work with Javascript-enabled
browsers only.
Not only do I regard active content such as Javascript to be a security risk, I have also
had too damned many denial-of-service
attacks disguised as Javascript web pages!! Too many web designers regard it as an opportunity to "one-up" frame-bombs. For this reason, I categorically refuse to
run Java or Javascript.
So either clean up your act or else forget about
me -- and my friends who consult me --
as a
customer.
The Constitutional authority for copyright follows from the following clause:
Article I Section 8. The Congress shall have power... To promote the progress of science and useful arts, by securing for limited times to authors and inventors the exclusive right to their respective writings and discoveries;...
The right to copyright as property was not regarded as a fundamental property right by the founders, nor was it such under Common Law. The Constitution established that Congress had the authority to create this right subject to several criteria. The present copyright regime does not in any realistic fashion fit under those criteria:
Present copyright term is not a "limited" term -- at least not in terms meaningful to a human being.
Present copyright benefit does not go to "authors and inventors" as the founders would have understood those terms, but to some rather-removed third party.
The present situation is one where the publishing industry is engaged in wholesale theft--first, theft of the works from their true authors; then theft of what should be in the public domain (and thus the property of all of us) from us as a society. It is a vast leap from the originally-passed copyright term of 14 years to today's life plus 70 years!
FT pages (not just the linked one, but various others, too) are consistently crashing my browser. The symptom is evidently an infinite loop attempting to load something that isn't there, followed by an append of a rather large (textually) "page not found" table.
Put them in the slammer(was :But Mattel _asks_)
on
Mattel Spyware
·
· Score: 2
This is quite interesting considering the fact that the installer didn't mention anything about Brodcast untill after the Children's Online Privacy Protection Act went into effect.
Mattel felony, as I read it!
on
Mattel Spyware
·
· Score: 2
As I read the law, Mattel should be in for it. I just sent Mr. Garfinkel the following:
Dear Mr. Garfinkel, I am not a lawyer, but it seems to me that the US Code, Title 18, Part 1, Chapter 47, Section 1030 (which you can find on-line at CornelL LAw School's Legal Information Institute, at URL
http://www4.law.cornell.edu/us code/18/1030.text.html, is relevant in this case.
Given that you are a journalist working for a publication engaged in interstate commerce, by subsection (D)(2)(b), your computer is a "protected computer" under the definitions of this Act. Under the definitions of (E)(5), Mattel's actions constituted "unauthorized access." Mattel is guilty of a felony. You and _Salon_ should sue them for damages, and make sure you include massive punitive damages while you're at it, because of the nature of this crime (not just a crime against you and _Salon_, but also a crime Against The Children, to quote our First Lady, and one that strikes at the heart of society's foundations -- and also "pour encourager les autres" who also want to engage in this sort of spying.
Someone with better than normal vision has 20/x vision, where x
Exactly right!
And Ted Williams also had 20/10 -- and allegedly could see well enough to see the seams on a fastball headed his way. That's why he was able to hit the homeruns so well. Does any one know about McGuire and Sosa?
Back before I retired from the sport of fencing, my optometrist and I would fiddle with my eyeglass prescription until I could get 20/12 or better. It did wonders for my depth perception and sense of distance! Being able to gauge distances of about ten feet accurate to about half an inch made life very frustrating for my opponents (who couldn't *quite* seem to reach me:-).
META: The Slashdot previewer doesn't seem to be handling nested BLOCKQUOTE/EM constructs correctly anymore. Is this fixable?
I'm not sure how this will work with "Only accept cookies originating from the as the page being viewed" option in netscape but there are clauses dealing with ebeding a unique id in the refering URL.
Easy: Suppose you're a bad guy at domain X, and the banner-client is from domain Y. As long as the banner-client includes anything -- even a 1x1 GIF -- from domain X, your domain-X cookies are accepted without question by the browser.
Slashdot Mirror
Is that homework, is that other code, "prepared by an employee within the scope of his or her employment"?? (Homework certainly is not, or so Federal precedent says.) Is it "specially ordered or commissioned...in a written instrument signed by them that the work shall be considered a work made for hire"? (Is there a specific agreement signed by both sides for each specific work?)
Note that patent law does not have this kind of definition with regard to "work for hire."
No, IBM has stretched things in this regard beyond what the law allows. So have the universities of "gherehmee" and "feydakin".
I think it would be an interesting exercise pour encourager les autres for a student to aggressively pursue copyright infringement action against such a university, to the full extent of the example provided by the BSA and by Scientology: ex parte orders and all that (show up with a Federal marshall and an 18-wheeler, confiscate every computer in the place for your own infringement-examination at your leisure in the place of your choosing...)
fwiw, I note that Carnegie Mellon's CS department has started doing the "right thing" for class projects, etc., which as it notes are properly considered works of joint authorship, both the students and the university being the authors.
Where? Prof John Lott's (UChicago) exhaustive study of the topic.
fwiw, violent crimes involving personal contact (murder, rape, mugging, assault, etc.) down by about that amount generally; burglaries and similar crimes NOT involving personal contact up about 5%.
- MM5 is a big sloppy vectorish code for meteorology modeling; POWER3 delivers about 25% of the performance I would have expected from its LINPACK numbers and given MM5 benchmark performance on known SGI's and Alphas.
- MAQSIP is a big air quality modeling code highly optimized for general microprocessor/parallel; POWER3 delivers about half the expected performance.
Does POWER4 have a similar gap between performance on a very simple and regular app (LINPACK) and real-world ones ??NOTE: for what it's worth, Sun SPARCs give excellent MAQSIP performance, but even more miserable MM5 performance (as compared to processor-peak) than POWER3.
DISCLAIMER: I am not a Napster user. Nor am I much of a movie viewer -- and don't have a DVD player nor do I watch them, so do not have a direct interest in that mess, but rather see it as part of a larger pattern. My hobbies -- ballroom dancing, choral singing, reading SF -- keep me busy enough that I rarely even look at TV.
The Founding Fathers did not regard "intellectual property" as a natural right, but rather as an artificial, legislated right which was of benefit to society as a whole, only if managed properly. The compromise they decided upon, and wrote into the Constitution dictated that "authors and inventors" might be granted for a limited time copyright or patent protection, with the consideration that after that limited time the work must pass into the public domain.
I contend that the present regime does not fit under these Constitutional conditions and limitations. In the music industry, it is rare for the true authors to have title to the copyright of their works (there has been rather a bit of commentary lately about impoverished artists, from whose work the big music houses have made fortunes). Nor -- and this is my most critical point -- is the present copyright term anything that can be considered "limited" at least from my point of view.
Under the present copyright law, works written a generation before I was born (I was born in 1953) are not scheduled to be released into the public domain until at least a generation after I die. This is not what the authors of the Constitution meant by "limited".
And even when works pass into the public domain, the publishing industry claims that they have not! As an example (I am an avid singer of classical music), my copy of Vivaldi's Gloria claims "Copyright Walton Publishing Co. 1988 All rights reserved No copy whether in whole or in part may be made without written permission of the publisher." (A quick survey of my pre-1800 music collection shows that this behavior by the publishers is pervasive.) This is not a claim "editorial markings copyright..." as case law would suggest, but of copyright in totality for a work first published more than two centuries ago! This kind of claim is widespread in the classical-music publishing business -- Kalmus (New York, Berlin) being the primary exception that comes to mind in this matter.
Some will claim that such protection is appropriate reward for the (mechanical! -- music-typesetting is a mathematical algorithm, described as such in the IEEE's journal Computer in the mid-Eighties) job of typesetting. Kalmus success as a publisher that does not make this kind of copyright-fraud sets the lie to this claim that copyright is necessary as a protection for the job of type-setting.
The publishing industry have hijacked copyright law in a way that seriously conflicts with the Constitution. After due thought, it is my considered, reasoned belief that they are (by and large) a bunch of thieves, robbers, and extortionists.
In the matter of "Two wrongs do not make a right," it is well worth writing about this first and primary wrong as well as the second ("music pirating") one.
And then a 1GB graphics card to drive it :-)
Can this give me that? (it sort of looks that way!)
Maybe this is an idea to use attacking the DMCA: Encourage your congresscritter to amend ADA1990 to include the following provisions:
I'm a monitor-bigot (I want at least a 21-incher; ideally, I'd like at least 72-inch by 30-inch at 200 DPI, in the shape of a quarter-cylinder (with focus-follows-eyeballs:-) ); I hate working on those dinky little laptop-screens and keyboards. In flat-screens, I wouldn't mind having a 42-inch one cut from the "motherglass" made by Samsung's new LCD fab, described at http://www.eetimes.com/story/OEG20000 817S0010
I'm an environmental modeling researcher, and I need insight, not numbers!
Idiot.
The web is too-much taken over by those who want to display their pages' flash and lack of content, and who take over my screen with hundreds of their damned popups. Frame-bombs and popup-bombs are inherently a problem in Java and Javascript pages.
</RANT>
As a matter of fact, I tried to look at your web-site yesterday. But not only did it not have any obvious Linux-system links, it was configured to work with Javascript-enabled browsers only.
Not only do I regard active content such as Javascript to be a security risk, I have also had too damned many denial-of-service attacks disguised as Javascript web pages!! Too many web designers regard it as an opportunity to "one-up" frame-bombs. For this reason, I categorically refuse to run Java or Javascript.
So either clean up your act or else forget about me -- and my friends who consult me -- as a customer.
- Present copyright term is not a "limited" term -- at least not in terms meaningful to a human being.
- Present copyright benefit does not go to "authors and inventors" as the founders would have understood those terms, but to some rather-removed third party.
The present situation is one where the publishing industry is engaged in wholesale theft--first, theft of the works from their true authors; then theft of what should be in the public domain (and thus the property of all of us) from us as a society. It is a vast leap from the originally-passed copyright term of 14 years to today's life plus 70 years!There is in fact a currently-active suit denouncing the latest copyright act as unconstitutional -- see URL http://eldred.ne.mediaone.net/complain t.html
I've had too damned many denial-of-service attacks disguised as JavaScript pages to allow it to be enabled on any of my machines.
And FS does not have a proper "webmaster" feedback address--webmaster@fs.com bounced. MAY THEY ROT LIKE THE BASTARDS THEY ARE!!
fwiw, I'm running NS4.71/Linux/noJava/noJavascript.