The unlikelier the explanation looks like at the surface, the likelier it is the truth of course. They are after you. They just don't want to make it likely that you can tell where and when. So after reading your post I'm convinced it must be a secret government tracking thing that keeps track of whatever terrorist activities you are doing, and there must be some white-hat programmer accidentally mistyping the signature of that software in the database.
Remember: that you are paranoid doesn't mean they are not after you.
And this piece of software after all appears to be a root kit.
Then you are talking about counterfeiting currency, that is considered a far more serious crime than copyright infringement. In China at least that is, I don't know about in the US where it seems the other way around.
This comment is not just funny, it is silly and obviously from someone who knows nothing about China.
For one, the Chinese themselves come up with a lot of IP. This ranges from music productions to technical innovations (yes also that, believe it or not). And yes they are copied big time, even though the Chinese government does try to enforce the protection of this IP. And yes it does so much more vigilantly than the protection of foreign IP. Mind that many US and other overseas patents are not valid in China in the first place, patents after all are limited to the countries/areas where they have been applied for and issued.
If someone comes with a new product in China and has some success, everyone will jump on the bandwagon and make it as well. Even if there is no protected IP involved. If someone starts making plastic coffee cups for example, and makes a good buck out of it, dozens of other factories will spring up and do the same. They all copy one another.
If you come up with some innovation in China and you really want to keep it for yourself you will have to keep it a secret. Don't tell anyone how you do it. This is why many Chinese are very reluctant to show you their production lines, and often you won't get access there at all. Taking photos of machines is also something that many Chinese really don't like. At trade shows many booths also have a no-photo-taking policy because otherwise within a few days they will find their newly designed jewellery at half the price all over the place. At their neighbour's booth for example (not joking).
IP in China is as if there is effectively no IP. Everyone copies from everyone with impunity. There is little enforcement, and what enforcement takes place is largely showing off to the outside world, staged media events making it look like something is being done. China can as such be used as case study for what happens if IP would be abolished. And it is overall not a pretty picture.
Very interesting point of view you have here, it outlines a quite different business model than I am used to. A business model though that makes sense: about ten years ago I was quite involved in the local pop scene, and learned that many bands while under a record label were barely making any money from album sales. And quite some considered albums (and certainly singles) as pure promotion, not something you make money off.
They made money off concerts fees, and merchandise sales during the concerts (t-shirts with the band logo usually).
Some made money from albums, but even the better selling ones barely got an income out of it. It went all to the record company that made the investment in recording the album. Most bands even didn't care about it: they got famous, they got the gigs, made a reasonable income out of it (almost none would get rich). When Napster came along some bands even started promoting the use of this network, but that caused friction with the record company of course.
The problem without copyright is how to make sure you can get back your investment on a recording. Studio time is still expensive, even though it's falling rapidly, recording an album is still quite an investment. Having copyright on the recording would guarantee a limited time (5-10 years is more than enough I think) to make up for your investment. Without copyrights the making of recordings I think will become really hard, and thus hurting the exposure of a musician. No recordings means no exposure.
Where the business model should change is the freedom of the artist. I think it's kind of what you mean, but it's not written explicitly. The artists should not sign for a record label - they could create a song, and then sell/license the song to the record label: the record label then invests in the recording and promotion of the song (or complete album), and the artist is free to arrange their own gigs. Or maybe have the record company help with that, or a separate booking office.
This won't work of course because of greed: artists will happily sign a seven-album contract because they think they will really make it. Only to be dumped after the first flops, and being unable to make more albums because they are still under contract. Greed - from the record label side but at least as much if not more from the artist's side - is why we have the current situation. And that won't change soon.
Force Majeure is sometimes also called "act of God". This normally refers to cases like natural disasters, not an economic downturn. At least it is something that is highly uncommon and unexpected, such as an earthquake (and even that may vary with your locality). Force Majeure is definitely reason to not oblige to contracts in this case, as an economic downturn is not uncommon. Even if it's a serious one.
I really think this is all very interesting stuff. Backyard rocket design, I really wonder what comes out of it.
The coolest would be if these amateurs (or any other hobby-group) would manage to lift and safely return to earth a person.
Mostly I expect this can give an enormous boost to general rocketry due to cost savings. After all we're talking about amateurs here, who thus do this in their spare time with their spare money. There is probably no rich sponsor nor company structure behind it paying them for their efforts and the materials - a sponsor putting in millions of Euros into such a project will hire the people making them professionals by definition. So this will be done on a budget, looking for cheaper rocket fuel, cheaper construction methods, cheaper everything. And this could very well lead to cheaper space travel.
Considering that the RAND Corporation has done actual research -- and you have done nothing --I see no substantial reason to doubt their conclusions. Even the MPA connection is fine by me, despite the submitter's insinuations.
And you obviously don't know what research is, how to do it, or how to look at the results.
RAND have done research, so we may start with the facts they present and consider them correct for now. And then based on those facts we may draw our own conclusions. You are right to be critical about a research piece, and may even doubt someones conclusions without doing your own. Doubting the facts however then you should do your own research (or have strong reason to doubt it, such as other research you know about, but then that is the start of your own research in itself).
When reading some report, you should always be critical of the facts (see whether they pass sanity checks such as that the numbers add up properly and that are within reason), and you should doubt the conclusions. Conclusions are an interpretation of the facts, and are reason for doubt and discussion. Facts, if measured correctly, will be the same for all researchers. Try to come with other conclusions that explain the facts, when possible. And see whether those conclusions may be more likely than what the researchers say. Or think of ways to test conclusions: other tests and/or measurements of new facts that would prove your conclusion and disprove their conclusion, or the other way around of course.
The RAND report says that counterfeiting levels are not likely to decline unless governments worldwide commit more resources to fighting counterfeiting and devise tougher laws to protect intellectual property.
Probably the only useful piece of information in the entire report, and something everyone already knew anyway. Thank you RAND. How much did the MPAA pay you for the "report"? I want to get in on that action.
More stringent laws are not the main solution. Very often laws are stringent enough, it is more commonly the enforcement that is the issue. In case of China, lots of copyright laws are in place, but they are not enforced. Often as in not at all, not even a little bit, except for the showing off to the world now and then in high-profile cases.
Enforcement is a main part of getting this under control, particularly in China. As the USA shows, putting draconian damages (tens of thousands of dollars per copy or so) in itself does nothing, nothing at all to stem the tide.
If you are talking about the sales of illegal copies of CD's, then this is likely to be a source of income for organised crime. In Hong Kong the sales of pirated disks is as a matter of fact a source of income for the triads, highly organised crime. And besides that, the whole sale of infringing materials is illegal (possibly a crime: not everything illegal is a crime), so almost by definition the organisations doing this are organised crime.
The link with terrorism is not too far fetched, as again terrorism is for sure illegal and presumably criminally so, and it tends to be organised, thus lots of terrorist organisations fall under organised crime as well simply for being criminal and organised.
Luckily (in a way), most piracy a.k.a. copyright infringement these days is file sharing between individuals, and no money changes hands in the process. Well maybe some advertising income for the torrent tracking site or so, but that's all then, and if even The Pirate Bay can barely cover cost, most other tracker sites will be running at a loss. Not much money for funding crime there, then.
This is an example where locks work perfectly well for humans. You do lock your front door when you go out, no? You rather leave it open to save the inconvenience of having to open it again when you come home? And at night I do assume you will lock that front door. This all to prevent other humans to come in without your knowledge/permission.
You have to open that one lock once, and you are in, and you can do whatever you want in that house. You can not enter your neighbour's house as you do not have the lock for it. So you can not do anything in there unless that very neighbour opens the door for you, and allows you in. You may be able to enter the garden, and peek through the windows without the key.
Now replace lock with "(super)user account password" and house with "computer system". One time you need the password to reach the required permissions, and do stuff. Only once, after that you're in. No dozens of locks for every single action to open, even if it is with a single key. You may look around in other places without special permission, read files from system directories, but you can not go in and change stuff without special permissions.
Yes, Microsoft has smart people. But this is a HUGE problem, probably a uniquely huge problem in the industry. It's not like "smartness" is some superpower that instantly solves the problem, it takes years of work, research, etc.
And as yet still no proper solution. UAC in Vista everyone complains about and UAC in Win7 is apparently filled with huge holes.
This means that they are either incompetent (possible but not likely, they have plenty of smarts in their company), or that this is actually an insolvable problem. The mess is so big it can not be solved, and the only real solution is to start all over. This is something touted here often and by many other considered impossible to do, it may just be the only solution out of the current mess.
Though MS will most certainly not take BSD or so and build a new Win UI on it: this would make it way too easy to port apps from Windows to other BSD and to Linux and OS/X. It would mean bye-bye lock-in. And really starting from scratch... yes that would take ages. Especially for MS that takes seven years to move from XP to Vista. And fail.
According to the wikipedia entry, Australia is a constitutional monarchy AND parliamentary democracy. A very common combination. The head of state (a foreign queen in case of OZ) has not much to say and is mostly a symbolic head of state; actual governing of the country is done by a democratically elected parliament.
My native Netherlands is also a constitutional monarchy, and a parliamentary democracy.
Well Australia is a democracy, while the USA is a republic. This is a typical difference between the two: openness and accountability, especially when taking the US government of late as an example. Now if only the USA would accept democracy for themselves instead of just imposing it on the rest of the world...
In general the facts themselves (e.g. sports results) are not protected, just the representation (the book, web site, TV show, etc) of it. A newspaper listing sports results may not be copied for example, but can be used as source for such facts, e.g. for someone wishing to collect statistics or to write a book or blog about their favourite team.
Where does a browser end, and a screen scraper begin? Also a "plain" browser like FF or IE interprets the data sent by a website. In this case, presumably the information from the origin's web site is highly reformatted for the iPhone screen, and likely some other functions added - why else bother writing a special app for it. This is certainly not a black-and-white case.
It also depends on how the information is retrieved.
For example, some 15 years ago in The Netherlands a company wanted to release a phone book to compete with the monopoly fixed line provider's phone book. This to sell advertisements and so of course. Now to get the telephone numbers, they took the phone book to China, and hired a bunch of Chinese for cheap to manually copy the numbers from paper into a computer, and then printed it. The monopolist of course didn't believe that, and a law suit followed.
The point was: reading and typing the numbers is legal, as the information could not be copyrighted. However directly copying the phone book (e.g. by using a photocopier) would be illegal.
This of course is not Australian law, but I just want to point out that even though the information (telephone numbers, sports results, TV schedules, transport time tables) may not be copyrighted, a certain representation of it may suddenly be copyrighted.
The train company may argue that it is illegal to draw the information from their web site (e.g. screen scraping), even though it is not legal for someone to walk down to the station, look at the published tables, type the information into their PDA, and publish is.
As another poster in this thread points out there is also an issue with TV listings: these are normally drawn directly from a TV channel's Internet site, and that may cause copyright problems. However if someone would gather the information from public sources (printed listings, the newspaper, whatever) then it may be a different matter.
Of course I think it is silly to have these tables copyrighted, and even silly from the train company to prevent this information to be known by as many people as possible (the more people know about when a train runs, the more are likely to actually take it), without knowing the details of how this information is retrieved and how the Australian copyright laws deal with this kind of information we can not say whether they are legally right or not. And whether they are morally right or not, that is a totally different discussion.
Judges don't do anything but 'interpret and apply law', but the doctrine of precedent means that interpreting and applying the law is one way of creating new law.
This immediately makes me wonder what happens if the government changes a law - let's say this is about the US government as it is/. and the US is doing a lot with precedents. Not revokes or so, but just changes a bit of a law. Is all precedent based on that law from before the change then revoked/invalidated?
E.g. there is a law banning prostitution, but someone finds a loophole in it and wins a court case about it. Then the loophole becomes not only well known but also becomes clearly legal. The government then changes the law to close the loophole, invalidating the precedent set. How about other precedents based on the same law? Is it going to be a case by case basis then? Sounds like it's getting very messy to me that way as laws are being changed and updated all the time, it's one of the major tasks of the government after all.
Here again, we see the Entitlement Mentality that's pervasive in the Big-Music industry:
"Without compensation the creators' livelihood is unsustainable. It is therefore of utmost importance that licensing schemes and new legal services can emerge in the digital environment, while at the same time legislation says firmly no to grand scale businesses that are built on copyright infringement."
You, me, and everyone else are not guaranteed a living in *any* profession we choose. You have to earn a living.
The standard rant. Of course they have to earn a living: that is one of the reasons why copyright exists. I agree that the term is too long, but that is a totally different discussion.
A plumber does a job, gets paid for it, finish. Presumably a job well done, there will be more plumbing to do and he has more work and makes a living of his trade.
A programmer creates a piece of code, gets his salary, finish. Copyrights are for the employer who takes the risk of being able to make money with the software.
Another programmer creates a piece of code, sells copies of it, and gets an income depending on these sales. If everyone and their dog copy it without paying, programmer loses his livelihood.
Yet another programmer goes open source and sells support, doing the same as above but with a different model.
What you conveniently ignore is that this record executive is TOTALLY RIGHT. Yes it is against common belief here on/. but musicians need compensation for their work. Be it from CD sales, mp3 sales, concert tickets, merchandise, whatever: making music costs money (instruments, rent of a practice room, etc), and compensating them for that encourages them to make more music. The better the music, the more compensation they can expect of course and maybe they can even make a living off of it.
Copyright infringement is illegal, and large scale business doing this ("based on it" is quite ambiguous) should be cracked down on. Pirated CD sales is just not OK. Swapping files between friends is a totally different matter, and imho should be allowed or at the very least condoned.
And finally the record executive even mentions the need of coming up with new ideas in the digital age. That's also so true. They have to come up with new business models, suing one's own customers doesn't sound like a good one to me.
Would be interesting if they move that into the extreme... as in no releases anymore from RIAA related record companies. Not much of value lost of course. And an immediate end to piracy for lack of new material to pirate. Sounds like a win-win situation to me.
By my understanding (mostly from/. discussions but still), precedent is typical for common law as practised in the UK and its former colonies that inherited this systems, including the US.
Precedent is imho not making law as such, it is interpreting law and maybe filling in gaps or setting limits that are left vague or undefined in the law. At least interpreting and then applying law is all a judge should do.
This court case took place in Sweden. I doubt Sweden has common law based on the UK system. And I have no idea how they think about precedent.
Is this license going to be translated to other languages?
This as we live in an international world, and I have no idea on how a foreign-language license is accepted in various jurisdictions. In many European countries, at least in my home The Netherlands, the official language (i.e. Dutch) must be used for agreements between individuals or between individuals and companies. Foreign languages (e.g. English) are legally accepted only for contracts between companies. And I wouldn't be surprised if the judge in such case may demand an approved translation to the official language, would the contract come to court or arbitration.
Of course IANAL, however using an English language copyright license for e.g. a Dutch language literary work simply sounds strange to me. Contracts and licenses are not the same of course, still language sounds like an issue to me here.
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The unlikelier the explanation looks like at the surface, the likelier it is the truth of course. They are after you. They just don't want to make it likely that you can tell where and when. So after reading your post I'm convinced it must be a secret government tracking thing that keeps track of whatever terrorist activities you are doing, and there must be some white-hat programmer accidentally mistyping the signature of that software in the database.
Remember: that you are paranoid doesn't mean they are not after you.
And this piece of software after all appears to be a root kit.
Then you are talking about counterfeiting currency, that is considered a far more serious crime than copyright infringement. In China at least that is, I don't know about in the US where it seems the other way around.
This comment is not just funny, it is silly and obviously from someone who knows nothing about China.
For one, the Chinese themselves come up with a lot of IP. This ranges from music productions to technical innovations (yes also that, believe it or not). And yes they are copied big time, even though the Chinese government does try to enforce the protection of this IP. And yes it does so much more vigilantly than the protection of foreign IP. Mind that many US and other overseas patents are not valid in China in the first place, patents after all are limited to the countries/areas where they have been applied for and issued.
If someone comes with a new product in China and has some success, everyone will jump on the bandwagon and make it as well. Even if there is no protected IP involved. If someone starts making plastic coffee cups for example, and makes a good buck out of it, dozens of other factories will spring up and do the same. They all copy one another.
If you come up with some innovation in China and you really want to keep it for yourself you will have to keep it a secret. Don't tell anyone how you do it. This is why many Chinese are very reluctant to show you their production lines, and often you won't get access there at all. Taking photos of machines is also something that many Chinese really don't like. At trade shows many booths also have a no-photo-taking policy because otherwise within a few days they will find their newly designed jewellery at half the price all over the place. At their neighbour's booth for example (not joking).
IP in China is as if there is effectively no IP. Everyone copies from everyone with impunity. There is little enforcement, and what enforcement takes place is largely showing off to the outside world, staged media events making it look like something is being done. China can as such be used as case study for what happens if IP would be abolished. And it is overall not a pretty picture.
If that is all, it sounds quite benign for going through the whole effort of hiding it so well.
Very interesting point of view you have here, it outlines a quite different business model than I am used to. A business model though that makes sense: about ten years ago I was quite involved in the local pop scene, and learned that many bands while under a record label were barely making any money from album sales. And quite some considered albums (and certainly singles) as pure promotion, not something you make money off.
They made money off concerts fees, and merchandise sales during the concerts (t-shirts with the band logo usually).
Some made money from albums, but even the better selling ones barely got an income out of it. It went all to the record company that made the investment in recording the album. Most bands even didn't care about it: they got famous, they got the gigs, made a reasonable income out of it (almost none would get rich). When Napster came along some bands even started promoting the use of this network, but that caused friction with the record company of course.
The problem without copyright is how to make sure you can get back your investment on a recording. Studio time is still expensive, even though it's falling rapidly, recording an album is still quite an investment. Having copyright on the recording would guarantee a limited time (5-10 years is more than enough I think) to make up for your investment. Without copyrights the making of recordings I think will become really hard, and thus hurting the exposure of a musician. No recordings means no exposure.
Where the business model should change is the freedom of the artist. I think it's kind of what you mean, but it's not written explicitly. The artists should not sign for a record label - they could create a song, and then sell/license the song to the record label: the record label then invests in the recording and promotion of the song (or complete album), and the artist is free to arrange their own gigs. Or maybe have the record company help with that, or a separate booking office.
This won't work of course because of greed: artists will happily sign a seven-album contract because they think they will really make it. Only to be dumped after the first flops, and being unable to make more albums because they are still under contract. Greed - from the record label side but at least as much if not more from the artist's side - is why we have the current situation. And that won't change soon.
Force Majeure is sometimes also called "act of God". This normally refers to cases like natural disasters, not an economic downturn. At least it is something that is highly uncommon and unexpected, such as an earthquake (and even that may vary with your locality). Force Majeure is definitely reason to not oblige to contracts in this case, as an economic downturn is not uncommon. Even if it's a serious one.
Who says you can not get bacon out of a Danish pig?
I really think this is all very interesting stuff. Backyard rocket design, I really wonder what comes out of it. The coolest would be if these amateurs (or any other hobby-group) would manage to lift and safely return to earth a person.
Mostly I expect this can give an enormous boost to general rocketry due to cost savings. After all we're talking about amateurs here, who thus do this in their spare time with their spare money. There is probably no rich sponsor nor company structure behind it paying them for their efforts and the materials - a sponsor putting in millions of Euros into such a project will hire the people making them professionals by definition. So this will be done on a budget, looking for cheaper rocket fuel, cheaper construction methods, cheaper everything. And this could very well lead to cheaper space travel.
Considering that the RAND Corporation has done actual research -- and you have done nothing --I see no substantial reason to doubt their conclusions. Even the MPA connection is fine by me, despite the submitter's insinuations.
And you obviously don't know what research is, how to do it, or how to look at the results.
RAND have done research, so we may start with the facts they present and consider them correct for now. And then based on those facts we may draw our own conclusions. You are right to be critical about a research piece, and may even doubt someones conclusions without doing your own. Doubting the facts however then you should do your own research (or have strong reason to doubt it, such as other research you know about, but then that is the start of your own research in itself).
When reading some report, you should always be critical of the facts (see whether they pass sanity checks such as that the numbers add up properly and that are within reason), and you should doubt the conclusions. Conclusions are an interpretation of the facts, and are reason for doubt and discussion. Facts, if measured correctly, will be the same for all researchers. Try to come with other conclusions that explain the facts, when possible. And see whether those conclusions may be more likely than what the researchers say. Or think of ways to test conclusions: other tests and/or measurements of new facts that would prove your conclusion and disprove their conclusion, or the other way around of course.
The RAND report says that counterfeiting levels are not likely to decline unless governments worldwide commit more resources to fighting counterfeiting and devise tougher laws to protect intellectual property.
Probably the only useful piece of information in the entire report, and something everyone already knew anyway. Thank you RAND. How much did the MPAA pay you for the "report"? I want to get in on that action.
More stringent laws are not the main solution. Very often laws are stringent enough, it is more commonly the enforcement that is the issue. In case of China, lots of copyright laws are in place, but they are not enforced. Often as in not at all, not even a little bit, except for the showing off to the world now and then in high-profile cases.
Enforcement is a main part of getting this under control, particularly in China. As the USA shows, putting draconian damages (tens of thousands of dollars per copy or so) in itself does nothing, nothing at all to stem the tide.
If you are talking about the sales of illegal copies of CD's, then this is likely to be a source of income for organised crime. In Hong Kong the sales of pirated disks is as a matter of fact a source of income for the triads, highly organised crime. And besides that, the whole sale of infringing materials is illegal (possibly a crime: not everything illegal is a crime), so almost by definition the organisations doing this are organised crime.
The link with terrorism is not too far fetched, as again terrorism is for sure illegal and presumably criminally so, and it tends to be organised, thus lots of terrorist organisations fall under organised crime as well simply for being criminal and organised.
Luckily (in a way), most piracy a.k.a. copyright infringement these days is file sharing between individuals, and no money changes hands in the process. Well maybe some advertising income for the torrent tracking site or so, but that's all then, and if even The Pirate Bay can barely cover cost, most other tracker sites will be running at a loss. Not much money for funding crime there, then.
This is an example where locks work perfectly well for humans. You do lock your front door when you go out, no? You rather leave it open to save the inconvenience of having to open it again when you come home? And at night I do assume you will lock that front door. This all to prevent other humans to come in without your knowledge/permission.
You have to open that one lock once, and you are in, and you can do whatever you want in that house. You can not enter your neighbour's house as you do not have the lock for it. So you can not do anything in there unless that very neighbour opens the door for you, and allows you in. You may be able to enter the garden, and peek through the windows without the key.
Now replace lock with "(super)user account password" and house with "computer system". One time you need the password to reach the required permissions, and do stuff. Only once, after that you're in. No dozens of locks for every single action to open, even if it is with a single key. You may look around in other places without special permission, read files from system directories, but you can not go in and change stuff without special permissions.
Yes, Microsoft has smart people. But this is a HUGE problem, probably a uniquely huge problem in the industry. It's not like "smartness" is some superpower that instantly solves the problem, it takes years of work, research, etc.
And as yet still no proper solution. UAC in Vista everyone complains about and UAC in Win7 is apparently filled with huge holes.
This means that they are either incompetent (possible but not likely, they have plenty of smarts in their company), or that this is actually an insolvable problem. The mess is so big it can not be solved, and the only real solution is to start all over. This is something touted here often and by many other considered impossible to do, it may just be the only solution out of the current mess.
Though MS will most certainly not take BSD or so and build a new Win UI on it: this would make it way too easy to port apps from Windows to other BSD and to Linux and OS/X. It would mean bye-bye lock-in. And really starting from scratch... yes that would take ages. Especially for MS that takes seven years to move from XP to Vista. And fail.
According to the wikipedia entry, Australia is a constitutional monarchy AND parliamentary democracy. A very common combination. The head of state (a foreign queen in case of OZ) has not much to say and is mostly a symbolic head of state; actual governing of the country is done by a democratically elected parliament.
My native Netherlands is also a constitutional monarchy, and a parliamentary democracy.
Well Australia is a democracy, while the USA is a republic. This is a typical difference between the two: openness and accountability, especially when taking the US government of late as an example. Now if only the USA would accept democracy for themselves instead of just imposing it on the rest of the world...
In general the facts themselves (e.g. sports results) are not protected, just the representation (the book, web site, TV show, etc) of it. A newspaper listing sports results may not be copied for example, but can be used as source for such facts, e.g. for someone wishing to collect statistics or to write a book or blog about their favourite team.
Where does a browser end, and a screen scraper begin? Also a "plain" browser like FF or IE interprets the data sent by a website. In this case, presumably the information from the origin's web site is highly reformatted for the iPhone screen, and likely some other functions added - why else bother writing a special app for it. This is certainly not a black-and-white case.
It also depends on how the information is retrieved.
For example, some 15 years ago in The Netherlands a company wanted to release a phone book to compete with the monopoly fixed line provider's phone book. This to sell advertisements and so of course. Now to get the telephone numbers, they took the phone book to China, and hired a bunch of Chinese for cheap to manually copy the numbers from paper into a computer, and then printed it. The monopolist of course didn't believe that, and a law suit followed.
The point was: reading and typing the numbers is legal, as the information could not be copyrighted. However directly copying the phone book (e.g. by using a photocopier) would be illegal.
This of course is not Australian law, but I just want to point out that even though the information (telephone numbers, sports results, TV schedules, transport time tables) may not be copyrighted, a certain representation of it may suddenly be copyrighted.
The train company may argue that it is illegal to draw the information from their web site (e.g. screen scraping), even though it is not legal for someone to walk down to the station, look at the published tables, type the information into their PDA, and publish is.
As another poster in this thread points out there is also an issue with TV listings: these are normally drawn directly from a TV channel's Internet site, and that may cause copyright problems. However if someone would gather the information from public sources (printed listings, the newspaper, whatever) then it may be a different matter.
Of course I think it is silly to have these tables copyrighted, and even silly from the train company to prevent this information to be known by as many people as possible (the more people know about when a train runs, the more are likely to actually take it), without knowing the details of how this information is retrieved and how the Australian copyright laws deal with this kind of information we can not say whether they are legally right or not. And whether they are morally right or not, that is a totally different discussion.
Judges don't do anything but 'interpret and apply law', but the doctrine of precedent means that interpreting and applying the law is one way of creating new law.
This immediately makes me wonder what happens if the government changes a law - let's say this is about the US government as it is /. and the US is doing a lot with precedents. Not revokes or so, but just changes a bit of a law. Is all precedent based on that law from before the change then revoked/invalidated?
E.g. there is a law banning prostitution, but someone finds a loophole in it and wins a court case about it. Then the loophole becomes not only well known but also becomes clearly legal. The government then changes the law to close the loophole, invalidating the precedent set. How about other precedents based on the same law? Is it going to be a case by case basis then? Sounds like it's getting very messy to me that way as laws are being changed and updated all the time, it's one of the major tasks of the government after all.
Here again, we see the Entitlement Mentality that's pervasive in the Big-Music industry:
You, me, and everyone else are not guaranteed a living in *any* profession we choose. You have to earn a living.
The standard rant. Of course they have to earn a living: that is one of the reasons why copyright exists. I agree that the term is too long, but that is a totally different discussion.
A plumber does a job, gets paid for it, finish. Presumably a job well done, there will be more plumbing to do and he has more work and makes a living of his trade.
A programmer creates a piece of code, gets his salary, finish. Copyrights are for the employer who takes the risk of being able to make money with the software.
Another programmer creates a piece of code, sells copies of it, and gets an income depending on these sales. If everyone and their dog copy it without paying, programmer loses his livelihood.
Yet another programmer goes open source and sells support, doing the same as above but with a different model.
What you conveniently ignore is that this record executive is TOTALLY RIGHT. Yes it is against common belief here on /. but musicians need compensation for their work. Be it from CD sales, mp3 sales, concert tickets, merchandise, whatever: making music costs money (instruments, rent of a practice room, etc), and compensating them for that encourages them to make more music. The better the music, the more compensation they can expect of course and maybe they can even make a living off of it.
Copyright infringement is illegal, and large scale business doing this ("based on it" is quite ambiguous) should be cracked down on. Pirated CD sales is just not OK. Swapping files between friends is a totally different matter, and imho should be allowed or at the very least condoned.
And finally the record executive even mentions the need of coming up with new ideas in the digital age. That's also so true. They have to come up with new business models, suing one's own customers doesn't sound like a good one to me.
Would be interesting if they move that into the extreme... as in no releases anymore from RIAA related record companies. Not much of value lost of course. And an immediate end to piracy for lack of new material to pirate. Sounds like a win-win situation to me.
By my understanding (mostly from /. discussions but still), precedent is typical for common law as practised in the UK and its former colonies that inherited this systems, including the US.
Precedent is imho not making law as such, it is interpreting law and maybe filling in gaps or setting limits that are left vague or undefined in the law. At least interpreting and then applying law is all a judge should do.
This court case took place in Sweden. I doubt Sweden has common law based on the UK system. And I have no idea how they think about precedent.
Is this license going to be translated to other languages?
This as we live in an international world, and I have no idea on how a foreign-language license is accepted in various jurisdictions. In many European countries, at least in my home The Netherlands, the official language (i.e. Dutch) must be used for agreements between individuals or between individuals and companies. Foreign languages (e.g. English) are legally accepted only for contracts between companies. And I wouldn't be surprised if the judge in such case may demand an approved translation to the official language, would the contract come to court or arbitration.
Of course IANAL, however using an English language copyright license for e.g. a Dutch language literary work simply sounds strange to me. Contracts and licenses are not the same of course, still language sounds like an issue to me here.
Are you sure this method is future proof?
I believe copyright law talks about "works", not "creative works". This would at least prevent the discussion of what is "creative".