I agree with you. Hmmm, let's see. The most successful of all of the Dreamworks movies you listed was Shrek. Also, the most original of the Dreamworks movies was Shrek...
2 + 2 = Forget the tired old rehashed storylines that Disney uses, Dreamworks! Make your own movies, we like them... really!
If for some reason all copies of the Linux kernel source code was wiped of the face of the earth... It might take another five years to get to the point were we are now but things would eventually get back to normal.
In another five years, especially without a large number of people using Free operating systems (read: without all the Linux users), hardware developers might have irrevocably moved towards closed hardware with nothing but Windows compatibility. Being "back to where we are now" would do us no good, because everybody else would have moved on.
Well, that pretty much writes off any small inventor. If you have to pour $X into R&D to get a patent, you've basically walled off a class of innovators from ever bringing their ideas to market.
I'm more concerned with the small inventors written off because they didn't want to pour $X into DC&H [Dewey, Cheatham, and Howe].
"The U.S. Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) strongly recommend that all prospective applicants retain the services of a registered patent attorney or patent agent to prepare and prosecute their applications." - US PTO FAQ
You neglected to touch on the crux of my point, which was that, in my opinion, the FreeCraft name was chosen solely because it follows the Warcraft/Starcraft naming heuristic... thereby indicating that it is a product meant to be a substitute for those games. In that context, the level to which the word "craft" is a general term is irrelevant.
I understand your point about the combination of words being the key factor, not the individual words. But there is validity in the idea that similarities to the trademarked expression are still infringing.
The law does not always agree with me. The Victor's Secret/Victoria's Secret case seems relevant. However, the deciding factor in that case was that there was no damage to the "famous" trademark. I think that the existence of FreeCraft, on the other hand, does damage the famous trademark. First, because it could decrease sales of War/Starcraft. Second, because if anyone believes that Freecraft is affiliated with War/Starcraft (which I believe to be possible, though you may disagree), then the perceived quality of the series as a whole could be diminished.
The Freecraft people should be allowed to continue their project; I don't believe that Blizzard has a right to prevent competition within the genre, and precedent has established that directly copying game interfaces is not a violation of IP rights. But the usage of the *craft pattern, for the purpose of identification with Blizzard's products, in a software project that is in direct competition to those products, is wrong.
And please, if you respond to this, tell me whether you actually think the FreeCraft name was chosen because the word "craft" is relevant to the genre, or if it was chosen in order to connect the project with Warcraft and Starcraft.
Your take on IP laws is completely backward... All IP -- trademark, patent, copyright, trade-secret -- is there for the benefit of the public, the consumers.
Clarify to me, if you don't mind, how any of those protections directly benefit the consumers. All other considerations aside, wouldn't it be "best" for consumers if all the software they wanted was free? All the music? If they could make a soft drink, label it "Coca-Cola", and resell it to people who think it's the well-known and well-reputed version? Suddenly, consumers would have a great deal more money, as they wouldn't have to spend it on DVDs; they'd just (legally) download all the movies they wanted to see for only the price of bandwidth.
You are correct that IP protections are there to benefit the public, but not for the decidedly one-sided "consumers" alone. Blizzard can afford to make and sell software for a living because it's illegal for people to take their software and redistribute it for free. If they didn't have that guarantee, they would not exist; the people who came up with the creative and innovative designs and behaviors in Star/Warcraft would not have been able to financially support the representation of those ideas. We would all have been worse off for that loss. Consumers benefit, not because they are granted free reign over the intellectual creations of others, but because others are able to create and share those ideas in the first place.
It's no-one's fault but Blizzard's that they used a common word [*craft] to describe their product.
Is your implication that the name "FreeCraft" was chosen on its own merits, simply because "Craft" seems relevant to the game's genre? That's incredibly naive. At the time FreeCraft was created, I would bet there was not a single person familiar with the RTS genre that was not aware of Warcraft. I cannot imagine that the project was named such for any other reason than to indicate the similarity between it and Blizzard's products, especially since it has been also designed as a way to interoperate with Warcraft tilesets (but not those of any other company's games, AFAIK). And you cannot claim that the fact that "craft" is a common word applies. Is Pizza Hut's trademark void as well? Both of those are common words. What about the National Broadcasting Corporation? General Electric [does it get more general than that]? All of those examples use common words relevant to their industry. It doesn't mean their trademark is invalid.
Actually, trademark laws are there for Blizzard, not the consumers. They're there so that innovative companies can safely invest money in marketing their name without a competitor mooching off it. Consumers indirectly benefit, because we're not led to use cheap knock-offs without clear knowledge.
FreeCraft uses Blizzard's naming heuristic for a product that directly competes with (and in this case, imitates) Blizzard's similarly named product. It's a means for FreeCraft to be easily remembered as the name of an open source RTS game, since it fits with the well-established naming convention of the leading proprietary games.
So explain to me how you can justify Blizzard's marketing dollars being used to increase recognition of a product that will likely hurt Blizzard's sales.
Well, the explanation for the GC having more sales of cross-platform games than the PS2 might be related to the plethora of single-platform games on the latter. If you're a PS2 owner, you spend presumably the same amount of money on a much wider selection of games. As a result, each individual game has diminished sales.
Besides the games distributed by Nintendo, and a few other titles (Monkey Ball), most GC games are cross-platform (AFAIK).
Importantly, one of the two other standards was for decreasing conflicts between WLAN and WPAN devices operating on the same part of the spectrum (802.11(b|g), 802.15.3, and Bluetooth, for example). Hopefully some vendors will include the collaborative mechanisms (where the interfering devices work together to minimize the problem), so the issue of legacy 802.11b signals won't be such a big deal.
When the RIAA searches the Internet to find infringing recordings that are being distributed, it is looking in exactly the same types of places that anybody else on the Internet may go.
We are not accessing anybody's "property," and we are certainly not violating anybody's personal rights. We are doing exactly the same thing that every other infringer is doing.
Heh. Not accessing others' property and not violating anybody's personal rights... is exactly what every other infringer is doing. Can I take that as the go-ahead that "infringers" aren't doing anything wrong?
In the context of his point, he's essentially saying that the RIAA is justified in doing whatever they want, even if it's illegal, because they're not doing it for an evil purpose. So if I lost a watch, I'd be justified in looking in your house for it without your permission. Hell, that's not even right. I'd be justified in looking to see if you had the same watch as me.
The DMCA Anti-Circumvention provision is not intended to stifle technological innovation. Indeed, it is intended to spur it on by creating and protecting business markets for new technologies.
Many new technology companies are focused on developing technologies to protect content, whether that be music or genetic code, and those companies will not be able to sustain their businesses if they cannot protect their products. In the absence of a business market, technological innovation will be limited because only the government and non-profits will ever be able to support it.
Can someone explain to me what Oppenheim is saying here? Many new companies are making anti-copying technology, but they can't exist if they can't protect their protection technology? And if those companies go under, then there will be no business market? Wha?
At least I understand the last sentence. If there's no business market, only government and non-profits will be able to innovate in technology because those will be the only things left, dummy! I mean, who else is innovating now, besides business, government, and non-profit interests?
Am I missing something that makes these statements make sense? Like a lobotomy?
Does "Lenny G. Arbage" seem like a fake name to anyone else? Lenny Garbage? I mean, it's possible that it's real, but considering that no one else with a question gave their middle initial, it seems suspect to me. I think we have an Anonymous Coward (I mean, besides the one who was actually anonymous).
My undergrad java language class used Robocode as one of our projects. It was pretty effective at getting people to become familiar with some of the nuances of the language, but mostly I think it was meant to be something interesting to break up our other, harder, projects.
We held a six-round tourney to determine whose robot was the most effective. I won, even though my robot wasn't the last one alive in any but the first round (you get points for good bullet accuracy). </bragging>
My prize was a huge bag of bite-size 3-musketeers. You'd think that anyone who had the time to slave over a robot program enough for it to win that tournament should have been discouraged from sitting on their butt eating candy... but oh well. Hey, candy!
apple is looking for a coder for the iTunes Music store for windows, Justin Frankel would be perfect
It seems likely that work he would do for Apple iTunes would be prohibited by a non-compete agreement. But maybe he was able to avoid that pitfall as part of the Nullsoft buyout. I hope he'll continue to be able to do media stuff too; he's so good at it.
If I design/create something, why should there be a time limit on it? It's 100% mine...
Yes, it should be yours forever... if you created the work in a vacuum. But your claim is faulty at the idea that the work is 100% yours. You create works based on your experiences and your ideas, which were contributed by the rest of the world. From The Cat in the Hat to the Washington Post to The Matrix to the inane drivel most DJs blather these days, your mind is heavily shaped by others' ideas. Hence, others should be able to benefit from your ideas.
The copyright protection is there so that you can benefit from your own personal spin on things, your level of creativity in your works. But you did not create the work out of thin air.
That, in addition to the fact that civilization is based on cooperation to the benefit of the public good. Sure, you would individually profit more if you held on to your ideas forever, but that theory falls apart if everybody does so. So, society dictates that all members must (eventually) sacrifice what is arguably their right, so that we can all benefit.
Proof can be some pretty arbitrary stuff. The old adage about "lies, damn lies, and statistics" rings true despite the fact that we use statistics as a form of evidence every day. On the other hand, the people who make extraordinary claims are the ones who get the publicity, the grant money, etc... if they can "prove" their claims.
So, if it's equally easy (in terms of evidence) to make an ordinary claim as an extraordinary one, as you say, then people will make the extraordinary claims more often (regardless of their truthfulness).
Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence in order to discourage people from fudging the data just so that they can make the extraordinary claim and be believed.
It's not ethically dishonest, it's ethically neutral. The goal of the security industry should be primarily to increase the functionality of available security applications, and secondarily to generate profit for themselves. In our society, these two priorities may get switched up, but both of them say that if a person convicted of a computer crime is the most qualified to achieve those goals, then he or she should be the one hired. Our society already "solves" the problem of punishing the person for their crime... the business community should not treat punishment as their responsibility in their hiring practices.
If you were silly enough to go to college and get legal work experience, congratulations! You didn't have to go to prison. You don't have the stigma of having broken the law upon you for the rest of your life. You may well get hired for a computer security position over an ex-convict of greater qualifications, simply because you are assumed to be trustworthy. But if someone else is so far above you in qualification as to negate the risks of hiring an ex-criminal, don't expect a handout. They paid their dues, as determined by our society. They don't owe you their job, too.
It could have easily been protected by.htaccess or whatever. So, they have no case.
A store can easily be protected by purchasing video cameras. That doesn't make it legal to burglarize a store that just uses lock-and-key.
Just because their attempt at security left a lot to be desired doesn't mean they have no case. Any website could "easily" be protected by some level of security, but having a lesser level of security doesn't absolve attackers.
Note that I am not arguing that Intentia has any legal ground. I'm just noting that your argument has nothing to do with the true legality of Reuters' actions.
Slashdot Mirror
2 + 2 = Forget the tired old rehashed storylines that Disney uses, Dreamworks! Make your own movies, we like them... really!
What about OpenOffice, you insensitive clod?! :)
In another five years, especially without a large number of people using Free operating systems (read: without all the Linux users), hardware developers might have irrevocably moved towards closed hardware with nothing but Windows compatibility. Being "back to where we are now" would do us no good, because everybody else would have moved on.
I'm more concerned with the small inventors written off because they didn't want to pour $X into DC&H [Dewey, Cheatham, and Howe].
"The U.S. Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) strongly recommend that all prospective applicants retain the services of a registered patent attorney or patent agent to prepare and prosecute their applications." - US PTO FAQ
I understand your point about the combination of words being the key factor, not the individual words. But there is validity in the idea that similarities to the trademarked expression are still infringing.
The law does not always agree with me. The Victor's Secret/Victoria's Secret case seems relevant. However, the deciding factor in that case was that there was no damage to the "famous" trademark. I think that the existence of FreeCraft, on the other hand, does damage the famous trademark. First, because it could decrease sales of War/Starcraft. Second, because if anyone believes that Freecraft is affiliated with War/Starcraft (which I believe to be possible, though you may disagree), then the perceived quality of the series as a whole could be diminished.
The Freecraft people should be allowed to continue their project; I don't believe that Blizzard has a right to prevent competition within the genre, and precedent has established that directly copying game interfaces is not a violation of IP rights. But the usage of the *craft pattern, for the purpose of identification with Blizzard's products, in a software project that is in direct competition to those products, is wrong.
And please, if you respond to this, tell me whether you actually think the FreeCraft name was chosen because the word "craft" is relevant to the genre, or if it was chosen in order to connect the project with Warcraft and Starcraft.
Clarify to me, if you don't mind, how any of those protections directly benefit the consumers. All other considerations aside, wouldn't it be "best" for consumers if all the software they wanted was free? All the music? If they could make a soft drink, label it "Coca-Cola", and resell it to people who think it's the well-known and well-reputed version? Suddenly, consumers would have a great deal more money, as they wouldn't have to spend it on DVDs; they'd just (legally) download all the movies they wanted to see for only the price of bandwidth.
You are correct that IP protections are there to benefit the public, but not for the decidedly one-sided "consumers" alone. Blizzard can afford to make and sell software for a living because it's illegal for people to take their software and redistribute it for free. If they didn't have that guarantee, they would not exist; the people who came up with the creative and innovative designs and behaviors in Star/Warcraft would not have been able to financially support the representation of those ideas. We would all have been worse off for that loss. Consumers benefit, not because they are granted free reign over the intellectual creations of others, but because others are able to create and share those ideas in the first place.
Is your implication that the name "FreeCraft" was chosen on its own merits, simply because "Craft" seems relevant to the game's genre? That's incredibly naive. At the time FreeCraft was created, I would bet there was not a single person familiar with the RTS genre that was not aware of Warcraft. I cannot imagine that the project was named such for any other reason than to indicate the similarity between it and Blizzard's products, especially since it has been also designed as a way to interoperate with Warcraft tilesets (but not those of any other company's games, AFAIK). And you cannot claim that the fact that "craft" is a common word applies. Is Pizza Hut's trademark void as well? Both of those are common words. What about the National Broadcasting Corporation? General Electric [does it get more general than that]? All of those examples use common words relevant to their industry. It doesn't mean their trademark is invalid.
FreeCraft uses Blizzard's naming heuristic for a product that directly competes with (and in this case, imitates) Blizzard's similarly named product. It's a means for FreeCraft to be easily remembered as the name of an open source RTS game, since it fits with the well-established naming convention of the leading proprietary games.
So explain to me how you can justify Blizzard's marketing dollars being used to increase recognition of a product that will likely hurt Blizzard's sales.
Besides the games distributed by Nintendo, and a few other titles (Monkey Ball), most GC games are cross-platform (AFAIK).
Yay for reference recognition. I wish I could claim that line as my own.
Yikes. I'd better stop reading this discussion; That was ten percent less than a lethal dose of acronyms.
More information here:l
http://grouper.ieee.org/groups/802/15/pub/TG2.htm
He said "feel free", not "feel able".
Heh. Not accessing others' property and not violating anybody's personal rights... is exactly what every other infringer is doing. Can I take that as the go-ahead that "infringers" aren't doing anything wrong?
In the context of his point, he's essentially saying that the RIAA is justified in doing whatever they want, even if it's illegal, because they're not doing it for an evil purpose. So if I lost a watch, I'd be justified in looking in your house for it without your permission. Hell, that's not even right. I'd be justified in looking to see if you had the same watch as me.
Can someone explain to me what Oppenheim is saying here? Many new companies are making anti-copying technology, but they can't exist if they can't protect their protection technology? And if those companies go under, then there will be no business market? Wha?
At least I understand the last sentence. If there's no business market, only government and non-profits will be able to innovate in technology because those will be the only things left, dummy! I mean, who else is innovating now, besides business, government, and non-profit interests?
Am I missing something that makes these statements make sense? Like a lobotomy?
Does "Lenny G. Arbage" seem like a fake name to anyone else? Lenny Garbage? I mean, it's possible that it's real, but considering that no one else with a question gave their middle initial, it seems suspect to me. I think we have an Anonymous Coward (I mean, besides the one who was actually anonymous).
My undergrad java language class used Robocode as one of our projects. It was pretty effective at getting people to become familiar with some of the nuances of the language, but mostly I think it was meant to be something interesting to break up our other, harder, projects.
We held a six-round tourney to determine whose robot was the most effective. I won, even though my robot wasn't the last one alive in any but the first round (you get points for good bullet accuracy).
</bragging>
My prize was a huge bag of bite-size 3-musketeers. You'd think that anyone who had the time to slave over a robot program enough for it to win that tournament should have been discouraged from sitting on their butt eating candy... but oh well. Hey, candy!
It seems likely that work he would do for Apple iTunes would be prohibited by a non-compete agreement. But maybe he was able to avoid that pitfall as part of the Nullsoft buyout. I hope he'll continue to be able to do media stuff too; he's so good at it.
Sucks for Princeton Review, Barrons, Kaplan...
Yes, it should be yours forever... if you created the work in a vacuum. But your claim is faulty at the idea that the work is 100% yours. You create works based on your experiences and your ideas, which were contributed by the rest of the world. From The Cat in the Hat to the Washington Post to The Matrix to the inane drivel most DJs blather these days, your mind is heavily shaped by others' ideas. Hence, others should be able to benefit from your ideas.
The copyright protection is there so that you can benefit from your own personal spin on things, your level of creativity in your works. But you did not create the work out of thin air.
That, in addition to the fact that civilization is based on cooperation to the benefit of the public good. Sure, you would individually profit more if you held on to your ideas forever, but that theory falls apart if everybody does so. So, society dictates that all members must (eventually) sacrifice what is arguably their right, so that we can all benefit.
So, if it's equally easy (in terms of evidence) to make an ordinary claim as an extraordinary one, as you say, then people will make the extraordinary claims more often (regardless of their truthfulness).
Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence in order to discourage people from fudging the data just so that they can make the extraordinary claim and be believed.
It's not ethically dishonest, it's ethically neutral. The goal of the security industry should be primarily to increase the functionality of available security applications, and secondarily to generate profit for themselves. In our society, these two priorities may get switched up, but both of them say that if a person convicted of a computer crime is the most qualified to achieve those goals, then he or she should be the one hired. Our society already "solves" the problem of punishing the person for their crime... the business community should not treat punishment as their responsibility in their hiring practices.
If you were silly enough to go to college and get legal work experience, congratulations! You didn't have to go to prison. You don't have the stigma of having broken the law upon you for the rest of your life. You may well get hired for a computer security position over an ex-convict of greater qualifications, simply because you are assumed to be trustworthy. But if someone else is so far above you in qualification as to negate the risks of hiring an ex-criminal, don't expect a handout. They paid their dues, as determined by our society. They don't owe you their job, too.
What rhymes with XDirectFB?
If we're going to mince words, I think it should be GNU/Copy Prevented.
(-1, cliche)
There are many things about space travel in its current form that would not be "real pleasant" to most earthgoers.
Don't want to be stuck on one of these things unless there's a functional waste disposal system, if you know what I mean.
It could have easily been protected by .htaccess or whatever. So, they have no case.
A store can easily be protected by purchasing video cameras. That doesn't make it legal to burglarize a store that just uses lock-and-key.
Just because their attempt at security left a lot to be desired doesn't mean they have no case. Any website could "easily" be protected by some level of security, but having a lesser level of security doesn't absolve attackers.
Note that I am not arguing that Intentia has any legal ground. I'm just noting that your argument has nothing to do with the true legality of Reuters' actions.