I'm a lot more familiar with copyright and patent law than trademark law, so I could be missing something, but AFAIK, unless WB is using the mark in commerce (and no, talking about something in a movie is not use in commerce), it's not dilution, and thus WB isn't in violation of trademark law. Assuming they don't have any contractual obligations to LV, I can't see how this is a problem.
But they expect insanely high quality, and they get it - genuine high-end stuff really is made with better, softer leather. It's hand-stitched. It's highly durable.
None of which is relevant in a prop, as you can't see "soft", "durable", or "hand-stitched" on the screen. I mean, as much as I'd love to see WB lose some sort of high-profile IP infringement case to make a mockery of them, this may be the dumbest possible example of IP infringement I can think of.
Heck, I'm not convinced it is actual infringement. At no point did WB claim that the product was an LV bag. A character in a fictional story made the claim. A character can also make the claim that the White House just blew up. Nobody is going to go running out of the theater to call a family member in D.C. to make sure he or she is okay. It's fiction. A character can claim that they have a LV freezer bag and it's still not likely to be a problem in a court of law.
The only thing dubious is that technically the use or continued possession of a known counterfeit might be a violation if the original design is protected by a patent and the knock-off violates it. Other than that, LV should have no case, and the judge should laugh them right out of the courtroom.
The best part was the comment by an AC that WB was warned before releasing the DVD and Blu-Ray. So apparently LV expects WB to go back and remake part of a movie that has already been shown in theaters to fix what amounts to a very minor technical error in the props department. Even though I would love to see WB lose an IP case, it shouldn't be this case. I hope WB spanks LV and gets a damage award of court costs and fines for frivolous litigation on top of the win.
More to the point, it would cost the public schools in the U.S. a lot less to hire writers directly to author the books and get rid of the middlemen. I'm actually surprised this hasn't happened already. Publishers truly provide almost no value in the area of educational publishing; there are only going to be a handful of books that meet the criteria for a particular grade level in a particular subject, so it's not like they have to provide a significant advertising budget, nor do they need to get reviews, list the title through Ingram, convince wholesalers and retailers to carry the title, etc.
It's a captive market with a captive set of authors, and no real need for pre-printing truckloads of books before taking orders. In short, they don't add value, but do add overhead. The availability of digital distribution just adds further reason to cut out the middlemen; it made sense long ago.
Agreed. Besides, most libraries I know replace books when they are worn out, and not before. A paperback best-selling fiction book might only go for a few years because it is being checked out frequently and isn't well-made to begin with. A typical hardcover book in a smaller university library is still on the shelves thirty years later, with the original binding, after a hundred or more checkouts. A two year or twenty-odd checkout limit seems somewhat absurd to me. That's at least an order of magnitude too low.
I am not aware of any legitimate publishers that "take full copyright control of the work from the author". Non-on-demand paper book publishers license a work from the author exclusively within a particular market for a particular period of time in exchange for paying the up-front costs of printing a run of books. Legitimate eBook publishers do not do this because they don't have that cost, and they usually pass the other costs on to the author directly.
The only authors who give up copyright on their works are those who ghost write books for other people, or those who write books published as works of corporate authorship (e.g. the folks who write the books on developer.apple.com) without author credits. Oh, and news writers.
I think you vastly misunderstand capitalism. Capitalism has never meant copying someone else's work precisely and passing it off as your own. Sure, there have always been a small number of unscrupulous artisans who did this, but the vast majority of artisans have always chosen to differentiate their products in some way. This is true without regard to intellectual property issues.
The reason for this is straightforward. If you are making an exact copy of something, it is a race to the bottom because the only thing left to compete over is price. If you try to make the product better in some way, then you can compete over features, over design, or even over something as minor as branding (the artist's name recognition, for example).
For the most part, in regular capitalism, you aren't going to buy an identical product from somebody else. Even though there are few patents involved, a Benge trumpet plays somewhat differently than a Bach, which plays radically differently than a Conn. Yet they're all trumpets, and they could easily have made perfect copies of each others' instruments had they decided to do so. Instead, each manufacturer offers a similar product with different features, behavior, and so on.
It's the same way in works of authorship. The only people who try to pass other people's designs off as their own are people who lack the creativity to do something new, and supporting such leaches is not a particularly useful thing for an economic system to do. It's irrelevant whether you can buy a Harry Potter book from someone else. The only interesting question is whether there are other books on the market about teenage wizards. The Harry Potter series competes on quality against those other books.
Given that with e-books, hard production costs (printing, binding, warehousing and distribution) are nearly non-existent, the inescapable conclusion we must reach is that most publishers are just plain fucking greedy.
Not at all. You're making several mistakes in that assessment:
You are assuming that the publishers are not also selling physical books. You have to assume that every purchase of an eBook is effectively taking away a sale of a physical book. Because eBook sales cannibalize print sales, the initial setup costs for printing take a bigger and bigger cut of publisher profits. This must be accounted for somehow, and the easiest way to do so is to take a chunk of the eBook sales to make up for it. The only alternative is to raise the cost of physical books, but that would tend to lead to a death spiral.
The manufacturing costs may be smaller, but your production costs (in publishing, "production" refers to everything that happens before a document goes to press) increase to eat some of those savings. It takes a fair amount of effort to format a book for printing. If you're trying to format a book as an eBook, you get to do it several times. If you're good, you can probably get it down to three—an EPUB version for iPad and all the Adobe Digital Editions readers, a Kindle version, and a PDF version. If you're not so good, you'll end up with the Nook EPUB, the iOS EPUB, the old-style Kindle MOBI, the new-style KF8, and the PDF. So your production costs go way up. The effect this has on the total cost of book publishing depends largely on how many copies that cost is divided across.
You're assuming comparable levels of sales per title. With the decreased up-front cost, the barrier to entry is much lower. This means that there will inevitably be more books on the market. Thus, each book makes less money. As a publisher, there are two ways to charge for services: charge it all up front or charge less up front and take a cut of each copy. The fewer copies, the more the publisher must take per unit. Therefore, unless the publisher charges you 10-15 grand for editing, cover design, book block design, etc., you would expect their per-unit fee to be higher for eBooks than printed books, not lower, because they cannot expect to make up the difference in volume.
For people who are sufficiently technically inclined, you can do all the work yourself and avoid much of this, but remember that those extra dollars you earn by formatting the eBook yourself were the direct result of work you put in.
The first one is somewhat overpriced. They just do the book layout work for you and then send it to LS for publication, but they charge you several times as much per copy for the printed books. Amazon's CreateSpace is usually a much better deal.
The second one expects you to deliver PDF content ready for press. Folks with a strong technical background and a few thousand dollars in software can pull that off. Most writers can't.
Its less of an issue with ebooks since fewer resources are needed...
Actually, I would argue that to do it right, more resources are needed. You have fewer physical resources like paper, and the cost of fixing mistakes is lower, so in the absence of other factors, the quality will tend to decline just as it has with digital downloads in the software world—publishers know that they can just release a bug fix later, and so they do. This means that publishers won't spend the resources to do it right.
The only way for authors who care about quality to combat this is to hire editors or spend their own time doing the editing themselves. This means that instead of a small pool of resources at the publisher, there are now hundreds of pools of resources required to do the same work that would previously have been done by the publisher.
This problem is compounded on every other front—cover design, book design, and so on. Worse, because the perceived cost of entry is so much lower, you end up with a lot more authors producing content. They all use templates, so their books all look the same. To differentiate yourself from the pack, you have to do more work. And again, you don't have a publisher providing a shared pool of resources, so you have to pay the much higher costs of hiring independent contractors to do the work (who charge more than salaried employees because their pay depends on whether they have work to do).
Thus, eBook publishing tends to require much greater resources than traditional publishing—so much so that hundreds of unscrupulous businesses have sprung up to take advantage of authors by providing these services at extortionate rates. The only real way to fix this is for somebody like Amazon or Barnes & Noble to create a legitimate author services division, at which point, you're basically back to the traditional publishing model, only in a more a la carte fashion.
They did. You just didn't notice. There were massive tech sector layoffs in about 2000-2003. The Silicon Valley didn't take as much of a hit in 2009 because it had already taken most of the hit up front in the dot-com crash.
Also, the notion that Silicon Valley housing prices are immune to the bust is a ridiculous myth. Maybe a few neighborhoods haven't taken a hit, but home sales and home prices in Sunnyvale have dropped significantly, as have prices in Santa Cruz, Los Gatos, and everywhere else I've actually looked. And they're still falling, last I checked.
Most of that had to be deliberate. I think that every single homophone in that entire last sentence was wrong. The "has" was an amusing typo. The "edit" versus "editing" thing was actually not wrong, though it was awkward. Reread it as "electing... or editing" instead.
I've hosted five commercial sites there for my customers over the past three years with zero problems.
Then you got really, really lucky. About two years ago, I tried hosting a site at GoDaddy. Among other things:
They had a wall-clock time limit per process that was so low (30 seconds) that I was having to try two or three times apiece to upload single files of five or six megs to the site for hosting because SCP kept dropping the connections. Yeah, time limits on commands running over SSH. Seriously.
This also meant that their servers often failed to serve those files back.
They had a maximum number of connections per IP per minute, which meant that my SCP upload script had to alternate between a pool of IP numbers just to get content uploaded to my site. I had barely finished the upload before I determined that performance was so poor that they were history. It took several days to upload the content.
Their servers were overloaded and regularly stalled for as much as a half minute at a time before they served the first byte of data on an HTTP request.
Their customer service reps refused to even take a look at what was going on on the server at the time, even though my server monitoring scripts provided them with detailed, atomic-clock-accurate time stamps of the periods of time when the server was malfunctioning.
They also refused to move me to a different shared server even though I was serving purely static content. Thus, as long as I stayed with GoDaddy, my trivial requests were going to be forever blocked behind phpBB search requests and requests going to badly misconfigured WordPress instances. Uh... no.
My attempt to buy an SSL cert from them was thwarted when they sold me a cert and then refused to actually fulfill it. Apparently, they no longer sold certificates for that length of time, but they hadn't updated their website to remove them.
I ran, not walked, over to DreamHost, and couldn't be happier. Their servers are always fast and always responsive—much, much faster than what I was getting from GoDaddy, and without any of the ridiculous 30 second process limits or SSH connections-per-minute limits that made me feel like I was dealing with a bunch of bozos who had never configured a server before. In short, it "just works", which is basically my sole criterion for choosing an ISP, so long as the cost isn't exorbitant.
Or the U.S. could just let them spend the money and take all the risks in terms of designing and testing the new reactors, then steal the designs and build the reactors themselves, forcing the Chinese firms to eat the R&D costs....
Wait, something about this sounds familiar. I sense a pot and a kettle are involved.
Not as versatile as a hammer, but when you're starving in a northern winter and the only thing to eat is that jackrabbit, guns can feed just as well as a spoon. Just saying.
Yes, but that's also potentially a case of premature optimization. What if the user jumps directly from page 1 to page 50? Now your device has just wasted power processing page 2 and page 3 while it could have been sitting in a completely idle state.
Don't get me wrong—I'm not saying it's always wrong to do what you're suggesting, but it's just like read-ahead in hard drives and other similar problems in that it helps to have a pretty good sense of what the user is likely to do next; if you don't have a pretty good sense of what the user is about to do, your optimization is probably making power consumption worse, not better, on the average. And, as always, the hardest thing that you can do in computer science is predict the future.
If it isn't going near 100% for a significant percentage of that time, the CPU should have been scaled back to a lower clock speed and, likely, a lower core voltage, so I would argue that not only is it likely, it should be nearly guaranteed. Am I missing something?
Yes, I know there are sometimes performance reasons to leave the CPU going at a higher speed for short periods of time just in case it is needed for something else high-power shortly thereafter, which makes the relationship between clock speed and battery life somewhat muddy. That said, the assumption that bumping up the maximum clock speed so that you can scale back to a slower clock speed and a lower voltage sooner will reduce power seems like a pretty good first approximation, assuming that running at a faster speed doesn't require increasing the core voltage above what would have been required at the slower maximum clock speed, and assuming that you don't introduce instability in the process.
Yes, but this research can only have military applications. That or defensive applications against a military. There's just no valid reason to create a stronger virus other than to kill a metric f**kton of people. We already have a pretty good idea what makes viruses mutate and spread more quickly, what makes viruses more or less deadly, etc.; there are plenty of examples in the wild to choose from. There's simply no non-military justification for combining those qualities of a virus into a single virus, period.
The right way to experiment, if you aren't sure about whether some particular sequence of genes increases or decreases pathogenicity or virulence, is to try to weaken a virus, not strengthen it. What they did is the biological equivalent of someone creating a doomsday weapon that could blot out the sun just to see if they can make it work. It is reckless and irresponsible; there are very good reasons to suppress such research, and few, if any, reasons to support it.
As Jurassic Park put it, "...your scientists were so preoccupied with whether or not they could, they didn't stop to think if they should."
The problem is that any solution to such a problem invariably results in an arms race between the people designing the security system and the people trying to fool it. That means that everyone who buys into any biometrics-based security system is going to have to keep buying into it over and over and over in order to stay ahead of the spoofers. Worse, every single user is going to have to keep upgrading his or her biometric profile every time the company upgrades their hardware.
Even in the short term, that's expensive. As a long-term solution, using voice recognition (or any biometric system) for real security is utterly untenable and always will be. If you want a great demonstration of what will happen, just take a look at how long each generation of captcha system has lasted before somebody came up with an algorithm that could defeat it. Or take a look at how long each iOS version has lasted before a new jailbreak came out. Now imagine the same basic set of problems, only with multi-billion-dollar stakes instead of just a few assholes spamming bulletin boards or running pirated iPhone games.
Slashdot Mirror
I'm a lot more familiar with copyright and patent law than trademark law, so I could be missing something, but AFAIK, unless WB is using the mark in commerce (and no, talking about something in a movie is not use in commerce), it's not dilution, and thus WB isn't in violation of trademark law. Assuming they don't have any contractual obligations to LV, I can't see how this is a problem.
None of which is relevant in a prop, as you can't see "soft", "durable", or "hand-stitched" on the screen. I mean, as much as I'd love to see WB lose some sort of high-profile IP infringement case to make a mockery of them, this may be the dumbest possible example of IP infringement I can think of.
Heck, I'm not convinced it is actual infringement. At no point did WB claim that the product was an LV bag. A character in a fictional story made the claim. A character can also make the claim that the White House just blew up. Nobody is going to go running out of the theater to call a family member in D.C. to make sure he or she is okay. It's fiction. A character can claim that they have a LV freezer bag and it's still not likely to be a problem in a court of law.
The only thing dubious is that technically the use or continued possession of a known counterfeit might be a violation if the original design is protected by a patent and the knock-off violates it. Other than that, LV should have no case, and the judge should laugh them right out of the courtroom.
The best part was the comment by an AC that WB was warned before releasing the DVD and Blu-Ray. So apparently LV expects WB to go back and remake part of a movie that has already been shown in theaters to fix what amounts to a very minor technical error in the props department. Even though I would love to see WB lose an IP case, it shouldn't be this case. I hope WB spanks LV and gets a damage award of court costs and fines for frivolous litigation on top of the win.
A movie is not an advertisement. Well, good movies are not advertisements....
More to the point, it would cost the public schools in the U.S. a lot less to hire writers directly to author the books and get rid of the middlemen. I'm actually surprised this hasn't happened already. Publishers truly provide almost no value in the area of educational publishing; there are only going to be a handful of books that meet the criteria for a particular grade level in a particular subject, so it's not like they have to provide a significant advertising budget, nor do they need to get reviews, list the title through Ingram, convince wholesalers and retailers to carry the title, etc.
It's a captive market with a captive set of authors, and no real need for pre-printing truckloads of books before taking orders. In short, they don't add value, but do add overhead. The availability of digital distribution just adds further reason to cut out the middlemen; it made sense long ago.
Agreed. Besides, most libraries I know replace books when they are worn out, and not before. A paperback best-selling fiction book might only go for a few years because it is being checked out frequently and isn't well-made to begin with. A typical hardcover book in a smaller university library is still on the shelves thirty years later, with the original binding, after a hundred or more checkouts. A two year or twenty-odd checkout limit seems somewhat absurd to me. That's at least an order of magnitude too low.
I am not aware of any legitimate publishers that "take full copyright control of the work from the author". Non-on-demand paper book publishers license a work from the author exclusively within a particular market for a particular period of time in exchange for paying the up-front costs of printing a run of books. Legitimate eBook publishers do not do this because they don't have that cost, and they usually pass the other costs on to the author directly.
The only authors who give up copyright on their works are those who ghost write books for other people, or those who write books published as works of corporate authorship (e.g. the folks who write the books on developer.apple.com) without author credits. Oh, and news writers.
I think you vastly misunderstand capitalism. Capitalism has never meant copying someone else's work precisely and passing it off as your own. Sure, there have always been a small number of unscrupulous artisans who did this, but the vast majority of artisans have always chosen to differentiate their products in some way. This is true without regard to intellectual property issues.
The reason for this is straightforward. If you are making an exact copy of something, it is a race to the bottom because the only thing left to compete over is price. If you try to make the product better in some way, then you can compete over features, over design, or even over something as minor as branding (the artist's name recognition, for example).
For the most part, in regular capitalism, you aren't going to buy an identical product from somebody else. Even though there are few patents involved, a Benge trumpet plays somewhat differently than a Bach, which plays radically differently than a Conn. Yet they're all trumpets, and they could easily have made perfect copies of each others' instruments had they decided to do so. Instead, each manufacturer offers a similar product with different features, behavior, and so on.
It's the same way in works of authorship. The only people who try to pass other people's designs off as their own are people who lack the creativity to do something new, and supporting such leaches is not a particularly useful thing for an economic system to do. It's irrelevant whether you can buy a Harry Potter book from someone else. The only interesting question is whether there are other books on the market about teenage wizards. The Harry Potter series competes on quality against those other books.
Not at all. You're making several mistakes in that assessment:
For people who are sufficiently technically inclined, you can do all the work yourself and avoid much of this, but remember that those extra dollars you earn by formatting the eBook yourself were the direct result of work you put in.
The first one is somewhat overpriced. They just do the book layout work for you and then send it to LS for publication, but they charge you several times as much per copy for the printed books. Amazon's CreateSpace is usually a much better deal.
The second one expects you to deliver PDF content ready for press. Folks with a strong technical background and a few thousand dollars in software can pull that off. Most writers can't.
Same thing we do now—make them CEOs.
Actually, I would argue that to do it right, more resources are needed. You have fewer physical resources like paper, and the cost of fixing mistakes is lower, so in the absence of other factors, the quality will tend to decline just as it has with digital downloads in the software world—publishers know that they can just release a bug fix later, and so they do. This means that publishers won't spend the resources to do it right.
The only way for authors who care about quality to combat this is to hire editors or spend their own time doing the editing themselves. This means that instead of a small pool of resources at the publisher, there are now hundreds of pools of resources required to do the same work that would previously have been done by the publisher.
This problem is compounded on every other front—cover design, book design, and so on. Worse, because the perceived cost of entry is so much lower, you end up with a lot more authors producing content. They all use templates, so their books all look the same. To differentiate yourself from the pack, you have to do more work. And again, you don't have a publisher providing a shared pool of resources, so you have to pay the much higher costs of hiring independent contractors to do the work (who charge more than salaried employees because their pay depends on whether they have work to do).
Thus, eBook publishing tends to require much greater resources than traditional publishing—so much so that hundreds of unscrupulous businesses have sprung up to take advantage of authors by providing these services at extortionate rates. The only real way to fix this is for somebody like Amazon or Barnes & Noble to create a legitimate author services division, at which point, you're basically back to the traditional publishing model, only in a more a la carte fashion.
Sorry, but speaker cables are almost never shielded. The capacitance of a shielded cable degrades the signal unacceptably over long cable runs.
Besides, the drone has to be able to reach escape velocity so that it can monitor the whalers on the moon. No missile can possibly catch that....
They did. You just didn't notice. There were massive tech sector layoffs in about 2000-2003. The Silicon Valley didn't take as much of a hit in 2009 because it had already taken most of the hit up front in the dot-com crash.
Also, the notion that Silicon Valley housing prices are immune to the bust is a ridiculous myth. Maybe a few neighborhoods haven't taken a hit, but home sales and home prices in Sunnyvale have dropped significantly, as have prices in Santa Cruz, Los Gatos, and everywhere else I've actually looked. And they're still falling, last I checked.
Most of that had to be deliberate. I think that every single homophone in that entire last sentence was wrong. The "has" was an amusing typo. The "edit" versus "editing" thing was actually not wrong, though it was awkward. Reread it as "electing... or editing" instead.
Then you got really, really lucky. About two years ago, I tried hosting a site at GoDaddy. Among other things:
I ran, not walked, over to DreamHost, and couldn't be happier. Their servers are always fast and always responsive—much, much faster than what I was getting from GoDaddy, and without any of the ridiculous 30 second process limits or SSH connections-per-minute limits that made me feel like I was dealing with a bunch of bozos who had never configured a server before. In short, it "just works", which is basically my sole criterion for choosing an ISP, so long as the cost isn't exorbitant.
Or the U.S. could just let them spend the money and take all the risks in terms of designing and testing the new reactors, then steal the designs and build the reactors themselves, forcing the Chinese firms to eat the R&D costs....
Wait, something about this sounds familiar. I sense a pot and a kettle are involved.
They would sing a whaling tune, but it was taken down due to copyright infringement claims.
Not as versatile as a hammer, but when you're starving in a northern winter and the only thing to eat is that jackrabbit, guns can feed just as well as a spoon. Just saying.
To use the famous example:
It's Christmas morning. Let's eat, Grandma.
It's Christmas morning. Let's eat Grandma.
Yes, but that's also potentially a case of premature optimization. What if the user jumps directly from page 1 to page 50? Now your device has just wasted power processing page 2 and page 3 while it could have been sitting in a completely idle state.
Don't get me wrong—I'm not saying it's always wrong to do what you're suggesting, but it's just like read-ahead in hard drives and other similar problems in that it helps to have a pretty good sense of what the user is likely to do next; if you don't have a pretty good sense of what the user is about to do, your optimization is probably making power consumption worse, not better, on the average. And, as always, the hardest thing that you can do in computer science is predict the future.
If it isn't going near 100% for a significant percentage of that time, the CPU should have been scaled back to a lower clock speed and, likely, a lower core voltage, so I would argue that not only is it likely, it should be nearly guaranteed. Am I missing something?
Yes, I know there are sometimes performance reasons to leave the CPU going at a higher speed for short periods of time just in case it is needed for something else high-power shortly thereafter, which makes the relationship between clock speed and battery life somewhat muddy. That said, the assumption that bumping up the maximum clock speed so that you can scale back to a slower clock speed and a lower voltage sooner will reduce power seems like a pretty good first approximation, assuming that running at a faster speed doesn't require increasing the core voltage above what would have been required at the slower maximum clock speed, and assuming that you don't introduce instability in the process.
Yes, but this research can only have military applications. That or defensive applications against a military. There's just no valid reason to create a stronger virus other than to kill a metric f**kton of people. We already have a pretty good idea what makes viruses mutate and spread more quickly, what makes viruses more or less deadly, etc.; there are plenty of examples in the wild to choose from. There's simply no non-military justification for combining those qualities of a virus into a single virus, period.
The right way to experiment, if you aren't sure about whether some particular sequence of genes increases or decreases pathogenicity or virulence, is to try to weaken a virus, not strengthen it. What they did is the biological equivalent of someone creating a doomsday weapon that could blot out the sun just to see if they can make it work. It is reckless and irresponsible; there are very good reasons to suppress such research, and few, if any, reasons to support it.
As Jurassic Park put it, "...your scientists were so preoccupied with whether or not they could, they didn't stop to think if they should."
As a matter of fact, there is one. It's called Flu-V, and was apparently developed using the same methodology used to create the AIDS vaccine.
The problem is that any solution to such a problem invariably results in an arms race between the people designing the security system and the people trying to fool it. That means that everyone who buys into any biometrics-based security system is going to have to keep buying into it over and over and over in order to stay ahead of the spoofers. Worse, every single user is going to have to keep upgrading his or her biometric profile every time the company upgrades their hardware.
Even in the short term, that's expensive. As a long-term solution, using voice recognition (or any biometric system) for real security is utterly untenable and always will be. If you want a great demonstration of what will happen, just take a look at how long each generation of captcha system has lasted before somebody came up with an algorithm that could defeat it. Or take a look at how long each iOS version has lasted before a new jailbreak came out. Now imagine the same basic set of problems, only with multi-billion-dollar stakes instead of just a few assholes spamming bulletin boards or running pirated iPhone games.