Better yet, how about something truly useful... like growing a new fovea in people with age-related macular degeneration? Slough off the old fovea and grow a new one, then surgically remove the old tissue.
As an author, let me just say there should be a penalty -- a significant penalty -- for the wanton disregard for copyrights and intellectual property rights.
Agreed, but I don't agree that this is anywhere near reasonable. Realistically speaking, unless nobody else was seeding the same content, this person probably seeded only about ten or twenty copies each of 30 songs. The fact that they, in turn, made copies for other people is immaterial. One person cannot reasonably be held liable for the actions of another.
The retail cost of these songs, then, was likely about $300-600, but the effective value for legal purposes is a third of that ($100-200) because we're talking about revenue for the record companies, and that's what they would get after you subtract out the distributor and retailer overhead. The right fine for a first offense is probably the cost of the goods plus a $500 fine (paid to the government, NOT the record companies) and six months probation. Even the initially proposed settlement amount was absurdly more than is reasonable.
So in your fantasy world, someone who shoplifts a point-and-shoot digital camera should face a multi-million-dollar fine. That's more than a significant penalty. That's downright criminal.
I'm going to have to go with terraforming. I don't think it's hundreds of years away at all. All you have to do to terraform Mars is add a huge amount of heat. The rest almost takes care of itself---seeding it with plants is fairly trivial, and maybe we could even be selective about which insects we allow (e.g. no fleas, mosquitoes, ticks, or other blood-sucking critters).
That might even be a good way to get rid of all of our planet's nuclear weapons---nuke Mars. Perhaps we should hug the Martians with nuclear arms, or at least hug the northern and southern ice caps with them....
Show me a registrar where you have to type it in more than once. After the first page, you're just reading the name, not typing it again.
Besides, people who made mistakes the first time will likely not notice those mistakes on a reread, either. This is particularly true for people who are dyslexic.
Just require them to extend the domain by one year in order to change the domain to a different name after the first 72 hours. It solves the tasting abuse problem equally well, but does so without causing an equally obnoxious "I'm throwing money away for something that should be an automated process and thus should cost nothing" problem.
That may or may not qualify as mutual consideration. Merely buying the ticket grants you access to the event. There is no additional consideration beyond what the purchase of a ticket to an event would ordinarily give someone, and as such one could reasonably claim that they are merely living up to their obligations by allowing the person to attend, which would mean that this does not count as consideration for contract purposes. Such an argument has been used to win many shrink wrap license cases over the years, and that's effectively what we're talking about here---a shrink wrap license for an event ticket. Don't get me wrong---the courts have ruled both way son these. My point is that the validity of the contract itself is not guaranteed by any stretch, which could make discussion of individual terms moot.
In either case, it certainly isn't additional consideration for the copyright transfer that may or may not occur at any indefinite point up until the copyright expires, and isn't sufficient consideration to potentially bind someone into a contract that typically lasts for well over a hundred years (until the expiration of copyright at the photographer's death plus 70 years). That's a draconian provision that IMHO should not pass the test for reasonableness.
For that matter, because the contract doesn't clearly state "without fee", agreeing to the transfer does not necessarily indicate that you agree to the transfer without further remuneration. I can see a fun little loophole there.
Yes, the terms do say that the copyrights are absconded with. See part 9. It says that if a third party uses your pictures commercially---even without your authorization---you are required to give your copyright to Burning Man so that they can sue the third party. That means that not only does it prevent you from authorizing commercial use of those photos, it also means that your copyright can be taken at any time without notice even if you did nothing wrong. That's an agreement to assign copyright, pure and simple, and according to Title 17, such an assignment requires a signature.
There are a lot of other things dubious about these terms and conditions, too. For instance, this is in effect a perpetual option to acquire (for no compensation) a copyright. Normally, such agreements would only be valid for a certain period of time. At least in business contract law, if a contract does not specify an expiration date, it is considered to only be valid for a reasonable period of time. The definition of reasonable is open to interpretation, of course. In any case, the contract term is nowhere near as clear cut when interpreted according to the legal framework. I've never seen a copyright assignment option that was open ended like that. That is highly nonstandard and should raise a lot of red flags.
The fact that there is no additional compensation for photos confiscated under this clause likely invalidates the contract. By law, a contract requires mutual consideration or else it isn't a contract.
The terms also prohibit descriptive use of their trademarks. I suspect that's a legally dubious contract term, as again it is an open-ended term that binds you forever. IIRC, such perpetually binding terms are generally not permitted in contracts between businesses and individuals.
Copyright law explicitly says that copyright law does not allow assignment except through a signed contract. This is clearly codified in Title 17. No contract can violate U.S. law, therefore, that particular contract term is automatically invalid. It is you who are suggesting that the courts should validate a fundamentally illegal contract term solely to suit the desires of select individuals. By your standards, no terms in any contract would ever be held unconscionable.... I'd hate to live in that world.
Any location where a significant number of the public area allowed, even if it requires admission, even if it is in the middle of freaking nowhere, is, by definition, a semi-public place. If the general public can buy tickets for it, an event is by definition not a private event. Any claims to the contrary are patently absurd. The legal definition of a semi-public place is a place where some, but not all, of the public are allowed. It was specifically created for copyright law purposes to cover things like movie theaters and thus extend public performance to cover private showings (including for-profit showings) where a significant number of people are present. In order to define Burning Man as a private venue, you would have to completely overturn the entire concept of a semi-public place and change every place where this is codified in the law.
Even if the law considered Burning Man to be a private place, they still would not have the legal right to confiscate the copyright. The participants would, however, have a good chance of winning a lawsuit for invasion of privacy. This seems fairly unlikely to me, but not unthinkable.
As long as the event is held in the United States, it must follow U.S. law, and any contract terms that explicitly violate that law should be held invalid. If they are not, something is very fundamentally wrong with the legal system. Period.
Well, UNIX is extremely useful. And Pacman and Galaga, while maybe not useful, remain entertaining.
Let's try this again. Find me new hardware that can still run a 20-year-old version of UNIX. Twenty years ago, hardware barely even had paged MMUs, IIRC. Modern UNIX is quite improved compared with the UNIX of that era. Even if some of the individual tools were moderately useful at some basic functional level, they would still be almost completely useless when compared with any of the modern implementations of those tools. It would also be problematic to maintain the old versions because few people still remember how to write code in K&R C.
In software, there's a very definite "innovate or die" mentality, and that's not just because we want to see improvements; it is because we must have improvements in order to keep up with the evolving hardware. Code written more than a few years ago is nearly useless. There are apps that are less than ten years old that I've tried to rewrite to work on modern OSes and given up on because I would have to start by writing a compiler. That's the price of a fast-moving industry---software that does not continuously improve becomes worthless pretty quickly.
The same goes for games. In order for 20-year-old games to be usable, you either have to write an emulator for the hardware (which becomes practical after about a decade of CPU speed increases) or find somebody to build ancient hardware with chips that haven't even been made for a decade. I would argue that if it is necessary to build custom hardware or large software emulator infrastructures in order for the software to be in any way usable, the software is of dubious value compared with a modern rewrite of that software, and copyright really wasn't intended to protect things whose sole value is sentimental in nature. If it has no serious literary or artistic purpose anymore, then the copyright should reasonably be vacated.
More to the point, long copyright durations for software doesn't encourage the creation of new works, and thus is contrary to the fundamental purpose of copyright. More to the point, the absence of these durations would do nothing to discourage creation of new works. The software industry rapidly innovates and creates new versions of software, but they stop producing old versions after a short time. There are few (if any) recorded cases in which a software publisher suddenly started publishing (unimproved) an old piece of software that was previously discontinued. Therefore, once the previous version is discontinued, it no longer has financial value to the company.
What valid reason, then, could possibly exist for continuing to maintain copyright protection over the older versions of the work? The fear that he older version might be "good enough" for most of the customers? If so, then by that admission, the copyright owners are admitting that long copyright durations stifle innovation by allowing companies to make only minimal improvements in their software over time and continue to charge money for those minor tweaks when they would otherwise be forced to make real improvements. In effect, any claim that these works should have protection because they have monetary value simultaneously invalidates the claim that the work should have copyright protection by proving that the copyright discourages the creation of new works.:-)
That's pretty surprising. Usually even a venue that charges admission is considered a semipublic space. Although a semipublic space does give the owners the right to throw people out, it does not confer any special rights to privacy beyond that, as far as I can tell. Further, it most assuredly does not meet the criteria needed for photographs inside to become works for hire. It's not even in the ballpark.
It's hard to believe that a venue can claim copyright on photos they don't own, and that sets a very dangerous precedent. For example, under those same rules, if I took a photograph that showed Disneyland workers doing something that compromised public safety, Disney could claim ownership and demand takedown under the DMCA.
Contract law does not generally allow someone to take control intellectual property without an explicit meeting of the minds, compensation, etc. There's no compensation for confiscated photographs above and beyond what you would get if you paid the admission fee but did not take photographs, the participants do not meet the criteria for being employees of the venue, and there is no signed agreement. Thus, it cannot be considered a work for hire, and the venue has no legitimate ownership claims.
Any ticket-sale terms to the contrary should rightfully be held as unconscionable by any court that actually takes the rule of law seriously. Copyright simply cannot be assigned away without a signed agreement or proof of employment, period, and the law is quite clear on that point. The copyright office agrees with me. From Circular 1 (Copyright Basics):
Any or all of the copyright owner's exclusive rights or any subdivision of those rights may be transferred, but the transfer of exclusive rights is not valid unless that transfer is in writing and signed by the owner of the rights conveyed or such owner's duly authorized agent.
Emphasis mine. The courts got this one dead wrong, and copyright law makes that abundantly clear.
I understand the desire to have this zone, but the correct way of enforcing this is to not allow cameras inside the zone, to post clear notices to this effect at the entrance, to confiscate any cameras and destroy the photos if that rule is violated, and to take legal action for breach of contract if the photos show up anyway. Anything else is WAY outside the scope of what copyright law allows by any sane reading.
True, Linux could move to LLVM/Clang. The point was that distros that choose to stick with GCC will be stuck with something inferior in the long run.
Regarding performance, you couldn't be more wrong. Although LVVM can be used to build code for a virtual machine environment, LLVM can also generate native code just like GCC does. More to the point, its x86 native code generation results in code that is generally at least as fast as code generated by GCC, and often faster.
I'm also told that LLVM is significantly more maintainable, extensible, etc. because the design is much cleaner. Thus, it is easier to add further performance optimizations to LLVM than to GCC.
Regarding the GCC front end, as has already been noted, there are multiple front ends. Clang is well on its way to supplanting GCC as an LLVM front end, at least for C code; its C++ support still has a long way to go.
As your own analogy points out, the people who hate the GPL are mad because you won't give them a free lunch.
Not at all. Even among companies that never take anything from open source without giving back the changes, there's still an almost universal preference for the BSD license because the GPLv3 license has the potential to creating a patent loophole so big you could drive a truck through it.
The problem is that the patent loophole created by GPLv3 is not just for your legitimate customers, but also for anyone who gets the source from them, including those who get it solely for use as a patent shield.
Let's say company A is suing company B over patent infringement. Company B points out that they took one line of code (a comment, perhaps) from a GPLv3 project C that company A redistributed. Company B claims that because this uses project C source code, it is protected by company A's patent license. And this is the sort of thing that companies do to each other. Although company B is technically on the hook for a GPL infringement, it also knows that one line of code is unlikely to be sufficient for a copyright claim, in practice.
Another problem with that clause is the risk of changes to the project causing it to kick in unexpectedly. If a company develops a technology and patents it, then distributes a completely unrelated GPLv3 project, that GPLv3 project could add similar functionality that violates the patent. If the company doesn't notice the inclusion of that infringing technology before it distributes a new version that contains the infringing code, for all practical purposes, that company has just lost control of the patent. This means that a company with patents would have to perform a complete patent review every time it ships a new version of any GPLv3 package. That's an expensive proposition, and would quickly exceed the cost of rewriting most software from scratch.
It's not about not wanting a free lunch. It's about the GPL massively overstepping and posing a perceived risk to unrelated intellectual property.
In my experience, the GPL almost never causes a company to push changes back if it otherwise would not. Many such companies ignore the license; the rest simply reject the software and rewrite it. Either way, a company either contributes back to open source or it doesn't, and no license is likely to cause a company that doesn't to do so without a fight. As a result, in the projects I've looked at, the GPL has consistently led to less sharing than the BSD license; companies see too many red flags, so they end up recreating equivalent functionality themselves, and in the long run, the GPL project languishes while another, more liberally licensed project gets all the attention. This helps no one.
Case in point: GCC vs. Clang/LLVM. Apple and Sun have active LLVM developers, FreeBSD announced plans to switch entirely to Clang/LLVM, and NetBSD and OpenBSD are similarly working on getting their code to all build, leaving Linux alone with its inferior GPL-licensed GCC. Samba is next.
GPL takes Copyright and adds rights you would not normally have; without GPL you lose those right and would be in [danger of] copyright infringement if you were to use it commercially.
That argument is rather tired, and rather wrong for several reasons:
Variants like the Affero GPL massively restrict your rights far beyond what is allowed by copyright, and in ways that affect even people/companies that do not redistribute the software (at least by the traditional definition of redistribution).
A lot of people wanted the Affero license rolled into the mainline GPL. The "version X or later" clause makes that a bit problematic for those who want to continue using software long term and still get security updates, bug fixes, etc.
Code under the Affero license can be freely combined with standard GPL works, leading to the possibility that someone may modify the project in a way that would effectively taint the rest of the work.
Even if the mainline GPL doesn't restrict beyond the level of ordinary copyright, the risk posed by the Affero GPL makes GPLed software unacceptable for ordinary use (much less distribution) in many, many corporate environments.
Further, the patent clauses in GPLv3 go way beyond what copyright provides for. As a result, the GPLv3 takes copyright, adds rights you otherwise wouldn't have, and takes away rights you otherwise would. This is why so many people object to the changes in version 3. What you said was correct five years ago and few would disagree with it. In light of GPLv3, though, that whole argument is defenestrated.
Look at AT&T's coverage in low density areas and say that again with a straight face. Also, according to Verizon's website, nearly every square inch of Finland has voice coverage. I don't buy that theory.
That really doesn't work, though. Laws as deterrents are only effective if the risk of getting caught is high. It's far too easy to almost completely eliminate that risk, and thus, using copyright law in this way is doomed to failure.
All the P2P clients would have to do to seriously frustrate attempts at assigning liability is design P2P clients to take advantage of the DMCA safe harbor provision for caching servers. If clients lie about the available peers and proxy requests for files that they don't have, caching the results on disk in the downloads folder, it would be exceptionally difficult to prosecute a P2P user. It would, however, still be possible to subpoena the tracker to try to establish the identity of the original uploader, which is exactly as it should be. I think it would be delightfully ironic if the DMCA were (ab)used in this way to protect mere users of P2P....
I would venture to say that Americans & Canadians suffer from sprawl much more than Finland and total area of dense population is probably more than five times that of Finland's.
You'd be wrong. The average population density in Finland is half that of the U.S. The U.S. has, on average, 31 people per square km; FInland has, on average, 16 people per square km. This according to Google. The total size of the area to cover shouldn't be relevant assuming similar percentages of the population use the service. Besides, the U.S. cell providers leave large swaths of the U.S. uncovered anyway....
In much the same way, my retired parents are on Facebook. They're still not Facebook's target demographic, and if they redesigned Facebook to cater to them, they would scare off most of their loyal user base.
There's no reason a company couldn't have two netbook models, one with all the extra stuff for people who want it and one that's pruned down to the bone for people who would rather have the extra screen real estate. Just build an 11" netbook with a camera and a 12" netbook without a camera and use a more open faceplate and a different interior frame on the 12" model. No other changes needed if you do it right.
Agreed... well... mostly. If I personally were building an HDCP stripper and selling it, I would do exactly what Hauppauge did. Anything else would get my license revoked and potentially open me up to civil and/or criminal penalties. If, however, I were the sort of person who would build and sell illegal cracking tools, I would just include a ROM with thousands of stolen keys. For that matter, if I understand some of the early papers on the subject correctly, it might even be possible to include the entire set of all possible valid keys....
This may be short-lived, though. Intel is replacing HDCP's worthless key exchange with HDCP 2.0. Translation: when content providers decide to mandate 2.0 support, all your existing TVs, Blu-Ray players, etc. will have to be replaced. Of course, given how many hundreds of millions of people that would affect, if they do mandate it, I expect riots, looting, and the biggest shift from purchased content to pirated content that the world has ever seen. We'll see whether greed or common sense wins out in the Blu-Ray consortium....
The BR consortium oversees Blu-Ray. This is a cable box we're talking about, not a BD player. HDCP is licensed by a subsidiary of Intel, and has nothing to do with the BR consortium except that they require the use of HDCP in order to build a licensed BD player.
That device almost certainly violates the HDCP spec, and if and when the cable company decides that it does, they can trivially add its key to the list of keys their cable box should reject, at which point the HD Fury 2 becomes a useless brick that outputs a black screen. I'd give it six months. A year, tops. Like I said, the only way to guarantee that you can record the content involves some seriously legally dubious activities.
Sure, they can. If your cable box supports it, they could enable analog output degradation and scale the analog outputs down to fractional resolution. There's only one way to record HDTV content that is guaranteed to be unstoppable: an HDCP stripper with an HDMI capture card....
A businessperson has no business trying to use an ultraportable. That's not the target market at all, and they are completely unsuitable for them.
Ultraportables require good eyesight, which means that they mostly appeal to the under-30 crowd; the statistical majority of the business types are older than that.
They tend to have small hard drives because they are designed to be a supplement to your primary desktop or laptop computer; most businesspeople I've known use a laptop as a portable desktop, and it is their only computer.
They are designed heavily with cost as a driving factor; businesspeople tend to be more concerned with reliability and robustness than cost.
They generally have reduced size keyboards, which don't lend themselves to business chores (which usually involve a lot of typing).
The ultraportable market targets mostly teenagers through college, mostly as a cheap way of carrying stuff back and forth to class or around the workplace, while leaving the bulk of their data at home or in the office. A webcam borders on useless for those people. If they want to video chat, 99.999% of the time, they'll be back in their rooms or offices and can use their main machines for that.
And built-in flash card readers only support a limited range of card formats. They also almost universally support only the low end consumer formats. Pro users with high end cameras generally have cameras that use Compact Flash cards, which is rarely, if ever supported in a built-in reader. This means that a significant percentage of your users end up carrying around an external reader anyway.
Besides, we're rapidly seeing cell phones converge on mini-USB connectors for charging. Because you will have to carry a USB to mini-USB cable to charge your cell phone anyway, you won't need any extra cables to connect your camera to your laptop. Unplug the cable from your phone and plug it into your camera, and suddenly that low-end card reader built into your laptop is just wasting space. Within five years or so, this will be moot.
Funny. I've come to the opposite conclusion. Flying in coach, the taller the laptop is off the table, the more likely you are to break the screen when the guy in front of you leans back. Thickness doesn't mean much because it is in a bag anyway.
As for twelve inches being too big, that's only be ause a 12 inch laptop is really almost 14 inches corner to corner because of the wide screen margins. Dump the built-in camera; a netbook isn't fast enough to do much with it anyway. Then, cut it down to the narrowest screen border that still allows you to hinge the screen. A near-borderless 12 inch laptop would be plenty small.
The problem is that instead of cutting stuff out, they keep trying to cram in crap like a webcam, flash reader, etc., none of which belong in an ultraportable. Clip your cell phone to the screen and use its camera over Bluetooth if you really need a webcam. Carry a reader in you bag or just use your camera with a USB cable in a pinch. Cut out all the wasted space and the 12 inch form factor will be the perfect size.
Slashdot Mirror
Better yet, how about something truly useful... like growing a new fovea in people with age-related macular degeneration? Slough off the old fovea and grow a new one, then surgically remove the old tissue.
Agreed, but I don't agree that this is anywhere near reasonable. Realistically speaking, unless nobody else was seeding the same content, this person probably seeded only about ten or twenty copies each of 30 songs. The fact that they, in turn, made copies for other people is immaterial. One person cannot reasonably be held liable for the actions of another.
The retail cost of these songs, then, was likely about $300-600, but the effective value for legal purposes is a third of that ($100-200) because we're talking about revenue for the record companies, and that's what they would get after you subtract out the distributor and retailer overhead. The right fine for a first offense is probably the cost of the goods plus a $500 fine (paid to the government, NOT the record companies) and six months probation. Even the initially proposed settlement amount was absurdly more than is reasonable.
So in your fantasy world, someone who shoplifts a point-and-shoot digital camera should face a multi-million-dollar fine. That's more than a significant penalty. That's downright criminal.
I'm going to have to go with terraforming. I don't think it's hundreds of years away at all. All you have to do to terraform Mars is add a huge amount of heat. The rest almost takes care of itself---seeding it with plants is fairly trivial, and maybe we could even be selective about which insects we allow (e.g. no fleas, mosquitoes, ticks, or other blood-sucking critters).
That might even be a good way to get rid of all of our planet's nuclear weapons---nuke Mars. Perhaps we should hug the Martians with nuclear arms, or at least hug the northern and southern ice caps with them....
Show me a registrar where you have to type it in more than once. After the first page, you're just reading the name, not typing it again.
Besides, people who made mistakes the first time will likely not notice those mistakes on a reread, either. This is particularly true for people who are dyslexic.
Just require them to extend the domain by one year in order to change the domain to a different name after the first 72 hours. It solves the tasting abuse problem equally well, but does so without causing an equally obnoxious "I'm throwing money away for something that should be an automated process and thus should cost nothing" problem.
That may or may not qualify as mutual consideration. Merely buying the ticket grants you access to the event. There is no additional consideration beyond what the purchase of a ticket to an event would ordinarily give someone, and as such one could reasonably claim that they are merely living up to their obligations by allowing the person to attend, which would mean that this does not count as consideration for contract purposes. Such an argument has been used to win many shrink wrap license cases over the years, and that's effectively what we're talking about here---a shrink wrap license for an event ticket. Don't get me wrong---the courts have ruled both way son these. My point is that the validity of the contract itself is not guaranteed by any stretch, which could make discussion of individual terms moot.
In either case, it certainly isn't additional consideration for the copyright transfer that may or may not occur at any indefinite point up until the copyright expires, and isn't sufficient consideration to potentially bind someone into a contract that typically lasts for well over a hundred years (until the expiration of copyright at the photographer's death plus 70 years). That's a draconian provision that IMHO should not pass the test for reasonableness.
For that matter, because the contract doesn't clearly state "without fee", agreeing to the transfer does not necessarily indicate that you agree to the transfer without further remuneration. I can see a fun little loophole there.
Yes, the terms do say that the copyrights are absconded with. See part 9. It says that if a third party uses your pictures commercially---even without your authorization---you are required to give your copyright to Burning Man so that they can sue the third party. That means that not only does it prevent you from authorizing commercial use of those photos, it also means that your copyright can be taken at any time without notice even if you did nothing wrong. That's an agreement to assign copyright, pure and simple, and according to Title 17, such an assignment requires a signature.
There are a lot of other things dubious about these terms and conditions, too. For instance, this is in effect a perpetual option to acquire (for no compensation) a copyright. Normally, such agreements would only be valid for a certain period of time. At least in business contract law, if a contract does not specify an expiration date, it is considered to only be valid for a reasonable period of time. The definition of reasonable is open to interpretation, of course. In any case, the contract term is nowhere near as clear cut when interpreted according to the legal framework. I've never seen a copyright assignment option that was open ended like that. That is highly nonstandard and should raise a lot of red flags.
The fact that there is no additional compensation for photos confiscated under this clause likely invalidates the contract. By law, a contract requires mutual consideration or else it isn't a contract.
The terms also prohibit descriptive use of their trademarks. I suspect that's a legally dubious contract term, as again it is an open-ended term that binds you forever. IIRC, such perpetually binding terms are generally not permitted in contracts between businesses and individuals.
In any case, read http://www.ehow.com/about_5120969_business-contract-laws.html and http://www.expertlaw.com/library/business/contract_law.html for a better understanding of why this contract likely isn't worth the bits it is written with.
Once again, my 2.0 Linux kernel is safe!
I think you are wrong for three reasons:
As long as the event is held in the United States, it must follow U.S. law, and any contract terms that explicitly violate that law should be held invalid. If they are not, something is very fundamentally wrong with the legal system. Period.
Let's try this again. Find me new hardware that can still run a 20-year-old version of UNIX. Twenty years ago, hardware barely even had paged MMUs, IIRC. Modern UNIX is quite improved compared with the UNIX of that era. Even if some of the individual tools were moderately useful at some basic functional level, they would still be almost completely useless when compared with any of the modern implementations of those tools. It would also be problematic to maintain the old versions because few people still remember how to write code in K&R C.
In software, there's a very definite "innovate or die" mentality, and that's not just because we want to see improvements; it is because we must have improvements in order to keep up with the evolving hardware. Code written more than a few years ago is nearly useless. There are apps that are less than ten years old that I've tried to rewrite to work on modern OSes and given up on because I would have to start by writing a compiler. That's the price of a fast-moving industry---software that does not continuously improve becomes worthless pretty quickly.
The same goes for games. In order for 20-year-old games to be usable, you either have to write an emulator for the hardware (which becomes practical after about a decade of CPU speed increases) or find somebody to build ancient hardware with chips that haven't even been made for a decade. I would argue that if it is necessary to build custom hardware or large software emulator infrastructures in order for the software to be in any way usable, the software is of dubious value compared with a modern rewrite of that software, and copyright really wasn't intended to protect things whose sole value is sentimental in nature. If it has no serious literary or artistic purpose anymore, then the copyright should reasonably be vacated.
More to the point, long copyright durations for software doesn't encourage the creation of new works, and thus is contrary to the fundamental purpose of copyright. More to the point, the absence of these durations would do nothing to discourage creation of new works. The software industry rapidly innovates and creates new versions of software, but they stop producing old versions after a short time. There are few (if any) recorded cases in which a software publisher suddenly started publishing (unimproved) an old piece of software that was previously discontinued. Therefore, once the previous version is discontinued, it no longer has financial value to the company.
What valid reason, then, could possibly exist for continuing to maintain copyright protection over the older versions of the work? The fear that he older version might be "good enough" for most of the customers? If so, then by that admission, the copyright owners are admitting that long copyright durations stifle innovation by allowing companies to make only minimal improvements in their software over time and continue to charge money for those minor tweaks when they would otherwise be forced to make real improvements. In effect, any claim that these works should have protection because they have monetary value simultaneously invalidates the claim that the work should have copyright protection by proving that the copyright discourages the creation of new works. :-)
That's pretty surprising. Usually even a venue that charges admission is considered a semipublic space. Although a semipublic space does give the owners the right to throw people out, it does not confer any special rights to privacy beyond that, as far as I can tell. Further, it most assuredly does not meet the criteria needed for photographs inside to become works for hire. It's not even in the ballpark.
It's hard to believe that a venue can claim copyright on photos they don't own, and that sets a very dangerous precedent. For example, under those same rules, if I took a photograph that showed Disneyland workers doing something that compromised public safety, Disney could claim ownership and demand takedown under the DMCA.
Contract law does not generally allow someone to take control intellectual property without an explicit meeting of the minds, compensation, etc. There's no compensation for confiscated photographs above and beyond what you would get if you paid the admission fee but did not take photographs, the participants do not meet the criteria for being employees of the venue, and there is no signed agreement. Thus, it cannot be considered a work for hire, and the venue has no legitimate ownership claims.
Any ticket-sale terms to the contrary should rightfully be held as unconscionable by any court that actually takes the rule of law seriously. Copyright simply cannot be assigned away without a signed agreement or proof of employment, period, and the law is quite clear on that point. The copyright office agrees with me. From Circular 1 (Copyright Basics):
Emphasis mine. The courts got this one dead wrong, and copyright law makes that abundantly clear.
I understand the desire to have this zone, but the correct way of enforcing this is to not allow cameras inside the zone, to post clear notices to this effect at the entrance, to confiscate any cameras and destroy the photos if that rule is violated, and to take legal action for breach of contract if the photos show up anyway. Anything else is WAY outside the scope of what copyright law allows by any sane reading.
Caveat: IANAL.
True, Linux could move to LLVM/Clang. The point was that distros that choose to stick with GCC will be stuck with something inferior in the long run.
Regarding performance, you couldn't be more wrong. Although LVVM can be used to build code for a virtual machine environment, LLVM can also generate native code just like GCC does. More to the point, its x86 native code generation results in code that is generally at least as fast as code generated by GCC, and often faster.
I'm also told that LLVM is significantly more maintainable, extensible, etc. because the design is much cleaner. Thus, it is easier to add further performance optimizations to LLVM than to GCC.
Regarding the GCC front end, as has already been noted, there are multiple front ends. Clang is well on its way to supplanting GCC as an LLVM front end, at least for C code; its C++ support still has a long way to go.
Not at all. Even among companies that never take anything from open source without giving back the changes, there's still an almost universal preference for the BSD license because the GPLv3 license has the potential to creating a patent loophole so big you could drive a truck through it.
The problem is that the patent loophole created by GPLv3 is not just for your legitimate customers, but also for anyone who gets the source from them, including those who get it solely for use as a patent shield.
Let's say company A is suing company B over patent infringement. Company B points out that they took one line of code (a comment, perhaps) from a GPLv3 project C that company A redistributed. Company B claims that because this uses project C source code, it is protected by company A's patent license. And this is the sort of thing that companies do to each other. Although company B is technically on the hook for a GPL infringement, it also knows that one line of code is unlikely to be sufficient for a copyright claim, in practice.
Another problem with that clause is the risk of changes to the project causing it to kick in unexpectedly. If a company develops a technology and patents it, then distributes a completely unrelated GPLv3 project, that GPLv3 project could add similar functionality that violates the patent. If the company doesn't notice the inclusion of that infringing technology before it distributes a new version that contains the infringing code, for all practical purposes, that company has just lost control of the patent. This means that a company with patents would have to perform a complete patent review every time it ships a new version of any GPLv3 package. That's an expensive proposition, and would quickly exceed the cost of rewriting most software from scratch.
It's not about not wanting a free lunch. It's about the GPL massively overstepping and posing a perceived risk to unrelated intellectual property.
In my experience, the GPL almost never causes a company to push changes back if it otherwise would not. Many such companies ignore the license; the rest simply reject the software and rewrite it. Either way, a company either contributes back to open source or it doesn't, and no license is likely to cause a company that doesn't to do so without a fight. As a result, in the projects I've looked at, the GPL has consistently led to less sharing than the BSD license; companies see too many red flags, so they end up recreating equivalent functionality themselves, and in the long run, the GPL project languishes while another, more liberally licensed project gets all the attention. This helps no one.
Case in point: GCC vs. Clang/LLVM. Apple and Sun have active LLVM developers, FreeBSD announced plans to switch entirely to Clang/LLVM, and NetBSD and OpenBSD are similarly working on getting their code to all build, leaving Linux alone with its inferior GPL-licensed GCC. Samba is next.
That argument is rather tired, and rather wrong for several reasons:
Even if the mainline GPL doesn't restrict beyond the level of ordinary copyright, the risk posed by the Affero GPL makes GPLed software unacceptable for ordinary use (much less distribution) in many, many corporate environments.
Further, the patent clauses in GPLv3 go way beyond what copyright provides for. As a result, the GPLv3 takes copyright, adds rights you otherwise wouldn't have, and takes away rights you otherwise would. This is why so many people object to the changes in version 3. What you said was correct five years ago and few would disagree with it. In light of GPLv3, though, that whole argument is defenestrated.
Look at AT&T's coverage in low density areas and say that again with a straight face. Also, according to Verizon's website, nearly every square inch of Finland has voice coverage. I don't buy that theory.
That really doesn't work, though. Laws as deterrents are only effective if the risk of getting caught is high. It's far too easy to almost completely eliminate that risk, and thus, using copyright law in this way is doomed to failure.
All the P2P clients would have to do to seriously frustrate attempts at assigning liability is design P2P clients to take advantage of the DMCA safe harbor provision for caching servers. If clients lie about the available peers and proxy requests for files that they don't have, caching the results on disk in the downloads folder, it would be exceptionally difficult to prosecute a P2P user. It would, however, still be possible to subpoena the tracker to try to establish the identity of the original uploader, which is exactly as it should be. I think it would be delightfully ironic if the DMCA were (ab)used in this way to protect mere users of P2P....
You'd be wrong. The average population density in Finland is half that of the U.S. The U.S. has, on average, 31 people per square km; FInland has, on average, 16 people per square km. This according to Google. The total size of the area to cover shouldn't be relevant assuming similar percentages of the population use the service. Besides, the U.S. cell providers leave large swaths of the U.S. uncovered anyway....
In much the same way, my retired parents are on Facebook. They're still not Facebook's target demographic, and if they redesigned Facebook to cater to them, they would scare off most of their loyal user base.
There's no reason a company couldn't have two netbook models, one with all the extra stuff for people who want it and one that's pruned down to the bone for people who would rather have the extra screen real estate. Just build an 11" netbook with a camera and a 12" netbook without a camera and use a more open faceplate and a different interior frame on the 12" model. No other changes needed if you do it right.
Agreed... well... mostly. If I personally were building an HDCP stripper and selling it, I would do exactly what Hauppauge did. Anything else would get my license revoked and potentially open me up to civil and/or criminal penalties. If, however, I were the sort of person who would build and sell illegal cracking tools, I would just include a ROM with thousands of stolen keys. For that matter, if I understand some of the early papers on the subject correctly, it might even be possible to include the entire set of all possible valid keys....
This may be short-lived, though. Intel is replacing HDCP's worthless key exchange with HDCP 2.0. Translation: when content providers decide to mandate 2.0 support, all your existing TVs, Blu-Ray players, etc. will have to be replaced. Of course, given how many hundreds of millions of people that would affect, if they do mandate it, I expect riots, looting, and the biggest shift from purchased content to pirated content that the world has ever seen. We'll see whether greed or common sense wins out in the Blu-Ray consortium....
The BR consortium oversees Blu-Ray. This is a cable box we're talking about, not a BD player. HDCP is licensed by a subsidiary of Intel, and has nothing to do with the BR consortium except that they require the use of HDCP in order to build a licensed BD player.
That device almost certainly violates the HDCP spec, and if and when the cable company decides that it does, they can trivially add its key to the list of keys their cable box should reject, at which point the HD Fury 2 becomes a useless brick that outputs a black screen. I'd give it six months. A year, tops. Like I said, the only way to guarantee that you can record the content involves some seriously legally dubious activities.
Sure, they can. If your cable box supports it, they could enable analog output degradation and scale the analog outputs down to fractional resolution. There's only one way to record HDTV content that is guaranteed to be unstoppable: an HDCP stripper with an HDMI capture card....
A businessperson has no business trying to use an ultraportable. That's not the target market at all, and they are completely unsuitable for them.
The ultraportable market targets mostly teenagers through college, mostly as a cheap way of carrying stuff back and forth to class or around the workplace, while leaving the bulk of their data at home or in the office. A webcam borders on useless for those people. If they want to video chat, 99.999% of the time, they'll be back in their rooms or offices and can use their main machines for that.
And built-in flash card readers only support a limited range of card formats. They also almost universally support only the low end consumer formats. Pro users with high end cameras generally have cameras that use Compact Flash cards, which is rarely, if ever supported in a built-in reader. This means that a significant percentage of your users end up carrying around an external reader anyway.
Besides, we're rapidly seeing cell phones converge on mini-USB connectors for charging. Because you will have to carry a USB to mini-USB cable to charge your cell phone anyway, you won't need any extra cables to connect your camera to your laptop. Unplug the cable from your phone and plug it into your camera, and suddenly that low-end card reader built into your laptop is just wasting space. Within five years or so, this will be moot.
Funny. I've come to the opposite conclusion. Flying in coach, the taller the laptop is off the table, the more likely you are to break the screen when the guy in front of you leans back. Thickness doesn't mean much because it is in a bag anyway.
As for twelve inches being too big, that's only be ause a 12 inch laptop is really almost 14 inches corner to corner because of the wide screen margins. Dump the built-in camera; a netbook isn't fast enough to do much with it anyway. Then, cut it down to the narrowest screen border that still allows you to hinge the screen. A near-borderless 12 inch laptop would be plenty small.
The problem is that instead of cutting stuff out, they keep trying to cram in crap like a webcam, flash reader, etc., none of which belong in an ultraportable. Clip your cell phone to the screen and use its camera over Bluetooth if you really need a webcam. Carry a reader in you bag or just use your camera with a USB cable in a pinch. Cut out all the wasted space and the 12 inch form factor will be the perfect size.
A president with enumerable brain cells. And no, I did not mean innumerable.