That's why the OP uses three VM's with varying degrees of security.
One VM has very low security, effectively nothing beyond basic security (i.e. less than an anti-virus). This is ONLY used for stuff she could give a rat's ass about - her examples for the types of things she would not do on this VM were things like online shopping or banking. Nothing with personal information or anything else she might not want compromised. She starts with a fresh image every week.
The second VM is a well secured system and is meant for doing things that are not absolutely critical, but are still sensitive and need protecting. She would not NOT do general web browsing on this machine, that is what the other is for. She would also not use it for banking, as it is not secure enough. It would be for things like shopping, giving out personal information over the web to trusted sites, etc.
The third VM is locked down like fort knox. Instead of using the "block X" methodology for securing the system, it uses the "Block everything except X". For example, all incoming and outgoing ports would be blocked except 443, for https traffic. All external hosts would be blocked except for her banking site or a very small number of similarly secured and sensitive websites. Basically, this system would be setup so securely that it would be practically unuseable except for what it is specifically intended to use.
So, Noscript would only be on the second or third VM's (blacklist on second, whitelist on third), neither of which you would use for generic browsing, and you should have no trouble at all.
She also addresses the shortcomings of her system, and that she is not completely satisfied with it because, theoretically at least, there is no reason an attack on one of the VMs should not make it to the host machine. In practice that doesn't seem to be the case, probably because there aren't many, if any, attacks in the wild geared toward hitting the host machine running a VM directly. It also probably helps that her host machine is OSx, and her VMs are Windows, making her a very small target.
Look, just because you don't like the fact that people make things illegal just because someone doesn't like them does NOT mean it should be illegal to make things illegal because someone doesn't like them for no other reason than because you don't like them.
Anybody remember how long it takes to partition and format a fresh hard drive on Windows as opposed to the minute or two it takes in Gparted from a liveCD? Doesn't need it, but it makes things a hell of a lot quicker.
Dude, when was the last time you used Windows, back in the 3.1 days? Diskpart is pretty darn fast, but really all the tools these days are. I've used both gparted and diskpart recently, and I'd have a really hard time saying gparted was faster than diskpart. Of course, the reverse is true as well.
Also, I'd prefer a WindowsPE disk for fixing any issues with windows these days. It's basically a 150mb (more or less, depending on what tools you add) bootable version of Vista. It runs almost all windows programs without a hitch, and is very very quick. There's some stuff that linux just can't do for windows.
You've got it a little mixed up. When we vote for President (and we do vote for president, just not completely directly) we are voting for the makeup of the electoral college. This in no way depends on the -vote- for the house of representatives. The number of representatives to the electoral college that a state recieves depends only on the number of representatives that state has in congress - which is their house of rep + two senators. The minimum is three, there is no maximum but it is around 130 or so, I forget how many representatives california has.
How a state votes in its electoral college members is up to the state, but it is always determined in a way that is linked to a vote of the people at some level. A state could, for example, have the electoral college members be chosen by the state legislature if they wanted. In reality the way it is set up for most states is parties register to the election officials who they will be supporting, and that presidential candidate is put on the ballot. The party who's candidate who gets the most votes then gets to choose who the delegates will be for the electoral college, and the electoral college votes for president. Some states actually split the vote, and each party sends the number of delegates equal to the percentage of the vote they recieved. As far as I know no state deviates from the format any further than this.
Either way, elections are held for president every four years, no matter what system is used. That have made it convenient and use a system that technically is not a direct vote for president does not change the fact that, for all except borderline cases we do, in a practical sense, vote directly for president.
First off, Mean Time Between Failures does not mean what you think it means. That is simply the average time between failures, and is in no way a guarantee that your particular tape drive will last anywhere near that long.
Second, most modern hard drives, particularly low speed hard drives, have a MTBF in the neighborhood of 500,000 hours and up. As your own personal experience suggests, that does not mean the drive will last 75 years. It would, however, if you used it for say three years and then archived it and used a new disk.
Third, hard drives, even low speed drives, are significantly faster than tape drives.
Fourth, hard drives, especially low speed drives, are signifficantly less expensive than tape drives.
Since you seemed more concerned with MTBF than any other statistic, why not spend a little more (ok, a lot more, but you're obviously not concerned with the least expensive option) and go with SSD storage? You get MTBFs in the neighborhood of 1 million+ hours then.
Seriously man, I work with large tape backup systems, and tapes fail just as often as hard drives, and they tend to be less robust. The only thing I can say for them is that they seem to do pretty well when thrown in a box and shoved in a corner for a few years. If you use them a lot, there is a heck of a lot more that can wear out in a tape drive than in a hard drive.
You realize that most large companies have either IBM, HP, or Fujitsu running their IT department, right? Mostly off-This is nothing more than a new kind of outsourcing, separating themselves even further from having to deal with IT decisions.
To protect themselves, they have NDA's, well written contracts, and the teams of lawyers necessary to sue the shit out of the company handling their IT if any of the "dangerous things" you imagine will happen, happen.
"Cloud Computing" is just the next wave in the movement to get things out of the responsibilities of the local business and into someone else's. It saves the business money and headache when someone else takes care of it as their specialty and simply charges a fee for the service.
I've got news for you, Microsoft and Google aren't comming up with this stuff in a vacuum and enticing customers to take the bait for their newest useless product. What they are actually doing is designing products in response to the needs and desires of their customers. It's the way service-oriented businesses grow and flourish.
My company has somewhere in the neighborhood of half a million employees. Seems to work pretty well for them, they use sharepoint for all sorts of things.
Plus the fact that it intigrates with outlook, which has communicator (a secure internal version of Live Messenger), and Live Meeting intigrates with all three.
Done properly, the Microsoft intigrations greatly improve workflows for many many people. Done poorly, of course, they suck monkey balls, but anything can be that way.
They can take images of the whole disks quite easily (there are hardware tools for doing this)
Dude, you've either been reading way too much or not nearly enough. That's not some special, secret technology they have. Hell, it isn't even hardware based. There are probably 40 million IT professionals who could do what you think is so secret and dastardly, and do so on a regular basis. That includes me, by the way.
It also doesn't work the way you think it does. It's true that they can make an exact, sector by sector copy of your hard drive. However, it's not some outlandish expensive hardware that does this, it's actually software and there are even a number of free programs that will do it, though the gold standard of sector based drive imaging is Norton's Ghost. The newer versions are shit, but you go back to around version 9 or so and it's lightweight and very powerful. These images can also be taken over the network, they don't need direct physical access to work.
Nice as it is though, sector based imaging requires 100% unfettered access to the drive it will be imaging. This means that if they want your hard drive, and you are using it, they can't get it. Furthermore, without direct physical access, it will take DAYS to get the image of your hard drive transferred over the network - and the programs don't image first and then send so that after a half hour you wouldn't notice, no they image and send at the same time, so your computer will be unuseable for days until the upload finishes. Not exactly sneaky. Plus, if the network gets interrupted at any time, the image will be corrupt and unreadable.
Maybe you should get out a little? You know, go for a walk or something, enjoy the sunshine. Leave the tinfoil hat on for now, you don't want to rush things.
Ok, if the white cops post their opinions about the minority (black) residents of their city, it's discrimination.
WTF? That's not discrimination. Do you even know what the word means? It came to be used in regards to minorities in the work place for a reason. It actually means chosing one thing over another. For example, when deciding whether to eat an apple or an orange, you discriminate between them and choos the apple because you like red better, or you may choose the orange because it has more vitamine C. That's discrimination, the meaning doesn't changed when applied to minorities, just the criteria. When it relates to race, "descrimination" means choosing one person over another based solely (or largely) on their ethnicity. It's choosing the apple because it is red rather than for any nutritional value it may have. That's the kind of discrimination in the work force that is illegal.
You are right that discrimination is illegal when it comes to employer-employee interaction. Harassment is also illegal, though they tend to focus on certain criteria (like racial harassment). It is very difficult, however, for an employee who is not in a position of authority over another employee to discriminate them in a way that would be illegal.
At best this is a case of harassment, and even then it seems more like "what they talk about makes me uncomfortable" rather than going out of their way to intimidate their co-workers. I could be wrong, and if I am management should be taken to the cleaners for allowing such behavior in the workplace.
FTFA: "The suit alleges white officers post on and moderate the privately operated site, Domelights.com, both on and off the job."
Until our political & judicial system is as bad as it was in Soviet Russia or as bad as it seems Europe is getting, allegations do not equal evidence. The GP specifically said they gave no evidence, and you just backed him up with your quote from the article.
It's a real dangerous world when allegations are considered proof.
For my personal opinion, these people are entitled to host and discuss their personal website at work. Depending on the internet usage policies governing what websites they can or can't visit, viewing a personal website is fine on the job. However, these people must work together in life-or-death situations on a regular basis, and if some of these officers were causing division - intentionally or unintentionally - then management needs to deal with their staff. If it was unintentional (hard to imagine in this particular case), a simple "Hey, quit talking bout that shit at work, it makes your fellow cops uncomfortable" will probably do the trick. If it is intentional, they need to be moved or canned if they won't straighten up their act.
The lawsuit is only the correct way to go if the upper echelon were supporting these cops.
it's an interesting exception to general copyright rules.
What you must remember, when looking at things like this, is that copyright itself is an exception to public domain, not the other way around. Copyright was invented as a legal exception to the public's right to their culture in order to provide incentive for individuals to expand that culture. Without it the arts would be in horrible shape, for there would be little new art produced, because as soon as it is made public nobody really owns it, it is in the public domain.
As such, whenever you look at cases like these, you should look at it through the filter of "does this add to or detract from public culture?" Through that filter, you'll see that every decision the SCOTUS has heard regarding copyright has been in the intrest of increasing the overall gain to society. That goal is stated in the constitution, and where it is infringed it always comes down in the favor of society, not the artist. It's why the fair use doctrine came about. You could argue term limit extensions on copyright harm society, but those have only been tested in congress. As far as I know the question has only gone to the SCOTUS once, and it was not argued in a way that the SCOTUS saw suffecient reason to decide the issue. They argued technicalities instead of the societal harm, and the SCOTUS simply did not see sufficient reason to address their arguments at all. They basically took a pass on the issue, as is their purview in such situations.
Except that in the US, those photos are definitely NOT copyrighted. The express purpose of those photographs was to reproduce them as accurately as possible. Reproducing something as close as possible to the original is the exact opposite of creativity, regardless of the technical skill required to do so, and photos of this type on works that have expired copyright have already gone to court in the US. The verdict was that they do not have sufficient creative merit to qualify as an original work and as such, the photographer receives no copyright to the work. The photos are immediately placed in the public domain. The NPG even acknowledges this.
Whenever a band plays a 300 year old symphony, what they are playing is NEVER the original work. They play what is called an Arrangement. Arranging a symphony involves deciding which instruments play which parts, interleaving parts to create an interesting new sound, changing the mood of the piece by adding or removing crescendos, moving sections arround, repeating sections, etc. It's kind of like what a disc jocky does, except it is done with great care and re-performed. After the arrangement, the director adds his own style, determining things like speed, the punch of crescendos, the energy of the work, and often times the makeup of the orchestra itself. Last, the individual instrumentalists add their own little flair to the work, as each member of the orchestra plays each part slightly differently, more or less dependant upon the director.
Compare that with scanning the original piece into a computer and converting it to a format that can be played by a piece of software, and you have the difference between an original work and an attempted exact copy, just in a different format.
A better example would be hand-typed. Hand writing though would even be a stretch if your handwriting did not significantly add to the artistic value of the work. If you did so in caligraphy, or you drew in illustrations of some sort to enhance the work, yeah, that would probably qualify. Otherwise you'd have to argue its artistic merits in courts, for most people just hand writing it would not be seen as enough.
A lot of these judgements of artistic merit and originality are subjective. There are some guidelines but it's still largely of "well, does it add to the piece?". Some will always say no, some will always say no. The test is, would most people think it is a significant creative change?
For a lot of things, it has not been decided yet simply because it hasn't gone to court yet. Others, like the type of photographs in question, have been decided on in the US. Apparently this type of reproduction has never gone to court to the UK, so even there it's uncertain.
I'm not sure how it is in the UK, honestly, but in the US courts don't attempt to adjudicate matters where they have no jurisdiction. The only exceptions to that are when congress acts to extend jurisdiction to a US controlled area outside the US, or when the interests of a fair trial demand moving to a new location. Neither of those situations allow someone in the US to sue someone in another country to sue for something that is legal in that country.
Since the initial download of these photos from the server in the UK was obviously 100% legal in the UK, and the copying occured in the US - far outside any UK court's jurisdiction - I'm not shure how they would even bring a case up. Would they attempt to sue them for something that is legal in the UK? Or would they attempt to get a UK court to let them sue citizens in another country for something that happened in another country and which is not illegal for them to do in that country? The second situation would most probably be laughed at as a kangaroo court, it makes no sense.
Honestly, I see this as a no-win for the NPG. I can't imagine a situation where the guy who posted the photos would lose anything in this case, even any fines or anything in the UK.
Aaand that's why you'd never make a living as a photographer. You don't know shit about photography.
Good photography requires quite a bit more than just "choosing what to shoot". Ever compare a photo you've taken on a camping trip to one in, say, National Geographic? The NG photo is significantly better, and most of the reasons for that are not technical in nature.
For a real life personal example, my dad has a framed photograph that he took of a sunset in Hawaii. It is a gorgeous photo, and I doubt he'll ever take another like it. The only thing that gives it away as an amature photo is the fact that he forgot to take the time stamp off, so the date in time is stamped in one corner. Without that he could probably sell it, really it would make a great poster or a referance for a painting. Now my roommate, she studied to be a photojournalist, and before that a digital artist. In fact I bought and framed a piece of her digital art to show off in my living room and she hates it because it isn't her best work (it's my favorite though, heh). I spent $200 on the frame to make sure it complimented the piece properly, it's that good. Most of the photos she has taken in the last three or four years are as good or better than the photo my dad took. She actually does sell her photos, and gets cash money for them (though that's not her profession, she went a different route after getting her PJ degree).
In fact, I've picked up some of the techniques she uses to shoot a photo, and it has greatly improved my photography (i.e. right place right time I could probably match my dad's photo), but I will never be able to shoot as well as my roommate does without years of study and practice. She also has a serious creative knack that I lack, at least for art.
And before you say "Technique, see? It's all technical!", a brush stroke is all technique too, but knowing how to stroke the brush properly does not make you a painter. It's exactly choosing where and how to place each brush stroke that makes the painter a good artist. The same is true for photography - if you don't know how to make a good photograph you'll only make a good one if you are lucky, but just because you DO know how to make a good photograph (technically) does NOT mean your photograph will be beautiful!
All that said, and back on topic, the Berne Convention applies US law to UK (and other) copyright holders' works in the US, not the other way around. No matter how much the NPG wishes it to be so, UK law will never be applied in this case, and under US law those photographs are public domain for exactly the reasons you despise photography: these photos, while technically difficult, have absolutely zero creative merit. The are not only duplicates of the original work, they are duplicates with the intent to eliminate any new originality in the photos. This is the exact OPPOSITE of what US copyright law requires.
That's not how it works. The Berne Convention does only three things: It sets a minimum copyright term standard - 50 years after the death of the artists for all works except photography and cinematography, 50 years after the first showing for cinematography, and 25 years from the year a photograph was created. It must be automatic - the US initially did not sign the convention for this reason, but we came around and changed our copyright law to comply. Lastly, works by foreign authors must be given the same rights as a domestic author would recieve for the same work. Applying term extensions to foreign works is optional, some countries do and some don't. They call that "the rule of the shorter term".
Thus, when the US extended copyright terms, it did jack diddly for anybody outside the US. They may or may not even apply for them within the US. US copyright law only applies to copyright cases inside the US. It does not, nor has it ever, applied to cases outside the US. The reverse is also true, and UK law will not apply here. After the Berne Convention the copyright laws of signatory countries jived as far as minimum standards go, but the laws still vary by country, and it is the local laws that apply, not any foreign law. If a work would never be recognized as having copyright in a country for a domestic author, then it will never be recognized for a foreign author in that country either.
Here is the full text of the convention, but Wikipedia is easier to understand.
Yeah, when what it's ACTUALLY saying is that it's ok for someone else to shoot missiles in your country if you are allowed to shoot them in your country.
That's completely different. And since in the US, since you can't shoot missiles around willy nilly, the NPG won't get to shoot them around here either.
Foreign authors are given the same rights and privileges to copyrighted material as domestic authors in any country that signed the Convention.
The poster above me has it right, UK law does not apply, US law applies to the UK copyright holder's work in the US. In the US, photographic copies of the kind in this case are considered to be public domain since the same work by a US artist would also be considered public domain.
That said, what I'd like to see is some sort of compromise, 3,000+ photos is a lot, and potentially damaging to a museum that has few revenue streams besides government funding.
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That's why the OP uses three VM's with varying degrees of security.
One VM has very low security, effectively nothing beyond basic security (i.e. less than an anti-virus). This is ONLY used for stuff she could give a rat's ass about - her examples for the types of things she would not do on this VM were things like online shopping or banking. Nothing with personal information or anything else she might not want compromised. She starts with a fresh image every week.
The second VM is a well secured system and is meant for doing things that are not absolutely critical, but are still sensitive and need protecting. She would not NOT do general web browsing on this machine, that is what the other is for. She would also not use it for banking, as it is not secure enough. It would be for things like shopping, giving out personal information over the web to trusted sites, etc.
The third VM is locked down like fort knox. Instead of using the "block X" methodology for securing the system, it uses the "Block everything except X". For example, all incoming and outgoing ports would be blocked except 443, for https traffic. All external hosts would be blocked except for her banking site or a very small number of similarly secured and sensitive websites. Basically, this system would be setup so securely that it would be practically unuseable except for what it is specifically intended to use.
So, Noscript would only be on the second or third VM's (blacklist on second, whitelist on third), neither of which you would use for generic browsing, and you should have no trouble at all.
She also addresses the shortcomings of her system, and that she is not completely satisfied with it because, theoretically at least, there is no reason an attack on one of the VMs should not make it to the host machine. In practice that doesn't seem to be the case, probably because there aren't many, if any, attacks in the wild geared toward hitting the host machine running a VM directly. It also probably helps that her host machine is OSx, and her VMs are Windows, making her a very small target.
"Sir, I'm afraid you've gone mad with power."
"Of course I have! Have you ever tried going mad without power? It's boring, nobody listens to you!"
Poor Belgium, nobody ever thinks they are a threat, do they?
Look, just because you don't like the fact that people make things illegal just because someone doesn't like them does NOT mean it should be illegal to make things illegal because someone doesn't like them for no other reason than because you don't like them.
Anybody remember how long it takes to partition and format a fresh hard drive on Windows as opposed to the minute or two it takes in Gparted from a liveCD? Doesn't need it, but it makes things a hell of a lot quicker.
Dude, when was the last time you used Windows, back in the 3.1 days? Diskpart is pretty darn fast, but really all the tools these days are. I've used both gparted and diskpart recently, and I'd have a really hard time saying gparted was faster than diskpart. Of course, the reverse is true as well.
Also, I'd prefer a WindowsPE disk for fixing any issues with windows these days. It's basically a 150mb (more or less, depending on what tools you add) bootable version of Vista. It runs almost all windows programs without a hitch, and is very very quick. There's some stuff that linux just can't do for windows.
You've got it a little mixed up. When we vote for President (and we do vote for president, just not completely directly) we are voting for the makeup of the electoral college. This in no way depends on the -vote- for the house of representatives. The number of representatives to the electoral college that a state recieves depends only on the number of representatives that state has in congress - which is their house of rep + two senators. The minimum is three, there is no maximum but it is around 130 or so, I forget how many representatives california has.
How a state votes in its electoral college members is up to the state, but it is always determined in a way that is linked to a vote of the people at some level. A state could, for example, have the electoral college members be chosen by the state legislature if they wanted. In reality the way it is set up for most states is parties register to the election officials who they will be supporting, and that presidential candidate is put on the ballot. The party who's candidate who gets the most votes then gets to choose who the delegates will be for the electoral college, and the electoral college votes for president. Some states actually split the vote, and each party sends the number of delegates equal to the percentage of the vote they recieved. As far as I know no state deviates from the format any further than this.
Either way, elections are held for president every four years, no matter what system is used. That have made it convenient and use a system that technically is not a direct vote for president does not change the fact that, for all except borderline cases we do, in a practical sense, vote directly for president.
First off, Mean Time Between Failures does not mean what you think it means. That is simply the average time between failures, and is in no way a guarantee that your particular tape drive will last anywhere near that long.
Second, most modern hard drives, particularly low speed hard drives, have a MTBF in the neighborhood of 500,000 hours and up. As your own personal experience suggests, that does not mean the drive will last 75 years. It would, however, if you used it for say three years and then archived it and used a new disk.
Third, hard drives, even low speed drives, are significantly faster than tape drives.
Fourth, hard drives, especially low speed drives, are signifficantly less expensive than tape drives.
Since you seemed more concerned with MTBF than any other statistic, why not spend a little more (ok, a lot more, but you're obviously not concerned with the least expensive option) and go with SSD storage? You get MTBFs in the neighborhood of 1 million+ hours then.
Seriously man, I work with large tape backup systems, and tapes fail just as often as hard drives, and they tend to be less robust. The only thing I can say for them is that they seem to do pretty well when thrown in a box and shoved in a corner for a few years. If you use them a lot, there is a heck of a lot more that can wear out in a tape drive than in a hard drive.
Yes
I don't follow, where's the ???
That's cause it's not a Wiki.
It's only bad if your admin is shit. I'm assuming you set it up? ;)
You realize that most large companies have either IBM, HP, or Fujitsu running their IT department, right? Mostly off-This is nothing more than a new kind of outsourcing, separating themselves even further from having to deal with IT decisions.
To protect themselves, they have NDA's, well written contracts, and the teams of lawyers necessary to sue the shit out of the company handling their IT if any of the "dangerous things" you imagine will happen, happen.
"Cloud Computing" is just the next wave in the movement to get things out of the responsibilities of the local business and into someone else's. It saves the business money and headache when someone else takes care of it as their specialty and simply charges a fee for the service.
I've got news for you, Microsoft and Google aren't comming up with this stuff in a vacuum and enticing customers to take the bait for their newest useless product. What they are actually doing is designing products in response to the needs and desires of their customers. It's the way service-oriented businesses grow and flourish.
My company has somewhere in the neighborhood of half a million employees. Seems to work pretty well for them, they use sharepoint for all sorts of things.
Plus the fact that it intigrates with outlook, which has communicator (a secure internal version of Live Messenger), and Live Meeting intigrates with all three.
Done properly, the Microsoft intigrations greatly improve workflows for many many people. Done poorly, of course, they suck monkey balls, but anything can be that way.
They can take images of the whole disks quite easily (there are hardware tools for doing this)
Dude, you've either been reading way too much or not nearly enough. That's not some special, secret technology they have. Hell, it isn't even hardware based. There are probably 40 million IT professionals who could do what you think is so secret and dastardly, and do so on a regular basis. That includes me, by the way.
It also doesn't work the way you think it does. It's true that they can make an exact, sector by sector copy of your hard drive. However, it's not some outlandish expensive hardware that does this, it's actually software and there are even a number of free programs that will do it, though the gold standard of sector based drive imaging is Norton's Ghost. The newer versions are shit, but you go back to around version 9 or so and it's lightweight and very powerful. These images can also be taken over the network, they don't need direct physical access to work.
Nice as it is though, sector based imaging requires 100% unfettered access to the drive it will be imaging. This means that if they want your hard drive, and you are using it, they can't get it. Furthermore, without direct physical access, it will take DAYS to get the image of your hard drive transferred over the network - and the programs don't image first and then send so that after a half hour you wouldn't notice, no they image and send at the same time, so your computer will be unuseable for days until the upload finishes. Not exactly sneaky. Plus, if the network gets interrupted at any time, the image will be corrupt and unreadable.
Maybe you should get out a little? You know, go for a walk or something, enjoy the sunshine. Leave the tinfoil hat on for now, you don't want to rush things.
Ok, if the white cops post their opinions about the minority (black) residents of their city, it's discrimination.
WTF? That's not discrimination. Do you even know what the word means? It came to be used in regards to minorities in the work place for a reason. It actually means chosing one thing over another. For example, when deciding whether to eat an apple or an orange, you discriminate between them and choos the apple because you like red better, or you may choose the orange because it has more vitamine C. That's discrimination, the meaning doesn't changed when applied to minorities, just the criteria. When it relates to race, "descrimination" means choosing one person over another based solely (or largely) on their ethnicity. It's choosing the apple because it is red rather than for any nutritional value it may have. That's the kind of discrimination in the work force that is illegal.
You are right that discrimination is illegal when it comes to employer-employee interaction. Harassment is also illegal, though they tend to focus on certain criteria (like racial harassment). It is very difficult, however, for an employee who is not in a position of authority over another employee to discriminate them in a way that would be illegal.
At best this is a case of harassment, and even then it seems more like "what they talk about makes me uncomfortable" rather than going out of their way to intimidate their co-workers. I could be wrong, and if I am management should be taken to the cleaners for allowing such behavior in the workplace.
FTFA: "The suit alleges white officers post on and moderate the privately operated site, Domelights.com, both on and off the job."
Until our political & judicial system is as bad as it was in Soviet Russia or as bad as it seems Europe is getting, allegations do not equal evidence. The GP specifically said they gave no evidence, and you just backed him up with your quote from the article.
It's a real dangerous world when allegations are considered proof.
For my personal opinion, these people are entitled to host and discuss their personal website at work. Depending on the internet usage policies governing what websites they can or can't visit, viewing a personal website is fine on the job. However, these people must work together in life-or-death situations on a regular basis, and if some of these officers were causing division - intentionally or unintentionally - then management needs to deal with their staff. If it was unintentional (hard to imagine in this particular case), a simple "Hey, quit talking bout that shit at work, it makes your fellow cops uncomfortable" will probably do the trick. If it is intentional, they need to be moved or canned if they won't straighten up their act.
The lawsuit is only the correct way to go if the upper echelon were supporting these cops.
it's an interesting exception to general copyright rules.
What you must remember, when looking at things like this, is that copyright itself is an exception to public domain, not the other way around. Copyright was invented as a legal exception to the public's right to their culture in order to provide incentive for individuals to expand that culture. Without it the arts would be in horrible shape, for there would be little new art produced, because as soon as it is made public nobody really owns it, it is in the public domain.
As such, whenever you look at cases like these, you should look at it through the filter of "does this add to or detract from public culture?" Through that filter, you'll see that every decision the SCOTUS has heard regarding copyright has been in the intrest of increasing the overall gain to society. That goal is stated in the constitution, and where it is infringed it always comes down in the favor of society, not the artist. It's why the fair use doctrine came about. You could argue term limit extensions on copyright harm society, but those have only been tested in congress. As far as I know the question has only gone to the SCOTUS once, and it was not argued in a way that the SCOTUS saw suffecient reason to decide the issue. They argued technicalities instead of the societal harm, and the SCOTUS simply did not see sufficient reason to address their arguments at all. They basically took a pass on the issue, as is their purview in such situations.
Dunno why I said director there, in an orchestra they are called conductors. A good one makes all the difference in the quality of a performance.
these photos are probably also copyrighted.
Except that in the US, those photos are definitely NOT copyrighted. The express purpose of those photographs was to reproduce them as accurately as possible. Reproducing something as close as possible to the original is the exact opposite of creativity, regardless of the technical skill required to do so, and photos of this type on works that have expired copyright have already gone to court in the US. The verdict was that they do not have sufficient creative merit to qualify as an original work and as such, the photographer receives no copyright to the work. The photos are immediately placed in the public domain. The NPG even acknowledges this.
Whenever a band plays a 300 year old symphony, what they are playing is NEVER the original work. They play what is called an Arrangement. Arranging a symphony involves deciding which instruments play which parts, interleaving parts to create an interesting new sound, changing the mood of the piece by adding or removing crescendos, moving sections arround, repeating sections, etc. It's kind of like what a disc jocky does, except it is done with great care and re-performed. After the arrangement, the director adds his own style, determining things like speed, the punch of crescendos, the energy of the work, and often times the makeup of the orchestra itself. Last, the individual instrumentalists add their own little flair to the work, as each member of the orchestra plays each part slightly differently, more or less dependant upon the director.
Compare that with scanning the original piece into a computer and converting it to a format that can be played by a piece of software, and you have the difference between an original work and an attempted exact copy, just in a different format.
A better example would be hand-typed. Hand writing though would even be a stretch if your handwriting did not significantly add to the artistic value of the work. If you did so in caligraphy, or you drew in illustrations of some sort to enhance the work, yeah, that would probably qualify. Otherwise you'd have to argue its artistic merits in courts, for most people just hand writing it would not be seen as enough.
A lot of these judgements of artistic merit and originality are subjective. There are some guidelines but it's still largely of "well, does it add to the piece?". Some will always say no, some will always say no. The test is, would most people think it is a significant creative change?
For a lot of things, it has not been decided yet simply because it hasn't gone to court yet. Others, like the type of photographs in question, have been decided on in the US. Apparently this type of reproduction has never gone to court to the UK, so even there it's uncertain.
I'm not sure how it is in the UK, honestly, but in the US courts don't attempt to adjudicate matters where they have no jurisdiction. The only exceptions to that are when congress acts to extend jurisdiction to a US controlled area outside the US, or when the interests of a fair trial demand moving to a new location. Neither of those situations allow someone in the US to sue someone in another country to sue for something that is legal in that country.
Since the initial download of these photos from the server in the UK was obviously 100% legal in the UK, and the copying occured in the US - far outside any UK court's jurisdiction - I'm not shure how they would even bring a case up. Would they attempt to sue them for something that is legal in the UK? Or would they attempt to get a UK court to let them sue citizens in another country for something that happened in another country and which is not illegal for them to do in that country? The second situation would most probably be laughed at as a kangaroo court, it makes no sense.
Honestly, I see this as a no-win for the NPG. I can't imagine a situation where the guy who posted the photos would lose anything in this case, even any fines or anything in the UK.
Aaand that's why you'd never make a living as a photographer. You don't know shit about photography.
Good photography requires quite a bit more than just "choosing what to shoot". Ever compare a photo you've taken on a camping trip to one in, say, National Geographic? The NG photo is significantly better, and most of the reasons for that are not technical in nature.
For a real life personal example, my dad has a framed photograph that he took of a sunset in Hawaii. It is a gorgeous photo, and I doubt he'll ever take another like it. The only thing that gives it away as an amature photo is the fact that he forgot to take the time stamp off, so the date in time is stamped in one corner. Without that he could probably sell it, really it would make a great poster or a referance for a painting. Now my roommate, she studied to be a photojournalist, and before that a digital artist. In fact I bought and framed a piece of her digital art to show off in my living room and she hates it because it isn't her best work (it's my favorite though, heh). I spent $200 on the frame to make sure it complimented the piece properly, it's that good. Most of the photos she has taken in the last three or four years are as good or better than the photo my dad took. She actually does sell her photos, and gets cash money for them (though that's not her profession, she went a different route after getting her PJ degree).
In fact, I've picked up some of the techniques she uses to shoot a photo, and it has greatly improved my photography (i.e. right place right time I could probably match my dad's photo), but I will never be able to shoot as well as my roommate does without years of study and practice. She also has a serious creative knack that I lack, at least for art.
And before you say "Technique, see? It's all technical!", a brush stroke is all technique too, but knowing how to stroke the brush properly does not make you a painter. It's exactly choosing where and how to place each brush stroke that makes the painter a good artist. The same is true for photography - if you don't know how to make a good photograph you'll only make a good one if you are lucky, but just because you DO know how to make a good photograph (technically) does NOT mean your photograph will be beautiful!
All that said, and back on topic, the Berne Convention applies US law to UK (and other) copyright holders' works in the US, not the other way around. No matter how much the NPG wishes it to be so, UK law will never be applied in this case, and under US law those photographs are public domain for exactly the reasons you despise photography: these photos, while technically difficult, have absolutely zero creative merit. The are not only duplicates of the original work, they are duplicates with the intent to eliminate any new originality in the photos. This is the exact OPPOSITE of what US copyright law requires.
That's not how it works. The Berne Convention does only three things: It sets a minimum copyright term standard - 50 years after the death of the artists for all works except photography and cinematography, 50 years after the first showing for cinematography, and 25 years from the year a photograph was created. It must be automatic - the US initially did not sign the convention for this reason, but we came around and changed our copyright law to comply. Lastly, works by foreign authors must be given the same rights as a domestic author would recieve for the same work. Applying term extensions to foreign works is optional, some countries do and some don't. They call that "the rule of the shorter term".
Thus, when the US extended copyright terms, it did jack diddly for anybody outside the US. They may or may not even apply for them within the US. US copyright law only applies to copyright cases inside the US. It does not, nor has it ever, applied to cases outside the US. The reverse is also true, and UK law will not apply here. After the Berne Convention the copyright laws of signatory countries jived as far as minimum standards go, but the laws still vary by country, and it is the local laws that apply, not any foreign law. If a work would never be recognized as having copyright in a country for a domestic author, then it will never be recognized for a foreign author in that country either.
Here is the full text of the convention, but Wikipedia is easier to understand.
Yeah, when what it's ACTUALLY saying is that it's ok for someone else to shoot missiles in your country if you are allowed to shoot them in your country.
That's completely different. And since in the US, since you can't shoot missiles around willy nilly, the NPG won't get to shoot them around here either.
Per your link:
Foreign authors are given the same rights and privileges to copyrighted material as domestic authors in any country that signed the Convention.
The poster above me has it right, UK law does not apply, US law applies to the UK copyright holder's work in the US. In the US, photographic copies of the kind in this case are considered to be public domain since the same work by a US artist would also be considered public domain.
That said, what I'd like to see is some sort of compromise, 3,000+ photos is a lot, and potentially damaging to a museum that has few revenue streams besides government funding.