The creation of orphan works is the greatest crime of all. And I have to wonder if the RIAA/etc are trying to use an orphan work strategy to suppress and destroy vast amounts of older works as a mechanism to encourage you to buy their new stuff.
There is a very simple way to fix the orphan work problem. First 10 years copyright is free. For each 10 years after that it has to be renewed with a payment of say $5,000. If your work isn't generating enough income to cover a $500/yr renewal fee it isn't economically viable. The artist can then choose to let the work go into the public domain or continue paying $5,000 renewals.
Artists will say, it's my work why do I have to pay the fee? Well it's not 100% your work, everything that is created is based on previous things that existed. Think of the $500/yr as a royalty payment to those previous artists via the government. We could even use those copyright extension payments to promote the creation of public art.
Now both sides are happy. If a work is economically viable keep paying the $500/yr indefinitely. If it isn't, let the work go into the public domain. An excellent side effect of this is the creation of a database of who is paying fees which will tell us exactly which works are still protected.
Download a Linux distro like Ubuntu and have fun. There is far more free software available today than you can possible consume. Hack on the kernel, set up a web server with LAMP, play with Java, hack on Open Office, use Eclipse for an IDE, etc. Source code for everything is freely available. The world of software has changed immensely from the 1980's.
There is very little bloat and compatibility code in the Linux kernel. Look at vmlinuz-* in/boot. That's your kernel. Mine is 2MB. Do 'lsmod' - add in another 3-4MB for device drivers (ignore the 11MB Nvidia driver). Your OS is under 10MB of code.
Much of the kernel is hardware specific. If you don't have the hardware, it doesn't load. The size of the kernel is a reflection on all of the varied hardware it supports, not bloat.
The kernel is getting mature. The x86 portion is getting very mature. I'm been working on OSes for 30 years and I don't want to work on Linux memory management or scheduling - it is too much work. Same for networking and file systems.
However, there are some large, untapped areas with lots to do. Graphics - AMD and Intel have released their 3D documentation. Kernel graphics support is no where near completion. It will be several years before this code is mature. It is also likely that someone will create a replacement for X in the next five years.
An IR subsystem is being created right now. It should go into the next kernel release. Only a few types of remote controls are supported. There are lots of protocols left to work on. Takes about five days work to support a new protocol.
Wireless sensors. Support for 802.15.4 6lowpan and ROLL is missing from the kernel. This is important for smart energy. We don't have RF4CE support either.
Embedded CPUs - there is an endless pile of work writing drivers for embedded CPUs. Even common embedded CPUs are missing half of their drivers.
Spend the money on the MoCa adapters and get a solution that will work. MoCa is not point to point, it is a LAN. You can hook all of this cable together and have a LAN all over the house with no new wires. Your TV can run on the same coax. This is done in almost every install of Verizon FIOS. If you are really cheap look for NIM100 on ebay.
Video ads that automatically play
Animated ads
Blinking ads
Ads that automatically talk
Ads that automatically popup
Large multimedia ads on a wireless link
I don't want my web pages to move or make noise unless I tell them to. Telling them to means clicking - not mouse over.
Unfortunately the ads blockers catch all of the other ads too. I don't mind ads that behave but the moving/talking ones are so annoying that I will block everything to get rid of them.
The actual presentation from the meeting is included in the article.
I am anxiously awaiting for this to be approved: "Mandate a home gateway device. Require MVPDs to provide a small, low-cost device whose functionality is to bridge the proprietary MVPD network elements (conditional access, tuning & reception functions) to common, open standard, widely used in home communications interfaces; enables a retail navigation device to operate on all MVPD platforms."
I'm hoping that means unencrypted channel streams in-house over Ethernet.
Post an ordered queue of all of the pending patents sorted by what the patent office perceives to be the best to worst patents. Pick the top three patents from the queue and only issue three patents a day. Allow everyone to fight over their place in the queue.
This provides a giant incentive for everyone to find prior art that invalidates or damages all of the patents in the queue in front of them. It also creates a giant incentive to provide perfect applications for truly outstanding ideas in order to convince the patent office to move you closer to the front of the queue.
No one is denied the opportunity to file a patent, but it has to be a really good idea in order to get to the front of the queue. If not your patent may sit in the queue indefinitely.
Limiting us to three patents a day would make patents truly valuable again.
I agree that the ISPs should charge for handling DCMA notices. Is there any rule that says they can't? $1000 is excessive but $100 each is not. The ISP is not the one being charged with infringement. It is clear that the content industry is trying to transfer the burden of policing and negative publicity on to an innocent third party, the ISP. The content industry should not be allowed to shift this burden for free. If they want to pursue insane business strategies they can do it on their own dime.
The world has changed and big content has to learn to live in the new world. Putting a police officer in every teenager's bedroom has tremendous costs associated with it. If big content wants to take that route they should bear the costs and not try and shift them onto a third party. Might be a whole lot cheaper to just sell the content in a form that people actually want.
x10 signaling is slow and notoriously unreliable. But what do you want from a signaling system that can be implemented with fifty cents worth of parts? Insteon costs about $3 to implement. It is much more reliable and 10x faster. 802.15.4 radio costs $5 to implement and its 10x faster than Insteon. You have to pick where you want to be in this spectrum.
Using a Linux kernel doesn't require you to release the user space source code. All of their interesting stuff is in user space. Their $10,000 home controllers are just normal x86 PCs running proprietary software.
I had a Control4 quote done for my house. $40,000 just for the lighting system. I stopped listening when they started talking audio distribution. It worked out to over $300 per switch and outlet. Needless to say I didn't buy the system.
Random Google search says US spent $4,920,813,719 subsidizing corn production in 2006. Corn gets turned into HFC (High Fructose Corn) Syrup. HFC is what makes most sodas and candies sweet. Fresh berries are $6.00 a pint in my grocery store. Make me president and I'll switch that $5B from corn to subsidizing the production of fresh produce.
Rosetta is a city in Egypt where the stone was found. So every stone in the city is a Rosetta stone. Google should do turnabout and counter sue the company for trademarking a generic term. I'm sure the city of Rosetta wasn't asked for permission to use their name.
If anyone really cared, you could build this today. Just generate one-time use, random URL links in each page view. Now nothing can be linked to except for the home page.
Microsoft has plenty of money. If they don't like the way the mainframe market looks then they should enter and build their own. IBM has already been through the anti-trust wringer for their mainframe hardware and has spent decades under supervision by the Justice Department.
The article is missing the fact that T3 bought it's technology from Platform Solutions. Platform Solutions was acquired by IBM. Without reselling Platform Solutions' product I don't see how T3 has any offerings that IBM competes with. They look like a distributor that has been cut off form a supplier, that's not grounds for anti-trust.
They should have subpoenaed the bands to testify since it was their music that was being infringed. It would have been very interesting to hear each band's statements about where they stand on having the music copied on the Internet. Say the wrong thing and they'll destroy their fan base.
Since this is supposed to be about compensating the artists, it would be interesting to have the bands testify on what percentage of these settlements they receive. How can it make sense to award $2M when the artists probably aren't going to see any of it?
Punitive damages should go to the US Treasury, actual damages should go to the victim.
Why are you knocking the court and judges? Their job is to apply the law no matter how stupid the law is. Courts are supposed to apply the law, not make it. It's Congress that needs to fix these messed up laws. But unfortunately we have elected a Congress that can be bought by Disney.
Slashdot Mirror
The creation of orphan works is the greatest crime of all. And I have to wonder if the RIAA/etc are trying to use an orphan work strategy to suppress and destroy vast amounts of older works as a mechanism to encourage you to buy their new stuff.
There is a very simple way to fix the orphan work problem. First 10 years copyright is free. For each 10 years after that it has to be renewed with a payment of say $5,000. If your work isn't generating enough income to cover a $500/yr renewal fee it isn't economically viable. The artist can then choose to let the work go into the public domain or continue paying $5,000 renewals.
Artists will say, it's my work why do I have to pay the fee? Well it's not 100% your work, everything that is created is based on previous things that existed. Think of the $500/yr as a royalty payment to those previous artists via the government. We could even use those copyright extension payments to promote the creation of public art.
Now both sides are happy. If a work is economically viable keep paying the $500/yr indefinitely. If it isn't, let the work go into the public domain. An excellent side effect of this is the creation of a database of who is paying fees which will tell us exactly which works are still protected.
Download a Linux distro like Ubuntu and have fun. There is far more free software available today than you can possible consume. Hack on the kernel, set up a web server with LAMP, play with Java, hack on Open Office, use Eclipse for an IDE, etc. Source code for everything is freely available. The world of software has changed immensely from the 1980's.
Limit the USPTO to issuing 365 patents a year. It has to choose the best patent each day from the pile of applications.
That would make the patents truly valuable and stop the rest of this nonsense.
There is very little bloat and compatibility code in the Linux kernel. Look at vmlinuz-* in /boot. That's your kernel. Mine is 2MB. Do 'lsmod' - add in another 3-4MB for device drivers (ignore the 11MB Nvidia driver). Your OS is under 10MB of code.
Much of the kernel is hardware specific. If you don't have the hardware, it doesn't load. The size of the kernel is a reflection on all of the varied hardware it supports, not bloat.
The kernel is getting mature. The x86 portion is getting very mature. I'm been working on OSes for 30 years and I don't want to work on Linux memory management or scheduling - it is too much work. Same for networking and file systems.
However, there are some large, untapped areas with lots to do. Graphics - AMD and Intel have released their 3D documentation. Kernel graphics support is no where near completion. It will be several years before this code is mature. It is also likely that someone will create a replacement for X in the next five years.
An IR subsystem is being created right now. It should go into the next kernel release. Only a few types of remote controls are supported. There are lots of protocols left to work on. Takes about five days work to support a new protocol.
Wireless sensors. Support for 802.15.4 6lowpan and ROLL is missing from the kernel. This is important for smart energy. We don't have RF4CE support either.
Embedded CPUs - there is an endless pile of work writing drivers for embedded CPUs. Even common embedded CPUs are missing half of their drivers.
I'm sure other people can expand on this list.
Use simultaneous dual band APs. Push everyone possible to 5Ghz.
Spend the money on the MoCa adapters and get a solution that will work. MoCa is not point to point, it is a LAN. You can hook all of this cable together and have a LAN all over the house with no new wires. Your TV can run on the same coax. This is done in almost every install of Verizon FIOS. If you are really cheap look for NIM100 on ebay.
I use an ad blocker to stop:
Video ads that automatically play
Animated ads
Blinking ads
Ads that automatically talk
Ads that automatically popup
Large multimedia ads on a wireless link
I don't want my web pages to move or make noise unless I tell them to. Telling them to means clicking - not mouse over.
Unfortunately the ads blockers catch all of the other ads too. I don't mind ads that behave but the moving/talking ones are so annoying that I will block everything to get rid of them.
FCC Takes on Cable But Not Carriers With National Broadband Plan
The actual presentation from the meeting is included in the article.
I am anxiously awaiting for this to be approved: "Mandate a home gateway device. Require MVPDs to provide a small, low-cost device whose functionality is to bridge the proprietary MVPD network elements (conditional access, tuning & reception functions) to common, open standard, widely used in home communications interfaces; enables a retail navigation device to operate on all MVPD platforms."
I'm hoping that means unencrypted channel streams in-house over Ethernet.
Post an ordered queue of all of the pending patents sorted by what the patent office perceives to be the best to worst patents. Pick the top three patents from the queue and only issue three patents a day. Allow everyone to fight over their place in the queue.
This provides a giant incentive for everyone to find prior art that invalidates or damages all of the patents in the queue in front of them. It also creates a giant incentive to provide perfect applications for truly outstanding ideas in order to convince the patent office to move you closer to the front of the queue.
No one is denied the opportunity to file a patent, but it has to be a really good idea in order to get to the front of the queue. If not your patent may sit in the queue indefinitely.
Limiting us to three patents a day would make patents truly valuable again.
Does this make the US dollar spam? We print about five trillion a year.
I agree that the ISPs should charge for handling DCMA notices. Is there any rule that says they can't? $1000 is excessive but $100 each is not. The ISP is not the one being charged with infringement. It is clear that the content industry is trying to transfer the burden of policing and negative publicity on to an innocent third party, the ISP. The content industry should not be allowed to shift this burden for free. If they want to pursue insane business strategies they can do it on their own dime.
The world has changed and big content has to learn to live in the new world. Putting a police officer in every teenager's bedroom has tremendous costs associated with it. If big content wants to take that route they should bear the costs and not try and shift them onto a third party. Might be a whole lot cheaper to just sell the content in a form that people actually want.
x10 signaling is slow and notoriously unreliable. But what do you want from a signaling system that can be implemented with fifty cents worth of parts? Insteon costs about $3 to implement. It is much more reliable and 10x faster. 802.15.4 radio costs $5 to implement and its 10x faster than Insteon. You have to pick where you want to be in this spectrum.
Using a Linux kernel doesn't require you to release the user space source code. All of their interesting stuff is in user space. Their $10,000 home controllers are just normal x86 PCs running proprietary software.
I had a Control4 quote done for my house. $40,000 just for the lighting system. I stopped listening when they started talking audio distribution. It worked out to over $300 per switch and outlet. Needless to say I didn't buy the system.
Zigbee is not Free Software friendly. Licensing is GPL incompatible and requires payment.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zigbee
Pogo Plug is a commercialized Sheeva Plug. It may be easier to buy.
http://www.pogoplug.com/
Sheeva/Pogo is the best solution to this problem that I am aware of. 5W and $99.
Random Google search says US spent $4,920,813,719 subsidizing corn production in 2006. Corn gets turned into HFC (High Fructose Corn) Syrup. HFC is what makes most sodas and candies sweet. Fresh berries are $6.00 a pint in my grocery store. Make me president and I'll switch that $5B from corn to subsidizing the production of fresh produce.
Rosetta is a city in Egypt where the stone was found. So every stone in the city is a Rosetta stone. Google should do turnabout and counter sue the company for trademarking a generic term. I'm sure the city of Rosetta wasn't asked for permission to use their name.
If anyone really cared, you could build this today. Just generate one-time use, random URL links in each page view. Now nothing can be linked to except for the home page.
Start a little further north and start in dark with charged batteries. They never follow the equator exactly on these around the world records.
The plane is too slow. If they had a faster design it could fly around the world in continuous daylight.
Microsoft has plenty of money. If they don't like the way the mainframe market looks then they should enter and build their own. IBM has already been through the anti-trust wringer for their mainframe hardware and has spent decades under supervision by the Justice Department.
The article is missing the fact that T3 bought it's technology from Platform Solutions. Platform Solutions was acquired by IBM. Without reselling Platform Solutions' product I don't see how T3 has any offerings that IBM competes with. They look like a distributor that has been cut off form a supplier, that's not grounds for anti-trust.
They should have subpoenaed the bands to testify since it was their music that was being infringed. It would have been very interesting to hear each band's statements about where they stand on having the music copied on the Internet. Say the wrong thing and they'll destroy their fan base.
Since this is supposed to be about compensating the artists, it would be interesting to have the bands testify on what percentage of these settlements they receive. How can it make sense to award $2M when the artists probably aren't going to see any of it?
Punitive damages should go to the US Treasury, actual damages should go to the victim.
Why are you knocking the court and judges? Their job is to apply the law no matter how stupid the law is. Courts are supposed to apply the law, not make it. It's Congress that needs to fix these messed up laws. But unfortunately we have elected a Congress that can be bought by Disney.