In particular as spaces on a board game revolving around the exchange of money in real estate transactions, yes. That's how the American copyright system works - names are categorized. The popular example is Apple Records and Apple Computer, though there's no shortage of other examples; ever notice that on Burlington Coat Factories there's a message at the bottom that says "not affiliated with Burlington Industries?" The story behind that is great. Look it up.
So, yes and no. Parker Brothers doesn't have copyrights to all uses of that name forever and ever amen. However, in conjunction with the specific set of thirty (or whatever) specific other names and used in that sort of game, yes, they're very covered by copyright.
In essence though not in spirit, it's the same argument as asking whether I can copyright a collection of words. Well, no, but I can copyright them in one particular arrangement.
I think you're being too glib about this. Patents aren't at issue here because the game is so old. So forgot Tetris and the ilk
Well, yes and no. Patents aren't part of the legal issue here, but they are a part of the common misunderstanding of the law. It is my opinion that in a matter with two sides, if one does not explain both sides the matter continues to be misunderstood. Therefore, I simply explained both, so that it would be clear which half was being discussed, and what the important strictures on phrasing were; those strictures were being violated (presumably accidentally) and therefore needed to be well-defined.
We know that there's a clear infringement of trademark. So forget that the dumbass called it eScrabble, he was an idiot for doing that. You actually said that the "Scrabble" name was an issue of copyright, which I think suggests you are not totally familiar with the issues yourself.
If you take a closer look, you will discover that Hasbro is approaching both the trademark issue, wherein the title is stolen, and the copyright issue, where game content such as the specific placement of bonus squares and the specific choice of letter scoring as a whole, are both being violated.
You are correct in that I should also have brought trademark up; however, the copyright issue, being seperate, is no less valid for my omission.
Copyright is an issue, but how much it protects is a delicate question.
When two games are similar but not identical, yes. This is a verbatim copy. The question of where to draw the line is moot: anywhere it's drawn it has been crossed. There is no divergence whatsoever.
You made the error of analogy. If it is easier to argue one than another, then it's because there is a difference and we should not swallow the analogy.
Actually, I did not. I used analogy as a legitimate tool. The way that this is different is thus: first I use the analogy, a clearer and less muddied example, to set the stage for concept and differentiation. Then I retreat from the analogy matter entirely, and make a complete but seperate argument along the same terms regarding scrabble.
You will notice that it appears as if I am repeating myself during discussion. I am not. I am abstracting myself from analogy and remaking the argument whole so that it stands on its own and is therefore uncontaminated by previous discussion. The analogy is solely an educational tool.
(If there's some question whether this is a valid approach to discussion and proof, I encourage you to go to a local college campus and discuss this with a philosophy teacher; this sort of thing is their bread and butter, and not only will they do a much better job of explaining than I, but you'll get an interesting new set of tools and you'll make the teacher's day.)
That is, analogies are like lampposts: for illumination, not support.
Quite right. I wonder if you grasp the actual admonition in that phrase, which is not to suggest the abolition of analogy wholesale, but rather to suggest bifurcation from the argument exactly as I did.
The point values of Scrabble are what the game is based on.
Well, it's more than that - the special squares, the tile count rules, the exchange rules, etc etc etc. That said, your point that the game rules are patent covered and that the patent is expired is well taken; you are correct.
You will notice that at no point did I suggest that Hasbro was levying patent attack on Jared. I was simply attempting to explain the difference, which I felt was being confused by the grandparent post.
The patents have expired, so the same game should be in the public domain now, although making duplicates of the gaming set would be an infringement of copyright.
Which is what he did, which is why Hasbro is suing for copyright.
Therefore, it should be allowed to make another gaming set which supports the same game mechanics
In business, advertising dollars are no less dollars than wallet dollars when they are generated by the non-recurring traffic of users. That money is created exactly once, and it should belong to Hasbro, with whom Jared is directly competing, despite that he stole the material. He made quite a bit of money from that infringement, and Hasbro's not asking for any of it.
Knowing is half the battle. Understanding is the other half.
I thought I was pretty clear about this. I plainly was not. I will try again.
Game material is copyrightable. Game mechanics are patentable.
Game mechanics are not copyrightable. Game material is not patentable.
Game material is story content. That's what the monopoly junior example was about - it's the monopoly story content, the titles, the text, the character, the branding. That is copyrightable, as the third paragraph at the link you just gave me clearly explains.
Game mechanics are not copyrightable. That's what that document says. Game mechanics are patentable. The US Copyright Office does not provide information about patent law. Consider looking around the USPTO for a similar document. (That document will make a similar statement - game content is not patentable, but game mechanics are, the converse of what this document says.)
Yes, they are copywritten.
Please use the term "copyrighted" rather than "copywritten" because many Slashdot users have a rule of thumb: anybody who uses "copywrite" to mean "copyright" probably knows little about copyright law.
Using a slashdot user's rule of thumb to identify appropriate grammar is like using Michael Jackson to watch your kids after school. In short, don't be absurd. As the Chicago Manual of Style, Strunk and White and Fowler's Modern English all clearly agree, the past tense of the verb "to copyright" is "copywritten."
English is full of strange holes, and is as much about knowing the exceptions as knowing the rules. This is such an exception. As far as knowing little about copyright law, pot, meet kettle; kettle, pot.
Interesting. What is the U.S. patent number on Tetris?
There isn't one. The patent is Russian, and was covered under international patent law. Unfortunately, ROSPATENT's search engine is mostly broken, and I don't speak enough Russian to search their database. You're welcome to give it a shot.
If you would research this in good faith, giving me the benefit of the doubt that I might be correct, you'd find quite a bit of supporting material very quickly.
All I see when searching the USPTO is a trademark assigned to Elorg.
The US Patent and Trade Office doesn't maintain foreign trademarks. Elorg was the company created in foreign territories to leverage international patent law against Mirrorsoft, who was attempting to steal a patented game system, because the international courts had a tradition of stricter application of trade sanction than Russian courts. That's why Elorg, which is a Russian company, has that trademark registered here instead of there.
They're not going after the small software developers. They're not even going after a lot of the people selling the game, especially on platforms like cellular phones and palm pilots.
He collected money from hundreds of thousands of people. That's not small potatoes.
You're right, and I probably should have been clear that I didn't mean to imply that Hasbro was acting on patent law. In another post in another thread I pointed that out explicitly and I forgot to here.
The reason I discussed patent law was to try to clear up what I see as misapprehensions about whether a game is protectable at all. The reason I contrasted it to copyright law, especially in the case of Monopoly where the distinction can be made so clear, was to display multiple routes of protection and how the different ones applied in different situations, because I believe that a lot of the misapprehensions about what may and may not be done come from an incomplete understanding of the phrase "game mechanics may not be copywritten" as in contrast to patent rather than protected in any way.
You are quite correct: Hasbro is only protecting their content material, not the fundamental nature of the game. Nonetheless, I stand by my evaluation: they're being very kind, and the original poster and the editor which accepted the story see things in a very different light than I do.
That's a matter of viewpoint. As I see it, the primary reason for algorithms being immoral to patent is that they're simple things which evolve from simple needs, not works of creativity.
Now, whether or not you believe someone would have invented LZW if LZW hadn't entered computer science - which I do - and even if you ignore that the purpose of the patent system is to grant a temporary protection to an invention or discovery to give economic incentive to research by creating a market, which this satisfies, there's still a very good reason deep down in one's gut to believe that nobody should be able to control a simple set of equations representing a fundamental property of the world we live in and the natural extrapolations thereof.
I should point out that I think saying "algorithm" here is dangerous - entirely too many things can be legitimately called algorithms, including kitchen recipes, driving habits, and the migration patterns of birds - and the word is being used for emotional content to describe something as fundamental in order to make it seem like it shouldn't be the case that someone can fence it off and call it theirs.
Consider by contrast haiku. The number of haiku that can be written are finite in a realistic way; it would not be absurd to try to generate every legal set of words to satisfy one of the haiku patterns, though it'd admittedly be sort of pointless. To wit, we still see haiku as an art, as a work of creativity, an exposition of the soul (some see it as a very pure such thing,) and as such we afford it all the protections that we do our other creative works.
He wrote that. It's his. He should keep it.
So, what about games? Monopoly does not represent a fundamental property of the universe, and other than that the squares with names from New Jersey invariably don't cost much, there's nothing in the game which would have naturally come up on its own. Sure, monopoly can be relatively easily represented by a set of deterministic algorithms with human-controlled yes/no decisions. Does that mean it's not creative?
By the viewpoint which supports software patent reform or destruction, the reason that LZW shouldn't be patentable is that it's a fundamental part of our existence.
Connect Four is not. It's a creative work. By that dint, I believe it should be protectable.
It's the combination of the scoring system, the rules regarding acceptable words, the rules regarding tile counts, timing of tile exchange, scoring, the bonus cells on the board, etc.
Basically, the patent on scrabble is the difference between putting letters on a grid and the game Scrabble. I hope that makes sense.
As a game designer, I actually tend to see that difference as important and the defense as reasonable, though I can see how others might disagree.
This is a well-meaning misunderstanding. The reason that game designs cannot be copywritten is not that they are not legally defensible. The reason is because they get patented instead. Tengen and Mirrorsoft found this out from Nintendo, Spectrum Holobyte and Elorg. Sega found this out from Hudsonsoft, and then a second time later from Sammy, who now owns them. Many small software developers have recently found this out (in a remarkably pleasant fashion) from Capcom, because Rio Grande games used to take a very lenient stance on independant development of their games including the popular Settlers of Cataan, but later sold the game rights to Capcom, who turned around and put a stop to the amateur developers.
Capcom wrote an apologetic letter and gave out free money just to make people feel better, but they didn't actually have to do that. They were just being good people, which shocks the hell out of me in this day and age.
There are two ways to protect a game. You protect the mechanics and the branding seperately. I'll show how this works.
Consider the case of Monopoly, a well protected Parker Brothers property which has been through huge amounts of battle in US legal history and established most of the law which led to the very protections being discussed. (You might read up on Monopoly's legal background; it's quite convoluted and interesting, and the amount of wrestling for control which happened over a fifty year period is just astonishing.)
Monopoly is a good example because it has a lot of variants, both in theme and in game mechanic. We're all pretty familiar with the recent bevy of "star wars monopoly," "simpsons monopoly," "lord of the rings monopoly," et cetera. That's branding. If I were to release, say, "Stoner monopoly," I would be liable against Parker Brothers' game design patents. They couldn't take me to task on copyright law, because instead of Park Avenue I'd have "The Park Street Dealer;" instead of community chest, "the weird hippie gather in the park," et cetera. No copyright infringement; Marvin Gardens doesn't appear anywhere on the board.
Now, consider that there's another kind of monopoly variant, with many fewer examples, most of which aren't well known. Monopoly Junior is probably my best chance: it was a short-lived early 90s monopoly-style game, but the rules were simplified and the board made a little smaller with fewer statistical quirks. Now, if I were to release "monopoly senior," which was the same sort of thing - I make the game more complex, add more statistical anomalies, make some more detailed rent rules, whatever - then I'm not liable under patent law, because the game design isn't the same. However, at that point I am liable under copyright law - I'm using the monopoly title, my board names all of the cells on the original board (plus some new ones,) community chest contains all the old community chest cards, etc etc etc.
Yes, game designs are legally defensible; the annals of gaming history are littered with bitter fights over who invented what, especially post-depression and in the strategy gaming community. Whole game companies have disappeared because of these lawsuits, and control of some of the most lucrative properties in history has been exchanged by the courts on these rights. Consider that there's an estimate that ownership of the Tetris property by all parties cumulative over time has been worth almost 600 million dollars; when you get into those sorts of numbers, lawyers will make damn sure that the law is clear one way or the other. In this case, of game mechanics being defensible, the court has ruled only one way since the early 1950s: if the game mechanics satisfy a certain closeness to the claimant, then they are considered a duplication of a protected process, and regulation is undertaken.
I mean, look, there's a ton of case law about this. Probably the best thing to look up is the tengen-elorg thing over tetris; the feud was huge, the losing side owned a media empire and tried t
Games are not copyrightable. The artwork is, yes, as is the text of the rules and the design of the pieces, and the name is trademark but the game itself has no IP protection.
Luckily, nobody made that stipulation but you. Yes, the game materials are copyrightable. Yes, they are copywritten. Yes, Jared stole them. Outright. Don't try to make some case for the game mechanics; you're pretending Jared didn't do something he did.
Besides, this bit that games aren't copyrightable is a popular misunderstanding; it's because game mechanics are patented. When you're busdy referring me to all these posts where people say that they can't be patented either, please realize that these are the same people which think warezing is legal if you stick a text file into an archive claiming to be a library and making some admonition about erasing things after a day. It's relatively easy to turn up the court case in which Tetris was taken away from Atari neé Tengen by Nintendo because Tengen bought the patent rights to the game mechanics from Robert Stein neé Mirrorsoft, who didn't actually own them, whereas Nintendo bought them from Elorg, who hadd purchased them legally from Bulletproof Software neé Spectrum Holobyte, and then had to go to court with Tengen and Elorg.
Now, let's be clear. They went to court on exactly the same laws you're currently claiming don't exist. Against a company in another country. In the middle of a media circus established by the owner of the companies trying to steal Tetris. A circus so big, in fact, that the Communist Party became involved.
And they still lost.
You know why? Because, despite your beliefs, games can be patented, and because game patents are regularly enforced. Almost every major board game has been extensively defended in this fashion, especially Monopoly, Battleship and The Game of Life, but more recently in the electronic world Tetris, Archon, Bandit Kings of Ancient China and so forth.
I can see Hasbro requesting that he stop using their trademark and stop distributing copies of their artwork (as the letter alleges they were doing) but they're demanding he dismantle the site.
Oh, so what you'd rather is that he take down all their current stolen stuff, but continue to steal their trademark?
but my paranoid little brain interprets this as an attempt to shut down a potential competitor.
Yes, they're trying to shut down an illegal competitor, the same way that Levi's does with knockoffs in china, the same way we all bitch that record companies should be doing with pirate CDs instead of MP3s.
This is ridiculous. A competitor would be if he made a different game and they were trying to shut that down. He's a thief, pure and simple. He copied their design wholesale.
Yes, they're trying to shut a thief down, and there's just nothing wrong with that.
Isn't this just Hasbro saying "we'll take the game and the site from you and run it ourselves...
No, it isn't. They're not interested in taking any of his work. What they're doing is saying "Scrabble is ours. Cut it out and quit selling our things. And by the way, since there's no way for you to sell scrabble, and since you've been breaking the law taking our trademarks, give up the name to us."
Trademark law supports this. Copyright law supports this. Patent law supports this.
then possibly take any money you made from it in the last year
1) they're not taking the money. 2) Scrabble belongs to them. Anyone selling scrabble is taking their money. If I get the coke formula and sell coke, the money belongs to Coca Cola. What part this is hard to understand? You're not allowed to just copy other people's things and sell them. Period. Even when it's a big company. It's that simple.
The game scrabble has a long history of legal defense. Hasbro's FAQ is very clear about the point. The guy just turned around and created a raw duplicate of a copywritten and patented game, and put it on the web in direct competition with Hasbro. I guarantee he never asked Hasbro permission. This isn't the first time Hasbro has said "cut it out." They haven't asked for any damages, they haven't asked for any of the money that this guy collected on their game, and they haven't asked for the registration data of any of the people which paid for a game that they own, all of which Hasbro has the rights to.
At what point does something become Jared's fault? What does he have to do to be in the wrong? Stealing a defended design and making money on it for a solid year doesn't make him a thief? I mean, so what if it took Hasbro some time to notice? That means they're supposed to just give things away? You think it's Hasbro's responsibility to scour the web every day looking for someone flaunting their right to retain their own materials?
So okay. I'm gonna put a monopoly game up. Doesn't matter that Hasbro says they won't allow that. Doesn't matter that I'm not going to ask them. I'm just going to copy their copyright without any pretense at all, and collect money and users on it, doing significant damage to Hasbro's trademarks and causing a minor blip (horseshit - hundreds of thousands of users) in their finances.
When it takes them six months to notice, and then they turn around and tell me no in the kindest and most forgiving possible legally enforcable way, I'm going to go crying to slashdot, and get an editor to tell the world that Hasbro should be paying me to steal their copyrights, their users, and their money.
It's like you guys aren't even trying to be honest anymore. Big corporation? THEIR FAULT. It doesn't matter that this guy didn't even bother to change any text on the board, that he's not even trying to hide the theft on which he's making assloads of money. No, Hasbro is daring to defend their trademark, which they have to do or else kenner and parker brothers can start making Scrabble too, and so when Hasbro says "hey cut it out" and doesn't ask for any of their money, somehow they're being bastards.
And when I bust into your house and take all your things while you're on vacation and it takes you a week to notice, and you go to the cops and ask me to stop stealing, but don't ask for your things back or for me to go to jail, I'll be sure to go to slashdot and tell them what a bastard you are that I was allowed to take the things in your home for an entire week and now they want me to start not being a thief.
The book contact doesn't do the prime number thing. It does a much more satisfying math sequence, and was dumbed down for the movie. Besides, Ray Bradbury had this in the 60s, which still predates that book, and Vannevar Bush and the Maya were both dead by then, so . . .
Yeah, we should definately turn off the multiple megawatt message lasers broadcasting peace, prosperity, and the hope for communication, because nobody's going to see the hundreds of gigawatts of waste light and heat generated by tokyo alone.
Maybe you didn't realize this, but earth gives off more radiant energy than a brown dwarf. If we really want to hide, we need to do two things:
1) build a wall around the entire planet 2) get a really fast corvette and drive around collecting the radio waves we've been giving off for a hundred years
(and because I'm on slashdot, 3) ???, 4) profit)
Translation: put out the welcome mat. We announced our presence long, long ago.
Re:neither numbers nor math are universal, power i
on
How To Talk To Aliens
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· Score: 2, Insightful
Keeping other creatures captive is a sign of intelligence.
No it isn't. Spiders, termites, fish, many kinds of snake, bears, great cats, various kinds of bacteria and two kinds of creature in Angband keep other things captive.
Trapping something is a sign of cunning. Cunning is not intelligence. Hunting animals all have cunning.
, who stole it from Ray Bradbury, who stole it from Vannevar bush, who stole it from the Victorians, who got it from the Maya, who worshipped prime numbers as the speech of the gods.
Which, of course, means that the aliens already sent us the primes, the maya heard, the british killed them off, and the aliens left in disgust.
So, maybe we should try a factor table instead.
PS: the star trek episode in question, "Allegiance," is from 1990. The movie "Contact" is from 1997. If you think Star Trek stole that from Jodi Foster you've been watching too many Quantum Enterprise episodes. Time travel doesn't work that way.
Apart from some hard-wired devices (simple sound clip recorders) or downclocked low-end devices, I don't see how defective chips can be used.
The 486 DX->SX example has been making rounds on this article a lot lately. A better example is a multicore chip: produce a bunch of four-core versions, then kill a two cores when one's got a flaw and sell it as the 2-core version on the cheap. Remember, everyone's going multicore this week.
Another example from multiple points in the dark nether-reaches of history are chip designs which implement "extra features" at the very edges of an IC grid, because in old fab processes those grids' edge sizes varied slightly. Extra testing and verification circuitry was a frequent choice; there is an apocryphal story that there was a chip which actually implemented CFAD which ISTR seeing a reference to, but for the life of me can't find. At any rate, the extra edge circuitry tactic shows up half a dozen times here.
I suspect that modern-day audio and video datastreams are becoming more fragile as they carry more metadata, highly compressed data, DRM, software, etc.
That's why streams are seperated, and have been since the MPEG-1 era. (Remember mpeg layer 3 = mp3? ever wonder why those things were layered? See also AVI = audio video interleave - it's not playing one stream, it's playing three at once. That's where those synch problems in networks with bandwidth blips come from.)
Something tells me that the manufacturers that use semi-defective chips are going to lose all their savings on product returns, warranty costs, and technical support.
Much to the chagrin of TFA, the practice is actually old-hat. This has been going on for thirty years already. This is why crappy stereos and crappy answering machines sound like crap. There's nothing to see here; move along.
Given the low cost of most consumer electronics chips and the high cost of service labor, I doubt they will want the hassles of unreliable products.
So what you're saying is, you've never bought Realistic?
I'm sorry, I forgot another major win on the transistor's side over vacuum tubes: reliability. Vacuum tubes had a tendency to burn out at the rate of one every third day in ENIAC, with 18,000 tubes. If you apply the same scale to the 32 million gates of the P4, you get about 592 bad connections per day, or about one every 2.43 seconds.
Don't jump to talk about how much better modern vacuum tubes are than the ones in 1950, either: we've had vacuum tubes since the 1500s, and not that much has changed recently. Even if their MTBF had gone up by three orders of magnitude, which as an audio enthusiast with a vacuum-tube amplifier I can sadly say from experience isn't the case, that'd still be a fault in your P4 every other day or so.
Transistors essentially don't die unless abused. Your CPU will die when its connection leads crack, when the casing cracks, when the clock crystal fragments, sure. But the transistors inside just don't go bad. Sure, if you pump too much voltage through them or over heat-stress them, they'll burn out, but under normal use they'll go on forever. They're just not the mortal parts of the CPU.
There is just no comparison to that kind of reliability. Even if they were ten times as expensive as vacuum tubes at half the speed, we would have switched for that reliability alone.
You're confused. The reason for moving to digital switches was threefold. First the transistor has always been virtually free; it's just a modified resistor. If you remember, just after its refabrication in germanium crystals by Czochralski in 1950, suddenly there was a proliferation of ridiculously cheap transistor radios; in fact, the transistor radio was seen as a herald of a new cheaper consumer economy in the post-WW2 economic boom.
Second, it's by comparison tiny, allowing even at its inception when you could still grab a transistor hundreds of times more gates per device. This is the thing which allows us to make crap like modern CPUs, GPUs and RAM; remember that with only 18,000 vacuum tubes ENIAC weighed over 300 tons. By comparison, the P4 has more than 32 million gates; if we ignore the extremely large amount of infrastructure you need for internal connections and pretend the gates are the whole mass, that still moves the weight of one pentium four in vacuum tubes up to about 530,000 tons, which is comparable in weight to a small sports stadium. That makes your server cluster fairly more expensive in materials and workmanship to create. Even with modern microvacuum tubes, it would be difficult to stuff a pentium four into a five bedroom house.
Most importantly, though, it takes a significant amount of time to suck gas out of a tube. Vacuum tube based gates, if really well made, have a switching speed of a few hertz. Not megahertz, not gigahertz. Hertz. The really good ones could function five or six times a second. We switched to transistors because they function at the speed of electricity. The very first transistor-based calculating devices operated at almost 150 hertz, an improvement at the time of almost fifty fold, going from a well developed and polished physical device to a first generation electrical device. Vacuum tubes had been developed for hundreds of years (not as an electrical switch, but still.) Transistors beat them by fifty fold in their very first real implementation.
As far as your characterization of "valve technology" (by which I presume you mean vacuum tubes, as valves haven't been used in computing since Ancient Greece) as an analog computing device, you are simply incorrect. Even though the device is physical, it's still a raw binary computer. The way a transistor works is to use a characteristic charge to allow commution of charge from a seond wire to a third wire; that way you can change whether a virtual wire is conductive based on another charge. The way a vacuum tube works is to use a conductive gas in the place of the characteristic field gate; instead of using a control wire you use a pump which can remove the gas. Though the mechanism is different, the conceptual design is exactly the same: using virtual wires (field effect PN junction gaps or tubes with removable carrier gas) which can be toggled, construct a one's or two's compliment programmable procedural mathematical device by large parallelism.
They're both digital computers. You might as well suggest that we switched away from the abacus to the calculator for accuracy. There's nothing inaccurate about abaci either; it's about speed, cost and the ability to take things to absurd extremes.
So, please, understand what you're saying before you say it. The first bitwise processors were mechanical and developed in Germany in the 1400s. The vacuum tube computers which were on their way out about 15 years earlier than the timeframe you give were indeed bitwise digital computers. Digital computing does not hinge on integrated circuits in any way.
In fact, analog processors are a relatively new development, stemming from the 1970s. Real-valued mechanical computation is spectacularly difficult to achieve even with current technology. The first mechanical computers were all digital (that only means operating on finite precision numbers, y'know.) Babbage's difference engine is digital. Ancient abaci are digital. The mayan rope-knot
Our definition of life is reproducing consuming agents. Just how less specific can one be?
Don't get confused. Just because we only know how to look for one kind of life, and therefore only look for that kind of life, doesn't mean that we've turned around and changed what life means. It's just, well, how do you make a detector for something you have no idea how works? I mean, they're just NASA. It's not like they're rocket scientists or anything.
Slashdot Mirror
In particular as spaces on a board game revolving around the exchange of money in real estate transactions, yes. That's how the American copyright system works - names are categorized. The popular example is Apple Records and Apple Computer, though there's no shortage of other examples; ever notice that on Burlington Coat Factories there's a message at the bottom that says "not affiliated with Burlington Industries?" The story behind that is great. Look it up.
So, yes and no. Parker Brothers doesn't have copyrights to all uses of that name forever and ever amen. However, in conjunction with the specific set of thirty (or whatever) specific other names and used in that sort of game, yes, they're very covered by copyright.
In essence though not in spirit, it's the same argument as asking whether I can copyright a collection of words. Well, no, but I can copyright them in one particular arrangement.
I think you're being too glib about this. Patents aren't at issue here because the game is so old. So forgot Tetris and the ilk
Well, yes and no. Patents aren't part of the legal issue here, but they are a part of the common misunderstanding of the law. It is my opinion that in a matter with two sides, if one does not explain both sides the matter continues to be misunderstood. Therefore, I simply explained both, so that it would be clear which half was being discussed, and what the important strictures on phrasing were; those strictures were being violated (presumably accidentally) and therefore needed to be well-defined.
We know that there's a clear infringement of trademark. So forget that the dumbass called it eScrabble, he was an idiot for doing that. You actually said that the "Scrabble" name was an issue of copyright, which I think suggests you are not totally familiar with the issues yourself.
If you take a closer look, you will discover that Hasbro is approaching both the trademark issue, wherein the title is stolen, and the copyright issue, where game content such as the specific placement of bonus squares and the specific choice of letter scoring as a whole, are both being violated.
You are correct in that I should also have brought trademark up; however, the copyright issue, being seperate, is no less valid for my omission.
Copyright is an issue, but how much it protects is a delicate question.
When two games are similar but not identical, yes. This is a verbatim copy. The question of where to draw the line is moot: anywhere it's drawn it has been crossed. There is no divergence whatsoever.
You made the error of analogy. If it is easier to argue one than another, then it's because there is a difference and we should not swallow the analogy.
Actually, I did not. I used analogy as a legitimate tool. The way that this is different is thus: first I use the analogy, a clearer and less muddied example, to set the stage for concept and differentiation. Then I retreat from the analogy matter entirely, and make a complete but seperate argument along the same terms regarding scrabble.
You will notice that it appears as if I am repeating myself during discussion. I am not. I am abstracting myself from analogy and remaking the argument whole so that it stands on its own and is therefore uncontaminated by previous discussion. The analogy is solely an educational tool.
(If there's some question whether this is a valid approach to discussion and proof, I encourage you to go to a local college campus and discuss this with a philosophy teacher; this sort of thing is their bread and butter, and not only will they do a much better job of explaining than I, but you'll get an interesting new set of tools and you'll make the teacher's day.)
That is, analogies are like lampposts: for illumination, not support.
Quite right. I wonder if you grasp the actual admonition in that phrase, which is not to suggest the abolition of analogy wholesale, but rather to suggest bifurcation from the argument exactly as I did.
The point values of Scrabble are what the game is based on.
Well, it's more than that - the special squares, the tile count rules, the exchange rules, etc etc etc. That said, your point that the game rules are patent covered and that the patent is expired is well taken; you are correct.
You will notice that at no point did I suggest that Hasbro was levying patent attack on Jared. I was simply attempting to explain the difference, which I felt was being confused by the grandparent post.
The patents have expired, so the same game should be in the public domain now, although making duplicates of the gaming set would be an infringement of copyright.
Which is what he did, which is why Hasbro is suing for copyright.
Therefore, it should be allowed to make another gaming set which supports the same game mechanics
In business, advertising dollars are no less dollars than wallet dollars when they are generated by the non-recurring traffic of users. That money is created exactly once, and it should belong to Hasbro, with whom Jared is directly competing, despite that he stole the material. He made quite a bit of money from that infringement, and Hasbro's not asking for any of it.
Knowing is half the battle. Understanding is the other half.
Sorry, I forgot the trailing . If you look at the source of the previous comment, "give it a shot" was linked to this page.
I thought I was pretty clear about this. I plainly was not. I will try again.
Game material is copyrightable. Game mechanics are patentable.
Game mechanics are not copyrightable. Game material is not patentable.
Game material is story content. That's what the monopoly junior example was about - it's the monopoly story content, the titles, the text, the character, the branding. That is copyrightable, as the third paragraph at the link you just gave me clearly explains.
Game mechanics are not copyrightable. That's what that document says. Game mechanics are patentable. The US Copyright Office does not provide information about patent law. Consider looking around the USPTO for a similar document. (That document will make a similar statement - game content is not patentable, but game mechanics are, the converse of what this document says.)
Yes, they are copywritten.
Please use the term "copyrighted" rather than "copywritten" because many Slashdot users have a rule of thumb: anybody who uses "copywrite" to mean "copyright" probably knows little about copyright law.
Using a slashdot user's rule of thumb to identify appropriate grammar is like using Michael Jackson to watch your kids after school. In short, don't be absurd. As the Chicago Manual of Style, Strunk and White and Fowler's Modern English all clearly agree, the past tense of the verb "to copyright" is "copywritten."
English is full of strange holes, and is as much about knowing the exceptions as knowing the rules. This is such an exception. As far as knowing little about copyright law, pot, meet kettle; kettle, pot.
Interesting. What is the U.S. patent number on Tetris?
There isn't one. The patent is Russian, and was covered under international patent law. Unfortunately, ROSPATENT's search engine is mostly broken, and I don't speak enough Russian to search their database. You're welcome to give it a shot.
If you would research this in good faith, giving me the benefit of the doubt that I might be correct, you'd find quite a bit of supporting material very quickly.
All I see when searching the USPTO is a trademark assigned to Elorg.
The US Patent and Trade Office doesn't maintain foreign trademarks. Elorg was the company created in foreign territories to leverage international patent law against Mirrorsoft, who was attempting to steal a patented game system, because the international courts had a tradition of stricter application of trade sanction than Russian courts. That's why Elorg, which is a Russian company, has that trademark registered here instead of there.
They're not going after the small software developers. They're not even going after a lot of the people selling the game, especially on platforms like cellular phones and palm pilots.
He collected money from hundreds of thousands of people. That's not small potatoes.
You're right, and I probably should have been clear that I didn't mean to imply that Hasbro was acting on patent law. In another post in another thread I pointed that out explicitly and I forgot to here.
The reason I discussed patent law was to try to clear up what I see as misapprehensions about whether a game is protectable at all. The reason I contrasted it to copyright law, especially in the case of Monopoly where the distinction can be made so clear, was to display multiple routes of protection and how the different ones applied in different situations, because I believe that a lot of the misapprehensions about what may and may not be done come from an incomplete understanding of the phrase "game mechanics may not be copywritten" as in contrast to patent rather than protected in any way.
You are quite correct: Hasbro is only protecting their content material, not the fundamental nature of the game. Nonetheless, I stand by my evaluation: they're being very kind, and the original poster and the editor which accepted the story see things in a very different light than I do.
Aw crap. You're right, and I can't even give you credit because you're an AC.
Well, you're still right, whoever you are.
That's a matter of viewpoint. As I see it, the primary reason for algorithms being immoral to patent is that they're simple things which evolve from simple needs, not works of creativity.
Now, whether or not you believe someone would have invented LZW if LZW hadn't entered computer science - which I do - and even if you ignore that the purpose of the patent system is to grant a temporary protection to an invention or discovery to give economic incentive to research by creating a market, which this satisfies, there's still a very good reason deep down in one's gut to believe that nobody should be able to control a simple set of equations representing a fundamental property of the world we live in and the natural extrapolations thereof.
I should point out that I think saying "algorithm" here is dangerous - entirely too many things can be legitimately called algorithms, including kitchen recipes, driving habits, and the migration patterns of birds - and the word is being used for emotional content to describe something as fundamental in order to make it seem like it shouldn't be the case that someone can fence it off and call it theirs.
Consider by contrast haiku. The number of haiku that can be written are finite in a realistic way; it would not be absurd to try to generate every legal set of words to satisfy one of the haiku patterns, though it'd admittedly be sort of pointless. To wit, we still see haiku as an art, as a work of creativity, an exposition of the soul (some see it as a very pure such thing,) and as such we afford it all the protections that we do our other creative works.
He wrote that. It's his. He should keep it.
So, what about games? Monopoly does not represent a fundamental property of the universe, and other than that the squares with names from New Jersey invariably don't cost much, there's nothing in the game which would have naturally come up on its own. Sure, monopoly can be relatively easily represented by a set of deterministic algorithms with human-controlled yes/no decisions. Does that mean it's not creative?
By the viewpoint which supports software patent reform or destruction, the reason that LZW shouldn't be patentable is that it's a fundamental part of our existence.
Connect Four is not. It's a creative work. By that dint, I believe it should be protectable.
It's the combination of the scoring system, the rules regarding acceptable words, the rules regarding tile counts, timing of tile exchange, scoring, the bonus cells on the board, etc.
Basically, the patent on scrabble is the difference between putting letters on a grid and the game Scrabble. I hope that makes sense.
As a game designer, I actually tend to see that difference as important and the defense as reasonable, though I can see how others might disagree.
This is a well-meaning misunderstanding. The reason that game designs cannot be copywritten is not that they are not legally defensible. The reason is because they get patented instead. Tengen and Mirrorsoft found this out from Nintendo, Spectrum Holobyte and Elorg. Sega found this out from Hudsonsoft, and then a second time later from Sammy, who now owns them. Many small software developers have recently found this out (in a remarkably pleasant fashion) from Capcom, because Rio Grande games used to take a very lenient stance on independant development of their games including the popular Settlers of Cataan, but later sold the game rights to Capcom, who turned around and put a stop to the amateur developers.
Capcom wrote an apologetic letter and gave out free money just to make people feel better, but they didn't actually have to do that. They were just being good people, which shocks the hell out of me in this day and age.
There are two ways to protect a game. You protect the mechanics and the branding seperately. I'll show how this works.
Consider the case of Monopoly, a well protected Parker Brothers property which has been through huge amounts of battle in US legal history and established most of the law which led to the very protections being discussed. (You might read up on Monopoly's legal background; it's quite convoluted and interesting, and the amount of wrestling for control which happened over a fifty year period is just astonishing.)
Monopoly is a good example because it has a lot of variants, both in theme and in game mechanic. We're all pretty familiar with the recent bevy of "star wars monopoly," "simpsons monopoly," "lord of the rings monopoly," et cetera. That's branding. If I were to release, say, "Stoner monopoly," I would be liable against Parker Brothers' game design patents. They couldn't take me to task on copyright law, because instead of Park Avenue I'd have "The Park Street Dealer;" instead of community chest, "the weird hippie gather in the park," et cetera. No copyright infringement; Marvin Gardens doesn't appear anywhere on the board.
Now, consider that there's another kind of monopoly variant, with many fewer examples, most of which aren't well known. Monopoly Junior is probably my best chance: it was a short-lived early 90s monopoly-style game, but the rules were simplified and the board made a little smaller with fewer statistical quirks. Now, if I were to release "monopoly senior," which was the same sort of thing - I make the game more complex, add more statistical anomalies, make some more detailed rent rules, whatever - then I'm not liable under patent law, because the game design isn't the same. However, at that point I am liable under copyright law - I'm using the monopoly title, my board names all of the cells on the original board (plus some new ones,) community chest contains all the old community chest cards, etc etc etc.
Yes, game designs are legally defensible; the annals of gaming history are littered with bitter fights over who invented what, especially post-depression and in the strategy gaming community. Whole game companies have disappeared because of these lawsuits, and control of some of the most lucrative properties in history has been exchanged by the courts on these rights. Consider that there's an estimate that ownership of the Tetris property by all parties cumulative over time has been worth almost 600 million dollars; when you get into those sorts of numbers, lawyers will make damn sure that the law is clear one way or the other. In this case, of game mechanics being defensible, the court has ruled only one way since the early 1950s: if the game mechanics satisfy a certain closeness to the claimant, then they are considered a duplication of a protected process, and regulation is undertaken.
I mean, look, there's a ton of case law about this. Probably the best thing to look up is the tengen-elorg thing over tetris; the feud was huge, the losing side owned a media empire and tried t
Games are not copyrightable. The artwork is, yes, as is the text of the rules and the design of the pieces, and the name is trademark but the game itself has no IP protection.
Luckily, nobody made that stipulation but you. Yes, the game materials are copyrightable. Yes, they are copywritten. Yes, Jared stole them. Outright. Don't try to make some case for the game mechanics; you're pretending Jared didn't do something he did.
Besides, this bit that games aren't copyrightable is a popular misunderstanding; it's because game mechanics are patented. When you're busdy referring me to all these posts where people say that they can't be patented either, please realize that these are the same people which think warezing is legal if you stick a text file into an archive claiming to be a library and making some admonition about erasing things after a day. It's relatively easy to turn up the court case in which Tetris was taken away from Atari neé Tengen by Nintendo because Tengen bought the patent rights to the game mechanics from Robert Stein neé Mirrorsoft, who didn't actually own them, whereas Nintendo bought them from Elorg, who hadd purchased them legally from Bulletproof Software neé Spectrum Holobyte, and then had to go to court with Tengen and Elorg.
Now, let's be clear. They went to court on exactly the same laws you're currently claiming don't exist. Against a company in another country. In the middle of a media circus established by the owner of the companies trying to steal Tetris. A circus so big, in fact, that the Communist Party became involved.
And they still lost.
You know why? Because, despite your beliefs, games can be patented, and because game patents are regularly enforced. Almost every major board game has been extensively defended in this fashion, especially Monopoly, Battleship and The Game of Life, but more recently in the electronic world Tetris, Archon, Bandit Kings of Ancient China and so forth.
I can see Hasbro requesting that he stop using their trademark and stop distributing copies of their artwork (as the letter alleges they were doing) but they're demanding he dismantle the site.
Oh, so what you'd rather is that he take down all their current stolen stuff, but continue to steal their trademark?
but my paranoid little brain interprets this as an attempt to shut down a potential competitor.
Yes, they're trying to shut down an illegal competitor, the same way that Levi's does with knockoffs in china, the same way we all bitch that record companies should be doing with pirate CDs instead of MP3s.
This is ridiculous. A competitor would be if he made a different game and they were trying to shut that down. He's a thief, pure and simple. He copied their design wholesale.
Yes, they're trying to shut a thief down, and there's just nothing wrong with that.
That, or generic corporate bullying.
Blinded by dogma much?
Isn't this just Hasbro saying "we'll take the game and the site from you and run it ourselves...
No, it isn't. They're not interested in taking any of his work. What they're doing is saying "Scrabble is ours. Cut it out and quit selling our things. And by the way, since there's no way for you to sell scrabble, and since you've been breaking the law taking our trademarks, give up the name to us."
Trademark law supports this. Copyright law supports this. Patent law supports this.
then possibly take any money you made from it in the last year
1) they're not taking the money.
2) Scrabble belongs to them. Anyone selling scrabble is taking their money. If I get the coke formula and sell coke, the money belongs to Coca Cola. What part this is hard to understand? You're not allowed to just copy other people's things and sell them. Period. Even when it's a big company. It's that simple.
Oh horseshit.
The game scrabble has a long history of legal defense. Hasbro's FAQ is very clear about the point. The guy just turned around and created a raw duplicate of a copywritten and patented game, and put it on the web in direct competition with Hasbro. I guarantee he never asked Hasbro permission. This isn't the first time Hasbro has said "cut it out." They haven't asked for any damages, they haven't asked for any of the money that this guy collected on their game, and they haven't asked for the registration data of any of the people which paid for a game that they own, all of which Hasbro has the rights to.
At what point does something become Jared's fault? What does he have to do to be in the wrong? Stealing a defended design and making money on it for a solid year doesn't make him a thief? I mean, so what if it took Hasbro some time to notice? That means they're supposed to just give things away? You think it's Hasbro's responsibility to scour the web every day looking for someone flaunting their right to retain their own materials?
So okay. I'm gonna put a monopoly game up. Doesn't matter that Hasbro says they won't allow that. Doesn't matter that I'm not going to ask them. I'm just going to copy their copyright without any pretense at all, and collect money and users on it, doing significant damage to Hasbro's trademarks and causing a minor blip (horseshit - hundreds of thousands of users) in their finances.
When it takes them six months to notice, and then they turn around and tell me no in the kindest and most forgiving possible legally enforcable way, I'm going to go crying to slashdot, and get an editor to tell the world that Hasbro should be paying me to steal their copyrights, their users, and their money.
It's like you guys aren't even trying to be honest anymore. Big corporation? THEIR FAULT. It doesn't matter that this guy didn't even bother to change any text on the board, that he's not even trying to hide the theft on which he's making assloads of money. No, Hasbro is daring to defend their trademark, which they have to do or else kenner and parker brothers can start making Scrabble too, and so when Hasbro says "hey cut it out" and doesn't ask for any of their money, somehow they're being bastards.
And when I bust into your house and take all your things while you're on vacation and it takes you a week to notice, and you go to the cops and ask me to stop stealing, but don't ask for your things back or for me to go to jail, I'll be sure to go to slashdot and tell them what a bastard you are that I was allowed to take the things in your home for an entire week and now they want me to start not being a thief.
Grow up.
The book contact doesn't do the prime number thing. It does a much more satisfying math sequence, and was dumbed down for the movie. Besides, Ray Bradbury had this in the 60s, which still predates that book, and Vannevar Bush and the Maya were both dead by then, so . . .
Yeah, because if anything is going to make us friends, it's letting them watch us blow shit up real good.
Yeah, um, which is why you only send them half of the key. PKI isn't impressed by a large count of lightyears.
Yeah, we should definately turn off the multiple megawatt message lasers broadcasting peace, prosperity, and the hope for communication, because nobody's going to see the hundreds of gigawatts of waste light and heat generated by tokyo alone.
Maybe you didn't realize this, but earth gives off more radiant energy than a brown dwarf. If we really want to hide, we need to do two things:
1) build a wall around the entire planet
2) get a really fast corvette and drive around collecting the radio waves we've been giving off for a hundred years
(and because I'm on slashdot, 3) ???, 4) profit)
Translation: put out the welcome mat. We announced our presence long, long ago.
Keeping other creatures captive is a sign of intelligence.
No it isn't. Spiders, termites, fish, many kinds of snake, bears, great cats, various kinds of bacteria and two kinds of creature in Angband keep other things captive.
Trapping something is a sign of cunning. Cunning is not intelligence. Hunting animals all have cunning.
, who stole it from Ray Bradbury, who stole it from Vannevar bush, who stole it from the Victorians, who got it from the Maya, who worshipped prime numbers as the speech of the gods.
Which, of course, means that the aliens already sent us the primes, the maya heard, the british killed them off, and the aliens left in disgust.
So, maybe we should try a factor table instead.
PS: the star trek episode in question, "Allegiance," is from 1990. The movie "Contact" is from 1997. If you think Star Trek stole that from Jodi Foster you've been watching too many Quantum Enterprise episodes. Time travel doesn't work that way.
Yes, I liked the book "Footfall" too. The fithp reaction to pornography, and the catholic reaction to the fithp reaction, were awesome.
Apart from some hard-wired devices (simple sound clip recorders) or downclocked low-end devices, I don't see how defective chips can be used.
The 486 DX->SX example has been making rounds on this article a lot lately. A better example is a multicore chip: produce a bunch of four-core versions, then kill a two cores when one's got a flaw and sell it as the 2-core version on the cheap. Remember, everyone's going multicore this week.
Another example from multiple points in the dark nether-reaches of history are chip designs which implement "extra features" at the very edges of an IC grid, because in old fab processes those grids' edge sizes varied slightly. Extra testing and verification circuitry was a frequent choice; there is an apocryphal story that there was a chip which actually implemented CFAD which ISTR seeing a reference to, but for the life of me can't find. At any rate, the extra edge circuitry tactic shows up half a dozen times here.
I suspect that modern-day audio and video datastreams are becoming more fragile as they carry more metadata, highly compressed data, DRM, software, etc.
That's why streams are seperated, and have been since the MPEG-1 era. (Remember mpeg layer 3 = mp3? ever wonder why those things were layered? See also AVI = audio video interleave - it's not playing one stream, it's playing three at once. That's where those synch problems in networks with bandwidth blips come from.)
Something tells me that the manufacturers that use semi-defective chips are going to lose all their savings on product returns, warranty costs, and technical support.
Much to the chagrin of TFA, the practice is actually old-hat. This has been going on for thirty years already. This is why crappy stereos and crappy answering machines sound like crap. There's nothing to see here; move along.
Given the low cost of most consumer electronics chips and the high cost of service labor, I doubt they will want the hassles of unreliable products.
So what you're saying is, you've never bought Realistic?
I'm sorry, I forgot another major win on the transistor's side over vacuum tubes: reliability. Vacuum tubes had a tendency to burn out at the rate of one every third day in ENIAC, with 18,000 tubes. If you apply the same scale to the 32 million gates of the P4, you get about 592 bad connections per day, or about one every 2.43 seconds.
Don't jump to talk about how much better modern vacuum tubes are than the ones in 1950, either: we've had vacuum tubes since the 1500s, and not that much has changed recently. Even if their MTBF had gone up by three orders of magnitude, which as an audio enthusiast with a vacuum-tube amplifier I can sadly say from experience isn't the case, that'd still be a fault in your P4 every other day or so.
Transistors essentially don't die unless abused. Your CPU will die when its connection leads crack, when the casing cracks, when the clock crystal fragments, sure. But the transistors inside just don't go bad. Sure, if you pump too much voltage through them or over heat-stress them, they'll burn out, but under normal use they'll go on forever. They're just not the mortal parts of the CPU.
There is just no comparison to that kind of reliability. Even if they were ten times as expensive as vacuum tubes at half the speed, we would have switched for that reliability alone.
You're confused. The reason for moving to digital switches was threefold. First the transistor has always been virtually free; it's just a modified resistor. If you remember, just after its refabrication in germanium crystals by Czochralski in 1950, suddenly there was a proliferation of ridiculously cheap transistor radios; in fact, the transistor radio was seen as a herald of a new cheaper consumer economy in the post-WW2 economic boom.
Second, it's by comparison tiny, allowing even at its inception when you could still grab a transistor hundreds of times more gates per device. This is the thing which allows us to make crap like modern CPUs, GPUs and RAM; remember that with only 18,000 vacuum tubes ENIAC weighed over 300 tons. By comparison, the P4 has more than 32 million gates; if we ignore the extremely large amount of infrastructure you need for internal connections and pretend the gates are the whole mass, that still moves the weight of one pentium four in vacuum tubes up to about 530,000 tons, which is comparable in weight to a small sports stadium. That makes your server cluster fairly more expensive in materials and workmanship to create. Even with modern microvacuum tubes, it would be difficult to stuff a pentium four into a five bedroom house.
Most importantly, though, it takes a significant amount of time to suck gas out of a tube. Vacuum tube based gates, if really well made, have a switching speed of a few hertz. Not megahertz, not gigahertz. Hertz. The really good ones could function five or six times a second. We switched to transistors because they function at the speed of electricity. The very first transistor-based calculating devices operated at almost 150 hertz, an improvement at the time of almost fifty fold, going from a well developed and polished physical device to a first generation electrical device. Vacuum tubes had been developed for hundreds of years (not as an electrical switch, but still.) Transistors beat them by fifty fold in their very first real implementation.
As far as your characterization of "valve technology" (by which I presume you mean vacuum tubes, as valves haven't been used in computing since Ancient Greece) as an analog computing device, you are simply incorrect. Even though the device is physical, it's still a raw binary computer. The way a transistor works is to use a characteristic charge to allow commution of charge from a seond wire to a third wire; that way you can change whether a virtual wire is conductive based on another charge. The way a vacuum tube works is to use a conductive gas in the place of the characteristic field gate; instead of using a control wire you use a pump which can remove the gas. Though the mechanism is different, the conceptual design is exactly the same: using virtual wires (field effect PN junction gaps or tubes with removable carrier gas) which can be toggled, construct a one's or two's compliment programmable procedural mathematical device by large parallelism.
They're both digital computers. You might as well suggest that we switched away from the abacus to the calculator for accuracy. There's nothing inaccurate about abaci either; it's about speed, cost and the ability to take things to absurd extremes.
So, please, understand what you're saying before you say it. The first bitwise processors were mechanical and developed in Germany in the 1400s. The vacuum tube computers which were on their way out about 15 years earlier than the timeframe you give were indeed bitwise digital computers. Digital computing does not hinge on integrated circuits in any way.
In fact, analog processors are a relatively new development, stemming from the 1970s. Real-valued mechanical computation is spectacularly difficult to achieve even with current technology. The first mechanical computers were all digital (that only means operating on finite precision numbers, y'know.) Babbage's difference engine is digital. Ancient abaci are digital. The mayan rope-knot
Our definition of life is reproducing consuming agents. Just how less specific can one be?
Don't get confused. Just because we only know how to look for one kind of life, and therefore only look for that kind of life, doesn't mean that we've turned around and changed what life means. It's just, well, how do you make a detector for something you have no idea how works? I mean, they're just NASA. It's not like they're rocket scientists or anything.