Yeah, but the fact that we're nerds probably means that those of use who care about it have enough technical savvy to access news sites other than Slashdot.
You're confusing the tangible medium with the expression contained therein. You can't distribute the latter independent of the former.
Re:The problem is not a failure of the market
on
Homogenized Music
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· Score: 2
Um, no. You're falling into one form of the indie fallacy, that of "people would like music X, only they're not exposed to it."
Tastes legimately differ, and when stations pop up playing nontraditional formats (e.g., Mars-FM and KNAC in the Southern California area), they're not as profitable and consequently are easily bought out.
The size of a market is not simply a function of the number of people; it's also dependent on the amount of wealth in the market.
America and Europe are huge markets, combined possibly larger than the Asian market. Or do you think a farmer in rural China will pay as much for a DVD player as some geek in the U.S. will?
Then the only people able to make money off an invention are large corporations that can quickly capitalize on the invention. The guy with a great idea but no means to produce it is screwed.
As has been pointed out, this was a German case, and so the DMCA doesn't apply. But the provisions you're referring to are part of the Communications Decency Act (CDA), not the DMCA.
Close, and a pretty good guess considering most Slashdotters know nothing about trademark law except that it suppresses their fanfic.
Calling a RTS game "FreeCraft" is very likely to confuse users into thinking that this is a Blizzard-created free version of WarCraft, akin to what Id has done with some of its old games. If users are likely to be confused, there's a trademark violation. That's what trademark does--prevent consumers from being misled by product names (with a secondary effect of preventing business from cashing in on the good name of a competitor).
This doesn't mean that they own the word; they can't successfully sue someone's crafts store, and they probably can't even win against non-entertainment software (i.e., if they haven't filed an ITU for business software, and you create a publishing program called PageCraft, too bad for them.)
It's different from Freeciv in that Blizzard/Vivendi have an entire line of games in the -Craft series, whereas "Civ," as far as I'm aware, isn't even trademarked, and has its own unique situation due to Avalon Hill's game. If I talked about a hypothetical game "TankCraft," you'd already have an idea about who published the game and what it would look/play like.
I think a multi-tiered copyright structure can be a good idea in theory. The problems I can see (aside from convincing legislatures to pass it at all):
You're going to have to turn the copyright office into something that decides which category a work falls into. If they handle it the way the patent office handles claims, we could see people claiming a software program is derivative of its manual, which has 20 years protection.
Software copyright is tricky. A few years ago, saying 2 years was fine because programs would be passed by. But a 2 year old computer today is more usable than a 2 year old computer in the 80s or 90s. If Joe User can run old versions of software, it encourages commercial developers to break these old version rather than simply improve the product. I think 5 years for software and 10 years for source code is more appropriate, and even that's short.
Basing an extension on percentage of sales is tricky, because it encourages market manipulation by publishers. When I drafted something like this, I tried to use "in print," but couldn't come up with a suitably comprehensive definition.
Basing licensing fees on percentages of gross profit creates accounting problems, as well as a pricing problem, as someone who simply gives the original away for free does not have to pay a license.
The moral rights argument with respect to the mandatory licensing scheme after an author's death seems specious to me. If the author's not around to approve it, either the author's estate can approve a derivative work, or the derivative author can wait until the copyright expires. Since duration of copyright in your proposed system is not dependent on the life of the author, this presents no problem.
A copyright law shouldn't be designed to be GNU friendly; a GNU license should be designed to be responsive to changes in copyright law.
The copy protection clause is just as ridiculous as the DMCA. "Oh, that easily deciphered format is really copy protection, so this isn't under copyright."
Would it have killed the guy to give a proper cite? I can't seem to find the actual case to read what it said.
Seductive lure of the Game of Life? Bah.
on
A New Kind of Science
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· Score: 2, Insightful
Article header made it seem like this lopsided prodigy had discovered the real world. Instead he's just shifting his focus a few microns over.
I would love to read a book about more mundane concerns written by someone whose education was accelerated like that, to try to see what a world I already know looks like to them.
Not exactly true. If you're a minor, you can opt out of a contract unless it's for essentials. But you can choose to keep the contract and bind the other party.
If the parent's authorizing it, though (by giving the disk to install, and using the software), they're probably going to be bound (as much as anyone else, anyway) even if they get their 10-year-old to click on the agreement.
(As usual, not legal advice or a recommended course of action.)
Google is pretty much immune under U.S. law for someone else's speech that they're caching. The Communications Decency Act of 1996 protects them from civil liability.
No, but that's a pretty nice straw man. I'm saying that people might think that there's a business relationship between whoever is selling advertising space in the real world and whoever has their ad superimposed on the space.
(I'm not a lawyer yet, and I don't know the facts of this particular case. This ain't legal advice for anyone.)
If EA sues, they'd have to show that their copyright or trademark has been infringed. You can't copyright game rules (as opposed to the textual expression of the rules), but you can copyright the text, graphics and music in the game. This is why Linux can have things like Freeciv and that Warcraft clone. "M.U.L.E." may still be a trademark of EA, in which case they can't use the name.
(If you're a Slashdot DMCA troll, go crawl back under your bridge. Doesn't apply here.)
Slashdot Mirror
It's the language in the statute. You want to convince a court that the statute applies to you, you use the same words.
Yeah, but the fact that we're nerds probably means that those of use who care about it have enough technical savvy to access news sites other than Slashdot.
First Insomnia, now Solaris? What's next, Jerry Bruckheimer remaking October?
I think they got the "C-" from the 7/10 ranking and a failure to realize that 70% isn't synonymous with a C-, even if many teachers grade that way.
You're confusing the tangible medium with the expression contained therein. You can't distribute the latter independent of the former.
Um, no. You're falling into one form of the indie fallacy, that of "people would like music X, only they're not exposed to it."
Tastes legimately differ, and when stations pop up playing nontraditional formats (e.g., Mars-FM and KNAC in the Southern California area), they're not as profitable and consequently are easily bought out.
The size of a market is not simply a function of the number of people; it's also dependent on the amount of wealth in the market.
America and Europe are huge markets, combined possibly larger than the Asian market. Or do you think a farmer in rural China will pay as much for a DVD player as some geek in the U.S. will?
Then the only people able to make money off an invention are large corporations that can quickly capitalize on the invention. The guy with a great idea but no means to produce it is screwed.
The judiciary didn't make an end run around the Congress in the case of slavery. The Thirteenth Amendment did. (You probably meant segregation.)
Because Japanese inventors have to get patents here if they want patent protection in the U.S. It's not automatic like copyright.
As has been pointed out, this was a German case, and so the DMCA doesn't apply. But the provisions you're referring to are part of the Communications Decency Act (CDA), not the DMCA.
Close, and a pretty good guess considering most Slashdotters know nothing about trademark law except that it suppresses their fanfic.
Calling a RTS game "FreeCraft" is very likely to confuse users into thinking that this is a Blizzard-created free version of WarCraft, akin to what Id has done with some of its old games. If users are likely to be confused, there's a trademark violation. That's what trademark does--prevent consumers from being misled by product names (with a secondary effect of preventing business from cashing in on the good name of a competitor).
This doesn't mean that they own the word; they can't successfully sue someone's crafts store, and they probably can't even win against non-entertainment software (i.e., if they haven't filed an ITU for business software, and you create a publishing program called PageCraft, too bad for them.)
It's different from Freeciv in that Blizzard/Vivendi have an entire line of games in the -Craft series, whereas "Civ," as far as I'm aware, isn't even trademarked, and has its own unique situation due to Avalon Hill's game. If I talked about a hypothetical game "TankCraft," you'd already have an idea about who published the game and what it would look/play like.
I think a multi-tiered copyright structure can be a good idea in theory. The problems I can see (aside from convincing legislatures to pass it at all):
You're going to have to turn the copyright office into something that decides which category a work falls into. If they handle it the way the patent office handles claims, we could see people claiming a software program is derivative of its manual, which has 20 years protection.
Software copyright is tricky. A few years ago, saying 2 years was fine because programs would be passed by. But a 2 year old computer today is more usable than a 2 year old computer in the 80s or 90s. If Joe User can run old versions of software, it encourages commercial developers to break these old version rather than simply improve the product. I think 5 years for software and 10 years for source code is more appropriate, and even that's short.
Basing an extension on percentage of sales is tricky, because it encourages market manipulation by publishers. When I drafted something like this, I tried to use "in print," but couldn't come up with a suitably comprehensive definition.
Basing licensing fees on percentages of gross profit creates accounting problems, as well as a pricing problem, as someone who simply gives the original away for free does not have to pay a license.
The moral rights argument with respect to the mandatory licensing scheme after an author's death seems specious to me. If the author's not around to approve it, either the author's estate can approve a derivative work, or the derivative author can wait until the copyright expires. Since duration of copyright in your proposed system is not dependent on the life of the author, this presents no problem.
A copyright law shouldn't be designed to be GNU friendly; a GNU license should be designed to be responsive to changes in copyright law.
The copy protection clause is just as ridiculous as the DMCA. "Oh, that easily deciphered format is really copy protection, so this isn't under copyright."
This article didn't appear in the New York Times. It appeared in the New Yorker, an entertainment magazine.
You're confusing the idea with its expression.
Would it have killed the guy to give a proper cite? I can't seem to find the actual case to read what it said.
Article header made it seem like this lopsided prodigy had discovered the real world. Instead he's just shifting his focus a few microns over.
I would love to read a book about more mundane concerns written by someone whose education was accelerated like that, to try to see what a world I already know looks like to them.
Thank you for making lawyers look good.
Not exactly true. If you're a minor, you can opt out of a contract unless it's for essentials. But you can choose to keep the contract and bind the other party.
If the parent's authorizing it, though (by giving the disk to install, and using the software), they're probably going to be bound (as much as anyone else, anyway) even if they get their 10-year-old to click on the agreement.
(As usual, not legal advice or a recommended course of action.)
Well, the suit would fail. Everything else the guy said is whiny hyperbole.
Google is pretty much immune under U.S. law for someone else's speech that they're caching. The Communications Decency Act of 1996 protects them from civil liability.
No, but that's a pretty nice straw man. I'm saying that people might think that there's a business relationship between whoever is selling advertising space in the real world and whoever has their ad superimposed on the space.
She wasn't a drag queen, you idiot.
Well, there was Archon Ultra a few years ago, but that was generally regarded as worse than the original.
(I'm not a lawyer yet, and I don't know the facts of this particular case. This ain't legal advice for anyone.)
If EA sues, they'd have to show that their copyright or trademark has been infringed. You can't copyright game rules (as opposed to the textual expression of the rules), but you can copyright the text, graphics and music in the game. This is why Linux can have things like Freeciv and that Warcraft clone. "M.U.L.E." may still be a trademark of EA, in which case they can't use the name.
(If you're a Slashdot DMCA troll, go crawl back under your bridge. Doesn't apply here.)