I use an iBook with RDC to my WinXP desktop. I get a good-sized keyboard, very good battery life, and acceptable WiFi performance. Granted, video plays poorly via RDC, but cut-and-paste works betweent RDC (I use RDC in a window) and Mac OS X, so if I have to pull up a video URL, I don't have too many problems.
The iBook is very reasonably priced for this purpose; at $1100-$1200 to set up, it makes working wirelessly on a desktop a lot more fun (and then you can start thinking about getting rid of your desktop monitor and keyboard, and sticking the CPU in a more unobtrusive place . . . and opening port 3389 on your firewall at home, so you can use your home fixed IP to access the machine via RDC . . . )
... And I imagine practicing lawyers use them quite a bit too. In law school, it seems every yahoo used to carry around a laptop, but the damn things, no matter how much you spend, are still heavy, bulky and awkward. Now, people carry PDA's with foldable keyboards, and hence the problem disappeared (as well as proving cheaper for poor students).
Sometimes "lumping together" fields like patent and copyright can create new and useful concepts. For instance, the idea of copyright misuse is an extension of the doctrine of patent misuse. Keeping the fields sealed from one another might not have allowed such powerful cross-pollination.
Your example is interesting. While I don't know if Porsche ever made lawnmowers, at one time they built tractors. You can easily hook up a lawnmower attachment, and away you go. However, I guess the tractors didn't kick enough ass to enthrall many of the faithful, as they only had 9 horsepower.
However, some people care mightily about Porsche's foray into farm technology. Porsche's web site has a page about a Porsche tractor club - you can view it at:
From a copyright perspective, there are some good things and bad things with these clauses.
First, mod files are generally recognized to be derivative works of the games they work "off of." The right to produce derivative works is presumably held by Bioware, although it may have been assigned to Infogrames. Either way, it's clear that by buying an audiovisual work a person does not automatically have a right to produce derivative works of that audiovisual work. Bioware should be lauded for allowing this content to be created at all.
However, the reservation of the right to control your works is not as sensible, in my opinion. While Bioware may want to make sure that the Dungeons and Dragons license is not sullied (which they need to do to preserve the value of the D&D trademark), this clause plainly seeks to establish the right and ability to control the works created by users of the NWN toolset.
Bioware could easily be sued by a company like Sony if you produced a module that was similar to say, a zone of EverQuest. Sony could legitimately claim that Bioware should be vicariously liable for the actions of its users. As many of us remember so well, Napster almost won the suit against it on contributory infringement (due to a substantial non-infringing use) but lost on vicarious liability because it:
1. Had the right and ability to control its users, and, 2. Received a direct (or possibly indirect) financial benefit from the direct infringement of another.
I don't think a lawyer would have a hard time proving an indirect financial benefit from the creation of mod files, and the clause in question seems to provide the right and ability to control. I wonder if Bioware is even aware that they are potentially liable?
So toss the IP laws out . . . there's still Equity
on
Freedom or Power?
·
· Score: 1
So, say we had no IP laws. I think companies would resort to unfair competition laws to prevent their competitors from doing many things that today fall under the ambit of copyright, trademark, and patent law. The IP laws may be an outgrowth of the received wisdom of the founding fathers, but they reflect the notion that one has a right to prevent others from engaging in a dishonest rivalry in trade or commerce with oneself.
At least to me, it's clear that modifying the software of another and redistributing it, without their permission, is an attempt to pass off the goods or business of one person as that of another. If a person grants you the right to redistribute it, then unfair competition is obviously not an issue. But asserting that freedom requires creators to surrender their right to compete fairly in the marketplace is misplaced hyperbole.
I've seen a bunch of calls for boycotts today, and I think it's silly. Look folks, you don't need to get RIAA's attention, you've already got it. They know what you're up to, it has bothered them, and they are taking action. If you want to keep making a difference, it's not hard - just keep using Napster, Gnutella, etc. They want to change the way you (and about 20+ million of your friends) act, and they'll use the courts if they have to do so. However, in the end, the law is what the people say it is. That's the whole point of Democracy. If the record companies want to try to fight this one in the court of public opinion, they're more than welcome to give it their best shot. They have been very successful at forging opinion in the past, and they may yet triumph. FWIW, I don't think history is on their side. After all, the Stamp Act (requiring a government mark on all documents, for which a tax was required) was one of the actions by the British that led to the Revolutionary War. Trying to tax (or charge for) the interchange of ideas wasn't too popular then, and it doesn't look like the intervening years have helped any.
Sure, it will happen, but it is highly unlikely that the Supreme Court will take this case. "Gravest National Importance" (which I believe is the operative standard for this particular type of jurisdiction) is a VERY stringent standard. Moreover, there are a plethora of SC opinions on the virtue of taking these cases through the appeals process, to isolate the true constitutional questions. In short, I highly doubt the SC will take this case away from the DC Circuit. The fact that the case is en banc is pretty interesting. The Ninth Circuit (most of the west, including CA) often hears cases en banc, because there is a minority of the judges in the circuit that often hear appeals cases and produce bizzare results. The en banc method makes it so those judges can't make law on their own. In this instance, it prevents Microsoft from facing a lottery on which judges will hear the case - all the judges (that want to hear it) will hear it. So the opinion will truly reflect the thoughts of the Circuit. All in all, probably a damn good idea.
John Carmack may be an employee, but he is also an owner. As such, his release of internal information is entirely different than if a disgruntled employee had posted such information.
If you're paraphrasing Napolean, I believe it ends with "incompetence", not "ignorance".:) Mind you I suppose in the proper context, they mean basically the same thing. If you're correcting me with a reference to the one-time Emperor of France, I believe you're referring to "Napoleon," not "Napolean.":) Mind you I suppose in the proper context, they mean basically the same thing.
The Yahoo! servers (there are a ton of them) are located at the GlobalCenter NOC in Sunnyvale. They have thousands of machines there - it's a very impressive setup. However, that NOC is perhaps the WORST place in the world to place a server - it is completely overloaded, and the employees barely have command of the English language. A company I worked for hosted their servers there, and the latency created by the jammed connections virtually hosed the web-based service they designed.
I find it quite likely that GlobalCenter screwed up, and that Yahoo! is attempting to spin the story so that their stock price doesn't get hammered. Fortunately for the readers of slashdot, we usually remember that it's not necessary to attribute something to malice that can adequately be explained by ignorance.
A friend and I were sitting around watching the NFL playoffs a few weeks ago, and we started talking about how we could use multiple cameras and some interferometry to calculate exact positions of objects for instant replay. Obviously, a 3D camera could aid massively in doing this. Has anyone tried real-time 3D rendering using multiple cameras on a particular event? It sure won't help the Tampa Bay Buccanneers, but it might help in later years . . .
Slashdot Mirror
I use an iBook with RDC to my WinXP desktop. I get a good-sized keyboard, very good battery life, and acceptable WiFi performance. Granted, video plays poorly via RDC, but cut-and-paste works betweent RDC (I use RDC in a window) and Mac OS X, so if I have to pull up a video URL, I don't have too many problems.
The iBook is very reasonably priced for this purpose; at $1100-$1200 to set up, it makes working wirelessly on a desktop a lot more fun (and then you can start thinking about getting rid of your desktop monitor and keyboard, and sticking the CPU in a more unobtrusive place . . . and opening port 3389 on your firewall at home, so you can use your home fixed IP to access the machine via RDC . . . )
... And I imagine practicing lawyers use them quite a bit too. In law school, it seems every yahoo used to carry around a laptop, but the damn things, no matter how much you spend, are still heavy, bulky and awkward. Now, people carry PDA's with foldable keyboards, and hence the problem disappeared (as well as proving cheaper for poor students).
Sometimes "lumping together" fields like patent and copyright can create new and useful concepts. For instance, the idea of copyright misuse is an extension of the doctrine of patent misuse. Keeping the fields sealed from one another might not have allowed such powerful cross-pollination.
Where's the substantial noninfringing use?
Your example is interesting. While I don't know if Porsche ever made lawnmowers, at one time they built tractors. You can easily hook up a lawnmower attachment, and away you go. However, I guess the tractors didn't kick enough ass to enthrall many of the faithful, as they only had 9 horsepower.
s /c w0299/schleppercup_i.htm
However, some people care mightily about Porsche's foray into farm technology. Porsche's web site has a page about a Porsche tractor club - you can view it at:
http://www.porsche.com/english/events/clubs/new
Draw your own parallels =)
From a copyright perspective, there are some good things and bad things with these clauses.
First, mod files are generally recognized to be derivative works of the games they work "off of." The right to produce derivative works is presumably held by Bioware, although it may have been assigned to Infogrames. Either way, it's clear that by buying an audiovisual work a person does not automatically have a right to produce derivative works of that audiovisual work. Bioware should be lauded for allowing this content to be created at all.
However, the reservation of the right to control your works is not as sensible, in my opinion. While Bioware may want to make sure that the Dungeons and Dragons license is not sullied (which they need to do to preserve the value of the D&D trademark), this clause plainly seeks to establish the right and ability to control the works created by users of the NWN toolset.
Bioware could easily be sued by a company like Sony if you produced a module that was similar to say, a zone of EverQuest. Sony could legitimately claim that Bioware should be vicariously liable for the actions of its users. As many of us remember so well, Napster almost won the suit against it on contributory infringement (due to a substantial non-infringing use) but lost on vicarious liability because it:
1. Had the right and ability to control its users, and,
2. Received a direct (or possibly indirect) financial benefit from the direct infringement of another.
I don't think a lawyer would have a hard time proving an indirect financial benefit from the creation of mod files, and the clause in question seems to provide the right and ability to control. I wonder if Bioware is even aware that they are potentially liable?
So, say we had no IP laws. I think companies would resort to unfair competition laws to prevent their competitors from doing many things that today fall under the ambit of copyright, trademark, and patent law. The IP laws may be an outgrowth of the received wisdom of the founding fathers, but they reflect the notion that one has a right to prevent others from engaging in a dishonest rivalry in trade or commerce with oneself.
At least to me, it's clear that modifying the software of another and redistributing it, without their permission, is an attempt to pass off the goods or business of one person as that of another. If a person grants you the right to redistribute it, then unfair competition is obviously not an issue. But asserting that freedom requires creators to surrender their right to compete fairly in the marketplace is misplaced hyperbole.
I've seen a bunch of calls for boycotts today, and I think it's silly. Look folks, you don't need to get RIAA's attention, you've already got it. They know what you're up to, it has bothered them, and they are taking action. If you want to keep making a difference, it's not hard - just keep using Napster, Gnutella, etc. They want to change the way you (and about 20+ million of your friends) act, and they'll use the courts if they have to do so. However, in the end, the law is what the people say it is. That's the whole point of Democracy. If the record companies want to try to fight this one in the court of public opinion, they're more than welcome to give it their best shot. They have been very successful at forging opinion in the past, and they may yet triumph. FWIW, I don't think history is on their side. After all, the Stamp Act (requiring a government mark on all documents, for which a tax was required) was one of the actions by the British that led to the Revolutionary War. Trying to tax (or charge for) the interchange of ideas wasn't too popular then, and it doesn't look like the intervening years have helped any.
Sure, it will happen, but it is highly unlikely that the Supreme Court will take this case. "Gravest National Importance" (which I believe is the operative standard for this particular type of jurisdiction) is a VERY stringent standard. Moreover, there are a plethora of SC opinions on the virtue of taking these cases through the appeals process, to isolate the true constitutional questions. In short, I highly doubt the SC will take this case away from the DC Circuit. The fact that the case is en banc is pretty interesting. The Ninth Circuit (most of the west, including CA) often hears cases en banc, because there is a minority of the judges in the circuit that often hear appeals cases and produce bizzare results. The en banc method makes it so those judges can't make law on their own. In this instance, it prevents Microsoft from facing a lottery on which judges will hear the case - all the judges (that want to hear it) will hear it. So the opinion will truly reflect the thoughts of the Circuit. All in all, probably a damn good idea.
John Carmack may be an employee, but he is also an owner. As such, his release of internal information is entirely different than if a disgruntled employee had posted such information.
If you're paraphrasing Napolean, I believe it ends with "incompetence", not "ignorance". :) Mind you I suppose in the proper context, they mean basically the same thing. If you're correcting me with a reference to the one-time Emperor of France, I believe you're referring to "Napoleon," not "Napolean." :) Mind you I suppose in the proper context, they mean basically the same thing.
The Yahoo! servers (there are a ton of them) are located at the GlobalCenter NOC in Sunnyvale. They have thousands of machines there - it's a very impressive setup. However, that NOC is perhaps the WORST place in the world to place a server - it is completely overloaded, and the employees barely have command of the English language. A company I worked for hosted their servers there, and the latency created by the jammed connections virtually hosed the web-based service they designed.
I find it quite likely that GlobalCenter screwed up, and that Yahoo! is attempting to spin the story so that their stock price doesn't get hammered. Fortunately for the readers of slashdot, we usually remember that it's not necessary to attribute something to malice that can adequately be explained by ignorance.
A friend and I were sitting around watching the NFL playoffs a few weeks ago, and we started talking about how we could use multiple cameras and some interferometry to calculate exact positions of objects for instant replay. Obviously, a 3D camera could aid massively in doing this. Has anyone tried real-time 3D rendering using multiple cameras on a particular event? It sure won't help the Tampa Bay Buccanneers, but it might help in later years . . .