"we can simultaneously improve enforcement, and get some government oversight into the process"
Great, my tax dollars go making sure the MPAA and RIAA members meet their quarterly revenue goals. When I first read the cautionary essay "The Right to Read" back in 1997, I thought it was silly, but I think folks like yourself read it and agree with it.
Society shouldn't revolve around copyright, copyright should revolve around society. You've got things very backwards.
"That would solve the addicted and ignorant pirate problem."
You can't "educate" people to accept a bad bargain, and right now copyright in particular is a bad bargain for this country.
I think the problem is one of fairness; you view the copyright holder's right as absolute, and they're not. I think big media companies feel they're entitled to a government monopoly on distribution forever. I don't think they are, and I'm guessing if we held a vote on it (i.e. Democracy, my views would be closer to the mainstream than yours.
There was no resolution. This is simply a case where PRS decided that this was not worth the PR hassle at this time.
Is is a problem with copyright if the law would supporting over-reaching copyright claims. That is, if you are certain that if this went to trial the singing stocker would prevail, then great. If you're not sure, then copyright is the problem.
The fact that they emboldened enough to make the claim shows me a problem exists.
First, he has come to the conclusion that people don't type in http://www.google.com/ to an address bar to visit Google, they're going to Google to eventually go somewhere else.
Second, he probably feels that his newspapers get a lot of web traffic. I have no idea, I'll assume they do.
Third, since he seems to own most of the major newspapers these days, he's probably convinced himself that he is an important part of the internet.
Fourth, he realizes Google is making money from these searches. He's right, of course. Google isn't a charity, and they manage to make money off search.
Fifth, if Google is making money connecting the average internet searcher with his content and making money from it, he probably wonders why he isn't seeing any of that money.
Therefore, from his viewpoint, he's spending all the money building content, but Google is making money from it. And while I'm sure his lawyers have advised him that it's legal, he's trying to figure out get a piece of that revenue.
Now I'm not agreeing with this thought process, but you can see how a businessman known for making $Billions would look at that revenue stream of Google's and try to figure out how to take it away. This is business 101 for him.
I don't think he's alone; the entire net neutrality debate is pretty much wrapped up this these types of thought processes.
"MySpace are not equipped to deal with the notion that anyone other than a major [label] can claim a copyright"
Do you think that's by accident? The major labels have gone out of their way in the past 10 years to convince the governments and public that they are the sole gatekeeper for music. It's to their benefit to create that thought so that passing laws to codify their position and become the sole gatekeeper for music actually seem reasonable.
Actually you do have to decrypt the contents, otherwise you have no idea what it is.
If you took videos of your children playing in the backyard and labeled it "Star Wars" and put it on P2P, that's not infringing on George Lucas regardless of what you've called your video.
It's a year newer (2009) and has a lot more interesting information. Including the fact that most of the high income states are in the northeast. Except for Wyoming.
"you must remember that without the DRM you wouldn't be able to do anything with those formats on your computer at all"
Really? You mean, they would decide not to sell to a huge set of potential customers just because they wouldn't agree to cripple their computer to see a bit of entertainment? Do you think BluRay is so entrenched that they would just prefer people sit in their living rooms and ignore what most people see as a huge mobile market for entertainment?
I've never heard of anything like that happening before.
"Other states will see this and, if they manage to grow a pair, will also tax them"
They won't. Delaware has been a haven to corporations forever. Florida and Delaware are considered low tax states and thus they benefit by attracting lots of people who pay a little bit of taxes.
We can argue this all day long, but the results are there in front of you. It's already happened.
Point is, it's pretty well accepted to used TM'd & copyrighted images to make a political point. Does that make it legal? You'll have to talk to Captain Morgan to find out...
Unfortunately, the link you gave doesn't actually go anywhere. It says text needs to be added; I don't know if you were trying to solicit my help to fill it out? In any event, here's a link that works: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Campbell_v._Acuff-Rose_Music,_Inc.
It's interesting that you would cite this, but probably not relevant since the circumstances are different.
But to help even more, what the supreme court gave as guidelines for fair use for fair use:
(1) the purpose and character of the use, including whether such use is of a commercial nature or is for nonprofit educational purposes;
(2) the nature of the copyrighted work;
(3) the amount and substantiality of the portion used in relation to the copyrighted work as a whole; and
(4) the effect of the use upon the potential market for or value of the copyrighted work.
(taken from Wikipedia, so maybe it's made up)
Anyway, if this is correct, not only is the original picture a parody of the Time cover passing your test (using Time to parody Time), but it is also political speech, and since there really is no attempt to commercialize the image, I think the odds are stacked against this being a copyright violation. You never know. Our courts seemed to be ruled by Captain Morgan these days, so you never know what you'll get when you start to litigate things.
The best explanation is probably that Flickr doesn't want to defend against any sort of lawsuit regardless of the merits.
"You're only allowed to use copyrighted characters and images that belong to the object of parody. This means that if you're mocking Disney, you can use Mickey Mouse, but you can't use Mickey Mouse to parody someone not associated with Disney."
If you wanted to show Obama was a terribly president, you might show him as Mickey Mouse president. If you wanted to show Bush as a warlike president, you might put him in a Rambo poster. I'm not sure why you think you can only use Donald Duck to parody Donald Duck.
Clearly, your personal interpretation of the law doesn't pass the common sense test.
I'm just curiuos; why would they bother with it? It implies some sort of financial gain for blocking the recording. Frankly, I can't believe a cable company cares very much about it one way or the other.
"B.S. You used the term "Ronald Wilson Reagan" how many times? "
Probably many more times that I used Barrack Hussein Obama. But then, Reagan was in office almost 16 times as long as Obama at this point. I also said "John F Kennedy" a lot. Do you remember Hubert H Humphrey? Great politician out of Minnesota. Harry S Truman. Now that I think of it, almost all president used their middle initial frequently. Dwight David Eisenhower. Yes, yes, it is common to use the middle name of a president. It usually considered a sign of endearment.
I've never known anyone to get upset with using the middle name of the president. This has got to be another first in American history.
Back to the main point of this article, Obama hasn't done either GM or the country any favors by nationalizing GM. He hasn't even saved the rank and file union jobs as they're going to shut down all those plants anyway. Those jobs will go to China and Brazil. I only hope the guy is smart enough to stay away from dictating product design or mix.
U.S. Presidents are routinely called by their full name, or at least their first & last plus initials
George W Bush (an initial, but still)
Dwight D Eisenhower (another initial)
George Herbert Walker Bush
William Jefferson Clinton
Richard Milhouse Nixon
It's neither common nor uncommon to call presidents by their full name. I think you're just being sensitive, really.
"If we let them, they would lower wages to nothing"
That ship has sailed. All those jobs will be moved to China anyway. Paying a few billion to prop up GM is a drop in the bucket compared with the massive economic & political forces at work to ensure this happens.
After that, I suspect the unions will look for direct government subsidies without all the legal niceties of running the subsidies through the legal fiction of a car company called GM.
Yes, in business, it's cruel to be kind in so many ways.
If they would have been left to normal bankruptcy, GM could have done the right thing, dropped it's union contracts, reshaped it dealers, etc.
Instead, the bankruptcy was railroaded through as quickly as possible to have the smallest impact on the unions. Ironically, this will be worse for the workers in the long run and worse for GM. Definitely worse for taxpayers as we're fleeced to shut down these companies rather than let nature take it's course.
What we're doing is the equivalent of feeding an injured deer in the winter. The deer still isn't going to survive and you wasted a lot of good food that could be used to feed more viable animals.
"Bless their hearts, they're still plugging away at the Zune."
The problem with the Zune is primarily that it has too many competing interests, the same thing that spoils Sony's products these days.
Imagine a product that had to do the following: 1) Compete with an established brand leader (iPod) 2) Start a new proprietary music market, which was different than Microsoft's proprietary old music market (Plays for sure) 3) Make sure it locks down content pretty tightly to appease the record companies 4) Innovate, but please see #3 5) Appeal to a wide audience of regular consumers and techies, but also make sure it's tied tightly to Windows
Microsoft could make the Zune really good with a firmware update, but that will never happen for the same reason that Sony keeps trying to make innovative consumer products that have as it's primary stakeholder their music and film division, not the consumer.
"Apple's clique in life has always been young, urban, chic, sexy"
Actually it hasn't; for much of it's life, Apple's niche was counter-culture, fight the man, this is a new way of doing things. It became the other things because the company changed from a technology driven company to a market driven company. The commercial 1984 was apple's image when the Mac came out.
I can't imagine them creating that commercial today.
"Thus, for households in which the computer is used primarily by one adult, an IP address is personally identifiable in that knowing the IP address (in conjunction with information from the ISP) makes it more likely than not that the adult in question was using the computer at the time the transaction with that IP was logged."
That's loaded with a whole bunch of assumptions.
First, the IP address that is public is the NAT'd address, thus, at best it identifies a pool of 1 to as many as 255 computers. While that may be ridiculous, let's be more realistic. If 2 adults and 2 teenage kids live in a house, it's fairly common for each of them to own their own laptop computer.
So if you say "IP address a.b.c.d was used to copy our music illegally", in the absence of any additional information, you narrowed it down to 4 people. But wait: it gets more complex if you have roommates who are not related to each other; there is no consideration that as a minor the parent may be responsible.
However, it's more complex than that. An IP address is changed regularly by an ISP, in absence of definitive logs from the issuer, it can't be considered reliable. Who owned address a.b.c.d at a particular time?
In the end, at best an IP narrows down the list of possible people from 5 Billion people down to perhaps several dozen. Useful for an investigator, but if I was on a jury, I wouldn't convict someone purely on the basis of an IP address, regardless of a judge's instructions.
They never did the obvious to make UMD successful... give UMD movies away when you bought the DVD. Yes, they would've taken a loss at first, but they would have built up a market for the things. Instead they charged *more* for a UMD movie than the DVD counterpart. So the rational thing to do was to buy the DVD, rip it and put it on a memory stick and watch it.
Many truly believe the world all have iPhones and everybody spends their day playing with them and looking to add little $1 apps to it. Even more can't fathom a world where people spend hours a day in their car and not only can you not get a data service on your phone, you can barely pick up one or two AM stations.
Your argument boils down to this... there is no real difference between the record companies trying to maximize revenue and consumers who would just as soon take it for free if possible.
"Free AV software doesn't offer tech support and you dont get frequent virus definition updates"
Well, I've had a PC longer than most, and in those 30 years, I've never had to call tech support over anti-virus. Besides which, I'm guessing the level of support will be essentially a foreign call-center with ESL reading from a script. That's not tech support, it's a slap in the face.
Finally, I can't speak for every free anti-virus maker, but AVG offers daily updates. That's more than good enough.
Symantec/Norton AVG is primarily chosen by home users because they've made a deal with HP & Dell to include the trial version. The wise PC user uninstalls that first and then looks for AVG free or if you want to pay Kapersky or NOD32.
I think anybody sufficiently technical and doesn't have a twitch urge to click on every email attachment probably doesn't even need AV protection seeing as how most of them don't actually protect you, but I keep mine on because other people use the computer.
Slashdot Mirror
"if we can make copyright infringement criminal"
We'll make criminals of pretty much everyone.
"we can simultaneously improve enforcement, and get some government oversight into the process"
Great, my tax dollars go making sure the MPAA and RIAA members meet their quarterly revenue goals. When I first read the cautionary essay "The Right to Read" back in 1997, I thought it was silly, but I think folks like yourself read it and agree with it.
Society shouldn't revolve around copyright, copyright should revolve around society. You've got things very backwards.
"That would solve the addicted and ignorant pirate problem."
You can't "educate" people to accept a bad bargain, and right now copyright in particular is a bad bargain for this country.
I think the problem is one of fairness; you view the copyright holder's right as absolute, and they're not. I think big media companies feel they're entitled to a government monopoly on distribution forever. I don't think they are, and I'm guessing if we held a vote on it (i.e. Democracy, my views would be closer to the mainstream than yours.
There was no resolution. This is simply a case where PRS decided that this was not worth the PR hassle at this time.
Is is a problem with copyright if the law would supporting over-reaching copyright claims. That is, if you are certain that if this went to trial the singing stocker would prevail, then great. If you're not sure, then copyright is the problem.
The fact that they emboldened enough to make the claim shows me a problem exists.
Murdoch might be looking at things differently
First, he has come to the conclusion that people don't type in http://www.google.com/ to an address bar to visit Google, they're going to Google to eventually go somewhere else.
Second, he probably feels that his newspapers get a lot of web traffic. I have no idea, I'll assume they do.
Third, since he seems to own most of the major newspapers these days, he's probably convinced himself that he is an important part of the internet.
Fourth, he realizes Google is making money from these searches. He's right, of course. Google isn't a charity, and they manage to make money off search.
Fifth, if Google is making money connecting the average internet searcher with his content and making money from it, he probably wonders why he isn't seeing any of that money.
Therefore, from his viewpoint, he's spending all the money building content, but Google is making money from it. And while I'm sure his lawyers have advised him that it's legal, he's trying to figure out get a piece of that revenue.
Now I'm not agreeing with this thought process, but you can see how a businessman known for making $Billions would look at that revenue stream of Google's and try to figure out how to take it away. This is business 101 for him.
I don't think he's alone; the entire net neutrality debate is pretty much wrapped up this these types of thought processes.
"MySpace are not equipped to deal with the notion that anyone other than a major [label] can claim a copyright"
Do you think that's by accident? The major labels have gone out of their way in the past 10 years to convince the governments and public that they are the sole gatekeeper for music. It's to their benefit to create that thought so that passing laws to codify their position and become the sole gatekeeper for music actually seem reasonable.
Actually you do have to decrypt the contents, otherwise you have no idea what it is.
If you took videos of your children playing in the backyard and labeled it "Star Wars" and put it on P2P, that's not infringing on George Lucas regardless of what you've called your video.
"you will cause massive damage to interstate commerce"
Autodesk seemed to be doing a good job of that all on their own.
http://www.taxfoundation.org/publications/show/2181.html
It's a year newer (2009) and has a lot more interesting information. Including the fact that most of the high income states are in the northeast. Except for Wyoming.
"you must remember that without the DRM you wouldn't be able to do anything with those formats on your computer at all"
Really? You mean, they would decide not to sell to a huge set of potential customers just because they wouldn't agree to cripple their computer to see a bit of entertainment? Do you think BluRay is so entrenched that they would just prefer people sit in their living rooms and ignore what most people see as a huge mobile market for entertainment?
I've never heard of anything like that happening before.
"Other states will see this and, if they manage to grow a pair, will also tax them"
They won't. Delaware has been a haven to corporations forever. Florida and Delaware are considered low tax states and thus they benefit by attracting lots of people who pay a little bit of taxes.
We can argue this all day long, but the results are there in front of you. It's already happened.
Oh, BTW, the Disney/Mickey ears are copyrighted & trademarked.
My advice is not to try to make them and sell them on the street. I wouldn't even sell pictures of them.
But if you want to put them on a picture of Obama to make a political point, it's Katy-bar-the-door.
Bush as Dracula in a French Dracula poster:
http://z.about.com/d/politicalhumor/1/0/a/T/bush_dubcula.jpg
Bush in a Rambo poster:
http://politicalhumor.about.com/library/images/blbushrambo2.htm
Obama as Dumbo:
http://media.photobucket.com/image/bush%20dumbo/darthdilbert/Blog/obama_dumbo.png (this one should rile the faithful, eh?)
Bush as Custer:
http://www.seedsofdoubt.com/distressedamerican/images/graphics/Custer.jpg (although the copyright has expired, so not a great example)
Making fun of the republican symbol (probably a TM)
http://kisrael.com/m/2009.01.23.dumbo.png
Point is, it's pretty well accepted to used TM'd & copyrighted images to make a political point. Does that make it legal? You'll have to talk to Captain Morgan to find out...
"I've actually been involved in cases where this exact precedent was used"
All that proves is that lawyers usually aren't as smart as they think they are. ;)
Well, I appreciate your watching over me.
Unfortunately, the link you gave doesn't actually go anywhere. It says text needs to be added; I don't know if you were trying to solicit my help to fill it out? In any event, here's a link that works:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Campbell_v._Acuff-Rose_Music,_Inc.
It's interesting that you would cite this, but probably not relevant since the circumstances are different.
But to help even more, what the supreme court gave as guidelines for fair use for fair use:
(1) the purpose and character of the use, including whether such use is of a commercial nature or is for nonprofit educational purposes;
(2) the nature of the copyrighted work;
(3) the amount and substantiality of the portion used in relation to the copyrighted work as a whole; and
(4) the effect of the use upon the potential market for or value of the copyrighted work.
(taken from Wikipedia, so maybe it's made up)
Anyway, if this is correct, not only is the original picture a parody of the Time cover passing your test (using Time to parody Time), but it is also political speech, and since there really is no attempt to commercialize the image, I think the odds are stacked against this being a copyright violation. You never know. Our courts seemed to be ruled by Captain Morgan these days, so you never know what you'll get when you start to litigate things.
The best explanation is probably that Flickr doesn't want to defend against any sort of lawsuit regardless of the merits.
Here's a few mainstream political images that *gasp* uses mickey mouse!
http://arttalksback.typepad.com/.a/6a0111685b3d8d970c0112796d38be28a4-320wi
Damn. Disney should sue!
"You're only allowed to use copyrighted characters and images that belong to the object of parody. This means that if you're mocking Disney, you can use Mickey Mouse, but you can't use Mickey Mouse to parody someone not associated with Disney."
If you wanted to show Obama was a terribly president, you might show him as Mickey Mouse president. If you wanted to show Bush as a warlike president, you might put him in a Rambo poster. I'm not sure why you think you can only use Donald Duck to parody Donald Duck.
Clearly, your personal interpretation of the law doesn't pass the common sense test.
"Actually, they never could take a joke."
You mean they never would invite a comedian like Colbert to mock Bush mercilessly for 20 minutes right to his face?
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qa-4E8ZDj9s
You're right, they couldn't take a joke.
I'm just curiuos; why would they bother with it? It implies some sort of financial gain for blocking the recording. Frankly, I can't believe a cable company cares very much about it one way or the other.
"B.S. You used the term "Ronald Wilson Reagan" how many times? "
Probably many more times that I used Barrack Hussein Obama. But then, Reagan was in office almost 16 times as long as Obama at this point. I also said "John F Kennedy" a lot. Do you remember Hubert H Humphrey? Great politician out of Minnesota. Harry S Truman. Now that I think of it, almost all president used their middle initial frequently. Dwight David Eisenhower. Yes, yes, it is common to use the middle name of a president. It usually considered a sign of endearment.
I've never known anyone to get upset with using the middle name of the president. This has got to be another first in American history.
Back to the main point of this article, Obama hasn't done either GM or the country any favors by nationalizing GM. He hasn't even saved the rank and file union jobs as they're going to shut down all those plants anyway. Those jobs will go to China and Brazil. I only hope the guy is smart enough to stay away from dictating product design or mix.
U.S. Presidents are routinely called by their full name, or at least their first & last plus initials
George W Bush (an initial, but still)
Dwight D Eisenhower (another initial)
George Herbert Walker Bush
William Jefferson Clinton
Richard Milhouse Nixon
It's neither common nor uncommon to call presidents by their full name. I think you're just being sensitive, really.
"If we let them, they would lower wages to nothing"
That ship has sailed. All those jobs will be moved to China anyway. Paying a few billion to prop up GM is a drop in the bucket compared with the massive economic & political forces at work to ensure this happens.
After that, I suspect the unions will look for direct government subsidies without all the legal niceties of running the subsidies through the legal fiction of a car company called GM.
Yes, in business, it's cruel to be kind in so many ways.
If they would have been left to normal bankruptcy, GM could have done the right thing, dropped it's union contracts, reshaped it dealers, etc.
Instead, the bankruptcy was railroaded through as quickly as possible to have the smallest impact on the unions. Ironically, this will be worse for the workers in the long run and worse for GM. Definitely worse for taxpayers as we're fleeced to shut down these companies rather than let nature take it's course.
What we're doing is the equivalent of feeding an injured deer in the winter. The deer still isn't going to survive and you wasted a lot of good food that could be used to feed more viable animals.
"Bless their hearts, they're still plugging away at the Zune."
The problem with the Zune is primarily that it has too many competing interests, the same thing that spoils Sony's products these days.
Imagine a product that had to do the following:
1) Compete with an established brand leader (iPod)
2) Start a new proprietary music market, which was different than Microsoft's proprietary old music market (Plays for sure)
3) Make sure it locks down content pretty tightly to appease the record companies
4) Innovate, but please see #3
5) Appeal to a wide audience of regular consumers and techies, but also make sure it's tied tightly to Windows
Microsoft could make the Zune really good with a firmware update, but that will never happen for the same reason that Sony keeps trying to make innovative consumer products that have as it's primary stakeholder their music and film division, not the consumer.
"Apple's clique in life has always been young, urban, chic, sexy"
Actually it hasn't; for much of it's life, Apple's niche was counter-culture, fight the man, this is a new way of doing things. It became the other things because the company changed from a technology driven company to a market driven company. The commercial 1984 was apple's image when the Mac came out.
I can't imagine them creating that commercial today.
"Thus, for households in which the computer is used primarily by one adult, an IP address is personally identifiable in that knowing the IP address (in conjunction with information from the ISP) makes it more likely than not that the adult in question was using the computer at the time the transaction with that IP was logged."
That's loaded with a whole bunch of assumptions.
First, the IP address that is public is the NAT'd address, thus, at best it identifies a pool of 1 to as many as 255 computers. While that may be ridiculous, let's be more realistic. If 2 adults and 2 teenage kids live in a house, it's fairly common for each of them to own their own laptop computer.
So if you say "IP address a.b.c.d was used to copy our music illegally", in the absence of any additional information, you narrowed it down to 4 people. But wait: it gets more complex if you have roommates who are not related to each other; there is no consideration that as a minor the parent may be responsible.
However, it's more complex than that. An IP address is changed regularly by an ISP, in absence of definitive logs from the issuer, it can't be considered reliable. Who owned address a.b.c.d at a particular time?
In the end, at best an IP narrows down the list of possible people from 5 Billion people down to perhaps several dozen. Useful for an investigator, but if I was on a jury, I wouldn't convict someone purely on the basis of an IP address, regardless of a judge's instructions.
They never did the obvious to make UMD successful... give UMD movies away when you bought the DVD. Yes, they would've taken a loss at first, but they would have built up a market for the things. Instead they charged *more* for a UMD movie than the DVD counterpart. So the rational thing to do was to buy the DVD, rip it and put it on a memory stick and watch it.
Many truly believe the world all have iPhones and everybody spends their day playing with them and looking to add little $1 apps to it. Even more can't fathom a world where people spend hours a day in their car and not only can you not get a data service on your phone, you can barely pick up one or two AM stations.
People should get out more ;)
Your argument boils down to this... there is no real difference between the record companies trying to maximize revenue and consumers who would just as soon take it for free if possible.
"Free AV software doesn't offer tech support and you dont get frequent virus definition updates"
Well, I've had a PC longer than most, and in those 30 years, I've never had to call tech support over anti-virus. Besides which, I'm guessing the level of support will be essentially a foreign call-center with ESL reading from a script. That's not tech support, it's a slap in the face.
Finally, I can't speak for every free anti-virus maker, but AVG offers daily updates. That's more than good enough.
Symantec/Norton AVG is primarily chosen by home users because they've made a deal with HP & Dell to include the trial version. The wise PC user uninstalls that first and then looks for AVG free or if you want to pay Kapersky or NOD32.
I think anybody sufficiently technical and doesn't have a twitch urge to click on every email attachment probably doesn't even need AV protection seeing as how most of them don't actually protect you, but I keep mine on because other people use the computer.