I am not a lawyer, but I have read the entire text of Title 17, United States Code, which contains copyright law and mask work law.
when the copyright expires it's allowed to copy the work in question, but assum the work is on a copy protected media like a dvd, acording to the DMCA it's then still ilegal to use copy protection cracking software
Not necessarily unlawful. The DMCA (17 USC 1201) bans only circumvention acts and devices that attack "a work protected under this title" (that is, Title 17), namely a work under either a subsisting copyright or a subsisting mask work monopoly. Works whose copyrights have expired are no longer "work[s] protected under this title." This is why the Big Seven studios haven't released much (if any) public domain content on DVDs, because in that case, somebody would be able to lawfully make or import a circumvention device designed specifically to decrypt public domain works (which also happens to work on copyrighted works, wink wink nudge nudge). And no, encoding celluloid to MPEG-2 doesn't introduce enough originality to pass the 103(b) exclusion.
so how are we legaly sopoused to be able to copy a copy protected work even when the copyright has expired?
Without the Bono Act, the DMCA lacks teeth because the Mickey's Early Years DVD would contain public domain content, making DeCSS, QrPFF, and EfDTT legit.
Broadband costs 100x more than a nice computer
on
Gentoo 1.0 Released
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· Score: 2
Yeah, and what about those without a cd-rom drive|electricity|computer|etc? That's so unfair.
You were trying to make a joke by comparing the costs of hardware to the costs of network infrastructure. Your joke doesn't add up. For some users in the United States, initially setting up broadband Internet access can cost a hundred times more than the price of a relatively high-end computer system. In some cases, adding broadband Internet access to a family's telecommunications package may cost upwards of $200,000.
The main components of Windows are modular. Meaning, you can upgrade IE, WMP, and MSN Messenger just fine.
However, does Microsoft document the specific COM interfaces necessary to replace MSHTML (IE's HTML rendering engine) with a third-party renderer such as Gecko (Mozilla's rendering engine), or MSN Messenger with Jabber? If so, I couldn't find it on MSDN.
Oh, of course - the ksymoops! Man, I loved how *nix makes their commands so obvious.
Let me take it apart: ksymoops = "kernel symbolic oops". In general, if something starts with a 'k' on Linux, it's either inside the kernel or some part of KDE.
For another thing, how is it obvious that a "chair" is something you sit on while in front of a desk, other than the fact that you've been using the word since you were two? As you learn Linux debugging, you pick up its special vocabulary.
The US Senate, or Congress, does not have the legal or authoritative right to pass a law that dictates the wherewithal of computing to the rest of the world.
However, it does have the right to regulate what flows into and out of any of the 50 United States under the Commerce Clause.
I just guessed the address webmaster@ because it's common for administrators of web sites to use this address. Even if it isn't, a competent postmaster will see the flood of bounces from webmaster@ and set up the appropriate forwarding.
Here's the letter I sent: To: webmaster@sharpelectronics.com Subject: Blocking web browsers is counterproductive
By blocking Netscape 6, you're throwing away potential sales.
Many of the people who would buy your Sharp Zaurus PDA are the same people who use more recent browsers such as Netscape 6.2. If you track Referer:, look in your server logs for hits coming from a site called slashdot.org. Many of lashdot's readers use Mozilla, an open-source web browser that's essentially identical to Netscape 6.x. Users of Netscape 6 and Mozilla would prefer even a text-only information page to the empty page you are providing.
Heck, you block Opera, the very browser built into the PDA. This strikes me as highly hypocritical.
I am using the web browser whose codebase will become either Netscape 6.3 or Netscape 6.5. For practical purposes, I am using Netscape, even though it has an M instead of an N in its throbber.
My neighbor is using a web browser with the same codebase as the one that Sharp ships with its device. He is using Opera. How hypocritical of Sharp to make a web site that its own device cannot access.
So then reselling bandwidth is a breach of contract, at which point the ISP cuts your access off.
Not only that, but if the contract included a software rental license, it might say something to the effect: "Any material breach of this contract by the Subscriber terminates the Client Software License, and any further use of the Client Software constitutes copyright infringement" to the tune of a fine up to $100,000 in the U.S. (The software backup law 17 USC 117 does not apply to rentals.)
But what's the point of giving a dialup 1/4 of a T1?
You misunderstood. 4:1 aggregation means that you buy enough upstream bandwidth to saturate the lines of 1/4 of your customers. This means 120 modems (at 50 kbps each, total of 6 Mbps) per T1 (at 1.5 Mbps).
tess.uspto.gov uses session-based navigation; links do not survive for longer than 15 minutes. In the TESS window, try clicking "Check Status" to get the TARR record. Turns out the trademarks are for keychains and sweaters. Here they are:
If the courts let this one pass, than a computer company with the name "Shintel Inside" could use this case as proof that the trademark is invalid.
No, because "Shintel" would infringe on "Intel". Any rational court would agree that the distinctive element in this case is "Intel" not "inside". It's like AOL trying to trademark "you have mail" which is generic and not distinctive.
The difference between Hindu karma and Slashdot "karma" (capped cumulative moderation result) is that with Hindu karma, you can't just reset your karma to neutral by killing yourself (i.e. creating another account). Your karma (action) has to follow dharma (the good way) if you want the god to give you the Bonus in the next life. See also Hindu Karma FAQ.
The page says it's this file system that will work regardless of the underlying operating system, and yet, one of the "system requirements" is a certain operating system, nevermind WHAT operating system...
The file system that the document describes will work on any OS, but the document itself is a compressed Windows Help file inside a zip file.
Is this kind of thing even legal? I mean, how can they enforce such a stupid license? If they want to distribute information, how can they tell us how to use that information?
Say hello to the United States Patent Office. Microsoft owns defensive patents on many software technologies but has a history of licensing many of them royalty-free to all comers. (Heck, even the W3C allows patented technologies into its standards, as long as the patents are licensed royalty-free.)
Note: I have not read the article.
Figures, since the article is not in a standard format (it's a compressed Windows help file in a self-extracting WinZip archive). To access this Windows help file without agreeing to the self-extractor's license, simply use any popular unzip tool. HEY MICRO$OFT, I'M WEARING A "DMCA ME" SIGN!
Copyright Act of 1790 provided for 14+14 years
on
When Elephants Dance
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· Score: 4, Informative
The demand to restrict the copyright to 14 years is pretty naive.
The Copyright Act of 1790 provided for a 14-year copyright term, renewable for 14 additional years. I remember reading that life expectancy for five-year-olds (a statistic that ignores infant mortality but does include child prodigies) has not increased significantly in the 200-odd years since that act was passed.
The model I use is designed to approximate the "substantially similar" standard that U.S. courts use to determine whether copying of a melody has occurred. Assume that all melodies on the Western musical scales can be transposed to start on note 5. Ignore sharps and flats, and fold notes outside [1..10] inward an octave (e.g. 12 becomes 12 - 7 = 5). Assume further that the note durations can be classified into short (8th note), medium (quarter note), swallowing rests into the previous note, and longer durations and that the last note is always long (because it's followed by an unbounded rest). Then you get (5, dur), (note, dur), (note, dur), (note, long) where note [1..10] and dur {short, medium, long}. Multiplying the possible choices out, you get (3 * 10)^3 = 27,000.
especially why is it Western-specific?
It assumes that melodies fall into the Western diatonic (major, minor, modal) system, that is, not the hindu or african scales or anything.
ObTopic: If the courts continue to grant monopolies on melody fragments this short, we may be seeing a movement among amateur songwriters analogous to the LPF/EFF effort against software patents.
In Part III of his speech... "To make a copy of a program you type 'copy', and the same copy command will copy any program." Hmm, but wouldn't you have thought someone like him would use "cp"
For one thing: Among English-speaking *N?X system users, it is commonly accepted that the utterance/KAH-pee/ refers to the `cp' command. It's analogous to calling the Hollings bill "sucker" after its former initials (SSSCA).
For another thing: Stallman doesn't use DOS, but he knows DOS, and he knew that many people in his audience were more familiar with DOS commands than with *N?X commands.
If you want to make nice, solid, constantly evolving software, go with Open-Source. Otherwise, if you're like the rest of the worl, you'll want to make money along with nice software (hopefully). Then, you'll go wtih Closed-Source proprietary, patented software.
The problem with patented software is that the patents that the USPTO has issued in the last 20 years are so d*ng broad that instead of "promot[ing] the progress of science and useful arts," they have precisely the opposite effect. For instance: data compression by dynamically building a character-to-string dictionary? Patent 4,558,302. Falling blocks puzzle game whose goal is to remove a specified initial set of colored or shaded blocks from the playfield (in other words, B-type Columns)? Patent 5,265,888. Image analysis by blocks against a smaller version of the same image? Patent 5,065,447. Heck, even topological sorting and XOR drawing were once patented in the U.S.
Sure there are a small set of notes, and only so many ways you can arange any two notes in any tempo. After two notes, it is all in the arrangement, and composition.
The Yes! We have no bananas! case set the precedent that four notes is enough to get a songwriter sued in the United States. Given that there are only about 30,000 ways to combine four notes in the Western music theory (reply if you want a more detailed explanation of the math), it appears that the only reason songwriters haven't exhausted the melody space is that the big "all your right are belong to us" publishers have entered into cross-licensing agreements with one another. This is part of why you should write your legislators and request a repeal of the Sonny BonoCopyright TermExtension Act.
Slashdot Mirror
Trolltech can release it under any damn license they please. YOU cannot take it, mod it, and rerelease under a different license.
This port was written by third party users (i.e. "YOU"), not Trolltech. I've fired off a friendly letter to the maintainers about the license issue.
when the copyright expires it's allowed to copy the work in question, but assum the work is on a copy protected media like a dvd, acording to the DMCA it's then still ilegal to use copy protection cracking software
Not necessarily unlawful. The DMCA (17 USC 1201) bans only circumvention acts and devices that attack "a work protected under this title" (that is, Title 17), namely a work under either a subsisting copyright or a subsisting mask work monopoly. Works whose copyrights have expired are no longer "work[s] protected under this title." This is why the Big Seven studios haven't released much (if any) public domain content on DVDs, because in that case, somebody would be able to lawfully make or import a circumvention device designed specifically to decrypt public domain works (which also happens to work on copyrighted works, wink wink nudge nudge). And no, encoding celluloid to MPEG-2 doesn't introduce enough originality to pass the 103(b) exclusion.
so how are we legaly sopoused to be able to copy a copy protected work even when the copyright has expired?
Without the Bono Act, the DMCA lacks teeth because the Mickey's Early Years DVD would contain public domain content, making DeCSS, QrPFF, and EfDTT legit.
You were trying to make a joke by comparing the costs of hardware to the costs of network infrastructure. Your joke doesn't add up. For some users in the United States, initially setting up broadband Internet access can cost a hundred times more than the price of a relatively high-end computer system. In some cases, adding broadband Internet access to a family's telecommunications package may cost upwards of $200,000.
The main components of Windows are modular. Meaning, you can upgrade IE, WMP, and MSN Messenger just fine.
However, does Microsoft document the specific COM interfaces necessary to replace MSHTML (IE's HTML rendering engine) with a third-party renderer such as Gecko (Mozilla's rendering engine), or MSN Messenger with Jabber? If so, I couldn't find it on MSDN.
Oh, of course - the ksymoops! Man, I loved how *nix makes their commands so obvious.
Let me take it apart: ksymoops = "kernel symbolic oops". In general, if something starts with a 'k' on Linux, it's either inside the kernel or some part of KDE.
For another thing, how is it obvious that a "chair" is something you sit on while in front of a desk, other than the fact that you've been using the word since you were two? As you learn Linux debugging, you pick up its special vocabulary.
Didn't the DMCA pass by voice vote, in the dead of night?
Yes, along with the Mickey Mouse Monopoly Extension Act.
The US Senate, or Congress, does not have the legal or authoritative right to pass a law that dictates the wherewithal of computing to the rest of the world.
However, it does have the right to regulate what flows into and out of any of the 50 United States under the Commerce Clause.
I just guessed the address webmaster@ because it's common for administrators of web sites to use this address. Even if it isn't, a competent postmaster will see the flood of bounces from webmaster@ and set up the appropriate forwarding.
Here's the letter I sent:
To: webmaster@sharpelectronics.com
Subject: Blocking web browsers is counterproductive
By blocking Netscape 6, you're throwing away
potential sales.
Many of the people who would buy your Sharp Zaurus
PDA are the same people who use more recent
browsers such as Netscape 6.2. If you track
Referer:, look in your server logs for hits coming
from a site called slashdot.org. Many of
lashdot's readers use Mozilla, an open-source web
browser that's essentially identical to Netscape
6.x. Users of Netscape 6 and Mozilla would prefer
even a text-only information page to the empty page
you are providing.
Heck, you block Opera, the very browser built into
the PDA. This strikes me as highly hypocritical.
Please remove the browser blocks.
They are aiming this product at the general public and guess what the general public uses Internet Explorer or Netscape.
You said Netscape? Sharp blocks Netscape.
I am using the web browser whose codebase will become either Netscape 6.3 or Netscape 6.5. For practical purposes, I am using Netscape, even though it has an M instead of an N in its throbber.
My neighbor is using a web browser with the same codebase as the one that Sharp ships with its device. He is using Opera. How hypocritical of Sharp to make a web site that its own device cannot access.
it doesn't mean that violation of the terms of the contract opens you to criminal liability.
Oh yes it can, if the contract includes a copyright license. See also my other comment in this thread.
So then reselling bandwidth is a breach of contract, at which point the ISP cuts your access off.
Not only that, but if the contract included a software rental license, it might say something to the effect: "Any material breach of this contract by the Subscriber terminates the Client Software License, and any further use of the Client Software constitutes copyright infringement" to the tune of a fine up to $100,000 in the U.S. (The software backup law 17 USC 117 does not apply to rentals.)
But what's the point of giving a dialup 1/4 of a T1?
You misunderstood. 4:1 aggregation means that you buy enough upstream bandwidth to saturate the lines of 1/4 of your customers. This means 120 modems (at 50 kbps each, total of 6 Mbps) per T1 (at 1.5 Mbps).
I believe AOL did get a trademark for "You've got Mail", when using the distinctive "AOL Guy" voice.
AOL(tw) has registered the mark YOU'VE GOT MAIL(tm) for AOL service, AOL service, toys, movies (e.g. with Hanks and Ryan), and t-shirts, and not just with Elwood Edwards' voice. However, AOL lost its (tm) on "you have mail" because it was too generic.
Intel has a trademark on "bunny people."
tess.uspto.gov uses session-based navigation; links do not survive for longer than 15 minutes. In the TESS window, try clicking "Check Status" to get the TARR record. Turns out the trademarks are for keychains and sweaters. Here they are:
BUNNYPEOPLE BUNNYPEOPLE
If the courts let this one pass, than a computer company with the name "Shintel Inside" could use this case as proof that the trademark is invalid.
No, because "Shintel" would infringe on "Intel". Any rational court would agree that the distinctive element in this case is "Intel" not "inside". It's like AOL trying to trademark "you have mail" which is generic and not distinctive.
all that bad karma could hammer them down.
The difference between Hindu karma and Slashdot "karma" (capped cumulative moderation result) is that with Hindu karma, you can't just reset your karma to neutral by killing yourself (i.e. creating another account). Your karma (action) has to follow dharma (the good way) if you want the god to give you the Bonus in the next life. See also Hindu Karma FAQ.
The page says it's this file system that will work regardless of the underlying operating system, and yet, one of the "system requirements" is a certain operating system, nevermind WHAT operating system...
The file system that the document describes will work on any OS, but the document itself is a compressed Windows Help file inside a zip file.
Is this kind of thing even legal? I mean, how can they enforce such a stupid license? If they want to distribute information, how can they tell us how to use that information?
Say hello to the United States Patent Office. Microsoft owns defensive patents on many software technologies but has a history of licensing many of them royalty-free to all comers. (Heck, even the W3C allows patented technologies into its standards, as long as the patents are licensed royalty-free.)
Note: I have not read the article.
Figures, since the article is not in a standard format (it's a compressed Windows help file in a self-extracting WinZip archive). To access this Windows help file without agreeing to the self-extractor's license, simply use any popular unzip tool. HEY MICRO$OFT, I'M WEARING A "DMCA ME" SIGN!
In other words, you have to make your music sound like theirs.
So how do I avoid making my music sound like any one of the umpteen thousand songs published since 1923 and getting dragged into court?
what if the "moral rights" holder -- who is now an individual rather than a corp -- wants to get compensated for his work?
Tough shit. What European laws call "moral rights," as I understand the term, include primarily the right to be recognized as a contributor to the work. Material compensation is the domain of copyprivilege (©), which expires after life + 70 (under the current laws) or publication+14(+14) years (under ideal laws).
The demand to restrict the copyright to 14 years is pretty naive.
The Copyright Act of 1790 provided for a 14-year copyright term, renewable for 14 additional years. I remember reading that life expectancy for five-year-olds (a statistic that ignores infant mortality but does include child prodigies) has not increased significantly in the 200-odd years since that act was passed.
How do you count it? Using only 13 sounds?
The model I use is designed to approximate the "substantially similar" standard that U.S. courts use to determine whether copying of a melody has occurred. Assume that all melodies on the Western musical scales can be transposed to start on note 5. Ignore sharps and flats, and fold notes outside [1..10] inward an octave (e.g. 12 becomes 12 - 7 = 5). Assume further that the note durations can be classified into short (8th note), medium (quarter note), swallowing rests into the previous note, and longer durations and that the last note is always long (because it's followed by an unbounded rest). Then you get (5, dur), (note, dur), (note, dur), (note, long) where note [1..10] and dur {short, medium, long}. Multiplying the possible choices out, you get (3 * 10)^3 = 27,000.
especially why is it Western-specific?
It assumes that melodies fall into the Western diatonic (major, minor, modal) system, that is, not the hindu or african scales or anything.
ObTopic: If the courts continue to grant monopolies on melody fragments this short, we may be seeing a movement among amateur songwriters analogous to the LPF/EFF effort against software patents.
In Part III of his speech... "To make a copy of a program you type 'copy', and the same copy command will copy any program." Hmm, but wouldn't you have thought someone like him would use "cp"
For one thing: Among English-speaking *N?X system users, it is commonly accepted that the utterance /KAH-pee/ refers to the `cp' command. It's analogous to calling the Hollings bill "sucker" after its former initials (SSSCA).
For another thing: Stallman doesn't use DOS, but he knows DOS, and he knew that many people in his audience were more familiar with DOS commands than with *N?X commands.
If you want to make nice, solid, constantly evolving software, go with Open-Source. Otherwise, if you're like the rest of the worl, you'll want to make money along with nice software (hopefully). Then, you'll go wtih Closed-Source proprietary, patented software.
The problem with patented software is that the patents that the USPTO has issued in the last 20 years are so d*ng broad that instead of "promot[ing] the progress of science and useful arts," they have precisely the opposite effect. For instance: data compression by dynamically building a character-to-string dictionary? Patent 4,558,302. Falling blocks puzzle game whose goal is to remove a specified initial set of colored or shaded blocks from the playfield (in other words, B-type Columns)? Patent 5,265,888. Image analysis by blocks against a smaller version of the same image? Patent 5,065,447. Heck, even topological sorting and XOR drawing were once patented in the U.S.
And don't count on waiting for the patents to expire. Just as Hollywood managed to get a Sonny Bono Copyright Term Extension Act passed with tons of soft money and (possibly mandatory) individual contributions, watch the pharmaceutical industry propose a Cherilyn LaPierre Patent Term Extension Act.
Sure there are a small set of notes, and only so many ways you can arange any two notes in any tempo. After two notes, it is all in the arrangement, and composition.
The Yes! We have no bananas! case set the precedent that four notes is enough to get a songwriter sued in the United States. Given that there are only about 30,000 ways to combine four notes in the Western music theory (reply if you want a more detailed explanation of the math), it appears that the only reason songwriters haven't exhausted the melody space is that the big "all your right are belong to us" publishers have entered into cross-licensing agreements with one another. This is part of why you should write your legislators and request a repeal of the Sonny Bono Copyright Term Extension Act.