then the laws stick around forever and are selectively enforced by the authorities whenever they feel like
Except authorities who enforce forgotten laws end up on DumbLaws.com and are embarrassed out of their... Next point?
there's nothing in the Constitution which says that laws which can't be enforced consistently will automatically expire.
In fact, there's nothing in the Constitution that requires copyright itself to expire. The "for limited times" in U.S. Const. 1.8.8 is relatively meaningless in the face of the Eldred v. Reno^H^H^H^HAshcroft decision, setting a precedent allowing for already nearly perpetual copyright to be extended even longer. This is a bad thing.
any given tab you pull off the internet will not be like source code because it will never be 100% accurate (I have seen exceptions, but those are few and far between). Therefore, it's not the same as the original work.
Your argument, "Just because it's a derivative work means it's no longer restricted," doesn't hold legal water. 17 USC 106 and foreign counterparts give the copyright owner exclusive rights to prepare and authorize "derivative works based upon the copyrighted work." Clones of software are not based upon the original source code, but tablature and other sheet music are based upon the original sequence of notes that makes up the music, and sequences of notes are expressions not ideas.
Clearly the poster has never played with FFTs (Fast Fourier Transforms for frequency analysis). The problem with a Fourier transform is that you must collect a large number of samples in order to get reasonable frequency resolution, unfortunately, that causes you to loose time resolution.
Most rock music is composed at a maximum resolution of about sixteenth notes (ignore complex guitar solos for now); decent beat detection will find the note grid. For a song at about 120 quarter per minute (Nirvana), this gives 1/8 second per grid space, or over 5,000 samples. 4,096 samples is more than enough to get a decent spectral resolution in an FFT. The problems discussed in MIDI FAQ may not apply as much to rock because you don't have 100 layers of instruments on top of each other (more like just drums, bass, three guitar notes, and vocals) or that many effects (just reverb and various sorts of harmonic distortion).
Or, why not apply an accoustic-analysis procedure and create a file that, when fed to the appropriate program, reproduces the music almost exactly how it was played!
This is MPEG layer 3 audio compression in a nutshell (sorry, O'Reilly).
Still free?
No. Look at the deep sh*t Napster is in right now.
Wouldn't that be the same as a clean re-implementation, and be legal?
It'd be another representation of the same notes. The sound isn't the issue here; the music is. A copyright on a musical composition can exist independent of any sound recording.
The tabs on the site are transcribed by people that listened to the music.
But they're derivative works of the original musical composition.
This can be compared to running a program and then making your own that is similar without looking at the source code.
Cloning software is legal, but cloning music is not. They differ in the amount of paraphrase (copying of ideas with new expression) between the original and the copy. Copying the behavior of a program is copying ideas and not restricted under copyright law. Raw music itself, on the other hand, contains hardly any content that could be considered "idea" (you can be sued for four notes), and the lyrics that normally accompany tablature are generally copied verbatim.
The ability to get free tabs makes playing music much easier, which in turn creates more musicians
It creates more performers, but it doesn't create more songwriters, does it? Most of the better artists (i.e. not Titney Spears or Backdoor Boys) write their own music.
Now you can close your eyes and pretend the law doesn't exist because there is no way to enforce it.
Laws that are too much trouble to enforce either cease to be enforced or are repealed. This war on sharing is similar to the war on drugs and the old war on alcohol (Prohibition era); it just doesn't work. There are other other ways to compensate artists, such as the Street Performer Protocol in which the full version of a work is released if and only if enough paid orders for it are received.
Music score is like source code and tablature is like object code and the sound is like the gui!
Music score is like source code. Tablature is another form of music score, and so is a MIDI file. The.wav or.mp3 is a binary, statically linked with the instruments, unlike MODs which are dynamically linked to their instruments.
but for some reason Napster supplies NO information on what to do if a song that you hold a valid copyright on is being blocked for no reason
If you hold the copyright on a sound recording, get your band listed in Napster's legal music registry. Or just sign up with MP3.com and name-drop your music in the chat rooms.
First, you would change your name; it's too similar to an existing Electronic artist Sandman. After that, you would sign up with MP3.com. You keep the copyright and $5 of every $10 CD you sell. And because they run the server and listen to everything that goes on it to make sure that no unauthorized cover songs are posted, RIAA/ASCAP/BMI won't attack them.
Google ranks by link popularity, putting pages that are too similar to popular pages in the "There are x hundred pages that are very similar to this page" section.
I was trying to find my old postings here on Slashdot, but the search engine is -- to put it politely -- poor. I go to the box at the bottom of the page, type in "ChaoticCoyote", and it can't find more than a few of my postings here.
Discussions older than two weeks are archived and reformatted into mostly static.shtml files that take less CPU time to serve. (Then they're removed from the database, freeing table space for more discussions.) Google and other search engines are free to follow the links through the doubly-linked list of static archives.
650 million messages (over a terabyte of pr0n, spam, and inane self obsessed rantings).
Assume the archive is 1.3 TB. Divide by 650 million messages and you get 2 KB/message. This seems to indicate that Deja removed newsgroup postings when archiving them.
Who has jurisdiction over interstate commerce in the US? What laws, if any, would apply?
Federal law applies to interstate commerce. According to United States Constitution, article 1, section 8: "The Congress shall have power... To regulate commerce with foreign nations, and among the several states."
In other words, all your jurisdiction in interstate commerce are belong to U.S.
How do they run things at twice the defined resolution without breaking something?
Interlaced television systems (such as NTSC, PAL, and HDTV 1080i) draw odd scanlines in odd fields (59.94 fields per second in NTSC) and even scanlines in even fields. Two fields make up a full frame. You see thin horizontal lines on the sides of moving objects in a high-resolution screen capture because an object can move between fields. (You don't see it in DVD captures because DVDs are stored at 24 fps.) Most PlayStation 2 games (and a few later PSX 1 games such as Tobal No. 1 and Ehrgeiz) render the display at 640x240 at 59.94 fps or 640x288 at 50 fps and move the camera down half a pixel every other field.
The solution, at least in the most frivolous cases, is loser pays. I would imagine that most courts would find against the RIAA at this point. If loser pays, then the RIAA would have to pay the legal expenses of these researchers.
This can be implemented in the current legal system if a defendant countersues on grounds of legal harassment.
Disclaimer: None of what you see on Slashdot is legal advice.
Slashdot Mirror
After I came down with multiple sclerosis, my whole right side stopped working, and now I'm typing everything left-handed only.
You might want to look at the Half Keyboard, where the space bar doubles as a shift key to access the keys that would normally be on the other side.
it is not Free in the sense of Free Software. It is merely Open Source.
Actually, FreeBSD is released under the BSD license version 2, which is a GPL-compatible free software license.
then the laws stick around forever and are selectively enforced by the authorities whenever they feel like
Except authorities who enforce forgotten laws end up on DumbLaws.com and are embarrassed out of their... Next point?
there's nothing in the Constitution which says that laws which can't be enforced consistently will automatically expire.
In fact, there's nothing in the Constitution that requires copyright itself to expire. The "for limited times" in U.S. Const. 1.8.8 is relatively meaningless in the face of the Eldred v. Reno^H^H^H^HAshcroft decision, setting a precedent allowing for already nearly perpetual copyright to be extended even longer. This is a bad thing.
But what about the owner of the underlying song?
I knew that. I wrote: "But they're derivative works of the original musical composition" not "original sound recording".
Of course, nothing you read on Slashdot can be taken as legal advice.any given tab you pull off the internet will not be like source code because it will never be 100% accurate (I have seen exceptions, but those are few and far between). Therefore, it's not the same as the original work.
Your argument, "Just because it's a derivative work means it's no longer restricted," doesn't hold legal water. 17 USC 106 and foreign counterparts give the copyright owner exclusive rights to prepare and authorize "derivative works based upon the copyrighted work." Clones of software are not based upon the original source code, but tablature and other sheet music are based upon the original sequence of notes that makes up the music, and sequences of notes are expressions not ideas.
How about all those bar bands that play nothing but cover songs? I guess they should pay to play music.
Except cover artists pay ASCAP and BMI for Public Performance rights.
Clearly the poster has never played with FFTs (Fast Fourier Transforms for frequency analysis). The problem with a Fourier transform is that you must collect a large number of samples in order to get reasonable frequency resolution, unfortunately, that causes you to loose time resolution.
Most rock music is composed at a maximum resolution of about sixteenth notes (ignore complex guitar solos for now); decent beat detection will find the note grid. For a song at about 120 quarter per minute (Nirvana), this gives 1/8 second per grid space, or over 5,000 samples. 4,096 samples is more than enough to get a decent spectral resolution in an FFT. The problems discussed in MIDI FAQ may not apply as much to rock because you don't have 100 layers of instruments on top of each other (more like just drums, bass, three guitar notes, and vocals) or that many effects (just reverb and various sorts of harmonic distortion).
Or, why not apply an accoustic-analysis procedure and create a file that, when fed to the appropriate program, reproduces the music almost exactly how it was played!
This is MPEG layer 3 audio compression in a nutshell (sorry, O'Reilly).
Still free?
No. Look at the deep sh*t Napster is in right now.
Wouldn't that be the same as a clean re-implementation, and be legal?
It'd be another representation of the same notes. The sound isn't the issue here; the music is. A copyright on a musical composition can exist independent of any sound recording.
The tabs on the site are transcribed by people that listened to the music.
But they're derivative works of the original musical composition.
This can be compared to running a program and then making your own that is similar without looking at the source code.
Cloning software is legal, but cloning music is not. They differ in the amount of paraphrase (copying of ideas with new expression) between the original and the copy. Copying the behavior of a program is copying ideas and not restricted under copyright law. Raw music itself, on the other hand, contains hardly any content that could be considered "idea" (you can be sued for four notes), and the lyrics that normally accompany tablature are generally copied verbatim.
The ability to get free tabs makes playing music much easier, which in turn creates more musicians
It creates more performers, but it doesn't create more songwriters, does it? Most of the better artists (i.e. not Titney Spears or Backdoor Boys) write their own music.
Now you can close your eyes and pretend the law doesn't exist because there is no way to enforce it.
Laws that are too much trouble to enforce either cease to be enforced or are repealed. This war on sharing is similar to the war on drugs and the old war on alcohol (Prohibition era); it just doesn't work. There are other other ways to compensate artists, such as the Street Performer Protocol in which the full version of a work is released if and only if enough paid orders for it are received.
Music score is like source code and tablature is like object code and the sound is like the gui!
Music score is like source code. Tablature is another form of music score, and so is a MIDI file. The .wav or .mp3 is a binary, statically linked with the instruments, unlike MODs which are dynamically linked to their instruments.
what if i don't have a cd.
Then go buy the CD. Or rip the tape or the vinyl.
some people don't have cd players.
If your home computer is old enough not to have a CD-ROM drive, it probably doesn't have a large enough hard drive to store many MPEG audio files.
In particular, where are all of the MusicCity servers?
MusicCity has switched from being an OpenNap network to being a Morpheus network with its own client.
how the hell do you get a hold of the gnapster author
Start with Mike Markley, who maintains the Debian package.
in particular, I want a client that can QUEUE UP SERVERS TO CONNECT TO
WinMX can add this. Why don't you add this feature to your favorite free software napclient?
but for some reason Napster supplies NO information on what to do if a song that you hold a valid copyright on is being blocked for no reason
If you hold the copyright on a sound recording, get your band listed in Napster's legal music registry. Or just sign up with MP3.com and name-drop your music in the chat rooms.
say I start a band, and I name the band "S@ndman"
First, you would change your name; it's too similar to an existing Electronic artist Sandman. After that, you would sign up with MP3.com. You keep the copyright and $5 of every $10 CD you sell. And because they run the server and listen to everything that goes on it to make sure that no unauthorized cover songs are posted, RIAA/ASCAP/BMI won't attack them.
I receive on three results
Google ranks by link popularity, putting pages that are too similar to popular pages in the "There are x hundred pages that are very similar to this page" section.
I was trying to find my old postings here on Slashdot, but the search engine is -- to put it politely -- poor. I go to the box at the bottom of the page, type in "ChaoticCoyote", and it can't find more than a few of my postings here.
Discussions older than two weeks are archived and reformatted into mostly static .shtml files that take less CPU time to serve. (Then they're removed from the database, freeing table space for more discussions.) Google and other search engines are free to follow the links through the doubly-linked list of static archives.
Get yerricde a pronounceable handle ... This one might take a while ....
Two years and a month, to be exact. By then, I will have graduated from the school that gave me this username (Damian E Yerrick => yerricde).
and a sense of humor
I have a sense of humor, but not for jokes that are old and poorly told.
650 million messages (over a terabyte of pr0n, spam, and inane self obsessed rantings).
Assume the archive is 1.3 TB. Divide by 650 million messages and you get 2 KB/message. This seems to indicate that Deja removed newsgroup postings when archiving them.
The MA people
Who has jurisdiction over interstate commerce in the US? What laws, if any, would apply?
Federal law applies to interstate commerce. According to United States Constitution, article 1, section 8: "The Congress shall have power ... To regulate commerce with foreign nations, and among the several states."
In other words, all your jurisdiction in interstate commerce are belong to U.S.How do they run things at twice the defined resolution without breaking something?
Interlaced television systems (such as NTSC, PAL, and HDTV 1080i) draw odd scanlines in odd fields (59.94 fields per second in NTSC) and even scanlines in even fields. Two fields make up a full frame. You see thin horizontal lines on the sides of moving objects in a high-resolution screen capture because an object can move between fields. (You don't see it in DVD captures because DVDs are stored at 24 fps.) Most PlayStation 2 games (and a few later PSX 1 games such as Tobal No. 1 and Ehrgeiz) render the display at 640x240 at 59.94 fps or 640x288 at 50 fps and move the camera down half a pixel every other field.
In my book, fragging lawyers counts as violence about as much as a insect exterminator thinks himself a hired killer.
Lawyers don't sue people.
Plaintiffs sue people.
The solution, at least in the most frivolous cases, is loser pays. I would imagine that most courts would find against the RIAA at this point. If loser pays, then the RIAA would have to pay the legal expenses of these researchers.
This can be implemented in the current legal system if a defendant countersues on grounds of legal harassment.
Disclaimer: None of what you see on Slashdot is legal advice.