Names cannot be copyrighted, but they can be trademarked. Use of a trademark to identify a company or a product is considered fair as long as the use cannot cause confusion between one company's products and another company's products.
Are you agreeing with perpetual copyrights and patents? What if, every time you drove or rode the bus to work, you had to pay royalties to the descendants of the caveman who invented the wheel?
Some performers have contracts for x% of the gross, and paying such royalties increases the marginal cost to the copyright owner. And according to the article, Palladium does reduce the marginal cost of piracy, which includes reducing the marginal probability of legal action.
However, marginal costs are not everything. Fixed costs help determine whether or not a producer enters the field.
your average war3z d00d doesn't have access to massive CD/DVD presses
I understand that the following anecdote is atypical, but George Harrison was a war3z d00d who had access to a CD press through his label. He accidentally pirated "He's So Fine" written by Robert Mack when he wrote and performed "My Sweet Lord". What steps can any other songwriter take to avoid accidentally pirating one of the millions of published songs?
There's no reason to believe it isn't. Google for "Planck time".
you're talking about the difference between a slow versus a fast chess game (they are identical), whereas "reality chess" would be a turn-less game
Video games are clocked at 60 turns per second, and the player can't tell. The difference between chess and Starcraft is that in Starcraft, the pieces do not move nearly as far in a "turn".
The $100 M blockbuster is a fixed cost that can be spread over all of the copies.
So is the cost of extraction of the pirate master.
often the pirate media simply does not work. If the failure rate is 50%
Fifty percent? Has that failure rate been observed in practice? And if so, is it any better than the legitimate route? I've experienced some pretty high failure rates when renting DVD videos, where "failure" == "disc is so scratched up that playback stutters in a key scene".
You have spent 15 minutes
I wasn't staring at the status bar for 15 minutes. I was reading Slashdot for a lot of that time.
acquiring a song which may be corrupt.
If a particular rip is widely shared, it's likely not to be corrupt.
Kazaa doesn't have a built in burning tool yet, so add in the cost of Nero -- either in dollars or the time it takes to obtain a pirate copy.
Most PCs come with a CD burner plus software nowadays.
Now the class of consumers who have unlimited time or otherwise undervalue their time is limited to those who are either unemployed or employeed beneath some poverty line
This is quite a large class, even ignoring the fact that the American economy is in the toilet. Assuming that the number of minors with a work permit is equal to or less than the number of adults enrolled full-time in university, at least as many Americans are unemployed or underemployed as are under 18.
I know that the RIAA itself does not have law enforcement powers, but what makes you think the RIAA is incapable of enlisting the Federal Bureau of Investigation?
To thward piracy the entertainment industry must keep distribution costs low, reducing the total cost for consumers to acquire legitimate content.
Assume that the copyright owner and the pirates have the same cost per copy of distribution. In order for the copyright owner's supply curve[1] to be to the left of the pirate's supply curve, the copyright owner's average cost must be less than the pirate's average cost. This means that the cost of creating a work must be less than the cost of extracting a pirate master. In the days of $100-million-plus blockbuster films, that ain't gonna happen.
To defeat this argument, refute my assumption that copyright owners and pirates incur comparable costs of distribution.
[1] The copyright owner's supply curve is vertical only in the case of pure monopoly. The motion picture industry is not a pure monopoly but rather a set of monopolistic competitors because each product has a close substitute. For example, West Side Story competes with Romeo + Juliet, and The Adventures of Pinocchio with Jonathan Taylor Thomas competes with Walt Disney's Pinocchio.
The DMCA doesn't necessarily keep investigators from circumventing encryption when monitoring alleged pirate networks. Law enforcement can get a judge's approval to violate 17 USC 1201, in a document called a "warrant":
(e) Law Enforcement, Intelligence, and Other Government Activities. -
This section does not prohibit any lawfully authorized investigative, protective, information security, or intelligence activity of an officer, agent, or employee of the United States, a State, or a political subdivision of a State, or a person acting pursuant to a contract with the United States, a State, or a political subdivision of a State. For purposes of this subsection, the term ''information security'' means activities carried out in order to identify and address the vulnerabilities of a government computer, computer system, or computer network.
In the US, the goal of govt. should be to protect the rights of individuals, not to better society at the expense of these rights.
The Constitution is at odds with your statement. The stated goal of the patent system is "To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts" (U.S. Const., Article I, section 8).
Patents are limited
Limited in duration? That's true now, but it won't be if the big pharmaceutical companies hire Cher as a spokesmodel for the Cher Patent Term Harmonization Act. Because she's about to retire from live performance of music, she'll have a lot of time on her hands.
Limited in scope? What hurts most is overly broad patents. Imagine if Edison had patented the process of sound recording rather than sound recording on a cylinder. That's how bad some of the software patents are.
But if the simulation runs on Microsoft Windows, we have the way out in more ways than one. In addition to the Unisys/Microsoft ad I just linked to, it's possible to escape Windows protection through shatter exploits.
Due to the way memories are stored, there is no way to erase specific memories from the human mind without some serious brain damage.
Haven't you seen Men in Black? In that movie, Agent Jones (known as "K") showed a darker-skinned Agent Smith (known as "J") a flashy thing called a "neuralizer" that could suppress approximately n days worth of the target's most recent memories.
I was very surprised by your saying that Terre Haute had one.
A quick Google search doesn't turn up any other major banks in Terre Haute. If you find some real competition to Terre Haute First National Bank (which was until recently IE-only with the exception of Netscape 4.7x; see bugzilla.mozilla.org bug 187615), I'll give you a cookie.
Any bank that tries this is going to see a massive shift to telephone and in-person banking
Some banks' checking account plans have a cover charge, where the bank charges the account holder $3 or so just to walk in the door.
Few people have that kind of loyalty to their banks.
Unless, as in the case of the City of Terre Haute, Indiana, their bank is the only bank with ATMs in the area. Using another bank's ATM typically costs $4 per withdrawal and may not allow deposits at all.
Try getting your aunt or grandfather to use Mozilla or Opera.
All I have to do is download Mozilla F*reb*rd, install it on my grandmother's Windows XP machine, hide IE, and tell her to click the bird when she would have clicked the 'e'. And once I hook up cable Internet service, I will do so, and she probably won't complain much. (Both of her banks' web sites work with Gecko.)
"But why did you put Firebird on there?" <analogy>Shouldn't a Pontiac Firebird get better gas mileage than a Ford Explorer?</analogy>
If people actually paid for the software the use, the music they listen to, and the movies they watch, the software, recording, and movie industries couldn't get away with a tithe of the garbage that they are shoving down our throats as we speak.
The recording industry was shoving garbage down American throats even before Napster brought recording piracy to the common person. Even now, it blames the decline in record sales on piracy rather than on the 30 percent drop on new titles per year. Analysts have claimed that record sales actually rose during the months Napster was in operation.
And how do you expect a home user to pay $6,000 to become proficient with a program such as 3DS Max?
And though I can see some causation from piracy to the DMCA and foreign counterparts, how was the Sonny Bono Copyright Term Extension Act a response to piracy?
But do you also approve of...
on
A Tour of Pixar
·
· Score: 1
If you buy from The Walt Disney Company, even though you express approval of gay-friendly policies, you express approval of the Bono Act, the DMCA, and sweatshop labor. You cannot separate them. You cannot specify that this many dollars of the ticket price go to Gay Days and this many don't go to lobbying for further copyright term extension.
Disney movies are for kids, Miramax movies are for adults
Disney owns at least a controlling interest in Miramax Films. Therefore, all Miramax movies are published by The Walt Disney Company.
Yes Bambi is better, for so many reasons that if you can't see you should not have even mentioned it.
Name three. Both movies involve a character being slaughtered. I haven't seen Bambi, but I'm going on news reports that the Bambi sequence has disturbed many, many children.
Lastly: Slippery slope much.
And how is a copyright term extension from 56 years to 75 years, with a further extension to 95 years, and with a Supreme Court ruling that Congress has unlimited power to extend it further in the future, not a slippery slope?
You will die someday. Why do you care what happens to works you have created after you no longer breathe? Why don't you think that it would be a good thing for the public to be able to appreciate those works fully?
I am too poor to see the value of having something I have copyrighted becoming public domain
Would you want to have to pay a royalty to the descendants of the caveman who invented the wheel? What if Beowulf were unavailable to the public because we could not locate the author?
If you want to see Finding Nemo, I'd say wait for the DVD release, rent it at Blockbuster Video, and give the same amount you paid to rent it to the Electronic Frontier Foundation.
if I promise to skip Disney's next inhouse 2D animation?
"Inhouse"? Try "outhouse". Walt Disney Pictures has not produced good cel animation since at least the Bono Act.
Since when companies should be boycotted for having pro-gay-policies?
Not all of Disney's potential customers are liberals like the typical Slashdot reader. Some are religious conservatives. Others are concerned with labor rights. The web site gives reasons for people of many political alignments not to buy Disney products.
Don't you think 95 years is excessive?
on
A Tour of Pixar
·
· Score: 1
I can't believe that they are advocating Shrek as an alternative to Disney movies.
What alternatives would you suggest? I know the webmaster of losingnemo.com, and perhaps I could give him some better alternatives.
Hello...Lord Farquaad...
I think Shrek portrayed Eisner quite accurately.
Also, what is so ridiculous about wanting to copyright something that you have done
I agree that copyright is the lesser of n evils, but don't you think 95 years is excessive? Do you not see the value of the public domain?
Slashdot Mirror
And if you archive it beforehand, you are technically violating one IP law or another.
Copyright law, 17 USC 108, allows nonprofit libraries to make archival copies of some copyrighted works.
Copyrighted name though, can't talk about it.
I recognize an attempt at a joke, but...
Names cannot be copyrighted, but they can be trademarked. Use of a trademark to identify a company or a product is considered fair as long as the use cannot cause confusion between one company's products and another company's products.
Are you agreeing with perpetual copyrights and patents? What if, every time you drove or rode the bus to work, you had to pay royalties to the descendants of the caveman who invented the wheel?
Maybe if there is some way to collect an informal archive about unjustified attempts to claim enforcement of copyrights
Would that be the Chilling Effects Clearinghouse?
Marginal.
Some performers have contracts for x% of the gross, and paying such royalties increases the marginal cost to the copyright owner. And according to the article, Palladium does reduce the marginal cost of piracy, which includes reducing the marginal probability of legal action.
However, marginal costs are not everything. Fixed costs help determine whether or not a producer enters the field.
your average war3z d00d doesn't have access to massive CD/DVD presses
I understand that the following anecdote is atypical, but George Harrison was a war3z d00d who had access to a CD press through his label. He accidentally pirated "He's So Fine" written by Robert Mack when he wrote and performed "My Sweet Lord". What steps can any other songwriter take to avoid accidentally pirating one of the millions of published songs?
That might work if our reality were clocked.
There's no reason to believe it isn't. Google for "Planck time".
you're talking about the difference between a slow versus a fast chess game (they are identical), whereas "reality chess" would be a turn-less game
Video games are clocked at 60 turns per second, and the player can't tell. The difference between chess and Starcraft is that in Starcraft, the pieces do not move nearly as far in a "turn".
The $100 M blockbuster is a fixed cost that can be spread over all of the copies.
So is the cost of extraction of the pirate master.
often the pirate media simply does not work. If the failure rate is 50%
Fifty percent? Has that failure rate been observed in practice? And if so, is it any better than the legitimate route? I've experienced some pretty high failure rates when renting DVD videos, where "failure" == "disc is so scratched up that playback stutters in a key scene".
You have spent 15 minutes
I wasn't staring at the status bar for 15 minutes. I was reading Slashdot for a lot of that time.
acquiring a song which may be corrupt.
If a particular rip is widely shared, it's likely not to be corrupt.
Kazaa doesn't have a built in burning tool yet, so add in the cost of Nero -- either in dollars or the time it takes to obtain a pirate copy.
Most PCs come with a CD burner plus software nowadays.
Now the class of consumers who have unlimited time or otherwise undervalue their time is limited to those who are either unemployed or employeed beneath some poverty line
This is quite a large class, even ignoring the fact that the American economy is in the toilet. Assuming that the number of minors with a work permit is equal to or less than the number of adults enrolled full-time in university, at least as many Americans are unemployed or underemployed as are under 18.
I know that the RIAA itself does not have law enforcement powers, but what makes you think the RIAA is incapable of enlisting the Federal Bureau of Investigation?
To thward piracy the entertainment industry must keep distribution costs low, reducing the total cost for consumers to acquire legitimate content.
Assume that the copyright owner and the pirates have the same cost per copy of distribution. In order for the copyright owner's supply curve[1] to be to the left of the pirate's supply curve, the copyright owner's average cost must be less than the pirate's average cost. This means that the cost of creating a work must be less than the cost of extracting a pirate master. In the days of $100-million-plus blockbuster films, that ain't gonna happen.
To defeat this argument, refute my assumption that copyright owners and pirates incur comparable costs of distribution.
[1] The copyright owner's supply curve is vertical only in the case of pure monopoly. The motion picture industry is not a pure monopoly but rather a set of monopolistic competitors because each product has a close substitute. For example, West Side Story competes with Romeo + Juliet, and The Adventures of Pinocchio with Jonathan Taylor Thomas competes with Walt Disney's Pinocchio.
The DMCA doesn't necessarily keep investigators from circumventing encryption when monitoring alleged pirate networks. Law enforcement can get a judge's approval to violate 17 USC 1201, in a document called a "warrant":
Sorry, an article that confuses units of power with units of energy
I guess I just mentally typecasted that to 18,200 megawatt-years of energy a year. A megawatt-year equals 31.56 terajoules.
In the US, the goal of govt. should be to protect the rights of individuals, not to better society at the expense of these rights.
The Constitution is at odds with your statement. The stated goal of the patent system is "To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts" (U.S. Const., Article I, section 8).
Patents are limited
Limited in duration? That's true now, but it won't be if the big pharmaceutical companies hire Cher as a spokesmodel for the Cher Patent Term Harmonization Act. Because she's about to retire from live performance of music, she'll have a lot of time on her hands.
Limited in scope? What hurts most is overly broad patents. Imagine if Edison had patented the process of sound recording rather than sound recording on a cylinder. That's how bad some of the software patents are.
In a proper simulation, there is no way out.
But if the simulation runs on Microsoft Windows, we have the way out in more ways than one. In addition to the Unisys/Microsoft ad I just linked to, it's possible to escape Windows protection through shatter exploits.
Due to the way memories are stored, there is no way to erase specific memories from the human mind without some serious brain damage.
Haven't you seen Men in Black? In that movie, Agent Jones (known as "K") showed a darker-skinned Agent Smith (known as "J") a flashy thing called a "neuralizer" that could suppress approximately n days worth of the target's most recent memories.
the "simple" computer is simulating the "complex" comptuer.
With attached storage. Can a computer with 128 MB of (RAM + attached storage) simulate a computer with 16 GB of (RAM + attached storage)?
I was very surprised by your saying that Terre Haute had one.
A quick Google search doesn't turn up any other major banks in Terre Haute. If you find some real competition to Terre Haute First National Bank (which was until recently IE-only with the exception of Netscape 4.7x; see bugzilla.mozilla.org bug 187615), I'll give you a cookie.
Any bank that tries this is going to see a massive shift to telephone and in-person banking
Some banks' checking account plans have a cover charge, where the bank charges the account holder $3 or so just to walk in the door.
Few people have that kind of loyalty to their banks.
Unless, as in the case of the City of Terre Haute, Indiana, their bank is the only bank with ATMs in the area. Using another bank's ATM typically costs $4 per withdrawal and may not allow deposits at all.
Try getting your aunt or grandfather to use Mozilla or Opera.
All I have to do is download Mozilla F*reb*rd, install it on my grandmother's Windows XP machine, hide IE, and tell her to click the bird when she would have clicked the 'e'. And once I hook up cable Internet service, I will do so, and she probably won't complain much. (Both of her banks' web sites work with Gecko.)
"But why did you put Firebird on there?" <analogy>Shouldn't a Pontiac Firebird get better gas mileage than a Ford Explorer?</analogy>
If people actually paid for the software the use, the music they listen to, and the movies they watch, the software, recording, and movie industries couldn't get away with a tithe of the garbage that they are shoving down our throats as we speak.
The recording industry was shoving garbage down American throats even before Napster brought recording piracy to the common person. Even now, it blames the decline in record sales on piracy rather than on the 30 percent drop on new titles per year. Analysts have claimed that record sales actually rose during the months Napster was in operation.
And how do you expect a home user to pay $6,000 to become proficient with a program such as 3DS Max?
And though I can see some causation from piracy to the DMCA and foreign counterparts, how was the Sonny Bono Copyright Term Extension Act a response to piracy?
If you buy from The Walt Disney Company, even though you express approval of gay-friendly policies, you express approval of the Bono Act, the DMCA, and sweatshop labor. You cannot separate them. You cannot specify that this many dollars of the ticket price go to Gay Days and this many don't go to lobbying for further copyright term extension.
Vote with your dollars against greed.
Disney movies are for kids, Miramax movies are for adults
Disney owns at least a controlling interest in Miramax Films. Therefore, all Miramax movies are published by The Walt Disney Company.
Yes Bambi is better, for so many reasons that if you can't see you should not have even mentioned it.
Name three. Both movies involve a character being slaughtered. I haven't seen Bambi, but I'm going on news reports that the Bambi sequence has disturbed many, many children.
Lastly: Slippery slope much.
And how is a copyright term extension from 56 years to 75 years, with a further extension to 95 years, and with a Supreme Court ruling that Congress has unlimited power to extend it further in the future, not a slippery slope?
You will die someday. Why do you care what happens to works you have created after you no longer breathe? Why don't you think that it would be a good thing for the public to be able to appreciate those works fully?
Disney movies are for kids
The Walt Disney Company owns Touchstone, Miramax, Caravan, and Dimension studios. Do you claim that Dimension's Scream series is for kids?
Farquaad =F***Wad
Is the nude scene in Disney's The Rescuers any better? What about the (accidental) penis-shaped tower on the cover of the first run of Disney's The Little Mermaid VHS and LaserDisc?
momma bear becoming a rug
Is Walt Disney's Bambi any better?
I am too poor to see the value of having something I have copyrighted becoming public domain
Would you want to have to pay a royalty to the descendants of the caveman who invented the wheel? What if Beowulf were unavailable to the public because we could not locate the author?
Can I see Finding Nemo
If you want to see Finding Nemo, I'd say wait for the DVD release, rent it at Blockbuster Video, and give the same amount you paid to rent it to the Electronic Frontier Foundation.
if I promise to skip Disney's next inhouse 2D animation?
"Inhouse"? Try "outhouse". Walt Disney Pictures has not produced good cel animation since at least the Bono Act.
Since when companies should be boycotted for having pro-gay-policies?
Not all of Disney's potential customers are liberals like the typical Slashdot reader. Some are religious conservatives. Others are concerned with labor rights. The web site gives reasons for people of many political alignments not to buy Disney products.
I can't believe that they are advocating Shrek as an alternative to Disney movies.
What alternatives would you suggest? I know the webmaster of losingnemo.com, and perhaps I could give him some better alternatives.
Hello...Lord Farquaad...
I think Shrek portrayed Eisner quite accurately.
Also, what is so ridiculous about wanting to copyright something that you have done
I agree that copyright is the lesser of n evils, but don't you think 95 years is excessive? Do you not see the value of the public domain?