what about the case of the guy who wanted a 4-second clip of the simpsons on the background?
What about it? He can ask permission to copy or he can be creative.
what about having an archive of our culture, legally?
Offer to provide Disney's off site digital and physical backups for them for free. If you prove you can do it reliably and securely, and sign a suitable NDA, you'd save them god knows how many millions of $s, they will bite your arm off in their eagerness to take you up on the offer. Repeat for Sony and everyone else. There is your legal archive. Of course you'd be talking billions to trillions of of dollars for the infrastructure, but that is what would intrinsicly be needed for such an archive and not a copyright issue. The reason there is no such archive is no one wants one enough to pay for it.
The BBC is a perfect example. The reason so much interesting stuff has been lost to fires and just people throwing it into skips is simply that in a pre-digital era it eas even more expensive to maintain an archive. Keeping all those old Dr Who episodes etc. cost real money, and someone had to choose between that and making new programmes.
what about scientology?
What about it? (a) they have never, to my knowledge, used copyright to limit creativity since they are interested in $$ and suckers, not creativity, (b) copyright law actually encourages real, creative, criticism of their `scriptures', which is fair use, rather than merely dumping them in a web page and (c) their abuse of the DMCA is a perfect illustration of what I said before about the abuse of the word `copyright' to cover other things.
Why shouldn't HP be forced to comply with the law?
What law? Is there really a US or Idaho law making it illegal to pay two people differently for the same work?
Certainly in the UK you might have to convince a tribunal that the difference wasn't based on the race or sex of the employees, but beyond that I can pay you twice what I pay the guy working next to you and it's not illegal.
Not all contract workers make more than permanent employees.
Why on earth would an employer pay a full employee the same as a contractor, other things being equal? The only reason I can think of is that they are wiating for the employees current contract to run out before kicking them out.
One way to convince yourself that (software) DRM is fundamentally useless is to consider the fact that if I am to play a DRM'ed media file, I must have all the information required to unscramble it. If I have that information I can, given some work and programming, unscramble it once and store rather than play the result. So, the only way you can stop me getting an unrestricted copy is to stop me being able to play the file.
Surely, if the consumers know to ask, they could pick an ISP which did this, or subscribe to a system which does it independent of their ISP. If there is no such ISP, and this bill has any purpose at all, then one will appear to suck up all those customers.
The issue here isn't that some, dim, people want to pretend the internet can be made a suitable playground for unsupervised children, but rather that the state wants to make the decision of what is suitable.
the company almost always has less to lose than the employees do,
That's not true. If the company didn't need that person at work, they would not be paying them. What is true is that companies, being bigger, can absorb damage for longer.
That, of course, is what unions are for.
But my original point is that these people should not have taken these contract jobs if they are really so baddly remmunerated, or at least they should have used the jobs as temporary lifebelts to keep afloat while they found a better job. If HP can keep finding people to fill these jobs it would seem to imply that either the remmuneration package isn't actually that bad, or HP is hireing fools.
There are situations which really give the company the upper hand, for instance company towns and, worse, comapny script. For those we do need employment law.
But Boise is a reasonably sied city, 33 jobs is not enough for HP to be holding the population to ransom:-).
Or the company just hires more people who are willing to work in the same situation that all the quitting contractors worked under; there's an endless supply of people willing to be exploited.
If there are, then HP is overpaying it's employees, and it should be HP shareholders taking HP to court.
They work everyone the same, but 'badge' employees actually get vacation, 401k, etc.
This is why contractors generally get payed significantly more than employees, because they have to buy things the employees get `for free' (including some level of job security).
If Compaq/HP contractors weren't getting payed sufficiantly more than employees to cover this kind of thing then they should have walked away from the job en-mass. At that point either HP finds they didn't need the contractors anyway, they increase the money or they start hireing lots more employees.
And I have to assume the sort of person who'd spend $3500 on a laptop to run Linux on either knows how to install Linux themselves or has people paid to do it for them
This isn't much of an argument. $500 would pay for half a day of my time at our full commercial rate, and I can easily imagine it taking me more than that to install Linux and kick all the drivers for Sharp's weirdo laptop hardware into action. So, paying someone else $500 while I earn the company more than that would make sense.
Whether they are making a huge margin on this is going to depend on how much effort they actually put into support, and how much they pay their minions.
Which is also a cause for downloading - not enough money goes to authors.
So the argument is ``the authors don't get enough, so I'll make sure they don't get anything''?
If you care so much, buy the DVD and send an extra cheque to the director. Say $1 or local equivalent. You wouldn't notice, and if a significant number of people also care he'll be very happy.
Alternatively you could just advise the guy to get a better agent.
Interesting. Seems to be a step in the correct direction. I couldn't see anything about quality standards. Just because the code generated publishable results, that does not mean that the code is publishable.
I think the important thing would be to have the quality threshold be high enough and reliable enough that there could be no sane argument that the creation of something in the archive was not as much of a contribution to the field as producing a journal article.
One thing occured to me just now. Publishing metrics have the undesirable side effect of making people split results to get two articles, when one would be better for the readership. In a source journal, that might be a positive effect. Imagine getting an extra publication by taking some part of your program and separating it into a useful, documented, library. You'd deserver double credit.
Of course, often you will only be paying for part of it. It is common for research to come out of a combination of `projects' funded from different sources.
What should happen if, for instance, a drug company funds a project into developing statistical theory and signal analysis and so on to improve analysis of early candidate drug screening data, and then the researchers use the prototype implementation in a publicly funded project they are involved in on climate data and find something significant?
Or what happens for part-state, part-commercially funded projects?
I think one thing which could be done is to give companies a (bigger) tax break on money put into research (internal or when they give grants) if they sign up to give out not only all the data, but things like source of programs and detailed design of prototypes and experimental setups.
Another thing would be to set up some kind of peer review process and then treat published source as a publication for the researcher. If your peers sign off to say that you have produced and documented the code to the level where it is a useful resource for other researchers, then it should count towards departmental and personal evaluations just as a journal article would. The formalised review process is important -- the average bit of lashed-together-to-get-the-data research code is more equivalent to a scribbled note on a whiteboard than to a journal article.
Perhaps all that is needed is an online journal set up and run as a properly organised accademic journal, but specialising in publishing code. Imagine an infrastructure not a million miles away from sourceforge, but with a peer review process to decide what gets counted as a release.
"Free Culture (http://www.free-culture.cc/). It's full of real examples of how current copyright laws constrain creativity.
I did read this a while ago, and I wasn't really persuaded.
In the bit I remember, he seemed to jump between things which are clearly breach of copyright (eg copying MP3s of copyrighted music) and things which by precident are fair use (eg creating catalogues of existing works) trying to argue that the fact that the former are prosecuted (quite rightly IMO, and in any case with no impact on creativity) to the idea that the latter is in danger. So far as I know, no one has been prosecuted for putting a list of I Love Lucy broadcast dates on the Web.
Most of this was thrashed out decades ago for literature and years ago for music when sampling became common, though IIRC there was a recent decision by some insane US court which will need to be squished before all uses of the letter `a' require a licence.
You need to distinguish arguments about copyright from arguments about current US copyright law and precident. Copyright per-se doesn't cause a problem, but laws labeled copyright and decisions using the word can. Indeed it is the innocuous nature of copyright which makes people try and re-use the name for thier plan to own the creative world.
It would be funny if aliens considered reruns of I Love Lucy and the Honeymooners as pr0n, don't you think?
having written what I wrote yesterday, I was watching TV last night and wondered what the aliens are going to make of all the adverts for bathroom cleaners and so on. There is one on UK TV at the moment with this magnified animated bacterium played as a gangland boss - and of course he gets snuffed at the end.
Europe got the hard-core green "environmentalist" movement instead.
Europe has lots of things, even a noticable religious right (though it is Catholic rather than protestant). However, none of these groups has the power of the US religious right.
Having a president saying an equivalent of "God bless France" would not only be hardly imaginable, but would be an instant political suicide.
Strangely, the UK with state churches, ends up at the same place. It's intersting to compare the UK and USA -- both have openly christian leaders, but for Bush it is a surfboard to winning elections, while it is perhaps Blair's biggest liability.
The USA seems to have a pretty fixed image of a president - white, male, married to an acceptable wife, couple of acceptable kids, professing an acceptable form of christianity. So, when one of them, like Shrub or Carter, makes more of a fuss about religionthan average it wins them points, even from many people with different beliefs, because they are emphasising their fit to the image.
Of course, there is no difference between seeking religious freedom and seeking to force your religion on others if your religion includes the assumption that it is your duty to spread the True Word.
So, if we ban Solitaire, the IRS employees will probably spend more time gambling.
So long as you firewall their internet connection so that they can only get to US gambling sites, this is a good way to get some of the money you are paying them back in the form of gambling taxes.
It's not 'your' song. The various copies are always property of the person who bought them.
You can't copy a song, only a recording of a song. So, yes, it is about my song.
The you make a quick calculation of what it costs to make a recording[...]
Not the point. The point is that you always have the choice not to pay, because what they have control of is a very tightly defined thing. So, if people are paying 1000X markup, it is because they feel the product is worth what they are paying for it, not because they have no choice.
Anyhow, having the state provide money collection for churches counts as state funding.
So is building and maintaining the road which passes the church and policing the area so no one pinches the silverware. By that definition all churches, indeed all organisations, are state funded.
Do all the smart people out there really think that science has all the answers, or ever will?
This is, of course, a straw man. Science is not about having all the answers, indeed having all the answers would negate the need for science. Sciece is about finding out some things, maybe, to some level of certainty. That is why it is fun. And, of course, there are vast areas of possible questions where science has no bearing.
The fundamental difference between the traditional revealed religions' POV and what we might broadly call the post-enlightenment POV is the letting go of the need to know all the answers.
Unanswered questions are not a problem, they are potential fun. Noting imaginable could be as awful, IMO, as knowing all the answers, and hence having nothing left to wonder about.
As for the perfectability of man, that's just humanism, another religion, and just about the dullest one ever devised.
You can still choose where and when you play your recording of the song. You just cant prevent anyone else from playing their recording of it where and when they want.
It's not about my recording of the song, it's about my song.
it's about limiting peoples rights to do what they wish with their creativity, memory, abilities and property [...]
If you are using your creativity and abilities non trivially, copyright can't touch you (traditionally, lets not get into recent evils given the name `copyright' to try and make them sound more legitimate).
Which is why, when it comes down to it, copyright, even when abused, can't be too much of a problem. If I try and charge you a ridiculous amount to make a copy of my song, you can always go get a copy of another song from someone less greedy, or sit down and write your own. I have monopoly control on only one from an infinite space of potential artifacts, so my scope for abuse is infinitesimal. Even if, say, Sony ends up owning all of the back catalogue of all the major record labels, there will still be people creating new music.
Compare that with patents, where I am granted control of your creativity.
Slashdot Mirror
What about it? He can ask permission to copy or he can be creative.
what about having an archive of our culture, legally?
Offer to provide Disney's off site digital and physical backups for them for free. If you prove you can do it reliably and securely, and sign a suitable NDA, you'd save them god knows how many millions of $s, they will bite your arm off in their eagerness to take you up on the offer. Repeat for Sony and everyone else. There is your legal archive. Of course you'd be talking billions to trillions of of dollars for the infrastructure, but that is what would intrinsicly be needed for such an archive and not a copyright issue. The reason there is no such archive is no one wants one enough to pay for it.
The BBC is a perfect example. The reason so much interesting stuff has been lost to fires and just people throwing it into skips is simply that in a pre-digital era it eas even more expensive to maintain an archive. Keeping all those old Dr Who episodes etc. cost real money, and someone had to choose between that and making new programmes.
what about scientology?
What about it? (a) they have never, to my knowledge, used copyright to limit creativity since they are interested in $$ and suckers, not creativity, (b) copyright law actually encourages real, creative, criticism of their `scriptures', which is fair use, rather than merely dumping them in a web page and (c) their abuse of the DMCA is a perfect illustration of what I said before about the abuse of the word `copyright' to cover other things.
What law? Is there really a US or Idaho law making it illegal to pay two people differently for the same work?
Certainly in the UK you might have to convince a tribunal that the difference wasn't based on the race or sex of the employees, but beyond that I can pay you twice what I pay the guy working next to you and it's not illegal.
Not all contract workers make more than permanent employees.
Why on earth would an employer pay a full employee the same as a contractor, other things being equal? The only reason I can think of is that they are wiating for the employees current contract to run out before kicking them out.
One way to convince yourself that (software) DRM is fundamentally useless is to consider the fact that if I am to play a DRM'ed media file, I must have all the information required to unscramble it. If I have that information I can, given some work and programming, unscramble it once and store rather than play the result. So, the only way you can stop me getting an unrestricted copy is to stop me being able to play the file.
Surely, if the consumers know to ask, they could pick an ISP which did this, or subscribe to a system which does it independent of their ISP. If there is no such ISP, and this bill has any purpose at all, then one will appear to suck up all those customers.
The issue here isn't that some, dim, people want to pretend the internet can be made a suitable playground for unsupervised children, but rather that the state wants to make the decision of what is suitable.
That's not true. If the company didn't need that person at work, they would not be paying them. What is true is that companies, being bigger, can absorb damage for longer.
That, of course, is what unions are for.
But my original point is that these people should not have taken these contract jobs if they are really so baddly remmunerated, or at least they should have used the jobs as temporary lifebelts to keep afloat while they found a better job. If HP can keep finding people to fill these jobs it would seem to imply that either the remmuneration package isn't actually that bad, or HP is hireing fools.
There are situations which really give the company the upper hand, for instance company towns and, worse, comapny script. For those we do need employment law.
But Boise is a reasonably sied city, 33 jobs is not enough for HP to be holding the population to ransom:-).
If there are, then HP is overpaying it's employees, and it should be HP shareholders taking HP to court.
This is why contractors generally get payed significantly more than employees, because they have to buy things the employees get `for free' (including some level of job security).
If Compaq/HP contractors weren't getting payed sufficiantly more than employees to cover this kind of thing then they should have walked away from the job en-mass. At that point either HP finds they didn't need the contractors anyway, they increase the money or they start hireing lots more employees.
This isn't much of an argument. $500 would pay for half a day of my time at our full commercial rate, and I can easily imagine it taking me more than that to install Linux and kick all the drivers for Sharp's weirdo laptop hardware into action. So, paying someone else $500 while I earn the company more than that would make sense.
Whether they are making a huge margin on this is going to depend on how much effort they actually put into support, and how much they pay their minions.
So the argument is ``the authors don't get enough, so I'll make sure they don't get anything''?
If you care so much, buy the DVD and send an extra cheque to the director. Say $1 or local equivalent. You wouldn't notice, and if a significant number of people also care he'll be very happy.
Alternatively you could just advise the guy to get a better agent.
Interesting. Seems to be a step in the correct direction. I couldn't see anything about quality standards. Just because the code generated publishable results, that does not mean that the code is publishable.
I think the important thing would be to have the quality threshold be high enough and reliable enough that there could be no sane argument that the creation of something in the archive was not as much of a contribution to the field as producing a journal article.
One thing occured to me just now. Publishing metrics have the undesirable side effect of making people split results to get two articles, when one would be better for the readership. In a source journal, that might be a positive effect. Imagine getting an extra publication by taking some part of your program and separating it into a useful, documented, library. You'd deserver double credit.
Of course, often you will only be paying for part of it. It is common for research to come out of a combination of `projects' funded from different sources.
What should happen if, for instance, a drug company funds a project into developing statistical theory and signal analysis and so on to improve analysis of early candidate drug screening data, and then the researchers use the prototype implementation in a publicly funded project they are involved in on climate data and find something significant?
Or what happens for part-state, part-commercially funded projects?
I think one thing which could be done is to give companies a (bigger) tax break on money put into research (internal or when they give grants) if they sign up to give out not only all the data, but things like source of programs and detailed design of prototypes and experimental setups.
Another thing would be to set up some kind of peer review process and then treat published source as a publication for the researcher. If your peers sign off to say that you have produced and documented the code to the level where it is a useful resource for other researchers, then it should count towards departmental and personal evaluations just as a journal article would. The formalised review process is important -- the average bit of lashed-together-to-get-the-data research code is more equivalent to a scribbled note on a whiteboard than to a journal article.
Perhaps all that is needed is an online journal set up and run as a properly organised accademic journal, but specialising in publishing code. Imagine an infrastructure not a million miles away from sourceforge, but with a peer review process to decide what gets counted as a release.
I did read this a while ago, and I wasn't really persuaded.
In the bit I remember, he seemed to jump between things which are clearly breach of copyright (eg copying MP3s of copyrighted music) and things which by precident are fair use (eg creating catalogues of existing works) trying to argue that the fact that the former are prosecuted (quite rightly IMO, and in any case with no impact on creativity) to the idea that the latter is in danger. So far as I know, no one has been prosecuted for putting a list of I Love Lucy broadcast dates on the Web.
Most of this was thrashed out decades ago for literature and years ago for music when sampling became common, though IIRC there was a recent decision by some insane US court which will need to be squished before all uses of the letter `a' require a licence.
You need to distinguish arguments about copyright from arguments about current US copyright law and precident. Copyright per-se doesn't cause a problem, but laws labeled copyright and decisions using the word can. Indeed it is the innocuous nature of copyright which makes people try and re-use the name for thier plan to own the creative world.
having written what I wrote yesterday, I was watching TV last night and wondered what the aliens are going to make of all the adverts for bathroom cleaners and so on. There is one on UK TV at the moment with this magnified animated bacterium played as a gangland boss - and of course he gets snuffed at the end.
We're sending out alien snuff porn!
Porn.
However, trying to imagine what might turn on a silicon based amoeboid lifeform with communal intelligence is a real mind bender.
Europe has lots of things, even a noticable religious right (though it is Catholic rather than protestant). However, none of these groups has the power of the US religious right.
Strangely, the UK with state churches, ends up at the same place. It's intersting to compare the UK and USA -- both have openly christian leaders, but for Bush it is a surfboard to winning elections, while it is perhaps Blair's biggest liability.
The USA seems to have a pretty fixed image of a president - white, male, married to an acceptable wife, couple of acceptable kids, professing an acceptable form of christianity. So, when one of them, like Shrub or Carter, makes more of a fuss about religionthan average it wins them points, even from many people with different beliefs, because they are emphasising their fit to the image.
Of course, there is no difference between seeking religious freedom and seeking to force your religion on others if your religion includes the assumption that it is your duty to spread the True Word.
Or simply faith that God can choose a filter with the correct transfer function, or pre-filter the signal through an inverse function.
I'm saying that you could go and buy music by someone else.
So long as you firewall their internet connection so that they can only get to US gambling sites, this is a good way to get some of the money you are paying them back in the form of gambling taxes.
North America was settled in part by people seeking religious freedom (but also by people seeking land and hence wealth).
But, surely, the US was founded by people seeking political freedom, hence the fuss over a symbolic tea tax.
You can't copy a song, only a recording of a song. So, yes, it is about my song.
The you make a quick calculation of what it costs to make a recording[...]
Not the point. The point is that you always have the choice not to pay, because what they have control of is a very tightly defined thing. So, if people are paying 1000X markup, it is because they feel the product is worth what they are paying for it, not because they have no choice.
So is building and maintaining the road which passes the church and policing the area so no one pinches the silverware. By that definition all churches, indeed all organisations, are state funded.
This is, of course, a straw man. Science is not about having all the answers, indeed having all the answers would negate the need for science. Sciece is about finding out some things, maybe, to some level of certainty. That is why it is fun. And, of course, there are vast areas of possible questions where science has no bearing.
The fundamental difference between the traditional revealed religions' POV and what we might broadly call the post-enlightenment POV is the letting go of the need to know all the answers.
Unanswered questions are not a problem, they are potential fun. Noting imaginable could be as awful, IMO, as knowing all the answers, and hence having nothing left to wonder about.
As for the perfectability of man, that's just humanism, another religion, and just about the dullest one ever devised.
It's not about my recording of the song, it's about my song.
it's about limiting peoples rights to do what they wish with their creativity, memory, abilities and property [...]
If you are using your creativity and abilities non trivially, copyright can't touch you (traditionally, lets not get into recent evils given the name `copyright' to try and make them sound more legitimate).
Which is why, when it comes down to it, copyright, even when abused, can't be too much of a problem. If I try and charge you a ridiculous amount to make a copy of my song, you can always go get a copy of another song from someone less greedy, or sit down and write your own. I have monopoly control on only one from an infinite space of potential artifacts, so my scope for abuse is infinitesimal. Even if, say, Sony ends up owning all of the back catalogue of all the major record labels, there will still be people creating new music.
Compare that with patents, where I am granted control of your creativity.