well, in case you drop back by this thread, I don't think the BBC exemption squares with any law or interpretation of the law I can dream up. Nor for that matter can i square up the way the PRS changes its rules in the UK to drop venues below 500 seats, cutting income from small bands and performers. It's a very murky and politicised area.
UK law allows fair use according to the circumstances. That's interpretative, and subject to more case than i care to read. This fits with the "no general . . . exemption" in Annex 4. which you cite. It has to say that, because it is only a guideline.
Regards the tapestry of life, I remember as a child being sorely impressed by the notices in books i was given - "not to be lent reproduced etc." Now that's plain silly in decent society.
I also agree with your comment regards photographic rights. The Gridiron Building in New York and the Eiffel Tower (or more specifically the illuminations which are privately maintained) are ridiculous examples of copy and design rights enforcement. Last i checked, fortunately, in the UK, no copyright applies to public spaces. No permission required. Interiors of a private building are a whole other matter.
But i morally draw the line where fair dealing or fair use touches the world of commerce. Google cacheing falls decidedly on the darker side of my wide grey line. I think it's plain Google has some major flaws in its legal underpinnings.
The question is ultimately whether these infringements offer a wider benefit, socially or economically. I'll pass on that debate if i may (!) but add only that all too much of the web is corporate ephemera. Is there much point to cacheing that? But corporatism will define the battle lines for a while to come, see "Adwords" suits aplenty. Since the web is transient in nature, and has not yet settled on one means of [self]organisation, let alone succomed to the vanities of categorisation, i dislike the sense of landgrab. Google is not certain to be the last word. (speaking as someone who found MSN is beating Google in many cases, time of writing). Nor maybe are search engines per se the last word. If something doesn't actually supercede search engine as we know it now, given sufficient bandwidth, what is to say it won't be practical for us all to write our own searchbots? . . . But my point is that i intuitively rally against monolithic repositories, like the Library of Alexandria they are too easy to ransack, and morally against those who profit by uninvited copyright taxation.
if i am not mistaken, just for those who want pictures. Bit slow now, so apologies if in any way redundant.
http://www.mlagazine.com/modules.php?op=modload& na me=News&file=article&sid=137&mode=thread&order=0&t hold=0&POSTNUKESID=7e761ab32b7b67210609bebf6a754b6 b
or just go to http://www.mlagazine.com/ and click the obvious.
Oh, and i forgot to add that the BBC also has a statutory right to broadcast any copyright media it chooses without prior permission. You cannot withhold broadcast rights from the BBC. Now, they tend not to use this provision to mess with big hollywood studios, but prefer to mess with small underpaid classical composers and other small fry who suddenly find the BBC broadcasts and drags its feet over negotiating a measly fee. Of course. . .:-/ The BBC, is on that same protected list as the Govt, though it is required to pay for broadcast rights.
The Crown / Government have rights to overrule copyright for public good and use, hence libraries.
Is it actually written that way in UK laws, or is that just paraphrasing? If so what level of the UK government determines this? Can a geeky monarch tell IP abusers to shove it?
I'm just thinking of the long term possibilities here.
What a wonderful thought! Yes, and er, No, depending on how you read your question and how you read the state of things here in the UK.
Yes, there are written sections in Copyright 1988 that reserve the rights i refered to.
No, Crown / Govt. does not imply right of fiat, i.e. any one person's unilateral action.
But there may be some work - arounds, some appealingly subversive, some rather worrying by their preconditions . ..
The Govt. has explicit rights in the UK copyright acts, including for public lending. This is referred to as Crown Copyright for historical reasons. I think the Queen Anne act of 1710 might have started the use of Crown to mean Govt. in this sense, though it's late and I'm not up to much research right now.
Rather, I'm afraid, in the sense I emphasised from your post above, the Monarch does little but rubber - stamp acts of parliament.
I get the impression by "IP abusers" you mean aggressively litigant copyright owners? IMO they are best told to shove off in the courts, but that takes time. The UK is sadly lacking organisations like the EFF. We have always been rather poor on such activist issues in comparison with the USA. But courts take time, and there will necessarily be collateral damage.
So in the sense you mean, to stop abuse of copyright rights by commercial interests, no one person quite has the power, and i have not seen a High Court case of a P2P sharer so far. When there is one, this will get interesting, as many Justices (Judges) in the commercial courts are very sharp at throwing out companies who over-reach and over-interpret. Bernie Ecclestone, the F1 racing honcho and many others have found they are spared little consideration, often receiving a real dressing - down in the judges reasoning. If you mean that we need laws to stop vexatious litigation by "IP abusers", i say only that some proper review of the wording of the law would help best with this, as does happen from time to time to occasionally sweeping effect. The Law Lords are feeling increasingly marginalised by and even hostile towards our Labour Govt. which has acted increasingly to interpret the law through statutes. No-one save Franz Von Papen, the fool who traded seats with Hitler in the Chancellery has done as much to make LAW a matter for the state, rather than for the courts, as our dear Mr Blair. So whilst I fairly bet, if he wanted, Blair could issue a statutory instrument to change the law by executive power (i.e. a statutory instrument is drawn up by a civil servant, who are increasingly political appointees) without a debate in parliament, i doubt he's about to bother. But a geeky Prime Minister, with all the new dictatorial powers available, might just agree with you. It would be an abuse, nonetheless. Individual Fiat is not permissable, even if it appears we have to suffer it.
Back to the good part of your idea:
Where it could get interesting is should a protected authority, such as a library, open up archives for public electronic access. Many libraries in London carry excellent lending stock of videos music and DVDs, often difficult to find rare or foreign language titles. What would happen if a library ripped its collection to a server? Personally, i think the library would prevail against infringement suits if, and only if, there was a time - limit imposed with some form of DRM, as in using your library number to access a title.
I am surprised that one or more of our notoriously left - wing, even militant left wing city councils has NOT already tried thi
There is no such thing as "fair use" in the UK (and Europe AFAIK)
Your statement is completely utterly incorrect. Most copyright concepts were developed in the UK and Europe. I mean it's a five second check on any given search engine ..
I am truly amazed how you injected that misstatement into an otherwise informed comment on copyright. This made me suspicious you were feeding the howlers into you post deliberately . ..
anyhow moving on ..
If copyright laws were strictly followed life would far less of a rich tapestry.
PS: I don't see anything wrong with what google do per se, just pointing out that it seems incompatible with the law.
Suggests to me you do not understand the law very well. First statement there needs justification. If however you say that public lending libraries are threatened (as they are in the UK in many places) then i might agree. The Crown / Government have rights to overrule copyright for public good and use, hence libraries. Absent libraries, maybe just maybe your comment has some validity. But we are not yet absent libraries, public or academic. Maybe you mean private lending of DVDs or books. But that argument is specious as it is difficult to draw the line between real infringement and social activity which encourages eventual sales, which being the current hottest debate for digital media creators since P2P was invented. Nonetheless, nowhere does your statement justify copyright breaches.
Second statement - I can think of a tort in damages would arise if you could prove that Google's cache dissuaded users from visiting your site and generating views of paying advertisers. Would it be right to disincentivise publishers in this way? Many publishers would be extremely financially challenged if even 20% of their advertising revenue disappeared.
So there is something wrong in what Google does. That much should be obvious. That cacheing is a neat and useful feature is irrelevant.
I believe this obvious breach is why Google does not, to my knowledge, ever display their own ads on cached pages, because this might be considered an aggravated breach of copyright - publisher looses ad revenue and Google gains in the same action. However I am not well up on aggravated copyright issues.
Nonetheless i am pleased you have recognised what in the UK are broadly called Creator's rights in copyright. Moreover your thought that imputes Google has not ex-ante obtained any rights to consume the media it indexes / caches is an interesting one indeed.
Has anyone out there written their server to push _abstracts_ rather than full pages to the googlebot? I have also heard it rumored that Google drops the "pagerank" of sites which prohibit cacheing, though this is quite unconfirmed.
i agree models look more convincing. if that really is the case, is there a real cost advantage for CGI? I mean so much of an advantage that actors have to imagine their whole environment which numbs performance because of the intellectual overhead?
As much as you can say about ham - acting in the Trilogy, nothing bored me more than the stultifyingly rigid acting of the prequels to date. I think this is a real byproduct of the CGI environment sets. What i am speculating, albeit wildly, is an analogy with how LOTR was imagined by kids before any film ever came out. I mean, everyone thought differently. So, as so much CGI happens in Post, and actors have only storyboards and sketches to work from, do they compromise by defaulting to a static interpretation, rather than risk being wildly at odds with another's take on the imaginary set? I don't doubt Lucas et.al. have contemplated this at some point in time, but can anyone point me to any public discussion of this issue?
On a less serious note. Imagine this - getting seriously rich only to find out all your toys have dematerialised. That wold make _me_ want to build more models at any rate:)
This was the plan that would make video search a killer tool:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/entertainment/tv_and_ ra dio/3177479.stm
Summary : Exiled Director General of the BBC planned to open the whole BBC archive online.
Makes me think. Did he resign over the Hutton enquiry , or was he pushed out by Murdochs lobbying. Similar timescale.
I mean, who would watch SKY if you could go online and watch anything the BBC ever produced. OK, almost. BBC don't own the Simpsons. But i bet Discovery would be short a few vieiwers . . anyhow, Spaghetti all round. .
In the UK at least, an author has stautory provision against false attribution. Fair use itself does not usually take consideration of the effect or intent. No new work was created in which a fair use rule can be applied. The effect is redistribution in a database, for which there is a ton of case law saying the incident is actionable.
Although to go into the grey area here would take too long, the person who "writes" is attributing material to themselves.
Ah, but it's Slashdot who writes "writes". Seriously, if that were my article, even if it is 5 years old, I'd be pretty pissed off at the mere lack of simple tact. A big publisher might see a need to defend their rights even apparently tenuous ones. There is a need for such commercial defences, even if it has all gone mad with the RIAA etc.
So I wonder when we'll see CoyboyNeal writes: "Today we got sued by Reuters, for the full story, please see our forthcoming 404 error
It's stupid to tread on toes. Even more stupid to encourage people to help you to tread on big companies toes.
Oh well, not that anything i said matters or anything . ..
George Smiley, Asst. Attorney to Director, National Security Agency Chief, Central Security Service (NSA Information Assurance Department) Date As Decrypt Key
Re: Unauthorized Use and Disclosure of Intellectual Property
VIA FEDERAL EXPRESS
Dear Cryptanalyst,
I serve as legal counsel to the NSA Information Assurance Department, owner of extensive intellectual property rights and trademarks pertaining to the use, distribution and deployment of intelligence worldwide. In fact you may have heard of us. To make you fully understand our concern and the reach of our recognised brands throughout the world, let me put it this way, we do what RIAA only dreams they could.
It has recently come to our attention that John Doe, in personam, i.e. youself, the only possible recipient of this message has sought to circumvent our intentional copy protection of classified communications, thereby exposing our proprietary materials, name, marks, trade dress, intellectual property and good will to possible illegal misuses including but not limited to commercial exploitation or karma whoring on Slashdot.
By reading this message you have violated federal laws, including (among others) the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, the Economic Espionage Act, the Electronic Communications Privacy Act, the Wiretap Act, the Legal Lobbyist Retirement Protection Act, and the Consumer Fraud and Abuse Act, as well as State of Wisconsin Natalie Portman 3D Redistribution Act (HP Amendment). (We're the NSA, we know about that one too.)
Therefore we require that you immediately CEASE AND DESIST from any and all activities causing, leading to or which might be construed to result in the actual or potential dissemination of the proprietary information and excellent legal drafting contained herin. Under the terms of the DMCA, inter alia, we inform you that henceforth your knowledge of this text will be deemed to be a Circumvention Device, and as such we are required to place restrictions on your person. Kindly call me on the number below and await instructions. Do not move, do not try to escape, do not pass go and do not collect $200 (that's all we have left after spending $20Bln on the Great Monument to ourselves you see before you.)
Failure to comply with these requests may expose you or your organization to an action for injunctive relief or monetary damages, and any other relief permitted under state and federal law, including court costs and attorneys' fees. You may also wish to consider and examine the potential criminal consequences, under theories of aiding and abetting and conspiracy to denigrate the agencies elite avant-garde sculptural skills.
If you fail to comply with these requests we will have to invoke recourse under the Homeland Bitchslap Act of 2001.
Sincerely, George "W" Smiley.
P.S. Son, you should have just applied through personnel. Way back when I was a junior we dreamed up this sucker distract the Russians who'd waste all their time drinking vodka and analysing it just to get one over us. Don't worry, I'll tell your Ma it was friendly fire.
Those expressions are then used by native speaking politicians and are broadcasted by television.
Dude, it's worse, the French have already infiltrated as far as the advertising business and are using covert channels to spread some dangerous crack i heard was called La Liberte:
http://french.about.com/b/a/081281.htm
Slightly more seriously:
Apart from pointing out that your use of the word native is rather presumptive of geographic origin in this big wide internet thing, i wonder if this linguistic adoption is more one way towards English since the internet. OK the French got Le Weekend, and tons of anglicised nouns, tried to ban them all and didn't manage. But i read Friday that a British pilot training firm lost a contract to a French one. The reason cited by the Asian airline was that, whilst the training had to be in English, the French trainers spoke better, clearer, more intelligble English than did the English. I can't argue with that. Sadly.
Not sure about that. If HP imanufactures printer ink in Europe
Utterly unknown to me is if HP or other companies localised production for ink.
There are quite some differences in cultural preferences for print output. e.g. Asia typically likes cooler colors than Europe.
Even sending a fully calibrated galley to a fully calibrated printer, ink densities and mixtures are still often applied to give a "feel" that is considered commmercially popular.
In fact it can be quite hard, not to mention expensive, to accurately match color correction at the press end with your pre-press soft proofs. Actually, very expensive, and very hard. If only because you have to start every conversation with "so i assume you're familiar with the latest ISO / DIN number bla, and it's revisions blah blah and blah . .." 'kay, fortunately not always, but some printers still trial and error their way through things, and it's worth checking on them.
So, allowing the huge number of ink designers and manufacturers in, mainly Germany, but also the rest of Europe, and the cost of wet transport, maybe inks are local, and that explains the price difference.
I would like to say this is a decision without impact, but i doubt it.
I can imagine this could also have political reasoning to protect EU dealers and distributors. HPs distribution in the UK is utterly awful. Last time i had a big HP proofer, it was a torture to obtain fresh inks, which is why our multi K$ printer stood idle much of the time. I am talking about inept large dealers who couldn't give a toss, were rude and intrusive (i asked for some specifics on a short run laser press, and had a business plan demanded of me! forget that . ..) Not to mention having their clocks cleaned by Dell.
Actually, given what a bunch or jerks most HP dealers i've encountered are, i'd not put it past them to have lobbied for some artifical extra margin.
The company introduced region-coding on several printers in the summer so it won't have to keep altering prices to keep pace with currency movements, says Kim Holm, vice president for H-P's supplies business in Europe, the Middle East and Africa.
And i thought when Carly took over at HP she rolled out the worlds most sophisticated SAP system to integrate their whole supply chain?
You mean HP can't write a script in SAP Financials?
Geez, where's that calculator division when you need a 17BII handy. . ..
So they admit failure of their biggest management project outside of kicking out the founding families?
Sorry if it's not SAP, but i remember a big hullabaloo that management pitched to Wall Street. comp.os.vms chronicles it almost blow by blow.
So, as per my earlier thought, if this is not purely political, then management is in a real mess.
I just hope some analyst picks up on this in the next conference call and releases a note slamming the incompetance and misguided greed.
Off the top of my head, and with no real data, I just see this as an attempt at implementing exchange rate controls.
HP is choosing to lock in an artifical rate, set effectivey by the disparity in localised prices.
But in reality, much of that disparity stems from stock inventory which has been bought and financed at historic exchange rates.
Not even large distributors can necessarily justify, manage or afford responsive hedeing programs.
Is this a return to the labarynthine export and exchange quotas of the 1970s, before the capital account was opened and rates floated freely?
Or is it more desperate, like the Exchange Rate Equalisation Tax that prevented US investors gaining a decent return from European investments?
But the net effect is to keep dollars in the US.
This seems to me to be at odds with the Petro - Dollar inflation that was engineered in the 70's (and led to technical mass bankruptcies in 1982, when Citibank was effectively bust) and which might be in play today. Then it was to balance huge trade deficits from OPEC oil price controls, now for a set of modern reasons such as the outsourcing of the manufacturing base to low wage countries.
Sorry, references left to reader excercise unless i get a for - real lunch break today.
In summary, i am impressed by a protectionist, political motivation for this move, and see how differential pricing could be enforced more widely to meet treasury dept. wishes.
Carly Runs For Office, I guess:) /:(
Anyhow, i no longer buy HP carts as mine all "timed out" before they were emptied, so in disgust i switched.
"And then it went all downhill because beating the Nazis with the rest of the world was too much effort for the little Brits. Awww!"
Absolute CRAP. If you had any sense of history, you'd know it wasn't the Brits or the Americans who broke the back of the Germans in WWII. It was the Soviets.
I now quote from John Erickson's "The Road To Berlin"
In the course of 1,320 days of active military operations (93 percent of the entire wartime period) the Red Army destroyed or disabled 506.5 German divisions in the east, while Germany's satellites lost a further 100 divisions as the price of participating in the war against the Societ Union. Out of the grand total of Germany's losses of 13,600,000 killed, wounded, missing and made prisoner, Soviet military staticians reckon that no less than 10,000,000 men met a grim fate on the Eastern Front.
That wasn't the action of Brits or GIs, in case you hadn't noticed.
By comparison, the western campaign was a mopping up operation.
But maybe it's just me. I haven't yet transcended meatspace.
The only thing an anthropologist said which stuck in my mind, and apologies in advance i cannot attribute or claim truth for this:
"The only primate we see in the wild, alone, is a dead primate".
For those who have "transcended meatspace", i doubt they've equally forsaken human interaction [not that any self respecting anthro-apologist* would call/. human interaction I'm sure] but it's a poor substitute.
That said, from my own reclusive ivory tower, I personally add that whilst humans are exceptionally adept at adapting to isolation, we are in turn chronically maladept at readapting to absense of isolation, intellectually, physically or emotionally.
Thus, my serious and heartfelt advice, as someone who started a estimated 15 year project (in terms of real intellectual payoff) to those who feel comfortable now remote working or working on-line or whatever, especially if you are young (and i was young when at the incept of my project) - you don't know what you're missing. I have for very real reasons decided to take time off work, simply because I've found enough material to write a blessed *book* on the subject, and feel that's a more worthwhile pursuit now, for me, and anyone else who's intellect is strong enough to misguide their person and enforce social stringencies upon themselves.
Guys and gals, that's heartfelt, after ten years of work, almost all of it alone. No, my project is on track, but it's possible not to notice self - inflicted pain. I shall now return my heart to its rightful place and wash the blood from my sleeve:)
Anyhow, as for the coffee shop model, in London at least it'd be good for productivity. Cost of WiFi access in this city sure stops reloading your favourite websites:)
* don't you just love expanding unintentional Freudian typos?
Ok then where are the 3Ghz chips? They should have been here 6 months ago according to the article. It is one of a few possibilites. 1. Steve lied to everyone. 2. They can't do it. 3. They can do it but won't for some reason.
Lets assume it is option 3 above. What do you think their reason is for not giving out faster machines? Are the ones they have now selling great? Are they stuck in the channel and they want to clear out all the 2.x Ghz machines first? If so then wouln't 6 months be long enough?
Actually, from my reading of Apple history, I'd say it was #1 as well as #3.
. ..
== Attr. Winston Churchill : "The truth should at all times be accompanied by a bodyguard of lies". But I bet some advertising guy said it first. ==
#2 : "Sorry, current guidelines indicate that under NSA rules I should interpret linked "stories" as commie propoganda, and respond by posting contradictory information as soon as is operationally possible."
== Life Imitates Government. Please Look Away ==
Re:I don't see what is so special here.
on
Defining Google
·
· Score: 1
. . ..
I even had to take a couple of lie detector and voice stress tests for minimum wage crap when a teenager.
sorry I can't find the link now (somewhere at the EFF.org site I guess), but as i understood it compulsory polygraph testing by an employer at any stage of the hire or thereafter is illegal in most states.
I'm not sure whether those laws were imposed after you were tested in this manner. Nonetheless, whilst I understand a employer thinking a polygraph is a good idea, it is a pretty crass way to demonstrate lack of trust in employees, which IMO is ultimately a bad thing.
Here in the UK, insurance companies are deploying polygraph voice stress testing to reject claims from insured customers. It's well proven from research I read, carried out by committees for the federal govt., that there is no scientific reliability in polygraph results. Now do a voice poly over a crap, distorted 3.1KHz voiceline? Disgusting, and likely illegal, de jure, on basis of forcing disproporte costs onto the insured if there is a false positive.
Slashdot Mirror
Hi,
:)
well, in case you drop back by this thread, I don't think the BBC exemption squares with any law or interpretation of the law I can dream up. Nor for that matter can i square up the way the PRS changes its rules in the UK to drop venues below 500 seats, cutting income from small bands and performers. It's a very murky and politicised area.
UK law allows fair use according to the circumstances. That's interpretative, and subject to more case than i care to read. This fits with the "no general . . . exemption" in Annex 4. which you cite. It has to say that, because it is only a guideline.
Regards the tapestry of life, I remember as a child being sorely impressed by the notices in books i was given - "not to be lent reproduced etc." Now that's plain silly in decent society.
I also agree with your comment regards photographic rights. The Gridiron Building in New York and the Eiffel Tower (or more specifically the illuminations which are privately maintained) are ridiculous examples of copy and design rights enforcement. Last i checked, fortunately, in the UK, no copyright applies to public spaces. No permission required. Interiors of a private building are a whole other matter.
But i morally draw the line where fair dealing or fair use touches the world of commerce. Google cacheing falls decidedly on the darker side of my wide grey line. I think it's plain Google has some major flaws in its legal underpinnings.
The question is ultimately whether these infringements offer a wider benefit, socially or economically. I'll pass on that debate if i may (!) but add only that all too much of the web is corporate ephemera. Is there much point to cacheing that? But corporatism will define the battle lines for a while to come, see "Adwords" suits aplenty. Since the web is transient in nature, and has not yet settled on one means of [self]organisation, let alone succomed to the vanities of categorisation, i dislike the sense of landgrab. Google is not certain to be the last word. (speaking as someone who found MSN is beating Google in many cases, time of writing). Nor maybe are search engines per se the last word. If something doesn't actually supercede search engine as we know it now, given sufficient bandwidth, what is to say it won't be practical for us all to write our own searchbots? . . . But my point is that i intuitively rally against monolithic repositories, like the Library of Alexandria they are too easy to ransack, and morally against those who profit by uninvited copyright taxation.
By the by, also from the UK.
if i am not mistaken, just for those who want pictures. Bit slow now, so apologies if in any way redundant.
& na me=News&file=article&sid=137&mode=thread&order=0&t hold=0&POSTNUKESID=7e761ab32b7b67210609bebf6a754b6 b
http://www.mlagazine.com/modules.php?op=modload
or just go to http://www.mlagazine.com/ and click the obvious.
Oh, and i forgot to add that the BBC also has a statutory right to broadcast any copyright media it chooses without prior permission. You cannot withhold broadcast rights from the BBC. Now, they tend not to use this provision to mess with big hollywood studios, but prefer to mess with small underpaid classical composers and other small fry who suddenly find the BBC broadcasts and drags its feet over negotiating a measly fee. Of course. . . :-/ The BBC, is on that same protected list as the Govt, though it is required to pay for broadcast rights.
What a wonderful thought! Yes, and er, No, depending on how you read your question and how you read the state of things here in the UK.
.
:
Yes, there are written sections in Copyright 1988 that reserve the rights i refered to.
No, Crown / Govt. does not imply right of fiat, i.e. any one person's unilateral action.
But there may be some work - arounds, some appealingly subversive, some rather worrying by their preconditions . .
The Govt. has explicit rights in the UK copyright acts, including for public lending. This is referred to as Crown Copyright for historical reasons. I think the Queen Anne act of 1710 might have started the use of Crown to mean Govt. in this sense, though it's late and I'm not up to much research right now.
Rather, I'm afraid, in the sense I emphasised from your post above, the Monarch does little but rubber - stamp acts of parliament.
I get the impression by "IP abusers" you mean aggressively litigant copyright owners? IMO they are best told to shove off in the courts, but that takes time. The UK is sadly lacking organisations like the EFF. We have always been rather poor on such activist issues in comparison with the USA. But courts take time, and there will necessarily be collateral damage.
So in the sense you mean, to stop abuse of copyright rights by commercial interests, no one person quite has the power, and i have not seen a High Court case of a P2P sharer so far. When there is one, this will get interesting, as many Justices (Judges) in the commercial courts are very sharp at throwing out companies who over-reach and over-interpret. Bernie Ecclestone, the F1 racing honcho and many others have found they are spared little consideration, often receiving a real dressing - down in the judges reasoning. If you mean that we need laws to stop vexatious litigation by "IP abusers", i say only that some proper review of the wording of the law would help best with this, as does happen from time to time to occasionally sweeping effect. The Law Lords are feeling increasingly marginalised by and even hostile towards our Labour Govt. which has acted increasingly to interpret the law through statutes. No-one save Franz Von Papen, the fool who traded seats with Hitler in the Chancellery has done as much to make LAW a matter for the state, rather than for the courts, as our dear Mr Blair. So whilst I fairly bet, if he wanted, Blair could issue a statutory instrument to change the law by executive power (i.e. a statutory instrument is drawn up by a civil servant, who are increasingly political appointees) without a debate in parliament, i doubt he's about to bother. But a geeky Prime Minister, with all the new dictatorial powers available, might just agree with you. It would be an abuse, nonetheless. Individual Fiat is not permissable, even if it appears we have to suffer it.
Back to the good part of your idea
Where it could get interesting is should a protected authority, such as a library, open up archives for public electronic access. Many libraries in London carry excellent lending stock of videos music and DVDs, often difficult to find rare or foreign language titles. What would happen if a library ripped its collection to a server? Personally, i think the library would prevail against infringement suits if, and only if, there was a time - limit imposed with some form of DRM, as in using your library number to access a title.
I am surprised that one or more of our notoriously left - wing, even militant left wing city councils has NOT already tried thi
. . . .
.
.
.
There is no such thing as "fair use" in the UK (and Europe AFAIK)
Your statement is completely utterly incorrect. Most copyright concepts were developed in the UK and Europe. I mean it's a five second check on any given search engine .
I am truly amazed how you injected that misstatement into an otherwise informed comment on copyright. This made me suspicious you were feeding the howlers into you post deliberately . .
anyhow moving on .
If copyright laws were strictly followed life would far less of a rich tapestry.
PS: I don't see anything wrong with what google do per se, just pointing out that it seems incompatible with the law.
Suggests to me you do not understand the law very well. First statement there needs justification. If however you say that public lending libraries are threatened (as they are in the UK in many places) then i might agree. The Crown / Government have rights to overrule copyright for public good and use, hence libraries. Absent libraries, maybe just maybe your comment has some validity. But we are not yet absent libraries, public or academic. Maybe you mean private lending of DVDs or books. But that argument is specious as it is difficult to draw the line between real infringement and social activity which encourages eventual sales, which being the current hottest debate for digital media creators since P2P was invented. Nonetheless, nowhere does your statement justify copyright breaches.
Second statement - I can think of a tort in damages would arise if you could prove that Google's cache dissuaded users from visiting your site and generating views of paying advertisers. Would it be right to disincentivise publishers in this way? Many publishers would be extremely financially challenged if even 20% of their advertising revenue disappeared.
So there is something wrong in what Google does. That much should be obvious. That cacheing is a neat and useful feature is irrelevant.
I believe this obvious breach is why Google does not, to my knowledge, ever display their own ads on cached pages, because this might be considered an aggravated breach of copyright - publisher looses ad revenue and Google gains in the same action. However I am not well up on aggravated copyright issues.
Nonetheless i am pleased you have recognised what in the UK are broadly called Creator's rights in copyright. Moreover your thought that imputes Google has not ex-ante obtained any rights to consume the media it indexes / caches is an interesting one indeed.
Has anyone out there written their server to push _abstracts_ rather than full pages to the googlebot? I have also heard it rumored that Google drops the "pagerank" of sites which prohibit cacheing, though this is quite unconfirmed.
. . .
. . .
:)
forgive me what is likely a dumb question,
i agree models look more convincing. if that really is the case, is there a real cost advantage for CGI? I mean so much of an advantage that actors have to imagine their whole environment which numbs performance because of the intellectual overhead?
As much as you can say about ham - acting in the Trilogy, nothing bored me more than the stultifyingly rigid acting of the prequels to date. I think this is a real byproduct of the CGI environment sets. What i am speculating, albeit wildly, is an analogy with how LOTR was imagined by kids before any film ever came out. I mean, everyone thought differently. So, as so much CGI happens in Post, and actors have only storyboards and sketches to work from, do they compromise by defaulting to a static interpretation, rather than risk being wildly at odds with another's take on the imaginary set? I don't doubt Lucas et.al. have contemplated this at some point in time, but can anyone point me to any public discussion of this issue?
On a less serious note. Imagine this - getting seriously rich only to find out all your toys have dematerialised. That wold make _me_ want to build more models at any rate
Nice one. Thank you. DONE!
.
I guess in Soviet Russia all your old browsers belong to us . .
Sorry, that should read, Welcome to Lawless Dictatorial Britain.
. . .
. . .
:-)
Now, I am trying to think up something appropriately insulting of their intellect to write to their logs with the UA spoofer extensions in Mozilla.
Any suggestions?
. . .
This was the plan that would make video search a killer tool :
_ ra dio/3177479.stm
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/entertainment/tv_and
Summary : Exiled Director General of the BBC planned to open the whole BBC archive online.
Makes me think. Did he resign over the Hutton enquiry , or was he pushed out by Murdochs lobbying. Similar timescale.
I mean, who would watch SKY if you could go online and watch anything the BBC ever produced. OK, almost. BBC don't own the Simpsons. But i bet Discovery would be short a few vieiwers . . anyhow, Spaghetti all round. .
. . .
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In the UK at least, an author has stautory provision against false attribution. Fair use itself does not usually take consideration of the effect or intent. No new work was created in which a fair use rule can be applied. The effect is redistribution in a database, for which there is a ton of case law saying the incident is actionable.
Although to go into the grey area here would take too long, the person who "writes" is attributing material to themselves.
Ah, but it's Slashdot who writes "writes". Seriously, if that were my article, even if it is 5 years old, I'd be pretty pissed off at the mere lack of simple tact. A big publisher might see a need to defend their rights even apparently tenuous ones. There is a need for such commercial defences, even if it has all gone mad with the RIAA etc.
So I wonder when we'll see CoyboyNeal writes: "Today we got sued by Reuters, for the full story, please see our forthcoming 404 error
It's stupid to tread on toes. Even more stupid to encourage people to help you to tread on big companies toes.
Oh well, not that anything i said matters or anything . .
. . .
George Smiley,
Asst. Attorney to
Director, National Security Agency
Chief, Central Security Service
(NSA Information Assurance Department)
Date As Decrypt Key
Re: Unauthorized Use and Disclosure of Intellectual Property
VIA FEDERAL EXPRESS
Dear Cryptanalyst,
I serve as legal counsel to the NSA Information Assurance Department, owner of extensive intellectual property rights and trademarks pertaining to the use, distribution and deployment of intelligence worldwide. In fact you may have heard of us. To make you fully understand our concern and the reach of our recognised brands throughout the world, let me put it this way, we do what RIAA only dreams they could.
It has recently come to our attention that John Doe, in personam, i.e. youself, the only possible recipient of this message has sought to circumvent our intentional copy protection of classified communications, thereby exposing our proprietary materials, name, marks, trade dress, intellectual property and good will to possible illegal misuses including but not limited to commercial exploitation or karma whoring on Slashdot.
By reading this message you have violated federal laws, including (among others) the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, the Economic Espionage Act, the Electronic Communications Privacy Act, the Wiretap Act, the Legal Lobbyist Retirement Protection Act, and the Consumer Fraud and Abuse Act, as well as State of Wisconsin Natalie Portman 3D Redistribution Act (HP Amendment). (We're the NSA, we know about that one too.)
Therefore we require that you immediately CEASE AND DESIST from any and all activities causing, leading to or which might be construed to result in the actual or potential dissemination of the proprietary information and excellent legal drafting contained herin. Under the terms of the DMCA, inter alia, we inform you that henceforth your knowledge of this text will be deemed to be a Circumvention Device, and as such we are required to place restrictions on your person. Kindly call me on the number below and await instructions. Do not move, do not try to escape, do not pass go and do not collect $200 (that's all we have left after spending $20Bln on the Great Monument to ourselves you see before you.)
Failure to comply with these requests may expose you or your organization to an action for injunctive relief or monetary damages, and any other relief permitted under state and federal law, including court costs and attorneys' fees. You may also wish to consider and examine the potential criminal consequences, under theories of aiding and abetting and conspiracy to denigrate the agencies elite avant-garde sculptural skills.
If you fail to comply with these requests we will have to invoke recourse under the Homeland Bitchslap Act of 2001.
Sincerely,
George "W" Smiley.
P.S. Son, you should have just applied through personnel. Way back when I was a junior we dreamed up this sucker distract the Russians who'd waste all their time drinking vodka and analysing it just to get one over us. Don't worry, I'll tell your Ma it was friendly fire.
. . .
:
:
Those expressions are then
used by native speaking politicians and are
broadcasted by television.
Dude, it's worse, the French have already infiltrated as far as the advertising business and are using covert channels to spread some dangerous crack i heard was called La Liberte
http://french.about.com/b/a/081281.htm
Slightly more seriously
Apart from pointing out that your use of the word native is rather presumptive of geographic origin in this big wide internet thing, i wonder if this linguistic adoption is more one way towards English since the internet. OK the French got Le Weekend, and tons of anglicised nouns, tried to ban them all and didn't manage. But i read Friday that a British pilot training firm lost a contract to a French one. The reason cited by the Asian airline was that, whilst the training had to be in English, the French trainers spoke better, clearer, more intelligble English than did the English. I can't argue with that. Sadly.
Here
http://www.heise.de/newsticker/meldung/55276
support Intel pretty well.
If you don't get the German, don't worry, it's all Geek to me.
Now please give me fast disks on a laptop. One gig on mine plays away as a RAMdrive (heavy P'shop load) and it runs way too hot for comfort.
He likely did RTFA -- he just didn't UTFA
But he definitely did UTF$
"Where could this technology lead in a 100
years I wonder?"
-delete where redundant-
a) HP charges a commission every time you walk across a border.
b) N Portman 3D Models trade on the black market for fortunes.
c) First DMCA suit from woman who used skin printer for enhancements : "You voilated my personal copyright, you macho letcherous *&^*^&"
- woman looses at trial, Pam Anderson proven to have prior art.
d) Penis enlargement SPAM pioneers go legit and IPO.
e) Tattoos actually get popular and mainstream
f) oh, heck, over to you.
Not sure about that. If HP imanufactures printer ink in Europe
." 'kay, fortunately not always, but some printers still trial and error their way through things, and it's worth checking on them.
.) Not to mention having their clocks cleaned by Dell.
Utterly unknown to me is if HP or other companies localised production for ink.
There are quite some differences in cultural preferences for print output. e.g. Asia typically likes cooler colors than Europe.
Even sending a fully calibrated galley to a fully calibrated printer, ink densities and mixtures are still often applied to give a "feel" that is considered commmercially popular.
In fact it can be quite hard, not to mention expensive, to accurately match color correction at the press end with your pre-press soft proofs. Actually, very expensive, and very hard. If only because you have to start every conversation with "so i assume you're familiar with the latest ISO / DIN number bla, and it's revisions blah blah and blah . .
So, allowing the huge number of ink designers and manufacturers in, mainly Germany, but also the rest of Europe, and the cost of wet transport, maybe inks are local, and that explains the price difference.
I would like to say this is a decision without impact, but i doubt it.
I can imagine this could also have political reasoning to protect EU dealers and distributors. HPs distribution in the UK is utterly awful. Last time i had a big HP proofer, it was a torture to obtain fresh inks, which is why our multi K$ printer stood idle much of the time. I am talking about inept large dealers who couldn't give a toss, were rude and intrusive (i asked for some specifics on a short run laser press, and had a business plan demanded of me! forget that . .
Actually, given what a bunch or jerks most HP dealers i've encountered are, i'd not put it past them to have lobbied for some artifical extra margin.
. . .
.
:(
The company introduced region-coding on several printers in the summer so it won't have to keep altering prices to keep pace with currency movements, says Kim Holm, vice president for H-P's supplies business in Europe, the Middle East and Africa.
And i thought when Carly took over at HP she rolled out the worlds most sophisticated SAP system to integrate their whole supply chain?
You mean HP can't write a script in SAP Financials?
Geez, where's that calculator division when you need a 17BII handy. . .
So they admit failure of their biggest management project outside of kicking out the founding families?
Sorry if it's not SAP, but i remember a big hullabaloo that management pitched to Wall Street. comp.os.vms chronicles it almost blow by blow.
So, as per my earlier thought, if this is not purely political, then management is in a real mess.
I just hope some analyst picks up on this in the next conference call and releases a note slamming the incompetance and misguided greed.
Such stupidity i almost couldn't care less.
Oh well, what can i do?
. . .
:) / :(
Off the top of my head, and with no real data, I just see this as an attempt at implementing exchange rate controls.
HP is choosing to lock in an artifical rate, set effectivey by the disparity in localised prices.
But in reality, much of that disparity stems from stock inventory which has been bought and financed at historic exchange rates.
Not even large distributors can necessarily justify, manage or afford responsive hedeing programs.
Is this a return to the labarynthine export and exchange quotas of the 1970s, before the capital account was opened and rates floated freely?
Or is it more desperate, like the Exchange Rate Equalisation Tax that prevented US investors gaining a decent return from European investments?
But the net effect is to keep dollars in the US.
This seems to me to be at odds with the Petro - Dollar inflation that was engineered in the 70's (and led to technical mass bankruptcies in 1982, when Citibank was effectively bust) and which might be in play today. Then it was to balance huge trade deficits from OPEC oil price controls, now for a set of modern reasons such as the outsourcing of the manufacturing base to low wage countries.
Sorry, references left to reader excercise unless i get a for - real lunch break today.
In summary, i am impressed by a protectionist, political motivation for this move, and see how differential pricing could be enforced more widely to meet treasury dept. wishes.
Carly Runs For Office, I guess
Anyhow, i no longer buy HP carts as mine all "timed out" before they were emptied, so in disgust i switched.
Happy hunting!
. . .
"And then it went all downhill because beating the Nazis with the rest of the world was too much effort for the little Brits. Awww!"
Absolute CRAP. If you had any sense of history, you'd know it wasn't the Brits or the Americans who broke the back of the Germans in WWII. It was the Soviets.
I now quote from John Erickson's "The Road To Berlin"
That wasn't the action of Brits or GIs, in case you hadn't noticed.
By comparison, the western campaign was a mopping up operation.
. . .
"Hey did you see the ass on the blonde?"
"Which one?
"Where?"
"Women are the fount of the craziest, most remarkable projects"
Me. This Day. Sometime in 2005.
Don't underestimate the motivating power of a great ass.
Please exclude any subliminal references to fascist PHBs in above statement.
. .
. . .
:
/. human interaction I'm sure] but it's a poor substitute.
:)
But maybe it's just me. I haven't yet transcended meatspace.
The only thing an anthropologist said which stuck in my mind, and apologies in advance i cannot attribute or claim truth for this
"The only primate we see in the wild, alone, is a dead primate".
For those who have "transcended meatspace", i doubt they've equally forsaken human interaction [not that any self respecting anthro-apologist* would call
That said, from my own reclusive ivory tower, I personally add that whilst humans are exceptionally adept at adapting to isolation, we are in turn chronically maladept at readapting to absense of isolation, intellectually, physically or emotionally.
Thus, my serious and heartfelt advice, as someone who started a estimated 15 year project (in terms of real intellectual payoff) to those who feel comfortable now remote working or working on-line or whatever, especially if you are young (and i was young when at the incept of my project) - you don't know what you're missing. I have for very real reasons decided to take time off work, simply because I've found enough material to write a blessed *book* on the subject, and feel that's a more worthwhile pursuit now, for me, and anyone else who's intellect is strong enough to misguide their person and enforce social stringencies upon themselves.
Guys and gals, that's heartfelt, after ten years of work, almost all of it alone. No, my project is on track, but it's possible not to notice self - inflicted pain. I shall now return my heart to its rightful place and wash the blood from my sleeve
Anyhow, as for the coffee shop model, in London at least it'd be good for productivity. Cost of WiFi access in this city sure stops reloading your favourite websites:)
* don't you just love expanding unintentional Freudian typos?
Ok then where are the 3Ghz chips? They should have been here 6 months ago according to the article. It is one of a few possibilites.
.
1. Steve lied to everyone.
2. They can't do it.
3. They can do it but won't for some reason.
Lets assume it is option 3 above. What do you think their reason is for not giving out faster machines? Are the ones they have now selling great? Are they stuck in the channel and they want to clear out all the 2.x Ghz machines first? If so then wouln't 6 months be long enough?
Actually, from my reading of Apple history, I'd say it was #1 as well as #3.
. .
== Attr. Winston Churchill : "The truth should at all times be accompanied by a bodyguard of lies". But I bet some advertising guy said it first. ==
. . .
:
:)
Attributed to Winston Churchill
"The truth should at all times be accompanied by a bodyguard of lies".
But I bet some advertising guy said it first
So it follows . . .
poster#1 : "RTFA Dipwad"
#2 : "Sorry, current guidelines indicate that under NSA rules I should interpret linked "stories" as commie propoganda, and respond by posting contradictory information as soon as is operationally possible."
== Life Imitates Government. Please Look Away ==
. . . .
I even had to take a couple of lie detector and voice stress tests for minimum wage crap when a teenager.
sorry I can't find the link now (somewhere at the EFF.org site I guess), but as i understood it compulsory polygraph testing by an employer at any stage of the hire or thereafter is illegal in most states.
I'm not sure whether those laws were imposed after you were tested in this manner. Nonetheless, whilst I understand a employer thinking a polygraph is a good idea, it is a pretty crass way to demonstrate lack of trust in employees, which IMO is ultimately a bad thing.
Here in the UK, insurance companies are deploying polygraph voice stress testing to reject claims from insured customers. It's well proven from research I read, carried out by committees for the federal govt., that there is no scientific reliability in polygraph results. Now do a voice poly over a crap, distorted 3.1KHz voiceline? Disgusting, and likely illegal, de jure, on basis of forcing disproporte costs onto the insured if there is a false positive.
. .