As the other reply indicates, this ISN'T about copyright but about moral rights. They're not completely unrelated, but they are significantly different beasts. They're just hard to wrap one's head around in an Anglo-American legal context, because the concept basically doesn't exist. Things like attribution are treated as matters of "fact" in the British system and its derivatives, not as rights.
Yes, under certain regimes. In France one can abandon one's "moral right" over a piece of art, for example, and artists have done this over pieces of work that they did, in fact, produce. Though I doubt this could be used a defense in, for example, a slander case.
Exactly. It's like certain rights under labor law: making them inviolable, impossible even willingly to give away, precludes certain abuses. Just as I can't give up my basic human rights in a contract (e.g., selling myself into indentured servitude), I shouldn't be able to give up certain rights over work I produce. For example, in France "moral rights" include the right of an artist to claim to have produced a certain work of art (which is distinct from ownership of the physical work or of rights to copy it). The artist retains the right to "disown" a work or to claim authorship of it. That could matter, for example, in the attribution of a literary prize, which depends on the authorship of a work but not on its copyright status. And it makes perfect sense that one not be allowed to sign away that basic right.
When was this golden age? Laws have always been about both freedom and justice, on the one hand, and oppression and inequality. Racial segregation was maintained through laws, as were many other kinds of discrimination and unfairness. And other laws protect people against abuse and limit the powers of corporations (e.g., antitrust). It's been a constant back-and-forth, and corporations have always had a lot of power (think of the "company towns" of the past, which couldn't exist in the same way today). You can say the system has flaws, and you'd be right, but it's absurd to imagine that things were once perfect.
I didn't say I thought that, only that that was what people who defend downloading copyrighted content would say.
My personal position is that both copying my data and stealing my stuff are wrong and should be illegal, but they are substantially different and should be treated differently.
Yes, it is off-topic, precisely because most people who engage in that activity do NOT defend themselves with a blanket claim that whatever they CAN take is rightfully theirs: they make the distinction between downloading (which does not deprive the "owner" of the good) and theft (which does).
In most jurisdictions entering a driveway is not trespass unless there's some kind of warning (an oral warning, a fence, or a "Private Property" sign).
Because that's how the legal system works, and quite rightly so. If I get sick from a bad batch of cornflakes, I sue Kellogg's, not the guy who was working at the factory that day, even if it was his sneezing in the flakerator that made me sick. I happen to think that's good public policy: it will encourage Kellogg's to make sure its operations prevent this kind of thing from happening again. If the only person I could sue were the employee, there would be no incentive for Kellogg's to clean up their act and they would dump all the blame on the "bad apple." That's an upside of treating corporations as persons under the law (there are downsides as well, of course).
You would expect the US and allied militaries to be on the ball enough to tell them to do so. Google does blur lots of military installations, but can't be expected to blur every possible base because they don't know beforehand where they are. This is a failure by the Pentagon, not by Google.
What an inane straw man you've created. Does anyone think, "if I can see it it is mine?" Of course not. If I park my car on the side of a (public) road or in my (private) driveway, the theft of it is the same crime. No one seriously argues that taking a parked car is "okay" because it's in a public place. The only question is whether there are privately owned places that are publicly accessible. And the answer in most places is an emphatic YES. That includes driveways, front walkways, etc. But it does NOT follow from that that the users of those spaces then somehow get rights over that place. It remains privately-owned, and a random person can't, for instance, remove the paving stones from in front of my house without expecting legal consequences. It's easy enough to keep the two sets of rights separate, unless you are willfully obtuse.
Two flaws in your argument. First, if such life forms exist in a remote but abundant environment--for example, deep underground--they could be having a significant effect--for example, on geology--that we don't yet recognize. Second, even if such organisms are extremely rare on earth, studying their biology could help us find similar life forms elsewhere. We already know what signatures to look for in the atmospheres of other planets to indicate the presence of carbon-based life, but not necessarily for other biochemistries.
I was galvanized at first reading about you idea, but ultimately find it revolting, and I'm sure that although it's well-grounded it will meet with resistance and nobody will follow your lead, no matter how you plug it. The arc of events will go something like this: a rodent will have his eye on an opening but find the mesh welded there (be careful of whiskering at the solder points), and be drawn to it. Although he was live, so was the mesh, and he will feel closure. Rat taken care of. But here's why it's hard to remain neutral: I'm positive that a big negative is the accumulation of rat corpses, which get smelly fast (and are hard to get at inside walls).
Rats will chew through steel wool. They won't chew through copper mesh, though, and it's sold for precisely that purpose (sometimes sold as "hardware cloth").
No, for most values of "needed." Satellite phones (like the Iridium system) serve many areas without cell phone service. What about satellite tv? And I'm not even going to get into space science...
Not information. If they are trying to find out, for example, which government official revealed secrets to you, if the name isn't on your computer they won't find it. They can make up charges against you, sure, and even plant whatever they want on your hard drive. But it won't get them any closer to finding the leak. In that sense, they truly can't find what isn't there.
It can get away with it because it has a larger repertoire of sounds than many languages (compare Italian, for example). With more phonemes to work with, the number of distinct monosyllabic combinations is greater. We also use strings of consonants in English that many languages would not permit. Consider a word like "sprints": it's one syllable, but has seven phonemes. In other words, yes we have monosyllables, but they are not "grunts," they are systematically distinct words.
The word photog is over a century old. These citations are from the Oxford English Dictionary:
1898 Daily Republican (Decatur, Illinois) 20 Oct. 2/2 (headline) Amateur Photogs. Mr Sargeant of New York will demonstrate the working of Velox Paper at our store this evening.
1952 Daily News (N.Y.) 21 Aug. C4 The Swedish fotogs were actually saving film.
1973 R. PARKES Guardians vi. 104 You'll like that fashion photog of ours--what's her name.
1995 Denver Post 13 Sept. A2/1 He clobbered a photog lurking outside a hotel.
So if your definition of "real word" is "word I use," sure, maybe not. But if it's "word that's in the dictionary," or, as I prefer, "word that is/has been used by a reasonably large number of people for a non-trivial length of time," this is a word.
Presumably the universe of tunes every internet user could be expected to know is quite small, so it would only be a matter of matching to that set. There's already an iPhone app (Shazam, I think it's called) that can identify ambient music and send you to the iTunes purchase link. That's presumably a much harder problem (a vastly bigger universe and probably poorer sound quality), and it's already been solved.
Slashdot Mirror
As the other reply indicates, this ISN'T about copyright but about moral rights. They're not completely unrelated, but they are significantly different beasts. They're just hard to wrap one's head around in an Anglo-American legal context, because the concept basically doesn't exist. Things like attribution are treated as matters of "fact" in the British system and its derivatives, not as rights.
Yes, under certain regimes. In France one can abandon one's "moral right" over a piece of art, for example, and artists have done this over pieces of work that they did, in fact, produce. Though I doubt this could be used a defense in, for example, a slander case.
Exactly. It's like certain rights under labor law: making them inviolable, impossible even willingly to give away, precludes certain abuses. Just as I can't give up my basic human rights in a contract (e.g., selling myself into indentured servitude), I shouldn't be able to give up certain rights over work I produce. For example, in France "moral rights" include the right of an artist to claim to have produced a certain work of art (which is distinct from ownership of the physical work or of rights to copy it). The artist retains the right to "disown" a work or to claim authorship of it. That could matter, for example, in the attribution of a literary prize, which depends on the authorship of a work but not on its copyright status. And it makes perfect sense that one not be allowed to sign away that basic right.
But they have serial numbers.
No, he's referring to a bounced check. There's a $25 fee for that.
No, he meant, "With enough Benjamin Franklins, you can route around censorship."
When was this golden age? Laws have always been about both freedom and justice, on the one hand, and oppression and inequality. Racial segregation was maintained through laws, as were many other kinds of discrimination and unfairness. And other laws protect people against abuse and limit the powers of corporations (e.g., antitrust). It's been a constant back-and-forth, and corporations have always had a lot of power (think of the "company towns" of the past, which couldn't exist in the same way today). You can say the system has flaws, and you'd be right, but it's absurd to imagine that things were once perfect.
I didn't say I thought that, only that that was what people who defend downloading copyrighted content would say.
My personal position is that both copying my data and stealing my stuff are wrong and should be illegal, but they are substantially different and should be treated differently.
Yes, it is off-topic, precisely because most people who engage in that activity do NOT defend themselves with a blanket claim that whatever they CAN take is rightfully theirs: they make the distinction between downloading (which does not deprive the "owner" of the good) and theft (which does).
In most jurisdictions entering a driveway is not trespass unless there's some kind of warning (an oral warning, a fence, or a "Private Property" sign).
Because that's how the legal system works, and quite rightly so. If I get sick from a bad batch of cornflakes, I sue Kellogg's, not the guy who was working at the factory that day, even if it was his sneezing in the flakerator that made me sick. I happen to think that's good public policy: it will encourage Kellogg's to make sure its operations prevent this kind of thing from happening again. If the only person I could sue were the employee, there would be no incentive for Kellogg's to clean up their act and they would dump all the blame on the "bad apple." That's an upside of treating corporations as persons under the law (there are downsides as well, of course).
Better yet, go with your invisible camera and make a big show of taking lots of pictures. That really freaks them out.
You would expect the US and allied militaries to be on the ball enough to tell them to do so. Google does blur lots of military installations, but can't be expected to blur every possible base because they don't know beforehand where they are. This is a failure by the Pentagon, not by Google.
What an inane straw man you've created. Does anyone think, "if I can see it it is mine?" Of course not. If I park my car on the side of a (public) road or in my (private) driveway, the theft of it is the same crime. No one seriously argues that taking a parked car is "okay" because it's in a public place. The only question is whether there are privately owned places that are publicly accessible. And the answer in most places is an emphatic YES. That includes driveways, front walkways, etc. But it does NOT follow from that that the users of those spaces then somehow get rights over that place. It remains privately-owned, and a random person can't, for instance, remove the paving stones from in front of my house without expecting legal consequences. It's easy enough to keep the two sets of rights separate, unless you are willfully obtuse.
Two flaws in your argument. First, if such life forms exist in a remote but abundant environment--for example, deep underground--they could be having a significant effect--for example, on geology--that we don't yet recognize. Second, even if such organisms are extremely rare on earth, studying their biology could help us find similar life forms elsewhere. We already know what signatures to look for in the atmospheres of other planets to indicate the presence of carbon-based life, but not necessarily for other biochemistries.
I was galvanized at first reading about you idea, but ultimately find it revolting, and I'm sure that although it's well-grounded it will meet with resistance and nobody will follow your lead, no matter how you plug it. The arc of events will go something like this: a rodent will have his eye on an opening but find the mesh welded there (be careful of whiskering at the solder points), and be drawn to it. Although he was live, so was the mesh, and he will feel closure. Rat taken care of. But here's why it's hard to remain neutral: I'm positive that a big negative is the accumulation of rat corpses, which get smelly fast (and are hard to get at inside walls).
Rats will chew through steel wool. They won't chew through copper mesh, though, and it's sold for precisely that purpose (sometimes sold as "hardware cloth").
No, for most values of "needed." Satellite phones (like the Iridium system) serve many areas without cell phone service. What about satellite tv? And I'm not even going to get into space science...
Booth was a patriot
Apparently you hold the same low opinion of patriots as I do.
A getaway car helps too.
Not information. If they are trying to find out, for example, which government official revealed secrets to you, if the name isn't on your computer they won't find it. They can make up charges against you, sure, and even plant whatever they want on your hard drive. But it won't get them any closer to finding the leak. In that sense, they truly can't find what isn't there.
It can get away with it because it has a larger repertoire of sounds than many languages (compare Italian, for example). With more phonemes to work with, the number of distinct monosyllabic combinations is greater. We also use strings of consonants in English that many languages would not permit. Consider a word like "sprints": it's one syllable, but has seven phonemes. In other words, yes we have monosyllables, but they are not "grunts," they are systematically distinct words.
The word photog is over a century old. These citations are from the Oxford English Dictionary:
So if your definition of "real word" is "word I use," sure, maybe not. But if it's "word that's in the dictionary," or, as I prefer, "word that is/has been used by a reasonably large number of people for a non-trivial length of time," this is a word.
Actually no. If a virus works only 50% of the time, no big deal, the author probably doesn't even know.
Presumably the universe of tunes every internet user could be expected to know is quite small, so it would only be a matter of matching to that set. There's already an iPhone app (Shazam, I think it's called) that can identify ambient music and send you to the iTunes purchase link. That's presumably a much harder problem (a vastly bigger universe and probably poorer sound quality), and it's already been solved.