As far as I understand, parodies are protected under copyright law.
Easy. This case is not about copyright law, but trademark law. There are significant differences, and I'm getting tired of teaching Slashdot what they could learn by glancing at a dictionary.
But, as a far as I can remember, it's ok to parody something as long as your parodoy is clearly a an imitaion that acknowledges the fact that it is immitating. ie. You can take a copyrighted material and make fun of it, provided it is apparent you can make fun of it. This one should be overturned in a second. I have no idea how the judge justified his descision.
Copyright law does make exceptions for parodies. Trademark law does not make explicit exceptions for parodies, although they're not impossible to find.
You'll notice the actual content of the parody is still online. This is simply about the use of the trademark as expressed in the domain name. ----
Parody is considered one of the fair use exemption to copyright law and I see no reason why trademark parodies should not be subject to the same protection.
Perhaps on principle, but in the real world, no. Trademark damages generally fall under the categories of infringement and dilution, and parody is NOT an affirmative defense for either. For example, the fellow up in Seattle who produced t-shirts that parodied the Starbucks logo as a "Corporate Whore" or something like that. Essentially, he was creating a whole new business based on public recognition of the other company's marks. Even though it was a funny parody, the fact that it was pursued in the realm of commerce of the original owner (who also sells T-shirts and coffee mugs with its mark) made it infringement and dilution.
Trademark laws are a LOT murkier than copyright laws. And unlike copyright laws, the owner is required to vigorously defend its mark, lest it go the way of "escalator" or "aspirin". ----
I do want to see this appealed however, up to the Supreme Court, such that some national precident is set; hopefully not in the judges words, but to the point that the cybersquatting/trademark laws are more strongly set. Why this case? Neither side is a large company with lots of money to blow, so this won't be a battle of resources, but of true intent.
Well, I bet PETA has bigger lawyers than Donoghue does, even if he's rich.
This won't get appealed, at least not that far, though. The law has already changed, and the Supreme Court is generally only interested in taking cases where there's a question about interpretation or an inconsistency. Here, the law in effect in 1995 (basic trademark law, for all intents and purposes) has been underlined and strengthened by the 1999 AntiCybersquatting law (S.1948 over at thomas.loc.gov, I've linked to it too many times to do it again:-S). Essentially, Congress has made its intent clear: famous marks have greater protection under the law, and even non-famous marks get full trademark protection from infringement or dilution. (And parody is NOT an affirmative defense against infringement or dilution, although it can be an effective one.)
In this case, nobody was arguing about the content of the site, except insofar as it pertained to the domain name. The domain name was clearly a trademark, even a famous one, and under S.1948 there's clearly no other way the decision could have gone.
Essentially, an appeal would be arguing obsolete law, which is generally a waste of time. When somebody's on death row, it's worth pursuing. When the appellant has no real economic harm to show, let alone personal harm, nobody's going to care. His site's still up; it's survived four years without the domain name so far.
Anon Coward wrote: Franklin and Linus were drawing with crayons and Franklin asks for the "Flesh" colored crayon. Linus hands him this peach colored crayon and ends with Franklin looking puzzled.
Yup. Crayola has changed the names of several colors over the years. In 1958, the name "Prussian Blue" was changed to "Midnight Blue". Apparently, it was perceived as somehow "Russian" at the height of the Cold War; in fact, Prussia was a German-speaking region of the Baltic coast that is mostly now part of Poland. Speaking as someone who's ethnically Prussian, I'm disappointed.
Second was "Flesh", which in 1962 was changed to "Peach", in recognition that there may actually be more than one flesh tone. (Later, Binney & Smith came out with a whole pack of skin-tone crayons.)
Finally, in 1999, "Indian Red" was changed to "Chestnut", probably because too many people wrongly associated it with the supposed "red skin" of Native Americans. In fact, the name refers to India and has nothing to do with flesh tones. Still, this is probably better than attaching a paragraph of explanatory text to the crayon. ----
Let's face it... Ringworld was a book with a GREAT concept, but sucky, uninteresting characters. But the concept was so great that it carried the book.
Louis Wu... uninteresting? Nessus... uninteresting? Speaker-to-Animals... uninteresting? You're kidding, right?
Some of the others were mere window-dressing, but c'mon! How is a Kzinti ambassador who has trouble thinking of his compatriots as not-food uninteresting?:)
Not that Niven is the greatest character writer in SF; he's below average. But you can't beat his hard SF ideas. ----
Was it really exaggerated? Who did the exaggeration?
Now, Slashdot picked up a CNN story. CNN merely picked up a security advisory, and described it with both pro and con comments. NetSec originally reported 2000 compromised computers, which I would consider a major threat, but by reporting what they'd found to the FBI, they were able to reduce the risk -- this round.
This is one of the problems of DDOS attacks: It's certainly a low risk to be compromised and turned into a zombie, but then, to launch an effective DDOS you don't need that many computers and you can take a long time to assemble as many as you need. So, 2000 out of millions of computers is a low risk, but that SubSeven DDOS would (and probably still could) be deadly to a chosen target which might be a single website. Again, one out of millions.
The point that Slashdot readers should take home is, "don't read the hype". The hype here was the Slashdot headline "Massive DDOS Attack Brewing?" I don't know that this could be considered massive, but it most certainly was groundwork for a DDOS attack. The technology principles for DDOS are out in the world, and the threat will not go away. The hype did not come from NetSec, or even, to be fair, CNN. It came from Slashdot.
NetSec has an economic interest in promoting its discovery.
CNN has an economic interest in promoting its news story.
Slashdot has an economic interest in promoting a provocative discussion. Hence, the hype may have been strongest of all right here, where presumably people should know better.
The news coverage given to these security threats is VERY spotty. It depends on a number of factors: how big the last scare was (Melissa? ILOVEYOU? or Michelangelo?), what other news is running, whether the threat directly affects consumers (their computers, or the websites they use), how easy the threat is to describe to and by a non-technical reporter, and so forth. Just because something hits the wires, because the FBI is investigating, doesn't automatically mean it's the biggest thing since Pearl Harbor. ----
Science fiction authors have always been running up against this problem. Arthur C. Clarke, who is at this writing still alive, once wrote a story about a communications satellite. In 1940. Or Larry Niven, who wrote about Mercury's orbit (as locked with the sun, always showing one face) shortly before it was determined that Mercury actually spins retrograde by several days (88 day orbit vs. 59 day spin). Bzzt! One of the most visionary science fiction films, Kubrick's _2001: A Space Odyssey_, showed an orbiting spinning space station, a weekly earth-orbit-to-lunar-surface shuttle, a bustling lunar base, even an archaeological dig on the moon... all taking place roughly this year. Not to mention the nuclear-powered Jupiter-bound spacecraft, human hibernation, and the intelligent (and mentally unstable) computer. Bzzt.
Basically, predicting the future is a funny business. It's more important (and ultimately more interesting) to examine the social changes than it is to try to be spot-on about the technology. One of the most visionary novels of the last twenty years was _Neuromancer_, which practically invented the concept of cyberspace, and author William Gibson had never used a computer or logged onto the internet. He wrote it on a manual Underwood. Yet many would say that it's chillingly accurate, half a generation later. ----
Of course, the first Trinoo and TFN clients ran on what OS? The insecure consumer OS from Redmond... or the free-beer hacker OS from Finland?
Just giving them Linux isn't going to solve the problem. You actually have to teach them how to implement security. Have you ever tried to teach your non-techie friends how to implement... their e-mail program? "Click there... no, no, THERE, no, you just shut the program down." Don't fool yourself. Not everybody is cut out to be a computer security expert. ----
>What do people in the villages need with the Internet anyway? They're currently working on a model where there's one woman who's the "phone lady" and who acts as the primary link to other villages.
Actually, it turns out that the internet is an excellent way to replace the "phone lady". Often poor families have the primary breadwinner working far out of town, even out of the country entirely. E-mail even better than the telephone for communicating important news and financial arrangements, without requiring perfect timing at both ends, and much faster than postal mail.
>Despite what pundits claim, you can't really get much of an education from the Web alone (yet).
India has a big chicken-and-egg problem: how to get from a prehistorical agricultural economy to the information age. They never had a strong industrial base, so there isn't anything to build a middle class off of or to sell to other nations. The solution India is working on is jump-start to a full information economy, more or less, by turning as many of its children as it can into engineers and computer scientists. Not surprisingly, many of these people end up working in or at least for companies in the US.
>If I were a person in a rural Indian village, I'd be more interested in getting me some of that modern plumbing and health care before I wanted to go read Slashdot. It's basic Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs stuff.
It's hard to judge from this article, but I'd say that some of those needs ARE taken care of. These are rural villages, and many of them are dirt poor by Western standards, but that doesn't mean that India hasn't already made great strides in meeting that "hierarchy of needs" -- they really have. Water, power, transportation, are already there. Even basic literacy has reached record levels. Now they're moving to the next phase, but they don't have time to wait for people to get factory jobs, join the middle class, buy ranch houses, etc. ----
>What gets me is WHY IN GOD'S NAME would anyone want lawn-scented tennis balls in the first place? What the freak is the point of scented tennis balls? I mean, their default rubbery smell is just fine.
Well, the WHY for the manufacturer is clearly to distinguish their product among a great number of similar products, all roughly the same size, shape, material, and so forth.
The WHY for the consumer is a bit murkier, as you suggest. Yes, it's a silly product.
But the trademark situation is perfectly logical. Yes, trademarks even apply to silly, pointless products that nobody wants. Or would, in an ideal world. ----
>Now, unless they've actually trademarked "The smell of fresh cut grass" as a slogan, then the journalist who wrote this piece needs a clue. Trademarks are for brands and slogans
You might actually read the article yourself. The journalist was reporting a ruling that in fact, a scent could be trademarked under European Union rules. (Apparently the Dutch originally allowed the scent trademark under their laws.) As the article notes, both Britain and the US have begun to allow scents to be trademarked. The US law reads "any word, name, symbol, or device... used in commerce to identify and distinguish" one product from another. These rules may originally have meant only names and slogans, as you suggest, but for a very long time have included broader concepts such as shapes (e.g. Coca-Cola bottle), musical tones (AT Microsoft), and more recently, specific colors (e.g. Pantone, as you note). One article suggested that, at least under British law, scents could be trademarked as long as they could be represented by a phrase like "the scent of...". in this case, "the scent of fresh cut grass".
>I don't see how a scent could ever be patented (let alone trademarked).
You're way behind the courts on this one. They're here, they're valid, and they're not going away. This ruling simply means that for the first time a single European Union country's trademarking of a scent is recognized across the EU. In other words, individual countries have been doing this for some time. ----
I'm trying to read through your rhetoric. If what you're saying is that the ISS is basically a US project that everyone else is tagging along on, I don't disagree with that interpretation.
Russia hasn't fallen down on their commitments, but they are tremendously late. We bailed them out not because we wanted a space station and they were the only way to get one, but because US politicians (White House and Congress) wanted a deal with Russia to get them to honor the nuclear non-proliferation treaty. The ISS project and subsequent money funnelled to Russia can be viewed as foreign aid with a pretty bow on top.
France is subsidized with US dollars? Please. France, a rich Western country, isn't even a partner, they have their own space program, and they're only connected with ISS indirectly, through the ESA. There's some "strong neutral" feelings there, but we may yet see an Ariane used to send supply flights to ISS, especially if Russia gets even more broke and cannot launch enough Progress flights.
The non-US modules are being built and funded by the respective countries, in exchange for access to the ISS down the road. The sole exception is the Functional Cargo Block (FGB), which was funded by the US but is technically owned by Russia. (It has two tiny flag logos on it, one Russian, one American.) ----
The 1967 Outer Space Treatydoes not ban commercial ventures. It bans national sovereignty and nuclear weapons and any obstacle to free access, among many other things, but puts responsibility for compliance in the hands of the signatories, e.g. the US is responsible for making sure that no US companies violate the treaty. The treaty didn't really envision private space launches, so it's going to be obsolete eventually, but it does have an amendment procedure.
Now, the 1979 Moon Treatydoes ban, in effect, private property rights on the Moon. That's a little different, and a potential obstacle to development, but Russia and China have both come around to free enterprise and trade, and we'll have to see what happens. The basic problem is the same as Antarctica: everyone will eventually want the resources, the only question is who gets the benefits of bringing them back to Earth. Most likely the treaty signatories will eventually provide commercial charters a la those that were used to initially explore and exploit the Americas (like the Hudsons Bay Company). I think this is so obvious and practical that we can assume it as the long-term outcome, though I don't discount political delays in getting there.
>Since when does NASA overrule the UN?
Since when does the UN have any jurisdiction over NASA or the USA? The UN, contrary to myth, is not a world government, it is a diplomatic body governed by treaty. The UN sponsored, but does not control, the space treaty; only the signatories govern the space treaty. If the US signs a treaty, it's obligated to live up to what it promised, which is why treatys are few and far between and argued over for years. But as far as the UN is concerned, the Assembly can pass resolutions of condemnation as many times as it likes and the US, like anyone else (say Saddam Hussein) may freely thumb its nose at them. Even the UN Security Council is effectively toothless in the face of a permanent member such as the US choosing to flout its decisions. ----
>Now, if the station is international, how can national NASA enter into any unilatera; contracts regarding ISS?
Short answer: because the station is not owned in common; each nation retains ownership of the modules it builds.
Long answer: Station operations are governed by a suite of bilateral agreements signed in 1998 among NASA, RSA (Russia), CSA (Canada), ESA (European Union), and NASDA (Japan). These agreements specify down to the tenth exactly how much usage of each module each of the partners is entitled to [for instance, the Russians have 100% usage of their modules; the Americans have 97.7% use of theirs; but Japan and Europe have smaller percentages, mainly because they can't launch their own elements]. Most of the "financial" arrangements among the partners are handled by barter, e.g. we agree to provide X module in return for Y launch vehicle or J station support service or K slots for an astronaut from our program.
In the case of this ISS multimedia deal, essentially what is happening is that NASA is getting a third party (Disney) to pony up for the provision of expensive cameras and transmission equipment (ISS support) in return for the usual temporary embargo allowing them exclusive public use of the images. This equipment will actually be available to all partners to a certain extent.
Effectively NASA is providing something for the ISS without paying for it. ----
llywrch asks: IANAL, just a basically honest guy, so what puzzles me about the whole contraversy is how the laws of Virginia affect an interstate (or in some cases, international) commercial transaction?
In the main, because Network Solutions is a corporation domiciled in the Commonwealth of Virginia. You generally have to sue a person or corporation where they "live". Secondarily, because the NSI contract specifies that Fairfax County is the jurisdiction of choice for issues relating to their contract. (This is normal for contracts, IIRC.)
I figure that if Federal Law (or the laws of another sovereign nation) say that a domain name is the IP of the registered party, then this pre-empts anything NSI attempts to assert.
Actually, federal law does not state that a domain name is the IP of the registered party. A domain name that is similar to a trademark is subject to certain rules, but under federal law, a domain name is not yet explicitly intellectual property in and of itself.
Besides, the rulings in question did not, repeat not, address whether NSI "owns" the name or the trademark, only whether the domain name was "property" for legal purposes of liability (i.e. like when you sue your neighbor to return your hedge-trimmer). ----
Slashdot staffer Cliff said: There is some mention of the fact that NSI reserves the right to revoke a domain if it is to be transferred. Does anyone know how likely NSI is to do something like this? Is there any way to prevent it?
This can be answered very simply, and your spreading panic isn't helping one bit. ICANN developed the Shared Registration System with two features explicitly included:
The functional and interface specifications of the Shared Registration System shall describe a protocol and associated software able to: (1) provide security and authentication protocols and procedures for requests from registrars; and (2) permit second level domain name holders to change registrars within the same registry without changing domain names.
If NSI tried to take back a domain just because you requested a transfer, they would not only be subject to a lengthy and expensive lawsuit, they could be removed as a registrar by ICANN.
Don't spread foolish rumors. This is just a waste of time. Slashdot staffers should know better, for pete's sake.
On the other hand, I suppose it's great entertainment seeing how many teenage slashdotters can dance on their pinheads. ----
It's called the Anti-CyberSquatting act (or some such nonsense).
The bill was S.1948 (read Title III) and passed as an amendment to other legislation.
NSI revoking the domain simply because you decided to go elsewhere (and had plenty of time left on your existing legitimate registration) would violate several areas of law
Indeed, which is why they're required by ICANN policy to transfer it to your chosen registrar on your request. If they were to violate this, they could be booted as a registrar, apart from any other legal considerations. Domain transfer is a built-in feature of the SRS (shared registration system), which many of the knee-jerkers on Slashdot don't seem to know or care.
Think about this -- what would happen if NSI claimed ownership of Microsoft's or Yahoo's or Altavista's domain name? The intellectual-property lawyers would be all over them in seconds! The name itself has got to be the intellectual property of the company.
NSI was not claiming the intellectual property rights; these two rulings were not addressing the question of whether the company or NSI owned the rights to the domain. They were about whether a domain name is subject to certain property laws such as garnishment (Virginia) or registrar liability (California). They haven't really addressed the issue of whether John Smith or Mary Jones or Widgets, Inc. "owns" a domain name; if anything, the judges and ICANN have all tiptoed around this question. The judge in California practically begged Congress to pass a law settling the question for once and for all.
Guess who Congress would side with on that one?
Anyone up to putting a RFC together? (And subsequently stuffing it down ICANN's throat?)
An RFC for what? Are you sure the things you want aren't already in place? In any case, this has already moved far beyond the capability of the net to "legislate" and well into the realm of intellectual property law. That RFC wouldn't be worth the paper it is (not) printed on; one lawsuit could blow it away like so much lint. ----
NSI is an American company that runs the master registry by contract with ICANN. ICANN is a non-profit corporation with board members appointed by various entities, some of which are the longstanding US entities with an interest in the DNS, some to represent Europe and other countries. This was a grand compromise about 3 years ago after a conference at the White House.
Under ICANN any qualifying company can become a domain registrar, and scores have already. This is intended to provide competition in the domain registry marketplace, and it clearly has. ----
The article says this solar sail could reach speeds of up to 58 miles per second -- or roughly 200,000 mph. A light year is a mere 5.8 trillion miles, so if the nearest star is just 4.2 light years away, we could be there in only... [tap tap tap] 13 thousand years!
(Well, I may be off by an order of magnitude, I threw this together in Excel after all:), but it's more likely to be even longer.]
The fact is that this is a propulsion systems R&D effort, and as of yet there is no actual mission that would use this light sail.. and if there were a mission (a Pluto-Kuiper Express follow-up, perhaps, or an Oort cloud explorer), it wouldn't get us to even the nearest star any time soon. The oldest space vehicle still in use is on its last legs at 23, after all.
We won't be in shooting distance of the stars until we can get travel time down to, oh, maybe a half a century -- the career lifetime of a scientist.
And there's lots of glib comments in the forum about things like, "oh, by then we'll have mag sails!" My boy, when I was 18, I believed in the stars too. I knew that by the year 2000, knew it in my bones, that we would have people continuously living in earth orbit, and probably a moon base too. Sure, I was a realist -- I knew that it wouldn't be a big spinning Kubrickian wagon wheel. That was beyond our engineering. But hey, we had the shuttle, and we could launch one on a weekly basis... it would be a snap. Right? ----
Flux wrote: As for you, you seem to have a pretty good grasp on the situation, aside from an earlier comment about sending through open mail relays: [But] the great majority of all email goes through these relays. They are out there on the internet and available for use by anyone that needs to use them (i.e. email way-stations).
Perhaps once upon a time, RFC821 and all that, but not for years. Today most e-mail is transferred via direct SMTP connections between the sender and recipient. (I don't count e-mail transferred via relays within organizations.) Relays served an important purpose when many internet connections were dial-up and non-permanent, but they have little need in this day and age, and great potential for abuse, in the form of spammers. Since 1999 with RFC 2505 closing mail relays has been labeled a "best practice".
Do I know what I'm talking about? I just spent several days cleaning up after someone else's mistake: a spammer discovered that the mail server for the company I work for was left open, and began sending reams of crap through it. If you count my time at billable prices, this problem caused our company approximately $5000 in my work alone, not counting lost productivity and delayed mail.
seumas writes: What still confuses me is how they can say they own that domain? What if another domain name service had registered the domain for you instead of NSI?
Obviously, they're not saying they own names registered elsewhere.
This is a very limited ruling concerning the question of using the property garnishment laws to force a registrar to transfer ownership. For whatever reason back in 1997, NSI didn't want to set a precedent where they were subject to this kind of third-party lawsuit action. The Va. Supreme Court noted in their ruling that one the one hand the question of domain ownership had yet to be legally established (Congress and ICANN are apparently taking hands-off approaches to the question), BUT even so NSI themselves had acknowledged in both this case and the Clue Computing (www.clue.com) case that there was a degree of ownership involved.
I don't think this ruling goes far beyond this specific case, and it may not stand. ----
Fluxrad writes: Most people who post about *spam* (both solicited email and non solicited email)
Wrong. Spam is unsolicited. Solicited mail is not spam. Perhaps in casual speech, but you should recognize that difference in your "defense" of spamming.
Even slashdot isn't free. The price you pay for the content is the banner ad at the top of the page.
Naturally. Advertising is also one of the costs we accept for "free" services like television and radio broadcasting. But when someone spams me, I get no content; I get an ad. And I have to pay for it.
Depending on the needs of the site... It may be necessary to ask you if you want to recieve some other ads in the mail. If you don't...you get to click a button that says you don't want it.
You have just described solicited mail. Solicited mail, strictly speaking, is not spam. You have not described spam in any way. Spam is not derived from a site a person has visited, nor have they been given an opt-in checkbox. Sometimes they are given an opt-out choice in the spam, but this is irrelevant for what is 99% of the time a one-time mailing.
If you're against everything that "marketed email" stands for - then please. go home...throw away your TV and your radio....because that's how "free" content gets paid for. Advertising.
Now that you've gallantly defended solicited e-mail advertising, do you have anything relevant to the discussion at hand, which is about spam? ----
First, spam is a theft of service for the recipient. You are the one paying for your e-mail address, you are the one whose time is taken up deleting/sorting the spam, you are the one whose ISP fees go up if they have to buy more disk space or bandwidth to deal with all the spam they get for all their customers. This is a cost borne by the consumer, in other words, not the advertiser.
Second, spam is almost always a violation of an Acceptable Use Policy for the spammer's ISP. ISPs don't like dealing with spam any more than recipients, especially because the spammer is more than likely using a throwaway account and will not be a continuing customer. This single short-time customer might be the source of 75% of the administrative work for the ISP during this period.
Third, spammers rarely use their own paid-for accounts, but find an open SMTP relay server to send their mail through. When they do this, there are two effects: theft of service and denial of service. The theft occurs because they have no contractual relationship with the manager of the relay server, yet they make the relay do all the work (expanding a CC list to hundreds of destination servers, for example), stealing the bandwidth, server disk space, server uptime, sysadmin labor, and other resources of the hapless victim. Second, the bandwidth and disk space taken up by the spammer are denied to the server owner, and if the server crashes under the weight of spam, the server owner's people have no mail server to use. Hence, theft of service AND denial of service.
While some people use "spam" generically to account for all kinds of unwanted e-mail, technically it refers first of all to unsolicited bulk commercial e-mail.
The kinds of solicited mail you speak of (forgetting to uncheck that "notify me of new products" box, for instance) are easily demonstrated by legitimate operations (who probably have to do it periodically). This kind of harassment is another nasty denial-of-service secondary effect of spammers: upstanding customers get raked over the coals for no good reason. Anyway, anybody who gets that kind of mail deserves it. But a legitimate bulk e-mail is also easy to unsubscribe from. ----
Slashdot Mirror
Well, duh. There were at least three slashdot threads on etoy that I recall. Where have YOU been?
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As far as I understand, parodies are protected under copyright law.
Easy. This case is not about copyright law, but trademark law. There are significant differences, and I'm getting tired of teaching Slashdot what they could learn by glancing at a dictionary.
But, as a far as I can remember, it's ok to parody something as long as your parodoy is clearly a an imitaion that acknowledges the fact that it is immitating. ie. You can take a copyrighted material and make fun of it, provided it is apparent you can make fun of it. This one should be overturned in a second. I have no idea how the judge justified his descision.
Copyright law does make exceptions for parodies. Trademark law does not make explicit exceptions for parodies, although they're not impossible to find.
You'll notice the actual content of the parody is still online. This is simply about the use of the trademark as expressed in the domain name.
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Parody is considered one of the fair use exemption to copyright law and I see no reason why trademark parodies should not be subject to the same protection.
Perhaps on principle, but in the real world, no. Trademark damages generally fall under the categories of infringement and dilution, and parody is NOT an affirmative defense for either. For example, the fellow up in Seattle who produced t-shirts that parodied the Starbucks logo as a "Corporate Whore" or something like that. Essentially, he was creating a whole new business based on public recognition of the other company's marks. Even though it was a funny parody, the fact that it was pursued in the realm of commerce of the original owner (who also sells T-shirts and coffee mugs with its mark) made it infringement and dilution.
Trademark laws are a LOT murkier than copyright laws. And unlike copyright laws, the owner is required to vigorously defend its mark, lest it go the way of "escalator" or "aspirin".
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I do want to see this appealed however, up to the Supreme Court, such that some national precident is set; hopefully not in the judges words, but to the point that the cybersquatting/trademark laws are more strongly set. Why this case? Neither side is a large company with lots of money to blow, so this won't be a battle of resources, but of true intent.
:-S). Essentially, Congress has made its intent clear: famous marks have greater protection under the law, and even non-famous marks get full trademark protection from infringement or dilution. (And parody is NOT an affirmative defense against infringement or dilution, although it can be an effective one.)
Well, I bet PETA has bigger lawyers than Donoghue does, even if he's rich.
This won't get appealed, at least not that far, though. The law has already changed, and the Supreme Court is generally only interested in taking cases where there's a question about interpretation or an inconsistency. Here, the law in effect in 1995 (basic trademark law, for all intents and purposes) has been underlined and strengthened by the 1999 AntiCybersquatting law (S.1948 over at thomas.loc.gov, I've linked to it too many times to do it again
In this case, nobody was arguing about the content of the site, except insofar as it pertained to the domain name. The domain name was clearly a trademark, even a famous one, and under S.1948 there's clearly no other way the decision could have gone.
Essentially, an appeal would be arguing obsolete law, which is generally a waste of time. When somebody's on death row, it's worth pursuing. When the appellant has no real economic harm to show, let alone personal harm, nobody's going to care. His site's still up; it's survived four years without the domain name so far.
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Anon Coward wrote:
Franklin and Linus were drawing with crayons and Franklin asks for the "Flesh" colored crayon. Linus hands him this peach colored crayon and ends with Franklin looking puzzled.
Yup. Crayola has changed the names of several colors over the years. In 1958, the name "Prussian Blue" was changed to "Midnight Blue". Apparently, it was perceived as somehow "Russian" at the height of the Cold War; in fact, Prussia was a German-speaking region of the Baltic coast that is mostly now part of Poland. Speaking as someone who's ethnically Prussian, I'm disappointed.
Second was "Flesh", which in 1962 was changed to "Peach", in recognition that there may actually be more than one flesh tone. (Later, Binney & Smith came out with a whole pack of skin-tone crayons.)
Finally, in 1999, "Indian Red" was changed to "Chestnut", probably because too many people wrongly associated it with the supposed "red skin" of Native Americans. In fact, the name refers to India and has nothing to do with flesh tones. Still, this is probably better than attaching a paragraph of explanatory text to the crayon.
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Let's face it... Ringworld was a book with a GREAT concept, but sucky, uninteresting characters. But the concept was so great that it carried the book.
... uninteresting? Nessus ... uninteresting? Speaker-to-Animals ... uninteresting? You're kidding, right?
:)
Louis Wu
Some of the others were mere window-dressing, but c'mon! How is a Kzinti ambassador who has trouble thinking of his compatriots as not-food uninteresting?
Not that Niven is the greatest character writer in SF; he's below average. But you can't beat his hard SF ideas.
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Was it really exaggerated? Who did the exaggeration?
Now, Slashdot picked up a CNN story. CNN merely picked up a security advisory, and described it with both pro and con comments. NetSec originally reported 2000 compromised computers, which I would consider a major threat, but by reporting what they'd found to the FBI, they were able to reduce the risk -- this round.
This is one of the problems of DDOS attacks: It's certainly a low risk to be compromised and turned into a zombie, but then, to launch an effective DDOS you don't need that many computers and you can take a long time to assemble as many as you need. So, 2000 out of millions of computers is a low risk, but that SubSeven DDOS would (and probably still could) be deadly to a chosen target which might be a single website. Again, one out of millions.
The point that Slashdot readers should take home is, "don't read the hype". The hype here was the Slashdot headline "Massive DDOS Attack Brewing?" I don't know that this could be considered massive, but it most certainly was groundwork for a DDOS attack. The technology principles for DDOS are out in the world, and the threat will not go away. The hype did not come from NetSec, or even, to be fair, CNN. It came from Slashdot.
NetSec has an economic interest in promoting its discovery.
CNN has an economic interest in promoting its news story.
Slashdot has an economic interest in promoting a provocative discussion. Hence, the hype may have been strongest of all right here, where presumably people should know better.
The news coverage given to these security threats is VERY spotty. It depends on a number of factors: how big the last scare was (Melissa? ILOVEYOU? or Michelangelo?), what other news is running, whether the threat directly affects consumers (their computers, or the websites they use), how easy the threat is to describe to and by a non-technical reporter, and so forth. Just because something hits the wires, because the FBI is investigating, doesn't automatically mean it's the biggest thing since Pearl Harbor.
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Science fiction authors have always been running up against this problem. Arthur C. Clarke, who is at this writing still alive, once wrote a story about a communications satellite. In 1940. Or Larry Niven, who wrote about Mercury's orbit (as locked with the sun, always showing one face) shortly before it was determined that Mercury actually spins retrograde by several days (88 day orbit vs. 59 day spin). Bzzt! One of the most visionary science fiction films, Kubrick's _2001: A Space Odyssey_, showed an orbiting spinning space station, a weekly earth-orbit-to-lunar-surface shuttle, a bustling lunar base, even an archaeological dig on the moon ... all taking place roughly this year. Not to mention the nuclear-powered Jupiter-bound spacecraft, human hibernation, and the intelligent (and mentally unstable) computer. Bzzt.
Basically, predicting the future is a funny business. It's more important (and ultimately more interesting) to examine the social changes than it is to try to be spot-on about the technology. One of the most visionary novels of the last twenty years was _Neuromancer_, which practically invented the concept of cyberspace, and author William Gibson had never used a computer or logged onto the internet. He wrote it on a manual Underwood. Yet many would say that it's chillingly accurate, half a generation later.
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Of course, the first Trinoo and TFN clients ran on what OS? The insecure consumer OS from Redmond ... or the free-beer hacker OS from Finland?
... their e-mail program? "Click there ... no, no, THERE, no, you just shut the program down." Don't fool yourself. Not everybody is cut out to be a computer security expert.
Just giving them Linux isn't going to solve the problem. You actually have to teach them how to implement security. Have you ever tried to teach your non-techie friends how to implement
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>What do people in the villages need with the Internet anyway? They're currently working on a model where there's one woman who's the "phone lady" and who acts as the primary link to other villages.
Actually, it turns out that the internet is an excellent way to replace the "phone lady". Often poor families have the primary breadwinner working far out of town, even out of the country entirely. E-mail even better than the telephone for communicating important news and financial arrangements, without requiring perfect timing at both ends, and much faster than postal mail.
>Despite what pundits claim, you can't really get much of an education from the Web alone (yet).
India has a big chicken-and-egg problem: how to get from a prehistorical agricultural economy to the information age. They never had a strong industrial base, so there isn't anything to build a middle class off of or to sell to other nations. The solution India is working on is jump-start to a full information economy, more or less, by turning as many of its children as it can into engineers and computer scientists. Not surprisingly, many of these people end up working in or at least for companies in the US.
>If I were a person in a rural Indian village, I'd be more interested in getting me some of that modern plumbing and health care before I wanted to go read Slashdot. It's basic Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs stuff.
It's hard to judge from this article, but I'd say that some of those needs ARE taken care of. These are rural villages, and many of them are dirt poor by Western standards, but that doesn't mean that India hasn't already made great strides in meeting that "hierarchy of needs" -- they really have. Water, power, transportation, are already there. Even basic literacy has reached record levels. Now they're moving to the next phase, but they don't have time to wait for people to get factory jobs, join the middle class, buy ranch houses, etc.
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>What gets me is WHY IN GOD'S NAME would anyone want lawn-scented tennis balls in the first place? What the freak is the point of scented tennis balls? I mean, their default rubbery smell is just fine.
Well, the WHY for the manufacturer is clearly to distinguish their product among a great number of similar products, all roughly the same size, shape, material, and so forth.
The WHY for the consumer is a bit murkier, as you suggest. Yes, it's a silly product.
But the trademark situation is perfectly logical. Yes, trademarks even apply to silly, pointless products that nobody wants. Or would, in an ideal world.
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>Now, unless they've actually trademarked "The smell of fresh cut grass" as a slogan, then the journalist who wrote this piece needs a clue. Trademarks are for brands and slogans
... used in commerce to identify and distinguish" one product from another. These rules may originally have meant only names and slogans, as you suggest, but for a very long time have included broader concepts such as shapes (e.g. Coca-Cola bottle), musical tones (AT Microsoft), and more recently, specific colors (e.g. Pantone, as you note). One article suggested that, at least under British law, scents could be trademarked as long as they could be represented by a phrase like "the scent of ...". in this case, "the scent of fresh cut grass".
You might actually read the article yourself. The journalist was reporting a ruling that in fact, a scent could be trademarked under European Union rules. (Apparently the Dutch originally allowed the scent trademark under their laws.) As the article notes, both Britain and the US have begun to allow scents to be trademarked. The US law reads "any word, name, symbol, or device
>I don't see how a scent could ever be patented (let alone trademarked).
You're way behind the courts on this one. They're here, they're valid, and they're not going away. This ruling simply means that for the first time a single European Union country's trademarking of a scent is recognized across the EU. In other words, individual countries have been doing this for some time.
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Ha ha. .sdrawkcab epyt nac ouY
I'm trying to read through your rhetoric. If what you're saying is that the ISS is basically a US project that everyone else is tagging along on, I don't disagree with that interpretation.
Russia hasn't fallen down on their commitments, but they are tremendously late. We bailed them out not because we wanted a space station and they were the only way to get one, but because US politicians (White House and Congress) wanted a deal with Russia to get them to honor the nuclear non-proliferation treaty. The ISS project and subsequent money funnelled to Russia can be viewed as foreign aid with a pretty bow on top.
France is subsidized with US dollars? Please. France, a rich Western country, isn't even a partner, they have their own space program, and they're only connected with ISS indirectly, through the ESA. There's some "strong neutral" feelings there, but we may yet see an Ariane used to send supply flights to ISS, especially if Russia gets even more broke and cannot launch enough Progress flights.
The non-US modules are being built and funded by the respective countries, in exchange for access to the ISS down the road. The sole exception is the Functional Cargo Block (FGB), which was funded by the US but is technically owned by Russia. (It has two tiny flag logos on it, one Russian, one American.)
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The 1967 Outer Space Treaty does not ban commercial ventures. It bans national sovereignty and nuclear weapons and any obstacle to free access, among many other things, but puts responsibility for compliance in the hands of the signatories, e.g. the US is responsible for making sure that no US companies violate the treaty. The treaty didn't really envision private space launches, so it's going to be obsolete eventually, but it does have an amendment procedure.
Now, the 1979 Moon Treaty does ban, in effect, private property rights on the Moon. That's a little different, and a potential obstacle to development, but Russia and China have both come around to free enterprise and trade, and we'll have to see what happens. The basic problem is the same as Antarctica: everyone will eventually want the resources, the only question is who gets the benefits of bringing them back to Earth. Most likely the treaty signatories will eventually provide commercial charters a la those that were used to initially explore and exploit the Americas (like the Hudsons Bay Company). I think this is so obvious and practical that we can assume it as the long-term outcome, though I don't discount political delays in getting there.
>Since when does NASA overrule the UN?
Since when does the UN have any jurisdiction over NASA or the USA? The UN, contrary to myth, is not a world government, it is a diplomatic body governed by treaty. The UN sponsored, but does not control, the space treaty; only the signatories govern the space treaty. If the US signs a treaty, it's obligated to live up to what it promised, which is why treatys are few and far between and argued over for years. But as far as the UN is concerned, the Assembly can pass resolutions of condemnation as many times as it likes and the US, like anyone else (say Saddam Hussein) may freely thumb its nose at them. Even the UN Security Council is effectively toothless in the face of a permanent member such as the US choosing to flout its decisions.
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>Now, if the station is international, how can national NASA enter into any unilatera; contracts regarding ISS?
Short answer: because the station is not owned in common; each nation retains ownership of the modules it builds.
Long answer: Station operations are governed by a suite of bilateral agreements signed in 1998 among NASA, RSA (Russia), CSA (Canada), ESA (European Union), and NASDA (Japan). These agreements specify down to the tenth exactly how much usage of each module each of the partners is entitled to [for instance, the Russians have 100% usage of their modules; the Americans have 97.7% use of theirs; but Japan and Europe have smaller percentages, mainly because they can't launch their own elements]. Most of the "financial" arrangements among the partners are handled by barter, e.g. we agree to provide X module in return for Y launch vehicle or J station support service or K slots for an astronaut from our program.
In the case of this ISS multimedia deal, essentially what is happening is that NASA is getting a third party (Disney) to pony up for the provision of expensive cameras and transmission equipment (ISS support) in return for the usual temporary embargo allowing them exclusive public use of the images. This equipment will actually be available to all partners to a certain extent.
Effectively NASA is providing something for the ISS without paying for it.
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llywrch asks:
IANAL, just a basically honest guy, so what puzzles me about the whole contraversy is how the laws of Virginia affect an interstate (or in some cases, international) commercial transaction?
In the main, because Network Solutions is a corporation domiciled in the Commonwealth of Virginia. You generally have to sue a person or corporation where they "live". Secondarily, because the NSI contract specifies that Fairfax County is the jurisdiction of choice for issues relating to their contract. (This is normal for contracts, IIRC.)
I figure that if Federal Law (or the laws of another sovereign nation) say that a domain name is the IP of the registered party, then this pre-empts anything NSI attempts to assert.
Actually, federal law does not state that a domain name is the IP of the registered party. A domain name that is similar to a trademark is subject to certain rules, but under federal law, a domain name is not yet explicitly intellectual property in and of itself.
Besides, the rulings in question did not, repeat not, address whether NSI "owns" the name or the trademark, only whether the domain name was "property" for legal purposes of liability (i.e. like when you sue your neighbor to return your hedge-trimmer).
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There is some mention of the fact that NSI reserves the right to revoke a domain if it is to be transferred. Does anyone know how likely NSI is to do something like this? Is there any way to prevent it?
This can be answered very simply, and your spreading panic isn't helping one bit. ICANN developed the Shared Registration System with two features explicitly included:
If NSI tried to take back a domain just because you requested a transfer, they would not only be subject to a lengthy and expensive lawsuit, they could be removed as a registrar by ICANN.
Don't spread foolish rumors. This is just a waste of time. Slashdot staffers should know better, for pete's sake.
On the other hand, I suppose it's great entertainment seeing how many teenage slashdotters can dance on their pinheads.
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It's called the Anti-CyberSquatting act (or some such nonsense).
The bill was S.1948 (read Title III) and passed as an amendment to other legislation.
NSI revoking the domain simply because you decided to go elsewhere (and had plenty of time left on your existing legitimate registration) would violate several areas of law
Indeed, which is why they're required by ICANN policy to transfer it to your chosen registrar on your request. If they were to violate this, they could be booted as a registrar, apart from any other legal considerations. Domain transfer is a built-in feature of the SRS (shared registration system), which many of the knee-jerkers on Slashdot don't seem to know or care.
Think about this -- what would happen if NSI claimed ownership of Microsoft's or Yahoo's or Altavista's domain name? The intellectual-property lawyers would be all over them in seconds! The name itself has got to be the intellectual property of the company.
NSI was not claiming the intellectual property rights; these two rulings were not addressing the question of whether the company or NSI owned the rights to the domain. They were about whether a domain name is subject to certain property laws such as garnishment (Virginia) or registrar liability (California). They haven't really addressed the issue of whether John Smith or Mary Jones or Widgets, Inc. "owns" a domain name; if anything, the judges and ICANN have all tiptoed around this question. The judge in California practically begged Congress to pass a law settling the question for once and for all.
Guess who Congress would side with on that one?
Anyone up to putting a RFC together? (And subsequently stuffing it down ICANN's throat?)
An RFC for what? Are you sure the things you want aren't already in place? In any case, this has already moved far beyond the capability of the net to "legislate" and well into the realm of intellectual property law. That RFC wouldn't be worth the paper it is (not) printed on; one lawsuit could blow it away like so much lint.
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NSI is an American company that runs the master registry by contract with ICANN. ICANN is a non-profit corporation with board members appointed by various entities, some of which are the longstanding US entities with an interest in the DNS, some to represent Europe and other countries. This was a grand compromise about 3 years ago after a conference at the White House.
Under ICANN any qualifying company can become a domain registrar, and scores have already. This is intended to provide competition in the domain registry marketplace, and it clearly has.
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The article says this solar sail could reach speeds of up to 58 miles per second -- or roughly 200,000 mph. A light year is a mere 5.8 trillion miles, so if the nearest star is just 4.2 light years away, we could be there in only ... [tap tap tap] 13 thousand years!
:), but it's more likely to be even longer.]
.. and if there were a mission (a Pluto-Kuiper Express follow-up, perhaps, or an Oort cloud explorer), it wouldn't get us to even the nearest star any time soon. The oldest space vehicle still in use is on its last legs at 23, after all.
... it would be a snap. Right?
(Well, I may be off by an order of magnitude, I threw this together in Excel after all
The fact is that this is a propulsion systems R&D effort, and as of yet there is no actual mission that would use this light sail
We won't be in shooting distance of the stars until we can get travel time down to, oh, maybe a half a century -- the career lifetime of a scientist.
And there's lots of glib comments in the forum about things like, "oh, by then we'll have mag sails!" My boy, when I was 18, I believed in the stars too. I knew that by the year 2000, knew it in my bones, that we would have people continuously living in earth orbit, and probably a moon base too. Sure, I was a realist -- I knew that it wouldn't be a big spinning Kubrickian wagon wheel. That was beyond our engineering. But hey, we had the shuttle, and we could launch one on a weekly basis
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Flux wrote:
;-)
As for you, you seem to have a pretty good grasp on the situation, aside from an earlier comment about sending through open mail relays: [But] the great majority of all email goes through these relays. They are out there on the internet and available for use by anyone that needs to use them (i.e. email way-stations).
Perhaps once upon a time, RFC821 and all that, but not for years. Today most e-mail is transferred via direct SMTP connections between the sender and recipient. (I don't count e-mail transferred via relays within organizations.) Relays served an important purpose when many internet connections were dial-up and non-permanent, but they have little need in this day and age, and great potential for abuse, in the form of spammers. Since 1999 with RFC 2505 closing mail relays has been labeled a "best practice".
Do I know what I'm talking about? I just spent several days cleaning up after someone else's mistake: a spammer discovered that the mail server for the company I work for was left open, and began sending reams of crap through it. If you count my time at billable prices, this problem caused our company approximately $5000 in my work alone, not counting lost productivity and delayed mail.
But thanks for asking.
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seumas writes:
What still confuses me is how they can say they own that domain? What if another domain name service had registered the domain for you instead of NSI?
Obviously, they're not saying they own names registered elsewhere.
This is a very limited ruling concerning the question of using the property garnishment laws to force a registrar to transfer ownership. For whatever reason back in 1997, NSI didn't want to set a precedent where they were subject to this kind of third-party lawsuit action. The Va. Supreme Court noted in their ruling that one the one hand the question of domain ownership had yet to be legally established (Congress and ICANN are apparently taking hands-off approaches to the question), BUT even so NSI themselves had acknowledged in both this case and the Clue Computing (www.clue.com) case that there was a degree of ownership involved.
I don't think this ruling goes far beyond this specific case, and it may not stand.
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Fluxrad writes:
... It may be necessary to ask you if you want to recieve some other ads in the mail. If you don't...you get to click a button that says you don't want it.
Most people who post about *spam* (both solicited email and non solicited email)
Wrong. Spam is unsolicited. Solicited mail is not spam. Perhaps in casual speech, but you should recognize that difference in your "defense" of spamming.
Even slashdot isn't free. The price you pay for the content is the banner ad at the top of the page.
Naturally. Advertising is also one of the costs we accept for "free" services like television and radio broadcasting. But when someone spams me, I get no content; I get an ad. And I have to pay for it.
Depending on the needs of the site
You have just described solicited mail. Solicited mail, strictly speaking, is not spam. You have not described spam in any way. Spam is not derived from a site a person has visited, nor have they been given an opt-in checkbox. Sometimes they are given an opt-out choice in the spam, but this is irrelevant for what is 99% of the time a one-time mailing.
If you're against everything that "marketed email" stands for - then please. go home...throw away your TV and your radio....because that's how "free" content gets paid for. Advertising.
Now that you've gallantly defended solicited e-mail advertising, do you have anything relevant to the discussion at hand, which is about spam?
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There are several simple arguments against spam.
First, spam is a theft of service for the recipient. You are the one paying for your e-mail address, you are the one whose time is taken up deleting/sorting the spam, you are the one whose ISP fees go up if they have to buy more disk space or bandwidth to deal with all the spam they get for all their customers. This is a cost borne by the consumer, in other words, not the advertiser.
Second, spam is almost always a violation of an Acceptable Use Policy for the spammer's ISP. ISPs don't like dealing with spam any more than recipients, especially because the spammer is more than likely using a throwaway account and will not be a continuing customer. This single short-time customer might be the source of 75% of the administrative work for the ISP during this period.
Third, spammers rarely use their own paid-for accounts, but find an open SMTP relay server to send their mail through. When they do this, there are two effects: theft of service and denial of service. The theft occurs because they have no contractual relationship with the manager of the relay server, yet they make the relay do all the work (expanding a CC list to hundreds of destination servers, for example), stealing the bandwidth, server disk space, server uptime, sysadmin labor, and other resources of the hapless victim. Second, the bandwidth and disk space taken up by the spammer are denied to the server owner, and if the server crashes under the weight of spam, the server owner's people have no mail server to use. Hence, theft of service AND denial of service.
While some people use "spam" generically to account for all kinds of unwanted e-mail, technically it refers first of all to unsolicited bulk commercial e-mail.
The kinds of solicited mail you speak of (forgetting to uncheck that "notify me of new products" box, for instance) are easily demonstrated by legitimate operations (who probably have to do it periodically). This kind of harassment is another nasty denial-of-service secondary effect of spammers: upstanding customers get raked over the coals for no good reason. Anyway, anybody who gets that kind of mail deserves it. But a legitimate bulk e-mail is also easy to unsubscribe from.
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