On the other hand, if you bought a PS3 from someone who didn't legally own it in the first place, it's not a valid sale, and you don't really own the PS3 either. You're not even entitled to automatic compensation if the rightful owner takes back the stolen property.
Incorrect. The bona fide purchaser for value without notice rule is applicable here. If the purchaser buys an item for non-trivial value (ie something that could be considered a real price) and does not have actual or constructive notice of a third party's title (which is to say that they did not know and could not reasonably have been expected to know about the third party's ownership) then they acquire good title and the original owner cannot enforce their property rights against the purchaser. The original owner is stuck with having to sue the thief for the value of the item.
Of course if you buy a PS3 from some guy in a pub with no proof that they own it, then you have constructive notice that someone else might own it. If, on the other hand, you buy an book from a reputable book retailer, you are entitled to rely on the retailer's implicit claim that they own what they are selling you. You can not reasonably be expected to check whether Amazon actually had the rights to sell 1984 so you acquire good title.
Of course in this case copyright law is also applicable and may allow authorities to seize infringing copies but the parent posters points were purely on the issue of property law and the parent is incorrect.
Standard disclaimer. I do have a law degree but I am not a lawyer.
How you finance the purchase of the car from the dealer also has nothing to do with ownership of the car. If you borrow from a bank, finance company, or merely agree to pay the dealer over time, the lender gets a collateral interest in the car, but that is not ownership.
This is a side issue to the original somewhat bizarre assertions by the grandparent but it's not true to say that a secured loan has nothing to do with ownership. The lender's colateral interest in the car is actually a property right and does go directly to the question of ownership. Depending on how the loan is set up, the individual may have legal title to the car with the lender having an equitable property right entitling them to posession in certain circumstances. Alternatively, the situation may be as in a mortgage. In that case the lender has the legal title and the debtor owns an equitable right to exclusive possession of the property and the right, in the event of reposession, to the surplus value of the property at sale after the debt is paid. The details of who owns what rights are a bit below the radar for most people since they don't typically directly affect the practicalities of their loan (they get the car, they make the payments and everyone is happy). You do hear it in general conversation about mortgages: people will talk about their equity and, of couse, there is the situation of "negative equity". The key point is that in a secured loan, both the lender and the debtor have a property (which is to say ownership) right in the colateral.
Your definition of a public good is clearly correct and straight out of the text book. The argument that education is not a public good, on the other hand only works if you ignore many of the benefits which education provides to society.
An educated workforce is exceptionally important in the economic prosperity of a nation. The economic prosperity of the nation as a whole delivers immediate tangible benefits to everyone in that society. That is a public good. Having people with the life skills to participate in society and especially to hold down regular jobs is also a public good - try seeing how society runs on acrime ridden public housing estate because that's what you get when a significant chunk of the population in a region aren't in a position to participate fully and productively in society.
Of course those are the benefits of school education. But higher education also has massive public benefits. For starters you're going to need teachers to run that school education so there's a clear public good in educating teachers at university. The other public service professions follow in a similar argument. Now if you want a fair and just society you're going to want a functioning legal system so you'll need some law graduates for that. Your national economic success is going to depend on sufficient engineers, scientists, architects - in fact all the regular professions.
Having a healthy national ecomony and a functional society are not "minor impacts on unrelated people", they have major impacts on the way everyone lives their life.
Even to the extent that higher education is also a private good, the effect of not funding it from the public purse would be significant. First there is the significant chunk of society who would have effectively no access to the system. If you look to the era before state subsidy of education or even if you look at the socioeconomic background of the students at the most expensive universities today it is clear that those from less priviledged backgrounds will be even more underrepresented if subsidy was absent. This is both socially divisive (a public cost) and economically daft as robbing the societal skills base is unlikely to increase output. Now, even if you assume that the market would correct for this by so increasing graduate salaries as to entice enough bright enough people to part with the massive costs of paying for all of their own education (and I think that's a pretty bold assertion) it is flat out unreasonable to assert that the public service professions, who account for a significant fraction of graduates and amassive amount of the public good resulting from education, will be in a position to do so. Nobody can find enough physics and maths teachers already, who's going to saddle themselves with tens of thousands of pounds worth of debt in order to earn a teacher's salary?
Now, there is an issue about how much to fund education and where the fair balance lies between the public and private goods delivered by education and hence to what extent the state should pay for it. However, in a context where the public service professions in particular find it hard to recuit enough students into their degrees it is very difficult to argue that there should be no place for state subsidy in higher education. If there is to be state subsidy then it can only be determined by legislators. It's very easy to bash parliament and say "I have no idea why you trust bureaucrats and congressmen to guess the correct balance." but the answer is, we do this via parliament because that's the most effective and democratically accountable way of making public financial decisions which anyone has come up with.
If, instead, Germany had strongly-enshrined free speech rights similar to the U.S.'s First Amendment, this case would never have even made it to an injunction.
Actually Article 5 of the Basic Law (the German constitution) does directly protect freedom of speech. Furthermore, since the German constitution provides no way of amending this article, it is more strongly entrenched than in the US.
In addition, the European Convention on Human Rights is directly applicable in German law and provides additional free speech safeguards.
However, every country, including the US, accepts that free speech is limited. The US has libel laws and hate speech laws and lots of other rules. You can go to court and get an interim injunction in the US on not much evidence, just like you can in Germany and lots of other countries.
It's only a requirement if you assume that continuing to do it the old way is an option. There are at least two reasons why tihs can cease to be the case.
The first is that people may break copyright in large numbers thereby undermining the existing model. This is sort of what happened with music downloads. The rational economic test for whether to sell single track downloads is not whether you'll make as much as you used to by only selling CDs, its whether you'll make more by selling downloads (at a given price) than you would by not selling them - even if you make less money than you used to before lots of people started downloading illegally.
The second is that copyright laws be weakened, either by legislation (which admitedly seems unlikely given recent trends) or by court cases. If you change the market conditions in this way, there is no need to guarantee the same revenue to any player in the marked.
A minor quibble. In the classical economic case for copyright, the test is not "same amount of money they're making now" - there is no social utility in a particular level of reward per se. Nor is there a moral right to a certain return on investment.
The classical economic test for copyright is, is sufficient return generated that enough people go to the effort of producing and publishing works? Now neither "sufficient" nor "enough" are objectively quantifiable - they express the trade off which exists between supply and return. From an economic point of view, discussions about the level of copyright protection which should be offered are about the point at which this trade off should be struck.
Of course none of this undermines your basic point that if you get rid of copying restrictions then you need an alternative way of making money by producing intangibles. The point is that there is no requirement that people make the same they make now.
I'm entirely in favor of the EU, and I'd prefer if it had a sane constitution, rather than one written to protect US interests
Now this is even stranger than the French "British conspiracy" version of the constitution. Whatever its faults - and IMHO it's got some bad ones - the EU constitution is clearly not written for the protection of US interests. The fact that the constitution doesn't have constraints stopping the EU from being overly business friendly doesn't make it a pro-business conspiracy. The constitution also doesn't have constraints preventing the EU from being business-unfriendly. Indeed EU labour and environmental standards impose significant costs on business - and the constitution doesn't change those. The competition clauses which the French have been claiming are an Anglo-Saxon liberalisation plot were lifted straight from the treaty of Rome - which was largely written by the French and certainly hasn't stopped them having pretty massive state intervention in their economy over the last 50 years. Why do the same clauses suddenly mean something different when they're in the constitution?
Law, but not constitution. Constitution is stronger than law. Now that the constitutional groundwork will have been laid, the commission will be free tomorrow to amend the directive to say that copyrights are perpetual. If the constitution had said "intellectual property shall be protected for a limited time after its creation", the commission would not be able to do this.
The Commission, as I'm sure you know, can't amend the directive. However the EU as a whole (Commission, Council and Parliament working in the usual way) can and the constitution doesn't change that. If you're not a Europhobe don't play to them by ascribing powers to EU institutions which don't have them.
We don't have perpetual copyright now and the clause you point to makes it no more likely*. It does not "mandate by omission". As far as I know, no country other than the US has a constitutional "limited times" rule and, Peter Pan aside, no-one has perpetual copyright.
In fact, now that the constitution is effectively dead, the EU continues on its existing constitutional basis - the treaties. None of those treaties has a copyright clause, let alone a "limited times" one - so does that "mandate by omission" perpetual copyright? (The reason the EU has copyright power is that it falls under more general market regulation powers)
* Of course certain companies would like longer copyright terms but (a) the US constitution doesn't seem to be stopping them and (b) the fact that a you or I might find a policy objectionable does not mean that there should be a constitutional prohibition on it.
Copyright terms in the EU are set by EU law. In particular the 50 year limit for phonographs is set by directive 93/98/EEC Article 3(2) as amended by directive 2001/29/EC Article 11(2) (the latter is the infamous EUCD).
At this stage this is 'just' a British minister floating ideas. By all eans write to your MP - if it's sufficiently controversial the UK may not even try to put it through at EU level. However, if it comes to a legislative fight then it's going to be in Brussels, not London.
Just wait until the new constitution is ratified, then we'll have copyrights that will indeed be forever (article II-77-2).
That's not what the relevant article says. While I might be tempted to agree that intellectual property is not a fundamental right which should be guaranteed in a treaty, the statement "Intellectual property shall be protected" in no way mandates perpetual copyright.
Of course lifting a few words out of context and pretending they mean something totally unreasonable is a pretty common Europhobe trick. If you read the sentence with the previous one then the most likely effect of II-77-2 is to make the property provisions in II-77-1 apply to "intellectual property". This is required because, as the free software community continuously points out, it's by no means obvious that intellectual property is property.
In fact, current EU law mandates 50 years for phonographs. The relevant section is Directive 93/98/EEC Article 3(2) as amended by the infamous EU Copyright Directive 2001/29/EC Article 11(2). In this case EU law may well be an impediment to the extension of copyright rather than an aid.
I've always wondered just how closed sourse can be legal. How can anyone know that a closed source project isn't just copied from someone else?
It's a general principle of law that the party claiming a breach of the law has to prove its case. There's therefore no obligation on a software author to prove his own legality by publishing source. If, on the other hand, a claimant can clear what's known as an evidentiary burden then a court can issue an order to a claimant to deliver documents (ie the source) to the claimant. In other words, if you can establish that there is reason to believe someone is violating copyright then the court can order that the source be disclosed.
This does make proving copyright infringements against closed source products harder - although there are ways around it -but no more so than in other areas of the law. For example, companies are not usually required to publish all their records to prove that they're not engaging in anti-competitive behaviour. Similarly, individuals are not required to publish their bank records to prove that they are not involved in fraud. In each case a court can order disclosure either to the state (in the case of a crime) or the claimant (in the case of a civil action) if there is evidence that the disclosure is warranted.
Disclaimer - I have a law degree but I am not a lawyer.
I wonder though, is Britain more "European" because larger immigrant blocks vote for their home countrymen?
Given that the vast majority of British immigrants come from outside Europe (source UK government International Migration Estimates 2002) and that immigrants as a whole make up a single digit percentage of the population, it seems pretty unlikely that they would make much difference. Where immigrants do make a difference on national Eurovision votes (Germany, for example) it seems to be in countries which hugely disproportionally have their immigrants from particular European countries (Turkey, in the case of Germany). That's not true for the UK.
Funnily enough, when they wrote the Australian constitution at the end of the 19th Century, they looked at America and decided that riders were a bad thing. As a result we have the following sections of the constitution:
54. The proposed law which appropriates revenue or moneys for the ordinary annual services of the Government shall deal only with such appropriation.
55. Laws imposing taxation shall deal only with the imposition of taxation, and any provision therein dealing with any other matter shall be of no effect.
Laws imposing taxation except laws imposing duties of customs or of excise, shall deal with one subject of taxation only; but laws imposing duties of customs shall deal with duties of customs only, and laws imposing duties of excise shall deal with duties of excise only.
Australia has less tradition of extraordinary appropriation than the US. To make such rules effective in the US you might need to exted s54 to all appropriations. Riders are still possible in other legislation but money bills tend to be the ones which are hardest for MPs to vote against on the grounds of the rider.
When google requested the various columns and images from the news site, did google agree to any type of non-redistribution of materials?
You miss the point. Copyright law already says they can't redistribute. When you download a web page, the initial copy is obviously with the consent of the host (who presumably does have permission to distribute) and either fair use or statutory rules to do with transitory copies allow all the remaining copies right down to the one in your video card. Fair use may also, depending on your country's copyright law, enable you to do things like print the page, send it to friends or save it for your later use.
Fair use does sometimes allow you to make copies for public distrbution. For example, the extracts which Google publishes on it's search result pages fall under fair use. Whether you are making a profit is relevant in determining what is fair use but it is not on its own determinative. Commercial news organisations rely on fair use all the time in conducting their business.
The interesting aspect of this case is whether Google news falls inside the bounds of fair use. Note that fair use is what you are allowed to do to copyright material without the owner's permission. Your comment about the website handing out data has to do with things that the copyright owner is giving you permission to do. It's not reasonable to assume that just because you are being given a copy that you are being given a licence to redistribute. In fact, this is very rarely the case and when you are allowed to redistribute (eg Free (as in speech) content) then that permission is usually explicit.
In Australia, general elections are not only held over several weeks, but voting is compulsory. See here, mate.
This isn't really true. While there is prepoll voting in Australia for a couple of weeks beforehand, most polling places are only open on polling day and the vast majority of people vote on polling day.
You are right that voting is compulsory which delivers turnouts of 95%+. It should also be noted that there is widespread agreement about compulsory voting. Opinion polls are usually about 2/3 in favour and the one major political party which is on paper in favour of getting rid of it (the Liberals) doesn't seem to be particularly active in actually making changes.
WIPO is an intergovernmental organisation. If you're not a government* then you can't possibly be a member. Obsever status is the way that NGOs can get involved in the process.
There is actually a good reason why membership is for governments only: the output of WIPO is treaties and only governments can sign treaties. That too is logical - treaties impose mutual obligations on countries. An NGO can't legislate for its country and therefore can't sign treaties. That's unless you'd like other NGOs like the RIAA and MPAA to have direct votes on treaties.
*Or one of a very small set of intergovernmental organisations like the EC and the UN which have international personhood.
It also conveniently solves the shop-at-home problem too (but does require that you have a smart card reader connected to your computer).
We already have this for net banking. My debit card has a chip on it (which is also used for stored value smart card stuff) and to authenticate to the banks website, I use a reader supplied by the bank.
The process works like this:
The bank sends me a challenge (number).
I authenticate to my card by keying my in in the smart card widget.
I key the challenge into the widget and get a response.
I send the response back to the bank.
Using basic public key signing, the bank now knows that it's me. In accordance with good crypto practice, all the security is in the key so I can use anyone's widget for the operation. Since it's a separate widget, I don't even have to trust my computer not to steal the pin - the computer only gets to see the one time challenges and responses
Furthermore, there are other countries (Sweden for example) which have parliamentary control of prime ministers who are not themselves members of parliament. This is also - sort of - how the EU system works: the commission is the executive and is appointed by the national governments but it is still answerable to the parliament.
That's rather... odd. Wouldn't that merit a different title than Prime Minister?
If you're referring to the EU situation, then it's fair to say that the system is odd, Byzantine and confusing. Negotiated settlements tend to be like that. The legislative process is even more bizarre. Of course in Europe the commission has a president not a prime minister (and the commission president is not the same as the president of the European Council - confused yet?)
In Sweden they talk about statsministern, literally "the Minister of State" but that tends to get translated as Prime Minister. I think that the key distinction is that a prime minister is the head of the government but not the head of state. A president is head of state and may or may not be head of government depending on where you are. Usually prime ministers are accountable to (ie can be sacked by) parliament but they are not always members of parliament.
For added confusion the Dutch Minister-president is a Swedish style prime minister while the German chancellor is like a prime minister and is a member of the Bundestag (lower house of parliament).
Just to top it off, France has an executive president and a prime minister and they are both sort of head of government (and can come from opposite parties!)
The short version is that different countries have different consitutional arrangements but for practical purposes there are some offices which are sufficiently similar that it makes sense to translate the names as "prime minister" or "president".
No, Tony Blair is the equivalent of Bush AND Delay rolled into one. Prime Ministers questions are more about keeping a check on the executive than on government legislation. Indeed, the other ministers also have to front the house to be quized about how they are running their departments too.
Furthermore, there are other countries (Sweden for example) which have parliamentary control of prime ministers who are not themselves members of parliament. This is also - sort of - how the EU system works: the commission is the executive and is appointed by the national governments but it is still answerable to the parliament.
The biggest problem with EULAs as they are generally implemented is the fact that they cannot be legally binding since the user doesn't actually sign anything either on paper or in the electronic signature sense. Also, the user cannot read them before opening the shrinkwrap, which, if I remember correctly, invalidates the agreement.
This is not quite correct. Signature is not a requirement for contract (except in some restricted unrelated areas such as land transactions). Most of the contracts you enter are not signed - think about what happens in the supermarket, for example.
The reason that most EULAs are probably void is want of consideration. Note here that consideration is a technical legal term which means that both parties must provide something in order to make a contract. It has nothing to do with thinking about the contract (ie "consideration" in it's normal sense).
The argument goes like this: you by the software in a shop. The vendor makes no effort to provide you with the EULA nor does he obtain your agreement with it. There is a perfectly valid sales contract - you get the software, he gets the money.
You open the box and it contains an EULA. The EULA is, at this point, an offer which you have not accepted. Moreover, most EULAs do not give you any rights which you didn't already have under copyright law as the owner of the software you bought. So, either you don't accept the offer and you can use the software, or you do accept it . In order to legally accept it you have to communicate your acceptance to the manufacturor - which there is never provision for doing. Assume, though, that you do communicate acceptance. The contract is still void because you didn't get anything out of it.
Some manufacturors will claim that the EULA forms part of the conditions of sale, which gets around the consideration problem. However this is when the fact that you didn't know the EULA at time of purchase comes into it. The contract, in this case, is void for want of agreement.
Note that all of this assumes a "conventional" sale in a shop. EULAs on downloads where the EULA is presented before download are on much safer legal ground. Even then, though, they only bind the downloader and not the user (although in a corporate setting the downloader and the user are probably for legal purposes both the same: the company). Further, the red hand rule still applies. This means that in a standard form contract, any term that usual participants in the market would not expect to find must be drawn to the particular attention of the accepting party. Note that the relevant standard here would be people who usually download this sort of software. This, then, is a further ground on which "first born child" clauses in EULAs are invalid.
Standard disclaimer: I am not a lawyer but I do have a law degree.
"You can license what people are allowed to do with your product."
This is far from legally clear. Copyright law only restricts certain things. The main one it restricts is copying and distributing copies. The reason that open source licences work is that in order to redistribute you need the authors permission. A copyright licence (such as (L)GPL or BSD) is a limited permission to do something which copyright law would otherwise prohibit.
On the other hand, you don't need the author's permission to run software and you probably don't need it to modify the software either. (Modifying on a computer necessarily involves copying but this form of copying may well not be regulated by copyright).
The non-free licences which purport to restrict lots of other things are End User Licence Agreements. Whether EULAs are ever valid is unclear. If they are valid it is because they form part of the contract of sale of the software: an EULA rests on contract law. In that sense it is not a licence at all.
In summary, under copyright law, you need a licence to release software where the copyright is owned by someone else but you don't need a licence to publish papers or give talks. Hence copyright licences can restrict releasing software but they can't directly restrict writing papers or giving talks.
On the subject of red, why is it that the US parties are coloured the other way round from the parties in most other places?
In most countries the major left party is red (due to historical links with socialism) and the main conservative party is often, though less universally, blue.
I think "note" is probably a mistranslation. Remember, Reportes Without Borders is an international NGO and the articel may well not have been written by a native speaker. "Note" is the German word for "mark" or "score" and it is frequently mistranslated. There are notes, though, in the pdfs in the main column. They are not organised by score.
On the subject on disingenuous, you will no doubt be aware that the overwhelming verdict in the rest of the media was that the Hutton report was an establishment whitewash. Even many of the tabloids who usually hate the BBC and take any chance to bash it came down on the BBC side. For an American view on the UK response to Hutton see CNN.
The reality is that the BBC deservedly has one of the best (if not the best) reputations for high quality and balanced journalism on the planet.
Lots of EU countries have PR in various forms. A few examples:
The Netherlands has PR with the whole country being one electorate (it's a small place).
Germany has single member electorates and then top-up members from national lists to make the proportions work out. This has the slightly odd result that you don't know in advance exactly how big the Bundestag will be.
Sweden has districts with about 7 members elected by PR and then has top-up members.
Australia (which is obviously not EU) has PR by state for the Senate. In Australia, each state gets 12 senators and half are elected every three years. Each state elects its 6 senators by a form of PR. (It's actually a form of single transferable vote to be precise). Since Australia had a federal election on Saturday, there's a lot of information about the Senate count (which is still ongoing) on the ABC web site.
Slashdot Mirror
On the other hand, if you bought a PS3 from someone who didn't legally own it in the first place, it's not a valid sale, and you don't really own the PS3 either. You're not even entitled to automatic compensation if the rightful owner takes back the stolen property.
Incorrect. The bona fide purchaser for value without notice rule is applicable here. If the purchaser buys an item for non-trivial value (ie something that could be considered a real price) and does not have actual or constructive notice of a third party's title (which is to say that they did not know and could not reasonably have been expected to know about the third party's ownership) then they acquire good title and the original owner cannot enforce their property rights against the purchaser. The original owner is stuck with having to sue the thief for the value of the item.
Of course if you buy a PS3 from some guy in a pub with no proof that they own it, then you have constructive notice that someone else might own it. If, on the other hand, you buy an book from a reputable book retailer, you are entitled to rely on the retailer's implicit claim that they own what they are selling you. You can not reasonably be expected to check whether Amazon actually had the rights to sell 1984 so you acquire good title.
Of course in this case copyright law is also applicable and may allow authorities to seize infringing copies but the parent posters points were purely on the issue of property law and the parent is incorrect.
Standard disclaimer. I do have a law degree but I am not a lawyer.
Your definition of a public good is clearly correct and straight out of the text book. The argument that education is not a public good, on the other hand only works if you ignore many of the benefits which education provides to society.
An educated workforce is exceptionally important in the economic prosperity of a nation. The economic prosperity of the nation as a whole delivers immediate tangible benefits to everyone in that society. That is a public good. Having people with the life skills to participate in society and especially to hold down regular jobs is also a public good - try seeing how society runs on acrime ridden public housing estate because that's what you get when a significant chunk of the population in a region aren't in a position to participate fully and productively in society.
Of course those are the benefits of school education. But higher education also has massive public benefits. For starters you're going to need teachers to run that school education so there's a clear public good in educating teachers at university. The other public service professions follow in a similar argument. Now if you want a fair and just society you're going to want a functioning legal system so you'll need some law graduates for that. Your national economic success is going to depend on sufficient engineers, scientists, architects - in fact all the regular professions.
Having a healthy national ecomony and a functional society are not "minor impacts on unrelated people", they have major impacts on the way everyone lives their life.
Even to the extent that higher education is also a private good, the effect of not funding it from the public purse would be significant. First there is the significant chunk of society who would have effectively no access to the system. If you look to the era before state subsidy of education or even if you look at the socioeconomic background of the students at the most expensive universities today it is clear that those from less priviledged backgrounds will be even more underrepresented if subsidy was absent. This is both socially divisive (a public cost) and economically daft as robbing the societal skills base is unlikely to increase output. Now, even if you assume that the market would correct for this by so increasing graduate salaries as to entice enough bright enough people to part with the massive costs of paying for all of their own education (and I think that's a pretty bold assertion) it is flat out unreasonable to assert that the public service professions, who account for a significant fraction of graduates and amassive amount of the public good resulting from education, will be in a position to do so. Nobody can find enough physics and maths teachers already, who's going to saddle themselves with tens of thousands of pounds worth of debt in order to earn a teacher's salary?
Now, there is an issue about how much to fund education and where the fair balance lies between the public and private goods delivered by education and hence to what extent the state should pay for it. However, in a context where the public service professions in particular find it hard to recuit enough students into their degrees it is very difficult to argue that there should be no place for state subsidy in higher education. If there is to be state subsidy then it can only be determined by legislators. It's very easy to bash parliament and say "I have no idea why you trust bureaucrats and congressmen to guess the correct balance." but the answer is, we do this via parliament because that's the most effective and democratically accountable way of making public financial decisions which anyone has come up with.
Actually Article 5 of the Basic Law (the German constitution) does directly protect freedom of speech. Furthermore, since the German constitution provides no way of amending this article, it is more strongly entrenched than in the US.
In addition, the European Convention on Human Rights is directly applicable in German law and provides additional free speech safeguards.
However, every country, including the US, accepts that free speech is limited. The US has libel laws and hate speech laws and lots of other rules. You can go to court and get an interim injunction in the US on not much evidence, just like you can in Germany and lots of other countries.
It's only a requirement if you assume that continuing to do it the old way is an option. There are at least two reasons why tihs can cease to be the case.
The first is that people may break copyright in large numbers thereby undermining the existing model. This is sort of what happened with music downloads. The rational economic test for whether to sell single track downloads is not whether you'll make as much as you used to by only selling CDs, its whether you'll make more by selling downloads (at a given price) than you would by not selling them - even if you make less money than you used to before lots of people started downloading illegally.
The second is that copyright laws be weakened, either by legislation (which admitedly seems unlikely given recent trends) or by court cases. If you change the market conditions in this way, there is no need to guarantee the same revenue to any player in the marked.
A minor quibble. In the classical economic case for copyright, the test is not "same amount of money they're making now" - there is no social utility in a particular level of reward per se. Nor is there a moral right to a certain return on investment.
The classical economic test for copyright is, is sufficient return generated that enough people go to the effort of producing and publishing works? Now neither "sufficient" nor "enough" are objectively quantifiable - they express the trade off which exists between supply and return. From an economic point of view, discussions about the level of copyright protection which should be offered are about the point at which this trade off should be struck.
Of course none of this undermines your basic point that if you get rid of copying restrictions then you need an alternative way of making money by producing intangibles. The point is that there is no requirement that people make the same they make now.
Now this is even stranger than the French "British conspiracy" version of the constitution. Whatever its faults - and IMHO it's got some bad ones - the EU constitution is clearly not written for the protection of US interests. The fact that the constitution doesn't have constraints stopping the EU from being overly business friendly doesn't make it a pro-business conspiracy. The constitution also doesn't have constraints preventing the EU from being business-unfriendly. Indeed EU labour and environmental standards impose significant costs on business - and the constitution doesn't change those. The competition clauses which the French have been claiming are an Anglo-Saxon liberalisation plot were lifted straight from the treaty of Rome - which was largely written by the French and certainly hasn't stopped them having pretty massive state intervention in their economy over the last 50 years. Why do the same clauses suddenly mean something different when they're in the constitution?
The Commission, as I'm sure you know, can't amend the directive. However the EU as a whole (Commission, Council and Parliament working in the usual way) can and the constitution doesn't change that. If you're not a Europhobe don't play to them by ascribing powers to EU institutions which don't have them.
We don't have perpetual copyright now and the clause you point to makes it no more likely*. It does not "mandate by omission". As far as I know, no country other than the US has a constitutional "limited times" rule and, Peter Pan aside, no-one has perpetual copyright.
In fact, now that the constitution is effectively dead, the EU continues on its existing constitutional basis - the treaties. None of those treaties has a copyright clause, let alone a "limited times" one - so does that "mandate by omission" perpetual copyright? (The reason the EU has copyright power is that it falls under more general market regulation powers)
* Of course certain companies would like longer copyright terms but (a) the US constitution doesn't seem to be stopping them and (b) the fact that a you or I might find a policy objectionable does not mean that there should be a constitutional prohibition on it.
Copyright terms in the EU are set by EU law. In particular the 50 year limit for phonographs is set by directive 93/98/EEC Article 3(2) as amended by directive 2001/29/EC Article 11(2) (the latter is the infamous EUCD).
At this stage this is 'just' a British minister floating ideas. By all eans write to your MP - if it's sufficiently controversial the UK may not even try to put it through at EU level. However, if it comes to a legislative fight then it's going to be in Brussels, not London.
That's not what the relevant article says. While I might be tempted to agree that intellectual property is not a fundamental right which should be guaranteed in a treaty, the statement "Intellectual property shall be protected" in no way mandates perpetual copyright.
Of course lifting a few words out of context and pretending they mean something totally unreasonable is a pretty common Europhobe trick. If you read the sentence with the previous one then the most likely effect of II-77-2 is to make the property provisions in II-77-1 apply to "intellectual property". This is required because, as the free software community continuously points out, it's by no means obvious that intellectual property is property.
In fact, current EU law mandates 50 years for phonographs. The relevant section is Directive 93/98/EEC Article 3(2) as amended by the infamous EU Copyright Directive 2001/29/EC Article 11(2). In this case EU law may well be an impediment to the extension of copyright rather than an aid.
It's a general principle of law that the party claiming a breach of the law has to prove its case. There's therefore no obligation on a software author to prove his own legality by publishing source. If, on the other hand, a claimant can clear what's known as an evidentiary burden then a court can issue an order to a claimant to deliver documents (ie the source) to the claimant. In other words, if you can establish that there is reason to believe someone is violating copyright then the court can order that the source be disclosed.
This does make proving copyright infringements against closed source products harder - although there are ways around it -but no more so than in other areas of the law. For example, companies are not usually required to publish all their records to prove that they're not engaging in anti-competitive behaviour. Similarly, individuals are not required to publish their bank records to prove that they are not involved in fraud. In each case a court can order disclosure either to the state (in the case of a crime) or the claimant (in the case of a civil action) if there is evidence that the disclosure is warranted.
Disclaimer - I have a law degree but I am not a lawyer.
Given that the vast majority of British immigrants come from outside Europe (source UK government International Migration Estimates 2002) and that immigrants as a whole make up a single digit percentage of the population, it seems pretty unlikely that they would make much difference. Where immigrants do make a difference on national Eurovision votes (Germany, for example) it seems to be in countries which hugely disproportionally have their immigrants from particular European countries (Turkey, in the case of Germany). That's not true for the UK.
Funnily enough, when they wrote the Australian constitution at the end of the 19th Century, they looked at America and decided that riders were a bad thing. As a result we have the following sections of the constitution:
Australia has less tradition of extraordinary appropriation than the US. To make such rules effective in the US you might need to exted s54 to all appropriations. Riders are still possible in other legislation but money bills tend to be the ones which are hardest for MPs to vote against on the grounds of the rider.
You miss the point. Copyright law already says they can't redistribute. When you download a web page, the initial copy is obviously with the consent of the host (who presumably does have permission to distribute) and either fair use or statutory rules to do with transitory copies allow all the remaining copies right down to the one in your video card. Fair use may also, depending on your country's copyright law, enable you to do things like print the page, send it to friends or save it for your later use.
Fair use does sometimes allow you to make copies for public distrbution. For example, the extracts which Google publishes on it's search result pages fall under fair use. Whether you are making a profit is relevant in determining what is fair use but it is not on its own determinative. Commercial news organisations rely on fair use all the time in conducting their business.
The interesting aspect of this case is whether Google news falls inside the bounds of fair use. Note that fair use is what you are allowed to do to copyright material without the owner's permission. Your comment about the website handing out data has to do with things that the copyright owner is giving you permission to do. It's not reasonable to assume that just because you are being given a copy that you are being given a licence to redistribute. In fact, this is very rarely the case and when you are allowed to redistribute (eg Free (as in speech) content) then that permission is usually explicit.
However the act of which you speek is American and not applicaple in the UK, which is the jurisdiction the previous poster was talking about.
This isn't really true. While there is prepoll voting in Australia for a couple of weeks beforehand, most polling places are only open on polling day and the vast majority of people vote on polling day.
You are right that voting is compulsory which delivers turnouts of 95%+. It should also be noted that there is widespread agreement about compulsory voting. Opinion polls are usually about 2/3 in favour and the one major political party which is on paper in favour of getting rid of it (the Liberals) doesn't seem to be particularly active in actually making changes.
WIPO is an intergovernmental organisation. If you're not a government* then you can't possibly be a member. Obsever status is the way that NGOs can get involved in the process.
There is actually a good reason why membership is for governments only: the output of WIPO is treaties and only governments can sign treaties. That too is logical - treaties impose mutual obligations on countries. An NGO can't legislate for its country and therefore can't sign treaties. That's unless you'd like other NGOs like the RIAA and MPAA to have direct votes on treaties.
*Or one of a very small set of intergovernmental organisations like the EC and the UN which have international personhood.
We already have this for net banking. My debit card has a chip on it (which is also used for stored value smart card stuff) and to authenticate to the banks website, I use a reader supplied by the bank.
The process works like this:
Using basic public key signing, the bank now knows that it's me. In accordance with good crypto practice, all the security is in the key so I can use anyone's widget for the operation. Since it's a separate widget, I don't even have to trust my computer not to steal the pin - the computer only gets to see the one time challenges and responses
If you're referring to the EU situation, then it's fair to say that the system is odd, Byzantine and confusing. Negotiated settlements tend to be like that. The legislative process is even more bizarre. Of course in Europe the commission has a president not a prime minister (and the commission president is not the same as the president of the European Council - confused yet?)
In Sweden they talk about statsministern, literally "the Minister of State" but that tends to get translated as Prime Minister. I think that the key distinction is that a prime minister is the head of the government but not the head of state. A president is head of state and may or may not be head of government depending on where you are. Usually prime ministers are accountable to (ie can be sacked by) parliament but they are not always members of parliament.
For added confusion the Dutch Minister-president is a Swedish style prime minister while the German chancellor is like a prime minister and is a member of the Bundestag (lower house of parliament).
Just to top it off, France has an executive president and a prime minister and they are both sort of head of government (and can come from opposite parties!)
The short version is that different countries have different consitutional arrangements but for practical purposes there are some offices which are sufficiently similar that it makes sense to translate the names as "prime minister" or "president".
No, Tony Blair is the equivalent of Bush AND Delay rolled into one. Prime Ministers questions are more about keeping a check on the executive than on government legislation. Indeed, the other ministers also have to front the house to be quized about how they are running their departments too.
Furthermore, there are other countries (Sweden for example) which have parliamentary control of prime ministers who are not themselves members of parliament. This is also - sort of - how the EU system works: the commission is the executive and is appointed by the national governments but it is still answerable to the parliament.
This is not quite correct. Signature is not a requirement for contract (except in some restricted unrelated areas such as land transactions). Most of the contracts you enter are not signed - think about what happens in the supermarket, for example.
The reason that most EULAs are probably void is want of consideration. Note here that consideration is a technical legal term which means that both parties must provide something in order to make a contract. It has nothing to do with thinking about the contract (ie "consideration" in it's normal sense).
The argument goes like this: you by the software in a shop. The vendor makes no effort to provide you with the EULA nor does he obtain your agreement with it. There is a perfectly valid sales contract - you get the software, he gets the money.
You open the box and it contains an EULA. The EULA is, at this point, an offer which you have not accepted. Moreover, most EULAs do not give you any rights which you didn't already have under copyright law as the owner of the software you bought. So, either you don't accept the offer and you can use the software, or you do accept it . In order to legally accept it you have to communicate your acceptance to the manufacturor - which there is never provision for doing. Assume, though, that you do communicate acceptance. The contract is still void because you didn't get anything out of it.
Some manufacturors will claim that the EULA forms part of the conditions of sale, which gets around the consideration problem. However this is when the fact that you didn't know the EULA at time of purchase comes into it. The contract, in this case, is void for want of agreement.
Note that all of this assumes a "conventional" sale in a shop. EULAs on downloads where the EULA is presented before download are on much safer legal ground. Even then, though, they only bind the downloader and not the user (although in a corporate setting the downloader and the user are probably for legal purposes both the same: the company). Further, the red hand rule still applies. This means that in a standard form contract, any term that usual participants in the market would not expect to find must be drawn to the particular attention of the accepting party. Note that the relevant standard here would be people who usually download this sort of software. This, then, is a further ground on which "first born child" clauses in EULAs are invalid.
Standard disclaimer: I am not a lawyer but I do have a law degree.
"You can license what people are allowed to do with your product."
This is far from legally clear. Copyright law only restricts certain things. The main one it restricts is copying and distributing copies. The reason that open source licences work is that in order to redistribute you need the authors permission. A copyright licence (such as (L)GPL or BSD) is a limited permission to do something which copyright law would otherwise prohibit.
On the other hand, you don't need the author's permission to run software and you probably don't need it to modify the software either. (Modifying on a computer necessarily involves copying but this form of copying may well not be regulated by copyright).
The non-free licences which purport to restrict lots of other things are End User Licence Agreements. Whether EULAs are ever valid is unclear. If they are valid it is because they form part of the contract of sale of the software: an EULA rests on contract law. In that sense it is not a licence at all.
In summary, under copyright law, you need a licence to release software where the copyright is owned by someone else but you don't need a licence to publish papers or give talks. Hence copyright licences can restrict releasing software but they can't directly restrict writing papers or giving talks.
On the subject of red, why is it that the US parties are coloured the other way round from the parties in most other places?
In most countries the major left party is red (due to historical links with socialism) and the main conservative party is often, though less universally, blue.
I think "note" is probably a mistranslation. Remember, Reportes Without Borders is an international NGO and the articel may well not have been written by a native speaker. "Note" is the German word for "mark" or "score" and it is frequently mistranslated. There are notes, though, in the pdfs in the main column. They are not organised by score.
On the subject on disingenuous, you will no doubt be aware that the overwhelming verdict in the rest of the media was that the Hutton report was an establishment whitewash. Even many of the tabloids who usually hate the BBC and take any chance to bash it came down on the BBC side. For an American view on the UK response to Hutton see CNN.
The reality is that the BBC deservedly has one of the best (if not the best) reputations for high quality and balanced journalism on the planet.
Lots of EU countries have PR in various forms. A few examples:
The Netherlands has PR with the whole country being one electorate (it's a small place).
Germany has single member electorates and then top-up members from national lists to make the proportions work out. This has the slightly odd result that you don't know in advance exactly how big the Bundestag will be.
Sweden has districts with about 7 members elected by PR and then has top-up members.
Australia (which is obviously not EU) has PR by state for the Senate. In Australia, each state gets 12 senators and half are elected every three years. Each state elects its 6 senators by a form of PR. (It's actually a form of single transferable vote to be precise). Since Australia had a federal election on Saturday, there's a lot of information about the Senate count (which is still ongoing) on the ABC web site.