(and I believe will be upheld by the Supreme Court) because "limited times" is too ambiguous.
Don't I remember correctly that the framers actually set the time originally to 7 years? So 7 years is a representative sample of a "limited time" duration as the framers conceived it. So where does that draw boundaries? It doesn't per se, but I suspect that changing most quantities that a person would suggest as a representative value of some set by a factor of 10 (7 years to 70 years) would put the changed value outside the bounds of the set. This could be verified or disproved through experiment and could actually give a close approximation to what range the framers had in mind when the law was created. Laws should not change over time just because a contemporary lawyer can argue the meaning of words like 'limited' or 'reasonable' and never be corrected by the original authors.
I have personally saved thousands by using Open Source software. Ditto for my employer. And as Benjamin Franklin pointed out, 'A penny saved is a penny earned.' Furthermore there are companies making money on Linux now, and as our share of the market continues to grow, those opportunities will multiply. Our marketshare will grow by prying the.doc stranglehold from the throat of the consumer. And once the advantages of open formats are realized then Microsoft will have to follow our lead and compete by innovating.
I have sent quite a bit of email to both my Senators and my Representative and I know it's getting read (at least by someone) because I get a response every time. Most of the time I get two responses, one by email and another by snail mail.
I never received ANY responses to emails to my representatives regarding the USA Patriot Act, only from snail mail and that wasn't until many, many months later. I wonder if they even received them.
I remember this issue coming up back when Phoenix cloned the IBM BIOS. But it has been so long that things have almost certainly changed due to the DMCA, etc. And in light of this anti-anti-trust ruling, I would love to hear from an authoritative source the answers to these questions.
What methods exist to create a program which is interchangeable with another, copyrighted program? Are there different rules that apply to file formats? What about network protocols, can I simply sniff my ethernet card and whatever I can deduce from the output is fair game?
What is the current legal status of 'reverse engineering' and 'disassembly' of a copyrighted program in order to create an interchangeable replacement program or alternately a program which interoperates compatibly with the original copyrighted program?
How many parties must be involved and what steps are required to reverse engineer a program? Must the party who writes the specifications be outside the U.S.? What ramifications are there for that party, i.e. can they ever write new software that competes with the program they reverse engineered without tainting the ownership of the new software?
He needed to get some cash so he can buy a thousand pissant companies and "integrate" a few lines of code from each into portions of windows, since MS will not have to disclose "Communications protocols and APIs", where it would affect "3rd-party" IP.
I am dumbfounded at some of the Olsen's arguments. For example, his suggestion that an author might want to publish in Europe rather than the US if their work could be locked up by a publishing company for an additonal 20 years beginning 5 decades after their death. His explanation for why an author would want to do this was based on what a publisher would pay. But in an amicus brief it is shown that 99.8% of the total value of a work will be sucked from it under the current rules. Extending the copyright length any longer would give a mighty small return, so a publisher would have no economic incentive to offer the auther any more than 0.2% additional and would have to wait possibly as long as 140 years to recoup.
Contrary to the governments position, I can think of at least a couple of arguments why having a shorter copyright period than Europe would create an incentive for authors and other creative producers to come to America. They would have a richer culture from which to draw. They would have a public domain which contains cultural and scientific material 20 years closer to the contemporary thinking. They would have less to fear from holders of old copyrights who would try to extort money from an artist because he created a song or poem or novel or whatever that has vague similarities to one created some hundred odd years ago.
Lessigs arguement is weak because a) two extensions by the congress over the span of more than a hundred years is a weak basis to establish a pattern of behavior and b) Lessig cannot prove that congress in the future will continue the pattern. On the other hand life+70 is a limited amout of time which is perfectly in line with the constitution.
...Must...refrain...from...using...sarcasm...
I don't think you have thoroughly thought out your position using common sense and the innate pattern matching abilities that your brain provides. ...Losing...control...
a) 100 years is a weak basis to establish a pattern of behavior? By your thinking then maybe Congress will vote itself a pay decrease one of these days. In fact, maybe they will give themselves a series of pay decreases resulting in a federal budget surplus. Just because it hasn't ever happened before doesn't mean it can't happen, right? ...Damn!...
b) You are so right. Life+70 years is a limited amount of time. And so is a much more reasonable length of time such as Life+2000 years. Just think of the love old Walt would feel if his great great great great great great great great great great grandchildren could pull him out of a cryogenic deep freezer and give him a big old hug for providing for them for so many years.
> However, a window washer's widow does not continue to take in income from her late husbands previously washed windows.
No, but she does inherit the window washing business, including any inventory or tools, receivables, contracts, etc.
Yes and the writer's widow inherits all monies and investments made on proceeds from the writer's work. A window washing business would not run itself for an additional 70 years. If she were the widow of a working man, she would would not receive a check for a broom that pushes itself or a bus that drives itself. This (originally) temporary monopoly on the expression of an idea was never meant to support a dead persons family, it was given to promote the progress of Science.
The anthrax attacks a year ago seemed designed and timed to ensure the passage of this "USA-Patriot" act. It targeted the media, Sen. Dashell, the democratic senate majority leader and the only man who could stop the bill through a party line vote, and Sen. Leahy who is known to be a staunch defender of the bill of rights and was campaigning for compromise on the bill to protect American liberties. Not only did the attacks scare the public and encourage the targeted leaders to tow the line and obey George W. Bush's order to pass the bill quickly and with no more than four minor amendments, but by attacking through the mail it stopped the legitimate messages of outraged citizens from reaching their representatives until long after the bill's passage.
We know now that the strain of anthrax used came from a highly secure US military lab. That greatly narrows what organizations could have planned and executed the attack. Could Al Quida steal biological weapons from Fort Detrick when they could have much more easily gotten anthrax from many other labs scattered throughout the world? In any investigation, the most important consideration is motive. Who stood to gain by passage of the USA-Patriot Act? And will the ACLU's challenge be enough to cause the killers to attack again, to persuade the masses to trade essential liberty for temporary safety? Tune in next time for the exciting conclusion...
It does also burn me that my taxes are continually wasted on Microsoft software. Whenever any money is spent on MS Office or a Windows 2000 file server, they are wasting my money when a perfectly suitable substitute exists as a free opensource product.
This is exactly why I will vote against every school levy that comes on the ballot in my area. Because the schools are doing the same thing. They whine and cry that they have no funding and the teachers go on strike because they aren't given a decent raise, but then the administration goes and wastes hundreds of thousands of dollars leasing M$ windows and M$ office. If a student is supposed to learn "keyboarding" then why must it be done with M$ Word? Why not use free software that looks just like M$ Word? Cut, copy, and paste do the same damn thing regardless of which company wrote the word processor so why waste $699 on each of 30 pc's in each computer lab at each school?
I agree. If you aren't a starving poet then support the community as best you can, lest it wither and fade away...
Well, I'm obviously not a poet so I picked it up last weekend.
So far I am impressed with how clearly it is written. And now that I am starting to understand what Mozilla is built on, I have much more respect for its developers. They weren't just building a browser, they were building a platform that can quickly adapt to become whatever the browser morphs into over the next decade. Navigator couldn't keep up with IE's pace of development but now I think the shoe is on the other foot.
Wouldn't it be nice if some federal judge were to rule that as part of reparations for crimes committed by Microsoft that they had to publish their file formats. That way anyone could compete with them on a level playing field. Of course they would probably try to get the judge to allow them to charge royalties and require persons to agree to a big-brother 'Passport' license before even allowing a prospective competitor to read the licensing terms or see the prices. Nah, no judge could be that short sighted.
This explains how some guy I saw on that Ripley's TV show poured molten lead into his mouth without burning the crap out of himself. It's been a while since I watched it but IIRC, he seemed to keep it in a pool on his tongue for a couple of seconds and then spit it out.
It's long been a running joke that people with Physics degrees end up in the Unemployment line. But now when you go to the fair and see a circus geek sticking his hand in molten lead, ask if he went to M.I.T. And the guy next to him that bites the heads off of chickens may have a PhD in Philosophy.
For some reason this news reminds me of the public land that is leased to mining companys for $5 an sq.mile or something like that. They keep telling us that doing so reduces our tax burden, etc. but I can't help but wonder how many tons of gold, silver, platinum, uranium, iron, copper, and so on comes out of that ground. Is my tax money just going to end up paying for some large corporations's R&D budgets?
For example, if Disney and other media companies would be unsuccessful in extending the term of copyright extension, Mickey Mouse hits the public domain in 2003. Legally, Universal could produce a line of Mickey Mouse cartoons based on the original appearance of the character from the 1928 Steamboat Willie, and anyone could package and sell the original Steamboat Willie cartoon - all without credit or payment to Walt Disney.
B.F.D. Kids today would never be interested in Mickey Mouse as he existed in Steamboat Willy. And decades from now when the most current incarnations would be available they will also seem like ancient history. Maybe we should grant Disney a permanent exception to copyright law so that they will no longer use their great wealth to trample the public's intellectual freedom.
I hate modems. When there is something I have to do on the network and I have to dialup to do it, it is debateable whether I should just drive in to work. Ever had to install some windows based network management utility on your machine at home through a dialup connection? I think windows will read a 4 meg file just so it can look inside it to get the 63 byte icon to display cause it seems to read it once when you click on it or display it in a folder. Then it seems to read it again when you choose to copy it saying 'preparing to copy'. Then it reads it yet again to actually copy it. Needless to say this inefficient crap is a lot less frustrating over a VPN connection over DSL/Cable. Not to mention getting 24k speeds on a 56k dialup. If broadband came to my area I would sign up in a heartbeat.
And I should point out that when I said 'not so bright' I was comparing against his father and the other U.S. presidents, who are obviously all exceptional men. So call off your IRS goons, W!;-)
> if someone disagrees with their OPINIONS they must be STUPID.
Lets take a look at this...
A not so bright son of a powerful ex president/spymaster disagrees with the educated opinions of a consensus of experts on various subjects. And you think 'maybe Bush is right because he's so gosh darn folksy!'
For a while, it looked like HP had the balls to stand up to Microshaft, but they clearly don't. Dell does. The meek shall inherit the dirt. HP is circling the drain. Dude, you're getting a Dell.
No it's not a surprise. Many of the teachers at community colleges aren't even professional teachers. I have known three people who taught computer courses on the side at a local community college and I can say that I would never sign up for a course with any of them as an instructor. It would be a waste of my money. What products would you expect low quality instructors to teach? They typically don't even know what alternatives exist, much less have any experience to compare and contrast them, although many have pretensious attitudes and regurgitate what they heard at some product seminar.
You know what... I do mind. I *care* if all the glamourous work becomes free and I can only get paid to do the crufty bits. We had a good thing going and then we went and ruined it. I am lucky in that my job quality was largely unaffected by our shift to open source, but I look at the shitty work some of my co-workers now have to do and it totally depresses me. It is demeaning for a highly skilled programmer to be stuck writing glue code to glue two poorly written, heterogenous open source apps together.
Geez dude, What universe are you living in? Is reinventing the wheel your idea of fun? If your kid asked you to help him build a go-kart, would you start mining ore in your backyard so you could smelt it to cast an engine block? I'll bet that if you were asked to make something for people to do expense reports on, you'd spend 12 months building some bloated VB app instead of using a spreadsheet and being done in 2 or 3 hours. You ought to be thankful that that open source saved your company so much time and money because it probably saved your job from the sound of things.
Slashdot Mirror
Don't I remember correctly that the framers actually set the time originally to 7 years? So 7 years is a representative sample of a "limited time" duration as the framers conceived it. So where does that draw boundaries? It doesn't per se, but I suspect that changing most quantities that a person would suggest as a representative value of some set by a factor of 10 (7 years to 70 years) would put the changed value outside the bounds of the set. This could be verified or disproved through experiment and could actually give a close approximation to what range the framers had in mind when the law was created. Laws should not change over time just because a contemporary lawyer can argue the meaning of words like 'limited' or 'reasonable' and never be corrected by the original authors.
I have personally saved thousands by using Open Source software. Ditto for my employer. And as Benjamin Franklin pointed out, 'A penny saved is a penny earned.' Furthermore there are companies making money on Linux now, and as our share of the market continues to grow, those opportunities will multiply. Our marketshare will grow by prying the .doc stranglehold from the throat of the consumer. And once the advantages of open formats are realized then Microsoft will have to follow our lead and compete by innovating.
I never received ANY responses to emails to my representatives regarding the USA Patriot Act, only from snail mail and that wasn't until many, many months later. I wonder if they even received them.
I remember this issue coming up back when Phoenix cloned the IBM BIOS. But it has been so long that things have almost certainly changed due to the DMCA, etc. And in light of this anti-anti-trust ruling, I would love to hear from an authoritative source the answers to these questions.
What methods exist to create a program which is interchangeable with another, copyrighted program? Are there different rules that apply to file formats? What about network protocols, can I simply sniff my ethernet card and whatever I can deduce from the output is fair game?
What is the current legal status of 'reverse engineering' and 'disassembly' of a copyrighted program in order to create an interchangeable replacement program or alternately a program which interoperates compatibly with the original copyrighted program?
How many parties must be involved and what steps are required to reverse engineer a program? Must the party who writes the specifications be outside the U.S.? What ramifications are there for that party, i.e. can they ever write new software that competes with the program they reverse engineered without tainting the ownership of the new software?
He needed to get some cash so he can buy a thousand pissant companies and "integrate" a few lines of code from each into portions of windows, since MS will not have to disclose "Communications protocols and APIs", where it would affect "3rd-party" IP.
Stephen King is dead? When did that happen?
I am dumbfounded at some of the Olsen's arguments. For example, his suggestion that an author might want to publish in Europe rather than the US if their work could be locked up by a publishing company for an additonal 20 years beginning 5 decades after their death. His explanation for why an author would want to do this was based on what a publisher would pay. But in an amicus brief it is shown that 99.8% of the total value of a work will be sucked from it under the current rules. Extending the copyright length any longer would give a mighty small return, so a publisher would have no economic incentive to offer the auther any more than 0.2% additional and would have to wait possibly as long as 140 years to recoup.
Contrary to the governments position, I can think of at least a couple of arguments why having a shorter copyright period than Europe would create an incentive for authors and other creative producers to come to America. They would have a richer culture from which to draw. They would have a public domain which contains cultural and scientific material 20 years closer to the contemporary thinking. They would have less to fear from holders of old copyrights who would try to extort money from an artist because he created a song or poem or novel or whatever that has vague similarities to one created some hundred odd years ago.
I don't think you have thoroughly thought out your position using common sense and the innate pattern matching abilities that your brain provides.
a) 100 years is a weak basis to establish a pattern of behavior? By your thinking then maybe Congress will vote itself a pay decrease one of these days. In fact, maybe they will give themselves a series of pay decreases resulting in a federal budget surplus. Just because it hasn't ever happened before doesn't mean it can't happen, right?
b) You are so right. Life+70 years is a limited amount of time. And so is a much more reasonable length of time such as Life+2000 years. Just think of the love old Walt would feel if his great great great great great great great great great great grandchildren could pull him out of a cryogenic deep freezer and give him a big old hug for providing for them for so many years.
Yes and the writer's widow inherits all monies and investments made on proceeds from the writer's work. A window washing business would not run itself for an additional 70 years. If she were the widow of a working man, she would would not receive a check for a broom that pushes itself or a bus that drives itself. This (originally) temporary monopoly on the expression of an idea was never meant to support a dead persons family, it was given to promote the progress of Science.
We know now that the strain of anthrax used came from a highly secure US military lab. That greatly narrows what organizations could have planned and executed the attack. Could Al Quida steal biological weapons from Fort Detrick when they could have much more easily gotten anthrax from many other labs scattered throughout the world? In any investigation, the most important consideration is motive. Who stood to gain by passage of the USA-Patriot Act? And will the ACLU's challenge be enough to cause the killers to attack again, to persuade the masses to trade essential liberty for temporary safety? Tune in next time for the exciting conclusion...
(for an extensive analysis of the anthrax attacks)
It does also burn me that my taxes are continually wasted on Microsoft software. Whenever any money is spent on MS Office or a Windows 2000 file server, they are wasting my money when a perfectly suitable substitute exists as a free opensource product.
This is exactly why I will vote against every school levy that comes on the ballot in my area. Because the schools are doing the same thing. They whine and cry that they have no funding and the teachers go on strike because they aren't given a decent raise, but then the administration goes and wastes hundreds of thousands of dollars leasing M$ windows and M$ office. If a student is supposed to learn "keyboarding" then why must it be done with M$ Word? Why not use free software that looks just like M$ Word? Cut, copy, and paste do the same damn thing regardless of which company wrote the word processor so why waste $699 on each of 30 pc's in each computer lab at each school?
I agree. If you aren't a starving poet then support the community as best you can, lest it wither and fade away...
Well, I'm obviously not a poet so I picked it up last weekend.
So far I am impressed with how clearly it is written. And now that I am starting to understand what Mozilla is built on, I have much more respect for its developers. They weren't just building a browser, they were building a platform that can quickly adapt to become whatever the browser morphs into over the next decade. Navigator couldn't keep up with IE's pace of development but now I think the shoe is on the other foot.
Wouldn't it be nice if some federal judge were to rule that as part of reparations for crimes committed by Microsoft that they had to publish their file formats. That way anyone could compete with them on a level playing field. Of course they would probably try to get the judge to allow them to charge royalties and require persons to agree to a big-brother 'Passport' license before even allowing a prospective competitor to read the licensing terms or see the prices. Nah, no judge could be that short sighted.
No kidding! What the heck is a wmv? Why can't they use standard mpeg files or at least quicktime or realplayer?
.LIF which stands for Latest Incompatible Format.
Next week they'll switch to Microshit
Isthay eallyray uckssay!
Sorry. Pig Latin is copyrighted by Mickius Mousikus and will not pass into the public domain until the year 2410 AD.
This explains how some guy I saw on that Ripley's TV show poured molten lead into his mouth without burning the crap out of himself. It's been a while since I watched it but IIRC, he seemed to keep it in a pool on his tongue for a couple of seconds and then spit it out.
It's long been a running joke that people with Physics degrees end up in the Unemployment line. But now when you go to the fair and see a circus geek sticking his hand in molten lead, ask if he went to M.I.T. And the guy next to him that bites the heads off of chickens may have a PhD in Philosophy.
For some reason this news reminds me of the public land that is leased to mining companys for $5 an sq.mile or something like that. They keep telling us that doing so reduces our tax burden, etc. but I can't help but wonder how many tons of gold, silver, platinum, uranium, iron, copper, and so on comes out of that ground. Is my tax money just going to end up paying for some large corporations's R&D budgets?
B.F.D. Kids today would never be interested in Mickey Mouse as he existed in Steamboat Willy. And decades from now when the most current incarnations would be available they will also seem like ancient history. Maybe we should grant Disney a permanent exception to copyright law so that they will no longer use their great wealth to trample the public's intellectual freedom.
Chickenman.
He's everywhere! He's everywhere!
I hate modems. When there is something I have to do on the network and I have to dialup to do it, it is debateable whether I should just drive in to work. Ever had to install some windows based network management utility on your machine at home through a dialup connection? I think windows will read a 4 meg file just so it can look inside it to get the 63 byte icon to display cause it seems to read it once when you click on it or display it in a folder. Then it seems to read it again when you choose to copy it saying 'preparing to copy'. Then it reads it yet again to actually copy it. Needless to say this inefficient crap is a lot less frustrating over a VPN connection over DSL/Cable. Not to mention getting 24k speeds on a 56k dialup. If broadband came to my area I would sign up in a heartbeat.
I'm sure you are right about that.
;-)
And I should point out that when I said 'not so bright' I was comparing against his father and the other U.S. presidents, who are obviously all exceptional men. So call off your IRS goons, W!
> if someone disagrees with their OPINIONS they must be STUPID.
Lets take a look at this...
A not so bright son of a powerful ex president/spymaster disagrees with the educated opinions of a consensus of experts on various subjects. And you think 'maybe Bush is right because he's so gosh darn folksy!'
I'd rather have a Microtel
No it's not a surprise. Many of the teachers at community colleges aren't even professional teachers. I have known three people who taught computer courses on the side at a local community college and I can say that I would never sign up for a course with any of them as an instructor. It would be a waste of my money. What products would you expect low quality instructors to teach? They typically don't even know what alternatives exist, much less have any experience to compare and contrast them, although many have pretensious attitudes and regurgitate what they heard at some product seminar.
Geez dude, What universe are you living in? Is reinventing the wheel your idea of fun? If your kid asked you to help him build a go-kart, would you start mining ore in your backyard so you could smelt it to cast an engine block? I'll bet that if you were asked to make something for people to do expense reports on, you'd spend 12 months building some bloated VB app instead of using a spreadsheet and being done in 2 or 3 hours. You ought to be thankful that that open source saved your company so much time and money because it probably saved your job from the sound of things.