I don't find the fair use clause vague. It isn't clairvoyant, so it isn't going to tell you that copying 1500 words is fair use, but copying 1501 words is infringement.
Regarding filesharing, I think it is more than obvious that fair use does not include copy hundreds or thousands of copyrighted files and making them available to a global audience.
If laws lent themselves to clear, self-evident binary intrepretation, we wouldn't need judges and juries to interpret the law and rule on guilt and innocence.
If you're involved in something in which copyright and fair use become important issues, then you owe it to yourself to make an effort to understand how the courts have interpreted fair use. If you're doing something that differs dramatically from what has been considered fair use in the past, then common sense will tell you that today's courts are unlikely to consider your actions as fair use.
Certainly, if you have a financial stake involved, find a good copyright lawyer.
This unfounded, unsubstantiated assertion gets modded as "Insightful"??
Geez, if Slashdot thinks that's insightful, maybe I'll post stories about airplanes and then tell everyone that "Wow...it's just like da Vinci and Jules Verne said it would be....!!"
In any case, this isn't the first time Slashdot has tossed this this DARPA RFP story to its core audience of adolescent male fantasizers. Must sure boost the ad impressions, though.
Everyone in the PC hardware market is selling the same thing. Sure, you get standards. You also get lack of choice.
I'll agree that PC hardware is commoditized. The downside is that no one can afford to move away from the architecture we all got locked into 20 years ago.
Arguing that standards enforced by Microsoft's hegemony are bad while extolling the standards set by the PC architecture hegemony isn't consistent.
>> What if I interpret that the digital nature of a CD makes it ok to make as many digital copies as I can?
Like any statute, it's the courts' interpretation that counts, not your interpretation. That's the way law works. You can't escape responsibility for your actions by declaring that your personal "interpretation" of the law tells you your actions were legal.
If you want to make a zillion copies of every CD you own, the legality won't be tested until someone else takes you to court. (Of course, you could consider getting an opinion from a lawyer, too, lest you set yourself up for a legal quagmire.)
If you're looking for a simplistic cheatsheet that clearly defines fair use in every possible circumstance, you won't find it.
One more thing: On a few occasions, I've needed to consult an attorney about copyright and fair use issues. Each of those attorneys made this one thing very clear: The nature of the medium that contains the copyrighted information (e.g., a paper book, a plastic CD, a file on a disk, etc.) is almost never relevant to the fair use question. That is, if it isn't fair use to make umpteen copies of the paperback novel you bought yesterday, it isn't fair use to make umpteen copies of the same novel distributed as a PDF file on a CD
I've been registered with the NYT from their beginning. I receive little spam from any source, and none that I can trace to them. The only mail I get from the NYT is mail I requested.
Lots of vendors supply parts to auto manufacturers, but there are only a handful of auto manufacturers. Trying to draw parallels between U.S. auto makers and Linux distributions is silly.
How do you know more PC vendors exist today> Got numbers? Even if that is accrate, they're all selling the same thing. The standards that exist in the PC market are entirely cutomer and market driven, which, I believe, supports my contention that customers really dislike competing "standards" that don't appear to offer any tangible beneiftsto them. The industry consolidated around the specific architecture of the IBM PC alost 20 years ago, leaving many vendors of DOS PC's with other architectures in the dust. My earlier point was that in the initial days of the PC, in the early 80's, companies marketed PC's that ran DOS without mimicing the architecture of the IBM PC. As software vendors reacted to the growing market represented by IBM's PC's, they coded specifcially to that architecture, not to DOS standards. In other words, they followed market standards, not committee standards, with the side effect that consolidation of the PC hardware market accelerated. (And caused 20-years worth of failure to innovate. We're all still running AT's.)
Finally, the reason you can buy "dop in" hardware replacements is that everyone is making the same bloody thing. Your "choices" are illusory.
I don't particularly agree, but even if I did it seems to me that there is a dynamic that drives the software industry to consolidate in a few large. monolithic corporations. This is the same dynamic that drove the consolidation of the American auto industry in the early 20th century. At one time, hundreds of auto manufacturers existed. But, within a few decades, all but a handful were out of business or had been absorbed by one of the survivors.
The same process is well underway in the software industry, and for the same reason: Customers don't want an abundance of vendors. Too many vendors creates confusion and conflicting standards (real, market-driven standards) that customers don't want to deal with.
Consider the number of pre-DOS PC platforms that existed. Each of those platforms spawned a community of developers and vendors. Where are they now?
Even with the DOS world, a brief window of opportunity existed for hardware vendors whose PC's ran DOS but were not duplicates of the IBM PC. As the market inevitably consolidated, they vanished.
In the end, small enterprises will either be absorbed by the big companies, remain as niche vendors selling to markets unappealing to others, or simply vanish when a big company starts marketing the same thing.
If a vendor absorbs the functionality of your product into its platform, or otherwise starts selling something that usurps your market position, that's competition. The way to compete is to start selling something that people want to buy. Sure, Sherlock might be a freebie clone of Watson, but nothing is stopping Watson from improving or modifying their product in order to attract additional sales.
Microsoft's dubious actions complicate what is already an industry that, by nature, encourages monolithic vendors and discourages small, innovative vendors.
>>...unless you occupy a niche too small for the big guys to notice, it's definitely an invitation to trouble in the long run.
The "big guys" in any industry will always move into a market once the "little guys" prove its viability. The trouble with the PC market is that there's only one big guy.
The same thing, however, can occur in the open source world. It's a different kind of market, but there's no reason why a popular and entrenched program can't be scuttled by a newer and better program. I'd argue that we don't see more of that because open source is still developer, not user, driven, and many (most?) developers will be satisfied to use something that's "good enough", especially if they can tweak the code to meet their specific needs.
As long as they open source everything, they obviously won't be able to exploit the closed source "secrets" that they wrote. But, nothing prevents RedHAt, or anyone else, from building a Better Mousetrap and putting your mousetrap out to pasture.
>> Why would they develop their own software if they can use yours...
Because they need something better. The fact that it will be open sourced and free simply makes it stronger competition.
Frankly, the ability to modify and release another's code is a two-edged sword. Yes, it does tend to produce a lot of good code. But it also encourages a conservative "What We Have Is Good Enough" approach to software.
Bray jumps from the Watson/Sherlock experience to branding everyone who uses proprietary tools as a sharecropper. His argument would be more convincing if he cited more than this single case of a big company pulling the rug out from a little company. (Yes, they exist, but they are few compared with the number of working developers.)
In any case, what Bray is really saying is that if you develop for open source and/or the web, then no one is going to come along with a new product that mimics or competes with yours.
Of course, that's wrong. Competition exists. In fact, a case could be made that opportunities for competition in the open source arena is greater than in the proprietary arena because the cost of entry, development and distribution are much lower. (E.g., see Gnome vs KDE)
If the scheduled launch succeeds, we'll find out soon enough if a solor sail can work.
But, here's what I want to know: How do you stop the thing? Or even brake? Get to the half-way point, pull the sail down, and coast to a stop? Carry some retrorockets? Throw out a space anchor?
Oh, I agree. I regularly post some strong pro-IP sentiments here and then watch the rants pour in. But I do get tired of people who've heard the "business model" buzzword and use it to leap at any opportunity to poke a phantom blade into Microsoft's ribs.
I do think there is a conceptual distinction to be made between the code developers write and the resulting bits that are eventually burned into hardware. The written code is obviously IP. But, that's moot.
Your point aout salvaging an X-Box is interesting. MS would have a claim if the box could continue to function as an X-Box, or be restored to that status, but not if the mods mode that impossible.
Re:Are Competitors Building Dead-End Technology?
on
X Prize Race Heats Up
·
· Score: 1
Earlier, there was talk of sending a tweaked X-15 on a sort-of orbital flight. North American proposed using a 3-stage booster to send the plane on a single orbit flight. Maximum altitude to be 120 km., with a 75-km peigee. They figured the low altitude meant the X-15 could fly back in, avoiding the need for retrorockets. The pilot would eject and the plane would ditch in the ocean.
Thanks for the half-baked economic theory. Where were you when the rest of us were in Econ 101?
This has nothing to do with a "business model" (a vacuous phrase if ever there was one). And it doesn't have anything to do with Microsoft's intellectual property rights.
MS would have a valid point about IP rights if they were selling a book containing the source listings for the X-Box. But, they aren't. The physical manifestation of that code in the X-Box hardware is real property ("real" as in "real estate"), not intellectual property. It's the same for Bill Gate's house. The architect's blueprints are intellectual property, but the house is real property.
So, if MS wants people to stop running some other OS on the X-Box, they should look to their engineers, not their lawyers.
Are Competitors Building Dead-End Technology?
on
X Prize Race Heats Up
·
· Score: 4, Interesting
I don't mean to demean any of the efforts, and all that cash is an obvious incentive. But, are any of the competitiors building something that isn't dead-end technology?
Consider: Rutan and others plan to boost a more-or-less conventional aircraft to a few times the speed of sound, coast to altitude, and glide back. (You can't just put a bigger firecracker in the back, remember. You need life-support, navigation, communications, and, especially, safe passage through re-entry.)
So, one of them bags the X-Prize, but in the end you still have a vehicle with a maximum velocity of 1500-2500 mph. That's a long way from the 17,000 mph needed to reach and sustain orbit.
Are any X-Prize competitors building something that can be the basis of a realistic orbital vehicle?
>>...EMI Recorded Music signed a deal with Brit singer Robbie Williams...
You could just as easily say: "Brit singer Robin Williams signed a deal with EMI Recorded Music..."
There are at least two parties to every contract. No one is compelled to sign.
Many stories exist of naive and unwise musicians signing contracts that take advantage of them. That's too bad. People ought not to take advantage of the naivete of others. But, alas, we do. I have some sympathy for the uninitiated who get ripped off, but no sympathy at all for established musicians who have lost their naivete.
Slashdot Mirror
Maybe you oughta shoplift it. After all, that was the napster business plan.
I don't find the fair use clause vague. It isn't clairvoyant, so it isn't going to tell you that copying 1500 words is fair use, but copying 1501 words is infringement.
Regarding filesharing, I think it is more than obvious that fair use does not include copy hundreds or thousands of copyrighted files and making them available to a global audience.
If laws lent themselves to clear, self-evident binary intrepretation, we wouldn't need judges and juries to interpret the law and rule on guilt and innocence.
If you're involved in something in which copyright and fair use become important issues, then you owe it to yourself to make an effort to understand how the courts have interpreted fair use. If you're doing something that differs dramatically from what has been considered fair use in the past, then common sense will tell you that today's courts are unlikely to consider your actions as fair use.
Certainly, if you have a financial stake involved, find a good copyright lawyer.
This unfounded, unsubstantiated assertion gets modded as "Insightful"??
Geez, if Slashdot thinks that's insightful, maybe I'll post stories about airplanes and then tell everyone that "Wow...it's just like da Vinci and Jules Verne said it would be....!!"
In any case, this isn't the first time Slashdot has tossed this this DARPA RFP story to its core audience of adolescent male fantasizers. Must sure boost the ad impressions, though.
>> I pretty much guessed as much...
Guessed what? That DARPA was going to request proposals to track movement in urban warfare environments?
Those shiny license plates must really be something.
Everyone in the PC hardware market is selling the same thing. Sure, you get standards. You also get lack of choice.
I'll agree that PC hardware is commoditized. The downside is that no one can afford to move away from the architecture we all got locked into 20 years ago.
Arguing that standards enforced by Microsoft's hegemony are bad while extolling the standards set by the PC architecture hegemony isn't consistent.
>> What if I interpret that the digital nature of a CD makes it ok to make as many digital copies as I can?
Like any statute, it's the courts' interpretation that counts, not your interpretation. That's the way law works. You can't escape responsibility for your actions by declaring that your personal "interpretation" of the law tells you your actions were legal.
If you want to make a zillion copies of every CD you own, the legality won't be tested until someone else takes you to court. (Of course, you could consider getting an opinion from a lawyer, too, lest you set yourself up for a legal quagmire.)
If you're looking for a simplistic cheatsheet that clearly defines fair use in every possible circumstance, you won't find it.
One more thing: On a few occasions, I've needed to consult an attorney about copyright and fair use issues. Each of those attorneys made this one thing very clear: The nature of the medium that contains the copyrighted information (e.g., a paper book, a plastic CD, a file on a disk, etc.) is almost never relevant to the fair use question. That is, if it isn't fair use to make umpteen copies of the paperback novel you bought yesterday, it isn't fair use to make umpteen copies of the same novel distributed as a PDF file on a CD
Sorry. That's:
U.S. Copyright Office
Go to the U.S. copyright office and put "Fair Use" in the search bar.
That's taking comparisons of Slashdot and NYT about as far as they can go without demeaning the NYT.
The Times practices real journalism; Slashdot practices poaching on real journalism.
I've been registered with the NYT from their beginning. I receive little spam from any source, and none that I can trace to them. The only mail I get from the NYT is mail I requested.
Lots of vendors supply parts to auto manufacturers, but there are only a handful of auto manufacturers. Trying to draw parallels between U.S. auto makers and Linux distributions is silly.
How do you know more PC vendors exist today> Got numbers? Even if that is accrate, they're all selling the same thing. The standards that exist in the PC market are entirely cutomer and market driven, which, I believe, supports my contention that customers really dislike competing "standards" that don't appear to offer any tangible beneiftsto them. The industry consolidated around the specific architecture of the IBM PC alost 20 years ago, leaving many vendors of DOS PC's with other architectures in the dust. My earlier point was that in the initial days of the PC, in the early 80's, companies marketed PC's that ran DOS without mimicing the architecture of the IBM PC. As software vendors reacted to the growing market represented by IBM's PC's, they coded specifcially to that architecture, not to DOS standards. In other words, they followed market standards, not committee standards, with the side effect that consolidation of the PC hardware market accelerated. (And caused 20-years worth of failure to innovate. We're all still running AT's.)
Finally, the reason you can buy "dop in" hardware replacements is that everyone is making the same bloody thing. Your "choices" are illusory.
I don't particularly agree, but even if I did it seems to me that there is a dynamic that drives the software industry to consolidate in a few large. monolithic corporations. This is the same dynamic that drove the consolidation of the American auto industry in the early 20th century. At one time, hundreds of auto manufacturers existed. But, within a few decades, all but a handful were out of business or had been absorbed by one of the survivors.
The same process is well underway in the software industry, and for the same reason: Customers don't want an abundance of vendors. Too many vendors creates confusion and conflicting standards (real, market-driven standards) that customers don't want to deal with.
Consider the number of pre-DOS PC platforms that existed. Each of those platforms spawned a community of developers and vendors. Where are they now?
Even with the DOS world, a brief window of opportunity existed for hardware vendors whose PC's ran DOS but were not duplicates of the IBM PC. As the market inevitably consolidated, they vanished.
In the end, small enterprises will either be absorbed by the big companies, remain as niche vendors selling to markets unappealing to others, or simply vanish when a big company starts marketing the same thing.
Sorry you're frightened, but I read it just fine.
If a vendor absorbs the functionality of your product into its platform, or otherwise starts selling something that usurps your market position, that's competition. The way to compete is to start selling something that people want to buy. Sure, Sherlock might be a freebie clone of Watson, but nothing is stopping Watson from improving or modifying their product in order to attract additional sales.
Microsoft's dubious actions complicate what is already an industry that, by nature, encourages monolithic vendors and discourages small, innovative vendors.
>> ...unless you occupy a niche too small for the big guys to notice, it's definitely an invitation to trouble in the long run.
The "big guys" in any industry will always move into a market once the "little guys" prove its viability. The trouble with the PC market is that there's only one big guy.
The same thing, however, can occur in the open source world. It's a different kind of market, but there's no reason why a popular and entrenched program can't be scuttled by a newer and better program. I'd argue that we don't see more of that because open source is still developer, not user, driven, and many (most?) developers will be satisfied to use something that's "good enough", especially if they can tweak the code to meet their specific needs.
>> Can RedHat do the same thing?
As long as they open source everything, they obviously won't be able to exploit the closed source "secrets" that they wrote. But, nothing prevents RedHAt, or anyone else, from building a Better Mousetrap and putting your mousetrap out to pasture.
>> Why would they develop their own software if they can use yours...
Because they need something better. The fact that it will be open sourced and free simply makes it stronger competition.
Frankly, the ability to modify and release another's code is a two-edged sword. Yes, it does tend to produce a lot of good code. But it also encourages a conservative "What We Have Is Good Enough" approach to software.
Bray jumps from the Watson/Sherlock experience to branding everyone who uses proprietary tools as a sharecropper. His argument would be more convincing if he cited more than this single case of a big company pulling the rug out from a little company. (Yes, they exist, but they are few compared with the number of working developers.)
In any case, what Bray is really saying is that if you develop for open source and/or the web, then no one is going to come along with a new product that mimics or competes with yours.
Of course, that's wrong. Competition exists. In fact, a case could be made that opportunities for competition in the open source arena is greater than in the proprietary arena because the cost of entry, development and distribution are much lower. (E.g., see Gnome vs KDE)
I bought my C64 for $199.00. Wonder what the new model will cost?
If the scheduled launch succeeds, we'll find out soon enough if a solor sail can work.
But, here's what I want to know: How do you stop the thing? Or even brake? Get to the half-way point, pull the sail down, and coast to a stop? Carry some retrorockets? Throw out a space anchor?
But...what if you need to escape from Jupiter's gravity after stopping to let off some passengers? Diminished solar gravity won't be the problem.
Oh, I agree. I regularly post some strong pro-IP sentiments here and then watch the rants pour in. But I do get tired of people who've heard the "business model" buzzword and use it to leap at any opportunity to poke a phantom blade into Microsoft's ribs.
I do think there is a conceptual distinction to be made between the code developers write and the resulting bits that are eventually burned into hardware. The written code is obviously IP. But, that's moot.
Your point aout salvaging an X-Box is interesting. MS would have a claim if the box could continue to function as an X-Box, or be restored to that status, but not if the mods mode that impossible.
Earlier, there was talk of sending a tweaked X-15 on a sort-of orbital flight. North American proposed using a 3-stage booster to send the plane on a single orbit flight. Maximum altitude to be 120 km., with a 75-km peigee. They figured the low altitude meant the X-15 could fly back in, avoiding the need for retrorockets. The pilot would eject and the plane would ditch in the ocean.
Thanks for the half-baked economic theory. Where were you when the rest of us were in Econ 101?
This has nothing to do with a "business model" (a vacuous phrase if ever there was one). And it doesn't have anything to do with Microsoft's intellectual property rights.
MS would have a valid point about IP rights if they were selling a book containing the source listings for the X-Box. But, they aren't. The physical manifestation of that code in the X-Box hardware is real property ("real" as in "real estate"), not intellectual property. It's the same for Bill Gate's house. The architect's blueprints are intellectual property, but the house is real property.
So, if MS wants people to stop running some other OS on the X-Box, they should look to their engineers, not their lawyers.
I don't mean to demean any of the efforts, and all that cash is an obvious incentive. But, are any of the competitiors building something that isn't dead-end technology?
Consider: Rutan and others plan to boost a more-or-less conventional aircraft to a few times the speed of sound, coast to altitude, and glide back. (You can't just put a bigger firecracker in the back, remember. You need life-support, navigation, communications, and, especially, safe passage through re-entry.)
So, one of them bags the X-Prize, but in the end you still have a vehicle with a maximum velocity of 1500-2500 mph. That's a long way from the 17,000 mph needed to reach and sustain orbit.
Are any X-Prize competitors building something that can be the basis of a realistic orbital vehicle?
>> ...EMI Recorded Music signed a deal with Brit singer Robbie Williams...
You could just as easily say: "Brit singer Robin Williams signed a deal with EMI Recorded Music..."
There are at least two parties to every contract. No one is compelled to sign.
Many stories exist of naive and unwise musicians signing contracts that take advantage of them. That's too bad. People ought not to take advantage of the naivete of others. But, alas, we do. I have some sympathy for the uninitiated who get ripped off, but no sympathy at all for established musicians who have lost their naivete.
Relax, not everything needs to be useful. (Like reading Slashdot...heh.)
Sometime people do things because it geves them pleasure. You remember, fun.