I've never really flamed before... and admittedly, the subject for this message is a bit harsh... but still.
The arguments he made... especially in the "ethical" section were poorly formulated, and lacked a basic understading of the bases of intellectual property.
The author opined that if he purchased a book, then he should have rights to reproduce and trade that work, because flow of information and knowledge cannot ethically be stopped. He missed the point that copyright does not affect free flow of knowledge, but of a specific adaptation of that knowledge. (e.g., If you buy a book full of telephone numbers and addresses, you cannot simply copy and sell that book, because it would be a violation of copyright. Not because the telephone numbers and addresses are copyrightable, but that specific organization of those phone numbers and addreses are. Thus you are allowed to sell lists of that information, just not in the same format or using the same method of organization.)
Again, the author opined that if he memorized a poem, and reproduced it from his memory with his own pen and paper, he should be able to publish and sell it. This is also absurd, where did he memorize the poem from? How would he have created it had the original poem not been published.. this is, of course, not his work.
Then moving on to patents. How can you own a law of nature. Similar to copyright, it is not the law of nature that is patented, but a specific adaptation of that law of nature. Of course, noone can patent the law of gravity, or the law of inertia, but you can patent a specific method of utilizing these laws to create a self-winding watch. This is analogous to not being able to copyright information or facts, but you are able to copyright a certain adaption of those facts.
Again, with his preposterous sabre tooth tiger argument, patent law does not prevent an individual from building a patented device for his own personal use (like to levitate him out of the pit to save his life), it does however prevent a corporation from taking an years of research from someone who came up with a patented device, mass producing it, and using for its own profitable enterprise without a penny of gratutde to the researcher.
As for the examples given of Bach and shakespeare, there is the fair use doctrine. Shakespeare did not callously steal the story of romeo and juliet verbatim from the original author, he did however make fair use of the a general plot line and wrote his own prose to tell this story. This goes back to the idea of it's not the information that is copyrightable, but the adaptation of the information.
I've ranted long enough, I personally am against a lot of ip, I think software patents are stupid (for reasons I will not go into) and I think many corporations have taken patent law and copyright law a bit too far... but this article left me feeling like I wasted my time reading it, and although I spent more time than I should replying to it, maybe I'll save other peoples precious time by telling them not to bother with it.
R.I.P. Shel, looks like your sidewalk has ended.
on
Shel Silverstein Dies
·
· Score: 1
You know, it's been probably over 10 years since I've read a Shel poem. But I still remember one verbatim (at least I think it is verbatim, tell me if I'm wrong).
The homework machine, Oh the homework machine, Most perfect contraption that you've ever seen, just put in your homework, and drop in a dime, snap on the switch, and in 10 seconds time, your homework comes out quick and clean as can be, here it is, nine plus four, and the answer is three! Three?! Oh me, I guess it's not as perfect as I thought it would be.
A man with a vision of the future, singing the praises of the soon to be windows OS!
Hey all, I've had no problem whatsoever getting the ls120 to boot linux, so long as the ls120 is not my root partition. It (says it) mounts the ls120 partition, then claims it can't find init and panics. Here's what I've done. I've fdisked the floppy, and created a partition (/dev/hda1) on it. I then formatted hda1, and mounted it under floppy. Afterwhich, I copied/etc,/sbin, and/bin to/floppy. (so that when hda1 is the root directory, the kernel should be able to find/sbin/init). Here's my lilo.conf...
As I said before, this works great. It gets through the whole lilo process, and mounts the hda1 as the root partition (At least it says it does) but then it dies saying it can't find init, which should clearly be there. Any ideas???
Actually, since HAL was so screwed up, and he was designed by IBM (because of the alphabet thing) He's probably running on one of those cheapo Cyrix chips that IBM fabs under license from Cyrix.
Slashdot Mirror
I've never really flamed before... and admittedly, the subject for this message is a bit harsh... but still.
- --
The arguments he made... especially in the "ethical" section were poorly formulated, and lacked a basic understading of the bases of intellectual property.
The author opined that if he purchased a book, then he should have rights to reproduce and trade that work, because flow of information and knowledge cannot ethically be stopped. He missed the point that copyright does not affect free flow of knowledge, but of a specific adaptation of that knowledge. (e.g., If you buy a book full of telephone numbers and addresses, you cannot simply copy and sell that book, because it would be a violation of copyright. Not because the telephone numbers and addresses are copyrightable, but that specific organization of those phone numbers and addreses are. Thus you are allowed to sell lists of that information, just not in the same format or using the same method of organization.)
Again, the author opined that if he memorized a poem, and reproduced it from his memory with his own pen and paper, he should be able to publish and sell it. This is also absurd, where did he memorize the poem from? How would he have created it had the original poem not been published.. this is, of course, not his work.
Then moving on to patents. How can you own a law of nature. Similar to copyright, it is not the law of nature that is patented, but a specific adaptation of that law of nature. Of course, noone can patent the law of gravity, or the law of inertia, but you can patent a specific method of utilizing these laws to create a self-winding watch. This is analogous to not being able to copyright information or facts, but you are able to copyright a certain adaption of those facts.
Again, with his preposterous sabre tooth tiger argument, patent law does not prevent an individual from building a patented device for his own personal use (like to levitate him out of the pit to save his life), it does however prevent a corporation from taking an years of research from someone who came up with a patented device, mass producing it, and using for its own profitable enterprise without a penny of gratutde to the researcher.
As for the examples given of Bach and shakespeare, there is the fair use doctrine. Shakespeare did not callously steal the story of romeo and juliet verbatim from the original author, he did however make fair use of the a general plot line and wrote his own prose to tell this story. This goes back to the idea of it's not the information that is copyrightable, but the adaptation of the information.
I've ranted long enough, I personally am against a lot of ip, I think software patents are stupid (for reasons I will not go into) and I think many corporations have taken patent law and copyright law a bit too far... but this article left me feeling like I wasted my time reading it, and although I spent more time than I should replying to it, maybe I'll save other peoples precious time by telling them not to bother with it.
-----------------------------------------------
You know, it's been probably over 10 years since I've read a Shel poem. But I still remember one verbatim (at least I think it is verbatim, tell me if I'm wrong).
The homework machine,
Oh the homework machine,
Most perfect contraption that you've ever seen,
just put in your homework, and drop in a dime,
snap on the switch, and in 10 seconds time,
your homework comes out quick and clean as can be,
here it is, nine plus four,
and the answer is three!
Three?! Oh me, I guess it's not as perfect as I
thought it would be.
A man with a vision of the future, singing the praises of the soon to be windows OS!
phrenology - don't ask me how I know that.
Actually, the live supports 4 channels, not three. It has front left and right, and back left and right. Dolby Pro-Logic (but not 5.1 surround)
Hey all, /etc, /sbin, and /bin to /floppy. (so that when hda1 is the root directory, the kernel should be able to find /sbin/init). Here's my lilo.conf...
I've had no problem whatsoever getting the ls120 to boot linux, so long as the ls120 is not my root partition. It (says it) mounts the ls120 partition, then claims it can't find init and panics. Here's what I've done. I've fdisked the floppy, and created a partition (/dev/hda1) on it. I then formatted hda1, and mounted it under floppy. Afterwhich, I copied
boot=/dev/hda
root=/dev/hda1
prompt
compact
disk=/dev/hda bios=0
install=/floppy/boot/boot.b
map=/floppy/boot/map
image=/floppy/boot/bzImage
label=Linux
read-only
As I said before, this works great. It gets through the whole lilo process, and mounts the hda1 as the root partition (At least it says it does) but then it dies saying it can't find init, which should clearly be there. Any ideas???
Amen
Actually, since HAL was so screwed up, and he was designed by IBM (because of the alphabet thing) He's probably running on one of those cheapo Cyrix chips that IBM fabs under license from Cyrix.