Can you now tell me why the common head gesture for "yes" is to shake the head up and down, and the common head gesture for "no" is to shake the head left and right?
Shortly after "the first Star Wars movie"* came out, during the first wave of Star Wars hysteria, the costumed character "Dark Invader" appeared at the local mall -- kids could get their pictures taken with him --, for a week or so, I guess until MPAA forces caught up with him. That has to have been one depressing job.
* I guess I am showing my age by not calling it "ANH"
Rather, it is the gathering of source data regarding income and deductions (W-2s, 1099s, the "basis" of investment assets sold, evidence of business expenses, etc.). Once such materials are gathered, it is trivial either: (i) if one has a simple tax situation with few potential deductions, to fill out the "EZ" versions of tax returns or (ii) if one has a slightly more complex situation, to pay a tax preparer $50-100 to prepare the more complex forms (and, if one has significant deductions, hiring a tax preparer will be well worth the small fee).
Efforts to promote flat rates (or, even worse, sales or value-added tax) as tax simplification are an attempt to trick those who are less well off and less sophisticated into reducing the tax burden on the more affluent. If you think lowering the tax rates on the most well off is a good idea, by all means advocate it, but do so explicitly and don't try to trick people into supporting it under the guise of liberating them from a little mental effort.
Undertaker43017 wrote: Even if they admitted that they are no longer innovative (or never were) I don't see this causing people to change their mind about using MS products. If you took a poll about why people use MS products, I suspect: "because they are innovative" would be well down the list...
The immediate purpose of the "innovation" argument is not to impress customers, but to persuade lawmakers and regulators not to pursue anti-trust actions. The implicit argument is that a company of the size and dominant market position of MS is necessary for "innovation" to occur. Of course, buying their "innovative" technologies from smaller companies undercuts this argument.
By the same token, why shouldn't you be allowed to voluntarily enter into a contract that restricts your ability to vote, or commits you to vote for one candidate or party?
The functioning of the political process is dependent on the free expression of one's views, whether in speech or in the voting booth. Put another way, our political process presumes participants who are free to express their views. While it may not matter whether one individual agrees to silence himself, at a societal level, it can change the nature of the political process.
Also, such conditions of employment are in a sense the equivalent of "adhesion contracts" -- provisions that are (apparently) minor portions of a larger contract but that are overlooked or misvalued by the counterparty to the contract so that they arguably are not bargained for.
What makes something ordinary course versus extraordinary in this context depends in large part to the value of the asset compared to the value of the company: if an asset was the "crown jewel" of a company, there may be issues, but if an asset was currently of limited value (evidenced for instance, by the company having received no revenues off it for years), I do not think it would be a real risk.
kaltkalt wrote: To [give away corporate assets like rights to defunct videogames] would breach duties owed to the corporations' shareholders and bring about derivative suits.
People often say this on/., but generally it is not true. Most U.S. states have a doctrine known as the "business judgment rule", meaning that a corporation's officers and directors are protected against liability to shareholders for almost all acts done within the scope of ordinary business decisions. This is the reason officers and directors can't be held liable merely for having a bad quarter of results. The prime example of something outside the scope of the rule would be approving a major corporate transaction, like a merger or acquisition -- and in that realm, shareholder lawsuits are the norm and accordingly corporations take precautions to demonstrate that the transaction was justified and not a breach of duty to shareholders. It seems pretty far-fetched that a routine business decision like giving away a license to Major Havoc (to pick a personal favorite) could be the basis for liability. Did AOL get sued for open-sourcing Mozilla or Sun for OpenOffice? Corporations give away, junk or sell at cut-rate prices physical assets all the time (I am sure many/.'ers have obtained old computers from work this way).
Besides there being a Freshmeat posting of a beta, has any particular milestone been reached in Mozilla/SVG development? I was able to compile and use SVG on Linux for a while already, and SVG-enabled builds have been available periodically. The netscape.public.mozilla.svg newsgroup does not have particularly much to say about status -- in fact, Alex Fritze, the primary programmer behind the effort, posted the following on July 16: "IMO Mozilla SVG is still too immature for inclusion in default builds. What we really need is more C++ developers working on SVG code. The problem is not so much the technology as the man-power. Any volunteers welcome!" Additionally, the last time the Mozilla SVG project page was updated was 3 months ago. I am a big fan of SVG and am impressed by Mr. Fritze's efforts, but I am wondering what the expectations are for when Mozilla SVG will be enabled by default.
mykepredko wrote: At the time, I seemed to be the only person in the world that noticed Microsoft paid $12 Million for a song with the chorus "You make a grown man cry..."
Did you also happen to notice what the fade-out vocals said "you" could make a dead man do?
msobkow wrote: banks and financial companies aren't even going to consider putting their internal processing systems out as GPL software, and don't qualify for internal-use-only exceptions in most cases.
Why wouldn't internally developed (even contractor-developed) bank or financial company internal processing systems qualify for the internal-use-only ("no distribution") exception?
Re:Does Linux have legal vulnerabilities?
on
SCO SCO SCO!
·
· Score: 1
I do not believe civil penalties under the U.S. Copyright Act (injunctions or payments of "actual damages") require intentionality, but I believe that criminal penalties do and intentionality may have an impact on the certain more punitive civil penalties (for instance, a higher level of statutory damages are payable for willful violations) or the willingness of a court to impose onerous injunctive relief. Perhaps an IP lawyer could clarify this.
I believe that many free software projects ask for copyright assignments or other representations from contributors to the effect that the contribution is not in violation of the copyright of another. The FSF also asks individual contributors to get copyright disclaimers from their employers (if any) so that it can be sure those employers won't claim to own the contributions.
What I would like to know (not being a software professional) is what commercial/proprietary companies do to address this issue. In a sense, the risks are higher for them than for free software: while most free software programmers have little access to proprietary code, any proprietary coder potentially has access to much GPL code -- it must be hard for a programmer who is stuck or pressed for time to resist taking a peek at GPL sources available on the net.
Lem, Keyes, Wolfram and a Few Thoughts
on
AI in Sci-Fi
·
· Score: 3, Informative
Several authors/books related to this subject that might be of interest are:
1. Stanislaw Lem's "Golem XIV" (it appeared as part of the "Imaginary Magnitude" collection (which also contains other stories about machine intelligence, for instance about machine literature), as well as apparently as a separate book). It is a story told as a series of lectures by a superintelligent computer (the Golem of the title). While some of it is pretty hokey (and some of it pretty funny), it contains some interesting speculations as to what superintelligence could consist of and how the physical and evolutionary contraints on human intelligence may make machine intelligence (which would presumably not be similarly encumbered) very different.
2. Daniel Keyes' "Flowers for Algernon". It is a story of a mentally retarded man who is given surgery that not only corrects his retardation, but makes him superintelligent. The story is told from a first-person perspective, so the level of the narration reflects his changing intellect. It has been 10+ years since I read it -- I would be interested in seeing how his superintelligent-phase writing held up.
3. Stephen Wolfram's "A New Kind of Science". Last year's geek-must-read book about how the entire universe is a cellular automatum (of course, I am compressing). It speculates -- and I am sure that I am getting this wrong (experts, please correct me) -- that the level of complexity of relatively simple CA rule sets is the maximum possible level of complexity, which would seem to have implications for limits on superintelligence.
A few additional thoughts:
4. One of the themes that seems to come up in SciFi treatments of AI is that a AI would have amazing predictive powers. I would think, however, that principles from chaos theory, the uncertainty principle, etc. would place real limits on that area of intelligence for most real world purposes.
5. I would be interested in hearing how cognitive psychologists and computer scientists even define intelligence, particularly at the high end of the (human) scale.
I do not think that your argument that the IRS was motivated by a simple desire to boost tax revenues works, given that the cost of tax preparation software is tax deductable to individuals and that amount of tax that software companies would pay on their profits on such software would almost certainly be less than the value of the tax deduction to individual taxpayers.
Boromir wrote: I know my own heritage is crucial in my self identity, and I would never give it up, not for all the wealth in the land. Keep in mind that you and your family are only the stewards of Gondor.
Anyone remember the Monorail (and spare me the Simpsons jokes)?
Most people believe the "plateau-ing" of consumer demands for computer power will lead to further commoditization of PCs, and thus lower profits for OEMs. It is possible, however, that a few select players -- Apple (of course) and potentially Sony -- will be able to leverage the lack of a need for horse-power type progress to be able to realize premiums for non-technical style points. Not for me, or probably you, but a stylish, unobtrusive computer could be worth the extra few $100 when one is trying to integrate computing into a family room setting where the furniture and other consumer electronics cost thousands of dollars.
spending 99% of your effort on pattern recognition on inputs and 1% of your processor capability fuulfilling the requested calacultion may make total sense in a mega scale processing environement. it might run 100x slower than straight code would but it will actually work in a mega scale system.
A number of years ago, my family was passing through North Carolina and we took a tour of one of the major tabacco companies' cigarette factories. Very cool, and if you smoke you might be able to pick up a few cartons cheap.
1. I wasn't saying that a "moral right" concept as such exists in the U.S. as it does in Europe (it was probably a bad idea on my part to use a term that has a specific meaning in another legal system), but that the "life of author" branch of the copyright term owes its origin to "moral" concepts as much as to economic incentive ones.
2. Again, "issue" was probably a bad choice of words -- I was not objecting to the consequences of copyrights lapsing. I just wanted to point out that the lapse of copyright on the early items in a series of derivative works (i) does not block the original IP holders from continuing to produce derivative works in the series (which would themselves be copyrighted, though in competition with other derivative works) and (ii) does not permit third-parties to freely use the subsequent items in the series of derivative works until their own expiry dates. I think most Dune fans would rather see the prequels in other hands.
Next time I have some time, I would like to try to check out the arguments made in favor of copyright extensions in any Congressional hearings on the subject -- just to see if there are any half-way legitimate arguments I am missing. (Does anyone have any links?)
You could justify the two branches (life and number of years) of the term of a copyright as follows: (i) the "life of author" branch is to prevent a person's creativity, heart & soul, etc. from being exploited by others without his consent while he is alive (call this a "moral right") and (ii) the term of years branch is to permit the discounted present value (DPV) of the IP to be extracted regardless of whether the author dies (call this an "economic right"). The combination of the two into life+years is to permit analogous rights to survive in the author's heirs for a time.
Of course, the current number of years is bizarrely long and arguably not necessary to encourage creation, given the minimal DPV differences between, say, a 20 year term and a perpetual term (does anyone have an HP12C to run this analysis?).
If I were making the laws, I would probably set the term of copyright as follows: a relatively short fixed term of years (20?), but authors would be able to hold the copyright through their life if and only if they retained the predominant rights in the IP. The point of this is:
(i) As mentioned above, assuming an IP asset produced a steady per annum income from its date of creation, its DPV over the next 20 years would not be significantly less than its DPV in perpetuity (of course, once you got to the end of the 20 year period, you would prefer the perpetuity, but if copyright is supposed to encourage creation, the time of creation is the relevant time to make the assessment), thus copyright as an economic inducement to creation does not need the longer term.
(ii) The "moral right" of a living author would be acknowledged so long as his interest in his creation was primarily personal and not economic -- once it became economic, the year-based economic argument would apply.
I guess, in theory, some IP may not throw off income evenly from the creation date, but perhaps ramp up after a delay, so that even on the date of creation a significant portion of its DPV is in the late years. For instance, to pick a/.-ish example, if 20 years were the figure (ignoring the life branch), the copyright on Dune would have elapsed by the mid-80s.
Disney and the like may use this argument. For instance, it is not _entirely_ implausible that, when creating a new set of characters (for instance, Lilo and Stitch) they may make their investment decision based upon the possibility of a whole range of sequels, spin-offs, toys, rides, etc. that may have very long time horizons. I would be quite surprised however, if significant portions of the DPV analysis go out beyond 20 years.
There are interesting issues relating to the interaction of copyright lapse and continuing derviative products. For instance, in the case of Dune, upon a theoretical 20-year copyright expiration in 1985, (i) publishers would have been free to publish the original Dune without royalties to Frank Herbert, etc., and (ii) authors and publishers would have been free to publish their own derivative works using characters from the original Dune (and not merely fan fiction -- given that there would not be a copyright problem, legit publishers may very well hire legit authors to produce such books) (but mention Leto II and you are violating the copyright on CoD, GEoD, until their periods lapse). It would not have prevented FH from publishing HoD or CD in 1986 or Brian Herbert and Kevin Anderson from publishing their own prequels more recently, though those books would have been in competition with the third-party derivative works (this is likely to have been more of a problem for Brian than Frank) and the Dune universe would become "muddied" by competing branches of the stories.
when does the black guy in the red shirt get killed by aliens?
Whose comedy skit contained the line "They turned the brother into a cube!"? (Actually, it was more like an icosohedron or dodecahedron or some other D&D dice shape.)
Can you see the people age visibly from one scene to the next? That can't be good for continuity. Suddenly the lead actor has gray hair and put on 20 pounds...
I am paraphrasing from memory, but anyway: "I used to be beautiful. Look at me now!"
Slashdot Mirror
Can you now tell me why the common head gesture for "yes" is to shake the head up and down, and the common head gesture for "no" is to shake the head left and right?
http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/f/f7/Radi ohead.hailtothetheif.albumart.jpg
I wonder if he will publish a poster of it.
Exactly -- that is the essential feature of (good) blogs: they accept/encourage correction.
Shortly after "the first Star Wars movie"* came out, during the first wave of Star Wars hysteria, the costumed character "Dark Invader" appeared at the local mall -- kids could get their pictures taken with him --, for a week or so, I guess until MPAA forces caught up with him. That has to have been one depressing job.
* I guess I am showing my age by not calling it "ANH"
Rather, it is the gathering of source data regarding income and deductions (W-2s, 1099s, the "basis" of investment assets sold, evidence of business expenses, etc.). Once such materials are gathered, it is trivial either: (i) if one has a simple tax situation with few potential deductions, to fill out the "EZ" versions of tax returns or (ii) if one has a slightly more complex situation, to pay a tax preparer $50-100 to prepare the more complex forms (and, if one has significant deductions, hiring a tax preparer will be well worth the small fee).
Efforts to promote flat rates (or, even worse, sales or value-added tax) as tax simplification are an attempt to trick those who are less well off and less sophisticated into reducing the tax burden on the more affluent. If you think lowering the tax rates on the most well off is a good idea, by all means advocate it, but do so explicitly and don't try to trick people into supporting it under the guise of liberating them from a little mental effort.
Undertaker43017 wrote: Even if they admitted that they are no longer innovative (or never were) I don't see this causing people to change their mind about using MS products. If you took a poll about why people use MS products, I suspect: "because they are innovative" would be well down the list...
The immediate purpose of the "innovation" argument is not to impress customers, but to persuade lawmakers and regulators not to pursue anti-trust actions. The implicit argument is that a company of the size and dominant market position of MS is necessary for "innovation" to occur. Of course, buying their "innovative" technologies from smaller companies undercuts this argument.
By the same token, why shouldn't you be allowed to voluntarily enter into a contract that restricts your ability to vote, or commits you to vote for one candidate or party?
The functioning of the political process is dependent on the free expression of one's views, whether in speech or in the voting booth. Put another way, our political process presumes participants who are free to express their views. While it may not matter whether one individual agrees to silence himself, at a societal level, it can change the nature of the political process.
Also, such conditions of employment are in a sense the equivalent of "adhesion contracts" -- provisions that are (apparently) minor portions of a larger contract but that are overlooked or misvalued by the counterparty to the contract so that they arguably are not bargained for.
What makes something ordinary course versus extraordinary in this context depends in large part to the value of the asset compared to the value of the company: if an asset was the "crown jewel" of a company, there may be issues, but if an asset was currently of limited value (evidenced for instance, by the company having received no revenues off it for years), I do not think it would be a real risk.
emptybody asks: Have they taken foot casts...?
Yes. Scientists are especially puzzled by the missing toe.
kaltkalt wrote: To [give away corporate assets like rights to defunct videogames] would breach duties owed to the corporations' shareholders and bring about derivative suits.
/., but generally it is not true. Most U.S. states have a doctrine known as the "business judgment rule", meaning that a corporation's officers and directors are protected against liability to shareholders for almost all acts done within the scope of ordinary business decisions. This is the reason officers and directors can't be held liable merely for having a bad quarter of results. The prime example of something outside the scope of the rule would be approving a major corporate transaction, like a merger or acquisition -- and in that realm, shareholder lawsuits are the norm and accordingly corporations take precautions to demonstrate that the transaction was justified and not a breach of duty to shareholders. It seems pretty far-fetched that a routine business decision like giving away a license to Major Havoc (to pick a personal favorite) could be the basis for liability. Did AOL get sued for open-sourcing Mozilla or Sun for OpenOffice? Corporations give away, junk or sell at cut-rate prices physical assets all the time (I am sure many /.'ers have obtained old computers from work this way).
People often say this on
Besides there being a Freshmeat posting of a beta, has any particular milestone been reached in Mozilla/SVG development? I was able to compile and use SVG on Linux for a while already, and SVG-enabled builds have been available periodically. The netscape.public.mozilla.svg newsgroup does not have particularly much to say about status -- in fact, Alex Fritze, the primary programmer behind the effort, posted the following on July 16: "IMO Mozilla SVG is still too immature for inclusion in default builds. What we really need is more C++ developers working on SVG code. The problem is not so much the technology as the man-power. Any volunteers welcome!" Additionally, the last time the Mozilla SVG project page was updated was 3 months ago. I am a big fan of SVG and am impressed by Mr. Fritze's efforts, but I am wondering what the expectations are for when Mozilla SVG will be enabled by default.
mykepredko wrote: At the time, I seemed to be the only person in the world that noticed Microsoft paid $12 Million for a song with the chorus "You make a grown man cry..."
Did you also happen to notice what the fade-out vocals said "you" could make a dead man do?
msobkow wrote: banks and financial companies aren't even going to consider putting their internal processing systems out as GPL software, and don't qualify for internal-use-only exceptions in most cases.
Why wouldn't internally developed (even contractor-developed) bank or financial company internal processing systems qualify for the internal-use-only ("no distribution") exception?
I do not believe civil penalties under the U.S. Copyright Act (injunctions or payments of "actual damages") require intentionality, but I believe that criminal penalties do and intentionality may have an impact on the certain more punitive civil penalties (for instance, a higher level of statutory damages are payable for willful violations) or the willingness of a court to impose onerous injunctive relief. Perhaps an IP lawyer could clarify this.
I believe that many free software projects ask for copyright assignments or other representations from contributors to the effect that the contribution is not in violation of the copyright of another. The FSF also asks individual contributors to get copyright disclaimers from their employers (if any) so that it can be sure those employers won't claim to own the contributions.
What I would like to know (not being a software professional) is what commercial/proprietary companies do to address this issue. In a sense, the risks are higher for them than for free software: while most free software programmers have little access to proprietary code, any proprietary coder potentially has access to much GPL code -- it must be hard for a programmer who is stuck or pressed for time to resist taking a peek at GPL sources available on the net.
Several authors/books related to this subject that might be of interest are:
1. Stanislaw Lem's "Golem XIV" (it appeared as part of the "Imaginary Magnitude" collection (which also contains other stories about machine intelligence, for instance about machine literature), as well as apparently as a separate book). It is a story told as a series of lectures by a superintelligent computer (the Golem of the title). While some of it is pretty hokey (and some of it pretty funny), it contains some interesting speculations as to what superintelligence could consist of and how the physical and evolutionary contraints on human intelligence may make machine intelligence (which would presumably not be similarly encumbered) very different.
2. Daniel Keyes' "Flowers for Algernon". It is a story of a mentally retarded man who is given surgery that not only corrects his retardation, but makes him superintelligent. The story is told from a first-person perspective, so the level of the narration reflects his changing intellect. It has been 10+ years since I read it -- I would be interested in seeing how his superintelligent-phase writing held up.
3. Stephen Wolfram's "A New Kind of Science". Last year's geek-must-read book about how the entire universe is a cellular automatum (of course, I am compressing). It speculates -- and I am sure that I am getting this wrong (experts, please correct me) -- that the level of complexity of relatively simple CA rule sets is the maximum possible level of complexity, which would seem to have implications for limits on superintelligence.
A few additional thoughts:
4. One of the themes that seems to come up in SciFi treatments of AI is that a AI would have amazing predictive powers. I would think, however, that principles from chaos theory, the uncertainty principle, etc. would place real limits on that area of intelligence for most real world purposes.
5. I would be interested in hearing how cognitive psychologists and computer scientists even define intelligence, particularly at the high end of the (human) scale.
I do not think that your argument that the IRS was motivated by a simple desire to boost tax revenues works, given that the cost of tax preparation software is tax deductable to individuals and that amount of tax that software companies would pay on their profits on such software would almost certainly be less than the value of the tax deduction to individual taxpayers.
Boromir wrote: I know my own heritage is crucial in my self identity, and I would never give it up, not for all the wealth in the land.
Keep in mind that you and your family are only the stewards of Gondor.
I would guess that as a law professor he was more interested in the license than the operating system.
Anyone remember the Monorail (and spare me the Simpsons jokes)?
Most people believe the "plateau-ing" of consumer demands for computer power will lead to further commoditization of PCs, and thus lower profits for OEMs. It is possible, however, that a few select players -- Apple (of course) and potentially Sony -- will be able to leverage the lack of a need for horse-power type progress to be able to realize premiums for non-technical style points. Not for me, or probably you, but a stylish, unobtrusive computer could be worth the extra few $100 when one is trying to integrate computing into a family room setting where the furniture and other consumer electronics cost thousands of dollars.
spending 99% of your effort on pattern recognition on inputs and 1% of your processor capability fuulfilling the requested calacultion may make total sense in a mega scale processing environement. it might run 100x slower than straight code would but it will actually work in a mega scale system.
Good point -- like a human society.
A number of years ago, my family was passing through North Carolina and we took a tour of one of the major tabacco companies' cigarette factories. Very cool, and if you smoke you might be able to pick up a few cartons cheap.
schon:
I think we are in agreement.
1. I wasn't saying that a "moral right" concept as such exists in the U.S. as it does in Europe (it was probably a bad idea on my part to use a term that has a specific meaning in another legal system), but that the "life of author" branch of the copyright term owes its origin to "moral" concepts as much as to economic incentive ones.
2. Again, "issue" was probably a bad choice of words -- I was not objecting to the consequences of copyrights lapsing. I just wanted to point out that the lapse of copyright on the early items in a series of derivative works (i) does not block the original IP holders from continuing to produce derivative works in the series (which would themselves be copyrighted, though in competition with other derivative works) and (ii) does not permit third-parties to freely use the subsequent items in the series of derivative works until their own expiry dates. I think most Dune fans would rather see the prequels in other hands.
Next time I have some time, I would like to try to check out the arguments made in favor of copyright extensions in any Congressional hearings on the subject -- just to see if there are any half-way legitimate arguments I am missing. (Does anyone have any links?)
You could justify the two branches (life and number of years) of the term of a copyright as follows: (i) the "life of author" branch is to prevent a person's creativity, heart & soul, etc. from being exploited by others without his consent while he is alive (call this a "moral right") and (ii) the term of years branch is to permit the discounted present value (DPV) of the IP to be extracted regardless of whether the author dies (call this an "economic right"). The combination of the two into life+years is to permit analogous rights to survive in the author's heirs for a time.
/.-ish example, if 20 years were the figure (ignoring the life branch), the copyright on Dune would have elapsed by the mid-80s.
Of course, the current number of years is bizarrely long and arguably not necessary to encourage creation, given the minimal DPV differences between, say, a 20 year term and a perpetual term (does anyone have an HP12C to run this analysis?).
If I were making the laws, I would probably set the term of copyright as follows: a relatively short fixed term of years (20?), but authors would be able to hold the copyright through their life if and only if they retained the predominant rights in the IP. The point of this is:
(i) As mentioned above, assuming an IP asset produced a steady per annum income from its date of creation, its DPV over the next 20 years would not be significantly less than its DPV in perpetuity (of course, once you got to the end of the 20 year period, you would prefer the perpetuity, but if copyright is supposed to encourage creation, the time of creation is the relevant time to make the assessment), thus copyright as an economic inducement to creation does not need the longer term.
(ii) The "moral right" of a living author would be acknowledged so long as his interest in his creation was primarily personal and not economic -- once it became economic, the year-based economic argument would apply.
I guess, in theory, some IP may not throw off income evenly from the creation date, but perhaps ramp up after a delay, so that even on the date of creation a significant portion of its DPV is in the late years. For instance, to pick a
Disney and the like may use this argument. For instance, it is not _entirely_ implausible that, when creating a new set of characters (for instance, Lilo and Stitch) they may make their investment decision based upon the possibility of a whole range of sequels, spin-offs, toys, rides, etc. that may have very long time horizons. I would be quite surprised however, if significant portions of the DPV analysis go out beyond 20 years.
There are interesting issues relating to the interaction of copyright lapse and continuing derviative products. For instance, in the case of Dune, upon a theoretical 20-year copyright expiration in 1985, (i) publishers would have been free to publish the original Dune without royalties to Frank Herbert, etc., and (ii) authors and publishers would have been free to publish their own derivative works using characters from the original Dune (and not merely fan fiction -- given that there would not be a copyright problem, legit publishers may very well hire legit authors to produce such books) (but mention Leto II and you are violating the copyright on CoD, GEoD, until their periods lapse). It would not have prevented FH from publishing HoD or CD in 1986 or Brian Herbert and Kevin Anderson from publishing their own prequels more recently, though those books would have been in competition with the third-party derivative works (this is likely to have been more of a problem for Brian than Frank) and the Dune universe would become "muddied" by competing branches of the stories.
when does the black guy in the red shirt get killed by aliens?
Whose comedy skit contained the line "They turned the brother into a cube!"? (Actually, it was more like an icosohedron or dodecahedron or some other D&D dice shape.)
Can you see the people age visibly from one scene to the next? That can't be good for continuity. Suddenly the lead actor has gray hair and put on 20 pounds...
I am paraphrasing from memory, but anyway: "I used to be beautiful. Look at me now!"