I mean, the real question is whether or not there's even any climate change going on in the first place! But if we concede the point that it might be happening, is it man-made? Because if it's natural instead of man-made, that changes everything, right?
No, it doesn't. It would still flood a lot of major cities in the world, disrupt crops and change weather patterns. I know you were being satirical, but this point seems to be missing a lot on the debates. Earth doesn't care if we're heating her skin or not, she'll just be hot for a while, shed the parasites and try again. If we as a race want to survive, we'd better do something about that shedding. If anything, if it turns out we're NOT doing it, we're in for a much harder job of fixing it than if it's us...
With the kind of PR, business sense and the regular first-to-market advantages already inherent in the Combination members, I don't really see how they could realistically fear outside competition. Real fortune seldom lie in preventing competition as this takes focus away from actually competing.
The conclusion I draw from reading the paper is that this patent thicket was resolved by the main players essentially agreeing to stop bothering about suing each other and start manufacturing sewing machines instead - as if the patent system had not existed at all. So the way to fix the problems that patents create is to ignore patents. Tell me again why we have them in the first place?
What I'm interested to know is why - despite the prosecution failing to really prove their case, only to speculate on various things - this decision was reached.
Because of two reasons:
1. This lower court consists mostly of a kind of politically-appointed jury, where local politicians serve time on the bench, judging small claims all day. They are not equipped to handle complex copyright cases, but instead rely on expert witnesses and emotions of the "how will the starving artists get paid" kind.
2. It being a complex case, there are a number of interpretations to make of the law and the facts at hand, for example if TPB can seek refuge in the common carrier clauses of a specific law dealing with service providers. The court ruled that they would operate under that law, but not qualify for the exemptions of responsibility in it. Almost every decision of this kind has been ruled against TPB, throughout the verdict.
I have not found a single large miscarriage of justice when reading the verdict, only a large number of small, deliberate steps leading towards a conviction. The same steps in the other direction, each as reasonable and plausible as the ones taken, would have led to an aquittal.
That was sort of my point as the example of the F-15 top speed and SR-71 crusing speed also are reasonably close, as numbers go. I was shooting for a mental image of the effort required to attain and sustain those speeds, but apparently, I missed.:-)
You're comparing the top speed of one airplane with the nominal cruising speed of another. Those are two very different beasts. If I were prone to car analogies, I'd say something along the lines of "this is like comparing the escape velocity of a Ford Pinto, tossed from a trebuchet suspended from a zeppelin in low earth orbit, to the crusing speed of the space shuttle."
The max speed of the SR-71 was governed mostly by the maximum temperature of the air inlets, which was 800 degrees C (or 427 F which is the reason the limited edition of the book Sled Driver cost 427 USD and yes, I own one). The Wikipedia article on The Article suggests that using other materials in the inlets would allow a top speed in the Mach 6 range...
The RS-71 was re-named the SR-71 after Lyndon Johnson flubbed the name on live television. They changed all drawings and documents for the program, an amazingly expensive waste of tax-payers dollars, just so that no one would have to correct the Commander in Chief.
No.
"Air Force Chief of Staff General Curtis LeMay preferred the SR (Strategic Reconnaissance) designation and wanted the RS-71 to be named SR-71. Before the July speech, LeMay lobbied to modify Johnson's speech to read SR-71 instead of RS-71. The media transcript given to the press at the time still had the earlier RS-71 designation in places, creating the myth that the president had misread the aircraft's designation." http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SR-71_Blackbird
Furthermore, all the materials at the time were labeled "R-12" and would have been re-printed regardless.
The point is that a 1:1 correlation between downloading and lost sales does not make sense outside the MAFIAA board rooms. Yet, this is the stated driving motivator behind the law...
The arguments for implementing and enforcing this law is to "encourage legal alternatives". So, after a 30% drop if file-sharing traffic, we'd expect to see a 30% increase in sales of CDs, DVDs and e-books. Or, there is no correlation between downloads and lost sales, just as a bunch of scientific reports suggest.
Anyone care to wager that this purported increase in sales will not, in fact, happen?
Copyright already, inherently and by design, only protects published works. Lowering the terms would not change that.
I know that Berne says "creation", but if you write something and keep the single copy locked away in a safe, copyright can not in any meaningful way be applied to that work until it's published, in which case your copyright runs until your death + 75 years (this number may differ slightly in different jurisdictions, but 75 is the most common). The publisher's copyright (P) runs for a number of years after publication, typically 50-75 years.
In no case are the terms tied to the date of creation.
Your proposed scheme is fairly close to the way things worked in the US until 1974, or what the Creative Commons refers to as the "Founder's Copyright". It worked rather well, and is one of the few things I would have loved to see the US export to the rest of the world...
Not necessarily. Ever noticed how the RIAA lawsuits always are by the record company, and never the artists? That's because the copyright for the recorded songs (denoted by a P in a circle as opposed to a C in a circle) almost always belongs to the record company. Most artists are not allowed, by their contracts, to upload "their own songs" on their own websites, for example.
The rights to the song itself, as an independent work, belongs to the composer(s) and writer(s). Different actions infringe on different rights and it's been more or less established that filesharing infringes on the record company's rights to distribute, not the artist's/composer's/writer's rights.
But I wonder if Lars knew that he most likely was seeding the album.:-)
How do we know that? No, really. I have seen exactly zero studies that come to this conclusion while there is at least circumstantial evidence to the contrary.
Slashdot Mirror
I mean, the real question is whether or not there's even any climate change going on in the first place! But if we concede the point that it might be happening, is it man-made? Because if it's natural instead of man-made, that changes everything, right?
No, it doesn't. It would still flood a lot of major cities in the world, disrupt crops and change weather patterns. I know you were being satirical, but this point seems to be missing a lot on the debates. Earth doesn't care if we're heating her skin or not, she'll just be hot for a while, shed the parasites and try again. If we as a race want to survive, we'd better do something about that shedding. If anything, if it turns out we're NOT doing it, we're in for a much harder job of fixing it than if it's us...
With the kind of PR, business sense and the regular first-to-market advantages already inherent in the Combination members, I don't really see how they could realistically fear outside competition. Real fortune seldom lie in preventing competition as this takes focus away from actually competing.
The conclusion I draw from reading the paper is that this patent thicket was resolved by the main players essentially agreeing to stop bothering about suing each other and start manufacturing sewing machines instead - as if the patent system had not existed at all. So the way to fix the problems that patents create is to ignore patents. Tell me again why we have them in the first place?
There are ways: http://www.cepr.net/index.php/publications/reports/financing-drug-research-what-are-the-issues/
3. Google caches and hosts lots of copyrighted content. TPB does not.
we have all of our Pirate Party servers in that bunker
Target acquired
Bring it on. Atleast the main webserver isn't in my garage anymore. :-P
(No, I'm not kidding, it actually was in my garage, on a 10mbps fiber, until late last summer)
That bunker, that one of their ISP has may just come in handy.
Actually, that ISP is one of our best supporters and we have all of our Pirate Party servers in that bunker. ;-)
What I'm interested to know is why - despite the prosecution failing to really prove their case, only to speculate on various things - this decision was reached.
Because of two reasons:
1. This lower court consists mostly of a kind of politically-appointed jury, where local politicians serve time on the bench, judging small claims all day. They are not equipped to handle complex copyright cases, but instead rely on expert witnesses and emotions of the "how will the starving artists get paid" kind.
2. It being a complex case, there are a number of interpretations to make of the law and the facts at hand, for example if TPB can seek refuge in the common carrier clauses of a specific law dealing with service providers. The court ruled that they would operate under that law, but not qualify for the exemptions of responsibility in it. Almost every decision of this kind has been ruled against TPB, throughout the verdict.
I have not found a single large miscarriage of justice when reading the verdict, only a large number of small, deliberate steps leading towards a conviction. The same steps in the other direction, each as reasonable and plausible as the ones taken, would have led to an aquittal.
But... That's not a valid car analogy since you're not allowed to drink and drive.
Not really. Come to think of it, you probably couldn't put a zeppelin in LEO either. :-D
I guess you could moderate my post "Fail" all around.
That was sort of my point as the example of the F-15 top speed and SR-71 crusing speed also are reasonably close, as numbers go. I was shooting for a mental image of the effort required to attain and sustain those speeds, but apparently, I missed. :-)
I am sure the SR-71's that are 'mothballed' are far from retired.
You can go have a look: http://gmaps.tommangan.us/blackbirds.html
I still kick myself because I used to work just a few miles from the one in Chantilly, never knowing it was there. :-(
You're comparing the top speed of one airplane with the nominal cruising speed of another. Those are two very different beasts. If I were prone to car analogies, I'd say something along the lines of "this is like comparing the escape velocity of a Ford Pinto, tossed from a trebuchet suspended from a zeppelin in low earth orbit, to the crusing speed of the space shuttle."
The max speed of the SR-71 was governed mostly by the maximum temperature of the air inlets, which was 800 degrees C (or 427 F which is the reason the limited edition of the book Sled Driver cost 427 USD and yes, I own one). The Wikipedia article on The Article suggests that using other materials in the inlets would allow a top speed in the Mach 6 range...
The Book: https://galleryonepublishing.com/BlackbirdStores/
The RS-71 was re-named the SR-71 after Lyndon Johnson flubbed the name on live television. They changed all drawings and documents for the program, an amazingly expensive waste of tax-payers dollars, just so that no one would have to correct the Commander in Chief.
No.
"Air Force Chief of Staff General Curtis LeMay preferred the SR (Strategic Reconnaissance) designation and wanted the RS-71 to be named SR-71. Before the July speech, LeMay lobbied to modify Johnson's speech to read SR-71 instead of RS-71. The media transcript given to the press at the time still had the earlier RS-71 designation in places, creating the myth that the president had misread the aircraft's designation."
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SR-71_Blackbird
Furthermore, all the materials at the time were labeled "R-12" and would have been re-printed regardless.
Sadly, IPRED 2 is already in the works.
The point is that a 1:1 correlation between downloading and lost sales does not make sense outside the MAFIAA board rooms. Yet, this is the stated driving motivator behind the law...
watch TV for free on Hulu
"Sorry, currently our video library can only be streamed from within the United States."
You fail, Ace.
*woooosh*
The point was that this correlation does not exist, yet it is touted as fact by the copyright-huggers.
The arguments for implementing and enforcing this law is to "encourage legal alternatives". So, after a 30% drop if file-sharing traffic, we'd expect to see a 30% increase in sales of CDs, DVDs and e-books. Or, there is no correlation between downloads and lost sales, just as a bunch of scientific reports suggest.
Anyone care to wager that this purported increase in sales will not, in fact, happen?
You will get your comeuppance, dear Sir, come the revolution. :-P
There's going to be an expansion out soon, upping that to level 60.
As you say - that's a breach of contract. Regular contract law applies, not copyright.
Copyright already, inherently and by design, only protects published works. Lowering the terms would not change that.
I know that Berne says "creation", but if you write something and keep the single copy locked away in a safe, copyright can not in any meaningful way be applied to that work until it's published, in which case your copyright runs until your death + 75 years (this number may differ slightly in different jurisdictions, but 75 is the most common). The publisher's copyright (P) runs for a number of years after publication, typically 50-75 years.
In no case are the terms tied to the date of creation.
Your proposed scheme is fairly close to the way things worked in the US until 1974, or what the Creative Commons refers to as the "Founder's Copyright". It worked rather well, and is one of the few things I would have loved to see the US export to the rest of the world...
Not necessarily. Ever noticed how the RIAA lawsuits always are by the record company, and never the artists? That's because the copyright for the recorded songs (denoted by a P in a circle as opposed to a C in a circle) almost always belongs to the record company. Most artists are not allowed, by their contracts, to upload "their own songs" on their own websites, for example.
The rights to the song itself, as an independent work, belongs to the composer(s) and writer(s). Different actions infringe on different rights and it's been more or less established that filesharing infringes on the record company's rights to distribute, not the artist's/composer's/writer's rights.
But I wonder if Lars knew that he most likely was seeding the album. :-)
Patents are good and necessary in general
How do we know that? No, really. I have seen exactly zero studies that come to this conclusion while there is at least circumstantial evidence to the contrary.