Nor in the USA. To be copyrightable, the work must contain a certain threshhold amount of creativity (very very minimal).
Titles are explicitly not copyrightable, and URLs are (arguably) either an address (also not copyrightable) or a title that conforms to a technical specification.
I've found that on weeks when I travel around the city a lot, I get far less standby than on days when I just go to the office (which is only a cell or two away from home), especially when I drive out to the boondocks. (Same thing the one time I accidentally left the cell on while flying, only more so... It started fully charged and a 3 hour flight knocked off 75% of the charge.)
I'm guessing that the phone does a lot more chatting with the cell towers under those conditions.
I also find that when I have a looong conversation when I'm sitting next to my WiFi base station at home, the battery is a lot lower then a similar conversation elsewhere in the house. I'm guessing that being really close (under 5 feet) to the base station causes some interference, forcing the phone to user higher power to talk to the cell tower.
I haven't done a systematic test yet, but the experiance has happened enough that I'm pretty sure that's what's going on...
Variants on "Cialis soft tabs" is my most frequent spam topic at the moment.
Lately, I've been getting lots of mortgage-related spam, but Regalis used to be #2
Vicodin was towards the top of the pack for a log time, but we got a new upstream filter and I haven't seen one of those in a week or two.
I work for an ASP and the CIO of a client told his staff that we were engaging in "vendor speak" when we told him that he was the only one of our customers having intermittent performance problems. After that, we could never get anybody at the customer site to help us with end-to-end tests when the problem appeared.
After their CIO stomped his feet and whined to our CEO that he wasn't getting support, we shipped a "sales engineer" to their site and then quickly found an intermittent MTU problem 3 or 4 hops into their ISP, God only knows why.
Oh, and due to the strange and specific way they used to munge my street address on my pay stubs, I've noticed that they've sold or otherwise distributed my address to a third party that has sent me junk mail. Real nice company.>
There's a nice little market in stolen mailing lists; there's a good chance you were sold-out by somebody with access to the list, e.g. a clerk in payroll...
While I can't speak for Google, practically all "start-up" firms run on outside investment; they therefore almost all are incorporated and have a board of directors.
Those investors also want a return on their investment and in many cases they have more control than investors in a publicly traded company do.
George Will wrote a recent column arguing that "winner-take-all" electoral college voting fosters a two-party system that requires compromise to get anything done; especially compromise within the parties, as they have to build broad enough coalitions to win statewide races. If it were a direct election, a candidate could, in a 3 way race, come in 2nd in every state but still win by having just more than a 3rd of the vote.
I don't particularly agree with the analysis, but it's thoughtful. He also suggests that under a non-"winner take all" electoral college system (e.g. Maine and the Colorado proposal), the candidates have very little incentive to campaign in those states; the cost/benefit ration isn't as good as in a "winner take all" state. I don't think he addresses direct elections, but presumably candidates would focus their attention on the urban/suburban voter, and the rural areas wouldn't be particularly wooed, whereas now capturing the farm vote in some states is key to winning those electoral votes.
I'm saying that creating an analogy between intellectual property and personal property is flawed, by comparing the real attributes of one form of intellectual property (copyright) with the real attributes of one form of personal property (cars). You're comparing two forms of intellectual property, so the similarity is unsurprising and off-topic.
Your analogy is slightly flawed; in the patent case, the alleged "property" gets converted to not-property judicially, whereas in the car case, the ownership gets changed.
The real problem is that because the word "property" is in "IP", people tend to flasely analogize that the attributes of IP are like the attributes of our prototype of property, "personal property", when they're hardly similar at all. For example, did you know that a published song is subject to compulsory license? The U.S. copyright law (as described in this PDF) allows anyone to record an already-recorded song and sell copies, so long as they do some paperwork and pay the songwriter a small per-copy royalty, the so-called "mechanical" fee, currently the greater of 8 1/2 cents total 1.65 cents per minute, per copy sold.
If we're analogizing copyright with cars, this would mean that anyone could fill out some paperwork, borrow your car, and pay you a small per-mile fee.
First, linguistic researchers routinely control for color-blindness on the scale of perception being tested.
Second, the results of the gender study you mention are concerned with small perceived differences while the linguistic studies are concerned with much grosser differences, for example with languages that have only one word for the color range yellow-green-blue-violet.
I know it may seem strange to many of you, but quite a few languages don't have seperate words for all of the "elemental" colors: black, white, red, green, yellow, blue, brown, purple, grey, orange and pink. No one thinks that speakers of languages with one word for "yellow-to-violet" can't perceive the difference between green and yellow, it's just that they see that range as one basic color (that sometimes looks a little different) in the same way that those of us familiar with the clothing shades "forrest green" and "kelly green" can see them as different shades of one color "green".
The language that the Inuit speak is a polysynthetic agglutinative language, unlike English or the other Indo-European languages most of you are familiar with. In laymen's terms, this means that "words" in their language aren't the same thing as "words" in ours, and comparing counts between them is an apples and oranges comparison that doesn't tell us very much. This Straight Dope article illustrates this nicely.
Serious linguists find the question "are there more linguistic units that mean 'snow'" more useful and meaningful. However, this approach also has some difficulty because the boundary between things that are "snow" and thing that are not-"snow" is a somewhat soft one in language, e.g. is "sleet" a wet type of "snow" or not?
Despite these issues, people are still interested in "the answer" and experts commonly come up with counts of about 1 or 2 dozen, which is not particularly remarkable in comparison to english.Here's a brief article synopsizing all that a little more clearly.
Some languages have only a few words for color, for example. However, experiments show that this does not impair speakers of these languages from differentiating different shades of colors.
Actually, your synopsis drastically oversimplifies and mis-states the current understanding in linguistics of color terms in relation to Whorf-Sapir. One of the leading linguists in color research is Paul Kay, and in 1999 he wrote this paper (PDF) synopsizing the state of research (he's a major participant in the debates, so salt as needed...). In it, he writes:
Color is one of the very few lexical domains for which humans possess dedicated peripheral receptors. In the retina, the rods and (at least) three different families of cones are devoted to detecting variations in wavelength and luminance information. Color should be the last place where one would expect
a priori for language to influence perception. That the relativists [pro-Whorfians] of the
fifties and sixties chose color as their empirical battleground stands as a tribute to their self-confidence and a rebuke to their common sense. Of course, if the relativist case could be made in the domain of color, then a fortiori it should hold everywhere else.
He then summarizes both the pro-Whorfian results and the anti-Whorfian results, ending the section on intra-language research with:
However, Kay and Kempton, using a non-correlational, cross-linguistic experimental procedure, showed that certain non-linguistic color similarity judgments do appear to be influenced by the lexical classification of color in a language, although others are not so influenced. The Kay and Kempton results of both Whorfian and anti-Whorfian effects in color similarity judgments have recently been replicated in unpublished work of Jules Davidoff, Ian Davies and Debi Roberson.
The paper also summarizes inter-language color research, emphasizing Kay's work on physiologically-based universals.
Note that virtually everyone has abandoned the "strong" Whorfian hypothesis, that language tends to constrain thought. The "weak" hypothesis, that language can significantly influences thought, was still vigorously argued by the lingustic faculty when I was in college ('80s) and, from Kay's remarks in his paper, was still being argued into this century... WordIQ has a nice summary, which features this provocative quote about programming languages from Alan Perlis
"a language that doesn't affect the way you think about programming, is not worth knowing".
Interesting. If this had been the law in Texas, George W. Bush might not have been able to turn $600,000 into $14.9 million, through the power of eminent domain, with the help of the Texas Legislature and the city of Arlington.
There's something about taking someone's home to build a baseball stadium that really ticks me off.
The summary is there: Grokster, et al won at the 9th Circuit, based on the application of the Betamax case.
There really isn't a better summary than that, without supplying several hundred words of background information, which are in that 18-page court ruling.
Betamax explicitly envisions itself being applied to new technologies, which is why it incorporates the substantial non-infringing use rule, and the 9th applied it without a hint of breaking new ground. There really really really just isn't any new legal issue here, despite the bells and whistles of bits and bytes. Adding on the internet doesn't make something new, legally speaking (except maybe at the patent office).
While it's always possible the Supreme Court might decide that they've screwed up and revisit Betamax, I'm 90% certain that they'll deny cert on the inevitable appeal.
However, if they *do* take the case, it will probably be because one of the justices wants to make new law on infringement liability; if Grokster et al loses, it'll either be an "activist" decision carving out a new liability theory, or a total repudiation of Betamax. Unfortunately, the latter could outlaw the Internet and the general purpose computer, so I'm betting against that possibility too.
The DMCA doesn't change standard copyright infringement law all that much, which is what the 9th Circuit applied in the case we're talking about.
The main points of the relevant-to-the-digital-age portions of the DMCA are:
(as part of Title I; the WIPO Treaty Implementation) making it illegal to circumvent technological access controls *under certain circumstances* or tamper with rights-management information
(Title II: ONLINE COPYRIGHT INFRINGEMENT LIABILITY LIMITATION) giving service providers "safe harbor" from liability if they comply with the notice and takedown provisions
(TITLE III: COMPUTER MAINTENANCE OR REPAIR)Allows computer owners to authorize 3rd party repair people to make incidental copies of someone else's software (that the owner has the right to posess and use) in the course of repairing the computer. (This change was needed because a court found a repair person liable for copyright infringement for such incidental copying and Congress got convinced that vendor lock-in for maintenance was a bad thing.)
(TITLE IV: MISCELLANEOUS PROVISIONS) among other things, broadens the exemption for ephemeral recordings for broadcasters (allows DJs to record their shows way in advance of broadcast and keep them for a while afterwards), modified section 108 so that libraries and archives may make digital copies and not just "facsimile" copies, for archival use, modified the compulsory license terms for webcasters and includes them in the exemption for ephemeral recordings.
There were also a number of provisions tossed in the bucket that had nothing "digital" about them, such as Title V of the DMCA, entitled the Vessel Hull Design Protection Act.
If you know anything about copyright law, you'll see that the DMCA's provisions outlined above don't really affect infringement liabilty unless you're a "service provider" (or dealing with one) or are circumventing access controls, none of which is relevant in the Grokster case.
If you agree to a contract, then both parties have to respect it.
Actually, courts routinely rule that some contracts (or parts thereof) are unenforceable and therefore null and void.
For example, if John Doe signs an employment contract that says he'll never work for a competing company the rest of his life, any (competent) court in the U.S. will decline to enforce it. (Limited, short-term constraints are routinely upheld however.)
Congress's ability to change copyright law is constrained by the Copyright Clause of the Constitution. For example, they couldn't grant a perpetual copyright (although the current case law is that they can grant a very very long copyright, with no limit yet defined).
But yes, Congress has a huge degree of flexibility in modifying copyright.
The court of appeals is not the appropriate venue to decide a point of law of this magnitude,
If you'd bother reading the decision, you would realize that the 9th didn't decide any new points of law at all, they're merely applied existing law, particularly the Betamax decision that the Supreme Court back in the '70s.
The decision is entirely black-letter law, except for applying it to new technologies.
Actually, having completed a university program in linguistics with pretty good marks, I think I have an adequate grasp of what "grammar" is, as well as how languages change. And change occurs in the standard (the "grammar" books) following actual long-term usage among the high-prestige actual language users. (In other words, French "grammar" doesn't change until the Parisians adopt a change, no matter what the folks in Quebec are doing or how long they've been doing it.) The "grammars" always lag the reality, and the only way to change the reality is to change the usage.
I'm not asserting that "he" is currently "wrong" according to grammatical "standards", but rather that I choose to change my usage in order to (I hope) change the standards. Traditions are made to be broken and as long as my communications are understood, I'm not gonna worry my pretty little head about what the language police think (especially since most such language police don't know anything more than rote rules anyway, e.g. they still belive in the "8 parts of speech".)
BTW, the classic example of a major modern-day language reformation, complete with real language police, was the reformation by decree of Turkish starting about 1930. They switched to the Latin alphabet from Arabic letters, and threw out all non-Turkish borrowed words, replacing them with either historical Turkish words or newly coined terms. There's a book about it for the curious.
Rather, "he" is the correct pronoun to use in a situation where the pronoun could refer to a person of either sex.
In writings that will see the public, I generally substitute "they" instead of "he" (except in really formal business/technical stuff, where I find a way to use "one"/"one who" or "someone" or avoid pronouns), even when it's clear that there's only one person in "them". Alternately, in things like examples, I "instantiate" the unknown individual by supplying a gender-spcific name such as "John/Jane Doe", and using the correct pronoun for the hypothetical scenario.
"He" has been correct merely by the weight of tradition, and traditions are made to be broken. I prefer to make the "error" of mis-stating the count over the "error" of mis-stating the gender of the unknown person. Of course, in casual private communications, I write "quick and lazy" and don't worry too much about it. While I think gender-neutral language is the "right thing to do", it usually takes time for any language to evolve (except in places/times where the "language police" have real sanctions to impose). I find that people who nit-pick on the folks who don't follow the "language rules" (new or old) are usually also annoying little weasels.
EyeMDlink.com describes the all the major eye diseases and common treatements, including LASIK vision correction.
They explain how a "flap" is opened on the surface of the eye to allow the laser access to the inside where they shape the lans via laser ablation. (UGH!)
For what it's worth, everybody I know who's had it (3 people) have been satsified to ecstatic. One of them suffered "dry eye" syndrome for about 6 weeks afterwards; in the middle of it, she found it mildly miserable but said the trade-off was worth it, and it cleared up...
Slashdot Mirror
Titles are explicitly not copyrightable, and URLs are (arguably) either an address (also not copyrightable) or a title that conforms to a technical specification.
I've found that on weeks when I travel around the city a lot, I get far less standby than on days when I just go to the office (which is only a cell or two away from home), especially when I drive out to the boondocks. (Same thing the one time I accidentally left the cell on while flying, only more so... It started fully charged and a 3 hour flight knocked off 75% of the charge.) I'm guessing that the phone does a lot more chatting with the cell towers under those conditions. I also find that when I have a looong conversation when I'm sitting next to my WiFi base station at home, the battery is a lot lower then a similar conversation elsewhere in the house. I'm guessing that being really close (under 5 feet) to the base station causes some interference, forcing the phone to user higher power to talk to the cell tower. I haven't done a systematic test yet, but the experiance has happened enough that I'm pretty sure that's what's going on...
Variants on "Cialis soft tabs" is my most frequent spam topic at the moment. Lately, I've been getting lots of mortgage-related spam, but Regalis used to be #2 Vicodin was towards the top of the pack for a log time, but we got a new upstream filter and I haven't seen one of those in a week or two.
I work for an ASP and the CIO of a client told his staff that we were engaging in "vendor speak" when we told him that he was the only one of our customers having intermittent performance problems. After that, we could never get anybody at the customer site to help us with end-to-end tests when the problem appeared.
After their CIO stomped his feet and whined to our CEO that he wasn't getting support, we shipped a "sales engineer" to their site and then quickly found an intermittent MTU problem 3 or 4 hops into their ISP, God only knows why.
There's a nice little market in stolen mailing lists; there's a good chance you were sold-out by somebody with access to the list, e.g. a clerk in payroll...
Those investors also want a return on their investment and in many cases they have more control than investors in a publicly traded company do.
I don't particularly agree with the analysis, but it's thoughtful. He also suggests that under a non-"winner take all" electoral college system (e.g. Maine and the Colorado proposal), the candidates have very little incentive to campaign in those states; the cost/benefit ration isn't as good as in a "winner take all" state. I don't think he addresses direct elections, but presumably candidates would focus their attention on the urban/suburban voter, and the rural areas wouldn't be particularly wooed, whereas now capturing the farm vote in some states is key to winning those electoral votes.
I'm saying that creating an analogy between intellectual property and personal property is flawed, by comparing the real attributes of one form of intellectual property (copyright) with the real attributes of one form of personal property (cars). You're comparing two forms of intellectual property, so the similarity is unsurprising and off-topic.
The real problem is that because the word "property" is in "IP", people tend to flasely analogize that the attributes of IP are like the attributes of our prototype of property, "personal property", when they're hardly similar at all. For example, did you know that a published song is subject to compulsory license? The U.S. copyright law (as described in this PDF) allows anyone to record an already-recorded song and sell copies, so long as they do some paperwork and pay the songwriter a small per-copy royalty, the so-called "mechanical" fee, currently the greater of 8 1/2 cents total 1.65 cents per minute, per copy sold.
If we're analogizing copyright with cars, this would mean that anyone could fill out some paperwork, borrow your car, and pay you a small per-mile fee.
First, linguistic researchers routinely control for color-blindness on the scale of perception being tested.
Second, the results of the gender study you mention are concerned with small perceived differences while the linguistic studies are concerned with much grosser differences, for example with languages that have only one word for the color range yellow-green-blue-violet.
I know it may seem strange to many of you, but quite a few languages don't have seperate words for all of the "elemental" colors: black, white, red, green, yellow, blue, brown, purple, grey, orange and pink. No one thinks that speakers of languages with one word for "yellow-to-violet" can't perceive the difference between green and yellow, it's just that they see that range as one basic color (that sometimes looks a little different) in the same way that those of us familiar with the clothing shades "forrest green" and "kelly green" can see them as different shades of one color "green".
Serious linguists find the question "are there more linguistic units that mean 'snow'" more useful and meaningful. However, this approach also has some difficulty because the boundary between things that are "snow" and thing that are not-"snow" is a somewhat soft one in language, e.g. is "sleet" a wet type of "snow" or not?
Despite these issues, people are still interested in "the answer" and experts commonly come up with counts of about 1 or 2 dozen, which is not particularly remarkable in comparison to english.Here's a brief article synopsizing all that a little more clearly.
Actually, your synopsis drastically oversimplifies and mis-states the current understanding in linguistics of color terms in relation to Whorf-Sapir. One of the leading linguists in color research is Paul Kay, and in 1999 he wrote this paper (PDF) synopsizing the state of research (he's a major participant in the debates, so salt as needed...). In it, he writes:
He then summarizes both the pro-Whorfian results and the anti-Whorfian results, ending the section on intra-language research with:The paper also summarizes inter-language color research, emphasizing Kay's work on physiologically-based universals.
Note that virtually everyone has abandoned the "strong" Whorfian hypothesis, that language tends to constrain thought. The "weak" hypothesis, that language can significantly influences thought, was still vigorously argued by the lingustic faculty when I was in college ('80s) and, from Kay's remarks in his paper, was still being argued into this century... WordIQ has a nice summary, which features this provocative quote about programming languages from Alan Perlis
There's something about taking someone's home to build a baseball stadium that really ticks me off.
There really isn't a better summary than that, without supplying several hundred words of background information, which are in that 18-page court ruling.
The 9th Circuit explicitly addressed this argument in their decision.
While it's always possible the Supreme Court might decide that they've screwed up and revisit Betamax, I'm 90% certain that they'll deny cert on the inevitable appeal.
However, if they *do* take the case, it will probably be because one of the justices wants to make new law on infringement liability; if Grokster et al loses, it'll either be an "activist" decision carving out a new liability theory, or a total repudiation of Betamax. Unfortunately, the latter could outlaw the Internet and the general purpose computer, so I'm betting against that possibility too.
The main points of the relevant-to-the-digital-age portions of the DMCA are:
- (as part of Title I; the WIPO Treaty Implementation) making it illegal to circumvent technological access controls *under certain circumstances* or tamper with rights-management information
- (Title II: ONLINE COPYRIGHT INFRINGEMENT LIABILITY LIMITATION) giving service providers "safe harbor" from liability if they comply with the notice and takedown provisions
- (TITLE III: COMPUTER MAINTENANCE OR REPAIR)Allows computer owners to authorize 3rd party repair people to make incidental copies of someone else's software (that the owner has the right to posess and use) in the course of repairing the computer. (This change was needed because a court found a repair person liable for copyright infringement for such incidental copying and Congress got convinced that vendor lock-in for maintenance was a bad thing.)
- (TITLE IV: MISCELLANEOUS PROVISIONS) among other things, broadens the exemption for ephemeral recordings for broadcasters (allows DJs to record their shows way in advance of broadcast and keep them for a while afterwards), modified section 108 so that libraries and archives may make digital copies and not just "facsimile" copies, for archival use, modified the compulsory license terms for webcasters and includes them in the exemption for ephemeral recordings.
There were also a number of provisions tossed in the bucket that had nothing "digital" about them, such as Title V of the DMCA, entitled the Vessel Hull Design Protection Act.You can see this for yourself in the Copyright Office's summary of the DMCA
If you know anything about copyright law, you'll see that the DMCA's provisions outlined above don't really affect infringement liabilty unless you're a "service provider" (or dealing with one) or are circumventing access controls, none of which is relevant in the Grokster case.
Actually, courts routinely rule that some contracts (or parts thereof) are unenforceable and therefore null and void.
For example, if John Doe signs an employment contract that says he'll never work for a competing company the rest of his life, any (competent) court in the U.S. will decline to enforce it. (Limited, short-term constraints are routinely upheld however.)
Congress's ability to change copyright law is constrained by the Copyright Clause of the Constitution. For example, they couldn't grant a perpetual copyright (although the current case law is that they can grant a very very long copyright, with no limit yet defined).
But yes, Congress has a huge degree of flexibility in modifying copyright.
If you'd bother reading the decision, you would realize that the 9th didn't decide any new points of law at all, they're merely applied existing law, particularly the Betamax decision that the Supreme Court back in the '70s.
The decision is entirely black-letter law, except for applying it to new technologies.
Probably Omaha, or maybe Duluth.
Actually, having completed a university program in linguistics with pretty good marks, I think I have an adequate grasp of what "grammar" is, as well as how languages change. And change occurs in the standard (the "grammar" books) following actual long-term usage among the high-prestige actual language users. (In other words, French "grammar" doesn't change until the Parisians adopt a change, no matter what the folks in Quebec are doing or how long they've been doing it.) The "grammars" always lag the reality, and the only way to change the reality is to change the usage.
I'm not asserting that "he" is currently "wrong" according to grammatical "standards", but rather that I choose to change my usage in order to (I hope) change the standards. Traditions are made to be broken and as long as my communications are understood, I'm not gonna worry my pretty little head about what the language police think (especially since most such language police don't know anything more than rote rules anyway, e.g. they still belive in the "8 parts of speech".)
BTW, the classic example of a major modern-day language reformation, complete with real language police, was the reformation by decree of Turkish starting about 1930. They switched to the Latin alphabet from Arabic letters, and threw out all non-Turkish borrowed words, replacing them with either historical Turkish words or newly coined terms. There's a book about it for the curious.
In writings that will see the public, I generally substitute "they" instead of "he" (except in really formal business/technical stuff, where I find a way to use "one"/"one who" or "someone" or avoid pronouns), even when it's clear that there's only one person in "them". Alternately, in things like examples, I "instantiate" the unknown individual by supplying a gender-spcific name such as "John/Jane Doe", and using the correct pronoun for the hypothetical scenario.
"He" has been correct merely by the weight of tradition, and traditions are made to be broken. I prefer to make the "error" of mis-stating the count over the "error" of mis-stating the gender of the unknown person. Of course, in casual private communications, I write "quick and lazy" and don't worry too much about it. While I think gender-neutral language is the "right thing to do", it usually takes time for any language to evolve (except in places/times where the "language police" have real sanctions to impose). I find that people who nit-pick on the folks who don't follow the "language rules" (new or old) are usually also annoying little weasels.
They explain how a "flap" is opened on the surface of the eye to allow the laser access to the inside where they shape the lans via laser ablation. (UGH!)
For what it's worth, everybody I know who's had it (3 people) have been satsified to ecstatic. One of them suffered "dry eye" syndrome for about 6 weeks afterwards; in the middle of it, she found it mildly miserable but said the trade-off was worth it, and it cleared up...