"Greedy publishers" , "commies", etc., etc.
on
Who Owns Science?
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· Score: 1
A lot of the flamage in the replies seems to break down to arguments between people who think publishers are abusing the scientists and those who have a strong "pro-business" bias.
My points:
the "public science" movement is subject to the same market and economic forces as "traditional" publishing. If over time the "public science" sites don't get the articles and support from their consumers (the scientific community), they'll wither away.
no one is forcing scientists to use "public science" facilities. The traditional scientific publishers have the advantage of "installed base" and process inertia. If they can't survive in the marketplace against a new business model for scientific publishing, so be it; if they can't stay in business then it's because they've failed to serve their customers.
There are a lot of problems with the science publication process, including "publish or perish", authorship credit issues, mediocre peer review, reference padding, etc., even if you ignore the publishers' role in the process. These are problems that the scientific community as a whole needs to address, and perhaps the "public science" movement will lead to a re-examination of publication within the scientific process.
There are plenty of anecdotal examples of "greedy publisher" issues among scientific and medical publishers. Perhaps the strongest examples are the cases wherein the author of an article not only didn't get paid for the article, but in order to get published was forced to assign copyright to the journal *AND* subsequently had to pay the journal for reuse rights to publish later work. Another example (from medical publishing) is the case of Teri J. McDermott et al v. Advanstar Communications, Inc., wherein a group of medical artists are suing a publisher, claiming that the publisher systematically violate the contracts between publisher and artists. The artists sold one-time use rights and clain the publisher is reusing without payment and reselling the art.
We use a VOIP solution from Shoreline Communications. From our perspective, it's boxes that just work, but the docs says they're running VxWorks, not Windows. They do integrate with Windows via a Java call manager app.
If you'd bother to read the judges opinion, it would explain it all for you; however to synopsize...
The First Amendment guarantees "freedom of speech" and "freedom of the press".
The Supreme Court has decided that this entails a "freedom to read" without supervision of the government.
The Supreme Court has further decided that libraries and bookstores have the right to defend this "freedom to read", both as a matter of public policy and to further their own economic interests, to prevent the "chilling effect" of governmental monitoring.
Incidentally, the Court's opinion noted that the local cops(Thornton, CO) were unable to get a warrant from the local DA's office, even after approaching numerous ADAs, because they all thought it was improper; they eventually got their warrant from the Denver DA, despite the fact that the crime was not committed in that jurisdiction.
By law, for something to be copyrightable, it must be "an original work of authorship".
Courts have interpreted this mean that a non-trivial creative component must be part of the work; a mechanical translation of DNA to some "musical" format would therefore fail to be lawfully copyrightable.
No doubt, this idiot executive saw the DNA-to-music exhibit at the Exploratium in San Francisco...
Of course, a little legal problem like that won't stop someone from forming a business around the idea, raising funding, etc...
No. While it varies from jurisdiction to jurisdiction, parents are generally only held (somewhat) liable for criminal mischief by their kids, on the theory that they have a responsibility of general supervision. In other words, if Johnny is out tagging the neighborhood at 3am, the parents have failed in supervision and can be held accountable, at least for damages.
However, parents can't be bound to a contract by their minor children and any business willing to make a contract with a minor is presumed to know the risks of doing so.
BTW, even though a minor generally can't be bound to a contract, a business can still contract to a minor and can reclaim property if the terms of a purchase contract aren't met. Also, the limitations on a business enforcing a contract on a minor don't have any effect on the criminal justice system; if a minor deliberately commits fraud by making a contract to receive goods with no intention of honoring it, it's still a crime that can be prosecuted by the state (if the DA is willing); the minor just can't be sued to honor the contract by the business.
No. The SSN is required in order to apply for such a license, mandated by the DMV.
This can vary, state by U.S. state, but seems to be the common standard. Apparently, Federal law allows this, at least according to this Texas DPS statement on the issue.
Most stores that do the saving card thing also track credit card purchases/purchasers this way...
Cash is the only way out of the DB at these places. Personally, I try to shop at places that don't do that to their customers and (almost) always use cash at the others.
For the less paranoid/rebellious, an alias oughta work unless the government *really* wants to know about your habits, then they could match you to your card via surveillance, especially with the store security cameras and the transaction time-stamps... Personally, I don't worry about the government too much (me being an upstanding, all-american heterosexual, white, middle-aged male and all), it's the friggin' marketing of the personal that drives me nuts. Why should someone who's trying to sell me something I don't want be able to find out what medicines/prophylactics/books/magazines/food I buy...?
I predict it's only a matter of time before one of these consumer DBs is used in a blackmail/extortion scheme. "So, Mr. Doe... Does your wife know you bought condoms while you were on that business trip? Do you want her not to know...?"
Unfortunately, in the U.S. there's a very strong assumption that everyone over 16 drives (because it's *almost* true). However, (almost?) every state has a state *ID* card that is not a drivers license, but is entered in the drivers license DB and managed by the same division of the state and treated by everone just like a DL, except for the actual driving part of life.
Having one is legally optional, but you can't cash a check almost anywhere without "proper ID", even at your own bank, and some places are now requiring it for credit card transactions, so almost everybody except the institutionalized/homeless have either a state-issued driver's license or ID card.
In other words, "driver's license" in the U.S. is shorthand for "driver's license or other state-issued ID".
A large percentage of the spam I receive has a forged Yahoo address in the From:, but the headers show that it actually comes from somewhere else - about half the time via an open relay somewhere in asia.
Based on the patent abstract, this looks like another crap patent.
Patented inventions are required to be, well, "inventive", and this looks to be a straightforward distributed app., the only "novelty" being that it's using the web for gaming. In other words, they're describing an implementation of standard technology applied to a standard problem.
I think it fails the non-obviousness test, especially in light of the state of the art on the filing date...
A classic example of the "on a computer" syndrome of crap patents...
has found a click thru license that has been upheld in court. They can demand all kinds of things but what the courts let them get away with is entirely a different matter
has found a click thru license that has been upheld in court. They can demand all kinds of things but what the courts let them get away with is entirely a different matter
The case you're talking about is ProCD,Inc. vs. Zeidenberg, and your remarks are close but a bit off. Because white-page phonebook listings and similar "brute-force" database lists that are the product of hard work but no creativity are *not* protected by copyright (The Suprmeme Court's "Feist v. Rural Telephone" decision), ProCd was able to gather up phone books and create a national phone CD. Zeidenberg then took the CD, created a web interface to the data and was sued by ProCD.
Zeidenberg won in District Court, ProCd appealed to the 7th Circuit and lost there, and Zeidenberg did not appeal to the Supreme Court. In the 7th circuit ruling, Judge Easterbrook specifically reversed the trial court on the enforceability of shrinkwrap licenses. The way courts do things, this precedent is binding in all the District Courts in the 7th Circuit, but not elsewhere.
From a copyright perspective, this decision is ludicrous, because it in essence says that any publisher can slap a "contract" on something (book, cd, etc.) and thereby void any rights consumers otherwise might have, but until someone with bucks take the matter to the Supreme Court, we lack a definitive answer to the problem...
Under U.S. copyright law, works of the Federal government are not copyrightable; these programs were "public domain" the moment they were created (unless they were created by government contractors who were NOT working on a "work-for-hire" basis).
But it's real nice that they're now publicly accessible...
Maybe where you live, but in the U.S. almost every state has a Trade Secret law.
Here's Florida's, which is modeled on the national UNIFORM TRADE SECRETS ACT, and is therefore the same or similar to most states' act.
In answer to the original question, note 688.002,especially (2)(b)3., which reads in part:
(2)"Misappropriation" means:
(a)...
(b) Disclosure or use of a trade secret of another without express or implied consent by a person who:
1....
2....
3. Before a material change of his position, knew or had reason to know that it was a trade secret and that knowledge of it had been acquired by accident or mistake.
Without the 'Before a material change of his position' clause, it would seem that this law would clearly prohibit redistribution of "SirCam secrets". However, that clause (to me) seems to imply that the person who acquired the secret throgh mistake or accident is presumed to be an employee or in some other particular relationship to the owner of the secret, and not a stranger, thus not prohibiting distribution by such an "innocent" stranger even when that stranger knows it's a secret.
Perhaps I'm mistaken, but I thought that the dilution theory only applied to "famous marks".
Also, this act can't be applied retro-actively, and the dilution has been occuring prior to 1996.
They're like most people, trying to find an easy solution, by promoting the nearest potentially qualified person, but since you don't want the job, they've still got a problem. Don't let them make it your problem.
And with supervisors like that, it's only a matter of time before something else screwy comes along. I'd start looking for something else if I were you...
So Yahoo is charging now. Next thing, their stocks will go down and it'll end up disappearing.
Not likely anytime soon. They're sitting on 1.34 billion dollars in assets - about half in cash (American billion - thousands of millions, not the old British billion - millions of millions), and currently making profits: 25 million last quarter, 65 million in 2nd quarter and 77 million in the 3rd.
However, the Audio Home Recording Act that you speak of refers to analog recordings.
No. The U.S. AHRA specifically allows digital audio copies, provided they're recorded on taxed media and on a device that implements "Serial Copy Management System". The AHRA only covers audio devices, and not general-purpose computers, BTW. You can read the law yourself at the U.S. Copyright Office. (This is the major part of the AHRA, I think some minor bits of it are elsewhere in the U.S. code.)
Yes, the AHRA came into being because of the fears of DAT, and effectively killed it as a consumer format, but your analysis of how it did so is wrong.
Not Fair use... try public domain. Once somthing is distributed with consent over an insecure medium (aka. radio, television) with the purpose of distribution, it becomes legal to record, copy and distribute at will.
That's absolutely wrong. Think about it! If this were true, copyright would have no effect at all. Books are as insecure as a radio broadcast; if this argument were true, a publisher selling a book would eliminate the book's copyright.
Fair use only covers "purposes such as criticism, comment, news reporting, teaching (including multiple copies for classroom use), scholarship, or research."
You've trimmed the quote and changed it's meaning. The full sentence is:
Notwithstanding the provisions of sections 106 and 106A, the fair use of a copyrighted work,
including such use by reproduction in copies or phonorecords or by any other means specified by that section, for purposes such as criticism, comment, news reporting, teaching (including multiple copies for classroom use), scholarship, or research, is not an infringement of copyright.
In other words, the list of purposes is a list of examples, not a limitive list. "including" is read by the courts as "including, but not limited to" and is treated in this instance as illustrative, not definitive.
And it is further limited by several criteira: the purpose of the use, the nature of the work, the amount of the work (in relation to the whole) used, and the effect on the value of the work in its market.
Those criteria aren't further limits, in fact they're not limits at all. The classic 4 "fair use" factors are things that a court by law must consider when deciding whether a use is fair or not - however the word "include" pops up again, indicating that courts are free to use additional factors if they seem appropriate. These factors are balanced to decide if a particular use is fair. For example, a court is more likely to find that copying 50% of a book was a "fair use" if it was for an educational purpose, the work was not very creative, and the copying had no effect on the market, than if it was for a commercial purpose, was a really creative work, and the copies were competing in the market with the original work.
Slashdot Mirror
My points:
We use a VOIP solution from Shoreline Communications. From our perspective, it's boxes that just work, but the docs says they're running VxWorks, not Windows. They do integrate with Windows via a Java call manager app.
Trolling through the archives in Google Groups might well turn up some nuggets of wisdom amongst the dross...
The First Amendment guarantees "freedom of speech" and "freedom of the press".
The Supreme Court has decided that this entails a "freedom to read" without supervision of the government.
The Supreme Court has further decided that libraries and bookstores have the right to defend this "freedom to read", both as a matter of public policy and to further their own economic interests, to prevent the "chilling effect" of governmental monitoring.
Incidentally, the Court's opinion noted that the local cops(Thornton, CO) were unable to get a warrant from the local DA's office, even after approaching numerous ADAs, because they all thought it was improper; they eventually got their warrant from the Denver DA, despite the fact that the crime was not committed in that jurisdiction.
Courts have interpreted this mean that a non-trivial creative component must be part of the work; a mechanical translation of DNA to some "musical" format would therefore fail to be lawfully copyrightable.
No doubt, this idiot executive saw the DNA-to-music exhibit at the Exploratium in San Francisco...
Of course, a little legal problem like that won't stop someone from forming a business around the idea, raising funding, etc...
However, parents can't be bound to a contract by their minor children and any business willing to make a contract with a minor is presumed to know the risks of doing so.
BTW, even though a minor generally can't be bound to a contract, a business can still contract to a minor and can reclaim property if the terms of a purchase contract aren't met. Also, the limitations on a business enforcing a contract on a minor don't have any effect on the criminal justice system; if a minor deliberately commits fraud by making a contract to receive goods with no intention of honoring it, it's still a crime that can be prosecuted by the state (if the DA is willing); the minor just can't be sued to honor the contract by the business.
This can vary, state by U.S. state, but seems to be the common standard. Apparently, Federal law allows this, at least according to this Texas DPS statement on the issue.
Cash is the only way out of the DB at these places. Personally, I try to shop at places that don't do that to their customers and (almost) always use cash at the others.
For the less paranoid/rebellious, an alias oughta work unless the government *really* wants to know about your habits, then they could match you to your card via surveillance, especially with the store security cameras and the transaction time-stamps... Personally, I don't worry about the government too much (me being an upstanding, all-american heterosexual, white, middle-aged male and all), it's the friggin' marketing of the personal that drives me nuts. Why should someone who's trying to sell me something I don't want be able to find out what medicines/prophylactics/books/magazines/food I buy...?
I predict it's only a matter of time before one of these consumer DBs is used in a blackmail/extortion scheme. "So, Mr. Doe... Does your wife know you bought condoms while you were on that business trip? Do you want her not to know...?"
I suspect that some places, particularly bars and banks, will assume that the license is forged and treat you/it differently...
Unfortunately, in the U.S. there's a very strong assumption that everyone over 16 drives (because it's *almost* true). However, (almost?) every state has a state *ID* card that is not a drivers license, but is entered in the drivers license DB and managed by the same division of the state and treated by everone just like a DL, except for the actual driving part of life.
Having one is legally optional, but you can't cash a check almost anywhere without "proper ID", even at your own bank, and some places are now requiring it for credit card transactions, so almost everybody except the institutionalized/homeless have either a state-issued driver's license or ID card.
In other words, "driver's license" in the U.S. is shorthand for "driver's license or other state-issued ID".
A large percentage of the spam I receive has a forged Yahoo address in the From:, but the headers show that it actually comes from somewhere else - about half the time via an open relay somewhere in asia.
Patented inventions are required to be, well, "inventive", and this looks to be a straightforward distributed app., the only "novelty" being that it's using the web for gaming. In other words, they're describing an implementation of standard technology applied to a standard problem.
I think it fails the non-obviousness test, especially in light of the state of the art on the filing date...
A classic example of the "on a computer" syndrome of crap patents...
has found a click thru license that has been upheld in court. They can demand all kinds of things but what the courts let them get away with is entirely a different matter
The case you're talking about is ProCD,Inc. vs. Zeidenberg, and your remarks are close but a bit off. Because white-page phonebook listings and similar "brute-force" database lists that are the product of hard work but no creativity are *not* protected by copyright (The Suprmeme Court's "Feist v. Rural Telephone" decision), ProCd was able to gather up phone books and create a national phone CD. Zeidenberg then took the CD, created a web interface to the data and was sued by ProCD.
Zeidenberg won in District Court, ProCd appealed to the 7th Circuit and lost there, and Zeidenberg did not appeal to the Supreme Court. In the 7th circuit ruling, Judge Easterbrook specifically reversed the trial court on the enforceability of shrinkwrap licenses. The way courts do things, this precedent is binding in all the District Courts in the 7th Circuit, but not elsewhere.
From a copyright perspective, this decision is ludicrous, because it in essence says that any publisher can slap a "contract" on something (book, cd, etc.) and thereby void any rights consumers otherwise might have, but until someone with bucks take the matter to the Supreme Court, we lack a definitive answer to the problem...
They don't define "computer" in the law though. Since a game console is a computer in fact, you'd have a pretty good shot at convincing a judge...
Findum, Fleesum, Skinnum & Skip
Under U.S. copyright law, works of the Federal government are not copyrightable; these programs were "public domain" the moment they were created (unless they were created by government contractors who were NOT working on a "work-for-hire" basis).
But it's real nice that they're now publicly accessible...
Maybe where you live, but in the U.S. almost every state has a Trade Secret law.
Here's Florida's, which is modeled on the national UNIFORM TRADE SECRETS ACT, and is therefore the same or similar to most states' act.
In answer to the original question, note 688.002,especially (2)(b)3., which reads in part:
(2)"Misappropriation" means: ... ...
(a)...
(b) Disclosure or use of a trade secret of another without express or implied consent by a person who:
1.
2.
3. Before a material change of his position, knew or had reason to know that it was a trade secret and that knowledge of it had been acquired by accident or mistake.
Without the 'Before a material change of his position' clause, it would seem that this law would clearly prohibit redistribution of "SirCam secrets". However, that clause (to me) seems to imply that the person who acquired the secret throgh mistake or accident is presumed to be an employee or in some other particular relationship to the owner of the secret, and not a stranger, thus not prohibiting distribution by such an "innocent" stranger even when that stranger knows it's a secret.
However, I'm not a lawyer...
Most jurisdictions now run copyright for "author's lifetime plus X". X = 70 in the U.S., and I believe that's the value for most of Europe as well.
Perhaps I'm mistaken, but I thought that the dilution theory only applied to "famous marks". Also, this act can't be applied retro-actively, and the dilution has been occuring prior to 1996.
They're like most people, trying to find an easy solution, by promoting the nearest potentially qualified person, but since you don't want the job, they've still got a problem. Don't let them make it your problem.
And with supervisors like that, it's only a matter of time before something else screwy comes along. I'd start looking for something else if I were you...
Article on tuplay.
Not likely anytime soon. They're sitting on 1.34 billion dollars in assets - about half in cash (American billion - thousands of millions, not the old British billion - millions of millions), and currently making profits: 25 million last quarter, 65 million in 2nd quarter and 77 million in the 3rd.
No. The U.S. AHRA specifically allows digital audio copies, provided they're recorded on taxed media and on a device that implements "Serial Copy Management System". The AHRA only covers audio devices, and not general-purpose computers, BTW. You can read the law yourself at the U.S. Copyright Office. (This is the major part of the AHRA, I think some minor bits of it are elsewhere in the U.S. code.)
Yes, the AHRA came into being because of the fears of DAT, and effectively killed it as a consumer format, but your analysis of how it did so is wrong.
That's absolutely wrong. Think about it! If this were true, copyright would have no effect at all. Books are as insecure as a radio broadcast; if this argument were true, a publisher selling a book would eliminate the book's copyright.
You've trimmed the quote and changed it's meaning. The full sentence is:
In other words, the list of purposes is a list of examples, not a limitive list. "including" is read by the courts as "including, but not limited to" and is treated in this instance as illustrative, not definitive.And it is further limited by several criteira: the purpose of the use, the nature of the work, the amount of the work (in relation to the whole) used, and the effect on the value of the work in its market.
Those criteria aren't further limits, in fact they're not limits at all. The classic 4 "fair use" factors are things that a court by law must consider when deciding whether a use is fair or not - however the word "include" pops up again, indicating that courts are free to use additional factors if they seem appropriate. These factors are balanced to decide if a particular use is fair. For example, a court is more likely to find that copying 50% of a book was a "fair use" if it was for an educational purpose, the work was not very creative, and the copying had no effect on the market, than if it was for a commercial purpose, was a really creative work, and the copies were competing in the market with the original work.