Besides, there's no need for a pirate to worry about cleaning up the file. Any pirate would use a stolen credit card number to order the movie in the first place. Some random person will be on the hook as the "owner" of the file, and the pirate won't give a damn about the embedded watermark.
Agreed. I guess I wasn't clear that I was only questioning the general issue that the OP raised that ANY use of company resources means a company outright owns the software. I understand that in this specific situation his prospects are grim, and frankly (IMO) this lawsuit is absurd since, as you point out, he was essentially commissioned to write this program by and for his employer with employer training and resources. At best, as an hourly employee he could claim that he was deprived of overtime pay, although that would undercut his argument that he was creating the work independently.
The minute they provided him with any resource to work on it (work time, computer, etc...) it became theirs. This is not open to discussion.
Really? Just curious. What if the officer had a second job after hours, which is not uncommon for police officers, and he worked on the program during that second job as well? Would his second job then co-own the software? And if that's the case, what if his second job was e.g., a newsstand owned by his wife? Or, even more to the point, his own home-office IT business? Would he then have rights to his own work?
I just canceled a real Superpass account I'd been meaning to cancel for ages. It was dead easy. I told them I wanted to upgrade to Rhapsody. It so happens the memberships aren't directly transferable so they have to de-register you from Superpass and then you have to manually sign up for Rhapsody. So they canceled my Superpass but, of course, I never signed up for the Rhapsody. In fairness to them, I understand the Rhapsody service itself is pretty good as far as those subscription music plans go, and also it ties into one of the Sansa products. Their Superpass was also a decent deal (it included 10 purchased downloads a month) until they decided to tack on some useless bonus software as an excuse for jacking up the price. So I think they've got some decent offerings at their core, but if Real ever want to compete with iTunes, they're going to have to quit with the silly/sleazy business practices.
One other thing. People here keep trotting out that VISA Terms and Conditions which says the merchant is not allowed to bind you to XYZ terms (e.g., they can't penalize you for using virtual cc numbers) But if you contractually agree to the penalty, I wonder if the Visa T&C will be a valid defense? After all, just because they've breached their contract with VISA doesn't mean you (necessarily) get to breach your contract with the merchant. Presumably your defense would be fraudulent inducement? Any case law on this?
...why should we believe anything that Microsoft says about the feature set of a distant-future operating system? Furthermore, the days of geek dominance of the computer world are long over -- average people simply don't care what bells and whistles an OS has. They want to send email, play games, browse the web, play movies, organize their music, and write a few reports. Without having to worry about their computer being infected. All of those things are properly OS-agnostic: Firefox with Gmail and Flash, VLC and OpenGL work much the same on any modern OS. The only reasons for MS's continuing OS dominance are inertia, the forced tie-in with its flagship business apps, and DRM.
What reason is there why people should NOT still use the word "Communist" as a sort of bogeyman?
Because using ANY word as a magical talisman, Communist, atheist, free, liberal, democratic, Republican, stands in the way of reasoned debate and careful consideration of the issues at hand. In this case, all of the communist dictators were evil, not because they were communist, but because they were dictators who murdered thousands or millions of their own people in the effort to silence dissent and tighten their grip on power. The irony is they themselves brandished the word "Communist" as a talisman to justify their horrific mistreatment of those they governed.
Nice rant, but I think he meant that you misused the word "truthiness." Stephen Colbert didn't call it "truth that comes from the gut," "Stephen Colbert" did. And pretty much everything that "Stephen Colbert" says is not to be taken at face value. "Truthiness" is the act of setting forth a feel-good falsehood in the place of real truth.
Well I disagree. Google is putting the data freely available on the net.
Google is not making the data freely available -- it is encrypted and can (ordinarily) only be accessed from within Google software or within the Google network through a passkey. It is as if you had some private banking information stored on an ftp server. The server is connected to the internet. Does that mean it's up for grabs? Would you like for someone to crack your password? Would you like for them to share that information with others?
Secondly, there is no indication in the letter that Google is preventing users from using the content. They are merely trying to regulate it, just as you must regulate any resource. There is not even the threat of a lawsuit. More likely Google would just change their protocols and make people jump through more hoops to get at the data. Is that to anyone's advantage?
Imagine you own a toy store. You have a large free candy dispenser outside your store window set up so that people can sample sweets throughout the day, in the hope of luring in customers. After a few weeks, a woman named Gaia comes by and figures out how to jerry-rig the dispenser so that she can get an unlimited quantity of candy for free all at once. She sets up a table in the public park with the candy she's taken from your dispenser and just gives it out to people, no charge. That's nice of her, being so generous, but it's really at your expense. Soon after, you're forced to take down your dispenser.
Software patents are a complete cancer. You can't design any kind of complex system without potentially violating someones patent on something.
I think it's pretty ironic that software patents have the "viral" effect that anti-open sourcers claim comes from the GPL, yet they only condemn the latter. Simply because they condemn anything that is "free."
Nowhere does the summary try to justify piracy. It's simply saying that the threat is overrated, and consequently, by implication, so is the punishment. "Wrong is wrong" is a moronic sentiment usually uttered by people who ignore the myriad ways they violate little laws in their everyday lives. Surely you can see that there should be different consequences for mass murder than for underinflating your bicycle tires. Similarly, I'd argue that uploading a song is less of a public danger than running a red light and ought to be punished less severely.
I don't consider myself pro-Israel, but honestly, check your facts*. There have been Jews in the Middle East pretty much continuously since there were Jews, admittedly in small numbers, but they never entirely went away. Western history as typically taught tends to follow the story of European Jewry, not unreasonably, since most Jews today are of course of European ancestry. But that doesn't mean Palestinian, Lebanese, Iranian and African Jews ceased to exist.
*On this subject, particularly, I don't know if it's even possible to find factual information that is entirely free of political agenda, but this page seems to be fairly free of BS. Can't vouch for the rest of the website, just that particular page.
In addition, it appears that the patent was thought up by techs at a company gobbled up by Cisco, not a homegrown invention.
A couple of things:
1) This appears to be a rather detailed and well-thought out patent. Although the "triple play" concept may seem obvious in hindsight, the implementation of it, converting everything into a single protocol, is not necesarily the only way to go, and seems as worthy of being patented as most other inventions that have received the imprimatur of the USPTO throughout the years.
2) Since, as I said, their implementation is not necessarily the only way to handle multiple types of data, a competing company could get around licensing by simply keeping the protocols separate. Cable wiring and fiber are obviously fat enough to multiplex various datastreams at once, hence instead of converting at the source, one might be able to avoid the Cisco tax by overlaying the various incompatible networks on top of each other and let the set top boxes sort things out at the receiving end. Chances are, though, that if that's worth doing at all, someone's patented it already.
You can explain the rules of society to your children and be a good role model. However your children, despite being minors, are independent agents. They can choose to obey you or not, and in the final analysis you simply cannot force them to comply with your wishes. To that extent, the law recognizes that children are not absolute proxies for their parents. If your child commits murder, you WILL NOT go to prison to pay the child's debt to society. If your child puts up a fake MySpace page, you may bear some negligence, but it's not reasonable that your liability would be exactly the same as if you committed the act yourself.
Besides, the answer here is that in a reasonable court, this AP would only be entitled to minimal damages in any event. Oh, somebody made fun of her. Boo hoo. What does she expect -- she supervises CHILDREN FOR A LIVING. Unless she can prove direct losses, some suspensions and apologies should be enough revenge for her. She wasn't rich before and their prank didn't change the situation, so by no means should she be entitled to get rich off the backs of these children's parents.
tokenism makes people suspicious of multi-minority high-profile characters
The problem with that line of reasoning is that it is itself a form of elitism.
The assumption is that Condi couldn't have gotten the position through any other means than her race. Discount the fact that she's a long time friend of the family, and seems to be extremely close to W. Discount the fact that she's one of the most qualified people (for what it's worth) in the Bush Administration, discount the fact that she is a model conservative, a true believer, considered a genius in some circles, and has some influence of her own, no, her only value to Bush is in her race.
Don't get me wrong. Obviously once Rice was picked, the administration would be eager to take advantage of her race, but that's not at all the same as accusing her of being just another underqualified minority, end of story. Political reality means that you have to make ALL your major appointments with a constituency in mind. Northern candidates often pick Southern running mates, and presidential cabinets wind up demographically representing America to a much greater extent than the average board of directors. But folks should be very careful about assuming that all the women, disabled folks, and hyphenated Americans placed in positions of power are by their nature unqualified and fit only as tokens, while not similarly questioning the politics behind the selection of straight white males. That's just as sexist and racist coming from the left as it is from the right. Perhaps more so because at least some on the right will acknowledge, if only to themselves, their own bias, but those on the left almost never do.
I wonder how useful this kind of aggressive C&Ding is in actually protecting one's market share? I mean, let's say Apple lost trademark protection over the word "iPod," and it becomes a generic term. They're still the Apple iPod. They've still got the ipod.com domain. They can still call themselves "The Original iPod." They've still got iTunes and their proprietary DRM. And they still have control over the lion's share of the market. As long as they still have their product design and logo trademarked, nobody will mistake a knock-off iPod with the real thing, and any company that starts calling its player an iPod is just setting itself up for a poor comparison with the real thing, and at best anonymity, at worst, disrepute.
For a contrast, look at what happened to Xerox. They once had a commanding lead in photocopies, so much that their name nearly became verbed. They no longer suffer that threat, thanks to their efforts to protect their trademark. But neither do they have their commanding lead any more.
Hmm, looks like someone else wondered about this before I did.
I don't see how it's so much more difficult or complicated to copy a key vs copying a directory. It's not A key. It's MULTIPLE keys in addition to the directory vs. just the directory alone. That may or may not be more difficult, but it certainly is by definition more complicated.
I'll give you a concrete example of something that happened to me a long while back. I had an XP Home Edition computer whose motherboard died, but the HD was still operational with all my programs and files intact. I bought a new XP Pro computer and made the old HD my "D" drive. In a sane computing environment, I ought to have been able to run my programs in place from the new drive. In reality, of course, that won't work because the old programs aren't in the new registry. The Files and Settings Transfer Wizard won't work either because it assumes that the transfer-from computer is still intact. Also, setting the old drive as boot was problematic because of 1) driver incompatibilities between the old and new installation 2) it effectively downgraded the operating system from Pro to Home 3) whatever software was installed in the new system no longer worked. So, although I eventually got things working, I don't recall the exact steps except that they were vastly more complicated than a simple file copy and beyond what one would expect a home user to accomplish.
Finally, copying a directory requires specialized tools? Thanks for the chuckle.
Here's a quote from Wikipedia's article about the new Windows Mail which responds to your question:
Account setup information is no longer stored in the registry. They are instead stored alongside the mail itself, making it possible to copy an entire Windows Mail configuration and mail store to another machine in a single step.
Basically, if you just have to export files (instead of registry keys) it is generally easier, simpler and safer for end users to perform maintenance tasks on their computers, without having to ask permission of the programs they are attempting to maintain. Even Microsoft has come to see this.
But if you have a young daughter, and she gets molested by a drunken driver, or a jaywalker, or a litterer, or an illegal left turner, she's just as bad off as if she's molested by someone on the sex offender list. So to play it really safe, maybe we should have a "list of everyone convicted of any offense ever."
And actually, if you are a dude, then statistically speaking she's more likely to be molested by YOU than by some random sex offender. So maybe we should separate daughters from their fathers at birth.
As a nation, let's think of some more ways we can make our children super-duper-ultra secure.
This is the absolute, most absurd stupid motherfucking idea I've ever heard in the universe. Businessweek has now kicked the bucket,
Thanks for proving nobody RTFA or even the summary. Business Week agrees with you that it's absurd. It's John Plender at the Financial Times who was making the suggestion, and BW was reporting on and rebutting his thesis.
After we make eye contact in the mirror, my cat will turn its head away to look at my _actual_ face.
Yes, I've seen cats do this many times. However, the fact that cats can recognize their owners and other objects in mirrors does nothing to answer the question of whether the cat has primate-level self-awareness. As I said earlier, it doesn't need to see its own image at all in order to react to you. I suggest reading here for more elaboration. Scroll down to the part where "mirror" is highlighted a bunch of times.
Academic B.S. Every cat I've had has recognized itself in the mirror. I can make eye contact with my cat _in_the_mirror_ and have it turn and look me in the face.
Your example doesn't constitute the proof you think it does. If you are staring at each other through a mirror, that means YOU recognize its mirror image, and in return it recognizes YOUR mirror image. It doesn't have to recognize its own mirror image to pass that test. In fact if you stand off to the side while staring at someone in the mirror, you'll notice that you don't even have to see your own image at all to stare at someone else.
The issue is not whether cats can recognize the existence of other objects in a mirror. Clearly they can. The question is whether it can recognize that the cat-shaped object is itself, and use that information in some intelligent fashion.
Slashdot Mirror
Besides, there's no need for a pirate to worry about cleaning up the file. Any pirate would use a stolen credit card number to order the movie in the first place. Some random person will be on the hook as the "owner" of the file, and the pirate won't give a damn about the embedded watermark.
Agreed. I guess I wasn't clear that I was only questioning the general issue that the OP raised that ANY use of company resources means a company outright owns the software. I understand that in this specific situation his prospects are grim, and frankly (IMO) this lawsuit is absurd since, as you point out, he was essentially commissioned to write this program by and for his employer with employer training and resources. At best, as an hourly employee he could claim that he was deprived of overtime pay, although that would undercut his argument that he was creating the work independently.
The minute they provided him with any resource to work on it (work time, computer, etc...) it became theirs. This is not open to discussion.
Really? Just curious. What if the officer had a second job after hours, which is not uncommon for police officers, and he worked on the program during that second job as well? Would his second job then co-own the software? And if that's the case, what if his second job was e.g., a newsstand owned by his wife? Or, even more to the point, his own home-office IT business? Would he then have rights to his own work?
I just canceled a real Superpass account I'd been meaning to cancel for ages. It was dead easy. I told them I wanted to upgrade to Rhapsody. It so happens the memberships aren't directly transferable so they have to de-register you from Superpass and then you have to manually sign up for Rhapsody. So they canceled my Superpass but, of course, I never signed up for the Rhapsody. In fairness to them, I understand the Rhapsody service itself is pretty good as far as those subscription music plans go, and also it ties into one of the Sansa products. Their Superpass was also a decent deal (it included 10 purchased downloads a month) until they decided to tack on some useless bonus software as an excuse for jacking up the price. So I think they've got some decent offerings at their core, but if Real ever want to compete with iTunes, they're going to have to quit with the silly/sleazy business practices.
One other thing. People here keep trotting out that VISA Terms and Conditions which says the merchant is not allowed to bind you to XYZ terms (e.g., they can't penalize you for using virtual cc numbers) But if you contractually agree to the penalty, I wonder if the Visa T&C will be a valid defense? After all, just because they've breached their contract with VISA doesn't mean you (necessarily) get to breach your contract with the merchant. Presumably your defense would be fraudulent inducement? Any case law on this?
...why should we believe anything that Microsoft says about the feature set of a distant-future operating system? Furthermore, the days of geek dominance of the computer world are long over -- average people simply don't care what bells and whistles an OS has. They want to send email, play games, browse the web, play movies, organize their music, and write a few reports. Without having to worry about their computer being infected. All of those things are properly OS-agnostic: Firefox with Gmail and Flash, VLC and OpenGL work much the same on any modern OS. The only reasons for MS's continuing OS dominance are inertia, the forced tie-in with its flagship business apps, and DRM.
What reason is there why people should NOT still use the word "Communist" as a sort of bogeyman?
Because using ANY word as a magical talisman, Communist, atheist, free, liberal, democratic, Republican, stands in the way of reasoned debate and careful consideration of the issues at hand. In this case, all of the communist dictators were evil, not because they were communist, but because they were dictators who murdered thousands or millions of their own people in the effort to silence dissent and tighten their grip on power. The irony is they themselves brandished the word "Communist" as a talisman to justify their horrific mistreatment of those they governed.
Nice rant, but I think he meant that you misused the word "truthiness." Stephen Colbert didn't call it "truth that comes from the gut," "Stephen Colbert" did. And pretty much everything that "Stephen Colbert" says is not to be taken at face value. "Truthiness" is the act of setting forth a feel-good falsehood in the place of real truth.
The *original* copyright was actually 21 years
Read the whole thing. The statute specified 14 years plus a 14 year extension. 21 years was just grandfathered in for existing works.
Even cooler is that there was only a three month statute of limitations for bringing actions for copyright violations.
Well I disagree. Google is putting the data freely available on the net.
Google is not making the data freely available -- it is encrypted and can (ordinarily) only be accessed from within Google software or within the Google network through a passkey. It is as if you had some private banking information stored on an ftp server. The server is connected to the internet. Does that mean it's up for grabs? Would you like for someone to crack your password? Would you like for them to share that information with others?
Secondly, there is no indication in the letter that Google is preventing users from using the content. They are merely trying to regulate it, just as you must regulate any resource. There is not even the threat of a lawsuit. More likely Google would just change their protocols and make people jump through more hoops to get at the data. Is that to anyone's advantage?
Imagine you own a toy store. You have a large free candy dispenser outside your store window set up so that people can sample sweets throughout the day, in the hope of luring in customers. After a few weeks, a woman named Gaia comes by and figures out how to jerry-rig the dispenser so that she can get an unlimited quantity of candy for free all at once. She sets up a table in the public park with the candy she's taken from your dispenser and just gives it out to people, no charge. That's nice of her, being so generous, but it's really at your expense. Soon after, you're forced to take down your dispenser.
That's what's wrong with your argument.
Software patents are a complete cancer. You can't design any kind of complex system without potentially violating someones patent on something.
I think it's pretty ironic that software patents have the "viral" effect that anti-open sourcers claim comes from the GPL, yet they only condemn the latter. Simply because they condemn anything that is "free."
If you're gonna be pedantic, be REALLY pedantic. Veneraforming. ;)
Stop trying to justify this illegal activity.
Nowhere does the summary try to justify piracy. It's simply saying that the threat is overrated, and consequently, by implication, so is the punishment. "Wrong is wrong" is a moronic sentiment usually uttered by people who ignore the myriad ways they violate little laws in their everyday lives. Surely you can see that there should be different consequences for mass murder than for underinflating your bicycle tires. Similarly, I'd argue that uploading a song is less of a public danger than running a red light and ought to be punished less severely.
Isn't there a "Close Other Tabs" option on the RMB? Or is that only with Tab Mix Plus?
I don't consider myself pro-Israel, but honestly, check your facts*. There have been Jews in the Middle East pretty much continuously since there were Jews, admittedly in small numbers, but they never entirely went away. Western history as typically taught tends to follow the story of European Jewry, not unreasonably, since most Jews today are of course of European ancestry. But that doesn't mean Palestinian, Lebanese, Iranian and African Jews ceased to exist.
*On this subject, particularly, I don't know if it's even possible to find factual information that is entirely free of political agenda, but this page seems to be fairly free of BS. Can't vouch for the rest of the website, just that particular page.
In addition, it appears that the patent was thought up by techs at a company gobbled up by Cisco, not a homegrown invention.
A couple of things:
1) This appears to be a rather detailed and well-thought out patent. Although the "triple play" concept may seem obvious in hindsight, the implementation of it, converting everything into a single protocol, is not necesarily the only way to go, and seems as worthy of being patented as most other inventions that have received the imprimatur of the USPTO throughout the years.
2) Since, as I said, their implementation is not necessarily the only way to handle multiple types of data, a competing company could get around licensing by simply keeping the protocols separate. Cable wiring and fiber are obviously fat enough to multiplex various datastreams at once, hence instead of converting at the source, one might be able to avoid the Cisco tax by overlaying the various incompatible networks on top of each other and let the set top boxes sort things out at the receiving end. Chances are, though, that if that's worth doing at all, someone's patented it already.
You can explain the rules of society to your children and be a good role model. However your children, despite being minors, are independent agents. They can choose to obey you or not, and in the final analysis you simply cannot force them to comply with your wishes. To that extent, the law recognizes that children are not absolute proxies for their parents. If your child commits murder, you WILL NOT go to prison to pay the child's debt to society. If your child puts up a fake MySpace page, you may bear some negligence, but it's not reasonable that your liability would be exactly the same as if you committed the act yourself.
Besides, the answer here is that in a reasonable court, this AP would only be entitled to minimal damages in any event. Oh, somebody made fun of her. Boo hoo. What does she expect -- she supervises CHILDREN FOR A LIVING. Unless she can prove direct losses, some suspensions and apologies should be enough revenge for her. She wasn't rich before and their prank didn't change the situation, so by no means should she be entitled to get rich off the backs of these children's parents.
The problem with that line of reasoning is that it is itself a form of elitism.
The assumption is that Condi couldn't have gotten the position through any other means than her race. Discount the fact that she's a long time friend of the family, and seems to be extremely close to W. Discount the fact that she's one of the most qualified people (for what it's worth) in the Bush Administration, discount the fact that she is a model conservative, a true believer, considered a genius in some circles, and has some influence of her own, no, her only value to Bush is in her race.
Don't get me wrong. Obviously once Rice was picked, the administration would be eager to take advantage of her race, but that's not at all the same as accusing her of being just another underqualified minority, end of story. Political reality means that you have to make ALL your major appointments with a constituency in mind. Northern candidates often pick Southern running mates, and presidential cabinets wind up demographically representing America to a much greater extent than the average board of directors. But folks should be very careful about assuming that all the women, disabled folks, and hyphenated Americans placed in positions of power are by their nature unqualified and fit only as tokens, while not similarly questioning the politics behind the selection of straight white males. That's just as sexist and racist coming from the left as it is from the right. Perhaps more so because at least some on the right will acknowledge, if only to themselves, their own bias, but those on the left almost never do.
I wonder how useful this kind of aggressive C&Ding is in actually protecting one's market share? I mean, let's say Apple lost trademark protection over the word "iPod," and it becomes a generic term. They're still the Apple iPod. They've still got the ipod.com domain. They can still call themselves "The Original iPod." They've still got iTunes and their proprietary DRM. And they still have control over the lion's share of the market. As long as they still have their product design and logo trademarked, nobody will mistake a knock-off iPod with the real thing, and any company that starts calling its player an iPod is just setting itself up for a poor comparison with the real thing, and at best anonymity, at worst, disrepute.
For a contrast, look at what happened to Xerox. They once had a commanding lead in photocopies, so much that their name nearly became verbed. They no longer suffer that threat, thanks to their efforts to protect their trademark. But neither do they have their commanding lead any more.
Hmm, looks like someone else wondered about this before I did.
Basically, if you just have to export files (instead of registry keys) it is generally easier, simpler and safer for end users to perform maintenance tasks on their computers, without having to ask permission of the programs they are attempting to maintain. Even Microsoft has come to see this.
But if you have a young daughter, and she gets molested by a drunken driver, or a jaywalker, or a litterer, or an illegal left turner, she's just as bad off as if she's molested by someone on the sex offender list. So to play it really safe, maybe we should have a "list of everyone convicted of any offense ever."
And actually, if you are a dude, then statistically speaking she's more likely to be molested by YOU than by some random sex offender. So maybe we should separate daughters from their fathers at birth.
As a nation, let's think of some more ways we can make our children super-duper-ultra secure.
Final scores
Thanks. I tried to RTFA, but "Slashdot and Readers Crush Low-End Website."
Thanks for proving nobody RTFA or even the summary. Business Week agrees with you that it's absurd. It's John Plender at the Financial Times who was making the suggestion, and BW was reporting on and rebutting his thesis.
Nice outrage, tho.
After we make eye contact in the mirror, my cat will turn its head away to look at my _actual_ face.
Yes, I've seen cats do this many times. However, the fact that cats can recognize their owners and other objects in mirrors does nothing to answer the question of whether the cat has primate-level self-awareness. As I said earlier, it doesn't need to see its own image at all in order to react to you. I suggest reading here for more elaboration. Scroll down to the part where "mirror" is highlighted a bunch of times.
Academic B.S. Every cat I've had has recognized itself in the mirror. I can make eye contact with my cat _in_the_mirror_ and have it turn and look me in the face.
Your example doesn't constitute the proof you think it does. If you are staring at each other through a mirror, that means YOU recognize its mirror image, and in return it recognizes YOUR mirror image. It doesn't have to recognize its own mirror image to pass that test. In fact if you stand off to the side while staring at someone in the mirror, you'll notice that you don't even have to see your own image at all to stare at someone else.
The issue is not whether cats can recognize the existence of other objects in a mirror. Clearly they can. The question is whether it can recognize that the cat-shaped object is itself, and use that information in some intelligent fashion.