True. According to this article, there are a few more authors who have beaten our Dick.
The article lists:
0. Bible/Homer/Shakespeare/Dickens 1. Stephen King 2. W. Somerset Maugham 3. Ernest Hemingway and possibly, depending on the current count 4. John Grisham
Ian Fleming seems to be missing from that list, and I suspect others as well.
1) The police would typically not investigate an alleged crime like this - there are simply too many cases of petit larceny for them to go after every one with detectives. 2) Filing a police report does not constitute proof of a crime -- anybody can file a lost property report and claim that my property is theirs. Maybe they sold me an animal and then feel remorse and want it back. Maybe my ex-wife wants back the mangy cur dog she surrendered in the divorce decree, or she just wants to keep track of my whereabouts. Without laws like the DPA, it'd be pretty easy to buy your bf a chipped dog when times are good and then use it to track him down when he leaves you. 3) The remedy for something like this is to start a civil proceeding to compel the company to provide the location information, much in the same way that the RIAA sues to get names and IP addresses. Remember the old principle: "Possession is 9/10ths of the law." The current custodians of the dog should be considered not guilty/liable for anything until a theft or illegal conversion has been proven to have occurred in court. And the fact that the dog is still alive after so many years speaks against any exigent circumstances compelling emergency relief, in other words, there's no rush.
Reading the article, it appears that things work approximately the same way in the UK So this is basically a non-story that relies on Joe Bloggs' ignorance of legal workings.
Primates? What, of all the rac--- oh, never mind, you're just pointing out that an excess of Catholic bishops discharging their "firearms" past Vespers has resulted in the Church losing membership, right?
but realistically its hard to see the rights to the Star Wars music for instance reverting to the individual orchestra after 35 years
Because the statute in question explicitly exempts works for hire. Which is why the GP's point is immaterial -- this orchestra is performing a work for hire, and the copyright holding company's charter explicitly releases the work into the public domain, which according to Stanford is ok. Of course they could be wrong but I trust Stanford more than I trust phiz187.
First, I find it interesting, to say the least, that the plaintiff in this case isn't Disney, Columbia, 20th Century Fox, etc., but "Achte/Neunte Boll Kino Beteiligungs Gmbh & Co KG" a crapware movie distributor so obscure that Googling seems to 95% turn up links for this lawsuit. Wearing a tin foil cap, one could almost think they were acting as a front for the MAFIAA, much in the way that SCO was to some degree a front for Microsoft in its anti-Linux crusade. In the end, as we in the USA further lose our rights, the major studios will shrug and say, "It wasn't us, blame the Germans..."
Second point is that there seems to be a conflation of the concepts "Privacy" and "anonymity" not only in this thread but in the original legal documents.
Privacy = You may know who I am, but you don't know what I'm up to. Anonymity = You may know what I'm up to, but you don't know who I am.
They're complementary terms, and both important rights, but for accuracy's sake we should be clear that, since the deed (file-sharing) is already known, just not the perpetrators, this is primarily a blow to anonymity.
Alternatively, given that it is accepted legal practice to refer to internet anonymity as "privacy of subscriber information," one can think of anonymity as a subset of privacy, "privacy of subscriber information" being one tine along with "privacy of home", "privacy of beliefs", "privacy of association," etc. Even so, treating this ruling as a generalized blow to privacy to some extent muddies and obscures what's going on, particularly the salient issue at hand: Should we be entitled to an expectation of anonymity/"privacy of subscriber information" on the internet?
Third, probably mentioned elsewhere by now, but here's the ruling. In point of fact, it's a mixed bag. While denying anonymity, it also says that jurisdiction may be a real problem for the plaintiffs.
But, even if that wasn't the case, particularly with large publishers, any time a library loans out a book, a small royalty is paid to the publisher, and the author. In short, the library is a revenue source.
That's true in certain countries, but not in the USA or Japan. But even so, an author wants to maximize retail sales first before relying on so-called "Public Lending Rights" royalties, which are generally quite small.
I disagree. It's not that laws don't need to be reformed. It's that these kind of kneejerk, ahistorical, situationally expedient solutions usually have unintended results that are worse than the problem they are attempting to mitigate.
Consider: Your dad passes away suddenly, and you're going through his old effects and papers and realize that his partner's been ripping him off for years to the tune of millions of dollars. What can you do about it? Nothing, in your world, because you had "lack of standing at the time the alleged infringement took place."
Or you buy a house next to a scenic lake. After you've been living there a couple of months you start to feel sick. It turns out that the old Duponsanto plant for years had been dumping toxic waste into the lake and polluting the land. They cleared out about a year before you moved in, so you have no recourse because of "lack of standing at the time the alleged infringement took place."
But, on top of that, although the wording in the article is ambiguous, it seems likely to me that Righthaven purchased the rights to the work while the alleged infringement was still ongoing. So even going by your litmus test they would still have standing to bring suit.
This has nothing to do with DMCA. It's just regular copyright. Generally speaking, you don't have to warn people in advance before taking them to court. And when notice is given (and not a statutory requirement), it's done, not as a favor to the putative defendant, but as a convenience to the plaintiff, in order to save on their own time and legal costs. But generally, the "warning" is the summons itself. Between service and the court date, there's plenty of time to hammer out a settlement if the parties are amenable to doing so.
Can you sue your landlord for 100x penalties for not providing necessary repairs? Can you sue your cable company for 100x for cable outages? Can you sue your job for 100x for unpaid overtime? So why should some media company be allowed to collect 100x damages on a movie? It's that sort of inequity, where corporate losses are given a higher value than deprivations suffered by human beings, that causes people to lose respect for the law.
Near as I can tell, the new iTouch is a proper superset of the old one in terms of functionality. They didn't pare back a single feature, so everything is at least the same, or improved, for the same price. I too am disappointed that the thing doesn't have every dream feature I ever wanted (128GB? mkv?) , but it's hard to hate on a solid improvement.
Lookie, you heathen scum! Creationism is vindicated! What's that you see glimmering by the end of the video? It's the eye of God!!! That proves He exists. Y'all scientists done hoist yerselves by your own atheistic little petards, aincha? Gaze into His ocular glory, that greenish, ominous, malevolent, downright wicked...hey wait a second, you're not fooling me, you used summa that false color tricknology to make Him look evil didn't ya?
Next time show us His true colors -- red, white and blue.
It's not them getting together and asking for 99c. It's Apple negotiating a 99c price point for their store. That's no more "collusion" than the 99c store in your neighborhood is.
Hold on, I don't see dreamchaser saying he wants to "force" anybody to do anything. He said he's against abortions for moral reasons, and he thinks foetuses "should" be allowed to grow to term. Sort of like, say, a person might be against eating meat for moral reasons, and might try to encourage other people to avoid eating it, but it doesn't mean they necessarily want to force others to be vegetarians. Or, I think everyone "should" learn a second language but I'm not trying, even a little bit, to make it a legal obligation and force it upon them unwillingly.
Now, it could very well be that dreamchaser wants to put "abortion = murder" into the law, but I'm not getting that reading from what he wrote.
Maybe so but don't worry, 10 years after THAT it won't matter any more, no-one will be allowed to manually drive a car anyway, they'll all be robotically controlled.
Or, instead of "free wifi with your coffee," they could offer "free coffee with your wifi." You pay for the wi-fi per 30/60 minutes, and get a cup and all the refills you want, and they'd still make money. Then the guy who sits around all day nursing one cup of coffee and web browsing is transformed from a leech into their best customer.
The reason he didn't feel his dog eating his toe is not just that he was drunk, but because diabetes causes peripheral neuropathy. When you have severe untreated diabetes, you often can't feel pain in your extremities, and untreated sores become gangrenous. So his being drunk was the least of his problems, his bigger problem was that his toe was decomposing and he couldn't feel it.
Interesting, but FYI by the 80's calculators were already at near-commodity pricing. The Casio Mini came out in 1972, and was priced at under $100. (One source has it at Y12,800 which at that time was the equivalent of about $45.)
Oh, sorry, never mind, rereading your sentence I see it was just a simple typo and you meant "early 1970s" for the first reference.
The complaint is that they are engaging in price-gouging activities, overcharging far beyond their costs. Imagine hypothetically that there were a dozen cable internet providers serving the same area. The ones with the smallest market share would, in an attempt to increase it, lower their prices to the barest bones. The bigger companies would initially try to compete just on the strength of their reputation, but eventually that would not be enough and they too would have to lower prices and/or build up their infrastructure to provide a better quality service for the same price. And competition would continue to ratchet up bandwidth and lower prices. This doesn't generally happen in the world of cable because the companies tend to have monopolies, whether by law, government contract or simply the high barrier to entering the cable market. All of which are anti-competitive, and cause the consumer to lose out. That's what the complaint is.
The fact that the companies get to by fiat decide that some minuscule level of service is "LITE" and that some slightly less minuscule level is "extreme" has nothing to do with the actual cost or actual level of service that a normal user could scarf down. Back before the world wide web, I remember buying a 40MB (megabyte!) hard drive for about $500 and thinking that I got a great deal and what's more, that there was no possible way I could ever fill up this bad boy. And it was true, back then, only a power user could even think about filling up that kind of space. Things changed, not because they had to change, but because competition spurred innovation, which in turn led to incredible efficiencies. But without competition we'd still be loping along on 286SX's and 300 baud modems, getting charged by the minute for internet use, and listening to apologists saying that only pirates and power users would ever need anything faster .
What are you talking about? The weapon system HAS been tested, TFA points out it's "already been tested more than 11,000 times on around 700 volunteers." And there's nothing in article 2 requiring testing anyway. As much as you would like to apply common sense definitions to legal documents, it doesn't work. Furthermore, cataracts do not fall under the definition of "permanent blindness" in the protocol. Cataract surgery is a common outpatient procedure and can certainly restore one's sight to better than 20/200 corrected. Finally, as the previous poster was saying, even if there were some slight possibility of permanent blindness, that itself is not a war crime. Bullets can cause permanent blindness too, btw, as can mines, mortars, and almost anything on the battlefield, up to and including a blow on the head with a rock. If the worst thing a weapon has going for it is that it may, in some limited circumstances, cause cataracts, it would be one of the safest weapons ever devised.
So, in short, you're wrong. You have not demonstrated in any way that the use of this weapon could be classified as a war crime.
Because, of those billion crap developers, there are going to be thousands who will come to the same conclusion that you have, that Inventor is not powerful enough to deliver the concept they have in their heads, and they will then proceed out of necessity to learn an advanced programming language, and this will add to the ranks of "real" developers with "real" apps. Google's nurturing a future army.
Slashdot Mirror
True. According to this article, there are a few more authors who have beaten our Dick.
The article lists:
0. Bible/Homer/Shakespeare/Dickens
1. Stephen King
2. W. Somerset Maugham
3. Ernest Hemingway
and possibly, depending on the current count
4. John Grisham
Ian Fleming seems to be missing from that list, and I suspect others as well.
In fact, to reply to my own post... I just found ;-)
Not bothering to look this up but I think almost self-evidently the correct answer would be Shakespeare.
Sorry, I meant, WonderfullyHelpfulOpenOfficeorgSoftware.html!
Shoulda kept it simple and just called themselves "MegaOpenOffice.org" or something.
Where I live in the US
1) The police would typically not investigate an alleged crime like this - there are simply too many cases of petit larceny for them to go after every one with detectives.
2) Filing a police report does not constitute proof of a crime -- anybody can file a lost property report and claim that my property is theirs. Maybe they sold me an animal and then feel remorse and want it back. Maybe my ex-wife wants back the mangy cur dog she surrendered in the divorce decree, or she just wants to keep track of my whereabouts. Without laws like the DPA, it'd be pretty easy to buy your bf a chipped dog when times are good and then use it to track him down when he leaves you.
3) The remedy for something like this is to start a civil proceeding to compel the company to provide the location information, much in the same way that the RIAA sues to get names and IP addresses. Remember the old principle: "Possession is 9/10ths of the law." The current custodians of the dog should be considered not guilty/liable for anything until a theft or illegal conversion has been proven to have occurred in court. And the fact that the dog is still alive after so many years speaks against any exigent circumstances compelling emergency relief, in other words, there's no rush.
Reading the article, it appears that things work approximately the same way in the UK
So this is basically a non-story that relies on Joe Bloggs' ignorance of legal workings.
Primates? What, of all the rac--- oh, never mind, you're just pointing out that an excess of Catholic bishops discharging their "firearms" past Vespers has resulted in the Church losing membership, right?
Because the statute in question explicitly exempts works for hire. Which is why the GP's point is immaterial -- this orchestra is performing a work for hire, and the copyright holding company's charter explicitly releases the work into the public domain, which according to Stanford is ok. Of course they could be wrong but I trust Stanford more than I trust phiz187.
Three points:
First, I find it interesting, to say the least, that the plaintiff in this case isn't Disney, Columbia, 20th Century Fox, etc., but "Achte/Neunte Boll Kino Beteiligungs Gmbh & Co KG" a crapware movie distributor so obscure that Googling seems to 95% turn up links for this lawsuit. Wearing a tin foil cap, one could almost think they were acting as a front for the MAFIAA, much in the way that SCO was to some degree a front for Microsoft in its anti-Linux crusade. In the end, as we in the USA further lose our rights, the major studios will shrug and say, "It wasn't us, blame the Germans..."
Second point is that there seems to be a conflation of the concepts "Privacy" and "anonymity" not only in this thread but in the original legal documents.
Privacy = You may know who I am, but you don't know what I'm up to.
Anonymity = You may know what I'm up to, but you don't know who I am.
They're complementary terms, and both important rights, but for accuracy's sake we should be clear that, since the deed (file-sharing) is already known, just not the perpetrators, this is primarily a blow to anonymity.
Alternatively, given that it is accepted legal practice to refer to internet anonymity as "privacy of subscriber information," one can think of anonymity as a subset of privacy, "privacy of subscriber information" being one tine along with "privacy of home", "privacy of beliefs", "privacy of association," etc. Even so, treating this ruling as a generalized blow to privacy to some extent muddies and obscures what's going on, particularly the salient issue at hand: Should we be entitled to an expectation of anonymity/"privacy of subscriber information" on the internet?
Third, probably mentioned elsewhere by now, but here's the ruling. In point of fact, it's a mixed bag. While denying anonymity, it also says that jurisdiction may be a real problem for the plaintiffs.
That's true in certain countries, but not in the USA or Japan. But even so, an author wants to maximize retail sales first before relying on so-called "Public Lending Rights" royalties, which are generally quite small.
I disagree. It's not that laws don't need to be reformed. It's that these kind of kneejerk, ahistorical, situationally expedient solutions usually have unintended results that are worse than the problem they are attempting to mitigate.
Consider: Your dad passes away suddenly, and you're going through his old effects and papers and realize that his partner's been ripping him off for years to the tune of millions of dollars. What can you do about it? Nothing, in your world, because you had "lack of standing at the time the alleged infringement took place."
Or you buy a house next to a scenic lake. After you've been living there a couple of months you start to feel sick. It turns out that the old Duponsanto plant for years had been dumping toxic waste into the lake and polluting the land. They cleared out about a year before you moved in, so you have no recourse because of "lack of standing at the time the alleged infringement took place."
But, on top of that, although the wording in the article is ambiguous, it seems likely to me that Righthaven purchased the rights to the work while the alleged infringement was still ongoing. So even going by your litmus test they would still have standing to bring suit.
This has nothing to do with DMCA. It's just regular copyright. Generally speaking, you don't have to warn people in advance before taking them to court. And when notice is given (and not a statutory requirement), it's done, not as a favor to the putative defendant, but as a convenience to the plaintiff, in order to save on their own time and legal costs. But generally, the "warning" is the summons itself. Between service and the court date, there's plenty of time to hammer out a settlement if the parties are amenable to doing so.
Can you sue your landlord for 100x penalties for not providing necessary repairs?
Can you sue your cable company for 100x for cable outages?
Can you sue your job for 100x for unpaid overtime?
So why should some media company be allowed to collect 100x damages on a movie?
It's that sort of inequity, where corporate losses are given a higher value than deprivations suffered by human beings, that causes people to lose respect for the law.
Near as I can tell, the new iTouch is a proper superset of the old one in terms of functionality. They didn't pare back a single feature, so everything is at least the same, or improved, for the same price. I too am disappointed that the thing doesn't have every dream feature I ever wanted (128GB? mkv?) , but it's hard to hate on a solid improvement.
Lookie, you heathen scum! Creationism is vindicated! What's that you see glimmering by the end of the video? It's the eye of God!!! That proves He exists. Y'all scientists done hoist yerselves by your own atheistic little petards, aincha? Gaze into His ocular glory, that greenish, ominous, malevolent, downright wicked...hey wait a second, you're not fooling me, you used summa that false color tricknology to make Him look evil didn't ya?
Next time show us His true colors -- red, white and blue.
It's not them getting together and asking for 99c. It's Apple negotiating a 99c price point for their store. That's no more "collusion" than the 99c store in your neighborhood is.
Hold on, I don't see dreamchaser saying he wants to "force" anybody to do anything. He said he's against abortions for moral reasons, and he thinks foetuses "should" be allowed to grow to term. Sort of like, say, a person might be against eating meat for moral reasons, and might try to encourage other people to avoid eating it, but it doesn't mean they necessarily want to force others to be vegetarians. Or, I think everyone "should" learn a second language but I'm not trying, even a little bit, to make it a legal obligation and force it upon them unwillingly.
Now, it could very well be that dreamchaser wants to put "abortion = murder" into the law, but I'm not getting that reading from what he wrote.
Maybe so but don't worry, 10 years after THAT it won't matter any more, no-one will be allowed to manually drive a car anyway, they'll all be robotically controlled.
Or, instead of "free wifi with your coffee," they could offer "free coffee with your wifi." You pay for the wi-fi per 30/60 minutes, and get a cup and all the refills you want, and they'd still make money. Then the guy who sits around all day nursing one cup of coffee and web browsing is transformed from a leech into their best customer.
The reason he didn't feel his dog eating his toe is not just that he was drunk, but because diabetes causes peripheral neuropathy. When you have severe untreated diabetes, you often can't feel pain in your extremities, and untreated sores become gangrenous. So his being drunk was the least of his problems, his bigger problem was that his toe was decomposing and he couldn't feel it.
Interesting, but FYI by the 80's calculators were already at near-commodity pricing. The Casio Mini came out in 1972, and was priced at under $100. (One source has it at Y12,800 which at that time was the equivalent of about $45.)
Oh, sorry, never mind, rereading your sentence I see it was just a simple typo and you meant "early 1970s" for the first reference.
The complaint is that they are engaging in price-gouging activities, overcharging far beyond their costs. Imagine hypothetically that there were a dozen cable internet providers serving the same area. The ones with the smallest market share would, in an attempt to increase it, lower their prices to the barest bones. The bigger companies would initially try to compete just on the strength of their reputation, but eventually that would not be enough and they too would have to lower prices and/or build up their infrastructure to provide a better quality service for the same price. And competition would continue to ratchet up bandwidth and lower prices. This doesn't generally happen in the world of cable because the companies tend to have monopolies, whether by law, government contract or simply the high barrier to entering the cable market. All of which are anti-competitive, and cause the consumer to lose out. That's what the complaint is.
The fact that the companies get to by fiat decide that some minuscule level of service is "LITE" and that some slightly less minuscule level is "extreme" has nothing to do with the actual cost or actual level of service that a normal user could scarf down. Back before the world wide web, I remember buying a 40MB (megabyte!) hard drive for about $500 and thinking that I got a great deal and what's more, that there was no possible way I could ever fill up this bad boy. And it was true, back then, only a power user could even think about filling up that kind of space. Things changed, not because they had to change, but because competition spurred innovation, which in turn led to incredible efficiencies. But without competition we'd still be loping along on 286SX's and 300 baud modems, getting charged by the minute for internet use, and listening to apologists saying that only pirates and power users would ever need anything faster .
What are you talking about? The weapon system HAS been tested, TFA points out it's "already been tested more than 11,000 times on around 700 volunteers." And there's nothing in article 2 requiring testing anyway. As much as you would like to apply common sense definitions to legal documents, it doesn't work. Furthermore, cataracts do not fall under the definition of "permanent blindness" in the protocol. Cataract surgery is a common outpatient procedure and can certainly restore one's sight to better than 20/200 corrected. Finally, as the previous poster was saying, even if there were some slight possibility of permanent blindness, that itself is not a war crime. Bullets can cause permanent blindness too, btw, as can mines, mortars, and almost anything on the battlefield, up to and including a blow on the head with a rock. If the worst thing a weapon has going for it is that it may, in some limited circumstances, cause cataracts, it would be one of the safest weapons ever devised.
So, in short, you're wrong. You have not demonstrated in any way that the use of this weapon could be classified as a war crime.
Get your ass to Mars.
Because, of those billion crap developers, there are going to be thousands who will come to the same conclusion that you have, that Inventor is not powerful enough to deliver the concept they have in their heads, and they will then proceed out of necessity to learn an advanced programming language, and this will add to the ranks of "real" developers with "real" apps. Google's nurturing a future army.