The problem is it's not explicit. Fair Use is called a "limitation on exclusive use" meaning it's a limitation of copyright. And what considerations are used for determining Fair Use are outlined in copyright law. But it's all still at the judge's discretion, which means that you won't know if your use is "Fair Use" until you're sued and win the case.
I've wondered how these things are supposed to work, anyway. Doesn't the tracker still provide your IP address to everyone in the swarm? That's all the RIAA really needs to file the subpoena for information, and unless you actually plan on fighting them in court, that's all they need to extract that settlement from you.
Of course, any time that anyone brings up the fact that the information was offered multiple times and rejected by those in power, they cry "liberal conspiracy".
The information was there. The President chose to ignore it.
Where else are you going to store all those MP3s (legally obtained, of course)? On a single 200 GB Drive? Or a RAID 5 Array? Take you pick, I know where I will be storing mine.
What utter nonsense.
It looked to me like they were running over 14 drives (old, probably used ones at that) in that RAID5. For the moment, we will ignore the potential differences between the quality of those drives vs a new 200GB one. With 14 drives, you are 14 times more likely to have a drive failure--no problem, right? Because it's RAID5, so one failure isn't all that bad. Except that now you still have 13 drives, any of which could fail and cause you to lose all your data. RAID5 isn't particularly about redundancy, it's just a slight redundancy improvement over RAID0. With that many drives, the statistical liklihood of two failing is not that much worse than the statistical liklihood of one failing.
From TFA: Major League Baseball has claimed that intellectual property law makes it illegal for fantasy league operators to "commercially exploit the identities and statistical profiles" of big league players.
The more important issue is "identities." If they win this suit, tabloids, "entertainment" magazines about celebrities, news sites which talk about celebrities, etc. will all disappear or have to pay royalties for use of the identity of the celebrity. So personally, I'm hoping MLB wins this one, just so I don't have to read about Paris Hilton every other day.
Firbird is your web browser? That's old enough that it's gotta have some security holes.
And as long as we're being pedantic, Thunderbird has "multiple SMTP server settings". What it doesn't have is a way to choose which server you want on-the-fly during composition. I assume this is what you are actually looking for, since "4 SMTP servers for 1 account" doesn't make much sense--to me, it implies wanting to send through all 4 rather than being able to choose which server to send through for any given composition.
I imagine that very, very few programs will do a good job of converting e-mails:) The OP might have a slightly easier time of it converting to a third, common format (such as mbox) as a go-between. Or better yet, Maildir, if there are easy conversion scripts for that.
The real solution would be to include WMF support, but disable it. For those 0.014% of people that need it, they or the software package they plan to use can enable it.
It's not that tough a concept. Linux distros did it a long, long time ago (disabling services by default).
The way the GP wrote it, you could invest $100 and not pay taxes on that money until the movie made you more than $100. So he'd actually pay $30 less. (That's all for my nitpicking)
Whether such an investment is useful depends upon the tax code, particularly if there are tax brackets. Investing in a sure loser could drop you to just below your current bracket, which, in some cases, means you earn more post-tax income. Heck, if the GP is right, and your investment is 100% deductible until it makes money, then even if the film simply breaks even, you're paying less in taxes.
To extend your example, an investor invests $100 in a $10mil movie. The movie makes $10mil, so the investor gets $100 back. That money is (apparently) not taxed--only film profits are--so this is effectively a shelter. $100 of the investor's income for that year is not counted as income for tax purposes, even though he broke even on the investment. Even small losses could mean a net gain.
I question whether this is an accurate representation of the law, but it's possible. Someone else mentioned that they were trying to close that hole, so maybe there's some truth to it.
You don't pay for your library card, do you? I wouldn't bitch about DRM if I was getting the music for free. And interestingly, you can do anything with your books that you can do with a CD, regarding copying, even if it came from the library.
It's fine if the model works for you, but it doesn't work for everyone. I'd like to listen to music in my car. I'd like to use my PDA to listen to music instead of an iPod/WMA-enabled device. As such, I care about what I can do with the music I have. I suspect that many people fall on both sides of the issue.
A few points: CDs, records... music on a physical medium have resale value. Should your taste in music change, you can sell your old stuff to fund your new collection. And don't get me started on old, out of production LPs.
There's also a fair amount of value in being able to control your music. I'm fairly certain that Urge won't be compatible with Linux (Maybe if DVD Jon takes an interest in it....) or Mac. There will likely be restrictions on burning your music to audio CD and which portable players it will play in, unlike CDs which can generally be ripped to play on anything.
No, I believe that there's a great value in owning a physical representation of your music. $0.99 per track (per the iTunes model) is almost ok with me given that I can burn the tracks to a CD and use DeDRMs if I want to play it elsewhere. The buffet model ala Napster 2.0 does not allow you to burn tracks (unless you pay the "purchase" fee for each track you wish to burn--double dipping!). I assume Urge will be the same way.
Well I've got an RPC-1 drive. And I actually wouldn't mind running Vista, as it will supposedly use hardware acceleration for the graphics engine and segregate user-mode and kernel-mode more, leading to what should be a more stable system overall.
But I don't want to sacrifice my region-2 DVD collection in order to do so. So here's one for you.
(a) Criminal Infringement. - Any person who infringes a copyright willfully either -
(1) for purposes of commercial advantage or private financial gain, or
(2) by the reproduction or distribution, including by electronic means, during any 180-day period, of 1 or more copies or phonorecords of 1 or more copyrighted works, which have a total retail value of more than $1,000,
shall be punished as provided under section 2319 of title 18, United States Code. For purposes of this subsection, evidence of reproduction or distribution of a copyrighted work, by itself, shall not be sufficient to establish willful infringement.
(b) Forfeiture and Destruction. - When any person is convicted of any violation of subsection (a), the court in its judgment of conviction shall, in addition to the penalty therein prescribed, order the forfeiture and destruction or other disposition of all infringing copies or phonorecords and all implements, devices, or equipment used in the manufacture of such infringing copies or phonorecords.
(c) Fraudulent Copyright Notice. - Any person who, with fraudulent intent, places on any article a notice of copyright or words of the same purport that such person knows to be false, or who, with fraudulent intent, publicly distributes or imports for public distribution any article bearing such notice or words that such person knows to be false, shall be fined not more than $2,500.
(d) Fraudulent Removal of Copyright Notice. - Any person who, with fraudulent intent, removes or alters any notice of copyright appearing on a copy of a copyrighted work shall be fined not more than $2,500.
(e) False Representation. - Any person who knowingly makes a false representation of a material fact in the application for copyright registration provided for by section 409, or in any written statement filed in connection with the application, shall be fined not more than $2,500.
(f) Rights of Attribution and Integrity. - Nothing in this section applies to infringement of the rights conferred by section 106A(a).
So actually, in some cases, it is criminal. Generally we're not talking about personal use infringement, but with broadband as prevelant as it is, it's not outside the realm of possibility that someone would download $1000 worth of copyrighted material in 180 days. That's 50 DVDRips (assuming $20 per rip--not unreasonable given MSRP is usually higher), 40ish CDs, and really, who knows how many currently-in-theater movies (given that it's pretty difficult to establish a dollar value worth on the item). But on top of all of that, you have to consider uploads. If you get your material from a torrent, you could potentially be seeding hundreds of people. You can argue about whether giving half of a download to someone constitutes a copy or what, but realistically, we'll never know how the courts are going to find this until a suit happens.
I think you missed his point. He's differentiating between theft (taking something from someone--you now have it and they do not) and copyright infringement--making an unauthorized copy of a piece of art.
It's a semantic difference, because it's still against the law. But if you could know without the shadow of a doubt that you would never ever ever purchase that art, then it would truly harm no one for you to copy it without authorization. Unfortunately, it's impossible to know beyond the shadow of a doubt that you'd never in the future buy that art.
Yes, I'm positive that the RIAA micromanages their contractors such that they know when they break the law in their subpoenas. That's probably why they contract out in the first place.
Also, you don't know how long the contract is for or if bad firms/are/ renewed, do you?
Intent has a huge impact on it. Paying someone with the intent that they break a law is illegal. But if you pay someone to do a job and they perform crappily, and break a couple of laws in the process, your accountability is minor if any at all.
And anyway, my point is that the RIAA isn't the one failing to comply. People make them out to be these ginormous assholes--and maybe they are--but don't ascribe things to them which they did not do.
A few points before you jump on the "I hate the RIAA bandwagon."
1) They contract out their infringement-detection. This means that it's not the RIAA who isn't conforming to the law, it's the contractor. This is like getting mad at the telemarketer who calls you instead of the company that employs them, or the company which gave them the contract to sell their product.
2) I'm sure that the RIAA contracts out to multiple businesses for infringement-detection. One group might follow the rules more rigidly than another. I made a reply to the grand-parent detailing my experience with RIAA infringement notices.
The RIAA is exercising their rights under the law. They are attempting to protect their copyrights by using the law. You may not like copyrights or the fact that a company can subpoena your personal information, but if this is the case, you should argue that the government should change the rules rather than complaining about the people who are using the rules.
Exposition: I am a network security analyst for a university. We have a group that solely handles "incidents" such as copyright infringement, spam notices, etc. That team delivers (and probably filters) incidents to the security group, who then scan the firewall logs for any evidence of network activity with the intersection of the timestamps, IP, and ports reported. We then return that information plus the name of the alleged infringer to the incident team.
I don't know if the RIAA uses multiple firms or if the incident team filters out the infringement notices, but I have never once received a notice without a timestamp. The notices I receive have the IP, timestamp, ports, p2p network, and infringing filename. We occasionally get the IP address that detected the infringement, too.
This tells me one of two things: 1) You're exaggerating or outright lying, because every notice I receive has the appropriate information. or 2) The incident team returns notices which do not include the necessary information, in which case your ISP could do the exact same thing.
The worst of it is, you can't upgrade to a better 3D card without re-buying the TV tuner features again and again, since if you use them as a secondary card (PCI versions) the TV features don't work! I tend to upgrade my video card and CPU a lot more often than I need to upgrade me TV-in ability. I've since switched to stand-alone generic PCI tuner cards, which work much better, and don't get in the way of upgrading my main AGP or PCI-express video card when I need to play newer 3D games.
This is the best point I've ever seen anyone make against the AiW series (or any combined 3D/Capture card, for that matter). Considering that the AiW version of the card can apparently cost over $100 more than the base card, it's definitely something to consider, even without the added headache of the drivers (I had a 9600 AiW running on Win2k for awhile--every reinstall, you had to install the drivers in a very specific order or you didn't show TV on the machine).
Fine--but is there any indication that these ramps would replace gasoline taxes? More likely they'd be in addition, as most Americans wouldn't understand that they're losing gas mileage.
Slashdot Mirror
Fair use is written into law:
e s/92chap1.html#107
http://fairuse.stanford.edu/primary_materials/cod
The problem is it's not explicit. Fair Use is called a "limitation on exclusive use" meaning it's a limitation of copyright. And what considerations are used for determining Fair Use are outlined in copyright law. But it's all still at the judge's discretion, which means that you won't know if your use is "Fair Use" until you're sued and win the case.
I've wondered how these things are supposed to work, anyway. Doesn't the tracker still provide your IP address to everyone in the swarm? That's all the RIAA really needs to file the subpoena for information, and unless you actually plan on fighting them in court, that's all they need to extract that settlement from you.
Of course, any time that anyone brings up the fact that the information was offered multiple times and rejected by those in power, they cry "liberal conspiracy".
The information was there. The President chose to ignore it.
Where else are you going to store all those MP3s (legally obtained, of course)? On a single 200 GB Drive? Or a RAID 5 Array? Take you pick, I know where I will be storing mine.
What utter nonsense.
It looked to me like they were running over 14 drives (old, probably used ones at that) in that RAID5. For the moment, we will ignore the potential differences between the quality of those drives vs a new 200GB one. With 14 drives, you are 14 times more likely to have a drive failure--no problem, right? Because it's RAID5, so one failure isn't all that bad. Except that now you still have 13 drives, any of which could fail and cause you to lose all your data. RAID5 isn't particularly about redundancy, it's just a slight redundancy improvement over RAID0. With that many drives, the statistical liklihood of two failing is not that much worse than the statistical liklihood of one failing.
Were you planning on using that for more than a fileserver? Otherwise, I can't fathom going AMD64 on there.
From TFA:
Major League Baseball has claimed that intellectual property law makes it illegal for fantasy league operators to "commercially exploit the identities and statistical profiles" of big league players.
The more important issue is "identities." If they win this suit, tabloids, "entertainment" magazines about celebrities, news sites which talk about celebrities, etc. will all disappear or have to pay royalties for use of the identity of the celebrity. So personally, I'm hoping MLB wins this one, just so I don't have to read about Paris Hilton every other day.
Firbird is your web browser? That's old enough that it's gotta have some security holes.
And as long as we're being pedantic, Thunderbird has "multiple SMTP server settings". What it doesn't have is a way to choose which server you want on-the-fly during composition. I assume this is what you are actually looking for, since "4 SMTP servers for 1 account" doesn't make much sense--to me, it implies wanting to send through all 4 rather than being able to choose which server to send through for any given composition.
I imagine that very, very few programs will do a good job of converting e-mails :) The OP might have a slightly easier time of it converting to a third, common format (such as mbox) as a go-between. Or better yet, Maildir, if there are easy conversion scripts for that.
The real solution would be to include WMF support, but disable it. For those 0.014% of people that need it, they or the software package they plan to use can enable it.
It's not that tough a concept. Linux distros did it a long, long time ago (disabling services by default).
Doesn't look like anyone else even noticed.
The way the GP wrote it, you could invest $100 and not pay taxes on that money until the movie made you more than $100. So he'd actually pay $30 less. (That's all for my nitpicking)
Whether such an investment is useful depends upon the tax code, particularly if there are tax brackets. Investing in a sure loser could drop you to just below your current bracket, which, in some cases, means you earn more post-tax income. Heck, if the GP is right, and your investment is 100% deductible until it makes money, then even if the film simply breaks even, you're paying less in taxes.
To extend your example, an investor invests $100 in a $10mil movie. The movie makes $10mil, so the investor gets $100 back. That money is (apparently) not taxed--only film profits are--so this is effectively a shelter. $100 of the investor's income for that year is not counted as income for tax purposes, even though he broke even on the investment. Even small losses could mean a net gain.
I question whether this is an accurate representation of the law, but it's possible. Someone else mentioned that they were trying to close that hole, so maybe there's some truth to it.
You don't pay for your library card, do you? I wouldn't bitch about DRM if I was getting the music for free. And interestingly, you can do anything with your books that you can do with a CD, regarding copying, even if it came from the library.
It's fine if the model works for you, but it doesn't work for everyone. I'd like to listen to music in my car. I'd like to use my PDA to listen to music instead of an iPod/WMA-enabled device. As such, I care about what I can do with the music I have. I suspect that many people fall on both sides of the issue.
A few points:
CDs, records... music on a physical medium have resale value. Should your taste in music change, you can sell your old stuff to fund your new collection. And don't get me started on old, out of production LPs.
There's also a fair amount of value in being able to control your music. I'm fairly certain that Urge won't be compatible with Linux (Maybe if DVD Jon takes an interest in it....) or Mac. There will likely be restrictions on burning your music to audio CD and which portable players it will play in, unlike CDs which can generally be ripped to play on anything.
No, I believe that there's a great value in owning a physical representation of your music. $0.99 per track (per the iTunes model) is almost ok with me given that I can burn the tracks to a CD and use DeDRMs if I want to play it elsewhere. The buffet model ala Napster 2.0 does not allow you to burn tracks (unless you pay the "purchase" fee for each track you wish to burn--double dipping!). I assume Urge will be the same way.
It is a revision, but it is the current wording of the law. I think it's pretty absurd, but that's the sort of government you can buy these days.
Well I've got an RPC-1 drive. And I actually wouldn't mind running Vista, as it will supposedly use hardware acceleration for the graphics engine and segregate user-mode and kernel-mode more, leading to what should be a more stable system overall.
But I don't want to sacrifice my region-2 DVD collection in order to do so. So here's one for you.
506. Criminal offenses5
(a) Criminal Infringement. - Any person who infringes a copyright willfully either -
(1) for purposes of commercial advantage or private financial gain, or
(2) by the reproduction or distribution, including by electronic means, during any 180-day period, of 1 or more copies or phonorecords of 1 or more copyrighted works, which have a total retail value of more than $1,000,
shall be punished as provided under section 2319 of title 18, United States Code. For purposes of this subsection, evidence of reproduction or distribution of a copyrighted work, by itself, shall not be sufficient to establish willful infringement.
(b) Forfeiture and Destruction. - When any person is convicted of any violation of subsection (a), the court in its judgment of conviction shall, in addition to the penalty therein prescribed, order the forfeiture and destruction or other disposition of all infringing copies or phonorecords and all implements, devices, or equipment used in the manufacture of such infringing copies or phonorecords.
(c) Fraudulent Copyright Notice. - Any person who, with fraudulent intent, places on any article a notice of copyright or words of the same purport that such person knows to be false, or who, with fraudulent intent, publicly distributes or imports for public distribution any article bearing such notice or words that such person knows to be false, shall be fined not more than $2,500.
(d) Fraudulent Removal of Copyright Notice. - Any person who, with fraudulent intent, removes or alters any notice of copyright appearing on a copy of a copyrighted work shall be fined not more than $2,500.
(e) False Representation. - Any person who knowingly makes a false representation of a material fact in the application for copyright registration provided for by section 409, or in any written statement filed in connection with the application, shall be fined not more than $2,500.
(f) Rights of Attribution and Integrity. - Nothing in this section applies to infringement of the rights conferred by section 106A(a).
So actually, in some cases, it is criminal. Generally we're not talking about personal use infringement, but with broadband as prevelant as it is, it's not outside the realm of possibility that someone would download $1000 worth of copyrighted material in 180 days. That's 50 DVDRips (assuming $20 per rip--not unreasonable given MSRP is usually higher), 40ish CDs, and really, who knows how many currently-in-theater movies (given that it's pretty difficult to establish a dollar value worth on the item). But on top of all of that, you have to consider uploads. If you get your material from a torrent, you could potentially be seeding hundreds of people. You can argue about whether giving half of a download to someone constitutes a copy or what, but realistically, we'll never know how the courts are going to find this until a suit happens.
I think you missed his point. He's differentiating between theft (taking something from someone--you now have it and they do not) and copyright infringement--making an unauthorized copy of a piece of art.
It's a semantic difference, because it's still against the law. But if you could know without the shadow of a doubt that you would never ever ever purchase that art, then it would truly harm no one for you to copy it without authorization. Unfortunately, it's impossible to know beyond the shadow of a doubt that you'd never in the future buy that art.
Yes, I'm positive that the RIAA micromanages their contractors such that they know when they break the law in their subpoenas. That's probably why they contract out in the first place.
/are/ renewed, do you?
Also, you don't know how long the contract is for or if bad firms
And the government can probably break your encryption as easily as opening an envelope.
Intent has a huge impact on it. Paying someone with the intent that they break a law is illegal. But if you pay someone to do a job and they perform crappily, and break a couple of laws in the process, your accountability is minor if any at all.
And anyway, my point is that the RIAA isn't the one failing to comply. People make them out to be these ginormous assholes--and maybe they are--but don't ascribe things to them which they did not do.
A few points before you jump on the "I hate the RIAA bandwagon."
1) They contract out their infringement-detection. This means that it's not the RIAA who isn't conforming to the law, it's the contractor. This is like getting mad at the telemarketer who calls you instead of the company that employs them, or the company which gave them the contract to sell their product.
2) I'm sure that the RIAA contracts out to multiple businesses for infringement-detection. One group might follow the rules more rigidly than another. I made a reply to the grand-parent detailing my experience with RIAA infringement notices.
The RIAA is exercising their rights under the law. They are attempting to protect their copyrights by using the law. You may not like copyrights or the fact that a company can subpoena your personal information, but if this is the case, you should argue that the government should change the rules rather than complaining about the people who are using the rules.
Exposition: I am a network security analyst for a university. We have a group that solely handles "incidents" such as copyright infringement, spam notices, etc. That team delivers (and probably filters) incidents to the security group, who then scan the firewall logs for any evidence of network activity with the intersection of the timestamps, IP, and ports reported. We then return that information plus the name of the alleged infringer to the incident team.
I don't know if the RIAA uses multiple firms or if the incident team filters out the infringement notices, but I have never once received a notice without a timestamp. The notices I receive have the IP, timestamp, ports, p2p network, and infringing filename. We occasionally get the IP address that detected the infringement, too.
This tells me one of two things: 1) You're exaggerating or outright lying, because every notice I receive has the appropriate information.
or
2) The incident team returns notices which do not include the necessary information, in which case your ISP could do the exact same thing.
The worst of it is, you can't upgrade to a better 3D card without re-buying the TV tuner features again and again, since if you use them as a secondary card (PCI versions) the TV features don't work! I tend to upgrade my video card and CPU a lot more often than I need to upgrade me TV-in ability. I've since switched to stand-alone generic PCI tuner cards, which work much better, and don't get in the way of upgrading my main AGP or PCI-express video card when I need to play newer 3D games.
This is the best point I've ever seen anyone make against the AiW series (or any combined 3D/Capture card, for that matter). Considering that the AiW version of the card can apparently cost over $100 more than the base card, it's definitely something to consider, even without the added headache of the drivers (I had a 9600 AiW running on Win2k for awhile--every reinstall, you had to install the drivers in a very specific order or you didn't show TV on the machine).
at launch. That's the only reason they can make this claim without being laughed out of the universe.
Some story awhile back detailed this and made the example of "Oblivion" as a launch title, even though it won't be available until 2006.
Spin, spin, spin....
Fine--but is there any indication that these ramps would replace gasoline taxes? More likely they'd be in addition, as most Americans wouldn't understand that they're losing gas mileage.