I hate Microsoft as much as anyone, but that "never give an inch" bit sounds more like Bill Gates than Slashdot.
Bill Gates only has that "never give an inch" policy because he doesn't have an inch to give. What do you think "Microsoft" means?
Seriously, though, I think this is right. While I think even the outright posting of the entire spec is somewhat defensible, it's best to pick your fights. I think the issue of links to infringing material is probably more likely to lead to interesting case law, and showing flexibility on the issue of wholesale infringement while still choosing to fight the hyperlink issue will look better to a judge than complete recalcitrance.
Click the Refresh button, or try again later. If you typed the page address in the Address bar, make sure that it is spelled correctly.
Stop right there, Mister! That's a copyrighted trade secret and it is a FELONY to possess it without signing the EULA in blood and returning it in triplicate, with your immortal soul as an enclosure. You're looking at some serious time, Mister!
Why not use this against MS and "purport" to be the owner of any or all software on MS websites. Send a formal notification as required. According to the Act, MS has to remove the software for a 15 day hiatus.
No, they don't. The ISP is only required to comply with such notification if they wish to take advantage of the "safe harbor" provisions of the DMCA. The only penalty for not doing so is that they don't receive immunity from copyright liability if they don't, and would have to defend an infringement suit.
Further, the declaration is made under penalty of perjury, so it would be a pretty good way to get a ticket to take "Mr. Bubba's Wild Ride" in the slammer.
"Finally, Erlich newly emphasizes in his Reply that the works he posted were not secrets because he received them through proper means: eight of the documents were allegedly previously posted anonymously to a public portion of the Internet and one of the documents (item 1 of Exhibit B) allegedly came to Erlich anonymously through the U.S. mail. Erlich claims that because the alleged trade secrets were received from "public sources," they should lose their trade secret protection. Although the Internet is a new technology, it requires no great leap to conclude that because more than 25 million people could have accessed the newsgroup postings from which Erlich alleges he received the Exhibit B works, those works would lose their status as secrets. While the Internet has not reached the status where a temporary posting on a newsgroup is akin to publication in a major newspaper or on a television network, those with an interest in using the Church's trade secrets to compete with the Church are likely to look to the newsgroup. Thus, posting works to the Internet makes them "generally known" to the relevant people -- the potential "competitors" of the Church.
"The court is troubled by the notion that any Internet user, including those using "anonymous remailers" [29] to protect their identity, can destroy valuable intellectual property rights by posting them over the Internet, especially given the fact that there is little opportunity to screen postings before they are made. See Eduardo M. Carreras, "Intellectual Property: First Casualty on the Information Highway," 13 No. 1 ACCA Docket 26 (Westlaw" ("Carreras")(Jan.-Feb. 1995) at *29-*32 (suggesting that trade secret protection is lost as soon as information is disclosed on the Internet)."
But more recently:
"The Court is not persuaded that trade secret status should be deemed destroyed at this stage merely by the posting of the trade secret to the Internet. Religious Technology Center v. Netcom on-Line.com supra. To hold otherwise would do nothing less than encourage misappropriaters of trade secrets to post the fruits of their wrongdoing on the Internet as quickly as possible and as widely as possible thereby destroying a trade secret forever. Such a holding would not be prudent in this age of the Internet. Plaintiffs moved expeditiously, reasonably and responsibly to protect their proprietary information as soon as they discovered it had been disclosed by investigating, sending cease and desist letters all over the world and then filing suit against those who refused within two months of the disclosure. The Court is satisfied that trade secret status has not been destroyed." From DVD CCA v. McLaughlin, Bunner et al. (Jan. 20, 2000)
I am satisfied that the Court is full of shit. However expeditiously DVD CCA acted, the material was already released. The honorable judge is a moron--however, at least one court *has* interpreted trade secrets as somehow able to be magically restored after public disclosure, flying in the face of all prior case law. So some other judge could make a ruling equally idiotic.
By Microsoft's reasoning concerning the links, if I comment that slashdot has copies of this Kerberos material, and that the article in the front page has discussions which contain links to it, and to discussions of how to "circumvent" the EULA, such as by opening it with winzip, then I have violated their copyrights by mentioning slashdot.
That's always good advice. And IANALBIWPMO. (I Am Not A Lawyer But I Watched Perry Mason Once.)
The difficulty is knowing exactly what the law is. I'm pretty certain that the wholesale posting is a copyright infringement. I'm not sure about something like this link, although clicking it will cause a copyright infringement. I'd say there's a fairly strong but still debatable case there. I state for the record that I'm operating under the assumption that it isn't an infringement to do this. The case is even weaker if I comment that the URL is http://free-dvd.org.lu/kerberos.pdf without the tag making it clickable. Again, I operate under the assumption that citing an URL is not an infringement.
If I comment that one can "circumvent" the EULA by opening it with winzip, I think the case for that being copyright infringement is pitiful, and on the verge of frivolous.
If I quote the specification as saying "If you have not downloaded the Specification from Microsoft's website and agreed to the terms and conditions of the Agreement, you are not an authorized licensee of the Specification" and then go on to state that this is some pretty silly shit, and the sort of nonsense that gets Microsoft a reputation as a bunch of morons, that is within Fair Use.
My personal advice to slashdot would be to remove the direct copyright infringements, such as this. The links are up to their legal counsel. As for "circumvention" instructions like commenting that you can open the damn thing with winzip, I'd say they can go blow.
Alternately, one could test the counternotification provisions of the DMCA by yanking everything they ask for, then waiting for counternotifications. I'm not sure how well this would work, as most people seem to be more interested in whining about the law than using it.
Recall that before the notification/counternotification provisions of the DMCA, a copyright complaint would result in material being yanked without any provisions for getting it replaced, no matter how bogus the complaint. The DMCA at least allows the ISP to be taken off the hook in the case of copyright infringement, so long as they follow the DMCA provisions relating to notification. Further, once the counternotification card has been played, the complaining party has nothing to do but put up or shut up.
There are a lot of questionable provisions in the DMCA, especially the parts about circumventing "devices," which are pretty vague about what these are, but the liability limitation parts of it are good, or at least better than what we had before.
Nope. The accuser doesn't have to swear to anything. In keeping with the spirit of the DMCA, it's the accused who has to come forward and under the penalty of perjury state that he is innocent. Ain't DMCA wonderful?
Wrong. Among other requirements of a DMCA notification is that it include:
"(vi) A statement that the information in the notification is accurate, and under penalty of perjury, that the complaining party is authorized to act on behalf of the owner of an exclusive right that is allegedly infringed."
A sizable segment of blame goes to the authors of the finger and sendmail daemons that the Worm used to thrive and propogate. Their careless programming caused the environment, and they should have been able to recognize the danger well before RTM started to code.
Of course, that's about the rsh and rexec exploits, but fingerd was already known to be buggy and a program like sendmail (which by its nature gives at least limited file access to your server by outside, untrusted hosts) is tricky to secure, and was also known to be imperfect.
My first choice would be splitting MS into a systems company and an applications company. I'm happy (and very surprised) that those seem to be the two options that the court is seriously considering.
I've been generally impressed by the rulings of Judge Jackson in this case. I knew he knew what he was doing when during the course of the pretrial hearings he was told that it would be impossible to remove IE from Win95 without completely crippling the system, and he went home and did it himself, then returned to the court with harsh words for Microsoft. He was not also terribly impressed by the way they broke a consent decree arrived at in an earlier case. I don't think he's going to be bamboozled by their bafflegab.
My initial impression that Judge Jackson knew what he was doing was confirmed by the fin ding of fact and then the dec ision. The proposal to split up Microsoft into two companies is also well-considered.
While I generally am leery of government interference in business, this case clearly involves blatant antitrust violations and is precisely what the Sherman Act was drafted to prevent.
As for Microsoft's whining about "innovation," and how this damages their right to "innovate," I hardly see how ripping off betas of your competitors' products, reverse-engineering them, then sending out goons to force computer manufacturers to use them constitutes "innovation." At most it is an "innovative" form of racketeering.
To be honest, I don't think the remedy goes far enough. I'd like to see Microsoft split up into about a dozen corporations. However, I'll readily confess that this is based more on blind hatred and animosity toward Microsoft than any valid legal reasoning.
Would you prefer to pay for content than to view ads? Because content-oriented sites including/.) rely on ads to make money. Otherwise they will have to charge money for subscriptions -- or fold up shop and go home! Advertisers (tv, web, etc) are doing you a favor by letting you view things for free
Advertisers who spam me with Java crap and engage in unauthorized invasion of privacy are doing me NO favors whatsoever. In fact, they are sucking up bandwidth I'm paying for to show me crap I don't want to see.
I'm not talking about all advertisements--for example, the advertisements I've seen on/. are not offensive and I have no problem with them. I've even clicked on a couple. But intrusive ads faking error messages or dialogue boxes, sneaky crap placed in cookies, and other offensive behavior is intolerable to me and I won't put up with it. And anyone whose website has such nonsense on it deserves to go under.
While I used to be a fanatical Usenet anti-commerce freak back in the late eighties, I changed my tune during the brouhaha that erupted when a bunch of geeks were frothing at the mouth about Yahoo putting ads on their site. They were entirely glad to use the site for free endlessly, while others did the work to keep it going, but not to allow it to make revenue. I decided at that point that commerce was good for the Internet, and should actually be encouraged.
That does NOT mean I have to put up with irresponsible commerce, though, or view it as a favor of some sort when some imbecile spams me with tons of useless buggy Java crap I don't want.
However, I don't see how it's relevant to the MP3 case. Mere lists are uncopyrightable, as are facts or ideas themselves. It is the expression of ideas that is copyrightable.
By this logic, the white pages are not copyrightable, but a set of yellow pages which separates businesses into categories is.
Court records, for example, are not copyrighted (although it may be copyright infringement to copy copyrighted materials which happen to appear in court records). However, the citation scheme and page numbering used by West *is* copyrighted.
In either case, I don't see how it applies to the copying of music files by mp3.com, which are not lists but musical works.
Incidentally, how do I stop my posts from all spilling out in one line without typing a bunch of goddamn paragraph tags?
The astronomers used the telescope to bounce radar signals off Kleopatra. With sophisticated computer-analysis techniques, they decoded the echoes, transformed them into images, and assembled a computer model of the asteroid's shape. The Arecibo telescope underwent major upgrades in the 1990s, which dramatically improved its sensitivity and made it feasible to image more distant objects. These new radar images were obtained when Kleopatra was about 106 million miles (171 million kilometers) from Earth. Travelling at the speed of light, the transmitted signal took about 19 minutes to make the round trip to Kleopatra and back. "Getting images of Kleopatra from Arecibo was like using a Los Angeles telescope the size of the human eye's lens to image a car in New York," Ostro said. From the article at JPL. Sounds fun--apologies if my link is broken, I'm still messing around with this.
http://laws.findlaw.com/9th/2/978/1093.html WAITS v. FRITO-LAY, INC., 978 F.2d 1093 (9th Cir. 1992) seems to be a previous case tried by Howard King, in which he represented Tom Waits in suing Frito-Lay for using a Waits sound-alike in a commercial based on Waits' "Step Right Up."
This is assuming it's the same Howard King.
http://laws.findlaw.com/9th/2/979/772.html involves this same Howard King but isn't terribly interesting.
Howard King is also a lawyer for The Temptations.
http://lawstreet.com/celebrity/dr_dre/cs01.html is an article about a previous suit by Dr. Dre over the use of the phrase "The Chronic."
http://chartattack.com/damn/032098.html is another Metallica suit about a bootleg tape called "Bay Area Thrashers." Some bogon took some early demo tapes, added crowd noise and then sold it as a "live" tape. This story identifies Howard King as Metallica's "manager" but that sounds bogus.
If they go ahead and publicly release a list like this, and it turns out they have been sloppy and falsely identified people as copyright infringers, they may just open themselves up for a number of massive defamation suits by people they have falsely identified and libelled. Further, if they're supplying Napster with a *paper* list of something that should be delivered as a flat database on electronic media, Napster may be able to ignore their request based on the deliberately burdensome manner it was delivered in. Obviously any such list was machine-generated and should be delivered that way, and delivering it on paper (60,000 pages of documents) is just bogus.
From what I can tell, this lawsuit is utterly bogus and is precluded by the Digital Millennium Copyright Act.
http://www.napster.com/dmca.html is the DMCA required statement which indicates Napster's registered DMCA agent, and requires that copyright infringement complaints comply with the provisions for a copyright infringement notice required by the DMCA.
"Their only response was (to say that) the songs aren't on their servers, and if (Young) will send a letter under penalty of perjury identifying specific songs and users that they would restrict those users," King said.
"That was not a satisfactory response. That was a comical response."
King's comment is utterly moronic and demonstrates a complete ignorance of the DMCA provisions relating to infringement. A notice saying "Quit infringing my copyrights you bad man" is insufficient. What is required is a signed statement, sworn under penalty of perjury. Napster's response was completely appropriate, if King's ignorant comment is any indication of what he included in his cease and desist letter.
If that cease and desist letter did not include such a statement sworn under penalty of perjury, it is entirely without weight and Napster is immune to prosecution.
"Their only response was (to say that) the songs aren't on their servers, and if (Young) will send a letter under penalty of perjury identifying specific songs and users that they would restrict those users," King said. "That was not a satisfactory response. That was a comical response." This supposed lawyer is an idiot. Under the new Digital Millennium Copyright Act, a company with a registered agent is protected from copyright infringement suits if they abide by the notification provisions of the law. One of these provisions is that those who complain of copyright infringement (or their agents) are supposed to provide a statement (under penalty of perjury) as to the specific infringing works and enough detail that the company contacted can reasonably be expected to be able to find the infringing material. That moron lawyer is apparently ignorant and his lawsuit will be thrown out under DMCA provisions, if his ignorant comment is any indication as to the legal notice he provided Napster.
Slashdot Mirror
I hate Microsoft as much as anyone, but that "never give an inch" bit sounds more like Bill Gates than Slashdot.
Bill Gates only has that "never give an inch" policy because he doesn't have an inch to give. What do you think "Microsoft" means?
Seriously, though, I think this is right. While I think even the outright posting of the entire spec is somewhat defensible, it's best to pick your fights. I think the issue of links to infringing material is probably more likely to lead to interesting case law, and showing flexibility on the issue of wholesale infringement while still choosing to fight the hyperlink issue will look better to a judge than complete recalcitrance.
My suggestion- kick them in the PR department.
Kick them in the PR department AND short their stock at the same time.
Fun AND profit.
Well now that you mention it, a few years ago someone got near enough to Bill to slap a creampie (almost two) into his face.
Here is a web page about the dude responsible for the Bill Gates pie-facing.
Here is a video of the incident.
OK, it's moderately offtopic but what the hey?
Click the Refresh button, or try again later. If you typed the page address in the Address bar, make sure that it is spelled correctly.
Stop right there, Mister! That's a copyrighted trade secret and it is a FELONY to possess it without signing the EULA in blood and returning it in triplicate, with your immortal soul as an enclosure. You're looking at some serious time, Mister!
Why not use this against MS and "purport" to be the owner of any or all software on MS websites. Send a formal notification as required. According to the Act, MS has to remove the software for a 15 day hiatus.
No, they don't. The ISP is only required to comply with such notification if they wish to take advantage of the "safe harbor" provisions of the DMCA. The only penalty for not doing so is that they don't receive immunity from copyright liability if they don't, and would have to defend an infringement suit.
Further, the declaration is made under penalty of perjury, so it would be a pretty good way to get a ticket to take "Mr. Bubba's Wild Ride" in the slammer.
I know it's been mentioned that there is legal precident that this CAN'T be a trade secret anymore, but better safe than sorry I always say.
"Once trade secrets have been exposed to the public, they cannot later be recalled." In re: Remington Arms Co., 952 F.2d 1029, 1033 (8th Cir. 1991)
from Religious Technology Center v. Netcom On-Line Communication Services, Inc., 923 F. Supp. 1231 (N.D. Cal. 1995)
"Finally, Erlich newly emphasizes in his Reply that the works he posted were not secrets because he received them through proper means: eight of the documents were allegedly previously posted anonymously to a public portion of the Internet and one of the documents (item 1 of Exhibit B) allegedly came to Erlich anonymously through the U.S. mail. Erlich claims that because the alleged trade secrets were received from "public sources," they should lose their trade secret protection. Although the Internet is a new technology, it requires no great leap to conclude that because more than 25 million people could have accessed the newsgroup postings from which Erlich alleges he received the Exhibit B works, those works would lose their status as secrets. While the Internet has not reached the status where a temporary posting on a newsgroup is akin to publication in a major newspaper or on a television network, those with an interest in using the Church's trade secrets to compete with the Church are likely to look to the newsgroup. Thus, posting works to the Internet makes them "generally known" to the relevant people -- the potential "competitors" of the Church.
"The court is troubled by the notion that any Internet user, including those using "anonymous remailers" [29] to protect their identity, can destroy valuable intellectual property rights by posting them over the Internet, especially given the fact that there is little opportunity to screen postings before they are made. See Eduardo M. Carreras, "Intellectual Property: First Casualty on the Information Highway," 13 No. 1 ACCA Docket 26 (Westlaw" ("Carreras")(Jan.-Feb. 1995) at *29-*32 (suggesting that trade secret protection is lost as soon as information is disclosed on the Internet)."
But more recently:
"The Court is not persuaded that trade secret status should be deemed destroyed at this stage merely by the posting of the trade secret to the Internet. Religious Technology Center v. Netcom on-Line.com supra. To hold otherwise would do nothing less than encourage misappropriaters of trade secrets to post the fruits of their wrongdoing on the Internet as quickly as possible and as widely as possible thereby destroying a trade secret forever. Such a holding would not be prudent in this age of the Internet. Plaintiffs moved expeditiously, reasonably and responsibly to protect their proprietary information as soon as they discovered it had been disclosed by investigating, sending cease and desist letters all over the world and then filing suit against those who refused within two months of the disclosure. The Court is satisfied that trade secret status has not been destroyed." From DVD CCA v. McLaughlin, Bunner et al. (Jan. 20, 2000)
I am satisfied that the Court is full of shit. However expeditiously DVD CCA acted, the material was already released. The honorable judge is a moron--however, at least one court *has* interpreted trade secrets as somehow able to be magically restored after public disclosure, flying in the face of all prior case law. So some other judge could make a ruling equally idiotic.
By Microsoft's reasoning concerning the links, if I comment that slashdot has copies of this Kerberos material, and that the article in the front page has discussions which contain links to it, and to discussions of how to "circumvent" the EULA, such as by opening it with winzip, then I have violated their copyrights by mentioning slashdot.
The difficulty is knowing exactly what the law is. I'm pretty certain that the wholesale posting is a copyright infringement. I'm not sure about something like this link, although clicking it will cause a copyright infringement. I'd say there's a fairly strong but still debatable case there. I state for the record that I'm operating under the assumption that it isn't an infringement to do this. The case is even weaker if I comment that the URL is http://free-dvd.org.lu/kerberos.pdf without the tag making it clickable. Again, I operate under the assumption that citing an URL is not an infringement.
If I comment that one can "circumvent" the EULA by opening it with winzip, I think the case for that being copyright infringement is pitiful, and on the verge of frivolous.
If I quote the specification as saying "If you have not downloaded the Specification from Microsoft's website and agreed to the terms and conditions of the Agreement, you are not an authorized licensee of the Specification" and then go on to state that this is some pretty silly shit, and the sort of nonsense that gets Microsoft a reputation as a bunch of morons, that is within Fair Use.
My personal advice to slashdot would be to remove the direct copyright infringements, such as this. The links are up to their legal counsel. As for "circumvention" instructions like commenting that you can open the damn thing with winzip, I'd say they can go blow.
Alternately, one could test the counternotification provisions of the DMCA by yanking everything they ask for, then waiting for counternotifications. I'm not sure how well this would work, as most people seem to be more interested in whining about the law than using it.
Recall that before the notification/counternotification provisions of the DMCA, a copyright complaint would result in material being yanked without any provisions for getting it replaced, no matter how bogus the complaint. The DMCA at least allows the ISP to be taken off the hook in the case of copyright infringement, so long as they follow the DMCA provisions relating to notification. Further, once the counternotification card has been played, the complaining party has nothing to do but put up or shut up.
There are a lot of questionable provisions in the DMCA, especially the parts about circumventing "devices," which are pretty vague about what these are, but the liability limitation parts of it are good, or at least better than what we had before.
Nope. The accuser doesn't have to swear to anything. In keeping with the spirit of the DMCA, it's the accused who has to come forward and under the penalty of perjury state that he is innocent. Ain't DMCA wonderful?
Wrong. Among other requirements of a DMCA notification is that it include:
"(vi) A statement that the information in the notification is accurate, and under penalty of perjury, that the complaining party is authorized to act on behalf of the owner of an exclusive right that is allegedly infringed."
A sizable segment of blame goes to the authors of the finger and sendmail daemons that the Worm used to thrive and propogate. Their careless programming caused the environment, and they should have been able to recognize the danger well before RTM started to code.
Especially since Robert Morris wrote a paper on the subject in 1985, two years before the worm attack. A Weakness in the 4.2BSD Unix TCP/IP Software
Of course, that's about the rsh and rexec exploits, but fingerd was already known to be buggy and a program like sendmail (which by its nature gives at least limited file access to your server by outside, untrusted hosts) is tricky to secure, and was also known to be imperfect.
My first choice would be splitting MS into a systems company and an applications company. I'm happy (and very surprised) that those seem to be the two options that the court is seriously considering.
I've been generally impressed by the rulings of Judge Jackson in this case. I knew he knew what he was doing when during the course of the pretrial hearings he was told that it would be impossible to remove IE from Win95 without completely crippling the system, and he went home and did it himself, then returned to the court with harsh words for Microsoft. He was not also terribly impressed by the way they broke a consent decree arrived at in an earlier case. I don't think he's going to be bamboozled by their bafflegab.
My initial impression that Judge Jackson knew what he was doing was confirmed by the fin ding of fact and then the dec ision. The proposal to split up Microsoft into two companies is also well-considered.
While I generally am leery of government interference in business, this case clearly involves blatant antitrust violations and is precisely what the Sherman Act was drafted to prevent.
As for Microsoft's whining about "innovation," and how this damages their right to "innovate," I hardly see how ripping off betas of your competitors' products, reverse-engineering them, then sending out goons to force computer manufacturers to use them constitutes "innovation." At most it is an "innovative" form of racketeering.
To be honest, I don't think the remedy goes far enough. I'd like to see Microsoft split up into about a dozen corporations. However, I'll readily confess that this is based more on blind hatred and animosity toward Microsoft than any valid legal reasoning.
After all, they are the enemy.
Would you prefer to pay for content than to view ads? Because content-oriented sites including /.) rely on ads to make money. Otherwise they will have to charge money for subscriptions -- or fold up shop and go home! Advertisers (tv, web, etc) are doing you a favor by letting you view things for free
Advertisers who spam me with Java crap and engage in unauthorized invasion of privacy are doing me NO favors whatsoever. In fact, they are sucking up bandwidth I'm paying for to show me crap I don't want to see.
I'm not talking about all advertisements--for example, the advertisements I've seen on /. are not offensive and I have no problem with them. I've even clicked on a couple. But intrusive ads faking error messages or dialogue boxes, sneaky crap placed in cookies, and other offensive behavior is intolerable to me and I won't put up with it. And anyone whose website has such nonsense on it deserves to go under.
While I used to be a fanatical Usenet anti-commerce freak back in the late eighties, I changed my tune during the brouhaha that erupted when a bunch of geeks were frothing at the mouth about Yahoo putting ads on their site. They were entirely glad to use the site for free endlessly, while others did the work to keep it going, but not to allow it to make revenue. I decided at that point that commerce was good for the Internet, and should actually be encouraged.
That does NOT mean I have to put up with irresponsible commerce, though, or view it as a favor of some sort when some imbecile spams me with tons of useless buggy Java crap I don't want.
This is the case. FEIST PUBLICATIONS, INC. v. RURAL TEL. SERVICE CO., 499 U.S. 340 (1991)
However, I don't see how it's relevant to the MP3 case. Mere lists are uncopyrightable, as are facts or ideas themselves. It is the expression of ideas that is copyrightable.
By this logic, the white pages are not copyrightable, but a set of yellow pages which separates businesses into categories is.
Court records, for example, are not copyrighted (although it may be copyright infringement to copy copyrighted materials which happen to appear in court records). However, the citation scheme and page numbering used by West *is* copyrighted.
In either case, I don't see how it applies to the copying of music files by mp3.com, which are not lists but musical works.
Incidentally, how do I stop my posts from all spilling out in one line without typing a bunch of goddamn paragraph tags?
Hmmm. So according to this ruling, if I "sufficiently transform" copyrighted material, it becomes permissible under fair use? I didn't see that in the fair use provisions. From : Under the first of the four 107 factors, "the purpose and Page II character of the use, including whether such use is of a commercial nature . . .," the enquiry focuses on whether the new work merely supersedes the objects of the original creation, or whether and to what extent it is "transformative," altering the original with new expression, meaning, or message.
The astronomers used the telescope to bounce radar signals off Kleopatra. With sophisticated computer-analysis techniques, they decoded the echoes, transformed them into images, and assembled a computer model of the asteroid's shape. The Arecibo telescope underwent major upgrades in the 1990s, which dramatically improved its sensitivity and made it feasible to image more distant objects. These new radar images were obtained when Kleopatra was about 106 million miles (171 million kilometers) from Earth. Travelling at the speed of light, the transmitted signal took about 19 minutes to make the round trip to Kleopatra and back. "Getting images of Kleopatra from Arecibo was like using a Los Angeles telescope the size of the human eye's lens to image a car in New York," Ostro said. From the article at JPL. Sounds fun--apologies if my link is broken, I'm still messing around with this.
http://laws.findlaw.com/9th/2/978/1093.html
WAITS v. FRITO-LAY, INC., 978 F.2d 1093 (9th Cir. 1992) seems to be a previous case tried by Howard
King, in which he represented Tom Waits in
suing Frito-Lay for using a Waits sound-alike
in a commercial based on Waits' "Step Right
Up."
This is assuming it's the same Howard King.
http://laws.findlaw.com/9th/2/979/772.html
involves this same Howard King but isn't
terribly interesting.
Howard King is also a lawyer for The Temptations.
http://lawstreet.com/celebrity/dr_dre/cs01.html
is an article about a previous suit by Dr. Dre
over the use of the phrase "The Chronic."
http://chartattack.com/damn/032098.html is another
Metallica suit about a bootleg tape called
"Bay Area Thrashers." Some bogon took some early
demo tapes, added crowd noise and then sold
it as a "live" tape. This story identifies
Howard King as Metallica's "manager" but that
sounds bogus.
If they go ahead and publicly release a list like this, and it turns out they have been sloppy and falsely identified people as copyright infringers, they may just open themselves up for a number of massive defamation suits by people they have falsely identified and libelled. Further, if they're supplying Napster with a *paper* list of something that should be delivered as a flat database on electronic media, Napster may be able to ignore their request based on the deliberately burdensome manner it was delivered in. Obviously any such list was machine-generated and should be delivered that way, and delivering it on paper (60,000 pages of documents) is just bogus.
From what I can tell, this lawsuit is utterly bogus and is precluded by the Digital Millennium Copyright Act.
http://www.napster.com/dmca.html is the DMCA required statement which indicates Napster's registered DMCA agent, and requires that copyright infringement complaints comply with the provisions for a copyright infringement notice required by the DMCA.
"Their only response was (to say that) the songs aren't on their servers, and if (Young) will send a letter under penalty of perjury identifying specific songs and users that they would restrict those users," King said.
"That was not a satisfactory response. That was a comical response."
King's comment is utterly moronic and demonstrates a complete ignorance of the DMCA provisions relating to infringement. A notice saying "Quit infringing my copyrights you bad man" is insufficient. What is required is a signed statement, sworn under penalty of perjury. Napster's response was completely appropriate, if King's ignorant comment is any indication of what he included in his cease and desist letter.
If that cease and desist letter did not include such a statement sworn under penalty of perjury, it is entirely without weight and Napster is immune to prosecution.
"Their only response was (to say that) the songs aren't on their servers, and if (Young) will send a letter under penalty of perjury identifying specific songs and users that they would restrict those users," King said. "That was not a satisfactory response. That was a comical response." This supposed lawyer is an idiot. Under the new Digital Millennium Copyright Act, a company with a registered agent is protected from copyright infringement suits if they abide by the notification provisions of the law. One of these provisions is that those who complain of copyright infringement (or their agents) are supposed to provide a statement (under penalty of perjury) as to the specific infringing works and enough detail that the company contacted can reasonably be expected to be able to find the infringing material. That moron lawyer is apparently ignorant and his lawsuit will be thrown out under DMCA provisions, if his ignorant comment is any indication as to the legal notice he provided Napster.