I've not heard of this actually happening. Do you have an example?
Usually if an account is going to be cancelled it happens when they look at the material during the first notification and determine that its blatently illegal. ISPs are operated by folks like you and I. They resent DMCA notices and enjoy the opportunity to tweak the noses of the folks sending them when they can do it risk-free.
The ISP is under a legal obligation to take down the site upon receiving notice from the folks alleging infringement. They're under the same obligation to restore it after receiving notice from the alleged infringer. If they fail to do either one, they're liable under the provision in the DMCA.
Basically, there's a provision that protects service providers from being sued for copyright violations if they agree to take down potentially infringing material pending investigation.
That's half of the provision. The other half is that the service provider must restore the content if the author asserts that no infringement has occurred. They're still protected after restoring the content, but they lose their protection if they don't!
Well, no. He had the option under the DMCA to file a refutation requiring that the site be put back online pending the resolution of any lawsuit that Walmart wished to file. He chose not to.
Walmart's ONLY beef was that he was using their images.
Which is silly. A copyright case would be DOA in court if the guy bothered to fight it. Indeed, his site could go back online immediately simply by presenting a letter to the effect that, "I, soandso at this address certify that I am making fair use of the graphics under the parody exception to copyright law. Restore the site." If the ISP refused to restore the site, they'd actually be breaking the law!
Walmart should have gone after the trademark issue. They actually has a legitimate case here for trademark infringement. There are no protections in trademark law for using someone's trademark for parody.
including a draconian law now on the books in Pennsylvania, which strips local governments of the right to choose their own homegrown broadband solutions without the prior approval
Perhaps Altoona PA's success at destroying the little independent ISPs with mediocre city-subsidized dialup played some small role in this decision.
Strike first. Do a scan yourself, note the items as "false positives" and give the list to the auditors.
If the auditors come back with the same list, your defense is: those are all false positives as noted in the initial report to the auditors. Get new auditors; these didn't do their job.
The BBB local to the company is usually a good place to start. Letters from the BBB tend to make it to the upper echelon at the company in question.
You won't necessarily get results, lots of companies fail to act on the BBB's letters. But they all read them. Its a good place to start, and its free.
I didn't say it was lousy, I said it was mediocre. It has to work at some basic level or the subsidized entity can't stay ahead of the headsman.
For a for-profit company to compete, they can't just offer better service. They have to offer service which is enough better to beat the subsidy yet not quickly copiable by the subsidized entity (who, as mentioned, is reasonably good at staying just ahead of the headsman). In most cases that's an impossible barrier to entry.
SBC successfully lobbied to pass a law so that they do not have to share the fiber that they are deploying in their area.
Well, that makes SBC bad and it makes the legislators ignorant and corrupt. Heard the phrase, "Two wrongs don't make a right?" SBC's behavior doesn't make government subsidized service a good idea.
Let's get rid of the police and fire services. And the roads.
For the most part, the roads already are done by private for-profit contractors. Police and fire services aren't, but all their equipment and supplies are. Meanwhile, ambulance and emergency medical service is almost totally private and works much better in areas where it is.
What's the force that makes "markets" work efficiently again?
Supply and demand. Create a subsidized supply and the demand falls. The demand falls and the subsidized supply (its revenue assured) rolls along while the non-subsidized supplies dry up.
I'm sure the one I worked for wasn't. We did fine down the road in the much smaller community of Everett but Altoona was a dead zone. There wasn't enough revenue to maintain a T1 and a a single PRI.
So the people and city of Altoona shouldn't be free to decide and handle their own affairs [...] reguardless of what it does to individual rights within a municipality?
Doesn't impact individual rights at all. Any Texan can set up his own Wifi hotspot and any group of Texans can set up a non-profit and build their own network.
What it limits is the government's ability to participate and fund it with taxes. And no, the city government (or any level of government) shouldn't be able to tax and spend on anything they feel like simply because a few legislators think its darn clever.
They own it because self-styled libertarians believe that it's better to grant a for-profit private enterprise a monopoly on owning it rather than the government directly.
Were you asleep during the Cold War? Neither method is good, but which of the two is better has long been resolved.
And for your information, you too can buy space on the poles. Last I checked, rent is $5-$6 per pole per attachment per year.
Whether or not individual municipalities want to experiment with providing access should be up to them and their citizens.
OKay, I'll buy that argument.
Which municipalities have left this up to their citizens? Which put out a referendum that says, "We want to raise your taxes by X so we can profide you wireless Internet. Do you agree?"
Municiple wifi is largely being championed by special intrest groups, a few maverick bureaucrats looking to expand their influence and their friendly politicians. When this happens for anything else we decry it as pork barrel. And so it is.
Mostly its being done with Universal Service Fund money that you (and every one else) get taxed on when you pay your phone bill.
And if Time Warner were required to open the public right-of-way portion of their infrastructure there would be a dozen small companies vying for your business. That would actually move towards solving the problem. Government subsidy just makes it worse.
Altoona PA subsidized a local non-profit to provide dialup internet service. Same excuse as normal: promote high technology.
The result:
1. The non-profit did the same mediocre job that every government subsidized project does. 2. Most of the independent ISPs (including the one I worked for) pulled out of Altoona since we couldn't compete (not enough people buy on quality; most buy on price). 3. As broadband was deployed, all the non-ILECs stayed out of Altoona. 4. The available options for Internet service in Altoona suck rocks.
Government subsidized anything sucks the life out of a market and just about guarantees stagnation. They're right to block it in Texas!
The better issue to be made is open access to the public infrastructure. The ILECs and cable companies use your right-of-way that you, the taxpayer, own. They should be compelled to open that part of their infrastructure to competitors at or near cost.
But there's no guarantee of success: its revenue from Linux licensing is puny, and it faces a crowded market of Linux distros.
Doesn't matter. Most US federal agencies still run Netware and they've pretty much all accepted the theory that the next server upgrade will be to Netware on SuSE Linux Enterprise Server. That's the only Linux platform that Netware will be "supported" on.
Remember: supported doesn't have to do with whether it works. The Feds don't care if it works. Supported has to do with whether the company says it'll stand behind it. Novell has thoroughly pumped this angle: "If its in SLES9, we're supporting it for the next 5 years."
You havn't seen it in Novell's numbers yet because the government has an obnoxiously long deployment cycle. But you can count on it. The senior folks at the federal agencies have a big investment in their Novell certifications. They're not going jump the fence for Microsoft, not when Linux is better and cheaper even at Novell's price tag.
With the huge federal market almost a guaranteed buy, Novell has a very solid base to work from.
Its not yet time to write Red Hat's epitaph but it might be a good time to buy Novell stock. Make no mistake: Novell is going to win this one.
you miss the point of Debian. The idea behind Debian is to be [...] a distribution completely Free as in GNU Public License.
The consequence has been delays in releasing the production system to the extent that modern commercial software won't run because the support structure (e.g. libriaries) isn't there.
Freedom is about individual choice. Today a user of debian stable can't choose to use a wealth of commercial software. Debian's politics have prevented it.
Oh come on. They didn't give Groklaw credit for scanning the court's documents. Boo hoo.
Scanning didn't create a derivative work. Scanning added no actual content. Plus, as legal filings they're arguably public domain in the first place in which case they'd still be public domain after scanning.
Yeah, sure I appreciate the irony of them using the work without recompense. But compared to the ghastly irony of continuing to offer Linux for download from their site this is piddling stuff.
Is there a Linux/*BSD equivalent to the Microsoft requirements to allow hardware designers to build OS agnostic systems?
Yes! Here they are:
1. Design whatever the hell crazy cool hardware you want. 2. Document the interface thoroughly. 3. Openly publish the documentation without restriction or encumberance. 4. (optional) give a couple test systems to folks who volunteer to write drivers and have demonstrated a history of doing so successfully.
That's it! Open source operating systems can and will adapt to anything you care to do in the hardware arena as long as the interfaces are openly documented and unencumbered.
Break #3 (e.g. require a key to access function so and so and the key isn't publicly available) and you're dead. I mean really dead. The hackers will break your code for the challenge of it but the open source folks will avoid you like the plague.
First off, what did you actually agree to in that contract? The only copyrights that can vest in the company are actual work you do while employed and in the scope of your employment for the company. Everything else vests in you and has to be explicitly signed over to the company after the fact before they own it. Most contracts say differently. The terms on those contracts are null and void. Think of it as a lawyer version oh phishing: you don't know any better so you don't challenge it.
Let me make this clear: You own the copyrights to any software you wrote which was not written within the scope of the actual work you do for the company. You will continue to own the software until the day you explicitly sign it over to them, in writing. Even if they take you to court and the judge finds that you violated your contract, the law forbids him to assign your copyrights as damages!
Now, I'm not a lawyer, this is not legal advice, and if you really care about this you should talk to someone who is a lawyer. But I have studied US federal copyright law and there is some really kick-ass stuff in there.
None of which solves your situation. So, here is a suggestion: Talk to your company's lawyer. "Mr. Lawyer, I want to let you know that our product A which you have been asked to file legal protections for is a derivative work of B, C and D. Here is a partial list of copyright owners for B, C and D as well as their contact information. Just thought you should know." Ding. If that doesn't kill it dead, nothing will.
Eventually, but not any time soon. DRM creates severe longevity issues in a non-physical media. When someone buys a DVD he expects it to still work next year. You don't just need fast broadband, you need to solve the drm problem too.
The near-term risk is to Blockbuster and their ilk. DRM doesn't matter so much if you're only watching it once anyway.
Netflix will probably outlive Blockbuster since broadband is slow coming to the rural areas.
the judge's refusal to extend journalist protections to Think Secret
Uh... last I checked, US courts do not recognize the notion that a journalist has the right to refuse to disclose a confidential source. More than one reporter has been thrown in jail for contempt of court over this. So, I'm not real clear here how Think Secret's treatment is any different than what a normal journalist would get?
Slashdot Mirror
I've not heard of this actually happening. Do you have an example?
Usually if an account is going to be cancelled it happens when they look at the material during the first notification and determine that its blatently illegal. ISPs are operated by folks like you and I. They resent DMCA notices and enjoy the opportunity to tweak the noses of the folks sending them when they can do it risk-free.
What law?
The one we're talking about. The DMCA.
The ISP is under a legal obligation to take down the site upon receiving notice from the folks alleging infringement. They're under the same obligation to restore it after receiving notice from the alleged infringer. If they fail to do either one, they're liable under the provision in the DMCA.
Basically, there's a provision that protects service providers from being sued for copyright violations if they agree to take down potentially infringing material pending investigation.
That's half of the provision. The other half is that the service provider must restore the content if the author asserts that no infringement has occurred. They're still protected after restoring the content, but they lose their protection if they don't!
His First Amendment rights are being violated.
Well, no. He had the option under the DMCA to file a refutation requiring that the site be put back online pending the resolution of any lawsuit that Walmart wished to file. He chose not to.
Walmart's ONLY beef was that he was using their images.
Which is silly. A copyright case would be DOA in court if the guy bothered to fight it. Indeed, his site could go back online immediately simply by presenting a letter to the effect that, "I, soandso at this address certify that I am making fair use of the graphics under the parody exception to copyright law. Restore the site." If the ISP refused to restore the site, they'd actually be breaking the law!
Walmart should have gone after the trademark issue. They actually has a legitimate case here for trademark infringement. There are no protections in trademark law for using someone's trademark for parody.
Divisive pride, or healthy competition?
Who cares? If it means more literature is digitally preserved then its all good.
including a draconian law now on the books in Pennsylvania, which strips local governments of the right to choose their own homegrown broadband solutions without the prior approval
Perhaps Altoona PA's success at destroying the little independent ISPs with mediocre city-subsidized dialup played some small role in this decision.
Strike first. Do a scan yourself, note the items as "false positives" and give the list to the auditors.
If the auditors come back with the same list, your defense is: those are all false positives as noted in the initial report to the auditors. Get new auditors; these didn't do their job.
The BBB local to the company is usually a good place to start. Letters from the BBB tend to make it to the upper echelon at the company in question.
You won't necessarily get results, lots of companies fail to act on the BBB's letters. But they all read them. Its a good place to start, and its free.
I didn't say it was lousy, I said it was mediocre. It has to work at some basic level or the subsidized entity can't stay ahead of the headsman.
For a for-profit company to compete, they can't just offer better service. They have to offer service which is enough better to beat the subsidy yet not quickly copiable by the subsidized entity (who, as mentioned, is reasonably good at staying just ahead of the headsman). In most cases that's an impossible barrier to entry.
SBC successfully lobbied to pass a law so that they do not have to share the fiber that they are deploying in their area.
Well, that makes SBC bad and it makes the legislators ignorant and corrupt. Heard the phrase, "Two wrongs don't make a right?" SBC's behavior doesn't make government subsidized service a good idea.
Let's get rid of the police and fire services. And the roads.
For the most part, the roads already are done by private for-profit contractors. Police and fire services aren't, but all their equipment and supplies are. Meanwhile, ambulance and emergency medical service is almost totally private and works much better in areas where it is.
What's the force that makes "markets" work efficiently again?
Supply and demand. Create a subsidized supply and the demand falls. The demand falls and the subsidized supply (its revenue assured) rolls along while the non-subsidized supplies dry up.
I'm sure the one I worked for wasn't. We did fine down the road in the much smaller community of Everett but Altoona was a dead zone. There wasn't enough revenue to maintain a T1 and a a single PRI.
So the people and city of Altoona shouldn't be free to decide and handle their own affairs [...] reguardless of what it does to individual rights within a municipality?
Doesn't impact individual rights at all. Any Texan can set up his own Wifi hotspot and any group of Texans can set up a non-profit and build their own network.
What it limits is the government's ability to participate and fund it with taxes. And no, the city government (or any level of government) shouldn't be able to tax and spend on anything they feel like simply because a few legislators think its darn clever.
They own it because self-styled libertarians believe that it's better to grant a for-profit private enterprise a monopoly on owning it rather than the government directly.
Were you asleep during the Cold War? Neither method is good, but which of the two is better has long been resolved.
And for your information, you too can buy space on the poles. Last I checked, rent is $5-$6 per pole per attachment per year.
Whether or not individual municipalities want to experiment with providing access should be up to them and their citizens.
OKay, I'll buy that argument.
Which municipalities have left this up to their citizens? Which put out a referendum that says, "We want to raise your taxes by X so we can profide you wireless Internet. Do you agree?"
Municiple wifi is largely being championed by special intrest groups, a few maverick bureaucrats looking to expand their influence and their friendly politicians. When this happens for anything else we decry it as pork barrel. And so it is.
Mostly its being done with Universal Service Fund money that you (and every one else) get taxed on when you pay your phone bill.
4. Free lawn service.
http://www.jefflindsay.com/NLCN.shtml
And if Time Warner were required to open the public right-of-way portion of their infrastructure there would be a dozen small companies vying for your business. That would actually move towards solving the problem. Government subsidy just makes it worse.
Altoona PA subsidized a local non-profit to provide dialup internet service. Same excuse as normal: promote high technology.
The result:
1. The non-profit did the same mediocre job that every government subsidized project does.
2. Most of the independent ISPs (including the one I worked for) pulled out of Altoona since we couldn't compete (not enough people buy on quality; most buy on price).
3. As broadband was deployed, all the non-ILECs stayed out of Altoona.
4. The available options for Internet service in Altoona suck rocks.
Government subsidized anything sucks the life out of a market and just about guarantees stagnation. They're right to block it in Texas!
The better issue to be made is open access to the public infrastructure. The ILECs and cable companies use your right-of-way that you, the taxpayer, own. They should be compelled to open that part of their infrastructure to competitors at or near cost.
But there's no guarantee of success: its revenue from Linux licensing is puny, and it faces a crowded market of Linux distros.
Doesn't matter. Most US federal agencies still run Netware and they've pretty much all accepted the theory that the next server upgrade will be to Netware on SuSE Linux Enterprise Server. That's the only Linux platform that Netware will be "supported" on.
Remember: supported doesn't have to do with whether it works. The Feds don't care if it works. Supported has to do with whether the company says it'll stand behind it. Novell has thoroughly pumped this angle: "If its in SLES9, we're supporting it for the next 5 years."
You havn't seen it in Novell's numbers yet because the government has an obnoxiously long deployment cycle. But you can count on it. The senior folks at the federal agencies have a big investment in their Novell certifications. They're not going jump the fence for Microsoft, not when Linux is better and cheaper even at Novell's price tag.
With the huge federal market almost a guaranteed buy, Novell has a very solid base to work from.
Its not yet time to write Red Hat's epitaph but it might be a good time to buy Novell stock. Make no mistake: Novell is going to win this one.
you miss the point of Debian. The idea behind Debian is to be [...] a distribution completely Free as in GNU Public License.
The consequence has been delays in releasing the production system to the extent that modern commercial software won't run because the support structure (e.g. libriaries) isn't there.
Freedom is about individual choice. Today a user of debian stable can't choose to use a wealth of commercial software. Debian's politics have prevented it.
Sounds like George Bush freedom to me.
Oh come on. They didn't give Groklaw credit for scanning the court's documents. Boo hoo.
Scanning didn't create a derivative work. Scanning added no actual content. Plus, as legal filings they're arguably public domain in the first place in which case they'd still be public domain after scanning.
Yeah, sure I appreciate the irony of them using the work without recompense. But compared to the ghastly irony of continuing to offer Linux for download from their site this is piddling stuff.
Is there a Linux/*BSD equivalent to the Microsoft requirements to allow hardware designers to build OS agnostic systems?
Yes! Here they are:
1. Design whatever the hell crazy cool hardware you want.
2. Document the interface thoroughly.
3. Openly publish the documentation without restriction or encumberance.
4. (optional) give a couple test systems to folks who volunteer to write drivers and have demonstrated a history of doing so successfully.
That's it! Open source operating systems can and will adapt to anything you care to do in the hardware arena as long as the interfaces are openly documented and unencumbered.
Break #3 (e.g. require a key to access function so and so and the key isn't publicly available) and you're dead. I mean really dead. The hackers will break your code for the challenge of it but the open source folks will avoid you like the plague.
First off, what did you actually agree to in that contract? The only copyrights that can vest in the company are actual work you do while employed and in the scope of your employment for the company. Everything else vests in you and has to be explicitly signed over to the company after the fact before they own it. Most contracts say differently. The terms on those contracts are null and void. Think of it as a lawyer version oh phishing: you don't know any better so you don't challenge it.
Let me make this clear: You own the copyrights to any software you wrote which was not written within the scope of the actual work you do for the company. You will continue to own the software until the day you explicitly sign it over to them, in writing. Even if they take you to court and the judge finds that you violated your contract, the law forbids him to assign your copyrights as damages!
Now, I'm not a lawyer, this is not legal advice, and if you really care about this you should talk to someone who is a lawyer. But I have studied US federal copyright law and there is some really kick-ass stuff in there.
None of which solves your situation. So, here is a suggestion: Talk to your company's lawyer. "Mr. Lawyer, I want to let you know that our product A which you have been asked to file legal protections for is a derivative work of B, C and D. Here is a partial list of copyright owners for B, C and D as well as their contact information. Just thought you should know." Ding. If that doesn't kill it dead, nothing will.
Will DVD join LaserDisc in obscurity?
Eventually, but not any time soon. DRM creates severe longevity issues in a non-physical media. When someone buys a DVD he expects it to still work next year. You don't just need fast broadband, you need to solve the drm problem too.
The near-term risk is to Blockbuster and their ilk. DRM doesn't matter so much if you're only watching it once anyway.
Netflix will probably outlive Blockbuster since broadband is slow coming to the rural areas.
the judge's refusal to extend journalist protections to Think Secret
Uh... last I checked, US courts do not recognize the notion that a journalist has the right to refuse to disclose a confidential source. More than one reporter has been thrown in jail for contempt of court over this. So, I'm not real clear here how Think Secret's treatment is any different than what a normal journalist would get?