I just went through the process of having fiber installed to my office by the local cable monopoly in order to get a T3. That's not a cable modem, by the way, and they beat the crap out of the local telephone monopoly when it came to quality and price (cleaner line at a third of the price). Anyway, I watched as they did it.
Fiber is hard to work with. You have to run it all the way back to a powered node... Its not good enough to run it back to a simple splitter. You generally have to fusion-splice it for these applications. Fusion splicing requires special training, expensive equiment and expertise that simple coax does not. No more installation contractors whose "in" was ownership of a van and a $250 course.
You could conceivably run cable from the powered location out to subpanels and then run fiber from the home to the subpanels with jacks rather than splices. By sending out the installers with preterminated lengths in 50' increments and instructing them to coil the excess at the home, it could be done. But if the connectors get dirty, its toast, pulling preterminated fiber is significantly more difficult than pulling unterminated wire, and either way its several times as expensive as coax.
Coax has plenty of bandwidth. Do you have any idea how much bandwidth is available in 60 analog television channels? Any idea how little bandwidth it takes to make a phone call? With a rational combination of the various multiplexing techniques (FDM, TDM, CDM) and an upper bound around 100 for the number of customers served on a particular coax segment, you could easily accomodate enough bandwidth to play one DVD movie, multiple phone calls and high speed internet all at once in each home.
Add a second coaxial cable and you can triple the number served on a segment by moving the head-end transmissions to one cable and the subscriber transmissions to the other. But best of all: Joe in a truck can still install the service in a subscriber's home without costing the company a fortune.
I've been wondering about this for a long time. They cache possibly illegal content, and are certianly distributing some stuff that the authors aren't giving them permission to, as well as possibly linking to sites which violate DMCA (and if they recieve too many letters about this, it could take forever to take down all the sites that are apparently violating the act).
Probably not... That's one of the few GOOD things about the DMCA: an intermediary like Google can't be held liable as long as they take down the material when notified per the DMCA's provisions. And generally speaking, a judge isn't going to take you to task for failing to meet an arbitrary deadline as long as you can show that you made every reasonable effort to meet it.
*The weight-loss testimonials presented are applicable to the individuals depicted and are not a guarantee of your weight loss nor are they typical.
*The income testimonials presented are applicable to the individuals depicted and are not a guarantee of your income nor are they typical.
They've got a great privacy policy too:
We have existing business relationships and may develop other relationships in the future with business partners. In these instances, we may share or otherwise allow access to information that is collected about you that will enable our business partners to contact you regarding products and services that may be of interest.
When a cop goes to a different DA, that's not an end run. An end run around the law would typically involve either perjury or not bothering to get a warrant at all before seizing.
The end-run I was refering to was seeking a search warrant against what was stipulated to be an "innocent third party" rather than seeking an enforceable subpoena.
If you read between the lines, it looks like the officer and agent were attempting to punish Tattered Cover for not heeding the unenforceable administrative subpoena. Snub your nose at us and will rip your place apart and scare away your customers.
We don't live in a Wyatt Earp society; this behavior was inappropriate.
When I first read this, I thought: "That's very strange. Why shouldn't the police be able to get the book buying records of a legitimate criminal suspect? They can get phone company records and credit card records, right?"
Pages 9 and 10 of the ruling make it clear:
---
[Officer Goin] and DI McFarland then served the Tattered Cover with a DEA administrative subpoena. [...] Using such a subpoena was ordinarily a successful technique for DEA officers, though such a subpoena lacks any legal force or effect.
[...]
INSTEAD OF ATTEMPTING TO OBTAIN AN ENFORCEABLE SUBPOENA, Officer Goin approached prosecutors from the Adams County District Attorney's office to get a search warrant for the Tattered Cover. Several prosecutors at the Adams County DA's office refused to sign off on the warrant, voicing concerns about its scope and subject matter. [...]
Without informing the Adams County DA's office, Officer Goin sought approval for his search warrant from the Denver DA's office. As approved by a Denver DA, the warrant authorized a search of the Tattered Cover for information related to the transaction in question, and for records of any other transaction involving Suspect A during the thirty-day period before the police searched the trailer. A Denver county court judge then approved the warrant.
---
So, basically the Officer was a dope who tried to do an end-run around the law. Oops!
Would a DNA sequence encoded as music still be the same work? I'd think it would be a derivative work, contributing no additional protection for the original.
A better choice of phrasing would have been "preliminary injunction" instead of "temporary injunction" although they're basically the same thing. You won't be able to get a preliminary injunction because you, the author, all but expressly disclaimed a dollar-value for your work.
After going through a full blown trial and proving the violation, you'll still be able to get an injunction since there is still a violation of copyright. And with a registered copyright, you'll even be entitled to punative damages. But that's a lot weaker and doesn't give a company much incentive to negotiate with you ahead of the trial.
Nah, the IP cartels are more like the property landlords that drove emigration from Europe through the begining of the 20th century. Capitalists and despots mostly, with no meaningful protection of the general public by the respective governments. The Marxists rose in opposition to that trend and withered as the various governments redressed the imbalance.
The article is a bunch of hooey. Sales killed @home. They set a price which was so low that they'd have to supplant UU-Net as the peering king before even a frugal infrastructure would be cost-effective enough to function on their revenue stream. The rest of it is politics and red-herrings.
Few ISPs employ cost analysts, and fewer still pay any attention to them. That finally caught up with the industry these past 12 months, and companies where sales had triumphed over sense paid the price.
"Economy of scale" is an analysts' term. You shouldn't use it to justify a price if you havn't done the math.
I havn't heard of a contested "electronic" signature yet holding up in court. Have you?
If a paper signature is contested in court, there are two ways to prove its real:
1) Handwriting expert that testifies convincingly that the signature is legit while the opposing expert fails to testify convicingly that its not.
2) Document containing the signature was notarized by a duly appointed notary public.
If I contest an "electronic" signature in court, what are your options to prove its legitimacy? E-Mail is trivially forged, making the equivalent of handwriting analysis impractical. Organizations like Verisign attempt to offer a notary-public like service for electronic signatures, but they have no legal standing and are not likely to: There is a reason you have to appear in person before a notary public, and a reason that the notary only validates that document and not your signature in general.
So what is the legal process to authenticate an electronic signature? You ask the sender to resend it as a signed and notarized paper document!
[The Judge] seemed to think "linking" code was analogous to hyperlinks on the web
In the case of dynamic linking, isn't it? I can link your graphic from your web server inside my web page. In both cases I'm telling the software (either a browser or the OS) where to go to get the rest of the relevant information. In the abstract sense, how is dynamic code linking unlike web linking?
It seemed like she [...] had trouble seeing how [immediate and irreparable injury, loss or damage] was the case
This is the clincher for pretty much any temporary injunction filed based on the GPL. The GPL requires that no money can be due to authors of the work for its use. No money, no damages. No damages, no injunction without a full blown trial.
The only way I can see to get around this would be to offer the software under a dual license where the second license required significant remuneration. That way you could argue that if they failed to comply with the GPL then the second license applied, which would mean a breach involving a lot of unpaid cash.
<Rant On>
Why are we fighting this fight anyway? If we as software developers choose to give our stuff away for the common good, what does it matter if someone who doesn't share our values manages to make a buck or two off of it? If the Open Source / Free Software doctrines are sound, then such folks are going to lose in the long run anyway. Its not as if there is a shortage of folks out there who are willing to be a part of this without being forced. Not for the better part of a decade.
Think about it: If Microsoft could swipe the Linux kernel, wrap Windows around it, and sell it without the source, what would the fallout be? Millions of users would see a more stable and secure operating system, hardware manufacturers would have an easier time of providing drivers for Linux (since they would be essentially the same), and Redmond would be financially motivated to keep coming back to the core linux source tree rather than a single-shot fork. Socially, Linux in the public domain would be far more powerful than Linux under the GPL.
Besides, saying that I "freely" offer you my stuff but you must subscribe to my social values to get it seems a little like a 21st century version of Marxism. Who do we think we are that we should have such power? Wouldn't we be better off to just release in the public domain?
Hint: Valid notice under requires a specific certification under penalty of purjury.
Hint: It is not possible to make a certification under penalty of purjury in a letter without a written signature.
Hint: It is not possible to include an original written signature in an email.
This is part of what makes the DMCA so dangerous to an ISP: If the ISP compelled you to take it down due to an email notification, you can sue them for damages. Improper notice = no notice. Suspension of service without cause (note: no notice thus no cause) is a breach of contract. Money (or assets that can be valued monetarily, such as your time) lost due to a breach of contract = damages.
The ISP is only protected when responding to a *correctly architected* notice, and it takes a lawyer to figure out whether a particular notice contains the necessary elements.
Hey bnetd guys: if you're looking for a place to host your stuff, drop me a line. I work for an ISP whose owner is rather passionate about the censorship issue. And it ain't a rinky-dink place subject to the upstream whims, either.
Look at a real world example: Arcades. If you play a few hours, invest tons of _real_ cash, and earn a million tokens, what can you do with them?
Apples and oranges. For one thing, tokens are a physical property, not an intellectual property. The law treats the two quite differently.
Yes, storage in a tangible physical medium is a requirement for creating a copyrighted property, but the medium is not the property. The property is what's stored on the medium.
An arcade game is a bad example for the same reason: the character exists entirely in the game's ram. Its never stored in a tangible medium, so there is never a copyright. If you could plug in a flash-memory card and save your character, then it might become a seperate copyrightable property depending on its nature. I.e. a code that says "character Joe has made it to level 9" doesn't constitute a substantive creative work, but throw in 100 8-bit attributes for character "Joe" and you've got a different story.
Just like a word isn't copyrightable but a simple limerick is.
Nelsonal hit the main points about the where not mattering, only the who. I want to follow up on the trick question:
You both own the copyright. Of two different things. He owns the copyright on the program, you own the copyright of the video (and NOT the program).
Close. If I type in the program from watching the video tape, I'll end up with an essentially exact copy of the programmer's program, but it'll be a derivative of my work rather than a derivative of his, which I own in its entirety.
Here's another trick question: Suppose I taped him illegally. Broke into his house and installed a hidden camera. In fact, suppose I didn't tape him at all, suppose I installed a keystroke logger on his computer that forwarded his keystrokes to mine and I saved them to my hard disk before he saved them to his. What are his rights with respect to the data I saved on my hard disk?
A game is not a tool; a game is a creative work of art in and of itself.
You are not *creating* anything. You are moving around and manipulating *their* creation.
If I take a book and remove every instance of the word "the," I've violated the author's copyright. I've also created an new derivative work entitled to its own independent copyright. In fact, if the author of the original book siezed it and published it, he'd be violating my copyright! That's the law.
So, your answer is really the question: Does the process of building a character add sufficient creative work to be entitled to seperate copyright? I havn't played DAoC, but if the definition of a character is as flexible as one in UOL then the odds are the character building process adds sufficient creativity that its no longer a mere icon but rather a whole new creative work inside the scope of the larger one.
Then you're faced with: Is it a derivative work or a whole new work? If you define the work as the definitions as stored on the hard disk rather than the character as displayed on the screen then it contains almost entirely information created by the player. Thus, its not a derivative work.
No creative or artistic efforts go in to making a paintbrush, unlike a game. A game is not a tool; a game is a creative work of art in and of itself.
So if I use a barbie doll with hair to paint a painting instead of using a brush, the painting belongs to Mattel? Of course not! The nature of the tool and the intent of its maker really don't matter. The only thing that matters is how I use what I allege to be "only a tool" in the production of my copyrightable property.
Since these provisions are spelled out in the EULA, I see no merit to this lawsuit.
It all hinges on how you define the property involved. Are the game and its characters all one property owned by Mythic? Or is the game a tool (e.g. a paint brush or Adobe Photoshop) used to produce a work of art (i.e. the character).
If its the former, the EULA likely rules. If its the latter, then as a lawyer once told me, "The contract can say anything it wants; that doesn't make it true."
People are making money off of *mythics* hard work; not their own. Just because a gamer has no life and plays 10 hours a day doesn't mean he has a right to be compensated for it.
Does the "hard work" associated with manufacturing paint brushes entitle that manufacturer to rights in any artwork produced with that brush? Clearly not! Even using a stolen brush doesn't entitle the brush's owner or manufacturer to art you produce with it.
Substitute "Adobe Photoshop" for "brush" and it still holds true: the works of art I produce using the tool belong exclusively to me... And its true even if I'm using an old video card and am constrained by the software to 256 colors!
Isn't a character in an MMORPG a creative work of art? You used a software tool to produce a unique set of characteristics for it, right? You're constrained by the software to a limited set of parameters, but how does that change anything?
Somewhere along the line, the data which comprises that work of art (the character) was stored on a hard disk by a computer acting at your direction. Presto. Storage in a tangible medium, the last ingredient needed to make an independent copyright.
So, if 1) You own the copyright on your character, and 2) your work is not a derivative of their work merely because they supplied the "brush," then how does the "manufacturer" gain any say whatsoever over your sale of the character or any part of it?
Of course, you can also argue the other side of it, that the character is nothing more than a pre-existing icon built into the software by the manufacturer and that the user's manipulation of the icon does not constitute a seperate creative work. For example, if you restore an old dirty painting, the hard work you put in cleaning it, touching it up, and otherwise changing its state does not confer any rights on you whatsoever.
As I said, not so simple. Copyrights matters aren't. Consider this trick question:
I videotape a programmer writing a piece of software. The contents of his programming are stored on my videotape BEFORE he selects "save", moving the program from the computer's ephemeral ram to the tangible hard disk. Who owns the copyright?
1) Put the critical private information on an isolated machine.
2) Permit authorized processes to connect to the isolated machine in WRITE ONLY mode.
3) Permit authorized processes to connect from the isolated machine to the surepay server.
4) Permit no other connections.
The details:
Set up some database server software on your isolated linux box.
Write a custom interface from the main system to the linux box which accepts the data into a chrooted environment while running as a normal user (not root).
Write software which retrieves the data from the chrooted environment (still not root) and stores it in the database.
Write software which connects from the isolated machine out to the surepay server as necessary.
Set up firewall rules (a la ipchains) such that the only connections permitted are from the general-purpose server that the user interfaces with, and to (but not from) the surepay servers.
Problems with this approach:
1) Can't verify billing status e.g. credit cards in real time.
2) Credit card data remains vulnerable during the path between when its entered at the web server and when the web server stores it to the isolated server and discards it.
The technique used by Digital Fountain is called Forward Error Correction. It allows a message M with m parts to be encoded into n parts, where n > m. The interesting thing about this is that any m of the n parts will allow the original message M to be reconstructed.
So, set:
n=infinity
stop condition=no current listeners
router priority=all waiting unicast traffic first, discard if multicast queue full (congestion control)
And then let the client subscribe to as much of the stream as he can handle. As soon as he has m packets, he's done and unsubscribes.
Can we actually do that? Are there any FEC codes that allow for an unbounded n?
This could be true genius or mediocre junk depending on the details. That article wasn't clear: Does it have to be N specific packets (in any order) or can it be any N of the transmitted packets?
N specific packets is, well, nothing special. The idea of using negative acknowledgements instead of positive acknowledgements and retransmitting only the missing pieces is nothing new. It was used extensively in pre-Internet days on dedicated connections. Ever heard of Z-Modem? Its been avoided on the Internet because it makes the congestion control problem very difficult. Translating it into symbols is really just saying that they also compress the file first. Whoop de doo.
On the other hand, if it can be ANY set of N of the transmitted packets, well, that's downright incredible. The applications for such a technique are boundless... Everything from finally making multicast viable and desirable to latency and congestion indifferent file transfers to ultra-reliable offline storage.
How would you like a web server that can serve a T3's worth of clients off of a T1 and do it in such a way that the smart web browser can pre-cache data from the server in anticipation of the reader's next click, realtime adaptive based on the documents currently in multicast transmission to somebody else? Oh yeah, the web server can be on the Moon and respond to you as fast as if it was across the street. Genius.
Remember, this was the same company that was giving away (yes giving away) $10 effectively the same as cash in order to sign up, and also giving away the credit card transaction fees every time you made a transaction. All this on the theory that they were going to make it back by investing the float. And all they need from you is your credit card, bank account, and a signed contract that on paper at least authorizes them to steal your identity. You were expecting honest professionalism? Duh! I keep looking for page 666.
If you want an honest service, use eBay's Billpoint . Yeah, it costs a little money. Honest and professional services generally do.
There's no free lunch. If you think you're getting a free lunch, it means you just havn't figured out the cost yet.
Suggestion: Use conduit. Have the electrician run 1" metal or flexmetal
conduit to extra wallboxes instead and insist on mild turns (no sharp 90's).
Terminate one end of each conduit at a wallbox and the other at a central
point in the house, probably where the phone lines enter in the basement.
Invest in a "fish tape" from your local hardware superstore so you can pull
wires through. Finally, attach a thick wire to all of the conduit and run
it outside to a copper stake in the ground.
Advantages: Run cat5/coax/fiber/futuretech to individual rooms as needed.
Use only as much as needed, of the types needed, when needed. The grounded
metal conduit serves as a faraday cage, keeping interference sources (such
as power wires) from impacting the signals. The no-sharp-90s rule allows the
fiber optic cable to work right (won't lose any signal out of sharp
turns because there are no sharp turns).
You are making an assumption about the purpose of Debian. You assume that it's about providing you with a new release. It is not. Debian as a project is about...
Debian is about different things to different people. I host one of the second-tier debian mirrors (and am getting ready to upgrade the disk again, 'cause its friggin huge), and to me Debian is about having a STABLE and SECURE linux system for work and play.
I couldn't give a rat's proverbial behind whether the LDP is moved from the "main" into the "non-free" section of the archive as long as I can still get to it with "dselect." I just want an OS I can depend on. That's what Debian does for me. Bottom line.
As for the "core" maintainers and the free/non-free issues, well, they've put in enough time on Debian that I guess they've earned the right to be zealots if they want to. But really fellas, I wish you'd get off your high horse. Its one of the strikes listed against Debian everytime some fool at work tries to suggest we switch to Red Hat.
Your problem is that the response to your complaint is being decided by a low-wage hourly employee in the "customer service" department who doesn't have the authority to do anything other than RMA & repair.
File a complaint with your local Better Business Bureau. The BBB doesn't judge complaints; all they do is record that a complaint was made, notify the company that a complaint was made, and then record whether you say that the complaint was resolved to your satisfaction. Its relatively easy, and the complaint will reach someone at Dell with the authority and motivation to make things right.
Well, no, its not. "Intellectual property" is not property in any traditional sense of the notion. That's why you have fair use and expiration and all that: because the author doesn't exactly own it. Its more accurate to say that the author has a right to profit from it.
Imagine someone being able to make "fair use" of your car or your cash. No, intellectual property is not normal property at all.
Slashdot Mirror
I just went through the process of having fiber installed to my office by the local cable monopoly in order to get a T3. That's not a cable modem, by the way, and they beat the crap out of the local telephone monopoly when it came to quality and price (cleaner line at a third of the price). Anyway, I watched as they did it.
Fiber is hard to work with. You have to run it all the way back to a powered node... Its not good enough to run it back to a simple splitter. You generally have to fusion-splice it for these applications. Fusion splicing requires special training, expensive equiment and expertise that simple coax does not. No more installation contractors whose "in" was ownership of a van and a $250 course.
You could conceivably run cable from the powered location out to subpanels and then run fiber from the home to the subpanels with jacks rather than splices. By sending out the installers with preterminated lengths in 50' increments and instructing them to coil the excess at the home, it could be done. But if the connectors get dirty, its toast, pulling preterminated fiber is significantly more difficult than pulling unterminated wire, and either way its several times as expensive as coax.
Coax has plenty of bandwidth. Do you have any idea how much bandwidth is available in 60 analog television channels? Any idea how little bandwidth it takes to make a phone call? With a rational combination of the various multiplexing techniques (FDM, TDM, CDM) and an upper bound around 100 for the number of customers served on a particular coax segment, you could easily accomodate enough bandwidth to play one DVD movie, multiple phone calls and high speed internet all at once in each home.
Add a second coaxial cable and you can triple the number served on a segment by moving the head-end transmissions to one cable and the subscriber transmissions to the other. But best of all: Joe in a truck can still install the service in a subscriber's home without costing the company a fortune.
I've been wondering about this for a long time. They cache possibly illegal content, and are certianly distributing some stuff that the authors aren't giving them permission to, as well as possibly linking to sites which violate DMCA (and if they recieve too many letters about this, it could take forever to take down all the sites that are apparently violating the act).
Probably not... That's one of the few GOOD things about the DMCA: an intermediary like Google can't be held liable as long as they take down the material when notified per the DMCA's provisions. And generally speaking, a judge isn't going to take you to task for failing to meet an arbitrary deadline as long as you can show that you made every reasonable effort to meet it.
From http://www.herbalife.com/ :
*The weight-loss testimonials presented are applicable to the individuals depicted and are not a guarantee of your weight loss nor are they typical.
*The income testimonials presented are applicable to the individuals depicted and are not a guarantee of your income nor are they typical.
They've got a great privacy policy too:
We have existing business relationships and may develop other relationships in the future with business partners. In these instances, we may share or otherwise allow access to information that is collected about you that will enable our business partners to contact you regarding products and services that may be of interest.
When a cop goes to a different DA, that's not an end run. An end run around the law would typically involve either perjury or not bothering to get a warrant at all before seizing.
The end-run I was refering to was seeking a search warrant against what was stipulated to be an "innocent third party" rather than seeking an enforceable subpoena.
If you read between the lines, it looks like the officer and agent were attempting to punish Tattered Cover for not heeding the unenforceable administrative subpoena. Snub your nose at us and will rip your place apart and scare away your customers.
We don't live in a Wyatt Earp society; this behavior was inappropriate.
When I first read this, I thought: "That's very strange. Why shouldn't the police be able to get the book buying records of a legitimate criminal suspect? They can get phone company records and credit card records, right?"
Pages 9 and 10 of the ruling make it clear:
---
[Officer Goin] and DI McFarland then served the Tattered Cover with a DEA administrative subpoena. [...] Using such a subpoena was ordinarily a successful technique for DEA officers, though such a subpoena lacks any legal force or effect.
[...]
INSTEAD OF ATTEMPTING TO OBTAIN AN ENFORCEABLE SUBPOENA, Officer Goin approached prosecutors from the Adams County District Attorney's office to get a search warrant for the Tattered Cover. Several prosecutors at the Adams County DA's office refused to sign off on the warrant, voicing concerns about its scope and subject matter. [...]
Without informing the Adams County DA's office, Officer Goin sought approval for his search warrant from the Denver DA's office. As approved by a Denver DA, the warrant authorized a search of the Tattered Cover for information related to the transaction in question, and for records of any other transaction involving Suspect A during the thirty-day period before the police searched the trailer. A Denver county court judge then approved the warrant.
---
So, basically the Officer was a dope who tried to do an end-run around the law. Oops!
Would a DNA sequence encoded as music still be the same work? I'd think it would be a derivative work, contributing no additional protection for the original.
A better choice of phrasing would have been "preliminary injunction" instead of "temporary injunction" although they're basically the same thing. You won't be able to get a preliminary injunction because you, the author, all but expressly disclaimed a dollar-value for your work.
After going through a full blown trial and proving the violation, you'll still be able to get an injunction since there is still a violation of copyright. And with a registered copyright, you'll even be entitled to punative damages. But that's a lot weaker and doesn't give a company much incentive to negotiate with you ahead of the trial.
IANAL, but maybe one day...
Nah, the IP cartels are more like the property landlords that drove emigration from Europe through the begining of the 20th century. Capitalists and despots mostly, with no meaningful protection of the general public by the respective governments. The Marxists rose in opposition to that trend and withered as the various governments redressed the imbalance.
The article is a bunch of hooey. Sales killed @home. They set a price which was so low that they'd have to supplant UU-Net as the peering king before even a frugal infrastructure would be cost-effective enough to function on their revenue stream. The rest of it is politics and red-herrings.
Few ISPs employ cost analysts, and fewer still pay any attention to them. That finally caught up with the industry these past 12 months, and companies where sales had triumphed over sense paid the price.
"Economy of scale" is an analysts' term. You shouldn't use it to justify a price if you havn't done the math.
I havn't heard of a contested "electronic" signature yet holding up in court. Have you?
If a paper signature is contested in court, there are two ways to prove its real:
1) Handwriting expert that testifies convincingly that the signature is legit while the opposing expert fails to testify convicingly that its not.
2) Document containing the signature was notarized by a duly appointed notary public.
If I contest an "electronic" signature in court, what are your options to prove its legitimacy? E-Mail is trivially forged, making the equivalent of handwriting analysis impractical. Organizations like Verisign attempt to offer a notary-public like service for electronic signatures, but they have no legal standing and are not likely to: There is a reason you have to appear in person before a notary public, and a reason that the notary only validates that document and not your signature in general.
So what is the legal process to authenticate an electronic signature? You ask the sender to resend it as a signed and notarized paper document!
From Adam Kessel's Comments:
[The Judge] seemed to think "linking" code was analogous to hyperlinks on the web
In the case of dynamic linking, isn't it? I can link your graphic from your web server inside my web page. In both cases I'm telling the software (either a browser or the OS) where to go to get the rest of the relevant information. In the abstract sense, how is dynamic code linking unlike web linking?
It seemed like she [...] had trouble seeing how [immediate and irreparable injury, loss or damage] was the case
This is the clincher for pretty much any temporary injunction filed based on the GPL. The GPL requires that no money can be due to authors of the work for its use. No money, no damages. No damages, no injunction without a full blown trial.
The only way I can see to get around this would be to offer the software under a dual license where the second license required significant remuneration. That way you could argue that if they failed to comply with the GPL then the second license applied, which would mean a breach involving a lot of unpaid cash.
<Rant On>
Why are we fighting this fight anyway? If we as software developers choose to give our stuff away for the common good, what does it matter if someone who doesn't share our values manages to make a buck or two off of it? If the Open Source / Free Software doctrines are sound, then such folks are going to lose in the long run anyway. Its not as if there is a shortage of folks out there who are willing to be a part of this without being forced. Not for the better part of a decade.
Think about it: If Microsoft could swipe the Linux kernel, wrap Windows around it, and sell it without the source, what would the fallout be? Millions of users would see a more stable and secure operating system, hardware manufacturers would have an easier time of providing drivers for Linux (since they would be essentially the same), and Redmond would be financially motivated to keep coming back to the core linux source tree rather than a single-shot fork. Socially, Linux in the public domain would be far more powerful than Linux under the GPL.
Besides, saying that I "freely" offer you my stuff but you must subscribe to my social values to get it seems a little like a 21st century version of Marxism. Who do we think we are that we should have such power? Wouldn't we be better off to just release in the public domain?
<Rant Off>
That notice smells like an email.
Hint: Valid notice under requires a specific certification under penalty of purjury.
Hint: It is not possible to make a certification under penalty of purjury in a letter without a written signature.
Hint: It is not possible to include an original written signature in an email.
This is part of what makes the DMCA so dangerous to an ISP: If the ISP compelled you to take it down due to an email notification, you can sue them for damages. Improper notice = no notice. Suspension of service without cause (note: no notice thus no cause) is a breach of contract. Money (or assets that can be valued monetarily, such as your time) lost due to a breach of contract = damages.
The ISP is only protected when responding to a *correctly architected* notice, and it takes a lawyer to figure out whether a particular notice contains the necessary elements.
Hey bnetd guys: if you're looking for a place to host your stuff, drop me a line. I work for an ISP whose owner is rather passionate about the censorship issue. And it ain't a rinky-dink place subject to the upstream whims, either.
Look at a real world example: Arcades. If you play a few hours, invest tons of _real_ cash, and earn a million tokens, what can you do with them?
Apples and oranges. For one thing, tokens are a physical property, not an intellectual property. The law treats the two quite differently.
Yes, storage in a tangible physical medium is a requirement for creating a copyrighted property, but the medium is not the property. The property is what's stored on the medium.
An arcade game is a bad example for the same reason: the character exists entirely in the game's ram. Its never stored in a tangible medium, so there is never a copyright. If you could plug in a flash-memory card and save your character, then it might become a seperate copyrightable property depending on its nature. I.e. a code that says "character Joe has made it to level 9" doesn't constitute a substantive creative work, but throw in 100 8-bit attributes for character "Joe" and you've got a different story.
Just like a word isn't copyrightable but a simple limerick is.
Nelsonal hit the main points about the where not mattering, only the who. I want to follow up on the trick question:
You both own the copyright. Of two different things. He owns the copyright on the program, you own the copyright of the video (and NOT the program).
Close. If I type in the program from watching the video tape, I'll end up with an essentially exact copy of the programmer's program, but it'll be a derivative of my work rather than a derivative of his, which I own in its entirety.
Here's another trick question: Suppose I taped him illegally. Broke into his house and installed a hidden camera. In fact, suppose I didn't tape him at all, suppose I installed a keystroke logger on his computer that forwarded his keystrokes to mine and I saved them to my hard disk before he saved them to his. What are his rights with respect to the data I saved on my hard disk?
A game is not a tool; a game is a creative work of art in and of itself. You are not *creating* anything. You are moving around and manipulating *their* creation.
If I take a book and remove every instance of the word "the," I've violated the author's copyright. I've also created an new derivative work entitled to its own independent copyright. In fact, if the author of the original book siezed it and published it, he'd be violating my copyright! That's the law.
So, your answer is really the question: Does the process of building a character add sufficient creative work to be entitled to seperate copyright? I havn't played DAoC, but if the definition of a character is as flexible as one in UOL then the odds are the character building process adds sufficient creativity that its no longer a mere icon but rather a whole new creative work inside the scope of the larger one.
Then you're faced with: Is it a derivative work or a whole new work? If you define the work as the definitions as stored on the hard disk rather than the character as displayed on the screen then it contains almost entirely information created by the player. Thus, its not a derivative work.
No creative or artistic efforts go in to making a paintbrush, unlike a game. A game is not a tool; a game is a creative work of art in and of itself.
So if I use a barbie doll with hair to paint a painting instead of using a brush, the painting belongs to Mattel? Of course not! The nature of the tool and the intent of its maker really don't matter. The only thing that matters is how I use what I allege to be "only a tool" in the production of my copyrightable property.
Since these provisions are spelled out in the EULA, I see no merit to this lawsuit.
It all hinges on how you define the property involved. Are the game and its characters all one property owned by Mythic? Or is the game a tool (e.g. a paint brush or Adobe Photoshop) used to produce a work of art (i.e. the character).
If its the former, the EULA likely rules. If its the latter, then as a lawyer once told me, "The contract can say anything it wants; that doesn't make it true."
People are making money off of *mythics* hard work; not their own. Just because a gamer has no life and plays 10 hours a day doesn't mean he has a right to be compensated for it.
Does the "hard work" associated with manufacturing paint brushes entitle that manufacturer to rights in any artwork produced with that brush? Clearly not! Even using a stolen brush doesn't entitle the brush's owner or manufacturer to art you produce with it.
Substitute "Adobe Photoshop" for "brush" and it still holds true: the works of art I produce using the tool belong exclusively to me... And its true even if I'm using an old video card and am constrained by the software to 256 colors!
Isn't a character in an MMORPG a creative work of art? You used a software tool to produce a unique set of characteristics for it, right? You're constrained by the software to a limited set of parameters, but how does that change anything?
Somewhere along the line, the data which comprises that work of art (the character) was stored on a hard disk by a computer acting at your direction. Presto. Storage in a tangible medium, the last ingredient needed to make an independent copyright.
So, if 1) You own the copyright on your character, and 2) your work is not a derivative of their work merely because they supplied the "brush," then how does the "manufacturer" gain any say whatsoever over your sale of the character or any part of it?
Of course, you can also argue the other side of it, that the character is nothing more than a pre-existing icon built into the software by the manufacturer and that the user's manipulation of the icon does not constitute a seperate creative work. For example, if you restore an old dirty painting, the hard work you put in cleaning it, touching it up, and otherwise changing its state does not confer any rights on you whatsoever.
As I said, not so simple. Copyrights matters aren't. Consider this trick question:
I videotape a programmer writing a piece of software. The contents of his programming are stored on my videotape BEFORE he selects "save", moving the program from the computer's ephemeral ram to the tangible hard disk. Who owns the copyright?
Here's how:
Overview:
1) Put the critical private information on an isolated machine.
2) Permit authorized processes to connect to the isolated machine in WRITE ONLY mode.
3) Permit authorized processes to connect from the isolated machine to the surepay server.
4) Permit no other connections.
The details:
Set up some database server software on your isolated linux box.
Write a custom interface from the main system to the linux box which accepts the data into a chrooted environment while running as a normal user (not root).
Write software which retrieves the data from the chrooted environment (still not root) and stores it in the database.
Write software which connects from the isolated machine out to the surepay server as necessary.
Set up firewall rules (a la ipchains) such that the only connections permitted are from the general-purpose server that the user interfaces with, and to (but not from) the surepay servers.
Problems with this approach:
1) Can't verify billing status e.g. credit cards in real time.
2) Credit card data remains vulnerable during the path between when its entered at the web server and when the web server stores it to the isolated server and discards it.
The technique used by Digital Fountain is called Forward Error Correction. It allows a message M with m parts to be encoded into n parts, where n > m. The interesting thing about this is that any m of the n parts will allow the original message M to be reconstructed.
So, set:
n=infinity
stop condition=no current listeners
router priority=all waiting unicast traffic first, discard if multicast queue full (congestion control)
And then let the client subscribe to as much of the stream as he can handle. As soon as he has m packets, he's done and unsubscribes.
Can we actually do that? Are there any FEC codes that allow for an unbounded n?
This could be true genius or mediocre junk depending on the details. That article wasn't clear: Does it have to be N specific packets (in any order) or can it be any N of the transmitted packets?
N specific packets is, well, nothing special. The idea of using negative acknowledgements instead of positive acknowledgements and retransmitting only the missing pieces is nothing new. It was used extensively in pre-Internet days on dedicated connections. Ever heard of Z-Modem? Its been avoided on the Internet because it makes the congestion control problem very difficult. Translating it into symbols is really just saying that they also compress the file first. Whoop de doo.
On the other hand, if it can be ANY set of N of the transmitted packets, well, that's downright incredible. The applications for such a technique are boundless... Everything from finally making multicast viable and desirable to latency and congestion indifferent file transfers to ultra-reliable offline storage.
How would you like a web server that can serve a T3's worth of clients off of a T1 and do it in such a way that the smart web browser can pre-cache data from the server in anticipation of the reader's next click, realtime adaptive based on the documents currently in multicast transmission to somebody else? Oh yeah, the web server can be on the Moon and respond to you as fast as if it was across the street. Genius.
So which is it? Any set of N or a specific set?
Remember, this was the same company that was giving away (yes giving away) $10 effectively the same as cash in order to sign up, and also giving away the credit card transaction fees every time you made a transaction. All this on the theory that they were going to make it back by investing the float. And all they need from you is your credit card, bank account, and a signed contract that on paper at least authorizes them to steal your identity. You were expecting honest professionalism? Duh! I keep looking for page 666.
If you want an honest service, use eBay's Billpoint . Yeah, it costs a little money. Honest and professional services generally do.
There's no free lunch. If you think you're getting a free lunch, it means you just havn't figured out the cost yet.
Suggestion: Use conduit. Have the electrician run 1" metal or flexmetal
conduit to extra wallboxes instead and insist on mild turns (no sharp 90's).
Terminate one end of each conduit at a wallbox and the other at a central
point in the house, probably where the phone lines enter in the basement.
Invest in a "fish tape" from your local hardware superstore so you can pull
wires through. Finally, attach a thick wire to all of the conduit and run
it outside to a copper stake in the ground.
Advantages: Run cat5/coax/fiber/futuretech to individual rooms as needed.
Use only as much as needed, of the types needed, when needed. The grounded
metal conduit serves as a faraday cage, keeping interference sources (such
as power wires) from impacting the signals. The no-sharp-90s rule allows the
fiber optic cable to work right (won't lose any signal out of sharp
turns because there are no sharp turns).
You are making an assumption about the purpose of Debian. You assume that it's about providing you with a new release. It is not. Debian as a project is about...
Debian is about different things to different people. I host one of the second-tier debian mirrors (and am getting ready to upgrade the disk again, 'cause its friggin huge), and to me Debian is about having a STABLE and SECURE linux system for work and play.
I couldn't give a rat's proverbial behind whether the LDP is moved from the "main" into the "non-free" section of the archive as long as I can still get to it with "dselect." I just want an OS I can depend on. That's what Debian does for me. Bottom line.
As for the "core" maintainers and the free/non-free issues, well, they've put in enough time on Debian that I guess they've earned the right to be zealots if they want to. But really fellas, I wish you'd get off your high horse. Its one of the strikes listed against Debian everytime some fool at work tries to suggest we switch to Red Hat.
Your problem is that the response to your complaint is being decided by a low-wage hourly employee in the "customer service" department who doesn't have the authority to do anything other than RMA & repair.
File a complaint with your local Better Business Bureau. The BBB doesn't judge complaints; all they do is record that a complaint was made, notify the company that a complaint was made, and then record whether you say that the complaint was resolved to your satisfaction. Its relatively easy, and the complaint will reach someone at Dell with the authority and motivation to make things right.
> But, know what? It's their property.
Well, no, its not. "Intellectual property" is not property in any traditional sense of the notion. That's why you have fair use and expiration and all that: because the author doesn't exactly own it. Its more accurate to say that the author has a right to profit from it.
Imagine someone being able to make "fair use" of your car or your cash. No, intellectual property is not normal property at all.