Sorry - copyright is there to encourage new creative works, not to pay the salary of a really good copier.
It's there to encourage the creation of difficult to produce but easy to copy works, creative or not (in some countries, anyway - not the USA it seems). There's no reason for it to pay the salary of the copier, and a simple look at the economics shows why. The economic problem copyright solves occurs in these circumstances:
A useful/valuable work requires huge effort to produce the first copy.
Subsequent copies require much less effort.
Everyone who might benefit from copies would, between them, be prepared to pay for the effort required to product the first copy and one further copy each.
No one individual amongst them benefits enough to be prepared to pay the whole cost of the first copy himself.
There are practical reasons why all of the the users of the work can't get together to form one big joint contract, such as huge transaction cost. Alternatively, the work might be worth producing on some sort of probabilistic basis - eg, there are probably enough people who will want it once it exists but don't right know because they've never thought of it, don't have a current need or haven't been born yet.
The work never gets made, despite being economically beneficial (at least on average). A copyright generated monopoly allows, to some extent, the cost to be spread across all of those who benefit, not just those who commission the work. That permits more works to be created, at the cost of an economic loss from the monopoly.
There's no need for copyright to cover the work of copiers because every individual who wants a good copy has to pay a copier to copy - there are no positive externalities to copying in the way there are to origination without copyright. This is also why making the first photograph of a painting is not the same as printing a copy of a ready-typeset book. (A particular typesetting is subject to copyright, too, IIRC). The photography need be done only once, the copying must be done once per copy.
The loss-from-monopoly/gain-from-creation balance might be different for photography of paintings so there might be good arguments for going either way copyright-law-wise. Lack of creativity is not one of them.
It takes a lot of skill to reproduce a public-domain book, too - but that doesn't mean it should be sent back into copyright if I do.
No-one is claiming that granting copyright on a photograph of a painting - or book - would or should make copyright on the original painting or book spring back in to existence. The question is purely one of copyright in the photograph (a photograph of an in-copyright painting might be subject to TWO copyrights, those of the painter and photographer, and you need permission from both to make copies).
IIRC, 'Originality' in UK copyright law means that the work originated with it's creator, not that it's 'original' in the sense in which you might praise something as 'a very original book'. Again IIRC, that means (in the UK) that 'a degree of skill, judgement or labour' has been used. Since the accusation is one of breaking UK copyright law in the UK that's the test that's relevant here.
The poster above me has it right, UK law does not apply, US law applies to the UK copyright holder's work in the US.
US copyright protection applies in the US. But UK protection applies in the UK, so if the downloader or Wikipedia broke UK law in the UK then there's a case in the UK. There appear to be three relevant things that the downloader and/or Wikipedia are accused of doing in the UK:
Making a copy (from web server to network).
Transmitting the images out of the UK.
Subsequently making them available to Wikipedia users in the UK
There's no need to be physically present in the UK to have done these things in the UK: these were things done remotely.
These are relevant because, from UK law:
Copyright in a work is infringed by a person who without the licence of the copyright owner transmits the work by means of a telecommunications system (otherwise than by broadcasting or inclusion in a cable programme service), knowing or having reason to believe that infringing copies of the work will be made by means of the reception of the transmission in the United Kingdom or elsewhere.
Copyright in a work is infringed by a person who without the licence of the copyright owner does, or authorises another to do, any of the acts restricted by the copyright.
ie, he's accused of transmitting the images out of the UK intending to use them to provide infringing copies to UK Internet users, and he's accused of authorizing UK Internet users to make infringing copies by downloading them from the US. (He's also accused of breaching NPG's database right and some other things, too). Obviously, if there's held to be no copyright in the UK then none of this is illegal....but they can't make it all go away by just screaming 'no jurisdiction!'.
Why? Maybe it's not creative...but so what? US law may not create copyright in that case, but there's no fundamental reason for that to be true and other countries are free to make other legislative choices. Copyright's purpose is to benefit the whole of society by making it possible and profitable to produce easily copied products. It'll never succeed perfectly - it'll grant monopolies on some works which would have been produced anyway, for example - but its imperfections don't come from an artistic vs non-artistic distinction.
Besides, do we really need to stretch definitions so that software gets protection because it's artistic or creative, when most (ordinary) people wouldn't regard it as particularly either? Granting copyright protection as a result of the exercise of sufficient skill solves that problem, as well as extending copyright to a class of works which have exactly the same economic characteristics as artistic work, and is an entirely reasonable choice. It also happens to be part of UK law, which is presumably why the NPG believe they have UK copyright.
If a person puts an photo on a Web-site that means they give defacto rights to an user to view it.
You don't require a licence to view something subject to copyright, only to perform certain acts like copying, broadcasting or performing it. If the photographs were hung on a wall you'd need no special to permission to look at them. You need a licence to download it because downloading involves copying, just as you need a licence to run software because running it involves copying. This licence can be implied (it's on a website obviously intended for public access), but implied licences tend to be as minimal as possible and I'd be surprised if there wasn't an explicit licence on the site instead/as well. This licence might (at least try to) restrict the purposes for which the images can be downloaded. It's not obvious that the licence would stretch to downloading ALL 3300 images, either.
The Computer where the user looked/uploaded it is the location of any possible copyright crime/transgression. There is not real IT person who can claim where the web-server that the user got the photo from had a crime committed on it.
No-one is accused of a crime. Why would the location of any copyright breaches be limited to one place? The downloader intentionally caused copying to happen in the UK. If that copying breached copyright why should he not be guilty of breaking UK law? He is also accused of causing transmission of the photographs from the UK to elsewhere, knowing that putting them on Wikipedia would make (infringing) copies available to people within the UK. The transmission is something he caused to happen within the UK, so why should that not be considered under UK law, too?
Note, I can see the location of the user computer and/or the site it was uploaded to have criminal jurisdiction of the crime. But, the Web-site the user downloaded it from does not; this assumes the Web-site was authorized to display the photo.
Web servers do not display photos, computers running web browsers do that. Web servers are machines which send you copies of files on request. Making a webserver send you an image is something you have done. It can't be something the web server has done of its own free will because it hasn't got one. That the webserver was set up to do this by its owner might imply you have permission to do certain limited things, but it doesn't mean you aren't the one doing them and it doesn't mean those things are unrestricted. The webserver is a tool you are using, and if you use it to do something illegal then you are doing something illegal.
Copyright in the UK does not provide statutory damages; the gallery will have to prove _actual damages_.
There are injunctions, too. I've no idea how/if you could enforce such a thing against someone in another country, though. They sell copies, so they've got a sensible reason to claim damages. I wouldn't want to bet on being able to refute them, especially if I couldn't afford expert witnesses.
I see no real way the inclusion of low resolution copies of the photographs in Wikipedia can possibly cause actual damage to the gallery
They're high resolution. The NPG is offering to talk about allowing low resolution ones on Wikipedia.
Surely, copying took place in a lot of places. Within the server, over a LAN, through switches and routers, onto transatlantic Internet links, that sort of thing. Any IT person should recognize that. All of that copying was done by him, using the computers as a tool to do so, because he submitted a request with the intention of making all of that happen. You can't pass any blame on to a computer, any more than 'it was the knife what murdered him, not me' will help you, so you can't claim that the server did the first bit of copying and not you. So, IMnon-legalO, he acted and performed copying in both the UK and US.
From what I remember UK courts have no problem considering two networked computers to be one device, part of which is located in one country and part in another. IIRC someone tried and failed to avoid patents by putting their server in Antigua and distributing CDs with client software of some sort to UK users. The users' computers were regarded as part of an infringing device, and were located in the UK where UK patents apply.
IIRC it's considered original under UK law - because it was originated by the photographer. It seems that's just how the term is interpreted by courts, rather than specifically part of the law.
Perhaps the most important purpose of copyright is to provide an economic incentive for the creation of easily copyable but valuable economic output, to the general betterment of everyone. It's arguable how well it succeeds in balancing the gain from such creation against the loss from monopoly power, but I don't see why excluding the result of expensive non-artistic labour would make it better. It seems to be part of it's principal mission to me.
Copyright may have been broken if it were in GB, but it wasn't in GB, it was in the US and it wasn't broken here.
It appears to me that copyright is being broken in the UK, because UK users can download the images (which is copying that Wikipedia/the Wikipedia user have authorized) and because they were fetched from a UK server with the intention of making infringing copies. See my other comment: http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=1299515&cid=28661433.
Oh, and IANAL, so please imagine there is a disclaimer here.
The works in the photo may not have copyright, but the fact is, the photos still have copyright. - only if the photograph of that public domain work has sufficient creative input from the creator to create a new copyright.
It's a degree of 'skill, labour or judgement' in the UK.
The bar for 'creative input' is fairly low (deciding where to stand in order to take a picture of a sculpture is enough), but a flatbed scan is clearly not enough, as the court explicitly found in the Bridgeman case.
It appears to be generally expected that this won't affect UK judgements. The NPC is also claiming a breach of database right and contract. Presumably this, legally, comes down to a question of whether an infringing act happened in the UK. (Practically speaking I imagine it'll come down to something entirely different, such as taking up there offer of low resolution images in order to avoid the risk of a personal tragedy of a lawsuit). Authorizing another to perform an infringing act in the UK is against UK law, even if the person giving the authorization is not in the UK. This Wikipedia user is specifically accused of this. It's also secondary infringement to transmit something from the UK to another country knowing that infringing copies will be made of it outside the UK and then re-imported (http://www.opsi.gov.uk/acts/acts1988/ukpga_19880048_en_2#pt1-ch2-pb2-l1g24 - 24(2)). Things don't look too good for him from this POV either.
Let's say someone made a cd, where they performed songs that are all in public domain. They still get copyright over their version of the performance. - that is because the performance of a public domain work is different from the original work.
Actually, you get performance rights (in the UK, anyway). You get them because a special bit of law says so.
You can experience the direct presence of God - as directed and refined through Jesus' perfect realization of the Holy Spirit - without a material resurrection.
A contraction is a word shortened by removing letters from the middle and an abbreviation is a word shortened by removing letters from the end. Presumably you spell it v's, but that's a little ugly and certainly not conventional. No punctuation is entirely normal where I come from. There's a wikipedia article with more: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Contraction_(grammar)
It's more than style. There's an important difference between, say, 'St' and 'St.' (saint and street - ever come across 'Liverpool Saint Station'?). Abbreviations end with a dot, contractions without. There's no problem at all with 'vs' for 'versus'.
It also puts it in the hands of government and adds legal compulsion. Aside from the privacy problems associated with the database which has been talked about endlessly, there's the 'dealing with government' and incompetence factor as well. Here's one story: http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2009/feb/04/idcards-biometrics. In short: a foreign national required to get an ID card paid 600 pounds and got thoroughly pissed about, and was too scared to complain in cased her immigration status was sabotaged in retribution.
I think a lot of ID card supporters will start to change their minds when they're required to use a day of holiday at HMG's convenience, spend however-long on trains going to an interview centre, wait for a few hours, hand over all their personal information to a minimum wage teenager and pay for the privilege. It'll be especially fun for those with limited mobility.
If you're trying to type in the least stressful way to your hands, then when you need to type in capitals it's extremely useful. This is also why there are two Ctrl and Shift keys, and why there ought to be two Alt keys. Remember: you shouldn't be pressing two keys with one hand very often if you type all day, because it'll put you at more risk of RSI. Constantly swapping shift keys is really quite annoying...
Oh, and swapping Caps Lock and Ctrl means you can press Ctrl-A by accident, thus selecting your entire document and erasing it with your next keystroke. I've seen people get in to a mini-panic that way. Though my Caps Lock has a lowered portion adjacent to 'A', presumably to stop it being pressed by mistake.
Countries don't have standards of living, people do. The average is irrelevant if yours is very different, which is quite likely if you're better educated and more experienced in a professional field than all but a tiny number of locals.
The problem is, people who want to decrease energy usage are not motivated by any kind of "costs". The actual motivation is to improve the lives of current and future generations of humans -- all humans.
To improve their lives - including there own - by reducing the external costs imposed on them. If they weren't costs, how would removing them improve their lives? Or to put it a better way, if removing them didn't improve their lives how could they not be costs? I'm not using costs to mean 'things which cost money', I'm using it to mean 'things which reduce someone's welfare'.
There's some altruism around, of course, some of which goes some way to causing some people to take some external costs in to account in some of their decisions. However:
Nobody is inclined to take all of the costs in to account. No-one (or so few people as to not matter) is utterly selfless, especially when others around them are even more selfish.
It doesn't work very well on corporations, thanks to fiduciary duties, competitive pressure and so on. This is an important influence on production methods. Consider, say, a Tesco decision on how many warehouses to build. More might mean shorter journeys and less congestion, but more staff, heating and cooling costs. Even selfless consumers won't influence this much.
No-one has much idea what their external costs ARE. What's the congestion cost of a pencil vs a cauliflower? Or the CO2 cost of a hard disk versus a CPU? Or the erosion of historic buildings from pollutants cost of more warehouses vs less?
This last one is the killer reason why price mechanisms have to be used. Without price signals no-one would have any idea what even the more certain internal costs are....imagine guessing the resource use of a pencil delivered to Tokyo vs a box of paper-clips without having price information. Feeding the external costs in to market mechanisms as best governments can by taxing congested road use, carbon, local pollutants, etc. makes this question much more tractable. You still need estimates of what those costs ARE (which you do however you do this), which will inevitably be wrong, but their inclusion in to prices means that consumers CAN take an estimate of the congestion cost of a pencil in to account, or the CO2 cost of driving to the bowling alley.
Trucks do not cause 200x the damage of cars. Each axle (in the EU) is limited to 8 tonnes, which means 4 tonnes per wheel so roughly 8x the weight of a cars wheel.
Prices of resources are set by people based on idea of those resources' availability, and impact of their usage on the rest of society.
You presumably missed Economics 101, as Americans would probably call it. I'm not an expert, but I'll do my best.
Prices in an 'idealized' free-market economy are set by the (physical, not money) costs and benefits to those people involved in the transaction, directly or indirectly (a supplier's supplier, etc). These private benefits are called internal costs. Costs on third parties - pollution, noise, aesthetics, congestion, etc - are external costs (or benefits) and are not taken in to account because the participants don't care about them. A less idealized one will have monopolies, information asymmetries and so on, but that doesn't take external costs in to account, other than by chance. This distorts economic decision making and leads the economy to make sub-optimal choices (in a 'resources in':'economic welfare out' sense). Government environmental (and other) regulation and taxes attempt to distort them back the other way.
It's obvious that with CURRENT availability of resources in US and CURRENT level of environmental protection, the all-around best mode of transportation is Ford Expedition carrying one driver.
That's unlikely, even if we pretend everyone's needs are the same and the benefits gained from all modes of transport are equal. The level of environmental protection is irrelevant unless it's so high it prevents the optimal choice: the best choice is almost certainly permitted by those rules, it's just not chosen by the many individuals involved because external costs are not fully taken in to account in their choices.
The problem is, if you try to scale this to the whole society, you will choke everyone
And this is one reason why it's not the best. It might be financially best, despite not being economically best, but that's irrelevant because finance is not an end in itself whereas economic welfare is.
nearly everybody involved in the industry acts like a Mac is something different from a PC. You can hardly blame people for picking up on that.
Well...they're right. A Mac is a computer with the smiley face, an apple menu thing at the top and the pretty icons. A PC is the one with the start button that's made by Bill Gates. Linux, naturally, doesn't exist - or is something funny complicated thing technical people use. They're brands (or at least brand-like in the case of PC) referring to 'kinds of computer', complete with all the associations that go with brands like 'nasty monopolist' or 'stylish arty thing'.
Every name is simplified to the smallest most specific sub-part that's still able to distinguish it. That's why no-one thinks about 'IBM compatible PCs' any more and why Macs are 'Macs' and not 'Apple Macintosh computers' or 'computers running MacOS'.
Not too many people care about the insides of computers, or have concepts of processors, instruction sets and hardware platforms, or a clear differentiation between hardware and OS. For as long as the words 'PC' and 'Mac' are enough to function in this area they aren't going to learn, either (and even if they cease to be they'll complain about it being so complicated). A (hypothetical) computer running Windows on ARM or Itanium or whatnot would be 'a PC', and Mac OS on x86 is 'a Mac', because they have all the attributes associated in an ordinary person's mind with PC-ness or Mac-ness. An Itanium computer running Windows which can't run, say, Photoshop would merely be a broken computer, or a computer which is not very good....not some special other class unless it became so common people were forced to waste their time on understanding it.
This is an excellent reason for the UK's Rehabilitation of offenders act. It's illegal to discriminate employment-wise once a conviction is spent - five years for non-custodial sentences, immediately for cautions, longer or forever for anything serious. (There are certain exceptions, however). It's also considered libel to maliciously publish the conviction after that time, and you can lie about it on insurance forms and not be sued for it. (Insurance companies normally don't ask about driving convictions over five years ago, for example).
You are not allowed to break the law even in a medical emergency
In the UK there is an exception for 'vehicles being used for fire brigade, ambulance or police purposes' which, IIRC, includes private cars being used as an unofficial ambulance. You can still be prosecuted for dangerous driving, etc, and you'd better have a very good reason and be prepared to put up with the hassle.
or when someone is "chasing you"
I think there are some quite general 'to prevent a greater crime' get-outs, too. I believe there's a defence to drink driving if you were in immediate physical danger, for example. (But don't expect it to be easy).
Hold down Ctrl and click on all of the contents links one after another to open them in new tabs. Then the rest load while you're reading the first page and you can flip back and forth between pages quickly enough to make it about usable.
Still annoying, though. And, of course, you need to know about tabs.
Slashdot Mirror
Sorry - copyright is there to encourage new creative works, not to pay the salary of a really good copier.
It's there to encourage the creation of difficult to produce but easy to copy works, creative or not (in some countries, anyway - not the USA it seems). There's no reason for it to pay the salary of the copier, and a simple look at the economics shows why. The economic problem copyright solves occurs in these circumstances:
The work never gets made, despite being economically beneficial (at least on average). A copyright generated monopoly allows, to some extent, the cost to be spread across all of those who benefit, not just those who commission the work. That permits more works to be created, at the cost of an economic loss from the monopoly.
There's no need for copyright to cover the work of copiers because every individual who wants a good copy has to pay a copier to copy - there are no positive externalities to copying in the way there are to origination without copyright. This is also why making the first photograph of a painting is not the same as printing a copy of a ready-typeset book. (A particular typesetting is subject to copyright, too, IIRC). The photography need be done only once, the copying must be done once per copy.
The loss-from-monopoly/gain-from-creation balance might be different for photography of paintings so there might be good arguments for going either way copyright-law-wise. Lack of creativity is not one of them.
It takes a lot of skill to reproduce a public-domain book, too - but that doesn't mean it should be sent back into copyright if I do.
No-one is claiming that granting copyright on a photograph of a painting - or book - would or should make copyright on the original painting or book spring back in to existence. The question is purely one of copyright in the photograph (a photograph of an in-copyright painting might be subject to TWO copyrights, those of the painter and photographer, and you need permission from both to make copies).
IIRC, 'Originality' in UK copyright law means that the work originated with it's creator, not that it's 'original' in the sense in which you might praise something as 'a very original book'. Again IIRC, that means (in the UK) that 'a degree of skill, judgement or labour' has been used. Since the accusation is one of breaking UK copyright law in the UK that's the test that's relevant here.
The poster above me has it right, UK law does not apply, US law applies to the UK copyright holder's work in the US.
US copyright protection applies in the US. But UK protection applies in the UK, so if the downloader or Wikipedia broke UK law in the UK then there's a case in the UK. There appear to be three relevant things that the downloader and/or Wikipedia are accused of doing in the UK:
There's no need to be physically present in the UK to have done these things in the UK: these were things done remotely.
These are relevant because, from UK law:
ie, he's accused of transmitting the images out of the UK intending to use them to provide infringing copies to UK Internet users, and he's accused of authorizing UK Internet users to make infringing copies by downloading them from the US. (He's also accused of breaching NPG's database right and some other things, too). Obviously, if there's held to be no copyright in the UK then none of this is illegal....but they can't make it all go away by just screaming 'no jurisdiction!'.
It should _NOT_ be covered by copyright.
Why? Maybe it's not creative...but so what? US law may not create copyright in that case, but there's no fundamental reason for that to be true and other countries are free to make other legislative choices. Copyright's purpose is to benefit the whole of society by making it possible and profitable to produce easily copied products. It'll never succeed perfectly - it'll grant monopolies on some works which would have been produced anyway, for example - but its imperfections don't come from an artistic vs non-artistic distinction.
Besides, do we really need to stretch definitions so that software gets protection because it's artistic or creative, when most (ordinary) people wouldn't regard it as particularly either? Granting copyright protection as a result of the exercise of sufficient skill solves that problem, as well as extending copyright to a class of works which have exactly the same economic characteristics as artistic work, and is an entirely reasonable choice. It also happens to be part of UK law, which is presumably why the NPG believe they have UK copyright.
If a person puts an photo on a Web-site that means they give defacto rights to an user to view it.
You don't require a licence to view something subject to copyright, only to perform certain acts like copying, broadcasting or performing it. If the photographs were hung on a wall you'd need no special to permission to look at them. You need a licence to download it because downloading involves copying, just as you need a licence to run software because running it involves copying. This licence can be implied (it's on a website obviously intended for public access), but implied licences tend to be as minimal as possible and I'd be surprised if there wasn't an explicit licence on the site instead/as well. This licence might (at least try to) restrict the purposes for which the images can be downloaded. It's not obvious that the licence would stretch to downloading ALL 3300 images, either.
The Computer where the user looked/uploaded it is the location of any possible copyright crime/transgression. There is not real IT person who can claim where the web-server that the user got the photo from had a crime committed on it.
No-one is accused of a crime. Why would the location of any copyright breaches be limited to one place? The downloader intentionally caused copying to happen in the UK. If that copying breached copyright why should he not be guilty of breaking UK law? He is also accused of causing transmission of the photographs from the UK to elsewhere, knowing that putting them on Wikipedia would make (infringing) copies available to people within the UK. The transmission is something he caused to happen within the UK, so why should that not be considered under UK law, too?
Note, I can see the location of the user computer and/or the site it was uploaded to have criminal jurisdiction of the crime. But, the Web-site the user downloaded it from does not; this assumes the Web-site was authorized to display the photo.
Web servers do not display photos, computers running web browsers do that. Web servers are machines which send you copies of files on request. Making a webserver send you an image is something you have done. It can't be something the web server has done of its own free will because it hasn't got one. That the webserver was set up to do this by its owner might imply you have permission to do certain limited things, but it doesn't mean you aren't the one doing them and it doesn't mean those things are unrestricted. The webserver is a tool you are using, and if you use it to do something illegal then you are doing something illegal.
UK jurisdiction on copyright issues requires copying to have occurred in the UK, or for the defendant to have imported copied material into the UK.
Firstly, copying did occur in the UK. From server to network, for example. Secondly, there are other ways to break UK copyright law other than by copying in the UK or importing in to the UK. But I'm repeating myself: http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=1299515&cid=28661433 and http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=1299515&cid=28661885.
Copyright in the UK does not provide statutory damages; the gallery will have to prove _actual damages_.
There are injunctions, too. I've no idea how/if you could enforce such a thing against someone in another country, though. They sell copies, so they've got a sensible reason to claim damages. I wouldn't want to bet on being able to refute them, especially if I couldn't afford expert witnesses.
I see no real way the inclusion of low resolution copies of the photographs in Wikipedia can possibly cause actual damage to the gallery
They're high resolution. The NPG is offering to talk about allowing low resolution ones on Wikipedia.
Surely, copying took place in a lot of places. Within the server, over a LAN, through switches and routers, onto transatlantic Internet links, that sort of thing. Any IT person should recognize that. All of that copying was done by him, using the computers as a tool to do so, because he submitted a request with the intention of making all of that happen. You can't pass any blame on to a computer, any more than 'it was the knife what murdered him, not me' will help you, so you can't claim that the server did the first bit of copying and not you. So, IMnon-legalO, he acted and performed copying in both the UK and US.
From what I remember UK courts have no problem considering two networked computers to be one device, part of which is located in one country and part in another. IIRC someone tried and failed to avoid patents by putting their server in Antigua and distributing CDs with client software of some sort to UK users. The users' computers were regarded as part of an infringing device, and were located in the UK where UK patents apply.
Perhaps the most important purpose of copyright is to provide an economic incentive for the creation of easily copyable but valuable economic output, to the general betterment of everyone. It's arguable how well it succeeds in balancing the gain from such creation against the loss from monopoly power, but I don't see why excluding the result of expensive non-artistic labour would make it better. It seems to be part of it's principal mission to me.
RTFS more carefully next time before you chastize someone for not paying attention. It makes you look bad.
Check up on the law before chastizing someone for chastizing someone for not paying attention. In particular: http://www.opsi.gov.uk/acts/acts1988/ukpga_19880048_en_2#pt1-ch2-pb1-l1g16 16(2) and http://rpc.oxfordjournals.org/cgi/content/abstract/112/22/657. The NPG appears to be alleging that the user/wikipedia are authorizing UK users' infringement. And: http://www.opsi.gov.uk/acts/acts1988/ukpga_19880048_en_2#pt1-ch2-pb2-l1g24 24(2); there's an accusation of unlawful downloading, too.
Copyright may have been broken if it were in GB, but it wasn't in GB, it was in the US and it wasn't broken here.
It appears to me that copyright is being broken in the UK, because UK users can download the images (which is copying that Wikipedia/the Wikipedia user have authorized) and because they were fetched from a UK server with the intention of making infringing copies. See my other comment: http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=1299515&cid=28661433.
Oh, and IANAL, so please imagine there is a disclaimer here.
Does effort and skill make something copyrightable? No.
Yes, in the UK. See, say http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sweat_of_the_brow and look at the UK bit.
The works in the photo may not have copyright, but the fact is, the photos still have copyright. - only if the photograph of that public domain work has sufficient creative input from the creator to create a new copyright.
It's a degree of 'skill, labour or judgement' in the UK.
The bar for 'creative input' is fairly low (deciding where to stand in order to take a picture of a sculpture is enough), but a flatbed scan is clearly not enough, as the court explicitly found in the Bridgeman case.
It appears to be generally expected that this won't affect UK judgements. The NPC is also claiming a breach of database right and contract. Presumably this, legally, comes down to a question of whether an infringing act happened in the UK. (Practically speaking I imagine it'll come down to something entirely different, such as taking up there offer of low resolution images in order to avoid the risk of a personal tragedy of a lawsuit). Authorizing another to perform an infringing act in the UK is against UK law, even if the person giving the authorization is not in the UK. This Wikipedia user is specifically accused of this. It's also secondary infringement to transmit something from the UK to another country knowing that infringing copies will be made of it outside the UK and then re-imported (http://www.opsi.gov.uk/acts/acts1988/ukpga_19880048_en_2#pt1-ch2-pb2-l1g24 - 24(2)). Things don't look too good for him from this POV either.
Let's say someone made a cd, where they performed songs that are all in public domain. They still get copyright over their version of the performance. - that is because the performance of a public domain work is different from the original work.
Actually, you get performance rights (in the UK, anyway). You get them because a special bit of law says so.
You can experience the direct presence of God - as directed and refined through Jesus' perfect realization of the Holy Spirit - without a material resurrection.
Yup. All you need is one of these: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/God_helmet
A contraction is a word shortened by removing letters from the middle and an abbreviation is a word shortened by removing letters from the end. Presumably you spell it v's, but that's a little ugly and certainly not conventional. No punctuation is entirely normal where I come from. There's a wikipedia article with more: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Contraction_(grammar)
It's more than style. There's an important difference between, say, 'St' and 'St.' (saint and street - ever come across 'Liverpool Saint Station'?). Abbreviations end with a dot, contractions without. There's no problem at all with 'vs' for 'versus'.
It also puts it in the hands of government and adds legal compulsion. Aside from the privacy problems associated with the database which has been talked about endlessly, there's the 'dealing with government' and incompetence factor as well. Here's one story: http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2009/feb/04/idcards-biometrics. In short: a foreign national required to get an ID card paid 600 pounds and got thoroughly pissed about, and was too scared to complain in cased her immigration status was sabotaged in retribution.
I think a lot of ID card supporters will start to change their minds when they're required to use a day of holiday at HMG's convenience, spend however-long on trains going to an interview centre, wait for a few hours, hand over all their personal information to a minimum wage teenager and pay for the privilege. It'll be especially fun for those with limited mobility.
I suppose _someone_ uses it, right?
If you're trying to type in the least stressful way to your hands, then when you need to type in capitals it's extremely useful. This is also why there are two Ctrl and Shift keys, and why there ought to be two Alt keys. Remember: you shouldn't be pressing two keys with one hand very often if you type all day, because it'll put you at more risk of RSI. Constantly swapping shift keys is really quite annoying...
Oh, and swapping Caps Lock and Ctrl means you can press Ctrl-A by accident, thus selecting your entire document and erasing it with your next keystroke. I've seen people get in to a mini-panic that way. Though my Caps Lock has a lowered portion adjacent to 'A', presumably to stop it being pressed by mistake.
Countries don't have standards of living, people do. The average is irrelevant if yours is very different, which is quite likely if you're better educated and more experienced in a professional field than all but a tiny number of locals.
The problem is, people who want to decrease energy usage are not motivated by any kind of "costs". The actual motivation is to improve the lives of current and future generations of humans -- all humans.
To improve their lives - including there own - by reducing the external costs imposed on them. If they weren't costs, how would removing them improve their lives? Or to put it a better way, if removing them didn't improve their lives how could they not be costs? I'm not using costs to mean 'things which cost money', I'm using it to mean 'things which reduce someone's welfare'.
There's some altruism around, of course, some of which goes some way to causing some people to take some external costs in to account in some of their decisions. However:
This last one is the killer reason why price mechanisms have to be used. Without price signals no-one would have any idea what even the more certain internal costs are....imagine guessing the resource use of a pencil delivered to Tokyo vs a box of paper-clips without having price information. Feeding the external costs in to market mechanisms as best governments can by taxing congested road use, carbon, local pollutants, etc. makes this question much more tractable. You still need estimates of what those costs ARE (which you do however you do this), which will inevitably be wrong, but their inclusion in to prices means that consumers CAN take an estimate of the congestion cost of a pencil in to account, or the CO2 cost of driving to the bowling alley.
Trucks do not cause 200x the damage of cars. Each axle (in the EU) is limited to 8 tonnes, which means 4 tonnes per wheel so roughly 8x the weight of a cars wheel.
You're right. 8^4 = 4096, so they do 4096 times as much damage, not 200. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gross_axle_weight_rating.
Prices of resources are set by people based on idea of those resources' availability, and impact of their usage on the rest of society.
You presumably missed Economics 101, as Americans would probably call it. I'm not an expert, but I'll do my best.
Prices in an 'idealized' free-market economy are set by the (physical, not money) costs and benefits to those people involved in the transaction, directly or indirectly (a supplier's supplier, etc). These private benefits are called internal costs. Costs on third parties - pollution, noise, aesthetics, congestion, etc - are external costs (or benefits) and are not taken in to account because the participants don't care about them. A less idealized one will have monopolies, information asymmetries and so on, but that doesn't take external costs in to account, other than by chance. This distorts economic decision making and leads the economy to make sub-optimal choices (in a 'resources in':'economic welfare out' sense). Government environmental (and other) regulation and taxes attempt to distort them back the other way.
It's obvious that with CURRENT availability of resources in US and CURRENT level of environmental protection, the all-around best mode of transportation is Ford Expedition carrying one driver.
That's unlikely, even if we pretend everyone's needs are the same and the benefits gained from all modes of transport are equal. The level of environmental protection is irrelevant unless it's so high it prevents the optimal choice: the best choice is almost certainly permitted by those rules, it's just not chosen by the many individuals involved because external costs are not fully taken in to account in their choices.
The problem is, if you try to scale this to the whole society, you will choke everyone
And this is one reason why it's not the best. It might be financially best, despite not being economically best, but that's irrelevant because finance is not an end in itself whereas economic welfare is.
nearly everybody involved in the industry acts like a Mac is something different from a PC. You can hardly blame people for picking up on that.
Well...they're right. A Mac is a computer with the smiley face, an apple menu thing at the top and the pretty icons. A PC is the one with the start button that's made by Bill Gates. Linux, naturally, doesn't exist - or is something funny complicated thing technical people use. They're brands (or at least brand-like in the case of PC) referring to 'kinds of computer', complete with all the associations that go with brands like 'nasty monopolist' or 'stylish arty thing'.
Every name is simplified to the smallest most specific sub-part that's still able to distinguish it. That's why no-one thinks about 'IBM compatible PCs' any more and why Macs are 'Macs' and not 'Apple Macintosh computers' or 'computers running MacOS'.
Not too many people care about the insides of computers, or have concepts of processors, instruction sets and hardware platforms, or a clear differentiation between hardware and OS. For as long as the words 'PC' and 'Mac' are enough to function in this area they aren't going to learn, either (and even if they cease to be they'll complain about it being so complicated). A (hypothetical) computer running Windows on ARM or Itanium or whatnot would be 'a PC', and Mac OS on x86 is 'a Mac', because they have all the attributes associated in an ordinary person's mind with PC-ness or Mac-ness. An Itanium computer running Windows which can't run, say, Photoshop would merely be a broken computer, or a computer which is not very good....not some special other class unless it became so common people were forced to waste their time on understanding it.
This is an excellent reason for the UK's Rehabilitation of offenders act. It's illegal to discriminate employment-wise once a conviction is spent - five years for non-custodial sentences, immediately for cautions, longer or forever for anything serious. (There are certain exceptions, however). It's also considered libel to maliciously publish the conviction after that time, and you can lie about it on insurance forms and not be sued for it. (Insurance companies normally don't ask about driving convictions over five years ago, for example).
You are not allowed to break the law even in a medical emergency
In the UK there is an exception for 'vehicles being used for fire brigade, ambulance or police purposes' which, IIRC, includes private cars being used as an unofficial ambulance. You can still be prosecuted for dangerous driving, etc, and you'd better have a very good reason and be prepared to put up with the hassle.
or when someone is "chasing you"
I think there are some quite general 'to prevent a greater crime' get-outs, too. I believe there's a defence to drink driving if you were in immediate physical danger, for example. (But don't expect it to be easy).
Hold down Ctrl and click on all of the contents links one after another to open them in new tabs. Then the rest load while you're reading the first page and you can flip back and forth between pages quickly enough to make it about usable. Still annoying, though. And, of course, you need to know about tabs.