...may recall the scene at the end of Stranger in a Strange Land in which Jubal Harshaw is writing a screenplay for a film of Michael's life. It begins, "Zoom in on Mars, using stock or bonestelled shots..."
I wondered for years what "bonestelled" meant, until I found out about Chesley Bonestell.
Thanks, I was about to post this very same information. Not only that, but John Gorrie--not this Buffalo guy--is the one whose invention of air conditioning was described in James Burke's classic TV series Connections, which all good geeks must surely revere.:)
I'm a little bit saddened that Apalachicola only has a "sign" about the guy now. When I was last there--about twenty years ago--they had a whole historical museum about him, with a replica of his ice-making machine and the ice-cooled room, and (as I recall) a general overview of the history of refrigeration as well. It was nice; I always kind of thought someday I'd go back and see it again. Ah well.
You take quicklime--probably finely ground--which is extremely energy intensive to create, run air through it so the carbon dioxide will turn into calcium carbonate, then you heat *that* to turn it back into quicklime and concentrated C02, and sequester the CO2.
Fine. Now, where does the heat come from? Are they planning to burn more fossil fuels to get it?
But wait, I have an idea. Nature has proven that atmospheric CO2 removal can be done with a much lower required input energy--plants do it with only solar power, and give back oxygen, to boot. And our solar cells today are many times more efficient at harvesting solar energy than a plant leaf is. So perhaps, as this technology is perfected, we'll be able to cover the desert with solar cells, providing all the energy we need to eliminate the carbon dioxide that's being emitted by our fossil-fuel power plants. *That* would certainly be efficient!
Let's say I have a TV set and the reception for a local station is so poor that it effectively doesn't come in at all. I put up rabbit ears, and it comes in a little bit. This is legal.
I add a low-noise amplifier to the rabbit ears, and it comes in better still. This is also legal.
I put up a roof antenna, and it comes in still better. Also legal.
But wait, maybe it's still not good enough, because the station is on the other side of yonder ridge, so maybe I could put up a tethered balloon with a TV antenna, and get *excellent* reception. May violate zoning restrictions or FAA obstruction rules, but certainly isn't a copyright violation.
Or I could run a cable up to the top of yonder ridge and put a TV antenna there and get the signal that way. Long as I'm not trespassing, that's as legal as church on Sunday.
If I'm dedicated enough, maybe I could also put an antenna on the next mountain range over, set up a passive repeater with a directional antenna beaming signals back to me, and get reception from far and wide. Legal? Don't see why not.
And if I'm really, really rich, I could put that TV antenna on an orbiting satellite, and beam back all the local TV stations from everywhere in the country! Or... just hire someone, like EchoStar, to provide that service for me for a monthly fee! And is *that* legal? Uh, wait a minute, no.
Now someone needs to explain to me where it was that I crossed the line from legal to illegal. Because it seems to me that a satellite TV system that rebroadcasts local TV is just a bigger, better, more expensive pair of rabbit ears.
"Unanimous consent" doesn't mean everyone voted yes, as I understand it--it means the people who shouted "yea" shouted louder than the people who voted "nay". This is a common trick when you're passing a law you don't necessarily want your name connected to.
But you've got a good point about that "veto" stamp... I wrote to President Clinton and asked him to veto it, but I guess he was busy with other things, considering this law passed right in the middle of the impeachment hearings.
Well, it's not called "ripping people off," it's called investing.
Only if it's "investing" for a bank to lend you the money to buy a house, and then after you've paid them back in full, they own the house.
Record companies lend you money, and then you pay your agent and manager, you pay the musicians, you pay for the recording studio, you pay for the art work, you pay for the advertising, you pay for videos, you pay for the tour. The record company takes 90% of the money the record earns, and you take 10%--but you still have to pay them back their advance, in full, from your 10%. And then afterward, who owns the copyright on the record? Why, the record company does! It's completely absurd.
Nicely put, but I'd take it a step further: Innovating and creating customer value are also just means to an end.
The real raison d'etre of a business--the one purpose that no business would ever be started or kept running if it didn't satisfy--is to give people something to do with their time, ideally something interesting and useful and remunerative. Yes, you have to profit to keep the enterprise going and make the investors happy, and to profit you have to innovate and create value--but that's not really why you're there. You're there because you and your employees all agree that today, for whatever reason, it's better to be there than somewhere else. Innovation can cease, profits can dwindle, and a business can creep along for quite a while waiting for better times--but as soon as nobody gives a rat's ass about coming to work anymore, it's doomed.
I see profit as comparable to breath. You have to breathe to stay alive, but that doesn't mean you were put on Earth for the sole purpose of breathing.
Oh, active development hasn't stopped, it's still ongoing in areas like hardware compatibility and occasional new features. We're putting out a new release in a few months. But major kernel revisions stopped when we acquired UnixWare from Novell in 1994, so dynamically loadable drivers, lightweight processes, the linux kernel personality, etc, went into the UnixWare 7 line, and the OSr5 kernel has remained relatively static, along with a lot of the user environment (still X11r5, for instance).
And it's really not a "living hell"; I like the company, like the people I work with, like the location (living and working in Santa Cruz is hard to beat), and swelpme I like the kernel. And the positive side of being on a tiny team maintaining a large distro is you never get bored; when I was one engineer among a hundred, I worked on my own code and that was that, but now it's kernel today, compiler tomorrow, network protocols the day after that. I dig it.
Thanks for your reply (and apologies to those who may be bored by a personal conversation in a public locale...)
First off--you're dissing an operating system released by one company in 1993, because a different company has released the source to a different OS, which was written by still a third company, decades before the one you're complaining about. How, exactly, is this even remotely on-topic?
That said, even though it isn't on-topic, I'd like to respond, for personal reasons: I'm one of the half-dozen engineers responsible for maintaining SCO OpenServer. (In point of fact, I'm the one responsible for that DHCP client you mentioned. BTW, if you think it's easy to maintain an entire OS distribution with a team that small, try it sometime.)
I could post voluminous defenses of why OSr5 is the way it is, but won't bother. I'll just say this: Some of your complaints are quite valid. (Others aren't--where in the world did you get the idea we don't have ELF libraries?) But it can essentially all be chalked up to the fact that we're talking about a legacy OS from 1993 which is neither intended to be, nor sold as, a state-of-the-art kernel in 2002. (For that, you want OpenUNIX 8.)
OSr5 is successful in the marketplace because it does what a lot of people need, does it well, does it extremely reliably, and does it in essentially the same way that it's done it for a decade (modulo those changes necessary to ensure that it runs well and takes advantage of the most current hardware)--which means no surprises for resellers and vertical-app vendors. There are fancier kernels nowadays, but nothing else on the market is as stable a platform, and for all its admitted outness-of-date, I'm very proud of it.
To bring this back within hailing distance of the topic: I fervently hope that one day OSr5 will be open source too. I don't really expect it, unfortunately; not all of the code belongs to Caldera. Bits of the XENIX-compatibility code, as you noted, are licensed from Microsoft, and what are they odds they'd ever agree to open-source anything? But it would be very satisfying.
Any other company coming in will have exactly the same market Adobe has, and they will face the same problem.
Not necessarily. Depends on whether they're clever enough to find a way to adapt to the Asian market instead of throwing up their hands and running away.
When pirated copies of XENIX were running every bank in China, a SCO sales guy told me: "Trying to convince the Chinese not to pirate software is a waste of time--they'd just laugh. But they want to buy manuals, and the idea of paying for books is part of their culture. So let 'em copy the software if they want, but charge 'em for the doc, and you can make lots of money in China."
I've already replied to someone else who made the same remark, but I want to reiterate: the "very stupid things" Ransom Love is alleged to have said about open source were complete fabrications. He never said them. I know him, and I've talked to him about it--all those anti-GPL statements he's reported to have made are just bogus, and do not reflect his actual opinions at all.
Remember that Caldera CEO Ransom Love publicly said that he agrees with Craig Mundie's statement that "Open Source is bad for business".
In fact, he said nothing of the sort, though what he did say has been widely misinterpreted along those lines. He's extremely outspoken in favor of the open source model.
What he said was, "Microsoft is attacking the open source movement at its weakest point--the GPL" (which is true; from a FUD standpoint, the GPL is precisely the most vulnerable aspect of the movement--that's not a statement of dislike for the GPL, just a statement of sales-and-marketing reality). He also said that in releasing its own projects to the community, Caldera would choose whatever license made the most sense from a business perspective, and that sometimes that would be the GPL, but other times it might be the BSD license.
I've met Ransom Love and talked with him at some length, and he's a good guy. He's gotten this reputation for being anti-GPL, and it's just completely undeserved.
Note that when Caldera announced it was open-sourcing some UNIX utilities last month, it used the GPL.
In fact, if you look at the quarterly results, the annualized results from the past quarter come out to be up near $100 million, in the same ballpark as RedHat, and with a better overall profit margin. It's just that RedHat has more money in the bank, so they can ride out their losses longer than Caldera can without cutting staff. Hence layoffs.
If Caldera can ride out the slump, the company's going to be in very good shape.
I don't suppose it would do any good to point out that this is per-system licensing, not per-seat... nor that licenses don't have to cost money, and in fact, SCO has been giving away free licenses to their UNIX products for noncommercial use for years and years.
I know Ransom Love; in fact, as of last Friday, I work for him. This gives me a certain amount of context to understand his remarks, so perhaps I shouldn't be irritated at the rush to judgement I see here. Nevertheless, I'm irritated.
He said uSoft was attacking the open source movement at its weakest point, the GPL. He's dead right; if you're going to attack the movement and you're willing to tell any lie, then the GPL is exactly the right place to attack.
From a business standpoint, the GPL and the Stallmanesque rhetoric of the free software movement are strange, and creepy, and frightening. The GPL is hard to understand, and it sounds vaguely communistic, and binds you with restrictions, and it's a rare suit that likes that sort of thing. So it's ripe for uSoft to spread FUD about it. Ransom's not saying anything about how good it is for the community for for developing projects (actually he said it was excellent for them). All he's saying is that from a marketing standpoint, it's a weak point that uSoft can exploit.
Then he goes on to say that Caldera's willing to consider releasing things as open source but use some other license than the GPL. He didn't commit to anything, but he's willing to do whatever turns out to be pragmatically best for business. Since my paycheck depends on his success at that, quite frankly I'm delighted by his priorities.
In an article that was posted to/. back in February, we read that former Congresswoman Pat Schroeder has taken on a new life as a lobbyist for publishers and has been fighting libraries for the "theft" they routinely practice in the form of free lending and interlibrary loan. There was an article about it here.
Good to see scientists fighting back so vigourously!
The use of the MC commercial format was just a parcel to package up how stupid and fucked in the head those Columbine dickheads were.
I don't think that's all it was. One of the early "priceless" commercials was about the look on your high school classmates faces when they see you at the reunion in the fancy expensive dress. Turning that into a Columbine reference ("the look on your classmates' faces as you blow them away") is, in fact, a very pointed and incisive parody of the MasterCard commercial itself--making the point that they are, after all, just selling another kind of revenge fantasy.
I'm afraid you've been sold a bill of goods with that "Happy Birthday" story. It was written in 1936 by Mildred J. and Patty K. Hill, two Kansas sisters. It's registered with ASCAP (whose database is available here) and published and administered by Warner-Chapell Music, a subsidiary of AOL/Time-Warner. Royalty payments go to the heirs of the Hill sisters, not Disney, and are only applicable to commercial reproductions--as in movies and TV shows in which the song is sung by characters. (Though I have heard stories--which may be apocryphal--of ASCAP thugs using the song as an excuse to go to restaurants and other establishments that don't have juke boxes, Muzak or live music, and extract license fees from them anyway... under the theory that a group of customers singing "Happy Birthday to You" at a table in the corner would render the restaurant liable for copyright infringement. But that's a whole different story.)
A 103-year-old song would be in the public domain even with the Bono Act.
No, this is an incredibly shrewd move to allow UnixWare to run all of those closed source binaries that are built for Linux like... umm...
well I can't think any right now, but I'm sure there are loads.
Exactly. Not user apps, though--server utilities. A company like Oracle would love to reduce the amount of time they have to invest in porting to different Unices... and more and more, these days, Linux is among the first ports that get done; IT managers ask about it a lot, whereas UnixWare hasn't built up much mindshare yet.
Well, now the Oracles of the world can port their stuff to Linux, and it'll Just Run on UnixWare--but it'll run better, from a gigantic-datacenter point of view, because UnixWare's multiprocessor and clustering support kicks Linux's ass on equivalent hardware. (Meaning no disrespect at all to Linux, which kicks UnixWare's ass in lots of other ways, but this sort of thing is exactly what UnixWare was developed and optimized for, and for all its flaws it's got an excellent kernel.)
That's not true. The character of Mickey Mouse is indeed covered by copyright. They have a trademark too, and you're quite right that that wouldn't expire, but that only means no one would be permitted to use Mickey Mouse as a corporate logo if they were in the same line of business as Disney (a different line of business would be okay).
The copyright protection on Steamboat Willie isn't just about that one short film, but about any derivative work based on the same character. Right now, no one else but Disney can make a cartoon about Mickey or Donald or Pluto, period, unless they're willing to beg for permission that won't be given, or to pay stupendous licensing fees in the unlikely event that it is. But once Steamboat Willie enters the public domain the character of Mickey Mouse will be public domain, and derivative works will be permitted.
The infinite extension of copyright is really a theft from artists who might wish to make use of such a cultural icon in their work.
(One of the most grating hypocrisies of the whole issue, to me, is that the Disney people see nothing wrong with making a Mickey Mouse version of A Christmas Carol without paying royalties to the heirs of Charles Dickens. Public domain material is fine for them to use, but if their goodies enter the public domain it'll be a catastrophe. What bastards.)
Just one more judge, and sanity would have prevailed. One more! We came so close. I'm truly disappointed.
It's nice to have a judge see our side of it, though. (Slightly surprising, from David Sentelle--he's reputed to be quite right-wing, and I would have expected him to side with big business; I apologize to him for misjudging him so.)
A pity that both the opinion and the dissent repeated the canard that the act's purpose was to harmonize US copyright law with European copyright law--that was a lie from the get-go. Individual copyrights in Europe did extend 20 years longer than individual copyrights in the US--but corporate copyrights were five years shorter--70 years--and are now twenty-five years shorter. I guess neither the apellant nor the amici thought to mention that fact, and now it's in the judicial record where it can deceive law students for years to come. Too bad.
I'm skeptical, actually. mp3.com's settlements, no doubt, included large payments for past infringment as well as a license agreement for the future. Well, the big payments have been paid and they wouldn't get a refund--but I doubt if the license agreements would continue to be operative.
Consider: When a book goes into the public domain, even though the publisher and author had a contract, the publisher still gets to stop paying royalties. I don't see how this would be different legally--what *was* considered copyright infringement under the law is no longer considered copyright infringement, therefore they aren't infringing, therefore the RIAA has no grounds on which to complain.
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...may recall the scene at the end of Stranger in a Strange Land in which Jubal Harshaw is writing a screenplay for a film of Michael's life. It begins, "Zoom in on Mars, using stock or bonestelled shots..."
I wondered for years what "bonestelled" meant, until I found out about Chesley Bonestell.
Thanks, I was about to post this very same information. Not only that, but John Gorrie--not this Buffalo guy--is the one whose invention of air conditioning was described in James Burke's classic TV series Connections, which all good geeks must surely revere. :)
I'm a little bit saddened that Apalachicola only has a "sign" about the guy now. When I was last there--about twenty years ago--they had a whole historical museum about him, with a replica of his ice-making machine and the ice-cooled room, and (as I recall) a general overview of the history of refrigeration as well. It was nice; I always kind of thought someday I'd go back and see it again. Ah well.
You take quicklime--probably finely ground--which is extremely energy intensive to create, run air through it so the carbon dioxide will turn into calcium carbonate, then you heat *that* to turn it back into quicklime and concentrated C02, and sequester the CO2.
Fine. Now, where does the heat come from? Are they planning to burn more fossil fuels to get it?
But wait, I have an idea. Nature has proven that atmospheric CO2 removal can be done with a much lower required input energy--plants do it with only solar power, and give back oxygen, to boot. And our solar cells today are many times more efficient at harvesting solar energy than a plant leaf is. So perhaps, as this technology is perfected, we'll be able to cover the desert with solar cells, providing all the energy we need to eliminate the carbon dioxide that's being emitted by our fossil-fuel power plants. *That* would certainly be efficient!
Let's say I have a TV set and the reception for a local station is so poor that it effectively doesn't come in at all. I put up rabbit ears, and it comes in a little bit. This is legal.
I add a low-noise amplifier to the rabbit ears, and it comes in better still. This is also legal.
I put up a roof antenna, and it comes in still better. Also legal.
But wait, maybe it's still not good enough, because the station is on the other side of yonder ridge, so maybe I could put up a tethered balloon with a TV antenna, and get *excellent* reception. May violate zoning restrictions or FAA obstruction rules, but certainly isn't a copyright violation.
Or I could run a cable up to the top of yonder ridge and put a TV antenna there and get the signal that way. Long as I'm not trespassing, that's as legal as church on Sunday.
If I'm dedicated enough, maybe I could also put an antenna on the next mountain range over, set up a passive repeater with a directional antenna beaming signals back to me, and get reception from far and wide. Legal? Don't see why not.
And if I'm really, really rich, I could put that TV antenna on an orbiting satellite, and beam back all the local TV stations from everywhere in the country! Or... just hire someone, like EchoStar, to provide that service for me for a monthly fee! And is *that* legal? Uh, wait a minute, no.
Now someone needs to explain to me where it was that I crossed the line from legal to illegal. Because it seems to me that a satellite TV system that rebroadcasts local TV is just a bigger, better, more expensive pair of rabbit ears.
Don't ever work for a company that takes its name from an evil trickster-god of Chaos.
Unfortunately, the Lotus 123 case (Lotus vs. Microsoft)
I haven't heard of that one. Could you be thinking of Lotus vs. Borland? Borland lost in court, but won the appeal.
"Unanimous consent" doesn't mean everyone voted yes, as I understand it--it means the people who shouted "yea" shouted louder than the people who voted "nay". This is a common trick when you're passing a law you don't necessarily want your name connected to.
But you've got a good point about that "veto" stamp... I wrote to President Clinton and asked him to veto it, but I guess he was busy with other things, considering this law passed right in the middle of the impeachment hearings.
Well, it's not called "ripping people off," it's called investing.
Only if it's "investing" for a bank to lend you the money to buy a house, and then after you've paid them back in full, they own the house.
Record companies lend you money, and then you pay your agent and manager, you pay the musicians, you pay for the recording studio, you pay for the art work, you pay for the advertising, you pay for videos, you pay for the tour. The record company takes 90% of the money the record earns, and you take 10%--but you still have to pay them back their advance, in full, from your 10%. And then afterward, who owns the copyright on the record? Why, the record company does! It's completely absurd.
Nicely put, but I'd take it a step further: Innovating and creating customer value are also just means to an end.
The real raison d'etre of a business--the one purpose that no business would ever be started or kept running if it didn't satisfy--is to give people something to do with their time, ideally something interesting and useful and remunerative. Yes, you have to profit to keep the enterprise going and make the investors happy, and to profit you have to innovate and create value--but that's not really why you're there. You're there because you and your employees all agree that today, for whatever reason, it's better to be there than somewhere else. Innovation can cease, profits can dwindle, and a business can creep along for quite a while waiting for better times--but as soon as nobody gives a rat's ass about coming to work anymore, it's doomed.
I see profit as comparable to breath. You have to breathe to stay alive, but that doesn't mean you were put on Earth for the sole purpose of breathing.
Oh, active development hasn't stopped, it's still ongoing in areas like hardware compatibility and occasional new features. We're putting out a new release in a few months. But major kernel revisions stopped when we acquired UnixWare from Novell in 1994, so dynamically loadable drivers, lightweight processes, the linux kernel personality, etc, went into the UnixWare 7 line, and the OSr5 kernel has remained relatively static, along with a lot of the user environment (still X11r5, for instance).
And it's really not a "living hell"; I like the company, like the people I work with, like the location (living and working in Santa Cruz is hard to beat), and swelpme I like the kernel. And the positive side of being on a tiny team maintaining a large distro is you never get bored; when I was one engineer among a hundred, I worked on my own code and that was that, but now it's kernel today, compiler tomorrow, network protocols the day after that. I dig it.
Thanks for your reply (and apologies to those who may be bored by a personal conversation in a public locale...)
First off--you're dissing an operating system released by one company in 1993, because a different company has released the source to a different OS, which was written by still a third company, decades before the one you're complaining about. How, exactly, is this even remotely on-topic?
That said, even though it isn't on-topic, I'd like to respond, for personal reasons: I'm one of the half-dozen engineers responsible for maintaining SCO OpenServer. (In point of fact, I'm the one responsible for that DHCP client you mentioned. BTW, if you think it's easy to maintain an entire OS distribution with a team that small, try it sometime.)
I could post voluminous defenses of why OSr5 is the way it is, but won't bother. I'll just say this: Some of your complaints are quite valid. (Others aren't--where in the world did you get the idea we don't have ELF libraries?) But it can essentially all be chalked up to the fact that we're talking about a legacy OS from 1993 which is neither intended to be, nor sold as, a state-of-the-art kernel in 2002. (For that, you want OpenUNIX 8.)
OSr5 is successful in the marketplace because it does what a lot of people need, does it well, does it extremely reliably, and does it in essentially the same way that it's done it for a decade (modulo those changes necessary to ensure that it runs well and takes advantage of the most current hardware)--which means no surprises for resellers and vertical-app vendors. There are fancier kernels nowadays, but nothing else on the market is as stable a platform, and for all its admitted outness-of-date, I'm very proud of it.
To bring this back within hailing distance of the topic: I fervently hope that one day OSr5 will be open source too. I don't really expect it, unfortunately; not all of the code belongs to Caldera. Bits of the XENIX-compatibility code, as you noted, are licensed from Microsoft, and what are they odds they'd ever agree to open-source anything? But it would be very satisfying.
Any other company coming in will have exactly the same market Adobe has, and they will face the same problem.
Not necessarily. Depends on whether they're clever enough to find a way to adapt to the Asian market instead of throwing up their hands and running away.
When pirated copies of XENIX were running every bank in China, a SCO sales guy told me: "Trying to convince the Chinese not to pirate software is a waste of time--they'd just laugh. But they want to buy manuals, and the idea of paying for books is part of their culture. So let 'em copy the software if they want, but charge 'em for the doc, and you can make lots of money in China."
This looks a lot like another public-transit concept I've been admiring for a long time, Cybertran.
I've already replied to someone else who made the same remark, but I want to reiterate: the "very stupid things" Ransom Love is alleged to have said about open source were complete fabrications. He never said them. I know him, and I've talked to him about it--all those anti-GPL statements he's reported to have made are just bogus, and do not reflect his actual opinions at all.
In fact, he said nothing of the sort, though what he did say has been widely misinterpreted along those lines. He's extremely outspoken in favor of the open source model.
What he said was, "Microsoft is attacking the open source movement at its weakest point--the GPL" (which is true; from a FUD standpoint, the GPL is precisely the most vulnerable aspect of the movement--that's not a statement of dislike for the GPL, just a statement of sales-and-marketing reality). He also said that in releasing its own projects to the community, Caldera would choose whatever license made the most sense from a business perspective, and that sometimes that would be the GPL, but other times it might be the BSD license.
I've met Ransom Love and talked with him at some length, and he's a good guy. He's gotten this reputation for being anti-GPL, and it's just completely undeserved.
Note that when Caldera announced it was open-sourcing some UNIX utilities last month, it used the GPL.
In fact, if you look at the quarterly results, the annualized results from the past quarter come out to be up near $100 million, in the same ballpark as RedHat, and with a better overall profit margin. It's just that RedHat has more money in the bank, so they can ride out their losses longer than Caldera can without cutting staff. Hence layoffs.
If Caldera can ride out the slump, the company's going to be in very good shape.
I don't suppose it would do any good to point out that this is per-system licensing, not per-seat... nor that licenses don't have to cost money, and in fact, SCO has been giving away free licenses to their UNIX products for noncommercial use for years and years.
He said uSoft was attacking the open source movement at its weakest point, the GPL. He's dead right; if you're going to attack the movement and you're willing to tell any lie, then the GPL is exactly the right place to attack.
From a business standpoint, the GPL and the Stallmanesque rhetoric of the free software movement are strange, and creepy, and frightening. The GPL is hard to understand, and it sounds vaguely communistic, and binds you with restrictions, and it's a rare suit that likes that sort of thing. So it's ripe for uSoft to spread FUD about it. Ransom's not saying anything about how good it is for the community for for developing projects (actually he said it was excellent for them). All he's saying is that from a marketing standpoint, it's a weak point that uSoft can exploit.
Then he goes on to say that Caldera's willing to consider releasing things as open source but use some other license than the GPL. He didn't commit to anything, but he's willing to do whatever turns out to be pragmatically best for business. Since my paycheck depends on his success at that, quite frankly I'm delighted by his priorities.
Chill out. He's a good guy.
Good to see scientists fighting back so vigourously!
I don't think that's all it was. One of the early "priceless" commercials was about the look on your high school classmates faces when they see you at the reunion in the fancy expensive dress. Turning that into a Columbine reference ("the look on your classmates' faces as you blow them away") is, in fact, a very pointed and incisive parody of the MasterCard commercial itself--making the point that they are, after all, just selling another kind of revenge fantasy.
A 103-year-old song would be in the public domain even with the Bono Act.
Exactly. Not user apps, though--server utilities. A company like Oracle would love to reduce the amount of time they have to invest in porting to different Unices... and more and more, these days, Linux is among the first ports that get done; IT managers ask about it a lot, whereas UnixWare hasn't built up much mindshare yet.
Well, now the Oracles of the world can port their stuff to Linux, and it'll Just Run on UnixWare--but it'll run better, from a gigantic-datacenter point of view, because UnixWare's multiprocessor and clustering support kicks Linux's ass on equivalent hardware. (Meaning no disrespect at all to Linux, which kicks UnixWare's ass in lots of other ways, but this sort of thing is exactly what UnixWare was developed and optimized for, and for all its flaws it's got an excellent kernel.)
The copyright protection on Steamboat Willie isn't just about that one short film, but about any derivative work based on the same character. Right now, no one else but Disney can make a cartoon about Mickey or Donald or Pluto, period, unless they're willing to beg for permission that won't be given, or to pay stupendous licensing fees in the unlikely event that it is. But once Steamboat Willie enters the public domain the character of Mickey Mouse will be public domain, and derivative works will be permitted.
The infinite extension of copyright is really a theft from artists who might wish to make use of such a cultural icon in their work.
(One of the most grating hypocrisies of the whole issue, to me, is that the Disney people see nothing wrong with making a Mickey Mouse version of A Christmas Carol without paying royalties to the heirs of Charles Dickens. Public domain material is fine for them to use, but if their goodies enter the public domain it'll be a catastrophe. What bastards.)
It's nice to have a judge see our side of it, though. (Slightly surprising, from David Sentelle--he's reputed to be quite right-wing, and I would have expected him to side with big business; I apologize to him for misjudging him so.)
A pity that both the opinion and the dissent repeated the canard that the act's purpose was to harmonize US copyright law with European copyright law--that was a lie from the get-go. Individual copyrights in Europe did extend 20 years longer than individual copyrights in the US--but corporate copyrights were five years shorter--70 years--and are now twenty-five years shorter. I guess neither the apellant nor the amici thought to mention that fact, and now it's in the judicial record where it can deceive law students for years to come. Too bad.
Consider: When a book goes into the public domain, even though the publisher and author had a contract, the publisher still gets to stop paying royalties. I don't see how this would be different legally--what *was* considered copyright infringement under the law is no longer considered copyright infringement, therefore they aren't infringing, therefore the RIAA has no grounds on which to complain.
Nota bene: I'm not a lawyer either.