US English is a little too encompasing for your purposes i would think. Are you talking southern US English? Californian english? New England English, etc? And who's to say that "US English" and "British English" are really all that different?
When you say Chinese - are you speaking of Mandarin or Cantonese (i would assume Mandarin)?
Maybe things will be different in the China-dominated future being described, but currently language on the Internet is primarily enountered in its written form rather than its spoken form. This relates to ypur comments on both the variations in English and Chinese.
There are definite variations in English as spoken in different parts of the USA. However, they tend to disappear from written English, being either differences how words are pronounced or local slang. Local slang tends to disappear from written documents that are more formal than relaxed speech and from Internet documents written for a geographically diverse audience. Different as California and New York English may be from each other, I would wager that few literate Californians would have trouble reading the New York Times.
On the other hand, there are significant differences between written British English and written American English. These appear both in spelling ("colour vs. "color", "centre" vs. "centre") and lexicon ("boot" vs. "trunk", "lift" vs. "elevator"). We're not talking about local slang here but frequently used common words.
Written vs. spoken language has an even greater effect on your Cantonese vs. Mandarin question. The "Chinese language" is an interesting linguistic phenomenon. In its spoken form it simply does not exist. Cantonese and Mandarin are not two different dialects of one "Chinese language". They are completely different languages and are mutually unintelligible. On the other hand, the "Chinese language" has a definite existence in the written form. Written Mandarin is indistinguishable from written Cantonese. So, since the Internet is primarily a written medium, I would expect that when he said "Chinese", he was not referring to "Cantonese" or "Mandarin" but the written language that they both share.
As was pointed out elsewhere in the thread "Chinese" (the written language) is different in Mainland China vs. Taiwan. So you could reasonably ask to which of those two he was referring. I think that the geopolitical part of his argument made it pretty clear that he was talking about Mainland China, though.
1. Imagine that there was a big market for snuff films, and a lot of people were breaking the law making them because they knew that it would be easy to sell them (since, according to your scenario a film of an illegal act should never be illegal).
If we thought snuff films (or child pornography) were bad and wanted to cut down on the practice of making them, one way might be to try and reduce the market, making it more difficult to sell them. Producers would then have less incentive to make them. One way to make it more difficult to sell them might be to make possession illegal.
2. People who buy snuff films (or child pornography) are rewarding the makers and sellers of the films for their illegal acts. It is not unreasonable to make laws against rewarding people for committing crimes.
3. It is illegal to possess stolen property, even if one can show that one bought it innocently from a reputable source. It is illegal to buy and sell stolen property, even if one did not know that it was stolen. If we are going to make these types of activities surrounding the proceeds of burglary and theft illegal, how much more so should we make these sorts of activities surrounding the proceeds of murder or assault (your snuff film example) or sexual abuse of children (videos or photos of children involved in sex).
Note that text child pornography is not "the proceeds of sexual abuse of children" as no actual children are involved in its creation.
True, in America this might be considered "child porn" -- but the canonized status of "Shakespeare" (and all that falls under category "Shakespeare") would probably pass a "censorware" test, whereas the noncanonized category of "Anonymous Photograph of Child Porn in a dark room with splotched colors" would certainly *fail* said censorware test. Even though in theory the photograph could *visually* represent the same "event" that the text is textually representing.
One crucial difference is that there is a much greater chance that real children were involved in real inappropriate activity in the creation photos/videos than in the creation of a text piece. Sure, it could be trick photography, photoediting magic and/or overage actors. But maybe it wasn't. With a text piece, you know no real children were involved.
It's sort of like the need to see "No animals were harmed in the making of this film." at the end of a movie that showed a lot of harm to animals. If it's not there, one might reasonably assume that real animals were hurt. In a book which describes animals getting hurt and killed left, right and centre there is no need to add in a line at the end "No animals were harmed in the writing of this book."
The crime in child pornography is not in the pictures it creates in pedophiles' heads. It is in the real harm that can happen to real kids. And that happens first and foremost where people are using children as "actors" or "models" in the creation of visual pornographic material. That's a significant difference between the visual and the textual material.
Let me begin by saying that I think that science is an excellent tool for learning about the universe and answering questions. I happily use its products every day and rely upon its premises.
However, science is not capable of answering all kinds of questions. Nor is it capable of accepting all kinds of answers.
To start with the latter. If a question about the universe exists with an unprovable (or untestable) answer, that question will forever be unanswered by science. Science is in the business of testing and any part of reality that is untestable is outside of the bounds of science. That is why the article says:
Of the many possible explanations for these life-affirming values, Rees favors
the multiverse theory because it has at least the potential to be tested and
scientifically confirmed. Labeling any theory "metaphysics," he contends, "is a
damning put-down from a physicist's point of view," because metaphysical
notions cannot be proved or disproved. The multiverse, on the other hand,
"genuinely lies within the province of science," says Rees, although he
concedes that the concept remains speculative.
It is not that this theory is more likely than any other theory, but that it is more testable, and thus within the boundaries of "science".
It's is not just answers that can fall in or out of the boundaries of science, but questions, too. A classic example that I like to use of an important area of inquiry that does not fall within the scope of science is Ethics. As most scientists will admit, science cannot answer the question of whether we "should" or "should not" do something. That doesn't lessen the importance of the question, its "metaphysical" nature notwithstanding.
This article was posted under the title "Why Does The Universe Exist?". "Why" can have a number of meanings and so can that question. It could mean "What caused the universe to exist?". It could also mean "To what purpose does the universe exist?". The answer to the former may or may not fall within the boundaries of science (depending on whether or not it is testable). The answer to the latter surely does not. But does that make it not worth asking?
I'm always amazed that people might actually believe statements like the one about how software "could tell the difference between art and pornography."
Me, too. As I understand it, before programmers can write the instructions that would allow software to make that kind of distinction, people would have to figure it out.
I guess my point here is where is the transition to illegality? In traditional trespassing law, it is when I step onto the property without permission. But ebay gave me permission to use the site. Where did I lose it? (If we allow that I did lose it when I began running a large commercial web site...)
You don't lose it when your site becomes commercial. You don't lose it when your site becomes large. You don't lose it when your site becomes popular. You lose it when eBay's lawyers write to you and tell you that they want you to stop. That's when eBay takes back the permission to use the site. Any use you make of the site before you get that letter is OK. If you keep going back after you've been evicted and told never to return, that's tresspassing (according to the judge).
slycer wrote: "But the last time I checked, it was fully legal to shop around for the best price. In fact, AFAIK it is legal to pay someone to shop for the best price for you. And lastly, if I was inclined to take notes on prices in different stores and make them publicly available, could I be charged?"
It's also legal for stores to refuse entry to people. If the stores don't want to be price checked, and they know that a particular person is a price checker, they can refuse that person entry into the store. And if that person enters after being told that he/she was not welcome, they can charge him/her with tresspassing. That's the parallel the judge has made. eBay told a specific individual (a corporate entity in this case) that they were not welcome on eBay's property (the computers). They entered anyway and were charged with tresspassing.
This reminds me of a saying common in the early days of the [Use]Net, "Freedom of the press belongs to them as owns one". It was all about the rights of systems administrators and the owners of networked computers to control absolutely the use that was made of their processors and storage space. No one has a right, the philosophy held, to propogation of their articles. It was a privilege and a favour extended by systems administrators, who would devote some of their valuable processor time and storage space to the public good by propogating the articles. And if they said "no" to you or to your article: tough beans, it's their computer.
It seems to me that eBay is making the same sort of argument. People don't have a "right", they say, to use the servers that belong to eBay. It is a privilege that they make generally available and can revoke at will. If you disagree with eBay, you are in the position of saying that at some point privately owned computers become "public property" in that the owners do not have final say over what they are used for and how. Where is the line drawn?
It also reminds me of the legal controversy over "deep linking", with some companies (for example, Ticketmaster, named in the article) protesting those who would link deep into their site, rather than to their home page. This would allow those following the link to bypass all of the upper level ads and get right to the material they wanted. They claimed that these links were a violation of their property rights, too.
Myself, I'd draw the line somewhere betwen the two positions. Much as I support the free flow of information around the Internet, I find myself forced to agree with eBay that their computers belong to them and they should be allowed to refuse entry to whomsoever they want. I don't buy the argument that once something is available on the Internet it must be available to everybody. I think Exranets and password protected sites are OK.
On the other hand, I'd disagree with Ticketmaster. They don't have the right to control the links on someone else's pages on someone else's server. That's someone else's property.
It seems to me that the whole point of the "Rosetta Disk" is to provide a key to languages that may be dead or impossible to decipher 10,000 years from now. They are hoping that one of the languages on the disk will survive and the passage in that language can be used as a key to enable future archaeologists to figure out the other languages on the disk and translate other survivals in those languages. That's how the Rosetta Stone worked, after all.
If that's the case, there are two things that they should be focussing on in selecting text and languages to be included:
In terms of languages they'd clearly want to place a priority on all of the languages in wide and common use that people are using to leave a lot of written records in. Languages without a written form (of which there are thousands) aren't as high a priority. They'd probably want to include languages showing as many as possible of the different writing schemes (alphabets, syllabaries, ideographs, etc.) as possible. I'd also recommend, for example, a list of ones and zeros representing the ASCII text version of whatever passage they've chosen in English (my chauvenism is showing).
In terms of the text, they'd want something fairly long using a lot of the most common words, to make it as effective as possible in acting as a key for deciphering other writings. They'd probably want to pay attention to which words undergo the least semantic shift over time (for example, pronouns, number, basic relationship words like "mother" and "father", words like "home", etc.) and include a lot of them as well as the words we think they might have lost the meaning of, but need to decipher other documents. These latter, we'd want to use in a number of different contexts to help them figure them out.
We might want to include a complete dictionary in one of the languages (my anglo-centrism would suggest English, not least for the size of its vocabulary and the mnumber of borrowings from other languages). This can help them get a fuller picture of that language to decipher other remains and, in conjunction with other multi-lingual finds they may come across, may help build up a larger picture of those languages. We may also want to think of what we can include as a key to computer-readable records that aren't so computer readable in the future. Whatever we include in the way of instructions shouldn't assume that our future archaeologist reads the language our instructions are written with.
Another approach (which they appear to have taken) is not assume that even one of the languages that you are using will survive into the future but to assume that a passage will. The language can then be treated as an "encryption scheme" for the semantic content of the passage. Future archaeologists may be able to decipher the language if they know what passage has been written. Genesis is a very good passage for this sort of thing. It has already survived thousands of years relatively unchanged and may very well survive thousands more. Even if our language is dead to future generations, parts of it may survive in a religious context (just as latin was used in the church for over a thousand years after it ceased to be a living language and Hebrew survived for thousands of years in a religious context before being revived as a living language). Keeping this in mind, including Genesis in one language (probably the same language as we've included the complete dictionary) along with a series of illustrations making it clear what the text referred to would make another point of entry for the Rosetta Disk.
Or so it seems to me. YMMV.
Limits of Science and Life's Questions
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Calculating God
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deander2 wrote " I draw my fundimentals about the universe through logic and science, methods which have long proven histories of successfully uncovering mysteries of our universe."
Logic is good. Science is good. I use and respect both. Both are very good at what they do. What neither do is answer (or even try to answer) all of the questions that need to be addressed in order to live "the good life".
For example, there is a whole field of study called "ethics": dealing with "right" and "wrong", what people should do, what choices they should make, etc. The answers to these questions are quite important in living our daily life and living it well. Science doesn't address these questions. It doesn't attempt to. I'm not saying it should. But that doesn't make them any less important. We shouldn't go through our lives saying "I don't know if what I'm doing is right or wrong and I don't care. I have no scientific method of answering the question, so I'll just ignore it." (At least I don't think we should - it's an ethical judgement I'm making.:->)
Similarly, there is more to a good life than logic (as Spock and Data remind us). We don't use logic to love or enjoy a beautiful sunset. That doesn't lessen the worth of love or of the enjoyment of a beautiful sunset.
Theology may be a study, like ethics, for which the scientific method is not the most appropriate tool. If so, to judge a theological book on how well it used the scientific method would not be logical. Similarly, for many people religion is (like love) something that they don't pursue logically. It doesn't make it any less valuable a part of their life.
Personally. I love getting into long philosophical debates about theology and ethics, debates where logic and empirical evidence play a large role. I know I won't end up with provable answers but the process is intellectually stimulating and helps me to understand and refine my position on some of life's most important questions. I'm glad Science isn't my only tool for answering questions because then I wouldn't even see some of the most important ones.
there is a huge difference between linking directly to a file and linking to a page. If you link to a web page, the content can change without your knowledge. If you link to a file, it can be assumed you know what is in that file to begin with, and the chances of the contents of a file being changed are extremely slim. As long as they keep this lawsuit about linking to files, and not linking to pages, the Internet is in no danger.
I don't think it is so simple.
Web pages are files. Admittedly they are text files rather than audio files, but that doesn't make them any less files. Any law against linking to "files" is going to include Web pages in its scope, too -- unless the framers are careful. They could say that text files are exempt. What about graphics files, like GIFs and JPEGS? When you link to a page, you are de facto linking to any inline graphics the page includes, whether or not you are aware of them. Maybe those files need an exemption, too.
You could say that only audio files are illegal to link to, with all text and graphic file links protected. Of course, there is a fair amount of intellectual property that is expressed in the written word or pictures. I suspect that the owners of that type of intellectual property will not be happy about extending protections to music owners while they are explicitly denied them.
Even with audio files, it is not necessarily fair to say that, unlike HTML files, they are unchanging and a linker can be expected to know where the link is leading. HTML files can be stable (www.whitehouse.gov/index.html can be expected remain a to link to the White House's home page and not suddenly switch to a travel agent's web site) and MP3 links can change (song_of_the_week.mp3 is a file name that could be applied to a different song every week. Perhaps, when I made a link to the file it held a legal song, but this week the file holds an illegal copy of a song).
With the corporate promotion of the Internet (everyone needs a Web site and we've seen what can happen to Web-related start-ups), the message I'm getting is: "Let the serfs surf".
You mean Nausicaa of the Wolves?
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Essential Anime
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· Score: 2
While I'm a big fan of Miyazaki's, I wouldn't recommend this as his best work.
I was actually quite surprised that Mononoke was chosen to be the "breakthrough anime" that was supposed to reach a wider North American audience. If I were to choose an anime feature to bring in the big audiences, I'd go for Castle of Cagliostro with a summer release. It's your typical summer blockbust with action, adventure and humour - just animated. It's also a good one to recommend here since, as it's available in DVD.
My personal favourite is Totoro, but then again, I still like to read children's books so I don't think I can speak for everyone. I also like Maison Ikkoku (by Rumiko Takahashi, famous for Ranma 1/2 or Lum/Urusei Yatsura). I can't speak to the feature length film version (which I haven't seen), but some of the half-hour episodes are available on video and the entire story is now available in graphic novel format.
Since information will become a commodity it will be governed by the laws of supply and demand in much the same way as any other product. However there are important differences, in that the supply is potentially infinite once the act of creation has occured.
The question is: is information a "market good" or a "public good". The authors of the article clearly wish it to be treated as the latter while the "powers that be" are just as clearly increasingly treating it as the former. AC alludes to that when (s)he wrote "Since information will become a commodity...". The commodification of information is treated as a given.
There are differences between market goods and public goods and the differences are not just different labels. One example of such a difference, is that market goods tend to be "zero sum" (the more you give away the less you have yourself) while public goods are not. Public goods are said to have the characteristic "indivisibility". Any individual that belongs to the relevant group can acquire the same amount of the public good already made available to the other members of the group at no extra cost. Thus street lamps are considered public good items. If I take advantage of the light cast, it doesn't diminish the availability of light for others. Public roads fit into the same category (though it may not seem that way during rush hour!). On the other hand, items like money, desks, chairs are clearly not indivisible.
Another characteristic of public goods is "non-excludability". What you give to one member of the group, you must give to all. Again street lamps meet this criteria (as does national defense). A third characteristic is "non-rejectability". Similar to non-excludability, this implies that a good cannot be rejected by a member of the group. Someone can decide not to pay for national defense, but he or she cannot reject the benefit (such as it is) of national defense.
Information is a mixed breed. It contains some of the properties of public goods (e.g., indivisibility - which is why libraries work) and some of the characteristics of market goods (e.g., excludability - which is how copyright works).
I was expecting, based on the title of the item, that it would discuss the characteristics of a public good shared by information and argue that since it acts like a public good, it makes sense to treat it as one. I was hoping that reading the article might refresh my memory of the various characteristics of public and market goods (as you can see above, I can only remember three of them). Oh, well.
It may be worth noting that, even as information is increasingly commodified in our "information economy", with the advent of the Internet, gnutella, etc. it increasingly losing its market good characteristic of excludability. Others may counter by pointing to PGP and other modern encryption technologies and say that exludability is as present as ever.
So what do you think: is information a public good (by characteristics) or a market good?
Aha! I knew those copyright courses would come in handy some day!
First, the orignal code was performed as work for hire according to your account. The copyright of work for hire is usually owned by the entity which paid for the work to be done, not by the entity performing the work.
When you are dealing with legal copyright issues "work for hire" may not mean what you think it means. While it is true that "work for hire" is presumed to belong to the employer rather than the employee unless otherwise specified in a contract, according to copyright law "work for hire" only applies to work created by employees, not contractors or consultants. Work written by contractors and consultants are presumed to belong to the contractor or consultant unless otherwise specified in their contract.
So, if I run a newspaper, any articles written by staff writers belong to the newspaper. Any articles commissioned from freelance writers belong to the writer. Of course, as a publisher I make damn sure that freelance writers sign all rights to commissioned articles over to me if I can.
It seems pretty clear that this HTML was not created by employees of the company so you'd have to check their contract to see if it assigned intellectual property rights to the company that hired them.
There is a copyright principle related to "value added". The person claiming the copyright has to "add value". This has prevented phone companies from copyrighting the telephone directory, for example. If all of the design and specification work was done by the company not the previous contractors and all of the HTMLing was done by Dreamweaver you may be able to argue that while they provided labour (like the telephone directory compilers) they haven't added intellectual value and thus cannot claim copyrights.
"If slashdot removes those comments, the DMCA has a precedent, and this site will be the place that set that precedent. I think it is of utmost importance not to do that."
Legal precedents (the kind taken into account in future court cases and which it may be of utmost importance not to set) are not set out of the courtroom and are not set by anyone other than judges. So I wouldn't let a fear or precedent-setting stop you from removing the comments. In fact, if you don't remove the comments and are taken to court, you might lose and be told to remove them by a judge, setting just the kind of precendent that Shomon2 seems to think it is imperative to avoid.
You may decide not to remove the comments, and take your chances on legal precedent setting, but do so based on ethical considerations (that are raised elsewhere in this discussion and that you come up with yourself) or legal considerations (based on the advice of professionals) not on fear of precedent setting.
The only people who have to follow the precedents you set are you. Or do you?
Slashdot Mirror
US English is a little too encompasing for your purposes i would think. Are you talking southern US English? Californian english? New England English, etc? And who's to say that "US English" and "British English" are really all that different?
When you say Chinese - are you speaking of Mandarin or Cantonese (i would assume Mandarin)?
Maybe things will be different in the China-dominated future being described, but currently language on the Internet is primarily enountered in its written form rather than its spoken form. This relates to ypur comments on both the variations in English and Chinese.
There are definite variations in English as spoken in different parts of the USA. However, they tend to disappear from written English, being either differences how words are pronounced or local slang. Local slang tends to disappear from written documents that are more formal than relaxed speech and from Internet documents written for a geographically diverse audience. Different as California and New York English may be from each other, I would wager that few literate Californians would have trouble reading the New York Times.
On the other hand, there are significant differences between written British English and written American English. These appear both in spelling ("colour vs. "color", "centre" vs. "centre") and lexicon ("boot" vs. "trunk", "lift" vs. "elevator"). We're not talking about local slang here but frequently used common words.
Written vs. spoken language has an even greater effect on your Cantonese vs. Mandarin question. The "Chinese language" is an interesting linguistic phenomenon. In its spoken form it simply does not exist. Cantonese and Mandarin are not two different dialects of one "Chinese language". They are completely different languages and are mutually unintelligible. On the other hand, the "Chinese language" has a definite existence in the written form. Written Mandarin is indistinguishable from written Cantonese. So, since the Internet is primarily a written medium, I would expect that when he said "Chinese", he was not referring to "Cantonese" or "Mandarin" but the written language that they both share.
As was pointed out elsewhere in the thread "Chinese" (the written language) is different in Mainland China vs. Taiwan. So you could reasonably ask to which of those two he was referring. I think that the geopolitical part of his argument made it pretty clear that he was talking about Mainland China, though.
There are a number of possible responses to this:
1. Imagine that there was a big market for snuff films, and a lot of people were breaking the law making them because they knew that it would be easy to sell them (since, according to your scenario a film of an illegal act should never be illegal).
If we thought snuff films (or child pornography) were bad and wanted to cut down on the practice of making them, one way might be to try and reduce the market, making it more difficult to sell them. Producers would then have less incentive to make them. One way to make it more difficult to sell them might be to make possession illegal.
2. People who buy snuff films (or child pornography) are rewarding the makers and sellers of the films for their illegal acts. It is not unreasonable to make laws against rewarding people for committing crimes.
3. It is illegal to possess stolen property, even if one can show that one bought it innocently from a reputable source. It is illegal to buy and sell stolen property, even if one did not know that it was stolen. If we are going to make these types of activities surrounding the proceeds of burglary and theft illegal, how much more so should we make these sorts of activities surrounding the proceeds of murder or assault (your snuff film example) or sexual abuse of children (videos or photos of children involved in sex).
Note that text child pornography is not "the proceeds of sexual abuse of children" as no actual children are involved in its creation.
StoryMan wrote:
One crucial difference is that there is a much greater chance that real children were involved in real inappropriate activity in the creation photos/videos than in the creation of a text piece. Sure, it could be trick photography, photoediting magic and/or overage actors. But maybe it wasn't. With a text piece, you know no real children were involved.
It's sort of like the need to see "No animals were harmed in the making of this film." at the end of a movie that showed a lot of harm to animals. If it's not there, one might reasonably assume that real animals were hurt. In a book which describes animals getting hurt and killed left, right and centre there is no need to add in a line at the end "No animals were harmed in the writing of this book."
The crime in child pornography is not in the pictures it creates in pedophiles' heads. It is in the real harm that can happen to real kids. And that happens first and foremost where people are using children as "actors" or "models" in the creation of visual pornographic material. That's a significant difference between the visual and the textual material.
Or so it seems to me. YMMV, of course.
Let me begin by saying that I think that science is an excellent tool for learning about the universe and answering questions. I happily use its products every day and rely upon its premises.
However, science is not capable of answering all kinds of questions. Nor is it capable of accepting all kinds of answers.
To start with the latter. If a question about the universe exists with an unprovable (or untestable) answer, that question will forever be unanswered by science. Science is in the business of testing and any part of reality that is untestable is outside of the bounds of science. That is why the article says:
It is not that this theory is more likely than any other theory, but that it is more testable, and thus within the boundaries of "science".It's is not just answers that can fall in or out of the boundaries of science, but questions, too. A classic example that I like to use of an important area of inquiry that does not fall within the scope of science is Ethics. As most scientists will admit, science cannot answer the question of whether we "should" or "should not" do something. That doesn't lessen the importance of the question, its "metaphysical" nature notwithstanding.
This article was posted under the title "Why Does The Universe Exist?". "Why" can have a number of meanings and so can that question. It could mean "What caused the universe to exist?". It could also mean "To what purpose does the universe exist?". The answer to the former may or may not fall within the boundaries of science (depending on whether or not it is testable). The answer to the latter surely does not. But does that make it not worth asking?
I guess Presidents are easier to buy than Supreme Court judges. ... or are they?
Me, too. As I understand it, before programmers can write the instructions that would allow software to make that kind of distinction, people would have to figure it out.
You don't lose it when your site becomes commercial. You don't lose it when your site becomes large. You don't lose it when your site becomes popular. You lose it when eBay's lawyers write to you and tell you that they want you to stop. That's when eBay takes back the permission to use the site. Any use you make of the site before you get that letter is OK. If you keep going back after you've been evicted and told never to return, that's tresspassing (according to the judge).
It's also legal for stores to refuse entry to people. If the stores don't want to be price checked, and they know that a particular person is a price checker, they can refuse that person entry into the store. And if that person enters after being told that he/she was not welcome, they can charge him/her with tresspassing. That's the parallel the judge has made. eBay told a specific individual (a corporate entity in this case) that they were not welcome on eBay's property (the computers). They entered anyway and were charged with tresspassing.
This reminds me of a saying common in the early days of the [Use]Net, "Freedom of the press belongs to them as owns one". It was all about the rights of systems administrators and the owners of networked computers to control absolutely the use that was made of their processors and storage space. No one has a right, the philosophy held, to propogation of their articles. It was a privilege and a favour extended by systems administrators, who would devote some of their valuable processor time and storage space to the public good by propogating the articles. And if they said "no" to you or to your article: tough beans, it's their computer.
It seems to me that eBay is making the same sort of argument. People don't have a "right", they say, to use the servers that belong to eBay. It is a privilege that they make generally available and can revoke at will. If you disagree with eBay, you are in the position of saying that at some point privately owned computers become "public property" in that the owners do not have final say over what they are used for and how. Where is the line drawn?
It also reminds me of the legal controversy over "deep linking", with some companies (for example, Ticketmaster, named in the article) protesting those who would link deep into their site, rather than to their home page. This would allow those following the link to bypass all of the upper level ads and get right to the material they wanted. They claimed that these links were a violation of their property rights, too.
Myself, I'd draw the line somewhere betwen the two positions. Much as I support the free flow of information around the Internet, I find myself forced to agree with eBay that their computers belong to them and they should be allowed to refuse entry to whomsoever they want. I don't buy the argument that once something is available on the Internet it must be available to everybody. I think Exranets and password protected sites are OK.
On the other hand, I'd disagree with Ticketmaster. They don't have the right to control the links on someone else's pages on someone else's server. That's someone else's property.
YMMV, of course.
It seems to me that the whole point of the "Rosetta Disk" is to provide a key to languages that may be dead or impossible to decipher 10,000 years from now. They are hoping that one of the languages on the disk will survive and the passage in that language can be used as a key to enable future archaeologists to figure out the other languages on the disk and translate other survivals in those languages. That's how the Rosetta Stone worked, after all.
If that's the case, there are two things that they should be focussing on in selecting text and languages to be included:
We might want to include a complete dictionary in one of the languages (my anglo-centrism would suggest English, not least for the size of its vocabulary and the mnumber of borrowings from other languages). This can help them get a fuller picture of that language to decipher other remains and, in conjunction with other multi-lingual finds they may come across, may help build up a larger picture of those languages. We may also want to think of what we can include as a key to computer-readable records that aren't so computer readable in the future. Whatever we include in the way of instructions shouldn't assume that our future archaeologist reads the language our instructions are written with.
Another approach (which they appear to have taken) is not assume that even one of the languages that you are using will survive into the future but to assume that a passage will. The language can then be treated as an "encryption scheme" for the semantic content of the passage. Future archaeologists may be able to decipher the language if they know what passage has been written. Genesis is a very good passage for this sort of thing. It has already survived thousands of years relatively unchanged and may very well survive thousands more. Even if our language is dead to future generations, parts of it may survive in a religious context (just as latin was used in the church for over a thousand years after it ceased to be a living language and Hebrew survived for thousands of years in a religious context before being revived as a living language). Keeping this in mind, including Genesis in one language (probably the same language as we've included the complete dictionary) along with a series of illustrations making it clear what the text referred to would make another point of entry for the Rosetta Disk.
Or so it seems to me. YMMV.
Logic is good. Science is good. I use and respect both. Both are very good at what they do. What neither do is answer (or even try to answer) all of the questions that need to be addressed in order to live "the good life".
For example, there is a whole field of study called "ethics": dealing with "right" and "wrong", what people should do, what choices they should make, etc. The answers to these questions are quite important in living our daily life and living it well. Science doesn't address these questions. It doesn't attempt to. I'm not saying it should. But that doesn't make them any less important. We shouldn't go through our lives saying "I don't know if what I'm doing is right or wrong and I don't care. I have no scientific method of answering the question, so I'll just ignore it." (At least I don't think we should - it's an ethical judgement I'm making. :->)
Similarly, there is more to a good life than logic (as Spock and Data remind us). We don't use logic to love or enjoy a beautiful sunset. That doesn't lessen the worth of love or of the enjoyment of a beautiful sunset.
Theology may be a study, like ethics, for which the scientific method is not the most appropriate tool. If so, to judge a theological book on how well it used the scientific method would not be logical. Similarly, for many people religion is (like love) something that they don't pursue logically. It doesn't make it any less valuable a part of their life.
Personally. I love getting into long philosophical debates about theology and ethics, debates where logic and empirical evidence play a large role. I know I won't end up with provable answers but the process is intellectually stimulating and helps me to understand and refine my position on some of life's most important questions. I'm glad Science isn't my only tool for answering questions because then I wouldn't even see some of the most important ones.
Or so it seems to me. YMMV, of course.
I don't think it is so simple.
Web pages are files. Admittedly they are text files rather than audio files, but that doesn't make them any less files. Any law against linking to "files" is going to include Web pages in its scope, too -- unless the framers are careful. They could say that text files are exempt. What about graphics files, like GIFs and JPEGS? When you link to a page, you are de facto linking to any inline graphics the page includes, whether or not you are aware of them. Maybe those files need an exemption, too.
You could say that only audio files are illegal to link to, with all text and graphic file links protected. Of course, there is a fair amount of intellectual property that is expressed in the written word or pictures. I suspect that the owners of that type of intellectual property will not be happy about extending protections to music owners while they are explicitly denied them.
Even with audio files, it is not necessarily fair to say that, unlike HTML files, they are unchanging and a linker can be expected to know where the link is leading. HTML files can be stable (www.whitehouse.gov/index.html can be expected remain a to link to the White House's home page and not suddenly switch to a travel agent's web site) and MP3 links can change (song_of_the_week.mp3 is a file name that could be applied to a different song every week. Perhaps, when I made a link to the file it held a legal song, but this week the file holds an illegal copy of a song).
With the corporate promotion of the Internet (everyone needs a Web site and we've seen what can happen to Web-related start-ups), the message I'm getting is: "Let the serfs surf".
While I'm a big fan of Miyazaki's, I wouldn't recommend this as his best work.
I was actually quite surprised that Mononoke was chosen to be the "breakthrough anime" that was supposed to reach a wider North American audience. If I were to choose an anime feature to bring in the big audiences, I'd go for Castle of Cagliostro with a summer release. It's your typical summer blockbust with action, adventure and humour - just animated. It's also a good one to recommend here since, as it's available in DVD.
My personal favourite is Totoro , but then again, I still like to read children's books so I don't think I can speak for everyone. I also like Maison Ikkoku (by Rumiko Takahashi, famous for Ranma 1/2 or Lum/Urusei Yatsura). I can't speak to the feature length film version (which I haven't seen), but some of the half-hour episodes are available on video and the entire story is now available in graphic novel format.
The question is: is information a "market good" or a "public good". The authors of the article clearly wish it to be treated as the latter while the "powers that be" are just as clearly increasingly treating it as the former. AC alludes to that when (s)he wrote "Since information will become a commodity...". The commodification of information is treated as a given.
There are differences between market goods and public goods and the differences are not just different labels. One example of such a difference, is that market goods tend to be "zero sum" (the more you give away the less you have yourself) while public goods are not. Public goods are said to have the characteristic "indivisibility". Any individual that belongs to the relevant group can acquire the same amount of the public good already made available to the other members of the group at no extra cost. Thus street lamps are considered public good items. If I take advantage of the light cast, it doesn't diminish the availability of light for others. Public roads fit into the same category (though it may not seem that way during rush hour!). On the other hand, items like money, desks, chairs are clearly not indivisible.
Another characteristic of public goods is "non-excludability". What you give to one member of the group, you must give to all. Again street lamps meet this criteria (as does national defense). A third characteristic is "non-rejectability". Similar to non-excludability, this implies that a good cannot be rejected by a member of the group. Someone can decide not to pay for national defense, but he or she cannot reject the benefit (such as it is) of national defense.
Information is a mixed breed. It contains some of the properties of public goods (e.g., indivisibility - which is why libraries work) and some of the characteristics of market goods (e.g., excludability - which is how copyright works).
I was expecting, based on the title of the item, that it would discuss the characteristics of a public good shared by information and argue that since it acts like a public good, it makes sense to treat it as one. I was hoping that reading the article might refresh my memory of the various characteristics of public and market goods (as you can see above, I can only remember three of them). Oh, well.
It may be worth noting that, even as information is increasingly commodified in our "information economy", with the advent of the Internet, gnutella, etc. it increasingly losing its market good characteristic of excludability. Others may counter by pointing to PGP and other modern encryption technologies and say that exludability is as present as ever.
So what do you think: is information a public good (by characteristics) or a market good?
Aha! I knew those copyright courses would come in handy some day!
First, the orignal code was performed as work for hire according to your account. The copyright of work for hire is usually owned by the entity which paid for the work to be done, not by the entity performing the work.
When you are dealing with legal copyright issues "work for hire" may not mean what you think it means. While it is true that "work for hire" is presumed to belong to the employer rather than the employee unless otherwise specified in a contract, according to copyright law "work for hire" only applies to work created by employees, not contractors or consultants. Work written by contractors and consultants are presumed to belong to the contractor or consultant unless otherwise specified in their contract.
So, if I run a newspaper, any articles written by staff writers belong to the newspaper. Any articles commissioned from freelance writers belong to the writer. Of course, as a publisher I make damn sure that freelance writers sign all rights to commissioned articles over to me if I can.
It seems pretty clear that this HTML was not created by employees of the company so you'd have to check their contract to see if it assigned intellectual property rights to the company that hired them.
There is a copyright principle related to "value added". The person claiming the copyright has to "add value". This has prevented phone companies from copyrighting the telephone directory, for example. If all of the design and specification work was done by the company not the previous contractors and all of the HTMLing was done by Dreamweaver you may be able to argue that while they provided labour (like the telephone directory compilers) they haven't added intellectual value and thus cannot claim copyrights.
Hoping this helps,
Legal precedents (the kind taken into account in future court cases and which it may be of utmost importance not to set) are not set out of the courtroom and are not set by anyone other than judges. So I wouldn't let a fear or precedent-setting stop you from removing the comments. In fact, if you don't remove the comments and are taken to court, you might lose and be told to remove them by a judge, setting just the kind of precendent that Shomon2 seems to think it is imperative to avoid.
You may decide not to remove the comments, and take your chances on legal precedent setting, but do so based on ethical considerations (that are raised elsewhere in this discussion and that you come up with yourself) or legal considerations (based on the advice of professionals) not on fear of precedent setting.
The only people who have to follow the precedents you set are you. Or do you?