I'm not so sure. Instead of RICO, the alleged misconduct here is collusion between competitors. So fr'instance, if at an RIAA meeting record company 1 talks to record company 2 and they decide that it is no longer profitable to make 45rpm records and they say "if you stop making them I will stop making them" that would probably be illegal collusion under the antitrust laws.
Likewise, in the absence of the noerr pennington doctrine, it would be illegal for those record companies to get together and both decide to sue somebody. The Noerr Pennington doctrine lets them collude for the purposes of pursuing their lawsuit without antitrust liability.
So Noerr Pennington makes an exception to the antitrust laws for suing people. The exception to that exception is in the case of sham litigation. I think there is a chance to land this case in that sham litigation exception because if you look at the cases (and probably at RIAA documents) the purpose of the cases is not necessarily to win, but to scare people, which I would argue is irrespective of the merits of the individual cases.
I also think there is some sort of a case here to say that the RIAA members may be able to collude to sue people for violation of copyrights - the antitrust issue is that they are using their market power in the production of copyrighted material and using that to establish a dominant position in the distribution of those materials. So the way I look at it, there are two markets here, one for owning content, and one for distributing it. The RIAA is leveraging their power in the ownership market to eliminate new & more efficient forms of distribution. I haven't thought this one all the way through yet, though.
There is a long standing line of cases (noerr pennington doctrine, I believe) that say this type of collusion is OK. It can be overcome if it can be proven that the litigation is a "sham". Figuring out whether litigation is a sham could take considerable discovery, which I am sure the RIAA doesn't want.
There is also another antitrust issue here, which is that the record companies are using their market power in the music production market to leverage that into market power in the music distribution market. Or something.
I guess what I am saying is if you decided you can accomplish your mission in 90 days, and your equipment lasts 3X that long, you probably spent some money on reliability that could have been spent elsewhere.
As you probably know, you start to hit diminishing returns on very high reliability, sometimes it is worth it to build redundant missions rather than high reliability components.
I'm not saying this is bad, I would rather the money be spent on Mars than on tobacco subsidies, it just helps to temper the crowing with the fact that good engineering means effeciency of resources as well as meeting a minimum standard.
What is the purpose of commercial radio? To affect consumer preference by luring you in with music then making the pitch with an ad.
Couple an iPod to a WiFi card, and you have a location based music distribution system. You do the same thing as radio except every song you give away has guaranteed brought someone to your physical location.
Soon Starbucks will just outright buy U@ and Britney songs to distribute.
This is gonna kill commercial radio, and the record companies. Look for one record company to be a clearinghouse for rights.
Just posting this to make sure there is some prior art documented.
You might be right, it may not be a derivative work, it may be instructions for creating a derivative work. So it's contributory infringement.
Might also not be DMCA actionable, but I am not sure about that. Might be up to the details of th CSS license.
The pathological case here would be if there was a machine that would take a recipe and produce a re-mix of a movie, changing scene orders, dimming brightness, maybe even split screening. Would that recipe be a derivative work? Either way, if you distribute the recipe to someone without the right to make derivative works (everyone) you may be contributing to infringement.
The thing that is interesting here is that it is now settled that what used to be a copyright neutral event, such as reading a book, is now, in the digital realm, considered to be governed by copyright (because in order to play a DVD, the bits must get "copied" to memory). This got settled long before people had a chance to think it through.
This case brings that stoopidity into sharp relief. RCA says that they are not making a derivative work, they are merely playing the file and skipping certain portions, which is an event that does not have any copyright implications.
Hollywood is going to say that because the algorithm is deterministic, they are in fact making a derivative work.
I think under current law, RCA will lose. Then maybe the store manager at your local wal-mart will have to go to jail on a DMCA rap.
I think this is an unauthorized making of a derivative work, and as such should be actionable under the DMCA. As a matter of fact, distribution of this player should be as well.
Couldn't we (meaning someone with more actual energy than me) put together an open source patent portfolio? This could be used to offset the dampening effect of corporate defensive portfolios.
Attorneys are sposeda donate 10% of their time to pro-bono causes, I think patent lawyers oughta do this too. A vanilla patent app can be got for 8-12K. What we (yes, there is a mouse in my pocket) need to do is set up some sort of foundation that patents can be donated to, which will serve as protection when an IBM or someone comes breathing down Open Source's neck.
ie. Letter from BigCo. says "please cease & desist, we patented the use of 1's in binary code." Letter back from Arsenal of Democracy says "oh, yeah, well we hold the patent on the 0's"
The spirit of compromise prevails, and a cross license is worked out.
That's a good question, but not insurmountable. I think if you analyzed most advertising (counting TV & Print as well as radio) you would see an information content somewhere below 10%. meaning that less than 10% of the bandwith of the ad is "special sauce, lettuce cheese". The rest is visuals showing happy, multiethnic families sharing quality time (or T&A in the case of beer).
The upshot is, the purpose of the ad is to get your corporeal being into the store, they are really only telling you about the special sauce to accomplish that end. That being said, you need some way to prime the pump and get the word out that the hot new Britney song is at McDonalds, this may be a function of the clearinghouse as well
(mix it with GPS, bio implants and a preference tracking service so it says "your ghrelin levels seem low, why not stop at the McDonalds 1.2 miles on the left and get that new GYBE! track you have been looking for, as well as two all beef patties, foo, bar, etc.")
Think about the marketing forces behind commercial radio stations, their value can be summed up as "driving consumer preference by making music available in a channel that exposes users to advertising messages."
Something like this (which I have been waiting for for a while now) can make it so that Pepsi, instead of paying to have Britney on their commercials, can just buy her new song from her for $1MM outright, and have access points which automagically d/l the song to you whenever you go into a Pepsi vending establishment.
In other words, moving back to a world where music is too cheap to pirate. Why bother downloading from Kazaa if all you gotta do is buy a Pepsi at lunch, or go to McDonalds instead of BK, or Mobil instead of Shell. This does two things: 1. Seriously reduces the need for record companies, really all you would need is some sort of clearinghouse. 2. Disintermediates all the middle men in radio advertising, since companies can now directly affect consumer preference, rather than coming up with tricky ad copy to do it and then baiting us to listen to the ad with a kewl tune.
Is there a place where we can get an informative matrix as to where each presidential candidate stands on issues such as H1B visa's and the like that are of interest to the/. community? So far, I have liked Dean, but AFAICT, his site is a leetle vague on H1B's specifically.
Somebody (not it) ought to create a command line tool to twiddle one insignifigant bit in an MP3 randomly, so you could just point it at your share directory periodically to break the chain that the RIAA seems to be making a lot of hay out of. Granted, this would wreck the ability to pull from multiple sources and verify files, but war is hell.
My suggestion it to not do this in the ID3 part, rather in the content part of the file, in that it would be possible to create a tool that would MD5 the audio content separate of the header.
I am aware of the benefits of H1-B, but what tax incentives are you referring to? I didn't know there were tax incentives and if there are, it would change my thoughts on this issue considerably.
Does anyone know of these tax incentives? Any citations would be greatly appreciated.
Most communities have zoning regulations which specify which types of home businesses are permissible. The types of businesses that are usually permissible are things like consultancies which have little or now walk up traffic.
On a more pragmatic level, just do it and see if anyone complains. Unless you have clients lining up down the street, no one will even notice. The IRS does not (yet, until Total Informatin Awareness comes online) coordinate with your town, so the town won't even know of the business until you file a ficticious name (D/B/A for a sole proprietorship) or form an llc or corporation (any of which is a good idea). Even then, the property tax folks in the town (who want to tax your computers) probably don't talk with the zoning folks, so go with the old "it's easier to get forgiveness than permission" motto on this one.
What are your views as to the adviseability of creating an arsenal of patents arising from open source projects, which could be used to deter (via cross-licensing, etc) closed source attacks on open source.
I have seen one project along these lines (perhaps a helpful/.er can fill this in) but I would like to see an actual patenting operation wherein open source coders could have help patenting their inventions, in return the patent is assigned to the portfolio, to be used in the event of a suit by a closed source company, etc.
Kazaa may be funding their defense, and thus some of their antitrust counterclaim, through insurance. I am not sure about internationally, but in the US, many commercial general liability plans cover "advertising damage", which is supposed to cover such things as if you put up a sign that unintentionally infringes on someone elses trademark (possibly copyright too, but I'm a leetle rusty here) your CGL policy covers it. What this means is that your defense of that claim can include a counterclaim that the people suing you consitute an illegal cartel, and your insurance carrier may be required to pay the costs of defense.
The problem, of course, is that rule of reason antitrust case can cost millions to pursue, whereas a copyright case is much cheaper. The upside for us is that discovery in a rule of reason antitrust case is frequently a proctological oddessey, which may take us into the inner workings of the RIAA.
In most cases like the one you are in, you probably don't need a lawyer until their lawyer contacts you or they get so obnoxious that it's causing you to worry alot.
One note here is to think of it from the CEO's side. He is going to call one of his many lawyers who is hopefully going to be able to talk him down.
I used to be a lawyer at a big company, and I faced this situation many times. I was always able to talk the offended wiggo-de-biggo out of overreacting, it just takes a little finesse. When you come down to it, most big companies are actually risk averse, they have much more to lose than you do.
Even though they will threaten & gnash their teeth, when it gets down to their claim against you (with which they can maybe take your house) vs your counterclaim against them (worth maybe $500 million in Alabama) in the jury room, they will think twice about it. Smart lawyers realize this off the bat and talk their shoot from the hip CEO's out of this type of thing right off the bat. Sometimes you may need to get a smart lawyer of your own to help the lawyer for the company get smarter.
Be Careful -- Might Not Be Fair Use
on
Accurate OCR?
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· Score: 1
Be careful about contacting the publishers. They may decide that they could cash in on this and try to hassle you for unauthorized copying of their work. Sounds evil, I know, but you know lawyers. Often the best bet is to stay under the radar.
IAAL, just not a very good one so get a good one's advice.
Actually, you are right, I was making my statement without benefit of reading the MS license; on account of I don't think it matters.
The case, I think, would be about whether the statement:
"A. It is a legal requirement that pre-installed operating systems remain with a machine for the life of the machine. If a company or individual donates a machine to your school, it must be donated with the operating system that was installed on the PC. "
is sufficiently misleading as to constitute an unfair trade practice.
Actually, there might be a good case for initiating suit on this one. I am speaking without benefit of excessive factual knowledge or even a fully thought out idea, but here's how it would go:
I haven't been following the case anymore, but I think it came out that MS is a monopoly, and as such, they are severely constrained in what they can do. Remember, it is a violation of the antitrust laws to "maintain" a monopoly. If their statements were found to be misleading, this could be construed to be an illegal maintennance of a monopoly, and possibly subject to treble damages.
The best way to sue them on this is to find someone small who microsoft is suing, and have them counterclaim it. An even better thing is if the small conterclaimer is actually paying for their defense from insurance money.
Slashdot Mirror
I'm not so sure. Instead of RICO, the alleged misconduct here is collusion between competitors. So fr'instance, if at an RIAA meeting record company 1 talks to record company 2 and they decide that it is no longer profitable to make 45rpm records and they say "if you stop making them I will stop making them" that would probably be illegal collusion under the antitrust laws.
Likewise, in the absence of the noerr pennington doctrine, it would be illegal for those record companies to get together and both decide to sue somebody. The Noerr Pennington doctrine lets them collude for the purposes of pursuing their lawsuit without antitrust liability.
So Noerr Pennington makes an exception to the antitrust laws for suing people. The exception to that exception is in the case of sham litigation. I think there is a chance to land this case in that sham litigation exception because if you look at the cases (and probably at RIAA documents) the purpose of the cases is not necessarily to win, but to scare people, which I would argue is irrespective of the merits of the individual cases.
I also think there is some sort of a case here to say that the RIAA members may be able to collude to sue people for violation of copyrights - the antitrust issue is that they are using their market power in the production of copyrighted material and using that to establish a dominant position in the distribution of those materials. So the way I look at it, there are two markets here, one for owning content, and one for distributing it. The RIAA is leveraging their power in the ownership market to eliminate new & more efficient forms of distribution. I haven't thought this one all the way through yet, though.
There is a long standing line of cases (noerr pennington doctrine, I believe) that say this type of collusion is OK. It can be overcome if it can be proven that the litigation is a "sham". Figuring out whether litigation is a sham could take considerable discovery, which I am sure the RIAA doesn't want.
There is also another antitrust issue here, which is that the record companies are using their market power in the music production market to leverage that into market power in the music distribution market. Or something.
http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=93366&cid=8019 630
Trying to document when I actually thought it up so there is some prior art.
That just means your budgeted too much.
I guess what I am saying is if you decided you can accomplish your mission in 90 days, and your equipment lasts 3X that long, you probably spent some money on reliability that could have been spent elsewhere.
As you probably know, you start to hit diminishing returns on very high reliability, sometimes it is worth it to build redundant missions rather than high reliability components.
I'm not saying this is bad, I would rather the money be spent on Mars than on tobacco subsidies, it just helps to temper the crowing with the fact that good engineering means effeciency of resources as well as meeting a minimum standard.
Isn't this overkill? Doesn't this mean they spent too much money on engineering this thing?
Not to be too trollish, but if you are building a bridge to hold 10 tons and it ends up holding 100 tons, you are wasting resources.
What is the purpose of commercial radio? To affect consumer preference by luring you in with music then making the pitch with an ad.
Couple an iPod to a WiFi card, and you have a location based music distribution system. You do the same thing as radio except every song you give away has guaranteed brought someone to your physical location.
Soon Starbucks will just outright buy U@ and Britney songs to distribute.
This is gonna kill commercial radio, and the record companies. Look for one record company to be a clearinghouse for rights.
Just posting this to make sure there is some prior art documented.
You might be right, it may not be a derivative work, it may be instructions for creating a derivative work. So it's contributory infringement.
Might also not be DMCA actionable, but I am not sure about that. Might be up to the details of th CSS license.
The pathological case here would be if there was a machine that would take a recipe and produce a re-mix of a movie, changing scene orders, dimming brightness, maybe even split screening. Would that recipe be a derivative work? Either way, if you distribute the recipe to someone without the right to make derivative works (everyone) you may be contributing to infringement.
It wasn't a troll, just typed in haste.
The thing that is interesting here is that it is now settled that what used to be a copyright neutral event, such as reading a book, is now, in the digital realm, considered to be governed by copyright (because in order to play a DVD, the bits must get "copied" to memory). This got settled long before people had a chance to think it through.
This case brings that stoopidity into sharp relief. RCA says that they are not making a derivative work, they are merely playing the file and skipping certain portions, which is an event that does not have any copyright implications.
Hollywood is going to say that because the algorithm is deterministic, they are in fact making a derivative work.
I think under current law, RCA will lose. Then maybe the store manager at your local wal-mart will have to go to jail on a DMCA rap.
I think this is an unauthorized making of a derivative work, and as such should be actionable under the DMCA. As a matter of fact, distribution of this player should be as well.
Couldn't we (meaning someone with more actual energy than me) put together an open source patent portfolio? This could be used to offset the dampening effect of corporate defensive portfolios.
Attorneys are sposeda donate 10% of their time to pro-bono causes, I think patent lawyers oughta do this too. A vanilla patent app can be got for 8-12K. What we (yes, there is a mouse in my pocket) need to do is set up some sort of foundation that patents can be donated to, which will serve as protection when an IBM or someone comes breathing down Open Source's neck.
ie.
Letter from BigCo. says "please cease & desist, we patented the use of 1's in binary code."
Letter back from Arsenal of Democracy says "oh, yeah, well we hold the patent on the 0's"
The spirit of compromise prevails, and a cross license is worked out.
What's the difference between this and a federally mandated speed governor on every car back when 55 was the federal speed limit?
That's a good question, but not insurmountable. I think if you analyzed most advertising (counting TV & Print as well as radio) you would see an information content somewhere below 10%. meaning that less than 10% of the bandwith of the ad is "special sauce, lettuce cheese". The rest is visuals showing happy, multiethnic families sharing quality time (or T&A in the case of beer).
The upshot is, the purpose of the ad is to get your corporeal being into the store, they are really only telling you about the special sauce to accomplish that end. That being said, you need some way to prime the pump and get the word out that the hot new Britney song is at McDonalds, this may be a function of the clearinghouse as well
(mix it with GPS, bio implants and a preference tracking service so it says "your ghrelin levels seem low, why not stop at the McDonalds 1.2 miles on the left and get that new GYBE! track you have been looking for, as well as two all beef patties, foo, bar, etc.")
Here is why this is important.
Think about the marketing forces behind commercial radio stations, their value can be summed up as "driving consumer preference by making music available in a channel that exposes users to advertising messages."
Something like this (which I have been waiting for for a while now) can make it so that Pepsi, instead of paying to have Britney on their commercials, can just buy her new song from her for $1MM outright, and have access points which automagically d/l the song to you whenever you go into a Pepsi vending establishment.
In other words, moving back to a world where music is too cheap to pirate. Why bother downloading from Kazaa if all you gotta do is buy a Pepsi at lunch, or go to McDonalds instead of BK, or Mobil instead of Shell. This does two things:
1. Seriously reduces the need for record companies, really all you would need is some sort of clearinghouse.
2. Disintermediates all the middle men in radio advertising, since companies can now directly affect consumer preference, rather than coming up with tricky ad copy to do it and then baiting us to listen to the ad with a kewl tune.
Is there a place where we can get an informative matrix as to where each presidential candidate stands on issues such as H1B visa's and the like that are of interest to the /. community? So far, I have liked Dean, but AFAICT, his site is a leetle vague on H1B's specifically.
Somebody (not it) ought to create a command line tool to twiddle one insignifigant bit in an MP3 randomly, so you could just point it at your share directory periodically to break the chain that the RIAA seems to be making a lot of hay out of. Granted, this would wreck the ability to pull from multiple sources and verify files, but war is hell.
My suggestion it to not do this in the ID3 part, rather in the content part of the file, in that it would be possible to create a tool that would MD5 the audio content separate of the header.
I am aware of the benefits of H1-B, but what tax incentives are you referring to? I didn't know there were tax incentives and if there are, it would change my thoughts on this issue considerably.
Does anyone know of these tax incentives? Any citations would be greatly appreciated.
Most communities have zoning regulations which specify which types of home businesses are permissible. The types of businesses that are usually permissible are things like consultancies which have little or now walk up traffic.
On a more pragmatic level, just do it and see if anyone complains. Unless you have clients lining up down the street, no one will even notice. The IRS does not (yet, until Total Informatin Awareness comes online) coordinate with your town, so the town won't even know of the business until you file a ficticious name (D/B/A for a sole proprietorship) or form an llc or corporation (any of which is a good idea). Even then, the property tax folks in the town (who want to tax your computers) probably don't talk with the zoning folks, so go with the old "it's easier to get forgiveness than permission" motto on this one.
Good luck.
What are your views as to the adviseability of creating an arsenal of patents arising from open source projects, which could be used to deter (via cross-licensing, etc) closed source attacks on open source.
/.er can fill this in) but I would like to see an actual patenting operation wherein open source coders could have help patenting their inventions, in return the patent is assigned to the portfolio, to be used in the event of a suit by a closed source company, etc.
I have seen one project along these lines (perhaps a helpful
Kazaa may be funding their defense, and thus some of their antitrust counterclaim, through insurance. I am not sure about internationally, but in the US, many commercial general liability plans cover "advertising damage", which is supposed to cover such things as if you put up a sign that unintentionally infringes on someone elses trademark (possibly copyright too, but I'm a leetle rusty here) your CGL policy covers it. What this means is that your defense of that claim can include a counterclaim that the people suing you consitute an illegal cartel, and your insurance carrier may be required to pay the costs of defense.
The problem, of course, is that rule of reason antitrust case can cost millions to pursue, whereas a copyright case is much cheaper. The upside for us is that discovery in a rule of reason antitrust case is frequently a proctological oddessey, which may take us into the inner workings of the RIAA.
In most cases like the one you are in, you probably don't need a lawyer until their lawyer contacts you or they get so obnoxious that it's causing you to worry alot.
One note here is to think of it from the CEO's side. He is going to call one of his many lawyers who is hopefully going to be able to talk him down.
I used to be a lawyer at a big company, and I faced this situation many times. I was always able to talk the offended wiggo-de-biggo out of overreacting, it just takes a little finesse. When you come down to it, most big companies are actually risk averse, they have much more to lose than you do.
Even though they will threaten & gnash their teeth, when it gets down to their claim against you (with which they can maybe take your house) vs your counterclaim against them (worth maybe $500 million in Alabama) in the jury room, they will think twice about it. Smart lawyers realize this off the bat and talk their shoot from the hip CEO's out of this type of thing right off the bat. Sometimes you may need to get a smart lawyer of your own to help the lawyer for the company get smarter.
Be careful about contacting the publishers. They may decide that they could cash in on this and try to hassle you for unauthorized copying of their work. Sounds evil, I know, but you know lawyers. Often the best bet is to stay under the radar.
IAAL, just not a very good one so get a good one's advice.
The set "research" is not exclusive of the set "fraud" or the set "Shilling"
It could also possibly be called price fixing
Actually, you are right, I was making my statement without benefit of reading the MS license; on account of I don't think it matters.
The case, I think, would be about whether the statement:
"A. It is a legal requirement that pre-installed operating systems remain with a machine for the life of the machine. If a company or individual donates a machine to your school, it must be donated with the operating system that was installed on the PC. "
is sufficiently misleading as to constitute an unfair trade practice.
Actually, there might be a good case for initiating suit on this one. I am speaking without benefit of excessive factual knowledge or even a fully thought out idea, but here's how it would go:
I haven't been following the case anymore, but I think it came out that MS is a monopoly, and as such, they are severely constrained in what they can do. Remember, it is a violation of the antitrust laws to "maintain" a monopoly. If their statements were found to be misleading, this could be construed to be an illegal maintennance of a monopoly, and possibly subject to treble damages.
The best way to sue them on this is to find someone small who microsoft is suing, and have them counterclaim it. An even better thing is if the small conterclaimer is actually paying for their defense from insurance money.
Wabbit season!