When you develop code for a client, the client then owns the code.
Not true. Unless the contract says you are doing a "work for hire" the writer retains the copyright. Also, only works that are created to be part of a larger existing work can be a "work for hire".
Also increasing the strength of an author's claim to ownership is the fact that he's a contractor and not an employee.
Therefore, if you are hired to write a program for someone, you own the copyright, even if the contract describes what you are doing as a "work for hire".
When I worked for ICL we often had one customer pay for development that later benefitted other customers.
There were features we weren't interested in adding to our base product but we would add them if a customer would pay for that development. Once the feature had been added to the base product the benefit was available to all our customers.
Also, customers did not receive the source code to our modifications (the code they paid would have done them no good without the rest of the code). The product was ours and if they wanted to pay for an enhancement that was fine but the product remained 100% ours.
I remember when cable TV (at least in my area) was commercial free. That was the main point of cable: free over-the-air TV needed commercials to pay for the programming but if you paid for cable then you had bought your way out of watching the commercials.
What we are faced with here (as always) is the golden rule: the one with the gold makes the rules. The only solution I see (and it's not 100%) is to systematically vote against the incumbant in every election.
Because elected officials who have served mutliple terms have more influence than newly elected officials, the voters represented by new officials get less representation than other voters. This situation is inherently unfair and should be challenged somehow.
Pretty much everything you said, while not unreasonable, is irrelevant to my point which was that people should think at least twice about where apparently small and reasonable changes will lead. I.e., Don't fix what's not broken and The road to Hell is paved with good intentions. Totalitarian states don't spring to life fully developed. They get that way one reasonable and logical step at a time.
At this point it might be appropriate to tell the story about a guy who jumped out of a 50th floor window while trying to fly by flapping his arms. As he shot past the 40th floor he thought "so far, so good". The point (for anyone who missed it) is that you can't just assume that because things are fine now that they will continue that way. Actions have consequences and sometimes those consequences are unintended and painful.
The problem is that totalitarian states don't spring into existence fully formed. They evolve one step at a time and at each step people say "that sounds reasonable, after all it's for our safety". Very often the people are right, each step in of itself is reasonable. The danger comes from the long term trend which can cause a country to quietly slide in real trouble.
My observation about driver's licenses is intended to cause people to examine how this country has changed over the last 50 or 100 years and to think about what the general trend has been. Perhaps things that are being proposed today and which seem reasonable on the surface shouldn't be supported after all. Perhaps the apparent gain isn't really worth the loss.
Revisionist history gets involved not because I think there is an organized plot to control people's minds but because people need to understand that history is not immutable. Just because you read it in an "real" textbook doesn't make it true.
Textbooks are chosen to satisfy a constituency. That constituency is largely comfortable with the current common view of the world. If the current view is that we should all have a national id complete with biometric information then there is a risk that anyone who suggested otherwise (Orwell perhaps?) will be quietly dropped from the curriculum.
The result is the danger Santayana warned of: those who fail to learn the lessons of history are doomed to repeat them.
I was going to post an on topic reply but then I noticed your final comment: No? Then shut the hell up and realized that you are incapable of a real discussion.
A driver's license wasn't always required. The first states to require a driver's license were Massachusetts and Missouri in 1903. However, it wasn't until the 1950s that all states required road test and/or examination in order to get a license (reference). Somehow the world managed to survive those 40 odd years of unlicensed drivers.
Most people don't have any inkling as to how how much the world has changed in the last 50 years (or 100 years for those of you over 50). Politicians today can get elected on platforms that would have had them run out of town on a rail only 30 years ago.
In the future people watching old movies won't understand the terror implicit in the phrase "ver are your paperz!". They won't recognize that phrase as being fundamentally un-American.
Revisionist history will make sure they aren't even taught that things were ever any different. Revisionist history may not even include a mention of Washington, Jefferson, or Franklin.
If some people get their way you won't even be able to teach yourself history. All that you will know are the "facts" The State has approved for your consumption.
The sad thing is that already anyone who points these things out is derided as a nut.
If you can prove that you had the idea before the competitor that stole it then you get the patent.
If you can prove being the key phrase here. The problem with a little guy defending his patent against MegaCorp Inc. is that MegaCorp Inc. has a battalion of lawyers with nothing better to do than to bury the case in paperwork thereby outspending the little guy until he has to quit before winning his case.
See
this page at Don Lancaster's site for more information.
To the people who are saying that if it turns out that these technologies are patented, we'll simply come up with an alternative: the problem isn't in the implementation of the technology (i.e., what's been sent to the W3C) the problem is that a patent covers the idea behind the technology and any attempt to implement the idea will also likely violate the patent.
I think one of the root causes of these situations is that the USPTO is issuing patents for ideas that are not truly innovative but which are pretty obvious to any programmer trying to solve that particular problem.
I'm an Electrical Engineer and when I worked in software development I altered my contract by editing it and initialing/dating each change. I had to explain why I had made the changes but they understood and accepted them.
I have used this same technique to change lease agreements on apartments.
You are quite right that the right to share copies of recordings seems to have vanished from Title 17. I think I may have been mistaken to think that's where I read about it although I'm not at all certain.
I have since found what I might have been remembering in
Title 17 Section 506
which defines Criminal Infringement. My take on it is that if (1) you don't sell the infringed material and (2) you infringe on less than $1000 worth of materials each 180 days then you are not guilty of criminal infringement. Also, evidence of reproduction or distribution of copyrighted material is not sufficient to establish willful infringement.
I admit I do find this section a little puzzling and probably worthy of more investigation.
A couple of decades ago when the recording industry "won" the right to collect a tax on all blank audio cassettes one of the concessions they made was to allow people to share recordings with friends.
The logic was that if you were presumed to be making illegal copies and were paying for that in advance, then you ought to be allowed to make a few copies. The industry apparently figured they could tolerate that as the analog nature of the recordings would keep people from making copies of copies of copies.
Now that people can make unlimited perfect digital copies and share them with anonymous "friends" thousands of miles away all bets seem to be off.
As far as I can tell, that right to make copies has been removed from the U.S. Code as part of the DMCA.
The advantage of any sort of Engineering degree is that it is assumed you have learned general problem solving and will be able to do just about any job, no matter what the field. Not many (if any) undergraduate degrees carry the weight of an Engineering degree with the general population. If your degree is in Engineering you are not limited to working with computers. You will be given good consideration for nearly any position you seek.
It has been SUBMITTED to the ECMA (not IEEE), but I'd like to see link to info that it actually has been APPROVED as a standard. The last spec document I saw had the entire chapter on exceptions missing, for instance.
The difference between submitted and approved is an important point so I checked for the current status at ECMA where the NEWS link on the front page led to this:
Assembly met in Montreux on 112the December 2001, and
approved 33 revised and 7 new Standards. Among the new Standards, the files
of Standard
ECMA-334, C# Language Specification, and Standard ECMA-335, Common Language Infrastructure (CLI), are already available in this web site and can be freely downloaded.
An ECMA TR, ECMA TR/84, related to Standard ECMA-335, has also been approved and can be found here.
I don't think they are hedging their bets with the X-Box. I think that the X-Box is the thin end of a ".NET home terminal for Microsoft services" wedge which would tie in nicely with.NET and, by association, C#.
I saw Echo 1a in 1960 although it was only 30.5 meters (100 feet) in diameter with a perigee/apogee of 966/2157 km. It was a ball of aluminized mylar (i.e., a balloon). Coincidentally, 600 miles is 966 km so I saw it from at least 600 miles away as I watched it nearly from horizon to horizon.
Your posting might have had some credibility if you hadn't over-ridden the DOCTYPE of the document in the links you provided and if you hadn't been quite so selective in the pages you chose to reference.
The Oracle HOWTO page was a quickie that required only a couple of minor edits to bring into compliance.
Perhaps you enjoy wasting your life away trying to put square pegs into round holes (or is it just a way to bill the customer for more hours?) but I will continue to support standards.
The companion web site of the book (at www.web-redesign.com) fails to validate as standard HTML when tested by validator.w3.org. What else needs to be said?
For most individuals and small scale startups, patents are virtually
certain to result in a net loss of time, energy, money, and sanity.
One reason for this is the outrageously wrong urban lore involving
patents and patenting. A second involves the outright scams which
inevitably surround "inventions" and "inventing".
A third is that the economic breakeven needed to recover patent costs
is something between $12,000,000.00 and $40,000,000 in gross sales.
It is ludicrously absurd to try and patent a million dollar idea.
Slashdot Mirror
Information about the 123 deaths from meteorites in the past couple of centuries is here.
Not true. Unless the contract says you are doing a "work for hire" the writer retains the copyright. Also, only works that are created to be part of a larger existing work can be a "work for hire".
Also increasing the strength of an author's claim to ownership is the fact that he's a contractor and not an employee.
Therefore, if you are hired to write a program for someone, you own the copyright, even if the contract describes what you are doing as a "work for hire".
IANAL but Google can confirm what I have said.
When I worked for ICL we often had one customer pay for development that later benefitted other customers.
There were features we weren't interested in adding to our base product but we would add them if a customer would pay for that development. Once the feature had been added to the base product the benefit was available to all our customers.
Also, customers did not receive the source code to our modifications (the code they paid would have done them no good without the rest of the code). The product was ours and if they wanted to pay for an enhancement that was fine but the product remained 100% ours.
By the way, the customers were banks.
I remember when cable TV (at least in my area) was commercial free. That was the main point of cable: free over-the-air TV needed commercials to pay for the programming but if you paid for cable then you had bought your way out of watching the commercials.
What we are faced with here (as always) is the golden rule: the one with the gold makes the rules. The only solution I see (and it's not 100%) is to systematically vote against the incumbant in every election.
Because elected officials who have served mutliple terms have more influence than newly elected officials, the voters represented by new officials get less representation than other voters. This situation is inherently unfair and should be challenged somehow.
Pretty much everything you said, while not unreasonable, is irrelevant to my point which was that people should think at least twice about where apparently small and reasonable changes will lead. I.e., Don't fix what's not broken and The road to Hell is paved with good intentions. Totalitarian states don't spring to life fully developed. They get that way one reasonable and logical step at a time.
At this point it might be appropriate to tell the story about a guy who jumped out of a 50th floor window while trying to fly by flapping his arms. As he shot past the 40th floor he thought "so far, so good". The point (for anyone who missed it) is that you can't just assume that because things are fine now that they will continue that way. Actions have consequences and sometimes those consequences are unintended and painful.
The problem is that totalitarian states don't spring into existence fully formed. They evolve one step at a time and at each step people say "that sounds reasonable, after all it's for our safety". Very often the people are right, each step in of itself is reasonable. The danger comes from the long term trend which can cause a country to quietly slide in real trouble.
My observation about driver's licenses is intended to cause people to examine how this country has changed over the last 50 or 100 years and to think about what the general trend has been. Perhaps things that are being proposed today and which seem reasonable on the surface shouldn't be supported after all. Perhaps the apparent gain isn't really worth the loss.
Revisionist history gets involved not because I think there is an organized plot to control people's minds but because people need to understand that history is not immutable. Just because you read it in an "real" textbook doesn't make it true.
Textbooks are chosen to satisfy a constituency. That constituency is largely comfortable with the current common view of the world. If the current view is that we should all have a national id complete with biometric information then there is a risk that anyone who suggested otherwise (Orwell perhaps?) will be quietly dropped from the curriculum.
The result is the danger Santayana warned of: those who fail to learn the lessons of history are doomed to repeat them.
The point is that today people can't conceive of a world without driver's licenses and yet we lived in such a world for ~40 years.
Tomorrow our children will be incapable of conceiving of a country where you are free to travel without producing your papers on demand.
I was going to post an on topic reply but then I noticed your final comment: No? Then shut the hell up and realized that you are incapable of a real discussion.
I agree, I should have looked for a better link than the first one I found. There is a more news-like article at the Washington Times.
A driver's license wasn't always required. The first states to require a driver's license were Massachusetts and Missouri in 1903. However, it wasn't until the 1950s that all states required road test and/or examination in order to get a license (reference). Somehow the world managed to survive those 40 odd years of unlicensed drivers.
Most people don't have any inkling as to how how much the world has changed in the last 50 years (or 100 years for those of you over 50). Politicians today can get elected on platforms that would have had them run out of town on a rail only 30 years ago.
In the future people watching old movies won't understand the terror implicit in the phrase "ver are your paperz!". They won't recognize that phrase as being fundamentally un-American.
Revisionist history will make sure they aren't even taught that things were ever any different. Revisionist history may not even include a mention of Washington, Jefferson, or Franklin.
If some people get their way you won't even be able to teach yourself history. All that you will know are the "facts" The State has approved for your consumption.
The sad thing is that already anyone who points these things out is derided as a nut.
If you can prove being the key phrase here. The problem with a little guy defending his patent against MegaCorp Inc. is that MegaCorp Inc. has a battalion of lawyers with nothing better to do than to bury the case in paperwork thereby outspending the little guy until he has to quit before winning his case.
See this page at Don Lancaster's site for more information.
To the people who are saying that if it turns out that these technologies are patented, we'll simply come up with an alternative: the problem isn't in the implementation of the technology (i.e., what's been sent to the W3C) the problem is that a patent covers the idea behind the technology and any attempt to implement the idea will also likely violate the patent.
I think one of the root causes of these situations is that the USPTO is issuing patents for ideas that are not truly innovative but which are pretty obvious to any programmer trying to solve that particular problem.
That reminds me of the Salesman's Universal Correct and Knowledgeable Answer (SUCKA):
Of course, it may take a complete rewrite to properly configure the product!
I'm an Electrical Engineer and when I worked in software development I altered my contract by editing it and initialing/dating each change. I had to explain why I had made the changes but they understood and accepted them.
I have used this same technique to change lease agreements on apartments.
You are quite right that the right to share copies of recordings seems to have vanished from Title 17. I think I may have been mistaken to think that's where I read about it although I'm not at all certain.
I have since found what I might have been remembering in Title 17 Section 506 which defines Criminal Infringement. My take on it is that if (1) you don't sell the infringed material and (2) you infringe on less than $1000 worth of materials each 180 days then you are not guilty of criminal infringement. Also, evidence of reproduction or distribution of copyrighted material is not sufficient to establish willful infringement.
I admit I do find this section a little puzzling and probably worthy of more investigation.
Neville Chamberlain.
A couple of decades ago when the recording industry "won" the right to collect a tax on all blank audio cassettes one of the concessions they made was to allow people to share recordings with friends.
The logic was that if you were presumed to be making illegal copies and were paying for that in advance, then you ought to be allowed to make a few copies. The industry apparently figured they could tolerate that as the analog nature of the recordings would keep people from making copies of copies of copies.
Now that people can make unlimited perfect digital copies and share them with anonymous "friends" thousands of miles away all bets seem to be off.
As far as I can tell, that right to make copies has been removed from the U.S. Code as part of the DMCA.
The advantage of any sort of Engineering degree is that it is assumed you have learned general problem solving and will be able to do just about any job, no matter what the field. Not many (if any) undergraduate degrees carry the weight of an Engineering degree with the general population. If your degree is in Engineering you are not limited to working with computers. You will be given good consideration for nearly any position you seek.
Gruntle is a real word meaning what you would expect. The usage rate is vanishingly small though.
The difference between submitted and approved is an important point so I checked for the current status at ECMA where the NEWS link on the front page led to this:
I don't think they are hedging their bets with the X-Box. I think that the X-Box is the thin end of a ".NET home terminal for Microsoft services" wedge which would tie in nicely with .NET and, by association, C#.
I saw Echo 1a in 1960 although it was only 30.5 meters (100 feet) in diameter with a perigee/apogee of 966/2157 km. It was a ball of aluminized mylar (i.e., a balloon). Coincidentally, 600 miles is 966 km so I saw it from at least 600 miles away as I watched it nearly from horizon to horizon.
Your posting might have had some credibility if you hadn't over-ridden the DOCTYPE of the document in the links you provided and if you hadn't been quite so selective in the pages you chose to reference.
The Oracle HOWTO page was a quickie that required only a couple of minor edits to bring into compliance.
The sites www.Erskine.edu and www.KentMcCarter.com are no longer under our control but the work we delivered validated. www.GaeaCorp.com does validate.
Perhaps you enjoy wasting your life away trying to put square pegs into round holes (or is it just a way to bill the customer for more hours?) but I will continue to support standards.
The companion web site of the book (at www.web-redesign.com) fails to validate as standard HTML when tested by validator.w3.org. What else needs to be said?
From Don Lancaster's web site at http://www.tinaja.com/patnt01.html :
Some people refer to them as MSTDs which I think is pretty funny and accurate.