You're assuming Apple are selling copies of their software. They'll claim they aren't selling copies at all, merely licensing them. To continue with your book analogy, owning a book gives you the right to tear it up and sell it. Borrowing a book from a library (a far-from-perfect analogy for software licensing, I admit) does not.
Are the notes in question a "Readers Digest" or a "Cliffs Notes"? The former is a derivative work, the latter is not. Without having seen the notes in question you're just speaking out of your ass.
One of the wonders of the normal distribution is that if you have a large number of independent random variables contributing to your value (like the tolerances of the numerous components in a hard drive, which are themselves caused by random process like thermal effects, uncorrelated vibrations and distributions of concentration during mixing) you can indeed reasonably expect a normal distribution.
If we replace "lecture notes sufficiently close to the original to be considered a derivative work" by "textbooks" or "research papers" I hope you can see that your argument about knowledge is fallacious. Not being able to reproduce entire textbooks or papers verbatim hasn't stopped the spread of knowledge from people who have read particular textbooks or papers to those who have not. You just have to re-write the facts in your own format, your own words. If you can't do that you didn't understand it in the first place. Some people's lecture notes are sufficiently original to be considered new works, but some are simply a "readers digest" version of the original.
The point about students swapping notes being infringement (if the notes themselves are indeed derivative works) is valid, but as the prof (thankfully) isn't going after them directly it's currently moot. I'd hope any sane judge would view any student on the course using lecture notes from any source as Fair Use on the basis that a) they paid for the lectures and b) the motive is education, not profit.
Try this analogy instead: Let's say you make a dramatisation of a historical event into a feature film (movie), you use compound characters, invent scenes to explain background, liven it up with some love interest and generally give it your own emphasis. Is my film which follows exactly the same characters through exactly the same plot and had exactly the same main scenes as your feature film a copyright violation? It is, because it's a copy of your film, not my interpretation of the historical facts.
I don't know the details of this case, but I can accept the notion that there can come a point where the notes are so close to the original lecture that they are a derivative work of that lecture, rather than an original restatement of the knowledge imparted by that lecture.
Both chambers of the 105th Congress had a Republican majority in 1998. The President doesn't make the laws and vetoing everything they didn't like would lead to their never being able to pass the stuff they do like, particularly when the Congress is dominated by the opposition. It's give and take - you agree to this, we'll agree to that. I don't know if Clinton was pro- or anti-DMCA, but his not vetoing it doesn't mean he was a fan of it, just that he wasn't extremely strongly against it.
Maybe they mean the MTBF for drives that are just on, but not being used. I've never put any stock into those numbers, because I've had too many drives fail to believe that they're supposed to be lasting 100 years.
If you think an MTBF of 100 years means the disk will last 100 years you're bound to be disappointed, because that's not what it means. MTBF is calculated in different ways by different companies, but generally there are at least two numbers you need to look at, MTBF and the design or expected lifetime. A disk with an MTBF of 200 000 hours and a lifetime of 20 000 hours means that 1 in 10 are expected to fail during their lifetime, or with 200 000 disks one will fail every hour. It does not mean the average drive will last 200 000 years. After the lifetime is over all bets are off.
In short, the MTBF is a statistical measure of the expected failure rate during the expected lifetime of a device, it is not a measure of the expected lifetime of a device.
This case is not about knowledge. It's about copyright. You cannot copyright knowledge and the professor isn't claiming copyright on the knowledge he imports in his lectures. You're just confusing yourself and getting worked up for no reason by complaining about that.
He's claiming copyright on the precise way that knowledge is imported - he thinks the notes of his lectures are a derivative work. A verbatim transcript would obviously be a derivative work of his lecture and thus protected by copyright. The same knowledge but in an entirely different format obviously would not be a derivative work and would not be covered by copyright law. Somewhere between those two extremes there is a line. Which side of the line do you think highly verbose notes which followed the structure of his lectures, used his explanations and analogies, directly quoted large chunks, cited all the same reference materials, reproduced his original diagrams and posed the same questions for further study would lie? That's a whole lot more than merely imparting the same knowledge.
it's called elitism... only the affluent deserve privacy
Nobody deserves to have access to Slashdot - Slashdot has no obligation to provide anything at all, let alone encrypted access. It's called economics. SSL costs more to deliver, not so much the certs (they're cheap) but in terms of machine resources. Perhaps I'm just too damn wealthy, but half a cent per page with a $5 minimum purchase doesn't seem to require very much affluence to me.
An important part of the professor owning the copyright is the ability to publish. If the university owned the copyright, they could deny permission to publish a particular result. That power would grant universities the right to quash anything they don't like and keep potentially unpopular opinions or research inside--thus doing the exact opposite of advancing knowledge, the goal of the university!
No, no, no, no, no, no. You cannot copyright ideas. They may have a claim on the original paper, even on the data, but they cannot stop a guy walking out and saying "I have discovered that if you do X and Y then Z happens". An NDA might stop them (or rather, give them legal comeback if it happened), but copyright sure as hell can't.
Fair Use and similar provisions around the world mean newspapers could report on it anyway, just as they can summarise plots and use quotes from copyrighted films and books in reviews.
Even if we were to make the jump that the professor's idea's are copywriteable then I'd have to ask the question of what exactly you're paying for when you pay your tuition?
You get the lectures. IMO think there is a implied right, morally at least, to make even a verbatim transcript of the lecture, not just notes. However, that's not what this is about, at least not directly. It's about a company duplicating students notes and selling them back to other students. He's not going after students for taking notes. If we say copyright does apply to the lecture notes as a derivative work of the lecture and that the students have an implied license or fair use right to make a derivative work in the form of notes, that doesn't mean they have a legal right to make and distribute further copies.
And please stop talking about ideas being copyrightable, they aren't. This is not about the ideas themselves but about the way they are expressed. Expressions of ideas, which could take the form of lectures, are subject to copyright. Ideas are not. As I see it (IANAL) this case will hinge upon where the line between creating a derivative work (which is subject to copyright) and the extraction of ideas from a work (which is not subject to copyright) is drawn.
It's been a long while since I play with Java GUI stuff, but it would have to be a hell of a lot better than it was to convince me it was worth using for anything other than the most trivial desktop apps. [...] Hmm, a quick search finds SWT has come on a bit and might be a viable alternative. Having said that, I assume Eclipse itself uses SWT and Eclipse has always had a treacle-like GUI on every platform I've tried it on (the last time being about 6 months ago on OS X). I don't know if that's down to Eclipse, SWT, SWT on OS X or OS X itself but it not a great advert.
Can you imagine if all 'Vista compatible' apps were also almost 100% compatible with Linux?
MS are pushing.NET as the platform of choice for desktop apps and Mono is getting ever better at running them on Linux. Wine supports a reasonable slice of Win32 apps already. So perhaps it's not so far fetched that a majority, if not 100%, of stuff will be portable. I know if I was commissioning some software targeted for Windows I'd want it written in the subset of the.NET/Win32 APIs which are compatible with Mono/Wine.
The implementation in the first trial injected javascript to do some of the snooping, though it doesn't work like that now apparently. That counts a running software in my book. It also strikes me as a truly shitty architecture, which the current implementation sounds like too, though not quite as bad. Why they think they have to do anything other than transparently scan it at the ISP end I have no idea. "Transparent" web caches have been around for a long time, they may not inspect the data but they do intercept the requests and store the pages without needing to fuck about with javascript or cookies on the clients.
Its not all about headline speeds and bandwidth allowance. I pay £25 a month for 20 GB of transfer from Zen, with "up to" 8 Mbps down (I can sync at 6.5, but prefer 5 for a more reliable connection) and 0.5 up. In terms of headline figures, it sucks. But they're consistently rated among the best ISPs in the country.
I get 8 static IPs with configurable reverse DNS, excellent speeds even at peak times and a contract which explicitly says they won't filter or throttle and I am allowed to run servers. Nothing at Zen's end has even broken for me and they have customer service who answer emails and the phone fast, know what they're talking about and have the power to actually do something. They have peering everywhere that matters, including decent transatlantic bandwidth of their own. It's a rolling one-month contract, so I can change at any time.
I'm sure I could pay half that for a service with better headline figures and have shitty speeds and pings at peak times, one dynamic IP, P2P throttled, ports blocked, a call centre in Bangalore with a 30 minute queue who can only work from a script and have my account throttled or cut off from their "unlimited" package for using it too much. If I wasn't happy I'd be stuffed because of a 12-18 month minimum contract.
It's worth pointing out that Home Office guidance isn't a binding statement on what is and is not legal (which the guidance does point out), it's up to the courts to interpret the law. A court could may well disagree with the Home Office official who wrote the guidance.
There was nominal breakup of BT, though not into regional "baby bells". BT Broadband, the ISP in TFA, could be sued (or more likely regulated) out of existence and the rest of the telecoms network (most importantly - BT Openreach (last mile), BT Retail (telecoms), BT Wholesale (bulk services, including ADSL provision)) would carry on. Openreach and Wholesale are the bits with a near-monopoly on the last mile and national network and are heavily regulated to provide open access to other providers. BT Broadband is a customer of Openreach and Wholesale and receive no preferential treatment over other providers like Tiscali or Carphone Warehouse. Thus it's not impractical for them to be shut down and their customer base moved to other providers. Tiscali are of similar size to BT Broadband and are currently looking to sell their customer base and Carphone Warehouse bought AOL's substantial subscriber base not too long ago, so it would be far from unprecedented. I doubt it'll happen, but not because it's not possible.
Not quite. 60% of UK broadband customers are on BT Wholesale's IPStream or DataStream products, whatever ISP they're with. These products are dictated by the telecoms regulator. With these products, BT (in various guises) provides the last mile and DSLAM and either aggregates data (IPStream) or rents dedicated virtual pipes (DataStream) from their DSLAMs for ISPs, the data from which they deliver to to the ISP at various POPs around the country. It works the same way, at the same prices, for BT Broadband; BT's ISP arm. It's BT Broadband who are in TFA and they do have a lot of customers, about a fifth of the UK broadband market. The other option for using copper is Local Loop Unbundling, where the ISP owns the DSLAM and rents the last mile and space in the exchange from BT Openreach and provide all their own pipes. About a fifth of the broadband market is cable, which no part of BT touches.
Just being rolled out is Wholesale Broadband Connect, which has different pricing and network structure to IPStream and DataStream, but is broadly similar in that BT Wholesale aggregates the data for the ISPs, but WBC delivers ADSL 2+ and offers QoS and a few other niceties.
The upshot of all this regulation is that anyone who can get ADSL (97% of the population, IIRC) has a choice of ISPs offering different levels of service. With WBC the potential for differentiation will be even greater, as the ISPs will have even more flexibility over QoS and contention without having to install their own kit in thousands of exchanges.
Perhaps the middle east and arab culture is even more drastically and fundamentally different to Western culture then I imagined (I know a whole lot more about the IRA than I do about Al Quadea, because that was a lot closer to home for me), or cultures which have been under a dictator for decades are drastically different to ones which haven't. But you don't need to have met a terrorist leader to have some understanding of how they think - they and the people who've known them write books, do interviews, speak in public.
You're looking at it sideways. Microsoft's overbearing presence will now create a completely new market of out-of-the-box-little-old PCs that are quite adequate to run XP.
You've got it backwards. The market exists, the devices already exist and are selling like hotcakes - Asus is seeling EeePCs as fast as it can make them, they're selling at above RRP everywhere and others are bringing similar devices to market in the coming weeks and months. Till this week they ran Linux out of the box. That scared Microsoft into extending the life of XP and offering Asus an extra-low price. Microsoft haven't created the market, they're reacting to it.
Slashdot Mirror
You're assuming Apple are selling copies of their software. They'll claim they aren't selling copies at all, merely licensing them. To continue with your book analogy, owning a book gives you the right to tear it up and sell it. Borrowing a book from a library (a far-from-perfect analogy for software licensing, I admit) does not.
ITYM "semantics weenies". HTH, HAND -- Semantics Weenie 71462
Are the notes in question a "Readers Digest" or a "Cliffs Notes"? The former is a derivative work, the latter is not. Without having seen the notes in question you're just speaking out of your ass.
One of the wonders of the normal distribution is that if you have a large number of independent random variables contributing to your value (like the tolerances of the numerous components in a hard drive, which are themselves caused by random process like thermal effects, uncorrelated vibrations and distributions of concentration during mixing) you can indeed reasonably expect a normal distribution.
If we replace "lecture notes sufficiently close to the original to be considered a derivative work" by "textbooks" or "research papers" I hope you can see that your argument about knowledge is fallacious. Not being able to reproduce entire textbooks or papers verbatim hasn't stopped the spread of knowledge from people who have read particular textbooks or papers to those who have not. You just have to re-write the facts in your own format, your own words. If you can't do that you didn't understand it in the first place. Some people's lecture notes are sufficiently original to be considered new works, but some are simply a "readers digest" version of the original.
The point about students swapping notes being infringement (if the notes themselves are indeed derivative works) is valid, but as the prof (thankfully) isn't going after them directly it's currently moot. I'd hope any sane judge would view any student on the course using lecture notes from any source as Fair Use on the basis that a) they paid for the lectures and b) the motive is education, not profit.
Try this analogy instead: Let's say you make a dramatisation of a historical event into a feature film (movie), you use compound characters, invent scenes to explain background, liven it up with some love interest and generally give it your own emphasis. Is my film which follows exactly the same characters through exactly the same plot and had exactly the same main scenes as your feature film a copyright violation? It is, because it's a copy of your film, not my interpretation of the historical facts.
I don't know the details of this case, but I can accept the notion that there can come a point where the notes are so close to the original lecture that they are a derivative work of that lecture, rather than an original restatement of the knowledge imparted by that lecture.
Both chambers of the 105th Congress had a Republican majority in 1998. The President doesn't make the laws and vetoing everything they didn't like would lead to their never being able to pass the stuff they do like, particularly when the Congress is dominated by the opposition. It's give and take - you agree to this, we'll agree to that. I don't know if Clinton was pro- or anti-DMCA, but his not vetoing it doesn't mean he was a fan of it, just that he wasn't extremely strongly against it.
If you think an MTBF of 100 years means the disk will last 100 years you're bound to be disappointed, because that's not what it means. MTBF is calculated in different ways by different companies, but generally there are at least two numbers you need to look at, MTBF and the design or expected lifetime. A disk with an MTBF of 200 000 hours and a lifetime of 20 000 hours means that 1 in 10 are expected to fail during their lifetime, or with 200 000 disks one will fail every hour. It does not mean the average drive will last 200 000 years. After the lifetime is over all bets are off.
In short, the MTBF is a statistical measure of the expected failure rate during the expected lifetime of a device, it is not a measure of the expected lifetime of a device.
It wouldn't be subject to copyright if you wrote it after you quit.
This case is not about knowledge. It's about copyright. You cannot copyright knowledge and the professor isn't claiming copyright on the knowledge he imports in his lectures. You're just confusing yourself and getting worked up for no reason by complaining about that.
He's claiming copyright on the precise way that knowledge is imported - he thinks the notes of his lectures are a derivative work. A verbatim transcript would obviously be a derivative work of his lecture and thus protected by copyright. The same knowledge but in an entirely different format obviously would not be a derivative work and would not be covered by copyright law. Somewhere between those two extremes there is a line. Which side of the line do you think highly verbose notes which followed the structure of his lectures, used his explanations and analogies, directly quoted large chunks, cited all the same reference materials, reproduced his original diagrams and posed the same questions for further study would lie? That's a whole lot more than merely imparting the same knowledge.
Nobody deserves to have access to Slashdot - Slashdot has no obligation to provide anything at all, let alone encrypted access. It's called economics. SSL costs more to deliver, not so much the certs (they're cheap) but in terms of machine resources. Perhaps I'm just too damn wealthy, but half a cent per page with a $5 minimum purchase doesn't seem to require very much affluence to me.
Erm, make that "facts and ideas", then it would make more sense.
No, no, no, no, no, no. You cannot copyright ideas. They may have a claim on the original paper, even on the data, but they cannot stop a guy walking out and saying "I have discovered that if you do X and Y then Z happens". An NDA might stop them (or rather, give them legal comeback if it happened), but copyright sure as hell can't.
Fair Use and similar provisions around the world mean newspapers could report on it anyway, just as they can summarise plots and use quotes from copyrighted films and books in reviews.
You get the lectures. IMO think there is a implied right, morally at least, to make even a verbatim transcript of the lecture, not just notes. However, that's not what this is about, at least not directly. It's about a company duplicating students notes and selling them back to other students. He's not going after students for taking notes. If we say copyright does apply to the lecture notes as a derivative work of the lecture and that the students have an implied license or fair use right to make a derivative work in the form of notes, that doesn't mean they have a legal right to make and distribute further copies.
And please stop talking about ideas being copyrightable, they aren't. This is not about the ideas themselves but about the way they are expressed. Expressions of ideas, which could take the form of lectures, are subject to copyright. Ideas are not. As I see it (IANAL) this case will hinge upon where the line between creating a derivative work (which is subject to copyright) and the extraction of ideas from a work (which is not subject to copyright) is drawn.
It's been a long while since I play with Java GUI stuff, but it would have to be a hell of a lot better than it was to convince me it was worth using for anything other than the most trivial desktop apps. [...] Hmm, a quick search finds SWT has come on a bit and might be a viable alternative. Having said that, I assume Eclipse itself uses SWT and Eclipse has always had a treacle-like GUI on every platform I've tried it on (the last time being about 6 months ago on OS X). I don't know if that's down to Eclipse, SWT, SWT on OS X or OS X itself but it not a great advert.
MS are pushing .NET as the platform of choice for desktop apps and Mono is getting ever better at running them on Linux. Wine supports a reasonable slice of Win32 apps already. So perhaps it's not so far fetched that a majority, if not 100%, of stuff will be portable. I know if I was commissioning some software targeted for Windows I'd want it written in the subset of the .NET/Win32 APIs which are compatible with Mono/Wine.
Encryption doesn't stop people knowing who you're talking to, just what you're saying to them. And Slashdot does offer SSL to subscribers.
The implementation in the first trial injected javascript to do some of the snooping, though it doesn't work like that now apparently. That counts a running software in my book. It also strikes me as a truly shitty architecture, which the current implementation sounds like too, though not quite as bad. Why they think they have to do anything other than transparently scan it at the ISP end I have no idea. "Transparent" web caches have been around for a long time, they may not inspect the data but they do intercept the requests and store the pages without needing to fuck about with javascript or cookies on the clients.
Its not all about headline speeds and bandwidth allowance. I pay £25 a month for 20 GB of transfer from Zen, with "up to" 8 Mbps down (I can sync at 6.5, but prefer 5 for a more reliable connection) and 0.5 up. In terms of headline figures, it sucks. But they're consistently rated among the best ISPs in the country.
I get 8 static IPs with configurable reverse DNS, excellent speeds even at peak times and a contract which explicitly says they won't filter or throttle and I am allowed to run servers. Nothing at Zen's end has even broken for me and they have customer service who answer emails and the phone fast, know what they're talking about and have the power to actually do something. They have peering everywhere that matters, including decent transatlantic bandwidth of their own. It's a rolling one-month contract, so I can change at any time.
I'm sure I could pay half that for a service with better headline figures and have shitty speeds and pings at peak times, one dynamic IP, P2P throttled, ports blocked, a call centre in Bangalore with a 30 minute queue who can only work from a script and have my account throttled or cut off from their "unlimited" package for using it too much. If I wasn't happy I'd be stuffed because of a 12-18 month minimum contract.
It's worth pointing out that Home Office guidance isn't a binding statement on what is and is not legal (which the guidance does point out), it's up to the courts to interpret the law. A court could may well disagree with the Home Office official who wrote the guidance.
There was nominal breakup of BT, though not into regional "baby bells". BT Broadband, the ISP in TFA, could be sued (or more likely regulated) out of existence and the rest of the telecoms network (most importantly - BT Openreach (last mile), BT Retail (telecoms), BT Wholesale (bulk services, including ADSL provision)) would carry on. Openreach and Wholesale are the bits with a near-monopoly on the last mile and national network and are heavily regulated to provide open access to other providers. BT Broadband is a customer of Openreach and Wholesale and receive no preferential treatment over other providers like Tiscali or Carphone Warehouse. Thus it's not impractical for them to be shut down and their customer base moved to other providers. Tiscali are of similar size to BT Broadband and are currently looking to sell their customer base and Carphone Warehouse bought AOL's substantial subscriber base not too long ago, so it would be far from unprecedented. I doubt it'll happen, but not because it's not possible.
Not quite. 60% of UK broadband customers are on BT Wholesale's IPStream or DataStream products, whatever ISP they're with. These products are dictated by the telecoms regulator. With these products, BT (in various guises) provides the last mile and DSLAM and either aggregates data (IPStream) or rents dedicated virtual pipes (DataStream) from their DSLAMs for ISPs, the data from which they deliver to to the ISP at various POPs around the country. It works the same way, at the same prices, for BT Broadband; BT's ISP arm. It's BT Broadband who are in TFA and they do have a lot of customers, about a fifth of the UK broadband market. The other option for using copper is Local Loop Unbundling, where the ISP owns the DSLAM and rents the last mile and space in the exchange from BT Openreach and provide all their own pipes. About a fifth of the broadband market is cable, which no part of BT touches.
Just being rolled out is Wholesale Broadband Connect, which has different pricing and network structure to IPStream and DataStream, but is broadly similar in that BT Wholesale aggregates the data for the ISPs, but WBC delivers ADSL 2+ and offers QoS and a few other niceties.
The upshot of all this regulation is that anyone who can get ADSL (97% of the population, IIRC) has a choice of ISPs offering different levels of service. With WBC the potential for differentiation will be even greater, as the ISPs will have even more flexibility over QoS and contention without having to install their own kit in thousands of exchanges.
Perhaps the middle east and arab culture is even more drastically and fundamentally different to Western culture then I imagined (I know a whole lot more about the IRA than I do about Al Quadea, because that was a lot closer to home for me), or cultures which have been under a dictator for decades are drastically different to ones which haven't. But you don't need to have met a terrorist leader to have some understanding of how they think - they and the people who've known them write books, do interviews, speak in public.
You've got it backwards. The market exists, the devices already exist and are selling like hotcakes - Asus is seeling EeePCs as fast as it can make them, they're selling at above RRP everywhere and others are bringing similar devices to market in the coming weeks and months. Till this week they ran Linux out of the box. That scared Microsoft into extending the life of XP and offering Asus an extra-low price. Microsoft haven't created the market, they're reacting to it.