Tell that to Prince, who has issued a takedown for a photo of a fan's Prince tattoo.
The right to have a tattoo of a copyrighted work (if such a right exists) and the right to use that work in a photo are two different rights, and the first would not automatically entail the latter.
Drive where slowly? Into the middle of an intersection? Into oncoming traffic? Through a guardrail?
I've seen this one happen. The traffic in both roads in the intersection stops, and then the guys who are in the way of the fire truck move into the intersection to let the emergency vehicles through. Everybody then waits until the guys in the middle of the intersection clear it, and traffic resumes as normal.
The quoted bits of the article leave out all the footnotes, and the footnotes are crucial. Each claim in the quote is backed up by references to relevant statutes or court decisions. And before laying out the scenario, TFA makes clear what exactly it's doing: trying to concoct the absolute worst case scenario possible based on existing law. The point is that all the law needed for this case to happen exists; a judge could decide in the way the article describes, and find plenty of support in statutes and precedents. The fact that the scenario given doesn't actually happen, and in fact would be catastrophic if it happened regularly, is an argument against existing law.
Unfortunately for the author's hyperbole, tattoos of copyrighted art on one's person fall under fair use.
Other people have called you on the fact that you give us no reason to believe this, but I think I ought to call you on one more thing.
If Joe Tattoo Artist gives me, for appropriate compensation, a tattoo of Mickey Mouse, there are three parties involved here:
Me
Joe Tattoo Artist
Disney
You fail to distinguish which of the parties Disney has or fails to have valid claims against. It is quite possible that Disney has no valid claim against me, but has a claim against Joe Tattoo Artist. If Joe offers tattoos of Mickey Mouse customarily as part of the services he gets paid for, and the popularity of Mickey Mouse makes his business that more profitable, I betcha Disney can go after Joe.
Can they go after me? Well, not in general, but I bet you there are circumstances where they can. If leverage the fact that I have a Mickey Mouse tattoo, e.g., by working as a model in a way that displays my Mickey Mouse tattoo too prominently, I bet you I can get in trouble too.
The law is subtle, and how it applies to any given case is a complicated matter. (And no, IANAL, but the fact that I understand this makes me better understand the value of the service that lawyers provide.)
Only if the demand for music exceeds the supply at the price of producing that music and marketing it. Do you really think that is the case?
Tuneless Joe's garage tape, anyone?
I have no idea what this means.
Britney Spears' albums are a very high quality production. The music is crap, of course, but it's a very high quality production kind of crap. She and her ilk are arguably one of the downsides of the traditional music industry.
In a market where anybody can bring attention to their music equally easily, on the other hand, the problem is that very low quality productions (epitomized by the aforementioned, mythical Tuneless Joe (who can't sing in tune) and his band the Random Drummers (who can't drum), who recorded in their album in 2 hours in Joe's garage) are able to garner as much attention as any other act. The market for music quickly becomes something quite similar (though not identical) to the market for lemons, where the price commanded by good quality work is brought down by the fact that it's not any more noticeable than bad work for the buyers.
Of course, the kind of cure needed for this would be people who, for a fee, sift through all the crap, find the good pieces, and market those; then you'd just buy from the crap-sifters with the assurance that folks like Tuneless Joe would never get past their filters. But guess what? You've gone the first step down the path to a music industry; and these folks still need to be paid, which means that there needs to be a way to secure some amount of income from the reproduction and performance of music recordings.
But the net makes it relatively easy AND cheap to market music for musicians. A band could create an online profile on MySpace, Facebook, and or any number of other social networking websites. There they can offer clips of selected songs if not a compleat catalogue of all songs. Then lower bitrate versions can be downloaded while higher bitrate versions can be paid for then downloaded. If this isn't enough then there are more steps that can be taken to heighten net advertising.
Yes, and then, magically, people start buying. Right. Sure.
Buying from a label guarantees some level of quality control.
Yeah, a modern computer could load up every single level of Doom or Super Mario Brothers at once and string them together... but strangely enough, game designers have actually scaled up the detail of their games as computing power has improved.
So, don't implement it that way. To implement an arbitrarily large seamless world, just load the area that the player is at currently, and adjacent areas. As the player moves around, then load the areas adjacent to where they moved.
This technique is useful even if the game is divided into levels, actually; the point is to load only as much game data at any time so as to (a) show the player everything that they can see from where they are, and (b) enable seamless movement away from where they are.
We have Leap Year with an extra day every four years because the revolution takes 365 1/4 days. The leap second is just an extension of that, because the year isn't exactly 365 1/4 days either, there's more error that needs to be corrected for.
No, we don't have leap seconds because of leap years. We have leap seconds because sidereal days aren't constant length, yet we want 00:00 UTC to roughly coincide with the beginning of sidereal days. In order to do that, we have to observe the discrepancies as they happen, and adjust for them periodically by adding or subtracting leap seconds.
Ah, but you missed the most important detail. According to the submission, in Washington a misleading subject line is illegal. Since the subject line claimed that the submitter owns Slashdot, it should have been an open and closed case.
The subject line made a false claim, and the plaintiff pointed out its falsehood. However, falsehood isn't a sufficient condition for a claim to be misleading, because a false claim can just be a honest error. (Hell, falsehood isn't even a necessary condition for something to be misleading; the best lies contain nothing but true statements, after all.)
No, you are. (See what you've done to this conversation now?)
Yes, Haselton's address was the only this particular message was sent to. But it clearly came from an automated source.
Sure. How do you prove that in court? Did Haselton do what it takes to prove it?
Do you honestly want spam legislation setup solely on the number of recipients?
Do you honestly want small claims judges to take a law that says that "spam" email is email that is sent in bulk to large numbers of recipients, and arbitrarily read it to mean email sent by automated sources?
At any rate, this is a discussion about the judiciary, not the legislature, so whether we want spam legislation setup solely on the number of recipients is completely irrelevant to the point. If the law is not clear or broad enough, well, then the legislature needs to amend the law.
With this ruling, if the subject line "Link exchange with your site http://slashdot.org/" is not "false or misleading", does that mean I can claim slashdot.org as my site after all?
No.
Now, can you please ask something intelligent instead of that?
I'm wondering... is that blog kinda satiric? Or are they serious?
They are absolutely serious. Shelley the Republican is a site with a very strict no-trolling policy. But sure, go ahead and pretend it's "satire" if you want to believe that your point of view is the only one held by rational people, and that anybody who seems to disagree with you is dishonest, insane, or just satirizing the dishonest and insane people who disagree with you.
The only sore point is that Android doesnt include a complete and compliant Java stack (neither JME or JSE), only a subset, so they wont be able to certify it as a compliant implementation, and therefore it's technically not 'the Java platform', it just looks alot like it. Google knows this, so they've been careful in their videos to only say 'written in the Java programming language'.
IANAL, but I bet you that actually doesn't work legally. Saying that the programs would be "written in the Java programming language" is enough to lead reasonable people to conclude that they would be providing a compliant Java environment, and thus, grounds for a complaint on the part of Sun. I.e., you don't get a pass to have your product to ride on Sun's Java(TM) product's reputation and value in the marketplace just because you use the word "language" instead of "platform."
I get a top-notch highway system, a federally insured system of banks, police and fire protection, my food and water are relatively safe, my workplace is held up to a minimum saftey requirement... All in all I think I am getting a pretty good deal.
Don't assume that you're getting all that stuff from federal income tax. Most of that is allocated to paying off loans, so you're actually mostly servicing the banks, not The People.
Yeah, you're right. It's awful that my tax money is used to pay the loans taken out to pay for stuff like top-knotch highways systems or fire department equipment.
The piston mechanism under each pedal readily collapsed under my weight.
Am I missing something, or are you? The mechanism in a stepper isn't really supposed to give you a lot of resistance. It's a cardio machine--it's about motion and making your heart rate rise.
Doing the opposite of diversification (*cough* Motorola *cough* by exiting as many markets you were even slightly competitive in *cough* damn I seem to have gotten a bad cough, or something) is a surefire way to die.
You're seeing it from the point of view of the continued existence of a single company, and not from the point of view of an investor that has thousands of different stocks to choose from.
Yes, companies without internal diversification have a bigger risk of going south. But for you as an investor, that isn't automatically bad. If the only stock you owned was Motorola, and the company went to hell, sure, you'd end up in a bad shape. If Motorola was only one of 3,500 companies you owned stock on, and it went bad, but you also owned stock in all the companies that benefit from Motorola's demise, you might actually end up ahead when you take everything into account.
The point is that, as an investor, you can always diversify your holdings on your own simply by buying a wider variety of stocks. A single company that has many diverse businesses under one roof doesn't necessarily offer you any more diversification than if you buy many companies with very different businesses.
But for the diversified stock-owner you dont want each and every one of your stocks weighted down by the dead fat they're trying to protect. You want lean companies generating high profits in a single area. If you wanted diverse, you'd _buy_ diverse. And then _sell_ it when a niche looked about to tank.
That's a pretty good point, but I think we can take it further.
If you're an investor, you have two ways to diversify your investments:
You can buy into the stocks of a wider, more diverse set of companies.
You can convince the companies you have shares in to diversify their business.
The former will always be easier to do--you just buy more stocks (or just go ahead and buy everything--and everything else, too.
The latter is the only option available to people who are hyper-concentrated in one company's stock and can't trade out--i.e., people who control companies that are really big.
This is not to say that diversifying a company's business makes no sense--there's no reason in principle why it can't work, and in fact, bringing many things under one roof can achieve efficiencies that separate companies can't. But the point is that there is a definite potential for a conflict of interest between majority and minority shareholders.
Diversification [within a single company] is for those with a sentimental attachment to an organization.
And here, as you can guess, I think you're wrong. If you control a company, and that company forms the bulk of your net worth, there is nothing sentimental behind your desire to diversify your business. The only way you can retain all that wealth is by holding on to your stock, and diversifying the business can protect its value.
[IP packets] do not represent, qua IP packets, an endorsement in your part of any idea, cause or product.
The gentlemen at your door are picking you up because of the child porn, not because of the IP packets. The IP addresses contained therein are circumstantial evidence that points at you.
[...] the customer's IP address (which is their "name" for all intents and purposes on an IP network)
A customer's IP address isn't their name or likeness. An objective third-party observer, given the IP address, isn't able to identify who the person is from that information. You need something like a list of which customers hold which IP address, and even then, that's fallible, because IP addresses and people aren't in a one-to-one relationship.
Also, IP packets are technical details of the normal operation of certain machinery. They do not represent, qua IP packets, an endorsement in your part of any idea, cause or product. If your your equipment sent out the packets in question, it is not clear that it would constitute something under your control that reflects upon your reputation or the opinion that an objective third party would form of you.
What Comcast are doing is fishy, but no, it's not a privacy issue; it's probably some sort of deliberate avoidance of provide the service they contracted to provide.
The license can expire by virtue of the explicit conditions show in the terms of service. "Irrevokable" means that you can't arbitrarily cancel the license. The only mechanism for the license to stop holding are the conditions stated in the copyright grant.
You're reading it wrong. To put content into Facebook, you must grant a license for that content for as long as it is in their site, and the moment the content is no longer in their site, the license expires. What you may not do is revoke the license while the conditions still hold, i.e., while the content is still on the site.
You have granted them a non-exclusive license to use any part or all of your content for any purpose they are so inclined to fulfill.
You've granted them a copyright license. A copyright license doesn't allow you to make use of a work when such use would otherwise be against the law. Notwithstanding the copyright license you grant by agreeing to the ToS, it is illegal to use somebody's name or likeness to promote a commercial service or product without their consent, a consent that you have not granted.
This is no different than if I took a photo of you where you are recognizable, licensed it to an advertising agency, and they printed it in an advertisement for Blockbuster. I, as the holder of the copyright on the picture of you, have the right to control who can use the picture for what. You, as the person being depicted in the picture, have the right to grant or deny permission to have your likeness be used to promote a commercial enterprise. The advertising agency, in order to make use of the picture in that way, must obtain my permission to copy, edit, reproduce and incorporate the photo that I took into their own derivative work, and they must also obtain your permission to use your likeness for advertising Blockbuster. This latter permission is normally obtained through a model release.
That case is useful because it shows how the copyright holder and the person being depicted can be two different people, and thus, how commercial use of the picture requires two different permissions from two different parties. In the Facebook case, it will be the common scenario that the holder of the copyright and the person whose likeness is depicted are the same; however, they still need the two permissions.
Umm.. that's not included in ANY PURPOSE ON THE SITE?
Nope. The right to display an image as part of the regular operation of the site is not the same right as the right to use somebody's name or likeness to promote a product or service. The terms of service explicitly ask you to grant a license for the former; it uses the language specific to copyright: "license," "sublicense," "derivative work," "perform," "display," "reformat," "translate," "incorporate," etc. Yes, you've surrendered your right to sue Facebook for merely using your works, but this doesn't mean that they are allowed to use your works in a way that breaks the law or infringes on any other of your rights.
Again, the right to use your name or likeness to promote or endorse a commercial product is a different right than copyright. Unless the terms specifically say that you've allowed Facebook to use your name or likeness in that way, they are not allowed to.
The classic example of this: if I take a portrait of you, I hold the copyright to that photograph and can license and sublicense it to any party to the extent allowable by law, but nobody can use that photograph to promote a product without obtaining your permission through a model release. Just because I own the copyright to the picture of you, and just because I extend Acme Advertising Agency a license to use the photo of you that I took, doesn't mean they can stick your photo in a Blockbuster ad. The uses that can be made of the recognizable likeness of somebody have restrictions on them that are orthogonal to copyright.
Slashdot Mirror
The right to have a tattoo of a copyrighted work (if such a right exists) and the right to use that work in a photo are two different rights, and the first would not automatically entail the latter.
I've seen this one happen. The traffic in both roads in the intersection stops, and then the guys who are in the way of the fire truck move into the intersection to let the emergency vehicles through. Everybody then waits until the guys in the middle of the intersection clear it, and traffic resumes as normal.
The quoted bits of the article leave out all the footnotes, and the footnotes are crucial. Each claim in the quote is backed up by references to relevant statutes or court decisions. And before laying out the scenario, TFA makes clear what exactly it's doing: trying to concoct the absolute worst case scenario possible based on existing law. The point is that all the law needed for this case to happen exists; a judge could decide in the way the article describes, and find plenty of support in statutes and precedents. The fact that the scenario given doesn't actually happen, and in fact would be catastrophic if it happened regularly, is an argument against existing law.
Other people have called you on the fact that you give us no reason to believe this, but I think I ought to call you on one more thing.
If Joe Tattoo Artist gives me, for appropriate compensation, a tattoo of Mickey Mouse, there are three parties involved here:
You fail to distinguish which of the parties Disney has or fails to have valid claims against. It is quite possible that Disney has no valid claim against me, but has a claim against Joe Tattoo Artist. If Joe offers tattoos of Mickey Mouse customarily as part of the services he gets paid for, and the popularity of Mickey Mouse makes his business that more profitable, I betcha Disney can go after Joe.
Can they go after me? Well, not in general, but I bet you there are circumstances where they can. If leverage the fact that I have a Mickey Mouse tattoo, e.g., by working as a model in a way that displays my Mickey Mouse tattoo too prominently, I bet you I can get in trouble too.
The law is subtle, and how it applies to any given case is a complicated matter. (And no, IANAL, but the fact that I understand this makes me better understand the value of the service that lawyers provide.)
Only if the demand for music exceeds the supply at the price of producing that music and marketing it. Do you really think that is the case?
Britney Spears' albums are a very high quality production. The music is crap, of course, but it's a very high quality production kind of crap. She and her ilk are arguably one of the downsides of the traditional music industry.
In a market where anybody can bring attention to their music equally easily, on the other hand, the problem is that very low quality productions (epitomized by the aforementioned, mythical Tuneless Joe (who can't sing in tune) and his band the Random Drummers (who can't drum), who recorded in their album in 2 hours in Joe's garage) are able to garner as much attention as any other act. The market for music quickly becomes something quite similar (though not identical) to the market for lemons, where the price commanded by good quality work is brought down by the fact that it's not any more noticeable than bad work for the buyers.
Of course, the kind of cure needed for this would be people who, for a fee, sift through all the crap, find the good pieces, and market those; then you'd just buy from the crap-sifters with the assurance that folks like Tuneless Joe would never get past their filters. But guess what? You've gone the first step down the path to a music industry; and these folks still need to be paid, which means that there needs to be a way to secure some amount of income from the reproduction and performance of music recordings.
Yes, and then, magically, people start buying. Right. Sure.
Tuneless Joe's garage tape, anyone?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Perspective_distortion_(photography)
So, don't implement it that way. To implement an arbitrarily large seamless world, just load the area that the player is at currently, and adjacent areas. As the player moves around, then load the areas adjacent to where they moved.
This technique is useful even if the game is divided into levels, actually; the point is to load only as much game data at any time so as to (a) show the player everything that they can see from where they are, and (b) enable seamless movement away from where they are.
Why shouldn't books be endless blobs of paragraph after paragraph after paragraph?
No, we don't have leap seconds because of leap years. We have leap seconds because sidereal days aren't constant length, yet we want 00:00 UTC to roughly coincide with the beginning of sidereal days. In order to do that, we have to observe the discrepancies as they happen, and adjust for them periodically by adding or subtracting leap seconds.
But that's just the start:
How do we know they're not constant? Because we can measure the variation using atomic clocks, of course.
The subject line made a false claim, and the plaintiff pointed out its falsehood. However, falsehood isn't a sufficient condition for a claim to be misleading, because a false claim can just be a honest error. (Hell, falsehood isn't even a necessary condition for something to be misleading; the best lies contain nothing but true statements, after all.)
No, you are. (See what you've done to this conversation now?)
Sure. How do you prove that in court? Did Haselton do what it takes to prove it?
Do you honestly want small claims judges to take a law that says that "spam" email is email that is sent in bulk to large numbers of recipients, and arbitrarily read it to mean email sent by automated sources?
At any rate, this is a discussion about the judiciary, not the legislature, so whether we want spam legislation setup solely on the number of recipients is completely irrelevant to the point. If the law is not clear or broad enough, well, then the legislature needs to amend the law.
No.
Now, can you please ask something intelligent instead of that?
They are absolutely serious. Shelley the Republican is a site with a very strict no-trolling policy. But sure, go ahead and pretend it's "satire" if you want to believe that your point of view is the only one held by rational people, and that anybody who seems to disagree with you is dishonest, insane, or just satirizing the dishonest and insane people who disagree with you.
IANAL, but I bet you that actually doesn't work legally. Saying that the programs would be "written in the Java programming language" is enough to lead reasonable people to conclude that they would be providing a compliant Java environment, and thus, grounds for a complaint on the part of Sun. I.e., you don't get a pass to have your product to ride on Sun's Java(TM) product's reputation and value in the marketplace just because you use the word "language" instead of "platform."
Yeah, you're right. It's awful that my tax money is used to pay the loans taken out to pay for stuff like top-knotch highways systems or fire department equipment.
Am I missing something, or are you? The mechanism in a stepper isn't really supposed to give you a lot of resistance. It's a cardio machine--it's about motion and making your heart rate rise.
You're seeing it from the point of view of the continued existence of a single company, and not from the point of view of an investor that has thousands of different stocks to choose from.
Yes, companies without internal diversification have a bigger risk of going south. But for you as an investor, that isn't automatically bad. If the only stock you owned was Motorola, and the company went to hell, sure, you'd end up in a bad shape. If Motorola was only one of 3,500 companies you owned stock on, and it went bad, but you also owned stock in all the companies that benefit from Motorola's demise, you might actually end up ahead when you take everything into account.
The point is that, as an investor, you can always diversify your holdings on your own simply by buying a wider variety of stocks. A single company that has many diverse businesses under one roof doesn't necessarily offer you any more diversification than if you buy many companies with very different businesses.
That's a pretty good point, but I think we can take it further.
If you're an investor, you have two ways to diversify your investments:
The former will always be easier to do--you just buy more stocks (or just go ahead and buy everything--and everything else, too.
The latter is the only option available to people who are hyper-concentrated in one company's stock and can't trade out--i.e., people who control companies that are really big.
This is not to say that diversifying a company's business makes no sense--there's no reason in principle why it can't work, and in fact, bringing many things under one roof can achieve efficiencies that separate companies can't. But the point is that there is a definite potential for a conflict of interest between majority and minority shareholders.
And here, as you can guess, I think you're wrong. If you control a company, and that company forms the bulk of your net worth, there is nothing sentimental behind your desire to diversify your business. The only way you can retain all that wealth is by holding on to your stock, and diversifying the business can protect its value.
I quote myself, with added emphasis:
The gentlemen at your door are picking you up because of the child porn, not because of the IP packets. The IP addresses contained therein are circumstantial evidence that points at you.
A customer's IP address isn't their name or likeness. An objective third-party observer, given the IP address, isn't able to identify who the person is from that information. You need something like a list of which customers hold which IP address, and even then, that's fallible, because IP addresses and people aren't in a one-to-one relationship.
Also, IP packets are technical details of the normal operation of certain machinery. They do not represent, qua IP packets, an endorsement in your part of any idea, cause or product. If your your equipment sent out the packets in question, it is not clear that it would constitute something under your control that reflects upon your reputation or the opinion that an objective third party would form of you.
What Comcast are doing is fishy, but no, it's not a privacy issue; it's probably some sort of deliberate avoidance of provide the service they contracted to provide.
The license can expire by virtue of the explicit conditions show in the terms of service. "Irrevokable" means that you can't arbitrarily cancel the license. The only mechanism for the license to stop holding are the conditions stated in the copyright grant.
You're reading it wrong. To put content into Facebook, you must grant a license for that content for as long as it is in their site, and the moment the content is no longer in their site, the license expires. What you may not do is revoke the license while the conditions still hold, i.e., while the content is still on the site.
You've granted them a copyright license. A copyright license doesn't allow you to make use of a work when such use would otherwise be against the law. Notwithstanding the copyright license you grant by agreeing to the ToS, it is illegal to use somebody's name or likeness to promote a commercial service or product without their consent, a consent that you have not granted.
This is no different than if I took a photo of you where you are recognizable, licensed it to an advertising agency, and they printed it in an advertisement for Blockbuster. I, as the holder of the copyright on the picture of you, have the right to control who can use the picture for what. You, as the person being depicted in the picture, have the right to grant or deny permission to have your likeness be used to promote a commercial enterprise. The advertising agency, in order to make use of the picture in that way, must obtain my permission to copy, edit, reproduce and incorporate the photo that I took into their own derivative work, and they must also obtain your permission to use your likeness for advertising Blockbuster. This latter permission is normally obtained through a model release.
That case is useful because it shows how the copyright holder and the person being depicted can be two different people, and thus, how commercial use of the picture requires two different permissions from two different parties. In the Facebook case, it will be the common scenario that the holder of the copyright and the person whose likeness is depicted are the same; however, they still need the two permissions.
Nope. The right to display an image as part of the regular operation of the site is not the same right as the right to use somebody's name or likeness to promote a product or service. The terms of service explicitly ask you to grant a license for the former; it uses the language specific to copyright: "license," "sublicense," "derivative work," "perform," "display," "reformat," "translate," "incorporate," etc. Yes, you've surrendered your right to sue Facebook for merely using your works, but this doesn't mean that they are allowed to use your works in a way that breaks the law or infringes on any other of your rights.
Again, the right to use your name or likeness to promote or endorse a commercial product is a different right than copyright. Unless the terms specifically say that you've allowed Facebook to use your name or likeness in that way, they are not allowed to.
The classic example of this: if I take a portrait of you, I hold the copyright to that photograph and can license and sublicense it to any party to the extent allowable by law, but nobody can use that photograph to promote a product without obtaining your permission through a model release. Just because I own the copyright to the picture of you, and just because I extend Acme Advertising Agency a license to use the photo of you that I took, doesn't mean they can stick your photo in a Blockbuster ad. The uses that can be made of the recognizable likeness of somebody have restrictions on them that are orthogonal to copyright.