With proprietary models, you would have to sign a huge, exclusive contract to get that sort of service. In open source, just send pizzas. They'll love you forever.:)
The big difference between the GPL and the Mozilla Public License: Any patches, features, and whatnot that the Mozilla project accepts have their copyright transferred to the Mozilla project. This leaves them the option of closing future releases (though they cannot take back rights granted to the code already out there.
With the regular ol' GPL, once you've incorporated someone else's code into your project, you have to get their permission to license it under other terms. With a huge project with thousands of contributors, this is no small feat.
That is how AOL is able to release Netscape without releasing the applicable source code. I wonder what would have happened if WASTE had been MPL'ed instead.
Actually, according to this cyberlaw.com article, the RSA patent [not copyright] expired back in 2000. So the only issue regarding the GPL'ing of WASTE is whether Justin or AOL owns the code.
Judging from what happened, and from Justin's blog, it sounds like he thought he owned the code, but AOL asserted its rights. Perhaps he used WASTE as a test case, to see if the corporate AOL culture was compatable with his attitude.
They've actually listed several "enterprise features" that Linux needed, SMP just being the most notable. In order to do a pre-emptive strike, too many different things would have to be rewritten.
At some point, the nature of the "infringing code" will have to be shown to the kernel hackers, and at that point, it will be removed. There's no point in trying to remove the infringing code before then.
Is it suddenly not acceptable for slashdotters to joke about the stereotypical single-34-year-old-living-in-mom's-basement image? Seems like I see a lot of posts on here along the lines of "hey, she's not so hot, I can do better than that!" No, you can't. That's why you're posting to slashdot. If you could, you'd be doing something else on a saturday night.:)
/me watches as his carefully crafted dream world where he isn't a total loser crumbles noisily around him.
The fact that the owner of a line can grossly overcharge service providers as well as end users isn't relevant. So long as Verizon has the choice not to license, there is no way to break their geographical monopoly.
How can you say "there will be no monopoly?" If company A has already laid fiber through an area, there is a high likelihood that it is uneconomical for company B to lay fiber in the same area, because company A has already wired up the most valuable customers. Even if company B offers superior service at a lower price, company A can merely drop prices long enough to keep the competition from gaining new customers.
In short, I'm asserting that it's economic suicide for an upstart company to wire up an already wired area.
Now, company B could go and look for a virgin area to wire up. But if the only way to get access to the Internet is to hook into company A's pipes, then both company B and the customers in the new area are screwed. After all, why should company A grant access to company B when it would surely be more profitable for them to develop the area themselves? Why should they help out the competition?
You might argue that company B can pay whatever is necessary to make it worth company A's effort. But think how high that price would be? How much would company B have to pay, before it was just as good for company A as owning the wire themselves? Obviously, too much.
Now, if a couple of major players each had thousands of miles of fiber laid, it would obviously serve both to grant each other access at reasonable rates. It's a form of competition, but if a small company with only a few miles of fiber tries to enter the market, they have no power to negotiate a reasonable price for access. What can they do? Threaten to deny access to their lines? The smaller company would go out of business, and the larger company would buy up the fiber for pennies on the dollar.
Without compulsory licensing, both small service providers and small infrastructure companies are locked out of the marketplace. How exactly does that situation foster competition?
What do you mean by "retract" the decision? In the case of Waste, it looks like the program and source may have been posted without the knowledge or consent of Nullsoft. I think it would be impossible for AOL to prove that Mozilla is being distributed without AOL's knowledge or consent. The bandwidth fees alone mean they know about it.
If, on the other hand, you mean they can close off access to new versions of Mozilla, they already have that right under the MPL. But they cannot stop the community from forking from the last public version and developing a competing product.
If I build a house, it is for my own private use. If I build a telecom network, it is to provide service to the people of that area.
If I build a house, nothing is stopping other people from building houses in the same neighborhood. If I build a network, the next company that tries to develop the area is put at a huge disadvantage. They not only have to ask permission from a city council which already had its streets ripped up once, but all the valuable customers already have service thankyouverymuch.
Let's try a better analogy. Say I grab some land out in the middle of nowhere, and put a warehouse on it. As part of the deal, I pay an absurd sum to the government to build a road to connect my land with the highway. Life is good.
Then another company builds a similar warehouse on the lot next to mine, and grabs several important contracts away from my business. Suddenly, they're using the road that I paid for, and I get nothing in return. Am I angry? Of course. Should I have the right to force my neighbor to build his own road? Not at all.
I think this analogy is more apt. BTW, I'm still trying to figure out how the transient is my "competition." Whatever, he'd still better not hog the Frosted Flakes.
"And this is better than a public, government-run-and-regulated monopoly how exactly?"
A few reasons:
A government-run monopoly will be more committed to laying fiber everywhere, not just to those areas that offer the highest ROI.
If a government-run monopoly is overcharging, voters can tell them to stop. A corporate monopoly only needs to listen to the shareholders (who just happen to benefit from the overcharging).
Private companies are less beholden to pesky rules like the First Amendment.
1) Building two totally separate networks to provide the same service to the same area is just a--what was the word you used?--stupid duplication of effort. Every time a new player wants to enter the market, they have to build yet another entirely different network, compounding stupidity upon stupidity and creating an unnecessarily high barrier to entry.
It should also be pointed out that building a second network incurs the same costs as the first, but the new player then has to overcome the additional burden of getting customers to use their service. If the new service is only marginally superior to the old one, there's no chance of turning a profit. So we end up with geographical monopolies, which can only work if subjected to an even heavier regimen of regulation than we face now.
2) Your analogy, wherein you come to somebody's office and force them to give you half their income for no other reason than that you want it, is... oh, there's that word again. So long as the company that laid the wire is allowed to charge access fees high enough to recoup their investment, then the investment is worth making.
If you want to argue the specifics of what access fees are reasonable, or how long a company's privileged status should last, that's not a problem. But to hand over a perpetual monopoly over an area is far too rich a reward.
3) Screw innovation in the telecom sector. What about innovation in the services being provided by those who use the network to deliver their services? Who does it serve when every time someone comes up with a new application, they have to beg and grovel to get permission to use the pipes? We're already seeing providers banning services like NAT and VPN, just so they can charge extra for such services.
Giving the fiber owners absolute control over what goes through their pipes does exactly what you describe: "It forces higher costs, discourages innovation and risk taking, and stigmatizes the development of new technology."
Re:this is killing Linux, OSD in general
on
Today's SCO News
·
· Score: 1
Some options for you:
1) Point out that, even if Linux is encumbered, BSD was cleared of similar charges years ago, and is therefore presumably safe.
2) On a related note, point out how the BSD settlement ended (with BSD removing about six "infringing" files, then moving on unencumbered).
3) Point out that, had a closed-source vendor taken another vendor's code as their own, their products would be just as much of a liability to your operation. The only difference is, it's harder to prove code theft when the code isn't there to be examined.
4) Do an informal poll of Apache developers, and see how many of them would be willing to help you through a technical issue for $400 a pop. Also, research into local consultants who could provide the same services.
5) Keep low. You have a family and/or Everquest addiction to feed.
6) Challenge your CIO for leadership of the tribe. Bring brass knuckles and a rolled up copy of CIO magazine.
[hopefully, you can recognize which are serious options. Otherwise, I'm sure an amusing Slashdot story will come out of it.]
The point is, no analyst would even think about suing a company for reproducing his or her "intellectual property" for a company meeting. But computers may or may not be able to see the distinction. All they know is that they've been given uncopyable material and asked to copy it.
The house painting example wasn't supposed to be an analogy, which is why your revision of the analogy is--to be blunt--so bad. So I'm not going to play by your rules. The point is, the rule is written into your lease to prevent you from trying to do major remodeling on the landlord's property, but no human would ever make the judgment that a bit of touch up paint would get you in trouble. If a computer were in charge of ensuring compliance with the lease, much unnecessary difficulty would ensue.
If there is any analogy between the painting example and the copyright debate, it should be an analogy of function. That is, find some action which is technically illegal, but shouldn't bother the copyright holder if he or she found out. For example, mixing a CD for your girlfriend, or using a song for a junior high's video yearbook. These would be analogous to the painting example.
There are many people who frown on wholesale copyright violation, and I think you would find the author of the article among them. But the rules now being put in place--and strictly enforced--are a huge disservice to consumers.
So, all you got from that was "it's okay to steal intangible material?" If so, then I guess it makes sense for you to try and apply that "rule" to tangible goods as well.
But the point he was trying to make wasn't that anybody, anywhere should be able to obtain and copy anything, in whatever quantities he or she desired. The point was that many of the things ordinary people do with their material are technically violations of copyright or licenses, but actually enforcing these rules is stupid in many situations.
Such situations cannot be perfectly analyzed by a computer, and the "leeway" the author describes is necessary, because we don't live in a black and white world. If you allow a machine to decide what does and does not constitute "fair use," then the machine will often get it wrong.*
How you managed to get "we should all be allowed to steal" from this article totally eludes me.
* This presumes that the creators of the device even try to make it possible to exercise fair use rights, which certainly isn't a given.
Imagine a DRM scheme where you had the option to force any "access device" to communicate with your server at loveandwhitemakeup.badpoetry.net before it can decrypt and display your work. The server will send back a token, allowing the work to be viewed.
As per the initial experiment, you decide your old poetry is too bad to inflict upon society. So you go to your server and set it to reject all authentication requests. Boom. Now nobody can ever read you bad poetry again. Since all you ever granted anyone was a revokable "license" to view the work, this is perfectly legal.
Or imagine that the copyright finally runs out on your book. By then, of course, it will be "life of the author plus 300 years, with an optional 200 year extension, but I digress. Now everyone can trade your bad poetry as they see fit, right? Nope. Somebody, somewhere, decided it wasn't worth the effort to keep the authentication scheme functioning, and shut down loveandwhitemakeup.badpoetry.net as soon as the copyright expired. Why should they bother, since they can no longer make a profit off supporting it?
This is the sort of scheme many in the content industry want: absolutely secure formats, where the copyright holder has complete and irrevocable control over distribution. The ability to stop publishing a work is fine. But these schemes might ensure that nothing can ever reach the public domain, and that would be a travesty.
Doubtful. The thing is, we already have such an "economy of abundance" when it comes to ones and zeros, but we still see lots of intellectual property owners going to every imaginable extreme to enforce the scarcity that served them so well in times past.
When nano takes off, it will start us on a path towards abundance. But it's going to be a long, winding path. The reason is simple: Few corporations are willing to allow a market to grow if it means giving up their control over it.
How long after release will somebody post the first Linux port?
- 24 hours - 48 hours - 72 hours - 1 week - The developers will spend the first month arguing whether to use GTK, QT, or wxWindows. - It will be done when CowboyNeal says it's done.
"I've played MMORPGs for years and usually when I quit playing a game it's because of something like this, I get killed by another player who steals all of my hard earned equipment, I suffer lag at the wrong moment and drop into a pit of acid causing me to die and lose all my best armor, etc. When stuff like that happens, I log out and usually never go back."
So what you're trying to say here is that these hackers have probably contributed significantly to the quality of life and productivity of hundreds--possibly thousands--of their fellow geeks.
Me, I like to think of this action as a post-modern tour de force. By forcing thousands of people to step back from an artificial system of rules that governs many hours of their lives, and view it from the perspective of its own falsity, they've created a very powerful response in the audience.
Do the game crashers need to be found and prosecuted? Of course. Do cheaters suck? Of course. But c'mon, man. If you can't laugh about something like this, where's the joy in life?
Theoretically, you might define a unit of mass as a frequency of light.
We all know the drill: Every photon carries a certain amount of energy, which defines its frequency. Low-energy waves like radio carry a small amount of energy, while very high frequency waves--gamma rays start around 10 picometers--carry a lot of energy.
As Einstein has drilled into the collective conscious of everyone over the age of ten, mass and energy are interchangeable. In this case,
E = 1 kg * 299792458^2 m^2 / s^2 [about 8.98 * 10^16 Joules]
If all this energy could be contained in a single photon--I'm not sure what the practical limitations are--then the kilogram could be defined by that wavelength.
All right, I found the formula. It's E (energy) = h (Planck's Constant) * f (frequency) So f = E / h... the frequency is around 1.356 * 10^50 Hz. I think that actually puts the wavelength below the Planck's length, which might be invalid.
Conclusion: You might have to take a smaller unit of mass, and multiply.
I've had the same Yahoo address for about four years now. I'm up to about 1200 spams a month. 95% end up in the "Bulk Mail" folder, but I still have to look through that for the occasional false positive. The sixty that slip through don't exactly make my heart leap with anticipation either.
I thought the article mentioned that. Because of the NCA, he wasn't actually qualified for any job in his field of expertise, and would be expected to take any burger-flipping job that was offered to him. I can see the logic behind that, but I still like your idea of increasing insurance rates for companies like Volt.
the idea that i should want to release my music under an open source license is insulting. my music is an expression of my aesthetic preferences. giving unknown others the freedom to recontextualize it without my input is worse to me than selling my music to an advertiser for cash -- not only does it reduce a song's value aesthetically without any chance of control on my part, but it furthers the notion that music is not something businesses looking for a sound for their tv spot should have to pay for.
There is a "noncommercial" version of the Share-alike license, which would make it impossible for anyone to use your work on TV without going to you for the rights.
already, it's common enough for companies and producers wanting cheap tunes to offer an underground artist a small amount of money for the use of a piece. the artist has no bargaining power because there are thousands of other smalltime underground producers. thus he must choose either to receive a little exposure and a few dollars from a rich company (pitiful compared to professional standards), or get nothing at all!
But it's also common for producers to be willing to pay good money for something that is already wildly popular. Publicity sometimes makes things more popular, and giving stuff away for free sometimes makes things more popular. It's a gamble, but what isn't these days?
putting music out there and encouraging others to use it for free just makes it that much harder for those who want to make a living off their art -- i'd go so far as to say it's irresponsible. it's fine for people to make their music available as free mp3 downloads... i mean, if nobody knows you, nobody is going to pay just to check out if you're any good or not. but for the love of god, keep your copyright.
None of the Creative Commons licenses require you to give up your copyright. They merely say, "Here are some things that you can do with this item, above and beyond the rights granted by copyright."
In their own ways, the licenses are pretty restrictive. Some deny you the right to use the material commercially, others deny the right to make "derivative works," and some require that derivative works be licensed under the same license as the original. [details]
So if you chose this license, the TV producer who wanted to "use your work for free" would be up a creek without a legal paddle, because you never granted him the right to do so. He still needs your permission.
i allow downloads of my music at a lowish bit rate. i'm not so precious about my tunes that i don't let anyone hear them, but i'm not about to give away what i spend so much time on for personal and commercial use. *cough* especially after an incident last summer where someone downloaded a high quality mp3 of a song i'd made available on my site and had it released on vinyl under their name ---> scroll down to the last item of the faq for the story
I read the story, and I feel for you. Plagarists are stupid pricks. But I have to point out that, if you'd released Autosome under the Attribution Share-alike license (Opsound's license of choice), it wouldn't have changed the way things went down. What the Russian dude did would still have been a violation of the terms of the license, and it would have still been enforceable in court.
Even if you'd released the song into the public domain, you could have gotten him in trouble with his label for plagarism (though I have no idea what your legal options would be).
The world needs copyrights. The CC licenses simply give users rights that you just cannot take for granted with normal copyright. If you want your listeners to have those rights (which vary between licenses) then release under those license
Re:Copyright ownership guarantees?
on
Open Source Music
·
· Score: 1
"What specific steps can an artist take to avoid George Harrison's fate?"
Well, if you're really wealthy, you might try cryogenic freezing. Best not to wait until you die, since it would probably be much easier to repair and resuscitate a young, healthy body. And anyways, who wants to face our Glorious Utopian Future as a ninety year old man?
Or just try not to get into a train wreck for about twenty years, and maybe something will come of all this genetic research.
George Harrison will be greatly missed, but his fate need not be your own. Catch you around at the heat death of the Universe.
Slashdot Mirror
With proprietary models, you would have to sign a huge, exclusive contract to get that sort of service. In open source, just send pizzas. They'll love you forever. :)
[I could be wrong, but I do believe]
The big difference between the GPL and the Mozilla Public License: Any patches, features, and whatnot that the Mozilla project accepts have their copyright transferred to the Mozilla project. This leaves them the option of closing future releases (though they cannot take back rights granted to the code already out there.
With the regular ol' GPL, once you've incorporated someone else's code into your project, you have to get their permission to license it under other terms. With a huge project with thousands of contributors, this is no small feat.
That is how AOL is able to release Netscape without releasing the applicable source code. I wonder what would have happened if WASTE had been MPL'ed instead.
Actually, according to this cyberlaw.com article, the RSA patent [not copyright] expired back in 2000. So the only issue regarding the GPL'ing of WASTE is whether Justin or AOL owns the code.
Judging from what happened, and from Justin's blog, it sounds like he thought he owned the code, but AOL asserted its rights. Perhaps he used WASTE as a test case, to see if the corporate AOL culture was compatable with his attitude.
That's just a theory, of course.
I find this post to be in shockingly horrible taste, and I'm absolutely livid that I didn't come up with it first.
They've actually listed several "enterprise features" that Linux needed, SMP just being the most notable. In order to do a pre-emptive strike, too many different things would have to be rewritten.
At some point, the nature of the "infringing code" will have to be shown to the kernel hackers, and at that point, it will be removed. There's no point in trying to remove the infringing code before then.
Why'd you have to go and do that, huh?
The fact that the owner of a line can grossly overcharge service providers as well as end users isn't relevant. So long as Verizon has the choice not to license, there is no way to break their geographical monopoly.
How can you say "there will be no monopoly?" If company A has already laid fiber through an area, there is a high likelihood that it is uneconomical for company B to lay fiber in the same area, because company A has already wired up the most valuable customers. Even if company B offers superior service at a lower price, company A can merely drop prices long enough to keep the competition from gaining new customers.
In short, I'm asserting that it's economic suicide for an upstart company to wire up an already wired area.
Now, company B could go and look for a virgin area to wire up. But if the only way to get access to the Internet is to hook into company A's pipes, then both company B and the customers in the new area are screwed. After all, why should company A grant access to company B when it would surely be more profitable for them to develop the area themselves? Why should they help out the competition?
You might argue that company B can pay whatever is necessary to make it worth company A's effort. But think how high that price would be? How much would company B have to pay, before it was just as good for company A as owning the wire themselves? Obviously, too much.
Now, if a couple of major players each had thousands of miles of fiber laid, it would obviously serve both to grant each other access at reasonable rates. It's a form of competition, but if a small company with only a few miles of fiber tries to enter the market, they have no power to negotiate a reasonable price for access. What can they do? Threaten to deny access to their lines? The smaller company would go out of business, and the larger company would buy up the fiber for pennies on the dollar.
Without compulsory licensing, both small service providers and small infrastructure companies are locked out of the marketplace. How exactly does that situation foster competition?
What do you mean by "retract" the decision? In the case of Waste, it looks like the program and source may have been posted without the knowledge or consent of Nullsoft. I think it would be impossible for AOL to prove that Mozilla is being distributed without AOL's knowledge or consent. The bandwidth fees alone mean they know about it.
If, on the other hand, you mean they can close off access to new versions of Mozilla, they already have that right under the MPL. But they cannot stop the community from forking from the last public version and developing a competing product.
Bad analogy.
If I build a house, it is for my own private use. If I build a telecom network, it is to provide service to the people of that area.
If I build a house, nothing is stopping other people from building houses in the same neighborhood. If I build a network, the next company that tries to develop the area is put at a huge disadvantage. They not only have to ask permission from a city council which already had its streets ripped up once, but all the valuable customers already have service thankyouverymuch.
Let's try a better analogy. Say I grab some land out in the middle of nowhere, and put a warehouse on it. As part of the deal, I pay an absurd sum to the government to build a road to connect my land with the highway. Life is good.
Then another company builds a similar warehouse on the lot next to mine, and grabs several important contracts away from my business. Suddenly, they're using the road that I paid for, and I get nothing in return. Am I angry? Of course. Should I have the right to force my neighbor to build his own road? Not at all.
I think this analogy is more apt. BTW, I'm still trying to figure out how the transient is my "competition." Whatever, he'd still better not hog the Frosted Flakes.
A government-run monopoly will be more committed to laying fiber everywhere, not just to those areas that offer the highest ROI.
If a government-run monopoly is overcharging, voters can tell them to stop. A corporate monopoly only needs to listen to the shareholders (who just happen to benefit from the overcharging).
Private companies are less beholden to pesky rules like the First Amendment.
1) Building two totally separate networks to provide the same service to the same area is just a--what was the word you used?--stupid duplication of effort. Every time a new player wants to enter the market, they have to build yet another entirely different network, compounding stupidity upon stupidity and creating an unnecessarily high barrier to entry.
It should also be pointed out that building a second network incurs the same costs as the first, but the new player then has to overcome the additional burden of getting customers to use their service. If the new service is only marginally superior to the old one, there's no chance of turning a profit. So we end up with geographical monopolies, which can only work if subjected to an even heavier regimen of regulation than we face now.
2) Your analogy, wherein you come to somebody's office and force them to give you half their income for no other reason than that you want it, is... oh, there's that word again. So long as the company that laid the wire is allowed to charge access fees high enough to recoup their investment, then the investment is worth making.
If you want to argue the specifics of what access fees are reasonable, or how long a company's privileged status should last, that's not a problem. But to hand over a perpetual monopoly over an area is far too rich a reward.
3) Screw innovation in the telecom sector. What about innovation in the services being provided by those who use the network to deliver their services? Who does it serve when every time someone comes up with a new application, they have to beg and grovel to get permission to use the pipes? We're already seeing providers banning services like NAT and VPN, just so they can charge extra for such services.
Giving the fiber owners absolute control over what goes through their pipes does exactly what you describe: "It forces higher costs, discourages innovation and risk taking, and stigmatizes the development of new technology."
Some options for you:
1) Point out that, even if Linux is encumbered, BSD was cleared of similar charges years ago, and is therefore presumably safe.
2) On a related note, point out how the BSD settlement ended (with BSD removing about six "infringing" files, then moving on unencumbered).
3) Point out that, had a closed-source vendor taken another vendor's code as their own, their products would be just as much of a liability to your operation. The only difference is, it's harder to prove code theft when the code isn't there to be examined.
4) Do an informal poll of Apache developers, and see how many of them would be willing to help you through a technical issue for $400 a pop. Also, research into local consultants who could provide the same services.
5) Keep low. You have a family and/or Everquest addiction to feed.
6) Challenge your CIO for leadership of the tribe. Bring brass knuckles and a rolled up copy of CIO magazine.
[hopefully, you can recognize which are serious options. Otherwise, I'm sure an amusing Slashdot story will come out of it.]
The point is, no analyst would even think about suing a company for reproducing his or her "intellectual property" for a company meeting. But computers may or may not be able to see the distinction. All they know is that they've been given uncopyable material and asked to copy it.
The house painting example wasn't supposed to be an analogy, which is why your revision of the analogy is--to be blunt--so bad. So I'm not going to play by your rules. The point is, the rule is written into your lease to prevent you from trying to do major remodeling on the landlord's property, but no human would ever make the judgment that a bit of touch up paint would get you in trouble. If a computer were in charge of ensuring compliance with the lease, much unnecessary difficulty would ensue.
If there is any analogy between the painting example and the copyright debate, it should be an analogy of function. That is, find some action which is technically illegal, but shouldn't bother the copyright holder if he or she found out. For example, mixing a CD for your girlfriend, or using a song for a junior high's video yearbook. These would be analogous to the painting example.
There are many people who frown on wholesale copyright violation, and I think you would find the author of the article among them. But the rules now being put in place--and strictly enforced--are a huge disservice to consumers.
So, all you got from that was "it's okay to steal intangible material?" If so, then I guess it makes sense for you to try and apply that "rule" to tangible goods as well.
But the point he was trying to make wasn't that anybody, anywhere should be able to obtain and copy anything, in whatever quantities he or she desired. The point was that many of the things ordinary people do with their material are technically violations of copyright or licenses, but actually enforcing these rules is stupid in many situations.
Such situations cannot be perfectly analyzed by a computer, and the "leeway" the author describes is necessary, because we don't live in a black and white world. If you allow a machine to decide what does and does not constitute "fair use," then the machine will often get it wrong.*
How you managed to get "we should all be allowed to steal" from this article totally eludes me.
* This presumes that the creators of the device even try to make it possible to exercise fair use rights, which certainly isn't a given.
Let's try another gendonkey whaddayacallit.
Imagine a DRM scheme where you had the option to force any "access device" to communicate with your server at loveandwhitemakeup.badpoetry.net before it can decrypt and display your work. The server will send back a token, allowing the work to be viewed.
As per the initial experiment, you decide your old poetry is too bad to inflict upon society. So you go to your server and set it to reject all authentication requests. Boom. Now nobody can ever read you bad poetry again. Since all you ever granted anyone was a revokable "license" to view the work, this is perfectly legal.
Or imagine that the copyright finally runs out on your book. By then, of course, it will be "life of the author plus 300 years, with an optional 200 year extension, but I digress. Now everyone can trade your bad poetry as they see fit, right? Nope. Somebody, somewhere, decided it wasn't worth the effort to keep the authentication scheme functioning, and shut down loveandwhitemakeup.badpoetry.net as soon as the copyright expired. Why should they bother, since they can no longer make a profit off supporting it?
This is the sort of scheme many in the content industry want: absolutely secure formats, where the copyright holder has complete and irrevocable control over distribution. The ability to stop publishing a work is fine. But these schemes might ensure that nothing can ever reach the public domain, and that would be a travesty.
Doubtful. The thing is, we already have such an "economy of abundance" when it comes to ones and zeros, but we still see lots of intellectual property owners going to every imaginable extreme to enforce the scarcity that served them so well in times past.
When nano takes off, it will start us on a path towards abundance. But it's going to be a long, winding path. The reason is simple: Few corporations are willing to allow a market to grow if it means giving up their control over it.
How long after release will somebody post the first Linux port?
- 24 hours
- 48 hours
- 72 hours
- 1 week
- The developers will spend the first month arguing whether to use GTK, QT, or wxWindows.
- It will be done when CowboyNeal says it's done.
It seems that he's pronouncing it perfectly. :)
Me, I like to think of this action as a post-modern tour de force. By forcing thousands of people to step back from an artificial system of rules that governs many hours of their lives, and view it from the perspective of its own falsity, they've created a very powerful response in the audience.
Do the game crashers need to be found and prosecuted? Of course. Do cheaters suck? Of course. But c'mon, man. If you can't laugh about something like this, where's the joy in life?
Theoretically, you might define a unit of mass as a frequency of light.
We all know the drill: Every photon carries a certain amount of energy, which defines its frequency. Low-energy waves like radio carry a small amount of energy, while very high frequency waves--gamma rays start around 10 picometers--carry a lot of energy.
As Einstein has drilled into the collective conscious of everyone over the age of ten, mass and energy are interchangeable. In this case,
E = 1 kg * 299792458^2 m^2 / s^2
[about 8.98 * 10^16 Joules]
If all this energy could be contained in a single photon--I'm not sure what the practical limitations are--then the kilogram could be defined by that wavelength.
All right, I found the formula. It's E (energy) = h (Planck's Constant) * f (frequency) So f = E / h... the frequency is around 1.356 * 10^50 Hz. I think that actually puts the wavelength below the Planck's length, which might be invalid.
Conclusion: You might have to take a smaller unit of mass, and multiply.
I've had the same Yahoo address for about four years now. I'm up to about 1200 spams a month. 95% end up in the "Bulk Mail" folder, but I still have to look through that for the occasional false positive. The sixty that slip through don't exactly make my heart leap with anticipation either.
I thought the article mentioned that. Because of the NCA, he wasn't actually qualified for any job in his field of expertise, and would be expected to take any burger-flipping job that was offered to him. I can see the logic behind that, but I still like your idea of increasing insurance rates for companies like Volt.
:: Thinks about it for a moment :: :: Resets page preferences to +4 ::
There is a "noncommercial" version of the Share-alike license, which would make it impossible for anyone to use your work on TV without going to you for the rights.
But it's also common for producers to be willing to pay good money for something that is already wildly popular. Publicity sometimes makes things more popular, and giving stuff away for free sometimes makes things more popular. It's a gamble, but what isn't these days?
None of the Creative Commons licenses require you to give up your copyright. They merely say, "Here are some things that you can do with this item, above and beyond the rights granted by copyright."
In their own ways, the licenses are pretty restrictive. Some deny you the right to use the material commercially, others deny the right to make "derivative works," and some require that derivative works be licensed under the same license as the original. [details]
So if you chose this license, the TV producer who wanted to "use your work for free" would be up a creek without a legal paddle, because you never granted him the right to do so. He still needs your permission.
I read the story, and I feel for you. Plagarists are stupid pricks. But I have to point out that, if you'd released Autosome under the Attribution Share-alike license (Opsound's license of choice), it wouldn't have changed the way things went down. What the Russian dude did would still have been a violation of the terms of the license, and it would have still been enforceable in court.
Even if you'd released the song into the public domain, you could have gotten him in trouble with his label for plagarism (though I have no idea what your legal options would be).
The world needs copyrights. The CC licenses simply give users rights that you just cannot take for granted with normal copyright. If you want your listeners to have those rights (which vary between licenses) then release under those license
Or just try not to get into a train wreck for about twenty years, and maybe something will come of all this genetic research.
George Harrison will be greatly missed, but his fate need not be your own. Catch you around at the heat death of the Universe.