This is not quite correct. The publishers did get paid for editing, proofreading, marketing, etc., when the books were first published, as was Cherryh's agent. No one thinks that those books will sell enough to pay printing, shipping, and so on today, so they are out of print. The only reason she can sell them for a couple bucks on a web site is because they already made money, or at least enough money was made from her other books to support the writing and publishing of her subsequent books. (Regenesis was excellent.)
"While I understand that the Kindle is sold somewhat as a loss-leader and a mechanism to try to sell ebooks for absurd prices (it's bad enough that paperbacks are $9; to charge that same price that costs you NOTHING to duplicate, NOTHING to store, NOTHING to ship, NOTHING to advertise is...hard to swallow)"
It's not clear that you do understand. To a reasonable first approximation, the cost of printing and binding a book, hardback or paperback, is zero. Most of the cost goes to paying people, like authors, agents, editors, proofreaders, artists, buyers, marketers, and so on, who do the same work whether a book is a hardback, an ebook, or etched onto gnat's wings. The only reason that hardbacks cost so much more is because people are willing to pay it the get the book when it is first published. That's where most of the money is made. If people switch from $30 hardbacks to $10 ebooks, there will be no more money to pay the people who produce books the way we know them today. A massive switch to $10 ebooks will kill the creation of new book.
Once you pay the fixed costs, like writing and editing, from the revenues from the hardbacks, any sale that makes any money is worthwhile, so we have paperbacks. If the ebook were to be released with the paperback, it could be sold for $1-2 less than the paperback and everyone would be happy. If it is released concurrently with the $30 hardback, they have to sell it for hardback prices. You could argue that all ebook sales are in addition to hardback sales, not replacing hardback sales, but that isn't very plausible.
Remember that the abstraction-filtration-comparison test is applicable to cases in the 10th Circuit. Other circuits have different tests. Until the Supreme Court weighs in, copyright law will in effect be different in different parts of the US.
Anyone with experience with simulations of this complexity must cringe at the thought of what bad approximations, improper algorithms, and just plain dumb mistakes must be in there. In some cases, the simulation will be robust to problems, and you can get good answers anyway (e.g. an energy sink in a particular equation can damp oscillations whether it is particularly accurately modeled or not). Sometimes the mistake is in the main feedback channel governing the system behavior, and you get nothing but garbage out. Considering the, what, trillions? quadrillions? of dollars in damage that could be caused by anthropogenic global climate change, any number of billions of dollars spent on improving the models is worth it.
On the other hand, the glaciers and ice sheets really are vanishing, aren't they?
VLC is reported to be GPL2 (I don't see it on their website, so "reported") and the real problem is with the GPL3. If VLC is GPL2 then the app must have information about where to acquire a copy of the source code, which is not a problem. GPL3 requires that all signing keys or anything else needed to run modified versions of the code be distributed with the source, and Apple won't do that.
I picked the easy, lowest common denominator and use CVS. Advantages for me: 1. It is installed on the machines that I use but don't control. 2. It is adequately compatible with emacs (adjust for whatever your preferred coding environment is) 3. Remote access (with no cvs server required) is trivially available over ssh.
CVS (or any other version control system) lets me create a copy of my analysis routines as they existed at a given date, e.g. the month before a certain conference three years ago. Thus I know that I can recreate exactly whatever I did then. I feel more free to rip out and rewrite things knowing that the old version is never lost. Can the same thing be done by archiving all old versions of routines, keeping careful changelogs, and (depending on your setup) frequently running rsync? Of course, but not as conveniently.
In practice, I give code to people I work with and when they complain about bugs, I fix them. I believe that on the local system, cvs checkin and checkout access is governed by unix file permissions, no server required.
People who don't work in this sort of environment don't understand the differences in mindset. Not many people want easy access to code and documents created over a decade ago, but I find this to be common in scientific work. Why do some scientists like TeX and FORTRAN? Because they can still use their work 20 years later. I figured that CVS would also be around forever.
I won't argue with anyone saying that there are better solutions, but using CVS was easy and good enough.
Version control! If I know what date I created a certain data set or performed a bit of analysis, I know how to recreate it (even if I know it has an error).
One of the hardest things is to figure out which bits of programming will actually aid in your work and which are needless complications. Will making my code super modular or OOP or whatever let me build new tools faster or will it make any new development too complicated?
Estoppel can be a little more complicated than that. If they change their minds and take you to court, estoppel would be your defense. But to use it, you would have to argue that their reversal has harmed you; saying "my company spent a million dollars creating and distributing free videos describing our product" would be a way to win, but "I have 10 GB of videos of my cat on my home page" would not. Also, defense of estoppel might be blocked if the program which initially encoded the video wasn't properly licensed or if you engaged in some other behavior that would be considered bad faith. If it's really important, get a lawyer. Or use a completely unencumbered codec.
Sounds like you may be mixing up GPL and copyright law. There is no clear definition in the courts as to when two pieces of code which are separated in the source files form a single work. In any case, the GPL can't change what is a derivative work under copyright law, and there are no exceptions under which a derivative work is licensed under any terms other than the GPL. You also may be thinking of the LGPL, a slightly different license designed for libraries which allows them to be used as part of larger work if they are accessed properly without the larger work being LGPL or GPL licensed.
No one can seriously argue that a web browser and a web server are a single work, and part of this is because they communicate over a network using a standardized interface. But this is based on copyright law, and has nothing to do with the licenses of the browser and the server.
I believe the term came from blackbody radiation (this is just the electromagnetic radiation of anything with a finite temperature; think infrared night-vision goggles.). Originally, the measured and theoretical emission spectra increased with frequency like the frequency squared. If you try to add up the total emission, though, you get something infinite (because you can't integrate x^2 from 0 to infinity). This is nonsense, because warm bodies, such as yourself, are not radiating infinite power. This is the ultraviolet catastrophe.
The answer to the problem is that quantum mechanical effects cause the spectrum to turn around again and head toward zero at high frequency, giving you something with a finite integral.
So the original poster meant that sometimes you can prove that what you have isn't the whole picture, but that is not the case here.
Actually, yes it is different. The first difference is cost. It is expensive to follow people around and record everything they are saying. I don't worry that someone is going to spend a half a million dollars to follow me around for the next year; it's not impossible, but it's about as likely that I will be struck by a meteor. The second is storage of information. If someone decides today to find out exactly what you said at lunch last week, they can't, because that information is gone, no matter how many people could overhear you. Cheap aggregation and eternal storage of public information lead to a loss of privacy.
What you are saying seems to match the outdated SOAP API, not the current AJAX interface. According to Google, the old interface had a limit but the new one does not.
You are starting out with a mistake. To a close enough approximation, all versions of a book cost the same amount to produce. Hardbacks don't cost more to the consumer because they have better bindings and nicer paper, they cost more because they are available first. If I want China Mieville's new novel on the day it is released (and I do), then I have to buy the hardback (which I might or might not, being a total cheapskate with full bookshelves).
The difference in the physical instantiations is meant to support the pricing difference based on time of availability, but most people think that the physical differences are the main driver in the price difference, instead of a kind of ornamental flourish on top. A mint condition hardback that has been stored at 36 degrees F in an atmosphere of dry argon for 10 years has lost almost all of its value, too. An ebook that comes out the day a book goes on sale is worth at that time about the same as the hardback, because what you are paying for is access.
What people are saying mostly is that they want an ebook at the same time as the hardback but pay a lot less. People can want anything, but they need to argue how this is going to lead to increased profits for the publisher. The argument often offered is that ebooks must be much cheaper to produce, but they aren't. The only sensible argument that can be made is that people who switch to ebooks will start spending significantly more money on books. Until there is, you know, evidence of this, publishers are right to be skeptical, because this argument sounds suspiciously like a rationalization.
Your point about betrayal is part of this, because Kindle owners feel like they have already bought into the system, they paid upfront for their cheap books, and now they want them. They want to spend less on books, so the total Kindle plus books expense matches their prior spending on books. But now Amazon is getting most of that money, so a consumer sees this as "I am spending the same but switching to ebooks," the publisher sees it as "We are selling the same books at the same time and getting less money."
Only a nitwit would deny that many successful open source projects that are not GPLed. I would put X at the head of the list. Is the GPL solely responsible for these? Of course not. Is it in any way responsible for these projects in their current state? Who knows? The only way to argue that the GPL is not in any way responsible for great open source software is to find an example of great open source software that was written with no dependence on GPLed software. There probably are some, but we haven't named one yet.
You could release your recipe under an open source license, and anyone else could modify and republish the recipe as long as they followed the terms of the license. This makes a lot more sense then the way recipes are usually handled, which is that books take old recipes and publish them with just enough random changes to avoid sanction under copyright law. Why not make only changes to improve the recipe?
If the GPL wouldn't work, I am sure one of the CC licenses would.
I am sitting on a great family recipe for crab cakes. Maybe I should post it under a CC license.
"the licensee's rights would be violated since he did not know what he was agreeing to."
This is also a mistake. The licensee didn't agree to anything. The GPL is not a negotiated contract. It is a grant of rights. The licensee has no rights whatsoever, except the rights received from copyright law. The GPL does not attempt to take away anything granted by copyright law, so no rights of the licensee are violated.
The intent of the author of the GPL is irrelevant, but not for the reason you say. The intent of the author is irrelevant because the grant of rights is from the copyright holder to the recipient. The intent of the author in releasing his work under the GPL could be relevant.
The GPL intends explicitly for "derivative" to have its common legal definition. This is a feature, not a bug.
If someone modifies a GPLed work and sells it as closed source, they have violated copyright law. They have no right to do such a thing. Legal action must be initiated by the copyright holder, i.e. the original author or whoever he transferred the rights to. There is no agreement between the customer and the seller which requires the seller to distribute the source. And the result of the court case may be that the seller gives the author money, and the consumer still doesn't get the source. (Of course the author and the seller might, if they feel like it, agree to source distribution in lieu of the payment of damages, if they and the judge agree to this settlement.)
The GPL is a grant of additional rights, a convoluted set of rights ("You can do A if you also do B"). Nothing forces the seller to distribute the source. But by not distributing the source, the seller distributed the code without permission of the original author. The problem is distribution without permission, which is illegal.
A different license is not the answer. Neither of you knew whether his book was a derivative work under copyright law. Your license can't redefine the terms of copyright law, so no change in the wording of the CC would reduce the confusion. This is the same problem with TFA. Like the GPL, the CC licenses are grants of rights to be added to those rights we already receive under copyright law. If they redefined terms, they would also potentially (attempt to) take away rights, which would make them very different beasts legally. It would completely change the legal landscape.
"If I own a copyrighted work, I'm entitled to do what I like with it, save for copying it."
I would be interested to know where you live that has laws like this. I live in the United States, and the laws here are very, very different. There are all sorts of things that you cannot legally do that do not involve copying the work, including for example transcribing lyrics of songs and public performances. I also can't buy a book, replace the covers with new ones that list me as the author, and resell it.
None of these things is copying the work, and they are illegal where I live (in the United States).
People are sloppy because the meaning is usually clear from context. Whether I say I own SimCity or The City & the City (the ancient computer game and the excellent novel by China Mieville, respectively) no one imagines that I am talking about copyrights, because most people don't own any meaningful copyrights (I own the copyrights to my blog posts, but no one really gives a hoot). Vernacular English does not provide us with the tools to speak unambiguously about these matters.
The issue comes up more with software because it is easy to copy. I am not going to scan my hardback of The City & the City and start printing my own copies (if for no other reason then because it is probably cheaper to buy it at B&N). I am a lot more likely to copy the CD of SimCity, because it is so easy to do so and nearly free. So the the distinction between owning the copyrights and owning a copy is much more of an issue for software and music. It is also relatively new because high-quality almost-free copying hasn't been available to the masses for that long.
I read through a part of the ruling. Because of the way the case was argued and the way the patent was written, one of the things it came down to was the question of whether an MD5 hash is the same thing as adding 4 numbers together. The jury said that they are the same, and the jury was totally wrong. This has nothing to do with a personal bias of the judge. Expert witnesses explained the MD5 hash, and no one ever disagreed with them, and the jury ignored the experts and said something ridiculous.
It seems like the jury decided that MS stole the guy's idea and was determined to find against MS no matter what the law said. The judge refused to allow it.
I can't find a price for the configuration with a bunch of atom processors, so it is hard to say whether it is an economical way to create a certain amount of processing power. I also wouldn't have the numbers to put a price on the possible savings due to lower electricity and cooling requirements. None of this matters unless you are running something that can use that many processors efficiently.
They have been campaigning legally for years. Gutenburg isn't a billion dollar advertising agency so can't afford the lawsuit that google pulled off.
Seriously, what is the chance that someone with no money will get Congress to change copyright law purely to benefit the public? You say they have been campaigning for years, to which I say they could campaign for a thousand years without getting anywhere. Copyright law is controlled by the behemoths. In this case, the behemoth is concerned with something other than restricting the public access for a change.
I am perfectly happy with Gutenburg rather than Google getting these rights. But I know it would never happen.
Slashdot Mirror
This is not quite correct. The publishers did get paid for editing, proofreading, marketing, etc., when the books were first published, as was Cherryh's agent. No one thinks that those books will sell enough to pay printing, shipping, and so on today, so they are out of print. The only reason she can sell them for a couple bucks on a web site is because they already made money, or at least enough money was made from her other books to support the writing and publishing of her subsequent books. (Regenesis was excellent.)
It's not clear that you do understand. To a reasonable first approximation, the cost of printing and binding a book, hardback or paperback, is zero. Most of the cost goes to paying people, like authors, agents, editors, proofreaders, artists, buyers, marketers, and so on, who do the same work whether a book is a hardback, an ebook, or etched onto gnat's wings. The only reason that hardbacks cost so much more is because people are willing to pay it the get the book when it is first published. That's where most of the money is made. If people switch from $30 hardbacks to $10 ebooks, there will be no more money to pay the people who produce books the way we know them today. A massive switch to $10 ebooks will kill the creation of new book.
Once you pay the fixed costs, like writing and editing, from the revenues from the hardbacks, any sale that makes any money is worthwhile, so we have paperbacks. If the ebook were to be released with the paperback, it could be sold for $1-2 less than the paperback and everyone would be happy. If it is released concurrently with the $30 hardback, they have to sell it for hardback prices. You could argue that all ebook sales are in addition to hardback sales, not replacing hardback sales, but that isn't very plausible.
Remember that the abstraction-filtration-comparison test is applicable to cases in the 10th Circuit. Other circuits have different tests. Until the Supreme Court weighs in, copyright law will in effect be different in different parts of the US.
On the other hand, the glaciers and ice sheets really are vanishing, aren't they?
VLC is reported to be GPL2 (I don't see it on their website, so "reported") and the real problem is with the GPL3. If VLC is GPL2 then the app must have information about where to acquire a copy of the source code, which is not a problem. GPL3 requires that all signing keys or anything else needed to run modified versions of the code be distributed with the source, and Apple won't do that.
CVS (or any other version control system) lets me create a copy of my analysis routines as they existed at a given date, e.g. the month before a certain conference three years ago. Thus I know that I can recreate exactly whatever I did then. I feel more free to rip out and rewrite things knowing that the old version is never lost. Can the same thing be done by archiving all old versions of routines, keeping careful changelogs, and (depending on your setup) frequently running rsync? Of course, but not as conveniently.
In practice, I give code to people I work with and when they complain about bugs, I fix them. I believe that on the local system, cvs checkin and checkout access is governed by unix file permissions, no server required.
People who don't work in this sort of environment don't understand the differences in mindset. Not many people want easy access to code and documents created over a decade ago, but I find this to be common in scientific work. Why do some scientists like TeX and FORTRAN? Because they can still use their work 20 years later. I figured that CVS would also be around forever.
I won't argue with anyone saying that there are better solutions, but using CVS was easy and good enough.
One of the hardest things is to figure out which bits of programming will actually aid in your work and which are needless complications. Will making my code super modular or OOP or whatever let me build new tools faster or will it make any new development too complicated?
Estoppel can be a little more complicated than that. If they change their minds and take you to court, estoppel would be your defense. But to use it, you would have to argue that their reversal has harmed you; saying "my company spent a million dollars creating and distributing free videos describing our product" would be a way to win, but "I have 10 GB of videos of my cat on my home page" would not. Also, defense of estoppel might be blocked if the program which initially encoded the video wasn't properly licensed or if you engaged in some other behavior that would be considered bad faith. If it's really important, get a lawyer. Or use a completely unencumbered codec.
No one can seriously argue that a web browser and a web server are a single work, and part of this is because they communicate over a network using a standardized interface. But this is based on copyright law, and has nothing to do with the licenses of the browser and the server.
The answer to the problem is that quantum mechanical effects cause the spectrum to turn around again and head toward zero at high frequency, giving you something with a finite integral.
So the original poster meant that sometimes you can prove that what you have isn't the whole picture, but that is not the case here.
Actually, yes it is different. The first difference is cost. It is expensive to follow people around and record everything they are saying. I don't worry that someone is going to spend a half a million dollars to follow me around for the next year; it's not impossible, but it's about as likely that I will be struck by a meteor. The second is storage of information. If someone decides today to find out exactly what you said at lunch last week, they can't, because that information is gone, no matter how many people could overhear you. Cheap aggregation and eternal storage of public information lead to a loss of privacy.
What you are saying seems to match the outdated SOAP API, not the current AJAX interface. According to Google, the old interface had a limit but the new one does not.
The difference in the physical instantiations is meant to support the pricing difference based on time of availability, but most people think that the physical differences are the main driver in the price difference, instead of a kind of ornamental flourish on top. A mint condition hardback that has been stored at 36 degrees F in an atmosphere of dry argon for 10 years has lost almost all of its value, too. An ebook that comes out the day a book goes on sale is worth at that time about the same as the hardback, because what you are paying for is access.
What people are saying mostly is that they want an ebook at the same time as the hardback but pay a lot less. People can want anything, but they need to argue how this is going to lead to increased profits for the publisher. The argument often offered is that ebooks must be much cheaper to produce, but they aren't. The only sensible argument that can be made is that people who switch to ebooks will start spending significantly more money on books. Until there is, you know, evidence of this, publishers are right to be skeptical, because this argument sounds suspiciously like a rationalization.
Your point about betrayal is part of this, because Kindle owners feel like they have already bought into the system, they paid upfront for their cheap books, and now they want them. They want to spend less on books, so the total Kindle plus books expense matches their prior spending on books. But now Amazon is getting most of that money, so a consumer sees this as "I am spending the same but switching to ebooks," the publisher sees it as "We are selling the same books at the same time and getting less money."
Only a nitwit would deny that many successful open source projects that are not GPLed. I would put X at the head of the list. Is the GPL solely responsible for these? Of course not. Is it in any way responsible for these projects in their current state? Who knows? The only way to argue that the GPL is not in any way responsible for great open source software is to find an example of great open source software that was written with no dependence on GPLed software. There probably are some, but we haven't named one yet.
"Developed" and "built" are not synonymous. Are you claiming that Python and Apache are developed using only Microsoft compilers?
You could release your recipe under an open source license, and anyone else could modify and republish the recipe as long as they followed the terms of the license. This makes a lot more sense then the way recipes are usually handled, which is that books take old recipes and publish them with just enough random changes to avoid sanction under copyright law. Why not make only changes to improve the recipe?
If the GPL wouldn't work, I am sure one of the CC licenses would.
I am sitting on a great family recipe for crab cakes. Maybe I should post it under a CC license.
This is also a mistake. The licensee didn't agree to anything. The GPL is not a negotiated contract. It is a grant of rights. The licensee has no rights whatsoever, except the rights received from copyright law. The GPL does not attempt to take away anything granted by copyright law, so no rights of the licensee are violated.
The intent of the author of the GPL is irrelevant, but not for the reason you say. The intent of the author is irrelevant because the grant of rights is from the copyright holder to the recipient. The intent of the author in releasing his work under the GPL could be relevant.
The GPL intends explicitly for "derivative" to have its common legal definition. This is a feature, not a bug.
If someone modifies a GPLed work and sells it as closed source, they have violated copyright law. They have no right to do such a thing. Legal action must be initiated by the copyright holder, i.e. the original author or whoever he transferred the rights to. There is no agreement between the customer and the seller which requires the seller to distribute the source. And the result of the court case may be that the seller gives the author money, and the consumer still doesn't get the source. (Of course the author and the seller might, if they feel like it, agree to source distribution in lieu of the payment of damages, if they and the judge agree to this settlement.)
The GPL is a grant of additional rights, a convoluted set of rights ("You can do A if you also do B"). Nothing forces the seller to distribute the source. But by not distributing the source, the seller distributed the code without permission of the original author. The problem is distribution without permission, which is illegal.
A different license is not the answer. Neither of you knew whether his book was a derivative work under copyright law. Your license can't redefine the terms of copyright law, so no change in the wording of the CC would reduce the confusion. This is the same problem with TFA. Like the GPL, the CC licenses are grants of rights to be added to those rights we already receive under copyright law. If they redefined terms, they would also potentially (attempt to) take away rights, which would make them very different beasts legally. It would completely change the legal landscape.
It is very hard to avoid relying on FSF software unless you stick with vanilla MS Windows or old-school proprietary UNIX.
I would be interested to know where you live that has laws like this. I live in the United States, and the laws here are very, very different. There are all sorts of things that you cannot legally do that do not involve copying the work, including for example transcribing lyrics of songs and public performances. I also can't buy a book, replace the covers with new ones that list me as the author, and resell it.
None of these things is copying the work, and they are illegal where I live (in the United States).
The issue comes up more with software because it is easy to copy. I am not going to scan my hardback of The City & the City and start printing my own copies (if for no other reason then because it is probably cheaper to buy it at B&N). I am a lot more likely to copy the CD of SimCity, because it is so easy to do so and nearly free. So the the distinction between owning the copyrights and owning a copy is much more of an issue for software and music. It is also relatively new because high-quality almost-free copying hasn't been available to the masses for that long.
It seems like the jury decided that MS stole the guy's idea and was determined to find against MS no matter what the law said. The judge refused to allow it.
I can't find a price for the configuration with a bunch of atom processors, so it is hard to say whether it is an economical way to create a certain amount of processing power. I also wouldn't have the numbers to put a price on the possible savings due to lower electricity and cooling requirements. None of this matters unless you are running something that can use that many processors efficiently.
Seriously, what is the chance that someone with no money will get Congress to change copyright law purely to benefit the public? You say they have been campaigning for years, to which I say they could campaign for a thousand years without getting anywhere. Copyright law is controlled by the behemoths. In this case, the behemoth is concerned with something other than restricting the public access for a change.
I am perfectly happy with Gutenburg rather than Google getting these rights. But I know it would never happen.