For software, I think copyrights of 10 years are about right.
The whole original intent of copyright was to promote progress in the arts. Source code to a 50 year old program won't promote anything, other than the appreciation of the painful things one had to go through in yesteryear to write a program, and a certain degree of quaintness.
Regarding the one vendor telling people to stay away from YOUR image, put up a copy on a website, and then taunt them with it. Make them sue you. Your response in Court should be most interesting.:-)
No, not by the copyright act, but the person you are responding to did not say so. To violate a contract is to violate a contract, however, and I think that these things are considered contracts, not merely licenses.
The idea that "use dependency" has anything whatsoever to whether a work is derivative of another is specious in the extreme.
I read the legal summary on that with great interest. Seems like a good argument. Be that as it may, whether that argument and case precedent citation is legitimate or not, one can be certain that a standard-approach plugin isn't a derivative work, because it doesn't make use of the parent at all, and so the argument doesn't matter.
To answer your question, only in the situation in which you really don't want a commercial organization exploiting you. If you don't really care, that's another matter.
php "code" is not run. It is just data that's fed to an interpreter...
This is true of all programs. A binary executable, as you think of it, is merely a bunch of numbers which are then "run". There is no additional argument for "binary" code over code which is interpreted.
If he's taken GPL code and put it in Thesis, game over. It's GPL. Period.
This is a common misconception. It's not true, though. It would be true if you wrote "It's a GPL violation. Period." But not that it's GPL'd.
Thesis is just some theme, but let's pretend that you found some GPL code in Microsoft Office, concluding "it was GPL, period," and then decided to be the user who distributed it without permission. The worst case for you: prison.
Excise this kind of thinking from your head. The GPL is not a court. The only party that can GPL a copyright work is the author/ownership interest, or potentially a court order. The court is very unlikely to order that under any circumstance. So put that out of your mind, too.
I've seen the source code for lots of plugins. Generally, a plugin developer implements a set of functions according to a well-known interface publication which the parent program then searches for and finds. The parent program then calls these functions. The plugin typically calls nothing in the parent program at all. One cannot call this a derivative work, because the pluging doesn't really depend on the parent program at all.
I don't think this is the argument with Word Press, though.
I think plugins get an escape clause because the parent modification is modified in such a way that it calls the plugin, not the other way around. Since the plugin entity doesn't "call" the parent program, one cannot call the plugin a derivative work at all. It's just implementing an interface standard.
There is no such thing as illegal information in the US. You can be held responsible if certain things happen directly because you...
I am sorry. You are incorrect. If one willfully possesses classified information outside of an authorized area, or publishes classified information in the US, one risks a very great deal, and it matters not at all if there is evidence anyone was hurt by the publication. Prison is a very real possibility, and depending on what information is compromised, treason is one of the possible charges, and for which the penalty is death.
There are also other types of illegal information, such as certain bytes in certain orders that constitute, when assembled, an image depicting sexual acts with minors. Mere possession of such information, if shown to be intentional, can result in a decade or more imprisonment in many States.
I understand you were addressing a wholly different point. And I agree with your point. But your statement wasn't true.
Thought about what you said a bit. It may be true that due to my mortgage alone, I have more than 20:1 borrowed than saved. But when I borrowed that money, I spent it. It went to the former home owner. Following the trail a bit more, some portion will go to stocks and bonds eventually, which of course don't count as reserves. Some other portion will come back to the banks as checking, savings, CD's, and so for th.
I read about this some more over the weekend. Apparently there are special rules for things like CD's, where they cannot be withdrawn except on a fixed timeline. Kinda makes sense.
Years back I hired a day laborer to help me with a concrete pad I was having him pour. He knew some broken English. I knew little about pouring concrete.
When I asked him to do the job he said in broken English "Senior, I think..... no. I know, yes I know, I must have a long... how do you say?... woods for these job". He was trying to tell me he needed a long 2x4 or some such to flat-scrape the small pad. Which was of course correct, but I really hadn't thought about it.
Good employee. I hired him again and again over the years. Speaks fluent English, now.
Bad management can be decent management insofar as they have some inkling the people they are working for may be a bit more acquainted with the work they are doing than management is. I have been lucky enough to work in settings where almost all managers are like me. Count my blessings, eh?
Well; I'll admit to using somewhat grandiose language. However, the fact that one checks to make sure results are reproducible is part and parcel of a system that acknowledges that they might not be. I.e., institutionalized suspicion. As it should be.
Interesting way of looking at it. Never thought about it from that perspective. I keep $5K-10K in the "bank," have sizable investments in stocks (which don't count towards reserves), but truthfully have well more than 20:1 in loans from just my mortgage alone.
As an aside, I read about this some more over the weekend. Apparently there are special rules for things like CD's, where they cannot be withdrawn except on a fixed timeline. Kinda makes sense.
Maybe the issue is just that a lot more people borrow money than save it, even at 20:1.
Hmm. Well. If it were 20:1, it would only require $1 of investor to loan $20 to debtors. That would allow 20 debtors per investor, insofar as you could find willing debtors.
Truthfully, I really wish I understood this better! I've looked online before for succinct descriptions of all this, but I think I don't know the right google words.:-)
Peer reviewers don't, in general, try to disprove the thesis.
That may be true, however this is a mistake. Revisit the notion of the Null Hypothesis from Freshman level Inferential Statistics so as to discover why. To wit: the process of science is to pull apart the other scientists theory, attempting to deny its validity. If one fails at it, the theory may just have some validity.
Now, I happen to be aware this doesn't happen as often as it ought. But the more it doesn't, the more a cadre of select individuals push for a suppression of naysayers, the more the process isn't really science.
And yes, I agree: the bleating of the public isn't particularly relevant to science, albeit if a mathematician says he wants to analyze a climatologists math, that climatologist had damn well better play ball. Anything less is blatant attempt to enshrine their position in something more tantamount to religion than science.
As an aside, I worked for several years at the Salk Institute as a data steward and "statistics boy" for a major laboratory there. It is not at all true that a Nobel-nominated scientist has a complete grasp of even the elementary concepts of the correct use of statistics as a tool in their field. While one would hope that the full world-wide practice of climatology is more than subject to close scrutiny of their statistical methods, if a statistician who is not a climatologist wants to review, the community should yield. Whether they feel territorial, threatened, beleaguered or no.
Yeah, I knew you would say that. It's obviously true. Although I've wondered. With a ratio of nearly 1:20 right now, why is it things like mortgages aren't better than 4% right now. To me, this is a puzzle, because I wouldn't think the risks are really that high, considering, and the total return on a dollar only has to be 20%-ish to justify an ROI in an area with even some risk. 20% return should be pretty easy when you loan the dollar out 20 times.
Anyway, I suspect that the Fed would never release the limit. One would hope they are not that dumb. The question is: how dumb are they? I think even 30 would be a dumb number. But who knows?
As I said previously, there are really only two good reasons to keep it cranked in. 1) inflation control, and 2) depositor risk. If #2 is evaporating due to a switch to an electronic currency economy, then #1 is the only thing to worry about. Have you checked CPI figures lately? So for 0.004 so far this year. And the CPI slightly overstates inflation, so there is some chance we've actually deflated some.
I'm with the school of economists that say that means the money supply needs to be expanded when the above is true.
Did you happen to read any of the articles about the Economists recommending the Bank of the United States? I'm with them, too.
(which would give banks the power to essentially print money without limit).
Well. Not quite. They could only create money without limit to the degree people are willing to borrow from them at rates the banks set. A subtle, but important difference.
(And as you know all this, you must also be aware that this is quite similar to the relationship between the Fed and the US itself, where money is created by fiat at times when the US deficit spends).
Anyway, I agree with you that it seems like a strangely foolhardy thing to do.
I can give some credence to the notion, possibility, that looser ratios may tend to work more and more as we transition to a fully electronic currency economy. Even saying this, I wonder if setting no legislative limit on the Fed isn't throwing caution to the winds.
Slashdot Mirror
For software, I think copyrights of 10 years are about right.
The whole original intent of copyright was to promote progress in the arts. Source code to a 50 year old program won't promote anything, other than the appreciation of the painful things one had to go through in yesteryear to write a program, and a certain degree of quaintness.
goats.cx would have been more interesting. :-)
Regarding the one vendor telling people to stay away from YOUR image, put up a copy on a website, and then taunt them with it. Make them sue you. Your response in Court should be most interesting. :-)
it is likely that a click through EULA isn't worth the paper it's written on.
Not so. EULA's have been found to be binding. :-(
C//
Common Law, in particular the part of our basis in legal tradition where one cannot violate a contract willy nilly.
No, not by the copyright act, but the person you are responding to did not say so. To violate a contract is to violate a contract, however, and I think that these things are considered contracts, not merely licenses.
C//
The idea that "use dependency" has anything whatsoever to whether a work is derivative of another is specious in the extreme.
I read the legal summary on that with great interest. Seems like a good argument. Be that as it may, whether that argument and case precedent citation is legitimate or not, one can be certain that a standard-approach plugin isn't a derivative work, because it doesn't make use of the parent at all, and so the argument doesn't matter.
C//
To answer your question, only in the situation in which you really don't want a commercial organization exploiting you. If you don't really care, that's another matter.
C//
php "code" is not run. It is just data that's fed to an interpreter...
This is true of all programs. A binary executable, as you think of it, is merely a bunch of numbers which are then "run". There is no additional argument for "binary" code over code which is interpreted.
C//
If he's taken GPL code and put it in Thesis, game over. It's GPL. Period.
This is a common misconception. It's not true, though. It would be true if you wrote "It's a GPL violation. Period." But not that it's GPL'd.
Thesis is just some theme, but let's pretend that you found some GPL code in Microsoft Office, concluding "it was GPL, period," and then decided to be the user who distributed it without permission. The worst case for you: prison.
Excise this kind of thinking from your head. The GPL is not a court. The only party that can GPL a copyright work is the author/ownership interest, or potentially a court order. The court is very unlikely to order that under any circumstance. So put that out of your mind, too.
C//
I've seen the source code for lots of plugins. Generally, a plugin developer implements a set of functions according to a well-known interface publication which the parent program then searches for and finds. The parent program then calls these functions. The plugin typically calls nothing in the parent program at all. One cannot call this a derivative work, because the pluging doesn't really depend on the parent program at all.
I don't think this is the argument with Word Press, though.
C//
The GPL is the better open source license for the creator, I would say, but other licenses like BSD are better for those using the work.
C//
I think plugins get an escape clause because the parent modification is modified in such a way that it calls the plugin, not the other way around. Since the plugin entity doesn't "call" the parent program, one cannot call the plugin a derivative work at all. It's just implementing an interface standard.
C//
Hmmmm? Well I didn't RTFA. But the GPL applies to derivative works, which it does not define at all. It leaves that to the law.
So a plugin, extension or other such could quite easily be confusing as to whether or not the GPL applies to it. The GPL doesn't really itself say.
C//
There is no such thing as illegal information in the US. You can be held responsible if certain things happen directly because you...
I am sorry. You are incorrect. If one willfully possesses classified information outside of an authorized area, or publishes classified information in the US, one risks a very great deal, and it matters not at all if there is evidence anyone was hurt by the publication. Prison is a very real possibility, and depending on what information is compromised, treason is one of the possible charges, and for which the penalty is death.
There are also other types of illegal information, such as certain bytes in certain orders that constitute, when assembled, an image depicting sexual acts with minors. Mere possession of such information, if shown to be intentional, can result in a decade or more imprisonment in many States.
I understand you were addressing a wholly different point. And I agree with your point. But your statement wasn't true.
C//
I'm more interested in what claimed legal authority they are using to do this.
I question that they hold the authority.
C//
This will, unfortunately, cost far more than the laptop is worth. Most attorneys charge in the neighborhood of $400/hr.
Thought about what you said a bit. It may be true that due to my mortgage alone, I have more than 20:1 borrowed than saved. But when I borrowed that money, I spent it. It went to the former home owner. Following the trail a bit more, some portion will go to stocks and bonds eventually, which of course don't count as reserves. Some other portion will come back to the banks as checking, savings, CD's, and so for th.
I read about this some more over the weekend. Apparently there are special rules for things like CD's, where they cannot be withdrawn except on a fixed timeline. Kinda makes sense.
Article here:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reserve_requirement [wikipedia.org]
C//
Years back I hired a day laborer to help me with a concrete pad I was having him pour. He knew some broken English. I knew little about pouring concrete.
When I asked him to do the job he said in broken English "Senior, I think..... no. I know, yes I know, I must have a long... how do you say?... woods for these job". He was trying to tell me he needed a long 2x4 or some such to flat-scrape the small pad. Which was of course correct, but I really hadn't thought about it.
Good employee. I hired him again and again over the years. Speaks fluent English, now.
Bad management can be decent management insofar as they have some inkling the people they are working for may be a bit more acquainted with the work they are doing than management is. I have been lucky enough to work in settings where almost all managers are like me. Count my blessings, eh?
Joe.
Well; I'll admit to using somewhat grandiose language. However, the fact that one checks to make sure results are reproducible is part and parcel of a system that acknowledges that they might not be. I.e., institutionalized suspicion. As it should be.
C//
Interesting way of looking at it. Never thought about it from that perspective. I keep $5K-10K in the "bank," have sizable investments in stocks (which don't count towards reserves), but truthfully have well more than 20:1 in loans from just my mortgage alone.
As an aside, I read about this some more over the weekend. Apparently there are special rules for things like CD's, where they cannot be withdrawn except on a fixed timeline. Kinda makes sense.
Article here:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reserve_requirement
C//
Maybe the issue is just that a lot more people borrow money than save it, even at 20:1.
Hmm. Well. If it were 20:1, it would only require $1 of investor to loan $20 to debtors. That would allow 20 debtors per investor, insofar as you could find willing debtors.
Truthfully, I really wish I understood this better! I've looked online before for succinct descriptions of all this, but I think I don't know the right google words. :-)
Peer reviewers don't, in general, try to disprove the thesis.
That may be true, however this is a mistake. Revisit the notion of the Null Hypothesis from Freshman level Inferential Statistics so as to discover why. To wit: the process of science is to pull apart the other scientists theory, attempting to deny its validity. If one fails at it, the theory may just have some validity.
Now, I happen to be aware this doesn't happen as often as it ought. But the more it doesn't, the more a cadre of select individuals push for a suppression of naysayers, the more the process isn't really science.
And yes, I agree: the bleating of the public isn't particularly relevant to science, albeit if a mathematician says he wants to analyze a climatologists math, that climatologist had damn well better play ball. Anything less is blatant attempt to enshrine their position in something more tantamount to religion than science.
As an aside, I worked for several years at the Salk Institute as a data steward and "statistics boy" for a major laboratory there. It is not at all true that a Nobel-nominated scientist has a complete grasp of even the elementary concepts of the correct use of statistics as a tool in their field. While one would hope that the full world-wide practice of climatology is more than subject to close scrutiny of their statistical methods, if a statistician who is not a climatologist wants to review, the community should yield. Whether they feel territorial, threatened, beleaguered or no.
C//
Yeah, I knew you would say that. It's obviously true. Although I've wondered. With a ratio of nearly 1:20 right now, why is it things like mortgages aren't better than 4% right now. To me, this is a puzzle, because I wouldn't think the risks are really that high, considering, and the total return on a dollar only has to be 20%-ish to justify an ROI in an area with even some risk. 20% return should be pretty easy when you loan the dollar out 20 times.
Anyway, I suspect that the Fed would never release the limit. One would hope they are not that dumb. The question is: how dumb are they? I think even 30 would be a dumb number. But who knows?
As I said previously, there are really only two good reasons to keep it cranked in. 1) inflation control, and 2) depositor risk. If #2 is evaporating due to a switch to an electronic currency economy, then #1 is the only thing to worry about. Have you checked CPI figures lately? So for 0.004 so far this year. And the CPI slightly overstates inflation, so there is some chance we've actually deflated some.
I'm with the school of economists that say that means the money supply needs to be expanded when the above is true.
Did you happen to read any of the articles about the Economists recommending the Bank of the United States? I'm with them, too.
C//
(which would give banks the power to essentially print money without limit).
Well. Not quite. They could only create money without limit to the degree people are willing to borrow from them at rates the banks set. A subtle, but important difference.
(And as you know all this, you must also be aware that this is quite similar to the relationship between the Fed and the US itself, where money is created by fiat at times when the US deficit spends).
Anyway, I agree with you that it seems like a strangely foolhardy thing to do.
I can give some credence to the notion, possibility, that looser ratios may tend to work more and more as we transition to a fully electronic currency economy. Even saying this, I wonder if setting no legislative limit on the Fed isn't throwing caution to the winds.
C//