My thoughts exactly... since these critters were apparently hunted into extinction by early humans, I can only surmise that they must have been really good eatin'!
There are, apparently, people alive today who've eaten mammoth. One of them described the experience as "like eating meat that's been in the freezer for too long," although there could be a reason for this...
It's far from certain that mammoth died out simply from climate change.
No, another theory is that they had very low genetic diversity (as suggested by surviving DNA fragments) and hence very susceptible to any kind of change, whether it was climate, conditions varying due to changes in competitor species, or disease.
an LLC (or full corporation, since you're going to be on the board) does not protect you in the way you seem to think it does. As a principal in a corporation, its critical to have an umbrella policy because you *are* liable for the actions of the company. The primary thing you're not liable for is financial losses. You're not safe from criminal or civil actions.
I accept that your jurisdiction may have different rules to mine, but I do know quite a bit about company law, and I know that in most jurisdictions, in most cases[1], you are _not_ liable as a shareholder or director for any civil actions that may be taken against the company. That's the entire point of limited liability; it encourages entrepreneurs to take risks with the knowledge that they will not be held financially liable for them. Criminal actions are, of course, an entirely different matter, and if patent infringement were a criminal issue this would be worth worrying about. It isn't.
[1] See, generally, "piercing the corporate veil" -- it isn't an easy process for a litigant to succeed at, and they'll basically need to show that the company has been mismanaged in some fashion.
Real name. It means I'm one of only two people I know who is mentioned in wikipedia. Of course, I'm unlikely to top the amusement value of the other.:)
Probably the best thing you can do is assign your copyright to an organization that keeps your identity private. Maybe FSF and some of the incorporated Open Source projects would do this.
And if they won't, it's simple enough to set up your own corporation. If you want good anonymity, offshore companies are good but a little on the pricey side (anyone with a valid case for legal action against you can get your identity, but they'll have to argue their case in a court in the country you registered in, which is probably neither cheap nor easy). Simple obfuscation of your identity can be achieved with a much cheaper standard company (anyone can get your identity, but they'll have to pay to get it).
> As a pure unpaid contributor of source code you have no patent liability.
Unfortunately, that's not true. Actually, as an unpaid, noncommercial USER of a software product, you CAN have patent liability.
Patents extend to the right to control all development and use of derivative technologies whether commercially or noncommercially.
Yes and no. Yes, patents cover all use. Yes, patents cover commercial development. No, in most circumstances, non-commercial development is probably not a patent infringing activity: there's an exclusion in what protection a patent provides for its holder so that it does not cover non-commercial research use, which non-commercial development arguably comes under. See here for a brief summary. You'd have to argue that your OSS development work is done for reasons of personal amusement or curiosity, but I think this is actually true for most of us.
Actually, no, if you're looking for personal liability protection, buy a personal liability insurance policy.
$2m in liability coverage is a couple hundred dollars a year. If you have any assets (and you'd have to in order to be concerned about liability), its an absolute no-brainer to buy an umbrella policy.
People are sue-happy these days.
And the cost of a lost patent-infringement suit could easily top $2M. You should be looking for at least $10M cover, if you ask me.
Or, as the GP suggests, simply use a limited liability corporation, which will cost substantially less. You can form a company which will cost about $150 in the first year and about $50 per annum thereafter, and if it isn't trading commercially you won't need to hire an accountant etc (just read a few books on how to look after it). If anybody is stupid enough to sue it you just file paperwork to fold the business. Sure, they'll end up owning copyright to your work, but as you've probably GPL'd it, that's not particularly helpful for them...
Just because somebody sends you an invoice doesn't mean that you have to pay it.
That's true. But if somebody says, "I'll do this, but I'll charge you for it," and you then tell them to do it, then you do have to pay for it. In this case "we'll have to invoice you for it" can be read the same as "we'll charge you for it."
If the site owner told Toyota's lawyers to go ahead and provide the list, that would basically form a contract for a service of identifying Toyoya's pictures.
The correct response to this is, "well, all right, I'm not going to pay you for that list, but according to the DMCA I'm not required to remove anything unless you identify it specifically, so I won't be taking anything down unless you provide it anyway."
They (Toyota) should know full well that if they actually take legal action to collect on these invoices, that they would be thrown out of court.
Nope. If the site owner continues to demand the list after being told they'll be charged for it, then the charge is legally valid.
At the same time, who "owns the copyright" on a picture of a Lexis or other vehicle is something that can be debated in court. Yes, the photographer who made the image in the first place has rights, as does the property owner (if it wasn't in a "public" place). The physical structure of the vehicle itself can also be considered "a work of art"... which is what I guess Toyota is trying to do here. So yeah, they do have a slight point even if Toyota didn't physically take the photo.
No, if you actually look at the site, they have a load of official Toyota publicity shots up there. I don't think this has anything to do with Toyota thinking they have rights over any photo of their cars.
The DCMA has nothing to do with trademarks [...] This is why the whole concept of IP law is a fraud. All types of IP have their own rules
I'll let you into a secret. Trademarks aren't really IP law. The lawyers want you to think they are because it helps them to sell their service to trademark holders, but trademarks are consumer protection law. They exist to stop people selling fake products with somebody else's name and confusing you into buying them.
Yep. I just had a look, too. I randomly clicked five of the images on the first page, and I'd say four of them were almost certainly official toyota publicity shots: they are professional quality shots, featuring cars in pristine condition, in some cases concept cars that haven't been made available to the general public, and none of the cars in them are carrying licence plates. They look like brochure pictures.
The only one that doesn't look like an official toyota pic is the one in the top left left corner, which appears to have been produced by a bodykit manufacturer to sell their stuff.
So the story hear: toyota's lawyers are too lazy to file a proper DMCA notice. Big deal.
Can I just ask, what the hell does logic (generally held to have been invented by the ancient greeks c. 350BC, although as usual the chinese have a claim as well, and developed over history with contributions made largely by islamic philosophers) have to do with Christianity?
"for instance, persecuting someone because of their sexual orientation--that is bigotry."
So are you saying it's bigotted to discriminate against pedophiles, what about against incest? Technically these are orientations that 'can't be changed'?
Yes, and I'd say a lot of the reactions people have to paedophiles are clearly in the realm of bigotry. These people have a mental illness and need our help. A lynch mob out for blood doesn't get us anywhere, yet 99% of the time when somebody is believed to be a paedophile that's what you end up with.
Nevertheless, the sounds aren't as frightening when you install your system onto a fault tolerant RAID array
Don't trust it to work. I've had a RAID0 array fail catastrophically. Turned out the disks I had acquired for it had a firmware bug which caused both to fail within hours of each other.
So it would follow that a description of how Harry Potter looked in the book would be non-copyrightable. Once she set it down as a fact, it lost it's copyright protections.
(1) Facts, as you observe, cannot be copyrighted. However, it is generally held that a particular expression of facts (e.g. the words used to relate them to somebody) may be copyrightable.
(2) Statements that are made in a work of fiction are generally held to be, you know, fiction. Not fact.
(3) Following your logic to its extreme, nothing can be copyrighted. You have to draw the line somewhere.
While wealth might not be a factor in whether there's an infringement or not, wealth is relevant to the theory of copyright law. Copyright doesn't exist to make people lots of money. It exists to provide incentive for people to create things they otherwise wouldn't have created.
In terms of economics, paying a dollar more than is required to provide that incentive, or providing a day more copyright, is inefficient. If the author would have created it without that extra little bit, then that extra little bit is a waste. Society is overpaying for creativity.
Yes and no. It's worth considering that Rowling's windfall in terms of the Potter royalties has effects on other people too. There are plenty of people who are inspired to write because of one or two high earners. It raises the profile of writing as an art form and generally encourages more people to try it.
Besides, the cost to society hasn't been any higher for Harry Potter than it was for, say, Robin Hobb's Farseer books (to pick an example from my desk). The cost in both cases was granting the author a monopoly over their work for a fixed period of time. What that author manages to achieve with the monopoly is not society's issue.
A sequel book, such as "Harry Potter and the Endless Revenue Stream" would be a derivative work
There's an interesting argument that it shouldn't be considered so, essentially because it generally wouldn't copy anything that was substantial enough to warrant copyright protection. Alluding to something isn't a protected right under copyright, so unless a sequel goes through lots of repetitions of things that have happened in previous books, whether there is really any logical reason for it to be protected by copyright is an interesting question.
I could write, if I wanted, an entire Harry Potter sequel that didn't copy more than the occasional word from any of the official books. It wouldn't copy events (although it would be written such that it didn't contradict any) nor would it copy character histories (although I'd certainly _know_ and _be influenced by_ those histories while writing the book). In fact, if a lawyer were asked, it would be very hard for him to pin down anything I'd copied other than character names (and, generally speaking, such things have been held in the past to be not subject to copyright at all) and one-or-two invented words (again, not generally held as being copyrightable, at least not as far as I grok copyright law).
What I would be doing, though, would be massive and willful trademark infringement, along with a fair helping of unjust enrichment.
Then could you explain how exactly did comp.lang.c managed to receive today, a sunday of all days, until now no less than 78 posts, all regarding subjects like call by reference, duff's device and shared pointes? Could you explain how a medium that "people are no longer answering questions on" happens to get over 700 posts a week discussing a single programming language alone?
When I used to read comp.lang.c back in the 90s, I reckon we'd see more like 700 posts per day. The traffic has dropped off remarkably. Yeah, discussion is still happening, but it isn't anything like it was back then.
[Python]'s not quite fast enough to write an operating system in (although there was an effort called Unununium which tried but never took off)
Unununium's kernel was, I believe, written in C. The user interface, userspace applications and drivers would have all been written in Python.
Unununium didn't take off because its developers had no clue about OS design. They apparently spent most of their time boasting about how their operating system didn't have a kernel (it did; its kernel was a slightly modified Python interpreter[1]) and how it was such an innovative design (when all it did was replicate some of the achievements of traditional language-based systems that were popular in the academic research community in the 70s and early 80s, cf. Smalltalk-80, which although now generally considered just as a language was originally considered by its developers and users as an operating system, or the earlier CMU Hydra system which was built around similar principles), and not enough time actually writing the damned thing.
[1]: The issue seems to be one of understanding what a kernel is. The unununium developers seemed to believe the defining factor of a kernel is that it provides inter-process protection by allocating different memory spaces to the different processes. Under this view, many modern OSs don't have kernels, including Singularity and JX. Also, some older ones, including 16-bit Windows and Amiga.
Slashdot Mirror
It's when the dead kittens start turning up scattered around the lab that they should start worrying.
Yippee - I never did get my damn pony
OMG! Mammoths!
That's a strange coincidence they're talking about this JP-like experiment a few weeks after Michael Crichton's death. Posthumous humour?
People have been talking about this for years. It's just now starting to become plausible, is why its hitting front pages.
The Japanese, for some reason, are particularly keen.
My thoughts exactly... since these critters were apparently hunted into extinction by early humans, I can only surmise that they must have been really good eatin'!
There are, apparently, people alive today who've eaten mammoth. One of them described the experience as "like eating meat that's been in the freezer for too long," although there could be a reason for this...
It's far from certain that mammoth died out simply from climate change.
No, another theory is that they had very low genetic diversity (as suggested by surviving DNA fragments) and hence very susceptible to any kind of change, whether it was climate, conditions varying due to changes in competitor species, or disease.
an LLC (or full corporation, since you're going to be on the board) does not protect you in the way you seem to think it does. As a principal in a corporation, its critical to have an umbrella policy because you *are* liable for the actions of the company. The primary thing you're not liable for is financial losses. You're not safe from criminal or civil actions.
I accept that your jurisdiction may have different rules to mine, but I do know quite a bit about company law, and I know that in most jurisdictions, in most cases[1], you are _not_ liable as a shareholder or director for any civil actions that may be taken against the company. That's the entire point of limited liability; it encourages entrepreneurs to take risks with the knowledge that they will not be held financially liable for them. Criminal actions are, of course, an entirely different matter, and if patent infringement were a criminal issue this would be worth worrying about. It isn't.
[1] See, generally, "piercing the corporate veil" -- it isn't an easy process for a litigant to succeed at, and they'll basically need to show that the company has been mismanaged in some fashion.
IANAL; this is not legal advice; YMMV; etc.
Real name. It means I'm one of only two people I know who is mentioned in wikipedia. Of course, I'm unlikely to top the amusement value of the other. :)
Probably the best thing you can do is assign your copyright to an organization that keeps your identity private. Maybe FSF and some of the incorporated Open Source projects would do this.
And if they won't, it's simple enough to set up your own corporation. If you want good anonymity, offshore companies are good but a little on the pricey side (anyone with a valid case for legal action against you can get your identity, but they'll have to argue their case in a court in the country you registered in, which is probably neither cheap nor easy). Simple obfuscation of your identity can be achieved with a much cheaper standard company (anyone can get your identity, but they'll have to pay to get it).
> As a pure unpaid contributor of source code you have no patent liability.
Unfortunately, that's not true. Actually, as an unpaid, noncommercial USER of a software product, you CAN have patent liability.
Patents extend to the right to control all development and use of derivative technologies whether commercially or noncommercially.
Yes and no. Yes, patents cover all use. Yes, patents cover commercial development. No, in most circumstances, non-commercial development is probably not a patent infringing activity: there's an exclusion in what protection a patent provides for its holder so that it does not cover non-commercial research use, which non-commercial development arguably comes under. See here for a brief summary. You'd have to argue that your OSS development work is done for reasons of personal amusement or curiosity, but I think this is actually true for most of us.
IANAL, this is not legal advice, etc.
Actually, no, if you're looking for personal liability protection, buy a personal liability insurance policy.
$2m in liability coverage is a couple hundred dollars a year. If you have any assets (and you'd have to in order to be concerned about liability), its an absolute no-brainer to buy an umbrella policy.
People are sue-happy these days.
And the cost of a lost patent-infringement suit could easily top $2M. You should be looking for at least $10M cover, if you ask me.
Or, as the GP suggests, simply use a limited liability corporation, which will cost substantially less. You can form a company which will cost about $150 in the first year and about $50 per annum thereafter, and if it isn't trading commercially you won't need to hire an accountant etc (just read a few books on how to look after it). If anybody is stupid enough to sue it you just file paperwork to fold the business. Sure, they'll end up owning copyright to your work, but as you've probably GPL'd it, that's not particularly helpful for them...
Just because somebody sends you an invoice doesn't mean that you have to pay it.
That's true. But if somebody says, "I'll do this, but I'll charge you for it," and you then tell them to do it, then you do have to pay for it. In this case "we'll have to invoice you for it" can be read the same as "we'll charge you for it."
If the site owner told Toyota's lawyers to go ahead and provide the list, that would basically form a contract for a service of identifying Toyoya's pictures.
The correct response to this is, "well, all right, I'm not going to pay you for that list, but according to the DMCA I'm not required to remove anything unless you identify it specifically, so I won't be taking anything down unless you provide it anyway."
They (Toyota) should know full well that if they actually take legal action to collect on these invoices, that they would be thrown out of court.
Nope. If the site owner continues to demand the list after being told they'll be charged for it, then the charge is legally valid.
At the same time, who "owns the copyright" on a picture of a Lexis or other vehicle is something that can be debated in court. Yes, the photographer who made the image in the first place has rights, as does the property owner (if it wasn't in a "public" place). The physical structure of the vehicle itself can also be considered "a work of art"... which is what I guess Toyota is trying to do here. So yeah, they do have a slight point even if Toyota didn't physically take the photo.
No, if you actually look at the site, they have a load of official Toyota publicity shots up there. I don't think this has anything to do with Toyota thinking they have rights over any photo of their cars.
The DCMA has nothing to do with trademarks [...] This is why the whole concept of IP law is a fraud. All types of IP have their own rules
I'll let you into a secret. Trademarks aren't really IP law. The lawyers want you to think they are because it helps them to sell their service to trademark holders, but trademarks are consumer protection law. They exist to stop people selling fake products with somebody else's name and confusing you into buying them.
Yep. I just had a look, too. I randomly clicked five of the images on the first page, and I'd say four of them were almost certainly official toyota publicity shots: they are professional quality shots, featuring cars in pristine condition, in some cases concept cars that haven't been made available to the general public, and none of the cars in them are carrying licence plates. They look like brochure pictures.
The only one that doesn't look like an official toyota pic is the one in the top left left corner, which appears to have been produced by a bodykit manufacturer to sell their stuff.
So the story hear: toyota's lawyers are too lazy to file a proper DMCA notice. Big deal.
Never will you find a more perfect nexus of horrid punnery and sheer nerd-ism.
They exist, if you keep looking.
I'm not going to link, because I don't want to attract trolls.
Can I just ask, what the hell does logic (generally held to have been invented by the ancient greeks c. 350BC, although as usual the chinese have a claim as well, and developed over history with contributions made largely by islamic philosophers) have to do with Christianity?
"for instance, persecuting someone because of their sexual orientation--that is bigotry."
So are you saying it's bigotted to discriminate against pedophiles, what about against incest? Technically these are orientations that 'can't be changed'?
Yes, and I'd say a lot of the reactions people have to paedophiles are clearly in the realm of bigotry. These people have a mental illness and need our help. A lynch mob out for blood doesn't get us anywhere, yet 99% of the time when somebody is believed to be a paedophile that's what you end up with.
If you are looking at increasing your penis size ^W^W^W^W^W^W^W^W^WYou're posting on slashdot so I'm guessing you are male
FTFY.
Nevertheless, the sounds aren't as frightening when you install your system onto a fault tolerant RAID array
Don't trust it to work. I've had a RAID0 array fail catastrophically. Turned out the disks I had acquired for it had a firmware bug which caused both to fail within hours of each other.
So it would follow that a description of how Harry Potter looked in the book would be non-copyrightable. Once she set it down as a fact, it lost it's copyright protections.
(1) Facts, as you observe, cannot be copyrighted. However, it is generally held that a particular expression of facts (e.g. the words used to relate them to somebody) may be copyrightable.
(2) Statements that are made in a work of fiction are generally held to be, you know, fiction. Not fact.
(3) Following your logic to its extreme, nothing can be copyrighted. You have to draw the line somewhere.
While wealth might not be a factor in whether there's an infringement or not, wealth is relevant to the theory of copyright law. Copyright doesn't exist to make people lots of money. It exists to provide incentive for people to create things they otherwise wouldn't have created.
In terms of economics, paying a dollar more than is required to provide that incentive, or providing a day more copyright, is inefficient. If the author would have created it without that extra little bit, then that extra little bit is a waste. Society is overpaying for creativity.
Yes and no. It's worth considering that Rowling's windfall in terms of the Potter royalties has effects on other people too. There are plenty of people who are inspired to write because of one or two high earners. It raises the profile of writing as an art form and generally encourages more people to try it.
Besides, the cost to society hasn't been any higher for Harry Potter than it was for, say, Robin Hobb's Farseer books (to pick an example from my desk). The cost in both cases was granting the author a monopoly over their work for a fixed period of time. What that author manages to achieve with the monopoly is not society's issue.
I wrote:
What I would be doing, though, would be massive and willful trademark infringement, along with a fair helping of unjust enrichment.
And Slashdot's bottom-of-page fortune responded:
You will gain money by an immoral action.
Perhaps this is an omen that I should be moving into the unauthorized Harry Potter book business.
A sequel book, such as "Harry Potter and the Endless Revenue Stream" would be a derivative work
There's an interesting argument that it shouldn't be considered so, essentially because it generally wouldn't copy anything that was substantial enough to warrant copyright protection. Alluding to something isn't a protected right under copyright, so unless a sequel goes through lots of repetitions of things that have happened in previous books, whether there is really any logical reason for it to be protected by copyright is an interesting question.
I could write, if I wanted, an entire Harry Potter sequel that didn't copy more than the occasional word from any of the official books. It wouldn't copy events (although it would be written such that it didn't contradict any) nor would it copy character histories (although I'd certainly _know_ and _be influenced by_ those histories while writing the book). In fact, if a lawyer were asked, it would be very hard for him to pin down anything I'd copied other than character names (and, generally speaking, such things have been held in the past to be not subject to copyright at all) and one-or-two invented words (again, not generally held as being copyrightable, at least not as far as I grok copyright law).
What I would be doing, though, would be massive and willful trademark infringement, along with a fair helping of unjust enrichment.
Then could you explain how exactly did comp.lang.c managed to receive today, a sunday of all days, until now no less than 78 posts, all regarding subjects like call by reference, duff's device and shared pointes? Could you explain how a medium that "people are no longer answering questions on" happens to get over 700 posts a week discussing a single programming language alone?
When I used to read comp.lang.c back in the 90s, I reckon we'd see more like 700 posts per day. The traffic has dropped off remarkably. Yeah, discussion is still happening, but it isn't anything like it was back then.
the most offensive of which put freely-given advice from volunteers behind a paywall.
Turn off javascript and hit the google cache.
[Python]'s not quite fast enough to write an operating system in (although there was an effort called Unununium which tried but never took off)
Unununium's kernel was, I believe, written in C. The user interface, userspace applications and drivers would have all been written in Python.
Unununium didn't take off because its developers had no clue about OS design. They apparently spent most of their time boasting about how their operating system didn't have a kernel (it did; its kernel was a slightly modified Python interpreter[1]) and how it was such an innovative design (when all it did was replicate some of the achievements of traditional language-based systems that were popular in the academic research community in the 70s and early 80s, cf. Smalltalk-80, which although now generally considered just as a language was originally considered by its developers and users as an operating system, or the earlier CMU Hydra system which was built around similar principles), and not enough time actually writing the damned thing.
[1]: The issue seems to be one of understanding what a kernel is. The unununium developers seemed to believe the defining factor of a kernel is that it provides inter-process protection by allocating different memory spaces to the different processes. Under this view, many modern OSs don't have kernels, including Singularity and JX. Also, some older ones, including 16-bit Windows and Amiga.