Please read my reply in context. You are correct for the most past: any author could write such a book without infringing copyright. Providing the characters and/or the setting were not substantially similar to those of Rowling's works.
So writing a book containing a description that is in all but name Harry Potter would almost certainly be infringing; the same goes for a setting that is Hogwarts in all but name(s).
However, if you took the concept of a boy wizard (most likely without a special scar caused by a mortal enemy) going to a magical school, and developed your own descriptions and story that didn't mimic those of Hogwarts and the events encountered by Harry, then you have no problem.
As seen from fan fiction, there is a broad grey area. It seems more acceptable to reuse setting than to reuse characters, for example, a lot of fan fiction in the Star Wars universe reuses elements of the setting but revolves around characters that weren't in the movies or had insignificant parts. In a similar way, I doubt that a book focusing on one of the other schools of wizardry that JKR mentions in passing would be an infringing work, despite it being able to draw substantially on the "mythology" (for lack of a better word) that she has created.
Very interesting. Sadly I can find no information on a translation of Griezelstate, and Google can only pinpoint four pages containing any information on similarities between the novels / series.
If these works are as similiar as you say they are, then maybe there has been an infringement of copyright. Or maybe not. The idea of evil adoptive parents is standard in children's literature. There are numerous books dealing with child magicians (A Wizard of Earthsea, Magician), dangerous woods are part of most folklore (and probably predate Tolkien in fiction), as misdirection is a common element of mystery stories.
So has JKR created a new work, or merely retold the story as presented in Griezelstate? Did she use the characters, setting or plot, by any other name or slight modification, where such elements are not common in their genre? If so, then I can only wonder that there has not already been a question raised over the copyright issue.
As fan fiction sites will tell you: fan fiction is necessarily a derivative work. Whether it is an infringing derivative work depends on its closeness to the original. Using any of the core characters or elements of the setting that make the original distinctive are likely to be infringing. Extending the setting or exploring a character largely ignored by the author (and hence not central to the author's story) is likely to be non-infringing.
Taking a single, recognisable character and putting him/her into a completely different story, even with a different name, is also likely to be infringing. But taking a character concept (a child wizard who goes away to learn at a magical school) and developing it into a distinct character with a unique identity/personality, and in a (sufficiently) different environment, would likely not be infringing.
I'll begin with the obligatory IANAL... but I am studying Copyright law, amongst others. In the US, UK, Australia and South Africa, you are, quite simply, wrong.
This site covers the question of fan fiction and what constitutes a derived work, and in other places on the web you will find lovely articles on Fan Fiction and the Copyright Dilemma.
But don't take my word for it. Try this homework assignment: write a story about a boy who was bitten by a mutant spider and gained superpowers (call him "SpiderBoy", since "SpiderMan" would violate an existing TRADEMARK) and describe his exploits in his red and blue web-printed bodysuit. Advance warning: you may receive a letter something like this (pay special attention to the Q/A "What are the major elements of FanFic")
Once you're finished, you may want to visit your doctor and get your colon disconnected from the back of your throat.
Do you think JK Rowling should be able to write a Harry Potter novel, using in her favor the huge success of all the stories that came before that talk about magic, witchcraft, good, evil, etc., to boost the acceptability and profit potential of her derivative? Well?
"Specific expressions of ideas". Get it? Magic, witchcraft, good and evil are concepts. A boy wizard with a lightning scar on his forehead who attends a school hidden in modern-day England where it can't be seen by muggles is not a general concept. This are very specific expressions of general concepts.
If JK Rowling is concerned about that possibility, then she has a means of dealing with it: it's called a trademark.
Wrong. A trademark could protect the name "Harry Potter" for use in a particular context for the purposes of carry out trade. A trademark does NOT protect her against another author writing a story about a boy wizard with a lightning scar on his forehead who attends a school hidden in modern-day England where it can't be seen by muggles, called John Miles. And unless she trademarks every character and place name in her books, it doesn't stop another author from writing a story about Sirius Black and his escapades at Hogwarts.
Use the right tool for the job.
Copyright is the right tool. You just don't understand it.
And remember the entire reason for copyright in the U.S.: "to promote progress in the sciences and useful arts". Not to make the originators of the works a boatload of money. Not to confer status. To make the world a better place.
Economics 101: We (as in the "Western world") live in a market economy. The premise of this system is that society has at its disposal resources, and each individual must use the resources at his/her disposal to obtain more resources in order to survive, and possibly to prosper. This usually entails exchanging labour for cash, and cash for food, clothing, housing, etc.
The profit motive is thus core to the functioning of a market economy, and a free democratic society. Like it or not. Every government intervention in a market economy is socialistic, intended to restrict the otherwise free ability to trade and profit for some (usually good) reason. For example, unjust enrichment (profit at the expense of another) is outlawed, unfair competition (which has no meaning in a true free market) is defined, consumers are protected by standards of products and behaviour, and so on.
The aim of copyright is to promote progress in sciences and arts. The mechanism through which most countries have elected to achieve this is economic: a protected monolopy over a work, so that a potential creator is given an economic incentive of being able to be the exclusive benefactor of that work for a period of time. In this way there is an incentive to create works that will, eventually, fall into the public domain.
Now, interpreting copyright the way it apparently has been may accomplish that, but I doubt it, considering all of the good stories (as an example) that certainly haven't been published because of this particular interpretation of copyright.
As it happens, I am strongly in favour of reduced copyright durations, especially for derivative works, for precisely the reasons you have voiced, but in conjunction with my knowledge and understanding of why you CAN'T make derivatives as you would like to.
But, as with everything, there needs to be balance. If derivatives were freely allowed, the new Harry Potter book would almost certainly not be going to China, as the Harry Potter works received a VERY bad name there after a very poor (and sordid) derivative was illegally published. That could deprive not only JKR of income, but Chinese people of very good literature.
At the other end of the spectrum, I am frustrated at the lack of ava
That's for the courts to answer. They will consider a range of issues including prior art (yes, even for Copyright) and substantial similarity. There are many more issues than Copyright to consider though.
what's to stop Microsoft from patenting a GUI in which the main menu can be accessed with a button containing the company's logo...
Not much. Patents are different to Copyright. Can MS patent this? Maybe, I don't know. Adobe got patents on their GUI elements, but they could have (at some point) been considered innovative. Then again, so could the taskbar.
I believe that yes, you can't copy a GUI bit for bit, but there has got to be some leeway allowed.
Certainly. In the end it comes down to cold cash. If you can't prove damage, you don't have a basis for delict, and you can't hold someone liable for patent, design or copyright infringement, or unfair competition.
So you have to ask yourself: is your interface using elements of another interface, either by intentionally copying the look and feel, or just because "it was a good idea"? Are those elements a novel or distinguishing feature, or are they recognised as standard practice in a UI? As a result of using these elements are you enriching yourself, and/or causing damage to the owner of the copyright in the other product? If "and" in the previous question, this may be unjust enrichment; otherwise it may be delictual liability. Is there copyright over the "original" work? Is there a patent or design reservation covering the elements in question? Are your products in competition (it is difficult to establish damage if they aren't)? And specifically, did you use the elements in order to gain a competitive edge, remove a competitive edge that the original product had over your's, or to make your product confusingly similar to the competition (all of which could be unfair competitive practice).
In short, there are numerous issues to be considered; Copyright is just one, and potentially the least powerful. Copyright covers the specific expression of an idea, and its derivatives. This is generally easy to determine with literary works, but very difficult with software, especially user interfaces. I would think that the notion of novelty will be considered: a thousand UIs designed in accordance with a HCI 101 textbook won't infringe on each other, because there is nothing to distinguish them from the general concept. A brand new UI idiom (if I could think of one I wouldn't tell you;p ) may, on the other hand, be worthy of copyright on its own.
Right now as I sit here with Opera7 and IE6 opened, I notice that each has the sequence of buttons: back, forward, refresh, home in the same order. Is that a potential breech of copyright, though the buttons look nothing like each other?
I am not a judge, but I would take into account factors like being able to redefine the toolbar(s), allowing you to present the buttons in whatever order is appropriate. The HTTP and HTML specifications in themselves and when read with commentary on their creation imply certain functionality, such as access to your hypertext traversal history (back, forward, history), and the need for caching and a mechanism to bypass caching (refresh). Also one would need to consider that a web browser's primary functionality is to display web pages, and there are recognised idioms for giving access to supporting functionality (menus and toolbars, and a status bar).
But to call something a "derivative work" simply because it makes use of some of the characters and ideas within someone else's work is sheer lunacy.
Put another way: I should be able to write a brand spanking new novel set in the Star Wars universe and involving some of the characters within it, without that novel being declared a "derivative work" and thus a violation of copyright. Why? Because I didn't copy anything except ideas.
Really? So you should be able to write a Harry Potter novel, using in your favour the huge success of JK Rowling's work to boost the acceptability and profit potential of your derivative? Do you really think JKR should have to suffer a loss of sales when someone reads your miserable derivative and decides that they don't really like Harry Potter?
So let's start with this: you have a completely wrong notion of what Copyright is intended to protect. Is is specifically intended to protect ideas, not a particular physical object in which they are captured. It is specifically intended to prevent anyone from copying your ideas so closely that they are confusingly similar to or even indistinguishable from the original work. It is specifically intended to protect the intellectual creations of a person from use (without permission) by any third party.
A character and a setting are VERY specific intellectual property or expressions. Although the fantasy and science fiction genres are HUGE, nearly every renowned work has immediately recognisable and distinguishable characters and settings. Middle Earth, Dune, Narnia, the Nautilus, Jedi, Discworld, Gandalf, Vimes, Paul Atreides - what makes you think that you can merely take the VAST amount of "development time" these authors spent on their creations and use it in a novel of your own?
You can prattle on about "should" and "shouldn't" all you like, but this IS the state of Copyright, this IS how it works, and in my not particularly humble opinion you are not only WRONG but a leech that doesn't understand the true source of value or just wants to sit on your arse and have society give you everything you deserve for being such a magnificent gift to this planet.
Consumers also want more Harry Potter, but that doesn't give authors (other than JKR) the right to use the character, setting or plot from the existing novels.
You have to remember that Copyright covers the original work as well as derivatives. In the case of computer software, the concept of a "derivative" has not been tested. There has been no need to do so in the US because of the availability of patents (e.g. Adobe has patented elements of their GUI). Other legal systems may allow patent or design laws to cover this issue.
In this particular case, Copyright isn't the issue being discussed, although it does come into it for other reasons. The seller has elected not to exercise his rights to redistribution (as Copyright owner) unless the buyer enters into a contract. In other words, it is law of contract that is in effect here.
The "legal opinion" stated in the article is, IMHO, fearmongering. Copyright law does not specifically reserve the right of reverse engineering, and there is no reason that such a limitation cannot be added by contract. On the other hand Copyright law does explicitly permit fair use. So to deny fair use in a contract would be at odds with a law, and most legal systems will find the contract or at least that provision invalid.
Back to the issue of derivative works. If the characters and setting of a novel are protected (in and of themselves) by Copyright, does it stand to reason that core elements of software bear the same protection? If not, why not? Any end user will tell you that a usable interfaces makes the difference between bad software and good software, even when the same functionality is present.
To be more precise, Copyright applies to a specific expression of an idea, not to an actual idea. An oft-cited example is "PacMan". Technically, almost every PacMan clone out there is an infringement of Copyright because they employ the same characters and gameplay. The general concept of a character running around eating dots, however, is not subject to Copyright. The test for copyright infringement is subjective and relies on establishing "substantial similarity" between the works.
So let's get down to business. Archive programs are a dime a dozen. They range from completely free to vastly expensive. Most of them have the same functionality: zip, tar, gz support; view, create, test and extract archives; vary the compression levels; etc. Some have minor functionality enhancements such as support for other formats, disk spanning, and the like. The what really sets one program apart from another, what puts WinZip as the market leader despite PKZip's many years of dominance and the dramatically lower price of other alternatives, is the intuitive and friendly user interface (to cluebies, not necessarily to you;p ).
Copyright is all about protecting a competitive edge, given that time and resources have been invested in creating it. User interfaces certainly sound to me like something that can enjoy Copyright protection.
Your premises are invalid. A government commissions software because it has a need for that software. Because the development is ultimately funded from taxpayers' money, the government has a responsibility to make that development (knowledge, design and implementation) available to the public that funded it.
There is no requirement, intention or need for the government to force compatibility with all potential derivations of the software.
To the government it is in fact desirable that no publically recognised derivations are made. This removes any pressure on the government to maintain and upgrade the software, or add features that it doesn't require.
Consider the following GPL case: government creates software for a national database, available under the GPL. A group of interested developers write some additional functionality and bring out NDBv2 (hosted on SourceForge). But as is typically in non-commercial environments, the changes are not fully backwards compatible. Anyone is free to install the original government version, or the New Improved v2, which won't be able to access the national database. Because the software has been improved, there is pressure on the government to upgrade, even though it may not see a need for the v2 functionality.
Now the BSD case. EvilSoft Inc. creates a proprietary extension to the software and released EvilSoftNDBv2 (R). If it sells this software, users will demand that it can perform the function they need it for -- accessing the national database. If it doesn't, they can still use the government version for free. If EvilSoft give away their software, users can demand interoperability with the national database. And the government will give the public the finger and say: this is a proprietary extension, we will not support it. IF EvilSoft contribute the code to use under the BSD license, we may provide support, if it suits us.
Embrace and extend only works within certain limitations. It does not work when a user has a requirement to integrate to another vendor/product, and that vendor/product cannot or will not accept a modification. (Yes, it can work if you can convince the user to change their requirements, but that isn't covered by this limitation, is it?)
On a completely different tack, research software cannot be properly exploited if it is released under GPL. Research typically requires a large amount of time and resources, and is undertaken by (or with the funding of) companies. A company's motivation, and the reason the capitalist system (sort of) works, is profit -- so any research expenditure needs to be justified by having the potential to create profit. Having to give away your research secrets the moment you publish the results of the research seriously reduces your potential to profit. So a company is unlikely to research or develop based around GPL software.
Before you shout about the moral responsibility companies should have to society, I suggest you read up on economics and business management. You may hate Microsoft, but they directly employ many thousand people, contribute billions to the US tax base, indirectly employ millions and drive markets for related products, and brought usable computers to the average household. I probably don't like their practices any more than you do, but they have already made a vast contribution to society, and continue to do so. Striving for paradise (or even balance) in the technology market doesn't necessarily benefit society as a whole.
A government is not a company, and has no separate legal identity. The concept of "internal distribution" in a government is flawed.
I agree that government should never commission proprietary software, but I also do not believe government should commission GPL software. Companies contribute significantly more to the tax base than individuals, and use of software by those who have ultimately paid for it should not be restricted to application, but should permit derivation.
The GPL prevents a company or individual from developing a proprietary derivation of software for which they have ultimately paid (in this scenario), and exploiting is commercially (without making the derivation available to competitors).
First you must understand that many significant open source / free software projects are led by those who are professional programmers by day.
Then you must understand that very few professional programmers are in fact coders. They are developers, and their skills focus on robust design.
Then you must understand that a skilled amateur can often produce code of the same quality as a professional, but very few can product designs of the same quality as a professional.
And finally you must understand that it is the design of software, not the coding, the ultimately determines its quality and suitability to a task.
Non-interference with drivers is not nonsense. You can't simply lean over and turn the steering wheel, fiddle with the indicator, or generally make any adjustment to the controls.
Now I will readily admit that there is a fine line between "assistance" and "interference". A very fine line. I would say (a first attempt) that the distinction is that interference takes a decision on behalf of the driver, reducing or eliminating the driver's choice and control.
ABS, for example, could only be seen to do this if you are intending to skid. As a driver you don't expect the brakes to lock or the car to skid (as in, its not the behavioural requirement of braking), so ABS makes the car do what you expect.
Compare this to an aircraft (like a 747). Automated systems make hundreds of tiny modifications every minute, like the foils on the wing that keep the aircraft stable. But these are not systems that override the pilot's control -- they simply make the plane behave as the pilot expects. There are (completely separate) systems in many leading aircraft that can override the pilot (for better or worse).
When a car decides to break or change direction without me prompting it to do so, I have a problem. This means a machine with distinctly less input and decision making capacity at a macro level is taking the decisions.
Did the car consider the following distance of the car behind me? Did it consider the fact that I could swerve; or if it decides to swerve that there is a 4-way intersection with oncoming traffic that isn't (yet) "visible" to it? This Honda doesn't appear to be any where near this invasive, but its not difficult to believe that we will get there.
Wrong. This is a huge deal if you happen to have seen the problem 125m ahead and are taking evasive action other than braking, for example changing lanes or even swerving. The slightest braking during a sharp direction change can throw your car into a skid.
It is illegal in most (all?) countries to interfere with the driver and/or the car's controls. Why should techology -- with less sensory input and a poorer decision making ability -- be permitted to do this?
You may be interested in more recent research on the subject. There is an etiology of the disorder, including some new research by Jay Giedd, which found underdevelopment of the right frontal lobe (in particular) to be significant. An imbalance of norepinephrine and dopamine, rather than seratonin, appear to be the result and the cause of the symptoms.
You should also be aware that ADHD is not ADD. ADHD is recognised in the DSM-IV, and has a definate biological basis. ADD (with or without hyperactivity) is a former and now unused classification of the symptoms, and is now loosely used to refer to ADHD-like symptoms in the absense of the biological characteristics of the disorder. In other words ADHD is behavioural and ADD is cognitive. Of course, other than the fact about the DSM-IV, this is still a subject of much debate.
This is hardly surprising. Most people think that Ritalin is a depressant, but it is in fact a stimulant -- it helps an ADHD sufferer to concentrate on a single topic without losing focus.
Caffeine is also a stimulant, and has been used successfully in numerous cases of ADHD. The problem is that caffeine usually has nastier side effects than Ritalin (caffeine is a dieuretic and ADHD sufferers are often allergic to it) and doesn't last as long.
I can't decide if you're a troll or just stupid. Probably both.
Information on NTFS has been publically available for years. The first complete book on NTFS was published by Microsoft Press in 1994. Since then there have been several books and many articles that have covered the topic. Little wonder the several dozen third party tool developers have created NTFS backup, recovery, defragmentation and analysis tools.
The simple fact is that a file system driver is hard to write, and hard to get right. That is why there has been no support for writes in the Linux driver. Read access has been fully functional for years.
And RTFA: WinFS is being implemented as a service on top of NTFS.
It's a hierarchical organization; it doesn't matter how big the drive gets.
One word: FAT. You are making three assumptions here. The first is that the underlying implementation is capable of supporting near-infinite extension without degradation. Invalid for FAT, valid for the FS types mentioned in the grandparent, and the reason for what I said. The second is that the file system will be used as a hierarchy, which is invalid for most end users. The third is a combination of the first and second, being that the file system extends without unreasonable degradation to a vasst number of files in a single directory, and performing operations (esp. searches) on them quickly. This is invalid for all of these file systems, because of how they store metadata.
Why would I want to do "a simple name search for a file across an entire drive"? The file name is meaningless outside the context of its hierarchy.
Again, you're assumiung you, a technically savvy user. End users don't behave like this. By and large they use meaningful file names in a single directory. If you're looking for a document someone else did, it will be in their single directory, not in a common folder for documents relating to that topic. If you don't know who worked on the document, you need to do a broad search based on keywords.
Yes, and it's fine for what it is. I certainly wouldn't want the overhead of updating the "locate" database every time a file changes somewhere.
Which shows how little you've thought about the implementation of this system. You only have to make a change if the file metadata changes. In many file systems you already have to write that change in a different location to changes to the file itself (if you don't, your metadata search time goes out the window). If your "locate" database is a relational database, making a change has trivial overhead.
Well, welcome to the club. For years, Linux has had several implementations, among them FAM, dnotify, and changedfiles, with hooks into indexing systems, and Linux is hardly the first.
Actually, this isn't what I was meaning. I was referring to the relationship between the data in the FS and in the locate database (or any other metadata search database), and indicating that WinFS (in theory) takes out the step of building a separate database by using the database as the "index" of the file system. Unfortunately in this incarnation of WinFS (the current implementation) MS will not be implementing it quite in that fashion.
But to answer your point... Win32 systems have had file change notification in their APIs from day 1 (NT 3.1 / Win95 + have FindFirstChangeNotification; NT 3.51 + have ReadDirectoryChangesW).
[snip] you are far better off with a real document database
And that's pretty much what MS is doing by converging a tradition file system with a metadata view.
Microsoft should focus on creating a robust file system with decent performance, not get side-tracked with gimmicks. NTFS could still stand a lot of improvement.
Of course, WinFS was intended for client operation systems, not servers. And while NTFS could still be improved, it doesn't make a lot of sense to do so: most high data volume applications store their data in structured files, and don't require much from the file system in any place where performance could be signficantly improved.
Right - which is what WinFS will do. Your "table of contents" is a relational database, which "points" to areas of storage on the drive, giving you the best of both worlds.
Current-generation file systems were designed to handle the drive capacity and file sizes of modern computing, but not the number of files. A simple name search for a file across an entire drive can take ages, thus the continued need for 'locate', which builds a search database on a daily basis. MS are taking out the middle man.
There are a number of factors that come into play, but I know that during one long car trip across an undulating wasteland my phone hopped between the nearest tower (1 to 5 km away) and ones up to 25 km away (no, I don't have a car kit or booster).
According to this page a tower could pick up a phone at up to 56km.
The orientation of cell tower antennae will affect reception, but Pythagoras tells me that at 10km up and 22km ground distance away, you've got a 25km line of sight to the tower (give or take an aircraft body). If I remember geometry correctly, that line is about 22 deg. to the horizontal, which isn't nearly as steep as being in a very short or tall building almost adjacent to a tower / base station.
Given that towers are typically around 10-15km apart outside urban areas (depending on the terrain and climate, let's use 12 for calculation), if you are in a plane directly above one tower (angle too steep to pick it up), it is quite reasonable that you can see up 12 surrounding cells at 12 to 24 km horizontal (16 to 28 km straight line) distance. Even on a straight road in the middle of nowhere with towers every 10 km you could be in range of 5 or more towers at once.
I have to disagree here, as I am left handed and write faster than most people I know, either in cursive or my own style (a sort of flowing print). The problem is when children are forced to learn a particular writing style and/or use a particular writing implement.
As you will know, writing in any wet ink pen (roller ball, fountain pen, etc) is certain script death for a left hander, unless you write "correctly" by tilting the page and drawing the pen along from above the line, which is obviously slower and a lot more stressful on your muscles.
Taught correctly and using the correct implement (such as a medium or fine ballpoint) a left hander will have no trouble pushing the pen across the page at the same speed that a right hander pulls it.
I will conceed that currently left handers are disadvantaged because of how they have been taught in the past.
I don't know anyone who writes in full cursive, and certainly not in exams. Here we are expected to use cursive until grade 7, after which its pretty much up to you. Most people use a print-like style which flows between some letters. Far quicker and more readable than cursive.
A huge problem with cursive is that it is unsuitable for left handed writers (like me). The "correct" way for a left-hander to write in cursive is to tilt the page 30-60 degrees to the path of the writing! The problem is only worsened if you are forced to use a roller ball, in which case attempting to write without such a tilt causing terrible smudging. Fountain pens are even worse, as they are meant to be pulled across the page, which is unnatural for a left hander writing a western language.
Delphi is by far superior to C++ when it's about creating a quick app with a nice GUI, combined from the insane amount of good ready-made components and samples, and some parts of proprietary code. Or when you work with e.g. anything combining SQL with a GUI, Delphi will be hard to beat. Or when you need to handle a ton of localized versions, which I have to for a current project.
So then, better than C/C++ for just about any general application apart from specific-purpose high-performance and non-interactive apps...?
Generics are at best a trade-off: compile-time type safety in exchange for less readable code. A poor trade-off at best.
Java never has and never will suffer the catastrophic consequences of type casting that C++ can. Type casts are all subject to runtime checks, so that the worst possible result is that an exception will be thrown. Where C++ has no safety without generics, Java has runtime safety.
As for readability, C++ has two major benefits over Java: a preprocessor and typedefs. Without at least one of these features, generics make code almost unreadable. Little wonder that developers new to C++ are very cautious about getting involved with generics, or that old hands know how long it has taken for the STL to become mostly stable (I say mostly, because using STL with threads in cross-platform development is a recipe for disaster).
Java is starting to look very much like something designed by a committee. A pity, because at its core it is still a good thing.
Slashdot Mirror
Please read my reply in context. You are correct for the most past: any author could write such a book without infringing copyright. Providing the characters and/or the setting were not substantially similar to those of Rowling's works.
So writing a book containing a description that is in all but name Harry Potter would almost certainly be infringing; the same goes for a setting that is Hogwarts in all but name(s).
However, if you took the concept of a boy wizard (most likely without a special scar caused by a mortal enemy) going to a magical school, and developed your own descriptions and story that didn't mimic those of Hogwarts and the events encountered by Harry, then you have no problem.
As seen from fan fiction, there is a broad grey area. It seems more acceptable to reuse setting than to reuse characters, for example, a lot of fan fiction in the Star Wars universe reuses elements of the setting but revolves around characters that weren't in the movies or had insignificant parts. In a similar way, I doubt that a book focusing on one of the other schools of wizardry that JKR mentions in passing would be an infringing work, despite it being able to draw substantially on the "mythology" (for lack of a better word) that she has created.
Very interesting. Sadly I can find no information on a translation of Griezelstate, and Google can only pinpoint four pages containing any information on similarities between the novels / series.
If these works are as similiar as you say they are, then maybe there has been an infringement of copyright. Or maybe not. The idea of evil adoptive parents is standard in children's literature. There are numerous books dealing with child magicians (A Wizard of Earthsea, Magician), dangerous woods are part of most folklore (and probably predate Tolkien in fiction), as misdirection is a common element of mystery stories.
So has JKR created a new work, or merely retold the story as presented in Griezelstate? Did she use the characters, setting or plot, by any other name or slight modification, where such elements are not common in their genre? If so, then I can only wonder that there has not already been a question raised over the copyright issue.
As fan fiction sites will tell you: fan fiction is necessarily a derivative work. Whether it is an infringing derivative work depends on its closeness to the original. Using any of the core characters or elements of the setting that make the original distinctive are likely to be infringing. Extending the setting or exploring a character largely ignored by the author (and hence not central to the author's story) is likely to be non-infringing.
Taking a single, recognisable character and putting him/her into a completely different story, even with a different name, is also likely to be infringing. But taking a character concept (a child wizard who goes away to learn at a magical school) and developing it into a distinct character with a unique identity/personality, and in a (sufficiently) different environment, would likely not be infringing.
http://superman.ws/fos/copyright/comicon1.php
I'll begin with the obligatory IANAL ... but I am studying Copyright law, amongst others. In the US, UK, Australia and South Africa, you are, quite simply, wrong.
This site covers the question of fan fiction and what constitutes a derived work, and in other places on the web you will find lovely articles on Fan Fiction and the Copyright Dilemma.
But don't take my word for it. Try this homework assignment: write a story about a boy who was bitten by a mutant spider and gained superpowers (call him "SpiderBoy", since "SpiderMan" would violate an existing TRADEMARK) and describe his exploits in his red and blue web-printed bodysuit. Advance warning: you may receive a letter something like this (pay special attention to the Q/A "What are the major elements of FanFic")
Once you're finished, you may want to visit your doctor and get your colon disconnected from the back of your throat.
"Specific expressions of ideas". Get it? Magic, witchcraft, good and evil are concepts. A boy wizard with a lightning scar on his forehead who attends a school hidden in modern-day England where it can't be seen by muggles is not a general concept. This are very specific expressions of general concepts.
Wrong. A trademark could protect the name "Harry Potter" for use in a particular context for the purposes of carry out trade. A trademark does NOT protect her against another author writing a story about a boy wizard with a lightning scar on his forehead who attends a school hidden in modern-day England where it can't be seen by muggles, called John Miles. And unless she trademarks every character and place name in her books, it doesn't stop another author from writing a story about Sirius Black and his escapades at Hogwarts.
Copyright is the right tool. You just don't understand it.
Economics 101: We (as in the "Western world") live in a market economy. The premise of this system is that society has at its disposal resources, and each individual must use the resources at his/her disposal to obtain more resources in order to survive, and possibly to prosper. This usually entails exchanging labour for cash, and cash for food, clothing, housing, etc.
The profit motive is thus core to the functioning of a market economy, and a free democratic society. Like it or not. Every government intervention in a market economy is socialistic, intended to restrict the otherwise free ability to trade and profit for some (usually good) reason. For example, unjust enrichment (profit at the expense of another) is outlawed, unfair competition (which has no meaning in a true free market) is defined, consumers are protected by standards of products and behaviour, and so on.
The aim of copyright is to promote progress in sciences and arts. The mechanism through which most countries have elected to achieve this is economic: a protected monolopy over a work, so that a potential creator is given an economic incentive of being able to be the exclusive benefactor of that work for a period of time. In this way there is an incentive to create works that will, eventually, fall into the public domain.
As it happens, I am strongly in favour of reduced copyright durations, especially for derivative works, for precisely the reasons you have voiced, but in conjunction with my knowledge and understanding of why you CAN'T make derivatives as you would like to.
But, as with everything, there needs to be balance. If derivatives were freely allowed, the new Harry Potter book would almost certainly not be going to China, as the Harry Potter works received a VERY bad name there after a very poor (and sordid) derivative was illegally published. That could deprive not only JKR of income, but Chinese people of very good literature.
At the other end of the spectrum, I am frustrated at the lack of ava
That's for the courts to answer. They will consider a range of issues including prior art (yes, even for Copyright) and substantial similarity. There are many more issues than Copyright to consider though.
Not much. Patents are different to Copyright. Can MS patent this? Maybe, I don't know. Adobe got patents on their GUI elements, but they could have (at some point) been considered innovative. Then again, so could the taskbar.
Certainly. In the end it comes down to cold cash. If you can't prove damage, you don't have a basis for delict, and you can't hold someone liable for patent, design or copyright infringement, or unfair competition.
So you have to ask yourself: is your interface using elements of another interface, either by intentionally copying the look and feel, or just because "it was a good idea"? Are those elements a novel or distinguishing feature, or are they recognised as standard practice in a UI? As a result of using these elements are you enriching yourself, and/or causing damage to the owner of the copyright in the other product? If "and" in the previous question, this may be unjust enrichment; otherwise it may be delictual liability. Is there copyright over the "original" work? Is there a patent or design reservation covering the elements in question? Are your products in competition (it is difficult to establish damage if they aren't)? And specifically, did you use the elements in order to gain a competitive edge, remove a competitive edge that the original product had over your's, or to make your product confusingly similar to the competition (all of which could be unfair competitive practice).
In short, there are numerous issues to be considered; Copyright is just one, and potentially the least powerful. Copyright covers the specific expression of an idea, and its derivatives. This is generally easy to determine with literary works, but very difficult with software, especially user interfaces. I would think that the notion of novelty will be considered: a thousand UIs designed in accordance with a HCI 101 textbook won't infringe on each other, because there is nothing to distinguish them from the general concept. A brand new UI idiom (if I could think of one I wouldn't tell you ;p ) may, on the other hand, be worthy of copyright on its own.
I am not a judge, but I would take into account factors like being able to redefine the toolbar(s), allowing you to present the buttons in whatever order is appropriate. The HTTP and HTML specifications in themselves and when read with commentary on their creation imply certain functionality, such as access to your hypertext traversal history (back, forward, history), and the need for caching and a mechanism to bypass caching (refresh). Also one would need to consider that a web browser's primary functionality is to display web pages, and there are recognised idioms for giving access to supporting functionality (menus and toolbars, and a status bar).
Really? So you should be able to write a Harry Potter novel, using in your favour the huge success of JK Rowling's work to boost the acceptability and profit potential of your derivative? Do you really think JKR should have to suffer a loss of sales when someone reads your miserable derivative and decides that they don't really like Harry Potter?
So let's start with this: you have a completely wrong notion of what Copyright is intended to protect. Is is specifically intended to protect ideas, not a particular physical object in which they are captured. It is specifically intended to prevent anyone from copying your ideas so closely that they are confusingly similar to or even indistinguishable from the original work. It is specifically intended to protect the intellectual creations of a person from use (without permission) by any third party.
A character and a setting are VERY specific intellectual property or expressions. Although the fantasy and science fiction genres are HUGE, nearly every renowned work has immediately recognisable and distinguishable characters and settings. Middle Earth, Dune, Narnia, the Nautilus, Jedi, Discworld, Gandalf, Vimes, Paul Atreides - what makes you think that you can merely take the VAST amount of "development time" these authors spent on their creations and use it in a novel of your own?
You can prattle on about "should" and "shouldn't" all you like, but this IS the state of Copyright, this IS how it works, and in my not particularly humble opinion you are not only WRONG but a leech that doesn't understand the true source of value or just wants to sit on your arse and have society give you everything you deserve for being such a magnificent gift to this planet.
Consumers also want more Harry Potter, but that doesn't give authors (other than JKR) the right to use the character, setting or plot from the existing novels.
You have to remember that Copyright covers the original work as well as derivatives. In the case of computer software, the concept of a "derivative" has not been tested. There has been no need to do so in the US because of the availability of patents (e.g. Adobe has patented elements of their GUI). Other legal systems may allow patent or design laws to cover this issue.
In this particular case, Copyright isn't the issue being discussed, although it does come into it for other reasons. The seller has elected not to exercise his rights to redistribution (as Copyright owner) unless the buyer enters into a contract. In other words, it is law of contract that is in effect here.
The "legal opinion" stated in the article is, IMHO, fearmongering. Copyright law does not specifically reserve the right of reverse engineering, and there is no reason that such a limitation cannot be added by contract. On the other hand Copyright law does explicitly permit fair use. So to deny fair use in a contract would be at odds with a law, and most legal systems will find the contract or at least that provision invalid.
Back to the issue of derivative works. If the characters and setting of a novel are protected (in and of themselves) by Copyright, does it stand to reason that core elements of software bear the same protection? If not, why not? Any end user will tell you that a usable interfaces makes the difference between bad software and good software, even when the same functionality is present.
To be more precise, Copyright applies to a specific expression of an idea, not to an actual idea. An oft-cited example is "PacMan". Technically, almost every PacMan clone out there is an infringement of Copyright because they employ the same characters and gameplay. The general concept of a character running around eating dots, however, is not subject to Copyright. The test for copyright infringement is subjective and relies on establishing "substantial similarity" between the works.
So let's get down to business. Archive programs are a dime a dozen. They range from completely free to vastly expensive. Most of them have the same functionality: zip, tar, gz support; view, create, test and extract archives; vary the compression levels; etc. Some have minor functionality enhancements such as support for other formats, disk spanning, and the like. The what really sets one program apart from another, what puts WinZip as the market leader despite PKZip's many years of dominance and the dramatically lower price of other alternatives, is the intuitive and friendly user interface (to cluebies, not necessarily to you ;p ).
Copyright is all about protecting a competitive edge, given that time and resources have been invested in creating it. User interfaces certainly sound to me like something that can enjoy Copyright protection.
I can't believe its only been mentioned once so far, and in passing ... or doesn't it qualify as non-techie? ;)
Role playing (no, not that kind). Dungeons and Dragons, Shadowrun, Mage, MERP, and many friends.
Its a lot of fun, doesn't (necessarily) involve sunlight, and does involve friends (even some non-techie ones).
You're absolutely right. A business can charge for / sell GPL software, providing that it also supplies the source code.
Then again, you're absolutely wrong. The GPL guarantees the receiver the right of distribution. See Section 3 of the GPL.
So once you've sold ONE copy, the buyer can resell or give away as many copies as (s)he wants. Have A Nice Day.
Your premises are invalid. A government commissions software because it has a need for that software. Because the development is ultimately funded from taxpayers' money, the government has a responsibility to make that development (knowledge, design and implementation) available to the public that funded it.
There is no requirement, intention or need for the government to force compatibility with all potential derivations of the software.
To the government it is in fact desirable that no publically recognised derivations are made. This removes any pressure on the government to maintain and upgrade the software, or add features that it doesn't require.
Consider the following GPL case: government creates software for a national database, available under the GPL. A group of interested developers write some additional functionality and bring out NDBv2 (hosted on SourceForge). But as is typically in non-commercial environments, the changes are not fully backwards compatible. Anyone is free to install the original government version, or the New Improved v2, which won't be able to access the national database. Because the software has been improved, there is pressure on the government to upgrade, even though it may not see a need for the v2 functionality.
Now the BSD case. EvilSoft Inc. creates a proprietary extension to the software and released EvilSoftNDBv2 (R). If it sells this software, users will demand that it can perform the function they need it for -- accessing the national database. If it doesn't, they can still use the government version for free. If EvilSoft give away their software, users can demand interoperability with the national database. And the government will give the public the finger and say: this is a proprietary extension, we will not support it. IF EvilSoft contribute the code to use under the BSD license, we may provide support, if it suits us.
Embrace and extend only works within certain limitations. It does not work when a user has a requirement to integrate to another vendor/product, and that vendor/product cannot or will not accept a modification. (Yes, it can work if you can convince the user to change their requirements, but that isn't covered by this limitation, is it?)
On a completely different tack, research software cannot be properly exploited if it is released under GPL. Research typically requires a large amount of time and resources, and is undertaken by (or with the funding of) companies. A company's motivation, and the reason the capitalist system (sort of) works, is profit -- so any research expenditure needs to be justified by having the potential to create profit. Having to give away your research secrets the moment you publish the results of the research seriously reduces your potential to profit. So a company is unlikely to research or develop based around GPL software.
Before you shout about the moral responsibility companies should have to society, I suggest you read up on economics and business management. You may hate Microsoft, but they directly employ many thousand people, contribute billions to the US tax base, indirectly employ millions and drive markets for related products, and brought usable computers to the average household. I probably don't like their practices any more than you do, but they have already made a vast contribution to society, and continue to do so. Striving for paradise (or even balance) in the technology market doesn't necessarily benefit society as a whole.
A government is not a company, and has no separate legal identity. The concept of "internal distribution" in a government is flawed.
I agree that government should never commission proprietary software, but I also do not believe government should commission GPL software. Companies contribute significantly more to the tax base than individuals, and use of software by those who have ultimately paid for it should not be restricted to application, but should permit derivation.
The GPL prevents a company or individual from developing a proprietary derivation of software for which they have ultimately paid (in this scenario), and exploiting is commercially (without making the derivation available to competitors).
First you must understand that many significant open source / free software projects are led by those who are professional programmers by day.
Then you must understand that very few professional programmers are in fact coders. They are developers, and their skills focus on robust design.
Then you must understand that a skilled amateur can often produce code of the same quality as a professional, but very few can product designs of the same quality as a professional.
And finally you must understand that it is the design of software, not the coding, the ultimately determines its quality and suitability to a task.
Non-interference with drivers is not nonsense. You can't simply lean over and turn the steering wheel, fiddle with the indicator, or generally make any adjustment to the controls.
Now I will readily admit that there is a fine line between "assistance" and "interference". A very fine line. I would say (a first attempt) that the distinction is that interference takes a decision on behalf of the driver, reducing or eliminating the driver's choice and control.
ABS, for example, could only be seen to do this if you are intending to skid. As a driver you don't expect the brakes to lock or the car to skid (as in, its not the behavioural requirement of braking), so ABS makes the car do what you expect.
Compare this to an aircraft (like a 747). Automated systems make hundreds of tiny modifications every minute, like the foils on the wing that keep the aircraft stable. But these are not systems that override the pilot's control -- they simply make the plane behave as the pilot expects. There are (completely separate) systems in many leading aircraft that can override the pilot (for better or worse).
When a car decides to break or change direction without me prompting it to do so, I have a problem. This means a machine with distinctly less input and decision making capacity at a macro level is taking the decisions.
Did the car consider the following distance of the car behind me? Did it consider the fact that I could swerve; or if it decides to swerve that there is a 4-way intersection with oncoming traffic that isn't (yet) "visible" to it? This Honda doesn't appear to be any where near this invasive, but its not difficult to believe that we will get there.
Wrong. This is a huge deal if you happen to have seen the problem 125m ahead and are taking evasive action other than braking, for example changing lanes or even swerving. The slightest braking during a sharp direction change can throw your car into a skid.
It is illegal in most (all?) countries to interfere with the driver and/or the car's controls. Why should techology -- with less sensory input and a poorer decision making ability -- be permitted to do this?
You may be interested in more recent research on the subject. There is an etiology of the disorder, including some new research by Jay Giedd, which found underdevelopment of the right frontal lobe (in particular) to be significant. An imbalance of norepinephrine and dopamine, rather than seratonin, appear to be the result and the cause of the symptoms.
You should also be aware that ADHD is not ADD. ADHD is recognised in the DSM-IV, and has a definate biological basis. ADD (with or without hyperactivity) is a former and now unused classification of the symptoms, and is now loosely used to refer to ADHD-like symptoms in the absense of the biological characteristics of the disorder. In other words ADHD is behavioural and ADD is cognitive. Of course, other than the fact about the DSM-IV, this is still a subject of much debate.
This is hardly surprising. Most people think that Ritalin is a depressant, but it is in fact a stimulant -- it helps an ADHD sufferer to concentrate on a single topic without losing focus.
Caffeine is also a stimulant, and has been used successfully in numerous cases of ADHD. The problem is that caffeine usually has nastier side effects than Ritalin (caffeine is a dieuretic and ADHD sufferers are often allergic to it) and doesn't last as long.
I can't decide if you're a troll or just stupid. Probably both.
Information on NTFS has been publically available for years. The first complete book on NTFS was published by Microsoft Press in 1994. Since then there have been several books and many articles that have covered the topic. Little wonder the several dozen third party tool developers have created NTFS backup, recovery, defragmentation and analysis tools.
The simple fact is that a file system driver is hard to write, and hard to get right. That is why there has been no support for writes in the Linux driver. Read access has been fully functional for years.
And RTFA: WinFS is being implemented as a service on top of NTFS.
One word: FAT. You are making three assumptions here. The first is that the underlying implementation is capable of supporting near-infinite extension without degradation. Invalid for FAT, valid for the FS types mentioned in the grandparent, and the reason for what I said. The second is that the file system will be used as a hierarchy, which is invalid for most end users. The third is a combination of the first and second, being that the file system extends without unreasonable degradation to a vasst number of files in a single directory, and performing operations (esp. searches) on them quickly. This is invalid for all of these file systems, because of how they store metadata.
Again, you're assumiung you, a technically savvy user. End users don't behave like this. By and large they use meaningful file names in a single directory. If you're looking for a document someone else did, it will be in their single directory, not in a common folder for documents relating to that topic. If you don't know who worked on the document, you need to do a broad search based on keywords.
Which shows how little you've thought about the implementation of this system. You only have to make a change if the file metadata changes. In many file systems you already have to write that change in a different location to changes to the file itself (if you don't, your metadata search time goes out the window). If your "locate" database is a relational database, making a change has trivial overhead.
Actually, this isn't what I was meaning. I was referring to the relationship between the data in the FS and in the locate database (or any other metadata search database), and indicating that WinFS (in theory) takes out the step of building a separate database by using the database as the "index" of the file system. Unfortunately in this incarnation of WinFS (the current implementation) MS will not be implementing it quite in that fashion.
But to answer your point ... Win32 systems have had file change notification in their APIs from day 1 (NT 3.1 / Win95 + have FindFirstChangeNotification; NT 3.51 + have ReadDirectoryChangesW).
And that's pretty much what MS is doing by converging a tradition file system with a metadata view.
Of course, WinFS was intended for client operation systems, not servers. And while NTFS could still be improved, it doesn't make a lot of sense to do so: most high data volume applications store their data in structured files, and don't require much from the file system in any place where performance could be signficantly improved.
Right - which is what WinFS will do. Your "table of contents" is a relational database, which "points" to areas of storage on the drive, giving you the best of both worlds.
Current-generation file systems were designed to handle the drive capacity and file sizes of modern computing, but not the number of files. A simple name search for a file across an entire drive can take ages, thus the continued need for 'locate', which builds a search database on a daily basis. MS are taking out the middle man.
There are a number of factors that come into play, but I know that during one long car trip across an undulating wasteland my phone hopped between the nearest tower (1 to 5 km away) and ones up to 25 km away (no, I don't have a car kit or booster).
According to this page a tower could pick up a phone at up to 56km.
The orientation of cell tower antennae will affect reception, but Pythagoras tells me that at 10km up and 22km ground distance away, you've got a 25km line of sight to the tower (give or take an aircraft body). If I remember geometry correctly, that line is about 22 deg. to the horizontal, which isn't nearly as steep as being in a very short or tall building almost adjacent to a tower / base station.
Given that towers are typically around 10-15km apart outside urban areas (depending on the terrain and climate, let's use 12 for calculation), if you are in a plane directly above one tower (angle too steep to pick it up), it is quite reasonable that you can see up 12 surrounding cells at 12 to 24 km horizontal (16 to 28 km straight line) distance. Even on a straight road in the middle of nowhere with towers every 10 km you could be in range of 5 or more towers at once.
I have to disagree here, as I am left handed and write faster than most people I know, either in cursive or my own style (a sort of flowing print). The problem is when children are forced to learn a particular writing style and/or use a particular writing implement.
As you will know, writing in any wet ink pen (roller ball, fountain pen, etc) is certain script death for a left hander, unless you write "correctly" by tilting the page and drawing the pen along from above the line, which is obviously slower and a lot more stressful on your muscles.
Taught correctly and using the correct implement (such as a medium or fine ballpoint) a left hander will have no trouble pushing the pen across the page at the same speed that a right hander pulls it.
I will conceed that currently left handers are disadvantaged because of how they have been taught in the past.
I don't know anyone who writes in full cursive, and certainly not in exams. Here we are expected to use cursive until grade 7, after which its pretty much up to you. Most people use a print-like style which flows between some letters. Far quicker and more readable than cursive.
A huge problem with cursive is that it is unsuitable for left handed writers (like me). The "correct" way for a left-hander to write in cursive is to tilt the page 30-60 degrees to the path of the writing! The problem is only worsened if you are forced to use a roller ball, in which case attempting to write without such a tilt causing terrible smudging. Fountain pens are even worse, as they are meant to be pulled across the page, which is unnatural for a left hander writing a western language.
So then, better than C/C++ for just about any general application apart from specific-purpose high-performance and non-interactive apps...?
Generics are at best a trade-off: compile-time type safety in exchange for less readable code. A poor trade-off at best.
Java never has and never will suffer the catastrophic consequences of type casting that C++ can. Type casts are all subject to runtime checks, so that the worst possible result is that an exception will be thrown. Where C++ has no safety without generics, Java has runtime safety.
As for readability, C++ has two major benefits over Java: a preprocessor and typedefs. Without at least one of these features, generics make code almost unreadable. Little wonder that developers new to C++ are very cautious about getting involved with generics, or that old hands know how long it has taken for the STL to become mostly stable (I say mostly, because using STL with threads in cross-platform development is a recipe for disaster).
Java is starting to look very much like something designed by a committee. A pity, because at its core it is still a good thing.