"Sure, TrollTech can decide to "close" a future version, but they cannot EVER in ANY WAY remove your right to reuse, modify, and distribute a version that was released under the GPL."
By stating the above, you have shown that you have no idea what the topic even is. The topic is discussing wether or not QT can be licensed under the BSD License.
First of all, nobody is clamining that anybody can take away the GNU from current versions, that is just a GIVEN. Arguing to me that a fact I already know to be true is true doesn't change my argument above.
Second of all, even IF someone is claiming that the GNU license on QT will be revoked(which they aren't), that still doesn't change the fact that they are still going to license it under a LESS RESTRICTIVE license known as BSD. If you want to make a GPL fork of the BSD'd code, nobody would (or could) stop you.
Your entire post is out of line and completely illogical. Re-stating facts that everyone knows to be true doesn't help your argument, and only helps prove your ignorance on the topic.
it IS a BSD License. The license is quoted IN THE AGREEMENT. go READ the agreement, and you will see. Don't make false statements that you have no clue about.
the agreement is simple, and is in a legally binding contract.
1) TrollTech must release a new version of QT (even if its just bugfix revisions) every 12 months or the latest QT Free edition becomes BSD Licensed. (this is a REAL BSD license, not a BSD Like license)
2) If TrollTech is ever bought out, the latest QT Free edition automatically becomes licensed under BSD
3) If TrollTech ever goes out of business, the latest QT Free edition is automatically licensed under the BSD license.
4) If a majority vote of the members of the foundation vote that QT has not met its obligations in the agreement, the latest version of QT Free Edition is automatically relicensed as BSD.
All you people talking about not being able to relicense GPL work is full of crap. You don't know what a license is, and therefore, should not comment. When an entity wholely ownes the copyright to a work, they can release it with ANY LICENSE THEY WANT, no matter what their conflicts are. As it stands now, TrollTech wholely owns the copyright to QT, and can license it to whatever license it wants (and can license it to anything it is forced to via the foundation's agreement).
Your post is innacurate at best, and completely inflamatory. Please check your facts before you post bullshit next time.
Phish has recently started selling their recordings online. They are the live show soundboard recordings. Very high quality, and you can download in SHN or MP3.
the price is around $10-15 depending on which show you get and how many songs the download has in it. They average about 2-4 CD's per download set after it is decompressed from SHN and burned to audio CD.
Apparently, they plan on releasing previous shows and all future shows in this format. It's a nice change from the $25 each for the live albums they had put out previously.
Maybe some day, other bands will follow suit.
For those of you who just want one song, and are willing to pay MORE than it would cost at the CD store just so you only pay for one song, you should probably start listening to better music that isn't on the top 40. top 40 is just a measurement of how much the CD stores were force fed that particular album by the record label, it isn't a measurement of quality or popularity by any means.
If this new service has all the songs from all the labels, full length and in a reasonable format for both lossy and non-lossy compression (read: not encyrpted for DRM), it might be a decent thing. But at 99 cents a song, only lossy downloads, and probably not many artists signed up for it, add the fact that it will say DMCA and DRM all over the package, and I doubt this service will do any good.
We sell HP and lexmark inks where I work. Trust me, the markup isn't from the retailer. There is a (very) slight possibility that our distributer is gouging us, but our cheapest vendor is only slightly less than our most expensive vendor in the ink world. I can say for almost a 100% certainty that the ink price gouging comes from the manufacturer. This is the exact opposite to the cable industry, where computer cables are marked up between 100% and 500% by the retailer (this is from the MSRP, which we don't follow). Since we use our same markup on these cables are our other products, we have undercut our local competition in cables by over 100-500% in almost every instance.
Interestingly, we sell an HP color inkjet printer for 76$, and we sell the ink cartriges for that printer for 89$ (this is the price for both color and black). We have the same margin on all 3 products. Lexmark does the same exact thing, but we don't sell their printers, just the inks.
We have a guy that comes around and picks up our empty inks that people bring back for us to recycle. We can get 1-5 dollars each (model, brand dependant). They ship them to africa to be refilled, and then resold later in asia. One reason is because of this copyright BS lexmark is pushing on everyone.
Contrary to popular belief, the circuitry and printhead on the cartrige itself is what costs the most. The guy we sell our used inks to can get up to $10-$15 on some models, and the people refilling them are still making a profit even after shipping them across the world, refilling, cleaning, and reselling them for less than new. I have personally refilled my black cartriges for less than $5 each refill, and only after a few refills does the print quality go down (due to worn out print head)
Yes, so they search outside the database? So what is the criteria before its a good search? Is searching google enough? Should they search every database having to do with scientific studies related to the invention? Should they search every html document on the internet that isn't password protected? Should they go even further and search every printed document ever published? There is a line. They have clearly drawn it. Where that line exactly is is irrelevant. It has been drawn, and it is at its maximum for its current budget. If you want to change that line, like I said, go talk to YOUR LEGISLATURE.
Bitching about the patent office's policy isn't working, will not work, and will never work. You can't search everything, and trying to do so is a waste of resources. It is the responsibility of the patent applicant to know if they are violating prior art. It is only the responsibility of the patent office to do a minor double check to make sure the company isn't blantly BSing.
Ok, so lets imagine you want these underpaid "patent experts" that work at the patent office to do better searches. So we are going to have to pay them significantly better. For that, patent applications will have to raise in price to compensate. Now, only big corporations can afford patents. wow, now all of a sudden we are in a worse situation than we were before!
The simple answer? You can't expect an office that processes paperwork to know everything about everything ever invented. That is what you want, and it ain't happening buddy. The USPTO was never designed to employ experts that can find similarities in every invention ever made. That isn't their job, and it never has been. Look elsewhere for a solution.
Others have mentioned the possibility of holding patent holders liable for infringing prior art. Maybe this is a good idea. Companies that spend millions on lawyers to sue people with a prior art claim are fraudulent, and should be punished. But but they aren't because no law punishes for this. If you think that patent holders should be held liable for patents infringing prior art (when they sue and lose), that is not a policy that can be changed from within the patent office.
As has been pointed out countless times, it is not the responsibility of the USPTO to search outside their database of already existing patents to find prior art. If you want them to, or think they should, maybe you should stop complaining about how the office is run, and start worrying about changing some laws.
With all due respect, maybe YOU should find out how its done *now*. You just described, more or less, the exact opposite process one goes through in the US to get a patent.
The problem with your reasoning is that your wrong. The patent office does NOT search outside the patent database for prior art. In order for them to do that, they would be required to staff experts in any field that a patent could be obtained. They don't, and so they don't. The only way you can get your idea rejected is if it's 1) in the patent database already, or 2) its a really obviously been invented before to the secretary that files it (ie, a fork probably isn't in the database, but obvioulsy there is prior art if someone were to apply for a patent for a fork), or 3) if the idea isn't patentable. Prior art outside the patent registry is for the judge to determine in current US patent laws.
Writing two patents, and reading many has nothing to do with your knowledge of how the USPTO grants patents. Don't bitch about how they grant patents. It's not the secretary's fault. If you want to change it, go to your legislator. It's not the USPTO's fault.
The patent office can only do so much to protect you. They are not an all knowing database that claims responsibility to every bad patent. They give out patents, keep them on record, and do a "reasonable" search for prior art. Whatever the definition of reasonable is is irrelevant. The company who did the sueing, and did the patent getting is the fraudulent company, and should be the person paying for the defense if they lose.
If the USPO was liable for this, do you really want your tax dollars coming out of it to pay for a defense that was there because of a fraudulent company? I didn't think so.
If you apply for a patent and didn't bother checking for prior art yourself (or in this case, purposely ignore that prior art fraudulently) then you are negligent, and self responsible for all costs pertaining to protecting that fraudulent patent.
This is how the law works now. Changing it so the government is liable for fraud of another company is just fucking ridiculous. If you want the defense costs to be reimbused, why not try to come up with an idea that punishes the fraudulent companies, and not the innocent tax payers.
your missing the point of why telecommunications was origionally, and still is, regulated.
It was regulated because the landlines had to be laid. The government granted monopolies to the companies laying cable, in exchange for their willingness to sell wholesale time on these cables. This created a government mandated monopoly that still allowed fair competition.
VoIP doesn't depend on these granted monopolised cables any more than the regular internet does (which is already regulated by the FCC because most ISP's still have to use these regulated copper and fiber cables owned by the telco). Regulating VoIP with yet another layer of restriction would be double restriction. There is already plenty of _healthy_ competition between ISPs. for these reasons, a second layer of regulation is not needed.
The only reason anybody would want to regulate VoIP the same as landline telephones is so the bells can stay in business. But in the end, we shouldn't be passing laws to keep failing, obsolete, inefficient, and humanity damaging business models afloat.
Willfull copyright violation for profit is a fealony. You CAN force them, physically, to stop making copies. It is a criminal offence that any police officer can enforce, legally.
Copyright law covers COPYING and DISTRIBUTING works. It is not part of contract law, and even if it did, the GNU GPL is NOT a contract. Therefore, it does not fall under contract law. The GNU GPL is a LICENSE.
Under US copyright laws, you are not allowed to copy any covered work (except for fair use) without the copyright owner's permission. This permission could come in the form of a license, or a contract. The GNU GPL is the license that gives permission to any licenseholder to copy and redistribute the program if certain constraints are met. This document is the "permission" that is required by copyright law. It doesn't need to be tested to be enforceable. And it doesn't have to be a contract. It isn't a contract, and thus doesnt fall under your hypothetical case's circumstances.
As is noted a hunderd thousand times on slashdot every year, you don't have to agree to the GNU GPL just because you use the program. You only have to follow the GPL when you make copies not covered under fair use.
Too bad fair use allows copies for personal use(which is exactly the case you describe).
If this was a mainframe computer that was giving all this data to multiple users, you might have a prayer, but no court will convict if someone is copying it for personal use(copying for personal use for convenience factor is acceptable). This by definition, is covered under the "Fair Use Doctrine" which was defined by the US Supreme Court.
You must also realize that if you are not distributing anything, Fair Use is extremely loose on copy restrictions. However, if you distribute it, you practically can't do ANYTHING to it first without permission.
Yes, barring fair use, which explicitly allows you to do this unless you re-distribute the work. Which you aren't.
Short answer is that you can modify any work under fair use for your OWN PERSONAL USE and not for someone else. If your web browser cuts out ads, then that is legal, and no US Code that is currently existance disallows these modifications.
Aside from this point, there is still the legal rammifications that there is no US Law which states it is illegal to build, distribute, or use tools that can modify copyrighted works (unless the work is encrypted and covered under the DMCA)
If an ISP started doing this at his firewall, and then re-distributing the web site to your computer after you request it, then this might be illegal. They might be able to argue that one party is getting the work, modifying it, and redistributing it, which is certaintly not covered under the Fair Use Doctrine.
OTOH, if the ISP has a fair use reason to do this (such as reformatting the text to work on a text only terminal), then this may also be legal.
What it all boils down to is that the spirit of copyright laws are restricting COPYING and REDISTRIBUTING, not how a person uses those works. This has been true untill 1998 when the DMCA was enacted, and even now is still true for all copyrighted works that are not covered under the DMCA's encryption clauses. To this day, I have yet to find a website that is encrypted for purposes of the DMCA protection. Untill this changes, they won't have any legal legs to stand on.
type about:[any word here] and it is supposed to display the word, of if the text says "blank" then it gives you a blank page. However, there is special code to handle the word "mozilla" that turns your page blue.
I dont know why, but I'm quite sure it is intentionally different than the expected result
"There is a difference in obtaining a product legally and utilizing it legally"
This is the mistake. There is no such thing as utilizing a product legally unless it breaks federal, state, or local laws. Copyright law does not mention the use of a work. It only describes how you can copy a work, and how you cannot. Any restriction not involving COPYING in an EULA (read that word again, COPYRIGHT is about COPYING, and US copyright laws ONLY cover copying, and not using) is not legal unless you sign a contract that is legally binding (for example, they give you extra rights, and take some of them away). Contracts are NOT legally binding unless you recieve something in return for giving up your right to Fair Use. No, the "right" to use the program doesn't count. This was already paid for when you bought the package at the store.
The act of purchasing the product (whether its a license to use the software in the box or anything) Is proof enough you did not obtain the product illegally.
After you obtain any copyrighted work legally, you have the legal right to do all of the following with said product, no matter what the EULA says:
1) make backup copies n number of times of the copyrighted work (where n is a number defined by the license purchaser to describe the number of copies you need for your personal and backup use) 2) re-sell the license and copyrighted work at a any price determined by you, but only if you destroy all copies you previously made. 3) use backup copies of the copyrighted work you purchased even if someone misplaces or steals the origional copy. 4) use the copyrighted work in any way defined by the "fair use doctrine" as defined by the U.S. Supreme Court
Everyone here needs to realize. NO BSA parts of ANY EULA have EVER been successfully litigated in federal or state court in the United States. Software licenses fall under the EXACT SAME LAW as music, books, movies, poems, etc. You have EVERY RIGHT to fair use as defined by the Supreme Court. These rights are given to you by nature of being a U.S. Citizen.
Secondly, EULA's are not legally abiding if they TAKE "fair use rights" away. the U.S. Supreme Court has defined EXACTLY what you can legally do with ANY copyrighted work legally obtained. An EULA can only give you EXTRA rights, not defined in the U.S. Copyright Clause. EULA's are contracts. In order for you to sign your rights away, you must be gaining something in RETURN. BUT, you ALREADY PAID for your copy of the copyrighted work, so the usage of the program is covered under that cost. If the contract that is the EULA takes rights away, it must also grant you extra rights. If it does not, the contract is null and void. Contracts are not a replacement for copyright law, no matter how much the BSA, or Microsoft will say it is. Once you paid money for the product, you can LEGALLY use the program under normal copyright law, with no extra rights.
Secondary to the above, even IF the contract is legit (ie, both parties agree to exchange something) you still do not have to agree to it. "Shrinkwrap" licenses are not signed, and are not agreed to. The only EULA I am aware of that is enforceable (but realize, it is still only enforceable under normal contract law, read above) is ones that force you to click "I agree" during install. However, If you can figure out how to install the software without pressing "I Agree" then you can legally use the software under currently existing copyright law with no reguard to the EULA.
As a third item, _NO_ EULA can EVER take the following rights away: 1) clean room reverse engineering 2) decompilation for reasons of clean room reverse engineering. 3) modifications to the software (but you can't re-distribute it w/ mods)
If any lawyer claims these rights as revokeable by them or your company, they are commiting federal fraud, and can be held liable for your damages plus, and have their license taken away or suspended.
It's your rights being taken away. You choose if you lose them. If you act weak, you lose. Period.
and one that is in use today, is to not accept any public email at all.
The US Senate and House of Representatives have their member's websites with a contact page utilizing a web form to submit letters. Since this email address is hidden by the web server, the only spam that could possibly get to senators is someone specifically writing a program to submit information for that specific web form.
Since no spammer would need to spam senators (unless someone tries to mail bomb them, but that is an other issue all together), nobody would spam them.
This also solves the problem with the post office mail and anthrax problems that happened just after 9/11. The quickest way to contact your senator is by fax, but even this web form is higher priority than snail mail.
This is exactly the problem with artsd. It currently has no hardware capabilities. Everything it does is in software. If i have a $10,000 card that can have/dev/dsp opened 23048032498 times, artsd can use 1 of them, and you fall back to "software" mixing.
In my opinion, the correct behavior is as you described it. Have the sound daemon allocate the hardware resources, and if there aren't enough, fall back to software mixing.
For example: Imagine i have a EMU10k1 sound device. I can open/dev/dsp up to 32 times. What if i have 33 applications that want to send sound to the device? Using arts' method, I must mix all that sound in software. Using a proper sound daemon, I would send all the streams to the daemon, and it would prioritize the hardware opens on/dev/dsp to the applications that need it, and the applications that won't be bothered using a software mixer can be mixed in software as the 32nd channel.
Running a 3d game through artsd while at the same time running your desktop sounds (ICQ, IRC, etc etc etc...) into the same software mixer IMO isn't a clean solution, and it essentially dumbs down all sound cards into a $5 SB16. This is wastefull.
My suggestions are a little different than the others, but I just want to tell you another perspective that might have been overlooked.
Career wise, you seem to be a graphics designer. Now, I'm not a computer scientist or computer engineer, but I do know how to program (basics) and I know more than one language. I have found that even if your job isn't to program, knowing how to do it, and knowing a few languages, will dramatically help your understanding and marketability in this particluar jobmarket. You need to be able to communicate with the developers in a way that both of you are on the same ballpark. Developers like to have a say in how their program is used, and trying to develop the most efficient interface to an application is not possible without the developers cooperation. Likewise, developers must work with the graphics designers to be able to provide in the application what the designers need to make the efficient UI.
The other suggestions are great, and if you are just wanting to toy around with open source programs, and help to improve them somewhat, then thats fine. But my suggestion that would be IMO a wise career move would be to learn how to program.
It's easy to sign up for a couple programing classes, or just buy a book and learn. I am not going to suggest which language to start with, because everyone has their preference. Computer engineers and computer scientists know better what languages can do what tasks with the most readability and structure and with the least work. However, I can say that if you wanted to help a project such as KDE, learning C++ and Python would be your best bet. If you wanted to help GNOME, you should probably learn C. The final step is to familiarize yourself with the standard toolkits on their respective platform (QT for KDE, GTK+ for GNOME).
That is all it takes. Once you know the basics of programing, and if you happened to learn C++, helping improve KDE applications would be that much easier, and more developers would be willing to take a look at a patch which made their application conform to the UI Guidelines on freedesktop.org before they will be willing to read criticism on what they need to do and need not to do in their UI.
If your not willing to learn to program, probably the best way to help improve a project like KDE in the UI area would be to submit detailed bug reports explaining what needs to be changed in order to conform the application to the freedesktop.org guidelines.
Or, maybe you should contact freedesktop.org and see if they need help developing these guidelines.
"Funny how a lot of these same users bashed MacOS (up to 9.x) for not having true preemptive multitasking, etc. etc...."
Did you take a survey and find out that most of the same people that bashed MacOS 9.x are touting their new wintel dual cpu machine?
Funny how you are bashing windows for crashing when the problem lies with drivers from a 3rd party driver from Handspring, and has absolutely nothing to do with a problem with the actual OS. And then try to contrast these problems with the MacOS to try to make it look better than it is, even though classic os is a POS and the features you list have nothing to do with eachother.
Conclusion: You are a mac troll. (not that I would expect any different on the mac forum on/.)
your example is a little different than actuality, here's what really happened:
(RAMBUS's business model)
1) Go to JDEC meeting 2) sign a contract that says you cannot patent technology introduced into the JDEC specification, and you must reveal all patents you hold or are pending that may conflict with the JDEC specification 3) Use JDEC specifications to produce a patent on memory technology. Also, introduce your (patented) ideas at the JDEC meeting and get it in the JDEC standard. 4) ??? 5) Pofit!
Slashdot Mirror
"Sure, TrollTech can decide to "close" a future version, but they cannot EVER in ANY WAY remove your right to reuse, modify, and distribute a version that was released under the GPL."
By stating the above, you have shown that you have no idea what the topic even is. The topic is discussing wether or not QT can be licensed under the BSD License.
First of all, nobody is clamining that anybody can take away the GNU from current versions, that is just a GIVEN. Arguing to me that a fact I already know to be true is true doesn't change my argument above.
Second of all, even IF someone is claiming that the GNU license on QT will be revoked(which they aren't), that still doesn't change the fact that they are still going to license it under a LESS RESTRICTIVE license known as BSD. If you want to make a GPL fork of the BSD'd code, nobody would (or could) stop you.
Your entire post is out of line and completely illogical. Re-stating facts that everyone knows to be true doesn't help your argument, and only helps prove your ignorance on the topic.
Incorrect.
it IS a BSD License. The license is quoted IN THE AGREEMENT. go READ the agreement, and you will see. Don't make false statements that you have no clue about.
the agreement is simple, and is in a legally binding contract.
1) TrollTech must release a new version of QT (even if its just bugfix revisions) every 12 months or the latest QT Free edition becomes BSD Licensed. (this is a REAL BSD license, not a BSD Like license)
2) If TrollTech is ever bought out, the latest QT Free edition automatically becomes licensed under BSD
3) If TrollTech ever goes out of business, the latest QT Free edition is automatically licensed under the BSD license.
4) If a majority vote of the members of the foundation vote that QT has not met its obligations in the agreement, the latest version of QT Free Edition is automatically relicensed as BSD.
All you people talking about not being able to relicense GPL work is full of crap. You don't know what a license is, and therefore, should not comment. When an entity wholely ownes the copyright to a work, they can release it with ANY LICENSE THEY WANT, no matter what their conflicts are. As it stands now, TrollTech wholely owns the copyright to QT, and can license it to whatever license it wants (and can license it to anything it is forced to via the foundation's agreement).
Your post is innacurate at best, and completely inflamatory. Please check your facts before you post bullshit next time.
Phish has recently started selling their recordings online. They are the live show soundboard recordings. Very high quality, and you can download in SHN or MP3.
the price is around $10-15 depending on which show you get and how many songs the download has in it. They average about 2-4 CD's per download set after it is decompressed from SHN and burned to audio CD.
Apparently, they plan on releasing previous shows and all future shows in this format. It's a nice change from the $25 each for the live albums they had put out previously.
Maybe some day, other bands will follow suit.
For those of you who just want one song, and are willing to pay MORE than it would cost at the CD store just so you only pay for one song, you should probably start listening to better music that isn't on the top 40. top 40 is just a measurement of how much the CD stores were force fed that particular album by the record label, it isn't a measurement of quality or popularity by any means.
If this new service has all the songs from all the labels, full length and in a reasonable format for both lossy and non-lossy compression (read: not encyrpted for DRM), it might be a decent thing. But at 99 cents a song, only lossy downloads, and probably not many artists signed up for it, add the fact that it will say DMCA and DRM all over the package, and I doubt this service will do any good.
"Do the heards really wear out?"
Yes they do, but it depends on the cartrige on how long they last. also, sometimes they get clogged and its hard to get them working good after that.
I can get a cartrige to work for many refills, but the print quality goes down(slightly) with every refill. So I replace them every once in a while.
"The people of the US --and I am an American citizen born and raised-- have allowed themselves to be trapped by being too permissive with monopolies."
I agree with this 100%. It's a shame we have let corporations make the laws and appoint the judges.
We sell HP and lexmark inks where I work. Trust me, the markup isn't from the retailer. There is a (very) slight possibility that our distributer is gouging us, but our cheapest vendor is only slightly less than our most expensive vendor in the ink world. I can say for almost a 100% certainty that the ink price gouging comes from the manufacturer. This is the exact opposite to the cable industry, where computer cables are marked up between 100% and 500% by the retailer (this is from the MSRP, which we don't follow). Since we use our same markup on these cables are our other products, we have undercut our local competition in cables by over 100-500% in almost every instance.
Interestingly, we sell an HP color inkjet printer for 76$, and we sell the ink cartriges for that printer for 89$ (this is the price for both color and black). We have the same margin on all 3 products. Lexmark does the same exact thing, but we don't sell their printers, just the inks.
We have a guy that comes around and picks up our empty inks that people bring back for us to recycle. We can get 1-5 dollars each (model, brand dependant). They ship them to africa to be refilled, and then resold later in asia. One reason is because of this copyright BS lexmark is pushing on everyone.
Contrary to popular belief, the circuitry and printhead on the cartrige itself is what costs the most. The guy we sell our used inks to can get up to $10-$15 on some models, and the people refilling them are still making a profit even after shipping them across the world, refilling, cleaning, and reselling them for less than new. I have personally refilled my black cartriges for less than $5 each refill, and only after a few refills does the print quality go down (due to worn out print head)
Yes, so they search outside the database? So what is the criteria before its a good search? Is searching google enough? Should they search every database having to do with scientific studies related to the invention? Should they search every html document on the internet that isn't password protected? Should they go even further and search every printed document ever published? There is a line. They have clearly drawn it. Where that line exactly is is irrelevant. It has been drawn, and it is at its maximum for its current budget. If you want to change that line, like I said, go talk to YOUR LEGISLATURE.
Bitching about the patent office's policy isn't working, will not work, and will never work. You can't search everything, and trying to do so is a waste of resources. It is the responsibility of the patent applicant to know if they are violating prior art. It is only the responsibility of the patent office to do a minor double check to make sure the company isn't blantly BSing.
Ok, so lets imagine you want these underpaid "patent experts" that work at the patent office to do better searches. So we are going to have to pay them significantly better. For that, patent applications will have to raise in price to compensate. Now, only big corporations can afford patents. wow, now all of a sudden we are in a worse situation than we were before!
The simple answer? You can't expect an office that processes paperwork to know everything about everything ever invented. That is what you want, and it ain't happening buddy. The USPTO was never designed to employ experts that can find similarities in every invention ever made. That isn't their job, and it never has been. Look elsewhere for a solution.
Others have mentioned the possibility of holding patent holders liable for infringing prior art. Maybe this is a good idea. Companies that spend millions on lawyers to sue people with a prior art claim are fraudulent, and should be punished. But but they aren't because no law punishes for this. If you think that patent holders should be held liable for patents infringing prior art (when they sue and lose), that is not a policy that can be changed from within the patent office.
As has been pointed out countless times, it is not the responsibility of the USPTO to search outside their database of already existing patents to find prior art. If you want them to, or think they should, maybe you should stop complaining about how the office is run, and start worrying about changing some laws.
With all due respect, maybe YOU should find out how its done *now*. You just described, more or less, the exact opposite process one goes through in the US to get a patent.
The problem with your reasoning is that your wrong. The patent office does NOT search outside the patent database for prior art. In order for them to do that, they would be required to staff experts in any field that a patent could be obtained. They don't, and so they don't. The only way you can get your idea rejected is if it's 1) in the patent database already, or 2) its a really obviously been invented before to the secretary that files it (ie, a fork probably isn't in the database, but obvioulsy there is prior art if someone were to apply for a patent for a fork), or 3) if the idea isn't patentable. Prior art outside the patent registry is for the judge to determine in current US patent laws.
Writing two patents, and reading many has nothing to do with your knowledge of how the USPTO grants patents. Don't bitch about how they grant patents. It's not the secretary's fault. If you want to change it, go to your legislator. It's not the USPTO's fault.
The patent office can only do so much to protect you. They are not an all knowing database that claims responsibility to every bad patent. They give out patents, keep them on record, and do a "reasonable" search for prior art. Whatever the definition of reasonable is is irrelevant. The company who did the sueing, and did the patent getting is the fraudulent company, and should be the person paying for the defense if they lose.
If the USPO was liable for this, do you really want your tax dollars coming out of it to pay for a defense that was there because of a fraudulent company? I didn't think so.
If you apply for a patent and didn't bother checking for prior art yourself (or in this case, purposely ignore that prior art fraudulently) then you are negligent, and self responsible for all costs pertaining to protecting that fraudulent patent.
This is how the law works now. Changing it so the government is liable for fraud of another company is just fucking ridiculous. If you want the defense costs to be reimbused, why not try to come up with an idea that punishes the fraudulent companies, and not the innocent tax payers.
Since when is it illegal to lie while not under oath or in public? It isn't.
Have a nice day RIAA/MPAA/BSA
your missing the point of why telecommunications was origionally, and still is, regulated.
It was regulated because the landlines had to be laid. The government granted monopolies to the companies laying cable, in exchange for their willingness to sell wholesale time on these cables. This created a government mandated monopoly that still allowed fair competition.
VoIP doesn't depend on these granted monopolised cables any more than the regular internet does (which is already regulated by the FCC because most ISP's still have to use these regulated copper and fiber cables owned by the telco). Regulating VoIP with yet another layer of restriction would be double restriction. There is already plenty of _healthy_ competition between ISPs. for these reasons, a second layer of regulation is not needed.
The only reason anybody would want to regulate VoIP the same as landline telephones is so the bells can stay in business. But in the end, we shouldn't be passing laws to keep failing, obsolete, inefficient, and humanity damaging business models afloat.
No. Fair use *does* allow copies for personal use.
Fair use has been clearly defined by the US Supreme Court for years. There is no *might* about it.
Willfull copyright violation for profit is a fealony. You CAN force them, physically, to stop making copies. It is a criminal offence that any police officer can enforce, legally.
(that is assuming you can find them)
You are missing the point of copyright law.
Copyright law covers COPYING and DISTRIBUTING works. It is not part of contract law, and even if it did, the GNU GPL is NOT a contract. Therefore, it does not fall under contract law. The GNU GPL is a LICENSE.
Under US copyright laws, you are not allowed to copy any covered work (except for fair use) without the copyright owner's permission. This permission could come in the form of a license, or a contract. The GNU GPL is the license that gives permission to any licenseholder to copy and redistribute the program if certain constraints are met. This document is the "permission" that is required by copyright law. It doesn't need to be tested to be enforceable. And it doesn't have to be a contract. It isn't a contract, and thus doesnt fall under your hypothetical case's circumstances.
As is noted a hunderd thousand times on slashdot every year, you don't have to agree to the GNU GPL just because you use the program. You only have to follow the GPL when you make copies not covered under fair use.
Too bad fair use allows copies for personal use(which is exactly the case you describe).
If this was a mainframe computer that was giving all this data to multiple users, you might have a prayer, but no court will convict if someone is copying it for personal use(copying for personal use for convenience factor is acceptable). This by definition, is covered under the "Fair Use Doctrine" which was defined by the US Supreme Court.
You must also realize that if you are not distributing anything, Fair Use is extremely loose on copy restrictions. However, if you distribute it, you practically can't do ANYTHING to it first without permission.
Yes, barring fair use, which explicitly allows you to do this unless you re-distribute the work. Which you aren't.
Short answer is that you can modify any work under fair use for your OWN PERSONAL USE and not for someone else. If your web browser cuts out ads, then that is legal, and no US Code that is currently existance disallows these modifications.
Aside from this point, there is still the legal rammifications that there is no US Law which states it is illegal to build, distribute, or use tools that can modify copyrighted works (unless the work is encrypted and covered under the DMCA)
If an ISP started doing this at his firewall, and then re-distributing the web site to your computer after you request it, then this might be illegal. They might be able to argue that one party is getting the work, modifying it, and redistributing it, which is certaintly not covered under the Fair Use Doctrine.
OTOH, if the ISP has a fair use reason to do this (such as reformatting the text to work on a text only terminal), then this may also be legal.
What it all boils down to is that the spirit of copyright laws are restricting COPYING and REDISTRIBUTING, not how a person uses those works. This has been true untill 1998 when the DMCA was enacted, and even now is still true for all copyrighted works that are not covered under the DMCA's encryption clauses. To this day, I have yet to find a website that is encrypted for purposes of the DMCA protection. Untill this changes, they won't have any legal legs to stand on.
type about:[any word here] and it is supposed to display the word, of if the text says "blank" then it gives you a blank page. However, there is special code to handle the word "mozilla" that turns your page blue.
I dont know why, but I'm quite sure it is intentionally different than the expected result
"There is a difference in obtaining a product legally and utilizing it legally"
This is the mistake. There is no such thing as utilizing a product legally unless it breaks federal, state, or local laws. Copyright law does not mention the use of a work. It only describes how you can copy a work, and how you cannot. Any restriction not involving COPYING in an EULA (read that word again, COPYRIGHT is about COPYING, and US copyright laws ONLY cover copying, and not using) is not legal unless you sign a contract that is legally binding (for example, they give you extra rights, and take some of them away). Contracts are NOT legally binding unless you recieve something in return for giving up your right to Fair Use. No, the "right" to use the program doesn't count. This was already paid for when you bought the package at the store.
IANAL, but this is incorrect information.
The act of purchasing the product (whether its a license to use the software in the box or anything) Is proof enough you did not obtain the product illegally.
After you obtain any copyrighted work legally, you have the legal right to do all of the following with said product, no matter what the EULA says:
1) make backup copies n number of times of the copyrighted work (where n is a number defined by the license purchaser to describe the number of copies you need for your personal and backup use)
2) re-sell the license and copyrighted work at a any price determined by you, but only if you destroy all copies you previously made.
3) use backup copies of the copyrighted work you purchased even if someone misplaces or steals the origional copy.
4) use the copyrighted work in any way defined by the "fair use doctrine" as defined by the U.S. Supreme Court
Everyone here needs to realize. NO BSA parts of ANY EULA have EVER been successfully litigated in federal or state court in the United States. Software licenses fall under the EXACT SAME LAW as music, books, movies, poems, etc. You have EVERY RIGHT to fair use as defined by the Supreme Court. These rights are given to you by nature of being a U.S. Citizen.
Secondly, EULA's are not legally abiding if they TAKE "fair use rights" away. the U.S. Supreme Court has defined EXACTLY what you can legally do with ANY copyrighted work legally obtained. An EULA can only give you EXTRA rights, not defined in the U.S. Copyright Clause. EULA's are contracts. In order for you to sign your rights away, you must be gaining something in RETURN. BUT, you ALREADY PAID for your copy of the copyrighted work, so the usage of the program is covered under that cost. If the contract that is the EULA takes rights away, it must also grant you extra rights. If it does not, the contract is null and void. Contracts are not a replacement for copyright law, no matter how much the BSA, or Microsoft will say it is. Once you paid money for the product, you can LEGALLY use the program under normal copyright law, with no extra rights.
Secondary to the above, even IF the contract is legit (ie, both parties agree to exchange something) you still do not have to agree to it. "Shrinkwrap" licenses are not signed, and are not agreed to. The only EULA I am aware of that is enforceable (but realize, it is still only enforceable under normal contract law, read above) is ones that force you to click "I agree" during install. However, If you can figure out how to install the software without pressing "I Agree" then you can legally use the software under currently existing copyright law with no reguard to the EULA.
As a third item, _NO_ EULA can EVER take the following rights away:
1) clean room reverse engineering
2) decompilation for reasons of clean room reverse engineering.
3) modifications to the software (but you can't re-distribute it w/ mods)
If any lawyer claims these rights as revokeable by them or your company, they are commiting federal fraud, and can be held liable for your damages plus, and have their license taken away or suspended.
It's your rights being taken away. You choose if you lose them. If you act weak, you lose. Period.
1) SPAM all businesses with lawyer letters claiming damages of millions of dollars with a 30 day payment deadline.
2) ???
4) profit!
If I started doing this, I would get sent to jail for fraud. Maybe someone should check into it.
and one that is in use today, is to not accept any public email at all.
The US Senate and House of Representatives have their member's websites with a contact page utilizing a web form to submit letters. Since this email address is hidden by the web server, the only spam that could possibly get to senators is someone specifically writing a program to submit information for that specific web form.
Since no spammer would need to spam senators (unless someone tries to mail bomb them, but that is an other issue all together), nobody would spam them.
This also solves the problem with the post office mail and anthrax problems that happened just after 9/11. The quickest way to contact your senator is by fax, but even this web form is higher priority than snail mail.
This is exactly the problem with artsd. It currently has no hardware capabilities. Everything it does is in software. If i have a $10,000 card that can have /dev/dsp opened 23048032498 times, artsd can use 1 of them, and you fall back to "software" mixing.
/dev/dsp up to 32 times. What if i have 33 applications that want to send sound to the device? Using arts' method, I must mix all that sound in software. Using a proper sound daemon, I would send all the streams to the daemon, and it would prioritize the hardware opens on /dev/dsp to the applications that need it, and the applications that won't be bothered using a software mixer can be mixed in software as the 32nd channel.
In my opinion, the correct behavior is as you described it. Have the sound daemon allocate the hardware resources, and if there aren't enough, fall back to software mixing.
For example: Imagine i have a EMU10k1 sound device. I can open
Running a 3d game through artsd while at the same time running your desktop sounds (ICQ, IRC, etc etc etc...) into the same software mixer IMO isn't a clean solution, and it essentially dumbs down all sound cards into a $5 SB16. This is wastefull.
My suggestions are a little different than the others, but I just want to tell you another perspective that might have been overlooked.
Career wise, you seem to be a graphics designer. Now, I'm not a computer scientist or computer engineer, but I do know how to program (basics) and I know more than one language. I have found that even if your job isn't to program, knowing how to do it, and knowing a few languages, will dramatically help your understanding and marketability in this particluar jobmarket. You need to be able to communicate with the developers in a way that both of you are on the same ballpark. Developers like to have a say in how their program is used, and trying to develop the most efficient interface to an application is not possible without the developers cooperation. Likewise, developers must work with the graphics designers to be able to provide in the application what the designers need to make the efficient UI.
The other suggestions are great, and if you are just wanting to toy around with open source programs, and help to improve them somewhat, then thats fine. But my suggestion that would be IMO a wise career move would be to learn how to program.
It's easy to sign up for a couple programing classes, or just buy a book and learn. I am not going to suggest which language to start with, because everyone has their preference. Computer engineers and computer scientists know better what languages can do what tasks with the most readability and structure and with the least work. However, I can say that if you wanted to help a project such as KDE, learning C++ and Python would be your best bet. If you wanted to help GNOME, you should probably learn C. The final step is to familiarize yourself with the standard toolkits on their respective platform (QT for KDE, GTK+ for GNOME).
That is all it takes. Once you know the basics of programing, and if you happened to learn C++, helping improve KDE applications would be that much easier, and more developers would be willing to take a look at a patch which made their application conform to the UI Guidelines on freedesktop.org before they will be willing to read criticism on what they need to do and need not to do in their UI.
If your not willing to learn to program, probably the best way to help improve a project like KDE in the UI area would be to submit detailed bug reports explaining what needs to be changed in order to conform the application to the freedesktop.org guidelines.
Or, maybe you should contact freedesktop.org and see if they need help developing these guidelines.
"Funny how a lot of these same users bashed MacOS (up to 9.x) for not having true preemptive multitasking, etc. etc. ..."
/.)
Did you take a survey and find out that most of the same people that bashed MacOS 9.x are touting their new wintel dual cpu machine?
Funny how you are bashing windows for crashing when the problem lies with drivers from a 3rd party driver from Handspring, and has absolutely nothing to do with a problem with the actual OS. And then try to contrast these problems with the MacOS to try to make it look better than it is, even though classic os is a POS and the features you list have nothing to do with eachother.
Conclusion: You are a mac troll. (not that I would expect any different on the mac forum on
your example is a little different than actuality, here's what really happened:
(RAMBUS's business model)
1) Go to JDEC meeting
2) sign a contract that says you cannot patent technology introduced into the JDEC specification, and you must reveal all patents you hold or are pending that may conflict with the JDEC specification
3) Use JDEC specifications to produce a patent on memory technology. Also, introduce your (patented) ideas at the JDEC meeting and get it in the JDEC standard.
4) ???
5) Pofit!