But the reality is that if someone only makes 1-10 units then the patent holder is exceptionally unlikely to even notice.
That one can get away with breaking a law isn't an excuse for doing so.
There was a time when I wanted to use an open source MPEG-4 player on our PalmOS devices at home. I actually got a patent license from MPEG LA, since there are no fees for under 100,000 units or so. I expressly told them that I'd just be doing this for personal use. They sent me the license agreements overnight. Twice a year, I've had had to report the number of units, so I duly reported one per installed build, each time I installed a build. I don't think they realized how absurdly costly this was for them. Too bad for them: I kind of hoped they'd say that with such a small number of units, they're fine with me doing it without a license.
Strictly speaking, going by the linked article, he never said that embryology (or evolution or the Big Bang, for the matter) was a lie. He said that all that he was taught about embryology, evolution or the Big Bang was a lie. In the case of evolution and the Big Bang that's probably not much of a distinction. In the case of embryology, it might be a bigger distinction.
IANAL, but I skimmed through the judge's decision, and it's not just for his downloading the stuff, but also for redistribution. The judge seems to think that one way to evaluate the costs of the redistribution would be to think about how much an unlimited license for all and sundry on the Internet for the songs would be worth.
That said, it sure seems excessive, but not as ridiculously excessive as it would be just for downloading.
I did google, never having heard of this method before. Cool. But actually, that's not the Pythagorean theorem. It's more like a converse to it (if c^2=a^2+b^2, then it's a right-angled triangle), but more precisely it's a qualitative application of the cosine rule: if c^2 is more than a^2+b^2 then cos theta is negative and the angle is more than 90 degrees, and if c^2 is less than a^2+b^2 then cos theta is positive and the angle is less than 90 degrees.
I've wondered for a while how people can do things like carpentry without trigonometry and the like. Yet obviously they can, and can do really well. Maybe some people are good at scale drawings--you can do a lot with good scale drawings (both on paper and, say, in Inkscape). Or really good at holding up one part to another, marking up where to cut, etc. Or even really good at eyeballing.
I very politely asked the developer of the PalmOS 2sky astronomy app for this. In asking, I emphasized that (a) all I needed was his agreement to license under GPL2+ and a copy of the source code, that (b) I would do all the maintenance and support and that (c) I am an experienced PalmOS developer, and I think I listed my shareware and open source credits. He agreed, telling me that he turned down an earlier request. I thanked him very much for his generosity. I think my emphasis on how little work he would have to do with the release was important. Before release, I had to rewrite and/or use an open source library as an alternative for some SDK example code that was being used and that was under an incompatible license, and then update some of the data. He even sent me a dump of his old website, which I updated and put at open2sky.sf.net .
In this, the hardest thing was actually tracking down the author and his email address. Then there was a lot of gruntwork rewriting code with an incompatible license, but that was fairly standard UI code.
I still regularly read books on my Palm TX--Plucker is a better ebook reader for my purposes than anything available for Android and PalmBible+ is better for my purposes than any Bible reader for Android (unsurprisingly, since I am a co-author of both apps)--but I now find the screen a bit small compared to my Epic 4G Touch.
I am having occasional freezes that require a momentary shorting of the battery to fix, so I expect it won't be that long before it dies completely.
The reason you can jailbreak the DMCA is that the DMCA allows the Copyright Office to make explicit exceptions to the DMCA, and the Copyright Office has chosen to make an exception for jailbreaking phones. The EFF is pushing for this to be extended to tablets and I sure hope they'll succeed.
Isn't the hierarchical nature of this basically just like the menu/submenu system, except that instead of a linear list popping up each time you press a successive key (for instance alt-i, n, r to insert a cross-reference), you get a messy two-dimensional array of icons? It seems to me that one can scan a linear list of text labels much faster than a two-dimensional array of icons, even if there are tooltips beside all of them (are there?).
I worked hard to let our IT people let me have Office 2003 on my new laptop. For unknown commands, I much prefer visually scanning a vertical list of text-based options rather than a messy two-dimensional arrangement of icons. Let's say I want to do something insert-ish. So, I press alt-i, and now I have a nice vertical text-based list of fairly self-explanatory commands that I can scan very quickly. And if I want I can then neatly navigate with the down-arrow to it without bothering with the mouse.
I guess I still really like PalmOS's UI design guidelines: use text instead of icons.:-)
If a language can be copyrighted, then it's the sort of thing of which there can be a copy. IANAL, but my understanding is that copies, for purposes of copyright law, are tangible objects, like pieces of paper with ink marks or CDs with etchings on them.
So what tangible object counts as a copy of, say, Java?
Here are three options: 1. A tangible copy of the source code of a program written in Java. 2. A tangible copy of a specification of Java. 3. A tangible copy of a Java compiler or interpreter.
Now, clearly neither 1 nor 3 is a copy of Java, since both contain copyrightable elements other than those from Java. At most, 1 and 3 are derived works from Java.
What about 2? I think that's the best bet. But 2 is a description of the Java language, and a description of a copyrightable work is not the same as the copyrightable work itself. Besides, a lot of creative work can go into a specification, and so a typical specification of Java can include copyrightable elements besides those of Java. So at most 2 is going to be a work derived from Java rather than a copy of Java.
So, it looks like a computer language is not something that there can be a copy of. But can copyright apply to something that cannot have a copy? Presumably not.
Here's an option, though. Maybe one could insist that a program in a language or a compiler or interpreter for it is a work derived from the specification of the language? Since specifications might be copyrightable, as they could have copyrightable elements, that might work. But it would be disastrous for everybody other than Prentice Hall, since then everybody who has a copy of a C or C++ compiler, or of the source code to a C or C++ program--and that, presumably, includes Oracle--is in violation of Prentice Hall's copyright on Kernighan and Ritchie's C book.
IANAL. But I would think that all that's needed for a derived work is that a copyrightable part of the original be a part of the derived work. If I copy the first three chapters of Gone With the Wind, and then write the rest from scratch, that's a derived work. In fact, in US jurisprudence, it's my understand that if I simply use a single character from a novel, that's a derived work.
So while Java doesn't contain C, it contains large chunks of C. Perhaps the "for(;;){}" construct counts like a character from a novel... I think that would be a terrible thing, but it would seem to kind of fit with the copyright of fictional characters.
I wish I had a laptop with 4:3. Most of my serious work on my new work laptop involves either running Microsoft Word or a TeX editor. I don't want to decrease the font size to the point where I can get two side-by-side pages, and I really hate the loss of vertical space with 16:9 versus the 4:3 that I had on my previous laptop. A 1:1 or portrait laptop would be even better. (Yes, a rotatable external monitor can be attached, but I do a lot of work while not at my office. I managed to get IT to let keep my old 4:3 external monitor for when I am in my office. But even in my office, I find it more comfortable to lean back in a comfy chair and use the laptop in the lap.)
As for movies, as long the physical width of the 4:3 screen stayed the same, and the screen just got taller (I wouldn't mind the lower portability much), it would be just as good. Black bars are no more problematic than a bezel on the screen.
Every couple of months, Netflix puts up a notice on the website that I should click to agree to their TOS. At least once, I noticed that eventually the notice started to sound more urgent. But it always disappears in the end.:-)
I wonder if their requesting that one click on "Agree" is an implicit admission that they cannot unilaterally change the TOS on us? Or is it that maybe that back when we signed up for Netflix (about 11 years ago), they forgot to put in a clause allowing them to change the terms unilaterally?
Something I've wondered about, as a non-lawyer, is how exactly the obviousness test works. Some solutions are obvious once you formulate the problem with sufficient specificity. Here the problem is something like: "How to make dynamic annotations by multiple authors, with different preferences about the distribution range for their annotations, usefully available to the user of an electronic work?" Given this formulation of the problem, the solution in this patent is pretty obvious.
But the problem itself isn't obvious. And there is an art to formulating a problem in such a way as makes a solution obvious. One could, after all, formulate the problem in a way that doesn't make this solution obvious: "How to do something really useful with an electronic work?" or even more specifically: "How to make an annotation system more sophisticated?"
And I know that when I implemented initial annotation support in the Plucker e-text reader for PalmOS in March, 2004, nothing as sophisticated as this patent occurred to me.
So, is the obviousness test a test of the obviousness of a solution or of the problem or both?
Sheckley is one of my favorites, too. There is a lot of bunch of stuff online, and much of it is hilarious and yet worth thinking about.
Re:That's why I like the basic Kindle
on
The eBook Backlash
·
· Score: 1
It's a matter of taste. I much prefer the way text looks on a backlit, properly subpixel antialiased display (not the Kindle Fire which screws up the subpixel antialiasing in three of four orientations), with good backlight brightness control (which on many devices requires a third-party app--I make one of them myself) and a good range of color choices (I particularly like reading green on black in the dark, and black on yellowish in daytime), instead of the grayish background and need for good ambient lighting of an e-ink screen. I don't like to read outdoors, and I don't like to have to turn on the light in whatever room I am reading in. Plus I much prefer scrolling to paging, and it's hard to do scrolling on e-ink.
Maybe it's just a matter of what one is used to? For the last eight years or so, most of my pleasure reading has been on backlit screens (mostly PalmOS 5 devices--yeah, I know, there was no subpixel antialiasing, but I wrote an app that at least did grayscale antialiasing). My daughter has an e-ink Kindle, which she loves, but I find reading from it not as nice as a backlit screen.
I don't know where the $200 estimate comes from. Currently, Amazon has a mirror monitor plus rear-view night vision camera for $69 (granted, that's a sale price) and for $53 a camera with a stand-alone monitor. Of course there is the labor to install, but there would be minimal labor cost if this was added at the factory, and economies of scale would bring the price down.
It depends how you take the quantifiers.:-) In first-order logic, "all As are Bs" is automatically true if there are no As. In the case at hand, there are no content owners, because nobody owns the bird songs (not even the birds). So, all content owners have reviewed the video and confirmed their claims. Likewise, all content owners have seven legs.
Nope. I can know something but be quite unable to prove it to anybody else. Suppose everyone knows I am a pathological liar and nobody believes anything I say since what I say is at least as likely to be false as to be true. Suppose that yesterday when I was out in the middle of nowhere, with no one else around, I clearly saw five birds flying in a pentagonal formation. I may know this as well as I know anything that I've seen with my own eyes, but be quite unable to prove it to anybody else, because nobody would believe anything I say.
Slashdot Mirror
I suppose there is no way to make Tor work only for users in repressive countries?
I don't think that committing rape and murder correlates with high intelligence.
There are tons of movies and TV series that just aren't available on Netflix or Amazon for rental.
But the reality is that if someone only makes 1-10 units then the patent holder is exceptionally unlikely to even notice.
That one can get away with breaking a law isn't an excuse for doing so.
There was a time when I wanted to use an open source MPEG-4 player on our PalmOS devices at home. I actually got a patent license from MPEG LA, since there are no fees for under 100,000 units or so. I expressly told them that I'd just be doing this for personal use. They sent me the license agreements overnight. Twice a year, I've had had to report the number of units, so I duly reported one per installed build, each time I installed a build. I don't think they realized how absurdly costly this was for them. Too bad for them: I kind of hoped they'd say that with such a small number of units, they're fine with me doing it without a license.
Strictly speaking, going by the linked article, he never said that embryology (or evolution or the Big Bang, for the matter) was a lie. He said that all that he was taught about embryology, evolution or the Big Bang was a lie. In the case of evolution and the Big Bang that's probably not much of a distinction. In the case of embryology, it might be a bigger distinction.
IANAL, but I skimmed through the judge's decision, and it's not just for his downloading the stuff, but also for redistribution. The judge seems to think that one way to evaluate the costs of the redistribution would be to think about how much an unlimited license for all and sundry on the Internet for the songs would be worth.
That said, it sure seems excessive, but not as ridiculously excessive as it would be just for downloading.
Except that it's harder to remember locations that are app-dependent, unlike hardware buttons that are app-independent.
I did google, never having heard of this method before. Cool. But actually, that's not the Pythagorean theorem. It's more like a converse to it (if c^2=a^2+b^2, then it's a right-angled triangle), but more precisely it's a qualitative application of the cosine rule: if c^2 is more than a^2+b^2 then cos theta is negative and the angle is more than 90 degrees, and if c^2 is less than a^2+b^2 then cos theta is positive and the angle is less than 90 degrees.
I've wondered for a while how people can do things like carpentry without trigonometry and the like. Yet obviously they can, and can do really well. Maybe some people are good at scale drawings--you can do a lot with good scale drawings (both on paper and, say, in Inkscape). Or really good at holding up one part to another, marking up where to cut, etc. Or even really good at eyeballing.
I very politely asked the developer of the PalmOS 2sky astronomy app for this. In asking, I emphasized that (a) all I needed was his agreement to license under GPL2+ and a copy of the source code, that (b) I would do all the maintenance and support and that (c) I am an experienced PalmOS developer, and I think I listed my shareware and open source credits. He agreed, telling me that he turned down an earlier request. I thanked him very much for his generosity. I think my emphasis on how little work he would have to do with the release was important. Before release, I had to rewrite and/or use an open source library as an alternative for some SDK example code that was being used and that was under an incompatible license, and then update some of the data. He even sent me a dump of his old website, which I updated and put at open2sky.sf.net .
In this, the hardest thing was actually tracking down the author and his email address. Then there was a lot of gruntwork rewriting code with an incompatible license, but that was fairly standard UI code.
I still regularly read books on my Palm TX--Plucker is a better ebook reader for my purposes than anything available for Android and PalmBible+ is better for my purposes than any Bible reader for Android (unsurprisingly, since I am a co-author of both apps)--but I now find the screen a bit small compared to my Epic 4G Touch.
I am having occasional freezes that require a momentary shorting of the battery to fix, so I expect it won't be that long before it dies completely.
Capacitive screens don't need a physical contact. Maybe that's what they're thinking?
The reason you can jailbreak the DMCA is that the DMCA allows the Copyright Office to make explicit exceptions to the DMCA, and the Copyright Office has chosen to make an exception for jailbreaking phones. The EFF is pushing for this to be extended to tablets and I sure hope they'll succeed.
Isn't the hierarchical nature of this basically just like the menu/submenu system, except that instead of a linear list popping up each time you press a successive key (for instance alt-i, n, r to insert a cross-reference), you get a messy two-dimensional array of icons? It seems to me that one can scan a linear list of text labels much faster than a two-dimensional array of icons, even if there are tooltips beside all of them (are there?).
I worked hard to let our IT people let me have Office 2003 on my new laptop. For unknown commands, I much prefer visually scanning a vertical list of text-based options rather than a messy two-dimensional arrangement of icons. Let's say I want to do something insert-ish. So, I press alt-i, and now I have a nice vertical text-based list of fairly self-explanatory commands that I can scan very quickly. And if I want I can then neatly navigate with the down-arrow to it without bothering with the mouse.
I guess I still really like PalmOS's UI design guidelines: use text instead of icons. :-)
If a language can be copyrighted, then it's the sort of thing of which there can be a copy. IANAL, but my understanding is that copies, for purposes of copyright law, are tangible objects, like pieces of paper with ink marks or CDs with etchings on them.
So what tangible object counts as a copy of, say, Java?
Here are three options:
1. A tangible copy of the source code of a program written in Java.
2. A tangible copy of a specification of Java.
3. A tangible copy of a Java compiler or interpreter.
Now, clearly neither 1 nor 3 is a copy of Java, since both contain copyrightable elements other than those from Java. At most, 1 and 3 are derived works from Java.
What about 2? I think that's the best bet. But 2 is a description of the Java language, and a description of a copyrightable work is not the same as the copyrightable work itself. Besides, a lot of creative work can go into a specification, and so a typical specification of Java can include copyrightable elements besides those of Java. So at most 2 is going to be a work derived from Java rather than a copy of Java.
So, it looks like a computer language is not something that there can be a copy of. But can copyright apply to something that cannot have a copy? Presumably not.
Here's an option, though. Maybe one could insist that a program in a language or a compiler or interpreter for it is a work derived from the specification of the language? Since specifications might be copyrightable, as they could have copyrightable elements, that might work. But it would be disastrous for everybody other than Prentice Hall, since then everybody who has a copy of a C or C++ compiler, or of the source code to a C or C++ program--and that, presumably, includes Oracle--is in violation of Prentice Hall's copyright on Kernighan and Ritchie's C book.
IANAL. But I would think that all that's needed for a derived work is that a copyrightable part of the original be a part of the derived work. If I copy the first three chapters of Gone With the Wind, and then write the rest from scratch, that's a derived work. In fact, in US jurisprudence, it's my understand that if I simply use a single character from a novel, that's a derived work.
So while Java doesn't contain C, it contains large chunks of C. Perhaps the "for(;;){}" construct counts like a character from a novel... I think that would be a terrible thing, but it would seem to kind of fit with the copyright of fictional characters.
I wish I had a laptop with 4:3. Most of my serious work on my new work laptop involves either running Microsoft Word or a TeX editor. I don't want to decrease the font size to the point where I can get two side-by-side pages, and I really hate the loss of vertical space with 16:9 versus the 4:3 that I had on my previous laptop. A 1:1 or portrait laptop would be even better. (Yes, a rotatable external monitor can be attached, but I do a lot of work while not at my office. I managed to get IT to let keep my old 4:3 external monitor for when I am in my office. But even in my office, I find it more comfortable to lean back in a comfy chair and use the laptop in the lap.)
As for movies, as long the physical width of the 4:3 screen stayed the same, and the screen just got taller (I wouldn't mind the lower portability much), it would be just as good. Black bars are no more problematic than a bezel on the screen.
Every couple of months, Netflix puts up a notice on the website that I should click to agree to their TOS. At least once, I noticed that eventually the notice started to sound more urgent. But it always disappears in the end. :-)
I wonder if their requesting that one click on "Agree" is an implicit admission that they cannot unilaterally change the TOS on us? Or is it that maybe that back when we signed up for Netflix (about 11 years ago), they forgot to put in a clause allowing them to change the terms unilaterally?
Something I've wondered about, as a non-lawyer, is how exactly the obviousness test works. Some solutions are obvious once you formulate the problem with sufficient specificity. Here the problem is something like: "How to make dynamic annotations by multiple authors, with different preferences about the distribution range for their annotations, usefully available to the user of an electronic work?" Given this formulation of the problem, the solution in this patent is pretty obvious.
But the problem itself isn't obvious. And there is an art to formulating a problem in such a way as makes a solution obvious. One could, after all, formulate the problem in a way that doesn't make this solution obvious: "How to do something really useful with an electronic work?" or even more specifically: "How to make an annotation system more sophisticated?"
And I know that when I implemented initial annotation support in the Plucker e-text reader for PalmOS in March, 2004, nothing as sophisticated as this patent occurred to me.
So, is the obviousness test a test of the obviousness of a solution or of the problem or both?
Sheckley is one of my favorites, too. There is a lot of bunch of stuff online, and much of it is hilarious and yet worth thinking about.
It's a matter of taste. I much prefer the way text looks on a backlit, properly subpixel antialiased display (not the Kindle Fire which screws up the subpixel antialiasing in three of four orientations), with good backlight brightness control (which on many devices requires a third-party app--I make one of them myself) and a good range of color choices (I particularly like reading green on black in the dark, and black on yellowish in daytime), instead of the grayish background and need for good ambient lighting of an e-ink screen. I don't like to read outdoors, and I don't like to have to turn on the light in whatever room I am reading in. Plus I much prefer scrolling to paging, and it's hard to do scrolling on e-ink.
Maybe it's just a matter of what one is used to? For the last eight years or so, most of my pleasure reading has been on backlit screens (mostly PalmOS 5 devices--yeah, I know, there was no subpixel antialiasing, but I wrote an app that at least did grayscale antialiasing). My daughter has an e-ink Kindle, which she loves, but I find reading from it not as nice as a backlit screen.
I don't know where the $200 estimate comes from. Currently, Amazon has a mirror monitor plus rear-view night vision camera for $69 (granted, that's a sale price) and for $53 a camera with a stand-alone monitor. Of course there is the labor to install, but there would be minimal labor cost if this was added at the factory, and economies of scale would bring the price down.
It depends how you take the quantifiers. :-) In first-order logic, "all As are Bs" is automatically true if there are no As. In the case at hand, there are no content owners, because nobody owns the bird songs (not even the birds). So, all content owners have reviewed the video and confirmed their claims. Likewise, all content owners have seven legs.
Nope. I can know something but be quite unable to prove it to anybody else. Suppose everyone knows I am a pathological liar and nobody believes anything I say since what I say is at least as likely to be false as to be true. Suppose that yesterday when I was out in the middle of nowhere, with no one else around, I clearly saw five birds flying in a pentagonal formation. I may know this as well as I know anything that I've seen with my own eyes, but be quite unable to prove it to anybody else, because nobody would believe anything I say.