RIAA companies can do anything they want with the artists they sign. My beef with record companies involves the extent to which they have arranged the laws to suit their needs. Nobody should be able to do that.
Speaking of contractual rights, copyright is a contract between the holder and the public. In exchange for paying the cost of enforcing the copyright, the work becomes public after a number of years. Oops, unless the entertainment industry bribes Congress to change the law.
Does anybody still have sympathy for the RIAA any more? They've been acting like a bunch of selfish 4-year-olds for years. "They're only protecting their legal rights." Record companies excel at doing exactly what is required of them and nothing more. They've honed this skill over decades of writing usurious recording contracts. And when that's not enough they get new laws written to suit their needs. What they do is wrong.
If you live in Utah, please VOTE AGAINST Senator Orrin Hatch, the entertainment industry's number one toadie and one of the most technologically clueless legislators in the country. He's the guy who a couple years back said record companies should be allowed to attack the computers of people whom they suspected of copyright infringement.
If you live in Kansas, please VOTE FOR for Senator Sam Brownback, who introduced the bill last year that stopped the RIAA from getting rubber-stamped subpoenas for identities of internet users they decided had infringed them.
If you live anywhere else and you are interested in the copyright issue, don't just read Slashdot, look up your senator's voting record and vote accordingly.
Not to mention videophone apps. Every employee would have full-screen teleconferencing available any time. That's my bet for what will drive this into office networks bigtime.
Niven and Pournelle depicted something like this about 30 years ago in their novel, The Mote in God's Eye. Humans encounter a clever race of aliens (the "Moties") who excel at improvising and cooperation. Rather than live by complicated rules as we do, they invent solutions as problems arise. Roads have no lanes or traffic controls; vehicles swarm along seemingly without organization, but nobody crashes. Pedestrians simply walk through traffic and it avoids them. Things get hairy when the Moties set about reconfiguring the systems aboard the humans' ship, just because they can.
This has long been a favorite book of mine. I hope it gets turned into a movie, now that we have the technology to do it really well.
sooner or later you'll get to the point where the lawyers won't touch a case that _does_ have merit because they think it would be too risky.
As opposed to now, where it's hard to find a lawyer to take a case that's not lucrative enough. We've been at that point for many years and the system is still working somehow. I don't see the downside of adding another arbitrary criterion, based on ethics instead of money, that might relieve us of some of these nonsensical suits.
"The TIS Committee grants you a non-exclusive, worldwide, royalty-free license to use the information disclosed in this Specification to make your software TIS-compliant..."
Pretty straightforward, isn't it? Should it be obvious to SCO's lawyers that the ELF infringement claim has no value? YES! Knowing this, should their rudimentary sense of ethics tell them NOT to help bring this suit? YES!! Should lawyers be held PERSONALLY responsible for participating in worthless suits like this that waste everybody else's time and money? HELL YES!!!
People would have access to a large library of music, and the
artists would be recieving compensation.
By putting artists in italics, apparently you want to emphasize that the artists are getting some of this money. That's probably not true. The artists who have contracts with RIAA companies rarely receive any compensation from the sale or CDs or downloads. Under a standard recording contract all the costs of production, advertising, distribution, shipping, etc, etc, etc come out of the artist's percentage, so they usually don't receive a dime. The RIAA companies hide behind the smoke screen of protecting the artists from the evil "pirates," but it's a big lie and always has been. The fact that the RIAA companies are making this offer at all tells me that either a) it costs less and nets them more than filing thousands of lawsuits, or b) they think it will gall their customers less. In any case, it's not about the artists, it's about egomaniacs in expensive suits, who think music couldn't exist without them.
Copyright protection isn't a privilege, unless you start with the assumption that nobody has the right to publish anything unless the government specifically says so. That's not true, at least not in the US or UK. Rather, copyright is a restriction imposed on everybody other than the copyright holder. But more than that, it is a Contract between the copyright holder and the public. The public pays for the government to protect the material for a limited time, and at the end of that time the public gets free access to the material. That eventual free access is the payoff to the public, in exchange for the expense of maintaining and enforcing the copyright system.
The copy-making industry, which has largely turned into a rights-control industry, takes the very different position that the only thing the public is ever entitled to is the privilege of paying to use whatever material is offered, under whatever conditions are imposed by the rights holder. This is a new and one-sided philosophy, which does not reflect the way copyright was ever meant to function.
What's wrong with the US Congress extending copyright for the entire useful life of the material is that the public essentially gets nothing of value when the copyright expires. That's assuming that Congress ever actually does let copyrights expire from now on. The US Supreme Court has specifically ruled that "a limited time" can mean "forever" if Congress says so.
"Good luck," said Paul Ryan, Acacia's chief executive. "Their chances are pretty remote."
The comfortable smugness of this modern-day pirate really galls me. I wonder how cocky he would be if he drove home one night after a hard day's work and found a pile of smoking rubble where his house used to be? Or if his car blew up in his face one morning when he turned the key? I'm not threatening or advocating doing any of these things, but surely thoughts like these must be going through the heads of many borderline psychotics, who feel that the world they live in is essentially being stolen piece by piece, in plain view and with the full support of the government.
The only reason people get away with this kind of crap is that they know they can depend on a certain level of civil behavior on the part of everyone else. They seem to feel that as long as they perform all the legal technical details correctly, nobody can touch them. They are like people who step purposefully off the curb with nary a glance at the traffic, confident that as pedestrians they have the legal right of way over cars, and therefore nobody can possibly run over them.
But there is a limit to people's willingness to bend over and squeal like a pig. At some point the possibility of getting caught and going to jail is not enough of an inhibitor. As acts of political terrorism become more commonplace, I think we are going to start seeing acts of domestic terrorism against individuals who flaunt their abuse of the system. I don't look forward to living in that type of environment, from a moral standpoint I can't say that I will completely blame the terrorists.
Back in the days of coffee can HBO receivers, a friend of mine who made them told me he had read about an antenna design involving concentric rings of aluminum foil, properly spaced on a flat surface, which simulated a parabolic dish. I know nothing whatsoever about antenna design. Does this sound like something that would actually work, and could it work for WiFi?
My first reaction to this was that it sounded really interesting because I couldn't think of an easy real-world analog. It's not like graffiti, because the notes aren't seen by everybody, you have to look for them. More like guestbooks. But not like guestbooks either, because you have to look for them too or you don't know they are there.
Its really more like Usenet, except you have to physically go to where each newsgroup is instead of them coming to you. And like Usenet, if this type of thing ever became truly public I bet it would be vandalized by spammers and idiots and rendered practically unusable.
It only applies if a large portion of the potential traffic was aware of the prediction
Not necessarily. Depending on the situation, the threshold number of people whose behavior can change the situation will vary; could be large or small.
Where I live (Seattle) the state DOT puts up a GREAT online traffic map, which I check religiously before hitting the road. I hope it someday incorporates technology like this.
If copyrights ended 7 or 8 years after the death of the artist, Yoko Ono would be no worse off than the other 4 billion people in the world who manage to survive somehow without income from John Lennon's music.
And why do they want editorial control? Money. Read further in the article.... the Nation estate accused the BBC of ignoring copyright laws and said the corporation was trying to "ruin the brand of the Daleks".
Brand? Ruin the "brand" of the Daleks? Doesn't sound like any sort of artistic interest to me. Sounds more like typical "content owners" worrying about the value of their "properties" and the income stream from toys, action figures, comic books, etc.
UPS could just as well start a pizza company, contracting out the making of the pizza and just doing the delivery. They could not only deliver the pizza but also keep their subcontractor kitchens supplied with ingredients. Come to think of it, why should they be satisfied to deliver goods for other companies? They could run their own online ordering service like Amazon.com.
Slashdot Mirror
Yeah, this story really belongs on Fark. But then, many Slashdot stories are on Fark a day ahead of Slashdot.
Probably not a lot of 29-year-olds who know most of them either.
But I second the cave-girl Racquel as Luan-n-n-a. Or the new improved Goldie Hawn (rent The Banger Sisters).
RIAA companies can do anything they want with the artists they sign. My beef with record companies involves the extent to which they have arranged the laws to suit their needs. Nobody should be able to do that.
Speaking of contractual rights, copyright is a contract between the holder and the public. In exchange for paying the cost of enforcing the copyright, the work becomes public after a number of years. Oops, unless the entertainment industry bribes Congress to change the law.
Does anybody still have sympathy for the RIAA any more? They've been acting like a bunch of selfish 4-year-olds for years. "They're only protecting their legal rights." Record companies excel at doing exactly what is required of them and nothing more. They've honed this skill over decades of writing usurious recording contracts. And when that's not enough they get new laws written to suit their needs. What they do is wrong.
If you live in Utah, please VOTE AGAINST Senator Orrin Hatch, the entertainment industry's number one toadie and one of the most technologically clueless legislators in the country. He's the guy who a couple years back said record companies should be allowed to attack the computers of people whom they suspected of copyright infringement.
If you live in Kansas, please VOTE FOR for Senator Sam Brownback, who introduced the bill last year that stopped the RIAA from getting rubber-stamped subpoenas for identities of internet users they decided had infringed them.
If you live anywhere else and you are interested in the copyright issue, don't just read Slashdot, look up your senator's voting record and vote accordingly.
Not to mention videophone apps. Every employee would have full-screen teleconferencing available any time. That's my bet for what will drive this into office networks bigtime.
Niven and Pournelle depicted something like this about 30 years ago in their novel, The Mote in God's Eye . Humans encounter a clever race of aliens (the "Moties") who excel at improvising and cooperation. Rather than live by complicated rules as we do, they invent solutions as problems arise. Roads have no lanes or traffic controls; vehicles swarm along seemingly without organization, but nobody crashes. Pedestrians simply walk through traffic and it avoids them. Things get hairy when the Moties set about reconfiguring the systems aboard the humans' ship, just because they can.
This has long been a favorite book of mine. I hope it gets turned into a movie, now that we have the technology to do it really well.
"Before applying Service Pack 2, make sure a full backup of the PC is implemented. "
As if they think anybody who has read this article is going to actually install SP2???
In the short term, feeding the troops their own urine causes desertion.
sooner or later you'll get to the point where the lawyers won't touch a case that _does_ have merit because they think it would be too risky.
As opposed to now, where it's hard to find a lawyer to take a case that's not lucrative enough. We've been at that point for many years and the system is still working somehow. I don't see the downside of adding another arbitrary criterion, based on ethics instead of money, that might relieve us of some of these nonsensical suits.
"The TIS Committee grants you a non-exclusive, worldwide, royalty-free license to use the information disclosed in this Specification to make your software TIS-compliant..."
Pretty straightforward, isn't it?
Should it be obvious to SCO's lawyers that the ELF infringement claim has no value? YES!
Knowing this, should their rudimentary sense of ethics tell them NOT to help bring this suit? YES!!
Should lawyers be held PERSONALLY responsible for participating in worthless suits like this that waste everybody else's time and money? HELL YES!!!
By putting artists in italics, apparently you want to emphasize that the artists are getting some of this money. That's probably not true. The artists who have contracts with RIAA companies rarely receive any compensation from the sale or CDs or downloads. Under a standard recording contract all the costs of production, advertising, distribution, shipping, etc, etc, etc come out of the artist's percentage, so they usually don't receive a dime. The RIAA companies hide behind the smoke screen of protecting the artists from the evil "pirates," but it's a big lie and always has been. The fact that the RIAA companies are making this offer at all tells me that either a) it costs less and nets them more than filing thousands of lawsuits, or b) they think it will gall their customers less. In any case, it's not about the artists, it's about egomaniacs in expensive suits, who think music couldn't exist without them.
Copyright protection isn't a privilege, unless you start with the assumption that nobody has the right to publish anything unless the government specifically says so. That's not true, at least not in the US or UK. Rather, copyright is a restriction imposed on everybody other than the copyright holder. But more than that, it is a Contract between the copyright holder and the public. The public pays for the government to protect the material for a limited time, and at the end of that time the public gets free access to the material. That eventual free access is the payoff to the public, in exchange for the expense of maintaining and enforcing the copyright system.
The copy-making industry, which has largely turned into a rights-control industry, takes the very different position that the only thing the public is ever entitled to is the privilege of paying to use whatever material is offered, under whatever conditions are imposed by the rights holder. This is a new and one-sided philosophy, which does not reflect the way copyright was ever meant to function.
What's wrong with the US Congress extending copyright for the entire useful life of the material is that the public essentially gets nothing of value when the copyright expires. That's assuming that Congress ever actually does let copyrights expire from now on. The US Supreme Court has specifically ruled that "a limited time" can mean "forever" if Congress says so.
The comfortable smugness of this modern-day pirate really galls me. I wonder how cocky he would be if he drove home one night after a hard day's work and found a pile of smoking rubble where his house used to be? Or if his car blew up in his face one morning when he turned the key? I'm not threatening or advocating doing any of these things, but surely thoughts like these must be going through the heads of many borderline psychotics, who feel that the world they live in is essentially being stolen piece by piece, in plain view and with the full support of the government.
The only reason people get away with this kind of crap is that they know they can depend on a certain level of civil behavior on the part of everyone else. They seem to feel that as long as they perform all the legal technical details correctly, nobody can touch them. They are like people who step purposefully off the curb with nary a glance at the traffic, confident that as pedestrians they have the legal right of way over cars, and therefore nobody can possibly run over them.
But there is a limit to people's willingness to bend over and squeal like a pig. At some point the possibility of getting caught and going to jail is not enough of an inhibitor. As acts of political terrorism become more commonplace, I think we are going to start seeing acts of domestic terrorism against individuals who flaunt their abuse of the system. I don't look forward to living in that type of environment, from a moral standpoint I can't say that I will completely blame the terrorists.
Back in the days of coffee can HBO receivers, a friend of mine who made them told me he had read about an antenna design involving concentric rings of aluminum foil, properly spaced on a flat surface, which simulated a parabolic dish. I know nothing whatsoever about antenna design. Does this sound like something that would actually work, and could it work for WiFi?
I vaguely remember about the post-it notes thing too. It might have been called sticky-something?
And incidentally, those widgets really do suck ass.
Freedom is Slavery.
Profit is Loss.
Sadly, there are no statistics about God killing kittens, which is what Usenet is all about.
My first reaction to this was that it sounded really interesting because I couldn't think of an easy real-world analog. It's not like graffiti, because the notes aren't seen by everybody, you have to look for them. More like guestbooks. But not like guestbooks either, because you have to look for them too or you don't know they are there.
Its really more like Usenet, except you have to physically go to where each newsgroup is instead of them coming to you. And like Usenet, if this type of thing ever became truly public I bet it would be vandalized by spammers and idiots and rendered practically unusable.
Next stop: downtown Seattle with a cardboard sign, "will write online editorials for food."
It only applies if a large portion of the potential traffic was aware of the prediction
Not necessarily. Depending on the situation, the threshold number of people whose behavior can change the situation will vary; could be large or small.
Where I live (Seattle) the state DOT puts up a GREAT online traffic map, which I check religiously before hitting the road. I hope it someday incorporates technology like this.
If copyrights ended 7 or 8 years after the death of the artist, Yoko Ono would be no worse off than the other 4 billion people in the world who manage to survive somehow without income from John Lennon's music.
And why do they want editorial control? Money. Read further in the article. ... the Nation estate accused the BBC of ignoring copyright laws and said the corporation was trying to "ruin the brand of the Daleks".
Brand? Ruin the "brand" of the Daleks? Doesn't sound like any sort of artistic interest to me. Sounds more like typical "content owners" worrying about the value of their "properties" and the income stream from toys, action figures, comic books, etc.
Or at least considered as dangerous, volatile materials capable of causing massive damage.
UPS could just as well start a pizza company, contracting out the making of the pizza and just doing the delivery. They could not only deliver the pizza but also keep their subcontractor kitchens supplied with ingredients. Come to think of it, why should they be satisfied to deliver goods for other companies? They could run their own online ordering service like Amazon.com.
I like Lunabago! How about the Terrain Traversing Reroutable Robot (Tatertot)?