That's the problem. If Congress wanted to exempt Disney or a few others from copyright expiration, they could have done it with a specific law addressing lucrative works. Or they could have instituted a general copyright extension that requires registration. What they have done instead is like turning off the Internet to stop file sharing.
Like all laws, copyright law is a contract between members of the public. The agreement of copyright is that when someone creates something original, the rest of us are obliged to respect the copyright and pay fees for copies of the work for a limited time. At the end of that time, we the people will own the work.
It's the same as when you sign a mortgage contract. You agree to pay $xxx/month for 30 years and then the house belongs to you. It would be insane for Congress to come along 28 years later and decide that, because that house is still valuable to the mortgage company, your 30-year mortgage is suddenly an 80-year mortgage. The contract you signed 28 years ago is void, and instead of 2 more years of payments ahead of you, you have 52, then they'll do the same thing.
Yes, that would be insane. But the Congress doesn't think so and the Supreme Court doesn't think so. And that, my friends, is "government of the people, by the people, and for the people," as Americans accept it today.
1. Banana plants are propagated from shoots taken from another banana plant. 2. Bananas are by far the most heavily sprayed crop in the world. 3. "Wild banana" would probably make a great name for a band.
This result has completely destroyed what little was left of my hope in American ideals. There's no point in pretending that our government has any public interest anymore. People who have enough money to buy what they want are officially aristocrats, and the rest of us are officially peasants. The judges on the Supreme Court were appointed to their lifetime positions by the same people who write laws to serve the same wealthy few. This is fascist America. Get used to it.
To me the saddest part is that it's probably beyond undoing. By the time our rulers become so arrogant that they piss off the general public enough to motivate a revolution, everybody will be so microchipped, geo-tracked and audited that revolution in America will no longer be possible. This niftly little bribery-fueled pseudo-democracy will probably stay in place until the next asteroid impact.
As usual, Lessig makes some great points. Unfortunately, expecting the litigation industry to learn from dojinshi is like expecting the pharmaceutical industry to embrace naturopathic healing. As he says at the end, it's really the business leaders themselves who have to learn this lesson and put it into action, taking their companies back from their attorneys, and in the process (quite incidentally) letting us participate in our own culture rather than merely "consuming" it.
Sure, plenty of people will buy Segways because they just have to have one. A guy I used to work with showed me his 1970 vintage, 4-function pocket calculator that cost him $400 new. That would be about $600 in today's dollars (or $2800 dog-dollars).
When the Klingons first ventured into space they immediately set about conquering every inhabited planet they encountered. Their overly ambitious expansion soon gave them an empire that was difficult for them to rule. As in the Roman Empire, the military forces on the frontier were highly autonomous, and what with the turmoil back home, many of the troops stationed faraway decided to settle down where they were, intermarry with locals and raise families.
After several generations various hybrid Klingon races became common on the frontier, assuming positions of authority and building and crewing their own starships. The first Klingons the Federation encountered were mostly of this type.
During the latter part of Kirk's career, the ruling clans undertook a vast campaign of racial cleansing, demoting or subjugating most of the hybrids. Those with distinguished service records (e.g. Kang) were allowed to take genetic therapy to remove "contaminants," which altered their appearance.
This brief episode of racial impurity, particularly the fact that the hybrids were often superior to pure-blooded Klingons in many ways (better organizers, less psycho) is tremendously embarassing to most Klingons. Hence Worf's extremely tight-lipped reaction -- "We do not speak of it."
Think about what Turkewitz is saying. Importing public domain material from Europe to the US is piracy.
I'm sure Neil firmly believes what he is saying, and that Jack Valenti firmly believes watching tv without watching the commercials is "theft of programming." These people live in a COMPLETELY unreal world, which is why we have to make them shut the hell up and go away, instead of letting them write our laws for us. This is why you should not buy RIAA music. Pay to listen to local bands, support musicians that distribute their own music online, ignore the RIAA-created fantasy world of big-time music and let the RIAA shrivel up and die.
Ok, say a guy is in the midst of a furious, raging battle, and this highly expensive gadget senses that his breathing, heart rate and bp are all elevated (duh). It says, "You seem stressed, is there anything I can do?" The guy says, "I want my mommy," or whatever you would normally say in this situation. So what does the thing do? Radio for help? Project a hologram of Marina Sirtis? Seems like the situation would call for something simpler, like a lapel-mounted PANIC button that lights up a blip on somebody's battle board. I'm sorry, but I go along with the guy who said the last thing he would want in battle is a girlfriend asking how he was feeling.
Senator Joe: Hey, Dick, we didn't use up our 2002 federal grant for transportation technology. We better come up with some kind of project so we can ask for more money in 2003.
Senator Dick: No problem. My sister in law's consulting firm just lost their FEMA contract because the funding got diverted to Homeland Security. Let's all do lunch.
Doubly Special Relativity
on
E ~ mc^2
·
· Score: 2
Top 5 Rejected names for the new formula: (read the article before modding)
Extra Special Relativity Relatively Special Relativity Double Secret Relativity Not Ready for Prime Time Relativity Britney Spears Nude !!!
The article focuses on the impact on customers, but I think the most serious effects of the tech-vs-business strain within Microsoft will be on the company itself. As the company is controlled more and more by lawyers and financial people rather than technical people, it is becoming less and less a geek-friendly place. Many valued techies who used to feel a real passion for working at Microsoft are probably already saying Screw It and walking away. And that's the poison pill that will kill Microsoft.
Hruska couldn't be more accurate. In my past 5+ years as a contractor working mostly at Microsoft, I've definitely seen the internal character of the place becoming less geek-centered and more suit-centered. Recently there was a poster on the wall exhorting people to save the company money by remembering that the free beverages are for consumption at work only. When you have administrative people busying themselves with that type of "hall monitor" behavior, you are also going to see things like junk-computer disposal disguised as charity, advertising disguised as customer feedback, and lawyer-driven software design.
If you actually read the article, you'll see it's not about fair use, copyright, or the RIAA hunting down ringtone pirates. There's no controversy raging here. The music industry has simply discovered that a lot of Europeans are willing to pay to download riffs from hit songs converted to ringtones. The RIAA is salivating because maybe they still have a future after all. If you think about it, it's pretty pathetic.
I'm surprised nobody has mentioned Troody, MIT's robot dinosaur, mentioned on Slashdot a year and a half ago. The head researcher, Peter Dilworth, said he was going to market talking, human-size versions to theme parks. Guess Disney went off on their own.
One thing I love about the Internet is that it screws with so many accepted institutions, often revealing how heavily they rely on assumptions about things like distance, scale and difficulty, and how fragile they are when those assumptions stop working.
The ideas of libel and slander evolved in a world where there were major practical differences between privacy and publicity. It was easy to outlaw certain things in public declarations while still allowing people to speak freely in personal conversations and private letters. Now along comes the Internet, which not only gives individuals the capability to publish their private thoughts to the whole world with ease, but lets them do it in a way that feels as normal and natural as writing a letter to a friend. Or for that matter, loaning someone a book or whistling a popular song in public. It's definitely not a given that people should be prohibited from treating the world as a big group of close friends, or that the limits created for a world in which that was impossible should continue to apply.
While there are such things as trade secrets and business confidentiality, a company's right to limit its employees freedom to speak about things that go on at work should not be unlimited. I understand that companies have good, practical reasons to want to control absolutely everything that's said about them. But they don't necessarily have the right to do it.
Most of us are used to the idea that our companies can limit what we say about them. We could just as easily get used to the idea that a lot of people shoot their mouths off meaninglessly in blogs and learn to ignore most of it. In my mind this would be better than going in the other direction and treating everybody on Earth like a 20th century publisher.
I'm surprised that in the bigtime news and even local coverage here in Seattle there's been no mention of the Blended Wing Body planes. Boeing has been working on this design for several years. The BWB plane promises much better fuel economy, which the airline market is more interested in than speed. I don't get why it didn't come up immediately with the news that the supersonic thing got cancelled.
In a way, what we are seeing here is gratifying. It's pretty clear that the RIAA has completely abandoned all pretense of being the good guys. Notice that they've even lightened up on the "protecting artists" blather lately? They know nobody buys that crap anymore. The RIAA has entered the thrashing, raving, foaming at the mouth stage, where they don't care how ugly they are or who sees it.
The RIAA is a doomed vampire that knows it is about to turn into dust and blow away. It is frantically looking around for any exposed vein it can still suck before the sun comes up.
Slashdot Mirror
I think you mean Billion Dollar Duck.
That's the problem. If Congress wanted to exempt Disney or a few others from copyright expiration, they could have done it with a specific law addressing lucrative works. Or they could have instituted a general copyright extension that requires registration. What they have done instead is like turning off the Internet to stop file sharing.
Like all laws, copyright law is a contract between members of the public. The agreement of copyright is that when someone creates something original, the rest of us are obliged to respect the copyright and pay fees for copies of the work for a limited time. At the end of that time, we the people will own the work.
It's the same as when you sign a mortgage contract. You agree to pay $xxx/month for 30 years and then the house belongs to you. It would be insane for Congress to come along 28 years later and decide that, because that house is still valuable to the mortgage company, your 30-year mortgage is suddenly an 80-year mortgage. The contract you signed 28 years ago is void, and instead of 2 more years of payments ahead of you, you have 52, then they'll do the same thing.
Yes, that would be insane. But the Congress doesn't think so and the Supreme Court doesn't think so. And that, my friends, is "government of the people, by the people, and for the people," as Americans accept it today.
1. Banana plants are propagated from shoots taken from another banana plant.
2. Bananas are by far the most heavily sprayed crop in the world.
3. "Wild banana" would probably make a great name for a band.
This result has completely destroyed what little was left of my hope in American ideals. There's no point in pretending that our government has any public interest anymore. People who have enough money to buy what they want are officially aristocrats, and the rest of us are officially peasants. The judges on the Supreme Court were appointed to their lifetime positions by the same people who write laws to serve the same wealthy few. This is fascist America. Get used to it.
To me the saddest part is that it's probably beyond undoing. By the time our rulers become so arrogant that they piss off the general public enough to motivate a revolution, everybody will be so microchipped, geo-tracked and audited that revolution in America will no longer be possible. This niftly little bribery-fueled pseudo-democracy will probably stay in place until the next asteroid impact.
They could just use the same age verification function used for 900 numbers:
if (hasCreditCard)
{
ConnectHottie();
}
As usual, Lessig makes some great points. Unfortunately, expecting the litigation industry to learn from dojinshi is like expecting the pharmaceutical industry to embrace naturopathic healing. As he says at the end, it's really the business leaders themselves who have to learn this lesson and put it into action, taking their companies back from their attorneys, and in the process (quite incidentally) letting us participate in our own culture rather than merely "consuming" it.
SlashNET Server
IIS++
Microsoft VirusLoader
Security Update Collector System (SUCS)
Haxxor Gateway 2003
heh-heh
Sure, plenty of people will buy Segways because they just have to have one. A guy I used to work with showed me his 1970 vintage, 4-function pocket calculator that cost him $400 new. That would be about $600 in today's dollars (or $2800 dog-dollars).
When the Klingons first ventured into space they immediately set about conquering every inhabited planet they encountered. Their overly ambitious expansion soon gave them an empire that was difficult for them to rule. As in the Roman Empire, the military forces on the frontier were highly autonomous, and what with the turmoil back home, many of the troops stationed faraway decided to settle down where they were, intermarry with locals and raise families.
After several generations various hybrid Klingon races became common on the frontier, assuming positions of authority and building and crewing their own starships. The first Klingons the Federation encountered were mostly of this type.
During the latter part of Kirk's career, the ruling clans undertook a vast campaign of racial cleansing, demoting or subjugating most of the hybrids. Those with distinguished service records (e.g. Kang) were allowed to take genetic therapy to remove "contaminants," which altered their appearance.
This brief episode of racial impurity, particularly the fact that the hybrids were often superior to pure-blooded Klingons in many ways (better organizers, less psycho) is tremendously embarassing to most Klingons. Hence Worf's extremely tight-lipped reaction -- "We do not speak of it."
You are a demigod.
Yeah, I think you probably are.
Think about what Turkewitz is saying. Importing public domain material from Europe to the US is piracy.
I'm sure Neil firmly believes what he is saying, and that Jack Valenti firmly believes watching tv without watching the commercials is "theft of programming." These people live in a COMPLETELY unreal world, which is why we have to make them shut the hell up and go away, instead of letting them write our laws for us. This is why you should not buy RIAA music. Pay to listen to local bands, support musicians that distribute their own music online, ignore the RIAA-created fantasy world of big-time music and let the RIAA shrivel up and die.
Ok, say a guy is in the midst of a furious, raging battle, and this highly expensive gadget senses that his breathing, heart rate and bp are all elevated (duh). It says, "You seem stressed, is there anything I can do?" The guy says, "I want my mommy," or whatever you would normally say in this situation. So what does the thing do? Radio for help? Project a hologram of Marina Sirtis? Seems like the situation would call for something simpler, like a lapel-mounted PANIC button that lights up a blip on somebody's battle board. I'm sorry, but I go along with the guy who said the last thing he would want in battle is a girlfriend asking how he was feeling.
SODIUM !
Senator Joe: Hey, Dick, we didn't use up our 2002 federal grant for transportation technology. We better come up with some kind of project so we can ask for more money in 2003.
Senator Dick: No problem. My sister in law's consulting firm just lost their FEMA contract because the funding got diverted to Homeland Security. Let's all do lunch.
Top 5 Rejected names for the new formula:
(read the article before modding)
Extra Special Relativity
Relatively Special Relativity
Double Secret Relativity
Not Ready for Prime Time Relativity
Britney Spears Nude !!!
The article focuses on the impact on customers, but I think the most serious effects of the tech-vs-business strain within Microsoft will be on the company itself. As the company is controlled more and more by lawyers and financial people rather than technical people, it is becoming less and less a geek-friendly place. Many valued techies who used to feel a real passion for working at Microsoft are probably already saying Screw It and walking away. And that's the poison pill that will kill Microsoft.
By using script to change it to a "Stay-Here" button. Those are the sites you make a point of never bookmarking, or ever intentionally visiting again.
Hruska couldn't be more accurate. In my past 5+ years as a contractor working mostly at Microsoft, I've definitely seen the internal character of the place becoming less geek-centered and more suit-centered. Recently there was a poster on the wall exhorting people to save the company money by remembering that the free beverages are for consumption at work only. When you have administrative people busying themselves with that type of "hall monitor" behavior, you are also going to see things like junk-computer disposal disguised as charity, advertising disguised as customer feedback, and lawyer-driven software design.
If you actually read the article, you'll see it's not about fair use, copyright, or the RIAA hunting down ringtone pirates. There's no controversy raging here. The music industry has simply discovered that a lot of Europeans are willing to pay to download riffs from hit songs converted to ringtones. The RIAA is salivating because maybe they still have a future after all. If you think about it, it's pretty pathetic.
I'm surprised nobody has mentioned Troody, MIT's robot dinosaur, mentioned on Slashdot a year and a half ago. The head researcher, Peter Dilworth, said he was going to market talking, human-size versions to theme parks. Guess Disney went off on their own.
One thing I love about the Internet is that it screws with so many accepted institutions, often revealing how heavily they rely on assumptions about things like distance, scale and difficulty, and how fragile they are when those assumptions stop working.
The ideas of libel and slander evolved in a world where there were major practical differences between privacy and publicity. It was easy to outlaw certain things in public declarations while still allowing people to speak freely in personal conversations and private letters. Now along comes the Internet, which not only gives individuals the capability to publish their private thoughts to the whole world with ease, but lets them do it in a way that feels as normal and natural as writing a letter to a friend. Or for that matter, loaning someone a book or whistling a popular song in public. It's definitely not a given that people should be prohibited from treating the world as a big group of close friends, or that the limits created for a world in which that was impossible should continue to apply.
While there are such things as trade secrets and business confidentiality, a company's right to limit its employees freedom to speak about things that go on at work should not be unlimited. I understand that companies have good, practical reasons to want to control absolutely everything that's said about them. But they don't necessarily have the right to do it.
Most of us are used to the idea that our companies can limit what we say about them. We could just as easily get used to the idea that a lot of people shoot their mouths off meaninglessly in blogs and learn to ignore most of it. In my mind this would be better than going in the other direction and treating everybody on Earth like a 20th century publisher.
I'm surprised that in the bigtime news and even local coverage here in Seattle there's been no mention of the Blended Wing Body planes. Boeing has been working on this design for several years. The BWB plane promises much better fuel economy, which the airline market is more interested in than speed. I don't get why it didn't come up immediately with the news that the supersonic thing got cancelled.
In a way, what we are seeing here is gratifying. It's pretty clear that the RIAA has completely abandoned all pretense of being the good guys. Notice that they've even lightened up on the "protecting artists" blather lately? They know nobody buys that crap anymore. The RIAA has entered the thrashing, raving, foaming at the mouth stage, where they don't care how ugly they are or who sees it.
The RIAA is a doomed vampire that knows it is about to turn into dust and blow away. It is frantically looking around for any exposed vein it can still suck before the sun comes up.
Nice.