So let me be the 103,345th person to point out the irony in Microsoft's position...
With one hand they're painting the GPL as a threat to your intellectual property that could wind up "stealing" your code out from under your nose, and with the other... they're stealing your intellectual property out from under your nose. Ugh.
But are you distributing code or information? I would think that SourceForge would be well within their rights to pull code from the various projects and keep use of entirely in-house. Their primary purpose is to distribute other's code, not their own.
They could if that was allowed by my license. For instance, under the GPL you can download and use code for in-house products with no catches, as long as you don't redistribute it. SourceForge can take advantage of this, as can any random third party. I think most Free Software licenses have this property.
In order to demonstrate the SourceForce is doing something wrong, you'd have to show me the clause that allows them to redistribute code on different terms than those granted by the license I released it under. Then there'd be something to talk about.
I don't want an FM tuner and I don't want recording capability. Apple got it just right on that score.
I can't figure out whether this unit features those features, because they're both listed, but "require an optional remote control". Does that mean that the features are built in (and therefore I'm paying for them in terms of extra hardware costs and weight), but can only get to them by buying a stupid remote? Or is the actual functionality built into the remote?
That said, I'm not sure that the Court will side with Lessig simply because, IMO, Congress isn't really in violation of the Constitution
When I first heard the argument against the law, I was inclined to agree with you on the face of it. The Constitution allows for protection for "limited times", and that seems compatible with Congress's actions. I really felt that the burden of arguing the case should fall to the plaintiffs.
However, the more I hear about it, the more my thinking changes. The government brief clearly expresses the opinion that the government may protect a copyright for unlimited times, which is exactly what unlimited renewals allows for.
Given that this is the case, I feel that the burden of argument lies with the government and supporters of the law. The government itself agrees that an single unlimited copyright term would be unconstitutional, but then insists that it's entitled to unlimited renewals. This just isn't consistent, and the burden lies with them to resolve this case in a manner consistent with the Constitution.
I bought one of those videos once, just to see what it looked like. It was abhorrent, of course. The screen was distorted, the color was horrible, and people were loudly eating popcorn next to the camera.
The only part that was at all interesting was the last few seconds of the tape... in which a brief but clear image of a guy sitting in front of a bunch of monitors and video equipment appeared.
What the hell... was they guy just unaware that he'd turned the camera on himself and left it on the tape? Or was this his way of "signing" his work? To this day it remains a mystery.
I suppose I shouldn't expect much from someone who writes "Therefore the law is clearly illegal". So, if it's all so clear, why the debate?
Lighten up. You could just as easily look at a statement in the Plaintiffs' brief-- like "the decision of the [appeals court]... was in plain error"-- and say, "if it was in plain error, why are we arguing about this now?" Of course, you'd be right, and you'd be missing the point-- it's just a manner of arguing.
The US Constitution includes the copyright clause , but doesn't specify a limit, rather states that any such grant must be limited. So, it seems apparent to me that the framers intended for Congress to modify the duration. Modifying the duration implies the ability to decrease or increase the duration. It seems we've only had increases, but I don't see anything unconstitutional about that... Would you be happier if Congress decided: "OK, this is the last increase ever. We're fixing the copyright term at 50,000 years". That's limited.
To begin with, it has nothing to do with my happiness. That, as you say, must be satisfied through the political process. If Congress increased the copyright term for new works to 50,000 years, I would find that personally abhorrent. But it would be constitutional, and nobody's arguing that.
The problem with retroactive term modifications is nothing to do with the lengths of the term or the fact that the modifications have all been increases. It's the fact that Congress has been granted a power with clear limits, but have found a technical way to achieve unlimited power by sticking to the letter (rather than the spirit) of the law. From the plaintiffs' brief:
The limits of the Copyright Clause, like the limits of the Commerce Clause, are both express and "inherent in [the] text and constitutional context."
Morrison, 529 U.S. at 619. As Judge Sentelle argued in dissent below, to determine their scope, a court must identify a "stopping point" to the enumerated power. [] If the government cannot articulate a practical stopping point to the expansion of Congress's power, then its understanding of that enumerated power is incomplete.
In this case, the government could identify no such stopping point. So long as each extension of copyright terms was itself fixed, the government argued that the constitutional requirement was met. That reading, Judge Sentelle rightly found, renders the constitutional restriction meaningless. "[T]here is no apparent substantive distiction between permanent protection and permanently available authority to extend originally limited protection." [] Indeed, as is demonstrated below [], the government's interpretation creates precisely the destructive incentives that the Framers were trying to avoid. Thus under the principle of enumeration, a different interpretation of "limited Times" is required-- one that forbids retroactive extensions of existing terms.
You're right that it's certainly possible to read the clause in the narrowest, legalistic sense possible. But to do so you would basically have to ignore the intent of the Framers, which was not compatible with a potentially unlimited copyright term through unlimited renewals.
Furthermore, Congress saying "this is the last extension we'll ever pass, really" is meaningless. This Congress has no legal authority to prevent future Congresses from passing further extensions. Only guidance from the Court can do that.
Oh, and as for promoting progress? That should be for Congress to decide as well. Retrospective extensions can't promote progress you say? Interesting point, but flawed. When you are going to produce a work, you know that copyright duration can be changed, either up or down. You might be more likely to produce the work if the U.S. has a long history of keeping the duration high.
Or even keeping the duration unlimited:)
You could just as easily make the following argument against that point of view: artists who created back in the 1920s could reasonably assume that their works would enter the public domain after a certain number of years (even if they or their heirs didn't care enough to do so explicitly). Therefore, a film-maker from that era had an expectation that his/her work might be free from restrictions before it completely degraded. Now, however, it's doomed to rot in a vault.
I don't argue that there are some limited arguments to be made that retroactive extensions might promote progress. For instance, giving Disney a few billion in extra copyright royalties could very well lead directly to the creation of new works that wouldn't have been created otherwise. What Lessig et al. argue is that a) Congress has other means by which it can insure these ends (tax relief, prospective term extensions, etc.), and that b) on balance, the benefits don't bear out such an imposition on speech as guaranteed by the First Amendment.
Incidentally, I'm very curious to see how this court rules on the First Amendment issue. The Appeals Court basically said that the First Amendment doesn't apply to copyright issues, and in support of this they referenced a case which may very well argue the opposite. Any way this comes down it may provide an instructive pile of precedents.
Now, to your defense, Dan's argument is limited (but since he is countering your assertion, the burden of proof, technically, is still on you).
It wasn't my assertion. Somebody else made it, and I only chimed in to correct Dan's bizarre attack on it. Had Dan simply said "you haven't proven this", that would have been legitimate.
Instead he came up with his bizarre reasoning.
But even so, we can really only show correlation, not causation, since we don't have any decent holdout groups or other controls built in.
Well, assuming statistics are our only way of analyzing these cases. Once you've discovered a correlation, you could get down to nuts and bolts and determine what precisely is causing the richer clients to win-- that might give us some insight into causation that we can't get from statistics.
The law isnt clearly illegal. The part of hte law about retroactivity may be illegal as you describe it. However, for new works, created today, the law is most likely valid.
I agree with you. Lawrence Lessig and the plaintiffs agree with you. Nobody is saying that Congress can't set any term they want for new works. Hell, the plaintiffs' brief makes that clear. However, Congress can't retroactively extend copyright terms, which is the crux of the case.
Now here's the problem: the way the law is written, if you throw out one portion (the retroactive extensions), the rest of the law can't stand on its own. I don't purport to understand the full legal reasoning-- it's pretty arcane-- but it has something to do with severability and the court having to substantially rewrite law in order to make the changes (and courts don't like to do that.)
Plaintiffs aren't saying that the court shouldn't do that if it wants to-- all they're saying is that they want to throw away the retroactive part. Period. If Congress wants to meet tomorrow and extend the protection for new works to say, a million years, they could do so without fear of legal challenges.
No, no. See, if money were the deciding factor, or even a factor at all, then you'd expect to see the side with the most money winning over 50% of the time.
You've sent statistics into a place where they just don't want to be. Here's an example that might clear things up: if a group of people goes to our legal system arguing that the United States is on the continent of Africa, they should see a 0% success rate. Anything other than a 0% success rate indicates that there's a problem with our system. You don't have to see a 100% or even a 50% rate in order to realize that something is wrong.
Now let's imagine that some percentage (say 10%) of the US-is-in-Africa plaintiffs are prevailing. Now it might be informative to look at the winners of this ridiculous case and see what percentage are wealthy. And if a huge percentage were, you'd have some evidence that maybe things weren't working right.
What you're doing is saying "well, sure 100 wealthy people won on the 'US-is-in-Africa' argument, but look over here; at least 100 poor people won on the 'US-is-in-North-America' argument. Since we've got just as many poor people winning as rich people, the system is clearly not broken." Overlooking the fact that the folks who won the second argument won it because they were right, while the folks who won on the first argument won despite the fact that they were wrong.
I'm not saying that every rich person has a bad case. I am saying that I believe there have been a fairly large number of cases where one side prevailed despite the fact that they had a crap case-- but simply had the legal resources to win out. Your argument-- that poor people sometimes win their cases too-- doesn't address this.
Olson's reponse was to point out that that is not the issue before this court, and I have to agree. While the Court is certainly free to say that the Congress's extensions are subject to judicial review on the grounds that "limited" need be reasonable or something like that, and establish some guidelines for that review, it has not been asked to do that in this case. More importantly, despite the Justices' feelings that there should be judicial review, lack of an explicit Constitutional limit on Congress's interpretation of "limited" does not create that power for the Court. It simply may be the case that Congress has the power to extend it however long it wants, as long as it is not "unlimited."
The argument is pretty straightforward. The court has ruled that where the Constitution grants a limited Congressional power, there must be a demonstrable limit to Congress's authority. The Supreme Court has made this ruling in the past.
In this case, there is no demonstrable limit. The government is arguing that it may extend copyright as many times as it wishes-- an unlimited number of times, if necessary. That interpretation clearly clashes with the straightforward requirement of "limited times". Thus there is no guaranteed limit on the power, and thus the law is not Constitutional. The notion of "reasonable" times doesn't really enter into it.
The recourse for that, of course, is elections. Olson pointed out that the Framers had the power to put a specific length of time in the Constitution, and Jefferson actually encouraged it, but they eventually chose not to; they chose to give that power to Congress.
You're going to have to fight that one out with the Framers. Clearly they did not feel that the political process provided a strong enough check on government power, so they wrote a strong constitution and created a Judicial branch to oversee it.
If you agree with my interpretation of "limited", the court has all the legal and moral authority it needs to rule against the law. If you don't, then you'll probably feel that it's a political issue. The court is in the process of making this determination, so let's not jump the gun.
Personally, I predict that Disney et all will win, but the SC will render an opinion with language that implies or outright states that the current setup is the extreme maximum that should be permitted to copyright--or at least that it's approaching a constitionally breaching overextension.
What case are you following? This case was narrowly targeted at the issue of retroactive term extensions. Even the plaintiffs admit that they have no authority to tell Congress how long copyright terms may last-- as long as those terms can't be changed after the fact. And I hardly think that this court is going to go further than that.
For each case you can name where money comes out on top, I can name a case where the party with more money came out on bottom
Well, sure. Our justice system isn't 100% broken, but that's hardly a defense. If someone who's clearly in the wrong can triumph even 10% of the time simply because they've got lots of resources, then something's badly wrong; you don't need to see a 100% success rate before you cry foul.
Courts are meant to be restrained. They are meant to take the word of the people (aka CONGRESS) unless the law is illegal
Congress is also meant to be restrained. If it wasn't, the Framers wouldn't have written in so many checks and balances on its power. The constitution would be a whole lot shorter.
Personally, I think the unlimited ability to retroactively extend copyright spits on the notion of "limited times", both as the Framers intended it and as the Court has previously ruled on such constitutional limitations (ie, if you can't point to a concrete limit on a Congressional power, you can't call it "limited".)
Therefore the law is clearly illegal. And from that point, there's not much else to say to your argument.
Let me lay out my reasoning. Stop me if you disagree with any of my points:
1. It costs my provider something to provide me with a voice circuit/channel, even if the call is incoming. Let's call that cost "c". (Obviously "c" isn't necessarily a fixed cost, but let's gloss over that by calling it an average.)
2. Obviously my provider doesn't do this work for free-- they expect to be reimbursed for the resources used, and therefore they bill that charge out to the caller's provider, at some agreed-upon rate "d". The value of "d" is either privately reached by agreement between the two providers, or more likely is mandated by the government so that smaller providers don't get screwed.
The value of "d" (the billing charge) may be loosely based on "c" (the cost of actually providing the service) but there's no absolute link. If my provider finds a way to save 20% on "c", the savings doesn't necessarily get passed along in "d". If "d" is a government mandated flat rate that applies to all of the carriers, it's possible that some providers are even clearing a substantial profit on this transaction ("d"-"c"), while others aren't.
3. Companies don't have always have direct incentives to reduce "d". If my provider reduces "d", I don't save any money-- only people on other providers will. In fact, most selfish consumers would probably rather that their own provider decreased the cost of their outgoing calls (charges they have to pay for) rather than decreasing the cost of incoming calls (charges someone else pays.)
You might argue that reducing "d" saves everybody money in the end. But that's not necessarily true. Assume that there's one big provider that has a huge customer base, and a few smaller providers that make up a minority of the market. The big provider has far less to lose by setting a high value for "d". For the big provider, a high "d" increases their own income and forces the other providers to raise rates on outgoing calls. For the small providers, a high "d" makes them less competitive. Consumers don't necessarily catch on to what's happening-- all they see is that the big provider can offer the best in-network rates to the largest number of customers.
Government regulation doesn't necessarily improve the situation. It's a slow process with four flaws: 1) it doesn't always adjust to changing market conditions, 2) it's vulnerable to political lobbying, 3) it frequently applies a single flat-fee ("d") to a service when different providers all have different costs ("c"), and 4) it's easy for providers to overstate their costs "c", so that "d" is set too high. This last case is worst for consumers, because it essentially results in a mass government subsidy that comes straight out of people's wallets.
So the best answer to all of this is to make the situation transparent to consumers. If you pay all the costs for making and receiving calls, you're likely to pick the plan with the lowest rates. This places direct consumer pressure on the providers to keep their rates low, rather than burying overcharges in a place that's one or two levels removed from consumer pressure.
Here in the US we have a system of long-distance where the government mandates the payment of a flat fee (about 2.5 cents/minute, last I checked) to the local telephone companies on either side of a long-distance call. No matter how cheaply the long-distance company routes the call, they can never charge less than 5 cents a minute without losing money. The entire telecom industry has caught on to this fact, and the big war now is to own both local and long-distance operations. Companies know that it costs far less than the clumsily mandated 2.5 cents to operate the local side of the call, and if you own both a local and long-distance operation, you can significantly reduce the cost of a long-distance call (and still turn a neat profit.)
I would argue that such a solution makes for an inefficient market.
When I pay for all of my calls, I have a strong incentive to find the plan with the lowest rates.
When somebody else pays for a portion of my calls, I don't have as much of an incentive to see that the charges are minimal. In fact, it the phone companies are willing to reduce the cost of my outgoing calls slightly by overcharging people who call me, I might even be happy to let them do so.
This is a great deal if you're someone who only receives calls and doesn't call anyone else. If you make an average number of outgoing calls to people with cellphones, however, you wind up being soaked by those overcharges.
I don't understand why americans don't like that, if so you should also ask to be charged for receiving long distance calls rather than for placing calls.
I would like that. You wanna know why?
Every time I make a long distance call, the carrier on the other side demands a fixed (government-regulated) per-minute charge. That used to be minimal, but the cost of long-distance has come down so much that it now represents a large portion of the cost of a long-distance call.
There's little incentive to reduce this charge, because:
a) it's set by a government agency (as are the charges in Europe, I imagine), and is therefore somewhat immune from competitive forces...
b) even it weren't regulated, companies would take advantage of it as a way to screw customers (sort of like collect calling.) Because you don't pay the cost of somebody else calling you, why would you go out of your way to get the best deal? If a company said "you can have free outgoing calls, but people who call you'll pay 20 cents a minute", a lot of people would jump on it.
Although it's contrary to "fairness", making people pay for all their own calls is the best system possible. Assuming a competitive market, you don't have to invoke the inefficiency of government price-regulation. And you also avoid the lack-of-information/desperation traps that you see in things like collect calling. And if you don't want to pick up a call, just check the caller ID.
The only control you don't have is that you don't know which service provider they are on. Since every mobile number starts with 07, you can tell instantly if it's going to cost more than usual... It does suck a bit.
You've got me thoroughly confused. If I have a landline, will I pay a fixed per-minute charge for calling any cellphone in the area? Or will I pay different charges depending on the particular plan/carrier chosen by the person I'm calling?
Clear this up for me and I'll try and clear up my reasoning.
I think that there's a middle-ground. People who don't live in the boonies but aren't close enough to a WiFi access point. This includes dense areas such as suburbs, etc. Perhaps it'll make sense to extend WiFi to cover these areas in the future, but a WiFi patchwork may just have too many holes in it to be a full replacement during the next decade or so.
The exact cost of the call to a mobile varies according to how much that mobile phone carrier, and how much the originating carrier charges. Which can vary, but not much generally. In the same way that the exact cost of a premium rate call can vary, but the area code prefix tells you the rough size of charge.
According to the poster above, prices can range up to 30p/minute. That's a pretty big range.
I would personally not be willing to have the same conversation with somebody at 30p/minute that I'd have at 5 or 10p. But of course I have no way of knowing before I place the call.
Personally I think you're getting screwed under the guise of fairness. If you have to pay for every call (incoming and outgoing), you're going to go for the cheapest plan you can get. You're not going to differentiate incoming and outgoing charges. If you only pay for the outgoing minutes, you're going to concentrate your price-shopping on those charges-- you'll get a great deal on outgoing charges, and if the phone company offers a slightly less-than-ideal charge for incoming calls, most people'll let it slide (hell, they're not paying for it, right?)
As a result, the phone company soaks other customers for money-- customers who don't have the opportunity to price-shop as you do. If I need to call you, I'm stuck with whatever plan you chose-- and I won't even know how much I'm paying until I get the bill.
On the aggregate, I imagine that the phone companies do pretty well off of this. You eventually wind up paying for it if you call other people's phones. It's a beautiful plan and I imagine it significantly increases everybody's bills.
I don't want to make phone calls without having any control over how much I'm being billed for them. At 30p/minute, you could run up a substantial bill with a relatively small amount of talking, and that would make me uncomfortable calling anyone with a mobile number-- unless I knew that person and was sure that they had a good cheap plan.
Why should some stranger be concerned with saving me money? A lot of are concerned with their own outlay and will look for good competitive plans if they're the ones shelling out the money. They don't necessarily do the same when other people are paying.
Also 10p/minute is a lot of money regardless of who's paying. In the US you can buy plans that put the price as low as 5 cents a minute (don't have an exchange rate calc here, but that's what, 2 or 3p?). Also, most plans now offer unlimited free night and weekend minutes, which further reduces the cost. And if you don't want to pay a particular fee (in an amount you'll know, because it's your plan), you have full control-- just don't pick up the call.
I have travelled all over Europe, also in China, Malesia, Jamaica and even Cuba without having to loose my lifeline to the rest of the world, switch SIM-cards or handsets or actually do anything out of the ordinary
What sort of roaming fees did you pay, and how do they compare to just, say, renting a GSM phone at the airport?
3G will be useful for folks outside of the densest urban areas, where WiFi can be rolled out on every street. Hopefully your handset will be smart enough to switch from 3G to WiFi when you go from one area to the other.
Playstation 2 drops price, GameCube drops price, suddenly XBOX is the expensive guy on the block. MS was forced to drop price to keep up. It's called competition.
Microsoft may be in a disadvantageous economic situation, but since when does copyright law have anything to do with protecting companies from bad pricing situations?
If I run a pizza parlour, and the guy across the street is pricing me out of business, it would sure be nice if the cops showed up and put him out of business. That doesn't make it right for me to anonymously accuse him of running a drug ring.
Not only is it a double post, but they also posted a story on a similar product a few months ago.
Though it's looking like that company is pretty much defunct, you'd think Slashdot'd tone down the excitement a few notches, considering that they'd already hyped exactly the same techology.
The PTO makes no money. It is a government service organization.
You may have some bizarre definition of "not making money". From a 4/01 News.com article:
WASHINGTON, D.C.--Saying the U.S. Patent Office is already functioning poorly, trade groups and companies such as Intel and Hewlett-Packard are fighting a Bush administration plan to divert about 15 percent of patent fees from the office to other government programs.
The U.S. Patent and Trademark Office is funded entirely by fees companies pay when they apply for patents or trademarks. President George W. Bush seeks to let the agency keep $1.14 billion, a boost of $100 million over last year, out of an anticipated $1.35 billion in fees to be collected in the fiscal year starting Oct. 1. But the fee percentage he's suggested for other programs is the highest ever.
The companies that pay the fee say it's important that the patent office use all the fees it collects to clear up a backlog of applications; companies now wait more than two years for a decision. Congress has used some of the office's income for other purposes in recent years. The $207 million Bush proposed yesterday is the most ever.
In other words, the USPTO takes in more money than it spends. The extra goes to other government programs. Now maybe you don't call it "making money", but that's exactly what it is. And the top-level poster is correct that the patent office could be spending more of its revenues checking applications.
Loss of copyright protection doesn't imply that trade secret laws would also be invalidated. There's still a chance that the chain of possesion could be tracked and that you could be charged with receiving stolen property (unpublished secrets).
You might be right. The good news being that in this particular case (with China), I don't think there's anything to worry about.
So Microsoft can now use GPL'ed software without adhering to the GPL because IP doesn't exist? You did know that the only thing protecting the GPL is copyright, right? Or were you fooled, like so many other slashbots that copyleft was actually a legal principle completely opposite to copyright? GPL requires copyright to exist otherwise it is a meaningless contract over, as you put it, a non-existent "thing", that cannot be enforced.
From the perspective of free software, losing copyright isn't such a disaster. You couldn't compel people to cough up modified source code anymore (causing the GPL to behave more like BSD), but you'd simultaneously gain the right to freely distribute and/or plagiarize anything you wanted-- including proprietary source code that some disgruntled employee posted to usenet.
One of the fundamental reasons to use the GPL vs. straight public domain is to prevent someone from just making a few changes to your free code, then using copyright law to prevent you from using the new work. This is why the GPL was first invented. In a society without copyright, that's not such a concern.
I'm not saying that a world without copyright would be a perfect place, but I certainly don't think it would be a disaster for projects that currently use the GPL. They'd probably be better for it. While Microsoft might be able to plagiarize a little bit of free code, their business model would basically collapse. Linux, on the other hand, would get along at least as well as BSD does now.
Slashdot Mirror
So let me be the 103,345th person to point out the irony in Microsoft's position... With one hand they're painting the GPL as a threat to your intellectual property that could wind up "stealing" your code out from under your nose, and with the other... they're stealing your intellectual property out from under your nose. Ugh.
They could if that was allowed by my license. For instance, under the GPL you can download and use code for in-house products with no catches, as long as you don't redistribute it. SourceForge can take advantage of this, as can any random third party. I think most Free Software licenses have this property.
In order to demonstrate the SourceForce is doing something wrong, you'd have to show me the clause that allows them to redistribute code on different terms than those granted by the license I released it under. Then there'd be something to talk about.
I can't figure out whether this unit features those features, because they're both listed, but "require an optional remote control". Does that mean that the features are built in (and therefore I'm paying for them in terms of extra hardware costs and weight), but can only get to them by buying a stupid remote? Or is the actual functionality built into the remote?
When I first heard the argument against the law, I was inclined to agree with you on the face of it. The Constitution allows for protection for "limited times", and that seems compatible with Congress's actions. I really felt that the burden of arguing the case should fall to the plaintiffs.
However, the more I hear about it, the more my thinking changes. The government brief clearly expresses the opinion that the government may protect a copyright for unlimited times, which is exactly what unlimited renewals allows for.
Given that this is the case, I feel that the burden of argument lies with the government and supporters of the law. The government itself agrees that an single unlimited copyright term would be unconstitutional, but then insists that it's entitled to unlimited renewals. This just isn't consistent, and the burden lies with them to resolve this case in a manner consistent with the Constitution.
The only part that was at all interesting was the last few seconds of the tape... in which a brief but clear image of a guy sitting in front of a bunch of monitors and video equipment appeared.
What the hell... was they guy just unaware that he'd turned the camera on himself and left it on the tape? Or was this his way of "signing" his work? To this day it remains a mystery.
Lighten up. You could just as easily look at a statement in the Plaintiffs' brief-- like "the decision of the [appeals court] ... was in plain error"-- and say, "if it was in plain error, why are we arguing about this now?" Of course, you'd be right, and you'd be missing the point-- it's just a manner of arguing.
The US Constitution includes the copyright clause , but doesn't specify a limit, rather states that any such grant must be limited. So, it seems apparent to me that the framers intended for Congress to modify the duration. Modifying the duration implies the ability to decrease or increase the duration. It seems we've only had increases, but I don't see anything unconstitutional about that ... Would you be happier if Congress decided: "OK, this is the last increase ever. We're fixing the copyright term at 50,000 years". That's limited.
To begin with, it has nothing to do with my happiness. That, as you say, must be satisfied through the political process. If Congress increased the copyright term for new works to 50,000 years, I would find that personally abhorrent. But it would be constitutional, and nobody's arguing that.
The problem with retroactive term modifications is nothing to do with the lengths of the term or the fact that the modifications have all been increases. It's the fact that Congress has been granted a power with clear limits, but have found a technical way to achieve unlimited power by sticking to the letter (rather than the spirit) of the law. From the plaintiffs' brief:
You're right that it's certainly possible to read the clause in the narrowest, legalistic sense possible. But to do so you would basically have to ignore the intent of the Framers, which was not compatible with a potentially unlimited copyright term through unlimited renewals.Furthermore, Congress saying "this is the last extension we'll ever pass, really" is meaningless. This Congress has no legal authority to prevent future Congresses from passing further extensions. Only guidance from the Court can do that.
Oh, and as for promoting progress? That should be for Congress to decide as well. Retrospective extensions can't promote progress you say? Interesting point, but flawed. When you are going to produce a work, you know that copyright duration can be changed, either up or down. You might be more likely to produce the work if the U.S. has a long history of keeping the duration high.
Or even keeping the duration unlimited :)
You could just as easily make the following argument against that point of view: artists who created back in the 1920s could reasonably assume that their works would enter the public domain after a certain number of years (even if they or their heirs didn't care enough to do so explicitly). Therefore, a film-maker from that era had an expectation that his/her work might be free from restrictions before it completely degraded. Now, however, it's doomed to rot in a vault.
I don't argue that there are some limited arguments to be made that retroactive extensions might promote progress. For instance, giving Disney a few billion in extra copyright royalties could very well lead directly to the creation of new works that wouldn't have been created otherwise. What Lessig et al. argue is that a) Congress has other means by which it can insure these ends (tax relief, prospective term extensions, etc.), and that b) on balance, the benefits don't bear out such an imposition on speech as guaranteed by the First Amendment.
Incidentally, I'm very curious to see how this court rules on the First Amendment issue. The Appeals Court basically said that the First Amendment doesn't apply to copyright issues, and in support of this they referenced a case which may very well argue the opposite. Any way this comes down it may provide an instructive pile of precedents.
It wasn't my assertion. Somebody else made it, and I only chimed in to correct Dan's bizarre attack on it. Had Dan simply said "you haven't proven this", that would have been legitimate.
Instead he came up with his bizarre reasoning.
But even so, we can really only show correlation, not causation, since we don't have any decent holdout groups or other controls built in.
Well, assuming statistics are our only way of analyzing these cases. Once you've discovered a correlation, you could get down to nuts and bolts and determine what precisely is causing the richer clients to win-- that might give us some insight into causation that we can't get from statistics.
I agree with you. Lawrence Lessig and the plaintiffs agree with you. Nobody is saying that Congress can't set any term they want for new works. Hell, the plaintiffs' brief makes that clear. However, Congress can't retroactively extend copyright terms, which is the crux of the case.
Now here's the problem: the way the law is written, if you throw out one portion (the retroactive extensions), the rest of the law can't stand on its own. I don't purport to understand the full legal reasoning-- it's pretty arcane-- but it has something to do with severability and the court having to substantially rewrite law in order to make the changes (and courts don't like to do that.)
Plaintiffs aren't saying that the court shouldn't do that if it wants to-- all they're saying is that they want to throw away the retroactive part. Period. If Congress wants to meet tomorrow and extend the protection for new works to say, a million years, they could do so without fear of legal challenges.
No, no. See, if money were the deciding factor, or even a factor at all, then you'd expect to see the side with the most money winning over 50% of the time.
You've sent statistics into a place where they just don't want to be. Here's an example that might clear things up: if a group of people goes to our legal system arguing that the United States is on the continent of Africa, they should see a 0% success rate. Anything other than a 0% success rate indicates that there's a problem with our system. You don't have to see a 100% or even a 50% rate in order to realize that something is wrong.
Now let's imagine that some percentage (say 10%) of the US-is-in-Africa plaintiffs are prevailing. Now it might be informative to look at the winners of this ridiculous case and see what percentage are wealthy. And if a huge percentage were, you'd have some evidence that maybe things weren't working right.
What you're doing is saying "well, sure 100 wealthy people won on the 'US-is-in-Africa' argument, but look over here; at least 100 poor people won on the 'US-is-in-North-America' argument. Since we've got just as many poor people winning as rich people, the system is clearly not broken." Overlooking the fact that the folks who won the second argument won it because they were right, while the folks who won on the first argument won despite the fact that they were wrong.
I'm not saying that every rich person has a bad case. I am saying that I believe there have been a fairly large number of cases where one side prevailed despite the fact that they had a crap case-- but simply had the legal resources to win out. Your argument-- that poor people sometimes win their cases too-- doesn't address this.
The argument is pretty straightforward. The court has ruled that where the Constitution grants a limited Congressional power, there must be a demonstrable limit to Congress's authority. The Supreme Court has made this ruling in the past.
In this case, there is no demonstrable limit. The government is arguing that it may extend copyright as many times as it wishes-- an unlimited number of times, if necessary. That interpretation clearly clashes with the straightforward requirement of "limited times". Thus there is no guaranteed limit on the power, and thus the law is not Constitutional. The notion of "reasonable" times doesn't really enter into it.
The recourse for that, of course, is elections. Olson pointed out that the Framers had the power to put a specific length of time in the Constitution, and Jefferson actually encouraged it, but they eventually chose not to; they chose to give that power to Congress.
You're going to have to fight that one out with the Framers. Clearly they did not feel that the political process provided a strong enough check on government power, so they wrote a strong constitution and created a Judicial branch to oversee it.
If you agree with my interpretation of "limited", the court has all the legal and moral authority it needs to rule against the law. If you don't, then you'll probably feel that it's a political issue. The court is in the process of making this determination, so let's not jump the gun.
What case are you following? This case was narrowly targeted at the issue of retroactive term extensions. Even the plaintiffs admit that they have no authority to tell Congress how long copyright terms may last-- as long as those terms can't be changed after the fact. And I hardly think that this court is going to go further than that.
Well, sure. Our justice system isn't 100% broken, but that's hardly a defense. If someone who's clearly in the wrong can triumph even 10% of the time simply because they've got lots of resources, then something's badly wrong; you don't need to see a 100% success rate before you cry foul.
Courts are meant to be restrained. They are meant to take the word of the people (aka CONGRESS) unless the law is illegal
Congress is also meant to be restrained. If it wasn't, the Framers wouldn't have written in so many checks and balances on its power. The constitution would be a whole lot shorter.
Personally, I think the unlimited ability to retroactively extend copyright spits on the notion of "limited times", both as the Framers intended it and as the Court has previously ruled on such constitutional limitations (ie, if you can't point to a concrete limit on a Congressional power, you can't call it "limited".)
Therefore the law is clearly illegal. And from that point, there's not much else to say to your argument.
1. It costs my provider something to provide me with a voice circuit/channel, even if the call is incoming. Let's call that cost "c". (Obviously "c" isn't necessarily a fixed cost, but let's gloss over that by calling it an average.)
2. Obviously my provider doesn't do this work for free-- they expect to be reimbursed for the resources used, and therefore they bill that charge out to the caller's provider, at some agreed-upon rate "d". The value of "d" is either privately reached by agreement between the two providers, or more likely is mandated by the government so that smaller providers don't get screwed.
The value of "d" (the billing charge) may be loosely based on "c" (the cost of actually providing the service) but there's no absolute link. If my provider finds a way to save 20% on "c", the savings doesn't necessarily get passed along in "d". If "d" is a government mandated flat rate that applies to all of the carriers, it's possible that some providers are even clearing a substantial profit on this transaction ("d"-"c"), while others aren't.
3. Companies don't have always have direct incentives to reduce "d". If my provider reduces "d", I don't save any money-- only people on other providers will. In fact, most selfish consumers would probably rather that their own provider decreased the cost of their outgoing calls (charges they have to pay for) rather than decreasing the cost of incoming calls (charges someone else pays.)
You might argue that reducing "d" saves everybody money in the end. But that's not necessarily true. Assume that there's one big provider that has a huge customer base, and a few smaller providers that make up a minority of the market. The big provider has far less to lose by setting a high value for "d". For the big provider, a high "d" increases their own income and forces the other providers to raise rates on outgoing calls. For the small providers, a high "d" makes them less competitive. Consumers don't necessarily catch on to what's happening-- all they see is that the big provider can offer the best in-network rates to the largest number of customers.
Government regulation doesn't necessarily improve the situation. It's a slow process with four flaws: 1) it doesn't always adjust to changing market conditions, 2) it's vulnerable to political lobbying, 3) it frequently applies a single flat-fee ("d") to a service when different providers all have different costs ("c"), and 4) it's easy for providers to overstate their costs "c", so that "d" is set too high. This last case is worst for consumers, because it essentially results in a mass government subsidy that comes straight out of people's wallets.
So the best answer to all of this is to make the situation transparent to consumers. If you pay all the costs for making and receiving calls, you're likely to pick the plan with the lowest rates. This places direct consumer pressure on the providers to keep their rates low, rather than burying overcharges in a place that's one or two levels removed from consumer pressure.
Here in the US we have a system of long-distance where the government mandates the payment of a flat fee (about 2.5 cents/minute, last I checked) to the local telephone companies on either side of a long-distance call. No matter how cheaply the long-distance company routes the call, they can never charge less than 5 cents a minute without losing money. The entire telecom industry has caught on to this fact, and the big war now is to own both local and long-distance operations. Companies know that it costs far less than the clumsily mandated 2.5 cents to operate the local side of the call, and if you own both a local and long-distance operation, you can significantly reduce the cost of a long-distance call (and still turn a neat profit.)
When I pay for all of my calls, I have a strong incentive to find the plan with the lowest rates.
When somebody else pays for a portion of my calls, I don't have as much of an incentive to see that the charges are minimal. In fact, it the phone companies are willing to reduce the cost of my outgoing calls slightly by overcharging people who call me, I might even be happy to let them do so.
This is a great deal if you're someone who only receives calls and doesn't call anyone else. If you make an average number of outgoing calls to people with cellphones, however, you wind up being soaked by those overcharges.
I would like that. You wanna know why?
Every time I make a long distance call, the carrier on the other side demands a fixed (government-regulated) per-minute charge. That used to be minimal, but the cost of long-distance has come down so much that it now represents a large portion of the cost of a long-distance call.
There's little incentive to reduce this charge, because:
a) it's set by a government agency (as are the charges in Europe, I imagine), and is therefore somewhat immune from competitive forces...
b) even it weren't regulated, companies would take advantage of it as a way to screw customers (sort of like collect calling.) Because you don't pay the cost of somebody else calling you, why would you go out of your way to get the best deal? If a company said "you can have free outgoing calls, but people who call you'll pay 20 cents a minute", a lot of people would jump on it.
Although it's contrary to "fairness", making people pay for all their own calls is the best system possible. Assuming a competitive market, you don't have to invoke the inefficiency of government price-regulation. And you also avoid the lack-of-information/desperation traps that you see in things like collect calling. And if you don't want to pick up a call, just check the caller ID.
You've got me thoroughly confused. If I have a landline, will I pay a fixed per-minute charge for calling any cellphone in the area? Or will I pay different charges depending on the particular plan/carrier chosen by the person I'm calling?
Clear this up for me and I'll try and clear up my reasoning.
I think that there's a middle-ground. People who don't live in the boonies but aren't close enough to a WiFi access point. This includes dense areas such as suburbs, etc. Perhaps it'll make sense to extend WiFi to cover these areas in the future, but a WiFi patchwork may just have too many holes in it to be a full replacement during the next decade or so.
According to the poster above, prices can range up to 30p/minute. That's a pretty big range.
I would personally not be willing to have the same conversation with somebody at 30p/minute that I'd have at 5 or 10p. But of course I have no way of knowing before I place the call.
Personally I think you're getting screwed under the guise of fairness. If you have to pay for every call (incoming and outgoing), you're going to go for the cheapest plan you can get. You're not going to differentiate incoming and outgoing charges. If you only pay for the outgoing minutes, you're going to concentrate your price-shopping on those charges-- you'll get a great deal on outgoing charges, and if the phone company offers a slightly less-than-ideal charge for incoming calls, most people'll let it slide (hell, they're not paying for it, right?)
As a result, the phone company soaks other customers for money-- customers who don't have the opportunity to price-shop as you do. If I need to call you, I'm stuck with whatever plan you chose-- and I won't even know how much I'm paying until I get the bill.
On the aggregate, I imagine that the phone companies do pretty well off of this. You eventually wind up paying for it if you call other people's phones. It's a beautiful plan and I imagine it significantly increases everybody's bills.
Why should some stranger be concerned with saving me money? A lot of are concerned with their own outlay and will look for good competitive plans if they're the ones shelling out the money. They don't necessarily do the same when other people are paying.
Also 10p/minute is a lot of money regardless of who's paying. In the US you can buy plans that put the price as low as 5 cents a minute (don't have an exchange rate calc here, but that's what, 2 or 3p?). Also, most plans now offer unlimited free night and weekend minutes, which further reduces the cost. And if you don't want to pay a particular fee (in an amount you'll know, because it's your plan), you have full control-- just don't pick up the call.
What sort of roaming fees did you pay, and how do they compare to just, say, renting a GSM phone at the airport?
3G will be useful for folks outside of the densest urban areas, where WiFi can be rolled out on every street. Hopefully your handset will be smart enough to switch from 3G to WiFi when you go from one area to the other.
Microsoft may be in a disadvantageous economic situation, but since when does copyright law have anything to do with protecting companies from bad pricing situations?
If I run a pizza parlour, and the guy across the street is pricing me out of business, it would sure be nice if the cops showed up and put him out of business. That doesn't make it right for me to anonymously accuse him of running a drug ring.
Though it's looking like that company is pretty much defunct, you'd think Slashdot'd tone down the excitement a few notches, considering that they'd already hyped exactly the same techology.
You may have some bizarre definition of "not making money". From a 4/01 News.com article:
In other words, the USPTO takes in more money than it spends. The extra goes to other government programs. Now maybe you don't call it "making money", but that's exactly what it is. And the top-level poster is correct that the patent office could be spending more of its revenues checking applications.You might be right. The good news being that in this particular case (with China), I don't think there's anything to worry about.
From the perspective of free software, losing copyright isn't such a disaster. You couldn't compel people to cough up modified source code anymore (causing the GPL to behave more like BSD), but you'd simultaneously gain the right to freely distribute and/or plagiarize anything you wanted-- including proprietary source code that some disgruntled employee posted to usenet.
One of the fundamental reasons to use the GPL vs. straight public domain is to prevent someone from just making a few changes to your free code, then using copyright law to prevent you from using the new work. This is why the GPL was first invented. In a society without copyright, that's not such a concern.
I'm not saying that a world without copyright would be a perfect place, but I certainly don't think it would be a disaster for projects that currently use the GPL. They'd probably be better for it. While Microsoft might be able to plagiarize a little bit of free code, their business model would basically collapse. Linux, on the other hand, would get along at least as well as BSD does now.