hacksoncode wrote: Honestly, what college student is going to legitimately own 10,000 songs anyway? Same with eBooks. Until you can download them easily and put the publishing industry out of business, they won't be popular.
There's a big difference between the songs that people were trading like crazy on Napster and e-books: there are a lot of books that are legitimately in the public domain. There are over 10,000 public domain books available through Project Gutenberg (as of October 2003), still more "free" books available from other sources either because they are public domain or because the rightholders decided to publish them on the internet, and many websites such as the New York Times allow downloading of daily content for offline reading.
What's more is that the file sizes are relatively small because they are, after all, merely text.
Yog wrote: Even easier: if you buy the hard copy of a book, you get a free download of the e-book. Sort of like providing the source code with a software application.
Baen basically did that when they published the most recent David Weber novel in the Honor Harrington series in paperback. In the back of the book was a CD-ROM with the full text of the book and (if memory serves) all the other books in the series. Apparently it didn't cause a problem because the next thing they did was to include John Ringo's entire backlist on a CD-ROM with his recent book Hell's Faire.
Baen has been distributing quite a few of its backlist titles for free in electronic form for reading on PDA's, onscreen, etc. and it has been increasing their sales. Check out the Baen Free Library if you enjoy science fiction or fantasy novels.
They also have a web subscription service where for $15/month you can get access to titles that are about to be published. The first month you get the first half of the book, the second month you get the next quarter, and the last month you get the final quarter, and they promise that a minimum of four books will be available in a given month. It looks like they have six available right now.
After the books are published, you can just buy an electronic version if you want for $4-6. That's a decent deal, considering that the even paperbacks often cost more than that these days.
As a kid, I noticed that the purple print color of the ditto'ed handouts we got in class appeared to be a different shade of blue-purple depending on whether or not I was wearing my glasses. I wonder if this is a related phenomenon?
FlopEJoe wrote: I'd like to play around with something like this but $2K is pretty high! And the SDK is tree-fiddy! Are there any other rigs with sainer prices?
I think a real EEG machine is going to run you at least $1500 unless you build it yourself.
As others have noted, the Journey to Wild Divine game is somewhat similar to Mindball, and much cheaper. (About $160.) However, it doesn't read brain waves, it detects relaxation levels with skin conductance and heart rate variablity-- it works very much like a "lie dectector." I don't think it is sensitive enough for multi-axis control, it only does "more relaxed" and "less relaxed."
There is a guy, Bryan Ingram, who has been working on a program that reads the signal from the Wild Divine monitor so you can do other things with it.
mog007 wrote: I haven't bought it, because I'm a poor college student, but this idea has already been fully experimented with in Wild Divine.
I agree that it is similar to Wild Divine, but there are significant differences. This game measures brain waves, Wild Divine measures skin conductance and heart rate variability. Also, Wild Divine is non-competitive.
Having played Wild Divine, I suspect that this game would be more difficult. When playing, one must not only be relaxed, but also be detached about doing better than the other person-- or you will wind up being less relaxed!
Because of Mindball's use of EEG rather than the less expensive equipment used by Wild Divine, I suspect Mindball will also be considerably more expensive. But that's not surprising-- it looks more like a set-up you'd have in a bar or lounge while Wild Divine is better adapted for home use.
mrwonton was probably referring to the news story posted on fireflyfans.net in which Nathan Fillion is quoted as having said that if the movie does well it will come back as a trilogy, not a television series.
That said, one would not think it completely beyond the realm of possibility that if the movie was successful enough be spun off into a series of sequels, that someone might also think that good profits could be made by continuing the television show.
The Rippa wrote: Budget in money for free sodas/water/coffee.
When I started at my job, we had water coolers that also made hot water. Everyone drank a lot of water and brought in their own tea bags, soup-in-a-cup, instant coffee, and so forth from home.
Then, because of budget problems, they had to get rid of the water coolers. I don't know how much money it saved, but from a morale point of view it was a serious mistake.
It's been about six months since they've been gone and everyone is still extremely bitter about it. It doesn't help that the tap water tastes terrible.
My advice: once you do decide to provide a perk, don't take it away if you can avoid it.
I'm an exception to this generalization, but perhaps I can shed some light on why what you have quoted might be true for many women.
When I'm bored, I shop online, or possibly post on bulletin boards (like Slashdot!). I play games for fun. I've been known to play MMORPGS for 18 hours straight, though it is rare that I have that much time available for gaming. I like games that I can install and play-- Age of Mythology has afforded me many hours of enjoyment. For the record, I don't play "The Sims." I have several adventure games that I enjoy, but I'm more interested in the problem-solving aspect of them than the "plot," as such. (E.g. the side storyline in Syberia about the main character's love life just annoyed me. But perhaps that's because I couldn't affect it.) Indeed, I've been enjoying games for decades, all the way back to playing "Heliocopter" and "The Wizard and the Princess" on my father's Apple II. (There is a rock here. Look rock. There is a scorpion here! Go east. There is a rock here. Look rock. There is a scorpion here...)
However, my gaming habits were not always this way. Several years ago when I was in law school, I would occasionally buy an adventure game and play it during semester breaks. The rest of the time, I had too much studying to do to have time for gaming, and I felt guilty about every moment I wasted on "leisure time." I still gamed, like my most of classmates, and we all played the same game: Freecell, for speed, and strings of wins. If you sat in the back of the lecture hall before the lecture began, you would see all these laptops with people madly playing Freecell as fast as they could. There's something almost meditative about playing Freecell for speed, it requires just enough attention, but not too much. It helped my stress level without taking too much of my time or mental effort. Now that I'm back in the real world, Freecell has lost its charm.
I suspect that the reason that women stereotypically play puzzle games rather than other types of games is that they don't take as much time. You noted that women tend not to play as long as men. That's because they have a lot of stuff to do!
Many stereotypically "female jobs" (cooking, cleaning, etc.) are tasks that must be done every day, leaving short blocks of free time between tasks. Many stereotypically "male jobs" (yard work, auto maintenance, etc.) may be equally time-consuming in the long run, but are only done periodically. This leaves longer blocks of free time for gaming. If you are going to play Everquest, you can't play for an hour here or there, and you can't get up when you want to in order to put the next load of laundry in the dryer, stir the soup, take a call from your relatives, etc. For women with children, I'm sure they have even more gaming interruptions.
I think the buying games vs. playing Bejeweled online thing might be more an issue of familiarity with computer games. Many games can be played online for free, if you like them then you sign up for a subscription to premium service. It's something you just fall into because you are bored surfing the web. Going out and buying a game that has to be installed requires more planning. It is easy to understand how someone who isn't that interested in computer games in the first place and hasn't heard of games that might be fun would be more likely to play an online game than one that must be purchased and installed.
If you want to make games that appeal to women, here are my suggestions: 1) The game must be intelligent. There should be interesting problems to solve. 2) The game should accommodate both long and short gaming sessions. 3) As noted above, pause buttons are very helpful. 4) Games that involve hurting other people probably aren't as appealing. I think in general women are socialized more than men are not to inflict physical damage on one another. I remember being taken on a date to play Laser Tag when I was in my late teens, and it took a while to get over the idea t
When I hired a photographer to photograph my wedding, I required that the copyright in the photographs would belong to me and that I would get the negatives. She was perfectly willing to do that for me for a minimal fee.
I'm glad I had the foresight to do this, as I now do not live in the same state where the photographer works.
When you hire a photographer to take a professional photo of you, see if he or she will agree to a deal like this.
One could make the argument (probably more easily than ASCAP could argue that your party were somehow a public performance) that one's campfire sing falls under 17 USC 110(4)(A). Basically, even a "public performance" might not be an infringement if it is without any commercial advantage.
If you are still worried, though, I suggest that there still are plenty of public domain folk songs for you to sing.
Goodness, man! You are willing to go up against Time Warner regarding the copyright status of "Happy Birthday" but you won't sing with your friends for fear of an infringement suit?
tepples wrote: Unless you have a fence around your campfire site, then the place is conceivably "open to the public." The music publisher will also argue in court over who is a "social acquaintance" and who is not.
They don't get to litigate about who a "social acquaintance" is until you get to a "substantial number." There is already legislative history and case law to rely on for that, and my parties typically aren't that large. And if someone did want to litigate that? There's plenty of case law there as well, unless you were hosting a huge party with lots of people you don't know from Adam, it would probably be a losing argument.
Furthermore, the last time I checked, my backyard firepit wasn't "public," fence or no fence. It's private property. Now that I think about it, most of the campfire sings that I've been involved in have been on private property. As for the rest, I look forward to the day ASCAP/BMI etc. goes after a Girl Scout troop in the state park.
Think I'll go whistle "Blackbird" while waiting for the bus . . . .
Tepples wrote (about singing around the campfire as jhines suggested): Then your problem will be with BMI and ASCAP and SESAC, when they bill you for singing copyrighted songs. The recording isn't the only thing copyrighted; the sheet music itself is subject to a monopoly.
I'm all for singing.
First of all, although many songs are covered by copyright (including, darn them, "Happy Birthday") many others are not. If I feel like singing a Handel aria while sitting around the campfire, guess what? It's in the public domain. BMI can kiss my behind if they want to collect royalties from me for singing "Verdi prati" from Alcina (first performed in 1735). Same goes for many folk songs and traditional tunes. Including Kumbaya, which you might or might not consider encouraging news.
Second of all, it is questionable whether the campfire scenario described even falls under one of the "exclusive rights" of copyright. I call your attention to 17 USC 106:
Subject to sections 107 through 121, the owner of copyright under this title has the exclusive rights to do and to authorize any of the following: . .. (4) in the case of literary, musical, dramatic, and choreographic works, pantomimes, and motion pictures and other audiovisual works, to perform the copyrighted work publicly;
Note the word "publicly." The right to perform "publicly" is reserved to the rightsholder, but it says nothing about performing "privately." That is why you don't have to pay a royalty when you sing happy birthday to your 3-year-old nephew at a party at your brother's house. Or when you sing while gathered around the campfire with friends.
A similar game is available, Journey to Wild Divine. It measures skin conductance and heart rate variation to control various objects in the game. I've played it, it was quite fun though it was a little short and had too much of a "new age" theme for my taste.
Anonymous Coward wrote: Incorrect. Any video that has an actor portraying a child (even a virtual actor) is childporn. I remember a story about this a few years ago.
No, you are incorrect, though you wouldn't have been a few years ago. Please see Ashcroft v. The Free Speech Coalition in which the U.S. Supreme court found that the Child Pornography Prevention Act of 1996 was overbroad, violating the first amendment. (Follow this link for a news story about it. A more in-depth article can be found on Findlaw.com here.)
Remember, the reason child porn is illegal while images of adults engaged in the same activities is legal is because engaging in those activities with children is abuse. (And if you come across a pair of emotionally disturbed 6-year-olds spontaneously engaging in sexual activity, grabbing your camera is not the proper response.) The images themselves are records of child abuse.
Think about it. No matter how icky the images, the situation is entirely different if the images are really of 19-year-old actors who happen to look younger, or if they are drawings or paintings of something that never really happened-- even if those drawings are computer graphics that are difficult to distinguish from photographs.
I remember reading a story in Cosmo or some magazine like that several years ago about a cellist in her 20's who decided to use an artistic topless picture of herself next to her cello on the cover of her first album. The picture was intended to make a reference to the similarities in the shape of the instrument and the female form. Unfortunately for her, her figure was rather "youthful" and probably looked more so the way the photograph was done. The album covers were sized for being child pornography and she had to go through a big rigmarole because of it. As awful as child pornography is, we don't want things like this to happen to innocent people either.
(page 20) Business Sales tax loopholes that will be closed focus on large businesses and luxury watercraft. Sales taxes will increase $98 million as a result of these adjustments. The following are the sales tax changes:
Limit the farm chemicals tax exemption to include only small farms - $27.0 million
Collect sales tax on software packages (currently paid by consumers but not by business) - $64.0 million
Eliminate luxury watercraft use tax loophole - $7.0 million
(page 406) Sales Tax Loophole Closings . . .. Collect sales tax on canned software - $64.0 million Close the loophole that allows a business to purchase multiple copies of a computer program without being subject to sales tax on the licensing fee, while an individual who purchases a single copy of the software is taxed on the software purchase.
Allan Zadr wrote: While this will be great for a lot of artists I question the motive. I doubt that Eliot Spitzer is doing this for artists. I'm sure New York state will benefit from the interest revenue from "hold[ing] these monies.
If the money weren't turned over to the state unclaimed property office, then the RIAA would be benefiting from the interest revenue. How is that better?
GreyPoopon wrote: Now that really doesn't make sense. If the Berne Convention makes copyright notices unnecessary, then it should be assumed that any image you find is copyrighted unless other notice is given. I don't think you can use cluelessness as a defence.
While it might be prudent to assume that everything is copyrighted unless you have knowledge to the contrary (which is why commercial publishers are usually so careful about copyright clearances), "cluelessness" can still be a useful defense.
There are several reasons for this. Even without considering criminal copyright infringement, one might be subject to greater liability if it were shown that the infringement was willful. See 17 USC 504. Statutory damages can be reduced to $200 for a "clueless" infringer (as you put it) and increased to $150,000 for a willful infringer.
Ironica wrote: You chose to live in a place without accessible transit.
And what if you are married and both of you have jobs, one in the city, and one in the 'burbs? Depending on the geography, it may not be possible to live somewhere where both can get to work by public transit.
If it's "no photography" because of concerns about copyright (which is rarely the reason), the device might fall under the exception found at Section 121 of the Copyright Act, Limitations on exclusive rights: reproduction for blind or other people with disabilities. 17 USC 121
Here is a tidbit from the history of U.S. corporation law that may be of interest:
Back in 1919, Ford Motor Company was making money hand-over-fist and Henry Ford was the majority shareholder. He basically controlled the company in every way. Henry Ford had some interesting ideas for the time: in order to make sure that the employees could afford to buy the cars that the company made, he paid incredibly high wages to all his workers, including the janitors that swept up the factory. (Interestingly, one of the reasons Ford Motor Co. was so profitable was that it managed avoid paying patent license fees to George Selden.)
Henry Ford believed that his company was making too much money! He felt that the right thing to do was not to increase profits for the shareholders, who were already getting potloads of money from the corporation, but "to spread the benefits of this industrial system." The result of this policy was that the dividends were not increased in favor of raising wages and lowering the selling price for the cars. Note that the company was immensely profitable in spite of this, and paid a large regular dividend to its shareholders.
What do you think happened to Mr. Ford as a result of this policy? Two shareholders who held 10% of the company, the John and Horace Dodge, brought a shareholder derivative suit against Ford demanding a larger dividend. They argued that a corporation has a responsibility to maximize return for its shareholders, and that Mr. Ford's actions in managing the company with social good in mind were inappropriate. The Supreme Court of Michigan agreed with the Dodge brothers, finding that "the corporation exists for the benefit of the shareholders," and ordered that a larger dividend be given. The case is Dodge v. Ford Motor Company, 204 Mich. 459, 170 N.W. 668 (1919), if you care to look it up, or it may be found here.
The two Dodge brothers used the money from the larger dividend to set up the competing Dodge Motor Company.
The "deal" that the grant of a patent expresses is that in exchange for sharing the invention with the public, the inventor gets exclusive use of the invention for a limited time. If the public already knows about the invention, then there is no point to granting a patent to someone as a reward/compensation for disclosing the invention. That's why prior art invalidates patents.
In order to qualify as "prior art," public disclosure of an invention potentially doesn't have to be very public, if it was known or someone was using it in the US (I assume you are asking about US patents) before the "inventor" trying to obtain the patent invented it. See 35 USC 120. Prior art can also be public disclosure after invention but more than a year before the patent was filed.
A person shall be entitled to a patent unless - (a) the invention was known or used by others in this country, or patented or described in a printed publication in this or a foreign country, before the invention thereof by the applicant for patent, or (b) the invention was patented or described in a printed publication in this or a foreign country or in public use or on sale in this country, more than one year prior to the date of the application for patent in the United States, or . . ..
If memory serves, in 1930 copyright wasn't "automatic," you had to formally file for copyright protection for published works. The company in the ad very well may have been providing a useful service.
Furthermore, even now it can be beneficial to formally register your copyright. Among other things, it helps you collect attorney's fees if you sue for infringement.
True. But if it is a collection of public domain works (which of course can be a copyrightable compilation), those works in the collection remain in the public domain and one might copy them and put them in one's own copyrightable compilation.
However, if this database law passes, it is arguable that the copyrightable compilation also becomes a protected database, preventing others from copying the public domain works from the database.
One would still be able to copy the works from their original source, but if the public domain works were not readily available (perhaps they are unpublished letters, or stories found only in very old rare books) than that might not be practical.
I agree that it would be better to have this under the FTC's purview, but it's still not great.
I notice that the FTC bill (H.R. 3872) doesn't have a definition of "database." I sure hope they come up with a better one than the one found in the original bill (H.R.3261):
IN GENERAL- Subject to subparagraph (B), the term 'database' means a collection of a large number of discrete items of information produced for the purpose of bringing such discrete items of information together in one place or through one source so that persons may access them.
Subparagraph B gives some exceptions (such as works of authorship that are not compilations or collective works) but it still leaves open a pretty wide field. A book of collected public domain short stories would qualify, for example, and that doesn't seem appropriate to me.
I'll grant you that getting the cases in the database wasn't easy, especially at first. From what I understand, in the early days of Lexis and Westlaw huge teams of typists in India retyped the cases and articles. Now they use OCR, in the rare situations where they can't get the content in electronic format to begin with. (The periodicals in the databases happily send electronic format because they get a royalty when their articles are accessed.) The real value of databases of court cases is not merely that the cases are in there, but that the databases have very powerful search tools to find the cases. Personally, I don't think the likes of Lexis and Westlaw really need this law to protect their interests in the long run. I can look up a lot of the information that they have just as quickly for free if I know what case or statute I'm looking for. But if I don't, then their tools are tremendous time-saver.
While it wouldn't be cheap to create your own database of cases to rival Westlaw or Lexis, it wouldn't be all that difficult. Court cases are all printed in books with a similar format, in a similar typeface, and in near identical sizes. Buy a set, slice off the covers, run them through the OCR and you are good to go. It's not like trying to OCR back issues of Vogue magazine where there are lots of changes of type size and pictures and things like that to confuse the system.
The folks that would benefit more from this legislation are the folks that sell databases of information that would be difficult to compile from original sources. Things like databases of contact people in certain industries (useful for marketing purposes), credit-reporting companies, map databases, news services (hard to collect because the information is recent and therefore has few sources), etc.
Of course, Lexis, Westlaw, and similar services will use this law to clamp down their content as much as possible if it's passed. Before the Feist v. Rural Telephone case (the one that said that the phone book isn't copyrightable) Westlaw sued Mead Data Central (Lexis) for infringement of its page numbers and won. Lexis was including the pagination from West's hard copy case reporter books as well as its own pagination in its online database. The reason Lexis wanted to do this is that when you cite a case, you often cite to volume number and page number in the books published by West (as well as the identifier of the series of case reporters in question). A cite might look like "Eldred v. Ashcroft, 123 S. Ct. 769 (2003)" where the first number is the volume number, the second number is the page number. If you don't know what volume the case is in and what page it is on, you are going to have a hard time finding it. Some courts even require citation to the page number in West's books. Anyway, Lexis included volume and page numbers from West's books in its database so people could find the cases and tell others where to find the cases. Although the case was widely considered to have been wrongly decided, Lexis settled. It is doubtful that it would be decided that way today under the copyright law. However, I wouldn't be surprised if West tried something like this again under this new database law if it passes.
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hacksoncode wrote: Honestly, what college student is going to legitimately own 10,000 songs anyway?
Same with eBooks. Until you can download them easily and put the publishing industry out of business, they won't be popular.
There's a big difference between the songs that people were trading like crazy on Napster and e-books: there are a lot of books that are legitimately in the public domain. There are over 10,000 public domain books available through Project Gutenberg (as of October 2003), still more "free" books available from other sources either because they are public domain or because the rightholders decided to publish them on the internet, and many websites such as the New York Times allow downloading of daily content for offline reading.
What's more is that the file sizes are relatively small because they are, after all, merely text.
Yog wrote: Even easier: if you buy the hard copy of a book, you get a free download of the e-book. Sort of like providing the source code with a software application.
Baen basically did that when they published the most recent David Weber novel in the Honor Harrington series in paperback. In the back of the book was a CD-ROM with the full text of the book and (if memory serves) all the other books in the series. Apparently it didn't cause a problem because the next thing they did was to include John Ringo's entire backlist on a CD-ROM with his recent book Hell's Faire.
Baen has been distributing quite a few of its backlist titles for free in electronic form for reading on PDA's, onscreen, etc. and it has been increasing their sales. Check out the Baen Free Library if you enjoy science fiction or fantasy novels.
They also have a web subscription service where for $15/month you can get access to titles that are about to be published. The first month you get the first half of the book, the second month you get the next quarter, and the last month you get the final quarter, and they promise that a minimum of four books will be available in a given month. It looks like they have six available right now.
After the books are published, you can just buy an electronic version if you want for $4-6. That's a decent deal, considering that the even paperbacks often cost more than that these days.
As a kid, I noticed that the purple print color of the ditto'ed handouts we got in class appeared to be a different shade of blue-purple depending on whether or not I was wearing my glasses. I wonder if this is a related phenomenon?
FlopEJoe wrote: I'd like to play around with something like this but $2K is pretty high! And the SDK is tree-fiddy! Are there any other rigs with sainer prices?
I think a real EEG machine is going to run you at least $1500 unless you build it yourself.
As others have noted, the Journey to Wild Divine game is somewhat similar to Mindball, and much cheaper. (About $160.) However, it doesn't read brain waves, it detects relaxation levels with skin conductance and heart rate variablity-- it works very much like a "lie dectector." I don't think it is sensitive enough for multi-axis control, it only does "more relaxed" and "less relaxed."
There is a guy, Bryan Ingram, who has been working on a program that reads the signal from the Wild Divine monitor so you can do other things with it.
mog007 wrote: I haven't bought it, because I'm a poor college student, but this idea has already been fully experimented with in Wild Divine.
I agree that it is similar to Wild Divine, but there are significant differences. This game measures brain waves, Wild Divine measures skin conductance and heart rate variability. Also, Wild Divine is non-competitive.
Having played Wild Divine, I suspect that this game would be more difficult. When playing, one must not only be relaxed, but also be detached about doing better than the other person-- or you will wind up being less relaxed!
Because of Mindball's use of EEG rather than the less expensive equipment used by Wild Divine, I suspect Mindball will also be considerably more expensive. But that's not surprising-- it looks more like a set-up you'd have in a bar or lounge while Wild Divine is better adapted for home use.
I'd like to try Mindball, it sounds like fun.
mrwonton was probably referring to the news story posted on fireflyfans.net in which Nathan Fillion is quoted as having said that if the movie does well it will come back as a trilogy, not a television series.
That said, one would not think it completely beyond the realm of possibility that if the movie was successful enough be spun off into a series of sequels, that someone might also think that good profits could be made by continuing the television show.
The Rippa wrote: Budget in money for free sodas/water/coffee.
When I started at my job, we had water coolers that also made hot water. Everyone drank a lot of water and brought in their own tea bags, soup-in-a-cup, instant coffee, and so forth from home.
Then, because of budget problems, they had to get rid of the water coolers. I don't know how much money it saved, but from a morale point of view it was a serious mistake.
It's been about six months since they've been gone and everyone is still extremely bitter about it. It doesn't help that the tap water tastes terrible.
My advice: once you do decide to provide a perk, don't take it away if you can avoid it.
I'm an exception to this generalization, but perhaps I can shed some light on why what you have quoted might be true for many women.
When I'm bored, I shop online, or possibly post on bulletin boards (like Slashdot!). I play games for fun. I've been known to play MMORPGS for 18 hours straight, though it is rare that I have that much time available for gaming. I like games that I can install and play-- Age of Mythology has afforded me many hours of enjoyment. For the record, I don't play "The Sims." I have several adventure games that I enjoy, but I'm more interested in the problem-solving aspect of them than the "plot," as such. (E.g. the side storyline in Syberia about the main character's love life just annoyed me. But perhaps that's because I couldn't affect it.) Indeed, I've been enjoying games for decades, all the way back to playing "Heliocopter" and "The Wizard and the Princess" on my father's Apple II. (There is a rock here. Look rock. There is a scorpion here! Go east. There is a rock here. Look rock. There is a scorpion here...)
However, my gaming habits were not always this way. Several years ago when I was in law school, I would occasionally buy an adventure game and play it during semester breaks. The rest of the time, I had too much studying to do to have time for gaming, and I felt guilty about every moment I wasted on "leisure time." I still gamed, like my most of classmates, and we all played the same game: Freecell, for speed, and strings of wins. If you sat in the back of the lecture hall before the lecture began, you would see all these laptops with people madly playing Freecell as fast as they could. There's something almost meditative about playing Freecell for speed, it requires just enough attention, but not too much. It helped my stress level without taking too much of my time or mental effort. Now that I'm back in the real world, Freecell has lost its charm.
I suspect that the reason that women stereotypically play puzzle games rather than other types of games is that they don't take as much time. You noted that women tend not to play as long as men. That's because they have a lot of stuff to do!
Many stereotypically "female jobs" (cooking, cleaning, etc.) are tasks that must be done every day, leaving short blocks of free time between tasks. Many stereotypically "male jobs" (yard work, auto maintenance, etc.) may be equally time-consuming in the long run, but are only done periodically. This leaves longer blocks of free time for gaming. If you are going to play Everquest, you can't play for an hour here or there, and you can't get up when you want to in order to put the next load of laundry in the dryer, stir the soup, take a call from your relatives, etc. For women with children, I'm sure they have even more gaming interruptions.
I think the buying games vs. playing Bejeweled online thing might be more an issue of familiarity with computer games. Many games can be played online for free, if you like them then you sign up for a subscription to premium service. It's something you just fall into because you are bored surfing the web. Going out and buying a game that has to be installed requires more planning. It is easy to understand how someone who isn't that interested in computer games in the first place and hasn't heard of games that might be fun would be more likely to play an online game than one that must be purchased and installed.
If you want to make games that appeal to women, here are my suggestions:
1) The game must be intelligent. There should be interesting problems to solve.
2) The game should accommodate both long and short gaming sessions.
3) As noted above, pause buttons are very helpful.
4) Games that involve hurting other people probably aren't as appealing. I think in general women are socialized more than men are not to inflict physical damage on one another. I remember being taken on a date to play Laser Tag when I was in my late teens, and it took a while to get over the idea t
When I hired a photographer to photograph my wedding, I required that the copyright in the photographs would belong to me and that I would get the negatives. She was perfectly willing to do that for me for a minimal fee.
I'm glad I had the foresight to do this, as I now do not live in the same state where the photographer works.
When you hire a photographer to take a professional photo of you, see if he or she will agree to a deal like this.
I forgot to mention: there is also 17 USC 110.
One could make the argument (probably more easily than ASCAP could argue that your party were somehow a public performance) that one's campfire sing falls under 17 USC 110(4)(A). Basically, even a "public performance" might not be an infringement if it is without any commercial advantage.
If you are still worried, though, I suggest that there still are plenty of public domain folk songs for you to sing.
Goodness, man! You are willing to go up against Time Warner regarding the copyright status of "Happy Birthday" but you won't sing with your friends for fear of an infringement suit?
tepples wrote: Unless you have a fence around your campfire site, then the place is conceivably "open to the public." The music publisher will also argue in court over who is a "social acquaintance" and who is not.
They don't get to litigate about who a "social acquaintance" is until you get to a "substantial number." There is already legislative history and case law to rely on for that, and my parties typically aren't that large. And if someone did want to litigate that? There's plenty of case law there as well, unless you were hosting a huge party with lots of people you don't know from Adam, it would probably be a losing argument.
Furthermore, the last time I checked, my backyard firepit wasn't "public," fence or no fence. It's private property. Now that I think about it, most of the campfire sings that I've been involved in have been on private property. As for the rest, I look forward to the day ASCAP/BMI etc. goes after a Girl Scout troop in the state park.
Think I'll go whistle "Blackbird" while waiting for the bus . . . .
Tepples wrote (about singing around the campfire as jhines suggested): Then your problem will be with BMI and ASCAP and SESAC, when they bill you for singing copyrighted songs. The recording isn't the only thing copyrighted; the sheet music itself is subject to a monopoly.
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I'm all for singing.
First of all, although many songs are covered by copyright (including, darn them, "Happy Birthday") many others are not. If I feel like singing a Handel aria while sitting around the campfire, guess what? It's in the public domain. BMI can kiss my behind if they want to collect royalties from me for singing "Verdi prati" from Alcina (first performed in 1735). Same goes for many folk songs and traditional tunes. Including Kumbaya, which you might or might not consider encouraging news.
Second of all, it is questionable whether the campfire scenario described even falls under one of the "exclusive rights" of copyright. I call your attention to 17 USC 106:
Subject to sections 107 through 121, the owner of copyright under this title has the exclusive rights to do and to authorize any of the following:
. .
(4) in the case of literary, musical, dramatic, and choreographic works, pantomimes, and motion pictures and other audiovisual works, to perform the copyrighted work publicly;
Note the word "publicly." The right to perform "publicly" is reserved to the rightsholder, but it says nothing about performing "privately." That is why you don't have to pay a royalty when you sing happy birthday to your 3-year-old nephew at a party at your brother's house. Or when you sing while gathered around the campfire with friends.
A similar game is available, Journey to Wild Divine. It measures skin conductance and heart rate variation to control various objects in the game. I've played it, it was quite fun though it was a little short and had too much of a "new age" theme for my taste.
It has been covered on Slashdot.
Anonymous Coward wrote: Incorrect. Any video that has an actor portraying a child (even a virtual actor) is childporn. I remember a story about this a few years ago.
No, you are incorrect, though you wouldn't have been a few years ago. Please see Ashcroft v. The Free Speech Coalition in which the U.S. Supreme court found that the Child Pornography Prevention Act of 1996 was overbroad, violating the first amendment. (Follow this link for a news story about it. A more in-depth article can be found on Findlaw.com here.)
Remember, the reason child porn is illegal while images of adults engaged in the same activities is legal is because engaging in those activities with children is abuse. (And if you come across a pair of emotionally disturbed 6-year-olds spontaneously engaging in sexual activity, grabbing your camera is not the proper response.) The images themselves are records of child abuse.
Think about it. No matter how icky the images, the situation is entirely different if the images are really of 19-year-old actors who happen to look younger, or if they are drawings or paintings of something that never really happened-- even if those drawings are computer graphics that are difficult to distinguish from photographs.
I remember reading a story in Cosmo or some magazine like that several years ago about a cellist in her 20's who decided to use an artistic topless picture of herself next to her cello on the cover of her first album. The picture was intended to make a reference to the similarities in the shape of the instrument and the female form. Unfortunately for her, her figure was rather "youthful" and probably looked more so the way the photograph was done. The album covers were sized for being child pornography and she had to go through a big rigmarole because of it. As awful as child pornography is, we don't want things like this to happen to innocent people either.
Here is what the budget itself says (444 page document found at http://www.state.il.us/budget/FY05%20Budget%20Book .pdf):
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(page 20)
Business Sales tax loopholes that will be closed focus on large businesses and luxury watercraft.
Sales taxes will increase $98 million as a result of these adjustments. The following are the sales tax changes:
Limit the farm chemicals tax exemption to include only small farms - $27.0 million
Collect sales tax on software packages (currently paid by consumers but not by business) - $64.0 million
Eliminate luxury watercraft use tax loophole - $7.0 million
(page 406)
Sales Tax Loophole Closings
. . .
Collect sales tax on canned software - $64.0 million
Close the loophole that allows a business to purchase multiple copies of a computer program without being subject to sales tax on the licensing fee, while an individual who purchases a single copy of the software is taxed on the software purchase.
Allan Zadr wrote: While this will be great for a lot of artists I question the motive. I doubt that Eliot Spitzer is doing this for artists. I'm sure New York state will benefit from the interest revenue from "hold[ing] these monies.
If the money weren't turned over to the state unclaimed property office, then the RIAA would be benefiting from the interest revenue. How is that better?
GreyPoopon wrote: Now that really doesn't make sense. If the Berne Convention makes copyright notices unnecessary, then it should be assumed that any image you find is copyrighted unless other notice is given. I don't think you can use cluelessness as a defence.
While it might be prudent to assume that everything is copyrighted unless you have knowledge to the contrary (which is why commercial publishers are usually so careful about copyright clearances), "cluelessness" can still be a useful defense.
There are several reasons for this. Even without considering criminal copyright infringement, one might be subject to greater liability if it were shown that the infringement was willful. See 17 USC 504. Statutory damages can be reduced to $200 for a "clueless" infringer (as you put it) and increased to $150,000 for a willful infringer.
Ironica wrote: You chose to live in a place without accessible transit.
And what if you are married and both of you have jobs, one in the city, and one in the 'burbs? Depending on the geography, it may not be possible to live somewhere where both can get to work by public transit.
If it's "no photography" because of concerns about copyright (which is rarely the reason), the device might fall under the exception found at Section 121 of the Copyright Act, Limitations on exclusive rights: reproduction for blind or other people with disabilities. 17 USC 121
Here is a tidbit from the history of U.S. corporation law that may be of interest:
Back in 1919, Ford Motor Company was making money hand-over-fist and Henry Ford was the majority shareholder. He basically controlled the company in every way. Henry Ford had some interesting ideas for the time: in order to make sure that the employees could afford to buy the cars that the company made, he paid incredibly high wages to all his workers, including the janitors that swept up the factory. (Interestingly, one of the reasons Ford Motor Co. was so profitable was that it managed avoid paying patent license fees to George Selden.)
Henry Ford believed that his company was making too much money! He felt that the right thing to do was not to increase profits for the shareholders, who were already getting potloads of money from the corporation, but "to spread the benefits of this industrial system." The result of this policy was that the dividends were not increased in favor of raising wages and lowering the selling price for the cars. Note that the company was immensely profitable in spite of this, and paid a large regular dividend to its shareholders.
What do you think happened to Mr. Ford as a result of this policy? Two shareholders who held 10% of the company, the John and Horace Dodge, brought a shareholder derivative suit against Ford demanding a larger dividend. They argued that a corporation has a responsibility to maximize return for its shareholders, and that Mr. Ford's actions in managing the company with social good in mind were inappropriate. The Supreme Court of Michigan agreed with the Dodge brothers, finding that "the corporation exists for the benefit of the shareholders," and ordered that a larger dividend be given. The case is Dodge v. Ford Motor Company, 204 Mich. 459, 170 N.W. 668 (1919), if you care to look it up, or it may be found here.
The two Dodge brothers used the money from the larger dividend to set up the competing Dodge Motor Company.
The "deal" that the grant of a patent expresses is that in exchange for sharing the invention with the public, the inventor gets exclusive use of the invention for a limited time. If the public already knows about the invention, then there is no point to granting a patent to someone as a reward/compensation for disclosing the invention. That's why prior art invalidates patents.
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In order to qualify as "prior art," public disclosure of an invention potentially doesn't have to be very public, if it was known or someone was using it in the US (I assume you are asking about US patents) before the "inventor" trying to obtain the patent invented it. See 35 USC 120. Prior art can also be public disclosure after invention but more than a year before the patent was filed.
A person shall be entitled to a patent unless -
(a) the invention was known or used by others in this country, or patented or described in a printed publication in this or a foreign country, before the invention thereof by the applicant for patent, or
(b) the invention was patented or described in a printed publication in this or a foreign country or in public use or on sale in this country, more than one year prior to the date of the application for patent in the United States, or
. . .
A useful basic article entitled "When is something prior art against a patent?" can be found at
http://www.iusmentis.com/patents/priorart/.
If memory serves, in 1930 copyright wasn't "automatic," you had to formally file for copyright protection for published works. The company in the ad very well may have been providing a useful service.
Furthermore, even now it can be beneficial to formally register your copyright. Among other things, it helps you collect attorney's fees if you sue for infringement.
True. But if it is a collection of public domain works (which of course can be a copyrightable compilation), those works in the collection remain in the public domain and one might copy them and put them in one's own copyrightable compilation.
However, if this database law passes, it is arguable that the copyrightable compilation also becomes a protected database, preventing others from copying the public domain works from the database.
One would still be able to copy the works from their original source, but if the public domain works were not readily available (perhaps they are unpublished letters, or stories found only in very old rare books) than that might not be practical.
I agree that it would be better to have this under the FTC's purview, but it's still not great.
I notice that the FTC bill (H.R. 3872) doesn't have a definition of "database." I sure hope they come up with a better one than the one found in the original bill (H.R.3261):
IN GENERAL- Subject to subparagraph (B), the term 'database' means a collection of a large number of discrete items of information produced for the purpose of bringing such discrete items of information together in one place or through one source so that persons may access them.
Subparagraph B gives some exceptions (such as works of authorship that are not compilations or collective works) but it still leaves open a pretty wide field. A book of collected public domain short stories would qualify, for example, and that doesn't seem appropriate to me.
I'll grant you that getting the cases in the database wasn't easy, especially at first. From what I understand, in the early days of Lexis and Westlaw huge teams of typists in India retyped the cases and articles. Now they use OCR, in the rare situations where they can't get the content in electronic format to begin with. (The periodicals in the databases happily send electronic format because they get a royalty when their articles are accessed.) The real value of databases of court cases is not merely that the cases are in there, but that the databases have very powerful search tools to find the cases. Personally, I don't think the likes of Lexis and Westlaw really need this law to protect their interests in the long run. I can look up a lot of the information that they have just as quickly for free if I know what case or statute I'm looking for. But if I don't, then their tools are tremendous time-saver.
While it wouldn't be cheap to create your own database of cases to rival Westlaw or Lexis, it wouldn't be all that difficult. Court cases are all printed in books with a similar format, in a similar typeface, and in near identical sizes. Buy a set, slice off the covers, run them through the OCR and you are good to go. It's not like trying to OCR back issues of Vogue magazine where there are lots of changes of type size and pictures and things like that to confuse the system.
The folks that would benefit more from this legislation are the folks that sell databases of information that would be difficult to compile from original sources. Things like databases of contact people in certain industries (useful for marketing purposes), credit-reporting companies, map databases, news services (hard to collect because the information is recent and therefore has few sources), etc.
Of course, Lexis, Westlaw, and similar services will use this law to clamp down their content as much as possible if it's passed. Before the Feist v. Rural Telephone case (the one that said that the phone book isn't copyrightable) Westlaw sued Mead Data Central (Lexis) for infringement of its page numbers and won. Lexis was including the pagination from West's hard copy case reporter books as well as its own pagination in its online database. The reason Lexis wanted to do this is that when you cite a case, you often cite to volume number and page number in the books published by West (as well as the identifier of the series of case reporters in question). A cite might look like "Eldred v. Ashcroft, 123 S. Ct. 769 (2003)" where the first number is the volume number, the second number is the page number. If you don't know what volume the case is in and what page it is on, you are going to have a hard time finding it. Some courts even require citation to the page number in West's books. Anyway, Lexis included volume and page numbers from West's books in its database so people could find the cases and tell others where to find the cases. Although the case was widely considered to have been wrongly decided, Lexis settled. It is doubtful that it would be decided that way today under the copyright law. However, I wouldn't be surprised if West tried something like this again under this new database law if it passes.