Here's Ellison's "press release" about the case. The overuse of ALL CAPS surprised me a little because he is a good writer, but I guess it shouldn't have given the man's personality.
bluGill wrote: Don't recall which case, but the supreme court has ruled that cops do not have to protect you. Case came out when one man broke into a house where 3 women lived, trapped them all in a bedroom, and was raping them.
You are probably thinking of Warren v. District of Columbia, 444 A.2d 1 (D.C.App. 1981), which is often cited in by folks opposing gun control. It is not a US Supreme Court case, but the principle you cite that the police are usually not civilly liable to you for failing to protect you personally from a crime is pretty well established.
In the Warren case, three women were in the house, and two men broke in. While one woman was being raped, another of the women in a different room heard her screams and called the police. While waiting for the police to arrive the two women who were not being raped crawled onto the roof for safety.
The police came to investigate, but didn't investigate too far. One knocked on the door, but there was no answer, and nothing appeared to be amiss from the outside, so they left. The women on the roof crawled back into the house and hearing the third woman's screams, made a second call to the police. No police were dispatched. The women thought the police might be in the house, so they called out . . . unfortunately drawing the attention of the rapists.
To make a long and horrible story short, all three women were kidnapped to one of the rapists' apartments, and were raped and brutally beaten for the next fourteen hours. They sued the District for damages and lost.
duncanatlk wrote: I can't believe he was lucky enough to dodge a DUI . . .
No luck involved. His daughter had been driving the truck.
As for why it's on Slashdot, I've noticed that the folks here have a fondness for the Electronic Frontier Foundation. Here's the amicus brief the EFF filed in support of Mr. Hiibel.
If you break in with the intention to steal and are thwarted, of course you are guilty of burglary and attempted theft. In many U.S. jurisdictions, the penalty for attempted theft is the same as that for theft itself.
On the other hand, whether or not you meant to steal anything is a very important point to consider in criminal law. It is arguably the most important point.
In many jurisdictions, "burglary" entails breaking in with the intention of committing a felony inside (such as theft). Where I live, if someone breaks into your house with the intention only of taking a nap on your sofa, it's criminal trespass to a residence (a misdemeanor, if no one is home during the break-in), not burglary (a felony). Both are crimes, but the intent involved in one is worse than the other, which is why one is more harshly punished than the other.
I had something called "Ramagon" which was made out of white plastic. It had 26-sided connectors and full and half-length bars. You could make very cool futuristic structures, Russian-looking "onion domes," etc. There were bright yellow and orange plates that you could snap on to form walls, rubber doughnuts you could put on the connectors to form wheels, etc. I had tremendous fun with it.
The only problem with it was that the structures it made were amazingly sturdy structurally but the plastic they used was too brittle (styrene, I think), so it was very hard to take the finished structures apart without breaking the components. I think they use a different type of plastic now that has solved that problem. Looks like they have more & different colored parts as well.
I doubt that there is any such contract between students and colleges in most situations. If you were taking a journalism course where part of the classwork was to write a publishable story and have it published in the school paper, or if you were working on a school journal and part of the work was to write a publishable article, it might be different. Neither of these is the situation in question with the guy at McGill.
That said, many universities have policies about ownership of patents developed by students. That is probably what you are thinking of. Here's the agreement that the University of California uses: http://www.ucop.edu/ott/patentpolicy/patentac.html
It says nothing about the copyright of any papers written.
Buck_Wild wrote: I think that all new TVs need to be attachable to a treadmill, and exercise bike, a stair climber, etc. that wil shut the device down if a certain cadence or time limit is not met.
Perhaps this bicycle-powered generator will help you:
In Illinois, at least, I believe that the rule is that an electronically signed document is rebuttably presumed genuine. In other words, if someone says that you signed the document, they don't have to prove you signed it, you have to prove that you didn't. (See 5 ILCS 175/10-120.)
It isn't so different from the way physically signed documents are treated. Remember, documents signed with a rubber "signature stamp" are still signed for many purposes.
Of course, it will cost you $30 to register it, not to mention the postage costs for mailing the two deposit copies and the time it will take for you to fill out the registration form. (Make sure you fill it out right the first time, correcting it after the fact is expensive.) For some things, it might not be worth it.
On the other hand, if you ever have to sue someone for copyright infringement, formal registration is nice because it makes certain remedies (like collecting legal fees from the infringer) available that wouldn't be otherwise.
I was a kid in the 70's. And the bill was either on the back cover, or as a bound-in insert of some kind. (I seem to recall stickers bound-in on another occasion.) The inside pages of the magazine were the usual cheap paper.
I remember when I was a kid, Mad Magazine got into trouble for printing a joke $5 bill with Alfred E. Newman's picture. Though the same size as a real bill, it didn't look real and wasn't very detailed -- it was like a cartoon drawing-- and was printed on magazine stock. I don't remember if it was single-sided or double-sided, but there is no way a person would have accepted it.
However . . . some people discovered that it would pass as a $5 in change machines. The treasury department wasn't very pleased about it, took Mad's plates and made them promise not to do it again.
They recently passed a law relating to this in Illinois. I'm not sure of the details. Basically, if you are a high school student who just got his or her driver's license, for the first six months you aren't allowed to have more than one passenger under 21 in the car with you unless your passengers are family members. I guess they put the exception in so you can drive your younger siblings to soccer practice, etc.
If parents want to decide beforehand that their children will be immune to the addictive properties of harmful drugs like cocaine and nicotine, so be it.
While I agree in principle with your idea, it would never work. The reason those compounds get people "high" is because they are very similar to substances that occur naturally in the body. Good idea, make kids immune to their own brain chemicals.
Even if that problem could be solved, which I doubt, those compounds have therapeutic uses. Cocaine is a phenomenally good local anesthetic. The opiates are excellent painkillers. If your kid has surgery, would you want it so they could get no benefit from good ol' Tylenol 3? Or if things were bad enough that your kid ever needed a morphine drip, would you want it so that it couldn't do anything for him or her? Would anyone? I doubt it.
I've heard the suggestion of giving shots like this to all children before, but I think it would be unwise. Nicotine does have legitimate therapeutic uses. If my kid (if I had one) wasn't already suffering from cigarette addiction and unable to quit, there's no way I'd consider potentially rendering him or her unable to benefit from future medical treatment involving nicotine, even if the conditions it is used to treat are not very common.
Imagine this scenario: You live in a rural area, the local paramedics are volunteers who have to get to the ambulance and then get to you. The hospital is miles from your house. Your child or spouse or parent suffers a serious injury in an accident, and you have to get them to the hospital right away. You might reasonably decide to put your injured family member in the car and drive to the hospital as fast as you can. There's no traffic and you know the road . . . how would you feel about a device that kept your car from exceeding the speed limit?
But Reebok wouldn't just claim it as a company name . . . that's not how trademarks work. Trademarks identify *goods and services* in the marketplace, so that consumers aren't confused about what they are buying. A mark could be a company name (like "Reebok" or "Nike") or it could be the name of a specific product (like "Air Jordan" or "Chia Pet.").
Now, in your hypothetical, if "Reebok" had registered its mark for athletic shoes only, there probably wouldn't be a problem with a red-sequined stiletto-heel shoe style named "Beebok," because it would not confuse the consumer as to the source of the product. That's the test: likelihood of confusion. Which brings me to my next point, if the mark is strong enough, one may infringe a trademark even if the product or service is different.
I believe "Mythic Entertainment" is only a registered mark for "computer game software" and for "Operating real time, role playing games for others over global computer networks." They'd probably have trouble stopping someone from using a similar name for a catering and party-planning business, but I would think twice about opening a RPG supply/comics shop with the identical name.
Actually, similarities between the name of a company and the name of a product absolutely can cause confusion in consumer's minds, and therefore can be the subject of a valid trademark claim.
However, the article isn't especially clearly written, which makes it hard to understand exactly what is going on here. It doesn't seem that the complaint is *only* about the similarity of "Mythica" to "Mythic."
According to the article, Mythic Co. is complaining that the Norse images and mythology used in Microsoft's "Mythica" game is too much like Mythic's game (DaoC). It sounds like in addition to a regular trademark infringement claim they are also making another particular type of trademark claim: a trade dress claim. The classic example of trade dress is the distinctive shape and appearance of a Coke bottle. Trade dress can be as simple as the color of a product (think about the pink fiberglass insulation that they used to advertise with the Pink Panther) or as complicated as the decor of a restaurant.
It obviously would be pretty difficult to make a Norse-based game without "Midgard," dwarves, Vikings, Thor, etc., so Mythic's arguments will likely rely heavily on the similarity of the "look & feel" of the two games, and the style of gameplay. You are right that "Mythic" isn't as "strong" a mark as a made-up word like "Kodak" would be, but at the same time, Mythic's claim against Microsoft will be stronger the more similar the two games are. I read elsewhere that the Microsoft game even uses the same names for the same levels as are used in DaoC, etc., so maybe the folks at Mythic really do have a point.
Use of "traffic control signal preemption devices" by non-emergency vehicles other than snow plows or commuter buses is illegal in Illinois. They just passed a law about it: 625 ILCS 5/12-601.1.
Based on what jea6 posted above, it appears that the Megadeth issue is about derivative works, not about recording a "cover."
If you base a new work on an existing work (different lyrics to a tune in this example), you have created a "derivative work" which is a kind of copy that requires permission. It's not the kind of copy/performance that is covered by the compulsory license. That's why they could include the song as an instrumental (no new lyrics added) or with the lyrics bleeped out (no new lyrics added), but not with the new lyrics without paying the fee Lee Hazelwood demanded.
I regularly buy silk fabric from a company in Hong Kong, Angus International I/E. The catalog has the warning (in all capital letters) that orders from Nigeria will not be accepted due to the high rate of bank draft fraud.
As for the difficulties of dealing with overseas fraud, there is another overseas fabric company I have dealt with, this time in China (Changsha Xiangchu Silk Co.), which was cheated by a woman in Auburn, Washington. They have no way of recovering the $200 that she didn't pay. The amount isn't enough to be worth suing over. Their only recourse has been to post the whole story on their website and warn their customers to be wary of doing business with her. Fortunately, they are still willing to do business with folks in the U.S. One can understand why a company would prefer to do business only with people in its own country.
When I was in law school, the first year I was assigned to a group that was required to have laptops. The classrooms were wired so that everywhere you went, you could connect to the school network and the internet.
Everyone who already knew how to use a computer tolerably well tended to use the laptops for note-taking in class. I found that it helped me a lot, though I already knew how to type very quickly and was quite adept with my word processing software. The school also made sure that we had electronic versions of all our course materials, which was very handy (and much lighter). Many people still read their paper copies of the books, but used the electronic versions in class. Having the electronic version also meant that one was never without one's books if they were unexpectedly needed. I would also have things like the entire copyright, trademark, and patent code loaded, the Constitution, a legal dictionary, etc.
Alas, people also used their laptops to "pass notes" in class via email, surf the web, and even play Doom with each other in the back row. Some of the professors didn't care; they figured that if people were playing Doom during a lecture, they would suffer the consequences when examination time came around. Others would have the internet connection to the room turned off during class.
The people who got the most benefit out of having the computers all the time were the people who already knew how to use them. The people who didn't even know how to turn the computer on when they got their laptops were hindered.
One thing that might be handy in teaching English would be if you have a function available that would allow you to show whatever is on a given student's screen at the front of the room for critique purposes. None of my legal writing professors did that, but some of the others did. I have also seen computers used very effectively for exercises in editing.
Depending on the English course to be taught, the computers might or might not be useful. Many universities teach a very basic English course where skills like looking things up in the library are taught along with basic parts of speech. I could imagine a course like that also including basic computer skills, and would legitimately be taught in a computer lab. For example, one could teach people to use the college library catalog search function much more effectively in a computer lab, show people how to find online journals, etc. However, if the course were a more advanced one, I would expect the computers to be somewhat distracting. On the other hand, students in a more advanced course might better be able to avoid the temptation to "play" on the computers during class.
Another potential problem: the acoustics in many computer rooms is not as good as that of a standard classroom, and you must be heard over the sound of all that typing!
My advice: turn off the internet connection during class unless you need it for something in particular that you are teaching that day.
Slashdot Mirror
Here's Ellison's "press release" about the case. The overuse of ALL CAPS surprised me a little because he is a good writer, but I guess it shouldn't have given the man's personality.
bluGill wrote: Don't recall which case, but the supreme court has ruled that cops do not have to protect you. Case came out when one man broke into a house where 3 women lived, trapped them all in a bedroom, and was raping them.
You are probably thinking of Warren v. District of Columbia, 444 A.2d 1 (D.C.App. 1981), which is often cited in by folks opposing gun control. It is not a US Supreme Court case, but the principle you cite that the police are usually not civilly liable to you for failing to protect you personally from a crime is pretty well established.
In the Warren case, three women were in the house, and two men broke in. While one woman was being raped, another of the women in a different room heard her screams and called the police. While waiting for the police to arrive the two women who were not being raped crawled onto the roof for safety.
The police came to investigate, but didn't investigate too far. One knocked on the door, but there was no answer, and nothing appeared to be amiss from the outside, so they left. The women on the roof crawled back into the house and hearing the third woman's screams, made a second call to the police. No police were dispatched. The women thought the police might be in the house, so they called out . . . unfortunately drawing the attention of the rapists.
To make a long and horrible story short, all three women were kidnapped to one of the rapists' apartments, and were raped and brutally beaten for the next fourteen hours. They sued the District for damages and lost.
If you want to read the case you can find it at http://www.healylaw.com/cases/warren2.htm
/dev/trash wrote: If only he WAS just parked there minding his own business.....but he wasn't. He was beating his daughter.
No, apparently she hit him. That's when he asked to get out of the car (she was driving) and she pulled over.
duncanatlk wrote: I can't believe he was lucky enough to dodge a DUI . . .
No luck involved. His daughter had been driving the truck.
As for why it's on Slashdot, I've noticed that the folks here have a fondness for the Electronic Frontier Foundation. Here's the amicus brief the EFF filed in support of Mr. Hiibel.
If you break in with the intention to steal and are thwarted, of course you are guilty of burglary and attempted theft. In many U.S. jurisdictions, the penalty for attempted theft is the same as that for theft itself.
On the other hand, whether or not you meant to steal anything is a very important point to consider in criminal law. It is arguably the most important point.
In many jurisdictions, "burglary" entails breaking in with the intention of committing a felony inside (such as theft). Where I live, if someone breaks into your house with the intention only of taking a nap on your sofa, it's criminal trespass to a residence (a misdemeanor, if no one is home during the break-in), not burglary (a felony). Both are crimes, but the intent involved in one is worse than the other, which is why one is more harshly punished than the other.
I had something called "Ramagon" which was made out of white plastic. It had 26-sided connectors and full and half-length bars. You could make very cool futuristic structures, Russian-looking "onion domes," etc. There were bright yellow and orange plates that you could snap on to form walls, rubber doughnuts you could put on the connectors to form wheels, etc. I had tremendous fun with it.
The only problem with it was that the structures it made were amazingly sturdy structurally but the plastic they used was too brittle (styrene, I think), so it was very hard to take the finished structures apart without breaking the components. I think they use a different type of plastic now that has solved that problem. Looks like they have more & different colored parts as well.
I doubt that there is any such contract between students and colleges in most situations. If you were taking a journalism course where part of the classwork was to write a publishable story and have it published in the school paper, or if you were working on a school journal and part of the work was to write a publishable article, it might be different. Neither of these is the situation in question with the guy at McGill.
l
That said, many universities have policies about ownership of patents developed by students. That is probably what you are thinking of. Here's the agreement that the University of California uses:
http://www.ucop.edu/ott/patentpolicy/patentac.htm
It says nothing about the copyright of any papers written.
Buck_Wild wrote:
d =17330
I think that all new TVs need to be attachable to a treadmill, and exercise bike, a stair climber, etc. that wil shut the device down if a certain cadence or time limit is not met.
Perhaps this bicycle-powered generator will help you:
http://www.gaiam.com/retail/product.asp?product_i
And here's a guy who built his own:
http://users.erols.com/mshaver/bikegen.htm
In Illinois, at least, I believe that the rule is that an electronically signed document is rebuttably presumed genuine. In other words, if someone says that you signed the document, they don't have to prove you signed it, you have to prove that you didn't. (See 5 ILCS 175/10-120.)
It isn't so different from the way physically signed documents are treated. Remember, documents signed with a rubber "signature stamp" are still signed for many purposes.
Of course, it will cost you $30 to register it, not to mention the postage costs for mailing the two deposit copies and the time it will take for you to fill out the registration form. (Make sure you fill it out right the first time, correcting it after the fact is expensive.) For some things, it might not be worth it.
On the other hand, if you ever have to sue someone for copyright infringement, formal registration is nice because it makes certain remedies (like collecting legal fees from the infringer) available that wouldn't be otherwise.
I was a kid in the 70's. And the bill was either on the back cover, or as a bound-in insert of some kind. (I seem to recall stickers bound-in on another occasion.) The inside pages of the magazine were the usual cheap paper.
I remember when I was a kid, Mad Magazine got into trouble for printing a joke $5 bill with Alfred E. Newman's picture. Though the same size as a real bill, it didn't look real and wasn't very detailed -- it was like a cartoon drawing-- and was printed on magazine stock. I don't remember if it was single-sided or double-sided, but there is no way a person would have accepted it.
However . . . some people discovered that it would pass as a $5 in change machines. The treasury department wasn't very pleased about it, took Mad's plates and made them promise not to do it again.
They recently passed a law relating to this in Illinois. I'm not sure of the details. Basically, if you are a high school student who just got his or her driver's license, for the first six months you aren't allowed to have more than one passenger under 21 in the car with you unless your passengers are family members. I guess they put the exception in so you can drive your younger siblings to soccer practice, etc.
Your rural area (and its paramedics) is better than my folks' rural area, I guess.
Obviously, someone rushing to the hospital would still drive carefully even if they were exceeding the speed limit. It can be done.
If parents want to decide beforehand that their children will be immune to the addictive properties of harmful drugs like cocaine and nicotine, so be it.
While I agree in principle with your idea, it would never work. The reason those compounds get people "high" is because they are very similar to substances that occur naturally in the body. Good idea, make kids immune to their own brain chemicals.
Even if that problem could be solved, which I doubt, those compounds have therapeutic uses. Cocaine is a phenomenally good local anesthetic. The opiates are excellent painkillers. If your kid has surgery, would you want it so they could get no benefit from good ol' Tylenol 3? Or if things were bad enough that your kid ever needed a morphine drip, would you want it so that it couldn't do anything for him or her? Would anyone? I doubt it.
I've heard the suggestion of giving shots like this to all children before, but I think it would be unwise. Nicotine does have legitimate therapeutic uses. If my kid (if I had one) wasn't already suffering from cigarette addiction and unable to quit, there's no way I'd consider potentially rendering him or her unable to benefit from future medical treatment involving nicotine, even if the conditions it is used to treat are not very common.
Imagine this scenario: You live in a rural area, the local paramedics are volunteers who have to get to the ambulance and then get to you. The hospital is miles from your house. Your child or spouse or parent suffers a serious injury in an accident, and you have to get them to the hospital right away. You might reasonably decide to put your injured family member in the car and drive to the hospital as fast as you can. There's no traffic and you know the road . . . how would you feel about a device that kept your car from exceeding the speed limit?
But Reebok wouldn't just claim it as a company name . . . that's not how trademarks work. Trademarks identify *goods and services* in the marketplace, so that consumers aren't confused about what they are buying. A mark could be a company name (like "Reebok" or "Nike") or it could be the name of a specific product (like "Air Jordan" or "Chia Pet.").
Now, in your hypothetical, if "Reebok" had registered its mark for athletic shoes only, there probably wouldn't be a problem with a red-sequined stiletto-heel shoe style named "Beebok," because it would not confuse the consumer as to the source of the product. That's the test: likelihood of confusion. Which brings me to my next point, if the mark is strong enough, one may infringe a trademark even if the product or service is different.
I believe "Mythic Entertainment" is only a registered mark for "computer game software" and for "Operating real time, role playing games for others over global computer networks." They'd probably have trouble stopping someone from using a similar name for a catering and party-planning business, but I would think twice about opening a RPG supply/comics shop with the identical name.
Actually, similarities between the name of a company and the name of a product absolutely can cause confusion in consumer's minds, and therefore can be the subject of a valid trademark claim.
However, the article isn't especially clearly written, which makes it hard to understand exactly what is going on here. It doesn't seem that the complaint is *only* about the similarity of "Mythica" to "Mythic."
According to the article, Mythic Co. is complaining that the Norse images and mythology used in Microsoft's "Mythica" game is too much like Mythic's game (DaoC). It sounds like in addition to a regular trademark infringement claim they are also making another particular type of trademark claim: a trade dress claim. The classic example of trade dress is the distinctive shape and appearance of a Coke bottle. Trade dress can be as simple as the color of a product (think about the pink fiberglass insulation that they used to advertise with the Pink Panther) or as complicated as the decor of a restaurant.
It obviously would be pretty difficult to make a Norse-based game without "Midgard," dwarves, Vikings, Thor, etc., so Mythic's arguments will likely rely heavily on the similarity of the "look & feel" of the two games, and the style of gameplay. You are right that "Mythic" isn't as "strong" a mark as a made-up word like "Kodak" would be, but at the same time, Mythic's claim against Microsoft will be stronger the more similar the two games are. I read elsewhere that the Microsoft game even uses the same names for the same levels as are used in DaoC, etc., so maybe the folks at Mythic really do have a point.
(See http://www.legis.state.il.us/legislation/publicact s/93/093-0080.htm.)
My grandmother (from central U.S.) always called it a "davenport."
Based on what jea6 posted above, it appears that the Megadeth issue is about derivative works, not about recording a "cover."
If you base a new work on an existing work (different lyrics to a tune in this example), you have created a "derivative work" which is a kind of copy that requires permission. It's not the kind of copy/performance that is covered by the compulsory license. That's why they could include the song as an instrumental (no new lyrics added) or with the lyrics bleeped out (no new lyrics added), but not with the new lyrics without paying the fee Lee Hazelwood demanded.
An Anonymous Coward wrote: A lot of people just arent interested in fantasies about space monsters and ghosts.
One of the things that I liked about Firefly was that it didn't have any weird-looking alien monsters. All the monsters were human . . .
I regularly buy silk fabric from a company in Hong Kong, Angus International I/E. The catalog has the warning (in all capital letters) that orders from Nigeria will not be accepted due to the high rate of bank draft fraud.
As for the difficulties of dealing with overseas fraud, there is another overseas fabric company I have dealt with, this time in China (Changsha Xiangchu Silk Co.), which was cheated by a woman in Auburn, Washington. They have no way of recovering the $200 that she didn't pay. The amount isn't enough to be worth suing over. Their only recourse has been to post the whole story on their website and warn their customers to be wary of doing business with her. Fortunately, they are still willing to do business with folks in the U.S. One can understand why a company would prefer to do business only with people in its own country.
When I was in law school, the first year I was assigned to a group that was required to have laptops. The classrooms were wired so that everywhere you went, you could connect to the school network and the internet.
Everyone who already knew how to use a computer tolerably well tended to use the laptops for note-taking in class. I found that it helped me a lot, though I already knew how to type very quickly and was quite adept with my word processing software. The school also made sure that we had electronic versions of all our course materials, which was very handy (and much lighter). Many people still read their paper copies of the books, but used the electronic versions in class. Having the electronic version also meant that one was never without one's books if they were unexpectedly needed. I would also have things like the entire copyright, trademark, and patent code loaded, the Constitution, a legal dictionary, etc.
Alas, people also used their laptops to "pass notes" in class via email, surf the web, and even play Doom with each other in the back row. Some of the professors didn't care; they figured that if people were playing Doom during a lecture, they would suffer the consequences when examination time came around. Others would have the internet connection to the room turned off during class.
The people who got the most benefit out of having the computers all the time were the people who already knew how to use them. The people who didn't even know how to turn the computer on when they got their laptops were hindered.
One thing that might be handy in teaching English would be if you have a function available that would allow you to show whatever is on a given student's screen at the front of the room for critique purposes. None of my legal writing professors did that, but some of the others did. I have also seen computers used very effectively for exercises in editing.
Depending on the English course to be taught, the computers might or might not be useful. Many universities teach a very basic English course where skills like looking things up in the library are taught along with basic parts of speech. I could imagine a course like that also including basic computer skills, and would legitimately be taught in a computer lab. For example, one could teach people to use the college library catalog search function much more effectively in a computer lab, show people how to find online journals, etc. However, if the course were a more advanced one, I would expect the computers to be somewhat distracting. On the other hand, students in a more advanced course might better be able to avoid the temptation to "play" on the computers during class.
Another potential problem: the acoustics in many computer rooms is not as good as that of a standard classroom, and you must be heard over the sound of all that typing!
My advice: turn off the internet connection during class unless you need it for something in particular that you are teaching that day.