Common, the slightest bit of reference on your part could have avoided this. Even Wikipedia has us listed as being bound by the WIPO treaties in 1996 where the DMCA was in 1998. The two WIPO treaties (and yes, 2 of them, not just the copyright treaty) were employed and discussed in 1996, congress ratified it on October 21 1998.
You are not bound by it until you ratify it. So you were bound by it as of Oct 21, 1998.
Sorry I got the date the DMCA was passed wrong: it was introduced long before you were required to introduce it, but it wasn't passed until after the ratification.
Tou will find the clause under sections 18 that says...
That paragraph also ends with "or permitted by law". There is no obligation to prevent fair use. There is no obligation to prevent any legal use.
Two quotes from your message. I hope I haven't left out any important context, but I don't want to quote your whole message:
But the reality is that when people know something is inevitable, they will prepare for it somewhere along the way so it is viable at the time it is necessary.
and
Make no mistake, the DMCA would have happened because of the WIPO treaties regardless of if we waited 20 years after their ratification or created the laws in parallel with the ratifications.
Now these are bizarre claims. I think you are claiming that the US had no choice but to ratify the treaty, so it was in effect bound by the treaty as soon as it signed it. But the whole point of ratification is this: there are no obligations on the country until their support for the treaty is ratified by the legislative bodies. Before ratifying a treaty, there is *no* obligation. The democratic institutions need to decide whether to ratify the treaty or not.
In the case of the WCT, only 68 countries have taken that second step and ratified it. The US and Japan are the biggest ones, no other members of the G8 have done so. Most of the 68 are small countries, presumably doing it to try to curry favour with the US. (Australia ratified to get a free trade agreement. Canada already had a free trade agreement, and hasn't ratified. I can't see any large European country that has ratified. China has, Russia hasn't. Etc.)
You can repeat this as often as you like, but it's just not true. The US ratified the WCT *after* passing the DMCA, not before. It had signed the treaty before, indicating non-binding support for it, but it had not ratified it, so it was not obligated to do anything.
And take the language in Article 11 of the WCT. It says
Contracting Parties shall provide adequate legal protection and effective legal remedies against the circumvention of effective technological measures that are used by authors in connection with the exercise of their rights under this Treaty or the Berne Convention and that restrict acts, in respect of their works, which are not authorized by the authors concerned or permitted by law.
Yes, this requires some sort of protection of DRM, but the DMCA goes far further. Look at the last four words: "or permitted by law". That means that fair use could trump DRM, but in the DMCA, it does not. There's nothing there to prohibit software that breaks DRM, but the DMCA does that.
The US didn't need to do *anything* until it had ratified the WCT, but instead it chose to go far beyond the requirements of the treaty. Don't blame others for your bad decisions.
What did is say, the treaty enabled Clinton to pass sweeping changed to copyright law.
I think you should read your own post, difficult as that may be. "Required" is stronger than "enabled". Even "enabled" is stronger than the page you cited, according to which "was used as an excuse" is more accurate.
I'm Canadian. We have more or less the same movies and music available as in the USA, and no DMCA, though there have been a couple of attempts to pass one. (Canada signed the WCT, but has not ratified it). The Canada-US trading relationship is still the largest bilateral trading relationship in the world.
So the repercussions of not having a DMCA are at least not immediate.
1. Less than 100 countries signed onto either of those treaties. The page you refer to says they were adopted "by consensus", but that doesn't imply any countries signed onto them. It just says that at some WIPO meeting they were adopted by consensus.
2. The page you referred to says:
Both Congress and the Clinton Administration used these international treaties as an excuse for passing a broad, sweeping changes to U.S. copyright laws that were urged by the entertainment industry , despite the fact that such changes to U.S. copyright law were not required by the treaties themselves.
This contradicts your main point, which was that the WCT and WPPT obligated the US to pass the DMCA. No, the DMCA was passed because lobbyists convinced your government to pass it. It's a US invention.
two WIPO treaties that 150 of countries signed on to.
Which treaties are you talking about? The relevant one is the Copyright Treaty, and only 68 countries have ratified it. Another 26 or so have signed it but not ratified it, which means it's not in force in those countries. (Of the G8, only the US and Japan are among the ratifiers.)
The signature on the treaty is used as an excuse by the proponents of it to say that countries have international obligations to put a DMCA-like law in place, but it doesn't mean that at all. The signature is a general sign of support for it, but it implies no legal obligations.
They aren't just posting some parts of their DNA, they're also posting their full medical records. At the moment, that's a bigger loss of privacy.
They are healthy people, so they aren't at a big risk: but it might be that they'll eventually be recognized as carriers of some genetic problem, in which case their relatives may have trouble getting health insurance.
The important thing to have cited is your results in your paper, not your software.
That's making an assumption that there is no intellectual value in the software, only in the underlying theory. I'd say both are valuable, and both should be cited by other researchers who depend on them.
I publish a paper on new research, I get priority, no amount of pissing about by other people removes that priority, regardless of what may be attempted.
However, when you are trying to get a grant, or tenure, or a promotion, the boards examining your work will want to know if it has had any impact. Citations to it indicate impact.
If MS wanted to support open source projects, they could devote some resources to help them. In particular:
- MinGW could use help porting to Win64
- Anyone using gcc compilers on Windows would benefit if Microsoft's debuggers supported debugging one of the gcc debug info formats, or if they helped gcc to produce their format.
I suggested these ideas to a Microsoft rep at the Flourish conference in April, but was brushed off.
Re:General gripe about 3D formats.
on
Mars In 3D
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
In the case of these images, the left image is entirely in the red bits in the image, and the right image is the sum of blue and green, so you can separate them, if you've got any image processing software. (Or did I get left and right reversed?)
Yes, it's a necessary evil to deceive potential customers when you have nothing to offer. Sure it's fraudulent, but how else is a scammer supposed to get anywhere?
I think the last one is more accurate than your Wikipedia article, which talks about vitrification at Sellafield. That may be done to some waste in the UK, but most waste in other countries is still stored on-site.
And for a bit more fun, here's an article on an anti-nuclear site:
Both of them mention that spent fuel is stored for several years underwater for cooling, but only the anti-nuclear one mentions what would happen if the coolant was removed.
Most nuclear waste is solid, but it is very hot and so it won't necessarily stay solid. If an accident drains one of those swimming pools holding the waste it could catch fire and a lot of it would be aerosolized.
You can not think global warming is both human caused and a genuine threat and not be for nuclear power. Because there can be only one threat?
Actually, nuclear power and fossil fuels have a lot in common. Current oil/gas/coal burning is releasing large reservoirs of carbon that have built up over a long time, causing increases in atmospheric CO2 far quicker than is natural. Almost all current nuclear power designs convert long half-life uranium into much shorter half-life waste products: the radiation that would naturally be released from the fuel is being released about a million times faster by the waste products, which are a nasty mix of chemically reactive elements. So a large reservoir of radioactive but relatively chemically inert material (the uranium) is being converted into much more radioactive waste products, and in a way that is harder to contain.
These are both technologies that produce a short term benefit but leave a long term problem for our descendants. I think the global warming problem is worse, so nuclear power is probably a necessary solution, but it's not a panacea.
I was using an old version, not 2007, but the point is not the import alone, it's the cycle. Save it as.csv, and you won't get what you just read in. Unless they've fixed this braindead behaviour, but I wouldn't bet on that.
Comma Separated Variable Text Files, as exported and imported by Excel. Don't use CSV with Excel, it will by default change values on import.
For example, if you ask it to read and write this:
May 20,5/20,1.000
you get this:
20-May,20-May,1
That might be okay if those were really two dates and a number, but I was never asked if they were. (OOO Calc is just as bad: it asks, and by default modifies the data).
The globalissues point about foreign aid is looking only at Government spending. This is a very small part of humanitarian aid coming out of the US.
Most of the aid comes from individuals and it is directed by individuals to whatever causes they desire.
In light of this, I believe the statement that international charity would collapse is likely true. And you want us to rely on your personal reputation in support of that? Unfortunately, you posted anonymously.
so what was the actual surplus vs. imported? that article is 4 years old, surly the real numbers are out there... Go for it, I'm curious too.
do you have any proof for who funds the UN? Proof? No, but here's a link.
Without the USA, the world would starve. You are aware of the volume of US food exports, aren't you? According to this article from 2004, 2005 was expected to be the first year when the US did not have a net agricultural surplus, i.e. it imported as much as it exported.
Without the USA, international charity would collapse. The USA is the most charitable nation on earth? I believe it's true that Americans give more of their income to charity than other countries do, but much of that stays within the USA. In terms of foreign aid, the USA is quite far down the list.
Without the USA, the United Nations would close up shop almost immediately. Who do you think funds MOST of the UN activities? No single country. The USA funds about 25% of the UN budget.
I don't think your other claims can be tested against data.
TeX is not a programming language, it's for typesetting. TeX is a programming language for typesetting. And the GP is right, it's a horrible design for a language.
The point is that you or me or anyone else will make the decision based on public information. The executives who are profiting from the scheme described in this article have insider information.
The basis for the stock market is that it is open and transparent, with the same information available to everybody. That's not true of company insiders, so they're not supposed to be allowed to participate in it on the same basis as everyone else. This scheme lets them in, cheating the rest of us.
Slashdot Mirror
Common, the slightest bit of reference on your part could have avoided this. Even Wikipedia has us listed as being bound by the WIPO treaties in 1996 where the DMCA was in 1998. The two WIPO treaties (and yes, 2 of them, not just the copyright treaty) were employed and discussed in 1996, congress ratified it on October 21 1998.
You are not bound by it until you ratify it. So you were bound by it as of Oct 21, 1998.
Sorry I got the date the DMCA was passed wrong: it was introduced long before you were required to introduce it, but it wasn't passed until after the ratification.
Tou will find the clause under sections 18 that says...
That paragraph also ends with "or permitted by law". There is no obligation to prevent fair use. There is no obligation to prevent any legal use.
Two quotes from your message. I hope I haven't left out any important context, but I don't want to quote your whole message:
But the reality is that when people know something is inevitable, they will prepare for it somewhere along the way so it is viable at the time it is necessary.
and
Make no mistake, the DMCA would have happened because of the WIPO treaties regardless of if we waited 20 years after their ratification or created the laws in parallel with the ratifications.
Now these are bizarre claims. I think you are claiming that the US had no choice but to ratify the treaty, so it was in effect bound by the treaty as soon as it signed it. But the whole point of ratification is this: there are no obligations on the country until their support for the treaty is ratified by the legislative bodies. Before ratifying a treaty, there is *no* obligation. The democratic institutions need to decide whether to ratify the treaty or not.
In the case of the WCT, only 68 countries have taken that second step and ratified it. The US and Japan are the biggest ones, no other members of the G8 have done so. Most of the 68 are small countries, presumably doing it to try to curry favour with the US. (Australia ratified to get a free trade agreement. Canada already had a free trade agreement, and hasn't ratified. I can't see any large European country that has ratified. China has, Russia hasn't. Etc.)
You can repeat this as often as you like, but it's just not true. The US ratified the WCT *after* passing the DMCA, not before. It had signed the treaty before, indicating non-binding support for it, but it had not ratified it, so it was not obligated to do anything.
And take the language in Article 11 of the WCT. It says
Contracting Parties shall provide adequate legal protection and effective legal remedies against the circumvention of effective technological measures that are used by authors in connection with the exercise of their rights under this Treaty or the Berne Convention and that restrict acts, in respect of their works, which are not authorized by the authors concerned or permitted by law.
Yes, this requires some sort of protection of DRM, but the DMCA goes far further. Look at the last four words: "or permitted by law". That means that fair use could trump DRM, but in the DMCA, it does not. There's nothing there to prohibit software that breaks DRM, but the DMCA does that.
The US didn't need to do *anything* until it had ratified the WCT, but instead it chose to go far beyond the requirements of the treaty. Don't blame others for your bad decisions.
What did is say, the treaty enabled Clinton to pass sweeping changed to copyright law.
I think you should read your own post, difficult as that may be. "Required" is stronger than "enabled". Even "enabled" is stronger than the page you cited, according to which "was used as an excuse" is more accurate.
Thanks for fixing the typo.
I'm Canadian. We have more or less the same movies and music available as in the USA, and no DMCA, though there have been a couple of attempts to pass one. (Canada signed the WCT, but has not ratified it). The Canada-US trading relationship is still the largest bilateral trading relationship in the world.
So the repercussions of not having a DMCA are at least not immediate.
Duncan
1. Less than 100 countries signed onto either of those treaties. The page you refer to says they were adopted "by consensus", but that doesn't imply any countries signed onto them. It just says that at some WIPO meeting they were adopted by consensus.
2. The page you referred to says:
Both Congress and the Clinton Administration used these international treaties as an excuse for passing a broad, sweeping changes to U.S. copyright laws that were urged by the entertainment industry , despite the fact that such changes to U.S. copyright law were not required by the treaties themselves.
This contradicts your main point, which was that the WCT and WPPT obligated the US to pass the DMCA. No, the DMCA was passed because lobbyists convinced your government to pass it. It's a US invention.
two WIPO treaties that 150 of countries signed on to.
Which treaties are you talking about? The relevant one is the Copyright Treaty, and only 68 countries have ratified it. Another 26 or so have signed it but not ratified it, which means it's not in force in those countries. (Of the G8, only the US and Japan are among the ratifiers.)
The signature on the treaty is used as an excuse by the proponents of it to say that countries have international obligations to put a DMCA-like law in place, but it doesn't mean that at all. The signature is a general sign of support for it, but it implies no legal obligations.
They aren't just posting some parts of their DNA, they're also posting their full medical records. At the moment, that's a bigger loss of privacy.
They are healthy people, so they aren't at a big risk: but it might be that they'll eventually be recognized as carriers of some genetic problem, in which case their relatives may have trouble getting health insurance.
The important thing to have cited is your results in your paper, not your software.
That's making an assumption that there is no intellectual value in the software, only in the underlying theory. I'd say both are valuable, and both should be cited by other researchers who depend on them.
I publish a paper on new research, I get priority, no amount of pissing about by other people removes that priority, regardless of what may be attempted.
However, when you are trying to get a grant, or tenure, or a promotion, the boards examining your work will want to know if it has had any impact. Citations to it indicate impact.
If MS wanted to support open source projects, they could devote some resources to help them. In particular:
- MinGW could use help porting to Win64
- Anyone using gcc compilers on Windows would benefit if Microsoft's debuggers supported debugging one of the gcc debug info formats, or if they helped gcc to produce their format.
I suggested these ideas to a Microsoft rep at the Flourish conference in April, but was brushed off.
In the case of these images, the left image is entirely in the red bits in the image, and the right image is the sum of blue and green, so you can separate them, if you've got any image processing software. (Or did I get left and right reversed?)
Yes, it's a necessary evil to deceive potential customers when you have nothing to offer. Sure it's fraudulent, but how else is a scammer supposed to get anywhere?
Wikipedia is lots of fun. Here's another article there that gives quite contradictory information about high level waste:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_power#High_level_radioactive_waste
And here's one from the US NRC:
http://www.nrc.gov/waste/high-level-waste.html
I think the last one is more accurate than your Wikipedia article, which talks about vitrification at Sellafield. That may be done to some waste in the UK, but most waste in other countries is still stored on-site.
And for a bit more fun, here's an article on an anti-nuclear site:
http://www.nirs.org/factsheets/hlwfcst.htm
and one on a pro-nuclear site:
http://www.world-nuclear.org/education/wast.htm
Both of them mention that spent fuel is stored for several years underwater for cooling, but only the anti-nuclear one mentions what would happen if the coolant was removed.
Most nuclear waste is solid, but it is very hot and so it won't necessarily stay solid. If an accident drains one of those swimming pools holding the waste it could catch fire and a lot of it would be aerosolized.
Actually, nuclear power and fossil fuels have a lot in common. Current oil/gas/coal burning is releasing large reservoirs of carbon that have built up over a long time, causing increases in atmospheric CO2 far quicker than is natural. Almost all current nuclear power designs convert long half-life uranium into much shorter half-life waste products: the radiation that would naturally be released from the fuel is being released about a million times faster by the waste products, which are a nasty mix of chemically reactive elements. So a large reservoir of radioactive but relatively chemically inert material (the uranium) is being converted into much more radioactive waste products, and in a way that is harder to contain.
These are both technologies that produce a short term benefit but leave a long term problem for our descendants. I think the global warming problem is worse, so nuclear power is probably a necessary solution, but it's not a panacea.
Sorry, that label is already reserved for getting the guy who decided to suppress filename extensions in Explorer. But it can be a supporting example.
I was using an old version, not 2007, but the point is not the import alone, it's the cycle. Save it as .csv, and you won't get what you just read in. Unless they've fixed this braindead behaviour, but I wouldn't bet on that.
For example, if you ask it to read and write this:
May 20,5/20,1.000
you get this:
20-May,20-May,1
That might be okay if those were really two dates and a number, but I was never asked if they were. (OOO Calc is just as bad: it asks, and by default modifies the data).
Most of the aid comes from individuals and it is directed by individuals to whatever causes they desire.
In light of this, I believe the statement that international charity would collapse is likely true. And you want us to rely on your personal reputation in support of that? Unfortunately, you posted anonymously.
I don't think your other claims can be tested against data.
The point is that you or me or anyone else will make the decision based on public information. The executives who are profiting from the scheme described in this article have insider information.
The basis for the stock market is that it is open and transparent, with the same information available to everybody. That's not true of company insiders, so they're not supposed to be allowed to participate in it on the same basis as everyone else. This scheme lets them in, cheating the rest of us.