If I intentionally abandon an item on public property, under common law I lose all ownership rights in that item. After some reasonable period (providing evidence of abandonment) that item is free to be legally acquired by any passerby.
In addition, unless there are local ordinances to the contrary, placing trash on a public street curb causes the owner to immediately lose all rights of privacy and ownership in that material. (Not intellectual rights, of course)
The original retailer cannot sell or distribute stripped books because they are bound by contract with the publisher.
However, no such contract binds someone who obtains a stripped book from a dumpster. He or she can read or resell such a book at will, barring any laws against dumpster diving.
Now of course, there are ethical problems with that, but there do not appear to be any legal ones.
That is the whole reason why the books are stripped in the first place. The problem here is that the pattern industry is does not bother to do the same with their unsold patterns.
Books, cds, tapes, sewing patterns, (and arguably mass market software) do not need licenses, implicit or otherwise, to be protected by copyright. Under the Bern convention, adopted by the U.S. in 1978, all original creative works are protected by copyright.
However, in the U.S., the First Sale Doctrine prevents publishers from placing binding licensing restrictions on the re-sale of used copyrighted materials.
The mass-market software industry has invented a legal fiction known as a "shrink wrap license" to attempt to get around the First Sale Doctrine as well as add other restrictions beyond those in copyright law. However, with one exception, these "licenses" have not held up in court, which is why the software industry is trying to persuade individual states to pass the perversion known as UCITA.
Informal licenses such as the GPL do work when they only grant the licensee rights that they would not otherwise have under copyright law. However, it is highly doubtful that license terms adding new restrictions (i.e. you cannot read this book aloud, you may only run this program on even numbered Tuesdays, you may not resell this package to others) would hold up in court.
In the case of discarded sewing patterns, books, magazines, etc., this doubly applies, because following long standard precedent, the relevant publishers do not even pretend to license the works to the end users.
There probably ought to be a law restricting dumpster diving in general, but I seriously doubt any copyright complaint is going to hold up. The pattern publishers simply need to require the retailers to physically destroy the patterns, preferably by shredding them, or better yet actually *sell* them to Monsterpatterns.
The Law.com article is wrong. Nothing in the treaty requires countries to allow warrants to issue from foreign judges or allow countries to exercise jurisdiction over foreign residents short of cooperative extradition for serious computer offenses against the law in BOTH countries.
If it did, any implementing legislation would be seriously unconstitutional in the United States.
The name "Curl" has been in use for years by a open source url downloading program by Daniel Stenberg. This program is now in its seventh major release version. See the
Curl web site for more information.
As an erstwhile contributor to the original Curl, I am a little annoyed they did not bother to check freshmeat.net first to see if the name they had chosen was already in common use.
Other than that, I do not see how this technology has any serious potential unless they plan to submit it as a fully documented, patent-free international standard capable of independent implementation.
The fee you pay the USPS for the first copy is reasonable, the duplication restrictions are not. All USPS databases legally ought be in the public domain, but are rather copyrighted by the USPS. The following is from http://www.usps.gov/ncsc/products/products.htm :
Products Address Information System (AIS) Products Customer License Registration/Agreement
Customers who want to copy, in part or whole, or redistribute any AIS product must pay a fee, which constitutes permission to duplicate a USPS product. Fee amounts are calculated by the initial price of the product and the number of copies a customer wishes to generate. A copy of the copyright regulations and the license agreement can be obtained by calling the National Customer Support Center at 1-800-238-3150.
If the federal government would give up its hopeless quest to keep encryption out of unwashed hands, no one would be able to break into their systems any more. Why? Because every Internet protocol in the world would be changed to support real security and people would actually be able to use it without fear of criminal prosecution.
The number one security hole in nearly every system is poorly chosen passwords. This problem could completely go away with a good public key authentication / encryption system implemented by default in all the key Internet protocols.
It would certainly help if the U.S. Patent Office would quit granting spurious software patents contrary to Title 17 Sections 101-103 of the U.S. Code and reduced the term to ten years for all the rest.
A journaling filesystem is not the same thing as a log structured filesystem.
A journaling filesystem is any filesystem that keeps a meta data transaction log so that it can be restored to a consistent state quickly by replaying the log instead of checking every file in the filesystem.
A log structured filesystem, on the other hand, is a filesystem that places all disk writes on the disk sequentially in a log structure, which drastically improves file I/O performance when you have total rewrites of a large number of small files. The log is written into garbage collected segments that gradually free up the room taken by old file versions.
According the to actual text of the bill at http://thomas.loc.gov, these new extensions only apply to works created on or after Janurary 1, 1978, with an exception for phonorecordings. All published works created before 1978 still expire a maxiumum of 75 years after the work's *creation*. That means the recent bill will not have any effect on Project Gutenberg until 2053.
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If I intentionally abandon an item on public property, under common law I lose all ownership rights in that item. After some reasonable period (providing evidence of abandonment) that item is free to be legally acquired by any passerby.
In addition, unless there are local ordinances to the contrary, placing trash on a public street curb causes the owner to immediately lose all rights of privacy and ownership in that material. (Not intellectual rights, of course)
See CALIFORNIA v. GREENWOOD, 486 U.S. 35 (1988)
The original retailer cannot sell or distribute stripped books because they are bound by contract with the publisher.
However, no such contract binds someone who obtains a stripped book from a dumpster. He or she can read or resell such a book at will, barring any laws against dumpster diving.
Now of course, there are ethical problems with that, but there do not appear to be any legal ones.
That is the whole reason why the books are stripped in the first place. The problem here is that the pattern industry is does not bother to do the same with their unsold patterns.
Books, cds, tapes, sewing patterns, (and arguably mass market software) do not need licenses, implicit or otherwise, to be protected by copyright. Under the Bern convention, adopted by the U.S. in 1978, all original creative works are protected by copyright.
However, in the U.S., the First Sale Doctrine prevents publishers from placing binding licensing restrictions on the re-sale of used copyrighted materials.
The mass-market software industry has invented a legal fiction known as a "shrink wrap license" to attempt to get around the First Sale Doctrine as well as add other restrictions beyond those in copyright law. However, with one exception, these "licenses" have not held up in court, which is why the software industry is trying to persuade individual states to pass the perversion known as UCITA.
Informal licenses such as the GPL do work when they only grant the licensee rights that they would not otherwise have under copyright law. However, it is highly doubtful that license terms adding new restrictions (i.e. you cannot read this book aloud, you may only run this program on even numbered Tuesdays, you may not resell this package to others) would hold up in court.
In the case of discarded sewing patterns, books, magazines, etc., this doubly applies, because following long standard precedent, the relevant publishers do not even pretend to license the works to the end users.
There probably ought to be a law restricting dumpster diving in general, but I seriously doubt any copyright complaint is going to hold up. The pattern publishers simply need to require the retailers to physically destroy the patterns, preferably by shredding them, or better yet actually *sell* them to Monsterpatterns.
The Law.com article is wrong. Nothing in the treaty requires countries to allow warrants to issue from foreign judges or allow countries to exercise jurisdiction over foreign residents short of cooperative extradition for serious computer offenses against the law in BOTH countries.
If it did, any implementing legislation would be seriously unconstitutional in the United States.
The name "Curl" has been in use for years by a open source url downloading program by Daniel Stenberg. This program is now in its seventh major release version. See the Curl web site for more information.
As an erstwhile contributor to the original Curl, I am a little annoyed they did not bother to check freshmeat.net first to see if the name they had chosen was already in common use.
Other than that, I do not see how this technology has any serious potential unless they plan to submit it as a fully documented, patent-free international standard capable of independent implementation.
The fee you pay the USPS for the first copy is reasonable, the duplication restrictions are not. All USPS databases legally ought be in the public domain, but are rather copyrighted by the USPS. The following is from http://www.usps.gov/ncsc/products/products.htm :
Products
Address Information System (AIS) Products
Customer License Registration/Agreement
Customers who want to copy, in part or whole, or redistribute any AIS product must pay a fee, which constitutes permission to duplicate a USPS product. Fee amounts are calculated by the initial price of the product and the number of copies a customer wishes to generate. A copy of the copyright regulations and the license agreement can be obtained by calling the National Customer Support Center at 1-800-238-3150.
If the federal government would give up its hopeless quest to keep encryption out of unwashed hands, no one would be able to break into their systems any more. Why? Because every Internet protocol in the world would be changed to support real security and people would actually be able to use it without fear of criminal prosecution.
The number one security hole in nearly every system is poorly chosen passwords. This problem could completely go away with a good public key authentication / encryption system implemented by default in all the key Internet protocols.
It would certainly help if the U.S. Patent Office would quit granting spurious software patents contrary to Title 17 Sections 101-103 of the U.S. Code and reduced the term to ten years for all the rest.
A journaling filesystem is not the same thing as a log structured filesystem.
A journaling filesystem is any filesystem that keeps a meta data transaction log so that it can be restored to a consistent state quickly by replaying the log instead of checking every file in the filesystem.
A log structured filesystem, on the other hand, is a filesystem that places all disk writes on the disk sequentially in a log structure, which drastically improves file I/O performance when you have total rewrites of a large number of small files. The log is written into garbage collected segments that gradually free up the room taken by old file versions.
According the to actual text of the bill at http://thomas.loc.gov, these new extensions only apply to works created on or after Janurary 1, 1978, with an exception for phonorecordings. All published works created before 1978 still expire a maxiumum of 75 years after the work's *creation*. That means the recent bill will not have any effect on Project Gutenberg until 2053.