So, you would prefer a situation where "we give you any information, because you may misinterpret it"? In other words, "Trust us, we're from the government, we're here to help."
In that case, the right response to any complaint about his performance would be to explain why those numbers happened. The fact that complete information can't easily be disclosed doesn't mean that no information should be disclosed.
The recent Cablevision case, where Cablevision provided a remote DVR functionality, was an example. There, a portion of a video was temporarily buffered and was not considered a copy.
Well, first of all, some of those things aren't copies -- the short buffer in a CD player, for example, is too temporary to be considered "fixed" under copyright law, so it's not a legal copy at all. Other parts are covered by the "Essential Step Doctrine". Others are covered by fair use.
The mp3 on external storage can be directly manipulated, in the same way that a single song on a vinyl album can be directly manipulated. It only has to be in a "tangible medium of expression" -- as long as you can touch the hard-drive, it's tangible. There's no requirement that you be able to separate it from everything else on the same medium.
Often the license of an mp3 includes an explicit limited right to copy for specific uses -- ex: "You may copy this mp3 file only as a step in the playback process."
As to laches (note spelling), that's a defense based on a delay by the other party. Has nothing to do with a "willfully onesided and abusive contract." You're probably thinking of unconscionability.
Citizen's United did not say that corporations are people. That's a popular, but incorrect, misstatement of its holding. See my reply to the other post.
Incidentally, businesses still are chartered -- that's what happens when a corporation is formed; they get a charter from the state. The idea of limited liability for stockholders is a bit more recent invention, but has been an enormous benefit to each of us: Do you have any mutual funds in your 401(k)? Under the rule you propose, you would be _personally liable_ for the actions of each of the thousands of companies in that mutual fund. What does that do to your investment decisions?
So, a corporation is, indeed, a legal construct. Saying that it's a "Legal Person" is simply a shorthand to say that the law treats it as if it were a person in many cases: it can own property, it can sue and be sued, it has to pay taxes, it can be found criminally liable, there are due process rights, etc....
You're right that we could do what you suggest, but that would involve re-writing a bunch of law that, currently, treats corporations as persons.
As a side note the idea that "corporations are people, so they have the right to free speech" does not appear in the Citizen's United majority opinion (go look it up if you don't believe me.) The entire point there was, basically: a corporation is a group of individual people. People have first amendment rights. And you can't suppress those rights simply because they've chosen to come together in a corporate form. In other words, the source of the ability of corporations to spend money on political campaigns isn't some right the corporation has because it's a person; the source is the individual rights of the people who make up the corporation.
At least that part falls apart. But, the main part of the case claims an infringement of the right to make copies, not an infringement of the distribution right. The argument is, approximately, "You claim to be re-selling electronic goods. But, to do that, this is what you do: (1) copy the mp3 file from the seller's computer to yours, (2) delete the file from the seller's computer, (3) copy the mp3 file to the buyer's computer, (4) delete the copy on your computer. The verb 'copy' appears in there twice. But, you're not allowed to copy the original work.
There's also the question of whether the seller actually owns a copy, or is just a licensee. Because if he doesn't own a copy, then the first sale doctrine doesn't apply either.
This case has interesting implications for libraries, who have been fighting with publishers over rights to 'lend' electronic copies of their books -- so far, all of those agreements have been predicated on the idea that 'lending' an ebook does make a copy of it. (Of course, the facts are a bit different there, since the library typically does not delete the copy from its servers; the copy just electronically expires on the borrower's computer.)
So, I can pretty much guarantee that anybody who was involved in Monsanto's decisions 63 years ago is no longer at the company and, in fact, may no longer be alive. Why does it make sense to sue the current company and injure its current stockholders for something that those people did all that time ago?
The answer? The legal fiction that the company is a 'person' that, among other things, has to be responsible for its actions.
All the people complaining about companies not being 'persons' in regard to free-speech rights should be careful, because if they're not persons, then they're just collections of people. And in the US, we only hold people liable for things they're personally responsible for. For example, if your parents die owing a lot of money, you don't inherit their debt. If corporations are just collections of persons, then there's no sense in suing Monsanto for this today -- they weren't involved. At most, you could find out who made all the decisions and go back and sue their estates.
Problem, though, is that the Gingrich campaign probably has a blanket license from ASCAP or BMI which would cover what he's doing with this song. Political campaigns always get them, even though the artists whose songs are used sometimes don't like it. After the Gingrich campaign sends a copy of the license, the suit will be quietly dropped, having done what it was intended to do -- express displeasure at Gingrich.
Alternatively, the campaign may stop using the song because the distraiction isn't worth it. If that's the case, then this really is abusive.
Every election season, this comes up. A politician licenses music from one of the performance rights organizations (often ASCAP). The artist (or, really, the composer) gets all upset and either sues or threatens to sue. He has no claim, but just does it for political reasons.
Why assume that these jobs will materialize in the future, with a salary that will allow the person to have a decent quality of life, when they don't exist now?
Because those jobs have ALWAYS materialized. Yeah, the economy still stinks right now. But, it will get better eventually.
As to worrying about a 'decent quality of life,' that's something that has always gone up as well. You can't tell me that people in the '50s were better off than they are today.
Those aren't brand-new jobs, though. They'd all be specialized forms of existing veterinary careers, i.e. a subset of vet surgeons, nurses, anesthesiologists, and so forth, just like the shift seen in human medicine.
The vets are brand-new jobs -- if not for feline knee-surgery and things like it, there would be fewer vets. And consider the company that made the feline knee implant.
Well, interest in medical care for pets, much like tech purchases, has shifted in sync with it things becoming possible & affordable for the middle class.
Precisely. One of the reasons its more affordable is because we spend less on many other things than we used to. Why? In part because many of those things are made in China.
On your #1, Brokaw's reputation is really irrelevant to the copyright analysis. If Brokaw wants to do some sort of right-of-publicity claim, he can always try that, but it doesn't have anything to do with whether the use was fair.
In this case, the real point of factor #1 is that this is political speech, which is something that the government has always been leery about limiting since it's at the core of the purpose of the 1st amendment. Fair use has always been a vehicle for balancing the two concerns.
Not making that assumption at all. Just pointing out that we actually do benefit from some military research. Heck, right now, you probably have a device in your car or pocket that benefits from GPS -- a military technology.
I'm not a huge fan of government research because the government lacks the market incentive to develop useful things and often has an incentive to develop things that benefit political donors. But, that doesn't mean that all government research is worthless.
Oh, they'll be employed. But, many people will be employed doing things that we'd consider utterly frivolous today, just as today, people are employed doing things that our ancestors would have considered to be utterly frivolous. I have no idea what they will be, but people them will consider them valuable.
Examples of things our ancestors would have considered frivolous? Computer game design, professional "life coaches" & fitness instructors come to mind, but there are hundreds of such jobs if you think about it. Heck, there was a story on local news about a cat that got a knee-replacement -- there were 10 people involved in the surgery. Can you imagine anybody in the 1950s thinking "Oh, yes, our cat can't walk. Let's get him surgery."?
Should be "You must pay this person slightly above the going rate for software developers where you are," thus taking away the incentive to bring in foreign workers only because they're cheaper, and leaving the incentive to bring them in when you can't find a domestic worker to do the same thing.
That's silly. Almost nobody is engaged in the production of food, yet it's plentiful and cheap. 100 years ago, well over 50% of the population of the US was engaged in agriculture; today, that number is around 2%.
The same forces that drove agricultural employment down have also driven manufacturing employment down. US manufacturing output, after adjusting for inflation, is the highest it's ever been (well, in 2007, it was the highest. It's in a dip right now b/c of the economy.) Meanwhile, manufacturing employment has been dropping steadily since the early '50s. That's only possible because US workers are far more productive than they were in the past.
As US manufacturing workers become more productive, more are freed up to do things which a less prosperous country could not afford to do, like developing software.
First of all, what you're seeing is nothing new. Lots of people thing that the right to copy only includes the right to make a direct "slavish" reproduction of the work itself. That has never been the rule in US law. In 1977, for example, a court found that Mayor McCheese (of McDonald's fame) infringed H.R. Puffnstuff even though one was clearly not a copy of the other.
The dividing line between idea and expression does not just occur at the item itself -- it's possible to infringe by copying expressive elements of an original and not the entire original. In this case, the red bus against a black and whilte London background are both expressive elements and both have been copied, along with a lot of other aspects of the original.
I could write a book about a boy wizard attending a british boarding school for witches and wizards, who has a scar on his forehead, wears glasses and battles an evil wizard lord whose name people don't want to use, and where there's a government organization whose existence is not known to non-magical people. If I copy enough of JK Rowlings' expression -- her characters, her plots and her scenes -- I will have infringed Harry Potter, even if I don't use any of her words.
So, first of all, this is more than a straight photograph -- it's clearly undergone a lot of post-processing.
Secondly, the "photos are barely copyrightable at all" line was rejected about 100 years ago, not long after photography first came into being. The photographer makes a lot of creative choices -- the camera settings, lens choices, the angle of the camera, time of day, subject matter, any posing of the subject matter, etc.... All those are "creative expression," which is what the copyright act is intended to protect.
Of course, there are certainly some photos which don't warrant copyright because all of those things are completely determine by the application -- video from security cameras is a great example.
Snoopy is subject to both copyright and trademark. But, those two bodies of law protect different things.
Worse, though, overstating the argument by comparing it to evolution actually harms the pro-climate change argument.
Evolution has more acceptance than climate change -- by saying "climate change is the new evolution," there's an implication that they are equally accepted. But, everybody knows that they're not equally accepted, so the person making that claim is perceived to be a liar, and that taints everything else they say. You don't make people believe you by lying to them.
Scheduled to end....
on
Is E85 Dead Now?
·
· Score: 5, Insightful
The E85 manufacturers and the agriculture companies that grow corn have a lot riding on this, and are quite good at influencing Congress. There's a very good chance that they will successfully lobby to extend this subsidy.
That's a shame, because the subsidy was originally intended to support this fuel alternative for a short time in order to give it a chance to become economically viable. Well, it's had that chance and the results have been a disaster.
Slashdot Mirror
Maybe they already did. When's the last time you checked under your bumper?
So, you would prefer a situation where "we give you any information, because you may misinterpret it"? In other words, "Trust us, we're from the government, we're here to help."
In that case, the right response to any complaint about his performance would be to explain why those numbers happened. The fact that complete information can't easily be disclosed doesn't mean that no information should be disclosed.
The recent Cablevision case, where Cablevision provided a remote DVR functionality, was an example. There, a portion of a video was temporarily buffered and was not considered a copy.
Well, first of all, some of those things aren't copies -- the short buffer in a CD player, for example, is too temporary to be considered "fixed" under copyright law, so it's not a legal copy at all. Other parts are covered by the "Essential Step Doctrine". Others are covered by fair use.
The mp3 on external storage can be directly manipulated, in the same way that a single song on a vinyl album can be directly manipulated. It only has to be in a "tangible medium of expression" -- as long as you can touch the hard-drive, it's tangible. There's no requirement that you be able to separate it from everything else on the same medium.
Often the license of an mp3 includes an explicit limited right to copy for specific uses -- ex: "You may copy this mp3 file only as a step in the playback process."
As to laches (note spelling), that's a defense based on a delay by the other party. Has nothing to do with a "willfully onesided and abusive contract." You're probably thinking of unconscionability.
Citizen's United did not say that corporations are people. That's a popular, but incorrect, misstatement of its holding. See my reply to the other post.
Incidentally, businesses still are chartered -- that's what happens when a corporation is formed; they get a charter from the state. The idea of limited liability for stockholders is a bit more recent invention, but has been an enormous benefit to each of us: Do you have any mutual funds in your 401(k)? Under the rule you propose, you would be _personally liable_ for the actions of each of the thousands of companies in that mutual fund. What does that do to your investment decisions?
So, a corporation is, indeed, a legal construct. Saying that it's a "Legal Person" is simply a shorthand to say that the law treats it as if it were a person in many cases: it can own property, it can sue and be sued, it has to pay taxes, it can be found criminally liable, there are due process rights, etc....
You're right that we could do what you suggest, but that would involve re-writing a bunch of law that, currently, treats corporations as persons.
As a side note the idea that "corporations are people, so they have the right to free speech" does not appear in the Citizen's United majority opinion (go look it up if you don't believe me.) The entire point there was, basically: a corporation is a group of individual people. People have first amendment rights. And you can't suppress those rights simply because they've chosen to come together in a corporate form. In other words, the source of the ability of corporations to spend money on political campaigns isn't some right the corporation has because it's a person; the source is the individual rights of the people who make up the corporation.
At least that part falls apart. But, the main part of the case claims an infringement of the right to make copies, not an infringement of the distribution right. The argument is, approximately, "You claim to be re-selling electronic goods. But, to do that, this is what you do: (1) copy the mp3 file from the seller's computer to yours, (2) delete the file from the seller's computer, (3) copy the mp3 file to the buyer's computer, (4) delete the copy on your computer. The verb 'copy' appears in there twice. But, you're not allowed to copy the original work.
There's also the question of whether the seller actually owns a copy, or is just a licensee. Because if he doesn't own a copy, then the first sale doctrine doesn't apply either.
This case has interesting implications for libraries, who have been fighting with publishers over rights to 'lend' electronic copies of their books -- so far, all of those agreements have been predicated on the idea that 'lending' an ebook does make a copy of it. (Of course, the facts are a bit different there, since the library typically does not delete the copy from its servers; the copy just electronically expires on the borrower's computer.)
So, I can pretty much guarantee that anybody who was involved in Monsanto's decisions 63 years ago is no longer at the company and, in fact, may no longer be alive. Why does it make sense to sue the current company and injure its current stockholders for something that those people did all that time ago?
The answer? The legal fiction that the company is a 'person' that, among other things, has to be responsible for its actions.
All the people complaining about companies not being 'persons' in regard to free-speech rights should be careful, because if they're not persons, then they're just collections of people. And in the US, we only hold people liable for things they're personally responsible for. For example, if your parents die owing a lot of money, you don't inherit their debt. If corporations are just collections of persons, then there's no sense in suing Monsanto for this today -- they weren't involved. At most, you could find out who made all the decisions and go back and sue their estates.
Problem, though, is that the Gingrich campaign probably has a blanket license from ASCAP or BMI which would cover what he's doing with this song. Political campaigns always get them, even though the artists whose songs are used sometimes don't like it. After the Gingrich campaign sends a copy of the license, the suit will be quietly dropped, having done what it was intended to do -- express displeasure at Gingrich.
Alternatively, the campaign may stop using the song because the distraiction isn't worth it. If that's the case, then this really is abusive.
Every election season, this comes up. A politician licenses music from one of the performance rights organizations (often ASCAP). The artist (or, really, the composer) gets all upset and either sues or threatens to sue. He has no claim, but just does it for political reasons.
Why assume that these jobs will materialize in the future, with a salary that will allow the person to have a decent quality of life, when they don't exist now?
Because those jobs have ALWAYS materialized. Yeah, the economy still stinks right now. But, it will get better eventually.
As to worrying about a 'decent quality of life,' that's something that has always gone up as well. You can't tell me that people in the '50s were better off than they are today.
Those aren't brand-new jobs, though. They'd all be specialized forms of existing veterinary careers, i.e. a subset of vet surgeons, nurses, anesthesiologists, and so forth, just like the shift seen in human medicine.
The vets are brand-new jobs -- if not for feline knee-surgery and things like it, there would be fewer vets. And consider the company that made the feline knee implant.
Well, interest in medical care for pets, much like tech purchases, has shifted in sync with it things becoming possible & affordable for the middle class.
Precisely. One of the reasons its more affordable is because we spend less on many other things than we used to. Why? In part because many of those things are made in China.
On your #1, Brokaw's reputation is really irrelevant to the copyright analysis. If Brokaw wants to do some sort of right-of-publicity claim, he can always try that, but it doesn't have anything to do with whether the use was fair.
In this case, the real point of factor #1 is that this is political speech, which is something that the government has always been leery about limiting since it's at the core of the purpose of the 1st amendment. Fair use has always been a vehicle for balancing the two concerns.
Not making that assumption at all. Just pointing out that we actually do benefit from some military research. Heck, right now, you probably have a device in your car or pocket that benefits from GPS -- a military technology.
I'm not a huge fan of government research because the government lacks the market incentive to develop useful things and often has an incentive to develop things that benefit political donors. But, that doesn't mean that all government research is worthless.
Oh, they'll be employed. But, many people will be employed doing things that we'd consider utterly frivolous today, just as today, people are employed doing things that our ancestors would have considered to be utterly frivolous. I have no idea what they will be, but people them will consider them valuable.
Examples of things our ancestors would have considered frivolous? Computer game design, professional "life coaches" & fitness instructors come to mind, but there are hundreds of such jobs if you think about it. Heck, there was a story on local news about a cat that got a knee-replacement -- there were 10 people involved in the surgery. Can you imagine anybody in the 1950s thinking "Oh, yes, our cat can't walk. Let's get him surgery."?
Should be "You must pay this person slightly above the going rate for software developers where you are," thus taking away the incentive to bring in foreign workers only because they're cheaper, and leaving the incentive to bring them in when you can't find a domestic worker to do the same thing.
Says the man posting to a computer on a network whoich started as a DARPA project.
That's silly. Almost nobody is engaged in the production of food, yet it's plentiful and cheap. 100 years ago, well over 50% of the population of the US was engaged in agriculture; today, that number is around 2%.
The same forces that drove agricultural employment down have also driven manufacturing employment down. US manufacturing output, after adjusting for inflation, is the highest it's ever been (well, in 2007, it was the highest. It's in a dip right now b/c of the economy.) Meanwhile, manufacturing employment has been dropping steadily since the early '50s. That's only possible because US workers are far more productive than they were in the past.
As US manufacturing workers become more productive, more are freed up to do things which a less prosperous country could not afford to do, like developing software.
First of all, what you're seeing is nothing new. Lots of people thing that the right to copy only includes the right to make a direct "slavish" reproduction of the work itself. That has never been the rule in US law. In 1977, for example, a court found that Mayor McCheese (of McDonald's fame) infringed H.R. Puffnstuff even though one was clearly not a copy of the other. The dividing line between idea and expression does not just occur at the item itself -- it's possible to infringe by copying expressive elements of an original and not the entire original. In this case, the red bus against a black and whilte London background are both expressive elements and both have been copied, along with a lot of other aspects of the original. I could write a book about a boy wizard attending a british boarding school for witches and wizards, who has a scar on his forehead, wears glasses and battles an evil wizard lord whose name people don't want to use, and where there's a government organization whose existence is not known to non-magical people. If I copy enough of JK Rowlings' expression -- her characters, her plots and her scenes -- I will have infringed Harry Potter, even if I don't use any of her words.
So, first of all, this is more than a straight photograph -- it's clearly undergone a lot of post-processing. Secondly, the "photos are barely copyrightable at all" line was rejected about 100 years ago, not long after photography first came into being. The photographer makes a lot of creative choices -- the camera settings, lens choices, the angle of the camera, time of day, subject matter, any posing of the subject matter, etc.... All those are "creative expression," which is what the copyright act is intended to protect. Of course, there are certainly some photos which don't warrant copyright because all of those things are completely determine by the application -- video from security cameras is a great example. Snoopy is subject to both copyright and trademark. But, those two bodies of law protect different things.
Not a question of whether it should be. It is different. Unions have an antitrust exemption; corporations don't.
But, isn't the relevant pool larger than just biologists and climatologists?
Worse, though, overstating the argument by comparing it to evolution actually harms the pro-climate change argument. Evolution has more acceptance than climate change -- by saying "climate change is the new evolution," there's an implication that they are equally accepted. But, everybody knows that they're not equally accepted, so the person making that claim is perceived to be a liar, and that taints everything else they say. You don't make people believe you by lying to them.
The E85 manufacturers and the agriculture companies that grow corn have a lot riding on this, and are quite good at influencing Congress. There's a very good chance that they will successfully lobby to extend this subsidy.
That's a shame, because the subsidy was originally intended to support this fuel alternative for a short time in order to give it a chance to become economically viable. Well, it's had that chance and the results have been a disaster.
Thanks!