There's a problem with your logic, or at least its implication that each party should go half way and meet in the middle. Applying that to the nomination process is approximately the same as saying "the New York Jets and my middle school football team agreed to compromise and call it a draw."
The fact is that both the President and the majority of the Senate are Republicans. If there's any compromising done, by all rights it should be "Ok, Harry Reid. We'll give you 10% and we'll take the other 90%," if that. The Democrats are hardly equal partners in this, nor should they be treated as such.
So, you've basically defined trade secret protection. But, it's insufficient, especially insufficient today.
You have a free-rider problem: if anybody can copy your stuff, then you can't make a living off of it. Let's say you spend $1M publishing 10 books and two of them are successful while eight lose money. I can come along, sell copies of the two successful ones and undercut your prices because I don't have to pay for either (1) the cost of creation or (2) the loss on the other eight books.
In that scenario, are you going to publish any books at all? You take all the risk, but gain very little of the reward.
Copyright has to exist if people are going to profit from their own work. The questions are really (1) how long? and (2) what exactly is protected?
The uniforms may be copyright, but that's a bit sketchy -- how much creative expression is in that? It's a shirt with a number on it.
The event itself is not an "original work of authorship," as required by 17 U.S.C. 102(a) and is thus not copyrightable subject matter. Pictures and video of the game, however, probably are.
When I said it's enforced by contract, I meant that when you buy a ticket to the game, you're probably agreeing not to photograph it (check the reverse side of your ticket). Also, the people who own the park have the right to prevent you from bringing a camera in.
That's not even close to right. Under your logic, no photographer can take a picture of a sunset because he didn't "create" what he took a picture of. Sure, the copyright is thin -- anybody else can take a picture of the same thing -- but it's still valid.
When a broadcasting company claims "exclusive rights" to transmit a game, that's enforced by contract and security: if you happen to be at the game and take a picture, that's your picture, not the NFL's. They can say "you can't get in with a camera," and they can kick you out, but once you've taken the picture, that's your picture -- you own the copyright to it.
The work-for-hire doctrine is built into U.S. copyright law -- in most employment contexts, it doesn't need to be contracted for. Often, the reason for those contract clauses are to avoid the "But I was doing this on my own time" arguments.
Descriptive words are weak. Fanciful words are stronger. "Green Soap" is really weak. "Irish Spring" is much stronger. "Numbers" is much better than "Spreadsheet."
Recall that Microsoft had a really tough time trying to trademark "Windows" (and I'm not sure of the current status of that one. By now, it's probably acquired secondary meaning.)
Using a trademark where there is no chance of confusion is generally not infringement (famous marks are a different matter), thus "Delta" airlines, power tools, 88, faucets, delta delta, Burke. So, even if Apple makes a spreadsheet called 'Numbers,' it's still useful in a bunch of other markets.
Huh? One of the things about Fair Use is that there are not very many things that are clear about it. In fact, it can even change over time -- what used to be fair use may not be anymore. This is largely because things that uses which used to be really hard to compensate the owner for have become much easier thanks to technology. Consider music: just about anybody can go to BMI or ASCAP online and buy a fairly inexpensive license. 20 years ago, that would have been much harder.
Consider what would happen if, say, the Library of Congress scanned an in-print dictionary and made it available to everybody in the federal government, even one-at-a-time electronically. Going through the 17 USC 107 factors: (1) It would be a governmental purpose, and the government (of all people) surely has the resources to compensate owners for use of their work, (2) it's a commercially available item, not some one-of-a-kind that needs protection, (3) it's the entire work, (4) it would harm the market by making the federal gov't much less likely to buy dictionaries. By my reckoning (and, IANAL), that's not fair use.
But, let's say that it's a 1946 work that's out of print, the publisher is defunct and the LoC holds the only copy. Well, that's a much better case for fair use -- there's very little effect on the market since the copyright holder probably doesn't even have a copy to exploit. And, it's a one-of-a-kind work and thus in need of protecting.
Eh.... I think there's a false dichotomy here: it's either legally useful or human-readable, but not both.
As somebody making the switch from writing code to writing contracts, they're actually amazingly similar: they both try to precisely specify behavior. Just as you can make your code readible, you can also make a written contract readible. But, just as there's a lot of obtuse code, there's also a lot of obtuse contracts.
That said, there are some things which ought to be in a license agreement that are not going to be intuitively obvious to a lay person and which in fact may seem unnecessary.
For example, what happens if a work under the GPL infringes a patent and a user of the GPL'd work is sued by the patent holder for infringement. Can the user sue the author? The GPL appears to be silent. By just adding the works "OR NON-INFRINGEMENT" to the "NO WARRANTIES" section, it would be clear.
So, the deal is that digital TV stations use 1/5th the bandwidth of conventional analog stations. The space used by VHF (and UHF, to a lesser extent) is ideal for emergency personnel b/c those frequencies penetrate better through buildings. It's also well suited for things like WiMax. The gov't is going to auction off the freed spectrum, raising anywhere from $11B to $40B, depending on who you listen to.
And, for those who are concerned about such things, Congress is trying to figure out how to pay for the converters that people will need to use their current analog TVs with DTV -- they're concerned about voter backlash figure that part of the revenue from the spectrum auction should easily pay for the converters.
I'm not a big fan of the mandate -- only about 16% of the US population gets their TV through broadcast, so you're making these TVs marginally more expensive for the 84% of the people who don't need it. In reality, it won't be very much -- the market will take over and the DTV-capable TVs will cost about what the non DTV-capable TVs do now.
The FCC needs to interfere mainly because spectrum is scarce. If it weren't, then it wouldn't matter.
Considering that the FCC didn't have the authority to require broadcast flag, I wonder how they have the authority to requre DTV receivers.
Your premise is clearly false. If it were, it would be impossible for children to be victims of crimes or torts. But, because of their immaturity, we allow parents to limit their exercise of those rights. Other adults and government are far more limited in their ability to do so.
BTW, I know adults who are in their 40s and still don't take responsibility. Look at how many people are in their 50s and haven't saved a dime for retirement. Parents certainly pass dumb decision-making onto their kids, but that's been true for a lot longer than 20 years.
We should think of IP more like we think of real property, not personal property -- the better analogy for wholesale infringement isn't stealing, which deprives the owner of the use, but trespassing, which is unconsented use.
I think that transformative uses of material under copyright should be judged under a related real property concept -- nuisance.
Nuisance is part of this branch of law -- basically, let's say that your neighbor is doing something really valuable, but that imposes a cost on you (say noise or pollution or something). In general, nuisance law says that if he can afford to pay you for your harm, he should. If he can't, though, then you can't close him down.
So, let's consider Star Wars Revelations (mentioned previously). In theory, George Lucas could shut it down -- it uses the original Star Wars logo, Star Wars characters, music and so on. But, it was done on a shoestring -- if they had to pay for the right to do it, it never would have been made. That's transformative use, and it differs from just plain wholesale infringement -- downloading entire movies or songs or whatever. That sort of use, like when a 16-year-old remixes his favorite song, should be allowed.
In theory, US Fair Use could cover this. In practice, it doesn't.
On a side note, you're going to have to pay attention to when Australia is a party to the Boerne Convention and the TRIPS agreement, both of which spell out minimum protections.
When I posted originally, the title said "Red Hat..." not "Red Hat founder...." The title has since been changed. Not a whoring attempt, just wanted to get it corrected.
IT'S NOT RED HAT -- it's Bob Young. Young isn't in Red Hat management any more.
Geez... Why not just say "United States builds houses with Habitat for Humanity on Georgia," when you're talking about (former president) Jimmy Carter?
Sex offenses include public indecency & solicitation. Should somebody be forced to wear a GPS tag because they got drunk & streaked their college football game or used a prostitute?
One problem with labelling people as 'sex offenders' is that doing so lumps streakers in with pedophiles, necrophiliacs and serial rapists.
There was a case very recently in Raleigh where some college freshman had downloaded child porn on his computer, his roommate saw it and called the cops. Instant sex offender status. This is a case more in the middle: On one hand, that's horrible, and the right punishment seems to be scratching his eyes out and throwing him into the wilderness to fend for himself. But, on the other hand, he's only 18 years old. Do you really want him carrying a 'sex offender' label for the rest of his life? Is it reasonable to still tag him with that when he's 78?
Well, there's the longstanding legal doctrine of 'nuisance,' which (if I recall correctly) is "a non-trespassory invasion into the right of quiet enjoyment of one's property." The idea is that if what you're putting up causes the property values around you to diminish by more than the value of what you put up, then either (a) you won't be allowed to do it, or (b) you'll be forced to pay all those people for their harm.
There's an old English case about a 19th century train that runs next to a farmer's flax field. The train emits sparks which could set the field on fire. Do you give the farmer to right to tell the train not to run, or do you allow the train to tell the farmer not to plant? In theory, it doesn't matter: If you give the right to the farmer and the train running has more value than the farmer's crop, then the train company will just pay the farmer for the right to emit sparks, and vice-versa.
The problem comes when there are 1000 different farmers: at this point, it does matter who gets the right, since it's much too difficult to deal with that many farmers. In this case, the government somehow has to figure out which option has the highest value, because the market is too convoluted to do it.
To me, that appears to be exactly what's going on with cell towers -- the value of nationwide cell-phone coverage is worth more than the drop in value of property around the towers.
(1) Deere & Co was decided under NY trademark law, *not* federal copyright law. Secondly, it wasn't a straight parody case -- a competitor was using the parody to sell a competing product. Didn't you read the case? (p. 44) "Satirists, selling no product other than the publication that contains their expression, may wish to parody a mark to make a point of social commentary . . . Such uses risk some dilution of the identifying or selling power of the mark, but that risk is generally tolerated in the interest of maintaining broad opportunities for expression."
(2) Dallas Cowboys Cheerleaders also was not a parody case. In fact, if you look at the page you cite to, it says ". . . the doctrine of fair use permits limited copyright infringement for purposes of parody."
If you think about it, parodies have to make some use of the original copyright material, if only to remind people of the original. As Justice Souter said, 'When parody takes aim at a particular original work, the parody must be able to "conjure up" at least enough of that original to make the object of its critical wit recognizable.' Campbell v. Acuff-Rose Music, Inc., 510 U.S. 569, 588 (1994).
1. When somebody is just speaking off the cuff, not from prepared notes, then it's not fixed in any tangible medium of expression and thus ineligible for copyright protection. When the work is fixed in notes, or the person speaking records it, then it is under copyright.
(Note that this isn't true for musical performances -- see 17 U.S.C. 1101(a)(1).)
2. You cannot create a derivative work without permission of the original author. 17 U.S.C. 106(2).
In the US, the copyright office is an office under the Congress, not an administrative body in the executive branch. What they say does not have the force of law.
Even when you looking at the US copyright act, it's not completely clear: Under section 102, fonts would be a "Pictorial, graphic or sculptural work" and then under section 113(b), you have to look at what the law looked like in 1977. And, it only gets messier from there. There was a concern that allowing a "useful work" to be copyrighted would effectively grant a long-term patent without all the patent formalities.
There has been one court case on the matter (Adobe Systems v. Southern Software) that found for Adobe. But, it was only a district court case and is somewhat contentious: http://www.smu.edu/csr/Sum98-4-Mezrich.pdf
By my reading, there are two cases in which the GPL requires you to allow others to reproduce your work.
1. If you "modify your copy or copies of the Program or any portion of it... and copy and distribute such modifications..." (Paragraph 2).
Even if you assume that the font is a "Program," you are not modifying your copy of the font by using it.
2. "You may copy and distribute the Program (or a work based on it, under Section 2) in object code or executable form... provided that you also do one of the following...."
Fonts are not in either object code or executable form, so no problem here.
3. "Each time you redistribute the Program (or any work based on the Program), the recipient automatically receives a license form the original licensor to copy, distribute or modify the Program...."
But, that's not a problem -- they get your document and they get a right to modify the font from the original licensor.
Incidently, how many GPL'd fonts are distributed with the font equivalent of "Source Code" -- the data file used by whatever font program you used?
One reason that we have so many competing Open Source Licenses is that the GPL is not exactly clear in a lot of areas. For example, section 2 says "You may modify your copy or copies of the Program or any portion of it, thus forming a work based on the Program," and a "work based on the program" is defined to be "the program or any derivative work under copyright law." But, does that mean that section 2 applies to all derivative works or only to modificiations of the original program? I'm guessing the intent was that it should apply to all derivative works, but it actually reads like it only applies to modifications. Not all derivative works are modifications.
There's a rule of construction in contract cases that says that you "construe the contract against the drafter." In the case of fonts, that probably means that writing a document using a font is not covered by the GPL.
First of all, stock options are taxable, as are capital gains.
Secondly, let's see what's going on here.... Google has over 3,000 employees. To me, employing thousands of people helps society. They are the premiere search engine on the internet. I, as a member of society, am personally helped by google daily.
Don't equate "paying taxes" with "helping society." Plenty of tax money is spent in was that don't help society (and often hurting society) and there are many things that help society that are not paid for by taxes. You could just as easily say "We wouldn't want the high income earners to pay for studying bovine flatulence or $1000 toilet seats, now would we?"
The FCC absolutely can make law, when the ability to do so has been delegated to them by the Congress. If you break an FCC regulation that says "you cannot broadcast on this frequency," the fine you get is going to be just as enforceable as if Congress had said it itself.
Note that Congress can't just delegate naked power -- they have to give guidelines for doing so, and the agency cannot go beyond those guidelines. Effectively, Congress sets the policy and the FCC creates law to advance the policy, until it's overruled by Congress.
Note also that antitrust law has something to say about tying two products together -- there have been a number of cases where a monopolist's tying arrangment violated the Sherman Antitrust Act.
The second amendment was about government tyranny, but the view that the right to bear arms was there to fight against government tyranny isn't entirely accurate: The 2nd amendment was mainly based in a pro-militia, anti-standing army view. The concern was that a standing army would lead to tyranny, that militias were better and that people had to have guns in order to be in the militia. (some early statutes required men to own guns and to be part of the militia.)
You can see this from the proposed amendments in the Constitutional ratifying conventions and in the Virginia Bill of Rights.
BTW... The "Framers of the Constitution" did not write the Bill of Rights -- that was handled by the 1st Congress formed under the Constitution and by state ratifying conventions. There was certainly some overlap, but not complete.
Also note that 2nd amendment was originally labelled #4 -- the original #2 is now the 27th amendment. So, the oft-used argument "Well, it's 2nd, right after freedom of speech, so it must have been really important" doesn't hold water.
1. While I'm a firm believer in the 2nd amendment, it's a stretch to say that it was all about people being able to use guns against government tyranny.
If you look at it historically, you have to recognize that at the time the Bill of Rights was enacted, the people most affected by gun restrictions weren't in the population centers but on the frontier -- people facing problems with wild animals and hostile Indians. (Before I get raked over the coals for not being PC, they were called Indians at the time, and some of them were clearly hostile. I'm not going to go into the legitimacy of the hostility.) That, combined with hunting, made guns necessary to the survival of the frontiersmen. And with their survival went the expansion of the Union. Heck, at the time, Marbury v. Madison hadn't yet been decided and many people though of the Bill of Rights as being a paper tiger which the Congress might just ignore.
2. Also, note that natural law was an approach to the law based on specific principles, not just generically "law based on principles." Heck, most of today's law is still based on principles, just not the same principles that fans of natural law had. For example, in natural law, government could not do anything to interfere with contracts. Since then, we've established all sorts of principled judicial doctrines to limit the power of contract(doctrines of unconscionability, and non-enforcement of contracts against public policy, for example.) Similarly, the right to free association was an absolute natural law right. But, when the result of that was that Black people could not freely travel in the South (and in the North, to a lesser extent) because no hotels would serve them, a different principle took over.
These take-it-or-leave-it contracts, also known as "contracts of adhesion" are generally enforced by US courts, subject to most of the same rules that any contract is enforced. There is a bit of an argument about whether this _should_ be -- contracts are based on 'mutual assent,' and it's hard to say that you agreed to a contract that you didn't even read and couldn't understand even if you did. But, courts generally take the view that these things all have about the same terms in them, and by accepting the agreement, you're accepting a broad range of possible terms.
Note that this breaks down when the agreement says something like "You agree to name your firstborn son 'Merle'" -- this term would be completely unexpected and really would be unconscionable and probably against public policy, so a court probably wouldn't enforce it. (Again, IANAL, so don't rely on this.)
So, what DRM would I accept? I'd accept something that (1) was guaranteed to work into the future and (2) allowed me to do whatever copyright law allows me to do.
Both these have problems -- under (1), when the MS Monopoly eventually collapses under its own weight, what will I do with my iTunes music?
And (2) is exceptionally hard to encode as DRM. Gross infringement is fairly easy to deal with -- the case where I take a new music CD under copyright, make a copy of it and sell the copy. But, there are a lot of cases where infringement is not as obvious. Let's say, for example, that the CD contained a mix of public domain stuff and new stuff and I just wanted to extract and copy the public domain items. Or, it was a phonebook and I wanted to copy it. (Under a SCOTUS case, Feist v. Rural, Copyright does not extend to raw collections of facts. A bunch of European countries do have a pseudo-copyright in such works.) Or, I want to make a parody. These things are legal but extremely difficult for DRM software to deal with because it would require the software to look at the intent of what I'm doing.
Rights holders are trying to replace the rules of copyright with the rules of contract -- "I'll let you listen to this music if you agree to only listen to it 10 times." And, the main enabler for this is contracts of adhesion -- those shrink-wrap/click-through agreements that nobody reads but that courts generally enforce. Getting rid of these contracts will break DRM's legal foundation.
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There's a problem with your logic, or at least its implication that each party should go half way and meet in the middle. Applying that to the nomination process is approximately the same as saying "the New York Jets and my middle school football team agreed to compromise and call it a draw."
The fact is that both the President and the majority of the Senate are Republicans. If there's any compromising done, by all rights it should be "Ok, Harry Reid. We'll give you 10% and we'll take the other 90%," if that. The Democrats are hardly equal partners in this, nor should they be treated as such.
So, you've basically defined trade secret protection. But, it's insufficient, especially insufficient today.
You have a free-rider problem: if anybody can copy your stuff, then you can't make a living off of it. Let's say you spend $1M publishing 10 books and two of them are successful while eight lose money. I can come along, sell copies of the two successful ones and undercut your prices because I don't have to pay for either (1) the cost of creation or (2) the loss on the other eight books.
In that scenario, are you going to publish any books at all? You take all the risk, but gain very little of the reward.
Copyright has to exist if people are going to profit from their own work. The questions are really (1) how long? and (2) what exactly is protected?
The uniforms may be copyright, but that's a bit sketchy -- how much creative expression is in that? It's a shirt with a number on it.
The event itself is not an "original work of authorship," as required by 17 U.S.C. 102(a) and is thus not copyrightable subject matter. Pictures and video of the game, however, probably are.
When I said it's enforced by contract, I meant that when you buy a ticket to the game, you're probably agreeing not to photograph it (check the reverse side of your ticket). Also, the people who own the park have the right to prevent you from bringing a camera in.
IANAL. Don't rely on this.
If it's a good enough case and if IMBlaze actually has some cash, then finding a lawyer who will do it on contingency shouldn't be too hard.
The GAIM developers could transfer their copyright(s) to the FSF and let them hack it out.
That's not even close to right. Under your logic, no photographer can take a picture of a sunset because he didn't "create" what he took a picture of. Sure, the copyright is thin -- anybody else can take a picture of the same thing -- but it's still valid.
When a broadcasting company claims "exclusive rights" to transmit a game, that's enforced by contract and security: if you happen to be at the game and take a picture, that's your picture, not the NFL's. They can say "you can't get in with a camera," and they can kick you out, but once you've taken the picture, that's your picture -- you own the copyright to it.
The work-for-hire doctrine is built into U.S. copyright law -- in most employment contexts, it doesn't need to be contracted for. Often, the reason for those contract clauses are to avoid the "But I was doing this on my own time" arguments.
Descriptive words are weak. Fanciful words are stronger. "Green Soap" is really weak. "Irish Spring" is much stronger. "Numbers" is much better than "Spreadsheet."
Recall that Microsoft had a really tough time trying to trademark "Windows" (and I'm not sure of the current status of that one. By now, it's probably acquired secondary meaning.)
Using a trademark where there is no chance of confusion is generally not infringement (famous marks are a different matter), thus "Delta" airlines, power tools, 88, faucets, delta delta, Burke. So, even if Apple makes a spreadsheet called 'Numbers,' it's still useful in a bunch of other markets.
IANAL.
Huh? One of the things about Fair Use is that there are not very many things that are clear about it. In fact, it can even change over time -- what used to be fair use may not be anymore. This is largely because things that uses which used to be really hard to compensate the owner for have become much easier thanks to technology. Consider music: just about anybody can go to BMI or ASCAP online and buy a fairly inexpensive license. 20 years ago, that would have been much harder.
Consider what would happen if, say, the Library of Congress scanned an in-print dictionary and made it available to everybody in the federal government, even one-at-a-time electronically. Going through the 17 USC 107 factors: (1) It would be a governmental purpose, and the government (of all people) surely has the resources to compensate owners for use of their work, (2) it's a commercially available item, not some one-of-a-kind that needs protection, (3) it's the entire work, (4) it would harm the market by making the federal gov't much less likely to buy dictionaries. By my reckoning (and, IANAL), that's not fair use.
But, let's say that it's a 1946 work that's out of print, the publisher is defunct and the LoC holds the only copy. Well, that's a much better case for fair use -- there's very little effect on the market since the copyright holder probably doesn't even have a copy to exploit. And, it's a one-of-a-kind work and thus in need of protecting.
Fair use is rarely a 'clear case.'
Eh.... I think there's a false dichotomy here: it's either legally useful or human-readable, but not both.
As somebody making the switch from writing code to writing contracts, they're actually amazingly similar: they both try to precisely specify behavior. Just as you can make your code readible, you can also make a written contract readible. But, just as there's a lot of obtuse code, there's also a lot of obtuse contracts.
That said, there are some things which ought to be in a license agreement that are not going to be intuitively obvious to a lay person and which in fact may seem unnecessary.
For example, what happens if a work under the GPL infringes a patent and a user of the GPL'd work is sued by the patent holder for infringement. Can the user sue the author? The GPL appears to be silent. By just adding the works "OR NON-INFRINGEMENT" to the "NO WARRANTIES" section, it would be clear.
So, the deal is that digital TV stations use 1/5th the bandwidth of conventional analog stations. The space used by VHF (and UHF, to a lesser extent) is ideal for emergency personnel b/c those frequencies penetrate better through buildings. It's also well suited for things like WiMax. The gov't is going to auction off the freed spectrum, raising anywhere from $11B to $40B, depending on who you listen to.
And, for those who are concerned about such things, Congress is trying to figure out how to pay for the converters that people will need to use their current analog TVs with DTV -- they're concerned about voter backlash figure that part of the revenue from the spectrum auction should easily pay for the converters.
I'm not a big fan of the mandate -- only about 16% of the US population gets their TV through broadcast, so you're making these TVs marginally more expensive for the 84% of the people who don't need it. In reality, it won't be very much -- the market will take over and the DTV-capable TVs will cost about what the non DTV-capable TVs do now.
The FCC needs to interfere mainly because spectrum is scarce. If it weren't, then it wouldn't matter.
Considering that the FCC didn't have the authority to require broadcast flag, I wonder how they have the authority to requre DTV receivers.
Your premise is clearly false. If it were, it would be impossible for children to be victims of crimes or torts. But, because of their immaturity, we allow parents to limit their exercise of those rights. Other adults and government are far more limited in their ability to do so.
BTW, I know adults who are in their 40s and still don't take responsibility. Look at how many people are in their 50s and haven't saved a dime for retirement. Parents certainly pass dumb decision-making onto their kids, but that's been true for a lot longer than 20 years.
We should think of IP more like we think of real property, not personal property -- the better analogy for wholesale infringement isn't stealing, which deprives the owner of the use, but trespassing, which is unconsented use.
I think that transformative uses of material under copyright should be judged under a related real property concept -- nuisance.
Nuisance is part of this branch of law -- basically, let's say that your neighbor is doing something really valuable, but that imposes a cost on you (say noise or pollution or something). In general, nuisance law says that if he can afford to pay you for your harm, he should. If he can't, though, then you can't close him down.
So, let's consider Star Wars Revelations (mentioned previously). In theory, George Lucas could shut it down -- it uses the original Star Wars logo, Star Wars characters, music and so on. But, it was done on a shoestring -- if they had to pay for the right to do it, it never would have been made. That's transformative use, and it differs from just plain wholesale infringement -- downloading entire movies or songs or whatever. That sort of use, like when a 16-year-old remixes his favorite song, should be allowed.
In theory, US Fair Use could cover this. In practice, it doesn't.
On a side note, you're going to have to pay attention to when Australia is a party to the Boerne Convention and the TRIPS agreement, both of which spell out minimum protections.
When I posted originally, the title said "Red Hat..." not "Red Hat founder...." The title has since been changed. Not a whoring attempt, just wanted to get it corrected.
IT'S NOT RED HAT -- it's Bob Young. Young isn't in Red Hat management any more.
Geez... Why not just say "United States builds houses with Habitat for Humanity on Georgia," when you're talking about (former president) Jimmy Carter?
Sex offenses include public indecency & solicitation. Should somebody be forced to wear a GPS tag because they got drunk & streaked their college football game or used a prostitute?
One problem with labelling people as 'sex offenders' is that doing so lumps streakers in with pedophiles, necrophiliacs and serial rapists.
There was a case very recently in Raleigh where some college freshman had downloaded child porn on his computer, his roommate saw it and called the cops. Instant sex offender status. This is a case more in the middle: On one hand, that's horrible, and the right punishment seems to be scratching his eyes out and throwing him into the wilderness to fend for himself. But, on the other hand, he's only 18 years old. Do you really want him carrying a 'sex offender' label for the rest of his life? Is it reasonable to still tag him with that when he's 78?
Well, there's the longstanding legal doctrine of 'nuisance,' which (if I recall correctly) is "a non-trespassory invasion into the right of quiet enjoyment of one's property." The idea is that if what you're putting up causes the property values around you to diminish by more than the value of what you put up, then either (a) you won't be allowed to do it, or (b) you'll be forced to pay all those people for their harm.
There's an old English case about a 19th century train that runs next to a farmer's flax field. The train emits sparks which could set the field on fire. Do you give the farmer to right to tell the train not to run, or do you allow the train to tell the farmer not to plant? In theory, it doesn't matter: If you give the right to the farmer and the train running has more value than the farmer's crop, then the train company will just pay the farmer for the right to emit sparks, and vice-versa.
The problem comes when there are 1000 different farmers: at this point, it does matter who gets the right, since it's much too difficult to deal with that many farmers. In this case, the government somehow has to figure out which option has the highest value, because the market is too convoluted to do it.
To me, that appears to be exactly what's going on with cell towers -- the value of nationwide cell-phone coverage is worth more than the drop in value of property around the towers.
Uh, wrong...
(1) Deere & Co was decided under NY trademark law, *not* federal copyright law. Secondly, it wasn't a straight parody case -- a competitor was using the parody to sell a competing product. Didn't you read the case? (p. 44) "Satirists, selling no product other than the publication that contains their expression, may wish to parody a mark to make a point of social commentary . . . Such uses risk some dilution of the identifying or selling power of the mark, but that risk is generally tolerated in the interest of maintaining broad opportunities for expression."
(2) Dallas Cowboys Cheerleaders also was not a parody case. In fact, if you look at the page you cite to, it says ". . . the doctrine of fair use permits limited copyright infringement for purposes of parody."
If you think about it, parodies have to make some use of the original copyright material, if only to remind people of the original. As Justice Souter said, 'When parody takes aim at a particular original work, the parody must be able to "conjure up" at least enough of that original to make the object of its critical wit recognizable.' Campbell v. Acuff-Rose Music, Inc., 510 U.S. 569, 588 (1994).
IANAL -- don't take this message as legal advice.
IANAL, but...
That's not quite right either. In the US...
1. When somebody is just speaking off the cuff, not from prepared notes, then it's not fixed in any tangible medium of expression and thus ineligible for copyright protection. When the work is fixed in notes, or the person speaking records it, then it is under copyright.
(Note that this isn't true for musical performances -- see 17 U.S.C. 1101(a)(1).)
2. You cannot create a derivative work without permission of the original author. 17 U.S.C. 106(2).
Not a lawyer. Don't take my advice.
In the US, the copyright office is an office under the Congress, not an administrative body in the executive branch. What they say does not have the force of law.
Even when you looking at the US copyright act, it's not completely clear: Under section 102, fonts would be a "Pictorial, graphic or sculptural work" and then under section 113(b), you have to look at what the law looked like in 1977. And, it only gets messier from there. There was a concern that allowing a "useful work" to be copyrighted would effectively grant a long-term patent without all the patent formalities.
There has been one court case on the matter (Adobe Systems v. Southern Software) that found for Adobe. But, it was only a district court case and is somewhat contentious: http://www.smu.edu/csr/Sum98-4-Mezrich.pdf
I am not a lawyer. Go see one if you need advice.
... and copy and distribute such modifications ..." (Paragraph 2).
... provided that you also do one of the following...."
By my reading, there are two cases in which the GPL requires you to allow others to reproduce your work.
1. If you "modify your copy or copies of the Program or any portion of it
Even if you assume that the font is a "Program," you are not modifying your copy of the font by using it.
2. "You may copy and distribute the Program (or a work based on it, under Section 2) in object code or executable form
Fonts are not in either object code or executable form, so no problem here.
3. "Each time you redistribute the Program (or any work based on the Program), the recipient automatically receives a license form the original licensor to copy, distribute or modify the Program...."
But, that's not a problem -- they get your document and they get a right to modify the font from the original licensor.
Incidently, how many GPL'd fonts are distributed with the font equivalent of "Source Code" -- the data file used by whatever font program you used?
One reason that we have so many competing Open Source Licenses is that the GPL is not exactly clear in a lot of areas. For example, section 2 says "You may modify your copy or copies of the Program or any portion of it, thus forming a work based on the Program," and a "work based on the program" is defined to be "the program or any derivative work under copyright law." But, does that mean that section 2 applies to all derivative works or only to modificiations of the original program? I'm guessing the intent was that it should apply to all derivative works, but it actually reads like it only applies to modifications. Not all derivative works are modifications.
There's a rule of construction in contract cases that says that you "construe the contract against the drafter." In the case of fonts, that probably means that writing a document using a font is not covered by the GPL.
Beg Pardon?
First of all, stock options are taxable, as are capital gains.
Secondly, let's see what's going on here.... Google has over 3,000 employees. To me, employing thousands of people helps society. They are the premiere search engine on the internet. I, as a member of society, am personally helped by google daily.
Don't equate "paying taxes" with "helping society." Plenty of tax money is spent in was that don't help society (and often hurting society) and there are many things that help society that are not paid for by taxes. You could just as easily say "We wouldn't want the high income earners to pay for studying bovine flatulence or $1000 toilet seats, now would we?"
Huh? That's just plain wrong.
The FCC absolutely can make law, when the ability to do so has been delegated to them by the Congress. If you break an FCC regulation that says "you cannot broadcast on this frequency," the fine you get is going to be just as enforceable as if Congress had said it itself.
Note that Congress can't just delegate naked power -- they have to give guidelines for doing so, and the agency cannot go beyond those guidelines. Effectively, Congress sets the policy and the FCC creates law to advance the policy, until it's overruled by Congress.
Note also that antitrust law has something to say about tying two products together -- there have been a number of cases where a monopolist's tying arrangment violated the Sherman Antitrust Act.
The second amendment was about government tyranny, but the view that the right to bear arms was there to fight against government tyranny isn't entirely accurate: The 2nd amendment was mainly based in a pro-militia, anti-standing army view. The concern was that a standing army would lead to tyranny, that militias were better and that people had to have guns in order to be in the militia. (some early statutes required men to own guns and to be part of the militia.)
You can see this from the proposed amendments in the Constitutional ratifying conventions and in the Virginia Bill of Rights.
BTW... The "Framers of the Constitution" did not write the Bill of Rights -- that was handled by the 1st Congress formed under the Constitution and by state ratifying conventions. There was certainly some overlap, but not complete.
Also note that 2nd amendment was originally labelled #4 -- the original #2 is now the 27th amendment. So, the oft-used argument "Well, it's 2nd, right after freedom of speech, so it must have been really important" doesn't hold water.
2 comments:
1. While I'm a firm believer in the 2nd amendment, it's a stretch to say that it was all about people being able to use guns against government tyranny.
If you look at it historically, you have to recognize that at the time the Bill of Rights was enacted, the people most affected by gun restrictions weren't in the population centers but on the frontier -- people facing problems with wild animals and hostile Indians. (Before I get raked over the coals for not being PC, they were called Indians at the time, and some of them were clearly hostile. I'm not going to go into the legitimacy of the hostility.) That, combined with hunting, made guns necessary to the survival of the frontiersmen. And with their survival went the expansion of the Union.
Heck, at the time, Marbury v. Madison hadn't yet been decided and many people though of the Bill of Rights as being a paper tiger which the Congress might just ignore.
2. Also, note that natural law was an approach to the law based on specific principles, not just generically "law based on principles." Heck, most of today's law is still based on principles, just not the same principles that fans of natural law had. For example, in natural law, government could not do anything to interfere with contracts. Since then, we've established all sorts of principled judicial doctrines to limit the power of contract(doctrines of unconscionability, and non-enforcement of contracts against public policy, for example.) Similarly, the right to free association was an absolute natural law right. But, when the result of that was that Black people could not freely travel in the South (and in the North, to a lesser extent) because no hotels would serve them, a different principle took over.
IANAL (yet!)
These take-it-or-leave-it contracts, also known as "contracts of adhesion" are generally enforced by US courts, subject to most of the same rules that any contract is enforced. There is a bit of an argument about whether this _should_ be -- contracts are based on 'mutual assent,' and it's hard to say that you agreed to a contract that you didn't even read and couldn't understand even if you did. But, courts generally take the view that these things all have about the same terms in them, and by accepting the agreement, you're accepting a broad range of possible terms.
Note that this breaks down when the agreement says something like "You agree to name your firstborn son 'Merle'" -- this term would be completely unexpected and really would be unconscionable and probably against public policy, so a court probably wouldn't enforce it. (Again, IANAL, so don't rely on this.)
So, what DRM would I accept? I'd accept something that (1) was guaranteed to work into the future and (2) allowed me to do whatever copyright law allows me to do.
Both these have problems -- under (1), when the MS Monopoly eventually collapses under its own weight, what will I do with my iTunes music?
And (2) is exceptionally hard to encode as DRM. Gross infringement is fairly easy to deal with -- the case where I take a new music CD under copyright, make a copy of it and sell the copy. But, there are a lot of cases where infringement is not as obvious. Let's say, for example, that the CD contained a mix of public domain stuff and new stuff and I just wanted to extract and copy the public domain items. Or, it was a phonebook and I wanted to copy it. (Under a SCOTUS case, Feist v. Rural, Copyright does not extend to raw collections of facts. A bunch of European countries do have a pseudo-copyright in such works.) Or, I want to make a parody. These things are legal but extremely difficult for DRM software to deal with because it would require the software to look at the intent of what I'm doing.
Rights holders are trying to replace the rules of copyright with the rules of contract -- "I'll let you listen to this music if you agree to only listen to it 10 times." And, the main enabler for this is contracts of adhesion -- those shrink-wrap/click-through agreements that nobody reads but that courts generally enforce. Getting rid of these contracts will break DRM's legal foundation.