After the telecom nuclear winter, I went from being a software developer to being a law student and am now a transactional attorney, dealing largely with technology transactions and startup companies. Drafting contracts uses many of the same root skills as programming does, and I understand the needs of my software and Internet clients much better. Plus, the pay can be a lot better (if you go to a good law school), layoffs are a lot less frequent -- sure, attorneys were laid off in this economy, but they've generally been immune in previous downturns. Also, since becoming a lawyer means 3 years of law school and bar admission, there's a lot less competition for available jobs.
Of course, it all depends on getting into a good law school -- there are lots of attorneys out there who graduated from 3rd tier law schools and are making less than they would have had they chosen an IT career.
And, being a lawyer is not for everybody -- lawyers have a maxim "the law is a jealous mistress."
Do you play an instrument?
I might agree with you if the sheet music were fed into a computer that just mechanically reproduced the sounds without any human intervention at all.
But, anything other than a straight mechanical performance always adds to the music -- maybe you play with a little vibrato when the original music didn't call for it, or maybe you hold a note just a tiny bit longer than the 1/4 note in the music. Maybe you play an electric guitar and have to decide how to set the controls on your axe, or whether to play with a heavy pick or a light one. Maybe you hit the bass notes on a chord harder than you do the treble notes. And that doesn't even mention the post-processing of the music.
The Copyright Act recognizes copyright in both sheet music and in recordings of performances of that sheet music because the recording has independent creative expression.
Ok, fine. But, my basic point still stands -- do you really want the people who designed Cash for Clunkers (and decided to include a Hummer on the list of vehicles you could buy) also be the ones to decide where to invest for basic research.
Here's the economist's critique of the program: no program can improve the economy by destroying useful assets. Maybe it improves the environment, but it helped the car companies at the expense of all the people who would have bought those now destroyed vehicles. The difference is that the car companies are politically powerful, and poor people are not.
Who is this "we" and "our"? And, how did "we" encourage creativity, research and learning?
Basic research is a source of economic competitiveness, which is why "we" don't need the government trying to direct economic competitiveness. Why should we believe that the government will do a better job of figuring out what needs to be developed than the free market? This is the same government that thought "Cash for Clunkers" was a good idea -- allowing people to turn in a 5-year-old car that gets 20 mpg for a new Hummer that gets about 10!
The original question was "What will produce 1 million jobs in the next three years"? I don't know. But, I suggest that there have been very few times in history when "we" did know the answer to this question. But, that's the great thing about capitalism -- somebody, someplace, has an idea for something revolutionary and is starting up a company to take advantage of it. They see the opportunity to make money, so they're going after that opportunity.
Think about what would happen if we tried to transfer that to the government: "Hmm.. Mr. Smith. I see that you have a great idea that will change lives. Once you submit your idea, we'll assign it to the department of novel inventions, which will study your idea and, in a few years, decide whether it's worth asking the Congress to fund. Right now, Sen. So-and-So is in charge of Committee Thus-n-Such, so be sure that your submission talks about how many people in his state will be hired. Oh, and it better fit in with the President's new economic plan. If it doesn't, then your idea will never be implemented."
The premise of the original question is strange -- apparently, the value of the research isn't in the amount of benefit that people get from it; the value is in the number of jobs that are needed to support it. Under this logic, a more efficient air-conditioning system is better if it requires thousands of trained technicians to keep it running than if homeowners could install and repair it themselves. How twisted is that?
3 cents is a lot? They have to pay for the servers, the electricity and the people who run these systems. Sure, the marginal cost for accessing documents is negligible, but there is a significant fixed cost that has to be made up for somewhere. And, parts of it--largely the opinions--are free.
As far as free ways to search case law, check out findlaw.com, lexisone.com, the websites for the courts themselves, archive.org, etc... Or, you can do what lawyers have done for centuries -- find a law library and look through the hardcopy. Assembling and storing all that information is a non-trivial task and, so far, nobody is willing to do it for free.
But, there's a difference between siding "on the consensus of the scientific community" and what the EPA did here.
When a regulatory agency intends to enact some regulations, it has a "public comment period" in which members of the public can comment on what the regulation should look like. Before that public comment period starts, the agency is supposed to publish all of its information on the subject matter, *INCLUDING* internal reports that it discounted.
That's the problem we have here -- the EPA basically decided "this report doesn't support our position, so we're not going to release it, EVEN THOUGH WE HAVE TO."
It's not a question of being "paralyzed" by dissenting opinions -- it's a matter of acknowledging that they exist.
Hmm... That sounds like an argument completely against centralized control. I suggest that you're even better not giving power in the first place. The UN is anything *but* impartial and, what's worse, it's horribly corrupt.
"Sign this or no job" is not coercion. You are not coerced just because the other side has something you really want and you're willing to give up a lot to get that thing, whether that thing is a new car, a new house or a new job. (There are some limits: "Sign this and I'll give you the medicine you need to stay along," for example.)
If you don't like the deal, either find a different job or offer a different deal. I have passed on jobs because I didn't like the terms of employment. And, in others, I've negotiated the terms.
You'd think that. But, at least in the US, Copyright has more, including the right to copy, the right to distribute, the right to make derivative works & the right to perform or display publicly.
So, the procedure for getting a new gTLD includes a review of the proposal to see if the gTLD is confusingly similar to other gTLDs. Nobody is going to be able to register.co(r)n. The bigger, and related, issue is in internationalized domain names -- imagine.com, where the 'o' is in cyrillic or something. But, the same policy applies. (And, anyway, most browsers already catch that today....)
No. If you show the border agents the encrypted kiddie porn on the hard drive, you cannot later claim that being forced to give them a copy of that same kiddie porn would be a violation of your 5th amendment right.
If you cause the "I Agree" button to be clicked, even indirectly by a cat, you are just as bound as if you had clicked it by hand yourself. There are a variety of possible ways to get out of a EULA; this isn't one of them.
(To my knowledge, nobody has been foolish enough to actually try this sort of defense, so it's *conceivable* that I'm wrong. But, I would be very surprised.)
Uh... I don't know about you, but when I buy a phone, there are usually a ton of display models. It's real obvious which ones use which connectors.
I never said "it was the cheapest design." My point was that these switches are never costless -- the consumer is going to have to give up something else. It may be a company will determine that by increasing the charging voltage beyond what the EU specification says, they can charge the battery faster. But, by forcing the EU spec, the consumer will never get that benefit. Instead, they're forced to have the standardized charger.
Why would they do that? Is it because of the EU? I doubt it -- this standard has clearly been under development for a while. Instead, it sounds like they're responding to what consumers want.
Car emissions are a different beast -- they're a negative externality, a cost that's imposed on everybody else. And, regulation makes sense in that situation because the car consumer can make a choice that's bad for everybody else. But, there's no externality in cell phone chargers, apart from the very, very minimal cost of disposing of old chargers.
If the average Joe doesn't care, why should the EU? I would rather have the industry put their effort into, say, extending battery life, than dealing with a common phone charger. Why does the EU think its choices about what should be in a product are better than my choices?
Imagine if this happened in the computer industry -- consumers are concerned about faster processors, more RAM, price, monitor size, etc.... and then the EU comes along and says "Oh, by the way, every computer has to have an external fan that the user can redirect to cool himself off if he gets too hot while using the computer."
The problem is that the fan, and the common power adapter, are not free. The computer maker has to increase prices or reduce other features in order to have the fan, and the phone maker has to make similar trade-offs. Why do the EU regulators think that they know more about what's good for consumers than the consumers themselves?
No drawbacks? How about people don't buy your product because you have some screwy power adapter?
The cell-phone market is hypercompetitive -- there are dozen and dozens of cellphones out there with all sorts of choice. If you don't like how one phone charges, nobody's forcing you to buy it -- pick a different one.
This is one market where you don't really need to worry about standards evolving -- the cell phone market has standards for applications, wireless headsets, configuration, telephone communications, etc..... Why does anybody think they won't direct their energies to standardizing chargers? (It could be that they've been focusing their efforts on things that consumers care about a lot more).
Watch out -- that's the cancer cluster myth. In any population, random events will not be uniformly distributed throughout the population, but will sometimes cluster. People in the cluster then look for a reason behind the cluster instead of recognizing it for what it is -- a product of randomness.
In answer to the first question, the special masters (3 of them in 3 different cases) said that the current scientific evidence overwhelmingly indicates that there is no link between childhood vaccines and autism.
In the original study that showed some sort of a link, it was later discovered that 7 out of the 8 affected kids showed indications of autism before getting the vacccines.
That's true of any book. You just have to go through a little more decoding to get to the audio.
In any case, Amazon can distribute this particular "encoded form of an audiobook," since that particular encoded form is the text, and they have licensed the right to distribute the text.
There is certainly a meaningful difference -- in your example, Amazon would be distributing audio copies of books without a license. That's not what they're doing.
Your logic: "If one way to do X is infringing, then all ways to do X must be infringing" is preposterous. Here's an analogy: I can go from A to B by driving for an hour at 85 mph and then for an hour at 35 mph, or by driving at 60 for two hours. You get the same result, but you can only get a speeding ticket in one case.
A performance is *not* a copy. Under 17 U.S.C. 101, a copy is a *material object*. It also has to be "fixed," which (again S. 101) means the copy has to exist for "more than a transitory duration."
No derivative work is created here, either because the creation of a work means fixing it in a copy or phonorecord, neither of which is happening here.
Tepples already addressed your public performance point, so I won't reiterate that.
Pfft. Yeah, technically, lawyers have a monopoly. In reality, it's not that hard to take the LSAT, go to law school and pass the bar exam. That's not a huge barrier. The median starting salary for a lawyer is around $55K; in a number of states, it's around $40K. Sure, lawyers from Harvard and a few other top schools get the $160K jobs (plus $25K+ bonus), but there are relatively few of those and they cater largely to corporate America.
The main reason lawyers are expensive is because most things they do take a lot of their time and because they have to pay the receptionist, rent, insurance, etc.... Consider, for example, preparing a will: the lawyer talks with you for 30-60 minutes, gathering information, answering questions about the process, finding out exactly what you need (do you need a trust also? What sort? How about a living will?) Then, goes off for 2-3 hours preparing those documents, sends them to you to get your feedback, makes any changes you need, then has you come in to execute the whole thing. All told, he has probably spent 5-6 hours on you.
As far as the "there's too much of it" argument, you're right -- blame Congress for that one. Luckily, most of us are unaffected by the large majority of those laws.
Slashdot Mirror
After the telecom nuclear winter, I went from being a software developer to being a law student and am now a transactional attorney, dealing largely with technology transactions and startup companies. Drafting contracts uses many of the same root skills as programming does, and I understand the needs of my software and Internet clients much better. Plus, the pay can be a lot better (if you go to a good law school), layoffs are a lot less frequent -- sure, attorneys were laid off in this economy, but they've generally been immune in previous downturns. Also, since becoming a lawyer means 3 years of law school and bar admission, there's a lot less competition for available jobs. Of course, it all depends on getting into a good law school -- there are lots of attorneys out there who graduated from 3rd tier law schools and are making less than they would have had they chosen an IT career. And, being a lawyer is not for everybody -- lawyers have a maxim "the law is a jealous mistress."
Do you play an instrument? I might agree with you if the sheet music were fed into a computer that just mechanically reproduced the sounds without any human intervention at all. But, anything other than a straight mechanical performance always adds to the music -- maybe you play with a little vibrato when the original music didn't call for it, or maybe you hold a note just a tiny bit longer than the 1/4 note in the music. Maybe you play an electric guitar and have to decide how to set the controls on your axe, or whether to play with a heavy pick or a light one. Maybe you hit the bass notes on a chord harder than you do the treble notes. And that doesn't even mention the post-processing of the music. The Copyright Act recognizes copyright in both sheet music and in recordings of performances of that sheet music because the recording has independent creative expression.
Ok, fine. But, my basic point still stands -- do you really want the people who designed Cash for Clunkers (and decided to include a Hummer on the list of vehicles you could buy) also be the ones to decide where to invest for basic research. Here's the economist's critique of the program: no program can improve the economy by destroying useful assets. Maybe it improves the environment, but it helped the car companies at the expense of all the people who would have bought those now destroyed vehicles. The difference is that the car companies are politically powerful, and poor people are not.
Who is this "we" and "our"? And, how did "we" encourage creativity, research and learning?
Basic research is a source of economic competitiveness, which is why "we" don't need the government trying to direct economic competitiveness. Why should we believe that the government will do a better job of figuring out what needs to be developed than the free market? This is the same government that thought "Cash for Clunkers" was a good idea -- allowing people to turn in a 5-year-old car that gets 20 mpg for a new Hummer that gets about 10!
The original question was "What will produce 1 million jobs in the next three years"? I don't know. But, I suggest that there have been very few times in history when "we" did know the answer to this question. But, that's the great thing about capitalism -- somebody, someplace, has an idea for something revolutionary and is starting up a company to take advantage of it. They see the opportunity to make money, so they're going after that opportunity.
Think about what would happen if we tried to transfer that to the government: "Hmm.. Mr. Smith. I see that you have a great idea that will change lives. Once you submit your idea, we'll assign it to the department of novel inventions, which will study your idea and, in a few years, decide whether it's worth asking the Congress to fund. Right now, Sen. So-and-So is in charge of Committee Thus-n-Such, so be sure that your submission talks about how many people in his state will be hired. Oh, and it better fit in with the President's new economic plan. If it doesn't, then your idea will never be implemented."
The premise of the original question is strange -- apparently, the value of the research isn't in the amount of benefit that people get from it; the value is in the number of jobs that are needed to support it. Under this logic, a more efficient air-conditioning system is better if it requires thousands of trained technicians to keep it running than if homeowners could install and repair it themselves. How twisted is that?
3 cents is a lot? They have to pay for the servers, the electricity and the people who run these systems. Sure, the marginal cost for accessing documents is negligible, but there is a significant fixed cost that has to be made up for somewhere. And, parts of it--largely the opinions--are free.
As far as free ways to search case law, check out findlaw.com, lexisone.com, the websites for the courts themselves, archive.org, etc... Or, you can do what lawyers have done for centuries -- find a law library and look through the hardcopy. Assembling and storing all that information is a non-trivial task and, so far, nobody is willing to do it for free.
But, there's a difference between siding "on the consensus of the scientific community" and what the EPA did here.
When a regulatory agency intends to enact some regulations, it has a "public comment period" in which members of the public can comment on what the regulation should look like. Before that public comment period starts, the agency is supposed to publish all of its information on the subject matter, *INCLUDING* internal reports that it discounted.
That's the problem we have here -- the EPA basically decided "this report doesn't support our position, so we're not going to release it, EVEN THOUGH WE HAVE TO."
It's not a question of being "paralyzed" by dissenting opinions -- it's a matter of acknowledging that they exist.
Hmm... That sounds like an argument completely against centralized control. I suggest that you're even better not giving power in the first place. The UN is anything *but* impartial and, what's worse, it's horribly corrupt.
"Sign this or no job" is not coercion. You are not coerced just because the other side has something you really want and you're willing to give up a lot to get that thing, whether that thing is a new car, a new house or a new job. (There are some limits: "Sign this and I'll give you the medicine you need to stay along," for example.)
If you don't like the deal, either find a different job or offer a different deal. I have passed on jobs because I didn't like the terms of employment. And, in others, I've negotiated the terms.
You'd think that. But, at least in the US, Copyright has more, including the right to copy, the right to distribute, the right to make derivative works & the right to perform or display publicly.
Here's one: .bank, where every entity in .bank is (1) certified to actually be a bank and (2) is certified to follow certain data security procedures.
Or consider .kids, where every domain follows some list of kid-friendly policies.
So, the procedure for getting a new gTLD includes a review of the proposal to see if the gTLD is confusingly similar to other gTLDs. Nobody is going to be able to register .co(r)n. The bigger, and related, issue is in internationalized domain names -- imagine .com, where the 'o' is in cyrillic or something. But, the same policy applies. (And, anyway, most browsers already catch that today....)
No. If you show the border agents the encrypted kiddie porn on the hard drive, you cannot later claim that being forced to give them a copy of that same kiddie porn would be a violation of your 5th amendment right.
Yes.
http://www.law.uh.edu/faculty/RNimmer/contracts/supp7.pdf
http://caselaw.lp.findlaw.com/cgi-bin/getcase.pl?court=7th&navby=docket&no=961139
http://www.law.uh.edu/faculty/RNimmer/contracts/supp7.pdf
That's an edited version, but gets at the meat.
If you cause the "I Agree" button to be clicked, even indirectly by a cat, you are just as bound as if you had clicked it by hand yourself. There are a variety of possible ways to get out of a EULA; this isn't one of them.
(To my knowledge, nobody has been foolish enough to actually try this sort of defense, so it's *conceivable* that I'm wrong. But, I would be very surprised.)
Uh... I don't know about you, but when I buy a phone, there are usually a ton of display models. It's real obvious which ones use which connectors.
I never said "it was the cheapest design." My point was that these switches are never costless -- the consumer is going to have to give up something else. It may be a company will determine that by increasing the charging voltage beyond what the EU specification says, they can charge the battery faster. But, by forcing the EU spec, the consumer will never get that benefit. Instead, they're forced to have the standardized charger.
If the industry determines that consumers care about this, then they'll make the change. In fact, it appears that it is already doing so: http://www.pcworld.com/article/159630/universal_chargers_to_finally_become_a_reality.html
Why would they do that? Is it because of the EU? I doubt it -- this standard has clearly been under development for a while. Instead, it sounds like they're responding to what consumers want.
Car emissions are a different beast -- they're a negative externality, a cost that's imposed on everybody else. And, regulation makes sense in that situation because the car consumer can make a choice that's bad for everybody else. But, there's no externality in cell phone chargers, apart from the very, very minimal cost of disposing of old chargers.
If the average Joe doesn't care, why should the EU? I would rather have the industry put their effort into, say, extending battery life, than dealing with a common phone charger. Why does the EU think its choices about what should be in a product are better than my choices?
Imagine if this happened in the computer industry -- consumers are concerned about faster processors, more RAM, price, monitor size, etc.... and then the EU comes along and says "Oh, by the way, every computer has to have an external fan that the user can redirect to cool himself off if he gets too hot while using the computer."
The problem is that the fan, and the common power adapter, are not free. The computer maker has to increase prices or reduce other features in order to have the fan, and the phone maker has to make similar trade-offs. Why do the EU regulators think that they know more about what's good for consumers than the consumers themselves?
No drawbacks? How about people don't buy your product because you have some screwy power adapter?
The cell-phone market is hypercompetitive -- there are dozen and dozens of cellphones out there with all sorts of choice. If you don't like how one phone charges, nobody's forcing you to buy it -- pick a different one.
This is one market where you don't really need to worry about standards evolving -- the cell phone market has standards for applications, wireless headsets, configuration, telephone communications, etc..... Why does anybody think they won't direct their energies to standardizing chargers? (It could be that they've been focusing their efforts on things that consumers care about a lot more).
Watch out -- that's the cancer cluster myth. In any population, random events will not be uniformly distributed throughout the population, but will sometimes cluster. People in the cluster then look for a reason behind the cluster instead of recognizing it for what it is -- a product of randomness.
In answer to the first question, the special masters (3 of them in 3 different cases) said that the current scientific evidence overwhelmingly indicates that there is no link between childhood vaccines and autism.
In the original study that showed some sort of a link, it was later discovered that 7 out of the 8 affected kids showed indications of autism before getting the vacccines.
Well, you're not blind, are you? Proof enough.
That's true of any book. You just have to go through a little more decoding to get to the audio.
In any case, Amazon can distribute this particular "encoded form of an audiobook," since that particular encoded form is the text, and they have licensed the right to distribute the text.
The EFF has a great analysis on this: http://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2009/02/does-authors-guild-want-sue-you-reading-aloud-your
There is certainly a meaningful difference -- in your example, Amazon would be distributing audio copies of books without a license. That's not what they're doing.
Your logic: "If one way to do X is infringing, then all ways to do X must be infringing" is preposterous. Here's an analogy: I can go from A to B by driving for an hour at 85 mph and then for an hour at 35 mph, or by driving at 60 for two hours. You get the same result, but you can only get a speeding ticket in one case.
There is no "read aloud right." If there were, then millions of parents and schoolteachers would be infringing it every day.
There is a public performance right, a derivative work right and a reproduction right. But, none of those rights are implicated here.
A performance is *not* a copy. Under 17 U.S.C. 101, a copy is a *material object*. It also has to be "fixed," which (again S. 101) means the copy has to exist for "more than a transitory duration."
No derivative work is created here, either because the creation of a work means fixing it in a copy or phonorecord, neither of which is happening here.
Tepples already addressed your public performance point, so I won't reiterate that.
Pfft. Yeah, technically, lawyers have a monopoly. In reality, it's not that hard to take the LSAT, go to law school and pass the bar exam. That's not a huge barrier. The median starting salary for a lawyer is around $55K; in a number of states, it's around $40K. Sure, lawyers from Harvard and a few other top schools get the $160K jobs (plus $25K+ bonus), but there are relatively few of those and they cater largely to corporate America.
The main reason lawyers are expensive is because most things they do take a lot of their time and because they have to pay the receptionist, rent, insurance, etc.... Consider, for example, preparing a will: the lawyer talks with you for 30-60 minutes, gathering information, answering questions about the process, finding out exactly what you need (do you need a trust also? What sort? How about a living will?) Then, goes off for 2-3 hours preparing those documents, sends them to you to get your feedback, makes any changes you need, then has you come in to execute the whole thing. All told, he has probably spent 5-6 hours on you.
As far as the "there's too much of it" argument, you're right -- blame Congress for that one. Luckily, most of us are unaffected by the large majority of those laws.