question for the supreme court: do you really believe the the copyright of the bay city rollers first album is more deserving of legal protection than a human life?
Since when is it the Supreme Court's job to decide what deserves legal protection?
Research papers that are released, even by MS, usually aren't intended to get the attention of the broader market. They're intended to put forth ideas and let a few select people know what's going on inside the heads of MS engineers.
I think you're right. If the original paper is just a research paper, then there's no particular point in claiming that it's another vaporware campaign.
On the other hand, Cohen also offered explicit reasons why it was a misleading research paper. In particular, the analysis of BitTorrent was simply wrong, both in explaining the design (tit-for-tat, says MS, like hell, says the author) and in guessing the typical environment (4 to 6 connections, guesses MS, more like dozens, says Cohen).
So, even if we ignore the apparently spurious claims of vaporware, Cohen's article has real criticisms of the paper.
Excuse me? You'd have to learn Monad (and get-process and what it passes) for the same task, and awk is basically the Unix competitor to its scripting capabilities.
Fair enough, but I was already skipping the requirement of learning awk from my estimates.
Let's take it for granted that our hypothetical shell-user knows the basics of both awk and Monad. In this case, I *think* that constructing the Monad command would be easier for me than constructing the command using awk (which involves knowing the flags for ps and which field is the correct output field).
I don't think that it is a critical difference, but counting keystrokes is a little misleading. I'm also not suggesting that Monad is better simply because it uses long but easily remembered fields like virtualwhosits or whatever that easily remembered field was called. Just that the difference between the two shouldn't be measured by keystrokes on the line.
The not-for-profit organisation paid out 46% of its total expenses of $404m in salaries and fringe benefits last year, with its executive director receiving a total compensation package of over $1m.
he gets paid more than the president?
His college transcript is better than the president's. Let that be a lesson to us: your permanent record really does follow you around.
If you absolutely -must- sort out those that have less than n mem usage, try $ ps vOr | awk '{if ($8 > 15000) print $_ }'
Be fair, now. If your skill with bash is anything like mine (it's not -- I don't know awk), you have to add in keypresses needed to write that. For me, that includes "man ps" (you used flags I've never used). Let's skip the "awk" command, since it would take too many keystrokes for me to learn awk so that I'd write that. Assuming I knew awk, I'd still have to execute the ps command to figure which field is relevant.
The code snippet he wrote was lengthier (much too long for geek kudos) but I bet I have a better chance to write it correctly on the first try.
(As a matter of personal taste, I wager that Bash is more to my liking than MSH. But we should count the keystrokes needed to learn how to write the commandline, too.)
[S]top talking about how Microsoft is so evil because they are suppressing free speech (which they are not, that's China) and start talking about how the Chinese government is denying peoples rights, and how people and governments can influence China to change.
Er, isn't Microsoft some of those people that can influence China to change?
I'm not convinced that MS is wrong here, but your argument is lacking. It is essentially: dealing with the devil is acceptable if you get a good deal. (Pardon the hyperbole. I don't regard China as evil.)
But you also say that people ought to persuade China to change. How can you reconcile these two claims? Microsoft shouldn't care about China's policies but people should?
Fortunately or unfortunately, that is indeed a reasonable interpretation of the Constitution, too.
You and I differ on reasonableness.
Repeated retroactive extensions that potentially prevent a work from ever becoming part of the public domain don't satisfy my interpretation of "limited time".
Indeed, I tend to oppose retroactive extensions altogether, but I can't defend that opinion like Lessig can, so I won't try.
Well, it wasn't the Sonny Bono act that made it this way. Copyright had been relative to author-death since at least the prior copyright extension act, which was in the 1970s. And it might've been earlier still.
Everyone did get the same extensions... in the United States.
Nope. It was unfair to some copyright-holders. If the copyright on a work had already expired, it wasn't extended.
That's a different partition of interested parties. The OP was talking music vs. other forms of copyrightable material.
But you're right that previously copyright relied only on date of creation and now it is defined by the death of the author. Which is a remarkably stupid determining factor.
Disney did it... why not let others do it too? Either everyone gets extensions or no one does... it's only fair...
Everyone did get the same extensions... in the United States. The Sonny Bono/Mickey Mouse act curiously doesn't apply in the UK.
But rather than fixing an existing difference, it seems that the UK is looking to create a difference. They want to extend copyright on music (only pop music?) and not elsewhere, if I understood the article correctly.
Of course, maybe this isn't creating a copyright difference -- maybe such differences already exist in the UK. Also, by extending copyright, they will be more closely matching the US copyright terms -- which is hardly something I support.
Having worked for a university tech department that did this, I would have to say, I can't think of a better way to open peoples eyes to the threat of virii than to revoke their internet privilages.
And when they learn that lesson, they still have lost their "privilages", right? So what is the advantage of learning the lesson?
Anyway, I think this is a brilliant plan, but it doesn't go far enough. Too many people are being compromised by malicious websites and insecure browsers. I think we ought to block port 80, too.
I thought pirates existed well before electricity and generally used cannons, muskets and sabres.
If I ever got sued for "piracy" and "stealing IP", I would probably base part of my defense on fighting the language abuse that blows everything out of proportions and presumes factual things that are fundamentally hypothetical.
You're right that copyright infringement isn't stealing and calling it that only yields confusion.
But, calling infringement a form of piracy is not a misuse of language. At least, it is not a recent misuse. I understand that the relevant meaning of pirate ("one who takes another's work without permission") dates back to 1701. See this site.
I only mention this because I was fairly shocked when I learned that this usage of piracy had such a long pedigree. So, I still complain when folks call infringement "stealing", but apparently it is correct to call it "piracy" and has been correct for a long damn time.
(Of course, no one is sued for "piracy" or "stealing IP", so your hypothetical legal defense was a long shot. Lawyers use the correct words when filing suits.)
But yes, it's still stealing. Even if it doesn't apply to you, the fact that this commercial product (yes, Star Wars is a commercial product), because they are only offering it as a *PAY* product, it is only a pay product, and it is not up to the general public to make the decisions for them.
Bullshit. This is not stealing. It is copyright infringement. It is a bad thing. But it is not stealing.
Nothing good comes from using such loose analogies. Stealing is one thing and infringing on copyright is another. Neither is a good thing, but they are distinct bad things, not particularly similar in any morally relevant ways.
In fact, illegal parking in a handicap spot is arguably more similar to stealing than illegal downloading is.
would someone explain how the fuck they can essentially condone this via analog forms, but not via digital forms? the law makes no distinction...
I have to agree that this seems a bit contradictory, but they don't say "ask friends to make a copy of their copied show." I assume they mean "ask to borrow a copy." I don't know, but it may be considered fair use to make a single copy and loan it out --- or maybe not.
If over the air broadcasts come in to my home, without my asking, for free... I'm a criminal for redistributing that show even if it's still free?!
I don't know if you're a criminal, but you're certainly infringing the copyright. Cost doesn't really have much to do with whether it's an infringement or not.
What am I supposed to do with the junk mail that is piled into my mail box? Am I a criminal for giving it to the trash man?!
You have the right to give away your copy of a text, I reckon. You can buy a book and give it as a gift. You can't make copies of the book and distribute those.
In other words, I don't think your reductio works.
A black screen does hide the flaws of MS software, but so what? The people that would buy these systems (stores, public transit, government offices, etc.) are not in the business of publicizing software flaws. They want the computer to display relevant information and if it crashes, then a black screen is more attractive than a BSOD.
Apparently it is OK to record TV as long as your aren't sharing it.
Duh.
It is a basic fair use right to record T.V. programs. Distributing them is copyright infringement.
Note: as an expat, I regularly use a torrent site to watch American television. But I don't kid myself. What I'm doing is an infringement of copyright and, while there's a lot going wrong in copyright law, this ought to be an infringement.
I did lose a lot of CDs and LPs in a hurricane several years back. I don't have a record of what I lost.
But you said you were worried about the fact that your legally-made backups would be considered pirated copies. If you have the backups, then you do indeed have a record of what you lost. If you don't have the backups, then you certainly couldn't be considered a pirate.
All you have to do is report the loss some time after the hurricane and before the MPAA claims that you are a pirate. I don't see the problem.
(Would it be suspicious to report it months or years after the event? Perhaps, but it would still give plenty of reasonable doubt as long as you don't report new losses every month or two.)
Do you run the risk of jail? I doubt it, but why get legal advice from know-nothing slashdot posters like me?
"Sure, but how am I to prove my fair use in the face of an accusation that could put me in jail?"
I'm not sure that one could go to jail for having a reasonably sized mp3 collection and no evidence that he's been trading it. I'm also a bit dubious that in your example (CDs stolen or lost in fire, backup copies kept), the jury would be persuaded beyond a reasonable doubt that you had stolen all those goods.
But if you wanted to be safe, you would of course file a report with the police and/or insurance company listing the lost CDs. This wouldn't be a problem, since you have the backups and so know what you lost.
It's not really that hard a hypothetical to answer, you know.
Unless you dream of being free you will never escape, even were they to leave the cage unlocked. The world is constantly changing, faster now than ever before. If you live an average lifespan you will see major changes, some good, some bad. We have the opportunity to influence what shape the future will take.
Yeah, I think I read that in a fortune cookie once. Thanks.
But it won't be the reality tomorrow, Müller. So get back in your horse and buggy and go tell Bill that the slaves are revolting, that the chains of legal chicanery are being broken, and a new Age of Reason is dawning.
You think? If I had to wager, I think I'd still place my money on ignorance and exploitation instead of the dawning of a new Age of Reason.
(It's a shame that I know where I live in this food chain: one of the ignorant and exploited instead of vaunted member of the BSA.)
Corporations had limited liability and limited rights later the Supreme Court read the 14th amendment as giving human rights to property, thus giving human rights to limited liability legal structures.
What ruling was this? When did the Court decide the 14th amendment applied to non-humans?
Slashdot Mirror
Are we the only country with a leader who went swimming and never came back?
Does Germany's Ludwig II count?
question for the supreme court: do you really believe the the copyright of the bay city rollers first album is more deserving of legal protection than a human life?
Since when is it the Supreme Court's job to decide what deserves legal protection?
Wrong frigging branch. Try somewhere else.
Research papers that are released, even by MS, usually aren't intended to get the attention of the broader market. They're intended to put forth ideas and let a few select people know what's going on inside the heads of MS engineers.
I think you're right. If the original paper is just a research paper, then there's no particular point in claiming that it's another vaporware campaign.
On the other hand, Cohen also offered explicit reasons why it was a misleading research paper. In particular, the analysis of BitTorrent was simply wrong, both in explaining the design (tit-for-tat, says MS, like hell, says the author) and in guessing the typical environment (4 to 6 connections, guesses MS, more like dozens, says Cohen).
So, even if we ignore the apparently spurious claims of vaporware, Cohen's article has real criticisms of the paper.
Excuse me? You'd have to learn Monad (and get-process and what it passes) for the same task, and awk is basically the Unix competitor to its scripting capabilities.
Fair enough, but I was already skipping the requirement of learning awk from my estimates.
Let's take it for granted that our hypothetical shell-user knows the basics of both awk and Monad. In this case, I *think* that constructing the Monad command would be easier for me than constructing the command using awk (which involves knowing the flags for ps and which field is the correct output field).
I don't think that it is a critical difference, but counting keystrokes is a little misleading. I'm also not suggesting that Monad is better simply because it uses long but easily remembered fields like virtualwhosits or whatever that easily remembered field was called. Just that the difference between the two shouldn't be measured by keystrokes on the line.
His college transcript is better than the president's. Let that be a lesson to us: your permanent record really does follow you around.
If you absolutely -must- sort out those that have less than n mem usage, try
$ ps vOr | awk '{if ($8 > 15000) print $_ }'
Be fair, now. If your skill with bash is anything like mine (it's not -- I don't know awk), you have to add in keypresses needed to write that. For me, that includes "man ps" (you used flags I've never used). Let's skip the "awk" command, since it would take too many keystrokes for me to learn awk so that I'd write that. Assuming I knew awk, I'd still have to execute the ps command to figure which field is relevant.
The code snippet he wrote was lengthier (much too long for geek kudos) but I bet I have a better chance to write it correctly on the first try.
(As a matter of personal taste, I wager that Bash is more to my liking than MSH. But we should count the keystrokes needed to learn how to write the commandline, too.)
[S]top talking about how Microsoft is so evil because they are suppressing free speech (which they are not, that's China) and start talking about how the Chinese government is denying peoples rights, and how people and governments can influence China to change.
Er, isn't Microsoft some of those people that can influence China to change?
I'm not convinced that MS is wrong here, but your argument is lacking. It is essentially: dealing with the devil is acceptable if you get a good deal. (Pardon the hyperbole. I don't regard China as evil.)
But you also say that people ought to persuade China to change. How can you reconcile these two claims? Microsoft shouldn't care about China's policies but people should?
Fortunately or unfortunately, that is indeed a reasonable interpretation of the Constitution, too.
You and I differ on reasonableness.
Repeated retroactive extensions that potentially prevent a work from ever becoming part of the public domain don't satisfy my interpretation of "limited time".
Indeed, I tend to oppose retroactive extensions altogether, but I can't defend that opinion like Lessig can, so I won't try.
Well, it wasn't the Sonny Bono act that made it this way. Copyright had been relative to author-death since at least the prior copyright extension act, which was in the 1970s. And it might've been earlier still.
Thanks much for the correction.
Everyone did get the same extensions ... in the United States.
Nope. It was unfair to some copyright-holders. If the copyright on a work had already expired, it wasn't extended.
That's a different partition of interested parties. The OP was talking music vs. other forms of copyrightable material.
But you're right that previously copyright relied only on date of creation and now it is defined by the death of the author. Which is a remarkably stupid determining factor.
Disney did it... why not let others do it too? Either everyone gets extensions or no one does... it's only fair...
... in the United States. The Sonny Bono/Mickey Mouse act curiously doesn't apply in the UK.
Everyone did get the same extensions
But rather than fixing an existing difference, it seems that the UK is looking to create a difference. They want to extend copyright on music (only pop music?) and not elsewhere, if I understood the article correctly.
Of course, maybe this isn't creating a copyright difference -- maybe such differences already exist in the UK. Also, by extending copyright, they will be more closely matching the US copyright terms -- which is hardly something I support.
Having worked for a university tech department that did this, I would have to say, I can't think of a better way to open peoples eyes to the threat of virii than to revoke their internet privilages.
And when they learn that lesson, they still have lost their "privilages", right? So what is the advantage of learning the lesson?
Anyway, I think this is a brilliant plan, but it doesn't go far enough. Too many people are being compromised by malicious websites and insecure browsers. I think we ought to block port 80, too.
I thought pirates existed well before electricity and generally used cannons, muskets and sabres.
If I ever got sued for "piracy" and "stealing IP", I would probably base part of my defense on fighting the language abuse that blows everything out of proportions and presumes factual things that are fundamentally hypothetical.
You're right that copyright infringement isn't stealing and calling it that only yields confusion.
But, calling infringement a form of piracy is not a misuse of language. At least, it is not a recent misuse. I understand that the relevant meaning of pirate ("one who takes another's work without permission") dates back to 1701. See this site.
I only mention this because I was fairly shocked when I learned that this usage of piracy had such a long pedigree. So, I still complain when folks call infringement "stealing", but apparently it is correct to call it "piracy" and has been correct for a long damn time.
(Of course, no one is sued for "piracy" or "stealing IP", so your hypothetical legal defense was a long shot. Lawyers use the correct words when filing suits.)
But yes, it's still stealing. Even if it doesn't apply to you, the fact that this commercial product (yes, Star Wars is a commercial product), because they are only offering it as a *PAY* product, it is only a pay product, and it is not up to the general public to make the decisions for them.
Bullshit. This is not stealing. It is copyright infringement. It is a bad thing. But it is not stealing.
Nothing good comes from using such loose analogies. Stealing is one thing and infringing on copyright is another. Neither is a good thing, but they are distinct bad things, not particularly similar in any morally relevant ways.
In fact, illegal parking in a handicap spot is arguably more similar to stealing than illegal downloading is.
would someone explain how the fuck they can essentially condone this via analog forms, but not via digital forms? the law makes no distinction...
I have to agree that this seems a bit contradictory, but they don't say "ask friends to make a copy of their copied show." I assume they mean "ask to borrow a copy." I don't know, but it may be considered fair use to make a single copy and loan it out --- or maybe not.
If over the air broadcasts come in to my home, without my asking, for free... I'm a criminal for redistributing that show even if it's still free?!
I don't know if you're a criminal, but you're certainly infringing the copyright. Cost doesn't really have much to do with whether it's an infringement or not.
What am I supposed to do with the junk mail that is piled into my mail box? Am I a criminal for giving it to the trash man?!
You have the right to give away your copy of a text, I reckon. You can buy a book and give it as a gift. You can't make copies of the book and distribute those.
In other words, I don't think your reductio works.
A black screen does hide the flaws of MS software, but so what? The people that would buy these systems (stores, public transit, government offices, etc.) are not in the business of publicizing software flaws. They want the computer to display relevant information and if it crashes, then a black screen is more attractive than a BSOD.
Apparently it is OK to record TV as long as your aren't sharing it.
Duh.
It is a basic fair use right to record T.V. programs. Distributing them is copyright infringement.
Note: as an expat, I regularly use a torrent site to watch American television. But I don't kid myself. What I'm doing is an infringement of copyright and, while there's a lot going wrong in copyright law, this ought to be an infringement.
That's a better reply than I could write.
I did lose a lot of CDs and LPs in a hurricane several years back. I don't have a record of what I lost.
But you said you were worried about the fact that your legally-made backups would be considered pirated copies. If you have the backups, then you do indeed have a record of what you lost. If you don't have the backups, then you certainly couldn't be considered a pirate.
All you have to do is report the loss some time after the hurricane and before the MPAA claims that you are a pirate. I don't see the problem.
(Would it be suspicious to report it months or years after the event? Perhaps, but it would still give plenty of reasonable doubt as long as you don't report new losses every month or two.)
Do you run the risk of jail? I doubt it, but why get legal advice from know-nothing slashdot posters like me?
"Sure, but how am I to prove my fair use in the face of an accusation that could put me in jail?"
I'm not sure that one could go to jail for having a reasonably sized mp3 collection and no evidence that he's been trading it. I'm also a bit dubious that in your example (CDs stolen or lost in fire, backup copies kept), the jury would be persuaded beyond a reasonable doubt that you had stolen all those goods.
But if you wanted to be safe, you would of course file a report with the police and/or insurance company listing the lost CDs. This wouldn't be a problem, since you have the backups and so know what you lost.
It's not really that hard a hypothetical to answer, you know.
Unless you dream of being free you will never escape, even were they to leave the cage unlocked. The world is constantly changing, faster now than ever before. If you live an average lifespan you will see major changes, some good, some bad. We have the opportunity to influence what shape the future will take.
Yeah, I think I read that in a fortune cookie once. Thanks.
But it won't be the reality tomorrow, Müller. So get back in your horse and buggy and go tell Bill that the slaves are revolting, that the chains of legal chicanery are being broken, and a new Age of Reason is dawning.
You think? If I had to wager, I think I'd still place my money on ignorance and exploitation instead of the dawning of a new Age of Reason.
(It's a shame that I know where I live in this food chain: one of the ignorant and exploited instead of vaunted member of the BSA.)
Thanks.
Corporations had limited liability and limited rights later the Supreme Court read the 14th amendment as giving human rights to property, thus giving human rights to limited liability legal structures.
What ruling was this? When did the Court decide the 14th amendment applied to non-humans?