Wow... I think it has been a little more extreme in Canada.
I have to take time off work to be able to visit a bank and see a real person.
I tried to make a joke once that my bank was open 24 hours... a week. When I realized they were only open 16.
Old teller queues have been ripped out and replaced with cubicle office space for loan officers. It's not uncommon now to see one teller in a bank working half-days and a "business wicket" the other half day.
Banks in Canada lend money out on leverage. The government only requires a very small percentage of actual money in the bank at any given time. The bank literally has the power to generate money from nothing, charge interest for it, and pay it back to the void when done.
Worse, ATMs in popular locations in Canada have been replaced with "White label ATMs"... you know how they said "banks don't charge their own customers to use a machine?" well... the banks realized that they could charge their own customers if they opened a daughter corporation to create ATM machines under a different brand and name, then charge "convenience fees" depending on the location of the ATM.
With all the service charges, I pay:
$1 for each withdrawal past 2 per month
$1.50 for interbranch banking (half goes to my bank, half to the other bank)
$1-$3.50 "convenience" fee.
That can be as high as $3.50 to $5.50 per transaction! I've been stuffing a lot more cash in my drawers at home these days (fewer transactions) and trying to buy everything I can on a credit card. For some dumb reason, credit cards are still "free" for personal use, although the banks were recently thwarted by the government for trying to charge per use... and the banks bleed the retailers dry when you use credit cards.
But the Canadian banking industry is very different than the U.S. As I understand it, the U.S. has a fairly deregulated banking industry. I'm certian that the Canadian banks collude on service charges to deter their customers from leaving.
There may simply be an evolutionary force in action. Those who see there are plenty of people managing any given project will see little result for their efforts spent trying to understand the nuiances of the project.
After the anti-hate groups start their lawsuits, people will scream that "Hey, people are using off-shore proxies to access child porn, block those!", then of course inevitably, there will be lawsuits, lots of lawsuits.
I suppose that you could get posession defenses coming up like "but B.T. didn't block it, I thought it was legal!"
All of this ignores the non-www methods to trade this stuff... which will probably take the public a little longer to figure out.
It would be nice if we lived in a world where people could say "hey, this is obviously illegal, immoral and easy to control... let's take initiative", but in taking initiative means they're taking responsability. B.T. is no longer acting as a network provider, they're a content provider.
It's also inevitable that somebody is going to try to stop them.
But it is foolish for those people who're trying to stop them to think that they can actually succeed.
You can greatly reduce the likelyhood of somebody authoring viruses with strong detection and deterrants, but that generally has side effects which are worse than the problem.
Viruses are a technical problem, I think they can be solved, they might take a new philosophy in software design, but wrapping up software development and research in laws is a bad idea.
Oh no, don't for a second think that I somehow believe that photography isn't hard "work", nor that it does not require artistic talent to produce that work. Also don't for a second think I'm commenting on photography.
My point is that there's a difference between freelance work and work for hire. From what you describe, wedding photographers seem to be taking the best of both worlds and for no good reason.
In a freelance work, you take the photos, write the article, or write the software yourself and you hold the copyrights. You then try to sell a copy of the results to a buyer. They don't buy the copyright, they never buy the copyright. If they don't like the work, they don't pay for it, and you sell it elsewhere. No big deal.
In a work for hire, your patron tells you to use your artistic abilities to solve their problem. You're paid for your time, and the copyright of your results are entirely held by the patron.
Now you're saying that a wedding photographer falls into some strange third category. The patron has absolutely no rights. They pay both for the result (which they're contractually obligated to purchase), they're paying the hourly salary, and when it is all done, they get a copy of the work, but no rights to the work what-so-ever.
This wedding-photographer takes all plan is legal and ethical if it is written out in cold contracts beforehand, but without the contracts, it is not the way copyright works in Canada, and I doubt it is the way copyright works in the States. I suppose that patrons agree to the terms in exchange for what you feel is a fair price... but as I was saying earlier, it's unnecessary.
It's unnecssary because even if the patron holds the copyrights, you still would hold the "Moral rights" to the work. You might want a stipulation to have restricted use of the your negatives so that you can use them in your portfolio, or study them artistically, but you shouldn't need them for anything more than that. It's not your wedding! The moral rights, among other things, protect you from having Walmart prints represented as yours.
Just to flip things around, pretend you're an evil wedding photographer... just pretend. Now your client says "hey, can you brighten up these photos a bit?" and you, the evil wedding photographer say "Ah, but you see, Mercury was in retrograde, it was a dark time, and the photos must reflect that". Now the upset couple goes off with the photos and has them professionally retouched so that they don't reflect the arbitrary artistic whim of the evil photographer. So... what do you, the evil photographer do?
Sue them for copyright infringement, damages and demand that the illegal copies be destroyed.
Now you're saying that you need these rights to protect yourself from what is already protected by something in Canada called "moral rights"
You seem to be a U.S. entrepreneur, is there really no such thing as "moral rights" in the U.S.?
I would actually attribute this correlation to a few very simple factors:
The graphics and arts communities are targeted by Apple, and they're quite disproportionately literate.
Macintoshes aren't the best machines for non-academic pursuits
Macintoshes are not the "default" choice for a computer, you have to make a decision to buy one, you have to seek it out, research it and finally yes, you have to pay more.
You know it could be that Macintosh advertisers are targeting people who are susceptable to being fooled into associating themselves with the "Think different" branding.
Yeah, you have to look at the whole North American picture... the Canada/U.S. border doesn't change very much. There's some heavy fluctuation on account of dollar shifts, and expenses aren't very high...
There might be a 40% difference, but you have to compare city for city, not country for country. The countries are far too large, and Canada doesn't have as many uber-expensive areas as the U.S... infact, I can only think of Vancouver, and even that isn't spectacularly expensive.
You want to use the same libraries for this project. You can't though. You don't have the right to do so. You're no longer the owner. You can recreate it but you're still probably violating the copyrights you signed away.
This is a real sore spot in software development. You can't know where to draw the line between "trivial" functions and copyrighted functions protected further by non-competition clauses.
A previous employer could drag you into court for anything, and it would have just enough bite to make it a pain in the ass to defend... then finally, you have to convince a Judge that the algorithm to draw a circle is not protected under the copyright of the previous employer...
At which point, your current employer would have certainly fired you regardless of the outcome... infact, the trial outcome would probably outlast the software project.
GPL software is nice to link to (with your employer's permission) since it screws the employer's powers and, depending upon your employer's decision regarding distribution, it may allow you to use the sofware outside the company.
I have to agree with the argument that the wedding photographer copyright thing is scummy. It's your event, you've paid a photographer to attend and work for a couple days, you've given him exclusive rights to photograph your wedding, and now he's claimed that you're paying not for his work, but for his results... of course if the results are unacceptable, the argument would be that you've paid for his work... but if an issue of copyright comes up, like if you pay somebody else to alter and correct the bad photos, then you've paid for the results, not the work... so they retain the exclusive copyright... and all the artistic rights.
If I ever have a wedding, I'd probably avoid this at all costs... I'd rather not have a bitter feeling of being ripped off and manipulated every time I looked at my wedding photos.
Of course I imagine most photographers are real people and are willing to talk about this stuff... but I'm rather shocked to hear that the copyright isn't transferred.
The rights to not have your work butchered and presented as your own or misrepresented as someone else's are protected even if you assign the copyright... at least that's the case in Canada.
Hmph... ditto for my girlfriend, I thought she just had bad luck, but they screwed up delivery, screwed up the bill, screwed up billing, then screwed up cancelling the billing and finally, screwed up cancelling the collection agency which they screwed up by calling to collect for the screwed up bill.
There were about 5 lengthy phonecalls involved, 2 letters of apology and probably about 3 hours of time.
She then tried to use the privacy act to have them destroy all her personal information as she never wants to conduct business with them again. I'm sure they screwed that up too... but they've shut up for a while.
I think their 10 hours included a much smaller commute and did not include breaks (since there weren't really any to speak of)
Tack in 45 minutes of lunch which you can't control, and and two hours of commuting, and you're up to 10:45 minutes, except you also have to handle the maintinence of your car, home, work clothes and lunch (if you bag it) on your own time and money.
10:45, now add in 8 hours sleep, an hour for making and eating breakfast and an hour for making and eating dinner... you're down to 20:45 minutes. We have 3:15 waking minutes per day ( 4:00 if you rush breakfast or dinner, but don't forget the dishes... or the mean time to get groceries) to use at our leisure... we might use it in a traffic jam, to get caught up on our sleep, maybe do some excercise so that our bodies don't deteriorate at our desk jobs.
I get the sense that North America is wasting a lot of time in the office though, doing dumb stuff like posting to Slashdot, since their jobs don't actualy require a 40 hour work week.
Men have a tendency to be sleepy after sex, whereas women don't have that tendency. It's a weird world. So women want to cuddle or get a back rub or something, when the guy just wants to sleep.
Jabs? M$ is a profitable corporation who successfully exploited the Internet with their Internet Exploiter/Exploder product... entirely to the detriment of a competitive marketplace.
They're accurate word-play based on their wealth, business record, software security and software stability.
I have used them, and in some situations they can, feel more comfortable I guess, but over all I've always really really noticed the loss of power over a good hardtail. And you really HAVE to pay the big bucks for a full suspension, or you're riding a 30+ pound bike.
I have never done any real riding with a soft-tail, not that I consider myself a good mountain biker, but you know when you get on a super-steep, loose rocky slope? the kind where you're in first gear and you're leaning so far forward, but you still feel like you're going to flip over backwards? The kind where you couldn't possibly start riding if you stopped? Well, it's really tough to pedal the crank without jerking the bike, but if you can reduce the amount you jerk the bike, you reduce the chances of slipping and falling. I'd love to try a soft-tail for something like that.
Yeah, Squeak is very simple because it based on very simple and consistant principles... it's also very different from anything out there.
A couple things right off the bat which are weird are the concepts of a persist environment and the deep OO nature of it all.
I'm surprised it got refered to as a "toy", I always thought it was just a somewhat unpopular experiment. It would make a cool basis for a desktop environment... kind of like Microsoft's Active Desktop... only more insane.
Yeah, you're right, I meant the common ones with the tigs welded onto the frame. The side-pull you still see on some road bikes, but they were silly on mountain bikes.
Disk brakes are good for muddy mountain biking and other icky things where your side-pull brakes squeal, whine and generally don't work as well as they should.
Rear suspension is another one of those weird items... it adds weight, and the geometry is such that the tension on your chain ever so slightly compresses your suspension... but if you're doing downhill mountain bike racing through a stony creek bed, that won't hurt you and you _might_ find it advantageous. Climbing hills, you may even find the suspension smooths out the dirt so you don't bounce on it and slip during a climb
With bicycles, somewhere around the $500CDN full retail pricetag, you don't get much more bang for your buck. All the garbage components are generally stripped off the bike at that point and you've got the "low-end" good stuff... provided you don't have any gimick components... like rear-suspension, disk brakes, etc.
Years ago, I think it was Radiohead, they commented on this in regard to censorship in U.S. media. Do you recall that video with the corporate type in the gimp outfit who cuts off his legs, drowns and runs into a mermaid?
Well, it ran into a censorship kafuffle. Not because of the axe, not because of the blood, but because the mermaid had nipples.
S&M, kinky sex acts, dismemberment and death are o.k. for children, but nipples! I think the band commented something to the effect of "American children are going to grow up thinking that women don't have nipples!"
Slashdot Mirror
Wow... I think it has been a little more extreme in Canada.
I have to take time off work to be able to visit a bank and see a real person.
I tried to make a joke once that my bank was open 24 hours... a week. When I realized they were only open 16.
Old teller queues have been ripped out and replaced with cubicle office space for loan officers. It's not uncommon now to see one teller in a bank working half-days and a "business wicket" the other half day.
Banks in Canada lend money out on leverage. The government only requires a very small percentage of actual money in the bank at any given time. The bank literally has the power to generate money from nothing, charge interest for it, and pay it back to the void when done.
Worse, ATMs in popular locations in Canada have been replaced with "White label ATMs"... you know how they said "banks don't charge their own customers to use a machine?" well... the banks realized that they could charge their own customers if they opened a daughter corporation to create ATM machines under a different brand and name, then charge "convenience fees" depending on the location of the ATM.
With all the service charges, I pay:
That can be as high as $3.50 to $5.50 per transaction! I've been stuffing a lot more cash in my drawers at home these days (fewer transactions) and trying to buy everything I can on a credit card. For some dumb reason, credit cards are still "free" for personal use, although the banks were recently thwarted by the government for trying to charge per use... and the banks bleed the retailers dry when you use credit cards.
But the Canadian banking industry is very different than the U.S. As I understand it, the U.S. has a fairly deregulated banking industry. I'm certian that the Canadian banks collude on service charges to deter their customers from leaving.
Or... commercial software paid the royalties to create GIFs, just as they pay royalties to use other technologies.
There really isn't a lot of software out there which needs to create gifs.
Usually when Apple doesn't do something, it's because they know it is a bad idea.
My name starts with an upper-case shwa.
There may simply be an evolutionary force in action. Those who see there are plenty of people managing any given project will see little result for their efforts spent trying to understand the nuiances of the project.
Where will the thousands of home routers tunnel to?
This whole thing is a really bad precedent.
After the anti-hate groups start their lawsuits, people will scream that "Hey, people are using off-shore proxies to access child porn, block those!", then of course inevitably, there will be lawsuits, lots of lawsuits.
I suppose that you could get posession defenses coming up like "but B.T. didn't block it, I thought it was legal!"
All of this ignores the non-www methods to trade this stuff... which will probably take the public a little longer to figure out.
It would be nice if we lived in a world where people could say "hey, this is obviously illegal, immoral and easy to control... let's take initiative", but in taking initiative means they're taking responsability. B.T. is no longer acting as a network provider, they're a content provider.
It makes me wonder why Microsoft is more afraid of the name "Lindows" than of giving a small upstart competitor $20,000,000
It's not o.k., it's inevitable.
It's also inevitable that somebody is going to try to stop them.
But it is foolish for those people who're trying to stop them to think that they can actually succeed.
You can greatly reduce the likelyhood of somebody authoring viruses with strong detection and deterrants, but that generally has side effects which are worse than the problem.
Viruses are a technical problem, I think they can be solved, they might take a new philosophy in software design, but wrapping up software development and research in laws is a bad idea.
Oh no, don't for a second think that I somehow believe that photography isn't hard "work", nor that it does not require artistic talent to produce that work. Also don't for a second think I'm commenting on photography.
My point is that there's a difference between freelance work and work for hire. From what you describe, wedding photographers seem to be taking the best of both worlds and for no good reason.
In a freelance work, you take the photos, write the article, or write the software yourself and you hold the copyrights. You then try to sell a copy of the results to a buyer. They don't buy the copyright, they never buy the copyright. If they don't like the work, they don't pay for it, and you sell it elsewhere. No big deal.
In a work for hire, your patron tells you to use your artistic abilities to solve their problem. You're paid for your time, and the copyright of your results are entirely held by the patron.
Now you're saying that a wedding photographer falls into some strange third category. The patron has absolutely no rights. They pay both for the result (which they're contractually obligated to purchase), they're paying the hourly salary, and when it is all done, they get a copy of the work, but no rights to the work what-so-ever.
This wedding-photographer takes all plan is legal and ethical if it is written out in cold contracts beforehand, but without the contracts, it is not the way copyright works in Canada, and I doubt it is the way copyright works in the States. I suppose that patrons agree to the terms in exchange for what you feel is a fair price... but as I was saying earlier, it's unnecessary.
It's unnecssary because even if the patron holds the copyrights, you still would hold the "Moral rights" to the work. You might want a stipulation to have restricted use of the your negatives so that you can use them in your portfolio, or study them artistically, but you shouldn't need them for anything more than that. It's not your wedding! The moral rights, among other things, protect you from having Walmart prints represented as yours.
Just to flip things around, pretend you're an evil wedding photographer... just pretend. Now your client says "hey, can you brighten up these photos a bit?" and you, the evil wedding photographer say "Ah, but you see, Mercury was in retrograde, it was a dark time, and the photos must reflect that". Now the upset couple goes off with the photos and has them professionally retouched so that they don't reflect the arbitrary artistic whim of the evil photographer. So... what do you, the evil photographer do?
Sue them for copyright infringement, damages and demand that the illegal copies be destroyed.
Now you're saying that you need these rights to protect yourself from what is already protected by something in Canada called "moral rights"
You seem to be a U.S. entrepreneur, is there really no such thing as "moral rights" in the U.S.?
Wow... that's so elitist.
I would actually attribute this correlation to a few very simple factors:
You know it could be that Macintosh advertisers are targeting people who are susceptable to being fooled into associating themselves with the "Think different" branding.
Mainstream sports on Slashdot? You guys have been spending too much time with the Sales and Marketing department.
Yeah, you have to look at the whole North American picture... the Canada/U.S. border doesn't change very much. There's some heavy fluctuation on account of dollar shifts, and expenses aren't very high...
There might be a 40% difference, but you have to compare city for city, not country for country. The countries are far too large, and Canada doesn't have as many uber-expensive areas as the U.S... infact, I can only think of Vancouver, and even that isn't spectacularly expensive.
You want to use the same libraries for this project. You can't though. You don't have the right to do so. You're no longer the owner. You can recreate it but you're still probably violating the copyrights you signed away.
This is a real sore spot in software development. You can't know where to draw the line between "trivial" functions and copyrighted functions protected further by non-competition clauses.
A previous employer could drag you into court for anything, and it would have just enough bite to make it a pain in the ass to defend... then finally, you have to convince a Judge that the algorithm to draw a circle is not protected under the copyright of the previous employer...
At which point, your current employer would have certainly fired you regardless of the outcome... infact, the trial outcome would probably outlast the software project.
GPL software is nice to link to (with your employer's permission) since it screws the employer's powers and, depending upon your employer's decision regarding distribution, it may allow you to use the sofware outside the company.
I have to agree with the argument that the wedding photographer copyright thing is scummy. It's your event, you've paid a photographer to attend and work for a couple days, you've given him exclusive rights to photograph your wedding, and now he's claimed that you're paying not for his work, but for his results... of course if the results are unacceptable, the argument would be that you've paid for his work... but if an issue of copyright comes up, like if you pay somebody else to alter and correct the bad photos, then you've paid for the results, not the work... so they retain the exclusive copyright... and all the artistic rights.
If I ever have a wedding, I'd probably avoid this at all costs... I'd rather not have a bitter feeling of being ripped off and manipulated every time I looked at my wedding photos.
Of course I imagine most photographers are real people and are willing to talk about this stuff... but I'm rather shocked to hear that the copyright isn't transferred.
The rights to not have your work butchered and presented as your own or misrepresented as someone else's are protected even if you assign the copyright... at least that's the case in Canada.
http://laws.justice.gc.ca/en/C-42/38965.html#rid-3 9073
I'm not sure about the U.S... A quick Google turns up stuff which makes me wonder if the U.S. is screwed up in this regard:
http://www.rbs2.com/moral.htm
If Perl is God, then nobody would be able to understand the bible.
... oh wait.
Hmph... ditto for my girlfriend, I thought she just had bad luck, but they screwed up delivery, screwed up the bill, screwed up billing, then screwed up cancelling the billing and finally, screwed up cancelling the collection agency which they screwed up by calling to collect for the screwed up bill.
There were about 5 lengthy phonecalls involved, 2 letters of apology and probably about 3 hours of time.
She then tried to use the privacy act to have them destroy all her personal information as she never wants to conduct business with them again. I'm sure they screwed that up too... but they've shut up for a while.
10 hours? 6 days a week?
8 hours? 5 days a week?
I think their 10 hours included a much smaller commute and did not include breaks (since there weren't really any to speak of)
Tack in 45 minutes of lunch which you can't control, and and two hours of commuting, and you're up to 10:45 minutes, except you also have to handle the maintinence of your car, home, work clothes and lunch (if you bag it) on your own time and money.
10:45, now add in 8 hours sleep, an hour for making and eating breakfast and an hour for making and eating dinner... you're down to 20:45 minutes. We have 3:15 waking minutes per day ( 4:00 if you rush breakfast or dinner, but don't forget the dishes... or the mean time to get groceries) to use at our leisure... we might use it in a traffic jam, to get caught up on our sleep, maybe do some excercise so that our bodies don't deteriorate at our desk jobs.
I get the sense that North America is wasting a lot of time in the office though, doing dumb stuff like posting to Slashdot, since their jobs don't actualy require a 40 hour work week.
Men have a tendency to be sleepy after sex, whereas women don't have that tendency. It's a weird world. So women want to cuddle or get a back rub or something, when the guy just wants to sleep.
Jabs? M$ is a profitable corporation who successfully exploited the Internet with their Internet Exploiter/Exploder product... entirely to the detriment of a competitive marketplace.
They're accurate word-play based on their wealth, business record, software security and software stability.
Not that I would use such puns.
I have used them, and in some situations they can, feel more comfortable I guess, but over all I've always really really noticed the loss of power over a good hardtail. And you really HAVE to pay the big bucks for a full suspension, or you're riding a 30+ pound bike.
I have never done any real riding with a soft-tail, not that I consider myself a good mountain biker, but you know when you get on a super-steep, loose rocky slope? the kind where you're in first gear and you're leaning so far forward, but you still feel like you're going to flip over backwards? The kind where you couldn't possibly start riding if you stopped? Well, it's really tough to pedal the crank without jerking the bike, but if you can reduce the amount you jerk the bike, you reduce the chances of slipping and falling. I'd love to try a soft-tail for something like that.
Yeah, Squeak is very simple because it based on very simple and consistant principles... it's also very different from anything out there.
A couple things right off the bat which are weird are the concepts of a persist environment and the deep OO nature of it all.
I'm surprised it got refered to as a "toy", I always thought it was just a somewhat unpopular experiment. It would make a cool basis for a desktop environment... kind of like Microsoft's Active Desktop... only more insane.
Yeah, you're right, I meant the common ones with the tigs welded onto the frame. The side-pull you still see on some road bikes, but they were silly on mountain bikes.
Disk brakes are good for muddy mountain biking and other icky things where your side-pull brakes squeal, whine and generally don't work as well as they should.
Rear suspension is another one of those weird items... it adds weight, and the geometry is such that the tension on your chain ever so slightly compresses your suspension... but if you're doing downhill mountain bike racing through a stony creek bed, that won't hurt you and you _might_ find it advantageous. Climbing hills, you may even find the suspension smooths out the dirt so you don't bounce on it and slip during a climb
With bicycles, somewhere around the $500CDN full retail pricetag, you don't get much more bang for your buck. All the garbage components are generally stripped off the bike at that point and you've got the "low-end" good stuff... provided you don't have any gimick components... like rear-suspension, disk brakes, etc.
Years ago, I think it was Radiohead, they commented on this in regard to censorship in U.S. media. Do you recall that video with the corporate type in the gimp outfit who cuts off his legs, drowns and runs into a mermaid?
Well, it ran into a censorship kafuffle. Not because of the axe, not because of the blood, but because the mermaid had nipples.
S&M, kinky sex acts, dismemberment and death are o.k. for children, but nipples! I think the band commented something to the effect of "American children are going to grow up thinking that women don't have nipples!"