Of course you're spot on. For brevity's sake, I connected the notion of "distribution" to a part of IP law (copyright) that explicitly calls it out, without also elaborating that distribution is just one of the exclusive rights listed in 17 USC 106. Whereas, "distribution" is not explicitly listed as an exclusive patent right under 35 USC 154.
Agree completely with your sentiments. And as an IP attorney, IP policy wonk, and a musician, I think Bridgeport was an atrocious decision.
They can't affect the screen grab feature in Linux, but patent law can prevent you (legally) writing a DRM compliant image viewer for Linux.
Patent law can't stop you from legally doing this. It can only stop you from distributing the program you wrote.
Patent attorney here. A patent owner has the right to exclude people from making, using, importing, selling, or offering to sell the invention. Merely reimplementing or running a patented process (or using an infringing device, etc.) can be infringement, without distribution (and subject to very limited experimental use defenses). Unlike in copyright law, distribution isn't the crux at all.
So if there is a patented method of creating or displaying DRM-encumbered JPEGs, and you write a program practicing that method but never share the code or distribute an executable, it may still technically be infringement.
This "feature" of patent law is not very well known to the public, because the type of infringement above is nigh impossible to uncover and is value negative to pursue. Also because most companies do not go around suing millions of end users of competitors' infringing products, rather going after the competitors themselves and getting them on direct and induced infringement.
However, this is mostly for PR and C/B reasons, not because patent law forbids it. If you've heard about the rash of troll suits/shakedown letters against small businesses for, e.g., using a fax machine they purchased, you're hearing about a patent owner leaning on the "use" prong of exclusionary patent rights.
Double jeopardy is about being tried and found innocent by the court, and then being tried again for the same crime. It says nothing about being arrested/charged, then released, then being re-arrested/re-charged, as the outcome of the charge was never decided by a court. A judge may optionally dismiss a case with prejudice, meaning it cannot be brought back before the courts unamended.
Correct, but nitpick: jeopardy attaches when a jury is impaneled, or in a bench trial when the first witness is sworn, not just upon acquittal.
That said, neither of the above have occurred in Sweden, and in any case the US is not trying to prosecute Assange for sexual misconduct. Even if it was, jeopardy only applies to a single sovereign (state acquittal, foreign conviction, etc. don't foreclose later federal charges brought on the same facts), so Sweden could convict Assange on these charges and the US could still bring identical charges (if a US law was somehow broken by an Australian national's sexual activities with a Swede in Sweden).
A prohibition on double jeopardy is also codified in international law (e.g. in ICCPR, Article 14(7)), but AFAIK only applies to readjudication in the same country. So basically, what has happened to Assange does not invoke, and is not analogous to, double jeopardy.
However, GP's underlying point (made by him and others across a number of posts) is that this situation is fishy, and smacks of US intervention. That appears to be at least as plausible as the alternative--that the investigation, dropping of the arrest warrant, explicitly allowing Assange to leave, and the ensuing "return for an interview" extradition debacle these past years has been 100% the good faith efforts of the Swedish judiciary.
There's no way to do a sweeping reform of the system that will fix this
Yes there is! It's called LEGISLATION in a democracy.
I think you misunderstood me. There are lots ways to do sweeping, big picture, fix-it-all-at-once reforms. However, I doubt any of them are politically feasible, but more importantly I doubt they'd actually do much to fix the underlying problem of a militarized, us-versus-them law enforcement mentality. And there are already very clear laws in every jurisdiction delineating the legally acceptable thresholds for use of force (especially lethal force). I do agree that self-policing by the police isn't enough.
Don't get me wrong, I think we're in desperate need of reform at all levels of law enforcement and criminal justice. But this isn't the kind of systemic problem with an easily identifiable and fixable cause.
Banks are fucking up by leveraging too hard? Sweeping reform forcing them all to stay better capitalized is a good answer!
People in a life-threatening line of work increasingly (and sometimes justifiably) view those they police as hostile combatants, amidst a perversely incentivized justice system, while maintaining a subtle yet pervasive culture of racial disparity and insular self-protection? I don't know if there's a broad strokes answer to that.
Community review is definitely not the answer in every situation. But there's an important distinction your post seems (implicitly) not to make: brutality and officer-involved shootings are not precisely the same thing.
For example, I would not put the split second decision to fire a gun at a suspect who is "reaching" in the same class as a video of 7 cops kneeling on a guy and beating him while he says "I can't breathe." The former may well be a poor candidate for citizen review, while I think the latter would be an excellent candidate.
There are a lot of ingredients that have gone into making the toxic brew that is modern American law enforcement. There's no way to do a sweeping reform of the system that will fix this, but some items that might help, individually or in combination:
- Laws or state/federal constitutional amendments that prohibit using criminal statutes for revenue generation (or redirect funds out of the hands of the entities that pass and enforce those statutes)
- Ending the drug war/decriminalizing possession
- Expanded training in de-escalation, legal use of force, and constitutional rights
- Demilitarization of a large proportion of each local and state law enforcement agency, excepting justifiable units (e.g., small, dedicated SWAT teams)
- Expanded protections against, and personal liability for, prosecutorial misconduct (because not all abuses have their genesis at the street level)
- Expanded mandates for body and vehicle cameras (both at the departmental and evidentiary levels); simultaneously, thoughtful limitations to unfettered sunshine law access to every minute of footage
- Community (e.g. citizen board) review of brutality complaints
- Abolishing vague "disorderly conduct"-type statutes that allow for meritless arrest-and-drop-charges-later encounters
- Financial penalty for instances of "resisting arrest," "failure to obey," or "disorderly conduct" for which no conviction/guilty plea is eventually secured
Not all of these would be appropriate for every situation. But some subset might go a long way in a lot of places.
(admittedly, a bit further in the article, it is mentioned that the relation is not neccesarily causal -my bad)
Even if it is causal, IIRC it's currently understood to have the potential to trigger (or be one in a combination of triggers) for a psychotic break in people already susceptible to schizophrenia.
In a bid to short cut the supply lines of those "runners" getting high, the DEA has announced a maximum speed limit for unpowered human locomotion: 2mph. Those caught in pedestrian speed traps going over the 2mph speed limit will be jailed a minimum of 7 months.
Kingpins of cartels like the Running Room and gyms will face stiffer penalties due to their "intent to traffic" and could face up to 8 or more years in federal prison.
If Hillary gets in, I wouldn't be shocked to see this headline in a real newspaper.
I've heard that she's really hitting the addiction theme hard on the campaign trail, but I just can't be arsed to go and look up her detailed platform points on these things. What's her position on actual drug laws, enforcement, decrim/legalization, etc?
Unfortunately, below is some strange debate about libertarianism. So I am highjacking your top-of-the-thread comment to provide a space for people to discuss:
-TFA/TFS
-Semiconductors and ICs
-Carbon nanotubes
-Anything funny or witty about IBM, electronics, Moore's Law, etc.
-Anything at all remotely on-topic
I actually worked with carbon nanotubes back in the day when I was doing polymer and electronics research. I can attest to how squirrelly they are and how hard it is to get them straightened out and aligned. If IBM can figure out how to do this for transistors in bulk, that'll be one hell of an achievement.
There is a difference between an infringing work and a work that may have involved infringement in its making.
For example, posting a song/movie without the copyright holder's permission is not the same thing as posting a video that includes a song/movie clip that is protected by fair use, but instead of buying the song/movie you got it from a filesharing site.
You are not the only one. If he called it quits earlier in the process, maybe. But you have to put a nontrivial amount of energy into developing a final product (that's worth a damn). Thats an awful lot of time to spend, creating something from the ground up, to suddenly develop moral qualms about it a few days after releasing the finished product.
So... after the time coding and testing, getting to a releasable product, he's just now realizing that a program he wrote to block ads indiscriminately... blocks ads indiscriminately? Like he didn't realize his own site was part of $everywhere_ads_are_served? And he's just now getting the "moral" implications of the code that he specifically wrote to do what it does?
Unfortunately giving him credit for being smarter than that means acknowledging the reasons he states may not be entirely truthful.
I want to believe something like this has legs, because higher education has turned into quite the racket, and honestly I've listened to TED talks that were more valuable than entire semesters of undergrad.
But. Pretty much all of life is a learning experience if you approach it with an open mind. Are we going to give credit for "unexpectedly good advice from chance meeting on the train" or "frugality and determination learned from the year I was broke"?
Now, Vodafone Australia has admitted that an employee went through her phone and text records to try and figure out who her sources were within the company. . . . Despite the admission, Vodafone has denied that it engaged in improper behavior (PDF). The company says it found no evidence the employee was directed to do so by management.
Oh. Well, as long as it was some IT vigilante whose love for Vodafone just got the better of him. Sounds fine to me!
Probably just some sweet, over-dedicated mook who took the workplace banner too seriously. Definitely not any of the top brass directing this to happen.
The kicker is that water inside is used as evidence that you had a plug out.
Indeed. My experience with the equally waterproof-but-oh-not-actually Galaxy S6 Active:
Me: I've had it underwater for a few minutes total, to a depth of a foot at most. It flipped its shit, the screen bugs out and it thinks a Galaxy Gear is plugged into it.
Customer Service Rep: OK. Take the SIM tray out. Is the ring white or red?
Me: Red.
CSR: Well that's proof that water has gotten into the phone, so unfortunately there's nothing we can do for you.
Me: The red ring is proof you've sold me a defective product. You advertise it as able to withstand water under the conditions in which I've used it. Your own commercial has this device getting doused in ketchup, dropped hard, and then dunked into a bowl of milk. Water getting in means it didn't function as advertised.
CSR: You must've used it wrong.
Me: Everything was perfectly secured and I used it in a way supported by the manual and your advertising materials. You even have an "Aqua Mode" explicitly for taking pictures underwater.
CSR:...
Me: If you don't make this right, I'm just going to dispute the charge on this defective product.
CSR: Unfortunately there's nothing I can do.
They ended up with their defective phone back and I ended up with my money back. PITA, though.
I think playing it straight in-universe in any of the settings is probably missing the mark, even though that's exactly what the movie will end up doing.
There are tons of excellent fantasy properties out there, including the aforementioned GoTs, that are already story-driven because, well, they're stories. The whole point of D&D is to make your own story and frontal cortex your way out of tight situations--the now-cliched generic fantasy stuff** is just the wall covering that keeps a set of mechanical game rules from becoming Office: The Businessing.
If moviemakers want to use the D&D name and history for more than just a ticket jackoff, they'll need to evoke the whole tabletop gaming ethos. Which means they should go for a 4th-wall-breaking fantasy/comedy style (see Acquisitions Inc.) that, e.g., Never Ending Stories some gamers into the fantasy world. Or in some other ways captures the ficklewhims of the dice roll.
But undifferentiated fantasy, even in a script chock-full of fan service characters and places, is not a recipe for success.
**Of course, D&D (and its forebear LotR) is largely responsible for cliche-ifying this stuff in the first place.
Oh hell yes. It's a pain to wait for the water to cool to body temp, but it's way less painful than putting a brain-swelling hellbug up there. Or even just making the sinus infection worse.
I'm not so sure that's a hard and fast rule, especially for high quality (or lossless!) compression. Much like dashcam video and other forms of video evidence, bodycam footage will have to be erased periodically, if only because its impossible to continuously store the growing volume of every video ever recorded. And AFAIK this is a perfectly legal practice. I'm not aware of a legal precept that would make, e.g., keeping 2 years of uncompressed video fine, but deciding to keep 4 years of compressed video at the tradeoff of a bit of image quality somehow impermissible.
Of course, this would be different if it was $murder_weapon, or even if it was $specifc_footage_of_crime. I think it would be reasonable to have a different policy in place for compressing and retaining general archival footage (98% of which will never be looked at), and for retaining unaltered footage of an incident.
FWIW, IAAL (though I don't practice criminal law).
Great link, but you have the bad guys backwards. It's the mobile industry that wants to keep FM inoperable (as it competes with revenue-generating data plans), and the National Association of Broadcasters (along with FEMA and some state actors) who want the FM tuners turned on--any extra ears listening to FM mean extra ad revenue for NAB members.
Slashdot Mirror
Of course you're spot on. For brevity's sake, I connected the notion of "distribution" to a part of IP law (copyright) that explicitly calls it out, without also elaborating that distribution is just one of the exclusive rights listed in 17 USC 106. Whereas, "distribution" is not explicitly listed as an exclusive patent right under 35 USC 154.
Agree completely with your sentiments. And as an IP attorney, IP policy wonk, and a musician, I think Bridgeport was an atrocious decision.
They can't affect the screen grab feature in Linux, but patent law can prevent you (legally) writing a DRM compliant image viewer for Linux.
Patent law can't stop you from legally doing this. It can only stop you from distributing the program you wrote.
Patent attorney here. A patent owner has the right to exclude people from making, using, importing, selling, or offering to sell the invention. Merely reimplementing or running a patented process (or using an infringing device, etc.) can be infringement, without distribution (and subject to very limited experimental use defenses). Unlike in copyright law, distribution isn't the crux at all.
So if there is a patented method of creating or displaying DRM-encumbered JPEGs, and you write a program practicing that method but never share the code or distribute an executable, it may still technically be infringement.
This "feature" of patent law is not very well known to the public, because the type of infringement above is nigh impossible to uncover and is value negative to pursue. Also because most companies do not go around suing millions of end users of competitors' infringing products, rather going after the competitors themselves and getting them on direct and induced infringement.
However, this is mostly for PR and C/B reasons, not because patent law forbids it. If you've heard about the rash of troll suits/shakedown letters against small businesses for, e.g., using a fax machine they purchased, you're hearing about a patent owner leaning on the "use" prong of exclusionary patent rights.
Double jeopardy is about being tried and found innocent by the court, and then being tried again for the same crime. It says nothing about being arrested/charged, then released, then being re-arrested/re-charged, as the outcome of the charge was never decided by a court. A judge may optionally dismiss a case with prejudice, meaning it cannot be brought back before the courts unamended.
Correct, but nitpick: jeopardy attaches when a jury is impaneled, or in a bench trial when the first witness is sworn, not just upon acquittal.
That said, neither of the above have occurred in Sweden, and in any case the US is not trying to prosecute Assange for sexual misconduct. Even if it was, jeopardy only applies to a single sovereign (state acquittal, foreign conviction, etc. don't foreclose later federal charges brought on the same facts), so Sweden could convict Assange on these charges and the US could still bring identical charges (if a US law was somehow broken by an Australian national's sexual activities with a Swede in Sweden).
A prohibition on double jeopardy is also codified in international law (e.g. in ICCPR, Article 14(7)), but AFAIK only applies to readjudication in the same country. So basically, what has happened to Assange does not invoke, and is not analogous to, double jeopardy.
However, GP's underlying point (made by him and others across a number of posts) is that this situation is fishy, and smacks of US intervention. That appears to be at least as plausible as the alternative--that the investigation, dropping of the arrest warrant, explicitly allowing Assange to leave, and the ensuing "return for an interview" extradition debacle these past years has been 100% the good faith efforts of the Swedish judiciary.
There's no way to do a sweeping reform of the system that will fix this
Yes there is! It's called LEGISLATION in a democracy.
I think you misunderstood me. There are lots ways to do sweeping, big picture, fix-it-all-at-once reforms. However, I doubt any of them are politically feasible, but more importantly I doubt they'd actually do much to fix the underlying problem of a militarized, us-versus-them law enforcement mentality. And there are already very clear laws in every jurisdiction delineating the legally acceptable thresholds for use of force (especially lethal force). I do agree that self-policing by the police isn't enough.
Don't get me wrong, I think we're in desperate need of reform at all levels of law enforcement and criminal justice. But this isn't the kind of systemic problem with an easily identifiable and fixable cause.
Banks are fucking up by leveraging too hard? Sweeping reform forcing them all to stay better capitalized is a good answer!
People in a life-threatening line of work increasingly (and sometimes justifiably) view those they police as hostile combatants, amidst a perversely incentivized justice system, while maintaining a subtle yet pervasive culture of racial disparity and insular self-protection? I don't know if there's a broad strokes answer to that.
Community review is definitely not the answer in every situation. But there's an important distinction your post seems (implicitly) not to make: brutality and officer-involved shootings are not precisely the same thing.
For example, I would not put the split second decision to fire a gun at a suspect who is "reaching" in the same class as a video of 7 cops kneeling on a guy and beating him while he says "I can't breathe." The former may well be a poor candidate for citizen review, while I think the latter would be an excellent candidate.
There are a lot of ingredients that have gone into making the toxic brew that is modern American law enforcement. There's no way to do a sweeping reform of the system that will fix this, but some items that might help, individually or in combination:
- Laws or state/federal constitutional amendments that prohibit using criminal statutes for revenue generation (or redirect funds out of the hands of the entities that pass and enforce those statutes)
- Ending the drug war/decriminalizing possession
- Expanded training in de-escalation, legal use of force, and constitutional rights
- Demilitarization of a large proportion of each local and state law enforcement agency, excepting justifiable units (e.g., small, dedicated SWAT teams)
- Expanded protections against, and personal liability for, prosecutorial misconduct (because not all abuses have their genesis at the street level)
- Expanded mandates for body and vehicle cameras (both at the departmental and evidentiary levels); simultaneously, thoughtful limitations to unfettered sunshine law access to every minute of footage
- Community (e.g. citizen board) review of brutality complaints
- Abolishing vague "disorderly conduct"-type statutes that allow for meritless arrest-and-drop-charges-later encounters
- Financial penalty for instances of "resisting arrest," "failure to obey," or "disorderly conduct" for which no conviction/guilty plea is eventually secured
Not all of these would be appropriate for every situation. But some subset might go a long way in a lot of places.
Egads. When TFS said "pay with your face," I thought Mason Verger...
(admittedly, a bit further in the article, it is mentioned that the relation is not neccesarily causal -my bad)
Even if it is causal, IIRC it's currently understood to have the potential to trigger (or be one in a combination of triggers) for a psychotic break in people already susceptible to schizophrenia.
In a bid to short cut the supply lines of those "runners" getting high, the DEA has announced a maximum speed limit for unpowered human locomotion: 2mph. Those caught in pedestrian speed traps going over the 2mph speed limit will be jailed a minimum of 7 months.
Kingpins of cartels like the Running Room and gyms will face stiffer penalties due to their "intent to traffic" and could face up to 8 or more years in federal prison.
If Hillary gets in, I wouldn't be shocked to see this headline in a real newspaper.
I've heard that she's really hitting the addiction theme hard on the campaign trail, but I just can't be arsed to go and look up her detailed platform points on these things. What's her position on actual drug laws, enforcement, decrim/legalization, etc?
Bravo, AC, pithy and humorous. +1.
Unfortunately, below is some strange debate about libertarianism. So I am highjacking your top-of-the-thread comment to provide a space for people to discuss:
-TFA/TFS
-Semiconductors and ICs
-Carbon nanotubes
-Anything funny or witty about IBM, electronics, Moore's Law, etc.
-Anything at all remotely on-topic
I actually worked with carbon nanotubes back in the day when I was doing polymer and electronics research. I can attest to how squirrelly they are and how hard it is to get them straightened out and aligned. If IBM can figure out how to do this for transistors in bulk, that'll be one hell of an achievement.
There is a difference between an infringing work and a work that may have involved infringement in its making.
For example, posting a song/movie without the copyright holder's permission is not the same thing as posting a video that includes a song/movie clip that is protected by fair use, but instead of buying the song/movie you got it from a filesharing site.
Now I am become AdBlock, the destroyer of ad revenue.
You are not the only one. If he called it quits earlier in the process, maybe. But you have to put a nontrivial amount of energy into developing a final product (that's worth a damn). Thats an awful lot of time to spend, creating something from the ground up, to suddenly develop moral qualms about it a few days after releasing the finished product.
So... after the time coding and testing, getting to a releasable product, he's just now realizing that a program he wrote to block ads indiscriminately... blocks ads indiscriminately? Like he didn't realize his own site was part of $everywhere_ads_are_served? And he's just now getting the "moral" implications of the code that he specifically wrote to do what it does?
Unfortunately giving him credit for being smarter than that means acknowledging the reasons he states may not be entirely truthful.
On the internet no one can tell you're a Millennial
Totally gave me the "chilling movie tagline" vibe.
In #space, no one can read your #hashtags........
I want to believe something like this has legs, because higher education has turned into quite the racket, and honestly I've listened to TED talks that were more valuable than entire semesters of undergrad.
But. Pretty much all of life is a learning experience if you approach it with an open mind. Are we going to give credit for "unexpectedly good advice from chance meeting on the train" or "frugality and determination learned from the year I was broke"?
Now, Vodafone Australia has admitted that an employee went through her phone and text records to try and figure out who her sources were within the company. . . . Despite the admission, Vodafone has denied that it engaged in improper behavior (PDF). The company says it found no evidence the employee was directed to do so by management.
Oh. Well, as long as it was some IT vigilante whose love for Vodafone just got the better of him. Sounds fine to me!
Probably just some sweet, over-dedicated mook who took the workplace banner too seriously. Definitely not any of the top brass directing this to happen.
The kicker is that water inside is used as evidence that you had a plug out.
Indeed. My experience with the equally waterproof-but-oh-not-actually Galaxy S6 Active:
...
Me: I've had it underwater for a few minutes total, to a depth of a foot at most. It flipped its shit, the screen bugs out and it thinks a Galaxy Gear is plugged into it.
Customer Service Rep: OK. Take the SIM tray out. Is the ring white or red?
Me: Red.
CSR: Well that's proof that water has gotten into the phone, so unfortunately there's nothing we can do for you.
Me: The red ring is proof you've sold me a defective product. You advertise it as able to withstand water under the conditions in which I've used it. Your own commercial has this device getting doused in ketchup, dropped hard, and then dunked into a bowl of milk. Water getting in means it didn't function as advertised.
CSR: You must've used it wrong.
Me: Everything was perfectly secured and I used it in a way supported by the manual and your advertising materials. You even have an "Aqua Mode" explicitly for taking pictures underwater.
CSR:
Me: If you don't make this right, I'm just going to dispute the charge on this defective product.
CSR: Unfortunately there's nothing I can do.
They ended up with their defective phone back and I ended up with my money back. PITA, though.
Challenge accepted?
Hey if you can drop it into a black hole and still get the information out later, this should be a breeze!
I think playing it straight in-universe in any of the settings is probably missing the mark, even though that's exactly what the movie will end up doing.
There are tons of excellent fantasy properties out there, including the aforementioned GoTs, that are already story-driven because, well, they're stories. The whole point of D&D is to make your own story and frontal cortex your way out of tight situations--the now-cliched generic fantasy stuff** is just the wall covering that keeps a set of mechanical game rules from becoming Office: The Businessing.
If moviemakers want to use the D&D name and history for more than just a ticket jackoff, they'll need to evoke the whole tabletop gaming ethos. Which means they should go for a 4th-wall-breaking fantasy/comedy style (see Acquisitions Inc.) that, e.g., Never Ending Stories some gamers into the fantasy world. Or in some other ways captures the fickle whims of the dice roll.
But undifferentiated fantasy, even in a script chock-full of fan service characters and places, is not a recipe for success.
**Of course, D&D (and its forebear LotR) is largely responsible for cliche-ifying this stuff in the first place.
So that's the movie that would've been made if I'd invented the Finglonger!
Hey!
... ... ...
Hey buddy!
I see you over there.
I seeeeeeeeeeeee you.
That's kinda my thing. I'm an artificially intelligent surveillance camera.
WRRRRR THIS IS ME MOVING MY SERVOS TO LOOK AT YOU.
So anyway, it looks like you're not going to steal anything. I'm pretty bored.... you wanna play Global Thermonuclear War?
An excellent alternative to messing with tapwater at all.
Oh hell yes. It's a pain to wait for the water to cool to body temp, but it's way less painful than putting a brain-swelling hellbug up there. Or even just making the sinus infection worse.
I'm not so sure that's a hard and fast rule, especially for high quality (or lossless!) compression. Much like dashcam video and other forms of video evidence, bodycam footage will have to be erased periodically, if only because its impossible to continuously store the growing volume of every video ever recorded. And AFAIK this is a perfectly legal practice. I'm not aware of a legal precept that would make, e.g., keeping 2 years of uncompressed video fine, but deciding to keep 4 years of compressed video at the tradeoff of a bit of image quality somehow impermissible.
Of course, this would be different if it was $murder_weapon, or even if it was $specifc_footage_of_crime. I think it would be reasonable to have a different policy in place for compressing and retaining general archival footage (98% of which will never be looked at), and for retaining unaltered footage of an incident.
FWIW, IAAL (though I don't practice criminal law).
Great link, but you have the bad guys backwards. It's the mobile industry that wants to keep FM inoperable (as it competes with revenue-generating data plans), and the National Association of Broadcasters (along with FEMA and some state actors) who want the FM tuners turned on--any extra ears listening to FM mean extra ad revenue for NAB members.