The highway system is responsible for enabling people to traffic illegal substances/goods. Therefore it's violating laws too.
As is the car industry, the car fuel industry, the shoe industry, etc. At some point in the recent past the meme of "ban things which can be used for illegal acivities" has become part of lawyer culture.
without the air, the gun wouldn't fire...gunpowder consumes oxygen to burn.
All the oxygen needed for gunpowder to explode is in there anyway. As is normal with explosives... The only kind of gun which needs air in order to fire is a matchlock musket.
It's the first two words in the subject line that makes censorship on the web difficult. It transcends state and country boundaries.
This simply makes it more difficult for national governments to censor. Though not impossible. This simply means that the greater risk is from entities such as megacorps which also transcend internationa boundries.
That's the way glass is recycled at least here in Finland When you buy a bottle or can of beer you end up pay about 18 eurocents more than the product itself would cost. Then, when the hard night of beer drinking is over, you take all the empty bottles and cans to the shop, feed them into a machine that counts them and prints out a receipt which you can cash on your way out.
Effectivly you are paying a deposit on the container. Also not just glass bottles, the same method can be used for plastic bottles.
Block the keywords 'xxx' and 'mp3' from a port-80 web site.
The sequence xxx turns up in a suprising number of contexts unrelated to pornography. e.g. x is sometimes used as a placeholder in numbers to mean any digit...
There's an interesting thing about filtering software in schools- I know some schools here in the SF Bay Area use some sort of proxy filtering that makes viewing "innapropriate" material impossible.
Problem is that you need to make sure that the software supplier and the school agree on what is "inappropriate". Plenty of material is "inappropriate" not because it is offensive, but because it is time/bandwidth wasting in excess of any possible educational value.Kids looking for games can be more of a problem than their looking for porn... However there can easily be "offensive material", especially relating to history, politics and religion when is actually directly related to the curriculum.
I live in Europe, where the legal climate is slightly different from the US. But corporate legal intimidation is not a purely US phenomenon. The KaZaA case was filed in The Netherlands, the KIllustrator case in Germany, etc..
Remember many of the corporations in question are truely global. Though some of them have different trading or simply well known names in different parts of the world. It's more common in the US because they have more experience of using US laws and quite probabaly at manipulating them there. The domination of the Democrat and Republican parties in the US at all levels of government makes things easier. In many European countries you find not only a more diverse range of political parties, but also differances between national, regional and local government.
That's actually quite false, though it is a common European misconception. Our problem is that we are a country that too quickly moves our problems into the courtroom.
More the lawyer's office than the court room.
A C&D letter does not actually imply that the person sending it has any legal case; it simply means they took the time to try to intimidate you into believing they do.
Also to convince them that they have no way to defend themselves in an actual court, Let alone the possibility to counter sue the plaintiff.
Unforunately I think it would only be helpful for those living under US law. Therefore not applicable to many people.
The way things are going that will soon be the entire planet anyway. The US is quite happy to try and impose US law on Canadians, hassle people in Europe and abduct a group of people from Asia.US citizens are also bound by US law wherever they might be.
You also have various things such as the WIPO treaty and ideas of "globalisation" and "harmonisation" of laws. (When it comes to copyright laws the typical result appears to be more to put some of the worst bits of various copyright laws together. From the customer and quite often the actual producer POV more a "disharmonisation".)
I'm more worried about "This letter is confidential and cannot be shared with your attorney."
The point is that it's as meaningful as "by reading this letter you agree to do XYZ". Youc annot unilaterally force what amounts to a contractual obligation. About they only way which it might be possible would be to attempt to use something like the DMCA to do this. But the last thing they'd want would be a judge striking that kind of usage down and then looking very closely at the rest of the statute.
I find it fascinating that publishers know all they need to about copyright law, and the game makers are, by and large, ignorant of the real law and its issues.
Maybe it means that modern copyright is more use to publishers than authors. Indeed it's quite possibly written more with publishers than authors in mind, even though its ostensivly for authors...
My attitude on this whole issue is: if the producers know these films won't turn a profit anymore, and they don't have the time / money to keep them, release copyright on them!
Why should they do that? Rather than hold onto them for possible future profit. Either by rerelease or through licencing related to "derived works". They also want to be able to milk the likes of "Micky Mouse" for as much as possible. No matter that it may mean a far poorer public domain. Indeed a lack of public domain isn't really a problem for movie companies rich enough to cross licence with other big corporates.
That timeframe of 14 years also comes from an era of relatively slow advancements compared to today. If anything that figure should be reduced to 5-10 years,
Not just changes in technology, but also changes in busienss attitudes. Such that commercial backers want very short term returns. There are modern books which went out of print within months of publication.
A fair and constitutional copyright law would require that preservation as a condition of being granted a copyright. This was not considered in the 18th century when the constitution and the first copyright law were enacted since at the time, copyright only lasted 14 years and thus there was little danger that a work would be lost by the time it's copyright expired.
Also little chance of something ending up in "limbo" because no-one knew who the current copyright holder actually was...
One of the issues that this article avoided is the issue of lost copyrights. This occures when a copyright is held by... No one. The copyright exists but the legal fiction called a corporation no longer exists to enforce it.
No doubt a nominal copyright holder does exist. But no-one, including that entity themselves, knows who they are... This is a problem which can only get worst with increasing copyright terms.
There's value in being able to take a story like the Odyssey and Illiad, and being able to reuse elements from them in crafting another work -- such as the Aenid.
Probably what Homer did in the first place...
Disney does this all the time. Those guys didn't independently develop Snow White, or Cinderella
The Brother's Grimm didn't independantly develop them either, they AFAIK never claimed to have done so though...
I'm sure that in 2055 or so, when the copyright on these classic games runs out(*), the game publishers will be glad to release them into the public domain, having received a fair return on their initial investment.
Assuming a usable copy even exists to be placed in the public domain in 50 odd years time. The copyright term now extends far beyond the typical commercial life of the work in question. Indeed with many corporate sponsered works they will either make a "return on their investment" or give up trying to in a period shorter than a decade, sometimes even shorter than a year. Most creative works derive in some way from what has gone before. The idea of taking a classic story and altering the characters and setting to a contempoary audience is an old one. But now it's difficult to do this since so much possible source material is locked up under corporate copyright...
Yup, true story. 'Back in the day', there was a single link between what you so quaintly refer to as 'the whole internet' (e.g. the US network that grew out of ARPAnet) and JANet. You had to telnet to a host out on the US east cost (name escapes me at the moment, it was a long time ago) and then enter the JANet address you wanted.
I don't recall any of the NSFNET relay machines being anywhere other than the ULCC (University of London Computer Centre.) There were also a couple of links between JANet and EARN (European Academic Research Network.)
Anyway, the point is that several other countries had their own packet switched networks that eventually got hooked together to create the 'internet'.
Many of them, certainly in Europe were already "hooked together", the only changes were to the protocols used.
Governments do work to benefit the people they represent. Your confusion arises from your misconception that the government represents you, and not multinational corporations who line the pockets of politicians with "donations" and under the table kickbacks.
They also represent professional lobbiests, not all of whom are even from big corporate interests. It wouldn't suprise me if many politicans simply treat elections as a game to play every few years...
Quality is (often) defined as fitness for purpose. I have been using StarOffice 6.0 Beta since its release and here is the #1 problem: it does not render documents in the *exact* same way as MS-Word. When sending business correspondence, it is important to know what your document will look like at the other end.
It's not unknown for word documents to look different when opened in different versions of MS Word, even where the two versions are nominally the same (the latter as a side effect of the way Windows handles DLLs).
To guarantee this, I use the MS-Viewer, for the final check; the alternative being conversion to PDF.
The only way you can be exactly sure of that is to print the document and send the paper copy:) A word document may well contain information you explicitally don't want to send to the other party, PDF is somewhat better in this respect, but it still isn't exactly WYSIWYG.
Very easily: support, 'priority features' voted on by paying membership holders, training manuals/videos/seminars, etc.
Or extras over and above the basic package, such as clip art, example files, templates, etc. Enhanced support at various levels, end user, sysadmin, etc.
Slashdot Mirror
The highway system is responsible for enabling people to traffic illegal substances/goods. Therefore it's violating laws too.
As is the car industry, the car fuel industry, the shoe industry, etc.
At some point in the recent past the meme of "ban things which can be used for illegal acivities" has become part of lawyer culture.
without the air, the gun wouldn't fire...gunpowder consumes oxygen to burn.
All the oxygen needed for gunpowder to explode is in there anyway. As is normal with explosives... The only kind of gun which needs air in order to fire is a matchlock musket.
It's the first two words in the subject line that makes censorship on the web difficult. It transcends state and country boundaries.
This simply makes it more difficult for national governments to censor. Though not impossible. This simply means that the greater risk is from entities such as megacorps which also transcend internationa boundries.
ANAC (I am not a christian) but I do think it's cool that the bible is included in the list of religious/political censored works.
Hardly suprising when you don't have to read too far into it to find descriptions of murder, child abuse, rape, genocide, etc...
That's the way glass is recycled at least here in Finland
When you buy a bottle or can of beer you end up pay about 18 eurocents more than the product itself would cost. Then, when the hard night of beer drinking is over, you take all the empty bottles and cans to the shop, feed them into a machine that counts them and prints out a receipt which you can cash on your way out.
Effectivly you are paying a deposit on the container.
Also not just glass bottles, the same method can be used for plastic bottles.
Block the keywords 'xxx' and 'mp3' from a port-80 web site.
The sequence xxx turns up in a suprising number of contexts unrelated to pornography. e.g. x is sometimes used as a placeholder in numbers to mean any digit...
And what constitutes a "religious cult"? Anything with socially unacceptable teaching which screws up your mind?
Here there isn't a clear defining line between "religion" and "politics"...
There's an interesting thing about filtering software in schools- I know some schools here in the SF Bay Area use some sort of proxy filtering that makes viewing "innapropriate" material impossible.
Problem is that you need to make sure that the software supplier and the school agree on what is "inappropriate". Plenty of material is "inappropriate" not because it is offensive, but because it is time/bandwidth wasting in excess of any possible educational value.Kids looking for games can be more of a problem than their looking for porn... However there can easily be "offensive material", especially relating to history, politics and religion when is actually directly related to the curriculum.
I live in Europe, where the legal climate is slightly different from the US. But corporate legal intimidation is not a purely US phenomenon. The KaZaA case was filed in The Netherlands, the KIllustrator case in Germany, etc..
Remember many of the corporations in question are truely global. Though some of them have different trading or simply well known names in different parts of the world. It's more common in the US because they have more experience of using US laws and quite probabaly at manipulating them there.
The domination of the Democrat and Republican parties in the US at all levels of government makes things easier. In many European countries you find not only a more diverse range of political parties, but also differances between national, regional and local government.
That's actually quite false, though it is a common European misconception. Our problem is that we are a country that too quickly moves our problems into the courtroom.
More the lawyer's office than the court room.
A C&D letter does not actually imply that the person sending it has any legal case; it simply means they took the time to try to intimidate you into believing they do.
Also to convince them that they have no way to defend themselves in an actual court, Let alone the possibility to counter sue the plaintiff.
Unforunately I think it would only be helpful for those living under US law. Therefore not applicable to many people.
The way things are going that will soon be the entire planet anyway. The US is quite happy to try and impose US law on Canadians, hassle people in Europe and abduct a group of people from Asia.US citizens are also bound by US law wherever they might be.
You also have various things such as the WIPO treaty and ideas of "globalisation" and "harmonisation" of laws. (When it comes to copyright laws the typical result appears to be more to put some of the worst bits of various copyright laws together. From the customer and quite often the actual producer POV more a "disharmonisation".)
In fact this indicates [princeton.edu] (under the fair use section) that using a quote from a personal letter probably isn't even fair use.
Except that such a C&D letter is a business letter. Does this make no difference?
I'm more worried about "This letter is confidential and cannot be shared with your attorney."
The point is that it's as meaningful as "by reading this letter you agree to do XYZ". Youc annot unilaterally force what amounts to a contractual obligation.
About they only way which it might be possible would be to attempt to use something like the DMCA to do this. But the last thing they'd want would be a judge striking that kind of usage down and then looking very closely at the rest of the statute.
that the US abides by?
Those which suit US interests at the time and those which were created by the corporate masters of the US government, maybe...
I find it fascinating that publishers know all they need to about copyright law, and the game makers are, by and large, ignorant of the real law and its issues.
Maybe it means that modern copyright is more use to publishers than authors. Indeed it's quite possibly written more with publishers than authors in mind, even though its ostensivly for authors...
My attitude on this whole issue is: if the producers know these films won't turn a profit anymore, and they don't have the time / money to keep them, release copyright on them!
Why should they do that? Rather than hold onto them for possible future profit. Either by rerelease or through licencing related to "derived works".
They also want to be able to milk the likes of "Micky Mouse" for as much as possible. No matter that it may mean a far poorer public domain. Indeed a lack of public domain isn't really a problem for movie companies rich enough to cross licence with other big corporates.
That timeframe of 14 years also comes from an era of relatively slow advancements compared to today. If anything that figure should be reduced to 5-10 years,
Not just changes in technology, but also changes in busienss attitudes. Such that commercial backers want very short term returns. There are modern books which went out of print within months of publication.
A fair and constitutional copyright law would require that preservation as a condition of being granted a copyright. This was not considered in the 18th century when the constitution and the first copyright law were enacted since at the time, copyright only lasted 14 years and thus there was little danger that a work would be lost by the time it's copyright expired.
Also little chance of something ending up in "limbo" because no-one knew who the current copyright holder actually was...
One of the issues that this article avoided is the issue of lost copyrights. This occures when a copyright is held by... No one. The copyright exists but the legal fiction called a corporation no longer exists to enforce it.
No doubt a nominal copyright holder does exist. But no-one, including that entity themselves, knows who they are...
This is a problem which can only get worst with increasing copyright terms.
There's value in being able to take a story like the Odyssey and Illiad, and being able to reuse elements from them in crafting another work -- such as the Aenid.
Probably what Homer did in the first place...
Disney does this all the time. Those guys didn't independently develop Snow White, or Cinderella
The Brother's Grimm didn't independantly develop them either, they AFAIK never claimed to have done so though...
I'm sure that in 2055 or so, when the copyright on these classic games runs out(*), the game publishers will be glad to release them into the public domain, having received a fair return on their initial investment.
Assuming a usable copy even exists to be placed in the public domain in 50 odd years time.
The copyright term now extends far beyond the typical commercial life of the work in question. Indeed with many corporate sponsered works they will either make a "return on their investment" or give up trying to in a period shorter than a decade, sometimes even shorter than a year.
Most creative works derive in some way from what has gone before. The idea of taking a classic story and altering the characters and setting to a contempoary audience is an old one. But now it's difficult to do this since so much possible source material is locked up under corporate copyright...
Yup, true story. 'Back in the day', there was a single link between what you so quaintly refer to as 'the whole internet' (e.g. the US network that grew out of ARPAnet) and JANet. You had to telnet to a host out on the US east cost (name escapes me at the moment, it was a long time ago) and then enter the JANet address you wanted.
I don't recall any of the NSFNET relay machines being anywhere other than the ULCC (University of London Computer Centre.)
There were also a couple of links between JANet and EARN (European Academic Research Network.)
Anyway, the point is that several other countries had their own packet switched networks that eventually got hooked together to create the 'internet'.
Many of them, certainly in Europe were already "hooked together", the only changes were to the protocols used.
Governments do work to benefit the people they represent. Your confusion arises from your misconception that the government represents you, and not multinational corporations who line the pockets of politicians with "donations" and under the table kickbacks.
They also represent professional lobbiests, not all of whom are even from big corporate interests.
It wouldn't suprise me if many politicans simply treat elections as a game to play every few years...
Quality is (often) defined as fitness for purpose. I have been using StarOffice 6.0 Beta since its release and here is the #1 problem: it does not render documents in the *exact* same way as MS-Word. When sending business correspondence, it is important to know what your document will look like at the other end.
:)
It's not unknown for word documents to look different when opened in different versions of MS Word, even where the two versions are nominally the same (the latter as a side effect of the way Windows handles DLLs).
To guarantee this, I use the MS-Viewer, for the final check; the alternative being conversion to PDF.
The only way you can be exactly sure of that is to print the document and send the paper copy
A word document may well contain information you explicitally don't want to send to the other party, PDF is somewhat better in this respect, but it still isn't exactly WYSIWYG.
Very easily: support, 'priority features' voted on by paying membership holders, training manuals/videos/seminars, etc.
Or extras over and above the basic package, such as clip art, example files, templates, etc. Enhanced support at various levels, end user, sysadmin, etc.