They were originally set up to expire in 17 years with the option for one renewal.
What the fuck are you talking about? Patent terms in the US were 14 years from issue, then 17 years from issue, then 20 years from filing. No renewals; in fact, you generally have to pay up periodically just to get the full, single, term.
I think you're confusing patents and copyrights (which originally were 14+14 years)
That means that knowledge would be locked down for a maximum of 34 years.
Publication requirements ensure that knowledge isn't 'locked down.' It's not directly usable, perhaps, but it's commonly available.
I have a J.D. from Rutgers Camden and an LL.M. in IP law from Franklin Pierce. Neither are correspondance schools, although my wallet wishes they were. Quite honestly, while you might not like what I have to say, it's pretty damn certain that when it comes to copyright law, I know more than you do. It's my specialty, and it's my favorite area of law.
Sure, but the problem is that here in America, at least, it's illegal to use it. (And, unlike most forms of piracy, involves sending credit card information to shady Russians)
No, I don't think there's really a correct term at all; it describes a closeness or relationship that's not really there. Certainly in the context of the earlier poster it's incorrect: creationism is overwhelmingly pushed by people who are Christians.
He instituted rules to govern his creation (that we know as physics) and knew what those rules would create billions of years later--and I don't think it's improbable that He gave early life a "push" from time to time.
Those two statements don't really go together. If God created the universe and the various physical laws that could give rise to life, knowing what the outcome of all of them would be -- and presumably all other possible outcome for permutations on the universe -- then why would he need to intervene? Surely if it's designed properly to begin with, it won't need divine intervention later.
It's orders of magnitude more likely than that life just spontaneously happened and got more and more complex all by itself.
Actually, yeah. Given the scope of the universe and the time available, even the longest odds are likely to be satisfied somewhere, sometime. That's just probability, and has more in its favor than postulating the existence of God. In particular a monotheistic God -- why is that more probable to you, given the observable universe, than multiple gods, or gods that aren't interested in people? Who says that we're the deliberate end product of the universe? (Other than us, which is really just vanity)
The problem with intelligent design is that it's a firmly Judeo-Christian agenda outlined by monotheistic origin mythology.
It's kind of annoying when people throw around the term 'Judeo-Christian.' The two religions are not all that close, and anyway it's usually just used as a synonym for Christian. Certainly in this case, it's mostly Christians that have the agenda of teaching creationism in schools.
We'll become a generation where we have to admit--because we've seen the electronic evidence--that, for example, our next President was, as a teenager, a Green Day listening, Microsoft hating, MySpace blogging, whiny, self absorbed git.
So basically you're saying that the next President will be better than the one we've got now?
That's funny, since the Supreme Court ruled that students don't have to pledge. That was back in '42. I sympathize, having also grown up in Florida. Thank God I left as soon as I could.
It's really quite variable depending on the case, the jurisdiction, and so on. I doubt there's a standard practice, although remember that the ACLU's work is not like a typical plaintiff's firm's.
At any rate, even if it were on contingency, that tops out at about a third. Contingency fees are a gamble; sometimes you win big, sometimes you get about what your rate would've been, and sometimes the lawyer ends up worse off than if he had never taken the case.
Well, your argument didn't convince me that consumers' rights are being fully considered.
It's supposed to convince you that consumers' privacy rights aren't being considered at all with regards to copyright. The purpose of copyright is to promote the public interest by encouraging the creation and publication of works with an economic incentive, and placing those works in the public domain as rapidly as possible, and as close to the public domain as possible during any term of copyright.
Protecting consumer privacy is not even on the radar.
If you're interested in consumer privacy, I would suggest getting some laws passed that are specifically concerned with that.
OK. Once upon a time, I selectively decided to purchase one specific hot dog product instead of another. Instead of using one credit card to pay for it, I artistically whipped out another and rendered my digitized signature with a unique flourish. This was recorded.
Why is it that so many of the geeks here think that they can game the system; that they're more brilliant than the everyone in the legal profession and that their smart-ass cleverness will be rewarded?
I think it's too much interaction with computers. The judicial system is not a computer. It is run by people, at every step, and they are not so easily fooled or willing to tolerate people who think they're oh-so clever.
Your example fails because you are still trying to protect all the facts about you. Whether fact one involves a Visa, and fact two involves a MasterCard doesn't change the fact that they're both facts, and both are still in the set of facts you're trying to keep private. Even using cash doesn't matter; it's not recorded, but this isn't due to your using cash. It's due to a decision by merchants to not carefully record such details in cash transactions. You didn't make that decision, and can't benefit from it here. It also fails because you are not the author; yours is not the hand that takes the intangible fact and fixes it in some tangible form. The merchants et al who do this will do so whether you like it or not. In fact, the whole point of this exercise is that you don't like it. If you actually had authorial control, you could stop them from recording data to begin with. As they're going to record it anyhow, you don't get to claim it as your own.
A non-fiction story is a compilation of facts. A fictional story is a compilation of some mixture of fact and imagination. Both are subject to copyright. People can take excerpts, but (correct me if I'm wrong) they cannot obtain the entire work. If giving out one number allows someone to obtain the entire work, would that not be considered a violation of copyright?
Facts can never be copyrighted, and thus can always be taken from any compilation of facts. If you write a history book, I can copy out all of your dates, battles, names, and so on, and use them in my own history book. This is because you do not own history.
The most you can expect is that I cannot copy your expression of those facts, if it is creative (e.g. not "Battle of Hastings in 1066" but rather a paragraph describing what happened) or your selection and arrangement of facts, also if it is creative. Certainly in no case can the copyright actually or even strongly tend to effectively result in a copyright on a fact (e.g. if there is only one way, or a few ways, to practically express a fact), under the merger doctrine.
So your discussion about even small exerpts of works leading to infringement is premature. So far, the facts of your life are not a work. They're just a bunch of unprotected facts, in an unprotected compilation.
Your credit record is a document you are writing either by action or inaction.
Utterly wrong. It is a document someone else is writing about you, based on observation. Action and inaction are not acts of creative authorship. Again, you cannot get a copyright on the facts of your life by living them. In fact, you cannot get a copyr
It is in their financial best interests to make the law obfuscated, obtuse and arcane.
Again, I assure you, that the complexities of the law are typically there due to the corresponding complexities of the subject matter, which in turn are usually present because a lot of different parties wanted their individual concerns addressed.
Honestly, you're basically accusing the legal profession of having a vast conspiracy that has lasted for many centuries (the law has been complicated for a long time). As is typical with conspiracy theories, it just doesn't fly. You might want to believe, in the face of common sense, that virtually all lawyers are out to get everyone else, but all you're doing is putting yourself among the ranks of crackpots.
And the reason there is "enough work to go around" now is *precisely* because the law as it stands is obfuscated, obtuse and arcane.
Nope. But please, point to a time when there were too many lawyers for their clients.
Law is medicine. People get sick, so there'll always be work for doctors. Well, people disagree, or anticipate future disagreement, or harm one another, so there'll always be work for lawyers.
The only way that wouldn't work is if we abandoned law, or medicine, altogether. If people thought prayer healed people, you wouldn't have many doctors, but it also wouldn't work. If people were willing to abandon justice and the rule of law, instead just having a king that decided things arbitrarily, then, and only then, would you not need lawyers. (Except that many lawyers are also good at advocacy, so actually you'd still want them if you were no good at presenting your side of things to the king. Or are you going to accuse us of a conspiracy to make it difficult to orate?)
there is "wonder" in the legal profession why they are looked down upon
I don't wonder. I attribute it to a combination of stupidity, shortsightedness, and ingratitude. People often don't like lawyers -- except when they need one and he wins their case -- at which time they like that lawyer very much.
It's like those samurai stories where the village is under attack, gets the help of a ronin, who fights off the band of thieves, and is then told thanks very much, now get out of town.
that's what people really think
I know. I'm not saying that most people have a high opinion of lawyers. I'm saying that most people are dumb. I'm not even surprised about it, but I do think that it's a sad state of affairs.
Lawyers have, as a profession, made up a huge number of the members of congress over the years.
That seems sensible. Congress is the legislative branch of the federal government. Their job is to create, modify, and repeal laws. Is it that strange that people who work with the law professionally, and who have received years of legal training, and probably have a significant amount of practical experience with the law, would be the most qualified to work with laws some more?
When your plumbing breaks, you get a plumber, not an accountant. When your taxes need doing, you get an accountant, not a chef. When you need gourmet food, you get a chef, not a lawyer. So why shouldn't you get a lawyer when you need someone to write laws? They are the relevant experts.
Obviously you can pick whoever you want; it's a democracy. But you'll probably want someone who agrees with your positions who is technically adept enough to accomplish something. Thus, an ideal Congressman is probably a lawyer who shares your views as to what the government should be doing. They'll be more efficient at doing the job you sent them to Washington to do than someone who has to learn about law while on the job.
As such, it is in their pure selfish and planned economic interest to make laws as verbose and complex and numerous as possible. This leads to a higher potential pool of victims for the hired guns to aim at.
Yeah, and programmers deliberately write buggy software to ensure their job security. Get real. What you're describing does not happen. There is plenty of legal work to go around without deliberately overcomplicating things. (And lawyers don't care much for complicated laws as a rule, since we have to work with them)
What's really happening is that people have particular goals that they want the law to accomplish. Often there are multiple goals, since people with different interests worked together to make one law, and they wrote it to suit them all. Actually being able to do this makes things complicated, because there are often not simple answers.
For example, a simple tax code might say that everyone is taxed 10% annually. This immediately gets complicated when people argue about what is being taxed, precisely. People who favor progressive taxation want income taxes, which requires defining what income is. People who favor regressive taxation want sales taxes, which similarly requires definition. Then people argue over what should be included, since they find special cases -- should children have to file? How and when should we tax capital gains? Should we provide exemptions for sympathetic groups such as charitable organizations? How do we define what those are? And so on.
This isn't all that strange. A program that takes input from the keyboard and saves it to a file makes for a primative word processor and is pretty simple to program. A word processor that checks spelling, grammar, has a WYSIWYG interface, allows for complicated formatting and typeface selection, and so on, is considerably more complicated to write. But it may serve your needs better. Is the programmer trying to keep his job through one-up-manship, or serve his customers, who have needs that the simple word processor can't address?
I am just not seeing any effort by the "law community" to make [IP law] fairer or simpler
Oh, most lawyers involved in policy with regards to these laws are indeed trying to do this. The thing is, you disagree with them as to what's fair. A lot of people think that perpetual copyright, without exceptions such as fair use is entirely fair. Meanwhile, laws you'd agree with would probably be no more or less complex than they are now, but would merely have somewhat different goals.
Only use cash. Avoid owning things that have titles to them, e.g. land or cars. Don't use banks. Don't have accounts with businesses or other organizations, e.g. library cards, discount cards at stores or supermarkets, a phone, etc. Avoid having people remember you. Don't get arrested or take a job that involves records filed about you. Earn so little income that you don't need to file tax returns. Don't have a job. Don't seek professional medical care. Don't have a passport, driver's license, government-issued ID, etc.
You get the idea.
On the whole, if you have to either live like Ted Kaczynski, or work on a political solution by lobbying the government, you may well find that the latter is easier and more likely to work.
If my neighbor collects a database about me which outlines my entire life it's typically viewed as stalking. If a company does it then it's a legal business.
What gives?
This depends on the specific elements of criminal stalking as set forth by statute. A quick glance at the Massachusetts statute (chosen because I live there; I have no idea whether there's a model act, or what) includes some elements that distinguish the two scenarios:
The defendant has to be malicious, their acts have to be directed at a particular person (presumably as opposed to observing everyone, or everyone that meets some particular criteria), the acts have to cause a reasonable person to suffer substantial emotional distress, and make a threat, with the intent of placing the person in imminent fear of death or bodily injury. (There are other elements, but these are the most pertinent ones)
So apparently, at least with regards to criminal stalking, just collecting every scrap of data about someone or someones is not criminal. (There might be some other crime involved, or maybe a tort or something -- I'm not going to exhaustively research this for a/. post)
If stalking is about motive it can be demonstrated that the company compiling the database is not worried in the least about my best welfare.
So? Virtually no one is worried in the least about your welfare. The duty of caring about you is very rare. People are only obligated, generally, to not hurt other people. They don't have to help. Sometimes people might assume a duty to care about you, e.g. your doctor. But this is pretty unusual, and not something you'd see between all the strangers in the world. From the MGL statute discussed above, there has to be actual malice and an intent to make you afraid of injury or death; few if any people will have that mental state.
If stalking is about the nature of the data collected
Apparently it's not. This seems sensible. I'm less worried, in a stalking context, about someone who looks up where I live, than someone who actively follows me around all day, even if they aren't collecting any data at all. The researcher is more of a concern from a fraud angle, than a threat to my person.
how is it that the consumer database agencies are not empowering employees who may be stalkers?
Maybe they are. Do they have a duty not to? Does the phone company have a duty not to give my address and number to my stalker when they're passing out the phone book?
Certainly there have been cases of stalkers that used commonly available data about people. I recall a case in NH where a man stalked a woman, primarily by gathering or buying copies of data about her, finally resulting in his murdering her and killing himself. It's sad, I guess, but I'm not sure if there's a good way to prevent it without resulting in significant burdens on everyone else. While I'm no (naive) Libertarian, I do tend to find that it's better to be free and unsafe than unfree and safe... especially since you're probably not all that safe in the latter case, anyway. See any safe police states lately?
Re:I *am* original... the facts about me define me
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The Ethics Of Data Brokers
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· Score: 2, Informative
Please explain to me how "all facts related to me" as a compilation is not original.
A compilation that includes everything does not possess originality with regards to selection. The selection was unthinking and all-inclusive. It is not a creative work of authorship, as is constitutionally required for copyright protection to attach. Simply, there has to be a creative choice to include some facts and to not include other ones.
From the Feist case:
[O]riginality is not a stringent standard; it does not require that facts be presented in an innovative or surprising way. It is equally true, however, that the selection and arrangement of facts cannot be so mechanical or routine as to require no creativity whatsoever. The standard of originality is low, but it does exist....
The selection, coordination, and arrangement of Rural's white pages do not satisfy the minimum constitutional standards for copyright protection. As mentioned at the outset, Rural's white pages are entirely typical. Persons desiring telephone service in Rural's service area fill out an application and Rural issues them a telephone number. In preparing its white pages, Rural simply takes the data provided by its subscribers and lists it alphabetically by surname. The end product is a garden-variety white pages directory, devoid of even the slightest trace of creativity.
Rural's selection of listings could not be more obvious: it publishes the most basic information -- name, town, and telephone number -- about each person who applies to it for telephone service. This is "selection" of a sort, but it lacks the modicum of creativity necessary to transform mere selection into copyrightable expression. Rural expended sufficient effort to make the white pages directory useful, but insufficient creativity to make it original.
While the white pages phone book in the Feist case was uncopyrightable, other kinds of phone books have been found to be copyrightable. For example, in the Key Publications case, a phone book that only contained listings that the author thought would be useful for the local Chinese community was copyrightable as a compilation, since the author had creatively chosen some listings to include and others to exclude.
Given that, do you agree that I should be able to copyright my data as a compilation?
Absolutely not.
First, the facts are uncopyrightable. Second, a compilation of all facts about you is uncopyrightable. Third, even if a compilation were copyrightable, the people who you do not want using your data are not copying the facts from the compilation, they are obtaining facts through observation of you, and copyright cannot be used to prevent them from finding out the same facts you compiled from other sources. Fourth, even when compiled in a copyrightable compilation, the facts themselves are uncopyrightable, and free for others to copy from your compilation itself. Fifth, the act of living and thereby producing facts (e.g. eating a hotdog produces the fact that you ate a hotdog at a particular time, date, and place, in a particular manner, etc.) is not an act of authorship resulting in a fixed original work of authorship, and so merely living does not produce a compilation of facts, nor any other copyrightable work.
This is a really stupid, pointless line of discussion, because there is no way that the brain-dead notion of copyrighting the facts of one's life so as to ensure privacy will ever, ever, ever work.
No. In fact, not just no, but hell no. It's a stupid idea.
Facts are not copyrightable. So if you write down that you have brown hair, I can extract that fact and use it myself without infringing. Since there's no copyright, there's nothing to infringe on.
Compilations of facts might be copyrightable, but are not necessarily so. In order to be copyrightable, a compilation must possess originality, i.e. a creative selection and arrangement of components. All facts is not a creative selection. Ordinary arrangements, e.g. chronological, or alphabetical, is not a creative arrangement. It is fairly difficult to construct a copyrightable factual compilation (mostly it is a matter of creative selection).
As facts remain uncopyrightable, they can be copied from the copyrighted compilation, so long as the compilation itself is not copied. Furthermore, they can be observed from the source. So long as the copyrighted work is not itself copied, it is not infringing to have an identical, independently produced work, however the facts within are obtained. While it's possible to claim that sufficient similarity is indicative of copying (think of the odds of monkeys on typewriters) access is required to allege this. Since we're talking about information you don't want made public, there would presumably be no public copies which a purported infringer could've copied from, so similarity doesn't work for you.
But this is all dancing around the central issue: living your life and in the process producing facts is not an act of creative authorship. Just because you do something doesn't mean that you own the fact of it, or that the fact of it, by itself, is a creative work. You'd need to write it down. And even then, you can only protect what you write, as opposed to the uncopyrightable material within or the independently observable facts your writing is based upon.
Privacy is an interesting issue, particularly given the ability to store, search, and correlate vast quantities of information quickly and automatically. But it has nothing to do with copyright. Again, your post was pretty stupid.
Slashdot Mirror
No, no, he means it's optimized for playing back the Quatermass shows from the BBC.
Actually, I understand that it's not really that lucrative unless you're also a lawyer. Then it's very good work indeed.
However, I don't see how this is a valid criticism of the PTO.
They were originally set up to expire in 17 years with the option for one renewal.
What the fuck are you talking about? Patent terms in the US were 14 years from issue, then 17 years from issue, then 20 years from filing. No renewals; in fact, you generally have to pay up periodically just to get the full, single, term.
I think you're confusing patents and copyrights (which originally were 14+14 years)
That means that knowledge would be locked down for a maximum of 34 years.
Publication requirements ensure that knowledge isn't 'locked down.' It's not directly usable, perhaps, but it's commonly available.
Patents don't disallow you from doing research after all, but "only" commercializing it; having it made into product or processes.
They do in the US. There is an exemption for research purposes, but it's too small to be all that useful AFAIK.
I have a J.D. from Rutgers Camden and an LL.M. in IP law from Franklin Pierce. Neither are correspondance schools, although my wallet wishes they were. Quite honestly, while you might not like what I have to say, it's pretty damn certain that when it comes to copyright law, I know more than you do. It's my specialty, and it's my favorite area of law.
Last I heard they were not taking Paypal anymore.
Anyway, downloading from them infringes on the exclusive right of the copyright holder to reproduce copies of a copyrighted work. 17 USC 106(1).
Sure, but the problem is that here in America, at least, it's illegal to use it. (And, unlike most forms of piracy, involves sending credit card information to shady Russians)
If you really like Wikipedia, have you looked up 'Judeo Christian' on it yet?
No, I don't think there's really a correct term at all; it describes a closeness or relationship that's not really there. Certainly in the context of the earlier poster it's incorrect: creationism is overwhelmingly pushed by people who are Christians.
He instituted rules to govern his creation (that we know as physics) and knew what those rules would create billions of years later--and I don't think it's improbable that He gave early life a "push" from time to time.
Those two statements don't really go together. If God created the universe and the various physical laws that could give rise to life, knowing what the outcome of all of them would be -- and presumably all other possible outcome for permutations on the universe -- then why would he need to intervene? Surely if it's designed properly to begin with, it won't need divine intervention later.
It's orders of magnitude more likely than that life just spontaneously happened and got more and more complex all by itself.
Actually, yeah. Given the scope of the universe and the time available, even the longest odds are likely to be satisfied somewhere, sometime. That's just probability, and has more in its favor than postulating the existence of God. In particular a monotheistic God -- why is that more probable to you, given the observable universe, than multiple gods, or gods that aren't interested in people? Who says that we're the deliberate end product of the universe? (Other than us, which is really just vanity)
The problem with intelligent design is that it's a firmly Judeo-Christian agenda outlined by monotheistic origin mythology.
It's kind of annoying when people throw around the term 'Judeo-Christian.' The two religions are not all that close, and anyway it's usually just used as a synonym for Christian. Certainly in this case, it's mostly Christians that have the agenda of teaching creationism in schools.
We'll become a generation where we have to admit--because we've seen the electronic evidence--that, for example, our next President was, as a teenager, a Green Day listening, Microsoft hating, MySpace blogging, whiny, self absorbed git.
So basically you're saying that the next President will be better than the one we've got now?
Oh, and when did the ACLU ever say that? There's a difference between students praying, and the school endorsing their prayer.
That's funny, since the Supreme Court ruled that students don't have to pledge. That was back in '42. I sympathize, having also grown up in Florida. Thank God I left as soon as I could.
It's really quite variable depending on the case, the jurisdiction, and so on. I doubt there's a standard practice, although remember that the ACLU's work is not like a typical plaintiff's firm's.
At any rate, even if it were on contingency, that tops out at about a third. Contingency fees are a gamble; sometimes you win big, sometimes you get about what your rate would've been, and sometimes the lawyer ends up worse off than if he had never taken the case.
There are both civil and criminal penalties. See 17 USC 1203 and 1204.
Well, your argument didn't convince me that consumers' rights are being fully considered.
It's supposed to convince you that consumers' privacy rights aren't being considered at all with regards to copyright. The purpose of copyright is to promote the public interest by encouraging the creation and publication of works with an economic incentive, and placing those works in the public domain as rapidly as possible, and as close to the public domain as possible during any term of copyright.
Protecting consumer privacy is not even on the radar.
If you're interested in consumer privacy, I would suggest getting some laws passed that are specifically concerned with that.
OK. Once upon a time, I selectively decided to purchase one specific hot dog product instead of another. Instead of using one credit card to pay for it, I artistically whipped out another and rendered my digitized signature with a unique flourish. This was recorded.
Why is it that so many of the geeks here think that they can game the system; that they're more brilliant than the everyone in the legal profession and that their smart-ass cleverness will be rewarded?
I think it's too much interaction with computers. The judicial system is not a computer. It is run by people, at every step, and they are not so easily fooled or willing to tolerate people who think they're oh-so clever.
Your example fails because you are still trying to protect all the facts about you. Whether fact one involves a Visa, and fact two involves a MasterCard doesn't change the fact that they're both facts, and both are still in the set of facts you're trying to keep private. Even using cash doesn't matter; it's not recorded, but this isn't due to your using cash. It's due to a decision by merchants to not carefully record such details in cash transactions. You didn't make that decision, and can't benefit from it here. It also fails because you are not the author; yours is not the hand that takes the intangible fact and fixes it in some tangible form. The merchants et al who do this will do so whether you like it or not. In fact, the whole point of this exercise is that you don't like it. If you actually had authorial control, you could stop them from recording data to begin with. As they're going to record it anyhow, you don't get to claim it as your own.
A non-fiction story is a compilation of facts. A fictional story is a compilation of some mixture of fact and imagination. Both are subject to copyright. People can take excerpts, but (correct me if I'm wrong) they cannot obtain the entire work. If giving out one number allows someone to obtain the entire work, would that not be considered a violation of copyright?
Facts can never be copyrighted, and thus can always be taken from any compilation of facts. If you write a history book, I can copy out all of your dates, battles, names, and so on, and use them in my own history book. This is because you do not own history.
The most you can expect is that I cannot copy your expression of those facts, if it is creative (e.g. not "Battle of Hastings in 1066" but rather a paragraph describing what happened) or your selection and arrangement of facts, also if it is creative. Certainly in no case can the copyright actually or even strongly tend to effectively result in a copyright on a fact (e.g. if there is only one way, or a few ways, to practically express a fact), under the merger doctrine.
So your discussion about even small exerpts of works leading to infringement is premature. So far, the facts of your life are not a work. They're just a bunch of unprotected facts, in an unprotected compilation.
Your credit record is a document you are writing either by action or inaction.
Utterly wrong. It is a document someone else is writing about you, based on observation. Action and inaction are not acts of creative authorship. Again, you cannot get a copyright on the facts of your life by living them. In fact, you cannot get a copyr
It is in their financial best interests to make the law obfuscated, obtuse and arcane.
Again, I assure you, that the complexities of the law are typically there due to the corresponding complexities of the subject matter, which in turn are usually present because a lot of different parties wanted their individual concerns addressed.
Honestly, you're basically accusing the legal profession of having a vast conspiracy that has lasted for many centuries (the law has been complicated for a long time). As is typical with conspiracy theories, it just doesn't fly. You might want to believe, in the face of common sense, that virtually all lawyers are out to get everyone else, but all you're doing is putting yourself among the ranks of crackpots.
And the reason there is "enough work to go around" now is *precisely* because the law as it stands is obfuscated, obtuse and arcane.
Nope. But please, point to a time when there were too many lawyers for their clients.
Law is medicine. People get sick, so there'll always be work for doctors. Well, people disagree, or anticipate future disagreement, or harm one another, so there'll always be work for lawyers.
The only way that wouldn't work is if we abandoned law, or medicine, altogether. If people thought prayer healed people, you wouldn't have many doctors, but it also wouldn't work. If people were willing to abandon justice and the rule of law, instead just having a king that decided things arbitrarily, then, and only then, would you not need lawyers. (Except that many lawyers are also good at advocacy, so actually you'd still want them if you were no good at presenting your side of things to the king. Or are you going to accuse us of a conspiracy to make it difficult to orate?)
there is "wonder" in the legal profession why they are looked down upon
I don't wonder. I attribute it to a combination of stupidity, shortsightedness, and ingratitude. People often don't like lawyers -- except when they need one and he wins their case -- at which time they like that lawyer very much.
It's like those samurai stories where the village is under attack, gets the help of a ronin, who fights off the band of thieves, and is then told thanks very much, now get out of town.
that's what people really think
I know. I'm not saying that most people have a high opinion of lawyers. I'm saying that most people are dumb. I'm not even surprised about it, but I do think that it's a sad state of affairs.
Lawyers have, as a profession, made up a huge number of the members of congress over the years.
That seems sensible. Congress is the legislative branch of the federal government. Their job is to create, modify, and repeal laws. Is it that strange that people who work with the law professionally, and who have received years of legal training, and probably have a significant amount of practical experience with the law, would be the most qualified to work with laws some more?
When your plumbing breaks, you get a plumber, not an accountant. When your taxes need doing, you get an accountant, not a chef. When you need gourmet food, you get a chef, not a lawyer. So why shouldn't you get a lawyer when you need someone to write laws? They are the relevant experts.
Obviously you can pick whoever you want; it's a democracy. But you'll probably want someone who agrees with your positions who is technically adept enough to accomplish something. Thus, an ideal Congressman is probably a lawyer who shares your views as to what the government should be doing. They'll be more efficient at doing the job you sent them to Washington to do than someone who has to learn about law while on the job.
As such, it is in their pure selfish and planned economic interest to make laws as verbose and complex and numerous as possible. This leads to a higher potential pool of victims for the hired guns to aim at.
Yeah, and programmers deliberately write buggy software to ensure their job security. Get real. What you're describing does not happen. There is plenty of legal work to go around without deliberately overcomplicating things. (And lawyers don't care much for complicated laws as a rule, since we have to work with them)
What's really happening is that people have particular goals that they want the law to accomplish. Often there are multiple goals, since people with different interests worked together to make one law, and they wrote it to suit them all. Actually being able to do this makes things complicated, because there are often not simple answers.
For example, a simple tax code might say that everyone is taxed 10% annually. This immediately gets complicated when people argue about what is being taxed, precisely. People who favor progressive taxation want income taxes, which requires defining what income is. People who favor regressive taxation want sales taxes, which similarly requires definition. Then people argue over what should be included, since they find special cases -- should children have to file? How and when should we tax capital gains? Should we provide exemptions for sympathetic groups such as charitable organizations? How do we define what those are? And so on.
This isn't all that strange. A program that takes input from the keyboard and saves it to a file makes for a primative word processor and is pretty simple to program. A word processor that checks spelling, grammar, has a WYSIWYG interface, allows for complicated formatting and typeface selection, and so on, is considerably more complicated to write. But it may serve your needs better. Is the programmer trying to keep his job through one-up-manship, or serve his customers, who have needs that the simple word processor can't address?
I am just not seeing any effort by the "law community" to make [IP law] fairer or simpler
Oh, most lawyers involved in policy with regards to these laws are indeed trying to do this. The thing is, you disagree with them as to what's fair. A lot of people think that perpetual copyright, without exceptions such as fair use is entirely fair. Meanwhile, laws you'd agree with would probably be no more or less complex than they are now, but would merely have somewhat different goals.
I say we let them go.
Nah. Generally if you create a fiction but present it as a fact, it's treated as such.
Leave civilization.
Only use cash. Avoid owning things that have titles to them, e.g. land or cars. Don't use banks. Don't have accounts with businesses or other organizations, e.g. library cards, discount cards at stores or supermarkets, a phone, etc. Avoid having people remember you. Don't get arrested or take a job that involves records filed about you. Earn so little income that you don't need to file tax returns. Don't have a job. Don't seek professional medical care. Don't have a passport, driver's license, government-issued ID, etc.
You get the idea.
On the whole, if you have to either live like Ted Kaczynski, or work on a political solution by lobbying the government, you may well find that the latter is easier and more likely to work.
If my neighbor collects a database about me which outlines my entire life it's typically viewed as stalking. If a company does it then it's a legal business.
/. post)
What gives?
This depends on the specific elements of criminal stalking as set forth by statute. A quick glance at the Massachusetts statute (chosen because I live there; I have no idea whether there's a model act, or what) includes some elements that distinguish the two scenarios:
The defendant has to be malicious, their acts have to be directed at a particular person (presumably as opposed to observing everyone, or everyone that meets some particular criteria), the acts have to cause a reasonable person to suffer substantial emotional distress, and make a threat, with the intent of placing the person in imminent fear of death or bodily injury. (There are other elements, but these are the most pertinent ones)
So apparently, at least with regards to criminal stalking, just collecting every scrap of data about someone or someones is not criminal. (There might be some other crime involved, or maybe a tort or something -- I'm not going to exhaustively research this for a
If stalking is about motive it can be demonstrated that the company compiling the database is not worried in the least about my best welfare.
So? Virtually no one is worried in the least about your welfare. The duty of caring about you is very rare. People are only obligated, generally, to not hurt other people. They don't have to help. Sometimes people might assume a duty to care about you, e.g. your doctor. But this is pretty unusual, and not something you'd see between all the strangers in the world. From the MGL statute discussed above, there has to be actual malice and an intent to make you afraid of injury or death; few if any people will have that mental state.
If stalking is about the nature of the data collected
Apparently it's not. This seems sensible. I'm less worried, in a stalking context, about someone who looks up where I live, than someone who actively follows me around all day, even if they aren't collecting any data at all. The researcher is more of a concern from a fraud angle, than a threat to my person.
how is it that the consumer database agencies are not empowering employees who may be stalkers?
Maybe they are. Do they have a duty not to? Does the phone company have a duty not to give my address and number to my stalker when they're passing out the phone book?
Certainly there have been cases of stalkers that used commonly available data about people. I recall a case in NH where a man stalked a woman, primarily by gathering or buying copies of data about her, finally resulting in his murdering her and killing himself. It's sad, I guess, but I'm not sure if there's a good way to prevent it without resulting in significant burdens on everyone else. While I'm no (naive) Libertarian, I do tend to find that it's better to be free and unsafe than unfree and safe... especially since you're probably not all that safe in the latter case, anyway. See any safe police states lately?
A compilation that includes everything does not possess originality with regards to selection. The selection was unthinking and all-inclusive. It is not a creative work of authorship, as is constitutionally required for copyright protection to attach. Simply, there has to be a creative choice to include some facts and to not include other ones.
From the Feist case:
While the white pages phone book in the Feist case was uncopyrightable, other kinds of phone books have been found to be copyrightable. For example, in the Key Publications case, a phone book that only contained listings that the author thought would be useful for the local Chinese community was copyrightable as a compilation, since the author had creatively chosen some listings to include and others to exclude.
Given that, do you agree that I should be able to copyright my data as a compilation?
Absolutely not.
First, the facts are uncopyrightable. Second, a compilation of all facts about you is uncopyrightable. Third, even if a compilation were copyrightable, the people who you do not want using your data are not copying the facts from the compilation, they are obtaining facts through observation of you, and copyright cannot be used to prevent them from finding out the same facts you compiled from other sources. Fourth, even when compiled in a copyrightable compilation, the facts themselves are uncopyrightable, and free for others to copy from your compilation itself. Fifth, the act of living and thereby producing facts (e.g. eating a hotdog produces the fact that you ate a hotdog at a particular time, date, and place, in a particular manner, etc.) is not an act of authorship resulting in a fixed original work of authorship, and so merely living does not produce a compilation of facts, nor any other copyrightable work.
This is a really stupid, pointless line of discussion, because there is no way that the brain-dead notion of copyrighting the facts of one's life so as to ensure privacy will ever, ever, ever work.
No. In fact, not just no, but hell no. It's a stupid idea.
Facts are not copyrightable. So if you write down that you have brown hair, I can extract that fact and use it myself without infringing. Since there's no copyright, there's nothing to infringe on.
Compilations of facts might be copyrightable, but are not necessarily so. In order to be copyrightable, a compilation must possess originality, i.e. a creative selection and arrangement of components. All facts is not a creative selection. Ordinary arrangements, e.g. chronological, or alphabetical, is not a creative arrangement. It is fairly difficult to construct a copyrightable factual compilation (mostly it is a matter of creative selection).
As facts remain uncopyrightable, they can be copied from the copyrighted compilation, so long as the compilation itself is not copied. Furthermore, they can be observed from the source. So long as the copyrighted work is not itself copied, it is not infringing to have an identical, independently produced work, however the facts within are obtained. While it's possible to claim that sufficient similarity is indicative of copying (think of the odds of monkeys on typewriters) access is required to allege this. Since we're talking about information you don't want made public, there would presumably be no public copies which a purported infringer could've copied from, so similarity doesn't work for you.
But this is all dancing around the central issue: living your life and in the process producing facts is not an act of creative authorship. Just because you do something doesn't mean that you own the fact of it, or that the fact of it, by itself, is a creative work. You'd need to write it down. And even then, you can only protect what you write, as opposed to the uncopyrightable material within or the independently observable facts your writing is based upon.
Privacy is an interesting issue, particularly given the ability to store, search, and correlate vast quantities of information quickly and automatically. But it has nothing to do with copyright. Again, your post was pretty stupid.