No, because there are nonobvious software and business method inventions, but they still tend to cause trouble. And remember that nonobviousness is considered without hindsight (which tends to make everything obvious) and involves the obviousness of the problem itself, to an extent.
E.g. one-click purchasing seems obvious, and certainly wouldn't be difficult for any PHOSITA to do, but even with all the online stores, no one thought of actually doing it, hence, it's apparently not all that obvious after all. (I'm not trying to confuse novelty and nonobviousness here, but remember that obvious inventions are those that a noncreative person having full knowledge of prior art, would have had a reason to put together.)
There does seem to be a problem with examination lately, but I think that even if it was working fine, things would still be bad.
Copyrights and patents have nonoverlapping subject matter.
Copyrights are for creative works; expressions of ideas. Patents are for inventions, regardless of implementation.
Copyrighting a story only lets you get that expression of the underlying idea. Anyone else is free to use the idea, even if they distill it from the copyrighted work. Drawing the line between idea and expression is tricky, but the more abstract, the more likely that it's an idea. It's okay to have many coexisting works that have the same underlying ideas.
A patent on a story would be more like having protection on the underlying plot. No one could write a story using the plot, even if the story was otherwise different.
We can find a good analogy in the software field: you could patent a program that did a certain thing (let's say spreadsheet programs, assuming that you invented it, filed early enough, etc.). You could also copyright your specific implementation of a spreadsheet program. The patent prevents other people from writing spreadsheet software, however they do it. The copyright prevents other people from copying your specific program, but doesn't protect spreadsheet programs generally, like a patent would.
Of course, there are no good arguments against software patents other than one. It's pretty widely accepted that a machine ought to be patentable. What's the difference, then, between a mechanical calculator, with many gears and so forth, that can add, subtract, and so forth, or an electronic calculator that does the same with hardwired transistors, or software that does the same on a general purpose platform? There's no good line, and certainly nothing in the statutes that would support drawing a line. Likewise, method patents are perfectly reasonable in the main. If you invent a way of turning lead into gold, why shouldn't you be able to get a patent on it? Similarly, what's the difference between a method of doing that, and a method of selling things online, in a particular fashion?
No, the good argument against software patents, business method patents, etc. is that they're simply unnecessary. Patents are intended to encourage the creation, disclosure, and use of inventions. But these fields are already rife with incentives to create and use, and disclosure tends to come naturally enough. The name 'one click shopping' or a demonstration of it in action is enough disclosure for any PHOSITA. So what would more incentives accomplish? Furthermore, the exclusive rights are actually impairing progress in the field far more than they're encouraging it. We're worse off with patents in these areas than we would be without them. Now, this might not always be true, and I don't mind looking at these fields from time to time to see if they've matured and slowed down such that patents are of some utility. But at present, they're doing more harm than good.
Unfortunately, the courts can't do anything about this. There are no good arguments that exclude software and so on from the field of patentable subject matter given what the law is now. Instead, this is a policy argument that has to be addressed to Congress. Good luck with that.
Nah, they're obligated to accept it, so long as the paperwork and fees are all proper. Only when it's accepted can it be examined and rejected. It would be bad if the PTO rejected applications out of hand without actually examining them first.
Actually the Mac was in development before the Lisa project adopted similar UI concepts and goals. They were both worked on at the same time, with a lot of ideas going from one to the other. The Lisa happened to be released first, but it's incorrect to think of it as being the source of the Macintosh.
(Also, pre System 6 version numbers are wierd. Generally, people wouldn't talk about the version of the OS, so much as the versions of the Finder and System. E.g. version 5 of the OS was comprised of System 4.2 and Finder 6.0. System 6 was much more coherent, and System 7 even more so.)
If everyone can get off by claiming that "someone else did it" then why are copyright cases ever litigated?
Because it usually doesn't work. The identity of the defendant has to be proven by a preponderance of the evidence. Typically it's more likely than not that a particular person did it. For example, claiming that you had an open WAP and that someone infringed via your WAP is not a very good defense; if it's more likely that it was you than some mysterious stranger, than that meets the standard of proof. OTOH, is it more likely that Grandpa is downloading "The Incredibles," "I, Robot," "The Grudge," and "The Forgotten" via some sort of P2P program, or that 12-year-old Timmy is? In the end, it depends on what the jury believes.
As for the abolishment of copyright law, you gotta wonder exactly how much shit people will take before they say enough and demand an exemption for home use.
Well, an exception is different. I'd like to see an exception that applied to otherwise-infringing acts by natural persons, noncommercially. But this would still preserve copyright for corporate entities and for commercial behavior (i.e. pretty much anything involving money changing hands). In fact, I've been promoting this idea for a few years now.
I had assumed that we were only talking about minors. Of course children in their majority are responsible for themselves, but the same is usually true of minor children as well. There are a few exceptions, but usually if a child injures you, you need to sue the child, not the parent.
As for the name being on the bill, that won't make you responsible for just any use of the service, at least where a third party like a copyright holder is involved.
Actually, parents are rarely ever responsible for the torts of their children. If MPAA can't prove that the grandparent did it, in light of his claim that it was his grandchild who did it, then he will indeed get off the hook.
There are indirect forms of copyright infringement, but they would still require that the grandchild be shown to be the direct infringer, and would require more of the grandfather than merely owning the telephone line. I'm afraid that your grasp of the law remains, as ever, poor.
Additionally, while I would like to see significant reform of copyright law, I don't think that we're at a point where it makes sense to abolish it.
The amount has no connection to any actual harm that the copyright holder might have suffered; it's just an arbitrary number that Congress put in the law ($150k per work). Think of it as being a bit like worker's comp in that regard.
This time the MPAA wants "as much as $600,000" in damages.... Not sure where the MPAA comes up with these figures."
17 USC 504(c)(2) is where.
There are two types of damages available in a copyright infringement suit: actual and statutory. The plaintiff gets to pick which one he wants. The maximum possible statutory damages are $150,000 per work willfully infringed. In this case there are apparently four works. 4 times $150,000 is $600,000.
Of course, they would need to not only prove infringement, but that the infringement was willful. Furthermore, that only results in the court being able to award any amount it feels appropriate, within the range of $750 - $150,000 per work. The amount awarded may well be less than the amount sought.
First, the NET Act is merely a modification to title 17. No one is prosecuted under that act alone; rather they're prosecuted under the Copyright Act as a whole. As already noted, it is entirely possible to be a criminal copyright infringer without touching on the provisions added by the NET Act. Why you have such an obsession about that specific act, I cannot imagine.
In fact, even if you were to upload the work in question, I suspect that a case prosecuted under FECA (i.e. 506(a)(1)(C)) would be more likely than one prosecuted under NET (i.e. 506(a)(1)(A)).
Second, while I'd want to look at some cases involving determination of retail value in the context of criminal copyright infringement, I would not rely on the idea that x86 OSX has no retail value at all. Courts don't like infringers, as a rule, and would likely feel free to interpret this in a manner that is bad for the defendant.
Copyright infringement is the infringement of any of the exclusive rights of the copyright holder, per 17 USC 501. One of the exclusive rights is the right to reproduce the work in copies, per 106(1). As it happens, the courts have generally considered the reproduction of works into RAM, hard drives, etc. to qualify, and to be infringing. The MAI and Intellectual Reserve cases are examples of this.
This is too well settled for you to be able to truthfully dispute it. You can argue that it's dumb, but that doesn't mean that it's not the current law.
The only question left is whether it is criminal copyright infringement, which is a subset of copyright infringement generally. Per 506(a), copyright infringement of the reproduction sort is criminal if it is willful and either a) is for the purpose of commercial advantage or private financial gain, or b) involves the reproduction during any 180 day period of works with a total retail value of over $1000.
Private financial gain is defined in 101 to include the "receipt, or expectation of receipt, of anything of value, including the receipt of other copyrighted works." That's what the NET Act added, to cover warez trading. Presumably it isn't applicable for a mere downloader. Of course, making a copy through downloading, where you anticipate someone will return the favor by making a copy of something for you would qualify. Uploading without any receipt or expectation of receipt would not. So it's more complicated than whether data went up or down, as you seemed to think.
In any case, if the retail value of the downloaded work -- or all the downloads over the last 180 days, as your typical downloader probably downloads a lot -- is over $1000, then it is irrelevant whether or not he planned to trade warez. He's a criminal infringer anyway, if he infringed willfully.
You really ought to try reading the statutes instead of relying on just the laws that tweak them, or more likely, the sort of gossip and hearsay that most people on the net seem to believe in.
He is incorrect, as downloading is capable of being copyright infringement, which can rise to the level of a crime in the United States. But you're incorrect too. You can't use a stolen property law as a substitute for a copyright law; this was settled decades ago by the Supreme Court.
Their insistence on the "resource" fork always struck me as idiotic: data is data. If it is in a file, it is a bunch of bytes (or even blocks of bytes) -- no need to have separate "meta" information.
Resource forks are sensible given their purpose: to allow strings, in-program graphics, sounds, etc. to be tweaked without having to recompile or have necessary files outside of the application itself.
This way localization and some UI changes could be made without having to know how to change the source directly. Translators that can program are more costly than translators that can fiddle with ResEdit. Early on it was also hoped that files could use them productively (e.g. a text file that was raw text in the data fork, so that lesser systems could still read it, but with formatting in the resource fork) but this didn't really work out.
Application bundles (folders that masquerade as actual programs, and contain all the various resources in separate files) are a different way of accomplishing the same goal, basically. They're not quite as good, since they're known to break and revert back to behaving like folders, but it's better than what you see on other platforms.
At any rate, given that you seem to actually be complaining about metadata, this indicates that you have no idea what a resource fork is and probably never seriously used a Mac. Metadata (which is invaluable) is known on pretty much all platforms to one degree or another. Filenames, permissions, modification dates -- these are all metadata, and may or may not be portable across platforms. The Mac had some additional metadata -- custom icons, file types, which app should open a particular file, etc. -- and it improved the usability of the system. Frankly, we could do with yet more.
Of course, if you like to tell software what sectors on the disk to read instead of using filenames, which are metadata, more power to you. But most people aren't that crazy.
That drove me nuts -- it meant you couldn't easily make tools (as in any Unix environment), because you had to be willing to do resource fork stuff.
Meh. As a rule of thumb, doing a task in software takes a set amount of work. The more work that the programmer does once, the less work that the user will have to do repeatedly. So programming should be comparatively hard, in order to make use quite easy.
Now, the form of use that consists of creating more tools should also be easy, but that requires a hell of a lot of work by programmers to make it so. Recently, Apple has put out Automator, which is handy, but still needs significant work. Applescript was an interesting attempt, but really didn't work out well for most people.
No. Processes are not copyrightable. A description of a process might be, but any such copyright can't impair other people from writing their own descriptions of the same process, even if they're determining what the process is by reading the first description.
This is due to the idea/expression dichotomy which is at the heart of copyright. You can also look at 17 USC 102, in particular subsection (b), for the statute regarding this.
No, no, I'm talking about policy. There is no need to grant copyrights on all works by all artists. We should try to limit grants of copyrights to only those artists that otherwise wouldn't create the works in question, and limit the degree of copyright to the minimum that gets them to create those works.
It's perfectly fine to take a work without paying for it if it is not copyrighted, and we should not grant copyrights indiscriminately.
That's true but only after a period in which the author has had an opportunity to be compensated. That's why copyrights exist - to foster the creation of new works with an eye towards the betterment of society at large.
No. It's not necessary that the author has an opportunity to be compensated. Only that the aforementioned societal goals are maximally satisfied.
Piracy is a degenerate act - it requires little effort and has the negative effect of discouraging creation.
It doesn't discourage creation. It just fails to encourage it economically. Also, effort isn't relevant. Some pirates work hard. Some authors don't work hard.
If you want a society in which people create new bodies of work, you have to reward them.
Of course, copyright is hardly the only way of doing so, and only provides at most one sort of reward.
It's foolhardy to think that artists will create new works without regard to how they will feed and house themselves.
And I don't expect them to, although this has been known to happen. But I also am unwilling to provide economic incentives for every artist and their work. I don't care at all for helping artists for their own sake. I just want their works, freedom with regard to those works, and the least possible cost, if any, in order to accomplish this.
Well, if we're going all the way back to 'Organization A asks for information about John Doe B from ISP C' then I don't think there's a problem with them asking.
It's probably good to have laws limiting how fully, if at all, the ISP can answer. But if you don't have those laws, then it's at the ISP's discretion; might work out well, might not.
And the author and ditchdigger are both free to do something else if they don't like the framework set up around writing and ditchdigging. No one is forcing them to work at a particular job.
The public is willing to grant copyrights, but only as it sees fit, and only for its own ultimate goals. If an author can work with that, then that's great. If not, well, that's how things go.
Authors can ask for compensation. Whether they can get it or not depends more on everyone else, since they're the ones that get to decide whether it will be given.
Well, I'm talking about this in the context of a trial or other legal proceedings. I had figured this was clear, given that we're talking about serving process, discovery, etc. Would you care to respond again, given that?
You're forgetting that if the author isn't protected from theft, he/she will be less inclined to produce the culture that's being "stolen."
Yes. But so what? The goals of society are to both encourage the creation of works and to have those works be in the public domain. While we can cause a lot of creation to occur by slightly delaying entrance into the public domain, and only granting a modicum of protection even during that initial period, there does come a point of diminishing returns. In fact, we eventually reach a point where granting more protection reduces the amount of creation.
So there will always be unprotected authors, because some works just aren't worth protecting to the extent that it would take to cause them to be created.
Furthermore, we should be responsible with copyright policy. We should provide no more incentive than the minimum amount necessary to get the maximum amount of net public benefit (i.e. the benefit of creation minus the harm caused by their not being in the public domain). To provide more of an incentive would be wasteful.
Slavery arises when a man is required to work for nothing which from the jist of your post, is exactly what you think creators should be paid.
Failure to give artists an economic incentive to create works is hardly comparable to forcing them to create. If artists aren't incentivized, they can be accountants or something. There's no one cracking a whip over them, so please stop with your useless hyperbole.
It's not the protection from theft that's evil, it's the theft itself that's evil.
It's not theft, and neither is evil. Copyright is utilitarian and essentially amoral.
Although if there were a moral component, it'd be in favor of pirates, who spread and enjoy knowledge and help ensure that works will survive, as opposed to authors, who act as gatekeepers.
Slashdot Mirror
No, because there are nonobvious software and business method inventions, but they still tend to cause trouble. And remember that nonobviousness is considered without hindsight (which tends to make everything obvious) and involves the obviousness of the problem itself, to an extent.
E.g. one-click purchasing seems obvious, and certainly wouldn't be difficult for any PHOSITA to do, but even with all the online stores, no one thought of actually doing it, hence, it's apparently not all that obvious after all. (I'm not trying to confuse novelty and nonobviousness here, but remember that obvious inventions are those that a noncreative person having full knowledge of prior art, would have had a reason to put together.)
There does seem to be a problem with examination lately, but I think that even if it was working fine, things would still be bad.
Useful and nonobvious, perhaps, but we all know it's not a novel acronym. ;)
Copyrights and patents have nonoverlapping subject matter.
Copyrights are for creative works; expressions of ideas. Patents are for inventions, regardless of implementation.
Copyrighting a story only lets you get that expression of the underlying idea. Anyone else is free to use the idea, even if they distill it from the copyrighted work. Drawing the line between idea and expression is tricky, but the more abstract, the more likely that it's an idea. It's okay to have many coexisting works that have the same underlying ideas.
A patent on a story would be more like having protection on the underlying plot. No one could write a story using the plot, even if the story was otherwise different.
We can find a good analogy in the software field: you could patent a program that did a certain thing (let's say spreadsheet programs, assuming that you invented it, filed early enough, etc.). You could also copyright your specific implementation of a spreadsheet program. The patent prevents other people from writing spreadsheet software, however they do it. The copyright prevents other people from copying your specific program, but doesn't protect spreadsheet programs generally, like a patent would.
Of course, there are no good arguments against software patents other than one. It's pretty widely accepted that a machine ought to be patentable. What's the difference, then, between a mechanical calculator, with many gears and so forth, that can add, subtract, and so forth, or an electronic calculator that does the same with hardwired transistors, or software that does the same on a general purpose platform? There's no good line, and certainly nothing in the statutes that would support drawing a line. Likewise, method patents are perfectly reasonable in the main. If you invent a way of turning lead into gold, why shouldn't you be able to get a patent on it? Similarly, what's the difference between a method of doing that, and a method of selling things online, in a particular fashion?
No, the good argument against software patents, business method patents, etc. is that they're simply unnecessary. Patents are intended to encourage the creation, disclosure, and use of inventions. But these fields are already rife with incentives to create and use, and disclosure tends to come naturally enough. The name 'one click shopping' or a demonstration of it in action is enough disclosure for any PHOSITA. So what would more incentives accomplish? Furthermore, the exclusive rights are actually impairing progress in the field far more than they're encouraging it. We're worse off with patents in these areas than we would be without them. Now, this might not always be true, and I don't mind looking at these fields from time to time to see if they've matured and slowed down such that patents are of some utility. But at present, they're doing more harm than good.
Unfortunately, the courts can't do anything about this. There are no good arguments that exclude software and so on from the field of patentable subject matter given what the law is now. Instead, this is a policy argument that has to be addressed to Congress. Good luck with that.
Nah, they're obligated to accept it, so long as the paperwork and fees are all proper. Only when it's accepted can it be examined and rejected. It would be bad if the PTO rejected applications out of hand without actually examining them first.
Actually the Mac was in development before the Lisa project adopted similar UI concepts and goals. They were both worked on at the same time, with a lot of ideas going from one to the other. The Lisa happened to be released first, but it's incorrect to think of it as being the source of the Macintosh.
(Also, pre System 6 version numbers are wierd. Generally, people wouldn't talk about the version of the OS, so much as the versions of the Finder and System. E.g. version 5 of the OS was comprised of System 4.2 and Finder 6.0. System 6 was much more coherent, and System 7 even more so.)
If everyone can get off by claiming that "someone else did it" then why are copyright cases ever litigated?
Because it usually doesn't work. The identity of the defendant has to be proven by a preponderance of the evidence. Typically it's more likely than not that a particular person did it. For example, claiming that you had an open WAP and that someone infringed via your WAP is not a very good defense; if it's more likely that it was you than some mysterious stranger, than that meets the standard of proof. OTOH, is it more likely that Grandpa is downloading "The Incredibles," "I, Robot," "The Grudge," and "The Forgotten" via some sort of P2P program, or that 12-year-old Timmy is? In the end, it depends on what the jury believes.
As for the abolishment of copyright law, you gotta wonder exactly how much shit people will take before they say enough and demand an exemption for home use.
Well, an exception is different. I'd like to see an exception that applied to otherwise-infringing acts by natural persons, noncommercially. But this would still preserve copyright for corporate entities and for commercial behavior (i.e. pretty much anything involving money changing hands). In fact, I've been promoting this idea for a few years now.
I had assumed that we were only talking about minors. Of course children in their majority are responsible for themselves, but the same is usually true of minor children as well. There are a few exceptions, but usually if a child injures you, you need to sue the child, not the parent.
As for the name being on the bill, that won't make you responsible for just any use of the service, at least where a third party like a copyright holder is involved.
Actually, parents are rarely ever responsible for the torts of their children. If MPAA can't prove that the grandparent did it, in light of his claim that it was his grandchild who did it, then he will indeed get off the hook.
There are indirect forms of copyright infringement, but they would still require that the grandchild be shown to be the direct infringer, and would require more of the grandfather than merely owning the telephone line. I'm afraid that your grasp of the law remains, as ever, poor.
Additionally, while I would like to see significant reform of copyright law, I don't think that we're at a point where it makes sense to abolish it.
A couple of nits:
It's $600k, not $60k.
The amount has no connection to any actual harm that the copyright holder might have suffered; it's just an arbitrary number that Congress put in the law ($150k per work). Think of it as being a bit like worker's comp in that regard.
This time the MPAA wants "as much as $600,000" in damages. ... Not sure where the MPAA comes up with these figures."
17 USC 504(c)(2) is where.
There are two types of damages available in a copyright infringement suit: actual and statutory. The plaintiff gets to pick which one he wants. The maximum possible statutory damages are $150,000 per work willfully infringed. In this case there are apparently four works. 4 times $150,000 is $600,000.
Of course, they would need to not only prove infringement, but that the infringement was willful. Furthermore, that only results in the court being able to award any amount it feels appropriate, within the range of $750 - $150,000 per work. The amount awarded may well be less than the amount sought.
I do not agree with you.
First, the NET Act is merely a modification to title 17. No one is prosecuted under that act alone; rather they're prosecuted under the Copyright Act as a whole. As already noted, it is entirely possible to be a criminal copyright infringer without touching on the provisions added by the NET Act. Why you have such an obsession about that specific act, I cannot imagine.
In fact, even if you were to upload the work in question, I suspect that a case prosecuted under FECA (i.e. 506(a)(1)(C)) would be more likely than one prosecuted under NET (i.e. 506(a)(1)(A)).
Second, while I'd want to look at some cases involving determination of retail value in the context of criminal copyright infringement, I would not rely on the idea that x86 OSX has no retail value at all. Courts don't like infringers, as a rule, and would likely feel free to interpret this in a manner that is bad for the defendant.
Wrong.
Copyright infringement is the infringement of any of the exclusive rights of the copyright holder, per 17 USC 501. One of the exclusive rights is the right to reproduce the work in copies, per 106(1). As it happens, the courts have generally considered the reproduction of works into RAM, hard drives, etc. to qualify, and to be infringing. The MAI and Intellectual Reserve cases are examples of this.
This is too well settled for you to be able to truthfully dispute it. You can argue that it's dumb, but that doesn't mean that it's not the current law.
The only question left is whether it is criminal copyright infringement, which is a subset of copyright infringement generally. Per 506(a), copyright infringement of the reproduction sort is criminal if it is willful and either a) is for the purpose of commercial advantage or private financial gain, or b) involves the reproduction during any 180 day period of works with a total retail value of over $1000.
Private financial gain is defined in 101 to include the "receipt, or expectation of receipt, of anything of value, including the receipt of other copyrighted works." That's what the NET Act added, to cover warez trading. Presumably it isn't applicable for a mere downloader. Of course, making a copy through downloading, where you anticipate someone will return the favor by making a copy of something for you would qualify. Uploading without any receipt or expectation of receipt would not. So it's more complicated than whether data went up or down, as you seemed to think.
In any case, if the retail value of the downloaded work -- or all the downloads over the last 180 days, as your typical downloader probably downloads a lot -- is over $1000, then it is irrelevant whether or not he planned to trade warez. He's a criminal infringer anyway, if he infringed willfully.
You really ought to try reading the statutes instead of relying on just the laws that tweak them, or more likely, the sort of gossip and hearsay that most people on the net seem to believe in.
He is incorrect, as downloading is capable of being copyright infringement, which can rise to the level of a crime in the United States. But you're incorrect too. You can't use a stolen property law as a substitute for a copyright law; this was settled decades ago by the Supreme Court.
Their insistence on the "resource" fork always struck me as idiotic: data is data. If it is in a file, it is a bunch of bytes (or even blocks of bytes) -- no need to have separate "meta" information.
Resource forks are sensible given their purpose: to allow strings, in-program graphics, sounds, etc. to be tweaked without having to recompile or have necessary files outside of the application itself.
This way localization and some UI changes could be made without having to know how to change the source directly. Translators that can program are more costly than translators that can fiddle with ResEdit. Early on it was also hoped that files could use them productively (e.g. a text file that was raw text in the data fork, so that lesser systems could still read it, but with formatting in the resource fork) but this didn't really work out.
Application bundles (folders that masquerade as actual programs, and contain all the various resources in separate files) are a different way of accomplishing the same goal, basically. They're not quite as good, since they're known to break and revert back to behaving like folders, but it's better than what you see on other platforms.
At any rate, given that you seem to actually be complaining about metadata, this indicates that you have no idea what a resource fork is and probably never seriously used a Mac. Metadata (which is invaluable) is known on pretty much all platforms to one degree or another. Filenames, permissions, modification dates -- these are all metadata, and may or may not be portable across platforms. The Mac had some additional metadata -- custom icons, file types, which app should open a particular file, etc. -- and it improved the usability of the system. Frankly, we could do with yet more.
Of course, if you like to tell software what sectors on the disk to read instead of using filenames, which are metadata, more power to you. But most people aren't that crazy.
That drove me nuts -- it meant you couldn't easily make tools (as in any Unix environment), because you had to be willing to do resource fork stuff.
Meh. As a rule of thumb, doing a task in software takes a set amount of work. The more work that the programmer does once, the less work that the user will have to do repeatedly. So programming should be comparatively hard, in order to make use quite easy.
Now, the form of use that consists of creating more tools should also be easy, but that requires a hell of a lot of work by programmers to make it so. Recently, Apple has put out Automator, which is handy, but still needs significant work. Applescript was an interesting attempt, but really didn't work out well for most people.
No. Processes are not copyrightable. A description of a process might be, but any such copyright can't impair other people from writing their own descriptions of the same process, even if they're determining what the process is by reading the first description.
This is due to the idea/expression dichotomy which is at the heart of copyright. You can also look at 17 USC 102, in particular subsection (b), for the statute regarding this.
You simply can't go around splashing people's signatures in public places any more than you can publish their social security numbers.
Do you mind providing some basis for that? I can't think of anything that prohibits either, actually, unless there's something more going on.
I think we're pretty much agreed on these points then.
No, no, I'm talking about policy. There is no need to grant copyrights on all works by all artists. We should try to limit grants of copyrights to only those artists that otherwise wouldn't create the works in question, and limit the degree of copyright to the minimum that gets them to create those works.
It's perfectly fine to take a work without paying for it if it is not copyrighted, and we should not grant copyrights indiscriminately.
That's true but only after a period in which the author has had an opportunity to be compensated. That's why copyrights exist - to foster the creation of new works with an eye towards the betterment of society at large.
No. It's not necessary that the author has an opportunity to be compensated. Only that the aforementioned societal goals are maximally satisfied.
Piracy is a degenerate act - it requires little effort and has the negative effect of discouraging creation.
It doesn't discourage creation. It just fails to encourage it economically. Also, effort isn't relevant. Some pirates work hard. Some authors don't work hard.
If you want a society in which people create new bodies of work, you have to reward them.
Of course, copyright is hardly the only way of doing so, and only provides at most one sort of reward.
It's foolhardy to think that artists will create new works without regard to how they will feed and house themselves.
And I don't expect them to, although this has been known to happen. But I also am unwilling to provide economic incentives for every artist and their work. I don't care at all for helping artists for their own sake. I just want their works, freedom with regard to those works, and the least possible cost, if any, in order to accomplish this.
Well, if we're going all the way back to 'Organization A asks for information about John Doe B from ISP C' then I don't think there's a problem with them asking.
It's probably good to have laws limiting how fully, if at all, the ISP can answer. But if you don't have those laws, then it's at the ISP's discretion; might work out well, might not.
And the author and ditchdigger are both free to do something else if they don't like the framework set up around writing and ditchdigging. No one is forcing them to work at a particular job.
The public is willing to grant copyrights, but only as it sees fit, and only for its own ultimate goals. If an author can work with that, then that's great. If not, well, that's how things go.
Authors can ask for compensation. Whether they can get it or not depends more on everyone else, since they're the ones that get to decide whether it will be given.
Actually, RIAA and MPAA use 'Association of America' in their names.
Well, I'm talking about this in the context of a trial or other legal proceedings. I had figured this was clear, given that we're talking about serving process, discovery, etc. Would you care to respond again, given that?
You're forgetting that if the author isn't protected from theft, he/she will be less inclined to produce the culture that's being "stolen."
Yes. But so what? The goals of society are to both encourage the creation of works and to have those works be in the public domain. While we can cause a lot of creation to occur by slightly delaying entrance into the public domain, and only granting a modicum of protection even during that initial period, there does come a point of diminishing returns. In fact, we eventually reach a point where granting more protection reduces the amount of creation.
So there will always be unprotected authors, because some works just aren't worth protecting to the extent that it would take to cause them to be created.
Furthermore, we should be responsible with copyright policy. We should provide no more incentive than the minimum amount necessary to get the maximum amount of net public benefit (i.e. the benefit of creation minus the harm caused by their not being in the public domain). To provide more of an incentive would be wasteful.
Slavery arises when a man is required to work for nothing which from the jist of your post, is exactly what you think creators should be paid.
Failure to give artists an economic incentive to create works is hardly comparable to forcing them to create. If artists aren't incentivized, they can be accountants or something. There's no one cracking a whip over them, so please stop with your useless hyperbole.
It's not the protection from theft that's evil, it's the theft itself that's evil.
It's not theft, and neither is evil. Copyright is utilitarian and essentially amoral.
Although if there were a moral component, it'd be in favor of pirates, who spread and enjoy knowledge and help ensure that works will survive, as opposed to authors, who act as gatekeepers.
That's odd. Wouldn't work in the US, though.