Yeah, and most of those, if subject to suit in US courts, are complying with the DMCA safe harbor regulations I should hope.
Nothing more illegal about indexing shares than the web -- it's basically a matter of it they knew of infringement, or if they took advantage of the safe harbor.
I'm not saying I think this is good reasoning necessarily. But it's what we're presently stuck with, so it's important to at least know the rules that will be applied, unless and until we can get a beneficial change through. (and in that regards the safe harbor was pretty good!)
Napster provided an index of only MP3 files and means for people to connect and talk to each other to swap files. These guys were running an indexing program that searched all the shared drives on the local network and produced an index of the files.
Doesn't matter.
Contributory infringement: if you know or have reason to know of direct infringement, and induce, cause, or materially contribute to it, you're liable too. You don't need knowledge of specific acts of infringement according to the Napster court; just infringement generally. Providing the technology isn't enough to give you knowledge if there are possible substantial noninfringing uses. But if you know or have reason to know for some other reason than the capabilities of your technology, that won't really help you. Particularly if you know of specific instances of infringement and don't purge it from your system insofar as you're capable and legally able to.
Vicarious infringement: if you have the right and ability to control the direct infringer's action, and get a direct financial benefit from the infringement. There can be financial benefit if infringement is a draw for paying customers. In Napster it attracted users who might someday be paying users, so it qualified. If you were a landlord for an actual place where this occurred and got a cut of the profits (as opposed to a flat rent that never varied) that would count too. Helping to sell ads might qualify as well. And if you have a legal right to control what's done over your system, and the actual ability to do so, you must be forever perfectly vigilant to never let any infringement occurr, or at least persist once you know of it. A system that didn't let you delete stuff off of it might help you, but it would probably be hard to build one that really worked like that and certainly to avoid the court not really believing you since it seems like such bad faith thing to do, viz. willful blindness. Even if the material isn't quite on your system, the index of material still has to be policed, since it basically corresponds to the infringing files and is what's actually helping the infringement occur. Wrong spellings don't help, since you have to police with common sense, just as users can decipher the typos with common sense.
So this still seems wrong to me, as contributory infringement. Maybe not vicarious, but I don't know all the details of what the people here were doing or planned to do. Most important was what they actually knew -- but unless these guys were naive pollyannas, I don't see much wiggle room there.
So my question is, are services that find copywritten material on networks Illegal?
Sometimes. It depends on whether or not there was contributory or vicarious infringement. The Napster case went into this quite a bit.
It's rarely an issue now though, because per 17 USC 512, if the person with the search engine takes a few simple steps, they can totally avoid getting sued.
These kids didn't know about that apparently, so they didn't try. Google, which has lawyers, knows enough to comply with the statute (the DMCA safe harbor -- the halfway decent part of the DMCA, just as there's a very good part of the CDA) and so avoids the issue.
It sounds like it runs perilously close to renting CDs which is illegal. You can normally rent copyrighted materials, but not music or computer games (except for console games). 17 USC 109, IIRC.
Other countries, e.g. Japan do have music rental stores, so it's not like this is a worldwide practice.
I suppose that if you can buy a CD and keep it permanently it could work.... but there is the issue that YOU didn't create the mp3 of it, and the co-op is keeping possession of the mp3 in order to transfer it to you (arguably illegal distribution) which sounds like the mp3.com case that the RIAA won.
Really? And here I thought that 17 USC 506 was pretty clear that for certain types of copyright infringements you can be imprisoned for at most a couple of years.
Of course, it requires the government to prosecute you, but they've been doing that more and more these days. Skylarov went to jail. Some guy selling XBox mod chips just pled and went to jail, IIRC. I don't recall if Mitnick had copyright infringement charges brought against him or not; he was already in enough trouble though.
Actually, one of these guys was running a search engine. Since when is that illegal!?
I believe they all were running search engines.
But that's been held illegal before. Napster ran a search engine and was destroyed over it. It's because, without getting into the nitty gritty of contributory and vicarious infringement, you're helping other people infringe.
Congress enacted a law as part of the DMCA that allows people with search engines to totally avoid this sort of liability. But it requires you to do certain things to be immune, e.g. comply with takedown notices, have certain policies posted for your users to see, etc.
These kids didn't do any of that apparently, so it didn't help them. Professional operations like Google usually hire lawyers who tell them what to do in advance, so they can avoid getting sued.
Hopefully this whole experience will at least be good for getting people who run these kinds of search engines in the future to be aware of and take advantage of this safe harbor, like the big boys do.
Perhaps there should be a/. article describing precisely what to do to acquire the immunity.
Well, if you download music, pretty likely making a copy in the process, this is an infringement of the right to create copies.
You're correct that the offeror of the file is liable for infringing the right to distribute copies, though.
As for receiving infringing copies without having made the copies yourself... maybe there's a vicarious or contributory infringement there. I can see the argument, but it seems particularly inequitable, so I'm not sure how a court would feel about enforcing that if the only indirect infringement alleged was paying someone to sell you the infringing copy.
Well, given that the program is small enough that it arguably is actually just a key that also happens to have some executory function (it's what, 55 bytes?) then couldn't the merger doctrine in copyright law apply?
That is, I'm not saying that it's impossible to be creative in 55 bytes. I wrote a very small haiku just to prove otherwise. But I sincerely doubt that it is reasonably possible to write ANOTHER 55 byte program that has the same function without it being virtually or wholly identical.
I do think that it would be good if everyone were knowledgable about their computers.
But I don't demand it. And I certainly don't think that computers should be an exclusive club, no matter how low the standards are.
Computers are here to help people do things. An ideal computer would help people do things with as little input as possible. I don't see why this is bad.
Your complaint strikes me as being as nonsensical as someone who doesn't like automatic transmissions since people ought to learn how to use manual transmissions. Hell, I'd like a car that I could get in, tell it my destination, and I could take a nap or read a book.
Any degree of difficulty should, eventually, be eliminated. Preferably sooner than later. Because difficulty doesn't help anyone; it's worthless.
Well, unfortunately for you, the motivation behind usability is to help out everyone to do things.
UIs that are avoidably difficult to use are bad. In fact, it's offensive that people would create them -- they are wasting other people's time and effort due to incompetence or laziness.
If people believed as you did, we'd still be using CLIs exclusively. Or maybe we'd make everyone toggle in individual bytes on the front panel of their computers with switches. Because easy things are for losers.
In your car analogy, you forget how awful very old cars were to drive. And you forget that there is a great desire for self-driving cars, at least as soon as we can figure out how to make 'em work. Is that too easy for you?
I would suggest reading Jef Raskin's book. It has some discussion of this argument.
No, it's both. The S.S. character drawn is derivative of the copyright A.G. holds, even though by no means an exact copy.
Trademarks are ALSO an issue; possibly a stronger one. But not the only one. See the case involving "The Cat Not in the Hat" for how the copyright side of this might play out.
Exaggerated differences will, I hope, (everything in UI needs to be TESTED before being rolled out; everything) make documentation easier to write, make the user more aware that he is doing something quite different when he uses the secondary button, and hopefully speed up development of the reflex / muscle memory associated with that button without confusion with the primary one.
I think that the similarity between the two buttons now is responsible for a lot of the confusion newbie users have. Get rid of that similarity, and we might be able to improve usability significantly for them. Without imparing it for expert users (who often benefit from careful UI work anyway).
After all, users are of great importance. And they might not be especially intelligent. But we have to take them as we find them; they cannot be rejected.
Well that's why you mod it by putting in a PPC board that used the same sort of slot. IIRC some people took apart G4 cubes (also a neat design) and put them into the CCs.
Personally, I think that the entire compact line would've done well to have a portrait screen; too expensive in terms of RAM back in the day, but nowadays it's something I'd like to see. The new iMacs could do this handily.
Well, this is why having two otherwise identical buttons save for the left/right thing is bad.
More differentiation is needed. They should be different colors, have different textures, be located further apart so that different fingers are used to control them, have different sizes, and above all have an label on the button that is consistantly used by software or in speech whenever the buttons are referred to instead of having to rely on their position.
Personally as far as positioning goes, I favor having one large button on the top of the mouse along the lines of the old Apple ADB II mice, and then having a smaller button (or maybe a clickable jog dial) along the the side for use with the thumb.
What the hell ancient right are you talking about?
Copyrights didn't exist anywhere in the world at all prior to 1710 when the English Statute of Anne was passed, and that only applied to books, IIRC.
The states picked it up after the Revolution because our law was based on English law. They did a terrible job of dealing with copyrights and patents during the Confederacy, so, like raising armies, or running the post, it was a power granted to the new federal government.
BUT like so many other Article I powers, it is entirely at Congress' discretion as to whether or not to exercise that power. There's no ancient right to copyrights -- everything hinges on whether Congress chooses to grant copyrights. And they need not do so. Read Wheaton v. Peters, 33 U.S. (8 Peters) 591 (1834). And yes, it's the same Peters -- the case was a dispute between two different court reporters.
At any rate, with regards to music, compositions didn't become eligible for copyright until the 1831 Act, and the actual sound recordings didn't become eligible until the 1909 Act, and music generally is still not very well favored by copyright law.
Yeah, but did you notice how the tolls on the Ben Franklin and the Walt Whitman are both only for cars going west? It's not to make money, it's to discourage people from leaving New Jersey. And Jersey needs all the help it can get.;)
(posting from Camden, NJ, a few hundred yards away from the Ben Franklin Bridge)
Secret 2: The history channel is concerned with the history of hitler, the occult, UFOs and the secrets of the pyramids only
But they all share the same history. (i.e. Hitler being sent back in time by Nazi sorcerers, and building the pyramids with the help of aliens in UFOs)
No -- distribution is quite distinct from copying. A distributor need not ever make a copy in order to infringe. You only mentioned a part of infringement, and insinuated that you had discussed it all.
As for 106, firstly I did this from memory, secondly it IS the appropriate section of the code, and thirdly, I think that I have a decent understanding of it. At least enough to know that copying is not the end all be all of infringement.
Well in that case you'd just drop back to the issue of trademark infringement, which requires proof of actual customer confusion, or dilution, which requires proof of actual dilution.
Parodies of marks aren't an infringement or dilution. They're allowed. And copyrights don't suffer from a use-it-or-lose-it doctrine.
This didn't have to be done. OTOH if you are being very cautious about pursuing infringements of marks, you'd do it anyway to make sure. But you don't strictly have to.
Slashdot Mirror
Yeah, and most of those, if subject to suit in US courts, are complying with the DMCA safe harbor regulations I should hope.
Nothing more illegal about indexing shares than the web -- it's basically a matter of it they knew of infringement, or if they took advantage of the safe harbor.
I'm not saying I think this is good reasoning necessarily. But it's what we're presently stuck with, so it's important to at least know the rules that will be applied, unless and until we can get a beneficial change through. (and in that regards the safe harbor was pretty good!)
Napster provided an index of only MP3 files and means for people to connect and talk to each other to swap files. These guys were running an indexing program that searched all the shared drives on the local network and produced an index of the files.
Doesn't matter.
Contributory infringement: if you know or have reason to know of direct infringement, and induce, cause, or materially contribute to it, you're liable too. You don't need knowledge of specific acts of infringement according to the Napster court; just infringement generally. Providing the technology isn't enough to give you knowledge if there are possible substantial noninfringing uses. But if you know or have reason to know for some other reason than the capabilities of your technology, that won't really help you. Particularly if you know of specific instances of infringement and don't purge it from your system insofar as you're capable and legally able to.
Vicarious infringement: if you have the right and ability to control the direct infringer's action, and get a direct financial benefit from the infringement. There can be financial benefit if infringement is a draw for paying customers. In Napster it attracted users who might someday be paying users, so it qualified. If you were a landlord for an actual place where this occurred and got a cut of the profits (as opposed to a flat rent that never varied) that would count too. Helping to sell ads might qualify as well. And if you have a legal right to control what's done over your system, and the actual ability to do so, you must be forever perfectly vigilant to never let any infringement occurr, or at least persist once you know of it. A system that didn't let you delete stuff off of it might help you, but it would probably be hard to build one that really worked like that and certainly to avoid the court not really believing you since it seems like such bad faith thing to do, viz. willful blindness. Even if the material isn't quite on your system, the index of material still has to be policed, since it basically corresponds to the infringing files and is what's actually helping the infringement occur. Wrong spellings don't help, since you have to police with common sense, just as users can decipher the typos with common sense.
So this still seems wrong to me, as contributory infringement. Maybe not vicarious, but I don't know all the details of what the people here were doing or planned to do. Most important was what they actually knew -- but unless these guys were naive pollyannas, I don't see much wiggle room there.
So my question is, are services that find copywritten material on networks Illegal?
Sometimes. It depends on whether or not there was contributory or vicarious infringement. The Napster case went into this quite a bit.
It's rarely an issue now though, because per 17 USC 512, if the person with the search engine takes a few simple steps, they can totally avoid getting sued.
These kids didn't know about that apparently, so they didn't try. Google, which has lawyers, knows enough to comply with the statute (the DMCA safe harbor -- the halfway decent part of the DMCA, just as there's a very good part of the CDA) and so avoids the issue.
It sounds like it runs perilously close to renting CDs which is illegal. You can normally rent copyrighted materials, but not music or computer games (except for console games). 17 USC 109, IIRC.
Other countries, e.g. Japan do have music rental stores, so it's not like this is a worldwide practice.
I suppose that if you can buy a CD and keep it permanently it could work.... but there is the issue that YOU didn't create the mp3 of it, and the co-op is keeping possession of the mp3 in order to transfer it to you (arguably illegal distribution) which sounds like the mp3.com case that the RIAA won.
Really? And here I thought that 17 USC 506 was pretty clear that for certain types of copyright infringements you can be imprisoned for at most a couple of years.
Of course, it requires the government to prosecute you, but they've been doing that more and more these days. Skylarov went to jail. Some guy selling XBox mod chips just pled and went to jail, IIRC. I don't recall if Mitnick had copyright infringement charges brought against him or not; he was already in enough trouble though.
Actually, one of these guys was running a search engine. Since when is that illegal!?
/. article describing precisely what to do to acquire the immunity.
I believe they all were running search engines.
But that's been held illegal before. Napster ran a search engine and was destroyed over it. It's because, without getting into the nitty gritty of contributory and vicarious infringement, you're helping other people infringe.
Congress enacted a law as part of the DMCA that allows people with search engines to totally avoid this sort of liability. But it requires you to do certain things to be immune, e.g. comply with takedown notices, have certain policies posted for your users to see, etc.
These kids didn't do any of that apparently, so it didn't help them. Professional operations like Google usually hire lawyers who tell them what to do in advance, so they can avoid getting sued.
Hopefully this whole experience will at least be good for getting people who run these kinds of search engines in the future to be aware of and take advantage of this safe harbor, like the big boys do.
Perhaps there should be a
Well, if you download music, pretty likely making a copy in the process, this is an infringement of the right to create copies.
You're correct that the offeror of the file is liable for infringing the right to distribute copies, though.
As for receiving infringing copies without having made the copies yourself... maybe there's a vicarious or contributory infringement there. I can see the argument, but it seems particularly inequitable, so I'm not sure how a court would feel about enforcing that if the only indirect infringement alleged was paying someone to sell you the infringing copy.
Well, given that the program is small enough that it arguably is actually just a key that also happens to have some executory function (it's what, 55 bytes?) then couldn't the merger doctrine in copyright law apply?
That is, I'm not saying that it's impossible to be creative in 55 bytes. I wrote a very small haiku just to prove otherwise. But I sincerely doubt that it is reasonably possible to write ANOTHER 55 byte program that has the same function without it being virtually or wholly identical.
Proper RE also would work, of course.
Yeah, but 600 baud will never die!
I do think that it would be good if everyone were knowledgable about their computers.
But I don't demand it. And I certainly don't think that computers should be an exclusive club, no matter how low the standards are.
Computers are here to help people do things. An ideal computer would help people do things with as little input as possible. I don't see why this is bad.
Your complaint strikes me as being as nonsensical as someone who doesn't like automatic transmissions since people ought to learn how to use manual transmissions. Hell, I'd like a car that I could get in, tell it my destination, and I could take a nap or read a book.
Any degree of difficulty should, eventually, be eliminated. Preferably sooner than later. Because difficulty doesn't help anyone; it's worthless.
Well, unfortunately for you, the motivation behind usability is to help out everyone to do things.
UIs that are avoidably difficult to use are bad. In fact, it's offensive that people would create them -- they are wasting other people's time and effort due to incompetence or laziness.
If people believed as you did, we'd still be using CLIs exclusively. Or maybe we'd make everyone toggle in individual bytes on the front panel of their computers with switches. Because easy things are for losers.
In your car analogy, you forget how awful very old cars were to drive. And you forget that there is a great desire for self-driving cars, at least as soon as we can figure out how to make 'em work. Is that too easy for you?
I would suggest reading Jef Raskin's book. It has some discussion of this argument.
Well, a little bit. That case only said that when trademark dilution is alleged, that the plaintiff has to show proof of actual dilution.
So it's harder to meet that standard, but not impossible. It's basically an issue of how much effort the plaintiff wants to put into the case.
Anyway, I suspect that this will all eventually blow over.
No, it's both. The S.S. character drawn is derivative of the copyright A.G. holds, even though by no means an exact copy.
Trademarks are ALSO an issue; possibly a stronger one. But not the only one. See the case involving "The Cat Not in the Hat" for how the copyright side of this might play out.
No, I'm deadly serious.
Exaggerated differences will, I hope, (everything in UI needs to be TESTED before being rolled out; everything) make documentation easier to write, make the user more aware that he is doing something quite different when he uses the secondary button, and hopefully speed up development of the reflex / muscle memory associated with that button without confusion with the primary one.
I think that the similarity between the two buttons now is responsible for a lot of the confusion newbie users have. Get rid of that similarity, and we might be able to improve usability significantly for them. Without imparing it for expert users (who often benefit from careful UI work anyway).
After all, users are of great importance. And they might not be especially intelligent. But we have to take them as we find them; they cannot be rejected.
Well that's why you mod it by putting in a PPC board that used the same sort of slot. IIRC some people took apart G4 cubes (also a neat design) and put them into the CCs.
Personally, I think that the entire compact line would've done well to have a portrait screen; too expensive in terms of RAM back in the day, but nowadays it's something I'd like to see. The new iMacs could do this handily.
Well, this is why having two otherwise identical buttons save for the left/right thing is bad.
More differentiation is needed. They should be different colors, have different textures, be located further apart so that different fingers are used to control them, have different sizes, and above all have an label on the button that is consistantly used by software or in speech whenever the buttons are referred to instead of having to rely on their position.
Personally as far as positioning goes, I favor having one large button on the top of the mouse along the lines of the old Apple ADB II mice, and then having a smaller button (or maybe a clickable jog dial) along the the side for use with the thumb.
Man, the Color Classic was a nice machine. I'd still like one. I always liked the compact form factor.
What the hell ancient right are you talking about?
Copyrights didn't exist anywhere in the world at all prior to 1710 when the English Statute of Anne was passed, and that only applied to books, IIRC.
The states picked it up after the Revolution because our law was based on English law. They did a terrible job of dealing with copyrights and patents during the Confederacy, so, like raising armies, or running the post, it was a power granted to the new federal government.
BUT like so many other Article I powers, it is entirely at Congress' discretion as to whether or not to exercise that power. There's no ancient right to copyrights -- everything hinges on whether Congress chooses to grant copyrights. And they need not do so. Read Wheaton v. Peters, 33 U.S. (8 Peters) 591 (1834). And yes, it's the same Peters -- the case was a dispute between two different court reporters.
At any rate, with regards to music, compositions didn't become eligible for copyright until the 1831 Act, and the actual sound recordings didn't become eligible until the 1909 Act, and music generally is still not very well favored by copyright law.
NJ also has, IIRC, more lawyers per capita than any other state. ;)
Yeah, but did you notice how the tolls on the Ben Franklin and the Walt Whitman are both only for cars going west? It's not to make money, it's to discourage people from leaving New Jersey. And Jersey needs all the help it can get. ;)
(posting from Camden, NJ, a few hundred yards away from the Ben Franklin Bridge)
Secret 2: The history channel is concerned with the history of hitler, the occult, UFOs and the secrets of the pyramids only
But they all share the same history. (i.e. Hitler being sent back in time by Nazi sorcerers, and building the pyramids with the help of aliens in UFOs)
No -- distribution is quite distinct from copying. A distributor need not ever make a copy in order to infringe. You only mentioned a part of infringement, and insinuated that you had discussed it all.
As for 106, firstly I did this from memory, secondly it IS the appropriate section of the code, and thirdly, I think that I have a decent understanding of it. At least enough to know that copying is not the end all be all of infringement.
Well in that case you'd just drop back to the issue of trademark infringement, which requires proof of actual customer confusion, or dilution, which requires proof of actual dilution.
In both cases it's a fairly hefty standard.
Parodies of marks aren't an infringement or dilution. They're allowed. And copyrights don't suffer from a use-it-or-lose-it doctrine.
This didn't have to be done. OTOH if you are being very cautious about pursuing infringements of marks, you'd do it anyway to make sure. But you don't strictly have to.
They probably thought it was funny. Lawyers do have a sense of humor, you know.
OTOH, whoever at Mastercard was upset enough to want their lawyers to take action -- that's the person who's face you'd want to see.