An error is fine, and I don't normally worry about it, save to simply correct it. The fool comment arose largely because it's an English idiom, but partially because you introduced it into the thread for no reason, despite the story being reasonably well known, and with what seemed like a fairly insufferable authoritative tone. Nothing personal was meant, but you should have realized that if you didn't _actually_ know the name's origins, you should have known better than to pass yourself off as if you did.
Incidentally, the English word 'kidnap' is probably related to what you were saying, and was the basis for the 'Kidnapster' joke in Futurama.
The word Napster, was derived from the word "nap" which is listed as: nap nap, vt to seize; to steal. [Cf Swed nappa Dan and Norw nappe to catch or snatch; relation to nab uncertain]
The intention of the site, I would argue by light of it's name, no accident I am certain, was to "steal" music. At least that's what it was to the creator of the site.
Of course, Shawn Fanning named Napster after himself; his nickname is Napster. He acquired that, not out of any knowledge of scandanavian languages, but because he has nappy hair. Which he's apparently a little touchy about.
Maybe you should read a little about Fanning before you make more of a fool out of yourself?
Intellectual property is just that -- property! Just because nothing physical is involved doesn't mean it's free and clear, where just anyone can do anything they want with it.
No, it's not property. Indeed, the term IP was basically conceived of by lawyers who wanted a more succinct and sexier job description. If you want to claim that content is property, then you should tell me what criteria I can use to determine whether any given thing is or is not property, and which evidences content as being the former.
The test I'm familiar with is threefold: First, it can be used by the 'owner.' Second, it can be lent out and returned. Third, it can be transferred.
Content meets the first test, but fails the other two. The copyright on the content however, as carefully distinguished from the copyright's subject matter, is property however, at least of a sort. (There's a fifth amendment issue involved, you see)
Certainly if content were property, it would really be strange that a) it wasn't protected anywhere in the world until the early 18th century, despite millennia of property laws in force around the world; b) it is required to expire when the government so mandates; c) the government can impose 'easements' on the 'owner', etc. d) The common law actions for stealing and conversion (or trespass to chattels) have never been held to apply to copyright or patent infringement, which have totally different, exclusively federal statutory remedies.
Clearly the legal system has not and does not consider content to be property. I can point to the courts literally saying that if you like, but I don't want to have to go that far.
Information, despite the current trendy tagline, is not free, nor does it want to be free.
Naw. It's a saying similar to 'Water seeks its own level.' Information is nonrivalrous. If you tell me something, you can never untell me; you can never take that back. If I tell someone, I can never untell it either. Thus information has a natural tendancy to spread, and can never be recaptured. This is what that saying means. Monetary value has nothing to do with it. It's a speech free, not a beer free.
France tried this back in the 1800's. All inventions and creations were made public domain, and it failed miserably.
I've found a lot of people parroting this, but very few understanding what the laws in France were actually like. I suggest you read up on it.
Besides which, copyrights were only invented anywhere in circa 1710. Patents were only invented anywhere circa 1300. For all of the countless eons of human history prior to that, we had neither, but invention and creation seem to have been happening regardless. After all; there's always going to be payment for LABOR, even if you won't get paid more than once for your work as under the present system.
If you remove the carrot, that being a financial payoff to making a unique creation, from the system, you will destroy the largest motivating factor to innovation and creation.
Sure, but who said anything about shutting the system down completely? I would prefer to reduce the scope of the rights granted in a work in ways that lead to MORE innovation and creation. Right now we have overprotected, and it's harming what it is that we want out of the system. Protection after all, DOES NOT NECESSARILY lead to a greater public benefit.
Well, that is the issue: ban films that have a connection to abuse, and might be inciting more of it even without directly encouraging it... or only those that were produced in an actual abusive manner, because we're concerned about that, and not about the film proper.
Those who want to say that Child Porn is no justification for censorship might look at what actually happens to the kids who get caught up in the hell that is constant abuse.
So you wouldn't say that there's a problem with porn involving simulated children though? I just ask because I imagine that eventually there'll be comparatively little child porn involving real children, but that the simulated stuff will still apparently be popular. Thus the real question is, are you upset about it because of the impact on children, or because you don't like the people who like it even if they never actually have any involvement with a child in any way, even through porn?
Are you saying that people who are in fact injured should not be able to make a claim for it, and should have to suffer?
Or are you saying that the problem is that there are people making fraudulent claims that the insurance companies are too incompetent to have dismissed, so we need to coddle them since they can't manage their own business?
I live in NJ. I have no problems with law firms advertising. After all, it sounds as though back in the old days insurance companies were getting away with a lot at the expense of injured people, to hear you describe it. Or were run properly, take your pick.
No, I'm basically that guy. But to be more precise:
It's not a matter of Aqua v. Platinum, though there are some issues along those lines regarding space efficiency, visibility, color perception, etc.
UI is basically about _behavior_. OS X, even if it looked just like MacOS, still would behave differently.
Which isn't a defense of MacOS -- it should've been put out to pasture gently no later than 1995 or so. Just that OS X is a step backwards. MacOS has the best UI ever commercially available, and it wasn't very good. Sadly, no one is managing to get anywhere near to topping it; certainly not Apple.
I'd say that it's a legal system in a country that prides itself on having freedom of speech.
People _can_ advertise even before there's a product. Seen any movie trailers, for example? Similarly, there are legal discussions here all the time.
Or would you prefer we go back to the old days when lawyers couldn't advertise in any way at all, and if you wanted legal representation you'd wind up more or less picking a name out of the phone book with no indication as to whether or not you'd actually want to hire them?
Well what they should have done was buy a ziggurat. The ramp forms an integral part of the structure, and looks classy as well. Plus, ziggurats last an amazingly long time! Some are still standing today, thousands of years after their construction. Add vinyl siding, and who knows how long it might stay up.
No, I just don't like talking on phones. It's not that I can't or that I don't; it's just distasteful and something I try to avoid because I don't like it. Sort of how I don't like raw tomatoes either, so I don't eat foods containing them. It's entirely a personal preference.
Chat (be it talk, or IRC, or IM, or whatever the hell it is that people use these days) I avoid more because I fear that I'd waste a huge amount of time there. Slashdot is bad enough for me. Chat would just be a problem I don't need.
And at any rate, I prefer communicating with people at my own pace, when I feel like it. As the previous poster mentioned, it's annoying to feel like you have to pick up a phone because it's ringing, etc.
OTOH in real life, I'm fairly chatty at least with people that I know well enough to strike up a conversation with.
Now: what the hell does all of this have to do with OS X? Because I haven't got the slightest clue unless it was some utterly stupid, miserable failure of an insult.
Don't they teach kids good insults anymore? E.g. you like to lick the ass of a leper; that's a decent insult. This autism crap, that's just no good.
Personally I make only two types of phone calls -- calling my parents every weekend at a roughly prearranged time, and sometimes calling to arrange an order of take out food.
I don't have a cel, and with the computer online 24/7, it's extremely unusual for anyone to be able to call me at home. I prefer email instead. (in fact, I so loathe real time, non-face to face communication I don't have any sort of IM or chat either)
Because I have to make a semi-permanent copy of the software to use it; it can't run directly from the CD and very-temporary copies in RAM. This may or may not violate copyright--I have no idea.
Per 17 USC 117(a), IIRC, you're allowed to make as many copies as you need of software you own a copy of in order to use it. E.g. if you buy a copy (not the copyright of) a program, you can make a copy from CD to HD, and HD to RAM, etc.
Besides which, the concept that you can make a fixed copy in RAM is ludicrous. The MAI decision holding that you can was due to a total failure by the court to understand how the technology works, and how it is no different than epehemereal media such as air carrying sound.
When was that? As far as I know, software has _always_ been copyrightable
The late 70's, early 80's, IIRC. The source was copyrightable since at least 1978. But compiled software was arguably not the same thing, having been passed through a machine. Plus of course there's still no copyrights for certain things, such as mere facts or rule systems. There has to be some original material involved. Check out some histories of early microcomputing and there'll likely be some mention of the first people to begin attempting to do this; prior, contracts were used as a substitute.
At least _you_ lived in an area with a school bus. I lived slightly too close to school, so I had to be frozen, pressurized, launched at 3Gs and torched to 2500 degrees myself. It was hell on my sneakers.
The begining state is the Federal Copyright law. If MS were to hand me a CD with Office 11 on it, without any license, it'd still be covered by the established copyright law. I could use it, or not use it and give it away, and probably even make a backup copy of it. Then again, I might not be able to even install the darn thing--and for MS to give me that CD, it'd cost upwards of two thousdand dollars.
Firstly, why couldn't you install it? Secondly, why would it cost so much. I buy books, movies, music, etc. with no licensure whatsoever. It doesn't seem to cost a hell of a lot because of that.
Software licensure is archaic. It dates back to a time when software wasn't copyrightable, and contracts had to provide all protection. This having not been the state of affairs for decades now, basically, there's simply no need for them in the typical instance.
Could you clarify your statement, please? At any rate, at least in the realm of ordinary store-bought software, why should we permit licensure of use at all? Site licenses I can see being allowable within limits; licenses regarding matters other than use (such as the GPL) I have no problems with.
A generic adhesive EULA though.... I see no reason to permit such things on as wide scales as we've been seeing it.
The proposed title 17 section 123(b) is crippled in that it doesn't apply to barring licensure of software in ways that would impede limits on copyright in title 17. Nice as this generally is, it's still not going far enough in protecting customers and promoting science.
Well, think of it as being like a car. If you're going at a thousand miles an hour, even a tiny adjustment to the steering wheel will have a huge, perhaps largely unintended effect.
So, this is like putting a governor on the speed. BUT only when it's necessary to help the driver steer; go in a straight line, and it keeps running as fast as possible.
(For an example of when technically better performance can result in worse actual performance, play GTA3 for a while, and get comfortable driving around. Then use the Perfect Handling cheat. The car responds _too_ well; you practically have to relearn how to control it, or else constantly pay strict attention instead of letting the driving come naturally.)
At any rate, a lot of these were old GUI developments, but still important at the time, and not something you'd want to forget about nowadays. All of the UI on your computer had to be invented, remember. Even little things like double clicking, or clicking and dragging. (which were invented so that the Mac wouldn't need more than one mouse button)
Who's crippling performance? The metric of success of a UI is how well it 'communicates' with the user, bidirectionally. If providing additional feedback in a human-oriented process where time savings pretty likely won't be noticed anyway (it takes a moment for people to react to commands they've issued), then I don't see what was crippled.
You do see what I'm saying, right? It worked better with the lag. If you didn't have the lag, it would be faster on paper, but no actual benefit would be derived from that. Actual benefit realized is what is important.
Sure, characters are copyrightable. Everything is copyrightable, since 1987. Well, any visual or audible work is copyrighted, and that includes all the characters it contains.
Out of curiosity, why 1987? Surely you mean 1978, when the most recent major overhaul to the Copyright Act took effect.
Anyway, no characters are not copyrightable. Check out, among other things, Copyright circular 44 at the US Copyright Office. Names are not copyrightable; they belong under trademark law. A specific description of a character may be part of a copyrighted work, BUT the character qua character is more of an idea, and thus not copyrightable either.
If the character became PD, I could use it in original drawings and animations- just so long as I did not attempt to cause consumers to mistake me for the Walt Disney corporation.
Yes, but wouldn't confusion NATURALLY occur as a result of using MM? If so, wouldn't you be claiming that a mere statutory trademark is trumping the Constitutional imperative that copyrights expire, since an in-force trademark would never allow some creative uses of the public domain work?
That clearly cannot hold up. A person who seeks the benefits of copyright can't avoid the downside when copyright is no longer convenient for him.
As for regular trademark usage, why would it persist? A trademark is only granted to people if it indicates that a good or service originates from a unique source. Well if everyone on Earth can freely copy MM, how can Disney possibly allege that they're a unique source for him? They have a fallback to using MM in conjunction with the Disney name, but I'm talking about MM all by his lonesome.
I thought that the Disney corporate logo was a stylized Disney signature? (possibly in conjunction with a castle)
At any rate, trademark fair use and nominative use also would've applied, just as they do now, even in trade. If I sell a Disney product, I'm allowed to use the Disney name so that you know what it is; I just can't masquerade as Disney, or use the name to label things untruthfully.
Characters are really a special case in trademarks. It works like so: If Steamboat Willy fell into the p.d., then I could create a derivative work based upon it. This work might include the Mickey Mouse character. Characters aren't copyrightable, they're trademarked. But if anyone can create a work using the character as a part of their freedom to create derivatives of p.d. works, then the trademark is no longer valid because it applies to a generic character. I.e., Mickey Mouse is no longer necessarily from one source, he's from any of a million sources. It'd be like trying to trademark 'Car' with regards to automobiles. That dog don't hunt.
Now, no one could create a new Mickey Mouse short and claim that it's Disney's Mickey Mouse. But I'm sure that's not much consolation to Disney. (since people could sell copies of the p.d. shorts and claim that they were, or create new ones and just leave out the Disney part)
Utility patents are for useful inventions. Machines that do things, methods for doing things, etc.
Copyrights are for original artistic works. BUT with regards to pictoral, sculptural, or graphic works, they must be non-functional.
Trademarks are for designs that indicate the source of a good or service used in commerce. Since the Trash isn't being used to identify products in commerce, it wouldn't qualify. The Apple logo would, OTOH.
Thus, a typeface is not copyrightable, because the letter shapes are arguably not sufficiently original, and are certainly graphic and functional, said function being to convey to people a particular letter.
Design patents apply to how things look, as opposed to how they function. There's some additional requirements (one relevant here being that the design might not be original enough)
Thus a typeface could receive a design patent, and basically they exist to fill in that gap in copyrights.
Of course, if you had a Banana Jr. computer that closely resembled the original Macintoshes, and Apple had a design patent on the case, then a design patent could serve a similar role to trademarks.
Note also that the types of protection that the various approaches convey can be significantly different.
I wonder if this actually couldn't be considered to diminish the copyright. Once the patent expires, the public absolutely CAN use whatever the patent covered. If it happens to be copyrighted as well, wouldn't the copyright wind up having to be ended to avoid a sort of illegal lengthening of the patent term?
I doubt anyone'll fight over it with this, but it's worth looking into, I guess.
As for the additional protection, considering the 106 right in derivatives, I don't see what was gained by this either.
Slashdot Mirror
An error is fine, and I don't normally worry about it, save to simply correct it. The fool comment arose largely because it's an English idiom, but partially because you introduced it into the thread for no reason, despite the story being reasonably well known, and with what seemed like a fairly insufferable authoritative tone. Nothing personal was meant, but you should have realized that if you didn't _actually_ know the name's origins, you should have known better than to pass yourself off as if you did.
Incidentally, the English word 'kidnap' is probably related to what you were saying, and was the basis for the 'Kidnapster' joke in Futurama.
nap nap, vt to seize; to steal. [Cf Swed nappa Dan and Norw nappe to catch or snatch; relation to nab uncertain]
The intention of the site, I would argue by light of it's name, no accident I am certain, was to "steal" music.
At least that's what it was to the creator of the site.
Of course, Shawn Fanning named Napster after himself; his nickname is Napster. He acquired that, not out of any knowledge of scandanavian languages, but because he has nappy hair. Which he's apparently a little touchy about.
Maybe you should read a little about Fanning before you make more of a fool out of yourself?
No, it's not property. Indeed, the term IP was basically conceived of by lawyers who wanted a more succinct and sexier job description. If you want to claim that content is property, then you should tell me what criteria I can use to determine whether any given thing is or is not property, and which evidences content as being the former.
The test I'm familiar with is threefold: First, it can be used by the 'owner.' Second, it can be lent out and returned. Third, it can be transferred.
Content meets the first test, but fails the other two. The copyright on the content however, as carefully distinguished from the copyright's subject matter, is property however, at least of a sort. (There's a fifth amendment issue involved, you see)
Certainly if content were property, it would really be strange that a) it wasn't protected anywhere in the world until the early 18th century, despite millennia of property laws in force around the world; b) it is required to expire when the government so mandates; c) the government can impose 'easements' on the 'owner', etc. d) The common law actions for stealing and conversion (or trespass to chattels) have never been held to apply to copyright or patent infringement, which have totally different, exclusively federal statutory remedies.
Clearly the legal system has not and does not consider content to be property. I can point to the courts literally saying that if you like, but I don't want to have to go that far.
Information, despite the current trendy tagline, is not free, nor does it want to be free.
Naw. It's a saying similar to 'Water seeks its own level.' Information is nonrivalrous. If you tell me something, you can never untell me; you can never take that back. If I tell someone, I can never untell it either. Thus information has a natural tendancy to spread, and can never be recaptured. This is what that saying means. Monetary value has nothing to do with it. It's a speech free, not a beer free.
France tried this back in the 1800's. All inventions and creations were made public domain, and it failed miserably.
I've found a lot of people parroting this, but very few understanding what the laws in France were actually like. I suggest you read up on it.
Besides which, copyrights were only invented anywhere in circa 1710. Patents were only invented anywhere circa 1300. For all of the countless eons of human history prior to that, we had neither, but invention and creation seem to have been happening regardless. After all; there's always going to be payment for LABOR, even if you won't get paid more than once for your work as under the present system.
If you remove the carrot, that being a financial payoff to making a unique creation, from the system, you will destroy the largest motivating factor to innovation and creation.
Sure, but who said anything about shutting the system down completely? I would prefer to reduce the scope of the rights granted in a work in ways that lead to MORE innovation and creation. Right now we have overprotected, and it's harming what it is that we want out of the system. Protection after all, DOES NOT NECESSARILY lead to a greater public benefit.
Well, that is the issue: ban films that have a connection to abuse, and might be inciting more of it even without directly encouraging it... or only those that were produced in an actual abusive manner, because we're concerned about that, and not about the film proper.
Is there a corresponding Sailor Senshi? If so, it's a planet. Ironically, this means that the Earth is not a planet, but the Moon is. Go figure.
So you wouldn't say that there's a problem with porn involving simulated children though? I just ask because I imagine that eventually there'll be comparatively little child porn involving real children, but that the simulated stuff will still apparently be popular. Thus the real question is, are you upset about it because of the impact on children, or because you don't like the people who like it even if they never actually have any involvement with a child in any way, even through porn?
I'm sorry, I don't quite understand.
Are you saying that people who are in fact injured should not be able to make a claim for it, and should have to suffer?
Or are you saying that the problem is that there are people making fraudulent claims that the insurance companies are too incompetent to have dismissed, so we need to coddle them since they can't manage their own business?
I live in NJ. I have no problems with law firms advertising. After all, it sounds as though back in the old days insurance companies were getting away with a lot at the expense of injured people, to hear you describe it. Or were run properly, take your pick.
No, I'm basically that guy. But to be more precise:
It's not a matter of Aqua v. Platinum, though there are some issues along those lines regarding space efficiency, visibility, color perception, etc.
UI is basically about _behavior_. OS X, even if it looked just like MacOS, still would behave differently.
Which isn't a defense of MacOS -- it should've been put out to pasture gently no later than 1995 or so. Just that OS X is a step backwards. MacOS has the best UI ever commercially available, and it wasn't very good. Sadly, no one is managing to get anywhere near to topping it; certainly not Apple.
I'd say that it's a legal system in a country that prides itself on having freedom of speech.
People _can_ advertise even before there's a product. Seen any movie trailers, for example? Similarly, there are legal discussions here all the time.
Or would you prefer we go back to the old days when lawyers couldn't advertise in any way at all, and if you wanted legal representation you'd wind up more or less picking a name out of the phone book with no indication as to whether or not you'd actually want to hire them?
Well what they should have done was buy a ziggurat. The ramp forms an integral part of the structure, and looks classy as well. Plus, ziggurats last an amazingly long time! Some are still standing today, thousands of years after their construction. Add vinyl siding, and who knows how long it might stay up.
No, I just don't like talking on phones. It's not that I can't or that I don't; it's just distasteful and something I try to avoid because I don't like it. Sort of how I don't like raw tomatoes either, so I don't eat foods containing them. It's entirely a personal preference.
Chat (be it talk, or IRC, or IM, or whatever the hell it is that people use these days) I avoid more because I fear that I'd waste a huge amount of time there. Slashdot is bad enough for me. Chat would just be a problem I don't need.
And at any rate, I prefer communicating with people at my own pace, when I feel like it. As the previous poster mentioned, it's annoying to feel like you have to pick up a phone because it's ringing, etc.
OTOH in real life, I'm fairly chatty at least with people that I know well enough to strike up a conversation with.
Now: what the hell does all of this have to do with OS X? Because I haven't got the slightest clue unless it was some utterly stupid, miserable failure of an insult.
Don't they teach kids good insults anymore? E.g. you like to lick the ass of a leper; that's a decent insult. This autism crap, that's just no good.
I agree; I also don't like phones generally.
Personally I make only two types of phone calls -- calling my parents every weekend at a roughly prearranged time, and sometimes calling to arrange an order of take out food.
I don't have a cel, and with the computer online 24/7, it's extremely unusual for anyone to be able to call me at home. I prefer email instead. (in fact, I so loathe real time, non-face to face communication I don't have any sort of IM or chat either)
And of course, rather than use an artificial light source during the day, you could just pipe in sunlight from outside, filtering out uv as desired.
Per 17 USC 117(a), IIRC, you're allowed to make as many copies as you need of software you own a copy of in order to use it. E.g. if you buy a copy (not the copyright of) a program, you can make a copy from CD to HD, and HD to RAM, etc.
Besides which, the concept that you can make a fixed copy in RAM is ludicrous. The MAI decision holding that you can was due to a total failure by the court to understand how the technology works, and how it is no different than epehemereal media such as air carrying sound.
When was that? As far as I know, software has _always_ been copyrightable
The late 70's, early 80's, IIRC. The source was copyrightable since at least 1978. But compiled software was arguably not the same thing, having been passed through a machine. Plus of course there's still no copyrights for certain things, such as mere facts or rule systems. There has to be some original material involved. Check out some histories of early microcomputing and there'll likely be some mention of the first people to begin attempting to do this; prior, contracts were used as a substitute.
At least _you_ lived in an area with a school bus. I lived slightly too close to school, so I had to be frozen, pressurized, launched at 3Gs and torched to 2500 degrees myself. It was hell on my sneakers.
Have you ever seen the DC-2 1/2 that CNAC wound up having to fly at one point? It's hilarious.
The begining state is the Federal Copyright law. If MS were to hand me a CD with Office 11 on it, without any license, it'd still be covered by the established copyright law. I could use it, or not use it and give it away, and probably even make a backup copy of it. Then again, I might not be able to even install the darn thing--and for MS to give me that CD, it'd cost upwards of two thousdand dollars.
Firstly, why couldn't you install it? Secondly, why would it cost so much. I buy books, movies, music, etc. with no licensure whatsoever. It doesn't seem to cost a hell of a lot because of that.
Software licensure is archaic. It dates back to a time when software wasn't copyrightable, and contracts had to provide all protection. This having not been the state of affairs for decades now, basically, there's simply no need for them in the typical instance.
Could you clarify your statement, please? At any rate, at least in the realm of ordinary store-bought software, why should we permit licensure of use at all? Site licenses I can see being allowable within limits; licenses regarding matters other than use (such as the GPL) I have no problems with.
A generic adhesive EULA though.... I see no reason to permit such things on as wide scales as we've been seeing it.
The proposed title 17 section 123(b) is crippled in that it doesn't apply to barring licensure of software in ways that would impede limits on copyright in title 17. Nice as this generally is, it's still not going far enough in protecting customers and promoting science.
Well, think of it as being like a car. If you're going at a thousand miles an hour, even a tiny adjustment to the steering wheel will have a huge, perhaps largely unintended effect.
So, this is like putting a governor on the speed. BUT only when it's necessary to help the driver steer; go in a straight line, and it keeps running as fast as possible.
(For an example of when technically better performance can result in worse actual performance, play GTA3 for a while, and get comfortable driving around. Then use the Perfect Handling cheat. The car responds _too_ well; you practically have to relearn how to control it, or else constantly pay strict attention instead of letting the driving come naturally.)
At any rate, a lot of these were old GUI developments, but still important at the time, and not something you'd want to forget about nowadays. All of the UI on your computer had to be invented, remember. Even little things like double clicking, or clicking and dragging. (which were invented so that the Mac wouldn't need more than one mouse button)
Who's crippling performance? The metric of success of a UI is how well it 'communicates' with the user, bidirectionally. If providing additional feedback in a human-oriented process where time savings pretty likely won't be noticed anyway (it takes a moment for people to react to commands they've issued), then I don't see what was crippled.
You do see what I'm saying, right? It worked better with the lag. If you didn't have the lag, it would be faster on paper, but no actual benefit would be derived from that. Actual benefit realized is what is important.
Sure, characters are copyrightable. Everything is copyrightable, since 1987. Well, any visual or audible work is copyrighted, and that includes all the characters it contains.
Out of curiosity, why 1987? Surely you mean 1978, when the most recent major overhaul to the Copyright Act took effect.
Anyway, no characters are not copyrightable. Check out, among other things, Copyright circular 44 at the US Copyright Office. Names are not copyrightable; they belong under trademark law. A specific description of a character may be part of a copyrighted work, BUT the character qua character is more of an idea, and thus not copyrightable either.
If the character became PD, I could use it in original drawings and animations- just so long as I did not attempt to cause consumers to mistake me for the Walt Disney corporation.
Yes, but wouldn't confusion NATURALLY occur as a result of using MM? If so, wouldn't you be claiming that a mere statutory trademark is trumping the Constitutional imperative that copyrights expire, since an in-force trademark would never allow some creative uses of the public domain work?
That clearly cannot hold up. A person who seeks the benefits of copyright can't avoid the downside when copyright is no longer convenient for him.
As for regular trademark usage, why would it persist? A trademark is only granted to people if it indicates that a good or service originates from a unique source. Well if everyone on Earth can freely copy MM, how can Disney possibly allege that they're a unique source for him? They have a fallback to using MM in conjunction with the Disney name, but I'm talking about MM all by his lonesome.
I thought that the Disney corporate logo was a stylized Disney signature? (possibly in conjunction with a castle)
At any rate, trademark fair use and nominative use also would've applied, just as they do now, even in trade. If I sell a Disney product, I'm allowed to use the Disney name so that you know what it is; I just can't masquerade as Disney, or use the name to label things untruthfully.
Characters are really a special case in trademarks. It works like so: If Steamboat Willy fell into the p.d., then I could create a derivative work based upon it. This work might include the Mickey Mouse character. Characters aren't copyrightable, they're trademarked. But if anyone can create a work using the character as a part of their freedom to create derivatives of p.d. works, then the trademark is no longer valid because it applies to a generic character. I.e., Mickey Mouse is no longer necessarily from one source, he's from any of a million sources. It'd be like trying to trademark 'Car' with regards to automobiles. That dog don't hunt.
Now, no one could create a new Mickey Mouse short and claim that it's Disney's Mickey Mouse. But I'm sure that's not much consolation to Disney. (since people could sell copies of the p.d. shorts and claim that they were, or create new ones and just leave out the Disney part)
Utility patents are for useful inventions. Machines that do things, methods for doing things, etc.
Copyrights are for original artistic works. BUT with regards to pictoral, sculptural, or graphic works, they must be non-functional.
Trademarks are for designs that indicate the source of a good or service used in commerce. Since the Trash isn't being used to identify products in commerce, it wouldn't qualify. The Apple logo would, OTOH.
Thus, a typeface is not copyrightable, because the letter shapes are arguably not sufficiently original, and are certainly graphic and functional, said function being to convey to people a particular letter.
Design patents apply to how things look, as opposed to how they function. There's some additional requirements (one relevant here being that the design might not be original enough)
Thus a typeface could receive a design patent, and basically they exist to fill in that gap in copyrights.
Of course, if you had a Banana Jr. computer that closely resembled the original Macintoshes, and Apple had a design patent on the case, then a design patent could serve a similar role to trademarks.
Note also that the types of protection that the various approaches convey can be significantly different.
I wonder if this actually couldn't be considered to diminish the copyright. Once the patent expires, the public absolutely CAN use whatever the patent covered. If it happens to be copyrighted as well, wouldn't the copyright wind up having to be ended to avoid a sort of illegal lengthening of the patent term?
I doubt anyone'll fight over it with this, but it's worth looking into, I guess.
As for the additional protection, considering the 106 right in derivatives, I don't see what was gained by this either.