If you were to cleave a Dilbert strip, you'd find that generally most of the value lies in the joke. There is much less of a visual element to that strip (partly b/c of the subject matter, mostly b/c Adams can't draw worth a damn) than there is for something along the lines of, say, Bizzaro.
In that particular strip, virtually nothing at all happens in the art. It's Dilbert at a workstation, talking to Ratbert.
And when examining claims of fair use, one of the criteria, IIRC, is the portion of the work used. Joy used almost the entire thing. Even if it's really short, that generally isn't fair use if you want to be really strict about it. (this deriving from the footage taken of and then broadcast of a human cannonball. His act is only a few seconds long, but who's going to see him if you already saw it on tv)
That all said, I don't have a problem with him doing that. There are other criteria as well. But if you want to get really snippy about it, he's certainly acting hypocritical. Perhaps he should reexamine his opinion.
Sure. But since they're copyrighted only the specific font is protected - not the face.
Thus... if you really wanted a copy of, say, Adobe Garamond, you print it up really big (but with all the various hints - could be tricky), trace it with a vector program, and voila!
You've got your own copyrightable implementation of that face.
As for music, it would be almost impossible to RE. Imagine the requests that the definition team puts in to the implementation team:
"Song should be about the singer's girlfriend; 4/4 time; two guitar players, one drummer, one keyboardist"
and later after a few trials,
"Increase the soul by half; add drum solo"
RE is perhaps a bit easier for some things than others.
As I understand it there's quite a battle going on regarding treaties. Basically, can treaties self-execute as law when agreed to, or would Congress have to pass laws in the normal manner to bring the US into compliance with otherwise toothless treaties.
The issue is this: Constitutionally, the powers of the Executive and Legislative branches are limited. For example, only the House may propose an appropriations bill, and it may only become law if passed by majorities of the House and Senate, and signed or allowed to pass into law by the President.
So, if treaties can self-execute, could not the Senate and the President, without any input whatsoever from the House, agree to a treaty that levied a tax?
They have no Constitutional power to do so directly. What is at stake is their ability to do so indirectly.
I'm pretty firmly in the non-self-executing treaty camp. What parts of the government have no power to do on their own, they have no power to do through other means.
Treaties can have no actual binding force if no laws are passed enacting the provisions of the treaty. To do otherwise would be to place our soverignty in the hands of 2/3rds of the Senate, the President and foreign nations. Which would be highly unconstitutional.
This also implies however, that any treaty (or provision therof) which requires unconstitutional laws to be passed to enact them cannot take place. Thus, if the courts rule current copyright terms to be unconstitutionally long (they are IMHO, and I'm a frickin' artist!) those parts of the treaties (and any enacting laws) go to jail, go directly to jail, do not pass go and do not collect $200.
A few good ruling in the courts could bring the whole house down to acceptable and legal levels.
Additionally, the government isn't allowed to copyright or patent anything that it develops, IIRC. Why shouldn't it require the same of any projects that it orders from contractors? That would just be the cost of doing business with the govt. for custom work.
Wouldn't impact off-the-shelf stuff, and the govt. shouldn't necessarily act like a business in a lot of ways either.
Of course almost all private universities still draw upon government grants, etc. AFAIK (IANAL) even if it's not total funding, they can lose it if they seriously infringe on civil rights.
Anecdotally, there was some sort of trouble that a student at MIT got into some years back. The rules of the school (like most) ignore due process, which they probably aren't really allowed to do if you press the matter, but he was at least given the opportunity to defend himself, with a family member present, in front of what was basically a drumhead tribunal hell-bent on kicking him out.
Fortunately for him, his uncle is Alan Dershowitz and he managed not to get kicked out.:) Unfortunately the policy was quickly changed so that no family members could help.
Of course, someone (Reynolds?) lost the trademark on Cellophane because there was really no other way to describe the stuff. It was too new, and too unique.
I could see a trademark on SSH as in SSH-brand Secure Shell, but not on 'Secure Shell' itself.That's how you describe the entire class of products. They're shells, they're secure, it's in common usage.
Re:Remembering is Copying...
on
License to Sit
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· Score: 1
Sure. Which isn't protected.
Remember mp3.com? Why precisely they got in trouble? It wasn't that they had the ability to store commerical, unlicensed mp3s and relay them back to you wherever you were.
It was that they ripped the mp3s, and you got to listen to them*
Had they required that everyone rip their own music and put it up, and that they stored all that music seperately, they'd've been in much better shape.
*mp3 is a business, and what they did qualifies as a public performance. your right to listen to music in the comfort of your house with a few close friends is still fine, though the RIAA would surely like to eliminate it.
Re:Remembering is Copying...
on
License to Sit
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· Score: 1
I think that there was some debate over the validity of copying to memory (whatever kind) in order to execute software. Congress rendered it moot; it's entirely legal to copy software as long as it's necessary to get it to run. (thus you can run Windows w/o agreeing to the EULA, as long as it's a legally owned copy; you can't make copies for all your friends, that's not a prerequisite of it functioning on your computer)
Well there's a difference. Copyright law, which is what prevents him from playing music someone else holds a copyright on and getting away scot free is generally only constitutionally permitted to be concerned with copying and public performance. And even then, not always.
BUT if he's copying it for his own purposes, it's doubtful that this is much of a conflict with copyright law. Certainly the space shifting argument worked well enough for the Rio.
And he's right of course. He didn't license it. He never signed or agreed to a license; he merely paid for a CD. His inability to legally copy the disc for profit, etc. stems not from any license (nor is a license necessary for authors to prevent it) but from law.
They have. It happened to Xing. It doesn't matter because the entire keyspace has been discovered though. And it really doesn't matter in this case, because it's a Sony. I'll eat my hat if the MPAA did something like that to Sony. They're too damn big.
Naw, I wouldn't think so. Most countries including the US, IIRC, formally renounced any claim over space. Seems to me that if you can put a satellite up there, it's not subject to any licensing authority. This wouldn't necessarily make things easy... you'd have to run the whole operation out of some country that you couldn't get extradited for copyright infringement from, but there woudn't be much that could be done to you AFAIK.
Speak for yourself. Personally, I always harbor a deep and broad suspicion for anyone that encourages restrictions on speech for any reason. It's essential to be able to communicate freely if you wish to live in a free society. Furthermore it's essential that PEOPLE first and foremost have this freedom, as it is people that our societies and governments must serve. The Constitution (as a typical American/.'er, I pretty much limit my discussion to the US as that's what I'm familiar with) does after all begin 'We the People' and not 'We the Businesses' or 'We the Government' or 'We the Economic Interests.'
Economic sense is secondary here. Authors are not entitled to make money by virtue of the fact that they wrote a book. Nor are they entitled to make money whenever that book is copied, or control the use, possession and copying of that book. In order, not to support authors, but to encourage the creation of more works, our government can choose to give them the ability to gain somewhat more profit than they could in a copyrightless world by controlling SOME copying, SOMETIMES, for a LIMITED TIME. But we're under no obligation to do so, and in fact, if it could be conclusively shown that society benefits more from not having copyright, we'd be bound to abolish it. Money isn't even mentioned as a factor.
Additionally, the tax scheme in the US is typically set up along two parallel lines. First that you owe a tax on income that you recieve. (they had to pass an entire amendment to the Constitution to get this; not an easy thing. Sadly it's been terribly abused since day one) Second, in many local jurisdictions, you pay a sales tax that is a flat percentage of the price of something. If identical, say, computers are for sale at two different stores for $10,000 and $100 the tax would be dramatically different even though there's no difference between what you're getting and how much work and parts went into it.
The difference as I see it is that
1) The sales tax is equally applied.
The govt. pretty certainly would not be permitted long (if anyone had the stones to challenge it) to impose more of a tax burden on speech than they do on other goods. If the tax on a piece of paper and a shovel are identical, they're not trying to impose a burden on free speech especially. A very liberal minded judge might be persuaded that taxing materials used for speech/press purposes might be unconstitutional too, but there's always the matter of precedent. If the courts act in one manner for a long time, it's very difficult to get them to change, regardless of whether they're right or wrong. (which usually works out okay)
2) If it weren't private entities couldn't be involved
Even making the assumption that speech-making materials could legally be taxed at an excessive rate compared to everything else, it would be pretty likely an infringement on free speech (because your ability to fund free speech is also generally considered free speech; this is why political donations will always be difficult to regulate, and it's a position i agree with) as well as copyright (among other reasons because the right to copy is required to lie -broadly- only with the copyright holder. Paying someone else for the privlege would be a copyright violation, ironically)
It's not quite that there are taxes so much, as to what the specifics are, and what they're meant to accomplish.
Re:Unions are such parasites
on
The Jungle
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· Score: 2
Amazon is struggling to even stay in business. Do the unions care at all about that? No. Those guys don't even stop to think about how they can help make Amazon a success. Instead, all they care about is themselves.
Good. I'm glad to hear that you've discovered an important principle of our economy. People tend to act out of self-interest, and the competing interests drive things. Do you think that Jeff Bezos would be as interested in Amazon if he weren't making money hand over fist? (with the possibility of more money to come) I doubt it.
People have the right to associate freely. And if they want to bargain collectively they have that right too. The only thing that I don't like about unions is when they tend to acquire too much power (I don't like really massive accumulations of power) and can force businesses to not hire outside of the union. But that's the choice of the business; if they're willing to lose all of their experienced employees, and lose credibility among workers they can do that.
After all, Amazon has no obligation to retain any of their employees right now. They could show the biggest profit in history if their workers slept in their offices, worked for free, etc. Then they could fire them all. And the employees would get the shaft.
Just as Amazon should generally try to do things that are in it's best interest as a company, so should the individual people working there do the same. Once in a while I have to work extra hours at my job, but I accepted that when the contract was negotiated. That's quite different from working every weekend, or skipping my non-accumulatable vacation time (which my boss has encouraged from time to time) and I'll be damned if I give my company that for free. They can EARN things; they're not entitled, and it's a piss-poor company that relies on getting free work from it's workers.
As usual, snpp.com comes through again.
(IIRC, potassium benzoate (C7H5KO2) is a white, flakey powder used as a food preservative. guess it's not all that healthy, like good ol' Red Dye #4:)
Homer rushes off to the nearest convenient `House of Evil' (your one-stop Evil shop). He asks the very old Asian owner who appears out of the shadows if he sells toys.
Owner: We sell forbidden objects from places men fear to tread. We also sell frozen yogurt, which I call ``Frogurt''!
Homer tells the owner that he is looking for a present for his son's birthday. The owner hands to him a talking Krusty doll.
Owner: Take this object, but beware it carries a terrible curse!
Homer: [worried] Ooooh, that's bad.
Owner: But it comes with a free Frogurt!
Homer: [relieved] That's good.
Owner: The Frogurt is also cursed.
Homer: [worried] That's bad.
Owner: But you get your choice of topping!
Homer: [relieved] That's good.
Owner: The toppings contains Potassium Benzoate.
Homer: [stares]
Owner: That's bad.
1) Recording your own music (that is if you're a musician) should not be subject to taxes. That's a tax on speech, which is blatantly unconstitutional.
2) Musicians can copy music to which they hold the copyright an infinte number of times. A law mandating that they can't do so unless they pay a tax both infringes on their freedom of speech and copyright (if the tax goes to some entity other than the govt., which it does)
3) Recording other people's music can, under some circumstances, be quite legal. The normal set of fair uses of course. Time shifting if it's coming off of broadcast. No copyright infringement occurs in either case, so there's no justification for a tax.
4) Public domain recordings are legal to copy an infinite number of times, and preventing people from doing so again tramples on both the first amendment and on copyright (b/c copyrighted content has to become p.d. - effectively preventing that is unconstitutional)
5) The reason that DAT never took off was that it was killed at birth by the RIAA. They didn't want anyone to use the damn thing. If it had become popular we'd probably have CD and DAT as standards, and some migration to DVDA by now (though if they were that flexible, you'd also see CDMP3 and DVDMP3 compilations in stores...)
I also say to hell with taxes and restrictions on legal and protected speech and copying. The RIAA members have no more right whatsoever to make, sell and copy music than anyone else. There should be no special treatment.
Already I can double click on a url in many Mac apps and it will automatically be sent to my preferred web browser, or ftp client or whatever.
But there would have to be a HUGE amount of thought put into it before it would be ready for prime time, to ensure that it would really work well, and that the perception of the interface that the users had was a good/useful one.
Boy is this quite a troll. Still, it's dangerous to let these sorts of attitudes foster. Ignoring it isn't going to make it go away.
So...
Firstly, copyright does not exist in the US, unless Congress passes a law permitting it; such a law has to comply to the Copyright Clause of the Constitution and also exists in tension with the First Amendment. The Copyright Clause (CC) is a utilitarian power of Congress. Never in US history (even IIRC when we were British colonies and the Statute of Anne applied) has copyright been a natural law. That is, authors are not entitled to copyright by virtue of authorship. In other countries natural law systems do exist, and imply that even in a lawless environment authors still are entitled to control how others use their works. (though that's a good example of fuzzy thinking IMHO)
There are three provisions in the CC. First that copyright is only permitted to exist should it promote the progress of the arts and sciences. Second, that it should only be given to the author. (though it is accepted that the author can later transfer it to other parties) Third, that the copyright last for a limited time.
If anything blasts apart the misconception that the US has or could have, barring an amendment, a natural law copyright scheme the first and third do. Natural rights don't have to benefit society, and don't ever go away.
Anyway, among the wide body of people who consider the DMCA unconstitutional, one of the common opinions is this:
It still maintains the principle that it is ENTIRELY possible to use copyrighted works without the permission of the author, in ways that the author is vehemently against, make copies under certain circumstances w/o permission. This is explicit.
Yet at the same time, it makes it illegal to access the work (obviously a prerequisite to do any of those things) w/o permission.
Not only does access not involve the making of copies or other forms of wide dissemination of the work, thus placing outside of the scope of copyright, but it is in total conflict with the principles of property ownership (that you can do whatever you want with a legally purchased DVD other than, loosely, copy or publicly display it), contract law (implying that a contract was implicitly formed when this is pretty clearly not the case or the buyer's intention), fair use (which derives from the First Amendment and CC and cannot be created or destroyed by Congress, though they have chosen to recognize it), and even some of it's own language.
Phew! And I've probably forgotten one or two things from that laundry list, because it's pretty late here.
Freedom of speech and the freedom of the press necessarily imply a freedom to listen. Do you have free speech if the police force you to speak freely in a jail cell? Or arrest people for listening to what you have to say?
No. This is patently not the case. Furthermore, some forms of free speech require the usage of other content. Reviews. Parodies. Quotation. Education. These have higher social priorities than copyright, and the courts have said so (as if the requirement that it promote progress wasn't good enough) again and again. That's the facts, Jack.
Authors have the power not to sell works to people. And they have the power (loosely speaking again - there are exceptions a'plenty) to make copies. That's about it. And the latter only for a limited time.
They have no real control over what others may do with their work once it leaves their hands, save for public showings and the making of some copies, sometimes, maybe.
Personally, I don't mind SOME copyright. But I can't tolerate the copyright we're stuck with right now. It's oppressive, and pretty likely unconstitutional.
And in this great nation, the author only gets the privelege of copyright when it serves the social uses that the populace puts it to. And the people don't enjoy reading or watching or listening at the sufference of the government. If they bought it, they can read it.
Er, it was founded on the principle that there were advantages to be found in making available distributed computing resources, promoting communication and doing so in an efficient, fault-tolerant manner.
The attitude of the early days of minicomputers and time sharing systems are closely linked to the attitudes of the people who developed the ARPANet. Which wasn't especially military yet, either.
The Endless September aside, the 'net has grown and profited by leaps and bounds since the microcomputer users hooked up to it. Sure, the signal to noise ratio has gotten worse. But there's also more signal, and that's pretty good too.
Capitalism's okay - the problem you seem to be seeing here a bit is that it's vunerable to positive feedback. Ideally, we want a free market in which all goods and services therin are interchangable with all other goods and services. It's the efficiency that we're after more than the means of getting it. (though freedom's always lots of fun; the Borg might be more efficient but it's not worth it) Unfortunately in the real world, businesses attempt to grow and combine, which does not always do wonders for the benefits that the system is supposed to provide for society.
IMHO regulation is only really important in the realm of antitrust, truthful advertising and safety. The first to prevent the collusion you describe with the toll roads; the second to ensure that when you buy a product you're getting what you asked for; the third to make sure that your jeans don't cause your head to fall off. The last _could_ emerge naturally from a market unregulated in that respect, but I don't trust businesses enough to not sell jeans that make peoples heads fall off far enough down the road that it doesn't matter. Like cigarette companies lying about their product's addictive and carcinogenic properties. If they'd been up front about it, that would have at least been a mark in their favor.
More centralized systems than that though seem to result in accumulations of power. Be they in businesses or paternalistic governments I don't feel comfortable either way. And even that isn't so hot. Perhaps there's a much better system that hasn't been invented yet, but we're stuck for now.
Ok. Lockheed and the lockheedsucks guy are both in the US, making it a domestic matter.
Obviously if anyone for any reason wishes to change their name servers, they can anyway. If some heathen country (why yes, I'm an American;) wishes to, or was foolish enough to give WIPO the power to compel them, that's fine too.
But just because WIPO says jump, doesn't mean that the US has to ask how high.
Imagine if they had requested that he be thrown in jail without a trial, tortured, and his property siezed without due compensation. The US hasn't got the power to do any of that, and aren't allowed to follow the orders of anyone who tells them to do it anyway. It's no different in this case.
But this case is based entirely in the US. The US govt. can't delegate authority to violate the first amendment to international bodies or treaty organizations that it's a party to, because it never had that authority anyway.
Treaties are great - but they shouldn't really have any effect until there's a federal law passed to comply with the treaty (otherwise you have impermissable situations like the President and a majority of the Senate taxing people through treaties w/o any involvement by the House) and that law has to be constitutional or it'll get overturned.
IIRC it was called QDOS - Quick and Dirty OS - when it was written by a totally different Seattle based company. MS bought it, hacked around with it a bit and renamed it.
Who cares what authors think? It's none of their damn business.
If they don't want their books to be lent out by libraries they had better well not bother writing books. Libraries have just as much right to buy books as the next person. And ANYONE can resell, lend or give away books.
In fact, the tide is turning on the software front as well, as the handful of cases regarding the legality of EULAs has presently shifted (AFAIK) towards the 'EULA's are illegal' side.
Book piracy, by the way, has existed since before copyrights even existed. Why people don't realize that, I don't know. (While you had to have a printing press, that press was more or less identical to the one the original publisher had; the cost difference was in the royalty to the author, which has always been quite small, and the legal actions against pirates that pirates normally don't care about but publishers do)
Heh. Knowing him personally, I think that he'd probably be happy with not counting the votes in the panhandle. And we're both FROM the panhandle:)
OTOH I was calling '00 for Bush since '97, moved to Seattle and voted Nader because I so disliked both major parties. I think that there were certainly screwups of the highest order in FL. However, it also ended up going for Bush, and I'm not contesting that. I think he'd win anyway.
Regarding networks, although they should be perfectly free to report what they want even while polls are open (it's a free country) I hope that people stop relying on them as much, or worry about getting the results the second the polls close. It won't kill them to wait for a day or two as counts are made, instead of relying on exit polls.
Slashdot Mirror
That wasn't fair use by that criteria.
If you were to cleave a Dilbert strip, you'd find that generally most of the value lies in the joke. There is much less of a visual element to that strip (partly b/c of the subject matter, mostly b/c Adams can't draw worth a damn) than there is for something along the lines of, say, Bizzaro.
In that particular strip, virtually nothing at all happens in the art. It's Dilbert at a workstation, talking to Ratbert.
And when examining claims of fair use, one of the criteria, IIRC, is the portion of the work used. Joy used almost the entire thing. Even if it's really short, that generally isn't fair use if you want to be really strict about it. (this deriving from the footage taken of and then broadcast of a human cannonball. His act is only a few seconds long, but who's going to see him if you already saw it on tv)
That all said, I don't have a problem with him doing that. There are other criteria as well. But if you want to get really snippy about it, he's certainly acting hypocritical. Perhaps he should reexamine his opinion.
Sure. But since they're copyrighted only the specific font is protected - not the face.
Thus... if you really wanted a copy of, say, Adobe Garamond, you print it up really big (but with all the various hints - could be tricky), trace it with a vector program, and voila!
You've got your own copyrightable implementation of that face.
As for music, it would be almost impossible to RE. Imagine the requests that the definition team puts in to the implementation team:
"Song should be about the singer's girlfriend; 4/4 time; two guitar players, one drummer, one keyboardist"
and later after a few trials,
"Increase the soul by half; add drum solo"
RE is perhaps a bit easier for some things than others.
Re: #1, not precisely.
As I understand it there's quite a battle going on regarding treaties. Basically, can treaties self-execute as law when agreed to, or would Congress have to pass laws in the normal manner to bring the US into compliance with otherwise toothless treaties.
The issue is this: Constitutionally, the powers of the Executive and Legislative branches are limited. For example, only the House may propose an appropriations bill, and it may only become law if passed by majorities of the House and Senate, and signed or allowed to pass into law by the President.
So, if treaties can self-execute, could not the Senate and the President, without any input whatsoever from the House, agree to a treaty that levied a tax?
They have no Constitutional power to do so directly. What is at stake is their ability to do so indirectly.
I'm pretty firmly in the non-self-executing treaty camp. What parts of the government have no power to do on their own, they have no power to do through other means.
Treaties can have no actual binding force if no laws are passed enacting the provisions of the treaty. To do otherwise would be to place our soverignty in the hands of 2/3rds of the Senate, the President and foreign nations. Which would be highly unconstitutional.
This also implies however, that any treaty (or provision therof) which requires unconstitutional laws to be passed to enact them cannot take place. Thus, if the courts rule current copyright terms to be unconstitutionally long (they are IMHO, and I'm a frickin' artist!) those parts of the treaties (and any enacting laws) go to jail, go directly to jail, do not pass go and do not collect $200.
A few good ruling in the courts could bring the whole house down to acceptable and legal levels.
Additionally, the government isn't allowed to copyright or patent anything that it develops, IIRC. Why shouldn't it require the same of any projects that it orders from contractors? That would just be the cost of doing business with the govt. for custom work.
Wouldn't impact off-the-shelf stuff, and the govt. shouldn't necessarily act like a business in a lot of ways either.
Of course almost all private universities still draw upon government grants, etc. AFAIK (IANAL) even if it's not total funding, they can lose it if they seriously infringe on civil rights.
:) Unfortunately the policy was quickly changed so that no family members could help.
Anecdotally, there was some sort of trouble that a student at MIT got into some years back. The rules of the school (like most) ignore due process, which they probably aren't really allowed to do if you press the matter, but he was at least given the opportunity to defend himself, with a family member present, in front of what was basically a drumhead tribunal hell-bent on kicking him out.
Fortunately for him, his uncle is Alan Dershowitz and he managed not to get kicked out.
Of course, someone (Reynolds?) lost the trademark on Cellophane because there was really no other way to describe the stuff. It was too new, and too unique.
I could see a trademark on SSH as in SSH-brand Secure Shell, but not on 'Secure Shell' itself.That's how you describe the entire class of products. They're shells, they're secure, it's in common usage.
Sure. Which isn't protected.
Remember mp3.com? Why precisely they got in trouble? It wasn't that they had the ability to store commerical, unlicensed mp3s and relay them back to you wherever you were.
It was that they ripped the mp3s, and you got to listen to them*
Had they required that everyone rip their own music and put it up, and that they stored all that music seperately, they'd've been in much better shape.
*mp3 is a business, and what they did qualifies as a public performance. your right to listen to music in the comfort of your house with a few close friends is still fine, though the RIAA would surely like to eliminate it.
I think that there was some debate over the validity of copying to memory (whatever kind) in order to execute software. Congress rendered it moot; it's entirely legal to copy software as long as it's necessary to get it to run. (thus you can run Windows w/o agreeing to the EULA, as long as it's a legally owned copy; you can't make copies for all your friends, that's not a prerequisite of it functioning on your computer)
Well there's a difference. Copyright law, which is what prevents him from playing music someone else holds a copyright on and getting away scot free is generally only constitutionally permitted to be concerned with copying and public performance. And even then, not always.
BUT if he's copying it for his own purposes, it's doubtful that this is much of a conflict with copyright law. Certainly the space shifting argument worked well enough for the Rio.
And he's right of course. He didn't license it. He never signed or agreed to a license; he merely paid for a CD. His inability to legally copy the disc for profit, etc. stems not from any license (nor is a license necessary for authors to prevent it) but from law.
They have. It happened to Xing. It doesn't matter because the entire keyspace has been discovered though. And it really doesn't matter in this case, because it's a Sony. I'll eat my hat if the MPAA did something like that to Sony. They're too damn big.
Naw, I wouldn't think so. Most countries including the US, IIRC, formally renounced any claim over space. Seems to me that if you can put a satellite up there, it's not subject to any licensing authority. This wouldn't necessarily make things easy... you'd have to run the whole operation out of some country that you couldn't get extradited for copyright infringement from, but there woudn't be much that could be done to you AFAIK.
Speak for yourself. Personally, I always harbor a deep and broad suspicion for anyone that encourages restrictions on speech for any reason. It's essential to be able to communicate freely if you wish to live in a free society. Furthermore it's essential that PEOPLE first and foremost have this freedom, as it is people that our societies and governments must serve. The Constitution (as a typical American /.'er, I pretty much limit my discussion to the US as that's what I'm familiar with) does after all begin 'We the People' and not 'We the Businesses' or 'We the Government' or 'We the Economic Interests.'
Economic sense is secondary here. Authors are not entitled to make money by virtue of the fact that they wrote a book. Nor are they entitled to make money whenever that book is copied, or control the use, possession and copying of that book. In order, not to support authors, but to encourage the creation of more works, our government can choose to give them the ability to gain somewhat more profit than they could in a copyrightless world by controlling SOME copying, SOMETIMES, for a LIMITED TIME. But we're under no obligation to do so, and in fact, if it could be conclusively shown that society benefits more from not having copyright, we'd be bound to abolish it. Money isn't even mentioned as a factor.
Additionally, the tax scheme in the US is typically set up along two parallel lines. First that you owe a tax on income that you recieve. (they had to pass an entire amendment to the Constitution to get this; not an easy thing. Sadly it's been terribly abused since day one) Second, in many local jurisdictions, you pay a sales tax that is a flat percentage of the price of something. If identical, say, computers are for sale at two different stores for $10,000 and $100 the tax would be dramatically different even though there's no difference between what you're getting and how much work and parts went into it.
The difference as I see it is that
1) The sales tax is equally applied.
The govt. pretty certainly would not be permitted long (if anyone had the stones to challenge it) to impose more of a tax burden on speech than they do on other goods. If the tax on a piece of paper and a shovel are identical, they're not trying to impose a burden on free speech especially. A very liberal minded judge might be persuaded that taxing materials used for speech/press purposes might be unconstitutional too, but there's always the matter of precedent. If the courts act in one manner for a long time, it's very difficult to get them to change, regardless of whether they're right or wrong. (which usually works out okay)
2) If it weren't private entities couldn't be involved
Even making the assumption that speech-making materials could legally be taxed at an excessive rate compared to everything else, it would be pretty likely an infringement on free speech (because your ability to fund free speech is also generally considered free speech; this is why political donations will always be difficult to regulate, and it's a position i agree with) as well as copyright (among other reasons because the right to copy is required to lie -broadly- only with the copyright holder. Paying someone else for the privlege would be a copyright violation, ironically)
It's not quite that there are taxes so much, as to what the specifics are, and what they're meant to accomplish.
Good. I'm glad to hear that you've discovered an important principle of our economy. People tend to act out of self-interest, and the competing interests drive things. Do you think that Jeff Bezos would be as interested in Amazon if he weren't making money hand over fist? (with the possibility of more money to come) I doubt it.
People have the right to associate freely. And if they want to bargain collectively they have that right too. The only thing that I don't like about unions is when they tend to acquire too much power (I don't like really massive accumulations of power) and can force businesses to not hire outside of the union. But that's the choice of the business; if they're willing to lose all of their experienced employees, and lose credibility among workers they can do that.
After all, Amazon has no obligation to retain any of their employees right now. They could show the biggest profit in history if their workers slept in their offices, worked for free, etc. Then they could fire them all. And the employees would get the shaft.
Just as Amazon should generally try to do things that are in it's best interest as a company, so should the individual people working there do the same. Once in a while I have to work extra hours at my job, but I accepted that when the contract was negotiated. That's quite different from working every weekend, or skipping my non-accumulatable vacation time (which my boss has encouraged from time to time) and I'll be damned if I give my company that for free. They can EARN things; they're not entitled, and it's a piss-poor company that relies on getting free work from it's workers.
(IIRC, potassium benzoate (C7H5KO2) is a white, flakey powder used as a food preservative. guess it's not all that healthy, like good ol' Red Dye #4
Gah?
1) Recording your own music (that is if you're a musician) should not be subject to taxes. That's a tax on speech, which is blatantly unconstitutional.
2) Musicians can copy music to which they hold the copyright an infinte number of times. A law mandating that they can't do so unless they pay a tax both infringes on their freedom of speech and copyright (if the tax goes to some entity other than the govt., which it does)
3) Recording other people's music can, under some circumstances, be quite legal. The normal set of fair uses of course. Time shifting if it's coming off of broadcast. No copyright infringement occurs in either case, so there's no justification for a tax.
4) Public domain recordings are legal to copy an infinite number of times, and preventing people from doing so again tramples on both the first amendment and on copyright (b/c copyrighted content has to become p.d. - effectively preventing that is unconstitutional)
5) The reason that DAT never took off was that it was killed at birth by the RIAA. They didn't want anyone to use the damn thing. If it had become popular we'd probably have CD and DAT as standards, and some migration to DVDA by now (though if they were that flexible, you'd also see CDMP3 and DVDMP3 compilations in stores...)
I also say to hell with taxes and restrictions on legal and protected speech and copying. The RIAA members have no more right whatsoever to make, sell and copy music than anyone else. There should be no special treatment.
A lot of that wouldn't be terribly difficult...
Already I can double click on a url in many Mac apps and it will automatically be sent to my preferred web browser, or ftp client or whatever.
But there would have to be a HUGE amount of thought put into it before it would be ready for prime time, to ensure that it would really work well, and that the perception of the interface that the users had was a good/useful one.
Boy is this quite a troll. Still, it's dangerous to let these sorts of attitudes foster. Ignoring it isn't going to make it go away.
So...
Firstly, copyright does not exist in the US, unless Congress passes a law permitting it; such a law has to comply to the Copyright Clause of the Constitution and also exists in tension with the First Amendment. The Copyright Clause (CC) is a utilitarian power of Congress. Never in US history (even IIRC when we were British colonies and the Statute of Anne applied) has copyright been a natural law. That is, authors are not entitled to copyright by virtue of authorship. In other countries natural law systems do exist, and imply that even in a lawless environment authors still are entitled to control how others use their works. (though that's a good example of fuzzy thinking IMHO)
There are three provisions in the CC. First that copyright is only permitted to exist should it promote the progress of the arts and sciences. Second, that it should only be given to the author. (though it is accepted that the author can later transfer it to other parties) Third, that the copyright last for a limited time.
If anything blasts apart the misconception that the US has or could have, barring an amendment, a natural law copyright scheme the first and third do. Natural rights don't have to benefit society, and don't ever go away.
Anyway, among the wide body of people who consider the DMCA unconstitutional, one of the common opinions is this:
It still maintains the principle that it is ENTIRELY possible to use copyrighted works without the permission of the author, in ways that the author is vehemently against, make copies under certain circumstances w/o permission. This is explicit.
Yet at the same time, it makes it illegal to access the work (obviously a prerequisite to do any of those things) w/o permission.
Not only does access not involve the making of copies or other forms of wide dissemination of the work, thus placing outside of the scope of copyright, but it is in total conflict with the principles of property ownership (that you can do whatever you want with a legally purchased DVD other than, loosely, copy or publicly display it), contract law (implying that a contract was implicitly formed when this is pretty clearly not the case or the buyer's intention), fair use (which derives from the First Amendment and CC and cannot be created or destroyed by Congress, though they have chosen to recognize it), and even some of it's own language.
Phew! And I've probably forgotten one or two things from that laundry list, because it's pretty late here.
Freedom of speech and the freedom of the press necessarily imply a freedom to listen. Do you have free speech if the police force you to speak freely in a jail cell? Or arrest people for listening to what you have to say?
No. This is patently not the case. Furthermore, some forms of free speech require the usage of other content. Reviews. Parodies. Quotation. Education. These have higher social priorities than copyright, and the courts have said so (as if the requirement that it promote progress wasn't good enough) again and again. That's the facts, Jack.
Authors have the power not to sell works to people. And they have the power (loosely speaking again - there are exceptions a'plenty) to make copies. That's about it. And the latter only for a limited time.
They have no real control over what others may do with their work once it leaves their hands, save for public showings and the making of some copies, sometimes, maybe.
Personally, I don't mind SOME copyright. But I can't tolerate the copyright we're stuck with right now. It's oppressive, and pretty likely unconstitutional.
And in this great nation, the author only gets the privelege of copyright when it serves the social uses that the populace puts it to. And the people don't enjoy reading or watching or listening at the sufference of the government. If they bought it, they can read it.
Rebuttal?
Er, it was founded on the principle that there were advantages to be found in making available distributed computing resources, promoting communication and doing so in an efficient, fault-tolerant manner.
The attitude of the early days of minicomputers and time sharing systems are closely linked to the attitudes of the people who developed the ARPANet. Which wasn't especially military yet, either.
The Endless September aside, the 'net has grown and profited by leaps and bounds since the microcomputer users hooked up to it. Sure, the signal to noise ratio has gotten worse. But there's also more signal, and that's pretty good too.
Capitalism's okay - the problem you seem to be seeing here a bit is that it's vunerable to positive feedback. Ideally, we want a free market in which all goods and services therin are interchangable with all other goods and services. It's the efficiency that we're after more than the means of getting it. (though freedom's always lots of fun; the Borg might be more efficient but it's not worth it) Unfortunately in the real world, businesses attempt to grow and combine, which does not always do wonders for the benefits that the system is supposed to provide for society.
IMHO regulation is only really important in the realm of antitrust, truthful advertising and safety. The first to prevent the collusion you describe with the toll roads; the second to ensure that when you buy a product you're getting what you asked for; the third to make sure that your jeans don't cause your head to fall off. The last _could_ emerge naturally from a market unregulated in that respect, but I don't trust businesses enough to not sell jeans that make peoples heads fall off far enough down the road that it doesn't matter. Like cigarette companies lying about their product's addictive and carcinogenic properties. If they'd been up front about it, that would have at least been a mark in their favor.
More centralized systems than that though seem to result in accumulations of power. Be they in businesses or paternalistic governments I don't feel comfortable either way. And even that isn't so hot. Perhaps there's a much better system that hasn't been invented yet, but we're stuck for now.
Ok. Lockheed and the lockheedsucks guy are both in the US, making it a domestic matter.
;) wishes to, or was foolish enough to give WIPO the power to compel them, that's fine too.
Obviously if anyone for any reason wishes to change their name servers, they can anyway. If some heathen country (why yes, I'm an American
But just because WIPO says jump, doesn't mean that the US has to ask how high.
Imagine if they had requested that he be thrown in jail without a trial, tortured, and his property siezed without due compensation. The US hasn't got the power to do any of that, and aren't allowed to follow the orders of anyone who tells them to do it anyway. It's no different in this case.
But this case is based entirely in the US. The US govt. can't delegate authority to violate the first amendment to international bodies or treaty organizations that it's a party to, because it never had that authority anyway.
Treaties are great - but they shouldn't really have any effect until there's a federal law passed to comply with the treaty (otherwise you have impermissable situations like the President and a majority of the Senate taxing people through treaties w/o any involvement by the House) and that law has to be constitutional or it'll get overturned.
IIRC it was called QDOS - Quick and Dirty OS - when it was written by a totally different Seattle based company. MS bought it, hacked around with it a bit and renamed it.
Who cares what authors think? It's none of their damn business.
If they don't want their books to be lent out by libraries they had better well not bother writing books. Libraries have just as much right to buy books as the next person. And ANYONE can resell, lend or give away books.
In fact, the tide is turning on the software front as well, as the handful of cases regarding the legality of EULAs has presently shifted (AFAIK) towards the 'EULA's are illegal' side.
Book piracy, by the way, has existed since before copyrights even existed. Why people don't realize that, I don't know. (While you had to have a printing press, that press was more or less identical to the one the original publisher had; the cost difference was in the royalty to the author, which has always been quite small, and the legal actions against pirates that pirates normally don't care about but publishers do)
Ooh, sorry, if you store things in the Midwest you still have to watch out for tornadoes and the occassional Tsathoqqua.
Heh. Knowing him personally, I think that he'd probably be happy with not counting the votes in the panhandle. And we're both FROM the panhandle :)
OTOH I was calling '00 for Bush since '97, moved to Seattle and voted Nader because I so disliked both major parties. I think that there were certainly screwups of the highest order in FL. However, it also ended up going for Bush, and I'm not contesting that. I think he'd win anyway.
Regarding networks, although they should be perfectly free to report what they want even while polls are open (it's a free country) I hope that people stop relying on them as much, or worry about getting the results the second the polls close. It won't kill them to wait for a day or two as counts are made, instead of relying on exit polls.