Well, it'll be argued on the basis of US copyright law; no one here cares about the Berne Convention, or international copyright generally, and there's no point in discussing it in court.
The issue is a matter of interpreting our own statute, and in fact, the relevant language predates our entering the Berne Convention
On what grounds did they argue that First Sale doesn't apply to things manufactured outside of the US?
The First Sale statute (17 USC 109) only applies to "a particular copy... lawfully made under this title." There is some question as to exactly what that means, but the interpretation that won the day in this case, so far, is 'literally manufactured in the US.'
What specific law prevents me, a private citizen, from having foreign buyers send me books from abroad and me to resell them in the US?
17 USC 106 and 602, if the books have a US copyright and you are acting without the authorization of the copyright holder (or some applicable exception).
I really don't see how copyright law applies here. I could see how international trade agreements apply here. What are the relevant laws?
US copyright law prohibits importing copies of copyrighted works without the permission of the US copyright holder, unless one of several exceptions apply. For one of these exceptions, first sale, there is presently some dispute as to whether it applies to copies manufactured outside of the US. This guy had some bad luck and wound up in a court that felt that it does not apply to foreign-made copies.
The laws you might want to look at are 17 USC 106, providing an exclusive right of distribution, 17 USC 602, making unauthorized importation an infringement of the distribution right, and providing a few exceptions, none of which seem to apply here, and 17 USC 109, making unauthorized sales of used copies lawful, but only under certain circumstances, which the courts so far say do not apply here.
By the doctrine of first sale, he now owns that item and can sell it.
There's your problem.
The First Sale statute (17 USC 109) only applies to a "a particular copy... lawfully made under this title."
Various courts are currently unable to agree as to whether this means that first sale applies to copies which are lawfully made per US law (i.e. if US law had applied in the place where they were made, would they have been made lawfully), or whether it only applies to copies that were literally manufactured in the US, or whether it applies to any work protected by a US copyright.
In this case, the court seems to have gone with the 'literally manufactured in the US' option.
If first sale doesn't apply, then he runs afoul of the distribution right, which is one of the several rights that together compromise copyright.
Had he done it with one book he'd happened to bring with him, no one would have cared.
There's a particular exception for this, although it doesn't go so far as to cover later sales of the book.
He owned the book, he had a "license" for the material, what did he do wrong?
First, if copyright law and practice in the place where he got the books is anything like the US, he didn't have a license for the books. Usually (at least in the US) when you buy a book, you just own that copy, period. There is no license involved. Copyright licenses involving end users as parties is really only common in the software world (and increasingly other media provided via computer), but it is a very bad practice from a consumer standpoint, and generally not necessary. It would be great if people would stop thinking of it as a perfectly normal and acceptable thing.
Second, importation into the US of copies of works which are copyrighted in the US is unlawful unless certain exceptions apply. The idea is that if it were allowed, a US copyright would be basically worthless, since everyone would just buy copies from a country where the works were in the public domain, import them, and undercut the holder of the US copyright. What he did wrong here, apparently, is to have imported without the benefit of any of the exceptions that might have saved him.
Aside from that being bad in case someone really needed reliable numbers, it wouldn't work; if information is provided an claimed as factual, third parties are entitled to rely on that claim for copyright purposes. Nash v. CBS is a good starting point for this sort of thing.
Of course factual looking information that is presented as an opinion can be protectable. IIRC the values given in the blue book for used cars are protected since they're not really objective facts and not claimed as such.
Deliberate errors are only useful for determining if copying has occurred. Not or whether the copying was unlawful.
Really? Would you care to discuss that further? I'm happy with common law in a lot of ways (although we've got a lot of statutes mucking it up), but I've never understood the appeal of Roman law.
I don't know anything about Canadian copyright law, but in the US, at least, copyright is entirely concerned with provenance. If you copy a work, that may be infringement; if you independently create a new work which is coincidentally identical to another, that's not infringement. (Although the more complicated the work, and the less documentation you have for how you did it, the less likely you are to convince anyone that it's the truth)
Crowdsourcing isn't necessarily relevant to this; if the crowd merely copies a work for you, one bit at a time, it won't help.
It is entirely possible -- again, in the US -- to deliberately produce a work that is functionally similar to another work without infringing. This was done to reverse engineer the IBM BIOS and make compatible BIOSes back in the 80s, and was absolutely key to the development of the microcomputer market as we know it today.
tl;dr -- The previous poster is wrong: the source of data is crucially important, not the similarity of the source work and the new work.
JK Rowling cannot copyright the individual facts around the fictional universe she has created, I do not believe, so if you were to create a fan sequel to one of her books it would not be a problem with copyright I do not believe (though it MIGHT be a trademark problem).
Wow, no.
Facts that are true (or presented as true, e.g. a conspiracy theory, since the author shouldn't get to have it both ways) are treated as being uncopyrightable. Fictional facts, OTOH, usually are copyrightable, at least in aggregate, since copying them is to copy little snippets from the creative work in which they originate. The Seinfeld Aptitude Test case, Castle Rock Entertainment Inc. v. Carol Publishing Group, 150 F.3d 132 (2nd Cir. 1998), is a fairly good example of why your idea wouldn't work.
Further, a straight-up sequel would run afoul of the derivative right that is a part of copyright, and would clearly be infringing. And there would pretty certainly be trademark problems as well.
No, an individual phone number is not copyrightable, but a collection of them is.
Well, Feist is a little more detailed than that.
Basically the issue is creativity of the selection and arrangement of uncopyrightable facts. If the selection and arrangement are creative, it can be copyrightable. A phone book selecting all listed numbers in a geographic area, arranging them by last name alphabetical order is not creative. But a phone book that listed only the telephone company's favorite subscribers, in order by the color of their houses or buildings, quite likely would be copyrightable, for whatever good that does the phone company.
In the US, at least, due to the ever-loathesome Berne Convention, architectural works have been copyrightable since 1990. Prior to that, blueprints were considered copyrightable, but this only mattered for the purpose of copying the blueprints themselves; they could be freely used to build buildings based on the blueprints. There are a few restrictions on the scope of these copyrights, which makes things a little better. Really though, it's a stupid idea; the history of architecture in the US before and after the law was enacted makes it pretty clear that copyright does not incentivize architects to create and build buildings that they would not have created and built otherwise. As such, granting copyright is wholly inappropriate as it provides no public benefit, but does incur a cost to the public. The real incentives in the architectural field involve what is fashionable, our abilities in the realm of engineering, what clients will pay for, building codes, etc.
I suppose there is some benefit in not having numerous copies of the latest monstrosity by Gehry, Libeskind, Koolhaas, etc. floating around. OTOH there would be more benefit in not having any of their crap inflicted on us.
No, they don't have to be different; rather, if the selection and arrangement are copyrightable, it just can't have been copied. If they're the same by coincidence it's ok. And lots of selections and arrangements aren't copyrightable anyway. Eg a math book for young children is likely to have the first operations be addition and subtraction for non creative reasons, and likewise probably won't jump straight to integration or geometric proofs.
Quite easy means that you have people who are literate in the relevant language and have good eyesight copying it, and you use some redundant copying and automated comparisons to check for accuracy. But it's pricier than OCR and slower too (unless you throw bodies at it) so people don't usually do it.
Paper degrades with use, and being analog can't be copied with perfect fidelity. Digital does not degrade with use, and can be copied with perfect fidelity.
No, while letter shapes printed in ink on paper may be analog, the letters themselves, regardless of medium, are digital; There aren't any letters in between A and B.
It's quite easy to copy the text of printed books with absolute fdelity. But it's cheaper to use imperfect OCR.
Both are illegal, as are a few other things besides. Well, actually, if one looks at the precise language of the statute, while distribution is illegal, uploading doesn't meet the definition of distribution, so it either has to be something else that is illegal (my money would be on some form of secondary liability, where in essence the assistance that the uploader provides the downloader for the downloader's offense makes the uploader liable too) or it is perfectly okay. There's a case underway where someone is finally making that argument, but I doubt that the courts looking at it are ever going to side with pirates merely because of the actual language of the law. Justice could stand to be blinder.
Anyway, you can see a list of the major types of copyright infringement at 17 USC 106 (definitions are helpfully provided at 17 USC 101 -- n.b. that definitions provided in the statute override ordinary dictionary definitions).
And, since all else being equal, they are just forms of the same offense -- infringement -- the remedies are the same for both: Actual damages and profits, and perhaps costs, fees, an injunction, even the destruction of copies and copying equipment (though I don't think I've heard of a court ordering the destruction of anyone's computer in this sort of case -- I wonder why the other side has neglected such a mean tactic). And, if the work is eligible (it usually will be for anything you'd get in copyright trouble for downloading), statutory damages, if the plaintiff so opts. Civil remedies for copyright infringement may be found at 17 USC 502-505. Section 504 is the major bit.
There's no real distinction for civil damages as to whether one acted in a saintly or fiendish fashion with regard to infringement. It won't matter for actual damages and profits. But statutory damages simply must fall within a particular range between a minimum and a maximum in the statute. In practice, if you've gotten to the point where you're being sued in a case like this, the minimum can't be lowered, and the maximum can be relied upon to be raised as high as it'll go. The actual number in that range is picked by the jury, who may do so for entirely inscrutable reasons, and may then be reduced by the judge to as low as the minimum, as the judge sees fit.
It's mainly because of the technical reason you identified: it's hard to catch people who only download, unless they download from you (or you obtain logs from someone who was uploading).
There is a bit of legal strategy as well, though; even the RIAA has finite legal resources, and it's not as though the few lawsuits (or even the more common settlements, probably) are a profit center for them. Given this, it's more efficient to go for the head of the snake, as it were. That's why they like to sue / pressure people who are behind entire file sharing networks (e.g. Napster, Grokster, MegaUpload) since that could (if it worked) cut off lots of file sharers in one stroke. Suing uploaders is less efficient, but still could prevent at least some downloading from occurring. Suing a downloader is the least efficient thing of all, since it only stops that one person with no beneficial side effects. That isn't to say that it would never happen, but it can't possibly be a high priority.
No. A line item veto for the President is unconstitutional. It was tried back in the 90s and overturned. You'd need an amendment to allow for it. State constitutions may or may not allow their governors to have line item vetos, but that's of no help at the federal level.
Instead the President has to veto or approve entire bills.
Well, don't just ask that. Also ask why we were (and still are) so ill-prepared for such price changes, even though it's patently obvious that the price keeps increasing and is becoming ever more volatile, and why we're so locked into it, instead of having a variety of alternative systems (not just of fuel, or of energy sources, but also of transportation and ways to reduce the need for transportation) that can help to cushion the problems with gas; preferably without wrecking te environment or the economy. (Though of the two, I'd rather risk the economy -- it's easier to repair than the environment, which is still too complex and majestic for us to reliably manipulate to our advantage at will)
This country really needs serious pushes on telecommuting, increased urban density, mass transit (preferably electrified), high speed intercity rail, battery r&d, and clean, inexpensive electricity generation and transmission. The TVA worked well -- why not couple this with a works project when we have a lot of unemployed people who can be had cheaply?
Paper documents that I get are usually of that size. Paper documents that I write are usually of that size. And even if I'm just writing something in a word processor that is not destined to be printed out, it is still formatted by default as if it is going to be printed in that size.
And since the dream of the paperless office still hasn't come to pass, it would be nice if my experience with a given document were the same whether I've got that document on paper or a screen -- same ratio, same physical size, and at a high enough resolution for the screen that they're effectively equally as sharp.
The iPad already has a 1.33:1 ratio screen at about 197mm x 148mm. I only want 1.375:1 at 297mm x 216mm. I'll grant, though, that the bezel, which adds another 20mm on every side, probably needs to remain, so as to provide a non-active surface to grip the front of the device. (i.e. usually where you'd place your thumb)
Call it a Pro model, if you like -- the iPod has been very successful with physical size as a differentiator between product lines from the Classic through to the Invisa. I've been holding out on getting an iPad ever since the iPhone 4 came out and it became obvious that high res screens were coming eventually. It looks like I'll get the iPad 3, but it would be just that much better if it were a little bit better for those of us that work with paper.
Well, remember that the ratio for movies at the time that NTSC was developed was the old Academy Ratio of 1.375:1, and that itself was a modification (to allow for the addition of a sound track to the film) of the older silent movie ratio of 1.33:1... or as it might otherwise be expressed, 4:3. And that's the way it is due to the way that Edison chose standards for the width of the film, and the width and frequency of the sprocket holes.
Movies didn't start to get wider until television was already on the scene. And because the movie industry has always been dumber than a sack of hammers, wide ratios were adopted for the usual reason: as a way of breaking compatibility with the new technology.
However -- for the iPad, what I'd really prefer to see is a screen large enough to display both full-sized A4 and 8.5x11 paper formats. This means it would need to be 216mm x 297mm, at an 8:11 ratio. If there were more UI cruft, it would need to be a little bigger still in order to accommodate it and still show an entire page of content, but iOS seems to be pretty good about hiding that stuff when it isn't wanted.
Distributing someone else's work is NOT a right[.] Unless you have permission.
Sure it is.
I can print up a bunch of copies of Shakespeare's 'Romeo and Juliet,' go down to the street corner, and start passing them out to anyone who wants one, all without getting any permission from anyone at all. If the police tried to stop me, I could go to court, assert my right of free speech, and win handily, because the government (here at least) recognizes my preexisting right to do this, and protects it.
Freedom of speech not only includes communicating your own speech, but also repeating the speech of others verbatim.
Copyright is an infringement of the freedom of speech, as it grants to private parties (and, in a way, to the government), the power to censor other people when they use the speech of others (under certain conditions, in certain ways, etc.). It's clear therefore that copyright is inherently a bad thing. However, it may nevertheless be tolerable if it produces an even greater benefit for the public that suffers the injury of that censorship.
Still, we should never forget that copyright is a very risky, very dubious practice. We should always be highly skeptical of any infringement on free speech, no matter how lofty the goal of the infringement is claimed to be. We should carefully measure the benefits and harms of copyright, in terms of both its scope and duration, to make sure that we not only have a system that produces a net public benefit (copyright with less public benefit than public harm should be abolished or reformed immediately, of course), but the greatest net public benefit possible. And even then, it is perfectly legitimate to call for the abolition of copyright.
The authors cut of a book sale is usually quite low (once they have paid for their advance)
That's between them and their publisher. The author is free to hold out for a higher royalty (whether from one publisher or another), or to self-publish. I don't see why it is any concern of the public whether the author gets a good deal or not.
As each book borrowed is potentially a book that the reader no longer needs to buy, it seems only fair that the author should get some recompense
I don't think it's fair. If the author can't make a living from sales of his book, even taking into account that some people won't read it, or will resell it, or borrow it, etc., he should try something else, e.g. raising the price to something he can live with, getting a larger share of the sales, writing something more popular so as to get more sales, or only writing as a hobby and not relying on it for an income. In the US, authors do not get a payment from libraries when books are borrowed, but we seem to have a successful literary industry, so I don't think that those payments are really necessary. Literature in the UK would probably not be harmed if you got rid of it, and it would free up some of the budget of the libraries to buy more books.
The big issue I have with the whole "license" thing, is that they are saying I, as a customer of their web store, am agreeing to a content license for which I have never seen the terms.
Oh, you probably have the opportunity to, at least. Not showing it at all would risk running afoul of Specht v. Netscape, and could result in the EULA not being enforceable, and they're not going to want to risk that.
Despite the fact that there should be, I don't think that there effectively is a real lower limit on duration for the purposes of fixation. I suspect that if there were actual litigation, the CD player's buffer would be prima facie infringing, but would then be allowed under fair use or an implied non-exclusive license (the copyright holder presumably expected people to play the CD on CD players, however they work), etc. Not that it's likely to ever come up.
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Well, it'll be argued on the basis of US copyright law; no one here cares about the Berne Convention, or international copyright generally, and there's no point in discussing it in court.
The issue is a matter of interpreting our own statute, and in fact, the relevant language predates our entering the Berne Convention
On what grounds did they argue that First Sale doesn't apply to things manufactured outside of the US?
The First Sale statute (17 USC 109) only applies to "a particular copy ... lawfully made under this title." There is some question as to exactly what that means, but the interpretation that won the day in this case, so far, is 'literally manufactured in the US.'
What specific law prevents me, a private citizen, from having foreign buyers send me books from abroad and me to resell them in the US?
17 USC 106 and 602, if the books have a US copyright and you are acting without the authorization of the copyright holder (or some applicable exception).
I really don't see how copyright law applies here. I could see how international trade agreements apply here. What are the relevant laws?
US copyright law prohibits importing copies of copyrighted works without the permission of the US copyright holder, unless one of several exceptions apply. For one of these exceptions, first sale, there is presently some dispute as to whether it applies to copies manufactured outside of the US. This guy had some bad luck and wound up in a court that felt that it does not apply to foreign-made copies.
The laws you might want to look at are 17 USC 106, providing an exclusive right of distribution, 17 USC 602, making unauthorized importation an infringement of the distribution right, and providing a few exceptions, none of which seem to apply here, and 17 USC 109, making unauthorized sales of used copies lawful, but only under certain circumstances, which the courts so far say do not apply here.
By the doctrine of first sale, he now owns that item and can sell it.
There's your problem.
The First Sale statute (17 USC 109) only applies to a "a particular copy ... lawfully made under this title."
Various courts are currently unable to agree as to whether this means that first sale applies to copies which are lawfully made per US law (i.e. if US law had applied in the place where they were made, would they have been made lawfully), or whether it only applies to copies that were literally manufactured in the US, or whether it applies to any work protected by a US copyright.
In this case, the court seems to have gone with the 'literally manufactured in the US' option.
If first sale doesn't apply, then he runs afoul of the distribution right, which is one of the several rights that together compromise copyright.
Had he done it with one book he'd happened to bring with him, no one would have cared.
There's a particular exception for this, although it doesn't go so far as to cover later sales of the book.
He owned the book, he had a "license" for the material, what did he do wrong?
First, if copyright law and practice in the place where he got the books is anything like the US, he didn't have a license for the books. Usually (at least in the US) when you buy a book, you just own that copy, period. There is no license involved. Copyright licenses involving end users as parties is really only common in the software world (and increasingly other media provided via computer), but it is a very bad practice from a consumer standpoint, and generally not necessary. It would be great if people would stop thinking of it as a perfectly normal and acceptable thing.
Second, importation into the US of copies of works which are copyrighted in the US is unlawful unless certain exceptions apply. The idea is that if it were allowed, a US copyright would be basically worthless, since everyone would just buy copies from a country where the works were in the public domain, import them, and undercut the holder of the US copyright. What he did wrong here, apparently, is to have imported without the benefit of any of the exceptions that might have saved him.
Aside from that being bad in case someone really needed reliable numbers, it wouldn't work; if information is provided an claimed as factual, third parties are entitled to rely on that claim for copyright purposes. Nash v. CBS is a good starting point for this sort of thing.
Of course factual looking information that is presented as an opinion can be protectable. IIRC the values given in the blue book for used cars are protected since they're not really objective facts and not claimed as such.
Deliberate errors are only useful for determining if copying has occurred. Not or whether the copying was unlawful.
Really? Would you care to discuss that further? I'm happy with common law in a lot of ways (although we've got a lot of statutes mucking it up), but I've never understood the appeal of Roman law.
I don't know anything about Canadian copyright law, but in the US, at least, copyright is entirely concerned with provenance. If you copy a work, that may be infringement; if you independently create a new work which is coincidentally identical to another, that's not infringement. (Although the more complicated the work, and the less documentation you have for how you did it, the less likely you are to convince anyone that it's the truth)
Crowdsourcing isn't necessarily relevant to this; if the crowd merely copies a work for you, one bit at a time, it won't help.
It is entirely possible -- again, in the US -- to deliberately produce a work that is functionally similar to another work without infringing. This was done to reverse engineer the IBM BIOS and make compatible BIOSes back in the 80s, and was absolutely key to the development of the microcomputer market as we know it today.
tl;dr -- The previous poster is wrong: the source of data is crucially important, not the similarity of the source work and the new work.
JK Rowling cannot copyright the individual facts around the fictional universe she has created, I do not believe, so if you were to create a fan sequel to one of her books it would not be a problem with copyright I do not believe (though it MIGHT be a trademark problem).
Wow, no.
Facts that are true (or presented as true, e.g. a conspiracy theory, since the author shouldn't get to have it both ways) are treated as being uncopyrightable. Fictional facts, OTOH, usually are copyrightable, at least in aggregate, since copying them is to copy little snippets from the creative work in which they originate. The Seinfeld Aptitude Test case, Castle Rock Entertainment Inc. v. Carol Publishing Group, 150 F.3d 132 (2nd Cir. 1998), is a fairly good example of why your idea wouldn't work.
Further, a straight-up sequel would run afoul of the derivative right that is a part of copyright, and would clearly be infringing. And there would pretty certainly be trademark problems as well.
No, an individual phone number is not copyrightable, but a collection of them is.
Well, Feist is a little more detailed than that.
Basically the issue is creativity of the selection and arrangement of uncopyrightable facts. If the selection and arrangement are creative, it can be copyrightable. A phone book selecting all listed numbers in a geographic area, arranging them by last name alphabetical order is not creative. But a phone book that listed only the telephone company's favorite subscribers, in order by the color of their houses or buildings, quite likely would be copyrightable, for whatever good that does the phone company.
In the US, at least, due to the ever-loathesome Berne Convention, architectural works have been copyrightable since 1990. Prior to that, blueprints were considered copyrightable, but this only mattered for the purpose of copying the blueprints themselves; they could be freely used to build buildings based on the blueprints. There are a few restrictions on the scope of these copyrights, which makes things a little better. Really though, it's a stupid idea; the history of architecture in the US before and after the law was enacted makes it pretty clear that copyright does not incentivize architects to create and build buildings that they would not have created and built otherwise. As such, granting copyright is wholly inappropriate as it provides no public benefit, but does incur a cost to the public. The real incentives in the architectural field involve what is fashionable, our abilities in the realm of engineering, what clients will pay for, building codes, etc.
I suppose there is some benefit in not having numerous copies of the latest monstrosity by Gehry, Libeskind, Koolhaas, etc. floating around. OTOH there would be more benefit in not having any of their crap inflicted on us.
No, they don't have to be different; rather, if the selection and arrangement are copyrightable, it just can't have been copied. If they're the same by coincidence it's ok. And lots of selections and arrangements aren't copyrightable anyway. Eg a math book for young children is likely to have the first operations be addition and subtraction for non creative reasons, and likewise probably won't jump straight to integration or geometric proofs.
Quite easy means that you have people who are literate in the relevant language and have good eyesight copying it, and you use some redundant copying and automated comparisons to check for accuracy. But it's pricier than OCR and slower too (unless you throw bodies at it) so people don't usually do it.
Pictures, I agree, will tend to be analog.
Paper degrades with use, and being analog can't be copied with perfect fidelity. Digital does not degrade with use, and can be copied with perfect fidelity.
No, while letter shapes printed in ink on paper may be analog, the letters themselves, regardless of medium, are digital; There aren't any letters in between A and B.
It's quite easy to copy the text of printed books with absolute fdelity. But it's cheaper to use imperfect OCR.
Both are illegal, as are a few other things besides. Well, actually, if one looks at the precise language of the statute, while distribution is illegal, uploading doesn't meet the definition of distribution, so it either has to be something else that is illegal (my money would be on some form of secondary liability, where in essence the assistance that the uploader provides the downloader for the downloader's offense makes the uploader liable too) or it is perfectly okay. There's a case underway where someone is finally making that argument, but I doubt that the courts looking at it are ever going to side with pirates merely because of the actual language of the law. Justice could stand to be blinder.
Anyway, you can see a list of the major types of copyright infringement at 17 USC 106 (definitions are helpfully provided at 17 USC 101 -- n.b. that definitions provided in the statute override ordinary dictionary definitions).
And, since all else being equal, they are just forms of the same offense -- infringement -- the remedies are the same for both: Actual damages and profits, and perhaps costs, fees, an injunction, even the destruction of copies and copying equipment (though I don't think I've heard of a court ordering the destruction of anyone's computer in this sort of case -- I wonder why the other side has neglected such a mean tactic). And, if the work is eligible (it usually will be for anything you'd get in copyright trouble for downloading), statutory damages, if the plaintiff so opts. Civil remedies for copyright infringement may be found at 17 USC 502-505. Section 504 is the major bit.
There's no real distinction for civil damages as to whether one acted in a saintly or fiendish fashion with regard to infringement. It won't matter for actual damages and profits. But statutory damages simply must fall within a particular range between a minimum and a maximum in the statute. In practice, if you've gotten to the point where you're being sued in a case like this, the minimum can't be lowered, and the maximum can be relied upon to be raised as high as it'll go. The actual number in that range is picked by the jury, who may do so for entirely inscrutable reasons, and may then be reduced by the judge to as low as the minimum, as the judge sees fit.
It's mainly because of the technical reason you identified: it's hard to catch people who only download, unless they download from you (or you obtain logs from someone who was uploading).
There is a bit of legal strategy as well, though; even the RIAA has finite legal resources, and it's not as though the few lawsuits (or even the more common settlements, probably) are a profit center for them. Given this, it's more efficient to go for the head of the snake, as it were. That's why they like to sue / pressure people who are behind entire file sharing networks (e.g. Napster, Grokster, MegaUpload) since that could (if it worked) cut off lots of file sharers in one stroke. Suing uploaders is less efficient, but still could prevent at least some downloading from occurring. Suing a downloader is the least efficient thing of all, since it only stops that one person with no beneficial side effects. That isn't to say that it would never happen, but it can't possibly be a high priority.
No. A line item veto for the President is unconstitutional. It was tried back in the 90s and overturned. You'd need an amendment to allow for it. State constitutions may or may not allow their governors to have line item vetos, but that's of no help at the federal level.
Instead the President has to veto or approve entire bills.
Well, don't just ask that. Also ask why we were (and still are) so ill-prepared for such price changes, even though it's patently obvious that the price keeps increasing and is becoming ever more volatile, and why we're so locked into it, instead of having a variety of alternative systems (not just of fuel, or of energy sources, but also of transportation and ways to reduce the need for transportation) that can help to cushion the problems with gas; preferably without wrecking te environment or the economy. (Though of the two, I'd rather risk the economy -- it's easier to repair than the environment, which is still too complex and majestic for us to reliably manipulate to our advantage at will)
This country really needs serious pushes on telecommuting, increased urban density, mass transit (preferably electrified), high speed intercity rail, battery r&d, and clean, inexpensive electricity generation and transmission. The TVA worked well -- why not couple this with a works project when we have a lot of unemployed people who can be had cheaply?
Paper documents that I get are usually of that size. Paper documents that I write are usually of that size. And even if I'm just writing something in a word processor that is not destined to be printed out, it is still formatted by default as if it is going to be printed in that size.
And since the dream of the paperless office still hasn't come to pass, it would be nice if my experience with a given document were the same whether I've got that document on paper or a screen -- same ratio, same physical size, and at a high enough resolution for the screen that they're effectively equally as sharp.
The iPad already has a 1.33:1 ratio screen at about 197mm x 148mm. I only want 1.375:1 at 297mm x 216mm. I'll grant, though, that the bezel, which adds another 20mm on every side, probably needs to remain, so as to provide a non-active surface to grip the front of the device. (i.e. usually where you'd place your thumb)
Call it a Pro model, if you like -- the iPod has been very successful with physical size as a differentiator between product lines from the Classic through to the Invisa. I've been holding out on getting an iPad ever since the iPhone 4 came out and it became obvious that high res screens were coming eventually. It looks like I'll get the iPad 3, but it would be just that much better if it were a little bit better for those of us that work with paper.
Well, remember that the ratio for movies at the time that NTSC was developed was the old Academy Ratio of 1.375:1, and that itself was a modification (to allow for the addition of a sound track to the film) of the older silent movie ratio of 1.33:1 ... or as it might otherwise be expressed, 4:3. And that's the way it is due to the way that Edison chose standards for the width of the film, and the width and frequency of the sprocket holes.
Movies didn't start to get wider until television was already on the scene. And because the movie industry has always been dumber than a sack of hammers, wide ratios were adopted for the usual reason: as a way of breaking compatibility with the new technology.
However -- for the iPad, what I'd really prefer to see is a screen large enough to display both full-sized A4 and 8.5x11 paper formats. This means it would need to be 216mm x 297mm, at an 8:11 ratio. If there were more UI cruft, it would need to be a little bigger still in order to accommodate it and still show an entire page of content, but iOS seems to be pretty good about hiding that stuff when it isn't wanted.
Distributing someone else's work is NOT a right[.] Unless you have permission.
Sure it is.
I can print up a bunch of copies of Shakespeare's 'Romeo and Juliet,' go down to the street corner, and start passing them out to anyone who wants one, all without getting any permission from anyone at all. If the police tried to stop me, I could go to court, assert my right of free speech, and win handily, because the government (here at least) recognizes my preexisting right to do this, and protects it.
Freedom of speech not only includes communicating your own speech, but also repeating the speech of others verbatim.
Copyright is an infringement of the freedom of speech, as it grants to private parties (and, in a way, to the government), the power to censor other people when they use the speech of others (under certain conditions, in certain ways, etc.). It's clear therefore that copyright is inherently a bad thing. However, it may nevertheless be tolerable if it produces an even greater benefit for the public that suffers the injury of that censorship.
Still, we should never forget that copyright is a very risky, very dubious practice. We should always be highly skeptical of any infringement on free speech, no matter how lofty the goal of the infringement is claimed to be. We should carefully measure the benefits and harms of copyright, in terms of both its scope and duration, to make sure that we not only have a system that produces a net public benefit (copyright with less public benefit than public harm should be abolished or reformed immediately, of course), but the greatest net public benefit possible. And even then, it is perfectly legitimate to call for the abolition of copyright.
The authors cut of a book sale is usually quite low (once they have paid for their advance)
That's between them and their publisher. The author is free to hold out for a higher royalty (whether from one publisher or another), or to self-publish. I don't see why it is any concern of the public whether the author gets a good deal or not.
As each book borrowed is potentially a book that the reader no longer needs to buy, it seems only fair that the author should get some recompense
I don't think it's fair. If the author can't make a living from sales of his book, even taking into account that some people won't read it, or will resell it, or borrow it, etc., he should try something else, e.g. raising the price to something he can live with, getting a larger share of the sales, writing something more popular so as to get more sales, or only writing as a hobby and not relying on it for an income. In the US, authors do not get a payment from libraries when books are borrowed, but we seem to have a successful literary industry, so I don't think that those payments are really necessary. Literature in the UK would probably not be harmed if you got rid of it, and it would free up some of the budget of the libraries to buy more books.
Shit! I can't believe I forgot about that one. Thanks for the reminder.
The big issue I have with the whole "license" thing, is that they are saying I, as a customer of their web store, am agreeing to a content license for which I have never seen the terms.
Oh, you probably have the opportunity to, at least. Not showing it at all would risk running afoul of Specht v. Netscape, and could result in the EULA not being enforceable, and they're not going to want to risk that.
Despite the fact that there should be, I don't think that there effectively is a real lower limit on duration for the purposes of fixation. I suspect that if there were actual litigation, the CD player's buffer would be prima facie infringing, but would then be allowed under fair use or an implied non-exclusive license (the copyright holder presumably expected people to play the CD on CD players, however they work), etc. Not that it's likely to ever come up.