Perhaps I'm misremembering this, but doesn't the UK have a law that requires that public libraries pay copyright holders in order to lend books? (Not to buy copies of books for their collection, but to lend copies)
Water vapor is a greenhouse gas, and since the hydrogen used comes from natural gas, IIRC, the Shuttle does add the water to the environment. But the water isn't up in the atmosphere all of the time, and the quantity from a shuttle launch was probably a lot more benign than the amount of CO2 we've dumped up there in the same period of time.
The SRBs have pretty nasty exhausts, but I don't think they're greenhouse gases. It would've been nice, though, if they had gone with the LRB option instead.
In the US, a work may be a work made for hire under one of two circumstances:
First, if the work is specially ordered or commissioned, the work falls into one of a handful of categories enumerated in the Copyright Act (e.g. part of an atlas, part of a motion picture) and the parties involved expressly agree in a written instrument that they both sign, that the work shall be considered a work made for hire. (N.B.: Unless the work is of one of the specific types, explicitly saying that a work is made for hire doesn't mean anything.)
Second, if the work is prepared by an employee in the scope of their employment, the employer will be considered to be the author, unless the parties involved expressly agree in a written instrument that they both sign, that the work shall not be considered a work made for hire.
But Congress never really addressed what constitutes employment in this situation, so the courts will look at a number of factors to try to figure it out, e.g. who supplied the equipment that was used, where the labor occured, how it was treated for tax purposes, etc. It's entirely possible for a contractor to be considered an employee for the purposes of this part of copyright law, given the right circumstances.
The Wikipedia article on this goes into more depth.
tax brackets screw over individuals that get just on the wrong side of the bracket, while giving individuals on the right side of the bracket an unfair advantage
Given that only income that falls into the range of a given bracket is taxed at that bracket's rate, how is that so? A person $1 below the top of a bracket does pay less in taxes than a person $1 above the bottom of the next bracket up, that's true, but the difference, all else being equal, would only be a few cents.
I suppose that we have the spare computing resources to calculate these things on a curve now without it being laborious, but it hardly seems like one of the major problems with our tax policy. I'm sure we've got bigger issues to address there.
No, you can own tangible things, like a share in a company, or a debt someone owes to you.
I think you're confusing intangibility with non-rivalry. If something is non-rivalrous, it means that multiple people can possess the whole of it without lessening the possession of anyone else. An idea is not rivalrous because if Alice tells her idea to Bob, she doesn't lose it, but rather they now both have it.
Firstly, I would gently remind you that we are discussing UK copyright law here, not US.
True. However, if I can say so without sounding chauvinistic, I think our general model for copyright (based on the original UK authorial copyright laws, thanks) is superior to what you guys have had for well over a century. While I don't care for international minimum standards, and I don't mind if each country tries different approaches to see what works best for its people, you would probably do well to look to our model and to your roots in reforming copyright to something more sensible and better suited for modern times. It's just a suggestion though; I really don't care what the UK does, so long as you afford us the same courtesy.
As a moderately close analogy, consider what would happen if a musical composer were required to register every recording of his composition that he or anyone associated with him ever made in order to guarantee the exclusive rights that composers enjoy today, or if a font studio had to register every demonstration page they ever made using a new font to secure the exclusive rights on the font files themselves.
The analogy may be alright, but I fear you've misunderstood the point. (I am drawing from my knowledge of US copyright here, since that's what I have to work with, and I'd be flabbergasted if what you have is radically different)
If an author were to create and obtain a copyright on (where registration is a required formality) a musical composition, he'd have rights in that work, regardless of what format it appears in. Should that work be incorporated into a later, derivative work (such as a sound recording of someone performing the composition), the new copyright on the derivative work would only cover new, original, copyrightable material that was added in the derivative work. Old material -- the underlying composition -- is still protected by the copyright on the composition, and not by anything else.
Therefore a failure by the author of the derivative sound recording to secure a copyright would not jeopardize the copyright status of the underlying composition. This happened all the time in the US; the example that springs to mind, partially because I have a copy of the book framed and hung on the wall, is the Air Pirates case. There, the defendants apparently thought that because a few Mickey Mouse comic strips from the 1930's were in the public domain (Disney had failed to renew the copyrights, IIRC), that the entire character was up for grabs. Turns out, not so, because only the new material in those strips would've entered the public domain, rather than the derivative parts relating to the character.
If you're still having trouble, a venn diagram may help.
I have privileged information about some of them, which I don't want to accidentally disclose on a public forum for obvious reasons
Don't worry about it; I know what that's like.
Thirdly, I apologise for not providing more details, but please understand that there are multiple scenarios where (a) there is original, creative data (not just a database, something that required serious work that no-one has ever made before) and (b) there are many ways to present that data (and presenting the data in different ways is a direct benefit to the interested public) and (c) freely copying enough of those ways will damage or negate the value of the rest, and finally (d) registering them in a way that takes "no more than a few minutes" each is the kind of administrative burden that kills start-ups before they get going, because a few minutes multiplied by hundreds or thousands of cases rapidly becomes a full-time job just doing red tape.
Though I still can't think of a concrete example as an aid to understanding this situation. Still, the main thing that sticks out to me is this:
Have you considered how much of an overhead mandatory regulation [sic] would introduce for businesses that offer many different ways to present the same set of underlying data?
Little to no additional overhead, probably. There'd be a standard form, and any business that cared about copyrights on their products (assuming eligibility) would make it their business to establish a routine procedure for preparing and filing registrations. If they really did it a lot, it might even be largely automated since their own internal procedures for tracking jobs would already include a lot of the relevant information (and anyway, the US Copyright Office, like the PTO before it, is getting all their registration stuff online, so that simplifies things too).
As a rule of thumb, it shouldn't take more than a few minutes; copyright registrations aren't anything as complicated as patents. If it takes you longer than that, it's likely because you were not prepared with the information you need, which is pretty basic (e.g. title of the work, name of the author), or you're so new to it that you're bewildered and have to sit down and carefully pore over the instructions (and even then, you may actually be overthinking it).
The purpose of having a copyright registry is that it 1) serves to put people on constructive notice as to what is (and thus what isn't) copyrighted; 2) aids in getting prospective licensees / assignees in touch with rights holders; 3) aids the mission of the Library of Congress; and 4) places a minimal but material hurdle in the path to getting a copyright so that works are only copyrighted if the author takes affirmative action to obtain a copyright, thus causing those works which authors neglect to enter the public domain immediately, enriching the public. So long as these purposes are served, feel free to suggest ways to streamline the process, or simplify the form. (Dropping Berne and granting fixed-term copyrights unilaterally would do this: we'd no longer care about the birth or death dates of the author or nationality, so they could be removed from the form)
Maybe the data itself is valuable, requiring significant effort and/or investment to create/collect/organise.
In the US, at least, the sweat of the brow theory has been utterly repudiated. Copyrights here cannot be granted on the basis that a work was difficult to author, or data were difficult to gather, etc. All works, in order to be protectable, must be original and creative in nature; raw data is often neither. Furthermore, even compilations or arrangements of uncopyrightable data are only protectable if they meet the same standards for orginality and creativity. This policy has worked out quite well for us AFAIK; we have a pretty good database industry that doesn't rely much, if at all, on copyrights, while Europe, which did adopt a policy of granting special database rights, had a little spike and has since languished as the right created barriers to entry that depressed their industry.
And yet, permitting a relatively small proportion of those different modes of presentation to be freely copied could effectively negate any meaningful protection, and thus any meaningful compensation to whoever provide the value in collecting and presenting the data.
Then I guess they ought to be careful. Although I'm not really sure what your concerns are here.
If you're worried about secrecy, then copyright -- which is intended to encourage publication -- is not really for you. Especially since we'd also want to fully revive the deposit formality (it goes hand in hand with the registration formality for metes and bounds purposes, and is also handy as a cheap way of subsidizing the Library of Congress), so the data would be available for public inspection by those who bothered to go to DC.
OTOH, if you're worried that where you have a chain of partially derivative works (remember that a copyright only covers original material; materia
If by 'flawed' you mean 'excellent' (there are plenty of humorous differences between American English and British English, so I suppose this must just be one of them).
A copyright is serious business. The state grants a temporary monopoly over the work, subject to relatively few limitations, for a span of many years, in order to serve the public's interests in 1) encouraging the creation and publication of original and derivative works that otherwise would not have been created and published and 2) having the fewest, if any, restrictions in scope and duration on the public as to works. Those are the only real justifications for copyright at all.
A registration system serves those dual interests very nicely. First, it limits the grant of protection only to those works where the author claims that it is necessary (and in the absence of psychic bureaucrats, the author is probably in the best position to know). Second, since it takes some positive action, and for most works, the author doesn't care and won't bother to so much as lift a finger in pursuit of a copyright, it means that most works are not copyrighted at all, leaving the public free to enjoy them in any way they see fit.
A minimal, short-lived level of automatic protection may be useful for works which are unpublished just so that authors have a chance to finish creating a work, and have a reasonable length of time (but not too long) to try to get it published. But this is just to deter manuscript pirates, really. Any material protection ought to require a proper copyright, if only for the social benefits of registration, deposit, and notice.
Registration is not an alien concept. In the US you can't get a patent unless you register for one, and the filing is important, among other reasons, for informing people as to just what it is that you claim. Likewise there is a registration system to get trademark protection at the national level, the states require the registration of deeds to real property, etc.
Why should copyright be exempt? I refuse to believe that it's because authors are stupid or helpless naifs. Like everyone else in modern society, they have to fill out numerous forms in their day to day life. Why should a simple copyright registration -- directly relevant to their line of business -- be any different? They're not substantially more complicated than a change of address form you'd file with the post office when you move.
As for Berne, fuck Berne. Berne was always a bad idea, and we'd all do very well to withdraw from it. But at the very least -- too little for me, in fact -- Berne only prohibits formalities during the span of time for which it applies. Works beyond their life+50 term no longer fall under Berne, and so formalities can be required there, which is the usual solution for orphan works. (Not that they'd be orphans at all, if registration were required right away)
But really the better answer is for Berne to die, and for various countries to have no international copyright treaties (an informal working group to avoid mutually exclusive national copyright laws would be acceptable, however), and to instead just unilaterally grant national treatment, with no international minimum standards. If your goal is to encourage the creation and publication of the most works at the least cost to the public, then the nationality of the author or place of first publication is irrelevant.
The performance doesn't start until the file is decoded.
I suppose, but so what? Was there a suggestion that Zediva should not be liable because the videos were never viewable by anyone?
If I stream a DVD, they copy the file into my system memory over the internet saving me a trip, where it is then decoded and performed. Both are transient copies for the purpose of performance. But the transmission of the data itself isn't a performance.
I'd disagree. It's not a performance until the audio and/or video is presented in human comprehensible form. But once it is, the entire causal chain is fair game. It's a performance because it is, ultimately, shown/audible, and the performance was transmitted because it was communicated in a fashion that allowed it to be shown/audible beyond from where it was sent.
No transmission I know of can be understood by a human directly; they have to be processed by some sort of machine. That the transmission is necessarily processed after having been transmitted doesn't invalidate the fact of the transmission itself. That wouldn't make any sense.
Otherwise, copying a file from one folder to another would be a performance of it. And that's absurd.
No, not really. On the downloader's end, it's reproduction -- that's always been clear.
Uploaders are usually accused of distribution, but in fact, uploading isn't a good fit for that at all. Since a copy is defined in the law as a tangible object (e.g. RAM, a hard drive, a paperback, a plastic optical disc, etc.), you certainly can't distribute them over an Internet connection. Performance or display rights work better in settings that involve transmissions. But to the consternation of myself and a few others I know of who agree, the courts have stuck with distribution on, I guess, the theory that so long as a new copy came into being, it wasn't necessary that it was distributed post-copying, rather than pre-copying.
Yes, in this case the process is putting a stamp and an address on it and handing it over to the U.S. Postal service for delivery utilizing a combination of devices such as Jeeps and airplanes.
'Fraid not. It's not transmission that's prohibited, it's public performance even if via transmission. When you send a DVD via mail there's still no performance involved, because a DVD is not, itself, a performance. It is a copy, where the work fixed within it is capable of being performed.
If it's easier for you, think of the script for a play. If you xerox the play, you have engaged in reproduction. If you give copies of the play to other people (via, e.g. the mail), you have engaged in distribution. If you act out the play on a stage, only then have you engaged in performance (and even then, you might not have infringed, if the performance was not public). If you have a live tv broadcast of the performance, then you're transmitting the peformance, and it is certainly going to be considered public.
DVDs can't be performed until they're put in a player and the contents are output to some sort of appropriate device. Transmission can only happen after you've done that, not before.
Sorry if it wasn't clear before; the definition I provided is the definition of 'transmit' that's found within the Copyright Act itself. It is the authoritative definition. We can quibble as to what it means, exactly, but we can't substitute anything else for it without changing the law. You can find most of the definitions for the Copyright Act at 17 USC 101. (A few others are scattered here and there)
mailing a DVD or taking it home in your car would also count as transmission
No. Remember the definition:
To 'transmit' a performance or display is to communicate it by any device or process whereby images or sounds are received beyond the place from which they are sent.
For a DVD (whether sent in the mail or by car) to be transmitted, it has to be "a performance or display." Well, let's see if the definitions section has anything else for us:
To 'perform' a work means to recite, render, play, dance, or act it, either directly or by means of any device or process or, in the case of a motion picture or other audiovisual work, to show its images in any sequence or to make the sounds accompanying it audible.
To 'display' a work means to show a copy of it, either directly or by means of a film, slide, television image, or any other device or process or, in the case of a motion picture or other audiovisÂual work, to show individual images nonsequentially.
So a DVD by itself isn't a performance. Setting aside the noun/verb thing (a DVD is an object, a performance is something that people do or cause to have done, and it's the act of performance that may be infringing), a mere DVD can't display itself; it has to be used in a DVD player in conjunction with speakers and/or a screen. In the case of a DVD, same problem; ordinarily it's quite hard to see the individual images by looking at the surface of the disc with the naked eye.
best guess given the time frame is that they meant like a television station would transmit (since the legal definition of transmit clearly wasn't used).
No, I don't think so. There's no support for them directly, it's just coinciding interests.
I'm a liberal, and I'm firmly in support of free speech. While it's true that there are some people on the left who have problems outside of their comfort zones (e.g. violent video games, explicit song lyrics, pornography as demeaning and oppressive toward women), there are plenty of us who think that the "no" in "Congress shall make no law" is important.
This general position results in supporting publishers against those who would censor them, but it's not because leftists like the publishers or even the works (the record and movie industries are full of slimy people, business practices that run from bad to unethical and often illegal, and output that's trashy or distasteful to say the least), but because leftists dislike censorship.
And since there's not too much that's objectionable about those industries other than the content that they produce -- they're not really known for destroying the environment, or needing dictatorships propped up, or needing billions in tax dollars to build useless military hardware, they're treated as being relatively (though not wholly) benign.
The industry itself has plenty of liberals and plenty of conservatives, and plenty of lobbyists who will seek to garner support from any legislators they can without being ideologically picky, just as you'd expect from any large number of people in a major industry. For example, look at all the fights that the publishers get into with unions.
When the law was written I'm fairly certain it was intended to mean transmission to multiple people, and probably over the air or some such multicast method.
Well, here's what it says:
To âoetransmitâ a performance or display is to communicate it by any device or process whereby images or sounds are received beyond the place from which they are sent.
No suggestion either way as to the number of people, so on its face it seems to include transmitting to only one person, and it is explicit that it includes any device or process, so it's not just over the air broadcasts.
where it leads so long as the signal is only going to one customer should not be legally relevant.
Maybe, but as things stand, where it leads is entirely relevant. You could probably argue that a DVD player in one room of a house, connected to a TV in another room are both in the same place (i.e. the house), but I think it's a stretch to say that the entire US or world only count as one place for this purpose.
Some where along the line some court should manage to acurately interpret the law instead of acting as a MPAA shill.
The copyright industry has been writing copyright laws for their own purposes for over a century, and it's been getting worse and worse over the last several decades. So don't be surprised that interpreting the law correctly yields MPAA-friendly outcomes; it's deliberately so.
In response to an earlier post claiming that the purpose of our war in Iraq was to advance the interests of certain US businesses and secure oil, you replied saying that even individuals in the US would like to see gas prices be lower.
I was pointing out that if one of the reasons to invade Iraq was to lower the price of gas, it has backfired spectacularly. But this hasn't particularly harmed the US businesses that the earlier poster thought were the intended beneficiaries of the war. This suggests that either lower gas prices was never an objective or that it came a distant second in terms of priorities for the Bush administration, which, typically, fucked it up.
In any event, I'd just as soon see our energy use reduced through greater efficiency and reduced demand, and more of our energy provided by safe, clean, domestic sources. Sadly, there seems to be little collective will in getting this done, or at least little evidence of it. If it takes continued increases in the price of gas to get us going in that direction, then I'm all for it, though I would certainly prefer to use whatever cheap energy we have left in a wise manner so as to get ready for the future, rather than to waste it on frivolous driving. But as long as we make the transition, I suppose it'll work out.
Are you saying that gas prices have gone down since we've been in Iraq? But the petroleum industry has been making record profits.
Re:Could Someone Help Me Out With This?
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Debt Deal Reached
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· Score: 2
Adding to your B) we could also stand to shut down a lot of our other military spending by canceling programs to build more (and new types of) planes, ships, tanks, etc. and by reducing the number of people in the military. If there is a concern about putting large numbers of people out of work, then at least let us do that and then start up civilian programs: The companies that built things could transition to building drones for civilian use, rail infrastructure and trains (at all levels from trolleys to high speed rail), electric vehicle recharging infrastructure, green energy projects, etc., all of which are better uses of money. Likewise, rather than have servicemen return home to face unemployment, civilian jobs programs based on the WPA, CCC, etc. could be made available to them (and to all unemployed civilians for that matter) to help them out during tough times in exchange for their productive labor.
Your C) is just a bad idea, though. The events of recent years show that the private financial industry is a complete sham. The financial industry basically needs to be small, with simple products, financially conservative (i.e. not risk-taking), so tightly and aggressively regulated that they have virtually no chance to misbehave, and always distrusted. Social security is better left with the government -- though this does raise political problems -- than trusted to the bankers.
D) is also a bad idea. There's a great deal of value in unused land (would that it were really less used) and we're not so desperate that the one-time benefit would be worth it.
I would add, though, in the realm of spending cuts, we that I'd be interested to see changes to the mortgage interest tax deduction to the effect that by default there is no deduction, but the better your county and municipality is (where better is based upon more: population density, mixed commercial / residential / light industrial uses, multifamily homes & lots, mass transit, carpooling, walking & bicycling, school funding, renewable energy use, modernity of infrastructure, racial integration, etc. and less: driving, pollution, crime, etc.) the more of a deduction becomes available.
You also seem to have forgotten substantially increasing revenues via e.g. increased income taxes (particularly by adding brackets to the top and increasing tax rates on upper brackets and by aggressively pursuing income taxes on businesses and closing loopholes); increased capital gains taxes; financial transaction taxes; wealth taxes; increased estate taxes (surely we can find a way to avoid taxing to death small family owned and operated businesses that are passed down without letting go of the idle rich); eliminating caps on payroll taxes; nationalization of certain industries if it would be beneficial and services would not be reduced (probably health care, all forms of post, and rail infrastructure); taxing regulated industries enough to pay regulators an amount commensurate to that of their private sector counterparts, and then barring regulators from working in that private sector, so as to deter brain drain from low pay and regulatory capture.
It's not enough to just reduce spending (which is important, though more for some programs than others, and some programs need increased spending), but also to increase revenues. We're gonna need both.
The army is a bad example, since the federal government usually disclaims copyright on works prepared by federal officials or employees in the course of their duties. But generally your point is a good one.
We could double taxes at this point and still be in the red.
Are you sure? The 2010 federal budget was about $3.4 billion, and 2010 federal tax receipts were about $2.1 billion. Doubling taxes -- your suggestion -- sounds like it might just work, without having to reduce spending. If we also reduced spending, and we could stick to this long enough to seriously pay down our debt, we'd probably be sitting pretty. Better still if we could stick to it even longer so that when we have good times we're building up a rainy day fund.
And, yes, I left out the military to make a point as these four are retirement and support services-related, and of course interest on the debt, which isn't going away.
And other than, perhaps that you oppose cutting the military budget, what point was that, exactly? (Also, federal pensions don't seem to be a big deal, so why'd you include them?)
If we dropped the entire defense budget to $0, it still would not be enough
No, but it would get us much closer. That would bring that 2010 budget down to about $2.8 trillion with $2.1 in receipts. But I don't think that anyone is seriously suggesting disbanding the entire military. It needs substantial cuts, but not outright dissolution.
Everything you listed sounds nice, but it's simply impossible to make any of it work at this point.
Why so glum? The new receipts would take a little while to come in but so long as there's a viable plan in place, it's not as though we couldn't obtain coverage in the interim one way or another. The problem is political is all.
Or when we go bankrupt
That would take a lot of effort, actually. The US isn't like a person or a business. It prints its own money and its debts are denominated in US currency. It would come at the cost of inflation, and it would likely not be repeatable, but the country can't go bankrupt anytime soon unless it done very deliberately.
Also, Social Security was never envisioned by our Founding Fathers... I doubt if they would have ever have voted for it.
So? I don't want to live in a country that is governed by long dead patricians. I'd rather that the living run things, and in the here and now, Social Security seems to be well liked and useful (if not implemented as well as we might hope). I don't have a problem with its existence.
The issue isn't any of that stuff that you posted. It's that Goverment Pensions, Social Security, Medicare, and Interest on the Debt account for almost 100% of our current budget. That leaves only 25 billion (less than 1.5%!) for our entire defense department, military, and, well, literally thousands and thousands of programs and agencies. Until we get rid of these four items, we're broke. We could cut the military to $0. Kill off every single social spending program. Get rid of student aid. Stop patrolling our borders. Stop foreign aid. Close down NASA. None of it would make any more difference than spitting on a bonfire. Those four items alone are literally killing our nation, and until we get rid of them entirely, we are doomed.
Well, you seem to be ignoring half of the picture. Why have you forgotten about raising additional revenue? (Which is not to say that we should not address some of our current spending priorities)
We could:
Add additional brackets to the top of the income tax, and raise rates in the various top brackets.
Increase the capital gains tax
Establish financial transaction taxes (has a good side benefit of reducing speculation in the markets; we've seen where too much of that gets us)
Increase / modify estate taxes. There is a long-standing public policy in the US against substantial inherited wealth, you know (Jefferson considered one of his greatest accomplishments, alongside the Declaration of Independence, to be abolishing the fee tail). People often complain that this could cause the loss of small, family-owned and operated businesses, but I'm sure some skilled tax lawyers and snake warriors could work out a way to avoid that outcome while still collecting a reasonable amount and discouraging people from becoming indolent on the basis of inherited wealth. It's fine to want to provide for one's family, but it's not fine for people to not have to work to make their own way in the world, if they're able.
Wealth taxes (as above, the country does not need a lot of idle rich people)
Eliminate the cap on payroll deductions for Social Security
Set the pay of federal employees in a regulatory capacity to a floating level commensurate with their private sector opposites, establish lifetime Chinese walls on federal employees' dealings with those industries (to avoid regulatory capture) and tax the regulated industries to pay for it, to avoid a brain drain on the basis of compensation.
We should also do a study to see if there's any financial advantage in nationalizing industries where the government could or is obligated to participate in without reducing services to customers (I'm mainly thinking of the Post Office here, but railroad trackage is another, and single-payer health care effectively is as well). If the study indicates that it would be advantageous to do so, let's.
I'd also suggest that we pursue full employment policies; there are too many beneficial effects to ignore. True, it tends to cause moderate inflation, as we discovered in the 60's and 70's, but our experience since then demonstrates, I think, that inflation is the lesser evil. COLA adjustments would be needed for payrolls, benefits, etc., of course. This would also help substantially with the crushing debt load that most individual Americans carry.
As for our spending, I'd suggest cutting the military significantly. We might merely shift that money elsewhere -- infrastructure, jobs programs, NASA, etc. -- but doing so would have a nice side benefit of
If you're talking about novelty (i.e. never has been done before), that's irrelevant for copyright purposes. Only originality (i.e. not copied from elsewhere, regardless of whether or not it's been done before) matters.
If computer source code is kept secret there is no need for copyright protection on the source.
That's never stopped them.
I have never heard of anyone being sued for copyright violation of trade secret source.
It's not really unusual for a licensor to end up suing its licensee regarding the copyright to software that, while a trade secret, the licensor was allowed to access.
As for incidents where someone illicitly obtained the source, the only one that instantly comes to mind was NuPrometheus; that resulted in the FBI investigating, but I don't think anything came of it.
Personally, I'd prefer to have mandatory registrations for published works, and to require a deposit formality to get the registration, and to have deposit include any supplemental information that the Library of Congress or the Copyright Office wish to also be included, in whatever form they specify. Thus, to get a copyright on a binary, you'd need to provide clear, well commented source code, instructions for compilation, hardware requirements, etc., which would be copyrighted, but not a secret. (Much like patented inventions must be disclosed, and can't be a secret)
In this way, we would advance the public policy of having works be useful to the public when they're in the public domain (since people would be able to get at and change the source), when they're copyrighted (since there is an exception to copyright that allows the owner of a copy of a computer program (as distinct from the copyright holder) to modify it so that it can run on a system.
Further, since copyright isn't meant to protect the functional aspects of software, this would avoid interference with the advancement of the art of computer programming, since people could inspect one another's software and learn from doing so. For most works, there's not the same sort of difference between the 'manuscript' if you will, and the published version, where literary techniques or the like are used in one but not visible in the other. Software is a special case, and so it's acceptable to require more disclosure than merely a copy of the published work.
So long as it does not substitute for fair use, I suppose I don't have any complaints, though I might differ as to the numbers involved, the types of works it's applicable to, etc. It generally doesn't seem too useful to me, though. Academic quotations might fall under this, but I don't think a good commercial review would.
(Incidentally, for a typical 3 minute song, you'd really only get 18 seconds, which is very low indeed)
Not sure why you are dismissive of sampling. While it really ought to be a fair use -- sampling is the audio form of collage, after all, and that is well protected -- the poor treatment of sampling in the courts really does warrant a strong exception for it.
Within these terms, I don't see any real room for usage to be unfair
You dealt with amount, but you forgot about substantiality.
2. Congress (past, present & future) participates in Social Security.
They've been doing this since the 80's. Not sure if I see the point in having Congressmen who paid into the previous system get switched at this late date; it disrupts predictability (people planned for their retirement according to assumptions that you'd now retroactively upset), and many of them are probably retired from Congress already, so it's not as though this can be used to pressure them into doing anything to help everyone who pays into Social Security out of self interest.
5. Congress loses their current health care system and participates in the same health care system as the American people.
Already done in the big health care reform last year. Of course, I'd be happy to see more substantial reforms along the lines of real universal health care.
6. Congress must equally abide by all laws they impose on the American people.
Basically already true.
7. All contracts with past and present Congressmen are void effective 1/1/12.
So... what are you suggesting happens to a Congressman who took out a mortgage, or leased a car, or borrowed money for a student loan? Does he get a windfall, or does he lose everything? In what universe is this possibly a good idea?
Your chain email makes no sense, everyone who read it is now dumber for having done so, I award you no points, and Snopes rated it as 'mostly false.'
In the making your own food market we have cookbooks. They, and the recipes in them (except for the lists of ingredients) are in fact protected by copyright.
Copyright (in the US, at least) doesn't apply to procedures, though it may apply to a particular expression of them. (So for example, a book that explains how to do double-entry bookkeeping may be copyrightable, but anyone else can write their own book that explains precisely the same thing)
Furthermore, where there is only one or are only a few reasonable ways to express an procedure, those expressions are not copyrightable due to the merger, lest they effectively provide a copyright on the underlying, uncopyrightable procedure. Nor are stock expressions that are typical of a genre copyrightable, due to the scÃnes à faire doctrine. So the portions of a recipe to the effect of "mix well" or "serves 4" or "cook until brown" wouldn't be protectable.
Really, the best you can hope for for a typical recipe that is clearly written, straightforward, and all business, is a copyright that protects it from verbatim copying; even then anyone could rewrite it (in many cases without having to change much of the wording per the above paragraph) and not infringe. And I wouldn't want to bet money that even that level of protection could be obtained.
Really, about the only substantially copyrightable things in a cookbook are 1) the photographs (if any) that accompany the recipe to show you what the food should look like, and 2) the selection and arrangement of recipes, provided that it rises to the level of copyrightability (and this only protects the compilation, not the individual recipes themselves).
Your example of Coca Cola is perfect - you MAY duplicate Coke, but in over a hundred years of trying no-one has succeeded.
I doubt that. Pepsi is probably entirely capable of it, but why would they? Even the most shell-shocked veteran of the infamous Cola Wars knows that the point was always differentiation. If they all tasted the same, there'd be a huge loss in brand loyalty.
You can't keep a book, recording, or movie a trade secret and still sell it like you can with prepared food.
Computer software source code, if you only sell the binaries?
here was no copyright anywhere before about 100-150 years ago.
Well... it was invented in England in 1710 (assuming we're talking about modern copyright and not the very different stationer's copyright that predates it), and started showing up in the United States in 1783, and a different sort appeared in France in 1793. So, they're a bit older than 100-150 years, but it's true that they mostly spread via colonialism, and the 19th century was really a golden age for that.
Regarding your main argument, I disagree. I think that if properly formulated, copyright can provide a benefit to the public greater than its cost to the public; the issue is holding onto that ideal formulation and avoiding corruption. But I suppose that it's possible that under the right circumstances copyright might never provide a net public benefit. Only in that case would I support abolition, which is why that option should remain on the table.
Slashdot Mirror
Perhaps I'm misremembering this, but doesn't the UK have a law that requires that public libraries pay copyright holders in order to lend books? (Not to buy copies of books for their collection, but to lend copies)
Water vapor is a greenhouse gas, and since the hydrogen used comes from natural gas, IIRC, the Shuttle does add the water to the environment. But the water isn't up in the atmosphere all of the time, and the quantity from a shuttle launch was probably a lot more benign than the amount of CO2 we've dumped up there in the same period of time.
The SRBs have pretty nasty exhausts, but I don't think they're greenhouse gases. It would've been nice, though, if they had gone with the LRB option instead.
It's somewhat more complicated.
In the US, a work may be a work made for hire under one of two circumstances:
First, if the work is specially ordered or commissioned, the work falls into one of a handful of categories enumerated in the Copyright Act (e.g. part of an atlas, part of a motion picture) and the parties involved expressly agree in a written instrument that they both sign, that the work shall be considered a work made for hire. (N.B.: Unless the work is of one of the specific types, explicitly saying that a work is made for hire doesn't mean anything.)
Second, if the work is prepared by an employee in the scope of their employment, the employer will be considered to be the author, unless the parties involved expressly agree in a written instrument that they both sign, that the work shall not be considered a work made for hire.
But Congress never really addressed what constitutes employment in this situation, so the courts will look at a number of factors to try to figure it out, e.g. who supplied the equipment that was used, where the labor occured, how it was treated for tax purposes, etc. It's entirely possible for a contractor to be considered an employee for the purposes of this part of copyright law, given the right circumstances.
The Wikipedia article on this goes into more depth.
tax brackets screw over individuals that get just on the wrong side of the bracket, while giving individuals on the right side of the bracket an unfair advantage
Given that only income that falls into the range of a given bracket is taxed at that bracket's rate, how is that so? A person $1 below the top of a bracket does pay less in taxes than a person $1 above the bottom of the next bracket up, that's true, but the difference, all else being equal, would only be a few cents.
I suppose that we have the spare computing resources to calculate these things on a curve now without it being laborious, but it hardly seems like one of the major problems with our tax policy. I'm sure we've got bigger issues to address there.
Sorry, that was a typo. I meant to say intangible.
No, you can own tangible things, like a share in a company, or a debt someone owes to you.
I think you're confusing intangibility with non-rivalry. If something is non-rivalrous, it means that multiple people can possess the whole of it without lessening the possession of anyone else. An idea is not rivalrous because if Alice tells her idea to Bob, she doesn't lose it, but rather they now both have it.
Firstly, I would gently remind you that we are discussing UK copyright law here, not US.
True. However, if I can say so without sounding chauvinistic, I think our general model for copyright (based on the original UK authorial copyright laws, thanks) is superior to what you guys have had for well over a century. While I don't care for international minimum standards, and I don't mind if each country tries different approaches to see what works best for its people, you would probably do well to look to our model and to your roots in reforming copyright to something more sensible and better suited for modern times. It's just a suggestion though; I really don't care what the UK does, so long as you afford us the same courtesy.
As a moderately close analogy, consider what would happen if a musical composer were required to register every recording of his composition that he or anyone associated with him ever made in order to guarantee the exclusive rights that composers enjoy today, or if a font studio had to register every demonstration page they ever made using a new font to secure the exclusive rights on the font files themselves.
The analogy may be alright, but I fear you've misunderstood the point. (I am drawing from my knowledge of US copyright here, since that's what I have to work with, and I'd be flabbergasted if what you have is radically different)
If an author were to create and obtain a copyright on (where registration is a required formality) a musical composition, he'd have rights in that work, regardless of what format it appears in. Should that work be incorporated into a later, derivative work (such as a sound recording of someone performing the composition), the new copyright on the derivative work would only cover new, original, copyrightable material that was added in the derivative work. Old material -- the underlying composition -- is still protected by the copyright on the composition, and not by anything else.
Therefore a failure by the author of the derivative sound recording to secure a copyright would not jeopardize the copyright status of the underlying composition. This happened all the time in the US; the example that springs to mind, partially because I have a copy of the book framed and hung on the wall, is the Air Pirates case. There, the defendants apparently thought that because a few Mickey Mouse comic strips from the 1930's were in the public domain (Disney had failed to renew the copyrights, IIRC), that the entire character was up for grabs. Turns out, not so, because only the new material in those strips would've entered the public domain, rather than the derivative parts relating to the character.
If you're still having trouble, a venn diagram may help.
I have privileged information about some of them, which I don't want to accidentally disclose on a public forum for obvious reasons
Don't worry about it; I know what that's like.
Thirdly, I apologise for not providing more details, but please understand that there are multiple scenarios where (a) there is original, creative data (not just a database, something that required serious work that no-one has ever made before) and (b) there are many ways to present that data (and presenting the data in different ways is a direct benefit to the interested public) and (c) freely copying enough of those ways will damage or negate the value of the rest, and finally (d) registering them in a way that takes "no more than a few minutes" each is the kind of administrative burden that kills start-ups before they get going, because a few minutes multiplied by hundreds or thousands of cases rapidly becomes a full-time job just doing red tape.
Though I still can't think of a concrete example as an aid to understanding this situation. Still, the main thing that sticks out to me is this:
there are many ways to present that data ... freel
Have you considered how much of an overhead mandatory regulation [sic] would introduce for businesses that offer many different ways to present the same set of underlying data?
Little to no additional overhead, probably. There'd be a standard form, and any business that cared about copyrights on their products (assuming eligibility) would make it their business to establish a routine procedure for preparing and filing registrations. If they really did it a lot, it might even be largely automated since their own internal procedures for tracking jobs would already include a lot of the relevant information (and anyway, the US Copyright Office, like the PTO before it, is getting all their registration stuff online, so that simplifies things too).
As a rule of thumb, it shouldn't take more than a few minutes; copyright registrations aren't anything as complicated as patents. If it takes you longer than that, it's likely because you were not prepared with the information you need, which is pretty basic (e.g. title of the work, name of the author), or you're so new to it that you're bewildered and have to sit down and carefully pore over the instructions (and even then, you may actually be overthinking it).
The purpose of having a copyright registry is that it 1) serves to put people on constructive notice as to what is (and thus what isn't) copyrighted; 2) aids in getting prospective licensees / assignees in touch with rights holders; 3) aids the mission of the Library of Congress; and 4) places a minimal but material hurdle in the path to getting a copyright so that works are only copyrighted if the author takes affirmative action to obtain a copyright, thus causing those works which authors neglect to enter the public domain immediately, enriching the public. So long as these purposes are served, feel free to suggest ways to streamline the process, or simplify the form. (Dropping Berne and granting fixed-term copyrights unilaterally would do this: we'd no longer care about the birth or death dates of the author or nationality, so they could be removed from the form)
Maybe the data itself is valuable, requiring significant effort and/or investment to create/collect/organise.
In the US, at least, the sweat of the brow theory has been utterly repudiated. Copyrights here cannot be granted on the basis that a work was difficult to author, or data were difficult to gather, etc. All works, in order to be protectable, must be original and creative in nature; raw data is often neither. Furthermore, even compilations or arrangements of uncopyrightable data are only protectable if they meet the same standards for orginality and creativity. This policy has worked out quite well for us AFAIK; we have a pretty good database industry that doesn't rely much, if at all, on copyrights, while Europe, which did adopt a policy of granting special database rights, had a little spike and has since languished as the right created barriers to entry that depressed their industry.
And yet, permitting a relatively small proportion of those different modes of presentation to be freely copied could effectively negate any meaningful protection, and thus any meaningful compensation to whoever provide the value in collecting and presenting the data.
Then I guess they ought to be careful. Although I'm not really sure what your concerns are here.
If you're worried about secrecy, then copyright -- which is intended to encourage publication -- is not really for you. Especially since we'd also want to fully revive the deposit formality (it goes hand in hand with the registration formality for metes and bounds purposes, and is also handy as a cheap way of subsidizing the Library of Congress), so the data would be available for public inspection by those who bothered to go to DC.
OTOH, if you're worried that where you have a chain of partially derivative works (remember that a copyright only covers original material; materia
If by 'flawed' you mean 'excellent' (there are plenty of humorous differences between American English and British English, so I suppose this must just be one of them).
A copyright is serious business. The state grants a temporary monopoly over the work, subject to relatively few limitations, for a span of many years, in order to serve the public's interests in 1) encouraging the creation and publication of original and derivative works that otherwise would not have been created and published and 2) having the fewest, if any, restrictions in scope and duration on the public as to works. Those are the only real justifications for copyright at all.
A registration system serves those dual interests very nicely. First, it limits the grant of protection only to those works where the author claims that it is necessary (and in the absence of psychic bureaucrats, the author is probably in the best position to know). Second, since it takes some positive action, and for most works, the author doesn't care and won't bother to so much as lift a finger in pursuit of a copyright, it means that most works are not copyrighted at all, leaving the public free to enjoy them in any way they see fit.
A minimal, short-lived level of automatic protection may be useful for works which are unpublished just so that authors have a chance to finish creating a work, and have a reasonable length of time (but not too long) to try to get it published. But this is just to deter manuscript pirates, really. Any material protection ought to require a proper copyright, if only for the social benefits of registration, deposit, and notice.
Registration is not an alien concept. In the US you can't get a patent unless you register for one, and the filing is important, among other reasons, for informing people as to just what it is that you claim. Likewise there is a registration system to get trademark protection at the national level, the states require the registration of deeds to real property, etc.
Why should copyright be exempt? I refuse to believe that it's because authors are stupid or helpless naifs. Like everyone else in modern society, they have to fill out numerous forms in their day to day life. Why should a simple copyright registration -- directly relevant to their line of business -- be any different? They're not substantially more complicated than a change of address form you'd file with the post office when you move.
As for Berne, fuck Berne. Berne was always a bad idea, and we'd all do very well to withdraw from it. But at the very least -- too little for me, in fact -- Berne only prohibits formalities during the span of time for which it applies. Works beyond their life+50 term no longer fall under Berne, and so formalities can be required there, which is the usual solution for orphan works. (Not that they'd be orphans at all, if registration were required right away)
But really the better answer is for Berne to die, and for various countries to have no international copyright treaties (an informal working group to avoid mutually exclusive national copyright laws would be acceptable, however), and to instead just unilaterally grant national treatment, with no international minimum standards. If your goal is to encourage the creation and publication of the most works at the least cost to the public, then the nationality of the author or place of first publication is irrelevant.
The performance doesn't start until the file is decoded.
I suppose, but so what? Was there a suggestion that Zediva should not be liable because the videos were never viewable by anyone?
If I stream a DVD, they copy the file into my system memory over the internet saving me a trip, where it is then decoded and performed. Both are transient copies for the purpose of performance. But the transmission of the data itself isn't a performance.
I'd disagree. It's not a performance until the audio and/or video is presented in human comprehensible form. But once it is, the entire causal chain is fair game. It's a performance because it is, ultimately, shown/audible, and the performance was transmitted because it was communicated in a fashion that allowed it to be shown/audible beyond from where it was sent.
No transmission I know of can be understood by a human directly; they have to be processed by some sort of machine. That the transmission is necessarily processed after having been transmitted doesn't invalidate the fact of the transmission itself. That wouldn't make any sense.
Otherwise, copying a file from one folder to another would be a performance of it. And that's absurd.
No, not really. On the downloader's end, it's reproduction -- that's always been clear.
Uploaders are usually accused of distribution, but in fact, uploading isn't a good fit for that at all. Since a copy is defined in the law as a tangible object (e.g. RAM, a hard drive, a paperback, a plastic optical disc, etc.), you certainly can't distribute them over an Internet connection. Performance or display rights work better in settings that involve transmissions. But to the consternation of myself and a few others I know of who agree, the courts have stuck with distribution on, I guess, the theory that so long as a new copy came into being, it wasn't necessary that it was distributed post-copying, rather than pre-copying.
Yes, in this case the process is putting a stamp and an address on it and handing it over to the U.S. Postal service for delivery utilizing a combination of devices such as Jeeps and airplanes.
'Fraid not. It's not transmission that's prohibited, it's public performance even if via transmission. When you send a DVD via mail there's still no performance involved, because a DVD is not, itself, a performance. It is a copy, where the work fixed within it is capable of being performed.
If it's easier for you, think of the script for a play. If you xerox the play, you have engaged in reproduction. If you give copies of the play to other people (via, e.g. the mail), you have engaged in distribution. If you act out the play on a stage, only then have you engaged in performance (and even then, you might not have infringed, if the performance was not public). If you have a live tv broadcast of the performance, then you're transmitting the peformance, and it is certainly going to be considered public.
DVDs can't be performed until they're put in a player and the contents are output to some sort of appropriate device. Transmission can only happen after you've done that, not before.
This is actually fairly straightforward, I think.
Sorry if it wasn't clear before; the definition I provided is the definition of 'transmit' that's found within the Copyright Act itself. It is the authoritative definition. We can quibble as to what it means, exactly, but we can't substitute anything else for it without changing the law. You can find most of the definitions for the Copyright Act at 17 USC 101. (A few others are scattered here and there)
mailing a DVD or taking it home in your car would also count as transmission
No. Remember the definition:
To 'transmit' a performance or display is to communicate it by any device or process whereby images or sounds are received beyond the place from which they are sent.
For a DVD (whether sent in the mail or by car) to be transmitted, it has to be "a performance or display." Well, let's see if the definitions section has anything else for us:
To 'perform' a work means to recite, render, play, dance, or act it, either directly or by means of any device or process or, in the case of a motion picture or other audiovisual work, to show its images in any sequence or to make the sounds accompanying it audible.
To 'display' a work means to show a copy of it, either directly or by means of a film, slide, television image, or any other device or process or, in the case of a motion picture or other audiovisÂual work, to show individual images nonsequentially.
So a DVD by itself isn't a performance. Setting aside the noun/verb thing (a DVD is an object, a performance is something that people do or cause to have done, and it's the act of performance that may be infringing), a mere DVD can't display itself; it has to be used in a DVD player in conjunction with speakers and/or a screen. In the case of a DVD, same problem; ordinarily it's quite hard to see the individual images by looking at the surface of the disc with the naked eye.
best guess given the time frame is that they meant like a television station would transmit (since the legal definition of transmit clearly wasn't used).
They left it open ended.
No, I don't think so. There's no support for them directly, it's just coinciding interests.
I'm a liberal, and I'm firmly in support of free speech. While it's true that there are some people on the left who have problems outside of their comfort zones (e.g. violent video games, explicit song lyrics, pornography as demeaning and oppressive toward women), there are plenty of us who think that the "no" in "Congress shall make no law" is important.
This general position results in supporting publishers against those who would censor them, but it's not because leftists like the publishers or even the works (the record and movie industries are full of slimy people, business practices that run from bad to unethical and often illegal, and output that's trashy or distasteful to say the least), but because leftists dislike censorship.
And since there's not too much that's objectionable about those industries other than the content that they produce -- they're not really known for destroying the environment, or needing dictatorships propped up, or needing billions in tax dollars to build useless military hardware, they're treated as being relatively (though not wholly) benign.
The industry itself has plenty of liberals and plenty of conservatives, and plenty of lobbyists who will seek to garner support from any legislators they can without being ideologically picky, just as you'd expect from any large number of people in a major industry. For example, look at all the fights that the publishers get into with unions.
When the law was written I'm fairly certain it was intended to mean transmission to multiple people, and probably over the air or some such multicast method.
Well, here's what it says:
To âoetransmitâ a performance or display is to communicate it by any device or process whereby images or sounds are received beyond the place from which they are sent.
No suggestion either way as to the number of people, so on its face it seems to include transmitting to only one person, and it is explicit that it includes any device or process, so it's not just over the air broadcasts.
where it leads so long as the signal is only going to one customer should not be legally relevant.
Maybe, but as things stand, where it leads is entirely relevant. You could probably argue that a DVD player in one room of a house, connected to a TV in another room are both in the same place (i.e. the house), but I think it's a stretch to say that the entire US or world only count as one place for this purpose.
Some where along the line some court should manage to acurately interpret the law instead of acting as a MPAA shill.
The copyright industry has been writing copyright laws for their own purposes for over a century, and it's been getting worse and worse over the last several decades. So don't be surprised that interpreting the law correctly yields MPAA-friendly outcomes; it's deliberately so.
In response to an earlier post claiming that the purpose of our war in Iraq was to advance the interests of certain US businesses and secure oil, you replied saying that even individuals in the US would like to see gas prices be lower.
I was pointing out that if one of the reasons to invade Iraq was to lower the price of gas, it has backfired spectacularly. But this hasn't particularly harmed the US businesses that the earlier poster thought were the intended beneficiaries of the war. This suggests that either lower gas prices was never an objective or that it came a distant second in terms of priorities for the Bush administration, which, typically, fucked it up.
In any event, I'd just as soon see our energy use reduced through greater efficiency and reduced demand, and more of our energy provided by safe, clean, domestic sources. Sadly, there seems to be little collective will in getting this done, or at least little evidence of it. If it takes continued increases in the price of gas to get us going in that direction, then I'm all for it, though I would certainly prefer to use whatever cheap energy we have left in a wise manner so as to get ready for the future, rather than to waste it on frivolous driving. But as long as we make the transition, I suppose it'll work out.
Are you saying that gas prices have gone down since we've been in Iraq? But the petroleum industry has been making record profits.
Adding to your B) we could also stand to shut down a lot of our other military spending by canceling programs to build more (and new types of) planes, ships, tanks, etc. and by reducing the number of people in the military. If there is a concern about putting large numbers of people out of work, then at least let us do that and then start up civilian programs: The companies that built things could transition to building drones for civilian use, rail infrastructure and trains (at all levels from trolleys to high speed rail), electric vehicle recharging infrastructure, green energy projects, etc., all of which are better uses of money. Likewise, rather than have servicemen return home to face unemployment, civilian jobs programs based on the WPA, CCC, etc. could be made available to them (and to all unemployed civilians for that matter) to help them out during tough times in exchange for their productive labor.
Your C) is just a bad idea, though. The events of recent years show that the private financial industry is a complete sham. The financial industry basically needs to be small, with simple products, financially conservative (i.e. not risk-taking), so tightly and aggressively regulated that they have virtually no chance to misbehave, and always distrusted. Social security is better left with the government -- though this does raise political problems -- than trusted to the bankers.
D) is also a bad idea. There's a great deal of value in unused land (would that it were really less used) and we're not so desperate that the one-time benefit would be worth it.
I would add, though, in the realm of spending cuts, we that I'd be interested to see changes to the mortgage interest tax deduction to the effect that by default there is no deduction, but the better your county and municipality is (where better is based upon more: population density, mixed commercial / residential / light industrial uses, multifamily homes & lots, mass transit, carpooling, walking & bicycling, school funding, renewable energy use, modernity of infrastructure, racial integration, etc. and less: driving, pollution, crime, etc.) the more of a deduction becomes available.
You also seem to have forgotten substantially increasing revenues via e.g. increased income taxes (particularly by adding brackets to the top and increasing tax rates on upper brackets and by aggressively pursuing income taxes on businesses and closing loopholes); increased capital gains taxes; financial transaction taxes; wealth taxes; increased estate taxes (surely we can find a way to avoid taxing to death small family owned and operated businesses that are passed down without letting go of the idle rich); eliminating caps on payroll taxes; nationalization of certain industries if it would be beneficial and services would not be reduced (probably health care, all forms of post, and rail infrastructure); taxing regulated industries enough to pay regulators an amount commensurate to that of their private sector counterparts, and then barring regulators from working in that private sector, so as to deter brain drain from low pay and regulatory capture.
It's not enough to just reduce spending (which is important, though more for some programs than others, and some programs need increased spending), but also to increase revenues. We're gonna need both.
The army is a bad example, since the federal government usually disclaims copyright on works prepared by federal officials or employees in the course of their duties. But generally your point is a good one.
We could double taxes at this point and still be in the red.
Are you sure? The 2010 federal budget was about $3.4 billion, and 2010 federal tax receipts were about $2.1 billion. Doubling taxes -- your suggestion -- sounds like it might just work, without having to reduce spending. If we also reduced spending, and we could stick to this long enough to seriously pay down our debt, we'd probably be sitting pretty. Better still if we could stick to it even longer so that when we have good times we're building up a rainy day fund.
And, yes, I left out the military to make a point as these four are retirement and support services-related, and of course interest on the debt, which isn't going away.
And other than, perhaps that you oppose cutting the military budget, what point was that, exactly? (Also, federal pensions don't seem to be a big deal, so why'd you include them?)
If we dropped the entire defense budget to $0, it still would not be enough
No, but it would get us much closer. That would bring that 2010 budget down to about $2.8 trillion with $2.1 in receipts. But I don't think that anyone is seriously suggesting disbanding the entire military. It needs substantial cuts, but not outright dissolution.
Everything you listed sounds nice, but it's simply impossible to make any of it work at this point.
Why so glum? The new receipts would take a little while to come in but so long as there's a viable plan in place, it's not as though we couldn't obtain coverage in the interim one way or another. The problem is political is all.
Or when we go bankrupt
That would take a lot of effort, actually. The US isn't like a person or a business. It prints its own money and its debts are denominated in US currency. It would come at the cost of inflation, and it would likely not be repeatable, but the country can't go bankrupt anytime soon unless it done very deliberately.
Also, Social Security was never envisioned by our Founding Fathers ... I doubt if they would have ever have voted for it.
So? I don't want to live in a country that is governed by long dead patricians. I'd rather that the living run things, and in the here and now, Social Security seems to be well liked and useful (if not implemented as well as we might hope). I don't have a problem with its existence.
The issue isn't any of that stuff that you posted. It's that Goverment Pensions, Social Security, Medicare, and Interest on the Debt account for almost 100% of our current budget. That leaves only 25 billion (less than 1.5%!) for our entire defense department, military, and, well, literally thousands and thousands of programs and agencies. Until we get rid of these four items, we're broke. We could cut the military to $0. Kill off every single social spending program. Get rid of student aid. Stop patrolling our borders. Stop foreign aid. Close down NASA. None of it would make any more difference than spitting on a bonfire. Those four items alone are literally killing our nation, and until we get rid of them entirely, we are doomed.
Well, you seem to be ignoring half of the picture. Why have you forgotten about raising additional revenue? (Which is not to say that we should not address some of our current spending priorities)
We could:
I'd also suggest that we pursue full employment policies; there are too many beneficial effects to ignore. True, it tends to cause moderate inflation, as we discovered in the 60's and 70's, but our experience since then demonstrates, I think, that inflation is the lesser evil. COLA adjustments would be needed for payrolls, benefits, etc., of course. This would also help substantially with the crushing debt load that most individual Americans carry.
As for our spending, I'd suggest cutting the military significantly. We might merely shift that money elsewhere -- infrastructure, jobs programs, NASA, etc. -- but doing so would have a nice side benefit of
But how many 'new' recipes are in cookbooks?
If you're talking about novelty (i.e. never has been done before), that's irrelevant for copyright purposes. Only originality (i.e. not copied from elsewhere, regardless of whether or not it's been done before) matters.
If computer source code is kept secret there is no need for copyright protection on the source.
That's never stopped them.
I have never heard of anyone being sued for copyright violation of trade secret source.
It's not really unusual for a licensor to end up suing its licensee regarding the copyright to software that, while a trade secret, the licensor was allowed to access.
As for incidents where someone illicitly obtained the source, the only one that instantly comes to mind was NuPrometheus; that resulted in the FBI investigating, but I don't think anything came of it.
Personally, I'd prefer to have mandatory registrations for published works, and to require a deposit formality to get the registration, and to have deposit include any supplemental information that the Library of Congress or the Copyright Office wish to also be included, in whatever form they specify. Thus, to get a copyright on a binary, you'd need to provide clear, well commented source code, instructions for compilation, hardware requirements, etc., which would be copyrighted, but not a secret. (Much like patented inventions must be disclosed, and can't be a secret)
In this way, we would advance the public policy of having works be useful to the public when they're in the public domain (since people would be able to get at and change the source), when they're copyrighted (since there is an exception to copyright that allows the owner of a copy of a computer program (as distinct from the copyright holder) to modify it so that it can run on a system.
Further, since copyright isn't meant to protect the functional aspects of software, this would avoid interference with the advancement of the art of computer programming, since people could inspect one another's software and learn from doing so. For most works, there's not the same sort of difference between the 'manuscript' if you will, and the published version, where literary techniques or the like are used in one but not visible in the other. Software is a special case, and so it's acceptable to require more disclosure than merely a copy of the published work.
So long as it does not substitute for fair use, I suppose I don't have any complaints, though I might differ as to the numbers involved, the types of works it's applicable to, etc. It generally doesn't seem too useful to me, though. Academic quotations might fall under this, but I don't think a good commercial review would.
(Incidentally, for a typical 3 minute song, you'd really only get 18 seconds, which is very low indeed)
Not sure why you are dismissive of sampling. While it really ought to be a fair use -- sampling is the audio form of collage, after all, and that is well protected -- the poor treatment of sampling in the courts really does warrant a strong exception for it.
Within these terms, I don't see any real room for usage to be unfair
You dealt with amount, but you forgot about
substantiality.
2. Congress (past, present & future) participates in Social Security.
They've been doing this since the 80's. Not sure if I see the point in having Congressmen who paid into the previous system get switched at this late date; it disrupts predictability (people planned for their retirement according to assumptions that you'd now retroactively upset), and many of them are probably retired from Congress already, so it's not as though this can be used to pressure them into doing anything to help everyone who pays into Social Security out of self interest.
5. Congress loses their current health care system and participates in the same health care system as the American people.
Already done in the big health care reform last year. Of course, I'd be happy to see more substantial reforms along the lines of real universal health care.
6. Congress must equally abide by all laws they impose on the American people.
Basically already true.
7. All contracts with past and present Congressmen are void effective 1/1/12.
So... what are you suggesting happens to a Congressman who took out a mortgage, or leased a car, or borrowed money for a student loan? Does he get a windfall, or does he lose everything? In what universe is this possibly a good idea?
Your chain email makes no sense, everyone who read it is now dumber for having done so, I award you no points, and Snopes rated it as 'mostly false.'
In the making your own food market we have cookbooks. They, and the recipes in them (except for the lists of ingredients) are in fact protected by copyright.
Copyright (in the US, at least) doesn't apply to procedures, though it may apply to a particular expression of them. (So for example, a book that explains how to do double-entry bookkeeping may be copyrightable, but anyone else can write their own book that explains precisely the same thing)
Furthermore, where there is only one or are only a few reasonable ways to express an procedure, those expressions are not copyrightable due to the merger, lest they effectively provide a copyright on the underlying, uncopyrightable procedure. Nor are stock expressions that are typical of a genre copyrightable, due to the scÃnes à faire doctrine. So the portions of a recipe to the effect of "mix well" or "serves 4" or "cook until brown" wouldn't be protectable.
Really, the best you can hope for for a typical recipe that is clearly written, straightforward, and all business, is a copyright that protects it from verbatim copying; even then anyone could rewrite it (in many cases without having to change much of the wording per the above paragraph) and not infringe. And I wouldn't want to bet money that even that level of protection could be obtained.
Really, about the only substantially copyrightable things in a cookbook are 1) the photographs (if any) that accompany the recipe to show you what the food should look like, and 2) the selection and arrangement of recipes, provided that it rises to the level of copyrightability (and this only protects the compilation, not the individual recipes themselves).
Your example of Coca Cola is perfect - you MAY duplicate Coke, but in over a hundred years of trying no-one has succeeded.
I doubt that. Pepsi is probably entirely capable of it, but why would they? Even the most shell-shocked veteran of the infamous Cola Wars knows that the point was always differentiation. If they all tasted the same, there'd be a huge loss in brand loyalty.
You can't keep a book, recording, or movie a trade secret and still sell it like you can with prepared food.
Computer software source code, if you only sell the binaries?
here was no copyright anywhere before about 100-150 years ago.
Well... it was invented in England in 1710 (assuming we're talking about modern copyright and not the very different stationer's copyright that predates it), and started showing up in the United States in 1783, and a different sort appeared in France in 1793. So, they're a bit older than 100-150 years, but it's true that they mostly spread via colonialism, and the 19th century was really a golden age for that.
Regarding your main argument, I disagree. I think that if properly formulated, copyright can provide a benefit to the public greater than its cost to the public; the issue is holding onto that ideal formulation and avoiding corruption. But I suppose that it's possible that under the right circumstances copyright might never provide a net public benefit. Only in that case would I support abolition, which is why that option should remain on the table.