But the gui does work well w/o reading documentation. Oh sure, you need a little help getting started - how the file menu works, how to move the pointer, how to click on buttons, what icons are and how to use them - but that's the basic literacy you need. After that it's all a matter of how many additional but non-essential ways there are to do things.
surely you don't think that modifier keys are absolutely essential? extremely helpful and time-saving, sure, but not essential. Just goes to show that the easy way != the fast way.
Oh hell, you're allowed to listen to the thing on a record player if you want. There are no restrictions on your USE of the thing at all - only on the duplication. It's a copyright, after all, not a usageright.
Boilerplate legaleese is usually stuck on things like that to prevent people who don't know any better from fully exercising their rights. About the only thing in there that seemed reasonable (IANAL) is the public viewing bit. That's been upheld IIRC but I can live with it.
I think that if they had patented the CCS process (a very iffy thing, but the Patent Office has not been known for their ability to use common sense in granting computer-related patents recently, preferring to let it be hashed out in the overworked judicial system) it would be protected. Well, insofar as the patent was upheld. Trick is, it would expire in 17 years and I guess they plan to keep DVD around longer than that (VHS is already 20+ years old and still kicking, so it's a good bet)
Of course, all government orginizations are legal corporations as well, the official title of your town's lawyer is "corporation counsel," so banning corporations would disolve all US governments, so maybe it's not such a bad idea.
I'm pretty sure that this is not the case. Back when the country was founded it was damn near impossible and illegal to create a corporation. At the time they were much like government-granted monopolies (like most utilities are today). Really I'd be happy with the courts rediscovering that they have the ability to unilaterally revoke corporate charters if it is deemed in the best interests of the people. (I am not sure if this would be considered a taking and would thus require recompensation under the 5th amendment, but I doubt it) Seems like it frequently would be.
Well... when you're a professional (and it's not illegal duplication in a number of countries which have no copyright law, so there), you tend to have the same kind of equipment that other professionals have.
Obviously _someone_ manufactures enough DVDs to sell them at ~$15-30 and make a profit. They're the ones sold normally. Work on that kind of a scale and it's no trouble, I'm sure.
The expensive blanks are really more like the equivalent of CD-Rs, which themselves cost more than a 'real' CD. It only stops amatures.
Ah, but many of the rights enumerated in the amendments to the constitution (including, but not limited to the Bill of Rights) are inalienable rights. Everyone has them, although they may be saddled with a government which, because it restricts them, is therefore bad. YMMV in other parts of the world, but Americans are more or less supposed to believe that everyone naturally have these rights no matter where they live or are from.
My personal interpretation of Article I, Section 8, Clause 8 (which gives Congress powers to promote the Arts and Sciences) would be that they have undefined powers, and any specific act of congress to promote the arts and sciences (like passing copyright laws) is obviously subordinate to the First Amendment. (were there some specifics about the matter in the constitution itself we'd be in much more of a pickle)
There must be some reconciliation between the First Amendment and the aforementioned clause, but it's probably a moot point, or a great opportunity for precedents to be made in a completely new field.
After all, the DeCSS code (et al) are _NOT_ copyright violations in and of themselves, or so it is thought. That would ONLY be true if it turned out that the code used by the DVD CCA is identical or so exceptionally similar that it could be considered plagarism. In that case an argument could be made that DeCSS is infringing on the copyright, not of movies, but of the DVD CCA's code. Plagarized material is not useful to the public and would therefore probably have little protection or sympathy from the court. But I can live with that.
Given that there was a clean reverse-engineering process though, this would not seem to apply.
In that case, the freedom of the DeCSS authors to express themselves, and the advancement in the arts and sciences that it permits (after all, it now makes DVDs more widely available, and was an interesting challenge in itself) would seem to weigh only in favor of its' protection.
The entire case of the DVD CCA is founded on the idea that by permitting freedom of expression you are simultaneously restricting the freedom of expression of the authors of DVDs. But that's clearly not true - there is no inalienable right to freedom from competition in the 'marketplace of ideas.' That right is only granted by Congress and cannot stand against the 1st amendment.
Futhermore by allowing people more freedom with regard to the whole DVD situation, you'd be promoting smaller copyright holders who are not part of the DVD CCA and may wish to use DeCSS on material for which they hold the copyright to.
---
Whew!
On your other points though, yeah it's very sad how people are permissive of the erosion of rights and liberties simply because they can't be bothered to think about the matter rationally. Makes me want to move to some Geek-run country where we would have a chance to do things a bit differently. Sic transit gloria mundi.
The trick will be: does the law cover 'retransmit' or 'rebroadcast'? They don't presently broadcast, because you have to explicitly request that their server send you the data.
But why should you have to be Canadian to view it? I'm sure Americans near the border can pick up signals from our neighbors to the north and no one cares. As long as the server is in Canada and people outside Canada don't re-retransmit the signal everything should be gravy.
Mmmm.... gravy.
Personally, I don't want to have to stoop to the level of pretending to be a Canadian;)
I believe that the current royalty is 25 cents per device, not number of controllers. Given that they spent a hell of a long time developing the thing (I remember reading about it in 92-93 but didn't see it for real until 99) they deserve an opportunity to run it up the flagpole and see who salutes it.
So far it's been pretty good. USB is still too processor heavy imho. Let USB handle low-key devices like keyboards, mice or such. Ethernet can handle the network (printers are best when they're shared) and firewire can take high-end, intensive traffic for digital video, etc. And while USB is improving, so is Firewire. USB 2 is on paper right now, and will theoretically match the first rev of Firewire. Will it match the second rev? Will it even live up to the hype (USB 1 has not, really)
Well, you _also_ can't use a cell phone in an airplane because:
1)It just couldn't hook up to the cellular network - you're too far away and moving too fast (probably over large areas with no coverage)
2)If it did, you wouldn't use the phones built into the plane, would you?
While there is probably a good technical reason to prohibit people from using cel phones on planes, I suspect the prohibition stems from business reasons.
VCRs are also legal for those of us which use them as tools for our own content creation. If I created my own tape (or DVD), and owned the rights to it entirely, who has the right to stop me from watching it on anything I want? Or duplicating it in my home in small runs?
VHS and DVD authorship should _never_ be limited just to those of us with funny-sounding names like "Sony" or "Disney."
Which is why it's essential to get this case in the courts and have the DMCA overthrown.
Personally, I am not much in favor of the trend in copyrights in recent years. Copyrights are a *temporary* monopoly granted to the creator, with the idea that the monopoly is worth creating content for, but the limited life of the monopoly prevents creators from sitting on their asses (which is not good for the development of the arts and sciences). IMHO make copyrights apply only for the life of the creator, or in the case of a corporate entity (a rant for another time) 10-25 years.
Businesses are proving to be the least capitalistic of anyone these days - afraid of competition, afraid of work, and willing to subvert the government in order to get their way.
Family Guy was really very good, although a lot of the humor relied on the show going off onto fairly long tangents and references to media and culture.
My favorite though was at the Octoberfest there are several stalls in a row. 'German Sausage' is manned by a Hitler-looking fellow. Next to him is the 'Polish Sausage' booth. The German guy looks around, runs up and knocks out the Polish guy and replaces the 'Polish Sausage' sign with another 'German Sausage' sign. Then he starts eyeing the 'Czechloslovakian Sausage' stall....
Having lived in New England I also liked some of the local mannerisms and places - the Natick Twinkie factory was a lot of fun;)
As you'll recall, Homer works in sector 7G of the Springfield Nuclear Power Plant. The season labels (iirc) start there, and eventually had to cycle into 'f'.
Milhouse: We can tell everyone on the Internet! Bart: Yeah, but we really need to reach people who's opinions matter.
Well, the difference is this: In the past no one at all thought that the media was unbiased. It helped that any good-sized city would have several newspapers which would constantly attack each other, endorse different political candidates, etc.
Weirdly enough, for a good part of the 20th century the media has generally been pretty unbiased but has, unfortunately propogated the myth that they're unbiased - have always been unbiased - will always be unbiased - and that therefore the news requires no critical examination or analysis by the people who recieve it.
I don't trust the media, and I like to get as many different confirmations for it as possible.
IMHO the most unbiased major news source is the BBC - unfortunately though it's not always convenient for me to get.
Okay - there is a difference between a font and a typeface, and I should not have used them interchangably. It's a bad habit that I've picked up from having spent most of my professional career using computers.
In case anyone is wondering what the difference is, it's this: A typeface is what letters look like. It is the shape and appearance of the letters. It is not copyrightable in the US. A font is a specific expression of a typeface. Fonts were originally hunks of wood or metal (and even there 'font' and 'type' are pretty much used interchangably) and more recently consist of computer files with lots of information in them. Fonts are copyrightable.
In computing, this is really only limited to scalable fonts, which is stored as a vector file on the computer. Bitmapped fonts have already been classified as unprotected.
Where this becomes useful for people who want to copy a typeface is that when you print out a vector font it loses its protection.
It seems to be a pretty safe bet that you are not infringing on copyright if you duplicate a font by tracing the printed output of a protected font, since the typeface is unprotectable in the first place. It's basically reverse engineering.
I'm not aware of any court cases in which the tracing method was considered derivative and infringing on the plantiff's copyright. Certainly I'd like to know if there are.
This also means that you can copyright a particular Times or Courier font (both of which are pretty recent, honestly - printing the latin characters has been around for ~500 years now) as long as you created it without using someone else's font.
But, like I had said, you can actually patent a typeface. This is not the same as patenting the technology used to display and store a vector font (like TrueType or PostScript). IIRC there have been something like 1500 typeface patents issued since the mid-19th century, and patents do not have a particularly long life.
Well, assuming that we're talking about the US here, you're the one who's wrong. Derivative works may or may not infringe on someone's copyright (generally determined on a case by case basis - a photo of a Cambell's soup can infringes, an Andy Warhol silkscreen of Cambell's soup cans is a work of art in its own right and does not infringe).
However, in the US fonts are not copyrightable in the first place. They can be patented, but this is very rare, because letters of the alphabet tend to have prior art;) Basically this stance is because fonts are considered to have more utility value than artistic value. Frankly, that's true, with the exception of pi fonts. If you can't spell with them they're pretty useless.
Until quite recently it was perfectly legal to perform a bit by bit copy of a font and sell it as your own. Recently the Supreme Court made a ruling in favor of Adobe on the matter of *ONE* specific face which made digital duplication illegal. The idea was that the vector information can be protected from digital copying. This means that now we're back to having to print them out and then trace them back in. Which is totally legal.
In fact, the only part of a font that's copyrightable in the states is the NAME. Take it from me - a graphic designer - the name is actually quite important. There are 8 * 10^zillion subtle variations on common faces and families. Being ruthlessly consistent is really important. Even a small change in the font metrics can fsck everything up when you print it out.
At any rate, while you seem to have good intentions, you aren't quite aware of all of the specifics when it comes to fonts and copyrights in the US. YMMV in other countries though - some are quite odd.
No, IIRC NTSC is the second FCC color standard, and do remember that there were a number of early television experiments since the 20's. A lot of people were working on it.
The original color standard was basically going to transmit the R, G and B channels as sequential black and white signals, and the reciver would have a synchronized spinning wheel in front of the tube with R, G and B filters. But it was incompatable with the black and white transmission system and a real pain in the ass. NTSC was clearly a better choice when it was picked.
Personally, I think that local NTSC broadcasts should be left alone, BUT send HDTV signals over subsidized low-cost cable in cities, or digital satellite for rural areas. (somewhat like universal phone service) With a bit of work I think it shouldn't be hard to pipe local channels to their appropriate geographic areas. This wouldn't apply for pay channels, just the stuff you'd normally expect to get on VHF/UHF broadcasts.
Then slowly phase out NTSC broadcasts as the market switches to HDTV. Say 20-30 years.
What I heard was that there was an attempt to rescue the dog, the dog bit the guy trying to save it, the dog was left on the bridge. moral: don't bite the hand that gets you away from a collapsing bridge
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But the gui does work well w/o reading documentation. Oh sure, you need a little help getting started - how the file menu works, how to move the pointer, how to click on buttons, what icons are and how to use them - but that's the basic literacy you need. After that it's all a matter of how many additional but non-essential ways there are to do things.
surely you don't think that modifier keys are absolutely essential? extremely helpful and time-saving, sure, but not essential. Just goes to show that the easy way != the fast way.
Oh hell, you're allowed to listen to the thing on a record player if you want. There are no restrictions on your USE of the thing at all - only on the duplication. It's a copyright, after all, not a usageright.
Boilerplate legaleese is usually stuck on things like that to prevent people who don't know any better from fully exercising their rights. About the only thing in there that seemed reasonable (IANAL) is the public viewing bit. That's been upheld IIRC but I can live with it.
I think that if they had patented the CCS process (a very iffy thing, but the Patent Office has not been known for their ability to use common sense in granting computer-related patents recently, preferring to let it be hashed out in the overworked judicial system) it would be protected. Well, insofar as the patent was upheld. Trick is, it would expire in 17 years and I guess they plan to keep DVD around longer than that (VHS is already 20+ years old and still kicking, so it's a good bet)
True but once the point is made of how new the DVD CCA is, I doubt that this tactic will be worth much.
I'm pretty sure that this is not the case. Back when the country was founded it was damn near impossible and illegal to create a corporation. At the time they were much like government-granted monopolies (like most utilities are today). Really I'd be happy with the courts rediscovering that they have the ability to unilaterally revoke corporate charters if it is deemed in the best interests of the people. (I am not sure if this would be considered a taking and would thus require recompensation under the 5th amendment, but I doubt it) Seems like it frequently would be.
Well... when you're a professional (and it's not illegal duplication in a number of countries which have no copyright law, so there), you tend to have the same kind of equipment that other professionals have.
Obviously _someone_ manufactures enough DVDs to sell them at ~$15-30 and make a profit. They're the ones sold normally. Work on that kind of a scale and it's no trouble, I'm sure.
The expensive blanks are really more like the equivalent of CD-Rs, which themselves cost more than a 'real' CD. It only stops amatures.
Ah, but many of the rights enumerated in the amendments to the constitution (including, but not limited to the Bill of Rights) are inalienable rights. Everyone has them, although they may be saddled with a government which, because it restricts them, is therefore bad. YMMV in other parts of the world, but Americans are more or less supposed to believe that everyone naturally have these rights no matter where they live or are from.
My personal interpretation of Article I, Section 8, Clause 8 (which gives Congress powers to promote the Arts and Sciences) would be that they have undefined powers, and any specific act of congress to promote the arts and sciences (like passing copyright laws) is obviously subordinate to the First Amendment. (were there some specifics about the matter in the constitution itself we'd be in much more of a pickle)
There must be some reconciliation between the First Amendment and the aforementioned clause, but it's probably a moot point, or a great opportunity for precedents to be made in a completely new field.
After all, the DeCSS code (et al) are _NOT_ copyright violations in and of themselves, or so it is thought. That would ONLY be true if it turned out that the code used by the DVD CCA is identical or so exceptionally similar that it could be considered plagarism. In that case an argument could be made that DeCSS is infringing on the copyright, not of movies, but of the DVD CCA's code. Plagarized material is not useful to the public and would therefore probably have little protection or sympathy from the court. But I can live with that.
Given that there was a clean reverse-engineering process though, this would not seem to apply.
In that case, the freedom of the DeCSS authors to express themselves, and the advancement in the arts and sciences that it permits (after all, it now makes DVDs more widely available, and was an interesting challenge in itself) would seem to weigh only in favor of its' protection.
The entire case of the DVD CCA is founded on the idea that by permitting freedom of expression you are simultaneously restricting the freedom of expression of the authors of DVDs. But that's clearly not true - there is no inalienable right to freedom from competition in the 'marketplace of ideas.' That right is only granted by Congress and cannot stand against the 1st amendment.
Futhermore by allowing people more freedom with regard to the whole DVD situation, you'd be promoting smaller copyright holders who are not part of the DVD CCA and may wish to use DeCSS on material for which they hold the copyright to.
---
Whew!
On your other points though, yeah it's very sad how people are permissive of the erosion of rights and liberties simply because they can't be bothered to think about the matter rationally. Makes me want to move to some Geek-run country where we would have a chance to do things a bit differently. Sic transit gloria mundi.
The trick will be: does the law cover 'retransmit' or 'rebroadcast'? They don't presently broadcast, because you have to explicitly request that their server send you the data.
;)
But why should you have to be Canadian to view it? I'm sure Americans near the border can pick up signals from our neighbors to the north and no one cares. As long as the server is in Canada and people outside Canada don't re-retransmit the signal everything should be gravy.
Mmmm.... gravy.
Personally, I don't want to have to stoop to the level of pretending to be a Canadian
And you can move the entire contents of that disk over the bus in like a half a second ;)
Yeah, but Canadian money won't buy you the time of day in volumes less than a wheelbarrow load ;)
(actually, here in Seattle I sometimes have difficulty passing off Canadian money as US money, on the occassions that I end up with some)
I believe that the current royalty is 25 cents per device, not number of controllers. Given that they spent a hell of a long time developing the thing (I remember reading about it in 92-93 but didn't see it for real until 99) they deserve an opportunity to run it up the flagpole and see who salutes it.
So far it's been pretty good. USB is still too processor heavy imho. Let USB handle low-key devices like keyboards, mice or such. Ethernet can handle the network (printers are best when they're shared) and firewire can take high-end, intensive traffic for digital video, etc. And while USB is improving, so is Firewire. USB 2 is on paper right now, and will theoretically match the first rev of Firewire. Will it match the second rev? Will it even live up to the hype (USB 1 has not, really)
One size does not fit all.
Well, you _also_ can't use a cell phone in an airplane because:
1)It just couldn't hook up to the cellular network - you're too far away and moving too fast (probably over large areas with no coverage)
2)If it did, you wouldn't use the phones built into the plane, would you?
While there is probably a good technical reason to prohibit people from using cel phones on planes, I suspect the prohibition stems from business reasons.
VCRs are also legal for those of us which use them as tools for our own content creation. If I created my own tape (or DVD), and owned the rights to it entirely, who has the right to stop me from watching it on anything I want? Or duplicating it in my home in small runs?
VHS and DVD authorship should _never_ be limited just to those of us with funny-sounding names like "Sony" or "Disney."
Which is why it's essential to get this case in the courts and have the DMCA overthrown.
Personally, I am not much in favor of the trend in copyrights in recent years. Copyrights are a *temporary* monopoly granted to the creator, with the idea that the monopoly is worth creating content for, but the limited life of the monopoly prevents creators from sitting on their asses (which is not good for the development of the arts and sciences). IMHO make copyrights apply only for the life of the creator, or in the case of a corporate entity (a rant for another time) 10-25 years.
Businesses are proving to be the least capitalistic of anyone these days - afraid of competition, afraid of work, and willing to subvert the government in order to get their way.
Yeah, but it rather implies that the supposed IT people have little faith in any version after b3 ;)
"It was the best of times, it was the blurst of times?!? Stupid monkeys!"
Family Guy was really very good, although a lot of the humor relied on the show going off onto fairly long tangents and references to media and culture.
;)
My favorite though was at the Octoberfest there are several stalls in a row. 'German Sausage' is manned by a Hitler-looking fellow. Next to him is the 'Polish Sausage' booth. The German guy looks around, runs up and knocks out the Polish guy and replaces the 'Polish Sausage' sign with another 'German Sausage' sign. Then he starts eyeing the 'Czechloslovakian Sausage' stall....
Having lived in New England I also liked some of the local mannerisms and places - the Natick Twinkie factory was a lot of fun
Milhouse: We can tell everyone on the Internet!
Bart: Yeah, but we really need to reach people who's opinions matter.
precisely - we need at least 10 million people in times square.
Well, the difference is this: In the past no one at all thought that the media was unbiased. It helped that any good-sized city would have several newspapers which would constantly attack each other, endorse different political candidates, etc.
Weirdly enough, for a good part of the 20th century the media has generally been pretty unbiased but has, unfortunately propogated the myth that they're unbiased - have always been unbiased - will always be unbiased - and that therefore the news requires no critical examination or analysis by the people who recieve it.
I don't trust the media, and I like to get as many different confirmations for it as possible.
IMHO the most unbiased major news source is the BBC - unfortunately though it's not always convenient for me to get.
Okay - there is a difference between a font and a typeface, and I should not have used them interchangably. It's a bad habit that I've picked up from having spent most of my professional career using computers.
In case anyone is wondering what the difference is, it's this: A typeface is what letters look like. It is the shape and appearance of the letters. It is not copyrightable in the US. A font is a specific expression of a typeface. Fonts were originally hunks of wood or metal (and even there 'font' and 'type' are pretty much used interchangably) and more recently consist of computer files with lots of information in them. Fonts are copyrightable.
In computing, this is really only limited to scalable fonts, which is stored as a vector file on the computer. Bitmapped fonts have already been classified as unprotected.
Where this becomes useful for people who want to copy a typeface is that when you print out a vector font it loses its protection.
It seems to be a pretty safe bet that you are not infringing on copyright if you duplicate a font by tracing the printed output of a protected font, since the typeface is unprotectable in the first place. It's basically reverse engineering.
I'm not aware of any court cases in which the tracing method was considered derivative and infringing on the plantiff's copyright. Certainly I'd like to know if there are.
This also means that you can copyright a particular Times or Courier font (both of which are pretty recent, honestly - printing the latin characters has been around for ~500 years now) as long as you created it without using someone else's font.
But, like I had said, you can actually patent a typeface. This is not the same as patenting the technology used to display and store a vector font (like TrueType or PostScript). IIRC there have been something like 1500 typeface patents issued since the mid-19th century, and patents do not have a particularly long life.
Well, assuming that we're talking about the US here, you're the one who's wrong. Derivative works may or may not infringe on someone's copyright (generally determined on a case by case basis - a photo of a Cambell's soup can infringes, an Andy Warhol silkscreen of Cambell's soup cans is a work of art in its own right and does not infringe).
;) Basically this stance is because fonts are considered to have more utility value than artistic value. Frankly, that's true, with the exception of pi fonts. If you can't spell with them they're pretty useless.
However, in the US fonts are not copyrightable in the first place. They can be patented, but this is very rare, because letters of the alphabet tend to have prior art
Until quite recently it was perfectly legal to perform a bit by bit copy of a font and sell it as your own. Recently the Supreme Court made a ruling in favor of Adobe on the matter of *ONE* specific face which made digital duplication illegal. The idea was that the vector information can be protected from digital copying. This means that now we're back to having to print them out and then trace them back in. Which is totally legal.
In fact, the only part of a font that's copyrightable in the states is the NAME. Take it from me - a graphic designer - the name is actually quite important. There are 8 * 10^zillion subtle variations on common faces and families. Being ruthlessly consistent is really important. Even a small change in the font metrics can fsck everything up when you print it out.
At any rate, while you seem to have good intentions, you aren't quite aware of all of the specifics when it comes to fonts and copyrights in the US. YMMV in other countries though - some are quite odd.
Actually, HP developed the technology for the new optical mice that MS has been hawking.
And there have been agents (and the promise of agents) for a really long time before Office had the stupid paperclip, which is not a great one anyway.
No, IIRC NTSC is the second FCC color standard, and do remember that there were a number of early television experiments since the 20's. A lot of people were working on it.
The original color standard was basically going to transmit the R, G and B channels as sequential black and white signals, and the reciver would have a synchronized spinning wheel in front of the tube with R, G and B filters. But it was incompatable with the black and white transmission system and a real pain in the ass. NTSC was clearly a better choice when it was picked.
Personally, I think that local NTSC broadcasts should be left alone, BUT send HDTV signals over subsidized low-cost cable in cities, or digital satellite for rural areas. (somewhat like universal phone service) With a bit of work I think it shouldn't be hard to pipe local channels to their appropriate geographic areas. This wouldn't apply for pay channels, just the stuff you'd normally expect to get on VHF/UHF broadcasts.
Then slowly phase out NTSC broadcasts as the market switches to HDTV. Say 20-30 years.
What I heard was that there was an attempt to rescue the dog, the dog bit the guy trying to save it, the dog was left on the bridge. moral: don't bite the hand that gets you away from a collapsing bridge