Consider this. There are about 2 billion internet users in the whole world. Google has a market cap of ~200Billion USD, so by your metric, Google already values each user at $100, at least (since not everyone uses Google).
And unlike Facebook, Google has been earning solid money by targetted advertisements etc.
Your fears have been realized long ago, there's no reason to start fretting about it just now.
Concerning the Confucius quote: I dwell quite a bit in Chinese classics. It doesn't mean what you think it means. Heck, unless the translation is from some obscure source I've never heard of, the translation itself is absolutely horrible.
The original text was about teaching gentlemen to acquire proper names and title before attempting to change and improve society. Nothing about language nor linguistics.
A lot of common translations of Chinese classics were undertaken by people who really didn't know much Chinese, much less classical Chinese (which is not in common use today). It's really amusing to read their attempts at making sense of the texts and making it sound wise (and at the same time completely missing the point).:)
If it pays to be "evil", then by the mere existence of competition in the business world, the survival of the "fittest" (or evilest) principle would ensure that only the most evil survive.
It won't matter if most businessmen are taught to believe "ethics" or whatever noble ideals. As long as there are a small bunch of bad apples and as long as being "evil" pays well, they'd take over the system.
Therefore, we should disallow "evil" within the system as far as possible. Not to say that we shouldn't push for a better culture of "goodness", but its effectiveness is unfortunately quite low.
I'm no atheist, (more like a mix of traditional Chinese folklore + new age + agnostic... whatever that means), and I do hate the hard core atheists with a passion too, but seriously, besides the "HE NEEDS MONEY" part, which of them do not describe factually the purported beliefs of mainstream Christians?
You may think that the "magic man in the sky" has nothing to do with the earth and its creation (well, actually I also think so), except that book called the Bible actually says he does.
Sometimes I just wonder why you'd (presumably) call yourself Christians when you claim you believe what that book says, except that to read it properly you'd have to squint your eyes really hard and read it in some funny way.
PS: Yes it's a bit off topic, just wanted to get this off my chest... sorry.
This seems to be the classic scenario of the so called "Equity's Darling", i.e. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bona_fide_purchaser, albeit in the realm of "Intellectual" property instead of tangibles.
I'm not totally sure whether this principle applies, but it might. Though if it does, it would be really hard to argue that Mega___ didn't have any (constructive) knowledge of the deals, since any prudent person in their shoes would have asked about any exclusivity deals....
PS: Stop arguing like school children and learn the law:)
However, I also have distributed Emacs on a Debian distribution (I created some of the early Debian distribution masters) along with thousands of texts and programs
Yes, I'm aware. (And I'm typing this reply on a Debian machine:)
That Debian CD was self-booting, self-extracting, really very similar to the Windows installer being discussed. If I tried to testify that the Windows installer was derivative, a canny defense expert would cue the lawyer to cross-examine me about that Debian CD, and she'd be right, it would discredit my (theoretical) testimony.
The position of an legal issue shouldn't be dependent on the past affairs of an expert witnesses, but then, realistically speaking I suppose you do have a point..
The problem with the redefinition of derivative work isn't that there's no contract, it's that legal professionals already know what derivative works are, and would prove in court, easily, that what Fyodor thinks is derivative actually isn't. Fyodor would have to state it differently than he has to make this stick.
I think this boils down to plain old interpretation of license clauses, the kind that courts frequently have to do when dealing with botched clauses written by laypeople or (sometimes) lousy lawyers. While it''s indeed rather unfortunate that the nmap license is written that way, it's still difficult to simply dismiss the explicit modifications (or "clarifications") to the GPL as ineffective. I'm a bit rusty here, but IIRC it's sufficient to show that the licensor and licensee understood the "real" intent of the text, notwithstanding it's rather lousy expression.
I'm not saying that you're definitely wrong. I'm just saying I can't see how you're definitely correct.
The installer package is a medium from which the payload can be extracted and becomes separate files, identical to their form before being archived, that is the function of the installer. The installer copies the and stores data the way that Emacs copies and stores the text that you type while it runs.
The problem is while Emacs itself is not a derivative work of my text, if you bundled Emacs together with my text as a single package, then I can't see why it can't be a derivative work of both my text and Emacs. Probably slightly a bit of a stretch, but I wouldn't cross the out.
The fact that you can revert the alleged derivative work back to its original form is neither here nor there -- if I s/wand/wang/g in the Harry Potter books, I almost certainly can return it to the original text by the substituting back. It doesn't mean my modifications isn't a "derivative work".
-- Further, I do have reservations to your claim that such modifications to redefine "derivative works" to the GPL isn't effective. It doesn't have to be a contract for such things to be effective. As long as CNET did not obtain a license to redistribute the work (whether derivative or not, doesn't matter. Copyright law does not allow redistributing of the original work unless licensed either), then it would be a copyright violation.
So did CNET obtain a license to distribute nmap? The nmap is licensed under GPL with explicit exceptions regarding some forms of aggregation. Depending on how a court is inclined to interpret the "patch" to GPL, i.e. whether overloading the term "derivative works" is effective in law, or whether the "spirit" of the license is to be followed, is not so clear cut IMHO. Generally a licensor is free to draft up a license text with strange words and terminology as long as he defines it in clear terms. In the nmap case, basically the author is saying: "ignore the legal meaning of 'derivative work', what we really mean is this:". That may not be the best way to modify the intentions of a GPL license, but I can't see how it is fundamentally fatal.
--- (In case you're wondering, I've studied law in a common law jurisdiction, but I'm not a lawyer either.)
Sorry, but when Fyodor crosses out some of the GPL terms and writes in new ones in crayon (meaning without the assistance of a lawyer or in a manner contrary to existing law), it doesn't really have the effect he desires.
You're not an IP lawyer either.
Go read Judge Walker's finding in CAI v. Altai and tell me that just installing the software makes it a derivative work.
I'm not exactly an expert in US Copyright law, but after reading (time is limited mate) the Wikipedia article on the case, I see nothing related to the issue of whether such "aggregation" is a derivative work. My gut feeling is that whether it infringes depends on how it is "aggregated", and I really can't see how one can declare it is "non-infringing" without even looking at the installer itself.
The tricky parts of law are always in the devilry details. The "aggregation does not constitute derivative work, period" is great for OSS advocacy and establishing clear ground rules, but your words (and the community's words) are not the law. Honestly, from my limited understanding, the current case law is far from clear as to a lot of copyright issues than you OSS advocates seem to convey. As I said, that's not necessarily a bad thing from the advocacy perspective, but it's really no good if you actually *believed* what you said where the unequivocal legal position and gave pseudo-legal advice based on this.
To be fair, there's actually multiple levels of responsibilities the law can impose on a person.
From the strictest: - Strict liability: whenever something goes wrong, you're liable, no matter your actions or intentions. - Negligence: liable if you've failed to do enough to prevent it from happening - Gross negligence: liable if you've fucked up badly and caused/allowed it to happen. - Knowledge required: you're liable only if you knew it will happen - Intentional: liable only if you intentionally did something to make it happen
Between these shades of responsibility, I do think a shift to a stricter one can be contemplated, I think we're currently only making them liable if knowledge of the wrongdoing can be proved, but I do think some forms of liability on the negligence level should be imposed.
Then you're going to love it when the Chinese and Russians take our place as super powers. I will enjoy watching your rioting, pathetic masses of children being tortured and then crushed under the boot heels of actual nationalist imperialists on CNN (well, before those self same governments kick the free press out, anyway).
If you feel the need to dream up improbable scenarios to justify the actual and real atrocities committed by the US government, I pity you.
A little known inconvenient truth. The world always has, and will continue to have empires and nations of super power status. Now that we got that out of the way, ask yourself this. WHO would you rather have this title?
What truth? The complaint is not about the US having super power status. It's about the US abusing its super power status. The hypothetical idea that some other evil regime would do worse if they had superpower status is NO EXCUSE for the crimes and abuses committed by the US government.
Which country is the only self proclaimed Savior of the World, Defender of Freedom and Justice, that regularly invades other countries in the name of <ideal> ? "Hand of God" does not have to refer to a literal religious God of the kind you know.
Just imagine what you're saying with a reversed perspective: some "middle east looking" person on the other side of the planet saying: "I don't have a problem with common US people, just the nut heads at the top. Let me blow off their heads with a M4 rifle and I'll leave all you innocent citizens in peace".
By the way, I'm honestly perplexed who you're referring to in:
And yes, in current state of affairs there's still HUGE difference between power obsessed richies and "I'm fundamentally right to call myself a hand of the God and I will execute my rights nuking you" regime.
It seems both are referring to the USA. Or are you still talking about those "nut heads" at the top of the Iranian government?
Slashdot Mirror
Your sig might have something to do with it...........
Consider this. There are about 2 billion internet users in the whole world. Google has a market cap of ~200Billion USD, so by your metric, Google already values each user at $100, at least (since not everyone uses Google).
And unlike Facebook, Google has been earning solid money by targetted advertisements etc.
Your fears have been realized long ago, there's no reason to start fretting about it just now.
Concerning the Confucius quote: I dwell quite a bit in Chinese classics. It doesn't mean what you think it means. Heck, unless the translation is from some obscure source I've never heard of, the translation itself is absolutely horrible.
The original text was about teaching gentlemen to acquire proper names and title before attempting to change and improve society. Nothing about language nor linguistics.
A lot of common translations of Chinese classics were undertaken by people who really didn't know much Chinese, much less classical Chinese (which is not in common use today). It's really amusing to read their attempts at making sense of the texts and making it sound wise (and at the same time completely missing the point). :)
It shows that these days you can't find 34 guys on slashdot whose first language isn't Mandarin.
A monopoly of what? Shiny devices?
Right.
I don't recall many capacitive multi-touch touchscreen phones
Which part of "many" is your one example about?
http://mediacenter.motorola.com/Press-Releases/Motorola-Mobility-Sues-Apple-for-Patent-Infringement-344d.aspx
They're owned by Google now.
And if I'm not mistaken, the lawsuit hasn't been called to a halt by Google.
If it pays to be "evil", then by the mere existence of competition in the business world, the survival of the "fittest" (or evilest) principle would ensure that only the most evil survive.
It won't matter if most businessmen are taught to believe "ethics" or whatever noble ideals. As long as there are a small bunch of bad apples and as long as being "evil" pays well, they'd take over the system.
Therefore, we should disallow "evil" within the system as far as possible. Not to say that we shouldn't push for a better culture of "goodness", but its effectiveness is unfortunately quite low.
Yes.
That legal doctrine applies to cases where a person purchases property belonging to another person unknowingly.
Well, the "moons" of Mars are really nothing but some large rocks.
The significance of the Earth's moon is not that it exists, but it's large enough to have some effect on the planet and the life on it.
For other planets, they're much larger gas giants which naturally have larger moons.
Not to say your general point is wrong though.
I'm no atheist, (more like a mix of traditional Chinese folklore + new age + agnostic... whatever that means), and I do hate the hard core atheists with a passion too, but seriously, besides the "HE NEEDS MONEY" part, which of them do not describe factually the purported beliefs of mainstream Christians?
You may think that the "magic man in the sky" has nothing to do with the earth and its creation (well, actually I also think so), except that book called the Bible actually says he does.
Sometimes I just wonder why you'd (presumably) call yourself Christians when you claim you believe what that book says, except that to read it properly you'd have to squint your eyes really hard and read it in some funny way.
PS: Yes it's a bit off topic, just wanted to get this off my chest... sorry.
Seriously, no civilization who's burnt gigatonnes of fuel for interstellar travel would be interested in eating you low energy density crap.....
This seems to be the classic scenario of the so called "Equity's Darling", i.e. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bona_fide_purchaser, albeit in the realm of "Intellectual" property instead of tangibles.
I'm not totally sure whether this principle applies, but it might. Though if it does, it would be really hard to argue that Mega___ didn't have any (constructive) knowledge of the deals, since any prudent person in their shoes would have asked about any exclusivity deals....
PS: Stop arguing like school children and learn the law :)
I guess that's why PhDs are also known as "Permanent Head Damage"...
However, I also have distributed Emacs on a Debian distribution (I created some of the early Debian distribution masters) along with thousands of texts and programs
Yes, I'm aware. (And I'm typing this reply on a Debian machine :)
That Debian CD was self-booting, self-extracting, really very similar to the Windows installer being discussed. If I tried to testify that the Windows installer was derivative, a canny defense expert would cue the lawyer to cross-examine me about that Debian CD, and she'd be right, it would discredit my (theoretical) testimony.
The position of an legal issue shouldn't be dependent on the past affairs of an expert witnesses, but then, realistically speaking I suppose you do have a point..
The problem with the redefinition of derivative work isn't that there's no contract, it's that legal professionals already know what derivative works are, and would prove in court, easily, that what Fyodor thinks is derivative actually isn't. Fyodor would have to state it differently than he has to make this stick.
I think this boils down to plain old interpretation of license clauses, the kind that courts frequently have to do when dealing with botched clauses written by laypeople or (sometimes) lousy lawyers. While it''s indeed rather unfortunate that the nmap license is written that way, it's still difficult to simply dismiss the explicit modifications (or "clarifications") to the GPL as ineffective. I'm a bit rusty here, but IIRC it's sufficient to show that the licensor and licensee understood the "real" intent of the text, notwithstanding it's rather lousy expression.
I'm sure the originals were based off of a real person, and probably touched up a bit with photoshop
RTFA, and you'll see that they were based off dolls, and photoshopped to make them look more human.
I'm not saying that you're definitely wrong. I'm just saying I can't see how you're definitely correct.
The installer package is a medium from which the payload can be extracted and becomes separate files, identical to their form before being archived, that is the function of the installer. The installer copies the and stores data the way that Emacs copies and stores the text that you type while it runs.
The problem is while Emacs itself is not a derivative work of my text, if you bundled Emacs together with my text as a single package, then I can't see why it can't be a derivative work of both my text and Emacs. Probably slightly a bit of a stretch, but I wouldn't cross the out.
The fact that you can revert the alleged derivative work back to its original form is neither here nor there -- if I s/wand/wang/g in the Harry Potter books, I almost certainly can return it to the original text by the substituting back. It doesn't mean my modifications isn't a "derivative work".
--
Further, I do have reservations to your claim that such modifications to redefine "derivative works" to the GPL isn't effective. It doesn't have to be a contract for such things to be effective. As long as CNET did not obtain a license to redistribute the work (whether derivative or not, doesn't matter. Copyright law does not allow redistributing of the original work unless licensed either), then it would be a copyright violation.
So did CNET obtain a license to distribute nmap? The nmap is licensed under GPL with explicit exceptions regarding some forms of aggregation. Depending on how a court is inclined to interpret the "patch" to GPL, i.e. whether overloading the term "derivative works" is effective in law, or whether the "spirit" of the license is to be followed, is not so clear cut IMHO. Generally a licensor is free to draft up a license text with strange words and terminology as long as he defines it in clear terms. In the nmap case, basically the author is saying: "ignore the legal meaning of 'derivative work', what we really mean is this:". That may not be the best way to modify the intentions of a GPL license, but I can't see how it is fundamentally fatal.
---
(In case you're wondering, I've studied law in a common law jurisdiction, but I'm not a lawyer either.)
Sorry, but when Fyodor crosses out some of the GPL terms and writes in new ones in crayon (meaning without the assistance of a lawyer or in a manner contrary to existing law), it doesn't really have the effect he desires.
You're not an IP lawyer either.
Go read Judge Walker's finding in CAI v. Altai and tell me that just installing the software makes it a derivative work.
I'm not exactly an expert in US Copyright law, but after reading (time is limited mate) the Wikipedia article on the case, I see nothing related to the issue of whether such "aggregation" is a derivative work. My gut feeling is that whether it infringes depends on how it is "aggregated", and I really can't see how one can declare it is "non-infringing" without even looking at the installer itself.
The tricky parts of law are always in the devilry details. The "aggregation does not constitute derivative work, period" is great for OSS advocacy and establishing clear ground rules, but your words (and the community's words) are not the law. Honestly, from my limited understanding, the current case law is far from clear as to a lot of copyright issues than you OSS advocates seem to convey. As I said, that's not necessarily a bad thing from the advocacy perspective, but it's really no good if you actually *believed* what you said where the unequivocal legal position and gave pseudo-legal advice based on this.
To be fair, there's actually multiple levels of responsibilities the law can impose on a person.
From the strictest:
- Strict liability: whenever something goes wrong, you're liable, no matter your actions or intentions.
- Negligence: liable if you've failed to do enough to prevent it from happening
- Gross negligence: liable if you've fucked up badly and caused/allowed it to happen.
- Knowledge required: you're liable only if you knew it will happen
- Intentional: liable only if you intentionally did something to make it happen
Between these shades of responsibility, I do think a shift to a stricter one can be contemplated, I think we're currently only making them liable if knowledge of the wrongdoing can be proved, but I do think some forms of liability on the negligence level should be imposed.
Mao has been dead for 30+ years already. Policies change, and have changed.
You might as well mentioned that some of the US founding fathers encouraged slave ownership by owning some of their own.
Then you're going to love it when the Chinese and Russians take our place as super powers. I will enjoy watching your rioting, pathetic masses of children being tortured and then crushed under the boot heels of actual nationalist imperialists on CNN (well, before those self same governments kick the free press out, anyway).
If you feel the need to dream up improbable scenarios to justify the actual and real atrocities committed by the US government, I pity you.
A little known inconvenient truth. The world always has, and will continue to have empires and nations of super power status. Now that we got that out of the way, ask yourself this. WHO would you rather have this title?
What truth? The complaint is not about the US having super power status. It's about the US abusing its super power status. The hypothetical idea that some other evil regime would do worse if they had superpower status is NO EXCUSE for the crimes and abuses committed by the US government.
But as soon as we did we would have dozens of Countries asking or begging for our support.
Are you aiming for +5 Funny? Last time I saw this argument it was called the White Man's burden or something.
The fact that you're instead modded as +5 Insightful sickens me.
Actions speak louder than words.
Which country is the only self proclaimed Savior of the World, Defender of Freedom and Justice, that regularly invades other countries in the name of <ideal> ? "Hand of God" does not have to refer to a literal religious God of the kind you know.
Just imagine what you're saying with a reversed perspective: some "middle east looking" person on the other side of the planet saying: "I don't have a problem with common US people, just the nut heads at the top. Let me blow off their heads with a M4 rifle and I'll leave all you innocent citizens in peace".
By the way, I'm honestly perplexed who you're referring to in:
And yes, in current state of affairs there's still HUGE difference between power obsessed richies and "I'm fundamentally right to call myself a hand of the God and I will execute my rights nuking you" regime.
It seems both are referring to the USA. Or are you still talking about those "nut heads" at the top of the Iranian government?