The letter is from the publisher's Canadian representative and objects to the distribution of scores that are still under copyright in Canada.
Really? Where? They certainly weren't listed in the posted C&D letter. Which composers was the IMSLP distributing works by which were copyrighted in Canada? (I'm aware that they had a US server for works in the public domain only in the US; I uploaded to it. But again, none of that was mentioned in the C&D letter. You appear to be making this all up.)
Furthermore, insofar as the site is available to people in the EU, the publisher can claim that it is engaged in copyright violation in the EU and take legal action in the EU resulting in a judgment that would be enforceable in Canada.
They could argue that, yes, but they'd be wrong. Project Gutenberg has gotten takedown requests very similar to this, and has responded with a (polite) "piss off, mate". The difference is that PG has legal representation and can stand up to the threat of barratry. On the other hand, the IMSLP was just one guy who maintained a fantastic resource. Without legal backing, he could have his life ruined by this. I'm sad that it's gone, but the blame goes squarely on the company doing the suing, with a smidge left over for the whole system that screws over people without legal retainers. The claim never needed to be enforceable in court, it only needed to take the guy to court.
Works that are derivative of public domain works are copyrightable--you just don't need permission from anyone to make them. Consider West Side Story, or pretty much anything Disney's ever made.
It used heavily-customized Mediawiki software to act as a catalog. What kind of catalog would be subject to legendarily lame edit wars? You don't see that kind of thing at Wikisource, for instance; it's just not in scope. None of this takes away from the accomplishment that was the IMSLP, but comparing its culture to that of Wikipedia doesn't make sense.
Could this database have been the intelligence in question?
After the last six years and change, you still have to ask this? What makes you think there even is "intelligence in question"? Given how buddy-buddy the Australian government has been with our own local authoritarians, why do you think they'd need a reason other than "because I wanted to" to detain, deport or disappear someone?
I've just come across the most fascinating invention. You can take any word or phrase, enter it into this device, and it will consult an incomprehensibly vast database to tell you where that phrase may have been seen. I most earnestly entreat you to use this device rather than rely on my fallible memory. It may be found here.
If you find this device perplexing, I've taken the liberty of using it myself, and have found the case in question, Ex parte H. H., which states in part:
Homosexual behavior is a ground for divorce, an act of sexual misconduct punishable as a crime in Alabama, a crime against nature, an inherent evil, and an act so heinous that it defies one's ability to describe it. That is enough under the law to allow a court to consider such activity harmful to a child. To declare that homosexuality is harmful is not to make new law but to reaffirm the old; to say that it is not harmful is to experiment with people's lives, particularly the lives of children.
The decision also mentions:
Homosexuality is strongly condemned in the common law because it violates both natural and revealed law. The author of Genesis writes: "God created man in His own image, in the image of God He created him; male and female He created them.... For this reason a man shall leave his father and his mother, and be joined to his wife; and they shall become one flesh." Genesis 1:27, 2:24 (King James). The law of the Old Testament enforced this distinction between the genders by stating that "[i]f a man lies with a male as he lies with a woman, both of them have committed an abomination." Leviticus 20:13 (King James).
You are, of course, not obligated to believe your lyin' eyes.
I hear that the libertarian paradise of Somalia is lovely this time of year. If ever there were a place that respected your right to buy all sorts of fabulous weaponry, that would be it.
The Bill of Rights was drafted by Madison in 1789. The French Revolution began that year, but the Reign of Terror didn't start until 1793. It seems a little odd that Jefferson could have foreseen how the Revolution overseas would turn out and been influenced to push for a Bill of Rights because of it, rather than arguments which had begun well before the French stormed the Bastille.
He cited the Bible in a court decision which declared gay couples "presumptively unfit to have custody of minor children", and referred to gay sex as an "inherent evil and an act so heinous that it defies one's ability to describe it". That smacks of bigotry to me, but perhaps you have another interpretation.
The first result for Googling "Ron Paul on the issues" is this page, a summary of his voting record. (Note the 0% rating from NARAL and the 76% rating from the Christian Coalition.) You can also see his weird ideas that children are being forbidden to pray in school and that the Ten Commandments cannot be displayed in a courtroom over here, which is pretty bog-standard Religious Right nonsense.
You could find this stuff out for yourself. The fact that this isn't common knowledge speaks more about the willing suspension of disbelief by the internet-libertarian crowd than about Ron Paul's status as magical savior.
Given that Obama entered the Senate in 2005, he must have used a time machine to go back and vote for the war in 2002 and the Patriot Act in 2001. Since he didn't go a bit further back and shoot Hitler, he's objectively pro-Hitler. Well, he's just lost my vote.
Yes, because Herrnstein and Murray's bog-standard scientific racism which belonged in the 1920s is so fact-based. Ugh. If ever there was a collection of unstated assumptions lining up behind one's biases and politically motivated conclusions tortured out of the facts, it was The Bell Curve.
Exactly. Copyright isn't the end-all and be-all of permissions problems. I'm sure Virgin wouldn't have had any problems if they'd used a CC picture of squirrel or something. The Wikimedia Commons has been instituting personality rights and trademark tags (though it's unclear exactly how widespread their use is; this case is an excellent illustration of why they need to do so.
I agree that one and a half cents per page is a fantastically cheap rate for library scanning. The New York Public Library charges twenty-five cents per page plus all sorts of additional fees. One of these three-dollar packages would easily run more than eighty bucks from the New York Public Library. (A little less if you got it by mail rather than PDF, but not much.)
On the other hand, these needed to be scanned precisely once; the labor is entirely a sunken cost. There are plenty of people (looking at you, Distributed Proofreaders) who undertake truly staggering tasks of scanning and proofreading in their spare time, using bandwidth donated by the internet archive.
This sort of archive could have been scanned by volunteers (it's partially funded by a library, so it may in fact have been), and I'm sure that Brewster Kahle would have been happy to donate bandwidth. I'm aware that that's not how things were done, and that the library is charging an extraordinarily reasonable rate for access to what would normally be very restricted collections, but it could have been done as a freebie rather than as a fundraising opportunity for the Foundation. (Which has very admirable aims, I agree.)
I forgot to mention that the scenario from "Farnham's Freehold" is done much, much better in Vernor Vinge's short story "Apartness". For one thing, it doesn't have the incredible reek of racism that the Heinlein story had. (Honestly--the negroes get too uppity and start castrating the white folks. You can't make this shit up.)
One about the backyard nuclear shelter that gets nuked into the future, what was it called? Maybe some others, I don't recall. Here, I'll state just two of my criticisms.
If the future was one where scary castrating black men (led by one named "Ponse") were in charge, then that's "Farnham's Freehold".
Also, stock character (3)--who you forgot to mention is almost invariably a redhead--is Heinlein's wife Virginia. Apparently she actually was a sexy redheaded super-genius.
It definitely takes a special kind of mindset to enjoy Heinlein. I read pretty much the complete works over a few months shortly after exiting my Ayn Rand fanboy stage; I don't think I could do that again at this point.
UC Santa Cruz doesn't operate on flowers and sunshine; they have an endowment, tuition income, and state subsidies. While it's perfectly understandable that they want to subsidize their archival efforts by selling the results rather than giving them away for free, it's important to recognize that making them free to download would not be providing a free lunch--rather, the lunch has already been bought by the fine folks in California and anyone else who donated to the archives.
Heinlein (and his successors) were extraordinarily diligent about renewing every single thing he ever wrote. If they hadn't been, you could read some examples that had fallen through the cracks and into the public domain, such as the works of: Poul Anderson, Marion Zimmer Bradley, John W. Campbell, Lester Del Rey, Harry Harrison, Damon Knight, Andre Norton, H. Beam Piper, Frederik Pohl, E. E. "Doc" Smith and Kurt Vonnegut.
Sites can use the HTTPS spec to transport data with end-to-end encryption. In short, the server sends you a certificate (a public key, meaning you can use it to encrypt things that only they can decrypt), which you use to encrypt a session key to send back to them, and you've got an encrypted link which is secure between you and the server.
However, you don't know who the server is; any black hat could be sitting between you and your bank, performing what's called a "man in the middle" attack. You send them your credentials over a wonderfully secure encrypted link... that doesn't go where you think it does; the black hats forward this information to your bank, and everything seems to work fine except that next week, your accounts are all empty. To solve this, those public keys that the servers send are signed by what are called "root certificates", which are generally installed along with your operating system, which is a secure second channel.
What that lock in the corner of your browser means is that the certificate that the site provided is signed by a root certificate that you have. In practice, it means that the site owner went through some kind of process involving proving to the holder of a root certificate that yes, they really are Amazon.com. (I believe that there was a scandal some time ago where some guy managed to get a certificate signed by a trusted issuer saying that he was Microsoft, but I might be wrong, as I can't find the story.)
So for a site owner to provide that little lock, they have to set up their server to do HTTPS, generate a cert and have it signed by one of the root certificate issuers. It's nontrivial, but anyone running a business pretty much has to do it, as only a complete nimrod would send credit care information unprotected across the wild and wooly internet.
It turns into a denial of service attack for that website on the tor network as a whole. Not terribly scary. Tor endpoints are just a few more open proxies, in the scheme of things.
This has been alluded to, but I want to make it explicit.
Something will change in order for this to be productive; diesel from dead dinosaurs will become more expensive. Twenty years ago, a process that could produce fuel for two bucks a gallon (in now-dollars) wouldn't find any buyers. Now, that imaginary process would be the hottest thing going. The difference over the twenty years wasn't in the process itself, but it nevertheless changed whether or not it was feasible.
Coal is considered worse than wood as an energy source partly because methods of extracting it tend to be horrible destructive to the environment, and partly because when you're burning coal, you're releasing carbon which had been sequestered beneath the surface for a very, very long time. When you're burning trees, you're releasing carbon that was recently pulled from the atmosphere when the trees grew. The net carbon output of coal is positive; the net carbon output of the "grow a tree, burn a tree, grow a tree" cycle is zero.
Slashdot Mirror
Works that are derivative of public domain works are copyrightable--you just don't need permission from anyone to make them. Consider West Side Story, or pretty much anything Disney's ever made.
It used heavily-customized Mediawiki software to act as a catalog. What kind of catalog would be subject to legendarily lame edit wars? You don't see that kind of thing at Wikisource, for instance; it's just not in scope. None of this takes away from the accomplishment that was the IMSLP, but comparing its culture to that of Wikipedia doesn't make sense.
If you find this device perplexing, I've taken the liberty of using it myself, and have found the case in question, Ex parte H. H. , which states in part: The decision also mentions: You are, of course, not obligated to believe your lyin' eyes.
I hear that the libertarian paradise of Somalia is lovely this time of year. If ever there were a place that respected your right to buy all sorts of fabulous weaponry, that would be it.
The Bill of Rights was drafted by Madison in 1789. The French Revolution began that year, but the Reign of Terror didn't start until 1793. It seems a little odd that Jefferson could have foreseen how the Revolution overseas would turn out and been influenced to push for a Bill of Rights because of it, rather than arguments which had begun well before the French stormed the Bastille.
He cited the Bible in a court decision which declared gay couples "presumptively unfit to have custody of minor children", and referred to gay sex as an "inherent evil and an act so heinous that it defies one's ability to describe it". That smacks of bigotry to me, but perhaps you have another interpretation.
The first result for Googling "Ron Paul on the issues" is this page, a summary of his voting record. (Note the 0% rating from NARAL and the 76% rating from the Christian Coalition.) You can also see his weird ideas that children are being forbidden to pray in school and that the Ten Commandments cannot be displayed in a courtroom over here, which is pretty bog-standard Religious Right nonsense.
You could find this stuff out for yourself. The fact that this isn't common knowledge speaks more about the willing suspension of disbelief by the internet-libertarian crowd than about Ron Paul's status as magical savior.
Given that Obama entered the Senate in 2005, he must have used a time machine to go back and vote for the war in 2002 and the Patriot Act in 2001. Since he didn't go a bit further back and shoot Hitler, he's objectively pro-Hitler. Well, he's just lost my vote.
Yes, because Herrnstein and Murray's bog-standard scientific racism which belonged in the 1920s is so fact-based. Ugh. If ever there was a collection of unstated assumptions lining up behind one's biases and politically motivated conclusions tortured out of the facts, it was The Bell Curve.
I'm not talking about David Carr; I'm talking about the listing under "unidentified Kinshasa man". Look again.
The first confirmed case was from a 1959 sample of blood plasma. Maybe you can blame Sputnik somehow?
Exactly. Copyright isn't the end-all and be-all of permissions problems. I'm sure Virgin wouldn't have had any problems if they'd used a CC picture of squirrel or something. The Wikimedia Commons has been instituting personality rights and trademark tags (though it's unclear exactly how widespread their use is; this case is an excellent illustration of why they need to do so.
I agree that one and a half cents per page is a fantastically cheap rate for library scanning. The New York Public Library charges twenty-five cents per page plus all sorts of additional fees. One of these three-dollar packages would easily run more than eighty bucks from the New York Public Library. (A little less if you got it by mail rather than PDF, but not much.)
On the other hand, these needed to be scanned precisely once; the labor is entirely a sunken cost. There are plenty of people (looking at you, Distributed Proofreaders) who undertake truly staggering tasks of scanning and proofreading in their spare time, using bandwidth donated by the internet archive.
This sort of archive could have been scanned by volunteers (it's partially funded by a library, so it may in fact have been), and I'm sure that Brewster Kahle would have been happy to donate bandwidth. I'm aware that that's not how things were done, and that the library is charging an extraordinarily reasonable rate for access to what would normally be very restricted collections, but it could have been done as a freebie rather than as a fundraising opportunity for the Foundation. (Which has very admirable aims, I agree.)
It's been reprinted a couple of times. Good luck!
I forgot to mention that the scenario from "Farnham's Freehold" is done much, much better in Vernor Vinge's short story "Apartness". For one thing, it doesn't have the incredible reek of racism that the Heinlein story had. (Honestly--the negroes get too uppity and start castrating the white folks. You can't make this shit up.)
Also, stock character (3)--who you forgot to mention is almost invariably a redhead--is Heinlein's wife Virginia. Apparently she actually was a sexy redheaded super-genius.
It definitely takes a special kind of mindset to enjoy Heinlein. I read pretty much the complete works over a few months shortly after exiting my Ayn Rand fanboy stage; I don't think I could do that again at this point.
UC Santa Cruz doesn't operate on flowers and sunshine; they have an endowment, tuition income, and state subsidies. While it's perfectly understandable that they want to subsidize their archival efforts by selling the results rather than giving them away for free, it's important to recognize that making them free to download would not be providing a free lunch--rather, the lunch has already been bought by the fine folks in California and anyone else who donated to the archives.
Heinlein (and his successors) were extraordinarily diligent about renewing every single thing he ever wrote. If they hadn't been, you could read some examples that had fallen through the cracks and into the public domain, such as the works of: Poul Anderson, Marion Zimmer Bradley, John W. Campbell, Lester Del Rey, Harry Harrison, Damon Knight, Andre Norton, H. Beam Piper, Frederik Pohl, E. E. "Doc" Smith and Kurt Vonnegut.
Actually, it appears there may be one or two available shorts, the ones that he really, really hated and prevented from ever being republished. I may hit up my interlibrary loan department for that.
Start with the Wikipedia article; this is a very, very cursory explanation.
Sites can use the HTTPS spec to transport data with end-to-end encryption. In short, the server sends you a certificate (a public key, meaning you can use it to encrypt things that only they can decrypt), which you use to encrypt a session key to send back to them, and you've got an encrypted link which is secure between you and the server.
However, you don't know who the server is; any black hat could be sitting between you and your bank, performing what's called a "man in the middle" attack. You send them your credentials over a wonderfully secure encrypted link... that doesn't go where you think it does; the black hats forward this information to your bank, and everything seems to work fine except that next week, your accounts are all empty. To solve this, those public keys that the servers send are signed by what are called "root certificates", which are generally installed along with your operating system, which is a secure second channel.
What that lock in the corner of your browser means is that the certificate that the site provided is signed by a root certificate that you have. In practice, it means that the site owner went through some kind of process involving proving to the holder of a root certificate that yes, they really are Amazon.com. (I believe that there was a scandal some time ago where some guy managed to get a certificate signed by a trusted issuer saying that he was Microsoft, but I might be wrong, as I can't find the story.)
So for a site owner to provide that little lock, they have to set up their server to do HTTPS, generate a cert and have it signed by one of the root certificate issuers. It's nontrivial, but anyone running a business pretty much has to do it, as only a complete nimrod would send credit care information unprotected across the wild and wooly internet.
(For more edification, here's a thread where some guy doesn't know what the protocol provides. What he doesn't understand is that there's absolutely no way apart from signatures on certificates to make sure you're not the subject of a man-in-the-middle attack.)
It turns into a denial of service attack for that website on the tor network as a whole. Not terribly scary. Tor endpoints are just a few more open proxies, in the scheme of things.
This has been alluded to, but I want to make it explicit.
Something will change in order for this to be productive; diesel from dead dinosaurs will become more expensive. Twenty years ago, a process that could produce fuel for two bucks a gallon (in now-dollars) wouldn't find any buyers. Now, that imaginary process would be the hottest thing going. The difference over the twenty years wasn't in the process itself, but it nevertheless changed whether or not it was feasible.
Coal is considered worse than wood as an energy source partly because methods of extracting it tend to be horrible destructive to the environment, and partly because when you're burning coal, you're releasing carbon which had been sequestered beneath the surface for a very, very long time. When you're burning trees, you're releasing carbon that was recently pulled from the atmosphere when the trees grew. The net carbon output of coal is positive; the net carbon output of the "grow a tree, burn a tree, grow a tree" cycle is zero.