The sentence appear to me to be the one defining "your Communications", as used in the following sentence. But unlike some people posting in this thread, I Am Not A Lawyer.
I would expect most courts to honor the site's terms of usage over the copyright notice you post in your file, just as no court would force this site to remove my comment if I wrote "User does not grant permission to display this information on slashdot" in the comments I submitted here.
The fact that I put a copyright notice on my paper (as submitted) is almost irrelevant. My work is copyrigthed with or without a notice. I have NOT granted iParadigms a license to store a copy of my work indefinitely.
There is a key difference between submitting a paper to Turnitin and posting to Slashdot. My posts to Slashdot are entirely voluntary. While I retain a copyright on my Slashdot posts, I have no reasonable expectation that Slashdot will not copy them, since the entire point of posting to Slashdot is to cause Slashdot to make them publicly available. In effect, by posting to Slashdot, I am the one causing the copying, with full knowledge of that result.
With Turnitin, my choices are to submit the paper for them to compare to their database for plagiarism, or to not submit it and fail the class. I doubt that a court would find that my submission of papers under duress granted any kind of implied license. Furthermore, even if I am willing to allow Turnitin to compare my paper to their database, that is a significantly different proposition than allowing them to retain a copy of my paper indefinitely. In the former case, they need only make a small number of transient copies during the checking process, and no permanent copy. In the latter case, they would have to make a permanent copy, and many transient copies in the future.
The fact that their business model requires them to store papers in their database does not force me to grant them a license to do so with my papers.
You quoted it out of context. The full paragraph (emphasis added) is:
Your License to Us: Unless otherwise indicated in this Site, including our Privacy Policy or in connection with one of our services, any communications or material of any kind that you e-mail, post, or transmit through the Site (excluding personally identifiable information of students and any papers submitted to the Site), including, questions, comments, suggestions, and other data and information (your "Communications") will be treated as non-confidential and non-proprietary. You grant iParadigms a non-exclusive, royalty-free, perpetual, world-wide, irrevocable license to reproduce, transmit, display, disclose, and otherwise use your Communications on the Site or elsewhere for our business purposes. We are free to use any ideas, concepts, techniques, know-how in your Communications for any purpose, including, but not limited to, the development and use of products and services based on the Communications.
They have explicitly exempted the papers submitted on the Site from being part of "your 'Communications'", and then state the you grant iParadigms a license to "your Communications". Thus the papers are not what I have granted a license on.
Last I checked, you could only sue for statutory damages if the copyright was registered.
Statutory damages may be awarded for infringment after first publication but before the effective date of copyright registration, provided the copyright was registered within three months after the first publication (17 USC 412). I published the papers on my web site before submitting them to Turnitin. I am about to submit the registration forms, fees, and deposit copies of the works to the Copyright office.
Please explain this "laugh test". I am reasonably certain that if Dreamworks SKG sued someone for unlawfully copying a DVD of "Shrek", the court wouldn't immediately dismiss the suit with prejudice.
And sue for what, exactly?
Copyright infringement, requesting the award of statutory damages. Actual damages are not a requirement.
The best you could hope for is the remedy that you yourself demanded. That is, to get a judge's order demanding that Turnitin remove your papers.
That is most certainly not "the best you can hope for". The copyright owner has the option of requesting statutory damages rather than actual damages. Statutory damages range from $750 to $30,000 per work infringed. (17 USC 504). If the court finds that the infringement was willful (which seems reasonably likely), statutory damages may be increated up to a maximum of $150,000 per work.
In the course I am taking, I am forced to submit eight separate works to Turnitin, which could therefore potentially result in legal liability of $6000 to $1.2M.
Part of the purpose of statutory damages is to deter copyright infringment even in cases where the infringement does not cause quantifiable monetary damages. Without such provisions, copyright law would be much weaker.
I was surprised to find that the agreement I had to accept to use the Turnitin "service" didn't say anything about my granting them permission to use my paper. All it said was that I wouldn't use their intellectual property. Seems rather hypocritical to me.
The argument that Turnitin is not infringing is flawed for at least two reasons:
Copyright infringement doesn't require publication. If you rent a DVD and make a copy of it, you have almost certainly infringed copyright, even though you haven't "published" the work by making your copy available to any third party. In a copyright infringement lawsuit relating to a work with a registered copyright, publication may result in a larger award of actual damages, but has nothing to do with whether infringement occurred.
As I understand it, Turnitin does republish the work, or at least fragments of it. If someone submits a paper, and Turnitin finds some degree of match with another paper in their database, reportedly Turnitin will supply the matched paper or excerpts from it to the course instructor.
I am currently taking a course that requires me to submit my papers to Turnitin. My objection to Turnitin is that they are not only infringing my copright, but that they are doing so for commercial profit. If they want to make money from storing my paper in a database, they should pay me for a license.
I carefully read the Turnitin terms and conditions when I signed up for the account. I was particularly concerned that I might be forced to agree to terms that grant them a license to my work, although arguably if I was forced to enter the agreement in order to take a college course, the agreement might not be legally binding. However, there were no such terms in the agreement. The agreement primarily said that I would not make improper use of Turnitin's intellectual property, something that I have no interest in doing.
Every paper I submit to Turnitin contains the statement "Copyright 2006 Eric Smith. All Rights Reserved. No part of this work may be stored in a database or electronic retrieval system without explicit written permission of the author."
After the course is over, and I have received my degree from the college (expected in December), I plan to send a registered letter to Turnitin demanding that they delete my papers from the database and provide some evidence that they have done so. I expect to either get no response, or a response stating that they will not comply. At that point I'll consider legal action.
[blockquote]
Why anyone at all, home users or enterprises still use it is beyond me.
[/blockquote]
And what are you going to do when your enterprise needs to store monthly (or perhaps even weekly) full backups for archival purposes? Buy another Capricorn box every few months?
For offsite backup, are you going to ship each Capricorn box to another facility when you've filled it up?
Tape (such as LTO) works absolutely fine for things like that. No, it's not the solution to absolutely every backup problem, but there are still very good reasons why enterprises use it.
[blockquote]
It's a crappy, slow and expensive medium.
[/blockquote]
Sure, if you're using some cheap-ass Travan junk. LTO and SDLT are fast and reliable. In fact, most computers even with RAID can't stream data at the full speed of an LTO-3 drive.
But for the original question of backing up 30GB at home, LTO isn't the best solution. Backing up to DVD+R would actually be a good approach, though I'm not aware of any Windows software that meets the stated requirements.
The next step after using mylar and rubylith was using CAD, and sending a nine-track magnetic tape of the data to the foundry. So "tapeout" came to mean writing the final magnetic tape.
Nowdays, of course, the data is usually transferred over the internet, so no tape of any kind is involved (not even duct tape). But it is still called tapeout for historical reasons.
There's no reason that a system using hardware virtualization (which still requires a lot of software anyhow) can't employ the same sort of code modifications used by all-software virtualization. But the all-software approach must scan ALL code before it is executed, to find the trouble spots, while the hardware-software combo can simply wait for a trap, then modify the code that cause the trap.
They've been a constant voice against GA (General Aviation) paranoia (ie "someone's going to steal a Cessna and smash it into a Nu-cle-ar power plant!")
You spelled that wrong. They say it "nuc-you-lar". (I'm not making this up.)
I'd be entirely happy to sell you a robot that can cook a breakfast for you. No big deal.
It won't *serve* the breakfast, but it will definitely cook it.
You'd expect that at this price, the designer could've come up with a way to hold the bed in place magnetically.
You'd expect that at that price, the designer could figure out how to violate the laws of physics? It is proven that stable magnetic levitation with fixed permanent magnets is impossible. Doesn't matter how many magnets you carefully position.
You can make it stable by using electromagnets and closed-loop feedback.
They don't want their citizens to know that they only have three aircraft for their big airstrip. They probably spent the rest of the money that was budgeted for aircraft on hookers and booze or something.
Interesting. I wasn't aware that ITS had file versioning that early. I never used ITS and am not very well acquainted with it. Still, I would point out as a minor nit that the interval from late 1960s for ITS to 1972 for TENEX is only about five years, not ten.
Actually, when VMS did it, it was not at all new. It was one of the few good features they copied from the TOPS-20 operating system of the DECSYSTEM-20, which in turn was derived from the Tenex operating system by BBN (circa 1972). The VMS developers mostly tried hard to avoid doing anything in the same way TOPS-10 or TOPS-20 did it, so I'm not sure how it came about that they included file versioning.
It's perfectly reasonable for the GPLv3 to not allow DRM and similar suggestions. Software authors can choose the GPLv3 if they like it. If software authors don't like it, they can use a different license; possibly GPLv2. No software authors are forced to use GPLv3.
Similarly, no hardware vendors are forced to use GPLv3 software. If they don't like it, they can find software with a different license, possibly GPLv2. The key thing is that the hardware vendors are not allowed to violate the license terms chosen by the software author.
For Linux it is completely irrelevant. Despite any opinions Linus might have on the matter, it is effectively impossible to get all of the owners of the copyright of any non-trivial amount of the Linux code to agree to a license change, so Linux will use GPLv2 for most of its code for the forseeable future.
What about my post was "flamebait"? Do the moderators really believe that students DO need a dual-core processor? Or that spending 50% more on a laptop improves the educational experience by anywhere near 50%?
Well, if an Anonymous Coward says so, it must be true, despite the lack of arguments to support the statement.
And to the person who said that if he/she lived in Maine, he/she would be asking his/her state legislator for an investigation, I have this question: If this was the only computer that your son/daughter got to use, becuase you didn't have one at home... would you still feel this way?
Yes, I would definitely still feel that the state could have obtained equivalent products that provide just as good support for education for less of my tax dollars. That would leave more of my tax dollars available for improving other aspects of the school system, such as hiring more teachers or building more classrooms, either of which would improve the quality of education more than the laptops (Apple or otherwise) will.
As it happens, I live in California, which has the worst ranked public schools in the nation. I would rather see the schools forgo laptops entirely, if the money could be spent on teachers and facilities. But the reality seems to be that any time the schools get more money, it gets spent on more administration rather than on anything worthwhile.
Maybe someday a good laptop setup with fancy educational software will be more effective than a teacher, but that day is not here.
The cost of the cart, access point, and printer should be distributed over the cost of twenty to thirty laptops, so as I've said, it's lost in the noise. HP might not have a ready-made package, but I'm sure they'd be willing to put one together for a large order like that, as would any systems integrator.
And I've seen plenty of school labs that have routine, automated processes for reinstalling the OS on PCs, so the cost of doing that (if necessary) is minimal. But I'd assume that in elementary and middle school classes, the students won't be allowed direct access to the internet at large. They should have a more constrained environment. One way to do that at almost zero cost is to use VMware Player, which is available at no charge from VMware. You can set up the machine so the student only has access to the virtual machine, not the native OS. If the virtual machine image gets damaged, it can easily be reverted to a snapshot or restored from another copy on a network server. A few students might figure out how to screw up the host OS, but most won't.
I'm not saying that they shouldn't have any access to the internet, but it doesn't need to be provided in every class at all times. There can be specific classes or specific stations in the library that have full internet access, thus the threat level to the other machines is reduced.
Anyhow, the point is that the effective cost of server and support portions of this contract is FAR higher than it should be. The Apple products and services may have some advantages, but equivalent products and services from other vendors are available at lower cost.
I was only describing the stats of the inexpensive HP laptop to show that it was plenty good enough for education, not to try to claim that it matched the Apple laptop feature-for-feature. What's the point in spending more taxpayer money for features that aren't actually necessary or useful to promote the educational purpose of the machine?
Why do K-12 students need a dual-core processor? I think they can get a perfectly fine education using laptops that have a 1.8 GHz single-core Turion. Next you'll be telling us that the kids won't be able to learn anything unless they have the latest and greatest
NVidia video cards.
And whether it's an iBook or a MacBook, it's overpriced. Aside from the overrated Mac OS, neither has any compelling advantage over the inexpensive HP Pavilion.
Sure, if you're going to spend your own money, get all sorts of fancy stuff. Maybe it's even worthwhile. But when you're spending the taxpayers' money, stick to the essentials. A $650 laptop will provide >99% of the educational value of a $949 or $1199 laptop.
Slashdot Mirror
The sentence appear to me to be the one defining "your Communications", as used in the following sentence. But unlike some people posting in this thread, I Am Not A Lawyer.
There is a key difference between submitting a paper to Turnitin and posting to Slashdot. My posts to Slashdot are entirely voluntary. While I retain a copyright on my Slashdot posts, I have no reasonable expectation that Slashdot will not copy them, since the entire point of posting to Slashdot is to cause Slashdot to make them publicly available. In effect, by posting to Slashdot, I am the one causing the copying, with full knowledge of that result.
With Turnitin, my choices are to submit the paper for them to compare to their database for plagiarism, or to not submit it and fail the class. I doubt that a court would find that my submission of papers under duress granted any kind of implied license. Furthermore, even if I am willing to allow Turnitin to compare my paper to their database, that is a significantly different proposition than allowing them to retain a copy of my paper indefinitely. In the former case, they need only make a small number of transient copies during the checking process, and no permanent copy. In the latter case, they would have to make a permanent copy, and many transient copies in the future.
The fact that their business model requires them to store papers in their database does not force me to grant them a license to do so with my papers.
Darn right. I fully recognized that possiblity, and saved a copy less than two minutes before I clicked my acceptance.
In the course I am taking, I am forced to submit eight separate works to Turnitin, which could therefore potentially result in legal liability of $6000 to $1.2M.
Part of the purpose of statutory damages is to deter copyright infringment even in cases where the infringement does not cause quantifiable monetary damages. Without such provisions, copyright law would be much weaker.
I was surprised to find that the agreement I had to accept to use the Turnitin "service" didn't say anything about my granting them permission to use my paper. All it said was that I wouldn't use their intellectual property. Seems rather hypocritical to me.
- Copyright infringement doesn't require publication. If you rent a DVD and make a copy of it, you have almost certainly infringed copyright, even though you haven't "published" the work by making your copy available to any third party. In a copyright infringement lawsuit relating to a work with a registered copyright, publication may result in a larger award of actual damages, but has nothing to do with whether infringement occurred.
- As I understand it, Turnitin does republish the work, or at least fragments of it. If someone submits a paper, and Turnitin finds some degree of match with another paper in their database, reportedly Turnitin will supply the matched paper or excerpts from it to the course instructor.
I am currently taking a course that requires me to submit my papers to Turnitin. My objection to Turnitin is that they are not only infringing my copright, but that they are doing so for commercial profit. If they want to make money from storing my paper in a database, they should pay me for a license.I carefully read the Turnitin terms and conditions when I signed up for the account. I was particularly concerned that I might be forced to agree to terms that grant them a license to my work, although arguably if I was forced to enter the agreement in order to take a college course, the agreement might not be legally binding. However, there were no such terms in the agreement. The agreement primarily said that I would not make improper use of Turnitin's intellectual property, something that I have no interest in doing.
Every paper I submit to Turnitin contains the statement "Copyright 2006 Eric Smith. All Rights Reserved. No part of this work may be stored in a database or electronic retrieval system without explicit written permission of the author."
After the course is over, and I have received my degree from the college (expected in December), I plan to send a registered letter to Turnitin demanding that they delete my papers from the database and provide some evidence that they have done so. I expect to either get no response, or a response stating that they will not comply. At that point I'll consider legal action.
Wouldn't the "Precise" code give better resolution than either DGPS or WAAS?
For offsite backup, are you going to ship each Capricorn box to another facility when you've filled it up?
Tape (such as LTO) works absolutely fine for things like that. No, it's not the solution to absolutely every backup problem, but there are still very good reasons why enterprises use it. [blockquote] It's a crappy, slow and expensive medium. [/blockquote] Sure, if you're using some cheap-ass Travan junk. LTO and SDLT are fast and reliable. In fact, most computers even with RAID can't stream data at the full speed of an LTO-3 drive.
But for the original question of backing up 30GB at home, LTO isn't the best solution. Backing up to DVD+R would actually be a good approach, though I'm not aware of any Windows software that meets the stated requirements.
The next step after using mylar and rubylith was using CAD, and sending a nine-track magnetic tape of the data to the foundry. So "tapeout" came to mean writing the final magnetic tape.
Nowdays, of course, the data is usually transferred over the internet, so no tape of any kind is involved (not even duct tape). But it is still called tapeout for historical reasons.
There's no reason that a system using hardware virtualization (which still requires a lot of software anyhow) can't employ the same sort of code modifications used by all-software virtualization. But the all-software approach must scan ALL code before it is executed, to find the trouble spots, while the hardware-software combo can simply wait for a trap, then modify the code that cause the trap.
I'd be entirely happy to sell you a robot that can cook a breakfast for you. No big deal. It won't *serve* the breakfast, but it will definitely cook it.
You can make it stable by using electromagnets and closed-loop feedback.
They don't want their citizens to know that they only have three aircraft for their big airstrip. They probably spent the rest of the money that was budgeted for aircraft on hookers and booze or something.
that P=NP.
Interesting. I wasn't aware that ITS had file versioning that early. I never used ITS and am not very well acquainted with it. Still, I would point out as a minor nit that the interval from late 1960s for ITS to 1972 for TENEX is only about five years, not ten.
Actually, when VMS did it, it was not at all new. It was one of the few good features they copied from the TOPS-20 operating system of the DECSYSTEM-20, which in turn was derived from the Tenex operating system by BBN (circa 1972). The VMS developers mostly tried hard to avoid doing anything in the same way TOPS-10 or TOPS-20 did it, so I'm not sure how it came about that they included file versioning.
Similarly, no hardware vendors are forced to use GPLv3 software. If they don't like it, they can find software with a different license, possibly GPLv2. The key thing is that the hardware vendors are not allowed to violate the license terms chosen by the software author.
For Linux it is completely irrelevant. Despite any opinions Linus might have on the matter, it is effectively impossible to get all of the owners of the copyright of any non-trivial amount of the Linux code to agree to a license change, so Linux will use GPLv2 for most of its code for the forseeable future.
What about my post was "flamebait"? Do the moderators really believe that students DO need a dual-core processor? Or that spending 50% more on a laptop improves the educational experience by anywhere near 50%?
As it happens, I live in California, which has the worst ranked public schools in the nation. I would rather see the schools forgo laptops entirely, if the money could be spent on teachers and facilities. But the reality seems to be that any time the schools get more money, it gets spent on more administration rather than on anything worthwhile.
Maybe someday a good laptop setup with fancy educational software will be more effective than a teacher, but that day is not here.
The cost of the cart, access point, and printer should be distributed over the cost of twenty to thirty laptops, so as I've said, it's lost in the noise. HP might not have a ready-made package, but I'm sure they'd be willing to put one together for a large order like that, as would any systems integrator.
And I've seen plenty of school labs that have routine, automated processes for reinstalling the OS on PCs, so the cost of doing that (if necessary) is minimal. But I'd assume that in elementary and middle school classes, the students won't be allowed direct access to the internet at large. They should have a more constrained environment. One way to do that at almost zero cost is to use VMware Player, which is available at no charge from VMware. You can set up the machine so the student only has access to the virtual machine, not the native OS. If the virtual machine image gets damaged, it can easily be reverted to a snapshot or restored from another copy on a network server. A few students might figure out how to screw up the host OS, but most won't.
I'm not saying that they shouldn't have any access to the internet, but it doesn't need to be provided in every class at all times. There can be specific classes or specific stations in the library that have full internet access, thus the threat level to the other machines is reduced.
Anyhow, the point is that the effective cost of server and support portions of this contract is FAR higher than it should be. The Apple products and services may have some advantages, but equivalent products and services from other vendors are available at lower cost.
I was only describing the stats of the inexpensive HP laptop to show that it was plenty good enough for education, not to try to claim that it matched the Apple laptop feature-for-feature. What's the point in spending more taxpayer money for features that aren't actually necessary or useful to promote the educational purpose of the machine?
And whether it's an iBook or a MacBook, it's overpriced. Aside from the overrated Mac OS, neither has any compelling advantage over the inexpensive HP Pavilion.
Sure, if you're going to spend your own money, get all sorts of fancy stuff. Maybe it's even worthwhile. But when you're spending the taxpayers' money, stick to the essentials. A $650 laptop will provide >99% of the educational value of a $949 or $1199 laptop.