Interesting, but extending to do digital products is a hige stretch. For one, it applies to "works of graphic or plastic art such as pictures, collages, paintings, drawings, engravings, prints, lithographs, sculptures, tapestries, ceramics, glassware and photographs" and does not apply to goods valued less than 3000 euro.
While I agree it is a stretch; my point is the EU has started down that road and I would not be surprised at efforts to extend the law to other creative works, of lesser value and mass-produced such as games and DVDs.
as price drops demand picks up; and purchasers at $20 will not buy at the $50 retail price. Thank you for restating how supply and demand curves work.
The real question is:
Is there a price point between the price of used games and new games that would generate greater profits for game manufacturers than the current pricing model?If there is, then used sales do cut into new ones in the sense that purchaser will wait until the game price drops to a price they are willing to pay if the used game reaches that price prior to publishers lowering the price of new ones. If the used market captures those sales then it is cutting into new game sales since used games are replacing new game sales.
Publishers would probably like to price so as to capture as much of the "I must have it on release day" sales as at high a price as possible; then drop prices enough so the incremental demand from the price drop generates higher profits than fewer sales at higher prices. While falling prices would drive down the value of used games and their attractiveness to stores; publishers run the risk of training buyers to wait a few weeks for the first price drop and losing release day sales and profits. Given how rapidly used games start to appear after release shows their is a large demand at lower prices (duh); how to tap into that without hurting earlier sales is a difficult question to answer. It's a tough call; especially given the money it takes to develop a game.
In the end, however, I think their is more to the story than just $20 used game sales don't hurt the $60 new game sales./P.
I haven't had any trouble with any MS Office files I've thrown at OpenOffice. Granted I mostly open MS Word documents but they've all opened fine. Far more impressive to me was when I dug out an MS Office for Mac file from about 15 years ago and THAT opened in OpenOffice even though MS Word for Windows wouldn't have anything to do with it.
So while I'm sure there are certain files which don't convert well I've been extremely happy with OpenOffice's support so far. I'm less happy about the general level of bloat and lower level of usability that comes with the product. I can't help wonder who thought it would be a great idea to toss in Python, Java, StarBasic and god knows what other runtimes into this app. There is a very cobbled together feel about the whole thing.
OTOH, I've had nothing but problems with OO and NeoOffice when it come to Powerpoint. They both mangle relatively simple files with embedded tables;to the point that the trouble to fix them is not worth the few hundred bucks it costs to Office for the Mac.
If you only use OO or Neo it's not really a problem, and I use and recommend Neo for someone looking for a good office suite and does not need to collaborate with MS Office users. I think its great for college students; especially since it's free and saves in MS file formats for when you turn in assignments.
If you need seamless MS Office interoperablity stick with MS Office./P.
Whatever you are smoking, please share. This has NOTHING to do with the first amendment. The death of the Old Media business model is NOT a blow to the first amendment, it STRENGTHENS it, because broadcasted speech becomes less controlled and more democratic. When the cost of entry to the broadcast medium (the internet) is effectively zero, EVERYONE becomes a member of the press. The death of the Old Media business model is the best thing that could possibly happen for freedom of speech.
I think you missed the point of Becker and Posner - that if it becomes financially nonviable to maintain a good news gathering and reporting organization only a few large corporations, such as Reuters and AP, will control what becomes news and how it is reported.
While that is not a first amendment issue it would weaken greatly our access to news. As for citizen reporters - the problem with that is it is how do you cull the vast amount of low quality, lack of independent fact checking, biased reporting that fails to meet even minimal journalistic standards of ethics and quality from really good reporting?
Without trust and reputation news reporting becomes, well a cess pool of people vying to present their POV as fact.
While this seems like an opinion that runs counter to many tenants slashdotters hold dear, I think we should at least consider it. By any measure, Posner is one of the most impressive judges on the bench today-- and in my opinion, one of the only judges that really 'get' all the issues surrounding copyright and digital things in general.
So you may disagree with this opinion-- I'm leaning that way too-- but it's worth fair consideration. Go and actually read his post before passing judgment. When he was guest blogging about copyright law at Lessig.org back in 2004, he noted, "I am distrustful of people who think they have confident answers to such questions." That goes for both sides in this debate.
Sort of a hack job by techcrunch actually.
Great comments - note that the blog in question is written by Gary Becker, a Nobel laureate in economics (also at Chicago) as well as Judge Posner.
While people have focused on a single comment in the blog; they miss the overall argument - how do you make it economically attractive for people to create independent news gathering organizations, so that only a few large corporations have control over what is presented as news. The comment in questions poses - is there a way to ensure they are actually compensated for their work; and suggested a change in copyright law as away to do that. While many may not agree with such a change; the bloggers are simply illustrating one way to make running a news organization financially viable, not saying that is the only, best or preferred solution.
Gee - last I heard - you couldn't copyright a database. Further, unless he specifically provided for it in his contract up front, work done for hire belongs to he who pays. If you under-price your services, that isn't the cities fault.
Actually, databases are generally copyrightable as a compilation; however the underlying data generally isn't. So, if he is collecting real time data from muni buses; data muni makes available, I don't see how he is violating someone else's copyright. It's not like he is downloading a thrid party database, which might be protected.
Or, simply having one person in a group sign up and "share" offline?
They already have this problem. My guess is that they'd prefer going back to the days of "person gives a taped copy to his friend" if they can avoid "person shares with thousands of people".
You might as well ask, how can a cable company ever sell TV - surely by your reasoning, only one person would buy it, then he'd tape all the shows for his friends?
First of all, cable companies sell convince and variety - I can get a whole lot of different shows beyond free OTA broadcast; many off which it would be difficult to find otherwise and / or cost a lot more on DVD.
TV, in general, is a more here and now type of entertainment. People want to talk about their favorite shows or latest sports events the next day; so taped copies lack the same experience.
Music, OTOH, is different - it's much more of a repeat and activity based consumption - you listen while traveling, jogging, etc; and don't mind hearing old favorites again and again. Indeed, most people probably have small play lists relative to the available music in a genre. How many people watch the same show over and over?
From a consumer side of things, a pay-per-month model of getting access to a DRM-free library does sound good, but it seems awfully fishy that Universal would offer it.
I'd be surprised if it were truly DRM free - if Universal releases their entire play list; what would be the point of staying subscribed once you got the songs you really want? Or, simply having one person in a group sign up and "share" offline? My guess is they'll have some sort of ID tag to identify the music tied to the original subscriber; so if songs get shared beyond that then they have someone to sue.
Of course, that doesn't solve the churn problem - if people simply subscribe to get a catalog and then bolt, how do you generate a reliable long term revenue stream? Do you produce enough new music each month to make a subscription a more viable option than say iTunes or buying CDs? Do you slowly release the catalog to milk people for subscription fees?
Finally, how do you negotiate payments for songs sold by this method? Large volumes of downloads means each song gets a small slice of teh revenue - so a per d/l fixed cut could kill Universal. How many people would simply d/l everything they can because it's "free?"
I bet you see caps and some sort of watermarking at a minimum.
Title 17, 204:
 204. Execution of transfers of copyright ownership
(a) A transfer of copyright ownership, other than by operation of law, is not valid unless an instrument of conveyance, or a note or memorandum of the transfer, is in writing and signed by the owner of the rights conveyed or such owner's duly authorized agent.
Considering the University's policies are usually explicitly agreed to as part of enrollment I think that may meet the "note or memorandum of the transfer" requirement of Title 17.of course, it is ultimately up to a court to decide if it does.
In addition, since the policy may state that the University owns the copyright you could make an argument that the student never actually held the copyright so no "note or memorandum of the transfer" is needed since the student has no ownership of the work; per their agreement with University when they enrolled.
While IANAL, it seems the contract argument (you never had ownership per the contract you signed when you enrolled) is the better argument; with the transfers through agreed to policies a secondary argument if the first fails.
That's exactly the problem. It looks like cheating if there's only N logical ways to write something and N+1 students in the class. A dumb/mean (take your pick) prof once accused a friend of that very thing on a final exam, causing him to stress out and lose weight for 4-5 months before the case came before the honor council, where he was acquitted in the shortest deliberation on record.
While there are the occasional dumb / mean profs most that I've known take such accusations very seriously; to the point of allowing what is most likely cheating to go by rather than falsely accuse a student.
I've been a paper grader for profs; and usually there is enough difference, even when there is really only one correct solution, between papers to recognize individual work vs. cheating. Even so, unless a paper had the exact same errors as another, and it was not a common error, would I even raise an issue with the prof.
As a side note, I once had a professor ask me some questions about a recent take home assignment. After a few questions, he confided another student had the exact same answers as I did and he wanted to verify my answers. Apparently the student took my exam from the prof's mailbox, copied it and then returned his and my answers. Which really proves how dumb he was - not only did a marginal student chose to copy the answers from a good student, he left evidence of what he did as well; down to some quirks in my style and errors I had made.
Could someone have copied one answer and not others? Sure, but given the limited number of solutions it generally was more likely they simply came to the same answer independently. As a result, we erred on the side of caution; given the seriousness of the accusation and the ramifications if we accuse someone who is innocent.
The course agreement for most universities attributes the copyright from any works you create during your studies to the unversity. They own it.
Where did the student sign this agreement, specifically? In the US, a written and signed agreement is necessary for copyright transfer. A policy statement by the university isn't going to cut it.
As I recall, in the US a valid contract only requires - offer, acceptance and consideration. The school, a part of its offer of an education requires you to assign copyright to them. You accept by enrolling, they get your cash and you get to attend classes. Sounds like a valid contract; even if I don't agree with the terms.
The problem with this approach is the nature of collage assignments. If you ignore variable names and comments then there is only so many ways to write a short efficient bubble sort.
I submit if you have to cheat to write a bubble sort you need to find a different major.
The student released the source after the release date, which prevented any of his peers from cheating
Prevented them from cheating this semester. I'm sure the reason the prof wanted it taken down is so he could easily just copy-n-paste next semester's assignment. This is a lazy instructor working to maintain his laziness.
Good profs at the very least work on a 4 semester rotation of courses where you're going to have to dig up a student from a few years ago at least before you have an easy "tweak and resubmit" assignment. Any instructor that dishes out the exact same projects semester after semester isn't showing any commitment, and certainly isn't staying with the times. Computer science is in such a continuous state of flux that any prof that isn't consistently reworking their coursework isn't doing their job.
Catching these sorts of cheats isn't too difficult either even if you don't want to start projects from scratch. Just a matter of properly adjusting the project. Make a few fundamental changes that make it look different, update as needed, and subtly tweak a few things. (make a small change to limits etc) This makes it fresh and new, and is fairly easy to spot a cheat since they will blatantly be meeting subtle goals from the wrong project.
Unless his solutions are only solution to the problem, catching cheating would be very easy - simply look for the exact same code as was posted. If you find it, quiz the student about how they arrived at the solution, and perhaps ask how they would approach a slightly different problem. If they fail open, they probably cheated an you can go from their.
Maybe I was lucky; but all of my professors didn't care if we looked at old tests / assignments etc. Their attitude was - "if you take the time to review all that material you're going to learn it anyway;" and they'd always make subtle changes to the questions so simply copying and changing a number wouldn't cut it.
The reviews did help - I had one prof who'd always sneak a trick question in that required some thought and analysis; if you jumped right in you'd miss it and get the wrong answer. When I caught that on the final I wrote "You'd think you'd do this by X; but you being a sneaky SOB we really need to do Y..." We're still friends today, many years later...
Users who have to sit for days doing nothing because their user accounts aren't set up right. Ridiculous security policies like being forced to change your password every month.
Any self respecting user knows that if you change teh password x times in a row you can revert back to your original password. If you don't know what X is, keep trying new passwords and your old one until the system takes it.
At my last job, we had a constant problem of new staff turning up on their first day and their bosses ringing us to say that they need a new user setup straight away. For one-off cases, this wasn't a problem*, but for those that didn't learn, we took a good few days to do it. Paying to have staff sitting there with nothing to do usually teaches them quickly. * we usually left it a day anyway, firstly because some of the aspects of the setup did take time, and secondly, to allow us to stall if they become repeat offenders.
While i feel your pain; I've worked with a number of companies that, when faced with the issues you describe, had a simple solution - fire the IT staff and try again. While that may not fix the underlying cause it really impacted the IT staff.
The problem is IT is overhead; and guess what is the easiest to get rid of?
Have you tried really analyzing the situation and figuring out the real root causes, other than stupid users, and recommending fixes? That makes you part of the solution and makes your bosses and their peers happy.
If your company is small enough sometimes something as simple as walking around and seeing if people's PC's are working or if they've had problems goes a long way to making things better; as does letting people know when something is busted and when you expect it fixed.
While it sounds good, the logistics of providing access will be a nightmare. Simply expecting kids to have internet access / laptops won't cut it; that's a lawsuit waiting to happen. Books, while not cheap, are much more durable and can be expected to last a lot longer. The value of a 10 year old text as a teaching aid is suspect; but the life cycle costs is less than electronic.
Publishers now have a reason to update books more rapidly - remove the production costs for hardcover books and they can "outdate" books much faster; plus try to force per student per year licenses on districts.
Of course, it would be lovely if we could dispense with the entire status quo wherein mobile carriers subsidize the cost of phones to lock people in to long-term contracts. I'd gladly pay more for unlocked smartphones if it meant I could pay less for service (you'd better believe the cost of all those handsets is built into your bill) and switch at-will.
There are several reasons why I don't see that happening:
Carriers would lose a significant amount of customers - many people will not pay the full price up front - either they can't or simply won't - and as a result would not get a cell phone. I remember the days when that was the model - and very few people actually had a cell phone.
Pay as you go customers are less valuable because they can price shop regularly - so revenue streams are unpredictable and carriers either get caught in price wars to keep customers, losing revenue, or the have high churn and need to advertise to get new customers, raising costs.
Most people seem to like getting a new phone every few years - whether they need done or not. Contracts let them do that at a perceived lower cost; plus most companies let you renew at 18 months anyway so the two year lock is not really two years. This lowers churn making the model very desirable for companies.
Realistically, as much as I want a new iPhone GS; for me the killer app is TomTom. As long as that works reasonably well on my existing 2G phone I really don't need an upgrade. If not, I can always get a cheap GPS and carry it with me and wait until my contract allows me the lowest subsidized price. By then the GS may well be old news as well.
No more free lunches.
Gas costing more than $0.05 a gallon.
Having to walk more than three feet from my car to my local superstore.
The fact that I wasn't born in a time where peace was on earth, everything is free, and we're all immortal.
I'm so angry that I'm punching a wall and hoping someone will pay for its repair as we speak.
This is essentially a design philosophy - Airbus designs its planes so pilots are not able to fly outside the envelop; Boeing lets pilots have the ultimate choice in what to do. There are advantages to both approaches - humans can often try things to fix a problem that a computer would not even consider. Computers are real good at analyzing large amounts of data and taking defined actions; humans are good at problem solving and developing unique solutions that a designer may never had considered or considered and decided to prevent for what were valid reasons based on the designer's assumptions.
My experience is the real issue is not the philosophy but the interface between the man and the machine. Poor or confusing design can lead operators to make erroneous decisions based on what they think the computer is doing and not realize its actual mode of operation. While the end call is often operator error, as someone who has done incident investigation that over-simplifies the cause and unless you address the underlying causes that lead to the decisions you haven't fixed teh problem. Highly trained and skilled operators generally do not go stupid all of a sudden; they are generally lead down a path that results in a bad outcome.
As someone who has operated in fully automatic and totally manual environments, I find automation great; especially for taking many routine burdens off the operator; freeing them to maintain better situational awareness of the entire system. I also like having the final say - that's what I'm paid to do - make decisions - but I realize I must also be fully aware of what is happening before I take over control.
Ultimately, designers need to be fully cognizant that a control system is just that a system made up of computer and human actions and interactions between the two and design the system to minimize confusion and the possibility of errors; operators need to understand how the system responds and why to properly diagnose a situation and make informed decisions. Ideally, both sides are involved in the initial design. I was involved in a control room design project. The designers wanted to make digital readouts (easier to see values); thy did not realize that operators wanted traditional needle readouts since they often do not read an indicator - the scan a set of dials and if the needles are where they normally are they don't care what the actual value is and if one is out of whack it is obvious. You lose that with digital, as well as the ability to read and interpret widely fluctuating values. A needle provides feedback on range and rate - digital is just flashing numbers. As a result, we had an all galss display that mimic a traditional layout in many areas.
Under capitalism, Man exploits man - under communism, its the otherway round!
Under communism, the state owns "the means of production". According to Marx, one of the four "means of
production" is Labour - the people. Thus, under communism, the state owns the people.
Owning people is called "slavery".
Actually, if you reread Marx he has a bit different slany - and teh state does not own the means of production
I am A Marxist of the Groucho faction
That's OK, I'm a Leninist of the John faction. All hail Marx and Lenin (sounds like a good album)
I would caution, however, against vilifying China too much in this regard. Even much of the Chinese intelligentsia believes that their country needs a brutal government to avoid total chaos. Often the very Chinese you think would be rebelling against measures like this--people who read foreign news and travel or even reside abroad--think it necessary for the health of their country. Moments like this do lead one to question if American notions of freedom are truly applicable to every country.
If you don't subscribe to the idea that China is one monolithic country but rather a collection of differing groups bound together by a strong central government (such as the old USSR); then the "chaos" would be a natural breakup into separate nations.
Though people in the West may want to paint the Chinese masses as a suffering people yearning to break free of the yoke of oppressive government, such a portrayal may not stand up to facts. Indeed, just last week in the International Herald Tribune (the international version of the New York Times) there was an article about how Chinese students nowadays think Tiananmen-square style civic commitment needs to be nipped in the bud, because it would threaten China's economic development that is making them very happy.
That's pretty much true everywhere - as long as people feel they're getting their share and not directly repressed they pretty much don't care what type of government they have.
Slashdot Mirror
Interesting, but extending to do digital products is a hige stretch. For one, it applies to "works of graphic or plastic art such as pictures, collages, paintings, drawings, engravings, prints, lithographs, sculptures, tapestries, ceramics, glassware and photographs" and does not apply to goods valued less than 3000 euro.
While I agree it is a stretch; my point is the EU has started down that road and I would not be surprised at efforts to extend the law to other creative works, of lesser value and mass-produced such as games and DVDs.
This is insane beyond belief.
Should MSI get a cut of the sales if I sell my laptop?
Why should game companies get a cut of resell?
Even candy is labelled "no individual re-sell".
While I agree with you in concept; there is precedent in laws in some countries that give artists a cut of subsequent resale of original art.
as price drops demand picks up; and purchasers at $20 will not buy at the $50 retail price. Thank you for restating how supply and demand curves work.
The real question is:
Is there a price point between the price of used games and new games that would generate greater profits for game manufacturers than the current pricing model?If there is, then used sales do cut into new ones in the sense that purchaser will wait until the game price drops to a price they are willing to pay if the used game reaches that price prior to publishers lowering the price of new ones. If the used market captures those sales then it is cutting into new game sales since used games are replacing new game sales.
Publishers would probably like to price so as to capture as much of the "I must have it on release day" sales as at high a price as possible; then drop prices enough so the incremental demand from the price drop generates higher profits than fewer sales at higher prices. While falling prices would drive down the value of used games and their attractiveness to stores; publishers run the risk of training buyers to wait a few weeks for the first price drop and losing release day sales and profits. Given how rapidly used games start to appear after release shows their is a large demand at lower prices (duh); how to tap into that without hurting earlier sales is a difficult question to answer. It's a tough call; especially given the money it takes to develop a game.
In the end, however, I think their is more to the story than just $20 used game sales don't hurt the $60 new game sales./P.
I haven't had any trouble with any MS Office files I've thrown at OpenOffice. Granted I mostly open MS Word documents but they've all opened fine. Far more impressive to me was when I dug out an MS Office for Mac file from about 15 years ago and THAT opened in OpenOffice even though MS Word for Windows wouldn't have anything to do with it.
So while I'm sure there are certain files which don't convert well I've been extremely happy with OpenOffice's support so far. I'm less happy about the general level of bloat and lower level of usability that comes with the product. I can't help wonder who thought it would be a great idea to toss in Python, Java, StarBasic and god knows what other runtimes into this app. There is a very cobbled together feel about the whole thing.
OTOH, I've had nothing but problems with OO and NeoOffice when it come to Powerpoint. They both mangle relatively simple files with embedded tables;to the point that the trouble to fix them is not worth the few hundred bucks it costs to Office for the Mac.
If you only use OO or Neo it's not really a problem, and I use and recommend Neo for someone looking for a good office suite and does not need to collaborate with MS Office users. I think its great for college students; especially since it's free and saves in MS file formats for when you turn in assignments.
If you need seamless MS Office interoperablity stick with MS Office./P.
Whatever you are smoking, please share. This has NOTHING to do with the first amendment. The death of the Old Media business model is NOT a blow to the first amendment, it STRENGTHENS it, because broadcasted speech becomes less controlled and more democratic. When the cost of entry to the broadcast medium (the internet) is effectively zero, EVERYONE becomes a member of the press. The death of the Old Media business model is the best thing that could possibly happen for freedom of speech.
I think you missed the point of Becker and Posner - that if it becomes financially nonviable to maintain a good news gathering and reporting organization only a few large corporations, such as Reuters and AP, will control what becomes news and how it is reported.
While that is not a first amendment issue it would weaken greatly our access to news. As for citizen reporters - the problem with that is it is how do you cull the vast amount of low quality, lack of independent fact checking, biased reporting that fails to meet even minimal journalistic standards of ethics and quality from really good reporting?
Without trust and reputation news reporting becomes, well a cess pool of people vying to present their POV as fact.
While this seems like an opinion that runs counter to many tenants slashdotters hold dear, I think we should at least consider it. By any measure, Posner is one of the most impressive judges on the bench today-- and in my opinion, one of the only judges that really 'get' all the issues surrounding copyright and digital things in general.
I'm hardly alone-- Lessig has noted that there isn't a federal judge I respect more, both as a judge and person, and Posner was Obama's first choice when asked which sitting judge he would most like to argue before.
So you may disagree with this opinion-- I'm leaning that way too-- but it's worth fair consideration. Go and actually read his post before passing judgment. When he was guest blogging about copyright law at Lessig.org back in 2004, he noted, "I am distrustful of people who think they have confident answers to such questions." That goes for both sides in this debate.
Sort of a hack job by techcrunch actually.
Great comments - note that the blog in question is written by Gary Becker, a Nobel laureate in economics (also at Chicago) as well as Judge Posner.
While people have focused on a single comment in the blog; they miss the overall argument - how do you make it economically attractive for people to create independent news gathering organizations, so that only a few large corporations have control over what is presented as news. The comment in questions poses - is there a way to ensure they are actually compensated for their work; and suggested a change in copyright law as away to do that. While many may not agree with such a change; the bloggers are simply illustrating one way to make running a news organization financially viable, not saying that is the only, best or preferred solution.
Gee - last I heard - you couldn't copyright a database. Further, unless he specifically provided for it in his contract up front, work done for hire belongs to he who pays. If you under-price your services, that isn't the cities fault.
Actually, databases are generally copyrightable as a compilation; however the underlying data generally isn't. So, if he is collecting real time data from muni buses; data muni makes available, I don't see how he is violating someone else's copyright. It's not like he is downloading a thrid party database, which might be protected.
Or, simply having one person in a group sign up and "share" offline?
They already have this problem. My guess is that they'd prefer going back to the days of "person gives a taped copy to his friend" if they can avoid "person shares with thousands of people".
You might as well ask, how can a cable company ever sell TV - surely by your reasoning, only one person would buy it, then he'd tape all the shows for his friends?
First of all, cable companies sell convince and variety - I can get a whole lot of different shows beyond free OTA broadcast; many off which it would be difficult to find otherwise and / or cost a lot more on DVD.
TV, in general, is a more here and now type of entertainment. People want to talk about their favorite shows or latest sports events the next day; so taped copies lack the same experience.
Music, OTOH, is different - it's much more of a repeat and activity based consumption - you listen while traveling, jogging, etc; and don't mind hearing old favorites again and again. Indeed, most people probably have small play lists relative to the available music in a genre. How many people watch the same show over and over?
From a consumer side of things, a pay-per-month model of getting access to a DRM-free library does sound good, but it seems awfully fishy that Universal would offer it.
I'd be surprised if it were truly DRM free - if Universal releases their entire play list; what would be the point of staying subscribed once you got the songs you really want? Or, simply having one person in a group sign up and "share" offline? My guess is they'll have some sort of ID tag to identify the music tied to the original subscriber; so if songs get shared beyond that then they have someone to sue.
Of course, that doesn't solve the churn problem - if people simply subscribe to get a catalog and then bolt, how do you generate a reliable long term revenue stream? Do you produce enough new music each month to make a subscription a more viable option than say iTunes or buying CDs? Do you slowly release the catalog to milk people for subscription fees?
Finally, how do you negotiate payments for songs sold by this method? Large volumes of downloads means each song gets a small slice of teh revenue - so a per d/l fixed cut could kill Universal. How many people would simply d/l everything they can because it's "free?"
I bet you see caps and some sort of watermarking at a minimum.
Title 17, 204: Â 204. Execution of transfers of copyright ownership
(a) A transfer of copyright ownership, other than by operation of law, is not valid unless an instrument of conveyance, or a note or memorandum of the transfer, is in writing and signed by the owner of the rights conveyed or such owner's duly authorized agent.
Considering the University's policies are usually explicitly agreed to as part of enrollment I think that may meet the "note or memorandum of the transfer" requirement of Title 17.of course, it is ultimately up to a court to decide if it does.
In addition, since the policy may state that the University owns the copyright you could make an argument that the student never actually held the copyright so no "note or memorandum of the transfer" is needed since the student has no ownership of the work; per their agreement with University when they enrolled.
While IANAL, it seems the contract argument (you never had ownership per the contract you signed when you enrolled) is the better argument; with the transfers through agreed to policies a secondary argument if the first fails.
That's exactly the problem. It looks like cheating if there's only N logical ways to write something and N+1 students in the class. A dumb/mean (take your pick) prof once accused a friend of that very thing on a final exam, causing him to stress out and lose weight for 4-5 months before the case came before the honor council, where he was acquitted in the shortest deliberation on record.
While there are the occasional dumb / mean profs most that I've known take such accusations very seriously; to the point of allowing what is most likely cheating to go by rather than falsely accuse a student.
I've been a paper grader for profs; and usually there is enough difference, even when there is really only one correct solution, between papers to recognize individual work vs. cheating. Even so, unless a paper had the exact same errors as another, and it was not a common error, would I even raise an issue with the prof.
As a side note, I once had a professor ask me some questions about a recent take home assignment. After a few questions, he confided another student had the exact same answers as I did and he wanted to verify my answers. Apparently the student took my exam from the prof's mailbox, copied it and then returned his and my answers. Which really proves how dumb he was - not only did a marginal student chose to copy the answers from a good student, he left evidence of what he did as well; down to some quirks in my style and errors I had made.
Could someone have copied one answer and not others? Sure, but given the limited number of solutions it generally was more likely they simply came to the same answer independently. As a result, we erred on the side of caution; given the seriousness of the accusation and the ramifications if we accuse someone who is innocent.
Where did the student sign this agreement, specifically? In the US, a written and signed agreement is necessary for copyright transfer. A policy statement by the university isn't going to cut it.
As I recall, in the US a valid contract only requires - offer, acceptance and consideration. The school, a part of its offer of an education requires you to assign copyright to them. You accept by enrolling, they get your cash and you get to attend classes. Sounds like a valid contract; even if I don't agree with the terms.
The problem with this approach is the nature of collage assignments. If you ignore variable names and comments then there is only so many ways to write a short efficient bubble sort.
I submit if you have to cheat to write a bubble sort you need to find a different major.
The student released the source after the release date, which prevented any of his peers from cheating
Prevented them from cheating this semester. I'm sure the reason the prof wanted it taken down is so he could easily just copy-n-paste next semester's assignment. This is a lazy instructor working to maintain his laziness.
Good profs at the very least work on a 4 semester rotation of courses where you're going to have to dig up a student from a few years ago at least before you have an easy "tweak and resubmit" assignment. Any instructor that dishes out the exact same projects semester after semester isn't showing any commitment, and certainly isn't staying with the times. Computer science is in such a continuous state of flux that any prof that isn't consistently reworking their coursework isn't doing their job.
Catching these sorts of cheats isn't too difficult either even if you don't want to start projects from scratch. Just a matter of properly adjusting the project. Make a few fundamental changes that make it look different, update as needed, and subtly tweak a few things. (make a small change to limits etc) This makes it fresh and new, and is fairly easy to spot a cheat since they will blatantly be meeting subtle goals from the wrong project.
Unless his solutions are only solution to the problem, catching cheating would be very easy - simply look for the exact same code as was posted. If you find it, quiz the student about how they arrived at the solution, and perhaps ask how they would approach a slightly different problem. If they fail open, they probably cheated an you can go from their.
Maybe I was lucky; but all of my professors didn't care if we looked at old tests / assignments etc. Their attitude was - "if you take the time to review all that material you're going to learn it anyway;" and they'd always make subtle changes to the questions so simply copying and changing a number wouldn't cut it.
The reviews did help - I had one prof who'd always sneak a trick question in that required some thought and analysis; if you jumped right in you'd miss it and get the wrong answer. When I caught that on the final I wrote "You'd think you'd do this by X; but you being a sneaky SOB we really need to do Y..." We're still friends today, many years later...
Users who have to sit for days doing nothing because their user accounts aren't set up right. Ridiculous security policies like being forced to change your password every month.
Any self respecting user knows that if you change teh password x times in a row you can revert back to your original password. If you don't know what X is, keep trying new passwords and your old one until the system takes it.
At my last job, we had a constant problem of new staff turning up on their first day and their bosses ringing us to say that they need a new user setup straight away. For one-off cases, this wasn't a problem*, but for those that didn't learn, we took a good few days to do it. Paying to have staff sitting there with nothing to do usually teaches them quickly. * we usually left it a day anyway, firstly because some of the aspects of the setup did take time, and secondly, to allow us to stall if they become repeat offenders.
While i feel your pain; I've worked with a number of companies that, when faced with the issues you describe, had a simple solution - fire the IT staff and try again. While that may not fix the underlying cause it really impacted the IT staff.
The problem is IT is overhead; and guess what is the easiest to get rid of?
Have you tried really analyzing the situation and figuring out the real root causes, other than stupid users, and recommending fixes? That makes you part of the solution and makes your bosses and their peers happy.
If your company is small enough sometimes something as simple as walking around and seeing if people's PC's are working or if they've had problems goes a long way to making things better; as does letting people know when something is busted and when you expect it fixed.
While it sounds good, the logistics of providing access will be a nightmare. Simply expecting kids to have internet access / laptops won't cut it; that's a lawsuit waiting to happen. Books, while not cheap, are much more durable and can be expected to last a lot longer. The value of a 10 year old text as a teaching aid is suspect; but the life cycle costs is less than electronic.
Publishers now have a reason to update books more rapidly - remove the production costs for hardcover books and they can "outdate" books much faster; plus try to force per student per year licenses on districts.
Be careful what you wish for, you may get it.
Of course, it would be lovely if we could dispense with the entire status quo wherein mobile carriers subsidize the cost of phones to lock people in to long-term contracts. I'd gladly pay more for unlocked smartphones if it meant I could pay less for service (you'd better believe the cost of all those handsets is built into your bill) and switch at-will.
There are several reasons why I don't see that happening:
Carriers would lose a significant amount of customers - many people will not pay the full price up front - either they can't or simply won't - and as a result would not get a cell phone. I remember the days when that was the model - and very few people actually had a cell phone.
Pay as you go customers are less valuable because they can price shop regularly - so revenue streams are unpredictable and carriers either get caught in price wars to keep customers, losing revenue, or the have high churn and need to advertise to get new customers, raising costs.
Most people seem to like getting a new phone every few years - whether they need done or not. Contracts let them do that at a perceived lower cost; plus most companies let you renew at 18 months anyway so the two year lock is not really two years. This lowers churn making the model very desirable for companies.
Realistically, as much as I want a new iPhone GS; for me the killer app is TomTom. As long as that works reasonably well on my existing 2G phone I really don't need an upgrade. If not, I can always get a cheap GPS and carry it with me and wait until my contract allows me the lowest subsidized price. By then the GS may well be old news as well.
Things I'm also upset about:
No more free lunches. Gas costing more than $0.05 a gallon. Having to walk more than three feet from my car to my local superstore. The fact that I wasn't born in a time where peace was on earth, everything is free, and we're all immortal.
I'm so angry that I'm punching a wall and hoping someone will pay for its repair as we speak.
You need to upgrade to Life2.0.
This is essentially a design philosophy - Airbus designs its planes so pilots are not able to fly outside the envelop; Boeing lets pilots have the ultimate choice in what to do. There are advantages to both approaches - humans can often try things to fix a problem that a computer would not even consider. Computers are real good at analyzing large amounts of data and taking defined actions; humans are good at problem solving and developing unique solutions that a designer may never had considered or considered and decided to prevent for what were valid reasons based on the designer's assumptions.
My experience is the real issue is not the philosophy but the interface between the man and the machine. Poor or confusing design can lead operators to make erroneous decisions based on what they think the computer is doing and not realize its actual mode of operation. While the end call is often operator error, as someone who has done incident investigation that over-simplifies the cause and unless you address the underlying causes that lead to the decisions you haven't fixed teh problem. Highly trained and skilled operators generally do not go stupid all of a sudden; they are generally lead down a path that results in a bad outcome.
As someone who has operated in fully automatic and totally manual environments, I find automation great; especially for taking many routine burdens off the operator; freeing them to maintain better situational awareness of the entire system. I also like having the final say - that's what I'm paid to do - make decisions - but I realize I must also be fully aware of what is happening before I take over control.
Ultimately, designers need to be fully cognizant that a control system is just that a system made up of computer and human actions and interactions between the two and design the system to minimize confusion and the possibility of errors; operators need to understand how the system responds and why to properly diagnose a situation and make informed decisions. Ideally, both sides are involved in the initial design. I was involved in a control room design project. The designers wanted to make digital readouts (easier to see values); thy did not realize that operators wanted traditional needle readouts since they often do not read an indicator - the scan a set of dials and if the needles are where they normally are they don't care what the actual value is and if one is out of whack it is obvious. You lose that with digital, as well as the ability to read and interpret widely fluctuating values. A needle provides feedback on range and rate - digital is just flashing numbers. As a result, we had an all galss display that mimic a traditional layout in many areas.
I'm gonna buy one and put it next to my Apple II GS. :)
Was that a joke? Some of us actually HAVE working Apple IIGS machines.
Too bad the comparatively low-res iPhone (competing phones are at WVGA resolution) is still much higher-res than an Apple IIGS
The ][gs - the first Apple with a color finder. I still smile when I remember telling Mac users "What, no color?"
Under capitalism, Man exploits man - under communism, its the otherway round!
Under communism, the state owns "the means of production". According to Marx, one of the four "means of production" is Labour - the people. Thus, under communism, the state owns the people. Owning people is called "slavery".
Actually, if you reread Marx he has a bit different slany - and teh state does not own the means of production
I am A Marxist of the Groucho faction
That's OK, I'm a Leninist of the John faction. All hail Marx and Lenin (sounds like a good album)
I would caution, however, against vilifying China too much in this regard. Even much of the Chinese intelligentsia believes that their country needs a brutal government to avoid total chaos. Often the very Chinese you think would be rebelling against measures like this--people who read foreign news and travel or even reside abroad--think it necessary for the health of their country. Moments like this do lead one to question if American notions of freedom are truly applicable to every country.
If you don't subscribe to the idea that China is one monolithic country but rather a collection of differing groups bound together by a strong central government (such as the old USSR); then the "chaos" would be a natural breakup into separate nations.
Though people in the West may want to paint the Chinese masses as a suffering people yearning to break free of the yoke of oppressive government, such a portrayal may not stand up to facts. Indeed, just last week in the International Herald Tribune (the international version of the New York Times) there was an article about how Chinese students nowadays think Tiananmen-square style civic commitment needs to be nipped in the bud, because it would threaten China's economic development that is making them very happy.
That's pretty much true everywhere - as long as people feel they're getting their share and not directly repressed they pretty much don't care what type of government they have.
Passengers are freight..
As someone who flys a lot I agree in sentiment; but this study focuses on passenger rail, not freight as normally defined.