When you apply for a trademark, you are applying for exclusive use of a given mark for a particular business area. If O'Reilly registers the phrase "Maker Faire" as a trademark for the business of trade conferences, what exactly is wrong with that? Most people wouldn't argue that it would probably be wrong for somebody to start up some mom-n-pop copy store and call it "FedEx Kinko's." They can't do that, because the real FedEx Kinko's has registered that mark as a trademark. Similarly, if O'Reilly invests a considerable amount of money to organize, advertise, staff, and otherwise produce a trade show and they have decided on a name for that trade show, why on earth should they not trademark that name?? If some "Irish scallywag" moved to Palo Alto next week and threw together a fly-by-night trade show under the name "Maker Faire," how could it conceivably not damage the equity O'Reilly has invested in that brand? Protecting business investments is the purpose of trademarks.
NEWS FLASH: The name "Slashdot" is trademarked. Shock! Horror!
I would submit that in a lot of cases, uninformed C&Ds are issued and heeded without trademark protection backing them up.
Certainly true; but that's not the fault of the issuer. Remember: Anyone can sue you for anything. Moreover, a lawyer can write a letter on any topic he/she wants.
If Charles Dickens time travelled to 2006 and wrote an epic novel about the trials of Harry Potter, would it be garbage?
I expect so. Because he'd be writing prose designed to target/consume an intellectual property, rather than doing what writers ought to do, which is concentrate on telling good stories with compelling characters. By insisting on limiting himself to the use of someone else's character, he's already chucked out half his faculties.
if Mickey Mouse's copyright were to expire right now, then it'd be legal for me to sell copies of his "free" cartoons without fear of a lawsuit. If Mickey is then a public domain entity, would trademarks actually apply to him anymore? That is to say, can you exert trademark control over public domain art?
Murky. You'd be advised to tread carefully. For starters, Mickey Mouse doesn't have a copyright. Individual Mickey Mouse cartoons have copyrights. Each one has an entirely separate copyright.
As to whether trademarks can protect things that are "public domain" or in common usage, consider this: Many trademarks are just combinations of English words. "Etch-a-sketch." How can that be a trademark? Those are three English words and I can etch a sketch for you right now, if you'd like.
The key is that trademarks are marks that are employed in the practice of trade. The marks are used to define and differentiate practitioners in their trade -- exclusive use is granted so that I can let people know that I'm me, and you can let people know that you're you, but you can't all of a sudden start using my mark on your goods to confuse people and make them think you're me.
When you register a trademark, you also have to tell the trademark office what you're registering it for. Just because you register the trademark "Lucky 7" and you sell Lucky 7 brand motor oil, that doesn't mean I can't sell Lucky 7 brand pillow cases if our other marks are sufficiently differentiated from one another. You would have to also register a tradmark in the area of pillow cases (or textiles or whatever the appropriate category might be) to stop me from doing that.
I think it's reasonably safe to say that Disney has registered the likeness of the Mickey Mouse character for just about every category imaginable, however.
So you've got a public domain Mickey Mouse cartoon. How can you sell it? Well, you can probably put a still from the cartoon on the front cover -- since the whole cartoon is public domain then it stands to reason that so is any individual still from the cartoon. You might not be able to use the phrase "Mickey Mouse" on the cover (it's probably trademarked), but you could use the title of the cartoon, most certainly. You probably couldn't use the Disney logo. But you could use your own logo, and your company could be called "Classic Toonz Unlimited," further explaining what the contents are. Obviously I'm pulling all this out of my ass, but these are the types of issues that might come up.
Sound like a hassle? Sure. So, answer your own question -- even though the work you want to sell has gone out of copyright, do the trademarks still have value? Sounds like they do, to me.
Also, even if an individual Mickey Mouse cartoon went public domain -- even if they all did -- that wouldn't give you the license to make brand-new Mickey Mouse cartoons. A copyright covers a particular expression of a particular work. It doesn't cover the idea of Mickey Mouse himself. Copyrights don't protect ideas, they protect expression. That one cartoon, either it's copyrighted or it's not. Even if
I have to confess that I look upon his sojourn into Field Theory as a diversion in the same sense that a prestidigitator (magician), in his field of legerdemain (sleight of hand), distracts the audience members, thereby lessening their attention on what's really going on.
Like using big words to disguise a blatant troll, perhaps?
Use less media. See fewer movies and NONE at the theater.
But I like seeing movies in the theater. If they came up with a copy protection scheme that kept me from being able to see movies in the theater, I'd be bummed. Seems unlikely, though.
Fanfic may be completely legal under copyright law, but the concept of fair use is, too. All it takes is a C&D to frighten people away, which large corporations use willy-nilly.
As they are required to do, by the terms of trademark law. If you fail to "vigorously defend" trademarks, you could lose the protection. Again, you're not talking about copyrights with fanfic. You're talking about trademarks.
As for whether fanfic can rise to the level of great literature... I'd say there's as good a chance as not, really. Honestly, I don't see the difference between a Star Wars novel and something written about the fall of Troy (on a conceptual level at least). If you write off a whole class of art as being frivolous simply because it's derivative, you might be missing something great.
I've given you an example of some great fanfic of the ages (the False Quixote). Please cite a counter-example of real world fanfic that succeeds in rising even to the level of a licensed Star Wars novel. And even then, to me, no Star Wars novel will ever be considered great literature, licensed or not. If you don't understand why, then I submit that you are woefully behind on your reading. My recommendation is to branch out of the Star Wars aisle.
The debate isn't a manifestation of the modern era, but, like you said, the modern era's given the originating artist (or, more likely, the corporation that owns the copyright) a huge arsenal of weapons to put unreasonable dampeners on creativity.
No it doesn't. It gives you copyright law, which is the very essence of the Gnu General Public License, as well as the Creative Commons licenses. As for the rest of the "arsenal," that's something else again, and contrary to what you keep saying, it's not about copyrights. Mickey Mouse cartoons could go out of copyright tomorrow and you would be able to make and sell as many copies of those cartoons as you wanted... but you might still not be able to use an image of Mickey Mouse on the front cover, or Disney's logo, or the Mickey Mouse logo, or even Walt Disney's signature... because those things may all still be trademarks. You need to read up on IP law, cuz you're confused. (This is not to say that I'm arguing in favor of current trademark laws, but changing copyright law won't change trademark law, so you're barking up the wrong tree.)
But the bigger issue is whether Jack Ryan is actually the exclusive property of Tom Clancy as a concept. Fanfic isn't strictly legal if you're a copyright maximalist. Exploring the characters and ideas that other authors have created should be encouraged. "Patriot Games" may not be the best book in the world, but it could be that someone out there will write the Best Novel of All Time based on a character Mr Clancy created. But no one will try that if they think they're going to get sued. CC content creates an environment where derivative works can be made without fear of retribution, and quite possibly lead to more revenue streams for the originating artist.
First of all, fanfic is completely legal under copyright law. If you've created an original work that doesn't borrow large sections from any other work, then you own the copyright on that work outright. You can't copyright character names or even the titles of books. You can, however, trademark them... and this is where most fanfic runs into trouble, but this is a completely separate issue.
Besides, I really doubt any fanfic will ever rise to the category of Greatest Novel of All Time, mainly because most people recognize a pastiche for what it is.
This debate has been going on throughout history. Many people consider the first "modern" novel to be Don Quixote de la Mancha by Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra, which was published in two parts. The first part appeared in 1605 and the second in 1615. Before Cervantes could publish the second part, however, a man writing under the name of Alonso Fernándo de Avellaneda published an unauthorized sequel to the original, in an attempt to capitalize on Cervantes' huge success. Cervantes was pissed.
There was no trademark law at the time that could protect him. Instead, he fought back by devoting several sections of the authentic sequel to lampooning and chiding the impostor. Some characters in the real sequel even claim to have read the fake one.
More to the point, academic society frowns on Avellaneda's work, which has come to be known as the "false Quixote" and is often dismissed outright. In other words, society at large perceives the validity of Cervantes' "ownership" of the character of Quixote, even if there is no explicit law on the books that makes what Avellaneda did a crime, and they view the Avellaneda book as a pointless pastiche -- even though a few people who have actually taken the time to read it claim that it's actually decent fun.
So you can't act like this debate is a manifestation of the modern era; in fact it goes back centuries. And you also can't act like mainstream society agrees with your view on fanfic, and only evil modern media corporations take the opposite view, because the historical record clearly proves you wrong.
I used to work at a startup where the founders would occasionally give venture capitalists the big tour. We rank-and-file workers, well aware that any VC investor would inevitably install its own stooges in senior management and basically undermine and overthrow the company for short-term gain, referred to these people as "Victor Charlie."
Today, you can merrily write about vampires without worry of a lawsuit, but if you try and write about another fictional villain, say a Star Wars Sith Lord, and you will find your ass sued into the ground. This SHOULD be troubling.
Should it? For one thing, you're not talking about copyrights. You're talking about trademarks -- which are another form of "intellectual property," but they aren't Lessig's main issue.
The problem with the Sith Lord is that Lucas owns a trademark on the term "Sith Lord." But there are plenty of amateur fictional works about, for example, a guy who travels in time with a few companions in a time machine that's bigger on the outside than on the inside and who undoes the plans of evil robots -- they just can't call those stories "Doctor Who." That's nothing to do with copyrights. That's trademarks.
Even so, it's not as if wanting to protect one's intellectual property is a new idea. Many people consider the first "modern" novel to be Don Quixote by Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra, which was published in two parts. The first part appeared in 1605 and the second in 1615. Before Cervantes could publish the second part, however, a man writing under the name of Alonso Fernándo de Avellaneda published an unauthorized sequel to the original, in an attempt to capitalize on Cervantes' huge success. Cervantes was pissed. There was no trademark law at the time that could protect him; he fought back by devoting several sections of the authentic sequel to lampooning and chiding the impostor. Some characters in the real sequel even claim to have read the fake one. What's more, academic society frowns on Avellaneda's work, which has come to be known as the "false Quixote" and is often dismissed outright. In other words, society at large perceives the validity of Cervantes' "ownership" of the character of Quixote, even if there is no explicit law on the books that makes what Avellaneda did a crime. So you can't act like this debate is a manifestation of the modern era; in fact it goes back centuries.
Er no. Communism is a political philosphy, not an economic one like capitalism.
Upon what do you base this statement? Is it a coincidence that, after The Communist Manifesto, Karl Marx's most significant work is called Das Kapital? Marx saw capitalism and communism as not just comparable, but inextricably linked. He argued that communism would be the economic system that would succeed the era of rampant capitalism. Who knows... he may yet be proven right. The capitalist era seems only to be gaining steam.
The unit really does look nice, but why on earth would I go out and buy a Nokia if it can't do more than what my Zaurus does? Point out some of the positive things.
The screen really is the big selling factor. I've read thousands of pages worth of e-books on mine. With its high dpi, the text quality is almost equivalent to print.
I, too, also prefer the 770's UI. KDE has never been able to win me over, and I dislike QTopia even more.
Also, because it's backed by Nokia, arguably the 770's OS is going to be better supported in the long run. Wait and see, I guess.
I have had mine for almost a year now. Some new firmware was released a month or so ago, but the device is certainly not new.
What's interesting is that they were actually handing them out to media attendees at the press registration desk. If you got there early enough, they'd let you have one on loan to play with for the duration of the show.
...but considering the exhibit floor doesn't open until 10am pacific time, I am surprised there are so many attendees there already. Since I am supposed to be there to man my company's booth, I hope the time machine is open-source and I can download a copy.
Somebody who works at LinuxWorld told me that this conference is somewhat unique in that fully half of the attendees show up early, to attend the conference/tutorial sessions that kick off a day before the floor opens.
Also, the conference floor might open at 10am but Lawrence Lessig's keynote was at 9am.
Contrary to popular wisdom, the New Coke formula didn't come completely out of nowhere.
Coca-Cola had been enjoying tremendous success with a recent product, Diet Coke. So at some point the big brains at Coca-Cola decided that they might as well reform their product line so that all the Coke products had a similar taste.
It seems that, due to FDA restrictions on various artificial sweeteners in the U.S., Coca-Cola was not able to come up with a sugar free formula that tasted exactly like regular Coke. Instead, they decided not to try -- they came up with a new formula that tasted something like Coke, but different. Thus was Diet Coke born. Diet Coke has never been based on the same formula as the product we now know as Coca-Cola Classic.
Well, Diet Coke sold like gangbusters (seen much Tab around lately?). It stood to reason that some of the sales of Diet Coke were coming from customers who had previously bought regular Coke and who were attracted to the low-calorie aspect -- so, Diet Coke was technically eating sales from regular Coke. Diet Coke is a little sweeter than regular Coke, so it also stood to reason that sales of Diet Coke were coming from people who might otherwise prefer Pepsi (which is typically also a little sweeter than Coke). This was great.
A longstanding problem with the marketing of sugar free soft drinks in the United States, however, has been the word "diet." In Europe they don't tend to use it. Sugar free Coke is called "Coke Lite" in Europe (and, coincidentally, it is based on the regular Coke formula). But in the U.S. there is a strong demographic that responds to the word Diet. There is also, however, a large demographic that does not respond to it -- namely manly men who won't eat anything that pretends to be low calorie.
So given this conflagration of events, what would you do? Chances are, you would do exactly what Coke did: Change the formula of Coke so that it has the slightly sweeter flavor of Diet Coke, but has all the sugar and doesn't have the word "diet" on the can. That way, regular Coke could continue the trend of eating up Pepsi's sales by appealing to the broader demographic that wasn't reached by Diet Coke.
Well, it turned out that this was a misstep. One problem was that nobody ever told anyone that Diet Coke had a different formula than regular Coke. Loyal Coke customers knew that "Coke tastes better than Pepsi." What they didn't realize was that, by that logic, Coke also tasted better than Diet Coke. They were willing to ignore the slightly different taste, chalking it up to the sugar-free sweetener instead of an actual change in formula. Old Coke loyalists wanted nothing to do with the new formula, however; the classic product was serving their needs just fine.
So Coke failed to understand its own market. There was a huge backlash. But did it hurt Coke, really? Consider:
- Old Coke was back on the shelves within a few months, under the name Coca-Cola Classic. It was sold alongside New Coke, giving customers plenty of opportunity to buy lots of both and taste-test for themselves.
- Newspapers ate up the story of this controversy, which meant that Coke got plenty of free press headlines all throughout the summer of the "Cola Wars."
- It gave Coca-Cola an opportunity to rethink their branding and marketing and retool their products around nostalgia for classic Coca-Cola marketing... notice how they do those Santa Claus cans at Christmastime; how they still sell the classic 8 oz. glass bottles as novelties, at a premium; various retro merchandise you can buy, etc. In the long term I think the whole thing did nothing but strengthen and solidify the Coca-Cola brand.
So was it a misstep? Yeah. A failure? I doubt it. A learning opportunity, if anything, and one that Coke bounced right back from.
P.S. You'll notice that Coca-Cola has a new sugar free cola product on the market now. This one is based on the Classic Coke formula, because the FDA restrictions on artificial
I have 1,215 messages in my inbox and all of them have been answered. I keep them because it's a "paper trail" for when someone asks me about it again in 6 months.
That's nothing. I literally have 12,000+ messages in my inbox at home, and anybody who hasn't received a response from one of them isn't going to get one.
The reason I keep them is simple. In this digital age, it's the only record I have of my correspondence with a great many people -- some of it memorable, some of it totally frivolous. Think about it: The only record. Have you ever noticed those six-volume collected editions of the letters of famous writers? Well, I and you might never be that important, but even if we were, guess what? Nobody writes letters anymore. Unless you do something to hang onto it, anything you spirit away into the Internet ether is essentially gone for good.
So why not hang onto it? There's all kinds of stuff in that inbox. It's a paper trail, sure... but it's also a crate full of opportunities acted upon or otherwise, phone numbers I forgot to write down elsewhere, copies of old files, heck, even plain old memories. Why take the time to sort through it all and decide what's what, when the entire archive can be zipped onto a keychain USB drive in less than a minute, and even the most basic email client can search out anything I want to find in the whole stack in a few seconds?
Clearly this jerk is just another typical psychologist, willing to say anything to keep the Thetans trapped in my body.
P.S. Oh, for the record, that email client is Thunderbird. 12,000 messages and counting, works just fine. Beat that, Outlook.
That's just the CLI. It's not.Net, which includes the associated Windows libraries and frameworks. And it's hardly an "official version" -- it's just an experimental release. It is not the source code to the official Microsoft.Net Runtime for Windows.
.Net was never meant to be platform independent. It is language independent, meaning it supports a number of different languages running atop the CLR. Python is one of the most recent languages to be implemented on the CLR, for example. But it is fundamentally a Windows technology, Mono notwithstanding.
And, since when has Microsoft actually developed an app using.NET?
Huge sections of Windows Vista are written using managed code. Likewise the new Microsoft Office. Windows development, in general, is moving toward the use of managed code (and hence.Net).
What you're asking for sounds a lot like what Microsoft is shipping today. I know because I use a media PC just about every day.
1) A small quiet set-top box type PC
I've seen these around. I have a Sony Vaio desktop that looks pretty much like a regular tower case, but I live in an apartment and I was in the market for a new PC, not an A/V component. The media PC aspects were a secondary concern. My PC is wayyyy quieter than the Power Mac G4 that it replaced; admittedly, however, it could be quieter still. I have seen cases that look like A/V equipment that I am told are virtually silent, however. And I'd imagine even my PC would be inaudible to "the older generation." My refrigerator is 20 times more distracting to me.
2) Records cable/terrestrial TV to HD like a TIVO/VCR
Check. I almost never watch anything when it's first broadcast.
3) Has a simple kiosk type menu with a remote
Microsoft has never really been the master of the easy-to-use UI, but it's simple enough. Fonts are big, options are streamlined.
4) Low power so it can be always on
I doubt my Vaio can make this claim, but it does do the next best thing: If you put it into Suspend mode, it will actually wake itself up when it's time to record a show and then put itself back into Suspend again.
5) Does internet radio
Mine doesn't (my hardware doesn't support it), but Media Center is capable of it. For some reason, though, there are no time-shifting capabilities for radio, a real bummer.
6) (*and very tellingly added as a last afterthought) Can browse the web
I think there may be a third-party add-on for Media Center that essentially embeds Internet Explorer. Don't quote me on that, though.
So there you have it; what's the problem? People loooovvve to knock Microsoft, but here's one situation where Microsoft has been spending a ton of money to give you what you're looking for. It may not be exactly perfect yet, but so far there have been no announcements as to what improvements will be done on the Media Center side when Vista ships. Why don't we wait and see?
And what is the justification to remove VBA support from MS Office for Mac? It's not like the code doesn't exist?
If I had to guess, it's probably because the VBA support in the upcoming version of Office for Windows is based on the.Net framework. Some portion of the syntax of VBA macros will probably work on the Mac, but a large part of what you will be able to do with VBA on Windows will not be available. If Microsoft advertises that Office for Mac has VBA support, it will be expected to be full and total support -- if it can't provide that, then Microsoft would just as soon not ship it at all. In addition, Microsoft seems to be encouraging people to write macros for Office in other languages, such as C#. If corporate IT goes that direction, then Mac users will be left in the cold even if they have VBA support (which was always more of an add-on than an integral part of Mac Office anyway).
If GPS is tied to some NAVY building in Maryland and the building moves, do we then declare that the building DID NOT MOVE because it is by definition in a particular place? Everybody else moved?
Uhhhhh... somebody correct me if I'm wrong, but so far as I was aware, the only thing GPS is "tied to" is a ring of satellites in geosynchronous orbit above the Earth, where they are mostly indifferent to earthquakes. Just because this article (rather vaguely) says that "GPS measurements" changed doesn't mean there was any change in the GPS system itself. One's position relative to a few satellites will still remain that -- one's position relative to a few satellites.
No, seriously, what's the point of doing this? The comics will be hosted on this site; check. But the arrangement is non-exclusive, which means the creators are still free to host them on their own sites, also -- which presumably they would have done anyway.
Wouldn't it be much easier to create a kind of "Drudge Report" of Web comics, that aggregates links to new episodes as they appear? Seems like just about anybody could do that with some blogging software.
Are we shooting ourselves in the foot by staying obsessed with the old classics?
You mean we, meaning gamers? I dunno. From the summary, it sounds like the problem is that the industry is shooting itself in the foot by insisting on strip-mining those old classics instead of coming up with new ideas, despite the fact that (as is mentioned) there's not much meat on those old bones. It's the same reason everyone's always ripping on Hollywood.
Slashdot Mirror
When you apply for a trademark, you are applying for exclusive use of a given mark for a particular business area. If O'Reilly registers the phrase "Maker Faire" as a trademark for the business of trade conferences, what exactly is wrong with that? Most people wouldn't argue that it would probably be wrong for somebody to start up some mom-n-pop copy store and call it "FedEx Kinko's." They can't do that, because the real FedEx Kinko's has registered that mark as a trademark. Similarly, if O'Reilly invests a considerable amount of money to organize, advertise, staff, and otherwise produce a trade show and they have decided on a name for that trade show, why on earth should they not trademark that name?? If some "Irish scallywag" moved to Palo Alto next week and threw together a fly-by-night trade show under the name "Maker Faire," how could it conceivably not damage the equity O'Reilly has invested in that brand? Protecting business investments is the purpose of trademarks.
NEWS FLASH: The name "Slashdot" is trademarked. Shock! Horror!
Certainly true; but that's not the fault of the issuer. Remember: Anyone can sue you for anything. Moreover, a lawyer can write a letter on any topic he/she wants.
I expect so. Because he'd be writing prose designed to target/consume an intellectual property, rather than doing what writers ought to do, which is concentrate on telling good stories with compelling characters. By insisting on limiting himself to the use of someone else's character, he's already chucked out half his faculties.
Murky. You'd be advised to tread carefully. For starters, Mickey Mouse doesn't have a copyright. Individual Mickey Mouse cartoons have copyrights. Each one has an entirely separate copyright.
As to whether trademarks can protect things that are "public domain" or in common usage, consider this: Many trademarks are just combinations of English words. "Etch-a-sketch." How can that be a trademark? Those are three English words and I can etch a sketch for you right now, if you'd like.
The key is that trademarks are marks that are employed in the practice of trade. The marks are used to define and differentiate practitioners in their trade -- exclusive use is granted so that I can let people know that I'm me, and you can let people know that you're you, but you can't all of a sudden start using my mark on your goods to confuse people and make them think you're me.
When you register a trademark, you also have to tell the trademark office what you're registering it for. Just because you register the trademark "Lucky 7" and you sell Lucky 7 brand motor oil, that doesn't mean I can't sell Lucky 7 brand pillow cases if our other marks are sufficiently differentiated from one another. You would have to also register a tradmark in the area of pillow cases (or textiles or whatever the appropriate category might be) to stop me from doing that.
I think it's reasonably safe to say that Disney has registered the likeness of the Mickey Mouse character for just about every category imaginable, however.
So you've got a public domain Mickey Mouse cartoon. How can you sell it? Well, you can probably put a still from the cartoon on the front cover -- since the whole cartoon is public domain then it stands to reason that so is any individual still from the cartoon. You might not be able to use the phrase "Mickey Mouse" on the cover (it's probably trademarked), but you could use the title of the cartoon, most certainly. You probably couldn't use the Disney logo. But you could use your own logo, and your company could be called "Classic Toonz Unlimited," further explaining what the contents are. Obviously I'm pulling all this out of my ass, but these are the types of issues that might come up.
Sound like a hassle? Sure. So, answer your own question -- even though the work you want to sell has gone out of copyright, do the trademarks still have value? Sounds like they do, to me.
Also, even if an individual Mickey Mouse cartoon went public domain -- even if they all did -- that wouldn't give you the license to make brand-new Mickey Mouse cartoons. A copyright covers a particular expression of a particular work. It doesn't cover the idea of Mickey Mouse himself. Copyrights don't protect ideas, they protect expression. That one cartoon, either it's copyrighted or it's not. Even if
A Bulwer-Lytton candidate to be proud of!
Like using big words to disguise a blatant troll, perhaps?
I'd just like to point out that InfoWorld covered this story extensively last year.
But I like seeing movies in the theater. If they came up with a copy protection scheme that kept me from being able to see movies in the theater, I'd be bummed. Seems unlikely, though.
As they are required to do, by the terms of trademark law. If you fail to "vigorously defend" trademarks, you could lose the protection. Again, you're not talking about copyrights with fanfic. You're talking about trademarks.
I've given you an example of some great fanfic of the ages (the False Quixote). Please cite a counter-example of real world fanfic that succeeds in rising even to the level of a licensed Star Wars novel. And even then, to me, no Star Wars novel will ever be considered great literature, licensed or not. If you don't understand why, then I submit that you are woefully behind on your reading. My recommendation is to branch out of the Star Wars aisle.
No it doesn't. It gives you copyright law, which is the very essence of the Gnu General Public License, as well as the Creative Commons licenses. As for the rest of the "arsenal," that's something else again, and contrary to what you keep saying, it's not about copyrights. Mickey Mouse cartoons could go out of copyright tomorrow and you would be able to make and sell as many copies of those cartoons as you wantedFirst of all, fanfic is completely legal under copyright law. If you've created an original work that doesn't borrow large sections from any other work, then you own the copyright on that work outright. You can't copyright character names or even the titles of books. You can, however, trademark them ... and this is where most fanfic runs into trouble, but this is a completely separate issue.
Besides, I really doubt any fanfic will ever rise to the category of Greatest Novel of All Time, mainly because most people recognize a pastiche for what it is.
This debate has been going on throughout history. Many people consider the first "modern" novel to be Don Quixote de la Mancha by Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra, which was published in two parts. The first part appeared in 1605 and the second in 1615. Before Cervantes could publish the second part, however, a man writing under the name of Alonso Fernándo de Avellaneda published an unauthorized sequel to the original, in an attempt to capitalize on Cervantes' huge success. Cervantes was pissed.
There was no trademark law at the time that could protect him. Instead, he fought back by devoting several sections of the authentic sequel to lampooning and chiding the impostor. Some characters in the real sequel even claim to have read the fake one.
More to the point, academic society frowns on Avellaneda's work, which has come to be known as the "false Quixote" and is often dismissed outright. In other words, society at large perceives the validity of Cervantes' "ownership" of the character of Quixote, even if there is no explicit law on the books that makes what Avellaneda did a crime, and they view the Avellaneda book as a pointless pastiche -- even though a few people who have actually taken the time to read it claim that it's actually decent fun.
So you can't act like this debate is a manifestation of the modern era; in fact it goes back centuries. And you also can't act like mainstream society agrees with your view on fanfic, and only evil modern media corporations take the opposite view, because the historical record clearly proves you wrong.
I used to work at a startup where the founders would occasionally give venture capitalists the big tour. We rank-and-file workers, well aware that any VC investor would inevitably install its own stooges in senior management and basically undermine and overthrow the company for short-term gain, referred to these people as "Victor Charlie."
Should it? For one thing, you're not talking about copyrights. You're talking about trademarks -- which are another form of "intellectual property," but they aren't Lessig's main issue.
The problem with the Sith Lord is that Lucas owns a trademark on the term "Sith Lord." But there are plenty of amateur fictional works about, for example, a guy who travels in time with a few companions in a time machine that's bigger on the outside than on the inside and who undoes the plans of evil robots -- they just can't call those stories "Doctor Who." That's nothing to do with copyrights. That's trademarks.
Even so, it's not as if wanting to protect one's intellectual property is a new idea. Many people consider the first "modern" novel to be Don Quixote by Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra, which was published in two parts. The first part appeared in 1605 and the second in 1615. Before Cervantes could publish the second part, however, a man writing under the name of Alonso Fernándo de Avellaneda published an unauthorized sequel to the original, in an attempt to capitalize on Cervantes' huge success. Cervantes was pissed. There was no trademark law at the time that could protect him; he fought back by devoting several sections of the authentic sequel to lampooning and chiding the impostor. Some characters in the real sequel even claim to have read the fake one. What's more, academic society frowns on Avellaneda's work, which has come to be known as the "false Quixote" and is often dismissed outright. In other words, society at large perceives the validity of Cervantes' "ownership" of the character of Quixote, even if there is no explicit law on the books that makes what Avellaneda did a crime. So you can't act like this debate is a manifestation of the modern era; in fact it goes back centuries.
Upon what do you base this statement? Is it a coincidence that, after The Communist Manifesto, Karl Marx's most significant work is called Das Kapital? Marx saw capitalism and communism as not just comparable, but inextricably linked. He argued that communism would be the economic system that would succeed the era of rampant capitalism. Who knows... he may yet be proven right. The capitalist era seems only to be gaining steam.
The screen really is the big selling factor. I've read thousands of pages worth of e-books on mine. With its high dpi, the text quality is almost equivalent to print.
I, too, also prefer the 770's UI. KDE has never been able to win me over, and I dislike QTopia even more.
Also, because it's backed by Nokia, arguably the 770's OS is going to be better supported in the long run. Wait and see, I guess.
What's interesting is that they were actually handing them out to media attendees at the press registration desk. If you got there early enough, they'd let you have one on loan to play with for the duration of the show.
Somebody who works at LinuxWorld told me that this conference is somewhat unique in that fully half of the attendees show up early, to attend the conference/tutorial sessions that kick off a day before the floor opens.
Also, the conference floor might open at 10am but Lawrence Lessig's keynote was at 9am.
Contrary to popular wisdom, the New Coke formula didn't come completely out of nowhere.
... notice how they do those Santa Claus cans at Christmastime; how they still sell the classic 8 oz. glass bottles as novelties, at a premium; various retro merchandise you can buy, etc. In the long term I think the whole thing did nothing but strengthen and solidify the Coca-Cola brand.
Coca-Cola had been enjoying tremendous success with a recent product, Diet Coke. So at some point the big brains at Coca-Cola decided that they might as well reform their product line so that all the Coke products had a similar taste.
It seems that, due to FDA restrictions on various artificial sweeteners in the U.S., Coca-Cola was not able to come up with a sugar free formula that tasted exactly like regular Coke. Instead, they decided not to try -- they came up with a new formula that tasted something like Coke, but different. Thus was Diet Coke born. Diet Coke has never been based on the same formula as the product we now know as Coca-Cola Classic.
Well, Diet Coke sold like gangbusters (seen much Tab around lately?). It stood to reason that some of the sales of Diet Coke were coming from customers who had previously bought regular Coke and who were attracted to the low-calorie aspect -- so, Diet Coke was technically eating sales from regular Coke. Diet Coke is a little sweeter than regular Coke, so it also stood to reason that sales of Diet Coke were coming from people who might otherwise prefer Pepsi (which is typically also a little sweeter than Coke). This was great.
A longstanding problem with the marketing of sugar free soft drinks in the United States, however, has been the word "diet." In Europe they don't tend to use it. Sugar free Coke is called "Coke Lite" in Europe (and, coincidentally, it is based on the regular Coke formula). But in the U.S. there is a strong demographic that responds to the word Diet. There is also, however, a large demographic that does not respond to it -- namely manly men who won't eat anything that pretends to be low calorie.
So given this conflagration of events, what would you do? Chances are, you would do exactly what Coke did: Change the formula of Coke so that it has the slightly sweeter flavor of Diet Coke, but has all the sugar and doesn't have the word "diet" on the can. That way, regular Coke could continue the trend of eating up Pepsi's sales by appealing to the broader demographic that wasn't reached by Diet Coke.
Well, it turned out that this was a misstep. One problem was that nobody ever told anyone that Diet Coke had a different formula than regular Coke. Loyal Coke customers knew that "Coke tastes better than Pepsi." What they didn't realize was that, by that logic, Coke also tasted better than Diet Coke. They were willing to ignore the slightly different taste, chalking it up to the sugar-free sweetener instead of an actual change in formula. Old Coke loyalists wanted nothing to do with the new formula, however; the classic product was serving their needs just fine.
So Coke failed to understand its own market. There was a huge backlash. But did it hurt Coke, really? Consider:
- Old Coke was back on the shelves within a few months, under the name Coca-Cola Classic. It was sold alongside New Coke, giving customers plenty of opportunity to buy lots of both and taste-test for themselves.
- Newspapers ate up the story of this controversy, which meant that Coke got plenty of free press headlines all throughout the summer of the "Cola Wars."
- It gave Coca-Cola an opportunity to rethink their branding and marketing and retool their products around nostalgia for classic Coca-Cola marketing
So was it a misstep? Yeah. A failure? I doubt it. A learning opportunity, if anything, and one that Coke bounced right back from.
P.S. You'll notice that Coca-Cola has a new sugar free cola product on the market now. This one is based on the Classic Coke formula, because the FDA restrictions on artificial
Oh, and also for the record, I am organized. Every single one of my emails is filed exactly where it belongs -- ordered by date.
That's nothing. I literally have 12,000+ messages in my inbox at home, and anybody who hasn't received a response from one of them isn't going to get one.
The reason I keep them is simple. In this digital age, it's the only record I have of my correspondence with a great many people -- some of it memorable, some of it totally frivolous. Think about it: The only record. Have you ever noticed those six-volume collected editions of the letters of famous writers? Well, I and you might never be that important, but even if we were, guess what? Nobody writes letters anymore. Unless you do something to hang onto it, anything you spirit away into the Internet ether is essentially gone for good.
So why not hang onto it? There's all kinds of stuff in that inbox. It's a paper trail, sure ... but it's also a crate full of opportunities acted upon or otherwise, phone numbers I forgot to write down elsewhere, copies of old files, heck, even plain old memories. Why take the time to sort through it all and decide what's what, when the entire archive can be zipped onto a keychain USB drive in less than a minute, and even the most basic email client can search out anything I want to find in the whole stack in a few seconds?
Clearly this jerk is just another typical psychologist, willing to say anything to keep the Thetans trapped in my body.
P.S. Oh, for the record, that email client is Thunderbird. 12,000 messages and counting, works just fine. Beat that, Outlook.
That's just the CLI. It's not .Net, which includes the associated Windows libraries and frameworks. And it's hardly an "official version" -- it's just an experimental release. It is not the source code to the official Microsoft .Net Runtime for Windows.
.Net was never meant to be platform independent. It is language independent, meaning it supports a number of different languages running atop the CLR. Python is one of the most recent languages to be implemented on the CLR, for example. But it is fundamentally a Windows technology, Mono notwithstanding.
Huge sections of Windows Vista are written using managed code. Likewise the new Microsoft Office. Windows development, in general, is moving toward the use of managed code (and hence .Net).
What you're asking for sounds a lot like what Microsoft is shipping today. I know because I use a media PC just about every day.
I've seen these around. I have a Sony Vaio desktop that looks pretty much like a regular tower case, but I live in an apartment and I was in the market for a new PC, not an A/V component. The media PC aspects were a secondary concern. My PC is wayyyy quieter than the Power Mac G4 that it replaced; admittedly, however, it could be quieter still. I have seen cases that look like A/V equipment that I am told are virtually silent, however. And I'd imagine even my PC would be inaudible to "the older generation." My refrigerator is 20 times more distracting to me.
Check. I almost never watch anything when it's first broadcast.
Microsoft has never really been the master of the easy-to-use UI, but it's simple enough. Fonts are big, options are streamlined.
I doubt my Vaio can make this claim, but it does do the next best thing: If you put it into Suspend mode, it will actually wake itself up when it's time to record a show and then put itself back into Suspend again.
Mine doesn't (my hardware doesn't support it), but Media Center is capable of it. For some reason, though, there are no time-shifting capabilities for radio, a real bummer.
I think there may be a third-party add-on for Media Center that essentially embeds Internet Explorer. Don't quote me on that, though.
So there you have it; what's the problem? People loooovvve to knock Microsoft, but here's one situation where Microsoft has been spending a ton of money to give you what you're looking for. It may not be exactly perfect yet, but so far there have been no announcements as to what improvements will be done on the Media Center side when Vista ships. Why don't we wait and see?
If I had to guess, it's probably because the VBA support in the upcoming version of Office for Windows is based on the .Net framework. Some portion of the syntax of VBA macros will probably work on the Mac, but a large part of what you will be able to do with VBA on Windows will not be available. If Microsoft advertises that Office for Mac has VBA support, it will be expected to be full and total support -- if it can't provide that, then Microsoft would just as soon not ship it at all. In addition, Microsoft seems to be encouraging people to write macros for Office in other languages, such as C#. If corporate IT goes that direction, then Mac users will be left in the cold even if they have VBA support (which was always more of an add-on than an integral part of Mac Office anyway).
But it does. And so do comics.
Uhhhhh... somebody correct me if I'm wrong, but so far as I was aware, the only thing GPS is "tied to" is a ring of satellites in geosynchronous orbit above the Earth, where they are mostly indifferent to earthquakes. Just because this article (rather vaguely) says that "GPS measurements" changed doesn't mean there was any change in the GPS system itself. One's position relative to a few satellites will still remain that -- one's position relative to a few satellites.
...what?
No, seriously, what's the point of doing this? The comics will be hosted on this site; check. But the arrangement is non-exclusive, which means the creators are still free to host them on their own sites, also -- which presumably they would have done anyway.
Wouldn't it be much easier to create a kind of "Drudge Report" of Web comics, that aggregates links to new episodes as they appear? Seems like just about anybody could do that with some blogging software.
You mean we, meaning gamers? I dunno. From the summary, it sounds like the problem is that the industry is shooting itself in the foot by insisting on strip-mining those old classics instead of coming up with new ideas, despite the fact that (as is mentioned) there's not much meat on those old bones. It's the same reason everyone's always ripping on Hollywood.