That's what reciprocal agreements are for. In general, these agreements say that one country will honor court judgments from another country provided that that other country has jurisdiction. That is almost certainly not the case here. The actions occurred in the US, the files were published on servers in the US, and all of this is legal under US law.
The works in the photo may not have copyright, but the fact is, the photos still have copyright. - only if the photograph of that public domain work has sufficient creative input from the creator to create a new copyright. The bar for 'creative input' is fairly low (deciding where to stand in order to take a picture of a sculpture is enough), but a flatbed scan is clearly not enough, as the court explicitly found in the Bridgeman case.
Let's say someone made a cd, where they performed songs that are all in public domain. They still get copyright over their version of the performance. - that is because the performance of a public domain work is different from the original work. These pictures are, by definition, not different.
The same would apply to a photo that you have taken. - No, it doesn't. See above
Unfortunately these events are occuring in Europe. - no, they are not. The user they threatened is in the US, and the servers he uploaded to are in the US.
They're threatening an american user for doing what is perfectly legal in the US on servers based in the US. Their copyright claims have no merit whatsoever.
If they sue him in the US, it'll get tossed out on the basis that the US does not recognize these works as having copright (or any "slavish" reproductions thereof, according to Corel v. Bridgeman); if they sue him in the UK, he can ignore the lawsuit, have a default judgement entered against him, and good luck to them in pursuing it.
This is one bit of denialist propaganda that gets repeated over and over. Only there's one huge problem with it -- the satellites temperature measurements correlate very closely with the ground temperature measurements. (Compare the blue with black and red lines here). I suppose the satellites are misbehaving in exactly the same way too?
I think you're confusing two different uses of parallelism. One is "small" parallelism -- the kind you see in graphical user interfaces. That is to say, if Firefox is busy loading a page, you can still click on the menus and get a response. Different aspects of the GUI are handled by different threads, so the program is responsive instead of hanging. That's done by using threading libraries like Posix and the like. But that's really a negligible application of parallelism. The really important use of parallelism is for really large programs that require lots of hardware to run in a reasonable amount of time.
The threading libraries that you use for GUI applications don't work well for computationally intensive applications requiring parallelism. They require a shared-memory architecture. (A shared memory architecture is one in which all processors see the same values in the RAM. E.g, if processor #1 writes X to memory block 0x87654321, and processor #2 reads 0x87654321, it returns X instead of whatever value processor #2 last wrote there) Shared-memory architectures don't scale -- the biggest ones you can buy have about 64 CPUs. If you do want to run computationally intensive applications on shared memory architectures, then OpenMP is the library of choice. It's also fairly simple to use.
If you want to run a big applications, you need to use a distributed memory architecture. And MPI (message passing interface) is pretty much the only game in town where that is concerned. It's by far the dominant player.
This is a subject near and dear to my heart. I got to participate in one of the early X10 alpha tests (my research group was asked to try it out and give feedback to Vivek Sarker's IBM team). Since then, I've worked with lots of other specialized programming HPC programming languages.
One extremely important aspect of supercomputing, a point that many people fail to grasp, is that application code tends to live a long, long, long time. Far longer than the machines themselves. Rewriting code is simply too expensive and economically inefficient. At Los Alamos National Lab, much of the source code they run are nuclear simulations written Fortran 77 or Fortran 90. Someone might have updated it to use MPI, but otherwise it's the same program. So it's important to bear in mind that those older languages, while not nearly as well suited for parallelism (either for programmer ease-of-use/effeciency, or to allow the compiler to do deep analysis/optimization/scheduling), are going to be around for a long time yet.
"Submitting a picture is a simple thing. It shouldn't involve much learning." - in a world without copyright that's true. It's technically trivial create something like 4chan.
But if you want such a database to be reusable and legally trusthworthy, and not a legal land mine, then you have to ask a bit more of your contributors. And copyright law, especially international copyright law, is anything but simple.
On Wikipedia, a distinction is made between pictures and text. All the text is GFDL, but the pictures can be other licenses. An article can have GFDL text with creative commons attribution/sharealike pictures. I'm not a lawyer, but I've been told that mixed copyright like this is a relatively new, ill-defined area of law. For distribution, Wikipedia is available in text-only dumps and combined text/image dumps.
Everything you said is true, but you forgot to mention that disseminating classified information is a felony and far more likely to land you in Leavenworth than unauthorized reproduction of copyrighted material:)
It's not exactly a secret that the best way to back up data is to have multiple copies in multiple places. It's just that Wikipedia's license happens to facilitate this. However, most people consider their data private and don't want anyone being able to get a copy willy-nilly.
English is the almost universal language of academia, business, and the internet. Once you have the captions translated into English, it's relatively easy to go from English to each of the other 300-odd Wikipedia languages.
The good side is that American law specifies that the work of government employees on government time is in the public domain. The bad side is that the library of congress website is the single most disorganized, least function website on the internet. It is the only non-proxy website I have seen in a decade or more that uses temporary URLs (which makes deep linking to their content on Wikipedia difficult, since we can't link to the page we got it from).
The tools for automated submissions of the pictures are already in place. What is needed, however, are people to translate the German captions into English.
The government treats newspapers the same as it does any other for-profit institution. Your argument is tantamount to saying they should be given special tax exempt status just because of what they do. The first amendment says it can't pass laws that discriminate against them - that is not the same as treating them better than all others.
They aren't teaching them how to "use" Wikipedia in the sense of editing it, they are teaching them to apply critical thinking skills. That is to say, to analyze an article for themselves, determine whether or not it is valid, to use it as a springboard for jumping off into other resources, etc.
NBC hasn't had a new hit TV show in years - that's why they recently moved Jay Leno to 10. They, literally, had nothing that could fill the slot. So yes, I think NBC might be in bad enough shape that they'd be willing to take some risks.
Slashdot Mirror
That's what reciprocal agreements are for. In general, these agreements say that one country will honor court judgments from another country provided that that other country has jurisdiction. That is almost certainly not the case here. The actions occurred in the US, the files were published on servers in the US, and all of this is legal under US law.
The works in the photo may not have copyright, but the fact is, the photos still have copyright. - only if the photograph of that public domain work has sufficient creative input from the creator to create a new copyright. The bar for 'creative input' is fairly low (deciding where to stand in order to take a picture of a sculpture is enough), but a flatbed scan is clearly not enough, as the court explicitly found in the Bridgeman case.
Let's say someone made a cd, where they performed songs that are all in public domain. They still get copyright over their version of the performance. - that is because the performance of a public domain work is different from the original work. These pictures are, by definition, not different.
The same would apply to a photo that you have taken. - No, it doesn't. See above
US courts have already ruled that "slavishly accurate" reproductions of public domain works have no copyright protection.
Unfortunately these events are occuring in Europe. - no, they are not. The user they threatened is in the US, and the servers he uploaded to are in the US.
but that does not mean that the photographs (a derivative work) are automatically in the public domain - in the US, yes, they are.
They're threatening an american user for doing what is perfectly legal in the US on servers based in the US. Their copyright claims have no merit whatsoever.
If they sue him in the US, it'll get tossed out on the basis that the US does not recognize these works as having copright (or any "slavish" reproductions thereof, according to Corel v. Bridgeman); if they sue him in the UK, he can ignore the lawsuit, have a default judgement entered against him, and good luck to them in pursuing it.
The user they threatened, and the servers, are both located in the US. There's really no way for them to pursue this.
This is one bit of denialist propaganda that gets repeated over and over. Only there's one huge problem with it -- the satellites temperature measurements correlate very closely with the ground temperature measurements. (Compare the blue with black and red lines here). I suppose the satellites are misbehaving in exactly the same way too?
If only that was a joke...
I think you're confusing two different uses of parallelism. One is "small" parallelism -- the kind you see in graphical user interfaces. That is to say, if Firefox is busy loading a page, you can still click on the menus and get a response. Different aspects of the GUI are handled by different threads, so the program is responsive instead of hanging. That's done by using threading libraries like Posix and the like. But that's really a negligible application of parallelism. The really important use of parallelism is for really large programs that require lots of hardware to run in a reasonable amount of time.
The threading libraries that you use for GUI applications don't work well for computationally intensive applications requiring parallelism. They require a shared-memory architecture. (A shared memory architecture is one in which all processors see the same values in the RAM. E.g, if processor #1 writes X to memory block 0x87654321, and processor #2 reads 0x87654321, it returns X instead of whatever value processor #2 last wrote there) Shared-memory architectures don't scale -- the biggest ones you can buy have about 64 CPUs. If you do want to run computationally intensive applications on shared memory architectures, then OpenMP is the library of choice. It's also fairly simple to use.
If you want to run a big applications, you need to use a distributed memory architecture. And MPI (message passing interface) is pretty much the only game in town where that is concerned. It's by far the dominant player.
This is a subject near and dear to my heart. I got to participate in one of the early X10 alpha tests (my research group was asked to try it out and give feedback to Vivek Sarker's IBM team). Since then, I've worked with lots of other specialized programming HPC programming languages.
One extremely important aspect of supercomputing, a point that many people fail to grasp, is that application code tends to live a long, long, long time. Far longer than the machines themselves. Rewriting code is simply too expensive and economically inefficient. At Los Alamos National Lab, much of the source code they run are nuclear simulations written Fortran 77 or Fortran 90. Someone might have updated it to use MPI, but otherwise it's the same program. So it's important to bear in mind that those older languages, while not nearly as well suited for parallelism (either for programmer ease-of-use/effeciency, or to allow the compiler to do deep analysis/optimization/scheduling), are going to be around for a long time yet.
I have three suggestions - The Dragons of Eden by Carl Sagan (1977), A Brief History of Time by Stephen Hawking (1988), and A Short History of Nearly Everything by Bill Bryson (2005)
"Submitting a picture is a simple thing. It shouldn't involve much learning." - in a world without copyright that's true. It's technically trivial create something like 4chan.
But if you want such a database to be reusable and legally trusthworthy, and not a legal land mine, then you have to ask a bit more of your contributors. And copyright law, especially international copyright law, is anything but simple.
On Wikipedia, a distinction is made between pictures and text. All the text is GFDL, but the pictures can be other licenses. An article can have GFDL text with creative commons attribution/sharealike pictures. I'm not a lawyer, but I've been told that mixed copyright like this is a relatively new, ill-defined area of law. For distribution, Wikipedia is available in text-only dumps and combined text/image dumps.
Everything you said is true, but you forgot to mention that disseminating classified information is a felony and far more likely to land you in Leavenworth than unauthorized reproduction of copyrighted material :)
It's not exactly a secret that the best way to back up data is to have multiple copies in multiple places. It's just that Wikipedia's license happens to facilitate this. However, most people consider their data private and don't want anyone being able to get a copy willy-nilly.
English is the almost universal language of academia, business, and the internet. Once you have the captions translated into English, it's relatively easy to go from English to each of the other 300-odd Wikipedia languages.
The good side is that American law specifies that the work of government employees on government time is in the public domain. The bad side is that the library of congress website is the single most disorganized, least function website on the internet. It is the only non-proxy website I have seen in a decade or more that uses temporary URLs (which makes deep linking to their content on Wikipedia difficult, since we can't link to the page we got it from).
The tools for automated submissions of the pictures are already in place. What is needed, however, are people to translate the German captions into English.
The government treats newspapers the same as it does any other for-profit institution. Your argument is tantamount to saying they should be given special tax exempt status just because of what they do. The first amendment says it can't pass laws that discriminate against them - that is not the same as treating them better than all others.
This isn't the first case like this. There was A.H. v Florida, which made national headlines. Unfortunately, it ended badly for the teens in question.
They aren't teaching them how to "use" Wikipedia in the sense of editing it, they are teaching them to apply critical thinking skills. That is to say, to analyze an article for themselves, determine whether or not it is valid, to use it as a springboard for jumping off into other resources, etc.
That comment was hilarious - I wish I had mod points for you.
NBC hasn't had a new hit TV show in years - that's why they recently moved Jay Leno to 10. They, literally, had nothing that could fill the slot. So yes, I think NBC might be in bad enough shape that they'd be willing to take some risks.