This is what I don't get, too. Trademarks are basically there to stop someone passing off their product or service as someone else's. IMHO, this is entirely reasonable: someone doing so would be gaining from others' work at the expense of those others.
In this case, there is pretty much zero danger of someone mistaking a security product called "Windows Defender" from a small software outfit in Australia for the flagship full-scale operating system from the most famous software vendor in the world.
If this is allowed to stand, does that mean no-one can release "MySuperNovelProduct for Windows" because it uses the term Windows, despite the fact that this use is informative, accurate and non-deceptive?
If this is an open-and-shut case under Australian trademark law, then I suggest that the law needs amending so that it's clear that Microsoft has no claim. In fact, trademark law should be doing exactly the opposite here: protecting the small guy from having a big guy come along and take the name associated with his existing product for their own benefit. They aren't defending a legitimate right to preserve the integrity of the Windows name, they're abusing a legal technicality at the expense of a genuine product to further their own ends, and the law should punish such behaviour, not reward it.
This is something I don't get. A contract must have consideration for both parties. If Microsoft got the use of the name and the other guy got screwed, what legal basis does any "signing over" of the rights to the name have?
There must be more to this story than just that, because that's Amateur Legal Studies 101.
The truth is, if they cut the price in half, they would likely sell more than double what they are now.
The thing is, that's almost certainly not true, because their marketing people almost certainly did some trials on what people would be prepared to pay and picked the sweet spot that maximises their income. As much as I'd like to believe what you wrote, and see various over-priced sci-fi DVDs brought down to the same level as everything else, I can believe that in the case of ST there are enough super-geeks willing to pay almost any price that the "normal" fans are not the deciding factor here.
The problem they have is that under UK law, once a suspect has been charged, they become the responsibility of the organisation that handles public prosections, not the police. At that point, the police are no longer allowed to question them.
Obviously the solution to this problem is not to change the law such that questioning after charging is permitted under some reasonable circumstances, but to extend the period an individual may be held against their will without any opportunity to defend themselves to an arbitrarily long time based on claims whose true merit will never be revealed for "national security reasons".:-/
Re:Is it always in the interest of content provide
on
Reining in Google
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· Score: 1
You quoted one sentence of my post as a decontextualized and conveniently divided straw man.
No, I challenged your initial premise, which was clearly stated (without further context) in your opening paragraph. Having undermined that point, much of the later content of your post becomes irrelevant. Exactly the same is true of your next post, and my comment here in reply to it.
If you feel that this was the wrong point to pick up on in your post, perhaps you could consider not opening future posts with an absolute statement that presents your personal opinion, without supporting reasoning or evidence, as fact.
Didn't amazon do something like this already? Well at least a few pages of the book.
Something like it, yes, but only with the explicit agreement of the rights holders.
Is it always in the interest of content providers?
on
Reining in Google
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· Score: 4, Insightful
When someone puts something on the Web, they have agreed to try to make it visible,
...on their web site...
and Google is serving their interests by making it more visible.
But who are we to say that for someone else's material?
It's very easy to take the public-spirited view in any intellectual property debate, be it on copyright or patents or whatever. Allowing anyone to control access to or use of information is (almost) always against the public interest in any isolated case and once the information has already been published. But you have to consider the bigger picture, which is why concepts like copyright exist in law.
Personally, I agree with the original reply that started this subthread: things like Google Cache and the Wayback Machine are on very dubious ground, both legally and ethically. It isn't a no-brainer that these caching systems are of benefit to the original creators of the material. I've enumerated some reasons that I believe this before, but probably the three most important are:
potential financial damage (for example, not seeing ads on the original site)
potential disruption of feedback (not getting an accurate idea of numbers of page impressions, click-throughs, referrers, etc.)
presenting out of date or incorrect information that's been removed from the real site.
Caching/archival services disrupt all of these things, potentially damaging the interests of the content provider. Those interests are protected by copyright to encourage them to offer the content to the public in the first place, and thus I have a problem with violating the letter and/or spirit of copyright law to set up a cache. If you want to offer such a service, by all means do, but make it opt-in; "You can just disable it with robots.txt/by e-mailing us at.../by setting up a password" really isn't good enough.
Although commercial entities can be killed off by the unfortunate side effects of dubious caching, this isn't automatically a money issue, either. For example, I help to run a relatively large web site for a local club, and we rely on server logs to see which links visitors do and don't follow and which pages they want to get to from which other pages. We use this information to improve the links and menus on our site. We have no commercial stake here; this is a non-profit organisation, providing the site purely to help our members and anyone else with common interests. However, if everyone started seeing our site indirectly via Google Cache or whatever, we couldn't do this because our server logs would be empty, and therefore we couldn't continue to update our site to better provide for our visitors.
We also update our content regularly, sometimes even providing information in an afternoon that's relevant only to the same evening. Yes, we make mistakes occasionally too, and have to fix them. Having a cache that's out of date by even a couple of hours could spoil a whole evening for one of our members who missed a last-minute announcement or saw cached data that was copied while there was a mistake on the site that had since been fixed.
None of this is in either our interests or that of our members/random visitors interested in our stuff, and there's not a single financial consideration in any of the above problems. So no, Google Cache isn't automatically serving the interests of either the copyright holder or the general public, and more to the point, it's not up to them to decide what's in the best interests of others and whether it's OK to break the law on that basis.
I don't think I'd want all those things in a browser. Then again, since there's rather more to CAD than the graphics (which is a tiny portion of any serious CAD package), I don't think I'll stress over my job writing libraries used in CAD software just yet.
What will be cool about SVG, assuming it works in practice, is having all those CGI scripts that do simple database look-ups able to render simple but effective graphical representations, rather than just displaying data in ugly and/or unhelpful tabular text formats. As long as major sites don't do a Flash with it (must... make... everything... use... cool... new... feature) and stick to the same niches where things like Flash are actually useful (presenting graphical data where this actually enhances the user's experience) this should be great.
Once the browser with 90% market share supports it too, of course.;-)
With the exception of a very small number of national copyright libraries, those books will generally have been bought at the market rate, regardless of the fact that libraries then hire them out for free for a limited time to library members. Moreover, they can only hire out as many books as they've bought, not an arbitrarily large number at any given time. Google's proposed scheme is fundamentally different in both respects.
Google don't have any fair use rights. (Neither does anyone else under US law: fair use is an affirmative defence.) Even if they did, it's highly debatable whether they'd apply here, where the purpose of making the copy is clearly for commercial benefit, and the much-claimed advantages for copyright holders (/cite Slashdot discussions passim) while not implausible are still purely hypothetical at this stage. Sorry, but your post is just fanboy wishful thinking.
In addition to the above, you can probably ask for a special exception & say you are willing to take the blame if your FreeBSD box gets rooted.
It would also be a good idea to demonstrate that you have the financial resources to cover the loss if the system gets compromised as a result of your non-standard box creating a security flaw. For the benefit of the uninitiated/wishful thinkers, that liability is $EXPERT_HOURLY_RATE * $HOURS_TO_REINSTALL_ENTIRE_NETWORK + $COST_TO_ORGANISATION_OF_TIME_LOST_DOING_SO, because once you're compromised, nothing less is safe.
If you aren't prepared/able to underwrite such a sum, you have no business ignoring IT's policy and using a non-standard set-up, end of story. If you want to do something else for a genuine reason connected with your job, make a case for why your need to do that is more important than any risk it creates to the organisation's IT infrastructure, and the attendant risk to everyone else's ability to do their job, and ask to have the policy changed or for an exception to be made.
Contrary to popular opinion, not all sysadmins are stupid, draconian power freaks. Some of them just take security seriously. (Not saying that's necessarily the case here, but don't assume a policy like this is unreasonable just because it's inconvenient.)
They'd better hope it's them, because if it's us, then it's not circumventing their copy protection scheme to hold down shift while I load the CD, is it?
On the other hand, if it's them and they install software on my PC without my permission in the UK, my lawyer would like to talk to them about the Computer Misuse Act.
Oh dear. This sounds like a lose-lose proposition for Sony. That's really, y'know, too bad and all.:-)
Bah. Real women don't become starship captains until series 5, when they've finished the much harder job of clearing up after dubious male commanding officers for four years.
Sorry. He meant to say that in Star Trek, all the women are aliens, wear short skirts, or wear skin-tight body suits that often strangely contravene the uniform guidelines followed by all other characters. Do please forgive him.:-)
The beast has been starving for years. We've run massive deficits for years, and not had a problem continuing. We haven't even had a problem expanding spending. The beast will not be starved into submission, we have to take political action.
Fortunately, that overspending will collapse in on the government eventually, probably sooner rather than later at this point.
Write your legislators, tell them you want them to [...] kill certain *ahem* agencies.
I think they throw you in prison under anti-terrorist legislation for that, don't they?:-/
The truth of the matter is that sometimes the little guys will get abused by authority until authority picks on a public figure in which uses his position to fix the problem and therefore no more little guys get abused.
Hear, hear!
I find I increasingly have a problem with the Internet being unregulated. When it's unregulated, certain people or organisations (particularly large ones) naturally come to have more power than others, not necessarily based on merit. At that point, they can damage less powerful people or organisations, and often the usual recourse is not available to the damaged party. I have encountered this several times now.
For example, I've had a bitter ex post (on LiveJournal) modified versions of some intimate personal mails we exchanged while going out, knowing they would present a false image of me to some mutual friends who would see them there. The LiveJournal admins fobbed off my complaint, giving a technically implausible excuse for why they couldn't fix it, and (scary part) when I mentioned it once in a relevant discussion on Slashdot, I got loads of replies saying of course they can't censor it just on your say-so, while failing to notice that I had been given no reasonable opportunity to prove that my objection was legitimate. I guess it's easy to make flippant comments like "Just deal with it, it's only words", or "You need to find more understanding friends", from the safety of an anonymous account hidden behind a computer screen. Try it in real life and see how you do.
Just a few days ago, I had a deeply unpleasant encounter with the infamous editors at the Open Directory Project (DMOZ). Here's a group whose directory is so significant that my organisation's descriptive text if you Google for us comes from what some random ODP editor decided, not from either Google or us. They rejected a request to update certain aspects of our entry, on the basis that they violated editorial guidelines, and those guidelines are for the benefit of the web-browsing public and not webmasters (whose opinions they consider irrelevant - Google for them and you'll find numerous tales of woe where an ODP has treated others with contempt and hidden behind their guidelines to get away with it).
The key point here is that both of these organisations admitted that their actions (or lack of them) were actually doing me/my group harm. They knew they were damaging other people through their decision and their influence, and they chose to ignore that fact.
And what options are we left with? The damaged party could, theoretically, take some sort of legal action. Of course, when you're acting across international boundries, that's not exactly straightforward, nor cheap. In a case of major damage being cause it might be worth it, but what about all the minor injustices that happen every day when groups like this choose to throw their weight around? In the real world, we have legal systems, small claims courts, and such to deal with it. On the Internet, we have nothing.
I'm sure some would argue that this is a price worth paying for a free Internet. Once upon a time, I might have agreed with them, but as more large organisations rise to a power above their station, and more little guys like you and me get trampled in small but still damaging ways, I find my belief in the practicality of a free Internet challenged. With freedom should come responsibility, yet right now, the Big Guys accept no responsibility for their actions and anyone who's damaged by a Big Guy has no recourse.
Unless, of course, they themselves run the most popular geek blog on the Internet, and have a voice to shout back. So you go for it, CmdrTaco, because the rest of us can't.
Perhaps the Onion staff should mail the lawyer concerned back a copy of the Penn & Teller episode of The West Wing, with the caption "But did we really use the Seal of the President, or did you just think we did...?"
Slashdot Mirror
This is what I don't get, too. Trademarks are basically there to stop someone passing off their product or service as someone else's. IMHO, this is entirely reasonable: someone doing so would be gaining from others' work at the expense of those others.
In this case, there is pretty much zero danger of someone mistaking a security product called "Windows Defender" from a small software outfit in Australia for the flagship full-scale operating system from the most famous software vendor in the world.
If this is allowed to stand, does that mean no-one can release "MySuperNovelProduct for Windows" because it uses the term Windows, despite the fact that this use is informative, accurate and non-deceptive?
If this is an open-and-shut case under Australian trademark law, then I suggest that the law needs amending so that it's clear that Microsoft has no claim. In fact, trademark law should be doing exactly the opposite here: protecting the small guy from having a big guy come along and take the name associated with his existing product for their own benefit. They aren't defending a legitimate right to preserve the integrity of the Windows name, they're abusing a legal technicality at the expense of a genuine product to further their own ends, and the law should punish such behaviour, not reward it.
This is something I don't get. A contract must have consideration for both parties. If Microsoft got the use of the name and the other guy got screwed, what legal basis does any "signing over" of the rights to the name have?
There must be more to this story than just that, because that's Amateur Legal Studies 101.
Stable and secure like Linux, presumably?
The Windows bashing is getting a little tired now.
Bah. By the 24th century, if you want a holographic version you just tell the computer to generate you one, and it'll produce ST:TNG or whatever.
Rumours that the technology to generate a complete ST episode using only a computer program exists today are, of course, wholly unfounded.
The thing is, that's almost certainly not true, because their marketing people almost certainly did some trials on what people would be prepared to pay and picked the sweet spot that maximises their income. As much as I'd like to believe what you wrote, and see various over-priced sci-fi DVDs brought down to the same level as everything else, I can believe that in the case of ST there are enough super-geeks willing to pay almost any price that the "normal" fans are not the deciding factor here.
The problem they have is that under UK law, once a suspect has been charged, they become the responsibility of the organisation that handles public prosections, not the police. At that point, the police are no longer allowed to question them.
Obviously the solution to this problem is not to change the law such that questioning after charging is permitted under some reasonable circumstances, but to extend the period an individual may be held against their will without any opportunity to defend themselves to an arbitrarily long time based on claims whose true merit will never be revealed for "national security reasons". :-/
No, I challenged your initial premise, which was clearly stated (without further context) in your opening paragraph. Having undermined that point, much of the later content of your post becomes irrelevant. Exactly the same is true of your next post, and my comment here in reply to it.
If you feel that this was the wrong point to pick up on in your post, perhaps you could consider not opening future posts with an absolute statement that presents your personal opinion, without supporting reasoning or evidence, as fact.
Something like it, yes, but only with the explicit agreement of the rights holders.
...on their web site...
But who are we to say that for someone else's material?
It's very easy to take the public-spirited view in any intellectual property debate, be it on copyright or patents or whatever. Allowing anyone to control access to or use of information is (almost) always against the public interest in any isolated case and once the information has already been published. But you have to consider the bigger picture, which is why concepts like copyright exist in law.
Personally, I agree with the original reply that started this subthread: things like Google Cache and the Wayback Machine are on very dubious ground, both legally and ethically. It isn't a no-brainer that these caching systems are of benefit to the original creators of the material. I've enumerated some reasons that I believe this before, but probably the three most important are:
Caching/archival services disrupt all of these things, potentially damaging the interests of the content provider. Those interests are protected by copyright to encourage them to offer the content to the public in the first place, and thus I have a problem with violating the letter and/or spirit of copyright law to set up a cache. If you want to offer such a service, by all means do, but make it opt-in; "You can just disable it with robots.txt/by e-mailing us at.../by setting up a password" really isn't good enough.
Although commercial entities can be killed off by the unfortunate side effects of dubious caching, this isn't automatically a money issue, either. For example, I help to run a relatively large web site for a local club, and we rely on server logs to see which links visitors do and don't follow and which pages they want to get to from which other pages. We use this information to improve the links and menus on our site. We have no commercial stake here; this is a non-profit organisation, providing the site purely to help our members and anyone else with common interests. However, if everyone started seeing our site indirectly via Google Cache or whatever, we couldn't do this because our server logs would be empty, and therefore we couldn't continue to update our site to better provide for our visitors.
We also update our content regularly, sometimes even providing information in an afternoon that's relevant only to the same evening. Yes, we make mistakes occasionally too, and have to fix them. Having a cache that's out of date by even a couple of hours could spoil a whole evening for one of our members who missed a last-minute announcement or saw cached data that was copied while there was a mistake on the site that had since been fixed.
None of this is in either our interests or that of our members/random visitors interested in our stuff, and there's not a single financial consideration in any of the above problems. So no, Google Cache isn't automatically serving the interests of either the copyright holder or the general public, and more to the point, it's not up to them to decide what's in the best interests of others and whether it's OK to break the law on that basis.
I don't think I'd want all those things in a browser. Then again, since there's rather more to CAD than the graphics (which is a tiny portion of any serious CAD package), I don't think I'll stress over my job writing libraries used in CAD software just yet.
What will be cool about SVG, assuming it works in practice, is having all those CGI scripts that do simple database look-ups able to render simple but effective graphical representations, rather than just displaying data in ugly and/or unhelpful tabular text formats. As long as major sites don't do a Flash with it (must... make... everything... use... cool... new... feature) and stick to the same niches where things like Flash are actually useful (presenting graphical data where this actually enhances the user's experience) this should be great.
Once the browser with 90% market share supports it too, of course. ;-)
You don't think a company whose profits are based almost entirely on its hosting of advertisements might have a slight ulterior motive here?
With the exception of a very small number of national copyright libraries, those books will generally have been bought at the market rate, regardless of the fact that libraries then hire them out for free for a limited time to library members. Moreover, they can only hire out as many books as they've bought, not an arbitrarily large number at any given time. Google's proposed scheme is fundamentally different in both respects.
Google don't have any fair use rights. (Neither does anyone else under US law: fair use is an affirmative defence.) Even if they did, it's highly debatable whether they'd apply here, where the purpose of making the copy is clearly for commercial benefit, and the much-claimed advantages for copyright holders (/cite Slashdot discussions passim) while not implausible are still purely hypothetical at this stage. Sorry, but your post is just fanboy wishful thinking.
You appear to be from the US, and you consider an explicit provision in the Constitution of your country to be a flimsy legal basis?
Do you feel similarly about the international agreements and long-established statute law in other countries as well?
How exactly is "firm legal ground" defined in your dictionary?! :-)
It would also be a good idea to demonstrate that you have the financial resources to cover the loss if the system gets compromised as a result of your non-standard box creating a security flaw. For the benefit of the uninitiated/wishful thinkers, that liability is $EXPERT_HOURLY_RATE * $HOURS_TO_REINSTALL_ENTIRE_NETWORK + $COST_TO_ORGANISATION_OF_TIME_LOST_DOING_SO, because once you're compromised, nothing less is safe.
If you aren't prepared/able to underwrite such a sum, you have no business ignoring IT's policy and using a non-standard set-up, end of story. If you want to do something else for a genuine reason connected with your job, make a case for why your need to do that is more important than any risk it creates to the organisation's IT infrastructure, and the attendant risk to everyone else's ability to do their job, and ask to have the policy changed or for an exception to be made.
Contrary to popular opinion, not all sysadmins are stupid, draconian power freaks. Some of them just take security seriously. (Not saying that's necessarily the case here, but don't assume a policy like this is unreasonable just because it's inconvenient.)
They'd better hope it's them, because if it's us, then it's not circumventing their copy protection scheme to hold down shift while I load the CD, is it?
On the other hand, if it's them and they install software on my PC without my permission in the UK, my lawyer would like to talk to them about the Computer Misuse Act.
Oh dear. This sounds like a lose-lose proposition for Sony. That's really, y'know, too bad and all. :-)
Your welcome is irrelevant. Prepare to be assimilated. <nudge> <nudge> <wink> <wink>
Love & hugs
7 of 9
Bah. Real women don't become starship captains until series 5, when they've finished the much harder job of clearing up after dubious male commanding officers for four years.
Sorry. He meant to say that in Star Trek, all the women are aliens, wear short skirts, or wear skin-tight body suits that often strangely contravene the uniform guidelines followed by all other characters. Do please forgive him. :-)
Isn't that kinda normal for a development environment?
Mencken is often very perceptive. Here's another quote from the same source:
Well, when the web site for your highest elected official is a porn site... ;-)
Fortunately, that overspending will collapse in on the government eventually, probably sooner rather than later at this point.
I think they throw you in prison under anti-terrorist legislation for that, don't they? :-/
Hear, hear!
I find I increasingly have a problem with the Internet being unregulated. When it's unregulated, certain people or organisations (particularly large ones) naturally come to have more power than others, not necessarily based on merit. At that point, they can damage less powerful people or organisations, and often the usual recourse is not available to the damaged party. I have encountered this several times now.
For example, I've had a bitter ex post (on LiveJournal) modified versions of some intimate personal mails we exchanged while going out, knowing they would present a false image of me to some mutual friends who would see them there. The LiveJournal admins fobbed off my complaint, giving a technically implausible excuse for why they couldn't fix it, and (scary part) when I mentioned it once in a relevant discussion on Slashdot, I got loads of replies saying of course they can't censor it just on your say-so, while failing to notice that I had been given no reasonable opportunity to prove that my objection was legitimate. I guess it's easy to make flippant comments like "Just deal with it, it's only words", or "You need to find more understanding friends", from the safety of an anonymous account hidden behind a computer screen. Try it in real life and see how you do.
Just a few days ago, I had a deeply unpleasant encounter with the infamous editors at the Open Directory Project (DMOZ). Here's a group whose directory is so significant that my organisation's descriptive text if you Google for us comes from what some random ODP editor decided, not from either Google or us. They rejected a request to update certain aspects of our entry, on the basis that they violated editorial guidelines, and those guidelines are for the benefit of the web-browsing public and not webmasters (whose opinions they consider irrelevant - Google for them and you'll find numerous tales of woe where an ODP has treated others with contempt and hidden behind their guidelines to get away with it).
The key point here is that both of these organisations admitted that their actions (or lack of them) were actually doing me/my group harm. They knew they were damaging other people through their decision and their influence, and they chose to ignore that fact.
And what options are we left with? The damaged party could, theoretically, take some sort of legal action. Of course, when you're acting across international boundries, that's not exactly straightforward, nor cheap. In a case of major damage being cause it might be worth it, but what about all the minor injustices that happen every day when groups like this choose to throw their weight around? In the real world, we have legal systems, small claims courts, and such to deal with it. On the Internet, we have nothing.
I'm sure some would argue that this is a price worth paying for a free Internet. Once upon a time, I might have agreed with them, but as more large organisations rise to a power above their station, and more little guys like you and me get trampled in small but still damaging ways, I find my belief in the practicality of a free Internet challenged. With freedom should come responsibility, yet right now, the Big Guys accept no responsibility for their actions and anyone who's damaged by a Big Guy has no recourse.
Unless, of course, they themselves run the most popular geek blog on the Internet, and have a voice to shout back. So you go for it, CmdrTaco, because the rest of us can't.
Perhaps the Onion staff should mail the lawyer concerned back a copy of the Penn & Teller episode of The West Wing, with the caption "But did we really use the Seal of the President, or did you just think we did...?"