It can botch complex layouts when loading microsoft`s formats, due to the proprietary nature of the formats.. If you create complex layouts in openoffice and save them in the native format there are no such problems..
I'm sorry, but from direct personal experience over the past week, you are really, really wrong.
I can't believe I'm seeing so many posts to this thread about how stable the beta of 2.0 is. We've seen pretty fundamental bugs in the formatting code: save a document... reload it... half your character styles are applied to some random stretch of text nowhere near where you applied them before!
As noted in my post at the start of this thread, we've been very disappointed with the robustness of 1.1.0 in our latest project too -- it failed to read a file saved by the same version of Writer on a different machine -- so we're hoping 1.1.5 will bring some much-needed stability.
I'd settle for saving and opening its own files better. My team had a nightmare for several hours yesterday, after a Writer document that was created in 1.1.0 on one machine (and displayed, saved, loaded and exported to PDF fine on that machine) had completely screwed up formatting when loaded onto other machines running the same version of Writer. The same problem was evident trying to load that file into 1.1.5 or the beta of 2.0. This is not what you need when your documents were supposed to go to the print shop the day before and a deadline is looming...:-(
After trying the beta for a while, there are still some very basic formatting bugs there, so I can't see that going mainstream for a few months yet. Here's hoping 1.1.5 is a more stable platform in the meantime!
And what happens when 1,000 other services follow up the precedent, and all expect the author/publisher to opt out of them individually?
It's funny how so many people think opt-in is the only fair thing for things like spam mailing lists, yet opt-out is perfectly reasonable when it's the rights of others that are being sacrificed.
I wonder how many of those people have ever actually contributed a truly worthwhile book to society, and how many of them are freeloaders who don't want to pay for something they can have for nothing (at the expense of those who worked to create it).
What about the moral argument that if you benefit from someone else's efforts, they should be given some fair reward in exchange?
That seems to me to be one of the most fundamental moral principles there is.
Please note that this does not conflict with your position that making an effort does not equate to a right to be rewarded. The fact that someone else is benefitting from the effort, and thus the effort has demonstrable value, is what implies the right to be rewarded.
Really? Had I bought a book(and I have), I would not consider someone forbidding me to copy my personal property to be acceptable by default.
Really? Had I found where you kept your book, I would not consider someone forbidding me to pick it up and walk off with it because I don't believe in the concept of "property" to be acceptable by default.
Fortunately for everyone, in civilised society we agree and follow laws to prevent such selfish attitudes screwing things up for everyone. Copyright is no more an artificial concept than physical property, and both exist only because society at large considers their effects to be a net plus.
In one post, you've restated just about everything I disagree with in this discussion.
Everyone supporting Google here seems to be claiming they're doing the authors a favour by giving them free advertising. For a start, there are the small issues that:
the authors didn't ask for that form of advertising (which you're assuming without evidence that they want)
there is no exemption to copyright for "providing unsolicited free advertising" (which you're assuming with evidence that the courts will somehow allow)
the benefits to the authors aren't clear (though you're assuming without evidence that they will be significant; I very much doubt this, since people already go to sites like Amazon to find and check out books they are interested in buying).
Even then, this is a lot more than just a friendly hand helping with advertising the book: it is inevitable that people will find a way around the content controls, and download copies of complete works. Google can advertise legitimate channels all they like, but it doesn't mean they're not blatantly facilitating wholesale copyright infringement for a whole new industry by the unscrupulous (and still profiting from it themselves, of course; this isn't an exercise in charity, it's an exercise in raising ad revenue by a profit-making corporation).
I thought this was your best bit:
While I agree Google should probably have asked the publishers for permission,
D'ya think?
a lawsuit is just far beyond common decency.
Google is fairly clearly treading a fine line here and upsetting a lot of people as a result, just as many of its past offerings have. It amazes me that they haven't suffered a crippling law suit already, and I will have little sympathy if, having decided to basically take on a whole industry on dubious grounds, said industry then annihilates them in the courts. Unlike some around here, I haven't drunk the Kool-Aid that makes me think this particular profit-making corporation is somehow the saviour of mankind, exempt from our laws and any ethical responsibilities, and incapable of doing wrong.
Bringing a lawsuit where you have a case to make is any individual's (or, in this case, group's) right, and the only people who should be worried about it are those who can't defend themselves. There are genuine problems with this approach in the US (witness RIAA intimidation and settling out of court where defendants can't afford legal fees) but I hardly think that applies to Google.
It is time copyright gets a huge makeover to make it more edible for consumers and work better in the new "digital reality", and I am not talking about stronger measurements and DRM.
Copyright exists for a reason. If people like you didn't constantly ignore it as you see fit and/or campaign for changes, we'd have had genuine, mutually beneficial electronic distribution channels years ago. Instead, we get half-assed crap like this, and the inevitable resulting conflicts that serve no-one but lawyers.
People like you are well meaning, I'm sure, but ultimately you are part of the problem and not part of the solution.
That's simply not true. I have read content from inside several books via Amazon, without any sort of log-in.
However, there is still the obvious difference that the excerpts on Amazon are provided with the co-operation of the publishers, with their active consent. Also, the excerpts available are limited, with no scope for bypassing them to obtain a copy of the complete work.
How could they control this market? There are few if any barriers to prevent others from participating. If this is validated as legal then I guarantee that there will be more participants.
You can bet your bottom dollar that if Google manage to get away with this, their new offering will have terms of service prohibiting anyone else systematically downloading from their database via automated means. Then they'll put the same army of lawyers behind it, in order to stop others from copying the material Google did. Getting hold of equivalent original sources will be difficult for any organisation that isn't already the size of Google, too. At that stage, the content will have been held freely available for Google to copy, but not for anyone else to copy from Google, and this paradox will stand until someone else with mightier lawyers collapses it. The only people to profit from this will be those connected with... Google!
C'mon... if we can come up with the books we can, we must be creative enough to figure out a way to make re-distributable data have value.
Yeah, you'd think someone would have invented copyright by now.:-)
Most redistributable content does have value today, in the eyes of the law. If everyone respected that law, it would be straightforward to implement an electronic distribution scheme that benefitted both authors and their audience, with traditional publishers still able to provide valuable services in editing, providing the distribution and advertising, and perhaps the layout and finishing work. In other words, everybody would win.
Unfortunately, significant parts of the population choose to break that law for their own selfish purposes. This is the reason cases like this are brought, and more beneficial alternative distribution channels have thus far been still-born.
Anti-virus software is itself a hugely invasive, expensive, destabilizing chunk of voodoo that alters your system's behaviour in countless poorly-documented ways. Unless your virus risk is absurdly out of control (ie, you're running Windows), anti-virus software is vastly worse than the problem it supposedly solves.
So much for the legendary robustness of $ALTERNATIVE_OS, then. If Linux or MacOS X is so much better designed than Windows, how can some anti-virus software destabilise the system as you describe?
I've been an OSX user for nearly 5 years. Still waiting...
You hope. A lot of users don't realise their system has been "pwn3d", particularly those naive enough to think that using Platform X or Application Y somehow makes them immune to attack.
This is the year 2005, and it's worth more to a botnet to use your compromised system discreetly. Sure, they could annoy you by making letters fall off your screen instead, but they'd alert you to their presence in the process, and that went out with amateur hour in the 1980s.
Actually, those exemptions to copyright law that we do have are enumerated specifically in statute law; the CDPA makes some provision for criticism and academic study, for example. There are also a couple of separate provisions, such as making back-ups of computer software. However, there is no blanket right to copy for personal use in the UK.
You seem to misunderstand the powers of the courts. They do not make new laws, they only interpret existing ones (and by doing so, set precedents that may be used in future cases, so yes, they do make law in a different sense). A judge cannot simply decide that you should be allowed to violate the statute law that provides copyright protection because he happens to think you should be allowed to do so.
If you cannot avail yourself of any statutory defence in this case -- and from the waffly arguments and lack of references you've provided in this discussion, clearly you can't -- then the judge will almost certainly stress this to the jury when summing up, and direct them as firmly as possible to reach a guilty verdict on the basis that you have submitted no defence of any legal merit.
Now, it is almost impossible to sell anything and once you do manage to sell something, getting paid is a whole different ballgame too.
S'funny, we never really had a problem with that. Our sales figures dipped a little during the tech bust, but that's about it. Of course, we have a product that our customers actually want and that offers them genuine advantages with each new version rather than just a facelift. Perhaps it's different for certain other types of software company?:-)
Rather, as you quoted, IP generated by an employee through the course of his or her employment legally belongs to the employer. The problem, of course, is figuring out when/where the idea was generated.
Not always. You can't copyright ideas, for example, so all that matters as far as copyright is concerned is when the expression of the idea was created.
This particular article is a Member view. Is this just someones blog piece, or a regular column writer? Does this piece matter at all?
The author is an academic, whose name turns up a couple of times if you google it together with "BCS", along with some intriguing comments on other forums.
One of the most interesting was the question of why, being an academic, he chose to publish this rant in a freebie magazine rather than a peer-reviewed journal.
Another notes that his department has rather close ties to licensing of IP.
Several described the correctness of his claims about IP using various unflattering terms.
After a fairly extensive web search, I have been unable to find anything substantiating his unsupported claim that for professional software developers in the UK, any code you write (even out of work time) belongs to your employer by default. That would have been a very worrying revelation had it been true, but pretty much everyone on the web just quotes the letter of the law ("in the normal course of their employment"), mentioning the common themes of employer's time, employer's resources, and work based on the nature of the employment.
That's funny. I used to work for a small, privately owned software company that was successful by just about any measure. We had about 30 developers, 4 sales guys, 3 support guys, and a few people doing admin, accounts, etc.
We got bought out by a US megacorp, and now there are several times as many sales guys as there are developers, and strangely, key initiatives are getting held up or canned because there isn't enough manpower to do them! Well, duh.
Yeah, I was wondering about that, too. Here's the bit that applies to me:
In most industrialized nations, intellectual property (IP) generated by an employee through the course of his or her employment legally belongs to the employer. In the UK, this is embodied in the Patents Act 1977 and the Copyright, Designs & Patents Act 1988. Of course, if you are employed as a janitor and happen to write software in your spare time, you could argue that the IP that you are generating is entirely unconnected with your normal duties as an employee and therefore belongs to you. However, when it comes to software professionals, there is no such argument. Any software that they write, irrespective of whether it is during or outside normal working hours, legally belongs to their employer.
That's interesting, because we had a huge issue with this in getting the contracts sorted out when my employer was taken over by a US megacorp whose default contract basically said they owned everything. There is now an explicit exemption in my contract for things not done on company time, not using company resources, and not connected with the job. If they owned everything by default, why did the company need to put such draconian terms into the original contract, and then accept our changes afterwards?
I'd like to know which part of the CDPA he thinks screws every salaried software developer in the UK, without anyone even noticing, but curiously he seems to have forgotten to give a full citation.
Sales and support are the hard part. Writing the code is easy.
Sure. The world is full of great software written by average developers to prove it. Sales guys who can spin a line and get a cheque are very rare, though, and it costs way more to hire a highly qualified front-line support guy than a senior software engineer.
Indeed. Here in the UK, on the one hand, you pay a cost for a new CD that's much higher than the production cost, because of the value of the information stored on it. On the other hand, you can't buy your own blank media and duplicate that information for personal uses like format shifting or making a compilation (or even transferring to one of those portable players the industry is so happy to sell you).
Please do cite the UK law(s) that provide the rights you describe, because I help to organise a dancing club that would love to take advantage of them. Our legal advice has invariably been that things like format shifting or making compilations of material we already own purely for convenience would infringe the copyright (though you can pay various token fees to various organisations to legitimise the copying for some of these purposes).
I'd be interested to hear the jurisdictions where you think "copy prevention" is illegal and the laws that give consumers rights that trump such laws, too. Again, no-one else seems to have found them, which is surprising given the interest groups like the EFF would presumably have in such legal tools!
Thing is, the world is moving to web based interfaces.
Well, maybe it is this week. My experience has been that applications trying to do this bring little benefit and a lot of drawbacks over old-fashioned desktop apps. Why does my word processor/development environment/mathematical modelling framework/computer game need to use a web-based interface?
The claimed advantages are mostly marketing hype from companies who are investing (perhaps unwisely) in this technology. The rest of the world will carry on making programs that work for as long as they make money (commercial) or make the programmers feel good (various free software/OSS/shareware things).
It will be fun to see what happens with the enterprise, but I feel that someone needs to take a big step back if they are to stop C#/.NET/Mono from taking the desktop. Saying "I'm just sticking with C, and so should you" is only going to work until the gap becomes large enough.
Perhaps. The alternative outcome is that whatever industry you work in finds that the UI stuff is only a small part of the application, for the bulk of it current practices using $OTHER_LANGUAGE work just fine, and this emperor has no clothes. Saying "C# and.Net will bring massive productivity benefits" is only going to work until the gaps have failed to materialise for long enough, too.
In reality, of course, there are few absolutes and most projects will appear somewhere on the sliding scale. For smart dev teams, the choice of whether to invest in C# and.Net will depend on where on the scale they fall.
Slashdot Mirror
I'm sorry, but from direct personal experience over the past week, you are really, really wrong.
I can't believe I'm seeing so many posts to this thread about how stable the beta of 2.0 is. We've seen pretty fundamental bugs in the formatting code: save a document... reload it... half your character styles are applied to some random stretch of text nowhere near where you applied them before!
As noted in my post at the start of this thread, we've been very disappointed with the robustness of 1.1.0 in our latest project too -- it failed to read a file saved by the same version of Writer on a different machine -- so we're hoping 1.1.5 will bring some much-needed stability.
I'd settle for saving and opening its own files better. My team had a nightmare for several hours yesterday, after a Writer document that was created in 1.1.0 on one machine (and displayed, saved, loaded and exported to PDF fine on that machine) had completely screwed up formatting when loaded onto other machines running the same version of Writer. The same problem was evident trying to load that file into 1.1.5 or the beta of 2.0. This is not what you need when your documents were supposed to go to the print shop the day before and a deadline is looming... :-(
After trying the beta for a while, there are still some very basic formatting bugs there, so I can't see that going mainstream for a few months yet. Here's hoping 1.1.5 is a more stable platform in the meantime!
And what happens when 1,000 other services follow up the precedent, and all expect the author/publisher to opt out of them individually?
It's funny how so many people think opt-in is the only fair thing for things like spam mailing lists, yet opt-out is perfectly reasonable when it's the rights of others that are being sacrificed.
I wonder how many of those people have ever actually contributed a truly worthwhile book to society, and how many of them are freeloaders who don't want to pay for something they can have for nothing (at the expense of those who worked to create it).
Didn't Amazon quickly discontinue the "look inside" feature that allowed access to the entire content of a book, for precisely this reason?
Which part of this sentence:
was too difficult for you to understand?
What about the moral argument that if you benefit from someone else's efforts, they should be given some fair reward in exchange?
That seems to me to be one of the most fundamental moral principles there is.
Please note that this does not conflict with your position that making an effort does not equate to a right to be rewarded. The fact that someone else is benefitting from the effort, and thus the effort has demonstrable value, is what implies the right to be rewarded.
Really? Had I found where you kept your book, I would not consider someone forbidding me to pick it up and walk off with it because I don't believe in the concept of "property" to be acceptable by default.
Fortunately for everyone, in civilised society we agree and follow laws to prevent such selfish attitudes screwing things up for everyone. Copyright is no more an artificial concept than physical property, and both exist only because society at large considers their effects to be a net plus.
Stop reading books.
In one post, you've restated just about everything I disagree with in this discussion.
Everyone supporting Google here seems to be claiming they're doing the authors a favour by giving them free advertising. For a start, there are the small issues that:
Even then, this is a lot more than just a friendly hand helping with advertising the book: it is inevitable that people will find a way around the content controls, and download copies of complete works. Google can advertise legitimate channels all they like, but it doesn't mean they're not blatantly facilitating wholesale copyright infringement for a whole new industry by the unscrupulous (and still profiting from it themselves, of course; this isn't an exercise in charity, it's an exercise in raising ad revenue by a profit-making corporation).
I thought this was your best bit:
D'ya think?
Google is fairly clearly treading a fine line here and upsetting a lot of people as a result, just as many of its past offerings have. It amazes me that they haven't suffered a crippling law suit already, and I will have little sympathy if, having decided to basically take on a whole industry on dubious grounds, said industry then annihilates them in the courts. Unlike some around here, I haven't drunk the Kool-Aid that makes me think this particular profit-making corporation is somehow the saviour of mankind, exempt from our laws and any ethical responsibilities, and incapable of doing wrong.
Bringing a lawsuit where you have a case to make is any individual's (or, in this case, group's) right, and the only people who should be worried about it are those who can't defend themselves. There are genuine problems with this approach in the US (witness RIAA intimidation and settling out of court where defendants can't afford legal fees) but I hardly think that applies to Google.
Copyright exists for a reason. If people like you didn't constantly ignore it as you see fit and/or campaign for changes, we'd have had genuine, mutually beneficial electronic distribution channels years ago. Instead, we get half-assed crap like this, and the inevitable resulting conflicts that serve no-one but lawyers.
People like you are well meaning, I'm sure, but ultimately you are part of the problem and not part of the solution.
That's simply not true. I have read content from inside several books via Amazon, without any sort of log-in.
However, there is still the obvious difference that the excerpts on Amazon are provided with the co-operation of the publishers, with their active consent. Also, the excerpts available are limited, with no scope for bypassing them to obtain a copy of the complete work.
You can bet your bottom dollar that if Google manage to get away with this, their new offering will have terms of service prohibiting anyone else systematically downloading from their database via automated means. Then they'll put the same army of lawyers behind it, in order to stop others from copying the material Google did. Getting hold of equivalent original sources will be difficult for any organisation that isn't already the size of Google, too. At that stage, the content will have been held freely available for Google to copy, but not for anyone else to copy from Google, and this paradox will stand until someone else with mightier lawyers collapses it. The only people to profit from this will be those connected with... Google!
Yeah, you'd think someone would have invented copyright by now. :-)
Most redistributable content does have value today, in the eyes of the law. If everyone respected that law, it would be straightforward to implement an electronic distribution scheme that benefitted both authors and their audience, with traditional publishers still able to provide valuable services in editing, providing the distribution and advertising, and perhaps the layout and finishing work. In other words, everybody would win.
Unfortunately, significant parts of the population choose to break that law for their own selfish purposes. This is the reason cases like this are brought, and more beneficial alternative distribution channels have thus far been still-born.
So much for the legendary robustness of $ALTERNATIVE_OS, then. If Linux or MacOS X is so much better designed than Windows, how can some anti-virus software destabilise the system as you describe?
You hope. A lot of users don't realise their system has been "pwn3d", particularly those naive enough to think that using Platform X or Application Y somehow makes them immune to attack.
This is the year 2005, and it's worth more to a botnet to use your compromised system discreetly. Sure, they could annoy you by making letters fall off your screen instead, but they'd alert you to their presence in the process, and that went out with amateur hour in the 1980s.
Do you run a virus checker and use a firewall?
Actually, those exemptions to copyright law that we do have are enumerated specifically in statute law; the CDPA makes some provision for criticism and academic study, for example. There are also a couple of separate provisions, such as making back-ups of computer software. However, there is no blanket right to copy for personal use in the UK.
You seem to misunderstand the powers of the courts. They do not make new laws, they only interpret existing ones (and by doing so, set precedents that may be used in future cases, so yes, they do make law in a different sense). A judge cannot simply decide that you should be allowed to violate the statute law that provides copyright protection because he happens to think you should be allowed to do so.
If you cannot avail yourself of any statutory defence in this case -- and from the waffly arguments and lack of references you've provided in this discussion, clearly you can't -- then the judge will almost certainly stress this to the jury when summing up, and direct them as firmly as possible to reach a guilty verdict on the basis that you have submitted no defence of any legal merit.
S'funny, we never really had a problem with that. Our sales figures dipped a little during the tech bust, but that's about it. Of course, we have a product that our customers actually want and that offers them genuine advantages with each new version rather than just a facelift. Perhaps it's different for certain other types of software company? :-)
Not always. You can't copyright ideas, for example, so all that matters as far as copyright is concerned is when the expression of the idea was created.
The author is an academic, whose name turns up a couple of times if you google it together with "BCS", along with some intriguing comments on other forums.
One of the most interesting was the question of why, being an academic, he chose to publish this rant in a freebie magazine rather than a peer-reviewed journal.
Another notes that his department has rather close ties to licensing of IP.
Several described the correctness of his claims about IP using various unflattering terms.
After a fairly extensive web search, I have been unable to find anything substantiating his unsupported claim that for professional software developers in the UK, any code you write (even out of work time) belongs to your employer by default. That would have been a very worrying revelation had it been true, but pretty much everyone on the web just quotes the letter of the law ("in the normal course of their employment"), mentioning the common themes of employer's time, employer's resources, and work based on the nature of the employment.
That's funny. I used to work for a small, privately owned software company that was successful by just about any measure. We had about 30 developers, 4 sales guys, 3 support guys, and a few people doing admin, accounts, etc.
We got bought out by a US megacorp, and now there are several times as many sales guys as there are developers, and strangely, key initiatives are getting held up or canned because there isn't enough manpower to do them! Well, duh.
Yeah, I was wondering about that, too. Here's the bit that applies to me:
That's interesting, because we had a huge issue with this in getting the contracts sorted out when my employer was taken over by a US megacorp whose default contract basically said they owned everything. There is now an explicit exemption in my contract for things not done on company time, not using company resources, and not connected with the job. If they owned everything by default, why did the company need to put such draconian terms into the original contract, and then accept our changes afterwards?
I'd like to know which part of the CDPA he thinks screws every salaried software developer in the UK, without anyone even noticing, but curiously he seems to have forgotten to give a full citation.
Sure. The world is full of great software written by average developers to prove it. Sales guys who can spin a line and get a cheque are very rare, though, and it costs way more to hire a highly qualified front-line support guy than a senior software engineer.
Indeed. Here in the UK, on the one hand, you pay a cost for a new CD that's much higher than the production cost, because of the value of the information stored on it. On the other hand, you can't buy your own blank media and duplicate that information for personal uses like format shifting or making a compilation (or even transferring to one of those portable players the industry is so happy to sell you).
Please do cite the UK law(s) that provide the rights you describe, because I help to organise a dancing club that would love to take advantage of them. Our legal advice has invariably been that things like format shifting or making compilations of material we already own purely for convenience would infringe the copyright (though you can pay various token fees to various organisations to legitimise the copying for some of these purposes).
I'd be interested to hear the jurisdictions where you think "copy prevention" is illegal and the laws that give consumers rights that trump such laws, too. Again, no-one else seems to have found them, which is surprising given the interest groups like the EFF would presumably have in such legal tools!
Well, maybe it is this week. My experience has been that applications trying to do this bring little benefit and a lot of drawbacks over old-fashioned desktop apps. Why does my word processor/development environment/mathematical modelling framework/computer game need to use a web-based interface?
The claimed advantages are mostly marketing hype from companies who are investing (perhaps unwisely) in this technology. The rest of the world will carry on making programs that work for as long as they make money (commercial) or make the programmers feel good (various free software/OSS/shareware things).
Perhaps. The alternative outcome is that whatever industry you work in finds that the UI stuff is only a small part of the application, for the bulk of it current practices using $OTHER_LANGUAGE work just fine, and this emperor has no clothes. Saying "C# and .Net will bring massive productivity benefits" is only going to work until the gaps have failed to materialise for long enough, too.
In reality, of course, there are few absolutes and most projects will appear somewhere on the sliding scale. For smart dev teams, the choice of whether to invest in C# and .Net will depend on where on the scale they fall.