Well, the problem is that "intellectual property" is not actual property, it's a colloquialism cooked up by people who wish it was actual property.
I hate to break it to you, but the whole concept of property -- whether physical or intellectual -- is artificial, a binding agreement codified in law between the individuals of the world so as to allow us to get on with our lives.
Without such agreements, we revert to the state where possession is 9/10 of the law, and the other 1/10 is who can physically compel another to give up their possession most effectively.
Gee, you'd almost think that all these dumb ideas in law were put there for a reason, wouldn't ya?
God damn, these "it's an artificial government monopoly" threads are tedious.
Theft is a criminal offence. Copyright violation is a civil offence.
Nah. It used to be a civil offence, but then people abused the system, so the DMCA came along and, as I understand it, made it a criminal offence with immediate consequences. (If any US lawyers out there would care to correct the above or post a rather more informed variation of it, please feel free.)
So you think that Microsoft's idea of what is right should guide your coding?
I wouldn't choose to phrase it that way, but in this case, effectively, yes, I do. These people have a job: to communicate to/with their clients. They should write their code to do that as best they can. Standards are merely a means to an end, in this or any other industry. They are not, and should not be, an end in themselves.
Write to the standard (W3C).
Like it or not (and I don't like it any more than you do) IE effectively defines the current standard. IE has 96% market penetration (source: BBC News article today). At that point, what Microsoft say is more important than what a "standards" body says.
I would much rather IE and others all signed up to the W3C standards. But the simple fact is that we're talking about businesses trying to do a job. In the real world, the pragmatic thing to do is to write for the vast majority of your customer base (IE users) first, and any others ("standards" people using alternative browsers) later.
Fortunately, it doesn't take 96% of the effort to reach those 96% of your clients, so it's usually possible to address both IE and non-IE visitors without prohibitive extra effort. However, if you put principles ahead of pragmatism in this sort of environment, you fail. It's really as simple as that. It sucks, but I know it, you know it really, and nothing either of us writes here is going to change it.
If MS can't render the standard properly, then IE is broken.
That's one perspective. A more realistic one might be that if your standard isn't followed by 96% of the market then it has no right to call itself a standard and it is your "standard" that is broken.
Standards aren't supposed to define new things, they're supposed to codify common practice so that others can match it. A standards body that doesn't have the market leader on its side has at best a dubious remit. When that market leader represents all but 4% of the market, does the standards body really have any remit at all? (Clearly, this isn't a black and white question and I'm overstating the case, but there's an element of truth here that I think needs to be understood.)
What the Mozilla Foundation needs to do is get deals with computer manufacturers to pre-install Mozilla, and put an icon for the big lizard on the desktop.
You mean the same Mozilla that isn't an end user app and has no support?
You know a typical answer of project managers: "Make it just for IE and as flashy/sexy as possible... Who cares about Mozilla?.. All our customers use IE..."
And they have a fair point. The vast majority of surfers do use IE, and most of those with alternatives are fairly geeky. If your customer base is 99.5% IE-using, you write your web site for IE, not W3C. It's not some bold statement about what is The Standard, it's just common sense.
It isn't very easily extensible, it doesn't really have good style sheet support, and it's remarkably easy to mix presentation and content.
Okay, now that is a good troll. I needed the laugh, thanks!
Actually, speaking as a veteran LaTeX user, I think those are all fair and justified criticisms.
LaTeX is great if you have a class that's very close to your desired formatting, but if you need something new and different, designing a new class or package file to support it is horrible. The style sheet and templating facilities in a serious DTP package blow LaTeX away a million times over for ease of use, and are more than powerful enough for most purposes.
Extensible is a bit of a moot point. Clearly it is very flexible, given the number of packages available for it. OTOH, very few people could write a similar package to meet their own requirements if one didn't already exist. Perhaps it would be fairer to say that LaTeX isn't easily extensible.
And as for mixing content and formatting: yes, it does, quite blatantly. The means of selecting font attributes, on a par with more logical things like \emph{}, are as bad as pre-CSS HTML. And don't even mention tables!:-/ Yes, there can be a fair degree of logical mark-up in a LaTeX document, but in my experience, few people know how to use it well, and even those who do frequently cheat and/or don't spend the time to set it up because it's too awkward, and "cheating" is much easier.
These are all pretty well-understood and accepted flaws in LaTeX when compared against the alternatives. I'm slightly surprised you thought the parent post was trolling...
There are a lot of really crappy things about LaTeX, but it is definitely the standard.
Yep. I've always thought of LaTeX as being kinda C-like. Everyone knows it sucks in places, the syntax is hideous and the tricky bits require a minimum of guru status (and preferably demigod) to get right. And yet, it's awesomely powerful, it can do almost anything if you ask it nicely enough, and no-one has yet made anything with even close to the same level of power and a significantly nicer interface. For these reasons, it remains the standard for serious users.
Easy to add greek/roman letters into the text without going through a bunch of menues.
FWIW, in MS Word you can hit Ctrl+Shift+Q, and then the next character you type comes out as a symbol, i.e., alphabetic characters map onto greek letters. There are also shortcuts for many useful mathematical symbols by default, and you can assign a keyboard shortcut to any given symbol you use frequently if you like.
Of course, that doesn't overcome MS Word's other major limitations, such as its persistent inability to handle long documents well, its awkward file formats and its comparatively pathetic formula editor. But hey, maybe it'll be useful to the long-suffering geeks who have to use it for some reason.:-)
OpenOffice has a somewhat intuitive formula editor that's pretty useful.
With all due respect to OpenOffice's math editor, it's not in the same league as what you can do with TeX. In fact, it's not even on the same planet.
If the OP is principally interested in typesetting fairly mathematical papers, which sounds plausible but not certain from the description, then OO is not a good way to go (and nor are things like MS Word, for much the same reason).
There is a large disclaimer at the top of the cached page saying that the page is NOT "part of [Google's] own site".
As a girl I know once told another girl I know, referring to a guy I know very well: saying you're about to be a bastard doesn't justify actually being one...
As you say, we're somewhat getting into legalities here, but there are serious concerns relating to all of the points you make about legality, damages, the superficial similarity between linking, caching and archiving on the web, etc. There was another recent Slashdot discussion on this subject; you might like to read the comments made by myself and others there if you're interested in why this isn't as black and white as it first appears.
Under some conditions, basically satisfying "fair use" in copyright.
OK, if it's fair use then it's fair use, but how does the behaviour of Google's cache fall under any fair use provision in any jurisdiction's copyright law, even the US (which allows more in terms of copyright exemptions than, say, the UK)? They're basically taking whole web sites and presenting them as part of their own site, for profit...
I'm sorry, but I'm losing your argument here. Are you saying that you think it's OK for one commercial body to republish material written by another, on its own web site and presumably for its own commercial benefit, without permission?
Or are you saying that putting up any material on the web in any form grants others an arbitrary licence to copy and republish it? (In this case, needless to say, I strongly disagree with you.)
I'm pretty sure that Google's web cache (not images.google.com) does not cache images. [...] So if you look at a cached page, the images, and specifically banners, are coming from the original site, and so you still see their ads.
I'm not sure whether that's better or worse. Now the Google cache isn't really helping bandwidth much, since images are usually the dominant content there, but it's still stealing the traffic. Linking to images on someone else's web site, using their bandwidth while users are visiting your site, is considered rude (at best) normally, and I'm not sure I see how this is any different.
Anyone else starting to feel that caches really aren't worth it?;-)
Well, we managed without cars and airplanes quite happily for most of human history.
Indeed we did. Somehow, walking or cycling a mile or two across town doesn't seem to kill me, even today. Of course, the environmental damage from motor vehicles and air traffic is trying, and I'd waste much of my life sitting in traffic queues if I tried to drive everywhere instead...
Hey, you'd almost think that even cars and aeroplanes could be expendable. They do have their uses, but they're overused because people are lazy, and the alternatives have suffered as a result. And at least cars and planes have uses under some circumstances, which is probably why they're a daily part of most people's lives, unlike web caches, which are commercial entities we could easily do without in their current forms.
I don't think the noarchive setting is standard, for one thing. It may be that Google happens to pick it up and respect it, but it's not a general solution.
Besides, as others have noted here, not everyone gives a **** about files like robots.txt or similar META tags. Some people are quite prepared to take stuff even if they're asked not to.
If there's one thing that annoys the heck out of me, then its websites that take more than 5 seconds to load.
Maybe if you actually visited them, so they could get some revenue from their advertising, they could afford more bandwidth?
Nice highlighting so I can quickly page down to whatever I was looking for
So now it's OK for one web site to take another site's content, plagiarise and modify it, and steal their traffic? <ahem> And Slashdot readers wonder why so many people don't agree with them about removing all copyright.
Using Google's cached links usually blocks silly popups and other annoying stuff too many websites seem to incorporate these days.
If you don't like them, don't visit the site. Visiting the cached version of the site and circumventing its means of financing itself it tantamount to taking the goods and then shooting the shopkeeper instead of paying. (I can morally accept pop-up killers because certain sites were abusing the facility and causing problems for those visiting, but blocking banner ads and such is a bit pathetic.)
Perhaps I'll make a proxy server which browses the web exlusively using Google's caching...
Yep, let's hope everyone else does that, too. Then all the small but great web sites, struggling to survive in an economy too old for advertising but not smart enough to have micropayments yet, will go under. Hey, at least it'll save bandwidth for Google's cache, right?
Respecting robots.txt is no more than a courtesy as far as I'm concerned.
Yep, and people like you are the reason we have copyright laws, and they should apply to the Internet just as anywhere else.
If you don't want your pages to be archived or cached or whatever, then by all means protect your page, or donot put up a webpage in the first place (I'm sure a thousand others will leap at the chance to fill the void).
So are all your kind. And yet still, everyone links to the NYT. Bad tutorials on computer-related subjects outnumber good ones by orders of magnitude in every field I know about. In non-computing areas, it's worse. There are obvious subjects -- health and nutrition, for example -- where almost every site in existence is commercial and full of crappy advertising. Yet no-one, not even government-sponsored public information people, manages to put up the most simple information. (Granted, this is slowly starting to change in that particular case, but only barely even now.)
So, I ask you, where are all the great benefactors who will leap forward and fill the Internet with freely given goodness? Where's all the good, free and legal music? Where are the fantastic on-line tutorials that you don't have to pay for? Where is the free version of the software that I used at the office this afternoon? Why do Red Hat still sell boxed versions of Linux?
One day, you people will realise that most things cannot be had for free, and your high and mighty stances on things like intellectual property will come back to bite you. Unfortunately, they'll bite the rest of us too. DRM, here we come...
Anyone else see the irony that big buisness feels that "Opt-Out" is a fair policy when advertising to thier customers by phone and Spam.
Anyone else see the irony that every Slashbot and his dog feels that "opt-in" is a fair policy when discussing spam and advertising, but "opt-out" is fair when it comes to taking others' data without paying for it?
Why should the NYT make a profit from its online presence?
Maybe the answer is "because they are providing, at considerable expense, a service that is of value to others"? Sounds like a pretty fair business case to me.
My personal view is that caching the exact content of information thats made freely and publically accessible by the author can hardly constitute a breach of copyright,...
On what law do you base that? Someone else wrote it. You copied it without permission. You want to argue in court that ripping a whole site by a commercial organisation and putting up somewhere else without permission is fair use (assuming you're in a jurisdiction that even has fair use)...?
I think the dividing line has to be what would be considered reasonable by a typical person offering the information. If there was no suggestion at the time that the information might persist for more than the few days typical of a Usenet posting, then keeping it for years is not reasonable. If the poster was given fair warning that this might happen, it may become reasonable under the circumstances. Selling it for profit, however, may still be unreasonable even then. And of course, whether allowing provision of fair warning to heavily limit copyright protection is actually in anyone's best interests -- since in cases such as informative personal web sites it could motivate people not to provide the information at all -- is a different question again.
There are scads of newspapers that offer online services for free without the hassle having to force you to put in "Elmer Fudd at zip code 90210" registration information.
So you, and others here, have said. And yet, people keep linking to the NYT stories. Why's that?
Slashdot Mirror
I hate to break it to you, but the whole concept of property -- whether physical or intellectual -- is artificial, a binding agreement codified in law between the individuals of the world so as to allow us to get on with our lives.
Without such agreements, we revert to the state where possession is 9/10 of the law, and the other 1/10 is who can physically compel another to give up their possession most effectively.
Gee, you'd almost think that all these dumb ideas in law were put there for a reason, wouldn't ya?
God damn, these "it's an artificial government monopoly" threads are tedious.
Nah. It used to be a civil offence, but then people abused the system, so the DMCA came along and, as I understand it, made it a criminal offence with immediate consequences. (If any US lawyers out there would care to correct the above or post a rather more informed variation of it, please feel free.)
I wouldn't choose to phrase it that way, but in this case, effectively, yes, I do. These people have a job: to communicate to/with their clients. They should write their code to do that as best they can. Standards are merely a means to an end, in this or any other industry. They are not, and should not be, an end in themselves.
Like it or not (and I don't like it any more than you do) IE effectively defines the current standard. IE has 96% market penetration (source: BBC News article today). At that point, what Microsoft say is more important than what a "standards" body says.
I would much rather IE and others all signed up to the W3C standards. But the simple fact is that we're talking about businesses trying to do a job. In the real world, the pragmatic thing to do is to write for the vast majority of your customer base (IE users) first, and any others ("standards" people using alternative browsers) later.
Fortunately, it doesn't take 96% of the effort to reach those 96% of your clients, so it's usually possible to address both IE and non-IE visitors without prohibitive extra effort. However, if you put principles ahead of pragmatism in this sort of environment, you fail. It's really as simple as that. It sucks, but I know it, you know it really, and nothing either of us writes here is going to change it.
That's one perspective. A more realistic one might be that if your standard isn't followed by 96% of the market then it has no right to call itself a standard and it is your "standard" that is broken.
Standards aren't supposed to define new things, they're supposed to codify common practice so that others can match it. A standards body that doesn't have the market leader on its side has at best a dubious remit. When that market leader represents all but 4% of the market, does the standards body really have any remit at all? (Clearly, this isn't a black and white question and I'm overstating the case, but there's an element of truth here that I think needs to be understood.)
You mean the same Mozilla that isn't an end user app and has no support?
And they have a fair point. The vast majority of surfers do use IE, and most of those with alternatives are fairly geeky. If your customer base is 99.5% IE-using, you write your web site for IE, not W3C. It's not some bold statement about what is The Standard, it's just common sense.
Actually, speaking as a veteran LaTeX user, I think those are all fair and justified criticisms.
LaTeX is great if you have a class that's very close to your desired formatting, but if you need something new and different, designing a new class or package file to support it is horrible. The style sheet and templating facilities in a serious DTP package blow LaTeX away a million times over for ease of use, and are more than powerful enough for most purposes.
Extensible is a bit of a moot point. Clearly it is very flexible, given the number of packages available for it. OTOH, very few people could write a similar package to meet their own requirements if one didn't already exist. Perhaps it would be fairer to say that LaTeX isn't easily extensible.
And as for mixing content and formatting: yes, it does, quite blatantly. The means of selecting font attributes, on a par with more logical things like \emph{}, are as bad as pre-CSS HTML. And don't even mention tables! :-/ Yes, there can be a fair degree of logical mark-up in a LaTeX document, but in my experience, few people know how to use it well, and even those who do frequently cheat and/or don't spend the time to set it up because it's too awkward, and "cheating" is much easier.
These are all pretty well-understood and accepted flaws in LaTeX when compared against the alternatives. I'm slightly surprised you thought the parent post was trolling...
Yep. I've always thought of LaTeX as being kinda C-like. Everyone knows it sucks in places, the syntax is hideous and the tricky bits require a minimum of guru status (and preferably demigod) to get right. And yet, it's awesomely powerful, it can do almost anything if you ask it nicely enough, and no-one has yet made anything with even close to the same level of power and a significantly nicer interface. For these reasons, it remains the standard for serious users.
FWIW, in MS Word you can hit Ctrl+Shift+Q, and then the next character you type comes out as a symbol, i.e., alphabetic characters map onto greek letters. There are also shortcuts for many useful mathematical symbols by default, and you can assign a keyboard shortcut to any given symbol you use frequently if you like.
Of course, that doesn't overcome MS Word's other major limitations, such as its persistent inability to handle long documents well, its awkward file formats and its comparatively pathetic formula editor. But hey, maybe it'll be useful to the long-suffering geeks who have to use it for some reason. :-)
With all due respect to OpenOffice's math editor, it's not in the same league as what you can do with TeX. In fact, it's not even on the same planet.
If the OP is principally interested in typesetting fairly mathematical papers, which sounds plausible but not certain from the description, then OO is not a good way to go (and nor are things like MS Word, for much the same reason).
As a girl I know once told another girl I know, referring to a guy I know very well: saying you're about to be a bastard doesn't justify actually being one...
As you say, we're somewhat getting into legalities here, but there are serious concerns relating to all of the points you make about legality, damages, the superficial similarity between linking, caching and archiving on the web, etc. There was another recent Slashdot discussion on this subject; you might like to read the comments made by myself and others there if you're interested in why this isn't as black and white as it first appears.
OK, if it's fair use then it's fair use, but how does the behaviour of Google's cache fall under any fair use provision in any jurisdiction's copyright law, even the US (which allows more in terms of copyright exemptions than, say, the UK)? They're basically taking whole web sites and presenting them as part of their own site, for profit...
Of course there are: Intel think it matters, and AMD think it doesn't. ;-)
I'm sorry, but I'm losing your argument here. Are you saying that you think it's OK for one commercial body to republish material written by another, on its own web site and presumably for its own commercial benefit, without permission?
Or are you saying that putting up any material on the web in any form grants others an arbitrary licence to copy and republish it? (In this case, needless to say, I strongly disagree with you.)
I'm not sure whether that's better or worse. Now the Google cache isn't really helping bandwidth much, since images are usually the dominant content there, but it's still stealing the traffic. Linking to images on someone else's web site, using their bandwidth while users are visiting your site, is considered rude (at best) normally, and I'm not sure I see how this is any different.
Anyone else starting to feel that caches really aren't worth it? ;-)
If we accept the basic premises that
then is education (part of) the answer to wholesale infringement? If so, who should do the educating, and what should they say?
Indeed we did. Somehow, walking or cycling a mile or two across town doesn't seem to kill me, even today. Of course, the environmental damage from motor vehicles and air traffic is trying, and I'd waste much of my life sitting in traffic queues if I tried to drive everywhere instead...
Hey, you'd almost think that even cars and aeroplanes could be expendable. They do have their uses, but they're overused because people are lazy, and the alternatives have suffered as a result. And at least cars and planes have uses under some circumstances, which is probably why they're a daily part of most people's lives, unlike web caches, which are commercial entities we could easily do without in their current forms.
You did, when you started using legal terms like "breach of copyright".
I don't think the noarchive setting is standard, for one thing. It may be that Google happens to pick it up and respect it, but it's not a general solution.
Besides, as others have noted here, not everyone gives a **** about files like robots.txt or similar META tags. Some people are quite prepared to take stuff even if they're asked not to.
Maybe if you actually visited them, so they could get some revenue from their advertising, they could afford more bandwidth?
So now it's OK for one web site to take another site's content, plagiarise and modify it, and steal their traffic? <ahem> And Slashdot readers wonder why so many people don't agree with them about removing all copyright.
If you don't like them, don't visit the site. Visiting the cached version of the site and circumventing its means of financing itself it tantamount to taking the goods and then shooting the shopkeeper instead of paying. (I can morally accept pop-up killers because certain sites were abusing the facility and causing problems for those visiting, but blocking banner ads and such is a bit pathetic.)
Yep, let's hope everyone else does that, too. Then all the small but great web sites, struggling to survive in an economy too old for advertising but not smart enough to have micropayments yet, will go under. Hey, at least it'll save bandwidth for Google's cache, right?
Yep, and people like you are the reason we have copyright laws, and they should apply to the Internet just as anywhere else.
So are all your kind. And yet still, everyone links to the NYT. Bad tutorials on computer-related subjects outnumber good ones by orders of magnitude in every field I know about. In non-computing areas, it's worse. There are obvious subjects -- health and nutrition, for example -- where almost every site in existence is commercial and full of crappy advertising. Yet no-one, not even government-sponsored public information people, manages to put up the most simple information. (Granted, this is slowly starting to change in that particular case, but only barely even now.)
So, I ask you, where are all the great benefactors who will leap forward and fill the Internet with freely given goodness? Where's all the good, free and legal music? Where are the fantastic on-line tutorials that you don't have to pay for? Where is the free version of the software that I used at the office this afternoon? Why do Red Hat still sell boxed versions of Linux?
One day, you people will realise that most things cannot be had for free, and your high and mighty stances on things like intellectual property will come back to bite you. Unfortunately, they'll bite the rest of us too. DRM, here we come...
Anyone else see the irony that every Slashbot and his dog feels that "opt-in" is a fair policy when discussing spam and advertising, but "opt-out" is fair when it comes to taking others' data without paying for it?
Maybe the answer is "because they are providing, at considerable expense, a service that is of value to others"? Sounds like a pretty fair business case to me.
On what law do you base that? Someone else wrote it. You copied it without permission. You want to argue in court that ripping a whole site by a commercial organisation and putting up somewhere else without permission is fair use (assuming you're in a jurisdiction that even has fair use)...?
I think the dividing line has to be what would be considered reasonable by a typical person offering the information. If there was no suggestion at the time that the information might persist for more than the few days typical of a Usenet posting, then keeping it for years is not reasonable. If the poster was given fair warning that this might happen, it may become reasonable under the circumstances. Selling it for profit, however, may still be unreasonable even then. And of course, whether allowing provision of fair warning to heavily limit copyright protection is actually in anyone's best interests -- since in cases such as informative personal web sites it could motivate people not to provide the information at all -- is a different question again.
So you, and others here, have said. And yet, people keep linking to the NYT stories. Why's that?
It is? In this sense? We managed without it being mainstream quite happily until a year or two back.
In your opinion. Others have different opinions. We have a legal system to resolve differences of opinion. Go figure. :-)