Other insurance companies are certainly related to a search on "Geico."
That's a possible analysis. And it may even be the dominant one under present law. But increasingly I think that it is a bad approach, so please take this set of remarks as a discussion not of present law but as a critique of present law and a discussion of a possible basis for a variant law.
I feel like the US (and perhaps the world) has a set of laws that used to work well for small to medium-sized companies pre-Internet, but that increasingly those same laws are having different competitive effects in the modern world where all the money is being centralized in a few companies and market entrants are having a harder and harder time.
I'll give an example that is a real example I've seen happen. (I'm changing the names.) A small retail company, WidgetCo, was struggling to get some notice in advertising for the frobs it makes. A larger chain of retail outlets, GadgetCo, also makes frobs. GadgetCo kept appearing at the top of the list of stores in search lists even when the search term was just "WidgetCo". Why? Because GadgetCo made a "helpful" list of names and addresses of its competitors in its page. This means that since GadgetCo's pages get more hits (it being bigger) and since it mentions WidgetCo, it shows up. But the customers don't see WidgetCo first--it's buried way down there in tiny print with huge GadgetCo logos dominating the page.
What bothers me about this is that it means under the AdWords scheme, the owner of the trademark has to bid for the use of their own name. That means GadgetCo can outbid them and still show up top of the list. They can even buy several ads and push WidgetCo onto the next page. (Another way present law does not address these issues is not acknowledging the huge real effect of visibility. Being in a search result list, but not at the top, is often the same as not being there.)
This is a barrier to new entry into the market. It prefers entrenched vendors who are cash-rich and locks out cash-poor newcomers. That's bad for the market, not just for the vendor, which is why I care. I want competitors to enter because I don't want vendors getting too comfy. But as long as they can use practices like this to keep others out, new entrants are reduced and so my choice as a consumer is restricted to fat, comfy, anti-competitive big companies.
I don't mind having search terms like "something like Coke" turning up Pepsi (and other competitors with coke). I don't mind asking for Coke at a restaurant and having people who do not have Coke interpreting that as a request for similar beverages, so offering me Pepsi as a fallback. But I draw the line at asking for a Coke where it is available and finding that Pepsi is now paying people to say "Pepsi is really better. Are you sure you wouldn't want that instead?" Not only does that violate my sense of Truth and Right and Justice for the Coke trade name, it opens me to infinite ads from beverage servers from whom I just want to get the beverage I asked for!
The FCC commissioners probably only see a new toy to play with in this tracking technology, and have no concept of the monster they are creating.
The really bad ideas always start out in the clothing of good ideas and then just sort of creep down the slippery slope.
The problem with these tools is that the people using them imagine themselves to be unambiguously the good guys. And the sad truth is that often they are the good guys. But they don't understand that they have no way of assuring that the people running the show tomorrow will be the people running the show today. People don't live forever. People don't hold the same job forever.
Even without a political attack, there's still the issue that you have to hand over the tools you build today to the government employees of tomorrow. Even if you just look at political party issues, the mildest of all possible concerns: if you're a Democrat, do you trust the Republicans with the spy tools you've made, or if you're a Republican, do you trust the Democrats? And when you add in the possibility of enemy infiltration, influence through bribes, and outright attack to take control, it gets scarier in a variety of ways.
Any time you centralize the power of the Good Guys, you risk that in a single stroke, the Bad Guys (however you define them) can take central control of everything. One of the big protections of the United States, rarely talked about, has been the non-centrality of the "root password". That is, even if someone took over Washington, they would not necessarily control all the states.
As things get more and more centralized, and all these walls between agencies are broken down in the name of "efficient prosecution", the walls are also broken down that prevent "efficient toppling".
What I find ironic is that the people who want this power are also the biggest supporters of the Second Amendment, which was never historically about hunting and always about protecting the right of the people to retain the power to overthrow the government if it ever got uppity. (I seem to recall that some--e.g., Jefferson?--thought this would probably need to happen every 20 years or so...) Yet these tools they are creating for surveillance are designed specifically to assure that no such overthrow would ever succeed, nor even be attempted. Maybe that's even good. But if it is, we don't need all those second amendment guns. And if it's not, we don't need the cameras. Without even making a value judgment, I'll just say it seems just-plain-inconsistent to me.
Why does the news media keep reporting these *completely* unsubstantiated rumors about Google as if they were actually news? Why not wait until Google actually announces what it is going to do?
Are you completely certain they're false? It's common in politics for people to deliberately leak what they're thinking of doing just to test public opinion about a controversial idea in a deniable way.
It's also possible that the occasional idea is leaked by an employee or ex-employee who doesn't like the proposed strategy and wants to raise alarm bells early enough to do something about it.
I'm not saying either of these is in play in the various situations with Google we've seen recently. But they are ever-present possibilities.
How are we going to increase the gravity of Mars to prevent the Atmosphere from leaking off very fast?
Well, presumably, once those Martian ski slopes open, many bodies will be attracted (and many will insist on bringing their super-massive SUV's, thus guranteeing a continual healthy supply of greenhouse gases). The tourist trade will snowball, and...
Any company trying to roll out yet another instant messenger would be making a mistake.
Only if they couldn't offer something unique. But think of it: An IM system with full text search where you can search the world's ongoing conversations for a complete list of the three IM chat sessions going on that's actually got interesting content going on.
All the other IM systems have to offer is just the same old prattle with people one already knows, and a few weak tools for trying to shut those people up or hide from them when you can't take it any more.
Based on its potential to perform massively parallel... er,... "indexing" of the world's entire chat traffic, I predict it's going to be called Oooooogle.
I can't wait to see whether random anonymous outtakes from chat sessions will be scrolled over monitors at the entrances to their buildings (as now appears to be done for search keyword sets people use).
Disclaimer: All just meant in goooood fun, of course. I'm sure there's no one anywhere in the world, much less at Google, that would seriously consider doing anything like this. Just look at how restrained the world's web spiders have been in their interpretation of copyright law. With examples like that, I'm sure privacy buffs have nothing whatsoever to fear.
For example, [...] If I wrapped numbers and words believed to be numbers in bold tags, technically I'd be violating this patent.
Actually, you might not. According to the patent, one of the major features of the software is the ability to remove the highlighting.
Ah, so what actually violates the patent is using CSS like:
a { background: white; }
a:hover { background: yellow; }
Yeah, no one would think to do that. Almost makes you wonder why they put:hover or the entire manipulable DOM in the Javascript spec given that there were no obvious intended uses.
Hmm. Is it possible that Microsoft itself was publicly using this so-called "non-obvious" kind of scripting years before it applied for the patent (Feb 11, 2004)... Time for a trip to the Wayback Machine, I guess...
Machines)used something called "Dynamic Windows" which was later further developed as CLIM (the "Common Lisp Interface Manager"). Among the various features of that system was the ability to annotate output with its datatype. e.g., and I'll simplify notation here for presentational clarity (and to save me looking it up) but it's substantially like this:
(with-output-as-presentation (stream 'integer:data 5.3)
(write-string "a bit more than five" stream))
This would cause the user to see the string "a bit more than five" but the system to have backing store information (kind of like the HREF that underlies a URL presentation in a browser, except that's really more imperative in nature rather than declarative) that says that if the user clicks on that, he's really clicking on 5.3 instead.
What was interesting about the way Genera did it was that there was a conceptual relationship between "presentation" (the analog of printing output) and "accepting" (the analog of reading input). If someone later did:
(accept 'integer:prompt "Please input a number")
then the mouse would become aware of all the occurrences of things that had been presented as integers (or even things that could be coerced to integers). The system could be further abstracted so that if you output British Pounds and someone asked for input of American Dollars, translators ran so that when you clicked on the value in pounds, it got translated at input time to the appropriate representation (presumably the translator you wrote knew how to acceess the currency exchange to do this). Output in inches could be converted to feet or meters, of course, without such network appliances.
But the key feature which seems to have been "obvious" even decades ago when Symbolics did this work was the idea of highlighting data of various kinds with boxes. In that case, it wasn't even limited to numeric data. It could be any kind of data, even things of different types that were hierachically presented (such a filename listing being sensitive on its whole line as a file, but as only part of the line for this and that date mentioned in the listing).
And it didn't get patented then, which to my understanding of patent law means it's missed its chance...
The really sad thing is that so few people know about this I/O paradigm, which had some very cool features. And then such sadness is compounded when others come along and attempt to say they dreamt up the idea.
I mean, geez, people have been drawing boxes around in paper for a long time. I don't doubt there's some implementation of a kids' book that has a piece of cellophane you can pull back and forth to highlight something. I recall things that use red over red text to make the text "become invisible" being implemented in physical books when I was a kid. That's a form of emphasis through boxes, too!
The patent office is way overboard these days. I think software copyright serves a critical purpose, but I think software patents are an abomination. I'd like to see the software patent system overhauled completely.
The patent covers targeted advertising, not advertising in RSS,Targeted meaning IP address location.
I'm impressed you could tell this much from it. I found it pretty thick reading and hard to tell what it was getting at. (I suspect that's intentional, to reduce the number of eyes on the document.)
The primary weakness I see in the patent is the reference everywhere to a URL where they would have been smarter to use URIs. I suspect someone can "trivially" get around the patent with an appropriate shift of that detail.
The patent also references XML, RSS, and Atom by name, which seems equally well a weakness and is one of the strongest arguments I've seen so far for ditching XML (which I have other problems with anyway).
And while I was about to start using RSS, I am now forced to reconsider. On the one hand, I was actually planning to seek out Google's AdWords for use in RSS just because it seems a cool technology and possible source of funding for pages. But the fact that they are trying to patent the technology and compete not on "coolness of use" but on "force" makes me think that perhaps I should seek out and support competitor technologies...
I also think the RSS authors (or, at least, the users) should create WINNER (Winner Is Notationally Not Exactly RSS), so that it is neither XML compliant nor RSS, and hence doesn't fall under the patent... At least, it doesn't look to me like it would then fall under the patent. Since RSS looks like it comes out of Harvard, maybe they have the lawyer power to look at the Google patent and work out a minimal workaround from the holes in how the patent is written...
The more patents there are in the advertising space, the more likely it will be that anyone operating in that space will get sued for violating some patent.
If you think that will lead to a lot of bankrupt companies, you're probably wrong. I believe what this is known to lead to is fewer low-end market entrants, since the low-end cannot afford the lawsuits. But at the upper end, large companies that own a lot of patents just write contracts agreeing to mutually not sue each other, and so they lock in an elite few who are allowed to participate in the market. I could have misjudged your political position, but I'm guessing this is not something you'd see as a "good effect". Certainly I do not.
If Google wants to patent every form of advertising known to man, more power to them.
I believe your literal words identify literally the mostly likely outcome of their action--that is, "more [commercial] power [will come] to them".
Leap seconds and leap days aren't related. Leap days are related to the need to make a year's length expressible in integral number of days by a sort of infinite series approximation. Unless the length of a year were an actual integral number of days, leap days would be needed even if there was no "slowing" ever. By contrast, leap seconds are added to accomodate "slowing" and are not an artifact of the original relation. The use of the term "leap" for both of these is probably what attracts politicians to "leap" to the rescue. Perhaps they should take a second to reconsider...
I actually agree that leap seconds are a bit of a mess, and I wouldn't mind seeing a better solution. But the one proposed sounds a bit bizarre. Surely the real problem is an artifact of the infancy of computer systems and the ad hoc, non-general solutions to time representation we've been using due to very small address spaces that are rapidly falling by the wayside. Why not just delay the issuing of them for a couple of decades until we can think harder about the problem. Pretending that any law passed now is going to stand unused for hundreds of years before it has any effect seems a little... arrogant. I'm pretty sure that, say, somewhere around 2027, we're going to have a lot of discussion about our present representation of time and whether it's the right one...
Absolutely, but the other thing is that young kids all have the same schedule. They don't yet need asynchronous because they're all in school at the same time and then they come home and they all avoid their homework at the same time (from the time they get home until 2 hours after you wish they had gone to bed).
Not only will they ultimately find the subtleties of asynchrony later, but they will need the subtleties later, too. Right now even if you explained these issues to them, they'd just stare at you with a blank face and ask what it means to be on a different schedule... They think "grownups" just make things needlessly complicated--it doesn't occur to them yet that complexity is a property of the world itself and that some of the behaviors of adults are the response to that, not the cause of that.
... now the things valued most highly in American institutions [...] are things like 'diversity training,' 'empowering employees,' and 'inclusive respect.'...
Is it just me or does it seem like all MS is doing these days is just copy catting google?
Aren't they both just following up (slowly) on Neal Stephenson's idea from Snow Crash?
With all due respect to those "hard-earned" software patents the big vendors are sporting at every turn, I'm not sure that at this point in time that anything you see actually implemented was necessarily thought up by the organization that implemented it.
For example, science fiction writers often write about things like communicators, phasers, voice interfaces to computers, teleportation, robots, and so on long before big companies implement them. And often those scifi writers get their ideas from other, less well-known but still publicly available technical journals, computer programs, fanciful stories, and so on.
Society is rich these days with technological ideas, which is why software patents are such a bad idea. But while ideas are cheap, implementations are not. So I don't see that any of us are hurt by a second implementation of this complex idea per se.
What we ought to be more worried about than where the ideas came from is where they're going. "Copycatting" is self-correcting because if the market thinks it was a waste of time, the cost will not be recovered.
But meanwhile it's there and accessible. And especially as program APIs are added to these things, I wonder where people will point fingers the first time one of these is used as a targeting system for terrorist missiles.
What if I didn't like your reply to my post, however? You did disagree with me, after all. Should I be able to remove my post and demand anyone who had a copy of it delete that as well? Of course not.
This is something that depends on the forum, and the way it's normally handled is for the forum to have rules about what permissions you have to give as a requirement of posting. Contract law allows you to yield your rights or to offer licenses or other things like that, and a possible way of accepting a contract is to say "if you post here, you agree to our terms and conditions".
But it doesn't have to follow from first principles about what you think is workable or even what you think is good for a group. And it especially doesn't follow that just because I post to your forum that you're allowed to later make other unrelated uses.
This is very analogous to well-established copyright law that says if I paint a painting and sell it to you, I am not (no matter what you wish) giving you the right to publish pictures of that painting. You have to separately purchase the rights to reproduce the painting, to sell prints, to feature it in a magazine, etc.
You do however, have fair use exceptions that would likely protect you from a problem if, for example, you replied to me here and quoted some of my text for the purpose of continuity of public dialog, especially if you did so in the same forum but probably even if you wrote a book in which you wanted to detail your upsetness at me.
I say "probably" because there could be cases in which you just "mostly quoted me" and "said very little yourself" and were trying to piggy back fame for yourself by putting a thin veneer of yourself over something that tried to exploit me. e.g., I can't just post a pirated copy of Star Wars on the net and then at the end add an extra few frames where I say "Wasn't that awful?" but where secretly it just becomes a vehicle for displaying the movie in a royalty-free way.
I just think that once you've posted something for free to the public, you can't go back and tell everyone that they have to delete any copies they may have.
Hmmm. First, it would help me if you were using phrases like "I think you shouldn't be able to..." because the fact is that in some cases you can. I can't tell if you are telling me what you think is the law, or you are just speaking about what you wish were the law.
I don't agree that this follows a priori. And I'm not sure why the "for free" is in there. You mean if I charged the public $100 to see my commentary, I'd have more right to remove it? You'd think in the abstract that as money increased, there'd be more assumption that the public had some ownership in it. But that's not even true. My copyright transfers only if I say it does--that is, if I offer that as part of the deal. But certainly if it's a gift (the notion of free here you're using is, I assume, "as in beer"), I don't see that you have leverage to demand rights.
If you want that type of control, you should have to get the user to positively acknowledge agreement to those terms before allowing them to access your work.
When it comes to IP law, for better or worse (I think better, you think worse), it works the other way. The reason is to protect and incentivize content creators. People willing to use others' creations need little incentive to use the creation--they need incentive to see that the creator isn't chewed up and spit out without even so much as a thank you.
Btw, "libel" is the thing you mean, not "liable" (which sounds like "liability", another unrelated branch of law). But, by the way, what keeps Newsweek from retra
If you are an artist and what you do is art, find a way to finance it. World could use far fewer inept amateur "artists" and more dedication and quality from those who remain
That may be a trade you're prepared to make, but it's not one I'm prepared to make. I think the world would be poorer if we had only professional artists. The quality of being good at art (whether writing, basket weaving, painting, or whatever) is not the same as being good at business.
But whether we disagree or agree on that, you're arguing against your own cause because my remark was meant to say that even though I think what I do, I still think the present copyright law gives too many years to authors and too many more to their survivors. If drawn back to only protect what I claimed was reasonable, the situation would be improved for you and still livable for me.
... the very act of viewing a website requires that you make a copy of the website. So how can someone require that you not make copies and at the same time force you to make a copy?...
Copyright is subdividable into individual rights to perform individual acts. The fact that there may well be an implicitly conveyed right to make the specific copy that goes to your browser does not imply that you have given the right to make any copies for any other purpose. Some of my pages make this explicit (e.g., see the bottom of this page).
The fact of a copyright does not necessarily mean that no copies can be made; it merely means (to quote the US Code) "the owner of copyright under this title has the exclusive rights to do and to authorize any of the following: (1) to reproduce... (2) to prepare derivative works... (3) to disribute copies... etc." The owner of the copyright can even give you permission to publish only in a certain language, only in a certain country, etc.
Current copyright laws simply shouldn't apply to the Internet because it's a different beast.
If you had to wait for new laws to be written to apply to new things, far fewer companies would dive into new areas, and the public would enjoy far less protection because those who did create new technologies would claim that everything they did was, by definition, lawless.
Makers of designer drugs do this to violate laws against illegal drugs, claiming every new drug is a distinct thing from anything legislated, and therefore claiming no drug laws apply to them. This violates common sense and the intent of having laws.
any content published to the public on the Internet should immediatly be considered public domain because that's how the content owner has implicitly made it available
This is nonsense. Just because you didn't know there were laws protecting you from others using your stuff does not mean everyone thinks the same thing. I and many many other people only publish our works to the internet for free viewing because we know that doing so does not lose our rights. If publishing were the same as "giving away" and "relinquishing rights", then you can be sure there would be a lot less available free. Copyright exists for the purpose of separating the notion of sharing from releasing rights. It is exactly an incentive to share without someone saying "ha, ha, I saw it, and now it's mine because you can't do anything about it".
Furthermore, if you are one of the many that think that copyright protects only big companies, you're wrong. Big companies don't care nearly as much about copyright as the little guy. AOL or MSN can make money whether they own copyrights or not just by pointing to others' works. Most users don't distinguish a pointer from the real thing, so they think AOL or MSN did make the things pointed to. But the person they are pointing to still has rights to take back that stuff and not to have AOL say "it's ours now, we backed it up". That protects us who do not have big portals and who have as our only value the few things we created personally. That right is essential to a sharing economy. Even what some see as the all-holy GPL could not be constructed without that right in a world containing only a "i see it, i own it" policy.
Surely it's not about the storing of archives, but about the use they are put to?
From a legal standpoint, that's not the only issue.
The fact that something of remarkable value has been created does not
mean it hasn't been made by trampling anothers' rights. I could be
Da Vinci and draw a beautiful mural on your wall, but it wouldn't be
my right, nor even the public's, to assert that you, as the owner of the wall,
had no say in whether it was erased. There are legal and illegal (and moral and
immoral, not always aligned with legality) ways of going about doing things.
There may be reasons to make exceptions even for this venture, but
if 20 organizations had done it, do all 20 need the exception? At some point,
you should stop making exceptions and change the law. But the law is also
there for a reason, so such action should not be taken lightly nor with the
view that there's a need for change means there's no adverse impact on those
who have relied on their belief in the law.
The Internet Archive is an excellent concept - a library of congress for the internet. Just because it retains some controversial material does that give us a right to burn the whole thing down?
No, as a strict matter of law, the fact that they've built something
beautiful in the willful knowledge that they were violating the law to do it
is what gives the technical right to burn it down. As I said, an exception
might be made. But it should be made with care because it sets precedent and
impacts the rights of others.
The evidence that was unearthed was clearly important and timely to the case,
Yes
and it did exist in the public domain.
Not as the term "public domain" is defined under copyright law. As a term of art in intellectual copyright law, this term means that copyright had been expressly released, which it had not been. If you mean, viewable by the public, that's not the same as having had its right of copy, distribution, or display released to others. Just as it's not your right to carry a camcorder and record a movie in the theater as you watch it. The fact that you can view it is not a release into the "public domain" even if it is a movie "released to the public" (or sometimes simply "published"). These are very different.
It's not as though the Internet Archive had metaphorically rummaged through the shredder trash.
No, it's as if they brought a recorder to a public showing that was marked "no cameras". A great many sites have copyright notices, but even those that do not are implicitly covered by copyright not only in the US but in most nations.
That is, metaphorically they took a videocam to every movie ever made and videotaped it and then offered it to the public a few years later in case they were having trouble finding that movie at their local video store.
What if the law firm got hold of a marketing leaflet from the time that had the same information?
Then they have not made but have received a copy. There is an issue as to whether the person who gave it to them had a right to distribute that copy, but usually it comes from the company itself that made it, so usually they did. But it's simply a different case.
Should they sue the law firm and the person who had 'reproduced' the leaflet?
It's legal under fair use to reproduce the leaflet once there is a fair use reason to do so. However, "I save copies of everything I ever see in case I ever need one" has less legal merit as a reason for copying than "I had a copy for legal reasons and reproduced it because it was relevant.
Yes, but the difference is that under copyright law, I can require that you not make copies of my site
Hellooooo, pragma NO-CACHE?
"Hellooooo" to you, too. Thanks for participating in this lively discussion.
If you read the original article, the issue of robots.txt is discussed there and is similar in nature. The bottom line is that these are not legal tools, and copyright is. As such, copyright has trump. Nothing in the US Code requires me to take any action whatsoever in order to have my rights under copyright. I get additional statutory rights to help me enforce my rights if I bother to register my work, but my basic rights "attach" as soon as my work is "fixed in a medium". My decisions to announce my preferences for caching, spidering, and whatnot are not part of the US Code requirements for asserting or otherwise affecting my rights.
for, say 25 or 50 years, or perhaps, the number of years copyright runs
Uh oh. This, for all means except the spirit and letter of law, is equivalent to "forever minus one day".
Sorry, perhaps I was not clear: The reason I mentioned in another paragraph (you didn't quote) that I thought copyright should not keep getting extended was to avoid this. I think a reasonable duration for either the "life of the author" or "life of a survivor if the author dies prematurely" (so that a spouse doesn't work his/her fingers to the bone helping the author get published only to have the author die and the spouse get no financial benefit from their sacrifice) is ok. But after a time, I think the public interest in being able to build on others' work takes over. e.g., kids in school listen to classical music and learn folk songs because there is no copyright. Businesses play classical music again for the same reasons. There is a public interest in making it affordable for there to be other choices, over time, and not have these pieces be the permanent property of a dynasty that did not itself build the wealth.
But there is no overwhelming public interest in robbing the original author of at least a period of time during which he/she can seek reasonable compensation. Especially since this would be both a disincentive and a moral injustice to at least some content creators, many of whom take a financial risk (if not outright certain financial hit) to make their creations in the first place.
There are several law firms in the NY city area that pay to have every sidewalk and store front and such filmed on video...
And while I have heard that some places/scenes have tried to assert a copyright claim on the "view of themselves" such that photographers wanting to photograph their public facing elements had to pay for that right, I think in general there is not a presumptive claim of copyright control over one's storefront view (though maybe some lawyer, which I am not, will assert otherwise). What seems to me different on the net is that there is a presumptive claim of copyright on the storefront.
In defense of the idea that there could be a legitimate distinction, let me observe that it may be necessary for mere locomotion to get from point A to B in the real world by going through some point C. And to explain or document or comment about that route from A to B through C, pictures make sense for a variety of reasons not related to the purpose of the site. The presence of the storefront is in fact a secondary use of the space, the primary use of which is "for the public to be there". It is the storefront taking advantage of a public thoroughfare, not vice versa. In cyberspace, the "space" occupied by a website is not "in the way of" getting from place to place, and hence it is not a secondary use of some other space. So it makes actual philosophical sense that these should not follow the same rules. (It doesn't, of course, follow that the rules ought be of any particular nature. It merely doesn't follow that you can show the rules are right in cyberspace by showing they are long-accepted in the real world.)
almost everything (there have been a few mistakes) posted on the Web that is publicly accessible was put there to be seen!
Yes, but the difference is that under copyright law, I can require that you not make copies of my site just so that you continue to come to my site to get updated versions of things.
I do this routinely with my technical papers exactly because I know they will be updated. They're usually available for people to view and read and link to, but I ask people not to make copies elsewhere and technically that "request" is enforceable under copyright law.
this suit is like complaining about a "for sale" sign in a store window being photographed, saved for years, and later viewed
Now it's true that fair use allows some things to be copied for certain reasons. And, curiously, I think the need to copy for a lawsuit might stand up. But copying the entire of everything everywhere in anticipation of something being needed for a lawsuit sounds to me to be a questionable thing. To stretch the analogy one further: making a complete repository of photos of all store windows, almost as a workaround for the fact that those store windows were not directly accessible for use. That doesn't sound like fair use to me. One of the fair use criteria is about the totality of the work, and while it's undefined how that comes into play in each instance, it's clear that the amount of bulk matters here.
Personally, I was initially uncomfortable with the Internet Archive, and I continue to be of mixed feelings about it. I think it serves a huge historical interest. However, in the nearterm it has some ill effects that run counter to the copying/distribution/presentation laws of copyright and may need some correction.
I might think it reasonable if
the internet archive were allowed to make, but not immediately publish, a complete record
they could immediately sell 404 protection and wayback search tools and other such things if both they and the affected site wanted (since that's voluntary on the part of the copyright holder)
they had to hold off on full view for, say 25 or 50 years, or perhaps, the number of years copyright runs
The disturbing part is that legal term of copyright seems to continue to lengthen with time. I'm a big fan of copyright as a form of personal control for authors to get income from their works, but copyright must lapse after some part and it is already well exceeding what I think is reasonable in that regard, with the trend looking to extend indefinitely as rich copyright holders influence congress to extend every time, say, Mickey Mouse comes into jeopardy.
I don't think it would be a great concern until that species could effectively support the transmission... of memes
Well, I guess part of what I was getting at is that we don't know what triggers this, whether it's a gradual process or a sudden epiphany-like event. Would this particular thing cause it? My point here was not that I was alleging I'm the keeper of the Secret Knowledge that if you put a roach in a car, it will evolve. My point was that I'd feel better if research like this were coupled with some degree of ethics and philosophy, and a bit of concern about possible ill consequences in the general process of this kind of research.
Btw, thanks for mentioning memes--I didn't know that term and have linked its definition to your quote in case others didn't either.
the most likely problem I can think of is if the legislators make the patent application & bidding process a closed system
Well, this is no small matter. I personally find it much more scary than you appear to.
But I certainly give you credit for honestly thinking hard about not only the potential positives but also the potential negatives of your own proposal. It shows you are trying to think it through carefully.
My other concern is that although auctions are good at identifying price, they are not good at identifying either need or merit (which may or may not be the same thing, depending on circumstance).
Assistant monkeys for the handicapped should be a real concern for you then
Ok, I'll confess to minor sensationalism by using "the Prime Directive" as my model, since I think it's more complex than that. But it seemed a pithy way of introducing the issue of ethics without putting people to sleep. I'm not so sure that a strict rule of non-interference is really the issue, though I think that's a good debate topic. What I do think is a more useful ethical line is "if the thing I'm experimenting on actually did become intelligent, would I be [pardon pun] bugged?"
I think most people would think that if guide animals were smarter, that would be good. (People might change their mind if those animals tarted to apply for Social Security, Welfare, equal Access to public buildings--including bathroom access, non-discrimination in employment, etc. But that's a debate for another day. For now, at least, I think they would say they don't fear animals that we already deal with one-on-one, and that are already semi-integrated into our society getting a bit smarter.)
Cockroaches are not generally welcomed in our society at all (at least in the western world). We are somewhat at war with them. That's probably a useful distinction to consider when feeding them information and ideas which would make people less worried about other animals.
so... i should stop teaching my kittens to type?
I think I'll steer clear of (stereo)typing cats for now. In this case, it's not the cats I fear, it's their owners.
Slashdot Mirror
That's a possible analysis. And it may even be the dominant one under present law. But increasingly I think that it is a bad approach, so please take this set of remarks as a discussion not of present law but as a critique of present law and a discussion of a possible basis for a variant law.
I feel like the US (and perhaps the world) has a set of laws that used to work well for small to medium-sized companies pre-Internet, but that increasingly those same laws are having different competitive effects in the modern world where all the money is being centralized in a few companies and market entrants are having a harder and harder time.
I'll give an example that is a real example I've seen happen. (I'm changing the names.) A small retail company, WidgetCo, was struggling to get some notice in advertising for the frobs it makes. A larger chain of retail outlets, GadgetCo, also makes frobs. GadgetCo kept appearing at the top of the list of stores in search lists even when the search term was just "WidgetCo". Why? Because GadgetCo made a "helpful" list of names and addresses of its competitors in its page. This means that since GadgetCo's pages get more hits (it being bigger) and since it mentions WidgetCo, it shows up. But the customers don't see WidgetCo first--it's buried way down there in tiny print with huge GadgetCo logos dominating the page.
What bothers me about this is that it means under the AdWords scheme, the owner of the trademark has to bid for the use of their own name. That means GadgetCo can outbid them and still show up top of the list. They can even buy several ads and push WidgetCo onto the next page. (Another way present law does not address these issues is not acknowledging the huge real effect of visibility. Being in a search result list, but not at the top, is often the same as not being there.)
This is a barrier to new entry into the market. It prefers entrenched vendors who are cash-rich and locks out cash-poor newcomers. That's bad for the market, not just for the vendor, which is why I care. I want competitors to enter because I don't want vendors getting too comfy. But as long as they can use practices like this to keep others out, new entrants are reduced and so my choice as a consumer is restricted to fat, comfy, anti-competitive big companies.
I don't mind having search terms like "something like Coke" turning up Pepsi (and other competitors with coke). I don't mind asking for Coke at a restaurant and having people who do not have Coke interpreting that as a request for similar beverages, so offering me Pepsi as a fallback. But I draw the line at asking for a Coke where it is available and finding that Pepsi is now paying people to say "Pepsi is really better. Are you sure you wouldn't want that instead?" Not only does that violate my sense of Truth and Right and Justice for the Coke trade name, it opens me to infinite ads from beverage servers from whom I just want to get the beverage I asked for!
The really bad ideas always start out in the clothing of good ideas and then just sort of creep down the slippery slope.
The problem with these tools is that the people using them imagine themselves to be unambiguously the good guys. And the sad truth is that often they are the good guys. But they don't understand that they have no way of assuring that the people running the show tomorrow will be the people running the show today. People don't live forever. People don't hold the same job forever.
Even without a political attack, there's still the issue that you have to hand over the tools you build today to the government employees of tomorrow. Even if you just look at political party issues, the mildest of all possible concerns: if you're a Democrat, do you trust the Republicans with the spy tools you've made, or if you're a Republican, do you trust the Democrats? And when you add in the possibility of enemy infiltration, influence through bribes, and outright attack to take control, it gets scarier in a variety of ways.
Any time you centralize the power of the Good Guys, you risk that in a single stroke, the Bad Guys (however you define them) can take central control of everything. One of the big protections of the United States, rarely talked about, has been the non-centrality of the "root password". That is, even if someone took over Washington, they would not necessarily control all the states.
As things get more and more centralized, and all these walls between agencies are broken down in the name of "efficient prosecution", the walls are also broken down that prevent "efficient toppling".
What I find ironic is that the people who want this power are also the biggest supporters of the Second Amendment, which was never historically about hunting and always about protecting the right of the people to retain the power to overthrow the government if it ever got uppity. (I seem to recall that some--e.g., Jefferson?--thought this would probably need to happen every 20 years or so...) Yet these tools they are creating for surveillance are designed specifically to assure that no such overthrow would ever succeed, nor even be attempted. Maybe that's even good. But if it is, we don't need all those second amendment guns. And if it's not, we don't need the cameras. Without even making a value judgment, I'll just say it seems just-plain-inconsistent to me.
Are you completely certain they're false? It's common in politics for people to deliberately leak what they're thinking of doing just to test public opinion about a controversial idea in a deniable way.
It's also possible that the occasional idea is leaked by an employee or ex-employee who doesn't like the proposed strategy and wants to raise alarm bells early enough to do something about it.
I'm not saying either of these is in play in the various situations with Google we've seen recently. But they are ever-present possibilities.
Well, presumably, once those Martian ski slopes open, many bodies will be attracted (and many will insist on bringing their super-massive SUV's, thus guranteeing a continual healthy supply of greenhouse gases). The tourist trade will snowball, and ...
Only if they couldn't offer something unique. But think of it: An IM system with full text search where you can search the world's ongoing conversations for a complete list of the three IM chat sessions going on that's actually got interesting content going on.
All the other IM systems have to offer is just the same old prattle with people one already knows, and a few weak tools for trying to shut those people up or hide from them when you can't take it any more.
Based on its potential to perform massively parallel ... er, ... "indexing" of the world's entire chat traffic, I predict it's going to be called Oooooogle.
I can't wait to see whether random anonymous outtakes from chat sessions will be scrolled over monitors at the entrances to their buildings (as now appears to be done for search keyword sets people use).
Disclaimer: All just meant in goooood fun, of course. I'm sure there's no one anywhere in the world, much less at Google, that would seriously consider doing anything like this. Just look at how restrained the world's web spiders have been in their interpretation of copyright law. With examples like that, I'm sure privacy buffs have nothing whatsoever to fear.
Ah, so what actually violates the patent is using CSS like:
a { background: white; }
a:hover { background: yellow; }
Yeah, no one would think to do that. Almost makes you wonder why they put :hover or the entire manipulable DOM in the Javascript spec given that there were no obvious intended uses.
Hmm. Is it possible that Microsoft itself was publicly using this so-called "non-obvious" kind of scripting years before it applied for the patent (Feb 11, 2004)... Time for a trip to the Wayback Machine, I guess...
Machines)used something called "Dynamic Windows" which was later further developed as CLIM (the "Common Lisp Interface Manager"). Among the various features of that system was the ability to annotate output with its datatype. e.g., and I'll simplify notation here for presentational clarity (and to save me looking it up) but it's substantially like this:
(with-output-as-presentation (stream 'integerThis would cause the user to see the string "a bit more than five" but the system to have backing store information (kind of like the HREF that underlies a URL presentation in a browser, except that's really more imperative in nature rather than declarative) that says that if the user clicks on that, he's really clicking on 5.3 instead.
What was interesting about the way Genera did it was that there was a conceptual relationship between "presentation" (the analog of printing output) and "accepting" (the analog of reading input). If someone later did:
(accept 'integerthen the mouse would become aware of all the occurrences of things that had been presented as integers (or even things that could be coerced to integers). The system could be further abstracted so that if you output British Pounds and someone asked for input of American Dollars, translators ran so that when you clicked on the value in pounds, it got translated at input time to the appropriate representation (presumably the translator you wrote knew how to acceess the currency exchange to do this). Output in inches could be converted to feet or meters, of course, without such network appliances.
But the key feature which seems to have been "obvious" even decades ago when Symbolics did this work was the idea of highlighting data of various kinds with boxes. In that case, it wasn't even limited to numeric data. It could be any kind of data, even things of different types that were hierachically presented (such a filename listing being sensitive on its whole line as a file, but as only part of the line for this and that date mentioned in the listing).
And it didn't get patented then, which to my understanding of patent law means it's missed its chance...
The really sad thing is that so few people know about this I/O paradigm, which had some very cool features. And then such sadness is compounded when others come along and attempt to say they dreamt up the idea.
I mean, geez, people have been drawing boxes around in paper for a long time. I don't doubt there's some implementation of a kids' book that has a piece of cellophane you can pull back and forth to highlight something. I recall things that use red over red text to make the text "become invisible" being implemented in physical books when I was a kid. That's a form of emphasis through boxes, too!
The patent office is way overboard these days. I think software copyright serves a critical purpose, but I think software patents are an abomination. I'd like to see the software patent system overhauled completely.
I'm impressed you could tell this much from it. I found it pretty thick reading and hard to tell what it was getting at. (I suspect that's intentional, to reduce the number of eyes on the document.)
The primary weakness I see in the patent is the reference everywhere to a URL where they would have been smarter to use URIs. I suspect someone can "trivially" get around the patent with an appropriate shift of that detail.
The patent also references XML, RSS, and Atom by name, which seems equally well a weakness and is one of the strongest arguments I've seen so far for ditching XML (which I have other problems with anyway).
And while I was about to start using RSS, I am now forced to reconsider. On the one hand, I was actually planning to seek out Google's AdWords for use in RSS just because it seems a cool technology and possible source of funding for pages. But the fact that they are trying to patent the technology and compete not on "coolness of use" but on "force" makes me think that perhaps I should seek out and support competitor technologies...
I also think the RSS authors (or, at least, the users) should create WINNER (Winner Is Notationally Not Exactly RSS), so that it is neither XML compliant nor RSS, and hence doesn't fall under the patent ... At least, it doesn't look to me like it would then fall under the patent. Since RSS looks like it comes out of Harvard, maybe they have the lawyer power to look at the Google patent and work out a minimal workaround from the holes in how the patent is written...
If you think that will lead to a lot of bankrupt companies, you're probably wrong. I believe what this is known to lead to is fewer low-end market entrants, since the low-end cannot afford the lawsuits. But at the upper end, large companies that own a lot of patents just write contracts agreeing to mutually not sue each other, and so they lock in an elite few who are allowed to participate in the market. I could have misjudged your political position, but I'm guessing this is not something you'd see as a "good effect". Certainly I do not.
I believe your literal words identify literally the mostly likely outcome of their action--that is, "more [commercial] power [will come] to them".
Leap seconds and leap days aren't related. Leap days are related to the need to make a year's length expressible in integral number of days by a sort of infinite series approximation. Unless the length of a year were an actual integral number of days, leap days would be needed even if there was no "slowing" ever. By contrast, leap seconds are added to accomodate "slowing" and are not an artifact of the original relation. The use of the term "leap" for both of these is probably what attracts politicians to "leap" to the rescue. Perhaps they should take a second to reconsider...
... arrogant. I'm pretty sure that, say, somewhere around 2027, we're going to have a lot of discussion about our present representation of time and whether it's the right one...
I actually agree that leap seconds are a bit of a mess, and I wouldn't mind seeing a better solution. But the one proposed sounds a bit bizarre. Surely the real problem is an artifact of the infancy of computer systems and the ad hoc, non-general solutions to time representation we've been using due to very small address spaces that are rapidly falling by the wayside. Why not just delay the issuing of them for a couple of decades until we can think harder about the problem. Pretending that any law passed now is going to stand unused for hundreds of years before it has any effect seems a little
Absolutely, but the other thing is that young kids all have the same schedule. They don't yet need asynchronous because they're all in school at the same time and then they come home and they all avoid their homework at the same time (from the time they get home until 2 hours after you wish they had gone to bed).
Not only will they ultimately find the subtleties of asynchrony later, but they will need the subtleties later, too. Right now even if you explained these issues to them, they'd just stare at you with a blank face and ask what it means to be on a different schedule... They think "grownups" just make things needlessly complicated--it doesn't occur to them yet that complexity is a property of the world itself and that some of the behaviors of adults are the response to that, not the cause of that.
And apparently not just the US. Note, too, the Professional Association of Teachers in the UK has recently debated or will soon be debating the following motion:
Or maybe it will just have a "deferred sense of importance"...
Aren't they both just following up (slowly) on Neal Stephenson's idea from Snow Crash ?
With all due respect to those "hard-earned" software patents the big vendors are sporting at every turn, I'm not sure that at this point in time that anything you see actually implemented was necessarily thought up by the organization that implemented it.
For example, science fiction writers often write about things like communicators, phasers, voice interfaces to computers, teleportation, robots, and so on long before big companies implement them. And often those scifi writers get their ideas from other, less well-known but still publicly available technical journals, computer programs, fanciful stories, and so on.
Society is rich these days with technological ideas, which is why software patents are such a bad idea. But while ideas are cheap, implementations are not. So I don't see that any of us are hurt by a second implementation of this complex idea per se.
What we ought to be more worried about than where the ideas came from is where they're going. "Copycatting" is self-correcting because if the market thinks it was a waste of time, the cost will not be recovered.
But meanwhile it's there and accessible. And especially as program APIs are added to these things, I wonder where people will point fingers the first time one of these is used as a targeting system for terrorist missiles.
This is something that depends on the forum, and the way it's normally handled is for the forum to have rules about what permissions you have to give as a requirement of posting. Contract law allows you to yield your rights or to offer licenses or other things like that, and a possible way of accepting a contract is to say "if you post here, you agree to our terms and conditions".
But it doesn't have to follow from first principles about what you think is workable or even what you think is good for a group. And it especially doesn't follow that just because I post to your forum that you're allowed to later make other unrelated uses.
This is very analogous to well-established copyright law that says if I paint a painting and sell it to you, I am not (no matter what you wish) giving you the right to publish pictures of that painting. You have to separately purchase the rights to reproduce the painting, to sell prints, to feature it in a magazine, etc.
You do however, have fair use exceptions that would likely protect you from a problem if, for example, you replied to me here and quoted some of my text for the purpose of continuity of public dialog, especially if you did so in the same forum but probably even if you wrote a book in which you wanted to detail your upsetness at me.
I say "probably" because there could be cases in which you just "mostly quoted me" and "said very little yourself" and were trying to piggy back fame for yourself by putting a thin veneer of yourself over something that tried to exploit me. e.g., I can't just post a pirated copy of Star Wars on the net and then at the end add an extra few frames where I say "Wasn't that awful?" but where secretly it just becomes a vehicle for displaying the movie in a royalty-free way.
Hmmm. First, it would help me if you were using phrases like "I think you shouldn't be able to..." because the fact is that in some cases you can. I can't tell if you are telling me what you think is the law, or you are just speaking about what you wish were the law.
I don't agree that this follows a priori. And I'm not sure why the "for free" is in there. You mean if I charged the public $100 to see my commentary, I'd have more right to remove it? You'd think in the abstract that as money increased, there'd be more assumption that the public had some ownership in it. But that's not even true. My copyright transfers only if I say it does--that is, if I offer that as part of the deal. But certainly if it's a gift (the notion of free here you're using is, I assume, "as in beer"), I don't see that you have leverage to demand rights.
When it comes to IP law, for better or worse (I think better, you think worse), it works the other way. The reason is to protect and incentivize content creators. People willing to use others' creations need little incentive to use the creation--they need incentive to see that the creator isn't chewed up and spit out without even so much as a thank you.
Btw, "libel" is the thing you mean, not "liable" (which sounds like "liability", another unrelated branch of law). But, by the way, what keeps Newsweek from retra
That may be a trade you're prepared to make, but it's not one I'm prepared to make. I think the world would be poorer if we had only professional artists. The quality of being good at art (whether writing, basket weaving, painting, or whatever) is not the same as being good at business.
But whether we disagree or agree on that, you're arguing against your own cause because my remark was meant to say that even though I think what I do, I still think the present copyright law gives too many years to authors and too many more to their survivors. If drawn back to only protect what I claimed was reasonable, the situation would be improved for you and still livable for me.
Copyright is subdividable into individual rights to perform individual acts. The fact that there may well be an implicitly conveyed right to make the specific copy that goes to your browser does not imply that you have given the right to make any copies for any other purpose. Some of my pages make this explicit (e.g., see the bottom of this page).
The fact of a copyright does not necessarily mean that no copies can be made; it merely means (to quote the US Code) "the owner of copyright under this title has the exclusive rights to do and to authorize any of the following: (1) to reproduce... (2) to prepare derivative works... (3) to disribute copies... etc." The owner of the copyright can even give you permission to publish only in a certain language, only in a certain country, etc.
If you had to wait for new laws to be written to apply to new things, far fewer companies would dive into new areas, and the public would enjoy far less protection because those who did create new technologies would claim that everything they did was, by definition, lawless.
Makers of designer drugs do this to violate laws against illegal drugs, claiming every new drug is a distinct thing from anything legislated, and therefore claiming no drug laws apply to them. This violates common sense and the intent of having laws.
This is nonsense. Just because you didn't know there were laws protecting you from others using your stuff does not mean everyone thinks the same thing. I and many many other people only publish our works to the internet for free viewing because we know that doing so does not lose our rights. If publishing were the same as "giving away" and "relinquishing rights", then you can be sure there would be a lot less available free. Copyright exists for the purpose of separating the notion of sharing from releasing rights. It is exactly an incentive to share without someone saying "ha, ha, I saw it, and now it's mine because you can't do anything about it".
Furthermore, if you are one of the many that think that copyright protects only big companies, you're wrong. Big companies don't care nearly as much about copyright as the little guy. AOL or MSN can make money whether they own copyrights or not just by pointing to others' works. Most users don't distinguish a pointer from the real thing, so they think AOL or MSN did make the things pointed to. But the person they are pointing to still has rights to take back that stuff and not to have AOL say "it's ours now, we backed it up". That protects us who do not have big portals and who have as our only value the few things we created personally. That right is essential to a sharing economy. Even what some see as the all-holy GPL could not be constructed without that right in a world containing only a "i see it, i own it" policy.
From a legal standpoint, that's not the only issue. The fact that something of remarkable value has been created does not mean it hasn't been made by trampling anothers' rights. I could be Da Vinci and draw a beautiful mural on your wall, but it wouldn't be my right, nor even the public's, to assert that you, as the owner of the wall, had no say in whether it was erased. There are legal and illegal (and moral and immoral, not always aligned with legality) ways of going about doing things. There may be reasons to make exceptions even for this venture, but if 20 organizations had done it, do all 20 need the exception? At some point, you should stop making exceptions and change the law. But the law is also there for a reason, so such action should not be taken lightly nor with the view that there's a need for change means there's no adverse impact on those who have relied on their belief in the law.
No, as a strict matter of law, the fact that they've built something beautiful in the willful knowledge that they were violating the law to do it is what gives the technical right to burn it down. As I said, an exception might be made. But it should be made with care because it sets precedent and impacts the rights of others.
Yes
Not as the term "public domain" is defined under copyright law. As a term of art in intellectual copyright law, this term means that copyright had been expressly released, which it had not been. If you mean, viewable by the public, that's not the same as having had its right of copy, distribution, or display released to others. Just as it's not your right to carry a camcorder and record a movie in the theater as you watch it. The fact that you can view it is not a release into the "public domain" even if it is a movie "released to the public" (or sometimes simply "published"). These are very different.
No, it's as if they brought a recorder to a public showing that was marked "no cameras". A great many sites have copyright notices, but even those that do not are implicitly covered by copyright not only in the US but in most nations.
That is, metaphorically they took a videocam to every movie ever made and videotaped it and then offered it to the public a few years later in case they were having trouble finding that movie at their local video store.
Then they have not made but have received a copy. There is an issue as to whether the person who gave it to them had a right to distribute that copy, but usually it comes from the company itself that made it, so usually they did. But it's simply a different case.
It's legal under fair use to reproduce the leaflet once there is a fair use reason to do so. However, "I save copies of everything I ever see in case I ever need one" has less legal merit as a reason for copying than "I had a copy for legal reasons and reproduced it because it was relevant.
"Hellooooo" to you, too. Thanks for participating in this lively discussion.
If you read the original article, the issue of robots.txt is discussed there and is similar in nature. The bottom line is that these are not legal tools, and copyright is. As such, copyright has trump. Nothing in the US Code requires me to take any action whatsoever in order to have my rights under copyright. I get additional statutory rights to help me enforce my rights if I bother to register my work, but my basic rights "attach" as soon as my work is "fixed in a medium". My decisions to announce my preferences for caching, spidering, and whatnot are not part of the US Code requirements for asserting or otherwise affecting my rights.
Sorry, perhaps I was not clear: The reason I mentioned in another paragraph (you didn't quote) that I thought copyright should not keep getting extended was to avoid this. I think a reasonable duration for either the "life of the author" or "life of a survivor if the author dies prematurely" (so that a spouse doesn't work his/her fingers to the bone helping the author get published only to have the author die and the spouse get no financial benefit from their sacrifice) is ok. But after a time, I think the public interest in being able to build on others' work takes over. e.g., kids in school listen to classical music and learn folk songs because there is no copyright. Businesses play classical music again for the same reasons. There is a public interest in making it affordable for there to be other choices, over time, and not have these pieces be the permanent property of a dynasty that did not itself build the wealth.
But there is no overwhelming public interest in robbing the original author of at least a period of time during which he/she can seek reasonable compensation. Especially since this would be both a disincentive and a moral injustice to at least some content creators, many of whom take a financial risk (if not outright certain financial hit) to make their creations in the first place.
And while I have heard that some places/scenes have tried to assert a copyright claim on the "view of themselves" such that photographers wanting to photograph their public facing elements had to pay for that right, I think in general there is not a presumptive claim of copyright control over one's storefront view (though maybe some lawyer, which I am not, will assert otherwise). What seems to me different on the net is that there is a presumptive claim of copyright on the storefront.
In defense of the idea that there could be a legitimate distinction, let me observe that it may be necessary for mere locomotion to get from point A to B in the real world by going through some point C. And to explain or document or comment about that route from A to B through C, pictures make sense for a variety of reasons not related to the purpose of the site. The presence of the storefront is in fact a secondary use of the space, the primary use of which is "for the public to be there". It is the storefront taking advantage of a public thoroughfare, not vice versa. In cyberspace, the "space" occupied by a website is not "in the way of" getting from place to place, and hence it is not a secondary use of some other space. So it makes actual philosophical sense that these should not follow the same rules. (It doesn't, of course, follow that the rules ought be of any particular nature. It merely doesn't follow that you can show the rules are right in cyberspace by showing they are long-accepted in the real world.)
Yes, but the difference is that under copyright law, I can require that you not make copies of my site just so that you continue to come to my site to get updated versions of things.
I do this routinely with my technical papers exactly because I know they will be updated. They're usually available for people to view and read and link to, but I ask people not to make copies elsewhere and technically that "request" is enforceable under copyright law.
Now it's true that fair use allows some things to be copied for certain reasons. And, curiously, I think the need to copy for a lawsuit might stand up. But copying the entire of everything everywhere in anticipation of something being needed for a lawsuit sounds to me to be a questionable thing. To stretch the analogy one further: making a complete repository of photos of all store windows, almost as a workaround for the fact that those store windows were not directly accessible for use. That doesn't sound like fair use to me. One of the fair use criteria is about the totality of the work, and while it's undefined how that comes into play in each instance, it's clear that the amount of bulk matters here.
Personally, I was initially uncomfortable with the Internet Archive, and I continue to be of mixed feelings about it. I think it serves a huge historical interest. However, in the nearterm it has some ill effects that run counter to the copying/distribution/presentation laws of copyright and may need some correction.
I might think it reasonable if
The disturbing part is that legal term of copyright seems to continue to lengthen with time. I'm a big fan of copyright as a form of personal control for authors to get income from their works, but copyright must lapse after some part and it is already well exceeding what I think is reasonable in that regard, with the trend looking to extend indefinitely as rich copyright holders influence congress to extend every time, say, Mickey Mouse comes into jeopardy.
Well, I guess part of what I was getting at is that we don't know what triggers this, whether it's a gradual process or a sudden epiphany-like event. Would this particular thing cause it? My point here was not that I was alleging I'm the keeper of the Secret Knowledge that if you put a roach in a car, it will evolve. My point was that I'd feel better if research like this were coupled with some degree of ethics and philosophy, and a bit of concern about possible ill consequences in the general process of this kind of research.
Btw, thanks for mentioning memes--I didn't know that term and have linked its definition to your quote in case others didn't either.
Well, this is no small matter. I personally find it much more scary than you appear to.
But I certainly give you credit for honestly thinking hard about not only the potential positives but also the potential negatives of your own proposal. It shows you are trying to think it through carefully.
My other concern is that although auctions are good at identifying price, they are not good at identifying either need or merit (which may or may not be the same thing, depending on circumstance).
Ok, I'll confess to minor sensationalism by using "the Prime Directive" as my model, since I think it's more complex than that. But it seemed a pithy way of introducing the issue of ethics without putting people to sleep. I'm not so sure that a strict rule of non-interference is really the issue, though I think that's a good debate topic. What I do think is a more useful ethical line is "if the thing I'm experimenting on actually did become intelligent, would I be [pardon pun] bugged?"
I think most people would think that if guide animals were smarter, that would be good. (People might change their mind if those animals tarted to apply for Social Security, Welfare, equal Access to public buildings--including bathroom access, non-discrimination in employment, etc. But that's a debate for another day. For now, at least, I think they would say they don't fear animals that we already deal with one-on-one, and that are already semi-integrated into our society getting a bit smarter.)
Cockroaches are not generally welcomed in our society at all (at least in the western world). We are somewhat at war with them. That's probably a useful distinction to consider when feeding them information and ideas which would make people less worried about other animals.
I think I'll steer clear of (stereo)typing cats for now. In this case, it's not the cats I fear, it's their owners.