And I can't help but believe that their sales have been up since having their name everywhere. Is there any reason to believe that all this talk of spam has hurt their sales? People often buy cans of SPAM® as humorous gifts for others who are always complaining about computer spam.
It seems to me that they're just jealously guarding their mark because law sites everywhere (e.g., http://www.bohanlaw.com/tmcmcm.html) make a point of noting that if you don't guard your mark, you should expect to lose it. Marks like Kleenex®, Xerox®, and others live in perpetual fear that courts will find these words have replaced "facial tissue" and "photocopy", respectively, in streetspeak, and that the marks will be so diluted as to be no longer enforceable.
Yet, as far as I can tell, the US trademark law on trademark dilution (a possible way to lose protection for a "famous mark") is pretty clear that the issues are:
competition between the owner of the famous mark and other parties, or
likelihood of confusion, mistake, or deception.
I don't see how a food product could be confused with a mail filtering program.
Maybe they've just gotten such good publicity out of the spam problem that they're afraid tools for de-spamming will end the ride, so they have to find other ways to keep their name in the news for free...;)
I've heard a lot of people cite the RSA as something that deserves a patent. I agree and often cite it myself. But there are so few that do...
Why doesn't the EU do something innovative and just elect a blue ribbon panel of judges to give away patents based on how cool they are and how useful they are... like the Nobel prize.
The award could have two components: a right of unique use for a period of time (set by the judges, and surely shorter than 17 years, but probably a function of the development costs, so that more expensive developments could get somewhat longer protections, still not to exceed, say, 5 years, but some might get only 6 months or a year) and then, too, a monetary award to the inventor(s). You'd want to reward each separately, since the former needs to be an incentive to business and the latter to people to avoid business claiming all the credit. A business not willing to cite the inventors would not be eligible to win at all, and hence to have its development costs retroactively subsidized by the award.
And if they gave out few enough, rational people could keep track of what was patented and what not.
I think most reasonable people would have voted RSA as a winner to this award, so it passes that litmus test for a proper system. I think most reasonable people would not vote for the XOR patent to get a multi-year protection, even though it was cool in its time--the cost of development was just not steep enough, so it passes that litmus test as well. And no matter how strongly people on the committee felt that something intermittently important like LZW compression was, it would still be available for others to use freely in 5 years, not 17, which is a worst case most of us could live with.
Another solution: Allow the patents, but make it absolutely clear that no patent can be infringed on by writing, publishing, downloading or using software on a normal computer.
The problem with this is that it's about use. So the patent gets granted, and you just don't know for sure what it applies to. But it's still a lurking snake in the grass waiting to bite you.
Here's another, still more minimal, protection I'll offer as an alternative:
A documented demonstration that something has been independently developed should be a defense, not an infringement, because it demonstrates "obviousness".
One of the chief problems with patents in general, and software patents in particular, at least in the US (someone tell me if it's different in the EU or elsewhere, please), is that if you independently come up with the idea, that's considered an infringement. It should instead start to chip away at the notion that this was a powerful and unique idea worthy of protection.
Among other reasons why independent development should not be considered an infringement is that it's easy to see that as the number of patents grows, the amount of ESP required by each programmer is intense. It is not possible to legally make a new, non-infringing thing without knowledge of all extant things that might be infringed. This is a goldmine for lawyers, but an increasing minefield for programmers and builders, and simply makes no sense.
Will some nation eventually deploy weapons in space? I'd say there's a high liklihood. To me then, the question boils down to, do you want to be first or attempt to be second?
Then again, there's an opposite line of thought that goes:
If we don't deploy space weapons now, there's a finite chance no one else will hurry to do it either. But if we do, it's an almost certainty that people will.
And then how much safer will anyone be? The ante will be raised, but everyone will be more afraid, just like with the nuclear arsenal. All our nuclear weapons can't protect us from a terrorist dirty bomb.
Why isn't our first line of attack a verifiable treaty opposing this all across the board?
The summary of this bill here at Slashdot seems to suggest it outlaws keystroke logging, but in fact it's a bit more specific and talks about transmitting, etc. Still, one thing that disturbs me is fragile wording like:
(a) Through the use of a keystroke-logging function that records all keystrokes made by an owner or operator and transfers that information from the computer to another person;
It looks to me like if you just skip recording characters every now and then, you're safe on that point. Or if you transferred the data first to another computer and then maybe a person or program or corporation or someone's dog picked up the data instead of having it transferred to them.
It probably needs at least some wording like "substantially all" instead of "all", and "entity" instead of "person".
I doubt this is the only problem with the legislation, it was just the first thing I saw when I spot-checked that one sentence.
Seems like quite a gamble. They're spending real money on digging up and writing real stories, and then giving that away. Now they're going to hope what is their real value, the thing we'll pay for, is not all that news they made but rather "opinions" (when the Big Bang of the Blogoverse is only microseconds ago and the entire Universe is composed, to round numbers, exclusively of blogs--not exactly the world's most scarce commodity) and "old news" (again, to round numbers, "everything else left on the net"--Google and its ilk are quite well able to access old news). Well, let's just say, it wouldn't have been my first guess about a strategy. I might even sign up, mind you. But it still seems... uninspired.
What's really sad to me about this is that it's just "more of same". With the world kneedeep in computers, RSS feeds popping up all over, e-business continuing to claim it's going to spring out all over the place, etc. you'd think their big plan for something to charge for could be, I dunno,... active. Or even... interactive. Something that does something, not just something that, well, sits there.
But that's just my opinion--one of many out here in the unpaid area... nothing of consequence.
Hmm, thinking on it, that's probably the biggest thing they'll lose. By hiding behind a wall, they may kid themselves into thinking that the real value is happening inside. In that regard, I'd almost feel better if they were pay-only all the way through, not just paying for their own opinions. Because if those opinions drive the paper, they're walling themselves off from good ideas that might otherwise keep them going...
Trip can return in a movie or expansion on the series, as long as it takes place in the long time span they gave themselves between the Terra Prime thing and the coda where he is killed.
Now I'm not remembering clearly, nor am I highly motivated to rush out and find a friend who cared enough to record this fiasco of a last-two-episodes, but didn't T'Pol mention she hadn't thought of him in all that time? Presumably implying that he wasn't on the ship, and at least implying that the one plot feature people want to see (the two of them together) can't usefully happen?
[Spoiler context not repeated. Get context from previous messages, and stop reading now if you've not seen the last episode and care about having it spoiled.]
I can understand her upsetness. Although I had remarked upthread that a death could be instructive to our space program, I meant "by way of showing that things can continue", not "as a way of so demoralizing everyone that they would know the series was really over". That kind of misses the "sometimes death is necessary for things to move ahead" message.
Plus, this is a lesson Star Trek has already taught us well, and is not one that required repeating. I heard my wife muttering "The good of the many must outweigh..." before the incident was even half-over and we knew the outcome. You could see it coming a mile away.
It seemed a serious diss either to the people who canceled it or personally to Connor Trinneer (who played Trip in the series but won't be in any movies without help from the 28th Century Temporal Police--they closed the door on that relatively firmly with Riker's historical commentary and museum video).
[Actually, IMDB shows its bounding notation "(2001-2005)", usually reserved for characers present only for part of a series after not just Trip but also Archer, T'Pol, Flox, and Malcolm (but not Travis and Hoshi, for example). Wonder what that's about. Conspiratorial thought: Did I see talk here on Slahdot of the South Park people picking up the show? Maybe that's why Chef was the central character in the last episode... maybe he's the common element that's going to tie the two shows together.]
Well, if it were a real different species, of course, their problem would be inability to mate. So I don't think it's exploring that at all.
But Star Trek has made a tradition of highlighting the condition of man by contrast with aliens. And sure, there were things about ourselves to learn here. But they were paid short shrift, and the thing we really got a lot of was overt sexuality, including "sharing her around" instead of focusing on a special thing between her and Trip. On some days I had to wonder if she actually had a preferred person, or if that person was Trip. The number of tender moments and legitimate emotions was too small, I thought. That's why I summed it up as "good setup, bad delivery". They could have done lots better with what they started with.
Lives will be lost... However, this is not 'acceptable', merely inevitable.
People often use the word intolerable, and then go on to tolerate. They use the word unacceptable, and then they accept. I guess you can make a definition of acceptable that doesn't mean what the word means, but in the end, lives will be lost and if you don't accept that, it means you don't do it.
Remedial viewing: Glory (on the matter of sacrifice), The Princess Bride (on the topic of words that people use but don't really mean, in that case, "inconceivable").
I gave up on it. I was pulled back by what people were saying about the Mirror Universe episodes so I watched those but...
The Mirror universe was clever, but I wished they'd put as much energy into the rest of the series. It was a brilliant premise and they botched it from the start.
The right use of the mirror episode would have been to pull a Dallas and just erase the entire series by admitting that all the preceding episodes were the mirror version. They could have a version of T'Pol enter and find herself horrified to see that there's a universe where she's just a sex object with emotions and pointy ears and not a regular crew member, a scientist, and a practicing emotionless vulcan. Then they wouldn't have to worry how they were going to link up all the temporal inconsistencies with the subsequent series either. We could have gone back with the good guys to our universe and lived happily ever after.
What I liked about the original premise of the Enterprise series was the notion of putting some humor and adventure back into Star Trek. For as much as TNG was brilliant, it suffered in the end because it appears they had no more places where no man had gone before, and they turned inward to the mental. A lot of us think Space is about new starts, things that don't always work, a chance to rebuild and make up for past mistakes, etc. Here was a series where transporters didn't quite work, the universal translator wasn't debugged, people were not experienced diplomats, and there was a big chance of things going wrong, sometimes comedically and sometimes tragically.
It was to be a show about real adventure and uncertainty, showing how hard it was surviving in Space before the invention of the red shirt for expendible crewmen. Maybe with characters that came and went on shorter timelines than the whole series, if that's even possible in modern television qua business. My generation grew up with Star Trek to teach us about optimism and hope for the future. Those are things people needed to get the Space program going. But recently, we panic in real life when the space program loses even one life. That's not realistic. We need Star Trek to be brave enough to teach us that good lives will be lost, and that this is acceptable. I think we are losing that sense, and insisting on a completely planned experience both in real life and on the show.
Other than venue, the show has mostly just converged on the same old formula, made worse only by intensive pushes for a love story with T'Pol and the need to constantly be pushing to undress her, just as killed Lt. Yar's hope for being an equal. Yar's only really good episode was Yesterday's Enterprise, and it's probably not a coincidence that she had to be dead to do it. I grew up on the original series and loved its characters, but sad as it was, I really thought it a genius stroke to kill a main character in one of the movies (you know which one, but I'm trying not to spoil it). I thought "Yes! Finally we know they're playing for keeps. Now the uncertainty will be real..." This was to be a show about uncertainty, but it didn't deliver.
Have we learned nothing. Calling it a nuclear (or nucular) battery will only ensure it's [sic] complete and total failure.
I was with you up to the equating of nucular with nuclear. Regardless of your feelings about Bush, pro or con, you have to admit he's managed to sway a lot of people by his [irony acknowledged] scientific choice of words. So since, as you seem to implicitly suggest, we seem a nation more susceptible to words than truths, maybe this is just the shift that's needed to get it over the hump.
Then again, maybe it will later run afoul of something related to what I've heard cited about bicycles as the "40 pound rule", that is (if I'm recalling correctly): If you have a very light bike, it needs a 40 pound lock, if you have a 20 pound bike, it neeeds a 20 pound lock, and if you have a 40 pound bike, it needs no lock... so all bikes weigh the same. Maybe the same will be true with laptops, efficient batteries, and the weight of lead shielding to compensate for or protect from the so-called nucular option for efficient batteries...
Let's not let the quantum mechanical nature of this thing lead to too much spin control. The public deserves an immediate up or down volt...
Google has spent years maintaining the highest ethical standards... I don't think they would piss away their credibility for profit, especially since they aren't hurting for cash in the first place.
Of course, it's not always "now" that these problems occur. One reason that one maintains strict ethical breaks between various organizations is not to protect them when they're strong, but on the assumption that one is not always strong every day.
I heard a few years back that Reader's Digest was not doing economically well and that their biggest asset turned out to be a repository of the reading habits of a huge part of the US population. Even if they were not inclined to sell out, they were still candidate for takeover by another company buying them just for this data and not for their editorial work or revenue stream. I didn't end up following the news, so I don't know how it turned out, or even that this account I'd heard was correct. (Maybe someone else knows better can offer more info here.) But even if you take it only as a hypothetical, it seems pretty plausible that such things could happen.
Big companies have sometimes fallen. And one would like to believe we haven't entered a political climate where that will never happen again, even if one doesn't have a deathwish for any particular big company. So what if Google gets all this stuff and then gets either nervous or outright cheap... If their size and economic power is what protects us now, what protects us then?
what Salon does with TableTalk is make you pay to write code. That's completely different than getting paid to write code
Ah, you missed my point. Ignore the issue of my being paid--you don't know that I got paid. All you know is that I had free time enough to write it. Maybe that's because my Mom houses and feeds me. You can call that pay, but thankfully, the IRS doesn't agree and at least doesn't tax such things as income. But it's irrelevant to my point.
Let me make an analogy: If I'm going to offer you a discount in a business, there are two ways to account for it. I can either think to myself "This costs $1.00 and then when I sell it I can make two transactions, the original $1.00 and a -$0.20 cost every time I make a sale at $0.80" or I can think to myself "This costs $0.80 and every time I sell it for that, I get what I expected, but sometimes when I sell it for $1.00 I'm taking in an additional $0.20 premium for someone being willing to buy the product not-at-discount." Whether I'm selling the product normally at the right price and taking a loss on some sales, or whether I'm selling the product normally at the right price and making a windfall on some sales is purely a matter of perception.
So when I sell something and don't get to charge someone money for it, you see the money that maybe came in from Mom and think that's "the right pay" and you see the other as "extra pay". However, there's an alternate model in which the usage fee was part of the model, and I'm losing money by not getting the usage fee. The point is not which way I model it. The point is that the GPL restricts me from getting the larger amount. You can choose to say it keeps me from getting a windfall, but that's just semantics. It doesn't alter what I said, it alters how you want to spin it and how you write it into the ledger. The phenomenon is the same: there is only one price at which it's being sold, not two. And, worse, my real customer--that is, my economic buyer--Mom, probably hasn't even been informed of what she bought in a lot of cases. And she may not be happy that her money was thrown away in this way when she thought she was investing in me getting a career as a computer programmer that might pay for her living in comfort in her old age.
If this hypothetical Mom is anything lke mine, she is not even a programmer, and barely uses her computer, so I'm pretty sure she's not going to benefit from all those other free programs and bug fixes to my program I get back. Mom would benefit indirectly if those things were getting taxed, but the commerce in them is outside the taxable base, and does not enrich her.
No, the people who believe in free markets champion the basic concept that people should get paid if they provide desired goods & services, and shouldn't expect to get paid otherwise.
Hmmm. And here I thought people who believed in free markets didn't try to control how others got paid.
people who believe in private property rights champion being able to use your own private property without being charged a "usage fee" by someone who doesn't own the property
Of course, the real reason that copyright exists (and it includes the right to charge someone that usage fee), is to encourage the person creating something to also share it.
What you say about property is true, but IP is not "real property", it is "intellectual property", and the law deals differently with that exactly because the problem is that if you share something, you risk that the person you're sharing it with will just take their copy and go. Society makes a bargain with creative people, saying that if you share your work, we will allow you to continue to control aspects of it. This avoids a society in which creative people, in order to eat, have to only share their intellectual creations in secret with people who can afford to pay a lot, so that the money they get for such rare showings is enough to feed them--but people who can't afford to pay don't ever get to share.
And besides, the requirement that a GPL'd work be treated in a certain way is no less a "usage fee". It is the author exerting control over a user even after the user has possession. One form of control is access to a fee, the other is a requirement of behavior. But they are both, under the law, variations on "acting to one's own legal detriment". The GPL does not implement freedom, it implements the same kind of coercion that copyright does. In fact, had there been no copyright law, there could be no GPL, and anyone who made and shared something that would have been copyrightable in the real world would instead be placing it in the public domain.
That's the way in law to permit real freedom of a work you create: expressly dedicate a work to the public domain. Anything less, such as GPL, and either you're abusing the term "freedom" or, at best, you don't have the right to claim that you have a unique point of view on what is free or what is not. Copyright and GPL are in an equivalence set here, freedomwise.
Don't pay, don't comment, don't contribute. Go someplace else and watch the site wither on the vine.
The market only responds to the high-order bit, where the decision about which bit is highest-order is also decided by the market.
Suppose you have a great Chinese restaurant near your house. The food is world-class. The owner is nice. But the service is consistently slower than you wish. You can't simply stop going there and expect a new one, just like it, to pop up to compete. The market doesn't work that way. It can't discriminate why you are failing to send it money. Especially if you're eating Indian food at the restaurant next door in the interim, in which case it will conclude you have stopped liking Chinese, and you're more likely to get two Indian food restaurants than an Indian and a punctual Chinese one.
It's common in US Presidential elections for newly elected Presidents to claim, as our latest president did, that The People actively wanted the whole platform, when in fact mostly all a vote ever shows is that "for some reason(s), you thought this president was better (or less bad) than the other." It certainly does mean "for all reasons" nor does it help you discover for which reason(s).
Salon Magazine tried the same thing as is being complained about here quite a while back. They wanted to charge people for posting on TableTalk, their online forum, but continue to allow people to read for free. I was incensed. Charge the content producers and let the users get things for free? As a sensible poster, I stopped posting and went away. Salon continued, though, in spite of that.
What's hilarious to me about complaining about such matters here is that Slashdot is a haven of free software buffs--that is, people who champion the idea that people should pay to produce stuff (you do have to eat while you code) but you shouldn't have to pay to use stuff (you don't pay for the result of all that free software that it cost someone to produce).
Perhaps the human mind is some sort of capitalist market, deciding what rationales are most and least important based on internal market forces that we can only barely understand because we see only that same, elusive, high order bit of outcome. Maybe understanding the process from the outcome is more than we should expect...
Re:Static code verifications, anyone?
on
Practical Common Lisp
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
There is quite a lot I could say about this, but I'm going to focus here on just one point:
Managers would care a lot less about handling runtime errors if static languages didn't just plain segfault when they get them. Error handling in non-Lisp languages is so bad that of course people outside of Lisp are obsessed with handling errors. Even Java, which drew from Lisp in its design, failed to pick up the notion of "restarts" and so only has the throw-style environment=wrecking error handling. That is severe and it's no wonder managers think it matters.
Also, the number of NULL problems you get in many static languages all by itself makes me distrust the confidence factor that managers put in static compilation. The number of wrong-type-data problems I've seen in Lisp pales by comparison to this one unchecked "detail" in these static languages.
And besides, there are other kinds of errors you can get that are just as severe but not as easily seen as type errors, and that lots of times people in static languages don't check for because they're so relieved their program runs at all. While Lisp programmers, not having this safety net, write much better tests. Tests for things other than just type match and nullness, I mean. Tests to do things like see whether the answer is right--because it's so much more easy in Lisp to represent and manipulate data that it's much easier to write GOOD test cases.
I think the process of managing Lisp projects is simply different than managing C++ projects There are a lot of details that they should account for quite differently if they want a successful outcome. This is only one of them. The paradigm shift is noticeable, I'll grant you that. But I'm not sure fixing it by making Lisp just do what other langauges do is the right fix.
The problem is that if a voting machine is programmed to cheat, it is easy enough to fake a paper receipt.
I'm not 100% sure that what you say is true about receipts. I haven't thought it through thoroughly, but it seems likely to me that the voting box could give you back a secret code (not your ssn or a voter index # but something more like an encryption key) that would identify you and your vote anonymously. Let's say you got something that said that person #ABCD voted for and then a list of what you voted for. Then they could publish a list of voters by magic key that said exactly which votes contributed to the result. Any person could add them up and see who won and lost. Every participant could verify that their own vote was in the list. That would reduce the problem to wondering if anyone changed after the fact and wondering if there were more votes than people who were able to verify themselves. What bothers me is not that this is being done wrong, but that no one seems to be doing anything about this at all.
What is really needed is publicly-available source code that anyone can view.
What makes you think the machines they're using are running the code they publish? Open source works great if it's you that owns the machine you're going to run it on--I don't understand how to verify that a machine you don't own is running the code it purports to be running.
The problem with this is that you have to specify pretty clearly whether web walkers are browsers that are just fetching pages, or whether they are something else. And if you have a webwalker connected to an interactive browser, does that make it more of a browser or more of a webwalker?
Also, some people transitively conclude that they can print things they can see in their browser. And some people might assume they can do this many times. And then they assume they can sell the result. And so on. Pretty soon all copyright control has eroded by a series of slippery-slope style inferences.
I'm not a lawyer, but I often attach to my pages a notice like this. And even then, I don't know that it is adequately specific...
The following limited, non-exclusive, revokable licenses are granted:
Browsing of this document (that is, transmission and display of a temporary copy of this document for the ordinary purpose of direct viewing by a human being in the usual manner that hypertext browsers permit such viewing) is expressly permitted, provided that no recopying, redistribution, redisplay, or retransmission is made of any such copy.
Bookmarking of this document (that is, recording only the document's title and Uniform Resource Locator, or URL, but not its content, for the purpose of remembering an association between the document's title and the URL, and/or for the purpose of making a subsequent request for a fresh copy of the content named by that URL) is also expressly permitted.
Free speech is about the idea that one is not kept from speaking. A single domain is enough to assure that you get your message out. Grabbing many of them starts to monopolize the stage, and robs free speech from the person who might otherwise respond.
This political situation seems to me to be different than the commercial one in which someone with a tradename ACME might legitimately grab ACME.com, ACME.net, and ACME.org to prevent dilution of the mark.
I happen to think the Freedom of Speech is often better analyzed as the Freedom to Hear. Under this analysis, it's the public's right to hear the alternative point of view that's in jeopardy.
The Supreme Court has generally taken the position that, where feasible, the answer to Bad Speech is More Speech. That is, if the injured party has rebuttal time, the public stage can play out the debate. (The Supreme Court has yet to hear a definitive case in which someone's right to respond is simply drowned in an infinite capacity of one side to outflame the other, but no doubt it will ultimately happen.) Grabbing too many "obvious" domain names, while it doesn't keep the targeted person from responding, does hide the targeted person's response, and seems to me even to edge toward fraud.
Why is someone who makes a profit necessarily evil?
I'll go a step farther, just to underscore this already excellent point:
By not first assuring that there was a way to make money on the net, one could argue that it is he who condemned all of us content-providers on the net to a life of never being reimbursed for our efforts.
It is certainly the case that some people make money on the net, but mostly it is not the myriad people who have contributed the value it provides. If you want information on the mating habits of certain bark beetles, you can be sure there's some uncompensated bark beetle expert who has done you the favor of typing in this info, and you can be equally sure that when AOL or NetZero says it can offer you "all the value of the internet for a very low price" (times millions of people subscribing, it's still a tidy profit for them ) they are not making an effort to pay the many content providers.
So let's all "thank" Sir Tim for that, too.
In fact, I think the net just ran out of control and was co-opted by those with power in an attempt to continue to hold power.
Further compounded by the exchange of free software, it has assured that the net is not a very friendly place to try to make a buck. Real success already means, after a very short time, the ability to supply globally in order to make the sales volume that offsets the incredibly low margins the net has produced. And only a few people are capitalized to do that.
I have started to wonder if the world economy and overall happiness is actually improved by the presence of the net. Business seems to thrive on inefficiency, and the net is all about eliminating inefficiency. Something is awry.
I'm not a lawyer, but I don't think these guys can hide behind the parody protection laws. They aren't really looking to specifically make fun of the movie, they just need a starting place to hang their improv humor.
Ah, well, I'm just working with the limited info from the article.
I do agree that there is a fine but important line between "parody" and "fan fiction".
"Parody" is commentary on a particular story, and the latter is merely taking the stage of a particular item as a jump-off. "Fan fiction", by contrast,I would imagine the fair use restrictions are stronger.
The point of parody is to make humor and sometimes a political message as well. Certainly my parody tends to have its basis in parody, and (in part out of parody and in part out of paranoia) I've gone to trouble to meticulously document on a per-episode basis the nature of the political commentary in plain text, for those who are comedically challenged and might otherwise overlook it. (e.g., consider Episode 47 as an example) was accompanied by a corresponding "moral of the story" page (e.g., Moral 47). In fact, some of my readers tell me they have preferred to just read the morals directly, either in addition or instead, so I know the commentary itself had value in and of itself.
I have heard that others who have "fan fiction" sites have been contacted by studios asking them to cease and desist. Perhaps it's just coincidence, but I have never been contacted by Sony or CBS suggesting that I am outside my bounds in the site I've done. I like to think that this is because I've stayed to the correct side of the parody/fan-fiction line.
The strange thing is that if this group is as good at improv as it is, it seems like the backdrop would be more distraction than help... Fan fiction, by its nature, usually just starts with an existing something as a jump-off and then goes a separate way. Improv as well.
They are showing a movie in a theatre, so they need permission from whoever owns the movie.
I don't agree with this as either an isolated statement or a summary of our (or, at least, my) analysis. The copyright law makes no such clear statement, and I think for good reason. I can imagine situations where you'd need this right of "fair use" even when showing the whole of someone's movie.
Parody IS fair use, and, more than that, constitutionally protected freedom of expression, but using actual Star Wars in the background is a violation of their IP.
[Disclaimers: I am not a lawyer; these are just my personal understandings as a member of the public. I am an advocate of existing strong controls by copyright owners. I am also, however, a strong advocate of the existing special protections for the work of parody authors. I myself am an author of works of parody that would not be possible absent such protection.]
As I understand it, the "fair use" criteria are not hard and fast. Substantial resources are available on the web for helping to understand this complex issue.
There are four criteria used in judging fair use. Among them, the principal one in controversy here seems to be "the amount and substantiality of the portion used in relation to the copyrighted work as a whole". The law doesn't say how the court is to address the amount and substantiality, just that it is to pay heed to it. What follows here is my own analysis of these issues.
First, and most obviously, by omitting the soundtrack, they are plainly taking only part of the work. This, it seems to me, is an acknowledgment of their need to not just rely on the power of the original piece in making their new work. (Note: I think there could exist situations where using the whole work might still be necessary to a proper public dialog through parody, but the case is easier to make when some parts have been omitted.)
Personally, I think the case for "fair use" in this case hinges on these issues: Are they using parody as a mere dodge for paying royalties on a movie they would just like to show for free? That is, are they negatively impacting the commercial stake of the movie? And secondarily, are they adding content which legitimately justifies the price they are charging on its own,or are they merely riding on the coat-tails of the movie to make money without adding any legitimate content of their own.
It seems to me very unlikely that a person who had never seen the movie would endure a parody session as a dodge for seeing it. It would be cheaper for them to just rent the DVD. Notwithstanding Lucas' desire that they not charge money, it seems to me that the fact that money is being willingly paid by attendees is a kind of proof that there is legitimate new content here. For far less, people could rent the DVD.
Additionally, and importantly, the work is not likely to appeal to anyone not having seen the movie. The movie would barely be intelligible to them. I'd bet that (to round numbers) everyone attending has seen (and paid for seeing) the movie several times. So I find it hard to imagine Lucas can make a case of losing money on this. If anything, the movie might create a desire on the part of attendees to go back and watch again to check on something, and that might generate new revenue for Lucas. So that seems a win/win, not an injury to Lucas.
Ironically, I further think that if Lucas made the materials routinely available for parody situations at an affordable cost, I might think they had more of a claim. It's the hard-line "you absolutely must not" stand that leads me to believe the courts should defend the individual rights of parody creators. Probably Lucas should just have a "parody-maker's price" for partial viewings,and then they'd have a new revenue source that people could tap into.
Further, if the work were not so ubiquitous as to make it likely that nearly everyone in the audience had paid at least once and probably many times to see the movie in some form already, one might be able to more easily make the claim that this was a dodge of the money-making version. But since the entire point rests upon the recognizability (presumably due to mu
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And I can't help but believe that their sales have been up since having their name everywhere. Is there any reason to believe that all this talk of spam has hurt their sales? People often buy cans of SPAM® as humorous gifts for others who are always complaining about computer spam.
It seems to me that they're just jealously guarding their mark because law sites everywhere (e.g., http://www.bohanlaw.com/tmcmcm.html) make a point of noting that if you don't guard your mark, you should expect to lose it. Marks like Kleenex®, Xerox®, and others live in perpetual fear that courts will find these words have replaced "facial tissue" and "photocopy", respectively, in streetspeak, and that the marks will be so diluted as to be no longer enforceable.
Yet, as far as I can tell, the US trademark law on trademark dilution (a possible way to lose protection for a "famous mark") is pretty clear that the issues are:
I don't see how a food product could be confused with a mail filtering program.
Maybe they've just gotten such good publicity out of the spam problem that they're afraid tools for de-spamming will end the ride, so they have to find other ways to keep their name in the news for free... ;)
I've heard a lot of people cite the RSA as something that deserves a patent. I agree and often cite it myself. But there are so few that do...
Why doesn't the EU do something innovative and just elect a blue ribbon panel of judges to give away patents based on how cool they are and how useful they are... like the Nobel prize.
The award could have two components: a right of unique use for a period of time (set by the judges, and surely shorter than 17 years, but probably a function of the development costs, so that more expensive developments could get somewhat longer protections, still not to exceed, say, 5 years, but some might get only 6 months or a year) and then, too, a monetary award to the inventor(s). You'd want to reward each separately, since the former needs to be an incentive to business and the latter to people to avoid business claiming all the credit. A business not willing to cite the inventors would not be eligible to win at all, and hence to have its development costs retroactively subsidized by the award.
And if they gave out few enough, rational people could keep track of what was patented and what not.
I think most reasonable people would have voted RSA as a winner to this award, so it passes that litmus test for a proper system. I think most reasonable people would not vote for the XOR patent to get a multi-year protection, even though it was cool in its time--the cost of development was just not steep enough, so it passes that litmus test as well. And no matter how strongly people on the committee felt that something intermittently important like LZW compression was, it would still be available for others to use freely in 5 years, not 17, which is a worst case most of us could live with.
The problem with this is that it's about use. So the patent gets granted, and you just don't know for sure what it applies to. But it's still a lurking snake in the grass waiting to bite you.
Here's another, still more minimal, protection I'll offer as an alternative:
One of the chief problems with patents in general, and software patents in particular, at least in the US (someone tell me if it's different in the EU or elsewhere, please), is that if you independently come up with the idea, that's considered an infringement. It should instead start to chip away at the notion that this was a powerful and unique idea worthy of protection.
Among other reasons why independent development should not be considered an infringement is that it's easy to see that as the number of patents grows, the amount of ESP required by each programmer is intense. It is not possible to legally make a new, non-infringing thing without knowledge of all extant things that might be infringed. This is a goldmine for lawyers, but an increasing minefield for programmers and builders, and simply makes no sense.
Then again, there's an opposite line of thought that goes:
If we don't deploy space weapons now, there's a finite chance no one else will hurry to do it either. But if we do, it's an almost certainty that people will.And then how much safer will anyone be? The ante will be raised, but everyone will be more afraid, just like with the nuclear arsenal. All our nuclear weapons can't protect us from a terrorist dirty bomb.
Why isn't our first line of attack a verifiable treaty opposing this all across the board?
Well, it has long been known that as one gets older, one tends to vote more republican. ;-)
Yeah, right, like that's going to really scare them.
Now, if you said we might threaten to de-list their DVD offerings on eBay...
The summary of this bill here at Slashdot seems to suggest it outlaws keystroke logging, but in fact it's a bit more specific and talks about transmitting, etc. Still, one thing that disturbs me is fragile wording like:
It looks to me like if you just skip recording characters every now and then, you're safe on that point. Or if you transferred the data first to another computer and then maybe a person or program or corporation or someone's dog picked up the data instead of having it transferred to them.
It probably needs at least some wording like "substantially all" instead of "all", and "entity" instead of "person".
I doubt this is the only problem with the legislation, it was just the first thing I saw when I spot-checked that one sentence.
Seems like quite a gamble. They're spending real money on digging up and writing real stories, and then giving that away. Now they're going to hope what is their real value, the thing we'll pay for, is not all that news they made but rather "opinions" (when the Big Bang of the Blogoverse is only microseconds ago and the entire Universe is composed, to round numbers, exclusively of blogs--not exactly the world's most scarce commodity) and "old news" (again, to round numbers, "everything else left on the net"--Google and its ilk are quite well able to access old news). Well, let's just say, it wouldn't have been my first guess about a strategy. I might even sign up, mind you. But it still seems ... uninspired.
What's really sad to me about this is that it's just "more of same". With the world kneedeep in computers, RSS feeds popping up all over, e-business continuing to claim it's going to spring out all over the place, etc. you'd think their big plan for something to charge for could be, I dunno, ... active. Or even... interactive. Something that does something, not just something that, well, sits there.
But that's just my opinion--one of many out here in the unpaid area... nothing of consequence.
Hmm, thinking on it, that's probably the biggest thing they'll lose. By hiding behind a wall, they may kid themselves into thinking that the real value is happening inside. In that regard, I'd almost feel better if they were pay-only all the way through, not just paying for their own opinions. Because if those opinions drive the paper, they're walling themselves off from good ideas that might otherwise keep them going...
Now I'm not remembering clearly, nor am I highly motivated to rush out and find a friend who cared enough to record this fiasco of a last-two-episodes, but didn't T'Pol mention she hadn't thought of him in all that time? Presumably implying that he wasn't on the ship, and at least implying that the one plot feature people want to see (the two of them together) can't usefully happen?
[Spoiler context not repeated. Get context from previous messages, and stop reading now if you've not seen the last episode and care about having it spoiled.]
I can understand her upsetness. Although I had remarked upthread that a death could be instructive to our space program, I meant "by way of showing that things can continue", not "as a way of so demoralizing everyone that they would know the series was really over". That kind of misses the "sometimes death is necessary for things to move ahead" message.
Plus, this is a lesson Star Trek has already taught us well, and is not one that required repeating. I heard my wife muttering "The good of the many must outweigh..." before the incident was even half-over and we knew the outcome. You could see it coming a mile away.
It seemed a serious diss either to the people who canceled it or personally to Connor Trinneer (who played Trip in the series but won't be in any movies without help from the 28th Century Temporal Police--they closed the door on that relatively firmly with Riker's historical commentary and museum video).
[Actually, IMDB shows its bounding notation "(2001-2005)", usually reserved for characers present only for part of a series after not just Trip but also Archer, T'Pol, Flox, and Malcolm (but not Travis and Hoshi, for example). Wonder what that's about. Conspiratorial thought: Did I see talk here on Slahdot of the South Park people picking up the show? Maybe that's why Chef was the central character in the last episode... maybe he's the common element that's going to tie the two shows together.]
Well, if it were a real different species, of course, their problem would be inability to mate. So I don't think it's exploring that at all.
But Star Trek has made a tradition of highlighting the condition of man by contrast with aliens. And sure, there were things about ourselves to learn here. But they were paid short shrift, and the thing we really got a lot of was overt sexuality, including "sharing her around" instead of focusing on a special thing between her and Trip. On some days I had to wonder if she actually had a preferred person, or if that person was Trip. The number of tender moments and legitimate emotions was too small, I thought. That's why I summed it up as "good setup, bad delivery". They could have done lots better with what they started with.
People often use the word intolerable, and then go on to tolerate. They use the word unacceptable, and then they accept. I guess you can make a definition of acceptable that doesn't mean what the word means, but in the end, lives will be lost and if you don't accept that, it means you don't do it.
Remedial viewing: Glory (on the matter of sacrifice), The Princess Bride (on the topic of words that people use but don't really mean, in that case, "inconceivable").
The Mirror universe was clever, but I wished they'd put as much energy into the rest of the series. It was a brilliant premise and they botched it from the start.
The right use of the mirror episode would have been to pull a Dallas and just erase the entire series by admitting that all the preceding episodes were the mirror version. They could have a version of T'Pol enter and find herself horrified to see that there's a universe where she's just a sex object with emotions and pointy ears and not a regular crew member, a scientist, and a practicing emotionless vulcan. Then they wouldn't have to worry how they were going to link up all the temporal inconsistencies with the subsequent series either. We could have gone back with the good guys to our universe and lived happily ever after.What I liked about the original premise of the Enterprise series was the notion of putting some humor and adventure back into Star Trek. For as much as TNG was brilliant, it suffered in the end because it appears they had no more places where no man had gone before, and they turned inward to the mental. A lot of us think Space is about new starts, things that don't always work, a chance to rebuild and make up for past mistakes, etc. Here was a series where transporters didn't quite work, the universal translator wasn't debugged, people were not experienced diplomats, and there was a big chance of things going wrong, sometimes comedically and sometimes tragically.
It was to be a show about real adventure and uncertainty, showing how hard it was surviving in Space before the invention of the red shirt for expendible crewmen. Maybe with characters that came and went on shorter timelines than the whole series, if that's even possible in modern television qua business. My generation grew up with Star Trek to teach us about optimism and hope for the future. Those are things people needed to get the Space program going. But recently, we panic in real life when the space program loses even one life. That's not realistic. We need Star Trek to be brave enough to teach us that good lives will be lost, and that this is acceptable. I think we are losing that sense, and insisting on a completely planned experience both in real life and on the show.
Other than venue, the show has mostly just converged on the same old formula, made worse only by intensive pushes for a love story with T'Pol and the need to constantly be pushing to undress her, just as killed Lt. Yar's hope for being an equal. Yar's only really good episode was Yesterday's Enterprise, and it's probably not a coincidence that she had to be dead to do it. I grew up on the original series and loved its characters, but sad as it was, I really thought it a genius stroke to kill a main character in one of the movies (you know which one, but I'm trying not to spoil it). I thought "Yes! Finally we know they're playing for keeps. Now the uncertainty will be real..." This was to be a show about uncertainty, but it didn't deliver.
I was with you up to the equating of nucular with nuclear. Regardless of your feelings about Bush, pro or con, you have to admit he's managed to sway a lot of people by his [irony acknowledged] scientific choice of words. So since, as you seem to implicitly suggest, we seem a nation more susceptible to words than truths, maybe this is just the shift that's needed to get it over the hump.
Then again, maybe it will later run afoul of something related to what I've heard cited about bicycles as the "40 pound rule", that is (if I'm recalling correctly): If you have a very light bike, it needs a 40 pound lock, if you have a 20 pound bike, it neeeds a 20 pound lock, and if you have a 40 pound bike, it needs no lock... so all bikes weigh the same. Maybe the same will be true with laptops, efficient batteries, and the weight of lead shielding to compensate for or protect from the so-called nucular option for efficient batteries...
Let's not let the quantum mechanical nature of this thing lead to too much spin control. The public deserves an immediate up or down volt...
Of course, it's not always "now" that these problems occur. One reason that one maintains strict ethical breaks between various organizations is not to protect them when they're strong, but on the assumption that one is not always strong every day.
I heard a few years back that Reader's Digest was not doing economically well and that their biggest asset turned out to be a repository of the reading habits of a huge part of the US population. Even if they were not inclined to sell out, they were still candidate for takeover by another company buying them just for this data and not for their editorial work or revenue stream. I didn't end up following the news, so I don't know how it turned out, or even that this account I'd heard was correct. (Maybe someone else knows better can offer more info here.) But even if you take it only as a hypothetical, it seems pretty plausible that such things could happen.
Big companies have sometimes fallen. And one would like to believe we haven't entered a political climate where that will never happen again, even if one doesn't have a deathwish for any particular big company. So what if Google gets all this stuff and then gets either nervous or outright cheap... If their size and economic power is what protects us now, what protects us then?
Ah, you missed my point. Ignore the issue of my being paid--you don't know that I got paid. All you know is that I had free time enough to write it. Maybe that's because my Mom houses and feeds me. You can call that pay, but thankfully, the IRS doesn't agree and at least doesn't tax such things as income. But it's irrelevant to my point.
Let me make an analogy: If I'm going to offer you a discount in a business, there are two ways to account for it. I can either think to myself "This costs $1.00 and then when I sell it I can make two transactions, the original $1.00 and a -$0.20 cost every time I make a sale at $0.80" or I can think to myself "This costs $0.80 and every time I sell it for that, I get what I expected, but sometimes when I sell it for $1.00 I'm taking in an additional $0.20 premium for someone being willing to buy the product not-at-discount." Whether I'm selling the product normally at the right price and taking a loss on some sales, or whether I'm selling the product normally at the right price and making a windfall on some sales is purely a matter of perception.
So when I sell something and don't get to charge someone money for it, you see the money that maybe came in from Mom and think that's "the right pay" and you see the other as "extra pay". However, there's an alternate model in which the usage fee was part of the model, and I'm losing money by not getting the usage fee. The point is not which way I model it. The point is that the GPL restricts me from getting the larger amount. You can choose to say it keeps me from getting a windfall, but that's just semantics. It doesn't alter what I said, it alters how you want to spin it and how you write it into the ledger. The phenomenon is the same: there is only one price at which it's being sold, not two. And, worse, my real customer--that is, my economic buyer--Mom, probably hasn't even been informed of what she bought in a lot of cases. And she may not be happy that her money was thrown away in this way when she thought she was investing in me getting a career as a computer programmer that might pay for her living in comfort in her old age.
If this hypothetical Mom is anything lke mine, she is not even a programmer, and barely uses her computer, so I'm pretty sure she's not going to benefit from all those other free programs and bug fixes to my program I get back. Mom would benefit indirectly if those things were getting taxed, but the commerce in them is outside the taxable base, and does not enrich her.
Hmmm. And here I thought people who believed in free markets didn't try to control how others got paid.
Of course, the real reason that copyright exists (and it includes the right to charge someone that usage fee), is to encourage the person creating something to also share it.
What you say about property is true, but IP is not "real property", it is "intellectual property", and the law deals differently with that exactly because the problem is that if you share something, you risk that the person you're sharing it with will just take their copy and go. Society makes a bargain with creative people, saying that if you share your work, we will allow you to continue to control aspects of it. This avoids a society in which creative people, in order to eat, have to only share their intellectual creations in secret with people who can afford to pay a lot, so that the money they get for such rare showings is enough to feed them--but people who can't afford to pay don't ever get to share.
And besides, the requirement that a GPL'd work be treated in a certain way is no less a "usage fee". It is the author exerting control over a user even after the user has possession. One form of control is access to a fee, the other is a requirement of behavior. But they are both, under the law, variations on "acting to one's own legal detriment". The GPL does not implement freedom, it implements the same kind of coercion that copyright does. In fact, had there been no copyright law, there could be no GPL, and anyone who made and shared something that would have been copyrightable in the real world would instead be placing it in the public domain.
That's the way in law to permit real freedom of a work you create: expressly dedicate a work to the public domain. Anything less, such as GPL, and either you're abusing the term "freedom" or, at best, you don't have the right to claim that you have a unique point of view on what is free or what is not. Copyright and GPL are in an equivalence set here, freedomwise.
The market only responds to the high-order bit, where the decision about which bit is highest-order is also decided by the market.
Suppose you have a great Chinese restaurant near your house. The food is world-class. The owner is nice. But the service is consistently slower than you wish. You can't simply stop going there and expect a new one, just like it, to pop up to compete. The market doesn't work that way. It can't discriminate why you are failing to send it money. Especially if you're eating Indian food at the restaurant next door in the interim, in which case it will conclude you have stopped liking Chinese, and you're more likely to get two Indian food restaurants than an Indian and a punctual Chinese one.
It's common in US Presidential elections for newly elected Presidents to claim, as our latest president did, that The People actively wanted the whole platform, when in fact mostly all a vote ever shows is that "for some reason(s), you thought this president was better (or less bad) than the other." It certainly does mean "for all reasons" nor does it help you discover for which reason(s).
Salon Magazine tried the same thing as is being complained about here quite a while back. They wanted to charge people for posting on TableTalk , their online forum, but continue to allow people to read for free. I was incensed. Charge the content producers and let the users get things for free? As a sensible poster, I stopped posting and went away. Salon continued, though, in spite of that.
What's hilarious to me about complaining about such matters here is that Slashdot is a haven of free software buffs--that is, people who champion the idea that people should pay to produce stuff (you do have to eat while you code) but you shouldn't have to pay to use stuff (you don't pay for the result of all that free software that it cost someone to produce).
Perhaps the human mind is some sort of capitalist market, deciding what rationales are most and least important based on internal market forces that we can only barely understand because we see only that same, elusive, high order bit of outcome. Maybe understanding the process from the outcome is more than we should expect...
There is quite a lot I could say about this, but I'm going to focus here on just one point:
Managers would care a lot less about handling runtime errors if static languages didn't just plain segfault when they get them. Error handling in non-Lisp languages is so bad that of course people outside of Lisp are obsessed with handling errors. Even Java, which drew from Lisp in its design, failed to pick up the notion of "restarts" and so only has the throw-style environment=wrecking error handling. That is severe and it's no wonder managers think it matters.
Also, the number of NULL problems you get in many static languages all by itself makes me distrust the confidence factor that managers put in static compilation. The number of wrong-type-data problems I've seen in Lisp pales by comparison to this one unchecked "detail" in these static languages.
And besides, there are other kinds of errors you can get that are just as severe but not as easily seen as type errors, and that lots of times people in static languages don't check for because they're so relieved their program runs at all. While Lisp programmers, not having this safety net, write much better tests. Tests for things other than just type match and nullness, I mean. Tests to do things like see whether the answer is right--because it's so much more easy in Lisp to represent and manipulate data that it's much easier to write GOOD test cases.
I think the process of managing Lisp projects is simply different than managing C++ projects There are a lot of details that they should account for quite differently if they want a successful outcome. This is only one of them. The paradigm shift is noticeable, I'll grant you that. But I'm not sure fixing it by making Lisp just do what other langauges do is the right fix.
I'm not 100% sure that what you say is true about receipts. I haven't thought it through thoroughly, but it seems likely to me that the voting box could give you back a secret code (not your ssn or a voter index # but something more like an encryption key) that would identify you and your vote anonymously. Let's say you got something that said that person #ABCD voted for and then a list of what you voted for. Then they could publish a list of voters by magic key that said exactly which votes contributed to the result. Any person could add them up and see who won and lost. Every participant could verify that their own vote was in the list. That would reduce the problem to wondering if anyone changed after the fact and wondering if there were more votes than people who were able to verify themselves. What bothers me is not that this is being done wrong, but that no one seems to be doing anything about this at all.
What makes you think the machines they're using are running the code they publish? Open source works great if it's you that owns the machine you're going to run it on--I don't understand how to verify that a machine you don't own is running the code it purports to be running.
The problem with this is that you have to specify pretty clearly whether web walkers are browsers that are just fetching pages, or whether they are something else. And if you have a webwalker connected to an interactive browser, does that make it more of a browser or more of a webwalker?
Also, some people transitively conclude that they can print things they can see in their browser. And some people might assume they can do this many times. And then they assume they can sell the result. And so on. Pretty soon all copyright control has eroded by a series of slippery-slope style inferences.
I'm not a lawyer, but I often attach to my pages a notice like this. And even then, I don't know that it is adequately specific...
Free speech is about the idea that one is not kept from speaking. A single domain is enough to assure that you get your message out. Grabbing many of them starts to monopolize the stage, and robs free speech from the person who might otherwise respond.
This political situation seems to me to be different than the commercial one in which someone with a tradename ACME might legitimately grab ACME.com, ACME.net, and ACME.org to prevent dilution of the mark.
I happen to think the Freedom of Speech is often better analyzed as the Freedom to Hear. Under this analysis, it's the public's right to hear the alternative point of view that's in jeopardy.
The Supreme Court has generally taken the position that, where feasible, the answer to Bad Speech is More Speech. That is, if the injured party has rebuttal time, the public stage can play out the debate. (The Supreme Court has yet to hear a definitive case in which someone's right to respond is simply drowned in an infinite capacity of one side to outflame the other, but no doubt it will ultimately happen.) Grabbing too many "obvious" domain names, while it doesn't keep the targeted person from responding, does hide the targeted person's response, and seems to me even to edge toward fraud.
I'll go a step farther, just to underscore this already excellent point:
By not first assuring that there was a way to make money on the net, one could argue that it is he who condemned all of us content-providers on the net to a life of never being reimbursed for our efforts.
It is certainly the case that some people make money on the net, but mostly it is not the myriad people who have contributed the value it provides. If you want information on the mating habits of certain bark beetles, you can be sure there's some uncompensated bark beetle expert who has done you the favor of typing in this info, and you can be equally sure that when AOL or NetZero says it can offer you "all the value of the internet for a very low price" (times millions of people subscribing, it's still a tidy profit for them ) they are not making an effort to pay the many content providers.
So let's all "thank" Sir Tim for that, too.
In fact, I think the net just ran out of control and was co-opted by those with power in an attempt to continue to hold power.
Further compounded by the exchange of free software, it has assured that the net is not a very friendly place to try to make a buck. Real success already means, after a very short time, the ability to supply globally in order to make the sales volume that offsets the incredibly low margins the net has produced. And only a few people are capitalized to do that.
I have started to wonder if the world economy and overall happiness is actually improved by the presence of the net. Business seems to thrive on inefficiency, and the net is all about eliminating inefficiency. Something is awry.
Ah, well, I'm just working with the limited info from the article.
I do agree that there is a fine but important line between "parody" and "fan fiction".
"Parody" is commentary on a particular story, and the latter is merely taking the stage of a particular item as a jump-off. "Fan fiction", by contrast,I would imagine the fair use restrictions are stronger.
The point of parody is to make humor and sometimes a political message as well. Certainly my parody tends to have its basis in parody, and (in part out of parody and in part out of paranoia) I've gone to trouble to meticulously document on a per-episode basis the nature of the political commentary in plain text, for those who are comedically challenged and might otherwise overlook it. (e.g., consider Episode 47 as an example) was accompanied by a corresponding "moral of the story" page (e.g., Moral 47). In fact, some of my readers tell me they have preferred to just read the morals directly, either in addition or instead, so I know the commentary itself had value in and of itself.
I have heard that others who have "fan fiction" sites have been contacted by studios asking them to cease and desist. Perhaps it's just coincidence, but I have never been contacted by Sony or CBS suggesting that I am outside my bounds in the site I've done. I like to think that this is because I've stayed to the correct side of the parody/fan-fiction line.
The strange thing is that if this group is as good at improv as it is, it seems like the backdrop would be more distraction than help... Fan fiction, by its nature, usually just starts with an existing something as a jump-off and then goes a separate way. Improv as well.
I don't agree with this as either an isolated statement or a summary of our (or, at least, my) analysis. The copyright law makes no such clear statement, and I think for good reason. I can imagine situations where you'd need this right of "fair use" even when showing the whole of someone's movie.
[Disclaimers: I am not a lawyer; these are just my personal understandings as a member of the public. I am an advocate of existing strong controls by copyright owners. I am also, however, a strong advocate of the existing special protections for the work of parody authors. I myself am an author of works of parody that would not be possible absent such protection.]
As I understand it, the "fair use" criteria are not hard and fast. Substantial resources are available on the web for helping to understand this complex issue.
There are four criteria used in judging fair use. Among them, the principal one in controversy here seems to be "the amount and substantiality of the portion used in relation to the copyrighted work as a whole". The law doesn't say how the court is to address the amount and substantiality, just that it is to pay heed to it. What follows here is my own analysis of these issues.
First, and most obviously, by omitting the soundtrack, they are plainly taking only part of the work. This, it seems to me, is an acknowledgment of their need to not just rely on the power of the original piece in making their new work. (Note: I think there could exist situations where using the whole work might still be necessary to a proper public dialog through parody, but the case is easier to make when some parts have been omitted.)
Personally, I think the case for "fair use" in this case hinges on these issues: Are they using parody as a mere dodge for paying royalties on a movie they would just like to show for free? That is, are they negatively impacting the commercial stake of the movie? And secondarily, are they adding content which legitimately justifies the price they are charging on its own,or are they merely riding on the coat-tails of the movie to make money without adding any legitimate content of their own.
It seems to me very unlikely that a person who had never seen the movie would endure a parody session as a dodge for seeing it. It would be cheaper for them to just rent the DVD. Notwithstanding Lucas' desire that they not charge money, it seems to me that the fact that money is being willingly paid by attendees is a kind of proof that there is legitimate new content here. For far less, people could rent the DVD.
Additionally, and importantly, the work is not likely to appeal to anyone not having seen the movie. The movie would barely be intelligible to them. I'd bet that (to round numbers) everyone attending has seen (and paid for seeing) the movie several times. So I find it hard to imagine Lucas can make a case of losing money on this. If anything, the movie might create a desire on the part of attendees to go back and watch again to check on something, and that might generate new revenue for Lucas. So that seems a win/win, not an injury to Lucas.
Ironically, I further think that if Lucas made the materials routinely available for parody situations at an affordable cost, I might think they had more of a claim. It's the hard-line "you absolutely must not" stand that leads me to believe the courts should defend the individual rights of parody creators. Probably Lucas should just have a "parody-maker's price" for partial viewings,and then they'd have a new revenue source that people could tap into.
Further, if the work were not so ubiquitous as to make it likely that nearly everyone in the audience had paid at least once and probably many times to see the movie in some form already, one might be able to more easily make the claim that this was a dodge of the money-making version. But since the entire point rests upon the recognizability (presumably due to mu