The copyright holders would be her parents!
on
The Immortal Cell
·
· Score: 2
The way copyright law works, someone who produces a work gets automatic protection of that work.
I believe the authors of this HeLa product would have to be her parents, and the date of creation of this product would be birthdate minus approximately 0.75 years. That would place the creation date at the turn of the century, that other century. That means that the pre-1928 copyright laws would apply, but the 1978 changes would allow the copyright to exist from the death of the creator or copyright holder plus 75 years. So if you know when her parents died, there could possibly be a copyright issue. But I don't think so.
1. Most science is conducted with a mix of monies, private funding (VC etc), public funding (nonprofits via donations), and taxes (via federal institutional grants from NIH, DoD, etc.) and secondarily through taxes (SBIR grants).
2. Scientific endeavors funded through federal funds are supposed to be made available to the gov't for use without additional licensing fees.
3. Peer-reviewed journals used to require that scientists publishing through them would openly allow collaboration through access to their data or their cell lines, materiels, bioligicals (e.g. mice, bacteria, other creatures) with particular mutations appropriate for studies.
4. There is a big debate about the human genome prject data and the embargoing of the data by private firms which used public monies.
5. A lot of scientists have seen the cash register instead of the light and are looking towards their own personal beneficence rather than 'the public good'.
6. Physicians, clinical and research types, used to share information about particular cases to create larger datasets allowing them to be aware of particular problems that may occur very infrequently. Nowadays, with the competition for grants and funding, information cards are held close to the chest and very little is shared.
Doesn't this seem very parallel to the open source software community? What are we in it for? Is it for the greater good or for personal gain?
It is possible to have personal gain and public benefit. They are not mutually exclusive. However, certain elements always feel that they should be able to profit enormously and obscenely from things which they did not even create.
And on another parallel with open-source software, the Patent Office has seen fit to allow the patenting of certain organisms based on their genetic makeup. I believe that prior art exists for these organisms and thus these objects should not be patentable.
True, * is a better compression. But aleph1:2 bytes compression vs. aleph1:1 byte compression are exactly the same ratio, since an infinity of digits in pi is compressed. But bravo, I agree.
I didn't use the symbol because it's not universally supported in ASCII, and I didn't want to get into the UNICODE argument. In fact, when I cut and pasted it from your posting into this and previewed it, it comes out as an asterisk rather than as the Greek letter 'pi'.
Of course, the infinite series can be compressed into two ASCII symbols representing the english letter 'p' followed by the letter 'i',
or by the english phrase 'the exact value of the ratio of the circumference of a circle to its diameter'. These are technically both accurate compressions of the transcendental value of pi, and of course require that the metadescription of the compression scheme is external to the compressed data, but that is also true of most encoding schemes.
The digits of pi are definitely not random, the are determinate and calculable; they are however present in a random probability distribution, or at least presumed to be, since no one can calculate all of the digits of a transcendental number in finite time. The digits of pi are calculable, and there has been inexorable progress in coming up with better algorithms for calculating pi.
Slashdot Mirror
The way copyright law works, someone who produces a work gets automatic protection of that work.
I believe the authors of this HeLa product would have to be her parents, and the date of creation of this product would be birthdate minus approximately 0.75 years. That would place the creation date at the turn of the century, that other century. That means that the pre-1928 copyright laws would apply, but the 1978 changes would allow the copyright to exist from the death of the creator or copyright holder plus 75 years. So if you know when her parents died, there could possibly be a copyright issue. But I don't think so.
1. Most science is conducted with a mix of monies, private funding (VC etc), public funding (nonprofits via donations), and taxes (via federal institutional grants from NIH, DoD, etc.) and secondarily through taxes (SBIR grants).
2. Scientific endeavors funded through federal funds are supposed to be made available to the gov't for use without additional licensing fees.
3. Peer-reviewed journals used to require that scientists publishing through them would openly allow collaboration through access to their data or their cell lines, materiels, bioligicals (e.g. mice, bacteria, other creatures) with particular mutations appropriate for studies.
4. There is a big debate about the human genome prject data and the embargoing of the data by private firms which used public monies.
5. A lot of scientists have seen the cash register instead of the light and are looking towards their own personal beneficence rather than 'the public good'.
6. Physicians, clinical and research types, used to share information about particular cases to create larger datasets allowing them to be aware of particular problems that may occur very infrequently. Nowadays, with the competition for grants and funding, information cards are held close to the chest and very little is shared.
Doesn't this seem very parallel to the open source software community? What are we in it for? Is it for the greater good or for personal gain?
It is possible to have personal gain and public benefit. They are not mutually exclusive. However, certain elements always feel that they should be able to profit enormously and obscenely from things which they did not even create.
And on another parallel with open-source software, the Patent Office has seen fit to allow the patenting of certain organisms based on their genetic makeup. I believe that prior art exists for these organisms and thus these objects should not be patentable.
True, * is a better compression. But aleph1:2 bytes compression vs. aleph1:1 byte compression are exactly the same ratio, since an infinity of digits in pi is compressed. But bravo, I agree.
I didn't use the symbol because it's not universally supported in ASCII, and I didn't want to get into the UNICODE argument. In fact, when I cut and pasted it from your posting into this and previewed it, it comes out as an asterisk rather than as the Greek letter 'pi'.
Of course, the infinite series can be compressed into two ASCII symbols representing the english letter 'p' followed by the letter 'i', or by the english phrase 'the exact value of the ratio of the circumference of a circle to its diameter'. These are technically both accurate compressions of the transcendental value of pi, and of course require that the metadescription of the compression scheme is external to the compressed data, but that is also true of most encoding schemes. The digits of pi are definitely not random, the are determinate and calculable; they are however present in a random probability distribution, or at least presumed to be, since no one can calculate all of the digits of a transcendental number in finite time. The digits of pi are calculable, and there has been inexorable progress in coming up with better algorithms for calculating pi.
C alone should be enough. PERL alone can handle it. C++ should not be needed.