Allow me to recommend that you actually acquaint yourself with the characteristics of property, and the bundle of rights that come with ownership, and then go down the list and ask yourself whether _Winnie the Pooh_ has those characteristics. Then do the same for the copyright in _Winnie the Pooh_.
On copyright as the solution to a free rider problem: first, you need to demonstrate that there is a free rider problem here to be solved. Do the alleged costs to society (in creative work not done) outweigh the costs of limiting the availability of the benefits of ideas or bodies of information?
It is odd how "intellectual property" has come commonly to be misapplied to copyrighted works. I'm not sure whether it is due to an intentional propaganda campaign, or just careless speaking. The works themselves are not property. What is property is the copyright. So no, the argument is not whether ideas can be property. Even those who support copyright, if knowledgeable about the Constitution and the law, do not claim that ideas are property. I fully agree with you that a copyright is a limited and artificial monopoly, but it nonetheless bears all the characteristics of property (for which see any introduction to property law), however artificial and unjust you and I may agree it to be.
You are the one who lacks understanding of dilution. This is not about splitting. It is about dilution. If Ceglia owned 84% of the equity and Zuckerberg 16%, a decision to raise capital by a stock issue could easily dilute their respective stakes in the company. A simple extreme example proves the point: Suppose you own 100% of a company, and you sell shares to raise needed funds. Do you imagine that you will still own 100%? Hardly. But Ceglia would still own proportionally more than Zuckerberg, unless Zuckerberg had acquired additional diluted shares in some way, such as by exercising stock options granted by the board of directors, or outright purchase of shares.
to state that they will lead kids to do drugs is nonsense at best
What purpose is served by throwing in such an editorial comment? Also, given that it is not all obviously true, it should be supported by at least a sketch of an argument or an allusion to empirical data. It is at least plausible that an individual experimenting with mind alteration by one means might be led to pursue more effective ones.
if we forget little details like a database of signatures of almost all of the popular song recordings ever published, a server to run it on, and iPhone etc. client apps.
You take such a strong positivist stance that you come across as believing that various kinds of speech acts are prohibited or not on a purely random basis, as though a group of legislators rolled a die for each kind of act: "Okay, now let's roll for libel. A six! Put libel on the prohibited list. Now let's roll for publishing landscape photos. Five! That goes on the allowed list." Allow me to suggest that you instead look for what is common among the set of prohibited acts, that is, what divides the prohibited from the protected. It's not hard to see. Yes, there may be a few tough cases, some grey areas. But you will have to be deliberately obtuse to say that you cannot see that there really are prior rights that the law is attempting to protect. The law is attempting to enforce a rule that has been stated as "Your right to swing your fist ends where my nose begins." Otherwise, the right to "life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness" as stated in the American Declaration of Independence would be rendered meaningless.
So you caught Dewey contradicting himself. Not surprising for a human being. Or maybe he was being sarcastic. Or lying. But on which occasion? Neither side is going to be able to offer in soundbites on slashdot a convincing case for or against Dewey's and others' having deliberately designed an educational system intended to create dull, submissive industrial robots. Confirmation of that must be left as an exercise.
The fugitive slave laws are a system to ensure that those who have spent good money buying and training Africans don't get screwed just cause some abolitionist runs an underground railroad and could, hypothetically, free as many slaves as possible.
You must be new around here. Anti-Christian posts are always modded up Informative or Insightful. The more outlandishly silly, the more so. They are the slashdot equivalent of trash-talk on the basketball court. And don't imagine that most modders take the moderation rules seriously. Modding is an expression of solidarity with the trash-talkers.
Precisely. That is why it is the perfect analogy. Just as a person shouting from a window has no reasonable expectation that passersby will somehow "shut their ears", neither does a person broadcasting unencrypted information have a reasonable expectation that the public will not receive that. This is not just a legal technicality; it is practical reality.
It's odd that almost all the posts on this story sidestep the issue that the article actually raises, which is that if this kind of radiation is almost entirely absorbed by the skin (which has been a selling point), it is misleading to also treat it as though the dosage were spread uniformly through the recipient's body. To get a better idea of the health effects of the scans, we need to determine the fraction captured in each different layer of the human skin and consider what is known about the effects of dosages to those layers. If you want to convince us of the safety of these scans, offer an argument that the stratum corneum absorbs the bulk of it, rather than posting yet another beside-the-point comparision of the expected total body dose against that received from other kinds of ionizing radiation exposures.
That's all very true etymologically, but it does not accurately describe current American usage, which is much more complicated. At some point in the US, liberals became enamored of the use of state power to achieve equality, even at the expense of individual freedom. And an important component of American 'conservatism' is the preservation of American liberal values against the encroachments of the state. On issues related to copyright, there is no clear alignment of pro- and con- with 'conservative' and 'liberal'. Gardner's use in the article of 'liberal' as descriptive of the pro-fair-use position is confusing at best.
A one-hundred dollar 'note' that promises to give you another one-hundred dollar 'note' in exchange is no note. It is a self-referential monstrosity. The wording "THIS NOTE IS LEGAL TENDER FOR ALL DEBTS, PUBLIC AND PRIVATE" that appears on it is an insider joke at the expense of the schmucks who accept them.
1. No foreign units. Especially not foreign currencies.
You're missing the point. The question that decides whether a certain word is allowable is whether it is in the English language, not whether it had a foreign origin. Admittedly, there are difficult cases. But your arbitrary rules miss that crucial point.
2. No "spellings" of "letters". Example: Why is "en" in the Scrabble Dictionary as a "spelling" of the pronounciation of the letter "n" ??!?
Duh. It's in the dictionary because, whether you realize it or not, it has been an English word for hundreds of years.
3. Despite #2, spellings of Greek letters are allowed (example: "alpha") since they are used in so many disciplines
Here you are beginning to see the light: "used in so many disciplines" is your way of saying "is an English word"
4. No abbreviations! No to "amp", "ref", "ex", etc. Or while we are at it, "etc" itself.
Actually, abbreviations as such are not allowed. But of course English words that originated as abbreviations are allowed. For example, "ref" has entered common English usage. It is now a full-fledged word on its own. If you consult the Scrabble dictionary, you'll find that "etc." is not there. It couldn't be in any case, since it contains punctuation.
5. No Old English or Middle English words or spelling variants
English spelling was not standardized until recently. You will not find various OE or ME spellings of modern words in the Scrabble dictionary. You will find some variant spellings, but those are variants in modern usage.
It makes a great story, yet one requiring a large dose of suspension of disbelief, since we know that pi is not arbitrary, but logically necessary. Even God could not insert a message into pi.
Every time some poor soul has enough insight to observe that ISPs naturally serve the role of common carriers, but mistakenly assumes that US law recognizes that fact, a member of the "ISPs are not common carriers, you dolt" squad jabs at his hotkey like a First Post! kiddy and in short order has his canned and hardly insightful insult boosted to "5, Insightful".
Slashdot Mirror
Allow me to recommend that you actually acquaint yourself with the characteristics of property, and the bundle of rights that come with ownership, and then go down the list and ask yourself whether _Winnie the Pooh_ has those characteristics. Then do the same for the copyright in _Winnie the Pooh_.
On copyright as the solution to a free rider problem: first, you need to demonstrate that there is a free rider problem here to be solved. Do the alleged costs to society (in creative work not done) outweigh the costs of limiting the availability of the benefits of ideas or bodies of information?
It is odd how "intellectual property" has come commonly to be misapplied to copyrighted works. I'm not sure whether it is due to an intentional propaganda campaign, or just careless speaking. The works themselves are not property. What is property is the copyright. So no, the argument is not whether ideas can be property. Even those who support copyright, if knowledgeable about the Constitution and the law, do not claim that ideas are property. I fully agree with you that a copyright is a limited and artificial monopoly, but it nonetheless bears all the characteristics of property (for which see any introduction to property law), however artificial and unjust you and I may agree it to be.
"you sell shares" should have read "the company issues shares". Mea culpa.
You are the one who lacks understanding of dilution. This is not about splitting. It is about dilution. If Ceglia owned 84% of the equity and Zuckerberg 16%, a decision to raise capital by a stock issue could easily dilute their respective stakes in the company. A simple extreme example proves the point: Suppose you own 100% of a company, and you sell shares to raise needed funds. Do you imagine that you will still own 100%? Hardly. But Ceglia would still own proportionally more than Zuckerberg, unless Zuckerberg had acquired additional diluted shares in some way, such as by exercising stock options granted by the board of directors, or outright purchase of shares.
to state that they will lead kids to do drugs is nonsense at best
What purpose is served by throwing in such an editorial comment? Also, given that it is not all obviously true, it should be supported by at least a sketch of an argument or an allusion to empirical data. It is at least plausible that an individual experimenting with mind alteration by one means might be led to pursue more effective ones.
and have a working clone of Shazam
if we forget little details like a database of signatures of almost all of the popular song recordings ever published, a server to run it on, and iPhone etc. client apps.
You take such a strong positivist stance that you come across as believing that various kinds of speech acts are prohibited or not on a purely random basis, as though a group of legislators rolled a die for each kind of act: "Okay, now let's roll for libel. A six! Put libel on the prohibited list. Now let's roll for publishing landscape photos. Five! That goes on the allowed list." Allow me to suggest that you instead look for what is common among the set of prohibited acts, that is, what divides the prohibited from the protected. It's not hard to see. Yes, there may be a few tough cases, some grey areas. But you will have to be deliberately obtuse to say that you cannot see that there really are prior rights that the law is attempting to protect. The law is attempting to enforce a rule that has been stated as "Your right to swing your fist ends where my nose begins." Otherwise, the right to "life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness" as stated in the American Declaration of Independence would be rendered meaningless.
So you caught Dewey contradicting himself. Not surprising for a human being. Or maybe he was being sarcastic. Or lying. But on which occasion? Neither side is going to be able to offer in soundbites on slashdot a convincing case for or against Dewey's and others' having deliberately designed an educational system intended to create dull, submissive industrial robots. Confirmation of that must be left as an exercise.
If the French operate under the same theory of extraterritoriality that the United States does, they could.
The fugitive slave laws are a system to ensure that those who have spent good money buying and training Africans don't get screwed just cause some abolitionist runs an underground railroad and could, hypothetically, free as many slaves as possible.
What??? How was this modded informative?
You must be new around here. Anti-Christian posts are always modded up Informative or Insightful. The more outlandishly silly, the more so. They are the slashdot equivalent of trash-talk on the basketball court. And don't imagine that most modders take the moderation rules seriously. Modding is an expression of solidarity with the trash-talkers.
Precisely. That is why it is the perfect analogy. Just as a person shouting from a window has no reasonable expectation that passersby will somehow "shut their ears", neither does a person broadcasting unencrypted information have a reasonable expectation that the public will not receive that. This is not just a legal technicality; it is practical reality.
The root cause of this insoluble problem is state education. With separation of education and state, it would not have arisen.
It's odd that almost all the posts on this story sidestep the issue that the article actually raises, which is that if this kind of radiation is almost entirely absorbed by the skin (which has been a selling point), it is misleading to also treat it as though the dosage were spread uniformly through the recipient's body. To get a better idea of the health effects of the scans, we need to determine the fraction captured in each different layer of the human skin and consider what is known about the effects of dosages to those layers. If you want to convince us of the safety of these scans, offer an argument that the stratum corneum absorbs the bulk of it, rather than posting yet another beside-the-point comparision of the expected total body dose against that received from other kinds of ionizing radiation exposures.
Forgive me for pointing out that you misspelled the first occurrence of the word "copy" in your post. It is spelled C O P Y, not S T E A L.
That's all very true etymologically, but it does not accurately describe current American usage, which is much more complicated. At some point in the US, liberals became enamored of the use of state power to achieve equality, even at the expense of individual freedom. And an important component of American 'conservatism' is the preservation of American liberal values against the encroachments of the state. On issues related to copyright, there is no clear alignment of pro- and con- with 'conservative' and 'liberal'. Gardner's use in the article of 'liberal' as descriptive of the pro-fair-use position is confusing at best.
This third grader, her parents and those who read the story are learning a valuable lesson about the nature of the state.
which formats information before beaming it back to Earth
And the alternative was...?
A one-hundred dollar 'note' that promises to give you another one-hundred dollar 'note' in exchange is no note. It is a self-referential monstrosity. The wording "THIS NOTE IS LEGAL TENDER FOR ALL DEBTS, PUBLIC AND PRIVATE" that appears on it is an insider joke at the expense of the schmucks who accept them.
1. No foreign units. Especially not foreign currencies.
You're missing the point. The question that decides whether a certain word is allowable is whether it is in the English language, not whether it had a foreign origin. Admittedly, there are difficult cases. But your arbitrary rules miss that crucial point.
2. No "spellings" of "letters". Example: Why is "en" in the Scrabble Dictionary as a "spelling" of the pronounciation of the letter "n" ??!?
Duh. It's in the dictionary because, whether you realize it or not, it has been an English word for hundreds of years.
3. Despite #2, spellings of Greek letters are allowed (example: "alpha") since they are used in so many disciplines
Here you are beginning to see the light: "used in so many disciplines" is your way of saying "is an English word"
4. No abbreviations! No to "amp", "ref", "ex", etc. Or while we are at it, "etc" itself.
Actually, abbreviations as such are not allowed. But of course English words that originated as abbreviations are allowed. For example, "ref" has entered common English usage. It is now a full-fledged word on its own. If you consult the Scrabble dictionary, you'll find that "etc." is not there. It couldn't be in any case, since it contains punctuation.
5. No Old English or Middle English words or spelling variants
English spelling was not standardized until recently. You will not find various OE or ME spellings of modern words in the Scrabble dictionary. You will find some variant spellings, but those are variants in modern usage.
There will be two vastly different games: Scrabble and Scrabble for Dummies. The new "Dummies" game will be chiefly a 'social influence' party game.
And _The Brothers Karamazov_ is merely an emergent property of ink and paper.
It makes a great story, yet one requiring a large dose of suspension of disbelief, since we know that pi is not arbitrary, but logically necessary. Even God could not insert a message into pi.
When a headline writer can employ the incoherent phrase "hostile videogames and toys" with a straight face, the battle is already lost.
Every time some poor soul has enough insight to observe that ISPs naturally serve the role of common carriers, but mistakenly assumes that US law recognizes that fact, a member of the "ISPs are not common carriers, you dolt" squad jabs at his hotkey like a First Post! kiddy and in short order has his canned and hardly insightful insult boosted to "5, Insightful".