"Fair Use"...like breaking the law in a way that has been designated as fair, and therefore unpunishable?
No, that wouldn't be a good way to put it.
I think the most informative answer is to explain the very origin of the term. We must start with the US Constitution which has a clause permitting Congress to create copyright&patent law, but more specifically such law can only be created to the purpose of promoting progress and promoting more such creation for the benefit of society. So Congress created copyright law, and it pretty much said copying was prohibited, period. Very quickly it became clear that there was a problem, with the Supreme Court making a number of rulings. Consider a typical example of modern Fair Use, something like a newspaper reviewing a book and quoting a couple of key sentences. And just to help the example lets say the newspaper is bashing the book, saying that it is riddled with errors and just plain lousy writing. The newspaper can't effectively review and criticize the book without quoting some of the errors from the book and showing an example of the atrocious writing style from the book. It is often virtually impossible to write effective review or criticism without quoting anything, and under copyright law even the smallest quote is copying is prohibited. Copyright law was having the effect of pretty much prohibiting the writing and publications of reviews, and it was most particularly a problem that anyone writing negative review or criticism would get sued under copyright law. There is a double constitutional problem there. For one, the First Amendment guarantees the right to Free Speech. Copyright law was effectively prohibiting a broad class of speech, it was prohibiting effective review and most particularly having the effect of prohibiting negative point-of-view review and criticism. The second issue is that the REQUIRED function of copyright law is to promote the creation and publication of new creative works. Copyright law was functioning to virtually prohibit the creation of valuable new independent review and criticism. It is not so unusual for one part of the Constitution to wind up in conflict with another part of the Constitution, or even in conflict with itself. Many categories of Fair Use were established on 1st Amendment free speech grounds or other constitutional issues.
Anyway, what happened is the Supreme Court got the case and saw that copyright Law was unconstitutionally prohibiting 1st Amendment protected free speech to review and criticism. When law does something unconstitutional that law is generally struck down as unconstitutional. Well, the Supreme Court apparently didn't relish the prospect of just plain striking down the entirety of copyright law and leaving it to congress to fix the problem by figuring out some new valid law to pass. Some call it "judicial activism", but the Supreme Court just plain invented the concept of "Fair Use", and they invented the idea that copyright law never actually attempted to do what the text of the law said it did. The text of copyright law prohibited copying, period, but the court decided that copyright law never actually tried to prohibit short quote-copying. Copyright law was not struck down as invalid because copyright law never actually tried to prohibit that copying. So the way Fair Use concept works is that copyright law is assumed to willingly flees when faced with any case of Fair Use. Copyright law would have to be struck down as invalid if it ever did actually attempt to restrict Fair Use.
Fair Use is the only thing keeping copyright law from being struck down as invalid.
Some people with a extremely aggressive views on copyright, people trying to diminish or eliminate Fair Use, they are very very misguided. If they actually succeeded in their efforts then copyright itself would be null and void, struck down as unconstitutional.
I have some extraordinarily significant information to offer. I offer PROOF that evolution can and did do exactly this sort of telomere fusion mutation that branched the 48 chromosome apes into the early 46 chromosome humans, and that it has in fact happened multiple times.
1. How long is this telomere?
It is normal for the length of telomeres to change of the life of an individual, so the particular length of the fused telomere in ape-human evolution isn't really significant to anything. It was some arbitrary length when the mutation first occurred, and would generally have remained remained the same length after that.
2. How many other telomeres have been found in the middle of other organisms' chromosome pairs?
I can only assume it's reasonably common in other species, but my knowledge is specific to humans. See below.
3.How often has this happened in other organisms? "Their format changed, but they didn't lose any information, so the mutation wasn't deadly."
It is a relatively common mutation, even just within humans. Normally a person has 46 chromosomes - 23 matched pairs. Occasionally two will fuse together like this, and the person winds up with 45 chromosomes, with the "missing" one glued to one of the others. I don't recall exactly how common it is, but I think it's probably a few hundred thousand humans with this condition, and they usually don't even know it. It is generally undetectable unless a doctor specifically screens your DNA. The only real symptom of the condition is a slightly lowered fertility rate due to the odd chromosome number screwing up a percentage of your egg/sperm cells. Sexual reproduction is based on an even number paired chromosomes, when there are an odd number things get slightly messed up. Such a person may need to try for an extra few months to conceive a pregnancy. Some egg or sperm cells will be defective. A conception using a defective egg or sperm cell will silently auto abort. Given a few pregnancy attempts a healthy egg or sperm cell will randomly get used and it will produce a healthy child. The child produced would have a 50-50 chance of carrying this mutation as well.
Thus far I've been talking about people with a single merged-chromosome mutation, people who are generally healthy but and with an oddball 45 chromosome makeup, people with minor fertility issues. But now here's the really cool part. If someone with one of these mutations gets together with someone else with the *same matching* chromosome mutation, they will have double the fertility difficulties !BUT! they also have a significant chance of producing a very special child. Each child they do produce has a 25% chance of inheriting TWO copies of this mutation, inheriting it once from the mother and once from the father. This child will have !44! chromosomes. Instead of the normal human 23-pairs of chromosomes, the child will have 22-pairs of chromosomes. The child has 44 instead of 46, but 2 of those 44 are extra long and they hold the "missing" genes that a normal 46-person has. The child now has an even number of chromosomes - and they are all properly matched up pairs of chromosomes - with one extra ling "glued" chromosome paired up with another matching extra long "glued" chromosome. Now since this child has an even number of properly paired up chromosomes - this child does not have any fertility problems. The child is healthy and all of the genetic machinery for making children works smoothly again. If this 44 child has kids with a "normal" 46 human, they will have no fertility problems themselves but all of their children will have the funky 45 odd number fertility problem again. But if this 44 child were to marry another 44 person, they would true-breed perfectly healthy perfectly fertile 44 children.
Medical science has documented at least TWO families with people reaching this 44 condition, one known family in the US and one known family in India.
And the really really significant thing is that evolving fr
The first thing to note, before you get the notion that this might be a parody, is the Wikipedia biography page for Ray Comfort. This guy is as serious as they come. He's offered a few tens of thousands of dollars to debate Richard Dawkins for an hour. He's an honest-to-god Christian Evangelical Minister of some extremely minor fame, with some 64 books to his name, including "You Can Lead an Atheist to Evidence, But You Can't Make Him Think", "Russia Will Attack Israel: a 'For the Thinking Mind' Publication", "Hell's Best Kept Secret", "Scientific Facts in the Bible: 100 Reasons to Believe the Bible is Supernatural in Origin", and my personal favorite "Scratch & Sniff (Creation for Kids)".
An honorable mention for Truth in Advertising goes to "Comfort, the Feeble-Minded: Consolation for People Who Do Dumb Things: an Autobiography".
This guy is the poster boy for Poe's law. No, let me take that back. This guy climbed on stage at the Poe's law telethon and fucking ATE the poster boy for Poe's law, turned around and laid a steaming shitburger, and somehow in trying to walk offstage he managed to accidentally step in his own steaming shitburger. Twice.
Before you watch this video... I must warn you to put down any food or beverages you may be holding/consuming. In fact, that goes for anyone within earshot. This guy proves the existence of god - with a banana. And holy fuck he's serious. All the things you're currently imaging about this video... they don't come close. Oh, and bonus points to you if you somehow manage to make it through the video without ever picturing the banana as a phallic symbol.
There are many reasons people can initially wind up with a wrong view on something, and there are many reasons people wind up stuck in a self-reinforcing wrong view, but most all people are are wrong are entirely sincere in their wrongness.
It is an unfortunate fact of human nature that most people will quickly adopt a strong view from minimal or even irrelevant reasons, and an even more unfortunate fact of human nature that people generally find it exceedingly difficult to recognize they were wrong and reverse their position even when later faced with far better reasons to accept the opposite position. It's generally that they are being willfully dishonest, it's just that the current personal belief is presumed true, and the "fact" of the current belief being true itself implicitly establishes the perceived "falsity" of the new contradicting information. They sincerely believe the new information is indeed false, with the correct logical response being to identify and present the reason the new information is false. People can be quite creative in figuring out how and why something is wrong, and it is hardly unusual for such explanations to have less than ironclad mathematical proof to them, they are nonetheless sincerely believed explanations for why the new contradicting information is indeed wrong.
One of the quickest simplest methods to dismiss incorrect information coming from an unreasonable foe is simply to determine that the source is obviously biased for spewing such absurd false claims. The opponent is being unreasonable and irrational and is using obviously impossible arguments ceaselessly defending the clearly false claim they obtained from the blatantly biased source. And when someone is being completely unreasonable and they are completely incapable of grasping your simple reasonable explanations, sooner or later you just give up and write them off as a brick wall incapable of seeing (your) reason. They are biased and unreasonable, and they are blindly persisting in repeating the blatantly biased information from the biased source.
The quickest easiest way to dismiss "false information" and self-reinforcingly preserve one's own bias is simply to dismiss *it* with a charge of bias.
Except for your climate skepticism, I pretty well agree with most everything you said. For example nuclear power, we gotta open the goddamn waste facility at Yucca Mountain already, and push past the NIMBYs for power plants. I'd rather live on the front lawn of a nuclear plant than live several miles downwind of a coal plant.
As for human-global-warming, I think it's trivial to resolve the basic point. (1)It is indisputed reality that humans have been increasing the levels of CO2, methane, and related gases in the atmosphere. (2)It is indisputed trivial physics fact that CO2, methane, and gases trap infrared radiation, i.e. they trap heat. (3) There is no 3. That's it, over, Q.E.D., done, finito, the fat lady sang.
Elaborating on number 1, fossil fuel burning alone releases 20-odd approaching 30 gigatins of CO2 into the atmosphere per year. Human emissions of CO2 are somewhere between one hundred and two hundred times the emissions from volcanoes. Direct ongoing measurement of CO2 in the atmosphere is currently rising at an extremely consistent rate of rise of just under 2 parts per million per year, with levels just cracking 390 this year, up from a very flat 280 in pre-industrial modern history. We are also releasing smaller amounts of far more powerful methane, and smaller amounts other gases many more times more powerful than even methane. I don't think there's any significant debate on any of these statistics. Wondering if humans might have something to do with measured atmospheric CO2 levels is kinda like opening a fire hose inside your house, and wondering if it might have anything to do with the water level in your livingroom as you watch it rise before your eyes.
Elaborating on number 2, the CO2 and other greenhouse gases effect is already about fifty degrees. Not that I'm not talking about global warming. I'm talking about the pre-existing natural greenhouse gas effect. The earth is - right now - about fifty degrees warmer than it would be if there were no infrared trapping gases in the atmosphere. The atmosphere is pretty well a transparent window allowing visible-light sunlight come down and hit the ground. That solar radiation energy hits the ground and gets radiated back up as infrared radiation - as heat radiation. If not for the normal level of atmospheric gases all of that heat would almost immediately reflect back up through the atmosphere and vanish out into space. The earth would literally ice over, almost right down to the equator. Instead that infrared radiation gets trapped under the blanket of CO2 and other gases, the heat stays near the surface. CO2 and such gases are transparent to visible light letting sunlight in, but they are dark and cloudy to infrared radiation. The thicker such gases in the atmosphere the thicker darker and cloudier it is as a blanket trapping heat. It is trivial physics, these gases allow sunlight-energy in and and act as a blanket blocking that heat energy from bouncing back out. That is trivial indisputed physics. The natural size of the effect is already about 50 degrees, a thicker blanker increases the size of the warming effect. Venus for example is marginally closer to the sun and gets marginally more sunlight, but the surface is around 800 degrees and hot enough to melt soft metal, because the atmosphere is an extremely thick blanket of almost completely CO2 - sunlight can get in but none if the infrared heat radiation can make its way through the thick blanket.
To elaborate on point three, we have trivially established the basic fact that humans are are doing something that does have the effect of trapping heat. People can talk about the sun or anything else, but that is beside the point. The effect is real and it exists, if people have any claims about the sun or anything else then the most they can possibly do is claim they have some additional effect, on-top of human-global-warming. Such "other effect" arguments cannot refute the fundamental reality and existence of the human caused effect. No I didn't prove anything
it is not the same- we know none of the technical details of what was done with the UK works
The threat letter from the museum pretty throughly concedes the issue, instead trying to claim applicability of UK law and claim certainty of such copyright under UK law (untrue, it is actually an open and iffy question under UK law), and the letter proceeds with the intimidation tactic of piling on every half-plausible charge plus the kitchen sink.
The US Supreme Court has ruled that there is a constitutional requirement for a modicum of creative expression to obtain a copyright. The Supreme Court generally sets the "creative contribution" threshold incredibly low, but concluded that "slavishly" uncreative slavishly accurate photographic reproduction of other people's 2D artwork did not possess any significant quantity of creative expression. Such images are sometimes produced by nothing more than dropping the original on a flatbed scanner and hitting the COPY button, however even where substantial labor and skill are applied, the very POINT of such work is to slavishly AVOID any new creative expression from creeping into the new image. The very intent is to achieve zero creative expression.
If you as a photographer find that objectionable, all I can say is you should avoid jobs for "slavishly unexpressive" reproduction of other people's 2D artwork, or simply get paid upfront as "work for hire" for it. It seems to me it's an extraordinarily narrow exception with a fairly simple workaround.
The DMCA is unusually specific in stating "No person shall circumvent a technological measure that effectively controls access to a work protected under this title" - the images at hand are public domain by US law and are most particularly NOT protected works. There can be no circumvention crime for accessing unprotected works.
The DMCA also has a definition for "effectively controls access to a work" which Zoomify appears to fail to meet - as I understand it Zoomify merely serves to deliver the content in pieces. What he did in supposedly "circumventing" Zoomify (stitching together image segments) appears to fail to meet even the DMCA's quite broad definition for "circumvent a technological measure". The claim for criminal circumvention has more holes than swiss cheese.
Zoomify appears to be nothing more than a fairly routine interface to *ASSIST* in accessing particularly high resolution images over the internet.
If you a weak or nonexistant case, intimidate target by piling on a shotgun spray of additional allegations - pile on every remotely plausible charge you can think of and toss in the kitchen sink for good measure.
I think it's worth mentioning that the US's DMCA doesn't discriminate as to the *purpose* of circumvention of copy protection, the *act* of circumvention is in itself an offence
An interesting note, the letter quoted the UK circumvention law and the following jumped out at me "knowing, or with reasonable grounds to know, that he is pursuing that objective". As you note, that does not exist in the US DMCA. I beggars belief that a typical user would ever imagine that Zoomify was intended to be a copyright protection mechanism.
It doesn't matter if it's US law or UK law, they are throwing in the kitchen sink with the circumvention charges. And their sink has more holes than a slice of swiss cheese.
No copyright infringement occurred, not only is this new database crap not apply in the US but it is actually unconstitutional and prohibited here, and the circumvention charges are a crock. Hell, trying to establish copyright on these images in the UK itself is probably no more than a 50-50 proposition.
And for what it's worth, if you are a law-abiding citizen sitting at home in the UK and some fuctard US company tries to threaten you with US laws, please tell them to bugger off. And that goes double if they're trying to push something like an expired copyright against you because an idiotic law over here retroactively renewed and extended the copyright within the US. I would really really enjoy siding with you on that one.
I don't see any reason why a foreigner gets to break the law in the UK.
You need to be very careful with that sort of issue. If a UK citizen in sitting at home in the UK I think you might object to an attempt to accuse him under arbitrary US laws. And if that doesn't raise you hackles, how about a UK citizen sitting at home getting charged under some foreign Taliban-style laws for posting swimsuit models, or charged under Chinese laws for posting Tiananmen Square photos?
The international nature of the internet has led to an increasing number of messy situations. The usual answer is that there must be dual-criminality to make this sort of international charge stick. The act must be criminal under the laws of both countries involved. That solves the swimsuit and Tiananmen Square issues along with all the other insane laws that exist across some 200 or so foreign jurisdictions.
The lawyer's letter asserts that an infringing act took place in the United Kingdom: the downloading from a UK server.
The letter makes a number of claims, but scattershotting a large number of bad claims does not improve the quality of those claims.
As far as as copyright infringement acts within the UK, the only act in the UK subject to copyright was the act of distributing the images, and that act was preformed by the museum itself. The act of creating a copy on his computer harddrive occurred within the US, and the redistribution of the image to the Wiki servers also occurred entirely within the US. Under US law neither of those acts was infringing. Hell, it's seriously questionable whether the images are even copyrightable under UK law. A US court had cause to analyze UK law on the subject, and concluded that under UK law these sorts of images would not have a valid copyright. Obviously the UK is not bound by that opinion, but it appears many UK legal experts believe UK courts are likely to concur with its analysis.
As far as database infringement charges, not only does the US not recognize any such thing, the US Supreme Court has ruled that sort of law to be unconstitutional.
The "Unlawful circumvention of technical measures" charge could likely be matched up against the US's DMCA circumvention laws to claim dual-criminality, but it appears to stumble on a multitude of points on both sides of the pond. The first thing that jumped out at me reading the letter was that the UK law requires "knowing, or with reasonable grounds to know, that he is pursuing that objective"... I am not familiar with the "Zoomify" software they are claiming as the circumvented protection measure, but the impression I have is that no one would reasonably infer that it was intended as a copyright protection measure. It sounds like the typical sort of interface that would routinely exist to *assist* in the internet access of high resolution images over the internet. The DMCA is also unusually specific in stating "No person shall circumvent a technological measure that effectively controls access to a work protected under this title" - the images at hand are public domain by US law and most particularly NOT protected works. There can be no circumvention crime for accessing unprotected works. The DMCA also has a definition for "effectively controls access to a work" which Zoomify appears to fail to meet - as I understand it Zoomify merely serves to deliver the content in pieces. What he did in supposedly "circumventing" Zoomify (stitching together image segments) appears to fail to meet even the DMCA's quite broad definition for "circumvent a technological measure". The claim for criminal circumvention has more holes than swiss cheese.
The shotgun approach to making charges is common, all the more so when the person making the charges know that their position is weak or frivolous. It often has great psychological impact - the "oh my god at least ONE of them is probably going to hold up" effect - but courtrooms are not impressed by it. Courts analyze the charges one by one, and they
I suspect you are mistaken. A US court had cause to analyze UK law and precedent on the subject and concluded that these sort of images would not be subject to copyright in the UK. While a US court analysis of UK law is obviously not binding upon the UK, and it is certainly conceivable the US court misapplied UK court precedent during its analysis, I find it difficult to believe that the court and the UK lawyers in support of such copyright protection would have overlooked a clause in the Copyright Act 1988 explicitly saying so.
Corel v. Bridgeman discusses the case, along with a discussion of UK law. I am well familiar with the text of US copyright law and with the general international standards for copyright, but I haven't yet looked at the UK Copyright Acts in particular. If you happen to have a link to a section of the UK Copyright Act 1988 explicitly addressing this sort of situation I would be most interested.
By charging for postcards, books, t-shirts, tea and cakes Museums can reduce their dependency on the tax payer and continue to open for free to all. That seems like a good thing.
Having the entire world of old (copyright-expired) artwork freely available to students and to the general public ALSO seems like a good thing.
You can't just look at situations with different people and randomly flip back and forth between opposite positions based on what you feel would be nice way to go in each case. We're taking law here. These sorts of images either are restricted by copyright law or they are not restricted by copyright law, and it is going to apply to a lot of different people in a lot of conflicting "seems like a good idea" situations.
But I'm not sure anyone can really trust the Wiki Foundation to do the right thing. They have a vain, overblown sense of their own importance and relevance.
Yeah, that and their annoying habit of following the law, chuckle.
They are in the US. There is no dispute that the images are public domain under US law. They are following the law that applies.
Under UK law there is no direct ruling on the issue. The Museum is trying to claim copyright on them, but a US court actually had cause to examine UK precedent on the subject and concluded that under UK law such images are not subject to copyright. Obviously a US court ruling in not binding upon UK courts, but many UK law experts believe UK courts are likely to concur with the US analysis of UK precedent and reach the same result.
It's also secondary infringement to transmit something from the UK to another country knowing that infringing copies will be made of it outside the UK and then re-imported
Well then lets hope no one at the museum knew of the project to get the art onto Wikipedia, or they may be in big trouble under that law. Chuckle.
It appears to be generally expected that this won't affect UK judgements.
Wikipedia has an extensive discussion of the US case Corel_v._Bridgeman, in particular in relation to UK law. While it was a US ruling and obviously not binding upon UK courts, it cited and analyzed extensive UK rulings in the area and came to a concluded that UK law would produce the same result. Many UK legal experts believe UK courts are likely to agree with the US court's analysis of UK precedent.
The best anyone can really say is that the copyright status of the images are uncertain under UK law, until some UK court specifically rules on such a case.
Every page he copied from had a link "Use this image on your website".
And it is POSSIBLE he clicked that link.
But even if he did, he had good cause to know or believe the claims legally false. Even if the images were copyrighted in the UK (with is legally questionable), *he* most certainly did not need permission to create copies of them on his computer in the US, and he most certainly did not need permission to redistribute them to a website in the US.
Personally I would not like to be in a criminal trial...
Oh, certainly agreed. And I personally would not want to be charged by some Taliban-style government over in the mid east for the crime of uploading bikini models here in the US. That would really suck. That would really seriously suck. However I would be forced to give them a big fuck FUCK YOU, GO TAKE A LONG HIKE OFF A SHORT PIER. I would personally not want the Chinese government charging me as a criminal for uploading Tiananmen Square photos to Wikipedia here in the U.S. That would really suck. It would really seriously suck. However I would be forced to give them a big fuck FUCK YOU, GO TAKE A LONG HIKE OFF A SHORT PIER.
But you know what would really suck far more than that? For SCO or any other large entity to threaten a fraudulent lawsuit against me here in the US. That would MASSIVELY suck, because no matter how bogus the charges, they would seriously fuck me over because I can't simply tell them to fuck off and take a hike. I would have to actually hire a lawyer and deal with the US court case, and it would suck even more because no matter how false the charges, they might splatter me just because they are bigger and have the money and lawyers to pull it off.
So no, I do not envy his position. Yes, it is bad that he is being threatened by an entity large enough to potentially squash him in court even if they are wrong. But most fortunately this situation is like someone in an Arab nation threating him for bikini models or someone in China threatening him for Tiananmen Square images. All of teh charges are absolutely fraudulent under US law. The fact that he is being threatened like this... no I would not want to be in that position. However his most appropriate response is, most likely, to blow them off.
If someone in Talibanistan threatened you for bikini photos, would you not blow them off?
If someone in China threatened you with claims that the copyright to all Tiananmen Square images were owned by the Chinese government and that no such image could be copied or distributed without permission from the Chinese government, would you not blow them off?
Seriously, would you or would you not blow off those sorts of threats made against you from China or Talibanistan?
And furthermore the demands made in the legal-threat letter are absurd. They are demanding that he delete the images from Wikipedia. He has neither the legal right, nor the physical capability, to comply with those demands. He has neither the legal power nor the physical ability to remove those images from Wikipedia. He did happen to have some admin authorities that would have enabled him to temporarily hide the images from public pages, but not to delete them and not to unilaterally keep them hidden. And in any case his admin powers have been (at least temporarily) withdrawn for conflict of interest.... both to protect Wikipedia's interest and (hopefully) to his benefit as well by simplifying his legal situation. He is now a common user of Wikipedia, and he has no more power or ability than they themselves have over Wikipedia content. They can edit pages and remove links to the images (which will likely be reverted), and they can flag the images COPYVIO to trigger a Wikipedia copyright review on the images (which I believe they tried and which was legally rejected). There is nothing they can demand he do for them that they cannot do, or have not done, for themselves.
The legal claims are questionable in the UK, and they are flagrantly false in the
which he knows or has reason to believe is, an infringing copy of a copyright work.
Well, except maybe for the fact that the person on question in fact knew or had reason to believe that the images were public domain.
This was not merely a random user, but a skilled and respected admin well familiar with copyright issues for such content, and he did not trivially or carelessly undertake a MASSIVE and abnormally complex project involving well over three thousand images. He had extremely good cause to "know or believe" the images public domain.
Here I sit thinking the US legislature is kinda like an elementary school teacher that's been fucking all the students in his class, and along comes your post about how your kid's elementary school teach has been fucking all his students *and* he's got crabs.
It makes me feel ever-so-slightly better about our own legislature, in a nauseatingly sad way.
and remove potential tax revenue (people in prison are not earning taxable income
Duh, haven't you read the financial impact studies from music industry? Putting these people in prison will prevent six hundred trillion dollars in piracy, which means eighty two hundred trillion in extra tax revenue to the government.
Copyright draws a distinction between the "ideas" in a work from the "expression" of those ideas. A direct translation of Harry Potter into German would be an infringement of copyright, however reading Harry Potter and extracting some of the ideas of how characters interact with each other, or the idea of the protagonist confronting his fears or being deceived and undermined by the villain, and writing a new story (in any language) based on those ideas would not be infringement. The idea vs expression concept is in particular used in software copyright. It is absolutely legal to examine or reverse engineer software to understand what it does and how it works. It is legal for you to then write your own software using those ideas, or even to write functionally identical software to fulfill the same role. When attempting to create "functionally identical" software you are very vulnerable to charges of deliberate or accidental copying of the particular code in the source, so sometimes an explicitly "clean room" implementation is done. One programmer (or set of programmers) examines the original program and then writes a specification of exactly what the software does... defines exactly what the inputs are and defines exactly what sorts of outputs must be generates and how the inputs and outputs must be structured and what kinds of processing need to be done... and then a second programmer (or group) writes their own code to carry out the task. This is a clean room implementation. A properly carried out and properly documented clean room implementation makes you immune to charges of copyright infringement, even if significant chunks of the final code are substantially identical to the original.
Another significant point is code that is "purely functional"... copyright only protects creativity and expression, not function. Your earlier post commented on "A short amount of code only has so many unique representations... Since most of these will be effectively identical, the inventor ideally has some good protection right there. In fact that would leave you with little to no copyright protection. Programmers are free to write their own programs, and if there is only one way or a small number of ways to do something then there there is no creativity in doing it that way. All programs in C need to contain "main(" - that is the one and only way to identify where execution should begin. Writing "main(" is purely functional, it has zero protectable creativity.
There are interesting stories behind the origins of court rulings like these. The entire PC revolution rests upon clean-room reimplementation. In the early computer days a variety of manufacturers began manufacturing IBM-compatible parts for personal computers. The most significant barrier to introducing a compatible "clone" computer was the BIOS making the whole computer work. I forget who, but some company did a clean-room project creating their own PC-compatible BIOS software replacement, and thus ushered in the era of low cost "PC-clones". Had IBM been able to maintain a monopoly on the PC-compatible market based on their BIOS copyright, PC prices would never have sharply fallen the way they did, and the "IBM-compatible" PCs would not have exploded the way they did directly into today's modern PCs. The world would be a very different place if not for the PC revolution, and it all rests upon the legal right of a company to program their own BIOS software to recreate the functionality of IBM's BIOS.
The other case involves a gaming console company's extremely primitive attempts at a form of DRM for their game cartridges. I forget what company it was, but what they did was take an arbitrary small copyrighted image (it was like a hundred bytes or so) and include it at the start of every game. The game console was designed to check for that exact image as part of the startup sequence before running any game cartridge. Another company started releasing independent games for that console, and in order to get the games to load and run they obviously had
Your reasoning seems to indicate that a novel non-obvious and useful three hundred digit number should also be a patentable invention.
In any case, the US Supreme Court has ruled that as math, all algorithms must be treated as "familiar prior art" as far as patent law is concerned. You can no more "invent" an algorithm than you can "invent" a number or a law of nature. Any possible number is inherently treated as familiar prior art. Unfortunately the Supreme Court phrased it as "algorithms" without explicitly filling in the word "software" as being non-patentable and inherently treated as familiar prior art.
The conflict is that many people do not understand that software is in fact nothing more than a particular form of mathematical algorithm (and believe software *is* legitimately patentable), and that some people who do understand the nature of software are nonetheless highly motivated to circumvent the rules and the law fighting for such patents anyway.
combination of those algorithms may be non-obvious and novel.
True, but irrelevant. The one algorithm in the first place could have have been non-obvious and novel. That does not make it patentable. Trying to combine two or more algorithms cannot produce anything other than just another algorithm.
You could be the first person to write down some non-obvious, novel, and extremely useful three hundred digit number. However a number is not an "invention" in any patentable sense, calculus was once novel and non-obvious and definitely useful, but calculus is not an "invention" in any patentable sense. No matter how novel or non-obvious or useful an algorithm may be, it cannot be an "invention" in the patentable sense. The US Supreme Court has explicitly ruled that algorithms must be treated as a "familiar part of prior art" for patent purposes. Software is nothing more than a form of math algorithm, and as such no possible software can ever qualify as novel or non-obvious as far as patentability is concerned.
Well, it's a lawyer fighting for a new way to make money.
Most of them sincerely believe that software does validly fall within patentable inventions. A patent lawyer looks at software and they see stuff that is "novel" and "non-obvious" and "useful", and that pattern screams out to them "patentable invention!". They look at computers and see machines doing things, and there's this mysterious complex software-stuff doing new and amazing things.
Programmers, and mathematicians with any familiarity with software, have a pretty unique understanding of how it all works and what it all fundamentally *is*. We see that software is literally nothing more than a complex pure-math function taking numbers in, doing calculations, and outputting the math-result numbers. To most people math is passive - math doesn't "do" things. They look at computers and they don't see numbers, they don't see calculations, that see software "doing stuff", software doesn't look like math to them. They look at different computers and they see "different machines", or they look at the same computer running different software and it looks like a "different machine" doing something completely different. We look at a computer and see a "universal machine" capable of "universal calculation", the computer is a single machine capable of doing anything if you just feed the fight math equations into it, a computer is just a glorified calculator and software is nothing more than glorified math equations.
I'm sure virtually all pro-software-patent people would agree that a three hundred digit number was not an "invention" and not patentable even if the number was "novel" and "non-obvious" and no matter how useful that number may be, and I think most of them would agree software was not an "invention" and is not patentable if they had the same grasp on the basic nature of software that a typical programmer has.
They don't grasp the idea that software is actually nothing more than math. It doesn't look like math to them, it doesn't act like math to them. It's technological, it's made by creators, it's often novel, it's often non-obvious, and it's generally very useful and valuable, and as far as they can see it looks like a bunch of inventions.
One could argue that nothing should be patentable on the same basis
No, the "argument" and "basis" there is that software is a form of math. There are some people with other arguments against patents in general, but that is a relatively insignificant position mostly held up as a straw man to slander the pro-patent position rejecting software as a non-invention.
Pardon the US-based discussion if you happen to be from elsewhere, but the US Constitution does permit the creation of patent laws as a potentially useful thing, and the US Supreme Court has ruled that physical objects are patentable inventions and that (physical/industrial) processes for transforming articles into a different state or thing are patentable process inventions, and has ruled that mathematics and algorithms and laws of nature are NOT patentable inventions.
You may write down a three hundred digit number, and that number may be "novel" and "non-obvious" in that one one has ever seen it before, and that number may be useful, but for patent purposes a number cannot qualify as novel or as non-obvious. Any number, any math, any algorithm, is and must be treated as a "familiar part of prior art".
The argument going on is that some people have the peculiar notion that software is somehow not a mathematical algorithm. They are trying to claim that the mathematical algorithmic calculations of software are a patentable "process".Most any mathematician dealing with the subject of software will tell you that all software is in fact nothing more than a mathematical algorithm. Most any programmer who has studied Computer Science or the relationship of math and programming will tell you that software is nothing more than a mathematical algorithm.
The Supreme Court has ruled (with good reason) that math and algorithms are not patentable inventions. Unfortunately the Supreme Court has not explicitly use the word "software" in there, and many people (and especially many patent lawyers) do not grasp that software is in fact nothing more than math. They see computers doing "novel" and "non-obvious" and "useful" things, and it seems to them that software fits in with "patentable inventions". But Calculus was once novel and non-obvious and extremely useful, but Calculus and software are nothing more than math, and with that understanding most people realize that Calculus and software are not - and should not be - patentable "inventions". Calculus may be called an "invention" in a figurative sense, but not in a patentable-invention sense.
Slashdot Mirror
"Fair Use" ...like breaking the law in a way that has been designated as fair, and therefore unpunishable?
No, that wouldn't be a good way to put it.
I think the most informative answer is to explain the very origin of the term. We must start with the US Constitution which has a clause permitting Congress to create copyright&patent law, but more specifically such law can only be created to the purpose of promoting progress and promoting more such creation for the benefit of society. So Congress created copyright law, and it pretty much said copying was prohibited, period. Very quickly it became clear that there was a problem, with the Supreme Court making a number of rulings. Consider a typical example of modern Fair Use, something like a newspaper reviewing a book and quoting a couple of key sentences. And just to help the example lets say the newspaper is bashing the book, saying that it is riddled with errors and just plain lousy writing. The newspaper can't effectively review and criticize the book without quoting some of the errors from the book and showing an example of the atrocious writing style from the book. It is often virtually impossible to write effective review or criticism without quoting anything, and under copyright law even the smallest quote is copying is prohibited. Copyright law was having the effect of pretty much prohibiting the writing and publications of reviews, and it was most particularly a problem that anyone writing negative review or criticism would get sued under copyright law. There is a double constitutional problem there. For one, the First Amendment guarantees the right to Free Speech. Copyright law was effectively prohibiting a broad class of speech, it was prohibiting effective review and most particularly having the effect of prohibiting negative point-of-view review and criticism. The second issue is that the REQUIRED function of copyright law is to promote the creation and publication of new creative works. Copyright law was functioning to virtually prohibit the creation of valuable new independent review and criticism. It is not so unusual for one part of the Constitution to wind up in conflict with another part of the Constitution, or even in conflict with itself. Many categories of Fair Use were established on 1st Amendment free speech grounds or other constitutional issues.
Anyway, what happened is the Supreme Court got the case and saw that copyright Law was unconstitutionally prohibiting 1st Amendment protected free speech to review and criticism. When law does something unconstitutional that law is generally struck down as unconstitutional. Well, the Supreme Court apparently didn't relish the prospect of just plain striking down the entirety of copyright law and leaving it to congress to fix the problem by figuring out some new valid law to pass. Some call it "judicial activism", but the Supreme Court just plain invented the concept of "Fair Use", and they invented the idea that copyright law never actually attempted to do what the text of the law said it did. The text of copyright law prohibited copying, period, but the court decided that copyright law never actually tried to prohibit short quote-copying. Copyright law was not struck down as invalid because copyright law never actually tried to prohibit that copying. So the way Fair Use concept works is that copyright law is assumed to willingly flees when faced with any case of Fair Use. Copyright law would have to be struck down as invalid if it ever did actually attempt to restrict Fair Use.
Fair Use is the only thing keeping copyright law from being struck down as invalid.
Some people with a extremely aggressive views on copyright, people trying to diminish or eliminate Fair Use, they are very very misguided. If they actually succeeded in their efforts then copyright itself would be null and void, struck down as unconstitutional.
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I have some extraordinarily significant information to offer.
I offer PROOF that evolution can and did do exactly this sort of telomere fusion mutation that branched the 48 chromosome apes into the early 46 chromosome humans, and that it has in fact happened multiple times.
1. How long is this telomere?
It is normal for the length of telomeres to change of the life of an individual, so the particular length of the fused telomere in ape-human evolution isn't really significant to anything. It was some arbitrary length when the mutation first occurred, and would generally have remained remained the same length after that.
2. How many other telomeres have been found in the middle of other organisms' chromosome pairs?
I can only assume it's reasonably common in other species, but my knowledge is specific to humans. See below.
3.How often has this happened in other organisms? "Their format changed, but they didn't lose any information, so the mutation wasn't deadly."
It is a relatively common mutation, even just within humans. Normally a person has 46 chromosomes - 23 matched pairs. Occasionally two will fuse together like this, and the person winds up with 45 chromosomes, with the "missing" one glued to one of the others. I don't recall exactly how common it is, but I think it's probably a few hundred thousand humans with this condition, and they usually don't even know it. It is generally undetectable unless a doctor specifically screens your DNA. The only real symptom of the condition is a slightly lowered fertility rate due to the odd chromosome number screwing up a percentage of your egg/sperm cells. Sexual reproduction is based on an even number paired chromosomes, when there are an odd number things get slightly messed up. Such a person may need to try for an extra few months to conceive a pregnancy. Some egg or sperm cells will be defective. A conception using a defective egg or sperm cell will silently auto abort. Given a few pregnancy attempts a healthy egg or sperm cell will randomly get used and it will produce a healthy child. The child produced would have a 50-50 chance of carrying this mutation as well.
Thus far I've been talking about people with a single merged-chromosome mutation, people who are generally healthy but and with an oddball 45 chromosome makeup, people with minor fertility issues. But now here's the really cool part. If someone with one of these mutations gets together with someone else with the *same matching* chromosome mutation, they will have double the fertility difficulties !BUT! they also have a significant chance of producing a very special child. Each child they do produce has a 25% chance of inheriting TWO copies of this mutation, inheriting it once from the mother and once from the father. This child will have !44! chromosomes. Instead of the normal human 23-pairs of chromosomes, the child will have 22-pairs of chromosomes. The child has 44 instead of 46, but 2 of those 44 are extra long and they hold the "missing" genes that a normal 46-person has. The child now has an even number of chromosomes - and they are all properly matched up pairs of chromosomes - with one extra ling "glued" chromosome paired up with another matching extra long "glued" chromosome. Now since this child has an even number of properly paired up chromosomes - this child does not have any fertility problems. The child is healthy and all of the genetic machinery for making children works smoothly again. If this 44 child has kids with a "normal" 46 human, they will have no fertility problems themselves but all of their children will have the funky 45 odd number fertility problem again. But if this 44 child were to marry another 44 person, they would true-breed perfectly healthy perfectly fertile 44 children.
Medical science has documented at least TWO families with people reaching this 44 condition, one known family in the US and one known family in India.
And the really really significant thing is that evolving fr
Does someone actually use that argument?
Ohboy, you're in for a special treat.
The first thing to note, before you get the notion that this might be a parody, is the Wikipedia biography page for Ray Comfort. This guy is as serious as they come. He's offered a few tens of thousands of dollars to debate Richard Dawkins for an hour. He's an honest-to-god Christian Evangelical Minister of some extremely minor fame, with some 64 books to his name, including "You Can Lead an Atheist to Evidence, But You Can't Make Him Think", "Russia Will Attack Israel: a 'For the Thinking Mind' Publication", "Hell's Best Kept Secret", "Scientific Facts in the Bible: 100 Reasons to Believe the Bible is Supernatural in Origin", and my personal favorite "Scratch & Sniff (Creation for Kids)".
An honorable mention for Truth in Advertising goes to "Comfort, the Feeble-Minded: Consolation for People Who Do Dumb Things: an Autobiography".
This guy is the poster boy for Poe's law. No, let me take that back. This guy climbed on stage at the Poe's law telethon and fucking ATE the poster boy for Poe's law, turned around and laid a steaming shitburger, and somehow in trying to walk offstage he managed to accidentally step in his own steaming shitburger. Twice.
Before you watch this video... I must warn you to put down any food or beverages you may be holding/consuming. In fact, that goes for anyone within earshot. This guy proves the existence of god - with a banana. And holy fuck he's serious. All the things you're currently imaging about this video... they don't come close. Oh, and bonus points to you if you somehow manage to make it through the video without ever picturing the banana as a phallic symbol.
Behold: The Atheist's Nightmare featuring Ray Comfort and silent pal Kirk Cameron
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they have an intent to misinform
There are many reasons people can initially wind up with a wrong view on something, and there are many reasons people wind up stuck in a self-reinforcing wrong view, but most all people are are wrong are entirely sincere in their wrongness.
It is an unfortunate fact of human nature that most people will quickly adopt a strong view from minimal or even irrelevant reasons, and an even more unfortunate fact of human nature that people generally find it exceedingly difficult to recognize they were wrong and reverse their position even when later faced with far better reasons to accept the opposite position. It's generally that they are being willfully dishonest, it's just that the current personal belief is presumed true, and the "fact" of the current belief being true itself implicitly establishes the perceived "falsity" of the new contradicting information. They sincerely believe the new information is indeed false, with the correct logical response being to identify and present the reason the new information is false. People can be quite creative in figuring out how and why something is wrong, and it is hardly unusual for such explanations to have less than ironclad mathematical proof to them, they are nonetheless sincerely believed explanations for why the new contradicting information is indeed wrong.
One of the quickest simplest methods to dismiss incorrect information coming from an unreasonable foe is simply to determine that the source is obviously biased for spewing such absurd false claims. The opponent is being unreasonable and irrational and is using obviously impossible arguments ceaselessly defending the clearly false claim they obtained from the blatantly biased source. And when someone is being completely unreasonable and they are completely incapable of grasping your simple reasonable explanations, sooner or later you just give up and write them off as a brick wall incapable of seeing (your) reason. They are biased and unreasonable, and they are blindly persisting in repeating the blatantly biased information from the biased source.
The quickest easiest way to dismiss "false information" and self-reinforcingly preserve one's own bias is simply to dismiss *it* with a charge of bias.
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Except for your climate skepticism, I pretty well agree with most everything you said. For example nuclear power, we gotta open the goddamn waste facility at Yucca Mountain already, and push past the NIMBYs for power plants. I'd rather live on the front lawn of a nuclear plant than live several miles downwind of a coal plant.
As for human-global-warming, I think it's trivial to resolve the basic point.
(1)It is indisputed reality that humans have been increasing the levels of CO2, methane, and related gases in the atmosphere.
(2)It is indisputed trivial physics fact that CO2, methane, and gases trap infrared radiation, i.e. they trap heat.
(3) There is no 3. That's it, over, Q.E.D., done, finito, the fat lady sang.
Elaborating on number 1, fossil fuel burning alone releases 20-odd approaching 30 gigatins of CO2 into the atmosphere per year. Human emissions of CO2 are somewhere between one hundred and two hundred times the emissions from volcanoes. Direct ongoing measurement of CO2 in the atmosphere is currently rising at an extremely consistent rate of rise of just under 2 parts per million per year, with levels just cracking 390 this year, up from a very flat 280 in pre-industrial modern history. We are also releasing smaller amounts of far more powerful methane, and smaller amounts other gases many more times more powerful than even methane. I don't think there's any significant debate on any of these statistics. Wondering if humans might have something to do with measured atmospheric CO2 levels is kinda like opening a fire hose inside your house, and wondering if it might have anything to do with the water level in your livingroom as you watch it rise before your eyes.
Elaborating on number 2, the CO2 and other greenhouse gases effect is already about fifty degrees. Not that I'm not talking about global warming. I'm talking about the pre-existing natural greenhouse gas effect. The earth is - right now - about fifty degrees warmer than it would be if there were no infrared trapping gases in the atmosphere. The atmosphere is pretty well a transparent window allowing visible-light sunlight come down and hit the ground. That solar radiation energy hits the ground and gets radiated back up as infrared radiation - as heat radiation. If not for the normal level of atmospheric gases all of that heat would almost immediately reflect back up through the atmosphere and vanish out into space. The earth would literally ice over, almost right down to the equator. Instead that infrared radiation gets trapped under the blanket of CO2 and other gases, the heat stays near the surface. CO2 and such gases are transparent to visible light letting sunlight in, but they are dark and cloudy to infrared radiation. The thicker such gases in the atmosphere the thicker darker and cloudier it is as a blanket trapping heat. It is trivial physics, these gases allow sunlight-energy in and and act as a blanket blocking that heat energy from bouncing back out. That is trivial indisputed physics. The natural size of the effect is already about 50 degrees, a thicker blanker increases the size of the warming effect. Venus for example is marginally closer to the sun and gets marginally more sunlight, but the surface is around 800 degrees and hot enough to melt soft metal, because the atmosphere is an extremely thick blanket of almost completely CO2 - sunlight can get in but none if the infrared heat radiation can make its way through the thick blanket.
To elaborate on point three, we have trivially established the basic fact that humans are are doing something that does have the effect of trapping heat. People can talk about the sun or anything else, but that is beside the point. The effect is real and it exists, if people have any claims about the sun or anything else then the most they can possibly do is claim they have some additional effect, on-top of human-global-warming. Such "other effect" arguments cannot refute the fundamental reality and existence of the human caused effect. No I didn't prove anything
it is not the same- we know none of the technical details of what was done with the UK works
The threat letter from the museum pretty throughly concedes the issue, instead trying to claim applicability of UK law and claim certainty of such copyright under UK law (untrue, it is actually an open and iffy question under UK law), and the letter proceeds with the intimidation tactic of piling on every half-plausible charge plus the kitchen sink.
The US Supreme Court has ruled that there is a constitutional requirement for a modicum of creative expression to obtain a copyright. The Supreme Court generally sets the "creative contribution" threshold incredibly low, but concluded that "slavishly" uncreative slavishly accurate photographic reproduction of other people's 2D artwork did not possess any significant quantity of creative expression. Such images are sometimes produced by nothing more than dropping the original on a flatbed scanner and hitting the COPY button, however even where substantial labor and skill are applied, the very POINT of such work is to slavishly AVOID any new creative expression from creeping into the new image. The very intent is to achieve zero creative expression.
If you as a photographer find that objectionable, all I can say is you should avoid jobs for "slavishly unexpressive" reproduction of other people's 2D artwork, or simply get paid upfront as "work for hire" for it. It seems to me it's an extraordinarily narrow exception with a fairly simple workaround.
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The DMCA is unusually specific in stating "No person shall circumvent a technological measure that effectively controls access to a work protected under this title" - the images at hand are public domain by US law and are most particularly NOT protected works. There can be no circumvention crime for accessing unprotected works.
The DMCA also has a definition for "effectively controls access to a work" which Zoomify appears to fail to meet - as I understand it Zoomify merely serves to deliver the content in pieces. What he did in supposedly "circumventing" Zoomify (stitching together image segments) appears to fail to meet even the DMCA's quite broad definition for "circumvent a technological measure". The claim for criminal circumvention has more holes than swiss cheese.
Zoomify appears to be nothing more than a fairly routine interface to *ASSIST* in accessing particularly high resolution images over the internet.
If you a weak or nonexistant case, intimidate target by piling on a shotgun spray of additional allegations - pile on every remotely plausible charge you can think of and toss in the kitchen sink for good measure.
I think it's worth mentioning that the US's DMCA doesn't discriminate as to the *purpose* of circumvention of copy protection, the *act* of circumvention is in itself an offence
An interesting note, the letter quoted the UK circumvention law and the following jumped out at me "knowing, or with reasonable grounds to know, that he is pursuing that objective". As you note, that does not exist in the US DMCA. I beggars belief that a typical user would ever imagine that Zoomify was intended to be a copyright protection mechanism.
It doesn't matter if it's US law or UK law, they are throwing in the kitchen sink with the circumvention charges. And their sink has more holes than a slice of swiss cheese.
No copyright infringement occurred, not only is this new database crap not apply in the US but it is actually unconstitutional and prohibited here, and the circumvention charges are a crock. Hell, trying to establish copyright on these images in the UK itself is probably no more than a 50-50 proposition.
And for what it's worth, if you are a law-abiding citizen sitting at home in the UK and some fuctard US company tries to threaten you with US laws, please tell them to bugger off. And that goes double if they're trying to push something like an expired copyright against you because an idiotic law over here retroactively renewed and extended the copyright within the US. I would really really enjoy siding with you on that one.
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What most irks me about this is that again we have people from the US arguing that their rules apply
For what it's worth, I at least am no hypocrite there.
I am American and I bitch quite loudly when I see US companies (or other entities) attempting to push US law against people and events outside the US.
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I don't see any reason why a foreigner gets to break the law in the UK.
You need to be very careful with that sort of issue. If a UK citizen in sitting at home in the UK I think you might object to an attempt to accuse him under arbitrary US laws. And if that doesn't raise you hackles, how about a UK citizen sitting at home getting charged under some foreign Taliban-style laws for posting swimsuit models, or charged under Chinese laws for posting Tiananmen Square photos?
The international nature of the internet has led to an increasing number of messy situations. The usual answer is that there must be dual-criminality to make this sort of international charge stick. The act must be criminal under the laws of both countries involved. That solves the swimsuit and Tiananmen Square issues along with all the other insane laws that exist across some 200 or so foreign jurisdictions.
The lawyer's letter asserts that an infringing act took place in the United Kingdom: the downloading from a UK server.
The letter makes a number of claims, but scattershotting a large number of bad claims does not improve the quality of those claims.
As far as as copyright infringement acts within the UK, the only act in the UK subject to copyright was the act of distributing the images, and that act was preformed by the museum itself. The act of creating a copy on his computer harddrive occurred within the US, and the redistribution of the image to the Wiki servers also occurred entirely within the US. Under US law neither of those acts was infringing. Hell, it's seriously questionable whether the images are even copyrightable under UK law. A US court had cause to analyze UK law on the subject, and concluded that under UK law these sorts of images would not have a valid copyright. Obviously the UK is not bound by that opinion, but it appears many UK legal experts believe UK courts are likely to concur with its analysis.
As far as database infringement charges, not only does the US not recognize any such thing, the US Supreme Court has ruled that sort of law to be unconstitutional.
The "Unlawful circumvention of technical measures" charge could likely be matched up against the US's DMCA circumvention laws to claim dual-criminality, but it appears to stumble on a multitude of points on both sides of the pond. The first thing that jumped out at me reading the letter was that the UK law requires "knowing, or with reasonable grounds to know, that he is pursuing that objective"... I am not familiar with the "Zoomify" software they are claiming as the circumvented protection measure, but the impression I have is that no one would reasonably infer that it was intended as a copyright protection measure. It sounds like the typical sort of interface that would routinely exist to *assist* in the internet access of high resolution images over the internet. The DMCA is also unusually specific in stating "No person shall circumvent a technological measure that effectively controls access to a work protected under this title" - the images at hand are public domain by US law and most particularly NOT protected works. There can be no circumvention crime for accessing unprotected works. The DMCA also has a definition for "effectively controls access to a work" which Zoomify appears to fail to meet - as I understand it Zoomify merely serves to deliver the content in pieces. What he did in supposedly "circumventing" Zoomify (stitching together image segments) appears to fail to meet even the DMCA's quite broad definition for "circumvent a technological measure". The claim for criminal circumvention has more holes than swiss cheese.
The shotgun approach to making charges is common, all the more so when the person making the charges know that their position is weak or frivolous. It often has great psychological impact - the "oh my god at least ONE of them is probably going to hold up" effect - but courtrooms are not impressed by it. Courts analyze the charges one by one, and they
I suspect you are mistaken. A US court had cause to analyze UK law and precedent on the subject and concluded that these sort of images would not be subject to copyright in the UK. While a US court analysis of UK law is obviously not binding upon the UK, and it is certainly conceivable the US court misapplied UK court precedent during its analysis, I find it difficult to believe that the court and the UK lawyers in support of such copyright protection would have overlooked a clause in the Copyright Act 1988 explicitly saying so.
Corel v. Bridgeman discusses the case, along with a discussion of UK law. I am well familiar with the text of US copyright law and with the general international standards for copyright, but I haven't yet looked at the UK Copyright Acts in particular. If you happen to have a link to a section of the UK Copyright Act 1988 explicitly addressing this sort of situation I would be most interested.
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By charging for postcards, books, t-shirts, tea and cakes Museums can reduce their dependency on the tax payer and continue to open for free to all. That seems like a good thing.
Having the entire world of old (copyright-expired) artwork freely available to students and to the general public ALSO seems like a good thing.
You can't just look at situations with different people and randomly flip back and forth between opposite positions based on what you feel would be nice way to go in each case. We're taking law here. These sorts of images either are restricted by copyright law or they are not restricted by copyright law, and it is going to apply to a lot of different people in a lot of conflicting "seems like a good idea" situations.
But I'm not sure anyone can really trust the Wiki Foundation to do the right thing. They have a vain, overblown sense of their own importance and relevance.
Yeah, that and their annoying habit of following the law, chuckle.
They are in the US. There is no dispute that the images are public domain under US law. They are following the law that applies.
Under UK law there is no direct ruling on the issue. The Museum is trying to claim copyright on them, but a US court actually had cause to examine UK precedent on the subject and concluded that under UK law such images are not subject to copyright. Obviously a US court ruling in not binding upon UK courts, but many UK law experts believe UK courts are likely to concur with the US analysis of UK precedent and reach the same result.
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That's just bizarre.... writing "small-C Conservative" using capital-C Conservative.
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Yeah, from 1776 to 2003.
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would probably have been thrown out for whipping out my Canon.
I'm sure all your lady-friends are suitably impressed by that nickname you have for it.
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It's also secondary infringement to transmit something from the UK to another country knowing that infringing copies will be made of it outside the UK and then re-imported
Well then lets hope no one at the museum knew of the project to get the art onto Wikipedia, or they may be in big trouble under that law. Chuckle.
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It appears to be generally expected that this won't affect UK judgements.
Wikipedia has an extensive discussion of the US case Corel_v._Bridgeman, in particular in relation to UK law. While it was a US ruling and obviously not binding upon UK courts, it cited and analyzed extensive UK rulings in the area and came to a concluded that UK law would produce the same result. Many UK legal experts believe UK courts are likely to agree with the US court's analysis of UK precedent.
The best anyone can really say is that the copyright status of the images are uncertain under UK law, until some UK court specifically rules on such a case.
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Every page he copied from had a link "Use this image on your website".
And it is POSSIBLE he clicked that link.
But even if he did, he had good cause to know or believe the claims legally false. Even if the images were copyrighted in the UK (with is legally questionable), *he* most certainly did not need permission to create copies of them on his computer in the US, and he most certainly did not need permission to redistribute them to a website in the US.
Personally I would not like to be in a criminal trial...
Oh, certainly agreed. And I personally would not want to be charged by some Taliban-style government over in the mid east for the crime of uploading bikini models here in the US. That would really suck. That would really seriously suck. However I would be forced to give them a big fuck FUCK YOU, GO TAKE A LONG HIKE OFF A SHORT PIER. I would personally not want the Chinese government charging me as a criminal for uploading Tiananmen Square photos to Wikipedia here in the U.S. That would really suck. It would really seriously suck. However I would be forced to give them a big fuck FUCK YOU, GO TAKE A LONG HIKE OFF A SHORT PIER.
But you know what would really suck far more than that? For SCO or any other large entity to threaten a fraudulent lawsuit against me here in the US. That would MASSIVELY suck, because no matter how bogus the charges, they would seriously fuck me over because I can't simply tell them to fuck off and take a hike. I would have to actually hire a lawyer and deal with the US court case, and it would suck even more because no matter how false the charges, they might splatter me just because they are bigger and have the money and lawyers to pull it off.
So no, I do not envy his position. Yes, it is bad that he is being threatened by an entity large enough to potentially squash him in court even if they are wrong. But most fortunately this situation is like someone in an Arab nation threating him for bikini models or someone in China threatening him for Tiananmen Square images. All of teh charges are absolutely fraudulent under US law. The fact that he is being threatened like this... no I would not want to be in that position. However his most appropriate response is, most likely, to blow them off.
If someone in Talibanistan threatened you for bikini photos, would you not blow them off?
If someone in China threatened you with claims that the copyright to all Tiananmen Square images were owned by the Chinese government and that no such image could be copied or distributed without permission from the Chinese government, would you not blow them off?
Seriously, would you or would you not blow off those sorts of threats made against you from China or Talibanistan?
And furthermore the demands made in the legal-threat letter are absurd. They are demanding that he delete the images from Wikipedia. He has neither the legal right, nor the physical capability, to comply with those demands. He has neither the legal power nor the physical ability to remove those images from Wikipedia. He did happen to have some admin authorities that would have enabled him to temporarily hide the images from public pages, but not to delete them and not to unilaterally keep them hidden. And in any case his admin powers have been (at least temporarily) withdrawn for conflict of interest.... both to protect Wikipedia's interest and (hopefully) to his benefit as well by simplifying his legal situation. He is now a common user of Wikipedia, and he has no more power or ability than they themselves have over Wikipedia content. They can edit pages and remove links to the images (which will likely be reverted), and they can flag the images COPYVIO to trigger a Wikipedia copyright review on the images (which I believe they tried and which was legally rejected). There is nothing they can demand he do for them that they cannot do, or have not done, for themselves.
The legal claims are questionable in the UK, and they are flagrantly false in the
which he knows or has reason to believe is, an infringing copy of a copyright work.
Well, except maybe for the fact that the person on question in fact knew or had reason to believe that the images were public domain.
This was not merely a random user, but a skilled and respected admin well familiar with copyright issues for such content, and he did not trivially or carelessly undertake a MASSIVE and abnormally complex project involving well over three thousand images. He had extremely good cause to "know or believe" the images public domain.
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Here I sit thinking the US legislature is kinda like an elementary school teacher that's been fucking all the students in his class, and along comes your post about how your kid's elementary school teach has been fucking all his students *and* he's got crabs.
It makes me feel ever-so-slightly better about our own legislature, in a nauseatingly sad way.
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and remove potential tax revenue (people in prison are not earning taxable income
Duh, haven't you read the financial impact studies from music industry? Putting these people in prison will prevent six hundred trillion dollars in piracy, which means eighty two hundred trillion in extra tax revenue to the government.
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Copyright draws a distinction between the "ideas" in a work from the "expression" of those ideas. A direct translation of Harry Potter into German would be an infringement of copyright, however reading Harry Potter and extracting some of the ideas of how characters interact with each other, or the idea of the protagonist confronting his fears or being deceived and undermined by the villain, and writing a new story (in any language) based on those ideas would not be infringement. The idea vs expression concept is in particular used in software copyright. It is absolutely legal to examine or reverse engineer software to understand what it does and how it works. It is legal for you to then write your own software using those ideas, or even to write functionally identical software to fulfill the same role. When attempting to create "functionally identical" software you are very vulnerable to charges of deliberate or accidental copying of the particular code in the source, so sometimes an explicitly "clean room" implementation is done. One programmer (or set of programmers) examines the original program and then writes a specification of exactly what the software does... defines exactly what the inputs are and defines exactly what sorts of outputs must be generates and how the inputs and outputs must be structured and what kinds of processing need to be done... and then a second programmer (or group) writes their own code to carry out the task. This is a clean room implementation. A properly carried out and properly documented clean room implementation makes you immune to charges of copyright infringement, even if significant chunks of the final code are substantially identical to the original.
Another significant point is code that is "purely functional"... copyright only protects creativity and expression, not function. Your earlier post commented on "A short amount of code only has so many unique representations... Since most of these will be effectively identical, the inventor ideally has some good protection right there. In fact that would leave you with little to no copyright protection. Programmers are free to write their own programs, and if there is only one way or a small number of ways to do something then there there is no creativity in doing it that way. All programs in C need to contain "main(" - that is the one and only way to identify where execution should begin. Writing "main(" is purely functional, it has zero protectable creativity.
There are interesting stories behind the origins of court rulings like these. The entire PC revolution rests upon clean-room reimplementation. In the early computer days a variety of manufacturers began manufacturing IBM-compatible parts for personal computers. The most significant barrier to introducing a compatible "clone" computer was the BIOS making the whole computer work. I forget who, but some company did a clean-room project creating their own PC-compatible BIOS software replacement, and thus ushered in the era of low cost "PC-clones". Had IBM been able to maintain a monopoly on the PC-compatible market based on their BIOS copyright, PC prices would never have sharply fallen the way they did, and the "IBM-compatible" PCs would not have exploded the way they did directly into today's modern PCs. The world would be a very different place if not for the PC revolution, and it all rests upon the legal right of a company to program their own BIOS software to recreate the functionality of IBM's BIOS.
The other case involves a gaming console company's extremely primitive attempts at a form of DRM for their game cartridges. I forget what company it was, but what they did was take an arbitrary small copyrighted image (it was like a hundred bytes or so) and include it at the start of every game. The game console was designed to check for that exact image as part of the startup sequence before running any game cartridge. Another company started releasing independent games for that console, and in order to get the games to load and run they obviously had
Your reasoning seems to indicate that a novel non-obvious and useful three hundred digit number should also be a patentable invention.
In any case, the US Supreme Court has ruled that as math, all algorithms must be treated as "familiar prior art" as far as patent law is concerned. You can no more "invent" an algorithm than you can "invent" a number or a law of nature. Any possible number is inherently treated as familiar prior art. Unfortunately the Supreme Court phrased it as "algorithms" without explicitly filling in the word "software" as being non-patentable and inherently treated as familiar prior art.
The conflict is that many people do not understand that software is in fact nothing more than a particular form of mathematical algorithm (and believe software *is* legitimately patentable), and that some people who do understand the nature of software are nonetheless highly motivated to circumvent the rules and the law fighting for such patents anyway.
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combination of those algorithms may be non-obvious and novel.
True, but irrelevant. The one algorithm in the first place could have have been non-obvious and novel. That does not make it patentable. Trying to combine two or more algorithms cannot produce anything other than just another algorithm.
You could be the first person to write down some non-obvious, novel, and extremely useful three hundred digit number. However a number is not an "invention" in any patentable sense, calculus was once novel and non-obvious and definitely useful, but calculus is not an "invention" in any patentable sense. No matter how novel or non-obvious or useful an algorithm may be, it cannot be an "invention" in the patentable sense. The US Supreme Court has explicitly ruled that algorithms must be treated as a "familiar part of prior art" for patent purposes. Software is nothing more than a form of math algorithm, and as such no possible software can ever qualify as novel or non-obvious as far as patentability is concerned.
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Well, it's a lawyer fighting for a new way to make money.
Most of them sincerely believe that software does validly fall within patentable inventions. A patent lawyer looks at software and they see stuff that is "novel" and "non-obvious" and "useful", and that pattern screams out to them "patentable invention!". They look at computers and see machines doing things, and there's this mysterious complex software-stuff doing new and amazing things.
Programmers, and mathematicians with any familiarity with software, have a pretty unique understanding of how it all works and what it all fundamentally *is*. We see that software is literally nothing more than a complex pure-math function taking numbers in, doing calculations, and outputting the math-result numbers. To most people math is passive - math doesn't "do" things. They look at computers and they don't see numbers, they don't see calculations, that see software "doing stuff", software doesn't look like math to them. They look at different computers and they see "different machines", or they look at the same computer running different software and it looks like a "different machine" doing something completely different. We look at a computer and see a "universal machine" capable of "universal calculation", the computer is a single machine capable of doing anything if you just feed the fight math equations into it, a computer is just a glorified calculator and software is nothing more than glorified math equations.
I'm sure virtually all pro-software-patent people would agree that a three hundred digit number was not an "invention" and not patentable even if the number was "novel" and "non-obvious" and no matter how useful that number may be, and I think most of them would agree software was not an "invention" and is not patentable if they had the same grasp on the basic nature of software that a typical programmer has.
They don't grasp the idea that software is actually nothing more than math. It doesn't look like math to them, it doesn't act like math to them. It's technological, it's made by creators, it's often novel, it's often non-obvious, and it's generally very useful and valuable, and as far as they can see it looks like a bunch of inventions.
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One could argue that nothing should be patentable on the same basis
No, the "argument" and "basis" there is that software is a form of math. There are some people with other arguments against patents in general, but that is a relatively insignificant position mostly held up as a straw man to slander the pro-patent position rejecting software as a non-invention.
Pardon the US-based discussion if you happen to be from elsewhere, but the US Constitution does permit the creation of patent laws as a potentially useful thing, and the US Supreme Court has ruled that physical objects are patentable inventions and that (physical/industrial) processes for transforming articles into a different state or thing are patentable process inventions, and has ruled that mathematics and algorithms and laws of nature are NOT patentable inventions.
You may write down a three hundred digit number, and that number may be "novel" and "non-obvious" in that one one has ever seen it before, and that number may be useful, but for patent purposes a number cannot qualify as novel or as non-obvious. Any number, any math, any algorithm, is and must be treated as a "familiar part of prior art".
The argument going on is that some people have the peculiar notion that software is somehow not a mathematical algorithm. They are trying to claim that the mathematical algorithmic calculations of software are a patentable "process".Most any mathematician dealing with the subject of software will tell you that all software is in fact nothing more than a mathematical algorithm. Most any programmer who has studied Computer Science or the relationship of math and programming will tell you that software is nothing more than a mathematical algorithm.
The Supreme Court has ruled (with good reason) that math and algorithms are not patentable inventions. Unfortunately the Supreme Court has not explicitly use the word "software" in there, and many people (and especially many patent lawyers) do not grasp that software is in fact nothing more than math. They see computers doing "novel" and "non-obvious" and "useful" things, and it seems to them that software fits in with "patentable inventions". But Calculus was once novel and non-obvious and extremely useful, but Calculus and software are nothing more than math, and with that understanding most people realize that Calculus and software are not - and should not be - patentable "inventions". Calculus may be called an "invention" in a figurative sense, but not in a patentable-invention sense.
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