once they wrestle this guy to the ground (after about a minute of his resisting arrest) they tell him numerous times that if he doesn't place his hands behind his back and comply with the officers' requests that he's going to be tased
There's no point in writing complaint letters. Unless Youtube want to run the risk of being judged guilty of copyright violations themselves, they have to honour the takedown notice unconditionally if it's at all credible. If the takedown notice was erroneously or perjuriously issued, that's the issuer's fault, not Youtube's.
Also, have you been reminding those of your colleagues who have been presented with takedown notices that their first port of call should be to file the appropriate counternotice? YouTube have to honour it, just as they had to honour the takedown.
Granting the existence in copyright law of a lower limit, the fact remains that a licence can extend the rights available under copyright law; would you accept that a licence could even set its own definition of "derived work", should it so choose, and that such a definition would supersede the official one (but only for that work)?
(To clarify, I'm entirely in sympathy with your point that it isn't moral to merely add your assertion of copyright to the top of a file you haven't otherwise touched.)
Whether the new material qualifies for copyright determines whether it is legitimate to add your own copyright declaration to the header.
However, the BSD licence explicitly permits reproduction in any form so long as the original copyright text is preserved. So you may not be able to enforce copyright, because you don't have anything to license - but the BSDL leaves you free to (passively) assert copyright, provided that you otherwise comply with the terms of the BSDL.
Which presumably implies that if you obtain a file which is identical to its BSD-licensed predecessor except for a declaration of relicensing at the top, you're actually free to strip off that declaration and use the rest of the text under the terms of the BSD licence, on the grounds that the relicensor had not done enough to create a derived work...
*shudder* As far as I know, we've never met; and I don't consider most of the people I have met to be my friends. I'm sure you meant it as a pleasantry, but to me it actually sounds quite menacing.
[I]t may not be so wise to argue with someone over what a writer really meant, when that same writer is immediately available to correct you.
Ah! So nice to finally meet you, Mr Dumpty; I've heard so much about you. A word of advice, though? Don't sit on any high walls; and if any small girls encounter you, you might suggest to them that they beware of Oxford dons with mushrooms and wandering hands.
Anyway, despite all this quibbling over whether or not "substantive" was the correct word for you to use - in fact I believed you were quoting "substantive" from a discussion elsewhere and misunderstanding its sense, rather than originating it yourself; and I maintain that if you meant "substantial", you should have said "substantial" - the "twelve line" test you mention above was determined in answer to almost precisely the opposite question: namely, what is the greatest amount a work may include of another work whilst still not being considered derived from that work - and therefore not subject to that work's copyright arrangements? If derivation is not in question, I don't believe there's any legal upper limit.
But in the case of the BSD licence, the point is moot anyway; the BSD licence explicitly permits redistribution of the unaltered work under a different licence. And following that logic, "derived work" is pretty much a binary definition: either you haven't altered the file, in which case it's the work; or you have, in which case, it's a derived work. The notion of a grey area in which a work is neither unaltered nor derived is plainly silly.
www.m-w.com defines it as simply "having or expressing substance". Which is certainly closer to my interpretation than to your claims, and makes me wonder about the definitions you found it convenient to elide.
So next time you want to "correct" someone, try trading your insulting insinuations for verifiable references.
That's (a contentious definition of, and one that ignores the fact that a program is not only an expressive work, but also has an external purpose) "substantial".
"Substantive" merely means "having existence". That's an important distinction if one is concerned with the legal issues around copyright, and one that does not permit of wiggle room; if a change only has to be substantive before a work is derived, then that pretty much means that changing the case of the first character of the original source creates a derived work.
And you know, a free version would always be available even if nobody did. You might relicense a source file that you received under the BSD licence under the most draconian licence known to man, but you can't make that new licence apply to that file retroactively - not even if you're the copyright holder, thanks to the doctrine of promisory estoppel. If someone else obtained the BSD-licensed file, they can use and redistribute it under those terms - period.
Even if that's the case, if the derivative acknowledges the original, people will generally want to find the original for the sake of curiosity or comparison... look at the number of people who today track down the original version of a remix track.
(Or have I inadvertantly just told a worldwide audience that I'm a music anorak?)
If you believe NTP, it was this blatant patent trolling that led NTP to file its own suit. (How would NTP explain this one?)
Easy. Their patents were found valid in a fair trial, these companies have only just started introducing violating technologies, and they weren't polite enough to arrange protection^W cross-licensing deals first.
The only difference is that in Europe your "software patent" is written to describe a machine.
Which makes all the difference. Software alone does not constitute a machine; it only becomes a machine when it lands on some hardware and starts running. If anything, software itself is a description of a machine. Funnily enough, that's exactly what a patent is too, but in a different form (software is read by Turing machines, patents are read by lawyer machines); and the notion of patenting a patent is, er, patently absurd.
Um, please provide some evidence for the assumptions you have made about any opinion of mine that I didn't express in that post.
And whilst you're at it, please tell me which part of what I said you're disagreeing with. Are you contending that hate speech and racism are identical sets, or that they are completely disjoint sets?
(But then, I don't expect a useful reply. There's something inherently contemptible about a comment that starts "by that logic" and then goes on to demonstrate a complete lack of grasp of it.)
Given the definition of logical implication, isn't it more reasonable to state that a lack of correlation implies a lack of causation?
Of course, a strong correlation may well imply connection, but it cannot imply causation; aside from anything else, positive correlation is an equivalence relation and causation obviously isn't.
Other than rewriting the same code every 3 years when MS decides to rebrand an technology and stop supporting old versions...
Which is saddest of all, given that a good chunk of the reason for Microsoft's ascent was their absolute committment to backwards compatibility (with a few key exceptions), no matter how much it compromised future developments.
Slashdot Mirror
At least he didn't call them "freetards" this time.
s/tased/executed/ - still ok?
Or the microphone, apparently.
There's no point in writing complaint letters. Unless Youtube want to run the risk of being judged guilty of copyright violations themselves, they have to honour the takedown notice unconditionally if it's at all credible. If the takedown notice was erroneously or perjuriously issued, that's the issuer's fault, not Youtube's.
As I'm sure you're aware, a counterclaim is distinct from a complaint. For anyone else who needs them, here are Youtube's instructions on how to counterclaim: http://www.google.com/support/youtube/bin/answer.py?answer=58127&hl=en_US
Your URL is missing an 'o'.
Also, have you been reminding those of your colleagues who have been presented with takedown notices that their first port of call should be to file the appropriate counternotice? YouTube have to honour it, just as they had to honour the takedown.
(To clarify, I'm entirely in sympathy with your point that it isn't moral to merely add your assertion of copyright to the top of a file you haven't otherwise touched.)
However, the BSD licence explicitly permits reproduction in any form so long as the original copyright text is preserved. So you may not be able to enforce copyright, because you don't have anything to license - but the BSDL leaves you free to (passively) assert copyright, provided that you otherwise comply with the terms of the BSDL.
Which presumably implies that if you obtain a file which is identical to its BSD-licensed predecessor except for a declaration of relicensing at the top, you're actually free to strip off that declaration and use the rest of the text under the terms of the BSD licence, on the grounds that the relicensor had not done enough to create a derived work...
*shudder* As far as I know, we've never met; and I don't consider most of the people I have met to be my friends. I'm sure you meant it as a pleasantry, but to me it actually sounds quite menacing.
Ah! So nice to finally meet you, Mr Dumpty; I've heard so much about you. A word of advice, though? Don't sit on any high walls; and if any small girls encounter you, you might suggest to them that they beware of Oxford dons with mushrooms and wandering hands.
Anyway, despite all this quibbling over whether or not "substantive" was the correct word for you to use - in fact I believed you were quoting "substantive" from a discussion elsewhere and misunderstanding its sense, rather than originating it yourself; and I maintain that if you meant "substantial", you should have said "substantial" - the "twelve line" test you mention above was determined in answer to almost precisely the opposite question: namely, what is the greatest amount a work may include of another work whilst still not being considered derived from that work - and therefore not subject to that work's copyright arrangements? If derivation is not in question, I don't believe there's any legal upper limit.
But in the case of the BSD licence, the point is moot anyway; the BSD licence explicitly permits redistribution of the unaltered work under a different licence. And following that logic, "derived work" is pretty much a binary definition: either you haven't altered the file, in which case it's the work; or you have, in which case, it's a derived work. The notion of a grey area in which a work is neither unaltered nor derived is plainly silly.
What on earth makes you think insurance premiums can go down as well as up...?
www.m-w.com defines it as simply "having or expressing substance". Which is certainly closer to my interpretation than to your claims, and makes me wonder about the definitions you found it convenient to elide.
So next time you want to "correct" someone, try trading your insulting insinuations for verifiable references.
That's (a contentious definition of, and one that ignores the fact that a program is not only an expressive work, but also has an external purpose) "substantial".
"Substantive" merely means "having existence". That's an important distinction if one is concerned with the legal issues around copyright, and one that does not permit of wiggle room; if a change only has to be substantive before a work is derived, then that pretty much means that changing the case of the first character of the original source creates a derived work.
I think that's a claim someone else can test.
Define "substantive".
And you know, a free version would always be available even if nobody did. You might relicense a source file that you received under the BSD licence under the most draconian licence known to man, but you can't make that new licence apply to that file retroactively - not even if you're the copyright holder, thanks to the doctrine of promisory estoppel. If someone else obtained the BSD-licensed file, they can use and redistribute it under those terms - period.
Even if that's the case, if the derivative acknowledges the original, people will generally want to find the original for the sake of curiosity or comparison... look at the number of people who today track down the original version of a remix track.
(Or have I inadvertantly just told a worldwide audience that I'm a music anorak?)
So, a win-win situation all ways round then?
Easy. Their patents were found valid in a fair trial, these companies have only just started introducing violating technologies, and they weren't polite enough to arrange protection^W cross-licensing deals first.
Come now. Surely they could just do a bit more coke than usual and stay up til then?
Whoops.
(I'm sure even you would agree that neither is a proper subset of the other.)
Um, please provide some evidence for the assumptions you have made about any opinion of mine that I didn't express in that post.
And whilst you're at it, please tell me which part of what I said you're disagreeing with. Are you contending that hate speech and racism are identical sets, or that they are completely disjoint sets?
(But then, I don't expect a useful reply. There's something inherently contemptible about a comment that starts "by that logic" and then goes on to demonstrate a complete lack of grasp of it.)
Given the definition of logical implication, isn't it more reasonable to state that a lack of correlation implies a lack of causation?
Of course, a strong correlation may well imply connection, but it cannot imply causation; aside from anything else, positive correlation is an equivalence relation and causation obviously isn't.
Hate speech != racism. They intersect, that's all.
You read one of the articles? You must be new here...
Which is saddest of all, given that a good chunk of the reason for Microsoft's ascent was their absolute committment to backwards compatibility (with a few key exceptions), no matter how much it compromised future developments.