Why is everything always about money? Maybe people use Free Software because they believe in freedom. The users' election of "Reduced dependence on software vendors" seems to indicate this. I know the reason I do not pay for software is not because I want to save money. I do not pay because I do not want to support monopolies. Using Free Software, at least in the short term, protects me from things like DRM. I like my freedom.
Well, at least in Switzerland (and probably the reset of Europe - dont know for the rest of the world), you dont have to register anything or hand a copy of your work or anything. As soon as you have a created a new work, it is copyrighted. That's the good point about copyright : you dont have to actually do anything, or pay anything. Copyright is an "automatic protection". It really should stay that way !
Well, it is nice to see that Europeans can create posts that are every bit as ignorant as they accuse everyone else of creating.
This is one of the largest problems with copyright. It mixes copyright with authorship rights (or as Europeans call them "moral rights"). Authorship rights should remain distinct from copyright. Copyright is a limited privilege. Authorship is perpetual. The author of a document will always be its author, but that author will not always have a monopoly over it. This gives authors the misguided idea that they should have a perpetual monopoly as well.
The other problem with this system is that it creates a situation where nobody knows who has the rights to what. This means that in court, there is no way to determine which claims are blatantly false from claims that are legitimate. In effect, this is a system of "guilty until proven innocent" (the opposite of the legal ideal of the USA, at least). There is no document trail pointing to when a thing was written or to what form it took when it was written. This has been exploited for numerous abuses of the system, including censorship. It allows rich corporations to sue relatively poor individuals knowing the individuals will give up regardless of the merits of the claim against them. If there were a registration system, these cases would be thrown out, and the RIAA would not be able to profit by suing our grandmothers and taking their life savings.
Finally, apply your automatic copyright system to the Internet and see what happens. On the Internet, all speech/writing/communication is cached. That means its all in "fixed and tangible form" or whatever the phrase is (I am too tired to check). Basically, we now have a law that governs all speech. I do not think that copyright was designed to limit the right of Free Speech, a right that you Europeans seem to believe is as important in Europe as it is in the US. In fact, there is probably no element more important to free societies in general than Free Speech. Do you want to defend Arnold Schwarzenegger's right to sue anyone who says or types "I'll be back!" online?
People should have to register copyrights because copyrights are about money. It is a request for the government to grant a monopoly. This monopoly has nothing to do with the author's rights. It is just an incentive to get more creative work produced. Europeans were the first to mix up copyright with authorship, and now we are all paying for it. We are prevented from learning, seeing, creating, and sharing just when the perfect tool for such things has come into existence. But being a European, you will just continue to believe that the way you do things is the most "modern", the highest stage in "cultural development" (as if such a thing were possible).
I will start with the questions in the article and then continue with some other additions:
What fair use rights should be defined under copyright law? Is the use of a static, defined set of rights too restrictive?
Your question points out a very obvious problem: every time rights are defined, they are restricted. The Founding Fathers, the authors of the US Constitiution, probably would have found the idea of locking up a book ludicrous, but today we have DRM where publishers have fine tuned control of how we, the owners, use our own books. I am pretty certain the Right of Access would have been assumed by the Founding Fathers. Now that it cannot be assumed, many people claim it is not a right.
Having said that, if you are going to create enumerated rights, they should be as broad as possible. Things like: You may do anything with the copyrighted material except sell it for such and such a term.
The entire idea of derivative works should be eliminated. If I translate a book, that is a new book. If I want to make a better Star Wars, let the public choose whether or not I have beaten Lucas at his own game. If I want to annotate or critisize a book that I agree or disagree with, I should be able to. And I should be able to sell that book with same protections as the original author got even if it contains the bulk or the entirety of the original text.
What's right/wrong with the copyright laws where you live?
Where I currently live, the Republic of China, copyright is imposed by another culture. Europe is taking its ideas of censorship and exporting them to the rest of the world. These information control laws have been imposed on every Asian country, and the US government is constantly putting pressure on the ROC government to extend and enhance enforcement of these foreign (barbaric?) copyright laws. The USA is even a victim of this exportation of European feudalism. The 1976 Copyright Act imposed the "moral rights" provisions of the Berne Convention which altered the entire face of copyright. It increased copyright terms, added derivative works, and made copyright automatic. The last addition, when applied to the Internet makes copyright an enemy of free speech.
China has a long history of annotation going back thousands of years. Many editions of books have extensive and very useful commentary added by subsequent authors all throughout Chinese history. While the original author's words were often preserved, other educated people were able to contribute to their works without fear of any sort of punishment. Chinese society for centuries was the most educated society on earth for precisely this reason.
This was the first society to have paper and printing, and the prices of books here have always been lower. People here read way more than people in the West. Text is such a part of life that it is impossible to watch a movie without subtitles. In the USA, people complain if the movie has subtitles because "It's too much work". This is in large part a result of the lack of restrictions with respect to the exchange of information here.
The cost of information access in the West is staggering. The best example of this is college text book "business". Ten years ago, some books cost up to US$80. They were updated -- rarely noticably -- every two years or so. Often, a student could not sell the book back because the new edition was out. By contrast, when I studied in Taiwan, I never paid more than about US$8 for a book. In addition to that, the language books were better than any language book I ever had for any Western language I ever studied.
Another good example is Joseph Needham's Science and Civilization in China. In the USA, each volume is about US$120. In the ROC, each volume is around US$30. It is exactly the same book. Here, I can afford it, in the USA, I cannot.
Hear! Hear! This idea of limiting copyright to 5 years is absolutely beautiful. To that, certain other limitations might be made. Perhaps newspapers could be limited to a week. Magazines could be limited to 6 months. That is enough time to make the bulk of the money they are going to make, but also makes the information available to the public during their lifetimes.
Such rules would work to prevent 1984 style revisionist history as documents located in multiple places are harder to alter than documents in a single place (like the NYT servers).
They would also allow people to annotate books written in their lifetimes. If onc were to compose a compendium of Jack Valenti's works and use them to demonstrate the flaws in his thinking, for instance, that individual would not have to worry about a multi-million dollar lawsuit for doing so.
I cannot believe there is not a single comment about this issue. The article had a nice quote:
Users baulked at the idea of having to pay to access a community which the feel they are responsible for creating...
The requisite question then is: Who should be paying?
Under copyright law and considering many of the things the *AAs and publishers have been saying about the value of copyrighted speech, are the posts of the visitors to the site not the factor that makes the site valuable? Do their posts not exceed the value of the site's articles and the magazine? Should the magazine not be contributing its revenues to users with highly modded or highly visited posts?
Actually, there are many good, real examples of things that you can do on Windows that you can't on Linux. First of all, running any native win32 binary is going to work better in Windows (as opposed to Wine). I would argue that having to crap around with Wine to run a certain Windows program decreases productivity, if it will even work at all. Second, there is no Photoshop and for most professionals Gimp is not an acceptable alternative. A great number of professional tools can be inserted in the previous sentence, if you aren't a graphic artist.
Is that not the point? If Linux or BSD or MacOS were more popular, less of this stuff would be available as Windows only binaries. One Posix compatible binary would make an easy port for all the other Posix OSs. You have just demonstrated why I or you should care whether other people use OSS. You should care because more OSS usage means more and better software for you.
This recently happened to my parents. They were using the AA website, and Firefox kept giving them a "form not completed" error (or something like that). When they called AA's tech support, they were told, "Our website only works with IE. Please use IE."
They did not think to ask why, but why is a relavant question. Why is it that a major corporation would have a website that does not comply with existing, published standards for Web documents? It is not like they do not pay money for these websites.
All I care about is myself. And I want to use software I like. If everyone uses MS Office, I am forced to use their dc/xls/ppt file formats. If eveyone else is using Windows I will have to deal with wmv files. Many properitory plugins are not available on platform I want to use (because of small user base). As 90% people use IE website will refuse to work with browser I use. I dont care what other people use. I just want everyone to follow (open) standards. If MS Office supports open document format, IE is standards compliant and wmv is replaced by ogg I dont care.
Well put. This brings up both of two points for me. The two points are freedom and the usefulness of my OS. The second is really related to the first in an indirect way, so I suppose freedom is really my goal.
RMS is right. Proprietary software hurts everyone, purist or not. It enables DRM. It allows for draconian EULAs (think MS's clause that states that you cannot use MSWord to create documents critical of MS). It allows for software that cannot be controlled by its owner (the owner being the owner of the computer, not the "owner" of some abstract "intellectual property" rights). It creates corporations that lobby for things like software patents in Europe. If this did not affect me, I would not care.
As the parent said, as well, these engineered incompatibilities of MS's "embrace, extend, and extinguish" policy make my life difficult. If I want to create a website with transparent PNGs, I just have to accept that IE will not be able to handle it (and 90% of the users on the Web will not see it as intended). I even had to have a friend help with a hack to display transparent PNGs one time (the effect of the site was still ruined because IE cannot properly handle fixed background images).
The other is driver software. If Linux or MacOS or BSD or whatever had more users, there would be more hardware drivers available. If those drivers were open source, the hardware they interface with would be available to everyone. Open source drivers are quickly ported to many platforms. I am sick of having to search for hardware before I buy it just because MS has a monopoly. I actually got laughed at once because I asked if I could buy a laptop without Windows on it. I did not even ask to have another OS, I just did not want Windows. If I want to buy a laptop in any store, I am forced to pay MS. Caveat emptor. This sort of thing is so anti-free-market, I do not know where to begin.
MS wants to tell me how I am going to use my computer. They want to log my files. They want to "authorize" software I put on my computer. The only way I can avoid that is to use another OS. The only way another OS will be usable is for the userbase to be large enough that hardware will be supported by that OS.
Freedom is why I want more people to use Free Software. I did not ask for my freedom to depend on other people. It just does. If you do not believe that, think of the phrase "majority rules". When a large enough group of people decides that Free Software is a good thing, I will be safe(r) from the MSs and Adobes of the world who would keep information from me -- keep me ignorant, in effect -- to further their monetary goals.
The arguement that the dictionary is just a guide is just fine until you consider that if the dictionary is considered to be wrong, there should be a source of information more reliable or more believable than the dictionary. Do you honestly believe that the RI/MPAA's definition of "theft" should supplant Mr. Webster's or the English legal definition of theft? Why should these lying organizations be redefining the language for us? Does the popular press decide how you speak and think? Are you then not advocating Newspeak?
Canadian citizens have to pay taxes on their income wherever they live regardless of their income. In the US, I have heard, there is an exception up to US$70,000 for overseas work.
Basically, it's one thing if Walmart sends this stuff out unsolicited, it's quite another if they misrepresent themselves and try to "hack" the snail-mail system. (This is called fraud and mail tampering and will land you in jail quicker than you can say: "I want my lawyer!")
Excellent argument. The question that springs to mind is: Do we want to regulate the Internet the way we regulate realspace?
How important is anonymity on the Internet? Should that be protected? What if the types of spoofing that are illegalized in the spam laws are also used to guarantee anonymity for political or other important speech? Are we going to live in a world where every transaction, every web page we view, every phrase we utter, is all logged and identified and cannot be obfuscated?
Who should be punished for spam? The spammers or their customers? Are not the vendors responsible for buying this advertising? In order to buy things, people must eventually commit transactions in realspace. This may be through the postal service or from a store. This places it in the same category with the Walmart scenario.
this is completely different and a bad analogy, it cost these stores money to send it out, and they don't send out in massive bulk quantities, once a week from safeway? who cares.
This sounds dangerously close to charging for the priviledge to speak. Should only the landed gentry get a seat in Congress?
you know how ridiculous you sound? spamming has NOTHING to with free speech, it's all about advertising, go read the first amendment, i'm not even american and i know enough about it.
So, how do you define free speech? Is it political speech and not commercial speech? Or is it public speech and not private speech? Or is it short speech and not long speech? The First Amendment is certainly not specific about that:
Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press;
I do not see anything about advertising in there, and I am glad you are not a judge.
Free speech should not be limited to one person's conception of what should be protected. All speech should be protected. This is especially true today when attacks on "spam" or "child pornography" or "piracy(/theft)" or "hackers" are being used as springboards for the advocacy of new laws to lock down speech on the Internet. There is a massive effort underway by governments and monopolists to make the Internet look like an evil, lawless place. This way, laws like the DMCA and laws to filter and monitor speech on the Internet can be passed.
So, cleaning your inbox is a little incovenient. Big deal. It is much better than losing the Internet as we know it. Read Code and think about the fact that most of the things this book predicted in 1999 have already or are rapidly becoming true.
But second and more importantly, to be able to produce a stable, constant "edition" that can be referenced and cited to. How do you cite Wikipedia, when the content is always changing?
Why not just include the file in your paper as an attachment or something. As long as the work is not printed, it is trivial to include Wikipedia pages with what you have written. It is also perfectly legal to do so.
Alternatively, you could include the exact revision date and time in the citation and a link to that revision since all revisions are persistent.
The real question in this scenario is whether or not they will learn enough by cheating to have gained something valuable.
If they have to write a program to beat the teacher's program, are the students not learning something very valuable (at least in the marketable business skills department)?
Also, in order to write a program that creates essays that conform to the teachers program, will it not also be necessary to learn the grammar and logic rules the teacher considers to be important and even ponder those rules for extended periods of time?
It seems to me that the cheater (or at least the first cheater) will do more work than the professor did and thereby become quite familiar with English grammar, organization of arguments, and computer programming. All of these are useful skills.
This service also appears to be limited to English. It did not work until I switched to the English version of Google (no, I did not test all the languages -- the page normally comes up in Chinese for me).
Even with DRM, the term "copyright" would still be obsolete because after the file was unlocked (or unencrypted or whatever), it would have to be copied into memory for display. That would be an actionable copy. In fact, by this, you could reasonbly argue that you have a fair use right to copy any DVD or CD any time you wanted since accessing it (even with DRM) creates a copy.
It could even be argued that the decryption process created an actionable copy since all the data has to loaded into memory and processed. But since you used to the decryption program (a legal DVD player for instance), you would be liable for the copy it created as it changed the data from encrypted to decrypted. That is two actionable copies per access.
So, the word "copyright" is obsolete (unless it refers to a fair use right to copy).
Also, while the idea that Japanese cellphones are vastly technologically superior to phones everywhere else was true 5 years ago, there is less and less that is incredibly amazing about Japanese cell phones. Now that everyone has color screens and can use their cellphones to connect to the Internet and pretty cellphones are being sold outside of Japan, file transfer speed is probably the only advantage. Truthfully, I was disappointed the last time I went to Japan.
Large screen cellphones are available in most markets now. And those PDA/cellphone contraptions have much larger screens than any cellphones I saw in Japan. No one would be caught dead with such bulk in Tokyo. So, screen size is probably a non-issue for those intending to read eTexts outside of Japan.
Unlike languages that have to be spelled out, Chinese characters take up much less space and don't have to be word wrapped or hyphenated.
Okay, I am starting to get tired of this argument now. Yes, Chinese characters are more efficient than Roman ones. Yes, they communicate more information per given space. This does not matter. English is still readable on a cell phone. I have been reading books for over a year and a half on two cell phones using Opera. It is more than a little readable. In fact, on a crowded bus or train, it is absolutely superior to paper books. It is backlit, so it can be read in a dark cab at night. Plus, the phone can be loaded with many books for you to choose from depending on your mood, and music can be played as well on the same device.
While I agree that Chinese is probably the most efficient language for this application, nearly all languages can be read in this way. Yes, it takes some getting used to, but is that not true for everything?
IMO, the "news" aspect of it isn't the technology per se, but the fact that it's actually catching on. Surprising.
No doubt. Most everybody I suggest this to seems to want to convince me of the virtues of paper. But people believe what they are used to is always the best thing...
I suppose this is just more proof that Japanese people are more open to new technology than Westerners.
Slashdot Mirror
Why is everything always about money? Maybe people use Free Software because they believe in freedom. The users' election of "Reduced dependence on software vendors" seems to indicate this. I know the reason I do not pay for software is not because I want to save money. I do not pay because I do not want to support monopolies. Using Free Software, at least in the short term, protects me from things like DRM. I like my freedom.
This is one of the largest problems with copyright. It mixes copyright with authorship rights (or as Europeans call them "moral rights"). Authorship rights should remain distinct from copyright. Copyright is a limited privilege. Authorship is perpetual. The author of a document will always be its author, but that author will not always have a monopoly over it. This gives authors the misguided idea that they should have a perpetual monopoly as well.
The other problem with this system is that it creates a situation where nobody knows who has the rights to what. This means that in court, there is no way to determine which claims are blatantly false from claims that are legitimate. In effect, this is a system of "guilty until proven innocent" (the opposite of the legal ideal of the USA, at least). There is no document trail pointing to when a thing was written or to what form it took when it was written. This has been exploited for numerous abuses of the system, including censorship. It allows rich corporations to sue relatively poor individuals knowing the individuals will give up regardless of the merits of the claim against them. If there were a registration system, these cases would be thrown out, and the RIAA would not be able to profit by suing our grandmothers and taking their life savings.
Finally, apply your automatic copyright system to the Internet and see what happens. On the Internet, all speech/writing/communication is cached. That means its all in "fixed and tangible form" or whatever the phrase is (I am too tired to check). Basically, we now have a law that governs all speech. I do not think that copyright was designed to limit the right of Free Speech, a right that you Europeans seem to believe is as important in Europe as it is in the US. In fact, there is probably no element more important to free societies in general than Free Speech. Do you want to defend Arnold Schwarzenegger's right to sue anyone who says or types "I'll be back!" online?
People should have to register copyrights because copyrights are about money. It is a request for the government to grant a monopoly. This monopoly has nothing to do with the author's rights. It is just an incentive to get more creative work produced. Europeans were the first to mix up copyright with authorship, and now we are all paying for it. We are prevented from learning, seeing, creating, and sharing just when the perfect tool for such things has come into existence. But being a European, you will just continue to believe that the way you do things is the most "modern", the highest stage in "cultural development" (as if such a thing were possible).
I will start with the questions in the article and then continue with some other additions:
Your question points out a very obvious problem: every time rights are defined, they are restricted. The Founding Fathers, the authors of the US Constitiution, probably would have found the idea of locking up a book ludicrous, but today we have DRM where publishers have fine tuned control of how we, the owners, use our own books. I am pretty certain the Right of Access would have been assumed by the Founding Fathers. Now that it cannot be assumed, many people claim it is not a right.
Having said that, if you are going to create enumerated rights, they should be as broad as possible. Things like: You may do anything with the copyrighted material except sell it for such and such a term.
The entire idea of derivative works should be eliminated. If I translate a book, that is a new book. If I want to make a better Star Wars, let the public choose whether or not I have beaten Lucas at his own game. If I want to annotate or critisize a book that I agree or disagree with, I should be able to. And I should be able to sell that book with same protections as the original author got even if it contains the bulk or the entirety of the original text.
Where I currently live, the Republic of China, copyright is imposed by another culture. Europe is taking its ideas of censorship and exporting them to the rest of the world. These information control laws have been imposed on every Asian country, and the US government is constantly putting pressure on the ROC government to extend and enhance enforcement of these foreign (barbaric?) copyright laws. The USA is even a victim of this exportation of European feudalism. The 1976 Copyright Act imposed the "moral rights" provisions of the Berne Convention which altered the entire face of copyright. It increased copyright terms, added derivative works, and made copyright automatic. The last addition, when applied to the Internet makes copyright an enemy of free speech.
China has a long history of annotation going back thousands of years. Many editions of books have extensive and very useful commentary added by subsequent authors all throughout Chinese history. While the original author's words were often preserved, other educated people were able to contribute to their works without fear of any sort of punishment. Chinese society for centuries was the most educated society on earth for precisely this reason.
This was the first society to have paper and printing, and the prices of books here have always been lower. People here read way more than people in the West. Text is such a part of life that it is impossible to watch a movie without subtitles. In the USA, people complain if the movie has subtitles because "It's too much work". This is in large part a result of the lack of restrictions with respect to the exchange of information here.
The cost of information access in the West is staggering. The best example of this is college text book "business". Ten years ago, some books cost up to US$80. They were updated -- rarely noticably -- every two years or so. Often, a student could not sell the book back because the new edition was out. By contrast, when I studied in Taiwan, I never paid more than about US$8 for a book. In addition to that, the language books were better than any language book I ever had for any Western language I ever studied.
Another good example is Joseph Needham's Science and Civilization in China. In the USA, each volume is about US$120. In the ROC, each volume is around US$30. It is exactly the same book. Here, I can afford it, in the USA, I cannot.
Copyright, in this case, se
Hear! Hear! This idea of limiting copyright to 5 years is absolutely beautiful. To that, certain other limitations might be made. Perhaps newspapers could be limited to a week. Magazines could be limited to 6 months. That is enough time to make the bulk of the money they are going to make, but also makes the information available to the public during their lifetimes.
Such rules would work to prevent 1984 style revisionist history as documents located in multiple places are harder to alter than documents in a single place (like the NYT servers).
They would also allow people to annotate books written in their lifetimes. If onc were to compose a compendium of Jack Valenti's works and use them to demonstrate the flaws in his thinking, for instance, that individual would not have to worry about a multi-million dollar lawsuit for doing so.
I cannot believe there is not a single comment about this issue. The article had a nice quote:
The requisite question then is: Who should be paying?Under copyright law and considering many of the things the *AAs and publishers have been saying about the value of copyrighted speech, are the posts of the visitors to the site not the factor that makes the site valuable? Do their posts not exceed the value of the site's articles and the magazine? Should the magazine not be contributing its revenues to users with highly modded or highly visited posts?
In short, who should be getting paid here?
Awesome point. Mod the parent up.
This recently happened to my parents. They were using the AA website, and Firefox kept giving them a "form not completed" error (or something like that). When they called AA's tech support, they were told, "Our website only works with IE. Please use IE."
They did not think to ask why, but why is a relavant question. Why is it that a major corporation would have a website that does not comply with existing, published standards for Web documents? It is not like they do not pay money for these websites.
RMS is right. Proprietary software hurts everyone, purist or not. It enables DRM. It allows for draconian EULAs (think MS's clause that states that you cannot use MSWord to create documents critical of MS). It allows for software that cannot be controlled by its owner (the owner being the owner of the computer, not the "owner" of some abstract "intellectual property" rights). It creates corporations that lobby for things like software patents in Europe. If this did not affect me, I would not care.
As the parent said, as well, these engineered incompatibilities of MS's "embrace, extend, and extinguish" policy make my life difficult. If I want to create a website with transparent PNGs, I just have to accept that IE will not be able to handle it (and 90% of the users on the Web will not see it as intended). I even had to have a friend help with a hack to display transparent PNGs one time (the effect of the site was still ruined because IE cannot properly handle fixed background images).
The other is driver software. If Linux or MacOS or BSD or whatever had more users, there would be more hardware drivers available. If those drivers were open source, the hardware they interface with would be available to everyone. Open source drivers are quickly ported to many platforms. I am sick of having to search for hardware before I buy it just because MS has a monopoly. I actually got laughed at once because I asked if I could buy a laptop without Windows on it. I did not even ask to have another OS, I just did not want Windows. If I want to buy a laptop in any store, I am forced to pay MS. Caveat emptor. This sort of thing is so anti-free-market, I do not know where to begin.
MS wants to tell me how I am going to use my computer. They want to log my files. They want to "authorize" software I put on my computer. The only way I can avoid that is to use another OS. The only way another OS will be usable is for the userbase to be large enough that hardware will be supported by that OS.
Freedom is why I want more people to use Free Software. I did not ask for my freedom to depend on other people. It just does. If you do not believe that, think of the phrase "majority rules". When a large enough group of people decides that Free Software is a good thing, I will be safe(r) from the MSs and Adobes of the world who would keep information from me -- keep me ignorant, in effect -- to further their monetary goals.
The arguement that the dictionary is just a guide is just fine until you consider that if the dictionary is considered to be wrong, there should be a source of information more reliable or more believable than the dictionary. Do you honestly believe that the RI/MPAA's definition of "theft" should supplant Mr. Webster's or the English legal definition of theft? Why should these lying organizations be redefining the language for us? Does the popular press decide how you speak and think? Are you then not advocating Newspeak?
Canadian citizens have to pay taxes on their income wherever they live regardless of their income. In the US, I have heard, there is an exception up to US$70,000 for overseas work.
Define noise.
Now define speech.
Now that I know my speech is restricted to your definitions, I will have to take more care when opening my mouth.
How important is anonymity on the Internet? Should that be protected? What if the types of spoofing that are illegalized in the spam laws are also used to guarantee anonymity for political or other important speech? Are we going to live in a world where every transaction, every web page we view, every phrase we utter, is all logged and identified and cannot be obfuscated?
Who should be punished for spam? The spammers or their customers? Are not the vendors responsible for buying this advertising? In order to buy things, people must eventually commit transactions in realspace. This may be through the postal service or from a store. This places it in the same category with the Walmart scenario.
Free speech should not be limited to one person's conception of what should be protected. All speech should be protected. This is especially true today when attacks on "spam" or "child pornography" or "piracy(/theft)" or "hackers" are being used as springboards for the advocacy of new laws to lock down speech on the Internet. There is a massive effort underway by governments and monopolists to make the Internet look like an evil, lawless place. This way, laws like the DMCA and laws to filter and monitor speech on the Internet can be passed.
So, cleaning your inbox is a little incovenient. Big deal. It is much better than losing the Internet as we know it. Read Code and think about the fact that most of the things this book predicted in 1999 have already or are rapidly becoming true.
Alternatively, you could include the exact revision date and time in the citation and a link to that revision since all revisions are persistent.
The real question in this scenario is whether or not they will learn enough by cheating to have gained something valuable.
If they have to write a program to beat the teacher's program, are the students not learning something very valuable (at least in the marketable business skills department)?
Also, in order to write a program that creates essays that conform to the teachers program, will it not also be necessary to learn the grammar and logic rules the teacher considers to be important and even ponder those rules for extended periods of time?
It seems to me that the cheater (or at least the first cheater) will do more work than the professor did and thereby become quite familiar with English grammar, organization of arguments, and computer programming. All of these are useful skills.
This service also appears to be limited to English. It did not work until I switched to the English version of Google (no, I did not test all the languages -- the page normally comes up in Chinese for me).
Even with DRM, the term "copyright" would still be obsolete because after the file was unlocked (or unencrypted or whatever), it would have to be copied into memory for display. That would be an actionable copy. In fact, by this, you could reasonbly argue that you have a fair use right to copy any DVD or CD any time you wanted since accessing it (even with DRM) creates a copy.
It could even be argued that the decryption process created an actionable copy since all the data has to loaded into memory and processed. But since you used to the decryption program (a legal DVD player for instance), you would be liable for the copy it created as it changed the data from encrypted to decrypted. That is two actionable copies per access.
So, the word "copyright" is obsolete (unless it refers to a fair use right to copy).
Also, while the idea that Japanese cellphones are vastly technologically superior to phones everywhere else was true 5 years ago, there is less and less that is incredibly amazing about Japanese cell phones. Now that everyone has color screens and can use their cellphones to connect to the Internet and pretty cellphones are being sold outside of Japan, file transfer speed is probably the only advantage. Truthfully, I was disappointed the last time I went to Japan.
Large screen cellphones are available in most markets now. And those PDA/cellphone contraptions have much larger screens than any cellphones I saw in Japan. No one would be caught dead with such bulk in Tokyo. So, screen size is probably a non-issue for those intending to read eTexts outside of Japan.
Get a Zaurus.
While I agree that Chinese is probably the most efficient language for this application, nearly all languages can be read in this way. Yes, it takes some getting used to, but is that not true for everything?
I suppose this is just more proof that Japanese people are more open to new technology than Westerners.