Let's see. I'm a taxpayer in the state of Minnesota, and the ration is more on the order of me paying 57% and the state picking up the other 43%. So, I'd say I paid for it.
Its only a work for hire if you get paid for it. The education and the degree do not count as pay, since you've got to pay for them (regardless of whether you get a stipend as an X Assistant).
For more information, see my comment a bit higher re the California and Minnesota labor codes, and the UMN IP policy.
Depending on the state, any such policies may be unenforceable. My Assignment agreement with my employer (governed by the State of California), not only cites, but quotes section 2870 of the California Labor Code:
a) Any provisions in an employment agreement which provide that an employee shall assign, or offer to assign, any of his or her rights in an invention to his or her employer shall not apply to an invention that the employee developed entirely on his or her own time without using the employer's equipment, supplies, facilities, or trade secret information except for those inventions that either:
i) relate at the time of conception or reduction to practice of the invention to the employer's business, or actual or demonstrably anticipated research or development of the employer; or
ii) result from any work performed by the employee for the employer.
b) To the extent a provision in an employment agreement purports to require an employee to assign an invention otherwise excluded from being required to be assigned under subdivision (a), the provision is against the public policy of this state and is unenforceable.
Since I actually live in Minnesota, I thought I'd look up our (similar) assignment law:
Text:
181.78 Agreements; terms relating to inventions.
Subdivision 1. Any provision in an employment agreement which provides that an employee shall assign or offer to assign any of the employee's rights in an invention to the employer shall not apply to an invention for which no equipment, supplies, facility or trade secret information of the employer was used and which was developed entirely on the employee's own time, and (1) which does not relate (a) directly to the business of the employer or (b) to the employer's actual or demonstrably anticipated research or development, or (2) which does not result from any work performed by the employee for the employer. Any provision which purports to apply to such an invention is to that extent against the public policy of this state and is to that extent void and unenforceable.
Subd. 2. No employer shall require a provision made void and unenforceable by subdivision 1 as a condition of employment or continuing employment.
Subd. 3. If an employment agreement entered into after August 1, 1977 contains a provision requiring the employee to assign or offer to assign any of the employee's rights in any invention to an employer, the employer must also, at the time the agreement is made, provide a written notification to the employee that the agreement does not apply to an invention for which no equipment, supplies, facility or trade secret information of the employer was used and which was developed entirely on the employee's own time, and (1) which does not relate (a) directly to the business of the employer or (b) to the employer's actual or demonstrably anticipated research or development, or (2) which does not result from any work performed by the employee for the employer.
HIST: 1977 c 47 s 1; 1986 c 444
I also looked at my alma mater's policy, I didn't sign anything over (current policy, not the one while I was there).
Now, IANAL, but I'd like to think that MN and CA's employment agreement laws could be extended to academia, especially because students generally pay for their education, rather than get paid for it. In fact, since no pay occurs, I'd like to think that those assignments would also be null and unenforceable.
Local post offices will make paper printouts of e-mail messages and deliver them with the snail mail, charging the sender about 41 cents for a two-page document -- an eight-cent premium to first-class mail.
Methinks you really don't have to worry about this.
While you are correct in that the EM frequency is the frequency of the EM wave, let me just state that the US Navy uses VLF radio transmissions to communicate through the planet. Obviously, sonar uses sound for its functionality, but these VLF transmissions are most definitely EM.
Yeah, but the guy in Montana never fled from Justice, so does the extradition clause apply? Further, since the crime was committed within Montana, Pennsylvania wouldn't (shouldn't?) get a say in the matter, given that nothing used to create and propagate the virus was in PA. IMHO, routers don't count in this unless it happens to be the router (or modem pool) you're directly connected to. Now, if the creator sent the virus to everyone@state.pa.us, things change again, and PA should, through its long-arm law (if it exists) be able to claim jurisdiction. If he sent it to someone in North Dakota who used outlook and it self propagated to everyone@state.pa.us......
Aarrgh. Damn the borderless internet:-). It makes things like this quite the pain.
Not according to Lars. In the interview the other day, he stated that their action was initiated by themselves.
What I don't get is how they can prosecute those who download (at least in the US). My reading of the US Copyright code is that its illegal to redistribute, not acquire, copyrighted material without the permission of the copyright holder. In fact, no BTS license agreement I've ever seen says that you can't acquire the software without forking over the cash, just that you can't make copies of it. Of course, the DMCA BS may change that.
BTW, is it just me or has anyone else noticed that the "Extrans" method of posting doesn't exactly work right?
I'd have to agree. If I read it carefully enough, it sounds like you can distribute.exe's, but not.obj's or.lib's, since they're not truly executable. I'd cast a vote for this even more so, given that the title of the excerpt is <I>"GENERAL TERMS THAT APPLY TO COMPILED PROGRAMS AND REDISTRIBUTABLES"</I>. The key words are compiled programs and redistributables. Source code is hardly compiled, and this the terms do not apply to it. Twenty bucks says this is here to prevent the developer from redistributing the headers, object files, and libraries that come with it.
Of course, I ain't a lawyer, so the above may be a a bunch of hooey. If you're that concerned, talk to someone who is.
Actually, while they won't ever publically admit it, this is the number 1 reason for it not happening. Many companies derive a significant portion of their revenue source from support contracts. By allowing a user to support themselves on a piece of obsolete hardware, the company has not only denied themselves the revenue from the product sale, but also that of the sale of the support contract. Many of these companies are publically held, which means they have, as we've read so many times here, a legal obligation to maximize profits for the shareholders. To be quite extreme, opening specs to obsolete hardware is illegal.
Re:Just drive over, or need folks move?
on
Fighting UCITA
·
· Score: 1
Hell, Iowa is an hour and 15 minutes due south of me. I can just see, in amongst the large stands of corn, a massive CompU$A just off I-35, and every other major port of entry into the state if jurisdiction is granted by transaction location. 75 minutes is hardly a hindrance to me, considering I drive that long to get to the casino.
Although US law does not apply in Taiwan, the distribution may well be in violation of the GPL, and if so, US copyright law applies the moment it arrives on US ground. Put another way, if I were to go to one of the East Asian Piracy markets (Malaysia comes to mind, though Taiwan may be even more of a haven), and purchase several thousand dollars worth of software on CDs for pennies (or less) on the dollar, its fine to possess there. As soon as I get back home, they immediately become illegal to possess.
The source of the distribution is irrelevant if it is being distributed in the US where, coincidentally, US law does apply, and anyone who owns code on that distribution has every right to go after their American affiliate (if such a beast exists) or their American distributors for criminal and civil penalties under US copyright code.
My immediate supervisors knew I did this. The guy who ran the firewall, however, didn't; he definitely would not have approved. In fact, I had planned to do my own VPN over ssh, but left that company for one with less concern about remote access to the network, and got a PPTP account (and stock options [publicly traded so they were worth something] and more money). I never did get VPN-over-ssh set up and thoroughly documented, which was what the original "experiment" was intended for, anyway.
Thanks for the correction. Nonetheless, regardless of who said it, it is (or at least at one time was) codified by the First Amendment to the US Constitution.
Gawd I hate quoting movies, but this one seems appropriate.
"You want to call America the land of the free. Lets see you acknowledge a man center-stage advocating at the top of his lungs that which you would spend a lifetime opposing at the top of yours." -- Michael Douglas -- The American President
Of course, I'm sure that the movie was too leftist for you, but the point is there. Free speech means all speech, not just what happens to agree with your point of view. Unfortunately, this is quite rapidly becoming SOP in the US. I'm quite certain that there are people in this country who would go to a KKK rally, be offended by what they hear, and try to sue over it. Is it offensive, I think so, but no one forced you to listen. Thankfully, the right to speak does not include the right to be heard, or there'd be a lot of door-to-door religion sales folk who had their right to speak summarily terminated.
I'm not sure which one of our colonial patriots said it, but:
"I do not agree with what you say, sir, but I will defend to the death your right to say it"
Call me Leftist, Liberal, or whatever else you want, but if you don't like the way something is being done, I see you having two choices: get out, but don't let the door hit your ass when you go, or get off your ass and do something about it. Just don't expect a Constitutional amendment to end "the radical leftists who inhibit the free operation of the media" to come easily. Sadly, we have people such as yourself who would rather bitch about what you perceive to be a problem (granted, I think that morals are missing from our society, as well, but it is not the place of the government to mandate them); there is nothing stopping you from printing your own flyers, newspaper, or whatever (getting a news program on TV or radio is admittedly somewhat difficult). See, I'd acknowledge you advocating at the top of your lungs. Why can't things work the other way?
As for your statement about the Constitution, I'm not sure what Constitution you're reading, but mine says nothing about accurate Christian information. Quite the opposite, mine says that "Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof...". Your day may come, not in my lifetime, but it may come.
Going slightly off-topic, for a moment, I am a Christian. Do I support school prayer? Not if we mandate it as some people would lead us to believe. But if, when I were in high school, a teacher or administrator told me I couldn't pray before lunch, or before a sports game, because its not allowed in school, they'd have their ass in court so fast it'd make their head spin, not only on the grounds that they're violating my right to the free exercise of my religion, but also that they would be effectively establishing Atheism (with any necessary apologies to the Atheists out there who may disagree with me)
Ah, but if I'm paying for my Internet Service, and its my ISP's firewall that's blocking me, I'm not working on their computer. Using their routers, and bandwith, yes, but I'm also paying for the use of it.
SSH gives the ability to subvert firewalls, quite well, I might add. If I have a shell account on a machine outside the firewall, I can use ssh to set up a connection from inside the firewall, and have it redirect a port or 4. If I use the right redirections, I can use ssh back in across that connection to gain access to my email, or even to do real work from outside the company. I did this quite a bit while in school with my former employer (and no, its not the reason they're my former employer either). ssh subverts firewalls, does that mean it has no legitimate purpose? Of course not. How many of you use ssh instead of rsh or telnet to remotely log in to another system. I use it almost exclusively.
I do believe you're 100% correct about employer's time/bandwidth. We have jobs to do while at work, and I'm sure that very few people here have a job description that includes scouring the Internet for kiddie pr0n, unless of course that is your job because you're an enforcer of some sort.
But if I pay my ISP for bandwidth, that bandwidth is mine for the duration of my connection. Any filtering whatsoever (via blocking access to "unapproved" sites), and the ISP should lose their Service Provider status, and be relegated to the realms of Content Providers.
Anyone running Linux/*BSD on cable, and still has telnet and ftp (etc.) still running ESPECIALLY if on the standard ports, without some kind of filtering needs to have his/her head examined.
Even those who have them turned on but on different ports without some protection should have their head examined; they're practicing security through obscurity, which we all know is an oxymoron.
Other than that, you pretty much hit the nail on the head. Then we have the entire debate about the cranio-rectal inversion of people who run "The Other OS (TM)" on a Cable line.
All other things aside, if the cops stumble across L0Phtcrack on my boxen, they damn well better have a warrant, or I'll have them for "illegal computer entry" or whatever it is we call "cracking" in the legal world these days.
Slashdot Mirror
Let's see. I'm a taxpayer in the state of Minnesota, and the ration is more on the order of me paying 57% and the state picking up the other 43%. So, I'd say I paid for it.
Its only a work for hire if you get paid for it. The education and the degree do not count as pay, since you've got to pay for them (regardless of whether you get a stipend as an X Assistant).
For more information, see my comment a bit higher re the California and Minnesota labor codes, and the UMN IP policy.
Actually...
Depending on the state, any such policies may be unenforceable. My Assignment agreement with my employer (governed by the State of California), not only cites, but quotes section 2870 of the California Labor Code:
a) Any provisions in an employment agreement which provide that an employee shall assign, or offer to assign, any of his or her rights in an invention to his or her employer shall not apply to an invention that the employee developed entirely on his or her own time without using the employer's equipment, supplies, facilities, or trade secret information except for those inventions that either:
i) relate at the time of conception or reduction to practice of the invention to the employer's business, or actual or demonstrably anticipated research or development of the employer; or
ii) result from any work performed by the employee for the employer.
b) To the extent a provision in an employment agreement purports to require an employee to assign an invention otherwise excluded from being required to be assigned under subdivision (a), the provision is against the public policy of this state and is unenforceable.
Since I actually live in Minnesota, I thought I'd look up our (similar) assignment law:
Chapter Title: EMPLOYMENT; WAGES, CONDITIONS, HOURS, RESTRICTIONS
Section: 181.78
Text:
181.78 Agreements; terms relating to inventions.
Subdivision 1. Any provision in an employment agreement which provides that an employee shall assign or offer to assign any of the employee's rights in an invention to the employer shall not apply to an invention for which no equipment, supplies, facility or trade secret information of the employer was used and which was developed entirely on the employee's own time, and (1) which does not relate (a) directly to the business of the employer or (b) to the employer's actual or demonstrably anticipated research or development, or (2) which does not result from any work performed by the employee for the employer. Any provision which purports to apply to such an invention is to that extent against the public policy of this state and is to that extent void and unenforceable.
Subd. 2. No employer shall require a provision made void and unenforceable by subdivision 1 as a condition of employment or continuing employment.
Subd. 3. If an employment agreement entered into after August 1, 1977 contains a provision requiring the employee to assign or offer to assign any of the employee's rights in any invention to an employer, the employer must also, at the time the agreement is made, provide a written notification to the employee that the agreement does not apply to an invention for which no equipment, supplies, facility or trade secret information of the employer was used and which was developed entirely on the employee's own time, and (1) which does not relate (a) directly to the business of the employer or (b) to the employer's actual or demonstrably anticipated research or development, or (2) which does not result from any work performed by the employee for the employer.
HIST: 1977 c 47 s 1; 1986 c 444
I also looked at my alma mater's policy, I didn't sign anything over (current policy, not the one while I was there).
Now, IANAL, but I'd like to think that MN and CA's employment agreement laws could be extended to academia, especially because students generally pay for their education, rather than get paid for it. In fact, since no pay occurs, I'd like to think that those assignments would also be null and unenforceable.
Local post offices will make paper printouts of e-mail messages and deliver them with the snail mail, charging the sender about 41 cents for a two-page document -- an eight-cent premium to first-class mail.
Methinks you really don't have to worry about this.
Latinum
Think Sprint, a creation of the Southern Pacific Railroad.
Get it here:
sit.wav.
Then you need to masquerade, and make the source IP depend on which DSL connection its going over.
Quoth the poster's friend:
"The searchability factor is the only reason OCRing is needed in most instances."
That and the need to keep the total file size down to a manageable level.
While you are correct in that the EM frequency is the frequency of the EM wave, let me just state that the US Navy uses VLF radio transmissions to communicate through the planet. Obviously, sonar uses sound for its functionality, but these VLF transmissions are most definitely EM.
Yeah, but the guy in Montana never fled from Justice, so does the extradition clause apply? Further, since the crime was committed within Montana, Pennsylvania wouldn't (shouldn't?) get a say in the matter, given that nothing used to create and propagate the virus was in PA. IMHO, routers don't count in this unless it happens to be the router (or modem pool) you're directly connected to. Now, if the creator sent the virus to everyone@state.pa.us, things change again, and PA should, through its long-arm law (if it exists) be able to claim jurisdiction. If he sent it to someone in North Dakota who used outlook and it self propagated to everyone@state.pa.us......
:-). It makes things like this quite the pain.
Aarrgh. Damn the borderless internet
Not according to Lars. In the interview the other day, he stated that their action was initiated by themselves.
What I don't get is how they can prosecute those who download (at least in the US). My reading of the US Copyright code is that its illegal to redistribute, not acquire, copyrighted material without the permission of the copyright holder. In fact, no BTS license agreement I've ever seen says that you can't acquire the software without forking over the cash, just that you can't make copies of it. Of course, the DMCA BS may change that.
BTW, is it just me or has anyone else noticed that the "Extrans" method of posting doesn't exactly work right?
I'd have to agree. If I read it carefully enough, it sounds like you can distribute .exe's, but not .obj's or .lib's, since they're not truly executable. I'd cast a vote for this even more so, given that the title of the excerpt is <I>"GENERAL TERMS THAT APPLY TO COMPILED PROGRAMS AND REDISTRIBUTABLES"</I>. The key words are compiled programs and redistributables. Source code is hardly compiled, and this the terms do not apply to it. Twenty bucks says this is here to prevent the developer from redistributing the headers, object files, and libraries that come with it.
Of course, I ain't a lawyer, so the above may be a a bunch of hooey. If you're that concerned, talk to someone who is.
Actually, while they won't ever publically admit it, this is the number 1 reason for it not happening. Many companies derive a significant portion of their revenue source from support contracts. By allowing a user to support themselves on a piece of obsolete hardware, the company has not only denied themselves the revenue from the product sale, but also that of the sale of the support contract. Many of these companies are publically held, which means they have, as we've read so many times here, a legal obligation to maximize profits for the shareholders. To be quite extreme, opening specs to obsolete hardware is illegal.
Hell, Iowa is an hour and 15 minutes due south of me. I can just see, in amongst the large stands of corn, a massive CompU$A just off I-35, and every other major port of entry into the state if jurisdiction is granted by transaction location. 75 minutes is hardly a hindrance to me, considering I drive that long to get to the casino.
kilo-
mega-
giga-
tera-
peta-
exa-
Although peta- and exa- aren't legitimate SI prefixes.
The source of the distribution is irrelevant if it is being distributed in the US where, coincidentally, US law does apply, and anyone who owns code on that distribution has every right to go after their American affiliate (if such a beast exists) or their American distributors for criminal and civil penalties under US copyright code.
My immediate supervisors knew I did this. The guy who ran the firewall, however, didn't; he definitely would not have approved. In fact, I had planned to do my own VPN over ssh, but left that company for one with less concern about remote access to the network, and got a PPTP account (and stock options [publicly traded so they were worth something] and more money). I never did get VPN-over-ssh set up and thoroughly documented, which was what the original "experiment" was intended for, anyway.
Thanks for the correction. Nonetheless, regardless of who said it, it is (or at least at one time was) codified by the First Amendment to the US Constitution.
Gawd I hate quoting movies, but this one seems appropriate.
"You want to call America the land of the free. Lets see you acknowledge a man center-stage advocating at the top of his lungs that which you would spend a lifetime opposing at the top of yours."
-- Michael Douglas -- The American President
Of course, I'm sure that the movie was too leftist for you, but the point is there. Free speech means all speech, not just what happens to agree with your point of view. Unfortunately, this is quite rapidly becoming SOP in the US. I'm quite certain that there are people in this country who would go to a KKK rally, be offended by what they hear, and try to sue over it. Is it offensive, I think so, but no one forced you to listen. Thankfully, the right to speak does not include the right to be heard, or there'd be a lot of door-to-door religion sales folk who had their right to speak summarily terminated.
I'm not sure which one of our colonial patriots said it, but:
"I do not agree with what you say, sir, but I will defend to the death your right to say it"
Call me Leftist, Liberal, or whatever else you want, but if you don't like the way something is being done, I see you having two choices: get out, but don't let the door hit your ass when you go, or get off your ass and do something about it. Just don't expect a Constitutional amendment to end "the radical leftists who inhibit the free operation of the media" to come easily. Sadly, we have people such as yourself who would rather bitch about what you perceive to be a problem (granted, I think that morals are missing from our society, as well, but it is not the place of the government to mandate them); there is nothing stopping you from printing your own flyers, newspaper, or whatever (getting a news program on TV or radio is admittedly somewhat difficult). See, I'd acknowledge you advocating at the top of your lungs. Why can't things work the other way?
As for your statement about the Constitution, I'm not sure what Constitution you're reading, but mine says nothing about accurate Christian information. Quite the opposite, mine says that "Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof...". Your day may come, not in my lifetime, but it may come.
Going slightly off-topic, for a moment, I am a Christian. Do I support school prayer? Not if we mandate it as some people would lead us to believe. But if, when I were in high school, a teacher or administrator told me I couldn't pray before lunch, or before a sports game, because its not allowed in school, they'd have their ass in court so fast it'd make their head spin, not only on the grounds that they're violating my right to the free exercise of my religion, but also that they would be effectively establishing Atheism (with any necessary apologies to the Atheists out there who may disagree with me)
I'm not su sure this would be considered an oxymoron. More like a proof by self-reference.
Ah, but if I'm paying for my Internet Service, and its my ISP's firewall that's blocking me, I'm not working on their computer. Using their routers, and bandwith, yes, but I'm also paying for the use of it.
SSH gives the ability to subvert firewalls, quite well, I might add. If I have a shell account on a machine outside the firewall, I can use ssh to set up a connection from inside the firewall, and have it redirect a port or 4. If I use the right redirections, I can use ssh back in across that connection to gain access to my email, or even to do real work from outside the company. I did this quite a bit while in school with my former employer (and no, its not the reason they're my former employer either). ssh subverts firewalls, does that mean it has no legitimate purpose? Of course not. How many of you use ssh instead of rsh or telnet to remotely log in to another system. I use it almost exclusively.
I do believe you're 100% correct about employer's time/bandwidth. We have jobs to do while at work, and I'm sure that very few people here have a job description that includes scouring the Internet for kiddie pr0n, unless of course that is your job because you're an enforcer of some sort.
But if I pay my ISP for bandwidth, that bandwidth is mine for the duration of my connection. Any filtering whatsoever (via blocking access to "unapproved" sites), and the ISP should lose their Service Provider status, and be relegated to the realms of Content Providers.
I would have written that more like:
Anyone running Linux/*BSD on cable, and still has telnet and ftp (etc.) still running ESPECIALLY if on the standard ports, without some kind of filtering needs to have his/her head examined.
Even those who have them turned on but on different ports without some protection should have their head examined; they're practicing security through obscurity, which we all know is an oxymoron.
Other than that, you pretty much hit the nail on the head. Then we have the entire debate about the cranio-rectal inversion of people who run "The Other OS (TM)" on a Cable line.
Yes, but can they claim Coke as a trademark? Admittedly, the can of Diet Coke in front of me says:
Diet
Coke
Trademark(R)
Now, the question is what is trademarked? the stylized "Diet Coke", the stylized "Coke", the word?
All other things aside, if the cops stumble across L0Phtcrack on my boxen, they damn well better have a warrant, or I'll have them for "illegal computer entry" or whatever it is we call "cracking" in the legal world these days.