Exactly. You can, I do myself. But ads are part of a package, not a "work" in the artistic sense. The writers rarely know or have any control over what ads will be delivered along with their articles. "Moral rights" belong to authors and creators, not packagers or publishers
If you skip the commercials, you're bowderlising the dramatic pacing of the show.
I'll assume you're trying to be funny, but again, the ads are part of the package, not the work. The BBC in the UK for instance doesn't interrupt shows for ads. Neither of course do DVD versions.
I did not say that morality does not exist -- I said that morals are based on subjective values, not objective facts.
I wasn't referring to "morality" but the term "moral rights", which you will find in authors' contracts, copyright law, etc. The ethics of it is another discussion.
Tinfoil-hat digression: Personally I see a slippery slope begining; a censoring DVD player (and ultimately TV, etc) that can receive its instructions online. What a tool for people like Ashcroft. It's horribly reminsicent of Winston Smith editing past news. If the players are controlled it doesn't matter what is on the disk, you will only see what you are allowed to. It's amazing that the same people who probably rail against region coding are all for something far more sinister.
Killfiles.
Pop-up blockers.
Auto-editing DVD players.
Commerical-skip button on TiVo.
If you object to this Auto-Censoring DVD player, then shouldn't you also object to the other 3 things above? The user is bowderlising the content someone else provided, without their permission.
No, because none of these others are distributed and specific to a single "work". And they all remove a "work" in its entirety (ads, posts).
And just one more time you can bowdlerise your copy however you like.
>Creators have moral rights on their works.
That is a specious argument: define "moral" in objective rather than subjective terms.
If you're saying that moral rights don't exist, well, try Googling for it -- 163,000 hits. I'm sure someone has defined it for you.
Making a "no-naughty-bits" derivitive of a movie for your own use probably falls under fair use.
Of course; you can do whatever you like with your copy. It's when you distribute your edit that you have a problem.
They must be really pissed off when I skip the boring bits then.
Not to mention all those bastards who blink during viewing!
You're missing the point, you can edit or watch your copy of a movie however you like. When you distribute that version to others, even as a "patch" to the original, you cross over a line. The director's name is still on it, but it isn't what he signed off on. If these players are sold widely (they are in Walmart after all) they could even become the way most people saw the movie; as some strait-laced group of censors determined.
1) RCA makes money...
2) Producers make money...
3) Consumers get to enjoy more movies.
Uh hello, this is a win-win for everybody!
Except the creators of the movie, who find their work has been bowdlerised without their permission. The creators (the producer at least) usually have the option of pulling a movie from a market rather than cutting it. As a last resort, if the studio overrides them, the director can pull their name from the credits to show that they disapprove of this. Creators have moral rights on their works.
Wikipedia:
Alan Smithee is a pseudonym used by the director of a movie if he wants to disown it. A director cannot do so on his own, however, he has to get permission to do so from the Directors Guild of America, which has a number of rules for it, the most important being that it is only used when someone else (for example the editor or the studio) has changed the movie to something different than what the director intended.
particularly spam sent to news groups where anonymous delivery is practically guaranteed.
Not really; many news server admins make strenuous efforts to remove spam from usenet; it's not likely it would propagate to any random server. Those that don't care about their servers often have lousy completion, so your spam might not appear becasue of that, or be pushed off immediately by a real spammer's flood.
It's so easy to get a throwaway web mail account that is a much simpler way to go. The garbage text is there simply as an attempt to foil filtering.
Or the not-so-hidden messages - like Tom Clancy's plot in which a hijacked (though by the pilot) airliner flies into a building...
Not to mention the first episode of The Lone Gunmen where the CIA sends a plane on autopilot to crash into the WTC. I was somewhat amazed that I didn't see a word of commentary about this after the real event.
How exactly do you go building a ringworld (or anything at all for that matter) from a gas giant that is composed of about 90% hydrogen and 10% helium?
If I knew that, I'd patent it.
Obviously, you use elemental transmutation, that's where all the other elements came from anyway. (Ringworld is made of "scrith", though what exactly that is, besides being amazingly strong, isn't gone into.) Also, Jupiter is theorised to have a rocky/metallic core, 20-30 times the mass of Earth.
I'm running Firefox and the demo link on the how.htm page doesn't work, so hopefully the ads won't either?
That demo is a flash popup, not the same as a real page. According to that it has two effects on the page: selecting a normal ad to go on the page, and making double-underlined green links that give popups when selected. SO I suspect that you'll at least see the underlines, whihc would be a distraction, till a filter comes along a week later.
workers who usually 'burn' the parts to get rid of plastic and recover small amounts of valuable metals
I don't know why the submitter/editor put quotes around burn; there is nothing metaphorical about this. The parts are burnt in a fire to get rid of plastic coating from wires, etc, to make separation of copper and other metals easier.
She's going to be in a tank top for the entire movie, most likely. Studio execs wouldn't allow the main character to be in that suit of armor for the entire movie. They need sex appeal and all that.
Like they did with Stallone's Judge Dredd, he lost his mask in about 10 minutes. In 20 years or more of comics, Dredd never ever showed his face. Or the Starship Troopers movie, which dispensed with the armour entirely, making the troopers basically WWI grunts being mowed down by aliens. (I'm pretty sure that the book, published in 1959, was the inspiration for all those anime robot/armoured warriors/Transformers, etc).
Anyway, hopefully we can look forward to some suiting/unsuiting scenes like the opening of Barbarella.
No it's not. It's "Chow Yun-fat" with one "t". I may be a gweilo, but I happen to live on Lamma Island, where he was born, and you can imagine he's a real local hero. Also, that's the way it's spelled on the movie posters. And if I had to write it phonetically the way Cantonese pronounce it, it'd be something like "Chow yun fah", not that far removed.
"ISO" in that context is short for ISO9660, the data format used on the CD. It's equally valid.
I understand it, I use it myself, but it's more of an abuse. "ISO" = "International Standards Organisation", and there are God knows how many ISO standards.
Reminds me of a musican I knew who got annoyed at plebians who'd say their favorite classical piece was 'The Ninth'. She said: `Whose ninth? Mahler's, Bruckner's, Williams's, Dvorak's?'
How do you meaningfully use only part of a program? Sure, if you have the source code, you can chop out, say, eight of ten levels in a game. But from just a binary? You just can't do it.
I wasn't saying that you could; only that in most media that "fair use" never allows a complete copy to be published, and as in software it generally isn't possible to use anything less that it isn't relevant. Though it probably would enable screenshots and such. Lots of ROM and warez sites have claimed that it's all right to download and use for "24 hours", for "evaluation", etc, hoping somehow that this was "fair use", by limiting the time; though of course no one really expected you to download Photo Shop and delete it the next day.
I cringe everytime I read about people talking about where to get "ROMs".
Seems perfectly reasonable usage. Most of these files are copies (or derived from) the code that was in a physical ROM. Do you also get annoyed if someone refers to a CD "ISO"? That is somewhat sillier if you recall what the letters mean. Extending usage of a term is fine as long as there is no confusion created.
Not exactly a guarantee, but the fact that, for most abandonware, no legit source exists weighs positively in favor of otherwise-illegally obtaining it falling under fair use.
A copy of the entire work is hard to justify as "fair use" in any situation. For written work, the general rule is no more than 50% of an article, or a chapter or two of a book, may be quoted as "fair use" without requiring permission. These limits are rubbery, and are rarely tested in court. If you can show you made some attempt to find the owner, and have an open offer to make an arrangement with them should they contact you, you would probably be reasonably safe. But if it's a company in the phone book (not some bankrupt and long-gone publisher) that just refuses to licence their work, you would be in trouble.
There's also a little exemption in copyright if its not commonly attainable (some 70's song you heard long ago and nobody carries it. You get it off of kazaa)
No there isn't an "exemption". If you have any references saying otherwise, please share them. You may notice in some books notes to the effect that "every attempt was made to contact copyright owners, but some could not be found" and asking them to get in touch. If they did, they'd have to negotiate; showing good intentions in this way makes claiming damages by the owner unlikely, but it doesn't revoke their copyright at all.
ringworld is unstable while a Dyson sphere is stable
They're both unstable, and for the same reason, the gravitational force within a ring or speher cancels out. So the ring/sphere is not in an orbit, but can just drift, eventually hitting the sun (maybe the solar wind would be enough to kep it in place, as long as it was basically symmetric). Unless you're referring to what Freeman Dyson actually proposed; not the solid eggshell that's implied in most SF, but a lost of small objects in independent orbits.
He gets the credit for thinking up ringworlds,
Not sure about that; but Niven was certainly the first to use them in SF. The advantage of a ringworld over a Dyson shell is that it is actually conceivable to build one, given extremely, but not impossibly, strong materials, and the spin gives it gravity (yes, I know, centripetal force) without magic.
Slashdot Mirror
Exactly. You can, I do myself. But ads are part of a package, not a "work" in the artistic sense. The writers rarely know or have any control over what ads will be delivered along with their articles. "Moral rights" belong to authors and creators, not packagers or publishers If you skip the commercials, you're bowderlising the dramatic pacing of the show.
I'll assume you're trying to be funny, but again, the ads are part of the package, not the work. The BBC in the UK for instance doesn't interrupt shows for ads. Neither of course do DVD versions.
It proves the concept exists.
You used the term, you define what you meant by it.
The "I'm feeling lucky" one seems a good place to start: Moral Rights of Authors in USA. I could summarise it, but why should I -- read it yourself.
I wasn't referring to "morality" but the term "moral rights", which you will find in authors' contracts, copyright law, etc. The ethics of it is another discussion.
Tinfoil-hat digression: Personally I see a slippery slope begining; a censoring DVD player (and ultimately TV, etc) that can receive its instructions online. What a tool for people like Ashcroft. It's horribly reminsicent of Winston Smith editing past news. If the players are controlled it doesn't matter what is on the disk, you will only see what you are allowed to. It's amazing that the same people who probably rail against region coding are all for something far more sinister.
They have a contract wiith the movie company that allows them to do so. The people selling the censorware don't.
I wouldn't be surprised if the movie companies didn't put out their own version of this, where you could select to watch the G, R or X cut.
No, because none of these others are distributed and specific to a single "work". And they all remove a "work" in its entirety (ads, posts).
And just one more time you can bowdlerise your copy however you like.
That is a specious argument: define "moral" in objective rather than subjective terms.
If you're saying that moral rights don't exist, well, try Googling for it -- 163,000 hits. I'm sure someone has defined it for you. Making a "no-naughty-bits" derivitive of a movie for your own use probably falls under fair use.
Of course; you can do whatever you like with your copy. It's when you distribute your edit that you have a problem.
You're missing the point, you can edit or watch your copy of a movie however you like. When you distribute that version to others, even as a "patch" to the original, you cross over a line. The director's name is still on it, but it isn't what he signed off on. If these players are sold widely (they are in Walmart after all) they could even become the way most people saw the movie; as some strait-laced group of censors determined.
2) Producers make money...
3) Consumers get to enjoy more movies.
Uh hello, this is a win-win for everybody!
Except the creators of the movie, who find their work has been bowdlerised without their permission. The creators (the producer at least) usually have the option of pulling a movie from a market rather than cutting it. As a last resort, if the studio overrides them, the director can pull their name from the credits to show that they disapprove of this. Creators have moral rights on their works.
Wikipedia:
Alan Smithee is a pseudonym used by the director of a movie if he wants to disown it. A director cannot do so on his own, however, he has to get permission to do so from the Directors Guild of America, which has a number of rules for it, the most important being that it is only used when someone else (for example the editor or the studio) has changed the movie to something different than what the director intended.
Not really; many news server admins make strenuous efforts to remove spam from usenet; it's not likely it would propagate to any random server. Those that don't care about their servers often have lousy completion, so your spam might not appear becasue of that, or be pushed off immediately by a real spammer's flood.
It's so easy to get a throwaway web mail account that is a much simpler way to go. The garbage text is there simply as an attempt to foil filtering.
Not to mention the first episode of The Lone Gunmen where the CIA sends a plane on autopilot to crash into the WTC. I was somewhat amazed that I didn't see a word of commentary about this after the real event.
If I knew that, I'd patent it.
Obviously, you use elemental transmutation, that's where all the other elements came from anyway. (Ringworld is made of "scrith", though what exactly that is, besides being amazingly strong, isn't gone into.) Also, Jupiter is theorised to have a rocky/metallic core, 20-30 times the mass of Earth.
That demo is a flash popup, not the same as a real page. According to that it has two effects on the page: selecting a normal ad to go on the page, and making double-underlined green links that give popups when selected. SO I suspect that you'll at least see the underlines, whihc would be a distraction, till a filter comes along a week later.
I don't know why the submitter/editor put quotes around burn; there is nothing metaphorical about this. The parts are burnt in a fire to get rid of plastic coating from wires, etc, to make separation of copper and other metals easier.
He might have mentioned it in his article "Bigger than Worlds", about ringworlds and other mega-structures, found in several anthologies.
But more seriously, Tron; though the movie wasn't based on a particular game; and War Games, even less so.
I think Bruce Willis did a good portayal of Super Mario in Die Hard.
Like they did with Stallone's Judge Dredd, he lost his mask in about 10 minutes. In 20 years or more of comics, Dredd never ever showed his face. Or the Starship Troopers movie, which dispensed with the armour entirely, making the troopers basically WWI grunts being mowed down by aliens. (I'm pretty sure that the book, published in 1959, was the inspiration for all those anime robot/armoured warriors/Transformers, etc).
Anyway, hopefully we can look forward to some suiting/unsuiting scenes like the opening of Barbarella.
No it's not. It's "Chow Yun-fat" with one "t". I may be a gweilo, but I happen to live on Lamma Island, where he was born, and you can imagine he's a real local hero. Also, that's the way it's spelled on the movie posters. And if I had to write it phonetically the way Cantonese pronounce it, it'd be something like "Chow yun fah", not that far removed.
I understand it, I use it myself, but it's more of an abuse. "ISO" = "International Standards Organisation", and there are God knows how many ISO standards.
Reminds me of a musican I knew who got annoyed at plebians who'd say their favorite classical piece was 'The Ninth'. She said: `Whose ninth? Mahler's, Bruckner's, Williams's, Dvorak's?'
Well, of course, the mass comes from dismantling a jovian or two -- Jupiter has 318 Earth masses.
I wasn't saying that you could; only that in most media that "fair use" never allows a complete copy to be published, and as in software it generally isn't possible to use anything less that it isn't relevant. Though it probably would enable screenshots and such. Lots of ROM and warez sites have claimed that it's all right to download and use for "24 hours", for "evaluation", etc, hoping somehow that this was "fair use", by limiting the time; though of course no one really expected you to download Photo Shop and delete it the next day.
Seems perfectly reasonable usage. Most of these files are copies (or derived from) the code that was in a physical ROM. Do you also get annoyed if someone refers to a CD "ISO"? That is somewhat sillier if you recall what the letters mean. Extending usage of a term is fine as long as there is no confusion created.
A copy of the entire work is hard to justify as "fair use" in any situation. For written work, the general rule is no more than 50% of an article, or a chapter or two of a book, may be quoted as "fair use" without requiring permission. These limits are rubbery, and are rarely tested in court. If you can show you made some attempt to find the owner, and have an open offer to make an arrangement with them should they contact you, you would probably be reasonably safe. But if it's a company in the phone book (not some bankrupt and long-gone publisher) that just refuses to licence their work, you would be in trouble.
No there isn't an "exemption". If you have any references saying otherwise, please share them. You may notice in some books notes to the effect that "every attempt was made to contact copyright owners, but some could not be found" and asking them to get in touch. If they did, they'd have to negotiate; showing good intentions in this way makes claiming damages by the owner unlikely, but it doesn't revoke their copyright at all.
They're both unstable, and for the same reason, the gravitational force within a ring or speher cancels out. So the ring/sphere is not in an orbit, but can just drift, eventually hitting the sun (maybe the solar wind would be enough to kep it in place, as long as it was basically symmetric). Unless you're referring to what Freeman Dyson actually proposed; not the solid eggshell that's implied in most SF, but a lost of small objects in independent orbits.
He gets the credit for thinking up ringworlds,
Not sure about that; but Niven was certainly the first to use them in SF. The advantage of a ringworld over a Dyson shell is that it is actually conceivable to build one, given extremely, but not impossibly, strong materials, and the spin gives it gravity (yes, I know, centripetal force) without magic.