I think most people's concept of "teleport" is something else entirely.
I'd disagree - surely "Star Trek" is an example of the popular conception of teleporting, and I always interpretted that as transmitting information, not matter. Indeed, are there any sci-fis where the matter is transported, rather than reconstructing a copy at the other end?
Would we suddenly see all sorts of mysterious deaths of authors directly after they publish their works, if the copyright on their works would immediately end?
Unlikely. Indeed, I think a next-of-kin murdering someone in order to inherit the copyright with the current system is far more likely than someone committing murder simply to make something public domain. Surely people would rather simply commit copyright infringement than murder...
I agree a fixed term would be better. Preferable a much short fixed term too (e.g., 30 years).
This is why I think the spat in the UK about ID cards is silly, most people in the UK own a cellphone and it's freely, continuously and permanently giving away their identity AND position.
And cellphones have to be registered with the state? Is there evidence that the state is tracking these things (the problem is not some random person could track them, it's about the very real fear that ID cards would be needed for every single use of public transport for example)? And are cellphones compulsory to own? Of course not - those paranoid about being tracked can not take a cellphone.
Anyhow, you're debating with a giant strawman. Mostly the arguments against ID cards having nothing to do with this. Does a cellphone cost over £90, for no benefit to the user, is compulsory to buy, requires your details be put onto a database, and result in a prison sentence if you fail to notify for a damaged/lost/stolen phone, or fail to notify about changes in your details?
Funnily enough, fewer people seem to think that a reasonable proposal than snatching artists' property at, or even before, their deaths.
Who said anything about snatching property? Nothing is being removed. The state granted a monopoly of production to the original author, and this would simply mean that they don't grant that monopoly to someone else when that person dies).
If I die, my family get to keep my possessions. But they don't get to continually be paid my salary, or have any rights to my job in anyway. Why should children of artists be treated any differently? I mean, non-artists could make the same emotional argument by whining about how their family will starve if the income is no longer there, but that's tough luck. Family of non-artists have to rely on welfare or insurance for that situation, and those of artists should do to.
Perhaps making copyright a fixed-term for everyone might be a way round these issues.
Like I said, while it may be nice to stand on a soapbox and claim that you just won't go to the country. For 99% of people, something like this will not play into their travel plans at all.
And it's nice to stand on your soapbox and make up statistics out of thin air, but this has no bearing on reality.
The reason for the tone of my post is that to someone (like me) whose experience with international travel involves only the American continent, Britain (or France, etc.) seems pretty representative of Europe.
It's not, at least in this context. The current UK Government is increasingly authoritarian these days, and I'm sure they love to hand data over to the US. The problem is the *EU* laws.
I don't see any inconsistency here. Furthermore, I believe that the CCTV cameras are subject to data protection laws too.
Agreed. Also my worry is that if you slip up and fill it in wrong, they won't accept it as a mistake due to their long-winded procedure, instead you face strip-search, arrest, being taken to a detention facility and locked up before finally being sent home, as happened to one UK journalist ( http://www.guardian.co.uk/usa/story/0,12271,123108 9,00.html ).
How about EU collecting the same data from US passengers?
A nice idea, but that just makes things bad for the US citizens, not the Government. Two wrongs don't make a right here. I doubt the US Government would care, indeed it would probably try to obtain the data back from the EU so it could better monitor its own citizens too.
Now if you want to get back, I suggest imposing this data collection solely for US politicians. And finger-printing of course. And whilst we're at it, mandatory strip-searches - after all, they've got nothing to hide, so they've nothing to fear, right?
I wonder how many Europeans with a trip planned to Disney World are going to get to the airport with kids in tow and decide the tradeoff of sharing those 31 pieces of information with the American government (who will likely never even look at the information) just isn't worth it and call the taxi and head back home?
The question is not how many will turn back home, it's how many will not fly there in the first place.
I'm all for privacy, but I am willing to give away some of my privacy for my own convenience. In this case, if I am European and I want to go to America for some reason, my choices are:
If it's *convenience* that I want, then clearly one will choose option 4: Don't go to a country with such an inconvenient and time-consuming entry process in the first place.
I'm presuming that sponsored communities won't have the same TOS as paid individual users.
Well sponsored communities will be allowed under the current TOS, as it's with "prior approval". But I presumed you were referring to doing it via normal communities, by saying it can already be done.
And as far as I can tell, if you're logged in as a paid user you do not get the sponsored-community promo on the main page or search results. Those are strictly shown to free users.
The short and sweet of it is that unless you browse specifically to someone's journal who OPTED into ads - you won't be seeing them.
I believe that this also means they appear if you go to read/post comments on someone's journal - so yes, if someone else opts-in, free users will see the ads.
I'm not saying there's anything wrong with this system, but it's ridiculous that people keep claiming that seeing ads is "opt in".
It's not necessarily a problem, but I disliked the way it was implied that free users wouldn't see adverts, and the only people seeing ads are those who want to, and opt into the system. See the original post at http://community.livejournal.com/lj_biz/236361.htm l . Although the details of the post point out that free users will see ads, the table earlier claimed they wouldn't, and the general tone of the post was "it's okay to let people see ads if they want to". Also "Well, we're not forcing it on users. It's purely a new option that users can enable if they want, so we don't feel it's that evil."
However, in later announcements they appeared to back-peddle, admitting that free users now see ads, and trying to forget that they were ever against ads in the first place...
The sponsored community part I don't see a problem with the ads in. Those would be communities created by a company, and the company gets to put their ads in the community. The company can already do that by an ad in a floating entry at the top of the community, all this is doing is making it official and giving LJ a cut.
Actually, that might be against the TOS:
You agree to NOT use the Service to: Engage in commercial activities within LiveJournal or on behalf of LiveJournal without prior approval. This includes, but is not limited to, the following activities: Displaying a banner that is designed to profit you or any other business or organization; and Displaying banners for services that provide cash or cash-equivalent prizes to users in exchange for hyperlinks to their web sites.
Also, the problem is not just the communities themselves, but that they are promoted on the main site, or (apparentely) given priority on searches.
Then there are other issues, like what happens if people post "I saw this movie and it was shit" to that community?
They have at least said that Paid users won't see sponsored communities being promoted, so I'm fine with that.
There was also an uproar when they introduced Plus accounts, which were also introduced as opt-in, and have so far remained that way.
The accounts are opt-in, but seeing ads most certainly isn't: A free user (or non-LJ user) will see ads on the sponsored account, even though this user hasn't ever opted in. Only paid users don't ever see ads.
I hope you are right - the danger is if a law is brought in as a knee-jerk reaction.
Here in the UK, possession of private/consensual BDSM porn is to be criminalised, because one person who killed someone, even though his murder conviction was overturned, was into erotic asphyxiation porn. There's been absolutely no attempt to produce evidence that even a correlation exists, let alone causation, between watching porn and killing people; the vocal minority alone may get such material criminalised.
(The US at least is more resistant to this, thanks to Freedom of Speech - but just saying, even if the logic that games/images causes death is absurd, that doesn't stop Governments making laws on the matter.)
They harrassed me when I had no TV. When I later had a TV licence, they still harrassed me claiming I didn't. I have nothing to hide, but that does not excuse their fraudulent claims and acts of extorion. No other company would be allowed to get away with this.
Not Guantanamo Bay, but otherwise not too far from the truth: When the compulsory combined ID card and passport is introduced, it will be a criminal offence to not report a damaged or defective card, punishable by up to 51 weeks in prison ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/British_national_iden tity_card ).
Your computer didn't beat you at chess, a programmer did.
Whilst I agree that playing chess isn't an indication of being intelligent in general, I disagree with this logic. If we had a computer which was as intelligent as a human in every respect, but nonetheless required the "AI program" to be installed, are you saying it wouldn't be intelligent, and it's only the programmer who is intelligent? And why make the distinction between software and hardware at all - what if the chess program is implemented in hardware?
I think what you're actually trying to say is that a chess program doesn't learn. Even then we must be careful - whilst we tend to associate learning with intelligence, conceivably something can be intelligent without being able to learn more (think of the "Terminator", which clearly showed intelligence, but could not learn unless it had its chip reset).
It's also not a problem that the computer didn't write its own program - I didn't make my own brain, either.
You can't copyright "ideas". Copyright covers the implementation/expression of an idea.
If I gave an idea to a Hollywood producer, then I might be able to make a claim that I should receive some of the profits. However, it most certainly would not mean that I owned the copyright to the film.
If you review their usage policies, they are using the document under an extention of the implicit license given to a teacher by a student when that student submits an assignment.
If you review my usage policy, it says that as an extension of the implicit licence given to me when someone sells me a CD, I am allowed to distribute said CD through the filesharing program of my choice...
During the Kazaa trials it was revealed that the woman who runs Sharman was worth some $40MM -- I forget if that was US$ or AUS$, but either way, it's a lot. Sam and Jed were making close to $1MM per month in advertising revenues at eDonkey before they were shut down. By all accounts, Bram Cohen has made his million bucks.
From TFA:
Turnitin charges about 80 cents per student per year, according to a company official. Fairfax County paid between $24,000 and $30,000 in the last school year for the service, school system officials said.
Firstly, let's be clear here: The problem isn't that Turnitin are making money from advertising. It's not even that they are making money selling a piece of software that may or may not be used for copyright infringment. The problem is that they are directly charging people for their service.
Secondly, they know that every single paper in there is copyrighted, unlike the case with filesharing software.
Thirdly is the problem that they host the copyrighted material. Look how quickly Napster got taken down, because it was actively handling the search requests - even then, the music files weren't hosted by napster (and they weren't to know which files were copyrighted).
Your opinion of the Slashdot response is wrong. I predict that if a company set itself up, which hosted music files, where all of them were infringing copyrights, and charged for access, not only would this get shut down immediately, but there would be little sympathy for the site from Slashdot readers.
Or what about porn that involves some 17 year old?
Strange but true: In the UK, it's legal to shag a 17 year old, but now as soon as you take a photo, you're guilty of making and possessing child porn (the 2003 Sexual Offences Act bizarrely raised the age for appearing in photos from 16 to 18, despite the age of consent remaining at 16 where it as always been).
All of this is very wrong, but still, I'm pretty sure that without prior history photoshopped pictures will not land you in jail in the UK.
This guy was a previous sex offender, but nonetheless, fake child porn pictures are treated equivalent to actual child porn pictures. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indecent_pseudo-photo graph_of_a_child : "If the impression conveyed by a pseudo-photograph is that the person shown is a child, the pseudo-photograph shall be treated for all purposes of this Act as showing a child and so shall a pseudo-photograph where the predominant impression conveyed is that the person shown is a child notwithstanding that some of the physical characteristics shown are those of an adult."
I don't know if a non-previous-sex-offender has been sent to prison for such an act - but the law as it stands suggest that you could be sent to prison (given that downloading or creating child porn can get you sent to prison without prior history).
The worst about all this is, that it has never actually been shown that CP is bad. Or at least, that it is any worse than the adult version.
This is particularly the case in the UK, where now, even fake sexual images of child are illegal. Yes, it's illegal to make images of women look younger, even if you have no intent to distribute these images: http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/england/tees/4776123.st m .
Basically, liking women with small breasts, shaved pussy and school uniforms is a crime in the UK, and considered equivalent to raping babies, irrespective of any harm actually done. This undermines any attempt to actually combat genuine crimes of child abuse.
Slashdot Mirror
I think most people's concept of "teleport" is something else entirely.
I'd disagree - surely "Star Trek" is an example of the popular conception of teleporting, and I always interpretted that as transmitting information, not matter. Indeed, are there any sci-fis where the matter is transported, rather than reconstructing a copy at the other end?
Would we suddenly see all sorts of mysterious deaths of authors directly after they publish their works, if the copyright on their works would immediately end?
Unlikely. Indeed, I think a next-of-kin murdering someone in order to inherit the copyright with the current system is far more likely than someone committing murder simply to make something public domain. Surely people would rather simply commit copyright infringement than murder...
I agree a fixed term would be better. Preferable a much short fixed term too (e.g., 30 years).
This is why I think the spat in the UK about ID cards is silly, most people in the UK own a cellphone and it's freely, continuously and permanently giving away their identity AND position.
And cellphones have to be registered with the state? Is there evidence that the state is tracking these things (the problem is not some random person could track them, it's about the very real fear that ID cards would be needed for every single use of public transport for example)? And are cellphones compulsory to own? Of course not - those paranoid about being tracked can not take a cellphone.
Anyhow, you're debating with a giant strawman. Mostly the arguments against ID cards having nothing to do with this. Does a cellphone cost over £90, for no benefit to the user, is compulsory to buy, requires your details be put onto a database, and result in a prison sentence if you fail to notify for a damaged/lost/stolen phone, or fail to notify about changes in your details?
Funnily enough, fewer people seem to think that a reasonable proposal than snatching artists' property at, or even before, their deaths.
Who said anything about snatching property? Nothing is being removed. The state granted a monopoly of production to the original author, and this would simply mean that they don't grant that monopoly to someone else when that person dies).
If I die, my family get to keep my possessions. But they don't get to continually be paid my salary, or have any rights to my job in anyway. Why should children of artists be treated any differently? I mean, non-artists could make the same emotional argument by whining about how their family will starve if the income is no longer there, but that's tough luck. Family of non-artists have to rely on welfare or insurance for that situation, and those of artists should do to.
Perhaps making copyright a fixed-term for everyone might be a way round these issues.
Like I said, while it may be nice to stand on a soapbox and claim that you just won't go to the country. For 99% of people, something like this will not play into their travel plans at all.
And it's nice to stand on your soapbox and make up statistics out of thin air, but this has no bearing on reality.
The reason for the tone of my post is that to someone (like me) whose experience with international travel involves only the American continent, Britain (or France, etc.) seems pretty representative of Europe.
It's not, at least in this context. The current UK Government is increasingly authoritarian these days, and I'm sure they love to hand data over to the US. The problem is the *EU* laws.
I don't see any inconsistency here. Furthermore, I believe that the CCTV cameras are subject to data protection laws too.
Agreed. Also my worry is that if you slip up and fill it in wrong, they won't accept it as a mistake due to their long-winded procedure, instead you face strip-search, arrest, being taken to a detention facility and locked up before finally being sent home, as happened to one UK journalist ( http://www.guardian.co.uk/usa/story/0,12271,123108 9,00.html ).
How about EU collecting the same data from US passengers?
A nice idea, but that just makes things bad for the US citizens, not the Government. Two wrongs don't make a right here. I doubt the US Government would care, indeed it would probably try to obtain the data back from the EU so it could better monitor its own citizens too.
Now if you want to get back, I suggest imposing this data collection solely for US politicians. And finger-printing of course. And whilst we're at it, mandatory strip-searches - after all, they've got nothing to hide, so they've nothing to fear, right?
I wonder how many Europeans with a trip planned to Disney World are going to get to the airport with kids in tow and decide the tradeoff of sharing those 31 pieces of information with the American government (who will likely never even look at the information) just isn't worth it and call the taxi and head back home?
The question is not how many will turn back home, it's how many will not fly there in the first place.
I'm all for privacy, but I am willing to give away some of my privacy for my own convenience. In this case, if I am European and I want to go to America for some reason, my choices are:
If it's *convenience* that I want, then clearly one will choose option 4: Don't go to a country with such an inconvenient and time-consuming entry process in the first place.
I'm presuming that sponsored communities won't have the same TOS as paid individual users.
Well sponsored communities will be allowed under the current TOS, as it's with "prior approval". But I presumed you were referring to doing it via normal communities, by saying it can already be done.
And as far as I can tell, if you're logged in as a paid user you do not get the sponsored-community promo on the main page or search results. Those are strictly shown to free users.
Yes, that's what I said.
The short and sweet of it is that unless you browse specifically to someone's journal who OPTED into ads - you won't be seeing them.
I believe that this also means they appear if you go to read/post comments on someone's journal - so yes, if someone else opts-in, free users will see the ads.
I'm not saying there's anything wrong with this system, but it's ridiculous that people keep claiming that seeing ads is "opt in".
It's not necessarily a problem, but I disliked the way it was implied that free users wouldn't see adverts, and the only people seeing ads are those who want to, and opt into the system. See the original post at http://community.livejournal.com/lj_biz/236361.htm l . Although the details of the post point out that free users will see ads, the table earlier claimed they wouldn't, and the general tone of the post was "it's okay to let people see ads if they want to". Also "Well, we're not forcing it on users. It's purely a new option that users can enable if they want, so we don't feel it's that evil."
However, in later announcements they appeared to back-peddle, admitting that free users now see ads, and trying to forget that they were ever against ads in the first place...
The sponsored community part I don't see a problem with the ads in. Those would be communities created by a company, and the company gets to put their ads in the community. The company can already do that by an ad in a floating entry at the top of the community, all this is doing is making it official and giving LJ a cut.
Actually, that might be against the TOS:
You agree to NOT use the Service to: Engage in commercial activities within LiveJournal or on behalf of LiveJournal without prior approval. This includes, but is not limited to, the following activities: Displaying a banner that is designed to profit you or any other business or organization; and Displaying banners for services that provide cash or cash-equivalent prizes to users in exchange for hyperlinks to their web sites.
Also, the problem is not just the communities themselves, but that they are promoted on the main site, or (apparentely) given priority on searches.
Then there are other issues, like what happens if people post "I saw this movie and it was shit" to that community?
They have at least said that Paid users won't see sponsored communities being promoted, so I'm fine with that.
I don't think i've ever seen such a bunch of drama queens since last time I got lost in Blackpool with a cargo of wigs.
Are you new here?
(Slashdot far outdoes LiveJournal in terms of complaining about what company X has done.)
There was also an uproar when they introduced Plus accounts, which were also introduced as opt-in, and have so far remained that way.
The accounts are opt-in, but seeing ads most certainly isn't: A free user (or non-LJ user) will see ads on the sponsored account, even though this user hasn't ever opted in. Only paid users don't ever see ads.
I hope you are right - the danger is if a law is brought in as a knee-jerk reaction.
Here in the UK, possession of private/consensual BDSM porn is to be criminalised, because one person who killed someone, even though his murder conviction was overturned, was into erotic asphyxiation porn. There's been absolutely no attempt to produce evidence that even a correlation exists, let alone causation, between watching porn and killing people; the vocal minority alone may get such material criminalised.
(The US at least is more resistant to this, thanks to Freedom of Speech - but just saying, even if the logic that games/images causes death is absurd, that doesn't stop Governments making laws on the matter.)
They harrassed me when I had no TV. When I later had a TV licence, they still harrassed me claiming I didn't. I have nothing to hide, but that does not excuse their fraudulent claims and acts of extorion. No other company would be allowed to get away with this.
Not Guantanamo Bay, but otherwise not too far from the truth: When the compulsory combined ID card and passport is introduced, it will be a criminal offence to not report a damaged or defective card, punishable by up to 51 weeks in prison ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/British_national_iden tity_card ).
Your computer didn't beat you at chess, a programmer did.
Whilst I agree that playing chess isn't an indication of being intelligent in general, I disagree with this logic. If we had a computer which was as intelligent as a human in every respect, but nonetheless required the "AI program" to be installed, are you saying it wouldn't be intelligent, and it's only the programmer who is intelligent? And why make the distinction between software and hardware at all - what if the chess program is implemented in hardware?
I think what you're actually trying to say is that a chess program doesn't learn. Even then we must be careful - whilst we tend to associate learning with intelligence, conceivably something can be intelligent without being able to learn more (think of the "Terminator", which clearly showed intelligence, but could not learn unless it had its chip reset).
It's also not a problem that the computer didn't write its own program - I didn't make my own brain, either.
You can't copyright "ideas". Copyright covers the implementation/expression of an idea.
If I gave an idea to a Hollywood producer, then I might be able to make a claim that I should receive some of the profits. However, it most certainly would not mean that I owned the copyright to the film.
If you review their usage policies, they are using the document under an extention of the implicit license given to a teacher by a student when that student submits an assignment.
If you review my usage policy, it says that as an extension of the implicit licence given to me when someone sells me a CD, I am allowed to distribute said CD through the filesharing program of my choice...
During the Kazaa trials it was revealed that the woman who runs Sharman was worth some $40MM -- I forget if that was US$ or AUS$, but either way, it's a lot. Sam and Jed were making close to $1MM per month in advertising revenues at eDonkey before they were shut down. By all accounts, Bram Cohen has made his million bucks.
From TFA:
Turnitin charges about 80 cents per student per year, according to a company official. Fairfax County paid between $24,000 and $30,000 in the last school year for the service, school system officials said.
Firstly, let's be clear here: The problem isn't that Turnitin are making money from advertising. It's not even that they are making money selling a piece of software that may or may not be used for copyright infringment. The problem is that they are directly charging people for their service.
Secondly, they know that every single paper in there is copyrighted, unlike the case with filesharing software.
Thirdly is the problem that they host the copyrighted material. Look how quickly Napster got taken down, because it was actively handling the search requests - even then, the music files weren't hosted by napster (and they weren't to know which files were copyrighted).
Your opinion of the Slashdot response is wrong. I predict that if a company set itself up, which hosted music files, where all of them were infringing copyrights, and charged for access, not only would this get shut down immediately, but there would be little sympathy for the site from Slashdot readers.
Or what about porn that involves some 17 year old?
Strange but true: In the UK, it's legal to shag a 17 year old, but now as soon as you take a photo, you're guilty of making and possessing child porn (the 2003 Sexual Offences Act bizarrely raised the age for appearing in photos from 16 to 18, despite the age of consent remaining at 16 where it as always been).
All of this is very wrong, but still, I'm pretty sure that without prior history photoshopped pictures will not land you in jail in the UK.
o graph_of_a_child : "If the impression conveyed by a pseudo-photograph is that the person shown is a child, the pseudo-photograph shall be treated for all purposes of this Act as showing a child and so shall a pseudo-photograph where the predominant impression conveyed is that the person shown is a child notwithstanding that some of the physical characteristics shown are those of an adult."
This guy was a previous sex offender, but nonetheless, fake child porn pictures are treated equivalent to actual child porn pictures. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indecent_pseudo-phot
I don't know if a non-previous-sex-offender has been sent to prison for such an act - but the law as it stands suggest that you could be sent to prison (given that downloading or creating child porn can get you sent to prison without prior history).
The worst about all this is, that it has never actually been shown that CP is bad. Or at least, that it is any worse than the adult version.
t m .
This is particularly the case in the UK, where now, even fake sexual images of child are illegal. Yes, it's illegal to make images of women look younger, even if you have no intent to distribute these images: http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/england/tees/4776123.s
Basically, liking women with small breasts, shaved pussy and school uniforms is a crime in the UK, and considered equivalent to raping babies, irrespective of any harm actually done. This undermines any attempt to actually combat genuine crimes of child abuse.