Except that they're not a "Robin Hood" because the people they're giving to aren't exactly the oppressed and poor.
All they're doing is undermining those who legitimately seek fairer copyright laws by giving industry groups more ammunition for their own cause.
They aren't undermining such people, because they haven't a chance anyway. At this point, there are three "mainstream" positions about copyright:
1) The default, status quo position 2) The RIAA/MPAA "Eternal copyright which covers all possible uses" position 3) The "reasonable" middle ground (sometimes espoused by the RIAA and MPAA) which says that copyright just has to be made a little bit stronger than it is now.
Given this situation (which has existed for some time), any change to the system will be for the worse. Copyright will get longer, it will get stronger. If the RIAA can't get "making available" in the courts, it will go to the legislature to get this "loophole" plugged. If they can't get the broadcast flag via the regulatory process, they'll get it in Congress (and if not this one, the next one). And as soon as they've gotten that each addition, the three positions above re-adjust.
The Pirate Bay says "fuck all that", operates completely without regard to copyright law, and so long as they get away with it, undermine the system. To object to them is to support copyright law, and therefore one of those three "mainstream" positions.
Murder's a pretty simple issue compared to copyright. I don't know about the Swedish legal system, but if the prosecution dropped 4000 pages of paperwork on a defendant right before some deadline in the US system, the defendant's lawyers would ask the judge for more time, and get it (unless the fix was in).
Car locks, home locks, e-mail accounts, and computer firewalls all differ greatly from media DRM in (at least) one important way: Not one of the security models used in his analogy depends on giving the key to the potential attacker.
Here's a second critical difference: Breaking the lock on one physical item nets you one physical item. Breaking the protection on a copy-protected work nets you as many copies of that work as you care to make.
And a third difference: Sometimes breaking the copy-protection on a work allows you to copy many other works as well.
If breaking one auto lock gave a thief access to every car of that model, and perhaps every car of that model year, they'd be pretty useless. Such is copy protection.
...just pick the shopping card displaying the Blue Screen of Death.
Actually, given how shopping carts are treated (banged around the parking lot, slammed around by the cart-pushers, left in the rain, cleaned with a high-pressure hose), I suspect quite a few of these will be broken shortly after introduction.
So how much did Andy Warhol pay Campbell's Soup to make those images?
The list you linked to is of organizations who have thuggish lawyers who in many cases go beyond the law. US copyright protection for architectural works is fairly recent (more recent than the Chrysler Building, certainly) and does not apply to 2-dimensional photographs taken from public property.
The use of trademark as a kind of super-copyright which never expires goes far beyond what the law actually specifies. This covers most of the items on the list.
It's not possible to obtain copyright by implied contract. So the various cases where "personal photography is allowed but commercial photography forbidden" by policy of the place where the picture was taken would not prevent anyone from later publishing (for profit) the pictures they took there.
Design patents do not prohibit photographs of the work covered by the design.
The only consolation is that the model makers are generally foreign and that the royalties are levied on the worldwide market.
Read: The model makers are generally foreign and would flip the local equivalent of the bird in the general direction of Boeing or MDD, if they gave it any thought at all, which they don't. All those Chinese companies making scale models of US aircraft aren't paying a dime in royalties. Probably every once in a while Boeing or MDD gets some of them stopped in Customs, but most of them just fly in under the radar.
I guess it's not surprising for a lawyer, but you have a lot more faith in the legal system than I do. As far as I can tell, in most cases the courts decide the prevailing party first (based on their own prejudices), and work backwards from that to the facts in order to get their argument. The exceptions (like the Miranda case) are, well, exceptional. So in this case, where the Big Kahuna Copyright Holder's Representative is going against the gawd-darn thief who just wants music for free, the court is going to want to rule for the RIAA. If you point out that the law requires that there must be a direct infringement before any secondary infringement claims can be sustained, well, the court will just carve out an exception to that doctrine. Probably using the same language the RIAA uses -- right from the plaintiff's arguments into the decision, just like the Verizon case in the District court or in the Blizzard v. bnetd case.
It's fun you mention Atanasoff. I just shows a trend that is even getting worse these days in the USA : Atanasoff was Bulgarian.
Only if being born in New York and growing up in NY and Florida makes one Bulgarian. His father (also John Atanasoff, some sources have Ivan -- perhaps he anglicized his name when he immigrated) was Bulgarian, but he was a natural-born American.
These day the tendency is even getting worse : more and more foreign brain go in the USA to obtain PhDs and other academic achievement, whereas the US government is fucking-up it's own school system (see the "No More Teaching Evolution" fiasco mentioned on/. a couple of gays ago).
The US primary and secondary school system is fucked up, but the situation is nothing new -- the Scopes trial was in 1925, and Scopes lost. Importing talent is one of the ways the US has kept ahead for so many years. Now with much the rest of the world being comparatively less fucked up than it was e.g. during the Cold War, we're likely to lose that particular advantage.
And Americans mostly did invent the Internet,
CERN (Geneva, Switzerland) - designers of the WWW, the internet as Joe-6 pack knows it.
Just because Joe Six-Pack is ignorant doesn't mean the rest of us have to be. If you go by Joe Six-Pack rules, then Douglas Aircraft Company invented the airplane, too.
just google for "Aluminum Shortage" and take a look at the results
Aluminum shortage? Brought to you by the same people who if shown the Sahara desert would claim there's a silicon shortage, right?
Actually, googling for "Aluminum Shortage" reveals that the shortage was of production capacity, not ore. It's over.
As a civilisation we are facing Peak Everything a century of resource decline in the face of population expansion.
And what makes now different from 1798 (Malthus's "An Essay on the Principle of Population"), or 1968 (Erlich's "The Population Bomb") or 1974 (The Club of Rom's "Mankind at the Turning Point")?
The RIAA member companies can't use the public display right; it does not apply to sound recordings. By "musical works" the statute is referring to the music's composition and arrangement.
Courts can change their minds on that, given enough impetus.
Today's courts are generally pro-authority; the 2600 decision and the Blizzard v. bnetd decision underscore that. The RIAA has the patina of authority, and the to the court the defendants look like crooks trying to wiggle out on a technicality. Arguing fine legal points like "no direct infringement occurred" is likely to get a judge to decide to change that doctrine rather than the decision.
Uhh, assuming that's really you, hasn't your lawyer told you not to say anything? It's pretty standard in the case of a lawsuit. Not that I mind, but I'd hate to see you miss out on a piece of their hide due to a Slashdot posting.
You're free to act without copyrights, its completely voluntary. Every suggestion I have seen involves unilaterally removing it from the hands of others.
Yes, I want to take away the stick which is being used to beat me. If my ability to relinquish copyright in my own work (if that ability exists; there is no provision in copyright law for it) is just as good for me as if there were no copyright at all, there wouldn't be any discussion; copyright would be "voluntary" and it would last forever.
If you're referring to the duration and current implementation of copyright then we need to fix it, not remove it.
"We've" been "fixing" it for centuries and each fix has made it worse. Time to stop fixing and start dismantling.
Not even close. The ABC was a non-Turing calculator, not a full computer, and the Zuse Z3 pre-dated it anyway.
Konrad Zuse built the first Turing complete digital solid state computer. I say this as an Englishman, and you know how much we like to claim it as ours.
The Zuse Z3 (1941) did not pre-date the Atanasoff-Berry computer (late 1939), and it was not solid state (being based on telephone switch relays).
From your own cited article: "Said Judge Lowell, in rendering his famous decision: 'A century of Reis would never have produced a speaking telephone by mere improvement of construction. It was left for Bell to discover that the failure was due not to workmanship but to the principle which was adopted as the basis of what had to be done. "
(Bell, of course, was not an American in any case, having been born in Scotland and emigrated to Canada, so it's not clear why you want to knock him down)
Always what will happen is the rate at which new works are produced will drop (significantly, most likely) but never cease. And there's no reason for this drop to be forced.
Even if it the first part is true, it would be worth it. Because we are living the alternative.
Agreed, it is insane. But blatantly violating copyrights like we see today does nothing to correct it. On the contrary, it gives them ammunition to use against us.
What, so we should obey the insanity while waiting for the laws to change? Sorry, but unlike copyright, I _am_ going to expire, long before the laws become more reasonable.
But the use of apostrophes with initialisms like "learn your ABC's and "mind your P's and Q's" is now so universal as to be acceptable in almost any context.
The term "to authorize" is insufficient to cover contributory infringement as it's used today. Consider the Betamax case, which almost killed the consumer VCR in its infancy. If the question was merely whether Sony, by selling a video cassette recorder, "authorized" the reproduction of copyrighted materials, it certainly wouldn't have gone as far as it did. Furthermore, the court in that case even described the tort of contributory infringement as "nonstatutory".
The law is 17 USC 602(a). But you're right, it doesn't apply to a Canadian carrying the work in, as there's a specific personal use exception for that which I hadn't checked for.
In the US, the way it works is that if the copy was acquired legally, then it is legal to import for personal use, but not for resale.
The way it works is that if the copy was authorized by the copyright owner in that other country, it is legal to import (and to resell). That was the holding in 523 U.S. 135 (1998). This does not apply to unauthorized copies which were legal in the other country, because the case was about the doctrine of "copyright exhaustion", not about whether the copy was legal.
The personal use exemption in 17 USC 602(a) is broad enough to allow even pirated copies to be imported for personal use, but the relevant regulations don't reflect that.
Funny thing is, I have a scientific interest in these subjects, the chemistry and physics behind food is fascinating, but I would like to see this chemistry and physics used to make more "honest" food, with less additives, instead of more "cheap" food.
That's close to a logical contradiction. Food chemistry can be used to make cheaper food, better food, or even better and cheaper food. But by definition just about anything which comes out of it will be an additive. True, they can also come up with techniques to use natural substances together to get the same effect, but is this really better?
Physics, now, that has some possibilities. Invent the stasis box and a lot of preservatives can just go away.
Most, nearly all, of the problems with re-freezing come due to the defrost cycles of automatic cycle residential freezers.
Perhaps, but I'm willing to accept that if I don't eat the ice cream quickly it's going to turn icy. Particularly since dragging my freezer outside to defrost every few months would just suck. But when I get ice cream from the store that's icy already, it ain't my freezer's fault.
It is also worth noting that the protein is synthesized in a lab, not extracted from insects/eels/whatever else that uses it, so it's not like you're eating a bug or something.
Yeah, but if they got it from the insect/eel/whatever, they could still call it "all natural", like locust bean gum, carrageenan, polysorbate 80, etc.
These stories are getting old. We've been hearing about stuff like this for years now. At some point there has to be a truce.
No, there doesn't. And it's like the middle east; if there is a truce, it will only be until one side sees an advantage in breaking it.
I'm not sure what the answer is, but perhaps it is time for the entire middle tier (the record labels) to get ripped out of the equation and for the RIAA to be dissolved.
That's a good idea, but that's not a truce; that's victory.
Slashdot Mirror
They aren't undermining such people, because they haven't a chance anyway. At this point, there are three "mainstream" positions about copyright:
1) The default, status quo position
2) The RIAA/MPAA "Eternal copyright which covers all possible uses" position
3) The "reasonable" middle ground (sometimes espoused by the RIAA and MPAA) which says that copyright just has to be made a little bit stronger than it is now.
Given this situation (which has existed for some time), any change to the system will be for the worse. Copyright will get longer, it will get stronger. If the RIAA can't get "making available" in the courts, it will go to the legislature to get this "loophole" plugged. If they can't get the broadcast flag via the regulatory process, they'll get it in Congress (and if not this one, the next one). And as soon as they've gotten that each addition, the three positions above re-adjust.
The Pirate Bay says "fuck all that", operates completely without regard to copyright law, and so long as they get away with it, undermine the system. To object to them is to support copyright law, and therefore one of those three "mainstream" positions.
Murder's a pretty simple issue compared to copyright. I don't know about the Swedish legal system, but if the prosecution dropped 4000 pages of paperwork on a defendant right before some deadline in the US system, the defendant's lawyers would ask the judge for more time, and get it (unless the fix was in).
Here's a second critical difference: Breaking the lock on one physical item nets you one physical item. Breaking the protection on a copy-protected work nets you as many copies of that work as you care to make.
And a third difference: Sometimes breaking the copy-protection on a work allows you to copy many other works as well.
If breaking one auto lock gave a thief access to every car of that model, and perhaps every car of that model year, they'd be pretty useless. Such is copy protection.
...just pick the shopping card displaying the Blue Screen of Death.
Actually, given how shopping carts are treated (banged around the parking lot, slammed around by the cart-pushers, left in the rain, cleaned with a high-pressure hose), I suspect quite a few of these will be broken shortly after introduction.
So how much did Andy Warhol pay Campbell's Soup to make those images?
The list you linked to is of organizations who have thuggish lawyers who in many cases go beyond the law. US copyright protection for architectural works is fairly recent (more recent than the Chrysler Building, certainly) and does not apply to 2-dimensional photographs taken from public property.
The use of trademark as a kind of super-copyright which never expires goes far beyond what the law actually specifies. This covers most of the items on the list.
It's not possible to obtain copyright by implied contract. So the various cases where "personal photography is allowed but commercial photography forbidden" by policy of the place where the picture was taken would not prevent anyone from later publishing (for profit) the pictures they took there.
Design patents do not prohibit photographs of the work covered by the design.
Read: The model makers are generally foreign and would flip the local equivalent of the bird in the general direction of Boeing or MDD, if they gave it any thought at all, which they don't. All those Chinese companies making scale models of US aircraft aren't paying a dime in royalties. Probably every once in a while Boeing or MDD gets some of them stopped in Customs, but most of them just fly in under the radar.
I guess it's not surprising for a lawyer, but you have a lot more faith in the legal system than I do. As far as I can tell, in most cases the courts decide the prevailing party first (based on their own prejudices), and work backwards from that to the facts in order to get their argument. The exceptions (like the Miranda case) are, well, exceptional. So in this case, where the Big Kahuna Copyright Holder's Representative is going against the gawd-darn thief who just wants music for free, the court is going to want to rule for the RIAA. If you point out that the law requires that there must be a direct infringement before any secondary infringement claims can be sustained, well, the court will just carve out an exception to that doctrine. Probably using the same language the RIAA uses -- right from the plaintiff's arguments into the decision, just like the Verizon case in the District court or in the Blizzard v. bnetd case.
Only if being born in New York and growing up in NY and Florida makes one Bulgarian. His father (also John Atanasoff, some sources have Ivan -- perhaps he anglicized his name when he immigrated) was Bulgarian, but he was a natural-born American.
The US primary and secondary school system is fucked up, but the situation is nothing new -- the Scopes trial was in 1925, and Scopes lost. Importing talent is one of the ways the US has kept ahead for so many years. Now with much the rest of the world being comparatively less fucked up than it was e.g. during the Cold War, we're likely to lose that particular advantage.
Just because Joe Six-Pack is ignorant doesn't mean the rest of us have to be. If you go by Joe Six-Pack rules, then Douglas Aircraft Company invented the airplane, too.
The RIAA member companies can't use the public display right; it does not apply to sound recordings. By "musical works" the statute is referring to the music's composition and arrangement.
Courts can change their minds on that, given enough impetus.
Today's courts are generally pro-authority; the 2600 decision and the Blizzard v. bnetd decision underscore that. The RIAA has the patina of authority, and the to the court the defendants look like crooks trying to wiggle out on a technicality. Arguing fine legal points like "no direct infringement occurred" is likely to get a judge to decide to change that doctrine rather than the decision.
Uhh, assuming that's really you, hasn't your lawyer told you not to say anything? It's pretty standard in the case of a lawsuit. Not that I mind, but I'd hate to see you miss out on a piece of their hide due to a Slashdot posting.
Yes, I want to take away the stick which is being used to beat me. If my ability to relinquish copyright in my own work (if that ability exists; there is no provision in copyright law for it) is just as good for me as if there were no copyright at all, there wouldn't be any discussion; copyright would be "voluntary" and it would last forever.
"We've" been "fixing" it for centuries and each fix has made it worse. Time to stop fixing and start dismantling.
>>computer (well, us and the Brits),
>Konrad Zuse?
John Vincent Atanasoff?
>>and the telephone
>Philip Reis?
From your own cited article:
"Said Judge Lowell, in rendering his famous decision: 'A century of Reis would never have produced a speaking telephone by mere improvement of construction. It was left for Bell to discover that the failure was due not to workmanship but to the principle which was adopted as the basis of what had to be done. "
(Bell, of course, was not an American in any case, having been born in Scotland and emigrated to Canada, so it's not clear why you want to knock him down)
Even if it the first part is true, it would be worth it. Because we are living the alternative.
What, so we should obey the insanity while waiting for the laws to change? Sorry, but unlike copyright, I _am_ going to expire, long before the laws become more reasonable.
http://www.wsu.edu/~brians/errors/acronyms.html
The term "to authorize" is insufficient to cover contributory infringement as it's used today. Consider the Betamax case, which almost killed the consumer VCR in its infancy. If the question was merely whether Sony, by selling a video cassette recorder, "authorized" the reproduction of copyrighted materials, it certainly wouldn't have gone as far as it did. Furthermore, the court in that case even described the tort of contributory infringement as "nonstatutory".
The way it works is that if the copy was authorized by the copyright owner in that other country, it is legal to import (and to resell). That was the holding in 523 U.S. 135 (1998). This does not apply to unauthorized copies which were legal in the other country, because the case was about the doctrine of "copyright exhaustion", not about whether the copy was legal.
The personal use exemption in 17 USC 602(a) is broad enough to allow even pirated copies to be imported for personal use, but the relevant regulations don't reflect that.
That's close to a logical contradiction. Food chemistry can be used to make cheaper food, better food, or even better and cheaper food. But by definition just about anything which comes out of it will be an additive. True, they can also come up with techniques to use natural substances together to get the same effect, but is this really better?
Physics, now, that has some possibilities. Invent the stasis box and a lot of preservatives can just go away.
Perhaps, but I'm willing to accept that if I don't eat the ice cream quickly it's going to turn icy. Particularly since dragging my freezer outside to defrost every few months would just suck. But when I get ice cream from the store that's icy already, it ain't my freezer's fault.
Yeah, but if they got it from the insect/eel/whatever, they could still call it "all natural", like locust bean gum, carrageenan, polysorbate 80, etc.