Was it ruled illegal because it was considered a public performance, or for some other reason?
Public performance -- but it was a single district judge from Hollywood's home district. I don't think his decision is reconcilable with the Cablevision decision, but that was a different circuit.
I wrote the fine code, YOU write the fine manual. Do I look like a tech writer? No, I do not. (They generally dress better but are more disheveled, which may have to do with the contents of their hip flask)
He argues that copyright protection holds regardless of the technological means used to engage in an action which constitutes infringement, which is true as far as it goes. He further argues that Aereo is committing infringement and claiming it's not because of mere technological details, and there he's on shakier ground.
But actually his argument fell apart a bit earlier than his discussion of Aereo, when he disputes the Cablevision decision:
To be consistent with that entirely correct analysis, if, instead of a subscriber sending an electronic instruction to Cablevision or Aereo to make a copy by pressing a âoerecordâ button, the customer had sent an email to one of their employees with instructions to make a copy and transmit a performance, there would be no question as to the direct liability of Cablevision or Aereo. Copyright liability should not turn on minor technical features as to whether âoerecordâ instructions are communicated by verbal commands, pressing a button, sending an email or as a result of automated functions.
I am sorry, Mr. Oman, but that is not a "minor technical feature". My giving instructions to a machine and my giving instructions to a human being are a very different thing. The human being can make a choice, he can say "Mr. Russotto, to make that copy would be an infringement of copyright and I will not do so". The machine is a machine, it does what it's told, and direct liability is rightly placed on the person who told it to do something.
Best I can tell, Aereo is claiming its retransmissions do not amount to public performance because each individual is getting his own transmission. That is, it's not one public performance but many private ones. This is indeed splitting hairs, but since when has the law been opposed to splitting hairs?
17 USC 101 is quite clear that it does not matter "whether the members of the public capable of receiving the performance or display receive it in the same place or in separate places and at the same time or at different times." However, it does matter whether there is one performance or many; if I set up a booth where one person can view a DVD, it's not a public performance if 100 people view the same DVD in sequence; it's 100 private performances. Similarly, if I have 100 such booths with 100 such (identical) DVDs and everyone watches them at once, it's still 100 private performances. However, if I rig up one DVD player to play one DVD to all those booths, it's a public performance.
First, let me start by saying that from reading the comments so far, a vast majority view this as something trivial and meaningless.
Because to most of us, it is meaningless.
When did we lose the capability to sympathize with the families of those affected?
After about the 16 millionth time someone tried to gain advantage by playing on that sympathy.
Someone reached a breaking point, did something bad, and gave up. It is horrible, and we have all been in a position similar, and while all of us here exist because we didn't give up, we should show no superiority over those that do.
Why? We're demonstrably superior in that respect at least.
Hey, maybe those people were just pissed off at society taking their contributions and treating them like dirt, and decided to go on strike in a rather final way. If that's the case, trying to stop the suicide is just strikebreaking.
Turing particularly got the short end of the stick; Van Gogh famously sold only one painting in his lifetime, not counting "sales" to his brother. He also ate his paint and likely wouldn't have produced what he did if he wasn't crazy already.
Ah, so true. Oldest piece of computer history I have is a 4 kilobit core, though many of the bits have broken off of it. Apple II disk controller cards, 4116 memories, random power supplies, various Macs, any number of modems...
The decision of the court in the Pentagon Papers case was
We granted certiorari in these cases in which the United States seeks to enjoin the New York Times and the Washington Post from publishing the contents of a classified study entitled "History of U. S. Decision-Making Process on Viet Nam Policy." Post, pp. 942, 943.
"Any system of prior restraints of expression comes to this Court bearing a heavy presumption against its constitutional validity." Bantam Books, Inc. v. Sullivan, 372 U. S. 58, 70 (1963); see also Near v. Minnesota, 283 U. S. 697 (1931). The Government "thus carries a heavy burden of showing justification for the imposition of such a restraint." Organization for a Better Austin v. Keefe, 402 U. S. 415, 419 (1971). The District Court for the Southern District of New York in the New York Times case and the District Court for the District of Columbia and the Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit in the Washington Post case held that the Government had not met that burden. We agree.
The judgment of the Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit is therefore affirmed. The order of the Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit is reversed and the case is remanded with directions to enter a judgment affirming the judgment of the District Court for the Southern District of New York. The stays entered June 25, 1971, by the Court are vacated. The judgments shall issue forthwith.
So ordered.
That's the whole thing. Nothing enabling the government to prosecute for publication. Justice Black's opinion also says nothing about that, nor does Justice Douglas's, nor Justice Brennan's, nor Justice Stewart's. Justice Marshall brings up the question of prosecution, but only to note that the government was not relying on criminal law; he does not state his opinion of such a prosecution. Justice White (with Justice Stewart concurring) says that he could support such a prosecution, but it's dicta, as the laws he mentions were not at issue.
It's called "reckless disregard". He knew the film would create outrage and protests that could endanger others.
The protestors are responsible for their actions, the filmmaker is not. To claim otherwise is to reduce the protestors to the status of mere machines with no moral value whatsoever. If they are mere machines, I suggest we turn them off. If they are not mere machines, they are responsible. If everyone is a machine (including the filmmaker), responsibility is irrelevant
The oft-cited "fire in a crowded theater" analogy postulates a situation where a person cannot -- because of a threatened emergency -- make a rational decision. In that case, the consequences of his forced decision may be attributed to the person falsely claiming an emergency. That simply isn't the case here; the protestors decisions were not forced by circumstance.
The "shouting fire in a crowded theatre" example dates back to 1919. A time when theatres didn't have convenient "break glass" fire alarms all around, and without today's health and safety and buiilding regs, theatres burning down with audiences unable to escape wasn't that uncommon. Back then if someone shouted fire, you'd have been well advised to get the hell out as soon as possible - very much more so than if a fire alarm rang today.
Also, the films themselves were made of nitrocellulose, which is ridiculously flammable.
However, the "fire in a crowded theatre" decision (Schenck v. US) was a bad one.... and it's no longer good law. The current standard is from Brandenburg v. Ohio, the "imminent lawless action" test.
The DMCA is like the Skull of Mondain. You can do a lot of destruction with it, and you can even only destroy bad guys with it if you like. But it's an evil law and you're evil for using it.
Because the whole system is idiotic. It's not like doctors and hospitals have prices for (non-emergency) procedures, tell you what those prices are in advance, tell you what the procedures they will be performing on before in advance, and get agreement on price before doing anything. They don't even do so much as give you an estimate.
No, instead, assuming an insured patient, they do an exam and get a flat fee from you. Then depending on what they did during the exam, they bill for everything they did (according to the standard set of codes) at some totally fictitious rate that maybe one sucker in a million pays. The insurance company or Medicare then looks at what they did (according to the codes), ignores completely the amount they charged, and pays them whatever they, the insurance company or Medicare, feels like paying. So basically, a doctor who doesn't code the most expensive codes he can based on what he did is leaving money on the table for no reason.
you are 100% correct. indictments like this are full of horse shit and red herrings that are completely irrelevant to the case. it makes you wonder sometimes if prosecutors even know the law they are trying to uphold.
They don't care. It's a shotgun indictment; they fire as many charges at him as they can, figuring at least one will hit.
This has the stink of the Craig Neidorf case where Neidorf was accused of stealing a super-secret operation manual worth hundreds of thousands of dollars and capable of giving Neidorf the power to destroy the phone system.... a manual was in fact available to the public for $13.
This little tale of immature daring do is utterly irrelevant. At best, it aspires to be Penthouse letters for nerds.
It's worse than that; read the other "Eric Spiegel" articles at the site. They're apparently all morality plays or cautionary tales, about as credible as the one about the guy who took LSD and stared at the sun.
Rules at my work is dating only across departments. We have many married couples working here, but always different departments and never a direct superior.
Yeah, rules. If you're interested in her and she's interested in you, are the two of you going to let office rules stand in the way? I mean, certainly many people are faithful to their marriage, and some (even today) to religious constraints. But how many people with any passion at all would be faithful to office rules? Not too many.
I've been an embedded systems programmer. Hard real time, you miss this deadline your system fails (didn't kill anyone, just dropped a phone call or missed an alarm, but still hard real time). And quite constrained; one device had 16K of flash and 128 bytes of RAM. I'd like to think I was pretty good at it.
My background: after being rejected from your hoity-toity institution, I went to a humbler school (University of Maryland, College Park) which had a CS program, but no ECE program. In that program, while we did not learn control theory, we did have courses which taught concepts all the way down to the level of logic gates (not how they worked, just to the symbolic level). We wrote a simple compiler, and a simple multitasking operating system in assembler. We also, of course, did all the algorithm analysis and more abstract CS stuff.
My point being that maybe the problem is just that your programs are too specialized; that you can teach people to be good embedded programmers AND good "transformational" programmers. Maybe not; maybe they are separate aptitudes. But I strongly suspect that anyone who can write good complex SQL or good UI code or good data analysis code could be trained to do embedded. But someone who can only write poor hacked-up copypasta SQL or data analysis code or program a UI with a visual toolkit probably could not do embedded at all, simply because it is unforgiving.
My point is that your whole "and is qualified enough..." is not part of it. A lousy professional is still a professional. A code monkey who gets paid to write code is still a professional, even if he cuts and pastes an identical block 10 times rather than write a loop.
Reality is more complex than humans just appearing in one location in Africa? That doesn't really question ANYTHING about the theory, but instead just suggests a refinement.
There are multiple theories that really are different
1) H. Sapiens evolved in Africa, travelled from there, overtaking and outcompeting (or outright killing) previous hominids who earlier left Africa.
2) A mostly-modern H. Sapiens evolved in Africa, travelled from there, and interbred with/absorbed existing hominid populations (by some definitions these were also H. Sapiens) who had earlier left Africa. This one isn't so different, but it is different.
3) Multiregional. Earlier hominids (not H. Sapiens) leave Africa in multiple expansions. These various groups evolve, run into each other, and interbreed, and continue migrating (including back to Africa). H. Sapiens emerges as a product of this global interbreeding and evolution. This is obviously a very different theory.
Evidence of modern humans having some Neanderthal and Denisovan DNA casts a lot of doubt on the first theory.
Dr. Carol Dweck spent much of her career answering the question "Why do some kids seem to excel at school, and others seem to struggle?" Using various controls she developed her somewhat famous "Mindset Theory".
And failed to answer anything, as she concentrated entirely on perception and left reality by the wayside. If you refuse to consider the hypothesis that there are actual inherent aptitudes, it follows that people who have a mindset that they cannot accomplish something are thereby not accomplishing it because of that mindset.
Whereas if you accept the hypothesis that there are actual inherent aptitudes, you might think that people who have a mindset that they cannot accomplish something got that mindset because they attempted to do so and failed utterly.
So when I talk my father through a computing problem and he can't work his way through the next similar one, and then I face the same problem when he walks me through something in differential equations, that gives me a pretty solid clue that the two fields' underpinnings are dissimilar. If they weren't, the insights and approaches to problem solving would be portable.
Perhaps they are portable, and you merely haven't found the reductions.
Even the problems proven to be unsolvable with lambda calculus turn out to be solvable in the practice of computer science. We just move the goal post: find a computable way to get an answer that's "good enough." Indeed, much of the art of computer science lies in intuiting when and how to redefine the problem so that you reach a useful solution
Heuristic solutions are still in the realm of mathematics.
But Calculus? Trigonometry? Geometry? Outside of very specialized portions of computing, these branches of math have no value to computer science at all.
Slashdot Mirror
Public performance -- but it was a single district judge from Hollywood's home district. I don't think his decision is reconcilable with the Cablevision decision, but that was a different circuit.
I wrote the fine code, YOU write the fine manual. Do I look like a tech writer? No, I do not. (They generally dress better but are more disheveled, which may have to do with the contents of their hip flask)
No, it's not "human". It's "polite", under Western standards.
He argues that copyright protection holds regardless of the technological means used to engage in an action which constitutes infringement, which is true as far as it goes. He further argues that Aereo is committing infringement and claiming it's not because of mere technological details, and there he's on shakier ground.
But actually his argument fell apart a bit earlier than his discussion of Aereo, when he disputes the Cablevision decision:
I am sorry, Mr. Oman, but that is not a "minor technical feature". My giving instructions to a machine and my giving instructions to a human being are a very different thing. The human being can make a choice, he can say "Mr. Russotto, to make that copy would be an infringement of copyright and I will not do so". The machine is a machine, it does what it's told, and direct liability is rightly placed on the person who told it to do something.
Best I can tell, Aereo is claiming its retransmissions do not amount to public performance because each individual is getting his own transmission. That is, it's not one public performance but many private ones. This is indeed splitting hairs, but since when has the law been opposed to splitting hairs?
17 USC 101 is quite clear that it does not matter "whether the members of the public capable of receiving the performance or display receive it in the same place or in separate places and at the same time or at different times." However, it does matter whether there is one performance or many; if I set up a booth where one person can view a DVD, it's not a public performance if 100 people view the same DVD in sequence; it's 100 private performances. Similarly, if I have 100 such booths with 100 such (identical) DVDs and everyone watches them at once, it's still 100 private performances. However, if I rig up one DVD player to play one DVD to all those booths, it's a public performance.
Because to most of us, it is meaningless.
After about the 16 millionth time someone tried to gain advantage by playing on that sympathy.
Why? We're demonstrably superior in that respect at least.
Hey, maybe those people were just pissed off at society taking their contributions and treating them like dirt, and decided to go on strike in a rather final way. If that's the case, trying to stop the suicide is just strikebreaking.
Turing particularly got the short end of the stick; Van Gogh famously sold only one painting in his lifetime, not counting "sales" to his brother. He also ate his paint and likely wouldn't have produced what he did if he wasn't crazy already.
Ah, so true. Oldest piece of computer history I have is a 4 kilobit core, though many of the bits have broken off of it. Apple II disk controller cards, 4116 memories, random power supplies, various Macs, any number of modems...
The decision of the court in the Pentagon Papers case was
That's the whole thing. Nothing enabling the government to prosecute for publication. Justice Black's opinion also says nothing about that, nor does Justice Douglas's, nor Justice Brennan's, nor Justice Stewart's. Justice Marshall brings up the question of prosecution, but only to note that the government was not relying on criminal law; he does not state his opinion of such a prosecution. Justice White (with Justice Stewart concurring) says that he could support such a prosecution, but it's dicta, as the laws he mentions were not at issue.
The protestors are responsible for their actions, the filmmaker is not. To claim otherwise is to reduce the protestors to the status of mere machines with no moral value whatsoever. If they are mere machines, I suggest we turn them off. If they are not mere machines, they are responsible. If everyone is a machine (including the filmmaker), responsibility is irrelevant
The oft-cited "fire in a crowded theater" analogy postulates a situation where a person cannot -- because of a threatened emergency -- make a rational decision. In that case, the consequences of his forced decision may be attributed to the person falsely claiming an emergency. That simply isn't the case here; the protestors decisions were not forced by circumstance.
Also, the films themselves were made of nitrocellulose, which is ridiculously flammable.
However, the "fire in a crowded theatre" decision (Schenck v. US) was a bad one.... and it's no longer good law. The current standard is from Brandenburg v. Ohio, the "imminent lawless action" test.
This study funded by the Foundation for Obvious Studies, and will soon be published in the Journal for Obvious and Tautological Results.
In a follow up study, they'll figure out where you work, too.
How soon we forget: New York Times Co. v. United States, 403 U.S. 713 (1971)
The DMCA is like the Skull of Mondain. You can do a lot of destruction with it, and you can even only destroy bad guys with it if you like. But it's an evil law and you're evil for using it.
Because the whole system is idiotic. It's not like doctors and hospitals have prices for (non-emergency) procedures, tell you what those prices are in advance, tell you what the procedures they will be performing on before in advance, and get agreement on price before doing anything. They don't even do so much as give you an estimate.
No, instead, assuming an insured patient, they do an exam and get a flat fee from you. Then depending on what they did during the exam, they bill for everything they did (according to the standard set of codes) at some totally fictitious rate that maybe one sucker in a million pays. The insurance company or Medicare then looks at what they did (according to the codes), ignores completely the amount they charged, and pays them whatever they, the insurance company or Medicare, feels like paying. So basically, a doctor who doesn't code the most expensive codes he can based on what he did is leaving money on the table for no reason.
Actually, you can. Meat.
They don't care. It's a shotgun indictment; they fire as many charges at him as they can, figuring at least one will hit.
This has the stink of the Craig Neidorf case where Neidorf was accused of stealing a super-secret operation manual worth hundreds of thousands of dollars and capable of giving Neidorf the power to destroy the phone system.... a manual was in fact available to the public for $13.
I think the Nazgul are going to have a light snack.
It's worse than that; read the other "Eric Spiegel" articles at the site. They're apparently all morality plays or cautionary tales, about as credible as the one about the guy who took LSD and stared at the sun.
Yeah, rules. If you're interested in her and she's interested in you, are the two of you going to let office rules stand in the way? I mean, certainly many people are faithful to their marriage, and some (even today) to religious constraints. But how many people with any passion at all would be faithful to office rules? Not too many.
I've been an embedded systems programmer. Hard real time, you miss this deadline your system fails (didn't kill anyone, just dropped a phone call or missed an alarm, but still hard real time). And quite constrained; one device had 16K of flash and 128 bytes of RAM. I'd like to think I was pretty good at it.
My background: after being rejected from your hoity-toity institution, I went to a humbler school (University of Maryland, College Park) which had a CS program, but no ECE program. In that program, while we did not learn control theory, we did have courses which taught concepts all the way down to the level of logic gates (not how they worked, just to the symbolic level). We wrote a simple compiler, and a simple multitasking operating system in assembler. We also, of course, did all the algorithm analysis and more abstract CS stuff.
My point being that maybe the problem is just that your programs are too specialized; that you can teach people to be good embedded programmers AND good "transformational" programmers. Maybe not; maybe they are separate aptitudes. But I strongly suspect that anyone who can write good complex SQL or good UI code or good data analysis code could be trained to do embedded. But someone who can only write poor hacked-up copypasta SQL or data analysis code or program a UI with a visual toolkit probably could not do embedded at all, simply because it is unforgiving.
My point is that your whole "and is qualified enough..." is not part of it. A lousy professional is still a professional. A code monkey who gets paid to write code is still a professional, even if he cuts and pastes an identical block 10 times rather than write a loop.
There are multiple theories that really are different
1) H. Sapiens evolved in Africa, travelled from there, overtaking and outcompeting (or outright killing) previous hominids who earlier left Africa.
2) A mostly-modern H. Sapiens evolved in Africa, travelled from there, and interbred with/absorbed existing hominid populations (by some definitions these were also H. Sapiens) who had earlier left Africa. This one isn't so different, but it is different.
3) Multiregional. Earlier hominids (not H. Sapiens) leave Africa in multiple expansions. These various groups evolve, run into each other, and interbreed, and continue migrating (including back to Africa). H. Sapiens emerges as a product of this global interbreeding and evolution. This is obviously a very different theory.
Evidence of modern humans having some Neanderthal and Denisovan DNA casts a lot of doubt on the first theory.
And failed to answer anything, as she concentrated entirely on perception and left reality by the wayside. If you refuse to consider the hypothesis that there are actual inherent aptitudes, it follows that people who have a mindset that they cannot accomplish something are thereby not accomplishing it because of that mindset.
Whereas if you accept the hypothesis that there are actual inherent aptitudes, you might think that people who have a mindset that they cannot accomplish something got that mindset because they attempted to do so and failed utterly.
A professional is someone who gets paid for the job; it matters not how good they are.
Perhaps they are portable, and you merely haven't found the reductions.
Heuristic solutions are still in the realm of mathematics.
Big-O notation comes close to requiring calculus.