How do I register my copyright?
To register a work, you need to submit a completed application form, a non-refundable filing fee of $30, and a non-returnable copy or copies of the work to be registered. See Circular 1, section Registration Procedures.
...and...
HOW TO SECURE A COPYRIGHT Copyright Secured Automatically upon Creation
The way in which copyright protection is secured is frequently misunderstood. No publication or registration or other action in the Copyright Office is required to secure copyright. (See following Note.) There are, however, certain definite advantages to registration. See "Copyright Registration."
Copyright is secured automatically when the work is created, and a work is "created" when it is fixed in a copy or phonorecord for the first time. "Copies" are material objects from which a work can be read or visually perceived either directly or with the aid of a machine or device, such as books, manuscripts, sheet music, film, videotape, or microfilm. "Phonorecords" are material objects embodying fixations of sounds (excluding, by statutory definition, motion picture soundtracks), such as cassette tapes, CDs, or LPs. Thus, for example, a song (the "work") can be fixed in sheet music (" copies") or in phonograph disks (" phonorecords"), or both.
If a work is prepared over a period of time, the part of the work that is fixed on a particular date constitutes the created work as of that date.
and later...
COPYRIGHT REGISTRATION
In general, copyright registration is a legal formality intended to make a public record of the basic facts of a particular copyright. However, registration is not a condition of copyright protection. Even though registration is not a requirement for protection, the copyright law provides several inducements or advantages to encourage copyright owners to make registration. Among these advantages are the following:
Registration establishes a public record of the copyright claim.
Before an infringement suit may be filed in court, registration is necessary for works of U. S. origin.
If made before or within 5 years of publication, registration will establish prima facie evidence in court of the validity of the copyright and of the facts stated in the certificate.
If registration is made within 3 months after publication of the work or prior to an infringement of the work, statutory damages and attorney's fees will be available to the copyright owner in court actions. Otherwise, only an award of actual damages and profits is available to the copyright owner.
Registration allows the owner of the copyright to record the registration with the U. S. Customs Service for protection against the importation of infringing copies. For additional information, request Publication No. 563 "How to Protect Your Intellectual Property Right," from: U.S. Customs Service, P.O. Box 7404, Washington, D.C. 20044. See the U.S. Customs Service Website at www.customs.gov for online publications.
Registration may be made at any time within the life of the copyright. Unlike the law before 1978, when a work has been registered in unpublished form, it is not necessary to make another registration when the work becomes published, although the copyright owner may register the published edition, if desired.
Even though others have clarified the ruling, I think it's worth noting (again?) that the judge did NOT think FAQs were not "copyrightable." In fact, the copy right of any work is automatically bestowed upon the author, but there is a formal procedure as well for registering a copyright.
The judge ruled that there was no copyright infringement. This ruling does not, in any way, imply that FAQs do not deserve copyright protection. It does, however, set the bar reasonably high for proving copyright infringement for a FAQ-style document.
This is a Good Thing. FAQs on vendors'/retailers sites will often have similar information. Think of the thousands of companies that install windows, or who sell nutritional products or cleaning products or pretty much anything manufactured by someone else. Two competitors could reasonably come up with very similar FAQs about that product category and its use, completely independent of each other.
The good news here is that the Court ruled in a reasonable manner, which we might hope will continue when the CBDTPA hits it in a few years...
Take his criteria for a successful disruptive technology. I can't help but observe that the light bulb, a successful innovation if ever there was one, satisfies neither.
It is instructive to note that he indicates there is a success rate, albeit very small (6%), for innovations that do not meet his criteria. Thus, simply finding an example of a success that does not follow his rules does not, by itself, invalidate the rules.
Plus, if I recall correctly, Edison had hundreds of innovations that were commercial flops. So perhaps the 6% rule is right along the proper lines for your example...
"Leveraging"?! Pleeeease... Is it just me, or are all biz-school types these days just far too in love with the euphony of buzzwordiness?
I don't see the problem. Leveraging is a perfectly acceptable word that means using something to gain greater benefit than if you didn't have that thing. (like a lever) Just because something has been used as a buzzword does not eliminate it from the list of useful, valid words.
Give me where to stand, and I will move the earth.
-- Archimedes, expounding on the theoretically limitless power of the lever
Microsoft tends to solve problems by throwing money at them, but if this article is correct, that is a flawed strategy. The excess cash allows them to keep a flawed product on the shelves (e.g. XBox) long past the point where a poorer company would be focusing on improving the product to make it match the customers needs.
Not really. Microsoft is an example of an established company that can essentially build insurmountable barriers to entry by piling up bales of cash. To answer your example: If a non-established, non-disruptive innovator tries to enter the game console market with a product that competes with xbox, the new guy will fail because the market will go with the established company. In the example, the xbox is not a flawed product that is allowed to live on but rather a non-innovative product that keeps non-disruptive innovators out of the game console market.
In this way, Microsoft is not (and really has never been) an innovator. Even with DOS, the technology was not disruptively innovative. Now, their LICENSING deal was a disruptive innovation, and that is what allowed them to instantly move from non-established to established overnight.
The first of two articles on sfgate.com (SF Chronicle) covers the prerelease piracy of this movie (and others) by internet file swapping. It's not heavy handed either way, thank goodness.
The review of the movie is by Mick LaSalle. An excerpt:
No one goes to a "Star Wars" movie for the witty repartee. A more serious flaw is that the story is opaque, despite a script loaded down with exposition. And then there's the movie's atmosphere of super- seriousness -- an aura of here-we-are-making-a-classic -- which hangs over the action like a mildewed blanket.
A lot of the discussion has been around the production of the hydrogen for the fuel cells. An interesting side note: California Solar Center has a weekly new clipping service that, this week, has this article about scientists discovering huge, natural stores of H2 gas. From the article:
LONDON -- Scientists have discovered vast quantities of hydrogen gas, widely regarded as the most promising alternative to today's dwindling stocks of fossil
fuels, lying beneath the Earth's crust.
The discovery has stunned energy experts, who believe that it could provide virtually limitless supplies of clean fuel for cars, homes and industry.
Another point about parental involvement is that often, parents aren't properly educated about how to monitor and supervise their kids. Parenting is difficult, folks, and there's no user manual or README file for a kid. And, keeping this study in mind, many of the parents who think they're good at it actually are not.
So, what perhaps would have been a good suggestion to the legislators, to ease their boredom, would be the establishment of a federal department or program that would help educate parents on how to monitor their kids's usage of the internet. Proactive help, not reactionary restriction.
My 12-year-old neighbor had one of her friends over yesterday and was playing with my 5-year-old in the yard. I asked her about chatting online. She said, "We're always really careful not to go to those bad places on line."
Even though she was just a neighbor, I felt proud of her savvy.
Then her friend "Alex" spoke up: "You know, I was on the Disney site and saw a listing of places not to go because those places would have like subversive ideas and people I shouldn't talk to. I mean, 'slashdot' is such a cute name. Who would have known it was filled with criminals and perverts?"
Re:Artistic and Theft are not mutually exclusive
on
Mashed-Up Music
·
· Score: 2
The song has been combined with another song, creating a new and different work...
Legally, that is not a "new and different work." It is a "derivative work." If you search uspto.gov you will find this page: http://www.uspto.gov/web/offices/com/doc/ipnii/ipn ii.txt, which is about intellectual property rights. It includes the following text:
A derivative work is a work "based upon"
one or more preexisting works.112 A derivative
work is created when one or more preexisting
works is "recast, transformed, or adapted"
into a new work, such as when a novel is used
as the basis of a movie or when a drawing is
transformed into a sculpture.113 Translations,
musical arrangements and abridgments are
types of derivative works.
You can not create a derivative work without the express permission of the initial work's author/artist. Pretty clear-cut.
Do all your work in front of a webcam and sell the client a ticket to watch you create open-source software that just happens to meet his exact project needs. This way, you get to thumb your nose at all the self-righteous/.ers who are wailing about "having your cake and eating it too." You get paid for your performance (just like an actor), the client gets his software, and the software is liberated.
And if you didn't realize this was a joke, well... either you need a better sense of humor or I need to work on it and tell it again when it's funny.
Of course, this is true in the advancement of any technology. As adoption becomes more widespread, a small, elite group of experts grows to maintain what's "under the hood." That expression alone is enough to illustrate. Automobiles: who knows how to fix these besides mechanics and serious hobbyists? A/C systems, timing, hydraulic systems, electrical systems, emissions controls...
Though your point is taken. People get dependent on the convenience of technology interfaces. That's why they exist. What evolves is a multitiered group of experts, some of whom can service the deepest, most complex problems, others of whom can only make things work if the tools help them.
When I was on an airplane once, the guy next to me said, "You're in computers? I'm majoring in computers at Florida State. Do you think I should go into Excel or Wordperfect?" I kid you not. That was the end of our discussion (mostly because I hate to talk on airplanes, but...)
As to "quality of education," I think high schools should focus on the basics skills that go into programming: logical approaches to problems, automation of simple tasks, procedural programming, object-oriented concepts. I think they should not get too deep into specifics of things like network admin, web development, etc.--that's better left to the vocational schools and JCs/community colleges/OTJ training. Instead, those make good independent-study project areas for the really motivated students. This way, instruction is kept at an achievable level for instructors, kids get the basics that school should teach them, and they can get "advanced" education through college courses during the summer or at night or via correspondence if they really want/need it.
Many excellent points. In elementary school, however, computers are not widely used for things like writing reports (at least not in the dozen or so classrooms I've seen). Instead, they are used to run educational games and programs focused on certain skills or lessons. High-tech worksheets, letter and number exercises.
The best use for computers in elementary school I've seen was for long-distance communication/collaboration. My stepmom's 5th grade class hooked up via email/message boards to collaborate on various projects; the usage was on the order of a music or art class: pretty much once a week, with structured objectives. And my stepmom's computer literacy? Somewhere around my ability to read/write sanskrit (i.e. nil).
Where I see computers can play a role in elementary school is in promoting diversity and in exposing underprivileged schoolchildren to computers. Thus: The little rich kids who play with computers at home all the time (like most of us here were) collaborate with a poor rural or inner-city classroom on a research project using the internet. The poor kids at the other school who don't even have books or pencilss at home would get the benefit of exposure to computers, hopefully reducing the technology gap between the haves and the have-nots. The rich kids would get a taste of diversity, hopefully encouraged to interact with their sister classroom's kids individually and as a group.
Does this alone justify "computers" in elementary classrooms? Probably not. But if all schools are wired, I don't see why a single linux server couldn't have several dozen thin clients in the classrooms to achieve these types of applications.
If the teacher you rant against is discussing the ethics of licensing, and the conclusion is that certain practices of certain business units is "unethical," then he should not be fired.
There is a fine line between the fringes of "personal politics" and the fringes of "ethics." Somewhere along the line, the people at Microsoft responsible for designing and enforcing these ELUAs learned that either (a) they were acceptably ethical or (b) the ends justify the means or (c) ethics really don't matter in business.
It is the teacher's job to present varying alternatives and facts to the students, and to help the students draw well-reasoned conclusions. If the well-reasoned conclusion happens to coincide with the teacher's own philosophies (e.g. don't kill someone else in anger), should that conclusion NOT be taught because it falls into "personal politics"?
So where do consumers go if they want a complete lack of bias
The Library of Congress.
Sorry to be flip about this, but really, the only "complete lack of bias" is in a listing of titles. Not even a bookstore is unbiased because simply categorizing a book as romance, science fiction, fantasy, etc. labels it with what someone else thought of it.
The trick in life is to find people whos opinions you respect and share recommendations. We all have friends whose opinions we respect, and we rely on them for all kinds of recommendations, from landscape contractors to books to spouses.
Media outlets like the WSJ and the Post serve a similar role. People turn to them for certain information and turn away from them for other information. (E.g. the WSJ does not include the horse racing sheet, unless I'm mistaken)
But it's this exact role that makes me hope these outlets carry both types of lists. One that is biased only by actual sales figures and another that is biased by their editorial bent... both are valuable to me, and side-by-side they are more valuable together.
interesting! I had no idea Scientologists were referred to as "clams" or that the theory went that they evolved from clams. I just like it because of that old expression, "happy as a clam at high tide," an expression which my wife abhors.
Since most people are dull crayons and avoid science fiction...
Clearly you have not read a really good book in a long time. I highly recommend hooking up with some intelligent, well-rounded, non-SF readers and finding out what they've read and giving it a shot. For many years I had time only for trade journals and tech books; recently I went back to real literature and have found it much, much more interesting than nearly all SF or fantasy I have read since the Tolkein/Asimov days.
Perhaps the general populace are "dull crayons" but that's because they're the colorful ones. The sharpest crayon in the box is always the white one...
I, for one, hope that the major newspapers publish both lists.
The benefit of consuming WSJ, NYT, the Post, or any of a host of others is their editorial expertise. Each newspaper has a brand they maintain. Science Fiction is simply not that compatible with their brands. If you want to know about science fiction, do you go to WSJ? Huh, didn't think so. Consumers expect the editorial bent of the paper to affect their content. (Perhaps the moniker "best seller list" is exceptional because it implies statistical rather than anecdotal analysis.)
The new format will be interesting from a sociological perspective. It will provide all kinds of demographic information. Unfortunately, I'm sure the information will be very expensive, so we will probably not benefit beyond the top 10 lists, which will be not all that interesting.
As to why Sci Fi and Fantasy are not taken seriously by the heavy hitters: those categories are, today, formula fiction as much as any thriller or romance is. Go to the "Reference" section of your bookstore. How many "How to Write Science Fiction" books are there? Now, how many "How to Write a Really Good Story" books are there? Sci Fi and Fantasy provide easy gimmicks to let writers off the hook, so the best writing no longer tends to be in them.
A similar thing has happened in TV. Look at any show that starts off really interesting. After a few episodes, people start having exrtraordinary things happening to them: they get shot, things blow up, they get amnesia (and it's prime time, not just daytime TV). That's because it's hard to write really good, creative fiction without using these easy devices. And once the devices were well established, the formula became well known, and its the exceptional writer that now really creates something new in any of these formula categories.
Many developing countries are in very sunny locations. Solar panels are really getting cheaper. For example, plastic solar cells that can be "painted" onto clothing are strong enough to power portable radios. I bet they'd be powerful enough to charge up that battery that runs the LEDs.
A very interesting read about solar is From Space to Earth, which discusses the use of and need for solar power in developing countries.
One thing that is clear is that power in rural areas is greatly needed for things like well pumps; powering reading lights is great, but it would be better used for true necessities. (though light becomes necessary when you need to fix that broken well pump...)
The article is pretty vague on the specifics of what gets taxed. Is a subscription service subject to the VAT? So if someone wanted to subscribe to a web publication, would the tax have to be paid?
If not, then there's a workaround for this tax: Call it a "subscription" to a particular area of a web site where the product is downloadable "for free" by all subscribers to that section.
And if the subscriber is an educational institution, you can charge them a "subscription fee" for every person in the school and get around that pesky per-CPU pricing. Sweet!
Slashdot Mirror
Here are the exact words from the FAQ of the Library of Congress:
...and...
and later...
Even though others have clarified the ruling, I think it's worth noting (again?) that the judge did NOT think FAQs were not "copyrightable." In fact, the copy right of any work is automatically bestowed upon the author, but there is a formal procedure as well for registering a copyright.
The judge ruled that there was no copyright infringement. This ruling does not, in any way, imply that FAQs do not deserve copyright protection. It does, however, set the bar reasonably high for proving copyright infringement for a FAQ-style document.
This is a Good Thing. FAQs on vendors'/retailers sites will often have similar information. Think of the thousands of companies that install windows, or who sell nutritional products or cleaning products or pretty much anything manufactured by someone else. Two competitors could reasonably come up with very similar FAQs about that product category and its use, completely independent of each other.
The good news here is that the Court ruled in a reasonable manner, which we might hope will continue when the CBDTPA hits it in a few years...
someone stole my sig!It is instructive to note that he indicates there is a success rate, albeit very small (6%), for innovations that do not meet his criteria. Thus, simply finding an example of a success that does not follow his rules does not, by itself, invalidate the rules.
Plus, if I recall correctly, Edison had hundreds of innovations that were commercial flops. So perhaps the 6% rule is right along the proper lines for your example...
No, no... he's an investor.
I don't see the problem. Leveraging is a perfectly acceptable word that means using something to gain greater benefit than if you didn't have that thing. (like a lever) Just because something has been used as a buzzword does not eliminate it from the list of useful, valid words.
Give me where to stand, and I will move the earth.
-- Archimedes, expounding on the theoretically limitless power of the lever
Not really. Microsoft is an example of an established company that can essentially build insurmountable barriers to entry by piling up bales of cash. To answer your example: If a non-established, non-disruptive innovator tries to enter the game console market with a product that competes with xbox, the new guy will fail because the market will go with the established company. In the example, the xbox is not a flawed product that is allowed to live on but rather a non-innovative product that keeps non-disruptive innovators out of the game console market.
In this way, Microsoft is not (and really has never been) an innovator. Even with DOS, the technology was not disruptively innovative. Now, their LICENSING deal was a disruptive innovation, and that is what allowed them to instantly move from non-established to established overnight.
The first of two articles on sfgate.com (SF Chronicle) covers the prerelease piracy of this movie (and others) by internet file swapping. It's not heavy handed either way, thank goodness.
The review of the movie is by Mick LaSalle. An excerpt:
A lot of the discussion has been around the production of the hydrogen for the fuel cells. An interesting side note: California Solar Center has a weekly new clipping service that, this week, has this article about scientists discovering huge, natural stores of H2 gas. From the article:
Excellently stated.
Another point about parental involvement is that often, parents aren't properly educated about how to monitor and supervise their kids. Parenting is difficult, folks, and there's no user manual or README file for a kid. And, keeping this study in mind, many of the parents who think they're good at it actually are not.
So, what perhaps would have been a good suggestion to the legislators, to ease their boredom, would be the establishment of a federal department or program that would help educate parents on how to monitor their kids's usage of the internet. Proactive help, not reactionary restriction.
My 12-year-old neighbor had one of her friends over yesterday and was playing with my 5-year-old in the yard. I asked her about chatting online. She said, "We're always really careful not to go to those bad places on line."
Even though she was just a neighbor, I felt proud of her savvy.
Then her friend "Alex" spoke up: "You know, I was on the Disney site and saw a listing of places not to go because those places would have like subversive ideas and people I shouldn't talk to. I mean, 'slashdot' is such a cute name. Who would have known it was filled with criminals and perverts?"
Legally, that is not a "new and different work." It is a "derivative work." If you search uspto.gov you will find this page: http://www.uspto.gov/web/offices/com/doc/ipnii/ipn ii.txt, which is about intellectual property rights. It includes the following text:
You can not create a derivative work without the express permission of the initial work's author/artist. Pretty clear-cut.
Do all your work in front of a webcam and sell the client a ticket to watch you create open-source software that just happens to meet his exact project needs. This way, you get to thumb your nose at all the self-righteous /.ers who are wailing about "having your cake and eating it too." You get paid for your performance (just like an actor), the client gets his software, and the software is liberated.
And if you didn't realize this was a joke, well... either you need a better sense of humor or I need to work on it and tell it again when it's funny.
Of course, this is true in the advancement of any technology. As adoption becomes more widespread, a small, elite group of experts grows to maintain what's "under the hood." That expression alone is enough to illustrate. Automobiles: who knows how to fix these besides mechanics and serious hobbyists? A/C systems, timing, hydraulic systems, electrical systems, emissions controls...
Though your point is taken. People get dependent on the convenience of technology interfaces. That's why they exist. What evolves is a multitiered group of experts, some of whom can service the deepest, most complex problems, others of whom can only make things work if the tools help them.
When I was on an airplane once, the guy next to me said, "You're in computers? I'm majoring in computers at Florida State. Do you think I should go into Excel or Wordperfect?" I kid you not. That was the end of our discussion (mostly because I hate to talk on airplanes, but...)
As to "quality of education," I think high schools should focus on the basics skills that go into programming: logical approaches to problems, automation of simple tasks, procedural programming, object-oriented concepts. I think they should not get too deep into specifics of things like network admin, web development, etc.--that's better left to the vocational schools and JCs/community colleges/OTJ training. Instead, those make good independent-study project areas for the really motivated students. This way, instruction is kept at an achievable level for instructors, kids get the basics that school should teach them, and they can get "advanced" education through college courses during the summer or at night or via correspondence if they really want/need it.
Many excellent points. In elementary school, however, computers are not widely used for things like writing reports (at least not in the dozen or so classrooms I've seen). Instead, they are used to run educational games and programs focused on certain skills or lessons. High-tech worksheets, letter and number exercises.
The best use for computers in elementary school I've seen was for long-distance communication/collaboration. My stepmom's 5th grade class hooked up via email/message boards to collaborate on various projects; the usage was on the order of a music or art class: pretty much once a week, with structured objectives. And my stepmom's computer literacy? Somewhere around my ability to read/write sanskrit (i.e. nil).
Where I see computers can play a role in elementary school is in promoting diversity and in exposing underprivileged schoolchildren to computers. Thus: The little rich kids who play with computers at home all the time (like most of us here were) collaborate with a poor rural or inner-city classroom on a research project using the internet. The poor kids at the other school who don't even have books or pencilss at home would get the benefit of exposure to computers, hopefully reducing the technology gap between the haves and the have-nots. The rich kids would get a taste of diversity, hopefully encouraged to interact with their sister classroom's kids individually and as a group.
Does this alone justify "computers" in elementary classrooms? Probably not. But if all schools are wired, I don't see why a single linux server couldn't have several dozen thin clients in the classrooms to achieve these types of applications.
Ethics plays a role in every classroom.
If the teacher you rant against is discussing the ethics of licensing, and the conclusion is that certain practices of certain business units is "unethical," then he should not be fired.
There is a fine line between the fringes of "personal politics" and the fringes of "ethics." Somewhere along the line, the people at Microsoft responsible for designing and enforcing these ELUAs learned that either (a) they were acceptably ethical or (b) the ends justify the means or (c) ethics really don't matter in business.
It is the teacher's job to present varying alternatives and facts to the students, and to help the students draw well-reasoned conclusions. If the well-reasoned conclusion happens to coincide with the teacher's own philosophies (e.g. don't kill someone else in anger), should that conclusion NOT be taught because it falls into "personal politics"?
http://www.linux.org/groups/
The Library of Congress.
Sorry to be flip about this, but really, the only "complete lack of bias" is in a listing of titles. Not even a bookstore is unbiased because simply categorizing a book as romance, science fiction, fantasy, etc. labels it with what someone else thought of it.
The trick in life is to find people whos opinions you respect and share recommendations. We all have friends whose opinions we respect, and we rely on them for all kinds of recommendations, from landscape contractors to books to spouses.
Media outlets like the WSJ and the Post serve a similar role. People turn to them for certain information and turn away from them for other information. (E.g. the WSJ does not include the horse racing sheet, unless I'm mistaken)
But it's this exact role that makes me hope these outlets carry both types of lists. One that is biased only by actual sales figures and another that is biased by their editorial bent... both are valuable to me, and side-by-side they are more valuable together.
interesting! I had no idea Scientologists were referred to as "clams" or that the theory went that they evolved from clams. I just like it because of that old expression, "happy as a clam at high tide," an expression which my wife abhors.
WTF?
Clearly you have not read a really good book in a long time. I highly recommend hooking up with some intelligent, well-rounded, non-SF readers and finding out what they've read and giving it a shot. For many years I had time only for trade journals and tech books; recently I went back to real literature and have found it much, much more interesting than nearly all SF or fantasy I have read since the Tolkein/Asimov days.
Perhaps the general populace are "dull crayons" but that's because they're the colorful ones. The sharpest crayon in the box is always the white one...
No, no... the assumption was that because you read slashdot, you don't read the Washington Post.
I, for one, hope that the major newspapers publish both lists.
The benefit of consuming WSJ, NYT, the Post, or any of a host of others is their editorial expertise. Each newspaper has a brand they maintain. Science Fiction is simply not that compatible with their brands. If you want to know about science fiction, do you go to WSJ? Huh, didn't think so. Consumers expect the editorial bent of the paper to affect their content. (Perhaps the moniker "best seller list" is exceptional because it implies statistical rather than anecdotal analysis.)
The new format will be interesting from a sociological perspective. It will provide all kinds of demographic information. Unfortunately, I'm sure the information will be very expensive, so we will probably not benefit beyond the top 10 lists, which will be not all that interesting.
As to why Sci Fi and Fantasy are not taken seriously by the heavy hitters: those categories are, today, formula fiction as much as any thriller or romance is. Go to the "Reference" section of your bookstore. How many "How to Write Science Fiction" books are there? Now, how many "How to Write a Really Good Story" books are there? Sci Fi and Fantasy provide easy gimmicks to let writers off the hook, so the best writing no longer tends to be in them.
A similar thing has happened in TV. Look at any show that starts off really interesting. After a few episodes, people start having exrtraordinary things happening to them: they get shot, things blow up, they get amnesia (and it's prime time, not just daytime TV). That's because it's hard to write really good, creative fiction without using these easy devices. And once the devices were well established, the formula became well known, and its the exceptional writer that now really creates something new in any of these formula categories.
naw... they'll just steal it.
Many developing countries are in very sunny locations. Solar panels are really getting cheaper. For example, plastic solar cells that can be "painted" onto clothing are strong enough to power portable radios. I bet they'd be powerful enough to charge up that battery that runs the LEDs.
A very interesting read about solar is From Space to Earth, which discusses the use of and need for solar power in developing countries.
One thing that is clear is that power in rural areas is greatly needed for things like well pumps; powering reading lights is great, but it would be better used for true necessities. (though light becomes necessary when you need to fix that broken well pump...)
The article is pretty vague on the specifics of what gets taxed. Is a subscription service subject to the VAT? So if someone wanted to subscribe to a web publication, would the tax have to be paid?
If not, then there's a workaround for this tax: Call it a "subscription" to a particular area of a web site where the product is downloadable "for free" by all subscribers to that section.
And if the subscriber is an educational institution, you can charge them a "subscription fee" for every person in the school and get around that pesky per-CPU pricing. Sweet!