If a conflict of interest exists and someone points it out, you can't (successfully) sue them for defamation. Stating the truth counts as a rock-solid defense.
Apparently this is not the case in Italy though. Maybe we should send the good mayor an hour long looping clip of the scene in "A Few Good Men" where Jack Nicholson rails, "you can't handle the truth!"
The RIAA should have asked him the questions that he was asked in cross examination.
The RIAA lawyers don't know which questions to ask when it comes to technical testimony - finding out exactly what to ask (and which answers can sink your case) is part of the reason they hire an expert in the first place. The fact that he apparently did not tell the attorneys that anyone with a halfway decent understanding of the subject matter would be able to shoot his testimony full of holes speaks volumes, as does the lack of time he admitted to spending on the subject matter presented to him. I can't imagine any lawyer would want to continue on the tack the RIAA did, having been given a decent expert opinion on their evidence.
I learned that TV doesn't represent real life on September 14, 1999, when I looked up and saw the Moon still trundling along its orbit around the earth, apparently having suffered no catastrophic nuclear accident on its far side. I guess Commissioner Simmonds was right when he said there wasn't anything to worry about.
FWIW, he was a civil rights attorney at one point in his life.
However, like many others who profess an interest in preserving the civil rights of those in the U.S., he advocates serious restrictions on the exercise of the *only* civil right that ultimately insures the government's observation of all the others.
What if a site posted SSNs and addresses of everyone they could?
You mean like when local TV station WFTV listed every concealed-carry permit holder in Central Florida on their web site back in 2005? They posted an Excel spreadsheet with the names, addresses, permit numbers, etc. for some 60,000 people (myself included) and encouraged their viewers to "look and see if your neighbor might be carrying". WFTV got a lot of nasty e-mails as did the Florida state government, but ultimately the station didn't suffer any consequences at all for their actions.
My favorite part is how he starts waving around the DMCA without mentioning what specifically is alleged to have infringed, or who the supposed rights-holder is, or any real useful information at all in the context of a DMCA action. As my non-lawyer self recalls, a valid DMCA takedown notice requires that the ISP be given that information, and the owner of the site with the information in question is allowed to dispute the claim. I would think it would also help if the website were actually in the United States and thus subject to U.S. law.
As much web-related entertainment industry crap as Spiegel is involved in (he's the registrant and admin contact for Kevin Federline's website, if that gives you any indication), you'd think he'd have all his ducks in a row and understand how the Internet really works before trying to bully some website operator that's not even in the United States.
You can publish a web service on your Web Server by pushing a button and publish a web form that queries or adds data to database tables without writing any SQL (cough, choke, gag). Of course, then you're stuck with IIS and SQLServer; not the best web or database server products.
And you also have no idea what your code is actually *doing*. These kinds of tools are great time-savers for experienced devs that understand what they're doing and could have done everything by hand anyway, but I see more and more inexperienced programmers that use these kinds features as a crutch and get totally lost when they have to do something without them. I guess it's kind of like the situation a number of years ago where you had people that used Visual Basic but often didn't have the first idea how GDI or anything else in the Win32 SDK worked. And heaven help these people if they have to port their code to a different platform that doesn't abstract the world out from under them.
...the rest of the military takes decades to introduce or retire airframes
Yup, just look at the B-52. It's been flying in one form or another for more than 55 years now, and I'm pretty sure at this time all of the active-duty B-52 pilots are younger than the planes they fly.
If you need more money, consider picking up trash and recycling the aluminum cans...
Or even going on a nostalgia tour. ABBA in particular's got no excuse - the last time they recorded anything new was more than 25 years ago, and these are the same people that turned down a *billion* dollars to do a reunion tour. There are plenty of old bands that continue to tour regularly (the wife insists we see Rick Springfield every year, for instance) to bring in income, maintain interest in their music, and hopefully gain some new fans rather than relying on twisting copyright law in some parasitic assumption that they're owed a living for past glories.
The average output power is 9 joules, not the total power consumption. I'm sure it draws quite a bit more. I've seen lamp-pumped ultraviolet YAG lasers that draw well in excess of a thousand watts of power to produce a 1.5 watt average output because of all the internal losses.
Honestly until we $100 blu ray players at walmart, and blu-ray movies that don't cost 50-75% more than their DVD counterparts, the pickup will be extremely slow even as it becomes possibly the definite standard for high def movies.
"Good enough" is a *very* formidable enemy to have to fight, and for a lot of people (myself included), DVD is good enough now and will be for some time. I'm not even considering the purchase of a high-def player, and will be buying a Blu-Ray drive for the computer only when the drives and media come down to a reasonable price. In the meantime I'm quite content to stay with DVD, and the whole HDCP silliness isn't encouraging a change in that position at all.
The Tolkien Trust does in fact 'enrich' society and is in fact a registered 'trust' linked with many many charites.
That's great for them, but it doesn't have the first thing to do with why copyright exists.
In regards to IP and copyright - how can you suggest that something someone else wrote, drew or imagined should not benefit that persons heirs. How is creative output different from bricks and mortar. I build a house, i die, it goes to my children and so on and so forth through the generations.
It's very simple - the concept of copyright presupposes that expressed ideas belong to society, and I can suggest it because I understand that the public benefit is more important than some misguided sentimental desire for the author's family to mooch off his creation forever. Understanding that creators of said ideas (be they music, writing, inventions. or anything else) need to eat too, society grants those creators a state-backed monopoly on the use of those ideas for a limited period of time in order to encourage them to create more ideas, *for the benefit of society*. Creative output is not comparable to "bricks and mortar" - it's an intangible thing that doesn't have any form until it's fixed in some kind of media, and as such can't be taken away from anyone, unlike a house, car, etc. The law recognizes and backs up this distinction, the bastardized term "intellectual property" notwithstanding.
I turn up at your door from an art concern that wants to mass produce the design as functional headware for smokers. i demand the ashtray as it 'should' now be 'public domain' as she has passed away and give you nothing for it...dont think you'd like that.
The art concern you mention would have every right to mass-produce the ashtray, provided the copyright had expired. They would have no right to take the original ashtray itself - it's tangible property and taking it would be theft in the traditional sense, no different than if they attempted to take my wallet without permission. I had no part in creating the ashtray, so how is it that I'm justified in claiming some nebulous exclusive rights just because my DNA happens to be a bit more similar to the creator's? In any event, there is nothing to keep them from creating exact copies and selling them, and that's exactly the way copyright is SUPPOSED to work.
Surely if an author wanted to write a book based on the characters of another author, then that first author deserves some of the success that may come from the new books. After all, the original author did all the hard work in creating the characters, fleshing them out and getting readers to care about them. Springboarding off that means the second author gets a free pass on some important parts of the book, such as character development.
If the original author is dead, who exactly is harmed by this? If we subscribe to the notion that the author's family deserves a portion of his success even after his death, how do we justify that using the stated purpose of copyright? Without the artificial construct of copyright, the author has zero exclusive rights to his work anyway, and in either event the author's family simply doesn't factor into it.
Let's say the second author wanted to write a sequel to LotR which destroyed parts of the original book. Maybe there's lots of explicit sex scenes, or you find out that the Elves were behind Saruman or whatever. What protection does the original author have to ensure their work isn't bastardised as soon as they die?
Why is the author assumed to have a right to such protection? I'm sure Alexander Borodin would cringe at "Stranger in Paradise", but that wasn't sufficient reason to prevent anyone from recording it, and now many people don't know anything of Borodin's music *except* that tune.
Whatever the eventual outcome of any copyright law reform, it's always good to debate why we have the laws, who they serve and how they could improve
Agreed. If you fall back on the excuse of "because that's how it's always been done" without any kind of critical thought, you end up with lots of bad laws.
But who's to say that someone else couldn't have done something better but hasn't had the opportunity to do so? Tolkien's son is a competent writer, but I'd argue that his books possibly have done as well as they have only because he had an unfair legal advantage over every other writer in the world and thus no competition. He already had a substantial commercial advantage based on his bloodline independent of the quality of his writing ("From the son of the author of LOTR!"), but now no one else that has interesting or different ideas about the fate or history of Middle-earth can express them.
A writer being related by blood (or marriage, for that matter) to another is not a reason to just hand the copyright on the original works to them, IMO, and still defeats the purpose of copyright. Christopher Tolkien has copyrights on his own works, which act to protect his own interests, and he still has a lock on that last name. There's no good reason his father's copyrights should belong to him as well except for those that are nebulously sentimental.
And here ladies and gentlemen, is someone that totally misses the point of copyright.
How is having a copyright on The Lord of the Rings discouraging authors to create new works? The copyright doesn't affect new creativity.
It doesn't? Let's see how far you get trying to publish "Frodo's Adventures with the Anonymous Coward". You can't until the copyright expires, even though your story may be of surpassing quality such that it could become beloved to millions just as the original Ring trilogy did. Let's not forget that Walt Disney would not have been able to build his empire had there not been plenty of existing stories for him to adapt and turn into movies without regard for existing copyrights. Let's also not forget that LOTR itself is a variation on the basic quest story, which has been told in one form or another for thousands of years. Should the descendants of Homer have been able to bring suit against Tolkien years ago?
If I want to write a book, how is stealing content from an existing book creative?
Because that's how the process works - there are *very* few totally original stories out there, LOTR among them. "West Side Story" is a sparkling example that shows how a story almost 400 years old could be adapted and retold in a wholly original manner. Just because you have a lack of imagination is no reason to deny society that which belongs to it.
Copyright should be treated the same as any other material ownership
Why? There's nothing material to be owned. It's an expression of an idea, not property that can be held and used.
And in this case, paying their legal staff to keep it tied up in court forever is likely cheaper than performing on the contract as agreed. Or they could just do what a lot of defendants in small claims cases do - just refuse to pay any court-ordered judgement out-of-hand and rest easy in the knowledge that it can sometimes be practically impossible to force payment.
He's actually been dead a little less than 35 years (September of this year will be 35), but otherwise the rest of your point is spot-on. He's not contributing any more to society and can't possibly benefit from any earnings, so there's no reason to let the copyright continue.
Major entertainment companies have long been of the opinion that the artists who create the products they sell are expendable and interchangable
While the artist that created the product New Line is selling was neither expendable nor interchangeable, after almost 35 years he is still irrevocably dead, and as such is quite unlikely to be writing anything more in the near future anyway. New Line should be getting raked firmly over the coals for attempting to weasel out of performing on a contract, but if copyright law made any sense at all they wouldn't have had to pay a dime to Tolkien's estate to make the movie.
I'm with you 100% there. Copyright is supposed to encourage authors/composers/etc. to create new works to enrich society. Tolkien isn't even enriching the ground he's buried in anymore, so there's *zero* need for a copyright to continue to exist on his works. Copyright is only providing an income stream for his heirs (and New Line) at the expense of society now.
I think that New Line is scummy for their shady accounting practices, but they really should not have had to negotiate for the film rights to begin with.
I already use SPF and it -did- cut down on the spammers that were impersonating my domain.
I wish I could say the same - I still get plenty of crap in my inbox from ISPs that don't check to see if the sender's domain has an SPF record before bouncing spam to me.
Slashdot Mirror
While this might not be entirely amazing, the fact that they did it using the same amount of juice required to light a 100-watt lightbulb, is.
Dad: "That's 100 watts to you and me, Billy"
Billy: "Wow!"
If a conflict of interest exists and someone points it out, you can't (successfully) sue them for defamation. Stating the truth counts as a rock-solid defense.
Apparently this is not the case in Italy though. Maybe we should send the good mayor an hour long looping clip of the scene in "A Few Good Men" where Jack Nicholson rails, "you can't handle the truth!"
Well, until the SWAT team busted through the door, anyway.
The RIAA should have asked him the questions that he was asked in cross examination.
The RIAA lawyers don't know which questions to ask when it comes to technical testimony - finding out exactly what to ask (and which answers can sink your case) is part of the reason they hire an expert in the first place. The fact that he apparently did not tell the attorneys that anyone with a halfway decent understanding of the subject matter would be able to shoot his testimony full of holes speaks volumes, as does the lack of time he admitted to spending on the subject matter presented to him. I can't imagine any lawyer would want to continue on the tack the RIAA did, having been given a decent expert opinion on their evidence.
I learned that TV doesn't represent real life on September 14, 1999, when I looked up and saw the Moon still trundling along its orbit around the earth, apparently having suffered no catastrophic nuclear accident on its far side. I guess Commissioner Simmonds was right when he said there wasn't anything to worry about.
FWIW, he was a civil rights attorney at one point in his life.
However, like many others who profess an interest in preserving the civil rights of those in the U.S., he advocates serious restrictions on the exercise of the *only* civil right that ultimately insures the government's observation of all the others.
What if a site posted SSNs and addresses of everyone they could?
You mean like when local TV station WFTV listed every concealed-carry permit holder in Central Florida on their web site back in 2005? They posted an Excel spreadsheet with the names, addresses, permit numbers, etc. for some 60,000 people (myself included) and encouraged their viewers to "look and see if your neighbor might be carrying". WFTV got a lot of nasty e-mails as did the Florida state government, but ultimately the station didn't suffer any consequences at all for their actions.
My favorite part is how he starts waving around the DMCA without mentioning what specifically is alleged to have infringed, or who the supposed rights-holder is, or any real useful information at all in the context of a DMCA action. As my non-lawyer self recalls, a valid DMCA takedown notice requires that the ISP be given that information, and the owner of the site with the information in question is allowed to dispute the claim. I would think it would also help if the website were actually in the United States and thus subject to U.S. law.
As much web-related entertainment industry crap as Spiegel is involved in (he's the registrant and admin contact for Kevin Federline's website, if that gives you any indication), you'd think he'd have all his ducks in a row and understand how the Internet really works before trying to bully some website operator that's not even in the United States.
You can publish a web service on your Web Server by pushing a button and publish a web form that queries or adds data to database tables without writing any SQL (cough, choke, gag). Of course, then you're stuck with IIS and SQLServer; not the best web or database server products.
And you also have no idea what your code is actually *doing*. These kinds of tools are great time-savers for experienced devs that understand what they're doing and could have done everything by hand anyway, but I see more and more inexperienced programmers that use these kinds features as a crutch and get totally lost when they have to do something without them. I guess it's kind of like the situation a number of years ago where you had people that used Visual Basic but often didn't have the first idea how GDI or anything else in the Win32 SDK worked. And heaven help these people if they have to port their code to a different platform that doesn't abstract the world out from under them.
...the rest of the military takes decades to introduce or retire airframes
Yup, just look at the B-52. It's been flying in one form or another for more than 55 years now, and I'm pretty sure at this time all of the active-duty B-52 pilots are younger than the planes they fly.
If you need more money, consider picking up trash and recycling the aluminum cans...
Or even going on a nostalgia tour. ABBA in particular's got no excuse - the last time they recorded anything new was more than 25 years ago, and these are the same people that turned down a *billion* dollars to do a reunion tour. There are plenty of old bands that continue to tour regularly (the wife insists we see Rick Springfield every year, for instance) to bring in income, maintain interest in their music, and hopefully gain some new fans rather than relying on twisting copyright law in some parasitic assumption that they're owed a living for past glories.
The average output power is 9 joules, not the total power consumption. I'm sure it draws quite a bit more. I've seen lamp-pumped ultraviolet YAG lasers that draw well in excess of a thousand watts of power to produce a 1.5 watt average output because of all the internal losses.
Honestly until we $100 blu ray players at walmart, and blu-ray movies that don't cost 50-75% more than their DVD counterparts, the pickup will be extremely slow even as it becomes possibly the definite standard for high def movies.
"Good enough" is a *very* formidable enemy to have to fight, and for a lot of people (myself included), DVD is good enough now and will be for some time. I'm not even considering the purchase of a high-def player, and will be buying a Blu-Ray drive for the computer only when the drives and media come down to a reasonable price. In the meantime I'm quite content to stay with DVD, and the whole HDCP silliness isn't encouraging a change in that position at all.
The Tolkien Trust does in fact 'enrich' society and is in fact a registered 'trust' linked with many many charites.
That's great for them, but it doesn't have the first thing to do with why copyright exists.
In regards to IP and copyright - how can you suggest that something someone else wrote, drew or imagined should not benefit that persons heirs. How is creative output different from bricks and mortar. I build a house, i die, it goes to my children and so on and so forth through the generations.
It's very simple - the concept of copyright presupposes that expressed ideas belong to society, and I can suggest it because I understand that the public benefit is more important than some misguided sentimental desire for the author's family to mooch off his creation forever. Understanding that creators of said ideas (be they music, writing, inventions. or anything else) need to eat too, society grants those creators a state-backed monopoly on the use of those ideas for a limited period of time in order to encourage them to create more ideas, *for the benefit of society*. Creative output is not comparable to "bricks and mortar" - it's an intangible thing that doesn't have any form until it's fixed in some kind of media, and as such can't be taken away from anyone, unlike a house, car, etc. The law recognizes and backs up this distinction, the bastardized term "intellectual property" notwithstanding.
I turn up at your door from an art concern that wants to mass produce the design as functional headware for smokers. i demand the ashtray as it 'should' now be 'public domain' as she has passed away and give you nothing for it...dont think you'd like that.
The art concern you mention would have every right to mass-produce the ashtray, provided the copyright had expired. They would have no right to take the original ashtray itself - it's tangible property and taking it would be theft in the traditional sense, no different than if they attempted to take my wallet without permission. I had no part in creating the ashtray, so how is it that I'm justified in claiming some nebulous exclusive rights just because my DNA happens to be a bit more similar to the creator's? In any event, there is nothing to keep them from creating exact copies and selling them, and that's exactly the way copyright is SUPPOSED to work.
Surely if an author wanted to write a book based on the characters of another author, then that first author deserves some of the success that may come from the new books. After all, the original author did all the hard work in creating the characters, fleshing them out and getting readers to care about them. Springboarding off that means the second author gets a free pass on some important parts of the book, such as character development.
If the original author is dead, who exactly is harmed by this? If we subscribe to the notion that the author's family deserves a portion of his success even after his death, how do we justify that using the stated purpose of copyright? Without the artificial construct of copyright, the author has zero exclusive rights to his work anyway, and in either event the author's family simply doesn't factor into it.
Let's say the second author wanted to write a sequel to LotR which destroyed parts of the original book. Maybe there's lots of explicit sex scenes, or you find out that the Elves were behind Saruman or whatever. What protection does the original author have to ensure their work isn't bastardised as soon as they die?
Why is the author assumed to have a right to such protection? I'm sure Alexander Borodin would cringe at "Stranger in Paradise", but that wasn't sufficient reason to prevent anyone from recording it, and now many people don't know anything of Borodin's music *except* that tune.
Whatever the eventual outcome of any copyright law reform, it's always good to debate why we have the laws, who they serve and how they could improve
Agreed. If you fall back on the excuse of "because that's how it's always been done" without any kind of critical thought, you end up with lots of bad laws.
But who's to say that someone else couldn't have done something better but hasn't had the opportunity to do so? Tolkien's son is a competent writer, but I'd argue that his books possibly have done as well as they have only because he had an unfair legal advantage over every other writer in the world and thus no competition. He already had a substantial commercial advantage based on his bloodline independent of the quality of his writing ("From the son of the author of LOTR!"), but now no one else that has interesting or different ideas about the fate or history of Middle-earth can express them.
A writer being related by blood (or marriage, for that matter) to another is not a reason to just hand the copyright on the original works to them, IMO, and still defeats the purpose of copyright. Christopher Tolkien has copyrights on his own works, which act to protect his own interests, and he still has a lock on that last name. There's no good reason his father's copyrights should belong to him as well except for those that are nebulously sentimental.
And here ladies and gentlemen, is someone that totally misses the point of copyright.
How is having a copyright on The Lord of the Rings discouraging authors to create new works? The copyright doesn't affect new creativity.
It doesn't? Let's see how far you get trying to publish "Frodo's Adventures with the Anonymous Coward". You can't until the copyright expires, even though your story may be of surpassing quality such that it could become beloved to millions just as the original Ring trilogy did. Let's not forget that Walt Disney would not have been able to build his empire had there not been plenty of existing stories for him to adapt and turn into movies without regard for existing copyrights. Let's also not forget that LOTR itself is a variation on the basic quest story, which has been told in one form or another for thousands of years. Should the descendants of Homer have been able to bring suit against Tolkien years ago?
If I want to write a book, how is stealing content from an existing book creative?
Because that's how the process works - there are *very* few totally original stories out there, LOTR among them. "West Side Story" is a sparkling example that shows how a story almost 400 years old could be adapted and retold in a wholly original manner. Just because you have a lack of imagination is no reason to deny society that which belongs to it.
Copyright should be treated the same as any other material ownership
Why? There's nothing material to be owned. It's an expression of an idea, not property that can be held and used.
And in this case, paying their legal staff to keep it tied up in court forever is likely cheaper than performing on the contract as agreed. Or they could just do what a lot of defendants in small claims cases do - just refuse to pay any court-ordered judgement out-of-hand and rest easy in the knowledge that it can sometimes be practically impossible to force payment.
Btw, isn't it ironic that a movie studio, seemingly very fond of copyrights and keen on apprehending copyrights violations would not pay their fees?
I think a better word would be "hypocritical".
He's actually been dead a little less than 35 years (September of this year will be 35), but otherwise the rest of your point is spot-on. He's not contributing any more to society and can't possibly benefit from any earnings, so there's no reason to let the copyright continue.
Major entertainment companies have long been of the opinion that the artists who create the products they sell are expendable and interchangable
While the artist that created the product New Line is selling was neither expendable nor interchangeable, after almost 35 years he is still irrevocably dead, and as such is quite unlikely to be writing anything more in the near future anyway. New Line should be getting raked firmly over the coals for attempting to weasel out of performing on a contract, but if copyright law made any sense at all they wouldn't have had to pay a dime to Tolkien's estate to make the movie.
I believe the question you meant to ask was, "what kind of retard let this story go live with such an obvious (though innocuous) spelling error?"
I'm with you 100% there. Copyright is supposed to encourage authors/composers/etc. to create new works to enrich society. Tolkien isn't even enriching the ground he's buried in anymore, so there's *zero* need for a copyright to continue to exist on his works. Copyright is only providing an income stream for his heirs (and New Line) at the expense of society now.
I think that New Line is scummy for their shady accounting practices, but they really should not have had to negotiate for the film rights to begin with.
And unlike SPF, it will survive forwarding without the need to alter the sending address.
I already use SPF and it -did- cut down on the spammers that were impersonating my domain.
I wish I could say the same - I still get plenty of crap in my inbox from ISPs that don't check to see if the sender's domain has an SPF record before bouncing spam to me.