"Godzilla" is a trademark, and exclusive rights in trademarks are perpetual by design. Should Coca-Cola be allowed to pass its own products off as Pepsi, just because Pepsi has been around since 1903?
Oh, that's easy: the answer is "no" if they are selling the product for money (that would indeed be a clear case of "passing off"), but "yes" if they are not. That's why they're called TRADE marks, because they exist to protect interests in commerce. There are three exceptions under which trademarks can be used: fair use in comparative advertising, in noncommercial use, and in news reporting or commentary.
So, if I want to make a brown fizzy drink to give away to the kids at my school's fair one Saturday, and I want to call it "Coke," I can and should be allowed to do so as long as I don't make a business out of it. I should also probably make it clear that it's not a product made by Coca-Cola Inc. just to be on the safe side! Needless to say, a lot of lawyers want to say that noncommercial use is a grey area - but they would because they want to justify their fees.
Of course, I CAN trade using somebody else's mark if I'm in an industry they have not registered their mark in. For example, if you have a furnace, you might like to buy some of my "super coke" to fuel it. No confusion there, no infringement. Drug dealers are also off the hook for the same reason.
He is not our ally in ensuring we can get whatever media we want whenever we want for no cost.
No, but speaking as somebody who has just downloaded and watched "My Fair Lady" made in 1964, not to mention "Raiders of the Lost Ark" (1981), I see no problem with his preferred term of 14 years plus 14 renewable on application.
In any case, the issue here is not about copyright and "intellectual property theft" it's about the erosion of the public domain. Without the public domain we would not HAVE any art. So, think of Lessig, et. al. as "ecologists of information" not people for or against profit.
The very fact you are reading and commenting on Slashdot - from a fairly low UID no less - means you are almost certainly one of those rich people you so disdain.
Did I say I disdained them? And in any case what has that to do with my UID? I am simply voicing my opinion, which turns out to be ill-informed.
Which makes you a hypocrite as well as an idiot, I guess.
If you say so. Still, I'd rather be that than attack people anonymously.
I worked at a place once where they had a bunch of Macs running System 7. People used to complain that they were dog slow, and indeed they were compared to the Win95 boxes we had because, hey, they were about three years older.
In an effort to at least show willing when asked to "do something" - I'd turn off extensions and stuff in an effort to get them to run a bit better. One day, I turned off the default menu "flashing" on a couple of machines to see if that made any difference. That was the only change I made.
You guessed it: the next day, the users of those machines thanked me for how fast their workstations were now running, and when I applied the "fix" for everyone, the Mac users bought me pizza for lunch.
Well, I'd say his inventions such as the portable dialysis machine, the auto-syringe technology for people who require round the clock injections, and the wheelchair that can climb stairs made a tremendous difference.
OK cool. I have nothing against the invention of expensive stuff for rich people.
"so the actual interface is more what the programmers want and users want"
Ah but that's the thing - how do users know they want that when there is no alternative? Users don't design software, designers do. Users just suggest to them what might be interesting.
It was a private company, Atos Origin, which lost the data.
Why is it that people always make this point about data losses? It was also the case for the recent MoD data loss too - we had people bleating about how it "wasn't the government's fault."
I know it won't do any use, but here goes:
If a government contractor loses some government data, it is ABSOLUTELY the government's fault. There is no moral, constitutional, statutory or contractual issue with that. In contracting a 3rd party to do the government's bidding, the government takes FULL RESPONSIBILITY for their actions.
This is the GOVERNMENT we are talking about. THE GOVERNMENT ANSWERS TO THE PEOPLE!
It is utterly beyond me how people could possibly think otherwise. STOP THINKING THIS IS NOT A GOVERNMENT ISSUE!!
Information does NOT want to be free; you might as well say your couch wants you to get your ass off of it.
However, when information isn't free, neither are you.
You don't seem to understand what that phrase is supposed to mean. The nature of a couch is to be sat on. The nature of information is to be shared. If a couch can't be sat on, it's not a couch, and if information isn't shared, it's not information.
First, it IS stealing./. can scream until it's blue in the face that it's "infringement" and not stealing, but it is still stealing. Poop is poop, it doesn't matter if you give it a fancy-sounding name.
If you regard copyright infringement as "theft," it prevents you from addressing the central issue that we're dealing with here: what to do about the problem.
I assume you know that copyright infringement IS a problem?
It is a privilege to be a writer, artist, musician. One should expect a living, but never, ever, riches.
MOD THAT UP!!
This simple fact so often overlooked. The logic always seems to be that if something doesn't make you a zillion then it's not worth doing ("Micropayments on MySpace? Pah! You need a *real* promotion like SonyBMG behind you!").
I'd far rather have millions of artists who also work in a post office twice a week than thousands who live like kings and support millions of people who create nothing.
For direct applications to tech companies PDFs are ideal, but recruitment agents are a) stupid and b) prefer Word files, so they can edit out your contact details to ensure they don't get bypassed.
Yep. That was exactly my experience. One agent even thought I was trying to pull some kind of "data protection" thing on him. It took me a while work out what he meant when he said "your CV is locked."
Particularly, the new interface of MSOffice makes it much easier and intuitive to use (for most users) compared to any other office automation software.
Interesting perception you have there. You may of course be correct, but my own experience is this:
Sitting in an office within earshot of about 20 people, it is now MSO 2007 "upgrade" day plus two months. I can honestly say I hear about three to four people a day asking how they can do this or that operation in Word, Excel, PPT etc. A lot of the self-help conversations are along the lines of one person finding the much-used feature, forgetting where it is, then asking somebody else, who has to hunt for it as well, usually with the words "Damn, I'm sure I got it from that menu the other day..." etc.
If we (large online business, average employee age 32, many below the age of 25) cannot get used to Office 2007, something would seem to be wrong.
Oh and by the way, please do not use the phrase "intuitive to use" - it doesn't mean anything.
You have a point. I would conjecture that the dissimilarities of OpenOffice.org and Microsoft Office 2007 are one of the driving factors in OpenOffice.org's adoption.
Really? It seems pretty obvious to me that Sun tried hard to mimic almsot every aspect of MSO's UI and feature set for the simple reason that doing so is probably the only way you are going to ensure Joe Sixpack migrates.
Personally, I was hugely disappointed by OO the first time I used it. Not that it's bad as such, but that it fails to address so many things in MSO that have been crying out for improvement. Thanks to the flatulent Microsoft monopoly that means they don't give a cr*p about quality, MS Word, Excel and (OMFG) PowerPoint remain difficult to use and suffer from poor design almost 20 years after they were first produced.
Very few, if any, of the very long-standing usability issues with MSO are addressed in OO. Perhaps the greatest tragedy is that none of the many principles of efficient word precessing laid down years ago by the likes of Jef Raskin or Don Norman look likely ever to see the light of day.
So while using MSO is a teeth-grinding, desk pounding slog though bone-headed "features", I would say that OO is a huge, but perhaps necessary, disappointment.
PS: Coincidentally, my father was wondering why spell check wasn't working in Word today. Every time he tried it, he got a message saying "Cannot find blahblahspell24.dll and somethingdict55.dll." After several hours of fumbling, he found out that this meant MSO didn't have its spelling and grammar tools installed (he was trying to save space when installing). Now, in a application over 20 years old, it takes a special kind of arrogance to let an error condition like that stand without having it say "Please install the spelling and grammar tools."
"A recession will be a boon for the webâ(TM)s pro-am, do-it-yourself ethic. Professional social networks such as Linked In may come into their own as out-of-work people look for jobs. There may be more Popbitch and less Heat magazine; more use of free, open-source software than expensive offerings from Microsoft; more recycling of secondhand goods through eBay and freecycling schemes; more sharing of resources like cars through websites like GoLoco and Liftsharing. The collaborative, low-cost organisational models the web allows will come into their own; high-cost industrial-era models will suffer."
most of them aren't the type that actually end up putting their money where their mouths are
Exactly - so there are no lost sales because they wouldn't buy them in the first place. This means no damage is done to the artists or the industry and lets only good things happen (like the happiness of the freetards and the expansion of the artists' fan base).
Basically, if it's good music then people will like it. If enough people like it, lucrative things will happen to the artist (read TFA). If it's crap then nobody will listen. Either way, it's *obscurity*, not piracy, that is the artist's biggest threat. If I were a new musician today, I'd been killing myself to give away my stuff to as many people as possible.
As to your second point about the difference between artists and publishers, I think you're assuming all musicians are or will be tied to publishing contacts in order to get their music heard. That used to be the case before the net, but now we have a global and effectively free publishing medium that artists can use instead. So - I don't think you did understand the difference.
Even if it were the artists distributing directly, they'd probably screw them over just the same.
Most of the time, at least in my experience, there's no concept of "taking a stand" that drives it. It's all about "why pay when I can get it for free? You bought it? What a moron!" that drives this.
Sorry, that's not quite what I meant by "paying attention to the artists" - what I meant was that in downloading Madonna's "greatest" hits, they are ignoring Madonna's publishers. I'd be as surprised as you if anyone "took a stand" on the issue.
On your second point, you may be correct but I doubt it. If you read TFA you'll understand why this might be the case.
That just doesn't represent the facts of the situation. The political reaction was this massive government intrusion into privacy which persists and expands 15 years later.
As I have said - I do not deny this to be the case. What I am saying is that my *perception* of what politicians were doing and the perception of others was what it was. That contrasts with what has happened in the US. I am glad you are not scared. I only wish your president did not keep referring to "wars on terror" and "grave threats to our liberty and way of life" when in fact the threat is no such thing.
And by the way - my original post did not say I was comparing 9/11 with 7/7, in fact the opposite - I said it did not compare. Such "comparisons" are in very poor taste, and you have reduced us all by dragging up the issue here.
I'm glad Keen has said this, because it's going to be easy enough to find out if he's right or not. Personally, I think his prediction will be reversed: there will in fact be *more* of the sort of thing he's talking about (mainly because what he's attacking are essentially leisure persuits, which, in times of hardship people will do more of as long as there isn't too high a monetary cost - just as k lifestyle magazine publishers like Conde Nast).
But, like I say, let's wait and see. I'm printing a copy of the article to put on my wall to consult in a few years time and (I hope) laugh like a drain at the idiocy of man.
BTW if you've read his book, you'll know I'm being rather kind to him.
In college the biggest pirates I knew were the guys who had enough money to buy most of what they got illegally.
They may have been *able* to pay, but how do you know they *would* have paid? This is the thing - you can't prove that a download is a lost sale any more than you can prove all the people that take free newspapers handed out at the station in the morning are depriving the broadsheets of sales. There simply isn't a 1-to-1 substitution going on. If it's there for free, most people will take it. But if it wasn't for free a great many would never bother to pay in the first place because it's not as if music (or news) is essential.
If the music and movie industries are so bad, stop downloading their shit. Ignore them, make them irrelevant. I swear, it's like a bunch of rich kids crying about exploitation, while they shop at the Gap and A&F.
Er, by your own logic, I think they ARE ignoring the music and movie industries. They are instead paying attention to the artists. Can you see the difference?
Pirates and bankers are parasitic. Neither creates new technology or wealth.
Given the title of the/. post, the least you could do is provide some evidence for that statement. If you're going to post, you can be a bit lazy, but don't be a total slob.
If he is such a strong believer in piracy, why is he allowing users to download it for free? Shouldn't he force them to pay for a DRM version while he secretly leaks a free torrent on the side? Now THAT would be hardcore.
Slashdot Mirror
So it would be allowable for a corporation to trademark peter pan and prevent works containing him long after the copyright expires?
Ah, bad example. Peter Pan is a special case.
"Godzilla" is a trademark, and exclusive rights in trademarks are perpetual by design. Should Coca-Cola be allowed to pass its own products off as Pepsi, just because Pepsi has been around since 1903?
Oh, that's easy: the answer is "no" if they are selling the product for money (that would indeed be a clear case of "passing off"), but "yes" if they are not. That's why they're called TRADE marks, because they exist to protect interests in commerce. There are three exceptions under which trademarks can be used: fair use in comparative advertising, in noncommercial use, and in news reporting or commentary.
So, if I want to make a brown fizzy drink to give away to the kids at my school's fair one Saturday, and I want to call it "Coke," I can and should be allowed to do so as long as I don't make a business out of it. I should also probably make it clear that it's not a product made by Coca-Cola Inc. just to be on the safe side! Needless to say, a lot of lawyers want to say that noncommercial use is a grey area - but they would because they want to justify their fees.
Of course, I CAN trade using somebody else's mark if I'm in an industry they have not registered their mark in. For example, if you have a furnace, you might like to buy some of my "super coke" to fuel it. No confusion there, no infringement. Drug dealers are also off the hook for the same reason.
He is not our ally in ensuring we can get whatever media we want whenever we want for no cost.
No, but speaking as somebody who has just downloaded and watched "My Fair Lady" made in 1964, not to mention "Raiders of the Lost Ark" (1981), I see no problem with his preferred term of 14 years plus 14 renewable on application.
In any case, the issue here is not about copyright and "intellectual property theft" it's about the erosion of the public domain. Without the public domain we would not HAVE any art. So, think of Lessig, et. al. as "ecologists of information" not people for or against profit.
The very fact you are reading and commenting on Slashdot - from a fairly low UID no less - means you are almost certainly one of those rich people you so disdain.
Did I say I disdained them? And in any case what has that to do with my UID? I am simply voicing my opinion, which turns out to be ill-informed.
Which makes you a hypocrite as well as an idiot, I guess.
If you say so. Still, I'd rather be that than attack people anonymously.
True story:
I worked at a place once where they had a bunch of Macs running System 7. People used to complain that they were dog slow, and indeed they were compared to the Win95 boxes we had because, hey, they were about three years older.
In an effort to at least show willing when asked to "do something" - I'd turn off extensions and stuff in an effort to get them to run a bit better. One day, I turned off the default menu "flashing" on a couple of machines to see if that made any difference. That was the only change I made.
You guessed it: the next day, the users of those machines thanked me for how fast their workstations were now running, and when I applied the "fix" for everyone, the Mac users bought me pizza for lunch.
Well, I'd say his inventions such as the portable dialysis machine, the auto-syringe technology for people who require round the clock injections, and the wheelchair that can climb stairs made a tremendous difference.
OK cool. I have nothing against the invention of expensive stuff for rich people.
Dean Kamen - "Inventor of the Segway"
Ah, Dean! Dean Kamen! Wonderful inventor and free-thinking genius!
Either that, or a manipulative self-promoter more interested in hyping his way to riches than actually making a difference with anything.
Perhaps he might change the world this time. Or maybe not. I doubt he really cares.
"so the actual interface is more what the programmers want and users want"
Ah but that's the thing - how do users know they want that when there is no alternative? Users don't design software, designers do. Users just suggest to them what might be interesting.
But what's the use - this is /. Who cares?
It was a private company, Atos Origin, which lost the data.
Why is it that people always make this point about data losses? It was also the case for the recent MoD data loss too - we had people bleating about how it "wasn't the government's fault."
I know it won't do any use, but here goes:
If a government contractor loses some government data, it is ABSOLUTELY the government's fault. There is no moral, constitutional, statutory or contractual issue with that. In contracting a 3rd party to do the government's bidding, the government takes FULL RESPONSIBILITY for their actions.
This is the GOVERNMENT we are talking about. THE GOVERNMENT ANSWERS TO THE PEOPLE!
It is utterly beyond me how people could possibly think otherwise. STOP THINKING THIS IS NOT A GOVERNMENT ISSUE!!
Information does NOT want to be free; you might as well say your couch wants you to get your ass off of it.
However, when information isn't free, neither are you.
You don't seem to understand what that phrase is supposed to mean. The nature of a couch is to be sat on. The nature of information is to be shared. If a couch can't be sat on, it's not a couch, and if information isn't shared, it's not information.
First, it IS stealing. /. can scream until it's blue in the face that it's "infringement" and not stealing, but it is still stealing. Poop is poop, it doesn't matter if you give it a fancy-sounding name.
If you regard copyright infringement as "theft," it prevents you from addressing the central issue that we're dealing with here: what to do about the problem.
I assume you know that copyright infringement IS a problem?
It is a privilege to be a writer, artist, musician. One should expect a living, but never, ever, riches.
MOD THAT UP!!
This simple fact so often overlooked. The logic always seems to be that if something doesn't make you a zillion then it's not worth doing ("Micropayments on MySpace? Pah! You need a *real* promotion like SonyBMG behind you!").
I'd far rather have millions of artists who also work in a post office twice a week than thousands who live like kings and support millions of people who create nothing.
For direct applications to tech companies PDFs are ideal, but recruitment agents are a) stupid and b) prefer Word files, so they can edit out your contact details to ensure they don't get bypassed.
Yep. That was exactly my experience. One agent even thought I was trying to pull some kind of "data protection" thing on him. It took me a while work out what he meant when he said "your CV is locked."
Particularly, the new interface of MSOffice makes it much easier and intuitive to use (for most users) compared to any other office automation software.
Interesting perception you have there. You may of course be correct, but my own experience is this:
Sitting in an office within earshot of about 20 people, it is now MSO 2007 "upgrade" day plus two months. I can honestly say I hear about three to four people a day asking how they can do this or that operation in Word, Excel, PPT etc. A lot of the self-help conversations are along the lines of one person finding the much-used feature, forgetting where it is, then asking somebody else, who has to hunt for it as well, usually with the words "Damn, I'm sure I got it from that menu the other day..." etc.
If we (large online business, average employee age 32, many below the age of 25) cannot get used to Office 2007, something would seem to be wrong.
Oh and by the way, please do not use the phrase "intuitive to use" - it doesn't mean anything.
You have a point. I would conjecture that the dissimilarities of OpenOffice.org and Microsoft Office 2007 are one of the driving factors in OpenOffice.org's adoption.
Really? It seems pretty obvious to me that Sun tried hard to mimic almsot every aspect of MSO's UI and feature set for the simple reason that doing so is probably the only way you are going to ensure Joe Sixpack migrates.
Personally, I was hugely disappointed by OO the first time I used it. Not that it's bad as such, but that it fails to address so many things in MSO that have been crying out for improvement. Thanks to the flatulent Microsoft monopoly that means they don't give a cr*p about quality, MS Word, Excel and (OMFG) PowerPoint remain difficult to use and suffer from poor design almost 20 years after they were first produced.
What are things coming to if we have to beg? ("Are you really listening to your customers' cries for help?" Answer: "Why should we? We're making money in a monopoly! See ya!")
Very few, if any, of the very long-standing usability issues with MSO are addressed in OO. Perhaps the greatest tragedy is that none of the many principles of efficient word precessing laid down years ago by the likes of Jef Raskin or Don Norman look likely ever to see the light of day.
So while using MSO is a teeth-grinding, desk pounding slog though bone-headed "features", I would say that OO is a huge, but perhaps necessary, disappointment.
PS: Coincidentally, my father was wondering why spell check wasn't working in Word today. Every time he tried it, he got a message saying "Cannot find blahblahspell24.dll and somethingdict55.dll." After several hours of fumbling, he found out that this meant MSO didn't have its spelling and grammar tools installed (he was trying to save space when installing). Now, in a application over 20 years old, it takes a special kind of arrogance to let an error condition like that stand without having it say "Please install the spelling and grammar tools."
http://www.zimmers.net/geos/GEOSFAQ.html
You'll have incredible speed based on the original purpose and you will also have access to many free applications.
Not quite. The OP is running i386
Ho ho ho. I see Charles Leadbeater thinks otherwise:
"A recession will be a boon for the webâ(TM)s pro-am, do-it-yourself ethic. Professional social networks such as Linked In may come into their own as out-of-work people look for jobs. There may be more Popbitch and less Heat magazine; more use of free, open-source software than expensive offerings from Microsoft; more recycling of secondhand goods through eBay and freecycling schemes; more sharing of resources like cars through websites like GoLoco and Liftsharing. The collaborative, low-cost organisational models the web allows will come into their own; high-cost industrial-era models will suffer."
most of them aren't the type that actually end up putting their money where their mouths are
Exactly - so there are no lost sales because they wouldn't buy them in the first place. This means no damage is done to the artists or the industry and lets only good things happen (like the happiness of the freetards and the expansion of the artists' fan base).
Basically, if it's good music then people will like it. If enough people like it, lucrative things will happen to the artist (read TFA). If it's crap then nobody will listen. Either way, it's *obscurity*, not piracy, that is the artist's biggest threat. If I were a new musician today, I'd been killing myself to give away my stuff to as many people as possible.
As to your second point about the difference between artists and publishers, I think you're assuming all musicians are or will be tied to publishing contacts in order to get their music heard. That used to be the case before the net, but now we have a global and effectively free publishing medium that artists can use instead. So - I don't think you did understand the difference.
Even if it were the artists distributing directly, they'd probably screw them over just the same.
Most of the time, at least in my experience, there's no concept of "taking a stand" that drives it. It's all about "why pay when I can get it for free? You bought it? What a moron!" that drives this.
Sorry, that's not quite what I meant by "paying attention to the artists" - what I meant was that in downloading Madonna's "greatest" hits, they are ignoring Madonna's publishers. I'd be as surprised as you if anyone "took a stand" on the issue.
On your second point, you may be correct but I doubt it. If you read TFA you'll understand why this might be the case.
That was the official primary argument from the MPAA
Really?? Do you have a reference for that? Better still, did the MPAA have any evidence that it was happening?
That just doesn't represent the facts of the situation. The political reaction was this massive government intrusion into privacy which persists and expands 15 years later.
As I have said - I do not deny this to be the case. What I am saying is that my *perception* of what politicians were doing and the perception of others was what it was. That contrasts with what has happened in the US. I am glad you are not scared. I only wish your president did not keep referring to "wars on terror" and "grave threats to our liberty and way of life" when in fact the threat is no such thing.
And by the way - my original post did not say I was comparing 9/11 with 7/7, in fact the opposite - I said it did not compare. Such "comparisons" are in very poor taste, and you have reduced us all by dragging up the issue here.
I'm glad Keen has said this, because it's going to be easy enough to find out if he's right or not. Personally, I think his prediction will be reversed: there will in fact be *more* of the sort of thing he's talking about (mainly because what he's attacking are essentially leisure persuits, which, in times of hardship people will do more of as long as there isn't too high a monetary cost - just as k lifestyle magazine publishers like Conde Nast).
But, like I say, let's wait and see. I'm printing a copy of the article to put on my wall to consult in a few years time and (I hope) laugh like a drain at the idiocy of man.
BTW if you've read his book, you'll know I'm being rather kind to him.
In college the biggest pirates I knew were the guys who had enough money to buy most of what they got illegally.
They may have been *able* to pay, but how do you know they *would* have paid? This is the thing - you can't prove that a download is a lost sale any more than you can prove all the people that take free newspapers handed out at the station in the morning are depriving the broadsheets of sales. There simply isn't a 1-to-1 substitution going on. If it's there for free, most people will take it. But if it wasn't for free a great many would never bother to pay in the first place because it's not as if music (or news) is essential.
If the music and movie industries are so bad, stop downloading their shit. Ignore them, make them irrelevant. I swear, it's like a bunch of rich kids crying about exploitation, while they shop at the Gap and A&F.
Er, by your own logic, I think they ARE ignoring the music and movie industries. They are instead paying attention to the artists. Can you see the difference?
Pirates and bankers are parasitic. Neither creates new technology or wealth.
Given the title of the /. post, the least you could do is provide some evidence for that statement. If you're going to post, you can be a bit lazy, but don't be a total slob.
If he is such a strong believer in piracy, why is he allowing users to download it for free? Shouldn't he force them to pay for a DRM version while he secretly leaks a free torrent on the side? Now THAT would be hardcore.
Now that is funny!