Mod parent up. The landmark case is Feist v. Rural Telephone Service Co, 499 U.S. 340 (1991), in which the US Supreme Court states: "As a constitutional matter, copyright protects only those constituent elements of a work that possess more than a de minimis quantum of creativity. Rural's white pages, limited to basic subscriber information and arranged alphabetically, fall short of the mark. As a statutory matter, 17 U.S.C. 101 does not afford protection [p*364] from copying to a collection of facts that are selected, coordinated, and arranged in a way that utterly lacks originality. Given that some works must fail, we cannot imagine a more likely candidate. Indeed, were we to hold that Rural's white pages pass muster, it is hard to believe that any collection of facts could fail."
One would be very hard pressed to succesfully argue that the facts on a business card are selected, coordinated, or arranged in a way that shows originality (this refers to the choice of facts, not the graphic layout of the card).
A business card is a collection of facts: a name, a title, a phone number, and an address. If there is creative content on the card - a photo, a short story, etc, that content is copyrightable. But the facts are not.
At least, that's my understanding of Feist. I have heard that there is more recent landmark caselaw that also touches on this issue. If anyone has the cite for it, please post it.
Inexpensive video players at the extreme low end are often much flimsier than their more expensive cousins. I had a $50 Panasonic DVD-S35 player that died after 18 months. When I looked for info on line about this failure, I found many Amazon reviews reporting the same problem - total failure after 12-18 months.
I opened the Panasonic up in an attempt to fix it, and found the design used the flimsiest of components. It was a testament to their engineers that they could get even 18 months out of the parts they used. See my blog post for a description of the brilliantly craptactular construction.
When I finally got a replacement, I looked for an older in-production model so I could get some reliability info. I paid a bit more for it (maybe $100). It's built like a tank. The video quality is no better, but it's built to last.
If you're on a plan, you get free phones and if you're on a pre-pay, those phones are only good for that plan.
Once you're month-to-month (which normally happens at the end of your plan) you may wish to get a new phone without being locked in for an additional year or two. You can get this year's model on eBay if you really need it, but why bother? Get last year's model for $40 and you've got the freedom of a pay as you go plan but with a much better phone and more predictable monthly costs. It's the best elements of a plan without the contract.
A "prior inventions" list is normally just a list of invention titles and a brief description of what the invention does. For example: "Invention: A method for exercising rodents via a wheel constructed from rigid wires. Description: The device is in the shape of a wheel. The rodent climbs inside the wheel and runs, spinning the wheel."
When signing a legal document, it's important to know why the company wants you to sign it. In this case, it's not so that they can take all the inventions you've thought of. Instead, it's to limit their liability to you. What they are trying to protect against is the scenario where you work for them on a contract, and without their knowledge, embed one of your prior inventions into their product, and four years later, when they've become the next Google, you step up and ask for a massive amount of money because they are infringing on something that you wound up patenting.
With that in mind, I suggest that this one isn't worth fighting over. The best way to deal with it is to list everything you've ever thought of, and let their lawyer decide whether he really wants to spend hours going over each one with you. In the end, the lawyer will probably decide that it's not worth while to do so, and you can get on with your work.
I've traveled Boston - New York on that line, and for that route, the train is about as fast as a plane flight, once you figure in an hour getting to Logan Airport and an hour getting from La Guardia or JFK into the city. The train departs from downtown Boston (and has an easy-to-reach station on one of the ring roads around Boston, I think 495) and arrives in the middle of NYC. It's quiet and convenient. For a few bucks, you can upgrade to business class and get comfier seats and the train version of a flight attendant. Highly recommended.
While the parent poster is right that "Wall Street" has a big effect on most companies, Google is not a typical public company. See, when we say "Wall Street" has an influence, Wall Street normally means institutional investors, who are often the largest shareholder block at a public company. Institutional investors, like any investor, would like the stock to go up and up and up, but unlike the rest of us, these large investors often tell companies what they want them to do.
Google is a dual-class stock -- founders hold one class, and everyone else holds the other common class.
Seattle Post Intelligencer: Google does IPO its own way: "To insulate themselves from outside pressure, Page and Brin are creating a two-class stock hierarchy designed to give them effective veto power. The company is selling Class A common stock to the public, but Page and Brin will control Class B stock, which will have 10 times the voting power."
Google's Class A common stock, the shares you and I can buy, has reduced voting rights relative to founder stock. A single Class B founder's share vote is the equivalent of 10 shares of Class A common. So already, the founders have tremendous say in what Google does, to an extent that isn't true of most other public companies.
Further, the majority of Google's stock is held by the founders.
This fact, combined with the 10x voting weight given to founders' shares, means that Google is insulated from Wall Street to an unusual degree. No block of shares held by outsiders, even by large institutional investors, can force Google to do something that the founders do not agree with.
This isn't to say Google is immune from the stock market. The founders' net worth certainly depends on the stock price. But again, Google's corporate direction is unusually strongly tied to what its founders want, rather than what an institutional investor or other common stockholder wants.
The parent poster writes:
Be careful of that seemingly innocuous qualification: "with the right software and daughterboards"... both imply serious limitations to the technology....Even with a reasonably fast processor (say 3 GHz) today, you are typically only be able to process, at most, a few million samples per second -- especially if you are performing complicated modulation/demodulation, coding/decoding, filtering and protocol processing. Each sample may require substantial computation, and that limits the number of samples you can process per second. That, in its turn, affects the bandwidth that a processor can address (i.e. how wide a part of the radio spectrum you can "see" at any one time).
I'll bet it's not long before the USRP/GnuRadio people hook up with the graphics card as a compute engine folks. Graphics cards are well suited for high-speed signal processing, and would give you the ability to process high-bandwidth signals in realtime even on an ordinary PC.
I would say "indefinately". Which really isn't that different to an NNTP server, which will (under it's normal operation) keep an archive of the article for an indefinate length of time.
I suspect a true test of copyright around this will dwell on the difference between ephemeral storage and long-term to permanent storage. It's one thing for a computer to cache that mp3 you just downloaded from a site. It's another for that computer to serve that mp3 up indefinitely or permanently. The former may be a necessity for distributing the item. The latter is not.
If NNTP servers were lucrative targets, copyright holders would be challenging the right of ISPs to keep articles on their servers indefinitely. However, it's the web rather than Usenet that has taken over the world, so copyright holders are more likely to go after web companies and web presentations of their works.
Well like it or not, ISPs run web caches and they make money out of it
I see your point, and I believe that caches get special treatment under copyright law, because they are ephemeral copies. In other words, if an ISP turned its cache into a browsable web site, they'd be in trouble.
If you have to _explicitly_ sign away rights rather than being allowed to _implicitly_ sign them away then the Internet is screwed anyway - you'd have to sign a licence with every usenet posting allowing all NNTP servers to archive your article for an arbitrary length of time for usenet to even work. Similarly you'd have to sign a licence allowing people to quote parts of your emails when they reply.
Sure, fair use exists. It's not a violation of my copyright when you quote me. But what we're talking about here isn't fair use. Google isn't presenting a small portion of the original work, in a way that does not take away from the marketability of the original. They are presenting the *entire* work.
Similarly, in the NNTP case, Joe may be fine with servers storing and forwarding articles as necessary to make Usenet run. BUt that does not mean he has signed away his copyright. Certainly, setting expiration times to "never" and opening up the server to the world equals what Google has done. But just because a Usenet admin can, techically, turn expiration off, does not mean he is allowed to do so under copyright.
Somewhere, in the eventual case that looks at this, a judge is going to say "well, expiration times less than n days are ephemeral, and more than that is right out." It hasn't happened yet, that I know, but it certainly will if someone chooses to test it in court.
Brad Templeton, a Usenet mover since the dawn of time, has this to say in his Copyright FAQ:
Myth 3) "If it's posted to Usenet it's in the public domain."
False. Nothing modern and creative is in the public domain anymore unless the owner explicitly puts it in the public domain. Explicitly, as in you have a note from the author/owner saying, "I grant this to the public domain." Those exact words or words very much like them.
Some argue that posting to Usenet implicitly grants permission to everybody to copy the posting within fairly wide bounds, and others feel that Usenet is an automatic store and forward network where all the thousands of copies made are done at the command (rather than the consent) of the poster. This is a matter of some debate, but even if the former is true (and in this writer's opinion we should all pray it isn't true) it simply would suggest posters are implicitly granting permissions "for the sort of copying one might expect when one posts to Usenet" and in no case is this a placement of material into the public domain. It is important to remember that when it comes to the law, computers never make copies, only human beings make copies. Computers are given commands, not permission. Only people can be
Since google has access to the work it was already archived somewhere, on tape usually, as such it did nothing different from what was already happening (someone had to provide it with the posts before it's creation). Nice try.
Unless Joe provided his work to Google on that CD, along with an explicit transfer of copyright to Google, Google does not have copyright for that work. Joe and Google never arranged to transfer copyright, and Joe never lost copyright by publishing his work.
The fact that some third party burned Joe's work to CD and then gave it to Google does not establish a relationship between Joe and Google, nor does it establish a relationship between Joe and the third party that made the CD. In other words, the third party violated Joe's copyright when they distributed his work to Google.
The works for hire bit you mentioned involves a consideration (payment) for the right to the works. Do you believe Joe had a work-for-hire arrangement with Google, possibly years before Google was incorporated?:)
This is an interesting take, but not what copyright says is the case. Copyright means the creator has the rights over copies. This doesn't mean Google has to say Joe Schmoe was the author, it's that Joe Schmoe has the final say over how his work is presented, and who gets to make copies of it.
Unless Joe Schmoe explicitly gave Google permission to copy his work, copyright is clear - Joe retains copyright and can prevent Google from distributing his work.
Now, you and I can certainly agree that Usenet, by definition, is a way of publishing a work. Joe posted his magnum opus to alt.fan.furries or whatever, and that's his right. What Google has done is to take an ephemeral work and make it available: 1) permanently, 2) in a different medium (the web, not Usenet), and 3) in a way that makes money. Part (3) is not necessary to show a copyright violation, but I'm sure it helps.
Let me give another example. Joe creates a web page with his opus. You could certainly argue that Joe wants his work seen. You might even say that technology makes it easy and likely that Joe's page will be copied (by visitors and by web crawlers). Does Joe, by publishing to the web, lose his copyright? Does someone who copies his work suddenly have the right to redistribute it forever, and in a different medium, in a way that makes them money?
Now if you believe that Joe does not lose or transfer his rights in this case, I think you'll see why the same holds true for Usenet and mailing list. Copyright is not about the technology used by Joe or an infringer to publish or show the work, it's about Joe retaining his rights to his works unless he explicitly signs those rights away. Unless Google can show a piece of paper, signed by Joe, and ideally along with a cancelled check from Google to Joe, they're likely to have a real challenge. It will help, of course, if Joe has a decent lawyer and doesn't craft his lawsuit himself, in his spare time, which is what seems to have happened in the case the article refers to.
You left out "that were submitted to a store-and-forward global distribution system with the intent of disseminating them as widely as possible, knowing full well that they would be archived, folded, spindled, and mutilated".
There are several things missing here. First, for most of the history of Usenet, it was not archived (or at least, not well known to be archived). Users of Usenet, up until around 1995, expected news postings to be ephemeral.
Second, the fact that a technology allows for something to happen, in this case the possibility of archiving information forever, does not alter the copyrights of a creator. The author of a work has received no consideration from Google for their copyright (that is, Google hasn't paid them anything), and there is no way I know of for an author to put something in the public domain just by their choice of the medium by which they spread their ideas.
Even when express something in a way that is likely to be recorded, you still hold the copyright to that work. Consider Greatful Dead concerts and the tapers. The Dead did not magically forfeit the copyrights to their songs when they allowed fans to archive and forward their recordings to others.
Something about this site doesn't feel write. Their whois info doesn't match the companies listed on the front page, and so I don't really know who they are. Did you find anything about them that made you comfortable with sending them your name and SSN?
I saw Matt Webb and Ben Cerveny demo Playsh at O'Reilly's ETech conference. The demo was pretty neat. I wrote up the talk and took some photos of the slides. You can see more here on my blog.
The grandparent post said they could build a gaming PC for this much (with some scrounging), while the parent post disputed this. I've been playing BF1942 and even Battlefield 2 on a PC I built from scratch 2 years ago for ~ $700. The only components I scrounged were the monitor, keyboard, and mouse. I'll bet I could build the same system today for $550.
The low-end graphics cards at my local store, Central Computer, have 256MB of video RAM and very capable cores, and now cost well under $80. Here's an OEM Radeon 9250 for $70
Games need decent video cards, but do not need much else. I'm running an old AMD Athlon XP 2500 and it doesn't break a sweat on BF2. The closest I can find to this dinosaur, the Sempron 2600, is $72 retail from NewEgg.
I suspect that if electronics are harder to re-sell in Japan, we're going to start seeing some neat cheap used electronics coming over to foreign markets. I wouldn't mind if some of the "made for the Japanese market only" notebooks and appliances became available used in the US.
I've worked at several companies that mixed languages for web services. Some things really do work best in C++, and others are fine to put together in Java, Python, or even (god help us all) Perl.
No, you don't have one person maintain the whole thing, but you do get individuals or teams to take responsibility for their part, and you make sure the interfaces are clean.
"Wasn't there talk sometime back about the US government directly providing means for people living in censorship-ridden nations to bypass their national firewalls? Whatever became of that?"
Yes, the Voice of America had a deal with SafeWeb (makers of the rewriting? proxy TriangleBoy) to run a moving set of proxies so that Chinese users could get around the great firewall, presumably to reach the VoA's site.
Slashdot Mirror
One would be very hard pressed to succesfully argue that the facts on a business card are selected, coordinated, or arranged in a way that shows originality (this refers to the choice of facts, not the graphic layout of the card).
A business card is a collection of facts: a name, a title, a phone number, and an address. If there is creative content on the card - a photo, a short story, etc, that content is copyrightable. But the facts are not.
At least, that's my understanding of Feist. I have heard that there is more recent landmark caselaw that also touches on this issue. If anyone has the cite for it, please post it.
--Pat
I opened the Panasonic up in an attempt to fix it, and found the design used the flimsiest of components. It was a testament to their engineers that they could get even 18 months out of the parts they used. See my blog post for a description of the brilliantly craptactular construction.
When I finally got a replacement, I looked for an older in-production model so I could get some reliability info. I paid a bit more for it (maybe $100). It's built like a tank. The video quality is no better, but it's built to last.
--Pat
If you're on a plan, you get free phones and if you're on a pre-pay, those phones are only good for that plan.
Once you're month-to-month (which normally happens at the end of your plan) you may wish to get a new phone without being locked in for an additional year or two. You can get this year's model on eBay if you really need it, but why bother? Get last year's model for $40 and you've got the freedom of a pay as you go plan but with a much better phone and more predictable monthly costs. It's the best elements of a plan without the contract.
--Pat
A "prior inventions" list is normally just a list of invention titles and a brief description of what the invention does. For example: "Invention: A method for exercising rodents via a wheel constructed from rigid wires. Description: The device is in the shape of a wheel. The rodent climbs inside the wheel and runs, spinning the wheel."
When signing a legal document, it's important to know why the company wants you to sign it. In this case, it's not so that they can take all the inventions you've thought of. Instead, it's to limit their liability to you. What they are trying to protect against is the scenario where you work for them on a contract, and without their knowledge, embed one of your prior inventions into their product, and four years later, when they've become the next Google, you step up and ask for a massive amount of money because they are infringing on something that you wound up patenting.
With that in mind, I suggest that this one isn't worth fighting over. The best way to deal with it is to list everything you've ever thought of, and let their lawyer decide whether he really wants to spend hours going over each one with you. In the end, the lawyer will probably decide that it's not worth while to do so, and you can get on with your work.
--Pat
Mod parent up.
Summary: The injured party is the company, which in turns means the company's owner's -- its stockholders.
--Pat
--Pat
Google is a dual-class stock -- founders hold one class, and everyone else holds the other common class.
Seattle Post Intelligencer: Google does IPO its own way: "To insulate themselves from outside pressure, Page and Brin are creating a two-class stock hierarchy designed to give them effective veto power. The company is selling Class A common stock to the public, but Page and Brin will control Class B stock, which will have 10 times the voting power."
Google's Class A common stock, the shares you and I can buy, has reduced voting rights relative to founder stock. A single Class B founder's share vote is the equivalent of 10 shares of Class A common. So already, the founders have tremendous say in what Google does, to an extent that isn't true of most other public companies.
Further, the majority of Google's stock is held by the founders.
This fact, combined with the 10x voting weight given to founders' shares, means that Google is insulated from Wall Street to an unusual degree. No block of shares held by outsiders, even by large institutional investors, can force Google to do something that the founders do not agree with.
This isn't to say Google is immune from the stock market. The founders' net worth certainly depends on the stock price. But again, Google's corporate direction is unusually strongly tied to what its founders want, rather than what an institutional investor or other common stockholder wants.
--Pat
I'll bet it's not long before the USRP/GnuRadio people hook up with the graphics card as a compute engine folks. Graphics cards are well suited for high-speed signal processing, and would give you the ability to process high-bandwidth signals in realtime even on an ordinary PC.
GPGPU: General-Purpose computation on GPUs
The FFT on a GPU
GPU-FFTlib - Graphics Card based Implementation of the Fast Fourier Transform
--Pat
And if it's a MacBook, and you've installed SmackBook Pro, your seatmate may decide to let you have the entire row to yourself.
--Pat
--Pat
Home again, home again, jiggity-jig!
We need a Family Guy version of this scene featuring Quagmire.
--Pat
No.
I hope this saved everyone a few minutes. Now get back to your 3270 terminal and XEDIT that REXX script to help you manage DASD on your VM/370.
--Pat
I suspect a true test of copyright around this will dwell on the difference between ephemeral storage and long-term to permanent storage. It's one thing for a computer to cache that mp3 you just downloaded from a site. It's another for that computer to serve that mp3 up indefinitely or permanently. The former may be a necessity for distributing the item. The latter is not.
If NNTP servers were lucrative targets, copyright holders would be challenging the right of ISPs to keep articles on their servers indefinitely. However, it's the web rather than Usenet that has taken over the world, so copyright holders are more likely to go after web companies and web presentations of their works.
Well like it or not, ISPs run web caches and they make money out of it
I see your point, and I believe that caches get special treatment under copyright law, because they are ephemeral copies. In other words, if an ISP turned its cache into a browsable web site, they'd be in trouble.
If you have to _explicitly_ sign away rights rather than being allowed to _implicitly_ sign them away then the Internet is screwed anyway - you'd have to sign a licence with every usenet posting allowing all NNTP servers to archive your article for an arbitrary length of time for usenet to even work. Similarly you'd have to sign a licence allowing people to quote parts of your emails when they reply.
Sure, fair use exists. It's not a violation of my copyright when you quote me. But what we're talking about here isn't fair use. Google isn't presenting a small portion of the original work, in a way that does not take away from the marketability of the original. They are presenting the *entire* work.
Similarly, in the NNTP case, Joe may be fine with servers storing and forwarding articles as necessary to make Usenet run. BUt that does not mean he has signed away his copyright. Certainly, setting expiration times to "never" and opening up the server to the world equals what Google has done. But just because a Usenet admin can, techically, turn expiration off, does not mean he is allowed to do so under copyright.
Somewhere, in the eventual case that looks at this, a judge is going to say "well, expiration times less than n days are ephemeral, and more than that is right out." It hasn't happened yet, that I know, but it certainly will if someone chooses to test it in court.
Brad Templeton, a Usenet mover since the dawn of time, has this to say in his Copyright FAQ:
http://www.templetons.com/brad/copymyths.html
Since google has access to the work it was already archived somewhere, on tape usually, as such it did nothing different from what was already happening (someone had to provide it with the posts before it's creation). Nice try.
:)
Unless Joe provided his work to Google on that CD, along with an explicit transfer of copyright to Google, Google does not have copyright for that work. Joe and Google never arranged to transfer copyright, and Joe never lost copyright by publishing his work.
The fact that some third party burned Joe's work to CD and then gave it to Google does not establish a relationship between Joe and Google, nor does it establish a relationship between Joe and the third party that made the CD. In other words, the third party violated Joe's copyright when they distributed his work to Google.
The works for hire bit you mentioned involves a consideration (payment) for the right to the works. Do you believe Joe had a work-for-hire arrangement with Google, possibly years before Google was incorporated?
--Pat
This is an interesting take, but not what copyright says is the case. Copyright means the creator has the rights over copies. This doesn't mean Google has to say Joe Schmoe was the author, it's that Joe Schmoe has the final say over how his work is presented, and who gets to make copies of it.
Unless Joe Schmoe explicitly gave Google permission to copy his work, copyright is clear - Joe retains copyright and can prevent Google from distributing his work.
Now, you and I can certainly agree that Usenet, by definition, is a way of publishing a work. Joe posted his magnum opus to alt.fan.furries or whatever, and that's his right. What Google has done is to take an ephemeral work and make it available: 1) permanently, 2) in a different medium (the web, not Usenet), and 3) in a way that makes money. Part (3) is not necessary to show a copyright violation, but I'm sure it helps.
Let me give another example. Joe creates a web page with his opus. You could certainly argue that Joe wants his work seen. You might even say that technology makes it easy and likely that Joe's page will be copied (by visitors and by web crawlers). Does Joe, by publishing to the web, lose his copyright? Does someone who copies his work suddenly have the right to redistribute it forever, and in a different medium, in a way that makes them money?
Now if you believe that Joe does not lose or transfer his rights in this case, I think you'll see why the same holds true for Usenet and mailing list. Copyright is not about the technology used by Joe or an infringer to publish or show the work, it's about Joe retaining his rights to his works unless he explicitly signs those rights away. Unless Google can show a piece of paper, signed by Joe, and ideally along with a cancelled check from Google to Joe, they're likely to have a real challenge. It will help, of course, if Joe has a decent lawyer and doesn't craft his lawsuit himself, in his spare time, which is what seems to have happened in the case the article refers to.
--Pat
You left out "that were submitted to a store-and-forward global distribution system with the intent of disseminating them as widely as possible, knowing full well that they would be archived, folded, spindled, and mutilated".
There are several things missing here. First, for most of the history of Usenet, it was not archived (or at least, not well known to be archived). Users of Usenet, up until around 1995, expected news postings to be ephemeral.
Second, the fact that a technology allows for something to happen, in this case the possibility of archiving information forever, does not alter the copyrights of a creator. The author of a work has received no consideration from Google for their copyright (that is, Google hasn't paid them anything), and there is no way I know of for an author to put something in the public domain just by their choice of the medium by which they spread their ideas.
Even when express something in a way that is likely to be recorded, you still hold the copyright to that work. Consider Greatful Dead concerts and the tapers. The Dead did not magically forfeit the copyrights to their songs when they allowed fans to archive and forward their recordings to others.
--Pat
the site probably doesn't feel "right" either, but it works.
I guess I picked the wrong week to get hooked on phonics.
--Pat
Something about this site doesn't feel write. Their whois info doesn't match the companies listed on the front page, and so I don't really know who they are. Did you find anything about them that made you comfortable with sending them your name and SSN?
--Pat
I saw Matt Webb and Ben Cerveny demo Playsh at O'Reilly's ETech conference. The demo was pretty neat. I wrote up the talk and took some photos of the slides. You can see more here on my blog.
- shell.html
http://ptufts.blogspot.com/2006/03/playsh-playful
Matt coded 90% of the Playsh environment in-game. Pretty cool.
--Pat
Just wait until someone discovers the Hot Chordate mod.
--Pat "mod +1 Evolutionary Biology / GTA tie-in"
--Pat
The grandparent post said they could build a gaming PC for this much (with some scrounging), while the parent post disputed this. I've been playing BF1942 and even Battlefield 2 on a PC I built from scratch 2 years ago for ~ $700. The only components I scrounged were the monitor, keyboard, and mouse. I'll bet I could build the same system today for $550.
A JETR9250R
The low-end graphics cards at my local store, Central Computer, have 256MB of video RAM and very capable cores, and now cost well under $80. Here's an OEM Radeon 9250 for $70
http://centralcomputer.com/itemdetail.asp?item=VG
Games need decent video cards, but do not need much else. I'm running an old AMD Athlon XP 2500 and it doesn't break a sweat on BF2. The closest I can find to this dinosaur, the Sempron 2600, is $72 retail from NewEgg.
--Pat
--Pat
I've worked at several companies that mixed languages for web services. Some things really do work best in C++, and others are fine to put together in Java, Python, or even (god help us all) Perl.
No, you don't have one person maintain the whole thing, but you do get individuals or teams to take responsibility for their part, and you make sure the interfaces are clean.
--Pat
Yes, the Voice of America had a deal with SafeWeb (makers of the rewriting? proxy TriangleBoy) to run a moving set of proxies so that Chinese users could get around the great firewall, presumably to reach the VoA's site.
--Pat