As to your reply to the grandparent's first item regarding costly drugs in 3rd world countries (brought to them by TRIPS, WIPO, and the US government):
... The fact that third world countries can't afford the medicine is not their [pharmaceutical companies] problem. They [the foreign countries] need to build an infrastructure that can support education of their people that will then lead to their own scientists discovering their own cures. To borrow an oft used phrase here, these governments "need to change their business model."
IP always was, and still is (though they're starting to change it) officially national. That is, each nation is sovereign and can implement IP as it chooses, at least in theory. India, for example, did have a working "business model" for patents in the biotechnology market which was very beneficial to India - it simply didn't provide much patent protection for pharmaceuticals. This was intentional and resulted in various benefits. For one, it allowed their pharmaceutical companies to reverse engineer foreign drugs at a fraction of the original cost to foreign companies. The usual numbers I have heard is that it costs 100 million for developing a successful new drug, and the Indians could reverse engineer a drug for about 10 million. Secondly, along with the lower development costs, as the drugs were then manufactured locally, with presumably lower manufacturing costs, the drugs were cheaper than if imported. Thirdly, as the domestic industry supplied much of the pharmaceuticals, there were plenty of local jobs made available. Whether it really pans out that as India adopts stricter patent protection as mandated by TRIPS, foreign companies build more plants and thus provides jobs in India, I don't know.
My point, which has been discussed on/. before, is that India, as well as Brazil and others, do not have the full freedom to conduct business as they please. At least not while the US is ready to apply economic and political pressure on them to the benefit of US companies.
As the US is acting on the behest of the pharmaceutical companies, I think the companies are, in part, responsible for the effects of the increased costs of drugs in the 3rd world - including the deaths.
Regarding the grandparent's item of software patents:
See above. While I agree that most software patents should never have been allowed, I do not believe all software patents shoudl be allowed. Some ideas are quite rare or unique and cost a lot of R&D money. Companies should be allowed to get the money back that they sunk into the project if this is the case. Real software innovation would be developing an alternative, non-infringing method to work around the patent. However, many here find it far easier to grouse about the situation instead of taking the challenge head on.
I agree with all of this. However, the grandparent was simply noting that patents slow software innovation. I think this is also true. Somewhere I have a Law Review article which sets forth studies of various industries in the 20th century. The article's point was that many industries were stifled due to one or more companies having a stranglehold on the patents for that industry. I don't think the same exact situation exists for software today, but the effects may be the same. I.e., instead of having a handful of huge rocks [blockbuster patents] in the way of innovation, there are many many smaller rocks [the patent portfolios of such as Microsoft].
Regarding the grandparent's comment that IP litigation is huge.
Again I don't disagree with what you said, but the grandparent's point is that all this litigation is not good. Being in law school, I just note that it is quite common to restrict the public's right to sue under the argument that 'we don't want to open the judicial floodgates' by allowing suits for a given cause of action (or the application of an old cause of action to a new situation). The idea being that t
Any discussion about Silly Putty isn't complete without this link. It is the movie where some guys drop a rather large ball of Silly Putty off of an office building for fun.
I think this was on/. before, but couldn't find the past story.
Thanks, perfect intro to the case we discussed in copyright class on Thursday.
Matthew Bender & Co., et al. v. West Publishing Co., decided at the 2nd Cir. in 1999 (Supreme Ct. denied cert.). This case was directly concerned with page references and West's claim of copyright over them. 2nd Circuit affirmed a rejection of this and the Supreme Ct., or scotus as some call them, declined to accept the appeal.
By way of explanation for those not in the legal field, page references are important because case citations in court pleadings generally use page references to the standard bound works, which just coincidentally are published by Westlaw. As cases are often long, covering many pages, it is very helpful to have cite references to the exact page of a given point.
Interestingly enough, I guess as a result of the above decision, I can get page references from cases downloaded from Lexis and such, but if I get the cases from Westlaw (West's online service), I don't have the page references. They don't put them in there. I've tried many times to see if there was an option to turn on or something, but cases on Westlaw just seem not to have the references to their hardbound volumes. As we discussed in class, West was likely fighting this tooth-and-nail to require all practitioners to have to buy hardcopies of their books so that they can get the specific page references.
Stupid. As a result, if I were the one paying for the database, I would likely lean towards Lexis as they include the page references.
Now ChoicePoint's database is no longer available to help U.S. authorities. An Associated Press report detailing the U.S. government's access to the data triggered a public outcry in Mexico and other Latin American countries from which Choic[e]Point had obtained citizens' private records.
Good for the Mexicans. And, while Choicepoint is, in my view, essentially pure evil (profiting off of private information), good for them as they cut of the U.S. government's access. Bad for the U.S. government - they should know better and give all people (citizens and non-citizens alike) the freedom from being tracked without cause. The U.S. government has no business having access to such data on Mexicans. But:
Lee said ChoicePoint's business is unaffected in seven of the 10 Latin American countries where it still deals in data. And the company still sells driver's license data on 6 million residents of Mexico City.
Hopefully, Latin America will continue to wake up:
Mexican authorities have launched an official probe into the data sales to ChoicePoint, as have those in Colombia, Guatemala, Nicaragua and Costa Rica. In Mexico, federal investigators issued an arrest warrant for a fugitive believed to have sold the federal election records to a Mexican data firm, which resold the database to ChoicePoint.
...
In Colombia, the attorney general's office said it is trying to determine who copied and sold the data. The country's human rights ombudsman, Eduardo Cifuentes, introduced a privacy bill in Colombia's congress this month that aims to prevent the "merchandising" of citizens' personal information.
...
Tellez, the Mexican data protection expert, said he believed Mexico's congress would propose privacy legislation when it returns in September. The ChoicePoint scandal broke during the deeply unpopular U.S. invasion of Iraq, which soured already mistrustful Mexicans on the motives of the United States.
In addition to fair use, mentioned in an older sibling post to this one, there are several types of use which are legal and thus not infringement.
One is non-originality. When part of a song is not original to the artist, the copyright on the song does not cover the non-original part. Of course, someone else might have a copyright on it.
Another is de minimus use. Some samples, if they are very short, are simply too short for the law to pay attention - "the law does not concern itself with trifles" is the usual quote. But in music, this might be a very short time-length sample, probably less than a second.
Eigenradio makes its optimal music by analyzing in real time dozens of radio stations at once. When our bank of computers has heard enough music, it will go to work on making more just like it.
This quote from their site seems to indicate that they synthesize their broadcast based on an analysis of various other broadcasts. But, now that I am listiening to the station, it seems to be made at least partly of sampling (at least the voices).
If the music is originally synthesized, even if based on an analysis of actual music, I don't see how this would be an infringement - I mean, surely one could analyze multiple paintings from various artists and then compose a composition based on the results (most common hues, subjects, etc.).
But if any parts are reused, even if transformed, I am pretty sure infringement could be found. The courts would likely apply the usual "substantial similarity" tests.
If you feel strongly about your idea, it's potential, and don't find any prior art, you might want to think about patenting your idea. I can say I've filed applications for clients on ideas which were conceptually not any more difficult in the Internet communication arena.
And since you've only been pitching this for 6 months, you aren't barred by your own disclosure yet.
It wouldn't individually be too cheap, at least for patents, but it seems time that open source/free software advocates and slashdot types should start getting as much of an IP stable as possible. It could be useful as a bargining resource if needed.
About a year ago I attended a DVD conference. We got a tour of NIST where they were doing reliability testing of various brands of DVDs.
I found it odd, though, as they said they couldn't tell the public their findings. This point stuck with me, but I forget the exact reason. Perhaps it is simply that it would influence the market? Wouldn't make sense to me: the taxpayer probably put up the funds for the tests and the public and the market would both benefit from the results. Maybe NIST got some industry money to do the test with the condition that the results be kept secret.
Anyway, it would seem they probably have done the same for CD-Rs.
"The seller ended this listing early because the item is no longer available for sale."
What allows them to do this? I understand that advertising items for sale or auction creates a responsibility to actually offer the item at the sale or auction. For example, my family had an estate action. One item (a tractor) was not at the auction site and my sister didn't want to be bothered to take it there. The lawyer became very upset because of the liability it would have caused to not actually sell it at the auction.
I am guessing the buy it early option available for most ebay auctions, in giving anyone the chance to actually get the item, allows the item to be sold prior to the actual auction without liability. But these Profiles-in-History auctions don't have such an option.
Except when they are young and growing. Each spring, I top off the bamboo in my yard and usually play around with a few pieces popping them into their segments.
Totally, I still don't understand why the age old method of burning things in a fire isn't being used today. I mean, I am all for recycling but some things are more important to destroy.
After reading several stories on slashdot about garbage diving for personal information (the Oregon story for one), I decided to do just this. I now collect all papers I want to discard having important information and use them to start fires in our chiminea.
My father was an agriculture teacher in one of his careers. Our fireplace ash was always put on the garden - thus the burned papers provide fertilization of new plant life - so it is recycled after all.
For me, there is always a choice. My current voting philosophy is that with the modern political arena, it is better to get a bad politician out of office than it is to try and choose between candidates based on who will do the best. Thus, for those incumbants who I feel worked more against my goals than for them, I will vote for the challenger who has the most chance of winning, even if their politics are not in line with mine. I.e., I prefer to send the message that politicians who perform unfavorably will be voted out of office irregardless of the suitability of any challengers.
I guess it is kindof a 'What have you done for me lately?' type of approach.
Next move I see is for a single source to be limited to providing 20 seconds of a particular music file so that we can take advantage of more fair use laws.
I posted a similar idea a long time ago on/. My idea differed a little from yours in that I suggested that transfers be further limited to very short snippets (such as 1 second or less). In analyzing whether either of our suggestions would work (legally), the legal analysis which would be applied would probably be the same as employed in music sampling cases - in one case (e.g. rap, industrial sampling), a snippet is reused (usually repeatedly) in a commercial release, in the other (our p2p networks) a snippet is reused, along with many other snippets, to rebuild an original song.
My rationale to use very short snippets is to take advantage of what is called de minimus use (full title is de minimus non curat lex, IIRC). De minimus use is similar to fair use - and refers to use which is so slight as to be negligible (so little is taken as to be of no value - falls under the rubric 'the law does not concern itself with trifles'). De minimus use shows up in sampling cases, where the amount of a song copied may be only a few notes and/or at most a few seconds long.
I think a problem with using longer song parts, such as 20 seconds or so, is that illegal copying of such a longer snippet would not be fair use. If I am wrong on this, someone please post a cite to the applicable law.
Provided that the filesharers limited transmissions to de minimus snippets, it would seem they should be ok under current law (each individual transfer is not infringing almost by definition - at least so long as the sharer does not send more than one snippet of the same song to a given end user). The interesting inquiry seems to be whether a given end user, having constructed a song from a myriad of de minimus snippets, is liable for copyright infringement. This would involve at least two inquires: (1) whether the copyright in the recording is infringed and (2) whether the copyright in the underlying composition (lyrics, score) is infringed.
Offhand, I cannot hazard a guess as to the first question. (I would think if this issue is not settled by the courts yet, given the current political environment, they would decide in favor of the copyright holder). Regarding the second question, it would seem that the end user, even if found not liable for the various samples taken from independent sources, would still be (quite clearly, I guess) liable for infringing the copyright(s) in the composition of the song (lyrics, score). In other words, even if the user did not infringe the sound recording copyright through the reconstruction, by the technical reason that each snippet came from a different source, the user would infringe the copyright in the lyrics and notes by creating a cover of the song (which happens to be a perfect imitation of the original).
If the answer to the first question comes out that a song reconstructed from de minimus samples is not infringed, our p2p networks could, in the least, share songs for which there is no copyright in the composition (lyrics, score). Hey - maybe we could use this to undermine Disney and share their works derived from the public domain;).
IANAL (yet - hopefully in 2 years). If anyone can cite cases to support or trash any of the above, please post. Does anybody have a cite in Nimmer on Copyrights regarding reconstruction of copyrighted works? I'm curious now, when possible I will try to find a case dealing with infringement through reconstructing a copyrighted work (perhaps in the graphics arena?).
Why is this good news? Well, there is a gold hidden in the RIAA's moneygrubbing, power mad jihad, lots of gold. A closer look at the webcast rates shows that it charges.07 cents per song per listener. For the math challenged, if you have 100,000 listeners, you pay 70 cents per song.
I thought I heard of cellphone app that vibrates a pager if you have matching search profiles with cell phone holders within a certain distance
While as an examiner, I reviewed a patent application on a similar idea. As I recall, there was a fair amount of prior art on the subject. It probably never issued as a patent.
you have a completely wrong notion of what Copyright is intended to protect. Is is specifically intended to protect ideas, not a particular physical object in which they are captured. It is specifically intended to prevent anyone from copying your ideas so closely that they are confusingly similar to or even indistinguishable from the original work.
I think you are quite wrong about this. Copyright purports to protect the expression, not the underlying idea. Perhaps I am misreading your post, for in your earlier post you said "Copyright applies to a specific expression of an idea, not to an actual idea" which is correct by my understanding. For example, Picasso can copyright a specific painting of three women in cubist form, but he cannot copyright the idea of painting three women in cubist form. Thus, while Picasso can sue anyone painting three women in cubist form, the court would need to consider access and substantial similarity in order to determine whether illegal copying of Picasso's painting occurred.
No fair! Whetting our interest like that and then not telling us your school.
Seriously, though, if your school hasn't fixed the problem, perhaps the local newspaper near your school could pull a similar expose. I'm sure that would get the problem fixed and in the long run it would benefit the students.
IANAL (yet), but given their code was a trade secret and was published in the kernel, the following at least holds:
1) they can get damages against those who revealed it,
2) code which could arguably be still protected as trade secret (perhaps code released to a controlled group but not yet to the general public) would likely be prevented from further disclosure by an injunction, and
3) for code which was copied but can still be valuable as a trade secret, there are ways it can be disclosed within the court to prove copying but kept from public exposure.
... it's like some idiotic Police Chief knowing damn good and well that several pizza delivery drivers are mugged every night when they go into a four-block area... but refusing to say anything...
Living in the D.C. Metro area, I was very upset when hearing that the D.C. Police Chief had been against revealing the make of the snipers' car when they finally found it out. Once this information was released, the snipers were caught in 2 hours or so, IIRC.
I agree with the parent poster - this seems like an apt analogy. At least if a non-negligible number of bugs, patches, fixes, or workarounds, even if just temporary, come from unexpected sources outside of the vendors or finders.
Actually, I'd advocate no building permits. If you own land, you should be allowed to do anything you like with it, as long as you don't endanger lives or harm the property of others (and perhaps a handful of other things).
But are you qualified to judge 'harm' to someone elses property? Leaving resolution of such disputes to the property owners involved would probably not provide an optimal solution.
Government regulations sometimes suck, but they suck less than anarchy of any variety.
(1) Actually, while the government can remedy illegal property use, property owners have a large burden of judging the harm even under ordinaces. I have an anal neighbor couple who cut down a tree on my property and last year removed a bed of ivy from my property. Both instances involved the harms of trespass and destruction of property. The police didn't want to get involved. It was up to me to judge the harm and respond if I chose.
(2) Why would a relaxation of regulations result in anarchy? Even with ordinances and regulations, violations occur and end up in court. Without ordinances there would still be the common law to remedy undesiriable property use. Such things as trespass, trespass on the case (generally used for indirect trespass such as noxious fumes or smells, flooding from a neighbors water reserve, etc.), and so forth could still be remedied in court. And the courts would create new common law for any property use deemed undesirable by society which wasn't covered by existing law.
I think the grandparent poster was mainly referring to the seemingly overabundance of ordinances these days against property use which violates so-called public sensibilities.
Look to the extreme of regulation - homeowner's associations. While these are built on contract law and not government ordinances, the authoritarian control is perhaps similar. Thank god I don't have a homeowner's association - I am sure that I couldn't handle it. I hear stories of people who are continually in fights with their associations and self-appointed neighbors who patrol the back sides of property looking for violations. The restrictions seem to get on people's nerves sooner or later. They can control what color can be used to paint the house, what fences are allowable, what plants can be used. Ouch!
Idealistically, I agree with the grandparent post. Live and let live - let each owner use his or her property as he or she wishes so long as it does not endanger others or infringe on other's rights.
Slashdot Mirror
IP always was, and still is (though they're starting to change it) officially national. That is, each nation is sovereign and can implement IP as it chooses, at least in theory. India, for example, did have a working "business model" for patents in the biotechnology market which was very beneficial to India - it simply didn't provide much patent protection for pharmaceuticals. This was intentional and resulted in various benefits. For one, it allowed their pharmaceutical companies to reverse engineer foreign drugs at a fraction of the original cost to foreign companies. The usual numbers I have heard is that it costs 100 million for developing a successful new drug, and the Indians could reverse engineer a drug for about 10 million. Secondly, along with the lower development costs, as the drugs were then manufactured locally, with presumably lower manufacturing costs, the drugs were cheaper than if imported. Thirdly, as the domestic industry supplied much of the pharmaceuticals, there were plenty of local jobs made available. Whether it really pans out that as India adopts stricter patent protection as mandated by TRIPS, foreign companies build more plants and thus provides jobs in India, I don't know.
My point, which has been discussed on /. before, is that India, as well as Brazil and others, do not have the full freedom to conduct business as they please. At least not while the US is ready to apply economic and political pressure on them to the benefit of US companies.
As the US is acting on the behest of the pharmaceutical companies, I think the companies are, in part, responsible for the effects of the increased costs of drugs in the 3rd world - including the deaths.
Regarding the grandparent's item of software patents:
See above. While I agree that most software patents should never have been allowed, I do not believe all software patents shoudl be allowed. Some ideas are quite rare or unique and cost a lot of R&D money. Companies should be allowed to get the money back that they sunk into the project if this is the case. Real software innovation would be developing an alternative, non-infringing method to work around the patent. However, many here find it far easier to grouse about the situation instead of taking the challenge head on.
I agree with all of this. However, the grandparent was simply noting that patents slow software innovation. I think this is also true. Somewhere I have a Law Review article which sets forth studies of various industries in the 20th century. The article's point was that many industries were stifled due to one or more companies having a stranglehold on the patents for that industry. I don't think the same exact situation exists for software today, but the effects may be the same. I.e., instead of having a handful of huge rocks [blockbuster patents] in the way of innovation, there are many many smaller rocks [the patent portfolios of such as Microsoft].
Regarding the grandparent's comment that IP litigation is huge.
Again I don't disagree with what you said, but the grandparent's point is that all this litigation is not good. Being in law school, I just note that it is quite common to restrict the public's right to sue under the argument that 'we don't want to open the judicial floodgates' by allowing suits for a given cause of action (or the application of an old cause of action to a new situation). The idea being that t
So does it do more bad than good to write and express displeasure at how they voted after the fact?
I think this was on /. before, but couldn't find the past story.
The recipe, well, at least the ingredients, are here.
Matthew Bender & Co., et al. v. West Publishing Co., decided at the 2nd Cir. in 1999 (Supreme Ct. denied cert.). This case was directly concerned with page references and West's claim of copyright over them. 2nd Circuit affirmed a rejection of this and the Supreme Ct., or scotus as some call them, declined to accept the appeal.
By way of explanation for those not in the legal field, page references are important because case citations in court pleadings generally use page references to the standard bound works, which just coincidentally are published by Westlaw. As cases are often long, covering many pages, it is very helpful to have cite references to the exact page of a given point.
Interestingly enough, I guess as a result of the above decision, I can get page references from cases downloaded from Lexis and such, but if I get the cases from Westlaw (West's online service), I don't have the page references. They don't put them in there. I've tried many times to see if there was an option to turn on or something, but cases on Westlaw just seem not to have the references to their hardbound volumes. As we discussed in class, West was likely fighting this tooth-and-nail to require all practitioners to have to buy hardcopies of their books so that they can get the specific page references.
Stupid. As a result, if I were the one paying for the database, I would likely lean towards Lexis as they include the page references.
Now ChoicePoint's database is no longer available to help U.S. authorities. An Associated Press report detailing the U.S. government's access to the data triggered a public outcry in Mexico and other Latin American countries from which Choic[e]Point had obtained citizens' private records.
Good for the Mexicans. And, while Choicepoint is, in my view, essentially pure evil (profiting off of private information), good for them as they cut of the U.S. government's access. Bad for the U.S. government - they should know better and give all people (citizens and non-citizens alike) the freedom from being tracked without cause. The U.S. government has no business having access to such data on Mexicans. But:
Lee said ChoicePoint's business is unaffected in seven of the 10 Latin American countries where it still deals in data. And the company still sells driver's license data on 6 million residents of Mexico City.
Hopefully, Latin America will continue to wake up:
Mexican authorities have launched an official probe into the data sales to ChoicePoint, as have those in Colombia, Guatemala, Nicaragua and Costa Rica. In Mexico, federal investigators issued an arrest warrant for a fugitive believed to have sold the federal election records to a Mexican data firm, which resold the database to ChoicePoint.
...
In Colombia, the attorney general's office said it is trying to determine who copied and sold the data. The country's human rights ombudsman, Eduardo Cifuentes, introduced a privacy bill in Colombia's congress this month that aims to prevent the "merchandising" of citizens' personal information.
...
Tellez, the Mexican data protection expert, said he believed Mexico's congress would propose privacy legislation when it returns in September. The ChoicePoint scandal broke during the deeply unpopular U.S. invasion of Iraq, which soured already mistrustful Mexicans on the motives of the United States.
(current count: 1 on bad side, 1 on good side)
One is non-originality. When part of a song is not original to the artist, the copyright on the song does not cover the non-original part. Of course, someone else might have a copyright on it.
Another is de minimus use. Some samples, if they are very short, are simply too short for the law to pay attention - "the law does not concern itself with trifles" is the usual quote. But in music, this might be a very short time-length sample, probably less than a second. Eigenradio makes its optimal music by analyzing in real time dozens of radio stations at once. When our bank of computers has heard enough music, it will go to work on making more just like it.
This quote from their site seems to indicate that they synthesize their broadcast based on an analysis of various other broadcasts. But, now that I am listiening to the station, it seems to be made at least partly of sampling (at least the voices).
If the music is originally synthesized, even if based on an analysis of actual music, I don't see how this would be an infringement - I mean, surely one could analyze multiple paintings from various artists and then compose a composition based on the results (most common hues, subjects, etc.).
But if any parts are reused, even if transformed, I am pretty sure infringement could be found. The courts would likely apply the usual "substantial similarity" tests.
And since you've only been pitching this for 6 months, you aren't barred by your own disclosure yet.
It wouldn't individually be too cheap, at least for patents, but it seems time that open source/free software advocates and slashdot types should start getting as much of an IP stable as possible. It could be useful as a bargining resource if needed.
One explaination
I found it odd, though, as they said they couldn't tell the public their findings. This point stuck with me, but I forget the exact reason. Perhaps it is simply that it would influence the market? Wouldn't make sense to me: the taxpayer probably put up the funds for the tests and the public and the market would both benefit from the results. Maybe NIST got some industry money to do the test with the condition that the results be kept secret.
Anyway, it would seem they probably have done the same for CD-Rs.
What allows them to do this? I understand that advertising items for sale or auction creates a responsibility to actually offer the item at the sale or auction. For example, my family had an estate action. One item (a tractor) was not at the auction site and my sister didn't want to be bothered to take it there. The lawyer became very upset because of the liability it would have caused to not actually sell it at the auction.
I am guessing the buy it early option available for most ebay auctions, in giving anyone the chance to actually get the item, allows the item to be sold prior to the actual auction without liability. But these Profiles-in-History auctions don't have such an option.
Except when they are young and growing. Each spring, I top off the bamboo in my yard and usually play around with a few pieces popping them into their segments.
After reading several stories on slashdot about garbage diving for personal information (the Oregon story for one), I decided to do just this. I now collect all papers I want to discard having important information and use them to start fires in our chiminea.
My father was an agriculture teacher in one of his careers. Our fireplace ash was always put on the garden - thus the burned papers provide fertilization of new plant life - so it is recycled after all.
I guess it is kindof a 'What have you done for me lately?' type of approach.
I posted a similar idea a long time ago on /. My idea differed a little from yours in that I suggested that transfers be further limited to very short snippets (such as 1 second or less). In analyzing whether either of our suggestions would work (legally), the legal analysis which would be applied would probably be the same as employed in music sampling cases - in one case (e.g. rap, industrial sampling), a snippet is reused (usually repeatedly) in a commercial release, in the other (our p2p networks) a snippet is reused, along with many other snippets, to rebuild an original song.
My rationale to use very short snippets is to take advantage of what is called de minimus use (full title is de minimus non curat lex, IIRC). De minimus use is similar to fair use - and refers to use which is so slight as to be negligible (so little is taken as to be of no value - falls under the rubric 'the law does not concern itself with trifles'). De minimus use shows up in sampling cases, where the amount of a song copied may be only a few notes and/or at most a few seconds long.
I think a problem with using longer song parts, such as 20 seconds or so, is that illegal copying of such a longer snippet would not be fair use. If I am wrong on this, someone please post a cite to the applicable law.
Provided that the filesharers limited transmissions to de minimus snippets, it would seem they should be ok under current law (each individual transfer is not infringing almost by definition - at least so long as the sharer does not send more than one snippet of the same song to a given end user). The interesting inquiry seems to be whether a given end user, having constructed a song from a myriad of de minimus snippets, is liable for copyright infringement. This would involve at least two inquires: (1) whether the copyright in the recording is infringed and (2) whether the copyright in the underlying composition (lyrics, score) is infringed.
Offhand, I cannot hazard a guess as to the first question. (I would think if this issue is not settled by the courts yet, given the current political environment, they would decide in favor of the copyright holder). Regarding the second question, it would seem that the end user, even if found not liable for the various samples taken from independent sources, would still be (quite clearly, I guess) liable for infringing the copyright(s) in the composition of the song (lyrics, score). In other words, even if the user did not infringe the sound recording copyright through the reconstruction, by the technical reason that each snippet came from a different source, the user would infringe the copyright in the lyrics and notes by creating a cover of the song (which happens to be a perfect imitation of the original).
If the answer to the first question comes out that a song reconstructed from de minimus samples is not infringed, our p2p networks could, in the least, share songs for which there is no copyright in the composition (lyrics, score). Hey - maybe we could use this to undermine Disney and share their works derived from the public domain ;).
IANAL (yet - hopefully in 2 years). If anyone can cite cases to support or trash any of the above, please post. Does anybody have a cite in Nimmer on Copyrights regarding reconstruction of copyrighted works? I'm curious now, when possible I will try to find a case dealing with infringement through reconstructing a copyrighted work (perhaps in the graphics arena?).
Why is this good news? Well, there is a gold hidden in the RIAA's moneygrubbing, power mad jihad, lots of gold. A closer look at the webcast rates shows that it charges .07 cents per song per listener. For the math challenged, if you have 100,000 listeners, you pay 70 cents per song.
Isn't 0.07 cents * 100,000 = $70?
While as an examiner, I reviewed a patent application on a similar idea. As I recall, there was a fair amount of prior art on the subject. It probably never issued as a patent.
Another examiner I knew issued this: Shapira - Introduction system for locating compatible persons. In trying to find that patent, I just ran across this which is kindof funny: Wertheim - Method for requesting a date with a driver of a vehicle spotted, via the license plate number of the vehicle.
I think you are quite wrong about this. Copyright purports to protect the expression, not the underlying idea. Perhaps I am misreading your post, for in your earlier post you said "Copyright applies to a specific expression of an idea, not to an actual idea" which is correct by my understanding. For example, Picasso can copyright a specific painting of three women in cubist form, but he cannot copyright the idea of painting three women in cubist form. Thus, while Picasso can sue anyone painting three women in cubist form, the court would need to consider access and substantial similarity in order to determine whether illegal copying of Picasso's painting occurred.
RFID (also on /. frontpage), Ashcroft, the Dept. of Homeland Security, Poindexter, TIA, ...
Seriously, though, if your school hasn't fixed the problem, perhaps the local newspaper near your school could pull a similar expose. I'm sure that would get the problem fixed and in the long run it would benefit the students.
1) they can get damages against those who revealed it,
2) code which could arguably be still protected as trade secret (perhaps code released to a controlled group but not yet to the general public) would likely be prevented from further disclosure by an injunction, and
3) for code which was copied but can still be valuable as a trade secret, there are ways it can be disclosed within the court to prove copying but kept from public exposure.
At least in this case, I don't think any of the OIS members are really wonders. They're just trying to pull something over the public's eyes.
Living in the D.C. Metro area, I was very upset when hearing that the D.C. Police Chief had been against revealing the make of the snipers' car when they finally found it out. Once this information was released, the snipers were caught in 2 hours or so, IIRC.
I agree with the parent poster - this seems like an apt analogy. At least if a non-negligible number of bugs, patches, fixes, or workarounds, even if just temporary, come from unexpected sources outside of the vendors or finders.
(2) Why would a relaxation of regulations result in anarchy? Even with ordinances and regulations, violations occur and end up in court. Without ordinances there would still be the common law to remedy undesiriable property use. Such things as trespass, trespass on the case (generally used for indirect trespass such as noxious fumes or smells, flooding from a neighbors water reserve, etc.), and so forth could still be remedied in court. And the courts would create new common law for any property use deemed undesirable by society which wasn't covered by existing law.
I think the grandparent poster was mainly referring to the seemingly overabundance of ordinances these days against property use which violates so-called public sensibilities.
Look to the extreme of regulation - homeowner's associations. While these are built on contract law and not government ordinances, the authoritarian control is perhaps similar. Thank god I don't have a homeowner's association - I am sure that I couldn't handle it. I hear stories of people who are continually in fights with their associations and self-appointed neighbors who patrol the back sides of property looking for violations. The restrictions seem to get on people's nerves sooner or later. They can control what color can be used to paint the house, what fences are allowable, what plants can be used. Ouch!
Idealistically, I agree with the grandparent post. Live and let live - let each owner use his or her property as he or she wishes so long as it does not endanger others or infringe on other's rights.