Not true. If the copyrighted work does not remain intact, then you have, in fact, created a derivative work. The copyright holder has the exclusive right to create and distribute derivative works based on the original work -- the law is quite explicit about it. Clean Flicks are indeed creating derivative works and reselling them without permission of the copyright holders.
And if CleanFlicks didn't destroy the original work, you would be completely correct. But they do - so the derivative work rule shouldn't apply - because they haven't created a work at all, just modified a COPY of one.
This is a very delicate issue, but it's important to realize the distinction between the original and a copy - though admittedly, this issue hazes that distinction as much as possible.
But still, to follow your GPL example...if I modify the source, AND I RELEASE IT, then I must disclose any mods. But what if someone contracts me to mod their COPY? I don't have to disclose at all - I can mod as much as I want, and as long as I don't release it as a new version, I can do that. Furthermore, a company could contract me to do the same.
This is exactly what CleanFlicks does. One copy in, one copy out. Note that they do not even attempt to copyright what they have done - they obviously couldn't. They are simply performing a service, on a single copy, for a single client. This is allowed, and shouldn't be covered by derivative works.
In general it's the democrats which back the the anti-consumer copyright laws and side with major labels and content producers against the consumer, and the republicans who attempt (however half-heartedly) to support individual rights and liberties.
You're point is still very good, and i think that you're correct, but your silly insertion of (thuthless) propaganda is offensive.
Whoa, no offense intended, I'm between parties (so no propaganda either (you might be surprised who I voted for...)
That said, I have no delusions that the directors would be able to get legislation they want through. You are right, I didn't think the situation completely through - I forgot that the republicans are pissed at all things hollywood for supporting Gore (fair enough - Clinton did the same thing to other industries). But like you say, they aren't going to spend much time helping us out here. And Fritz Holling and friends (D-SC as you are no doubt aware) will push it through.
So I got the parties switched in my haste, but the end result will likely be the same. Goodbye personal liberties!
1. Is this covered under copyright law? Where is the passage that prevents resale? Where is the passage that prevents editing? They do not, I believe, exist. So really, the Directors don't have much of a legal leg to stand on...currently. I assume they're trying to threaten the CLean Flicks people enough to settle or something. If so, we'll see them paying extra for the privilege of editing.
2. This is a MORAL argument. And we all know how much we hate it when the religious right tries to take away our rights. Among them are porn, violent video games, atheism, abortion, flag-burning, etc. We all say things about "not having to agree with speech to defend it..." At least until it's some Christian group needing the defending. Then where are the free-speech proponents?
3. This will end up being a back-door argument into a cash play. They will try to get legislation to prevent resale of copyrighted works. And they will use this example as one of their harms. We know the republicans will back them - they always do - but they will use this argument to win a few democrats. Watch.
So shouldn't EVERY network TV station be guilty of "violating" these people's rights? I mean, Ted Turner should be in jail for life by now after the cut-jobs TBS does all the time.
Or how about radio? Most stations will *bleep* out all the curse words in songs. Are they guilty?
How about Condensed Books? They don't seem to have a problem here - in fact, they license it!
When you get down to it, the artist's "vision" is compromised all the time, in many ways. But no one steals the original, which is the important thing. Like someone else said, if this was modded games we were talking about, half of/. woould be foaming at the mouth right now. But because it's the religious right, many of you switch sides. Not to troll, but this is so typical: I want speech I like protected, but not speech I don't.
Dunno if you've been to college at all or recently, but any student I knew would much rather buy a used textbook - not only because they were cheaper, but because if the prior owner was at all intelligent, then it really reduced your workload by the book being well-highlighted. New books almost never sell until the used ones sell out. So the edited version has more value.
In the movie example, how would clean flicks stay in business if they decreased the value of the movie? They buy a movie at standard retail and sell it for more. And obviously they have customers. That's the definition of value-added.
A car is not a copyrighted work. Your analogy is poor and misleading.
A car may not be copyrighted, but it's fairly irrelevant, because there's no part in copyright law that prevents resale (Used record stores still exist). There's also no part that says "upon resale, work must remain intact." So, since copyright law makes no guarantee of creative integrity, the car sees the same protection under law: ie, NONE.
The key phrase here is "signed an agreement with your apartment complex." Since your landlord owns the place, they have the right to restrict anything on their premises. This has nothing to do with broadcast spectrum rights, or anything of the kind.
Legally, you do indeed own everything inside your wall (ATT lost that one 20+ years ago). So that's your property. When it leaves your building, the network is THEIR property. So, if you hack cable, you are using your property to hack their physical network, their property, which is a crime. With WiFi, you do not hack their property, nor their proprietary spectrum. So it is not clear at all that any of the "Cable" laws extend to Wifi, as many of the "Cable" laws do not even extend to DirecTV.
Ok, there are some huge fundamental differences here that you are glossing over...
1. Cable isn't even comparable, as the signal does not pass over a publicly-accessible medium. I should have no expectation of access to a fiber network that the city (or the Cable company) put down underground.
2. DirecTV isn't comparable either, although last I checked (won't swear as to now), hacking DirecTV signals, at least with your own hardware, is not illegal (tampering with the card is because they own it). Reason? Signal goes through air that is public domain. To be fair, the particular frequencies they use are licensed to them, so there could be some ground here for legislation. But I would still argue that passive (ie, receiving) access is legal - if they can't keep their signal away from you, they should expect some hacking. Note that their solution has been equipment that has updatable security - smart.
3. 802.11 isn't even in the same ballpark. It goes through a public medium (air) and a public frequency spectrum (frequently the 2.4 GHz band). I suppose I shouldn't use anything that could interfere with that frequency? Like my cordless phone? That's ridiculous - there have been enough crappy analogies already, but expecting privacy here is like building a house with no doors in a public park, and then getting all upset when people trespass. Either licence your own spectrum or use some damned security.
I would say it depends on what the point of his patent is. If he is attempting to capitalize on it, then theoretically (very) he is expecting a potential revenue stream that would make defending the patent worth the cost.
Otherwise, he has a couple of options. First, he can sell the patent to an interested party before any legal issues occur. Second, he could be a real ass and only file the patent in expectation of collecting damages preventing a company from using it after they have invested R&D into their implementation (sound familiar, Rambus?). He could therefore either force the company to pay him royalties, or could sell them the rights to the patent outright. Either way, there would be a financial windfall expected from the suit, which means that he would likely get a lawyer to take on the case for free in expectation of a large chunk of the settlement.
So, depending on how you go, if you get a patent, you can legerage it for financial gain, if that's what you want - remember, large companies don't like legal fights either, and if the cost of a settlement isn't much more than the cost of a drawn-out battle, they will likely go for it. If you actually expect to keep and use the patent, things will be harder.
The variants I've seen do not successfully forge the headers, only the "from" field. I've used the header to track it back to friends of mine who have me in their Outlook addy book.
One of my solutions has been to only make friends with people who don't use Outlook.;)
I think we're going to have more allies in this than might be immediately evident. Hardware manufacturers HATE this idea, for the exact reasons you mention. Let's say that Joe Consumer wants a new MP3 ripper or player. Now, he has a large MP3 library, of course, and how he got them is irrelevant. If the new harware/software he wants only interfaces with "trusted" counterparts, that means he has to upgrade his computer, his OS, and his MP3 library (at huge cost, despite fair use rights) just to get a new piece of hardware.
Naturally, this means that hardware manufacturers are at a big disadvantage, because for them DRM=less sales. In other words, if the **AA win, hardware people lose - and from what I hear, they're starting to warm up to that and realize the situation.
So where does this place M$? At a crossroads. Non-DRM OS's will almost certainly become more popular (with Apple getting most of the overflow, but *nix too). That's not good for M$. And pissing off hardware manufacturers might not be the best idea. On the other hand, having a patent on DRM-OS would be great if Fritz Holling gets his way and that becomes law (can you say state-MANDATED monopoly?).
For us, I suppose a good course of action would be to identify those manufacturers that will come out and say they are against DRM as the **AA wants it, and support those guys. Let them know we're behind them.
While I don't have any problem with a single distro doing this, I don't think there is any point in ALL the distros making their products look identical. I can see the point in establishing a baseline of installed packages and maybe even a consistent pattern of install directories, (although environment variables should fix even that), but why SHOULD look and feel be the same across linux platforms? The attraction of linux is the variety, the diversity, not the homogeneity.
You can always recognize Windows by the look of it, as it should be for Linux.
Many in the linux community try so hard to beat Windows that they are trying to make linux essentially *become* windows. We need to watch out for this - otherwise, all we have is another crappy OS.
At most, I might go along with a "Dummy config" that looks as much like windows as possible to get the crossover users - but when you get down to it, that's called KDE.
Before I applaud them for playing fair (which they have done so far), I'll wait until the FSF takes a look at the new versions of the software to see if they've used smoke and mirrors to make it look like they aren't using open source code while they've actually plagiarized it.
I'll give them the benefit of the doubt, but we shall see.
No, market share doesn't necessarily mean best product, it's not like netcraft publishes a pro/con review anyway.
There's no doubt that it could hurt Microsoft's a teeny bit, but that's about it.
More than a teeny bit, considering that they make a lot more money off of business apps than home apps. You don't think Bill would love the server market? That's where they are currently devoting the greatest share of their attention.
And what I'm saying here is that Apache may or may not be a valuable part of many companies' mission critical applications. Maybe maybe maybe...for people who have used both, they will almost unanimously tell you that apache is MUCH more stable and secure. If you have something mission-critical, you run it on apache. End of story. Throw some stats otherwise if you have them, but you likely won't find them.
No way in hell I'd use IIS. I could show you server logs of how many CodeRed-style viruses have hit my server (to no avail of course - many before Norton can patch them. Had I been using IIS - kablooie!
Well, Apache did just release v 2.0. Now, it is debatable whether some of these are test/redundant machines running essentially mirrors which could account for the increase. But this doesn't account for M$'s decrease. It is possible that the new functionality in 2.0 was enough to convince some poor sysadmins tied to IIS.
Here's the way I look at it. Who's probably got the really sweet setup - the guy who spends all his time painting the thing, or the guy who doesn't even know where his computer's case cover is because he never even ?
A lot of those "tricked out" computers are like their car equivelants. Who hasn't seen the tricked out Honda Civic with the massive spoiler?
You forgot about Redmond releasing a bunch of bloated, buggy, unoptimized code, ensuring that the operating system needs a new computer to run decently. I don't know if that's covered under "pushing the envelope" or not...
It's actually fairly easy to sue a university (yes, state schools too). They let their lawyers run practically everything they do. Schools have endowments, and they make lawyers drool.
The difference between intentionally violating specific patents and remaining willfully ignorant of patents that are certainly being violated is damned slim. Linus is knowingly violating patents, period. The only difference is that he doesn't know which specific patents they are, but with a project the size of the linux kernel, violations will certainly occur if there's no checking, of which he is obviously aware.
This approcah is a crutch to avoid punitive damages, and as such, is a good idea. But ethically, there is scarcely any difference between the two, as he is intentionally violating patents either way. So I agree with the original post, I don't think Linus has much moral high ground here if people were to start infringing GPL patents.
We in the Linux community need to avoid deifying Linus too much - last I checked, he didn't have a halo.
Slashdot Mirror
Not true. If the copyrighted work does not remain intact, then you have, in fact, created a derivative work. The copyright holder has the exclusive right to create and distribute derivative works based on the original work -- the law is quite explicit about it. Clean Flicks are indeed creating derivative works and reselling them without permission of the copyright holders.
And if CleanFlicks didn't destroy the original work, you would be completely correct. But they do - so the derivative work rule shouldn't apply - because they haven't created a work at all, just modified a COPY of one.
This is a very delicate issue, but it's important to realize the distinction between the original and a copy - though admittedly, this issue hazes that distinction as much as possible.
But still, to follow your GPL example...if I modify the source, AND I RELEASE IT, then I must disclose any mods. But what if someone contracts me to mod their COPY? I don't have to disclose at all - I can mod as much as I want, and as long as I don't release it as a new version, I can do that. Furthermore, a company could contract me to do the same.
This is exactly what CleanFlicks does. One copy in, one copy out. Note that they do not even attempt to copyright what they have done - they obviously couldn't. They are simply performing a service, on a single copy, for a single client. This is allowed, and shouldn't be covered by derivative works.
In general it's the democrats which back the the anti-consumer copyright laws and side with major labels and content producers against the consumer, and the republicans who attempt (however half-heartedly) to support individual rights and liberties. You're point is still very good, and i think that you're correct, but your silly insertion of (thuthless) propaganda is offensive.
Whoa, no offense intended, I'm between parties (so no propaganda either (you might be surprised who I voted for...)
That said, I have no delusions that the directors would be able to get legislation they want through. You are right, I didn't think the situation completely through - I forgot that the republicans are pissed at all things hollywood for supporting Gore (fair enough - Clinton did the same thing to other industries). But like you say, they aren't going to spend much time helping us out here. And Fritz Holling and friends (D-SC as you are no doubt aware) will push it through.
So I got the parties switched in my haste, but the end result will likely be the same. Goodbye personal liberties!
Here is what it comes down to.
1. Is this covered under copyright law? Where is the passage that prevents resale? Where is the passage that prevents editing? They do not, I believe, exist. So really, the Directors don't have much of a legal leg to stand on...currently. I assume they're trying to threaten the CLean Flicks people enough to settle or something. If so, we'll see them paying extra for the privilege of editing.
2. This is a MORAL argument. And we all know how much we hate it when the religious right tries to take away our rights. Among them are porn, violent video games, atheism, abortion, flag-burning, etc. We all say things about "not having to agree with speech to defend it..." At least until it's some Christian group needing the defending. Then where are the free-speech proponents?
3. This will end up being a back-door argument into a cash play. They will try to get legislation to prevent resale of copyrighted works. And they will use this example as one of their harms. We know the republicans will back them - they always do - but they will use this argument to win a few democrats. Watch.
So shouldn't EVERY network TV station be guilty of "violating" these people's rights? I mean, Ted Turner should be in jail for life by now after the cut-jobs TBS does all the time.
/. woould be foaming at the mouth right now. But because it's the religious right, many of you switch sides. Not to troll, but this is so typical: I want speech I like protected, but not speech I don't.
Or how about radio? Most stations will *bleep* out all the curse words in songs. Are they guilty?
How about Condensed Books? They don't seem to have a problem here - in fact, they license it!
When you get down to it, the artist's "vision" is compromised all the time, in many ways. But no one steals the original, which is the important thing. Like someone else said, if this was modded games we were talking about, half of
By this notion the author would be guilty of violating his own copyright by autographing the book for you. ;)
Dunno if you've been to college at all or recently, but any student I knew would much rather buy a used textbook - not only because they were cheaper, but because if the prior owner was at all intelligent, then it really reduced your workload by the book being well-highlighted. New books almost never sell until the used ones sell out. So the edited version has more value.
In the movie example, how would clean flicks stay in business if they decreased the value of the movie? They buy a movie at standard retail and sell it for more. And obviously they have customers. That's the definition of value-added.
A car is not a copyrighted work. Your analogy is poor and misleading.
A car may not be copyrighted, but it's fairly irrelevant, because there's no part in copyright law that prevents resale (Used record stores still exist). There's also no part that says "upon resale, work must remain intact." So, since copyright law makes no guarantee of creative integrity, the car sees the same protection under law: ie, NONE.
So I'd say the guy's analogy looks pretty good.
They can't be all bad if they canned Futurama...I mean that show blows. It's the Simpsons...except homer's a robot...and it's not even remotely funny.
Family Guy, let's face it, is just a bit too intellectual for network audiences. I bet it'll end up on cable. Blame America for that one...
The key phrase here is "signed an agreement with your apartment complex." Since your landlord owns the place, they have the right to restrict anything on their premises. This has nothing to do with broadcast spectrum rights, or anything of the kind.
Legally, you do indeed own everything inside your wall (ATT lost that one 20+ years ago). So that's your property. When it leaves your building, the network is THEIR property. So, if you hack cable, you are using your property to hack their physical network, their property, which is a crime. With WiFi, you do not hack their property, nor their proprietary spectrum. So it is not clear at all that any of the "Cable" laws extend to Wifi, as many of the "Cable" laws do not even extend to DirecTV.
Ok, there are some huge fundamental differences here that you are glossing over...
1. Cable isn't even comparable, as the signal does not pass over a publicly-accessible medium. I should have no expectation of access to a fiber network that the city (or the Cable company) put down underground.
2. DirecTV isn't comparable either, although last I checked (won't swear as to now), hacking DirecTV signals, at least with your own hardware, is not illegal (tampering with the card is because they own it). Reason? Signal goes through air that is public domain. To be fair, the particular frequencies they use are licensed to them, so there could be some ground here for legislation. But I would still argue that passive (ie, receiving) access is legal - if they can't keep their signal away from you, they should expect some hacking. Note that their solution has been equipment that has updatable security - smart.
3. 802.11 isn't even in the same ballpark. It goes through a public medium (air) and a public frequency spectrum (frequently the 2.4 GHz band). I suppose I shouldn't use anything that could interfere with that frequency? Like my cordless phone? That's ridiculous - there have been enough crappy analogies already, but expecting privacy here is like building a house with no doors in a public park, and then getting all upset when people trespass. Either licence your own spectrum or use some damned security.
I would say it depends on what the point of his patent is. If he is attempting to capitalize on it, then theoretically (very) he is expecting a potential revenue stream that would make defending the patent worth the cost.
Otherwise, he has a couple of options. First, he can sell the patent to an interested party before any legal issues occur. Second, he could be a real ass and only file the patent in expectation of collecting damages preventing a company from using it after they have invested R&D into their implementation (sound familiar, Rambus?). He could therefore either force the company to pay him royalties, or could sell them the rights to the patent outright. Either way, there would be a financial windfall expected from the suit, which means that he would likely get a lawyer to take on the case for free in expectation of a large chunk of the settlement.
So, depending on how you go, if you get a patent, you can legerage it for financial gain, if that's what you want - remember, large companies don't like legal fights either, and if the cost of a settlement isn't much more than the cost of a drawn-out battle, they will likely go for it. If you actually expect to keep and use the patent, things will be harder.
Yeah, you guys are wonderful. Like I haven't had to take my car in like 12 times for recalls because of small, faulty parts. I mean seriously...
The variants I've seen do not successfully forge the headers, only the "from" field. I've used the header to track it back to friends of mine who have me in their Outlook addy book.
;)
One of my solutions has been to only make friends with people who don't use Outlook.
I think we're going to have more allies in this than might be immediately evident. Hardware manufacturers HATE this idea, for the exact reasons you mention. Let's say that Joe Consumer wants a new MP3 ripper or player. Now, he has a large MP3 library, of course, and how he got them is irrelevant. If the new harware/software he wants only interfaces with "trusted" counterparts, that means he has to upgrade his computer, his OS, and his MP3 library (at huge cost, despite fair use rights) just to get a new piece of hardware.
Naturally, this means that hardware manufacturers are at a big disadvantage, because for them DRM=less sales. In other words, if the **AA win, hardware people lose - and from what I hear, they're starting to warm up to that and realize the situation.
So where does this place M$? At a crossroads. Non-DRM OS's will almost certainly become more popular (with Apple getting most of the overflow, but *nix too). That's not good for M$. And pissing off hardware manufacturers might not be the best idea. On the other hand, having a patent on DRM-OS would be great if Fritz Holling gets his way and that becomes law (can you say state-MANDATED monopoly?).
For us, I suppose a good course of action would be to identify those manufacturers that will come out and say they are against DRM as the **AA wants it, and support those guys. Let them know we're behind them.
While I don't have any problem with a single distro doing this, I don't think there is any point in ALL the distros making their products look identical. I can see the point in establishing a baseline of installed packages and maybe even a consistent pattern of install directories, (although environment variables should fix even that), but why SHOULD look and feel be the same across linux platforms? The attraction of linux is the variety, the diversity, not the homogeneity.
You can always recognize Windows by the look of it, as it should be for Linux.
Many in the linux community try so hard to beat Windows that they are trying to make linux essentially *become* windows. We need to watch out for this - otherwise, all we have is another crappy OS.
At most, I might go along with a "Dummy config" that looks as much like windows as possible to get the crossover users - but when you get down to it, that's called KDE.
Before I applaud them for playing fair (which they have done so far), I'll wait until the FSF takes a look at the new versions of the software to see if they've used smoke and mirrors to make it look like they aren't using open source code while they've actually plagiarized it.
I'll give them the benefit of the doubt, but we shall see.
Come on, you know his wife posted that. How many "men" watch buffy for Chrissake?
Makes me think one of the editors let his girlfriend have article approval privileges...
No, market share doesn't necessarily mean best product, it's not like netcraft publishes a pro/con review anyway.
There's no doubt that it could hurt Microsoft's a teeny bit, but that's about it.
More than a teeny bit, considering that they make a lot more money off of business apps than home apps. You don't think Bill would love the server market? That's where they are currently devoting the greatest share of their attention.
And what I'm saying here is that Apache may or may not be a valuable part of many companies' mission critical applications.
Maybe maybe maybe...for people who have used both, they will almost unanimously tell you that apache is MUCH more stable and secure. If you have something mission-critical, you run it on apache. End of story. Throw some stats otherwise if you have them, but you likely won't find them.
No way in hell I'd use IIS. I could show you server logs of how many CodeRed-style viruses have hit my server (to no avail of course - many before Norton can patch them. Had I been using IIS - kablooie!
Well, Apache did just release v 2.0. Now, it is debatable whether some of these are test/redundant machines running essentially mirrors which could account for the increase. But this doesn't account for M$'s decrease. It is possible that the new functionality in 2.0 was enough to convince some poor sysadmins tied to IIS.
Here's the way I look at it. Who's probably got the really sweet setup - the guy who spends all his time painting the thing, or the guy who doesn't even know where his computer's case cover is because he never even ?
A lot of those "tricked out" computers are like their car equivelants. Who hasn't seen the tricked out Honda Civic with the massive spoiler?
You forgot about Redmond releasing a bunch of bloated, buggy, unoptimized code, ensuring that the operating system needs a new computer to run decently. I don't know if that's covered under "pushing the envelope" or not...
And the first time Wine crashes on you during a game, you'll give up on that shit. Please, God, not the "Wine runs all things windows" flamewar again.
It's actually fairly easy to sue a university (yes, state schools too). They let their lawyers run practically everything they do. Schools have endowments, and they make lawyers drool.
The difference between intentionally violating specific patents and remaining willfully ignorant of patents that are certainly being violated is damned slim. Linus is knowingly violating patents, period. The only difference is that he doesn't know which specific patents they are, but with a project the size of the linux kernel, violations will certainly occur if there's no checking, of which he is obviously aware.
This approcah is a crutch to avoid punitive damages, and as such, is a good idea. But ethically, there is scarcely any difference between the two, as he is intentionally violating patents either way. So I agree with the original post, I don't think Linus has much moral high ground here if people were to start infringing GPL patents.
We in the Linux community need to avoid deifying Linus too much - last I checked, he didn't have a halo.
If there were no regulation, our world would be an over-exploited toxic dump.
Yeah, the Soviets had a much better idea with state control. Chernobyl was a paradise.