And yet, somehow, dozens of worthy films get made in Hollywood every year.
I stand by my remark. People who have never made a movie are in no position at all to criticize Hollywood, or anybody who works in it. You can argue about the individual merits of any given film all you want-- after all, opinions are like assholes-- but in the face of so much evidence to the contrary, broad indictments of "the system" come across sounding utterly absurd.
Seriously, I'm not totally convinced of IDC's methodology.
It sounds like you might not be aware of it. IDC's report is based on surveys of-- I think it was-- 22 companies. They recorded data about things like how much each company spent on (for instance) IT staffing salaries. They found that companies that use Linux tend to spend more on IT staff than companies that use Windows. Since IT staffing salaries make up something like 62% of the total cost of ownership of a given computer system, the result is that Linux is no less expensive, and sometimes more expensive, than Windows.
This isn't a subjective test. IDC didn't look at an old version of Linux and say, "Damn, that sucks. We'd better report that it's hard to use."
At this point you should be thinking, "Hey, Band of Brothers was an awful lot like Saving Private Ryan. And From the Earth to the Moon was a lot like Apollo 13."
Maybe the resemblance-- thematically and visually-- between Close Encounters and Taken is no accident. Just maybe.
They teach you how to write a hook in writing classes for a reason. You only have a few seconds to get people's attention.
Did you watch the first two minutes of Taken? It was one hell of a hook. I wasn't actually that interested in watching, but when I saw the air battle over Germany and how it ended, I planted my butt on the couch and watched the rest of the two-hour episode.
Even then Spielberg felt the need for a "happy ending"; what the fuck was so happy about 6 million jews being put to death?
The part where 1,200 were saved.
Oskar Schindler was a hero. An accidental hero, yeah, but through his misguided actions and deeply flawed motives, he still managed to save the lives of 1,200 people, and by extension over 6,000 of their descendants. Are you aware that there are more Schindler Jews-- including survivors and their families-- alive in the world today than there are Jews in all of Poland? Schindler made a difference. His story, the story of his accomplishment, is inspirational. That, in my opinion, makes for a pretty fucking happy ending, you asshole.
many of the characters are stiff cartoonish cliche's of Nazis and Jews
Seeing as how the portrayals of the various major characters were all based on the accounts of eyewitnesses, I think you're a little out of line in this criticism.
Oh well, I guess we can't expect too much from Hollywood these days.
How many movies have you made? When you make your masterpiece, we'll all listen to your blanket criticisms of Hollywood. Until then, please shut the fuck up, okay? Thanks.
I wouldn't expect a ton of originality from Spielberg, his claim to fame is the lowest common denominator
Actually, I'm pretty sure his "claim to fame" is making Schindler's List, which is widely and rightfully regarded as one of the best motion pictures of the 20th century.
First of all I am NEVER going to use DHCP to assign a server an IP, Windows or Linux.
I don't recall asking. If you want to manage 200+ computers with static IP addresses, that's no skin off my ass. It would be difficult to argue, however, that such a policy is smart in any meaningful sense of the word.
Secondly, most of the new distros (as well as Windows) are able to configure a NIC to use DHCP (or it'll ask you what IP to use) during the install, providing that it's one that they have drivers for.
That wasn't my question either. Assume, for sake of argument, that the install was done with no network configuration at all. The question is simple: how do you configure a running Linux system to use DHCP to acquire its IP address at boot time, and how does that process compare to configuring a running Windows system to use DHCP?
I just select K menu --> Configuration --> Mandrake Control Center and then click on the pretty widgets in the Network section. Or, alternately, type "draknet" on the command line (its faster).
Interesting. Not only did that not work on my Linux box, but the instructions didn't even make any sense. What is "K menu?" What is "Mandrake Control Center?" And typing "draknet" resulted in "Command not found."
Is it relevant that I'm running Red Hat 7.2 and that my window manager is FVWM95?
(See my point? Even if you know how to do something under one specific instance of Linux, that doesn't help you at all when faced with another instance of Linux. The two aren't even similar.)
First, how are you supposed to know that unless you already know it? Second, that only works once; how do you configure the machine to get its IP via DHCP every time it boots?
Huh? Forget everything you know about Linux, or UNIX in general. Start with a clean slate. Now tell me how to set up a Linux machine to get its IP address via DHCP. Do the same thing with Windows 2000 Server. Which one was easier?
You may like Linux better, but that doesn't mean it's easier to use.
No, that's a bullshit comparison. The IDC study (yeah, I read it; you should, too, because it brings up some really good points) essentially says that the costs of administration for Linux are often higher than for Windows 2000 Server because Linux is, basically, a lot harder to use. It has nothing to do with the "weld the hood shut" open-source/closed-source argument (which is bullshit in and of itself, but that's another post).
The first comparison was, while still off the mark, more apt: driving an automatic is easier than driving a stick, and Windows 2000 is easier to set up, administer, and use than Linux.
"Only the writings and discoveries of authors and inventors may be protected, and then only to the end of promoting science and the useful arts."
Let us explore this further.
First of all, what you quote is from the annotations to the Constitution prepared by the Congressional Research Service. It is, therefore, a very sound source. But in order to interpret it correctly, it's necessary to understand the context of the annotations.
The one you quoted refers to two Supreme Court cases: Kendall v. Winsor (1858) and A&P Tea Co. v. Supermarket Corp. (1950). Both of these cases revolve around patents, not copyrights. The language of the annotation is inspired by Kendall, in which Justice Daniel wrote about the necessity of considering the motives of a patent-holder when considering a claim of infringement:
By correct induction from these truths, it follows, that the inventor who designedly, and with the view of applying it indefinitely and exclusively for his own profit, withholds his invention from the public, comes not within the policy or objects of the Constitution or acts of Congress. He does not promote, and, if aided in his design, would impede, the progress of science and the useful arts. And with a very bad grace could he appeal for favor or protection to that society which, if he had not injured, he certainly had neither benefitted nor intended to benefit. Hence, if, during such a concealment, an invention similar to or identical with his own should be made and patented, or brought into use without a patent, the latter could not be inhibited nor restricted, upon proof of its identity with a machine previously invented and withheld and concealed by the inventor from the public.
That's all well and good for patents, but a different story applies to copyrights. There are criteria-- expressed in the statutes-- for determining whether an idea is patentable: originality, novelty, "non-obviousness," and so on. No such criteria apply to copyrights; every "work of authorship" gets a copyright attached to it implicitly. Justice Day wrote about the motivation for this in American Tobacco Co. v. Werckmeister (1907):
A copyright, as defined by Bouvier's Law Dictionary, Rawles's edition, volume 1, p. 436, is: 'The exclusive privilege, secured according to certain legal forms, of printing, or otherwise multiplying, publishing, and vending copies of certain literary or artistic productions.' And further, says the same author, 'the foundation of all rights of this description is the natural dominion which everyone has over his own ideas, the enjoyment of which, although they are embodied in visible forms or characters, he may, if he chooses, confine to himself or impart to others.' That is, the law recognizes the artistic or literary productions of intellect or genius, not only to the extent which is involved in dominion over and ownership of the thing created, but also the intangible estate in such property which arises from the privilege of publishing and selling to others copies of the thing produced.
But the real good stuff comes from Mazer v. Stein (1954), in which Justice Reed specifically and exhaustively tackled the subject of the legal meaning (or absence thereof) of aesthetic value. His opinion is far too lengthy and comprehensive to quote in entirety here, but I will excerpt a brief passage to give you an idea of his gist:
The constitutional power of Congress to confer copyright protection on works of art or their reproductions is not questioned. Petitioners assume, as Congress has in its enactments and as do we, that the constitutional clause empowering legislation "To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries," Art. I, 8, cl. 8, includes within the term "Authors" the creator of a picture or a statue. The Court's consideration will be limited to the question presented by the petition for the writ of certiorari. In recent years the question as to utilitarian use of copyrighted articles has been much discussed.
In answering that issue, a review of the development of copyright coverage will make clear the purpose of the Congress in its copyright legislation. [...] Significant for our purposes was the deletion of the fine-arts clause of the 1870 Act. Verbal distinctions between purely aesthetic articles and useful works of art ended insofar as the statutory copyright language is concerned.
As you can see, the prevailing opinion in the case law is that patents should be applied selectively, while copyrights apply to all works of authorship without consideration of the nature or value of any particular work.
I don't think that has any relevance to what he's talking about. Sending nuclear waste to other planets would prevent the environmental problems associated with the waste.
Consider this thought experiment.
I take a kilogram of nuclear fuel (doesn't matter what variety) and use it to generate energy, in the form of electricity. At some point, that fuel is spent, and cannot be used to generate any more electricity. I have generated N joules of energy.
I then put that kilogram of still-radioactive but no longer useful fuel on a rocket and blast it into outer space. This requires M joules of energy. That energy has to come from somewhere; the simplest case is if the energy is electrical, through an electromagnetic cannon or some such. The energy required to launch the spent fuel, M, is greater than the energy produced by the fuel, N. So the net amount of electrical energy available for use goes down in this system. (For proof of this, hit Google. I don't feel like typing that much stuff in this comment tonight. The numbers are readily available.)
If you complicate the experiment by using a chemical rocket, the result remains the same. It still take M joules to heave a kilogram of spent fuel away from the Earth, but in this case you get those joules from the chemical energy of combustion. Somehow the fuel for the rocket had to be prepared; preparing rocket fuel and oxidizer to produce M joules of energy requires L joules of energy, and L is greater than M. So in that case, the net energy available for use still goes down.
If the only way to safely dispose of spent radioactive fuel were to blast it into orbit, then energy generation through nuclear fission would actually have a negative efficiency.
Kinda like celery. You can eat celery all day long and still starve to death because it requires more calories to digest it than your body actually gets from it. Celery is a net-negative-calorie food.
I wouldn't know. I haven't been asked to metamoderate since I started using this new account. I posted under a previous account for a few years, but grew sick of the user name and haven't been invited to participate in either form of moderation since. I have no idea if I'm deliberately being excluded, or if I'm just still in that "new user" phase. Don't know if there's any way to find out, either.
I strongly agree with "Misinformative", though I think I'd change it to "Incorrect", since "Misinformative" implies an attempt to deliberately spread misinformation
Yeah, you've got a point, but I'm not sure "incorrect" covers it either. I'd like a moderation that I could assign (in theory, if I ever were to get mod points again) to posts that are (1) wrong or (b) moot. Because sometimes a post can be technically correct, but wrong anyway because it doesn't apply to the situation at hand. The post that spawned this thread qualifies thus: it's true (transport-layer encryption [such as SSL] is less useful if other segments of the message path are unencrypted), but it doesn't apply to this discussion (we're not talking about transport-layer encryption, but rather message-layer encryption).
I don't know what the right answer is, but I do know that Troll, Offtopic, Redundant, and Flamebait don't apply.
You're ignoring the Constitution, to the point where you won't even comment on it.
The Constitution does not, despite what you seem to think, say that only "artistic" works are eligible for copyright protection. It says,
The Congress shall have power [...] to promote the progress of science and useful arts, by securing for limited times to authors and inventors the exclusive right to their respective writings and discoveries.
It does not, as you will certainly note, say that Congress shall have the power to grant exclusive right to artistic writings. Perhaps you're being thrown off by the bit about "the useful arts." You are aware, are you not, that "the useful arts" at the time that the Constitution was written included things like metalworking, navigation, and animal husbandry? That phrase refers to practical pursuits, not to what you would call "artistic" works.
Taken by itself, one might argue that the Constitution, in fact, only offers exclusive rights to authors of useful or scientific works, and that works that are purely artistic, or that merely entertain, cannot be protected at all. Fortunately, though, Congress made no such distinctions in the Copyright Act of 1790; that law protected all works, whether they could reasonable be considered "useful" or not.
Remind me again who's ignoring the Constitution?
I'll try to label my opinions more clearly in the future so we can safely ignore them.
I don't mean to imply that you're not entitled to your opinion. I simply don't want to get into an "uh-HUH"/"nuh-UH" argument.
But in any case, do you consider spam to be science?
You're not really talking about science in the way we most often use the term; you're talking about innovation. And innovation is one of those funny things that is often not recognized until well after the fact. If every patent application were judged on the basis of worth as well as the other factors, we'd be doing a great disservice.
That said, no, the spam in question is not an innovation or invention. But it is a work, and as such, is protected by copyright.
Yep, and "original works of authorship" is interpreted by the Supreme Court to only include Science and Useful Arts.
Citations?
I disagree.
Again, I respect that. But what are your qualifications?
So hotmail is breaking copyright law by putting emails on web pages?
No, because they don't. Hotmail has never, to my knowledge, published anybody's email on a web page. They do, however, have a graphical user interface to their service that runs through a browser.
Once you grasp this distinction, all will be clear.
I have a right to disagree over whether or not computer programs are artistic.
Sure. But the question of whether a work is "artistic" or not is irrelevant to the question of whether it's protected by copyright or not. But I'm beating a dead horse here.
Further, my statement that "computer programs shouldn't be copyrightable at all" was largely an extension of my opinion that "copyright shouldn't exist."
You and I will never agree on that point. I respect your opinion and your right to hold it, but I think you're wrong.
If you haven't heard of the Copyright Clause, then you are the one discussing something that's over your head.
Well, to be fair, you did refer to what you call the "Copyright Clause" (which I now understand you mean to be Article I section 8 of the Constitution, which incidentally doesn't mention the word "copyright" at all) in the context of justifying your position that "only artistic works can be copyrighted in the first place." Article I section 8 says, "To promote the progress of science and useful arts, by securing for limited times to authors and inventors the exclusive right to their respective writings and discoveries," which in fact appears to refer specifically not to works that are "artistic," but rather only to those which are practically useful or scientific in nature. The question of protecting works of pure art-- as opposed to inventions and improvements on inventions-- didn't really come up until Title 17. So it's understandable that your ambiguous reference to a "Copyright Clause" should be a source of confusion. In future, you might want to use the correct citation-- Article I section 8-- instead of the phrase "Copyright Clause."
I stand by my assertion that only artistic works (literally "useful arts") are copyrightable, and that this is a fact with which every single Supreme Court justice would agree.
But you're obviously wrong, friend. The statute clearly says that all original works are protected by copyright. This law is not even remotely unconstitutional, because Congress is explicitly given the power to grant exclusive rights to authors under Article I section 8.
I'm afraid that you're just mistaken. All original works-- regardless of their nature or merit-- are protected by copyright. Title 17 includes a set of categories of works, but it is not meant to be either exhaustive nor exclusive. All original works are protected.
By that argument the people aren't distributing the spams, the computers are.
Huh?
Look, it works like this: I send you an email. I wrote it, so the copyright on that email belongs to me. You are given, however, no "implied license" related to that email. If you then put that email on a web page-- i.e., republish it-- I can ask you to remove it on copyright grounds, because only I have the right to publish, broadcast, or distribute that email.
Whether a particular use of a copyrighted work is fair or not depends on the purpose and way that it is used, and has nothing at all to do with the way that the work was distributed.
Hey... how can the parent comment be "overrated" if it hasn't been moderated by anybody else?
Because while you can moderate up for being informative or insightful, you can't (at present) moderate down for being dumb or wrong. As long as the down-mod options are limited to troll, off-topic, flamebait, and overrated, expect to see comments that are just plain stupid moderated "overrated."
Seems to me that if there's a "+1, Informative," there ought to be a "-1, Misinformative."
Yes, it's a stupid definition, computer programs shouldn't be copyrightable at all, but it's the law.
Okay, we're done talking now. Normally you make sense in your posts, but in this particular case, you're way out of your depth. It's clear that you're arguing from a flawed position-- computer programs shouldn't be copyrightable??-- so I respectfully ask that we just agree to disagree on this point. As long as you start with the assumption that copyright only covers certain types of works-- which is contrary to what the law says; refer to the quoted passage I provided up-thread-- then we'll never see eye-to-eye.
But what gives slashdot the right to publish your post?
Sounds like you're confusing Slashdot the computer software-- which is just a database with some I/O software running on a computer somewhere-- with Slashdot the organization-- which is composed of people. Slashdot-the-organization has no right to publish my comments; if they do so without permission, they'll be in trouble. Rather, I publish my own comments using Slashdot-the-computer-software as the medium of transmission.
Basically what you're saying is, "What gives the printing press the right to reproduce your book? I'd argue that it's an implied license." See the difference?
What "Copyright Clause?" Are you talking about Title 17? It says, "original works of authorship fixed in any tangible medium of expression, now known or later developed, from which they can be perceived, reproduced, or otherwise communicated, either directly or with the aid of a machine or device." The key phrase there is "original works of authorship." Any original work in any medium of expression-- notwithstanding 17 U.S.C. 102(b) which describes those types of intellectual property that are covered by patents rather than ideas.
Nowhere in the statutes does it say anything about copyright extending only to "artistic" works. There's nothing artistic about this post; it's covered by copyright anyway.
Congress has decided it already: (list from 17 U.S.C. 102)
Those are examples of works of authorship. It's not an exclusive list. For example, the list does not include computer source code-- unless you twist the definition of "literary" to mean "anything written," which makes it pretty useless-- and yet computer source code is most definitely covered by copyright.
Is spam a literary work? Somewhat, but its protection under copyright only extends to the parts which are literary, and literary must be interpreted in light of the Copyright Clause, which means it must be artistic.
Your interpretation of the law is completely bogus. At no time has it been considered that copyright should only cover works that are "artistic," specifically because there is no objective definition of that word. Is the manual that came with my VCR "artistic?" Not by any meaningful definition. But it's covered by copyright anyway.
You should just drop this "only artistic works can be copyrighted" thing now. The truth is quite different: every original work is automatically copyrighted, no matter what its relative merits, artistic or otherwise. That includes the spam in question.
there has to be some implied licenses along with internet distribution
Remember that the Internet is merely a medium, from a legal point of view. Forget everything you know about computers-- lord knows I'm trying to-- and think of email, Slashdot, Usenet, et cetera as media. As I sit here, composing this post, I am creating a work. That work is protected by copyright. When I click the "Submit" button-- 'cause, you know, the "Preview" button is for wimps-- I'll use Slashdot as a broadcast medium to transmit my work to anybody who wants to sign in and read it. Just as if I were, instead, reading these words over the radio or on TV, the fact that I'm broadcasting my work doesn't in any way dilute my copyright on it, nor does it grant anybody any exceptional rights.
Technically speaking, the various modes of communication over the Internet work differently from the way TV or radio, or even traditional paper-based publishing, works. But the technical details aren't important; what's important is that the Internet (or more accurately the various types of software that run on it) behaves like a broadcast medium. That's why it should be thought of that way in situations like this one.
McLuhan was full of shit, basically. The medium is not the message, at least from the perspective of copyright.
Slashdot Mirror
And yet, somehow, dozens of worthy films get made in Hollywood every year.
I stand by my remark. People who have never made a movie are in no position at all to criticize Hollywood, or anybody who works in it. You can argue about the individual merits of any given film all you want-- after all, opinions are like assholes-- but in the face of so much evidence to the contrary, broad indictments of "the system" come across sounding utterly absurd.
Seriously, I'm not totally convinced of IDC's methodology.
It sounds like you might not be aware of it. IDC's report is based on surveys of-- I think it was-- 22 companies. They recorded data about things like how much each company spent on (for instance) IT staffing salaries. They found that companies that use Linux tend to spend more on IT staff than companies that use Windows. Since IT staffing salaries make up something like 62% of the total cost of ownership of a given computer system, the result is that Linux is no less expensive, and sometimes more expensive, than Windows.
This isn't a subjective test. IDC didn't look at an old version of Linux and say, "Damn, that sucks. We'd better report that it's hard to use."
reminded my of Close Encounters
At this point you should be thinking, "Hey, Band of Brothers was an awful lot like Saving Private Ryan. And From the Earth to the Moon was a lot like Apollo 13."
Maybe the resemblance-- thematically and visually-- between Close Encounters and Taken is no accident. Just maybe.
They teach you how to write a hook in writing classes for a reason. You only have a few seconds to get people's attention.
Did you watch the first two minutes of Taken? It was one hell of a hook. I wasn't actually that interested in watching, but when I saw the air battle over Germany and how it ended, I planted my butt on the couch and watched the rest of the two-hour episode.
That's a hook, friend.
Even then Spielberg felt the need for a "happy ending"; what the fuck was so happy about 6 million jews being put to death?
The part where 1,200 were saved.
Oskar Schindler was a hero. An accidental hero, yeah, but through his misguided actions and deeply flawed motives, he still managed to save the lives of 1,200 people, and by extension over 6,000 of their descendants. Are you aware that there are more Schindler Jews-- including survivors and their families-- alive in the world today than there are Jews in all of Poland? Schindler made a difference. His story, the story of his accomplishment, is inspirational. That, in my opinion, makes for a pretty fucking happy ending, you asshole.
many of the characters are stiff cartoonish cliche's of Nazis and Jews
Seeing as how the portrayals of the various major characters were all based on the accounts of eyewitnesses, I think you're a little out of line in this criticism.
Oh well, I guess we can't expect too much from Hollywood these days.
How many movies have you made? When you make your masterpiece, we'll all listen to your blanket criticisms of Hollywood. Until then, please shut the fuck up, okay? Thanks.
Frankly, anyone could have made Schindlers List.
Never seen it, huh?
I wouldn't expect a ton of originality from Spielberg, his claim to fame is the lowest common denominator
Actually, I'm pretty sure his "claim to fame" is making Schindler's List, which is widely and rightfully regarded as one of the best motion pictures of the 20th century.
Mandrake Linux is as easy (if not easier) to use and administer than Windows.
IDC-- an organization whose opinion I trust more than yours-- disagrees with you. How can you explain this?
First of all I am NEVER going to use DHCP to assign a server an IP, Windows or Linux.
I don't recall asking. If you want to manage 200+ computers with static IP addresses, that's no skin off my ass. It would be difficult to argue, however, that such a policy is smart in any meaningful sense of the word.
Secondly, most of the new distros (as well as Windows) are able to configure a NIC to use DHCP (or it'll ask you what IP to use) during the install, providing that it's one that they have drivers for.
That wasn't my question either. Assume, for sake of argument, that the install was done with no network configuration at all. The question is simple: how do you configure a running Linux system to use DHCP to acquire its IP address at boot time, and how does that process compare to configuring a running Windows system to use DHCP?
I just select K menu --> Configuration --> Mandrake Control Center and then click on the pretty widgets in the Network section. Or, alternately, type "draknet" on the command line (its faster).
Interesting. Not only did that not work on my Linux box, but the instructions didn't even make any sense. What is "K menu?" What is "Mandrake Control Center?" And typing "draknet" resulted in "Command not found."
Is it relevant that I'm running Red Hat 7.2 and that my window manager is FVWM95?
(See my point? Even if you know how to do something under one specific instance of Linux, that doesn't help you at all when faced with another instance of Linux. The two aren't even similar.)
That wasn't so hard, was it?
First, how are you supposed to know that unless you already know it? Second, that only works once; how do you configure the machine to get its IP via DHCP every time it boots?
Huh? Forget everything you know about Linux, or UNIX in general. Start with a clean slate. Now tell me how to set up a Linux machine to get its IP address via DHCP. Do the same thing with Windows 2000 Server. Which one was easier?
You may like Linux better, but that doesn't mean it's easier to use.
No, that's a bullshit comparison. The IDC study (yeah, I read it; you should, too, because it brings up some really good points) essentially says that the costs of administration for Linux are often higher than for Windows 2000 Server because Linux is, basically, a lot harder to use. It has nothing to do with the "weld the hood shut" open-source/closed-source argument (which is bullshit in and of itself, but that's another post).
The first comparison was, while still off the mark, more apt: driving an automatic is easier than driving a stick, and Windows 2000 is easier to set up, administer, and use than Linux.
Let us explore this further.
First of all, what you quote is from the annotations to the Constitution prepared by the Congressional Research Service. It is, therefore, a very sound source. But in order to interpret it correctly, it's necessary to understand the context of the annotations.
The one you quoted refers to two Supreme Court cases: Kendall v. Winsor (1858) and A&P Tea Co. v. Supermarket Corp. (1950). Both of these cases revolve around patents, not copyrights. The language of the annotation is inspired by Kendall, in which Justice Daniel wrote about the necessity of considering the motives of a patent-holder when considering a claim of infringement:That's all well and good for patents, but a different story applies to copyrights. There are criteria-- expressed in the statutes-- for determining whether an idea is patentable: originality, novelty, "non-obviousness," and so on. No such criteria apply to copyrights; every "work of authorship" gets a copyright attached to it implicitly. Justice Day wrote about the motivation for this in American Tobacco Co. v. Werckmeister (1907):But the real good stuff comes from Mazer v. Stein (1954), in which Justice Reed specifically and exhaustively tackled the subject of the legal meaning (or absence thereof) of aesthetic value. His opinion is far too lengthy and comprehensive to quote in entirety here, but I will excerpt a brief passage to give you an idea of his gist:As you can see, the prevailing opinion in the case law is that patents should be applied selectively, while copyrights apply to all works of authorship without consideration of the nature or value of any particular work.
I don't think that has any relevance to what he's talking about. Sending nuclear waste to other planets would prevent the environmental problems associated with the waste.
Consider this thought experiment.
I take a kilogram of nuclear fuel (doesn't matter what variety) and use it to generate energy, in the form of electricity. At some point, that fuel is spent, and cannot be used to generate any more electricity. I have generated N joules of energy.
I then put that kilogram of still-radioactive but no longer useful fuel on a rocket and blast it into outer space. This requires M joules of energy. That energy has to come from somewhere; the simplest case is if the energy is electrical, through an electromagnetic cannon or some such. The energy required to launch the spent fuel, M, is greater than the energy produced by the fuel, N. So the net amount of electrical energy available for use goes down in this system. (For proof of this, hit Google. I don't feel like typing that much stuff in this comment tonight. The numbers are readily available.)
If you complicate the experiment by using a chemical rocket, the result remains the same. It still take M joules to heave a kilogram of spent fuel away from the Earth, but in this case you get those joules from the chemical energy of combustion. Somehow the fuel for the rocket had to be prepared; preparing rocket fuel and oxidizer to produce M joules of energy requires L joules of energy, and L is greater than M. So in that case, the net energy available for use still goes down.
If the only way to safely dispose of spent radioactive fuel were to blast it into orbit, then energy generation through nuclear fission would actually have a negative efficiency.
Kinda like celery. You can eat celery all day long and still starve to death because it requires more calories to digest it than your body actually gets from it. Celery is a net-negative-calorie food.
immune to metamoderation
I wouldn't know. I haven't been asked to metamoderate since I started using this new account. I posted under a previous account for a few years, but grew sick of the user name and haven't been invited to participate in either form of moderation since. I have no idea if I'm deliberately being excluded, or if I'm just still in that "new user" phase. Don't know if there's any way to find out, either.
I strongly agree with "Misinformative", though I think I'd change it to "Incorrect", since "Misinformative" implies an attempt to deliberately spread misinformation
Yeah, you've got a point, but I'm not sure "incorrect" covers it either. I'd like a moderation that I could assign (in theory, if I ever were to get mod points again) to posts that are (1) wrong or (b) moot. Because sometimes a post can be technically correct, but wrong anyway because it doesn't apply to the situation at hand. The post that spawned this thread qualifies thus: it's true (transport-layer encryption [such as SSL] is less useful if other segments of the message path are unencrypted), but it doesn't apply to this discussion (we're not talking about transport-layer encryption, but rather message-layer encryption).
I don't know what the right answer is, but I do know that Troll, Offtopic, Redundant, and Flamebait don't apply.
The Constitution does not, despite what you seem to think, say that only "artistic" works are eligible for copyright protection. It says,It does not, as you will certainly note, say that Congress shall have the power to grant exclusive right to artistic writings. Perhaps you're being thrown off by the bit about "the useful arts." You are aware, are you not, that "the useful arts" at the time that the Constitution was written included things like metalworking, navigation, and animal husbandry? That phrase refers to practical pursuits, not to what you would call "artistic" works.
Taken by itself, one might argue that the Constitution, in fact, only offers exclusive rights to authors of useful or scientific works, and that works that are purely artistic, or that merely entertain, cannot be protected at all. Fortunately, though, Congress made no such distinctions in the Copyright Act of 1790; that law protected all works, whether they could reasonable be considered "useful" or not.
Remind me again who's ignoring the Constitution?
I'll try to label my opinions more clearly in the future so we can safely ignore them.
I don't mean to imply that you're not entitled to your opinion. I simply don't want to get into an "uh-HUH"/"nuh-UH" argument.
But in any case, do you consider spam to be science?
You're not really talking about science in the way we most often use the term; you're talking about innovation. And innovation is one of those funny things that is often not recognized until well after the fact. If every patent application were judged on the basis of worth as well as the other factors, we'd be doing a great disservice.
That said, no, the spam in question is not an innovation or invention. But it is a work, and as such, is protected by copyright.
Yep, and "original works of authorship" is interpreted by the Supreme Court to only include Science and Useful Arts.
Citations?
I disagree.
Again, I respect that. But what are your qualifications?
So hotmail is breaking copyright law by putting emails on web pages?
No, because they don't. Hotmail has never, to my knowledge, published anybody's email on a web page. They do, however, have a graphical user interface to their service that runs through a browser.
Once you grasp this distinction, all will be clear.
I have a right to disagree over whether or not computer programs are artistic.
Sure. But the question of whether a work is "artistic" or not is irrelevant to the question of whether it's protected by copyright or not. But I'm beating a dead horse here.
Further, my statement that "computer programs shouldn't be copyrightable at all" was largely an extension of my opinion that "copyright shouldn't exist."
You and I will never agree on that point. I respect your opinion and your right to hold it, but I think you're wrong.
If you haven't heard of the Copyright Clause, then you are the one discussing something that's over your head.
Well, to be fair, you did refer to what you call the "Copyright Clause" (which I now understand you mean to be Article I section 8 of the Constitution, which incidentally doesn't mention the word "copyright" at all) in the context of justifying your position that "only artistic works can be copyrighted in the first place." Article I section 8 says, "To promote the progress of science and useful arts, by securing for limited times to authors and inventors the exclusive right to their respective writings and discoveries," which in fact appears to refer specifically not to works that are "artistic," but rather only to those which are practically useful or scientific in nature. The question of protecting works of pure art-- as opposed to inventions and improvements on inventions-- didn't really come up until Title 17. So it's understandable that your ambiguous reference to a "Copyright Clause" should be a source of confusion. In future, you might want to use the correct citation-- Article I section 8-- instead of the phrase "Copyright Clause."
I stand by my assertion that only artistic works (literally "useful arts") are copyrightable, and that this is a fact with which every single Supreme Court justice would agree.
But you're obviously wrong, friend. The statute clearly says that all original works are protected by copyright. This law is not even remotely unconstitutional, because Congress is explicitly given the power to grant exclusive rights to authors under Article I section 8.
I'm afraid that you're just mistaken. All original works-- regardless of their nature or merit-- are protected by copyright. Title 17 includes a set of categories of works, but it is not meant to be either exhaustive nor exclusive. All original works are protected.
By that argument the people aren't distributing the spams, the computers are.
Huh?
Look, it works like this: I send you an email. I wrote it, so the copyright on that email belongs to me. You are given, however, no "implied license" related to that email. If you then put that email on a web page-- i.e., republish it-- I can ask you to remove it on copyright grounds, because only I have the right to publish, broadcast, or distribute that email.
Whether a particular use of a copyrighted work is fair or not depends on the purpose and way that it is used, and has nothing at all to do with the way that the work was distributed.
Hey... how can the parent comment be "overrated" if it hasn't been moderated by anybody else?
Because while you can moderate up for being informative or insightful, you can't (at present) moderate down for being dumb or wrong. As long as the down-mod options are limited to troll, off-topic, flamebait, and overrated, expect to see comments that are just plain stupid moderated "overrated."
Seems to me that if there's a "+1, Informative," there ought to be a "-1, Misinformative."
Yes, it's a stupid definition, computer programs shouldn't be copyrightable at all, but it's the law.
Okay, we're done talking now. Normally you make sense in your posts, but in this particular case, you're way out of your depth. It's clear that you're arguing from a flawed position-- computer programs shouldn't be copyrightable??-- so I respectfully ask that we just agree to disagree on this point. As long as you start with the assumption that copyright only covers certain types of works-- which is contrary to what the law says; refer to the quoted passage I provided up-thread-- then we'll never see eye-to-eye.
But what gives slashdot the right to publish your post?
Sounds like you're confusing Slashdot the computer software-- which is just a database with some I/O software running on a computer somewhere-- with Slashdot the organization-- which is composed of people. Slashdot-the-organization has no right to publish my comments; if they do so without permission, they'll be in trouble. Rather, I publish my own comments using Slashdot-the-computer-software as the medium of transmission.
Basically what you're saying is, "What gives the printing press the right to reproduce your book? I'd argue that it's an implied license." See the difference?
Or just read the Copyright Clause.
What "Copyright Clause?" Are you talking about Title 17? It says, "original works of authorship fixed in any tangible medium of expression, now known or later developed, from which they can be perceived, reproduced, or otherwise communicated, either directly or with the aid of a machine or device." The key phrase there is "original works of authorship." Any original work in any medium of expression-- notwithstanding 17 U.S.C. 102(b) which describes those types of intellectual property that are covered by patents rather than ideas.
Nowhere in the statutes does it say anything about copyright extending only to "artistic" works. There's nothing artistic about this post; it's covered by copyright anyway.
Congress has decided it already: (list from 17 U.S.C. 102)
Those are examples of works of authorship. It's not an exclusive list. For example, the list does not include computer source code-- unless you twist the definition of "literary" to mean "anything written," which makes it pretty useless-- and yet computer source code is most definitely covered by copyright.
Is spam a literary work? Somewhat, but its protection under copyright only extends to the parts which are literary, and literary must be interpreted in light of the Copyright Clause, which means it must be artistic.
Your interpretation of the law is completely bogus. At no time has it been considered that copyright should only cover works that are "artistic," specifically because there is no objective definition of that word. Is the manual that came with my VCR "artistic?" Not by any meaningful definition. But it's covered by copyright anyway.
You should just drop this "only artistic works can be copyrighted" thing now. The truth is quite different: every original work is automatically copyrighted, no matter what its relative merits, artistic or otherwise. That includes the spam in question.
there has to be some implied licenses along with internet distribution
Remember that the Internet is merely a medium, from a legal point of view. Forget everything you know about computers-- lord knows I'm trying to-- and think of email, Slashdot, Usenet, et cetera as media. As I sit here, composing this post, I am creating a work. That work is protected by copyright. When I click the "Submit" button-- 'cause, you know, the "Preview" button is for wimps-- I'll use Slashdot as a broadcast medium to transmit my work to anybody who wants to sign in and read it. Just as if I were, instead, reading these words over the radio or on TV, the fact that I'm broadcasting my work doesn't in any way dilute my copyright on it, nor does it grant anybody any exceptional rights.
Technically speaking, the various modes of communication over the Internet work differently from the way TV or radio, or even traditional paper-based publishing, works. But the technical details aren't important; what's important is that the Internet (or more accurately the various types of software that run on it) behaves like a broadcast medium. That's why it should be thought of that way in situations like this one.
McLuhan was full of shit, basically. The medium is not the message, at least from the perspective of copyright.