And eventually they could send nuclear waste to other planets.. lets say jupiter or saturn...
Idiot. The net energy produced by that kind of system would be negative; it would take more energy to send 1 kg of spent nuclear fuel to Jupiter than could be produced by that kilogram. You end up consuming more energy than you generate.
Only artistic works can be copyrighted in the first place.
There is absolutely no precedent for that sort of interpretation. The problems start with "How do you decide what's 'artistic' and what's not?" and get worse from there.
Re:What was the ending about - spoiler to follow
on
Review: Solaris
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· Score: 2
So was he (Clooney) a visitor or not?
No. At the end of the movie, Kelvin stayed aboard the Prometheus as Solaris engulfed it. The child was symbolic not of Solaris itself, but of only one aspect of Solaris. Everything that took place after that happened in a non-literal place-- inside the mind of Solaris, inside Kelvin's mind, whatever.
But the most important part of the ending is Kelvin's last line before the closing apartment scene. "I was haunted by the thought: what if I'd remembered her wrong."
Spend five minutes wondering whether Kelvin will ever be happy spending eternity with only his imperfect and superficial memories of Rhea. It'll really bake your noodle.
Re:wtf (uh.. spoilers)
on
Review: Solaris
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· Score: 5, Informative
What was the deal with the door knob?
It establishes Chris and Rhea's relationship. The first thing he noticed about her wasn't that she was a pretty girl, but that she was carrying, of all things, a doorknob. This demonstrates that their relationship will be unconventional.
What was the physicist-girl's creation that kept knocking around in her room?
That's not important to the story, so it was deliberately left to your imagination. Note, also, her line, "I never get used to these... resurrections." She's definitely got some serious issues.
Why did Chris' wife always have this creepy-ish plastic grin through the first half of the movie?
Because she's flirting with Chris. Women-- and men, for that matter-- who are attracted to you often smile for no apparent reason. It's possible that you might not be aware of this if you've never seen it in real life.
What the hell happened to the security detail that was sent in before Chris got there?
They disappeared.
The guy that was there said the security detail got there and killed one guy, but... where did the security detail go after that??
They disappeared. Any more time spent wondering about this will be classified under "missing the point."
And what about the guy they said just disappeared? that he simply wasn't on the ship anymore? what happened to him?
He also disappeared. This is what I meant by "missing the point."
But I'd still say there is an implied license which is granted.
Of course you're free to make that argument, this being a free country and all, but I'm not aware of any legal precedent to back it up. On the contrary, there's a strong precedent the other way around. TV shows are broadcast through the air, indiscriminately, to everybody for free. Whether you want to watch the shows or not, your TV antenna is receiving them right now. These shows are copyrighted.
What's more: the commercials aired along with these shows are copyrighted.
Nobody talks about "implied permission to use my TV antenna." TV just isn't thought of in those terms. I'm not sure it's useful to think of email in those terms, either.
Buffy the vampire slayer is a horrible, horrible, show.
Your opinion is broken. There is no meaningful criteria by which Buffy could be considered a horrible show. The writing, story construction, acting, and technical aspects are all as good or better than any other show on TV.
Um, no, the parent post is correct. The act of sending the letter is the "explicit action" that you mention.
Wrong. Simply sending a letter doesn't count because you aren't doing anything different from or in addition to what you would do without the agreement.
This disclaimer has been around for as long as I can remember,
Your own words trip up your argument here. The fact that institutions like newspapers have had this "letter to the editor" policy simply establishes that letters to institutions are different from letters to individual persons. If I sent a letter to Bob the copyboy at The Times, I'd be mightily pissed if that letter ended up in tomorrow's edition. When sending correspondence to an individual, there's a reasonable expectation that that correspondence won't be subject to any unusual terms or conditions.
I think the 1st A. values, even if the amendment is not cited, would appeal to most courts.
No, I don't buy it. Not being allowed to reproduce the work in an archive doesn't limit speech about the work in any meaningful way. It's too much of a reach, and unnecessary in light of the other arguments. Better to just avoid the issue of speech entirely, and rule entirely within the grounds of 107.
It's a wastebasket for avoiding a lot of these case-by-case public policy considerations.
See, that's why I don't buy it. The intent of 107 is that questions of fair use should be decided on a case-by-case basis. The first amendment and Title 17 really don't overlap very much in my mind. They're different issues.
Throw in the debatable value of the spam itself, and I don't think the spammer has a chance.
Judging the worth of a copyright claim based on the perceived value of the work is a dangerous precedent. The copyright law covers all works, no matter how trivial they may seem. Judging which works are fit for protection and which aren't runs contrary to the whole idea of the law, particularly since the '78 amendments.
Unfortunatly out of order showing appears to be the norm with US broadcasters. Maybe Joss should move to Europe or Australia...
Oh, no. The out-of-order thing has been quite the scandal; it's not the norm at all. There's been a vast amount of bitching among fans of the show, and even thinly veiled complaints from the writers and producers, about it. Joss is known for writing very continuity-heavy TV, and Fox is presently making that impossible for him. If it comes off of hiatus-- a possibility, but not a sure thing-- the rumor is that Mutant Enemy will effectively demand that they get a commitment from Fox to show the remaining episodes of the season in production order, so they can get their story-arc going again.
Copyright here is being used not to protect profitability but to suppress public discussion.
Ah. You may have just hit the nail right on the head. That's an excellent way of looking at the question. Public comment is critical to developing policy on the question of commercial email, and comment only in the abstract is not useful. Good one.
I'd imagine that a judge would just latch on to the noncommercial and critical aspects of the archive, and stamp the whole thing fair use, rather than trying to break new ground on yet another copyright exemption.
I have fantasies of someday living in a land where all children are raised to understand things like parallax, and shifting perceived color, and basic forest skills. Clearly that land will not be most of America anytime soon.
Well, no. Most Americans have to get in their cars and drive for more than an hour to get to anything remotely resembling a forest. Unfortunately, this is also true of a lot of the world. It's no surprise that the average 21st century person has no idea how to behave or what to expect in a forest. Most people only read about them at best.
Usually that point is oriented more towards whether the defendant's "fair use" undermines demand for the original in the marketplace.
It has, yes, but that's only because the law has thus far been applied to artistic works. Works of advertising derive their value differently, and that must be taken into account. In this case, the association of this advertising work with the other works in the archive presents a strong case for a value impact to the author, even independent of a reasonable claim of defamation.
If the maintainer described his archive as simply being a collection of non-private email correspondence that he has received, and put the messages up without expressing any value judgment about them at all, this point might go the other way. But as it is, the site makes it obvious that the maintainer views these works as worthless junk, and uses the archive as a tool to encourage technological and legal redress.
And here, it really is necessary for the librarian to reproduce the spam in whole.
Yes, I agree, which is why I said that issue comes down to a grey point. The fact that the spam is reproduced in full doesn't necessarily argue either for or against the use being fair in this case; it's a natural consequence of the archiving process.
I'm not attempting to practice law here.
Nor should you; Slashdotters are notoriously bad about paying their bills.;-)
Ah, but maybe the weren't numbered in order of distance from the star. They were probably numbered in order of discovery.
Possible, but that's not the way we do things today. Since the movie still uses the Bayer naming scheme, it's reasonable to assume that they're also using the same numbering scheme for planets that we use. Note that I'm not talking about the solar body catalogue system you're referring to. I'm talking about the Bayer system that uses Greek letters (and Roman letters) to name stars in order of apparent magnitude, and gives us names like Alpha Ceti (or Ceti Alpha). By the Flamsteed system, for instance, the star would be called 92 Ceti instead of Alpha Ceti (or Ceti Alpha), but the planets in it would still be numbered in order from the sun outward.
This would obviously mean, that most of our stigma's, moral's, and inherent beliefs that boils down to someone saying "it's just wrong" or "it's the word of god!" are obviously falacies of those who enjoy some sort of self importance.
Congratulations. You've discovered that there is no natural-law basis for behavior. Pat yourself on the back.
But don't break your arm. This "insight" is blindingly obvious to anybody with the slightest intelligence, and it doesn't serve any useful purpose. The world works better with rules for behavior-- morality, ethics, laws, etiquette-- than without. There's no natural law that dictates that I should say "excuse me" after I burp, but I do it anyway. Why? Because my world is better if I do; in this example, "better" means fewer people think I'm an obnoxious ass, which has all sorts of obvious benefits. That's the same basic principle behind all of ethics, although there it's applied on a grander scale.
I would suggest that you put this little insight of yours on the shelf and move beyond it. Living in a modern (i.e., "crowded") society, this idea is of no practical use to you.
SMTP servers, POP servers, IMAP servers, even TCP and IP all make copies of some or all of the data and then send it on to another computer, often not the destination computer.
Those copies are what Title 17 refers to as "ephemeral recordings." It's analogous to a TV station's making a temporary recording of a network feed and then broadcasting it later. Copyright law (specifically, 17 U.S.C. 112) grants a blanket exception (with exceptions of its own, of course) for ephemeral recordings.
I would think unless that can prove that they knew who every one they sent the message to was then they can't say they haven't implicitly given up some of their rights when the released the message to The Internet.
Fortunately, copyright law doesn't agree with you. A work doesn't have to be communicated privately for it to be protected. The TV shows you watch at night are protected by copyright, even though they're broadcast indiscriminately to millions of households. This is the same idea. The work is distributed widely, but the copyright on it remains intact.
If the spam broke the law, I would suggest that forfeits copyright, at least as to publicizing the offending communication.
What precedent would you cite to back that up? The work itself isn't in violation of any laws; the delivery of it is. Just because one party violated the law in delivering the work to its recipients, that doesn't mean that another party-- who may or may not be the same as the first party-- should lose their copyright on the work.
Heck, even libel laws don't touch copyright. A libelous work is, in and of itself, illegal, but the author still gets to hold on to his copyright to it.
Better to address the fair use angle, which is not a forfeiture of copyright but an exception to it.
As I wrote elsewhere, this doesn't sound like fair use to me. One of the key principles of fair use is that it should do no harm to the value of the work to the author. This use violates that principle; simply having one's work included in this archive reduces the value of that work.
what about putting up a page with a list of E-Mail addresses stating that "By sending E-Mail to this address/addresses you are giving up any and all claims to copyright..."
Wouldn't work. You can't hold somebody to a term or condition implicitly; they have to take some explicit action in fulfillment of the term or condition in order for it to be valid. Otherwise, I could walk around with a tee shirt on that said "By talking to me you agree to pay me $100" on it and make a fortune.
That's why software licenses always include some explicit action: sometimes the software media is enclosed in an envelope which reads, "By breaking this seal you agree to...." Sometimes the software's installer includes a screen that says, "By clicking this button you agree to...."
Simply putting a sign on your mailbox that says "By sending me a letter you agree to..." won't cut it.
Tell the 'lawyer' that you need definitive proof of the identity of the original author, and that said 'author' must personally claim copyright infrigement.
That's not true. Claims of infringement can be made by the current copyright holder, whether or not that institution or person is the original author of the work. In this case, the spam is declared "Copyright 1997, Email Connection Inc." (It's the first line in the message.) This indicates that the message was written as a work-for-hire, and that the corporation is the owner of the copyright. So any representative of that corporation can claim infringement: an employee, a retained worker like a lawyer, or even a third party who wishes to place the claim on behalf of the corporation.
There are two questions here, and two answers to go with them. The first question is easy; the second is hard.
The first question is, "Does copyright apply to spam?" The answer, of course, is yes. Anybody who writes anything automatically gets a copyright on that thing. (This is true in the biggest part of the world; the laws of your jurisdiction may vary. But since the question was submitted in English, it's fair to assume that we're talking about U.S. or similar copyright law here.) That applies to books, magazine articles, letters, pamphlets, Slashdot postings, grocery lists, and, yes, spam.
The second question is, "Is the publication of this work on a web site a fair use?" That's harder to answer. One small part of the answer, though, is easy: the fact that the author of the spam in question sent it to (possibly) millions of people indiscriminately does not give anyone else the right to republish the spam without the author's permission. You can't implicitly put a work into the public domain, even if you gave everybody in the world a copy. So the simple fact that this is bulk email doesn't invalidate the author's claim of copyright. But if your use is fair, you don't need the author's permission. The question, then, is whether publishing the spam in this way and on this site is a fair use.
The law (17 U.S.C. 107) defines fair use. It says, in relevant part, "[T]he fair use of a copyrighted work [...] for purposes such as criticism, comment, news reporting, teaching (including multiple copies for classroom use), scholarship, or research, is not an infringement of copyright." So the purpose of the use is relevant to the question of whether the use is fair.
The maintainer of the spam archive in question says, "I'm making this archive available in the hope that it will draw attention to the enormous problem that spam poses to ordinary Internet users, and to allow people to analyse this junk in the hope that one day it can be prevented by both technical and legal means." So the maintainer's purpose appears to be primarily political: he wants to stop spam, and he uses his archive as a tool for doing so. One could also say that the archive exists as an educational site, to provide information on the various techniques used by spammers in constructing their messages. One could also say that the purpose of the site is criticism: criticism of the spammers and their methods. So the purpose of the archive seems to be, at least generally, in line with the purposes outlined in the statute.
That test passed, we have to look at the rest of the statute, which names criteria to be used for judging whether a specific use is fair. The law says:
In determining whether the use made of a work in any particular case is a fair use the factors to be considered shall include--
(1) the purpose and character of the use, including whether such use is of a commercial nature or is for nonprofit educational purposes; (2) the nature of the copyrighted work; (3) the amount and substantiality of the portion used in relation to the copyrighted work as a whole; and (4) the effect of the use upon the potential market for or value of the copyrighted work
The purpose of this use is clearly noncommercial; the maintainer of the site does not make any commercial use of the archive at all.
The nature of the work is an advertisement; as such, it's difficult to imagine how the value of the work could be harmed by republishing it. Read on for more about this, though.
The archive reproduces the entire spam, including Internet message headers, which is a strike against the use being fair. The intent of the law is to allow portions of copyrighted works to be used without restriction for purposes like comment and education; without this clause, nobody would ever be able to quote anybody else without their permission. Reproducing the entire work is beyond the intent of this law. However, the fact that the works are reproduced in full is a consequence of the nature of the archive. So this criterion is a grey issue.
Finally, we have the kicker: "the effect of the use upon the potential market for or value of the copyrighted work." As an advertisement, the value of the work is directly proportional to its credibility. If you damage the credibility of the advertisement, you reduce its effectiveness, which reduces its value to the author. Publishing this advertisement in an archive of spam clearly associates-- even equates-- this work with ads for such products as "herbal Viagra," penis enlargement methods, and pornography, as well as out-and-out fraud. This association-- accurate or otherwise-- is obviously damaging to the value of the advertisement to the author.
Note also that we're not concerned here with absolute credibility. Even if the message in question is obviously not credible to a reasonable person, it still has some baseline value to the author. We can only be concerned with whether this use reduces the value, irrespective of what that initial value might have been.
If I were deciding this question, I'd have to rule that this use is not fair, because it significantly reduces the value of the work to the author. Therefore it is not permitted for this work to be published without the permission of the author, and the maintainer of the archive should remove the message in question immediately.
One more note: the maintainer of the archive says, on the front page, "These messages [are] in the public domain. You may use them for whatever reasons you wish." This is absolutely not true. Nothing is in the public domain unless and until its copyright expires or it is specifically placed there by the author or copyright holder. The maintainer of the archive needs to be aware of this. I'm not saying he should shut his archive down; chances are many of the messages contained in it will never be challenged on copyright grounds. But if the maintainer thinks that he's free and clear to do whatever he wants with these messages, he's setting himself up for a harsh and expensive firsthand lesson on copyright law.
Unfortunately it is free-beer, as the source is not available. Hmmmm, I guess rms should target God as the largest producer of closed-source software in the Universe?
As much as I hate RMS, I have to say that he works pretty much the same way God does; compare, for example, the source code to Emacs with the human genetic code. Both are available to anybody who wants to look at them, both are vast, and both are completely incomprehensible without doing a huge amount of analysis, deduction, and plain old guessing.
Maybe RMS is on to something after all. Release the source, but make sure before you do that it's utterly useless to anybody but yourself. After all, if the code were well documented and easy to understand, there'd be no need for the author of it.
(Hmm. If the world were well documented and easy to understand, there'd be no need for God. Uh-oh. Dangerously close to being profound here. Better bail out while there's still time.)
If you're wondering, her father is Mexican of Spanish extraction, and her mother is French Canadian with Danish roots.
They say, what with modern migration and transportation and all, that some day everybody will be a mix of various proportions of every ethnic group and racial type. If Jessica Alba is any evidence, oh, how I long for that day.
I'm doing my part; I'm white-bread American boy, and my girlfriend's Vietnamese. I hope our kids look more like her than like me...
You should give this page a read. It explains the whole story, from the initial reports down through the extremely reasonable explanations for all the allegedly weird events.
Slashdot Mirror
And eventually they could send nuclear waste to other planets.. lets say jupiter or saturn...
Idiot. The net energy produced by that kind of system would be negative; it would take more energy to send 1 kg of spent nuclear fuel to Jupiter than could be produced by that kilogram. You end up consuming more energy than you generate.
Only artistic works can be copyrighted in the first place.
There is absolutely no precedent for that sort of interpretation. The problems start with "How do you decide what's 'artistic' and what's not?" and get worse from there.
So was he (Clooney) a visitor or not?
No. At the end of the movie, Kelvin stayed aboard the Prometheus as Solaris engulfed it. The child was symbolic not of Solaris itself, but of only one aspect of Solaris. Everything that took place after that happened in a non-literal place-- inside the mind of Solaris, inside Kelvin's mind, whatever.
But the most important part of the ending is Kelvin's last line before the closing apartment scene. "I was haunted by the thought: what if I'd remembered her wrong."
Spend five minutes wondering whether Kelvin will ever be happy spending eternity with only his imperfect and superficial memories of Rhea. It'll really bake your noodle.
What was the deal with the door knob?
It establishes Chris and Rhea's relationship. The first thing he noticed about her wasn't that she was a pretty girl, but that she was carrying, of all things, a doorknob. This demonstrates that their relationship will be unconventional.
What was the physicist-girl's creation that kept knocking around in her room?
That's not important to the story, so it was deliberately left to your imagination. Note, also, her line, "I never get used to these... resurrections." She's definitely got some serious issues.
Why did Chris' wife always have this creepy-ish plastic grin through the first half of the movie?
Because she's flirting with Chris. Women-- and men, for that matter-- who are attracted to you often smile for no apparent reason. It's possible that you might not be aware of this if you've never seen it in real life.
What the hell happened to the security detail that was sent in before Chris got there?
They disappeared.
The guy that was there said the security detail got there and killed one guy, but... where did the security detail go after that??
They disappeared. Any more time spent wondering about this will be classified under "missing the point."
And what about the guy they said just disappeared? that he simply wasn't on the ship anymore? what happened to him?
He also disappeared. This is what I meant by "missing the point."
But I'd still say there is an implied license which is granted.
Of course you're free to make that argument, this being a free country and all, but I'm not aware of any legal precedent to back it up. On the contrary, there's a strong precedent the other way around. TV shows are broadcast through the air, indiscriminately, to everybody for free. Whether you want to watch the shows or not, your TV antenna is receiving them right now. These shows are copyrighted.
What's more: the commercials aired along with these shows are copyrighted.
Nobody talks about "implied permission to use my TV antenna." TV just isn't thought of in those terms. I'm not sure it's useful to think of email in those terms, either.
if you are like most slashdot readers...
That's okay. I'm not.
Buffy the vampire slayer is a horrible, horrible, show.
Your opinion is broken. There is no meaningful criteria by which Buffy could be considered a horrible show. The writing, story construction, acting, and technical aspects are all as good or better than any other show on TV.
Um, no, the parent post is correct. The act of sending the letter is the "explicit action" that you mention.
Wrong. Simply sending a letter doesn't count because you aren't doing anything different from or in addition to what you would do without the agreement.
This disclaimer has been around for as long as I can remember,
Your own words trip up your argument here. The fact that institutions like newspapers have had this "letter to the editor" policy simply establishes that letters to institutions are different from letters to individual persons. If I sent a letter to Bob the copyboy at The Times, I'd be mightily pissed if that letter ended up in tomorrow's edition. When sending correspondence to an individual, there's a reasonable expectation that that correspondence won't be subject to any unusual terms or conditions.
It would never work.
I think the 1st A. values, even if the amendment is not cited, would appeal to most courts.
No, I don't buy it. Not being allowed to reproduce the work in an archive doesn't limit speech about the work in any meaningful way. It's too much of a reach, and unnecessary in light of the other arguments. Better to just avoid the issue of speech entirely, and rule entirely within the grounds of 107.
It's a wastebasket for avoiding a lot of these case-by-case public policy considerations.
See, that's why I don't buy it. The intent of 107 is that questions of fair use should be decided on a case-by-case basis. The first amendment and Title 17 really don't overlap very much in my mind. They're different issues.
Throw in the debatable value of the spam itself, and I don't think the spammer has a chance.
Judging the worth of a copyright claim based on the perceived value of the work is a dangerous precedent. The copyright law covers all works, no matter how trivial they may seem. Judging which works are fit for protection and which aren't runs contrary to the whole idea of the law, particularly since the '78 amendments.
Unfortunatly out of order showing appears to be the norm with US broadcasters. Maybe Joss should move to Europe or Australia...
Oh, no. The out-of-order thing has been quite the scandal; it's not the norm at all. There's been a vast amount of bitching among fans of the show, and even thinly veiled complaints from the writers and producers, about it. Joss is known for writing very continuity-heavy TV, and Fox is presently making that impossible for him. If it comes off of hiatus-- a possibility, but not a sure thing-- the rumor is that Mutant Enemy will effectively demand that they get a commitment from Fox to show the remaining episodes of the season in production order, so they can get their story-arc going again.
Copyright here is being used not to protect profitability but to suppress public discussion.
Ah. You may have just hit the nail right on the head. That's an excellent way of looking at the question. Public comment is critical to developing policy on the question of commercial email, and comment only in the abstract is not useful. Good one.
I'd imagine that a judge would just latch on to the noncommercial and critical aspects of the archive, and stamp the whole thing fair use, rather than trying to break new ground on yet another copyright exemption.
Good argument.
I have fantasies of someday living in a land where all children are raised to understand things like parallax, and shifting perceived color, and basic forest skills. Clearly that land will not be most of America anytime soon.
Well, no. Most Americans have to get in their cars and drive for more than an hour to get to anything remotely resembling a forest. Unfortunately, this is also true of a lot of the world. It's no surprise that the average 21st century person has no idea how to behave or what to expect in a forest. Most people only read about them at best.
Usually that point is oriented more towards whether the defendant's "fair use" undermines demand for the original in the marketplace.
;-)
It has, yes, but that's only because the law has thus far been applied to artistic works. Works of advertising derive their value differently, and that must be taken into account. In this case, the association of this advertising work with the other works in the archive presents a strong case for a value impact to the author, even independent of a reasonable claim of defamation.
If the maintainer described his archive as simply being a collection of non-private email correspondence that he has received, and put the messages up without expressing any value judgment about them at all, this point might go the other way. But as it is, the site makes it obvious that the maintainer views these works as worthless junk, and uses the archive as a tool to encourage technological and legal redress.
And here, it really is necessary for the librarian to reproduce the spam in whole.
Yes, I agree, which is why I said that issue comes down to a grey point. The fact that the spam is reproduced in full doesn't necessarily argue either for or against the use being fair in this case; it's a natural consequence of the archiving process.
I'm not attempting to practice law here.
Nor should you; Slashdotters are notoriously bad about paying their bills.
Ah, but maybe the weren't numbered in order of distance from the star. They were probably numbered in order of discovery.
Possible, but that's not the way we do things today. Since the movie still uses the Bayer naming scheme, it's reasonable to assume that they're also using the same numbering scheme for planets that we use. Note that I'm not talking about the solar body catalogue system you're referring to. I'm talking about the Bayer system that uses Greek letters (and Roman letters) to name stars in order of apparent magnitude, and gives us names like Alpha Ceti (or Ceti Alpha). By the Flamsteed system, for instance, the star would be called 92 Ceti instead of Alpha Ceti (or Ceti Alpha), but the planets in it would still be numbered in order from the sun outward.
This would obviously mean, that most of our stigma's, moral's, and inherent beliefs that boils down to someone saying "it's just wrong" or "it's the word of god!" are obviously falacies of those who enjoy some sort of self importance.
Congratulations. You've discovered that there is no natural-law basis for behavior. Pat yourself on the back.
But don't break your arm. This "insight" is blindingly obvious to anybody with the slightest intelligence, and it doesn't serve any useful purpose. The world works better with rules for behavior-- morality, ethics, laws, etiquette-- than without. There's no natural law that dictates that I should say "excuse me" after I burp, but I do it anyway. Why? Because my world is better if I do; in this example, "better" means fewer people think I'm an obnoxious ass, which has all sorts of obvious benefits. That's the same basic principle behind all of ethics, although there it's applied on a grander scale.
I would suggest that you put this little insight of yours on the shelf and move beyond it. Living in a modern (i.e., "crowded") society, this idea is of no practical use to you.
SMTP servers, POP servers, IMAP servers, even TCP and IP all make copies of some or all of the data and then send it on to another computer, often not the destination computer.
Those copies are what Title 17 refers to as "ephemeral recordings." It's analogous to a TV station's making a temporary recording of a network feed and then broadcasting it later. Copyright law (specifically, 17 U.S.C. 112) grants a blanket exception (with exceptions of its own, of course) for ephemeral recordings.
I would think unless that can prove that they knew who every one they sent the message to was then they can't say they haven't implicitly given up some of their rights when the released the message to The Internet.
Fortunately, copyright law doesn't agree with you. A work doesn't have to be communicated privately for it to be protected. The TV shows you watch at night are protected by copyright, even though they're broadcast indiscriminately to millions of households. This is the same idea. The work is distributed widely, but the copyright on it remains intact.
If the spam broke the law, I would suggest that forfeits copyright, at least as to publicizing the offending communication.
What precedent would you cite to back that up? The work itself isn't in violation of any laws; the delivery of it is. Just because one party violated the law in delivering the work to its recipients, that doesn't mean that another party-- who may or may not be the same as the first party-- should lose their copyright on the work.
Heck, even libel laws don't touch copyright. A libelous work is, in and of itself, illegal, but the author still gets to hold on to his copyright to it.
Better to address the fair use angle, which is not a forfeiture of copyright but an exception to it.
As I wrote elsewhere, this doesn't sound like fair use to me. One of the key principles of fair use is that it should do no harm to the value of the work to the author. This use violates that principle; simply having one's work included in this archive reduces the value of that work.
what about putting up a page with a list of E-Mail addresses stating that "By sending E-Mail to this address/addresses you are giving up any and all claims to copyright..."
Wouldn't work. You can't hold somebody to a term or condition implicitly; they have to take some explicit action in fulfillment of the term or condition in order for it to be valid. Otherwise, I could walk around with a tee shirt on that said "By talking to me you agree to pay me $100" on it and make a fortune.
That's why software licenses always include some explicit action: sometimes the software media is enclosed in an envelope which reads, "By breaking this seal you agree to...." Sometimes the software's installer includes a screen that says, "By clicking this button you agree to...."
Simply putting a sign on your mailbox that says "By sending me a letter you agree to..." won't cut it.
Tell the 'lawyer' that you need definitive proof of the identity of the original author, and that said 'author' must personally claim copyright infrigement.
That's not true. Claims of infringement can be made by the current copyright holder, whether or not that institution or person is the original author of the work. In this case, the spam is declared "Copyright 1997, Email Connection Inc." (It's the first line in the message.) This indicates that the message was written as a work-for-hire, and that the corporation is the owner of the copyright. So any representative of that corporation can claim infringement: an employee, a retained worker like a lawyer, or even a third party who wishes to place the claim on behalf of the corporation.
The first question is, "Does copyright apply to spam?" The answer, of course, is yes. Anybody who writes anything automatically gets a copyright on that thing. (This is true in the biggest part of the world; the laws of your jurisdiction may vary. But since the question was submitted in English, it's fair to assume that we're talking about U.S. or similar copyright law here.) That applies to books, magazine articles, letters, pamphlets, Slashdot postings, grocery lists, and, yes, spam.
The second question is, "Is the publication of this work on a web site a fair use?" That's harder to answer. One small part of the answer, though, is easy: the fact that the author of the spam in question sent it to (possibly) millions of people indiscriminately does not give anyone else the right to republish the spam without the author's permission. You can't implicitly put a work into the public domain, even if you gave everybody in the world a copy. So the simple fact that this is bulk email doesn't invalidate the author's claim of copyright. But if your use is fair, you don't need the author's permission. The question, then, is whether publishing the spam in this way and on this site is a fair use.
The law (17 U.S.C. 107) defines fair use. It says, in relevant part, "[T]he fair use of a copyrighted work [...] for purposes such as criticism, comment, news reporting, teaching (including multiple copies for classroom use), scholarship, or research, is not an infringement of copyright." So the purpose of the use is relevant to the question of whether the use is fair.
The maintainer of the spam archive in question says, "I'm making this archive available in the hope that it will draw attention to the enormous problem that spam poses to ordinary Internet users, and to allow people to analyse this junk in the hope that one day it can be prevented by both technical and legal means." So the maintainer's purpose appears to be primarily political: he wants to stop spam, and he uses his archive as a tool for doing so. One could also say that the archive exists as an educational site, to provide information on the various techniques used by spammers in constructing their messages. One could also say that the purpose of the site is criticism: criticism of the spammers and their methods. So the purpose of the archive seems to be, at least generally, in line with the purposes outlined in the statute.
That test passed, we have to look at the rest of the statute, which names criteria to be used for judging whether a specific use is fair. The law says: The purpose of this use is clearly noncommercial; the maintainer of the site does not make any commercial use of the archive at all.
The nature of the work is an advertisement; as such, it's difficult to imagine how the value of the work could be harmed by republishing it. Read on for more about this, though.
The archive reproduces the entire spam, including Internet message headers, which is a strike against the use being fair. The intent of the law is to allow portions of copyrighted works to be used without restriction for purposes like comment and education; without this clause, nobody would ever be able to quote anybody else without their permission. Reproducing the entire work is beyond the intent of this law. However, the fact that the works are reproduced in full is a consequence of the nature of the archive. So this criterion is a grey issue.
Finally, we have the kicker: "the effect of the use upon the potential market for or value of the copyrighted work." As an advertisement, the value of the work is directly proportional to its credibility. If you damage the credibility of the advertisement, you reduce its effectiveness, which reduces its value to the author. Publishing this advertisement in an archive of spam clearly associates-- even equates-- this work with ads for such products as "herbal Viagra," penis enlargement methods, and pornography, as well as out-and-out fraud. This association-- accurate or otherwise-- is obviously damaging to the value of the advertisement to the author.
Note also that we're not concerned here with absolute credibility. Even if the message in question is obviously not credible to a reasonable person, it still has some baseline value to the author. We can only be concerned with whether this use reduces the value, irrespective of what that initial value might have been.
If I were deciding this question, I'd have to rule that this use is not fair, because it significantly reduces the value of the work to the author. Therefore it is not permitted for this work to be published without the permission of the author, and the maintainer of the archive should remove the message in question immediately.
One more note: the maintainer of the archive says, on the front page, "These messages [are] in the public domain. You may use them for whatever reasons you wish." This is absolutely not true. Nothing is in the public domain unless and until its copyright expires or it is specifically placed there by the author or copyright holder. The maintainer of the archive needs to be aware of this. I'm not saying he should shut his archive down; chances are many of the messages contained in it will never be challenged on copyright grounds. But if the maintainer thinks that he's free and clear to do whatever he wants with these messages, he's setting himself up for a harsh and expensive firsthand lesson on copyright law.
Unfortunately it is free-beer, as the source is not available. Hmmmm, I guess rms should target God as the largest producer of closed-source software in the Universe?
As much as I hate RMS, I have to say that he works pretty much the same way God does; compare, for example, the source code to Emacs with the human genetic code. Both are available to anybody who wants to look at them, both are vast, and both are completely incomprehensible without doing a huge amount of analysis, deduction, and plain old guessing.
Maybe RMS is on to something after all. Release the source, but make sure before you do that it's utterly useless to anybody but yourself. After all, if the code were well documented and easy to understand, there'd be no need for the author of it.
(Hmm. If the world were well documented and easy to understand, there'd be no need for God. Uh-oh. Dangerously close to being profound here. Better bail out while there's still time.)
She's got some damn fine genes...
If you're wondering, her father is Mexican of Spanish extraction, and her mother is French Canadian with Danish roots.
They say, what with modern migration and transportation and all, that some day everybody will be a mix of various proportions of every ethnic group and racial type. If Jessica Alba is any evidence, oh, how I long for that day.
I'm doing my part; I'm white-bread American boy, and my girlfriend's Vietnamese. I hope our kids look more like her than like me...
You call yourself a trekkie?
An emphatic no. I liked Wrath of Khan quite a bit, but the rest of it pretty much leaves me cold.
Besides, look elsewhere for my comments on why the whole counting-from-the-outside thing doesn't work.
You should give this page a read. It explains the whole story, from the initial reports down through the extremely reasonable explanations for all the allegedly weird events.
It was just an optical illusion.
It's just pathetic that you can't understand that there are other legal systems apart from your beloved consitution.
Well, considering that those other legal systems you mentioned are almost all based on our beloved Constitution, I think it's a fair statement.