There's no such thing as an implicit licence for copyright.
There is however the doctrine of first sale, which *does* apply to the sale of copyrighted works.
Specifically, once a contract for the sale of a copy of a copyrighted work is complete (here's some money for that book/DVD/photo - thank you, sale complete), no further restrictions to the use of that work can be applied by the copyright holder, other than those that apply through copyright law itself - i.e. no public performances or making your own copies (depending upon jurisdiction, some places let you make infinite copies for personal use, some, like the UK, allow for none except for those needed to use the work itself)
They tried shrinkwrap licences with books, back in the day. Publishers put extra limits on what you could do with the book, such as preventing your reselling it after you'd bought it. Doctrine of first sale killed that in court. The contract terms are up front, written down and agreed to prior to the sale, or they're completely unenforceable. Literally, the copyright holder only gets to require extra terms against the first sale of the work, up front and before the sale. After that, assuming no such actual contract exists, any further sales of the same copy are governed only by copyright itself. Thus the second-hand market is a fundamental right of copyrighted goods purchasers, which is why I get really peeved at software companies whining about lost sales and trying to kill it. It's a fundamental safety margin and customer balance of copyright.
Notice how you have to agree to the contract for mobile phones, cable TV or MMO's before you start, and before you exchange money? Well, that applies to the sale of copyrighted works too. Implied licences and post-sale click-wrap licences are just a massive con. Did you sign a contract at the till, last you bought a DVD or book?
The one exception I know of is US UCITA-signing states, with regards post-sale click-wrap licences for software. There is an extra law there to make those binding, even after the sale. Corporate to corporate contracts are also obviously a different beast.
I quite like the new padded cover. It's shaped to fit the hands better when holding it like an old NES controller, though it's too big for my fiancee to hold comfortably.
Out of interest, since you're running no AV/spyware scanners - how do you KNOW you're not and haven't been infected? I've seen all sorts of nasties that install and run silently. Including ones that don't require social engineering to install.
Firewalls protect against direct attacks, but they don't stop iffy attachments such as the latest.wri exploit, or exploits in the browser (and firefox isn't entirely immune either, though it's a lot safer than IE)
Linux offers a huge security advantage because it's better designed. Apache is still more popular than IIS, and has a had tiny, tiny amount of the exploits than IIS has had over the years, though IIS has improved a lot lately.
Even if I accept your premise that all you need is knowledge to protect your systems, which I don't, expecting all users to be expert technicians simply to browse the internet is unrealistic. Some measures to protect themselves, sure - but specialization requires time, and non-IT people rather need to spend that learning other things.
Equally, people may well not have the time to learn how to use linux, which is fair enough. Based on the criteria that many have for linux, windows isn't ready for the desktop either. If linux had 90% market share and everybody used it already, windows would be struggling hard to get any users.
The sun does give plenty of people skin-cancer already via UV over-exposure, so it's possibly not the best example of a non-harmful radiation source to an EM-phobe.
Not that I don't agree with you - if non-ionizing EM radiation from mobile phones or even wireless access points (which transmit at even lower levels) was harmful, broadcast radio and TV would already have given us all cancer.
Education discounts using MOLP licences are pretty sweet too. Added an extra couple of server 2008 standard licences at our school for sysadmin desktops at ~£90 each. Makes adding the MMC plugins for domain services management a hell of a lot easier for a start.
I'm on adsl24.co.uk, another enta.net reseller with a 30 day minimum contract. 45GB quota onpeak, 300GB offpeak, £28.75 pcm inc. No phorm, IWF filterlist, or port throttling of any kind.
Another happy customer and great customer support. If enta.net ever shutter their doors, I've no idea where I'd turn to.
You're misunderstanding me. I publish any and all works for free. The concept that protects my highly valued free speech is the concept of Free Speech. The ability to speak freely, without restraint. That is what I value highly, and I don't give it away lightly. I consider copyright a bad deal for everyone that matters - the public, and creators. Copyright removes my right of free speech, and I don't consider I'm getting a fair deal for it.
How would you make a truckload of money when I would be publishing the work online for free? And even if I did follow your tortured example, which I wouldn't, I honestly wouldn't care. Some people create for reasons other than money.
Anyway, thanks for making my point anyway. Copyright in its current form doesn't serve artists or the public, it serves middlemen. Even assuming I did get my theoretical book published, who'd be getting almost all of the sticker price in the shops? Not me.
You're talking about moral rights, and those aren't recognised in US copyright law. They are a component of European copyright law.
You're half-right though. I don't think having your name on an idea or your reputation based upon it should have anything to do with financial remuneration, which is what copyright is concerned with.
You're half-wrong too though. I do indeed place a high value on my speech. So much so, I don't think the right to use it should be given away so easily, for so little benefit to myself or others.
I'm not American, but just because something is in the constution, does not make it applicable to the modern day.
"Representatives and direct Taxes shall be apportioned among the several States which may be included within this Union, according to their respective Numbers, which shall be determined by adding to the whole Number of free Persons, including those bound to Service for a Term of Years, and excluding Indians not taxed, three fifths of all other Persons."
Yes, slaves count as 3/5 of a person in the US constitution, though it was rendered moot by the 13th and 14th amendments.
So Rosa Parks should have just shut up and sat at the back of the bus until the law was changed? I'm entirely free to break laws I disagree with, but shouldn't be surprised when I am prosecuted and punished for it. Equally, I'm fully entitled to disrespect the law and the basis for it, while still following it out of fear of punishment.
The original question wasn't about the law though, it was about the ethics of breaking it. It's clear what the laws regarding copyright are, and in my opinion they are draconian, unfair and unethical.
The only reason copyright laws exist as they do today is because they are not enforced against the vast majority of people. If everyone in the west was prosecuted to the full extent of the law for every possible infringement of copyright they commit, there would be very few non bankrupt citizens left. You reproduced part of my comment without permission. Slashdot have a licence to do so, from when I submitted it. Do you? Yes, you could probably get away with a fair use defence, and the actual damages are effectively nil. The statutory damages are huge though - would you like to bet several years of court cases and legal fees over it?
Copyright is an infringement on my right to free speech. Sharing knowledge does not diminish the original holder any more than lighting your taper from mine takes away my light. The public supposedly give up their free speech right in a limited and specific way for a limited time for the greater good. A large and healthy public domain of knowledge and culture being good for the public to build on, copyright is specifically designed to enlarge it by granting a temporary monopoly to authors so they could be encouraged by payment for their work. After a short period, the copyright lapses, the public domain is enhanced, and authors have to go on creating new works for more money.
The suppression of free speech was not given up to create a new class of fake property barons making all the money as the middlemen. Copyright was not supposed to be effectively permanent, the whole point was to improve the public domain, not bury it!
Copyright was a bargain between a creator and the public. Now it's an ever-extending new property right that benefits neither. I do not believe copyright in its current form to be an ethical restriction of free speech any longer, so I feel no ethical duty to respect it.
In the UK at least, this is not the case. Format shifting is not a Fair Dealing enumerated right, and making complete copies, even for your own use, is expressly reserved for the copyright owner. Distribution is not required. Every time someone rips their own CD to MP3 in the UK, they are breaking the law and could be sued. However, the BPI (the British RIAA) has said explicitly they have no intention of doing so.
That said, taping TV programmes was in the exact same legal situation, and it wasn't until it went to court than an enumerated right to 'timeshift' was effectively addded to your rights. Technically, you're only allowed to record it, watch it once, then you're supposed to delete it. The timeshift right does not extend to making an archive of recordings.
Since the BPI don't intend to sue over a case they know they'd lose, the most likely way it'll change is specific copyright legislation that would enumerate a specific right to format shift - the UK government has recently been looking at changes to the law.
I don't know about the US, but in the UK a man diagnosed with prostate cancer has only one-quarter of the cash spent on research into his disease compared to the amount devoted to a womanâ(TM)s breast cancer, despite that the two diseases kill about the same number of people. There is also a national breast cancer screening system to catch it early, but no such scheme for prostate cancer. I don't begrudge the funding for breast cancer research, or wish to cut anything, it's a terrible disease - but I wish prostate cancer could also get some of the same media frenzy, big name support and government funding.
That said, as I understand it there's been some criticism of AIDS research that it's primarily concentrating on the varieties that affect westerners the most, as opposed to the strains most prevalent in Africa - where the infection rate utterly dominates that of the west.
>> Official Site Orthogonal terwilliger accordion. Updated daily news service. Latest link, photo , video and more about orthogonal terwilliger accordion.
So if someone decides to hack into the pentagon using their work connection, without the knowledge of their colleagues and specifically against the terms and conditions of use of that network, they'd hold the entire company responsible? Even if it was a major corporation?
Companies are not responsible for the illegal activities of their employees unless they are acting on behalf of the company itself. Someone downloading DiRT for their own use, in breach of company network policy does not fall in that category. The most the company can be forced to do is hand over any records they hold identifying the perpetrator.
Or do you think the RIAA are going to start suing the universities for copyright infringement instead of the students?
As if moral issues are any different than personal choices. None of us are born with a particular moral framework, we learn it from our parents, culture, religion and sometimes we come to it on our own. No matter, it's still a personal choice of rules to live by.
You choose to assign a higher value to animal life than others, that doesn't make you defacto a better person. I also disagree with your premise that to be a meat eater requires 'meat guilt', ignorance, or callousness. I know full well the process of the UK slaughterhouse, I do feel we should prevent outright cruelty, and I don't feel guilt about eating meat. It's entirely possible to raise animals in a decent environment, slaughter them quickly and humanely, and enjoy the product in moderation.
This only applies to the media player, due to the knock-on effect on web-based video and music of having every windows pc guaranteed to have microsoft's codecs. This is the reason for the -N versions on the vista DVD.
There's no reason microsoft couldn't have split vista into two versions; home and business. All the extra 'ultimate' crap, and turning off aero entirely in basic was just segmenting the market to extract as much money as possible.
If large multinational corporations profited substantially from any of those laws being in your country, they probably would be law sooner or later, assuming you live in the 1st world anyway.
Since they're going after the ISP, the only grounds they can really do so on are knowingly assisting a user breach copyright, or on profiting from a user doing so when you should have known they were doing it, but wilfully ignored it. These type of offences were what took down Napster, various P2P networks and torrent sites.
Sweden doesn't currently have contributory or vicarious copyright offences; i.e. you can't be sued there for assisting someone else to breach copyright, only if you do so yourself directly - so there's no grounds to go after the ISP under swedish law. This is one reason why the piratebay is still running, despite numerous attempts to the contrary.
The standard estimated total cost of the ISS (difficult to measure precisely given the multinational aspect) is between $50 billion and $100 billion. Over 10 years.
In comparison, the US military budget for 2009 is $711 billion. $10 billion is spent a month in Iraq alone. total estimated cost of that war so far over 6 years? $660 billion, and that's just US costs.
Going into space for long periods safely, or as safely as is practicable anyway, is very, very hard. I'm not saying the ISS is cheap, but it's not bad in the grand scheme of things.
Unfortunately, most people didn't know Vista (especially vista basic) stunk at the original launch. I know quite a few people who looked at laptops and specifically went for vista ones because they were being advertised heavily and were the 'new shiny thing'. Putting XP on those underpowered laptops would have been the right thing for everyone involved, but vendors who did lost out to those sellers who had lower scruples.
What I find extreme is that there was the possibility of jail in the first place. He didn't use violence. He didn't threaten anyone. He's guilty of using a video camera in the wrong room.
The worst you can accuse him of is that he was going to cause economic harm to a corporation (and even that's a stretch - how many people do you know that skip going to the cinema because some shitty rip is available? The only people I know who watch rips is because they can't physically go, and the rip is better than nothing)
They didn't find a massive stash of recorded films and a dedicated shadowy organization ready to run off millions of DVDs and sell them across the far east, with him as the head making millions in profit. they found an unemployed builder on what appears to be his first offence. They didn't convict him of distribution or even copying.
Yet the studios wanted to put him in jail for using a camera. That's what I find extreme.
Slashdot Mirror
There's no such thing as an implicit licence for copyright.
There is however the doctrine of first sale, which *does* apply to the sale of copyrighted works.
Specifically, once a contract for the sale of a copy of a copyrighted work is complete (here's some money for that book/DVD/photo - thank you, sale complete), no further restrictions to the use of that work can be applied by the copyright holder, other than those that apply through copyright law itself - i.e. no public performances or making your own copies (depending upon jurisdiction, some places let you make infinite copies for personal use, some, like the UK, allow for none except for those needed to use the work itself)
They tried shrinkwrap licences with books, back in the day. Publishers put extra limits on what you could do with the book, such as preventing your reselling it after you'd bought it. Doctrine of first sale killed that in court. The contract terms are up front, written down and agreed to prior to the sale, or they're completely unenforceable. Literally, the copyright holder only gets to require extra terms against the first sale of the work, up front and before the sale. After that, assuming no such actual contract exists, any further sales of the same copy are governed only by copyright itself. Thus the second-hand market is a fundamental right of copyrighted goods purchasers, which is why I get really peeved at software companies whining about lost sales and trying to kill it. It's a fundamental safety margin and customer balance of copyright.
Notice how you have to agree to the contract for mobile phones, cable TV or MMO's before you start, and before you exchange money? Well, that applies to the sale of copyrighted works too. Implied licences and post-sale click-wrap licences are just a massive con. Did you sign a contract at the till, last you bought a DVD or book?
The one exception I know of is US UCITA-signing states, with regards post-sale click-wrap licences for software. There is an extra law there to make those binding, even after the sale.
Corporate to corporate contracts are also obviously a different beast.
I quite like the new padded cover. It's shaped to fit the hands better when holding it like an old NES controller, though it's too big for my fiancee to hold comfortably.
Out of interest, since you're running no AV/spyware scanners - how do you KNOW you're not and haven't been infected? I've seen all sorts of nasties that install and run silently. Including ones that don't require social engineering to install.
Firewalls protect against direct attacks, but they don't stop iffy attachments such as the latest .wri exploit, or exploits in the browser (and firefox isn't entirely immune either, though it's a lot safer than IE)
Linux offers a huge security advantage because it's better designed. Apache is still more popular than IIS, and has a had tiny, tiny amount of the exploits than IIS has had over the years, though IIS has improved a lot lately.
Even if I accept your premise that all you need is knowledge to protect your systems, which I don't, expecting all users to be expert technicians simply to browse the internet is unrealistic. Some measures to protect themselves, sure - but specialization requires time, and non-IT people rather need to spend that learning other things.
Equally, people may well not have the time to learn how to use linux, which is fair enough. Based on the criteria that many have for linux, windows isn't ready for the desktop either. If linux had 90% market share and everybody used it already, windows would be struggling hard to get any users.
The sun does give plenty of people skin-cancer already via UV over-exposure, so it's possibly not the best example of a non-harmful radiation source to an EM-phobe.
Not that I don't agree with you - if non-ionizing EM radiation from mobile phones or even wireless access points (which transmit at even lower levels) was harmful, broadcast radio and TV would already have given us all cancer.
Education discounts using MOLP licences are pretty sweet too. Added an extra couple of server 2008 standard licences at our school for sysadmin desktops at ~£90 each. Makes adding the MMC plugins for domain services management a hell of a lot easier for a start.
I'm on adsl24.co.uk, another enta.net reseller with a 30 day minimum contract. 45GB quota onpeak, 300GB offpeak, £28.75 pcm inc. No phorm, IWF filterlist, or port throttling of any kind.
Another happy customer and great customer support. If enta.net ever shutter their doors, I've no idea where I'd turn to.
Isn't that what email is for now?
You're misunderstanding me. I publish any and all works for free. The concept that protects my highly valued free speech is the concept of Free Speech. The ability to speak freely, without restraint. That is what I value highly, and I don't give it away lightly. I consider copyright a bad deal for everyone that matters - the public, and creators. Copyright removes my right of free speech, and I don't consider I'm getting a fair deal for it.
How would you make a truckload of money when I would be publishing the work online for free? And even if I did follow your tortured example, which I wouldn't, I honestly wouldn't care. Some people create for reasons other than money.
Anyway, thanks for making my point anyway. Copyright in its current form doesn't serve artists or the public, it serves middlemen. Even assuming I did get my theoretical book published, who'd be getting almost all of the sticker price in the shops? Not me.
You're talking about moral rights, and those aren't recognised in US copyright law. They are a component of European copyright law.
You're half-right though. I don't think having your name on an idea or your reputation based upon it should have anything to do with financial remuneration, which is what copyright is concerned with.
You're half-wrong too though. I do indeed place a high value on my speech. So much so, I don't think the right to use it should be given away so easily, for so little benefit to myself or others.
I'm not American, but just because something is in the constution, does not make it applicable to the modern day.
"Representatives and direct Taxes shall be apportioned among the several States which may be included within this Union, according to their respective Numbers, which shall be determined by adding to the whole Number of free Persons, including those bound to Service for a Term of Years, and excluding Indians not taxed, three fifths of all other Persons."
Yes, slaves count as 3/5 of a person in the US constitution, though it was rendered moot by the 13th and 14th amendments.
So Rosa Parks should have just shut up and sat at the back of the bus until the law was changed? I'm entirely free to break laws I disagree with, but shouldn't be surprised when I am prosecuted and punished for it. Equally, I'm fully entitled to disrespect the law and the basis for it, while still following it out of fear of punishment.
The original question wasn't about the law though, it was about the ethics of breaking it. It's clear what the laws regarding copyright are, and in my opinion they are draconian, unfair and unethical.
The only reason copyright laws exist as they do today is because they are not enforced against the vast majority of people. If everyone in the west was prosecuted to the full extent of the law for every possible infringement of copyright they commit, there would be very few non bankrupt citizens left. You reproduced part of my comment without permission. Slashdot have a licence to do so, from when I submitted it. Do you? Yes, you could probably get away with a fair use defence, and the actual damages are effectively nil. The statutory damages are huge though - would you like to bet several years of court cases and legal fees over it?
Copyright is an infringement on my right to free speech. Sharing knowledge does not diminish the original holder any more than lighting your taper from mine takes away my light. The public supposedly give up their free speech right in a limited and specific way for a limited time for the greater good. A large and healthy public domain of knowledge and culture being good for the public to build on, copyright is specifically designed to enlarge it by granting a temporary monopoly to authors so they could be encouraged by payment for their work. After a short period, the copyright lapses, the public domain is enhanced, and authors have to go on creating new works for more money.
The suppression of free speech was not given up to create a new class of fake property barons making all the money as the middlemen. Copyright was not supposed to be effectively permanent, the whole point was to improve the public domain, not bury it!
Copyright was a bargain between a creator and the public. Now it's an ever-extending new property right that benefits neither. I do not believe copyright in its current form to be an ethical restriction of free speech any longer, so I feel no ethical duty to respect it.
In the UK at least, this is not the case. Format shifting is not a Fair Dealing enumerated right, and making complete copies, even for your own use, is expressly reserved for the copyright owner. Distribution is not required. Every time someone rips their own CD to MP3 in the UK, they are breaking the law and could be sued. However, the BPI (the British RIAA) has said explicitly they have no intention of doing so.
That said, taping TV programmes was in the exact same legal situation, and it wasn't until it went to court than an enumerated right to 'timeshift' was effectively addded to your rights. Technically, you're only allowed to record it, watch it once, then you're supposed to delete it. The timeshift right does not extend to making an archive of recordings.
Since the BPI don't intend to sue over a case they know they'd lose, the most likely way it'll change is specific copyright legislation that would enumerate a specific right to format shift - the UK government has recently been looking at changes to the law.
I don't know about the US, but in the UK a man diagnosed with prostate cancer has only one-quarter of the cash spent on research into his disease compared to the amount devoted to a womanâ(TM)s breast cancer, despite that the two diseases kill about the same number of people. There is also a national breast cancer screening system to catch it early, but no such scheme for prostate cancer. I don't begrudge the funding for breast cancer research, or wish to cut anything, it's a terrible disease - but I wish prostate cancer could also get some of the same media frenzy, big name support and government funding.
That said, as I understand it there's been some criticism of AIDS research that it's primarily concentrating on the varieties that affect westerners the most, as opposed to the strains most prevalent in Africa - where the infection rate utterly dominates that of the west.
What gets me is the text ad beneath it:
>> Official Site
Orthogonal terwilliger accordion. Updated daily news service. Latest link, photo , video and more about orthogonal terwilliger accordion.
So if someone decides to hack into the pentagon using their work connection, without the knowledge of their colleagues and specifically against the terms and conditions of use of that network, they'd hold the entire company responsible? Even if it was a major corporation?
Companies are not responsible for the illegal activities of their employees unless they are acting on behalf of the company itself. Someone downloading DiRT for their own use, in breach of company network policy does not fall in that category. The most the company can be forced to do is hand over any records they hold identifying the perpetrator.
Or do you think the RIAA are going to start suing the universities for copyright infringement instead of the students?
As if moral issues are any different than personal choices. None of us are born with a particular moral framework, we learn it from our parents, culture, religion and sometimes we come to it on our own. No matter, it's still a personal choice of rules to live by.
You choose to assign a higher value to animal life than others, that doesn't make you defacto a better person. I also disagree with your premise that to be a meat eater requires 'meat guilt', ignorance, or callousness. I know full well the process of the UK slaughterhouse, I do feel we should prevent outright cruelty, and I don't feel guilt about eating meat. It's entirely possible to raise animals in a decent environment, slaughter them quickly and humanely, and enjoy the product in moderation.
This only applies to the media player, due to the knock-on effect on web-based video and music of having every windows pc guaranteed to have microsoft's codecs. This is the reason for the -N versions on the vista DVD.
There's no reason microsoft couldn't have split vista into two versions; home and business. All the extra 'ultimate' crap, and turning off aero entirely in basic was just segmenting the market to extract as much money as possible.
If large multinational corporations profited substantially from any of those laws being in your country, they probably would be law sooner or later, assuming you live in the 1st world anyway.
Since they're going after the ISP, the only grounds they can really do so on are knowingly assisting a user breach copyright, or on profiting from a user doing so when you should have known they were doing it, but wilfully ignored it. These type of offences were what took down Napster, various P2P networks and torrent sites.
Sweden doesn't currently have contributory or vicarious copyright offences; i.e. you can't be sued there for assisting someone else to breach copyright, only if you do so yourself directly - so there's no grounds to go after the ISP under swedish law. This is one reason why the piratebay is still running, despite numerous attempts to the contrary.
The standard estimated total cost of the ISS (difficult to measure precisely given the multinational aspect) is between $50 billion and $100 billion. Over 10 years.
In comparison, the US military budget for 2009 is $711 billion. $10 billion is spent a month in Iraq alone. total estimated cost of that war so far over 6 years? $660 billion, and that's just US costs.
Going into space for long periods safely, or as safely as is practicable anyway, is very, very hard. I'm not saying the ISS is cheap, but it's not bad in the grand scheme of things.
Unfortunately, most people didn't know Vista (especially vista basic) stunk at the original launch. I know quite a few people who looked at laptops and specifically went for vista ones because they were being advertised heavily and were the 'new shiny thing'. Putting XP on those underpowered laptops would have been the right thing for everyone involved, but vendors who did lost out to those sellers who had lower scruples.
You mean people who can't physically go, and can't possibly contain themselves until the official DVD is out.
You obviously don't have children. Perhaps we should send parents who download rips to keep their kids amused to jail too? That seems reasonable.
What I find extreme is that there was the possibility of jail in the first place. He didn't use violence. He didn't threaten anyone. He's guilty of using a video camera in the wrong room.
The worst you can accuse him of is that he was going to cause economic harm to a corporation (and even that's a stretch - how many people do you know that skip going to the cinema because some shitty rip is available? The only people I know who watch rips is because they can't physically go, and the rip is better than nothing)
They didn't find a massive stash of recorded films and a dedicated shadowy organization ready to run off millions of DVDs and sell them across the far east, with him as the head making millions in profit. they found an unemployed builder on what appears to be his first offence. They didn't convict him of distribution or even copying.
Yet the studios wanted to put him in jail for using a camera. That's what I find extreme.