Gates has never received a large salary (relatively speaking, of course), but does it really matter? Even though he made "only" $753k last year, he could, pretty easily, buy a $10M yacht or a $50M house just by liquidating a small portion of his shares (or by getting loan).
What I've never understood if Paul Allen's sports teams. He is worth "only" about $20B (he is Gates's original partner in MS). But he owns two sports teams, the Seahawks and the TrailBlazers. He could easily buy himself a championship by going well over the salary cap (and paying the related penalties) without putting a dent in his finances. Yet he has never done so.
I do. There's a great deal of difference between philanthropy and forced redistribution of wealth. If you're going to include money that would have been spent either way, then we should point out that the average US taxpayer probably "gives" a larger percentage of their income to charity than does Bill Gates.
What gives you the right to judge who is giving money away for the "right reasons" and who is doing it "only for tax purposes"?
"Tax-deductible" means that a donation qualifies as paying your income tax, putting your money towards something the government would have given your money to anyway. Making a tax-deductible donation only decides where the money is going, not whether or not to "give" the money in the first place. Sub-Saharan Africa would still be getting their fresh water and such, the only difference being whether the check is signed "Bill Gates" or "Uncle Sam."
Wrong. Tax-deductible means the amount you give is taken out of your taxable income. What you are talking about is a tax credit. Charitable contributions are tax deductible, not tax credits. See this definition. For example, lets say you earn $100,000. If you give away $10,000, you are taxed as if you earned only $90,000.
Let's use real tax rates here (taken from this site. If you earn $100,000, your tax liability is $24,308. But if you gave $10,000 to charity and you are taxed as if you earned $90,000, your tax liability is $21,323. Thus, your taxes are reduced by $2,985. In contrast, with a tax credit of $10,000, your taxes are reduced by $10,000.
And then of course if you decide to back out of the contract, the company owns the copyright to your music, making it more difficult to find a new label (because you can't put out any of your old music).
While the record label owns the sound recording copyright (meaning you can't take old songs and merely re-release them), some publishing company owns the copyright to the music itself. With the compulsory license, you can always re-record your own, or anyone else's music.
The first thing that came to mind, that they didn't address, was why doesn't the developing company glut the market? I mean nowadays the generic drugs are cheap and the brand name drugs cost a fortune. The brand name supposedly is the inventor of the drug, and thus should know how to make more of it faster and cheaper. I mean they invented it after all. If bigdrugco makes a cure for eldiseaso, they should make a shitload of it and sell it for less than anyone else. Pure old capitalistic price competition.
Apparently, there is more money to be made by building up a brand name first. Take Tylenol, for example. That is no longer patented, and every major drug store and grocery chain in the US has their own generic version of the drug. But you can still buy the name brand Tylenol. And because of the name recognition, they can charge more. Why glut the market when you can make money by charging a premium?
Who do you think actually invents things? Do you think that cancer drugs are being developed in garages or by large chemical corporations? Do you think some guy invented the transistor in his garage, or do you think a corporation paid a guy to invent it?
The simple fact is, most inventions are made by employees or corporations. Eliminating corporate ownership of IP accomplishes nothing.
Eliminating the right to sell or transfer IP rights? That's about the stupidist thing I've ever heard. Right now, the ONLY incentive individual inventors have to make an invention is the ability to sell the invention to corporations. An individual has little ability to manufacture items himself and has to rely on corporations to do so.
Thus, if my proposal (that corporations be made to hold copyright in the same manner that an individual does) is to make any sense, all mention of "Author's Lifetime" must be removed from copyright duration.
There really would be no point in doing this. First of all, there is already a presumption that a work expires in 95 years, unless the author's estate filed a certificate with the LOC. Second of all, most famous works are already owned by a corporation. The copyrights to most famous movies, music, TV, are all owned by corporations. Third, what would such a scheme accomplish. The problems with IP aren't caused by the mere fact that a corporation owns IP.
more modest, and reasonable, start to a solution would be to eliminate corporate ownership of IP. Does that sound the same as what you proposed? It's not. I don't mean that transfer of copyrights should be banned- but that corporate IP holders should be treated the same as everyone else. That means no "Author's Life + 70 years, vs 90 years for a corporation"- all copyrights should last the same time (X years from date of publication), regardless of who holds it (or how long he lives).
Corporate owners of patents are treated the same as individual owners as far as term goes.
I think a lot of people believe that an individual owner of copyright only has 70 years total, while corporations have 95. That is wrong. Individuals have 70 years in addition to the rest of their lives.
As for copyright, the difference between author's life + 70 and 95 is minimal. Sometimes, 95 years from creation is longer than the life of the author +70, sometimes it is not. It evens out in the end.
For example, photographer Ansel Adams died in 1984. Works that he owned individually expire 70 years after 1984, the end of 2054. 95 years before 2054 is 1959. Basically, any work he created after 1959 has a shorter copyright duration than it would if it were owned by a corporation, but works he created before 1959 (the majority of his famous works) have longer lives.
For a music example, take Paul McCartney. His first famous works were created 40 years ago. A lot longer than the 25 year difference between life + 70 and 95.
If I were to write some ground-breaking code while employed for a corporation, I sure as hell wouldn't get rich. I'd get paid my normal wage, and I might get a promotion for doing good work. Where's my incentive to create? I can get the same paycheck by mindlessly doing what I'm told, and I can get the same promotion by brown-nosing well enough.
I suppose the main point I'm making is: Corporations, and particularly CEOs of corporations, don't create anything. Individuals or groups of individuals, perhaps employed by corporatoins, do. By their own assumptions, corporations that own IP instead of the individuals that created the IP destroy the drive to innovate.
Corporations own a large number of patents. Eliminating that would be difficult to accomplish (because of corporations ties to Congress) and stupid. A company like Intel or IBM pays people to invent things. People don't just develop new ways of making semiconductors on their own. They are paid to do that. Moreover, most corporations provide incentives for inventing products. You invent a new transistor, the corporation will give you a bonus.
HMV carries 55 Michael Jackson titles on CD (includes CD-singles).
Including CD singles is stupid. Most are out of print. He has about half-dozen real albums out. Off the top of my head: Off The Wall, Thriller, Bad, Dangerous, HIStory, and the latest one. 6x7800 = 46,000. I think it is safe to assume that he will sell that many this year. Even in Canada.
The Globe & Mail reported on Saturday that the Michael Jackson documentary has piqued interest in his music. Quoting HMV, which has over 100 locations, they said sales of all of MJ CD's are about 40 a week nationwide.
I don't know where you got that figure from. According to this CNN article, sales of Jackson's catalog albums are up over 300%. Jackson's Thriller is the second largest selling album of all time. I would be very surprised if ANY of Jackson's albums sell less than 7800 copies per year.
The way Lexis and Westlaw sucker in budding attorneys is interesting. While law schools briefly attempt to teach you how to search case law using print books, Lexis and Westlaw give you a password pretty early in your law school career. After that, you can use there services for free throughout law school.
But here's the catch. Each year, thousands of people graduate law school accostomed to using Lexis and Westlaw and not books. So when they graduate and become lawyers, they have been trained to be Lexis and Westlaw junkies, not used to using traditional paper methods. Voila, built-in market for their services.
That's the amazing thing about non-computer games. Monopoly has been around since 1935. Games like chess and go have been around even longer. They are still popular. But Starcraft, an incredibly popular game just 5 years ago, has a fraction of the following it used to have.
I know a guy who replaced his P4 2.66ghz proc with the 2.8ghz. $300 spent and he doesnt understand why nothing seems faster. He cant do the math and see a mere 5% difference, and even that is theoretical.
That's what I don't get about overclocking. People will buy a 2.8 GHz processor and not think it's fast enough.
I guess I agree with your doubling suggestion. I went from a 400 MHz to a 1GHz. Part of me wants want to upgrade to at least 2 GHz (or Athlon equivalent), but the fiscal part of me says I have better things to do with my money. I run UT2k3 OK. I wish it were better, though, as it is very difficult to play on-line against people with better frame rates.
Because it's not that easy to make good mp3s!
I finally got fed up with my incredibly shitty CD-ROM drive taking 12 hours to rip using EAC in its most careful mode and got a Plextor that supports C2.
But now that you have a good CD-ROM, isn't it pretty easy? The only CDs I have trouble with are borrowed CDs that are in bad shape. I've never had a problem making MP3s out of CDs that I own and keep in good condition.
I use EAC and RazorLAME because I like those programs, they come very highly recommended on the net, and are free. I never even bothered to install the MusicMatch that came with my CD-RW.
You know what would have made me go out and buy the album in a heartbeat?
To have the MP3 tracks of the songs embedded on the CD also.
I've bought a few CDs and ripped them to MP3. If when I bought a CD, it came with the MP3s already (buying a CD legally entitles you to the MP3s, you just have to go find or rip them) that would be excellant.
Making MP3s from CD audio is trivially easy. It would be pointless to include MP3 versions of the same songs. If some band were to come up with the bright idea of, for example, releasing an album but the CD-Extra portion was a live concert, guess what, it would be on Kazaa before the release date.
The only smart idea I've seen to entice the purchase of a CD is the inclusion of a DVD video. Examples of this are early releases of Eminem's The Eminem Show and Dave Weckl's The Zone. However, both DVDs are only about 20 minutes.
Wrong! See above. For patent filed before 6/8/95, the term length is the longer of 20 years from filing or 17 years from issue. In this case, one would use the 1983 filing date.
I always thought e-books was a silly idea as well . . . Until I got a Sony Clie. Since I carry my Clie with me most of the time, if I have downtime, I can read books that I stored on the Clie. For example, I was shopping last weekend with my wife. She was taking longer than expected, and I was bored. So I just pulled out my Clie and started reading a novel. I have the complete Sherlock Holmes works with me everywhere I go. Try carrying the big print edition of the Complete Sherlock Holems with you.
This means that we can't simply take electronic versions of modern texts and put them in the archive, because only out-of-copyright books are in there.
Thanks for the very useful post. But the parent was talking about public domain books. Yeah, you can't take electronic version of modern texts. But some publisher somewhere has Charles Dickens on the computer. Ask them to export the text to Project Gutenberg. Will they want to do so? Probably not. They don't want to hurt their own sales. But it won't hurt to ask.
I think they're using "browser" to mean basically the web page itself, not the software that lets you view the web page.
I disagree. Look at the Abstract: "A structured document browser includes a constant user interface for displaying and viewing sections of a document that is organized according to a pre-defined structure. The structured document browser displays documents that have been marked with embedded codes that specify the structure of the document." The browser displays marked up documents.
The same is on claim 29: "a browser having a user interface for viewing documents having embedded codes that identify parts of documents according to a predefined document structure" (emphasis added).
From the specification: "a structured document browser is provided with a user interface that remains uniform and familiar as the user browses documents according to their structure instead of their contents." and the following: "the browser 80 is designed to navigate documents according to their structure."
It is very clear that by "browser," they mean a program used to view documents. Possibly, SBC is trying to assert that Museumtour is inducing infringement of the browser, but that seems to be a stretch. It seems clear that Musyem tour created a text document that is displayed in a certain manner in a browser and didn't create a browser itself.
The patents are 5,933,841, filed May 17, 1996 and issued August 3, 1999; and 6,442,574, filed April 29, 1999 and issued August 27, 2002.
The letter to museumstore specifically lists claim 13 of the later patent. Here is claim 13:
13. A browser for navigating a document comprising a plurality of sections, the browser comprising:
a display window displaying a document; and
a user interface comprising a plurality of selectors automatically configured to correspond to a respective plurality of sections of the document regardless of what section of the document is being displayed in the display window;
wherein the plurality of selectors are not part of the document displayed in the display window of the browser and continue to be displayed after one of the plurality of selectors is selected.
The thing is, the claim covers a browser. Museumstore doesn't make a browser. IE, Netscape, Mozilla, etc. are browsers. I'd have to look more closely at the patent to see what they mean by "browser."
It appears that the patent was filed in 1996 and granted in 1999, so they weren't sitting on it for a long time: the patent statutes allow you 6 years before you can sue.
However, looking at the letter sent to museumtour, it looks like they patented frames in which one frame has navigational information. So no one had frames before 1996?
Say I have a CD of "Revolver" by the Beatles, I can legally convert it to MP3. But converting CDs to MP3 is a drag, if I can't be stuffed doing the conversion, I can log into napster and download the MP3s. Similarly, if I want to save other owners of that CD the hassle of converting their CDs to MP3, there is nothing wrong with me sharing the files via p2p.
If I wanted to make MP3s of Revolver, here's what I do:
Put disc in drive
Start EAC (one click)
type Alt+G to download the song information
Click the MP3 button
Takes no more than 30 seconds to start, two mouse clicks and one keypress, and less than 10 minutes to complete.
If I want to download MP3s:
Start Kazaa
Type in Beatles, Revolver in the search portion
Hope that the entire album is available right now
Sort the titles
try to make sure that I am downloading the correct version (i.e., not a live version, but the album version of each song)
Once they are finally downloaded (depending on the connection quality, may take over an hour, even if you use broadband), sort the songs by track number to make sure you have every song (downloaded version may not have track numbers, so you have to manually determine that you have all 14 tracks and which ones you are missing
listen to every song to make sure the copies are complete and not just portions of the songs
Also make sure they are good quality songs, not copied from the radio
repeat downloading steps for any bad files, possibly having to wait a few days to find another user sharing those files.
Slashdot Mirror
Aargh. If there's one thing I don't want to be known as is an MJ expert. :-)
What I've never understood if Paul Allen's sports teams. He is worth "only" about $20B (he is Gates's original partner in MS). But he owns two sports teams, the Seahawks and the TrailBlazers. He could easily buy himself a championship by going well over the salary cap (and paying the related penalties) without putting a dent in his finances. Yet he has never done so.
What gives you the right to judge who is giving money away for the "right reasons" and who is doing it "only for tax purposes"?
"Tax-deductible" means that a donation qualifies as paying your income tax, putting your money towards something the government would have given your money to anyway. Making a tax-deductible donation only decides where the money is going, not whether or not to "give" the money in the first place. Sub-Saharan Africa would still be getting their fresh water and such, the only difference being whether the check is signed "Bill Gates" or "Uncle Sam."
Wrong. Tax-deductible means the amount you give is taken out of your taxable income. What you are talking about is a tax credit. Charitable contributions are tax deductible, not tax credits. See this definition. For example, lets say you earn $100,000. If you give away $10,000, you are taxed as if you earned only $90,000.
Let's use real tax rates here (taken from this site. If you earn $100,000, your tax liability is $24,308. But if you gave $10,000 to charity and you are taxed as if you earned $90,000, your tax liability is $21,323. Thus, your taxes are reduced by $2,985. In contrast, with a tax credit of $10,000, your taxes are reduced by $10,000.
True, but it sure makes for a boring race.
While the record label owns the sound recording copyright (meaning you can't take old songs and merely re-release them), some publishing company owns the copyright to the music itself. With the compulsory license, you can always re-record your own, or anyone else's music.
Apparently, there is more money to be made by building up a brand name first. Take Tylenol, for example. That is no longer patented, and every major drug store and grocery chain in the US has their own generic version of the drug. But you can still buy the name brand Tylenol. And because of the name recognition, they can charge more. Why glut the market when you can make money by charging a premium?
The simple fact is, most inventions are made by employees or corporations. Eliminating corporate ownership of IP accomplishes nothing.
Eliminating the right to sell or transfer IP rights? That's about the stupidist thing I've ever heard. Right now, the ONLY incentive individual inventors have to make an invention is the ability to sell the invention to corporations. An individual has little ability to manufacture items himself and has to rely on corporations to do so.
There really would be no point in doing this. First of all, there is already a presumption that a work expires in 95 years, unless the author's estate filed a certificate with the LOC. Second of all, most famous works are already owned by a corporation. The copyrights to most famous movies, music, TV, are all owned by corporations. Third, what would such a scheme accomplish. The problems with IP aren't caused by the mere fact that a corporation owns IP.
Corporate owners of patents are treated the same as individual owners as far as term goes.
I think a lot of people believe that an individual owner of copyright only has 70 years total, while corporations have 95. That is wrong. Individuals have 70 years in addition to the rest of their lives .
As for copyright, the difference between author's life + 70 and 95 is minimal. Sometimes, 95 years from creation is longer than the life of the author +70, sometimes it is not. It evens out in the end.
For example, photographer Ansel Adams died in 1984. Works that he owned individually expire 70 years after 1984, the end of 2054. 95 years before 2054 is 1959. Basically, any work he created after 1959 has a shorter copyright duration than it would if it were owned by a corporation, but works he created before 1959 (the majority of his famous works) have longer lives.
For a music example, take Paul McCartney. His first famous works were created 40 years ago. A lot longer than the 25 year difference between life + 70 and 95.
Corporations own a large number of patents. Eliminating that would be difficult to accomplish (because of corporations ties to Congress) and stupid. A company like Intel or IBM pays people to invent things. People don't just develop new ways of making semiconductors on their own. They are paid to do that. Moreover, most corporations provide incentives for inventing products. You invent a new transistor, the corporation will give you a bonus.
Including CD singles is stupid. Most are out of print. He has about half-dozen real albums out. Off the top of my head: Off The Wall, Thriller, Bad, Dangerous, HIStory, and the latest one. 6x7800 = 46,000. I think it is safe to assume that he will sell that many this year. Even in Canada.
I don't know where you got that figure from. According to this CNN article, sales of Jackson's catalog albums are up over 300%. Jackson's Thriller is the second largest selling album of all time. I would be very surprised if ANY of Jackson's albums sell less than 7800 copies per year.
But here's the catch. Each year, thousands of people graduate law school accostomed to using Lexis and Westlaw and not books. So when they graduate and become lawyers, they have been trained to be Lexis and Westlaw junkies, not used to using traditional paper methods. Voila, built-in market for their services.
That's the amazing thing about non-computer games. Monopoly has been around since 1935. Games like chess and go have been around even longer. They are still popular. But Starcraft, an incredibly popular game just 5 years ago, has a fraction of the following it used to have.
That's what I don't get about overclocking. People will buy a 2.8 GHz processor and not think it's fast enough.
I guess I agree with your doubling suggestion. I went from a 400 MHz to a 1GHz. Part of me wants want to upgrade to at least 2 GHz (or Athlon equivalent), but the fiscal part of me says I have better things to do with my money. I run UT2k3 OK. I wish it were better, though, as it is very difficult to play on-line against people with better frame rates.
Uhhhh, how about doing it in the morning (when it's 6am in CA, it is 9AM in NY).
But now that you have a good CD-ROM, isn't it pretty easy? The only CDs I have trouble with are borrowed CDs that are in bad shape. I've never had a problem making MP3s out of CDs that I own and keep in good condition.
I use EAC and RazorLAME because I like those programs, they come very highly recommended on the net, and are free. I never even bothered to install the MusicMatch that came with my CD-RW.
I've bought a few CDs and ripped them to MP3. If when I bought a CD, it came with the MP3s already (buying a CD legally entitles you to the MP3s, you just have to go find or rip them) that would be excellant.
Making MP3s from CD audio is trivially easy. It would be pointless to include MP3 versions of the same songs. If some band were to come up with the bright idea of, for example, releasing an album but the CD-Extra portion was a live concert, guess what, it would be on Kazaa before the release date.
The only smart idea I've seen to entice the purchase of a CD is the inclusion of a DVD video. Examples of this are early releases of Eminem's The Eminem Show and Dave Weckl's The Zone . However, both DVDs are only about 20 minutes.
Wrong! See above. For patent filed before 6/8/95, the term length is the longer of 20 years from filing or 17 years from issue. In this case, one would use the 1983 filing date.
I always thought e-books was a silly idea as well . . . Until I got a Sony Clie. Since I carry my Clie with me most of the time, if I have downtime, I can read books that I stored on the Clie. For example, I was shopping last weekend with my wife. She was taking longer than expected, and I was bored. So I just pulled out my Clie and started reading a novel. I have the complete Sherlock Holmes works with me everywhere I go. Try carrying the big print edition of the Complete Sherlock Holems with you.
Thanks for the very useful post. But the parent was talking about public domain books. Yeah, you can't take electronic version of modern texts. But some publisher somewhere has Charles Dickens on the computer. Ask them to export the text to Project Gutenberg. Will they want to do so? Probably not. They don't want to hurt their own sales. But it won't hurt to ask.
I disagree. Look at the Abstract: "A structured document browser includes a constant user interface for displaying and viewing sections of a document that is organized according to a pre-defined structure. The structured document browser displays documents that have been marked with embedded codes that specify the structure of the document." The browser displays marked up documents.
The same is on claim 29: "a browser having a user interface for viewing documents having embedded codes that identify parts of documents according to a predefined document structure" (emphasis added).
From the specification: "a structured document browser is provided with a user interface that remains uniform and familiar as the user browses documents according to their structure instead of their contents." and the following: "the browser 80 is designed to navigate documents according to their structure."
It is very clear that by "browser," they mean a program used to view documents. Possibly, SBC is trying to assert that Museumtour is inducing infringement of the browser, but that seems to be a stretch. It seems clear that Musyem tour created a text document that is displayed in a certain manner in a browser and didn't create a browser itself.
The letter to museumstore specifically lists claim 13 of the later patent. Here is claim 13:
13. A browser for navigating a document comprising a plurality of sections, the browser comprising:
a display window displaying a document; and
a user interface comprising a plurality of selectors automatically configured to correspond to a respective plurality of sections of the document regardless of what section of the document is being displayed in the display window;
wherein the plurality of selectors are not part of the document displayed in the display window of the browser and continue to be displayed after one of the plurality of selectors is selected.
The thing is, the claim covers a browser. Museumstore doesn't make a browser. IE, Netscape, Mozilla, etc. are browsers. I'd have to look more closely at the patent to see what they mean by "browser."
However, looking at the letter sent to museumtour, it looks like they patented frames in which one frame has navigational information. So no one had frames before 1996?
If I wanted to make MP3s of Revolver, here's what I do:
- Put disc in drive
- Start EAC (one click)
- type Alt+G to download the song information
- Click the MP3 button
Takes no more than 30 seconds to start, two mouse clicks and one keypress, and less than 10 minutes to complete.If I want to download MP3s:
- Start Kazaa
- Type in Beatles, Revolver in the search portion
- Hope that the entire album is available right now
- Sort the titles
- try to make sure that I am downloading the correct version (i.e., not a live version, but the album version of each song)
- Once they are finally downloaded (depending on the connection quality, may take over an hour, even if you use broadband), sort the songs by track number to make sure you have every song (downloaded version may not have track numbers, so you have to manually determine that you have all 14 tracks and which ones you are missing
- listen to every song to make sure the copies are complete and not just portions of the songs
- Also make sure they are good quality songs, not copied from the radio
- repeat downloading steps for any bad files, possibly having to wait a few days to find another user sharing those files.
Yeah, downloading is easier *rolls eyes*