Except, this shouldn't be a computer law at all. Fraud is fraud on the telephone, in person, or through a web browser. We've had wire fraud statutes for around 100 years.
All of this obviously illegal stuff was already sufficiently outlawed when the internet was still a fleeting dream in Al Gore's little head.
Re:This article isn't very good. Neat story though
on
When Sysadmins Go Bad
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· Score: 2
Their definition of logic bomb isn't quite accurate, it's a little too specific. Logic bombs and trojans are highly related (you could argue that either is a subclass of the other), but viruses are quite different.
A virus is a program fragment which, when run, inserts that same fragment in other programs. Today's mass media enjoys the word "virus" and applies it to many other kinds of malware- the recent headliners like Melissa, ILoveYou, and Code Red were mostly worms, not viruses. (A virus rarely spreads very fast, since the delay before infected programs are restarted introduces a lagtime)
The difference between Trojan and Logic Bomb is a little vaguer. Trojans are usually inserted into software by a programmer who wishes to gain access to a computer he doesn't administer. The canoncial logic bomb is something left behind to impair a system long after the bomber has gone away.
Usually "Logic Bomb" implies that there is some kind of timer mechanism involved, so that after you're fired the payload can still be delivered, even if the target computer has no internet access.
For instance, a simple logic bomb might be to schedule a job to delete all a server's files in 6 months. As long as you're employed, you can keep cancelling that job and re-scheduling it... but a while after you leave, boom! (More subtle payloads would be both more damaging, and less likely to get you caught)
B&tB was a really decent story, up til the sell-out* conformist ending. Of course, the ending and overall flow was the same as the fairy tell, but the parts Disney added were supporting characters to add length- helpful servants and vile, closeminded peasants. This created a racial-discrimination subplot that concluded in an entirely unedifiying way.
The White Gaulic Catholics are the bad guys, because they attack the hero after judging him solely by his appearance. So how is the situation resolved? He changes his appearance to look just like the bigots who had shunned him.
What's the moral of the story kids? "If you're different than other people, try to change and blend in. Nobody likes a weirdo, and don't you want to be liked?"
A better, more courageous ending would've had the Beast miss his deadline, and still live happily without that last-minute miracle.
Shrek (an anti-Disney film in more blatant ways also) nicely reversed B&tB, by allowing the curse victim to decide that she was better off under the spell (superhuman strength trumps prettiness).
*Yes, I feel the painful redundancy of using "sell-out" in reference to a Disney movie.
You mean die from malformed pairs, right? XML disallows any sort of "recovery". Parsers must abort on any kind of mistake like that.
The "benefit"- that error detection is easier- is a tiny one, and far outweighed by the greater difficulty in modifying XML in a traditional text editor. (Sure, an XML-aware editor could update the closing tag for you, but a smart editor would do its own checking anyway).
Another drawback is that XML parsers are more complex and slower than similar Lisp parsers. Of course the performance difference is tiny, but since people want to use XML with big databases and small devices, it still matters.
This could be a sign that today's programmers use "objects" or some other abstraction instead of "algorithm" as their conceptual building-block of software development. That scary, Arabic word is unpopular with guys who just want to "call methods on object classes" or whatever the new jargon is.
From one point of view, only a tiny minority of today's programmers ever need to create "new algorithms"- so much documented study has gone on in that area, you'd only be reinventing the same wheels.
That can be a sign of maturity, that the field has evolved to the point where specialists can go their thing, and not force everyone else to understand the trickier aspects.
Looking at your examples- data converters particualrly- I don't see much room for new algorithms. From a restrictive, Computer Science standpoint, nearly everything you do will be isomorphic with a known existing algorithm (modulo "trivial", "cosmetic" variations, of course)
Naturally, people who don't understand algorithms will have difficulty selecting the ones they should re-use, and are at risk of using them wrongly. But that's a consequence of newer, user-friendly development tools- with a lower barrier to entry, less competent persons can enter the profession, and still muddle by.
Wait for it. Websites will eventually show a click-through popup agreement to all non-cookied users, consenting to using your bandwidth just like they want.
However, I routinely click-through on my favorite sites' banner ads just to give them a little extra bank.
Hey! I found another thief! He's defrauding the poor advertisers by feigning an interest in their products that doesn't really exist. Using up their precious server bandwidth to view an order form that he has no intention of ever filling out.
Guys like you will be the downfall of the interweb.
It has been used in the sense of copyright violations for hundreds of years.
Wasn't it around 125 years ago that William Gilbert started using "pirate" to refer to Americans who could reproduce his works because copyright didn't apply internationally?
Earilier usages of "piracy" for intellectual-property violations may have been based on the fact that the most valuable copyrighted works were nautical charts, and thus often stolen during violent crimes onboard ship. Does anyone have a good reference for the history of the word "pirate"?
As soon as someone downloads music that they would have otherwise purchased, there is a theft of the money that would have been paid.
The situation is very similar to sneaking into a movie theater. The owners are out $9 they might otherwise have been paid, but no one would call it "theft". Especially in a legal setting.
(Would you call bringing grocery-store snacks into a theater theft also?)
By the definitions of the English language, it is possible to "steal" a song or work of art- this means convincing the public that you, and not the author, are entitled to the copyright for it. The canonical usage for "She stole my song" is in response to a radio DJ misattributing your music. That offense would still be prosecuted as a fraud, though.
He also argued that slavery is justified and women belong in the home. Do you wish that caught on too?
Notice my words "Plato argued"? He said it, not me (and it was the grandparent post who wanted to "screw the Estate"), and of course per his profession, Plato was just challenging people to think and take their ideas to their natural conclusions.
However, I don't see where "women belong in the home come from". Read the same chapter I linked, 3 paragraphs up:
Then let the wives of our guardians strip, for their virtue will be their robe, and let them share in the toils of war and the defence of their country; only in the distribution of labours the lighter are to be assigned to the women, who are the weaker natures, but in other respects their duties are to be the same.
and elsewhere on the page They will use friendly correction, but will not enslave or destroy their opponents; they will be correctors, not enemies?
We could easily find passages to show that other influential men supported slavery as well.
I think the article explained it best:
The copyright article explains it wrong here: The whole issue was argued three centuries ago, and it was established as a principle of democracy that, when the author is dead, his work becomes the property of all.
It was not "established" with any kind of unanimity at all. It is not a "principle of democracy", but merely a law that some democracies found profitable at the time. And the copyrights of 300 years ago lasted a fixed amount of time (14+14 years), independent of the author's death. Nonetheless, it would be nice to return to such limited timesframes.
However current lawmaker's have been swayed by the publishing cartel's arguments: "We didn't have copyright 1000 years ago, and didn't need it. But as technology advances and copying gets easier, we'll continually need longer terms and stronger enforcement". The simplistic reasoning goes that if 28 years was good 300 years ago, then 96 years must be even better today.
He managed to fool a lot of them with Shindler's List and Saving P Ryan. Lucas hasn't had anything as well-recieved by the hoity-toity crowd since 1974.
The proposed throttle limits the number of outgoing connections to NEW machines. This will have no effect on the execution a traditional DDOS attack- DDOS means that all the infected systems target one computer, instead of how a propagating worm targets random computers.
A hacker infiltrates 2000 random PCs, and instruct them to hammer on www.ebay.com at a synchronized time. They each connect, the address is added to the throttle's automated whitelist, and away they go.
The prepartion of a DDOS could be slowed, if it uses "viruses" to prepare the helper systems. But super-fast spreading "viruses" (mostly worms, really) aren't what you use to prep a DDOS- slow & steady is best for that.
1. "Slower moving" doesn't make a plane easier to jump from. Parachutists want to jump from a stable, level platform. When the plane is tumbling around at the end of a cable, he'll have a hard time even making it from the cockpit to a door.
2. And then him or his chute will probably get tangled in the airplane's chute.
3. Even if they don't tangle, you've got two parachutes falling from nearby initial points. They'll stay nearby each other, and he may never get to a "safe distance".
4. Even if he lands safely, many people saw him descend and will be coming to find him, where he'll probably be tangled and disoriented.
5. Even if he's not caught immediately, then he's on foot next to a smoking crater. He may as well have driven a truck bomb to do the same thing, without the need to learn how to fly & jump.
All in all, if you want to target a city with a flying bomb, just put it on autopilot ten minutes out, start the detonation timer, and bail out immediately.
Yes. By definition, heuristics can only find some evil programs, not all of them. (If they could, they'd be algorithims). Holes will always exist.
And since virus-scanner software must be widely distributed to all the users it's supposed to protect, the virus author can always test his code against the heuristic until he finds a way to slip past it.
This suggests an altered business model for anti-virus vendors: start treating their heuristics like a trade secret, and don't let them out of the building. Run virus scanning on an ASP model.
Of course, the privacy, network-capacity, and liability problems with that approach are enormous.
Your comment about not being able to use material when no one is around to control the copyright? If it's not enforced, and no one claims ownership, it dissolves.
Are you thinking about how trademarks need to be defended or lost? (Maybe you're not saying that, but it's irrelevant to copyrights)
The works would be absorbed into the public domain. If anyone noticed/cared enough that could claim ownership, they'd pop up.
And that's the problem. An abandoned copyright with no one to enforce it may seem to be public domain. But suppose I dig up a forgotten 1939 pulp comic and think it'd make a great screenplay. Can I find the current owner? Probably not- I can't spread the word far enough to search, and the current heirs may not even be aware they own it.
But when the film clears $130 million on its second weekend? Lawyers will be coming out of the woodwork to find those people and help them sue me.
The longevity of inactive copyrights disincents new authors from picking up the torches of their creative forebears.
That makes sense, but the D&C in the contexts of Cold War propaganda is still plenty ridiculous. Government-produced films clearly depicted cartoon youngsters (and turtles) being saved from lethal radiation by cowering behind their classroom walls, instead of getting hit through the window.
The best advice for an earthquake or threat from collapsing buildings is to get outside- yet the Civil Defense plans plainly called for everyone to seek cover in the nearest basement, where walls and soil could absorb the energy blast.
Of course, the funniest part is when they told you to go hide after seeing the explosion go off- as if a ten-year old could outrun a pack of angry gamma particles.
I didn't say that the current 90-year limit would be removed- only that you'd have to keep on paying to even get there.
There's a lot of details I just didn't get into- should the fee be flat, or based on the profits from the work, or its revenues, or?
I called that proposal only a "minor improvement" because it is a compromise far short of what I'd really like to see done with copyrights.
The renewal-fee is biased towards the wealthy. I would prefer first a lower maximum copyright period (28 years), and secondly a gradually increasing freedom to copy as time moves along.
For the first 7 years, the work is protected as strongly as it is today. But then the public gains the right to create derivative works- the equivalent of today's fanfiction (which is currently illegal, but not much enforced). Those derivative can't be sold for-profit until another 7 years go by, though. When the copyright is 21 years old, 3rd parties can adapt the original work into "substantially different media". And 7 years after that, the protection completely expires.
(There'll be room for legal wrangling about what it means for a work to be non-profit, and what media is different enough, but lawyers can always find something to scuffle about)
We do already have different lengths of protection for kinds of works. Right now, things that are creative and entertaining get copyrights for 90 years, and stuff that is inventive and useful has 21 years of patent protection. There's an implication that the truely important stuff should be returned to the public faster.
(In the distant past, some useful discoveries (like navigation routes) were copyrighted, but today discoveries like genomes get patented)
Software describes a process to produce an effect, just as patents do. Prehaps it would be fairer to treat software as a hybrid category between patents and copyright, with a correspondingly intermediate duration.
Screw the "estate". That is Newspeak for spoiled brat kids living large off someone else's creativity, lacking their own.
NewSpeak? If you say so! Estates and inheritances have let spoiled brats live off their parents' wealth for thousands of years.
To be consistent, you should argue to crank up the estate-tax as well, so that no one can be exempted from work by virtue of his birth, or given any inherited advantages in money or status. Plato argued for that some time ago:
their children are to be common, and no parent is to know his own child, nor any child his parent
In a way they do. Most nations exact a "property tax" on the value of your property, which pays for (amoung other things) the police service that keeps you from getting robbed.
If you have no source of income, your property will dwindle away as you annually sell off a portion to pay each year's tax.
One major problem with the current legal status of copyright is that it's getting some of the advantages of physical property, without the drawbacks (like property tax).
The situation would minor improvement a little if copyrights were treated more like physical property, and subjected to a "copyright tax". Say copyright is free for 10 years, then you can pay a fee to have it renewed on 10-year intervals. That would increase the growth of public domain, because low-earning works would tend not to be renewed (thus protecting those works from being forgotten by the time copyright expires, lost to the world and future historians)
No, you're thinking Terry Colon. The styles are quite different, apart from both using outlines digitally filled with solid color, then shrunken for publication.
In the waning days of Suck he started getting work in some mass media-printed stuff (as did the backup suck arist, PB), and is occasionally seen in Time Magazine today.
Peers don't have to mean perfectly equal. Someone's peers are the people similar enough to a person that her behavior and accomplishments can be judged (by herself and others) as relative to them. Children with 2 years of age difference are often called peers. "I'm worried that Susan is falling behind her peer group"
In this case, Lucas and Spielburg are both highly successful directors of blockbuster action films, nearly 60 years old and with thin grey beards to show it. By broad descriptions they're very much alike, but still Spielburg will be favored by any high-class film critic.
Slashdot Mirror
Except, this shouldn't be a computer law at all. Fraud is fraud on the telephone, in person, or through a web browser. We've had wire fraud statutes for around 100 years.
All of this obviously illegal stuff was already sufficiently outlawed when the internet was still a fleeting dream in Al Gore's little head.
Their definition of logic bomb isn't quite accurate, it's a little too specific. Logic bombs and trojans are highly related (you could argue that either is a subclass of the other), but viruses are quite different.
A virus is a program fragment which, when run, inserts that same fragment in other programs. Today's mass media enjoys the word "virus" and applies it to many other kinds of malware- the recent headliners like Melissa, ILoveYou, and Code Red were mostly worms, not viruses. (A virus rarely spreads very fast, since the delay before infected programs are restarted introduces a lagtime)
The difference between Trojan and Logic Bomb is a little vaguer. Trojans are usually inserted into software by a programmer who wishes to gain access to a computer he doesn't administer. The canoncial logic bomb is something left behind to impair a system long after the bomber has gone away.
Usually "Logic Bomb" implies that there is some kind of timer mechanism involved, so that after you're fired the payload can still be delivered, even if the target computer has no internet access.
For instance, a simple logic bomb might be to schedule a job to delete all a server's files in 6 months. As long as you're employed, you can keep cancelling that job and re-scheduling it... but a while after you leave, boom! (More subtle payloads would be both more damaging, and less likely to get you caught)
That was flamebait, you know very well that porn/hentai is just a tiny fraction of anime. (The majority of it is toy commercials for 7
-year olds!)
But I must reply to tell you that "something recently in the news" was that animations of children engaged in sex is legal, even though the Republican Congress is trying to change that.
B&tB was a really decent story, up til the sell-out* conformist ending. Of course, the ending and overall flow was the same as the fairy tell, but the parts Disney added were supporting characters to add length- helpful servants and vile, closeminded peasants. This created a racial-discrimination subplot that concluded in an entirely unedifiying way.
The White Gaulic Catholics are the bad guys, because they attack the hero after judging him solely by his appearance. So how is the situation resolved? He changes his appearance to look just like the bigots who had shunned him.
What's the moral of the story kids? "If you're different than other people, try to change and blend in. Nobody likes a weirdo, and don't you want to be liked?"
A better, more courageous ending would've had the Beast miss his deadline, and still live happily without that last-minute miracle.
Shrek (an anti-Disney film in more blatant ways also) nicely reversed B&tB, by allowing the curse victim to decide that she was better off under the spell (superhuman strength trumps prettiness).
*Yes, I feel the painful redundancy of using "sell-out" in reference to a Disney movie.
the parser can recover from malformed pairs
You mean die from malformed pairs, right? XML disallows any sort of "recovery". Parsers must abort on any kind of mistake like that.
The "benefit"- that error detection is easier- is a tiny one, and far outweighed by the greater difficulty in modifying XML in a traditional text editor. (Sure, an XML-aware editor could update the closing tag for you, but a smart editor would do its own checking anyway).
Another drawback is that XML parsers are more complex and slower than similar Lisp parsers. Of course the performance difference is tiny, but since people want to use XML with big databases and small devices, it still matters.
This could be a sign that today's programmers use "objects" or some other abstraction instead of "algorithm" as their conceptual building-block of software development. That scary, Arabic word is unpopular with guys who just want to "call methods on object classes" or whatever the new jargon is.
From one point of view, only a tiny minority of today's programmers ever need to create "new algorithms"- so much documented study has gone on in that area, you'd only be reinventing the same wheels.
That can be a sign of maturity, that the field has evolved to the point where specialists can go their thing, and not force everyone else to understand the trickier aspects.
Looking at your examples- data converters particualrly- I don't see much room for new algorithms. From a restrictive, Computer Science standpoint, nearly everything you do will be isomorphic with a known existing algorithm (modulo "trivial", "cosmetic" variations, of course)
Naturally, people who don't understand algorithms will have difficulty selecting the ones they should re-use, and are at risk of using them wrongly. But that's a consequence of newer, user-friendly development tools- with a lower barrier to entry, less competent persons can enter the profession, and still muddle by.
until I sign an agreement
Wait for it. Websites will eventually show a click-through popup agreement to all non-cookied users, consenting to using your bandwidth just like they want.
However, I routinely click-through on my favorite sites' banner ads just to give them a little extra bank.
Hey! I found another thief! He's defrauding the poor advertisers by feigning an interest in their products that doesn't really exist. Using up their precious server bandwidth to view an order form that he has no intention of ever filling out.
Guys like you will be the downfall of the interweb.
It has been used in the sense of copyright violations for hundreds of years.
Wasn't it around 125 years ago that William Gilbert started using "pirate" to refer to Americans who could reproduce his works because copyright didn't apply internationally?
Earilier usages of "piracy" for intellectual-property violations may have been based on the fact that the most valuable copyrighted works were nautical charts, and thus often stolen during violent crimes onboard ship. Does anyone have a good reference for the history of the word "pirate"?
As soon as someone downloads music that they would have otherwise purchased, there is a theft of the money that would have been paid.
The situation is very similar to sneaking into a movie theater. The owners are out $9 they might otherwise have been paid, but no one would call it "theft". Especially in a legal setting.
(Would you call bringing grocery-store snacks into a theater theft also?)
By the definitions of the English language, it is possible to "steal" a song or work of art- this means convincing the public that you, and not the author, are entitled to the copyright for it. The canonical usage for "She stole my song" is in response to a radio DJ misattributing your music. That offense would still be prosecuted as a fraud, though.
He also argued that slavery is justified and women belong in the home. Do you wish that caught on too?
Notice my words "Plato argued"? He said it, not me (and it was the grandparent post who wanted to "screw the Estate"), and of course per his profession, Plato was just challenging people to think and take their ideas to their natural conclusions.
However, I don't see where "women belong in the home come from". Read the same chapter I linked, 3 paragraphs up:
Then let the wives of our guardians strip, for their virtue will be their robe, and let them share in the toils of war and the defence of their country; only in the distribution of labours the lighter are to be assigned to the women, who are the weaker natures, but in other respects their duties are to be the same.
and elsewhere on the page
They will use friendly correction, but will not enslave or destroy their opponents; they will be correctors, not enemies?
We could easily find passages to show that other influential men supported slavery as well.
I think the article explained it best:
The copyright article explains it wrong here:
The whole issue was argued three centuries ago, and it was established as a principle of democracy that, when the author is dead, his work becomes the property of all.
It was not "established" with any kind of unanimity at all. It is not a "principle of democracy", but merely a law that some democracies found profitable at the time. And the copyrights of 300 years ago lasted a fixed amount of time (14+14 years), independent of the author's death. Nonetheless, it would be nice to return to such limited timesframes.
However current lawmaker's have been swayed by the publishing cartel's arguments: "We didn't have copyright 1000 years ago, and didn't need it. But as technology advances and copying gets easier, we'll continually need longer terms and stronger enforcement". The simplistic reasoning goes that if 28 years was good 300 years ago, then 96 years must be even better today.
He managed to fool a lot of them with Shindler's List and Saving P Ryan. Lucas hasn't had anything as well-recieved by the hoity-toity crowd since 1974.
The proposed throttle limits the number of outgoing connections to NEW machines. This will have no effect on the execution a traditional DDOS attack- DDOS means that all the infected systems target one computer, instead of how a propagating worm targets random computers.
A hacker infiltrates 2000 random PCs, and instruct them to hammer on www.ebay.com at a synchronized time. They each connect, the address is added to the throttle's automated whitelist, and away they go.
The prepartion of a DDOS could be slowed, if it uses "viruses" to prepare the helper systems. But super-fast spreading "viruses" (mostly worms, really) aren't what you use to prep a DDOS- slow & steady is best for that.
But that joke was using it in the singular sense!
That makes no sense.
1. "Slower moving" doesn't make a plane easier to jump from. Parachutists want to jump from a stable, level platform. When the plane is tumbling around at the end of a cable, he'll have a hard time even making it from the cockpit to a door.
2. And then him or his chute will probably get tangled in the airplane's chute.
3. Even if they don't tangle, you've got two parachutes falling from nearby initial points. They'll stay nearby each other, and he may never get to a "safe distance".
4. Even if he lands safely, many people saw him descend and will be coming to find him, where he'll probably be tangled and disoriented.
5. Even if he's not caught immediately, then he's on foot next to a smoking crater. He may as well have driven a truck bomb to do the same thing, without the need to learn how to fly & jump.
All in all, if you want to target a city with a flying bomb, just put it on autopilot ten minutes out, start the detonation timer, and bail out immediately.
heuristic scanning is very ineffective.
Yes. By definition, heuristics can only find some evil programs, not all of them. (If they could, they'd be algorithims). Holes will always exist.
And since virus-scanner software must be widely distributed to all the users it's supposed to protect, the virus author can always test his code against the heuristic until he finds a way to slip past it.
This suggests an altered business model for anti-virus vendors: start treating their heuristics like a trade secret, and don't let them out of the building. Run virus scanning on an ASP model.
Of course, the privacy, network-capacity, and liability problems with that approach are enormous.
Your comment about not being able to use material when no one is around to control the copyright? If it's not enforced, and no one claims ownership, it dissolves.
Are you thinking about how trademarks need to be defended or lost? (Maybe you're not saying that, but it's irrelevant to copyrights)
The works would be absorbed into the public domain. If anyone noticed/cared enough that could claim ownership, they'd pop up.
And that's the problem. An abandoned copyright with no one to enforce it may seem to be public domain. But suppose I dig up a forgotten 1939 pulp comic and think it'd make a great screenplay. Can I find the current owner? Probably not- I can't spread the word far enough to search, and the current heirs may not even be aware they own it.
But when the film clears $130 million on its second weekend? Lawyers will be coming out of the woodwork to find those people and help them sue me.
The longevity of inactive copyrights disincents new authors from picking up the torches of their creative forebears.
That makes sense, but the D&C in the contexts of Cold War propaganda is still plenty ridiculous. Government-produced films clearly depicted cartoon youngsters (and turtles) being saved from lethal radiation by cowering behind their classroom walls, instead of getting hit through the window.
The best advice for an earthquake or threat from collapsing buildings is to get outside- yet the Civil Defense plans plainly called for everyone to seek cover in the nearest basement, where walls and soil could absorb the energy blast.
Of course, the funniest part is when they told you to go hide after seeing the explosion go off- as if a ten-year old could outrun a pack of angry gamma particles.
If the wings are removed, it will be easier
Finally we can install the feature that every trainee pilot has always dreaded- the legendary "Wings Fall Off" switch!
I didn't say that the current 90-year limit would be removed- only that you'd have to keep on paying to even get there.
There's a lot of details I just didn't get into- should the fee be flat, or based on the profits from the work, or its revenues, or?
I called that proposal only a "minor improvement" because it is a compromise far short of what I'd really like to see done with copyrights.
The renewal-fee is biased towards the wealthy. I would prefer first a lower maximum copyright period (28 years), and secondly a gradually increasing freedom to copy as time moves along.
For the first 7 years, the work is protected as strongly as it is today. But then the public gains the right to create derivative works- the equivalent of today's fanfiction (which is currently illegal, but not much enforced). Those derivative can't be sold for-profit until another 7 years go by, though. When the copyright is 21 years old, 3rd parties can adapt the original work into "substantially different media". And 7 years after that, the protection completely expires.
(There'll be room for legal wrangling about what it means for a work to be non-profit, and what media is different enough, but lawyers can always find something to scuffle about)
We do already have different lengths of protection for kinds of works. Right now, things that are creative and entertaining get copyrights for 90 years, and stuff that is inventive and useful has 21 years of patent protection. There's an implication that the truely important stuff should be returned to the public faster.
(In the distant past, some useful discoveries (like navigation routes) were copyrighted, but today discoveries like genomes get patented)
Software describes a process to produce an effect, just as patents do. Prehaps it would be fairer to treat software as a hybrid category between patents and copyright, with a correspondingly intermediate duration.
Screw the "estate". That is Newspeak for spoiled brat kids living large off someone else's creativity, lacking their own.
NewSpeak? If you say so! Estates and inheritances have let spoiled brats live off their parents' wealth for thousands of years.
To be consistent, you should argue to crank up the estate-tax as well, so that no one can be exempted from work by virtue of his birth, or given any inherited advantages in money or status. Plato argued for that some time ago:
their children are to be common, and no parent is to know his own child, nor any child his parent
For some reason, this never caught on.
Copyrights expire. Property rights don't.
In a way they do. Most nations exact a "property tax" on the value of your property, which pays for (amoung other things) the police service that keeps you from getting robbed.
If you have no source of income, your property will dwindle away as you annually sell off a portion to pay each year's tax.
One major problem with the current legal status of copyright is that it's getting some of the advantages of physical property, without the drawbacks (like property tax).
The situation would minor improvement a little if copyrights were treated more like physical property, and subjected to a "copyright tax". Say copyright is free for 10 years, then you can pay a fee to have it renewed on 10-year intervals. That would increase the growth of public domain, because low-earning works would tend not to be renewed (thus protecting those works from being forgotten by the time copyright expires, lost to the world and future historians)
No, you're thinking Terry Colon. The styles are quite different, apart from both using outlines digitally filled with solid color, then shrunken for publication.
In the waning days of Suck he started getting work in some mass media-printed stuff (as did the backup suck arist, PB), and is occasionally seen in Time Magazine today.
Now I feel really old. Kids today... no attention to history.
Heard of Star Trek? The campaign that ressurected the cancelled original series is what inspires all of these latter-day fan-intervention imitators.
Peers don't have to mean perfectly equal. Someone's peers are the people similar enough to a person that her behavior and accomplishments can be judged (by herself and others) as relative to them. Children with 2 years of age difference are often called peers. "I'm worried that Susan is falling behind her peer group"
In this case, Lucas and Spielburg are both highly successful directors of blockbuster action films, nearly 60 years old and with thin grey beards to show it. By broad descriptions they're very much alike, but still Spielburg will be favored by any high-class film critic.