Dell's a corporation. They're either a Texas or a Delaware corp. (Probably Texas.) They'll be registered with whatever the local equivalent of the secretary of state's office is. They'll have provided the name and address of a person or agency authorized by them to receive service of process (in the event they're sued or something). Send a certified letter to that person/agency. You'll get someone's attention right quick, without plowing through India.
You might also think about talking to a tort lawyer. From what I got from this article, you've probably got a pretty good consumer products liability claim. (Even if you're not interested in pursuing it, whomever insured your farm house -- it was insured, right? -- is probably interested in recouping their loss. And, enough of these exploding Dells have made the news of late, it might force Dell to be substantially more careful when designing their next round of laptops... But, then, I'm a trial lawyer, that's how I think.:)
Actually this is a problem with the DMCA qua DMCA. Anyone can *claim* to own a copyright on any crazy thing, and send a DMCA notice, and effectively reverse the burden of proof for the price of 30 seconds typing.
The DMCA doesn't shift any burdens of proof. If a DMCA notice takes a piece of content down, the person who posted the content can counter-notify and the ISP, to retain their safe harbor, must reinstate access to the content. The entity making the DMCA notification in the first place must then file a lawsuit to continue. The counter-notification does not have to prove anything, it just has to state a belief that the DMCA notification was sent in error. At the lawsuit stage the burden of proof is still on the purported copyright holder to establish (a) a valid copyright and (b) infringement of same.
This is going to be interesting for exam takers. My law school, and later the California State Bar exam, allowed laptops with ExamSoft software (http://www.examsoft.com/). For each exam you turned in one disk and kept for yourself a backup disk with your answer (the data was stored encrypted); there was also a tertiary backup stored on your hard drive in the event both floppies were bad. For the CA State Bar, with its two essay blocks and two "performance exams" over a two day period (with the multiple choice multistate exam on a full day in between), with no overlap and the disks vanishing up to Sacramento, using USB flash drives for that would be fairly expensive. (Of course, it costs $500+ to take the exam, plus getting a hotel room next to the testing site etc., so the cost, relatively speaking, isn't that great, and they'd pass the costs along to the test takers in any case...)
Still, for that particular problem, the floppy was a fairly elegant solution. The answer files were a couple of hundred kilobytes at their largest, the media was basically disposable and low-cost enough to be, as was necessary, single-use...
Many countries, such as Britain, criminalize witholding encryption keys from law enforcement to the extent that unless you are actually a terrorist with detailed and executable plans of action labeled 'evil plot' stupidly stored on your laptop, you are probably better off (in the criminal liability sense) just giving it to them. Sadly, I don't think that the US is far behind on this one, either.
[T]he DMCA makes it illegal to excercise fair use rights if there is DRM in place.
No it doesn't; that's FUD. 17 U.S.C. 1201(c) [the 'DRM' part of the DMCA]: "Other Rights, Etc., Not Affected.--(1) Nothing in this section shall affect rights, remedies, limitations, or defenses to copyright infringement, including fair use, under this title."
" . . . [T]he DMCA does not impose even an arguable limitation on the opportunity to make a variety of traditional fair uses of DVD movies, such as commenting on their content, quoting excerpts from their screenplays, and even recording portions of the video images and sounds on film or tape by pointing a
camera, a camcorder, or a microphone at a monitor as it displays the DVD movie. The fact that the resulting copy will not be as perfect or as manipulable as a digital copy obtained by having direct access to the DVD movie in its digital form, provides no basis for a claim of unconstitutional limitation of fair use. A film critic making fair use of a movie by quoting selected lines of dialogue has no constitutionally valid claim that the review (in print or on television) would be
technologically superior if the reviewer had not been prevented from using a movie camera in the theater, nor has an art student a valid constitutional claim to fair use of a painting by photographing it in a museum. Fair use has never been held to be a guarantee of access to copyrighted material in order to copy it by the fair user's preferred technique or in the format of the original." UNIVERSAL CITY STUDIOS, INC. v. CORLEY, 273 F.3d 429, 459 (2nd Cir. 2001)
If you are part of the MPAA and you download a torrent from someone else just to prosecute, technically isnt the MPAA breaking the law as well??
The MPAA operates with the authorization of its member companies. They've presumably authorized the association to make reproductions of the copyrighted content for anti-piracy purposes, and copyright infringement is the unauthorized reproduction (or distribution, or...) of the protected works, so, at a guess, I'd say they're pretty safe on that one.
commenting on segments of shows like this with portions of the original broadcast is COMPLETELY legal under the Fair Use laws
Interesting claim to make, considering that fair use defenses (and it's a defense that must be raised in the context of -- generally expensive -- copyright litigation) are always treated as open-ended, context-sensitive inquiries "not to be simplified with bright -- line rules, for the statute, like the doctrine it recognizes, calls for case-by-case analysis." CAMPBELL v. ACUFF-ROSE MUSIC, INC., 510 U.S. 569 (1994).
Pretty dangerous thinking, IMHO, to decide that something is 'completely legal under the Fair Use laws' when even the Supreme Court has said that there's no such thing, and that every fair use claim must be independently evaluated. Unless you've got all the facts that will be put to a jury in front of you (full discovery and the results of any and all pretrial evidentiary motions), and can cane somehow divine how the finder of fact (the jury) will rule, I'd say there's no such thing as 'completely legal under [fair use].' YMMV.
Aiwa came out with walkman clones, which I considered better quality and a much better value. This was not an issue because there was a clear branding difference between the Sony and Aiwa product.
I thought Aiwa was a wholly owned subsidiary of Sony?
The AHRA certainly puts a lot of pressure on other forms of media to conform to the same measure of "fair use". RIAA v. Diamond sets a strong precedent, and not just for audio.
The AHRA was a legislative construct where the 'private copying' exemption was (at least in theory) offset by the tariff [for lack of a better word] placed on blank media. The (c) industry as a whole is pretty strongly opposed to such "taking" and, representing our single largest export and ~5% of our GDP, has some pretty strong lobbying support on the Hill. The odds of an AHRA-like piece of legislation passing both houses is pretty slim, I'd wager, but we'll see what the new Congressional majority's temperment is. As it stands now, Diamond applies only to audio, since it was only space-shifting being presumably "within the ambit of the [Audio Home Recording] Act" that made it fair use. Other copyrighted works don't fall within the ambit of the Act.
It could also be argued that, as the hardware used to play older games is no longer produced, space-shifting is in itself a form of archival preservation, and use of archival copies is simply fair use.
There you might have something, under 17 USC 117(a)(1) (permitting an adaptation as a necessary step in using the software with "a machine"). Though you'd probably want to have copied the ROM to the computer yourself for the cleanest application of that doctrine.
Oh, well of course that would be subsection 42, paragraph Q, clause IV, entitled "Common Fucking Sense!" It's a little known clause, especially among those involved in the legal system...
Tell that one to the judge, you'll all get a good chuckle before he enters judgment against you.:)
ROM sites put it on and don't get shut down. That's all the proof I need.
I was in a car going 95 mph, and I didn't get a ticket! It must be legal!
Btw don't copyrights run out after 10 years anyway?
At least in the U.S. (with most of Europe being similar, IIRC; part of the Berne Convention), for "corporate" works like most console video games, it's 95 years from date of first release.
And wtf, the RIAA has nothing to do with games at all.
There's this thing called stare decisis, you might know it as "precedent." There was a case in 1999, the RIAA suing Diamond over its Rio MP3 player. That case gave us precedent to cite for "space-shifting" as a fair use, however, it appears to have been applicable only to digital audio, for which an exemption from the copyright act's blanket (subject to "carve-outs") reservation of the reproduction right as exclusive to the copyright holder was made by the Audio Home Recording Act.
You're right, the RIAA does not administer rights to video games per se (if anyone does, it would probably be the ESA). But they were the plaintiffs in a case that one might cite in support of the position that ROM files may be legal.
Hope your brain hasn't exploded. I know there's actual information here, which might be too much for you.
I do still actually own the cartridges so it's legal too!
Really? You sure about that? Which part of Title 17 of the United States Code do you read as permitting reproduction into a different media for the purpose of playing (private performance)? 117 might apply, but you didn't reproduce the contents as an archival step, you made a transformation into a different media. Space-shifting as a fair use was built atop the Audio Home Recording Act's carveout, so I don't think RIAA v. Diamond helps you here (though happy to be proven wrong).
I'm not saying it's legal. Or that it's not. Just that it's anything but clear-cut.
Now we've heard that space-shifting falls under fair use, as long as you don't distribute the copy. This is the principle under which it's legal to rip tracks from your own CDs and load them on your iPod.
As far as I'm aware, space-shifting has only really been discussed in the Diamond case (RECORDING INDUSTRY v. DIAMOND MULTIMEDIA SYS., 180 F.3d 1072 (9th Cir. 1999)), which was specific to audio. As such, 'space-shifting' was analyzed under the Audio Home Recording Act.
Copyright law reserves the 17 USC 106 enumerated rights as exclusive to the copyright holder, except as modified (carved out) by subsequent sections. The Audio Home Recording Act, codified at 17 USC 1001 et seq, carves out an exemption for private copying of digital audio. There's no such carve-out for video, so the blanket prohibition (reservation of the right as exclusive to the copyright holder) against reproduction (copying) remains intact.
Also, I don't believe space-shifting in a commercial context is a fair use. The facts of RIAA v. Diamond were pretty specific; end-user space-shifting of digital audio -- held to be OK by at least one Federal Circuit and binding on lower courts in the 9th Circuit (including all of California). I don't believe a third party engaged in commercial 'space shifting' would fall under fair use.
Now it may be that circumventing copy protection is illegal under DMCA... but does that make it an infringement of copyright?
See above. Copying the video is a reproduction of a copyrighted motion picture work, without a carve-out that would permit even private shifting, let alone commercial...
They have no problem with the idea of selling movies on hard disc, it's just that they don't want competition.
Um, yeah. I mean, no, they don't want competition. Nor should there be competition. That's what a monopoly means, which is inherent in the term 'exclusive,' which is in the Constitution...
Art. I, Sect. 8, Cl. 8: . . . securing for limited times to authors . . . the exclusive right to their respective writings . . .
The problem is that NASA, and other space agencies, standardized on a date/time format composed of day-of-year (1..366) and time-of-day (UTC). This goes back to the 1960s. In ASCII, the clock looks like "310 04:35.27.642". This date/time format is embedded in a huge amount of hardware, software and standards documents.
That trickled down into other projects, too. Last time I saw it was on an old 8-pin dot matrix printer's logfile output. Most memorable were all the SYSTEM FAILURE entries from Desmond wasn't around to enter the damned code. But so far, it's all working out -- at least, for Ben.
Big sell outs expected in stores across the country!
Dude, Sony already sold out, big-time. I remember when they were an unsigned console manufacturer, setting up at dive bars for 20 people to play a few games for a quarter each. Yeah, PlayStation (back then, that's all it was; there was no PSP or PS2 or PS3) was primitive and unpolished by their standards of today, but you could tell there was passion behind it. It used to be about the gaming, man, it used to be about the gaming. Now, it's all corporate and sterile and 'how-can-we-leverage-this-product-to-increase-plat form-dominance' bundled Blu-Ray and stuff. They've changed, man. They've changed.
Did the whole "everybody is an Enemy Combatant if we say so" thing start already and no one told me? What exactly is this "isolation" where you can't contact your laywer?
Until and unless he's formally charged (indicted), the right to an attorney doesn't actually attach, except as has been judicially constructed/interpreted. For light reading on the topic: http://caselaw.lp.findlaw.com/data/constitution/am endment06/11.html#1 If he hasn't been arraigned yet (and it sounds like he hasn't), he doesn't technically have a right to counsel yet. (The 'custodial interrogation' right to counsel, Miranda et seq., says that an interogatee, upon clear demand for the assistance of counsel, either be provided with assistance of counsel or that interrogation stop until and unless the party under custodial arrest voluntarily reinitiates contact with his interrogators. It doesn't mean the attorney automatically gets access to the guy.)
there is mention of physical abuse (though in divorce cases it isn't uncommon to have such accusations).
Relatively uncommon in California, which is a no-fault divorce state. That is, no reason whatsoever needs to be nor can be entered into the record as to cause of the divorce. (Though evidence of cause can be used in child custody fights.)
Is their[sic] a reason why he can't continue working on this project from jail?
Inmates, outside of a class or specific vocation program, rarely if ever have access to computers. At no time do they have access to the Internet, nor are they likely to have access to compilers or the operating system of the workstations they might have access to. (There are extremely limited and limiting exceptions to this; e.g., the Federal Bureau of Prisons is experimenting with a highly controlled email-like system: http://www.prisontalk.com/forums/archive/index.php /t-139246.html.) He might be able to code via pen (or typewriter) and paper, that can't really be restricted, but most prison systems forbid communicating in "code," and since I guarantee the CDCR doesn't employ any COs that will be able to grok Reiser's C source, he won't be able to mail it out. No, if he's sent up, his work on ReiserFS is done for the duration.
To clarify, I was responding to the particular point that software "making... use of the interfaces" of GPL'd software thus fell under the ambit of the GPL, that is, the simple act of linking or using an header would make an otherwise stand-alone piece of software somehow a derivative work and thus GPL-infected.
You are wrong; you're thinking of the BSD-style licenses. Anything under the GPL (or software that extensively uses GPL-software's interfaces) must have source released if it's released.
Actually, you are wrong. The GPL is only required (i.e., only applicable) when copyright is involved; i.e., making a derivative work. For there to be a derivative work, there has to be a copying within the ambit of the copyright act. If you look to the Altai test (adopted by pretty much every court), you'll see that code dictated by external requirements (i.e., pretty much every piece of software running on a UNIX/Linux system has to use malloc, etc., and thus must either call the system calls directly or via the C Library) is specifically filtered out of the copyright comparison. So any interface calls, even symbols brought in from include files, are [strongly] arguably not even copyrightable (a 'method of operation'; see, e.g., 17 U.S.C. 102, and Lotus v. Borland, 49 F.3d 807 (1st Cir. 1995)) and even if they are, would be stripped out of any comparison of code done in an infringement action. Absent an infringement, there's no need for GPL applicability...
Further, the COPYING file for the Linux kernel (http://www.kernel.org/pub/linux/kernel/COPYING) specifically carves out "user programs that use kernel services by normal system call." So, with appropriate facts, one could easily argue copyright estoppel in the (unlikely) event that Linus (as the copyright holder for much, if not most, of the kernel, AFAIK -- the FSF, etc. would not have standing to sue, it would have to be Linus or some other kernel contributor whose work was in the Wii) brought suit.
Slashdot Mirror
Dell's a corporation. They're either a Texas or a Delaware corp. (Probably Texas.) They'll be registered with whatever the local equivalent of the secretary of state's office is. They'll have provided the name and address of a person or agency authorized by them to receive service of process (in the event they're sued or something). Send a certified letter to that person/agency. You'll get someone's attention right quick, without plowing through India.
You might also think about talking to a tort lawyer. From what I got from this article, you've probably got a pretty good consumer products liability claim. (Even if you're not interested in pursuing it, whomever insured your farm house -- it was insured, right? -- is probably interested in recouping their loss. And, enough of these exploding Dells have made the news of late, it might force Dell to be substantially more careful when designing their next round of laptops... But, then, I'm a trial lawyer, that's how I think. :)
Good luck, sorry to hear about your loss!
On the one hand, we could sell salvage rights to the Ferengi.
On the other, it would provide good cover for the 'Falcon after she fools GWB's fleet admirals...
The summary left out the most important tidbit of information in this case: The police did not have a warrant for their actions.
Warrantless use of electronic surveillance to track movement is not new, and was upheld by SCOTUS in United States v. Knotts, 460 U.S. 276 (1983). Read it here: http://caselaw.lp.findlaw.com/scripts/getcase.pl?n avby=case&court=us&vol=460&page=276 GPS is a new technological twist on binding precedent now more than two decades old.
Actually this is a problem with the DMCA qua DMCA. Anyone can *claim* to own a copyright on any crazy thing, and send a DMCA notice, and effectively reverse the burden of proof for the price of 30 seconds typing.
The DMCA doesn't shift any burdens of proof. If a DMCA notice takes a piece of content down, the person who posted the content can counter-notify and the ISP, to retain their safe harbor, must reinstate access to the content. The entity making the DMCA notification in the first place must then file a lawsuit to continue. The counter-notification does not have to prove anything, it just has to state a belief that the DMCA notification was sent in error. At the lawsuit stage the burden of proof is still on the purported copyright holder to establish (a) a valid copyright and (b) infringement of same.
This is going to be interesting for exam takers. My law school, and later the California State Bar exam, allowed laptops with ExamSoft software (http://www.examsoft.com/). For each exam you turned in one disk and kept for yourself a backup disk with your answer (the data was stored encrypted); there was also a tertiary backup stored on your hard drive in the event both floppies were bad. For the CA State Bar, with its two essay blocks and two "performance exams" over a two day period (with the multiple choice multistate exam on a full day in between), with no overlap and the disks vanishing up to Sacramento, using USB flash drives for that would be fairly expensive. (Of course, it costs $500+ to take the exam, plus getting a hotel room next to the testing site etc., so the cost, relatively speaking, isn't that great, and they'd pass the costs along to the test takers in any case...)
Still, for that particular problem, the floppy was a fairly elegant solution. The answer files were a couple of hundred kilobytes at their largest, the media was basically disposable and low-cost enough to be, as was necessary, single-use...
Many countries, such as Britain, criminalize witholding encryption keys from law enforcement to the extent that unless you are actually a terrorist with detailed and executable plans of action labeled 'evil plot' stupidly stored on your laptop, you are probably better off (in the criminal liability sense) just giving it to them. Sadly, I don't think that the US is far behind on this one, either.
We're not there yet, AFAIK...
http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/columnone(And the Clipper Chip and key escrow were DOA.)
[T]he DMCA makes it illegal to excercise fair use rights if there is DRM in place.
No it doesn't; that's FUD. 17 U.S.C. 1201(c) [the 'DRM' part of the DMCA]: "Other Rights, Etc., Not Affected.--(1) Nothing in this section shall affect rights, remedies, limitations, or defenses to copyright infringement, including fair use, under this title."
" . . . [T]he DMCA does not impose even an arguable limitation on the opportunity to make a variety of traditional fair uses of DVD movies, such as commenting on their content, quoting excerpts from their screenplays, and even recording portions of the video images and sounds on film or tape by pointing a camera, a camcorder, or a microphone at a monitor as it displays the DVD movie. The fact that the resulting copy will not be as perfect or as manipulable as a digital copy obtained by having direct access to the DVD movie in its digital form, provides no basis for a claim of unconstitutional limitation of fair use. A film critic making fair use of a movie by quoting selected lines of dialogue has no constitutionally valid claim that the review (in print or on television) would be technologically superior if the reviewer had not been prevented from using a movie camera in the theater, nor has an art student a valid constitutional claim to fair use of a painting by photographing it in a museum. Fair use has never been held to be a guarantee of access to copyrighted material in order to copy it by the fair user's preferred technique or in the format of the original." UNIVERSAL CITY STUDIOS, INC. v. CORLEY, 273 F.3d 429, 459 (2nd Cir. 2001)
If you are part of the MPAA and you download a torrent from someone else just to prosecute, technically isnt the MPAA breaking the law as well??
The MPAA operates with the authorization of its member companies. They've presumably authorized the association to make reproductions of the copyrighted content for anti-piracy purposes, and copyright infringement is the unauthorized reproduction (or distribution, or ...) of the protected works, so, at a guess, I'd say they're pretty safe on that one.
commenting on segments of shows like this with portions of the original broadcast is COMPLETELY legal under the Fair Use laws
Interesting claim to make, considering that fair use defenses (and it's a defense that must be raised in the context of -- generally expensive -- copyright litigation) are always treated as open-ended, context-sensitive inquiries "not to be simplified with bright -- line rules, for the statute, like the doctrine it recognizes, calls for case-by-case analysis." CAMPBELL v. ACUFF-ROSE MUSIC, INC., 510 U.S. 569 (1994).
Pretty dangerous thinking, IMHO, to decide that something is 'completely legal under the Fair Use laws' when even the Supreme Court has said that there's no such thing, and that every fair use claim must be independently evaluated. Unless you've got all the facts that will be put to a jury in front of you (full discovery and the results of any and all pretrial evidentiary motions), and can cane somehow divine how the finder of fact (the jury) will rule, I'd say there's no such thing as 'completely legal under [fair use].' YMMV.
Aiwa came out with walkman clones, which I considered better quality and a much better value. This was not an issue because there was a clear branding difference between the Sony and Aiwa product.
I thought Aiwa was a wholly owned subsidiary of Sony?
Since no DX10 capable cards or games exist at the moment it's a moot point.
I think you mean to say, "the point is not yet ripe." A moot point would be whether or not Vista had support for MicroChannel or the 8088 processor.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ripeness http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MootnessThe AHRA certainly puts a lot of pressure on other forms of media to conform to the same measure of "fair use". RIAA v. Diamond sets a strong precedent, and not just for audio.
The AHRA was a legislative construct where the 'private copying' exemption was (at least in theory) offset by the tariff [for lack of a better word] placed on blank media. The (c) industry as a whole is pretty strongly opposed to such "taking" and, representing our single largest export and ~5% of our GDP, has some pretty strong lobbying support on the Hill. The odds of an AHRA-like piece of legislation passing both houses is pretty slim, I'd wager, but we'll see what the new Congressional majority's temperment is. As it stands now, Diamond applies only to audio, since it was only space-shifting being presumably "within the ambit of the [Audio Home Recording] Act" that made it fair use. Other copyrighted works don't fall within the ambit of the Act.
It could also be argued that, as the hardware used to play older games is no longer produced, space-shifting is in itself a form of archival preservation, and use of archival copies is simply fair use.
There you might have something, under 17 USC 117(a)(1) (permitting an adaptation as a necessary step in using the software with "a machine"). Though you'd probably want to have copied the ROM to the computer yourself for the cleanest application of that doctrine.
Oh, well of course that would be subsection 42, paragraph Q, clause IV, entitled "Common Fucking Sense!" It's a little known clause, especially among those involved in the legal system...
Tell that one to the judge, you'll all get a good chuckle before he enters judgment against you. :)
ROM sites put it on and don't get shut down. That's all the proof I need.
I was in a car going 95 mph, and I didn't get a ticket! It must be legal!
Btw don't copyrights run out after 10 years anyway?
At least in the U.S. (with most of Europe being similar, IIRC; part of the Berne Convention), for "corporate" works like most console video games, it's 95 years from date of first release.
And wtf, the RIAA has nothing to do with games at all.
There's this thing called stare decisis, you might know it as "precedent." There was a case in 1999, the RIAA suing Diamond over its Rio MP3 player. That case gave us precedent to cite for "space-shifting" as a fair use, however, it appears to have been applicable only to digital audio, for which an exemption from the copyright act's blanket (subject to "carve-outs") reservation of the reproduction right as exclusive to the copyright holder was made by the Audio Home Recording Act.
You're right, the RIAA does not administer rights to video games per se (if anyone does, it would probably be the ESA). But they were the plaintiffs in a case that one might cite in support of the position that ROM files may be legal.
Hope your brain hasn't exploded. I know there's actual information here, which might be too much for you.
I do still actually own the cartridges so it's legal too!
Really? You sure about that? Which part of Title 17 of the United States Code do you read as permitting reproduction into a different media for the purpose of playing (private performance)? 117 might apply, but you didn't reproduce the contents as an archival step, you made a transformation into a different media. Space-shifting as a fair use was built atop the Audio Home Recording Act's carveout, so I don't think RIAA v. Diamond helps you here (though happy to be proven wrong).
I'm not saying it's legal. Or that it's not. Just that it's anything but clear-cut.
Where did he get the Deuterium from?
It's like this: You take two frisbies, a remote control toy truck, and a bottle of shampoo, and wait for a stormy night...
Now we've heard that space-shifting falls under fair use, as long as you don't distribute the copy. This is the principle under which it's legal to rip tracks from your own CDs and load them on your iPod.
As far as I'm aware, space-shifting has only really been discussed in the Diamond case (RECORDING INDUSTRY v. DIAMOND MULTIMEDIA SYS., 180 F.3d 1072 (9th Cir. 1999)), which was specific to audio. As such, 'space-shifting' was analyzed under the Audio Home Recording Act.
Copyright law reserves the 17 USC 106 enumerated rights as exclusive to the copyright holder, except as modified (carved out) by subsequent sections. The Audio Home Recording Act, codified at 17 USC 1001 et seq, carves out an exemption for private copying of digital audio. There's no such carve-out for video, so the blanket prohibition (reservation of the right as exclusive to the copyright holder) against reproduction (copying) remains intact.
Also, I don't believe space-shifting in a commercial context is a fair use. The facts of RIAA v. Diamond were pretty specific; end-user space-shifting of digital audio -- held to be OK by at least one Federal Circuit and binding on lower courts in the 9th Circuit (including all of California). I don't believe a third party engaged in commercial 'space shifting' would fall under fair use.
Now it may be that circumventing copy protection is illegal under DMCA... but does that make it an infringement of copyright?
See above. Copying the video is a reproduction of a copyrighted motion picture work, without a carve-out that would permit even private shifting, let alone commercial...
They have no problem with the idea of selling movies on hard disc, it's just that they don't want competition .
Um, yeah. I mean, no, they don't want competition. Nor should there be competition. That's what a monopoly means, which is inherent in the term 'exclusive,' which is in the Constitution...
Art. I, Sect. 8, Cl. 8: . . . securing for limited times to authors . . . the exclusive right to their respective writings . . .
The problem is that NASA, and other space agencies, standardized on a date/time format composed of day-of-year (1..366) and time-of-day (UTC). This goes back to the 1960s. In ASCII, the clock looks like "310 04:35.27.642". This date/time format is embedded in a huge amount of hardware, software and standards documents.
That trickled down into other projects, too. Last time I saw it was on an old 8-pin dot matrix printer's logfile output. Most memorable were all the SYSTEM FAILURE entries from Desmond wasn't around to enter the damned code. But so far, it's all working out -- at least, for Ben.
Big sell outs expected in stores across the country!
Dude, Sony already sold out, big-time. I remember when they were an unsigned console manufacturer, setting up at dive bars for 20 people to play a few games for a quarter each. Yeah, PlayStation (back then, that's all it was; there was no PSP or PS2 or PS3) was primitive and unpolished by their standards of today, but you could tell there was passion behind it. It used to be about the gaming, man, it used to be about the gaming. Now, it's all corporate and sterile and 'how-can-we-leverage-this-product-to-increase-plat form-dominance' bundled Blu-Ray and stuff. They've changed, man. They've changed.
Did the whole "everybody is an Enemy Combatant if we say so" thing start already and no one told me? What exactly is this "isolation" where you can't contact your laywer?
Until and unless he's formally charged (indicted), the right to an attorney doesn't actually attach, except as has been judicially constructed/interpreted. For light reading on the topic: http://caselaw.lp.findlaw.com/data/constitution/am endment06/11.html#1 If he hasn't been arraigned yet (and it sounds like he hasn't), he doesn't technically have a right to counsel yet. (The 'custodial interrogation' right to counsel, Miranda et seq., says that an interogatee, upon clear demand for the assistance of counsel, either be provided with assistance of counsel or that interrogation stop until and unless the party under custodial arrest voluntarily reinitiates contact with his interrogators. It doesn't mean the attorney automatically gets access to the guy.)
there is mention of physical abuse (though in divorce cases it isn't uncommon to have such accusations).
Relatively uncommon in California, which is a no-fault divorce state. That is, no reason whatsoever needs to be nor can be entered into the record as to cause of the divorce. (Though evidence of cause can be used in child custody fights.)
Is their[sic] a reason why he can't continue working on this project from jail?
Inmates, outside of a class or specific vocation program, rarely if ever have access to computers. At no time do they have access to the Internet, nor are they likely to have access to compilers or the operating system of the workstations they might have access to. (There are extremely limited and limiting exceptions to this; e.g., the Federal Bureau of Prisons is experimenting with a highly controlled email-like system: http://www.prisontalk.com/forums/archive/index.php /t-139246.html.) He might be able to code via pen (or typewriter) and paper, that can't really be restricted, but most prison systems forbid communicating in "code," and since I guarantee the CDCR doesn't employ any COs that will be able to grok Reiser's C source, he won't be able to mail it out. No, if he's sent up, his work on ReiserFS is done for the duration.
To clarify, I was responding to the particular point that software "making ... use of the interfaces" of GPL'd software thus fell under the ambit of the GPL, that is, the simple act of linking or using an header would make an otherwise stand-alone piece of software somehow a derivative work and thus GPL-infected.
You are wrong; you're thinking of the BSD-style licenses. Anything under the GPL (or software that extensively uses GPL-software's interfaces) must have source released if it's released.
Actually, you are wrong. The GPL is only required (i.e., only applicable) when copyright is involved; i.e., making a derivative work. For there to be a derivative work, there has to be a copying within the ambit of the copyright act. If you look to the Altai test (adopted by pretty much every court), you'll see that code dictated by external requirements (i.e., pretty much every piece of software running on a UNIX/Linux system has to use malloc, etc., and thus must either call the system calls directly or via the C Library) is specifically filtered out of the copyright comparison. So any interface calls, even symbols brought in from include files, are [strongly] arguably not even copyrightable (a 'method of operation'; see, e.g., 17 U.S.C. 102, and Lotus v. Borland, 49 F.3d 807 (1st Cir. 1995)) and even if they are, would be stripped out of any comparison of code done in an infringement action. Absent an infringement, there's no need for GPL applicability...
Further, the COPYING file for the Linux kernel (http://www.kernel.org/pub/linux/kernel/COPYING) specifically carves out "user programs that use kernel services by normal system call." So, with appropriate facts, one could easily argue copyright estoppel in the (unlikely) event that Linus (as the copyright holder for much, if not most, of the kernel, AFAIK -- the FSF, etc. would not have standing to sue, it would have to be Linus or some other kernel contributor whose work was in the Wii) brought suit.