I remember this game. As a kid I played on the old school machines of the day as well, of course. Am i remembering correctly or am I fantasizing that it had separate "naughty" and "tame" modes of play?
You're probably thinking of arguments heard in a 9th Circuit appeals cout on Feb. 3 of this year in re: the Grokster case. During those oral arguments, available as mp3 here , Judge Noonan told music industry attorney Cary Ramos to stop using abusive language like "theft" when framing his arguments against Grokster.
Listening to the above mp3 is great to (1) listen to what a real appellate argument sounds like, and (2) hear real lawyers debate stuff that's important to many/. readers, including file sharing and the meaning of the Sony Betamax decision.
Just to add something to your excellent summation, this is why the Poison Pill was created. When the hostile party aquires N share in the company the Poison Pill provision kicks in which effectively dilutes the hostile party's ownership share to levels well below controlling.
This post of OT in that I have no idea if Disney has Poison Pill protections in place, I just think the concept is interesting.
I think that's at least a significant part of the motivation for the statement. Disney looks bad currently what with the whole Pixar thing and Eisner basically forcing a legitimate Disney surname out of the picture. If some wealthy shareholder gets pissed and decides to start a lawsuit, Disney is going to have to demonstrate that it carefully considered legitimate offers to enhance stockholder value rather than just acted like a reactionary bitch.
IANAL, but if my corporate law class was reasonably accurate, the board has pretty wide latitude under the famous "business judgment rule" to exercise its own discretion but if it starts looking like reactionary bitchery (waste or breach of the board's duty of care to the shareholders especially in the face of a categorically reasonable offer (I have no idea how reasonable Comcast's offer was)) Disney might find itself in real legal trouble. The more Disney actually does or gives the apparance of considering legitimate offers the stronger its "business judgment" protection and the more likely it can make such a lawsuit go away at summary judgment time, which is a heck of a lot better than after a trial.
1) law students don't know or claim to know much. 2) they don't have specialties, as you ask. If you wnat to know, I was a unix systems programmer (c, asm) before I went to law school. 3) the power to squelch speech through the first amendment comes through interpertation of the 1st amendment. there is a lot of case law on this. look it up. 4) yes, local governments are given power by the states, generally. If you are interested in this look up the difference between "home rule" and "dillon's rule." I mean this seriously, not as some/. dismissal. It is important. 5) I don't care if you've not been impressed with law students before. The fact is when I said the 1st Am is "incorporated" to the states by the 14th it was correct. As I said, look it up.
Yes, my copy of the Constitution is mostly up-to-date. My understanding of the scotus and various circuits' decisions is not, I admit, up-to-the-month complete. However, the fact remains that the first amendment applies only to the federal and state governments restricting your speech.
I may not know a lot, but I am also almost finished with law school, which, I bet, is more than you can claim for knowledge of law.
If you don't believe me about this, Larry Lessig himself has articulated a similar point just this week here : http://www.lessig.org/blog/archives/001718.shtml#0 01718
When you read that remember that corporations are considered "persons," and then try some google searches to learn more.
The First Amendment applies to the federal government restricting your speech. The 14th Amendment "incorporates" the First Amendment to apply its provisions to state governments as well.
If you wanted to challenge a libel suit with a First Amendment defense, I think you'd have to argue that the libel laws the professor invoked violated the First Amendment. You wouldn't win this argument.
As has been mentioned in other posts, you'd think the CDA and its interpretation in US courts would have the website in the clear and force the professor to go after the poster of the allegedly libellous material. It's possible that this is a little unclear as the cases I remember dealing with this involved ISP liability rather than website liability. But I could be massively wrong about that.
Either way, teacherreviews' problem is that unless the EFF, ACLU, or some other group with deep pockets takes an interest in underwriting the expenses it doesn't really matter whose side the law is on. What matters is that one side, especially if the teachers' unions get behind the professor, has a crapload more resources than the other and can bully the little guy into acquiescing by the mere threat of litigation. Using the law this way happens all the time.
Some of the problems with the current easier application and harder enforcement system, however, are the nature of the inventors and the exortion it allows on the back end.
If our nation's inventors were toiling away in their basements in their spare time then avoiding a bias against inventors would be more important. But that's just what we like to pretend. In reality the overwhelming majority of patents are issued to corporations and have been developed by engineers and scientists working in their corporate capacity. Corporations should be able to deal with a more front-loaded system. Which is not to indulge a fantasy that corporrations are all huge and wealthy, but that it's not hardto argue that a "bias against inventors" fear mischaracterizes reality.
Also, patent litigation is massively, massively expensive. I mean, seriously expensive. Patent lawyers are expensive and litigation takes a long time. (from 1995 to 1999 there were 9615 patent cases filed, mean time for resolution was 1.12 years.. BUT only 5% of those cases went to trial)* So when a patent issues you suddenly have a lot of power to threaten and extort -- because the costs associated with challenging the patent in court are astronomical. This effect actively discourages the progress of science and the useful arts in areas like computer science where the patents are broad and their scope usually unclear.
* - according to Kimberely Moore, Forum Shopping in Patent Cases : Does Geographic Choice Affect Innovation? in the North Carolina Law Review.. sometime in 2001 (i forget)
Ok, IANAL. I am a second year law student at the university of virginia and before I went back to school I was a unix systems programmer.
That being said, I think you are correct. The facts in the the actual tuples would not be copyrightable. One of the Big Deals in copyright jurisprudence is that facts themselves are not copytightable and neither are ideas. What is copyrightable is expression (your particular expression of ideas or facts rather than those ideas or facts themselves).
So, the data in the tuples, if we're talking about just facts, are not copyrightable. If you generated a report from the database it might be copyrightable if its "selection, coordination, and arrangement" were sufficiently creative. "sufficiently creative" is a blurry concept, I know.
Here is a summary of Feist's holding, from findlaw.com:
Rural's white pages are not entitled to copyright, and therefore Feist's use of them does not constitute infringement. Pp. 344-364.
(a) Article I, 8, cl. 8, of the Constitution mandates originality as a prerequisite for copyright protection. The constitutional requirement necessitates independent creation plus a modicum of creativity. Since facts do not owe their origin to an act of authorship, they are not original, and thus are not copyrightable. Although a compilation of facts may possess the requisite originality because the author typically chooses which facts to include, in what order to place them, and how to arrange the data so that readers may use them effectively, copyright protection extends only to those components of the work that are original to the author, not to the facts themselves. This fact/expression dichotomy severely limits the scope of protection in fact-based works. Pp. 344-351.
(b) The Copyright Act of 1976 and its predecessor, the Copyright Act of 1909, leave no doubt that originality is the touchstone of copyright protection in directories and other fact-based works. The 1976 Act explains that copyright extends to "original works of authorship," 17 U.S.C. 102(a), and that there can be no copyright in facts, 102(b). [499 U.S. 340, 341] A compilation is not copyrightable per se, but is copyrightable only if its facts have been "selected, coordinated, or arranged in such a way that the resulting work as a whole constitutes an original work of authorship." 101 (emphasis added). Thus, the statute envisions that some ways of selecting, coordinating, and arranging data are not sufficiently original to trigger copyright protection. Even a compilation that is copyrightable receives only limited protection, for the copyright does not extend to facts contained in the compilation. 103(b). Lower courts that adopted a "sweat of the brow" or "industrious collection" test - which extended a compilation's copyright protection beyond selection and arrangement to the facts themselves - misconstrued the 1909 Act and eschewed the fundamental axiom of copyright law that no one may copyright facts or ideas. Pp. 351-361.
(c) Rural's white pages do not meet the constitutional or statutory requirements for copyright protection. While Rural has a valid copyright in the directory as a whole because it contains some forward text and some original material in the yellow pages, there is nothing original in Rural's white pages. The raw data are uncopyrightable facts, and the way in which Rural selected, coordinated, and arranged those facts is not original in any way. Rural's selection of listings - subscribers' names, towns, and telephone numbers - could not be more obvious, and lacks the modicum of creativity necessary to transform mere selection into copyrightable expression. In fact, it is plausible to conclude that Rural did not truly "select" to publish its subscribers' names and telephone numbers, since it was required to do so by state law. Moreover, there is nothing remotely creative about arranging names alphabetically in a white pages directory. It is an age-old practice, firmly rooted in tradition and so commonplace that it has come to
I said this in an earlier post, but if parent is going to be +5 Insightful, I'll repeat it here:
Feist absolutely does not say that compilations of facts are not copyrightable.
I promise. Go and read it. Feist says a couple things. For purposes of this thread it says that the white pages does not have a sufficient level of originality or creativity to rise to copyrightable level. The originality or creativity spoken of for factual compilations would be in their selection, coordination, or arrangement.
From the headnotes in the link you provided:
A compilation is not copyrightable per se, but is copyrightable only if its facts have been "selected, coordinated, or arranged in such a way that the resulting work as a whole constitutes an original work of authorship." 101 (emphasis added). Thus, the statute envisions that some ways of selecting, coordinating, and arranging data are not sufficiently original to trigger copyright protection. Even a compilation that is copyrightable receives only limited protection, for the copyright does not extend to facts contained in the compilation.
Compilations of facts are copyrightable if they attain a certain threshold of originality in their arrangement. If a compilation reaches this level and attains copyright, however, the facts themselves are not copyrighted.
I haven't read the new bill linked to in the original post and have no comment on how it treats protection of facts... the point of this post is just to point out a misunderstanding of what Feist stands for.
Currently mere compilations of facts, such as phone books, are not copyrightable.
That's not true. The Supreme Court decision that all this stuff comes from is known as Feist. Feist ruled, basically, that the white pages is not copyrightable because there was absolutely no creativity or originality in listing : last name, first name, address, phone number.
If, however, you took a bunch of mere facts and arranged them in an innovative and creative way you very well might be able to get copyright protection for the compilation. the white pates isn't copytightable, but some other collections of mere facts certainly are. The copyright would cover the compilation, however, and not the facts themselves.
The RIAA might decide to come down harder, yeah. Since they can ask for statutory damages and since statutory damages, they can potentially ask for astronomical sums.
504(c)(1) says in part:
Except as provided by clause (2) of this subsection, the copyright owner may elect, at any time before final judgment is rendered, to recover, instead of actual damages and profits, an award of statutory damages for all infringements involved in the action, with respect to any one work, for which any one infringer is liable individually, or for which any two or more infringers are liable jointly and severally, in a sum of not less than $750 or more than $30,000 as the court considers just. For the purposes of this subsection, all the parts of a compilation or derivative work constitute one work.
That means they can potentially get between 750 and 30,000 for each infringement. Every time someone downloaded a song from them that was an infringement. That runs into a lot of money real fast. And the numbers are even bigger if the act was "willful."
Re:Intellectual Property theft is still theft...
on
RIAA Files 532 Lawsuits
·
· Score: 2, Informative
No.
You're confusing "real" property with "intellectual" property. The US Const., the document from which all this flows, contemplates what we call "intellectual property" as a separate thing.
Article 1, Section 8, Paragraph 8 of the says: "[Congress shall have the power t]o promote the progress of science and useful arts, by securing for limited times to authors and inventors the exclusive right to their respective writings and discoveries."
That means that Congress, if it felt like it _could_ set up protections for intellectual property, for limited amounts of time, and for the purpose of promoting sciences and useful arts. It doesn't say "because citizens have a natural right to exclusive rights to their writings and discoveries akin to their rights over, eg, land"
So Congress created copyright and patent in order to promote the progress of science and the useful arts. Copyright and patent exist, therefore, in the service of *society* with limited benefits flowing to authors and inventors in order to, you guessed it, promote the progress of science and the useful arts.
Copyrights and patents are infringed. "intellectual property theft" is a misleading phrase flowing from the unfortunate choice of "intellectual property" as the moniker we give to this stuff flowing from Art 1 sec. 8 paragraph 8. It's different from tangible stuff.
This is all not to say that real people don't lose real money from IP infringement. It's just to say that it's misleading to comingle the language of tangible property with that of IP.
The RIAA isn't going to ask for an injunction. They want to use these cases as a deterrent. Getting news out that people are getting slapped with damages or agreeing to settlements in which they pay some non-trivial amount to the RIAA is what they're going to do.
Second, any copyright infringement suit is subject to the plaintiff asking for statutory damages. See 17 USCA 504(c). The choice is either statutory damages (the limits of which are determined in the statute but decided by jury) or actual damages. There are stiffer penalties if the criminal (see 17 USCA 506 for the requirements) stuff is invoked.
In short, the RIAA or any copyright plaintiff can ask for actual or statutory damages irrespective of "willfulness," "knowingly," or whether or not the criminal bits are being invoked (and they almost never are).
You're completely right that ignorance is not a defense to copyright infringement.
Something is copyrighted, basically, as soon as it's fixed in a tangible medium. So, when Madonna screeches into a mic "what the fuck do you think you're doing?" and saves it as a dummy mp3 song, that's just as copyrighted as Like a Virgin.
And yes, even RAM counts for 'tangible medium.'
This is actually about copyrighted content that authors wish to control.. not "copyright" simply as such. That's why the Creative Commons Project is so important.
You're pretty much right on here ( not that you care that some ramdom/.'er says so:) )... except that it can be a little more complicated than that. Whereas the First Amendment applies to our relationships with the government, there are a couple of case in US precedent which extend this.
The big example is a line of cases in NJ in which the NJ supreme court read its own (ie NOT the US Const) as going further than traditional notions of 1AM requirements as regards freedom of speech in a private setting. To whit, this issue related to passing out flyers on the private property of a regional (huge) mall. Even though it was private property, the NJ supreme court reasoned that since the mall was acting as a pseudo-public entity anyway (malls replacing downtowns as places of congregation, malls advertising themselves and providing services as such, etc..), it had to accept limited and appropriate acts of free speech in certain areas -- notwithstanding the fact that this was private property.
There's also some US Supreme Court stuff like this regarding free speech in "company towns" but it's much more strictly limited than the big NJ deal I just mentioned.
If it were earlier in the day I'd look up the citations for the NJ case. IIRC, it was New Jersey Coalition Against War In The Middle East v. J.M.B. Realty from 1994, but I'm not 100% sure.
yes, the wrong combination of people would suck. But did you ever work in a small scale, high-intensity coding environment that actually worked? It's not that hard. You just have to choose well.
iPod profit margins as of today may be large, but consider a plan for Apple in the nearish future:
1) build os x for intel
2) build ipod, ilife, and other devices such as fantastic set-top devices, etc... for computer users
as #2 grows, the number of Apple HW owners increases and its user base increases dramatically. Even iPod and iTMS accomplishes this.
Eventually, apple will release #1.. os x for Intel. This will hurt, badly, their own cpu hardware sales for desktop PCs. But instead of killing the close market like before, Apple will welcome it because their revenue will be coming from their host of excellent iLife, iPod, and other iDevice hardware, as well as their OS updates.
Steve realizes that tying his revenue to IBM/Moto hardware bundled to his OS ultimately is a losing venture and the best way to go is to build the 'apple lifestyle'.. and that's, I bet, the long-term plan at Apple.
I am not an insider, but I'd lay even money that OS X is running well on Intel internally and Apple is betting on switching its revenue stream to sources other than its own pc hardware sales. This will free it from the 80s-90s computer co. model and into the realm of the future.
fairplay.com redirects to welcome.net, which doesn't help.
veridisc.com, a company which does appear to make a DRM solution called Fairplay, redirects to a porn site.
http://64.244.235.240/ appears to take one to a company called Veridisc working on DRM called Fairplay, but their website doesn't seem to mention a big Apple related score. And all their internal links use the IP to self reference.
In short, I think the best option is to contact veridisc.com and ask the webmaster for a license to his content.:)
If people didn't pirate the fuck out of every new album, maybe labels would be more willing to shell out money on the riskier acts. As it is, it's too expensive to expect a return on your investment when you know that if it turns out good enough, half of its sales will be robbed to convenient online piracy.
Is "pirate the fuck out of" code for p2p? I think this is a meaningful question because piracy has been going on for a long time, but p2p has brought it to a new level. If "pirate the fuck out of" doesn't refer to p2p, were labels more willing to promote riskier acts and inject more brilliance (and crap, admittedly) into the mainstream, at least potentially, in the 70s? And if so, wouldn't it be true, or at least presumptively true (which is to say you'd need to show some data rather than invective) that 70s labels were more given to produce music like, say, King Crimson than they are today?
This is totally not meant to be sarcastic. It's just the first two paragraphs of your response seemed to say "there's same same good/crap ratio" and the last seemed to say "with pirating the fuck out of music these days labels are more concerned with sure things," and it seemed like they might be inconsistent. I have no data as to total number of albums released in these periods and am aware that the number of "musicians" has increased exponentially such that now "guitarists" are dime-a-dozen in a way they didn't, at least as obviously, be before.
also, it's disturbing that there is no audit trail of the submitter's keystrokes. For all we know he typed the name correctly but somewhere in the black box of his Win XP system and internet transit through unknown routers the letters were (purposefully?) munged!
um, when I wrote "this post should be +5 Informative." at the top of the above post I was refering to the parent and wasn't planning on writing the long post that appears below.... the first line of my post was not intended to announce to the/. world that my thoughts self-evidently deserve +5 moderation.:)
For all the ranting about/. readers "rights to privacy," which are clearly deeply felt, it's not clear where in the Constitution such a right comes from.
Go and read Griswold v. Connecticut, 381 U.S. 479 (1965) to see just what hoops the SCOTUS had to jump through in order to find a "privacy" right sufficient to protect married couples using contraception.
Read the whole thing and in Justice Black's dissent you'll find the following language:
One of the most effective ways of diluting or expanding a constitutionally guaranteed right is to substitute for the crucial word or words of a constitutional guarantee another word or words, more or less flexible and more or less restricted in meaning. This fact is well illustrated by the use of the term "right of privacy" as a comprehensive substitute for the Fourth Amendment's guarantee against "unreasonable searches and seizures." "Privacy" is a broad, abstract and ambiguous concept which can easily be shrunken in meaning but which can also, on the other hand, easily be interpreted as a constitutional ban against many things other than searches and seizures. I have expressed the view many times that First Amendment freedoms, for example, have suffered from a failure of the courts to stick to the simple language of the First Amendment in construing it, instead of invoking multitudes of words substituted for those the Framers used. See, e.g., New York Times Co. v. Sullivan, 376 U.S. 254 , 293 (concurring opinion); cases collected in City of El Paso v. Simmons, 379 U.S. 497, 517, n. 1 (dissenting opinion); Black, The Bill of Rights, 35 N.Y.U.L.Rev. 865. For these reasons, I get nowhere in this case by talk about a constitutional "right of privacy" as an emanation from [p*510] one or more constitutional provisions. [n1] I like my privacy as well as the next one, but I am nevertheless compelled to admit that government has a right to. invade it unless prohibited by some specific constitutional provision. For these reasons, I cannot agree with the Court's judgment and the reasons it gives for holding this Connecticut law unconstitutional.
Justice Black lost that argument, of course, but the decision was narrow in scope and the "right to privacy" is STILL hotly contested. See Lawrence v. Texas from earlier this year, among a crapload of other cases implicating it.
If you read the majority opinion carefully you'll see that the right is derived from "penumbras" and "emanations" in our Constitution. That is, shall we say, not the most concrete ground for privacy rights to rest.
I realize that the idea that there is not a fundamental, clear, and general right to privacy in our constitution many of you guys think is a severe affront. And I'm with you. But making conclusory "there IS a right to privacy because it's important to me and... umm.. stuff about searches and seizures and other unspecified rights that can't be taken away which must include privacy as i'm defining it because i say so and.. oh yeah.. it's really important to me" statements isn't helpful. It's understandable, mind you, but the Supreme Court is going to have more sophisticated stuff on its collective mind.
(which is not to say that making the argument, if you could show it, that the framers would clearly have supported such a privacy right and indeed it was intended to be understood as part of the guarantees in the Constitution would be a bad argument just because it's not "sophisticated"... it's just that's not nearly the whole story about what's going to go on in real life.
I'll probably get modded troll but am I the only one who thinks this looks like a hoax? Did you see the pictures? It's hilarious. They have a metallic box, a laptop sitting on top... some hose running up and out, and some computer elements looking "home brew" occasionally in the frame.
Perhaps I'm wrong, but I think/. just got taken for quite an amusing ride.
Slashdot Mirror
I remember this game. As a kid I played on the old school machines of the day as well, of course. Am i remembering correctly or am I fantasizing that it had separate "naughty" and "tame" modes of play?
Listening to the above mp3 is great to (1) listen to what a real appellate argument sounds like, and (2) hear real lawyers debate stuff that's important to many /. readers, including file sharing and the meaning of the Sony Betamax decision.
Related links are here and here.
This post of OT in that I have no idea if Disney has Poison Pill protections in place, I just think the concept is interesting.
IANAL, but if my corporate law class was reasonably accurate, the board has pretty wide latitude under the famous "business judgment rule" to exercise its own discretion but if it starts looking like reactionary bitchery (waste or breach of the board's duty of care to the shareholders especially in the face of a categorically reasonable offer (I have no idea how reasonable Comcast's offer was)) Disney might find itself in real legal trouble. The more Disney actually does or gives the apparance of considering legitimate offers the stronger its "business judgment" protection and the more likely it can make such a lawsuit go away at summary judgment time, which is a heck of a lot better than after a trial.
Again, IANAL.
1) law students don't know or claim to know much. 2) they don't have specialties, as you ask. If you wnat to know, I was a unix systems programmer (c, asm) before I went to law school. 3) the power to squelch speech through the first amendment comes through interpertation of the 1st amendment. there is a lot of case law on this. look it up. 4) yes, local governments are given power by the states, generally. If you are interested in this look up the difference between "home rule" and "dillon's rule." I mean this seriously, not as some /. dismissal. It is important. 5) I don't care if you've not been impressed with law students before. The fact is when I said the 1st Am is "incorporated" to the states by the 14th it was correct. As I said, look it up.
I may not know a lot, but I am also almost finished with law school, which, I bet, is more than you can claim for knowledge of law.
If you don't believe me about this, Larry Lessig himself has articulated a similar point just this week here : http://www.lessig.org/blog/archives/001718.shtml#0 01718
When you read that remember that corporations are considered "persons," and then try some google searches to learn more.
If you wanted to challenge a libel suit with a First Amendment defense, I think you'd have to argue that the libel laws the professor invoked violated the First Amendment. You wouldn't win this argument.
As has been mentioned in other posts, you'd think the CDA and its interpretation in US courts would have the website in the clear and force the professor to go after the poster of the allegedly libellous material. It's possible that this is a little unclear as the cases I remember dealing with this involved ISP liability rather than website liability. But I could be massively wrong about that.
Either way, teacherreviews' problem is that unless the EFF, ACLU, or some other group with deep pockets takes an interest in underwriting the expenses it doesn't really matter whose side the law is on. What matters is that one side, especially if the teachers' unions get behind the professor, has a crapload more resources than the other and can bully the little guy into acquiescing by the mere threat of litigation. Using the law this way happens all the time.
If our nation's inventors were toiling away in their basements in their spare time then avoiding a bias against inventors would be more important. But that's just what we like to pretend. In reality the overwhelming majority of patents are issued to corporations and have been developed by engineers and scientists working in their corporate capacity. Corporations should be able to deal with a more front-loaded system. Which is not to indulge a fantasy that corporrations are all huge and wealthy, but that it's not hardto argue that a "bias against inventors" fear mischaracterizes reality.
Also, patent litigation is massively, massively expensive. I mean, seriously expensive. Patent lawyers are expensive and litigation takes a long time. (from 1995 to 1999 there were 9615 patent cases filed, mean time for resolution was 1.12 years .. BUT only 5% of those cases went to trial)* So when a patent issues you suddenly have a lot of power to threaten and extort -- because the costs associated with challenging the patent in court are astronomical. This effect actively discourages the progress of science and the useful arts in areas like computer science where the patents are broad and their scope usually unclear.
* - according to Kimberely Moore, Forum Shopping in Patent Cases : Does Geographic Choice Affect Innovation? in the North Carolina Law Review .. sometime in 2001 (i forget)
That being said, I think you are correct. The facts in the the actual tuples would not be copyrightable. One of the Big Deals in copyright jurisprudence is that facts themselves are not copytightable and neither are ideas. What is copyrightable is expression (your particular expression of ideas or facts rather than those ideas or facts themselves).
So, the data in the tuples, if we're talking about just facts, are not copyrightable. If you generated a report from the database it might be copyrightable if its "selection, coordination, and arrangement" were sufficiently creative. "sufficiently creative" is a blurry concept, I know. Here is a summary of Feist's holding, from findlaw.com:
Feist absolutely does not say that compilations of facts are not copyrightable.
I promise. Go and read it. Feist says a couple things. For purposes of this thread it says that the white pages does not have a sufficient level of originality or creativity to rise to copyrightable level. The originality or creativity spoken of for factual compilations would be in their selection, coordination, or arrangement.
From the headnotes in the link you provided:
Compilations of facts are copyrightable if they attain a certain threshold of originality in their arrangement. If a compilation reaches this level and attains copyright, however, the facts themselves are not copyrighted.
I haven't read the new bill linked to in the original post and have no comment on how it treats protection of facts... the point of this post is just to point out a misunderstanding of what Feist stands for.
That's not true. The Supreme Court decision that all this stuff comes from is known as Feist. Feist ruled, basically, that the white pages is not copyrightable because there was absolutely no creativity or originality in listing : last name, first name, address, phone number.
If, however, you took a bunch of mere facts and arranged them in an innovative and creative way you very well might be able to get copyright protection for the compilation. the white pates isn't copytightable, but some other collections of mere facts certainly are. The copyright would cover the compilation, however, and not the facts themselves.
504(c)(1) says in part:
That means they can potentially get between 750 and 30,000 for each infringement. Every time someone downloaded a song from them that was an infringement. That runs into a lot of money real fast. And the numbers are even bigger if the act was "willful."
You're confusing "real" property with "intellectual" property. The US Const., the document from which all this flows, contemplates what we call "intellectual property" as a separate thing.
Article 1, Section 8, Paragraph 8 of the says: "[Congress shall have the power t]o promote the progress of science and useful arts, by securing for limited times to authors and inventors the exclusive right to their respective writings and discoveries."
That means that Congress, if it felt like it _could_ set up protections for intellectual property, for limited amounts of time, and for the purpose of promoting sciences and useful arts. It doesn't say "because citizens have a natural right to exclusive rights to their writings and discoveries akin to their rights over, eg, land"
So Congress created copyright and patent in order to promote the progress of science and the useful arts. Copyright and patent exist, therefore, in the service of *society* with limited benefits flowing to authors and inventors in order to, you guessed it, promote the progress of science and the useful arts.
Copyrights and patents are infringed. "intellectual property theft" is a misleading phrase flowing from the unfortunate choice of "intellectual property" as the moniker we give to this stuff flowing from Art 1 sec. 8 paragraph 8. It's different from tangible stuff.
This is all not to say that real people don't lose real money from IP infringement. It's just to say that it's misleading to comingle the language of tangible property with that of IP.
Second, any copyright infringement suit is subject to the plaintiff asking for statutory damages. See 17 USCA 504(c). The choice is either statutory damages (the limits of which are determined in the statute but decided by jury) or actual damages. There are stiffer penalties if the criminal (see 17 USCA 506 for the requirements) stuff is invoked.
In short, the RIAA or any copyright plaintiff can ask for actual or statutory damages irrespective of "willfulness," "knowingly," or whether or not the criminal bits are being invoked (and they almost never are).
You're completely right that ignorance is not a defense to copyright infringement.
This is actually about copyrighted content that authors wish to control .. not "copyright" simply as such. That's why the Creative Commons Project is so important.
The big example is a line of cases in NJ in which the NJ supreme court read its own (ie NOT the US Const) as going further than traditional notions of 1AM requirements as regards freedom of speech in a private setting. To whit, this issue related to passing out flyers on the private property of a regional (huge) mall. Even though it was private property, the NJ supreme court reasoned that since the mall was acting as a pseudo-public entity anyway (malls replacing downtowns as places of congregation, malls advertising themselves and providing services as such, etc..), it had to accept limited and appropriate acts of free speech in certain areas -- notwithstanding the fact that this was private property.
There's also some US Supreme Court stuff like this regarding free speech in "company towns" but it's much more strictly limited than the big NJ deal I just mentioned.
If it were earlier in the day I'd look up the citations for the NJ case. IIRC, it was New Jersey Coalition Against War In The Middle East v. J.M.B. Realty from 1994, but I'm not 100% sure.
have a nice evening, nudicle
For instance, if we allocated a billion of those dollars to public education they'd probably waste it teaching kids to read and right.
yes, the wrong combination of people would suck. But did you ever work in a small scale, high-intensity coding environment that actually worked? It's not that hard. You just have to choose well.
1) build os x for intel
2) build ipod, ilife, and other devices such as fantastic set-top devices, etc... for computer users
as #2 grows, the number of Apple HW owners increases and its user base increases dramatically. Even iPod and iTMS accomplishes this.
Eventually, apple will release #1 .. os x for Intel. This will hurt, badly, their own cpu hardware sales for desktop PCs. But instead of killing the close market like before, Apple will welcome it because their revenue will be coming from their host of excellent iLife, iPod, and other iDevice hardware, as well as their OS updates.
Steve realizes that tying his revenue to IBM/Moto hardware bundled to his OS ultimately is a losing venture and the best way to go is to build the 'apple lifestyle' .. and that's, I bet, the long-term plan at Apple.
I am not an insider, but I'd lay even money that OS X is running well on Intel internally and Apple is betting on switching its revenue stream to sources other than its own pc hardware sales. This will free it from the 80s-90s computer co. model and into the realm of the future.
Or maybe I'm totally off base.
http://www.forbes.com/2003/04/29/cx_ah_0429tentech .html
fairplay.com redirects to welcome.net, which doesn't help.
veridisc.com, a company which does appear to make a DRM solution called Fairplay, redirects to a porn site.
http://64.244.235.240/ appears to take one to a company called Veridisc working on DRM called Fairplay, but their website doesn't seem to mention a big Apple related score. And all their internal links use the IP to self reference.
In short, I think the best option is to contact veridisc.com and ask the webmaster for a license to his content. :)
This is totally not meant to be sarcastic. It's just the first two paragraphs of your response seemed to say "there's same same good/crap ratio" and the last seemed to say "with pirating the fuck out of music these days labels are more concerned with sure things," and it seemed like they might be inconsistent. I have no data as to total number of albums released in these periods and am aware that the number of "musicians" has increased exponentially such that now "guitarists" are dime-a-dozen in a way they didn't, at least as obviously, be before.
Just wondering.
also, it's disturbing that there is no audit trail of the submitter's keystrokes. For all we know he typed the name correctly but somewhere in the black box of his Win XP system and internet transit through unknown routers the letters were (purposefully?) munged!
um, when I wrote "this post should be +5 Informative." at the top of the above post I was refering to the parent and wasn't planning on writing the long post that appears below .... the first line of my post was not intended to announce to the /. world that my thoughts self-evidently deserve +5 moderation. :)
For all the ranting about /. readers "rights to privacy," which are clearly deeply felt, it's not clear where in the Constitution such a right comes from.
Go and read Griswold v. Connecticut, 381 U.S. 479 (1965) to see just what hoops the SCOTUS had to jump through in order to find a "privacy" right sufficient to protect married couples using contraception.
Read the whole thing and in Justice Black's dissent you'll find the following language: One of the most effective ways of diluting or expanding a constitutionally guaranteed right is to substitute for the crucial word or words of a constitutional guarantee another word or words, more or less flexible and more or less restricted in meaning. This fact is well illustrated by the use of the term "right of privacy" as a comprehensive substitute for the Fourth Amendment's guarantee against "unreasonable searches and seizures." "Privacy" is a broad, abstract and ambiguous concept which can easily be shrunken in meaning but which can also, on the other hand, easily be interpreted as a constitutional ban against many things other than searches and seizures. I have expressed the view many times that First Amendment freedoms, for example, have suffered from a failure of the courts to stick to the simple language of the First Amendment in construing it, instead of invoking multitudes of words substituted for those the Framers used. See, e.g., New York Times Co. v. Sullivan, 376 U.S. 254 , 293 (concurring opinion); cases collected in City of El Paso v. Simmons, 379 U.S. 497, 517, n. 1 (dissenting opinion); Black, The Bill of Rights, 35 N.Y.U.L.Rev. 865. For these reasons, I get nowhere in this case by talk about a constitutional "right of privacy" as an emanation from [p*510] one or more constitutional provisions. [n1] I like my privacy as well as the next one, but I am nevertheless compelled to admit that government has a right to. invade it unless prohibited by some specific constitutional provision. For these reasons, I cannot agree with the Court's judgment and the reasons it gives for holding this Connecticut law unconstitutional.
Justice Black lost that argument, of course, but the decision was narrow in scope and the "right to privacy" is STILL hotly contested. See Lawrence v. Texas from earlier this year, among a crapload of other cases implicating it.
If you read the majority opinion carefully you'll see that the right is derived from "penumbras" and "emanations" in our Constitution. That is, shall we say, not the most concrete ground for privacy rights to rest.
I realize that the idea that there is not a fundamental, clear, and general right to privacy in our constitution many of you guys think is a severe affront. And I'm with you. But making conclusory "there IS a right to privacy because it's important to me and ... umm .. stuff about searches and seizures and other unspecified rights that can't be taken away which must include privacy as i'm defining it because i say so and .. oh yeah .. it's really important to me" statements isn't helpful. It's understandable, mind you, but the Supreme Court is going to have more sophisticated stuff on its collective mind.
(which is not to say that making the argument, if you could show it, that the framers would clearly have supported such a privacy right and indeed it was intended to be understood as part of the guarantees in the Constitution would be a bad argument just because it's not "sophisticated" ... it's just that's not nearly the whole story about what's going to go on in real life.
Perhaps I'm wrong, but I think /. just got taken for quite an amusing ride.