Having been the recipient of some of these "fake invoices", even that is hard to press. It gets real grey and fuzzy with the law here. I have demanded to know from some companies specific details about what it is that I'm being charged with and to know what service was being provided. Some medical billing can get rather vague... where one company billed me something like eight months after I went to an emergency room for treatment, when I already paid the hospital and the physician who treated me, as well as the radiologist in three separate previous billings. I could go on here, but sometimes you might actually owe the money, and perhaps you don't. It can be hard to know when you must pay a bill.
Regardless, fraud laws are a criminal statue that requires the involvement of a state attorney general or at least a government prosecutor of some sort willing to step in and help you out. While some of these prosecutors are willing to step in and offer some good advise, often they don't really have the time available to go into specifics unless the fraud is rather clear-cut and blatantly trying to be malicious. Or more importantly, if you haven't paid the bill, they (the prosecutors) won't do anything at all (usually).
Even more strangely, a company that bills you for services that you never received or requested can still hit your credit ratings for failure to make payments on those bills. That can and sometimes does negatively impact your credit scores, regardless of any "comment" that you can put onto your credit report denoting fraud. If anything, noting that the billing was fraud makes you look even worse to creditors.
Still, until Toyota says "We own the copyright on image 11684.jpg, 11689.jpg" and mentioning other image explicitly on the website, all the site owner has to say is:
"We were not served a proper DMCA take-down notice, and as such we were unable to fill the request."
The judge would look at the invoice and throw the thing out. The DMCA notice has to be done in writing, be specific, and allow for a response if the copyright is being questioned or challenged. None of this is happening, and it would be Toyota that would have egg on its face if they really tried to follow through with this tactic.
Still, as far as the free advertising is concerned, once copyright is clearly established and can be legitimately claimed by Toyota, proper notices have been filed and the law has been followed, the images have to go.
Unless.... you are claiming "fair-use" privileges for the use of the image of the vehicle.... so the whole thing starts all over again in another round of legal maneuvering. Fair-use here might actually be valid, depending on who took the image and in what context it is being used.
You get served a notice by the FCC for operating an unlicensed device capable of receiving elements of the electro-magnetic spectrum. Who cares if this is a part of the "unregulated" section of the E/M spectrum.
Since there is a device that alters the E/M frequencies coming from this machine (aka the "paint" on the vehicle), you are in violation of other sections of the DMCA due to having an unauthorized device (the "camera") that circumvents the "anti-piracy" protection from obtaining the image in the first place.
This isn't about trademarks here. The website owner isn't (yet) disputing the use of the trademark, nor is the website owner attempt to sell a similar product (aka an automobile) using that trademark.
Yes, trademarks have to be defended according to U.S. law, but there isn't a trademark infringement going on here.
Besides, the DCMA doesn't cover trademark usage... it only applies to the use of copyright.
The issue with the "New Zork Times" is that the "New York Times" certainly does sound similar, and the purpose of the "New Zork Times" was for something "related" to journalism... aka it was for a similar product. Branding is important, and Infocom in this case tried to make the "newspaper" appear in a format similar to the better known commercial organization as well. Again, this doesn't relate to the above incident.
Trademarks aren't copyright protected. The form and styling of the vehicle, however, might be considered a "work of art" and as such have tertiary copyright status such as when you attempt to take a photo of a statue or other 3-D work of art. It depends largely on the context, but clearly this website is using the vehicle as the focus of the image and it certainly could be argued that the vehicles are being admired as works of art. As they should be in many cases.
Some (not all) of the images also appear to be from official Toyota publications and/or photographers hired under contract by Toyota. The copyright status of these images is much more clear-cut.
Still, there is no reason to even comply (or even respond) to letters or notices that don't give specifics regarding what images are out of compliance and what aspect of the copyright status is being asserted here. They can't just ask you to shut down your website.
It is even more insane to shoot the fans here, who are hyping up and adding "buzz" to their products. This is "free" advertising of the kind that most marketing groups salivate over and only could wish they could get. The lawyer/marketing genius needs to get fired by Toyota for even considering the thought of going after these guys.
If the website was offering images of Toyota cars blowing up, in crashes, covered with blood, or appearing in a negative light, that could be something more of a concern. Instead, they (Toyota) should be grateful that they aren't being charged for this "service". Heck, their P.R. guys should be uploading more photos to this website.... particularly after this has received some huge attention through slashdotting and other blog posts.
The status of being a non-profit or not has no relevance with the DMCA. It applies to what network "hosts" have to do in order to comply with copyright laws in regards to electronic communications.
In other words, the DMCA notice is certainly appropriate in this circumstance, given the nature of the request (to remove images from a website). There are additional provisions where either the person uploading the image or the web hosting service to protest the removal and gets into a larger legal challenge for both those demanding the take down as well as for the "web host". The site operator certainly can't just remove these images without a formal DMCA notification without getting himself into a whole lot of legal trouble.
These images do seem to be posted by 3rd party individuals. These 3rd party uploaders are the ones that could put this website operator into a real bind here, forcing the need for formal DMCA take-down notices.
Just because somebody sends you an invoice doesn't mean that you have to pay it.
This, in fact, is a common scam technique, where somebody will send to a small business some sort of random invoice (sometimes to larger businesses) demanding payment for some random "service" that has been provided.
They (Toyota) should know full well that if they actually take legal action to collect on these invoices, that they would be thrown out of court.
But of course that does mean you have to appear in court (often not in a convenient venue) and defend why you have refused to pay on the bill if you are refusing payment.... and you have to give formal notice to the person submitting the invoice that you dispute the terms of service.
Still, if I were running this website, I would refuse payment as the DCMA is quite clear about what the law is here in terms of legal requirements to take down photos or "copyrighted content".
At the same time, who "owns the copyright" on a picture of a Lexis or other vehicle is something that can be debated in court. Yes, the photographer who made the image in the first place has rights, as does the property owner (if it wasn't in a "public" place). The physical structure of the vehicle itself can also be considered "a work of art"... which is what I guess Toyota is trying to do here. So yeah, they do have a slight point even if Toyota didn't physically take the photo.
Still, this is a P.R. nightmare and something most companies don't want to either bother with or are usually tickled that somebody is promoting their product over and above their competitors. Frankly, rather than demanding a take-down of the pictures, they ought to be sending professionally looking pictures with full republication and distribution rights granted.
There really isn't "intellectual property". There are patents, copyrights, trade secrets, and trademarks. Patents and trademarks are regulated by one agency, and copyrights by a completely different one (the USPTO and Library of Congress respectively). Trade secret laws tend to be state-regulated and not a federal issue (for the most part).
These are very, very different and unfortunately are lumped together into one big vat called "intellectual property" with the further concept that anything which can be drawn, written down, or discussed can also be "owned". That is so far from the truth that it makes me hurt to even hear this.
More to the point. "IP" doesn't exist. It never has. There are no "intellectual property laws" on the books, as this is just a popular media shorthand for the other kinds of laws I mentioned above... certainly not a legal term.
Richard Stallman does a better job at explaining this issue and concept:
No, "intellectual property" really doesn't exist and to claim that it does is a lie. This is, however, a concept that is seeking to expand very narrowly defined concepts to encompass things like databases of factual data which was never covered by these laws.
OCLC can "copright" their catalog of classification codes, but I fail to see how publishing a minor except (aka the bibliographic entry for a book) is necessarily protected. Indeed, it is explicitly permitted under U.S. copyright law (and similar laws in other countries) under the concept of "fair-use". Like I said, this is "copyright law" and not "intellectual property law".
Mind you, I'm not complaining about the bias here... just the assumption of being "unbiased".
-In contrast, the US news claims not to editorialize while slanting the actual 'facts' being reported or ignoring stories which do not fit the worldview they are selling.
As a semi-regular viewer of the BBC news and a couple other "international" news outlets, it is amazing to me the bias that does come from American journalists even when they aren't out to promote one particular political philosophy over the other.
Not that the BBC is any better, but at least it is a very different perspective than those who think the USA ends at the Hudson River west of NYC.
As far as the limited spectrum is concerned.... can you name any group that haas been explicitly denied a permit for commercial radio due to political leanings?
I'll admit that I'm not really keen on the consolidation of the radio spectrum by just a small number of companies, and I'd rather have some severe restrictions on how many stations a company or group of individuals can own at the same time. I certainly don't like one company owning all of the stations in a particular market.
Even so, there is nothing that would stop a group (or has stopped a group) from starting up their own "radio network" that espouses any sort of political ideals. Getting that "network" commercially viable, however, is not a trivial task. The conservative hosts seem to have figured it out, and the liberal ones haven't.
The problem here is that the major news media outlets assert the claim to "balanced and fair" news coverage, and add the veneer of being a 3rd party when covering political issues.
The truth is far different from this, and that is the real issue.
I don't object to something like "Worker's World Daily" or some other magazine that proudly proclaims its political bias. Or talk radio shows like Rush Limbaugh or Howard Stern. At least you know where those guys are coming from and have clearly stated agendas for what they are discussing.
CBS Evening News with Katie Coric pretends to be "balanced" in its coverage of events for each candidate, but did nearly nothing about the "breaking news" of Obama's suggestion to kill the American coal industry or his association with Bill Ayers. Yet they dove (and continue to dive into) the trivial issue of Sarah Palin's clothing... ignoring that Hillary Clinton spent even more on the clothing she wore during her campaign this past year (or had it donated by various famous designers).
If you are going to endorse a candidate... at least announce the fact and let your viewers/listeners/readers know about that fact before they get the news from you. The major news outlets don't do this, in spite of their rather blatant and obvious bias.
It isn't universal within the Wikimedia Foundation politics arena, but there certainly are some hard-core zealots who support the Creative Commons suite at the exclusion of all other types of licenses, and some of those few individuals have seats on the WMF board of trustees.
Yes, I do think RMS is being strong-armed here into making changes to the GFDL strictly because the WMF wants to get out from under the GFDL and throw it into the trash. I have been told so explicitly, and that my claims on the GFDL are moot for anything I've published under just the GFDL. So much so that I've been asked to identify what is my work so it can be removed from all Wikimedia projects (including Wikipedia), allowing a smoother transition to the CC license suite.
It is highly doubtful that RMS would have done anything approaching this if it weren't for WMF politics.
Another term for "first name", as it applies to a unique name identifier within a family is also a "given name", although "christian name" is appropriate as well in some contexts.
The "last name" is also called "sir name" or "surname" is also an appropriate term for the family name.
Otherwise, you got the gist of this whole thing correctly.
Right now the arrow is pointing at Gays and Muslims and atheists. I wonder who will be the target(s) in 2030?
One word:
Chinese
If there were as many Chinese immigrants proportionally to their mother country's population as there are Mexican immigrants, Latino illegal immigrants wouldn't even be a blip on the American political scene at all.
Certainly the hispanic labor unions don't want a bunch of Chinese illegals coming in and stealing their jobs and speaking an unintelligible language (to them) with strange cultural and religious customs.
If given half a chance, there would be several times more illegal Chinese immigrants than Mexican and Latino immigrants as well. The only thing stopping it at the moment is a small body of water called the Pacific Ocean. It is happening anyway, but at the moment it is relatively small time problems and not something commanding the national media attention.
You don't have to like this, but this will be the next major ethnic group for Americans to have to work with and deal with. It will also make Latinos seem very mainstream American by comparison.
As far as what will happen with Obama over the next four years (before the 2012 election), all I hope is that the concerns and even out right fears are proven to be unfounded. I genuinely hope that Obama is going to prove himself to be a moderate (perhaps slightly more liberal than typical) and not really do too much that is massively radical in terms of changing key U.S. foreign policy platforms.
BTW, be careful for what you wish for here as well, if you think that Bush is so awful that Obama incompetency and malevolence isn't going to be just as bad for the Democrats.
I think Obama is going to flush a bunch of hard won victories against terrorism down the toilet and lead to direct attacks against America on American soil by these terrorist groups. I pray that I'm wrong, and only time will tell. In this sense, I am praying to God to intervene into the Obama presidency and help him and the rest of our country to actually succeed in this job he has talked the rest of the country into giving to him. I don't wish Obama any problem, and if he is able to keep America strong over the next four years, he will legitimately deserve another term in office.
If this attitude does happen, it would be an amazing accomplishment.
For years and years in American society, the person a great many people looked at was Abraham Lincoln, Andrew Jackson, and several other people who achieved the U.S. Presidency that genuinely arose from near poverty and very meager circumstances to ultimately attain this highest political office in the country... and everything associated with that kind of achievement.
Giving rise to some genuine hope and providing some inspiration to some kids to try and do something beyond joining a gang and partying up a storm is certainly a good thing. Obama certainly isn't the only person to look at as a role model and leader (I can name Colin Powell, Bill Cosby, Martin Luther King Jr., and a great many others) but this is a seminal achievement worthy of note.
What is rough about the American black community (as opposed to recent immigrants from Africa... a wholly different ethnic community entirely even if they share the same skin color) is how they have had an incredibly tough time becoming a part of the American mainstream. Irish, Italian, Polish, and even German immigrants all have had tough times trying to fit in and having to live in inner city slums and ghettos... as have a great many other large ethnic groups.
There are no easy answers here, but on the whole what this has done is to be able to let the black community be able to say "we have arrived" to the rest of America, just as having JFK become president in 1961 was able to let American Catholics be able to feel like they were a part of mainstream America as well.
I agree. I thought it was wonderful that the current U.S. Congress has had its lowest rate of passing legislation in the past 50 years.
The stuff that is getting passed is usually important enough and has enough consensus to really be worth getting passed, and the meat grinder legislation is usually not getting through.
Sounds like a good thing to me.
If anything scares me more, is a legislator who claims he is working by getting laws passed. A vast majority of the time of a legislator ought to be seeing that stuff doesn't get passed, or at least strongly questioning the rationale for change.
When I've sat on legislative bodies myself, it amazes me how much just gets through out of sheer apathy of those who are supposed to be voting on the issues. Well, that and how powerful the "staff" tends to be in terms of setting and determining the agenda even though they don't have a formal vote. In order to get things done, I usually have to piss off a staff member or two along the way, and usually it is fighting bureaucratic inertia to even try. The bodies I've sat on are of relatively minor consequence as well.
The problem isn't the "neoconservative leadership" in the Republican party, but rather those who have sold out. A great many Republicans ran on a platform of conservatism and then once they got into power they ended up taxing & spending as much if not more than their Democratic predecessors.
It didn't help when the Republican party threw Newt Gingrich under the bus at the first hint of trouble, and have repeatedly shown a tendency of abandoning those folks just when the political heat gets turned up a little bit. Had the Democrats done this, Bill Clinton wouldn't have been re-elected for a 2nd term and Hillary would have been known only as a former first lady.
I don't know if the Democratic tendency of sticking with their leaders no matter how corrupt or bizzare their behavior might be is good either, like sleeping with same-sex congressional pages or laundering money in the congressional post office.
Both major political parties have shown a strong self-interest and haven't really cared about ordinary citizens except when it comes time to get their vote.
I don't get this attitude here, or anybody saying things like this to photographers who are trying to contribute to Wikipedia and other Wikimedia projects.
First of all, the GFDL isn't a "pretend free license", although I do admit it has some strong detractors. More than that, however.
Also, for photographers and graphical/multi-media content, there has always been a plethora of other licenses that you could use for contributions to Wikimedia projects, including a great many that have been permitted on the Wikimedia Commons.
So the main issue here is the textual content, and importantly those who wish to make large textual donations to the Wikimedia Foundation in one form or another. This isn't easy to do, but there have been some notable examples of some large projects that have been donated to Wikibooks, just to give an example. Re-licensing that content for the GFDL, apparently, has been acceptable for quite a few people who have made these kind of donations.
I have been leading those who would want to allow dual-licensed content on Wikimedia projects as well, which seems to bring as much confusion here as the license switch (perhaps more confusion than the switch). In a great many ways, I hope that at least for now both licenses can be maintained on most of the Wikimedia sister projects until the whole mess gets straightened out. Wikinews is already CC-by-SA, so it won't be impacted by this change.
I see no reason why FSF should accomodate a GFDL user just because they are big. If a person who has written two articles asks FSF to make a future GFDL version permitting relicensing, FSF will probably say no, but now we see a legal person that has actually not written anything but merely hosts content written by others to be able to get FSF do them a favour.
There is a whole lot of mis-information about what is happening and why it is happening. I also don't believe Jimbo Wales when he said that he would have selected another license had it been available at the time.
One of the things not spoken here is how the GNUpedia project was merged into Nupedia (and Wikipedia at the same time), which also included some who were already committed to the GFDL at the very beginning for exactly what the GFDL represented. This was not a small group of people who gave Wikipedia an early boost at a critical time in the history of that project. I know this, as I was one of those people who transitioned from GNUpedia to Wikipedia.
There are some individuals on the board of trustees of the Wikimedia Foundation who are also involved with Creative Commons, and I believe there is a little bit of a conflict of interest here. Of course conflicts of interest are hardly new to Wikimedia politics either.
Creative Commons has some good licenses, and they certainly have a role to play in the development of free content. But they aren't the ultimate solution, nor do I think it is necessarily the best thing for Wikipedia and the other Wikimedia projects to transition into the CC-by-SA (or whatever license, I'm really not sure the exact license that is being selected).
This transition is being spearheaded by some diehard Creative Commons fans that have a near religious attitude about this transition which is also "forget what anybody else thinks here, we must make this change and make the change now!"
I personally would have preferred to have the GFDL modified to take care of some of the very legitimate concerns about shorter excerpts that required republishing the whole GFDL license along with the content, and some of the other problem issues that still haven't been resolved with this "transition" to a newer version of the GFDL.
This is also a dangerous move for the Free Software Foundation, as it sort of breaks the contract with the content developers on the belief that the FSF wouldn't ever "sell out" to some high power interests. While this is an extreme, it is almost like the next rev of the GPL allowing you to re-license all content under the Microsoft EULA. Yeah, the Creative Commons license still is mostly a "free content" license at least, but then again it isn't fool-proof either, nor do I trust Creative Commons due to their strong-arm tactics that have been involved here with modifying the GFDL.
They certainly don't represent all stake holders in the GFDL'd content.... even on just Wikipedia.
I disagree that the GFDL "turns out to be highly impractical for Wikipedia" or "any meaningful reuse of its content"
This is just a bunch of people who are religious zealots about the Creative Commons licensing suite who are upset that they can't just re-license the content of Wikipedia into whatever other content license they choose, and hate the viral nature of the Free Software Foundation license suite.
The politics of this simply turn my stomach, even if there are some "legitimate" issues about the GFDL that do need to be worked out. Switching licenses, I don't believe, resolves the issues here and instead creates even more heartburn.
Furthermore, one of the reasons I contribute to Wikimedia projects is because they are licensed under the GFDL, and I support the general goals set forth by the Free Software Foundation for this sort of content.
Like I said, there are problems with the GFDL, but throwing it away just because a small group (and it is a very small group of individuals pushing to make this change) doesn't like the Free Software Foundation. Unfortunately this small group making this change also have some prominent positions within the WMF.
I think the current plan is to eventually move the ISS to one of the Lagrangian points between the Earth and the Moon, where it would become a museum and semi-permanent artifact of the late 20th Century space science.
Because that is something to worry about more than eight years away, no presidential administration in the USA has even really worried about the issue or certainly devoted any budgetary concern about how that is going to happen. Certainly the current plan is to utilize the ISS for more than the next decade even in its current orbit.
The answer to this has to do more with what the rest of the ISS is doing than the little piece of trash that you are throwing "overboard".
You are completely correct that anything you toss out will eventually come back and hit you no matter how hard you throw it. Well, that is if that is the only thing you have tossed and in a completely pure mathematical sense.
At the ISS altitude you are still somewhat inside the Earth's atmosphere anyway, so everything has a bit of atmospheric drag to it. Yeah, it is so little "atmosphere" that it might as well be the best vacuum you can find on any ground-based laboratory, but getting pelted by air molecules still eventually slow down spacecraft, including the ISS. That is also the reason why this tank is even in the news at all right now.
The ISS has to use thrusters and "boosts" from the shuttle visits to raise the altitude of the station periodically. As soon as this happens, the station is in a completely different orbit from the trash, which can then take its sweet time to crash to the Earth eventually.
Both Skylab and MIR suffered the ultimate consequences of what would happen if you didn't perform this periodic boosting... and ultimately came crashing to the Earth. The ISS is large enough that, at least from what I understand, the partner agencies don't ever want to see that happen.
We already know that Earth is our only hope for sustaining the human race inside the solar system. If we want to colonise anywhere outside the solar system, we're not going to achieve it with traditional manned spacecraft (in the sense of having a living crew).
To paraphrase:
"We already know that the Serengeti plains of Africa is our only hope for sustaining the human race on the Earth. If we want to colonize anywhere outside of Africa, we're not going to achieve it with traditional hunting expedition on foot"
Please..... the whole of human history and pre-history is filled with people going to places and doing things that is outside of our comfort zone. If we would have stayed in a place that offered the ultimate comfort, we never would have left the birthplace of humanity.
There is no reason to believe that the Earth is the one and the only place that mankind can live. Yeah, it is filled with life and capable of sustaining mankind with a minimum of technological resources. But if you are looking for locations where people are living that can't sustain human life without technology... I'd invite you to look at almost any major metro area in the world.
I love pointing out that the original settlement of Los Angeles, California, died out completely due to starvation and a lack of water. The early history of that city is remarkable as it was very rough for the early groups of individuals who tried to come there. With technology, it now supports a population of close to 12 million people.
I see no reason that a similar level of technological support couldn't sustain a similarly sized population on the Moon, Mars, or elsewhere in the Solar System. The Moon is somewhat easier because supply lines from the Earth are closer, although Mars is easier because all of the basic "ingredients" necessary to support life are already there (carbon, water, nitrogen, etc.)
It also doesn't have to be an either/or proposition for manned vs. unmanned space exploration either, and I find those individuals espousing the viewpoint that we should cancel all manned spaceflight as short sighted and ultimately shooting themselves in the foot if they genuinely want to see unmanned spaceflight happen as well. You can't have one type of space exploration without the other, and I dare you to show me otherwise. Without manned spaceflight, the bucks simply won't be there for unmanned probes either.
They may be "required" to take cash, but they sure don't have to make it easy. My former electric utility company would gladly take cash from me... as long as I went to their office, in person, in Scotland (I live in Utah). It is former as I have since moved and have another electric utility company I work with.
You also may be required to fill out a whole bunch of forms and even perhaps be finger printed for trying to do a cash transaction. After spending the half hour or so on all of that paper work, yeah, they'll take your cash from you. Perhaps.
Slashdot Mirror
Having been the recipient of some of these "fake invoices", even that is hard to press. It gets real grey and fuzzy with the law here. I have demanded to know from some companies specific details about what it is that I'm being charged with and to know what service was being provided. Some medical billing can get rather vague... where one company billed me something like eight months after I went to an emergency room for treatment, when I already paid the hospital and the physician who treated me, as well as the radiologist in three separate previous billings. I could go on here, but sometimes you might actually owe the money, and perhaps you don't. It can be hard to know when you must pay a bill.
Regardless, fraud laws are a criminal statue that requires the involvement of a state attorney general or at least a government prosecutor of some sort willing to step in and help you out. While some of these prosecutors are willing to step in and offer some good advise, often they don't really have the time available to go into specifics unless the fraud is rather clear-cut and blatantly trying to be malicious. Or more importantly, if you haven't paid the bill, they (the prosecutors) won't do anything at all (usually).
Even more strangely, a company that bills you for services that you never received or requested can still hit your credit ratings for failure to make payments on those bills. That can and sometimes does negatively impact your credit scores, regardless of any "comment" that you can put onto your credit report denoting fraud. If anything, noting that the billing was fraud makes you look even worse to creditors.
Still, until Toyota says "We own the copyright on image 11684.jpg, 11689.jpg" and mentioning other image explicitly on the website, all the site owner has to say is:
"We were not served a proper DMCA take-down notice, and as such we were unable to fill the request."
The judge would look at the invoice and throw the thing out. The DMCA notice has to be done in writing, be specific, and allow for a response if the copyright is being questioned or challenged. None of this is happening, and it would be Toyota that would have egg on its face if they really tried to follow through with this tactic.
Still, as far as the free advertising is concerned, once copyright is clearly established and can be legitimately claimed by Toyota, proper notices have been filed and the law has been followed, the images have to go.
Unless.... you are claiming "fair-use" privileges for the use of the image of the vehicle.... so the whole thing starts all over again in another round of legal maneuvering. Fair-use here might actually be valid, depending on who took the image and in what context it is being used.
You get served a notice by the FCC for operating an unlicensed device capable of receiving elements of the electro-magnetic spectrum. Who cares if this is a part of the "unregulated" section of the E/M spectrum.
Since there is a device that alters the E/M frequencies coming from this machine (aka the "paint" on the vehicle), you are in violation of other sections of the DMCA due to having an unauthorized device (the "camera") that circumvents the "anti-piracy" protection from obtaining the image in the first place.
This isn't about trademarks here. The website owner isn't (yet) disputing the use of the trademark, nor is the website owner attempt to sell a similar product (aka an automobile) using that trademark.
Yes, trademarks have to be defended according to U.S. law, but there isn't a trademark infringement going on here.
Besides, the DCMA doesn't cover trademark usage... it only applies to the use of copyright.
The issue with the "New Zork Times" is that the "New York Times" certainly does sound similar, and the purpose of the "New Zork Times" was for something "related" to journalism... aka it was for a similar product. Branding is important, and Infocom in this case tried to make the "newspaper" appear in a format similar to the better known commercial organization as well. Again, this doesn't relate to the above incident.
Trademarks aren't copyright protected. The form and styling of the vehicle, however, might be considered a "work of art" and as such have tertiary copyright status such as when you attempt to take a photo of a statue or other 3-D work of art. It depends largely on the context, but clearly this website is using the vehicle as the focus of the image and it certainly could be argued that the vehicles are being admired as works of art. As they should be in many cases.
Some (not all) of the images also appear to be from official Toyota publications and/or photographers hired under contract by Toyota. The copyright status of these images is much more clear-cut.
Still, there is no reason to even comply (or even respond) to letters or notices that don't give specifics regarding what images are out of compliance and what aspect of the copyright status is being asserted here. They can't just ask you to shut down your website.
It is even more insane to shoot the fans here, who are hyping up and adding "buzz" to their products. This is "free" advertising of the kind that most marketing groups salivate over and only could wish they could get. The lawyer/marketing genius needs to get fired by Toyota for even considering the thought of going after these guys.
If the website was offering images of Toyota cars blowing up, in crashes, covered with blood, or appearing in a negative light, that could be something more of a concern. Instead, they (Toyota) should be grateful that they aren't being charged for this "service". Heck, their P.R. guys should be uploading more photos to this website.... particularly after this has received some huge attention through slashdotting and other blog posts.
The status of being a non-profit or not has no relevance with the DMCA. It applies to what network "hosts" have to do in order to comply with copyright laws in regards to electronic communications.
In other words, the DMCA notice is certainly appropriate in this circumstance, given the nature of the request (to remove images from a website). There are additional provisions where either the person uploading the image or the web hosting service to protest the removal and gets into a larger legal challenge for both those demanding the take down as well as for the "web host". The site operator certainly can't just remove these images without a formal DMCA notification without getting himself into a whole lot of legal trouble.
These images do seem to be posted by 3rd party individuals. These 3rd party uploaders are the ones that could put this website operator into a real bind here, forcing the need for formal DMCA take-down notices.
Just because somebody sends you an invoice doesn't mean that you have to pay it.
This, in fact, is a common scam technique, where somebody will send to a small business some sort of random invoice (sometimes to larger businesses) demanding payment for some random "service" that has been provided.
They (Toyota) should know full well that if they actually take legal action to collect on these invoices, that they would be thrown out of court.
But of course that does mean you have to appear in court (often not in a convenient venue) and defend why you have refused to pay on the bill if you are refusing payment.... and you have to give formal notice to the person submitting the invoice that you dispute the terms of service.
Still, if I were running this website, I would refuse payment as the DCMA is quite clear about what the law is here in terms of legal requirements to take down photos or "copyrighted content".
At the same time, who "owns the copyright" on a picture of a Lexis or other vehicle is something that can be debated in court. Yes, the photographer who made the image in the first place has rights, as does the property owner (if it wasn't in a "public" place). The physical structure of the vehicle itself can also be considered "a work of art"... which is what I guess Toyota is trying to do here. So yeah, they do have a slight point even if Toyota didn't physically take the photo.
Still, this is a P.R. nightmare and something most companies don't want to either bother with or are usually tickled that somebody is promoting their product over and above their competitors. Frankly, rather than demanding a take-down of the pictures, they ought to be sending professionally looking pictures with full republication and distribution rights granted.
There really isn't "intellectual property". There are patents, copyrights, trade secrets, and trademarks. Patents and trademarks are regulated by one agency, and copyrights by a completely different one (the USPTO and Library of Congress respectively). Trade secret laws tend to be state-regulated and not a federal issue (for the most part).
These are very, very different and unfortunately are lumped together into one big vat called "intellectual property" with the further concept that anything which can be drawn, written down, or discussed can also be "owned". That is so far from the truth that it makes me hurt to even hear this.
More to the point. "IP" doesn't exist. It never has. There are no "intellectual property laws" on the books, as this is just a popular media shorthand for the other kinds of laws I mentioned above... certainly not a legal term.
Richard Stallman does a better job at explaining this issue and concept:
http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/not-ipr.xhtml
No, "intellectual property" really doesn't exist and to claim that it does is a lie. This is, however, a concept that is seeking to expand very narrowly defined concepts to encompass things like databases of factual data which was never covered by these laws.
OCLC can "copright" their catalog of classification codes, but I fail to see how publishing a minor except (aka the bibliographic entry for a book) is necessarily protected. Indeed, it is explicitly permitted under U.S. copyright law (and similar laws in other countries) under the concept of "fair-use". Like I said, this is "copyright law" and not "intellectual property law".
Mind you, I'm not complaining about the bias here... just the assumption of being "unbiased".
As a semi-regular viewer of the BBC news and a couple other "international" news outlets, it is amazing to me the bias that does come from American journalists even when they aren't out to promote one particular political philosophy over the other.
Not that the BBC is any better, but at least it is a very different perspective than those who think the USA ends at the Hudson River west of NYC.
As far as the limited spectrum is concerned.... can you name any group that haas been explicitly denied a permit for commercial radio due to political leanings?
I'll admit that I'm not really keen on the consolidation of the radio spectrum by just a small number of companies, and I'd rather have some severe restrictions on how many stations a company or group of individuals can own at the same time. I certainly don't like one company owning all of the stations in a particular market.
Even so, there is nothing that would stop a group (or has stopped a group) from starting up their own "radio network" that espouses any sort of political ideals. Getting that "network" commercially viable, however, is not a trivial task. The conservative hosts seem to have figured it out, and the liberal ones haven't.
The problem here is that the major news media outlets assert the claim to "balanced and fair" news coverage, and add the veneer of being a 3rd party when covering political issues.
The truth is far different from this, and that is the real issue.
I don't object to something like "Worker's World Daily" or some other magazine that proudly proclaims its political bias. Or talk radio shows like Rush Limbaugh or Howard Stern. At least you know where those guys are coming from and have clearly stated agendas for what they are discussing.
CBS Evening News with Katie Coric pretends to be "balanced" in its coverage of events for each candidate, but did nearly nothing about the "breaking news" of Obama's suggestion to kill the American coal industry or his association with Bill Ayers. Yet they dove (and continue to dive into) the trivial issue of Sarah Palin's clothing... ignoring that Hillary Clinton spent even more on the clothing she wore during her campaign this past year (or had it donated by various famous designers).
If you are going to endorse a candidate... at least announce the fact and let your viewers/listeners/readers know about that fact before they get the news from you. The major news outlets don't do this, in spite of their rather blatant and obvious bias.
It isn't universal within the Wikimedia Foundation politics arena, but there certainly are some hard-core zealots who support the Creative Commons suite at the exclusion of all other types of licenses, and some of those few individuals have seats on the WMF board of trustees.
Yes, I do think RMS is being strong-armed here into making changes to the GFDL strictly because the WMF wants to get out from under the GFDL and throw it into the trash. I have been told so explicitly, and that my claims on the GFDL are moot for anything I've published under just the GFDL. So much so that I've been asked to identify what is my work so it can be removed from all Wikimedia projects (including Wikipedia), allowing a smoother transition to the CC license suite.
It is highly doubtful that RMS would have done anything approaching this if it weren't for WMF politics.
Another term for "first name", as it applies to a unique name identifier within a family is also a "given name", although "christian name" is appropriate as well in some contexts.
The "last name" is also called "sir name" or "surname" is also an appropriate term for the family name.
Otherwise, you got the gist of this whole thing correctly.
One word:
Chinese
If there were as many Chinese immigrants proportionally to their mother country's population as there are Mexican immigrants, Latino illegal immigrants wouldn't even be a blip on the American political scene at all.
Certainly the hispanic labor unions don't want a bunch of Chinese illegals coming in and stealing their jobs and speaking an unintelligible language (to them) with strange cultural and religious customs.
If given half a chance, there would be several times more illegal Chinese immigrants than Mexican and Latino immigrants as well. The only thing stopping it at the moment is a small body of water called the Pacific Ocean. It is happening anyway, but at the moment it is relatively small time problems and not something commanding the national media attention.
You don't have to like this, but this will be the next major ethnic group for Americans to have to work with and deal with. It will also make Latinos seem very mainstream American by comparison.
As far as what will happen with Obama over the next four years (before the 2012 election), all I hope is that the concerns and even out right fears are proven to be unfounded. I genuinely hope that Obama is going to prove himself to be a moderate (perhaps slightly more liberal than typical) and not really do too much that is massively radical in terms of changing key U.S. foreign policy platforms.
BTW, be careful for what you wish for here as well, if you think that Bush is so awful that Obama incompetency and malevolence isn't going to be just as bad for the Democrats.
I think Obama is going to flush a bunch of hard won victories against terrorism down the toilet and lead to direct attacks against America on American soil by these terrorist groups. I pray that I'm wrong, and only time will tell. In this sense, I am praying to God to intervene into the Obama presidency and help him and the rest of our country to actually succeed in this job he has talked the rest of the country into giving to him. I don't wish Obama any problem, and if he is able to keep America strong over the next four years, he will legitimately deserve another term in office.
But now, Obama has to put up or shut up.
If this attitude does happen, it would be an amazing accomplishment.
For years and years in American society, the person a great many people looked at was Abraham Lincoln, Andrew Jackson, and several other people who achieved the U.S. Presidency that genuinely arose from near poverty and very meager circumstances to ultimately attain this highest political office in the country... and everything associated with that kind of achievement.
Giving rise to some genuine hope and providing some inspiration to some kids to try and do something beyond joining a gang and partying up a storm is certainly a good thing. Obama certainly isn't the only person to look at as a role model and leader (I can name Colin Powell, Bill Cosby, Martin Luther King Jr., and a great many others) but this is a seminal achievement worthy of note.
What is rough about the American black community (as opposed to recent immigrants from Africa... a wholly different ethnic community entirely even if they share the same skin color) is how they have had an incredibly tough time becoming a part of the American mainstream. Irish, Italian, Polish, and even German immigrants all have had tough times trying to fit in and having to live in inner city slums and ghettos... as have a great many other large ethnic groups.
There are no easy answers here, but on the whole what this has done is to be able to let the black community be able to say "we have arrived" to the rest of America, just as having JFK become president in 1961 was able to let American Catholics be able to feel like they were a part of mainstream America as well.
I agree. I thought it was wonderful that the current U.S. Congress has had its lowest rate of passing legislation in the past 50 years.
The stuff that is getting passed is usually important enough and has enough consensus to really be worth getting passed, and the meat grinder legislation is usually not getting through.
Sounds like a good thing to me.
If anything scares me more, is a legislator who claims he is working by getting laws passed. A vast majority of the time of a legislator ought to be seeing that stuff doesn't get passed, or at least strongly questioning the rationale for change.
When I've sat on legislative bodies myself, it amazes me how much just gets through out of sheer apathy of those who are supposed to be voting on the issues. Well, that and how powerful the "staff" tends to be in terms of setting and determining the agenda even though they don't have a formal vote. In order to get things done, I usually have to piss off a staff member or two along the way, and usually it is fighting bureaucratic inertia to even try. The bodies I've sat on are of relatively minor consequence as well.
The problem isn't the "neoconservative leadership" in the Republican party, but rather those who have sold out. A great many Republicans ran on a platform of conservatism and then once they got into power they ended up taxing & spending as much if not more than their Democratic predecessors.
It didn't help when the Republican party threw Newt Gingrich under the bus at the first hint of trouble, and have repeatedly shown a tendency of abandoning those folks just when the political heat gets turned up a little bit. Had the Democrats done this, Bill Clinton wouldn't have been re-elected for a 2nd term and Hillary would have been known only as a former first lady.
I don't know if the Democratic tendency of sticking with their leaders no matter how corrupt or bizzare their behavior might be is good either, like sleeping with same-sex congressional pages or laundering money in the congressional post office.
Both major political parties have shown a strong self-interest and haven't really cared about ordinary citizens except when it comes time to get their vote.
I don't get this attitude here, or anybody saying things like this to photographers who are trying to contribute to Wikipedia and other Wikimedia projects.
First of all, the GFDL isn't a "pretend free license", although I do admit it has some strong detractors. More than that, however.
Also, for photographers and graphical/multi-media content, there has always been a plethora of other licenses that you could use for contributions to Wikimedia projects, including a great many that have been permitted on the Wikimedia Commons.
So the main issue here is the textual content, and importantly those who wish to make large textual donations to the Wikimedia Foundation in one form or another. This isn't easy to do, but there have been some notable examples of some large projects that have been donated to Wikibooks, just to give an example. Re-licensing that content for the GFDL, apparently, has been acceptable for quite a few people who have made these kind of donations.
I have been leading those who would want to allow dual-licensed content on Wikimedia projects as well, which seems to bring as much confusion here as the license switch (perhaps more confusion than the switch). In a great many ways, I hope that at least for now both licenses can be maintained on most of the Wikimedia sister projects until the whole mess gets straightened out. Wikinews is already CC-by-SA, so it won't be impacted by this change.
There is a whole lot of mis-information about what is happening and why it is happening. I also don't believe Jimbo Wales when he said that he would have selected another license had it been available at the time.
One of the things not spoken here is how the GNUpedia project was merged into Nupedia (and Wikipedia at the same time), which also included some who were already committed to the GFDL at the very beginning for exactly what the GFDL represented. This was not a small group of people who gave Wikipedia an early boost at a critical time in the history of that project. I know this, as I was one of those people who transitioned from GNUpedia to Wikipedia.
There are some individuals on the board of trustees of the Wikimedia Foundation who are also involved with Creative Commons, and I believe there is a little bit of a conflict of interest here. Of course conflicts of interest are hardly new to Wikimedia politics either.
Creative Commons has some good licenses, and they certainly have a role to play in the development of free content. But they aren't the ultimate solution, nor do I think it is necessarily the best thing for Wikipedia and the other Wikimedia projects to transition into the CC-by-SA (or whatever license, I'm really not sure the exact license that is being selected).
This transition is being spearheaded by some diehard Creative Commons fans that have a near religious attitude about this transition which is also "forget what anybody else thinks here, we must make this change and make the change now!"
I personally would have preferred to have the GFDL modified to take care of some of the very legitimate concerns about shorter excerpts that required republishing the whole GFDL license along with the content, and some of the other problem issues that still haven't been resolved with this "transition" to a newer version of the GFDL.
This is also a dangerous move for the Free Software Foundation, as it sort of breaks the contract with the content developers on the belief that the FSF wouldn't ever "sell out" to some high power interests. While this is an extreme, it is almost like the next rev of the GPL allowing you to re-license all content under the Microsoft EULA. Yeah, the Creative Commons license still is mostly a "free content" license at least, but then again it isn't fool-proof either, nor do I trust Creative Commons due to their strong-arm tactics that have been involved here with modifying the GFDL.
They certainly don't represent all stake holders in the GFDL'd content.... even on just Wikipedia.
I disagree that the GFDL "turns out to be highly impractical for Wikipedia" or "any meaningful reuse of its content"
This is just a bunch of people who are religious zealots about the Creative Commons licensing suite who are upset that they can't just re-license the content of Wikipedia into whatever other content license they choose, and hate the viral nature of the Free Software Foundation license suite.
The politics of this simply turn my stomach, even if there are some "legitimate" issues about the GFDL that do need to be worked out. Switching licenses, I don't believe, resolves the issues here and instead creates even more heartburn.
Furthermore, one of the reasons I contribute to Wikimedia projects is because they are licensed under the GFDL, and I support the general goals set forth by the Free Software Foundation for this sort of content.
Like I said, there are problems with the GFDL, but throwing it away just because a small group (and it is a very small group of individuals pushing to make this change) doesn't like the Free Software Foundation. Unfortunately this small group making this change also have some prominent positions within the WMF.
I think the current plan is to eventually move the ISS to one of the Lagrangian points between the Earth and the Moon, where it would become a museum and semi-permanent artifact of the late 20th Century space science.
Because that is something to worry about more than eight years away, no presidential administration in the USA has even really worried about the issue or certainly devoted any budgetary concern about how that is going to happen. Certainly the current plan is to utilize the ISS for more than the next decade even in its current orbit.
The only reason the USA has more people incarcerated than China is because China has killed (aka executed) the difference.
BTW, China adds insult to injury by charging the family of the prisoner who is executed a fine for the bullet that is used for the execution.
Yeah, comparing the criminal justice system in China to that in the USA makes a whole lot of sense.
The answer to this has to do more with what the rest of the ISS is doing than the little piece of trash that you are throwing "overboard".
You are completely correct that anything you toss out will eventually come back and hit you no matter how hard you throw it. Well, that is if that is the only thing you have tossed and in a completely pure mathematical sense.
At the ISS altitude you are still somewhat inside the Earth's atmosphere anyway, so everything has a bit of atmospheric drag to it. Yeah, it is so little "atmosphere" that it might as well be the best vacuum you can find on any ground-based laboratory, but getting pelted by air molecules still eventually slow down spacecraft, including the ISS. That is also the reason why this tank is even in the news at all right now.
The ISS has to use thrusters and "boosts" from the shuttle visits to raise the altitude of the station periodically. As soon as this happens, the station is in a completely different orbit from the trash, which can then take its sweet time to crash to the Earth eventually.
Both Skylab and MIR suffered the ultimate consequences of what would happen if you didn't perform this periodic boosting... and ultimately came crashing to the Earth. The ISS is large enough that, at least from what I understand, the partner agencies don't ever want to see that happen.
To paraphrase:
"We already know that the Serengeti plains of Africa is our only hope for sustaining the human race on the Earth. If we want to colonize anywhere outside of Africa, we're not going to achieve it with traditional hunting expedition on foot"
Please..... the whole of human history and pre-history is filled with people going to places and doing things that is outside of our comfort zone. If we would have stayed in a place that offered the ultimate comfort, we never would have left the birthplace of humanity.
There is no reason to believe that the Earth is the one and the only place that mankind can live. Yeah, it is filled with life and capable of sustaining mankind with a minimum of technological resources. But if you are looking for locations where people are living that can't sustain human life without technology... I'd invite you to look at almost any major metro area in the world.
I love pointing out that the original settlement of Los Angeles, California, died out completely due to starvation and a lack of water. The early history of that city is remarkable as it was very rough for the early groups of individuals who tried to come there. With technology, it now supports a population of close to 12 million people.
I see no reason that a similar level of technological support couldn't sustain a similarly sized population on the Moon, Mars, or elsewhere in the Solar System. The Moon is somewhat easier because supply lines from the Earth are closer, although Mars is easier because all of the basic "ingredients" necessary to support life are already there (carbon, water, nitrogen, etc.)
It also doesn't have to be an either/or proposition for manned vs. unmanned space exploration either, and I find those individuals espousing the viewpoint that we should cancel all manned spaceflight as short sighted and ultimately shooting themselves in the foot if they genuinely want to see unmanned spaceflight happen as well. You can't have one type of space exploration without the other, and I dare you to show me otherwise. Without manned spaceflight, the bucks simply won't be there for unmanned probes either.
They may be "required" to take cash, but they sure don't have to make it easy. My former electric utility company would gladly take cash from me... as long as I went to their office, in person, in Scotland (I live in Utah). It is former as I have since moved and have another electric utility company I work with.
You also may be required to fill out a whole bunch of forms and even perhaps be finger printed for trying to do a cash transaction. After spending the half hour or so on all of that paper work, yeah, they'll take your cash from you. Perhaps.