No, you really, really don't -- and that's very clear from your comments. We are not talking about using a copystand here. You are talking about getting accurate facsimiles of maybe 40 foot high pictures in stairwells lit by mixed light of differing colour temperatures -- and possibly no way of getting light in to cover it and fix the colour temp issues.
It doesn't matter how hard it is because solving a problem is simply not the same thing as creative expression. By your logic, brain surgery would be copyrightable just because it's hard! Do you see how ridiculous your argument is now?
Besides, this sort of thing doesn't qualify as "creative" for a much more basic reason: if you introduce originality into your reproduction, then you've just failed at your job of archiving it!
Did the photographer choose the lighting, colors, effects, etc.? No, he just used whatever lighting and camera settings would best preserve the color gamut of the original...
Sounds like a choice to me.
Sure, in the same way that answering "four" when asked "what is two plus two?" is a choice. Or, for a less "trivially easy" example, how solving a crossword puzzle correctly instead of incorrectly is a "choice." Or in other words, it's really no choice at all -- it's either right or it's wrong, and you don't get to decide which is which!
The fundamental error in your thinking is that you think it somehow matters whether the thing was easy or hard to create. Here's a hint: it doesn't. Not even slightly! I could spend six seconds scrawling stick figures on a napkin and it'd still be copyrightable. Or I could spend 50 years painstakingly weighing every individual grain of sand in a jar and recording it into a database, and it still wouldn't! Creativity and effort are orthogonal; copyright depends only on the former.
Oh, and by the way: my girlfriend is an artist and has had to photograph her work before, so I do know how difficult it is. But that still doesn't give the photo it's own copyright separate from that of the original!
I think we'll have to agree to disagree on whether there's any artistry in photographing a painting...
On the contrary, you're just flat-out wrong -- at least for the sort of photography (for the purpose of archival/preservation/digitization) we're talking about here. The artistry in photography is expressed by the choices of the photographer, but no choices were made! Did the photographer choose the subject? No, he's just systematically shooting each painting in the gallery. Did the photographer choose the composition? No, it's rigidly defined to be orthogonal to the painting and cropped at the edge. Did the photographer choose the lighting, colors, effects, etc.? No, he just used whatever lighting and camera settings would best preserve the color gamut of the original (and "best" isn't his choice either; it means minimizing the measured, mathematical difference). It's a mechanical process, not a creative one!
Now, there can be artistry in photographing a painting, but the photo would have had to been made for some purpose other than digitizing an existing work. For example, this photo (that I found randomly from a Google image search) is copyrightable because it was creatively composed. For another example, this one from one of the images being disputed, perhaps even this would be copyrightable (even though the original is certainly not) because whoever did the cropping had to creatively choose what to focus on -- and the copyright would belong to the cropper, not NPG.
I agree that the real solution for wind is decentralized, but it's not that decentralized. We need to keep the individual turbines as large as possible to maximize efficiency, but there's no reason not to distribute them individually or in small groups.
After all, the turbines' physical footprint (the mast foundation) is so small compared to their operational footprint (the minimum distance between turbines so that they don't stall in each other's wake) that they don't need to be sited on their own land, but rather should just be placed on any free patch of ground on property concurrently used for something else: farmland, suburban parking lots, etc.
Presumably because it makes people mistake your vehicle for a police car. Red lights (except on the rear, like brake lights) are illegal too, since they're used by firetrucks and ambulances.
That's the theory, anyway: you could also cynically argue that the real reason they (along with dark/reflective/colored window tint) are illegal is because the authorities want an extra excuse to hassle the sort of people who use these lights (e.g. the import street-racing crowd with their underbody neons, etc.).
Pulling some poor sap over for illegal tint/illegal lights/etc. gives the officer an extra chance to go on a fishing expedition for more profitable offenses, such as DUI or drug possession (especially if he can trick the driver into consenting to a search).
Note, by the way, that this sort of law varies considerably by jurisdiction in terms of what colors are illegal, where (on the car) and how many lights are allowed, etc.
Well yeah, the real issue is the plaintiff's loss, not the defendant's profit. However, they're often correlated well enough to calculate one from the other -- or in other words, the defendant's profit (or potential profit) is often equal to the plaintiff's loss, so you could talk about them interchangeably (as I did).
This doesn't apply to every file sharer, but it does apply to many more than prosecutors would ever want to go after.
No, this doesn't apply to any file sharer. Note the key phrase: "for purposes of commercial advantage or private financial gain." If you're not making a profit off it -- and I've never heard of anybody making a profit file-sharing -- then it can't be criminal infringement.
And they couldn't do this for i and b tags...why, exactly?
Because with the <i> tag, they don't know why it's italicized. Is it emphasis, or just a book title? They're both italicized, you know! Hence the <em> and <cite> tags: they might get rendered as italics, but the computer still knows they mean emphasis and citation, respectively.
I read italicized text differently when speaking aloud. I'd expect a screen reader program to do the same.
D1gital_Prob3 writes with this excerpt from a story about David Myers, a Loyola professor who spent some time studying superhero MMO <yelling>CITY OF HEROES/VILLAINS</yelling>:...
'Cause that's what would happen if the game title was marked up with the <i> tag instead of the <cite> tag and did what you propose. And that's why <i> is wrong. Either you have some particular common reason for wanting italics, in which case you use the appropriate semantic tag, or you don't, in which case the correct way to express "I want this italicized for no particular reason" is to use CSS to do something like this:
<span style="font-style: italic">this text is italicized for no particular reason</span>
(And before you start getting all bitchy about how it's too verbose, that's what CSS classes and ids are for.)
Sure, graphical web browsers all tend to render it as bold or italics, but what about other user agents? The difference is that when they see <strong>, things like screen readers know to yell and web spiders know the word is important, but neither of them has the foggiest idea what to do with <b> because it doesn't mean anything!
Why you choose to allow those that you disagree with to define you is beyond me..
I don't allow those who I disagree with to define me, and I'm baffled about how you got that impression. Speaking of which, I need to correct your attempt:
"In America, they came first for the ideas belonging to the Public Domain but temporarily lent to the studios, And I did not speak up because the studios were abusing their privilege of controlling the distribution of those ideas, and therefore deserve to lose it!"
And you want some definitions? Here are some definitions!
"Property" is physical, finite, and has a fixed inherent value that gets divided up when people try to share it.
"Ideas" are abstract, infinite, and have value only because they are shared and proportional to the extent of the sharing!
"Copyright" is a privilege (not a "right," despite the misleading name) that allows creators of ideas to temporarily control their distribution (instead of immediately entering the Public Domain, as they would inherently), in order to encourage creation of more ideas.
Imagine, for a moment, punitive damages were small or nonexistent.
Why would I want to imagine that? It has nothing whatsoever to do with my point!
I sell 100,000 each of two particular titles. my $5 is basically pure profit, because of the almost nonexistent cost of copying. If I don't get caught, that's, say, $450,000 per title profit for me. If I do get caught, I have to pay compensatory damages of $1,000,000. ($10/DVD).
The profits from one or two titles (in this example) completely offset the fines from getting caught for one.
Only in your idiotic and pointless strawman example. Back in reality, you get fined $1,000,000 in compensatory damages, eliminating all your profit, and then get fined another $1,000,000 in punitive damages, to act as a deterrent. That's what "compensatory" and "punitive" mean!
...straight-up compensatory damages don't act as an effective deterrent
No shit, Sherlock; that's what the punitive damages are for! WTF is your point?
Say Thomas had uploaded 100 songs, to 100 people, and somehow made $0.10 on each upload. (she didn't) The RIAA can prove 25 songs to 25 people (They can't). Straight compensation would be 25*25*$1, or $125. Her profits would be 100*100*$0.10, or $1000. A contrived example, yes, but it illustrates the idea. The expected value of for-profit piracy is a positive amount, without damages beyond straight compensatory.
No, that's not how it works. There are only two possibilities: either you can prove* that she'd made the $1000 profit, in which case you set that as the amount of compensatory damages, or you can't prove that she'd made the $1000 profit, in which case you leave the compensatory damages at $125.
In fact, it's a fucking tautology: if you can't prove it happened, then you have to assume it didn't happen. So, if the $1000 profit can't be proven, then the $1000 profit didn't exist. And since it didn't exist, it's irrelevant to the calculation of the damages, compensatory or otherwise!
And then either way, you tack on the punitive damages (that are not "small or nonexistent," but rather in a proportional amount) in addition, to act punitively. But what you can't do is go around saying "I can't prove you made $1000 profit but I want to imagine you did, so I'm going to arbitrarily punish you based on the imagined offense instead of the real one!" And that sort of gross miscarriage of justice is what happens when the punitive damages stop being proportional to the compensatory damages, as is the case here.
(* "prove" relative to the applicable standard of evidence -- "beyond a reasonable doubt" for criminal, "preponderance of evidence" for civil, etc.)
I can buy a laptop that will do everything this does and MUCH MORE for like an additional $100.
A $400 laptop isn't one pound and a quarter inch thick (my estimate from the pictures). A $400 laptop can't be easily held like a clipboard. A $400 laptop doesn't have battery life nearly as long as this ought to have. And even if a laptop did manage to have one of these characteristics, it sure as Hell wouldn't have all three and still be $400!
Without a keyboard, how much email can you do ? Read but not reply ? While a virtual keyboard might work for a few keystrokes, a simple 2 paragraph email becomes torture using a non-existent KB.
It's got a USB port; if they include USB-host (and they'd be brain-dead not to), you can just add one of those roll-up keyboards or something.
Of course, I'm personally hoping for a stylus and handwriting recognition (or at least character recognition, which they could add easily).
Incidentally, there's a reason that there's such a high cap on punitive damages in infringement cases. If that weren't the case, large companies could attempt for-profit infringement, and even if they did get caught and had to pay damages based on actual damage, those fines would be largely covered by the profit made infringing!
Wait, that doesn't make sense: the profit should be used up covering the fines for the compensatory damages (by definition!); punitive damages, even if proportional to the compensatory ones, would be over and above that.
violation of copyright and denies the copyright holder compensation
So what? The copyright holders (note: that's the studios -- not any of the artists involved) are actively and maliciously destroying our Fair Use rights; why should we give a shit about theirs?
And also keep in mind that most retailers won't let you return an opened disc for a refund if it doesn't work (most will only let you exchange it for another of the same title, pretty useless if the title isn't working because of some new copy protection).
That just means that the second disk was defective. And the third. And so on and so forth until they refund your money. And if they refuse, then you issue a chargeback on the credit card.
Of course, the point seems moot because it seems to me that there are plenty of bulk candy stores around here that don't have such nutritional information on the bins, which I dunno how they get around that (maybe they simply make the info available to anyone who asks for it?).
Perhaps it could be that the labeling isn't required when there's no packaging at all -- sort of like how restaurants aren't required to serve you a piece of paper with the nutritional information along with your dinner.
LOL Seriously. But the reason things are marked "no individual resale" is because the person who
sold it packaged it in bulk for sale to the public. Probably to make a certain profit, but just
to give them the benefit of the doubt, perhaps with less packaging that items meant for resale would have.
It's because the government-mandated nutrition information and whatnot is only printed on the bulk package, not each individual item.
Slashdot Mirror
It doesn't matter how hard it is because solving a problem is simply not the same thing as creative expression. By your logic, brain surgery would be copyrightable just because it's hard! Do you see how ridiculous your argument is now?
Besides, this sort of thing doesn't qualify as "creative" for a much more basic reason: if you introduce originality into your reproduction, then you've just failed at your job of archiving it!
Moreover, it's not as if Europe doesn't have several independent city-states (Monaco, Vatican City, Liechtenstein, etc.) already anyway!
Sure, in the same way that answering "four" when asked "what is two plus two?" is a choice. Or, for a less "trivially easy" example, how solving a crossword puzzle correctly instead of incorrectly is a "choice." Or in other words, it's really no choice at all -- it's either right or it's wrong, and you don't get to decide which is which!
The fundamental error in your thinking is that you think it somehow matters whether the thing was easy or hard to create. Here's a hint: it doesn't. Not even slightly! I could spend six seconds scrawling stick figures on a napkin and it'd still be copyrightable. Or I could spend 50 years painstakingly weighing every individual grain of sand in a jar and recording it into a database, and it still wouldn't! Creativity and effort are orthogonal; copyright depends only on the former.
Oh, and by the way: my girlfriend is an artist and has had to photograph her work before, so I do know how difficult it is. But that still doesn't give the photo it's own copyright separate from that of the original!
On the contrary, you're just flat-out wrong -- at least for the sort of photography (for the purpose of archival/preservation/digitization) we're talking about here. The artistry in photography is expressed by the choices of the photographer, but no choices were made! Did the photographer choose the subject? No, he's just systematically shooting each painting in the gallery. Did the photographer choose the composition? No, it's rigidly defined to be orthogonal to the painting and cropped at the edge. Did the photographer choose the lighting, colors, effects, etc.? No, he just used whatever lighting and camera settings would best preserve the color gamut of the original (and "best" isn't his choice either; it means minimizing the measured, mathematical difference). It's a mechanical process, not a creative one!
Now, there can be artistry in photographing a painting, but the photo would have had to been made for some purpose other than digitizing an existing work. For example, this photo (that I found randomly from a Google image search) is copyrightable because it was creatively composed. For another example, this one from one of the images being disputed, perhaps even this would be copyrightable (even though the original is certainly not) because whoever did the cropping had to creatively choose what to focus on -- and the copyright would belong to the cropper, not NPG.
I imagine theft of service would only allow them to go after the end users, whereas this allows them to go after the ones developing the product.
I agree that the real solution for wind is decentralized, but it's not that decentralized. We need to keep the individual turbines as large as possible to maximize efficiency, but there's no reason not to distribute them individually or in small groups.
After all, the turbines' physical footprint (the mast foundation) is so small compared to their operational footprint (the minimum distance between turbines so that they don't stall in each other's wake) that they don't need to be sited on their own land, but rather should just be placed on any free patch of ground on property concurrently used for something else: farmland, suburban parking lots, etc.
Presumably because it makes people mistake your vehicle for a police car. Red lights (except on the rear, like brake lights) are illegal too, since they're used by firetrucks and ambulances.
That's the theory, anyway: you could also cynically argue that the real reason they (along with dark/reflective/colored window tint) are illegal is because the authorities want an extra excuse to hassle the sort of people who use these lights (e.g. the import street-racing crowd with their underbody neons, etc.).
Pulling some poor sap over for illegal tint/illegal lights/etc. gives the officer an extra chance to go on a fishing expedition for more profitable offenses, such as DUI or drug possession (especially if he can trick the driver into consenting to a search).
Note, by the way, that this sort of law varies considerably by jurisdiction in terms of what colors are illegal, where (on the car) and how many lights are allowed, etc.
Well yeah, the real issue is the plaintiff's loss, not the defendant's profit. However, they're often correlated well enough to calculate one from the other -- or in other words, the defendant's profit (or potential profit) is often equal to the plaintiff's loss, so you could talk about them interchangeably (as I did).
No, this doesn't apply to any file sharer. Note the key phrase: "for purposes of commercial advantage or private financial gain." If you're not making a profit off it -- and I've never heard of anybody making a profit file-sharing -- then it can't be criminal infringement.
If cars could be copied easily (using Star Trek-style replicators or something) then manufacturers wouldn't add value either.
Because with the <i> tag, they don't know why it's italicized. Is it emphasis, or just a book title? They're both italicized, you know! Hence the <em> and <cite> tags: they might get rendered as italics, but the computer still knows they mean emphasis and citation, respectively.
Do you really want your screen reader to read this Slashdot article like this?
'Cause that's what would happen if the game title was marked up with the <i> tag instead of the <cite> tag and did what you propose. And that's why <i> is wrong. Either you have some particular common reason for wanting italics, in which case you use the appropriate semantic tag, or you don't, in which case the correct way to express "I want this italicized for no particular reason" is to use CSS to do something like this:
(And before you start getting all bitchy about how it's too verbose, that's what CSS classes and ids are for.)
Sure, graphical web browsers all tend to render it as bold or italics, but what about other user agents? The difference is that when they see <strong>, things like screen readers know to yell and web spiders know the word is important, but neither of them has the foggiest idea what to do with <b> because it doesn't mean anything!
Don't worry; the blue exterior lights aren't street-legal anyway.
I don't allow those who I disagree with to define me, and I'm baffled about how you got that impression. Speaking of which, I need to correct your attempt:
"In America, they came first for the ideas belonging to the Public Domain but temporarily lent to the studios, And I did not speak up because the studios were abusing their privilege of controlling the distribution of those ideas, and therefore deserve to lose it!"
And you want some definitions? Here are some definitions!
Is that better?
Why would I want to imagine that? It has nothing whatsoever to do with my point!
Only in your idiotic and pointless strawman example. Back in reality, you get fined $1,000,000 in compensatory damages, eliminating all your profit, and then get fined another $1,000,000 in punitive damages, to act as a deterrent. That's what "compensatory" and "punitive" mean!
No shit, Sherlock; that's what the punitive damages are for! WTF is your point?
No, that's not how it works. There are only two possibilities: either you can prove* that she'd made the $1000 profit, in which case you set that as the amount of compensatory damages, or you can't prove that she'd made the $1000 profit, in which case you leave the compensatory damages at $125.
In fact, it's a fucking tautology: if you can't prove it happened, then you have to assume it didn't happen. So, if the $1000 profit can't be proven, then the $1000 profit didn't exist. And since it didn't exist, it's irrelevant to the calculation of the damages, compensatory or otherwise!
And then either way, you tack on the punitive damages (that are not "small or nonexistent," but rather in a proportional amount) in addition, to act punitively. But what you can't do is go around saying "I can't prove you made $1000 profit but I want to imagine you did, so I'm going to arbitrarily punish you based on the imagined offense instead of the real one!" And that sort of gross miscarriage of justice is what happens when the punitive damages stop being proportional to the compensatory damages, as is the case here.
(* "prove" relative to the applicable standard of evidence -- "beyond a reasonable doubt" for criminal, "preponderance of evidence" for civil, etc.)
A $250 netbook creams this at having a 12" screen? I don't think so!
A $400 laptop isn't one pound and a quarter inch thick (my estimate from the pictures). A $400 laptop can't be easily held like a clipboard. A $400 laptop doesn't have battery life nearly as long as this ought to have. And even if a laptop did manage to have one of these characteristics, it sure as Hell wouldn't have all three and still be $400!
It's got a USB port; if they include USB-host (and they'd be brain-dead not to), you can just add one of those roll-up keyboards or something.
Of course, I'm personally hoping for a stylus and handwriting recognition (or at least character recognition, which they could add easily).
Wait, that doesn't make sense: the profit should be used up covering the fines for the compensatory damages (by definition!); punitive damages, even if proportional to the compensatory ones, would be over and above that.
So what? The copyright holders (note: that's the studios -- not any of the artists involved) are actively and maliciously destroying our Fair Use rights; why should we give a shit about theirs?
I, for one, will either download illegally or not watch. If the megalomaniacal studios want to murder home movie-watching, it's their fault, not mine!
That just means that the second disk was defective. And the third. And so on and so forth until they refund your money. And if they refuse, then you issue a chargeback on the credit card.
Nah, Blizzard quit being cool long before that... don't you remember Freecraft and bnetd?
Perhaps it could be that the labeling isn't required when there's no packaging at all -- sort of like how restaurants aren't required to serve you a piece of paper with the nutritional information along with your dinner.
It's because the government-mandated nutrition information and whatnot is only printed on the bulk package, not each individual item.
In all seriousness, the hard part would be getting Nintendo to license it.