The only problem is the hijackers would not have been in the database yet.
Actually, two of them WERE on the government's "watch list". I don't recall which flight they were on, but I think it quite likely that face recognition could have prevented one or two hijackings.
Casinos are using widespread face recognition NOW to catch cheats, frauds, and probably card counters. This has been standard practice for quite a while with them.
In an airport setting, I don't think you have any expectation of privacy. They already record your travels, X-Ray your bags, and check your ID. The fact that they don't check your name against a database pisses me off, frankly. I think if you are traveling on a passport, they ought to take your thumb print, too.
Face recognition goes too far when the government uses it in settings where you do have an expecation to privacy.
how many Afghanis would have to die in order for us to feel better?
All of the ones that support terrorism.
Re:Ground War in Afghanistan
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More On Tragedy
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· Score: 2
No proof of aghanistani imnovlvement at all
No proof it even was Bin Laden
No proof of any muslim complicity
You seem to be in denial. Wake up.
We are war in a global war against radical militant islamic terrorism. Frankly these people have been at war with us for a long time, but now we are joining the fight.
I expect moderate islamic forces like the Saudi's and Jordanians to support us. In Saddam Hussein's twisted mind there is one muslim people, but the real world just isn't so.
Ground War in Afghanistan
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More On Tragedy
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· Score: 1, Flamebait
Obviously we are going to have to seal off Afghanistan, invade it with ground troops, section it up and dismantle the sections.
The key diplomatic question is what kind of support or opposition we will get from neighboring countries. If none of them are willing to be the base of our invasion, it may be necessary to begin the invasion in another neighboring country. I'd guess that Iran may provide this avenue if we need it.
The big question mark is Pakistan. They have nuclear weapons (but not missles, I'm told). They are one of the few countries that have recognized the Taliban diplomatically. Pakistan will be a critical player in this conflict.
I don't know much about the former soviet republics to the north of Afghanistan. The ones that touch Afg are Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan, and Tajikstan. Here's a ethnic map of Afghanistan. If I recall, the forces that launched the rocket attacks were the "Northern rebels". I think their attack was a PR stunt looking for allies. Maybe we can find allies to the north?
China also touches a very small piece of Afg, but the tip of Afghanistan that touches China is very sparsely populated (I think its basically the Himalayas). We want to keep this as far from China as possible.
Basically there are three possiblities I see: (1) Get Pakistan on board, like we did Saudi Arabia in the Gulf war, (2) Get one or more soviet republics on our side (3) Move east through Iran, with or without them joining the cause.
Strategically, these aren't mutually exclusive, either. Option 3 seems like the most ambitious. If Pakistan will cooperate with (1), then it's probably the simplest. Doing option (3) without Iran could easily lead us into a much larger scale mideast conflict I can't imagine Iraq staying out of a conflict so close to them.
I don't see calling this World War 3. Maybe it's "World War T", though.
Is this real? Two senators introduce something, is that really sufficient to call it a threat?
Yes it is a nuclear bomb that has already been launched!! Do you think it is an accident that two Senators introduced this? One of them is the chairman of the commerce committee, for Christ's sake. Good God, man, are you really in denial this bad? Wake UP!!!
Right now the score is 0-2 in the Senate. Game is 51 (including the VP).
We have to act NOW to defeat this piece of fascism.
You need to write and call your representative and senators NOW. If you haven't done this in the next 48 hours, then you are a chump who deserves to have your computer given to the MPAA. The big media are preparing a heavy lobbying campaign to get this passed.
Talking points:
1) The bill is fascist. Keep the government's hands off my computer.
2) A mandatory security standard will direct all security applications to a single point of failure
3) Consumers hate "Digital Rights Management" and won't buy it. PC sales will stagnate even more.
4) Trusted client is provably crackable. If you try to shove this down consumer's throats, I guaranty it will be cracked quickly.
5) The "Copyright Industry" is harming America, because they are clinging to business models that require a police state to work.
6) Copyright is teetering dangerously close to illigitimacy because the government isn't listening to the people.
7) Reject Copyright Fascism.
People out there need to get organized and mobilze. It's still early, so we need to attack this thing early and often.
Some talking points:
1) This is a fascist bill. It is "over my dead body" outrageous.
2) Government regulation of technology is bad for the economy.
3) Consumers hate "Digital Rights Managment" and this will stop buying PC's
4) The "Copyright Industry" is harming America, because they are clinging to business models that require a police state to work.
5) Copyright is teetering dangerously close to illigitimacy because the government isn't listening to the people.
6) Rebuff the Copyright Fascists.
Re:This really means little...
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eBay Beats DMCA
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· Score: 5, Interesting
EBay provides auctions, not internet service, so they are an "ASP", not an "ISP".
When a judge dismisses a case, they do so based on legal reasoning that does set a precedent. This can come in one of two forms. A case can be dismissed for failure to state a claim for which the court has the power to provide a remedy, or it can be concluded on "summary judgement" which means that there were no disputed material facts requiring a trial so that the question is one of pure law. Both types of order are usually supported with a written opinion.
I cannot tell which actually occured and the article doesn't link to the opinion.
But what is the work, the image, or the entire site?
I don't have any citation handy, but I think generally a file constitutes a work. This would be a good question for the cni-copyright list.
There is also a concept of a collection of works, which is different from a derivitive work.
Google is clearly creating a derivitive work by taking your images and combining them with the images of others.
I think a stronger argument is to say that by shrinking them to thumbnails you make a derivitive work. That involves actually changing the original. Showing it along side others is roughly akin to placing books next to each other on the bookshelf.
Shrinking would have to be justified by a fair use argument, I guess. It involves a substanital loss of image detail, and quantity copied is one of the fair use factors.
The problem with your point is that there in nothing under US Law or International Law that states that a Robot/Crawler/Spider must read and obey the "robots.txt" file.
It's called copyright law, specifically 17 USC 106(1). In practice, the need for explicit authorization would be conclusive.
You must have authorization to make a copy, (assuming it's not fair use). Clearly the authors of the robots.txt standard did not have the authority to make law, but contextual standards do have meaning. Any judge would start the analysis by placing the burden of proof on the copier to prove they had authorization. An explicit denial of permission in the standard place would require pretty strong counter-evidence. The mere act of placing it in a web server probably would not suffice, given the more granular meaning expressed by an entry in robots.txt.
You would get laughed out of court if you said you wanted to hold the copyright owner to contextual opt-in but not contextual opt-out.
The issue in this case is the converse. If no robots.txt is present, is recopy authorization granted from the fact that the file was placed in a websever? I argue "yes", because a convention is required for every opt-out system. After the initial opt-in, it's fine to have an opt-out, and local tradition and convention *has* to define that.
There is an important difference. Copyright confers two distinct rights: exclusive authorization for copying and exclusive authorization to make derivitive works.
By putting you work in a web server, you clearly authorize some copying by your action. You do not however authorize somebody to change your work.
Files don't get on the internet by accident! It is inherent in the medium that when you put your files under the control of a web server and have it listen for connections on a network and respond that copies will be made. If that isn't good enough, password protect your website. Using a webserver without access control is an opt-in system that clearly authorizes some copying. The only question is how much copying is authorized.
I fail to see any meaningful difference between infinite copying for free from the original site and transitive copying from a search engine. Since "deep linking" has been held to not be infringement, the argument that you aren't forced to see the whole page is bogus, since an URL can target the individual image file.
You can explicitly unauthorize search engines by using robots.txt, right? . Any splitting of hairs about the scope of copying authorized by the act of putting your file in a web server can be fully accomodated by using robots.txt. Since this standard is publicly available and well known, doesn't placing your files on the web without restricting via this method constitute a grant of authority to everyone with access to your web server to copy? Now if these search engines ignore robots.txt, then that is another matter, but I doubt that is the case.
When you opt-in to copying by placing your files in a web server, but fail to subsequently explicitly opt-out after that, you have authorized copying, so tough.
The photographers say they might have to leave the net. Not so if they follow robots.txt . I don't generally think that forcing off people who won't learn how the net works is a bad thing. These groups are essentially trying to use the courts to create standards. The net already created its own standard for this in 1994. Perhaps we will have the first ruling that essentially says "RTFM".
All human behavior can be explained by rational self interest. Accordingly, humans invented and named the concept of "trade", which occurs when parties exchange things of value in an attempt to each better themselves. Trade is good.
Some trade is catalyzed by money, but anyone who has ever traded one baseball card for another, or scratched somebody else's back in return for being scratched knows that some trade happens easily without money. This does not mean that money is a bad thing or that all trade should happen without money. That would just about silly as trying to suggest that the only thing of value is money. You can rely on free people choosing the mechanism of trade that benefits them the most in any given situation.
Software is a thing of value, and is naturally an object of trade. Software has obvious utility value, but it also has value as an intellectual property value. This value is the value of the ideas expressed in the source code. Ideas are highly prized and run the gamut from the simple to the inspired work of genius. People generally want to trade things they can generate faster than others for things they can't, because that way they maximize the flow of value, and this applies to the trade of ideas as well.
Open source software is a clever form of trade that maximizes value flow by using copyright to secure return on investment as access to ideas that build upon the ideas disseminated. By releasing software under an open source licence, an author trades the ability to use and extend the software in return for a secure interest in doing the same to the resulting combination of intellectual property. Companies often pay programmers just to program code that won't be sold, so why is it surprising at all that programmers have discovered barter in code amonst themselves.
Any entrepenuer knows that trade is often maximized by accepting a little uncertainty and risk. Like any form of entrepenuerial activity, this involves an investment up front in time and effort that will be rewarded later according to its value to others. In order to maximize the return on investement, the open source author wants as many people as possible to obtain and use the software, in the hopes that by winning mind share, more people will contribute their valuable ideas back and thereby complete the trade. Interestly, when this form of trade is completed, each side automatically reinvests. Because ideas don't have physical existence, this is a cake that you can have and eat. One does not "consume" ideas.
What could be a better outcome from Congress exercising its power "to promote the progress of science and arts" than highly catalyzed iterative, derivitive growth of intellectual property accessable to all?
I sent mine in. In fact, the Copyright office cited to my comments serveral times.
Unfortunately, they missed my entire point because they appear to view "first sale" completely incorrectly. First sale is the beginning of ownership of ordinary property by the purchaser. That comes with all property rights not specifically reserved to the copyight holder by laws made in accordance with the Constitution. Because the first Supreme Court case (Bobbs-Merrill v Straus) on the interplay between property rights and copyrights found that the right to sell your property was one such property right, the copyright fascists latched on to that precedent and equated the conclusion with the reasoning. Judge Kaplan did this and so does the Copyright Office.
That view is profoundly wrong. One need look no farther than the plain text of section 109 and Supreme Court cases like PREI, INC. v. COLUMBIA PICTURES, 508 U.S. 49 (1993) to find the unsurprising idea that property rights entail more than just the right to sell. In particular, in PREI the Supreme Court agreed with the lower court that private viewing of movies is a first sale right that belongs to the owner of the copy, even when it occurs over the active objection copyright holder.
This wasn't even an issue in the case, though. The issue was whether that fact was so obvious that Columbia's raising it was "sham" litigation. The fact that the Court granted certiori on that issue says a lot, even if they didn't ultimately decide that it was a sham.
Isn't it interesting that no mention of this case is found in the Copyright Office's opinion, even though they explicitly consider the first sale rights of movie purchasers?
Property rights actually are property rights, while intellectual property rights are not. The copyright fascists seems to get this backwards.
As far as I'm concerned, Mozilla should have stayed with the milestone numbering system.
I HATE all the conversations about "When will it be 1.0?". The version number is an arbitrary string that has no affect on the code it is stamped on! All it does it make people complain.
Labelling something 1.0 does not remove any bugs. It does not mean that all severe bugs have been found. It does not mean that the next patch won't cause latent memory leaks or security problems or hard to reproduce crashes. In fact, it basically means nothing other than somebody decided to label it that way. If we called the damn thing 1.0 right now, the code would be exactly the same as if we called it 0.1. Arguing over version numbers is the stupidest activity programmers do. It's basically the one moronic marketing practice that hasn't been abandoned by the open source community.
What exactly was wrong with taking a nightly build every 4 to 6 weeks, testing it a little more thoroughly, and giving it the next whole number? They should have kept going after M18: 0.6 = M19, 0.7 = M20, 0.8 = M21, 0.8.1 = M22, 0.9 = M23, 0.9.1 = M24, 0.9.2 = M25, 0.9.2.1 = M26, 0.9.3 = M27.
I assume by storing graphs, you are refering to oracle's "connect by prior... start with" syntax -- which definitely rocks. It should be added to the SQL standard.
In-line views (from clause subqueries) are very useful, and starting in one of the 8i versions, you can even do subqueries in the select clause, which is sort of an inline-function. The analytic SQL functions are pretty cool, too, but Codd is probably rolling over in his grave about them.
The best new oracle SQL functionality though, is unquestionably materialized view SQL rewriting, which is sort of like using a view as an index - it stores the results and uses them transparently to rewrite SQL plans that would recalculate things. The affect on things like simple slice-and-dice tallies is just incredible.
I think the concept of "too public" is completely bogus. It is actually WORSE to allow access to public records in crippled ways only. In a nutshell, knowledge is power and a system where data is difficult to get citizens are at a tremendous knowledge power inequity. I support anything that moves power to citizens.
All privacy by obfuscation does is create fake value-add business models to market public data.
An example is judicial decisions and legal records. Most circuits are available on the net now, but most district opinions are still offline. Lexis and Westlaw make big bucks by doing nothing other than providing access to public documents. The whole legal industry is dependent on them, which increases legal costs dramatically, reduces predictability of the law, and serves to enforce the guild.
The credit report situtation is just as bad. You often have to pay to see what's in your own credit report, but it provides no privacy protection against creditors and potential creditors, who are the main groups you want privacy protection from.
Once policy decides that information should be public, it should be made available in the most accessible way. If the info should be private, the information subject should control all access. The problem is only if we choose to make information public or semi-public that should be private.
My appraisal district here makes all property values available on the net in a manner that can be searched by name or address. I have looked up all of my neighbors and my coworkers property values. I think that crosses the line, but I would absolutely NOT consider it a solution to make people go in to the property tax office to get these records, though. That would simply serve to limit the knowledge to those who could pay a falsely inflated price to get the information, which would then serve to improve the negotiation position of organizations over citizens.
Actually, HP is NOT selling a "GNU/Linux" distro. According to the article they are calling their product "HP Secure OS Software for Linux". I believe their choice of terminology represent a deliberate statement about their feelings of the significance of the GNU software within their total offering. Most distros feel similarly, as do most customers of Linux.
Clearly HP feels that the fact that GNU re-implemented "ls", "grep" and a few other commodity commands is not worthy of recognition within the name of their product. Perhaps the glibc library is a critical brand worthy component, but since the leader of that project hasn't asked to refer to distros as "glibc/Linux", this is a non-issue.
That's why the Stallman can claim the GNU project has a valid claim to share the Linux title.
You are confusing GNU software with the GNU project. The fact is that Linus essentially forked off from them as a project, even if not as code. He didn't want to work under the GNU banner with its narrow philosophical bent and so he didn't.
The fact is that Stallman is a hypocrit. He goes on and on about how important it is to "free" software, but as soon as somebody used it that way and did something that exceeded Stallman, his ego is hurt and he's trying to act like it's his right to direct the name.
That's just too bad, because the parties who decide what the official name is turned a cold shoulder. The major distros don't market "GNU/Linux", they market "Linux" because that is what they feel is the signature element that creates a brand. I agree, and that's why I use a "Linux" distro, not a "GNU/Linux" distro.
You're arguing that people cannot agree to keep a secret. Is that what you intend?
Who said anything about a secret? Trade secret law, and NDA type contract law operate outside of the scope of federal copyright law. Getting rid of copyright law altogether would do nothing to stop two people from making a contract not to tell a secret. Of course you actually have to have both a secret AND a bona fide contract for this.
Usually, the act of publishing a work and offering it for sale precludes it from being secret, so there is no conflict between copyright law and trade secret law. When there is a conflict between the two, Federal copyright law preempts trade secret law, for example, copyright sales terms disallowing reverse engineering are not enforcable (although one notable clueless trial judge in California seems not to realize this).
More influential Courts like the 5th and 9th Circuit Courts of Appeals tend to get the law right however (Vault v Quaid, Sony v Connectix).
I have the condition of flerbage when I can behave in the confidence that nobody will take my life, my physical property, or my time without my consent.
Larry Lessig once admonished ESR for what Lessig described as ESR's advocacy of "warmed over Ayn Rand". I would describe flerbage as "a moldy and rotting 'Ayn Rand'-like substance".
The problem with flerbage, is the "without my consent" part. Essentially it claims an individual right to veto laws that protect more than life and personal property. Ironically, given ESR's position, Copyright violations don't qualify as life, property, time deprivations so I don't know why or if ESR would support the government depriving software pirates of flerbage when they have not deprived him of it.
Like most radical libertarianism, flerbage simply misunderstands the role of public policy in recognizing property and trade. Neither property nor contracts exist outside of a context of government because both involve a concept of government force being used to redress transgressions. You do not have property or a contract unless the public, through it's agent the governement agrees to enforce it. This involves the public use of force that requires resources and the public has the right and the power to expend its resources in a way that is consistent with the heirarchy of legal principles established by a Constitution and due process of law thereunder, which includes some majoritarian lawmaking processes that predictably may occassionally result in rules that fail your personal "without my consent" test.
Enough people consent to the process to call it consensus, and you are never offered freedom from attack by the delegated power of the people if you don't consent to a particular rule and ignore it. Nobody really cares if you "never signed no steenkin social contract". If you don't consent to the process then you've declared anarchy and rebellion, so don't come whining when bad things happen to you such as your flerbage being violated. The Declaration of Independence states the principle that if the government becomes destructive to the will of the people that the people may overthrow it. Civil disobediance, peaceful or violent, is sometimes the morally correct thing to do, but nobody ever said it doesn't come with great peril precisely because it is outside of the rule of law.
I have the condition of flerbage when I can behave in the confidence that nobody will take my life, my physical property, or my time without my consent.
Contrary to ESR's assertion, government laws disallowing proprietary licences simply would not violate flerbage.
Let's back up: Copyright is an entirely statutory grant. It simply is not a fundamental right that you can legally exclude others from reproducing your speech. For example, Congress could abolish all copyright protection if it chose. Congress has been delegated, and justly so, the power "to promote the arts and sciences" by creating statutes (not rights) that secure authors their writings for "limited Times". Copyright is a loan from the public domain. Loans are a granted priviledge and Congress may secure the loan with restrictions aimed at promoting the ends desired by giving the loan.
It would also a coherent policy view to say that the best way to promote computer science is by demanding as part of the quid-pro-quo involved in securing copyright that source code be released and be modifiable. Can anyone argue that a reasonable man might believe this would advance the progress of computer science? If majoritarian forces in Congress were able to implement this policy into law, then I believe the answer to the question of what should happen to you if you were to release under a proprietary licence anyway is not as ESR asserts that you should be arrested, but rather that the principle of "misuse of copyright" should be applied, whereby you would not receive the governement's assistence in enforcing your copyright.
Trying to licence software under a proprietary licence in the hypothesized scenario simply would not lead to your arrest. It would lead to others violating your licence and the government refusing to help you enforce it.
"The protections afforded by copyright law are completely statutory" was the holding of the Sony Betamax decision, and traces back to the earliest Supreme Court cases. Thus, you have no rights to exclude others from your work unless those statutes recognize them as such. The public owns the public domain and tasked Congress with optimizing its expansion by choosing the most appropriate statutory scheme. If Congress decides that everything you write instantly enters the public domain, then too bad -- you have no injury under the US Constitution. Similarly, they can condition your grant of protection by requiring you to meet criteria the people deem helpful to the end of promoting science and arts.
I just cracked the voting system they are proposing to use. Unfortunately, because of the DMCA, I cannot share the technical details, other than to say that it does involve a double application of the rot-13 technology.
Slashdot Mirror
The only problem is the hijackers would not have been in the database yet.
Actually, two of them WERE on the government's "watch list". I don't recall which flight they were on, but I think it quite likely that face recognition could have prevented one or two hijackings.
Casinos are using widespread face recognition NOW to catch cheats, frauds, and probably card counters. This has been standard practice for quite a while with them.
In an airport setting, I don't think you have any expectation of privacy. They already record your travels, X-Ray your bags, and check your ID. The fact that they don't check your name against a database pisses me off, frankly. I think if you are traveling on a passport, they ought to take your thumb print, too.
Face recognition goes too far when the government uses it in settings where you do have an expecation to privacy.
how many Afghanis would have to die in order for us to feel better?
All of the ones that support terrorism.
No proof of aghanistani imnovlvement at all
No proof it even was Bin Laden
No proof of any muslim complicity
You seem to be in denial. Wake up.
We are war in a global war against radical militant islamic terrorism. Frankly these people have been at war with us for a long time, but now we are joining the fight.
I expect moderate islamic forces like the Saudi's and Jordanians to support us. In Saddam Hussein's twisted mind there is one muslim people, but the real world just isn't so.
Obviously we are going to have to seal off Afghanistan, invade it with ground troops, section it up and dismantle the sections.
The key diplomatic question is what kind of support or opposition we will get from neighboring countries. If none of them are willing to be the base of our invasion, it may be necessary to begin the invasion in another neighboring country. I'd guess that Iran may provide this avenue if we need it.
The big question mark is Pakistan. They have nuclear weapons (but not missles, I'm told). They are one of the few countries that have recognized the Taliban diplomatically. Pakistan will be a critical player in this conflict.
I don't know much about the former soviet republics to the north of Afghanistan. The ones that touch Afg are Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan, and Tajikstan. Here's a ethnic map of Afghanistan. If I recall, the forces that launched the rocket attacks were the "Northern rebels". I think their attack was a PR stunt looking for allies. Maybe we can find allies to the north?
China also touches a very small piece of Afg, but the tip of Afghanistan that touches China is very sparsely populated (I think its basically the Himalayas). We want to keep this as far from China as possible.
Basically there are three possiblities I see: (1) Get Pakistan on board, like we did Saudi Arabia in the Gulf war, (2) Get one or more soviet republics on our side (3) Move east through Iran, with or without them joining the cause.
Strategically, these aren't mutually exclusive, either. Option 3 seems like the most ambitious. If Pakistan will cooperate with (1), then it's probably the simplest. Doing option (3) without Iran could easily lead us into a much larger scale mideast conflict I can't imagine Iraq staying out of a conflict so close to them.
I don't see calling this World War 3. Maybe it's "World War T", though.
Is this real? Two senators introduce something, is that really sufficient to call it a threat?
Yes it is a nuclear bomb that has already been launched!! Do you think it is an accident that two Senators introduced this? One of them is the chairman of the commerce committee, for Christ's sake. Good God, man, are you really in denial this bad? Wake UP!!!
Right now the score is 0-2 in the Senate. Game is 51 (including the VP).
We have to act NOW to defeat this piece of fascism.
You need to write and call your representative and senators NOW. If you haven't done this in the next 48 hours, then you are a chump who deserves to have your computer given to the MPAA. The big media are preparing a heavy lobbying campaign to get this passed.
Talking points:
1) The bill is fascist. Keep the government's hands off my computer.
2) A mandatory security standard will direct all security applications to a single point of failure
3) Consumers hate "Digital Rights Management" and won't buy it. PC sales will stagnate even more.
4) Trusted client is provably crackable. If you try to shove this down consumer's throats, I guaranty it will be cracked quickly.
5) The "Copyright Industry" is harming America, because they are clinging to business models that require a police state to work.
6) Copyright is teetering dangerously close to illigitimacy because the government isn't listening to the people.
7) Reject Copyright Fascism.
People out there need to get organized and mobilze. It's still early, so we need to attack this thing early and often.
Some talking points:
1) This is a fascist bill. It is "over my dead body" outrageous.
2) Government regulation of technology is bad for the economy.
3) Consumers hate "Digital Rights Managment" and this will stop buying PC's
4) The "Copyright Industry" is harming America, because they are clinging to business models that require a police state to work.
5) Copyright is teetering dangerously close to illigitimacy because the government isn't listening to the people.
6) Rebuff the Copyright Fascists.
EBay provides auctions, not internet service, so they are an "ASP", not an "ISP".
When a judge dismisses a case, they do so based on legal reasoning that does set a precedent. This can come in one of two forms. A case can be dismissed for failure to state a claim for which the court has the power to provide a remedy, or it can be concluded on "summary judgement" which means that there were no disputed material facts requiring a trial so that the question is one of pure law. Both types of order are usually supported with a written opinion.
I cannot tell which actually occured and the article doesn't link to the opinion.
But what is the work, the image, or the entire site?
I don't have any citation handy, but I think generally a file constitutes a work. This would be a good question for the cni-copyright list.
There is also a concept of a collection of works, which is different from a derivitive work.
Google is clearly creating a derivitive work by taking your images and combining them with the images of others.
I think a stronger argument is to say that by shrinking them to thumbnails you make a derivitive work. That involves actually changing the original. Showing it along side others is roughly akin to placing books next to each other on the bookshelf.
Shrinking would have to be justified by a fair use argument, I guess. It involves a substanital loss of image detail, and quantity copied is one of the fair use factors.
The problem with your point is that there in nothing under US Law or International Law that states that a Robot/Crawler/Spider must read and obey the "robots.txt" file.
It's called copyright law, specifically 17 USC 106(1). In practice, the need for explicit authorization would be conclusive.
You must have authorization to make a copy, (assuming it's not fair use). Clearly the authors of the robots.txt standard did not have the authority to make law, but contextual standards do have meaning. Any judge would start the analysis by placing the burden of proof on the copier to prove they had authorization. An explicit denial of permission in the standard place would require pretty strong counter-evidence. The mere act of placing it in a web server probably would not suffice, given the more granular meaning expressed by an entry in robots.txt.
You would get laughed out of court if you said you wanted to hold the copyright owner to contextual opt-in but not contextual opt-out.
The issue in this case is the converse. If no robots.txt is present, is recopy authorization granted from the fact that the file was placed in a websever? I argue "yes", because a convention is required for every opt-out system. After the initial opt-in, it's fine to have an opt-out, and local tradition and convention *has* to define that.
There is an important difference. Copyright confers two distinct rights: exclusive authorization for copying and exclusive authorization to make derivitive works.
By putting you work in a web server, you clearly authorize some copying by your action. You do not however authorize somebody to change your work.
Files don't get on the internet by accident! It is inherent in the medium that when you put your files under the control of a web server and have it listen for connections on a network and respond that copies will be made. If that isn't good enough, password protect your website. Using a webserver without access control is an opt-in system that clearly authorizes some copying. The only question is how much copying is authorized.
I fail to see any meaningful difference between infinite copying for free from the original site and transitive copying from a search engine. Since "deep linking" has been held to not be infringement, the argument that you aren't forced to see the whole page is bogus, since an URL can target the individual image file.
You can explicitly unauthorize search engines by using robots.txt, right? . Any splitting of hairs about the scope of copying authorized by the act of putting your file in a web server can be fully accomodated by using robots.txt. Since this standard is publicly available and well known, doesn't placing your files on the web without restricting via this method constitute a grant of authority to everyone with access to your web server to copy? Now if these search engines ignore robots.txt, then that is another matter, but I doubt that is the case.
When you opt-in to copying by placing your files in a web server, but fail to subsequently explicitly opt-out after that, you have authorized copying, so tough.
The photographers say they might have to leave the net. Not so if they follow robots.txt . I don't generally think that forcing off people who won't learn how the net works is a bad thing. These groups are essentially trying to use the courts to create standards. The net already created its own standard for this in 1994. Perhaps we will have the first ruling that essentially says "RTFM".
All human behavior can be explained by rational self interest. Accordingly, humans invented and named the concept of "trade", which occurs when parties exchange things of value in an attempt to each better themselves. Trade is good.
Some trade is catalyzed by money, but anyone who has ever traded one baseball card for another, or scratched somebody else's back in return for being scratched knows that some trade happens easily without money. This does not mean that money is a bad thing or that all trade should happen without money. That would just about silly as trying to suggest that the only thing of value is money. You can rely on free people choosing the mechanism of trade that benefits them the most in any given situation.
Software is a thing of value, and is naturally an object of trade. Software has obvious utility value, but it also has value as an intellectual property value. This value is the value of the ideas expressed in the source code. Ideas are highly prized and run the gamut from the simple to the inspired work of genius. People generally want to trade things they can generate faster than others for things they can't, because that way they maximize the flow of value, and this applies to the trade of ideas as well.
Open source software is a clever form of trade that maximizes value flow by using copyright to secure return on investment as access to ideas that build upon the ideas disseminated. By releasing software under an open source licence, an author trades the ability to use and extend the software in return for a secure interest in doing the same to the resulting combination of intellectual property. Companies often pay programmers just to program code that won't be sold, so why is it surprising at all that programmers have discovered barter in code amonst themselves.
Any entrepenuer knows that trade is often maximized by accepting a little uncertainty and risk. Like any form of entrepenuerial activity, this involves an investment up front in time and effort that will be rewarded later according to its value to others. In order to maximize the return on investement, the open source author wants as many people as possible to obtain and use the software, in the hopes that by winning mind share, more people will contribute their valuable ideas back and thereby complete the trade. Interestly, when this form of trade is completed, each side automatically reinvests. Because ideas don't have physical existence, this is a cake that you can have and eat. One does not "consume" ideas.
What could be a better outcome from Congress exercising its power "to promote the progress of science and arts" than highly catalyzed iterative, derivitive growth of intellectual property accessable to all?
If their native document format is XML based, why not just use CVS?
I sent mine in. In fact, the Copyright office cited to my comments serveral times.
Unfortunately, they missed my entire point because they appear to view "first sale" completely incorrectly. First sale is the beginning of ownership of ordinary property by the purchaser. That comes with all property rights not specifically reserved to the copyight holder by laws made in accordance with the Constitution. Because the first Supreme Court case (Bobbs-Merrill v Straus) on the interplay between property rights and copyrights found that the right to sell your property was one such property right, the copyright fascists latched on to that precedent and equated the conclusion with the reasoning. Judge Kaplan did this and so does the Copyright Office.
That view is profoundly wrong. One need look no farther than the plain text of section 109 and Supreme Court cases like PREI, INC. v. COLUMBIA PICTURES, 508 U.S. 49 (1993) to find the unsurprising idea that property rights entail more than just the right to sell. In particular, in PREI the Supreme Court agreed with the lower court that private viewing of movies is a first sale right that belongs to the owner of the copy, even when it occurs over the active objection copyright holder.
This wasn't even an issue in the case, though. The issue was whether that fact was so obvious that Columbia's raising it was "sham" litigation. The fact that the Court granted certiori on that issue says a lot, even if they didn't ultimately decide that it was a sham.
Isn't it interesting that no mention of this case is found in the Copyright Office's opinion, even though they explicitly consider the first sale rights of movie purchasers?
Property rights actually are property rights, while intellectual property rights are not. The copyright fascists seems to get this backwards.
As far as I'm concerned, Mozilla should have stayed with the milestone numbering system.
I HATE all the conversations about "When will it be 1.0?". The version number is an arbitrary string that has no affect on the code it is stamped on! All it does it make people complain.
Labelling something 1.0 does not remove any bugs. It does not mean that all severe bugs have been found. It does not mean that the next patch won't cause latent memory leaks or security problems or hard to reproduce crashes. In fact, it basically means nothing other than somebody decided to label it that way. If we called the damn thing 1.0 right now, the code would be exactly the same as if we called it 0.1. Arguing over version numbers is the stupidest activity programmers do. It's basically the one moronic marketing practice that hasn't been abandoned by the open source community.
What exactly was wrong with taking a nightly build every 4 to 6 weeks, testing it a little more thoroughly, and giving it the next whole number? They should have kept going after M18: 0.6 = M19, 0.7 = M20, 0.8 = M21, 0.8.1 = M22, 0.9 = M23, 0.9.1 = M24, 0.9.2 = M25, 0.9.2.1 = M26, 0.9.3 = M27.
I assume by storing graphs, you are refering to oracle's "connect by prior ... start with" syntax -- which definitely rocks. It should be added to the SQL standard.
In-line views (from clause subqueries) are very useful, and starting in one of the 8i versions, you can even do subqueries in the select clause, which is sort of an inline-function. The analytic SQL functions are pretty cool, too, but Codd is probably rolling over in his grave about them.
The best new oracle SQL functionality though, is unquestionably materialized view SQL rewriting, which is sort of like using a view as an index - it stores the results and uses them transparently to rewrite SQL plans that would recalculate things. The affect on things like simple slice-and-dice tallies is just incredible.
You know, most of the time someone using a subselect just lacks the imagination needed to do a join :)
While some people will always do brain dead things, there are definitely many queries that you simply cannot write unless you do subqueries.
Consider something as simple as finding all students whose IQ is above average.
I think the concept of "too public" is completely bogus. It is actually WORSE to allow access to public records in crippled ways only. In a nutshell, knowledge is power and a system where data is difficult to get citizens are at a tremendous knowledge power inequity. I support anything that moves power to citizens.
All privacy by obfuscation does is create fake value-add business models to market public data.
An example is judicial decisions and legal records. Most circuits are available on the net now, but most district opinions are still offline. Lexis and Westlaw make big bucks by doing nothing other than providing access to public documents. The whole legal industry is dependent on them, which increases legal costs dramatically, reduces predictability of the law, and serves to enforce the guild.
The credit report situtation is just as bad. You often have to pay to see what's in your own credit report, but it provides no privacy protection against creditors and potential creditors, who are the main groups you want privacy protection from.
Once policy decides that information should be public, it should be made available in the most accessible way. If the info should be private, the information subject should control all access. The problem is only if we choose to make information public or semi-public that should be private.
My appraisal district here makes all property values available on the net in a manner that can be searched by name or address. I have looked up all of my neighbors and my coworkers property values. I think that crosses the line, but I would absolutely NOT consider it a solution to make people go in to the property tax office to get these records, though. That would simply serve to limit the knowledge to those who could pay a falsely inflated price to get the information, which would then serve to improve the negotiation position of organizations over citizens.
Actually, HP is NOT selling a "GNU/Linux" distro. According to the article they are calling their product "HP Secure OS Software for Linux". I believe their choice of terminology represent a deliberate statement about their feelings of the significance of the GNU software within their total offering. Most distros feel similarly, as do most customers of Linux.
Clearly HP feels that the fact that GNU re-implemented "ls", "grep" and a few other commodity commands is not worthy of recognition within the name of their product. Perhaps the glibc library is a critical brand worthy component, but since the leader of that project hasn't asked to refer to distros as "glibc/Linux", this is a non-issue.
That's why the Stallman can claim the GNU project has a valid claim to share the Linux title.
You are confusing GNU software with the GNU project. The fact is that Linus essentially forked off from them as a project, even if not as code. He didn't want to work under the GNU banner with its narrow philosophical bent and so he didn't.
The fact is that Stallman is a hypocrit. He goes on and on about how important it is to "free" software, but as soon as somebody used it that way and did something that exceeded Stallman, his ego is hurt and he's trying to act like it's his right to direct the name.
That's just too bad, because the parties who decide what the official name is turned a cold shoulder. The major distros don't market "GNU/Linux", they market "Linux" because that is what they feel is the signature element that creates a brand. I agree, and that's why I use a "Linux" distro, not a "GNU/Linux" distro.
You're arguing that people cannot agree to keep a secret. Is that what you intend?
Who said anything about a secret? Trade secret law, and NDA type contract law operate outside of the scope of federal copyright law. Getting rid of copyright law altogether would do nothing to stop two people from making a contract not to tell a secret. Of course you actually have to have both a secret AND a bona fide contract for this.
Usually, the act of publishing a work and offering it for sale precludes it from being secret, so there is no conflict between copyright law and trade secret law. When there is a conflict between the two, Federal copyright law preempts trade secret law, for example, copyright sales terms disallowing reverse engineering are not enforcable (although one notable clueless trial judge in California seems not to realize this).
More influential Courts like the 5th and 9th Circuit Courts of Appeals tend to get the law right however (Vault v Quaid, Sony v Connectix).
I have the condition of flerbage when I can behave in the confidence that nobody will take my life, my physical property, or my time without my consent.
Larry Lessig once admonished ESR for what Lessig described as ESR's advocacy of "warmed over Ayn Rand". I would describe flerbage as "a moldy and rotting 'Ayn Rand'-like substance".
The problem with flerbage, is the "without my consent" part. Essentially it claims an individual right to veto laws that protect more than life and personal property. Ironically, given ESR's position, Copyright violations don't qualify as life, property, time deprivations so I don't know why or if ESR would support the government depriving software pirates of flerbage when they have not deprived him of it.
Like most radical libertarianism, flerbage simply misunderstands the role of public policy in recognizing property and trade. Neither property nor contracts exist outside of a context of government because both involve a concept of government force being used to redress transgressions. You do not have property or a contract unless the public, through it's agent the governement agrees to enforce it. This involves the public use of force that requires resources and the public has the right and the power to expend its resources in a way that is consistent with the heirarchy of legal principles established by a Constitution and due process of law thereunder, which includes some majoritarian lawmaking processes that predictably may occassionally result in rules that fail your personal "without my consent" test.
Enough people consent to the process to call it consensus, and you are never offered freedom from attack by the delegated power of the people if you don't consent to a particular rule and ignore it. Nobody really cares if you "never signed no steenkin social contract". If you don't consent to the process then you've declared anarchy and rebellion, so don't come whining when bad things happen to you such as your flerbage being violated. The Declaration of Independence states the principle that if the government becomes destructive to the will of the people that the people may overthrow it. Civil disobediance, peaceful or violent, is sometimes the morally correct thing to do, but nobody ever said it doesn't come with great peril precisely because it is outside of the rule of law.
I have the condition of flerbage when I can behave in the confidence that nobody will take my life, my physical property, or my time without my consent.
Contrary to ESR's assertion, government laws disallowing proprietary licences simply would not violate flerbage.
Let's back up: Copyright is an entirely statutory grant. It simply is not a fundamental right that you can legally exclude others from reproducing your speech. For example, Congress could abolish all copyright protection if it chose. Congress has been delegated, and justly so, the power "to promote the arts and sciences" by creating statutes (not rights) that secure authors their writings for "limited Times". Copyright is a loan from the public domain. Loans are a granted priviledge and Congress may secure the loan with restrictions aimed at promoting the ends desired by giving the loan.
It would also a coherent policy view to say that the best way to promote computer science is by demanding as part of the quid-pro-quo involved in securing copyright that source code be released and be modifiable. Can anyone argue that a reasonable man might believe this would advance the progress of computer science? If majoritarian forces in Congress were able to implement this policy into law, then I believe the answer to the question of what should happen to you if you were to release under a proprietary licence anyway is not as ESR asserts that you should be arrested, but rather that the principle of "misuse of copyright" should be applied, whereby you would not receive the governement's assistence in enforcing your copyright.
Trying to licence software under a proprietary licence in the hypothesized scenario simply would not lead to your arrest. It would lead to others violating your licence and the government refusing to help you enforce it.
"The protections afforded by copyright law are completely statutory" was the holding of the Sony Betamax decision, and traces back to the earliest Supreme Court cases. Thus, you have no rights to exclude others from your work unless those statutes recognize them as such. The public owns the public domain and tasked Congress with optimizing its expansion by choosing the most appropriate statutory scheme. If Congress decides that everything you write instantly enters the public domain, then too bad -- you have no injury under the US Constitution. Similarly, they can condition your grant of protection by requiring you to meet criteria the people deem helpful to the end of promoting science and arts.
Please identify another country in the world that could pick its leader in an election decided by 567 votes without having a civil war.
Most of the major courtries in Europe can barely host a soccer game without people killing each other.
I just cracked the voting system they are proposing to use. Unfortunately, because of the DMCA, I cannot share the technical details, other than to say that it does involve a double application of the rot-13 technology.