You have to be very careful with this sort of "law A says I'm allowed to do such and such, but law B hampers it, so law B must be violating my civil rights" reasoning. It's true that the U.S. Copyright Act contains a provision that allows people to make backup copies of copyrighted works, but this does not mean that you have some sort of inalienable right to make backup copies - it merely means that there is nothing wrong in principle with making backup copies. You're still legally obligated to follow any other laws that might enter into the picture. You don't get to ignore the copy-protection circumvention sections of the DMCA in your pursuit of making a backup copy, just like you wouldn't be able to murder someone if shooting someone was somehow necessary for you to create your backup copy.
And no, I don't think that the DMCA is a good idea, I'm just trying to correct a common legal fallacy that I've see repeated many times on slashdot.
Doesn't the owner of a piece of intellectual property have the right to make their property unavailable if they so choose? I realize that most of the examples that have been posted here involve situations where giving widespread access to the 'orphaned' IP wouldn't really hurt anyone, but there are also plenty of cases where a company or individual might want to deliberately make a piece of IP unavailable. If I were a publisher who had recently replaced "The Complete Geek's Guide to Posting on Slashdot" with "The New and Revised Complete Geek's Guide to Posting on Slashdot," I would probably take the original version out of print and wouldn't want it released into the public domain as free competition for my newer product.
Or what if I just decide that I don't want my book/photo/software/whatever circulating any more? Maybe I had a religious conversion and decided that my IP is no longer fit for use in any decent society, so now I want to bury it. If it's my property, don't I have the right to lock it away?
I don't know what you mean by 'calculus,' but most calculus can't be done with a calculator. The cheapest calculator that can perform basic calculus functions (differentiating, integrating) that I'm aware of is the TI-89, which is closer to a PDA than a calculator.
The only thing that calculators are really good for is giving you things that would be tedious or impossible to calculate by hand, like roots, logs, etc.
You have to be open to change.
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I, for one, would like to extend a warm welcome to our new robot-vampire overlords. I would also like to remind them that I should not be drained immediately, as I can be useful to them in rounding up other humans to toil in their underground silicon mines.
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You have to be very careful with this sort of "law A says I'm allowed to do such and such, but law B hampers it, so law B must be violating my civil rights" reasoning. It's true that the U.S. Copyright Act contains a provision that allows people to make backup copies of copyrighted works, but this does not mean that you have some sort of inalienable right to make backup copies - it merely means that there is nothing wrong in principle with making backup copies. You're still legally obligated to follow any other laws that might enter into the picture. You don't get to ignore the copy-protection circumvention sections of the DMCA in your pursuit of making a backup copy, just like you wouldn't be able to murder someone if shooting someone was somehow necessary for you to create your backup copy.
And no, I don't think that the DMCA is a good idea, I'm just trying to correct a common legal fallacy that I've see repeated many times on slashdot.
Doesn't the owner of a piece of intellectual property have the right to make their property unavailable if they so choose? I realize that most of the examples that have been posted here involve situations where giving widespread access to the 'orphaned' IP wouldn't really hurt anyone, but there are also plenty of cases where a company or individual might want to deliberately make a piece of IP unavailable. If I were a publisher who had recently replaced "The Complete Geek's Guide to Posting on Slashdot" with "The New and Revised Complete Geek's Guide to Posting on Slashdot," I would probably take the original version out of print and wouldn't want it released into the public domain as free competition for my newer product.
Or what if I just decide that I don't want my book/photo/software/whatever circulating any more? Maybe I had a religious conversion and decided that my IP is no longer fit for use in any decent society, so now I want to bury it. If it's my property, don't I have the right to lock it away?
I don't know what you mean by 'calculus,' but most calculus can't be done with a calculator. The cheapest calculator that can perform basic calculus functions (differentiating, integrating) that I'm aware of is the TI-89, which is closer to a PDA than a calculator.
The only thing that calculators are really good for is giving you things that would be tedious or impossible to calculate by hand, like roots, logs, etc.
I, for one, would like to extend a warm welcome to our new robot-vampire overlords. I would also like to remind them that I should not be drained immediately, as I can be useful to them in rounding up other humans to toil in their underground silicon mines.