Google is even claiming a copyright itself on the images, which I don't understand at all They could be doing some modification of the images that results in a derivative work. Assuming they have the permission of the original copyright holder (if any), this should be entirely feasible.
In my corner of the world, pizza joints have been offering film deals for some time now. You'll order pizza and DVD and it'll get delivered to your door. It would surprise me if this wasn't happening elsewhere too...
Ignoring 2D for the moment, if a human decided when, what and how to photograph part of the Earth it might very well be an artistic expression. If the photographing is wholly mechanical and routine, on the other hand, then perhaps not.
Besides, I don't know how 18 months old pictures of secret service positions could be useful to a terrorist. It would be reasonable to assume that the Secret Service has mapped out a bunch of sweet spots they like to stock with snipers and the like. By conducting surveillance of the building over several months, one could conceivably get a good idea where there's likely to be agents at any given time. So while the Google picture might only show one subset of sweet spots, that's more information than none at all to a would-be attacker.
I have no reason to believe that Soviet rocket scientists were unskilled. In fact, the engines they ended up with were (arguable I am sure) better than their US counterparts. It's just a different way of doing engineering. Nukes are (perhaps) a more modern example. The US used to blow up real nukes in order to learn how to design them. Now they use computers to simulate them in stead. While this may be better in terms of pollution, it is not given that the results produced will necessary be better.
How come Europe has been able to switch over to metric? We did use some backward measuring systems in the past, and I'm sure we had problems converting. We had one measurement system per local lord, which meant that the foot in this valley would be different from the foot in the next valley. We had no concept of a common measurement system so that when the French invented one, it would start as "just one more measurement system" without meeting much resistance. Since people were used to dealing with different measurements anyway, eventually adopting this new system as the One True System wasn't much of a problem for them. Besides, for much of Europe, the system is Invented Here whileas in the US, it is Not. Furthermore, in the bargain that gave the British the Meridian and the French the Measurements, the US got nothing, so there may have been some sour grapes over the decades:-)
The Russian approach to rocket science was along the lines of "let's see how it blows up and make sure it blows up in a different way next time". Eventually, they ran out of ways for the engine to blow up and they had a working rocket engine. It seemed to work just fine for them.
When you steal software you are stealing money, because in effect, if you were to purchase the software you would pay money for it. That doesn't follow at all. If you want to attack the question with logic, then please try to be logical about it. If you wouldn't purchase the software in the first place, then you have no right to own a copy of it. While this may be the case, it has no bearing on the theft/not-theft debate. An activity can be wrong or criminal without being theft. You merely deprived the vendor from the money they should have earned on that Rolex. This is not actually what was done. The Rolex was stolen, a Rolex which the vendor had paid money for in the first place. This is theft. The Rolex was thereafter returned for a refund based upon a false receipt. This is fraud.
I find it ironic that in your attempt to admonish people who abuse apostrophes, you elect to abuse capital letters _and_ exclamation marks in order to make your point:-)
Capitalism is an ideology which appreciates that greed is an integral part of human nature and that there is no practical way that this can be changed. In stead, capitalism seeks to harness personal greed to benefit society to the maximum extent possible. It is therefore not particularly surprising if a nation that bases its economic system on capitalism is dominated by greed. It is not clear, however, that there exists a desirable alternative. Nations that have experimented with systems that attempt to suppress personal greed appear to have had very little success and those that embraced capitalism have generally emerged as winners.
Once copyright expires, you should technically be allowed to produce derivative works. In cases where this, in turn, gets stopped by trademark law, I can't really say which one wins out. There is a tendency, however, to not require very much "inconvenience to the public" argumentation in order to get a trademark "revoked" (for lack of a better term) by the courts so I'm not so sure that Mickey would stand up as a trademark in this case.
ÃEmpires have typically tried to get around some of this by using troops from elsewhere when suppressing civilians of some area. For bonus points, use troops from an ethnic group that is (for whatever reason) opposed to the ones you need to suppress. This should work well in multi-ethnic empires such as ancient Rome, China and the Soviet Union. The US isn't quite there yet but it could conceivably get there if poorly integrated Mexican or Chinese population groups became large enough. As for Norwegian military training, conscripts aren't generally trained to kill. They are trained to use their equipment, but there are rules against e.g., using targets that look like humans. The closest we get are cardboard cutouts with a quadratic "head" on top of a rectangular "body" with no artwork on it other than concentric circles (or ellipses). Since conscripts generally return to civilian lives after their year of service, we basically don't want to train them to be killers:-) Our professional forces (the ones we send to Afghanistan etc.) might get more realistic training the this, I don't know.
I served in the Norwegian air force for my compulsory year of military training. Norwegian conscript forces are pretty lax, and the air force even more so. Additionally, I ended up at a mostly academic training facility for a month. At this facility, a bunch of us went out to do some rafting and the girl we hired to lead the expedition told us that she always enjoyed it when recruits from the air force base came to do rafting because they always followed her directions without question and with the utmost effort. And that's from only a very relaxed military training regime. Of course, this isn't to say that we'd follow unreasonable orders. But when given reasonable ones (e.g., paddle upstream!), we wouldn't hesitate. I wouldn't know whether or not the US military trains its troops to follow unreasonable orders, but Norwegian conscripts generally are not.
A possible complication might be that the appearance of Mickey is also trademarked. But as the previous poster says, this particular (purely visual) trademark probably dies together with the copyright.
It's relatively straight-forward to register a new business in such a way that it cannot be connected to the "parent" business. There are just too many loopholes in both national and international laws to base restrictions on per-business limitations. Those laws that we already have along those lines (e.g., anti-trust legislation) are notoriously difficult and expensive to investigate and are only pursued in very high profile cases (e.g., Microsoft monopoly abuse, Enron scandal). It is not realistic to believe that this is a feasible way of pursuing patent abuse.
Employing various means to obfuscate or hide the workings behind one's invention used to be extremely common, and particularly effective in those cases where the inventor didn't necessarily have to widely distribute his actual invention (such as if he invents ingenius new production equipment for some consumer item - the item that the public gets access to holds no clues as to the clever new manufacturing process). This is even more of a factor today, when manufacturing equipment is so wide-spread and when some inventions are so tiny that you'd need extremely expensive equipment and techniques to figure out what exactly is going on (e.g., nanotech). The trend among geniuses has generally been to despise and sabotage eachother, and to jealously guard their own inventions. The patent system gives them an incentive to share the details with the world.
The governments aren't necessarily elected. What tends to happen is that the people who are elected (i.e., members of parliament) get together and work out some majority coalition and then decide on who gets to be prime minister. Then the prime minister and the heads of the coalition parties get together and bicker over who the ministers will be. The end result could very well be a govt full off non-elected ministers (that is, people not necessarily in parliament). This is, at best, an indirect way of electing members of government. More realistically, it's a lottery. The current prime minister of Norway is from a party that got around 10% of the votes for parliament. It's all a bit reminiscent of the excellent board game "Junta":-)
The idea that people will all the sudden stop innovating without patents is bullshit The problem with not having patents isn't that people will stop innovating. Rather, it's that they won't tell us what they did exactly. When they don't, it becomes very hard for the rest of us to build on top of their achievements, and so the general progress of science is impeded. So while there might be as many (or even more) people innovating without patents, most of them will be busy reinventing 200-year old wheel designs.
Who in the world would spend $200 million making a movie if they knew that rival film companies could pirate it immediately, or that pirates could freely distribute it without fear of retribution? Chances are we'd be better off without $200m movies, but without actual capitalism to help us determine that we are never going to know.
3. Any person or business that files over 5 patents in one year has their filing fees raised expotentially with each subsequent submission. This is an effective deterrent for individuals only since a business will just register an ad hoc business to hold the extra patents. With 5 patents per business, patent fees will dwarf business registration fees anyway so it's not even an interesting trade-off.
There is no need to treat corps as people just because there's people in them. People are already treated as people, whether or not their corp is. I also don't think that there actually _needs_ to be people in a corporation. It's a purely legal construct that only really exists on a piece of paper. Having people isn't necessary for that.
I think it can be valid to anthropomorphise anything, regardless of whether there's any sort of thought process behind it. I would consider "a proton wants to move towards negative charge" a valid anthropomorphisation even though this behaviour is obviously not preplanned by anyone in particular. I find, however, that anthropomorphisation should be used with the utmost care, and prefferably only in a circle of people that are intimately familiar with the topic in question.
Slashdot Mirror
Google is even claiming a copyright itself on the images, which I don't understand at all
They could be doing some modification of the images that results in a derivative work. Assuming they have the permission of the original copyright holder (if any), this should be entirely feasible.
In my corner of the world, pizza joints have been offering film deals for some time now. You'll order pizza and DVD and it'll get delivered to your door. It would surprise me if this wasn't happening elsewhere too ...
Ignoring 2D for the moment, if a human decided when, what and how to photograph part of the Earth it might very well be an artistic expression. If the photographing is wholly mechanical and routine, on the other hand, then perhaps not.
Besides, I don't know how 18 months old pictures of secret service positions could be useful to a terrorist.
It would be reasonable to assume that the Secret Service has mapped out a bunch of sweet spots they like to stock with snipers and the like. By conducting surveillance of the building over several months, one could conceivably get a good idea where there's likely to be agents at any given time. So while the Google picture might only show one subset of sweet spots, that's more information than none at all to a would-be attacker.
A photograph, like any creative work, is automatically copyrighted by whoever took it (well, in most cases anyway).
I have no reason to believe that Soviet rocket scientists were unskilled. In fact, the engines they ended up with were (arguable I am sure) better than their US counterparts. It's just a different way of doing engineering.
Nukes are (perhaps) a more modern example. The US used to blow up real nukes in order to learn how to design them. Now they use computers to simulate them in stead. While this may be better in terms of pollution, it is not given that the results produced will necessary be better.
How come Europe has been able to switch over to metric? We did use some backward measuring systems in the past, and I'm sure we had problems converting. :-)
We had one measurement system per local lord, which meant that the foot in this valley would be different from the foot in the next valley. We had no concept of a common measurement system so that when the French invented one, it would start as "just one more measurement system" without meeting much resistance. Since people were used to dealing with different measurements anyway, eventually adopting this new system as the One True System wasn't much of a problem for them.
Besides, for much of Europe, the system is Invented Here whileas in the US, it is Not. Furthermore, in the bargain that gave the British the Meridian and the French the Measurements, the US got nothing, so there may have been some sour grapes over the decades
The Russian approach to rocket science was along the lines of "let's see how it blows up and make sure it blows up in a different way next time". Eventually, they ran out of ways for the engine to blow up and they had a working rocket engine. It seemed to work just fine for them.
When you steal software you are stealing money, because in effect, if you were to purchase the software you would pay money for it.
That doesn't follow at all. If you want to attack the question with logic, then please try to be logical about it.
If you wouldn't purchase the software in the first place, then you have no right to own a copy of it.
While this may be the case, it has no bearing on the theft/not-theft debate. An activity can be wrong or criminal without being theft.
You merely deprived the vendor from the money they should have earned on that Rolex.
This is not actually what was done. The Rolex was stolen, a Rolex which the vendor had paid money for in the first place. This is theft. The Rolex was thereafter returned for a refund based upon a false receipt. This is fraud.
Only the Xs, Ys and Zs whose creation is wholly based on selling copies of the product.
The right to privacy is preserved by the tenth amendment to the US constitution.
http://www.house.gov/Constitution/Amend.html
I find it ironic that in your attempt to admonish people who abuse apostrophes, you elect to abuse capital letters _and_ exclamation marks in order to make your point :-)
Capitalism is an ideology which appreciates that greed is an integral part of human nature and that there is no practical way that this can be changed. In stead, capitalism seeks to harness personal greed to benefit society to the maximum extent possible. It is therefore not particularly surprising if a nation that bases its economic system on capitalism is dominated by greed.
It is not clear, however, that there exists a desirable alternative. Nations that have experimented with systems that attempt to suppress personal greed appear to have had very little success and those that embraced capitalism have generally emerged as winners.
Once copyright expires, you should technically be allowed to produce derivative works. In cases where this, in turn, gets stopped by trademark law, I can't really say which one wins out. There is a tendency, however, to not require very much "inconvenience to the public" argumentation in order to get a trademark "revoked" (for lack of a better term) by the courts so I'm not so sure that Mickey would stand up as a trademark in this case.
ÃEmpires have typically tried to get around some of this by using troops from elsewhere when suppressing civilians of some area. For bonus points, use troops from an ethnic group that is (for whatever reason) opposed to the ones you need to suppress. This should work well in multi-ethnic empires such as ancient Rome, China and the Soviet Union. The US isn't quite there yet but it could conceivably get there if poorly integrated Mexican or Chinese population groups became large enough. :-)
As for Norwegian military training, conscripts aren't generally trained to kill. They are trained to use their equipment, but there are rules against e.g., using targets that look like humans. The closest we get are cardboard cutouts with a quadratic "head" on top of a rectangular "body" with no artwork on it other than concentric circles (or ellipses). Since conscripts generally return to civilian lives after their year of service, we basically don't want to train them to be killers
Our professional forces (the ones we send to Afghanistan etc.) might get more realistic training the this, I don't know.
I served in the Norwegian air force for my compulsory year of military training. Norwegian conscript forces are pretty lax, and the air force even more so. Additionally, I ended up at a mostly academic training facility for a month. At this facility, a bunch of us went out to do some rafting and the girl we hired to lead the expedition told us that she always enjoyed it when recruits from the air force base came to do rafting because they always followed her directions without question and with the utmost effort.
And that's from only a very relaxed military training regime.
Of course, this isn't to say that we'd follow unreasonable orders. But when given reasonable ones (e.g., paddle upstream!), we wouldn't hesitate. I wouldn't know whether or not the US military trains its troops to follow unreasonable orders, but Norwegian conscripts generally are not.
A possible complication might be that the appearance of Mickey is also trademarked. But as the previous poster says, this particular (purely visual) trademark probably dies together with the copyright.
It's relatively straight-forward to register a new business in such a way that it cannot be connected to the "parent" business. There are just too many loopholes in both national and international laws to base restrictions on per-business limitations. Those laws that we already have along those lines (e.g., anti-trust legislation) are notoriously difficult and expensive to investigate and are only pursued in very high profile cases (e.g., Microsoft monopoly abuse, Enron scandal). It is not realistic to believe that this is a feasible way of pursuing patent abuse.
Employing various means to obfuscate or hide the workings behind one's invention used to be extremely common, and particularly effective in those cases where the inventor didn't necessarily have to widely distribute his actual invention (such as if he invents ingenius new production equipment for some consumer item - the item that the public gets access to holds no clues as to the clever new manufacturing process). This is even more of a factor today, when manufacturing equipment is so wide-spread and when some inventions are so tiny that you'd need extremely expensive equipment and techniques to figure out what exactly is going on (e.g., nanotech).
The trend among geniuses has generally been to despise and sabotage eachother, and to jealously guard their own inventions. The patent system gives them an incentive to share the details with the world.
The governments aren't necessarily elected. What tends to happen is that the people who are elected (i.e., members of parliament) get together and work out some majority coalition and then decide on who gets to be prime minister. Then the prime minister and the heads of the coalition parties get together and bicker over who the ministers will be. The end result could very well be a govt full off non-elected ministers (that is, people not necessarily in parliament). This is, at best, an indirect way of electing members of government. More realistically, it's a lottery. The current prime minister of Norway is from a party that got around 10% of the votes for parliament. :-)
It's all a bit reminiscent of the excellent board game "Junta"
The idea that people will all the sudden stop innovating without patents is bullshit
The problem with not having patents isn't that people will stop innovating. Rather, it's that they won't tell us what they did exactly. When they don't, it becomes very hard for the rest of us to build on top of their achievements, and so the general progress of science is impeded. So while there might be as many (or even more) people innovating without patents, most of them will be busy reinventing 200-year old wheel designs.
Who in the world would spend $200 million making a movie if they knew that rival film companies could pirate it immediately, or that pirates could freely distribute it without fear of retribution?
Chances are we'd be better off without $200m movies, but without actual capitalism to help us determine that we are never going to know.
3. Any person or business that files over 5 patents in one year has their filing fees raised expotentially with each subsequent submission.
This is an effective deterrent for individuals only since a business will just register an ad hoc business to hold the extra patents. With 5 patents per business, patent fees will dwarf business registration fees anyway so it's not even an interesting trade-off.
There is no need to treat corps as people just because there's people in them. People are already treated as people, whether or not their corp is.
I also don't think that there actually _needs_ to be people in a corporation. It's a purely legal construct that only really exists on a piece of paper. Having people isn't necessary for that.
I think it can be valid to anthropomorphise anything, regardless of whether there's any sort of thought process behind it. I would consider "a proton wants to move towards negative charge" a valid anthropomorphisation even though this behaviour is obviously not preplanned by anyone in particular.
I find, however, that anthropomorphisation should be used with the utmost care, and prefferably only in a circle of people that are intimately familiar with the topic in question.