Thank you! It amazes me how even MDs seem to get this wrong. Addiction is marked by phyisical withdrawl symptoms, and calling every habit an addiction is only going to confuse people, and even worse, hinder the progress of those trying to address the physical nature of addiction.
Actually, I should add that I agree with you: blind skepticism is just as bad a blind faith. I actually had to look at his "theory paper" to convince myself he was a crank. There are things like the casimir effect which really aren't well explained by accepted theories and seem to violate conservation of energy until you take very weird things into consideration.
Although seemingly unlikely, I couldn't convince myself from the article that it was impossible so I took a look at the paper. After looking at equation (1) I already suspect the guy doesn't know what he's talking about. He uses the group velocity of microwaves in the Lorentz equation, but the Lorentz equation only makes sense for charged particles, not light. That "q" in the equation in charge, so I guess he's claiming light is a charged particle?
Although I this DRM is evil, I just want to re-emphasize the above poster's extremely important point: current DRM technology does not protect creative works, but prevents them from being transferred legally from one device to another. The use of copy protection is debatable, but preventing interoperability is undeniably monopolistic. In my opinion, that is why current DRM technology is undebatably unacceptable.
So does that part of the agreement absolve me of responsibility for a work which has been modified by dA?
It definitely absolves you from the responsibility of making money off of it. I'm not a legal expert, but since it doesn't explicitly mention legal responsibility in the context of derivative works, it probably either depends on precedent or the whims of the judge if there isn't one.
And if the worst case situation was that I was liable, would I have to go to the USA for the court proceedings? Or would they be held in Australia where I live?
I do recall a case where a US citizen got in trouble with the German government for selling nazi memorabilia (which is illegal in Germany) on ebay.com (not ebay.de). I'm guessing that most cases like that are settled out of court and involve lots of paperwork being exchanged by lawyers.
There are a couple important distinctions between the YouTube and deviantART agreements, although I find both dispicable.
The YouTube license is transferrable without limitation, while the dA agreement is only transferrable in very specific cases. This is important because if YouTube sells content to a third party there is some ambiguity about what the third party can do if the user later removes their content from YouTube.
Another important point is that the dA agreement allows them to modify content. If they do so in such a way that violates a law or makes it more offensive to someone and they wind up getting sued, the original user is still fully legally responsible.
Slashdot Mirror
Thank you! It amazes me how even MDs seem to get this wrong. Addiction is marked by phyisical withdrawl symptoms, and calling every habit an addiction is only going to confuse people, and even worse, hinder the progress of those trying to address the physical nature of addiction.
Actually, I should add that I agree with you: blind skepticism is just as bad a blind faith. I actually had to look at his "theory paper" to convince myself he was a crank. There are things like the casimir effect which really aren't well explained by accepted theories and seem to violate conservation of energy until you take very weird things into consideration.
I got a degree in physics from mit, how about you? ;P
Although seemingly unlikely, I couldn't convince myself from the article that it was impossible so I took a look at the paper. After looking at equation (1) I already suspect the guy doesn't know what he's talking about. He uses the group velocity of microwaves in the Lorentz equation, but the Lorentz equation only makes sense for charged particles, not light. That "q" in the equation in charge, so I guess he's claiming light is a charged particle?
Although I this DRM is evil, I just want to re-emphasize the above poster's extremely important point: current DRM technology does not protect creative works, but prevents them from being transferred legally from one device to another. The use of copy protection is debatable, but preventing interoperability is undeniably monopolistic. In my opinion, that is why current DRM technology is undebatably unacceptable.
So does that part of the agreement absolve me of responsibility for a work which has been modified by dA? It definitely absolves you from the responsibility of making money off of it. I'm not a legal expert, but since it doesn't explicitly mention legal responsibility in the context of derivative works, it probably either depends on precedent or the whims of the judge if there isn't one. And if the worst case situation was that I was liable, would I have to go to the USA for the court proceedings? Or would they be held in Australia where I live? I do recall a case where a US citizen got in trouble with the German government for selling nazi memorabilia (which is illegal in Germany) on ebay.com (not ebay.de). I'm guessing that most cases like that are settled out of court and involve lots of paperwork being exchanged by lawyers.
There are a couple important distinctions between the YouTube and deviantART agreements, although I find both dispicable. The YouTube license is transferrable without limitation, while the dA agreement is only transferrable in very specific cases. This is important because if YouTube sells content to a third party there is some ambiguity about what the third party can do if the user later removes their content from YouTube. Another important point is that the dA agreement allows them to modify content. If they do so in such a way that violates a law or makes it more offensive to someone and they wind up getting sued, the original user is still fully legally responsible.