Although I have little sympathy for pesky telemarketers they do have a point. It is a burden to have to deal with 50 different state laws. Having a uniform national standard does have a lot of virtues.
Rather than doing what the telemarketers are asking for and relaxing the rules to the lowest common denominator, I wonder if there isn't a straightforward technological solution: create a database containing all of the state rules that telemarketers can use to filter their call lists.
When a telemarketer proposes to call a number, a program checks the number and responds: "sorry, that's a Louisiana number and its Acadian Day; you can't call there today." It sounds like there isn't very much variation among states, just a few holidays to avoid and differences as to what an existing business relationship allows you to do, so it seems like it wouldn't be very difficult to implement or much of a burden on the telemarketers.
From the point of view of adult programmers an MCAD may not count for a lot, and Microsoft may be a nasty company, but this is still an impressive little girl with an interesting story. There aren't a lot of nine year olds who can write C#. That's a good bit harder than some baby Basic, if for no other reason than the detail that you have to take care of and the object-orientation. And not very many nine year olds have the interest and dedication
to pursue something like this.
Its also important to realize that this is a little girl in a country that gives very few opportunities to women, especially women who are not from the upper class. According to the article, her dad is a soldier. It doesn't sound like she comes from a wealthy, powerful family.
So, while getting this certificate may well not make her a genius, it does make her a smart and persistent little girl who has done something quite unusual not only for her age but, in her country, for her gender. I say good for her, good for her family for encouraging her rather than telling her not to act unladylike, and good for Microsoft for giving her the trip. (But if I were in charge at Microsoft, I would have thrown in a stop at Disneyland.)
We can be quite confident that NT does not contain VMS code: VMS was written mostly in VAX assembly language. NT was written, I believe, mostly in C. In any case, one thing we can be sure of is that it was NOT written in VAX assembly language.
I'm not even sure that NT can be said to contain ideas proprietary to VMS. Is there any evidence of that? The general nature of VMS has been public knowledge since the outset, and as far as I know there is nothing in VMS that requires unusual algorithms or coding tricks that would make it hard to implement without detailed knowledge of the code. I'm no MS lover (and use no MS software), but I haven't heard anything that would make me thing that MS played dirty on this one.
Trademarks have traditionally been limited to specific types of goods or services on the principle that trademarks are intended to prevent confusion and consumers are not likely to confuse goods of different types. However, there is an exception, which took its current form in 1995 revisions to US federal law, for so-called "famous marks". These are trademarks that are very well known and strongly associated with a particular company. Examples are marks like Kodak, Coca-Cola, and Reebok. These can be protected even if the products are so different that there is no danger of confusion because the use of the mark by someone else is considered to "dilute" the original mark.
For example, if someone were to market "Reebok chocolate", there would be little likelihood of someone who wanted a pair of running shoes getting confused and buying chocolate instead, but the owner of the Reebok mark for shoes would be able to stop someone else from using it as a mark for chocolate on the grounds of dilution.
In general it is much easier to establish "famous mark" status for arbitrary marks like the ones mentioned than for marks like "Apple" or "Johnson's". Such meaningful marks are inherently less distinctive since they are unlikely to be unique and may have a non-arbitrary association with some products.
You'll notice, if you read the article carefully, that Stoller repeatedly refers to his "famous marks". It sounds a bit odd, as if he had a strange way of speaking, but I think that what he is really doing is emphasizing his claim that his marks are "universal" because they fall into the famous mark category. It seems clear that he is wrong about this - "stealth" is not famous like Reebok or Xerox - but I think that what he is up to is trying to establish "famous mark" status.
I think that you need to be very careful what you tell those kids. Most of what you see on TV about voice identification is nonsense. The images that
they call "voiceprints" are spectrograms: that is, they're 3D plots of the spectrum over time, with
frequency on the y axis, time on the x axis, and energy represented by darkness. Phoneticians like myself use them all the time.
In one sense every utterance, and therefore every spectrogram, is unique. The central problem in acoustic phonetics is the enormous variation in the physical signal for what in linguistic terms is the "same" utterance. The details of the signal depend on the speaker, the speaker's mood and state of health, the weather, rate of speech, choice of register (formal, casual, etc.), as well as on what other sounds the speaker is producing in the vicinity. There is a lot of contextual influence. If you compare, for example, the vowel/u/ in "tune" with that in "moose", you'll find a large difference. This one is so large you can see it just looking at the spectrogram.
Once spectrograms became available, in the late
1940s (using a machine called the sonagraph with analog filters), people started looking for the acoustic correlates of linguistic features. They thought that it would be simple. What they discovered was the tremendous amount of variation and the great difficulty of finding acoustic correlates of linguistic features that are invariant under changes in phonetic context and the various other factors I mentioned.
One result of this is that almost all of the research has been on abstracting away sources of variation such as speaker identity. As a result, not very much is known about the properties of the voice that are unique to individual speakers. In fact, we do not know whether voices are unique. It's clear, of course, that to some extent we can distinguish people by their voices, but we don't know that voices are truly unique, or how close they are to it.
The upshot of this is that there is no scientific
basis for determining whether two recordings, or two "voiceprints", are of the same speaker.
(If they're different enough we may be able to say that they are NOT from the same speaker.)
Anybody who claims to be able to look at a couple of spectrograms and testify with confidence that the same person produced both utterances is a quack. I know people who've spent substantial
time debunking this stuff in court. You won't find it supported by published research.
So, why can you login to your computer by voice?
Systems like that rely on statistical "ignorance modelling". We don't know very much about what the relevant acoustic properties are, but we can make statistical models that are good enough at distinguishing one speaker from another for some applications. Even the better speaker identification systems don't work too well if they can't make a comparison between two instances of the same utterance, and as another poster mentioned from his own experience, changes in his own voice over a few months would throw off his voice login system.
The other relevant factor here is that for some purposes its okay to have systems that make a lot of mistakes as long as they are in the right direction. If you want to limit access to a lab, let's say, it will very likely be okay to have a system that produces a lot of false negatives, that is, that incorrectly denies that the person trying to enter is authorized to. So long as you have a very low rate of false positives, the system may be acceptable.
So, the real situation is that for some applications statistical voice recognition works well enough, but that such systems do not work well enough to be acceptable for such purposes as identifying a unique individual as a criminal.
Speaker identification by visual comparison of spectrograms is junk science.
As for software for looking at speech, there are a number of free (as in beer and as in speech) programs available. This page has some links that you might find useful.
For the naive user, the confusion between OS and UI stems from the fact that its all one piece to them. For a somewhat less naive user, it may also be due to the fact that MS Windows intermingles the UI and the core OS functions. For those of us familiar with Unix and other OSes with a reasonable degree of modularity, the distinction is obvious, but if all you know is MS Windows, even if you know a fair amount about it, the idea of separating OS and UI may never have arisen.
I second this, especially since this product isn't a full scale keyboard. It may be useful for gamers or other special applications, but it doesn't look like it would be very useful for those who want a remappable full keyboard.
I use.xmodmaprc to remap the Caps Lock key as an additional Control key. That gives me a Control key where it was meant to be and gets rid of that pesky Caps Lock.
copyright infrigement--otherwise known in the academic field as plagarism
Actually, plagiarism and copyright infringement are quite different. Plagiarism means using someone else's words or ideas without attribution. Copyright violation is using someone's words without permission.
Plagiarism is broader in that you need not use someone's exact words to be guilty of plagiarism. Plagiarism can consist purely of taking someone else's ideas. Furthermore, using just a few words without attribution can make you guilty of plagiarism, while using the same number of words without permission would fall under fair use and not be actionable.
On the other hand, you can be guilty of copyright
infringment without engaging in plagiarism. If you burn a bunch of copies of MS Windows and sell them, labelled as MS Windows, you're not guilty of plagiarism. You haven't represented somebody else's words or ideas as your own. You are, however, infringing on MS's copyright. (You're also contributing to bad computing practice, the spread of viruses and worms, etc., but that's a different issue...)
Incidentally, this distinction seems not to be clear to a lot of people who are supposed to understand it. I must have seen half a dozen or more policy statements on plagiarism and pamphlets and so forth aimed at university students and high school students, and I think that only one of them got it right. They tend to lump plagiarism and copyright infringement together in a vague miasma of how its bad to take other people's things. One bad consequence of this is that a lot of kids probably sincerely believe that if they take something from a book and change the wording a little it isn't plagiarism, or that something they can literally copy something from the web that they think (often wrongly) is in the public domain. This is due to a confusion between plagiarism and copyright infringment.
No need to be confused. I'm pretty sure that what they're saying is that somebody who writes something
as part of his or her job, that is not research and not teaching material, is engaged in writing a work for hire, so the university gets the copyright. In other words, they're pretty much exempting faculty. The copyrights they are talking about are the ones on the stuff written by Human Resources people or the person hired to write a history of the university or something for the alumni magazine.
The situation the poster describes is, I think, atypical. In my experience (and I've been faculty for 22 years) virtually all universities concede to their faculty the copyright on what they write as part of their research or teaching. The only situation I can think of in which the university gets the copyright is when a faculty member writes something at the behest of the university. For instance, if you're one of a number of people who write a policy manual, the university will normally hold the copyright on that. But it is unheard of in my experience for the university to hold the copyright on research publications by faculty.
Patents are another story. Policies vary quite a bit. A common one is that the university has the right of first refusal. If they turn it down, its yours. If they decide they want it, you get a certain percentage of the profit.
Software, naturally, is sort of in between, being something written and typically protected by copyright, but at the same time more in the nature of a "thing" or a "product". In practice, lots of software is released under the GPL or BSD licenses. Roughly speaking, the less obvious commercial value the software has, the more closely it is tied to your research, and the smaller the group of people who work on it, the more likely you'll be able to release it freely.
If you write a compiler for the cool new dysfunctional language you've designed, all by yourself, the odds are they'll never even notice, much less care. If, on the other hand, a bunch of people create something that looks like a product and looks like a money-maker, the university may take a different view of things. If they can argue that you've used a lot of university resources (other than your research time), that will make it look more like it belongs to them.
People have sometimes gotten into trouble with big projects like this. Stephen Wolfram left Cal Tech when he got into a fight with them over the ownership of SMP, the symbolic math program that he had written, essentially the predecessor to Mathematica.
My impression is that unless you get involved in things like SMP that look really attractive as products, releasing software is generally not a big problem, though some places will want to use a BSD-type license instead of the GPL. I'd be curious to see if anyone else on Slashdot knows of problems of this sort arising in practice.
A public school is not someone's private residence. In general, people have full 1st Amendment rights in public facilities. Students have some too, but there are limits due to the fact that they re minors and that the school has to impose some restrictions in order to function as a school. Even so, courts have upheld some free speech rights for minor students.
Bonding in this sense refers to an employer taking out insurance against the malfeasance of an employee.
There are some jobs for which the ability to be bonded is a requirement. People like bank tellers and cashiers in businesses that deal with large amounts of cash are likely to be bonded. If, for instance, a bank teller steals money from the bank, the insurer who issued the bond pays compensation.
Sometimes a third party requires that certain types of employee be bonded. For instance, a company's principal insurer may require that the bank obtain bonds (from another insurer) for all of its tellers.
Granting that the federal government is good at screwing up large projects, the same is true of business, yet it seems to me that lots of businesses have set up comparable information systems. This is not an area in which I have any expertise, but to my perhaps naive eye, it seems like it ought to be possible to do it almost off-the-shelf. That is, the networking shouldn't be a big problem, and large database systems are of course widely deployed, so shouldn't setting up a system for the FBI be a matter of integrating a few familiar pieces of technology, with the programming mostly at the level of creating the appropriate fields, queries, forms, and so forth for FBI business? In short, is this actually a hard project, or is it a matter of adapting the same sort of technology used by companies like Ford and Walmart and so forth?
Nonetheless, I think you'll find that "preparation of derivative works" is not interpreted as applying to private modification. There's more to the law than the narrow interpretation of the statute itself. For example, on your interpretation, it would appear to be a violation of copyright for me to sell a book that I have purchased. Of course, it is perfectly legal to do so. What copyright secures to the holder is the right to make decisions about initial sales. He or she decides whether to sell or not, at what price, through which publisher, etc. But once the author sells me a copy of the book, it is mine to give or sell to someone else if I wish to.
One piece of evidence that adaptation without reproduction and distribution is not a violation of copyright is section 106A "Moral rights in works of visual art". Section 106A prevents, for example, alteration of a painting, even if the painting is unique. Section 106A would be redundant if section 106 had the meaning you propose.
Another relevant fact is that the statute contains a long list of categories exemplifying derivative works (translation, screenplay, etc.) but never mentions anything like annotation or defacement.
This is a case in which the law is badly written in that the wording used is compatible with the interpretation you suggest but that interpretation was pretty clearly not intended by Congress.
I don't think that the section 106 restriction of the right to prepare derivative works to the copyright holder is relevant here. That's a restriction only on distribution. If I buy a copyrighted book, for example, I am perfectly free to change the binding, cut out pages that I don't like, cross out bits I don't like, annotate it, and so forth. What the copyright restricts me from doing is distributing such things.
Do you really think that localization into a single language will typically take as much time as the development of the software in the first place? I find that hard to believe.
I'm pretty sure that Sweden is one of those highly advanced countries with tons of social benefits. I don't believe for a minute that they allow the hunting of the blind.
I have NEVER had a problem with a virus because I've never done much of my work on an MS Windows system and now don't use any Microsoft software at all. My machines run only GNU/Linux. I continue to be amazed that a company that consistently produces such poor software can stay in business when patently superior alternatives are available. The only thing newsworthy about the fact that they are going to make a half-baked effort to deal with a problem of their own creation and get people to pay for it is that they have the chutzpah to try it.
'Virii' is actually the correct plural of 'virus'.
Nope. You're making two assumptions, both false.
The first is that the "correct" English plural must always be the same as the Latin one, if a word is a loan from Latin. That is often the case, but it isn't a law of nature or of any other kind.
Like speakers of other languages, English speakers can and do adapt foreign words. The great majority of English speakers, including well-educated people and scientists who work with viruses, say viruses.
The second false assumption is that the Latin plural of virus is virii. It isn't.
That would be true if virus were a second declension masculine noun, but it isn't. It is a neuter noun of the second declension and has no Latin plural. Here is a summary of Latin plural formation that includes this fact about virus. For further discussion of Latin pseudo-plurals in English, I suggest this Language Log post.
When I purchase something (Windows XP, XBox, PS2, lumber, or a drill), I am now the owner of that piece of property.
Unfortunately, this isn't always true. The claim of the proprietary software companies is that what they are offering is a license. They are not selling you their software. You purchase the physical medium outright; you can do anything you like with the CD: use it as a coaster, resell it (without the software), use it for target practice. But you do not become the owner of the software anymore than you become the owner (that is, copyright holder) of the text of a book by virtue of purchasing the physical book.
I'm an advocate of FOSS myself and have no love for Microsoft, SCO, or their ilk, but you won't get anywhere in dealing with the problems they cause if you don't understand the legal situation.
By the way, GP looks familiar. I think I've seen this nonsensical piece here already, more than once. I think some troll (or group of trolls) post the same thing from time to time. Maybe somebody should post it together with an analysis so that people could just link to that rather than having to spend time on a new refutations each time.
This simply isn't true. Neither Microsoft nor the BSA has any legal authority to enter anyone's place of business or home in the absence of either a court order or the owner's permission to do so. The necessary permission could be granted at the time, or it could have been granted at an earlier time when a license agreement was signed. When the BSA conducts a raid (and they aren't just being allowed to tag along with real police) the only authority on which they have to rely is a prior valid agreement with the owner. If they try to enter your premises without either your permission or a court order, they are trespassing. You can refuse them entry or throw them out if they get inside, and you can use necessary and appropriate force to do so. (Details of that will vary with your jurisdiction.)
Even if they DO have a right to audit you, by virtue of a license agreement, they cannot force their way in. Remember, these aren't the police. All they've got is a contract. If you refuse them entry, at worst you're in breach of contract. If they want to do anything about it, they'll have to go to court. They may be able to get a court order, in which case you risk prosecution for contempt of court if you refuse. In an extreme case, they may persuade the court to order the sheriff to provide access for them by force if necessary. They may also be able to sue you for damages and win, though it isn't clear what sort of damages they can get.
In general I would guess that they could get very little by way statute or equity, but that some contracts may impose significant penalties for breach.
There have been incidents reported of BSA clowns conducting raids as if they had a right to force entry, but in most of the cases I have heard about, they were acting beyond their legal rights and succeeded in intimidating people who didn't know their legal rights.
Slashdot Mirror
Although I have little sympathy for pesky telemarketers they do have a point. It is a burden to have to deal with 50 different state laws. Having a uniform national standard does have a lot of virtues.
Rather than doing what the telemarketers are asking for and relaxing the rules to the lowest common denominator, I wonder if there isn't a straightforward technological solution: create a database containing all of the state rules that telemarketers can use to filter their call lists. When a telemarketer proposes to call a number, a program checks the number and responds: "sorry, that's a Louisiana number and its Acadian Day; you can't call there today." It sounds like there isn't very much variation among states, just a few holidays to avoid and differences as to what an existing business relationship allows you to do, so it seems like it wouldn't be very difficult to implement or much of a burden on the telemarketers.
From the point of view of adult programmers an MCAD may not count for a lot, and Microsoft may be a nasty company, but this is still an impressive little girl with an interesting story. There aren't a lot of nine year olds who can write C#. That's a good bit harder than some baby Basic, if for no other reason than the detail that you have to take care of and the object-orientation. And not very many nine year olds have the interest and dedication to pursue something like this.
Its also important to realize that this is a little girl in a country that gives very few opportunities to women, especially women who are not from the upper class. According to the article, her dad is a soldier. It doesn't sound like she comes from a wealthy, powerful family. So, while getting this certificate may well not make her a genius, it does make her a smart and persistent little girl who has done something quite unusual not only for her age but, in her country, for her gender. I say good for her, good for her family for encouraging her rather than telling her not to act unladylike, and good for Microsoft for giving her the trip. (But if I were in charge at Microsoft, I would have thrown in a stop at Disneyland.)
We can be quite confident that NT does not contain VMS code: VMS was written mostly in VAX assembly language. NT was written, I believe, mostly in C. In any case, one thing we can be sure of is that it was NOT written in VAX assembly language.
I'm not even sure that NT can be said to contain ideas proprietary to VMS. Is there any evidence of that? The general nature of VMS has been public knowledge since the outset, and as far as I know there is nothing in VMS that requires unusual algorithms or coding tricks that would make it hard to implement without detailed knowledge of the code. I'm no MS lover (and use no MS software), but I haven't heard anything that would make me thing that MS played dirty on this one.
Trademarks have traditionally been limited to specific types of goods or services on the principle that trademarks are intended to prevent confusion and consumers are not likely to confuse goods of different types. However, there is an exception, which took its current form in 1995 revisions to US federal law, for so-called "famous marks". These are trademarks that are very well known and strongly associated with a particular company. Examples are marks like Kodak, Coca-Cola, and Reebok. These can be protected even if the products are so different that there is no danger of confusion because the use of the mark by someone else is considered to "dilute" the original mark.
For example, if someone were to market "Reebok chocolate", there would be little likelihood of someone who wanted a pair of running shoes getting confused and buying chocolate instead, but the owner of the Reebok mark for shoes would be able to stop someone else from using it as a mark for chocolate on the grounds of dilution.
In general it is much easier to establish "famous mark" status for arbitrary marks like the ones mentioned than for marks like "Apple" or "Johnson's". Such meaningful marks are inherently less distinctive since they are unlikely to be unique and may have a non-arbitrary association with some products.
You'll notice, if you read the article carefully, that Stoller repeatedly refers to his "famous marks". It sounds a bit odd, as if he had a strange way of speaking, but I think that what he is really doing is emphasizing his claim that his marks are "universal" because they fall into the famous mark category. It seems clear that he is wrong about this - "stealth" is not famous like Reebok or Xerox - but I think that what he is up to is trying to establish "famous mark" status.
I think that the only reason the White House is pushing this so hard is that Bush thought they were talking about a TV station.
I think that you need to be very careful what you tell those kids. Most of what you see on TV about voice identification is nonsense. The images that they call "voiceprints" are spectrograms: that is, they're 3D plots of the spectrum over time, with frequency on the y axis, time on the x axis, and energy represented by darkness. Phoneticians like myself use them all the time.
In one sense every utterance, and therefore every spectrogram, is unique. The central problem in acoustic phonetics is the enormous variation in the physical signal for what in linguistic terms is the "same" utterance. The details of the signal depend on the speaker, the speaker's mood and state of health, the weather, rate of speech, choice of register (formal, casual, etc.), as well as on what other sounds the speaker is producing in the vicinity. There is a lot of contextual influence. If you compare, for example, the vowel /u/ in "tune" with that in "moose", you'll find a large difference. This one is so large you can see it just looking at the spectrogram.
Once spectrograms became available, in the late 1940s (using a machine called the sonagraph with analog filters), people started looking for the acoustic correlates of linguistic features. They thought that it would be simple. What they discovered was the tremendous amount of variation and the great difficulty of finding acoustic correlates of linguistic features that are invariant under changes in phonetic context and the various other factors I mentioned.
One result of this is that almost all of the research has been on abstracting away sources of variation such as speaker identity. As a result, not very much is known about the properties of the voice that are unique to individual speakers. In fact, we do not know whether voices are unique. It's clear, of course, that to some extent we can distinguish people by their voices, but we don't know that voices are truly unique, or how close they are to it.
The upshot of this is that there is no scientific basis for determining whether two recordings, or two "voiceprints", are of the same speaker. (If they're different enough we may be able to say that they are NOT from the same speaker.) Anybody who claims to be able to look at a couple of spectrograms and testify with confidence that the same person produced both utterances is a quack. I know people who've spent substantial time debunking this stuff in court. You won't find it supported by published research.
So, why can you login to your computer by voice? Systems like that rely on statistical "ignorance modelling". We don't know very much about what the relevant acoustic properties are, but we can make statistical models that are good enough at distinguishing one speaker from another for some applications. Even the better speaker identification systems don't work too well if they can't make a comparison between two instances of the same utterance, and as another poster mentioned from his own experience, changes in his own voice over a few months would throw off his voice login system.
The other relevant factor here is that for some purposes its okay to have systems that make a lot of mistakes as long as they are in the right direction. If you want to limit access to a lab, let's say, it will very likely be okay to have a system that produces a lot of false negatives, that is, that incorrectly denies that the person trying to enter is authorized to. So long as you have a very low rate of false positives, the system may be acceptable.
So, the real situation is that for some applications statistical voice recognition works well enough, but that such systems do not work well enough to be acceptable for such purposes as identifying a unique individual as a criminal. Speaker identification by visual comparison of spectrograms is junk science.
As for software for looking at speech, there are a number of free (as in beer and as in speech) programs available. This page has some links that you might find useful.
For the naive user, the confusion between OS and UI stems from the fact that its all one piece to them. For a somewhat less naive user, it may also be due to the fact that MS Windows intermingles the UI and the core OS functions. For those of us familiar with Unix and other OSes with a reasonable degree of modularity, the distinction is obvious, but if all you know is MS Windows, even if you know a fair amount about it, the idea of separating OS and UI may never have arisen.
I second this, especially since this product isn't a full scale keyboard. It may be useful for gamers or other special applications, but it doesn't look like it would be very useful for those who want a remappable full keyboard.
I use .xmodmaprc to remap the Caps Lock key as an additional Control key. That gives me a Control key where it was meant to be and gets rid of that pesky Caps Lock.
I think he did:
Actually, plagiarism and copyright infringement are quite different. Plagiarism means using someone else's words or ideas without attribution. Copyright violation is using someone's words without permission.
Plagiarism is broader in that you need not use someone's exact words to be guilty of plagiarism. Plagiarism can consist purely of taking someone else's ideas. Furthermore, using just a few words without attribution can make you guilty of plagiarism, while using the same number of words without permission would fall under fair use and not be actionable.
On the other hand, you can be guilty of copyright infringment without engaging in plagiarism. If you burn a bunch of copies of MS Windows and sell them, labelled as MS Windows, you're not guilty of plagiarism. You haven't represented somebody else's words or ideas as your own. You are, however, infringing on MS's copyright. (You're also contributing to bad computing practice, the spread of viruses and worms, etc., but that's a different issue...)
Incidentally, this distinction seems not to be clear to a lot of people who are supposed to understand it. I must have seen half a dozen or more policy statements on plagiarism and pamphlets and so forth aimed at university students and high school students, and I think that only one of them got it right. They tend to lump plagiarism and copyright infringement together in a vague miasma of how its bad to take other people's things. One bad consequence of this is that a lot of kids probably sincerely believe that if they take something from a book and change the wording a little it isn't plagiarism, or that something they can literally copy something from the web that they think (often wrongly) is in the public domain. This is due to a confusion between plagiarism and copyright infringment.
No need to be confused. I'm pretty sure that what they're saying is that somebody who writes something as part of his or her job, that is not research and not teaching material, is engaged in writing a work for hire, so the university gets the copyright. In other words, they're pretty much exempting faculty. The copyrights they are talking about are the ones on the stuff written by Human Resources people or the person hired to write a history of the university or something for the alumni magazine.
The situation the poster describes is, I think, atypical. In my experience (and I've been faculty for 22 years) virtually all universities concede to their faculty the copyright on what they write as part of their research or teaching. The only situation I can think of in which the university gets the copyright is when a faculty member writes something at the behest of the university. For instance, if you're one of a number of people who write a policy manual, the university will normally hold the copyright on that. But it is unheard of in my experience for the university to hold the copyright on research publications by faculty.
Patents are another story. Policies vary quite a bit. A common one is that the university has the right of first refusal. If they turn it down, its yours. If they decide they want it, you get a certain percentage of the profit.
Software, naturally, is sort of in between, being something written and typically protected by copyright, but at the same time more in the nature of a "thing" or a "product". In practice, lots of software is released under the GPL or BSD licenses. Roughly speaking, the less obvious commercial value the software has, the more closely it is tied to your research, and the smaller the group of people who work on it, the more likely you'll be able to release it freely. If you write a compiler for the cool new dysfunctional language you've designed, all by yourself, the odds are they'll never even notice, much less care. If, on the other hand, a bunch of people create something that looks like a product and looks like a money-maker, the university may take a different view of things. If they can argue that you've used a lot of university resources (other than your research time), that will make it look more like it belongs to them.
People have sometimes gotten into trouble with big projects like this. Stephen Wolfram left Cal Tech when he got into a fight with them over the ownership of SMP, the symbolic math program that he had written, essentially the predecessor to Mathematica.
My impression is that unless you get involved in things like SMP that look really attractive as products, releasing software is generally not a big problem, though some places will want to use a BSD-type license instead of the GPL. I'd be curious to see if anyone else on Slashdot knows of problems of this sort arising in practice.
A public school is not someone's private residence. In general, people have full 1st Amendment rights in public facilities. Students have some too, but there are limits due to the fact that they re minors and that the school has to impose some restrictions in order to function as a school. Even so, courts have upheld some free speech rights for minor students.
Bonding in this sense refers to an employer taking out insurance against the malfeasance of an employee. There are some jobs for which the ability to be bonded is a requirement. People like bank tellers and cashiers in businesses that deal with large amounts of cash are likely to be bonded. If, for instance, a bank teller steals money from the bank, the insurer who issued the bond pays compensation.
Sometimes a third party requires that certain types of employee be bonded. For instance, a company's principal insurer may require that the bank obtain bonds (from another insurer) for all of its tellers.
Jeff Merkey
Granting that the federal government is good at screwing up large projects, the same is true of business, yet it seems to me that lots of businesses have set up comparable information systems. This is not an area in which I have any expertise, but to my perhaps naive eye, it seems like it ought to be possible to do it almost off-the-shelf. That is, the networking shouldn't be a big problem, and large database systems are of course widely deployed, so shouldn't setting up a system for the FBI be a matter of integrating a few familiar pieces of technology, with the programming mostly at the level of creating the appropriate fields, queries, forms, and so forth for FBI business? In short, is this actually a hard project, or is it a matter of adapting the same sort of technology used by companies like Ford and Walmart and so forth?
Nonetheless, I think you'll find that "preparation of derivative works" is not interpreted as applying to private modification. There's more to the law than the narrow interpretation of the statute itself. For example, on your interpretation, it would appear to be a violation of copyright for me to sell a book that I have purchased. Of course, it is perfectly legal to do so. What copyright secures to the holder is the right to make decisions about initial sales. He or she decides whether to sell or not, at what price, through which publisher, etc. But once the author sells me a copy of the book, it is mine to give or sell to someone else if I wish to.
One piece of evidence that adaptation without reproduction and distribution is not a violation of copyright is section 106A "Moral rights in works of visual art". Section 106A prevents, for example, alteration of a painting, even if the painting is unique. Section 106A would be redundant if section 106 had the meaning you propose.
Another relevant fact is that the statute contains a long list of categories exemplifying derivative works (translation, screenplay, etc.) but never mentions anything like annotation or defacement.
This is a case in which the law is badly written in that the wording used is compatible with the interpretation you suggest but that interpretation was pretty clearly not intended by Congress.
I don't think that the section 106 restriction of the right to prepare derivative works to the copyright holder is relevant here. That's a restriction only on distribution. If I buy a copyrighted book, for example, I am perfectly free to change the binding, cut out pages that I don't like, cross out bits I don't like, annotate it, and so forth. What the copyright restricts me from doing is distributing such things.
Do you really think that localization into a single language will typically take as much time as the development of the software in the first place? I find that hard to believe.
I'm pretty sure that Sweden is one of those highly advanced countries with tons of social benefits. I don't believe for a minute that they allow the hunting of the blind.
I have NEVER had a problem with a virus because I've never done much of my work on an MS Windows system and now don't use any Microsoft software at all. My machines run only GNU/Linux. I continue to be amazed that a company that consistently produces such poor software can stay in business when patently superior alternatives are available. The only thing newsworthy about the fact that they are going to make a half-baked effort to deal with a problem of their own creation and get people to pay for it is that they have the chutzpah to try it.
Nope. You're making two assumptions, both false. The first is that the "correct" English plural must always be the same as the Latin one, if a word is a loan from Latin. That is often the case, but it isn't a law of nature or of any other kind. Like speakers of other languages, English speakers can and do adapt foreign words. The great majority of English speakers, including well-educated people and scientists who work with viruses, say viruses.
The second false assumption is that the Latin plural of virus is virii. It isn't. That would be true if virus were a second declension masculine noun, but it isn't. It is a neuter noun of the second declension and has no Latin plural. Here is a summary of Latin plural formation that includes this fact about virus. For further discussion of Latin pseudo-plurals in English, I suggest this Language Log post.
So, why is a car the greatest ever controller for a a flight simulator? Sheesh.
Unfortunately, this isn't always true. The claim of the proprietary software companies is that what they are offering is a license. They are not selling you their software. You purchase the physical medium outright; you can do anything you like with the CD: use it as a coaster, resell it (without the software), use it for target practice. But you do not become the owner of the software anymore than you become the owner (that is, copyright holder) of the text of a book by virtue of purchasing the physical book.
I'm an advocate of FOSS myself and have no love for Microsoft, SCO, or their ilk, but you won't get anywhere in dealing with the problems they cause if you don't understand the legal situation.
By the way, GP looks familiar. I think I've seen this nonsensical piece here already, more than once. I think some troll (or group of trolls) post the same thing from time to time. Maybe somebody should post it together with an analysis so that people could just link to that rather than having to spend time on a new refutations each time.
This simply isn't true. Neither Microsoft nor the BSA has any legal authority to enter anyone's place of business or home in the absence of either a court order or the owner's permission to do so. The necessary permission could be granted at the time, or it could have been granted at an earlier time when a license agreement was signed. When the BSA conducts a raid (and they aren't just being allowed to tag along with real police) the only authority on which they have to rely is a prior valid agreement with the owner. If they try to enter your premises without either your permission or a court order, they are trespassing. You can refuse them entry or throw them out if they get inside, and you can use necessary and appropriate force to do so. (Details of that will vary with your jurisdiction.)
Even if they DO have a right to audit you, by virtue of a license agreement, they cannot force their way in. Remember, these aren't the police. All they've got is a contract. If you refuse them entry, at worst you're in breach of contract. If they want to do anything about it, they'll have to go to court. They may be able to get a court order, in which case you risk prosecution for contempt of court if you refuse. In an extreme case, they may persuade the court to order the sheriff to provide access for them by force if necessary. They may also be able to sue you for damages and win, though it isn't clear what sort of damages they can get. In general I would guess that they could get very little by way statute or equity, but that some contracts may impose significant penalties for breach.
There have been incidents reported of BSA clowns conducting raids as if they had a right to force entry, but in most of the cases I have heard about, they were acting beyond their legal rights and succeeded in intimidating people who didn't know their legal rights.