You don't have a bogus lawsuit (or any lawsuit) without a plaintiff.
And you don't have one without a lawyer either. I'm all for blaming the plaintiffs, but I don't see why the lawyers shouldn't be blamed as well. Lawyers have no obligation to file bogus lawsuits just because people ask them to, and the world would be a better place if more sanctions were imposed on lawyers that do.
(Don't forget, the rights are slowly making their way to the public domain; it's not perpetual.)
Do you have any evidence for that? What I see is that every time the early Mickey Mouse cartoons are about to make their way into the public domain, Disney and the other media corporations get Congress to extend the copyright period again. When exactly do you think works are going to enter the public domain?
Of course, Disney itself benefits greatly from public-domain works (fairy tales, Victor Hugo, etc.). But they don't want to give back to the public domain they take from.
Corporations are amoral. Their only purpose is to maximize shareholder value, i.e. sales and profits. If they act in a way that reduces their shareholder value, e.g. by acting "morally responsible", they can even be sued by their shareholders under certain circumstances.
And that's exactly why it's important for people to make a fuss when a corporation does something wrong. If failing to act in a morally responsible manner ends up reducing a corporation's profits because of boycotts and tarnishing of the corporation's image, then moral and fiduciary responsibilities start to become more aligned. Public disapproval can hardly take the place of government regulation, but it doesn't hurt, and it's not against the rules of capitalism.
Google doesn't need petabytes of storage. Right now they claim 2 billion Web pages, 700 million Usenet messages, and 330 million images. That's a total of 3 billion things. Let's wildly overestimate their average size as 100K (remember that the Usenet archive doesn't include binaries). The storage space required would be 3e9 * 1e5 = 3e14, or 300 TB.
It's probably true that 20 TB isn't enough for Google, but it's not true (and won't be for quite a while) that the cached pages and Usenet archive require "a few PB".
... the articles themselves are skeptical and there isn't a need for a long "debunking" of something that's already pretty damn suspicious to begin with.
The question Reuters should have asked isn't whether there's a need for debunking, but whether there's a need to splash some silly claim by an unknown person all over the media in the first place. If you think there is, why shouldn't the guy on the corner wearing the tinfoil hat get the same coverage?
So if you write an article about the BSA (acknowledging their trademark of course)...
Unless you get a thrill out of being a lackey of trademark lawyers, you have no obligation to acknowledge their trademark in any way when you're simply writing an article about them. Have you ever seen a trademark indicated in a newspaper article?
The poster must not have heard that the last anthrax sent to DC was potent enough to kill "hundreds of thousands of people".
I hate it when I see statistics like that in the media. Sure, it was enough to kill hundreds of thousands if you lined them up and administered a minuscule bit to each, but it's not likely that that would happen. You might as well say that a terrorist had enough knives (one) to kill hundreds of thousands of people.
I did not grant others the rights to my works then. Neither did Bill G.
You posted your messages on an international network of servers that store messages and provide anyone with access to them. It's a little late to consider them secret. Why does it offend you that someone's storing them and providing anyone with access to them?
Google Groups is simply a very large and fancy news server that doesn't expire articles, and you implicitly granted permission for your articles to be stored on news servers by posting them in the first place.
My question is how Google determines whether someone is the real poster of a message. Can just anyone demand the removal of any message they don't like?
If you were to give a present-day person a time machine, [...] He would probably take over the world pretty freaking quickly.
If you were to give everyone on the planet a time machine, all at the same time, nobody would be able to take over the world.
Perhaps, but I think the world would be trashed pretty quickly. Besides, time travel is the only technology that gives you the ability to magically undo the actions of the bad guys.
For another analogy, suppose instead you gave everyone on the planet a hydrogen bomb that they could explode wherever they wanted. How long do you think society would last? Destruction is a lot easier than creation, so I'm not so confident that defensive abilities will outpace offensive ones.
Or maybe that "philosopher" has a much different connotation in American English rather than British English.
Really? I never knew that Monty Python's Philosophers' Drinking Song was about alchemists. It certainly is a coincidence that all the alchemists seem to have names of people we in the US call "philosophers" -- Kant, Heidegger, Descartes, and so on.
I'm sure that every person on the street in the UK is intimately familiar with the terminology of medieval alchemists, but I think even Americans might be able to handle the phrase "philosopher's stone" if it's explained. Reshooting all scenes in which it's mentioned, rather than just explaining once at the beginning, seems idiotic.
...but Pullman gives the impression that he's really trying to discuss the "fundamental truths" (though it's not surprising if his books are more pedagogical seeing as he used to be a teacher).
My my, the assumptions we make. It's not him, it's her.
Philip Pullman is a her? Well, she certainly sounded male when I heard her on the radio a while back, and the interview seemed to think Pullman was male too. Perhaps her parents should have given her a more feminine name. But I guess we'd all better watch our assumptions.
Meanwhile, you wouldn't be able to send anything addressed as being from your gnu.org email address.
?
Really. Reply-To: doesn't work anymore?
"Reply-To:" ne "From:". The whole point of having your own address is that you don't have to use the ISP's address at all. "Reply-To:" doesn't hide the "From:" address in any way, and requires the cooperation of the replier and their e-mail client.
This step does nothing to prevent spam, since the spammers don't care what their "From:" addresses are. The only ones inconvenienced are legitimate users.
I go to all the trouble of voting, and there is a chance, however small it is, that for one reason or another my vote simply didn't count. [...] I'm scared to vote again til they get this shit worked out.
I'm afraid someone's going to steal my money, so I'm going to throw it all out the window.
Or how about SubWay give your $20 in change to the next guy on line.
How likely do you think it is that a $20 bill will be given out in change rather than sent to the bank at the end of the day? Very few people are spending $50 and $100 bills.
If it's just a standard prelease agreement, why is there anything in it about open source at all? Why not just say no distribution? Since the restrictions targeting open source have nothing to do with the software's beta-ness, it doesn't seem completely unreasonable to fear that the same restrictions will be in the final version.
Are we going post rants every single time someone defends their copyright?
I don't know, but it does look like every time we have an intellectual property article we're going to have a post by someone who can't distinguish between patents, copyright, and trademarks but wants to defend the poor innocent lawyer-happy corporation anyway.
Re:I may be an old fart but...
on
IETF vs. ICANN
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· Score: 1
ICANN doesn't get to introduce.biz because someone else already has.
And there's the root of the problem. Who gets to decide what it means to say that "someone else already has"? For any possible TLD, there could be someone (or several someones) who's already set up a machine under his bed to handle DNS. Somewhere there has to be authority that decides who counts, if DNS is to work at all.
All of the above are things would would expect to happen if you posted information to usenet...
Not quite. I do think this article is overblown, but I certainly don't expect Google or anyone else to modify or edit my posts. (Of course, I'd never use Google to post messages anyway.)
You can feel free to move to the Pay-Per-View model for broadcast television anytime you want.
Can I? I'd have thought I'd need a network or two providing some shows before I could do that. Who am I supposed to pay? (I'm not talking about sports, of course.)
What an aggressive step. They effectively took down a website because of a newsletter.
First, if you can't take action against the Web sites of spammers, but only against the (usually throwaway) e-mail accounts they spam from, then stopping spam is close to impossible. Second, spam doesn't automatically become legitimate just because it's sent by a big company.
Gorton's Fish Products buys the customer list from the grocery store and sees that you bought a competitor's product. Now you suddenly receive a coupon in the mail for a discount on Gorton's brand of fishsticks.
Did you skip the part where people from Gorton's show up to do an audit of your freezer, hoping to levy fines? If not, how is this at all the same?
Slashdot Mirror
And you don't have one without a lawyer either. I'm all for blaming the plaintiffs, but I don't see why the lawyers shouldn't be blamed as well. Lawyers have no obligation to file bogus lawsuits just because people ask them to, and the world would be a better place if more sanctions were imposed on lawyers that do.
Do you have any evidence for that? What I see is that every time the early Mickey Mouse cartoons are about to make their way into the public domain, Disney and the other media corporations get Congress to extend the copyright period again. When exactly do you think works are going to enter the public domain?
Of course, Disney itself benefits greatly from public-domain works (fairy tales, Victor Hugo, etc.). But they don't want to give back to the public domain they take from.
And that's exactly why it's important for people to make a fuss when a corporation does something wrong. If failing to act in a morally responsible manner ends up reducing a corporation's profits because of boycotts and tarnishing of the corporation's image, then moral and fiduciary responsibilities start to become more aligned. Public disapproval can hardly take the place of government regulation, but it doesn't hurt, and it's not against the rules of capitalism.
Google doesn't need petabytes of storage. Right now they claim 2 billion Web pages, 700 million Usenet messages, and 330 million images. That's a total of 3 billion things. Let's wildly overestimate their average size as 100K (remember that the Usenet archive doesn't include binaries). The storage space required would be 3e9 * 1e5 = 3e14, or 300 TB.
It's probably true that 20 TB isn't enough for Google, but it's not true (and won't be for quite a while) that the cached pages and Usenet archive require "a few PB".
The question Reuters should have asked isn't whether there's a need for debunking, but whether there's a need to splash some silly claim by an unknown person all over the media in the first place. If you think there is, why shouldn't the guy on the corner wearing the tinfoil hat get the same coverage?
Unless you get a thrill out of being a lackey of trademark lawyers, you have no obligation to acknowledge their trademark in any way when you're simply writing an article about them. Have you ever seen a trademark indicated in a newspaper article?
I hate it when I see statistics like that in the media. Sure, it was enough to kill hundreds of thousands if you lined them up and administered a minuscule bit to each, but it's not likely that that would happen. You might as well say that a terrorist had enough knives (one) to kill hundreds of thousands of people.
You posted your messages on an international network of servers that store messages and provide anyone with access to them. It's a little late to consider them secret. Why does it offend you that someone's storing them and providing anyone with access to them?
Google Groups is simply a very large and fancy news server that doesn't expire articles, and you implicitly granted permission for your articles to be stored on news servers by posting them in the first place.
My question is how Google determines whether someone is the real poster of a message. Can just anyone demand the removal of any message they don't like?
Many geeks (including Perl geek Mark-Jason Dominus) are still boycotting Amazon because of their software patents.
Which would have been fine with him. Asimov was a teetotaler.
Perhaps, but I think the world would be trashed pretty quickly. Besides, time travel is the only technology that gives you the ability to magically undo the actions of the bad guys.
For another analogy, suppose instead you gave everyone on the planet a hydrogen bomb that they could explode wherever they wanted. How long do you think society would last? Destruction is a lot easier than creation, so I'm not so confident that defensive abilities will outpace offensive ones.
Really? I never knew that Monty Python's Philosophers' Drinking Song was about alchemists. It certainly is a coincidence that all the alchemists seem to have names of people we in the US call "philosophers" -- Kant, Heidegger, Descartes, and so on.
I'm sure that every person on the street in the UK is intimately familiar with the terminology of medieval alchemists, but I think even Americans might be able to handle the phrase "philosopher's stone" if it's explained. Reshooting all scenes in which it's mentioned, rather than just explaining once at the beginning, seems idiotic.
Philip Pullman is a her? Well, she certainly sounded male when I heard her on the radio a while back, and the interview seemed to think Pullman was male too. Perhaps her parents should have given her a more feminine name. But I guess we'd all better watch our assumptions.
"Reply-To:" ne "From:". The whole point of having your own address is that you don't have to use the ISP's address at all. "Reply-To:" doesn't hide the "From:" address in any way, and requires the cooperation of the replier and their e-mail client.
This step does nothing to prevent spam, since the spammers don't care what their "From:" addresses are. The only ones inconvenienced are legitimate users.
I'm afraid someone's going to steal my money, so I'm going to throw it all out the window.
How likely do you think it is that a $20 bill will be given out in change rather than sent to the bank at the end of the day? Very few people are spending $50 and $100 bills.
If it's just a standard prelease agreement, why is there anything in it about open source at all? Why not just say no distribution? Since the restrictions targeting open source have nothing to do with the software's beta-ness, it doesn't seem completely unreasonable to fear that the same restrictions will be in the final version.
I don't know, but it does look like every time we have an intellectual property article we're going to have a post by someone who can't distinguish between patents, copyright, and trademarks but wants to defend the poor innocent lawyer-happy corporation anyway.
And there's the root of the problem. Who gets to decide what it means to say that "someone else already has"? For any possible TLD, there could be someone (or several someones) who's already set up a machine under his bed to handle DNS. Somewhere there has to be authority that decides who counts, if DNS is to work at all.
Not quite. I do think this article is overblown, but I certainly don't expect Google or anyone else to modify or edit my posts. (Of course, I'd never use Google to post messages anyway.)
Can I? I'd have thought I'd need a network or two providing some shows before I could do that. Who am I supposed to pay? (I'm not talking about sports, of course.)
Absolutely. And since Fisher-Price produces toy telephones, all of its employees should have to use them for business.
My point precisely. And sending a coupon isn't anything like sending auditors. So why make the analogy?
Did you skip the part where people from Gorton's show up to do an audit of your freezer, hoping to levy fines? If not, how is this at all the same?