The man who pounds another man's face to pulp is decried as an animal and inhuman. In nature, animals of the same species regularly rip each other to shreds.
The man who pounds a child to death with a rock is decried as an animal and inhuman. In nature, a bear will bite and batter a cub to death in order to make a female receptive to mate.
The man who forces sex unwillingly upon a woman is decried as an animal and inhuman. In nature, young bucks will stalk does -- often in gangs of three or four -- force them to the ground, then engage in non-consensual copulation.
The man who has intercourse with a 15-year-old girl is decried as an animal and inhuman. In nature, females are regularly taken as sexual partners by significantly older males as soon as they start ovulating.
Yet when it comes to simple sex and the question of abstinence, we stand up and cry "we're just animals! Human animals!" Well, sauce for the goose is sauce for the gander. Society demands that we set limits on animal behaviour and use our higher cognitive skills to control ourselves.
Now I'm not going to stick up for abstinence or free-love or anything in between, but the argument "of course we're going to have sex -- we're animals" shows an extreme lack of maturity and leads to the philosophy that we exist purely to feed the id.
So please people, exercise some self-control. But remember that self-control does not necessarily mean "not having sex" -- "choosing to have sex" is a form of self-control too. It's doing it because "you and me baby ain't nothin but mammals" that isn't.
Choose, be responsible for your actions and live with the consequences. Be human, not animal. Peace out!
Bundling OO.org is a very scary prospect. Aside from the loss of sales as pointed out by other users, suddenly you're opening your helpdesk to a host of calls due to unfamiliar software. Office software in general has unbelievably complicated interfaces, whereas most browser users only every type addresses or click on links. Anyone who's not capable of working through OpenOffice.org on their own isn't likely to even look at a menu within a browser.
If you're doing the same thing twice, you're not really multitasking You're not performing two different tasks, you're performing the same task twice. Same rules, different datasets. Your brain may in fact interpret this as a single expanded dataset. An earlier poster commented that he could play several games of chess simultaneously, but that he couldn't play chess and bridge simultaneously.
It's the same with language. When you're talking to your friends, you talk differently from when you're talking to your boss, but most of the difference is in particular words or phrases -- the underlying grammar is the same. Maintaining two or more sets of words (data) and switching between them is easy, but when you switch between different languages, you change the grammar (rules). That's why people sometimes jam up when they change languages, but are perfectly capable of answering the phone appropriately when they're out with their friends and the boss calls.
I'm sorry to say that us geeks have been usurped by young hipsters in the website-disabling stakes. This site has not been slashdotted, it has been YouTubed. Someone at Stanford has been uploading videos of this to YouTube and inviting the plebs to go to their site before us. How ungrateful. The swines. Harumph.
(BTW, can you document that SeeqPod/YouTube are mostly used for illegal purposes as you claim in your OP, or is that just scaretactics?)
OK, I 'll rephrase that. The overwhelming majority of YouTube links that I receive (via email, social networking sites and RSS blog feeds) are of unauthorised TV rips or fan-vids.
Now look back at my justification for saying that YouTube should be liable for infringements: YouTube looks like a publisher; it quacks like a publisher. The only material difference between it and any paper/DVD/CD/broadcast-based publisher is that there is no paper/DVDs/CDs/broadcast media involved. The other key, non-material, difference is that they don't have editors. The lack of editors is not due to a limitation of the medium, it is a choice that YouTube made of their own volition. We would not allow anyone operating via any other medium to simply disavow any editorial responsibility, so in is entirely unjust to allow businesses on the internet to get away with it!.
And you're doing what the RIAA is doing: spreading FUD.
Copyright is not a criminal matter, it's civil -- so I'm not calling anyone a criminal.
A hammer is "content neutral". A hammer is not dedicated to breaking windows. A better example is a lock pick. As I understand it, possession of these is illegal in most US states as "burglar tools" (professional locksmiths excepted). The argument that the owner of the lockpick only uses it to open doors he is legally obliged to do is considered unlikely. There has been no huge outcry on this as an invasion of your natural rights, because it protects more innocent people than it harms.
Why wouldn't they want someone to collect pointers to their copyrighted material, and make it easy to go after the infringer?
Because a distribution site/point can close down and move to a new place, new name, new page layout and start up again. If they register with the search engines, they're just as visible as they were before the move. The fact that the site has to change address means that they would lose contact with their audience if it wasn't for the search engines.
This has created the current internet ecosystem: sites and collections of files that drift from place-to-place, and search engines/indexing sites that act as a fixed-location portal to the itinerant sites. The public only need to know the portal address. The portal is the hub. Kill the hub and you break the entire network, but go after content hosts and nothing changes.
No, this lawsuit is just testing the waters to see if they can overturn pieces of the DMCA that do not work in their favor.
No, they're seeking to either (A) Overturn bits of the DMCA that are over-broad or (B) challenge over-interpretations of the DCMA. I do not know the DCMA very well. IANAL. IANfromtheUSA.
BUT
To understand Safe Harbor and its intentions, consider the paper publishing industry. If I write a defamatory newspaper article, who can be sued for it? I can -- I wrote it; the editor probably can too -- he gave it the green light and so effectively put his name against it; but the publishing company is the most likely target. They approved it, they make money based on sales, they're ultimately responsible -- and they have the money to pay the settlement, while neither me nor my editor is likely to be good for the cash.
Who is not sued? The printer. The printer is paid by the page. If it doesn't sell, he doesn't lose out. He has no control or interest in the content of his work -- he is content neutral.
The first rightful beneficiary of Safe Harbor legislation is Bob's Server Shack. Your average host is content neutral and has no editorial control over your site. You pay a flat fee to him directly -- Bob has no real stake in the "saleability" of your site. Bob is the same as the printer.
I don't think Safe Harbor should apply to YouTube, for example. YouTube does not receive a flat fee from the content producers, instead making its money on click-through ads. This means that YouTube's profit is intrinsically linked to the popularity of its content (and, incidentally, the most popular material often infringes copyright). To my mind, this makes YouTube a publisher, not a printer, hence a valid target for law suits. They have chosen not to employ editors. Would a newspaper company be able to publish an edition without an editor and disavow all responsibility for the content? I think not! Why should YouTube get different treatment?
Search starts to get a bit tricky though, but I think we should apply the same content neutrality argument. Most major search engines are largely content neutral. OK, PageRank may have some bias in it, but most potential hits translate to actual hits. You can search for anything you want, and Google/Yahoo/Ask/Altavista will return it. These sites don't exist purely to find illegal material.
SeeqPod is different. SeeqPod is a music search engine, and the only music people search for is illegal stuff. Sure, you may be able to search for legal stuff, but who would bother? Legal MP3s just aren't redistributed much -- if you want them, you go to the band's homepage and download them, and you don't need a music search engine for that.
In my opinion, if the Safe Harbor defence works, then the Safe Harbor law needs to be rewritten.
The most success I've had getting users to switch off was in an old building with no air-conditioning. During summer it was unbearable. I pointed out to them that switching off monitors and PSUs at the socket would reduce the office temperature by a degree.
Look, I don't know who the DOE are. I don't even know what country they're in. This is an international site -- is it too much to expect some basic information?
IANAL either, but I would have thought that "public view" would refer to either:
the inclusion of copyright works unintentionally or unavoidably captured in the background while producing a new work. For example, imagine George W Bush was assassinated outside MacDonalds. A picture of his body may well include the "Golden Ars^H^H^HArches" in the background, but MacDonalds shouldn't be able to block publication.
Freedom of the "press" (more correctly journalism). As a journalist, you're selling news and any product can be news.
Neither of these describes the situation here: the calendar is a commercial venture and the cars are the subject of the calendar. They are not an incidental inclusion, and they are not there for the reporting of news. They are a commercially exploited image.
I'm not saying that Ford are right (or wrong) here, just pointing out where they're coming from.
Consider this: would you be allowed to release a commercial sci-fi film featuring people in Star Wars stormtrooper outfits? The outfits are available on the open market, and the same reasoning other posters have made in this thread ("I've bought it, I can do what I like with it") could equally well apply to this case.
Fair use provides for a single copy for personal use. Even though each of the MP3 files on his PC is a single copy, he has made explicit that these are not for personal use, but for public use. They are clearly not authorised by fair use -- the man is infringing, even if not in the way specified in the suit.
(5) in the case of literary, musical, dramatic, and choreographic works, pantomimes, and pictorial, graphic, or sculptural works, including the individual images of a motion picture or other audiovisual work, to display the copyrighted work publicly
If I stick up an infringing work on a wall in a public street, does it matter how many people go down the street and see it? This guy put the files in a publicly accessible place. Whether or not anyone saw them, they were on public display.
Furthermore, if he had any right to have those copies, it was under fair use, and fair use is for personal use only. Normally it's bloody difficult to prove intent, but putting something in a folder marked "public" quite clearly shows intent for non-private, ie. infringing, use.
One of the problems I always had with OSS was the lack minimum hardware requirements for the software. If you were on an underpowered PC it was just a matter of download-and-pray. Fair enough, the diversity of available systems and the lack of huge commercial testing facilities for amateurs meant it was never practical.
However, with a small core of uniform low-end Linux platforms emerging on the market, each with a relatively broad base, wouldn't it make sense to start a scheme of developers' standards: Run on XO, Runs on Eee, Runs on Shuttle, etc?
Even if the main developers don't want to invest in all the hardware, there could be sites set up to encourage reciprocal testing and optimisation between different dev teams.
Fair use presumably doesn't include the soundtrack to a televised ad for the Bigotted Neo-nazi Party or the like. I don't want them using my work that way.
I don't have time to wade through that whole PDF right now, but the author set off on the wrong foot with his criticism of James Watt. The fact that Watt had an abnormal patent extension granted does not invalidate the normal duration of patent. The fact that Watt's company were the market leaders after the loss of exclusivity does not mean that they would have been able to acheive any significant market penetration if they had had no protection on their market lead. Had things gone the other way, and the UK government decided that invalidating the patent early was in the public interest, it is surely likely that subsequent capitalists would have favoured a low-cost steady-state market over costly research with no protection on the outcome.
Fan fiction also expands the market for the entire setting.
Don't I get to choose my own market for my own setting? Imagine I was writing a trilogy of satirical sci-fi novels. In between my official stories, out come unofficial fan fiction, including various straight, gay and interspecies love stories, including public weddings and that sort of stuff. Aw s**t. The twist coming in my third part, which I was subtely, carefully bulding up to in the other two, was that modern society is substituting technology for emotion, so we were going to find out that the children's parents have never met, and everything is done in a lab. Thus the fan-fiction has destroyed my world and my work.
While you can argue that technological innovation is not creative, so does not naturally favour a monopoly, truly creative works are not commodities, so are natural monopolies. I own my thoughts, and damned if I'm going to let you rewrite them.
1. No more lifetime-plus copyrights. You get a couple decades and that's it. If it doesn't become popular until 40 years after the fact, well that's just rough luck.
That might work, it might not. I agree that in most countries, durations are now excessively long, but if they became too short there is a genuine risk of stifling innovation. If all copyright worldwide was 40 years from publication, the market would now be saturated with free public domain material. You think TVs full of repeats now? It would be ten times worse. Broadcast the free or the expensive? Star Trek: TOS or Enterprise? It's a no-brainer.
We're on the cusp of a creative crunch: copyright protection in the 20th century has created unprecedented growth in creative output, but as the fruits of that growth fall into the public domain, economics will cease to favour such innovation. The industry can't even prepare for this: the cost of star actors and directors is just getting more and more stupid, and further and further from competitive.
2. Full disclosure! If I can't build your invention from the patent application or create a copy of the work from your copyright filing then it is insufficient to garner protection. Patents should be engineering documents, not legalese.
Agreed.
3. No post-sale right to control. An owner of a copy can do as he pleases with that one copy. Convert the format. Edit the scenes. Split it in half and sell the halves separately. Anything except make new copies. Its his property now, not the authors.
In principle, I'd agree with this, but you can't split a DVD without making a copy. Two copies in fact -- you couldn't pass on the original to both, so how do you prove that they're both legitimate artifacts? One of the problems with the current debate in geekdom is that too many of us refuse to accept that the physical domain is still important.
4. No right to control distribution. You can choose the cost per copy but after than anyone has a right to make copies so long as they pay you for them.
Not practical: value != cost. The value of a copy of a song on a CD, for example, is much higher than the value of the same song playing on a jukebox during a fight-scene in a Hollywood film. The CD version is a work in its own right and can be appreciated in its own context. On average, you listen to a CD that you've bought more often than you'd watch a DVD you've bought. Now if we're setting a flat licensing rate, you're going to have to add the cost of an average CD to the cost of an average DVD, because sure as Hell they're going to set the rate by CDs. (With the odd exception, like the exceptionally odd Moby, musicians make the majority of their cash through direct sales, not sublicensing into others' works. This is of course not the case with photographers.)
Plus I still don't want the KKK to be able to use my works in their propaganda, paid for or not.
5. No exclusive right to make derivative works. If I want to write a story in your world setting, I can do it and sell it as much as I want, as long as it accompanies a legally acquired copy of your work as well.
Third-party derivative works risk my ability to profit from sequels. It allows another party to change the public perception of my world, diluting my vision and damaging my work. Imagine you're writing a series of books, and in between the publication of parts 2 and 3 an incredibly popular fan-fiction scene starts up and kills off my characters. Three books are released by different authors furthering the world in an opposite direction from which I intended -- including the two aforementioned characters saving the world in episode 9. A stupendously large chunk of my readership are now disengaged from my reality and are no longer interested. I'm left selling less books, and most of the books I am selling are just more reprints of the first book that'll never be read. Probably on a CD licensed under your proposal 4.
Oh, and the KKK have also decided that all the good guys are white, and the bad guys aren't. Again, I don't want people to subvert my work for objectionable propoganda.
"this isn't a problem with Creative Commons per se"
Yes it is, although perhaps it isn't a problem with the Creative Commons licenses per se. Creative Commons, the non-profit body have consistently oversold the concept, and crucially have tried to simplify copyright (womething that just can't be done, unless you're a legislator) when they should have been educating people to understand copyright laws.
Creative Commons have encouraged all and sundry to slap licenses on their creations. This all and sundry includes countless pseudonymous abandoned accounts with no contact details. It is impossible to carry out due diligence on such a work. It could be legitimate, it could be an honest mistake, it could be a mischief-maker or it could be a malicious copyright trap. The license is unverified, so legally worthless.
The licenses as they stand would be OK if users were contactable, but that would put users at risk of being flooded with email -- a deluge of both legitimate requests and spam -- so there'd be a heck of a lot less CC users if this was mandatory. At a generous estimate, about 1% of the current figure.
Without widespread takeup, the licenses effectively wouldn't exist; sadly, the compromise needed to bring it into existence was to make it essentially valueless.
Nowhere does that article state that a flat-plane perspective is a perfect representation of 3D. A flat-plane perspective can be a true representation if and only if 1) the projection is sized such that the observer's angle of vision matches the angle of vision of the projection, and 2) the user views the picture on-axis: in the centre and perpendicular to the projection plane.
Unfortunately, a computer screen typically occupies half the visual angle that the game represents. A flat-plane projection then has the illusion of representing a narrower view than it does. This makes turning potentially disorientating as you turn 360 in what the eye believes is only 180.
Neither will the player always be looking perpedicularly at the centre of the screen. In a static flat-plane projection, the nearest point to the eye becomes the centre of the picture. If you look at architectural photography, you'll see that a lot people use perspective distortion to force viewpoint. In a photograph approximating flat-plane perspective, or one that has been digitally perspective-corrected, the observer moves his viewpoint as he moves his eyes -- effectively walking around the picture. In a photograph with clear perspective distortion, the viewer is forced to "stand" in one place, and when he looks at a different part of the scene, he is simply moving his eyes. The effect is generally held to be more evocative and immersive. Now, in a moving environment, movement can reset the centre of vision, but only with simple movement. If you're moving forward, strafing and using mouselook simultaneously, the movement gives no clear centre.
The brain and eye have incredible potential for adaptability (check out "prism glasses" for more info) so most avid gamers will have trained these problems out of their systems by now, but the occasional gamer or non-gamer is likely to get floored by them.
Even if you still don't agree with me on that, the statement "You couldn't be more wrong" is clearly false. Even if your other assertion was correct, both our models suggest that this curved monitor will not provide an accurate rendering of a 3D environment using flat-plane projection, so I could have been more wrong. If I'd said that the curved monitor was any use in 3D gaming, I would have been more wrong.
Yes, a curved monitor does present great field-of-vision opportunities, but it's breaking one of the unwritten rules of 3D graphics: software perspective curving isn't necessary because the gamer's physical world does the job for you.
What do I mean? Modern 3D engines generally make a flat projection of a plane, with the drawn size of an object being related to the z difference between the player and the object. However, basic geometry says we should take the true distance, equated with the x, y and z differences. If you look at a window, you will see it as oblong, but if you compare the visual length of the top and bottom edges, they're likely to be different.
Calculating that perspective distortion is computationally expensive, but we're OK, because the difference in physical distance between the eye and the various points of the monitor starts to make up for this (but not completely).
In the days of Quake and Duke Nukem 3D, most of us still had curvy CRTs. These curves exaggerated the natural curve and enhanced the 3D. These days, our flat LCDs have reeduced that and things start to seem a bit flatter.
When they say bad sites they mean ones with a pretty clear form of "bad": fishing, not suitable for children etc. Blanket burying of business practices you personally disagree with? The totalitarianism is strong in this one....
One step away is safer: a solution installed by individuals on firewalls, proxies or PCs. Then it's "configuration", not "censorship". (IE it is unquestionably "opt-in".)
Slashdot Mirror
Hah! Your pathetic plan to down the site using the old "Slashdotting" DDoS attack has failed. Now your secrets are available to the whole world!
Bwahahahahahahahaha!
HAL.
The man who pounds another man's face to pulp is decried as an animal and inhuman. In nature, animals of the same species regularly rip each other to shreds.
The man who pounds a child to death with a rock is decried as an animal and inhuman. In nature, a bear will bite and batter a cub to death in order to make a female receptive to mate.
The man who forces sex unwillingly upon a woman is decried as an animal and inhuman. In nature, young bucks will stalk does -- often in gangs of three or four -- force them to the ground, then engage in non-consensual copulation.
The man who has intercourse with a 15-year-old girl is decried as an animal and inhuman. In nature, females are regularly taken as sexual partners by significantly older males as soon as they start ovulating.
Yet when it comes to simple sex and the question of abstinence, we stand up and cry "we're just animals! Human animals!" Well, sauce for the goose is sauce for the gander. Society demands that we set limits on animal behaviour and use our higher cognitive skills to control ourselves.
Now I'm not going to stick up for abstinence or free-love or anything in between, but the argument "of course we're going to have sex -- we're animals" shows an extreme lack of maturity and leads to the philosophy that we exist purely to feed the id.
So please people, exercise some self-control. But remember that self-control does not necessarily mean "not having sex" -- "choosing to have sex" is a form of self-control too. It's doing it because "you and me baby ain't nothin but mammals" that isn't.
Choose, be responsible for your actions and live with the consequences. Be human, not animal. Peace out!
HAL.
I tried to tell that to Macromedia, but would they listen? Noooo.
HAL.
Bundling OO.org is a very scary prospect. Aside from the loss of sales as pointed out by other users, suddenly you're opening your helpdesk to a host of calls due to unfamiliar software. Office software in general has unbelievably complicated interfaces, whereas most browser users only every type addresses or click on links. Anyone who's not capable of working through OpenOffice.org on their own isn't likely to even look at a menu within a browser.
Apples and oranges, mate.
HAL.
It is a metaphor for the futility of human existence.
Mah-vellous.
HAL.
If you're doing the same thing twice, you're not really multitasking You're not performing two different tasks, you're performing the same task twice. Same rules, different datasets. Your brain may in fact interpret this as a single expanded dataset. An earlier poster commented that he could play several games of chess simultaneously, but that he couldn't play chess and bridge simultaneously.
It's the same with language. When you're talking to your friends, you talk differently from when you're talking to your boss, but most of the difference is in particular words or phrases -- the underlying grammar is the same. Maintaining two or more sets of words (data) and switching between them is easy, but when you switch between different languages, you change the grammar (rules). That's why people sometimes jam up when they change languages, but are perfectly capable of answering the phone appropriately when they're out with their friends and the boss calls.
HAL.
I'm sorry to say that us geeks have been usurped by young hipsters in the website-disabling stakes. This site has not been slashdotted, it has been YouTubed. Someone at Stanford has been uploading videos of this to YouTube and inviting the plebs to go to their site before us. How ungrateful. The swines. Harumph.
HAL.
(BTW, can you document that SeeqPod/YouTube are mostly used for illegal purposes as you claim in your OP, or is that just scaretactics?)
OK, I 'll rephrase that. The overwhelming majority of YouTube links that I receive (via email, social networking sites and RSS blog feeds) are of unauthorised TV rips or fan-vids.
Now look back at my justification for saying that YouTube should be liable for infringements: YouTube looks like a publisher; it quacks like a publisher. The only material difference between it and any paper/DVD/CD/broadcast-based publisher is that there is no paper/DVDs/CDs/broadcast media involved. The other key, non-material, difference is that they don't have editors. The lack of editors is not due to a limitation of the medium, it is a choice that YouTube made of their own volition. We would not allow anyone operating via any other medium to simply disavow any editorial responsibility, so in is entirely unjust to allow businesses on the internet to get away with it!.
HAL.
And you're doing what the RIAA is doing: spreading FUD.
Copyright is not a criminal matter, it's civil -- so I'm not calling anyone a criminal.
A hammer is "content neutral". A hammer is not dedicated to breaking windows. A better example is a lock pick. As I understand it, possession of these is illegal in most US states as "burglar tools" (professional locksmiths excepted). The argument that the owner of the lockpick only uses it to open doors he is legally obliged to do is considered unlikely. There has been no huge outcry on this as an invasion of your natural rights, because it protects more innocent people than it harms.
HAL.
Why wouldn't they want someone to collect pointers to their copyrighted material, and make it easy to go after the infringer?
Because a distribution site/point can close down and move to a new place, new name, new page layout and start up again. If they register with the search engines, they're just as visible as they were before the move. The fact that the site has to change address means that they would lose contact with their audience if it wasn't for the search engines.
This has created the current internet ecosystem: sites and collections of files that drift from place-to-place, and search engines/indexing sites that act as a fixed-location portal to the itinerant sites. The public only need to know the portal address. The portal is the hub. Kill the hub and you break the entire network, but go after content hosts and nothing changes.
HAL.
No, this lawsuit is just testing the waters to see if they can overturn pieces of the DMCA that do not work in their favor.
No, they're seeking to either (A) Overturn bits of the DMCA that are over-broad or (B) challenge over-interpretations of the DCMA. I do not know the DCMA very well. IANAL. IANfromtheUSA.
BUT
To understand Safe Harbor and its intentions, consider the paper publishing industry. If I write a defamatory newspaper article, who can be sued for it? I can -- I wrote it; the editor probably can too -- he gave it the green light and so effectively put his name against it; but the publishing company is the most likely target. They approved it, they make money based on sales, they're ultimately responsible -- and they have the money to pay the settlement, while neither me nor my editor is likely to be good for the cash.
Who is not sued? The printer. The printer is paid by the page. If it doesn't sell, he doesn't lose out. He has no control or interest in the content of his work -- he is content neutral.
The first rightful beneficiary of Safe Harbor legislation is Bob's Server Shack. Your average host is content neutral and has no editorial control over your site. You pay a flat fee to him directly -- Bob has no real stake in the "saleability" of your site. Bob is the same as the printer.
I don't think Safe Harbor should apply to YouTube, for example. YouTube does not receive a flat fee from the content producers, instead making its money on click-through ads. This means that YouTube's profit is intrinsically linked to the popularity of its content (and, incidentally, the most popular material often infringes copyright). To my mind, this makes YouTube a publisher, not a printer, hence a valid target for law suits. They have chosen not to employ editors. Would a newspaper company be able to publish an edition without an editor and disavow all responsibility for the content? I think not! Why should YouTube get different treatment?
Search starts to get a bit tricky though, but I think we should apply the same content neutrality argument. Most major search engines are largely content neutral. OK, PageRank may have some bias in it, but most potential hits translate to actual hits. You can search for anything you want, and Google/Yahoo/Ask/Altavista will return it. These sites don't exist purely to find illegal material.
SeeqPod is different. SeeqPod is a music search engine, and the only music people search for is illegal stuff. Sure, you may be able to search for legal stuff, but who would bother? Legal MP3s just aren't redistributed much -- if you want them, you go to the band's homepage and download them, and you don't need a music search engine for that.
In my opinion, if the Safe Harbor defence works, then the Safe Harbor law needs to be rewritten.
HAL.
The most success I've had getting users to switch off was in an old building with no air-conditioning. During summer it was unbearable. I pointed out to them that switching off monitors and PSUs at the socket would reduce the office temperature by a degree.
HAL.
Look, I don't know who the DOE are. I don't even know what country they're in. This is an international site -- is it too much to expect some basic information?
HAL.
In other major currencies 200 000 yen is approximately
950 UK Pounds
1250 Euros
44850 Rubles
72300 Rupees
13400 Yuan
20150 Mexican Pesos
HAL.
IANAL either, but I would have thought that "public view" would refer to either:
Neither of these describes the situation here: the calendar is a commercial venture and the cars are the subject of the calendar. They are not an incidental inclusion, and they are not there for the reporting of news. They are a commercially exploited image.
I'm not saying that Ford are right (or wrong) here, just pointing out where they're coming from.
Consider this: would you be allowed to release a commercial sci-fi film featuring people in Star Wars stormtrooper outfits? The outfits are available on the open market, and the same reasoning other posters have made in this thread ("I've bought it, I can do what I like with it") could equally well apply to this case.
HAL.
Fair use provides for a single copy for personal use. Even though each of the MP3 files on his PC is a single copy, he has made explicit that these are not for personal use, but for public use. They are clearly not authorised by fair use -- the man is infringing, even if not in the way specified in the suit.
HAL.
What about public display of works?
If I stick up an infringing work on a wall in a public street, does it matter how many people go down the street and see it? This guy put the files in a publicly accessible place. Whether or not anyone saw them, they were on public display.
Furthermore, if he had any right to have those copies, it was under fair use, and fair use is for personal use only. Normally it's bloody difficult to prove intent, but putting something in a folder marked "public" quite clearly shows intent for non-private, ie. infringing, use.
But IANAL.
HAL.
One of the problems I always had with OSS was the lack minimum hardware requirements for the software. If you were on an underpowered PC it was just a matter of download-and-pray. Fair enough, the diversity of available systems and the lack of huge commercial testing facilities for amateurs meant it was never practical.
However, with a small core of uniform low-end Linux platforms emerging on the market, each with a relatively broad base, wouldn't it make sense to start a scheme of developers' standards: Run on XO, Runs on Eee, Runs on Shuttle, etc?
Even if the main developers don't want to invest in all the hardware, there could be sites set up to encourage reciprocal testing and optimisation between different dev teams.
HAL.
Fair use presumably doesn't include the soundtrack to a televised ad for the Bigotted Neo-nazi Party or the like. I don't want them using my work that way.
I don't have time to wade through that whole PDF right now, but the author set off on the wrong foot with his criticism of James Watt. The fact that Watt had an abnormal patent extension granted does not invalidate the normal duration of patent. The fact that Watt's company were the market leaders after the loss of exclusivity does not mean that they would have been able to acheive any significant market penetration if they had had no protection on their market lead. Had things gone the other way, and the UK government decided that invalidating the patent early was in the public interest, it is surely likely that subsequent capitalists would have favoured a low-cost steady-state market over costly research with no protection on the outcome.
Fan fiction also expands the market for the entire setting.
Don't I get to choose my own market for my own setting? Imagine I was writing a trilogy of satirical sci-fi novels. In between my official stories, out come unofficial fan fiction, including various straight, gay and interspecies love stories, including public weddings and that sort of stuff. Aw s**t. The twist coming in my third part, which I was subtely, carefully bulding up to in the other two, was that modern society is substituting technology for emotion, so we were going to find out that the children's parents have never met, and everything is done in a lab. Thus the fan-fiction has destroyed my world and my work.
While you can argue that technological innovation is not creative, so does not naturally favour a monopoly, truly creative works are not commodities, so are natural monopolies. I own my thoughts, and damned if I'm going to let you rewrite them.
HAL.
1. No more lifetime-plus copyrights. You get a couple decades and that's it. If it doesn't become popular until 40 years after the fact, well that's just rough luck.
That might work, it might not. I agree that in most countries, durations are now excessively long, but if they became too short there is a genuine risk of stifling innovation. If all copyright worldwide was 40 years from publication, the market would now be saturated with free public domain material. You think TVs full of repeats now? It would be ten times worse. Broadcast the free or the expensive? Star Trek: TOS or Enterprise? It's a no-brainer.
We're on the cusp of a creative crunch: copyright protection in the 20th century has created unprecedented growth in creative output, but as the fruits of that growth fall into the public domain, economics will cease to favour such innovation. The industry can't even prepare for this: the cost of star actors and directors is just getting more and more stupid, and further and further from competitive.
2. Full disclosure! If I can't build your invention from the patent application or create a copy of the work from your copyright filing then it is insufficient to garner protection. Patents should be engineering documents, not legalese.
Agreed.
3. No post-sale right to control. An owner of a copy can do as he pleases with that one copy. Convert the format. Edit the scenes. Split it in half and sell the halves separately. Anything except make new copies. Its his property now, not the authors.
In principle, I'd agree with this, but you can't split a DVD without making a copy. Two copies in fact -- you couldn't pass on the original to both, so how do you prove that they're both legitimate artifacts? One of the problems with the current debate in geekdom is that too many of us refuse to accept that the physical domain is still important.
4. No right to control distribution. You can choose the cost per copy but after than anyone has a right to make copies so long as they pay you for them.
Not practical: value != cost. The value of a copy of a song on a CD, for example, is much higher than the value of the same song playing on a jukebox during a fight-scene in a Hollywood film. The CD version is a work in its own right and can be appreciated in its own context. On average, you listen to a CD that you've bought more often than you'd watch a DVD you've bought. Now if we're setting a flat licensing rate, you're going to have to add the cost of an average CD to the cost of an average DVD, because sure as Hell they're going to set the rate by CDs. (With the odd exception, like the exceptionally odd Moby, musicians make the majority of their cash through direct sales, not sublicensing into others' works. This is of course not the case with photographers.)
Plus I still don't want the KKK to be able to use my works in their propaganda, paid for or not.
5. No exclusive right to make derivative works. If I want to write a story in your world setting, I can do it and sell it as much as I want, as long as it accompanies a legally acquired copy of your work as well.
Third-party derivative works risk my ability to profit from sequels. It allows another party to change the public perception of my world, diluting my vision and damaging my work. Imagine you're writing a series of books, and in between the publication of parts 2 and 3 an incredibly popular fan-fiction scene starts up and kills off my characters. Three books are released by different authors furthering the world in an opposite direction from which I intended -- including the two aforementioned characters saving the world in episode 9. A stupendously large chunk of my readership are now disengaged from my reality and are no longer interested. I'm left selling less books, and most of the books I am selling are just more reprints of the first book that'll never be read. Probably on a CD licensed under your proposal 4.
Oh, and the KKK have also decided that all the good guys are white, and the bad guys aren't. Again, I don't want people to subvert my work for objectionable propoganda.
HAL.
"this isn't a problem with Creative Commons per se"
Yes it is, although perhaps it isn't a problem with the Creative Commons licenses per se. Creative Commons, the non-profit body have consistently oversold the concept, and crucially have tried to simplify copyright (womething that just can't be done, unless you're a legislator) when they should have been educating people to understand copyright laws.
Creative Commons have encouraged all and sundry to slap licenses on their creations. This all and sundry includes countless pseudonymous abandoned accounts with no contact details. It is impossible to carry out due diligence on such a work. It could be legitimate, it could be an honest mistake, it could be a mischief-maker or it could be a malicious copyright trap. The license is unverified, so legally worthless.
The licenses as they stand would be OK if users were contactable, but that would put users at risk of being flooded with email -- a deluge of both legitimate requests and spam -- so there'd be a heck of a lot less CC users if this was mandatory. At a generous estimate, about 1% of the current figure.
Without widespread takeup, the licenses effectively wouldn't exist; sadly, the compromise needed to bring it into existence was to make it essentially valueless.
HAL.
Nowhere does that article state that a flat-plane perspective is a perfect representation of 3D. A flat-plane perspective can be a true representation if and only if 1) the projection is sized such that the observer's angle of vision matches the angle of vision of the projection, and 2) the user views the picture on-axis: in the centre and perpendicular to the projection plane.
Unfortunately, a computer screen typically occupies half the visual angle that the game represents. A flat-plane projection then has the illusion of representing a narrower view than it does. This makes turning potentially disorientating as you turn 360 in what the eye believes is only 180.
Neither will the player always be looking perpedicularly at the centre of the screen. In a static flat-plane projection, the nearest point to the eye becomes the centre of the picture. If you look at architectural photography, you'll see that a lot people use perspective distortion to force viewpoint. In a photograph approximating flat-plane perspective, or one that has been digitally perspective-corrected, the observer moves his viewpoint as he moves his eyes -- effectively walking around the picture. In a photograph with clear perspective distortion, the viewer is forced to "stand" in one place, and when he looks at a different part of the scene, he is simply moving his eyes. The effect is generally held to be more evocative and immersive. Now, in a moving environment, movement can reset the centre of vision, but only with simple movement. If you're moving forward, strafing and using mouselook simultaneously, the movement gives no clear centre.
The brain and eye have incredible potential for adaptability (check out "prism glasses" for more info) so most avid gamers will have trained these problems out of their systems by now, but the occasional gamer or non-gamer is likely to get floored by them.
Even if you still don't agree with me on that, the statement "You couldn't be more wrong" is clearly false. Even if your other assertion was correct, both our models suggest that this curved monitor will not provide an accurate rendering of a 3D environment using flat-plane projection, so I could have been more wrong. If I'd said that the curved monitor was any use in 3D gaming, I would have been more wrong.
HAL.
Yes, a curved monitor does present great field-of-vision opportunities, but it's breaking one of the unwritten rules of 3D graphics: software perspective curving isn't necessary because the gamer's physical world does the job for you.
What do I mean? Modern 3D engines generally make a flat projection of a plane, with the drawn size of an object being related to the z difference between the player and the object. However, basic geometry says we should take the true distance, equated with the x, y and z differences. If you look at a window, you will see it as oblong, but if you compare the visual length of the top and bottom edges, they're likely to be different.
Calculating that perspective distortion is computationally expensive, but we're OK, because the difference in physical distance between the eye and the various points of the monitor starts to make up for this (but not completely).
In the days of Quake and Duke Nukem 3D, most of us still had curvy CRTs. These curves exaggerated the natural curve and enhanced the 3D. These days, our flat LCDs have reeduced that and things start to seem a bit flatter.
HAL.
When they say bad sites they mean ones with a pretty clear form of "bad": fishing, not suitable for children etc. Blanket burying of business practices you personally disagree with? The totalitarianism is strong in this one....
One step away is safer: a solution installed by individuals on firewalls, proxies or PCs. Then it's "configuration", not "censorship". (IE it is unquestionably "opt-in".)
HAL.
No way -- a DNS has to be neutral. This would need to be seperate, with users having to choose to use it.
HAL.