Correct me if I am wrong, but I just read the AfD page and it doesn't appear that this was a hoax or vandalism at all. What it was, was a well written article on a theory that did not meet Wikipedia's notability requirements. It was also written by the creator of the theory which is against Wikipedia's policies on original research.
IANAL, but I believe the problem with your argument is that the "promote the progress of science and useful arts" preamble only means that when Congress passes a copyright law they must have the intention of promoting the progress of science and useful arts. That preamble does not affect individual copyrights or cases of copyright infringement.
Judging by this standard, it is obvious that although Congress could require that each copyrighted work be shown to promote the useful arts (as it has with patents), n19 it need not do so. As discussed in the previous section, Congress could reasonably conclude that the best way to promote creativity is not to impose any governmental restrictions on the subject matter of copyrightable works. By making this choice Congress removes the chilling effect of governmental judgments on potential authors and avoids the strong possibility that governmental officials (including judges) will err in separating the useful from the non-useful. Moreover, unlike patents, the grant of a copyright to a non-useful work impedes the progress of the sciences and the useful arts only very slightly, if at all, for the possessor of a copyright does not have any right to block further dissemination or use of the ideas contained in his works.
MITCHELL BROTHERS FILM GROUP v. CINEMA ADULT THEATER, 604 F.2d 852; 1979
Your concern is easily answered by reading the actual ruling:
The Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN), which was created through a Memorandum of Understanding between the U.S. Department of Commerce and ICANN to transition management of the Domain Name System (DNS) from the U.S. government to the global community, and/or Tucows, Inc., ICANN's accredited registrar for www.spamhaus.org, is hereby ordered to suspend or place a client hold on www.Spamhaus.org until such time as they receive a further order from this Court that such suspension or client hold be lifted.
Wow, I hope you don't get paid to do this. Reformat to add Administrator to the welecome screen? You could have just edited the registry (http://tinyurl.com/6utzj) or if that is too hard for you, Microsoft's TweakUI gives you a nice GUI to change the users displayed. I find it odd, however, that your boss was running XP with only one Administrator account to begin with since part of the installation process is adding a second User. You can get around this, but I doubt your boss did.
How long has the MP3 technology been around? Shouldn't this sort of thing have entered the public domain if there was any sanity in the Intellectual Property system?
In the US, patents last for 25 years. To put things in perspective, the patents on compact discs won't expire until next year. MP3 was developed in the early 90s
There isn't a linux version of MS Word either. If you read what I was replying to, it was the notion that people buy MS Word just to read Word documents written by others. If you can run MS Word you can run the viewer.
With the need to upgrade just to be able to read other people's documents removed, nobody is ever going to buy a paid-up copy of MS Office again.
The problem with your theory is that you don't need MS Word to read other people's documents.
Microsoft offers for free the MS Word viewer for this purpose.
Don't forget that the primary purpose of corporations is to avoid personal liability and responsibility. It is both difficult to jail a corporation or jail individuals working for a corporation for corporate misbehavior.
The primary purpose of a corporation is the shield the owners from liability and responsibility. Individuals working for a corporation are still responsible for any criminal offenses they commit or conspire to commit.
I love when people say intentionally ridiculous sounding things like "The Constitution doesn't guarantee your right to drive a car" or "The Constitution doesn't guarantee your right to be married." Yes, it does actually.
No, it doesn't actually. The constitution spells out which rights the government may not curtail (with the exception of the 18th amenndment). The constitution does not prevent the government from passing a law banning marriage or driving a car. It does not, therefore, guarantee those rights.
Is it the case that the non-violation of the DMCA through interoperability was so blindingly obvious here that the court simply had to get it wrong?
The court didn't say their actions weren't covered by the interoperability exemption. The court ruled that appelants waived the exemption when they agreed to Blizzard's EULA.
Appellants contractually accepted restrictions on their ability to reverse
engineer by their agreement to the terms of the TOU and EULA. "[P]rivate parties are
free to contractually forego the limited ability to reverse engineer a software product
under the exemptions of the Copyright Act[,]" Bowers v. Baystate Techs, Inc., 320
F.3d 1317, 1325-26 (Fed. Cir. 2003), and "a state can permit parties to contract away
a fair use defense or to agree not to engage in uses of copyrighted material that are
permitted by the copyright law if the contract is freely negotiated."
Of course, I wouldn't call a EULA "freely negotiated."
and why would they have any say in how you use it?
no really, tell me. i'm quite interested in how they still retain control of it when it's running on other people's computers.
why is it their business whether you run it on your wrist watch or your toaster? what are they losing?
what are you losing.
show me the logic.
They care because they charge companies a fee to include the flash player in the specialized devices in question. That is my guess atleast.
This doesn't make a whole lot of sence. I thought Linus Torvalds held the trademark of Linux, not the general userbase. How can they do something like this? Did he not file in Austrailia, and if he didn't would it even been legal for that usergroup to trademark Linux there when it's already in common use? And what would Linus have to say about all this?
Didn't RTFA, did you?
The user group acted to become an agent for the Linux Mark Institute, a US-based organisation created in 2002 to police use of Linux creator Linus Torvalds' trademark after he became concerned about a website operator selling pornography through linuxchix.com.
Can anyone here name any examples of Microsoft's participation in OSS projects?
Microsoft has released a few OSS projects on sourceforge and if you read the whole article he mentions some cases where they submitted fixes for OSS projects.
It tends to work correctly on shit that really doesn't matter (i.e. GIS data). It doesn't seem to work very well for civil rights violations such as the Patriot Act.
That is because the court does not arbitrarily decide the validity of laws. A case has to be brought by someone affected by the law first. Since the patriot act hasn't been as widely abused as some would have you believe, it hasn't been significantly tested in the courts.
Also, some parts of the patriot act have been found unconstitutional.
I have to respectfully disagree and say that it was [adult swim] on cartoon network. They aired it for years late at night, rebuilt the fanbase, and then Fox suddenly "changed their minds".
Why would I want IE permanently installed if I never use it?
Because IE is used in other core Windows functionality like explorer and the help system, etc. Also, a number of applications use IE's rendering engine and WMP's media functionality.
What they SHOULD have done, is force Microsoft to expose APIs to replace this functionality with other browsers.
The rants are that we PAY FOR IT even if we don't use it. XP N doesn't fix that, its still dumping, you still pay for it as part of the cost of Windows.
You don't pay anything for it. Its free, regardless of whether you purchase windows or not.
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You are allowed to add information as long as you write it from a neutral point of view, in the third person, and you cite reliable published sources.
l _research#Citing_oneself
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:No_origina
Correct me if I am wrong, but I just read the AfD page and it doesn't appear that this was a hoax or vandalism at all. What it was, was a well written article on a theory that did not meet Wikipedia's notability requirements. It was also written by the creator of the theory which is against Wikipedia's policies on original research.
MITCHELL BROTHERS FILM GROUP v. CINEMA ADULT THEATER, 604 F.2d 852; 1979
You mean like how Research in Motion wasn't subject to American court orders because they were Candian based?
You mean like LICRA vs Yahoo?
Wow, I hope you don't get paid to do this. Reformat to add Administrator to the welecome screen? You could have just edited the registry (http://tinyurl.com/6utzj) or if that is too hard for you, Microsoft's TweakUI gives you a nice GUI to change the users displayed. I find it odd, however, that your boss was running XP with only one Administrator account to begin with since part of the installation process is adding a second User. You can get around this, but I doubt your boss did.
USPS Priority Mail is pretty common on eBay and smaller retailers
There isn't a linux version of MS Word either. If you read what I was replying to, it was the notion that people buy MS Word just to read Word documents written by others. If you can run MS Word you can run the viewer.
Now we know the real reason why NTP acquired a stake in Visto yesterday.
Also, some parts of the patriot act have been found unconstitutional.
Of course the EU sanctions were misguided. That is what happens when you ask Microsoft's competitors for input rather than their customers.