The current copyright system HARMS the artist, as it allows rich old white fucks to become the eternal gatekeepers by making endless bank on back catalogs which the artists don't see a fucking cent of in a good 90% of the cases.
Wow, that's quite a leap of judgement. With or without copyright, the publishers/distributors would still screw over the artists because they have a monopoly or at least they used to and artists have little common sense. Copyright law makes it a lot harder to screw artists, not harm them. And the days of eating 80-90% revenue by labels for content sales are over.
Internet distributors like Apple, Amazon and Spotify typically take only a 30% cut from sales. Heck, if they did their own advertising and branding, they could get 100%, screw the middlemen, just like Tesla is trying to get rid of dealers for its cars to maximize its profits.
However, if they are being used by the courts to decide cases, we would have the odd situation where a private party was writing law... and if they were then considered "law" then probably not eligible for copyright.
These annotations are not being directly used to decide cases. Instead they are being used to quickly refer to previous cases and provide a quick summary. The private party writing the annotation is deciding nothing and your accusation is extremely ridiculous. The annotations can be covered by copyright because they are not necessary. You can decide cases by reading the laws and the previous court rulings. The annotations only speed up that process.
Just imagine each and every audio/visual recording from the 1970s and before becoming public domain, what an enormous wealth of culture would become available, for free or a minimal access fee, to everyone. Even if you assume that for a "Creative Industries Improvement Fee" of say $250,000.00 per work a copyright could be extended for another 20 years (e.g. a "Star Wars", "Star Trek: The Motion Picture", or the "White Album" by the Beatles, etc.).
That serves the needs of the consumers, not the creators and we don't want a system where creators are slave servants to the consumers. Go to a public library if you want copyrighted stuff for free. Yes, there's a long waiting list for movies and music CDs. By comparison, non-popular books sit there collecting dust. But at least they provide valuable income to authors.
You can already listen to almost all music for a whopping $10/month. I imagine the same thing will happen to movies soon as bandwidth becomes cheaper. In the meantime, you have netflix and hulu for those needs. I don't get the constant fuss over copyright laws If you can't afford spend less than $100/month for content.
My personal view is that copyrighted content should be like real estate -- you should be able to make money off it as long as you want. No one has presented a convincing argument why real estate owners make money infinitely, but copyright owners can't do the same. My guess is limited copyright times were done to screw the authors (copyright owners at the time of formation of copyright laws). Imagine how many millions of dollars publishers have made from reprinting out-of-copyright Mark Twain and Charles Dickens novels and giving the authors and their descendants $0. Now that companies like Disney own copyright to works, they have lobbied to extend copyright duration times.
And I currently pay hundreds of dollars per month to access and/or own licensed copies of copyrighted material, many of which I could just as easily access for free, thank you very much.
LOL, if consumers like you didn't pay that amount, that content would cease to exist. Content gets created because content creators and businesses want your money.
Don't these annotations provide short, usable summaries to previous court cases? They most certainly are not just indexes. It's like a slashdot summary -- a few condensed paragraphs for an article containing dozens of paragraphs. A slashdot summary is also not an index, and is eligible for copyright.
I never said they were subjective. While you are free to apply the laws of physics at no cost, learning and understanding those laws usually requires buying good physics books, which are not free.
Similarly, these annotations are probably more human-friendly readable version of the state laws. And like the physics textbooks, you have to pay to get access to them. Blame your lawmakers for not writing laws and explanations/examples/annotations in a human friendly manner.
It's not like we needed another example of why the current copyright laws are ridiculous and stupid and counter-productive but here it is, again.
Copyright law is not ridiculous. It exists so that creative folks can make money off their works. Without copyright, it is unlikely you, or any other consumer, will pay one red cent for copyrighted material.
While Georgia state laws are open source, the extra explanations for the laws, or "annotations," are not. An analogy to this case is, while the laws of physics are available to all for free, physics textbooks cost money. It's also a lot like Unix systems. The man pages give terse, difficult to understand information about all the command-line programs (like Georgia law), but you have to spend hundreds of dollars to buy decent Unix books if you want a good grasp on how to use those commands (like annotations to Georgia law).
This could all change is these annotations were part of the law. That is, laws should not be published without official, free annotations. Then they would be free. Until then, you have to pay the annotation copyright holder.
"Virtual Memory translation and paging are two of the worst decisions in computing history"
In the old days and even with current CPUs, one CPU can run multiple processes. But if CPUs were small enough and cheap enough, one program would run on multiple CPUs. Why would you need memory protection (virtual memory translation) if only a small portion of one program is running on one CPU? Answer: you don't.
So TL;DR, he could be right, but only for systems with huge number of weak/limited CPUs.
Uber doesn't own the cars, and the taxi company owns the cars.
This is nitpicking non-essential details. Here are the things that do matter: a) Like taxis, uber transport has a driver b) Like taxis, uber transport has a car for personal non-shared transportation c) Like taxis, uber transports a passenger from point A to point B with a fare similar to a taxi d) The only thing different compared to a traditional taxi is, instead of waving his/her hand to draw the attention of the taxi driver, the passenger sends a "hail taxi" message through the internet. That's it... that's the only difference. It's internet haling of taxis.
hey did bring something considerably different to the market - the ability to track reviews of specific users, and with it the ability to jettison anyone who didn't behave in accordance with their desires.
And by considerably different, you mean something like ebay's ratings for sellers that is 15-20 years old and that is used by buyers to decide whether they want to deal with a buyer?
A reboot is not a desired option in the middle of a work week when I have no time to deal with a mess up.
Unlike Unix variants, once you load a.exe or.dll in Windows, the executable file becomes read-only (for paging and security purposes). So to update the.exe or.dll, you need to shutdown the program, update the executable and restart the OS if the updated executable belongs to the OS.
"Update" is just a weasel word. We want them to use either (feature) "upgrades" or "bug fixes." Update is just a vague term used to mean upgrades and/or bug fixes. While bug fixes are welcome, upgrades should be reviewed by the user before installation. We don't want useless, bloated upgrades that hog system resources forcing you to buy new hardware every two years.
Here's a more detailed article about the dangers of microwave radiation, including cell phones:
Despite not being able to break atoms apart, non-ionizing radiation (such as microwaves) CAN cause physical alterations. For example, sunlight can damage your skin and eyes. Overexposure to radiation can affect tissues by causing molecular damage, DNA mutations, and other changes that can lead to cancer. The serious concern is, with all of this radiation surrounding us from cell and cordless phones, radio towers, satellites, broadcast antennas, military and aviation radar, home electronic devices, computers and Internet, we are all part of an involuntary mass epidemiological experiment, on a scale never before seen in the history of the human race. And the truth is that we don't really KNOW what long term, low-level (but persistent) radiation does to usâ"even the non-ionizing type.
But that tiny power can cause a lot of damage if the exposure is for many hours a day for several years. Here's a story about the dangers of microwave radiation. Calling all non-ionizing radiation safe is quite careless.
You can't just say off-hand there is no harmful effects. They need to perform studies to reach that conclusion. And the study should be done by an independent agency, not the FCC or Samsung. That would be like letting the wolves guard the hen house.
No, proximity has a huge impact on harmfulness. Radiation effect is probably proportional to the inverse square of the distance (impact proportional to 1/dist^2). They should redo the test with 2mm distance from thigh skin.
In 99.99% of the cases, the public doesn't know the name of an actor's agent. S/he is just a middleman doing some specialized work like contract price negotiation.
When you book a taxi, you choose the taxi based on Uber's reputation, and not on the driver's reputation. This is completely different in the actor's case where you don't care about the agent's reputation as much as the actor's reputation.
Uber handles all these roles: a) agent of e-taxi drivers b) marketing and selling e-taxi services c) billing and payment processing for passengers and drivers d) hiring and firing taxi drivers
The scope is much bigger than just an agent. Uber is just like any other employer except its employees come and go as they please, and work irregular hours compared to 9-to-5 workers.
So when the guy in the middle leans back to sleep you get to look at him and hear his snoring EXTRA loud
That's the thing, you can't lean back. Zoom in on TFA's seat image and you'll see the last row's window seat back is fused to its previous row's middle seat... all three seats in a row have their backs fused, so you can't lean them back or forward. I guess this is how they achieved extra rows.
What kind of people are you going to get to do that when money is not a requirement?
Maybe they'll work for free, as a hobby. Isn't slashdot and reddit moderated by moderators who work for free? Isn't stackexchange.com filled with Q&A created entirely for free, just like posting slashdot comments does not earn you money? Millions of man-hours for FREE.
Of course, someone will have to pay for travel expenses from the technician's house to the house that needs servicing. But his service after that will be free. My point is, we're already living in the star trek / communistic society but few people notice it.
Enough with the stupid analogies and defending Google. When you uninstall an app, all app-specific components should be deleted, including any background running programs, not just the user facing GUI program.
The photo uploader was not deleted and the question remains whether this was intentional and malicious to allow Google access to photos it was no longer authorized or entitled to.
And if these apps are useful why not offer free downloads from the play store instead of preinstalling them and making them non-removable? Samsung must be getting paid by software vendors to install these apps or the apps are free and Samsung is selling data collected by these apps.
You're not forced to buy a samsung phone.
That's no excuse to install something useless that wastes flash memory and RAM.
Yes, but most weapons today wouldn't be made by one person. Not even designed by one person.
So share the profits with the 10 or 100 designers based on the importance of their contribution. Instead all profits go to the organizers (management), investors and shareholders. These people who had little or nothing to do with the technical aspects of the product. Sure they should get a share of the profits, but not all of it.
And even a sword is often the result of centuries of development in its details. What metallurgy went into the blade, how long it is, the guard, the grip, etc.
I'll repeat the previous point: There's no reason only one person should profit from the development of this weapon. The profits could be shared by multiple innovators.
In the US at least, "sweat of the brow" does not by itself allow copyright protection; it is irrelevant how much work is done.
According to wikipedia, sweat of the brow implies:
Substantial creativity or "originality" is not required.
Designing APIs or instruction sets requires a ton of creativity and originality, since billions of lines of code are going to be using it and since changing them in the future is costly and difficult. The originality comes from improved API design that reduces coding time/debug time as is the case in Java API vs C API. Sweat of the brow type of work means something trivial like creating a database of people's names and phone numbers or printing phone books.
That being said, there is a lot of tedious, sweat of the brow concepts involved in designing APIs. For example, reading a text file still needs something like fileopen(), fileclose(), fileread() that is present in all programming languages in some form. But this API should still be copyrightable since copyright protects creative expression of an idea, but not the idea itself.
The TL;DR version: the API ideas/concepts are similar across many programming languages but the way they are expressed differently means they deserve copyright protection.
IP protection is poor and archaic because it was created in the 1700s where you only had to deal with protecting books and mechanical inventions. API/instruction set are a type of IP that seem like a blend of design patents and copyright. IP law should be extended to protect all types of intellectual property using different tools, not just patents and copyright.
I didn't read the NEC vs Intel case too much but it seems like copyright infringement because copying the body/implementation of a function API is similar to copying the microcode (or subassemly language) of a CPU.
Maybe the law back when Lexra was around was that instruction sets were not copyrightable. It is this hole in the law that allowed Google to reimplement the Java Standard Library without paying any licensing fees. But since SCOTUS has already ruled APIs are copyrightable, it should stand that instruction sets should also be copyrightable since APIs and instruction sets are very similar, conceptually.
I did find something about Lexra on google:
Nobody can patent, copyright, or otherwise own a language or an instruction set. Lexra had the right, legally and ethically, to design an IP core with the MIPS instruction set.
I disagree with the Lexra employee since a lot of effort and creativity goes into designing an instruction set. Both x86 and MIPS allow programs to execute common operations on their CPUs. However, there are a lot of design decisions that go into designing the nitty gritty portions of the operations.
You were right that Lexra did something similar to what Google just did. They created a MIPS clone but were sued for patent infringement:
Though you can not patent an instruction set, you can patent designs and methods that are necessary to implement a particular unusual instruction that is part of the instruction set. That prevents competitors from creating a fully compatible clone of your processor without infringing your patent. There are four instructions in the MIPS-I instruction set that are protected by one US patent, 4,814,976. These instructions, lwl, lwr, swl, and swr are known as the unaligned load and store instructions.
Slashdot Mirror
Wow, that's quite a leap of judgement. With or without copyright, the publishers/distributors would still screw over the artists because they have a monopoly or at least they used to and artists have little common sense. Copyright law makes it a lot harder to screw artists, not harm them. And the days of eating 80-90% revenue by labels for content sales are over.
Internet distributors like Apple, Amazon and Spotify typically take only a 30% cut from sales. Heck, if they did their own advertising and branding, they could get 100%, screw the middlemen, just like Tesla is trying to get rid of dealers for its cars to maximize its profits.
These annotations are not being directly used to decide cases. Instead they are being used to quickly refer to previous cases and provide a quick summary. The private party writing the annotation is deciding nothing and your accusation is extremely ridiculous. The annotations can be covered by copyright because they are not necessary. You can decide cases by reading the laws and the previous court rulings. The annotations only speed up that process.
That serves the needs of the consumers, not the creators and we don't want a system where creators are slave servants to the consumers. Go to a public library if you want copyrighted stuff for free. Yes, there's a long waiting list for movies and music CDs. By comparison, non-popular books sit there collecting dust. But at least they provide valuable income to authors.
You can already listen to almost all music for a whopping $10/month. I imagine the same thing will happen to movies soon as bandwidth becomes cheaper. In the meantime, you have netflix and hulu for those needs. I don't get the constant fuss over copyright laws If you can't afford spend less than $100/month for content.
My personal view is that copyrighted content should be like real estate -- you should be able to make money off it as long as you want. No one has presented a convincing argument why real estate owners make money infinitely, but copyright owners can't do the same. My guess is limited copyright times were done to screw the authors (copyright owners at the time of formation of copyright laws). Imagine how many millions of dollars publishers have made from reprinting out-of-copyright Mark Twain and Charles Dickens novels and giving the authors and their descendants $0. Now that companies like Disney own copyright to works, they have lobbied to extend copyright duration times.
LOL, if consumers like you didn't pay that amount, that content would cease to exist. Content gets created because content creators and businesses want your money.
Don't these annotations provide short, usable summaries to previous court cases? They most certainly are not just indexes. It's like a slashdot summary -- a few condensed paragraphs for an article containing dozens of paragraphs. A slashdot summary is also not an index, and is eligible for copyright.
Here's the link, where you can view current and past Georgia state laws. I'm not sure if the laws are shown in full detail.
I never said they were subjective. While you are free to apply the laws of physics at no cost, learning and understanding those laws usually requires buying good physics books, which are not free.
Similarly, these annotations are probably more human-friendly readable version of the state laws. And like the physics textbooks, you have to pay to get access to them. Blame your lawmakers for not writing laws and explanations/examples/annotations in a human friendly manner.
Copyright law is not ridiculous. It exists so that creative folks can make money off their works. Without copyright, it is unlikely you, or any other consumer, will pay one red cent for copyrighted material.
While Georgia state laws are open source, the extra explanations for the laws, or "annotations," are not. An analogy to this case is, while the laws of physics are available to all for free, physics textbooks cost money. It's also a lot like Unix systems. The man pages give terse, difficult to understand information about all the command-line programs (like Georgia law), but you have to spend hundreds of dollars to buy decent Unix books if you want a good grasp on how to use those commands (like annotations to Georgia law).
This could all change is these annotations were part of the law. That is, laws should not be published without official, free annotations. Then they would be free. Until then, you have to pay the annotation copyright holder.
"Virtual Memory translation and paging are two of the worst decisions in computing history"
In the old days and even with current CPUs, one CPU can run multiple processes. But if CPUs were small enough and cheap enough, one program would run on multiple CPUs. Why would you need memory protection (virtual memory translation) if only a small portion of one program is running on one CPU? Answer: you don't.
So TL;DR, he could be right, but only for systems with huge number of weak/limited CPUs.
This is nitpicking non-essential details. Here are the things that do matter:
a) Like taxis, uber transport has a driver
b) Like taxis, uber transport has a car for personal non-shared transportation
c) Like taxis, uber transports a passenger from point A to point B with a fare similar to a taxi
d) The only thing different compared to a traditional taxi is, instead of waving his/her hand to draw the attention of the taxi driver, the passenger sends a "hail taxi" message through the internet. That's it... that's the only difference. It's internet haling of taxis.
And by considerably different, you mean something like ebay's ratings for sellers that is 15-20 years old and that is used by buyers to decide whether they want to deal with a buyer?
Unlike Unix variants, once you load a .exe or .dll in Windows, the executable file becomes read-only (for paging and security purposes). So to update the .exe or .dll, you need to shutdown the program, update the executable and restart the OS if the updated executable belongs to the OS.
"Update" is just a weasel word. We want them to use either (feature) "upgrades" or "bug fixes." Update is just a vague term used to mean upgrades and/or bug fixes. While bug fixes are welcome, upgrades should be reviewed by the user before installation. We don't want useless, bloated upgrades that hog system resources forcing you to buy new hardware every two years.
Here's a more detailed article about the dangers of microwave radiation, including cell phones:
Despite not being able to break atoms apart, non-ionizing radiation (such as microwaves) CAN cause physical alterations. For example, sunlight can damage your skin and eyes. Overexposure to radiation can affect tissues by causing molecular damage, DNA mutations, and other changes that can lead to cancer. The serious concern is, with all of this radiation surrounding us from cell and cordless phones, radio towers, satellites, broadcast antennas, military and aviation radar, home electronic devices, computers and Internet, we are all part of an involuntary mass epidemiological experiment, on a scale never before seen in the history of the human race. And the truth is that we don't really KNOW what long term, low-level (but persistent) radiation does to usâ"even the non-ionizing type.
http://articles.mercola.com/si...
But that tiny power can cause a lot of damage if the exposure is for many hours a day for several years. Here's a story about the dangers of microwave radiation. Calling all non-ionizing radiation safe is quite careless.
You can't just say off-hand there is no harmful effects. They need to perform studies to reach that conclusion. And the study should be done by an independent agency, not the FCC or Samsung. That would be like letting the wolves guard the hen house.
No, proximity has a huge impact on harmfulness. Radiation effect is probably proportional to the inverse square of the distance (impact proportional to 1/dist^2). They should redo the test with 2mm distance from thigh skin.
Of course, you can still hire a $250-750/hr human lawyer when your e-lawyer screws up. Hopefully, that won't happen too often.
In 99.99% of the cases, the public doesn't know the name of an actor's agent. S/he is just a middleman doing some specialized work like contract price negotiation.
When you book a taxi, you choose the taxi based on Uber's reputation, and not on the driver's reputation. This is completely different in the actor's case where you don't care about the agent's reputation as much as the actor's reputation.
Uber handles all these roles:
a) agent of e-taxi drivers
b) marketing and selling e-taxi services
c) billing and payment processing for passengers and drivers
d) hiring and firing taxi drivers
The scope is much bigger than just an agent. Uber is just like any other employer except its employees come and go as they please, and work irregular hours compared to 9-to-5 workers.
That's the thing, you can't lean back. Zoom in on TFA's seat image and you'll see the last row's window seat back is fused to its previous row's middle seat... all three seats in a row have their backs fused, so you can't lean them back or forward. I guess this is how they achieved extra rows.
Maybe they'll work for free, as a hobby. Isn't slashdot and reddit moderated by moderators who work for free? Isn't stackexchange.com filled with Q&A created entirely for free, just like posting slashdot comments does not earn you money? Millions of man-hours for FREE.
Of course, someone will have to pay for travel expenses from the technician's house to the house that needs servicing. But his service after that will be free. My point is, we're already living in the star trek / communistic society but few people notice it.
Enough with the stupid analogies and defending Google. When you uninstall an app, all app-specific components should be deleted, including any background running programs, not just the user facing GUI program.
The photo uploader was not deleted and the question remains whether this was intentional and malicious to allow Google access to photos it was no longer authorized or entitled to.
And if these apps are useful why not offer free downloads from the play store instead of preinstalling them and making them non-removable? Samsung must be getting paid by software vendors to install these apps or the apps are free and Samsung is selling data collected by these apps.
That's no excuse to install something useless that wastes flash memory and RAM.
So share the profits with the 10 or 100 designers based on the importance of their contribution. Instead all profits go to the organizers (management), investors and shareholders. These people who had little or nothing to do with the technical aspects of the product. Sure they should get a share of the profits, but not all of it.
I'll repeat the previous point: There's no reason only one person should profit from the development of this weapon. The profits could be shared by multiple innovators.
That's not a subsidy. Instead, it's bundling the monthly rental fee of the phone with monthly phone service charges.
According to wikipedia, sweat of the brow implies:
Substantial creativity or "originality" is not required.
Designing APIs or instruction sets requires a ton of creativity and originality, since billions of lines of code are going to be using it and since changing them in the future is costly and difficult. The originality comes from improved API design that reduces coding time/debug time as is the case in Java API vs C API. Sweat of the brow type of work means something trivial like creating a database of people's names and phone numbers or printing phone books.
That being said, there is a lot of tedious, sweat of the brow concepts involved in designing APIs. For example, reading a text file still needs something like fileopen(), fileclose(), fileread() that is present in all programming languages in some form. But this API should still be copyrightable since copyright protects creative expression of an idea, but not the idea itself.
The TL;DR version: the API ideas/concepts are similar across many programming languages but the way they are expressed differently means they deserve copyright protection.
IP protection is poor and archaic because it was created in the 1700s where you only had to deal with protecting books and mechanical inventions. API/instruction set are a type of IP that seem like a blend of design patents and copyright. IP law should be extended to protect all types of intellectual property using different tools, not just patents and copyright.
I didn't read the NEC vs Intel case too much but it seems like copyright infringement because copying the body/implementation of a function API is similar to copying the microcode (or subassemly language) of a CPU.
Maybe the law back when Lexra was around was that instruction sets were not copyrightable. It is this hole in the law that allowed Google to reimplement the Java Standard Library without paying any licensing fees. But since SCOTUS has already ruled APIs are copyrightable, it should stand that instruction sets should also be copyrightable since APIs and instruction sets are very similar, conceptually.
I did find something about Lexra on google:
Nobody can patent, copyright, or otherwise own a language or an instruction set. Lexra had the right, legally and ethically, to design an IP core with the MIPS instruction set.
http://probell.com/Lexra/lexra...
I disagree with the Lexra employee since a lot of effort and creativity goes into designing an instruction set. Both x86 and MIPS allow programs to execute common operations on their CPUs. However, there are a lot of design decisions that go into designing the nitty gritty portions of the operations.
You were right that Lexra did something similar to what Google just did. They created a MIPS clone but were sued for patent infringement:
Though you can not patent an instruction set, you can patent designs and methods that are necessary to implement a particular unusual instruction that is part of the instruction set. That prevents competitors from creating a fully compatible clone of your processor without infringing your patent. There are four instructions in the MIPS-I instruction set that are protected by one US patent, 4,814,976. These instructions, lwl, lwr, swl, and swr are known as the unaligned load and store instructions.