So, when I die, can I still have the company I work for continue to pay my family for the work I did when I was alive?
Sure, is your work copyrighted and do you own the rights to your work (i.e. not sold to employer in a work-for-hire contract)?
Copyright laws that extend beyond the death of the artist are an abomination.
When you eat a meal at a restaurant, it stops providing benefit to you or anyone once you've consumed the meal. OTOH, a copyrighted work keeps providing benefits to its users for many years or decades, long after its creation. Therefore, copyright should be for infinite years and that's the right thing to do. So if you were reading a Charles Dickens novel today, what argument do you have that Dickens' descendents should not financially profit from your enjoyment of the book?
Limited copyright times were designed to (illegally) limit the amount of wealth earned by copyright holders (usually creators of copyrighted material in the days when copyright law was first formed). Nowadays, creators don't hold copyright to their own works. Instead it is owned by their employers, who in turn push politicians to extend copyright years. The way it works is, if creators own copyrights, the laws are tweaked to reduce copyright years. But if capitalists own the copyright, the laws are tweaked to extend copyright years.
From the lawsuit: She likened the app to a prisoner's ankle bracelet and informed Studbits that his actions were illegal. Stubits replied that she should tolerate the illegal intrusion because Intermex was paying Plaintiff more than NetSpend. He confirmed that she was required to keep her phone's power on "24/7" to answer phone calls from clients. Stubits scolded Plaintiff when she de-installed the app in late April 2014 in order to protect her privacy.
On May 5, 2014, within just a few weeks of Plaintiff's objection to the use of the Xora app on privacy grounds, Intermex fired Plaintiff.
Why is the TSA necessary on trains? Once a plane takes off, it's the wild west because it's disconnected from civilization and the authorities, and any terrorist can take control of the plane, take it elsewhere and kill the passengers.
A train, on the other hand, can be centrally controlled and stopped remotely by a central authority. Moreover, a train is sectioned many bogies and trying to takeover all bogies is quite difficult. You can have armed plainclothesmen inside trains if you want to deal with such people.
You are putting nothing into this other than the time you are spending to produce the code, and that time is being paid for by somebody else.
And how exactly do they calculate how much someone gets paid for their work? That's right, most of it based on the standards of living in the city, the remaining based on education and skill. IOW, the programmer gets paid the same regardless of quality of code, quantity of code or impact of code to the bottom line of the company. You agree that the code produced by a programmer and his salary are only distantly related.
The employer makes a small, one time payment for code they could use and profit from for several years or decades. It's a fool's agreement to get paid a small token amount for such work. Work for hire (aka no copyright for creators) is such a scam.
Sorry, this seems like the broken OSX and iOS/Android upgrade model -- constant "upgrades" (even if there seems no apparent performance improvement or features). These upgrades downgrade system performance, forcing you to buy new hardware every 2 years because new software and tools require the latest version. There should be a law against such abuse of customers.
It's high time we had an anonymous internet device for anonymous activities like shopping, web search, hailing taxis etc... i.e. personal stuff that's nobody else's business. And another highly tracked, non-anonymous part of the internet where security is more important than privacy.
a constant network connection is not really necessary for calls
If someone calls you, they will have to check all the cell towers (in a short amount of time) to figure out which tower is closest to you. And that's expensive and wasteful for millions of calls that happen every day.
You need internet. Cable-TV is a grossly overpriced luxury.
Cable/Satellite/OTA are broadcast mediums where one signal is transmitted to almost unlimited viewers whereas internet TV is a unicast medium where a every internet TV viewer has to be allocated some bandwidth from the source. If everybody ditched cable/satellite/OTA and switched to the internet, the bandwidth consumed would probably bring down the internet.
Uber is trying to enter the taxi market that is controlled by the govt. Instead of just providing internet hailing service to existing taxis and collect very low profits, it wants to provide taxis directly to consumer and make the whopping 20-30% cut of taxi fare (instead of the 2-4% cut by providing internet booking to existing taxis).
All these illegal maneuvers are about making a ton of money by working around the highly controlled and regulated taxi market.
Maybe IBM executives considered PCs as toys compared to mainframes and not likely to generate much revenue. So they outsourced almost everything -- CPU, RAM, OS, programming language. It's also probably why the inventors of GUI didn't value their own creation... instead, Steve Jobs profited from that.
Is convenience more important than security? Apparently so, since if the grades had been stored in on a more secure medium such as paper locked inside a vault or safe, it would be less hackable. A networked computer can be hacked from anywhere in the world and has typically thousands of bugs which form entry points for hackers.
It is quite possible for a company to preserve its trade secrets without a patent.
In which case they don't file patents. If trade secret is incapable of protecting the IP (by threats such as reverse engineering), they file patents. It's common sense, since trade secrets can last almost infinite years.
Patents are primarily supposed to help the People, not the "owners".
Not true. Patent are an exchange of resources -- a deal/trade. The patent holder can make a ton of money off his novel invention (because of 20 years of govt enforced monopoly) and the govt and the people get improvement in lifestyle because the secrets of the invention are exposed for anyone to remanufacture the product.
Also, let's not forget that the invention still needs an implementer. The implementer of the patent (after its expiry) also makes a lot of money of other people's work and a big corp is usually such an implementer of expired patents. So the patent system benefits the inventor less and the implementer most (along with the govt.). IOW, patent laws were written to benefit big business the most, since after the patent has expired, big business can bring the product based on expired patent to the market, at the lowest cost. And they can make profit off expired patents for infinite years as long as they have the lowest cost of production and distribution.
So just like short copyright terms, inventors are screwed of long term profits so that big business benefits the most. So patents are not a great deal unlike what many/.ers say.
Let me put it this way... there's plenty of free sand on the beaches. Can someone offer me a free CPU, since it is mainly made of sand (and should therefore be free according to your logic)?
How about you pay up every time you use your toothbrush? Not everyone can create a toothbrush. Same concept.
If you pay 1/100th or 1/200th the full retail price of a toothbrush, expect to pay every time you use it. That's what's happening with streaming music. Listeners are paying a tiny fraction of the 99 cent song to listen to it once.
You know getting free but old, overplayed music for almost a CENTURY...
FTFY! Radio plays the same, banal top 100 music over and over. These songs have been played so many times on radio, nobody enjoys them anymore. If radio started to play all the good music, nobody would buy records, they would just listen to the radio.
It's likely one API for UK government to access/store bank transaction data about its citizens (big brother). Having one API for multiple banks appears useless for customers.
All these problems could've been avoided if ios and android had simple file manager apps where you could store PDF files and use a regular PDF viewer to view docs. Instead, documents are embedded within apps or downloaded from the cloud creating easy points of failures in the custom viewer apps.
In this case, a badly written app (or piece of data) crashed a bunch of iPads.
Sorry, there's a big difference between "apps crashed a bunch of iPads (including iOS)" and "apps crashed (but did not crash iOS)." In this case, the latter happened, so it's only the fault of inhouse app developers who typically produce shitty code anyway. The former case is extremely rare since it's difficult for some app to crash a stable OS like iOS.
Why exactly do they need a special app to access these documents? Can't they just store them as PDFs and use some standard viewer, like Safari (at least as a backup app)?
How frickin hard is it set up a webserver to distribute their own music in this day and age? Protecting the music from pirate distributions once it leaves the server is quite hard though, as is marketing their songs.
And you are confused to think all intellectual property is ideas, whereas the reality is things like songs are based upon ideas, but are not ideas themselves. Songs are air vibrations created by instruments or human voices and ideas are ueed to guide these vibrations -- so songs are not ideas. Songs are tangible (to the ear) whereas ideas are abstract.
Just as a house can be based upon ideas (such as ideas about location, ideas about exterior design, ideas about interior design etc), the house is not ideas, rather it uses ideas just as songs use ideas.
The only rational argument for using state force to punish people or make them pay for making a copy of a work is that doing so promotes the creation of more works.
When you derive benefit from a commercial product, such as a song, without payment, that is theft, pure and simple. Your argument that the owner is not deprived of his copy is irrelevant. The music was created to be listened to by consumers in exchange for payment.
if I sing one of his songs it doesn't -- and so your comparison makes no sense.
I'm sure if enough people hear it, it does make a difference. You're using somebody else's hard work for your own gain (whether monetary or not) and it dilutes the value of that work even if you give it away for free. This results in lower sales of said song.
I'm not going to repeat the whole thing again (comes up in every copyright related/. thread)... Govt. spends resources to maintain infrastructure for your property. That's the main reason for the property tax. Where's the need for such (very expensive) infrastructure for a bunch of files sitting on a server?
While IP and real estate are similar, they are not exactly the same. The seller of copyrighted works already pays a cut of his sales as income tax (and sometimes sales tax as well), just as a homeowner pays a small cut of his home value as property tax. Do you want copyright holders to pay double/triple taxes? That's bullshit.
This is abused by labels which you have to give your whole copyright rights to. It either has some value, or its completely worthless.
I imagine some/many artists get screwed by the labels by giving up their copyrights. But at least some retain copyright of their work. In other cases, it's not abuse but just transfer of risk from artist to publisher. If your work is probably going to make between $10,000 and $1,000,000, wouldn't you rather sell it for $250,000 and let the publisher deal with the risk? At least conventional medium artists get copyrights, whereas almost all software devs handover copyright of their works to their employers.
Also, which incentive does it create for content creators to extend periods of existing works?
No matter how much money they make, they still want more. How many financially successful businessmen and artists quit their profession after making a ton of money? Not many. They enjoy their work and they enjoy making money.
Its hard to copy a piece of land, and now have two of it.
While you can't copy it, you can simulate a copy by building multistory buildings like highrises and skyscrapers.
Also, the law wasn't written for descendants to live off ideas of their anchestors.
Who cares? The copyrighted content is a commercial asset and usually descendents benefit from them. There is no need to write a special law about obvious things.
Slashdot Mirror
Sure, is your work copyrighted and do you own the rights to your work (i.e. not sold to employer in a work-for-hire contract)?
When you eat a meal at a restaurant, it stops providing benefit to you or anyone once you've consumed the meal. OTOH, a copyrighted work keeps providing benefits to its users for many years or decades, long after its creation. Therefore, copyright should be for infinite years and that's the right thing to do. So if you were reading a Charles Dickens novel today, what argument do you have that Dickens' descendents should not financially profit from your enjoyment of the book?
Limited copyright times were designed to (illegally) limit the amount of wealth earned by copyright holders (usually creators of copyrighted material in the days when copyright law was first formed). Nowadays, creators don't hold copyright to their own works. Instead it is owned by their employers, who in turn push politicians to extend copyright years. The way it works is, if creators own copyrights, the laws are tweaked to reduce copyright years. But if capitalists own the copyright, the laws are tweaked to extend copyright years.
From the lawsuit:
She likened the app to a prisoner's ankle bracelet and informed Studbits that his actions were illegal. Stubits replied that she should tolerate the illegal intrusion because Intermex was paying Plaintiff more than NetSpend. He confirmed that she was required to keep her phone's power on "24/7" to answer phone calls from clients. Stubits scolded Plaintiff when she de-installed the app in late April 2014 in order to protect her privacy.
On May 5, 2014, within just a few weeks of Plaintiff's objection to the use of the Xora app on privacy grounds, Intermex fired Plaintiff.
Namely, the car's AI programmers who did or didn't do something to prevent the accident. But now the passenger has to pay for the accident anyway.
Why is the TSA necessary on trains? Once a plane takes off, it's the wild west because it's disconnected from civilization and the authorities, and any terrorist can take control of the plane, take it elsewhere and kill the passengers.
A train, on the other hand, can be centrally controlled and stopped remotely by a central authority. Moreover, a train is sectioned many bogies and trying to takeover all bogies is quite difficult. You can have armed plainclothesmen inside trains if you want to deal with such people.
And how exactly do they calculate how much someone gets paid for their work? That's right, most of it based on the standards of living in the city, the remaining based on education and skill. IOW, the programmer gets paid the same regardless of quality of code, quantity of code or impact of code to the bottom line of the company. You agree that the code produced by a programmer and his salary are only distantly related.
The employer makes a small, one time payment for code they could use and profit from for several years or decades. It's a fool's agreement to get paid a small token amount for such work. Work for hire (aka no copyright for creators) is such a scam.
Sorry, this seems like the broken OSX and iOS/Android upgrade model -- constant "upgrades" (even if there seems no apparent performance improvement or features). These upgrades downgrade system performance, forcing you to buy new hardware every 2 years because new software and tools require the latest version. There should be a law against such abuse of customers.
It's high time we had an anonymous internet device for anonymous activities like shopping, web search, hailing taxis etc... i.e. personal stuff that's nobody else's business. And another highly tracked, non-anonymous part of the internet where security is more important than privacy.
If someone calls you, they will have to check all the cell towers (in a short amount of time) to figure out which tower is closest to you. And that's expensive and wasteful for millions of calls that happen every day.
Cable/Satellite/OTA are broadcast mediums where one signal is transmitted to almost unlimited viewers whereas internet TV is a unicast medium where a every internet TV viewer has to be allocated some bandwidth from the source. If everybody ditched cable/satellite/OTA and switched to the internet, the bandwidth consumed would probably bring down the internet.
Uber is trying to enter the taxi market that is controlled by the govt. Instead of just providing internet hailing service to existing taxis and collect very low profits, it wants to provide taxis directly to consumer and make the whopping 20-30% cut of taxi fare (instead of the 2-4% cut by providing internet booking to existing taxis).
All these illegal maneuvers are about making a ton of money by working around the highly controlled and regulated taxi market.
Maybe IBM executives considered PCs as toys compared to mainframes and not likely to generate much revenue. So they outsourced almost everything -- CPU, RAM, OS, programming language. It's also probably why the inventors of GUI didn't value their own creation... instead, Steve Jobs profited from that.
Is convenience more important than security? Apparently so, since if the grades had been stored in on a more secure medium such as paper locked inside a vault or safe, it would be less hackable. A networked computer can be hacked from anywhere in the world and has typically thousands of bugs which form entry points for hackers.
In which case they don't file patents. If trade secret is incapable of protecting the IP (by threats such as reverse engineering), they file patents. It's common sense, since trade secrets can last almost infinite years.
Not true. Patent are an exchange of resources -- a deal/trade. The patent holder can make a ton of money off his novel invention (because of 20 years of govt enforced monopoly) and the govt and the people get improvement in lifestyle because the secrets of the invention are exposed for anyone to remanufacture the product.
Also, let's not forget that the invention still needs an implementer. The implementer of the patent (after its expiry) also makes a lot of money of other people's work and a big corp is usually such an implementer of expired patents. So the patent system benefits the inventor less and the implementer most (along with the govt.). IOW, patent laws were written to benefit big business the most, since after the patent has expired, big business can bring the product based on expired patent to the market, at the lowest cost . And they can make profit off expired patents for infinite years as long as they have the lowest cost of production and distribution.
So just like short copyright terms, inventors are screwed of long term profits so that big business benefits the most. So patents are not a great deal unlike what many /.ers say.
Let me put it this way... there's plenty of free sand on the beaches. Can someone offer me a free CPU, since it is mainly made of sand (and should therefore be free according to your logic)?
If you pay 1/100th or 1/200th the full retail price of a toothbrush, expect to pay every time you use it. That's what's happening with streaming music. Listeners are paying a tiny fraction of the 99 cent song to listen to it once.
You know getting free but old, overplayed music for almost a CENTURY...
FTFY! Radio plays the same, banal top 100 music over and over. These songs have been played so many times on radio, nobody enjoys them anymore. If radio started to play all the good music, nobody would buy records, they would just listen to the radio.
It's likely one API for UK government to access/store bank transaction data about its citizens (big brother). Having one API for multiple banks appears useless for customers.
All these problems could've been avoided if ios and android had simple file manager apps where you could store PDF files and use a regular PDF viewer to view docs. Instead, documents are embedded within apps or downloaded from the cloud creating easy points of failures in the custom viewer apps.
Sorry, there's a big difference between "apps crashed a bunch of iPads (including iOS)" and "apps crashed (but did not crash iOS)." In this case, the latter happened, so it's only the fault of inhouse app developers who typically produce shitty code anyway. The former case is extremely rare since it's difficult for some app to crash a stable OS like iOS.
Why exactly do they need a special app to access these documents? Can't they just store them as PDFs and use some standard viewer, like Safari (at least as a backup app)?
How frickin hard is it set up a webserver to distribute their own music in this day and age? Protecting the music from pirate distributions once it leaves the server is quite hard though, as is marketing their songs.
And you are confused to think all intellectual property is ideas, whereas the reality is things like songs are based upon ideas, but are not ideas themselves. Songs are air vibrations created by instruments or human voices and ideas are ueed to guide these vibrations -- so songs are not ideas. Songs are tangible (to the ear) whereas ideas are abstract.
Just as a house can be based upon ideas (such as ideas about location, ideas about exterior design, ideas about interior design etc), the house is not ideas, rather it uses ideas just as songs use ideas.
When you derive benefit from a commercial product, such as a song, without payment, that is theft, pure and simple. Your argument that the owner is not deprived of his copy is irrelevant. The music was created to be listened to by consumers in exchange for payment.
I'm sure if enough people hear it, it does make a difference. You're using somebody else's hard work for your own gain (whether monetary or not) and it dilutes the value of that work even if you give it away for free. This results in lower sales of said song.
I'm not going to repeat the whole thing again (comes up in every copyright related /. thread)...
Govt. spends resources to maintain infrastructure for your property. That's the main reason for the property tax. Where's the need for such (very expensive) infrastructure for a bunch of files sitting on a server?
While IP and real estate are similar, they are not exactly the same. The seller of copyrighted works already pays a cut of his sales as income tax (and sometimes sales tax as well), just as a homeowner pays a small cut of his home value as property tax. Do you want copyright holders to pay double/triple taxes? That's bullshit.
I imagine some/many artists get screwed by the labels by giving up their copyrights. But at least some retain copyright of their work. In other cases, it's not abuse but just transfer of risk from artist to publisher. If your work is probably going to make between $10,000 and $1,000,000, wouldn't you rather sell it for $250,000 and let the publisher deal with the risk? At least conventional medium artists get copyrights, whereas almost all software devs handover copyright of their works to their employers.
No matter how much money they make, they still want more. How many financially successful businessmen and artists quit their profession after making a ton of money? Not many. They enjoy their work and they enjoy making money.
While you can't copy it, you can simulate a copy by building multistory buildings like highrises and skyscrapers.
Who cares? The copyrighted content is a commercial asset and usually descendents benefit from them. There is no need to write a special law about obvious things.