Well, I'm still reading the court ruling regarding this case. In one place it says, short words and sentence fragments can't be copyrighted. So while a single method/function declaration of foo() is original and creative, it is too short to be copyrightable.
Oracle had argued that the 37 Java packages, comprising of 6000 method API declarations were copied verbatim by Google, should as whole be copyrightable because the taxonomy, structure etc of those package/class/method declarations combined are original, creative, etc. and mostly meet the requirements of copyrightability.
So I have a door, it has a door bell. It follows a nice standard that if someone wants to get my attention at my door, they ring the doorbell. If they want to leave a message, they put a note in my mailbox. That's a rough equivalent for my house's API. I can copyright that (baring prior art and fair use)?
You seem to be describing a patent. To do copyright infringement of somebody else's door, you would have to use the same material of wood, the same color, the same design, and an exact duplicate of the knob. But copyright applies only to text and similar content. To protect the door's design, you have get a design patent.
In the programming world an API like this: int foo(int a, int b)
can be changed to: int foobar(int num1, int num2)
to avoid copyright infringement. In other words, don't copy letter-for-letter and you can avoid copyright infringement. Although I don't understand why programming APIs weren't protected by APIs before.
Yes, but starting your car with a button does not prove negligence or malice which is a prerequisite for placing blame and liability cost on the driver in case of an accident.
Software is already making a huge number of decisions for you (when to shift, when to employ the air-bags, etc.)
If the software were to fail in any of these cases, the car maker will be sued as happened to Toyota with their cars doing unintended acceleration.
Okay, Mr. lightbox, go thru the claims and list all the claims that you have already implemented after building light boxes for over a decade -- perhaps with photos of implementations.
Perhaps it just sits there or perhaps they invalidate the relevant claims, who knows. What we do know is that come litigation time, when the patent holder is suing the patent infringer, the infringer can show your prior art and either reduce his penalty or completely eliminate it and also help other so-called infringers in a patent lawsuit.
Well, professionals who take these types of photos care, outsiders don't care. Maybe you should at least skim through all the patent claims before saying it's just a camera in front of a white sheet.
The report covers almost 92,000 changes to Linux from 3,738 individuals since version 3.3 in March 2012.
That statistic is only after march 2012, when the kernel was more or less stable. What about 20 years worth of work before that? I don't think most of those developers have been paid. Also, making little changes to a stable product is easier that creating it from scratch.
The default copyright goes to the author no the website, unless author assigns it to the website. Hosting a comment on your website does not mean you own it, at least that's what I think. You have to get express permission from the original copyright holders, the authors, to legally obtain copyright.
Wrong. It is perfectly legal to charge for open source (GPL, BSD, etc).
Then why aren't the developers of Linux kernel getting paid? Google and other websites use Linux etc. to make billions off their free slave labor while giving nothing or little back.
it would seem like it's probably not protected by copyright under US law, since it is most likely a collection of data lacking originality.
Any original (non-plagiarized) content can be copyrighted. Further, if the site has an account signup license that states that "vulnerability report submitter assigns his/her posts' copyright to website so that it can modify, reproduce that post as it sees fit," then yes, you cannot mass copy the database freely without violating copyright laws.
I don't see why it would not be handled the same way hardware defects are right now:
What's different is cars (or rather the software) will be making decisions, and someone has to pay if the consequence of those decisions are bad. Right now, humans make all the decisions -- the car simply goes or stops in the direction the human wants. Consequences (& liability) of bad decisions are greater than those caused by just some mechanical failure.
In essence, the driverless car has transformed cars into old style car + software driver while the old human driver has been transformed into a passenger. So the human is now taking a virtual taxi ride instead of driving his car. And if someone taking a taxicab ride were involved in an accident where his taxi is at fault, is he liable to pay the injured party? No, but the taxi driver and his company is. Similarly, a person using (not driving) an autonomous car should not be liable in case his car causes damage to something or someone, but the car manufacturer (owner of the decision making software) should be liable.
So group C (capitalists) exploits group L (labor). But your solution is take the excess stolen amount (I'm not sure how you calculate the excess) and pass it on to group P (poor). Too many flaws in this solution -- group L gets the shaft.
GP's solution is much better, even if it results in these so-called invasive regulations (what's so invasive anyway, since the govt knows exactly how much you earn and from where you earned it?)
And that insurance is paid by the driver -- so it's a small monthly fee instead of a settlement. Therefore, the car manufacturers should pay insurance periodically during a year. Why should the driver be liable for software/hardware bugs of the car?
Well, why waste time and money gathering info if you're not gonna use it? Servers, network bandwidth, engineers, sys admins all cost a lot of money. It would be more cost effective if servers were installed inside the school and the school could then hire admins to maintain the servers.
And what makes you think the regular FTC privacy audits (from the Google Buzz consent decree) wouldn't catch it if they did?
Does the FTC have access to all source code that runs in the company and do they go thru it line by line?
They could compile the info by scanning your data, send it to some remote location and nobody would know anything about it.
Clearly from an ethical perspective you can argue a strong case for some degree of wealth redistribution,
Hypothetically, say you were in a park where there are thousands of starving, dying mosquitoes (there has been no human/animal in that area for days). According to your ethics of wealth distribution, and since the need of the many (mosquitoes) outweighs the need of one (you), shouldn't you allow these thousands of mosquitoes to suck your blood and obtain nourishment? But, will you allow that? Note that other than some short term stinging pain, you won't suffer from any long term effects.
"The needs of the many, outweight the needs of the few".
Is this actually a valid law? Many people are dying of hunger and disease because they have no money to handle their problems. Meanwhile the top 1% of the world controls a good chunk of the wealth (say 20% to 50%). If your statement were valid, it would be legal to seize the assets of these ultra-rich and distribute it to the poor and needy. That's neither legal nor fair, therefore that law is nonsense.
What if the crash were avoidable but the car just hit a cat (because the car went berserk for some unknown reason)? Who compensates the cat owner -- the driver or the car manufacturer?
$100,000 was just an example. I chose it because it seemed like a quite good salary (2-3 times higher than what I earn as a scientist) if he can manage one of these projects per year. But the author sets the price himself. If he doesn't feel like working for $100,000, then he can ask for $400,000 instead. Of course, the higher his demand, the harder it will be to find enough people to meet it.
Exactly, if the book is a dud, it isn't worth even $10,000 (funding public loses), or it could be worth $10,000,000 (author loses), making billions in movie sales and worldwide book publishing, so upfront pricing is highly inefficient. By agreeing to get paid $400,000 or some low salary x 5 or 10 amount, authors may lose their one time opportunity to make it big. This type of stuff happens everyday -- programmers who conceive, design and implement great software get paid around $100K while companies that simply provided them with that fixed salary make millions or even billions off that software. The risk to the company is low as it can afford to lose a million or two in programmer salaries, but if they succeed, the profit can be 10x, 100x or even 10,000x their original investment. Your pricing model exploits/abuses the creative class just like the business class exploits the creative class. Except this time, it is the common people exploiting creative people. Whereas before, the common people had to collectively pay $10 million to read a bestseller, now they only have to pay $500,000 -- pure communist exploitation.
No. I'm saying that before making each pizza the pizza house owner should ask to be paid. He sets the price himself so that he covers his costs for running the restaurant + any amount of profits he wants. And only when he's paid does he make the pizza. That sounds quite a bit like a normal pizza restaurant, doesn't it?
Before the restaurant owner receives a single cent of customer money, he has to spend the $1000/day so that he is ready to receive customer orders. If only a small number of patrons visit him that day, he will probably end his day in a loss and if there are many such days, he will have to shut down his business because he is out of capital he can risk. Until it is well established, there is considerable risk in owning a business, unlike a relatively stable salaried job. Except a business can earn orders of magnitude more than a salaried job, if the owner can handle the risk.
Just to be clear: The author is not employed by somebody who sets an arbitrary price per creative work that he has to slavishly accept. This isn't the case of the state telling everybody that they must work for $100,000 per book or something.
Sorry, but the $100,000 and $400,000 prices you cite are arbitrary fixed prices (as I have shown in the first paragraph). Without copyright, he has no choice but to accept this slavish income or quit and find a regular day job.
Permanent monopoly, with product price being reduced gradually. That is, every few years, the product price is reduced a certain percent until it reaches a final value.
Copyrighted materials don't hamper the progress of anybody else other than low-quality knockoffs. So why is the monopoly only for a limited period? What difference does it make if Mickey Mouse is copyrighted by Disney for a million billion years?
For example, with a Kickstarter-type method, an author would describe his plan for a new book on the site, and set his price for writing it (say $100,000). If enough people choose to buy in, he would write the book and publish it. At that point, he would already be fully compensated, and would have no need to prevent people from sharing the book.
While getting paid a fixed amount upfront is risk free, (because if you don't reach the $100K kickstarter goal, you don't have to write the book), the author is leaving a lot of profit on the table. Why should the author work so hard to earn such a meager sum? He would be better off doing a 9-5 job with little risk and making roughly the same income.
To understand what leaving profit on the table means, take a pizza shop as an example. Per day, the owner spends $200 on rent, $300 on employees, $400 on food material and $100 on other expenses for a total cost of $1000/day. What you are suggesting that once pizza sales for the day exceed a certain fixed threshold above the cost, say $1500 (or $500 profit), the pizza owner should give out free pizza to the remaining customers. So according to your upfront price sales model, if the pizza shop makes $3000 sales on a particular day, it should collect only $1500 and hand out $1500 worth of free pizzas. If all retail stores followed this communistic model, then yes, I agree that authors should be satisfied with a fixed price of $100K. But if not, then no thanks, why should creative people be underpaid, while business people maximize their profits?
Reality dictates this, not me. Copying cannot be controlled. Copying is easier than ever now, and will become easier yet. Can't make money off a tollbooth when everyone can so easily avoid it.
That's a lame excuse because copying has always been easy, even decades ago. If the majority won't pay, there won't be much content to consume ignoring low-quality content (whipped out in less than a day) -- blog posts, such as on this site, forum posts, reality tv shows, youtube videos about some mundane topic etc.
If you don't believe me, take a look at the iphone appstore where apple and the consumers forced itunes music price structure onto software apps. That is, a song is 99 cents, therefore apps should also cost around that value. Apps that are much higher than $5 don't sell much. Pre-iphone, even the simplest desktop app sold for $10 to $25. The result of the $1 to $4 price range of iphone apps has resulted in extremely simple apps with no depth or breadth in functionality, only good superficial looks. If you refuse to pay for content, that's the quality of content you can expect in the future.
Patronage
Kickstarter
Indiegogo
Humble Bundle
National Endowment for the Arts
universities and colleges
and the old fashioned kind, the rich and the nobility.
Work for Hire
Advertising
Merchandising
Endorsements
This is infuriating! What gives you the right to dictate the terms how stuff you did not create should be sold? Are creative people natural slaves of the human race, so that everything they create should be freely distributed to everyone?
In the natural state (without copyright and patents), the creators can still sell their works.
Except no one will buy it for $49.99 if someone copies it and sells it for $3.99 or less. The creator spent months/years and tons of money to get his work published. The copycat spent an afternoon and bought just one copy to get his business started. If you call this natural, then picking pockets should be legal. Copyright and patents are government protections against intellectual property theft that gives assurance to the creative people that their time and money spent on creating intellectual property will be rewarded fairly. This is because most intellectual property is easy to copy while copying physical products, like a car, is difficult. That is, until 3D printers evolve further.
Those laws just empower them to stop others from doing the same.
What gives these other people the right to profit or distribute someone else's work without permission and causing financial harm? They did not spend any time or money in creating it. Whether you admit it or not, information is an asset and most assets on this planet have a price tag.
Slashdot Mirror
Well, I'm still reading the court ruling regarding this case. In one place it says, short words and sentence fragments can't be copyrighted. So while a single method/function declaration of foo() is original and creative, it is too short to be copyrightable.
Oracle had argued that the 37 Java packages, comprising of 6000 method API declarations were copied verbatim by Google, should as whole be copyrightable because the taxonomy, structure etc of those package/class/method declarations combined are original, creative, etc. and mostly meet the requirements of copyrightability.
Take a look at Fig. 1 of the patent. Don't you think elements 119, 121, 131, 133 seem different from what's typically described in your lighting book?
You seem to be describing a patent. To do copyright infringement of somebody else's door, you would have to use the same material of wood, the same color, the same design, and an exact duplicate of the knob. But copyright applies only to text and similar content. To protect the door's design, you have get a design patent.
In the programming world an API like this:
int foo(int a, int b)
can be changed to:
int foobar(int num1, int num2)
to avoid copyright infringement. In other words, don't copy letter-for-letter and you can avoid copyright infringement. Although I don't understand why programming APIs weren't protected by APIs before.
Yes, but starting your car with a button does not prove negligence or malice which is a prerequisite for placing blame and liability cost on the driver in case of an accident.
If the software were to fail in any of these cases, the car maker will be sued as happened to Toyota with their cars doing unintended acceleration.
Okay, Mr. lightbox, go thru the claims and list all the claims that you have already implemented after building light boxes for over a decade -- perhaps with photos of implementations.
Perhaps it just sits there or perhaps they invalidate the relevant claims, who knows. What we do know is that come litigation time, when the patent holder is suing the patent infringer, the infringer can show your prior art and either reduce his penalty or completely eliminate it and also help other so-called infringers in a patent lawsuit.
Well, professionals who take these types of photos care, outsiders don't care. Maybe you should at least skim through all the patent claims before saying it's just a camera in front of a white sheet.
That statistic is only after march 2012, when the kernel was more or less stable. What about 20 years worth of work before that? I don't think most of those developers have been paid. Also, making little changes to a stable product is easier that creating it from scratch.
The default copyright goes to the author no the website, unless author assigns it to the website. Hosting a comment on your website does not mean you own it, at least that's what I think. You have to get express permission from the original copyright holders, the authors, to legally obtain copyright.
Then why aren't the developers of Linux kernel getting paid? Google and other websites use Linux etc. to make billions off their free slave labor while giving nothing or little back.
Any original (non-plagiarized) content can be copyrighted. Further, if the site has an account signup license that states that "vulnerability report submitter assigns his/her posts' copyright to website so that it can modify, reproduce that post as it sees fit," then yes, you cannot mass copy the database freely without violating copyright laws.
What's different is cars (or rather the software) will be making decisions, and someone has to pay if the consequence of those decisions are bad. Right now, humans make all the decisions -- the car simply goes or stops in the direction the human wants. Consequences (& liability) of bad decisions are greater than those caused by just some mechanical failure.
In essence, the driverless car has transformed cars into old style car + software driver while the old human driver has been transformed into a passenger. So the human is now taking a virtual taxi ride instead of driving his car. And if someone taking a taxicab ride were involved in an accident where his taxi is at fault, is he liable to pay the injured party? No, but the taxi driver and his company is. Similarly, a person using (not driving) an autonomous car should not be liable in case his car causes damage to something or someone, but the car manufacturer (owner of the decision making software) should be liable.
So group C (capitalists) exploits group L (labor). But your solution is take the excess stolen amount (I'm not sure how you calculate the excess) and pass it on to group P (poor). Too many flaws in this solution -- group L gets the shaft.
GP's solution is much better, even if it results in these so-called invasive regulations (what's so invasive anyway, since the govt knows exactly how much you earn and from where you earned it?)
And that insurance is paid by the driver -- so it's a small monthly fee instead of a settlement. Therefore, the car manufacturers should pay insurance periodically during a year. Why should the driver be liable for software/hardware bugs of the car?
Well, why waste time and money gathering info if you're not gonna use it? Servers, network bandwidth, engineers, sys admins all cost a lot of money. It would be more cost effective if servers were installed inside the school and the school could then hire admins to maintain the servers.
Does the FTC have access to all source code that runs in the company and do they go thru it line by line?
They could compile the info by scanning your data, send it to some remote location and nobody would know anything about it.
Can you prove they don't use scan people's info for other purposes, such as creating detailed profiles of individuals?
Hypothetically, say you were in a park where there are thousands of starving, dying mosquitoes (there has been no human/animal in that area for days). According to your ethics of wealth distribution, and since the need of the many (mosquitoes) outweighs the need of one (you), shouldn't you allow these thousands of mosquitoes to suck your blood and obtain nourishment? But, will you allow that? Note that other than some short term stinging pain, you won't suffer from any long term effects.
Is this actually a valid law? Many people are dying of hunger and disease because they have no money to handle their problems. Meanwhile the top 1% of the world controls a good chunk of the wealth (say 20% to 50%). If your statement were valid, it would be legal to seize the assets of these ultra-rich and distribute it to the poor and needy. That's neither legal nor fair, therefore that law is nonsense.
What if the crash were avoidable but the car just hit a cat (because the car went berserk for some unknown reason)? Who compensates the cat owner -- the driver or the car manufacturer?
Exactly, if the book is a dud, it isn't worth even $10,000 (funding public loses), or it could be worth $10,000,000 (author loses), making billions in movie sales and worldwide book publishing, so upfront pricing is highly inefficient. By agreeing to get paid $400,000 or some low salary x 5 or 10 amount, authors may lose their one time opportunity to make it big. This type of stuff happens everyday -- programmers who conceive, design and implement great software get paid around $100K while companies that simply provided them with that fixed salary make millions or even billions off that software. The risk to the company is low as it can afford to lose a million or two in programmer salaries, but if they succeed, the profit can be 10x, 100x or even 10,000x their original investment. Your pricing model exploits/abuses the creative class just like the business class exploits the creative class. Except this time, it is the common people exploiting creative people. Whereas before, the common people had to collectively pay $10 million to read a bestseller, now they only have to pay $500,000 -- pure communist exploitation.
Before the restaurant owner receives a single cent of customer money, he has to spend the $1000/day so that he is ready to receive customer orders. If only a small number of patrons visit him that day, he will probably end his day in a loss and if there are many such days, he will have to shut down his business because he is out of capital he can risk. Until it is well established, there is considerable risk in owning a business, unlike a relatively stable salaried job. Except a business can earn orders of magnitude more than a salaried job, if the owner can handle the risk.
Sorry, but the $100,000 and $400,000 prices you cite are arbitrary fixed prices (as I have shown in the first paragraph). Without copyright, he has no choice but to accept this slavish income or quit and find a regular day job.
Permanent monopoly, with product price being reduced gradually. That is, every few years, the product price is reduced a certain percent until it reaches a final value.
Copyrighted materials don't hamper the progress of anybody else other than low-quality knockoffs. So why is the monopoly only for a limited period? What difference does it make if Mickey Mouse is copyrighted by Disney for a million billion years?
While getting paid a fixed amount upfront is risk free, (because if you don't reach the $100K kickstarter goal, you don't have to write the book), the author is leaving a lot of profit on the table. Why should the author work so hard to earn such a meager sum? He would be better off doing a 9-5 job with little risk and making roughly the same income.
To understand what leaving profit on the table means, take a pizza shop as an example. Per day, the owner spends $200 on rent, $300 on employees, $400 on food material and $100 on other expenses for a total cost of $1000/day. What you are suggesting that once pizza sales for the day exceed a certain fixed threshold above the cost, say $1500 (or $500 profit), the pizza owner should give out free pizza to the remaining customers. So according to your upfront price sales model, if the pizza shop makes $3000 sales on a particular day, it should collect only $1500 and hand out $1500 worth of free pizzas. If all retail stores followed this communistic model, then yes, I agree that authors should be satisfied with a fixed price of $100K. But if not, then no thanks, why should creative people be underpaid, while business people maximize their profits?
That's a lame excuse because copying has always been easy, even decades ago. If the majority won't pay, there won't be much content to consume ignoring low-quality content (whipped out in less than a day) -- blog posts, such as on this site, forum posts, reality tv shows, youtube videos about some mundane topic etc.
If you don't believe me, take a look at the iphone appstore where apple and the consumers forced itunes music price structure onto software apps. That is, a song is 99 cents, therefore apps should also cost around that value. Apps that are much higher than $5 don't sell much. Pre-iphone, even the simplest desktop app sold for $10 to $25. The result of the $1 to $4 price range of iphone apps has resulted in extremely simple apps with no depth or breadth in functionality, only good superficial looks. If you refuse to pay for content, that's the quality of content you can expect in the future.
This is infuriating! What gives you the right to dictate the terms how stuff you did not create should be sold? Are creative people natural slaves of the human race, so that everything they create should be freely distributed to everyone?
Except no one will buy it for $49.99 if someone copies it and sells it for $3.99 or less. The creator spent months/years and tons of money to get his work published. The copycat spent an afternoon and bought just one copy to get his business started. If you call this natural, then picking pockets should be legal. Copyright and patents are government protections against intellectual property theft that gives assurance to the creative people that their time and money spent on creating intellectual property will be rewarded fairly. This is because most intellectual property is easy to copy while copying physical products, like a car, is difficult. That is, until 3D printers evolve further.
What gives these other people the right to profit or distribute someone else's work without permission and causing financial harm? They did not spend any time or money in creating it. Whether you admit it or not, information is an asset and most assets on this planet have a price tag.