I wonder if this creates a precedent in the UK whereby porting code to a new language/platform is deemed original work, and so the original creator's rights are immaterial...?
Hyperion Records is very sorry to announce that it has lost its defence of the copyright case brought against it by Dr Lionel Sawkins.
Dr Sawkins claimed musical copyright in four editions of the musical works of Lalande. He lost at first instance in relation to the recording of one of the pieces of music but won on the other three. Hyperion appealed with the leave of the trial judge.
Hyperion's principal objection to the claim made by Dr Sawkins was its contention that a performing edition does not amount to a new and substantive musical work in its own right unless the performing edition is original, in the sense that it amounts to a new musical work. Thus, Hyperion contended that if an edition is an arrangement or interpretation of an existing musical work then it may obtain copyright as an original musical work. Dr Sawkins expressly made clear that he was not contending that his editions were arrangements of Lalande's music.
Instead, Dr Sawkins made it clear that his intention was to faithfully produce the music of Lalande in a modern performing edition. Hyperion argued that an edition of Lalande's music that is a faithful reproduction of Lalande's music cannot itself be an original musical work.
Hyperion contended that Dr Sawkins had produced a modern performing edition and that the skill and labour that he had exerted in doing so gave him a literary copyright in the text. It did not give Dr Sawkins a musical copyright, as the sound was Lalande's.
In the lead judgment of the Court of Appeal, Lord Justice Mummery held that: In my judgment, on the application of Walter -v- Lane to this case, the effort, skill and time which the judge found Dr Sawkins spent in making the 3 performing editions were sufficient to satisfy the requirement that they should be "original" works in the copyright sense. This is so even though a) Dr Sawkins worked on the scores of existing musical works composed by another person (Lalande); b) Lalande's works are out of copyright; and c) Dr Sawkins had no intention of adding any new notes of music of his own (Para 36)
Lord Justice Mummery decided that "A work need only be 'original' in the limited sense that the author originated it by his efforts rather than slavishly copying it from the work produced by the efforts of another person" (Para 31).
In relying on the decision in Walter -v- Lane, the Court of Appeal rejected Hyperion's reliance on the House of Lords authority of Interlego -v- Tyco. This case (which concerned a claim to copyright in a new technical drawing for the lego brick) made it clear that even though a lot of skill was required to copy the original technical drawing that did not mean that the new drawing was original. By analogy, Hyperion contended that even though Dr Sawkins had exercised a lot of skill in copying the music of Lalande into the modern form (a textual process) that did not mean the resultant edition was an original musical work.
Jacob J recognised the dichotomy between Walter -v- Lane and Interlego in his judgment. His judgment recorded as follows:
I begin by recording the following cross examination of Dr Sawkins (in relation to one of the editions):
Q: Can I just be clear this is not one of the pieces that you actually claimed to have recomposed anything - there is no new music in Venite?
A: No, there is no new music. There are corrections to the musical text, which you could argue are the same thing, but they are individual notes.
It is that answer - no new music - which lies at the heart of Hyperion's objection... It was that answer which also caused me to pause.
He then held that Interlego could be resolved in the Court assessing the "extent to which the 'copyist' is a mere copyist - merely performing an
But it's OK for Sony to see all its own branded DVD players as region-free in Australia...? And it's OK for other MPAA members to see Region 4 NTSC English language DVDs in Australia as well because they know everyone has bought the region-free players they sell. Am I just not smoking the same stuff they hand-around at their meetings?
Easily - many Microsoft workgroups keep their stuff on private servers where almost everyone ahs write access to everything, and stuff is lost routinely. In one group, I found that if I hadn't made a private backup, then stuff would have been lost for good. Of course as soon as I left the group, then they lost it all again.
You also have to appreciate that the culture of Microsoft is not good at maintaining a corporate memory. When folks leave a group, there's no attempt to get a brain-dump or ramp up the replacement by the former incumbent. You are encouraged NOT to help out former groups with information. During new product cycles, it is highly unlikely that a team would revisit specs from previous cycles to learn from them. Instead the new bright young thing is expected to reinvent anything from before, but of course the same problems surface too late, when they could have been avoided by careful review of those old specs.
227MB is my personal best with Firefox at 3 tabs open and left alone overnight. BTW why is it when you close Firefox, the memory used continues to climb for about 10MB then it closes down?
How many people using a VCR can program it or set the clock? If you're counting features, hitting a couple of buttons is way less than 50%.
As for putting characters ona page in Word. Easy: open it and start typing. As for the other features, based on what I see in corporations and on newsgroups - there's a massive number of people doing those extra things.
Perhaps they're worried about submarine patent cases arising in Europe? The recent EU decision is as costly as anything the US might throw in Microsoft's way. Maybe/. should start a "patent move-on" campaign.
However, the quality of betas has degraded over the years. At one time a beta was pretty much feature-complete - there were a few rough edges but the presentation of the product didn't alter much from beta, through release candidates to golden build. A release candidate was precisely that: a build which you would ship if no severe/recall-class bugs were found.
Now betas are more like alphas (e.g. Windows Media Player), and the product changes materially through release candidates (Windows XP SP2).
Many sites limit you to 8 or 12 or 15 characters, and forbid some characters like underscore etc that would allow me to put in the strong phrase-oriented passwords that I'd like to use. So if I *have* to use that site, then I have to use a completely new password that is less easy to remember.
"The other part was open a document someone sends you." That issue is true for 90% of file types you receive. I haven't had any problem opening documents from Word 1.1 (when I first used it) and successive versions in any later version of Word.
Yawn. And most people use only 10% of the features of a VCR, but they pay for the other 90%. However with a VCR it's the same 10%, whereas for word-processors each user uses a different subset.
modded "Insightful"? "Spiteful" more like it.
What makes you think that the products are deliberately broken?
I'm sure any company agonizes over changes in file format - and that happens a lot less often than is claimed. With hindsight I'm sure everyone can develop a better product first time around. Perhaps you would care to demonstrate....
20yrs ago, a spreadsheet or word-processing program was $500 or more.
Every year the capacity grows. You can of course sit around using outdated hardware indefinitely or you can take the latest "model" of software off the shelf.
What's the problem with $500 or $100/year - not getting value for money? I suspect you're not even trying to use such software to even half of its capacity.
Get real.
I'm sure when/if virus-protection is added, the slahdot question becomes "Why did you seek to eliminate competition in the antivirus field by producing your own"?
Word's format hasn't changed since Word 97 (ditto, Excel, Powerpoint) which is 3 releases ago. Earlier versions of the format are either opened/imported directly or you can download text converters from Microsoft.
My third Maxtor external HDD failed about an hour ago with hundreds of unreadable segments - this one is less than 3 months old. CDs I bought in 1985 are still OK.
Why do we need a police force and courts to compensate for flaws in our society?
Why do we need doctors to compensate for flaws in our DNA?
Why do we need to get slapped occasionally for not having a sense of perspective.
Most of those Windows issues will be fixed in a couple of years. In the meantime go help out with the other problems.
> As ridiculous region coding is for DVDs, there I can see a minimal reason (the publishers not wanting a DVD to make it into a market where the movie hasn't even been in the cinemas yet...
So why are all these 50+ year old films still region-encoded? Believe it or not we've seen Gone With the Wind in Australia.
The region-coding is also completely US-centric - sometimes movies appear in other countries before the US but the system doesn't work for them. It's basically US-oriented suppression of trade.
Yes. Let's stop this stupid progress thing right now. Why would Grandparents want broadband? They just want to talk to grandkids on the phone and get photos every other month in the mail.
Can't imagine anyone would want extr-processing to provide more attractive presentation of media services or real-world resolution visual elements...
So you have a transmeta machine with Windows XP Tablet edition doing all the Tablet features slowly (let's repeat: Transmeta) or you have a laptop running linux and no tablet features. That's bang for your buck!
Slashdot Mirror
I wonder if this creates a precedent in the UK whereby porting code to a new language/platform is deemed original work, and so the original creator's rights are immaterial...?
Or compare this sort of idiocy in the area of intellectual property.
From http://www.hyperion-records.co.uk/
HYPERION RECORDS FAILS AT APPEAL
Hyperion Records is very sorry to announce that it has lost its defence of the copyright case brought against it by Dr Lionel Sawkins.
Dr Sawkins claimed musical copyright in four editions of the musical works of Lalande. He lost at first instance in relation to the recording of one of the pieces of music but won on the other three. Hyperion appealed with the leave of the trial judge.
Hyperion's principal objection to the claim made by Dr Sawkins was its contention that a performing edition does not amount to a new and substantive musical work in its own right unless the performing edition is original, in the sense that it amounts to a new musical work. Thus, Hyperion contended that if an edition is an arrangement or interpretation of an existing musical work then it may obtain copyright as an original musical work. Dr Sawkins expressly made clear that he was not contending that his editions were arrangements of Lalande's music.
Instead, Dr Sawkins made it clear that his intention was to faithfully produce the music of Lalande in a modern performing edition. Hyperion argued that an edition of Lalande's music that is a faithful reproduction of Lalande's music cannot itself be an original musical work.
Hyperion contended that Dr Sawkins had produced a modern performing edition and that the skill and labour that he had exerted in doing so gave him a literary copyright in the text. It did not give Dr Sawkins a musical copyright, as the sound was Lalande's.
In the lead judgment of the Court of Appeal, Lord Justice Mummery held that: In my judgment, on the application of Walter -v- Lane to this case, the effort, skill and time which the judge found Dr Sawkins spent in making the 3 performing editions were sufficient to satisfy the requirement that they should be "original" works in the copyright sense. This is so even though a) Dr Sawkins worked on the scores of existing musical works composed by another person (Lalande); b) Lalande's works are out of copyright; and c) Dr Sawkins had no intention of adding any new notes of music of his own (Para 36)
Lord Justice Mummery decided that "A work need only be 'original' in the limited sense that the author originated it by his efforts rather than slavishly copying it from the work produced by the efforts of another person" (Para 31).
In relying on the decision in Walter -v- Lane, the Court of Appeal rejected Hyperion's reliance on the House of Lords authority of Interlego -v- Tyco. This case (which concerned a claim to copyright in a new technical drawing for the lego brick) made it clear that even though a lot of skill was required to copy the original technical drawing that did not mean that the new drawing was original. By analogy, Hyperion contended that even though Dr Sawkins had exercised a lot of skill in copying the music of Lalande into the modern form (a textual process) that did not mean the resultant edition was an original musical work.
Jacob J recognised the dichotomy between Walter -v- Lane and Interlego in his judgment. His judgment recorded as follows:
I begin by recording the following cross examination of Dr Sawkins (in relation to one of the editions):
Q: Can I just be clear this is not one of the pieces that you actually claimed to have recomposed anything - there is no new music in Venite?
A: No, there is no new music. There are corrections to the musical text, which you could argue are the same thing, but they are individual notes.
It is that answer - no new music - which lies at the heart of Hyperion's objection... It was that answer which also caused me to pause.
He then held that Interlego could be resolved in the Court assessing the "extent to which the 'copyist' is a mere copyist - merely performing an
Does that mean the 1D plots and dialogue will get fleshed out to 2D? If so, can they be back-ported to the originals?
But it's OK for Sony to see all its own branded DVD players as region-free in Australia...? And it's OK for other MPAA members to see Region 4 NTSC English language DVDs in Australia as well because they know everyone has bought the region-free players they sell. Am I just not smoking the same stuff they hand-around at their meetings?
Easily - many Microsoft workgroups keep their stuff on private servers where almost everyone ahs write access to everything, and stuff is lost routinely. In one group, I found that if I hadn't made a private backup, then stuff would have been lost for good. Of course as soon as I left the group, then they lost it all again.
You also have to appreciate that the culture of Microsoft is not good at maintaining a corporate memory. When folks leave a group, there's no attempt to get a brain-dump or ramp up the replacement by the former incumbent. You are encouraged NOT to help out former groups with information. During new product cycles, it is highly unlikely that a team would revisit specs from previous cycles to learn from them. Instead the new bright young thing is expected to reinvent anything from before, but of course the same problems surface too late, when they could have been avoided by careful review of those old specs.
I'd rather leave while I'm still in love.
227MB is my personal best with Firefox at 3 tabs open and left alone overnight. BTW why is it when you close Firefox, the memory used continues to climb for about 10MB then it closes down?
How many people using a VCR can program it or set the clock? If you're counting features, hitting a couple of buttons is way less than 50%. As for putting characters ona page in Word. Easy: open it and start typing. As for the other features, based on what I see in corporations and on newsgroups - there's a massive number of people doing those extra things.
The server software is largely immaterial - it's what the admins choose to implement.
Perhaps they're worried about submarine patent cases arising in Europe? The recent EU decision is as costly as anything the US might throw in Microsoft's way. /. should start a "patent move-on" campaign.
Maybe
However, the quality of betas has degraded over the years. At one time a beta was pretty much feature-complete - there were a few rough edges but the presentation of the product didn't alter much from beta, through release candidates to golden build. A release candidate was precisely that: a build which you would ship if no severe/recall-class bugs were found. Now betas are more like alphas (e.g. Windows Media Player), and the product changes materially through release candidates (Windows XP SP2).
Many sites limit you to 8 or 12 or 15 characters, and forbid some characters like underscore etc that would allow me to put in the strong phrase-oriented passwords that I'd like to use. So if I *have* to use that site, then I have to use a completely new password that is less easy to remember.
"The other part was open a document someone sends you." That issue is true for 90% of file types you receive. I haven't had any problem opening documents from Word 1.1 (when I first used it) and successive versions in any later version of Word.
Yawn. And most people use only 10% of the features of a VCR, but they pay for the other 90%. However with a VCR it's the same 10%, whereas for word-processors each user uses a different subset.
modded "Insightful"? "Spiteful" more like it. What makes you think that the products are deliberately broken? I'm sure any company agonizes over changes in file format - and that happens a lot less often than is claimed. With hindsight I'm sure everyone can develop a better product first time around. Perhaps you would care to demonstrate....
20yrs ago, a spreadsheet or word-processing program was $500 or more. Every year the capacity grows. You can of course sit around using outdated hardware indefinitely or you can take the latest "model" of software off the shelf. What's the problem with $500 or $100/year - not getting value for money? I suspect you're not even trying to use such software to even half of its capacity. Get real.
I'm sure when/if virus-protection is added, the slahdot question becomes "Why did you seek to eliminate competition in the antivirus field by producing your own"?
Word's format hasn't changed since Word 97 (ditto, Excel, Powerpoint) which is 3 releases ago. Earlier versions of the format are either opened/imported directly or you can download text converters from Microsoft.
My third Maxtor external HDD failed about an hour ago with hundreds of unreadable segments - this one is less than 3 months old. CDs I bought in 1985 are still OK.
Why do we need a police force and courts to compensate for flaws in our society? Why do we need doctors to compensate for flaws in our DNA? Why do we need to get slapped occasionally for not having a sense of perspective. Most of those Windows issues will be fixed in a couple of years. In the meantime go help out with the other problems.
> As ridiculous region coding is for DVDs, there I can see a minimal reason (the publishers not wanting a DVD to make it into a market where the movie hasn't even been in the cinemas yet... So why are all these 50+ year old films still region-encoded? Believe it or not we've seen Gone With the Wind in Australia. The region-coding is also completely US-centric - sometimes movies appear in other countries before the US but the system doesn't work for them. It's basically US-oriented suppression of trade.
Yes. Let's stop this stupid progress thing right now. Why would Grandparents want broadband? They just want to talk to grandkids on the phone and get photos every other month in the mail. Can't imagine anyone would want extr-processing to provide more attractive presentation of media services or real-world resolution visual elements...
If you only compared Ogg to MP3, how can you claim "my point that Ogg Vorbis is FAR superior to any other codec."
Aren't those features bloat??
So you have a transmeta machine with Windows XP Tablet edition doing all the Tablet features slowly (let's repeat: Transmeta) or you have a laptop running linux and no tablet features. That's bang for your buck!