I've always been a bit ambivalent on this. I think it's quite silly for the causes of death to be changed, as we all know well enough that getting hit by a pretty healthy jolt of electricity certainly could result in death, especially for those whose health is already compromised by other factors.
On the other hand, it is true that police are able to use nonlethal force in place of lethal force in some scenarios (and Taser use is, in the overwhelming majority of cases, nonlethal). This is a good thing.
I think a good way to treat this would be as we would treat the use of a punch, kick, nightstick, or other form of painful but nonlethal force. If an officer were to punch, kick, or whack someone with a nightstick simply for "mouthing off" or refusing to cooperate without mounting any physical threat, that officer is guilty of a crime and should be punished. On the other hand, if the person is attempting to attack physically, the officer would be well-justified in using necessary force to defend him/herself. Why not develop some reasonable guidelines for the thing, and then, you know, actually hold cops accountable if they don't follow them?
Well, I can dream, can't I? Now back to this video of a cuffed suspect getting tasered repeatedly.
There would always be the possibility of putting those wishes in one's actual will. That would give a lot more legal "teeth" to those requests, and make it much more likely that they will indeed be carried out. It also allows exact specification of what is to be done in the "killswitch" process ("professionally wipe the hard drive of any computer I own without accessing or allowing access to any of the information on such drives, delete unread all data in the online account X with service provider Y, then close the account...") Especially with online providers, an actual request in a will would make them much more likely to comply.
Putting it in the will also does make it a legally binding request, so that you do not have to rely on the goodwill of someone after your death but have made your wishes clear and binding. That is, after all, the purpose of a will.
And if they cut the connection because you used "too much," then it's not exactly "always on," since they don't actually allow it to be in constant use, is it? If they want to have bandwidth caps, they need to put that in as big and as red of letters as the "unlimited" or "always-on" connection speed, not in the fine print in page 312 of the user agreement, and they need to tell you exactly what they are and how much will trigger them. I've always been all for the idea that restrictions, limitations, and such must be printed in advertising in print at least as large as that touting the features, or they can't be applied. I can wish, can't I?
If you're going to run an all-you-can-eat buffet, you'd better be prepared for the fact that some people who come in are going to be really, really hungry. If you want to put a "number of plates" limit, you can't call it all-you-can-eat. You can simply call it a "four plate" buffet, and that's fine, you're being honest, but you can't simply say "Well, effectively the same, since most people will only want a couple plates anyway." And most importantly, you can't change your "terms of eating" around after someone has already paid and sat down, at least not as they apply to them! You must tell the truth up front. Similarly, you can't call the connection here "always on", since having it always on will result in getting it cut off, or "unlimited", since it's not, or any such. If you want to call it "partial use" or "limited", that's true. I have no problem with ISPs selling such service, provided they represent it properly up front.
I'm very glad to know that American citizens are being protected from this terrible danger. I've heard, in fact, that more American children have been attacked by Nerf weapons than by all other types of weapons combined. We're taking a good first step toward eliminating this terrible menace.
If we must all be turned into zombies, well, that's just the price we pay for safety. Besides, we'll be completely safe that way, nothing hurts a zombie! What's to lose?
I'm quite aware of the difference. (Though it's hard to see how one is not copyrighting an "idea" when even a snippet of a few notes or a few lines can be seen as subject to copyright.) Believe me, I hate the term "intellectual property" as much as anyone, because patents, trademarks, and copyrights are totally disparate concepts, and lumping them together just doesn't work. Here, however, the discussion is of patents, which are an exclusive right to an idea or concept, not just an implementation of it. (This was not the intent, patents were originally indeed on specific types or implementations, such as on a certain design of a machine or engine.)
However, the copyright system is badly broken as well, if nothing else than by virtue of its length. Why should it be longer than five to ten years? That will still provide incentive for creators to create. After all, the vast majority of copyrighted works have either turned a profit after five years or never will at all. I cannot honestly imagine an author saying "Oh, well, I'd write my book if I could copyright it for life plus seventy, but not if it's only for ten years!" Nor can I imagine the music industry saying "Oh, our new hit single will only make us $30 million, we'll lose out on the $2 million we'd make after ten years is up! No way, not doing it."
It's also broken by virtue of "automatic" copyrights, since that makes effectively everything copyrighted, many times without an effective means to contact the copyright holder, possibly without any clue who that even is. Technically, this post is copyrighted. If you wanted to repost it somewhere, and you had a legal department breathing down your neck, you would have that as a worry. (Though, for clarity, I couldn't care less if anyone wants to copy my posts and invite them to do so if desired.) That creates a vast body of orphaned but copyrighted work, where the copyright holder is unclear or unreachable. Mandatory registration would eliminate that issue, ensuring that, firstly, only works which the author genuinely wants copyrighted are brought under protection, and that a copyright holder is on record if one should wish to contact them for permission.
I saw an interesting concept a short while back, and quite like it. The concept was that copyright registration would again become mandatory. Copyright holders could renew a copyright for as long as they wish, with only one caveat. The first year's copyright would cost $1, the second $2, the third $4, the fourth $8, and continuing on to double every year. That places short copyrights well within the financial reach of any citizen, while placing overlong copyrights well out of reach of even the richest corporation, and encourages work to be released to the public domain as soon as it is no longer significantly profiting the holder. I think something similar could work for patents as well, let them keep it as long as they want it, but the price continues to go up, and eventually, it will get to the point where it is no longer worth it or simply not even conceivable.
Yes, there is likely hypocrisy in this on the part of the US, but "do as I say, not as I do" on the part of the US is not news to anyone here. What I am glad to see, though, is that most countries seem to have some willingness to ignore at least some of the ridiculousness inherent in "intellectual property" law. The idea that ideas can be owned and hoarded is dying, and anything that hastens its demise is fine by me. How can one hoard ideas in a world where knowledge, information, and media are simply at the end of one's fingertips on a keyboard?
You are going to find that this applies to the expectations of what the court considers to be "an ordinary person". This is a pretty common standard and it eliminates lots of fringe stuff.
A while back Toyota ran an advertisement about how low their prices were and specifically used the phrase "for a song". Someone wrote a song, performed it in the dealership and asked for their car. Now please. I believe that guy actually got a car but the courts cut the rest of the claims off pretty quickly using the concept that an ordinary person would not be misled by this.
Now try to convince a court that whatever Comcast is advertising that this extends to what you specifically want to use their service for and how they are preventing you from doing so. You are very likely to find out that your fringe case doesn't mean they have violated the law.
Except that Bittorrent is a very widely-used protocol. The fact that World of Warcraft alone uses it puts that in the realm of "the ordinary person". Said ordinary person doesn't have to specifically know they're using the protocol; if Comcast were screwing with HTTP, they would be messing with a protocol widely used by ordinary people despite the fact that most web surfers don't have the first clue what it is. We're not talking about Gopher here.
This is in addition to the fact that this mythical "ordinary person" has a reasonable expectation that when (s)he is promised high-speed downloads, that this will occur regardless of the specific technical means used for the download, and that the ISP will not take steps to deliberately interfere with this. One would also presume that the ordinary person would not expect his or her ISP to be deliberately committing what amounts to a denial-of-service attack against its customers by forging packets.
I believe you're stretching "stealing" even farther in this case than it usually gets stretched around here. Sandisk does not appear to have made any major innovations here. They took an obvious and logical step based on vast amounts of prior art, they didn't come up with some major new idea. The objection here is, that should never have been patentable at all. Taking an obvious route is not stealing, even if someone else took that route first.
If we really must use your poor analogy, it would be more like:
"I got caught speeding 10 miles an hour over the limit once, and got 15 years in jail for it. In the meantime, there's a guy who's running around hitting pedestrians all over the city. They know exactly who he is and where to find him, but they haven't even given him a ticket yet."
I understand it pissed you off. But really, anything on my flash drive (especially anything on a flash drive I intend to hand around at any point) that I consider in any way to be secret or private is encrypted. I doubt you're the copyright holder of the music files you copied to the flash drive either, and if I hand a drive with several songs on it to someone to copy a file off, I figure they'll probably copy any music they like while they're at it.
I imagine he looked at you like you were from another planet, and politely told you where you could put that memory stick. Or at least, I hope he did. What harm does that do to you?
You may unfortunately be correct that it's not illegal, but realistically it should be. Most people don't know enough about the law or fair use to say "Hey, I can poke fun at you with a parody without violating the law" or "It's perfectly legal for me to use a short excerpt to illustrate my critical commentary on the work."
I've even heard of sports leagues trying to claim that statistics are copyrighted. A collection of statistics is a purely factual work with no creativity involved, those types of works are not copyrightable. But the way they put it, you'd think you have to pay royalties every time you mention how many home runs someone's hit this season.
Well, you're a troll or a shill (my bet's on the latter), but let's actually ask you something. Are there a greater number of: A. Slashdot users, or B. those who download music without giving two shits about your party line there?
If you answered B, YOU ARE CORRECT (by a couple orders of magnitude!) Your prize is this shiny new mp3 player, which it would cost you thousands of dollars to fill "legally"! But wait, that's not all! You've also won this shiny new Bittorrent client, with which your player will be full in no time at all!
On a more serious note, the DOJ isn't serving any "greater good" by propping up a business model which has been obsoleted by technological advances, any more than it would be serving the "greater good" by forcing us all to pay to support any form of obsolete technology.
RAM is, by definition, temporary data storage. Very temporary. How exactly does the judge think this could be accomplished in practice? You can't exactly pop a RAM card out of a machine, bring it to court, and expect there to be anything usable or readable on it when you get there. Nor could you log more than a tiny fraction of what goes through it (and even doing that would take a great deal of storage capacity over time). Do judges just think computers are magic boxes which they can order to do whatever they may like, and that there are no limits of technical feasibility?
So instead, I'll point out that it is rumored that early development versions of TiVo were so good at extracting a video signal from noise that they accidentally were very effective at defeating most analog cable scrambling in use at the time. They then had to re-engineer the TiVo so it was no longer capable of that function.
When copyright law is supposed to "promote the progress of Science and the useful Arts", and is instead being used to say "You engineered this too damn well. Dumb it back down.", is there not a bit of a problem here?
If the picture is from "Halloween 2005", and she's 27, would she not have been 25 at the time of the photo? How exactly is that promoting "underage" drinking? Am I just really bad at math today, or did they change the drinking age while I wasn't looking?
There's not even any clear indication the caption isn't satirical. You can't tell what she's drinking, there are no bottles of liquor anywhere to be seen, and the cup is opaque.
Even if she were underage in the photo, and were obviously drinking alcohol, what's that have to do with anything? If you're under the illusion that every teacher in your child's school never touched a drop of alcohol until they were 21, you're deluded, quite dangerously so.
Unfortunately, that was tried and failed, due to (in my own opinion) the Supreme Court's overly-technical interpretation of "limited times", and failure to examine the rest of that amendment's requirements-asking if the changes will indeed "promote the progress of Science and the useful Arts."
Firstly, the fact that most everything out there which was copyrighted before I was born will still be copyrighted when I am buried really doesn't show a whole lot of reasoning on their part. In the most technical sense, that is a "limited time." (In a very technical sense, ten million years would be a limited time.) In a realistic sense, neither one of those is a limited time, it's perpetual. That strikes me a bit like saying "Your Honor, this law criminalizing criticism of the President passes the First Amendment just fine. It doesn't restrict anyone's speech, it simply throws them in jail for it. But while they're in jail, they can keep on saying it all they like." The language of the Constitution was deliberately left open to a "rule of reason" interpretation, not a strict, technical one, and the Supreme Court got that one dead wrong by ignoring the obvious flaunting of the spirit of that provision.
This, of course, holds doubly true with allowing retroactive extensions. These also clearly fail the other part of the test. In the absence of a time machine, how can you promote progress of anything fifty years ago? Of course, this also flies in the face of the limited time requirement. Part of any reasonable definition of a limited time should be that the goalpost can't get moved. The timer gets set, and when it dings, time's up, period. You can't claim that something is "time-limited" due to a future expiration date, when that date can be moved.
Not a perfect solution, there isn't one. But it would be far better than what we have. Inefficient the government may be sometimes, but I don't think the heads of most government agencies are making megamillions a year. Please do correct me if I'm wrong there, in that case, I'm in the wrong line of work!
As to the FDA, they are heavily involved in the development and oversight of the testing methods and criteria. It is not "bullshit" because I didn't go into the minutiae, they are in charge there.
You can "call BS" all you like, and yes, about a third are discovered outright by universities and the like. However, a tremendous amount of the underlying research goes on at the university level. Big Pharma then takes that and performs the final step, in a lot of cases, but that's in no way necessary, and could be done if the excess and waste were put directly into research and research alone. What the CEO of one Big Pharma makes getting up from his seat could probably fund a university research department for a year.
Absolutely silly. But it's a good measure here. Looks like Big Pharma's line of shit is considerably more effective than the RIAA and MPAA. Here's hoping they don't catch on.
Here's the reality of the situation. The biggest expense to Big Pharma is not research and development (which mainly takes place in universities, including a lot of public ones. Big Pharma does not fund those. You and I do.) It is not testing (and that could be handled entirely by the FDA, without their involvement at all. A lot of it already is. Big Pharma does not pay for the FDA. You and I do.) Their biggest expense is not manufacturing the pharmaceuticals, which, as should be obvious here, can be done pretty cheaply. Their biggest expense is wining, dining, and schmoozing doctors to use their medicines. To advertise on TV, to get patients to push doctors into getting them whatever medication that is. And to pay overpaid executives.
Let's cut out the middleman, and one of the biggest expenses here-the millions-per-year CEOs. Fund the universities well to develop the drugs. They will develop drugs for Third-World maladies, once the impetus to "make something you can sell" is gone. Have the FDA entirely in charge of testing, and farming out production-just production-to corporate entities. There we go.
Under the current system, there's far more incentive to look for treatments rather than cures. A treatment is a lifelong paycheck, a cure is a one-time payment. There's far too much impetus to develop Viagra rather than treatments for diseases that kill millions in poor countries. There's far too big a temptation to hold back a slightly-improved formulation until the patent on the current one is about to expire, and to use it to extend the patent far longer than it was intended to last. If that system collapses, I won't shed too many tears. Something better will replace it.
That's very likely true. I imagine we're going to see a lot of difference in where "the originals" come from, and probably a reasonable bit of difference in what they look like. That happens. After all, silent films were still going strong less than a century ago, black-and-white long after that. And a century before that, entertainment was live, period, purchasing recorded entertainment wasn't even an option. This certainly won't be the first major shift in what entertainment looks like. We can certainly speculate on whether that will be good, bad, or ugly. But it is inevitable.
And in the good old spirit of profiteerism, someone, somewhere, will make a buck off this new paradigm. (Indeed, a lot of someones already are.) Whether that's with good old AdSense, a donation system like Magnatune, or some new bit we can't even conceive of yet, I can't tell you. I can tell you that it won't be by trying to put artificial restrictions on copying bits. That's quite a bit like trying to hold water in your hands. You can hold some, for a while, but it's not a viable long-term strategy, and it's going to drain away.
No, no, no, you didn't get a single digit of that right at all! The number is 3153-9338-1937-0135. Can't you even type?
On a more serious note, while if you knew my (or anyone's) credit card number it might be in very poor taste for you to post it, I don't believe it should be illegal. Now, of course, for someone to misuse that number, such as to purchase something on said card without authorization, is and should be illegal. On the other hand, using those same digits to seed a random-number generator would be perfectly legal. The number is not illegal, actions are.
On the same note, using those hex digits to copy a movie for a prohibited purpose, such as bootlegging movies to sell, is illegal. Using them to make a copy for your friend is illegal. (Whether or not the second should be is a different discussion, but it is.) Using them to format-shift, make a backup, watch a legally-purchased copy on a Linux box, or take a short snippet to use in the context of a personal review, is perfectly legal. Again, doing some things with the number may be illegal, but trying to outlaw a number itself is just silly.
Slashdot Mirror
I'm sorry, but original research is not allowed.
I've always been a bit ambivalent on this. I think it's quite silly for the causes of death to be changed, as we all know well enough that getting hit by a pretty healthy jolt of electricity certainly could result in death, especially for those whose health is already compromised by other factors.
On the other hand, it is true that police are able to use nonlethal force in place of lethal force in some scenarios (and Taser use is, in the overwhelming majority of cases, nonlethal). This is a good thing.
I think a good way to treat this would be as we would treat the use of a punch, kick, nightstick, or other form of painful but nonlethal force. If an officer were to punch, kick, or whack someone with a nightstick simply for "mouthing off" or refusing to cooperate without mounting any physical threat, that officer is guilty of a crime and should be punished. On the other hand, if the person is attempting to attack physically, the officer would be well-justified in using necessary force to defend him/herself. Why not develop some reasonable guidelines for the thing, and then, you know, actually hold cops accountable if they don't follow them?
Well, I can dream, can't I? Now back to this video of a cuffed suspect getting tasered repeatedly.
The good news is, you can!
There would always be the possibility of putting those wishes in one's actual will. That would give a lot more legal "teeth" to those requests, and make it much more likely that they will indeed be carried out. It also allows exact specification of what is to be done in the "killswitch" process ("professionally wipe the hard drive of any computer I own without accessing or allowing access to any of the information on such drives, delete unread all data in the online account X with service provider Y, then close the account...") Especially with online providers, an actual request in a will would make them much more likely to comply.
Putting it in the will also does make it a legally binding request, so that you do not have to rely on the goodwill of someone after your death but have made your wishes clear and binding. That is, after all, the purpose of a will.
And if they cut the connection because you used "too much," then it's not exactly "always on," since they don't actually allow it to be in constant use, is it? If they want to have bandwidth caps, they need to put that in as big and as red of letters as the "unlimited" or "always-on" connection speed, not in the fine print in page 312 of the user agreement, and they need to tell you exactly what they are and how much will trigger them. I've always been all for the idea that restrictions, limitations, and such must be printed in advertising in print at least as large as that touting the features, or they can't be applied. I can wish, can't I?
If you're going to run an all-you-can-eat buffet, you'd better be prepared for the fact that some people who come in are going to be really, really hungry. If you want to put a "number of plates" limit, you can't call it all-you-can-eat. You can simply call it a "four plate" buffet, and that's fine, you're being honest, but you can't simply say "Well, effectively the same, since most people will only want a couple plates anyway." And most importantly, you can't change your "terms of eating" around after someone has already paid and sat down, at least not as they apply to them! You must tell the truth up front. Similarly, you can't call the connection here "always on", since having it always on will result in getting it cut off, or "unlimited", since it's not, or any such. If you want to call it "partial use" or "limited", that's true. I have no problem with ISPs selling such service, provided they represent it properly up front.
I'm very glad to know that American citizens are being protected from this terrible danger. I've heard, in fact, that more American children have been attacked by Nerf weapons than by all other types of weapons combined. We're taking a good first step toward eliminating this terrible menace.
If we must all be turned into zombies, well, that's just the price we pay for safety. Besides, we'll be completely safe that way, nothing hurts a zombie! What's to lose?
I'm quite aware of the difference. (Though it's hard to see how one is not copyrighting an "idea" when even a snippet of a few notes or a few lines can be seen as subject to copyright.) Believe me, I hate the term "intellectual property" as much as anyone, because patents, trademarks, and copyrights are totally disparate concepts, and lumping them together just doesn't work. Here, however, the discussion is of patents, which are an exclusive right to an idea or concept, not just an implementation of it. (This was not the intent, patents were originally indeed on specific types or implementations, such as on a certain design of a machine or engine.)
However, the copyright system is badly broken as well, if nothing else than by virtue of its length. Why should it be longer than five to ten years? That will still provide incentive for creators to create. After all, the vast majority of copyrighted works have either turned a profit after five years or never will at all. I cannot honestly imagine an author saying "Oh, well, I'd write my book if I could copyright it for life plus seventy, but not if it's only for ten years!" Nor can I imagine the music industry saying "Oh, our new hit single will only make us $30 million, we'll lose out on the $2 million we'd make after ten years is up! No way, not doing it."
It's also broken by virtue of "automatic" copyrights, since that makes effectively everything copyrighted, many times without an effective means to contact the copyright holder, possibly without any clue who that even is. Technically, this post is copyrighted. If you wanted to repost it somewhere, and you had a legal department breathing down your neck, you would have that as a worry. (Though, for clarity, I couldn't care less if anyone wants to copy my posts and invite them to do so if desired.) That creates a vast body of orphaned but copyrighted work, where the copyright holder is unclear or unreachable. Mandatory registration would eliminate that issue, ensuring that, firstly, only works which the author genuinely wants copyrighted are brought under protection, and that a copyright holder is on record if one should wish to contact them for permission.
I saw an interesting concept a short while back, and quite like it. The concept was that copyright registration would again become mandatory. Copyright holders could renew a copyright for as long as they wish, with only one caveat. The first year's copyright would cost $1, the second $2, the third $4, the fourth $8, and continuing on to double every year. That places short copyrights well within the financial reach of any citizen, while placing overlong copyrights well out of reach of even the richest corporation, and encourages work to be released to the public domain as soon as it is no longer significantly profiting the holder. I think something similar could work for patents as well, let them keep it as long as they want it, but the price continues to go up, and eventually, it will get to the point where it is no longer worth it or simply not even conceivable.
Yes, there is likely hypocrisy in this on the part of the US, but "do as I say, not as I do" on the part of the US is not news to anyone here. What I am glad to see, though, is that most countries seem to have some willingness to ignore at least some of the ridiculousness inherent in "intellectual property" law. The idea that ideas can be owned and hoarded is dying, and anything that hastens its demise is fine by me. How can one hoard ideas in a world where knowledge, information, and media are simply at the end of one's fingertips on a keyboard?
Except that Bittorrent is a very widely-used protocol. The fact that World of Warcraft alone uses it puts that in the realm of "the ordinary person". Said ordinary person doesn't have to specifically know they're using the protocol; if Comcast were screwing with HTTP, they would be messing with a protocol widely used by ordinary people despite the fact that most web surfers don't have the first clue what it is. We're not talking about Gopher here.
This is in addition to the fact that this mythical "ordinary person" has a reasonable expectation that when (s)he is promised high-speed downloads, that this will occur regardless of the specific technical means used for the download, and that the ISP will not take steps to deliberately interfere with this. One would also presume that the ordinary person would not expect his or her ISP to be deliberately committing what amounts to a denial-of-service attack against its customers by forging packets.
I believe you're stretching "stealing" even farther in this case than it usually gets stretched around here. Sandisk does not appear to have made any major innovations here. They took an obvious and logical step based on vast amounts of prior art, they didn't come up with some major new idea. The objection here is, that should never have been patentable at all. Taking an obvious route is not stealing, even if someone else took that route first.
If we really must use your poor analogy, it would be more like:
"I got caught speeding 10 miles an hour over the limit once, and got 15 years in jail for it. In the meantime, there's a guy who's running around hitting pedestrians all over the city. They know exactly who he is and where to find him, but they haven't even given him a ticket yet."
I understand it pissed you off. But really, anything on my flash drive (especially anything on a flash drive I intend to hand around at any point) that I consider in any way to be secret or private is encrypted. I doubt you're the copyright holder of the music files you copied to the flash drive either, and if I hand a drive with several songs on it to someone to copy a file off, I figure they'll probably copy any music they like while they're at it.
You "politely asked him to delete the files?"
I imagine he looked at you like you were from another planet, and politely told you where you could put that memory stick. Or at least, I hope he did. What harm does that do to you?
You may unfortunately be correct that it's not illegal, but realistically it should be. Most people don't know enough about the law or fair use to say "Hey, I can poke fun at you with a parody without violating the law" or "It's perfectly legal for me to use a short excerpt to illustrate my critical commentary on the work."
I've even heard of sports leagues trying to claim that statistics are copyrighted. A collection of statistics is a purely factual work with no creativity involved, those types of works are not copyrightable. But the way they put it, you'd think you have to pay royalties every time you mention how many home runs someone's hit this season.
Well, you're a troll or a shill (my bet's on the latter), but let's actually ask you something. Are there a greater number of: A. Slashdot users, or B. those who download music without giving two shits about your party line there?
If you answered B, YOU ARE CORRECT (by a couple orders of magnitude!) Your prize is this shiny new mp3 player, which it would cost you thousands of dollars to fill "legally"! But wait, that's not all! You've also won this shiny new Bittorrent client, with which your player will be full in no time at all!
On a more serious note, the DOJ isn't serving any "greater good" by propping up a business model which has been obsoleted by technological advances, any more than it would be serving the "greater good" by forcing us all to pay to support any form of obsolete technology.
RAM is, by definition, temporary data storage. Very temporary. How exactly does the judge think this could be accomplished in practice? You can't exactly pop a RAM card out of a machine, bring it to court, and expect there to be anything usable or readable on it when you get there. Nor could you log more than a tiny fraction of what goes through it (and even doing that would take a great deal of storage capacity over time). Do judges just think computers are magic boxes which they can order to do whatever they may like, and that there are no limits of technical feasibility?
So instead, I'll point out that it is rumored that early development versions of TiVo were so good at extracting a video signal from noise that they accidentally were very effective at defeating most analog cable scrambling in use at the time. They then had to re-engineer the TiVo so it was no longer capable of that function.
When copyright law is supposed to "promote the progress of Science and the useful Arts", and is instead being used to say "You engineered this too damn well. Dumb it back down.", is there not a bit of a problem here?
If a corporation wants to turn over records on me to the government without my knowledge or consent, that is free speech.
If I want to tell you all about this number I learned about (here's a hint, the first hex block is "09"), it's a CRIME!
Why does something not seem quite right here?
Unfortunately, that was tried and failed, due to (in my own opinion) the Supreme Court's overly-technical interpretation of "limited times", and failure to examine the rest of that amendment's requirements-asking if the changes will indeed "promote the progress of Science and the useful Arts."
Firstly, the fact that most everything out there which was copyrighted before I was born will still be copyrighted when I am buried really doesn't show a whole lot of reasoning on their part. In the most technical sense, that is a "limited time." (In a very technical sense, ten million years would be a limited time.) In a realistic sense, neither one of those is a limited time, it's perpetual. That strikes me a bit like saying "Your Honor, this law criminalizing criticism of the President passes the First Amendment just fine. It doesn't restrict anyone's speech, it simply throws them in jail for it. But while they're in jail, they can keep on saying it all they like." The language of the Constitution was deliberately left open to a "rule of reason" interpretation, not a strict, technical one, and the Supreme Court got that one dead wrong by ignoring the obvious flaunting of the spirit of that provision.
This, of course, holds doubly true with allowing retroactive extensions. These also clearly fail the other part of the test. In the absence of a time machine, how can you promote progress of anything fifty years ago? Of course, this also flies in the face of the limited time requirement. Part of any reasonable definition of a limited time should be that the goalpost can't get moved. The timer gets set, and when it dings, time's up, period. You can't claim that something is "time-limited" due to a future expiration date, when that date can be moved.
Not a perfect solution, there isn't one. But it would be far better than what we have. Inefficient the government may be sometimes, but I don't think the heads of most government agencies are making megamillions a year. Please do correct me if I'm wrong there, in that case, I'm in the wrong line of work!
As to the FDA, they are heavily involved in the development and oversight of the testing methods and criteria. It is not "bullshit" because I didn't go into the minutiae, they are in charge there.
You can "call BS" all you like, and yes, about a third are discovered outright by universities and the like. However, a tremendous amount of the underlying research goes on at the university level. Big Pharma then takes that and performs the final step, in a lot of cases, but that's in no way necessary, and could be done if the excess and waste were put directly into research and research alone. What the CEO of one Big Pharma makes getting up from his seat could probably fund a university research department for a year.
By reading this post, you agree to pay me one million dollars.
Such a statement on a call is just as much (or as little) enforceable as that. It's a trick for the gullible, it carries no real weight.
Absolutely silly. But it's a good measure here. Looks like Big Pharma's line of shit is considerably more effective than the RIAA and MPAA. Here's hoping they don't catch on.
Here's the reality of the situation. The biggest expense to Big Pharma is not research and development (which mainly takes place in universities, including a lot of public ones. Big Pharma does not fund those. You and I do.) It is not testing (and that could be handled entirely by the FDA, without their involvement at all. A lot of it already is. Big Pharma does not pay for the FDA. You and I do.) Their biggest expense is not manufacturing the pharmaceuticals, which, as should be obvious here, can be done pretty cheaply. Their biggest expense is wining, dining, and schmoozing doctors to use their medicines. To advertise on TV, to get patients to push doctors into getting them whatever medication that is. And to pay overpaid executives.
Let's cut out the middleman, and one of the biggest expenses here-the millions-per-year CEOs. Fund the universities well to develop the drugs. They will develop drugs for Third-World maladies, once the impetus to "make something you can sell" is gone. Have the FDA entirely in charge of testing, and farming out production-just production-to corporate entities. There we go.
Under the current system, there's far more incentive to look for treatments rather than cures. A treatment is a lifelong paycheck, a cure is a one-time payment. There's far too much impetus to develop Viagra rather than treatments for diseases that kill millions in poor countries. There's far too big a temptation to hold back a slightly-improved formulation until the patent on the current one is about to expire, and to use it to extend the patent far longer than it was intended to last. If that system collapses, I won't shed too many tears. Something better will replace it.
That's very likely true. I imagine we're going to see a lot of difference in where "the originals" come from, and probably a reasonable bit of difference in what they look like. That happens. After all, silent films were still going strong less than a century ago, black-and-white long after that. And a century before that, entertainment was live, period, purchasing recorded entertainment wasn't even an option. This certainly won't be the first major shift in what entertainment looks like. We can certainly speculate on whether that will be good, bad, or ugly. But it is inevitable.
And in the good old spirit of profiteerism, someone, somewhere, will make a buck off this new paradigm. (Indeed, a lot of someones already are.) Whether that's with good old AdSense, a donation system like Magnatune, or some new bit we can't even conceive of yet, I can't tell you. I can tell you that it won't be by trying to put artificial restrictions on copying bits. That's quite a bit like trying to hold water in your hands. You can hold some, for a while, but it's not a viable long-term strategy, and it's going to drain away.
No, no, no, you didn't get a single digit of that right at all! The number is 3153-9338-1937-0135. Can't you even type?
On a more serious note, while if you knew my (or anyone's) credit card number it might be in very poor taste for you to post it, I don't believe it should be illegal. Now, of course, for someone to misuse that number, such as to purchase something on said card without authorization, is and should be illegal. On the other hand, using those same digits to seed a random-number generator would be perfectly legal. The number is not illegal, actions are.
On the same note, using those hex digits to copy a movie for a prohibited purpose, such as bootlegging movies to sell, is illegal. Using them to make a copy for your friend is illegal. (Whether or not the second should be is a different discussion, but it is.) Using them to format-shift, make a backup, watch a legally-purchased copy on a Linux box, or take a short snippet to use in the context of a personal review, is perfectly legal. Again, doing some things with the number may be illegal, but trying to outlaw a number itself is just silly.