Library. Of. Congress. If someone wants their work preserved, they'll submit it to the Copyright Office and it will end up there.
I'll read that as "legal deposit library". When legal deposit libraries were originally established, only works which had had copies deposited were afforded the protection of copyright. This was great, because it meant that if you couldn't make your own copy of something, you knew there was a place you'd definitely be able to track it down in the future. Unfortunately, when "copyrighted by default" became the law, we ended up in a situation whereby you have to assume that everything was copyrighted, but also that it haven't been deposited somewhere for safekeeping.
Not to mention that, on average, whether "someone wants their work preserved" is pretty irrelevant to whether it's actually worth preserving.
The rest of your issues are epistemological problems, not relevant to copyright.
Don't brush away the issues I've highlighted as "not relevant to copyright" in such a cavalier manner. The loss of knowledge and cultural works into the "20th century black hole" (as Pr. Jame Boyle of the Duke University Center for the Study of the Public Domain terms it) is a real problem that's affecting people right now -- and it's caused primarily by excessive copyright duration, and to a lesser extent by excessively restrictive copyright limitations.
The fact that you can't keep track of a book you once owned will never invalidate the rights of its author.
Copyright protection is not a right; it's a privilege, and it is one that exists to promote and enrich the public domain. Try reading your precious (and too-frequently-ignored) Constitution.
Not in this country, you can't. Also, this assumes that you have access to a copy. Example: there's a book I read when I was a young teenager. Our family copy was lost sometime in the early 2000s. I want to read it again. It went out of print in the 1970s. Copies are like gold dust, because it was printed as a rather shitty mass market paperback, and they tend to self-destruct within about 50 years anyway (the glue perishes and the paper oxidises). If it had entered the public domain within a reasonable time period after publication, there would be a legal copy somewhere on the Internet.
But really, it's not your right to steal something just because you think it's historical. It belongs to the person it belongs to and not to you.
I thought we were talking about copyright infringement, not stealing. There is a difference, you know.
If you want to preserve it before it's in the public domain, buy it from the person who owns it. If it's at all valuable to you, you'll pay. And that's the point.
You make several poor assumptions.
Firstly, you assume that you can track down the current copyright holder. For the majority of works currently under copyright, and particularly those created between 1930 and 1980, this will be difficult if not impossible -- a frequent occurrence is that the rights have reverted from publisher to original creator, but the original creator has died, it isn't possible to locate his or her inheritors, and/or the transference of intellectual property rights was not clearly expressed in the will, meaning that the current copyright holder is [undefined]. And since the work is copyrighted, but you can't get a license from [undefined], you're screwed.
Secondly, you assume that the copyright holder (I take it this is who you mean when you say "the person who owns it") has any interest in selling the rights and/or licensing them. There is a significant expense to be incurred by the copyright holder, in terms of time and effort as well as money, in setting up the required legal instruments, especially if they haven't done this kind of thing before. They may well decide that it's not worth the hassle, in which case you're screwed.
Thirdly, you assume that, having been located and being interested in licensing the work or acquiring the copyrights, the copyright holder is willing to charge a reasonable amount. In one well-documented case, a media corporation sought to charge an amateur film-maker several thousand USD per item for use in their film. The songs in question were each around three minutes long, and were recorded in the early 1930s. Note that this is merely for a license. If you are the hypothetical person interested in preserving significant works for posterity, this level of fees will not allow you to preserve very many, if any.
Consider an history postgraduate student living in 2100, and wishing to write his or her doctoral thesis on, "Journalistic effectiveness of 'blogger journalism' in the decade 2000 to 2010." Assuming that the average blogger during this last decade was between 20 and 30, and that they live to at least what is currently a statistically average age. In that case, the majority of blog-based source material for this student will still be in copyright, but given the ephemeral nature of most web hosting providers, the majority of that source material will no longer be available in its original location, especially given that dead peoples' websites tend to suffer from natural decay and attrition. Furthermore, the student will wish to consult contemporaneous articles and broadcasts in the traditional media. Few newspapers, radio stations or television channels are as meticulous about maintaining their archives as the BBC or the Times are.
The majority of the material of interest to this hypothetical student will not survive until 2100 unless people now make, and look after, copies
The problem with simply linking to a site that's hosting an article is that file organization systems change and old articles are either archived (sometimes behind a paywall) or simply purged. If an article is particularly important to a cause (evidence of a particular opinion of a group of people in a specific area at a specific time), then it would seem that, for posterity sake, the article can at least be partially re-posted on another site with a link to the direct source.
That's the problem. The solution is to write your own article, or to maintain your links.
That's not a "solution", that's a crappy and unnecessarily labour-intensive workaround. Idiocy like this is why most of the 20th century's literary, musical and cinematographic legacy is disappearing down the toilet of history -- fear of brokenly restrictive copyright law makes people unwilling and, indeed, unable to properly preserve cultural artefacts by copying and sharing them after the original creators and/or publishers have died and/or lost interest in the works.
I quite like autotools, actually. If you actually think about what you're doing when writing your configure.ac and M4 macros, it's an elegant, clean and easy to understand solution.
Unfortunately, at the moment it seems fashionable to throw all the configuration macros into a single, poorly commented file, with all the code copied and pasted from other projects with little understanding demonstrated of what it does or why it does it, with the predictable poor performance and low maintainability.
Naturally, my ssh denies all root attempts. Even if they got the password right they wouldn't know it, because the rejection would be the same. Other botnets have tried whitepages-style attacks using long lists of common user names and not matched any allowed users on my system as well.
I usually recommend disallowing password-based authentication, and permitting only key-based logins.
UK law prohibits sending a UK citizen into space so guess they are doing this deal so they can send Indians into space instead, thereby circumventing said law
[Citation needed]. The UK is a member of ESA; ESA has British astronauts; ergo the UK sends UK citizens into space.
But then what happens when the black hole evaporates through hawking radiation and the event horizon disappears?
That will only happen after the black hole has fully formed and matter has stopped falling into it. Which, in our reference frame, is never. It only ever evaporates in local time.
The physics of cosmological singularities: breaking your brain since 1915.
If it has edges, it has a center. Hell, if its finite it has a center. Oh wait, did you do shrooms?
A common (probably simplified) model for the universe is a 3-sphere (i.e. the set of points equidistant from a single point in 4 dimensions). A more familiar 2-sphere (e.g. a basketball) is the set of points equidistant from a single point in 3 dimensions. Imagine that you were a being that can only perceive 2 spatial dimensions. You would perceive a sphere as being a world in which you could travel in a straight line in any direction, and you would return to your starting point (i.e. either any point is the centre, or none of them are -- you can't visit the "real" centre). Similarly, we are beings who can only perceive 3 spatial dimensions. If the universe is a 3-sphere, then we could travel in a straight line away from Sol in any direction, and we would eventually return here. The universe may well have a geometric centre, but we can't visit it.
The expanding universe can be modelled by increasing the radius of a 3-sphere with time. At t = 0, the whole universe occupies a infinitesmal point in 4D space. As the universe "inflates", the "area" of the 3-sphere's "surface" increases (or, if you like, the 3D volume of the universe increases). This volume increase occurs evenly and at the same rate at all points in space.
The GP is entirely correct. You need to engage your brain.
On the other hand, that's exactly the reason I deliberately look for Baen-published books at the bookstore when I'm looking for something new. Read about their awesome policies, read Honor Harrington online, bought some (not enough!) novels in print later.
Definitely. Baen's policies and general attitude to publishing are really refreshing. And this workstation is called harrington.peter-b.co.uk, BTW.
so true. it's not like the whole ipod business was built on piracy or anything. i mean ask anyone with a few thousand tracks on their players.
Ummm... I've got something like 6,000 tracks in my iTunes library. Not a single one was pirated -- they're all rips from CDs that I own. I've bought several hundred CDs over the last few years. I know several people with thousands of tracks ripped from CDs in their collection.
Are you in the UK? If so, yes, you're a pirate. Because, over here, copying tracks from a CD (which you own) onto an iPod (which you own) using a PC (which you own) is unlawful.
Was this the Edinburgh Liberton/Gilmerton by-election earlier this month? If so, you should have at least received a flyer through the door, and I think our candidate canvassed a decent percentage of homes in the ward (you may have been out when he came round).
Unfortunately, most media is only interested in the "big" parties (I believe that in Scotland, those are Labour, Lib Dems, Conservatives, Greens and the SNP), and without a big campaign that is expensive both in terms of volunteers' time and in terms of money, it can be extremely difficult to get the message out even that it's possible to vote Pirate, let alone why you should.
Of course, if you feel that we missed out on some obvious opportunities to let you know that a candidate was standing, please let me know -- we certainly don't think we have all the answers, and we're always looking for new ways to address exactly the kind of issues you highlighted in your post.
And "retailers" like the Pirate Bay don't charge for the service (they make their money from ads) so they facilitate people's instinct to get something for nothing, and make millions doing it.
I don't think there's actually been any evidence published other than "the media companies say so" for the supposed "millions" that The Pirate Bay has earned, has there?
Maybe we'll also finally get HDDVD/BluRay support in Linux now.
How?
Hopefully because after this latest setback studios will give up their quixotic quest for total control, and start distributing media in open formats without Digital Restrictions Management.
Ever had a lot of "shiny bicycles" that aren't so shiny after your wife and/or small kids get their hands on them? I don't want to keep repurchasing the same stuff over and over. If I can get it for free from my neighbor, the original bicycle can stay safely put away.
I suggest you go and watch this excellent video, which explains why you're being disingenuous in a way a that five-year-old can understand.
I'm sure your neighbour would have no problem at all with you copying his bicycle.
It's mostly an attempt to con people with that whole "terroir" nonsense. I drink Loire sparkling wine because it's made with the same technique as Champagne, with the same grapes, in an area that isn't that different in climate. And most people I serve it to wouldn't know the difference (it's actually slightly fruitier).
If you're talking about Cremant de Loire, I think you'll enjoy Cremant d'Alsace even more. To be honest, though, Cremant does taste significantly different from Champagne, in my opinion. I'd say that the only thing that they have in common is that they're both sparkling white wines.
Also, check out Strohmeier Schlicher Sekt, from Austria...
I won't name my employer, for various reasons, but it is a Tier 1 research institution. We bring in some big research dollars and we grant PhDs. A diploma mill this is not.
...
However the engineering college is for training engineers. In particular, undergraduate work is largely based around getting people jobs. Most people only come for undergraduate degrees and they want to be employable. That means teaching them the theory of whatever kind of engineering they've chosen, and teaching them skills on the tools they'll use in the real world. If you don't like it, well then too bad.
At Cambridge University Engineering Department, which is probably a Tier 0 research institution, almost all teaching is carried out on OpenSuSE workstations; the mandatory programming labs are taught using Emacs/GCC and Octave, rather than Visual Studio and MATLAB; and coursework is accepted on paper (I wrote much of mine longhand) or in PDF format, and LaTeX is encouraged. They even used to hand out live DVDs with the department's standard Linux setup on them, but that seems to have stopped nowadays.
This seems to have no impact whatsoever on the ability of graduates to find jobs. My hypothesis is that because the course focuses on teaching people to think, to solve problems, and a large amount of theory, it really doesn't matter what piece of software is eventually used to generate or present the results.
So let me get this straight... they (pirate party) make an obvious move to turn it into a political fight when it isn't... and you're saying the Swedes are too stupid to figure it out, so they'll assume anyone attacking Wikileaks is attacking the Pirate Party?
Wikileaks is extremely political. I don't see any basis for you to assert that this isn't a political fight.
The point is that anyone attacking Wikileaks in Sweden will be generating publicity for PPse... and that's a handy thing indeed when there's a general election in Sweden coming up in a month's time.
This was a stupid move, but fitting considering the parties involved. Kill two birds with one stone.
But never mind, it looks like I'm feeding a troll. Silly me.
Slashdot Mirror
Library. Of. Congress. If someone wants their work preserved, they'll submit it to the Copyright Office and it will end up there.
I'll read that as "legal deposit library". When legal deposit libraries were originally established, only works which had had copies deposited were afforded the protection of copyright. This was great, because it meant that if you couldn't make your own copy of something, you knew there was a place you'd definitely be able to track it down in the future. Unfortunately, when "copyrighted by default" became the law, we ended up in a situation whereby you have to assume that everything was copyrighted, but also that it haven't been deposited somewhere for safekeeping.
Not to mention that, on average, whether "someone wants their work preserved" is pretty irrelevant to whether it's actually worth preserving.
The rest of your issues are epistemological problems, not relevant to copyright.
Don't brush away the issues I've highlighted as "not relevant to copyright" in such a cavalier manner. The loss of knowledge and cultural works into the "20th century black hole" (as Pr. Jame Boyle of the Duke University Center for the Study of the Public Domain terms it) is a real problem that's affecting people right now -- and it's caused primarily by excessive copyright duration, and to a lesser extent by excessively restrictive copyright limitations.
The fact that you can't keep track of a book you once owned will never invalidate the rights of its author.
Copyright protection is not a right; it's a privilege, and it is one that exists to promote and enrich the public domain. Try reading your precious (and too-frequently-ignored) Constitution.
You can make copies for your personal use.
Not in this country, you can't. Also, this assumes that you have access to a copy. Example: there's a book I read when I was a young teenager. Our family copy was lost sometime in the early 2000s. I want to read it again. It went out of print in the 1970s. Copies are like gold dust, because it was printed as a rather shitty mass market paperback, and they tend to self-destruct within about 50 years anyway (the glue perishes and the paper oxidises). If it had entered the public domain within a reasonable time period after publication, there would be a legal copy somewhere on the Internet.
But really, it's not your right to steal something just because you think it's historical. It belongs to the person it belongs to and not to you.
I thought we were talking about copyright infringement, not stealing. There is a difference, you know.
If you want to preserve it before it's in the public domain, buy it from the person who owns it. If it's at all valuable to you, you'll pay. And that's the point.
You make several poor assumptions.
Firstly, you assume that you can track down the current copyright holder. For the majority of works currently under copyright, and particularly those created between 1930 and 1980, this will be difficult if not impossible -- a frequent occurrence is that the rights have reverted from publisher to original creator, but the original creator has died, it isn't possible to locate his or her inheritors, and/or the transference of intellectual property rights was not clearly expressed in the will, meaning that the current copyright holder is [undefined]. And since the work is copyrighted, but you can't get a license from [undefined], you're screwed.
Secondly, you assume that the copyright holder (I take it this is who you mean when you say "the person who owns it") has any interest in selling the rights and/or licensing them. There is a significant expense to be incurred by the copyright holder, in terms of time and effort as well as money, in setting up the required legal instruments, especially if they haven't done this kind of thing before. They may well decide that it's not worth the hassle, in which case you're screwed.
Thirdly, you assume that, having been located and being interested in licensing the work or acquiring the copyrights, the copyright holder is willing to charge a reasonable amount. In one well-documented case, a media corporation sought to charge an amateur film-maker several thousand USD per item for use in their film. The songs in question were each around three minutes long, and were recorded in the early 1930s. Note that this is merely for a license. If you are the hypothetical person interested in preserving significant works for posterity, this level of fees will not allow you to preserve very many, if any.
Consider an history postgraduate student living in 2100, and wishing to write his or her doctoral thesis on, "Journalistic effectiveness of 'blogger journalism' in the decade 2000 to 2010." Assuming that the average blogger during this last decade was between 20 and 30, and that they live to at least what is currently a statistically average age. In that case, the majority of blog-based source material for this student will still be in copyright, but given the ephemeral nature of most web hosting providers, the majority of that source material will no longer be available in its original location, especially given that dead peoples' websites tend to suffer from natural decay and attrition. Furthermore, the student will wish to consult contemporaneous articles and broadcasts in the traditional media. Few newspapers, radio stations or television channels are as meticulous about maintaining their archives as the BBC or the Times are.
The majority of the material of interest to this hypothetical student will not survive until 2100 unless people now make, and look after, copies
The problem with simply linking to a site that's hosting an article is that file organization systems change and old articles are either archived (sometimes behind a paywall) or simply purged. If an article is particularly important to a cause (evidence of a particular opinion of a group of people in a specific area at a specific time), then it would seem that, for posterity sake, the article can at least be partially re-posted on another site with a link to the direct source.
That's the problem. The solution is to write your own article, or to maintain your links.
That's not a "solution", that's a crappy and unnecessarily labour-intensive workaround. Idiocy like this is why most of the 20th century's literary, musical and cinematographic legacy is disappearing down the toilet of history -- fear of brokenly restrictive copyright law makes people unwilling and, indeed, unable to properly preserve cultural artefacts by copying and sharing them after the original creators and/or publishers have died and/or lost interest in the works.
The real solution is to fix bloody copyright.
the sooner Autotools dies, the better.
I quite like autotools, actually. If you actually think about what you're doing when writing your configure.ac and M4 macros, it's an elegant, clean and easy to understand solution.
Unfortunately, at the moment it seems fashionable to throw all the configuration macros into a single, poorly commented file, with all the code copied and pasted from other projects with little understanding demonstrated of what it does or why it does it, with the predictable poor performance and low maintainability.
Naturally, my ssh denies all root attempts. Even if they got the password right they wouldn't know it, because the rejection would be the same. Other botnets have tried whitepages-style attacks using long lists of common user names and not matched any allowed users on my system as well.
I usually recommend disallowing password-based authentication, and permitting only key-based logins.
[Citation needed]. The UK is a member of ESA; ESA has British astronauts; ergo the UK sends UK citizens into space.
But then what happens when the black hole evaporates through hawking radiation and the event horizon disappears?
That will only happen after the black hole has fully formed and matter has stopped falling into it. Which, in our reference frame, is never. It only ever evaporates in local time.
The physics of cosmological singularities: breaking your brain since 1915.
A common (probably simplified) model for the universe is a 3-sphere (i.e. the set of points equidistant from a single point in 4 dimensions). A more familiar 2-sphere (e.g. a basketball) is the set of points equidistant from a single point in 3 dimensions. Imagine that you were a being that can only perceive 2 spatial dimensions. You would perceive a sphere as being a world in which you could travel in a straight line in any direction, and you would return to your starting point (i.e. either any point is the centre, or none of them are -- you can't visit the "real" centre). Similarly, we are beings who can only perceive 3 spatial dimensions. If the universe is a 3-sphere, then we could travel in a straight line away from Sol in any direction, and we would eventually return here. The universe may well have a geometric centre, but we can't visit it.
The expanding universe can be modelled by increasing the radius of a 3-sphere with time. At t = 0, the whole universe occupies a infinitesmal point in 4D space. As the universe "inflates", the "area" of the 3-sphere's "surface" increases (or, if you like, the 3D volume of the universe increases). This volume increase occurs evenly and at the same rate at all points in space.
The GP is entirely correct. You need to engage your brain.
On the other hand, that's exactly the reason I deliberately look for Baen-published books at the bookstore when I'm looking for something new. Read about their awesome policies, read Honor Harrington online, bought some (not enough!) novels in print later.
Definitely. Baen's policies and general attitude to publishing are really refreshing. And this workstation is called harrington.peter-b.co.uk, BTW.
Entitlement to cause harm to others is always a bad thing. Sadly, that's the pro-pirate platform.
No, it's not.
Ummm ... I've got something like 6,000 tracks in my iTunes library. Not a single one was pirated -- they're all rips from CDs that I own. I've bought several hundred CDs over the last few years. I know several people with thousands of tracks ripped from CDs in their collection.
Are you in the UK? If so, yes, you're a pirate. Because, over here, copying tracks from a CD (which you own) onto an iPod (which you own) using a PC (which you own) is unlawful.
Was this the Edinburgh Liberton/Gilmerton by-election earlier this month? If so, you should have at least received a flyer through the door, and I think our candidate canvassed a decent percentage of homes in the ward (you may have been out when he came round).
Unfortunately, most media is only interested in the "big" parties (I believe that in Scotland, those are Labour, Lib Dems, Conservatives, Greens and the SNP), and without a big campaign that is expensive both in terms of volunteers' time and in terms of money, it can be extremely difficult to get the message out even that it's possible to vote Pirate, let alone why you should.
Of course, if you feel that we missed out on some obvious opportunities to let you know that a candidate was standing, please let me know -- we certainly don't think we have all the answers, and we're always looking for new ways to address exactly the kind of issues you highlighted in your post.
And thanks for voting Pirate!
And "retailers" like the Pirate Bay don't charge for the service (they make their money from ads) so they facilitate people's instinct to get something for nothing, and make millions doing it.
I don't think there's actually been any evidence published other than "the media companies say so" for the supposed "millions" that The Pirate Bay has earned, has there?
Maybe we'll also finally get HDDVD/BluRay support in Linux now.
How?
Hopefully because after this latest setback studios will give up their quixotic quest for total control, and start distributing media in open formats without Digital Restrictions Management.
I can dream, can't I?
Ever had a lot of "shiny bicycles" that aren't so shiny after your wife and/or small kids get their hands on them? I don't want to keep repurchasing the same stuff over and over. If I can get it for free from my neighbor, the original bicycle can stay safely put away.
I suggest you go and watch this excellent video, which explains why you're being disingenuous in a way a that five-year-old can understand.
I'm sure your neighbour would have no problem at all with you copying his bicycle.
I know exactly how you feel.
It's mostly an attempt to con people with that whole "terroir" nonsense. I drink Loire sparkling wine because it's made with the same technique as Champagne, with the same grapes, in an area that isn't that different in climate. And most people I serve it to wouldn't know the difference (it's actually slightly fruitier).
If you're talking about Cremant de Loire, I think you'll enjoy Cremant d'Alsace even more. To be honest, though, Cremant does taste significantly different from Champagne, in my opinion. I'd say that the only thing that they have in common is that they're both sparkling white wines.
Also, check out Strohmeier Schlicher Sekt, from Austria...
What about reliable unified sound support, hows that comming along?
Uh, that's why you target SDL and OpenAL. Using the power of libraries, they take care of that for you.
It's not a replacement for a brick and mortar store. At the store I can get a refund or at least credit towards a different game; steam? .
Which store is this? I'm not aware of any store that will give refunds or store credit for a PC game unless it's still shrink wrapped.
I'm aware of stores which will never give refunds or store credit for a PC game even if it's still shrink-wrapped.
I don't shop there any more.
I won't name my employer, for various reasons, but it is a Tier 1 research institution. We bring in some big research dollars and we grant PhDs. A diploma mill this is not.
...
However the engineering college is for training engineers. In particular, undergraduate work is largely based around getting people jobs. Most people only come for undergraduate degrees and they want to be employable. That means teaching them the theory of whatever kind of engineering they've chosen, and teaching them skills on the tools they'll use in the real world. If you don't like it, well then too bad.
At Cambridge University Engineering Department, which is probably a Tier 0 research institution, almost all teaching is carried out on OpenSuSE workstations; the mandatory programming labs are taught using Emacs/GCC and Octave, rather than Visual Studio and MATLAB; and coursework is accepted on paper (I wrote much of mine longhand) or in PDF format, and LaTeX is encouraged. They even used to hand out live DVDs with the department's standard Linux setup on them, but that seems to have stopped nowadays.
This seems to have no impact whatsoever on the ability of graduates to find jobs. My hypothesis is that because the course focuses on teaching people to think, to solve problems, and a large amount of theory, it really doesn't matter what piece of software is eventually used to generate or present the results.
So let me get this straight ... they (pirate party) make an obvious move to turn it into a political fight when it isn't ... and you're saying the Swedes are too stupid to figure it out, so they'll assume anyone attacking Wikileaks is attacking the Pirate Party?
Wikileaks is extremely political. I don't see any basis for you to assert that this isn't a political fight.
The point is that anyone attacking Wikileaks in Sweden will be generating publicity for PPse... and that's a handy thing indeed when there's a general election in Sweden coming up in a month's time.
This was a stupid move, but fitting considering the parties involved. Kill two birds with one stone.
But never mind, it looks like I'm feeding a troll. Silly me.
The GPLv3 contains the section "7. Additional Terms.", which seems to allow and describe exactly the changes that they did.
Ah, I forgot about the new section 7 optional restrictions. Thanks.
Or you could get a non-proprietary like the Nokia n900.
Hear, hear -- the N900 is great!
The source released is covered under GPLv3, but has some additional terms attached to it. I would guess this makes it GPL-incompatible?
Yes, and also I believe that it may be violating the FSF's trademarks by advertising something as GPL-licensed when it's not.
Cool... and since most porn is digital now, and displayed on computers, can we then say that porn is just a calculation in lambda calculus?
I'm sure I don't need to explain the difference between an algorithm and a dataset.