This is/. Off the cuff responses to things that people haven't bothered to actually read, is the rule, not the exception.
It was made marginally more difficult at best.
on
Is Law Copyrighted?
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· Score: 2
And in the process, since the government didn't have to pay up front for the complete rights to the document, they weren't forced to squeeze the population at large for the money to pay.
It's nice that you started dragging out all these hypothesis, about what if they made it harder... but they didn't. The information was available.
I'm not selling my soul to capitalism at all. I'm merely supporting the decision to outsource for an extremely reasonable fee, a function that the govenrnment wasn't really qualified to perform anyhow.
Yes, I do think the government should outsource law-making.
I certainly don't want the average politician deciding building code standards. Would you want to live in a house architected by George Jr, or Al, or Bill Clinton?
And no mistake was made at all. If you make it so that an organization like this can't make moeny off it's intellectual property, then the government would be forced to hire this organization, or one like it, to create the same documentation. And everyone in the jurisdiction would be paying up front for something that they don't necessarily need.
Personally, I wouldn't willingly pay an extra dollar in taxes, just to have this be a public domain document. I'm not building anything, and if I was, the $300 is a normal cost of business.
was this made more difficult than necessary? Anyone that had any interest in the rules had every opportunity to read them. At no time did anyone involved say that these were secret rules, that only the priveleged few could have access to.
I fail to see how this case is serving to undermine any kind of order.
And just because there is a process for the state to exercise imminent domain, doesn't mean that they should exercise it at every opportunity. A power like that need be used sparingly, if at all. Or else the govenment devolves into a complete tyranny. Nobody is served by a government that capriciously takes whatever it wants from whoever it wants at will.
Once again, the editors, and the mass of users of/. are rising up to protest a law, and an organization, just because they are restricting in some small incredibly insignificant way, the flow of information.
The government in this case chose to let an experienced, knowlegable group generate laws, that frankly the lawmakers are incredibly ill suited to have created themselves. Then, rather than paying a large sum of cash up front and throwing the rules out into the public domain, they allowed the writers to retain copyright, so they could earn something for their work by selling copies.
At no time, did the government hide these laws. The information was readily available through governemnt offices, and at local libraries. Anyone that needed to see them, could. Anyone that felt they needed a copy, had every right to purchase a copy for a reasonable fee. Nobody was ever being compelled to follow directives that they were not allowed to know.
Based on reading how the court found in this case, and interpreting fair use laws, anyone that wanted to protest these laws, almost certainly wouldn't have been denied the ability to quote appropriately from them. The court just said that they couldn't be copied wholesale, in violation of the copyright law.
The hypocrisy? Once again, slashdot, and the bulk of it's community, are foaming at the mouth over copyright law. The same people that would scream bloody murder if someone ignored the GPL, and created a forked Linux, using proprietary, non-disclosed modifications. The same laws, that say that Linux, and all derivative works must remain open source, protects "closed source" material like these building codes from being freely distributed.
If you expect copyright laws to protect the GPL, you should allow others the same protection for their works. And that means that they are allowed to choose how open to make their IP. Just like some have chosen to release under the GPL, others have not.
When the book in question, is printed in a fairly limited run, the per copy price goes up. And I'm sure, that a building codes book doesn't exactly burn up the bestseller list.
Further, the non-profit had to pay experts to create the document in question. And that's a VERY significant expense as well.
They were published. And for a quite reasonable fee, to cover both the distribution, and the original creation of the document, ANYONE had complete access to them.
They were freely available. At any time, you could go to a library, or other govenment offices, and read away. Made photocopies for your own use, etc.
If you really want someone to complain to, complain about the local lawmakers in this case. When they passed these laws, they should have arranged the rights to go over to the local government, for an appropriate fee of course. Then they could have been freely available, as widely as anyone could want. Of course, the organization that generated the documents, would have needed to be paid for their work, just like any other subject matter expert that the governemtn might contract with. So the community at large, would pay increased taxes, so that a small group of people (building contractors) wouldn't have to pay individually to read the laws. I'm not sure that I want my taxes going up, for a purpose like this.
You can complain about something, without quoting it wholsale. And furthermore, as has been said several times, the reason that it was found to be a violation in this case, was that the law was readily available.
So either the law is readily available, and in your protest documents, you can refer people to it's sources. And quote appropriate passages, as needed as well.
Or it's not going to be readily available for people to read, and you can quote it wholesale in your screed.
"goverment should not be allowed to pass into law a text which is copyrighted by a private entity"
Why not? In this particular case, the government in question chose to allow a third party to generate the law for them. I would say that the only valid thing to object to in this case, is the elected officials letting someone else do their work for them. And I'm not sure that's even a valid complain. Governments have always needed outside experts to help with the governing. I'm not sure that I want my local elected officials writing the building codes. The average politician isn't really qualified.
"if a government does pass the text into law, quoting the law publicly, on line, should not be construed as infringement."
Again, this goes to fair use. He didn't "quote" the law. He copied it wholesale onto the web.
"citizens should not have to pay money to obtain a copy of a law they are obligated to follow"
They are/were not obligated to pay at all. The information is available for free, via libraries and at the appropriate government offices.
between the laws being bad, and the laws being badly applied.
Personally, I don't have any problem at all, with companies being able to patent, and profit from their inventions.
This case was all about a company suckering an entire industry into using their ideas in a standard. Then after the standard is widely adopted, and prohibitively expensive to back away from, the pop out with a patent that everyone is now in violation of. It's not about patent law being bad, it's just about sleazy business practices.
The article implied, that the cheated papers seem to span multiple semesters as well. So at the very least, you should be able to call newer versions of an older paper copies. I think the later students would be hard pressed to claim that they were preparing homework prior to joining the class.
It didn't seem like it took him much effort to access them when he was at the TV station. I sure didn't see any VPN client being fired up. It made it seem like if you knew the IP, they would be accessible from anywhere.
And it was very convenient, that the TV station was 100% compatible with the systems in use by NURV.
Just felt wrong to me, at the time I was watching the movie.
The thing that grabbed me, as the most immediately obnoxious, was that they didn't even pretend to use a real address. I'd like to give the producers the benefit of the doubt, and say that they did it on purpose. So that some poor real site wouldn't get slammed by ppl trying to connect to the satellites. More likely, they were just sloppy.
All in all, I've been recommending it to geeky friends of mine, as being great for a laugh. And advising everyone else to avoid it like the plague. I walked out smiling, only because it was so absurd.
It's just an expensive piece of product placement on Apple's part. Not everything has to be some sort of conspiracy, some things happen due to much less machiavellian reasons. Sometimes Steve Jobs just waves a basket of cash at Hollywood.
I used to work for Gazelle.com, a 9 month flameout. When the company turfed, the founders did sell off the mailing list, in violation of the terms that people signed up under. But far worse things happened as well.
The company was set up at a co-lo, where they didn't own the servers. But at the San Francisco office, there was a data mining server that collected all the clickstream data, all the credit card info, etc, into a honking SQL database.
When the company folded, the boxes were simply shut down. No cleanup was done at all. When the company sold all the systems that had been used for building the site, they advertised thm as including softare (non transferable, and never paid for anyhow), so they continued to not be erased.
The company that bought the data mining server apparently decided that rather than flattening, and rebuilding, it would be more fun to crack the box. So they hired someone to break open the security on the systems. Thus getting them a COMPLETE copy of every session ever opened to the production site. Including all the aforementioned credit card info.
about nothing. The vast bulk of the readers here, seem to think that MS wanting to make it more difficult to pirate their software, is some horrible conspiracy against god and man.
First, how is it horrible, if a company takes measures to preserve their copyrights?
Second, MS isn't so stupid as to make it impossible to move the license from one machine to another. It's a given, that people will upgrade machines, and reload systems from time to time. They know better than to prevent that. No matter how much you disapprove of their business practices, nobody has ever accused them of being that inept at marketing things.
Thirdly, by and large the users here have been quite supportive of the thought of MS getting split into pieces. If OS's are split off to a separate company, it's definitely in that companies interest to tighten controls on the OS products. They won't have the oceans of Office license money propping things up. So did anyone ever consider, that this might be a move being engineered with a split in mind?
Lastly, slashdot is rumored to be a bastion of Linux users. And MS users, are far and away a minority here. What do you all care, if us few MS users, are inconvenienced in some way.
Rather than saying "Intel is protecting the P3...", you could say that Intel is merely pursuing a valid market segmentation strategy. Rather like AMD is pursuing with the Duron.
Differently able processors at different price points.
Back on 8/23 Moto over at TechZone, wrote up a great piece on how to start a tech site. In it, he clearly talks about ad's, and how most networks pay for them only when they're not for other network sites. It seems to me, if you're going to work within and industry, and make deals with other companies within that industry, you ought to do your footwork. It's simply irresponsible, to sign a contract with a company, without reading what you're agreeing to. And if you do that, you have nobody to blame but yourself.
And I don't see fault with not being allowed to solicit outside advertising either. I would think, that part of being a network, is that the network can control it's identity. If you start working on side deals, it will dilute the brand identity that the network is trying to build. It's just part of the price you pay, for the convenience of not having to shop for your own ad's, and for the strength of co-marketing that you should get from the affiliated sites.
I'd basically chalk this whole episode up, as a sterling example of a variation of "caveat emptor". Be sure of what you are getting, before you lay out the cash to get it. I feel for the guy, but at least he'll provide an object lesson to some others by publicizing his mistakes.
The software that the book is about, is a Windows only application. So I'd say it's pretty irrelevant whether or not the CD is designed with other platforms in mind. I think it's a fairly safe bet that people that run a windows app, have access to a windows machine.
"whatta ya mean my RedHat CD doesn't have apache for windows bin's on it???"
He spends a noticeable amount of time ranting about how the tv listings on Tivo cost money, when you can get them for free from the newspaper. He doesn't seem to account that when you pay for the listings with Tivo, you're not just getting a copy of TV guide. You get everything pre-loaded into your box, with most of the programming to record done for you. No more setting stop/start times, and whatnot. Also it gives an additional value add, by providing recommendations tailored to your tastes. Over time, as the system learns more about you and others, it will make targeted recommendations of shows that you might like.
And above all, it's paying for convenience. And apparently plenty of people are willing to pay for that convenience. Just as apparently, he's not.
Other than the fairly rabid anti-profit motive slant to the whole piece, I don't see how this is all that noteworthy.
Slashdot Mirror
This is /. Off the cuff responses to things that people haven't bothered to actually read, is the rule, not the exception.
And in the process, since the government didn't have to pay up front for the complete rights to the document, they weren't forced to squeeze the population at large for the money to pay.
It's nice that you started dragging out all these hypothesis, about what if they made it harder... but they didn't. The information was available.
I'm not selling my soul to capitalism at all. I'm merely supporting the decision to outsource for an extremely reasonable fee, a function that the govenrnment wasn't really qualified to perform anyhow.
Yes, I do think the government should outsource law-making.
I certainly don't want the average politician deciding building code standards. Would you want to live in a house architected by George Jr, or Al, or Bill Clinton?
And no mistake was made at all. If you make it so that an organization like this can't make moeny off it's intellectual property, then the government would be forced to hire this organization, or one like it, to create the same documentation. And everyone in the jurisdiction would be paying up front for something that they don't necessarily need.
Personally, I wouldn't willingly pay an extra dollar in taxes, just to have this be a public domain document. I'm not building anything, and if I was, the $300 is a normal cost of business.
was this made more difficult than necessary? Anyone that had any interest in the rules had every opportunity to read them. At no time did anyone involved say that these were secret rules, that only the priveleged few could have access to.
I fail to see how this case is serving to undermine any kind of order.
And just because there is a process for the state to exercise imminent domain, doesn't mean that they should exercise it at every opportunity. A power like that need be used sparingly, if at all. Or else the govenment devolves into a complete tyranny. Nobody is served by a government that capriciously takes whatever it wants from whoever it wants at will.
Just pop on down to the library, and the poorest among us can read them for free.
Once again, the editors, and the mass of users of /. are rising up to protest a law, and an organization, just because they are restricting in some small incredibly insignificant way, the flow of information.
The government in this case chose to let an experienced, knowlegable group generate laws, that frankly the lawmakers are incredibly ill suited to have created themselves. Then, rather than paying a large sum of cash up front and throwing the rules out into the public domain, they allowed the writers to retain copyright, so they could earn something for their work by selling copies.
At no time, did the government hide these laws. The information was readily available through governemnt offices, and at local libraries. Anyone that needed to see them, could. Anyone that felt they needed a copy, had every right to purchase a copy for a reasonable fee. Nobody was ever being compelled to follow directives that they were not allowed to know.
Based on reading how the court found in this case, and interpreting fair use laws, anyone that wanted to protest these laws, almost certainly wouldn't have been denied the ability to quote appropriately from them. The court just said that they couldn't be copied wholesale, in violation of the copyright law.
The hypocrisy? Once again, slashdot, and the bulk of it's community, are foaming at the mouth over copyright law. The same people that would scream bloody murder if someone ignored the GPL, and created a forked Linux, using proprietary, non-disclosed modifications. The same laws, that say that Linux, and all derivative works must remain open source, protects "closed source" material like these building codes from being freely distributed.
If you expect copyright laws to protect the GPL, you should allow others the same protection for their works. And that means that they are allowed to choose how open to make their IP. Just like some have chosen to release under the GPL, others have not.
When the book in question, is printed in a fairly limited run, the per copy price goes up. And I'm sure, that a building codes book doesn't exactly burn up the bestseller list.
Further, the non-profit had to pay experts to create the document in question. And that's a VERY significant expense as well.
They were published. And for a quite reasonable fee, to cover both the distribution, and the original creation of the document, ANYONE had complete access to them.
They were freely available. At any time, you could go to a library, or other govenment offices, and read away. Made photocopies for your own use, etc.
If you really want someone to complain to, complain about the local lawmakers in this case. When they passed these laws, they should have arranged the rights to go over to the local government, for an appropriate fee of course. Then they could have been freely available, as widely as anyone could want. Of course, the organization that generated the documents, would have needed to be paid for their work, just like any other subject matter expert that the governemtn might contract with. So the community at large, would pay increased taxes, so that a small group of people (building contractors) wouldn't have to pay individually to read the laws. I'm not sure that I want my taxes going up, for a purpose like this.
You can complain about something, without quoting it wholsale. And furthermore, as has been said several times, the reason that it was found to be a violation in this case, was that the law was readily available.
So either the law is readily available, and in your protest documents, you can refer people to it's sources. And quote appropriate passages, as needed as well.
Or it's not going to be readily available for people to read, and you can quote it wholesale in your screed.
"goverment should not be allowed to pass into law a text which is copyrighted by a private entity"
Why not? In this particular case, the government in question chose to allow a third party to generate the law for them. I would say that the only valid thing to object to in this case, is the elected officials letting someone else do their work for them. And I'm not sure that's even a valid complain. Governments have always needed outside experts to help with the governing. I'm not sure that I want my local elected officials writing the building codes. The average politician isn't really qualified.
"if a government does pass the text into law, quoting the law publicly, on line, should not be construed as infringement."
Again, this goes to fair use. He didn't "quote" the law. He copied it wholesale onto the web.
"citizens should not have to pay money to obtain a copy of a law they are obligated to follow"
They are/were not obligated to pay at all. The information is available for free, via libraries and at the appropriate government offices.
I'm tired of hearing Malda, et al, smack MS, and corps. But whatcha gonna do. The site still has some relevance. So I live with the extreme politics.
between the laws being bad, and the laws being badly applied.
Personally, I don't have any problem at all, with companies being able to patent, and profit from their inventions.
This case was all about a company suckering an entire industry into using their ideas in a standard. Then after the standard is widely adopted, and prohibitively expensive to back away from, the pop out with a patent that everyone is now in violation of. It's not about patent law being bad, it's just about sleazy business practices.
The article implied, that the cheated papers seem to span multiple semesters as well. So at the very least, you should be able to call newer versions of an older paper copies. I think the later students would be hard pressed to claim that they were preparing homework prior to joining the class.
I asked Eric, and he confirmed that it was Blue Nile that he built it for.
And I do find it terribly ironic, that Sun implies that the CTO built it himself, given that Eric worked for Sun for several years out here in CA.
It didn't seem like it took him much effort to access them when he was at the TV station. I sure didn't see any VPN client being fired up. It made it seem like if you knew the IP, they would be accessible from anywhere.
And it was very convenient, that the TV station was 100% compatible with the systems in use by NURV.
Just felt wrong to me, at the time I was watching the movie.
The thing that grabbed me, as the most immediately obnoxious, was that they didn't even pretend to use a real address. I'd like to give the producers the benefit of the doubt, and say that they did it on purpose. So that some poor real site wouldn't get slammed by ppl trying to connect to the satellites. More likely, they were just sloppy.
All in all, I've been recommending it to geeky friends of mine, as being great for a laugh. And advising everyone else to avoid it like the plague. I walked out smiling, only because it was so absurd.
It's just an expensive piece of product placement on Apple's part. Not everything has to be some sort of conspiracy, some things happen due to much less machiavellian reasons. Sometimes Steve Jobs just waves a basket of cash at Hollywood.
I used to work for Gazelle.com, a 9 month flameout. When the company turfed, the founders did sell off the mailing list, in violation of the terms that people signed up under. But far worse things happened as well.
The company was set up at a co-lo, where they didn't own the servers. But at the San Francisco office, there was a data mining server that collected all the clickstream data, all the credit card info, etc, into a honking SQL database.
When the company folded, the boxes were simply shut down. No cleanup was done at all. When the company sold all the systems that had been used for building the site, they advertised thm as including softare (non transferable, and never paid for anyhow), so they continued to not be erased.
The company that bought the data mining server apparently decided that rather than flattening, and rebuilding, it would be more fun to crack the box. So they hired someone to break open the security on the systems. Thus getting them a COMPLETE copy of every session ever opened to the production site. Including all the aforementioned credit card info.
about nothing. The vast bulk of the readers here, seem to think that MS wanting to make it more difficult to pirate their software, is some horrible conspiracy against god and man.
First, how is it horrible, if a company takes measures to preserve their copyrights?
Second, MS isn't so stupid as to make it impossible to move the license from one machine to another. It's a given, that people will upgrade machines, and reload systems from time to time. They know better than to prevent that. No matter how much you disapprove of their business practices, nobody has ever accused them of being that inept at marketing things.
Thirdly, by and large the users here have been quite supportive of the thought of MS getting split into pieces. If OS's are split off to a separate company, it's definitely in that companies interest to tighten controls on the OS products. They won't have the oceans of Office license money propping things up. So did anyone ever consider, that this might be a move being engineered with a split in mind?
Lastly, slashdot is rumored to be a bastion of Linux users. And MS users, are far and away a minority here. What do you all care, if us few MS users, are inconvenienced in some way.
Rather than saying "Intel is protecting the P3...", you could say that Intel is merely pursuing a valid market segmentation strategy. Rather like AMD is pursuing with the Duron.
Differently able processors at different price points.
Back on 8/23 Moto over at TechZone, wrote up a great piece on how to start a tech site. In it, he clearly talks about ad's, and how most networks pay for them only when they're not for other network sites. It seems to me, if you're going to work within and industry, and make deals with other companies within that industry, you ought to do your footwork. It's simply irresponsible, to sign a contract with a company, without reading what you're agreeing to. And if you do that, you have nobody to blame but yourself.
And I don't see fault with not being allowed to solicit outside advertising either. I would think, that part of being a network, is that the network can control it's identity. If you start working on side deals, it will dilute the brand identity that the network is trying to build. It's just part of the price you pay, for the convenience of not having to shop for your own ad's, and for the strength of co-marketing that you should get from the affiliated sites.
I'd basically chalk this whole episode up, as a sterling example of a variation of "caveat emptor". Be sure of what you are getting, before you lay out the cash to get it. I feel for the guy, but at least he'll provide an object lesson to some others by publicizing his mistakes.
The software that the book is about, is a Windows only application. So I'd say it's pretty irrelevant whether or not the CD is designed with other platforms in mind. I think it's a fairly safe bet that people that run a windows app, have access to a windows machine.
"whatta ya mean my RedHat CD doesn't have apache for windows bin's on it???"
was the point of that?
He spends a noticeable amount of time ranting about how the tv listings on Tivo cost money, when you can get them for free from the newspaper. He doesn't seem to account that when you pay for the listings with Tivo, you're not just getting a copy of TV guide. You get everything pre-loaded into your box, with most of the programming to record done for you. No more setting stop/start times, and whatnot. Also it gives an additional value add, by providing recommendations tailored to your tastes. Over time, as the system learns more about you and others, it will make targeted recommendations of shows that you might like.
And above all, it's paying for convenience. And apparently plenty of people are willing to pay for that convenience. Just as apparently, he's not.
Other than the fairly rabid anti-profit motive slant to the whole piece, I don't see how this is all that noteworthy.