I would not worry too much. I happened to be on the VMWare site two days after OS X for intel was announced. A VMWare Workstation edition for the still unreleased x86 OS X was the single most requested feature on their customer feedback section.
Whatever time Apple spends "toughening" their TPM is time wasted.
The blog entry summary that is the root of this discussion is misleading. Apple did not implement the TPM functionality at all in their developer release, or really any other protection. People hacked it. Now they report Apple is "strengthening" their protection (which was pretty much non-existent) by adding TPM. I doubt they are wasting much time on it.
Re:Google, Books and the internet..
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This bears little relation to what google is doing which is reproducing and distributing almost entire texts (though not in one piece).
While it does not really matter, legally, I take exception to your claim that they are reproducing and redistributing entire texts. Do you have any support for the idea that Google is republishing entire works or even significantly large portions over the course of normal use? It is by no means a given. Are their any published statistics on what percentage of a given work Google has reproduced over time for users?
Have you not looked at Mac prices in a while? Current Macs run 2-10X more expensive than comparable PCs.
Really? Well lets do a comparison then:
Apple mac mini- $500
1.25GHz PowerPC G4, 512MB DDR333 SDRAM, ATI Radeon 9200, 32MB DDR video memory, 40GB Ultra ATA hard drive, Combo drive (DVD/CD-RW), DVI or VGA video output, Built-in 56k Internal Modem
So, tell me where can I find that small of form factor of a PC, pre-assembled and installed, with similar hardware specs, an included professional grade OS, plus equivalent applications to the iApps for $250 or less? No seriously, I want to know. I can't even find an empty case that small for less than $600. Looking at machines 25-50% larger, I still can't get anything for under $500, let alone something equivalent.
By your argument the New York Times could publish any novel they like simply by serializing it in small enough pieces. I expect that one was settled in court long agao[sic].
They already have using these things called letters which, when rearranged, can make any given book. The thing is, they did not publish them all at once, to any given person, with instructions for assembly. The courts decide these according to the four Fair Use criteria. What affect did this have on the market? What portion was published in any given instance. What was the purpose of the publication, was it to make money on the poem, or to critique, reference, or use the work as an example? The New York Times does not have to worry about republishing an entire work over the course of time since it is easier for some one to just copy it in its entirety somewhere else, and thus it has no noticeable, negative affect on the market for that poem. The printing in any instance was in order to discuss the poem or present an idea about the poem.
If they tried to reproduce an entire work by publishing small amounts, in a serial order, or labeled, and that resulted in a negative affect on the market for that work, then they would be in violation of fair use.
Google is making money referencing the work, not trying to reproduce the whole thing and I seriously doubt any of these publishers can make a good case for how this has negatively affected the market for a work. In most cases, it seems to be increasing the market. But, we've already been over this. If you read the fair use doctrine and then read the arriba soft case to see how it has been interpreted by the courts all of this is obvious.
Re:Google, Books and the internet..
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You seem to think that google is a special company that is not obliged by copyright laws.
No, I just actually took the time to read the copyright laws, while you don't seem to have a clue what they say.
I assure you that if I personally did it (what google is trying to do), I will be in jail for not being able to pay the sums of money the court will rule aginst me.
Further demonstrating your ignorance, you seem unaware that the U.S. has no debtor's prison provision and you can't go to jail for owing money in a civil suit. While it is true the U.S. legal system is influenced by having enough money to fight things in court, you would not be breaking the law by doing the same thing Google is doing.
Copyright laws are broken when google copies and make available (either for search or full/partial quote) without the concent[sic] of publishers.
You are wrong. The whole point of the Fair Use Doctrine, as implemented by the Copyright Act of 1976 is to enumerate the criteria for republishing without the copyright holder's permission.
Not only that, but if publishers wanted, they could simply prove financial damages regardless of copyright violations, that will still stand in court.
Financial damages are not, by themselves, grounds for compensation. If someone opens a McDonalds and Burger King goes out of business, the Burger King cannot win compensation unless there is wrongdoing.
This is not a question of view. it is a question of law.
Well, actually the law itself is a bit vague, it is more a matter of interpretation of that law, as embodied by previous court rulings on the matter. You should really educate yourself on the laws before arguing what they say.
As for your assumption that google will spend hundreds of millions by trying to contact authors, this is simply funny. The number of publishers that publish 80% of the books in the world is very limited. Publishers are trusted with the copyright laws of most of the books.
First, I said millions, not hundreds of millions. Second, the last time I looked more than 90% of copyrighted works right's were owned by unknown parties. What percentage of that is books is anyone's guess, but a substantial number of books are certainly owned by indeterminate parties. Google could go to great expense to get permission from some of them, but it has no need to do so and not doing so benefits them and end users.
We do indeed think differently on this subject. When I read about Google print I was unsure of it's legality, and my gut instinct said they were probably breaking the law. Then I did this thing called "research" where you look for facts to determine if an opinion is correct. After reading the laws, the case summaries, and reading expert opinions by lawyers I learned that Google is probably within their rights, as well as other tidbits about what why and how this case is being filed in an odd jurisdiction. You on the other hand, just made a bunch of assumptions and obviously did not bother to find out the facts. That is why although the courts could rule against Google, I know that it is unlikely. Please research "fair use," "copyright law," "Kelly v. Arriba Soft," and "google print." before bothering to reply or make more ignorant assertions about copyright law.
Speaking of VMWare and its ilk, does anyone care to predict if OSX will run on top of Linux or other OS's? Can the TPM functions be faked out?
Of course they can be faked, but doing so is probably a DMCA violation, so I doubt you will see any commercial products available that do this unless they partner with Apple to make it happen (i.e. pay Apple a pile o cash to cover the loss of hardware sales). I will likely run OS X as my base system anyway, with Linux and Windows running in virtual machines on top. OS X is plenty stable and reasonably secure so it should make a fine base OS with no hacking needed.
I want an OS that I can multi-boot MS-Windows and Linux on that runs on commodity hardware.
Apple has said they will not try to prevent other OS's from booting on intel boxes they sell. As for commodity hardware, well that will depend, I suspect Apple boxes will, as usual, implement lots of hardware that does not yet work in Windows. Apple will prevent OS X from running on hardware they don't sell, since the OS and all the other software they produce is a loss-leader to sell hardware and they would be losing money developing the OS and all the free applications and selling it at current market prices. Also it would put them in direct competition with MS, whose illegal contracts make business pretty much impossible. Four superior OS's (to Windows) have already died trying to sell into that market.
Otherwise, "Mac OSX on TPM'd Intel" is just another way of saying "Mac OSX on a proprieTary PlatforM." Not interested.
That will probably be your opinion of Apple boxes. They will run OSX , Linux, and the BSDs just fine, but Windows is anyone's guess. Windows will probably run fine in emulation ala VMWare and the like, and their will probably be some sort of WINE like way to run Windows programs, but I would not count on MS letting it boot out of the box. Of course Apple's PPC platform was technically even more open and runs Linux and the BSDs as well. It was even produced by multiple Vendors without reverse engineering (unlike x86). So when you say , "proprieTary PlatforM" I assume you really mean "platform that runs Windows."
Until every byte of code verifies for itself that it is running on genuine Apple hardware before it will execute, I'm not sure if Apple can ever close this door.
Of course they can't and don't expect to. Their goal is to make sure it does not effect profits. People will always hack and pirate and Apple can't stop them. Their goal is to make it hard enough that most people won't bother and so that 99.9% of users would rather use a Apple system than deal with hacking another system to sort of work. Heck people ran Mac OS in emulators on x86 hardware years and years ago. It just was never enough to make any difference in the marketplace. Do you think Apple cares if 500 hackers get OS X sort of running on commodity boxes? Hell no, these people would probably never have bought a legitimate copy anyway and even if they would have it is not worth the effort to lock the system down more just to sell 500 more copies. Anyone who thinks more than a tiny percentage of the market will be running a hacked version is quite mistaken.
The publishers are just pissed that Google's making money and they aren't, it has nothing to do with copyright or fair use. If it's such an issue, why don't they just encourage all of their authors to opt-out and setup their own search index to compete. That's not what they want at all, they just want a bigger piece of the pie than they are already going to get from purchases of searched books. Don't assign altruistic values to the publishing companies, they are just greedy like everyone else.
I don't think you are giving them enough credit here. This is about a threat to their revenue, not a grab for more. The groups suing google are publishing houses. What vital services do they perform? They print the hard copies, but anyone can do that. These companies really just send them on to the printers. They market the books, but Google is making that less necessary and if an author was so inclined they could always use a regular marketing agency. They have lots of contacts and contracts with book stores and chains which they use to distribute the works. Google is making it less necessary to be in a major brick and mortar store to get sold and online stores have already taken off. Where does this leave the publishing companies? It leaves them wishing there was no Google print, or at least not a good one, since their position is seriously undermined by it.
That said, I don't think the laws should be ensuring revenue streams. If Google has found a better way to let people find books than the traditional publishing houses have offered, well that is progress. Yes, the publishing companies are greedy. Yes, they are trying to abuse the spirit of the copyright system. They are also probably looking forward a bit more than you and seeing a real threat to their jobs.
As far as I know, in the case you discuss they didn't generate revenue from copies of the entire image, but from thumbnails. Google uses the entire copy of a book to generate revenue. If, instead of serving up thumbnails, this company had served up jigsaw pieces of the entire image, ultimately serving up almost the entire image to different customers, I think the court may have decided differently.
In both cases they profited from ads served with an excerpt from the work, which they copied in full. The law makes no relevant distinction between a thumbnail or another excerpt. The courts are judging based upon the end result of a republishing and it's effect on the market. Since no one user can get the whole book, only a few small excerpts that qualify, together as a single legal excerpt how is this any different? Sure a user could hack the system, but they can also go to the library and make their own copy. Google has performed due diligence here. Basically, based upon the fair use doctrine, I don't see any reason why the courts would rule differently. There are 4 criteria. Google's purpose is the same. The nature of the work is not such that is should be in the public domain due to an overriding public interest. The amount of the work is probably less if anything. Finally, the effect of the copying upon the marketplace is no different.
I like photograph X copyrighted by someone else, and I want to use it as a design on my chocolate gift boxes. Instead of putting the entire design on one box I chop the copies of the original photo up into little pieces and put different pieces on each box, ultimately using the entire image, but not on one box. Am I in breach of copyright?
Nope. The relevant criteria for fair use are spelled out. Your effect upon the market value of the original piece and the quantity and character of your excerpts are decidedly fair use.
I am using the entire image (to boost my sales), even if my customers individually only see a piece.
If the New York Times, over the course of four decades of quotation, eventually includes all the text contained in some famous poem, does that mean they have breached the copyright? The answer is no, because each "republishing" is a separate case. Even if eventually a person could piece together the entire work, you're still in the clear so long as your intention and effect on the market are within the specifications of fair use.
Re:Google, Books and the internet..
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'robots.txt' lets you gain _additional_ control that most publishers do not have.
Actually, it lets you request a single additional control, (although it need not be honored by others), in a formal, machine readable way. I imagine if Google print takes off some publishers might implement standardized tag in the text of the book to automate this request. This would be especially useful for certain reference works like dictionaries, thesaurus, recipe books, etc.
Neither am I a lawyer or legal historian. From my reading I get the impression that non-commercial copying was always considered fair use in court cases until the 1976 copyright act clarified the fair-use provisions of U.S. copyright law, at which point this was changed to the effect of the copying on the marketplace and given less weight. There may have been exceptions, but if so I have not read any of them.
Google is indeed scanning copyrighted works. Only about 1/3 of the books are in the public domain. For that matter all the pages Google caches and provides snippets of and links to on the internet are copyrighted.
The issue is whether or not this is a "fair use" of the works, which to date the U.S. courts have ruled similar instances are indeed fair use. Basically precedent has indicated that it is legal to copy entire works in order to use those works to produce and republish excerpts, provided it is a use covered under the fair use doctrine.
I think you have the right of it. A lot of the confusion comes from the fact that up until recently (the 70s I believe) non-commercial copying was permitted.
Re:You are confusing two issues
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So let me spell this out clearly: Google hold copies of original works. They use these entire copies to serve up snippets to individual users. By serving up snippets they are able to make sales of advertising. Therefore Google are using entire copies of copyrighted material for commercial benefit. This is so far from fair use it's not debatable. So Google are clearly in breach of copyright even though the end users aren't. I can't spell it out more simply than that.
The courts, thus far, have disagreed with you. In precedent setting cases it was ruled that the republishing, not the copying is the part restricted to excerpts. The courts have ruled that it is legal to copy entire works for the purpose of providing excerpts in a case where those excerpts were generating revenue via ads. Basically the case was about a system just like Google images where entire images were copied and made into thumbnails, which were displayed with ads to generate revenue.
This court case was a district one, not a supreme court decision but all but one district court has filed supporting briefs. Guess which district they chose to file against Google in? If they can win in the district court a supreme court appeal is almost guaranteed, and these lawyers are gambling that they can delay with an injunction and tie things up in court, or that the supremes will disagree with all the lower courts (sans one).
Re:Google, Books and the internet..
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Google does NOT index all the web. Robots.txt is opt out indeed, BUT the site has to be open to the web. NYTimes subscribed archive is not open to the web. Even without Robots.txt it wont be in google. Same with books. Books are not open to the net, nor they are free.
I think an argument could be made that selling a book to a public library is akin to publishing it on the internet. The NYTimes subscription version is akin to selling a limited print of a book and refusing sales to libraries. For some reason you're trying to draw parallels between books and the internet. Let me make it really simple for you. Publishing is publishing in the eyes of the law. Whether it is published on the internet or in a book does not matter. If a company started giving away books where you had to pay a subscription to unlock the cover would that make you feel better?
I would say - Tough. Most of the books published (that are still copyrighted) can be tracked back to the publisher. For those that are not, a solution can be found. That is no excuse for not contacting those you CAN contact.
So you're of the opinion that Google should spend millions of dollars and years of time trying to contact every publisher of every book and asking their permission to do something they don't legally need the author's permission to do and which most authors don't seem to have a problem with them doing. And your reason for this is what again? And you think if no author can be found for a work, that work should disappear from the face of the earth and be unavailable for people to find by searching. And why is that?
Not formatted? Its very clearly formatted. And you are claiming that after indexing the entire book google, with all their brilliant people, can not write some routine that searches for copyright notice?
No, I'm saying that notice was not designed with Google indexing in mind and is not a convention like robots.txt. If publishers want to come up with such a convention and implement it, and if Google still feels like being nice and then not indexing those works, that is fine. But their is no reason for them to devote time and money to make print.google.com not work as well. What is their motivation here?
Console games, DVD/VCR movies, all say that you are not allowed to publicly display the movie. Does that mean jack shit too? Maybe we can freely copy console games cause who cares if its written somewhere in the box that we can't why should we bother to read it?
You seem very unclear on the concept of fair use. Yes, absolutely it is legal to copy DVDs, VCR movies, and to publicly display them in certain circumstances. Provided it is a fair use, as the law defines it, for example, educational institutions can publicly display large parts of movies for their classes. If you want to make a backup copy of a DVD it is specifically protected as fair use. If the publisher includes a note that says you can't, too bad. They don't have the right to impose arbitrary restrictions on people who have already bought a work
If its hard for google to find the copyright notice, it should be hard for us to realize what theft is as well. Hell... what about any other crime... who are they to expect us to obey the law when it is written is some obscure book somewhere, which I never saw??
While I disagree in principal with the concept of "ignorance is no excuse for violating the law" that is a completely different argument. You are operating under the false assumption that what Google is doing is illegal, which is most likely not the case.
I disagree with you. See what happens if google stopped linking to the original sites from which they index data. How many sites do you think will allow google to keep scanning their sites? It is common sense and clearly is part of the fair use doctrine.
Gee maybe you should actually read the fair use doctrine. You are legally allowed to republished excerpts of works, subject to a number of rest
When an Xbox engineer working for MS says standards are good for us and let us get better prices and other advantages and MS's PR people say that standards are useless for their customers and won't give them better prices or other advantages some people see that as MS contradicting itself. The truth is, everyone knows standards and multiple vendors are good for buyers, but MS lies about it when trying to sell their products because they specifically don't adhere to standards to avoid competitive bids and disadvantage their customers.
His point was, this is an MS engineer contradicting what MS has been very vocally claiming in press releases and when lobbying politicians.
I hope you're a troll. Slashdot is not the world and most news agencies don't bother to print articles like this. They will print, "Xbox360 sells out in 3 hours!" because it will sell more papers.
The last time I was looking for a new bank, browser compatibility was an issue for me. I rejected three banks out of hand for not supporting anything but IE. I attempted to e-mail all of them to let them know why they lost my business, but one of the websites did not list an e-mail address anywhere and their "contact us" link was an invalid javascript that did not work on any browser at all. That sort of incompetence is enough to make me avoid them forever.
That was the sound of the previous post's point zipping right over your head.
The original poster did not argue that multiple suppliers for every possible component is a good thing or that MS or anyone else should not do it. Obviously it is advantageous to any business to have multiple suppliers for everything they need and to use parts built to standards to ensure that they are getting the same thing from any given vendor. The advantages to price, availability, and future planning is enormous.
What the previous poster was pointing out is that while MS intelligently makes sure to secure these benefits when it is a purchaser, it pooh-poohs them when it is the seller and one of their potential customers wants those advantages. A perfect example is the Mass. Open Office format issue. The state wants to use a standardized format so that they can take bids from multiple companies and thus get a better price, better availability, and can insure they get the same thing and thus will always be able to get the part. MS has been saying it is not fair to ask for a standardized part and take bids from multiple vendors and instead of bidding on supplying what the state wants, they have launched a PR campaign and have been trying to pressure politicians into going with them as the sole vendor for a proprietary part and thus losing all those advantages.
It is "crooked" in that it is deceptive. They are trying to use product supply and marketing to trick people into thinking something that is not true. Some of us think when a company blatantly lies to it's customers and potential customers, you know that is a bad thing. Yes, yes, I know all marketers are liars and "everybody is doing it." That is not an excuse.
Re:Google, Books and the internet..
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It is WE who like our sites scanned, and if not, we add a Robots.txt file.
I'd just like to mention, adding a robots.txt is an opt out scheme. Google indexes all the internet that people don't specifically request they do not. Legally, they do not even have to respect the robots.txt, they do so to generate good will. It would be prohibitively expensive to contact every website operator and get permission in advance.
The same holds true for books as well. It is just too expensive to ask every copyright holder, and many copyright holders are completely obscured. Authors die, publishing houses go out of business. Technically, someone owns the copy rights, but no one really knows who.
All (most) books say have on them, in print, right in the beginning a text saying "copying of material from this book is not allowed unless permitted, prior, in writing, by the author or the publisher".
Which means jack and shit since it is not formatted in such a way as to be machine readable, like the robots.txt and since it is not legally binding. Fair use means Google can index them in order to recreate a excerpt and children can copy a paragraph for their book report. They could but in a clause that says "you agree to pay me $1 for every letter in this book you read." It means nothing.
And authors have little ability to "check the web logs" and see who scans their books.
Neither do web users since it is easy to forge said information.
Fair use dictates that google links to our sites directly.
What the hell are you taking about? The fair use doctrine says no such thing.
Not only that, but internet has shaped to be mostly a free and open medium. Books - not. Books, you have to buy, or at least subscribe to a library (paid, directly or indirectly). Different "market".
The internet is not free. A good chunk is free, and a good chunk is paid for by ads, but then pay-to-view porn sites make up about a third as well. All three of these models apply to print as well.
Basically, from doing a little research it is pretty apparent Google is likely to prevail in this case. As for whether or not that is a bad thing, the only people who have so far objected are people who make their living marketing and distributing books, because they are afraid that their position is in jeopardy. They are right, their positions are in jeopardy. That does not mean print.google.com is not a wonderful thing for authors, readers, researchers, and mankind as a whole. I'm quite happy if Google indexes books I've written, it is free advertising. As an avid reader I'm happy to be able to easily find books relating to keywords if I am doing research of looking for a reference. I can't imagine that I or very many other people will search for some term, find a book, and use that excerpt of knowledge instead of buying a book, if they would otherwise have bought the book for that purpose. If the excerpt you need is that small you can just write it down at the library of book store and you have no business buying the whole book in the first place. Google print is a double win for authors and consumers and a minor blow to middle men. That is jsut fine, Copyright is supposed to be about encouraging authors and benefitting the people, not ensuring a revenue stream for distributors
I said HARDWARE requirements, because that is what was discussed by the CIO... the machines not being powerful enough to run office. SOFTWARE, specifically Windows 98 came into play by you guys, and I sufficiently squashed that FUD in my other post.
If by squashed you mean, demonstrated that you don't know what you are talking about..DOC is only really readable and writable completely by Word. Only certain versions of word are available for sale and they only run on certain platforms. Thus at least those minimum hardware standards for Word+the right version for Windows need to be met for a proposal using.doc format.
Using the Open Office format, the minimum requirements of machines are much lower because you can use any number of word processors and OS's with lower hardware requirements. Abiword+Linux, for example, will keep current hardware viable when their is no.doc solution to do the same. Further, even using the same OS, their are several programs with much less hardware requirements than any available that read/write the.doc format. What part of this are you failing to understand?
Also, this plan is for two years from now. So OO 2.0 is what would be used.
No, open document will be used. It may be using openoffice 1, 2, staroffice, abiword, wordperfect, koffice, or any number of other programs for a particular desktop, as needed.
I didn't say PDF wasn't open, I said that MS's format was more opened.
What the hell is "more opened?" You said "PDF is proprietary". This is completely untrue. It is an open, approved standard that is fully documented and has been implemented by dozens of companies and organizations. Word is not open, not documented, and in fact as obfuscated as possible to try to stop reverse engineering. It is not even a single format, but a whole group of them that are not compatible with one another.
AND Adobe owns the patent, its theirs and you can't change it.
PDF is not patent encumbered. It is trademarked, which is to say, you can change it all you want, but only Adobe is allowed to decide which documented format is called "PDF." You can take the PDF spec, change one thing in it, and call it "Bob's document format" and Adobe can do nothing about it. More importantly anyone can make readers and writers and will be able to do so in the future. Claiming otherwise is uninformed hogwash as is claiming that any of the Word formats are open or unencumbered. You're just full of shit on this one.
You are operating under the uninformed notion that MS Office 12 is a closed format, it is not. It can be used royalty free. It is also published and documented in great detail for anyone to see or use. Read my other posts to get links and educate yourself.
Too bad you are completely wrong. The format is not fully documented, vital formatting data is stored as a binary in the header, and patents restrict use of the format for many types of programs including all GPL software. Gee that would not be because OpenOffice is GPL would it? Get a fucking clue. The so called "Open XML" word format is XML that avoids the benefits of XML by encoding chunks of binary data and using patents to remove all the benefits of having a documented format. The most open thing about it is the fact that they put open in the name, because it is not open it is closed.
First of all, at no point will the government provide downloads to software. Maybe links to another site that will give you software, and that is were the problem comes in.
He asserts. Traditionally that is followed up by some support, or is that just your opinion that you pulled out of your ass?
Spend some time reading trends and you will learn that people are starting to get very scared about ID theft and spyware. The rate of downloads on sites like downloads.com has dropped drastically in comparison to what it use to be. People just don't
Slashdot Mirror
I would not worry too much. I happened to be on the VMWare site two days after OS X for intel was announced. A VMWare Workstation edition for the still unreleased x86 OS X was the single most requested feature on their customer feedback section.
Whatever time Apple spends "toughening" their TPM is time wasted.
The blog entry summary that is the root of this discussion is misleading. Apple did not implement the TPM functionality at all in their developer release, or really any other protection. People hacked it. Now they report Apple is "strengthening" their protection (which was pretty much non-existent) by adding TPM. I doubt they are wasting much time on it.
Have you opted out your book(s)?
This bears little relation to what google is doing which is reproducing and distributing almost entire texts (though not in one piece).
While it does not really matter, legally, I take exception to your claim that they are reproducing and redistributing entire texts. Do you have any support for the idea that Google is republishing entire works or even significantly large portions over the course of normal use? It is by no means a given. Are their any published statistics on what percentage of a given work Google has reproduced over time for users?
Have you not looked at Mac prices in a while? Current Macs run 2-10X more expensive than comparable PCs.
Really? Well lets do a comparison then:
Apple mac mini- $500
1.25GHz PowerPC G4, 512MB DDR333 SDRAM, ATI Radeon 9200, 32MB DDR video memory, 40GB Ultra ATA hard drive, Combo drive (DVD/CD-RW), DVI or VGA video output, Built-in 56k Internal ModemSo, tell me where can I find that small of form factor of a PC, pre-assembled and installed, with similar hardware specs, an included professional grade OS, plus equivalent applications to the iApps for $250 or less? No seriously, I want to know. I can't even find an empty case that small for less than $600. Looking at machines 25-50% larger, I still can't get anything for under $500, let alone something equivalent.
By your argument the New York Times could publish any novel they like simply by serializing it in small enough pieces. I expect that one was settled in court long agao[sic].
They already have using these things called letters which, when rearranged, can make any given book. The thing is, they did not publish them all at once, to any given person, with instructions for assembly. The courts decide these according to the four Fair Use criteria. What affect did this have on the market? What portion was published in any given instance. What was the purpose of the publication, was it to make money on the poem, or to critique, reference, or use the work as an example? The New York Times does not have to worry about republishing an entire work over the course of time since it is easier for some one to just copy it in its entirety somewhere else, and thus it has no noticeable, negative affect on the market for that poem. The printing in any instance was in order to discuss the poem or present an idea about the poem.
If they tried to reproduce an entire work by publishing small amounts, in a serial order, or labeled, and that resulted in a negative affect on the market for that work, then they would be in violation of fair use.
Google is making money referencing the work, not trying to reproduce the whole thing and I seriously doubt any of these publishers can make a good case for how this has negatively affected the market for a work. In most cases, it seems to be increasing the market. But, we've already been over this. If you read the fair use doctrine and then read the arriba soft case to see how it has been interpreted by the courts all of this is obvious.
You seem to think that google is a special company that is not obliged by copyright laws.
No, I just actually took the time to read the copyright laws, while you don't seem to have a clue what they say.
I assure you that if I personally did it (what google is trying to do), I will be in jail for not being able to pay the sums of money the court will rule aginst me.
Further demonstrating your ignorance, you seem unaware that the U.S. has no debtor's prison provision and you can't go to jail for owing money in a civil suit. While it is true the U.S. legal system is influenced by having enough money to fight things in court, you would not be breaking the law by doing the same thing Google is doing.
Copyright laws are broken when google copies and make available (either for search or full/partial quote) without the concent[sic] of publishers.
You are wrong. The whole point of the Fair Use Doctrine, as implemented by the Copyright Act of 1976 is to enumerate the criteria for republishing without the copyright holder's permission.
Not only that, but if publishers wanted, they could simply prove financial damages regardless of copyright violations, that will still stand in court.
Financial damages are not, by themselves, grounds for compensation. If someone opens a McDonalds and Burger King goes out of business, the Burger King cannot win compensation unless there is wrongdoing.
This is not a question of view. it is a question of law.
Well, actually the law itself is a bit vague, it is more a matter of interpretation of that law, as embodied by previous court rulings on the matter. You should really educate yourself on the laws before arguing what they say.
As for your assumption that google will spend hundreds of millions by trying to contact authors, this is simply funny. The number of publishers that publish 80% of the books in the world is very limited. Publishers are trusted with the copyright laws of most of the books.
First, I said millions, not hundreds of millions. Second, the last time I looked more than 90% of copyrighted works right's were owned by unknown parties. What percentage of that is books is anyone's guess, but a substantial number of books are certainly owned by indeterminate parties. Google could go to great expense to get permission from some of them, but it has no need to do so and not doing so benefits them and end users.
We do indeed think differently on this subject. When I read about Google print I was unsure of it's legality, and my gut instinct said they were probably breaking the law. Then I did this thing called "research" where you look for facts to determine if an opinion is correct. After reading the laws, the case summaries, and reading expert opinions by lawyers I learned that Google is probably within their rights, as well as other tidbits about what why and how this case is being filed in an odd jurisdiction. You on the other hand, just made a bunch of assumptions and obviously did not bother to find out the facts. That is why although the courts could rule against Google, I know that it is unlikely. Please research "fair use," "copyright law," "Kelly v. Arriba Soft," and "google print." before bothering to reply or make more ignorant assertions about copyright law.
Speaking of VMWare and its ilk, does anyone care to predict if OSX will run on top of Linux or other OS's? Can the TPM functions be faked out?
Of course they can be faked, but doing so is probably a DMCA violation, so I doubt you will see any commercial products available that do this unless they partner with Apple to make it happen (i.e. pay Apple a pile o cash to cover the loss of hardware sales). I will likely run OS X as my base system anyway, with Linux and Windows running in virtual machines on top. OS X is plenty stable and reasonably secure so it should make a fine base OS with no hacking needed.
I want an OS that I can multi-boot MS-Windows and Linux on that runs on commodity hardware.
Apple has said they will not try to prevent other OS's from booting on intel boxes they sell. As for commodity hardware, well that will depend, I suspect Apple boxes will, as usual, implement lots of hardware that does not yet work in Windows. Apple will prevent OS X from running on hardware they don't sell, since the OS and all the other software they produce is a loss-leader to sell hardware and they would be losing money developing the OS and all the free applications and selling it at current market prices. Also it would put them in direct competition with MS, whose illegal contracts make business pretty much impossible. Four superior OS's (to Windows) have already died trying to sell into that market.
Otherwise, "Mac OSX on TPM'd Intel" is just another way of saying "Mac OSX on a proprieTary PlatforM." Not interested.
That will probably be your opinion of Apple boxes. They will run OSX , Linux, and the BSDs just fine, but Windows is anyone's guess. Windows will probably run fine in emulation ala VMWare and the like, and their will probably be some sort of WINE like way to run Windows programs, but I would not count on MS letting it boot out of the box. Of course Apple's PPC platform was technically even more open and runs Linux and the BSDs as well. It was even produced by multiple Vendors without reverse engineering (unlike x86). So when you say , "proprieTary PlatforM" I assume you really mean "platform that runs Windows."
Until every byte of code verifies for itself that it is running on genuine Apple hardware before it will execute, I'm not sure if Apple can ever close this door.
Of course they can't and don't expect to. Their goal is to make sure it does not effect profits. People will always hack and pirate and Apple can't stop them. Their goal is to make it hard enough that most people won't bother and so that 99.9% of users would rather use a Apple system than deal with hacking another system to sort of work. Heck people ran Mac OS in emulators on x86 hardware years and years ago. It just was never enough to make any difference in the marketplace. Do you think Apple cares if 500 hackers get OS X sort of running on commodity boxes? Hell no, these people would probably never have bought a legitimate copy anyway and even if they would have it is not worth the effort to lock the system down more just to sell 500 more copies. Anyone who thinks more than a tiny percentage of the market will be running a hacked version is quite mistaken.
The publishers are just pissed that Google's making money and they aren't, it has nothing to do with copyright or fair use. If it's such an issue, why don't they just encourage all of their authors to opt-out and setup their own search index to compete. That's not what they want at all, they just want a bigger piece of the pie than they are already going to get from purchases of searched books. Don't assign altruistic values to the publishing companies, they are just greedy like everyone else.
I don't think you are giving them enough credit here. This is about a threat to their revenue, not a grab for more. The groups suing google are publishing houses. What vital services do they perform? They print the hard copies, but anyone can do that. These companies really just send them on to the printers. They market the books, but Google is making that less necessary and if an author was so inclined they could always use a regular marketing agency. They have lots of contacts and contracts with book stores and chains which they use to distribute the works. Google is making it less necessary to be in a major brick and mortar store to get sold and online stores have already taken off. Where does this leave the publishing companies? It leaves them wishing there was no Google print, or at least not a good one, since their position is seriously undermined by it.
That said, I don't think the laws should be ensuring revenue streams. If Google has found a better way to let people find books than the traditional publishing houses have offered, well that is progress. Yes, the publishing companies are greedy. Yes, they are trying to abuse the spirit of the copyright system. They are also probably looking forward a bit more than you and seeing a real threat to their jobs.
As far as I know, in the case you discuss they didn't generate revenue from copies of the entire image, but from thumbnails. Google uses the entire copy of a book to generate revenue. If, instead of serving up thumbnails, this company had served up jigsaw pieces of the entire image, ultimately serving up almost the entire image to different customers, I think the court may have decided differently.
In both cases they profited from ads served with an excerpt from the work, which they copied in full. The law makes no relevant distinction between a thumbnail or another excerpt. The courts are judging based upon the end result of a republishing and it's effect on the market. Since no one user can get the whole book, only a few small excerpts that qualify, together as a single legal excerpt how is this any different? Sure a user could hack the system, but they can also go to the library and make their own copy. Google has performed due diligence here. Basically, based upon the fair use doctrine, I don't see any reason why the courts would rule differently. There are 4 criteria. Google's purpose is the same. The nature of the work is not such that is should be in the public domain due to an overriding public interest. The amount of the work is probably less if anything. Finally, the effect of the copying upon the marketplace is no different.
I like photograph X copyrighted by someone else, and I want to use it as a design on my chocolate gift boxes. Instead of putting the entire design on one box I chop the copies of the original photo up into little pieces and put different pieces on each box, ultimately using the entire image, but not on one box. Am I in breach of copyright?
Nope. The relevant criteria for fair use are spelled out. Your effect upon the market value of the original piece and the quantity and character of your excerpts are decidedly fair use.
I am using the entire image (to boost my sales), even if my customers individually only see a piece.
If the New York Times, over the course of four decades of quotation, eventually includes all the text contained in some famous poem, does that mean they have breached the copyright? The answer is no, because each "republishing" is a separate case. Even if eventually a person could piece together the entire work, you're still in the clear so long as your intention and effect on the market are within the specifications of fair use.
'robots.txt' lets you gain _additional_ control that most publishers do not have.
Actually, it lets you request a single additional control, (although it need not be honored by others), in a formal, machine readable way. I imagine if Google print takes off some publishers might implement standardized tag in the text of the book to automate this request. This would be especially useful for certain reference works like dictionaries, thesaurus, recipe books, etc.
Neither am I a lawyer or legal historian. From my reading I get the impression that non-commercial copying was always considered fair use in court cases until the 1976 copyright act clarified the fair-use provisions of U.S. copyright law, at which point this was changed to the effect of the copying on the marketplace and given less weight. There may have been exceptions, but if so I have not read any of them.
When did Google start to index copyrighted works?
Google is indeed scanning copyrighted works. Only about 1/3 of the books are in the public domain. For that matter all the pages Google caches and provides snippets of and links to on the internet are copyrighted.
The issue is whether or not this is a "fair use" of the works, which to date the U.S. courts have ruled similar instances are indeed fair use. Basically precedent has indicated that it is legal to copy entire works in order to use those works to produce and republish excerpts, provided it is a use covered under the fair use doctrine.
I think you have the right of it. A lot of the confusion comes from the fact that up until recently (the 70s I believe) non-commercial copying was permitted.
So let me spell this out clearly: Google hold copies of original works. They use these entire copies to serve up snippets to individual users. By serving up snippets they are able to make sales of advertising. Therefore Google are using entire copies of copyrighted material for commercial benefit. This is so far from fair use it's not debatable. So Google are clearly in breach of copyright even though the end users aren't. I can't spell it out more simply than that.
The courts, thus far, have disagreed with you. In precedent setting cases it was ruled that the republishing, not the copying is the part restricted to excerpts. The courts have ruled that it is legal to copy entire works for the purpose of providing excerpts in a case where those excerpts were generating revenue via ads. Basically the case was about a system just like Google images where entire images were copied and made into thumbnails, which were displayed with ads to generate revenue.
This court case was a district one, not a supreme court decision but all but one district court has filed supporting briefs. Guess which district they chose to file against Google in? If they can win in the district court a supreme court appeal is almost guaranteed, and these lawyers are gambling that they can delay with an injunction and tie things up in court, or that the supremes will disagree with all the lower courts (sans one).
Google does NOT index all the web. Robots.txt is opt out indeed, BUT the site has to be open to the web. NYTimes subscribed archive is not open to the web. Even without Robots.txt it wont be in google. Same with books. Books are not open to the net, nor they are free.
I think an argument could be made that selling a book to a public library is akin to publishing it on the internet. The NYTimes subscription version is akin to selling a limited print of a book and refusing sales to libraries. For some reason you're trying to draw parallels between books and the internet. Let me make it really simple for you. Publishing is publishing in the eyes of the law. Whether it is published on the internet or in a book does not matter. If a company started giving away books where you had to pay a subscription to unlock the cover would that make you feel better?
I would say - Tough. Most of the books published (that are still copyrighted) can be tracked back to the publisher. For those that are not, a solution can be found. That is no excuse for not contacting those you CAN contact.
So you're of the opinion that Google should spend millions of dollars and years of time trying to contact every publisher of every book and asking their permission to do something they don't legally need the author's permission to do and which most authors don't seem to have a problem with them doing. And your reason for this is what again? And you think if no author can be found for a work, that work should disappear from the face of the earth and be unavailable for people to find by searching. And why is that?
Not formatted? Its very clearly formatted. And you are claiming that after indexing the entire book google, with all their brilliant people, can not write some routine that searches for copyright notice?
No, I'm saying that notice was not designed with Google indexing in mind and is not a convention like robots.txt. If publishers want to come up with such a convention and implement it, and if Google still feels like being nice and then not indexing those works, that is fine. But their is no reason for them to devote time and money to make print.google.com not work as well. What is their motivation here?
Console games, DVD/VCR movies, all say that you are not allowed to publicly display the movie. Does that mean jack shit too? Maybe we can freely copy console games cause who cares if its written somewhere in the box that we can't why should we bother to read it?
You seem very unclear on the concept of fair use. Yes, absolutely it is legal to copy DVDs, VCR movies, and to publicly display them in certain circumstances. Provided it is a fair use, as the law defines it, for example, educational institutions can publicly display large parts of movies for their classes. If you want to make a backup copy of a DVD it is specifically protected as fair use. If the publisher includes a note that says you can't, too bad. They don't have the right to impose arbitrary restrictions on people who have already bought a work
If its hard for google to find the copyright notice, it should be hard for us to realize what theft is as well. Hell... what about any other crime... who are they to expect us to obey the law when it is written is some obscure book somewhere, which I never saw??
While I disagree in principal with the concept of "ignorance is no excuse for violating the law" that is a completely different argument. You are operating under the false assumption that what Google is doing is illegal, which is most likely not the case.
I disagree with you. See what happens if google stopped linking to the original sites from which they index data. How many sites do you think will allow google to keep scanning their sites? It is common sense and clearly is part of the fair use doctrine.
Gee maybe you should actually read the fair use doctrine. You are legally allowed to republished excerpts of works, subject to a number of rest
Which relates to the Xbox how?
When an Xbox engineer working for MS says standards are good for us and let us get better prices and other advantages and MS's PR people say that standards are useless for their customers and won't give them better prices or other advantages some people see that as MS contradicting itself. The truth is, everyone knows standards and multiple vendors are good for buyers, but MS lies about it when trying to sell their products because they specifically don't adhere to standards to avoid competitive bids and disadvantage their customers.
His point was, this is an MS engineer contradicting what MS has been very vocally claiming in press releases and when lobbying politicians.
I hope you're a troll. Slashdot is not the world and most news agencies don't bother to print articles like this. They will print, "Xbox360 sells out in 3 hours!" because it will sell more papers.
The last time I was looking for a new bank, browser compatibility was an issue for me. I rejected three banks out of hand for not supporting anything but IE. I attempted to e-mail all of them to let them know why they lost my business, but one of the websites did not list an e-mail address anywhere and their "contact us" link was an invalid javascript that did not work on any browser at all. That sort of incompetence is enough to make me avoid them forever.
WHOOOOSH!
That was the sound of the previous post's point zipping right over your head.
The original poster did not argue that multiple suppliers for every possible component is a good thing or that MS or anyone else should not do it. Obviously it is advantageous to any business to have multiple suppliers for everything they need and to use parts built to standards to ensure that they are getting the same thing from any given vendor. The advantages to price, availability, and future planning is enormous.
What the previous poster was pointing out is that while MS intelligently makes sure to secure these benefits when it is a purchaser, it pooh-poohs them when it is the seller and one of their potential customers wants those advantages. A perfect example is the Mass. Open Office format issue. The state wants to use a standardized format so that they can take bids from multiple companies and thus get a better price, better availability, and can insure they get the same thing and thus will always be able to get the part. MS has been saying it is not fair to ask for a standardized part and take bids from multiple vendors and instead of bidding on supplying what the state wants, they have launched a PR campaign and have been trying to pressure politicians into going with them as the sole vendor for a proprietary part and thus losing all those advantages.
How is this "crooked?"
It is "crooked" in that it is deceptive. They are trying to use product supply and marketing to trick people into thinking something that is not true. Some of us think when a company blatantly lies to it's customers and potential customers, you know that is a bad thing. Yes, yes, I know all marketers are liars and "everybody is doing it." That is not an excuse.
It is WE who like our sites scanned, and if not, we add a Robots.txt file.
I'd just like to mention, adding a robots.txt is an opt out scheme. Google indexes all the internet that people don't specifically request they do not. Legally, they do not even have to respect the robots.txt, they do so to generate good will. It would be prohibitively expensive to contact every website operator and get permission in advance.
The same holds true for books as well. It is just too expensive to ask every copyright holder, and many copyright holders are completely obscured. Authors die, publishing houses go out of business. Technically, someone owns the copy rights, but no one really knows who.
All (most) books say have on them, in print, right in the beginning a text saying "copying of material from this book is not allowed unless permitted, prior, in writing, by the author or the publisher".
Which means jack and shit since it is not formatted in such a way as to be machine readable, like the robots.txt and since it is not legally binding. Fair use means Google can index them in order to recreate a excerpt and children can copy a paragraph for their book report. They could but in a clause that says "you agree to pay me $1 for every letter in this book you read." It means nothing.
And authors have little ability to "check the web logs" and see who scans their books.
Neither do web users since it is easy to forge said information.
Fair use dictates that google links to our sites directly.
What the hell are you taking about? The fair use doctrine says no such thing.
Not only that, but internet has shaped to be mostly a free and open medium. Books - not. Books, you have to buy, or at least subscribe to a library (paid, directly or indirectly). Different "market".
The internet is not free. A good chunk is free, and a good chunk is paid for by ads, but then pay-to-view porn sites make up about a third as well. All three of these models apply to print as well.
Basically, from doing a little research it is pretty apparent Google is likely to prevail in this case. As for whether or not that is a bad thing, the only people who have so far objected are people who make their living marketing and distributing books, because they are afraid that their position is in jeopardy. They are right, their positions are in jeopardy. That does not mean print.google.com is not a wonderful thing for authors, readers, researchers, and mankind as a whole. I'm quite happy if Google indexes books I've written, it is free advertising. As an avid reader I'm happy to be able to easily find books relating to keywords if I am doing research of looking for a reference. I can't imagine that I or very many other people will search for some term, find a book, and use that excerpt of knowledge instead of buying a book, if they would otherwise have bought the book for that purpose. If the excerpt you need is that small you can just write it down at the library of book store and you have no business buying the whole book in the first place. Google print is a double win for authors and consumers and a minor blow to middle men. That is jsut fine, Copyright is supposed to be about encouraging authors and benefitting the people, not ensuring a revenue stream for distributors
I said HARDWARE requirements, because that is what was discussed by the CIO... the machines not being powerful enough to run office. SOFTWARE, specifically Windows 98 came into play by you guys, and I sufficiently squashed that FUD in my other post.
If by squashed you mean, demonstrated that you don't know what you are talking about. .DOC is only really readable and writable completely by Word. Only certain versions of word are available for sale and they only run on certain platforms. Thus at least those minimum hardware standards for Word+the right version for Windows need to be met for a proposal using .doc format.
Using the Open Office format, the minimum requirements of machines are much lower because you can use any number of word processors and OS's with lower hardware requirements. Abiword+Linux, for example, will keep current hardware viable when their is no .doc solution to do the same. Further, even using the same OS, their are several programs with much less hardware requirements than any available that read/write the .doc format. What part of this are you failing to understand?
Also, this plan is for two years from now. So OO 2.0 is what would be used.
No, open document will be used. It may be using openoffice 1, 2, staroffice, abiword, wordperfect, koffice, or any number of other programs for a particular desktop, as needed.
I didn't say PDF wasn't open, I said that MS's format was more opened.
What the hell is "more opened?" You said "PDF is proprietary". This is completely untrue. It is an open, approved standard that is fully documented and has been implemented by dozens of companies and organizations. Word is not open, not documented, and in fact as obfuscated as possible to try to stop reverse engineering. It is not even a single format, but a whole group of them that are not compatible with one another.
AND Adobe owns the patent, its theirs and you can't change it.
PDF is not patent encumbered. It is trademarked, which is to say, you can change it all you want, but only Adobe is allowed to decide which documented format is called "PDF." You can take the PDF spec, change one thing in it, and call it "Bob's document format" and Adobe can do nothing about it. More importantly anyone can make readers and writers and will be able to do so in the future. Claiming otherwise is uninformed hogwash as is claiming that any of the Word formats are open or unencumbered. You're just full of shit on this one.
You are operating under the uninformed notion that MS Office 12 is a closed format, it is not. It can be used royalty free. It is also published and documented in great detail for anyone to see or use. Read my other posts to get links and educate yourself.
Too bad you are completely wrong. The format is not fully documented, vital formatting data is stored as a binary in the header, and patents restrict use of the format for many types of programs including all GPL software. Gee that would not be because OpenOffice is GPL would it? Get a fucking clue. The so called "Open XML" word format is XML that avoids the benefits of XML by encoding chunks of binary data and using patents to remove all the benefits of having a documented format. The most open thing about it is the fact that they put open in the name, because it is not open it is closed.
First of all, at no point will the government provide downloads to software. Maybe links to another site that will give you software, and that is were the problem comes in.
He asserts. Traditionally that is followed up by some support, or is that just your opinion that you pulled out of your ass?
Spend some time reading trends and you will learn that people are starting to get very scared about ID theft and spyware. The rate of downloads on sites like downloads.com has dropped drastically in comparison to what it use to be. People just don't