From the point of view of a university lecturer: agreed.
Incidentally, precisely because of this suit I've foresworn the use of Blackboard for a course I'm going to be teaching over the summer. Instead I'll be using good old fashioned WWW pages in conjunction with a password-protected Google Group. That combo provides the same functionality, and without any of the slowness and unreliability. Oh, and they don't cost six-figure sums per annum.
You mean to say that, were I an Oz resident, I couldn't flash my DVD-drive to enable me to play my perfectly legally imported Region 1 DVDs?
See this comment. However, it wouldn't have been surprising if this were in fact the case; Oz has been pretty draconian in these matters all along; it's still illegal to copy your own CDs to an MP3 player, for example. (I think. It's illegal in NZ, anyway.) Not that anyone's ever been prosecuted for that... yet.
Who says the goddesses Eris and Dysnomia weren't popular in ancient times?
Eris was popular (if you can call a goddess of strife "popular"), Dysnomia not so much so -- at least in the sense that Eris appears in literature a fair bit. I don't know offhand of any temples to either goddess outside civic complexes. Incidentally, both goddesses are in fact personifications, i.e. eris is the word for strife, dysnomia is simply the word for "bad governance"; but Eris in particular has a respectable provenance and history (she has a cameo or two in the Iliad).
Also, some universities do keep the intellectual property rights to professors' research under some circumstances, though I think that tends to be enforced only if there's any chance that a product of research will be profitable. I'm not sure if this tends to happen in some parts of the world more than others. I believe Cambridge University does this, though I'm not sure.
and couldn't bring myself to add others. While things like Half Life, Starcraft, Deus Ex, BG2, Rogue, and Grim Fandango are all great games, they either didn't change the way I thought about games in quite the way the above three did, or else I don't still enjoy playing them. Rogue and Deus Ex were great, but I just don't play them now, or not much. I don't think Half Life has quite the perfect storyline it needs to make a top five list. Anyway, I'll settle for a top three.
... and then he'd really be working for literally nothing. Look, maybe on Planet Hackwrench paying tuition fees gives you ownership of every idea a professor ever has and every minute of his time, 24/7, but in real life, a professor's employment by a university has some differences from slave labour.
It might be worth realising that teaching is only about 33% of what professors get paid for. The rest, in an ideal situation, is research. In the real world, it's a three-way split between teaching, research, and bureaucracy, though you can guess which of those three ends up becoming the dominant term.
And, I hasten to add, what this professor is doing certainly belongs in the "bureaucracy" category rather than the "teaching" category. (I recall fondly how much more time I had for both teaching and research before the days of Blackboard/WebCT.) Those people in this discussion who are insisting that this should become standard practice for all professors are basically trying to add more to the administrative load without any compensation elsewhere.
are teachers really starting to call their lessons "intellectual property"?
Not "starting"; it's been going on since the advent of the WWW, maybe even since the advent of Xerox. Lots of universities have very strict policies about not letting lecture notes be published online, unless they're password-access-only. In the UK, a department being reviewed can (sometimes) be heavily penalised for making lecture notes open-access. Most of the policies tend to come from top-down, though. Having said that, there's also a certain amount of this kind of thing coming from bottom-up in the department where I am now: not much interest around here in things like open-access archives or freedom of information.
I understand what you're saying -- I'm a university lecturer too -- but it is a two-edged axe. On the one hand, I agree that it feels awful when someone pinches your work and doesn't even attribute it to you. On the other hand, when I write an article, I want people to read it. I don't want it to be reserved for just a privileged few who have the good fortune to be at rich universities with well-endowed libraries. I don't see a lecture as something qualitatively different.
If you'd care to try it, I find that slapping a CC licence on my lecture notes does wonders for my peace of mind. The same things go on, but suddenly it's no longer "theft": suddenly it's ethical and above board.... and down goes the blood pressure.
The students have already paid tuition to hear the content of the lecture, why should they pay again.
Because they got what they paid for already.
Plus, he's recording all of this and hosting all of this with university equipment.
RTFA. It's not hosted on university servers; and how do you know he's recording it with university equipment? In any case lots of universities have the policy that academics retain IP rights on their work; others don't. I guess NCSU does.
What entitles him to any profit at all.
What, you think he should be compelled to do give his work away for free? Even if he should be (which would be monstrous), it's a purely nominal profit anyway -- to cover the effort and materials, as TFA says.
RTFA before letting a knee-jerk reaction effect a regime change on your brain.
FWIW I think it's ethically a grey area when academics choose to withhold their work by not putting it in an open-access archive, or by publishing only in for-profit journals -- just as much as most people around here have mixed feelings (at best) about proprietary computer code. But this isn't the same ballpark: the grey area is still miles away. And legally there's certainly no question of there being anything fishy here, unless the university has completely corrupt policies.
If I go into a Barnes and Nobles and buy a book there, the assumption is that the book is a legal copy of the book. If it isn't, it's Barnes and Nobles' fault, not mine.
Unless, of course, the book happens to be the new Harry Potter book, and Barnes and Noble sold it to you before they were supposed to. Then it's your problem, not Barnes and Noble's....
We need to have the EU sue apple and linux producers too for destroying the anti-spyware market in their areas too!
Leaving aside the fact that neither Apple nor Linux has any kind of monopoly, they'd have no case against Linux, since most of the apps in your average Linux distribution are third-party anyway. If Microsoft were to follow a similar practice, e.g. by including AVG, Sophos, Kerio, ZoneAlarm, etc etc, in a default install, there'd be no case against them either.
Look, I'm no fan of Microsoft,... but you can't force the company to make an (more?) insecure operating system so that security companies can make their dime.
The key word is "monopoly". Different rules apply to monopolies.
You cannot just alter the GPL license, by changing or deleting text from the middle of it.
Why not? If it's your code, you can release it under any licence you want. It might end up as a licence that's incompatible with the GPL, but there's nothing to stop you doing it, other than the FSF deciding to enforce its copyright on the wording of the licence.
Anyway, it's not relevant. The phrase "or (at your option) any later version" isn't actually in the licence. Take another look: notice that it isn't in the "Terms and conditions" section, but in the section "How to Apply These Terms to Your New Programs". This is how the Linux kernel, among other things, has been released without that phrase.
That's the bit the GP was drawing attention to too. Not all applications are distributed with the "or (at your option) any later version" clause. For example: the Linux kernel.
Indeed. Originally there was only one meaning, but changes in the technology of publication led to a dual meaning. It all started in Hellenistic Egypt, 3rd century BCE, when people decided to have standard "book" divisions in long poetic works like those of Homer. They divided works like the Iliad and Odyssey into "books" quite literally -- corresponding to the amount of material that would conveniently fit on a sensibly-sized papyrus scroll. Centuries later, with the advent of the codex and even more with the advent of printing, it became more common to publish such works in one or two volumes, but the "book" divisions were so ingrained that they are still preserved. Hence today we still have the 24 "books" of the Iliad published in one "book". It's a dual meaning that's pretty common.
First off, the Hobbit is only about 30 years prior to "Fellowship."
Make that 60 years plus. In The Hobbit Bilbo is 51/52; in TFotR he turns 111 in chapter one, and a good couple of decades more pass before chapter two. Sorry I don't have exact figures.
I also remember him planning on sueing someone for copying his "composition" but I'm not sure about that.
Yes, that is mostly correct -- except that the suit wasn't just planned, it actually took place. Mike Batt put a track called "A minute's silence" on an album called "Classical Graffiti". In July 2002 Cage's publisher, Peters, sued; in September Batt settled by making a donation to the John Cage Trust.
Put like that, it sounds monstrous. Well, it wasn't quite that simple: the catch is that on the album, the track was credited to "Batt/Cage". So there were actually some, slight, grounds for suing.
Batt claimed the settlement as a victory (he described it as a "gentlemanly dispute" and that he had persuaded Peters that they didn't have a case), but then again so did Peters.
Even though it supposedly happens over a bigger area than Morrowind, it feels much smaller. I think adding the fast travel option was probably a mistake.
I appreciated fast travel, but the thing I felt really made Oblivion feel smaller was the long-distance views. Oooo pretty, but still gives a "smaller" feel. Similarly Morrowind with the FPS-optimiser mod makes that feel a lot smaller too.
I don't recall there ever being a door you couldn't pick or an NPC you had to kill in Morrowind.
I hear that. In fact, I'll confirm that there really were no NPCs in Morrowind that you couldn't kill.
(Hell, I wouldn't mind getting the original Morrowind content on the new engine, either.)
I hear that too, though I predict that if such a thing ever materialises, you'll find that Vvardenfell suddenly feels tiny...
Slashdot Mirror
From the point of view of a university lecturer: agreed.
Incidentally, precisely because of this suit I've foresworn the use of Blackboard for a course I'm going to be teaching over the summer. Instead I'll be using good old fashioned WWW pages in conjunction with a password-protected Google Group. That combo provides the same functionality, and without any of the slowness and unreliability. Oh, and they don't cost six-figure sums per annum.
See this comment. However, it wouldn't have been surprising if this were in fact the case; Oz has been pretty draconian in these matters all along; it's still illegal to copy your own CDs to an MP3 player, for example. (I think. It's illegal in NZ, anyway.) Not that anyone's ever been prosecuted for that ... yet.
It may be of interest that an almost-literal translation of dysnomia into Latin would be discordia. Ah well.
Eris was popular (if you can call a goddess of strife "popular"), Dysnomia not so much so -- at least in the sense that Eris appears in literature a fair bit. I don't know offhand of any temples to either goddess outside civic complexes. Incidentally, both goddesses are in fact personifications, i.e. eris is the word for strife, dysnomia is simply the word for "bad governance"; but Eris in particular has a respectable provenance and history (she has a cameo or two in the Iliad).
Also, some universities do keep the intellectual property rights to professors' research under some circumstances, though I think that tends to be enforced only if there's any chance that a product of research will be profitable. I'm not sure if this tends to happen in some parts of the world more than others. I believe Cambridge University does this, though I'm not sure.
Hmm. I got as far as
and couldn't bring myself to add others. While things like Half Life, Starcraft, Deus Ex, BG2, Rogue, and Grim Fandango are all great games, they either didn't change the way I thought about games in quite the way the above three did, or else I don't still enjoy playing them. Rogue and Deus Ex were great, but I just don't play them now, or not much. I don't think Half Life has quite the perfect storyline it needs to make a top five list. Anyway, I'll settle for a top three.
... and then he'd really be working for literally nothing. Look, maybe on Planet Hackwrench paying tuition fees gives you ownership of every idea a professor ever has and every minute of his time, 24/7, but in real life, a professor's employment by a university has some differences from slave labour.
It might be worth realising that teaching is only about 33% of what professors get paid for. The rest, in an ideal situation, is research. In the real world, it's a three-way split between teaching, research, and bureaucracy, though you can guess which of those three ends up becoming the dominant term.
And, I hasten to add, what this professor is doing certainly belongs in the "bureaucracy" category rather than the "teaching" category. (I recall fondly how much more time I had for both teaching and research before the days of Blackboard/WebCT.) Those people in this discussion who are insisting that this should become standard practice for all professors are basically trying to add more to the administrative load without any compensation elsewhere.
Not "starting"; it's been going on since the advent of the WWW, maybe even since the advent of Xerox. Lots of universities have very strict policies about not letting lecture notes be published online, unless they're password-access-only. In the UK, a department being reviewed can (sometimes) be heavily penalised for making lecture notes open-access. Most of the policies tend to come from top-down, though. Having said that, there's also a certain amount of this kind of thing coming from bottom-up in the department where I am now: not much interest around here in things like open-access archives or freedom of information.
I understand what you're saying -- I'm a university lecturer too -- but it is a two-edged axe. On the one hand, I agree that it feels awful when someone pinches your work and doesn't even attribute it to you. On the other hand, when I write an article, I want people to read it. I don't want it to be reserved for just a privileged few who have the good fortune to be at rich universities with well-endowed libraries. I don't see a lecture as something qualitatively different.
If you'd care to try it, I find that slapping a CC licence on my lecture notes does wonders for my peace of mind. The same things go on, but suddenly it's no longer "theft": suddenly it's ethical and above board. ... and down goes the blood pressure.
Because they got what they paid for already.
RTFA. It's not hosted on university servers; and how do you know he's recording it with university equipment? In any case lots of universities have the policy that academics retain IP rights on their work; others don't. I guess NCSU does.
What, you think he should be compelled to do give his work away for free? Even if he should be (which would be monstrous), it's a purely nominal profit anyway -- to cover the effort and materials, as TFA says.
RTFA before letting a knee-jerk reaction effect a regime change on your brain.
FWIW I think it's ethically a grey area when academics choose to withhold their work by not putting it in an open-access archive, or by publishing only in for-profit journals -- just as much as most people around here have mixed feelings (at best) about proprietary computer code. But this isn't the same ballpark: the grey area is still miles away. And legally there's certainly no question of there being anything fishy here, unless the university has completely corrupt policies.
Unless, of course, the book happens to be the new Harry Potter book, and Barnes and Noble sold it to you before they were supposed to. Then it's your problem, not Barnes and Noble's ....
Leaving aside the fact that neither Apple nor Linux has any kind of monopoly, they'd have no case against Linux, since most of the apps in your average Linux distribution are third-party anyway. If Microsoft were to follow a similar practice, e.g. by including AVG, Sophos, Kerio, ZoneAlarm, etc etc, in a default install, there'd be no case against them either.
The key word is "monopoly". Different rules apply to monopolies.
Why not? If it's your code, you can release it under any licence you want. It might end up as a licence that's incompatible with the GPL, but there's nothing to stop you doing it, other than the FSF deciding to enforce its copyright on the wording of the licence.
Anyway, it's not relevant. The phrase "or (at your option) any later version" isn't actually in the licence. Take another look: notice that it isn't in the "Terms and conditions" section, but in the section "How to Apply These Terms to Your New Programs". This is how the Linux kernel, among other things, has been released without that phrase.
That's the bit the GP was drawing attention to too. Not all applications are distributed with the "or (at your option) any later version" clause. For example: the Linux kernel.
FWIW, I find a 1 ms cross-fade works nicely to erase any sense of a gap between different files.
Indeed. Originally there was only one meaning, but changes in the technology of publication led to a dual meaning. It all started in Hellenistic Egypt, 3rd century BCE, when people decided to have standard "book" divisions in long poetic works like those of Homer. They divided works like the Iliad and Odyssey into "books" quite literally -- corresponding to the amount of material that would conveniently fit on a sensibly-sized papyrus scroll. Centuries later, with the advent of the codex and even more with the advent of printing, it became more common to publish such works in one or two volumes, but the "book" divisions were so ingrained that they are still preserved. Hence today we still have the 24 "books" of the Iliad published in one "book". It's a dual meaning that's pretty common.
Make that 60 years plus. In The Hobbit Bilbo is 51/52; in TFotR he turns 111 in chapter one, and a good couple of decades more pass before chapter two. Sorry I don't have exact figures.
The dragons weren't maiar (though the Balrogs were).
Yes, that is mostly correct -- except that the suit wasn't just planned, it actually took place. Mike Batt put a track called "A minute's silence" on an album called "Classical Graffiti". In July 2002 Cage's publisher, Peters, sued; in September Batt settled by making a donation to the John Cage Trust.
Put like that, it sounds monstrous. Well, it wasn't quite that simple: the catch is that on the album, the track was credited to "Batt/Cage". So there were actually some, slight, grounds for suing.
Batt claimed the settlement as a victory (he described it as a "gentlemanly dispute" and that he had persuaded Peters that they didn't have a case), but then again so did Peters.
Or as Weird Al put it: you make a rich man come ... (from the song: Windows 95 Sucks)
How scary is it that I knew all of these abbreviations, in spite of never having played WoW? *shudder of fear*
I appreciated fast travel, but the thing I felt really made Oblivion feel smaller was the long-distance views. Oooo pretty, but still gives a "smaller" feel. Similarly Morrowind with the FPS-optimiser mod makes that feel a lot smaller too.
I hear that. In fact, I'll confirm that there really were no NPCs in Morrowind that you couldn't kill.
I hear that too, though I predict that if such a thing ever materialises, you'll find that Vvardenfell suddenly feels tiny ...
Fair enough. Rant over. :-)