A property is something you posses. There are many definition to the word 'property' and you seem to be getting hung up on the land definition as being the only one. And since you can not posses an idea, imaginary property really isn't property at all.
Sure, go ahead and try to argue that possesion does not mean the ability to exclude.
35% of the value of the contracts go into "offset deals" which benefit the Saudi economy to the tune of billions. There are other tricks to. So, 35% of what the saudis spend on way overpriced equipment comes back to them -- still don't see anything remotely aid-like about that. Still 0% of the money coming from the US government.
Well what about the billions in military aid given to Saudi Arabia, one of the most oppressive regimes in the world? I would be surprised if the USA gave any military aid to the Saudis. Sold them equipment at exorbitant prices, yes, gave them aid, no.
Naming a game "Scrabulous" obviously (court to decide) builds from the name Scrabble. Would Scrabulous be as popular if it wasn't instantly recognizable? Probably not. They should have named it "Definitely NOT Scrabble" - no chance of trademark confusion with that.
That doesn't mean I'd want somebody to be peering inside 24/7 watching my every move. ... If everybody does start thinking exactly that way, then that 'dystopian' future will indeed become reality. Replace "peering inside" with "recording any public space" and you've got that dystopian present. Most people have been brainwashed into thinking that it is OK for any public space to be recorded 24x7 and cross-referenced with the recordings of all other public spaces. As if there is no difference between an individual watching another individual for some period of time and a system watching everybody all the time.
The industry group in question was the IACC - International anti-Counterfeiting Coallition - their mandate being to fight the production and sale o fraudulent knock off products. They were essentially paying for a class to create a fraudulent student with a fraudulent blog while preventing any sort of critical discussion or analysis in the class.
Ho hum. Just another case of corporate hypocrisy, move along, move along....
But they take time, time which (in the scenario posited) doesn't exist. If no-knock warrants were illegal, the police would be forced to develop more civilian-safe protocols and invest in better equipment. That's a win for ALL the good guys - because even with no-knock warrants, cops still get killed.
The grandma case is a perfect example of where more time spent surveiling and less gung-ho would have completely avoiding the killing of an innocent, law-abiding citizen.
What was your media budget pre-internet? That's about as much damage as you can inflict regardless of how much you piss off your ISP. Not so. You ignore the network effect of the damage inflicted by all the people he uploads to. If you want to say that the damage they do is limited to their pre-piracy budgets, then you have to take into account the network effect of all those pre-piracy budgets too.
That's one reason I freely lend from my DVD collection. All my DVDs were purchased through legit means (usually used or at bargain/inventory-clearance pricing levels) but each time I lend one out that's one less sale for the studio, or their proxy, the rental stores.
I absolutely despise that "illegal" is almost always used in reference to file sharing. No one words other activities that way, such as illegal retailing. It's no different from the catch-phrase "muslim terrorist" - despite plenty of non-muslim terrorists (IRA, LTTE, ETA, KGK, ELN, FARC, DHKP/C, Kach, Shining Path, etc) who are usually referred to as just "terrorists" and the over-whelming majority (99.999%) of muslims who aren't terrorists.
You mean the edited version that they can't legally make? Just because a new storage medium inherently prevents direct alteration should not be an excuse to prevent a legitimate buyer from doing something that produces the same end result.
Would you be happy if someone figured out how to use a high-powered laser to burn out individual bits on a mastered DVD and that's what these people did instead?
What if they took the original VHS tape and clipped out certain sections, and over-dubbed other sections?
The end result is the SAME -- the studio gets paid for one copy of the movie either way. Do you really think a quirk of technology should be the deciding factor?
No, the reason such equipment doesn't exist - is because such equipment isn't really practical. Physics in the real world doesn't work like it does in Hollywood. Rrrrright. Of course you can hand-wave about some silly movie tech (which you haven't even bothered to name), but that's completely non-productive.
There are plenty of good tools that exist today but aren't regularly used because no-knock is easier. Fibre-based cameras on a wire as sophisticated "periscopes" for example and sensitive microphones with noise filtering. Hell, its been possible to turn a hung-up telephone on a land-line into a microphone with only minor trickery for 30+ years.
And of course, your whole hollywood baloney completely ignores the effect of better procedures like simply surveiling the premises for a longer period of time to get more information about who is present, what rooms they are in and what they are doing.
The grandma case is a perfect example of where more time spent surveiling and less gung-ho would have completely avoiding the killing of an innocent, law-abiding citizen.
You would think so - if your source of information is Hollywood or tinfoil hat websites. In reality, they don't. And part of the reason they don't have good equipment and, more importantly, good procedures is because the legalization of no-knock warrants has been a crutch they can lean on.
If no-knock warrants were illegal, the police would be forced to develop more civilian-safe protocols and invest in better equipment. That's a win for ALL the good guys - because even with no-knock warrants, cops still get killed.
The issue the directors/producers had with them was that they were changing the movies, not that they weren't getting paid. Which makes the judge's own ruling ironic - according to the findlaw summary, "Second, Judge Matsch said the edits to the movies, although constituting a small percentage of the original films, did nothing to transform the creative expression of the movies."
So, the judge specifically found that the public complaint (versus the lawyers looking for anything to hang their hat on) of the studios and directors was not true.
more like it's buying the book, printing up a redacted version of the book under new binding, and selling them both together. Just because a new storage medium inherently prevents direct alteration should not be an excuse to prevent a legitimate buyer from doing something that produces the same end result.
The only way I could see them having a leg to stand on is if they gave away the edited version at no charge or profit. Sure thing, they just resold the original for a higher price than they paid and threw in the edited version for free.
Indeed, that ruling was just an end-run around the first sale doctrine.
Those clean-edits people were doing the effective equivalent of buying a book, blacking out certain sentences and pulling out specific pages and then reselling the book.
Just because a new storage medium inherently prevents direct alteration should not be an excuse to prevent a legitimate buyer from doing something that produces the same end result.
And "ever-expanding their tastes and knowledge of the canon of art", seriously? I hope you were being sarcastic and not waving your elitist flag. When you are further away from the hollywood hype-machine it is much mentally easier to randomly sample from all over the world. Based on discussions with foreign friends, their interest in non-hollywood (and non-local) productions is orders of magnitude higher than the interest of americans in such things.
Sure the big-name american productions are pirated world-wide, but once you get past the blockbusters there just seems to be a broader interest among the "common man." I don't think that's elitism, I think its just a matter of less advertising.
How do you pronounce Gi-Fi? "guy-fie"? "giffy"? "jiffy"? Obviously it is "Guy-fie" because this will be the next "guy toy" - hooking up your home-theater system with no cables, new kind of remote controls with little video screens built in, all kinds of potential for guy toys.
I've tried to use GIMP a few times, without using the manuals, but after a few minutes of getting nowhere Next time, try google. There are about 3 billion gimp tutorials out there. I can usually find multiple examples for whatever task I want to accomplish by googling on "gimp" and a description of the task.
Different religions have different takes on things. Sure you won't get sued, you may however get imprisoned, lashed, deported or worse for naming a teddy bear or drawing a cartoon. For the most part, especially the teddy bear incident, the local governments have a very strong interest in focusing the attention of their populations on cartoons and teddy bears and away from their own internal problems. The countries where there were mass public protests about both are not the kind of country where mass protests just "happen" - they are orchestrated by the governments themselves.
In Sudan, the teddy bear fiasco was just a means to focus internal and external attention away from the ongoing Darfur Genocide.
Sure, there was a murder and some minor protesting in the "free countries" but not anything close to being considered institutional. Nut jobs are part of the cost of a free society.
I've never run across an online marketplace that doesn't include some provision for restoring purchased content that the buyer can prove he purchased Sounds like you've never used iTunes.
Since there isn't yet a problem for Net Neutrality laws to fix, it seems a little early to define what is and isn't net neutrality. Net neutrality was the law of the land in the USA until just a couple of years ago.
In 2005 the supreme court reclassified ISPs as "information providers" rather than "telecommuniactions providers." Those terms have specific meaning under the tariffs that regulate the telecom industry. Essentially "telecommunications providers" have a set of rules they must abide by that include most of the concepts generally referred to under the umbrella of "network neutrality" while "information providers" are not so regulated.
Hmm... if you have trichromatic light of wavelengths 570nm, 540nm, and 430nm shining on an object that absorbs everything except 550nm, then the object will appear black won't it? Whereas if true white light were shining on it, it would reflect the 550nm wavelengths and our eye would interpret that as... yellow or something. Is that wrong? I believe you are correct.
There has been some work on front-projection screens to produce material that reflects only the specific wavelengths that a (matched) projector produces. The goal being to use such a screen in a bright environment where it will absorb almost all of the visible spectrum, and thus appear black, except for the specific RGB wavelengths in the projected image. Thus greatly reducing the "washout" effect of using a projector in a brightly lit room.
I think sony has a half-assed implementation that they have been selling for a few years now - sorry that I don't have a model number, once I learned it needed more ass I didn't pay too much attention to it.
Slashdot Mirror
Sure, go ahead and try to argue that possesion does not mean the ability to exclude.
Sold them equipment at exorbitant prices, yes, gave them aid, no.
Would Scrabulous be as popular if it wasn't instantly recognizable? Probably not. They should have named it "Definitely NOT Scrabble" - no chance of trademark confusion with that.
...
If everybody does start thinking exactly that way, then that 'dystopian' future will indeed become reality. Replace "peering inside" with "recording any public space" and you've got that dystopian present. Most people have been brainwashed into thinking that it is OK for any public space to be recorded 24x7 and cross-referenced with the recordings of all other public spaces. As if there is no difference between an individual watching another individual for some period of time and a system watching everybody all the time.
"Basque terrorists"
"Kurdish terrorists"
"Hindu terrorists"
etc
Are all also "minorities" but are generally forgone for just "terrorist."
The industry group in question was the IACC - International anti-Counterfeiting Coallition - their mandate being to fight the production and sale o fraudulent knock off products. They were essentially paying for a class to create a fraudulent student with a fraudulent blog while preventing any sort of critical discussion or analysis in the class.
Ho hum. Just another case of corporate hypocrisy, move along, move along....
The grandma case is a perfect example of where more time spent surveiling and less gung-ho would have completely avoiding the killing of an innocent, law-abiding citizen.
That's one reason I freely lend from my DVD collection. All my DVDs were purchased through legit means (usually used or at bargain/inventory-clearance pricing levels) but each time I lend one out that's one less sale for the studio, or their proxy, the rental stores.
Would you be happy if someone figured out how to use a high-powered laser to burn out individual bits on a mastered DVD and that's what these people did instead?
What if they took the original VHS tape and clipped out certain sections, and over-dubbed other sections?
The end result is the SAME -- the studio gets paid for one copy of the movie either way. Do you really think a quirk of technology should be the deciding factor?
There are plenty of good tools that exist today but aren't regularly used because no-knock is easier. Fibre-based cameras on a wire as sophisticated "periscopes" for example and sensitive microphones with noise filtering. Hell, its been possible to turn a hung-up telephone on a land-line into a microphone with only minor trickery for 30+ years.
And of course, your whole hollywood baloney completely ignores the effect of better procedures like simply surveiling the premises for a longer period of time to get more information about who is present, what rooms they are in and what they are doing.
The grandma case is a perfect example of where more time spent surveiling and less gung-ho would have completely avoiding the killing of an innocent, law-abiding citizen.
If no-knock warrants were illegal, the police would be forced to develop more civilian-safe protocols and invest in better equipment. That's a win for ALL the good guys - because even with no-knock warrants, cops still get killed.
So, the judge specifically found that the public complaint (versus the lawyers looking for anything to hang their hat on) of the studios and directors was not true.
Indeed, that ruling was just an end-run around the first sale doctrine.
Those clean-edits people were doing the effective equivalent of buying a book, blacking out certain sentences and pulling out specific pages and then reselling the book.
Just because a new storage medium inherently prevents direct alteration should not be an excuse to prevent a legitimate buyer from doing something that produces the same end result.
Sure the big-name american productions are pirated world-wide, but once you get past the blockbusters there just seems to be a broader interest among the "common man." I don't think that's elitism, I think its just a matter of less advertising.
Sure you won't get sued, you may however get imprisoned, lashed, deported or worse for naming a teddy bear or drawing a cartoon. For the most part, especially the teddy bear incident, the local governments have a very strong interest in focusing the attention of their populations on cartoons and teddy bears and away from their own internal problems. The countries where there were mass public protests about both are not the kind of country where mass protests just "happen" - they are orchestrated by the governments themselves.
In Sudan, the teddy bear fiasco was just a means to focus internal and external attention away from the ongoing Darfur Genocide.
Sure, there was a murder and some minor protesting in the "free countries" but not anything close to being considered institutional. Nut jobs are part of the cost of a free society.
In 2005 the supreme court reclassified ISPs as "information providers" rather than "telecommuniactions providers." Those terms have specific meaning under the tariffs that regulate the telecom industry. Essentially "telecommunications providers" have a set of rules they must abide by that include most of the concepts generally referred to under the umbrella of "network neutrality" while "information providers" are not so regulated.
Brand X
There has been some work on front-projection screens to produce material that reflects only the specific wavelengths that a (matched) projector produces. The goal being to use such a screen in a bright environment where it will absorb almost all of the visible spectrum, and thus appear black, except for the specific RGB wavelengths in the projected image. Thus greatly reducing the "washout" effect of using a projector in a brightly lit room.
I think sony has a half-assed implementation that they have been selling for a few years now - sorry that I don't have a model number, once I learned it needed more ass I didn't pay too much attention to it.
Not necessarily specific recommendations but a good read about the subject in general:
http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2007/08/20/070820fa_fact_owen?printable=true