Jesus, Mary, Joseph and the camel. Every single thing you wrote here could have been lifted, verbatim, from one of the anti-property advocacy groups. Did you just google around and cut-and-paste?
(Incidentally, linking to political propaganda from an insane man makes you look like a crazy person. Be best if you didn't do that again, huh?)
The MPAA does not recognize your right to quote from their movies.
This screener copy of "Million Dollar Baby" that I just picked up from my movie reviewer's desk says different. We get two or three of these every single week. (Not all of the same movie, of course. That would be pretty weird.)
I think you also know that any DRM defeating technology is illegal by the construct of the DMCA.
Again: wrong. That is simply not true. First of all, the fact that you call it "DMCA" leads me to believe that you don't even know what we're talking about. The DMCA hasn't even existed since 1998, when the bill was signed into law. At that point, the DMCA ceased to exist. The function of the DMCA was to establish new provisions and to amend existing provisions within Title 17 of the United States Code, and once that function was carried out, the bill ceased to exist as a legal document.
So odds are outstanding that you've never actually read anything that you're talking about.
Now, to your point: Title 17 prohibits the manufacture or sale of devices whose sole purpose is to circumvent access control or copy prevention mechanisms. Since, by definition, any act that's carried out for the purpose of exercising fair use is not circumvention, this stipulation of the law has absolutely zero impact on fair use.
Remember Elcomsoft? Well, probably not, since you strike me as a short-timer, but what the hey.
There is no legal way for you to quote from a DRMd source, even though it is legal from a "copyright" perspective.
Nonsense. Even if it's inconvenient for you to use digital means, analog means are always available.
This contradiction leaves your rights under copyright laws null and void in a digital environment.
Have you ever heard of "Put That There?" It was a project at the Media Lab back in, I guess, the 80s that combined voice recognition with a gestural interface. The origin of the name should be obvious: The system's killer demo involved a guy sitting in front of a screen, pointing to a thing, saying "Put that," then pointing somewhere else and saying "there."
At the time, the system was slow and primitive, but more importantly it was big. It had a big-ass projection screen and multiple cameras, and I think the operator had to wear a glove. Very impractical.
Ironically, today we have basically everything we need to make a system like "Put That There" work. If you've got a Mac with an iSight camera, all you really need to add is software.
Anybody seen ToySight? We're already there. We just need to tweak the software a little bit.
Of course, something like "Put That There" would not be useful for actual input. Natural language recognition is a neat idea, but there are some very good arguments that imply that it'll never be good enough to supplant typing. So who the heck knows.
If you tried really, really hard, you probably could be more wrong than this. But you'd have to seriously bust your ass to pull it off.
Property rights are fundamental. They're basic to our society and our culture. They're inherent in everything that makes up our system of laws and norms.
You're saying that they're not natural. This is, to put it bluntly, fucking ignorant.
Have you ever taken a political science class? Have you ever read Locke?
Even if they weren't on the books, you could/would still be busted for copyright infringement in the theater for taping sections of the movie.
No, you couldn't be "busted" for it, because it's not a criminal violation of Title 17. Criminal penalties with respect to Title 17 don't kick in until you steal $1,000 worth of stuff over a span of 180 days.
You would, however, be asked to leave the movie theater, because videotaping movies in the theater is against the policy of every theater in America.
This is as it should be. There's absolutely no legitimate reason to set up a camera in a movie theater.
Movie review shows aren't allowed to tape their own clips from the movie.
Movie reviewers are given screener DVDs (they used to be Betacam tapes, and sometimes still are), and they're free to pull whatever clips they want. Want to review a movie? Just get ahold of the studio's publicity department and convince them that you're really going to review it rather than just pirating it. They'll send you a DVD via overnight mail. They have whole armies of employees whose job it is to put review copies in reviewers' hands.
What is fucking hilarious is that the DRM that is right now going into media players and monitors will make it virtually impossible to quote from original sources
Nonsense. You're free to use analog methods.
want to include a clip from a movie or a news broadcast? Sorry, that's a violation of the DRM mechanism and you cannot do it.
Also nonsense, because the 17 USC 1201(c)(1) expressly states that any circumvention for the purposes of exercising a use that would normally be considered fair is not a violation of the law.
The so-called "fair use" rights are poorly situated for legal protection at best, and are being eliminated systematically while complacent twits such as yourself look the other way.
Seeing as how the first two points in your comment were just plain wrong, I wonder if you recognize the irony of accusing me of looking the other way. One of us hasn't been paying attention to the facts. Which one do you think it is?
No, you didn't misread me. You just came at it with an erroneous preconception. There's so much disinformation out there, it's no wonder.
Copyright is a law of property. Creators of works --writings, paintings, whatever --have natural property rights over their creations. Copyright law is the legal recognition and protection of those rights by the government.
People who call copyright "a legal fiction" are usually seeking to undermine its acceptance with the goal of abolishing property rights altogether. Be sure to read between the lines.
Already, many individuals know that a certain litigious religious organization regularly sues people who quote and comment on the "copyrighted" religious works of its founder.
That's not correct. If you quote something --you know, pull a small segment of it --for the purposes of criticism, you're totally clear. It's when you start illegally distributing entire works that you run afoul of the law.
The fact that you, personally, do not like the person you're ripping off is not a legally acceptable defense.
Secondly, the DCMA makes no "quotation exemption"
17 USC 1201(c)(1): "Nothing in this section shall affect rights, remedies, limitations, or defenses to copyright infringement, including fair use, under this title."
In other words, yes, there is a quotation exemption. It's right there in black and white.
When you use modern technology to do the exact same thing as quotation, there is no protection for the action.
That's not correct. The law has specific exceptions for any activity that would ordinarily be considered fair use. That is to say, is what you're doing is fair use, the way you're doing it is automatically not illegal.
But if I quote a piece of a beat from a song in another song, or a segment of film or TV in a video art piece, I'm expected to get the permission of the copyright owner
It depends on your reason for quoting. It it's criticism or comment or parody or something along those lines, you're mistaken. But if you're just "sampling" in order to create your own work, no, that's not allowed. That's stealing.
No, that's not a "solution," it's a fucking prank. In case you're wondering, it's shit like that that makes content creators so unbelievably hostile to people who call for changes to copyright law. Because most of them are just trying to find a way to screw people out of their content.
No, because in that case you would be distributing entire copies of works. The law allows you to quote for the purpose of commenting. It doesn't allow you to duplicate entirely.
However, if you were to hand out copies of a work in a classroom as part of a lesson, that would be legal.
Yes, that's exactly right. For instance, if you were to produce a podcast where you review new music, and as part of that effort you were to include snippets of songs followed by your opinion of the album, that would be totally, 100%, hands-down, no-question legal.
However, if you were to reproduce whole songs, or to do so with not particular intention of commenting or offering criticism, that would probably not be legal.
The "promote the progress of science" clause has been interpreted by the courts to refer only to patents. Copyright law doesn't exist to promote anything. It's just a legal recognition of a creator's property rights over his creation.
Your comment was fucking hilarious. Mind if I use it as a springboard to make a point?
Copyright --which, just so we're all on the same page, is the legal recognition of natural property rights --does not prohibit quotation. To the contrary, the law specifically states that quoting a work for the purposes of commenting on it is not a violation of the work's creator's property rights.
That seems to be a point on which ever so many people have been misled. I figure it couldn't hurt to be explicitly clear about it.
Are they welcome to sue you for antitrust violation if you reply "not at any price"?
No. The notion of having a legal mandate requiring every person to do business with every customer who acts in good faith has been tried and struck down repeatedly over the years.
Remember that the GNU project was started over a dispute with a printer maker that refused to fix a bug in a driver.
I don't believe that story for a second. It's clear that the Gnu group is actually a political group masquerading as a technology advocacy organization. Their goal is the abolition of private property rights.
OS X was built off of the OPEN SOURCE FreeBSD kernel.
You're not the first person to make that mistake. The kernel in Mac OS X is called XNU, and it's a derivation of Mach, a piece of software that NeXT licensed from Carnegie Mellon University.
Now try taking the closed parts of OS X & building something better off of them. It will be very hard with out code, but the unsurmountable obstacle would actually be that it is illegal for you to do so.
That's completely false! Every Macintosh program in existence includes large parts of the Mac OS X operating system! Having the actual computer code is irrelevant because the programming interfaces are documented. So it's neither hard nor illegal to base new works on Mac OS X.
It is, however, both very hard and illegal to base new works on Gnu-licensed software unless you're willing to submit to draconian and restrictive backwards-over-a-barrel terms.
So tell me how Apple offers more rights
Sigh. I'm starting to suspect that I'm corresponding with one person who uses different names here, because you keep making the same fundamental mistakes. Rights are unalienable. They can neither be given nor taken away. You're talking about permission, which is an entirely different thing.
It would help me out a lot if you would take a minute and wrap your head around the vitally important idea.
The patents per million people per year is continually increasing.
That Web site ("cordis.lu?") purports to have information that conflicts with information that I trust. I don't believe it.
Patent lifetime should shortened/lengthened as needed to maximize innovation
"Maximize" is a word that has no place in law. It presumes a level of disassociation that cannot be achieved.
If there was enough innovation 10 years ago
"Enough innovation?" So we're back to centralized economies and five-year plans, now?
Liability is still attached in most countries.
I take absolutely no responsibility for the laws of "most countries." We already know that there are many otherwise civilized countries that are completely backwards on property rights.
Furthermore, in the US it may be impossible to voluntarily place a work in the public domain.
Incorrect. All it takes is a letter. Remember Desiderata?
There is no law saying you can throw away your copyright
There's no law saying you can do anything. That's not the purpose of the law.
If you own a licensed copy of a program, you have the right to run it.
No, you most certainly do not. You have permisison to run the program, permission received usually in return for a sum of money. That permission is not a right.
You're probably confused by the fact that in our society we recognize an unalienable right to liberty, which is to say that you're allowed to do anything that's not prohibited. But just because you have permission to do something that doesn't mean you have the right to do that thing.
The widespread confusion of the differences between rights, freedoms and liberties is part of what's wrong with this country today.
You can, for example, use The GIMP to generate the same sort of images you can in Photoshop.
Well, no you cannot, but that's a practical problem, not one of law. But this is not the subject we're discussing right now. We're talking about the creation of works based on existing works, not works created using a particular tool. Your analogy might be relevant to another conversation, not this one.
With The GIMP, you are able to modify the source code & redistribute it under the GPL (and even sell copies of your modified program).
Actually, that's so misleading as to be actually false. While you are not prohibited by the Gnu license from selling your work, you are required to give it away for free, which makes selling your work a practical impossibility.
How is sujch a term "temporary" relative to that person's life span?
That's funny, I don't recall the "it has to be really temporary, like short" clause in the Constitution. I must have missed that one.
What part of "limited time" is unclear?
And discovering that it, or an essential part of it, has already been patented by somebody else.
Well, that is the idea, isn't it? You're supposed to come up with something first. Are you bemoaning the fact that you, yourself, have never invented anything?
nothing is made in a vacuum; everything builds on something else
Yeah, that's real easy for somebody who's never invented anything to say. Since neither you nor I hold any patents, how about we both shut the hell up about how it's not really that big a deal?
patents on obvious inventions which should not have been granted in the first place
You've said that over and over again. You must not be getting my oh-so-subtle hints. That's bullshit. Kay? An invention, by definition, is not obvious. It may appear to be obvious in retrospect, but you should not be fooled by this into thinking that anybody could have thought of it. Because nobody did, until that first guy.
Kay?
So what happens when only "embedded systems" are available for purchase by residential end users, that nobody sells affordable general-purpose computers anymore?
I don't see how spinning off into fiction is going to make this conversation any more interesting. How about we stick to the real world, huh? The Xbox was released, what, a couple of years ago? Since that day, the number of general-purpose computers sold each year has gone up at a rate approaching 30% per year. That's way above the red line for expected industry growth.
I'm saying that it's morally wrong for Congress to mandate that all computer makers should start making what you call "embedded systems" rather than general-purpose computers, as has been proposed
Do you understand how Congress works? You shouldn't be afraid to admit that you don't; it seems like practically nobody does these days. See, Congress is a big group of people. At any time, anybody in the group can make a suggestion. The group then talk about the suggestion for a while before deciding whether it sounds like a good idea or not. If it does, the suggestion becomes a law which the President can either sign or not. But if the consensus of the group is that the idea's not good enough, it just disappears, as if it had never happened.
Fact one: Malicious computer software, like viruses, is a major problem in this country.
Fact two: Hardware-based code signing would make that problem disappear.
Fact three: It's good when serious problems go away.
Given facts one, two and three, you're actually arguing that Congress should not have been allowed to debate making hardware-based security a mandatory feature? Should our legislative bodies be allowed to debate seat-belt laws? Or laws governing the production and distribution of food and medicine?
Congress' mandate, in part, is to promote the general welfare. Because so much of our society depends on computers, issues of computer safety are definitely within the Congress' purview. You would deny them the authority, not only to pass laws, but merely to debate the question?
How so?
Nobody owns it. There's nobody to sue. You can't sue for damages if you stub your toe in a vacant lot.
All the more reason to just scrap the whole stinkin' mess. Licenses like these are for people who don't understand how copyright law works.
What is the rest of your business model such that you have to restrict access to your program's source code?
Trade secrets, intellectual property, competitive advantage. It doesn't really matter, because the point is that because I (in this example) created my product, I can decide exactly what I want to do with my product.
Unless the Gnu people get their sticky fingers on it, that is. In that case, they decide what I can do with my product. Which just is not okay.
And how does such a business model support the freedom of end users to (hire a consultant to) improve and redistribute the software in at least some lawful manner?
Not at all. In this example, it's my program. If they want changes made, they're welcome to offer to pay me to make them.
This is what copyleft is about.
No, you're confused again. It's totally understandable that you should be so turned around on this one, because the Gnu people have made a veritable crusade out of muddying the water. That's what the public domain is about. This abomination that the Gnu people so insidiously call "copyleft" is about exercising control over other people's works to suit a political agenda.
Besides, for each copylefted library, either it can be wrapped in a pipe (turning linking into "mere aggregation") or there's usually some sort of competing library available for licensing
See? There you go. Fortunately, because we do still have intellectual property laws, people are free to route around oppressive, restrictive pyramid schemes like the Gnu group by writing alternatives that are either available through a normal fee-based licensing transaction or via the public domain. Thank God that we still live in a society where the Gnu people can merely rail against copyright law rather than actually abolishing it.
There are more copyrights/patents granted now than a few decades ago, so the rate of innovation has increased.
No, the population has increased. The population of the United States has doubled in 50 years, and trebled in 70.
The purpose of patents was supposed to be an incentive for innovation. Their liftimes should not be extended.
That doesn't follow. The correct statement would be, "Patents should be extended as deemed necessary and beneficial for promoting invention."
I pulled it straight from a major limitation put into most license agreements
But you can't sue anybody for liability over a work that's in the public domain. That's totally irrelevant to the discussion at hand.
should the creator be entitle to claim authorship?
Authorship is not a legal term. It carries no meaning outside copyright law. Once claim to copyright has been waived, the term ceases to have any meaning.
At the very least, open soure is about taking away fewer rights from end-users than commercial software then.
No, that's completely backwards. You have no rights whatsoever to any works you didn't write yourself. You can't claim any rights over something you didn't create. It is, therefore, meaningless to talk about "taking away rights" in this context. The expression just doesn't make any sense.
"Open source" is about granting a license to make certain uses, but attaching to that license a maliciously insidious clause that governs not only what somebody does with your software, but what somebody does with their own software that merely uses your software. That's nightmarish compared with standard commercial software licenses for libraries. It's insane.
How do I get this thousand bucks when I have to flip burgers just to afford feeding myself and my family?
It's easy. Take your brilliant idea and write up a business plan. Take it to the Small Business Administration. If the people there think your idea is sound, they'll give you an SBA loan. Take the money and file your patent application. Become rich.
Wouldn't you feel safer with a disclaimer?
Not remotely. Don't be absurd.
A work under a permissive licenses can be treated in all practical ways as if nobody owned it.
That's demonstrably false, though. If I want to write a computer program using a library that's released, not into the public domain, but rather with the draconian "Gnu" license, I am not free to sell my program without also giving away my program's computer code.
what's to keep Congress from "harmonizing" the patent term
Nothing at all. They're Congress. They can pass any legal law they want.
What does that have to do with anything? Patents are temporary. Longer terms, shorter terms, whatever: still temporary.
do you find it just that the Free world should have to stay 20 years behind the state of the art?
I think it's entirely just that people should be prohibited for 20 years --or whatever --from using other people's ideas without permission. It encourages innovation. The problem is that you're not responding to patents the way you should. You should be out there trying to come up with the next great idea so you can get a patent of your own, not trying to bring the whole system down so you can copy other people's ideas.
Why are you more interested in copying other people's innovations than creating your own?
Wanna bet?
Um. You do know that that's an embedded system, right, not a general-purpose computer?
Should companies be allowed to sell computers that are incompatible by design with publicly available development tools to the exclusion of affordable computers that do work with publicly available development tools? No.
So you're saying that it should be against the law to build and sell a computer to your specifications? That's a pretty radical interpretation of the "freedom" text, no?
The only practical differences between permissive licensing of a work and dedication to the public domain are that the author gets credited and more importantly that the author is able to disclaim implied warranties.
If those are the only practical differences, why put up with this "license" bullshit?
But in point of fact, you're mistaken. It is not necessary to use a license to disclaim warranties. Releasing a product into the public domain does exactly the same thing.
Demonstrably false. You're not writing million-line projects. The difference between a ten-second compile and a twelve-second compile is a flimsy excuse, not a good reason.
it doesn't have enough storage
It's got practically infinite storage capacity through FireWire.
Now that I understand how the Xserve works, I could describe an AMD64 system that costs less and outclasses the Xserve in terms of hardware
No, you could not. You keep saying that you could, but (1) I know for a fact that you can't, and (2) you never actually bother to do so.
I refuse to speak with anyone that incapable of objective thought.
Hm. How is this different from, you know...running home to momma?
Slashdot Mirror
Jesus, Mary, Joseph and the camel. Every single thing you wrote here could have been lifted, verbatim, from one of the anti-property advocacy groups. Did you just google around and cut-and-paste?
(Incidentally, linking to political propaganda from an insane man makes you look like a crazy person. Be best if you didn't do that again, huh?)
The MPAA does not recognize your right to quote from their movies.
This screener copy of "Million Dollar Baby" that I just picked up from my movie reviewer's desk says different. We get two or three of these every single week. (Not all of the same movie, of course. That would be pretty weird.)
I think you also know that any DRM defeating technology is illegal by the construct of the DMCA.
Again: wrong. That is simply not true. First of all, the fact that you call it "DMCA" leads me to believe that you don't even know what we're talking about. The DMCA hasn't even existed since 1998, when the bill was signed into law. At that point, the DMCA ceased to exist. The function of the DMCA was to establish new provisions and to amend existing provisions within Title 17 of the United States Code, and once that function was carried out, the bill ceased to exist as a legal document.
So odds are outstanding that you've never actually read anything that you're talking about.
Now, to your point: Title 17 prohibits the manufacture or sale of devices whose sole purpose is to circumvent access control or copy prevention mechanisms. Since, by definition, any act that's carried out for the purpose of exercising fair use is not circumvention, this stipulation of the law has absolutely zero impact on fair use.
Remember Elcomsoft? Well, probably not, since you strike me as a short-timer, but what the hey.
There is no legal way for you to quote from a DRMd source, even though it is legal from a "copyright" perspective.
Nonsense. Even if it's inconvenient for you to use digital means, analog means are always available.
This contradiction leaves your rights under copyright laws null and void in a digital environment.
What does that mean, "in a digital environment?"
Have you ever heard of "Put That There?" It was a project at the Media Lab back in, I guess, the 80s that combined voice recognition with a gestural interface. The origin of the name should be obvious: The system's killer demo involved a guy sitting in front of a screen, pointing to a thing, saying "Put that," then pointing somewhere else and saying "there."
At the time, the system was slow and primitive, but more importantly it was big. It had a big-ass projection screen and multiple cameras, and I think the operator had to wear a glove. Very impractical.
Ironically, today we have basically everything we need to make a system like "Put That There" work. If you've got a Mac with an iSight camera, all you really need to add is software.
Anybody seen ToySight? We're already there. We just need to tweak the software a little bit.
Of course, something like "Put That There" would not be useful for actual input. Natural language recognition is a neat idea, but there are some very good arguments that imply that it'll never be good enough to supplant typing. So who the heck knows.
If you tried really, really hard, you probably could be more wrong than this. But you'd have to seriously bust your ass to pull it off.
Property rights are fundamental. They're basic to our society and our culture. They're inherent in everything that makes up our system of laws and norms.
You're saying that they're not natural. This is, to put it bluntly, fucking ignorant.
Have you ever taken a political science class? Have you ever read Locke?
Even if they weren't on the books, you could/would still be busted for copyright infringement in the theater for taping sections of the movie.
No, you couldn't be "busted" for it, because it's not a criminal violation of Title 17. Criminal penalties with respect to Title 17 don't kick in until you steal $1,000 worth of stuff over a span of 180 days.
You would, however, be asked to leave the movie theater, because videotaping movies in the theater is against the policy of every theater in America.
This is as it should be. There's absolutely no legitimate reason to set up a camera in a movie theater.
Movie review shows aren't allowed to tape their own clips from the movie.
Movie reviewers are given screener DVDs (they used to be Betacam tapes, and sometimes still are), and they're free to pull whatever clips they want. Want to review a movie? Just get ahold of the studio's publicity department and convince them that you're really going to review it rather than just pirating it. They'll send you a DVD via overnight mail. They have whole armies of employees whose job it is to put review copies in reviewers' hands.
What is fucking hilarious is that the DRM that is right now going into media players and monitors will make it virtually impossible to quote from original sources
Nonsense. You're free to use analog methods.
want to include a clip from a movie or a news broadcast? Sorry, that's a violation of the DRM mechanism and you cannot do it.
Also nonsense, because the 17 USC 1201(c)(1) expressly states that any circumvention for the purposes of exercising a use that would normally be considered fair is not a violation of the law.
The so-called "fair use" rights are poorly situated for legal protection at best, and are being eliminated systematically while complacent twits such as yourself look the other way.
Seeing as how the first two points in your comment were just plain wrong, I wonder if you recognize the irony of accusing me of looking the other way. One of us hasn't been paying attention to the facts. Which one do you think it is?
No, you didn't misread me. You just came at it with an erroneous preconception. There's so much disinformation out there, it's no wonder.
Copyright is a law of property. Creators of works --writings, paintings, whatever --have natural property rights over their creations. Copyright law is the legal recognition and protection of those rights by the government.
People who call copyright "a legal fiction" are usually seeking to undermine its acceptance with the goal of abolishing property rights altogether. Be sure to read between the lines.
Already, many individuals know that a certain litigious religious organization regularly sues people who quote and comment on the "copyrighted" religious works of its founder.
That's not correct. If you quote something --you know, pull a small segment of it --for the purposes of criticism, you're totally clear. It's when you start illegally distributing entire works that you run afoul of the law.
The fact that you, personally, do not like the person you're ripping off is not a legally acceptable defense.
Secondly, the DCMA makes no "quotation exemption"
17 USC 1201(c)(1): "Nothing in this section shall affect rights, remedies, limitations, or defenses to copyright infringement, including fair use, under this title."
In other words, yes, there is a quotation exemption. It's right there in black and white.
When you use modern technology to do the exact same thing as quotation, there is no protection for the action.
That's not correct. The law has specific exceptions for any activity that would ordinarily be considered fair use. That is to say, is what you're doing is fair use, the way you're doing it is automatically not illegal.
But if I quote a piece of a beat from a song in another song, or a segment of film or TV in a video art piece, I'm expected to get the permission of the copyright owner
It depends on your reason for quoting. It it's criticism or comment or parody or something along those lines, you're mistaken. But if you're just "sampling" in order to create your own work, no, that's not allowed. That's stealing.
No, that's not a "solution," it's a fucking prank. In case you're wondering, it's shit like that that makes content creators so unbelievably hostile to people who call for changes to copyright law. Because most of them are just trying to find a way to screw people out of their content.
No, because in that case you would be distributing entire copies of works. The law allows you to quote for the purpose of commenting. It doesn't allow you to duplicate entirely.
However, if you were to hand out copies of a work in a classroom as part of a lesson, that would be legal.
Yes, that's exactly right. For instance, if you were to produce a podcast where you review new music, and as part of that effort you were to include snippets of songs followed by your opinion of the album, that would be totally, 100%, hands-down, no-question legal.
However, if you were to reproduce whole songs, or to do so with not particular intention of commenting or offering criticism, that would probably not be legal.
The "promote the progress of science" clause has been interpreted by the courts to refer only to patents. Copyright law doesn't exist to promote anything. It's just a legal recognition of a creator's property rights over his creation.
Your comment was fucking hilarious. Mind if I use it as a springboard to make a point?
Copyright --which, just so we're all on the same page, is the legal recognition of natural property rights --does not prohibit quotation. To the contrary, the law specifically states that quoting a work for the purposes of commenting on it is not a violation of the work's creator's property rights.
That seems to be a point on which ever so many people have been misled. I figure it couldn't hurt to be explicitly clear about it.
There are three problems with that idea.
One: It's Wal-Mart.
Two: It's Linux.
Three: It's $498. Considering items one and two, that's highway fucking robbery.
Are they welcome to sue you for antitrust violation if you reply "not at any price"?
No. The notion of having a legal mandate requiring every person to do business with every customer who acts in good faith has been tried and struck down repeatedly over the years.
Remember that the GNU project was started over a dispute with a printer maker that refused to fix a bug in a driver.
I don't believe that story for a second. It's clear that the Gnu group is actually a political group masquerading as a technology advocacy organization. Their goal is the abolition of private property rights.
OS X was built off of the OPEN SOURCE FreeBSD kernel.
You're not the first person to make that mistake. The kernel in Mac OS X is called XNU, and it's a derivation of Mach, a piece of software that NeXT licensed from Carnegie Mellon University.
Now try taking the closed parts of OS X & building something better off of them. It will be very hard with out code, but the unsurmountable obstacle would actually be that it is illegal for you to do so.
That's completely false! Every Macintosh program in existence includes large parts of the Mac OS X operating system! Having the actual computer code is irrelevant because the programming interfaces are documented. So it's neither hard nor illegal to base new works on Mac OS X.
It is, however, both very hard and illegal to base new works on Gnu-licensed software unless you're willing to submit to draconian and restrictive backwards-over-a-barrel terms.
So tell me how Apple offers more rights
Sigh. I'm starting to suspect that I'm corresponding with one person who uses different names here, because you keep making the same fundamental mistakes. Rights are unalienable. They can neither be given nor taken away. You're talking about permission, which is an entirely different thing.
It would help me out a lot if you would take a minute and wrap your head around the vitally important idea.
The patents per million people per year is continually increasing.
That Web site ("cordis.lu?") purports to have information that conflicts with information that I trust. I don't believe it.
Patent lifetime should shortened/lengthened as needed to maximize innovation
"Maximize" is a word that has no place in law. It presumes a level of disassociation that cannot be achieved.
If there was enough innovation 10 years ago
"Enough innovation?" So we're back to centralized economies and five-year plans, now?
Liability is still attached in most countries.
I take absolutely no responsibility for the laws of "most countries." We already know that there are many otherwise civilized countries that are completely backwards on property rights.
Furthermore, in the US it may be impossible to voluntarily place a work in the public domain.
Incorrect. All it takes is a letter. Remember Desiderata?
There is no law saying you can throw away your copyright
There's no law saying you can do anything. That's not the purpose of the law.
If you own a licensed copy of a program, you have the right to run it.
No, you most certainly do not. You have permisison to run the program, permission received usually in return for a sum of money. That permission is not a right.
You're probably confused by the fact that in our society we recognize an unalienable right to liberty, which is to say that you're allowed to do anything that's not prohibited. But just because you have permission to do something that doesn't mean you have the right to do that thing.
The widespread confusion of the differences between rights, freedoms and liberties is part of what's wrong with this country today.
You can, for example, use The GIMP to generate the same sort of images you can in Photoshop.
Well, no you cannot, but that's a practical problem, not one of law. But this is not the subject we're discussing right now. We're talking about the creation of works based on existing works, not works created using a particular tool. Your analogy might be relevant to another conversation, not this one.
With The GIMP, you are able to modify the source code & redistribute it under the GPL (and even sell copies of your modified program).
Actually, that's so misleading as to be actually false. While you are not prohibited by the Gnu license from selling your work, you are required to give it away for free, which makes selling your work a practical impossibility.
Freedom isn't a nightmare and it isn't insane.
It's also not at all what you're talking about.
How is sujch a term "temporary" relative to that person's life span?
That's funny, I don't recall the "it has to be really temporary, like short" clause in the Constitution. I must have missed that one.
What part of "limited time" is unclear?
And discovering that it, or an essential part of it, has already been patented by somebody else.
Well, that is the idea, isn't it? You're supposed to come up with something first. Are you bemoaning the fact that you, yourself, have never invented anything?
nothing is made in a vacuum; everything builds on something else
Yeah, that's real easy for somebody who's never invented anything to say. Since neither you nor I hold any patents, how about we both shut the hell up about how it's not really that big a deal?
patents on obvious inventions which should not have been granted in the first place
You've said that over and over again. You must not be getting my oh-so-subtle hints. That's bullshit. Kay? An invention, by definition, is not obvious. It may appear to be obvious in retrospect, but you should not be fooled by this into thinking that anybody could have thought of it. Because nobody did, until that first guy.
Kay?
So what happens when only "embedded systems" are available for purchase by residential end users, that nobody sells affordable general-purpose computers anymore?
I don't see how spinning off into fiction is going to make this conversation any more interesting. How about we stick to the real world, huh? The Xbox was released, what, a couple of years ago? Since that day, the number of general-purpose computers sold each year has gone up at a rate approaching 30% per year. That's way above the red line for expected industry growth.
I'm saying that it's morally wrong for Congress to mandate that all computer makers should start making what you call "embedded systems" rather than general-purpose computers, as has been proposed
Do you understand how Congress works? You shouldn't be afraid to admit that you don't; it seems like practically nobody does these days. See, Congress is a big group of people. At any time, anybody in the group can make a suggestion. The group then talk about the suggestion for a while before deciding whether it sounds like a good idea or not. If it does, the suggestion becomes a law which the President can either sign or not. But if the consensus of the group is that the idea's not good enough, it just disappears, as if it had never happened.
Fact one: Malicious computer software, like viruses, is a major problem in this country.
Fact two: Hardware-based code signing would make that problem disappear.
Fact three: It's good when serious problems go away.
Given facts one, two and three, you're actually arguing that Congress should not have been allowed to debate making hardware-based security a mandatory feature? Should our legislative bodies be allowed to debate seat-belt laws? Or laws governing the production and distribution of food and medicine?
Congress' mandate, in part, is to promote the general welfare. Because so much of our society depends on computers, issues of computer safety are definitely within the Congress' purview. You would deny them the authority, not only to pass laws, but merely to debate the question?
How so?
Nobody owns it. There's nobody to sue. You can't sue for damages if you stub your toe in a vacant lot.
Point of terminology
All the more reason to just scrap the whole stinkin' mess. Licenses like these are for people who don't understand how copyright law works.
What is the rest of your business model such that you have to restrict access to your program's source code?
Trade secrets, intellectual property, competitive advantage. It doesn't really matter, because the point is that because I (in this example) created my product, I can decide exactly what I want to do with my product.
Unless the Gnu people get their sticky fingers on it, that is. In that case, they decide what I can do with my product. Which just is not okay.
And how does such a business model support the freedom of end users to (hire a consultant to) improve and redistribute the software in at least some lawful manner?
Not at all. In this example, it's my program. If they want changes made, they're welcome to offer to pay me to make them.
This is what copyleft is about.
No, you're confused again. It's totally understandable that you should be so turned around on this one, because the Gnu people have made a veritable crusade out of muddying the water. That's what the public domain is about. This abomination that the Gnu people so insidiously call "copyleft" is about exercising control over other people's works to suit a political agenda.
Besides, for each copylefted library, either it can be wrapped in a pipe (turning linking into "mere aggregation") or there's usually some sort of competing library available for licensing
See? There you go. Fortunately, because we do still have intellectual property laws, people are free to route around oppressive, restrictive pyramid schemes like the Gnu group by writing alternatives that are either available through a normal fee-based licensing transaction or via the public domain. Thank God that we still live in a society where the Gnu people can merely rail against copyright law rather than actually abolishing it.
There are more copyrights/patents granted now than a few decades ago, so the rate of innovation has increased.
No, the population has increased. The population of the United States has doubled in 50 years, and trebled in 70.
The purpose of patents was supposed to be an incentive for innovation. Their liftimes should not be extended.
That doesn't follow. The correct statement would be, "Patents should be extended as deemed necessary and beneficial for promoting invention."
I pulled it straight from a major limitation put into most license agreements
But you can't sue anybody for liability over a work that's in the public domain. That's totally irrelevant to the discussion at hand.
should the creator be entitle to claim authorship?
Authorship is not a legal term. It carries no meaning outside copyright law. Once claim to copyright has been waived, the term ceases to have any meaning.
At the very least, open soure is about taking away fewer rights from end-users than commercial software then.
No, that's completely backwards. You have no rights whatsoever to any works you didn't write yourself. You can't claim any rights over something you didn't create. It is, therefore, meaningless to talk about "taking away rights" in this context. The expression just doesn't make any sense.
"Open source" is about granting a license to make certain uses, but attaching to that license a maliciously insidious clause that governs not only what somebody does with your software, but what somebody does with their own software that merely uses your software. That's nightmarish compared with standard commercial software licenses for libraries. It's insane.
How do I get this thousand bucks when I have to flip burgers just to afford feeding myself and my family?
It's easy. Take your brilliant idea and write up a business plan. Take it to the Small Business Administration. If the people there think your idea is sound, they'll give you an SBA loan. Take the money and file your patent application. Become rich.
Wouldn't you feel safer with a disclaimer?
Not remotely. Don't be absurd.
A work under a permissive licenses can be treated in all practical ways as if nobody owned it.
That's demonstrably false, though. If I want to write a computer program using a library that's released, not into the public domain, but rather with the draconian "Gnu" license, I am not free to sell my program without also giving away my program's computer code.
what's to keep Congress from "harmonizing" the patent term
Nothing at all. They're Congress. They can pass any legal law they want.
What does that have to do with anything? Patents are temporary. Longer terms, shorter terms, whatever: still temporary.
do you find it just that the Free world should have to stay 20 years behind the state of the art?
I think it's entirely just that people should be prohibited for 20 years --or whatever --from using other people's ideas without permission. It encourages innovation. The problem is that you're not responding to patents the way you should. You should be out there trying to come up with the next great idea so you can get a patent of your own, not trying to bring the whole system down so you can copy other people's ideas.
Why are you more interested in copying other people's innovations than creating your own?
Wanna bet?
Um. You do know that that's an embedded system, right, not a general-purpose computer?
Should companies be allowed to sell computers that are incompatible by design with publicly available development tools to the exclusion of affordable computers that do work with publicly available development tools? No.
So you're saying that it should be against the law to build and sell a computer to your specifications? That's a pretty radical interpretation of the "freedom" text, no?
The only practical differences between permissive licensing of a work and dedication to the public domain are that the author gets credited and more importantly that the author is able to disclaim implied warranties.
If those are the only practical differences, why put up with this "license" bullshit?
But in point of fact, you're mistaken. It is not necessary to use a license to disclaim warranties. Releasing a product into the public domain does exactly the same thing.
The mini is no good for serious gaming
...running home to momma?
Talk about your contradictions in terms.
it won't compile things quickly enough
Demonstrably false. You're not writing million-line projects. The difference between a ten-second compile and a twelve-second compile is a flimsy excuse, not a good reason.
it doesn't have enough storage
It's got practically infinite storage capacity through FireWire.
Now that I understand how the Xserve works, I could describe an AMD64 system that costs less and outclasses the Xserve in terms of hardware
No, you could not. You keep saying that you could, but (1) I know for a fact that you can't, and (2) you never actually bother to do so.
I refuse to speak with anyone that incapable of objective thought.
Hm. How is this different from, you know