They're arguing that YouTube gets more viewership from copyrighted materials than non-copyrighted stuff
Well, duh. Under U.S. copyright law, everything is copyrighted automatically when it's created. There is no process to "copyright" something. Copyright just happens. Certainly, if you ever want to assert your copyright, you ought to register with the U.S. Copyright Office, but that's just documentation of what amounts to a natural right under U.S. law.
Everything on YouTube -- or the Web -- is copyrighted by someone. The question is, is it being distributed by someone who holds the copyright (or with permission from the holder)? Download logs won't answer that question. Upload logs would.
And I'm not a lawyer. I'm just a writer, who understand his rights enough not to let himself get swindled by publishing companies.
And another alternative they didn't seem to face... just because they used a computer to pick the candidate, doesn't mean the computer made a smart decision. Before we get all excited about which candidate the algorithm picked, let's talk about the algorithm's design and input data, and why that makes it more, or less, credible than a chimpanzee.
"The law" is whatever the last time judge decided after hearing a shouting match between two attorneys.
And that's why our society can still function in spite of the legislature's penchant for passing laws whose terms they never bothered to define, whose consequences they never bother consider, and whose Constitutionality they never bothered to verify.
Judicial independence. Where would we be without it?
Yes. But don't blame the judge for the ruling; she can only rule based on the evidence before her. Blame the prosecutors who did a shoddy job of putting the evidence before her, and the Microsoft defense attorneys who drew out the case beyond the states' will to pursue it with the required attention and vigor.
I don't have a problem with the idea of my cell phone automatically switching to vibrate when I walk into an auditorium. What I *do* have a problem with is the idea of one company owning a patent on the implementation technology, because then the marketplace can't offer competing implementations.
At some point one must strike a balance between complying with social conventions, and maintaining control of one's own device. If there is only one company selling "polite" devices (due to a patent), then *they* decide where to strike that balance. If there are many companies doing it, then *I* get the choice by deciding on the vendor whose products make the feature useful rather than obnoxious.
It's a stupid patent application anyway, because there's a ton of prior art.
Larger cities have the elitist upper class (who are on the Environmental Protection bandwagon) and the Lower class that have been in the Democraticy party pocket for years.
So what you're saying is that everyone who isn't exactly like you and your small town is either an elitist, or a pawn, and is therefore a lazy, unpatriotic waste of air? Yup, you're a Republican all right.
Left vs. right and liberal vs. conservative are EXACTLY the same as urban vs. rural. They're three different word-pairs that all describe the dichotomy. That's what the electoral map (by county) is saying.
And in spite of what the parent implies, neither group is inherently stupid. They have different priorities.
First, the ivory ban is not a 100% ban. There is some legal trade in ivory. The legality of an ivory sale depends on the provenance of the ivory. I usually sympathize with environmentalists but it's just ridiculous to try to stop all ivory sales in order to prevent illegal sales.
Second, there is serious question whether the ivory ban is a good policy.
Legal, managed hunting is a promising alternative. It would be arrogant and stupid to try to tell African or South Asian governments they can't manage the elephant population in whatever way works best for them.
That assumes the vendor bothered to pay that level of attention to detail. I've never bought a PC with Linux pre-installed, so I can't say for sure, but I'm skeptical whether the factory techs would do more than stick in a DVD and hit "return." I guess it would depend on the vendor.
You could try asking your boss why they revoked your access. It may be for different reasons than you think. You have only 3 weeks to hand off your responsibilities to other people. If I were your boss, I would be inclined to think those 3 weeks would be better spent training your successors and documenting your work, than in trying to actually start new tasks.
Audio commentary I heard recently by John Simpson (BBC), who was there at the time, talked of the soldiers laying down their weapons.
Interesting... I never heard that. I wasn't there either.
I did talk to someone (forget the name) who claimed to be one of the student leaders of the protest, and he struck me as a total jerk who cared more about making an international spectacle than getting his followers out of the square alive.
We'll never know what really happened there, but the end result does put the Chinese government in a bad light in my opinion. For instance, the choice to send an armored column instead of riot police.
Yes, western countries have never killed protesters
I don't trust them either. But if you mean to claim that China's - or any country's - actions are justified simply because they're not unique, then I fail to see how you can have any respect for human rights at all.
Most of the negative opinion of China comes from being brought up in the cold war with the anti-communist propaganda spread throughout that era (A result of McCarthyism? I wish I'd done more history at school).
In my case, my negative opinion comes more from watching TV coverage of the "People's Army" rolling nonviolent protesters with tanks. Am I the only one who remembers Tiananmen Square?
I think the point of doing a medical study is that they (NASA) don't know what the risks are.
And I do like your reference to the atomic-bomb testing; it's more appropriate than my over-the-top Nazi rhetoric. There remains a difference, as you say: the atomic-bomb soldiers weren't volunteers...
If NASA has done up-front a comprehensive risk analysis based on what happens to patients who are bedridden for long periods due to other causes (hospitals do know a thing or two about that) then maybe it's OK. Did they do that, though?
Good point. This basically amounts to destructive testing on human beings. When the Nazis did that to prisoners, it was an atrocity. When our government does it to volunteers, that's somehow OK?
But then words like "character" and "cleric" are words that already existed to describe the terms they are used for - they can't claim copyright over that!
Agreed. My point was to show there's a continuum of game terms from general ("healing spell") to specific ("Cure Light Wounds"), and somewhere along that continuum falls a dividing line between what a court would call copyright infringement and what it wouldn't. If you want a game that looks like D&D and plays like D&D, but doesn't require WotC's permission, how much terminology would you have to change or reinvent? I think the answer is, more than you would want to.
The fact that the pro-copyright lobby is persistently blurring distinctions and asserting rights they don't actually have, to the point where most of the public doesn't know the difference between a copyright and a trademark, certainly doesn't help matters.
What you are not allowed to do is use their particular expression of the rules. That means you can't copy and paste text, you can't use names, settings, unique creative elements, and so forth.
There is actually a lot of uncertainty in what is a "particular expression" of the rules. Verbatim copying is certainly out but what about a "character" called a "cleric" who casts "third-level spells" against a monster with 10 "hit dice?" Those terms are all expressions of the rules...
What you can and can't do is up for a jury to decide, and WotC can and will hire more and better lawyers than you.
How the hell do you "consider" something to be illegal? It either is, or isn't.
It must be kind of like skateboarding.
But seriously, it's a question of whether existing laws can be {twisted, interpreted} to apply to an {arbitrary, unforeseen} situation. That is, it depends on the state courts. What laws the DA tries to apply, depends on his {whim, professional judgment}.
and the inaccurate garbage (to which you ascribe a questionable 20% occurrence) is generally restricted to the host of articles so obscure or specific that they would be omitted in a standard encyclopedia anyway!
First, you're mischaracterizing my statement. I didn't say 20% of the articles on Wikipedia are garbage. I said about 20% of the approximately 20 articles I have read; i.e. four articles contain significant errors or omissions. And now I add, for purposes of clarification, that since I lack the time and interest to do a comprehensive study of my own, I conclude on this admittedly insufficient sample that Wikipedia isn't good enough for me. If you prefer to take your chances, feel free, but if you claim Wikipedia is as good as a print source then you'll have to go into a bit of detail to refute the evidence of my own eyes.
Second, your assertion that errors are "generally restricted to... articles so obscure or specific" makes it impossible to argue against you, because I can point to 20 articles containing errors and then you can dismiss them all because, in your exalted opinion, they're "obscure or specific" topics.
I'm surprised at how many people here are defending Wikipedia. When I first discovered it, I thought it was a great project. Now, I think it's not-so-great.
The problem I see is not factual inaccuracies (they exist but are comparatively easy to correct), but lack of rigor and a tendency to transparently pass-through the authors' biases.
When I say "bias," I am not necessarily referring to political opinions or prejudices. Those are examples but not, even, the most common. A bias is simply something that inclines one to think a certain way without realizing why, and especially without taking the trouble to consider and refute contrary propositions. For instance, Wikipedia's proponents (defenders? apologists?) are fond of saying that Wikipedia's open model makes it less biased than, say, a copyrighted encyclopedia. That's a biased statement itself -- it fails to consider, for example, the possibility that authors may be more inclined to rigorous fact-checking when they're being paid for their efforts, or the possibility that some opinions may be just wrong in spite of having vocal proponents who insist on getting a free soapbox in the name of "balance".
Finally, a rebuttal to the defense that "it's just an encyclopedia." Would you consult an encyclopedia, any encyclopedia, where 50% of the articles were known to be utterly false? Would you tolerate a 25% error rate? The question I pose is, what error rate really is acceptable and does Wikipedia exceed that rate, or not? My experience is a sample size of about 20 articles and in that sample, the rate of error or omission is about 20%. For me, that's far too high -- but I admit that's a biased analysis.;-)
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What does an ISP have to do with the highjacking of ships? That's the kind of piracy the G8 should be working on.
Well, duh. Under U.S. copyright law, everything is copyrighted automatically when it's created. There is no process to "copyright" something. Copyright just happens. Certainly, if you ever want to assert your copyright, you ought to register with the U.S. Copyright Office, but that's just documentation of what amounts to a natural right under U.S. law.
Everything on YouTube -- or the Web -- is copyrighted by someone. The question is, is it being distributed by someone who holds the copyright (or with permission from the holder)? Download logs won't answer that question. Upload logs would.
And I'm not a lawyer. I'm just a writer, who understand his rights enough not to let himself get swindled by publishing companies.
Naw, that's too much work. All we need to do for now is abolish Viacom. :-)
And another alternative they didn't seem to face ... just because they used a computer to pick the candidate, doesn't mean the computer made a smart decision. Before we get all excited about which candidate the algorithm picked, let's talk about the algorithm's design and input data, and why that makes it more, or less, credible than a chimpanzee.
And that's why our society can still function in spite of the legislature's penchant for passing laws whose terms they never bothered to define, whose consequences they never bother consider, and whose Constitutionality they never bothered to verify.
Judicial independence. Where would we be without it?
Yes. But don't blame the judge for the ruling; she can only rule based on the evidence before her. Blame the prosecutors who did a shoddy job of putting the evidence before her, and the Microsoft defense attorneys who drew out the case beyond the states' will to pursue it with the required attention and vigor.
I don't have a problem with the idea of my cell phone automatically switching to vibrate when I walk into an auditorium. What I *do* have a problem with is the idea of one company owning a patent on the implementation technology, because then the marketplace can't offer competing implementations.
At some point one must strike a balance between complying with social conventions, and maintaining control of one's own device. If there is only one company selling "polite" devices (due to a patent), then *they* decide where to strike that balance. If there are many companies doing it, then *I* get the choice by deciding on the vendor whose products make the feature useful rather than obnoxious.
It's a stupid patent application anyway, because there's a ton of prior art.
So what you're saying is that everyone who isn't exactly like you and your small town is either an elitist, or a pawn, and is therefore a lazy, unpatriotic waste of air? Yup, you're a Republican all right.
Left vs. right and liberal vs. conservative are EXACTLY the same as urban vs. rural. They're three different word-pairs that all describe the dichotomy. That's what the electoral map (by county) is saying.
And in spite of what the parent implies, neither group is inherently stupid. They have different priorities.
First, the ivory ban is not a 100% ban. There is some legal trade in ivory. The legality of an ivory sale depends on the provenance of the ivory. I usually sympathize with environmentalists but it's just ridiculous to try to stop all ivory sales in order to prevent illegal sales.
Second, there is serious question whether the ivory ban is a good policy. Legal, managed hunting is a promising alternative. It would be arrogant and stupid to try to tell African or South Asian governments they can't manage the elephant population in whatever way works best for them.
That assumes the vendor bothered to pay that level of attention to detail. I've never bought a PC with Linux pre-installed, so I can't say for sure, but I'm skeptical whether the factory techs would do more than stick in a DVD and hit "return." I guess it would depend on the vendor.
You could try asking your boss why they revoked your access. It may be for different reasons than you think. You have only 3 weeks to hand off your responsibilities to other people. If I were your boss, I would be inclined to think those 3 weeks would be better spent training your successors and documenting your work, than in trying to actually start new tasks.
Interesting... I never heard that. I wasn't there either.
I did talk to someone (forget the name) who claimed to be one of the student leaders of the protest, and he struck me as a total jerk who cared more about making an international spectacle than getting his followers out of the square alive.
We'll never know what really happened there, but the end result does put the Chinese government in a bad light in my opinion. For instance, the choice to send an armored column instead of riot police.
I don't trust them either. But if you mean to claim that China's - or any country's - actions are justified simply because they're not unique, then I fail to see how you can have any respect for human rights at all.
In my case, my negative opinion comes more from watching TV coverage of the "People's Army" rolling nonviolent protesters with tanks. Am I the only one who remembers Tiananmen Square?
I wish you'd done more history at school, too.
I think the point of doing a medical study is that they (NASA) don't know what the risks are. And I do like your reference to the atomic-bomb testing; it's more appropriate than my over-the-top Nazi rhetoric. There remains a difference, as you say: the atomic-bomb soldiers weren't volunteers... If NASA has done up-front a comprehensive risk analysis based on what happens to patients who are bedridden for long periods due to other causes (hospitals do know a thing or two about that) then maybe it's OK. Did they do that, though?
Good point. This basically amounts to destructive testing on human beings. When the Nazis did that to prisoners, it was an atrocity. When our government does it to volunteers, that's somehow OK?
Agreed. My point was to show there's a continuum of game terms from general ("healing spell") to specific ("Cure Light Wounds"), and somewhere along that continuum falls a dividing line between what a court would call copyright infringement and what it wouldn't. If you want a game that looks like D&D and plays like D&D, but doesn't require WotC's permission, how much terminology would you have to change or reinvent? I think the answer is, more than you would want to.
The fact that the pro-copyright lobby is persistently blurring distinctions and asserting rights they don't actually have, to the point where most of the public doesn't know the difference between a copyright and a trademark, certainly doesn't help matters.
There is actually a lot of uncertainty in what is a "particular expression" of the rules. Verbatim copying is certainly out but what about a "character" called a "cleric" who casts "third-level spells" against a monster with 10 "hit dice?" Those terms are all expressions of the rules...
What you can and can't do is up for a jury to decide, and WotC can and will hire more and better lawyers than you.
Sounds like a great way to get blacklisted. I'd recommend leaving without comment.
First, you're mischaracterizing my statement. I didn't say 20% of the articles on Wikipedia are garbage. I said about 20% of the approximately 20 articles I have read; i.e. four articles contain significant errors or omissions. And now I add, for purposes of clarification, that since I lack the time and interest to do a comprehensive study of my own, I conclude on this admittedly insufficient sample that Wikipedia isn't good enough for me. If you prefer to take your chances, feel free, but if you claim Wikipedia is as good as a print source then you'll have to go into a bit of detail to refute the evidence of my own eyes.
Second, your assertion that errors are "generally restricted to ... articles so obscure or specific" makes it impossible to argue against you, because I can point to 20 articles containing errors and then you can dismiss them all because, in your exalted opinion, they're "obscure or specific" topics.
I'm surprised at how many people here are defending Wikipedia. When I first discovered it, I thought it was a great project. Now, I think it's not-so-great.
The problem I see is not factual inaccuracies (they exist but are comparatively easy to correct), but lack of rigor and a tendency to transparently pass-through the authors' biases.
When I say "bias," I am not necessarily referring to political opinions or prejudices. Those are examples but not, even, the most common. A bias is simply something that inclines one to think a certain way without realizing why, and especially without taking the trouble to consider and refute contrary propositions. For instance, Wikipedia's proponents (defenders? apologists?) are fond of saying that Wikipedia's open model makes it less biased than, say, a copyrighted encyclopedia. That's a biased statement itself -- it fails to consider, for example, the possibility that authors may be more inclined to rigorous fact-checking when they're being paid for their efforts, or the possibility that some opinions may be just wrong in spite of having vocal proponents who insist on getting a free soapbox in the name of "balance".
Finally, a rebuttal to the defense that "it's just an encyclopedia." Would you consult an encyclopedia, any encyclopedia, where 50% of the articles were known to be utterly false? Would you tolerate a 25% error rate? The question I pose is, what error rate really is acceptable and does Wikipedia exceed that rate, or not? My experience is a sample size of about 20 articles and in that sample, the rate of error or omission is about 20%. For me, that's far too high -- but I admit that's a biased analysis. ;-)