Frankly I could care less about a bar code scanner myself, I don't have much use for it.
However, I don't like the idea of any peice of hardware being released (free or not) which tries to pretend it has the protection of the law preventing you from using it any damn way you please. The only protection this has is the ability of the company to file frivolous lawsuits against you to take your time and money (for a lawyer) to make it a pain to do something they don't approve of.
However this now seems to be becoming a trend in the consumer electronics market (iOpenr, Tivo) and I think its a trend that needs to be stopped. Hardware makers seem to have started thinking they should have the same type of lame licenses that software companies have on their products (ie. we'll sell you this but no you don't own it and can only use it how we want you to).
Thus I'm only interested in it because I don't like the idea of EULA's for hardware I buy or receive for free.
The patent is on the process of tying together the cookie, button and database to allow a purchase by clicking on the button. The One-Click I believe is under trademark (if it's protected at all). Phrases describing something can't be patented yet (just waiting for a law allowing that to be introduced though:( )
Here's the whole sorted history of the 1-Click patent on/.
You're absolutely correct. Any unsolicited merchandise you recieve is yours to keep without charge to do with what you will.
Here is the Postal Service guide to preventing mail fraud in PDF format (it doesn't say much about this other than anything sent to you unsolicited is yours to keep).
I thought of the same thing I think everyone reading should join a mass CueCat protest by mailing their CueCat (and as many as they can pick up) back to Digital Convergance POSTAGE DUE.
Maybe that will be enough of a clue-by-four to make them stop their ridiculous scary lawyer letters.
This is if you don't have an electronic surplus place (a useful resource if you need video cards, full height 5 1/4" 8" Floppy drives etc. for AT/AX or other old machines) in your town/city .
Actually you can do this and many recycling facilities do to separate metals (including non-ferrous, or generally non-magnetic) from other materials. The way it works is you drop the material in a rapidly oscillating magnetic field which produces a force on any conductive (read metal) material in the waste stream. This force pushes the metal into a separate path from the rest of the material (here's an example of a commercial separator). The only problem I see is that most of the lead is IN the glass (CRT's are good quality moderately leaded ~20% glass) and I don't see the lead in the glass being separated except through melting.
Since these run on NatGas don't you still need to deal with PG&E(I'm guessing this is Pacific GAS and Electric, since I am fortunately not living in CA). Although I guess you might be able to get a permit for a Propane Tank. Well at least you only will deal with their gas supply and not electric too.
This only puts any existing copies into public domain. If no one can make any copies and the company simply stops publishing when copyright expires that cantent is permanently lost as AFAIK.
I actually was posting on way too little sleep, the sexual harassment lawsuits I was thinking of actually were the ones which significantly removed reduced privacy rights which was the first time that had happened. I can't find the links right now but one of these was a judgement to open Senator Packwood's personal diaries, which was apparently unusual. Also sexual harassment has become the default excuse as to why employers (when they want to monitor) "must" monitor their employees. (here's a link on the erosion of privacy rights at the NYT)
However as an aside the "PC" movement in the early ninties did affect the tone of what could be said. For examle there was a professor in the business school at my university who was forced out because of some comments 1 student objected to. He was well liked (by the students in general anyway) and gifted at teaching and was a tenured professor. His being publicly forced to resign was a result of this attack on free speech and was quite surprising result(however some universities can be pretty viscious politically so there my have been something else going on which wasn't public).
DVD RAM is actually coming down in price much faster than I expected, right now you can get a creative DVD-RAM drive (5.2GB) for ~$270 and media for ~$20. This is much less expensive than I expected.
Code does fall under copyright law even in binary form. This is the boneheaded decision foisted on us. It would be interesting if the rulings had required the code to be released for copyright protection to be applied.
Here's a link to a statement of the law by one of the groups dedicated stamping out software piracy (the SIIA which used to be the SPA) among other things.
Actually this all started with the PC movement (as in politically correct not Personal computer) and a number of sexual harrassment lawsuits.
These slowly eroded (are eroding) free speech and now the government is just taking the next logical step and trying to control other speech which it finds "offensive" such as about drugs or guns or bombs or decoding algorithms or any other thing which they feel like.
This is the slippery slope often mentioned by people interested in protecting free speech and other Bill of Rights freedoms and as you said,
There are serious issues here. We cannot allow agencies, or people, or organizations, or judges to out-law some form of speech simply because it is distasteful or even slightly dangerous (in the non-physical form: excluding libel and slander, which are crimes that are alot harder to commit than one would think). This is exactly the type of thing we must prevent in order to secure our more "traditional" freedoms.
Unfortunately the small steps which are being taken are slowly eroding these freedoms and when the centerists see what has happened it might be too late to correct easily.
I didn't specify which lawsuit, I left that for the reader to determine. I'm guessing you mean that the MPAA and DVD-CCA are separate, but although they have different purposes in general in this case (DeCSS) they seem to be more or less interchangable. But point taken, it's not the money grubbing monopolist MPAA taking Copyleft to court, its the money grubbing monopolist DVD-CCA which was set up and designed by the MPAA taking Copyleft to court.
And the people at People for internet responsibility think that opening the source is important but consider far worse problems with the entire carnivore idea.
I think that was the point, the module is more than the price of the original device (which was designed as a lower cost alternative to the palm).
This MP3 company completely misjudged the price point for their target market. I think people are mostly interested in the Visor b/c of its low price and promise of future expandability. However most modules are ~$50, this module costs more than the original cost of the PDA and offers functionality which can be gotten much cheaper elsewhere (Rio) without being significantly larger.
Thank you for this link its very informative on this issue (much more than most of the posts in the thread).
The point by point refutation of the industry position is both detailed and mostly very depressing. I have seen the skill escalation going on in job descriptions and agree that this is going to eventually end up with the companies losing qualified applicants who could contribute to their success.
I would like to know if anyone has refuted any of the author's points successfully or if the industry and polititians are simply trying to ignore the points the author makes in hopes that no one will notice.
Slashdot Mirror
So you infringed on the copyright of the lawyer who originally wrote the legal text to protect against people infinging on copyright on your site.
How sweetly ironic, hehe....
The only winners in a civil suit are generally the lawyers, go figure I wonder who designed that system.
Frankly I could care less about a bar code scanner myself, I don't have much use for it.
However, I don't like the idea of any peice of hardware being released (free or not) which tries to pretend it has the protection of the law preventing you from using it any damn way you please. The only protection this has is the ability of the company to file frivolous lawsuits against you to take your time and money (for a lawyer) to make it a pain to do something they don't approve of.
However this now seems to be becoming a trend in the consumer electronics market (iOpenr, Tivo) and I think its a trend that needs to be stopped. Hardware makers seem to have started thinking they should have the same type of lame licenses that software companies have on their products (ie. we'll sell you this but no you don't own it and can only use it how we want you to).
Thus I'm only interested in it because I don't like the idea of EULA's for hardware I buy or receive for free.
The patent is on the process of tying together the cookie, button and database to allow a purchase by clicking on the button. The One-Click I believe is under trademark (if it's protected at all). Phrases describing something can't be patented yet (just waiting for a law allowing that to be introduced though :( )
/.
Here's the whole sorted history of the 1-Click patent on
You're absolutely correct. Any unsolicited merchandise you recieve is yours to keep without charge to do with what you will.
Here is the Postal Service guide to preventing mail fraud in PDF format (it doesn't say much about this other than anything sent to you unsolicited is yours to keep).
I thought of the same thing I think everyone reading should join a mass CueCat protest by mailing their CueCat (and as many as they can pick up) back to Digital Convergance POSTAGE DUE.
Maybe that will be enough of a clue-by-four to make them stop their ridiculous scary lawyer letters.
Here's a link for all your old parts needs.
This is if you don't have an electronic surplus place (a useful resource if you need video cards, full height 5 1/4" 8" Floppy drives etc. for AT/AX or other old machines) in your town/city .
Actually you can do this and many recycling facilities do to separate metals (including non-ferrous, or generally non-magnetic) from other materials. The way it works is you drop the material in a rapidly oscillating magnetic field which produces a force on any conductive (read metal) material in the waste stream. This force pushes the metal into a separate path from the rest of the material (here's an example of a commercial separator). The only problem I see is that most of the lead is IN the glass (CRT's are good quality moderately leaded ~20% glass) and I don't see the lead in the glass being separated except through melting.
Since these run on NatGas don't you still need to deal with PG&E(I'm guessing this is Pacific GAS and Electric, since I am fortunately not living in CA). Although I guess you might be able to get a permit for a Propane Tank. Well at least you only will deal with their gas supply and not electric too.
I think they ment that as a (bad) joke ie. orbiting satelltites, but I think everyone knows what you really mean.
This only puts any existing copies into public domain. If no one can make any copies and the company simply stops publishing when copyright expires that cantent is permanently lost as AFAIK.
Yet another reason to be disturbed by the DMCA.
I actually was posting on way too little sleep, the sexual harassment lawsuits I was thinking of actually were the ones which significantly removed reduced privacy rights which was the first time that had happened. I can't find the links right now but one of these was a judgement to open Senator Packwood's personal diaries, which was apparently unusual. Also sexual harassment has become the default excuse as to why employers (when they want to monitor) "must" monitor their employees. (here's a link on the erosion of privacy rights at the NYT)
However as an aside the "PC" movement in the early ninties did affect the tone of what could be said. For examle there was a professor in the business school at my university who was forced out because of some comments 1 student objected to. He was well liked (by the students in general anyway) and gifted at teaching and was a tenured professor. His being publicly forced to resign was a result of this attack on free speech and was quite surprising result(however some universities can be pretty viscious politically so there my have been something else going on which wasn't public).
DVD RAM is actually coming down in price much faster than I expected, right now you can get a creative DVD-RAM drive (5.2GB) for ~$270 and media for ~$20. This is much less expensive than I expected.
Code does fall under copyright law even in binary form. This is the boneheaded decision foisted on us. It would be interesting if the rulings had required the code to be released for copyright protection to be applied.
Here's a link to a statement of the law by one of the groups dedicated stamping out software piracy (the SIIA which used to be the SPA) among other things.
Actually this all started with the PC movement (as in politically correct not Personal computer) and a number of sexual harrassment lawsuits.
These slowly eroded (are eroding) free speech and now the government is just taking the next logical step and trying to control other speech which it finds "offensive" such as about drugs or guns or bombs or decoding algorithms or any other thing which they feel like.
This is the slippery slope often mentioned by people interested in protecting free speech and other Bill of Rights freedoms and as you said,
There are serious issues here. We cannot allow agencies, or people, or organizations, or judges to out-law some form of speech simply because it is distasteful or even slightly dangerous (in the non-physical form: excluding libel and slander, which are crimes that are alot harder to commit than one would think). This is exactly the type of thing we must prevent in order to secure our more "traditional" freedoms.
Unfortunately the small steps which are being taken are slowly eroding these freedoms and when the centerists see what has happened it might be too late to correct easily.
Sorry 'bout the broken links shoulda checked them.
here's ones that work:
Walt Disney Company
Sony Pictures Entertainment, Inc.
Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer Inc.
Paramount Pictures Corporation
Twentieth Century Fox Film Corp.
Universal Studios, Inc.
Warner Bros.
Those at least work, not sure how helpful they are ;) (particularly since about 50% don't load uless you have Javascript enabled :()
And don't bother doing either to Valenti, he's just a stuffed suit payed for by the movie companies to say what they want him to.
Better to send your mail to execs in the major movie studios which are part of the MPAA.
Walt Disney Company
Sony Pictures Entertainment, Inc.
Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer Inc.
Paramount Pictures Corporation
Twentieth Century Fox Film Corp.
Universal Studios, Inc.
Warner Bros.
and of course all their subsidiaries (too numerous to list even if I knew them all)
At least they have some power.
I didn't specify which lawsuit, I left that for the reader to determine. I'm guessing you mean that the MPAA and DVD-CCA are separate, but although they have different purposes in general in this case (DeCSS) they seem to be more or less interchangable. But point taken, it's not the money grubbing monopolist MPAA taking Copyleft to court, its the money grubbing monopolist DVD-CCA which was set up and designed by the MPAA taking Copyleft to court.
Haven't you heard that the MPAA has added Copyleft to the lawsuit for providing these t-shirts?
So order while you can.
Thanks for the link I'm presonally tired of hearing that particular misquote over and over.
And the people at People for internet responsibility think that opening the source is important but consider far worse problems with the entire carnivore idea.
And the fourth law is that the law is a two-edged sword.
And the second edge is what the MPAA and RIAA are setting themselves up to fall on.
I think that was the point, the module is more than the price of the original device (which was designed as a lower cost alternative to the palm).
This MP3 company completely misjudged the price point for their target market. I think people are mostly interested in the Visor b/c of its low price and promise of future expandability. However most modules are ~$50, this module costs more than the original cost of the PDA and offers functionality which can be gotten much cheaper elsewhere (Rio) without being significantly larger.
Thank you for this link its very informative on this issue (much more than most of the posts in the thread).
The point by point refutation of the industry position is both detailed and mostly very depressing. I have seen the skill escalation going on in job descriptions and agree that this is going to eventually end up with the companies losing qualified applicants who could contribute to their success.
I would like to know if anyone has refuted any of the author's points successfully or if the industry and polititians are simply trying to ignore the points the author makes in hopes that no one will notice.
How cute, next -- even if you don't sign my contract binding you to giving me all your property if you take this candy you still must abide by it.
This is why EULA's are abhorrent/stupid and UTICA/DMCA are going to make even more of a mess out of the IP landscape.