I was not aware you had a basic human right to make as many digital copies of photos or video or audio as you like and distribute them to whomever you wish. Nor was I aware that you had the right to possess material which exists in contravention of the law. Please, tell me where this basic human right is codified and on what basis it is established.
I don't think it's dishonest to conflate legal rights with ethical and moral rights. In fact, I think ethical and moral rights are legal rights. The two are one and the same. you have no ethical and moral rights that are not codified as legal rights.
The problem is that American companies act like jackasses toward the government. Not only do they tend to ridiculously inflate costs (especially American defense industries) but they also take weird ideological stances. I am thinking, of course, about Barrett firearms.
I don't know why the government would want to do business with a domestic corporation like that.
Rubbish. Society has a significant interest in what you do with your body, because the results of that action may cause harm to others. If, for example, you have extremely drug-resistant tuberculosis, you can expect public health authorities to hold you in isolation, and if necessary, force treatment upon you.
An individual's ignorance should not be to society's detriment. If their ignorance or lack of compliance will cause harm to others, they may be forced to comply with procedures, even when those procedures cause them discomfort, inconvenience, or possible harm.
With respect to a nation which has been democratic longer, certainly. England is a perfect example. Regardless...
The trouble is, and one that most Americans don't seem to realize, you don't have power transitions between two very different groups of people. Power remains consolidated in the hands of the same people. That's not a democracy, it's an oligarchy (and the reasons behind why it's an oligarchy can in some cases be oddly contradictory).
Moreover, the question of whether or not nations copied the American system is itself dubious. The American system is a copy of the British system with a few of the names changed. Given the proliferation of the British Empire at the time, I am given more toward the belief that the proliferation of states with the same form of government is far more the responsibility of the British than the Americans.
Likewise, leaving a published work unattended for a number of years indicates that you have no intention of using it, and that it SHOULD go into the public domain. We might argue over how many years is sufficient to indicate that the work has been abandoned, but at some point, I will win the argument. Copyright law backs me up.
I do not agree, and you will not win. Your argument is based on an entirely mistaken interpretation of copyright law, and the law in general, that conflates a whole bunch of totally separate constructs.
No, you are categorically wrong. Google has offered an "opt out" deal. Any publisher or IP owner who is blissfully ignorant of that deal, and fails to take advantage of it, is demonstrably NOT protecting their IP rights. They have done NOTHING.
You do not, apparently, understand the meaning of the term 'categorically', which means 'as a category'. The rest of your statement is mere bluster.
Again, the distinctions are merely legal distinctions, quibbled over by lawyers, at the expense of one and all. For my purposes, they are all the same - they grant me the right to presume that the owner doesn't care enough to protect his property.
My mistake. Not only are you presumptuous, you're also an idiot.
Why should I be forced to protect my property against your intrusion upon it? If I do not put up a fence, that is no license for you to walk in and set up camp on my front lawn.
Check out this video [youtube.com]. See any similarities? Can you tell us what happened to the innovative product being marketed? Do you remember Origami? Natal? Surface?
A variety of Origami devices were launched, and continue to be launched. Natal has been announced, but not released: Nobody expected it to be, and Microsoft did not claim it was. I've seen multiple Surface installations, and it was in any case never targeted to consumers but to corporate markets (A price point of $25,000 per unit does that.)
Your insistence does not make it fact, however. Each of those options have different names because they are different things, with different rights, responsibilities, and qualities.
You say that "no-one is using them, no one is making any effort to protect their IP rights, no one is doing anything". Categorically, that only applies to public domain works.
Creators of ''abandoned works" and "out of print" material will often act to protect their IP rights, despite not republishing them. This is very common with computer software. There may be a good reason not to reprint the material. They may be attempting to create artificial scarcity. They may be holding out for a better publishing deal. They may decide that the cost of publishing will outweigh any returns, but wish to prevent the work from being republished by others in order to generate revenues on other works (for example, Microsoft does not sell Word 2000- but presumably they would act immediately and stringently to block infringement of their rights on that work because the limitation on accessibility to Word 2000 sells more copies of Word 2007).
Creative commons material is a different beast entirely. People who publish their work under the creative commons license will often act strongly to protect their works and those same works are probably still being published under said license.
The only work to which your argument applies is the works in the public domain, which have passed out of copyright, which never had copyright on them, or which copyright has been renounced. These, of course, anyone is free to do anything with and nobody is saying otherwise.
Your argument is remarkably short-sighted in that it presumes that work that is not being currently put to use has been abandoned to the public domain. This is simply wrong, and it is not an assumption you, nor Google, has a right to make. There are procedures in place to allow work to be placed in the public domain. If a creator wishes to do that, they have that option. Why should you have the right to act as if they intended to do something, when in fact, had they intended to do that, they could easily have done so but have not?
A legal signature doesn't need to be anything, though. It doesn't even have to be your name, for goodness sake (mine, for the longest time, was not my name at all, in fact) and it certainly doesn't have to be externally legible.
And my point was that there is a risk in doing so, because the credit card company terms of service prohibit charging more for the use of credit cards and those rules are often selectively and arbitrarily enforced.
Merchants may decide the risk of facing off with Visa or Mastercard is not worth the effort, especially since the two major risks of facing off with them are a) getting severed from credit cards entirely, and b) getting whacked with a huge fine.
That's rather ridiculous. The media and the legal profession dislikes the internet as a whole because it draws no real distinction between those who distribute content and those who receive it. You can distribute and receive it at the same time; you can effectively distribute media without actually distributing it...
There is a real difference between telling somewhere where to get something illegal and then them having to get in their car and go over to get it. What is the difference between linking someone to something illegal and printing it? Why should one be distribution and the other not? The difference between information and distribution narrows significantly with the internet and so the rules that applied to one and not the other no longer make sense.
This is not necessarily a positive state of affairs; the old regime made a lot of sense, and unfortunately now we are having to redefine the boundaries in a way not entirely optimal.
Credit cards might be raping your store's profits, but what if you can't use credit cards at all? Will your total sales fall off sharply? Obviously it depends on what kind of store you are, but for most stores, the answer is yes.
Most of those retailers probably don't want to get into spats with the credit card companies, which prohibit charging more for credit transactions than you do for regular transactions.
They do permit a 'cash discount' price, and so in effect it's probably merely six of one and half a dozen of another, but their enforcement is spotty, which is just what you'd expect of such a program, so it may be more trouble than it's worth.
Did you seen 'often' in the definition? 'Often' =/= 'always'.
The definition you yourself presented suggests that a botnet can be formed of automatically spread programs but does not have to be.
Moreover, there is no part of the term 'bot' that suggests it requires automatic propagation. I have an IRC bot running right now. It does not go out and spread itself. It is merely a mechanical/electrical agent which operates autonomously in response to higher-level commands from me- just like any robot.
In that case, don't you think it should be up to Congress to specifically create an exception to current copyright law for the purposes of digital libraries?
Slashdot Mirror
Where is the right to liberty codified?
I do it all the time. It's not just a hobby, it's my job.
I was not aware you had a basic human right to make as many digital copies of photos or video or audio as you like and distribute them to whomever you wish. Nor was I aware that you had the right to possess material which exists in contravention of the law. Please, tell me where this basic human right is codified and on what basis it is established.
I don't think it's dishonest to conflate legal rights with ethical and moral rights. In fact, I think ethical and moral rights are legal rights. The two are one and the same. you have no ethical and moral rights that are not codified as legal rights.
Given that they are judges and you are not, perhaps it is you who is misinterpreting the laws as written.
It is a weird ideological stance for a corporation to take. It's a loss of business to no particular gain.
The problem is that American companies act like jackasses toward the government. Not only do they tend to ridiculously inflate costs (especially American defense industries) but they also take weird ideological stances. I am thinking, of course, about Barrett firearms.
I don't know why the government would want to do business with a domestic corporation like that.
Courts are also a form of government regulation. Without them, you couldn't have contracts. Sounds like fun capitalism to me, not having contracts...
Rubbish. Society has a significant interest in what you do with your body, because the results of that action may cause harm to others. If, for example, you have extremely drug-resistant tuberculosis, you can expect public health authorities to hold you in isolation, and if necessary, force treatment upon you.
An individual's ignorance should not be to society's detriment. If their ignorance or lack of compliance will cause harm to others, they may be forced to comply with procedures, even when those procedures cause them discomfort, inconvenience, or possible harm.
That seems to be an argument to reduce university tuition costs, not reduce interest rates.
With respect to a nation which has been democratic longer, certainly. England is a perfect example. Regardless...
The trouble is, and one that most Americans don't seem to realize, you don't have power transitions between two very different groups of people. Power remains consolidated in the hands of the same people. That's not a democracy, it's an oligarchy (and the reasons behind why it's an oligarchy can in some cases be oddly contradictory).
Moreover, the question of whether or not nations copied the American system is itself dubious. The American system is a copy of the British system with a few of the names changed. Given the proliferation of the British Empire at the time, I am given more toward the belief that the proliferation of states with the same form of government is far more the responsibility of the British than the Americans.
They're not absent, you just don't know them.
How about the first known ships? African. Irrigation? African. Early mathematics? Early medicine? African.
I do not agree, and you will not win. Your argument is based on an entirely mistaken interpretation of copyright law, and the law in general, that conflates a whole bunch of totally separate constructs.
You do not, apparently, understand the meaning of the term 'categorically', which means 'as a category'. The rest of your statement is mere bluster.
My mistake. Not only are you presumptuous, you're also an idiot.
Why should I be forced to protect my property against your intrusion upon it? If I do not put up a fence, that is no license for you to walk in and set up camp on my front lawn.
A variety of Origami devices were launched, and continue to be launched. Natal has been announced, but not released: Nobody expected it to be, and Microsoft did not claim it was. I've seen multiple Surface installations, and it was in any case never targeted to consumers but to corporate markets (A price point of $25,000 per unit does that.)
Your insistence does not make it fact, however. Each of those options have different names because they are different things, with different rights, responsibilities, and qualities.
You say that "no-one is using them, no one is making any effort to protect their IP rights, no one is doing anything". Categorically, that only applies to public domain works.
Creators of ''abandoned works" and "out of print" material will often act to protect their IP rights, despite not republishing them. This is very common with computer software. There may be a good reason not to reprint the material. They may be attempting to create artificial scarcity. They may be holding out for a better publishing deal. They may decide that the cost of publishing will outweigh any returns, but wish to prevent the work from being republished by others in order to generate revenues on other works (for example, Microsoft does not sell Word 2000- but presumably they would act immediately and stringently to block infringement of their rights on that work because the limitation on accessibility to Word 2000 sells more copies of Word 2007).
Creative commons material is a different beast entirely. People who publish their work under the creative commons license will often act strongly to protect their works and those same works are probably still being published under said license.
The only work to which your argument applies is the works in the public domain, which have passed out of copyright, which never had copyright on them, or which copyright has been renounced. These, of course, anyone is free to do anything with and nobody is saying otherwise.
Your argument is remarkably short-sighted in that it presumes that work that is not being currently put to use has been abandoned to the public domain. This is simply wrong, and it is not an assumption you, nor Google, has a right to make. There are procedures in place to allow work to be placed in the public domain. If a creator wishes to do that, they have that option. Why should you have the right to act as if they intended to do something, when in fact, had they intended to do that, they could easily have done so but have not?
A symbol? What are you talking about?
Well, for the longest time my 'signature' was merely a scrawl of my initials. Now it's simply a series of scrawled loops.
A legal signature doesn't need to be anything, though. It doesn't even have to be your name, for goodness sake (mine, for the longest time, was not my name at all, in fact) and it certainly doesn't have to be externally legible.
And my point was that there is a risk in doing so, because the credit card company terms of service prohibit charging more for the use of credit cards and those rules are often selectively and arbitrarily enforced.
Merchants may decide the risk of facing off with Visa or Mastercard is not worth the effort, especially since the two major risks of facing off with them are a) getting severed from credit cards entirely, and b) getting whacked with a huge fine.
That's rather ridiculous. The media and the legal profession dislikes the internet as a whole because it draws no real distinction between those who distribute content and those who receive it. You can distribute and receive it at the same time; you can effectively distribute media without actually distributing it...
There is a real difference between telling somewhere where to get something illegal and then them having to get in their car and go over to get it. What is the difference between linking someone to something illegal and printing it? Why should one be distribution and the other not? The difference between information and distribution narrows significantly with the internet and so the rules that applied to one and not the other no longer make sense.
This is not necessarily a positive state of affairs; the old regime made a lot of sense, and unfortunately now we are having to redefine the boundaries in a way not entirely optimal.
Credit cards might be raping your store's profits, but what if you can't use credit cards at all? Will your total sales fall off sharply? Obviously it depends on what kind of store you are, but for most stores, the answer is yes.
Prove that your double-blind study controlled all variables.
In other words, all those studies are are carefully reported datasets comprised of anecdotes.
Most of those retailers probably don't want to get into spats with the credit card companies, which prohibit charging more for credit transactions than you do for regular transactions.
They do permit a 'cash discount' price, and so in effect it's probably merely six of one and half a dozen of another, but their enforcement is spotty, which is just what you'd expect of such a program, so it may be more trouble than it's worth.
Did you seen 'often' in the definition? 'Often' =/= 'always'.
The definition you yourself presented suggests that a botnet can be formed of automatically spread programs but does not have to be.
Moreover, there is no part of the term 'bot' that suggests it requires automatic propagation. I have an IRC bot running right now. It does not go out and spread itself. It is merely a mechanical/electrical agent which operates autonomously in response to higher-level commands from me- just like any robot.
In that case, don't you think it should be up to Congress to specifically create an exception to current copyright law for the purposes of digital libraries?