This is already illegal under copyright law. From what I gather from the article, the "news" is that the bill seeks to criminalize unlicensed public performance of a copyrighted work. The summary is totally misleading. Also, giving "credit" in a YouTube video is irrelevant to whether it's licensed or not. Actually I'm surprised more of these aren't scooped up by YouTube's content filtering system right now.
As for fair use, it'd be a tough case to make, but I guess in theory you could argue that... tough because you typically use the whole song, but that's mitigated by the fact that it's non-commercial use, and hardly a replacement - people don't listen to YouTube lip-syncs instead of the original...
I think criminalization of unauthorized public performance is probably a bad idea in general, even if not applied to lip-syncing kids... but don't let the summary fool you, this isn't suddenly making things that are currently legal illegal.
Well, Berne Convention (and Paris Convention) compliance are required by TRIPs, so denouncing either one would involve violating or denouncing TRIPs - and as TRIPs is a crucial part of WTO membership, we would probably also have to leave the WTO, or face enormous retaliatory trade sanctions for non-compliance. None of that is going to happen, and in reality leaving tho WTO is probably not in the best interests of the country.
Mod this up. We don't have the flexibility to alter our domestic law in this manner any more. But, as parent suggests, we could implement some kind of utility model system, aka "petty patents" that are shorter. Whether we can do it and grant them within a reasonable time is a different question...
Eh, 35 on the open parts of New York Avenue is pretty weak... also, leaving work-zone speed restrictions up when the work has been finished for weeks... and $125 is the minimum fine... yeah, people speed, but I don't wish tickets on most of them.
Kids home-schooled into the high school level that don't already have competence with word processors and spreadsheets?
On the other hand, I know a lot of people who would say they are competent in the use of Word and Excel, but wouldn't know how to set tab stops, have never used styles, and probably aren't comfortable with formulae more complex than averages or autosum. Just because someone thinks they know how to use a program doesn't mean they actually do.
Typing is another thing. I am eternally grateful for a touch-typing class I had my freshman year of high school (even though several years later I retrained myself to use Dvorak - I probably would never have done that had I not known how to touch type in the first place). Despite its usefulness, I meet very few people who can actually touch-type.
I would assume that all commercial buildings are subject to warrentless searches to enforce various safety and workplace laws...
But that's just it - there are exceptions to warrantless searches on grounds such as public safety and worker safety... e.g., health inspections, nursing home inspections, OSHA compliance, etc.
Extending those kinds of warrantless searches to look for potential copyright infringement is not in the same vein. Where is the pressing public necessity that justifies the encroachment on the 4th Amendment? To me, it just sounds like the copyright industries want the taxpayer-funded police to act as their own private security force. What if every industry took that approach? Why not have warrantless searches of research labs in order to make sure there is no patent infringement going on?
There is no hard and fast rule about what is and is not fair use. Multiple copies for classroom use in the context of teaching are explicitly mentioned in the statue. As other posters have noted, this is more of an issue for small graduate courses - undergraduates typically use a textbook. In some cases works are out of print. Finally, in academic publishing, this is hardly about authors making money - academics don't write academic books to make money, they do it to advance their fields and their own careers.
The point of copyright is not making people pay for things, it is public benefit. We tend to forget that, but in Fox Film Corp. v. Doyal, SCOTUS put it well: "The
sole interest of the United States and the primary object in conferring the monopoly lie in the general benefits derived by the public from the labors of authors.”
"Multiple copies for classroom use" is not license for copy shops to duplicate textbooks next to campus, or even course packets. But if as a professor or teaching assistant, I want to photocopy a chapter from a seminal text for my class of 20 students, I am well within my rights.
Hell, there are some books that aren't even in print anymore... used copies are not only outrageously expensive, there simple aren't enough to go around. Sure, I can place it on two hour reserve at the library... or, I can use the Xerox machine in the manner in which it was intended.
I have an old original version of the Apple TV (came with a stripped down version of Tiger, I believe, rather than iOS). Cracked it open, replaced the hard drive with a larger one, used atv-bootloader to create a bootable USB disk, and installed LinHES (MythTV distro based on Arch). It was a PITA to do, but it's working reasonably well now. Cool little machine - the original had both HDMI and component out, new one is just HDMI, and doesn't have a standard USB port, I think.
I would say I'm amazed at the economic illiteracy of/.'ers, but it's not really a surprise given political discourse these days. I'll let the Joint Economic Committee do the talking for me.
The other thing is, the chunks you have quoted from the report tell us nothing since they do not include any information about how income distribution has changed over time. A reduction in upper tax brackets followed by an increase in tax receipts from upper income taxpayers doesn't mean one was caused by the other - that is a classic post hoc, ergo propter hoc fallacy. In fact, the concentration of of wealth in just the top 1% of households increased significantly from 1983 to 1995 (source)
I'm not saying undoing all of Reagan's tax policy would solve all our problems, but lifting a chunk out of a Republican memo doesn't really tell us anything, either.
The studios are the providers - Netflix is one of their licensed distributors.
This is certainly true now that Netflix is big into streaming, but I'm not sure that it was true when they were only doing mail delivery. I don't know Netflix history that well, but I do know that Redbox ran into a lot of opposition from studios precisely because they did not have licensing agreements - they would purchase DVDs off the shelf and stick them in vending machines. Under US copyright law, that is allowed (contrast with CDs or software, where it is not allowed). I would bet Netflix did not have licensing agreements with studios when it was just doing mail order delivery.
Probably the only reason the studios were willing to strike streaming license agreements with Netflix was because of its prior success with mail order delivery - they weren't getting as big a chunk of that cash as they wanted, and knew they couldn't ignore Netflix anymore.
It's not just developers. I originally discovered the benefit of having a second monitor at a coding job in college - one screen for code, another for a browser to test the code and read documentation, etc.
After that, I bought myself another monitor for my desktop. Two came in great handy for translation - one monitor for source document and reference works, other monitor for your translation. It came in handy for reading electronic documents and taking notes/outlining. It's great for any job where you deal with lots of text, and need to be able to compare different documents, synthesize them, etc.
I'm now up to three. There are diminishing returns, obviously; the third isn't strictly necessary for me, but highly convenient. Any more than this would be tought for me to use effectively, though I suppose a square arrangement of four could be useful for some people.
Well, there may be "pie-enlarging" productivity gains to be had, as well as comparative advantage across a whole economy that can mitigate the effects of credentialism, but what is most damning about his argument is that it applies equally well to free primary and secondary education. He's subsidizing that in large amounts right now, and probably complains bitterly about it. But in reality we need a working population that is literate and functional - it benefits everyone.
I actually think the probably too many people attend college, which has in large part become a training facility to impart skills that should have been adequately learned during high school. That, and employers also want the college to impart job-related skills that they'd be better off learning on the job itself. The more fundamental problem than the cost of higher education is probably the poor quality of primary and secondary education that leaves students unprepared to enter college or the workforce.
Not really. Social Security and Medicare are funded on a pay-as-you-go basis, meaning current workers pay for current benefits. Contrast this to a funded pension system, where workers/employers contribute over the course of the employee's working years, and then benefits are paid from those contributions.
His current social security and Medicare taxes go to pay for the benefits that others are currently receiving. When he retires, the benefits he receives will be paid for by whoever is working at that time. Of course, what he is entitled to receive depends on how much he contributed over his lifetime, but that's not the same as advance funding.
Of course he also fails to recognize that since the ratio of workers to beneficiaries is steadily declining, the 2.1 to 1.9 workers supporting his future benefits will need to make significantly more money in order to ensure he receives his Social Security and Medicare benefits than they do today. If all those workers are uneducated and poorly paid because he didn't to subsidize their education, it's going to be tough for them to pay his benefits.
Yeah, that's kind of what I had thought. Unfortunately it kind of kills the market for unsubsidized phones... the only advantage of buying an unsubsidized phone from most people's perspective is the ability to move to another provider whenever you want. Of course, given that the major providers use incompatible technologies in their networks, that benefit is pretty much gutted.
I'm actually willing to take the contract in exchange for the subsidized phone, I just wish they didn't put crappy branded firmware on everything.
In the US, our carriers do subsidies, and you commit to a contract term in return for that subsidy. It's always worked that way (at least as long as I've owned a cell phone, since about 1998). You're always free to pay the full price for the phone and not lock into a contract.
Here's what I don't understand. Let's say you do pay full price for a phone... why is your monthly rate the same as someone who buys a subsidized phone?
Sure, copyright is not a literal translation of Urheberrecht, just as it is not a literal translation of "droit d'auteur." But given that Germany was one of the original signatories of the Berne Convention, and also conforms to TRIPs, its "author's right" law provides in large part the same sort of protections that American copyright law provides. Yes, there are important differences, but to say that German sites using the English word "copyright" are lying is pretty misleading.
Their penalties for going over 250 are pretty severe.
Are they? I've been on Comcast for about three years in three different locations, and I've often exceeded 250 GB a month. One month I totaled about 600 GB. It varies, on average I am probably around 200 GB, but I have never heard a peep from them in the months when I do exceed 250.
I think the history of Hiroshima and Nagasaki show that this statement is not always true, in fact, the only real example of nukes in a war are of nukes ending a war.
The problem is, that example is virtually useless in understanding how a war between nuclear powers would play out.
Yeah, one day in undergrad I decided I wanted to make my own polyalphabetic substitution cipher, so I sat down and basically reinvented the Vignere cipher (actually the Gronsfeld cipher, which is identical except that the key is numeric. Also FWIW I was not in a technical major).
What I really want to know is why universities think they need to be involved in a discussion about copyright protection anyway.
Probably because due to intense lobbying by the MPAA et al., in the Higher Education Opportunity Act the federal government included stipulations that schools receiving federal money adopt certain procedures regarding copyright infringement and file-sharing. See, e.g., http://www.educause.edu/Resources/Browse/HEOA/34600.
That's simply not true. Copying is a plain violation of the reproduction right, which is an exclusive right of the copyright holder, regardless of what you do with the copy. And Carson's point is that while everyone assumes space shifting to be a fair use, by the letter of the law it may not be.
Now, you're right in the sense that no one is going to sue you if you sit around all day making copies of a book and never do or intend to do anything with them. But internal photocopying within an organization has been the subject of lawsuits, despite there being no legal transfer of possession (see, e.g., American Geophysical Union v. Texaco).
Slashdot Mirror
Not a regulatory violation, a civil law violation.
This is already illegal under copyright law. From what I gather from the article, the "news" is that the bill seeks to criminalize unlicensed public performance of a copyrighted work. The summary is totally misleading. Also, giving "credit" in a YouTube video is irrelevant to whether it's licensed or not. Actually I'm surprised more of these aren't scooped up by YouTube's content filtering system right now.
As for fair use, it'd be a tough case to make, but I guess in theory you could argue that... tough because you typically use the whole song, but that's mitigated by the fact that it's non-commercial use, and hardly a replacement - people don't listen to YouTube lip-syncs instead of the original...
I think criminalization of unauthorized public performance is probably a bad idea in general, even if not applied to lip-syncing kids... but don't let the summary fool you, this isn't suddenly making things that are currently legal illegal.
Well, Berne Convention (and Paris Convention) compliance are required by TRIPs, so denouncing either one would involve violating or denouncing TRIPs - and as TRIPs is a crucial part of WTO membership, we would probably also have to leave the WTO, or face enormous retaliatory trade sanctions for non-compliance. None of that is going to happen, and in reality leaving tho WTO is probably not in the best interests of the country.
Mod this up. We don't have the flexibility to alter our domestic law in this manner any more. But, as parent suggests, we could implement some kind of utility model system, aka "petty patents" that are shorter. Whether we can do it and grant them within a reasonable time is a different question...
Eh, 35 on the open parts of New York Avenue is pretty weak... also, leaving work-zone speed restrictions up when the work has been finished for weeks... and $125 is the minimum fine... yeah, people speed, but I don't wish tickets on most of them.
I was wondering the same thing, but I'd guess it's because iCloud requires iTunes or something, and the new version of iTunes doesn't support XP.
Kids home-schooled into the high school level that don't already have competence with word processors and spreadsheets?
On the other hand, I know a lot of people who would say they are competent in the use of Word and Excel, but wouldn't know how to set tab stops, have never used styles, and probably aren't comfortable with formulae more complex than averages or autosum. Just because someone thinks they know how to use a program doesn't mean they actually do.
Typing is another thing. I am eternally grateful for a touch-typing class I had my freshman year of high school (even though several years later I retrained myself to use Dvorak - I probably would never have done that had I not known how to touch type in the first place). Despite its usefulness, I meet very few people who can actually touch-type.
I would assume that all commercial buildings are subject to warrentless searches to enforce various safety and workplace laws...
But that's just it - there are exceptions to warrantless searches on grounds such as public safety and worker safety... e.g., health inspections, nursing home inspections, OSHA compliance, etc.
Extending those kinds of warrantless searches to look for potential copyright infringement is not in the same vein. Where is the pressing public necessity that justifies the encroachment on the 4th Amendment? To me, it just sounds like the copyright industries want the taxpayer-funded police to act as their own private security force. What if every industry took that approach? Why not have warrantless searches of research labs in order to make sure there is no patent infringement going on?
There is no hard and fast rule about what is and is not fair use. Multiple copies for classroom use in the context of teaching are explicitly mentioned in the statue. As other posters have noted, this is more of an issue for small graduate courses - undergraduates typically use a textbook. In some cases works are out of print. Finally, in academic publishing, this is hardly about authors making money - academics don't write academic books to make money, they do it to advance their fields and their own careers.
Fair use explicitly includes the possibility of multiple copies for classroom use in the context of teaching.
The point of copyright is not making people pay for things, it is public benefit. We tend to forget that, but in Fox Film Corp. v. Doyal, SCOTUS put it well: "The sole interest of the United States and the primary object in conferring the monopoly lie in the general benefits derived by the public from the labors of authors.”
"Multiple copies for classroom use" is not license for copy shops to duplicate textbooks next to campus, or even course packets. But if as a professor or teaching assistant, I want to photocopy a chapter from a seminal text for my class of 20 students, I am well within my rights.
Hell, there are some books that aren't even in print anymore... used copies are not only outrageously expensive, there simple aren't enough to go around. Sure, I can place it on two hour reserve at the library... or, I can use the Xerox machine in the manner in which it was intended.
I have an old original version of the Apple TV (came with a stripped down version of Tiger, I believe, rather than iOS). Cracked it open, replaced the hard drive with a larger one, used atv-bootloader to create a bootable USB disk, and installed LinHES (MythTV distro based on Arch). It was a PITA to do, but it's working reasonably well now. Cool little machine - the original had both HDMI and component out, new one is just HDMI, and doesn't have a standard USB port, I think.
I would say I'm amazed at the economic illiteracy of /.'ers, but it's not really a surprise given political discourse these days. I'll let the Joint Economic Committee do the talking for me.
I don't really get your point. You link to an explicitly Republican website with a report form 1996 extolling the virtues of the Reagan tax cuts. (FYI, Reagan's one of Reagan's "tax cuts" offset the lowering of income taxes with a major increase in corporate taxes).
The other thing is, the chunks you have quoted from the report tell us nothing since they do not include any information about how income distribution has changed over time. A reduction in upper tax brackets followed by an increase in tax receipts from upper income taxpayers doesn't mean one was caused by the other - that is a classic post hoc, ergo propter hoc fallacy. In fact, the concentration of of wealth in just the top 1% of households increased significantly from 1983 to 1995 (source)
I'm not saying undoing all of Reagan's tax policy would solve all our problems, but lifting a chunk out of a Republican memo doesn't really tell us anything, either.
The studios are the providers - Netflix is one of their licensed distributors.
This is certainly true now that Netflix is big into streaming, but I'm not sure that it was true when they were only doing mail delivery. I don't know Netflix history that well, but I do know that Redbox ran into a lot of opposition from studios precisely because they did not have licensing agreements - they would purchase DVDs off the shelf and stick them in vending machines. Under US copyright law, that is allowed (contrast with CDs or software, where it is not allowed). I would bet Netflix did not have licensing agreements with studios when it was just doing mail order delivery.
Probably the only reason the studios were willing to strike streaming license agreements with Netflix was because of its prior success with mail order delivery - they weren't getting as big a chunk of that cash as they wanted, and knew they couldn't ignore Netflix anymore.
That is very true. I've been using three for four or five years now, and I have always used two graphics cards to drive them.
It's not just developers. I originally discovered the benefit of having a second monitor at a coding job in college - one screen for code, another for a browser to test the code and read documentation, etc.
After that, I bought myself another monitor for my desktop. Two came in great handy for translation - one monitor for source document and reference works, other monitor for your translation. It came in handy for reading electronic documents and taking notes/outlining. It's great for any job where you deal with lots of text, and need to be able to compare different documents, synthesize them, etc.
I'm now up to three. There are diminishing returns, obviously; the third isn't strictly necessary for me, but highly convenient. Any more than this would be tought for me to use effectively, though I suppose a square arrangement of four could be useful for some people.
Well, there may be "pie-enlarging" productivity gains to be had, as well as comparative advantage across a whole economy that can mitigate the effects of credentialism, but what is most damning about his argument is that it applies equally well to free primary and secondary education. He's subsidizing that in large amounts right now, and probably complains bitterly about it. But in reality we need a working population that is literate and functional - it benefits everyone.
I actually think the probably too many people attend college, which has in large part become a training facility to impart skills that should have been adequately learned during high school. That, and employers also want the college to impart job-related skills that they'd be better off learning on the job itself. The more fundamental problem than the cost of higher education is probably the poor quality of primary and secondary education that leaves students unprepared to enter college or the workforce.
Not really. Social Security and Medicare are funded on a pay-as-you-go basis, meaning current workers pay for current benefits. Contrast this to a funded pension system, where workers/employers contribute over the course of the employee's working years, and then benefits are paid from those contributions.
His current social security and Medicare taxes go to pay for the benefits that others are currently receiving. When he retires, the benefits he receives will be paid for by whoever is working at that time. Of course, what he is entitled to receive depends on how much he contributed over his lifetime, but that's not the same as advance funding.
Of course he also fails to recognize that since the ratio of workers to beneficiaries is steadily declining, the 2.1 to 1.9 workers supporting his future benefits will need to make significantly more money in order to ensure he receives his Social Security and Medicare benefits than they do today. If all those workers are uneducated and poorly paid because he didn't to subsidize their education, it's going to be tough for them to pay his benefits.
Yeah, that's kind of what I had thought. Unfortunately it kind of kills the market for unsubsidized phones... the only advantage of buying an unsubsidized phone from most people's perspective is the ability to move to another provider whenever you want. Of course, given that the major providers use incompatible technologies in their networks, that benefit is pretty much gutted.
I'm actually willing to take the contract in exchange for the subsidized phone, I just wish they didn't put crappy branded firmware on everything.
In the US, our carriers do subsidies, and you commit to a contract term in return for that subsidy. It's always worked that way (at least as long as I've owned a cell phone, since about 1998). You're always free to pay the full price for the phone and not lock into a contract.
Here's what I don't understand. Let's say you do pay full price for a phone... why is your monthly rate the same as someone who buys a subsidized phone?
Sure, copyright is not a literal translation of Urheberrecht, just as it is not a literal translation of "droit d'auteur." But given that Germany was one of the original signatories of the Berne Convention, and also conforms to TRIPs, its "author's right" law provides in large part the same sort of protections that American copyright law provides. Yes, there are important differences, but to say that German sites using the English word "copyright" are lying is pretty misleading.
Their penalties for going over 250 are pretty severe.
Are they? I've been on Comcast for about three years in three different locations, and I've often exceeded 250 GB a month. One month I totaled about 600 GB. It varies, on average I am probably around 200 GB, but I have never heard a peep from them in the months when I do exceed 250.
I think the history of Hiroshima and Nagasaki show that this statement is not always true, in fact, the only real example of nukes in a war are of nukes ending a war.
The problem is, that example is virtually useless in understanding how a war between nuclear powers would play out.
Yeah, one day in undergrad I decided I wanted to make my own polyalphabetic substitution cipher, so I sat down and basically reinvented the Vignere cipher (actually the Gronsfeld cipher, which is identical except that the key is numeric. Also FWIW I was not in a technical major).
This story is made ironic by the fact that the Arabs were responsible for many historic advances in the history of pre-modern cryptography.
What I really want to know is why universities think they need to be involved in a discussion about copyright protection anyway.
Probably because due to intense lobbying by the MPAA et al., in the Higher Education Opportunity Act the federal government included stipulations that schools receiving federal money adopt certain procedures regarding copyright infringement and file-sharing. See, e.g., http://www.educause.edu/Resources/Browse/HEOA/34600.
That's simply not true. Copying is a plain violation of the reproduction right, which is an exclusive right of the copyright holder, regardless of what you do with the copy. And Carson's point is that while everyone assumes space shifting to be a fair use, by the letter of the law it may not be.
Now, you're right in the sense that no one is going to sue you if you sit around all day making copies of a book and never do or intend to do anything with them. But internal photocopying within an organization has been the subject of lawsuits, despite there being no legal transfer of possession (see, e.g., American Geophysical Union v. Texaco).