OP here. The replies already posted get it mostly right. An executive agreement is supposed to comply with existing U.S. law, and for that reason does not have to be reviewed by Congress.
The Obama administration is insisting that ACTA "colors within the lines" of current U.S. law - but of course, there is no way to know that until after it is signed and becomes public. In the meantime, the few public interest folks who have signed NDAs and seen draft texts have said that in their opinion, it goes beyond current U.S. law.
Of course if the agreement simply abides by current U.S. law, why the need to be so secretive about it?
There are a number of other issues - like the fact, IIRC, so-called "graduated response" (three-strikes) style laws are permitted under U.S. law, but not implemented by the DMCA, etc. So, it may be that ACTA contains provisions for three-strikes ISP disconnection despite this not being current law in the U.S. There is also the fact that ACTA will almost certainly not include U.S.-style protections for users/consumers.
Finally, and this is why Congress should be concerned, even if ACTA is totally within the bounds of current U.S. law, once this agreement is settled, if Congress then wants to change the law, the administration will point to this agreement and say "but we can't change our policy because we would be breaking ACTA." This is exactly what has happened with the Berne Convention, TRIPS, and any number of other international agreements. They constrain our future policy options.
Some people would like to see formalities for copyright registration brought back, but as long as we are a Berne signatory, that is not possible. Likewise, say that Congress eventually wants to ban three-strikes style laws (we can dream, right?). If ACTA explicitly requires that such laws are permissible, Congress would not be able to do so.
Thankfully, it's not just Ron Wyden (OR), either. Yesterday, I was present at a meeting between two of Al Franken's (MN) staffers and a number of DC-area IP experts. A Wyden staffer was also in attendance. This means that in the current session, at least Bernie Sanders (VT), Sherrod Brown (OH), Wyden, and Franken have expressed concern about ACTA. Franken's staffers seemed particularly bothered by the fact that since ACTA is being negotiated as an executive agreement, they neither see negotiating texts (which are being done in secret) nor have any chance to review the agreement before it has the force of law. The U.S. Trade Representative's office keeps telling them that such secrecy is par for the course, and one of the questions they were asking us was whether this is true (it's not).
I've also heard mention that Ben Cardin (MD) may have some concerns, though apparently he is more 'conservative' on IP issues than the above senators. In any case, I would urge Slashdotters to learn about ACTA, call their senators (especially if you're in one of the above states, and if you're not, tell your senator that these other senators are looking into it, and they should too), and ask them to grill the Obama administration on it's complete and total lack of transparency on this issue. Ask them why the few public-interest groups who have been permitted to see negotiating texts have been forced to sign non-disclosure agreements, why not a single academic or law professor has had an opportunity to see any of the drafts, and why Ron Kirk has said he believes the agreement will fall apart if it becomes public - while at the same time claiming that it does not go beyond the bounds of current U.S. law.
Reminds me of a story I mention every so often. When I was an undergrad, I along with a few other enterprising students discovered that our university ID cards stored our social security numbers in the clear on the magnetic stripe. We eventually brought this to the attention of the school, who rushed to find a solution. They needed a unique identifier that was also not important information. They quickly settled on using our "university ID numbers" - arbitrary numbers whose value had no importance to the individual, and they reissued cards to the entire university.
A few weeks after they finished reissuing cards, one of us discovered that the "university ID number" was a primary key in the school's LDAP database. By using a directory browser, you could look up any student, staff, or faculty member by name, and obtain their university ID number. Since this was the number on their ID card, and their ID card controlled access to buildings, labs, etc., it was trivial to obtain access privileges to pretty much anywhere on campus. Want to make it look like the president of the university broke into the nuclear reactor? Look him up, write his ID number to a magnetic stripe card (we had built the hardware to do this, as well as to "fake" cards, which allowed us to simple type in numbers and generate signals, without actually making a card), and have at it.
Again, it was brought to the attention of the university. After a failed attempt to begin disciplinary action against one of us, they recalled everyone's cards and wrote new, presumably pseudo-random identifiers to them that were not publicly accessible.
Moral of the story? In your rush to fix one problem, make sure you don't create an even bigger one.
We run a norton toolkit scan, meaning "find out if we can push a virus removal service (129.99),"
Over the holiday, I took a look at a family member's netbook running Windows XP. He told me it had a virus. Turned out to be multiple viruses, including a really nasty rootkit. Took me the better part of a day to fix it up; Trend micro's sysclean along with ComboFix finally did the trick. I think the time and effort spent was probably worth about that much:-)
Their president has said, "Nothing in the outline presented this morning would increase competition. Reforming universal service and supporting municipal networks are worthwhile goals, but they would do nothing to reverse the slide caused by eight years of misbegotten telecommunications policies that have crippled most meaningful broadband competition for consumers. There was no discussion of opening telecommunications networks to competitors. There was no discussion of structural separations of carriers into wholesale and retail components. These are the factors that Harvard’s Berkman Center told the FCC in a study a mere two months ago were the reasons other countries have surpassed ours – they are using policies we discarded."
Why are patents allowed on naturally occurring phenomena like genes anyway?
That's just it, though - the patent is granted for the isolation, refinement, or modification of the gene. The issue is what is considered 'naturally occurring.' Chemical composition patents are granted based on the assumption that the composition isn't just sitting around and easy to get at.
The policy question is whether just protecting the process used to isolate something is enough, rather than protecting the actual thing itself.
You're right, the language "common law copyright" is improper and confusing - all I meant to refer to was state copyright law.
If the state has a statute, on the books, that provides copyright protect to something that 301 doesn't provide protection for then that would allow the state court to hear the case. EXCEPT 301 covers everything which can be copyrighted in the United States, the state copyright statute will be invalidated for some reason, so it is a circular argument.
I understand that federal copyright law preempts state copyright law when the work is valid subject matter under federal law, but if the work is valid under a state statute and NOT valid under federal law, why couldn't someone just assert their claim under state law? They wouldn't be claiming a copyright under federal law, just the rights associated with their state's law.
In this case the guy's name is obviously not valid subject matter under 102. But, arguendo, if it were valid under his state's statutes, why would that be preempted?
Seriously. The guy wouldn't have a leg to stand on under federal law - words and short phrases cannot be copyrighted. That's why he sent the notice asserting common law copyright (which varies by state, mind you). In any case, even if that common law claim is technically legitimate, the compelling public interest in freedom of speech, freedom of the press, etc., would likely ensure this case was thrown out. And the title of the/. article is right on - all this idiot has done is drawn more attention to himself.
You're dead on with the non-Intel requirement. The tantalizing stories of new ARM-based netbooks (or "smartbooks" as I've heard them called) have kept me from buying.
What I want:
1. ARM-based processor. This means low power, meaning longer lasting battery life. Ideally something around 8 hours would be fantastic. Presumably this would also mean fanless (which means quiet, and thin).
2. Small - maybe 8" to 9". Also, light. My current aging setup is a PDA with bluetooth folding keyboard, for a total weight of about 1.5 lbs. I'd like something around the 2 lb weight range, or less. I no longer carry around my 5 lb MacBook unless I absolutely have to - it's simply too much weight (combined with books, sometimes lunch) to be lugging around a city all day.
3. Linux-based (or at least an option). Main reason my PDA/keyboard setup is no longer that viable is because it's a pain to use tools like scp, and there's no modern web browser. I'd like a machine to run ssh (and scp), definitely rsync, and have the option of installing open-source stuff like Perl, R, and LaTeX.
4. $200 price point. Don't subsidize it by requiring a wireless subscription, either.
I saw a prototype Pegatron machine that looked like it would meet all of these, but it's not available yet... every time I search, I keep hearing that these machines are just around the corner. In summer, they were coming about for Christmas 2009. Now that it's December, I hear they are coming out in Q1 2010.
Yeah, it just sounds like a typical corporate line about intellectual property. If the server is reimplemented (as opposed to downloaded off some warez site) by reverse engineering, seems to me the most it could be is an EULA violation. EULA probably states something like "you may only use this client to connect to authorized servers, etc."
Depending on the particular mechanisms involved, you might be able to argue that skipping the license check is a violation of the DMCA (for example, if the private server has to falsify a credential and return it to the client, and this takes place via a process of breaking an circumvention mechanism), but that's the only thing I can come up with off the top of my head.
On one hand, I see why a treaty like ACTA might be desirable to establish a common copyright law across all nations. Especially given how much copyright infringement is going on between nations and how hard it is to enforce laws nationally when the economy and the access is global.
We already have plenty of international agreement on copyright law: the Berne convention, WIPO copyright treaties, the TRIPS agreement, etc. All of those have plenty more signatories than ACTA will have, anyway.
There are also more appropriate venues to be negotiating changes to international copyright law (namely, WIPO). ACTA is not being negotiated there because WIPO requires transparency and broad participation, and ACTA's supporters know that it would not stand a chance at WIPO.
From what I have heard from people who have seen ACTA, as well as the few leaks about it, the reason it's being kept so secret is because it is exporting a lot of crappy US policy, including fundamentally flawed bits, like the anti-circumvention provisions of the DMCA.
If Kirk had any interest in increasing transparency in the ACTA negotiations, he'd be able to. He has about a dozen plausible ways:
1. He could say that the Obama administration is interested in transparency, therefore the US will make draft texts public.
2. He could have his office stop denying FOIA requests on the idiotic grounds of "national security."
3. He could say something like, "In light of increasing concern about the transparency (as expressed by groups like the MPAA and the European Parliament), we have opted to release draft texts."
That's just what I can come up with off the top of my head. No, I think his statement is probably honest (in part because I'm guessing he was caught off guard - I've met Jamie Love, and I'm betting the way he posed the question to Kirk put Kirk on the spot).
What do the negotiations matter? The politicians, or most of them, aren't usually involved in negotiations anyways. What counts is the ratification. That's where the politicians wear it.
Well, ratification would count, except that in the U.S., ACTA is being negotiated as an executive agreement, and thus doesn't require ratification by Congress.
A few Congresspeople have sent a letter to Obama expressing their concern over the secrecy of the treaty, but others are just parroting the line about protecting American business and innovation, etc.
I agree there are good reasons for some negotiations to be kept private, then ratified later. However, when there is no ratification, the negotiation is entirely secret and simply presented to us as a fait accompli, where is the opportunity for public involvement and comment?
If you want to exclude files matching a certain pattern in their path, wouldn't use just use something like "-not -path '*/excluded_path'"? I do that to exclude certain file extensions (but with -not -name '*.extensions'). According to the man page, prune determines whether to descend into directories at all, which is a different issue.
But yeah, find is kind of a fscked up command on the whole... doesn't really work how you think it should:-)
It uses a few methods - blank screen detection is one of them ( I think the default), since there are usually a few black frames at the start of a commercial break. Scene change detection is another. You can tweak which methods it uses. In my experience, it gets it right about 85% of time. When it doesn't, the 30-second skip works wonders:-)
Fast tracking is different from executive orders. Fast track (now called trade promotion authority) allows the president to negotiate a trade treaty in advance, then present the entire package to Congress in a take-it-or-leave-it fashion. This prevents trade negotiation from getting bogged down in Congress - without fast tracking, every senator is going to want a tariff on whatever their state happens to produce.
Fast track really isn't relevant to ACTA for two reasons. First, as I pointed out elsewhere, it's being negotiated as an executive agreement, so it doesn't require Congressional approval anyway. The flip side of this is that it is supposed to "color within the lines" (as a USTR rep put it) of existing US law, but without seeing the agreement, we just have to take the administration's word (along with that of other colorful characters, such as the MPAA and PhRMA) that this is true. Oh, and some of the few public interest group people who have gotten to see draft texts (under NDAs) have specifically said in their opinion, it would go beyond current US law.
Second, fast track authority expired a while ago (I believe in 2007), and Obama is unlikely to get it back anytime soon. Protectionist sentiment in the US is strong right now, and free trade is not high on Obama's agenda anyway (see, e.g., the tariff on Chinese tires).
One of the (many) problems with ACTA from the US perspective is that it's not being negotiated as a treaty, which would then require ratification by the Senate before becoming law. It's being negotiated as an "executive agreement", which requires zero Congressional oversight. Ostensibly this also means that it cannot go beyond the bounds of existing US law, and of course the USTR et al. all assure us that it doesn't, but without seeing the text, there is no way to know if that's actually true or not.
Another point - from my own perspective, one of the main problems with ACTA is not necessarily its effect on the US, but rather on other countries. At least in the US we already have well-established fair use provisions and other protections (safe harbor, counter notification, etc.), however that is not always the case elsewhere. If ACTA exports all the draconian features of our IP laws without any of the protections, it has the effect of screwing over everyone else. ACTA is currently being negotiated mostly among OECD countries (they could never have pushed it through WIPO, there is too much opposition from the G77), but when it's finally established, we can expect it to become a requirement for anyone who wants to sign a free-trade agreement with the US.
Sure, it might look like that this decade. But, as you know, China's population is about four (or more?) times the size of the US's, and China's economy is still developing. Read up on the history IP piracy in the U.S. - when our economy was in its infancy, we essentially promoted piracy from abroad (there's a reason it took us so long to sign on to Berne). Dickens complained about how his works were being sold in the US and he never saw a penny.
The first example I could quickly find would be something like this. It's a state government website, and its terms of use claim copyright on what is public, state-produced work that is publicly and freely available. However, the terms also deny you the right to redistribute the work.
In this case it looks like a boilerplate template... not sure off the top of my head if a state has ever invoked copyright law to stop redistribution of public records, but it's entirely possible.
By definition? No. The whole point is that the context of the work and the employment situation determines whether it will be a work for hire. There are likely some times when lesson plans could be considered works for hire, and other times when they wouldn't be.
Also, since public schools are are managed at the state and local level, even if you could obtain the material freely under public records laws, etc., you would not necessarily have the right to redistribute (by selling) the material freely - that is a separate right under copyright law, and would vary by state.
Care to point out which areas of law you think I'm wrong about (and specify your sources)? I didn't weigh in on the specific issue of whether the teachers' lesson plans would be considered works for hire, because I don't know the relevant precedents, and because it might vary by situation (as you note, factors such as whether you used your employer's resources, and whether you did it in "off hours" come into play).
My main point was that the OP's statement is completely misleading. Under no circumstances should anyone who considers themselves a normal employee (as opposed to a contractor) ever assume that works created in the course of their employment belong to them. You must, must, must get clarification on that point, either in your employment contract or from your own legal counsel. It's foolish and dangerous to assume that just because your contract doesn't say anything about ownership of copyright, that you automatically get it.
Some teachers are given "planning hours" during the school day, so it could be easily argued in court that creating a lesson plan used school resources (time) and was part of the normal course of employment, and thus they are works for hire. They may not be hired specifically to make lesson plans, but making lesson plans is (well, ideally, should be) part of teaching. If you are hired as a secretary, you may not specifically have been hired to write copy for a brochure, but if you were told to do so, the product would still be a work for hire.
It's not a matter of leverage. By changing the copyright act, they changed deals which were already closed. If it was 1970, and I gave you my work for 35 years before it naturally fell into public domain, then in the 1990s, the law changes it to 75, shouldn't *I* have some say about it?
There are two different provisions. Look at 17 USC Sec 203. If your work was made after 1978, you have a five year period beginning 35 years after transferring the copyright to decide to terminate the transfer and retain rights to the work.
If, as you claim, this five year period was put in place for the sake of people who had assigned copyrights before the duration of protection was changed in the 1976 Act, they would not have included the right of termination for works made after 1978. Since the provision applies to works not yet made, it's not changing deals that were already struck.
The section 304 bit (works made before 1978) uses your logic, but if I remember my legislative history correctly, the section 203 part was at least nominally designed to offer creators better bargaining power against publishers.
Slashdot Mirror
OP here. The replies already posted get it mostly right. An executive agreement is supposed to comply with existing U.S. law, and for that reason does not have to be reviewed by Congress.
The Obama administration is insisting that ACTA "colors within the lines" of current U.S. law - but of course, there is no way to know that until after it is signed and becomes public. In the meantime, the few public interest folks who have signed NDAs and seen draft texts have said that in their opinion, it goes beyond current U.S. law.
Of course if the agreement simply abides by current U.S. law, why the need to be so secretive about it?
There are a number of other issues - like the fact, IIRC, so-called "graduated response" (three-strikes) style laws are permitted under U.S. law, but not implemented by the DMCA, etc. So, it may be that ACTA contains provisions for three-strikes ISP disconnection despite this not being current law in the U.S. There is also the fact that ACTA will almost certainly not include U.S.-style protections for users/consumers.
Finally, and this is why Congress should be concerned, even if ACTA is totally within the bounds of current U.S. law, once this agreement is settled, if Congress then wants to change the law, the administration will point to this agreement and say "but we can't change our policy because we would be breaking ACTA." This is exactly what has happened with the Berne Convention, TRIPS, and any number of other international agreements. They constrain our future policy options.
Some people would like to see formalities for copyright registration brought back, but as long as we are a Berne signatory, that is not possible. Likewise, say that Congress eventually wants to ban three-strikes style laws (we can dream, right?). If ACTA explicitly requires that such laws are permissible, Congress would not be able to do so.
Thankfully, it's not just Ron Wyden (OR), either. Yesterday, I was present at a meeting between two of Al Franken's (MN) staffers and a number of DC-area IP experts. A Wyden staffer was also in attendance. This means that in the current session, at least Bernie Sanders (VT), Sherrod Brown (OH), Wyden, and Franken have expressed concern about ACTA. Franken's staffers seemed particularly bothered by the fact that since ACTA is being negotiated as an executive agreement, they neither see negotiating texts (which are being done in secret) nor have any chance to review the agreement before it has the force of law. The U.S. Trade Representative's office keeps telling them that such secrecy is par for the course, and one of the questions they were asking us was whether this is true (it's not).
I've also heard mention that Ben Cardin (MD) may have some concerns, though apparently he is more 'conservative' on IP issues than the above senators. In any case, I would urge Slashdotters to learn about ACTA, call their senators (especially if you're in one of the above states, and if you're not, tell your senator that these other senators are looking into it, and they should too), and ask them to grill the Obama administration on it's complete and total lack of transparency on this issue. Ask them why the few public-interest groups who have been permitted to see negotiating texts have been forced to sign non-disclosure agreements, why not a single academic or law professor has had an opportunity to see any of the drafts, and why Ron Kirk has said he believes the agreement will fall apart if it becomes public - while at the same time claiming that it does not go beyond the bounds of current U.S. law.
Reminds me of a story I mention every so often. When I was an undergrad, I along with a few other enterprising students discovered that our university ID cards stored our social security numbers in the clear on the magnetic stripe. We eventually brought this to the attention of the school, who rushed to find a solution. They needed a unique identifier that was also not important information. They quickly settled on using our "university ID numbers" - arbitrary numbers whose value had no importance to the individual, and they reissued cards to the entire university.
A few weeks after they finished reissuing cards, one of us discovered that the "university ID number" was a primary key in the school's LDAP database. By using a directory browser, you could look up any student, staff, or faculty member by name, and obtain their university ID number. Since this was the number on their ID card, and their ID card controlled access to buildings, labs, etc., it was trivial to obtain access privileges to pretty much anywhere on campus. Want to make it look like the president of the university broke into the nuclear reactor? Look him up, write his ID number to a magnetic stripe card (we had built the hardware to do this, as well as to "fake" cards, which allowed us to simple type in numbers and generate signals, without actually making a card), and have at it.
Again, it was brought to the attention of the university. After a failed attempt to begin disciplinary action against one of us, they recalled everyone's cards and wrote new, presumably pseudo-random identifiers to them that were not publicly accessible.
Moral of the story? In your rush to fix one problem, make sure you don't create an even bigger one.
We run a norton toolkit scan, meaning "find out if we can push a virus removal service (129.99),"
Over the holiday, I took a look at a family member's netbook running Windows XP. He told me it had a virus. Turned out to be multiple viruses, including a really nasty rootkit. Took me the better part of a day to fix it up; Trend micro's sysclean along with ComboFix finally did the trick. I think the time and effort spent was probably worth about that much :-)
Their president has said, "Nothing in the outline presented this morning would increase competition. Reforming universal service and supporting municipal networks are worthwhile goals, but they would do nothing to reverse the slide caused by eight years of misbegotten telecommunications policies that have crippled most meaningful broadband competition for consumers. There was no discussion of opening telecommunications networks to competitors. There was no discussion of structural separations of carriers into wholesale and retail components. These are the factors that Harvard’s Berkman Center told the FCC in a study a mere two months ago were the reasons other countries have surpassed ours – they are using policies we discarded."
Why are patents allowed on naturally occurring phenomena like genes anyway?
That's just it, though - the patent is granted for the isolation, refinement, or modification of the gene. The issue is what is considered 'naturally occurring.' Chemical composition patents are granted based on the assumption that the composition isn't just sitting around and easy to get at.
The policy question is whether just protecting the process used to isolate something is enough, rather than protecting the actual thing itself.
You're right, the language "common law copyright" is improper and confusing - all I meant to refer to was state copyright law.
If the state has a statute, on the books, that provides copyright protect to something that 301 doesn't provide protection for then that would allow the state court to hear the case. EXCEPT 301 covers everything which can be copyrighted in the United States, the state copyright statute will be invalidated for some reason, so it is a circular argument.
I understand that federal copyright law preempts state copyright law when the work is valid subject matter under federal law, but if the work is valid under a state statute and NOT valid under federal law, why couldn't someone just assert their claim under state law? They wouldn't be claiming a copyright under federal law, just the rights associated with their state's law.
In this case the guy's name is obviously not valid subject matter under 102. But, arguendo, if it were valid under his state's statutes, why would that be preempted?
Seriously. The guy wouldn't have a leg to stand on under federal law - words and short phrases cannot be copyrighted. That's why he sent the notice asserting common law copyright (which varies by state, mind you). In any case, even if that common law claim is technically legitimate, the compelling public interest in freedom of speech, freedom of the press, etc., would likely ensure this case was thrown out. And the title of the /. article is right on - all this idiot has done is drawn more attention to himself.
That'll be $1 million, please.
Well, he might have a defense given three of the four factors:
Was the nature of the use commercial, or for non-profit, educational use?
Did he use the entire work, or just portions of it? (I'm guessing just portions.)
Did his use of the work affect its marketability?
Wow. Even I found that tasteless.
No, I actually mean I'm going to qwerty some bitches foreheads here. Sorry for any confusion.
See, if you had said you were going to dvorak some bitches, then the authorities would have known you must be maladjusted and unstable.
What's that noise? Oh, I'm just tapping my keyboard. Aoeu, aoeu, aoeu...
You're dead on with the non-Intel requirement. The tantalizing stories of new ARM-based netbooks (or "smartbooks" as I've heard them called) have kept me from buying.
What I want:
1. ARM-based processor. This means low power, meaning longer lasting battery life. Ideally something around 8 hours would be fantastic. Presumably this would also mean fanless (which means quiet, and thin).
2. Small - maybe 8" to 9". Also, light. My current aging setup is a PDA with bluetooth folding keyboard, for a total weight of about 1.5 lbs. I'd like something around the 2 lb weight range, or less. I no longer carry around my 5 lb MacBook unless I absolutely have to - it's simply too much weight (combined with books, sometimes lunch) to be lugging around a city all day.
3. Linux-based (or at least an option). Main reason my PDA/keyboard setup is no longer that viable is because it's a pain to use tools like scp, and there's no modern web browser. I'd like a machine to run ssh (and scp), definitely rsync, and have the option of installing open-source stuff like Perl, R, and LaTeX.
4. $200 price point. Don't subsidize it by requiring a wireless subscription, either.
I saw a prototype Pegatron machine that looked like it would meet all of these, but it's not available yet... every time I search, I keep hearing that these machines are just around the corner. In summer, they were coming about for Christmas 2009. Now that it's December, I hear they are coming out in Q1 2010.
Yeah, it just sounds like a typical corporate line about intellectual property. If the server is reimplemented (as opposed to downloaded off some warez site) by reverse engineering, seems to me the most it could be is an EULA violation. EULA probably states something like "you may only use this client to connect to authorized servers, etc."
Depending on the particular mechanisms involved, you might be able to argue that skipping the license check is a violation of the DMCA (for example, if the private server has to falsify a credential and return it to the client, and this takes place via a process of breaking an circumvention mechanism), but that's the only thing I can come up with off the top of my head.
On one hand, I see why a treaty like ACTA might be desirable to establish a common copyright law across all nations. Especially given how much copyright infringement is going on between nations and how hard it is to enforce laws nationally when the economy and the access is global.
We already have plenty of international agreement on copyright law: the Berne convention, WIPO copyright treaties, the TRIPS agreement, etc. All of those have plenty more signatories than ACTA will have, anyway.
There are also more appropriate venues to be negotiating changes to international copyright law (namely, WIPO). ACTA is not being negotiated there because WIPO requires transparency and broad participation, and ACTA's supporters know that it would not stand a chance at WIPO.
From what I have heard from people who have seen ACTA, as well as the few leaks about it, the reason it's being kept so secret is because it is exporting a lot of crappy US policy, including fundamentally flawed bits, like the anti-circumvention provisions of the DMCA.
If Kirk had any interest in increasing transparency in the ACTA negotiations, he'd be able to. He has about a dozen plausible ways:
1. He could say that the Obama administration is interested in transparency, therefore the US will make draft texts public.
2. He could have his office stop denying FOIA requests on the idiotic grounds of "national security."
3. He could say something like, "In light of increasing concern about the transparency (as expressed by groups like the MPAA and the European Parliament), we have opted to release draft texts."
That's just what I can come up with off the top of my head. No, I think his statement is probably honest (in part because I'm guessing he was caught off guard - I've met Jamie Love, and I'm betting the way he posed the question to Kirk put Kirk on the spot).
What do the negotiations matter? The politicians, or most of them, aren't usually involved in negotiations anyways. What counts is the ratification. That's where the politicians wear it.
Well, ratification would count, except that in the U.S., ACTA is being negotiated as an executive agreement, and thus doesn't require ratification by Congress.
A few Congresspeople have sent a letter to Obama expressing their concern over the secrecy of the treaty, but others are just parroting the line about protecting American business and innovation, etc.
I agree there are good reasons for some negotiations to be kept private, then ratified later. However, when there is no ratification, the negotiation is entirely secret and simply presented to us as a fait accompli, where is the opportunity for public involvement and comment?
If you want to exclude files matching a certain pattern in their path, wouldn't use just use something like "-not -path '*/excluded_path'"? I do that to exclude certain file extensions (but with -not -name '*.extensions'). According to the man page, prune determines whether to descend into directories at all, which is a different issue.
But yeah, find is kind of a fscked up command on the whole... doesn't really work how you think it should :-)
It uses a few methods - blank screen detection is one of them ( I think the default), since there are usually a few black frames at the start of a commercial break. Scene change detection is another. You can tweak which methods it uses. In my experience, it gets it right about 85% of time. When it doesn't, the 30-second skip works wonders :-)
Fast tracking is different from executive orders. Fast track (now called trade promotion authority) allows the president to negotiate a trade treaty in advance, then present the entire package to Congress in a take-it-or-leave-it fashion. This prevents trade negotiation from getting bogged down in Congress - without fast tracking, every senator is going to want a tariff on whatever their state happens to produce.
Fast track really isn't relevant to ACTA for two reasons. First, as I pointed out elsewhere, it's being negotiated as an executive agreement, so it doesn't require Congressional approval anyway. The flip side of this is that it is supposed to "color within the lines" (as a USTR rep put it) of existing US law, but without seeing the agreement, we just have to take the administration's word (along with that of other colorful characters, such as the MPAA and PhRMA) that this is true. Oh, and some of the few public interest group people who have gotten to see draft texts (under NDAs) have specifically said in their opinion, it would go beyond current US law.
Second, fast track authority expired a while ago (I believe in 2007), and Obama is unlikely to get it back anytime soon. Protectionist sentiment in the US is strong right now, and free trade is not high on Obama's agenda anyway (see, e.g., the tariff on Chinese tires).
One of the (many) problems with ACTA from the US perspective is that it's not being negotiated as a treaty, which would then require ratification by the Senate before becoming law. It's being negotiated as an "executive agreement", which requires zero Congressional oversight. Ostensibly this also means that it cannot go beyond the bounds of existing US law, and of course the USTR et al. all assure us that it doesn't, but without seeing the text, there is no way to know if that's actually true or not.
Another point - from my own perspective, one of the main problems with ACTA is not necessarily its effect on the US, but rather on other countries. At least in the US we already have well-established fair use provisions and other protections (safe harbor, counter notification, etc.), however that is not always the case elsewhere. If ACTA exports all the draconian features of our IP laws without any of the protections, it has the effect of screwing over everyone else. ACTA is currently being negotiated mostly among OECD countries (they could never have pushed it through WIPO, there is too much opposition from the G77), but when it's finally established, we can expect it to become a requirement for anyone who wants to sign a free-trade agreement with the US.
Sure, it might look like that this decade. But, as you know, China's population is about four (or more?) times the size of the US's, and China's economy is still developing. Read up on the history IP piracy in the U.S. - when our economy was in its infancy, we essentially promoted piracy from abroad (there's a reason it took us so long to sign on to Berne). Dickens complained about how his works were being sold in the US and he never saw a penny.
The first example I could quickly find would be something like this. It's a state government website, and its terms of use claim copyright on what is public, state-produced work that is publicly and freely available. However, the terms also deny you the right to redistribute the work.
In this case it looks like a boilerplate template... not sure off the top of my head if a state has ever invoked copyright law to stop redistribution of public records, but it's entirely possible.
By definition? No. The whole point is that the context of the work and the employment situation determines whether it will be a work for hire. There are likely some times when lesson plans could be considered works for hire, and other times when they wouldn't be.
Also, since public schools are are managed at the state and local level, even if you could obtain the material freely under public records laws, etc., you would not necessarily have the right to redistribute (by selling) the material freely - that is a separate right under copyright law, and would vary by state.
Care to point out which areas of law you think I'm wrong about (and specify your sources)? I didn't weigh in on the specific issue of whether the teachers' lesson plans would be considered works for hire, because I don't know the relevant precedents, and because it might vary by situation (as you note, factors such as whether you used your employer's resources, and whether you did it in "off hours" come into play).
My main point was that the OP's statement is completely misleading. Under no circumstances should anyone who considers themselves a normal employee (as opposed to a contractor) ever assume that works created in the course of their employment belong to them. You must, must, must get clarification on that point, either in your employment contract or from your own legal counsel. It's foolish and dangerous to assume that just because your contract doesn't say anything about ownership of copyright, that you automatically get it.
Some teachers are given "planning hours" during the school day, so it could be easily argued in court that creating a lesson plan used school resources (time) and was part of the normal course of employment, and thus they are works for hire. They may not be hired specifically to make lesson plans, but making lesson plans is (well, ideally, should be) part of teaching. If you are hired as a secretary, you may not specifically have been hired to write copy for a brochure, but if you were told to do so, the product would still be a work for hire.
It's not a matter of leverage. By changing the copyright act, they changed deals which were already closed. If it was 1970, and I gave you my work for 35 years before it naturally fell into public domain, then in the 1990s, the law changes it to 75, shouldn't *I* have some say about it?
There are two different provisions. Look at 17 USC Sec 203. If your work was made after 1978, you have a five year period beginning 35 years after transferring the copyright to decide to terminate the transfer and retain rights to the work.
If, as you claim, this five year period was put in place for the sake of people who had assigned copyrights before the duration of protection was changed in the 1976 Act, they would not have included the right of termination for works made after 1978. Since the provision applies to works not yet made, it's not changing deals that were already struck.
The section 304 bit (works made before 1978) uses your logic, but if I remember my legislative history correctly, the section 203 part was at least nominally designed to offer creators better bargaining power against publishers.