It's not expiration of copyright, it's a provision in copyright law that allows creators who have assigned their work to a publisher (or label, etc.) to take it back after a set period of time. It was designed to give creators some leverage against publishers - i.e., they wouldn't have to assign their work forever just to get it published. From the article:
The Copyright Act includes two sets of rules for how this works. If an artist or author sold a copyright before 1978 (Section 304), they or their heirs can take it back 56 years later. If the artist or author sold the copyright during or after 1978 (Section 203), they can terminate that grant after 35 years. Assuming all the proper paperwork gets done in time, record labels could lose sound recording copyrights they bought in 1978 starting in 2013, 1979 in 2014, and so on. For 1953-and-earlier music, grants can already be terminated.
If not explicitly spelled out in a contract, then the IP rights are determined by the laws of the state. Most of the time, these tend to error on the side of the individual rather than the organization.
Where did you read that? Federal IP law preempts state law almost entirely. Occasionally in suits you'll see lawyers invoke state common law to add insult to injury. Also, no, if rights are not explicitly spelled out in the contract, it means nothing. If you are simply an "employee" (as opposed to a contractor), the default is that your work is "work for hire", and it belongs to your employer. This is long-settled doctrine. The question revolves around your type of employment, but your employment contract doesn't necessarily have to say anything about copyrights, and your boss can still own your work.
Unless the employment contract explicitly transfers ownership of creative works to the employer then the lesson plans legally do not belong to the school.
That's simply not true. The employment contract doesn't need to explicitly mention anything about ownership of creative works. If you are simply an "employee" as opposed to an independent contractor, your work falls under the work for hire doctrine, and your employer owns the copyright.
In the world of copyrights and contracts this stuff is cut and dry, the default in all cases - including software development - is for ownership to rest with the creator, full stop.
No, it's not cut and dry. See, for example, the Community for Creative Non-Violence. And the "default" would depend on whether you're an employee or a contractor. If you're a coder who's been hired as a salaried member for some company and that's your full time job, the "default" is probably that you're an employee and you're creating works for hire, so ownership rests with your employer, full stop.
That said, at least at the university level, the culture is that works by professors are not works for hire. I'm not sure if there really is a sound legal basis for that (probably depends on their employment contract), but any university who tried to assert ownership over professors' work would find itself being attacked on all sides.
Exactly. In another post, I mentioned that I wonder how this would have gone down had Psystar done something like like - maybe provided a special "first boot" CD along with some legalize that said, "By running this CD, you are authorizing us to adapt on your behalf the unmodified copy of OS X on your machine so that it properly works with your computer system."
Read carefully the full section, and you'll see that while it allows for the creation for "adaptations", it explicitly disallows resale of those adaptations if you don't have permission from the copyright holder:
(b) Lease, Sale, or Other Transfer of Additional Copy or Adaptation.— Any exact copies prepared in accordance with the provisions of this section may be leased, sold, or otherwise transferred, along with the copy from which such copies were prepared, only as part of the lease, sale, or other transfer of all rights in the program. Adaptations so prepared may be transferred only with the authorization of the copyright owner.
It shouldn't matter whether you copy a pre-patched copy of OS X onto the new machine, or whether you copy an identical copy first and then patch it. It shouldn't matter whether you sell the original copy of OS X to the customer and then patch it for him, or whether you sell him a copy that's already been patched and also give him the original. But apparently it does matter, and that's stupid.
While the end result may be the same, disallowing the latter prevents Psystar from selling fully functional, turn-it-on-and-it-works machines. If the law forces the purchaser to perform the final step of modifying the software, that is a relatively large disadvantage in the marketplace.
I have to wonder, if Psystar sold its machines with a special "first boot" CD that made the necessary modifications to the OS X installation, and had purchasers run that CD only after buying the machine... that sounds like it'd get around the letter of the law, but I suspect Apple's lawyers would creatively find some way to stop that, too.
First sale doesn't allow you resell derivatives
on
Psystar Crushed In Court
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· Score: 5, Interesting
That's a bunch of crap, and if that's what the decision says then First Sale law is over, at least until it gets escalated, and it will. First Sale is critical to whole long lists of industries. Using copyright law to restrict transfer of an object [blogspot.com] is an abuse... First Sale law permits you to modify things you've purchased.
If Psystar modified the OS X software and then sold the modified software (along with the computer), then they've both created a derivative work and distributed it. This should be clear cut in the courts. There is a circuit split over whether attaching a postcard to a tile and then reselling it constitutes the preparation and distribution of a derivative work, but the split is over the question of whether simply gluing the card to the tile is enough to qualify as a derivative work. In this case, modifying the software is almost unquestionably enough to constitute the preparation of a derivative work.
First sale will allow you to resell a copyrighted work that you have purchased; if, however, it's been modified enough to constitute a derivative work, you'll run afoul of copyright law. If, in the Seventh Circuit's tile case, the defendant had made a new piece of artwork, e.g. a collage or something with a bunch of postcard, that would likely pass the threshold for a derivative work.
If all Psystar had done was resell copies of unmodified copies of OS X along with their Hackintoshes, the issue of derivative works wouldn't come into play at all. It would be more a matter of whether Apple's EULA matters, etc. By modifying the copies, however, they opened up a big can of worms.
You're assuming it's hundred dollar bills. In the transcript they say there's a note with the money with the number $4710, and they seem to think there are a lot of bills, so it might be a bunch of 5s, 10s, and 20s - maybe small bills that people donated for the campaign.
Hey, I'm on your side. My point is that a lot of folks on/. seems to think that government works in general cannot be copyrighted. The fact is, that only applies to works of the federal government.
The whole reason I brought up the cases in my original post was to indicate that the public interest in access to the text of laws has (so far) outweighed the copyright interests in the same text.
As for "originality", laws would certainly pass that (very low) threshold. And "common sense" is never a given when it comes to things like this.:-)
Furthermore, public records laws don't necessarily mean the text in question isn't copyrighted. (In fact, after the Act of 1976, any document or report, etc., produced by a state is automatically copyrighted, unless a state has somehow disclaimed that - I don't even know if that's possible). They may have to disclose information to you under public records law, but under copyright law, they could then forbid you from redistributing the same information.
I don't know where people get the idea that "the government" equals only the Federal government. Your state and city have governments, too.
I "get the idea" from 17 USC Sec. 105, which clearly states (and has long been upheld to mean) that works of the federal government are ineligible for copyright. Meanwhile, works of state and local governments are not ineligible - nothing necessarily prevents them from being copyrighted.
First off, since these are state and local laws, the objection that "government works are in the public domain" doesn't apply, as that objection is only valid for federal works.
However, there are several cases that deal with the question of whether private codes (e.g. building codes, safety codes, etc.) that a local government pays for can remain copyrighted once they are enacted into law. Veeck v. Southern Bldg Code, Building Officials & Code Administrators Int'l v. Code Technology, Inc. There are others, but in both those, the idea was that once the private code is enacted into law, it would enter the public domain.
This case seems different though... if all this company has done is taken the city's law and made them an electronic version, surely they don't own the copyright to the text of the laws themselves (unless some idiot wrote the software contract).
This AC is absolutely right. WIPO has actually been taking a much more moderate approach to a lot of IP policy lately, with its development agenda and the increased influence of developing countries there. There has been so much relative moderation that some people feel WIPO is gridlocked
So, US, EU, Japan, et al. know that they will make no progress in pushing ACTA through WIPO (which would be the appropriate forum). As a result, they've pursued ACTA by itself, in a completely non-transparent manner.
What legal principle prevents me from loaning out, selling, or renting any (physical) CD/DVD/Book that I have purchased?
17 USC 109. Granted, that only prohibits the rental of software and sound recordings, however, people should be aware that "first sale" does not apply to all copyrighted materials equally. Special exemptions like these make it illegal for you to rent out copies of software or CDs, even if you own them (unless you get authorization from the copyright holder).
Do these companies seriously have to buy special versions that they rent out?
I forget how this works exactly, but IIRC rental stores typically buy special "rental" copies that are much more expensive than retail copies.
Yes, the corporations listed have legitimate interests. Yes, it's good that there are three PK people and one person from the Center for Democracy and Technology.
However, four people total from PK and CDT are not enough to constitute adequate representation in the public interest. The reason KEI is making such a fuss about this is because there is a big concern in the access-to-medicines community that any ACTA treaty will include provisions making it easier for customs authorities to seize pharmaceuticals that are allegedly "counterfeit". There's a very active effort to confuse the distinction between counterfeit and generic medicine, and KEI and others are worried that ACTA will make it easier for shipments of generic medicines to be seized as they make their way between countries. This has already happened several times this year, and in no case that I am aware of have the accusations been substantiated - it's always turned out that the medicines are legitimate generics.
People from PK and CDT have no history of working on access to medicine or public health issues. None of the groups on that list seem to have any relation to public health issues, yet ACTA could have a very real effect on public health.
Or is it the fact that ACTA is a 'treaty' make it substantially different?
Yes. It wouldn't become law until ratified by the Senate, and they are still in the stages of negotiating the draft text. Right now it's just a piece of paper, which apparently no one is allowed to see, despite FOIAs that have been filed, because both administrations have argued it's a matter of "national security." That's BS of course; the real reason is probably a combination of 1) public interest groups wouldn't like what was in the draft and 2) parties involved in the negotiation feel that opening up a draft text will impede honest negotiations.
Both of those are probably true, however I think that fewer people would be up in arms of the secrecy of the draft text if some public interest groups were among the stakeholders allowed to see it. As it stands now, the groups being allowed to see it are not at all representative.
Maybe you live in a city and don't use a car to go to the movie theater? E.g., you're out for the day, doing some work with your laptop, now this policy means you'll have to drop off the machine at home before catching the film.
Or maybe conveniently located rentable lockers will start showing up at the theater, which you can pay to store all your potentially infringing devices. Dump your laptop, phone, and any pens or pencils which may be used to write down dialogue. Also, when you leave the theater, please make sure to stop by our convenient memory erasing station, so that you don't carry unauthorized memories out of the theater.
Not really. The argument about the AACS key was not that the number itself was copyrighted, but rather that the number was the means to circumvent the protection measures controlling access to a copyrighted work. Thus, distribution of the number was a violation of the DMCA.
I'm not aware of anyone claiming that the number itself was copyrighted. Some people have suggested that line of argument in this case, but if TI really wanted to pursue this in court, they'd have to register the signing key with the copyright office (you have to do this prior to starting litigation). I'd really like to see them try to register a small number!
Yeah, neither argument holds water. Tthe owner already has license to access the copyrighted software that is the TI operating system. The garage door opener case pretty much closes off that avenue of logic.
Well, stick around some more, because it's not what the DMCA is designed to prevent.
As others have pointed out, you can only invoke the anti-circumvention provisions of the DMCA if the technological protection measures are controlling access to a copyrighted work. Simply bypassing a measure alone is not a violation of the DMCA.
In this case, they obtained keys that allow them to install custom software on the device. Where that software comes from may be a copyright issue, but that is not relevant to the overall matter of whether obtaining and using the keys is a violation of the DMCA. These keys control whether the hardware accepts given software; rather than controlling access to copyrighted software, the keys, in a manner of speaking, control the software's access to the hardware, so it's not a matter for the DMCA.
Actually, if you could demonstrate that your simulation independently created a work identical to another copyrighted work, the evolved work would not be a violation. In fact, you'd have the right to distribute "your" work, while the other person retained copyright on "their" work. There's precedent for this, but I'm not going to look up the case right now.
Of course the chances of that happening are pretty low... and any attempts to "filter" through all the random crap with the intent of searching for an evolved work that matches a current work would undermine the legal argument.
And in any case, the lobbyists will probably write a provision explicitly targeting this when the time comes:-)
I don't really think the OP had a point. Maybe it was a joke, it just sounded to me like political trolling. Taking issue with Star Trek because it involves a "socialist utopia" (and it's not, really... there's enough war and death that it can't be a utopia, and a show about a utopia would be boring) is just projecting the OP's dislike of socialism onto a television show.
And by the way, study history. Capitalism IS teh best. Pretty much every totalitarian ideology has had some aspect of socialism at it's core, just because it can't stand to leave the economy alone - and every implementation of socialism has involved meddling in plenty of non-economic affairs, because the politicians can't resist.
Whether "capitalism" is an effective economic system and whether it is better than other systems is a different question than whether holding the ideological position of "capitalism is teh best", and the associated tenets of ultra-privatization, ulta-propertization, ulta-deregulation, and ultra-free marketeering, is a sensible thing. If the OP seriously finds a TV show objectionable on the basis of its fictional economic system, he needs to chill out.
On other notes, political meddling in both economic affairs has never been foreign to capitalist systems. And whether or not people are actually driven by non-economic interests, one of the core assumptions of reductionistic economic analysis is to assume that people are driven by crass economic interests. The reason the discipline of economics is often useful is because that's a useful assumption - in reality, people are driven by crass economic interests to a great extent. My point was that it would be nice to live in a world where fulfilling one's needs was not the primary driving force of existence.
Seriously? Has the anti-socialist political fearmongering gotten so bad that now they have to pick on a fictional TV show?
Please reread your comment again. You are saying we should not like Star Trek because the Federation's economic system is a "socialist utopia". And presumably this is because socialism is bad! (Would you say the same thing if it were the equally implausible capitalist utopia?)
Not to mention that your characterization of the show not having any business or entrepreneurship is just not true, not to mention that some of us LIKE the idea of a world where human beings primary motivations are no longer purely and crassly economic... essentially you're saying that the ideological position of "Capitalism is teh best" is SO important to you that if a fictional work doesn't conform to it, people should dislike that work.
No, the TRUE one reason not to like Star Trek is the fact that they solve 95% of problems by reversing the polarity of something.
As Elizabeth Cady Stanton said, "To make laws that man cannot, and will not obey, serves to bring all law into contempt."
I think copyright, and IP law in general has a legitimate and defensible purpose. That said, IP policy is essentially made without any regard to facts (you could argue that about a lot of policy, but in IP it's particularly bad). The fact that one can violate copyright law so easily, without intending it, and the fact that so much stuff of so little value is copyrighted, as well as really old stuff, breeds contempt of copyright law altogether.
The legitimacy of copyright law might be salvaged by cutting down the length of terms drastically, or otherwise changing the policy so that it is actually sensible. Barring that, though, as long as some written works from 1924 are still copyrighted, can you really blame people for thinking the whole thing is ridiculous?
All the infrastructure that makes the documents available, scanned them in, store them, bandwidth, power, man-hours, backups, etc. COSTS MONEY. And you know what? They are entitled to it. You don't get to ask people to work for free.
PACER fees are not designed to recover those costs, which are probably just normal operating costs of the court system. After all, it's not like they run the service solely for public benefit - it's a necessity for a functioning justice system. According to the New York Times article from the summary,
But even the seemingly cheap cost of Pacer adds up, when court records can run to thousands of pages. Fees get plowed back to the courts to finance technology, but the system runs a budget surplus of some $150 million, according to recent court reports.
Secondly, the documents are not copyrighted, and were being offered for free at a library. The fact that this guy mass downloaded them and put them up on a separate server is actually probably SAVING the government money, since they will no longer have to field PACER requests from people who want what is freely available elsewhere.
Slashdot Mirror
The Copyright Act includes two sets of rules for how this works. If an artist or author sold a copyright before 1978 (Section 304), they or their heirs can take it back 56 years later. If the artist or author sold the copyright during or after 1978 (Section 203), they can terminate that grant after 35 years. Assuming all the proper paperwork gets done in time, record labels could lose sound recording copyrights they bought in 1978 starting in 2013, 1979 in 2014, and so on. For 1953-and-earlier music, grants can already be terminated.
If not explicitly spelled out in a contract, then the IP rights are determined by the laws of the state. Most of the time, these tend to error on the side of the individual rather than the organization.
Where did you read that? Federal IP law preempts state law almost entirely. Occasionally in suits you'll see lawyers invoke state common law to add insult to injury. Also, no, if rights are not explicitly spelled out in the contract, it means nothing. If you are simply an "employee" (as opposed to a contractor), the default is that your work is "work for hire", and it belongs to your employer. This is long-settled doctrine. The question revolves around your type of employment, but your employment contract doesn't necessarily have to say anything about copyrights, and your boss can still own your work.
Unless the employment contract explicitly transfers ownership of creative works to the employer then the lesson plans legally do not belong to the school.
That's simply not true. The employment contract doesn't need to explicitly mention anything about ownership of creative works. If you are simply an "employee" as opposed to an independent contractor, your work falls under the work for hire doctrine, and your employer owns the copyright.
In the world of copyrights and contracts this stuff is cut and dry, the default in all cases - including software development - is for ownership to rest with the creator, full stop.
No, it's not cut and dry. See, for example, the Community for Creative Non-Violence. And the "default" would depend on whether you're an employee or a contractor. If you're a coder who's been hired as a salaried member for some company and that's your full time job, the "default" is probably that you're an employee and you're creating works for hire, so ownership rests with your employer, full stop.
That said, at least at the university level, the culture is that works by professors are not works for hire. I'm not sure if there really is a sound legal basis for that (probably depends on their employment contract), but any university who tried to assert ownership over professors' work would find itself being attacked on all sides.
Exactly. In another post, I mentioned that I wonder how this would have gone down had Psystar done something like like - maybe provided a special "first boot" CD along with some legalize that said, "By running this CD, you are authorizing us to adapt on your behalf the unmodified copy of OS X on your machine so that it properly works with your computer system."
(b) Lease, Sale, or Other Transfer of Additional Copy or Adaptation.— Any exact copies prepared in accordance with the provisions of this section may be leased, sold, or otherwise transferred, along with the copy from which such copies were prepared, only as part of the lease, sale, or other transfer of all rights in the program. Adaptations so prepared may be transferred only with the authorization of the copyright owner.
It shouldn't matter whether you copy a pre-patched copy of OS X onto the new machine, or whether you copy an identical copy first and then patch it. It shouldn't matter whether you sell the original copy of OS X to the customer and then patch it for him, or whether you sell him a copy that's already been patched and also give him the original. But apparently it does matter, and that's stupid.
While the end result may be the same, disallowing the latter prevents Psystar from selling fully functional, turn-it-on-and-it-works machines. If the law forces the purchaser to perform the final step of modifying the software, that is a relatively large disadvantage in the marketplace.
I have to wonder, if Psystar sold its machines with a special "first boot" CD that made the necessary modifications to the OS X installation, and had purchasers run that CD only after buying the machine... that sounds like it'd get around the letter of the law, but I suspect Apple's lawyers would creatively find some way to stop that, too.
That's a bunch of crap, and if that's what the decision says then First Sale law is over, at least until it gets escalated, and it will. First Sale is critical to whole long lists of industries. Using copyright law to restrict transfer of an object [blogspot.com] is an abuse... First Sale law permits you to modify things you've purchased.
If Psystar modified the OS X software and then sold the modified software (along with the computer), then they've both created a derivative work and distributed it. This should be clear cut in the courts. There is a circuit split over whether attaching a postcard to a tile and then reselling it constitutes the preparation and distribution of a derivative work, but the split is over the question of whether simply gluing the card to the tile is enough to qualify as a derivative work. In this case, modifying the software is almost unquestionably enough to constitute the preparation of a derivative work.
First sale will allow you to resell a copyrighted work that you have purchased; if, however, it's been modified enough to constitute a derivative work, you'll run afoul of copyright law. If, in the Seventh Circuit's tile case, the defendant had made a new piece of artwork, e.g. a collage or something with a bunch of postcard, that would likely pass the threshold for a derivative work.
If all Psystar had done was resell copies of unmodified copies of OS X along with their Hackintoshes, the issue of derivative works wouldn't come into play at all. It would be more a matter of whether Apple's EULA matters, etc. By modifying the copies, however, they opened up a big can of worms.
You're assuming it's hundred dollar bills. In the transcript they say there's a note with the money with the number $4710, and they seem to think there are a lot of bills, so it might be a bunch of 5s, 10s, and 20s - maybe small bills that people donated for the campaign.
Hey, I'm on your side. My point is that a lot of folks on /. seems to think that government works in general cannot be copyrighted. The fact is, that only applies to works of the federal government.
The whole reason I brought up the cases in my original post was to indicate that the public interest in access to the text of laws has (so far) outweighed the copyright interests in the same text.
As for "originality", laws would certainly pass that (very low) threshold. And "common sense" is never a given when it comes to things like this. :-)
Furthermore, public records laws don't necessarily mean the text in question isn't copyrighted. (In fact, after the Act of 1976, any document or report, etc., produced by a state is automatically copyrighted, unless a state has somehow disclaimed that - I don't even know if that's possible). They may have to disclose information to you under public records law, but under copyright law, they could then forbid you from redistributing the same information.
I don't know where people get the idea that "the government" equals only the Federal government. Your state and city have governments, too.
I "get the idea" from 17 USC Sec. 105, which clearly states (and has long been upheld to mean) that works of the federal government are ineligible for copyright. Meanwhile, works of state and local governments are not ineligible - nothing necessarily prevents them from being copyrighted.
First off, since these are state and local laws, the objection that "government works are in the public domain" doesn't apply, as that objection is only valid for federal works.
However, there are several cases that deal with the question of whether private codes (e.g. building codes, safety codes, etc.) that a local government pays for can remain copyrighted once they are enacted into law. Veeck v. Southern Bldg Code, Building Officials & Code Administrators Int'l v. Code Technology, Inc. There are others, but in both those, the idea was that once the private code is enacted into law, it would enter the public domain.
This case seems different though... if all this company has done is taken the city's law and made them an electronic version, surely they don't own the copyright to the text of the laws themselves (unless some idiot wrote the software contract).
This AC is absolutely right. WIPO has actually been taking a much more moderate approach to a lot of IP policy lately, with its development agenda and the increased influence of developing countries there. There has been so much relative moderation that some people feel WIPO is gridlocked
So, US, EU, Japan, et al. know that they will make no progress in pushing ACTA through WIPO (which would be the appropriate forum). As a result, they've pursued ACTA by itself, in a completely non-transparent manner.
What legal principle prevents me from loaning out, selling, or renting any (physical) CD/DVD/Book that I have purchased?
17 USC 109. Granted, that only prohibits the rental of software and sound recordings, however, people should be aware that "first sale" does not apply to all copyrighted materials equally. Special exemptions like these make it illegal for you to rent out copies of software or CDs, even if you own them (unless you get authorization from the copyright holder).
Do these companies seriously have to buy special versions that they rent out?
I forget how this works exactly, but IIRC rental stores typically buy special "rental" copies that are much more expensive than retail copies.
Yes, the corporations listed have legitimate interests. Yes, it's good that there are three PK people and one person from the Center for Democracy and Technology.
However, four people total from PK and CDT are not enough to constitute adequate representation in the public interest. The reason KEI is making such a fuss about this is because there is a big concern in the access-to-medicines community that any ACTA treaty will include provisions making it easier for customs authorities to seize pharmaceuticals that are allegedly "counterfeit". There's a very active effort to confuse the distinction between counterfeit and generic medicine, and KEI and others are worried that ACTA will make it easier for shipments of generic medicines to be seized as they make their way between countries. This has already happened several times this year, and in no case that I am aware of have the accusations been substantiated - it's always turned out that the medicines are legitimate generics.
People from PK and CDT have no history of working on access to medicine or public health issues. None of the groups on that list seem to have any relation to public health issues, yet ACTA could have a very real effect on public health.
Or is it the fact that ACTA is a 'treaty' make it substantially different?
Yes. It wouldn't become law until ratified by the Senate, and they are still in the stages of negotiating the draft text. Right now it's just a piece of paper, which apparently no one is allowed to see, despite FOIAs that have been filed, because both administrations have argued it's a matter of "national security." That's BS of course; the real reason is probably a combination of 1) public interest groups wouldn't like what was in the draft and 2) parties involved in the negotiation feel that opening up a draft text will impede honest negotiations.
Both of those are probably true, however I think that fewer people would be up in arms of the secrecy of the draft text if some public interest groups were among the stakeholders allowed to see it. As it stands now, the groups being allowed to see it are not at all representative.
Or maybe conveniently located rentable lockers will start showing up at the theater, which you can pay to store all your potentially infringing devices. Dump your laptop, phone, and any pens or pencils which may be used to write down dialogue. Also, when you leave the theater, please make sure to stop by our convenient memory erasing station, so that you don't carry unauthorized memories out of the theater.
Not really. The argument about the AACS key was not that the number itself was copyrighted, but rather that the number was the means to circumvent the protection measures controlling access to a copyrighted work. Thus, distribution of the number was a violation of the DMCA.
I'm not aware of anyone claiming that the number itself was copyrighted. Some people have suggested that line of argument in this case, but if TI really wanted to pursue this in court, they'd have to register the signing key with the copyright office (you have to do this prior to starting litigation). I'd really like to see them try to register a small number!
Yeah, neither argument holds water. Tthe owner already has license to access the copyrighted software that is the TI operating system. The garage door opener case pretty much closes off that avenue of logic.
Well, stick around some more, because it's not what the DMCA is designed to prevent.
As others have pointed out, you can only invoke the anti-circumvention provisions of the DMCA if the technological protection measures are controlling access to a copyrighted work. Simply bypassing a measure alone is not a violation of the DMCA.
In this case, they obtained keys that allow them to install custom software on the device. Where that software comes from may be a copyright issue, but that is not relevant to the overall matter of whether obtaining and using the keys is a violation of the DMCA. These keys control whether the hardware accepts given software; rather than controlling access to copyrighted software, the keys, in a manner of speaking, control the software's access to the hardware, so it's not a matter for the DMCA.
Actually, if you could demonstrate that your simulation independently created a work identical to another copyrighted work, the evolved work would not be a violation. In fact, you'd have the right to distribute "your" work, while the other person retained copyright on "their" work. There's precedent for this, but I'm not going to look up the case right now.
Of course the chances of that happening are pretty low... and any attempts to "filter" through all the random crap with the intent of searching for an evolved work that matches a current work would undermine the legal argument.
And in any case, the lobbyists will probably write a provision explicitly targeting this when the time comes :-)
I don't really think the OP had a point. Maybe it was a joke, it just sounded to me like political trolling. Taking issue with Star Trek because it involves a "socialist utopia" (and it's not, really... there's enough war and death that it can't be a utopia, and a show about a utopia would be boring) is just projecting the OP's dislike of socialism onto a television show.
And by the way, study history. Capitalism IS teh best. Pretty much every totalitarian ideology has had some aspect of socialism at it's core, just because it can't stand to leave the economy alone - and every implementation of socialism has involved meddling in plenty of non-economic affairs, because the politicians can't resist.
Whether "capitalism" is an effective economic system and whether it is better than other systems is a different question than whether holding the ideological position of "capitalism is teh best", and the associated tenets of ultra-privatization, ulta-propertization, ulta-deregulation, and ultra-free marketeering, is a sensible thing. If the OP seriously finds a TV show objectionable on the basis of its fictional economic system, he needs to chill out.
On other notes, political meddling in both economic affairs has never been foreign to capitalist systems. And whether or not people are actually driven by non-economic interests, one of the core assumptions of reductionistic economic analysis is to assume that people are driven by crass economic interests. The reason the discipline of economics is often useful is because that's a useful assumption - in reality, people are driven by crass economic interests to a great extent. My point was that it would be nice to live in a world where fulfilling one's needs was not the primary driving force of existence.
Seriously? Has the anti-socialist political fearmongering gotten so bad that now they have to pick on a fictional TV show?
Please reread your comment again. You are saying we should not like Star Trek because the Federation's economic system is a "socialist utopia". And presumably this is because socialism is bad! (Would you say the same thing if it were the equally implausible capitalist utopia?)
Not to mention that your characterization of the show not having any business or entrepreneurship is just not true, not to mention that some of us LIKE the idea of a world where human beings primary motivations are no longer purely and crassly economic... essentially you're saying that the ideological position of "Capitalism is teh best" is SO important to you that if a fictional work doesn't conform to it, people should dislike that work.
No, the TRUE one reason not to like Star Trek is the fact that they solve 95% of problems by reversing the polarity of something.
As Elizabeth Cady Stanton said, "To make laws that man cannot, and will not obey, serves to bring all law into contempt."
I think copyright, and IP law in general has a legitimate and defensible purpose. That said, IP policy is essentially made without any regard to facts (you could argue that about a lot of policy, but in IP it's particularly bad). The fact that one can violate copyright law so easily, without intending it, and the fact that so much stuff of so little value is copyrighted, as well as really old stuff, breeds contempt of copyright law altogether.
The legitimacy of copyright law might be salvaged by cutting down the length of terms drastically, or otherwise changing the policy so that it is actually sensible. Barring that, though, as long as some written works from 1924 are still copyrighted, can you really blame people for thinking the whole thing is ridiculous?
... and I'm prone to alzheimers!
All the infrastructure that makes the documents available, scanned them in, store them, bandwidth, power, man-hours, backups, etc. COSTS MONEY. And you know what? They are entitled to it. You don't get to ask people to work for free.
PACER fees are not designed to recover those costs, which are probably just normal operating costs of the court system. After all, it's not like they run the service solely for public benefit - it's a necessity for a functioning justice system. According to the New York Times article from the summary,
But even the seemingly cheap cost of Pacer adds up, when court records can run to thousands of pages. Fees get plowed back to the courts to finance technology, but the system runs a budget surplus of some $150 million, according to recent court reports.
Secondly, the documents are not copyrighted, and were being offered for free at a library. The fact that this guy mass downloaded them and put them up on a separate server is actually probably SAVING the government money, since they will no longer have to field PACER requests from people who want what is freely available elsewhere.