Hm, I haven't heard of it, but that doesn't mean some court somewhere hasn't applied it. In most of the cases I've read, though, there has been a pretty detailed evaluation of whether a mark is infringing or not. One of the most well known cases involves what are now called the Sleekcraft factors.
Trademark law is all about protecting consumers from being deceived about the source of goods/services.
In theory, yes, but in practice (as you probably know, since you know what initial interest confusion is), that's not the reality. IIRC, consumers don't even have standing to sue in a case of trademark infringement. Maybe they can sue for false advertising, but it's the trademark owner who has to bring the lawsuit for infringement.
Besides, with the expansion of trademark due to the notion of "dilution", and the licensing of trademarks for purposes other than source-identification (sponsorship, etc. - the stadium doesn't come from M&T Bank), it's hard to argue that trademark is all about protecting consumers, or even mostly about it anymore.
In 1-800 Contacts v. WhenU, WhenU didn't run into trouble because their ads popped up in a separate window. That's not the case with Google (though they do clearly say "Sponsored Link"). WhenU was also not found to be "using" the trademark (despite including it in a database), because "use" of a trademark for the purpose of infringement has to be in commerce, and simply using the mark in a database didn't count as such.
Looks like it's pretty hard to verify that Stalin actually said that - at least, a quick Google search reveals a lot of people claiming he said it, but no references, and some contradictory attributions.
Second, that's an ad hominem argument. Even if Stalin said it, that doesn't mean it's not an accurate observation.
Yeah, I think the more descriptive term would be "open access." The article does talk about "digital" textbooks, whatever that means... in which case "open source" should mean not using a DRMed digital format.
There's a saying that goes, "Quantity has a quality all its own."
Tracking a vehicle by having a live officer tail it, or using a helicopter, takes significant resources and effort. Using a GPS device makes that job much, much easier. So yes, it saves resources and effort - but what if it makes it too effortless?
Perhaps the logic of why the police don't need a warrant to tail your car is because they can't possibly tail everyone's car all the time, and tailing a car represents a significant investment of effort on their part - which they are unlikely to do without reason. On the other hand, if it's as easy as slapping on a GPS device, the police might be much more likely to track cars without only minimal reason.
There are plenty of contracts that don't require signatures -- oral contracts spring immediately to mind.
Yes, I am well aware that there are non-wrtten contracts, which is why I specifically mentioned "written contracts" in my original post.
As for consideration, there is. If you don't agree to the contract, you return the software. You give them money, they give you software, subject to the conditions in the license. At least, that's how courts have ruled to date.
Care to cite that? I'm not being contrary, I would just really like to know the cases involved here. From what I've read, there seems to be a focus on the purchaser's actions - e.g., if they click an "I agree to the following terms as a condition of using this software," then an EULA is likely to be held as enforceable.
But what about all the EULAs that are just stuffed into boxes, or don't require affirmative action on the part of the purchaser? And as for your take on consideration, people download software every day that they don't pay for, but that involves an EULA. E.g., Firefox - I give them nothing, they give me software. Where is the consideration there?
So yes, while some licenses can be contracts, I fail to see how all licenses are therefore contracts. Moving beyond EULAs, how can general blanket copyright licenses, such as those found all over the Internet, be considered contracts?
Your citation would make more sense if the case involved copyrights, which is what we are talking about, not patents. I will be very surprised if you can show me patents being licensed via shrink-wrap EULA.
I don't know much about patent licensing, but I suspect the terms are much more contract-like - i.e., there is likely signed paperwork between the parties. (Patents are also a hell of a lot more valuable). Shrink-wrap EULAs are essentially distributed like pamphlets in a war zone - thrown out without any regard to how the other party responds.
Not all legal contracts are written, and not all of them (even written ones) require a signature.
Yes, I am well aware of that. Have you ever seen an oral EULA? I didn't think so. Thus why I explicitly said "written contracts."
"Licenses", particularly the EULA kind ("here's a slip of paper we claim you must abide by if you use this software") are not contracts. They may be enforceable, but not because they're a contractual agreement.
No, but it is a contract, and contracts are enforced by law.
I'm fairly certain this is still not correct.
The "L" in EULA stands for "license", not contract. A license is different than a contract. What kind of written contracts do you know that don't require a signature or any kind of consideration?
I just meant it was ironic that I was quoting an article I got through ScienceDirect in a discussion about fake journals from Elsevier.
When it comes to neglected tropical diseases, the patent system has little to do with it.
And that's exactly the problem. The patent system is supposed to be a system that generates incentives to produce products that increase social welfare (in a utilitarian sense). Yet it fails to offer the right kind of incentives to encourage research into treatments for neglected diseases. Of course, if the patent system did induce research and development in that area, we'd then face the problem of high prices, but with neglected diseases we are not at that point yet.
If the patent system has little to do with it, maybe it means we should change the patent system. Of course, that's not realistic given all the minimum requirements of TRIPS, etc., so the solution is probably to establish a parallel incentive system to work alongside with the patent system.
which can not be licensed away [arstechnica.com] by any EULA, at least in the United States.
Non sequitur. If you read your linked article, you'll see this bit:
Citing the 1977 case of United States v. Wise, which involved the sale of used films obtained under dubious circumstances, Jones found that the Ninth Circuit's precedents suggested that the circumstances surrounding the sale of AutoCAD software constituted a sale, not merely a license. Therefore, the First Sale Doctrine applied, and Vernor was not bound by any of the terms in Autodesk's license agreement.
But the judge acknowledged that three more recent Ninth Circuit decisions involving software seemed to cut in the opposite direction without explicitly overturning Wise. Jones found that Wise was controlling precedent, and ruled in Vernor's favor. If the case gets appealed to the Ninth Circuit, the conflict among these precedents is likely to occupy the court's attention.
I don't know if that case was appealed, or what's happened to it. However, even if it was appealed and upheld, I believe that ruling would set precedent only for the 9th circuit, not the entire U.S. I don't remember off the top of my head, but I seem to recall there being a circuit split on this issue.
Yes, R&D is not the only major cost involved with new drugs. Regulatory hurdles are enormous as well. However, PhRMA's own figures emphasize how expensive it is to do the research and development, along with how much research fails, etc.
Even if you got rid of regulatory requirements completely, it would not reduce the price of new medicines to the point where it would be financially feasible for drug companies to focus on neglected diseases. This doesn't mean that they are evil - there is just no motivation for them to do research on drugs that no one will be able to buy.
So what is needed is an alternative incentive system - a prize fund, something like the Health Impact Fund, or the Medical Innovation Prize Fund Act - something that offers companies the necessary incentives to focus on stuff like TB, malaria, trypanosomiasis, leishmaniasis, Chagas disease, etc.
Yeah, whatever: you are comparing a product that has been available for years to one that is has not yet been released. I call BS.
What exactly are you calling BS at? Are you saying you think the DX is vaporware? That's a pretty bold claim, considering Amazon (not Phantom or someone) is already taking orders for it, and has specifications posted, and they have photos and videos of it.
Display: 9.7" diagonal E-Ink® electronic paper display, 1200 x 824 pixel resolution at 150 ppi, 16-level gray scale.
That is both physically larger, and higher resolution than the iLiad (8.1-inch (diagonal) Electronic Paper Display
768 x 1024 pixels resolution, 160 DPI.)
And yes, I know the DR-1000 is available now. It also is about twice the price of the Kindle DX, and if you read the iRex forums, there are a lot of people who are very dissatisfied with the DR-1000 - enough to scare me off from buying one now that there is a viable alternative.
The Oxford English Dictionary attests both forms. Some uses of "noblest".
1616 SHAKESPEARE Julius Caesar (1623) V. v. 67 This was the Noblest Roman of them all. 1818 BYRON Childe Harold IV. cxlvii, Relic of nobler days, and noblest arts! 1976 S. F. HALLGARTEN German Wines vi. 61 The Riesling vine is the noblest that anyone in Germany has up till now succeeded in cultivating for the production of white wines.
These Kindles come with dictionaries, too. Maybe you could use one.
But really I want to stress that the most important "feature" is that is not Defective By Design: with the Kindle you have to send your PDF or HTML files to Amazon to be converted to the proprietary and DRM'ed format used, which will then only work on a single device, no matter what license you have...
I am not a kindle apologist, but with the DX, that is simply not true. The DX has a built in PDF reader. That's another reason why it's a big deal, and a major advance over the Kindle 2. I think you need to look up the specs for the DX before commenting further, you're clearly confusing it with the Kindle 2 - it is significantly different.
Also, if it can read PDFs natively, that means you can convert pretty much anything to PDF yourself and read it natively. Just get the PDFCreator print driver - volia - DOC, HTML, whatever, will be converted just fine.
Maybe my case is unusual, but I'm fairly sure I never spent more than $150 on books for a single class, and even that was rare. I went to a state flagship university for undergrad.
The most expensive books were for basic science classes (well, and that one accounting book I bought before realizing that I wanted nothing to do with the business school), running around $80 to $110...
This year, I had to buy a law textbook... the "revised" 4th edition was selling at Barnes and Noble for about $100. I bought the (not revised) 4th edition off of Amazon for $20. While I was waiting for it to ship, I sat in B&N drinking hot chocolate, and wrote down all the changes in the revised edition (which were helpfully noted in two pages at the beginning).
The slightly older version was practically identical; it lacked two cases that were very recent, both of which I found the opinions for online. The extra footwork was well worth the $80 saved.
The Kindle DX does support "markup", in the sense of bookmarks, annotations, notes, etc. It doesn't have a Wacom touchscreen or pen input like the iRex devices, no.
On the other hand, I'll put up with keyboard-only input to get a larger screen than the iLiad, and something 1/2 the price of the DR-1000.
First of all, the iLiad doesn't have a bigger screen or higher resolution than the Kindle DX. Bigger than the Kindle 2, yes, but the reason the DX is a big deal is because of the larger screen.
Now the iRex DR-1000 is bigger than the Kindle DX, but it also costs nearly $1000. I was looking at the DR-1000, but the reviews seem so mixed... some people are very happy, others really pissed that they spent so much money and got a buggy and apparently very fragile device.
In spite of all that, I was still thinking about dropping a grand on a large e-reader. Then, the DX came along - large, half the cost of the DR-1000, and from a reputable company with a large volume of previous devices sold. iRex may not be a bad company, but they don't have US offices (only through resellers), and their communication with customers leaves much to be desired. My customer experiences with Amazon have been fantastic (had two items replaced w/o question: one had never been delivered, other was defective).
Throw in the leather cover and extended warranty, and your Kindle costs a maximum of $638... x 50 students, $31,900 for hardware.
That leaves $28,100 for the course materials... / 50 students = $562 per student, / 3 courses = $187 per student per course for electronic materials.
If all those students were law students, and they were all buying their books new, maybe that would make sense. Otherwise, it just sounds like a ripoff. Used textbooks, even multiple ones per course, shouldn't run anywhere near that.
There is one simple principle here: pharmaceutical companies cannot make any profit from healthy people.
They also can't make any profit off the majority of sick people in the world, either, because those people have no money. That's how you get situations like this:
We found that, of 1393 new chemical entities marketed between 1975 and 1999, only 16 were for tropical diseases and tuberculosis. (Trouiller et al., "Drug Development for Neglected Diseases: a Deficient Market and a Public-Health Policy Failure." The Lancet 359, no. 9324 (June 22, 2002): 2188-2194.
(Ironically, I got that through ScienceDirect). Yet while the pharma giants won't focus R&D on neglected diseases, they'll also lobby against any attempts to set up alternative incentive systems designed to stimulate research into those disease... probably too afraid that the alternatives will be more successful than the current patent system, and people will start to wonder why more drugs can't be developed that way.
Interesting. This militates against the argument that the "imprimatur" of a publisher always adds to a journal's legitimacy, and is one more reason to ditch money-grubbing publishers for open-access journals.
That is really a huge blow to the reputation of Elsevier... of course they publish hundreds (thousands?) of journals, so in absolute terms maybe it is not that big a deal, but still...
While there will probably be some lawyer who will post a contradictory comment, here's my take:
I've taken a general IP law course at one of the top law schools in the country. (I won't say the exact ranking to leave some mystery.) The thing that struck me is that you really need no specific background to understand this stuff. If my kids ever decide they want to go to law school, I'm not going to let them be taken in by people who say they should be doing a specific pre-law track. It's nonsense.
One of my friends did classics and linguistics as her undergrad, and got a full ride to a first-tier law school. On the other hand, if you want to do patent law, you need a technical background - science or engineering undergraduate degree (at least if you want to do the patent bar and be able to practice).
Really, if you can read and comprehend, you can understand the material. The challenge is that there is a bulk of it - now that I've taken this IP law class, I understand all the basic pitfalls, but since I don't know civil procedure, I have no idea exactly how lawsuits are filed, etc. But I have a feeling that if I got a civil procedure textbook, I'd be able to read and understand it without much trouble.
Apparently BitTorrent is predominantly used for copyright infringement.
Well done for proving the RIAA / MPAA right, boys. You're a true help to the cause.
According to the logic of Sony v. Universal, as long as the technology has substantial non-infringing uses, the creators won't be held liable for contributory infringement. That's under US law, of course.
Also, there's this thing called selection bias. Or don't you think people who primarily use Mininova to download infringing material would be more likely to comment on an article that says Mininova is filtering infringing material?
Legally, "piracy" refers to hijacking boats.
(or can you reference any legal code, rather than random quotes?)
Does it? Because when I search through the federal reporter, a lot of the instances of "piracy" refer to aircraft. Or can you reference any legal code, rather than making shit up?
Also, two minutes searching reveals dozens of cases in the federal reporter referring to copyright infringement as piracy, only a couple of which follow.
506 F.2d 392:
To a schoolboy, 'piracy' may mean swashbuckling adventure, lumbering merchantmen, booty, and the Jolly Roger. To a musical composer or a record manufacturer, however, piracy means not doubloons, but dollars, not cutlasses, but cut-rate losses, not the creaking of a ship under way, but the almost imperceptible hum of a reel-to-reel tape, and certainly no jollity about unauthorized copies of a musical work. We conclude here that a composer is not defenseless but, using the guns of the Copyright Act, can force the pirate to heave to in response to an injunctive shot across the bow.
274 F.2d 487
I realize that the view I hold may seriously impair the use of copyright to prevent piracy in an area where this has been recognized to be rampant for thirty years, Cheney Bros. v. Doris Silk Corp., 2 Cir., 1929, 35 F.2d 279, certiorari denied, 1930, 281 U.S. 728, 50 S.Ct. 245, 74 L.Ed. 1145, and probably for much longer, since it may not be practicable to affix the notice to an inside seam on every repetition of the design.
191 F.2d 99
We have here a conflict of policies: (a) that of preventing piracy of copyrighted matter and (b) that of enforcing the anti-trust laws.
574 F.2d 312
Subsequent to the filing of this action, Michigan enacted Mich.Comp.L.Ann. Â 752.781-85 (Supp.1977) which makes record piracy a crime. Most of the states have enacted legislation making record piracy a crime.
While the legal definition of the crime "piracy" may well refer to hijacking of boats/planes, it is a well established practice to refer to copyright infringement as piracy in court opinions. But if you actually knew what you were talking about, you'd know that.
Slashdot Mirror
Hm, I haven't heard of it, but that doesn't mean some court somewhere hasn't applied it. In most of the cases I've read, though, there has been a pretty detailed evaluation of whether a mark is infringing or not. One of the most well known cases involves what are now called the Sleekcraft factors.
Trademark law is all about protecting consumers from being deceived about the source of goods/services.
In theory, yes, but in practice (as you probably know, since you know what initial interest confusion is), that's not the reality. IIRC, consumers don't even have standing to sue in a case of trademark infringement. Maybe they can sue for false advertising, but it's the trademark owner who has to bring the lawsuit for infringement.
Besides, with the expansion of trademark due to the notion of "dilution", and the licensing of trademarks for purposes other than source-identification (sponsorship, etc. - the stadium doesn't come from M&T Bank), it's hard to argue that trademark is all about protecting consumers, or even mostly about it anymore.
In 1-800 Contacts v. WhenU, WhenU didn't run into trouble because their ads popped up in a separate window. That's not the case with Google (though they do clearly say "Sponsored Link"). WhenU was also not found to be "using" the trademark (despite including it in a database), because "use" of a trademark for the purpose of infringement has to be in commerce, and simply using the mark in a database didn't count as such.
That's modded funny, but take a look at this.
Maybe they use automated page turning machines for normal books, and turn pages by hand for older/more fragile works?
Looks like it's pretty hard to verify that Stalin actually said that - at least, a quick Google search reveals a lot of people claiming he said it, but no references, and some contradictory attributions.
Second, that's an ad hominem argument. Even if Stalin said it, that doesn't mean it's not an accurate observation.
Yeah, I think the more descriptive term would be "open access." The article does talk about "digital" textbooks, whatever that means... in which case "open source" should mean not using a DRMed digital format.
There's a saying that goes, "Quantity has a quality all its own."
Tracking a vehicle by having a live officer tail it, or using a helicopter, takes significant resources and effort. Using a GPS device makes that job much, much easier. So yes, it saves resources and effort - but what if it makes it too effortless?
Perhaps the logic of why the police don't need a warrant to tail your car is because they can't possibly tail everyone's car all the time, and tailing a car represents a significant investment of effort on their part - which they are unlikely to do without reason. On the other hand, if it's as easy as slapping on a GPS device, the police might be much more likely to track cars without only minimal reason.
There are plenty of contracts that don't require signatures -- oral contracts spring immediately to mind.
Yes, I am well aware that there are non-wrtten contracts, which is why I specifically mentioned "written contracts" in my original post.
As for consideration, there is. If you don't agree to the contract, you return the software. You give them money, they give you software, subject to the conditions in the license. At least, that's how courts have ruled to date.
Care to cite that? I'm not being contrary, I would just really like to know the cases involved here. From what I've read, there seems to be a focus on the purchaser's actions - e.g., if they click an "I agree to the following terms as a condition of using this software," then an EULA is likely to be held as enforceable.
But what about all the EULAs that are just stuffed into boxes, or don't require affirmative action on the part of the purchaser? And as for your take on consideration, people download software every day that they don't pay for, but that involves an EULA. E.g., Firefox - I give them nothing, they give me software. Where is the consideration there?
So yes, while some licenses can be contracts, I fail to see how all licenses are therefore contracts. Moving beyond EULAs, how can general blanket copyright licenses, such as those found all over the Internet, be considered contracts?
Your citation would make more sense if the case involved copyrights, which is what we are talking about, not patents. I will be very surprised if you can show me patents being licensed via shrink-wrap EULA.
I don't know much about patent licensing, but I suspect the terms are much more contract-like - i.e., there is likely signed paperwork between the parties. (Patents are also a hell of a lot more valuable). Shrink-wrap EULAs are essentially distributed like pamphlets in a war zone - thrown out without any regard to how the other party responds.
Not all legal contracts are written, and not all of them (even written ones) require a signature.
Yes, I am well aware of that. Have you ever seen an oral EULA? I didn't think so. Thus why I explicitly said "written contracts."
"Licenses", particularly the EULA kind ("here's a slip of paper we claim you must abide by if you use this software") are not contracts. They may be enforceable, but not because they're a contractual agreement.
No, but it is a contract, and contracts are enforced by law.
I'm fairly certain this is still not correct.
The "L" in EULA stands for "license", not contract. A license is different than a contract. What kind of written contracts do you know that don't require a signature or any kind of consideration?
Nothing particularly ironic about it:
I just meant it was ironic that I was quoting an article I got through ScienceDirect in a discussion about fake journals from Elsevier.
When it comes to neglected tropical diseases, the patent system has little to do with it.
And that's exactly the problem. The patent system is supposed to be a system that generates incentives to produce products that increase social welfare (in a utilitarian sense). Yet it fails to offer the right kind of incentives to encourage research into treatments for neglected diseases. Of course, if the patent system did induce research and development in that area, we'd then face the problem of high prices, but with neglected diseases we are not at that point yet.
If the patent system has little to do with it, maybe it means we should change the patent system. Of course, that's not realistic given all the minimum requirements of TRIPS, etc., so the solution is probably to establish a parallel incentive system to work alongside with the patent system.
which can not be licensed away [arstechnica.com] by any EULA, at least in the United States.
Non sequitur. If you read your linked article, you'll see this bit:
Citing the 1977 case of United States v. Wise, which involved the sale of used films obtained under dubious circumstances, Jones found that the Ninth Circuit's precedents suggested that the circumstances surrounding the sale of AutoCAD software constituted a sale, not merely a license. Therefore, the First Sale Doctrine applied, and Vernor was not bound by any of the terms in Autodesk's license agreement.
But the judge acknowledged that three more recent Ninth Circuit decisions involving software seemed to cut in the opposite direction without explicitly overturning Wise. Jones found that Wise was controlling precedent, and ruled in Vernor's favor. If the case gets appealed to the Ninth Circuit, the conflict among these precedents is likely to occupy the court's attention.
I don't know if that case was appealed, or what's happened to it. However, even if it was appealed and upheld, I believe that ruling would set precedent only for the 9th circuit, not the entire U.S. I don't remember off the top of my head, but I seem to recall there being a circuit split on this issue.
Yes, R&D is not the only major cost involved with new drugs. Regulatory hurdles are enormous as well. However, PhRMA's own figures emphasize how expensive it is to do the research and development, along with how much research fails, etc.
Even if you got rid of regulatory requirements completely, it would not reduce the price of new medicines to the point where it would be financially feasible for drug companies to focus on neglected diseases. This doesn't mean that they are evil - there is just no motivation for them to do research on drugs that no one will be able to buy.
So what is needed is an alternative incentive system - a prize fund, something like the Health Impact Fund, or the Medical Innovation Prize Fund Act - something that offers companies the necessary incentives to focus on stuff like TB, malaria, trypanosomiasis, leishmaniasis, Chagas disease, etc.
Yeah, whatever: you are comparing a product that has been available for years to one that is has not yet been released. I call BS.
What exactly are you calling BS at? Are you saying you think the DX is vaporware? That's a pretty bold claim, considering Amazon (not Phantom or someone) is already taking orders for it, and has specifications posted, and they have photos and videos of it.
Display: 9.7" diagonal E-Ink® electronic paper display, 1200 x 824 pixel resolution at 150 ppi, 16-level gray scale.
That is both physically larger, and higher resolution than the iLiad (8.1-inch (diagonal) Electronic Paper Display 768 x 1024 pixels resolution, 160 DPI.)
And yes, I know the DR-1000 is available now. It also is about twice the price of the Kindle DX, and if you read the iRex forums, there are a lot of people who are very dissatisfied with the DR-1000 - enough to scare me off from buying one now that there is a viable alternative.
The Oxford English Dictionary attests both forms. Some uses of "noblest".
1616 SHAKESPEARE Julius Caesar (1623) V. v. 67 This was the Noblest Roman of them all.
1818 BYRON Childe Harold IV. cxlvii, Relic of nobler days, and noblest arts!
1976 S. F. HALLGARTEN German Wines vi. 61 The Riesling vine is the noblest that anyone in Germany has up till now succeeded in cultivating for the production of white wines.
These Kindles come with dictionaries, too. Maybe you could use one.
But really I want to stress that the most important "feature" is that is not Defective By Design: with the Kindle you have to send your PDF or HTML files to Amazon to be converted to the proprietary and DRM'ed format used, which will then only work on a single device, no matter what license you have...
I am not a kindle apologist, but with the DX, that is simply not true. The DX has a built in PDF reader. That's another reason why it's a big deal, and a major advance over the Kindle 2. I think you need to look up the specs for the DX before commenting further, you're clearly confusing it with the Kindle 2 - it is significantly different.
Also, if it can read PDFs natively, that means you can convert pretty much anything to PDF yourself and read it natively. Just get the PDFCreator print driver - volia - DOC, HTML, whatever, will be converted just fine.
Maybe my case is unusual, but I'm fairly sure I never spent more than $150 on books for a single class, and even that was rare. I went to a state flagship university for undergrad.
The most expensive books were for basic science classes (well, and that one accounting book I bought before realizing that I wanted nothing to do with the business school), running around $80 to $110...
This year, I had to buy a law textbook... the "revised" 4th edition was selling at Barnes and Noble for about $100. I bought the (not revised) 4th edition off of Amazon for $20. While I was waiting for it to ship, I sat in B&N drinking hot chocolate, and wrote down all the changes in the revised edition (which were helpfully noted in two pages at the beginning).
The slightly older version was practically identical; it lacked two cases that were very recent, both of which I found the opinions for online. The extra footwork was well worth the $80 saved.
The Kindle DX does support "markup", in the sense of bookmarks, annotations, notes, etc. It doesn't have a Wacom touchscreen or pen input like the iRex devices, no.
On the other hand, I'll put up with keyboard-only input to get a larger screen than the iLiad, and something 1/2 the price of the DR-1000.
First of all, the iLiad doesn't have a bigger screen or higher resolution than the Kindle DX. Bigger than the Kindle 2, yes, but the reason the DX is a big deal is because of the larger screen.
Now the iRex DR-1000 is bigger than the Kindle DX, but it also costs nearly $1000. I was looking at the DR-1000, but the reviews seem so mixed... some people are very happy, others really pissed that they spent so much money and got a buggy and apparently very fragile device.
In spite of all that, I was still thinking about dropping a grand on a large e-reader. Then, the DX came along - large, half the cost of the DR-1000, and from a reputable company with a large volume of previous devices sold. iRex may not be a bad company, but they don't have US offices (only through resellers), and their communication with customers leaves much to be desired. My customer experiences with Amazon have been fantastic (had two items replaced w/o question: one had never been delivered, other was defective).
That's exactly what I was wondering...
Throw in the leather cover and extended warranty, and your Kindle costs a maximum of $638... x 50 students, $31,900 for hardware.
That leaves $28,100 for the course materials... / 50 students = $562 per student, / 3 courses = $187 per student per course for electronic materials.
If all those students were law students, and they were all buying their books new, maybe that would make sense. Otherwise, it just sounds like a ripoff. Used textbooks, even multiple ones per course, shouldn't run anywhere near that.
There is one simple principle here: pharmaceutical companies cannot make any profit from healthy people.
They also can't make any profit off the majority of sick people in the world, either, because those people have no money. That's how you get situations like this:
We found that, of 1393 new chemical entities marketed between 1975 and 1999, only 16 were for tropical diseases and tuberculosis. (Trouiller et al., "Drug Development for Neglected Diseases: a Deficient Market and a Public-Health Policy Failure." The Lancet 359, no. 9324 (June 22, 2002): 2188-2194.
(Ironically, I got that through ScienceDirect). Yet while the pharma giants won't focus R&D on neglected diseases, they'll also lobby against any attempts to set up alternative incentive systems designed to stimulate research into those disease... probably too afraid that the alternatives will be more successful than the current patent system, and people will start to wonder why more drugs can't be developed that way.
Interesting. This militates against the argument that the "imprimatur" of a publisher always adds to a journal's legitimacy, and is one more reason to ditch money-grubbing publishers for open-access journals.
That is really a huge blow to the reputation of Elsevier... of course they publish hundreds (thousands?) of journals, so in absolute terms maybe it is not that big a deal, but still...
While there will probably be some lawyer who will post a contradictory comment, here's my take:
I've taken a general IP law course at one of the top law schools in the country. (I won't say the exact ranking to leave some mystery.) The thing that struck me is that you really need no specific background to understand this stuff. If my kids ever decide they want to go to law school, I'm not going to let them be taken in by people who say they should be doing a specific pre-law track. It's nonsense.
One of my friends did classics and linguistics as her undergrad, and got a full ride to a first-tier law school. On the other hand, if you want to do patent law, you need a technical background - science or engineering undergraduate degree (at least if you want to do the patent bar and be able to practice).
Really, if you can read and comprehend, you can understand the material. The challenge is that there is a bulk of it - now that I've taken this IP law class, I understand all the basic pitfalls, but since I don't know civil procedure, I have no idea exactly how lawsuits are filed, etc. But I have a feeling that if I got a civil procedure textbook, I'd be able to read and understand it without much trouble.
Apparently BitTorrent is predominantly used for copyright infringement. Well done for proving the RIAA / MPAA right, boys. You're a true help to the cause.
According to the logic of Sony v. Universal, as long as the technology has substantial non-infringing uses, the creators won't be held liable for contributory infringement. That's under US law, of course.
Also, there's this thing called selection bias. Or don't you think people who primarily use Mininova to download infringing material would be more likely to comment on an article that says Mininova is filtering infringing material?
Sheesh.
Legally, "piracy" refers to hijacking boats. (or can you reference any legal code, rather than random quotes?)
Does it? Because when I search through the federal reporter, a lot of the instances of "piracy" refer to aircraft. Or can you reference any legal code, rather than making shit up?
Also, two minutes searching reveals dozens of cases in the federal reporter referring to copyright infringement as piracy, only a couple of which follow.
506 F.2d 392:
To a schoolboy, 'piracy' may mean swashbuckling adventure, lumbering merchantmen, booty, and the Jolly Roger. To a musical composer or a record manufacturer, however, piracy means not doubloons, but dollars, not cutlasses, but cut-rate losses, not the creaking of a ship under way, but the almost imperceptible hum of a reel-to-reel tape, and certainly no jollity about unauthorized copies of a musical work. We conclude here that a composer is not defenseless but, using the guns of the Copyright Act, can force the pirate to heave to in response to an injunctive shot across the bow.
274 F.2d 487
I realize that the view I hold may seriously impair the use of copyright to prevent piracy in an area where this has been recognized to be rampant for thirty years, Cheney Bros. v. Doris Silk Corp., 2 Cir., 1929, 35 F.2d 279, certiorari denied, 1930, 281 U.S. 728, 50 S.Ct. 245, 74 L.Ed. 1145, and probably for much longer, since it may not be practicable to affix the notice to an inside seam on every repetition of the design.
191 F.2d 99
We have here a conflict of policies: (a) that of preventing piracy of copyrighted matter and (b) that of enforcing the anti-trust laws.
574 F.2d 312
Subsequent to the filing of this action, Michigan enacted Mich.Comp.L.Ann. Â 752.781-85 (Supp.1977) which makes record piracy a crime. Most of the states have enacted legislation making record piracy a crime.
While the legal definition of the crime "piracy" may well refer to hijacking of boats/planes, it is a well established practice to refer to copyright infringement as piracy in court opinions. But if you actually knew what you were talking about, you'd know that.