Actually, piracy has long been used to refer to copyright (and patent) infringement. "Long" as in, long before the RIAA existed. Look it up.
If you don't like Wikipedia, here are historical examples from the OED:
1654 J. MENNES Recreation for Ingenious Head-peeces clxxvi, All the wealth, Of wit and learning, not by stealth, Or Piracy, but purchase got.]
1700 E. WARD Journey to Hell II. vii. 14 Piracy, Piracy, they cry'd aloud, What made you print my Copy, Sir, says one, You're a meer Knave, 'tis very basely done.
1770 P. LUCKOMBE Conc. Hist. Printing 76 They..would suffer by this act of piracy, since it was likely to prove a very bad edition.
1855 D. BREWSTER Mem. Life I. Newton (new ed.) I. iv. 71 With the view of securing his invention of the telescope from foreign piracy.
1886 Cent. Mag. Feb. 629/1 That there are many publishers who despise such piracy..does not remove the presumption that publishers and papermakers have been influential opponents of an equitable arrangement.
Sigh. The misconception that piracy is not a term that has been historically and consistently used to described copyright infringement just won't die, so here goes.
I'd also provide you with real sources, such as various cases from an IP law textbook, but I'm too lazy. But they do exist.
Look it up in Encyclepedia Brittanica and you will find it there. Verified and checked by a lot more than one person. People with a professional regard for what they are doing. Do errors creep in? Sure they do, but they are not only caught they are accidental.
I imagine Britannica isn't written this way, but many topical encyclopedias are farmed out to people with little or no expertise in the area of the entry they are writing. As a grad student, I have received several e-mails requesting interested students to write the entry for a particular topic in the "Encyclopedia of Coptic Literature" or something equally obscure. I know my classmates (and students in general), and I would not confidently rely upon an encyclopedia article they have written in almost all cases. The opportunity to write an article is advertised with the statement "get a publication on your CV."
Even with better encyclopedias, expert writers can still misrepresent things. There's an entry in the Encyclopedia Judaica, a very well-known and highly-regarded work, that essentially misstates facts about an Israeli intellectual property court case. Luckily, I had dug deep enough to figure this out, but it just goes to show you that you cannot rely on the accuracy of encyclopedia articles - even highly regarded ones. Oh, and it is unlikely errors like that will be corrected. If they are, it will be when a new edition is put out... in who knows how many years?
Encyclopedias are fine for well-known facts that you just don't happen to know, to get a basic overview of something, and for the bibliography at the end of the entry. Incidentally, those happen to be the exact same things that Wikipedia is useful for. Anything more serious than that, and you should be doing real research, not relying upon Wikipedia or an encyclopedia.
If I am already carrying around a laptop, why would I want to carry another piece of equipment that performs a subset of functions that a laptop can do?
That's what everyone is missing. An e-book reader does not perform a subset of the features of a laptop - it performs a different task, one that a laptop is not as well-suited for, namely, reading long documents. I would MUCH rather read a 50 page journal article on the large Kindle than on my laptop.
I don't see much value from this device to students. Most textbooks are not available in electronic form, so it's not like students can carry one device instead of several heavy books. Also, from my experience I can tell that students generally don't have any time for casual reading,
I don't care about the textbooks so much as the ability to read PDFs. Both my undergraduate and master's degrees involved reading LOTS of PDFs - journal articles, scanned chapters of books, working papers, etc. That's why it could be useful for students, not for the casual reading part.
I think you underestimate the potential size of the business market.
Also, another thing to remember is that while college students are "poor", the little money they do have is typically disposable income.
But yes, obviously e-readers would take off if they were more like the PADD technology from Star Trek - cheap enough to leave lying around, give to someone else, etc.
Not necessarily. The DX is not geared towards the beach-reading crowd, the size alone should tell you that. It's more business/academic oriented - i.e., people who are already carrying around an expensive laptop all the time. I think it could be a real hit with students - it's pricey, so maybe not right away, but the next closest competitor in size is the iRex, which is closer to $1000.
The original Kindle had an SD slot... this one has 4 GB, which is quite a bit, but I agree, why not include one? I already have about 2 GB of PDFs on my computer.
As someone who has to read a lot of PDFs, I've gotten sick of reading them on the computer. If they're more than about 5 pages long, it's really irritating. Printing them out wastes paper, and takes a long time when they can be dozens or even hundreds of pages long.
The whole point of an e-book reader is the e-ink display. When I first saw one, it was amazing how much easier to read it is than a computer screen.
I pre-ordered a Kindle DX today. I'd been looking at the iRex DR-1000, but it was even more expensive, and has very mixed reviews. I anticipate using the DX on a daily basis probably for the next several years (grad student)... and I won't have to be tied to a computer, or drag around a laptop. Battery life is supposed to better even than netbooks.
Anyway, I don't care. LaTeX will still be readable long past the time ODT, DOC, DOCX and whatever new incarnation/version of those are more than unreadable.
You are aware that DOCX is simply a bunch of XML files zipped up together? So you can simply unzip a DOCX file, open up the "document.xml", and you have your text.
Even if all conversion utilities disappeared from the planet, it would be simple to write a script to strip out the XML tags and leave you with your text, or for that matter, to use the XML tags to preserve the formatting.
Now, if the ZIP format goes kaput... well, then you may have a point.
You're right. Special 301 reports are not "copyright blacklists." They deal with IP in general, and in past years have focused heavily on pharmaceutical patents (eyes on Thailand, Brazil, India, etc.). This one is a bit toned down in that respect, actually.
Anyone who is familiar with the USTR's reports will find this somewhat unremarkable - well, except with the elevation of Canada.
Do you really think Endnote is losing out to Zotero because Zotero is available for Linux (Endnote exists for OS X, too)? I doubt that's the reason. I'd say it's because Zotero is free!
I wouldn't call it "thinking inside the box" so much as thinking practically.
Why do I want a larger, higher-resolution screen? Because I know the content that I will receive is not going to be plain text that can be wrapped and reformatted at will. In fact, in many cases it may not even be searchable text, just scans of book chapters, etc.
Aside from that, resolution and DPI absolutely do matter, regardless of what type of document you're reading. It's not so much about "pages" as it is screen real-estate. I don't want to have to be constantly scrolling around to refer to the previous sentence because a reader with a small-screen only displays 1/5 the text of a page from a regular book. Maybe I'm atypical in this respect (I do have a triple-display setup, so I am used to having large amounts of screen space).
Finally, I would also be wary of leaving all rendering up to client devices. IMO one of the major benefits of having PDF articles from journals is precisely that those articles look like they came from the journal. They are properly typeset, use sane fonts, and look neat and clean. HTML versions of the same articles look like shit. I don't know what it is about PDFs that just makes them visually more appealing, but they invariably look better than HTML or Word documents on screen.
The whole point of getting a reader (for me, at least), is the e-ink display. I have a laptop I can read PDFs on. I hate it. It's tiring to read any more than about 20 pages of a PDF on-screen.
When I first saw an e-ink display, I actually thought it was a non-working display model, because it looked too good to be true. High contrast, fairly crisp text, no glare, can be read in sunlight... you can't get that on a tablet PC.
The resolution is important, though, because it's a matter of how much readable text you can fit on the screen at one time.
The Kindle and Sony readers seem fine for reading paper-back style e-books. Paperbacks are fairly small anyway, and the text can be wrapped or whatever to fit the screen. But for someone who wants to read PDFs, many of which may be image-based (i.e., scans, perhaps with underlying text or not), that text can't be wrapped. Higher resolution means being able to see the entire page (or even the entire width of the page).
The whole point of getting a reader (for me, at least), is the e-ink display. I have a laptop I can read PDFs on. I hate it. It's tiring to read any more than about 20 pages of a PDF on-screen.
When I first saw an e-ink display, I actually thought it was a non-working display model, because it looked too good to be true. High contrast, fairly crisp text, no glare, can be read in sunlight... you can't get that on a tablet PC.
I would say the reason smaller devices have been accepted in the marketplace is because there are almost no larger devices.
As a grad student who's just finished a master's degree, and is about to start down the long path to a PhD, I know I'm going to have to read a zillion PDFs - journal articles, scanned chapters of books, working papers from repositories, etc. I really want an ebook/digital reader, but I'm reluctant.
The only large-screen device I can find is the iRex DR-1000. It's got a 1024x1280 10" display, so much larger than the standard 600x800 of most readers. That would be great for PDFs. There's also a version with a stylus that allows for direct annotation on the screen. Fantastic.
Downside? It's about $900, has been reported to have battery life problems, and people give very mixed reviews to the firmware. Aside from the iRex, there's nothing else in this category (or if there is, please let me know!).
If someone made a larger, hi-res competitor to the DR-1000, and it cost maybe $500-$700, you might see more interest in larger readers. But right now, iRex has no competition.
The comment I replied to treats federal funding as if it is peanuts. It's not. The whole point of a policy move like not allowing federal funding for X is to effectively discourage X, or at least to not encourage it. It's effective because so much research relies on government grants.
And again, the OP failed to mention the issues of how few lines there were/are, and the difficulties in accessing those lines for research.
Too small a fine, and it's just looked at as a cost of doing business.
An appropriately-sized fine will make the cost of acting anti-competitively too much, which should motivate them to change their behavior.
Only when the fine is absolutely too large, _and_ the chance of them incurring it is enough, will they decide to stop doing business there.
I also doubt that a company like Intel would ever "stop doing business in the EU." Last time I checked, it was the world's largest unified market, larger than the U.S.
Isn't federal funding the lifeblood of a lot of research projects? Things like NIH grants, etc.? You talk as if "federal funding" is just one small source among lots of others. It is only one source among others, but it's not small.
You also mention that research was not banned but confined to existing lines. IIRC there were only about forty lines or so, many of which were not suitable for research, and accessing these for research was quite difficult.
Percentage has no necessary relation to the "amount and substantiality" analysis of fair use. That's why it's amount _and_ substantiality. If you copy the "heart" of a work, even if it makes up only 1% of the entire work, your use can be found infringing.
There is case law on this; the one that comes to mind is something about a newspaper that had published the really juicy bits of a forthcoming book. I don't remember the name off the top of my head, and I've no time to look it up. Use your googling skills.
If you're on the other side of the equation, as a student, save your drafts.
If you are ever wrongly accused of plagiarism (or for that matter, copyright infringement), having several earlier versions of a paper, along with outlines, notes, etc., will work greatly in your favor.
Not only that, but it also allows to see the progression in your work, and can double as a backup in case something goes catastrophically wrong with your current document.
FOIA only applies to the federal government, though most (if not all) states have their own public information acts. However, those acts will vary widely in scope and efficacy.
Aside from that, I highly doubt it's as easy as you think to obtain photos like this. Not familiar with the California statute, but there likely are privacy laws involved (e.g., I'm sure they can't just turn over whatever information they have to anyone who requests it).
Finally, no one has brought up the copyright issue. Again, not familiar with California's laws, but since these photos are not works of the federal government, the state may have copyright on them, introducing another complication.
"misjoinder" I'm guessing refers to their practice of binding a bunch of defendants together (thus the "Does 1-16". Given that they most likely have no relation to one another, there's no good reason to bind them together like that. It's done purely for the RIAA's convenience.
Slashdot Mirror
Actually, piracy has long been used to refer to copyright (and patent) infringement. "Long" as in, long before the RIAA existed. Look it up.
If you don't like Wikipedia, here are historical examples from the OED:
1654 J. MENNES Recreation for Ingenious Head-peeces clxxvi, All the wealth, Of wit and learning, not by stealth, Or Piracy, but purchase got.]
1700 E. WARD Journey to Hell II. vii. 14 Piracy, Piracy, they cry'd aloud, What made you print my Copy, Sir, says one, You're a meer Knave, 'tis very basely done.
1770 P. LUCKOMBE Conc. Hist. Printing 76 They..would suffer by this act of piracy, since it was likely to prove a very bad edition.
1855 D. BREWSTER Mem. Life I. Newton (new ed.) I. iv. 71 With the view of securing his invention of the telescope from foreign piracy.
1886 Cent. Mag. Feb. 629/1 That there are many publishers who despise such piracy..does not remove the presumption that publishers and papermakers have been influential opponents of an equitable arrangement.
Sorry to burst your bubble.
Sigh. The misconception that piracy is not a term that has been historically and consistently used to described copyright infringement just won't die, so here goes.
I'd also provide you with real sources, such as various cases from an IP law textbook, but I'm too lazy. But they do exist.
Look it up in Encyclepedia Brittanica and you will find it there. Verified and checked by a lot more than one person. People with a professional regard for what they are doing. Do errors creep in? Sure they do, but they are not only caught they are accidental.
I imagine Britannica isn't written this way, but many topical encyclopedias are farmed out to people with little or no expertise in the area of the entry they are writing. As a grad student, I have received several e-mails requesting interested students to write the entry for a particular topic in the "Encyclopedia of Coptic Literature" or something equally obscure. I know my classmates (and students in general), and I would not confidently rely upon an encyclopedia article they have written in almost all cases. The opportunity to write an article is advertised with the statement "get a publication on your CV."
Even with better encyclopedias, expert writers can still misrepresent things. There's an entry in the Encyclopedia Judaica, a very well-known and highly-regarded work, that essentially misstates facts about an Israeli intellectual property court case. Luckily, I had dug deep enough to figure this out, but it just goes to show you that you cannot rely on the accuracy of encyclopedia articles - even highly regarded ones. Oh, and it is unlikely errors like that will be corrected. If they are, it will be when a new edition is put out... in who knows how many years?
Encyclopedias are fine for well-known facts that you just don't happen to know, to get a basic overview of something, and for the bibliography at the end of the entry. Incidentally, those happen to be the exact same things that Wikipedia is useful for. Anything more serious than that, and you should be doing real research, not relying upon Wikipedia or an encyclopedia.
If I am already carrying around a laptop, why would I want to carry another piece of equipment that performs a subset of functions that a laptop can do?
That's what everyone is missing. An e-book reader does not perform a subset of the features of a laptop - it performs a different task, one that a laptop is not as well-suited for, namely, reading long documents. I would MUCH rather read a 50 page journal article on the large Kindle than on my laptop.
I don't see much value from this device to students. Most textbooks are not available in electronic form, so it's not like students can carry one device instead of several heavy books. Also, from my experience I can tell that students generally don't have any time for casual reading,
I don't care about the textbooks so much as the ability to read PDFs. Both my undergraduate and master's degrees involved reading LOTS of PDFs - journal articles, scanned chapters of books, working papers, etc. That's why it could be useful for students, not for the casual reading part.
I think you underestimate the potential size of the business market.
Also, another thing to remember is that while college students are "poor", the little money they do have is typically disposable income.
But yes, obviously e-readers would take off if they were more like the PADD technology from Star Trek - cheap enough to leave lying around, give to someone else, etc.
Not necessarily. The DX is not geared towards the beach-reading crowd, the size alone should tell you that. It's more business/academic oriented - i.e., people who are already carrying around an expensive laptop all the time. I think it could be a real hit with students - it's pricey, so maybe not right away, but the next closest competitor in size is the iRex, which is closer to $1000.
The original Kindle had an SD slot... this one has 4 GB, which is quite a bit, but I agree, why not include one? I already have about 2 GB of PDFs on my computer.
As someone who has to read a lot of PDFs, I've gotten sick of reading them on the computer. If they're more than about 5 pages long, it's really irritating. Printing them out wastes paper, and takes a long time when they can be dozens or even hundreds of pages long.
The whole point of an e-book reader is the e-ink display. When I first saw one, it was amazing how much easier to read it is than a computer screen.
I pre-ordered a Kindle DX today. I'd been looking at the iRex DR-1000, but it was even more expensive, and has very mixed reviews. I anticipate using the DX on a daily basis probably for the next several years (grad student)... and I won't have to be tied to a computer, or drag around a laptop. Battery life is supposed to better even than netbooks.
Anyway, I don't care. LaTeX will still be readable long past the time ODT, DOC, DOCX and whatever new incarnation/version of those are more than unreadable.
You are aware that DOCX is simply a bunch of XML files zipped up together? So you can simply unzip a DOCX file, open up the "document.xml", and you have your text.
Even if all conversion utilities disappeared from the planet, it would be simple to write a script to strip out the XML tags and leave you with your text, or for that matter, to use the XML tags to preserve the formatting.
Now, if the ZIP format goes kaput... well, then you may have a point.
You're right. Special 301 reports are not "copyright blacklists." They deal with IP in general, and in past years have focused heavily on pharmaceutical patents (eyes on Thailand, Brazil, India, etc.). This one is a bit toned down in that respect, actually.
Anyone who is familiar with the USTR's reports will find this somewhat unremarkable - well, except with the elevation of Canada.
Do you really think Endnote is losing out to Zotero because Zotero is available for Linux (Endnote exists for OS X, too)? I doubt that's the reason. I'd say it's because Zotero is free!
I wouldn't call it "thinking inside the box" so much as thinking practically.
Why do I want a larger, higher-resolution screen? Because I know the content that I will receive is not going to be plain text that can be wrapped and reformatted at will. In fact, in many cases it may not even be searchable text, just scans of book chapters, etc.
Aside from that, resolution and DPI absolutely do matter, regardless of what type of document you're reading. It's not so much about "pages" as it is screen real-estate. I don't want to have to be constantly scrolling around to refer to the previous sentence because a reader with a small-screen only displays 1/5 the text of a page from a regular book. Maybe I'm atypical in this respect (I do have a triple-display setup, so I am used to having large amounts of screen space).
Finally, I would also be wary of leaving all rendering up to client devices. IMO one of the major benefits of having PDF articles from journals is precisely that those articles look like they came from the journal. They are properly typeset, use sane fonts, and look neat and clean. HTML versions of the same articles look like shit. I don't know what it is about PDFs that just makes them visually more appealing, but they invariably look better than HTML or Word documents on screen.
As I noted in another comment:
The whole point of getting a reader (for me, at least), is the e-ink display. I have a laptop I can read PDFs on. I hate it. It's tiring to read any more than about 20 pages of a PDF on-screen.
When I first saw an e-ink display, I actually thought it was a non-working display model, because it looked too good to be true. High contrast, fairly crisp text, no glare, can be read in sunlight... you can't get that on a tablet PC.
The resolution is important, though, because it's a matter of how much readable text you can fit on the screen at one time.
The Kindle and Sony readers seem fine for reading paper-back style e-books. Paperbacks are fairly small anyway, and the text can be wrapped or whatever to fit the screen. But for someone who wants to read PDFs, many of which may be image-based (i.e., scans, perhaps with underlying text or not), that text can't be wrapped. Higher resolution means being able to see the entire page (or even the entire width of the page).
The whole point of getting a reader (for me, at least), is the e-ink display. I have a laptop I can read PDFs on. I hate it. It's tiring to read any more than about 20 pages of a PDF on-screen.
When I first saw an e-ink display, I actually thought it was a non-working display model, because it looked too good to be true. High contrast, fairly crisp text, no glare, can be read in sunlight... you can't get that on a tablet PC.
I would say the reason smaller devices have been accepted in the marketplace is because there are almost no larger devices.
As a grad student who's just finished a master's degree, and is about to start down the long path to a PhD, I know I'm going to have to read a zillion PDFs - journal articles, scanned chapters of books, working papers from repositories, etc. I really want an ebook/digital reader, but I'm reluctant.
The only large-screen device I can find is the iRex DR-1000. It's got a 1024x1280 10" display, so much larger than the standard 600x800 of most readers. That would be great for PDFs. There's also a version with a stylus that allows for direct annotation on the screen. Fantastic.
Downside? It's about $900, has been reported to have battery life problems, and people give very mixed reviews to the firmware. Aside from the iRex, there's nothing else in this category (or if there is, please let me know!).
If someone made a larger, hi-res competitor to the DR-1000, and it cost maybe $500-$700, you might see more interest in larger readers. But right now, iRex has no competition.
What does that have to do with my points?
The comment I replied to treats federal funding as if it is peanuts. It's not. The whole point of a policy move like not allowing federal funding for X is to effectively discourage X, or at least to not encourage it. It's effective because so much research relies on government grants.
And again, the OP failed to mention the issues of how few lines there were/are, and the difficulties in accessing those lines for research.
You're skipping a step.
Too small a fine, and it's just looked at as a cost of doing business.
An appropriately-sized fine will make the cost of acting anti-competitively too much, which should motivate them to change their behavior.
Only when the fine is absolutely too large, _and_ the chance of them incurring it is enough, will they decide to stop doing business there.
I also doubt that a company like Intel would ever "stop doing business in the EU." Last time I checked, it was the world's largest unified market, larger than the U.S.
Isn't federal funding the lifeblood of a lot of research projects? Things like NIH grants, etc.? You talk as if "federal funding" is just one small source among lots of others. It is only one source among others, but it's not small.
You also mention that research was not banned but confined to existing lines. IIRC there were only about forty lines or so, many of which were not suitable for research, and accessing these for research was quite difficult.
Percentage has no necessary relation to the "amount and substantiality" analysis of fair use. That's why it's amount _and_ substantiality. If you copy the "heart" of a work, even if it makes up only 1% of the entire work, your use can be found infringing.
There is case law on this; the one that comes to mind is something about a newspaper that had published the really juicy bits of a forthcoming book. I don't remember the name off the top of my head, and I've no time to look it up. Use your googling skills.
It was actually discussed on Slashdot just a few days ago.
If you're on the other side of the equation, as a student, save your drafts.
If you are ever wrongly accused of plagiarism (or for that matter, copyright infringement), having several earlier versions of a paper, along with outlines, notes, etc., will work greatly in your favor.
Not only that, but it also allows to see the progression in your work, and can double as a backup in case something goes catastrophically wrong with your current document.
FOIA only applies to the federal government, though most (if not all) states have their own public information acts. However, those acts will vary widely in scope and efficacy.
Aside from that, I highly doubt it's as easy as you think to obtain photos like this. Not familiar with the California statute, but there likely are privacy laws involved (e.g., I'm sure they can't just turn over whatever information they have to anyone who requests it).
Finally, no one has brought up the copyright issue. Again, not familiar with California's laws, but since these photos are not works of the federal government, the state may have copyright on them, introducing another complication.
No, I remember reading about the Pleo robotic dinosaur, last year, I think. There was one review where the reviewers tortured it, and a /. article.
"misjoinder" I'm guessing refers to their practice of binding a bunch of defendants together (thus the "Does 1-16". Given that they most likely have no relation to one another, there's no good reason to bind them together like that. It's done purely for the RIAA's convenience.