Well, that brings up the question, what exactly are "Linux skills"? I mean, if it's using a desktop, moving windows around, learning about files and directories, word processing, and spreadsheets, those aren't Linux skills, they are generic computer/office skills, in which case people are better off learning those skills in Windows, since at that level, that is what they will be using in their new job.
When I hear "Linux skills", I think "skills you need to use Linux but don't need to use Windows/Mac." So, yeah, command-line. Man pages. If you can't use a terminal or man pages, you're not going to get far with Linux. Maybe it's possible if you're using Ubuntu on very popular hardware and you never do anything exciting with your computer, in which case the skills you need are just as easily learned from Microsoft.
Personally, I want EVERY government training program to be training people is skills the real free market considers useless. Don't you?
Your point is well taken, but I think you underestimate the value of basic computer skills that Microsoft is offering training in. I found the list of stuff they're offering (threedifferent tiers).
So apparently they are offering some more advanced training in stuff like.NET, Visual Studio, etc., but I'm betting that the vast majority of people who find this useful are going to be learning basic computer/MS Office skills, and those are things the free market values highly - in fact, they're pretty much taken for granted in a lot of jobs.
I also suspect that Microsoft is probably going to be getting a tax break out of this, somehow...
Not only that, but honestly, if people are getting training in Microsoft products, that probably means... Windows, Word, Excel, Powerpoint, etc.? I'm thinking it's not so much Visual Studio / MCSE type stuff, but I could be wrong.
I'm guessing this is aimed at people who are considered unskilled, and after training, will now be able to work in jobs that require basic computer skills that we take for granted. This is not exactly a segment of the population that needs to learn how to use a command-line, or to manipulate strings with sed and awk.
if your PC is infected no one cares. if your cell phone gets infected by a virus and you can't call 911 in an emergency than Apple is going to pay out a lot of money in a lawsuit.
I highly doubt that. Someone might try to sue, but I guarantee that every cell contract you sign has some clause saying they don't guarantee 24/7 access, access may be interrupted unexpectedly for any reason, etc. Otherwise people would be suing just for a regular network outage.
I read an article a while back arguing something similar, i.e., we should do away with jury trials in patent cases because it's too complex.
It is complex, and there's a lot to be said against the common juror... but on the other hand, would it be better to leave it completely up to specialists? Then you might run into the same problem that the Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit experienced - a specialized venue for patents gets filled with a bunch of people who really like patents.
While I don't have much faith in my fellow citizen, I also don't have much faith that leaving the law up to a bunch of lawyers and experts will necessarily be better.
You can export some or all your references to a file, sneakernet the file to the new computer, import it into zotero, and you're done.
If you're brave, you can try the beta, which includes syncing functionality. I currently use it to sync between my XP desktop and my OS X laptop, and I haven't had any problems so far (though I make a point of it to back up the database regularly in case something goes wrong).
The Word integration for Office 2007 is fantastic; for Office 2008 on the Mac, you need Leopard, and it's slightly clunkier, but works.
The real question is, who's the judge who signed the warrant?
If the guy's done nothing wrong, the department either fabricated information in requesting the warrant, in which case heads should roll, or the judge is incompetent, in which case the judge should be fired.
Honestly, after browsing the e-mail exchanges between Nesson, Lessig, Fisher, and others, it sounds like he has gone off the deep end, which makes the possibility of misdirection sound more plausible.
In one of those e-mails, Terry Fisher is explaining to Nesson that he needs to "engage more than you have as yet with the case law... the key decisions are Napster, Aimster, and Grokster." WTF? Really? Anyone who's taken a basic IP class should be familiar with those cases.
I recently met Fisher when he came to give a lecture, and he really seems quite brilliant. The only way I can imagine him writing something like that to another professor is if he is trying to be polite, but really thinks Nesson is completely nuts.
Well, first of all, the statutory language of the fair use provisions in 17 USC Sec. 107 is clear that the four points are not exhaustive. It says:
In determining whether the use made of a work in any particular case is a fair use the factors to be considered shall include -
And then goes on to list the four factors. The "shall include" is the important bit there.
Also, there was a House Report (HR 94-1476, p. 66) on this legislation (the fair use bit was codified in the 1976 Act) that also supports the idea that the list is illustrative, not exhaustive.
The language of later decisions respects the illustrative nature of the list; e.g., in Harper & Row v. Nation (471 U.S. 539), which was decided in 1985, O'Connor describes the four factors as those "identified by Congress as especially relevant in determining whether the use was fair", thereby implying that if there was some other compelling thing to consider, a court would be free to do that.
One last thing - re: the fourth factor, people seem to think that empirical evidence about the effect of file-sharing on sales will help. They're probably wrong, though. The fourth factor is probably the most dominant one in most analyses, and it's been extended so much - even in the Harper opinion, you'll see the bit about "to negate fair use one need only show that if the challenged use 'should become widespread, it would adversely affect the potential market for the copyrighted work.'" I find it really unlikely that a court will buy the argument that people swapping songs may increase sales in the long run, even if it's true. More likely they will simply say, "Each file shared is an instance where a work could have been sold, so the effect of sharing on the potential market is negative, case closed."
For that matter, I bet/.'s response would be completely different if the quote were about Diebold (Premier Election Systems) and voting machines. Consider the following:
Sen. Juan Hinojosa, vice chairman of the Finance Committee, proposed the rider because 'of the many reports of problems with AccuVote TS... We are not in any way, shape or form trying to pick on Diebold, but the problems with this particular voting machine are known nationwide. And the optical scanning machines are working very well.'
Nesson's assertion is that the four points described in Title 17 are descriptive, not prescriptive, and that Fair Use is a broader and deeper concept arising from common law.
Well the "traditional" four points, as I put it, are just that - they are the aspects of fair use that are typically taken into account, but IIRC, there are cases that explicitly state that those four factors are not exhaustive, so he may have a point.
Indeed, I've sometimes wondered if fair use actually is harmful to those of us who want copyright reform, by acting as a steam valve of sorts: really absurd copyright nonsense is taken care of by fair use, but only slightly absurd nonsense isn't covered by it.
Based on the traditional four point analysis of fair use, the typical "file-sharing"/.ers are used to doesn't seem to fair too well:
1. The purpose and character - file-sharing is hardly transformative or derivative. You could argue transformation much better with things like mashups, etc. But torrents of movies and music?
2. Nature of the copied work. If it's factual, the infringer is on better ground - e.g., if you're a chemist who photocopies a journal article so that you can take the copy into the lab with you, rather than the entire journal. There are of course fair uses of creative works, too. This would of course depend on the individual work, not "file-sharing" as a whole, though probably the vast majority of file-sharing is in creative works, rather than scientific/factual.
3. Amount/Substantiality - well, most people I know torrent the whole film, not just 5 minutes of it, so...
4. Effect upon economic exploitation of the work - would seem to go against file-sharers. Obviously they aren't buying it! And by sharing it, they may be hurting the owner's ability to sell it, etc.
Mr. Brown gave Mr. Obama a pen holder carved from the timber of an anti-slave ship, receiving in return a DVD box set of American movies, igniting a torrent of criticism in the British press.
Brown, commenting on the matter, said: "I've already downloaded most of these on the Pirate Bay."
The aging baby boomers now flacking the settlement don't seem to understand that PDF scanning (how Google and everyone else digitizes books) isn't rocket science; it's cheap and easy. Books will be digitized without Google.
Actually, from what I've read, scanning books on any large scale is not cheap or easy. It's a fairly expensive undertaking, involving more specialized equipment than your desktop flatbed scanner, and involves moving lots of books around, in and out of large libraries. It's not an undertaking for the faint of heart. Microsoft tried, and decided to quit. Furthermore, the value of having a single large repository is greater than a bunch of fractured repositories that probably won't have a good way of connecting with one another.
Like a lot of op-eds in the WSJ, I think the author is missing a lot of things.
She argues that getting people to find and assert the copyrights on the works Google is scanning is too burdensome, turning everyone into data-entry slaves for Google. But this is the exact problem Google is facing - the copyright status of so much stuff it wants to scan is unknown. Now, who is in a better position to determine whether work X is copyrighted and who owns the copyright, Google, or the individual owner of that work?
And to fix the issue of making people data-entry slaves, it would be good if all the copyright status information that Google acquired was put into a publicly-accessible database. This is one of the things that James Grimmelmann suggests in an article called "How to Fix the Google Book Search Settlement." (PDF warning, also may be out of date)
Also, we do have "command-and-control" centers for copyright, e.g., the Copyright Clearance Center, the whole point of which was to consolidate the footwork of determining all the rights for people wanting to make course packets, etc.
You'll notice the conspicuous absence of the word "sentence" from what you quoted. Never have I read anywhere that a single sentence is ineligible for copyright. It's certainly not in Title 17. Part of the reason is that "sentence" is of an undefined length. Sentences can be very short. (like that one) Or they can be very long, like the kind you find in the last chapter of Ulysses.
My point is that if a haiku contains enough creative content to qualify for a copyright, a sentence of the same length, containing the same amount of creative content would also qualify.
I'm not hurt you that you bashed circletimessquare. I find myself constantly considering whether to foe him, in fact, but then I decide that I just don't care enough.
Believe me, I know that/.ers hold a lot of nonsense as common sense, esp. when it comes to stuff like IP.
Ok. Plan B: I'll write a perl program to enumerate all possible 140 character combinations and post them all to Twitter. Then I'll sue anyone else who posts for copyright infringement! That'll show them who's boss!
27^140 = 2.45995398 x 10^200
Good luck with that... and that's assuming that twitter posters are only using 26 letters and a space!
as long as you're in the US (YMMV in other countries)
Signatories of the Berne Convention are not allowed to impose formalities for the granting of copyright. Meaning in Berne Convention countries (the vast majority of the world), you don't need a registration to have a copyright.
You may need a registration for other purposes; e.g., in the U.S., you have to register your copyright before bringing a suit for infringement.
Well, there are always exceptions, thus why I said "probably."
My point was that the OP really trivializes the work of the judicial branch. Yes, there are bad judges (probably more the lower in the system you go), and yes, there are good judges who make bad decisions. But to say that the entire court system works on feelings, not facts, is kind of absurd.
I don't see how you can read more than a few opinions and not come away with the impression that judges are an analytical bunch. Unless maybe you're reading Clarence Thomas? (ducks!)
A lot of geeks might find that Posner or Easterbrook really resonate with them. I like Breyer and Stevens. But whomever you like, it's pretty much certain that their writing is going to be more analytical and well-thought out than that of almost any Congress critter.
Also, I think it's false to claim that all of the legal battles geeks are facing are due to issues of fact vs. feeling. When it comes to stuff like copyright and patent law, a lot of it has to do with a legal system that hasn't caught up to modernity. That's not "fact vs. feeling" at all.
And while legislators have "people giving input", it seems like most of the time those "people" are industry lobbyists.
Slashdot Mirror
Well, that brings up the question, what exactly are "Linux skills"? I mean, if it's using a desktop, moving windows around, learning about files and directories, word processing, and spreadsheets, those aren't Linux skills, they are generic computer/office skills, in which case people are better off learning those skills in Windows, since at that level, that is what they will be using in their new job.
When I hear "Linux skills", I think "skills you need to use Linux but don't need to use Windows/Mac." So, yeah, command-line. Man pages. If you can't use a terminal or man pages, you're not going to get far with Linux. Maybe it's possible if you're using Ubuntu on very popular hardware and you never do anything exciting with your computer, in which case the skills you need are just as easily learned from Microsoft.
Personally, I want EVERY government training program to be training people is skills the real free market considers useless. Don't you?
Your point is well taken, but I think you underestimate the value of basic computer skills that Microsoft is offering training in. I found the list of stuff they're offering (three different tiers).
So apparently they are offering some more advanced training in stuff like .NET, Visual Studio, etc., but I'm betting that the vast majority of people who find this useful are going to be learning basic computer/MS Office skills, and those are things the free market values highly - in fact, they're pretty much taken for granted in a lot of jobs.
I also suspect that Microsoft is probably going to be getting a tax break out of this, somehow...
Not only that, but honestly, if people are getting training in Microsoft products, that probably means... Windows, Word, Excel, Powerpoint, etc.? I'm thinking it's not so much Visual Studio / MCSE type stuff, but I could be wrong.
I'm guessing this is aimed at people who are considered unskilled, and after training, will now be able to work in jobs that require basic computer skills that we take for granted. This is not exactly a segment of the population that needs to learn how to use a command-line, or to manipulate strings with sed and awk.
if your PC is infected no one cares. if your cell phone gets infected by a virus and you can't call 911 in an emergency than Apple is going to pay out a lot of money in a lawsuit.
I highly doubt that. Someone might try to sue, but I guarantee that every cell contract you sign has some clause saying they don't guarantee 24/7 access, access may be interrupted unexpectedly for any reason, etc. Otherwise people would be suing just for a regular network outage.
I read an article a while back arguing something similar, i.e., we should do away with jury trials in patent cases because it's too complex.
It is complex, and there's a lot to be said against the common juror... but on the other hand, would it be better to leave it completely up to specialists? Then you might run into the same problem that the Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit experienced - a specialized venue for patents gets filled with a bunch of people who really like patents.
While I don't have much faith in my fellow citizen, I also don't have much faith that leaving the law up to a bunch of lawyers and experts will necessarily be better.
You can export some or all your references to a file, sneakernet the file to the new computer, import it into zotero, and you're done.
If you're brave, you can try the beta, which includes syncing functionality. I currently use it to sync between my XP desktop and my OS X laptop, and I haven't had any problems so far (though I make a point of it to back up the database regularly in case something goes wrong).
The Word integration for Office 2007 is fantastic; for Office 2008 on the Mac, you need Leopard, and it's slightly clunkier, but works.
The real question is, who's the judge who signed the warrant?
If the guy's done nothing wrong, the department either fabricated information in requesting the warrant, in which case heads should roll, or the judge is incompetent, in which case the judge should be fired.
Yeah, try that one in court and see how far it gets you :-)
Honestly, after browsing the e-mail exchanges between Nesson, Lessig, Fisher, and others, it sounds like he has gone off the deep end, which makes the possibility of misdirection sound more plausible.
In one of those e-mails, Terry Fisher is explaining to Nesson that he needs to "engage more than you have as yet with the case law... the key decisions are Napster, Aimster, and Grokster." WTF? Really? Anyone who's taken a basic IP class should be familiar with those cases.
I recently met Fisher when he came to give a lecture, and he really seems quite brilliant. The only way I can imagine him writing something like that to another professor is if he is trying to be polite, but really thinks Nesson is completely nuts.
Well, first of all, the statutory language of the fair use provisions in 17 USC Sec. 107 is clear that the four points are not exhaustive. It says:
In determining whether the use made of a work in any particular case is a fair use the factors to be considered shall include -
And then goes on to list the four factors. The "shall include" is the important bit there.
Also, there was a House Report (HR 94-1476, p. 66) on this legislation (the fair use bit was codified in the 1976 Act) that also supports the idea that the list is illustrative, not exhaustive.
The language of later decisions respects the illustrative nature of the list; e.g., in Harper & Row v. Nation (471 U.S. 539), which was decided in 1985, O'Connor describes the four factors as those "identified by Congress as especially relevant in determining whether the use was fair", thereby implying that if there was some other compelling thing to consider, a court would be free to do that.
One last thing - re: the fourth factor, people seem to think that empirical evidence about the effect of file-sharing on sales will help. They're probably wrong, though. The fourth factor is probably the most dominant one in most analyses, and it's been extended so much - even in the Harper opinion, you'll see the bit about "to negate fair use one need only show that if the challenged use 'should become widespread, it would adversely affect the potential market for the copyrighted work.'" I find it really unlikely that a court will buy the argument that people swapping songs may increase sales in the long run, even if it's true. More likely they will simply say, "Each file shared is an instance where a work could have been sold, so the effect of sharing on the potential market is negative, case closed."
For that matter, I bet /.'s response would be completely different if the quote were about Diebold (Premier Election Systems) and voting machines. Consider the following:
Sen. Juan Hinojosa, vice chairman of the Finance Committee, proposed the rider because 'of the many reports of problems with AccuVote TS... We are not in any way, shape or form trying to pick on Diebold, but the problems with this particular voting machine are known nationwide. And the optical scanning machines are working very well.'
Nesson's assertion is that the four points described in Title 17 are descriptive, not prescriptive, and that Fair Use is a broader and deeper concept arising from common law.
Well the "traditional" four points, as I put it, are just that - they are the aspects of fair use that are typically taken into account, but IIRC, there are cases that explicitly state that those four factors are not exhaustive, so he may have a point.
Indeed, I've sometimes wondered if fair use actually is harmful to those of us who want copyright reform, by acting as a steam valve of sorts: really absurd copyright nonsense is taken care of by fair use, but only slightly absurd nonsense isn't covered by it.
Based on the traditional four point analysis of fair use, the typical "file-sharing" /.ers are used to doesn't seem to fair too well:
1. The purpose and character - file-sharing is hardly transformative or derivative. You could argue transformation much better with things like mashups, etc. But torrents of movies and music?
2. Nature of the copied work. If it's factual, the infringer is on better ground - e.g., if you're a chemist who photocopies a journal article so that you can take the copy into the lab with you, rather than the entire journal. There are of course fair uses of creative works, too. This would of course depend on the individual work, not "file-sharing" as a whole, though probably the vast majority of file-sharing is in creative works, rather than scientific/factual.
3. Amount/Substantiality - well, most people I know torrent the whole film, not just 5 minutes of it, so...
4. Effect upon economic exploitation of the work - would seem to go against file-sharers. Obviously they aren't buying it! And by sharing it, they may be hurting the owner's ability to sell it, etc.
Mr. Brown gave Mr. Obama a pen holder carved from the timber of an anti-slave ship, receiving in return a DVD box set of American movies, igniting a torrent of criticism in the British press.
Brown, commenting on the matter, said: "I've already downloaded most of these on the Pirate Bay."
The aging baby boomers now flacking the settlement don't seem to understand that PDF scanning (how Google and everyone else digitizes books) isn't rocket science; it's cheap and easy. Books will be digitized without Google.
Actually, from what I've read, scanning books on any large scale is not cheap or easy. It's a fairly expensive undertaking, involving more specialized equipment than your desktop flatbed scanner, and involves moving lots of books around, in and out of large libraries. It's not an undertaking for the faint of heart. Microsoft tried, and decided to quit. Furthermore, the value of having a single large repository is greater than a bunch of fractured repositories that probably won't have a good way of connecting with one another.
Like a lot of op-eds in the WSJ, I think the author is missing a lot of things.
She argues that getting people to find and assert the copyrights on the works Google is scanning is too burdensome, turning everyone into data-entry slaves for Google. But this is the exact problem Google is facing - the copyright status of so much stuff it wants to scan is unknown. Now, who is in a better position to determine whether work X is copyrighted and who owns the copyright, Google, or the individual owner of that work?
And to fix the issue of making people data-entry slaves, it would be good if all the copyright status information that Google acquired was put into a publicly-accessible database. This is one of the things that James Grimmelmann suggests in an article called "How to Fix the Google Book Search Settlement." (PDF warning, also may be out of date)
Also, we do have "command-and-control" centers for copyright, e.g., the Copyright Clearance Center, the whole point of which was to consolidate the footwork of determining all the rights for people wanting to make course packets, etc.
You'll notice the conspicuous absence of the word "sentence" from what you quoted. Never have I read anywhere that a single sentence is ineligible for copyright. It's certainly not in Title 17. Part of the reason is that "sentence" is of an undefined length. Sentences can be very short. (like that one) Or they can be very long, like the kind you find in the last chapter of Ulysses.
My point is that if a haiku contains enough creative content to qualify for a copyright, a sentence of the same length, containing the same amount of creative content would also qualify.
Oh, come on, have a sense of humor :-)
I'm not hurt you that you bashed circletimessquare. I find myself constantly considering whether to foe him, in fact, but then I decide that I just don't care enough.
Believe me, I know that /.ers hold a lot of nonsense as common sense, esp. when it comes to stuff like IP.
Nah. Things don't have to conform to a standard kind of poetry or literature to be copyrightable.
While line breaks are important for a haiku, they are not going to be the threshold for whether a given sentence is considered "creative."
On that note, I wonder what's the length of the shortest portion of text that has been sued over (and not thrown out)...
Ok. Plan B: I'll write a perl program to enumerate all possible 140 character combinations and post them all to Twitter. Then I'll sue anyone else who posts for copyright infringement! That'll show them who's boss!
27^140 = 2.45995398 x 10^200
Good luck with that... and that's assuming that twitter posters are only using 26 letters and a space!
While most of Slashdot may hold these "truths" to be self-evident, they're not quite so self-evident to the industry lobbyists making the laws
There, fixed that for you.
You could fit a haiku into less than 140 characters. In fact, many haikus are shorter than sentences.
as long as you're in the US (YMMV in other countries)
Signatories of the Berne Convention are not allowed to impose formalities for the granting of copyright. Meaning in Berne Convention countries (the vast majority of the world), you don't need a registration to have a copyright.
You may need a registration for other purposes; e.g., in the U.S., you have to register your copyright before bringing a suit for infringement.
Well, there are always exceptions, thus why I said "probably."
My point was that the OP really trivializes the work of the judicial branch. Yes, there are bad judges (probably more the lower in the system you go), and yes, there are good judges who make bad decisions. But to say that the entire court system works on feelings, not facts, is kind of absurd.
I don't see how you can read more than a few opinions and not come away with the impression that judges are an analytical bunch. Unless maybe you're reading Clarence Thomas? (ducks!)
A lot of geeks might find that Posner or Easterbrook really resonate with them. I like Breyer and Stevens. But whomever you like, it's pretty much certain that their writing is going to be more analytical and well-thought out than that of almost any Congress critter.
Also, I think it's false to claim that all of the legal battles geeks are facing are due to issues of fact vs. feeling. When it comes to stuff like copyright and patent law, a lot of it has to do with a legal system that hasn't caught up to modernity. That's not "fact vs. feeling" at all.
And while legislators have "people giving input", it seems like most of the time those "people" are industry lobbyists.
Exactly. Or is it that the Firefox devs have already included the command "tpb" for us? ;-)