Fair use has nothing to do with this. The defendant has challenged the statutory damages of the Copyright Act as unconstitutional. So, the DOJ wants to look into this, and perhaps offer a brief supporting the constitutionality of the damages.
No, the Obama Administration's DOJ is considering filing an amicus brief supporting statutory damages even when they greatly exceed demonstrable actual damages.
Not just any statutory damages - they're specifically looking at the statutory damages of the Copyright Act, 17 U.S.C. Sec. 504(c), not some other set of statutory damages. It says so in the linked PDF.
I'm not sure that it makes as much sense for the Internet, though. The French idea is that you have limited broadcast time, and without a quota, they'd be playing American music and television shows 24/7. Maybe that makes sense, but with the Internet, you don't have the same broadcasting limits. People choose what they want to listen to with ease, actively seeking out their preferred content from any number of sources.
They can promote domestic content all they want, and it might even be a good thing, but it's not going to have the same "cultural preservation" effects as with broadcast media.
Ah yes, I remember this from several years ago. Our Dell came with Windows 98, and a free "upgrade" to Windows ME. I sure hope this time turns out better...
Speak for yourself. I like the "freedom" of watching HD content. I'm not going to be some technological luddite still watching shitty NTSC standard definition just for some bullshit cause, thank you very much. If you want me, you'll need to bring your cause into the 21st century. This is/. for Christ's sake!
See, I like a different kind of freedom. I like the freedom of being able to have my MythTV box automatically flag commercials, then encode a recorded program to H.264, and list it in an RSS feed that iTunes can subscribe to, whence it can be downloaded as a video podcast to an iPod.
I like the freedom of being able to watch my recorded programs from anywhere with a fast enough connection, via the built-in streaming capabilities of MythTV.
I like the freedom of being able to increase my storage capacity whenever I want, by simply popping in another hard drive.
I like the freedom of being able to record _any_ show that I can watch on the TV screen, regardless of whether it's "premium content" or whatever, and knowing that at no point in the future can someone simply decide to mandate a firmware update that changes my ability to do that.
The price of these freedoms? I'm limited to SD analog cable. But for me, it's totally worth it.
So, how much of that can you do with your provider's PVR?
Posner's comment is pretty flawed, when you look at it in detail; I don't think he thought out the implications very clearly. This can all be found In re: Aimster Copyright Litigation.
He wasn't talking about VOD - he was talking about the Sony Betamax, and says that
"skipping commercials by taping a program before watching it and then, while watching the tape, using the fast-forward button on the recorder to skip over the commercials... amounted to creating an unauthorized derivative work... namely a commercial-free copy that would reduce the copyright owner's income from his original program, since "free" television programs are financed by the purchase of commercials by advertisers."
Posner later suggests that Sony could have prevented this infringing use by removing the fast-forward button (I'm not making this up), but for other reasons, they didn't have to.
Also, the assumption that the various commercials and the television program together constitute a single work is almost certainly wrong - the commercials are probably all individually copyrighted by different authors, and licensed to the broadcaster.
It's certainly true that many judges and lawyers don't understand the technology that's involved in the cases they're ruling on. I remember reading something Richard Posner said about commercial-skipping features - that they were creating "derivative works" without the copyright holder's authorization, and thus were infringing. The implications of that are ridiculous.
On the other hand, many techies, myself included, lose perspective on the law. There's some project that aims to store files as a hash against a large set of random data, with the idea being that different hashes against the same data produce different files, but the hashes aren't the files themselves, and thus aren't copyrighted. It's that sort of thing that indicates a complete misunderstanding of the law. If you really think that "Your honor, I wasn't copying copyrighted files, I was only copying hashes, that when combined with a large, meaningless set of data, happen to produce those files" is going to hold up in court, you clearly don't understand copyright law.
I read a short story someone had linked in their sig, that was about the horror of eternal copyright protection. Again, it made a fundamental error. The plot basically relied upon the Copyright Office doing searches of previous works, and if they found a similar one, they would not give you a copyright on a new work, and the character in the story argued that this would mean the end of all art. Problem is, the Copyright Office does no such thing, and isn't allowed to. Copyrighted works have to be original, but not novel. If I independently create some work that already exists, it is not infringing and is eligible for a new copyright. This is basic IP law that people don't know or understand.
The decision is very risky as the quality of the decision of the Circuit Court was very high.
Not only that, but it wasn't just any court - it was the Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit, i.e., people who actually like patents in general. If even they don't like software and business method patents, it seems pretty unlikely that the Supreme Court is going to change the decision.
The main problem is that they're such a hassle to install, compared to a modern Linux distro. Last time I checked it out, NetBSD was worse than FreeBSD in this regard, and probably tied with OpenBSD.
I installed NetBSD a few weeks ago, and it's not all that bad. It doesn't seem any worse than Debian. Sure, you have what size partitions you want and stuff like that, but if you can't handle that, you probably shouldn't be installing a new operating system.
OpenBSD is essentially proprietary as they charge for CDs (IIRC), so I just avoid that.
Huh? Pretty much everyone charges for CDs, but you can of course download OpenBSD free of charge.
You're thinking too practically. Is it worthwhile for me to spend $20 in components on a project attempting to modify the value on the stored-value copy cards I use? Considering I can count on one hand the number of photocopies I've had to make, no. But it's fun:-)
If you have old or somewhat unusual hardware, NetBSD does quite well.
I have a Sun Ultra 1, circa 1995, that I pulled out of the closet for fun recently. Debian installs on it, but 1) is sluggish, and 2) doesn't support certain hardware. My machine has a PCMCIA adapter in it, and I have an old 802.11b PCMCIA card, so I thought I'd be able to use wireless on this machine.
Turns out no Linux drivers exist for the PCMCIA adapter, whereas in NetBSD they do. After a kernel recompilation, the Ultra 1 is up and running on the wireless network.
As for the article's statement that "In this context, government would give Rs 2.5 lakh per institution for 10 Kbps connection and subsidise 25% of costs for private and state government colleges," I think this is probably a misprint.
Just because the wise US forefathers saw patents as a meaningful concept doesn't mean everyone across the world share the same wisdom.
Well, China became a party to the Paris Convention for the Protection of Industrial Property in 1985, so this is not exactly news. (Also, the U.S. complaint didn't have anything to do with patents)
Though no one is going to deny the influence of the U.S. in pushing stronger IP protection throughout the world, patents by no means originated with the U.S. Furthermore, as a practical matter, since the vast majority of countries in the world are parties to the Berne Convention, the Paris Convention, and TRIPS, even if they don't "share the same wisdom" they are legally obliged to act as if they do.
In our defense, I don't think you should legislate morals.
The "moral rights" the GP was referring to aren't really "morals" in the common sense of the word. They refer to a particularly European view of copyright as protecting authors from misrepresentation and distortion of their work. Additionally, the U.S. actually has implemented a form of moral rights for specific visual works.
FYI, this is exactly what Comcast is planning on doing. The actual date of when they stop analog service will vary based on the market, but already in the Connecticut area, they're no longer signing up new customers for "standard" cable (i.e., 70 analog channels, no box).
Of course, once everyone has a box, that's one less argument against a la carte pricing...
If he has an Analog TV, then he is entitled to a coupon.... actually this statement is not true.
If he has an Analog TV and he has not purchased a replacement TV with a digital tuner (and for a 27" SDTV at Walmart, expect to pay around $200) because of his CHOICE... then he is not entitled to a coupon. People who cannot afford the switch over to digital are who are entitled to these coupons.
I hear a lot of people saying this, but I don't know where they're getting it from. The GP is correct: if he has a TV with only an analog tuner that he is using to get OTA signals, he is entitled to a converter box, regardless of whether he also has another (or eight other) TVs with digital tuners, and subscribes to cable, satellite, etc.
If you don't believe this, go to the DTV2009.gov website and read what it says. If you tell the script you have a TV with a digital tuner, and you watch OTA television, this is what it says:
You do not need a TV converter box for this TV set. Your TV has a digital tuner already built in and will likely continue to receive TV programming as usual after the transition on February 17th, 2009. If you have another TV set in your household that does not have a built-in digital tuner, you will need a TV converter box for this TV to continue to receive your programs after February 17th, 2009.
The correlation everyone is making between poor people and those needing converter boxes isn't necessarily true. My parents live in a rural area, and have two analog-tuner televisions they use to watch OTA signals. Cable is unavailable, and they do not want satellite TV. They aren't exactly "poor", but they are entitled to two boxes (which they applied for and got months ago).
But hey, I'm sure your world is the only one that exists, where everything is nice and pink and people are all lazy asses working for 30 hours or less.
You should also realize that there are plenty of industries where much more than 40 hours a week can actually be dangerous.
I had a summer job for several years in manufacturing, where I always made sure I never came into work tired, because I was afraid I might lose a finger or hand. There was a lot of physical work involved, and fatigue and lack of attention were safety issues.
Asking someone in one of those industries to work 80 hours a week, or even 60, is asking for workplace accidents.
Are you quite certain of that? As I recall, before Bayh-Dole, federally funded research was legally in the public domain, and thus unpatentable. Ashton-Tate dried up and blew away after the courts decided that their DBase III and DBase IV products were substantially based on Vulcan, a database program developed by NASA and, thus, in the public domain, not patentable or copyrighted.
Yes, I am. Different agencies had different rules, so it's possible some particular agency made its work public domain, but from what I've read most federal agencies retained the title to their patents. The procedures regarding if and how they would license to others were complex and sometimes unclear. This was the case at the Department of Health, Education, and Welfare (whence the NIH) in the 1960s.
Also, I'm not familiar with the specifics of the dBase and Ashton-Tate thing you mention, but the reason for it being unpatentable would probably be because the government work was prior art. Whether or not that prior art was in the public domain is a different issue - I don't know the details of NASA at that time, but it's definitely the case that the government was accumulating thousands of patents (which might not seem like much now, but back then was substantial).
Slashdot Mirror
Um, did you even read the linked article, such as the bit about Texaco and Pennzoil?
Not to mention things like implied contracts. Courts can and do enforce oral contracts.
Well, actually- it points out the absurdity of a contract without a signature.
Ever heard of an oral contract?
Fair use has nothing to do with this. The defendant has challenged the statutory damages of the Copyright Act as unconstitutional. So, the DOJ wants to look into this, and perhaps offer a brief supporting the constitutionality of the damages.
No, the Obama Administration's DOJ is considering filing an amicus brief supporting statutory damages even when they greatly exceed demonstrable actual damages.
Not just any statutory damages - they're specifically looking at the statutory damages of the Copyright Act, 17 U.S.C. Sec. 504(c), not some other set of statutory damages. It says so in the linked PDF.
Why is this modded insightful? It's stupid.
Did you not consider the possibility, however remote, that by doing something, he might make things worse?
Of course this sort of thing exists in other countries, at least for broadcast media. France, for example, has quotas on both television and radio content.
I'm not sure that it makes as much sense for the Internet, though. The French idea is that you have limited broadcast time, and without a quota, they'd be playing American music and television shows 24/7. Maybe that makes sense, but with the Internet, you don't have the same broadcasting limits. People choose what they want to listen to with ease, actively seeking out their preferred content from any number of sources.
They can promote domestic content all they want, and it might even be a good thing, but it's not going to have the same "cultural preservation" effects as with broadcast media.
Ah yes, I remember this from several years ago. Our Dell came with Windows 98, and a free "upgrade" to Windows ME. I sure hope this time turns out better...
Not sure where you live, but where I live there's nothing wrong with downloading anything. Providing is the problem.
With most P2P, downloading necessitates providing.
Speak for yourself. I like the "freedom" of watching HD content. I'm not going to be some technological luddite still watching shitty NTSC standard definition just for some bullshit cause, thank you very much. If you want me, you'll need to bring your cause into the 21st century. This is /. for Christ's sake!
See, I like a different kind of freedom. I like the freedom of being able to have my MythTV box automatically flag commercials, then encode a recorded program to H.264, and list it in an RSS feed that iTunes can subscribe to, whence it can be downloaded as a video podcast to an iPod.
I like the freedom of being able to watch my recorded programs from anywhere with a fast enough connection, via the built-in streaming capabilities of MythTV.
I like the freedom of being able to increase my storage capacity whenever I want, by simply popping in another hard drive.
I like the freedom of being able to record _any_ show that I can watch on the TV screen, regardless of whether it's "premium content" or whatever, and knowing that at no point in the future can someone simply decide to mandate a firmware update that changes my ability to do that.
The price of these freedoms? I'm limited to SD analog cable. But for me, it's totally worth it.
So, how much of that can you do with your provider's PVR?
Posner's comment is pretty flawed, when you look at it in detail; I don't think he thought out the implications very clearly. This can all be found In re: Aimster Copyright Litigation.
He wasn't talking about VOD - he was talking about the Sony Betamax, and says that
"skipping commercials by taping a program before watching it and then, while watching the tape, using the fast-forward button on the recorder to skip over the commercials... amounted to creating an unauthorized derivative work... namely a commercial-free copy that would reduce the copyright owner's income from his original program, since "free" television programs are financed by the purchase of commercials by advertisers."
Posner later suggests that Sony could have prevented this infringing use by removing the fast-forward button (I'm not making this up), but for other reasons, they didn't have to.
Also, the assumption that the various commercials and the television program together constitute a single work is almost certainly wrong - the commercials are probably all individually copyrighted by different authors, and licensed to the broadcaster.
I ran across this stuff in an article about commercial skipping (PDF).
It's certainly true that many judges and lawyers don't understand the technology that's involved in the cases they're ruling on. I remember reading something Richard Posner said about commercial-skipping features - that they were creating "derivative works" without the copyright holder's authorization, and thus were infringing. The implications of that are ridiculous.
On the other hand, many techies, myself included, lose perspective on the law. There's some project that aims to store files as a hash against a large set of random data, with the idea being that different hashes against the same data produce different files, but the hashes aren't the files themselves, and thus aren't copyrighted. It's that sort of thing that indicates a complete misunderstanding of the law. If you really think that "Your honor, I wasn't copying copyrighted files, I was only copying hashes, that when combined with a large, meaningless set of data, happen to produce those files" is going to hold up in court, you clearly don't understand copyright law.
I read a short story someone had linked in their sig, that was about the horror of eternal copyright protection. Again, it made a fundamental error. The plot basically relied upon the Copyright Office doing searches of previous works, and if they found a similar one, they would not give you a copyright on a new work, and the character in the story argued that this would mean the end of all art. Problem is, the Copyright Office does no such thing, and isn't allowed to. Copyrighted works have to be original, but not novel. If I independently create some work that already exists, it is not infringing and is eligible for a new copyright. This is basic IP law that people don't know or understand.
The decision is very risky as the quality of the decision of the Circuit Court was very high.
Not only that, but it wasn't just any court - it was the Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit, i.e., people who actually like patents in general. If even they don't like software and business method patents, it seems pretty unlikely that the Supreme Court is going to change the decision.
The main problem is that they're such a hassle to install, compared to a modern Linux distro. Last time I checked it out, NetBSD was worse than FreeBSD in this regard, and probably tied with OpenBSD.
I installed NetBSD a few weeks ago, and it's not all that bad. It doesn't seem any worse than Debian. Sure, you have what size partitions you want and stuff like that, but if you can't handle that, you probably shouldn't be installing a new operating system.
OpenBSD is essentially proprietary as they charge for CDs (IIRC), so I just avoid that.
Huh? Pretty much everyone charges for CDs, but you can of course download OpenBSD free of charge.
But is it worthwile?
You're thinking too practically. Is it worthwhile for me to spend $20 in components on a project attempting to modify the value on the stored-value copy cards I use? Considering I can count on one hand the number of photocopies I've had to make, no. But it's fun :-)
If you have old or somewhat unusual hardware, NetBSD does quite well.
I have a Sun Ultra 1, circa 1995, that I pulled out of the closet for fun recently. Debian installs on it, but 1) is sluggish, and 2) doesn't support certain hardware. My machine has a PCMCIA adapter in it, and I have an old 802.11b PCMCIA card, so I thought I'd be able to use wireless on this machine.
Turns out no Linux drivers exist for the PCMCIA adapter, whereas in NetBSD they do. After a kernel recompilation, the Ultra 1 is up and running on the wireless network.
crore = 10 million
lakh = 100,000
As for the article's statement that "In this context, government would give Rs 2.5 lakh per institution for 10 Kbps connection and subsidise 25% of costs for private and state government colleges," I think this is probably a misprint.
"Free market theory" is that buying and selling takes places voluntarily between two rational parties, both of whom agree to the terms of the deal.
The problem is that when you introduce DRM, "the terms of the deal" aren't always obvious or disclosed.
Just because the wise US forefathers saw patents as a meaningful concept doesn't mean everyone across the world share the same wisdom.
Well, China became a party to the Paris Convention for the Protection of Industrial Property in 1985, so this is not exactly news. (Also, the U.S. complaint didn't have anything to do with patents)
Though no one is going to deny the influence of the U.S. in pushing stronger IP protection throughout the world, patents by no means originated with the U.S. Furthermore, as a practical matter, since the vast majority of countries in the world are parties to the Berne Convention, the Paris Convention, and TRIPS, even if they don't "share the same wisdom" they are legally obliged to act as if they do.
In our defense, I don't think you should legislate morals.
The "moral rights" the GP was referring to aren't really "morals" in the common sense of the word. They refer to a particularly European view of copyright as protecting authors from misrepresentation and distortion of their work. Additionally, the U.S. actually has implemented a form of moral rights for specific visual works.
FYI, this is exactly what Comcast is planning on doing. The actual date of when they stop analog service will vary based on the market, but already in the Connecticut area, they're no longer signing up new customers for "standard" cable (i.e., 70 analog channels, no box).
Of course, once everyone has a box, that's one less argument against a la carte pricing...
If he has an Analog TV, then he is entitled to a coupon.... actually this statement is not true. If he has an Analog TV and he has not purchased a replacement TV with a digital tuner (and for a 27" SDTV at Walmart, expect to pay around $200) because of his CHOICE... then he is not entitled to a coupon. People who cannot afford the switch over to digital are who are entitled to these coupons.
I hear a lot of people saying this, but I don't know where they're getting it from. The GP is correct: if he has a TV with only an analog tuner that he is using to get OTA signals, he is entitled to a converter box, regardless of whether he also has another (or eight other) TVs with digital tuners, and subscribes to cable, satellite, etc.
If you don't believe this, go to the DTV2009.gov website and read what it says. If you tell the script you have a TV with a digital tuner, and you watch OTA television, this is what it says:
You do not need a TV converter box for this TV set. Your TV has a digital tuner already built in and will likely continue to receive TV programming as usual after the transition on February 17th, 2009. If you have another TV set in your household that does not have a built-in digital tuner, you will need a TV converter box for this TV to continue to receive your programs after February 17th, 2009.
The correlation everyone is making between poor people and those needing converter boxes isn't necessarily true. My parents live in a rural area, and have two analog-tuner televisions they use to watch OTA signals. Cable is unavailable, and they do not want satellite TV. They aren't exactly "poor", but they are entitled to two boxes (which they applied for and got months ago).
But hey, I'm sure your world is the only one that exists, where everything is nice and pink and people are all lazy asses working for 30 hours or less.
You should also realize that there are plenty of industries where much more than 40 hours a week can actually be dangerous.
I had a summer job for several years in manufacturing, where I always made sure I never came into work tired, because I was afraid I might lose a finger or hand. There was a lot of physical work involved, and fatigue and lack of attention were safety issues.
Asking someone in one of those industries to work 80 hours a week, or even 60, is asking for workplace accidents.
he can sue that information
Freudian slip?
Gee, with clear thinking like that, perhaps you ought to think about teaching the knuckleheads graduating from business school a thing or two!
Are you quite certain of that? As I recall, before Bayh-Dole, federally funded research was legally in the public domain, and thus unpatentable. Ashton-Tate dried up and blew away after the courts decided that their DBase III and DBase IV products were substantially based on Vulcan, a database program developed by NASA and, thus, in the public domain, not patentable or copyrighted.
Yes, I am. Different agencies had different rules, so it's possible some particular agency made its work public domain, but from what I've read most federal agencies retained the title to their patents. The procedures regarding if and how they would license to others were complex and sometimes unclear. This was the case at the Department of Health, Education, and Welfare (whence the NIH) in the 1960s.
Also, I'm not familiar with the specifics of the dBase and Ashton-Tate thing you mention, but the reason for it being unpatentable would probably be because the government work was prior art. Whether or not that prior art was in the public domain is a different issue - I don't know the details of NASA at that time, but it's definitely the case that the government was accumulating thousands of patents (which might not seem like much now, but back then was substantial).