The registration is required in order to prevent the collecting societies from collecting royalties on your behalf.
Thank you for the explanation; that's quite different from what the EDRI-gram and Slashdot articles make it look like, and actually similar to what we have in a few other countries (maybe someone can mod you informative). Then the points I made in my earlier comment below become irrelevant in this case.
I'm opposed to the system of collecting societies too, but I'm also living with it, and I don't see that it makes much of a difference with respect to the creation and distribution of publicly licensed works. The members of the collecting societies get an unfair advantage, but the corresponding disadvantage is spread out in such a thin layer over the rest of us that hardly anyone notices.
While the option of registering your work to avoid having some collecting society earn money on it seems appealing, I doubt I'd ever take advantage over it, as that would help legitimize their way of doing business (much like I never "opt out" of receiving advertising I haven't asked for). I prefer to deny them those royalties they don't deserve by avoiding the distribution channels they control instead.
Indeed it seems so, and the draft creates confusion with respect to the rights of foreign authors. From the EDRI-gram article:
It imposes the obligation to notify collecting societies on authors each time they decide to publish their works outside the strict copyright framework.
Leaving the issue of what "the strict copyright framework" actually covers aside, the draft appearantly imposes this obligation on "authors" rather than "distributors", meaning that a foreign author can technically be subject to Czech law merely by allowing his work to be distributed in the Czech Republic. How many foreign authors will bother even trying to satisfy the bizarre requirements of a single country? I certainly won't; I'd rather use this opportunity to ridicule their legal system.
This suggests to me that if this draft ever becomes law, the obligation will instead be placed on distributors working in the Czech Republic, which in the case of domestic works may very well be identical to the authors. That also seems more in line with the purpose of the notification, to demonstrate that the distributor is (or has permission from) the author, not that the author is the author (which is sort of self-evident).
Still, that only deals with domestic distributors (of physical copies or electronic transmissions). How about transmissions originating outside the country and aimed directly at individual recipients, such as radio broadcasts or Internet downloads? Will Czech residents be prohibited from using foreign hosting services (such as SourceForge, Youtube or Wikipedia) to contribute to our global collection of information and culture without also notifying their collecting societies? How will the obligation be enforced, by threat of monetary penalties or denial of copyright claims?
While the law itself may fly under WIPO:s radar, it will be interesting to see when the first foreign "public license" work ends up in any court, Czech or otherwise, for being distributed in the Czech Republic without passing their national clearinghouse or other paperwork hurdles.
I own the copyright to everything I have written. I'd be happy to help my Czech friends throw this piece of legislation out the window, with or without their legislators clinging on to it.
Software patents have never been allowed in Europe
But if New Zealand is joining us only now on that point, how is that a "first" in the face of ongoing ACTA negotiations? The European Union is involved in ACTA too, and I have seen no hint that software patentability (or even patents in general) would be an important factor in ACTA.
I mean, if customs officers can't tell the difference between a fake Rolex and a genuine one, how are they going to tell whether the software in a truckload of laptops is covered by a patent or not? Will they cross-check shipping manifests with the actual contents of individual executable binaries (possibly reverse-engineering them first)?
The American generic notion of "fair use" does not exist in Swedish copyright law. The current Copyright Act (which dates from 1960, but has been amended several times since) instead lists a number of exceptions to copyright which may or may not apply in certain situations; here are a few of them:
Making temporary copies for technical reasons
Making a limited number of copies for personal use
Recording your own performances of protected works
Making copies for preservation in libraries
Making copies in Braille for the blind
Quoting reasonable excerpts for context and critique
Depicting buildings and art in public areas
... the list goes on. Some of these situations may be listed in the U.S. Copyright Act as well (I haven't checked), but for those that aren't, I suppose a defense of fair use could be tried.
So, if two people sharing a work electronically falls under the umbrella of "fair use" in Sweden, then there can be no contribution to a crime by the TPB guys.
As long as we discuss "two people", the relevant exception here would be private use (Article 12 of the Swedish Copyright Act). As has been pointed out by AC above, this is a bit hard to claim when someone makes copies for thousands of recipients. However, as the Bittorrent protocol may just as well involve thousands of people making one copy each for another person, I'd say this defense would actually have some merit, depending on other circumstances. If everybody is allowed to make a single copy, you can't prosecute a thousand people for doing exactly that just because the net result is the same as if one of them had made all the copies. Neither can you prosecute someone else for contributing to a collective act which itself doesn't constitute infringement.
However, this particular defense happens to be moot in the TPB case, because the prosecutor dropped the "contributing to the making of copies" charge already on the second day of the trial. The charge that remains is "contributing to making works available to the public", which is a different kind of infringement, and that does not come with an exception for private use!
This still doesn't mean the TPB guys will be found guilty, because it's the "contributory" part that seems difficult to prove. Making works available to the public, that's traditionally what a radio station may do, and the kind of "contribution" to that which would correspond to the Pirate Bay is to publish lists of radio stations, their frequencies and broadcast schedules free of charge. And one of those radio stations may actually be operated by King Kong in Cambodia, who hasn't even been called to the witness stand. Illegal or not? The court should tell. Will the World Radio & TV Handbook be next?
It will be possible to look at every email v.s We will look at every email is different.
I don't think it's draconian to have such a law as long as there are reasonable restrictions on whose transmission even if intercepted is looked into and when they can do that.
It's already possible for the police to obtain a wiretap on anyone's subscriber line if they have a wiretap order from a competent court of law. They don't need any dedicated "wiretapping lines" for that; they can simply order the telco to establish the wiretap and send them the transmissions.
The current proposal, due to be voted on June 17, is not about creating dedicated lines to be used once in a while for transferring individual messages from senders singled out by a wiretap order.
The proposal is about creating dedicated lines to monitor all traffic passing any one of a number of access points 24/7, scanning the contents and metadata of every message for certain patterns (some sources claim there are to be around 250,000 search patterns in simultaneous use, all of them secret of course).
The FRA has claimed there will be no breach of privacy unless a message matches a pattern. This is a confusion of words at best, and a blatant lie at worst. It's like opening every letter handled by the post office, scanning it for an uncommon term like "hexamethyl fluoride", and then claiming only the privacy of messages containing the term "hexamethyl fluoride" has been breached, not the privacy of every other message.
Excuse me, but when anyone accesses my e-mail christmas greeting sent to a friend abroad to verify that I don't use the term "hexamethyl fluoride", my privacy has been breached regardless of whether I have used that term or not. And it doesn't matter a single bit to me that my message is scanned by a computer rather than a human, when I haven't the faintest idea of what that computer is looking for. Saying I'm unlikely to send a matching message doesn't resolve my complaint. I'm unlikely to be killed during a bank robbery too; that doesn't mean I will approve of making it legal for bank robbers to fire a gun at me.
When mass wiretapping is legalized and the physical infrastructure is implemented, there is nothing to stop this from being abused way beyond the original intentions, and the original intentions are unclear enough as it is. A committee of humans will oversee the world's fifth largest computer cluster scanning billions of messages every day for items matching a quarter of a million patterns, to make sure noone's privacy is being invaded without sufficient cause?
It's like watching a golf course from the club house during a thunderstorm to make sure the grass doesn't get wet.
And it's not like this 24/7 mass wiretapping programme is some unverified conspiracy theory. The technique to be used is described in the proposal itself, in the Proposed act on signals monitoring for military intelligence purposes ("Förslag till lag om signalspaning i försvarsunderrättelseverksamhet", pages 9-11), Article 3.
The good thing about this is that more people will become aware of the surveillance, whether it's legal or not, and hopefully begin defending their own privacy with the help of encryption and other means. It's a pity that it has become necessary, though.
It would be bad enough if he is doing this just to get hits (a strategy he jokingly admits to), it's downright frightening to think that an industry "legend" might actually think this way.
I'm not sure I agree with your comparison here. What is worse, a man who believes that snake oil can cure cancer, or a man who knows better but claims publicly that snake oil can cure cancer simply because he gets more money that way? Here I assume that hits = money; this is not always the case but usually so.
And apart from the advertising money he gets from his provocative statements whether they are factually correct or not, I find it even more frightening that someone, somewhere, may profit also indirectly from the dissemination of certain lies and misconceptions, for instance the idea that children in third world countries need food and food alone rather than educational equipment. Once delivered, education tends to self-replicate, while food doesn't, or at least isn't intended to. And someone will be asked, in fact paid, to produce that food, over and over again.
Given the right tools, a good teacher can turn his students into new teachers. Given proper nutrition, a good belly can turn that nutrition into new bellies requiring more nutrition. Now wait a minute, is there something wrong with this analogy..?
When informed about his error, an ignorant man with good intentions may be willing to correct himself. However, if he already knows that he is wrong, but telling lies serves him best, he is unlikely to change. I think I prefer the former.
3) Under Swedish trademark law, infringement occurs when you do business using someone else's name as your own. Simply putting up a web page to poke fun at some corporate entity doesn't mean you are doing business, though I suppose IFPI will ask the judge to consider whether the domain holder may be doing business without this being evident from the web page in question.
4) Even if two different companies are doing business using the same trademark, they could be doing it in entirely different branches (say, entertainment and merchant shipping, respectively). If the trademark is registered, its trademark class should be documented with the registration, and then it doesn't apply in the other classes. I believe those classes are defined in international treaties, though I suppose you can find a number of countries that aren't parties to said treaties.
Here please insert whatever disclaimers are considered appropriate in your jurisdiction.
The magnetic fields around Earth exist partly due to the Moon, but Mars has no natural satellite of sufficient size to make a difference; Phobos and Deimos are just tiny pebbles in comparison. I don't know whether the internal composition of Mars would be able to generate a magnetic field, but if so, I think either Jupiter or Saturn may have a satellite to spare.
How to get it to Mars? I'm thinking along the lines of a carefully engineered cascading gravity assist, hurling asteroids in various directions until a few of them diverts the designated object from its current orbit into one that intersects with that of Mars, and then another bunch arriving just in time to slow it down.
Then we'll wait a few million years while the Martian core and mantle stabilize again after the tidal chock and the crust cools down enough for bacteria to survive. Who's in a hurry?
I guess (IANAL) that it might be because the patent license is not given from Novell to their customers, but directly from Microsoft to Novell's customers. This does not seem to be covered by the patent license wording in the GPLv2, while it will be in the GPLv3.
That's what everybody (including RMS) seem to be saying. Yet, what exactly is that supposedly flawed "patent license wording" in GPLv2? Let's look at the first paragraph of Section 7 again (with its three sentences enumerated):
If, as a consequence of a court judgment or allegation of patent infringement or for any other reason (not limited to patent issues), conditions are imposed on you (whether by court order, agreement or otherwise) that contradict the conditions of this License, they do not excuse you from the conditions of this License.
If you cannot distribute so as to satisfy simultaneously your obligations under this License and any other pertinent obligations, then as a consequence you may not distribute the Program at all.
For example, if a patent license would not permit royalty-free redistribution of the Program by all those who receive copies directly or indirectly through you, then the only way you could satisfy both it and this License would be to refrain entirely from distribution of the Program.
The first sentence is not limited to "patent issues", but explicitely mentions also "any other reason". I believe the issue is the phrasing "conditions are imposed on you" (here referring to Novell). However, the sentence stops short of spelling out what you are required to do (or not to do); it merely says you are not "excused" from the conditions of the license.
I believe the second sentence is the crucial one: "If you cannot distribute so as to satisfy [...] then as a consequence you may not distribute the Program at all." Here, "you" still refers to Novell, but this sentence doesn't even mention any patent issues.
The third sentence merely provides a clarifying example involving a patent license, and it's thus not significant when interpreting the wordings of the first two sentences. However, I find it interesting that there is no mention of who receives the patent license, but the text instead reads "a patent license would not permit".
It's of course good that the language will be clarified in GPLv3, but I'm not convinced that GPLv2 is dead yet. The text must have some meaning, and if it really means you are free to distribute GPL software to people who are unable to redistribute it legally thanks in part to your own actions, then there are problems besides patent law we should worry about.
So, would it be ok for Novell to say to Microsoft "The GPL prevents us from enforcing any restrictions on copying against our customers' customers, but if you can find some restrictions to enforce on either your own or our behalf, you should be in the clear, since you are not party to the license agreement (and we will look the other way)"?
Of course, nothing would have prevented Microsoft from going after Novell's customers' customers even without the deal with Novell, but in that case Novell's hands would have been clean. Novell might even have offered indemnification to downstream recipients of its code and challenged Microsoft's claims, something this deal appearantly prevents - or does it? Novell has dirty hands by getting into the deal, and therefore they cannot claim they have had no influence on Microsoft's assertions of patent rights in GPL software they distribute in accordance with the deal.
If Novell distributes GPL software they believe cannot be freely redistributed by their recipients, is Novell distributing so as to satisfy its obligations under the GPL? This is, I think, what sentence 2 above requires of them.
"Here is the source code - catch! - Oh, your hands were tied? That's just too bad, but we did provide the source to you, technically speaking...";-)
Most people pay for car insurance yet those who don't view those who do as increasing their risk or cost.
This is because car accidents usually happen for other reasons than insurance agents working overtime to disable the brakes of cars belonging to people who don't pay for car insurance.
At least with fire insurance, there is a real possibility that a fire will happen due to a real accident rather than because of a paid arsonist who isn't caught or identified. This is not so with litigation. Nobody is ever sued "by accident", but it's always an intentional act on the part of an identified plaintiff. If the claims are unfounded, the plaintiff (rather than some insurance company) should bear the cost of litigation. If the claims are valid, however, the defendant should admit responsibility and pay up (if he has legal insurance, this is where it may kick in). In no way should the plaintiff be able to game the system to have the defendant pay "insurance" to him in order to protect against future litigation, without the claims ever being tested in court.
Legally speaking, this is not an issue of what is "best for the community", but what the GPL actually means. Software authors have attached the GPL to their code in the hope that it will promote the sharing and further development of said code, and in doing so they have already decided what is best for the community, in their opinion. Novell does not have the right to change the terms of that license, and neither has the FSF nor anybody else, except the copyright holders. Even if the Microsoft-Novell deal were to be good for the community, its wording and implementation is not what the software authors are likely to have approved of, even if there may be a technical "loophole" in GPLv2.
Novell is free to remain within the community, but it has chosen an unexpected path into unknown legal territory, and the community is unlikely to follow along just to keep Novell happy. If we accept Novell's position as "good", then we can expect a multitude of other companies to make similar deals, including those who have contributed nothing at all to the free software community, but simply want to make a quick buck out of the patent mess. The license must be interpreted in the same way regardless of who it applies to.
I haven't contributed any significant code myself, so I have no right to ask for a reward. Still, if I identify a particular concept that is used in some software, patent it, and begin selling the "right" of using "my invention" to various commercial distributors of free software, would you advocate them paying up just to keep me within the "community"? I hope you would not, because if they were to pay, the community would be overrun by parasites like me in no time. Fortunately, I'm not that kind of a freerider.:-)
True enough that Novell has eliminated the risk only for their customers. The trouble is Novell can not negotiate for the whole community they can only negotiate for themselves and in this case for their customers.
If my neighbour were to pay protection money to the mafia, I would want no part of it; I'd require him to leave my neighbourhood for putting the rest of us in danger. We don't want Novell or anybody else to pay protection money on behalf of everyone to somebody who doesn't deserve it, much like we don't want the government to give in to some airplane hijacker's demands and give him a million dollars plus a refuel; that only results in more hijackings. The community doesn't need collective "protection" from perceived legal threats, when we can simply ask our legislature to remove the ground from under those threats. You take out insurances against things neither you nor the insurance agent can predict, not against frivolous demands made by the insurance agent or against well-known consequences of the law.
I still look at the flow of money. It is from MS to Novell. Why would MS pay Novell for Novell's customers right to use their patents? Seems that the "insurer" is paying the insured in this case. Not your typical "protection money" scheme.
Who says "payment" has to be made in cash? Novell and Microsoft made a deal where both parties agreed to contribute. Among other things, Novell contributed a commitment not to sue Microsoft's customers, just as Microsoft promised not to sue Novell's. Why would those two commitments be valued to exactly the same price? Microsoft ended up giving Novell some change to cover the difference. If you return a malfunctioning TV set to the store within the warranty period, but agree to buy a cheaper model instead and receive the difference as a credit worth $20, would you say the "seller" pays you to accept the new TV?
And the mafia guy could very well grant a hefty "rebate" to the first buyer of his fire insurance, simply to be able to point at one happy "customer" when selling the same insurance to his neighbours (without the rebate).
To me the ideal solution would be for the Linux community to "buy up" or have contributed a number of patents for integration into Linux. Then the community has a patent portfolio to protect them against MS or other large companies who may want to sue for patent infringement. That is how the corporations use their patents in most cases, defensively.
Patents are like paper money, in that there is a potentially infinite supply of them. Where the Federal Reserve (or your corresponding national entity) could find reason to print more banknotes, the Patent Office issues new patents at the request of businesses. However, if the "currency" thus issued doesn't match up with something of value being held by either office, the result is inflation. If we engage in a virtual landgrab, trying to buy the "rights" to everything that is scribbled down on a piece of paper, there will be no shortage of scribblings covering gradually tinier portions of this virtual territory. Some critics of the patent system argue that this is what we are doing already today. Since free software is usually being distributed without demands for monetary compensation, where are we going to find the money to pay for all those patents? Do you expect us to outspend big business, like the USA outspent the USSR in much the same fashion during the cold war?
It would indeed; that's closer to the original meaning of "plagiarism" than a patent violation is today.
A patent violation could technically be 100% your own work, its just that the patent holder got a patent and others did not.
It may be 100% your own work, but that doesn't mean it's 100% your own property. Of course, Microsoft would be the last to admit there is a difference, stressing the significance of their intellectual property while conveniently ignoring who did the work that somehow became Microsoft's property. The general public, not versed in the intricacies of intellectual property law, may assume that the software was developed by Microsoft employees, or at least legally purchased by Microsoft, and that this "Linux" thing may simply contain portions of such code, hence the Linux crowd being branded as "plagiarists" even if they may not currently be aware of their infringements.
The notion that Microsoft could, as a matter of law, be the owner of exclusive rights to a product that hasn't even been seen in Redmond, much less been developed by Microsoft, is probably as alien to most outsiders as the possibility that the government could by default be the legal owner of your family photos. I do wonder when the revelation of what the law actually means will hit the fan, and in what form.
Without the deal MS could sue any Linux distribution user. Novell is just trying to eliminate the legal risk for their customers who say they can not move to Linux because of potential patent issues with MS.
No, Novell is just trying to eliminate the legal risk for their customers who say they can not move to Novell's variant of Linux (SuSE) because of potential patent issues with MS. In doing so, they leave every other user of Linux (as well as other open source software) out in the dark, fearing that Microsoft may one day sue them.
Even if the threat of litigation is weak, it's still a threat, and buying out your own customers from that threat actually strengthens it. As long as the entire neighbourhood stands united against mafia types trying to sell them "fire insurances", the risk of an actual fire is quite low. When one of the neighbours pay for such an insurance, the mafia sees that there is a potential customer base, and the risk of fire increases.
The difference with respect to the patent issue is that Microsoft will never be able to claim that they didn't start the fires. As if that would make their kind of insurance any more legit.
Not necessarily. If you read what the grandparent said about the XVid codecs, you'd see that the Novell agreement is similar. Novell can acknowledge that they don't have the full rights, but as long as they're distributing the rights the do have, they can stay in compliance regarding the GPL.
Section 7 of GPLv2 isn't limited to patent restrictions or even intellectual property rights in general, but appears to cover any restrictions affecting the freedom to distribute the software. Let's say that in some odd jurisdiction, distribution (or perhaps merely export) of source code is flat-out prohibited, while executable binaries are ok. The GPL allows binary-only distribution if they come with an offer to provide the source code at a later time. Now, when the recipient of those binaries decides to ask for the sources, the distributor cannot comply without violating the law. Are they really excused by the law to ignore that part of the GPL? They didn't add this restriction themselves, and thus they are distributing all the rights they do have under the law, but that doesn't include the freedom to distribute source code. They should of course have foreseen the recipient's request, and refrained from distributing even the binaries in the first place.
I interpret patent restrictions in the same way. The distributor cannot simultaneously recognize the validity of a claimed patent and distribute GPL software covered by it, knowing full well that the recipients cannot legally redistribute what they receive without additional patent licenses granted by someone else. If the law says redistribution is prohibited (due to the patent), then you cannot merely blame the law and continue to distribute.
It's bad because the GPL says (section 7): If you cannot distribute so as to satisfy simultaneously your obligations under this License and any other pertinent obligations, then as a consequence you may not distribute the Program at all. For example, if a patent license would not permit royalty-free redistribution of the Program by all those who receive copies directly or indirectly through you, then the only way you could satisfy both it and this License would be to refrain entirely from distribution of the Program.
Since the patent license mentioned above is only given as an example of a GPL violation, I wonder why GPLv2 isn't considered sufficient to block the Novell-Microsoft deal, while GPLv3 will be. The essence of section 7 should be inferred from its first sentence: Can Novell distribute so as to satisfy simultaneously their obligations under the GPL and the deal with Microsoft? As I understand the GPL without having the actual text in front of me, Novell must not only give their own customers the freedom to copy, but they must extend this freedom also to their customers' customers, and in fact to anyone who happens to directly or indirectly obtain copies or modified versions of the software in question. This is implemented in the GPL as a requirement to redistribute under the GPL only, with no restrictions added or removed.
The deal with Microsoft removes a supposed restriction that is not part of the GPL, and there are doubts whether this restriction is even legally valid (i.e. whether there are any patents being violated). However, if this restriction is legally valid, then it has in fact first been added by someone, and the deal doesn't completely remove the restriction since the removal only applies to Novell's customers, but not to other recipients of the same code, nor even to Novell itself (if I have understood it correctly). Adding a restriction and then not removing it completely is the same as adding a restriction, and that is a GPL violation, regardless of when it was added or by whom. So, either Novell has added a restriction (by acknowledging the potential validity of Microsoft's patent claims), or Novell has received software which wasn't distributed in accordance with the GPL in the first place, even if the distributor said it was.
... and that allthough Novell hasn't itself (officially) payed any patent license to Microsoft, they have implicitly acknowledged that the users of the software they sell need a promise from Microsoft not to sue.
Novell has "paid" for the patent license offered by Microsoft (to Novell's customers) already by entering the deal, regardless of the direction in which money has flowed. It doesn't matter that Microsoft ended up paying millions to Novell; Microsoft received something in return from Novell for their money and their covenant-not-to-sue, and that something was (in part) another covenant-not-to-sue. Maybe Novell's supposed patents were supposedly worth that much more than Microsoft's supposed patents? It's not very implicit really; the deal explicitely involves unspecified legal claims by Microsoft to rights in software sold by Novell, even as Microsoft has had no part in the creation of said software.
If Novell had merely issued a press release saying "yea, Microsoft may have rights to that software we sell, but we don't dispute that, as we don't care", things wouldn't have been half as bad. But Novell actually made a financial deal with Microsoft involving the transfer of money for effectively making that statement. How much more explicit can you get?
I hereby grant you an exclusive, non-transferrable right to free speech, in return for you granting me the same. Here, have some pocket money as well. Now, let's conquer the world together and sell free speech to anyone who can pay for it! $-)
Selling GPL software is quite clearly within the bounds of the license.
You are misreading the parent. It's not selling the GPL software that is prohibited; it's selling (or giving away) the GPL software in violation of the license agreement that is prohibited. Nobody is concerned about Novell making money; people are instead concerned about Novell sort of acknowledging that Microsoft may have patent claims as to what they are selling (which is software not produced by Microsoft, but produced by programmers who dislike being branded as plagiarists).
Indeed, and subject tags (keywords) have been used for ages in academic papers for precisely this purpose (indexing, not even limited to computerized indexing). However, I guess those few newspaper editors who even barely understand the concept are afraid they would have to display all those tags to the human reader at the beginning of each article, just like the printed scientific journals do it.
The article mentions tweaking other fields beside the headline as well, such as the page title going into the browser window bar. Still, they are only talking about items visible to the user, not about hidden tags. The Google search engine may be dyslectic or blind, but it can read HTML in the dark.
<H1>Now, if They Wanted to Support Full-Text Indexing, They Would Probably Suggest Putting the Entire Story in the Headline Itself.</H1>
It's hard to train old dogs to deal with a new medium. And it's not likely to get better quick, as long as the young dogs keep being trained by the old ones, and they all insist that a web page must be designed using the experience gained over the centuries designing its printed counterpart. Witness how difficult it seems to be for most web page designers to grasp the difference between <I> and <EM>, between <B> and <STRONG>.
"Sunrise" is a visual event involving an observer (you), a horizon, and the Sun. Disregarding the observer, the "place" where this event happens is where the object nearest to the observer is found, and that object is the horizon, which is usually pretty close to you. The light hitting your eyes may be 8 minutes old, but the shadow from your horizon isn't.
Saying that the sunrise occurs 8 minutes before you see it is like saying that it will take 8 minutes for you to see the effect of blinking your own eyelids. That's clearly not true.
Now go visit your nearest horizon to see the sunrise happen on location, and instantly rather than delayed.:-)
Likewise, anybody selling ad space on their website specifically aimed at mobile users would surely be annoyed learning about the mobile network provider messing up the users' experience with additional ads. If the user can't easily identify the source (website or network provider) of each ad visible on that tiny display (say, by having a fixed portion of it reserved for network ads), then I could definitely see a case of copyright infringement.
Filing a lawsuit over it would obviously be out of the question for most websites, but anybody could use a DNS-based blacklist to ban the IP address ranges of providers known to sell this kind of advertising space. Then the users would be left with ad-sponsored 403 messages instead, telling them about their providers ripping them off. I wonder how many advertisers would appreciate being associated primarly with rip-offs and error messages?
If you want to advertise on the Internet, you should buy space on the public website itself, not on individual HTTP sessions accessing said website or any other private communication channel. What if I were to buy ad space on the christmas cards you send to friends and family, after you have mailed them?
Registration of a party is solely for protecting the party's official name.
Correct. It prevents others from nominating candidates and ordering ballots using your party name.
If the Donald Duck Party got sufficient write-in votes to be represented in parliament, in principle the first person to claim to represent it would be able to dish out the seats as he saw fit.
Wrong. Any seats won by the party will be assigned to the candidates for that party with the highest number of votes, according to a complicated (but reasonable) vote counting algorithm. The party can only nominate candidates before the election, but the ultimate choice is made by the voters alone, by either giving one candidate a preferential vote or using a ballot with a specific ordering of the candidates (a single party may have several different ballots printed). Once election day is over and the votes are being counted, the party has no say in the matter of who gets a particular seat.
Fortunately, at a little over 100 votes, this is unlikely to happen any time soon.
Indeed, at least in the election for parliament. However, the same voting system is used at the county council and municipal levels, and within a small municipality, 100-200 write-in votes may very well be enough to get a seat in your local assembly. If none of those ballots indicate a single eligible candidate, and the party (if it exists) hasn't nominated any candidates, nobody will be allowed to take that seat (it has happened).
How about: how does this bypass the Berne Copyright Convention?
It doesn't, nor does it bypass any national copyright law either. It's a service to deliver bits of information to a recipient without painting the sender's address all over the place, much like the U. S. Mail is a service to deliver atoms of matter to a recipient without painting the sender's address all over the place.
There is nothing in the Berne Copyright Convention requiring telecom carriers or mail delivery services to maintain logs of senders for the purpose of identifying those who distribute stuff potentially infringing someone's moral or financial rights. It's the obligation of the sender, not of the delivery agent, to make sure that the stuff being sent is in compliance with the law, copyright or other restrictions.
Sweden is a signatory. I know that most countries don't completely abide by all their treaties, Sweden seems to be the biggest violator of Berne in the developed world.
Can you back that statement up with some evidence? I believe our copyright legislation is quite in line with Berne, and I'm not aware of WIPO having any complaints about our way of enforcing it. The fact that the MPAA may be unhappy with the outcome of a number of lawsuits brought to court in Sweden does not make a treaty violation.
What about the appearant lack of moral rights of authors in the USA? As the author of that article points out, moral rights are specifically included in the Berne Convention, but there are doubts about how well these are protected under United States law. Of course, as those trying to defend their moral rights are seldom supported by big pockets of money, disputes like these are unlikely to result in international treaty reconsiderations.
I heard that a law prohibiting "annoying speech" on the Internet was introduced recently. Some people argued that it might be abused against websites containing criticism meant for the public eye, while in theory the law is probably meant to mimic similar legislation against telephone harassment aimed at individual recipients.
Now, if having to repeatedly undo political graffiti sprayed all over your encyclopedic work-in-progress by your elected representatives isn't annoying to you, I don't know what is. If that law is to be used at all, wouldn't it be nice to see it first used in accordance with its purpose, rather than counter to it?
While we share some basic concepts, we are discussing this from entirely different legal perspectives, those of two different jurisdictions with different legal traditions. Laws from different countries cannot be compared to each other one by one, but they have to be seen in their respective contexts. I'm afraid we won't be getting much further, so I'll rest my case unconvinced, but I appreciate the discussion anyway.
Slashdot Mirror
The registration is required in order to prevent the collecting societies from collecting royalties on your behalf.
Thank you for the explanation; that's quite different from what the EDRI-gram and Slashdot articles make it look like, and actually similar to what we have in a few other countries (maybe someone can mod you informative). Then the points I made in my earlier comment below become irrelevant in this case.
I'm opposed to the system of collecting societies too, but I'm also living with it, and I don't see that it makes much of a difference with respect to the creation and distribution of publicly licensed works. The members of the collecting societies get an unfair advantage, but the corresponding disadvantage is spread out in such a thin layer over the rest of us that hardly anyone notices.
While the option of registering your work to avoid having some collecting society earn money on it seems appealing, I doubt I'd ever take advantage over it, as that would help legitimize their way of doing business (much like I never "opt out" of receiving advertising I haven't asked for). I prefer to deny them those royalties they don't deserve by avoiding the distribution channels they control instead.
Indeed it seems so, and the draft creates confusion with respect to the rights of foreign authors. From the EDRI-gram article:
Leaving the issue of what "the strict copyright framework" actually covers aside, the draft appearantly imposes this obligation on "authors" rather than "distributors", meaning that a foreign author can technically be subject to Czech law merely by allowing his work to be distributed in the Czech Republic. How many foreign authors will bother even trying to satisfy the bizarre requirements of a single country? I certainly won't; I'd rather use this opportunity to ridicule their legal system.
This suggests to me that if this draft ever becomes law, the obligation will instead be placed on distributors working in the Czech Republic, which in the case of domestic works may very well be identical to the authors. That also seems more in line with the purpose of the notification, to demonstrate that the distributor is (or has permission from) the author, not that the author is the author (which is sort of self-evident).
Still, that only deals with domestic distributors (of physical copies or electronic transmissions). How about transmissions originating outside the country and aimed directly at individual recipients, such as radio broadcasts or Internet downloads? Will Czech residents be prohibited from using foreign hosting services (such as SourceForge, Youtube or Wikipedia) to contribute to our global collection of information and culture without also notifying their collecting societies? How will the obligation be enforced, by threat of monetary penalties or denial of copyright claims?
While the law itself may fly under WIPO:s radar, it will be interesting to see when the first foreign "public license" work ends up in any court, Czech or otherwise, for being distributed in the Czech Republic without passing their national clearinghouse or other paperwork hurdles.
I own the copyright to everything I have written. I'd be happy to help my Czech friends throw this piece of legislation out the window, with or without their legislators clinging on to it.
Software patents have never been allowed in Europe
But if New Zealand is joining us only now on that point, how is that a "first" in the face of ongoing ACTA negotiations? The European Union is involved in ACTA too, and I have seen no hint that software patentability (or even patents in general) would be an important factor in ACTA.
I mean, if customs officers can't tell the difference between a fake Rolex and a genuine one, how are they going to tell whether the software in a truckload of laptops is covered by a patent or not? Will they cross-check shipping manifests with the actual contents of individual executable binaries (possibly reverse-engineering them first)?
The American generic notion of "fair use" does not exist in Swedish copyright law. The current Copyright Act (which dates from 1960, but has been amended several times since) instead lists a number of exceptions to copyright which may or may not apply in certain situations; here are a few of them:
... the list goes on. Some of these situations may be listed in the U.S. Copyright Act as well (I haven't checked), but for those that aren't, I suppose a defense of fair use could be tried.
As long as we discuss "two people", the relevant exception here would be private use (Article 12 of the Swedish Copyright Act). As has been pointed out by AC above, this is a bit hard to claim when someone makes copies for thousands of recipients. However, as the Bittorrent protocol may just as well involve thousands of people making one copy each for another person, I'd say this defense would actually have some merit, depending on other circumstances. If everybody is allowed to make a single copy, you can't prosecute a thousand people for doing exactly that just because the net result is the same as if one of them had made all the copies. Neither can you prosecute someone else for contributing to a collective act which itself doesn't constitute infringement.
However, this particular defense happens to be moot in the TPB case, because the prosecutor dropped the "contributing to the making of copies" charge already on the second day of the trial. The charge that remains is "contributing to making works available to the public", which is a different kind of infringement, and that does not come with an exception for private use!
This still doesn't mean the TPB guys will be found guilty, because it's the "contributory" part that seems difficult to prove. Making works available to the public, that's traditionally what a radio station may do, and the kind of "contribution" to that which would correspond to the Pirate Bay is to publish lists of radio stations, their frequencies and broadcast schedules free of charge. And one of those radio stations may actually be operated by King Kong in Cambodia, who hasn't even been called to the witness stand. Illegal or not? The court should tell. Will the World Radio & TV Handbook be next?
I don't think it's draconian to have such a law as long as there are reasonable restrictions on whose transmission even if intercepted is looked into and when they can do that.
It's already possible for the police to obtain a wiretap on anyone's subscriber line if they have a wiretap order from a competent court of law. They don't need any dedicated "wiretapping lines" for that; they can simply order the telco to establish the wiretap and send them the transmissions.
The current proposal, due to be voted on June 17, is not about creating dedicated lines to be used once in a while for transferring individual messages from senders singled out by a wiretap order.
The proposal is about creating dedicated lines to monitor all traffic passing any one of a number of access points 24/7, scanning the contents and metadata of every message for certain patterns (some sources claim there are to be around 250,000 search patterns in simultaneous use, all of them secret of course).
The FRA has claimed there will be no breach of privacy unless a message matches a pattern. This is a confusion of words at best, and a blatant lie at worst. It's like opening every letter handled by the post office, scanning it for an uncommon term like "hexamethyl fluoride", and then claiming only the privacy of messages containing the term "hexamethyl fluoride" has been breached, not the privacy of every other message.
Excuse me, but when anyone accesses my e-mail christmas greeting sent to a friend abroad to verify that I don't use the term "hexamethyl fluoride", my privacy has been breached regardless of whether I have used that term or not. And it doesn't matter a single bit to me that my message is scanned by a computer rather than a human, when I haven't the faintest idea of what that computer is looking for. Saying I'm unlikely to send a matching message doesn't resolve my complaint. I'm unlikely to be killed during a bank robbery too; that doesn't mean I will approve of making it legal for bank robbers to fire a gun at me.
When mass wiretapping is legalized and the physical infrastructure is implemented, there is nothing to stop this from being abused way beyond the original intentions, and the original intentions are unclear enough as it is. A committee of humans will oversee the world's fifth largest computer cluster scanning billions of messages every day for items matching a quarter of a million patterns, to make sure noone's privacy is being invaded without sufficient cause?
It's like watching a golf course from the club house during a thunderstorm to make sure the grass doesn't get wet.
And it's not like this 24/7 mass wiretapping programme is some unverified conspiracy theory. The technique to be used is described in the proposal itself, in the Proposed act on signals monitoring for military intelligence purposes ("Förslag till lag om signalspaning i försvarsunderrättelseverksamhet", pages 9-11), Article 3.
The good thing about this is that more people will become aware of the surveillance, whether it's legal or not, and hopefully begin defending their own privacy with the help of encryption and other means. It's a pity that it has become necessary, though.
I'm not sure I agree with your comparison here. What is worse, a man who believes that snake oil can cure cancer, or a man who knows better but claims publicly that snake oil can cure cancer simply because he gets more money that way? Here I assume that hits = money; this is not always the case but usually so.
And apart from the advertising money he gets from his provocative statements whether they are factually correct or not, I find it even more frightening that someone, somewhere, may profit also indirectly from the dissemination of certain lies and misconceptions, for instance the idea that children in third world countries need food and food alone rather than educational equipment. Once delivered, education tends to self-replicate, while food doesn't, or at least isn't intended to. And someone will be asked, in fact paid, to produce that food, over and over again.
Given the right tools, a good teacher can turn his students into new teachers. Given proper nutrition, a good belly can turn that nutrition into new bellies requiring more nutrition. Now wait a minute, is there something wrong with this analogy..?
When informed about his error, an ignorant man with good intentions may be willing to correct himself. However, if he already knows that he is wrong, but telling lies serves him best, he is unlikely to change. I think I prefer the former.
3) Under Swedish trademark law, infringement occurs when you do business using someone else's name as your own. Simply putting up a web page to poke fun at some corporate entity doesn't mean you are doing business, though I suppose IFPI will ask the judge to consider whether the domain holder may be doing business without this being evident from the web page in question.
4) Even if two different companies are doing business using the same trademark, they could be doing it in entirely different branches (say, entertainment and merchant shipping, respectively). If the trademark is registered, its trademark class should be documented with the registration, and then it doesn't apply in the other classes. I believe those classes are defined in international treaties, though I suppose you can find a number of countries that aren't parties to said treaties.
Here please insert whatever disclaimers are considered appropriate in your jurisdiction.
The magnetic fields around Earth exist partly due to the Moon, but Mars has no natural satellite of sufficient size to make a difference; Phobos and Deimos are just tiny pebbles in comparison. I don't know whether the internal composition of Mars would be able to generate a magnetic field, but if so, I think either Jupiter or Saturn may have a satellite to spare.
How to get it to Mars? I'm thinking along the lines of a carefully engineered cascading gravity assist, hurling asteroids in various directions until a few of them diverts the designated object from its current orbit into one that intersects with that of Mars, and then another bunch arriving just in time to slow it down.
Then we'll wait a few million years while the Martian core and mantle stabilize again after the tidal chock and the crust cools down enough for bacteria to survive. Who's in a hurry?
With a size of 3 billion points, breaking an earlier record, couldn't they have afforded a slightly more sophisticated typeface, such as Courier?
My browser (Firefox) doesn't go beyond 72 points. Is there a skywriting plugin available somewhere?
That's what everybody (including RMS) seem to be saying. Yet, what exactly is that supposedly flawed "patent license wording" in GPLv2? Let's look at the first paragraph of Section 7 again (with its three sentences enumerated):
The first sentence is not limited to "patent issues", but explicitely mentions also "any other reason". I believe the issue is the phrasing "conditions are imposed on you" (here referring to Novell). However, the sentence stops short of spelling out what you are required to do (or not to do); it merely says you are not "excused" from the conditions of the license.
I believe the second sentence is the crucial one: "If you cannot distribute so as to satisfy [...] then as a consequence you may not distribute the Program at all." Here, "you" still refers to Novell, but this sentence doesn't even mention any patent issues.
The third sentence merely provides a clarifying example involving a patent license, and it's thus not significant when interpreting the wordings of the first two sentences. However, I find it interesting that there is no mention of who receives the patent license, but the text instead reads "a patent license would not permit".
It's of course good that the language will be clarified in GPLv3, but I'm not convinced that GPLv2 is dead yet. The text must have some meaning, and if it really means you are free to distribute GPL software to people who are unable to redistribute it legally thanks in part to your own actions, then there are problems besides patent law we should worry about.
So, would it be ok for Novell to say to Microsoft "The GPL prevents us from enforcing any restrictions on copying against our customers' customers, but if you can find some restrictions to enforce on either your own or our behalf, you should be in the clear, since you are not party to the license agreement (and we will look the other way)"?
Of course, nothing would have prevented Microsoft from going after Novell's customers' customers even without the deal with Novell, but in that case Novell's hands would have been clean. Novell might even have offered indemnification to downstream recipients of its code and challenged Microsoft's claims, something this deal appearantly prevents - or does it? Novell has dirty hands by getting into the deal, and therefore they cannot claim they have had no influence on Microsoft's assertions of patent rights in GPL software they distribute in accordance with the deal.
If Novell distributes GPL software they believe cannot be freely redistributed by their recipients, is Novell distributing so as to satisfy its obligations under the GPL? This is, I think, what sentence 2 above requires of them.
"Here is the source code - catch! - Oh, your hands were tied? That's just too bad, but we did provide the source to you, technically speaking..." ;-)
This is because car accidents usually happen for other reasons than insurance agents working overtime to disable the brakes of cars belonging to people who don't pay for car insurance.
At least with fire insurance, there is a real possibility that a fire will happen due to a real accident rather than because of a paid arsonist who isn't caught or identified. This is not so with litigation. Nobody is ever sued "by accident", but it's always an intentional act on the part of an identified plaintiff. If the claims are unfounded, the plaintiff (rather than some insurance company) should bear the cost of litigation. If the claims are valid, however, the defendant should admit responsibility and pay up (if he has legal insurance, this is where it may kick in). In no way should the plaintiff be able to game the system to have the defendant pay "insurance" to him in order to protect against future litigation, without the claims ever being tested in court.
Legally speaking, this is not an issue of what is "best for the community", but what the GPL actually means. Software authors have attached the GPL to their code in the hope that it will promote the sharing and further development of said code, and in doing so they have already decided what is best for the community, in their opinion. Novell does not have the right to change the terms of that license, and neither has the FSF nor anybody else, except the copyright holders. Even if the Microsoft-Novell deal were to be good for the community, its wording and implementation is not what the software authors are likely to have approved of, even if there may be a technical "loophole" in GPLv2.
Novell is free to remain within the community, but it has chosen an unexpected path into unknown legal territory, and the community is unlikely to follow along just to keep Novell happy. If we accept Novell's position as "good", then we can expect a multitude of other companies to make similar deals, including those who have contributed nothing at all to the free software community, but simply want to make a quick buck out of the patent mess. The license must be interpreted in the same way regardless of who it applies to.
I haven't contributed any significant code myself, so I have no right to ask for a reward. Still, if I identify a particular concept that is used in some software, patent it, and begin selling the "right" of using "my invention" to various commercial distributors of free software, would you advocate them paying up just to keep me within the "community"? I hope you would not, because if they were to pay, the community would be overrun by parasites like me in no time. Fortunately, I'm not that kind of a freerider. :-)
If my neighbour were to pay protection money to the mafia, I would want no part of it; I'd require him to leave my neighbourhood for putting the rest of us in danger. We don't want Novell or anybody else to pay protection money on behalf of everyone to somebody who doesn't deserve it, much like we don't want the government to give in to some airplane hijacker's demands and give him a million dollars plus a refuel; that only results in more hijackings. The community doesn't need collective "protection" from perceived legal threats, when we can simply ask our legislature to remove the ground from under those threats. You take out insurances against things neither you nor the insurance agent can predict, not against frivolous demands made by the insurance agent or against well-known consequences of the law.
Who says "payment" has to be made in cash? Novell and Microsoft made a deal where both parties agreed to contribute. Among other things, Novell contributed a commitment not to sue Microsoft's customers, just as Microsoft promised not to sue Novell's. Why would those two commitments be valued to exactly the same price? Microsoft ended up giving Novell some change to cover the difference. If you return a malfunctioning TV set to the store within the warranty period, but agree to buy a cheaper model instead and receive the difference as a credit worth $20, would you say the "seller" pays you to accept the new TV?
And the mafia guy could very well grant a hefty "rebate" to the first buyer of his fire insurance, simply to be able to point at one happy "customer" when selling the same insurance to his neighbours (without the rebate).
Patents are like paper money, in that there is a potentially infinite supply of them. Where the Federal Reserve (or your corresponding national entity) could find reason to print more banknotes, the Patent Office issues new patents at the request of businesses. However, if the "currency" thus issued doesn't match up with something of value being held by either office, the result is inflation. If we engage in a virtual landgrab, trying to buy the "rights" to everything that is scribbled down on a piece of paper, there will be no shortage of scribblings covering gradually tinier portions of this virtual territory. Some critics of the patent system argue that this is what we are doing already today. Since free software is usually being distributed without demands for monetary compensation, where are we going to find the money to pay for all those patents? Do you expect us to outspend big business, like the USA outspent the USSR in much the same fashion during the cold war?
It would indeed; that's closer to the original meaning of "plagiarism" than a patent violation is today.
It may be 100% your own work, but that doesn't mean it's 100% your own property. Of course, Microsoft would be the last to admit there is a difference, stressing the significance of their intellectual property while conveniently ignoring who did the work that somehow became Microsoft's property. The general public, not versed in the intricacies of intellectual property law, may assume that the software was developed by Microsoft employees, or at least legally purchased by Microsoft, and that this "Linux" thing may simply contain portions of such code, hence the Linux crowd being branded as "plagiarists" even if they may not currently be aware of their infringements.
The notion that Microsoft could, as a matter of law, be the owner of exclusive rights to a product that hasn't even been seen in Redmond, much less been developed by Microsoft, is probably as alien to most outsiders as the possibility that the government could by default be the legal owner of your family photos. I do wonder when the revelation of what the law actually means will hit the fan, and in what form.
No, Novell is just trying to eliminate the legal risk for their customers who say they can not move to Novell's variant of Linux (SuSE) because of potential patent issues with MS. In doing so, they leave every other user of Linux (as well as other open source software) out in the dark, fearing that Microsoft may one day sue them.
Even if the threat of litigation is weak, it's still a threat, and buying out your own customers from that threat actually strengthens it. As long as the entire neighbourhood stands united against mafia types trying to sell them "fire insurances", the risk of an actual fire is quite low. When one of the neighbours pay for such an insurance, the mafia sees that there is a potential customer base, and the risk of fire increases.
The difference with respect to the patent issue is that Microsoft will never be able to claim that they didn't start the fires. As if that would make their kind of insurance any more legit.
Section 7 of GPLv2 isn't limited to patent restrictions or even intellectual property rights in general, but appears to cover any restrictions affecting the freedom to distribute the software. Let's say that in some odd jurisdiction, distribution (or perhaps merely export) of source code is flat-out prohibited, while executable binaries are ok. The GPL allows binary-only distribution if they come with an offer to provide the source code at a later time. Now, when the recipient of those binaries decides to ask for the sources, the distributor cannot comply without violating the law. Are they really excused by the law to ignore that part of the GPL? They didn't add this restriction themselves, and thus they are distributing all the rights they do have under the law, but that doesn't include the freedom to distribute source code. They should of course have foreseen the recipient's request, and refrained from distributing even the binaries in the first place.
I interpret patent restrictions in the same way. The distributor cannot simultaneously recognize the validity of a claimed patent and distribute GPL software covered by it, knowing full well that the recipients cannot legally redistribute what they receive without additional patent licenses granted by someone else. If the law says redistribution is prohibited (due to the patent), then you cannot merely blame the law and continue to distribute.
Since the patent license mentioned above is only given as an example of a GPL violation, I wonder why GPLv2 isn't considered sufficient to block the Novell-Microsoft deal, while GPLv3 will be. The essence of section 7 should be inferred from its first sentence: Can Novell distribute so as to satisfy simultaneously their obligations under the GPL and the deal with Microsoft? As I understand the GPL without having the actual text in front of me, Novell must not only give their own customers the freedom to copy, but they must extend this freedom also to their customers' customers, and in fact to anyone who happens to directly or indirectly obtain copies or modified versions of the software in question. This is implemented in the GPL as a requirement to redistribute under the GPL only, with no restrictions added or removed.
The deal with Microsoft removes a supposed restriction that is not part of the GPL, and there are doubts whether this restriction is even legally valid (i.e. whether there are any patents being violated). However, if this restriction is legally valid, then it has in fact first been added by someone, and the deal doesn't completely remove the restriction since the removal only applies to Novell's customers, but not to other recipients of the same code, nor even to Novell itself (if I have understood it correctly). Adding a restriction and then not removing it completely is the same as adding a restriction, and that is a GPL violation, regardless of when it was added or by whom. So, either Novell has added a restriction (by acknowledging the potential validity of Microsoft's patent claims), or Novell has received software which wasn't distributed in accordance with the GPL in the first place, even if the distributor said it was.
Novell has "paid" for the patent license offered by Microsoft (to Novell's customers) already by entering the deal, regardless of the direction in which money has flowed. It doesn't matter that Microsoft ended up paying millions to Novell; Microsoft received something in return from Novell for their money and their covenant-not-to-sue, and that something was (in part) another covenant-not-to-sue. Maybe Novell's supposed patents were supposedly worth that much more than Microsoft's supposed patents? It's not very implicit really; the deal explicitely involves unspecified legal claims by Microsoft to rights in software sold by Novell, even as Microsoft has had no part in the creation of said software.
If Novell had merely issued a press release saying "yea, Microsoft may have rights to that software we sell, but we don't dispute that, as we don't care", things wouldn't have been half as bad. But Novell actually made a financial deal with Microsoft involving the transfer of money for effectively making that statement. How much more explicit can you get?
I hereby grant you an exclusive, non-transferrable right to free speech, in return for you granting me the same. Here, have some pocket money as well. Now, let's conquer the world together and sell free speech to anyone who can pay for it! $-)
You are misreading the parent. It's not selling the GPL software that is prohibited; it's selling (or giving away) the GPL software in violation of the license agreement that is prohibited. Nobody is concerned about Novell making money; people are instead concerned about Novell sort of acknowledging that Microsoft may have patent claims as to what they are selling (which is software not produced by Microsoft, but produced by programmers who dislike being branded as plagiarists).
Indeed, and subject tags (keywords) have been used for ages in academic papers for precisely this purpose (indexing, not even limited to computerized indexing). However, I guess those few newspaper editors who even barely understand the concept are afraid they would have to display all those tags to the human reader at the beginning of each article, just like the printed scientific journals do it.
The article mentions tweaking other fields beside the headline as well, such as the page title going into the browser window bar. Still, they are only talking about items visible to the user, not about hidden tags. The Google search engine may be dyslectic or blind, but it can read HTML in the dark.
<H1>Now, if They Wanted to Support Full-Text Indexing, They Would Probably Suggest Putting the Entire Story in the Headline Itself.</H1>
It's hard to train old dogs to deal with a new medium. And it's not likely to get better quick, as long as the young dogs keep being trained by the old ones, and they all insist that a web page must be designed using the experience gained over the centuries designing its printed counterpart. Witness how difficult it seems to be for most web page designers to grasp the difference between <I> and <EM>, between <B> and <STRONG>.
Google's imagery still blurs out the United States Naval Observatory in Washington, DC. The source of the image is given as Sanborn.
"Sunrise" is a visual event involving an observer (you), a horizon, and the Sun. Disregarding the observer, the "place" where this event happens is where the object nearest to the observer is found, and that object is the horizon, which is usually pretty close to you. The light hitting your eyes may be 8 minutes old, but the shadow from your horizon isn't.
Saying that the sunrise occurs 8 minutes before you see it is like saying that it will take 8 minutes for you to see the effect of blinking your own eyelids. That's clearly not true.
Now go visit your nearest horizon to see the sunrise happen on location, and instantly rather than delayed. :-)
Likewise, anybody selling ad space on their website specifically aimed at mobile users would surely be annoyed learning about the mobile network provider messing up the users' experience with additional ads. If the user can't easily identify the source (website or network provider) of each ad visible on that tiny display (say, by having a fixed portion of it reserved for network ads), then I could definitely see a case of copyright infringement.
Filing a lawsuit over it would obviously be out of the question for most websites, but anybody could use a DNS-based blacklist to ban the IP address ranges of providers known to sell this kind of advertising space. Then the users would be left with ad-sponsored 403 messages instead, telling them about their providers ripping them off. I wonder how many advertisers would appreciate being associated primarly with rip-offs and error messages?
If you want to advertise on the Internet, you should buy space on the public website itself, not on individual HTTP sessions accessing said website or any other private communication channel. What if I were to buy ad space on the christmas cards you send to friends and family, after you have mailed them?
Correct. It prevents others from nominating candidates and ordering ballots using your party name.
Wrong. Any seats won by the party will be assigned to the candidates for that party with the highest number of votes, according to a complicated (but reasonable) vote counting algorithm. The party can only nominate candidates before the election, but the ultimate choice is made by the voters alone, by either giving one candidate a preferential vote or using a ballot with a specific ordering of the candidates (a single party may have several different ballots printed). Once election day is over and the votes are being counted, the party has no say in the matter of who gets a particular seat.
Indeed, at least in the election for parliament. However, the same voting system is used at the county council and municipal levels, and within a small municipality, 100-200 write-in votes may very well be enough to get a seat in your local assembly. If none of those ballots indicate a single eligible candidate, and the party (if it exists) hasn't nominated any candidates, nobody will be allowed to take that seat (it has happened).
It doesn't, nor does it bypass any national copyright law either. It's a service to deliver bits of information to a recipient without painting the sender's address all over the place, much like the U. S. Mail is a service to deliver atoms of matter to a recipient without painting the sender's address all over the place.
There is nothing in the Berne Copyright Convention requiring telecom carriers or mail delivery services to maintain logs of senders for the purpose of identifying those who distribute stuff potentially infringing someone's moral or financial rights. It's the obligation of the sender, not of the delivery agent, to make sure that the stuff being sent is in compliance with the law, copyright or other restrictions.
Can you back that statement up with some evidence? I believe our copyright legislation is quite in line with Berne, and I'm not aware of WIPO having any complaints about our way of enforcing it. The fact that the MPAA may be unhappy with the outcome of a number of lawsuits brought to court in Sweden does not make a treaty violation.
What about the appearant lack of moral rights of authors in the USA? As the author of that article points out, moral rights are specifically included in the Berne Convention, but there are doubts about how well these are protected under United States law. Of course, as those trying to defend their moral rights are seldom supported by big pockets of money, disputes like these are unlikely to result in international treaty reconsiderations.
I heard that a law prohibiting "annoying speech" on the Internet was introduced recently. Some people argued that it might be abused against websites containing criticism meant for the public eye, while in theory the law is probably meant to mimic similar legislation against telephone harassment aimed at individual recipients.
Now, if having to repeatedly undo political graffiti sprayed all over your encyclopedic work-in-progress by your elected representatives isn't annoying to you, I don't know what is. If that law is to be used at all, wouldn't it be nice to see it first used in accordance with its purpose, rather than counter to it?
While we share some basic concepts, we are discussing this from entirely different legal perspectives, those of two different jurisdictions with different legal traditions. Laws from different countries cannot be compared to each other one by one, but they have to be seen in their respective contexts. I'm afraid we won't be getting much further, so I'll rest my case unconvinced, but I appreciate the discussion anyway.