Well said. This is a much better explanation of the realities of the film and music industries. I think this lawsuit helps prove your point #1, by the way.
Now that's an excellent question. I think the answer is self evident. It appears that he is personally scouring the Internet for these "infringements." I guess ever since his little problem with the recording industry, he's been a bit of a copyright vigilante. As much as I admire his guitar playing abilities, I have grave misgivings about these heavy-handed tactics.
Well, the law reads "[T]he fair use of a copyrighted work... for purposes of criticism... is not an infringement of copyright." So I think your example would be a cut and dry case of fair use.
I'll never understand the persistence of the myth that you must get clearance for every little sound in your film. The intarweb is full of pretty smart people warning that any image or sound in your films is a copyright violation unless you get permission from the copyright holder. One even said if somebody was wearing an identifiable t-shirt, you had to blur it if you couldn't get "clearance." This is all nonsense. People perpetuating this myth are eroding our fair use rights. IANAL, but I am a copyright holder, and I have talked to a few lawyers about it.
That being said, I'm not sure this ladies video is fair use. The music is effectively a soundtrack and comprises a large portion of the video's content. If I heard my (CC-BY-SA) music in the background of a video like this, I would at least expect a "music by orgelspieler" somewhere in the video description.
Let's recap fair use and how it applies to this case:
the purpose and character of the use, including whether such use is of commercial nature or is for nonprofit educational purposes;
the nature of the copyrighted work;
amount and substantiality of the portion used in relation to the copyrighted work as a whole; and
the effect of the use upon the potential market for or value of the copyrighted work.
Obviously, the only item this might fail on is the amount. 29 seconds is about 10% of the song. You have to meet all four requirements to count as fair use. This is a great case for the courts to help explain what is and isn't allowed. Or better yet, maybe it will serve as a touchstone for those jerks in Washington to get off their asses and do something about this vast gray area that is diminishing the creative output of the nation. Copyright is supposed encourage creativity, not stifle it.
Did nobody go out there with hot sticks to verify the polarity and phase rotation?!?!? On the plants I used to work with (50 MW GTGs), there was only one time I heard of (before my time) where somebody hooked the PTs up wrong and nobody caught it. I think it was the phase rotation, rather than being 180 out. They said the whole genset tore loose of the pedestal and sent parts flying everywhere.
Although many people have heard many anecdotes, it's still possible to encounter new problems. We had one issue with single pole breaker failure that nobody had seen before. I'm trying to remember how we addressed it. I think we backed up the 50BF with an additional trip from the 59N or something bizarre like that. Never had that failure mode again, so I don't know for sure if it actually worked.
hell, you don't even need diodes. but you do need transformers (unless you happen to have bulbs rated at whatever voltage your grid is at). Funny that you should mention the check relay. I knew an operator that would just hold down the breaker close button and wait for the 25 to allow the breaker to close. Crazy bastard.
As a former generator protection guy, I can tell you that checking with somebody higher up doesn't always help. The guy that had the position before me fell victim to a very similar type of social engineering. It wasn't a hacker, but an over-zealous operator. The operator was getting what he thought were nuisance trips and asked to remove the 59 element (overvoltage protection). Really, really stupid thing to do. The protection guy knew it and said, "Hell no." But the operator insisted that he talk with the chief engineer. Well the head honcho is notorious for shooting from the hip and trying to make customers happy in whatever way possible, so he told the protection guy to go ahead. Well, shortly after they disabled the element, $2,000,000 worth of generators went up in smoke. My predecessor didn't get it in writing from the chief, so he got sacked, and I got his job.
So why not make a law against different types of murder? Make lynchings a different offense than shooting. Make it a crime to leave a body hanging from a tree. Craft the law in such a way that it is entirely blind to the skin colors and sexual orientations of the perpetrator and victim.
Hate crime laws are just a convenient end run around the equal protection clause of the Fourteenth Amendment. The only time most hate crime laws even come into play is when somebody in a "protected group" is the victim. Heterosexual white men would get no protection from those laws.
The murder is the crime. The hate, or "warning statement" if we take your point of view, is just motive. Remember any message a bigot hoped to transmit would be protected speech under any other circumstance.
What if a white guy was walking around a black neighborhood with a sign that read the same message. I hate bigots. If I ran over him in my car screaming "DIE, BIGOT, DIE!!" would that be a hate crime? What if the people in the neighborhood killed him or beat him, would that be one?
At least in the US it's not as crazy as in the UK where it's up to the victim's perception whether the crime was a hate crime or not.
So how do we get some traction for this idea? First, we need people to poke holes in the suggestion (see below) and shore those up. Then we need some PR, and I don't mean a MySpace page for "Amendment XXVIII". During an election year it could be easier to get attention if we could get a candidate to bring up the suggestion. Otherwise it will be way off the radar.
You have a point. At first I was going to suggest that the cops would need a warrant for every arrest, and then it's clearly lawful. But it would be hard for the cops to get a warrant as they're chasing a carjacker down the freeway, or something urgent like that, where innocent people are in immediate danger.
In practice it might just keep cops from slapping a resisting arrest charge on somebody if they don't have any other legitimate charges. I don't know that it would actually reduce the number of unlawful arrests or tasings. (is that a word?)
We should start a movement for an Amendment to the Constitution guaranteeing the right to resist unlawful arrest. Actually, I'm flabbergasted that this wasn't explicitly included in the original Bill of Rights. I suppose the due process clause and prohibition of illegal seizures sort of imply that there should never be any unlawful arrests in the first place.
Not to mention long songs. I have 38 songs that are more than 20 MB. Gorcki, Liszt, Taverner, and Mahler top the list. Each of those weigh in at 30 minutes or so. I have over 100 that are more than 10 minutes long. 30,000 downloads of the largest song I have would be 1.3 TB!! I doubt that's what they had in mind when they "clarified" their policy.
Anything that has to phone home is unacceptable. 1) There are several reasons a company would install software on a computer not connected to the Internet. 2) The software company's licensing servers won't be available always and forever. 3) It's an extra step that doesn't need to be there.
I can't tell if you mean "framing the story" or "in medias res." In a framed story, like the movies Titanic and The Princess Bride, the actual plot is set up inside of a mini-plot. In medias res refers to stories that begin after some of the crucial action has transpired, such as Crank and The Bourne Identity. I find in medias res to be an effective technique most of the time. One of my favorite TNG episodes that starts in the middle of the action is "Cause and Effect." I'm sure there are others.
I agree that framed stories normally suck. I liked Forrest Gump, but that is one of the few, and it pushed the boundary of what constitutes a framed story. I didn't care for the framing in Saving Private Ryan (even though the score from the scene in the beginning had some of the best harmonies I've heard in ages). In Titanic, I thought it was the absolute worst part of the film. In most flashback style framed stories, it's only tolerable if it helps me see the same plot from different viewpoints.
I actually haven't seen the episodes you're talking about so they might well be framed, but I just couldn't tell from your description.
I, like many others on slashdot, believe that when you die, your body goes into the ground and you rot. There is no continued existence after death...
Your statement got me thinking about the idea of existing after death, and whether that's really possible. I know that there are at least a few of us who would love for technology to be well-developed enough, by the time we are near the end of our natural lives, for us to perpetuate our cognitive and emotive functions through some form of artificial brain that is not subject to the downfalls of this carbon-based brain. I wonder if any of these wishful people also believe in the traditional afterlife. If they do, when would your soul go to heaven? When you actually die, Or when your positronic matrix gets turned off? If the former, are there then two instances of your soul, or is your bionic self is soulless?
Anybody have any thoughts on the subject? Sorry it's a little off-topic.
The father of a friend of mine is an old Sunday school buddy of W. He was very open about this crowd control stuff with me. He was frequently invited to Bush rallies to act as an "enforcer," asking people to leave if they appeared to be anti-Bush. What's so stunning is that he didn't see anything wrong with what he was doing. I was fuming, and he's just a cheery as can be about telling this one and that one to take a hike for banners and t-shirts and stuff.
Once, he asked a Secret Service agent to leave. I don't think he's been invited back since.
As an EE, I'd say there's absolutely no need for most EE to ever learn to solder. Power electrical guys don't have any use for soldering at all; sizing motor control centers and transmission lines requires an entirely different skill set. Electronics can (and should) be modeled on a computer, but you'd still need a prototype. Through hole prototypes on a breadboard can be wire wrapped rather than soldered, and surface mount PCBs can't readily be done by hand anyway.
I work at a small company that has a few serviceable circuit boards in our equipment, but the only time I had to solder was when my boss wanted me to fix a blown relay in his gate opener. All the other times I relied on my technician to do any soldering that needed to be done. We used to send the boards to the inventor, and he had his undergrad EE students fix them, but those days are gone. (I had actually learned soldering by working with stained glass, but that's a different story altogether.)
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Well said. This is a much better explanation of the realities of the film and music industries. I think this lawsuit helps prove your point #1, by the way.
Now that's an excellent question. I think the answer is self evident. It appears that he is personally scouring the Internet for these "infringements." I guess ever since his little problem with the recording industry, he's been a bit of a copyright vigilante. As much as I admire his guitar playing abilities, I have grave misgivings about these heavy-handed tactics.
Well, the law reads "[T]he fair use of a copyrighted work... for purposes of criticism... is not an infringement of copyright." So I think your example would be a cut and dry case of fair use.
That being said, I'm not sure this ladies video is fair use. The music is effectively a soundtrack and comprises a large portion of the video's content. If I heard my (CC-BY-SA) music in the background of a video like this, I would at least expect a "music by orgelspieler" somewhere in the video description.
Let's recap fair use and how it applies to this case:
- the purpose and character of the use, including whether such use is of commercial nature or is for nonprofit educational purposes;
- the nature of the copyrighted work;
- amount and substantiality of the portion used in relation to the copyrighted work as a whole; and
- the effect of the use upon the potential market for or value of the copyrighted work.
Obviously, the only item this might fail on is the amount. 29 seconds is about 10% of the song. You have to meet all four requirements to count as fair use. This is a great case for the courts to help explain what is and isn't allowed. Or better yet, maybe it will serve as a touchstone for those jerks in Washington to get off their asses and do something about this vast gray area that is diminishing the creative output of the nation. Copyright is supposed encourage creativity, not stifle it.This has got to be a hoax, right? RIGHT?!?
Don't forget: "Beware of Online Legal Advice." This must be how the incompleteness theorem applies to lawyers.
Although many people have heard many anecdotes, it's still possible to encounter new problems. We had one issue with single pole breaker failure that nobody had seen before. I'm trying to remember how we addressed it. I think we backed up the 50BF with an additional trip from the 59N or something bizarre like that. Never had that failure mode again, so I don't know for sure if it actually worked.
Do you work for Solar by any chance?
As a former generator protection guy, I can tell you that checking with somebody higher up doesn't always help. The guy that had the position before me fell victim to a very similar type of social engineering. It wasn't a hacker, but an over-zealous operator. The operator was getting what he thought were nuisance trips and asked to remove the 59 element (overvoltage protection). Really, really stupid thing to do. The protection guy knew it and said, "Hell no." But the operator insisted that he talk with the chief engineer. Well the head honcho is notorious for shooting from the hip and trying to make customers happy in whatever way possible, so he told the protection guy to go ahead. Well, shortly after they disabled the element, $2,000,000 worth of generators went up in smoke. My predecessor didn't get it in writing from the chief, so he got sacked, and I got his job.
Hate crime laws are just a convenient end run around the equal protection clause of the Fourteenth Amendment. The only time most hate crime laws even come into play is when somebody in a "protected group" is the victim. Heterosexual white men would get no protection from those laws.
The murder is the crime. The hate, or "warning statement" if we take your point of view, is just motive. Remember any message a bigot hoped to transmit would be protected speech under any other circumstance.
What if a white guy was walking around a black neighborhood with a sign that read the same message. I hate bigots. If I ran over him in my car screaming "DIE, BIGOT, DIE!!" would that be a hate crime? What if the people in the neighborhood killed him or beat him, would that be one?
At least in the US it's not as crazy as in the UK where it's up to the victim's perception whether the crime was a hate crime or not.
posting to cancel accidental mod down. sorry.
So how do we get some traction for this idea? First, we need people to poke holes in the suggestion (see below) and shore those up. Then we need some PR, and I don't mean a MySpace page for "Amendment XXVIII". During an election year it could be easier to get attention if we could get a candidate to bring up the suggestion. Otherwise it will be way off the radar.
In practice it might just keep cops from slapping a resisting arrest charge on somebody if they don't have any other legitimate charges. I don't know that it would actually reduce the number of unlawful arrests or tasings. (is that a word?)
I suspect you're right. I wonder what they would have thought about denying habeas corpus rights to non-citizens, and warrantless wire-tapping.
We should start a movement for an Amendment to the Constitution guaranteeing the right to resist unlawful arrest. Actually, I'm flabbergasted that this wasn't explicitly included in the original Bill of Rights. I suppose the due process clause and prohibition of illegal seizures sort of imply that there should never be any unlawful arrests in the first place.
Not to mention long songs. I have 38 songs that are more than 20 MB. Gorcki, Liszt, Taverner, and Mahler top the list. Each of those weigh in at 30 minutes or so. I have over 100 that are more than 10 minutes long. 30,000 downloads of the largest song I have would be 1.3 TB!! I doubt that's what they had in mind when they "clarified" their policy.
Game Genie? For a spinning disk that might get complicated, though.
Anything that has to phone home is unacceptable. 1) There are several reasons a company would install software on a computer not connected to the Internet. 2) The software company's licensing servers won't be available always and forever. 3) It's an extra step that doesn't need to be there.
Would the bionic soul be eligible for heaven?
How else will they be able to afford SUVs, private schools, and skiing trips for their kids? Won't somebody think of the lawyers' children?!
I agree that framed stories normally suck. I liked Forrest Gump, but that is one of the few, and it pushed the boundary of what constitutes a framed story. I didn't care for the framing in Saving Private Ryan (even though the score from the scene in the beginning had some of the best harmonies I've heard in ages). In Titanic, I thought it was the absolute worst part of the film. In most flashback style framed stories, it's only tolerable if it helps me see the same plot from different viewpoints.
I actually haven't seen the episodes you're talking about so they might well be framed, but I just couldn't tell from your description.
Your statement got me thinking about the idea of existing after death, and whether that's really possible. I know that there are at least a few of us who would love for technology to be well-developed enough, by the time we are near the end of our natural lives, for us to perpetuate our cognitive and emotive functions through some form of artificial brain that is not subject to the downfalls of this carbon-based brain. I wonder if any of these wishful people also believe in the traditional afterlife. If they do, when would your soul go to heaven? When you actually die, Or when your positronic matrix gets turned off? If the former, are there then two instances of your soul, or is your bionic self is soulless?
Anybody have any thoughts on the subject? Sorry it's a little off-topic.
Once, he asked a Secret Service agent to leave. I don't think he's been invited back since.
I'm impressed. Maybe all I need is a little practice. :-)
I work at a small company that has a few serviceable circuit boards in our equipment, but the only time I had to solder was when my boss wanted me to fix a blown relay in his gate opener. All the other times I relied on my technician to do any soldering that needed to be done. We used to send the boards to the inventor, and he had his undergrad EE students fix them, but those days are gone. (I had actually learned soldering by working with stained glass, but that's a different story altogether.)