I'm a law student, and I don't have practice problems. I would replace my textbooks with it in an instant. Even if I had to pay more for my books I would rather use the kindle. I bike to school, and I am easily bringing 30 lbs with me every day. If I could get that down to 10 lbs, boy would I be happy camper.
Even if the policy is fair to the students, which is debatable, what miffs me about this policy is that I like games. Developers don't make games for free, so they need some way to sell them. Copyright is the legal mechanism that allows people to make money off of video games. So this school is collecting a bunch of IP rights to a whole bunch of awesome games and then sitting on it with no intention of commercializing it. That means that the consumer is worse off in the long run and the purpose of copyright ("to promote the advancement of science and the useful arts" -- read as "make money off of video games") is being contravened.
Furthermore, it looks like DigiPen has no good reason for doing this! In FTA there is some vague reference to the fact that they don't know where their students get the code for their projects. I assume what they're worried about is secondary copyright liability (i.e. DigiPen didn't violate copyright itself, but it provided aid and resources to infringers). Putting aside issues of knowledge, which is generally required for secondary copyright infringement, if they are secondarily liable holding the copyrights to the products of the infringement would make them MORE culpable, not less, since then they are also materially benefiting from the infringement by gaining a valuable IP right!
So as a student, I respect your right to agree to DigiPen's policies and even defend it as a fair arrangement in consideration for the education you are receiving. I hope that you respect me, as a consumer of video games, to protest it on the theory that it decreases the number of good games I have access to.
Except the fungus is getting its carbon from cellulose in the first place. That cellulose was made from a plant that did fix CO2 from the atmosphere. So really, any industrial application of the fungus would be only step 2 in a three step process. 1) grow cellulose 2) use fungus to turn cellulose into fuel 3) burn fuel. While steps 2 and 3 are not carbon neutral, that ignores step 1, which should make up for the deficit.
That may be. But I also think that articles like this are helpful for those who are in the market for a new computer and want a comprehensive comparison that includes apple computers. Often you'll see notebook buying guides that compare HP, Lenovo, Dell, Sony, etc. but don't include apple computers because they're thought of as being in a different market. With more and more computing going online, what OS you have makes less of a difference. Yet, because apple computers aren't "PCs" they aren't compared with computers from other leading manufacturers. So, when apple is compared with other manufacturers the article is sold as "Is there a mac tax?" when all the reader really wants to know is what computer he or she should buy.
How do you find the annotation function on the iLiad? That's what I've been wanting in an ebook reader for a while now--the ability to carry thousands of pages of research materials to a coffee shop (or outdoors!) to do my reading. But I need to be able to mark up the page for later reference/my own memory. I don't know if it would be worth $700 to me even if the annotation function is terrific, but it would merit some serious thought.
The reason this injunction is so bad is that it explicitly forbids comparative advertising. You know how in the grocery store they shelve the Campbell's soup next to the store's off-brand label? That's similar to buying the trademarks of your competitors as keywords. That way, both products come up in the search results and the consumer gets to investigate both and determine which she would like to buy. That benefits the market by giving consumers more information, exactly the kind of thing that trademark law should promote.
I realize that the First Amendment doesn't protect commercial speech to the extent that it protects other kinds of speech, but this seems exactly like the kind of commercial speech the First Amendment should protect. You can't sell an off-brand product if you are not allowed to say, "We're cheaper than the brand name!"
In 1994 Congress passed the anti-bootlegging provisions, and 18 U.S.C. s. 2319A, that give perpetual, and retroactive, protection to unauthorized recordings of live musical performances. In 1998 Congress passed the Sonny Bono Copyright Term Extension Act which lengthened the copyright term from the life of the author plus 50 years to life of the author plus 70 years; the average copyright term is now longer than one human lifetime all but obliterating the usefulness of a "public domain." (As a point of reference the original copyright term in the first American copyright act was at most 28 years.) The statutory damages which accrue per instance of copyright infringement (up to $150,000) far exceeds actual damages in most cases. Thus, infringers who copy 50 songs which would have cost them $50 dollars on iTunes, or even $1000 in traditional CD format, end up owing hundreds of thousands of dollars in damages.
Is a more balanced, public domain friendly copyright law on your agenda?
Marriage is NOT a government responsibility. If ten people want to intermarry in an orgy of love, so be it. I don't have to acknowledge it, except the law forces me to. Ridiculous. Paul wants to disconnect marriage and government completely. He would support gays marrying, as long as no one had to give them special treatment. He would be against straights marrying, if it forced others to give them special treatment.
I'm not entirely sure what you mean by "the law forces me to" unless you equate yourself with the state government. I'm only replying to point out that marriage IS a government responsibility, at least so far as custody of children is concerned. There are many other governmental issues that marriage touches upon (spousal support, medical decisions, taxation as joint or individual) but it seems for each of these you have an ideological objection (correct me if I'm wrong but it seems like you would be against mandatory spousal support, against income tax of any kind, and possibly against a spouse making medical decisions for an incapacitated partner? Maybe reply and tell me what you think of that).
But at least as far as child custody is concerned, the government HAS to step in and decide which parent gets the kids. If you don't then you have, essentially, a string of kidnappings. Marriage is relevant to this for a number of reasons. In the case of a couple having children naturally, many states presume that if the mother has a husband, the husband is the father and force a challenger to the parental right to prove it. In the case of a couple who adopted, many states give full parental rights to both husband and wife. In the case of an artificial insemination the same thing applies: most states give both spouses full parental rights.
The issue with homosexual marriage then is this: what if you have two women who have a civil union and one of them has an artificial insemination in a state where, under the state law, both partners would have full parental rights. Then, sometime after birth, they move their family to a state that does not recognize civil unions or any right that arises out of a domestic partnership between two people of the same sex and they split up and want a court to decide which parent has child custody. Suppose this second state ALSO has a law that gives both spouses full parental rights in the case of an artificial insemination--that state is going to have to decide whether it considers the foreign marriage valid or not in order to decide the child custody issue. In the midst of all this there is a clause of the Constitution which mandates that each state give the laws of their sister states "full faith and credit" and the federal government has power to determine exactly how that gets done. The defense of marriage act is an exercise of this power. So, both on the federal AND the state level, marriage is something that the government is responsible for.
Wow! I didn't know that. I knew about government transparency and net neutrality, but what I didn't know, and what Lessig's blog post is convincing me of, is that Obama wouldn't be an evil copyright overlord. It seems like ALL of the interests in Washington are arrayed such that no one fights for access to copyrighted materials. Those constituencies that depend on public domain materials for their living (mostly researchers, resellers, and artists) are a disparate group unable bring political brunt to bear on their issues. Now, there are more important problems facing our country than the fact that the copyright is too long. But I do like the idea of a friend of Lawrence Lessig's in the Whitehouse.
And you might consider consulting one (if you have the money). You might also consider exactly what sorts of liability you'll be exposed to and search for jurisdictions with the most lax regulations in that area. You say that your site is going to be driven by user submissions . . . are you worried about copyright? You say you're worried about the FBI requesting user data, is there any particular reason you think the FBI will ask for your user data (that is, will you be requesting submissions on political/revolutionary/Islam topic areas? I suppose one could even piece together a user submission website dedicated to the discussion of criminal activity and how one might go about practicing crime . . . clearly an exposed place to be).
Also remember it isn't only the FBI that can compel disclosure of user identities. The Think Secret/Apple, Inc. lawsuit proved that. A foreign jurisdiction might make it really hard for the government to get at user data, but make it really easy for private parties to do so in a lawsuit. Also consider, however, that if your servers are in a foreign jurisdiction then U.S. constitutional guarantees may not apply (you might say that they don't apply here anymore, but I would submit that they protect you at least a little bit). That could mean that if the government wants your user data, and the servers are outside the U.S., they could tap/hack/physically break in and get the data they want w/o even the pretense of judicial sanction, and w/o even the possibility of court action for you.
My point here is that jurisdictions treat privacy differently across subject areas and differently depending on who's asking or taking the data. Find the subject area that your website most squarely fits under, and then find a jurisdiction with the most protective privacy laws, on the whole and against everyone you're scared of, for that subject.
More like 50 algorithms. Each state legislature is responsible for determining the federal congressional districts (with some complications having to do with the Justice Department, some Southern States, and the Voting Rights Act). This protracts the problem because if, say, California decides to use a relatively non-partisan districting process (like Schwarzenegger's proposal a few years back), Texas can still go on being as partisan as it wants. If there was ever a good case for federal control of an issue, congressional districting is it.
It is not the result I'm quibbling with, but the rationale. The court is arguing (as are you) that because the defendant did nothing to protect his privacy he had no expectation of privacy. My argument is that it is precisely where I do not protect my privacy that I expect it the most, because I simply don't expect others to look there. E.g, just because I don't lock my door doesn't mean that I have no expectation that the public at large is going to stay out. The court's statement that by renaming the files he would have protected his privacy is ridiculous from this point of view. The court is saying that by showing that he did expect the service technicians to look at his media files he would have established an expectation of privacy in those files.
Suppose that I hire a repairman to come to my home and fix a part in my bathroom. They wander around a bit, go into the garage (which, stupidly, I forgot to lock) and find my stash of child porn. Did I have no expectation of privacy in my garage? What if it were a guest cottage in my backyard? I think the court gave short shrift the scope of consent given to the repair shop. Now maybe a reasonable person would or should know that media files that happen to be on one's hard drive will be inspected prior to the installation of a dvd burner. But I didn't know that, and I imagine it would be surprising in the same sense to most people as if a plumber went into their garage.
The story quotes from the opinion this little gem:
The final factor we utilize is the volitional nature of appellee's actions. In this case, Appellee removed the computer from his home, took the computer to Circuit City, and left it there without either removing the videos containing child pornography or changing the titles of the videos so that they did not appear to have illegal content...Appellee was aware of the child pornography and could have elected to leave the store with the computer rather than risk discovery of the pornographic files.
So I guess this means that you have an expectation of privacy when you effectively negate the need for such an expectation and show that you do not in fact have such an expectation.
I don't have a problem with HushMail sharing information about customers engaging in illegal behavior with the authorities. Those people don't deserve their activities to be protected - they're illegal.
The problem with that reasoning is that the authorities don't necessarily know that you're up to no good before they read your email. That's the entire reason they are reading your email, they want to find evidence of illegal activities. That in and of itself should tell you something: innocent people will have their emails read because they look suspicious. We only find out about the times when they find something because those are the only people they charge and bring into court.
Really though, why would anyone use a PUBLIC service to conduct illicit activities? Setting up a private mail system complete with encryption is trivial and MUCH more secure.
HushMail IS private. It is a private entity providing an encrypted email solution by contract. This is not the U.S. Post Office (which, by the way, has much more protective privacy laws for some reason). I suspect you mean, "Why would anyone share confidential information that relates to illicit activities with a third party?" I think the answer is exactly what you pointed out: HushMail bills itself as a provider of private email. As such, there was a reasonable expectation of privacy in the communications. That should bring it within 4th Amendment protection (although I doubt any court will hold so).
Of course stuff like this is why. They can't force a redeployment from Iraq. They can't get the SCHIP expansion passed and they can't protect civil liberties. Those are the things the democrats stand for, and they are not doing a good job.
But the party leadership would like to do a good job. They traded ideological purity for majority control in the 2004 election. The majority party leadership gets to decide which bills make it to the floor and which get killed in committee. That's where most of the power is in Congress, so it wasn't such of a bad trade. That said, it still isn't the power to actually pass a law. The moderates (and even right-wingers) who gave the democrats the majority also don't vote like democrats on many key issues. Their majority is hollow. So while we aren't getting the telecom/wiretapping law we'd get if the republicans were in the majority, we aren't getting the one we want (or at least I, a registered democrat, want).
And in all honesty, there is some principle to not holding the telecoms responsible. They were following the directions of law enforcement. They were probably entitled to trust those law enforcement officials to know the law, and not ask them to do something that violated federal or state law--as it can be complicated. But law enforcement asked them to do exactly that. I'd like to hold the FBI and the DHS accountable, the telecoms are a proxy. Don't get me wrong, I'm mad that they took away my proxy, but I recognize it for what it is.
Someday, I'd like to live in a society that values evidence more than faith and thinking more than hope. From what I know of the world, things have been oscillating between these two styles of framing the world for a while now. The only way to get it to shift towards my end is to put my ideas out there and directly contrast them with the alternative. The more national the audience the better. In all likelihood there is a twelve year old somewhere, who's gonna watch the debate with fundamentally religious parents, and who might be attracted to a different (more rational) way to see things.
I agree that what's legal isn't often what's popular or even what makes common sense, yet I still think it was a terrible idea for J&J to sue ARC. ARC's big argument is going to be that the red cross is a generic symbol for healing and is unprotectable by trademark law. The ARC is a sympathetic defendant, and a judge is going to look at a bunch of red crosses all over the world and (might) buy the argument. If J&J were suing a competitor, say Walgreen's, the exact same argument simply wouldn't have as much force. J&J could still have protected their trademark by enforcing it against those who are really their competitors, in this instance they might lose trademark protection against the world.
It seems to me that open formats are most important for government archival purposes. That is, state governments are producing huge amounts of public documents that really ought to be preserved for posterity. Saving them in an open format (free from copyright protection which lasts 120 years in the instance of an institutional author like MS) seems to be a pretty good step to take towards that goal.
My question is, what are the practices of digital archival in state governments? Do they even have one? I'm taking it for granted that things like bills and committee reports are turned into pdfs and made publicly available, but what about letters to constituents, emails between legislators and things like that?
that you can make the player do things. I'm reminded of American Psycho by Bret Easton Ellis. The book was filled with extraordinarily repetitive prose. Pages and pages of what people were wearing, eating, driving etc. At first the murders in the book were horrific, but a break from boredom and a welcome change of pace for the reader. Something of fascination of the abomination. Then the murders became more frequent, and more repetitive and they became just as boring as the ultra-detailed exposition of clothing. The artistic triumph of the work, I thought, was the deft manipulation of the reader (or at least me) into being able to read about the disemboweling of a prostitute as if it were instructions for a stereo.
That kind of manipulation, on many more levels and not just with violence, is much more possible with games. You want to explore the kind of evil Hannah Arendt was interested in? Make a game about optimization and organization: start with trains in Germany 1938, then go to Auschwitz and manage the prisoners, and when the allies take over, run the trains for the allies. The game designer can focus the player's creative energies on whatever he or she wants. I think that will be very important for any game that aspires to be "high" art.
I've been using Apple computers for about three years now, and I can definitely see why someone would want to transition out of Apple into something else. I bought my iBook because I needed a laptop and I thought it was a good "bang for the buck" computer (with a student discount I think it was). I grew to like OS X a lot, I bought apps that I liked and I've been very happy with the computer.
But at this point it is starting to get a little long in the tooth, and I'd like to buy another laptop, but I don't like the laptops that Apple happens to be selling right now. MacBook Pros are a little too expensive and a little too big for me, MacBooks are little underpowered (especially in the graphics dept). I can certainly see the appeal of moving to a platform with more hardware choices, but not having to move over sums of data that I've put into platform dependent pieces of software and not having to give up apps that are OS X only that I like. I'll probably just stick it out at this point and wait until Apple starts selling something that I want. But having a WINE equivalent for OS X would allow much greater freedom in hardware configuration.
IANAL, but I am a law student studying IP law and I know a thing or two about fair use.
The thing about fair use is that it is an exception to copyright infringement. The way it is treated in the court system is 1) you figure out if there is a valid copyright in the work 2) you figure out if that work has been infringed and only *then* 3) you figure out if the infringement is allowed under the fair use exception.
You can copyright anything with sufficient originality, melodies, chord progressions, anything. Even rhythms can be copyrighted if they are truly original (which is very rare). So long drum solos are copyrightable, but a 4/4 beat isn't. And it isn't fair use when I hear a cool beat done by another artist and use it, because that beat was never copyrighted in the first place. It is also not fair use when I hear a cool song on the radio and, taking inspiration from it, but not copying to any appreciable extent, I make my own song. There is no copyright infringement in that case. It is only fair use when I copy someone else's copyrighted work to an appreciable extent, but for some reason or another, the kind of copying I did is allowed.
Fair use is used most often when the infringing work has some overriding public good (teaching or news gathering/dissemination) or doesn't impact the market for the work I copied. Parodies are very often ruled fair use because no one would seriously contend that Weird Al's "I'm Fat" is going to eat into the market for Michael Jackson's "I'm Bad."
All that said, I think the on-line guitar teacher has a pretty good case for fair use. No one wanting to listen to "Hotel California" is going to go to his site and watch his videos, and he's using the works for teaching purposes (thereby fostering the most important goal of copyright law: the creation of new works).
I buy the cost in customer goodwill, to a point. While MS denied that there was a systematic flaw, then I was disposed to think that the failure rates were more or less on par with any consumer electronic device, maybe on the high end. The failure rate, I thought, was magnified on the internet because gamers are generally a more computer literate (and vocal!) bunch. Now I know that the failure rate is well above that of most devices. Even if there is a warranty, I'd rather not have to go through the hassle of returning a console. And even though its bully that they are extending the warranty for those that buy/bought the flawed system, it doesn't make me want to buy it. Now, if I were to buy a gaming console (which I'm considering), I'd want to wait for another 6-12 mos. to see what happens to game portfolios, as opposed to yesterday when I was seriously thinking of getting a 360 today.
of another slashdot story that was roundly dismissed earlier today. I think this is exactly the sort of thing the author in that story was trying to get at. Mobile phones and big flat TVs are really super-duper cool, but not the earth-shattering events that we make them out to be. Take away a 16 year old's mobile phone, and he'll find some other way to do what he needs to get done. It is his perception of need and technological magic that makes it worth more than a million pounds in his mind.
I don't have a mobile phone, BTW, nor do I have a flat screen TV. So maybe I'm missing out on something. Then again, I also don't have a house and so couldn't get a second mortgage if I wanted said super-duper gadgets.
The problem with with not allowing a business to buy a keyword based off of a competitor's name is that, in America at least, businesses are encouraged to mention a competitor's products in advertisements and product placement. If I go to the store looking to buy Dawn dish soap, the grocery store places their cheaper knock-off brand next to the Dawn for a reason. In effect the grocery store is saying, "I know you want Dawn dish soap because they have a lot of advertising and you've heard of it before. But this knock-off brand will get your dishes just as clean and is a full dollar cheaper!" This law makes similar conduct on-line illegal. What will result is increased strength of already strong brands and increased barriers to get to the market. That hurts all of us by resulting in less effective competition and higher prices.
Above poster is on the right track in thinking about this as a commerce clause problem and not a 1st A. problem. But this is really a very narrow part of trademark law. States can and do have their own regimes of trademark protection and it is generally accepted that the federal government has not occupied the field on this one. So a constitutional challenge, while it could could probably be brought, is unlikely to be successful.
I'm confused. Is that a joke? I thought science WAS done by consensus. Maybe you're referring to the fact that science is done by a consensus exclusive to the scientific community?
If it's a joke, you're funny. It is ironic that a consensual process can end up changing minds. Ironic and also very validating of the scientific method.
Slashdot Mirror
I'm a law student, and I don't have practice problems. I would replace my textbooks with it in an instant. Even if I had to pay more for my books I would rather use the kindle. I bike to school, and I am easily bringing 30 lbs with me every day. If I could get that down to 10 lbs, boy would I be happy camper.
Even if the policy is fair to the students, which is debatable, what miffs me about this policy is that I like games. Developers don't make games for free, so they need some way to sell them. Copyright is the legal mechanism that allows people to make money off of video games. So this school is collecting a bunch of IP rights to a whole bunch of awesome games and then sitting on it with no intention of commercializing it. That means that the consumer is worse off in the long run and the purpose of copyright ("to promote the advancement of science and the useful arts" -- read as "make money off of video games") is being contravened.
Furthermore, it looks like DigiPen has no good reason for doing this! In FTA there is some vague reference to the fact that they don't know where their students get the code for their projects. I assume what they're worried about is secondary copyright liability (i.e. DigiPen didn't violate copyright itself, but it provided aid and resources to infringers). Putting aside issues of knowledge, which is generally required for secondary copyright infringement, if they are secondarily liable holding the copyrights to the products of the infringement would make them MORE culpable, not less, since then they are also materially benefiting from the infringement by gaining a valuable IP right!
So as a student, I respect your right to agree to DigiPen's policies and even defend it as a fair arrangement in consideration for the education you are receiving. I hope that you respect me, as a consumer of video games, to protest it on the theory that it decreases the number of good games I have access to.
Except the fungus is getting its carbon from cellulose in the first place. That cellulose was made from a plant that did fix CO2 from the atmosphere. So really, any industrial application of the fungus would be only step 2 in a three step process. 1) grow cellulose 2) use fungus to turn cellulose into fuel 3) burn fuel. While steps 2 and 3 are not carbon neutral, that ignores step 1, which should make up for the deficit.
That may be. But I also think that articles like this are helpful for those who are in the market for a new computer and want a comprehensive comparison that includes apple computers. Often you'll see notebook buying guides that compare HP, Lenovo, Dell, Sony, etc. but don't include apple computers because they're thought of as being in a different market. With more and more computing going online, what OS you have makes less of a difference. Yet, because apple computers aren't "PCs" they aren't compared with computers from other leading manufacturers. So, when apple is compared with other manufacturers the article is sold as "Is there a mac tax?" when all the reader really wants to know is what computer he or she should buy.
How do you find the annotation function on the iLiad? That's what I've been wanting in an ebook reader for a while now--the ability to carry thousands of pages of research materials to a coffee shop (or outdoors!) to do my reading. But I need to be able to mark up the page for later reference/my own memory. I don't know if it would be worth $700 to me even if the annotation function is terrific, but it would merit some serious thought.
The reason this injunction is so bad is that it explicitly forbids comparative advertising. You know how in the grocery store they shelve the Campbell's soup next to the store's off-brand label? That's similar to buying the trademarks of your competitors as keywords. That way, both products come up in the search results and the consumer gets to investigate both and determine which she would like to buy. That benefits the market by giving consumers more information, exactly the kind of thing that trademark law should promote.
I realize that the First Amendment doesn't protect commercial speech to the extent that it protects other kinds of speech, but this seems exactly like the kind of commercial speech the First Amendment should protect. You can't sell an off-brand product if you are not allowed to say, "We're cheaper than the brand name!"
In 1994 Congress passed the anti-bootlegging provisions, and 18 U.S.C. s. 2319A, that give perpetual, and retroactive, protection to unauthorized recordings of live musical performances. In 1998 Congress passed the Sonny Bono Copyright Term Extension Act which lengthened the copyright term from the life of the author plus 50 years to life of the author plus 70 years; the average copyright term is now longer than one human lifetime all but obliterating the usefulness of a "public domain." (As a point of reference the original copyright term in the first American copyright act was at most 28 years.) The statutory damages which accrue per instance of copyright infringement (up to $150,000) far exceeds actual damages in most cases. Thus, infringers who copy 50 songs which would have cost them $50 dollars on iTunes, or even $1000 in traditional CD format, end up owing hundreds of thousands of dollars in damages.
Is a more balanced, public domain friendly copyright law on your agenda?
I'm not entirely sure what you mean by "the law forces me to" unless you equate yourself with the state government. I'm only replying to point out that marriage IS a government responsibility, at least so far as custody of children is concerned. There are many other governmental issues that marriage touches upon (spousal support, medical decisions, taxation as joint or individual) but it seems for each of these you have an ideological objection (correct me if I'm wrong but it seems like you would be against mandatory spousal support, against income tax of any kind, and possibly against a spouse making medical decisions for an incapacitated partner? Maybe reply and tell me what you think of that).
But at least as far as child custody is concerned, the government HAS to step in and decide which parent gets the kids. If you don't then you have, essentially, a string of kidnappings. Marriage is relevant to this for a number of reasons. In the case of a couple having children naturally, many states presume that if the mother has a husband, the husband is the father and force a challenger to the parental right to prove it. In the case of a couple who adopted, many states give full parental rights to both husband and wife. In the case of an artificial insemination the same thing applies: most states give both spouses full parental rights.
The issue with homosexual marriage then is this: what if you have two women who have a civil union and one of them has an artificial insemination in a state where, under the state law, both partners would have full parental rights. Then, sometime after birth, they move their family to a state that does not recognize civil unions or any right that arises out of a domestic partnership between two people of the same sex and they split up and want a court to decide which parent has child custody. Suppose this second state ALSO has a law that gives both spouses full parental rights in the case of an artificial insemination--that state is going to have to decide whether it considers the foreign marriage valid or not in order to decide the child custody issue. In the midst of all this there is a clause of the Constitution which mandates that each state give the laws of their sister states "full faith and credit" and the federal government has power to determine exactly how that gets done. The defense of marriage act is an exercise of this power. So, both on the federal AND the state level, marriage is something that the government is responsible for.
Wow! I didn't know that. I knew about government transparency and net neutrality, but what I didn't know, and what Lessig's blog post is convincing me of, is that Obama wouldn't be an evil copyright overlord. It seems like ALL of the interests in Washington are arrayed such that no one fights for access to copyrighted materials. Those constituencies that depend on public domain materials for their living (mostly researchers, resellers, and artists) are a disparate group unable bring political brunt to bear on their issues. Now, there are more important problems facing our country than the fact that the copyright is too long. But I do like the idea of a friend of Lawrence Lessig's in the Whitehouse.
And you might consider consulting one (if you have the money). You might also consider exactly what sorts of liability you'll be exposed to and search for jurisdictions with the most lax regulations in that area. You say that your site is going to be driven by user submissions . . . are you worried about copyright? You say you're worried about the FBI requesting user data, is there any particular reason you think the FBI will ask for your user data (that is, will you be requesting submissions on political/revolutionary/Islam topic areas? I suppose one could even piece together a user submission website dedicated to the discussion of criminal activity and how one might go about practicing crime . . . clearly an exposed place to be).
Also remember it isn't only the FBI that can compel disclosure of user identities. The Think Secret/Apple, Inc. lawsuit proved that. A foreign jurisdiction might make it really hard for the government to get at user data, but make it really easy for private parties to do so in a lawsuit. Also consider, however, that if your servers are in a foreign jurisdiction then U.S. constitutional guarantees may not apply (you might say that they don't apply here anymore, but I would submit that they protect you at least a little bit). That could mean that if the government wants your user data, and the servers are outside the U.S., they could tap/hack/physically break in and get the data they want w/o even the pretense of judicial sanction, and w/o even the possibility of court action for you.
My point here is that jurisdictions treat privacy differently across subject areas and differently depending on who's asking or taking the data. Find the subject area that your website most squarely fits under, and then find a jurisdiction with the most protective privacy laws, on the whole and against everyone you're scared of, for that subject.
More like 50 algorithms. Each state legislature is responsible for determining the federal congressional districts (with some complications having to do with the Justice Department, some Southern States, and the Voting Rights Act). This protracts the problem because if, say, California decides to use a relatively non-partisan districting process (like Schwarzenegger's proposal a few years back), Texas can still go on being as partisan as it wants. If there was ever a good case for federal control of an issue, congressional districting is it.
It is not the result I'm quibbling with, but the rationale. The court is arguing (as are you) that because the defendant did nothing to protect his privacy he had no expectation of privacy. My argument is that it is precisely where I do not protect my privacy that I expect it the most, because I simply don't expect others to look there. E.g, just because I don't lock my door doesn't mean that I have no expectation that the public at large is going to stay out. The court's statement that by renaming the files he would have protected his privacy is ridiculous from this point of view. The court is saying that by showing that he did expect the service technicians to look at his media files he would have established an expectation of privacy in those files.
Suppose that I hire a repairman to come to my home and fix a part in my bathroom. They wander around a bit, go into the garage (which, stupidly, I forgot to lock) and find my stash of child porn. Did I have no expectation of privacy in my garage? What if it were a guest cottage in my backyard? I think the court gave short shrift the scope of consent given to the repair shop. Now maybe a reasonable person would or should know that media files that happen to be on one's hard drive will be inspected prior to the installation of a dvd burner. But I didn't know that, and I imagine it would be surprising in the same sense to most people as if a plumber went into their garage.
The story quotes from the opinion this little gem:
So I guess this means that you have an expectation of privacy when you effectively negate the need for such an expectation and show that you do not in fact have such an expectation.
The problem with that reasoning is that the authorities don't necessarily know that you're up to no good before they read your email. That's the entire reason they are reading your email, they want to find evidence of illegal activities. That in and of itself should tell you something: innocent people will have their emails read because they look suspicious. We only find out about the times when they find something because those are the only people they charge and bring into court.
HushMail IS private. It is a private entity providing an encrypted email solution by contract. This is not the U.S. Post Office (which, by the way, has much more protective privacy laws for some reason). I suspect you mean, "Why would anyone share confidential information that relates to illicit activities with a third party?" I think the answer is exactly what you pointed out: HushMail bills itself as a provider of private email. As such, there was a reasonable expectation of privacy in the communications. That should bring it within 4th Amendment protection (although I doubt any court will hold so).
Of course stuff like this is why. They can't force a redeployment from Iraq. They can't get the SCHIP expansion passed and they can't protect civil liberties. Those are the things the democrats stand for, and they are not doing a good job.
But the party leadership would like to do a good job. They traded ideological purity for majority control in the 2004 election. The majority party leadership gets to decide which bills make it to the floor and which get killed in committee. That's where most of the power is in Congress, so it wasn't such of a bad trade. That said, it still isn't the power to actually pass a law. The moderates (and even right-wingers) who gave the democrats the majority also don't vote like democrats on many key issues. Their majority is hollow. So while we aren't getting the telecom/wiretapping law we'd get if the republicans were in the majority, we aren't getting the one we want (or at least I, a registered democrat, want).
And in all honesty, there is some principle to not holding the telecoms responsible. They were following the directions of law enforcement. They were probably entitled to trust those law enforcement officials to know the law, and not ask them to do something that violated federal or state law--as it can be complicated. But law enforcement asked them to do exactly that. I'd like to hold the FBI and the DHS accountable, the telecoms are a proxy. Don't get me wrong, I'm mad that they took away my proxy, but I recognize it for what it is.
Someday, I'd like to live in a society that values evidence more than faith and thinking more than hope. From what I know of the world, things have been oscillating between these two styles of framing the world for a while now. The only way to get it to shift towards my end is to put my ideas out there and directly contrast them with the alternative. The more national the audience the better. In all likelihood there is a twelve year old somewhere, who's gonna watch the debate with fundamentally religious parents, and who might be attracted to a different (more rational) way to see things.
I agree that what's legal isn't often what's popular or even what makes common sense, yet I still think it was a terrible idea for J&J to sue ARC. ARC's big argument is going to be that the red cross is a generic symbol for healing and is unprotectable by trademark law. The ARC is a sympathetic defendant, and a judge is going to look at a bunch of red crosses all over the world and (might) buy the argument. If J&J were suing a competitor, say Walgreen's, the exact same argument simply wouldn't have as much force. J&J could still have protected their trademark by enforcing it against those who are really their competitors, in this instance they might lose trademark protection against the world.
It seems to me that open formats are most important for government archival purposes. That is, state governments are producing huge amounts of public documents that really ought to be preserved for posterity. Saving them in an open format (free from copyright protection which lasts 120 years in the instance of an institutional author like MS) seems to be a pretty good step to take towards that goal.
My question is, what are the practices of digital archival in state governments? Do they even have one? I'm taking it for granted that things like bills and committee reports are turned into pdfs and made publicly available, but what about letters to constituents, emails between legislators and things like that?
that you can make the player do things. I'm reminded of American Psycho by Bret Easton Ellis. The book was filled with extraordinarily repetitive prose. Pages and pages of what people were wearing, eating, driving etc. At first the murders in the book were horrific, but a break from boredom and a welcome change of pace for the reader. Something of fascination of the abomination. Then the murders became more frequent, and more repetitive and they became just as boring as the ultra-detailed exposition of clothing. The artistic triumph of the work, I thought, was the deft manipulation of the reader (or at least me) into being able to read about the disemboweling of a prostitute as if it were instructions for a stereo.
That kind of manipulation, on many more levels and not just with violence, is much more possible with games. You want to explore the kind of evil Hannah Arendt was interested in? Make a game about optimization and organization: start with trains in Germany 1938, then go to Auschwitz and manage the prisoners, and when the allies take over, run the trains for the allies. The game designer can focus the player's creative energies on whatever he or she wants. I think that will be very important for any game that aspires to be "high" art.
I've been using Apple computers for about three years now, and I can definitely see why someone would want to transition out of Apple into something else. I bought my iBook because I needed a laptop and I thought it was a good "bang for the buck" computer (with a student discount I think it was). I grew to like OS X a lot, I bought apps that I liked and I've been very happy with the computer.
But at this point it is starting to get a little long in the tooth, and I'd like to buy another laptop, but I don't like the laptops that Apple happens to be selling right now. MacBook Pros are a little too expensive and a little too big for me, MacBooks are little underpowered (especially in the graphics dept). I can certainly see the appeal of moving to a platform with more hardware choices, but not having to move over sums of data that I've put into platform dependent pieces of software and not having to give up apps that are OS X only that I like. I'll probably just stick it out at this point and wait until Apple starts selling something that I want. But having a WINE equivalent for OS X would allow much greater freedom in hardware configuration.
IANAL, but I am a law student studying IP law and I know a thing or two about fair use.
The thing about fair use is that it is an exception to copyright infringement. The way it is treated in the court system is 1) you figure out if there is a valid copyright in the work 2) you figure out if that work has been infringed and only *then* 3) you figure out if the infringement is allowed under the fair use exception.
You can copyright anything with sufficient originality, melodies, chord progressions, anything. Even rhythms can be copyrighted if they are truly original (which is very rare). So long drum solos are copyrightable, but a 4/4 beat isn't. And it isn't fair use when I hear a cool beat done by another artist and use it, because that beat was never copyrighted in the first place. It is also not fair use when I hear a cool song on the radio and, taking inspiration from it, but not copying to any appreciable extent, I make my own song. There is no copyright infringement in that case. It is only fair use when I copy someone else's copyrighted work to an appreciable extent, but for some reason or another, the kind of copying I did is allowed.
Fair use is used most often when the infringing work has some overriding public good (teaching or news gathering/dissemination) or doesn't impact the market for the work I copied. Parodies are very often ruled fair use because no one would seriously contend that Weird Al's "I'm Fat" is going to eat into the market for Michael Jackson's "I'm Bad."
All that said, I think the on-line guitar teacher has a pretty good case for fair use. No one wanting to listen to "Hotel California" is going to go to his site and watch his videos, and he's using the works for teaching purposes (thereby fostering the most important goal of copyright law: the creation of new works).
I buy the cost in customer goodwill, to a point. While MS denied that there was a systematic flaw, then I was disposed to think that the failure rates were more or less on par with any consumer electronic device, maybe on the high end. The failure rate, I thought, was magnified on the internet because gamers are generally a more computer literate (and vocal!) bunch. Now I know that the failure rate is well above that of most devices. Even if there is a warranty, I'd rather not have to go through the hassle of returning a console. And even though its bully that they are extending the warranty for those that buy/bought the flawed system, it doesn't make me want to buy it. Now, if I were to buy a gaming console (which I'm considering), I'd want to wait for another 6-12 mos. to see what happens to game portfolios, as opposed to yesterday when I was seriously thinking of getting a 360 today.
of another slashdot story that was roundly dismissed earlier today. I think this is exactly the sort of thing the author in that story was trying to get at. Mobile phones and big flat TVs are really super-duper cool, but not the earth-shattering events that we make them out to be. Take away a 16 year old's mobile phone, and he'll find some other way to do what he needs to get done. It is his perception of need and technological magic that makes it worth more than a million pounds in his mind.
I don't have a mobile phone, BTW, nor do I have a flat screen TV. So maybe I'm missing out on something. Then again, I also don't have a house and so couldn't get a second mortgage if I wanted said super-duper gadgets.
The problem with with not allowing a business to buy a keyword based off of a competitor's name is that, in America at least, businesses are encouraged to mention a competitor's products in advertisements and product placement. If I go to the store looking to buy Dawn dish soap, the grocery store places their cheaper knock-off brand next to the Dawn for a reason. In effect the grocery store is saying, "I know you want Dawn dish soap because they have a lot of advertising and you've heard of it before. But this knock-off brand will get your dishes just as clean and is a full dollar cheaper!" This law makes similar conduct on-line illegal. What will result is increased strength of already strong brands and increased barriers to get to the market. That hurts all of us by resulting in less effective competition and higher prices.
Above poster is on the right track in thinking about this as a commerce clause problem and not a 1st A. problem. But this is really a very narrow part of trademark law. States can and do have their own regimes of trademark protection and it is generally accepted that the federal government has not occupied the field on this one. So a constitutional challenge, while it could could probably be brought, is unlikely to be successful.
I'm confused. Is that a joke? I thought science WAS done by consensus. Maybe you're referring to the fact that science is done by a consensus exclusive to the scientific community?
If it's a joke, you're funny. It is ironic that a consensual process can end up changing minds. Ironic and also very validating of the scientific method.