Suppose DNA testing has a 1 in a million chance of giving a false positive, but this database contains a million people. Then there is a non-trivial chance of getting a false positive if you scan the entire database looking for your father. Usually paternity testing is done in a slightly different context: you already have evidence that your father is one of a small set of people and you test only the members of that small set. In this case a 1 in a million chance of a false positive becomes acceptable.
(Yes, people who aren't identical twins or clones have unique DNA sequences, but the amount of DNA actually tested isn't an entire sequence but certain sets of markers.)
What does that mean? Contrary to popular belief, good writing doesn't just require you to sprinkle adjectives liberally through your writing. They have to mean something too.
Dell adds value to the products it sells. If a company wishes to purchase a large number of PCs then (1) I know that Dell can satisfy a large order (2) the company will probably still be there when I need support (3) I know what kind of quality of product I can expect because of their past track record (4) I know what kind of quality of support I can expect (5) there are enough other Dell customers out there that I don't expect to have too many obscure issues such as a lack of drivers for my hardware if I upgrade OS and so on. There are many things Dell can provide that a no-name supplier can't.
However, as a home user I think Apple add far more value than Dell to a laptop, say. Mainly through the OS but also for aesthetics.
...that requires us to use his bones or something? Some kind of voodoo that allows us to predict the locations of planets? Otherwise I really can't see why anyone would be interested in identifying his old bones.
Funnily enough I just acquired one for the first time in my life. I found an Amiga 500 ('plus' I think) while going through the garbage thrown out by my old employer when they closed down(!!!). I opened the case, washed everything that was washable, and now it looks and functions as good as new. I have to admit to not enjoying Marble Madness as much as I had hoped. And I wish I had a BASIC interpreter for it. But some of the 2D graphics are damn fine stuff. I'm also pretty impressed with the 3D graphics in the game Frontier though as a game it's unplayable.
Google makes copies of books and then doles out copies of pieces of those copies to anyone who wants them. I don't understand where reselling comes into this.
If I remember correctly, in the Arriba case they only served up thumbnails, and they served up the same thumbnail to each viewer. They didn't have different users requesting different parts of the full image and Arriba never needed to store the entire original image for longer than it took to make a thumbnail. This seems, to me at least, to be a quite different situation to retaining the entire text, which is what Google do. Arriba used thumbnails for commercial benefit. Google use the entire text for commercial benefit. This is a highly non-trivial difference.
Consider reference works. Owners of such books rarely read the entire book. Over their lifetime they may only read a small fraction of the book. But they might not know in advance what sections they will need (Who knows what works you'll look up in a dictionary before you get it?). Owning the book is valuable because at any time you know that whichever snippet you want, it's available in the book, even though over a lifetime you only use a handful of snippets. But this is exactly the service print.google.com provides for each of its reference books. In fact, I use it in this way. Any time I want a formula for this or that I can look it up in a book. There is a large set of reference books I no longer need to consider buying. To reiterate: for a large class of books, even though I can only download a small number of snippets from any book, print.google.com provides a service that is as good as me owning those books. So I no longer need to own them.
Aside: If any economist is reading this. Is there a term for a group of goods that acquire utility for you not because they are individually useful, but because you know that at some future moment in time you may need to use one of them but you don't know which so you have to own the whole lot. eg. a set of drill bits, or a reference book?
If the New York Times, over the course of four decades of quotation, eventually includes all the text contained in some famous poem, does that mean they have breached the copyright?
By your argument the New York Times could publish any novel they like simply by serializing it in small enough pieces. I expect that one was settled in court long agao.
The argument that they use copies of copyrighted material for commercial benefit is weak. Anyone using information from an educational or reference book in a commercial context is doing the same thing.
This is a fundamental misunderstanding of copyright. You don't copyright an idea, you copyright a text (or a picture, or a movie etc.) You are allowed to make free use of (unpatented) techniques you learn from a textbook and even redescribe those techniques in a book of your own. But if you copy the text literally you are in breach of copyright.
Additionally: the Bible and works by Shakespeare are out of copyright. There's no point of comparison with google here.
Can you point me to a freely (and legally) available unauthorized concordance of an in-copyright book that is good enough to allow me to reconstruct most of the original book? Such a work would be deemed in breach of copyright.
Paper abstracts (at least short enough ones) and titles are clearly fair use. This bears little relation to what google is doing which is reproducing and distributing almost entire texts (though not in one piece).
The courts have ruled that it is legal to copy entire works for the purpose of providing excerpts...
There is a fundamental difference. As far as I know, in the case you discuss they didn't generate revenue from copies of the entire image, but from thumbnails. Google uses the entire copy of a book to generate revenue. If, instead of serving up thumbnails, this company had served up jigsaw pieces of the entire image, ultimately serving up almost the entire image to different customers, I think the court may have decided differently.
A though experiment: suppose I'm a chocolate vendor, I like photograph X copyrighted by someone else, and I want to use it as a design on my chocolate gift boxes. Instead of putting the entire design on one box I chop the copies of the original photo up into little pieces and put different pieces on each box, ultimately using the entire image, but not on one box. Am I in breach of copyright? I don't see how this can be fair use, I'm not using excerpts or low resolution thumbnails. I am using the entire image (to boost my sales), even if my customers individually only see a piece.
Aha! Someone who knows what I'm talking about:-) The problems were pretty unbelievably bad, for example I seem to remember that clipping was impossible - after all, a clipped quad is no longer a quad. Still, what it did might have been a bit weird, but at least it did what it did faster than the PC could do it in software, a trait not shared by many other 3D cards at the time (many of which never reached market).
To add to the MS/SGI conspiracy theory: many people felt that the MS/SGI Fahrenheit 3D library was a deliberate attempt by Microsoft to drain resources from SGI into a fruitless project (Many of the people saying this were working on Fahrenheit and are now colleagues or ex-colleagues of mine). When the project was canned this is exactly what it turned out to be: a fruitless waste of resource. The direct assault on OpenGL by MS is also well documented.
I'd be very surprised if a database isn't considered a "recast, transformed, or adapted" work. A compressed version of a work is considered to be a copy of the work even though it is, in effect, a database with indices point to snippets in a dictionary (as that is typically how compression algorithms work).
You'll be hard pressed to find the phrase "commercial benefit" in the Copyright act.
"Commercial benefit" is the sine qua non of copyright and isn't overlooked by judges in making their decisions. If/. hadn't stopped allowing me to look at my old comment history I'd provide some links on the subject.
...incompetence ever told. It's astonishing that a company that made the best computers in the world for 3D graphics can have fared so badly in a world where even your cell phone is a computer supporting 3D graphics. They had the world handed to them on a plate and they simply threw their hands in the air, the plate with it. Astonishing. And so depressing. I'd really ike to try to understand how the likes of nvidia took the laurel from them. I remember nvidia's very first '3D' card (you probably never saw it, I helped develop drivers for it many many years ago). It was the biggest pile of crap ever developed. Never in a million years would I guess that a few years later these guys would be blowing away SGI and hiring half of their staff.
You are confusing two issues
on
Reining in Google
·
· Score: 5, Insightful
There are two issues here: whether or not Google is breaching fair use, and whether or not they are enabling Google users to breach fair use. By providing only snippets Google are encouraging end users to make fair use of texts. But the question of whether or not Google is breaching copyright does not hinge on what their end users do. The fact is: in order to make available snippets to end users they hold entire copies of the original works. So let me spell this out clearly: Google hold copies of original works. They use these entire copies to serve up snippets to individual users. By serving up snippets they are able to make sales of advertising. Therefore Google are using entire copies of copyrighted material for commercial benefit. This is so far from fair use it's not debatable. So Google are clearly in breach of copyright even though the end users aren't. I can't spell it out more simply than that. The only reason Google have survived this far is that they have encouraged confusion, in the eyes of onlookers, between the notion of fair use by the end user and the notion of fair use by themselves.
I'll spell this out even more clearly. I have written book X recently. They have an entire copy of my book sitting on their servers. (It may in fact be an index and hence a derivative work from which the complete original can be constructed, but that is still subject to copyright.) They are using their complete copy of X to make profit. I don't see a penny of this except maybe occasionally someone will buy my book X because Google mentioned it. And there's certain no law that compels me to accept free advertising in recompense for abuse of my copyright.
Is there a story here? Even if these people were a majority it doesn't do anything to stop anyone who wants to write open source for whatever platform they feel like. Even if these people want to declare that freely distributed Windows source is no longer to be called Open Source it still wouldn't stop Windows users distributing software and calling it something else. So try as I might, I can't find even the tiniest shadow of a story here.
In this particular case the "graphics people" get the credit because he's mounted a massive publicity campaign of trying to convince people that the technique is his using PR people to flood magazines and award giving institutions with press releases. I think you'll find that other graphics people don't crave publicity for other people's work quite as much. The nost heartening thing here is the number of posters, including you, pointing out that Debevec didn't actually invent anything. I've had run-ins with him myself: he claims credit for work done by me and colleagues on his web site, going so far as to add his name to something that doesn't bear his name. (Fortunately for us nobody else in the business uses his name here.)
How about the people the people who'll have to live on top of the dumping site in 1,000 years time. Oh...but we haven't discovered communication through time yet. Cool, that means we don't have to take their opinions into account at all. Dump away!
Slashdot Mirror
(Yes, people who aren't identical twins or clones have unique DNA sequences, but the amount of DNA actually tested isn't an entire sequence but certain sets of markers.)
What does that mean? Contrary to popular belief, good writing doesn't just require you to sprinkle adjectives liberally through your writing. They have to mean something too.
Is that "Glide Effortless" as in "Think Different"?
What's that pink thing on the right? Looks like some kind of strap on dildo that plays music. OK, I take it back. That's pretty interesting.
However, as a home user I think Apple add far more value than Dell to a laptop, say. Mainly through the OS but also for aesthetics.
Remind me. Try as I might I can't think of an interesting product from a company called "Dell". Can someone jog my memory.
Well I certainly look forward to seeing the outcome of any court cases that arise and seeing the discussion that follows!
...that requires us to use his bones or something? Some kind of voodoo that allows us to predict the locations of planets? Otherwise I really can't see why anyone would be interested in identifying his old bones.
Funnily enough I just acquired one for the first time in my life. I found an Amiga 500 ('plus' I think) while going through the garbage thrown out by my old employer when they closed down(!!!). I opened the case, washed everything that was washable, and now it looks and functions as good as new. I have to admit to not enjoying Marble Madness as much as I had hoped. And I wish I had a BASIC interpreter for it. But some of the 2D graphics are damn fine stuff. I'm also pretty impressed with the 3D graphics in the game Frontier though as a game it's unplayable.
Google makes copies of books and then doles out copies of pieces of those copies to anyone who wants them. I don't understand where reselling comes into this.
Consider reference works. Owners of such books rarely read the entire book. Over their lifetime they may only read a small fraction of the book. But they might not know in advance what sections they will need (Who knows what works you'll look up in a dictionary before you get it?). Owning the book is valuable because at any time you know that whichever snippet you want, it's available in the book, even though over a lifetime you only use a handful of snippets. But this is exactly the service print.google.com provides for each of its reference books. In fact, I use it in this way. Any time I want a formula for this or that I can look it up in a book. There is a large set of reference books I no longer need to consider buying. To reiterate: for a large class of books, even though I can only download a small number of snippets from any book, print.google.com provides a service that is as good as me owning those books. So I no longer need to own them.
Aside: If any economist is reading this. Is there a term for a group of goods that acquire utility for you not because they are individually useful, but because you know that at some future moment in time you may need to use one of them but you don't know which so you have to own the whole lot. eg. a set of drill bits, or a reference book?
Additionally: the Bible and works by Shakespeare are out of copyright. There's no point of comparison with google here. Can you point me to a freely (and legally) available unauthorized concordance of an in-copyright book that is good enough to allow me to reconstruct most of the original book? Such a work would be deemed in breach of copyright. Paper abstracts (at least short enough ones) and titles are clearly fair use. This bears little relation to what google is doing which is reproducing and distributing almost entire texts (though not in one piece).
A though experiment: suppose I'm a chocolate vendor, I like photograph X copyrighted by someone else, and I want to use it as a design on my chocolate gift boxes. Instead of putting the entire design on one box I chop the copies of the original photo up into little pieces and put different pieces on each box, ultimately using the entire image, but not on one box. Am I in breach of copyright? I don't see how this can be fair use, I'm not using excerpts or low resolution thumbnails. I am using the entire image (to boost my sales), even if my customers individually only see a piece.
Aha! Someone who knows what I'm talking about :-) The problems were pretty unbelievably bad, for example I seem to remember that clipping was impossible - after all, a clipped quad is no longer a quad. Still, what it did might have been a bit weird, but at least it did what it did faster than the PC could do it in software, a trait not shared by many other 3D cards at the time (many of which never reached market).
To add to the MS/SGI conspiracy theory: many people felt that the MS/SGI Fahrenheit 3D library was a deliberate attempt by Microsoft to drain resources from SGI into a fruitless project (Many of the people saying this were working on Fahrenheit and are now colleagues or ex-colleagues of mine). When the project was canned this is exactly what it turned out to be: a fruitless waste of resource. The direct assault on OpenGL by MS is also well documented.
...incompetence ever told. It's astonishing that a company that made the best computers in the world for 3D graphics can have fared so badly in a world where even your cell phone is a computer supporting 3D graphics. They had the world handed to them on a plate and they simply threw their hands in the air, the plate with it. Astonishing. And so depressing. I'd really ike to try to understand how the likes of nvidia took the laurel from them. I remember nvidia's very first '3D' card (you probably never saw it, I helped develop drivers for it many many years ago). It was the biggest pile of crap ever developed. Never in a million years would I guess that a few years later these guys would be blowing away SGI and hiring half of their staff.
I'll spell this out even more clearly. I have written book X recently. They have an entire copy of my book sitting on their servers. (It may in fact be an index and hence a derivative work from which the complete original can be constructed, but that is still subject to copyright.) They are using their complete copy of X to make profit. I don't see a penny of this except maybe occasionally someone will buy my book X because Google mentioned it. And there's certain no law that compels me to accept free advertising in recompense for abuse of my copyright.
Is there a story here? Even if these people were a majority it doesn't do anything to stop anyone who wants to write open source for whatever platform they feel like. Even if these people want to declare that freely distributed Windows source is no longer to be called Open Source it still wouldn't stop Windows users distributing software and calling it something else. So try as I might, I can't find even the tiniest shadow of a story here.
In this particular case the "graphics people" get the credit because he's mounted a massive publicity campaign of trying to convince people that the technique is his using PR people to flood magazines and award giving institutions with press releases. I think you'll find that other graphics people don't crave publicity for other people's work quite as much. The nost heartening thing here is the number of posters, including you, pointing out that Debevec didn't actually invent anything. I've had run-ins with him myself: he claims credit for work done by me and colleagues on his web site, going so far as to add his name to something that doesn't bear his name. (Fortunately for us nobody else in the business uses his name here.)
Pah! Haven't these people heard they can download the news to their PDAs. 1 year of the NY Times would probably pay for a suitable PDA.
How about the people the people who'll have to live on top of the dumping site in 1,000 years time. Oh...but we haven't discovered communication through time yet. Cool, that means we don't have to take their opinions into account at all. Dump away!