Mix tapes are not piracy and in fact are expressly authorized under United States law.
Moreover, there is no conflation, because your conclusion that copyright infringement is "benign" is not falsifiable and thus begs the question. Copyright infringement is not benign. It is unlawful, and it is so for myriad good reasons. That said, personal use should not be considered infringement (though at the moment, some forms of it are), and the RIAA comprises little more than a bunch of asshats who give a bad name to all the honest and hardworking copyright owners in the world.
O RLY? "The unauthorized reproduction of another's work." -- Oxford English Dictionary (2006).
"The unauthorized and illegal reproduction or distribution of materials protected by copyright, patent, or trademark law." --Black's Law Dictionary, 8th Ed. (2004).
Lest you think this is some modern invention:
"[T]he test of piracy [is] not whether the identical language, the same words, are used, but whether the substance of the production is unlawfully appropriated." --Drone's Treatise on the Law of Property in Intellectual Productions (1879).
"It's being Printed again and again, by Pyrates" --Daniel Defoe, (1703).
"Pirated works may be seized on importation into those countries of the Union where the original work enjoys legal protection." --Berne Convention Art. 12 (1886).
It has been referred to as piracy in court cases dating all the way back to the 1830s, and notably for scholars of copyright, used in the landmark Folsom decision as well.
PR isn't a court, and regardless, it still does not contradict the parent post, so again I ask, what exactly do you think you were correcting in the parent to your original post?
Criminal copyright infringement is indeed pursued by the RIAA; that does not mean every suit the RIAA members file is a criminal suit. All of the filesharing cases against private individuals have been civil suits. In any event, the parent to your original post remains correct.
Illegal != criminal. 'Illegal' means contrary to law. Criminal law is just one kind of law.
Wrong, they claim that it is criminal copyright violation under Title 17 Sections 501 and 506.
You are not contradicting the parent post. What is the purpose of your inclusion of the word "wrong"?
Illegal != criminal. Illegal = contrary to the law.
Copyright infringement is both a civil and a criminal matter, but the RIAA's flimsy lawsuits would never survive criminal proceedings based on MediaSentry. RIAA companies frequently file successful criminal cases, but very rarely against private individuals, and not at all against the MediaSentry victims.
I'm afraid I can't help you there. It's pretty clear from within the App Store itself if they'd looked, where the ad says "iTunes Gift Cards. Give music, movies, apps, and more." But people are less than observant.
So it's now not up to the system to prove that they've got the right person, but to anyone caught randomly close with the same name now has to come out and yell up and and down "it's not me, it's not me." and hope that the system is sane in their case?
No. "Randomly close with the same name" is not random. You were the one that introduced the problem of ten on the same street, with the idiotic assumption that name and street address are the only factors used.
Your continued ignorance of this issue is tiresome. I'll ask simply, what is wrong with making every possible attempt at service? Is that not considered diligent? Perhaps you are also ignorant of the fact that the next stop after email service is service by publication. Why should they be prohibited from trying anything that might possibly work, having failed through conventional means, prior to the newspaper publication?
You seem to be upset about something you simply do not understand. You have an obligation, when you participate in society, to be able to be contacted by your obligors and government officials. If you make a deliberate choice to go off the radar, you are either taking a calculated risk with that known consequence, or you are intentionally trying not to be found (in which case the notice function of service is not necessary, because you are willfully hiding from it and therefore know about it). If you are forced to be inaccessible for a period of time, you can take steps when you come back to prove that and have the defaults lifted, or if you believe you were never notified, you can view the records of the contact attempts.
Where is the problem?
I don't know about you, but I've never seen a blank for e-mail address at anywhere other than at an ISP. All you really have circumstantial evidence not actual evidence that they may match up.
You're either joking or completely disconnected. All credit applications, car loans, mortgage packages, banks, and most monthly service providers (cable, ISP, cell phone, utilities) ask for an email contact when you sign up. It is usually optional, but it is hardly circumstantial. Again, were you actually reading, you would also know that a work or verifiable personal email address (as obtained through a friend or family member in recent contact) is used. And again, credit references supplied can be used to verify this information.
Um, sounds like it should be trivial for the bank/lending institution to get the house/property back and have the police arrest the squatters. Though in practice it turns out to be difficult.
Yes, because eviction is a legal action that requires service!
I'd be more upset at the system that allowed that rather than the individual that evaded being called up by the system. The thing is that process server is supposed to make sure that the right people get the papers. Think of 3-5 people with the same name living on the same street with only the address numbers being slightly different. I doubt that happens too much in the physical world, but it would be much easier to happen online.
An argument from ignorance. Those 3-5 people would have other distinguishing characteristics, and if they could not be satisfactorily identified, then they would all be contacted. The wrong person would simply have to submit proof that they got the wrong person.
It is not as though it's a bare email address with no context. It would be an email address reported on a credit application, a bank, or confirmed by an employer. There is no address book of email addresses, so the only way to get an email address for a person is to have some verifiable real-world link to them, or to have extensive circumstantial evidence.
Well, calling people on the phone/cell or e-mailing them is easy. It's difficult to actually verify if the person that you've contacted is the person that you actually should be talking to though.
No it isn't. If they're the wrong person, they'll tell you and you can take steps to verify it.
It sounds like this lawyer didn't even have a current address. I'm sorry, but this doesn't sound like it should be valid at all.
RTFA. They defaulted on their house payments, and multiple attempts were made to contact them at home, by telephone, and by email. Again, you don't get yourself off the hook simply by refusing to open your door.
And he left no way for anyone to get in touch with him? If so, then those are the consequences. If you have obligations, disappearing makes it impossible for anyone to help you.
For the record - I don't think anything other than in person should be a legal way to serve, but email is not superior to Facebook.
Why?
Personal service is preferred, and process servers go to extreme and often comical lengths to put the paper in your hand, but some people refuse to accept service. Should you have to continue a manhunt for a year, at a cost of tens of thousands of dollars, in order to exercise your legal rights? How would you feel if someone potentially owed you thousands or millions of dollars and you couldn't get it because they wouldn't open the door?
Like all forms of service other than personal service, it's a last resort after a documented showing of diligence. At some point, you're intentionally avoiding being served, because letters and messages have been left for you, and if that's the case, the notice function of service has been fulfilled. Like everything else in law, it's a balancing of competing needs. You also always have the opportunity to fight a default judgment if you can legitimately demonstrate that the dozens of attempted services were missed because you were actually, truly not available.
As you can imagine, the chances of you disappearing from society and leaving no trace of how to contact you with employers, neighbors, family, and friends is fairly small...unless you're running from something.
You'd think that if I knew that, then I'd put in a disclaimer like "all else being equal." Oh wait, I did. So that makes you the moron, not me.
You'd think if you knew that, you wouldn't have wasted time on it at all, since it has no relevance to anything. But clearly now that we're bandying "moron" and "pro-electric" and moving the goalposts to "places in the US" (where natural gas is among the cheapest in the world), you're simply trolling.
Since you're clearly asking for an illustration of your ignorance, the US average residential price for natural gas is ~$13.85/Mcf or ~$1.40/therm. One therm is ~29.3 kWh. Take a typical furnace/boiler, at 85,000 btuh or 0.85 therms per hour, or $1.20 an hour (same as running five 2000W electric fluid radiant heaters or more than six of the more typical 1500W units). Price varies, even across the US, from $10 to over $18/Mcf, and about $1 to $2 per therm. Again, remember US prices natural gas prices are low. In many other countries, prices can exceed US$4 per therm.
Average US price per kWh: 12.1 cents, or about $3.55/therm, but you can't make a direct comparison, because using all electric heating in places where this is uncommon kicks you into a higher rate for exceeding baseline. On the other hand, 29.3kWh is more than 19 1500W electric fluid radiant heaters, which is several more than a typical home would require. Operating 10, 2000W fluid radiant heaters (still more than would be in simultaneous use in a typical home, but let's overshoot to be sure of whole-home heating): 20kWh or $2.42 at average baseline (places where electricity is cheap and plentiful--supplied by nuclear or hydro). If electricity is expensive or you have aggressive baselines, it might cost significantly more than that (up to $4). US electricity prices vary from 7 to 18 cents per kWh, so the low end electricity prices overlap with the high end of gas prices in this country, to say nothing of the remaining 95% of the world's population.
If you travel to Vancouver, BC or many European, Middle Eastern, and Asian countries, you see the use of electric fluid radiant heat--electricity is cheap and plentiful; natural gas is expensive and rare. It is not hard to see that a region with less expensive electricity ($2 per therm or below) and comparatively expensive natural gas ($2/therm and up) would be better served with electric heat. Even at parity, your three zone system (relatively unusual) does not compete with the per-room granularity of a typical electric system, especially if the entire house does not need to be artificially heated to pass 50F. Moreover, radiators of any kind placed near windows can solve the draft cooling problem, allowing less use of the heating system in general--meaning that thermostats can be set lower. With the exception of steam radiators (fairly uncommon in most of the world outside of Old World cities), most gas systems don't address this problem and compensate by brute force.
How you can make the leap from "it depends" to "you're pro-electric" is as idiotic as your myopic scope of comparison. There are plenty of instances where gas heating is cheaper, and that includes most of the US. But it is far from universal.
But I have no rights beyond what simple possession allows.
Simple possession confers no rights to the work. That's the entire problem.
Same end result, and whether this ephemeral license actually exists doesn't seem very important.
On the contrary, it's a critical distinction. You have absolutely no rights in the work if there is no license, either statutory or actual. Acquiring possession of the object expressly excludes any right of any kind in the work. Simple possession of, say, a DVD, is worth about $1 for the disc and packaging. The owner must transfer rights to you in order for you to have any. Those usage rights, your interest in the work, are what accounts for the other $14 or so of the DVD.
The manufacturer of the DVD can give you ownership of the DVD, but can't give you any interest of any kind in a copyrighted work. For that, you need authorization from the copyright owner. That authorization may be provided various ways, and once you get to that point, you're right that the effect is the same regardless of what one calls the function of statutory authorization.
I sure hope you are lying about doing this stuff for a living. From 17 USC 101
Please refer to the canons of statutory construction. 202 refers to the material object, and not to the copy, for a very specific reason: the attempted conflation you present. Ownership of the material object does not confer any rights in the work. Ownership of the copydoes confer rights in the work, because the copy is the material object as well as the granted usage rights.
It is indeed basic stuff, and you haven't got it. The statement that ownership of a copy does not confer rights would be nonsensical and directly contradictory.
Since, in fact, there are fair uses which have none of those factors
Again, I press you for an example.
The Betamax decision is, as legal scholars have pointed out for nearly 30 years, correct in outcome but faulty in reasoning. It went under fair use, and is the only such exception, only because there was no other place to put it at the time. The concept of "personal" use had not yet developed, and because the prima facie infringement case had been made, the only avenue of precedent was the fair use doctrine. It has not been extended since, nor has any fair use case made an argument to set aside the above four factor test. This is further borne out in the copyright laws of other legal systems, which do recognize a personal use doctrine and accordingly are more permissive.
This glaring omission must be corrected if actual personal use rights are ever to become codified in the United States. It does not fit under 107, which is strained to find a constitutional basis for use clearly outside the operative zone for the doctrine. This, to borrow a term from Nimmer, is not sustainable. Fair use is not personal use, and it cannot be shoehorned in with any semblance of congruence or adequacy. Instead, we must press for a personal use exemption to correct these problems and bring US law in line with the rest of the world.
space shifting have been held to be fair use
Actually, if you refer to the language of the cases in which it has been upheld (a minority, it's worth noting), you see that the operative language is "noncommercial personal use". In nearly all cases where space shifting has been proposed as a 107 fair use, it has been rejected, and duly so.
And? You acquire rights to a copy of a particular piece of media via transfer of ownership.
No. You acquire rights to a material object via transfer of ownership. You acquire rights to the work via transfer of license. You have no ownership in the work itself or the copyright.
You own that copy and can use it within the limits of the law.
Yes, because ownership of a copy is ownership of the physical medium and permission to use (license) of the set of non-exclusive rights in the work.
It is not a non sequitur. The post I originally responded to asked, "Do I pay for a license for the movie/album/etc. meaning I can get a replacement copy for just the production costs of the disc if it breaks or a new format is introduced ?"
Again, the two are not exclusive of one another. Paying for a license does not imply a replacement copy. You are accepting the premise of the question and arguing that it is not a license because you don't get a replacement and there is no text document. Neither of these evince a license or a lack thereof.
Ripping a DVD is exactly interacting with a physical object.
Not in any appreciable sense--you're not after the parts and pieces, you're after the intangible expression embodied in it. Your interest has nothing to do with the object, in other words.
Taken to pedantic extremism, anything is problematic--photons emitted by your cat down the street would be trespassing on Mr. Jones' property. Thoughts are the product of the electrical impulses of the brain and thus physical. Speech, as a propagation of a mechanical process producing measurable, physical shock waves in a medium, becomes tangible.
My problem is that it becomes increasingly legal for copyright holders to break my stuff and keep secrets from me
A problem in search of harm, really, since it's their stuff you're trying to get. They're just increasingly disinclined to give as much as they did in the past, having, in their view, suffered for it. They're entitled to the secrets, as you're entitled to yours when you produce something.
becomes increasingly illegal for me to tell people various numbers
A bold reductionist argument that has relatively little to do with reality. There is no meaningful expression blocked by those "various numbers". Perhaps more to the point, it is simply impossible for anyone to be in a position to store and recite all of the "numbers" and have someone receive them and comprehend. 'Increasingly' also implies a vector not borne out by historical example. It is not as though you had an expressive purpose to the mechanized reproduction.
You're calling the implicit rights granted by copyright law a "license", and I'm calling the lack of an explicit piece of paper from the copyright holder "not a license". Same thing in the end.
No. A lack of a piece of paper is not evidence of the lack of license. A piece of paper is the memorialization of a license, license agreement, or other contract. Just as the lack of a signed form is not evidence of the lack of a contract, lack of a form is not evidence of a lack of license.
Illustrated another way, there are two ways to acquire rights in something you do not currently possess: (1) transfer of ownership and (2) transfer of license. There is no other way.
You can be assigned ownership by the operation of purely statutory law (e.g. intestate succession, adverse possession). You can be assigned license by the operation of purely statutory law (e.g. permission to enter public spaces, purchasing a copy). You can also be assigned ownership/license by simple grant (e.g. a will, donation). You can also be assigned ownership/license by contract (e.g. a sales contract, license agreement).
there is no right to obtain a second copy "at cost" if your first one gets destroyed
A non sequitur. There is never any such guaranteed right. As with anything you take possession of, you are responsible for it. If it is destroyed, and there is no provision for replacement/insurance/discount, and you simply have to repurchase it. Whether this is because of the value of the physical components or the value of its intellectual components does not matter.
The value of a copy, like any other object, is the sum of its physical parts and the value of its intellectual property. If the copy is destroyed, you must repurchase the entirety. If only the material object is destroyed, then you may replace that material object without falling afoul of the law.
Given that 17 USC 202 -- the very section you cited -- says that transfer of ownership of a copy does not confer a copyright interest, that's an extraordinary claim.
No, it says that transfer of a material object does not. A material object is not itself a copy.
Odd, then, that the language of Title 17 treats the work and the copyright in the work as separate things.
It's not odd. The work is an intellectual product of its creator. The copyright is the property in that creation. Just as legal "ownership of land" is really "ownership in the legal property coterminous with that land", legal ownership of a work is ownership in the legal property coterminous with that work.
If so, I feel sorry for your clients.
They certainly don't.
A license is certainly distinct from a promise not to sue.
No it isn't. A legally binding promise not to sue is a license at its most fundamental. This is really elementary stuff.
Whether you think it has been "overextended" or not, it has been so extended.
This does not make personal use fair use. An idiosyncratic extension of a personal use right into the doctrine does not incorporate the two. It is entirely possible for a particular act to be both personal use and fair use, but personal use is not fair use, and further extension has been repeatedly and consistently rejected, both by the Copyright Office and by the courts.
Ah, no moving the goalposts. You said that fair use had to be transformative AND that it had to be incorporation of a portion of a work into a new work AND that it had to be for artistic or informative purposes.
No. If you'll recall, I said that fair use is "the transformative incorporation of a portion of a work in a new work for a valid artistic or informative purpose". At no point does that suggest a threshold level for any particular factor in consideration, nor does it suggest or deny the presence of exceptions. As the factors for fair use are a balancing test, varying levels of each spill over to require varying levels of the others. Again, if you can assert a use that is not sufficiently compelling in any of those factors, I'd like to see it. Further, if you'd like to proffer an alternative sentence that captures the salient factors in 20 words or less, I'd be happy to point out the myriad conceptual problems with your general overview.
There's also the case of "reproduction by a library of a portion of a work to replace part of a damaged copy" (mentioned by the Copyright Office in its discussion of fair use)
The Copyright Act does not refer to ownership of the work, nor of the medium. It refers to ownership of the _copyright_ in the work, and ownership of a copy of the work.
Talking about ownership in the copyright tends to lead to lay confusion, since ownership of a copy does confer a copyright interest. The "work" is the subject of copyright. Moreover, had you actually paid attention to the reference, it quite clearly refutes your claim that the Copyright Act does not refer to the medium.
Shall we: "Ownership of a copyright, or of any of the exclusive rights under a copyright, is distinct from ownership of any material object in which the work is embodied."
This is not simply a copy. Ownership in the medium (the material object) is distinct from ownership of any of the exclusive rights (which may be conferred in a copy), and is in turn also distinct from the ownership of the copyright itself. Copyright and exclusive rights (partial copyright interests) are collectively the intellectual work. This is what I do.
Second: Not all permission is a license. Permission granted by law is typically NOT a license (except in the case of compulsory license), hence the common phrase "permitted by law or license".
All permission is indeed a license. A license is a promise not to sue. Entry into a shop involves a license--despite being granted by law. The common phrase you refer to does not speak to the line of division, and without getting into the metaphysics of law too deeply, the act of license is distinct from the manifestation of license. Problems tend to arise when people such as yourself conflate the two.
Compulsory license is a form of statutory license, but not the only form. Many statutory licenses are not compulsory.
Some personal use IS fair use (e.g. ripping songs to your MP3 player)
Again, you demonstrate a lack of appreciation for the development of copyright law in this country. Because the US lacks an explicit personal use exemption, the fair use doctrine has been overextended in some cases to cover certain personal use aspects. This is an idiosyncrasy of happenstance and not an accurate systemic appraisal, much like the industrial design omission.
Fair use is not limited to transformative uses, nor to artistic or informative purposes, though such uses are more likely to be judged "fair".
If you can point to a non-transformative, non-artistic, and non-informative fair use with an impact on the market that was still approved, I'd love to see it.
I think the point he was making is that all things being equal, you get a lot more travel per launch dollar with the ion/plasma engine.
Break it down into two stages: (I) get to orbit and (II) mill around in space. The launch vehicle will be able to lift the same amount of excess weight for stage II in either case (rocket or ion spacecraft), say 100,000 pounds.
Now, most of that 100,000 pounds can be wasted on propellant, as you point out in your first tradeoff analysis, meaning a smaller and crappier vehicle all around. Or, that "power supply problem" (in which "large and heavy" is still a fraction of the weight of the propellant from case A) allows for an all around larger, better-equipped vehicle.
The tradeoff is still (mostly) a no-brainer. It's not that the problem doesn't exist, it's that it doesn't have equal weight (pardon the pun) to the propellant problem of rockets.
To address your misunderstanding, we'll go in reverse.
You simply own a physical object, and can do with it as you wish, as long as you obey the restrictions set forth in the law. This is not a license,
Absolutely correct. You own a physical object. Ownership of a physical object does not confer any rights to anything but that physical object. You do not own any rights to the copyrighted work embedded in it.
You say a license is a grant of right. What rights are being granted?
The right of access to the copyrighted work--the second part of a copy (s. 101). The rights being granted comprise a set of rights collectively known as "use", which does not include the rights of ownership of the copyright, reproduction, distribution, derivation, public performance, and public display.
As far as I can see, all you get is some restrictions, and what you're allowed to do falls out implicitly as the inverse of those restrictions. Still no license in sight.
That's a license. What more are you expecting? "You can do what you want, except", "You can do these specific things", and "You can do these specific things, cannot do these specific things, and we can arrive at an agreement to do anything else" are all valid constructions.
So where is the license?
Right there in the Copyright Act, and in any other grants or agreements you make with the owner. Statutory license is a beautiful thing. The Copyright Act is a default, and you can build from there to modify it, subject to specific unwaivable limitations that cannot appear in a license agreement.
You're buying a physical object. You aren't buying a license, and you don't have any kind of license. (For the obvious proof of this, try to find the text of the license. You can't, because there isn't one.)
You're buying both, and your critical error is that a license has text. It does not. A license is not a document or an otherwise tangible thing. It is a grant of rights stemming from the owner of those rights to a user. Lack of text has no bearing on whether a license exists.
Second, the Copyright Act clearly spells out exactly what rights you do receive upon purchase: ownership of the medium, but zero ownership of the work (s. 202). You have no right to reproduce the work contained on the medium (s. 106), except as specifically permitted (i.e. licensed) by the Copyright Act (ss. 107-22), or as otherwise licensed to you by explicit grant or agreement (e.g. an SLA).
Making a copy for your friend, that gets a little fuzzy, but probably not fine. (Fair use is not very well defined.)
Absolutely not fine. There's nothing fuzzy about that. The AHRA permits the making of mix tapes and CDs for personal sharing with friends. You're allowed to let friends borrow your copy. You are not allowed to make a complete copy and then distribute that copy. Fair use doesn't enter into it at all, since all four fair use factors weigh solidly against it. As to the bounds of fair use, definition is rarely the problem. Fair use is the transformative incorporation of a portion of a work in a new work for a valid artistic or informative purpose. Fair use is not personal use. Personal use is a "fair" (in the colloquial sense) use, but it is not Fair Use.
but you're not free to do what you please with the physical object you're buying either.
Nonsense. You can do all of the things you can do with any other bit of plastic you own. But the bit of plastic isn't the valuable part, so it doesn't matter much. There's nothing you would want to do with the physical object that would be meaningful, though. "Ripping the DVD" isn't interacting with the physical object, it's extracting the copyrighted work contained therein, which you technically have no express right to do.
However, as a matter of personal, private use, you have a reasonable right to rip your own collection, provided that you do not make simultaneous use of the copy and do not, under any circumstances, share by distribution any of those copies, and that all digital copies are destroyed when ownership of the disc is lost, and that you can at all times prove lawful possession of a legal copy for every digital title in your possession. Staying within those limitations means that you will not be successfully sued; even deviating from them, as many do, makes it improbable that you'll make it to anyone's radar screen. Start a massive distribution network with hundreds or thousands of infringing works and trouble starts, as it rightly should.
US copyright law protects economic rights--that is the utilitarian incentive system. Don't interfere in or with the market and you're okay.
Efficiency drives price. The better the efficiency, the lower the price (all else equal).
All else is not equal. Overall efficiency is not the point made by GP--it was a comparison of thermal conversion between a heat pump and a resistive heating element, wholly out of place in the conversation since it is not a direct, even comparison, much less a comparison of the two methods in question here.
As far as I can tell, a gas-fired in-floor heating system is about the best you can do for whole house heating.
This DEPENDS ON WHERE YOU LIVE AND WHAT YOUR ENERGY PRICES ARE. Jesus. It's not that complicated. In many parts of the world, heated floors alone maintain a comfortable interior temperature at a fraction of the cost of heating the volume of any significant portion of a home's air volume. In many others, electricity is so much cheaper than natural gas that whole-house heating with electric floorboard radiators is cheaper than whole-house heating with a furnace.
There is no question that there are areas in which a gas furnace central heating system is the cheapest way to go. THIS IS NOT ALWAYS THE CASE.
When you freeze going to get a glass of water from the fridge in the middle of the night, it's not a loved system.
12-15 C is hardly freezing.
Why? Because only people making points on the Internet will claim to heat just their bedroom while the rest of their house drops below freezing overnight.
In order for any part of the house to drop below freezing, it must be colder than freezing outside.
Only people on the Internet will insist on seeing claims that aren't there in order to find an excuse to keep talking.
Yes, that is certainly an option, but it still does not necessarily imply that gas is the cheaper option. Even at the same price per unit, a high-output boiler connected to two rooms in a large plumbing run may not match the price/performance ratio of an installed electric fluid floorboard heater. It still very much depends on what your local price is and the various characteristics of your individual home.
I'm not mixing them. I'm comparing the typical use of each. Natural gas in the overwhelming majority of cases is a central heating unit, and most non-central installations are gas fireplaces, again the overwhelming majority of which are installed in living rooms. Electric radiator units, on the other hand, are almost all distributed systems, though central electric furnaces also exist.
In either case, this is why I said it depends.
2. You are advocating resistive heating as efficient.
No. I am simply presenting a contrary scenario to the suggestion that gas heating is uniformly cheaper.
Electric heaters (the real kind, not the absurdly wasteful heating pads you're referring to) circulate a liquid and operate in a very similar fashion to a heat pump (which is not a gas heating system at any rate, so I'm not sure why you're bringing it up), and are rather efficient.
Moreover, efficiency was never the stated criterion in the first place, so you are attempting to create an argument where none exists. Price was the criterion, and as I said, the use of installed floorboard electrical heaters may well be cheaper than the use of a natural gas heating system.
Slashdot Mirror
Mix tapes are not piracy and in fact are expressly authorized under United States law.
Moreover, there is no conflation, because your conclusion that copyright infringement is "benign" is not falsifiable and thus begs the question. Copyright infringement is not benign. It is unlawful, and it is so for myriad good reasons. That said, personal use should not be considered infringement (though at the moment, some forms of it are), and the RIAA comprises little more than a bunch of asshats who give a bad name to all the honest and hardworking copyright owners in the world.
O RLY?
"The unauthorized reproduction of another's work." -- Oxford English Dictionary (2006).
"The unauthorized and illegal reproduction or distribution of materials protected by copyright, patent, or trademark law." --Black's Law Dictionary, 8th Ed. (2004).
Lest you think this is some modern invention:
"[T]he test of piracy [is] not whether the identical language, the same words, are used, but whether the substance of the production is unlawfully appropriated." --Drone's Treatise on the Law of Property in Intellectual Productions (1879).
"It's being Printed again and again, by Pyrates" --Daniel Defoe, (1703).
"Pirated works may be seized on importation into those countries of the Union where the original work enjoys legal protection." --Berne Convention Art. 12 (1886).
It has been referred to as piracy in court cases dating all the way back to the 1830s, and notably for scholars of copyright, used in the landmark Folsom decision as well.
PR isn't a court, and regardless, it still does not contradict the parent post, so again I ask, what exactly do you think you were correcting in the parent to your original post?
Criminal copyright infringement is indeed pursued by the RIAA; that does not mean every suit the RIAA members file is a criminal suit. All of the filesharing cases against private individuals have been civil suits. In any event, the parent to your original post remains correct.
Illegal != criminal. 'Illegal' means contrary to law. Criminal law is just one kind of law.
Wrong, they claim that it is criminal copyright violation under Title 17 Sections 501 and 506.
You are not contradicting the parent post. What is the purpose of your inclusion of the word "wrong"?
Illegal != criminal. Illegal = contrary to the law.
Copyright infringement is both a civil and a criminal matter, but the RIAA's flimsy lawsuits would never survive criminal proceedings based on MediaSentry. RIAA companies frequently file successful criminal cases, but very rarely against private individuals, and not at all against the MediaSentry victims.
I'm afraid I can't help you there. It's pretty clear from within the App Store itself if they'd looked, where the ad says "iTunes Gift Cards. Give music, movies, apps, and more." But people are less than observant.
They didn't. The App Store is part of the iTunes Store. iTunes gift cards work just fine.
So it's now not up to the system to prove that they've got the right person, but to anyone caught randomly close with the same name now has to come out and yell up and and down "it's not me, it's not me." and hope that the system is sane in their case?
No. "Randomly close with the same name" is not random. You were the one that introduced the problem of ten on the same street, with the idiotic assumption that name and street address are the only factors used.
Your continued ignorance of this issue is tiresome. I'll ask simply, what is wrong with making every possible attempt at service? Is that not considered diligent? Perhaps you are also ignorant of the fact that the next stop after email service is service by publication. Why should they be prohibited from trying anything that might possibly work, having failed through conventional means, prior to the newspaper publication?
You seem to be upset about something you simply do not understand. You have an obligation, when you participate in society, to be able to be contacted by your obligors and government officials. If you make a deliberate choice to go off the radar, you are either taking a calculated risk with that known consequence, or you are intentionally trying not to be found (in which case the notice function of service is not necessary, because you are willfully hiding from it and therefore know about it). If you are forced to be inaccessible for a period of time, you can take steps when you come back to prove that and have the defaults lifted, or if you believe you were never notified, you can view the records of the contact attempts.
Where is the problem?
I don't know about you, but I've never seen a blank for e-mail address at anywhere other than at an ISP. All you really have circumstantial evidence not actual evidence that they may match up.
You're either joking or completely disconnected. All credit applications, car loans, mortgage packages, banks, and most monthly service providers (cable, ISP, cell phone, utilities) ask for an email contact when you sign up. It is usually optional, but it is hardly circumstantial. Again, were you actually reading, you would also know that a work or verifiable personal email address (as obtained through a friend or family member in recent contact) is used. And again, credit references supplied can be used to verify this information.
Um, sounds like it should be trivial for the bank/lending institution to get the house/property back and have the police arrest the squatters. Though in practice it turns out to be difficult.
Yes, because eviction is a legal action that requires service!
I'd be more upset at the system that allowed that rather than the individual that evaded being called up by the system. The thing is that process server is supposed to make sure that the right people get the papers. Think of 3-5 people with the same name living on the same street with only the address numbers being slightly different. I doubt that happens too much in the physical world, but it would be much easier to happen online.
An argument from ignorance. Those 3-5 people would have other distinguishing characteristics, and if they could not be satisfactorily identified, then they would all be contacted. The wrong person would simply have to submit proof that they got the wrong person.
It is not as though it's a bare email address with no context. It would be an email address reported on a credit application, a bank, or confirmed by an employer. There is no address book of email addresses, so the only way to get an email address for a person is to have some verifiable real-world link to them, or to have extensive circumstantial evidence.
Well, calling people on the phone/cell or e-mailing them is easy. It's difficult to actually verify if the person that you've contacted is the person that you actually should be talking to though.
No it isn't. If they're the wrong person, they'll tell you and you can take steps to verify it.
It sounds like this lawyer didn't even have a current address. I'm sorry, but this doesn't sound like it should be valid at all.
RTFA. They defaulted on their house payments, and multiple attempts were made to contact them at home, by telephone, and by email. Again, you don't get yourself off the hook simply by refusing to open your door.
And he left no way for anyone to get in touch with him? If so, then those are the consequences. If you have obligations, disappearing makes it impossible for anyone to help you.
For the record - I don't think anything other than in person should be a legal way to serve, but email is not superior to Facebook.
Why?
Personal service is preferred, and process servers go to extreme and often comical lengths to put the paper in your hand, but some people refuse to accept service. Should you have to continue a manhunt for a year, at a cost of tens of thousands of dollars, in order to exercise your legal rights? How would you feel if someone potentially owed you thousands or millions of dollars and you couldn't get it because they wouldn't open the door?
Like all forms of service other than personal service, it's a last resort after a documented showing of diligence. At some point, you're intentionally avoiding being served, because letters and messages have been left for you, and if that's the case, the notice function of service has been fulfilled. Like everything else in law, it's a balancing of competing needs. You also always have the opportunity to fight a default judgment if you can legitimately demonstrate that the dozens of attempted services were missed because you were actually, truly not available.
As you can imagine, the chances of you disappearing from society and leaving no trace of how to contact you with employers, neighbors, family, and friends is fairly small...unless you're running from something.
You'd think that if I knew that, then I'd put in a disclaimer like "all else being equal." Oh wait, I did. So that makes you the moron, not me.
You'd think if you knew that, you wouldn't have wasted time on it at all, since it has no relevance to anything. But clearly now that we're bandying "moron" and "pro-electric" and moving the goalposts to "places in the US" (where natural gas is among the cheapest in the world), you're simply trolling.
Since you're clearly asking for an illustration of your ignorance, the US average residential price for natural gas is ~$13.85/Mcf or ~$1.40/therm. One therm is ~29.3 kWh. Take a typical furnace/boiler, at 85,000 btuh or 0.85 therms per hour, or $1.20 an hour (same as running five 2000W electric fluid radiant heaters or more than six of the more typical 1500W units). Price varies, even across the US, from $10 to over $18/Mcf, and about $1 to $2 per therm. Again, remember US prices natural gas prices are low. In many other countries, prices can exceed US$4 per therm.
Average US price per kWh: 12.1 cents, or about $3.55/therm, but you can't make a direct comparison, because using all electric heating in places where this is uncommon kicks you into a higher rate for exceeding baseline. On the other hand, 29.3kWh is more than 19 1500W electric fluid radiant heaters, which is several more than a typical home would require. Operating 10, 2000W fluid radiant heaters (still more than would be in simultaneous use in a typical home, but let's overshoot to be sure of whole-home heating): 20kWh or $2.42 at average baseline (places where electricity is cheap and plentiful--supplied by nuclear or hydro). If electricity is expensive or you have aggressive baselines, it might cost significantly more than that (up to $4). US electricity prices vary from 7 to 18 cents per kWh, so the low end electricity prices overlap with the high end of gas prices in this country, to say nothing of the remaining 95% of the world's population.
If you travel to Vancouver, BC or many European, Middle Eastern, and Asian countries, you see the use of electric fluid radiant heat--electricity is cheap and plentiful; natural gas is expensive and rare. It is not hard to see that a region with less expensive electricity ($2 per therm or below) and comparatively expensive natural gas ($2/therm and up) would be better served with electric heat. Even at parity, your three zone system (relatively unusual) does not compete with the per-room granularity of a typical electric system, especially if the entire house does not need to be artificially heated to pass 50F. Moreover, radiators of any kind placed near windows can solve the draft cooling problem, allowing less use of the heating system in general--meaning that thermostats can be set lower. With the exception of steam radiators (fairly uncommon in most of the world outside of Old World cities), most gas systems don't address this problem and compensate by brute force.
How you can make the leap from "it depends" to "you're pro-electric" is as idiotic as your myopic scope of comparison. There are plenty of instances where gas heating is cheaper, and that includes most of the US. But it is far from universal.
But I have no rights beyond what simple possession allows.
Simple possession confers no rights to the work. That's the entire problem.
Same end result, and whether this ephemeral license actually exists doesn't seem very important.
On the contrary, it's a critical distinction. You have absolutely no rights in the work if there is no license, either statutory or actual. Acquiring possession of the object expressly excludes any right of any kind in the work. Simple possession of, say, a DVD, is worth about $1 for the disc and packaging. The owner must transfer rights to you in order for you to have any. Those usage rights, your interest in the work, are what accounts for the other $14 or so of the DVD.
The manufacturer of the DVD can give you ownership of the DVD, but can't give you any interest of any kind in a copyrighted work. For that, you need authorization from the copyright owner. That authorization may be provided various ways, and once you get to that point, you're right that the effect is the same regardless of what one calls the function of statutory authorization.
I sure hope you are lying about doing this stuff for a living. From 17 USC 101
Please refer to the canons of statutory construction. 202 refers to the material object, and not to the copy, for a very specific reason: the attempted conflation you present. Ownership of the material object does not confer any rights in the work. Ownership of the copy does confer rights in the work, because the copy is the material object as well as the granted usage rights.
It is indeed basic stuff, and you haven't got it. The statement that ownership of a copy does not confer rights would be nonsensical and directly contradictory.
Since, in fact, there are fair uses which have none of those factors
Again, I press you for an example.
The Betamax decision is, as legal scholars have pointed out for nearly 30 years, correct in outcome but faulty in reasoning. It went under fair use, and is the only such exception, only because there was no other place to put it at the time. The concept of "personal" use had not yet developed, and because the prima facie infringement case had been made, the only avenue of precedent was the fair use doctrine. It has not been extended since, nor has any fair use case made an argument to set aside the above four factor test. This is further borne out in the copyright laws of other legal systems, which do recognize a personal use doctrine and accordingly are more permissive.
This glaring omission must be corrected if actual personal use rights are ever to become codified in the United States. It does not fit under 107, which is strained to find a constitutional basis for use clearly outside the operative zone for the doctrine. This, to borrow a term from Nimmer, is not sustainable. Fair use is not personal use, and it cannot be shoehorned in with any semblance of congruence or adequacy. Instead, we must press for a personal use exemption to correct these problems and bring US law in line with the rest of the world.
space shifting have been held to be fair use
Actually, if you refer to the language of the cases in which it has been upheld (a minority, it's worth noting), you see that the operative language is "noncommercial personal use". In nearly all cases where space shifting has been proposed as a 107 fair use, it has been rejected, and duly so.
And? You acquire rights to a copy of a particular piece of media via transfer of ownership.
No. You acquire rights to a material object via transfer of ownership. You acquire rights to the work via transfer of license. You have no ownership in the work itself or the copyright.
You own that copy and can use it within the limits of the law.
Yes, because ownership of a copy is ownership of the physical medium and permission to use (license) of the set of non-exclusive rights in the work.
It is not a non sequitur. The post I originally responded to asked, "Do I pay for a license for the movie/album/etc. meaning I can get a replacement copy for just the production costs of the disc if it breaks or a new format is introduced ?"
Again, the two are not exclusive of one another. Paying for a license does not imply a replacement copy. You are accepting the premise of the question and arguing that it is not a license because you don't get a replacement and there is no text document. Neither of these evince a license or a lack thereof.
Ripping a DVD is exactly interacting with a physical object.
Not in any appreciable sense--you're not after the parts and pieces, you're after the intangible expression embodied in it. Your interest has nothing to do with the object, in other words.
Taken to pedantic extremism, anything is problematic--photons emitted by your cat down the street would be trespassing on Mr. Jones' property. Thoughts are the product of the electrical impulses of the brain and thus physical. Speech, as a propagation of a mechanical process producing measurable, physical shock waves in a medium, becomes tangible.
My problem is that it becomes increasingly legal for copyright holders to break my stuff and keep secrets from me
A problem in search of harm, really, since it's their stuff you're trying to get. They're just increasingly disinclined to give as much as they did in the past, having, in their view, suffered for it. They're entitled to the secrets, as you're entitled to yours when you produce something.
becomes increasingly illegal for me to tell people various numbers
A bold reductionist argument that has relatively little to do with reality. There is no meaningful expression blocked by those "various numbers". Perhaps more to the point, it is simply impossible for anyone to be in a position to store and recite all of the "numbers" and have someone receive them and comprehend. 'Increasingly' also implies a vector not borne out by historical example. It is not as though you had an expressive purpose to the mechanized reproduction.
You're calling the implicit rights granted by copyright law a "license", and I'm calling the lack of an explicit piece of paper from the copyright holder "not a license". Same thing in the end.
No. A lack of a piece of paper is not evidence of the lack of license. A piece of paper is the memorialization of a license, license agreement, or other contract. Just as the lack of a signed form is not evidence of the lack of a contract, lack of a form is not evidence of a lack of license.
Illustrated another way, there are two ways to acquire rights in something you do not currently possess: (1) transfer of ownership and (2) transfer of license. There is no other way.
You can be assigned ownership by the operation of purely statutory law (e.g. intestate succession, adverse possession). You can be assigned license by the operation of purely statutory law (e.g. permission to enter public spaces, purchasing a copy). You can also be assigned ownership/license by simple grant (e.g. a will, donation). You can also be assigned ownership/license by contract (e.g. a sales contract, license agreement).
there is no right to obtain a second copy "at cost" if your first one gets destroyed
A non sequitur. There is never any such guaranteed right. As with anything you take possession of, you are responsible for it. If it is destroyed, and there is no provision for replacement/insurance/discount, and you simply have to repurchase it. Whether this is because of the value of the physical components or the value of its intellectual components does not matter.
The value of a copy, like any other object, is the sum of its physical parts and the value of its intellectual property. If the copy is destroyed, you must repurchase the entirety. If only the material object is destroyed, then you may replace that material object without falling afoul of the law.
Given that 17 USC 202 -- the very section you cited -- says that transfer of ownership of a copy does not confer a copyright interest, that's an extraordinary claim.
No, it says that transfer of a material object does not. A material object is not itself a copy.
Odd, then, that the language of Title 17 treats the work and the copyright in the work as separate things.
It's not odd. The work is an intellectual product of its creator. The copyright is the property in that creation. Just as legal "ownership of land" is really "ownership in the legal property coterminous with that land", legal ownership of a work is ownership in the legal property coterminous with that work.
If so, I feel sorry for your clients.
They certainly don't.
A license is certainly distinct from a promise not to sue.
No it isn't. A legally binding promise not to sue is a license at its most fundamental. This is really elementary stuff.
Whether you think it has been "overextended" or not, it has been so extended.
This does not make personal use fair use. An idiosyncratic extension of a personal use right into the doctrine does not incorporate the two. It is entirely possible for a particular act to be both personal use and fair use, but personal use is not fair use, and further extension has been repeatedly and consistently rejected, both by the Copyright Office and by the courts.
Ah, no moving the goalposts. You said that fair use had to be transformative AND that it had to be incorporation of a portion of a work into a new work AND that it had to be for artistic or informative purposes.
No. If you'll recall, I said that fair use is "the transformative incorporation of a portion of a work in a new work for a valid artistic or informative purpose". At no point does that suggest a threshold level for any particular factor in consideration, nor does it suggest or deny the presence of exceptions. As the factors for fair use are a balancing test, varying levels of each spill over to require varying levels of the others. Again, if you can assert a use that is not sufficiently compelling in any of those factors, I'd like to see it. Further, if you'd like to proffer an alternative sentence that captures the salient factors in 20 words or less, I'd be happy to point out the myriad conceptual problems with your general overview.
There's also the case of "reproduction by a library of a portion of a work to replace part of a damaged copy" (mentioned by the Copyright Office in its discussion of fair use)
An informative purpose.
Come now.
Wrong, as usual.
No, as usual.
The Copyright Act does not refer to ownership of the work, nor of the medium. It refers to ownership of the _copyright_ in the work, and ownership of a copy of the work.
Talking about ownership in the copyright tends to lead to lay confusion, since ownership of a copy does confer a copyright interest. The "work" is the subject of copyright. Moreover, had you actually paid attention to the reference, it quite clearly refutes your claim that the Copyright Act does not refer to the medium.
Shall we:
"Ownership of a copyright, or of any of the exclusive rights under a copyright, is distinct from ownership of any material object in which the work is embodied."
This is not simply a copy. Ownership in the medium (the material object) is distinct from ownership of any of the exclusive rights (which may be conferred in a copy), and is in turn also distinct from the ownership of the copyright itself. Copyright and exclusive rights (partial copyright interests) are collectively the intellectual work. This is what I do.
Second: Not all permission is a license. Permission granted by law is typically NOT a license (except in the case of compulsory license), hence the common phrase "permitted by law or license".
All permission is indeed a license. A license is a promise not to sue. Entry into a shop involves a license--despite being granted by law. The common phrase you refer to does not speak to the line of division, and without getting into the metaphysics of law too deeply, the act of license is distinct from the manifestation of license. Problems tend to arise when people such as yourself conflate the two.
Compulsory license is a form of statutory license, but not the only form. Many statutory licenses are not compulsory.
Some personal use IS fair use (e.g. ripping songs to your MP3 player)
Again, you demonstrate a lack of appreciation for the development of copyright law in this country. Because the US lacks an explicit personal use exemption, the fair use doctrine has been overextended in some cases to cover certain personal use aspects. This is an idiosyncrasy of happenstance and not an accurate systemic appraisal, much like the industrial design omission.
Fair use is not limited to transformative uses, nor to artistic or informative purposes, though such uses are more likely to be judged "fair".
If you can point to a non-transformative, non-artistic, and non-informative fair use with an impact on the market that was still approved, I'd love to see it.
I think the point he was making is that all things being equal, you get a lot more travel per launch dollar with the ion/plasma engine.
Break it down into two stages: (I) get to orbit and (II) mill around in space. The launch vehicle will be able to lift the same amount of excess weight for stage II in either case (rocket or ion spacecraft), say 100,000 pounds.
Now, most of that 100,000 pounds can be wasted on propellant, as you point out in your first tradeoff analysis, meaning a smaller and crappier vehicle all around. Or, that "power supply problem" (in which "large and heavy" is still a fraction of the weight of the propellant from case A) allows for an all around larger, better-equipped vehicle.
The tradeoff is still (mostly) a no-brainer. It's not that the problem doesn't exist, it's that it doesn't have equal weight (pardon the pun) to the propellant problem of rockets.
To address your misunderstanding, we'll go in reverse.
You simply own a physical object, and can do with it as you wish, as long as you obey the restrictions set forth in the law. This is not a license,
Absolutely correct. You own a physical object. Ownership of a physical object does not confer any rights to anything but that physical object. You do not own any rights to the copyrighted work embedded in it.
You say a license is a grant of right. What rights are being granted?
The right of access to the copyrighted work--the second part of a copy (s. 101). The rights being granted comprise a set of rights collectively known as "use", which does not include the rights of ownership of the copyright, reproduction, distribution, derivation, public performance, and public display.
As far as I can see, all you get is some restrictions, and what you're allowed to do falls out implicitly as the inverse of those restrictions. Still no license in sight.
That's a license. What more are you expecting? "You can do what you want, except", "You can do these specific things", and "You can do these specific things, cannot do these specific things, and we can arrive at an agreement to do anything else" are all valid constructions.
So where is the license?
Right there in the Copyright Act, and in any other grants or agreements you make with the owner. Statutory license is a beautiful thing. The Copyright Act is a default, and you can build from there to modify it, subject to specific unwaivable limitations that cannot appear in a license agreement.
You're buying a physical object. You aren't buying a license, and you don't have any kind of license. (For the obvious proof of this, try to find the text of the license. You can't, because there isn't one.)
You're buying both, and your critical error is that a license has text. It does not. A license is not a document or an otherwise tangible thing. It is a grant of rights stemming from the owner of those rights to a user. Lack of text has no bearing on whether a license exists.
Second, the Copyright Act clearly spells out exactly what rights you do receive upon purchase: ownership of the medium, but zero ownership of the work (s. 202). You have no right to reproduce the work contained on the medium (s. 106), except as specifically permitted (i.e. licensed) by the Copyright Act (ss. 107-22), or as otherwise licensed to you by explicit grant or agreement (e.g. an SLA).
Making a copy for your friend, that gets a little fuzzy, but probably not fine. (Fair use is not very well defined.)
Absolutely not fine. There's nothing fuzzy about that. The AHRA permits the making of mix tapes and CDs for personal sharing with friends. You're allowed to let friends borrow your copy. You are not allowed to make a complete copy and then distribute that copy. Fair use doesn't enter into it at all, since all four fair use factors weigh solidly against it. As to the bounds of fair use, definition is rarely the problem. Fair use is the transformative incorporation of a portion of a work in a new work for a valid artistic or informative purpose. Fair use is not personal use. Personal use is a "fair" (in the colloquial sense) use, but it is not Fair Use.
but you're not free to do what you please with the physical object you're buying either.
Nonsense. You can do all of the things you can do with any other bit of plastic you own. But the bit of plastic isn't the valuable part, so it doesn't matter much. There's nothing you would want to do with the physical object that would be meaningful, though. "Ripping the DVD" isn't interacting with the physical object, it's extracting the copyrighted work contained therein, which you technically have no express right to do.
However, as a matter of personal, private use, you have a reasonable right to rip your own collection, provided that you do not make simultaneous use of the copy and do not, under any circumstances, share by distribution any of those copies, and that all digital copies are destroyed when ownership of the disc is lost, and that you can at all times prove lawful possession of a legal copy for every digital title in your possession. Staying within those limitations means that you will not be successfully sued; even deviating from them, as many do, makes it improbable that you'll make it to anyone's radar screen. Start a massive distribution network with hundreds or thousands of infringing works and trouble starts, as it rightly should.
US copyright law protects economic rights--that is the utilitarian incentive system. Don't interfere in or with the market and you're okay.
Exactly why I said, once again, it depends .
Efficiency drives price. The better the efficiency, the lower the price (all else equal).
All else is not equal. Overall efficiency is not the point made by GP--it was a comparison of thermal conversion between a heat pump and a resistive heating element, wholly out of place in the conversation since it is not a direct, even comparison, much less a comparison of the two methods in question here.
As far as I can tell, a gas-fired in-floor heating system is about the best you can do for whole house heating.
This DEPENDS ON WHERE YOU LIVE AND WHAT YOUR ENERGY PRICES ARE. Jesus. It's not that complicated. In many parts of the world, heated floors alone maintain a comfortable interior temperature at a fraction of the cost of heating the volume of any significant portion of a home's air volume. In many others, electricity is so much cheaper than natural gas that whole-house heating with electric floorboard radiators is cheaper than whole-house heating with a furnace.
There is no question that there are areas in which a gas furnace central heating system is the cheapest way to go. THIS IS NOT ALWAYS THE CASE.
When you freeze going to get a glass of water from the fridge in the middle of the night, it's not a loved system.
12-15 C is hardly freezing.
Why? Because only people making points on the Internet will claim to heat just their bedroom while the rest of their house drops below freezing overnight.
In order for any part of the house to drop below freezing, it must be colder than freezing outside.
Only people on the Internet will insist on seeing claims that aren't there in order to find an excuse to keep talking.
Yes, that is certainly an option, but it still does not necessarily imply that gas is the cheaper option. Even at the same price per unit, a high-output boiler connected to two rooms in a large plumbing run may not match the price/performance ratio of an installed electric fluid floorboard heater. It still very much depends on what your local price is and the various characteristics of your individual home.
1. You mix using gas with whole-house heating.
I'm not mixing them. I'm comparing the typical use of each. Natural gas in the overwhelming majority of cases is a central heating unit, and most non-central installations are gas fireplaces, again the overwhelming majority of which are installed in living rooms. Electric radiator units, on the other hand, are almost all distributed systems, though central electric furnaces also exist.
In either case, this is why I said it depends.
2. You are advocating resistive heating as efficient.
No. I am simply presenting a contrary scenario to the suggestion that gas heating is uniformly cheaper.
Electric heaters (the real kind, not the absurdly wasteful heating pads you're referring to) circulate a liquid and operate in a very similar fashion to a heat pump (which is not a gas heating system at any rate, so I'm not sure why you're bringing it up), and are rather efficient.
Moreover, efficiency was never the stated criterion in the first place, so you are attempting to create an argument where none exists. Price was the criterion, and as I said, the use of installed floorboard electrical heaters may well be cheaper than the use of a natural gas heating system.