Not exactly. The thickness of the case and its overall height are 2x and 1x a VHS tape. The depth of the case is governed by the diameter of the disc, and the result is a form that isn't easily pocketed.
The specific dimensions of the standard case are anything but an afterthought. That's not to say that one of the objectives wasn't loss prevention, but they could have been made "slightly too large" in a variety of ways.
The "16 million" or "16.2 million" are a result of dithering. It is therefore not related to binary powers directly--that's just per pixel depth. Dithering involves either spatial methods (e.g. "nearest neighbor") or temporal methods (changing a pixel's colors every x ms to alternate between shades, producing in effect a "new" color). Some displays use a combination of both.
You have 6-bit subpixels, for 262,144 colors. You then have dithering, which is a linear multiplier, because each of those 262,144 colors can be changed x number of times per "frame" (per response cycle, roughly speaking) or it can be combined in a pattern.
In the case of dithering, most methods can produce roughly 50-60 variations through combination of two or more of the 262,144 colors on the display (which gets you to about 16 million colors--what the exact methodology for "16.2M" is, I do not know). The math is complicated because simply combining two pixels does not ALWAYS produce a color that is outside those that already exist. For example, alternating between color A and color B will produce "effective color C" but that color might already be in the 262K inventory.
That's a bitter definition with a fatal flaw: the public isn't forced to consume from those who offer distasteful copyright terms.
I don't disagree that many copyright holders are beyond greedy and that their behavior is unacceptable from my personal perspective. However, it is their content and they should have the legal authority to do with it as they see fit. People here treat copyright law as though it's some inescapable black hole in some all-or-nothing battle to the death. You, as a content creator, do not have to offer draconian terms to your customers. My clients certainly don't. You, as a consumer, don't have to pay those distasteful individuals for terms that you dislike. I know I won't buy an CDs with copy protection and I won't buy anything Sony Media ever again.
The various forms of licensing available form a pretty comprehensive continuum of options. Not everyone offers the ideal combination of license type and content, but that's life. They created it, financed it, and decided to share it in a limited capacity. I can't find fault with that.
The reason these "bad copyright holders" succeed is because the general population is willing to admit, by the simplest of market gestures, that they find the terms acceptable for the price. This isn't a utility company gouging poor families in the desert on their water bill. It's an entertainment service financing the production of some content and then choosing to sell it under restrictive, but fully legal, terms. The simple solution is just not to buy it.
What I think is most interesting here on Slashdot is that people seem to be more angry that these companies are successful at selling to the public, and there aren't enough people who don't like the terms to have an effect. People aren't stupid, though, and except for some of the worst kind of DRM cockups, everything works perfectly as it was sold to them. There's nothing terribly wrong with that. I'm not saying you're in that camp, but I just find that "just don't buy it" is the perfect solution, but people get upset anyway--must be two conflicting desires.
You don't have to sue. That is merely one of your options for the exercise of your fair use rights. The financial burden is minimal--the process is simple and relatively straightforward. If you have an actual fair use defense, have been rebuffed in your attempts to obtain a DRM-free copy, it's basically a straight shot.
Your "time burden" is unimportant. It's usually faster and cheaper to do something the illegal way--that's why people put effort into stopping illegal acts (if it cost more and took more time, there wouldn't be any criminals). Just as the Library of Congress states, if it's impractical to obtain permission in advance, just be sure that your use is truly defensible in a fair use context.
The physical product has never been the primary component of the sales price. The license occupies the bulk of the price--cost savings by dropping the physical medium are essentially irrelevant to the industry, and certainly irrelevant to the Copyright office. The labels could claim that they're included the disc at no charge with the license of the content (n.b. "no charge" does not mean "no cost").
I would also disagree that format restrictions violate the spirit of copyright law. Copyright law has traditionally had format restrictions as a de facto reality of technology. Now that technology has advanced to allow for this potential effortlessly, they have continued in their traditional approach of maintaining platform separation. That's the spirit as they see it. I have never seen anything in copyright law that has ever exhibited a "spirit" of "do whatever you want with the property of others." Copyright is nothing more or less than a secured method of transfer designed to encourage sharing of the arts with the public (and that sharing is only an effective mechanism if it includes controls and restrictions--it's not "sharing" if one party has no responsibility to the other; that would be "gifting").
You can't compare with the per-track price of an album, because albums have inconsistent numbers and lengths of tracks, and the bulk discount mentality of an album applies. You don't have to imagine what the per-track price is, because it's clear that the labels have chosen to sell the singles at a high markup, as is their choice to make. Individual downloads tend to cost less than the per-track MSRP of the album--the labels simply have greater control over the pricing of online stores as opposed to retailers of CDs.
I thought we were talking about this particular video and whether or not it was a permissible violation of the DMCA. It is.
If you want to talk about copy protection and fair use generally, here's the story: your noninfringing fair use rights are guaranteed. If you cannot achieve those rights without bypassing copy protection, you are legally entitled to bypass it if you follow the appropriate steps. The DMCA is a component of Title 17--fair use rights apply to ALL works. You have three basic avenues for defense of this right: 1) obtain written permission to use the copyrighted material (the way we used to do things) 2) include a license disclosure indicating how your use of the material is considered fair use and no free alternative exists (a la Wikipedia--this will help cover your ass as long as your usage actually IS fair use). 3) sue preemptively for a court order granting you access to the material in a DRM-free format or for official authorization to use a DVD ripping tool.
In any case, your right to the material is not altered by the copy protection provisions. Your path to the material might well be different--but what people seem to forget is that once upon a time, if you wanted quality footage, you had to get it from the copyright holder. That changed with DVD, and suddenly everyone expected to be able to use that cinema-quality information directly. The exemptions for parody and criticism are GUARANTEED as fair use exemptions to copyright law, and that INCLUDES works protected by DRM or other means. The use of an illegal tool to achieve those rights is a separate question, and it's not on topic for this video. However, you would be hard-pressed to find a court case where a clear fair use right was cast aside in favor of upholding CSS protection on a DVD, as fair use specifies a scenario in which copyright protections do not apply, and the "DRM" provision ONLY applies to works so protected.
Right. And if you follow the trail to the Copyright website where the Librarian publishes those exemptions as per that section, you see number 1:
"1. Audiovisual works included in the educational library of a college or university's film or media studies department, when circumvention is accomplished for the purpose of making compilations of portions of those works for educational use in the classroom by media studies or film professors."
You asked for where in the US Code the authority for said exemptions were granted, not where the exemption was explicitly named.
PS - the "pseudo-fair use" I referred to is the overly broad and permissive definition that Slashdotters tend to use. For example, Linux DVD playback, which is not covered by fair use. In the DMCA revision committee, it was specifically discussed and dismissed because there ARE legal Linux DVD players--they're just proprietary software a la Adobe Flash player, etc. Pseudo-fair use is also "breaking encryption to format shift" which is specifically disallowed since digital media is distributed for specific platforms and is not licensed universally. The copy protection on those files is a direct component of the low price (and yes it is low, compared to what people were paying per-track for album singles in decades past [adjusted for inflation, of course]), and as such, format-shifting where there are specific prohibitions tied to the content license is NOT fair use in any courtroom in this country.
"The prohibition contained in subparagraph (A) SHALL NOT APPLY to persons who are users of a copyrighted work which is in a particular class of works, if such persons are, or are likely to be in the succeeding 3-year period, ADVERSELY AFFECTED by virtue of such prohibition in their ability to make NONINFRINGING uses of that particular class of works under this title, as determined under subparagraph (C)" (emphasis added)
where 17 US 1201 (a)(C) contains a juridical test including such factors as: "...(ii) the availability for use of works for nonprofit archival, preservation, and educational purposes; (iii) the impact that the prohibition on the circumvention of technological measures applied to copyrighted works has on criticism, comment, news reporting, teaching, scholarship, or research..."
In other words, if the appropriate copyright-protected sections are not made available in another form for these purposes, the prohibition on bypassing the security system does not apply (limited solely to that material for that single use; no storage of "cracked" protected content is permissable outside the final form used for criticism, teaching, and scholarship).
I'm not citing Wikipedia. I'm citing the US Code. The use of this material is not a copyright violation. As I said, whether or not copy protection was circumvented via an illegal method is not known. There are legal methods of obtaining such short sections for parody and educational use. The law as construed cannot be used against you. The mere existence of said clips in said configuration is fair use. Without additional data to prove that the clips were obtained through illegal circumvention, there is nothing here to say that there is an issue.
You are permitted to use the clips in this capacity per section 107. You are permitted to break encryption to access software content if there is no legal means of doing so while preserving said encryption per chapter 12 (primarily infra 17 USC 1201). Anti-circumvention does not trump fair use. The reason it appears so is because most of the uses Slashdot users wish to call "fair use" are, in fact, utterly lacking in legal precedent. Anti-circumvention certainly trumps pseudo-fair use, but exceptions to copyright law for fair use are spelled out in chapter 1; the DMCA is integral to copyright law and thus subordinate to the provisions of chapter 1.
"The DMCA" isn't a statutory law. It is a set of amendments and insertions to Title 17 of the US Code. Exemptions and exceptions to copy protection measures are referenced at Title 17, s. 1201 (a)(1) et seq. and (d)(1). Whether these clips were obtained via breaking DVD encryption through an illegal means has not been determined. My only point is that there are exceptions allowed to break copy protection where necessary for specifically authorized purposes (simply obtaining clips is not categorically one of them). See also copyright.gov for the recent added exemptions to the DMCA.
It doesn't matter because the DMCA itself includes exceptions for non-profit and educational purposes, not to mention that as part of Title 17 it is subject to fair use exceptions.
The difference being that it actually fits the four-prong test for fair use, unlike most of what the Slashdot crowd claims is fair use (and actually is not).
You obviously didn't finish reading. The work of your own hands is the only form of natural ownership. The only reason you have any rights to what your ancestor did is because we as a society place value on that, and the government backs up your right to maintain control of that work through estate law.
In terms of natural rights, yes, I have every right you do to that dead guy's statue. He's dead, and he's the creator/owner, so it's up for grabs to a new owner. You'd have a better chance of maintaining control than I, given your proximity to the deceased and the ability to assume control with less effort, but the only reason you have automatic legal ownership of that statue is because of societal values expressed via law.
Inheritance is once again just an endorsed transfer of control, like a sale.
Intellectual property is inexhaustible. With the exception of this one loon, no one wants perpetual copyright. So IP lapses, and of course truly derivative works are often protectable unto themselves. If you want to create something based on Harry Potter, you're free to do so, but it's unnecessary for you to use someone else's characters still under copyright. You can, of course, use the characters in a parody or in combination with other characters. As long as you don't present your story as an "official" continuation of the author's series, you're basically in the clear.
If you really think your water rights in Texas aren't affected by use in Idaho or Vancouver, you have a narrow view of the big picture. Look no further than the four or five states that are constantly suing California over its overconsumption of its share for a concrete example.
You were going strong until the last paragraph. Intellectual Property doesn't presume to constrain thought or knowledge, which is something the anti-IP side likes to build into a straw man and the pro-IP side tends to be too intellectually lazy to address (oh, the irony).
IP is merely about control for the sake of business and profit. It is exactly the same as the fundamental example of real property--land. No one actually has the authority to assume ownership of part of the planet. You are not any more or less entitled to a rock on the side of the river than any other creature, human or otherwise, on this earth. However, power to control has been ceded to the government as a society. Owning land is nothing more or less than a government-supported right of control. Intellectual property is simply the right to control mental real estate. The only natural "ownership" that exists is what you yourself produce. Everything else is just a transferred right of control.
I could not possibly care less about criticisms of Star Trek. I simply assumed, perhaps incorrectly, that you were some 80s baby who didn't know that the science words came first, and that it's not a bunch of geeky scientists sitting around and naming things after random crap uttered by actors.
I imagined you were joking, but this being Slashdot, I erred on the side of idiocy.
You shouldn't need to look at the keyboard while TYPING.
Keyboards are about far more than typing, though. Just think about games--I don't usually get too far into games anymore because I don't want to spend half an hour memorizing the keys. A game is supposed to be fun. If I can look down and see what each key does, I can start playing immediately. The keyboard could be switched out of text mode to allow me to eliminate on screen palettes and toolbars in Photoshop. It can show users what keys do in iTunes or GarageBand. Hell, it can act (with an A/B typing/interface switch instead of a scroll lock, for example) as a complete replacement for most kinds of toolbars in most any application.
Lots of people didn't think the mouse served a purpose. They could do it all with the keyboard. That's still true, but I for one am glad I was given the choice.
It's not our job in the industry to be society's moral police. A client comes to us with a case and a checkbook. The task at hand is simply whether or not that client's complaint can be made into a legal case.
Doctors don't refuse to operate on criminals, restaurants serve food to whiny jerks, the Gap sells pants to anyone who walks in the store with money. Unless the client is requesting to do something illegal, they're going to find a lawyer who will take it. It is no different from any other profession. You can find a scummy doctor to write you prescriptions for painkillers, you can find liquor stores that don't check ID, you can find gun shops carrying weapons that have no conceivable legal use. But if you think these are the rules, rather than the exceptions, you're sorely mistaken.
This company has a legal right to make whatever complaint it wants. Most law firms are for-profit enterprises. Taking bizarre cases only increases the profile of the firm, which in turn generates more money. It's not pretty, but it's business. Most attorneys don't have the freedom to choose their clients all the time. And all good attorneys are capable of defending a case they personally disagree with.
Being an asshole isn't illegal (if it were, Slashdot would be 90% smaller), and until it becomes so, they have every right to make their legal complaints. Their money is as good as anyone's, and they have the same right to use the legal system as you do. "Trial lawyers" wouldn't have cases if people weren't asses to begin with--it takes a client to initiate a complaint. A lawyer is nothing more or less than hired help.
Of course spell checker flagged it. What part of "new state of matter" didn't process when reading TFA? Spell checkers don't magically learn new words.
And Star Trek is just a prime example of art imitating life. Most of those words do exist in the field. They're often used incorrectly to throw around science-y sounding terms, but would they continue to do it if it didn't actually sound like scientific jargon?
Neither leasing cars nor using consumer credit are bad things. Leasing, in particular, can be highly beneficial if you're not scraping the bottom of the barrel. I leased a car at a lower finance rate than purchasing outright--it included free scheduled maintenance longer than the factory warranty did, and the buyout option at the end made the total price of the lease term + buyout amount (~$17,000) add up to just $500 more than the price of the car outright. In other words, I paid just $500 for the benefit of driving a brand new and expensive car, and it gave me three years to put away the money saved from the lower monthly payment toward buying it back. I only ended up financing $4000 of a $48,000 car.
Likewise, consumer credit is a perfect mechanism if you understand the time value of money sufficiently to use it to your advantage. The only problem is letting a small balance drift onward for years, snowballing out of control. The benefit of carrying a small amount of debt far outweighs even the very high finance charges when it comes time to make a major purchase like a car, a boat, or a home. Credit cards also carry a number of benefits that are substantially superior to a cash-only lifestyle, from cashback awards to extended warranty coverage, travel assistance, rental car insurance.
Avoiding credit entirely is certainly an option, but not if you don't have someone to pay for your education and not if you want to own a home in a major city or in California.
Hm. Apparently, "poison sumac" is a weed that grows in the eastern US. It is not the same sumac that is used for landscaping. That would put a different take on the original comment.
It is my understanding that sumac is a decorative plant that happens to be poisonous. Is that not the case? Poison oak is native here, and no one would plant that. Poison ivy is also a nuisance further east, but I have never heard of sumac being a "noxious weed." We don't even have it here in California.
Your car analogy is really bad, btw. A more accurate one would be saying "My car is better than yours. As proof, I present a matchbox car model of mine". How is that any different? Both are SYMBOLIC REPRESENTATIONS of something more complex. It doesn't have to be a car. It could be a pen for all I care. The example screenshot resolution is a complete non-sequitur to the argument presented. You know how images replace words? Well, the picture of the desktop clearly replaces 'I think OS X looks a lot better than Linux.' Whether that's a 300x200 thumbnail or a full-resolution desktop screen shot from a 30" display is 100% irrelevant.
I also find your tone unhelpful. For whatever it's worth, I am experienced with Mac OS X and I do know how it looks and how it feels. And I find your tone superior and without substance, not that tone matters at all. You're attacking the size of a web-ready image, rather than addressing the original point--Linux desktop UI is still visually inferior. "-1 troll" on a perfectly valid point is a prime example.
You then say you're familiar with OS X, but you can't make a comparison because you can't see the detail of the image? These two are mutually exclusive.
Actually, a check mark on an okay button is not superfluous; when used consistently it provides a visual cue of how to continue that is much faster to process than words. That doesn't make it not superfluous. The same goal can be achieved with a green button edge (like in our web-based application) or simply by highlighting the action to continue (like the OS X you claim to be familiar with). The pixellated V from hell is unnecessary visual clutter, and it's ugly to boot.
have no idea what you're saying here. How black a black is is determined by your hardware, not your operating system. (I suspect you might be referring to the Mac's media centre thing, but in that case I have no idea how it's relevant to the discussion. No, it's not. How black that black DISPLAYS is hardware-dependent. But the judicious use of black in a dynamic UI environment is about more than #000, and you Linux tools can't quite get your heads around that. The Mac's "media centre" thing is called Front Row, and it is just one example of a refined visual style that Linux, even Haitzler's golden boy, does not match. You've been given examples, but you can't SEE what's wrong with them. THAT'S THE PROBLEM.
It's not about fixing the kerning between A and V. That's just one of the fixes you need to make to look better. If you want a complete list of changes to be made, step by step, you're missing the point, and if you want it anyway, you're going to have to pay those of us with the ability to do so, since the Linux community has little interest in graphics designers who won't code kernel modules and won't provide people with UI experience with the tools they need to contribute. The problem is that it LOOKS bad, and everyone else can see it. If you can't see the changes that need to be made, then there's no hope of the problem ever being truly fixed.
Slashdot Mirror
Not exactly. The thickness of the case and its overall height are 2x and 1x a VHS tape. The depth of the case is governed by the diameter of the disc, and the result is a form that isn't easily pocketed.
The specific dimensions of the standard case are anything but an afterthought. That's not to say that one of the objectives wasn't loss prevention, but they could have been made "slightly too large" in a variety of ways.
The "16 million" or "16.2 million" are a result of dithering. It is therefore not related to binary powers directly--that's just per pixel depth. Dithering involves either spatial methods (e.g. "nearest neighbor") or temporal methods (changing a pixel's colors every x ms to alternate between shades, producing in effect a "new" color). Some displays use a combination of both.
You have 6-bit subpixels, for 262,144 colors. You then have dithering, which is a linear multiplier, because each of those 262,144 colors can be changed x number of times per "frame" (per response cycle, roughly speaking) or it can be combined in a pattern.
In the case of dithering, most methods can produce roughly 50-60 variations through combination of two or more of the 262,144 colors on the display (which gets you to about 16 million colors--what the exact methodology for "16.2M" is, I do not know). The math is complicated because simply combining two pixels does not ALWAYS produce a color that is outside those that already exist. For example, alternating between color A and color B will produce "effective color C" but that color might already be in the 262K inventory.
That's a bitter definition with a fatal flaw: the public isn't forced to consume from those who offer distasteful copyright terms.
I don't disagree that many copyright holders are beyond greedy and that their behavior is unacceptable from my personal perspective. However, it is their content and they should have the legal authority to do with it as they see fit. People here treat copyright law as though it's some inescapable black hole in some all-or-nothing battle to the death. You, as a content creator, do not have to offer draconian terms to your customers. My clients certainly don't. You, as a consumer, don't have to pay those distasteful individuals for terms that you dislike. I know I won't buy an CDs with copy protection and I won't buy anything Sony Media ever again.
The various forms of licensing available form a pretty comprehensive continuum of options. Not everyone offers the ideal combination of license type and content, but that's life. They created it, financed it, and decided to share it in a limited capacity. I can't find fault with that.
The reason these "bad copyright holders" succeed is because the general population is willing to admit, by the simplest of market gestures, that they find the terms acceptable for the price. This isn't a utility company gouging poor families in the desert on their water bill. It's an entertainment service financing the production of some content and then choosing to sell it under restrictive, but fully legal, terms. The simple solution is just not to buy it.
What I think is most interesting here on Slashdot is that people seem to be more angry that these companies are successful at selling to the public, and there aren't enough people who don't like the terms to have an effect. People aren't stupid, though, and except for some of the worst kind of DRM cockups, everything works perfectly as it was sold to them. There's nothing terribly wrong with that. I'm not saying you're in that camp, but I just find that "just don't buy it" is the perfect solution, but people get upset anyway--must be two conflicting desires.
You don't have to sue. That is merely one of your options for the exercise of your fair use rights. The financial burden is minimal--the process is simple and relatively straightforward. If you have an actual fair use defense, have been rebuffed in your attempts to obtain a DRM-free copy, it's basically a straight shot.
Your "time burden" is unimportant. It's usually faster and cheaper to do something the illegal way--that's why people put effort into stopping illegal acts (if it cost more and took more time, there wouldn't be any criminals). Just as the Library of Congress states, if it's impractical to obtain permission in advance, just be sure that your use is truly defensible in a fair use context.
The physical product has never been the primary component of the sales price. The license occupies the bulk of the price--cost savings by dropping the physical medium are essentially irrelevant to the industry, and certainly irrelevant to the Copyright office. The labels could claim that they're included the disc at no charge with the license of the content (n.b. "no charge" does not mean "no cost").
I would also disagree that format restrictions violate the spirit of copyright law. Copyright law has traditionally had format restrictions as a de facto reality of technology. Now that technology has advanced to allow for this potential effortlessly, they have continued in their traditional approach of maintaining platform separation. That's the spirit as they see it. I have never seen anything in copyright law that has ever exhibited a "spirit" of "do whatever you want with the property of others." Copyright is nothing more or less than a secured method of transfer designed to encourage sharing of the arts with the public (and that sharing is only an effective mechanism if it includes controls and restrictions--it's not "sharing" if one party has no responsibility to the other; that would be "gifting").
You can't compare with the per-track price of an album, because albums have inconsistent numbers and lengths of tracks, and the bulk discount mentality of an album applies. You don't have to imagine what the per-track price is, because it's clear that the labels have chosen to sell the singles at a high markup, as is their choice to make. Individual downloads tend to cost less than the per-track MSRP of the album--the labels simply have greater control over the pricing of online stores as opposed to retailers of CDs.
I thought we were talking about this particular video and whether or not it was a permissible violation of the DMCA. It is.
If you want to talk about copy protection and fair use generally, here's the story: your noninfringing fair use rights are guaranteed. If you cannot achieve those rights without bypassing copy protection, you are legally entitled to bypass it if you follow the appropriate steps. The DMCA is a component of Title 17--fair use rights apply to ALL works. You have three basic avenues for defense of this right: 1) obtain written permission to use the copyrighted material (the way we used to do things) 2) include a license disclosure indicating how your use of the material is considered fair use and no free alternative exists (a la Wikipedia--this will help cover your ass as long as your usage actually IS fair use). 3) sue preemptively for a court order granting you access to the material in a DRM-free format or for official authorization to use a DVD ripping tool.
In any case, your right to the material is not altered by the copy protection provisions. Your path to the material might well be different--but what people seem to forget is that once upon a time, if you wanted quality footage, you had to get it from the copyright holder. That changed with DVD, and suddenly everyone expected to be able to use that cinema-quality information directly. The exemptions for parody and criticism are GUARANTEED as fair use exemptions to copyright law, and that INCLUDES works protected by DRM or other means. The use of an illegal tool to achieve those rights is a separate question, and it's not on topic for this video. However, you would be hard-pressed to find a court case where a clear fair use right was cast aside in favor of upholding CSS protection on a DVD, as fair use specifies a scenario in which copyright protections do not apply, and the "DRM" provision ONLY applies to works so protected.
Right. And if you follow the trail to the Copyright website where the Librarian publishes those exemptions as per that section, you see number 1:
"1. Audiovisual works included in the educational library of a college or university's film or media studies department, when circumvention is accomplished for the purpose of making compilations of portions of those works for educational use in the classroom by media studies or film professors."
You asked for where in the US Code the authority for said exemptions were granted, not where the exemption was explicitly named.
PS - the "pseudo-fair use" I referred to is the overly broad and permissive definition that Slashdotters tend to use. For example, Linux DVD playback, which is not covered by fair use. In the DMCA revision committee, it was specifically discussed and dismissed because there ARE legal Linux DVD players--they're just proprietary software a la Adobe Flash player, etc. Pseudo-fair use is also "breaking encryption to format shift" which is specifically disallowed since digital media is distributed for specific platforms and is not licensed universally. The copy protection on those files is a direct component of the low price (and yes it is low, compared to what people were paying per-track for album singles in decades past [adjusted for inflation, of course]), and as such, format-shifting where there are specific prohibitions tied to the content license is NOT fair use in any courtroom in this country.
17 USC 1201 (a)(B):
"The prohibition contained in subparagraph (A) SHALL NOT APPLY to persons who are users of a copyrighted work which is in a particular class of works, if such persons are, or are likely to be in the succeeding 3-year period, ADVERSELY AFFECTED by virtue of such prohibition in their ability to make NONINFRINGING uses of that particular class of works under this title, as determined under subparagraph (C)" (emphasis added)
where 17 US 1201 (a)(C) contains a juridical test including such factors as:
"...(ii) the availability for use of works for nonprofit archival, preservation, and educational purposes;
(iii) the impact that the prohibition on the circumvention of technological measures applied to copyrighted works has on criticism, comment, news reporting, teaching, scholarship, or research..."
In other words, if the appropriate copyright-protected sections are not made available in another form for these purposes, the prohibition on bypassing the security system does not apply (limited solely to that material for that single use; no storage of "cracked" protected content is permissable outside the final form used for criticism, teaching, and scholarship).
I'm not citing Wikipedia. I'm citing the US Code. The use of this material is not a copyright violation. As I said, whether or not copy protection was circumvented via an illegal method is not known. There are legal methods of obtaining such short sections for parody and educational use. The law as construed cannot be used against you. The mere existence of said clips in said configuration is fair use. Without additional data to prove that the clips were obtained through illegal circumvention, there is nothing here to say that there is an issue.
You are permitted to use the clips in this capacity per section 107. You are permitted to break encryption to access software content if there is no legal means of doing so while preserving said encryption per chapter 12 (primarily infra 17 USC 1201). Anti-circumvention does not trump fair use. The reason it appears so is because most of the uses Slashdot users wish to call "fair use" are, in fact, utterly lacking in legal precedent. Anti-circumvention certainly trumps pseudo-fair use, but exceptions to copyright law for fair use are spelled out in chapter 1; the DMCA is integral to copyright law and thus subordinate to the provisions of chapter 1.
"The DMCA" isn't a statutory law. It is a set of amendments and insertions to Title 17 of the US Code. Exemptions and exceptions to copy protection measures are referenced at Title 17, s. 1201 (a)(1) et seq. and (d)(1). Whether these clips were obtained via breaking DVD encryption through an illegal means has not been determined. My only point is that there are exceptions allowed to break copy protection where necessary for specifically authorized purposes (simply obtaining clips is not categorically one of them). See also copyright.gov for the recent added exemptions to the DMCA.
It doesn't matter because the DMCA itself includes exceptions for non-profit and educational purposes, not to mention that as part of Title 17 it is subject to fair use exceptions.
The difference being that it actually fits the four-prong test for fair use, unlike most of what the Slashdot crowd claims is fair use (and actually is not).
You obviously didn't finish reading. The work of your own hands is the only form of natural ownership. The only reason you have any rights to what your ancestor did is because we as a society place value on that, and the government backs up your right to maintain control of that work through estate law.
In terms of natural rights, yes, I have every right you do to that dead guy's statue. He's dead, and he's the creator/owner, so it's up for grabs to a new owner. You'd have a better chance of maintaining control than I, given your proximity to the deceased and the ability to assume control with less effort, but the only reason you have automatic legal ownership of that statue is because of societal values expressed via law.
Inheritance is once again just an endorsed transfer of control, like a sale.
Intellectual property is inexhaustible. With the exception of this one loon, no one wants perpetual copyright. So IP lapses, and of course truly derivative works are often protectable unto themselves. If you want to create something based on Harry Potter, you're free to do so, but it's unnecessary for you to use someone else's characters still under copyright. You can, of course, use the characters in a parody or in combination with other characters. As long as you don't present your story as an "official" continuation of the author's series, you're basically in the clear.
If you really think your water rights in Texas aren't affected by use in Idaho or Vancouver, you have a narrow view of the big picture. Look no further than the four or five states that are constantly suing California over its overconsumption of its share for a concrete example.
You were going strong until the last paragraph. Intellectual Property doesn't presume to constrain thought or knowledge, which is something the anti-IP side likes to build into a straw man and the pro-IP side tends to be too intellectually lazy to address (oh, the irony).
IP is merely about control for the sake of business and profit. It is exactly the same as the fundamental example of real property--land. No one actually has the authority to assume ownership of part of the planet. You are not any more or less entitled to a rock on the side of the river than any other creature, human or otherwise, on this earth. However, power to control has been ceded to the government as a society. Owning land is nothing more or less than a government-supported right of control. Intellectual property is simply the right to control mental real estate. The only natural "ownership" that exists is what you yourself produce. Everything else is just a transferred right of control.
Interesting. I'll have to check that out. Thanks!
I could not possibly care less about criticisms of Star Trek. I simply assumed, perhaps incorrectly, that you were some 80s baby who didn't know that the science words came first, and that it's not a bunch of geeky scientists sitting around and naming things after random crap uttered by actors.
I imagined you were joking, but this being Slashdot, I erred on the side of idiocy.
Absolutely. But $10,000 is too much for a computer, too. $1000 is too much for a microwave. $5000 is too much for an HDTV. Prices come down.
You shouldn't need to look at the keyboard while TYPING.
Keyboards are about far more than typing, though. Just think about games--I don't usually get too far into games anymore because I don't want to spend half an hour memorizing the keys. A game is supposed to be fun. If I can look down and see what each key does, I can start playing immediately. The keyboard could be switched out of text mode to allow me to eliminate on screen palettes and toolbars in Photoshop. It can show users what keys do in iTunes or GarageBand. Hell, it can act (with an A/B typing/interface switch instead of a scroll lock, for example) as a complete replacement for most kinds of toolbars in most any application.
Lots of people didn't think the mouse served a purpose. They could do it all with the keyboard. That's still true, but I for one am glad I was given the choice.
It's not our job in the industry to be society's moral police. A client comes to us with a case and a checkbook. The task at hand is simply whether or not that client's complaint can be made into a legal case.
Doctors don't refuse to operate on criminals, restaurants serve food to whiny jerks, the Gap sells pants to anyone who walks in the store with money. Unless the client is requesting to do something illegal, they're going to find a lawyer who will take it. It is no different from any other profession. You can find a scummy doctor to write you prescriptions for painkillers, you can find liquor stores that don't check ID, you can find gun shops carrying weapons that have no conceivable legal use. But if you think these are the rules, rather than the exceptions, you're sorely mistaken.
This company has a legal right to make whatever complaint it wants. Most law firms are for-profit enterprises. Taking bizarre cases only increases the profile of the firm, which in turn generates more money. It's not pretty, but it's business. Most attorneys don't have the freedom to choose their clients all the time. And all good attorneys are capable of defending a case they personally disagree with.
Being an asshole isn't illegal (if it were, Slashdot would be 90% smaller), and until it becomes so, they have every right to make their legal complaints. Their money is as good as anyone's, and they have the same right to use the legal system as you do. "Trial lawyers" wouldn't have cases if people weren't asses to begin with--it takes a client to initiate a complaint. A lawyer is nothing more or less than hired help.
Of course spell checker flagged it. What part of "new state of matter" didn't process when reading TFA? Spell checkers don't magically learn new words.
And Star Trek is just a prime example of art imitating life. Most of those words do exist in the field. They're often used incorrectly to throw around science-y sounding terms, but would they continue to do it if it didn't actually sound like scientific jargon?
Neither leasing cars nor using consumer credit are bad things. Leasing, in particular, can be highly beneficial if you're not scraping the bottom of the barrel. I leased a car at a lower finance rate than purchasing outright--it included free scheduled maintenance longer than the factory warranty did, and the buyout option at the end made the total price of the lease term + buyout amount (~$17,000) add up to just $500 more than the price of the car outright. In other words, I paid just $500 for the benefit of driving a brand new and expensive car, and it gave me three years to put away the money saved from the lower monthly payment toward buying it back. I only ended up financing $4000 of a $48,000 car.
Likewise, consumer credit is a perfect mechanism if you understand the time value of money sufficiently to use it to your advantage. The only problem is letting a small balance drift onward for years, snowballing out of control. The benefit of carrying a small amount of debt far outweighs even the very high finance charges when it comes time to make a major purchase like a car, a boat, or a home. Credit cards also carry a number of benefits that are substantially superior to a cash-only lifestyle, from cashback awards to extended warranty coverage, travel assistance, rental car insurance.
Avoiding credit entirely is certainly an option, but not if you don't have someone to pay for your education and not if you want to own a home in a major city or in California.
Hm. Apparently, "poison sumac" is a weed that grows in the eastern US. It is not the same sumac that is used for landscaping. That would put a different take on the original comment.
It is my understanding that sumac is a decorative plant that happens to be poisonous. Is that not the case? Poison oak is native here, and no one would plant that. Poison ivy is also a nuisance further east, but I have never heard of sumac being a "noxious weed." We don't even have it here in California.
You then say you're familiar with OS X, but you can't make a comparison because you can't see the detail of the image? These two are mutually exclusive. Actually, a check mark on an okay button is not superfluous; when used consistently it provides a visual cue of how to continue that is much faster to process than words. That doesn't make it not superfluous. The same goal can be achieved with a green button edge (like in our web-based application) or simply by highlighting the action to continue (like the OS X you claim to be familiar with). The pixellated V from hell is unnecessary visual clutter, and it's ugly to boot. have no idea what you're saying here. How black a black is is determined by your hardware, not your operating system. (I suspect you might be referring to the Mac's media centre thing, but in that case I have no idea how it's relevant to the discussion. No, it's not. How black that black DISPLAYS is hardware-dependent. But the judicious use of black in a dynamic UI environment is about more than #000, and you Linux tools can't quite get your heads around that. The Mac's "media centre" thing is called Front Row, and it is just one example of a refined visual style that Linux, even Haitzler's golden boy, does not match. You've been given examples, but you can't SEE what's wrong with them. THAT'S THE PROBLEM.
It's not about fixing the kerning between A and V. That's just one of the fixes you need to make to look better. If you want a complete list of changes to be made, step by step, you're missing the point, and if you want it anyway, you're going to have to pay those of us with the ability to do so, since the Linux community has little interest in graphics designers who won't code kernel modules and won't provide people with UI experience with the tools they need to contribute. The problem is that it LOOKS bad, and everyone else can see it. If you can't see the changes that need to be made, then there's no hope of the problem ever being truly fixed.