You can do this by selecting your license and setting its termination date on the day before you formally abandon your copyright. Include language that indicates that after this date, the work will enter the public domain and be freely available to anyone, for any purpose.
Be sure to include a good warranty and liability disclaimer.
On the day after your licenses terminate, submit your statement to the Copyright Office.
Pitfalls? The obvious. It is irrevocable, period, and only applies in the United States. In other countries, you are automatically entitled to the full term of protection thanks to the Berne Convention. This is why a good disclaimer is important, because foreign users might otherwise turn to you. You can't release your copyrights in all countries in a single act, though you can decline to enforce them, and if you were to attempt to enforce one abroad, you can certainly bet that the license's mention of public domain, and your US abandonment would certainly be brought in as evidence against you.
If you are actually considering this, sit down with a licensing attorney to determine specifically what you need to do (and pretend you never saw Perens' ignorant "lawyers don't get open source!" crock of shit--you can bet that those who specialize in license and copyright law know more about the reality of open source licenses than Bruce Perens and RMS do; it's a rare specialty beyond just copyright law, and just like you wouldn't take your database issue to a web developer, don't take your legal issues to the wrong kind of lawyer). We're going to advise against it, because the actual reality of having no recourse when creators see their works used in ways they believe are "wrong" will always leave people frustrated.
This is why the whole article is absurd. There is no possible world in which everyone would agree what the important objectives are, and even if there were, there's no way that everyone would agree on the best balancing model. There are always going to be a glut of licenses. It's entirely hypocritical for open source advocates to deny creators the freedom of choice in what is an extremely personal question: how to share your own creation.
We can categorize licenses and group them together based on their similarities, and there are a limited number of basic types, and the point is taken that it is better to use an existing license where possible, and that there is little need at this point in time for additional open source licenses since most conceivable combinations are indeed covered. But to say that it is either practical or desirable to use the iron fist of One (or Four) True Licenses is simply moronic and a needless furthering of pseudoreligious dogma.
Utterly false. All it takes is a simple, signed statement to the Register of Copyrights and the same note on distribution. "I hereby release this work into the public domain" works quite nicely.
Sure, I guess the issue is that there are different models for doing that. If researchers didn't patent an invention but simply published the idea openly those inventions are highly likely to still make it in to products.
Naturally, but then there would be no way for the government to recoup some of its investments, and the commercialized products would still be patented by the private companies who completed the necessary R&D. The government would in effect just be spending money for nothing, to be freely exploited by corporate research labs.
Without the patents those ideas would be in the public domain. The researchers would be providing a service which provides inventions to industry and the public on an open bases.
That's what happens with patents, as well. A government patent on its own is freely available to industry and to the public, as it is publicly owned. Only when select patents are made candidates for exclusive licenses does this change. There is a particular set of criteria for selecting these patents that varies based on the research institution.
When an exclusive license to the patent is granted, the inventions and information remains public knowledge by the disclosure requirement of all patents, and it remains publicly owned based on the original government sponsorship. What the agency decides on behalf of the people is when to voluntarily surrender the fully free access for a few years (anywhere from one year to the term of the patent) in exchange for a sum of money that funds further research for the public good. The people, by way of the government agency granting the license, agrees to sit on that research for a while so that the people get three things out of it (a) someone to fund the necessary remaining research, (b) someone to do all the related labor and spending of commercialization/production, and (c) additional money, not raised from taxpayers, to continue public research.
Consider the following scenario. Agency A has $100 million in their research budget. They complete four, $25 million projects. Two of them are independently valuable, complete patents--they are not candidates for exclusive licenses, and anyone can use the patented inventions freely. Two other projects are not complete. Project 3 requires an additional $10 million in research to commercialize. Project 4 requires an additional $30 million to commercialize. Remaining agency budget: 0. Current usefulness to the public of projects 3 and 4: 0.
Now, XYZ Corporation has the right to spend that $30 million of its own money, patent the difference, and commercialize the product--the public loses the benefit of Project 4 for two decades, because it is buried behind a private patent. They can do this without approval from any government agency. Other companies can work independently on Project 4 and attempt to create a competing product, with or without success.
However, XYZ can also approach Agency A and offer to purchase an exclusive license (keeping competitors at bay, managing their own investment's risk, and so on) for $35 million. They will still provide the remaining $30 million in research, they will still own the patents that that second round of research yields, and they will still market the resulting product to the public. The difference is that Agency A now has an additional $35 million, replacing Project 4's budget entirely and funding Project 5, a new $25 million public research project that tax money would have been insufficient to pursue. They've also gotten $10 million extra to fund Project 3A, which then becomes commercially valuable and freely available.
This produces 5 usable inventions from a tax budget of $100 million, one of which has been partly privatized. Still, society nets 4 usable, public inventions.
The alternative, total public domain of all research, with the same $100 million budget, would have produced just two usable, public inventions. It also makes agenci
But my opinion was always if the taxpayers pay for it, the taxpayers own it. Research, patents and discoveries and even software.
They do, in exactly the same sense that the taxpayers own Navy destroyers, which is to say, collectively, with no individualized control.
If your research is that valuable, don't take federal money. A lot of universities are taking federal money for research and then selling those discoveries to companies that sell them back to the taxpayers. It's not always that clean but it just doesn't seem right.
That's not what's happening, nor is it federal money being taken. Federally-funded research products lead to patentable inventions. Those patents are held by the government. In order to make that research commercially valuable, additional research is needed and private investment is required to bring the research to a marketable level of maturity. In turn, private entities agree to fund the necessary further research, without which the first sets of patents are worthless.
If it's a 10 step process from theory to application and the federal project accomplishes the first four steps, and a private party comes in and develops 5 through 10, including patentable material, they have the right to that patent same as anyone else. Sometimes, a corporation will agree to continue/complete the research and pay the government for an exclusive license, which in turn funds further government research projects.
If you had a proposal to do the research for free, complete the project for free, and freely license the results, you would be an attractive bidder for the exclusive license. In the real world, though, no one ever makes such a proposal, so the whole notion is academic.
You've got $100 million to spend on research. Government projects don't care about commercialization, which is a difficult, time consuming, and expensive process. The end result is one of two basic scenarios: (1) everybody gets a fair chance at the fruits of the research, and it's the standard patent race to see who can fill in the gaps first, or (2) private party partners with the government, writes a check that (more than) covers the taxpayer expenditure on the research, and gets an exclusive license (but not ownership of the patent).
The second scenario, so often shortsightedly maligned, generates money for further public research. In effect, when a company purchases the project, it is as if they funded it directly themselves. They get a license to it with varying levels of restrictions, which serves the public interest better than actually granting ownership of the patent, and the upside to this restriction for the corporations is that they didn't bear the risk of the research failing. It's a win-win situation plainly visible for anyone who doesn't have his head up his ass.
If you don't like the restrictions, don't sell to the government.
And here you go off the rails entirely. Sell what to the government? Banks? What? Wouldn't be able to access what? Seriously, think things out before posting, people.
You're free to say whatever you want about the videos. They don't have to provide the paper and pen, the megaphone, or the bandwidth for you to do so.
The government has passed no law impinging your right to comment on or criticize the videos or the agencies themselves; you have no Amend. I cause of action. If a government office set up a Wordpress blog for updates, they don't have to enable comments so you can use it to piggyback your ramblings. Fire up your own Wordpress blog, or post your own video response on Youtube.
I don't need a special power controller, I need a consistent interface for the power equipment I already have.
Again, you're talking about data and not power. This whole tirade is not relevant.
We'll save far more power by eliminating redundant cable manufacturing than by anything Green Cable would accomplish
False. The total number of cables produced would remain constant. Regardless of what's on the device end, if the other end of the cable is USB, you can be assured of USB charging and of data sync. Why your Nokia has two cables is a mystery, but hardly a common occurrence.
The primary purpose of USB is to support accessory devices. There is nothing the iPod connector does that absolutely requires a proprietary cable.
The primary purpose of USB is to support accessory devices attached to a host PC. It is not a peer-to-peer standard. It has no capacity for a USB client device (a cell phone or iPod or keyboard or flash drive) to communicate with an accessory to that client device. You are absolutely out of your league here.
In order to fit all of the required services into a single connector, a proprietary connector is absolutely required. There are no standards-compliant connectors for serial data, video output, duplex audio IO, power, and USB protocol negotiations in a single package, nor are there connectors small enough for them all to fit individually (which would certainly complicate your terribly bulky mass of thousands of lead cables that you haul around chained to your ankle.
It would be quite possible to separate the USB for power and data from the rest of the connector pins.
Thus introducing two connectors, two sets of hardware control ICs, and two cables to the iPod, completely eviscerating your "I only want one cable" point.
It said "The other end, on the device, is not the goal of the project, which is to standardize DC power sources to be universal" which is complete and utter nonsense. USB is already a de-facto standard DC power source and works fine for a huge number of devices. Problem solved and moving on.
It's confirmed. You're a fool. The point is to spread the use of USB as that power source. USB devices don't need this hardware. Only DC devices that don't do data syncing at all would require it--it's controller logic for DC charging.
A charging receptacle is USELESS without a cable to attach to, ergo it matters. USB is already a de-facto standard power source. The wall end is solved
No. The wall end would be solved if built-in DC power supplies provided a USB connector in public places, which is one of the overarching goals of this kind of standardization.
First off, they aren't weightless and they are bulky.
No. I'm sorry, but the three or four cables, weighing a grand total of about two ounces and occupying less space than a single wall wart, is not significant. I do, in fact, travel regularly, and as with your specious network effects argument, it is vastly overstated.
If you want to talk about cell phone data syncing and charging using proprietary cables, you've got a point, but for the last bloody time, not one that is on topic as to the issue of charging devices and implementing a standard connector for DC-powered small devices (whether or not they communicate with a host PC or not).
Carrying two identical cables is still preferable to carrying two different proprietary cables. The standard cable will be cheaper due to economies of scale,
Economies of scale do not impact the price of modern cables. All of them are marked up far beyond their actual cost, and the efficiencies of shaving a few cents off the production cost would do very little to change the bundling.
Making an improvement does not cure infringement. Generally, you must still license the original patent in order to have clean hands in filing the improvement claim. The experimental use exception will not carry most patents through to the end. You can prepare a proof of concept under the extremely narrow and limited experimental use exception if you meet a variety of judicially-mandated standards, but you cannot prepare for introduction by beginning production, distributing prototypes to third parties for testing, or any other form of advancement.
If your patent for the improvement still requires that the underlying patent be involved, you still must have permission to use that underlying patent--you can't simply introduce the "improved" version fully of your own accord. Your patent covers only the improvement (the delta space between the original patent and yours) and not the whole apparatus.
The only value to an improvement patent without having ownership or a license to the underlying patent is to prevent the first patentholder from improving their invention in the way that you have patented. In this way, improvement patents are usually sold back to the patentholders of the underlying patent for money--the improver never actually does anything with it himself. The exception to this is for patents nearing expiration, in which case the improver waits until he no longer owes royalties to begin to act on the patent.
It's not irrelevant because only one end of many cables (including Apple's) are standard USB connectors, not both ends. There is no technological reason Apple could not sync and charge via a standard USB (or Firewire) connector on the device.
It is absolutely irrelevant. The cable is not the issue for the power adapter, nor is anything about data transfer relevant to the question of charging over USB. The lack of a technological reason for a proprietary connector is entirely outside the scope of the issue (and moreover isn't even true!).
The iPod dock connector is designed to support accessories and other connections. A standard USB connection cannot be used for this purpose, because the accessory would then need USB client hardware, and the iPod itself would need to build in bulky and CPU-intensive USB host hardware. This is simply not practical. But again, it's not at all relevant to the question of whether a USB port on the wall or in a vehicle enables charging without having to carry along a wall wart. And again, in such public places, you would always need to carry your own cables.
Clearly, you simply did not read or comprehend the post.
If you only have the one device you might not care but if you are like me and use many portable devices you end up carrying a rats nest of proprietary cables every time you travel. It's unnecessary, annoying, and wasteful.
That may be true, but it is outside the scope of the issue--the very definition of irrelevant. If you want to create a project to encourage standardized syncing cables for proprietary devices, have at it. This is about standardized charging receptacles.
I don't think anyone said otherwise but we should only have to bring ONE standard USB cord, and one transformer. Not a different power cord, data cord and transformer for each device we wish to charge.
It wouldn't work. There are three different standard USB connectors (four if you include the square one for printers) alone. Whether or not you need a separate data cable at all, and whether or not all devices use the same USB connector are outside of the issue.
I disagree because it is wasteful to haul around 20 different power and data cables. In my opinion everything should use a standard cable whenever possible. The fact that USB can carry data in addition to power should reduce the needed number of cords further.
It's hardly wasteful to carry a handful of easily stored, effectively weightless cables, as opposed to bulky, space-wasting wall warts. No one has to carry twenty different cables--you're vastly overstating. Moreover, if you want to charge all your devices at once or want to sync one device while another is charging, you still have to carry a cable for each device. You're not actually cutting down on anything, and you're not impacting the usefulness of a USB-A receptacle for providing universal DC power to devices.
I don't know what you're talking about with the clock (first whiff of ignorance or trolling), but the minimized windows aren't cycled because they're minimized. To use the paper document model, you've put them in a drawer. Shuffling the papers on your desk doesn't bring other papers in the drawer out either.
It's a functional model by design. Going through application windows only exposes those windows on your desktop. Windows that have been moved off the active desktop (to a another virtual desktop, or minimized to the Dock, or hidden) aren't part of the cycle because you took deliberate action to remove them. This is a pretty elementary component of the document UI model.
You minimized the window to get rid of it. Actively. Specifically banished it from occupying space on the desktop. Why on earth would you rationally expect it to come back of its own accord while interacting with the open windows on that very same desktop?
Huh? All of Apple's portable devices charge over USB or, if it's an older iPod, a Firewire port. This has always been the case. You're looking at the wrong end of the equation. If there's a USB port on the wall, you can plug it in. The other end, on the device, is not the goal of the project, which is to standardize DC power sources to be universal. Plug the device into the USB port and get a charge. You still have to bring your own cords. The idea is to eliminate the pile of wall warts, so that all devices can plug into them. Apple's wall chargers are a near-perfect example of what the Universal Power Adapter hopes to achieve--plugs into the wall, accepts USB cables for charging, delivers 5V DC. On planes and in public spaces where this would make a difference, you'd always have to supply your own cables, so the device end is mostly irrelevant.
Using Motorola as a counterexample is a poor choice, since most Motorola phones won't charge over a standard USB cable unless it's recognized on the other end.
Moreover, no one is saying it's a new thing to charge over USB--it's been done since 1997. Lots of companies have provided the option, and I would tend to agree that claiming that Apple is "leading the way" is something of an overstatement, but not if you accept the underlying premise that those "assorted" mp3 players and scattered other portable devices lack the conspicuousness, weight, and influence of Apple. You seem to be rather wide of the mark, though.
Okay, if my network guy got clocked by a bus, I would sincerely hope that anyone qualified enough to run my IT folder would maintain (and keep up to date) an "If I get hit by a bus" folder (which incidentally fits directly and literally into your scenario, as opposed to its figurative purpose used among attorneys).
Instead of having case updates, court calendars, etc. it would have for the IT/Sysadmins' folder at least two things: access instructions for all services and machines and a DIRECTORY OF ASSETS.
If an email alert told you that 'nas1' was down, you might assume that it's a NAS box, but you could very easily be wrong. Placing any faith in an arbitrary name is dangerous, especially one that appears to be functional. It could be an outdated name or an incomplete name. Perhaps in addition to NAS, it also hosts server-side backup utilities for the 14th floor offices.
"People here attack F/OSS Software almost constant."
People here attack proprietary software almost constantly, and in far greater numbers, too. There are an equal number of trolls and astroturfers on both sides, which is impressive considering the proposition that most "/. users Are WINDOWS users", as if that means they automatically support proprietary software or are automatically opposed to open source solutions.
Windows crashing jokes and Apple cult jokes are okay, but Linux pile of half-broken crap jokes aren't? Develop a sense of humor, because guess what, there are pros and cons to everything, and not everyone has to have a religious devotion to everything discussed.
Windows has its uses. Proprietary software has its uses. Linux has its uses. Open source software...you get the picture. People can make choices. Developers are free to release their code with an iron fist heavily slanted in their favor, or they can send it out into the world with no strings attached, or they can find some suitable middle ground. All approaches are valid. People are free to choose to walk into limitations--everything has them: Windows, OS X, Linux all have flaws.
If Linux users get attacked constantly, it's that small subset of "Linux users" who believe that There Can Be Only One Software Model and that TEH LINUX IS PERFECT. They are trolls, astroturfers, and zealots themselves.
Maybe because product reviews are about the product, and gripes about the retailer's service belong on a site where merchants are reviewed, and not on the product page, because how the box was handled doesn't have anything to do with what's inside the box.
The single most useless part about reviews are people who say "four stars for the product, but minus two stars because it didn't arrive on time and Newegg wouldn't give me a credit on my free shipping order." Go call a whaaaaambulance. If people want to find out about the merchant's performance, they'll look at reviews of the merchant. It's worse than the one-line reviews that say "Great! I love it!" At least those are easy to skip.
I refer to the McWhirter-Sanders study (1990) on the subject, as your CDC study curiously is not cited. It is indeed a Kinsey Institute study, but not a Kinsey study. If you can refer to a more recognized, professional institution studying sexual behavior, please do. In the study, nearly 14% of respondents had "more than incidental" homosexual relations. Assuming each one of those is a potential marriage, 13% of the population has potentially been impacted. This is the high end of the figure.
There is also a 2008 Joseph Fried study on the subject indicating a total percentage of approximately 9.8% (broken down among political affiliations for the curious) homosexual relationship experience.
Self-identified population is over 4%; this is a fraction of the actual number and recognizes its own internal problems in methodology.
Your essential mistake is in assuming that only "out" and fully homosexual individuals may wish to marry. Instead, the figure should include anyone who has had more than an incidental same-sex relationship (i.e. everyone but the one-time "experiments"), and thus you are grossly underestimating the percentage. Still, the essential point, that it is a "very small" minority, is simply invalid. They're almost all "very small" minorities; even if you use an overly conservative 5% figure, you've still got a population larger than almost any individual ethnic or religious minority in this country.
Minor correction: more LGBT than than everyone but Catholics and Baptists. I added the percentages incorrectly. There are more "out" homosexuals (not including bisexuals) than Episcopalians and Presbyterians combined.
While homosexuals are a very vocal minority out there...you can't kid yourself in thinking they are anything but a minority, and a fairly small one at that with regards to humans in general.
At 10-13% of US society, they are a bigger minority than the African-American population, all Asian minorities, Native Americans, and just about any other ethnic minority in this country.
The only one that is larger is the Hispanic and Latino block, which taken together, is 15%.
What exactly do you consider to be anything but a "fairly small" minority? There are more gays than Catholics. This is a single, blatant, discriminatory issue with a simple fix. Google doesn't actually care about their hiring. This is a social issue in which anyone with the means and desire will participate--and 51% majority or not, you don't get to deny others rights because you find them personally uncomfortable. It really is that simple, and it doesn't matter how many propositions or court cases it takes. The answer is clear.
Once the song is recorded, there are NO COSTS WHATEVER to delivering a digital download. There is no justification for charging a buck twenty or half that. None whatever.
The delivery costs are incidental. The price of the track is based on the value of the music. Those prices do not change appreciably over time. The cost to commission a painting today is roughly the same, adjusted for inflation, as the price to do so in 1965. The price of canvas and paint have both fallen relative to PPP, but, like music, this is mostly irrelevant
The price of gas and bread has skyrocketed since then, but the price of electronics has dropped.
And? The price of gas, bread, or electronics has very little to do with the price charged for a copy of a song.
And the cost of producing and recording that song has dropped tremendously.
Did you not even read what you quoted? Clearly not:
"Every product includes some portion of the price allocated for the intellectual labor and creativity that goes into it. In the case of your basic entertainment works, this is the lion's share of the price"
The cost of producing and recording the song was never more than a minority portion of the retail price. If only, say, 25% of the price was for production and distribution, then even a three-fold reduction in those fixed costs would only shave 15% off the price. The inflation in the mean time would have more than made up the difference. The value of music is not based in the cost of its production.
Back when a single came on vinyl and cost a dollar, the manufacturing, warehousing, transportation, etc. gave them maybe a dime profit at most.
Yeah, and ten cents in 1970 is sixty cents today. So if you really want to go tit for tat for your old vinyl singles (or doubles, more likely)--each one of those old vinyls would be priced at about $6 today.
Actually producing and recording the sucker was incredibly exoensive back then too. It's dirt cheap these days, but we're still paying the same inflated prices
Because the price doesn't reflect the sum of its tangible parts and never has. Every product includes some portion of the price allocated for the intellectual labor and creativity that goes into it. In the case of your basic entertainment works, this is the lion's share of the price. Changes in technology lowering actual physical costs doesn't have a major impact on the price of songs, books, and movies because it was a minority component to begin with, but music and movies have decreased appreciably in price.
The level of greed at recording studios has not, in fact, changed much at all in the past forty years. The level of asshattery has, but that's the world we live in.
People are claiming no need for this service or physical disks because their ISP will be delivering all this wonderful 20 to 50 gigabyte per episode HD content are missing one huge fact.
People who claim others are missing one huge fact are, in fact, themselves missing one huge fact.
As bandwidth increases and infrastructure is improved, both download speeds and data transfer caps increase. Remember when you paid hourly for dialing into ISPs at 9600 baud? Music download services were quite impractical then, too. Now the barrier is gone, and CDs are dying. You are poo-pooing a 6Mb, 250GB delivery system for HD content.
Well, surprise, professor! There's a reason why these services don't exist for HD content today--and it's exactly that, as I and others have already stated. Shockingly, it's download speed and low transfer caps. So to summarize, the main factor working against your post is that you're not actually arguing with anyone.
Moreover, if you're the kind of person who does not spend $75+/month on a combined cable/Internet package, and who does not buy more than a handful of DVDs a year, then you're not even in the demographic this post is talking about.
Talking about future products with today's limitations is like saying that television will never take off because AM radio doesn't have enough bandwidth for both picture and sound.
Today they do. Tomorrow there's the potential for them to be one and the same.
As soon as digital delivery of 50GB films becomes fairly trivial on the typical Internet connection, there's no longer a need for the disc. Long term ownership only has value if there's something to own. This is a transition in progress. It won't happen in one year or five, but it's definitely happening.
If your cable company switches to all digital on demand programming (with a cursory set of scheduled broadcast programming for e.g. news, sports), and the content library and infrastructure is designed to handle it, then there's very little point to discs.
If you're going to be paying the cable subscription anyway, and that film is available any time you want to watch it from that provider, in full HD quality, it's plain to see that customers on the whole aren't going to be buying discs.
How is this latest innovation any different from the old Divx?
Because there is no waste--no physical medium, no risk of damage before being able to watch. There is also no time limit. You can stream any title as long as it is available.
And you can hold them and touch them, resell them, and duplicate them for safekeeping, and you can play them a thousand times without having to engage a "service."
There are drawbacks to everything. Yes, you can hold and touch DVDs, which means you can lose and break them (and even with backups, you still have to be able to prove legitimate possession). You can resell them, yes, but you also have to pay a one-time fixed amount for production and higher distribution cost, as well as wait for them to arrive (or leave your home to acquire them), and buy them individually at the same price, whether you want to watch it twice or two hundred times. You can play them until you damage, sell, or lose them--but you also need a player that will break down or become obsolete.
On the other hand, with digital subscription services, you can watch a huge library of titles at any time on any compatible player (which Netflix is expanding). Sure, they also save quite a bit of money and the enjoyment of the service is dependent on the existence of both the service and Internet connectivity. Connections are insufficient to match BD quality. The library of tiles kind of sucks (much like BD!). But many of the big drawbacks are a result of newness.
Yes, streaming systems will likely always have some kind of DRM to prevent reproduction, and will require an ongoing account. But if you can play any one of tens of thousands of films on screens small and large, there's no actual need to "own" any slice of the content.
Selling limited-rights copies was a compromise to get people to pay for productions that cost more than theater sales could recoup, and where customers wanted to see films after the theater run. The studios need to run a business, the artists need money to produce their works, and consumers want to be entertained. In the 20th century, there was no real way for consumers to get value except by owning a limited-rights copy (essentially derived from a regular shareholder investment scheme, where the profit is entertainment instead of monetary profit). In the 21st century, there's no longer a need for a physical object to achieve this, and since consumers never owned any of the intellectual rights to begin with, there's no longer anything left worth "owning" for the consumer.
You're paying to bring the theater home. For the price of a DVD a month, you get access to thousands of films. You get quite a bit more, but there's no free lunch. Something's gotta give, and in this case, that's persistence of ownership. Some other system has to be created for true fair use (e.g. an online service available at public libraries that allows you to export clips of films to DRM-free digital files) and personal use (e.g. iTunes-style CD burning for mixes and syncing to portable devices).
One should be clear and accurate when using legal terms with non-lawyers, or it leads to confusion.
Again, there is no real lack of clarity given the basic terms here. The post you are responding to asked what is wrong with the phrase, and the answer is nothing.
Tort actions have remedies. You may find your legal remedy in a tort action. Your remedy may be in tort law. It's neither unclear nor inaccurate, and just as you accuse the other poster of trying to sound like "Joe Lawyer", you are trying to sound like "John Superior Lawyer" and have been called on it. There's plenty to address in the original post, were you actually interested in furthering clarity and accuracy in the discussion.
And BTW, since breach of contract, not a tort, might be a possible COA in such a matter, "tort" might be confusing as well.
Once again, setting aside the fact that you already (correctly) recognized possible actions in both contract and tort, it's not confusing at all. There are several possible tort actions that may be pursued in order to make available equitable remedies not available under contract law. They are not likely to be successful, given the structure of most TOS agreements, but that does not foreclose the general applicability of the theory. This is fairly basic, and certainly anyone who has taught business law should know as much.
And BTW, I went out of my way not to sound pedantic, even making references to Lionel Hutz. You, on the other hand, sound like you are competing in a pedant contest with William F Buckley and Dick Cavett, not discouraging pedantry.
No. You are attempting to correct that which is already correct and simply misconstrued by your incomplete reading, as opposed to dealing with the more pressing errors and mangled legal principles. A remedy in tort, is, once again, a perfectly valid and accurate English phrase.
You, on the other hand, are trying to make it an issue to sound superior, and doing it falsely with a poor understanding of English grammar, and quite frankly, the law. No one was confused by the usage, and no one thought that the cause of action was the remedy. The only responses you got were ones wondering about your false correction.
The only thing I'm attempting to discourage is your false pedanticism. If you want to be pedantic with just cause, fine, but don't hide behind "accuracy" as a justification while being inaccurate. It's neither grammatically nor legally wrong to make that statement. That's all I'm saying.
Unfortunately, it's false pedanticism from a Law Nazi, because you're not also a sufficient Grammar Nazi to recognize that you're using only one of two valid constructions.
You are assuming "in tort" is a prepositional phrase comprising colocation--"a tort is your remedy". This is legally nonsensical.
However, "a remedy in tort" can also be prepositional phrase comprising subordination--the phrase properly expands to "a remedy in a tort action". This is a valid usage, grammatically, legally, and jargonistically. It's quite likely that it's a construction you've used yourself in passing conversation when referring to the area of law in which you're likely to find relief. It may be a regional variation, but it's relatively common in West Coast firms.
Merging and local traffic is still slower than cruising traffic in the middle lanes. The "slow" lane should still be moving at a good clip so as to prevent people merging onto the freeway from being trapped in the right lane.
It's the conditions you can't foresee that I'd worry about.
In which case it does not matter how close the cars are. When merging and passing, the rule of thumb cannot be mechanically maintained, and road conditions dictate how much shorter a temporary following distance may be.
Most interruptions in the smooth flow of traffic are due to failure of "safety conscious" drivers to follow the basic protocol of multilane road systems: each progressive lane in the driver's-side direction should be moving faster than the preceding lane at all times. Problems arise when people block all lanes by completing a 1 mph-differential pass, which causes other drivers to stack up behind.
More often than not, these idiots are the ones who pull out in front of an already passing driver on the left (with a mile of empty space behind), going slower than that driver instead of waiting for the faster car to pass on the left before engaging their slow-motion passing maneuver. These people see a reasonable distance at their slower speed and pull into the passing lane, without looking beyond the first pair of headlights in the mirror and without considering their relative slower speed or the overall flow of traffic.
If there is enough room for another car to move from the left lane to the right lane and then back into the left lane, all while you putz about in the left lane (US), you have failed your roadway obligations not to be an obstruction to traffic, and as a result are creating a greater traffic hazard and risk to yourself and others than the risk mitigated by a steadfast following of a rule of thumb. If you have been passed, the two-second rule safe following distance automatically evens out over the course of a few seconds, because you should not be passing anyone unless you are traveling at an appreciably higher rate of speed. No brakes are needed, and if the following driver needs to make any small adjustment, it's simply by virtue of coasting.
You should not be in the passing lane unless you are moving a solid 5 mph or more faster than the lane to the right. If you are uncomfortable with that speed increase, you should not be passing at all. You should also never force a univariate analysis using only a following distance rule and assume that you're being "safe" by blindly adhering to such a standard, or that other drivers are unsafe. There are tailgaters and unsafe speeders, but there are equally obnoxious and unsafe drivers who insist on lingering longer than necessary and slower than permissible.
It's just like those people who put their turn signals on fifteen seconds in advance of a lane change. Preparation is good, but when following drivers slow down and give you space for five to ten seconds and nothing happens, other drivers begin to ignore what appear to be your mistaken blinkers. These people are as bad as those who don't signal at all, but they tend to be sanctimonious about their thoroughness and safety when in fact, their overlong signaling is a source of roadway confusion and elevated risk.
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You can do this by selecting your license and setting its termination date on the day before you formally abandon your copyright. Include language that indicates that after this date, the work will enter the public domain and be freely available to anyone, for any purpose.
Be sure to include a good warranty and liability disclaimer.
On the day after your licenses terminate, submit your statement to the Copyright Office.
Pitfalls? The obvious. It is irrevocable, period, and only applies in the United States. In other countries, you are automatically entitled to the full term of protection thanks to the Berne Convention. This is why a good disclaimer is important, because foreign users might otherwise turn to you. You can't release your copyrights in all countries in a single act, though you can decline to enforce them, and if you were to attempt to enforce one abroad, you can certainly bet that the license's mention of public domain, and your US abandonment would certainly be brought in as evidence against you.
If you are actually considering this, sit down with a licensing attorney to determine specifically what you need to do (and pretend you never saw Perens' ignorant "lawyers don't get open source!" crock of shit--you can bet that those who specialize in license and copyright law know more about the reality of open source licenses than Bruce Perens and RMS do; it's a rare specialty beyond just copyright law, and just like you wouldn't take your database issue to a web developer, don't take your legal issues to the wrong kind of lawyer). We're going to advise against it, because the actual reality of having no recourse when creators see their works used in ways they believe are "wrong" will always leave people frustrated.
This is why the whole article is absurd. There is no possible world in which everyone would agree what the important objectives are, and even if there were, there's no way that everyone would agree on the best balancing model. There are always going to be a glut of licenses. It's entirely hypocritical for open source advocates to deny creators the freedom of choice in what is an extremely personal question: how to share your own creation.
We can categorize licenses and group them together based on their similarities, and there are a limited number of basic types, and the point is taken that it is better to use an existing license where possible, and that there is little need at this point in time for additional open source licenses since most conceivable combinations are indeed covered. But to say that it is either practical or desirable to use the iron fist of One (or Four) True Licenses is simply moronic and a needless furthering of pseudoreligious dogma.
Utterly false. All it takes is a simple, signed statement to the Register of Copyrights and the same note on distribution. "I hereby release this work into the public domain" works quite nicely.
Sure, I guess the issue is that there are different models for doing that. If researchers didn't patent an invention but simply published the idea openly those inventions are highly likely to still make it in to products.
Naturally, but then there would be no way for the government to recoup some of its investments, and the commercialized products would still be patented by the private companies who completed the necessary R&D. The government would in effect just be spending money for nothing, to be freely exploited by corporate research labs.
Without the patents those ideas would be in the public domain. The researchers would be providing a service which provides inventions to industry and the public on an open bases.
That's what happens with patents, as well. A government patent on its own is freely available to industry and to the public, as it is publicly owned. Only when select patents are made candidates for exclusive licenses does this change. There is a particular set of criteria for selecting these patents that varies based on the research institution.
When an exclusive license to the patent is granted, the inventions and information remains public knowledge by the disclosure requirement of all patents, and it remains publicly owned based on the original government sponsorship. What the agency decides on behalf of the people is when to voluntarily surrender the fully free access for a few years (anywhere from one year to the term of the patent) in exchange for a sum of money that funds further research for the public good. The people, by way of the government agency granting the license, agrees to sit on that research for a while so that the people get three things out of it (a) someone to fund the necessary remaining research, (b) someone to do all the related labor and spending of commercialization/production, and (c) additional money, not raised from taxpayers, to continue public research.
Consider the following scenario. Agency A has $100 million in their research budget. They complete four, $25 million projects. Two of them are independently valuable, complete patents--they are not candidates for exclusive licenses, and anyone can use the patented inventions freely. Two other projects are not complete. Project 3 requires an additional $10 million in research to commercialize. Project 4 requires an additional $30 million to commercialize. Remaining agency budget: 0. Current usefulness to the public of projects 3 and 4: 0.
Now, XYZ Corporation has the right to spend that $30 million of its own money, patent the difference, and commercialize the product--the public loses the benefit of Project 4 for two decades, because it is buried behind a private patent. They can do this without approval from any government agency. Other companies can work independently on Project 4 and attempt to create a competing product, with or without success.
However, XYZ can also approach Agency A and offer to purchase an exclusive license (keeping competitors at bay, managing their own investment's risk, and so on) for $35 million. They will still provide the remaining $30 million in research, they will still own the patents that that second round of research yields, and they will still market the resulting product to the public. The difference is that Agency A now has an additional $35 million, replacing Project 4's budget entirely and funding Project 5, a new $25 million public research project that tax money would have been insufficient to pursue. They've also gotten $10 million extra to fund Project 3A, which then becomes commercially valuable and freely available.
This produces 5 usable inventions from a tax budget of $100 million, one of which has been partly privatized. Still, society nets 4 usable, public inventions.
The alternative, total public domain of all research, with the same $100 million budget, would have produced just two usable, public inventions. It also makes agenci
But my opinion was always if the taxpayers pay for it, the taxpayers own it. Research, patents and discoveries and even software.
They do, in exactly the same sense that the taxpayers own Navy destroyers, which is to say, collectively, with no individualized control.
If your research is that valuable, don't take federal money. A lot of universities are taking federal money for research and then selling those discoveries to companies that sell them back to the taxpayers. It's not always that clean but it just doesn't seem right.
That's not what's happening, nor is it federal money being taken. Federally-funded research products lead to patentable inventions. Those patents are held by the government. In order to make that research commercially valuable, additional research is needed and private investment is required to bring the research to a marketable level of maturity. In turn, private entities agree to fund the necessary further research, without which the first sets of patents are worthless.
If it's a 10 step process from theory to application and the federal project accomplishes the first four steps, and a private party comes in and develops 5 through 10, including patentable material, they have the right to that patent same as anyone else. Sometimes, a corporation will agree to continue/complete the research and pay the government for an exclusive license, which in turn funds further government research projects.
If you had a proposal to do the research for free, complete the project for free, and freely license the results, you would be an attractive bidder for the exclusive license. In the real world, though, no one ever makes such a proposal, so the whole notion is academic.
You've got $100 million to spend on research. Government projects don't care about commercialization, which is a difficult, time consuming, and expensive process. The end result is one of two basic scenarios: (1) everybody gets a fair chance at the fruits of the research, and it's the standard patent race to see who can fill in the gaps first, or (2) private party partners with the government, writes a check that (more than) covers the taxpayer expenditure on the research, and gets an exclusive license (but not ownership of the patent).
The second scenario, so often shortsightedly maligned, generates money for further public research. In effect, when a company purchases the project, it is as if they funded it directly themselves. They get a license to it with varying levels of restrictions, which serves the public interest better than actually granting ownership of the patent, and the upside to this restriction for the corporations is that they didn't bear the risk of the research failing. It's a win-win situation plainly visible for anyone who doesn't have his head up his ass.
If you don't like the restrictions, don't sell to the government.
And here you go off the rails entirely. Sell what to the government? Banks? What? Wouldn't be able to access what? Seriously, think things out before posting, people.
First Amendment, anyone?
No.
You're free to say whatever you want about the videos. They don't have to provide the paper and pen, the megaphone, or the bandwidth for you to do so.
The government has passed no law impinging your right to comment on or criticize the videos or the agencies themselves; you have no Amend. I cause of action. If a government office set up a Wordpress blog for updates, they don't have to enable comments so you can use it to piggyback your ramblings. Fire up your own Wordpress blog, or post your own video response on Youtube.
I don't need a special power controller, I need a consistent interface for the power equipment I already have.
Again, you're talking about data and not power. This whole tirade is not relevant.
We'll save far more power by eliminating redundant cable manufacturing than by anything Green Cable would accomplish
False. The total number of cables produced would remain constant. Regardless of what's on the device end, if the other end of the cable is USB, you can be assured of USB charging and of data sync. Why your Nokia has two cables is a mystery, but hardly a common occurrence.
The primary purpose of USB is to support accessory devices. There is nothing the iPod connector does that absolutely requires a proprietary cable.
The primary purpose of USB is to support accessory devices attached to a host PC. It is not a peer-to-peer standard. It has no capacity for a USB client device (a cell phone or iPod or keyboard or flash drive) to communicate with an accessory to that client device. You are absolutely out of your league here.
In order to fit all of the required services into a single connector, a proprietary connector is absolutely required. There are no standards-compliant connectors for serial data, video output, duplex audio IO, power, and USB protocol negotiations in a single package, nor are there connectors small enough for them all to fit individually (which would certainly complicate your terribly bulky mass of thousands of lead cables that you haul around chained to your ankle.
It would be quite possible to separate the USB for power and data from the rest of the connector pins.
Thus introducing two connectors, two sets of hardware control ICs, and two cables to the iPod, completely eviscerating your "I only want one cable" point.
It said "The other end, on the device, is not the goal of the project, which is to standardize DC power sources to be universal" which is complete and utter nonsense. USB is already a de-facto standard DC power source and works fine for a huge number of devices. Problem solved and moving on.
It's confirmed. You're a fool. The point is to spread the use of USB as that power source. USB devices don't need this hardware. Only DC devices that don't do data syncing at all would require it--it's controller logic for DC charging.
A charging receptacle is USELESS without a cable to attach to, ergo it matters. USB is already a de-facto standard power source. The wall end is solved
No. The wall end would be solved if built-in DC power supplies provided a USB connector in public places, which is one of the overarching goals of this kind of standardization.
First off, they aren't weightless and they are bulky.
No. I'm sorry, but the three or four cables, weighing a grand total of about two ounces and occupying less space than a single wall wart, is not significant. I do, in fact, travel regularly, and as with your specious network effects argument, it is vastly overstated.
If you want to talk about cell phone data syncing and charging using proprietary cables, you've got a point, but for the last bloody time, not one that is on topic as to the issue of charging devices and implementing a standard connector for DC-powered small devices (whether or not they communicate with a host PC or not).
Carrying two identical cables is still preferable to carrying two different proprietary cables. The standard cable will be cheaper due to economies of scale,
Economies of scale do not impact the price of modern cables. All of them are marked up far beyond their actual cost, and the efficiencies of shaving a few cents off the production cost would do very little to change the bundling.
Devices that a
Making an improvement does not cure infringement. Generally, you must still license the original patent in order to have clean hands in filing the improvement claim. The experimental use exception will not carry most patents through to the end. You can prepare a proof of concept under the extremely narrow and limited experimental use exception if you meet a variety of judicially-mandated standards, but you cannot prepare for introduction by beginning production, distributing prototypes to third parties for testing, or any other form of advancement.
If your patent for the improvement still requires that the underlying patent be involved, you still must have permission to use that underlying patent--you can't simply introduce the "improved" version fully of your own accord. Your patent covers only the improvement (the delta space between the original patent and yours) and not the whole apparatus.
The only value to an improvement patent without having ownership or a license to the underlying patent is to prevent the first patentholder from improving their invention in the way that you have patented. In this way, improvement patents are usually sold back to the patentholders of the underlying patent for money--the improver never actually does anything with it himself. The exception to this is for patents nearing expiration, in which case the improver waits until he no longer owes royalties to begin to act on the patent.
It's not irrelevant because only one end of many cables (including Apple's) are standard USB connectors, not both ends. There is no technological reason Apple could not sync and charge via a standard USB (or Firewire) connector on the device.
It is absolutely irrelevant. The cable is not the issue for the power adapter, nor is anything about data transfer relevant to the question of charging over USB. The lack of a technological reason for a proprietary connector is entirely outside the scope of the issue (and moreover isn't even true!).
The iPod dock connector is designed to support accessories and other connections. A standard USB connection cannot be used for this purpose, because the accessory would then need USB client hardware, and the iPod itself would need to build in bulky and CPU-intensive USB host hardware. This is simply not practical. But again, it's not at all relevant to the question of whether a USB port on the wall or in a vehicle enables charging without having to carry along a wall wart. And again, in such public places, you would always need to carry your own cables.
Clearly, you simply did not read or comprehend the post.
If you only have the one device you might not care but if you are like me and use many portable devices you end up carrying a rats nest of proprietary cables every time you travel. It's unnecessary, annoying, and wasteful.
That may be true, but it is outside the scope of the issue--the very definition of irrelevant. If you want to create a project to encourage standardized syncing cables for proprietary devices, have at it. This is about standardized charging receptacles.
I don't think anyone said otherwise but we should only have to bring ONE standard USB cord, and one transformer. Not a different power cord, data cord and transformer for each device we wish to charge.
It wouldn't work. There are three different standard USB connectors (four if you include the square one for printers) alone. Whether or not you need a separate data cable at all, and whether or not all devices use the same USB connector are outside of the issue.
I disagree because it is wasteful to haul around 20 different power and data cables. In my opinion everything should use a standard cable whenever possible. The fact that USB can carry data in addition to power should reduce the needed number of cords further.
It's hardly wasteful to carry a handful of easily stored, effectively weightless cables, as opposed to bulky, space-wasting wall warts. No one has to carry twenty different cables--you're vastly overstating. Moreover, if you want to charge all your devices at once or want to sync one device while another is charging, you still have to carry a cable for each device. You're not actually cutting down on anything, and you're not impacting the usefulness of a USB-A receptacle for providing universal DC power to devices.
I don't know what you're talking about with the clock (first whiff of ignorance or trolling), but the minimized windows aren't cycled because they're minimized. To use the paper document model, you've put them in a drawer. Shuffling the papers on your desk doesn't bring other papers in the drawer out either.
It's a functional model by design. Going through application windows only exposes those windows on your desktop. Windows that have been moved off the active desktop (to a another virtual desktop, or minimized to the Dock, or hidden) aren't part of the cycle because you took deliberate action to remove them. This is a pretty elementary component of the document UI model.
You minimized the window to get rid of it. Actively. Specifically banished it from occupying space on the desktop. Why on earth would you rationally expect it to come back of its own accord while interacting with the open windows on that very same desktop?
Huh? All of Apple's portable devices charge over USB or, if it's an older iPod, a Firewire port. This has always been the case. You're looking at the wrong end of the equation. If there's a USB port on the wall, you can plug it in. The other end, on the device, is not the goal of the project, which is to standardize DC power sources to be universal. Plug the device into the USB port and get a charge. You still have to bring your own cords. The idea is to eliminate the pile of wall warts, so that all devices can plug into them. Apple's wall chargers are a near-perfect example of what the Universal Power Adapter hopes to achieve--plugs into the wall, accepts USB cables for charging, delivers 5V DC. On planes and in public spaces where this would make a difference, you'd always have to supply your own cables, so the device end is mostly irrelevant.
Using Motorola as a counterexample is a poor choice, since most Motorola phones won't charge over a standard USB cable unless it's recognized on the other end.
Moreover, no one is saying it's a new thing to charge over USB--it's been done since 1997. Lots of companies have provided the option, and I would tend to agree that claiming that Apple is "leading the way" is something of an overstatement, but not if you accept the underlying premise that those "assorted" mp3 players and scattered other portable devices lack the conspicuousness, weight, and influence of Apple. You seem to be rather wide of the mark, though.
Okay, if my network guy got clocked by a bus, I would sincerely hope that anyone qualified enough to run my IT folder would maintain (and keep up to date) an "If I get hit by a bus" folder (which incidentally fits directly and literally into your scenario, as opposed to its figurative purpose used among attorneys).
Instead of having case updates, court calendars, etc. it would have for the IT/Sysadmins' folder at least two things: access instructions for all services and machines and a DIRECTORY OF ASSETS.
If an email alert told you that 'nas1' was down, you might assume that it's a NAS box, but you could very easily be wrong. Placing any faith in an arbitrary name is dangerous, especially one that appears to be functional. It could be an outdated name or an incomplete name. Perhaps in addition to NAS, it also hosts server-side backup utilities for the 14th floor offices.
"People here attack F/OSS Software almost constant."
People here attack proprietary software almost constantly, and in far greater numbers, too. There are an equal number of trolls and astroturfers on both sides, which is impressive considering the proposition that most "/. users Are WINDOWS users", as if that means they automatically support proprietary software or are automatically opposed to open source solutions.
Windows crashing jokes and Apple cult jokes are okay, but Linux pile of half-broken crap jokes aren't? Develop a sense of humor, because guess what, there are pros and cons to everything, and not everyone has to have a religious devotion to everything discussed.
Windows has its uses. Proprietary software has its uses. Linux has its uses. Open source software...you get the picture. People can make choices. Developers are free to release their code with an iron fist heavily slanted in their favor, or they can send it out into the world with no strings attached, or they can find some suitable middle ground. All approaches are valid. People are free to choose to walk into limitations--everything has them: Windows, OS X, Linux all have flaws.
If Linux users get attacked constantly, it's that small subset of "Linux users" who believe that There Can Be Only One Software Model and that TEH LINUX IS PERFECT. They are trolls, astroturfers, and zealots themselves.
Maybe because product reviews are about the product, and gripes about the retailer's service belong on a site where merchants are reviewed, and not on the product page, because how the box was handled doesn't have anything to do with what's inside the box.
The single most useless part about reviews are people who say "four stars for the product, but minus two stars because it didn't arrive on time and Newegg wouldn't give me a credit on my free shipping order." Go call a whaaaaambulance. If people want to find out about the merchant's performance, they'll look at reviews of the merchant. It's worse than the one-line reviews that say "Great! I love it!" At least those are easy to skip.
I refer to the McWhirter-Sanders study (1990) on the subject, as your CDC study curiously is not cited. It is indeed a Kinsey Institute study, but not a Kinsey study. If you can refer to a more recognized, professional institution studying sexual behavior, please do. In the study, nearly 14% of respondents had "more than incidental" homosexual relations. Assuming each one of those is a potential marriage, 13% of the population has potentially been impacted. This is the high end of the figure.
There is also a 2008 Joseph Fried study on the subject indicating a total percentage of approximately 9.8% (broken down among political affiliations for the curious) homosexual relationship experience.
http://www.law.ucla.edu/williamsinstitute/publications/SameSexCouplesandGLBpopACS.pdf
Self-identified population is over 4%; this is a fraction of the actual number and recognizes its own internal problems in methodology.
Your essential mistake is in assuming that only "out" and fully homosexual individuals may wish to marry. Instead, the figure should include anyone who has had more than an incidental same-sex relationship (i.e. everyone but the one-time "experiments"), and thus you are grossly underestimating the percentage. Still, the essential point, that it is a "very small" minority, is simply invalid. They're almost all "very small" minorities; even if you use an overly conservative 5% figure, you've still got a population larger than almost any individual ethnic or religious minority in this country.
Minor correction: more LGBT than than everyone but Catholics and Baptists. I added the percentages incorrectly. There are more "out" homosexuals (not including bisexuals) than Episcopalians and Presbyterians combined.
While homosexuals are a very vocal minority out there...you can't kid yourself in thinking they are anything but a minority, and a fairly small one at that with regards to humans in general.
At 10-13% of US society, they are a bigger minority than the African-American population, all Asian minorities, Native Americans, and just about any other ethnic minority in this country.
The only one that is larger is the Hispanic and Latino block, which taken together, is 15%.
What exactly do you consider to be anything but a "fairly small" minority? There are more gays than Catholics. This is a single, blatant, discriminatory issue with a simple fix. Google doesn't actually care about their hiring. This is a social issue in which anyone with the means and desire will participate--and 51% majority or not, you don't get to deny others rights because you find them personally uncomfortable. It really is that simple, and it doesn't matter how many propositions or court cases it takes. The answer is clear.
You're missing the point (purposely?)
No, but you are.
Once the song is recorded, there are NO COSTS WHATEVER to delivering a digital download. There is no justification for charging a buck twenty or half that. None whatever.
The delivery costs are incidental. The price of the track is based on the value of the music. Those prices do not change appreciably over time. The cost to commission a painting today is roughly the same, adjusted for inflation, as the price to do so in 1965. The price of canvas and paint have both fallen relative to PPP, but, like music, this is mostly irrelevant
The price of gas and bread has skyrocketed since then, but the price of electronics has dropped.
And? The price of gas, bread, or electronics has very little to do with the price charged for a copy of a song.
And the cost of producing and recording that song has dropped tremendously.
Did you not even read what you quoted? Clearly not:
"Every product includes some portion of the price allocated for the intellectual labor and creativity that goes into it. In the case of your basic entertainment works, this is the lion's share of the price"
The cost of producing and recording the song was never more than a minority portion of the retail price. If only, say, 25% of the price was for production and distribution, then even a three-fold reduction in those fixed costs would only shave 15% off the price. The inflation in the mean time would have more than made up the difference. The value of music is not based in the cost of its production.
Back when a single came on vinyl and cost a dollar, the manufacturing, warehousing, transportation, etc. gave them maybe a dime profit at most.
Yeah, and ten cents in 1970 is sixty cents today. So if you really want to go tit for tat for your old vinyl singles (or doubles, more likely)--each one of those old vinyls would be priced at about $6 today.
Actually producing and recording the sucker was incredibly exoensive back then too. It's dirt cheap these days, but we're still paying the same inflated prices
Because the price doesn't reflect the sum of its tangible parts and never has. Every product includes some portion of the price allocated for the intellectual labor and creativity that goes into it. In the case of your basic entertainment works, this is the lion's share of the price. Changes in technology lowering actual physical costs doesn't have a major impact on the price of songs, books, and movies because it was a minority component to begin with, but music and movies have decreased appreciably in price.
The level of greed at recording studios has not, in fact, changed much at all in the past forty years. The level of asshattery has, but that's the world we live in.
People are claiming no need for this service or physical disks because their ISP will be delivering
all this wonderful 20 to 50 gigabyte per episode HD content are missing one huge fact.
People who claim others are missing one huge fact are, in fact, themselves missing one huge fact.
As bandwidth increases and infrastructure is improved, both download speeds and data transfer caps increase. Remember when you paid hourly for dialing into ISPs at 9600 baud? Music download services were quite impractical then, too. Now the barrier is gone, and CDs are dying. You are poo-pooing a 6Mb, 250GB delivery system for HD content.
Well, surprise, professor! There's a reason why these services don't exist for HD content today--and it's exactly that, as I and others have already stated. Shockingly, it's download speed and low transfer caps. So to summarize, the main factor working against your post is that you're not actually arguing with anyone.
Moreover, if you're the kind of person who does not spend $75+/month on a combined cable/Internet package, and who does not buy more than a handful of DVDs a year, then you're not even in the demographic this post is talking about.
Talking about future products with today's limitations is like saying that television will never take off because AM radio doesn't have enough bandwidth for both picture and sound.
Today they do. Tomorrow there's the potential for them to be one and the same.
As soon as digital delivery of 50GB films becomes fairly trivial on the typical Internet connection, there's no longer a need for the disc. Long term ownership only has value if there's something to own. This is a transition in progress. It won't happen in one year or five, but it's definitely happening.
If your cable company switches to all digital on demand programming (with a cursory set of scheduled broadcast programming for e.g. news, sports), and the content library and infrastructure is designed to handle it, then there's very little point to discs.
If you're going to be paying the cable subscription anyway, and that film is available any time you want to watch it from that provider, in full HD quality, it's plain to see that customers on the whole aren't going to be buying discs.
How is this latest innovation any different from the old Divx?
Because there is no waste--no physical medium, no risk of damage before being able to watch. There is also no time limit. You can stream any title as long as it is available.
And you can hold them and touch them, resell them, and duplicate them for safekeeping, and you can play them a thousand times without having to engage a "service."
There are drawbacks to everything. Yes, you can hold and touch DVDs, which means you can lose and break them (and even with backups, you still have to be able to prove legitimate possession). You can resell them, yes, but you also have to pay a one-time fixed amount for production and higher distribution cost, as well as wait for them to arrive (or leave your home to acquire them), and buy them individually at the same price, whether you want to watch it twice or two hundred times. You can play them until you damage, sell, or lose them--but you also need a player that will break down or become obsolete.
On the other hand, with digital subscription services, you can watch a huge library of titles at any time on any compatible player (which Netflix is expanding). Sure, they also save quite a bit of money and the enjoyment of the service is dependent on the existence of both the service and Internet connectivity. Connections are insufficient to match BD quality. The library of tiles kind of sucks (much like BD!). But many of the big drawbacks are a result of newness.
Yes, streaming systems will likely always have some kind of DRM to prevent reproduction, and will require an ongoing account. But if you can play any one of tens of thousands of films on screens small and large, there's no actual need to "own" any slice of the content.
Selling limited-rights copies was a compromise to get people to pay for productions that cost more than theater sales could recoup, and where customers wanted to see films after the theater run. The studios need to run a business, the artists need money to produce their works, and consumers want to be entertained. In the 20th century, there was no real way for consumers to get value except by owning a limited-rights copy (essentially derived from a regular shareholder investment scheme, where the profit is entertainment instead of monetary profit). In the 21st century, there's no longer a need for a physical object to achieve this, and since consumers never owned any of the intellectual rights to begin with, there's no longer anything left worth "owning" for the consumer.
You're paying to bring the theater home. For the price of a DVD a month, you get access to thousands of films. You get quite a bit more, but there's no free lunch. Something's gotta give, and in this case, that's persistence of ownership. Some other system has to be created for true fair use (e.g. an online service available at public libraries that allows you to export clips of films to DRM-free digital files) and personal use (e.g. iTunes-style CD burning for mixes and syncing to portable devices).
One should be clear and accurate when using legal terms with non-lawyers, or it leads to confusion.
Again, there is no real lack of clarity given the basic terms here. The post you are responding to asked what is wrong with the phrase, and the answer is nothing.
Tort actions have remedies. You may find your legal remedy in a tort action. Your remedy may be in tort law. It's neither unclear nor inaccurate, and just as you accuse the other poster of trying to sound like "Joe Lawyer", you are trying to sound like "John Superior Lawyer" and have been called on it. There's plenty to address in the original post, were you actually interested in furthering clarity and accuracy in the discussion.
And BTW, since breach of contract, not a tort, might be a possible COA in such a matter, "tort" might be confusing as well.
Once again, setting aside the fact that you already (correctly) recognized possible actions in both contract and tort, it's not confusing at all. There are several possible tort actions that may be pursued in order to make available equitable remedies not available under contract law. They are not likely to be successful, given the structure of most TOS agreements, but that does not foreclose the general applicability of the theory. This is fairly basic, and certainly anyone who has taught business law should know as much.
And BTW, I went out of my way not to sound pedantic, even making references to Lionel Hutz. You, on the other hand, sound like you are competing in a pedant contest with William F Buckley and Dick Cavett, not discouraging pedantry.
No. You are attempting to correct that which is already correct and simply misconstrued by your incomplete reading, as opposed to dealing with the more pressing errors and mangled legal principles. A remedy in tort, is, once again, a perfectly valid and accurate English phrase.
You, on the other hand, are trying to make it an issue to sound superior, and doing it falsely with a poor understanding of English grammar, and quite frankly, the law. No one was confused by the usage, and no one thought that the cause of action was the remedy. The only responses you got were ones wondering about your false correction.
The only thing I'm attempting to discourage is your false pedanticism. If you want to be pedantic with just cause, fine, but don't hide behind "accuracy" as a justification while being inaccurate. It's neither grammatically nor legally wrong to make that statement. That's all I'm saying.
Unfortunately, it's false pedanticism from a Law Nazi, because you're not also a sufficient Grammar Nazi to recognize that you're using only one of two valid constructions.
You are assuming "in tort" is a prepositional phrase comprising colocation--"a tort is your remedy". This is legally nonsensical.
However, "a remedy in tort" can also be prepositional phrase comprising subordination--the phrase properly expands to "a remedy in a tort action". This is a valid usage, grammatically, legally, and jargonistically. It's quite likely that it's a construction you've used yourself in passing conversation when referring to the area of law in which you're likely to find relief. It may be a regional variation, but it's relatively common in West Coast firms.
Six of one...
Merging and local traffic is still slower than cruising traffic in the middle lanes. The "slow" lane should still be moving at a good clip so as to prevent people merging onto the freeway from being trapped in the right lane.
It's the conditions you can't foresee that I'd worry about.
In which case it does not matter how close the cars are. When merging and passing, the rule of thumb cannot be mechanically maintained, and road conditions dictate how much shorter a temporary following distance may be.
Most interruptions in the smooth flow of traffic are due to failure of "safety conscious" drivers to follow the basic protocol of multilane road systems: each progressive lane in the driver's-side direction should be moving faster than the preceding lane at all times. Problems arise when people block all lanes by completing a 1 mph-differential pass, which causes other drivers to stack up behind.
More often than not, these idiots are the ones who pull out in front of an already passing driver on the left (with a mile of empty space behind), going slower than that driver instead of waiting for the faster car to pass on the left before engaging their slow-motion passing maneuver. These people see a reasonable distance at their slower speed and pull into the passing lane, without looking beyond the first pair of headlights in the mirror and without considering their relative slower speed or the overall flow of traffic.
If there is enough room for another car to move from the left lane to the right lane and then back into the left lane, all while you putz about in the left lane (US), you have failed your roadway obligations not to be an obstruction to traffic, and as a result are creating a greater traffic hazard and risk to yourself and others than the risk mitigated by a steadfast following of a rule of thumb. If you have been passed, the two-second rule safe following distance automatically evens out over the course of a few seconds, because you should not be passing anyone unless you are traveling at an appreciably higher rate of speed. No brakes are needed, and if the following driver needs to make any small adjustment, it's simply by virtue of coasting.
You should not be in the passing lane unless you are moving a solid 5 mph or more faster than the lane to the right. If you are uncomfortable with that speed increase, you should not be passing at all. You should also never force a univariate analysis using only a following distance rule and assume that you're being "safe" by blindly adhering to such a standard, or that other drivers are unsafe. There are tailgaters and unsafe speeders, but there are equally obnoxious and unsafe drivers who insist on lingering longer than necessary and slower than permissible.
It's just like those people who put their turn signals on fifteen seconds in advance of a lane change. Preparation is good, but when following drivers slow down and give you space for five to ten seconds and nothing happens, other drivers begin to ignore what appear to be your mistaken blinkers. These people are as bad as those who don't signal at all, but they tend to be sanctimonious about their thoroughness and safety when in fact, their overlong signaling is a source of roadway confusion and elevated risk.