I'm no lawyer, or even close to being brushed up on all that legal stuff, but it seems to me that the copying is made by the person on the receiving end, not originating end.
I'm no lawyer, or even close to being brushed up on all that legal stuff, but it seems to me that the copying is made by the person on the receiving end, not originating end.
Have you ever used those automated fax-back document systems? Where you dial a number, press an extension and the system at the other end faxes you a document back based on the extension?
The receiver may have requested a copy, but it would be absurd to argue that the person who setup and maintains the system is not actively participating in the process.
The internet works much the same. The receiver sends an message to the sender that they want a copy of a file, and the senders equipment accepts tha request and issues the reciever a copy of the file.
Like a library cann't prevent you from copying a book that you borrow and bring back later, the person who makes available the songs online cann't be responsible for what the persons borrowing those songs do with them after they are "done" with them.
The analagy doesn't work, because the receiver doesn't borrow the songs. You sent them a copy, and are now trying to say its their fault if they keep it. That would be like someone asking you for a book, you photocopying it for them, sending it to them, and saying, if you keep it, I'm not responsible. That doesn't fly.
If you loan a book to your friend and that friend copies it before returning it, are you guilty of copyright infringement, or is your friend?
Your friend is guilty, because you gave him the original and he copied it. The analagy doesn't hold on the internet. You aren't giving him the original. You are making a copy and giving him that.
The only argument of which I'm currently aware is that they state the excessive damages are necessary to deter others.
Correct. The reason for the statutory minimum and and punitive damages in general are to say "hey what you did was wrong, don't do it again." This is why stealing a Britney Spears CD has a more serious penalty than payback of the $8 price tag.
However, the law was written with an eye to punishing 'single offenses'. e.g. If a business photocopies some pages out of a book and passes them around at a meeting, that might be a 750 fine. If they do it for a few books, it might run into a couple thousands. If a restaurant uses a song in their training videos... same deal. Only organized criminals would ever be systematically infringing thousands of works...
Nobody ever envisioned a 12 year old with the capability to obtain and re-distribute 5,000 songs with 5 minutes of spare time in the family room... and bringing down a potential fine of $5,000 x 750 = 3.75 million dollar fine on his parents.
This is essentially the thrust of the argument... that one computer sharing thousands of songs (esp. for noncommercial purposes) should really be treated as a single act of infringement, not thousands of individual infringements. And that the punitive damages amount should be applied once for the whole collection, not once for each track.
After all... when you shoplift 2 physical CDs, you are still only charged with one count of theft... not once for each track on each CD, not even once for each CD.
I could be wrong here, but wouldn't the easiest and most cost effective way of improving your image to be doing what you had described? Service improvements. Better pricing structures. Better policies.
No. It takes both. You can't run an effective image improving campaign if nothing has changed. But if you just change and hope everyone notices on their own that's horribly inefficient. You get much better results by telling people.
Why must EVERY conversation on privacy boil down to a few tired questions about "open source" alternatives ?
Because open source alternatives shouldn't have backdoors. And if it does they can be identified and closed. The only reason the conversation is tiresome is because proprietary software seems to have a perpetual stream of backdoors that keep keep bringing it up.
What, like if the source code is open, then that will prevent backdoors ? Erm hello, the client software isn't the problem, it's the network of Skype servers the bloody data passes through that is the weak point in the equation.
Nobody intelligent is asking for an oss skype client. They are asking for an oss replacement to the entire skype service. For precisely the reason you stated.
So who do you trust more with your privacy ? A multi million dollar company, or some nerd in his moms basement, acting as a VOIP connectivity server.
If that nerd is just hosting as a connection service, and the voip data stream itself is end-to-end encrypted and is actually transmitted directly to the recipient, then I trust the nerd in the basement more, because he never even sees the stream, and even if he did, its encrypted.
At least as long as I know I'm -really- using the public key of the called party to encrypt it, that is. But that is biggest weakness of almost all internet uses of encryption.
In my case, I'd chose option "none of the above", but really... open source is not the answer to ALL the worlds ills.
Not all of them. But it is the answer to this one.
Charging $2500 per year for a parking place is outright extortion.
It is supply and demand. Space is expensive in some cities. REALLY expensive.
A parking spot in the vicinity of where the Seinfeld show was set for example can easily run $350-$500 month, and the condos and apartments routinely don't come with a spot, so $5000-$6000/year for parking in new york... and then insurance and maintenance on top of that. If you are lucky enough to buy a place with a parking spot you can expect the place to cost $100k+ more than the same place would be without one.
Granted, New York is easily the worst place in the U.S., but other cities like London or Dubai, have similar or even higher costs. And lots of cities are up in the $150+/mo range.
The rules of a game can not be protected by copyright, trademark or patent. Only the specific expression of those rules can be covered by copyright.
However the fact that the -rules- are also the same contributes to the trademark infringment of the OTHER elements. Trademark is infringed when its reasonable that other people are confused -- if Scrabble and Scrabbulous were as different as scrabble and checkers their would be considerably less chance of confusing them... but because they both play by the same rules, on boards that look the same, with pieces that look the same, with a name that is similiar the case for trademark infringement is very strong.
As for copyright, the game board and pieces itself are also covered by copyright, in addition to the specific expression of the rules. You can make a game that -works- like candyland... you can't make a game that -looks- like candyland. Same for scrabble, or monopoly.
Whilst it's conceivable they might just turn up near Earth with no conception of our military capabilities I think it's hardly plausible they actually would do.
Human explorers often went exploring with no conception of the others military capabilities. Did Columbus have any prior knowledge of the American indians military strength?
Why not? Europe had the technology to cross the ocean... yet that didn't confer on them any special foreknowledge of the other side... and as another example, when they got their the natives while far less advanced technologically had ample weaponry capable of harming the Europeans.
So why do you find it so implausible that an alien race able to cross the intersteller ocean would not have detailed information about our military capability. That simply because they can cross that ocean they must also be able to do it effortlessly.
Even today, where crossing our ocean has more or less been mastered, its not effortless. We must plan for food and fuel... we must choose between getting there quickly in unarmoured planes, at far greater expense in more heavily armoured planes, or very slowly in massive ships with 3-foot thick hulls. And our supply of each type of vehicle is relatively limited... particularly the massive ships -- the US navy, according to wikipedia has fewer than 300 ships.
Similiarly an alien race might choose to send a small fast lightly armed craft with a couple crew over their slow moving death star.
The reason that all our military vehicles aren't built like tanks is because the military relies on good intelligence to let it know when it has to deploy tanks against an enemy and when it can get away with using an unarmoured land rover.
That's part of it, but the other part of it is: you fight with the army you have, not the one you would like to have.
Even if they -had- shielding capable of holding back nuclear weapons, that doesn't automatically imply that its practical, feasible, economical, or otherwise worth having it along for an intersteller first contact mission.
If -we- were sending a first contact mission to say Mars, even knowing there was a medieval culture there, would we send a heavily armed and armoured space craft? We have the technology. But would it be worth the extra cost? If we deemed the risk acceptably small? Or if the martian culture advanced to nuclear weapons since our last probe? (not likely on mars, but for an insterstellar journey possibly measured in decades or centuries... quite possible.
If they sent out an expedition while we were firing cannons from wooden ships, and arrived to find out we had nuclear weapons and icbms, what then? Curse their intel, and leave. Or make do with what they have?
I've never, in all the years I've used Linux, had to edit config files to accomplish some "ordinary" task. The only times I've had to edit the config files were "hacks" to accomplish something that I don't think would ever apply to an ordinary user.
Until recently I've routinely had to edit config files to get wifi working with better security than WEP. I've also routinely had to edit config files to get X working.
I've always wondered what it would be like to be admitted as an undercover "patient" in such an institution with the ability to scream a safe word and quickly be whisked away back to safety.
I've always wondered if I could get myself committed (as a completely sane person) unbeknownst the the institutional staff, and see if / how long it would take them to realize I was sane and let me out.
But if the opportunity ever came up, I doubt I'd do it. I simply don't have enough faith in the system that they'd diagnose me as sane before they drove me insane.
I think that's reflected in your need for a 'safety word', but having a safety net would probably help keep you sane.
I have never heard a compelling argument for why copyrights extends past 40 years. Thus, the whole of your argument, except the parts about trademark are moot.
The fact that you don't agree with copyright law doesn't make the argument moot. The laws are what they are.
And Hasbro -has- to go after them at least on the trademark stuff, or they weaken their trademarks.
The rest -- bollocks to a broken system that encourages Hasbro, et cetera, to sit on their lazy asses and instead of inventing something new or authoring an original work, to sue, sue, sue.
If you find it despicable that someone might sit on their lazy asses an not invent something new or author an original work, then where is your contempt for scrabulous? That game doesn't have a single original or innovative thought in it. Its f****** Scrabble.
And the alien ship could be equipped with some kind of energy weapon that could track the f22 for miles and vaporize it from a distance far outside its weapon range, instantly and with 100% accuracy.
It could also be this aliens first attempt at contacting another sentient form of life, and its ships might well be as fragile and as frugal as our own space shuttles.
If we're going to speculate about alien technology, why hold back?
I'm just pointing out that its stupid to conclude that just because they are 'alien' and have 'advanced technology' that they are all that likely to be invulnerable. Our F-22 Raptors and Space shuttles are vulnerable to a barrage of rocks thrown by technology a 1000 years inferior. We even have the tech... our tanks aren't terribly vulnerable to a trebuchet... but wouldn't you know it... only a fraction of our military vehicles are built like tanks.
Similiarly, even if the aliens had advanced shields, there'd be no automatic guarantee they'd be on every craft.
A rock may also be no danger to them, perhaps they have shields or a hull strong enough that a rock would do nothing to them.
Perhaps. Perhaps not. But there is no reason to believe one case is going to be more likely than the other.
Point is, random speculation isn't terribly insightful.
The 'insightful' part is realizing that. And that was my point. They may be invulnerable to our weapons... but its just as plausible that they aren't.
The notion that people adapt to not having cars is about like saying that people adapt to not having feet.
Lots of people in large cities don't have cars. They cope far better than you think, and miss it less than you would expect.
The second is that people tend to want to personalize their automobiles for comfort...
Really? Have you been on a bus, train, subway, ferry, cruise ship, taxi cab, or airplane? Have you rented a car before?
If people don't own it, they don't tend to personalize them. People personalize their cars because they own them, not because they have an innate need to personalize the things they travel in. The kids can bring a portable DVD player.
While I'm pointing out flaws in the articles, I'd like to point out a flaw in the suggestion of renting infrequently used durable goods: it generally costs more... a lot more. We did the math for a power washer and concluded that buying a low-end power washer would pay for itself in three or four years worth of rentals even if I only used it once a year. Why? Simple.
You apparently have a lot more space than I do, and space is part of the equation. If I bought a pressure washer, a tile saw, a large ladder, car ramps, and a other large durable goods that I have only occasional need for I would have have to rent an additional storage locker, and that would almost immediately nullify the economics of owning them.
Indeed, a car itself is subject to this space cost. In a large city, a parking spot adds significantly enough to the cost of maining a vehicle that it can push the economics in favor of renting a vehicle when you actually need one.
I know people paying $2500/year for a parking spot. Plus $2500/year for insurance. Plus maintenance. $6000+ per year will cover a lot more rentals, couriers, and delivery trucks than you might think. Sure public transit has a cost too, but that's less than they would be paying for gas... and that was at last years prices.
But our materials and systems will be a lot more vulnerable than theirs. We have to get the nuke close enough to even have a chance to try it. Our current missile tech will probably be quite a joke to anyone capable of FTL. And ICBM launches are easily detected by satellite with current technology.
1) A primitive martian with a rock would have little trouble dispatching our state of the art mars rovers. Yet -we- are the ones capable of launching interplanetary probes, while my hypothetical martian is one step up from cave-martian.
And his friend would have just finished telling him that "our rock tech would be quite a joke to anyone capabe of interplanetary flight..." And he'd be right... but the mars rover simply wasn't built to withstand it.
2) A 1000 year old trebuchet is quite a joke to a modern military too, but a jet on a landing strip will still be effectively disabled by a few falling 300lb chunks of rock. And once its on the ground, there is sweet-f***-all they are going to be able to do about it between detecting the rock being launched and it smashing into the plane.
3) Even today we could easily develop defense systems to deal with trebuchet attacks while on the ground, but we don't have any in place on any of our aircraft. It wouldn't be worth the cost, and it would affect the weight (which would affect the range, etc, etc, etc)
So just because aliens might have the technology to detect, and intercept a nuclear attack launched at their ship after it landed at the superbowl doesn't mean such a system will be installed or active, perhaps it wouldn't even make sense for them to have installed one even if they had considered the possibility. Perhaps the extra energy to transport a nuclear attack defense system accross intersteller distances vs the liklihood of actually needing it when they arrived was deemed sufficiently small. Or perhaps when they launched the craft, humans were still mucking around with steam engines and they weren't expecting mirv-nukes when they arrived.
In short, it would be daft to assume we could hurt an alien craft... but it would be equally daft to assume we couldn't.
Would that be like me publishing my own copy of Hamlet? or MacBeth?
Not at all. Hamlet and MacBeth are out of copyright.
If Lord of the Rings was out of copyright and in the public domain what you describe would be perfectly legal and reasonable.
That 'if' makes a difference.
As I understand it the rules of Scrabble are in the public domain so it's really not that cut and dry.
But the board and pieces are not. The rules to monopoly are in the public domain too, but the monopoly board and the designs, text, and artwork on the chance and treasury chest, utility, and property cards are NOT. And while you can make games that work much like monopoly, the board and pieces have to be different enough that it not be obviously the 'same' nor even a 'derivative work'.
And that's just -copyright-. Trademark and 'trade dress' also apply. The look of the scrabble pieces and board is arguably part of the Scrabble trademark 'trade dress'.
Rules of games aren't copyrightable (well the actual text of the rules are, but not the rules themselves),
Exactly. I mention the rules because they contribute to the trademark infringment. Because the rules of scrabulous are identical, that contributes to the Scrabulous' ability to confuse people into thinking they are playing Scrabble. (because lets face it... they are playing scrabble.)
but they are patentable. I believe Scrabble had been patented (like Monopoly) but the patent has long since expired.
Yes. They are suing based on copyright and trademark, not patents.
IANAL, and I don't use Scrabulous, so I can't say if they are infringing on board layout or some other copyrightable effect.
can be protected art. Then so can the scrabble board.
They probably have a good case on trademark though,
Definitely. Not only is there the name similiarity, but the look of the scrabble board is part of the 'trade dress' of the Scrabble trademark. Everything about scrabulous is designed to mimic scrabble exactly.
Scrabulous is pretty close to Scrabble. I don't think I can get away with a car company called Generalized Motors.
At least not if you sell cars; especially ones that from 6 ft away are virtually indistinguishable from GM cars.
Sorry, but I do not feel any of the so-called intellectual property associated with this game should be in force except for the name.
Why not? Copyrights are in force for longer than 50 years. This is being argued as a copyright and trademark violation. And why shouldn't copyright apply to a game? It applies to restaurant menus, email memos, blog posts, napkin doodles, finger paintings, and so on. Why can't it apply to a board game?
Granted, the idea of a crossword game where you construct words from pieces shouldn't be copy protected. But the precise rules, layout of a particular board, etc should be.
There are lots of scrabble-like games that should not be found infringing... but scrabulous?
Scrabulous has double and tripple letter and word scores in the same places on a board that is the same size and shape, from a set of pieces with the same letter frequency, and the game follows exactly the same rules.
It looks like scrabble. It plays like scrabble. Its even almost-but-not-quite called scrabble.
How is that different from writing a novel entitled Lord of the Bracelets, you know the one? Its about the Dark Lord Soron who forged 9 bracelets for men, 7 for dwarfs (not dwarves), and 3 for elfs (not elves), and one master bracelet for himself, which was lost in a great war and then found by Seegul... from whom it was stolen by Billy and then passed on to his adopted nephew Frobo...who carried it to Riverdell with his friend Samsmart while being pursued by braceletwraiths... and from there a great journey was undertaken by the council to form the Fellowship of the Bracelets to carry the ring to Doom Mountain and destroy it...
There's writing fantasy that was influenced and inspired by Tolkien... and then there is Lord of the Bracelets.
Like my "Lord of the Bracelets" Scrabulous deserves to be found infringing and shut down.
If they want to sue over trademark infringement over the name, fine.
actually there is no such thing as an earthrise on the moon, as the moon does not 'rotate' in relation to it's movement around the earth. At any point on the surface of the moon facing the earth, the earth will always be in the same point in the sky, always.
An 'earthrise' is still possible, you just have to put the mooncam on a buggy and drive in the correct direction.
If you have the technology to handle the incredibly, stupidly huge energies needed to travel between the stars, all the missiles on Earth don't mean a thing to you.
I disagree. A modern supersonic F-22 Raptor Fighter Jet armed with missiles, bombs, 20mm rotary canon, etc is orders of magnitude beyond say, a 1000 year old trebuchet. The jet utterly dominates and controls every aspect of the engagement... its just absurd to contemplate such a 'battle'.
Yet even so, if the pilot were to land the jet within range of the trebuchet to say hi to the locals, a barrage of 300lb rocks crashing into it is still going to break it.
Point is: just because something is fantastically advanced technology doesn't automatically mean it can't be smashed by a big rock.
The point was that there is a way to get the message across. It doesn't matter all the time if the words aren't exactly the same as long as you can take the same meanings away.
And my point is that there are TONS of things that don't translate. You -can't- take the same meanings away.
Tell me, how would one express the title of the short story "The Most Dangerous Game" by Richard Connell, in French? The english word game is deliberately being used both in its sense of 'something you play' 'checkers is a game' and in the sense of 'prey' as in a 'big game hunter'. That doesn't translate well.
You can talk about the hunting as a dangerous game, or you can talk about men as dangerous prey but you can't do both at once.
Or in French, according to the rules of grammar one can use tu or vous to address a singular person or multiple people respectively... while English only has 'you' for either case. However, in French the use of the word tu / vous also has a bearing on social distance and formality. One addresses friends and servants with tu, while vous is reserved for strangers and superiors. it would be quite rude and irregular for a waiter to refer to you as 'tu'. There really is no way to translate that to english while preserving the breach of etiquette and the insult it conveys.
But no one has trouble understanding who Jesus is which proves my point.
Proves nothing.
In one version of the bible I read a woman was 'great with child'; the image conjured was of a woman near the end of her pregnancy, with a large prominent belly. Some people I've spoken to have even gotten 'health and glow' pregnancy is known to convey into that phrase. Most people felt it expressed something 'uplifting' or 'positive'.
Another version simply translated it as 'pregnant'. This is a more ambiguous visual. And much more neutral in tone. Not outright 'negative', but not 'positive' either.
Why does it matter? imagine if jesus has spoken directly on abortion... should jesus have condemned the ending of a the life of an unborn child when a woman is 'pregnant' one might read that as no abortion allowed. Should jesus only have condemned the ending of the childs life when a woman is 'great with child' that might be read as consistent with it being unacceptable in the last trimester, but perhaps ok in the first trimester.
Two people who speak the same language can routinely read a passage of the bible and take a different meaning from it. So we can't express an idea accurately in ONE language, never mind try to express that idea accurately in multiple.
Who's more likely to buy Doom 4, someone who hasn't played any doom game in decades or someone who still plays doom 1 & 2 regularly using different mods? Communities build up, buzz is generated through the grassroots, if the community's any good it may even grow and spread, which would make your next game even bigger.
Maybe. Maybe not. And once the game is OpenSourced, you can't put it back in the box if it doesn't work out.
Plus subscription MMOs are different from other games in that most players won't play more than 1 or 2. So by open sourcing a game, you are creating competition for your other games.
Suppose Sony were to say, shut down and then OpenSource EQ1, nevermind the loss of revenue from EQ1 [lets say they were going to shut it down anyway, regardless so that revenue is gone either way].
But by opensourcing it, and giving it a life of its own, it could also have the net effect of actually pulling subscribers AWAY from their other paid MMOs like EQ2 and Vangaurd, etc, without any gaurantee that it will help subscription rates of their 'next mmo'.
It's already possible to look at the game databases and learn how the quests work. It's really simple most of the time. Go to X, kill Y, Z times. P.P.S. This information is also available in a quest log of sorts...
Everquest I, in particular would be a great counter example. Sure nearly all the quests were documented on the various sites, but the information was often sketchy or even outright wrong. Often it would say 'go to an area and kill everything that moves for a while and eventually the named will pop', but in reality the spawn was triggered elsewhere. Other times, the spawn you were interested in only popped from one particular place, or lots of mobs named X spawned in the area, but only the ones that spawned at (x,y) dropped z. So if you needed 5 z's you could spend hours killing all the mobs named X, until you had 5 z's... or you kill them until you get 1 z, then rush over to (x,y) and kill everything that respawns from that point, and get your 5 z's MUCH MUCH quicker.
A few quests -were- documented to this degree by people who had done the quest dozens of times, and -really- understood it. But far more quests exist where the sort of information you could get from the source code just isn't available.
Hell, in everquest, even some of the most basic mechanics weren't well understood for years. For example, whether the mobs spawned with loot, or whether it was generated on their death -- for -YEARS- people swore up and down that they had better drop rates of x if they had y equipped when they killed it.
This information is also available in a quest log of sorts...
Another feature EQ1 didn't have. (To its detriment really)
But there were elements of EQ1 quests that were really quite brilliant -- Its one of the few games that actually required the community come together and solve quests as a group. For one quest you needed two coins -- one on a high stump in a dark forest that was only somewhat safe to enter when the quest was level appropriate... and even then only during the day, the other in at the bottom of a frozen river, where you had to enter a hole in the ice.
The quest giver gave almost no direction to finding these coins, and a player playing 'solo' really had no chance in hell of ever completing the quest before he had levelled FAR beyond it... unless he communicated/collaborated with other players -- one of whom might have discovered the first coin while levitating through the forest, and another who discovered the 2nd coin exploring under the ice.
It was truly brilliant when playing it 'back in the day' when those quests were still being solved; sure after it was solved the locations and screenshots of where to go were up on the web, but many of the quests even today are only partially documented. People have reported you can get an X here or a Y there... but often there are much better places to get X's and Y's.
And any longtime player has lots of insights into the game that simply aren't documented.
New MMO's have really 'dumbed it down'. In WoW you just run from question mark to question mark on your map.
If I say "Hi, how are you" in any language that you can understand, am I still saying "Hi, how are you?". ... Like I said, "Hi, how are you" means the same thing spoken in any language that the recipient can understand.
Do you actually speak any other languages?
At best you can say approximately the same thing. But to convey exactly the same semantics -- what might take a short sentence in Japanese, becomes pages worth of English to convey all the semantics that went into that short sentence... and vice versa.
Depending on the language you can play around with plural forms, gender forms, tenses, verb forms, idioms, puns, double entendre, slang, formal vs informal forms, etc, etc to achieve all kinds of semantic layering that simply can't be concisely expressed in another language.
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I'm no lawyer, or even close to being brushed up on all that legal stuff, but it seems to me that the copying is made by the person on the receiving end, not originating end.
I'm no lawyer, or even close to being brushed up on all that legal stuff, but it seems to me that the copying is made by the person on the receiving end, not originating end.
Have you ever used those automated fax-back document systems? Where you dial a number, press an extension and the system at the other end faxes you a document back based on the extension?
The receiver may have requested a copy, but it would be absurd to argue that the person who setup and maintains the system is not actively participating in the process.
The internet works much the same. The receiver sends an message to the sender that they want a copy of a file, and the senders equipment accepts tha request and issues the reciever a copy of the file.
Like a library cann't prevent you from copying a book that you borrow and bring back later, the person who makes available the songs online cann't be responsible for what the persons borrowing those songs do with them after they are "done" with them.
The analagy doesn't work, because the receiver doesn't borrow the songs. You sent them a copy, and are now trying to say its their fault if they keep it. That would be like someone asking you for a book, you photocopying it for them, sending it to them, and saying, if you keep it, I'm not responsible. That doesn't fly.
If you loan a book to your friend and that friend copies it before returning it, are you guilty of copyright infringement, or is your friend?
Your friend is guilty, because you gave him the original and he copied it. The analagy doesn't hold on the internet. You aren't giving him the original. You are making a copy and giving him that.
The only argument of which I'm currently aware is that they state the excessive damages are necessary to deter others.
Correct. The reason for the statutory minimum and and punitive damages in general are to say "hey what you did was wrong, don't do it again." This is why stealing a Britney Spears CD has a more serious penalty than payback of the $8 price tag.
However, the law was written with an eye to punishing 'single offenses'. e.g. If a business photocopies some pages out of a book and passes them around at a meeting, that might be a 750 fine. If they do it for a few books, it might run into a couple thousands. If a restaurant uses a song in their training videos... same deal. Only organized criminals would ever be systematically infringing thousands of works...
Nobody ever envisioned a 12 year old with the capability to obtain and re-distribute 5,000 songs with 5 minutes of spare time in the family room... and bringing down a potential fine of $5,000 x 750 = 3.75 million dollar fine on his parents.
This is essentially the thrust of the argument... that one computer sharing thousands of songs (esp. for noncommercial purposes) should really be treated as a single act of infringement, not thousands of individual infringements. And that the punitive damages amount should be applied once for the whole collection, not once for each track.
After all... when you shoplift 2 physical CDs, you are still only charged with one count of theft... not once for each track on each CD, not even once for each CD.
I could be wrong here, but wouldn't the easiest and most cost effective way of improving your image to be doing what you had described? Service improvements. Better pricing structures. Better policies.
No. It takes both. You can't run an effective image improving campaign if nothing has changed. But if you just change and hope everyone notices on their own that's horribly inefficient. You get much better results by telling people.
As much as you may hate it, advertising works.
Why must EVERY conversation on privacy boil down to a few tired questions about "open source" alternatives ?
Because open source alternatives shouldn't have backdoors. And if it does they can be identified and closed. The only reason the conversation is tiresome is because proprietary software seems to have a perpetual stream of backdoors that keep keep bringing it up.
What, like if the source code is open, then that will prevent backdoors ? Erm hello, the client software isn't the problem, it's the network of Skype servers the bloody data passes through that is the weak point in the equation.
Nobody intelligent is asking for an oss skype client. They are asking for an oss replacement to the entire skype service. For precisely the reason you stated.
So who do you trust more with your privacy ? A multi million dollar company, or some nerd in his moms basement, acting as a VOIP connectivity server.
If that nerd is just hosting as a connection service, and the voip data stream itself is end-to-end encrypted and is actually transmitted directly to the recipient, then I trust the nerd in the basement more, because he never even sees the stream, and even if he did, its encrypted.
At least as long as I know I'm -really- using the public key of the called party to encrypt it, that is. But that is biggest weakness of almost all internet uses of encryption.
In my case, I'd chose option "none of the above", but really ... open source is not the answer to ALL the worlds ills.
Not all of them. But it is the answer to this one.
Charging $2500 per year for a parking place is outright extortion.
It is supply and demand. Space is expensive in some cities. REALLY expensive.
A parking spot in the vicinity of where the Seinfeld show was set for example can easily run $350-$500 month, and the condos and apartments routinely don't come with a spot, so $5000-$6000/year for parking in new york... and then insurance and maintenance on top of that. If you are lucky enough to buy a place with a parking spot you can expect the place to cost $100k+ more than the same place would be without one.
Granted, New York is easily the worst place in the U.S., but other cities like London or Dubai, have similar or even higher costs. And lots of cities are up in the $150+/mo range.
http://www.nysun.com/new-york/parking-spaces-too-are-soaring-topping-1300/55630/
http://www.reuters.com/article/lifestyleMolt/idUSSP4465520080717
The rules of a game can not be protected by copyright, trademark or patent. Only the specific expression of those rules can be covered by copyright.
However the fact that the -rules- are also the same contributes to the trademark infringment of the OTHER elements. Trademark is infringed when its reasonable that other people are confused -- if Scrabble and Scrabbulous were as different as scrabble and checkers their would be considerably less chance of confusing them... but because they both play by the same rules, on boards that look the same, with pieces that look the same, with a name that is similiar the case for trademark infringement is very strong.
As for copyright, the game board and pieces itself are also covered by copyright, in addition to the specific expression of the rules. You can make a game that -works- like candyland... you can't make a game that -looks- like candyland. Same for scrabble, or monopoly.
Whilst it's conceivable they might just turn up near Earth with no conception of our military capabilities I think it's hardly plausible they actually would do.
Human explorers often went exploring with no conception of the others military capabilities. Did Columbus have any prior knowledge of the American indians military strength?
Why not? Europe had the technology to cross the ocean... yet that didn't confer on them any special foreknowledge of the other side... and as another example, when they got their the natives while far less advanced technologically had ample weaponry capable of harming the Europeans.
So why do you find it so implausible that an alien race able to cross the intersteller ocean would not have detailed information about our military capability. That simply because they can cross that ocean they must also be able to do it effortlessly.
Even today, where crossing our ocean has more or less been mastered, its not effortless. We must plan for food and fuel... we must choose between getting there quickly in unarmoured planes, at far greater expense in more heavily armoured planes, or very slowly in massive ships with 3-foot thick hulls. And our supply of each type of vehicle is relatively limited... particularly the massive ships -- the US navy, according to wikipedia has fewer than 300 ships.
Similiarly an alien race might choose to send a small fast lightly armed craft with a couple crew over their slow moving death star.
The reason that all our military vehicles aren't built like tanks is because the military relies on good intelligence to let it know when it has to deploy tanks against an enemy and when it can get away with using an unarmoured land rover.
That's part of it, but the other part of it is: you fight with the army you have, not the one you would like to have.
Even if they -had- shielding capable of holding back nuclear weapons, that doesn't automatically imply that its practical, feasible, economical, or otherwise worth having it along for an intersteller first contact mission.
If -we- were sending a first contact mission to say Mars, even knowing there was a medieval culture there, would we send a heavily armed and armoured space craft? We have the technology. But would it be worth the extra cost? If we deemed the risk acceptably small? Or if the martian culture advanced to nuclear weapons since our last probe? (not likely on mars, but for an insterstellar journey possibly measured in decades or centuries... quite possible.
If they sent out an expedition while we were firing cannons from wooden ships, and arrived to find out we had nuclear weapons and icbms, what then? Curse their intel, and leave. Or make do with what they have?
I've never, in all the years I've used Linux, had to edit config files to accomplish some "ordinary" task. The only times I've had to edit the config files were "hacks" to accomplish something that I don't think would ever apply to an ordinary user.
Until recently I've routinely had to edit config files to get wifi working with better security than WEP.
I've also routinely had to edit config files to get X working.
I've always wondered what it would be like to be admitted as an undercover "patient" in such an institution with the ability to scream a safe word and quickly be whisked away back to safety.
I've always wondered if I could get myself committed (as a completely sane person) unbeknownst the the institutional staff, and see if / how long it would take them to realize I was sane and let me out.
But if the opportunity ever came up, I doubt I'd do it. I simply don't have enough faith in the system that they'd diagnose me as sane before they drove me insane.
I think that's reflected in your need for a 'safety word', but having a safety net would probably help keep you sane.
I have never heard a compelling argument for why copyrights extends past 40 years. Thus, the whole of your argument, except the parts about trademark are moot.
The fact that you don't agree with copyright law doesn't make the argument moot. The laws are what they are.
And Hasbro -has- to go after them at least on the trademark stuff, or they weaken their trademarks.
The rest -- bollocks to a broken system that encourages Hasbro, et cetera, to sit on their lazy asses and instead of inventing something new or authoring an original work, to sue, sue, sue.
If you find it despicable that someone might sit on their lazy asses an not invent something new or author an original work, then where is your contempt for scrabulous? That game doesn't have a single original or innovative thought in it. Its f****** Scrabble.
And the alien ship could be equipped with some kind of energy weapon that could track the f22 for miles and vaporize it from a distance far outside its weapon range, instantly and with 100% accuracy.
It could also be this aliens first attempt at contacting another sentient form of life, and its ships might well be as fragile and as frugal as our own space shuttles.
If we're going to speculate about alien technology, why hold back?
I'm just pointing out that its stupid to conclude that just because they are 'alien' and have 'advanced technology' that they are all that likely to be invulnerable. Our F-22 Raptors and Space shuttles are vulnerable to a barrage of rocks thrown by technology a 1000 years inferior. We even have the tech... our tanks aren't terribly vulnerable to a trebuchet... but wouldn't you know it... only a fraction of our military vehicles are built like tanks.
Similiarly, even if the aliens had advanced shields, there'd be no automatic guarantee they'd be on every craft.
A rock may also be no danger to them, perhaps they have shields or a hull strong enough that a rock would do nothing to them.
Perhaps. Perhaps not. But there is no reason to believe one case is going to be more likely than the other.
Point is, random speculation isn't terribly insightful.
The 'insightful' part is realizing that. And that was my point. They may be invulnerable to our weapons... but its just as plausible that they aren't.
Human life, sent millions and millions of miles, is too precious to risk on non-Earth spelunking.
As a representative of human life, I hereby volunteer to take that chance. I thin if you put the word out, people would be lined up around the block.
The notion that people adapt to not having cars is about like saying that people adapt to not having feet.
Lots of people in large cities don't have cars. They cope far better than you think, and miss it less than you would expect.
The second is that people tend to want to personalize their automobiles for comfort...
Really? Have you been on a bus, train, subway, ferry, cruise ship, taxi cab, or airplane? Have you rented a car before?
If people don't own it, they don't tend to personalize them. People personalize their cars because they own them, not because they have an innate need to personalize the things they travel in. The kids can bring a portable DVD player.
While I'm pointing out flaws in the articles, I'd like to point out a flaw in the suggestion of renting infrequently used durable goods: it generally costs more... a lot more. We did the math for a power washer and concluded that buying a low-end power washer would pay for itself in three or four years worth of rentals even if I only used it once a year. Why? Simple.
You apparently have a lot more space than I do, and space is part of the equation. If I bought a pressure washer, a tile saw, a large ladder, car ramps, and a other large durable goods that I have only occasional need for I would have have to rent an additional storage locker, and that would almost immediately nullify the economics of owning them.
Indeed, a car itself is subject to this space cost. In a large city, a parking spot adds significantly enough to the cost of maining a vehicle that it can push the economics in favor of renting a vehicle when you actually need one.
I know people paying $2500/year for a parking spot. Plus $2500/year for insurance. Plus maintenance. $6000+ per year will cover a lot more rentals, couriers, and delivery trucks than you might think. Sure public transit has a cost too, but that's less than they would be paying for gas... and that was at last years prices.
But our materials and systems will be a lot more vulnerable than theirs. We have to get the nuke close enough to even have a chance to try it. Our current missile tech will probably be quite a joke to anyone capable of FTL. And ICBM launches are easily detected by satellite with current technology.
1) A primitive martian with a rock would have little trouble dispatching our state of the art mars rovers. Yet -we- are the ones capable of launching interplanetary probes, while my hypothetical martian is one step up from cave-martian.
And his friend would have just finished telling him that "our rock tech would be quite a joke to anyone capabe of interplanetary flight..." And he'd be right... but the mars rover simply wasn't built to withstand it.
2) A 1000 year old trebuchet is quite a joke to a modern military too, but a jet on a landing strip will still be effectively disabled by a few falling 300lb chunks of rock. And once its on the ground, there is sweet-f***-all they are going to be able to do about it between detecting the rock being launched and it smashing into the plane.
3) Even today we could easily develop defense systems to deal with trebuchet attacks while on the ground, but we don't have any in place on any of our aircraft. It wouldn't be worth the cost, and it would affect the weight (which would affect the range, etc, etc, etc)
So just because aliens might have the technology to detect, and intercept a nuclear attack launched at their ship after it landed at the superbowl doesn't mean such a system will be installed or active, perhaps it wouldn't even make sense for them to have installed one even if they had considered the possibility. Perhaps the extra energy to transport a nuclear attack defense system accross intersteller distances vs the liklihood of actually needing it when they arrived was deemed sufficiently small. Or perhaps when they launched the craft, humans were still mucking around with steam engines and they weren't expecting mirv-nukes when they arrived.
In short, it would be daft to assume we could hurt an alien craft... but it would be equally daft to assume we couldn't.
Would that be like me publishing my own copy of Hamlet? or MacBeth?
Not at all. Hamlet and MacBeth are out of copyright.
If Lord of the Rings was out of copyright and in the public domain what you describe would be perfectly legal and reasonable.
That 'if' makes a difference.
As I understand it the rules of Scrabble are in the public domain so it's really not that cut and dry.
But the board and pieces are not. The rules to monopoly are in the public domain too, but the monopoly board and the designs, text, and artwork on the chance and treasury chest, utility, and property cards are NOT. And while you can make games that work much like monopoly, the board and pieces have to be different enough that it not be obviously the 'same' nor even a 'derivative work'.
And that's just -copyright-. Trademark and 'trade dress' also apply. The look of the scrabble pieces and board is arguably part of the Scrabble trademark 'trade dress'.
Rules of games aren't copyrightable (well the actual text of the rules are, but not the rules themselves),
Exactly. I mention the rules because they contribute to the trademark infringment. Because the rules of scrabulous are identical, that contributes to the Scrabulous' ability to confuse people into thinking they are playing Scrabble. (because lets face it... they are playing scrabble.)
but they are patentable. I believe Scrabble had been patented (like Monopoly) but the patent has long since expired.
Yes. They are suing based on copyright and trademark, not patents.
IANAL, and I don't use Scrabulous, so I can't say if they are infringing on board layout or some other copyrightable effect.
http://www.dvorak.org/blog/?p=15619
Tell me that picture isn't immediately recognizable as a scrabble board. Same color scheme. Same grid positions. Everything.
If this:
http://www.worsleyschool.net/socialarts/mon/mondrian.html
can be protected art. Then so can the scrabble board.
They probably have a good case on trademark though,
Definitely. Not only is there the name similiarity, but the look of the scrabble board is part of the 'trade dress' of the Scrabble trademark. Everything about scrabulous is designed to mimic scrabble exactly.
Scrabulous is pretty close to Scrabble. I don't think I can get away with a car company called Generalized Motors.
At least not if you sell cars; especially ones that from 6 ft away are virtually indistinguishable from GM cars.
Sorry, but I do not feel any of the so-called intellectual property associated with this game should be in force except for the name.
Why not? Copyrights are in force for longer than 50 years. This is being argued as a copyright and trademark violation. And why shouldn't copyright apply to a game? It applies to restaurant menus, email memos, blog posts, napkin doodles, finger paintings, and so on. Why can't it apply to a board game?
Granted, the idea of a crossword game where you construct words from pieces shouldn't be copy protected. But the precise rules, layout of a particular board, etc should be.
There are lots of scrabble-like games that should not be found infringing... but scrabulous?
Scrabulous has double and tripple letter and word scores in the same places on a board that is the same size and shape, from a set of pieces with the same letter frequency, and the game follows exactly the same rules.
It looks like scrabble. It plays like scrabble. Its even almost-but-not-quite called scrabble.
How is that different from writing a novel entitled Lord of the Bracelets, you know the one? Its about the Dark Lord Soron who forged 9 bracelets for men, 7 for dwarfs (not dwarves), and 3 for elfs (not elves), and one master bracelet for himself, which was lost in a great war and then found by Seegul... from whom it was stolen by Billy and then passed on to his adopted nephew Frobo...who carried it to Riverdell with his friend Samsmart while being pursued by braceletwraiths... and from there a great journey was undertaken by the council to form the Fellowship of the Bracelets to carry the ring to Doom Mountain and destroy it...
There's writing fantasy that was influenced and inspired by Tolkien... and then there is Lord of the Bracelets.
Like my "Lord of the Bracelets" Scrabulous deserves to be found infringing and shut down.
If they want to sue over trademark infringement over the name, fine.
That's part of it too.
actually there is no such thing as an earthrise on the moon, as the moon does not 'rotate' in relation to it's movement around the earth. At any point on the surface of the moon facing the earth, the earth will always be in the same point in the sky, always.
An 'earthrise' is still possible, you just have to put the mooncam on a buggy and drive in the correct direction.
Could this not be fixed with a simple Python script to scrape the license data?
No. It would have to be perl. And by virtue of being perl it absolutely could not be simple. ;)
If you have the technology to handle the incredibly, stupidly huge energies needed to travel between the stars, all the missiles on Earth don't mean a thing to you.
I disagree. A modern supersonic F-22 Raptor Fighter Jet armed with missiles, bombs, 20mm rotary canon, etc is orders of magnitude beyond say, a 1000 year old trebuchet. The jet utterly dominates and controls every aspect of the engagement... its just absurd to contemplate such a 'battle'.
Yet even so, if the pilot were to land the jet within range of the trebuchet to say hi to the locals, a barrage of 300lb rocks crashing into it is still going to break it.
Point is: just because something is fantastically advanced technology doesn't automatically mean it can't be smashed by a big rock.
The point was that there is a way to get the message across. It doesn't matter all the time if the words aren't exactly the same as long as you can take the same meanings away.
And my point is that there are TONS of things that don't translate. You -can't- take the same meanings away.
Tell me, how would one express the title of the short story "The Most Dangerous Game" by Richard Connell, in French? The english word game is deliberately being used both in its sense of 'something you play' 'checkers is a game' and in the sense of 'prey' as in a 'big game hunter'. That doesn't translate well.
You can talk about the hunting as a dangerous game, or you can talk about men as dangerous prey but you can't do both at once.
Or in French, according to the rules of grammar one can use tu or vous to address a singular person or multiple people respectively... while English only has 'you' for either case. However, in French the use of the word tu / vous also has a bearing on social distance and formality. One addresses friends and servants with tu, while vous is reserved for strangers and superiors. it would be quite rude and irregular for a waiter to refer to you as 'tu'. There really is no way to translate that to english while preserving the breach of etiquette and the insult it conveys.
But no one has trouble understanding who Jesus is which proves my point.
Proves nothing.
In one version of the bible I read a woman was 'great with child'; the image conjured was of a woman near the end of her pregnancy, with a large prominent belly. Some people I've spoken to have even gotten 'health and glow' pregnancy is known to convey into that phrase. Most people felt it expressed something 'uplifting' or 'positive'.
Another version simply translated it as 'pregnant'. This is a more ambiguous visual. And much more neutral in tone. Not outright 'negative', but not 'positive' either.
Why does it matter? imagine if jesus has spoken directly on abortion... should jesus have condemned the ending of a the life of an unborn child when a woman is 'pregnant' one might read that as no abortion allowed. Should jesus only have condemned the ending of the childs life when a woman is 'great with child' that might be read as consistent with it being unacceptable in the last trimester, but perhaps ok in the first trimester.
Two people who speak the same language can routinely read a passage of the bible and take a different meaning from it. So we can't express an idea accurately in ONE language, never mind try to express that idea accurately in multiple.
Who's more likely to buy Doom 4, someone who hasn't played any doom game in decades or someone who still plays doom 1 & 2 regularly using different mods? Communities build up, buzz is generated through the grassroots, if the community's any good it may even grow and spread, which would make your next game even bigger.
Maybe. Maybe not. And once the game is OpenSourced, you can't put it back in the box if it doesn't work out.
Plus subscription MMOs are different from other games in that most players won't play more than 1 or 2. So by open sourcing a game, you are creating competition for your other games.
Suppose Sony were to say, shut down and then OpenSource EQ1, nevermind the loss of revenue from EQ1 [lets say they were going to shut it down anyway, regardless so that revenue is gone either way].
But by opensourcing it, and giving it a life of its own, it could also have the net effect of actually pulling subscribers AWAY from their other paid MMOs like EQ2 and Vangaurd, etc, without any gaurantee that it will help subscription rates of their 'next mmo'.
TFA says to open source games that are no longer supported. Thus, they aren't being played anymore.
Thus most of the players are playing something else, and paying for it.
Thus open sourcing the no longer supported game will attract players from existing paid games, reducing their profitability.
It's already possible to look at the game databases and learn how the quests work. It's really simple most of the time. Go to X, kill Y, Z times. P.P.S. This information is also available in a quest log of sorts...
Everquest I, in particular would be a great counter example. Sure nearly all the quests were documented on the various sites, but the information was often sketchy or even outright wrong. Often it would say 'go to an area and kill everything that moves for a while and eventually the named will pop', but in reality the spawn was triggered elsewhere. Other times, the spawn you were interested in only popped from one particular place, or lots of mobs named X spawned in the area, but only the ones that spawned at (x,y) dropped z. So if you needed 5 z's you could spend hours killing all the mobs named X, until you had 5 z's... or you kill them until you get 1 z, then rush over to (x,y) and kill everything that respawns from that point, and get your 5 z's MUCH MUCH quicker.
A few quests -were- documented to this degree by people who had done the quest dozens of times, and -really- understood it. But far more quests exist where the sort of information you could get from the source code just isn't available.
Hell, in everquest, even some of the most basic mechanics weren't well understood for years. For example, whether the mobs spawned with loot, or whether it was generated on their death -- for -YEARS- people swore up and down that they had better drop rates of x if they had y equipped when they killed it.
This information is also available in a quest log of sorts...
Another feature EQ1 didn't have. (To its detriment really)
But there were elements of EQ1 quests that were really quite brilliant -- Its one of the few games that actually required the community come together and solve quests as a group. For one quest you needed two coins -- one on a high stump in a dark forest that was only somewhat safe to enter when the quest was level appropriate... and even then only during the day, the other in at the bottom of a frozen river, where you had to enter a hole in the ice.
The quest giver gave almost no direction to finding these coins, and a player playing 'solo' really had no chance in hell of ever completing the quest before he had levelled FAR beyond it... unless he communicated/collaborated with other players -- one of whom might have discovered the first coin while levitating through the forest, and another who discovered the 2nd coin exploring under the ice.
It was truly brilliant when playing it 'back in the day' when those quests were still being solved; sure after it was solved the locations and screenshots of where to go were up on the web, but many of the quests even today are only partially documented. People have reported you can get an X here or a Y there... but often there are much better places to get X's and Y's.
And any longtime player has lots of insights into the game that simply aren't documented.
New MMO's have really 'dumbed it down'. In WoW you just run from question mark to question mark on your map.
If I say "Hi, how are you" in any language that you can understand, am I still saying "Hi, how are you?". ...
Like I said, "Hi, how are you" means the same thing spoken in any language that the recipient can understand.
Do you actually speak any other languages?
At best you can say approximately the same thing. But to convey exactly the same semantics -- what might take a short sentence in Japanese, becomes pages worth of English to convey all the semantics that went into that short sentence... and vice versa.
Depending on the language you can play around with plural forms, gender forms, tenses, verb forms, idioms, puns, double entendre, slang, formal vs informal forms, etc, etc to achieve all kinds of semantic layering that simply can't be concisely expressed in another language.