Today you can find things on YouTube that I don't want to see--
Yeah, I didn't need to see Chef's hairy ass on the South Park episode the other week:)
What bothers me is the objection the librarians have to making sure a kid coming into the library doesn't find some obscene site left open as a joke by the last person. Or that they can look up porn to their heart's content. You'd think they'd be the first ones to want children protected. They wouldn't (at least I hope they wouldn't) hand a kid a porn mag--yet they want totally open access to anything and everything the tykes trip on by mistyping a site or look for.
Perhaps you should go talk to a few librarians... If the library has a porn mag & the kid specifically asks for it by name, volume, and issue - then chances are pretty good that the librarian would give it to them. In fact, in several states, they would be required to give it to them. Librarians are in a very specific business - helping people find information they are looking for. Think of them as the original 'information wants to be free' crowd.
Librarians protest any curtailing of the availability of information for 1 very clear reason: They have already seen what happens once it starts. Recorded book burnings go back to 200BC in China, and libraries are often favorite places to start your revolutions - from the Library at Alexandria to Sarajevo's National Library - they have a nasty tendency to burn as being full of counter-revolutionary propaganda. I will also point out that books as varied as Tom Sawyer, Uncle Tom's Cabin, Harry Potter, Mein Kampf, and Justine have all been banned/removed from public libraries by state decree in the US as recently as the 80s so it's not some hypothetical 'might happen' it has happened recently & the memories are still fresh in the minds of the people who preserve your literary history. (The fine people at the LoC are NOT people you want to start an discussion of censorship with.)
If you know enough to ask for something specific, then you are going to find out information anyway, why not make sure that the information you get is accurate & clear. IE, get your sex-ed from the health teacher not Bud the 5th year Sr in the locker-room. I am aware that this doesn't jibe with the current Christian Right movement in our government, but it's much more reality based than "If we don't teach about sex in schools, kids won't find out about it until they are married".
But you do let people gamble in American casinos in Vegas, Atlantic City (at times!) and certain native American reservations?
Technically, the NA reservations don't count. It's a very complicated arrangement, but they are semi-autonomous. They technically are bound by certain restrictions, but for the most part they are self governing. So they are neither truly external like Antigua, nor internal like Atlantic City or Las Vegas.
But the point stands, they are blocking off-shore gambling on moral grounds while permitting it on-shore. That makes it protectionist, hypocritical, and in viloation of multiple treaties.
There's nothing pathetic about protecting your citizens from gambling away their mortgage/rent/food money with the ease of a click of a mouse button.
That would be really nice, if that was what was happening. However, if you live in CT, NV, or a few other states, you can quite happily log into an in-state's casino website & gamble away your life savings. Or you could just go to the OTB website & do so across state lines. Or you can go to your states lottery website & do it.
Nope, look at the reasons the US govt is giving, 'the money supports drug lords', 'the money supports terrorists', 'Online gambling is being blocked because of moral reasons'. The first 2 are bunk because Antigua monitors their gaming establishments very carefully, they are about 30% of the countries GNP. If the last one was true, and it is the reason they formally advanced to WIPO, then they would be obligated to block it within the US as well. WIPO told them that, and they responded by doing nothing internally & passing more international restrictions.
This is not about a moral issue, this is about blocking money moving out of the country. That's protectionism, and it's blocked by all the treaties we've signed - we've screamed in the past on exactly the same points, so it's perfectly alright to call the US govt a bunch of hypocrites, because they provably are. That's not anti-US, it's fact. I know it's hard to believe, but even in this day & age, sometimes we still get to say the Emperor has no clothes without a trip to Gitmo.
The comment I was responding to implies that the only way to qualify for the safe harbor provision is to put in place a system of registration. If the only way to 'comply' with the provisions of a law is to require registration of your users, then yes, whether it's writen into the law or not, it's part of it. If the court determines that the only way to comply with the law is to abrige free speech, then the law has to be tossed. As for your analogy, it's nothing like that at all. Given the nature of the internet, and the goals of YouTube, it's much more like making everyone show photo ID to get into the park; so that if you play a song on your guitar, the RIAA can make sure you chip in your performance fee.
Beyond that, the other point of: even if YouTube requires registration to post, Viacom still has to issue take down notices. There is no gain except to bypass a couple of supeonas.
It's actually quite common to do in international business deals. The contract will usually state which set of laws & definitions will apply. Hence, SCO & Novell are in Switzerland[Sweden?] arguing over the results of their contract - signed & executed in the US. It's also why IBM keeps telling SCO that NY state law is the governing law for specific portions of their contract - because it's specified as being so.
By defining a specific international or country specific law, the meaning of the contract/license is proofed against exactly the type of variations you are presenting with your 'rubber' example. IIRC, the legal code in question defines a laptop as a consumer good. There may be other countries that define it as a business good. By explicitly stating "We are going to use the definition of a 'consumer good' as published in US code 15.X" the FSF ensures that the license is applied equally & fairly in all countries - regardless of how an individual country might come down on a specific item.
Mandating a term of use like that would be struck down in court faster than Viacom can post takedown notices. It hinders freespeech & destroys the right of anonymous speech.
Could YouTube do it, yes, but it still doesn't prevent the infringing material from appearing online, it just gives a name & signature to go with it. So, what is the gain for YouTube or Viacom? Viacom can still get the name from an ISP after supeona-ing the IP address from Viacom.
Basically whose responsibility is it to identify and remove infringing copyright material?
The DMCA safe harbor provision declares it to explictly be the owner of the copyright who must object & request the takedown of the material. In fact, it has always been the responsibility of the copyright owner to initiate any form of copyright complaint. There is no way that YouTube or any other content aggregate can determine if the material is:
copyright by a specific individual (Stephen Colbert posting a home video) vs copyright by a company (A clip from the Colbert report).
Permitted by the company (Any number of adds posted on YouTube by the add company)
Permitted under fair use (Yes it still applies)
Used under license from the copyright owner by the poster.
Given those factors, it is strictly the copyright owners responsibility to identify & request the removal of infringing material. YouTube in fact goes farther & uses a hash system to block the re-upload of videos it removes - in effect performing the pro-active filtering that Viacom wants.
It doesn't make it any more questionable than using 'the 3rd definition of Webster's 4th collegate dictionary' to define a controversial word. If there was an international standard for 'consumer product' they probably would have used it. With no such available standard, they found a definition already in place in US code.
I actually don't find this to be all that disturbing. US law actually codified this for some strange reason (probably taxes) at some point. Note that this section of legal code is only to be fallen back on if there is a conflicting determination. So, a portable MP3 player is always a consumer good. DJ equipments isn't - even if you put it in your house. A laptop is a consumer good whether destined for a house or a business. A server isn't even if it ends up as the media server in a house. Is the fiber adapter that ties the fiber network to my house a consumer good or a commercial one (it's designed for use in a residence, but it's technically part of the telco network)? Guess I need to check the legal code for that one.
Vista is using a 'smart cache' that is supposed to link to flash thumbdrives - in theory it sets the swap file up like L1 & L2 processor caches, with the L1 cache going to the thumb drive & the L2 to the HD. I am assuming that if they've implimented it as a standard for a 'business class' operating system, they've at least done some feasability studies here - though I know for a fact that most places with a security clearance requirement won't be able to make use of this feature so I could be wrong about that assumption.
Waco was about shooting police officers trying to serve a Warrant. The Branch Davidians were 1 of several groups snagged in a multi year long investigation involving a couple of fairly disreputable gun dealers who were selling semi->full auto kits to people at gun shows. The list of groups the kits were sold to include several gangs as well as drug cartels.
At the conclusion of that phase of the investigation, the govt went after the people who had purchased the kits to get them back off the street. When the warrant was served on the BD compound, several police officers where shot. Starting your legal proceedings by shooting police officers isn't likely to make things go your way in the long run.
Stupid thing is that with a few hours of paperwork & some ingenuity, the BD compound could have legally had those same half dozen full auto weapons - via at least 2 alternate methods. Their issue is that they clandestinely purchased the conversion kits through a dealer known to be supplying drug dealers/gangs with them.
They were paying a fee. They actually could pay 1 of 2 fees, either a % of profit or a per-song fee. The dropping of the % profit fee structure is going to put most of the small e-radio stations out of business. The increase in the per-song fee is going to put most of the others out of business too.
Good Standing is actually a technical term for professionals, as a lawyer it has a specific meaning:
He has a certified law degree.
He has passed the State Bar Exam.
he has paid his annual dues.
He has not been expelled or suspended from the State Bar.
That's it. Once you are in, you are in Good Standing unless you loose your license or forget to pay your dues & allow it to lapse. So like Jack, you can be in the process of being disbarred for baritry while at the same time legitimately claim to be in good standard.
these genes could conceivably be transfered to: corn, wheat, barley, oats . . . in fact all other grasses.
Not very likely. Monkeys & Gorillas are both primates, but they don't produce offspring. Even if they managed to cross polinate with the corn, it's unlikely that the hybrid would be fertile & reproduce.
I would also take this with a grain of salt. When the EPA blocked the use of Alar as a pesticide for apples, it turns out that the volume of apples required to get to the toxic level was about a bushel a day for 2 months. Note well that almost everything is toxic in improper amounts - remember the woman who died of water poisoning during the contest for a Wii? How about the fact that hospitals only put you on pure oxygen in emergencies because it will eat your lungs with prolonged exposure. Or my favorite: Vitamin A is toxic in doses lower than that of many industrial cleaning chemicals and some poisons.
They have won a few cases either through default or misrepresentation. AFAIK they have never had to subject their 'proof' to a jury or even cross examination.
The reason the US govt brings obscenity suits in Georgia is because they have some of the strictest obscenity laws around. It has to be pretty bad to get classed as obscene in NYC, but rural Georgia didn't stop treating consenting oral sex between a married couple as worse than armed robbery until SCOTUS said they couldn't enforce the sodomy laws anymore.
So, when you post pictures of your donkey sex vacation on the web, expect a summons from the Federal Court in the GA district - even if you are living in NYC where you can see the same picture spray painted on the subway trains.
leather straps, you mean leather straps, not elastic. If you're going to gag someone, do it right - none of that cheap crap they try to sell you at the local 'adult toy' store.
So sites covering things like birth control, sexual health, oh and definitely abortion would all be transfered to ports inaccesable by minors. To be consistant lets also throw in National Geographic, CDC (Center for Disease Control), and any site that discusses the reality of war. What will really frost their tits is having to class the Bible as adult content - Song of Solemen is not kids stuff.
The whole issue with this is that there is no definition of mature content yet they are talking about trying to make it illegal to post it on the standard port. Should we make then the official censors for the internet? I doubt even they would want the job of trying to do real time censoring of the 300M+ websites out there.
Now, if the original poster uses the clip & includes some commentary on how stupid person X was to say thing Y, then you have a commentary. However, the raw posting of the clip in & by itself isn't fair use under current standards. The aggregate of the clip and all of the commentary below may be covered under fair use, but the posting of the clip without the poster commenting on the contents of the clip isn't fair use because the clip isn't included in a larger work at the time of the posting - ie the poster hasn't made any educational use of the clip, hasn't used the clip as an example of their point in a commentary, and isn't using the clip in parody of itself (those 3 comprise the majority of the accepted fair use cases).
The question becomes how would you go from the infringing initial posting to the potentially fair use posting + included commentaries. Generally you wouldn't be able to legally. If the predicating action is illegal, so are the following ones.
Next comes the question of what is the status of a video posted on youtube just to provide hosting for a clip that is used in a 3rd party site where it is a portion of a larger commentary? Obviously the 3rd party site is making fair use of the clip, does that make the naked posting of the video on YouTube fair use? If not, is a link to the full commentary on the 3rd party site enough to make the video fair use? How about if a 4th party embeds the video in their page without commentary, does that make the video infringing even though it's covered by fair use for the original poster?
Funny AT&T is a common carrier & the NSA's bitch. Don't see the problem there.
The issue is they aren't a common carrier. Neither is YouTube. They have restrictions on adult content & filters in place to try and catch it. They do however, have the safe harbor provision of the DMCA. Because the content is user posted and not generated by YouTube, so long as they keep taking down videos at the request of Viacom, they are on solid legal ground.
Youtube takes down the offending material as soon as they are notified by the copyright holder. The poster may request that the content be placed back on the site, but they have to use a much longer & stringently worded form that screws them if they are wrong.
Process:
Viacom bot flags video as infringing - for as little as South Park playing in the background of a home movie.
Viacom bot adds video to takedown notice of the day.
Notice is sent to YouTube - on belief & good faith that Viacom is the copyright holder of the video.
Youtube removes the video
YouTube notifies poster.
Poster returns notarized letter swearing under penalty of purgery that the video does not infringe on Viacom's copyright.
YouTube notifies Viacom & reposts the video.
You can bet the next step is:
Viacom sues poster
The takedown notices need to have some penalties added to them also - unless you can prove malice, there is no penalty for one issued in error.
Fair use provisions don't just include small portions of the work. You have to be using the small portion of the work in a larger work. IE, commenting on a single passage in a book, using snippets from a press conference to create a parody of the press conference, showing a scene from a movie to teach the importance of lighting in setting the scene, etc. Just taking a small portion & displaying it by itself doesn't fall under fair use. Heck, the riff from Under Pressure was deemed not to be fair use when used in Ice Ice Baby and it's less than a dozen notes buried under the melody & words.
Where this should die a quick & horrible death for Viacom is that YouTube is following the safe harbor provisions of the DMCA & removing copyright material as soon as ViaCom presents them with the takedown notices. Whether Viacom likes it or not, what YouTube is doing is perfectly legal, so long as they continue to take down videos that Viacom advises them of.
Given that YouTube has code in place to reject reposts of videos they have already received takedown notices about, Viacom's argument that they are doing nothing to prevent the infringement is incorrect at best & argued in bad faith at the worst. (incorrect will loose them credibility for shoddy groundwork, bad faith will get the case tossed and possibly sanctioned into paying Google's legal fees)
Ohhh, not quite true. In 2004, the RealTeck 8192 drivers in XP worked fine with the RCN network. SP1 tweaked the minimum lease times for the test lease & it refused to work directly connected to the network - it worked fine connected through a router.
So if they are tweaking the throughput parameters outside of what the router is requesting/expecting on the old firmware, then you might actually need to upgrade the firmware to connect to Vista properly. This wouldn't be the first time MS & it's drivers didn't follow a fallback standard.
XML is for self describing data. Anything properly formatted into XML becomes an XML document. If that XML document can be displayed as a formatted Text document, a spreadsheet, or a presentation so be it. Web services are clearly not 'documents' as you are using the word, but they are certainly defined by XML documents (SOAP formatting). Most of the data exchange going on today in system integration/intercommunication is happening through XML documents.
The EDI standard for telephone ordering is defined in a 700 page document explaining how the various types of orders effect the positional interpretation of the string. Calling it ugly is being cruel to ugly. This is a data standard that could definately benefit from XML.
The interface for several external systems that I have had to intigrate with have used XML structures to transmit & receive data. It does work well, given certain constraints. The biggest one being that you don't transmit huge data tables via fully encoded XML.
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Yeah, I didn't need to see Chef's hairy ass on the South Park episode the other week :)
Perhaps you should go talk to a few librarians ... If the library has a porn mag & the kid specifically asks for it by name, volume, and issue - then chances are pretty good that the librarian would give it to them. In fact, in several states, they would be required to give it to them. Librarians are in a very specific business - helping people find information they are looking for. Think of them as the original 'information wants to be free' crowd.
Librarians protest any curtailing of the availability of information for 1 very clear reason: They have already seen what happens once it starts. Recorded book burnings go back to 200BC in China, and libraries are often favorite places to start your revolutions - from the Library at Alexandria to Sarajevo's National Library - they have a nasty tendency to burn as being full of counter-revolutionary propaganda. I will also point out that books as varied as Tom Sawyer, Uncle Tom's Cabin, Harry Potter, Mein Kampf, and Justine have all been banned/removed from public libraries by state decree in the US as recently as the 80s so it's not some hypothetical 'might happen' it has happened recently & the memories are still fresh in the minds of the people who preserve your literary history. (The fine people at the LoC are NOT people you want to start an discussion of censorship with.)
If you know enough to ask for something specific, then you are going to find out information anyway, why not make sure that the information you get is accurate & clear. IE, get your sex-ed from the health teacher not Bud the 5th year Sr in the locker-room. I am aware that this doesn't jibe with the current Christian Right movement in our government, but it's much more reality based than "If we don't teach about sex in schools, kids won't find out about it until they are married".
Jerking the **AA's chain isn't illegal yet :)
Technically, the NA reservations don't count. It's a very complicated arrangement, but they are semi-autonomous. They technically are bound by certain restrictions, but for the most part they are self governing. So they are neither truly external like Antigua, nor internal like Atlantic City or Las Vegas.
But the point stands, they are blocking off-shore gambling on moral grounds while permitting it on-shore. That makes it protectionist, hypocritical, and in viloation of multiple treaties.
That would be really nice, if that was what was happening. However, if you live in CT, NV, or a few other states, you can quite happily log into an in-state's casino website & gamble away your life savings. Or you could just go to the OTB website & do so across state lines. Or you can go to your states lottery website & do it.
Nope, look at the reasons the US govt is giving, 'the money supports drug lords', 'the money supports terrorists', 'Online gambling is being blocked because of moral reasons'. The first 2 are bunk because Antigua monitors their gaming establishments very carefully, they are about 30% of the countries GNP. If the last one was true, and it is the reason they formally advanced to WIPO, then they would be obligated to block it within the US as well. WIPO told them that, and they responded by doing nothing internally & passing more international restrictions.
This is not about a moral issue, this is about blocking money moving out of the country. That's protectionism, and it's blocked by all the treaties we've signed - we've screamed in the past on exactly the same points, so it's perfectly alright to call the US govt a bunch of hypocrites, because they provably are. That's not anti-US, it's fact. I know it's hard to believe, but even in this day & age, sometimes we still get to say the Emperor has no clothes without a trip to Gitmo.
The comment I was responding to implies that the only way to qualify for the safe harbor provision is to put in place a system of registration. If the only way to 'comply' with the provisions of a law is to require registration of your users, then yes, whether it's writen into the law or not, it's part of it. If the court determines that the only way to comply with the law is to abrige free speech, then the law has to be tossed. As for your analogy, it's nothing like that at all. Given the nature of the internet, and the goals of YouTube, it's much more like making everyone show photo ID to get into the park; so that if you play a song on your guitar, the RIAA can make sure you chip in your performance fee.
Beyond that, the other point of: even if YouTube requires registration to post, Viacom still has to issue take down notices. There is no gain except to bypass a couple of supeonas.
It's actually quite common to do in international business deals. The contract will usually state which set of laws & definitions will apply. Hence, SCO & Novell are in Switzerland[Sweden?] arguing over the results of their contract - signed & executed in the US. It's also why IBM keeps telling SCO that NY state law is the governing law for specific portions of their contract - because it's specified as being so.
By defining a specific international or country specific law, the meaning of the contract/license is proofed against exactly the type of variations you are presenting with your 'rubber' example. IIRC, the legal code in question defines a laptop as a consumer good. There may be other countries that define it as a business good. By explicitly stating "We are going to use the definition of a 'consumer good' as published in US code 15.X" the FSF ensures that the license is applied equally & fairly in all countries - regardless of how an individual country might come down on a specific item.
Mandating a term of use like that would be struck down in court faster than Viacom can post takedown notices. It hinders freespeech & destroys the right of anonymous speech.
Could YouTube do it, yes, but it still doesn't prevent the infringing material from appearing online, it just gives a name & signature to go with it. So, what is the gain for YouTube or Viacom? Viacom can still get the name from an ISP after supeona-ing the IP address from Viacom.
The DMCA safe harbor provision declares it to explictly be the owner of the copyright who must object & request the takedown of the material. In fact, it has always been the responsibility of the copyright owner to initiate any form of copyright complaint. There is no way that YouTube or any other content aggregate can determine if the material is:
Given those factors, it is strictly the copyright owners responsibility to identify & request the removal of infringing material. YouTube in fact goes farther & uses a hash system to block the re-upload of videos it removes - in effect performing the pro-active filtering that Viacom wants.
It doesn't make it any more questionable than using 'the 3rd definition of Webster's 4th collegate dictionary' to define a controversial word. If there was an international standard for 'consumer product' they probably would have used it. With no such available standard, they found a definition already in place in US code.
I actually don't find this to be all that disturbing. US law actually codified this for some strange reason (probably taxes) at some point. Note that this section of legal code is only to be fallen back on if there is a conflicting determination. So, a portable MP3 player is always a consumer good. DJ equipments isn't - even if you put it in your house. A laptop is a consumer good whether destined for a house or a business. A server isn't even if it ends up as the media server in a house. Is the fiber adapter that ties the fiber network to my house a consumer good or a commercial one (it's designed for use in a residence, but it's technically part of the telco network)? Guess I need to check the legal code for that one.
Vista is using a 'smart cache' that is supposed to link to flash thumbdrives - in theory it sets the swap file up like L1 & L2 processor caches, with the L1 cache going to the thumb drive & the L2 to the HD. I am assuming that if they've implimented it as a standard for a 'business class' operating system, they've at least done some feasability studies here - though I know for a fact that most places with a security clearance requirement won't be able to make use of this feature so I could be wrong about that assumption.
Waco was about shooting police officers trying to serve a Warrant. The Branch Davidians were 1 of several groups snagged in a multi year long investigation involving a couple of fairly disreputable gun dealers who were selling semi->full auto kits to people at gun shows. The list of groups the kits were sold to include several gangs as well as drug cartels. At the conclusion of that phase of the investigation, the govt went after the people who had purchased the kits to get them back off the street. When the warrant was served on the BD compound, several police officers where shot. Starting your legal proceedings by shooting police officers isn't likely to make things go your way in the long run. Stupid thing is that with a few hours of paperwork & some ingenuity, the BD compound could have legally had those same half dozen full auto weapons - via at least 2 alternate methods. Their issue is that they clandestinely purchased the conversion kits through a dealer known to be supplying drug dealers/gangs with them.
They were paying a fee. They actually could pay 1 of 2 fees, either a % of profit or a per-song fee. The dropping of the % profit fee structure is going to put most of the small e-radio stations out of business. The increase in the per-song fee is going to put most of the others out of business too.
- He has a certified law degree.
- He has passed the State Bar Exam.
- he has paid his annual dues.
- He has not been expelled or suspended from the State Bar.
That's it. Once you are in, you are in Good Standing unless you loose your license or forget to pay your dues & allow it to lapse. So like Jack, you can be in the process of being disbarred for baritry while at the same time legitimately claim to be in good standard.Not very likely. Monkeys & Gorillas are both primates, but they don't produce offspring. Even if they managed to cross polinate with the corn, it's unlikely that the hybrid would be fertile & reproduce.
I would also take this with a grain of salt. When the EPA blocked the use of Alar as a pesticide for apples, it turns out that the volume of apples required to get to the toxic level was about a bushel a day for 2 months. Note well that almost everything is toxic in improper amounts - remember the woman who died of water poisoning during the contest for a Wii? How about the fact that hospitals only put you on pure oxygen in emergencies because it will eat your lungs with prolonged exposure. Or my favorite: Vitamin A is toxic in doses lower than that of many industrial cleaning chemicals and some poisons.
They have won a few cases either through default or misrepresentation. AFAIK they have never had to subject their 'proof' to a jury or even cross examination.
The reason the US govt brings obscenity suits in Georgia is because they have some of the strictest obscenity laws around. It has to be pretty bad to get classed as obscene in NYC, but rural Georgia didn't stop treating consenting oral sex between a married couple as worse than armed robbery until SCOTUS said they couldn't enforce the sodomy laws anymore.
So, when you post pictures of your donkey sex vacation on the web, expect a summons from the Federal Court in the GA district - even if you are living in NYC where you can see the same picture spray painted on the subway trains.
leather straps, you mean leather straps, not elastic. If you're going to gag someone, do it right - none of that cheap crap they try to sell you at the local 'adult toy' store.
So sites covering things like birth control, sexual health, oh and definitely abortion would all be transfered to ports inaccesable by minors. To be consistant lets also throw in National Geographic, CDC (Center for Disease Control), and any site that discusses the reality of war. What will really frost their tits is having to class the Bible as adult content - Song of Solemen is not kids stuff.
The whole issue with this is that there is no definition of mature content yet they are talking about trying to make it illegal to post it on the standard port. Should we make then the official censors for the internet? I doubt even they would want the job of trying to do real time censoring of the 300M+ websites out there.
Now, if the original poster uses the clip & includes some commentary on how stupid person X was to say thing Y, then you have a commentary. However, the raw posting of the clip in & by itself isn't fair use under current standards. The aggregate of the clip and all of the commentary below may be covered under fair use, but the posting of the clip without the poster commenting on the contents of the clip isn't fair use because the clip isn't included in a larger work at the time of the posting - ie the poster hasn't made any educational use of the clip, hasn't used the clip as an example of their point in a commentary, and isn't using the clip in parody of itself (those 3 comprise the majority of the accepted fair use cases).
The question becomes how would you go from the infringing initial posting to the potentially fair use posting + included commentaries. Generally you wouldn't be able to legally. If the predicating action is illegal, so are the following ones.
Next comes the question of what is the status of a video posted on youtube just to provide hosting for a clip that is used in a 3rd party site where it is a portion of a larger commentary? Obviously the 3rd party site is making fair use of the clip, does that make the naked posting of the video on YouTube fair use? If not, is a link to the full commentary on the 3rd party site enough to make the video fair use? How about if a 4th party embeds the video in their page without commentary, does that make the video infringing even though it's covered by fair use for the original poster?
Funny AT&T is a common carrier & the NSA's bitch. Don't see the problem there.
The issue is they aren't a common carrier. Neither is YouTube. They have restrictions on adult content & filters in place to try and catch it. They do however, have the safe harbor provision of the DMCA. Because the content is user posted and not generated by YouTube, so long as they keep taking down videos at the request of Viacom, they are on solid legal ground.
Process:
- Viacom bot flags video as infringing - for as little as South Park playing in the background of a home movie.
- Viacom bot adds video to takedown notice of the day.
- Notice is sent to YouTube - on belief & good faith that Viacom is the copyright holder of the video.
- Youtube removes the video
- YouTube notifies poster.
- Poster returns notarized letter swearing under penalty of purgery that the video does not infringe on Viacom's copyright.
- YouTube notifies Viacom & reposts the video.
You can bet the next step is:- Viacom sues poster
The takedown notices need to have some penalties added to them also - unless you can prove malice, there is no penalty for one issued in error.Fair use provisions don't just include small portions of the work. You have to be using the small portion of the work in a larger work. IE, commenting on a single passage in a book, using snippets from a press conference to create a parody of the press conference, showing a scene from a movie to teach the importance of lighting in setting the scene, etc. Just taking a small portion & displaying it by itself doesn't fall under fair use. Heck, the riff from Under Pressure was deemed not to be fair use when used in Ice Ice Baby and it's less than a dozen notes buried under the melody & words.
Where this should die a quick & horrible death for Viacom is that YouTube is following the safe harbor provisions of the DMCA & removing copyright material as soon as ViaCom presents them with the takedown notices. Whether Viacom likes it or not, what YouTube is doing is perfectly legal, so long as they continue to take down videos that Viacom advises them of.
Given that YouTube has code in place to reject reposts of videos they have already received takedown notices about, Viacom's argument that they are doing nothing to prevent the infringement is incorrect at best & argued in bad faith at the worst. (incorrect will loose them credibility for shoddy groundwork, bad faith will get the case tossed and possibly sanctioned into paying Google's legal fees)
Ohhh, not quite true. In 2004, the RealTeck 8192 drivers in XP worked fine with the RCN network. SP1 tweaked the minimum lease times for the test lease & it refused to work directly connected to the network - it worked fine connected through a router. So if they are tweaking the throughput parameters outside of what the router is requesting/expecting on the old firmware, then you might actually need to upgrade the firmware to connect to Vista properly. This wouldn't be the first time MS & it's drivers didn't follow a fallback standard.
XML is for self describing data. Anything properly formatted into XML becomes an XML document. If that XML document can be displayed as a formatted Text document, a spreadsheet, or a presentation so be it. Web services are clearly not 'documents' as you are using the word, but they are certainly defined by XML documents (SOAP formatting). Most of the data exchange going on today in system integration/intercommunication is happening through XML documents.
The EDI standard for telephone ordering is defined in a 700 page document explaining how the various types of orders effect the positional interpretation of the string. Calling it ugly is being cruel to ugly. This is a data standard that could definately benefit from XML.
The interface for several external systems that I have had to intigrate with have used XML structures to transmit & receive data. It does work well, given certain constraints. The biggest one being that you don't transmit huge data tables via fully encoded XML.