What is the "consideration" given to the patient, in exchange for giving up copyright? Clearly it isn't dentistry, since that could be had elsewhere without the requirement of waiving copyright.
So what did Makhnevich give patients in exchange for that? If nothing, then there is no contract.
Courts do not analyze consideration with that degree of detail.
My direct statement to you was that courts may examine consideration in some cases, while YOUR statement was a blanket denial that it ever happens.
No, your so-called "direct statement" was that courts would parse the consideration in a contract on an item by item or type by type basis to determine whether matching consideration existed. I specifically recall referencing that by writing "with that degree of detail," and specifically recall your reply that courts would evaluate consideration "with that degree of detail" in unspecified cases. Care to show us any instance in which a court would do what you initially proposed? I have denied that any US court would, and I've linked to some relevant material to back it up.
Your blanket statement that "Courts do not analyze consideration with that degree of detail" is a generalization that is not true in all cases. It depends on the case, the contract, and the surrounding circumstances.
There it was -- your contention that courts would analyze consideration "with that level of detail" in some cases.
My direct statement to you was that courts may examine consideration in some cases...
Not really, since you referred to a specific manner of examining consideration. Of course, once you adopt a new goalpost where "some cases" switch to entirely different theories of defect and consider an overall disparity to somehow be the same as a hole in a piecewise comparison, you can probably create an illusion of affirmation pretty easily. Yet we didn't do that -- did we?
A severe imbalance of consideration may be evidence supporting other reasons to invalidate a contract, but those other reasons also have to be supported by other facts. "All I got for my money and copyright was dentistry" cannot by itself invalidate a contract.
...while YOUR statement was a blanket denial that it ever happens. However, this quote by you is affirmation that it does, indeed, happen in some cases. Thank you for proving my point.
Ah, there it is. I didn't and you did. Then you simply omitted any reference I made to to the original misguided point in order to say that I did. Moving the goalpoasts... is such a fine salve for the ego. So "with that level of detail" does not refer to the "no consideration for copyright" point that you initially made, but to any thought given to consideration at all? Really?? You're also OK with conveniently omitting the conclusion that "'All I got for my money and copyright was dentistry' cannot by itself invalidate a contract" while we're at it? You, who complains about supposed omissions of context??
Once you attempt to spin my argument into "a blanket denial that it ever happens," you commit a cheap fraud, Ms. "IANAL either, but I had very good instructors in Business Law in college" My so-called blanket denials have been specifically directed to your initial point that a court would say "I see obligation A and consideration X, and obligation B, but no consideration Y, so there is no contract." Yes that is absolutely denied. It. Does. Not. Happen.
If the material that I've linked affirms a theory of defect entirely different from the one you first wrote about, it does not prove that you were correct. It proves that your analysis and advice SUCKS.
That's why I *THEN* wrote "I suppose it's remotely possible that the patients were trading their copyright for dentistry, but that seems a pretty thin argument."
I'm not going to deconstruct your argument for you. You declared that the consideration for the copyright "Clearly [] isn't dentistry." Then at the last minute you hedged and declared that it "seems a pretty thin argument" without any explanation as to why. The only way to interpret what you wrote is that something had to be provided in exchange for the copyright other than dentistry, or that the dentist would be making the "thin argument" that (part of) the dentistry was paid for an assignment of future copyright. If you believed something else, you should have written it.
Your blanket statement that "Courts do not analyze consideration with that degree of detail" is a generalization that is not true in all cases. It depends on the case, the contract, and the surrounding circumstances.
Citation needed. Here's mine A severe imbalance of consideration may be evidence supporting other reasons to invalidate a contract, but those other reasons also have to be supported by other facts. "All I got for my money and copyright was dentistry" cannot by itself invalidate a contract.
You didn't bother to quote the more specific point that "Courts do not break apart the transaction to say which consideration was exchanged for what part -- if there is a single contract, it's a single package." Yet you vaguely claim that "[i]t depends on the case, the contract, and the surrounding circumstances." Provide an example of the case, the contract, and the surrounding circumstances. Show me where a court has played Match Game with consideration in a single contract and voided one obligation, out of many others actually supported by consideration, merely because it was not tied to specific consideration. I already know what you'll find -- cases in which someone attempted to amend a contract without offering any additional consideration (the amendment is itself a contract, therefore...), and cases in which the case, the contract, and the surrounding circumstances support an entirely different theory such as fraud in the formation.
Handwaving about supposed exceptions to "broad generalizations" is an even more egregious generalization. Which exception? Medical Justice's contracts were the height of stupidity, and the copyright claims potentially unenforceable as against public policy, yet claiming that there was no consideration given to the patient, and therefore no contract, was utterly, totally, and incontrovertably wrong.
In order to be a valid contract, there has to be "consideration" on both sides.
What is the "consideration" given to the patient, in exchange for giving up copyright? Clearly it isn't dentistry, since that could be had elsewhere without the requirement of waiving copyright.
Courts do not analyze consideration with that degree of detail. In order for there to be consideration, both sides have to agree to provide something of value and/or agree not to do something that they otherwise had the right to do (provide services, tender payment, agree to a property boundary, not disparage each other, etc.). The contract has to have mutual obligations. If I contract to give you $20 in exchange for absolutely nothing, it's not a contract -- it's a non-contractual promise to make a gift. If I contract to give you $20 to shovel my walk and not drink alcohol for a week, that's a presumably enforceable contract.
Courts do not break apart the transaction to say which consideration was exchanged for what part -- if there is a single contract, it's a single package. The fact that you could get dentistry elsewhere without agreeing to the covenant means that you could have refused and taken your custom elsewhere, yet instead chose to contract -- who's to say why. Courts will rarely look at the relative value of what was exchanged -- the key is that something was exchanged.
This is why there is a bar exam. You could not have been more wrong if you'd tried.
Designers copyright... their designs. They then license those designs as theys see fit. The licensee's manufacture them, and some of the artifacts end up at Target or Macy's. There is nothing about manufacturing with a 3D printer that changes the idea of a copyrighted/patented design that needs to be licensed in order to manufacture it.
You've forgotten to layer on the fact that the designer has offered a general license to manufacture copies of the design so long as it is for non-commercial purposes -- a "Creative Commons - Attribution - NON Commercial License" (version not specified). You need to analyze whether the manufacturing -- not a sufficiently separated subsequent use -- of the copy violates the license. Nahmias seems to believe that his license controls subsequent use of the design. That is not true.
Copyright law does not give the designer of a sculptural work the ability to control the public display of copies owned by others. If you own it, you can display it. 17 USC 109(c). The other exclusive rights under copyright pertain to the creation of copies, not their subsequent use. 17 USC 106.
If the objects were created for display in a trade show, then there is an argument that they were created in breach of the license. However, if the objects were printed without the intent to sell them, use them for advertising, etc., there is a good argument that their initial creation did not violate the license -- which prohibits creating copies "in any manner that is primarily intended for or directed toward commercial advantage or private monetary compensation" -- and that later use for "commercial advantage" is not a copyright violation. It's the sort of grey area that drives the typical Slashdot reader nuts as they try to find the sharp separation between permitted and prohibited -- and come up with increasingly crazy ways to try to bend/break the rule ("What if you print 100 copies without intending to sell them, and then 5 minutes later decide to sell them...").
The "Restrictions" section of the CC BY-NC license is not a contract signed by the person using the design or a subsequent purchaser of what was made. It is only enforceable if what is prohibited is also prohibited by copyright law, and the designer cannot retroactively revoke the license after the physical object has been made. Stratasys did not "screw[] up, pure and simple." You would need to know much more concerning when and why the design was made before you can conclude that they've violated the license.
The press release: ""The device offers the possibility of a cheap and flexible design suitable for harvesting waste heat in the 100- to 200-degrees Celsius range."
The abstract: "Power densities reached >0.5 W*m-2 in unoptimized devices, operating with a 130 C hot side."
For half a watt per square meter had better be incredibly cheap and flexible considering wind and solarare about 4 and 10 times more dense, respectively, on a real-world basis. Nevermind that gains in optimization must be offset by losses in building a system which can pass cooling water over a large surface area and delivering the cooling water to it.
Well, those darned Swedes were in a clear violation of U.S. Code Title 17, 102 and 106.
Or, perhaps, Article 8 of the Berne Convention, to which Sweden is a signatory, and Article 2 of the Swedish Copyright Legislation, which implements the treaty obligation and states that "...copyright shall include the excludive right to exploit the work by making copies of it and by making it available to the public, be it in the original or an altered manner, in translation or adaptation, in another literary or artistic form, or in another technical manner."
Setting your snark aside, extraterritorial use of U.S. law was required, and I would expect Swedes to be a ble to locate and read their own copyright law.
Bullshit, until relatively recently everybody had that kind of privacy that wasn't a celebrity or other famous individual.
"That kind of privacy" = thoroughly 'modern' redefinition of privacy by the self-entitled.
Privacy 1 a : the quality or state of being apart from company or observation : seclusion b : freedom from unauthorized intrusion 2 archaic : a place of seclusion 3 a : secrecy b : a private matter : secret
What's more, even for the famous, if something happened a year ago, chances are good that you'd have to go digging for it in the news paper archives if you wanted information about it. Now, you can do a web search and find information from the last decade easily, and usually within minutes.
Backhanded way of admitting exactly the point that I've made. You're merely complaining about availability. You want to take activities which were not private and control whether other people may make their pictures/writing availablile -- for your benefit.
It's not just how you behave in public, it's knowing how an innocuous action is going to be construed by an out of context photo or recording. Even just drinking soda out of a red plastic cup is sufficient to end a persons career in teaching if they weren't 21 at the time the photo was taken.
Your solution is to control others' innocuous actions, taking their actions out of context (after all, it's all about you, and not at all about them), because you're incapable of avoiding 'innocuous' situations which are potentially career ending? That's very ends-justify-the-means. Would you care to try again? Or should I merely dismiss you as the censorious nutcase you apparently aspire to be?
And the people causing the loss of my privacy are numb nuts that post pictures of me to FB and various other places without my permission.
They've never needed your permission, and you've never had that privacy, so its rather counternormative to claim that they are numb nuts causing a loss of your privacy. People have always discussed who attended the social event happened the night, week, or months before. Photographs of those events have only become more common with the rise, ever increasing ubiquity, and ever decreasing cost of photography. Unless you've only attended events where photography was forbidden (which are rare) or refuse to venture outside your home (and forbid photography in your own home, also rare), what privacy are you claiming that you deserve?
Oh yes, I know... the "privacy" of not having pictures that other people have taken or stories that other people have written posted to Facebook. "Privacy" as in limited accessibility, not as seclusion from others. Not an established norm. We will see if it ever becomes one. In the meantime, society is technologically reverting to more or less the situation which prevailed for most people prior to the 20th century -- most people in your will know, or at least be able to discover, how you behave in public. Boo hoo.
You may be able to agree with your friends how you'll treat each other, but you cannot force everyone else to follow that agreement. I've love to see an attempt to justify what you should be able to do so.
How many of these measures to "Protect something from piracy" ever work? Name the most DRM'd copy-protected movie ever distributed. I'll be there's a copy on Pirate Bay. They seem to be under the impression that each individual pirate has to crack their weird schemes.
Once a single person does it and produces a clean file then it's game over - its in the wild - and SOMEONE always manages to do it.
You seem to be under the impression that they have to have perfect DRM. Also, as to the "SOMEONE always manages to do it" part -- Microsoft PlayReady DRM. I've trashed hours of WMC recordings rendered unviewable due to a failure of the host PC which required a hardware swap. Good thing it was only television.
The goal of DRM is to make casual piracy difficult. The goal of the litgation campaigns is to make using TPB risky. The goal of DRM is not to prevent anyone anywhere from ever managing to make a copy. It's to make it difficult enough to copy that you'll pay. Combine a lesser degree of DRM with a greater degree of convenience, and you have NetFlix. I can't easily copy NetFlix content, and frankly it wouldn't be worth my time to find that content elsewhere.
As to the idiots part -- I kindly refer you to the Humble Bundles. DRM free. Pay what you want. Dedicate any fraction of what you do pay to charity. Yet each and every one has been posted to TPB. If you're in it for a living, you might as well keep it from being too easy to copy, because nobody is going to cut you a break for not trying.
So do LEDs bother your eyes? I think CRTs gave me headaches far more often than has any form of flat panel display, at least partly because of the whining noise that CRTs emit.
No. You're imagining things.
No, he's not. That whining noise is well known, objectively measurable, and explainable by actual physics.
Unless IBM was imagining things.. Or you deny the existence of eddy currents in what is essentially a high frequency electromagnet (see material under "stray losses").
But, that being said, once you've blown out your hearing above 15 kHz you have no reason to believe that high frequency sounds exist -- dog whistles, ultrasound machines, animal ecolocation are all a giant conspiracy to fool you, not features of the real world.
Or, it might be that the researchers know that the next command from politicians and the general population will be "Unleash the plastic-eating microbes!", and they're trying to get ahead of the general mess that comes from it.
The plastic-eating microbes are already unleased. This isn't a test of a new GMO strain, this is a discovery that some naturally occuring organism as colonized floating plastic detritus -- the same sort of plastic detritus that arriving on the US west coast from the March 2011 tsunami, and the same sort of plastic detritus that is destined to migrate pretty much everywhere. Unless the conditions around Cape Horn and the Cape of Good Hope reliably kill these organisms, you're probably waiting for confirmation that they exist in the Indian and Pacific oceans rather than politician-ordered seeding.
Unless you're proposing to sterilize the North Atlantic Subtropical Gyre, there is very little chance of getting ahead of the "general mess." The cats are well and truly out of the bag, and it's more likely than not that they're already living in other places where you simply haven't looked.
No, they aren't. This reflects ignorance of how the law in the US actually works. (No insult intended. A great many people don't know how it works.)
First, the Safe Harbor provisions of the DMCA -- the only good provisions in the DMCA -- free them from liability from any content uploaded by their users... as long as they don't mess with that content.
Another important legal precedent says that if they DO mess with that content, including editing, censoring, or even top-down moderation, then they DO become liable for that content. Because then they are controlling that content, and if they control it they become liable for it. (Question: if you remove one "illegal" post but not another, why would you NOT be responsible for leaving that other post up? The law says you are. You made a choice.)
A great many people don't know how it works, including you.
The Communications Decency Act provides a safe harbor for editing/moderation. The section 230 immunities include an immunity for "any action voluntarily taken in good faith to restrict access to or availability of material that the provider or user considers to be obscene, lewd, lascivious, filthy, excessively violent, harassing, or otherwise objectionable, whether or not such material is constitutionally protected." This section 230(c) immunity has been interpreted by the courts to include essentially any editing decision short of creating content.
Thus, if a service provides choses to "mess" with content, they will not automatically become liable for that content. Instead, they are only potentially liable for any content that they might add. When you combine that with various exceptions to the DMCA user-generated content safe harbor, most particularly "red flag" knowledge of infringement, most service providers have an incentive to moderate. They are usually not obligated to do so because proving that they knew that content was infringing is difficult, but they certainly are not biased toward leaving user-generated content "as is" in order to avoid liability.
If I own a bull, and this bull gets loose in a china shop, I'm liable. Why should intellectual property be any different?
Ignoring the fact that you cannot patent a product of nature, which means that nobody (should) have patented the virus rather than isolated genes or segments of cDNA which might be used to uniquely identify it in a laboratory assay (i.e., patenting a non-viable portion of an organism shouldn't make you liable for the existence of the natural organism)...
I cannot buy this argument from the software crowd, whether commercial, open source, or GNU-ish. The coders among you lot disclaim warranties, liability, and general responsibility for anything which you write as a matter of course. The users among you lot sit there and take it. But when it comes to patents, suddenly the patent-owners should be liable for anything remotely related to their patent.
Why should intellectual property be any different? Because you treat so every chance that you get, and there are far better arguments for why the owner of 'a gene' is not responsible for the actions of the natural virus. First and foremost, a little concept called 'proximate cause.'
It's interesting that you're willing to draw lines with regard to free speech, but incapable of drawing lines with regard to second amendment arms. Like it or not, semi-automatic handguns and long rifles are within the bounds of the second amendment. Nuclear arms are not. The second amendment does not support your supposed line drawing against machine-printed semi-automatic guns and gun components.
Free speech famously has limits (falsely yelling "fire" in a crowded theater) so where do we draw the line here?
That old saw does not cut it. The pro-censorship crowd famoulsy assume that a line must exist for any given situation, and then seek to draw it wherever is necessary to achieve their goals. What is false in the digital files describing how to manufacture a machine-printed semi-automatic handgun? Nothing. You want to censor true speech. Trotting out a rhetorical flourish concerning false speech does nothing but demonstrate that you have no sound basis for suppressing true speech.
Whatever line may exist is far, far behind you.
----- "Suppression of speech as an effective police measure is an old, old device, outlawed by our Constitution." - William O. Douglas, Watts v. United States, 394 U.S. 705 (1969).
Why not sell it to me for a dollar? Or for that matter to another commercial entity, who at least might actually be a little less evil?
Do you also have the resources to operate a network that is currently running at substantial loss for the next 15 years? Because that is required by the "lease the network to Provo city for 15 years" part of the transaction.
If you have a $6000 book value car with a $4000 loan on it that requires $4000 in repairs (new engine and transmission, or whatever), you're not going to sell that car for $6000, or for $4000, but somewhere around $2000. Now tack on a requirement that whoever buys the car drive you around for 15 years because you've proven incapable of maintaining a car, and the price will rapidly drop toward $1.*
*$1 is a semi-standard "this isn't worth anything but the law says that I should pay you something to make this a binding contract" price.
I mean, before this case is even brought before a courtroom...
You're free to hide out until the verdict, and beyond. I'll trust the identification provided by the guy who was carjacked, while you explain why he would lie about the alleged confession/boast.
They asked me. They want the input. That was a month or two ago, I'm sorry if you missed it.
They've received your input. They've made their decision. The fact that they sent a survey suggests that they're not sifting the comments looking for your input, and those of us who've noted that the "news for nerds, stuff that matters" slogan is long gone from the site are tired of the continuous complaints.
Here's my input: I don't want to see asinine "does this belong?" discussion in every non-nerdy thread. The part of the community that tought it was worthy upvoted the contributions in the firehose, and the editors selected the topic. The part of the community that thinks that it was unworthy needs to learn that the site is not exlusively for them and deal with it.
if you can only see a world of "intellectual property" then the free exchange of ideas may have no meaning to you. People who want to use the code in "intellectual property" may have a problem. The rest of us do not.
Ah, I see. You are too myopic to see the myriad alternatives.
No. I am highly focused on the world as it is, not the world as you wish it to be. Although you may wish that copyright did not exist, or only applied to code which was marked as being copyrighted, there is this minor matter known as the Berne Convention, and implementing legislation such as 17 USC 102, which mean that by default you assume that works are copyrighted, and then need to ascertain whether the copyright has lapsed or whether there is a license (such as explicit dedication to the public domain). Unless you're willing to walk away from any work you've put into your 'assumed' public domain code, you cannot rely upon the lack of a copyright marking (17 USC 405), even assuming that you can prove that you've obtained an authorized copy so as to take advantage of an innocent infringement defense.
People who want to use the code in "intellectual property" may have a problem. The rest of us do not.
The people with the guns and the power to seize your property disagree. They will make it your problem. That is the world that you live in as well.
I'll be happy to introduce you to people who reject a world of "material property," and will be willing to take anything unguarded which appears useful. You can argue with them after they've carted off your computer about who has what problem and whether there is a natural right to 'own' property which you've abandoned by going somewhere else.
Who cares?!? Copying the code and removing the statement "this code is in the public domain" does not remove the code from the public domain.
No, it removes notice that the code is public domain. If you don't have the notice, you'd be a fool to use the code. Which is the point which started this part of the thread.
This message brought to you by the department of redundancy department, second branch.
I think he is asking why not simply state that this code is hereby made public domain.
I'm so conflicted. Undo a moderation of the grandparent because the AC score 0 reply raises a teachable issue, or leave it to die in obscurity. Crap, I feel preachy...
Because if the code is public domain, then you can modify it in any conceivable way and the original author(s) lose all ability to control not only use (which is the point of selecting the BSD license) but content, such as statements that "this code is public domain."
Even in the simplified two paragraph BSD license you have (1) attribution (in the copyright notice) (2) an implicit requirement to indicate that the code is (was) available as BSD-licensed code (no suggestion by omission that GPL relicensed code is GPL or nothing) and (3) disclaimers of warranty and liability.
You may as well ask why the Creative Commons "CC BY" license exists. Authors may simply want attribution, or in using BSD some additional protections, but not minor-to-smack-you-in-the-mouth restrictions on use and licensing (CC BY-SA to CC BY-NC-ND or, frankly, GPLv3).
Wait! So Apple is enforcing their rules which they've openly and clearly published and that they hold all developers to?
Those bastards!/yawn_at_the_non-story...
Yes! So long as you openly and clearly publish your rules and hold everyone to them, your rules are above criticism!
That's why I openly and clearly publish that anyone entering my house will be bitchslapped if they present excessively objectionable or crude content. No more pesky assault and battery claims when I arbitrarily decide what is excessively objectionable and crude.
The only reason it would ever be nearly impossible for objective journalism to cover this is if there was some sort of cover-up in the first place. Which, gosh-darn-it... sounds *JUST* like a conspiracy theory.
You've had three chances to provide an alternative explanation. You have not. That says it all.
Pot, meet kettle.
No, I have been arguing a hypothesis. Offered a copy of the very resignation letter. The best you've come up with is a PR denial that will be belied by sales data post-release
If consumer retaliation over such games actually played some part in this turn of events, then it stands to reason that would be endeavoring to learn from their mistakes. But they are showing no intention of changing their behavior, which suggests that they weren't that negatively impacted by the consumer outcry.
If you conveniently ignore that whole "oops" EA game giveaway. I look forward to the strained rationalization you will apply to sales data, financial results, and further management attrition.
Which suggests that the notion they are firing their CEO over it may be nothing more than wishful thinking on the part of the person who posted the summary.
And where...do you find anyone who is reputable suggesting the two events are causally connected?
No, no, no... you do not have the privilege of creating ever shifting standards that others must meet.
Where is your other, more plausible explanation for the deviation from the January revenue forcast cited in the man's own resignation letter?
EA's already stated that they believe that the extreme outrage that was recently expressed about their practices was just a very "vocal minority", and not a reflection of the true direction that today's market is heading for... which does not suggest they are a company that genuinely thinks they had made any real mistakes.
And Bill Clinton did not have sexual relations with that woman...
Show me an official statement, from the company, or an otherwise objectively issued report that states that was the reason for it, and I'll buy it. But so far, it sounds like just another conspiracy theory to me... one built on nothing more than wishful thinking.
Create a near-impossible standard of proof, fail to present any counter-hypothesis, and then sit back and claim that your professed ignorance as to why events have occurred is the only possible rational position. Too bad that's not the way that life works.
Show me an official statment, from the company, or an otherwise objectively issued report that states that the SimCity 5 met its financial expectations for release (especially in view of the royalty charges and measurable, if less than 1:1, sales hit that their free-game giveaway has incurred). Otherwise, it's the most plausible explanation you'll find short of an Anonymous raid-and-dump of board meeting minutes.
Slashdot Mirror
No, your so-called "direct statement" was that courts would parse the consideration in a contract on an item by item or type by type basis to determine whether matching consideration existed. I specifically recall referencing that by writing "with that degree of detail," and specifically recall your reply that courts would evaluate consideration "with that degree of detail" in unspecified cases. Care to show us any instance in which a court would do what you initially proposed? I have denied that any US court would, and I've linked to some relevant material to back it up.
There it was -- your contention that courts would analyze consideration "with that level of detail" in some cases.
Not really, since you referred to a specific manner of examining consideration. Of course, once you adopt a new goalpost where "some cases" switch to entirely different theories of defect and consider an overall disparity to somehow be the same as a hole in a piecewise comparison, you can probably create an illusion of affirmation pretty easily. Yet we didn't do that -- did we?
Ah, there it is. I didn't and you did. Then you simply omitted any reference I made to to the original misguided point in order to say that I did. Moving the goalpoasts... is such a fine salve for the ego. So "with that level of detail" does not refer to the "no consideration for copyright" point that you initially made, but to any thought given to consideration at all? Really?? You're also OK with conveniently omitting the conclusion that "'All I got for my money and copyright was dentistry' cannot by itself invalidate a contract" while we're at it? You, who complains about supposed omissions of context??
Once you attempt to spin my argument into "a blanket denial that it ever happens," you commit a cheap fraud, Ms. "IANAL either, but I had very good instructors in Business Law in college" My so-called blanket denials have been specifically directed to your initial point that a court would say "I see obligation A and consideration X, and obligation B, but no consideration Y, so there is no contract." Yes that is absolutely denied. It. Does. Not. Happen.
If the material that I've linked affirms a theory of defect entirely different from the one you first wrote about, it does not prove that you were correct. It proves that your analysis and advice SUCKS.
I'm not going to deconstruct your argument for you. You declared that the consideration for the copyright "Clearly [] isn't dentistry." Then at the last minute you hedged and declared that it "seems a pretty thin argument" without any explanation as to why. The only way to interpret what you wrote is that something had to be provided in exchange for the copyright other than dentistry, or that the dentist would be making the "thin argument" that (part of) the dentistry was paid for an assignment of future copyright. If you believed something else, you should have written it.
Citation needed. Here's mine A severe imbalance of consideration may be evidence supporting other reasons to invalidate a contract, but those other reasons also have to be supported by other facts. "All I got for my money and copyright was dentistry" cannot by itself invalidate a contract.
You didn't bother to quote the more specific point that "Courts do not break apart the transaction to say which consideration was exchanged for what part -- if there is a single contract, it's a single package." Yet you vaguely claim that "[i]t depends on the case, the contract, and the surrounding circumstances." Provide an example of the case, the contract, and the surrounding circumstances. Show me where a court has played Match Game with consideration in a single contract and voided one obligation, out of many others actually supported by consideration, merely because it was not tied to specific consideration. I already know what you'll find -- cases in which someone attempted to amend a contract without offering any additional consideration (the amendment is itself a contract, therefore...), and cases in which the case, the contract, and the surrounding circumstances support an entirely different theory such as fraud in the formation.
Handwaving about supposed exceptions to "broad generalizations" is an even more egregious generalization. Which exception? Medical Justice's contracts were the height of stupidity, and the copyright claims potentially unenforceable as against public policy, yet claiming that there was no consideration given to the patient, and therefore no contract, was utterly, totally, and incontrovertably wrong.
Courts do not analyze consideration with that degree of detail. In order for there to be consideration, both sides have to agree to provide something of value and/or agree not to do something that they otherwise had the right to do (provide services, tender payment, agree to a property boundary, not disparage each other, etc.). The contract has to have mutual obligations. If I contract to give you $20 in exchange for absolutely nothing, it's not a contract -- it's a non-contractual promise to make a gift. If I contract to give you $20 to shovel my walk and not drink alcohol for a week, that's a presumably enforceable contract.
Courts do not break apart the transaction to say which consideration was exchanged for what part -- if there is a single contract, it's a single package. The fact that you could get dentistry elsewhere without agreeing to the covenant means that you could have refused and taken your custom elsewhere, yet instead chose to contract -- who's to say why. Courts will rarely look at the relative value of what was exchanged -- the key is that something was exchanged.
This is why there is a bar exam. You could not have been more wrong if you'd tried.
You've forgotten to layer on the fact that the designer has offered a general license to manufacture copies of the design so long as it is for non-commercial purposes -- a "Creative Commons - Attribution - NON Commercial License" (version not specified). You need to analyze whether the manufacturing -- not a sufficiently separated subsequent use -- of the copy violates the license. Nahmias seems to believe that his license controls subsequent use of the design. That is not true.
Copyright law does not give the designer of a sculptural work the ability to control the public display of copies owned by others. If you own it, you can display it. 17 USC 109(c). The other exclusive rights under copyright pertain to the creation of copies, not their subsequent use. 17 USC 106.
If the objects were created for display in a trade show, then there is an argument that they were created in breach of the license. However, if the objects were printed without the intent to sell them, use them for advertising, etc., there is a good argument that their initial creation did not violate the license -- which prohibits creating copies "in any manner that is primarily intended for or directed toward commercial advantage or private monetary compensation" -- and that later use for "commercial advantage" is not a copyright violation. It's the sort of grey area that drives the typical Slashdot reader nuts as they try to find the sharp separation between permitted and prohibited -- and come up with increasingly crazy ways to try to bend/break the rule ("What if you print 100 copies without intending to sell them, and then 5 minutes later decide to sell them...").
The "Restrictions" section of the CC BY-NC license is not a contract signed by the person using the design or a subsequent purchaser of what was made. It is only enforceable if what is prohibited is also prohibited by copyright law, and the designer cannot retroactively revoke the license after the physical object has been made. Stratasys did not "screw[] up, pure and simple." You would need to know much more concerning when and why the design was made before you can conclude that they've violated the license.
The press release: ""The device offers the possibility of a cheap and flexible design suitable for harvesting waste heat in the 100- to 200-degrees Celsius range."
The abstract: "Power densities reached >0.5 W*m-2 in unoptimized devices, operating with a 130 C hot side."
For half a watt per square meter had better be incredibly cheap and flexible considering wind and solarare about 4 and 10 times more dense, respectively, on a real-world basis. Nevermind that gains in optimization must be offset by losses in building a system which can pass cooling water over a large surface area and delivering the cooling water to it.
Or, perhaps, Article 8 of the Berne Convention, to which Sweden is a signatory, and Article 2 of the Swedish Copyright Legislation, which implements the treaty obligation and states that "...copyright shall include the excludive right to exploit the work by making copies of it and by making it available to the public, be it in the original or an altered manner, in translation or adaptation, in another literary or artistic form, or in another technical manner."
Setting your snark aside, extraterritorial use of U.S. law was required, and I would expect Swedes to be a ble to locate and read their own copyright law.
"That kind of privacy" = thoroughly 'modern' redefinition of privacy by the self-entitled.
Privacy
1 a : the quality or state of being apart from company or observation : seclusion
b : freedom from unauthorized intrusion
2 archaic : a place of seclusion
3 a : secrecy
b : a private matter : secret
Backhanded way of admitting exactly the point that I've made. You're merely complaining about availability. You want to take activities which were not private and control whether other people may make their pictures/writing availablile -- for your benefit.
Your solution is to control others' innocuous actions, taking their actions out of context (after all, it's all about you, and not at all about them), because you're incapable of avoiding 'innocuous' situations which are potentially career ending? That's very ends-justify-the-means. Would you care to try again? Or should I merely dismiss you as the censorious nutcase you apparently aspire to be?
They've never needed your permission, and you've never had that privacy, so its rather counternormative to claim that they are numb nuts causing a loss of your privacy. People have always discussed who attended the social event happened the night, week, or months before. Photographs of those events have only become more common with the rise, ever increasing ubiquity, and ever decreasing cost of photography. Unless you've only attended events where photography was forbidden (which are rare) or refuse to venture outside your home (and forbid photography in your own home, also rare), what privacy are you claiming that you deserve?
Oh yes, I know... the "privacy" of not having pictures that other people have taken or stories that other people have written posted to Facebook. "Privacy" as in limited accessibility, not as seclusion from others. Not an established norm. We will see if it ever becomes one. In the meantime, society is technologically reverting to more or less the situation which prevailed for most people prior to the 20th century -- most people in your will know, or at least be able to discover, how you behave in public. Boo hoo.
You may be able to agree with your friends how you'll treat each other, but you cannot force everyone else to follow that agreement. I've love to see an attempt to justify what you should be able to do so.
You seem to be under the impression that they have to have perfect DRM. Also, as to the "SOMEONE always manages to do it" part -- Microsoft PlayReady DRM. I've trashed hours of WMC recordings rendered unviewable due to a failure of the host PC which required a hardware swap. Good thing it was only television.
The goal of DRM is to make casual piracy difficult. The goal of the litgation campaigns is to make using TPB risky. The goal of DRM is not to prevent anyone anywhere from ever managing to make a copy. It's to make it difficult enough to copy that you'll pay. Combine a lesser degree of DRM with a greater degree of convenience, and you have NetFlix. I can't easily copy NetFlix content, and frankly it wouldn't be worth my time to find that content elsewhere.
As to the idiots part -- I kindly refer you to the Humble Bundles. DRM free. Pay what you want. Dedicate any fraction of what you do pay to charity. Yet each and every one has been posted to TPB. If you're in it for a living, you might as well keep it from being too easy to copy, because nobody is going to cut you a break for not trying.
No, he's not. That whining noise is well known, objectively measurable, and explainable by actual physics.
Unless IBM was imagining things.. Or you deny the existence of eddy currents in what is essentially a high frequency electromagnet (see material under "stray losses").
But, that being said, once you've blown out your hearing above 15 kHz you have no reason to believe that high frequency sounds exist -- dog whistles, ultrasound machines, animal ecolocation are all a giant conspiracy to fool you, not features of the real world.
The plastic-eating microbes are already unleased. This isn't a test of a new GMO strain, this is a discovery that some naturally occuring organism as colonized floating plastic detritus -- the same sort of plastic detritus that arriving on the US west coast from the March 2011 tsunami, and the same sort of plastic detritus that is destined to migrate pretty much everywhere. Unless the conditions around Cape Horn and the Cape of Good Hope reliably kill these organisms, you're probably waiting for confirmation that they exist in the Indian and Pacific oceans rather than politician-ordered seeding.
Unless you're proposing to sterilize the North Atlantic Subtropical Gyre, there is very little chance of getting ahead of the "general mess." The cats are well and truly out of the bag, and it's more likely than not that they're already living in other places where you simply haven't looked.
A great many people don't know how it works, including you.
The Communications Decency Act provides a safe harbor for editing/moderation. The section 230 immunities include an immunity for "any action voluntarily taken in good faith to restrict access to or availability of material that the provider or user considers to be obscene, lewd, lascivious, filthy, excessively violent, harassing, or otherwise objectionable, whether or not such material is constitutionally protected." This section 230(c) immunity has been interpreted by the courts to include essentially any editing decision short of creating content.
Thus, if a service provides choses to "mess" with content, they will not automatically become liable for that content. Instead, they are only potentially liable for any content that they might add. When you combine that with various exceptions to the DMCA user-generated content safe harbor, most particularly "red flag" knowledge of infringement, most service providers have an incentive to moderate. They are usually not obligated to do so because proving that they knew that content was infringing is difficult, but they certainly are not biased toward leaving user-generated content "as is" in order to avoid liability.
Ignoring the fact that you cannot patent a product of nature, which means that nobody (should) have patented the virus rather than isolated genes or segments of cDNA which might be used to uniquely identify it in a laboratory assay (i.e., patenting a non-viable portion of an organism shouldn't make you liable for the existence of the natural organism)...
I cannot buy this argument from the software crowd, whether commercial, open source, or GNU-ish. The coders among you lot disclaim warranties, liability, and general responsibility for anything which you write as a matter of course. The users among you lot sit there and take it. But when it comes to patents, suddenly the patent-owners should be liable for anything remotely related to their patent.
Why should intellectual property be any different? Because you treat so every chance that you get, and there are far better arguments for why the owner of 'a gene' is not responsible for the actions of the natural virus. First and foremost, a little concept called 'proximate cause.'
It's interesting that you're willing to draw lines with regard to free speech, but incapable of drawing lines with regard to second amendment arms. Like it or not, semi-automatic handguns and long rifles are within the bounds of the second amendment. Nuclear arms are not. The second amendment does not support your supposed line drawing against machine-printed semi-automatic guns and gun components.
That old saw does not cut it. The pro-censorship crowd famoulsy assume that a line must exist for any given situation, and then seek to draw it wherever is necessary to achieve their goals. What is false in the digital files describing how to manufacture a machine-printed semi-automatic handgun? Nothing. You want to censor true speech. Trotting out a rhetorical flourish concerning false speech does nothing but demonstrate that you have no sound basis for suppressing true speech.
Whatever line may exist is far, far behind you.
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"Suppression of speech as an effective police measure is an old, old device, outlawed by our Constitution." - William O. Douglas, Watts v. United States, 394 U.S. 705 (1969).
Do you also have the resources to operate a network that is currently running at substantial loss for the next 15 years? Because that is required by the "lease the network to Provo city for 15 years" part of the transaction.
If you have a $6000 book value car with a $4000 loan on it that requires $4000 in repairs (new engine and transmission, or whatever), you're not going to sell that car for $6000, or for $4000, but somewhere around $2000. Now tack on a requirement that whoever buys the car drive you around for 15 years because you've proven incapable of maintaining a car, and the price will rapidly drop toward $1.*
*$1 is a semi-standard "this isn't worth anything but the law says that I should pay you something to make this a binding contract" price.
You're free to hide out until the verdict, and beyond. I'll trust the identification provided by the guy who was carjacked, while you explain why he would lie about the alleged confession/boast.
They've received your input. They've made their decision. The fact that they sent a survey suggests that they're not sifting the comments looking for your input, and those of us who've noted that the "news for nerds, stuff that matters" slogan is long gone from the site are tired of the continuous complaints.
Here's my input: I don't want to see asinine "does this belong?" discussion in every non-nerdy thread. The part of the community that tought it was worthy upvoted the contributions in the firehose, and the editors selected the topic. The part of the community that thinks that it was unworthy needs to learn that the site is not exlusively for them and deal with it.
Is it really your place to question what Slashdot decides to post on Slashdot?
Start your own news site, and then you can tell your own editors what they can and cannot put on the front page.
(c) 1999-2001 Rob Riggs. All rights reserved.
The footer of your personal website for more than a decade. Hypocrite.
No. I am highly focused on the world as it is, not the world as you wish it to be. Although you may wish that copyright did not exist, or only applied to code which was marked as being copyrighted, there is this minor matter known as the Berne Convention, and implementing legislation such as 17 USC 102, which mean that by default you assume that works are copyrighted, and then need to ascertain whether the copyright has lapsed or whether there is a license (such as explicit dedication to the public domain). Unless you're willing to walk away from any work you've put into your 'assumed' public domain code, you cannot rely upon the lack of a copyright marking (17 USC 405), even assuming that you can prove that you've obtained an authorized copy so as to take advantage of an innocent infringement defense.
The people with the guns and the power to seize your property disagree. They will make it your problem. That is the world that you live in as well.
I'll be happy to introduce you to people who reject a world of "material property," and will be willing to take anything unguarded which appears useful. You can argue with them after they've carted off your computer about who has what problem and whether there is a natural right to 'own' property which you've abandoned by going somewhere else.
No, it removes notice that the code is public domain. If you don't have the notice, you'd be a fool to use the code. Which is the point which started this part of the thread.
This message brought to you by the department of redundancy department, second branch.
I'm so conflicted. Undo a moderation of the grandparent because the AC score 0 reply raises a teachable issue, or leave it to die in obscurity. Crap, I feel preachy...
Because if the code is public domain, then you can modify it in any conceivable way and the original author(s) lose all ability to control not only use (which is the point of selecting the BSD license) but content, such as statements that "this code is public domain."
Even in the simplified two paragraph BSD license you have (1) attribution (in the copyright notice) (2) an implicit requirement to indicate that the code is (was) available as BSD-licensed code (no suggestion by omission that GPL relicensed code is GPL or nothing) and (3) disclaimers of warranty and liability.
You may as well ask why the Creative Commons "CC BY" license exists. Authors may simply want attribution, or in using BSD some additional protections, but not minor-to-smack-you-in-the-mouth restrictions on use and licensing (CC BY-SA to CC BY-NC-ND or, frankly, GPLv3).
Yes! So long as you openly and clearly publish your rules and hold everyone to them, your rules are above criticism!
That's why I openly and clearly publish that anyone entering my house will be bitchslapped if they present excessively objectionable or crude content. No more pesky assault and battery claims when I arbitrarily decide what is excessively objectionable and crude.
You've had three chances to provide an alternative explanation. You have not. That says it all.
No, I have been arguing a hypothesis. Offered a copy of the very resignation letter. The best you've come up with is a PR denial that will be belied by sales data post-release
If you conveniently ignore that whole "oops" EA game giveaway. I look forward to the strained rationalization you will apply to sales data, financial results, and further management attrition.
Then pray-tell, why was he fired?
No, no, no... you do not have the privilege of creating ever shifting standards that others must meet.
Where is your other, more plausible explanation for the deviation from the January revenue forcast cited in the man's own resignation letter?
And Bill Clinton did not have sexual relations with that woman...
Create a near-impossible standard of proof, fail to present any counter-hypothesis, and then sit back and claim that your professed ignorance as to why events have occurred is the only possible rational position. Too bad that's not the way that life works.
Show me an official statment, from the company, or an otherwise objectively issued report that states that the SimCity 5 met its financial expectations for release (especially in view of the royalty charges and measurable, if less than 1:1, sales hit that their free-game giveaway has incurred). Otherwise, it's the most plausible explanation you'll find short of an Anonymous raid-and-dump of board meeting minutes.