I wonder howm many citizens (let alone politicians) are aware of these kind of topics in the United States. I am sure/.'ers are the exception, not the rule.
The X-Com concept, trademark and copyright belongs to Infogrames Interactive.
We do not intend to infringe on any IP owned by Infogrames. This game is fan
work and was designed for fun not money.
Interesting notion since it appears that the game is made up of graphics, concepts and characters from the game how they don't intend to infringe any IP owned by Infogrames. Curious if they even bothered contacting anyone for permission or if they are operating on the better to beg forgiveness then seek permission premise.
I see this a lot, where someone obviously creates a derivitive work, but then puts a little disclaimer on it and hopes for the best. Now IANAL, but someone could create something like this for personal use without muich worry, but it would seem that distributing it online, with a contributions link, would be crossing the fair-use line.
Whatever the outcome it looks like a lot of effort was put into this, and it may actually be fun to play. I wish them the best, and hope they don't need a legal defense.
Re:Spinder Award Winner!
on
Safe and Insecure?
·
· Score: 5, Interesting
Long ago I ran a BBS (a bulletin board system is a computer with an open modem where people could dial in an send e-mail, exchange files, play games, chat, etc. This is what geeks did before the Internet was available.) In running my BBS I did some research into the common carrier law. This is the law that protects the phone company (at the time) and ISP's today from the actions of their subscribers. In
essence, if you don't monitor the activity on your system / network (e.g. Don't listen in on calls), then you are not liable for the actions of those on the network.
If you are providing wireless network access for your neighborhood, houseguests, or even patrons in your restaurant, then you are a carrier and protected. Just in case you were not sure, IANAL.
So the question really is if you are in violation of your Terms of Service or not. My experience has been that most cable Internet providers restrict your usage to you and your household - no operating servers (e-mail, web, etc.) This is because of the shared bandwidth nature (bus topology) of the connection. If you are consuming mass quantities, then your neighbor's connection slows down. Same is true of most satellite systems. I am sure there are some satellite and cable ISP's that offer guaranteed bandwidth, so obviously they are the exception to my comments.
xDSL on the other hand is guaranteed bandwidth (star topology). In essence you have a dedicated pipe between you and the central office. Granted if you could consume all the bandwidth at the CO then you would slow everyone else down, which is why they throttle you and have a really fat pipe there. Now xDSL typically allows servers and other activities that could result in greater bandwidth consumption because you cannot degrade the performance of your neighbors connection.
So to sum up, it would seem that this strategy would work to defray suits from MPAA, RIAA, etc., and if you were running xDSL it may even be allowed under your TOS. But, your TOS probably says you are responsible for anything that goes over your pipe. This means you are responsible to your ISP, not to anyone else. So if your ISP says "Hey, you can't do that!" then they might pull your plug. It would seem to me that loosing your ISP and having to switch to one of the competitors would be much less of a inconvenience then being sued by RIAA, MPAA, SCO, etc.
Bottom line, if you think there is a chance that incriminating traffic might take place on your connection (by you or someone else) then you may improve your odds of claiming it wasn't you by adopting this strategy. But when you are trying to download game patches or some other large download, and it is taking a lot longer then you expected, remember that is the price you pay for freedom in this country.
What you need is a router that provides bandwidth priority to some connections and not others (I forget the term), and also that partitions the public portion of your personal network off from the private portion. And instead of claiming ignorance, claim you are a nice guy who just wants to help out your neighbors, houseguests or restaurant patrons.
This is in no way an endorsment or advocation for any of the actions outlined in this comment, the comments of others, or the original news post. It is just an observation.
If the work was previously offered under another license then anyone who took advantage of that license may continue to use it as such. Unless the license agreement has a revocation clause.
Unless it was explicitly stated that it is free for all to use, then it is not implied that it can be used in a commercial way. Commercial works do not generally fall under fair use, which is the only way you can use a copyrighted work without a license to do so.
...would posting your stuff on that site, imply your making it public domain?
Popular misconception. Previously (I forget the date, but '70s or '80s I think) you had to explicitly indicate copyright, or register your work. They then changed the law that every copyrightable work is copyrighted the moment it is created. Technically this news post is already copyrighted by me for the duration of my life plus 50 years. So no one had better copy it.
Without a license for a copyrighted work the only rights you, as a consumer, have are those granted under fair use. These rights are actually a little grey at times, but generally they allow time and phase shifting of the content (i.e. caching, etc.), and it is implied that since I posted it in a public forum you are allowed to view it.
Now I may place a permissive license on my work (say Creative Commons, or GPL), but that doesn't change my copyright ownership. In fact it is the fact that I own the copyright that I can enforce the license.
The way these Open licenses are different is that they request attribution or contribution in return for the license to use the work. Traditional licenses require money for the right to use a copyrighted work. Interestingly the law specifically mentions the exchange of copyrighted works for a license to use. (Linus made a post about it a long time ago when SCO was saying GPL was anti-copyright).
So to sum up, the public domain is dead. It is pretty much impossible to actually have any new work added to it, and if congress continues to extend copyright terms as they have then nothing will ever enter the public domain again.
Apple already lost to Microsoft over the "look and feel" issue for their OS's. I doubt that anyone would try to win for look and feel of a web site. It is one thing to outright copy, or create derivitive works, but it is another mimic the look and feel.
The test is no-one will look at Linspire and say "Hey, all they took Apple's site and changed the colors and names." What they will say is "Hmm. . . that looks kind of like Apple's site."
...it says that Microsoft is involved with developing the format...
Not to long ago there was a push for Microsoft to adopt open file formats for their office suite. They naturally didn't follow through. Their reason is they have a virtual monopoly in office suites - despite very viable alternatives. If they adopted an open file format then that would, in their mind, strengthen the competitors and weaken customer lock-in.
Their motive for advocating an opne 3D graphic format is that they have no stake in the 3D imaging market. If an open format is adopted then that gives them a leg up on taking over the 3D image market.
The interesting thing is how Microsoft "embraced and extended" the SVG format - only to make their own incompatible format wvg. This is inspite of the fact that Microsoft was involved in the specification. I would suspect they will use the same strategy with U3D.
I think it was April 26th, 1999, or shortly after. My fiancée and I were discussing when we should get married. My sister had a wedding
coming up as well and we didn't want our weddings to conflict. I was thinking about this User Friendly comic and said "Well, we can eliminate May 19th, or none of our friends will be there."
My fiancée responded, "Well, we could have it May 19th, if we had it at the theater. . .."
Went down and asked the local Edwards theater manager if we could have the wedding May 19th in the lobby. He had to check with Mr. Edwards himself, but we got the ok. People were already in line outside the theater.
I called the state for what was required to officiate a wedding. They referred me to the Universal Life Church, which I found offered on-line ordination. So I instant messaged a friend of mine at work and he went and got his ordination
real quick, printing his certificate out at work (I think it still hangs in his
cubicle). He agreed to dress as Qui Gon Gin and quote Yoda in the ceremony ("Do, or do not. There is no try.")
A friend of mine volunteered his for his wife, a very talented seamstress, to
make our costumes. We set out to find the assorted props and such that we
would need to complete the experience. I picked up a toy Han Solo blaster
from Toys 'R Us. It was made of orange plastic. I used a black magic
marker to color it black, adding a few highlights and scuffs.
We camped out overnight the last day, night and day before tickets went on sale.
My boss gave me time off since he knew it was for getting hitched and all.
We bought tickets for the first show after 5pm on the 19th (although a lot of the guests went to the midnight one too),
so the most people could attend.
Everyone was in costume.
I was Han Solo, she was Princess Leia and Darth Vader gave her away, Chewbaka was my best man while
Boba Fett looked on. Jedis, with their lightsabers drawn, lined the isle. The
ceremony music from the end of Episode 4 filled the lobby for the wedding march,
and after the wedding we played the original celebration music from the end of
Episode 6.
Then the manager let us all go straight to the theater to get good seats for the
movie. No standing in line outside necessary (which some people had been
doing all week). We lined up outside the theater while they finished
cleaning it up. My wife and I walked down the line of guests and shook
their hands. A reverse wedding line is much more efficient then a
traditional one.
I ran to use the restroom before the movie started, and I ran into a guy who saw
I was dressed up and said Did you hear someone got married out in the lobby?
These online libraries treat you like you are going to take a book and read it cover to cover online. Safari gives you a limited bookshelf that only holds so many books. You can only read books on your bookshelf. You can search all the books in the library, but you can only read the intro for each chapter until it is on your bookshelf. Books24x7 charges a price comparable to if you were going to be buying all those books.
When we go to the library, or even the book store, they let use browse all the books and read as much as we want there. The library lets you take a limited number of books home per day, but you are not limited to how much you read while there.
Virtual libraries have a lot to learn from brick and mortar libraries. The Internet always promises faster, better and cheaper, but rarely delivers on the last one. Seems the sellers are too greedy to share the reduced overhead with the buyers.
Things are measured as comparable in price to physically purchasing it. Like online music downloads, it is not uncommon for a service to compare their price per track to the price for a full CD. These virtual libraries compare their prices to what it would cost you to buy the books. They are missing the point.
...interferes with my typing of comments. I'm mid comment when it steals focus from the textarea.
You must be using IE. I use Opera. If I am on another computer and use IE I am always surprised how annoying the ads are when they do that. Also, if you want to block ads all together you could subscribe to slashdot, or just use an ad-blocking technique.
In an effort to keep from being modded down for being offtopic I will point out that banner ads represent yet another possible exploit in IE. They run Flash or JavaScript and set cookies from a 3rd party site. Hopefully that will keep the moderators happy. . . . .
If you would prefer not to be recognized on our site, we recommend that you use our alternate service located at generic.A9.com. On generic.a9.com, we will not recognize your A9.com or Amazon.com cookie. Information we gather on generic.a9.com will not be used in our data analysis (other than to detect abuse) and will not be used to personalize the services we offer you.
Of course if you disable the Amazon and A9 cookies then you loose the search inside and history "features", which is most of what A9 offers over Google.
Disabling the tracking is a nice feature. Wish you could do that with Google. Sure, google doesn't tell you what your history is, but they know.
...a lot of vulnerabilities that concern Linux never get posted to slashdot. Usually I read about these on news.com.
news.com is a real news site, so they post real news. I am surprised anyone resports vulnerabilities in MS Windows as news. The only reason to report these is so people know to update again, and to poke fun at the joke that is Microsoft's quality control. Real news would be if they go for an extended period of time without a vulnerability!
For Linux on the other hand it is an event when there is a vulnerability reported.
To 90% of computer users having "Windows" means having a GUI, like Hoovering means using a vacuum cleaner, and Xeroxing means photocopying. In other words "Windows" is no longer a trade mark, but a generic term.
Back before Microsoft released Microsoft Windows the term "Windows" meant software that provided different windows to work in. Not even a GUI for that matter (anyone remember DesqView? - it was a text based windowing enviroment.
Games wont take off on this. You can't copy protect a CD-R.
If the game is a play online game (like most are) then the CD-KEY provides all the copy protection you need. If the CD-KEY is used by more then one person then it is rejected, and the central server can always reject known pirated keys.
I imagine this is the offending link to the California Diciplinary Actions List. All the information he claims Google distorted is displayed in black on white on the page owned by ca.gov. Don't know how anyone else could be liable for that.
So in other words he is suing Google, et al. for pointing to publicly available records that are not flattering. The odd side effect is now that everyone will see this link and know all the sorted details about he and his law firm. Before he made this fuss no one would have cared. Maybe he will sue me too for posting this link. Hmm. . . .
Slashdot Mirror
I wonder howm many citizens (let alone politicians) are aware of these kind of topics in the United States. I am sure /.'ers are the exception, not the rule.
I see this a lot, where someone obviously creates a derivitive work, but then puts a little disclaimer on it and hopes for the best. Now IANAL, but someone could create something like this for personal use without muich worry, but it would seem that distributing it online, with a contributions link, would be crossing the fair-use line.
Whatever the outcome it looks like a lot of effort was put into this, and it may actually be fun to play. I wish them the best, and hope they don't need a legal defense.
Avoid the SlashDot effect:
f
http://freecache.org/http://myoldmac.net/webse.sw
Brought to you by FreeCache.org!
Yes, QOS. Provide priority for your local Internet connections and let all the wireless guests feast on your bandwidth tablescraps.
That makes a lot more sense.
If you are providing wireless network access for your neighborhood, houseguests, or even patrons in your restaurant, then you are a carrier and protected. Just in case you were not sure, IANAL.
So the question really is if you are in violation of your Terms of Service or not. My experience has been that most cable Internet providers restrict your usage to you and your household - no operating servers (e-mail, web, etc.) This is because of the shared bandwidth nature (bus topology) of the connection. If you are consuming mass quantities, then your neighbor's connection slows down. Same is true of most satellite systems. I am sure there are some satellite and cable ISP's that offer guaranteed bandwidth, so obviously they are the exception to my comments.
xDSL on the other hand is guaranteed bandwidth (star topology). In essence you have a dedicated pipe between you and the central office. Granted if you could consume all the bandwidth at the CO then you would slow everyone else down, which is why they throttle you and have a really fat pipe there. Now xDSL typically allows servers and other activities that could result in greater bandwidth consumption because you cannot degrade the performance of your neighbors connection.
So to sum up, it would seem that this strategy would work to defray suits from MPAA, RIAA, etc., and if you were running xDSL it may even be allowed under your TOS. But, your TOS probably says you are responsible for anything that goes over your pipe. This means you are responsible to your ISP, not to anyone else. So if your ISP says "Hey, you can't do that!" then they might pull your plug. It would seem to me that loosing your ISP and having to switch to one of the competitors would be much less of a inconvenience then being sued by RIAA, MPAA, SCO, etc.
Bottom line, if you think there is a chance that incriminating traffic might take place on your connection (by you or someone else) then you may improve your odds of claiming it wasn't you by adopting this strategy. But when you are trying to download game patches or some other large download, and it is taking a lot longer then you expected, remember that is the price you pay for freedom in this country.
What you need is a router that provides bandwidth priority to some connections and not others (I forget the term), and also that partitions the public portion of your personal network off from the private portion. And instead of claiming ignorance, claim you are a nice guy who just wants to help out your neighbors, houseguests or restaurant patrons.
This is in no way an endorsment or advocation for any of the actions outlined in this comment, the comments of others, or the original news post. It is just an observation.
BSA = Boy Scouts of America?
Is there an underground market in merit badge books that I am not aware of?
Optimoz's mouse gestures are not as fluid as Opera's.
If the work was previously offered under another license then anyone who took advantage of that license may continue to use it as such. Unless the license agreement has a revocation clause.
Unless it was explicitly stated that it is free for all to use, then it is not implied that it can be used in a commercial way. Commercial works do not generally fall under fair use, which is the only way you can use a copyrighted work without a license to do so.
Copyright law also covers derivative works. You can create one, but you cannot distribute it without the original copyright holder's permission.
Popular misconception. Previously (I forget the date, but '70s or '80s I think) you had to explicitly indicate copyright, or register your work. They then changed the law that every copyrightable work is copyrighted the moment it is created. Technically this news post is already copyrighted by me for the duration of my life plus 50 years. So no one had better copy it.
Without a license for a copyrighted work the only rights you, as a consumer, have are those granted under fair use. These rights are actually a little grey at times, but generally they allow time and phase shifting of the content (i.e. caching, etc.), and it is implied that since I posted it in a public forum you are allowed to view it.
Now I may place a permissive license on my work (say Creative Commons, or GPL), but that doesn't change my copyright ownership. In fact it is the fact that I own the copyright that I can enforce the license.
The way these Open licenses are different is that they request attribution or contribution in return for the license to use the work. Traditional licenses require money for the right to use a copyrighted work. Interestingly the law specifically mentions the exchange of copyrighted works for a license to use. (Linus made a post about it a long time ago when SCO was saying GPL was anti-copyright).
So to sum up, the public domain is dead. It is pretty much impossible to actually have any new work added to it, and if congress continues to extend copyright terms as they have then nothing will ever enter the public domain again.
Apple already lost to Microsoft over the "look and feel" issue for their OS's. I doubt that anyone would try to win for look and feel of a web site. It is one thing to outright copy, or create derivitive works, but it is another mimic the look and feel.
The test is no-one will look at Linspire and say "Hey, all they took Apple's site and changed the colors and names." What they will say is "Hmm. . . that looks kind of like Apple's site."
In case there was any doubt, IANAL
If you can believe it I haven't scanned any in yet. Had a lot of other things on my mind immediately after the wedding.
Not to long ago there was a push for Microsoft to adopt open file formats for their office suite. They naturally didn't follow through. Their reason is they have a virtual monopoly in office suites - despite very viable alternatives. If they adopted an open file format then that would, in their mind, strengthen the competitors and weaken customer lock-in.
Their motive for advocating an opne 3D graphic format is that they have no stake in the 3D imaging market. If an open format is adopted then that gives them a leg up on taking over the 3D image market.
The interesting thing is how Microsoft "embraced and extended" the SVG format - only to make their own incompatible format wvg. This is inspite of the fact that Microsoft was involved in the specification. I would suspect they will use the same strategy with U3D.
I think it was April 26th, 1999, or shortly after. My fiancée and I were discussing when we should get married. My sister had a wedding coming up as well and we didn't want our weddings to conflict. I was thinking about this User Friendly comic and said "Well, we can eliminate May 19th, or none of our friends will be there."
My fiancée responded, "Well, we could have it May 19th, if we had it at the theater. . . ."
Went down and asked the local Edwards theater manager if we could have the wedding May 19th in the lobby. He had to check with Mr. Edwards himself, but we got the ok. People were already in line outside the theater.
I called the state for what was required to officiate a wedding. They referred me to the Universal Life Church, which I found offered on-line ordination. So I instant messaged a friend of mine at work and he went and got his ordination real quick, printing his certificate out at work (I think it still hangs in his cubicle). He agreed to dress as Qui Gon Gin and quote Yoda in the ceremony ("Do, or do not. There is no try.")
A friend of mine volunteered his for his wife, a very talented seamstress, to make our costumes. We set out to find the assorted props and such that we would need to complete the experience. I picked up a toy Han Solo blaster from Toys 'R Us. It was made of orange plastic. I used a black magic marker to color it black, adding a few highlights and scuffs.
We camped out overnight the last day, night and day before tickets went on sale. My boss gave me time off since he knew it was for getting hitched and all. We bought tickets for the first show after 5pm on the 19th (although a lot of the guests went to the midnight one too), so the most people could attend.
Everyone was in costume. I was Han Solo, she was Princess Leia and Darth Vader gave her away, Chewbaka was my best man while Boba Fett looked on. Jedis, with their lightsabers drawn, lined the isle. The ceremony music from the end of Episode 4 filled the lobby for the wedding march, and after the wedding we played the original celebration music from the end of Episode 6.
Then the manager let us all go straight to the theater to get good seats for the movie. No standing in line outside necessary (which some people had been doing all week). We lined up outside the theater while they finished cleaning it up. My wife and I walked down the line of guests and shook their hands. A reverse wedding line is much more efficient then a traditional one.
I ran to use the restroom before the movie started, and I ran into a guy who saw I was dressed up and said Did you hear someone got married out in the lobby?
These online libraries treat you like you are going to take a book and read it cover to cover online. Safari gives you a limited bookshelf that only holds so many books. You can only read books on your bookshelf. You can search all the books in the library, but you can only read the intro for each chapter until it is on your bookshelf. Books24x7 charges a price comparable to if you were going to be buying all those books.
When we go to the library, or even the book store, they let use browse all the books and read as much as we want there. The library lets you take a limited number of books home per day, but you are not limited to how much you read while there.
Virtual libraries have a lot to learn from brick and mortar libraries. The Internet always promises faster, better and cheaper, but rarely delivers on the last one. Seems the sellers are too greedy to share the reduced overhead with the buyers.
Things are measured as comparable in price to physically purchasing it. Like online music downloads, it is not uncommon for a service to compare their price per track to the price for a full CD. These virtual libraries compare their prices to what it would cost you to buy the books. They are missing the point.
You must be using IE. I use Opera. If I am on another computer and use IE I am always surprised how annoying the ads are when they do that. Also, if you want to block ads all together you could subscribe to slashdot, or just use an ad-blocking technique.
In an effort to keep from being modded down for being offtopic I will point out that banner ads represent yet another possible exploit in IE. They run Flash or JavaScript and set cookies from a 3rd party site. Hopefully that will keep the moderators happy. . . . .
Of course if you disable the Amazon and A9 cookies then you loose the search inside and history "features", which is most of what A9 offers over Google.
Disabling the tracking is a nice feature. Wish you could do that with Google. Sure, google doesn't tell you what your history is, but they know.
Internet Explorer is like the picture that comes with the frame. It is good enough for those who really don't care to upgrade.
news.com is a real news site, so they post real news. I am surprised anyone resports vulnerabilities in MS Windows as news. The only reason to report these is so people know to update again, and to poke fun at the joke that is Microsoft's quality control. Real news would be if they go for an extended period of time without a vulnerability!
For Linux on the other hand it is an event when there is a vulnerability reported.
Back before Microsoft released Microsoft Windows the term "Windows" meant software that provided different windows to work in. Not even a GUI for that matter (anyone remember DesqView? - it was a text based windowing enviroment.
They should go with "Lindos" with the slogan, "Because it's the MS that is causing all the problems."
Yeah, I was thinking of that Penny Arcade reference too.
So in other words he is suing Google, et al. for pointing to publicly available records that are not flattering. The odd side effect is now that everyone will see this link and know all the sorted details about he and his law firm. Before he made this fuss no one would have cared. Maybe he will sue me too for posting this link. Hmm. . . .