That is not "applying creativity".
Trying to find the best settings to make a copy as close to original as possible is not "creativity".
Also, your analogy fails on another level, as phone books are a collection of non-copyrightable facts. You could at worst copyright the format you use to present your list (font, colors, layout and other embellishments), but you cannot copyright the data itself. (Although there are other ways to "protect" data, it is not the subject of copyright.)
The closest analogy to the case presented in the article is taking a photo of a painting. You have to make settings, both environmental and technical, to take the photo with optimal lighting, contrast, focus and whatever else makes a good photo. But it has already been judged that those don't count as "creative" choices when the goal is to make a close or exact reproduction.
You fail to get the point of copyright.
What you're doing, even with different scans on different settings, is not "your expression". You're still trying to capture something as close to possible to the original. A technical process trying to replicate a non-copyrightable work is not copyrightable in itself, even if it's not the copy is imperfect.
There have been judgments on this matter already.
It might be different if you deliberately mess with the settings to create a new item inspired from the original, like an 8-bit color version with a blocky Lego-style structure. But that is clearly not what we're talking about here. This is even less "creative" than taking a photo of a painting (which I think was the subject of one the judgment I mentioned above.)
This kind of behavior will continue as long as there is no clear definition for and active enforcement of the public domain. Under the current culture of "everything must be owned", public domain is just "leftovers" when property rights expire, hence the negative image of works of art "falling into public domain".
Copyright law should be rewritten to explicitly mention that the goal of any particular work is to move to public domain after a finite duration, along with redefining "finite duration".
As a side note, a duration that is extended by 20 years every 20 years is not "finite". At worst, the date of the move to public domain should be fixed at the time of the creation of the work. Retroactively extending the duration of these rights should have been forbidden a long time ago. There is no added incentive to create any given work of art by adding duration to it when it's already created.
Back to the main point: it's important to clearly define public domain, not as a "default status when rights have expired", but as a clear "collective ownership by the public". This would particularly allow standing to sue for anyone when a work is misappropriated, like in this case when a museum pretends it has the right to assign a CC licence to the 3D model of a public domain item.
Actually, there are good arguments in favor of police immunity. However, there is a balance to strike that is very far from being achieved here.
On the one hand, you don't want suspects to sue policemen and hold them personally liable anytime a conviction is not obtained.
On the other hand, you definitely want to hold cops personally responsible when they are breaking the law themselves, regardless of their good or bad faith belief that a crime was committed.
Currently the balance is so heavily stacked in favor of immunity / public responsibility that cops have no incentive to follow the law and policies that apply to them. Given the situation, only the morally best individuals will follow procedure. Everyone else knows that they don't need to, that their hierarchy and unions and ultimately tax payers will cover for anything they do.
no known dangerous individuals or criminal enterprises were researched or targeted and no pre-existing drug rings or conspiracies were broken up.
[...]
By their very nature, so-called "reverse sting" operations, in which the Government creates the illusion of crimes in order to catch would-be criminals, are open to potential abuse, since they are not cabined by the demands of reality, but only by the vagaries of imagination.
These are the problems here. Not the statistical spread of "criminals" caught this way, but the very fact that the LEOs never bothered to find actual criminals, but fabricated both the criminal and the circumstances of the crime itself.
Why bother looking for existing criminals that you can't easily locate when you can just make one yourself?
I feel sorry for the public when the judges seeming can't or won't resist such practices from law enforcement. This idea of looking at statistical groups won't solve the basic issue that the crimes have been manufactured by officers.
"I don't see a problem with jailing people for imaginary crimes as long as you jail them proportionally."
Riiiight...
He was giving a press conference a few weeks ago to present his "new and improved border wall", and started discussing how they are "wired" and all.
When asking one of his officials to give more details about the security features, he had to be told that it would be a bad idea.
Add to this the guests at his golf resort, who can simply pay to access him and some of his international counterparts, listening in as he's loudly talking foreign affairs over "the most beautiful chocolate cake", and this latest reveal is not so new or surprising.
All of this is several levels of stupid that we've never seen in a US president.
That was a vicious cycle, though a pretty fragile one.
Scientists are recognized by the number of papers they submit for peer-review in well-known journals. Elsevier owns several such journals. Hence Elsevier had a solid position as gatekeeper.
Rosson has no issue with the Beauty’s request, considering it has the trademark, but wonders, like so many others, why this issue is coming up now.
And that's nice and dandy, but it serves to entrench that "trademark = ownership of a word", where there might be no merit to it. Tons of trademark are granted without merit (as happens with parents too), so we can't let this go to easily.
Could a user successfully claim standing to sue someone over this, or win if they did?
That is the big flaw of copyright law.
In theory, public domain works belong to the public, so anyone should be able to sue when works are illegitimately claimed.
In practice, judges have interpreted public domain works as belonging to nobody, hence no one has standing to sue in such a case.
There are several problems with this interpretation, of course. And we can only hope that this will be either explicitly fixed in law, or re-interpreted by a different court, at worst leading to the Supreme Court to fix a split.
Affidavit:
Detective… approached the house to conduct a knock and talk. Complaint:
[Detective] Tapp did not even attempt to knock on the door.
Well, this affidavit excerpt doesn't state that the detective did knock. Only that he approached the house with the intent to knock.
I can only assume the smell of marijuana was so overwhelming he couldn't make it to the door. /s
That's technically not a lie. Then again, when your only defense is "that's technically not a lie", you're on pretty shaky grounds.
Isn’t an organization led and staffed exclusively by lawyers who are drafting complaints, filing papers with courts, and arguing before judges amount to a “law firm”?
There was a case where people debated semantics like here.
The judge went something like this:
Judge: If you call a tail "a leg", how many legs does a horse have?
Lawyer: Five?
Judge: No, four. It doesn't matter what you call something, but how they are defined.
So they can play on words, but if they match the legal definition of a law firm, judges will treat them as such.
Ok, I reread both articles.
My mistake. It's indeed a county courthouse, though it seems to fall under the authority of the state. I might be wrong about the level of autonomy of county versus state.
So, either state has authority over county, in which case the case is null because the researchers had proper authorization... or they didn't, in which case the state made the mistake of authorizing an operation it didn't have authority to. Still doesn't seem like a mistake on the researchers' side. The county sheriff even had confirmation of the whole story. He just wants to change someone for... something? And he knows the individuals are easier targets than the state.
Going by this logic, the state deputies that arrived first should be arrested too. They are not invited, and are not county agents.
More seriously, this building is used for official state business, and who "paid" for the building doesn't matter. It is only fitting that the state can invite anyone they need to do their state business, including validating their security.
If not, anyone could technically be considered trespassing arbitrarily, including the judges, lawyers and parties to suits being judged in this courthouse. I'm pretty sure that's not how the law works.
Finally, the researchers had proof that they were invited in by someone who, by all appearances, had authority over the premise. More so than a case of murder by cop, I would say that "good faith exception" should apply here. They did everything right, except that they were tricked into thinking that state judicial authorities had authority over a building used for official state judicial business. Ah yes, how could anyone make such a rookie mistake?
A quick reminder on how DNA is not 100% reliable evidence should be mentioned somewhere. There are multiple cases of DNA "evidence" turning out to point to completely unrelated individuals.
Between cases where the DNA was deposited by the police or lab workers, or even the manufacturer of the DNA collection tools... cases where the DNA was too broken and/or limited in quantity for properly targeted matches... and lots of other problems.
DNA should only be used once you already have a suspect, and even then with great caution, and definitely not to find a suspect in the first place. (DNA matching tends to return enough false positives that it's unreliable for this purpose.). But of course, that's not the opinion of some law enforcement officers who need someone to pin a crime on more than the actual perpetrator.
On the post: The Curious Case Of The Bogus CC License On A 3D Scan Of A 3000-Year-Old Bust Of Nefertiti
Re: Re: Comparison
Nb: for those interested:
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bridgeman_Art_Library_v._Corel_Corp.
On the post: The Curious Case Of The Bogus CC License On A 3D Scan Of A 3000-Year-Old Bust Of Nefertiti
Re: Comparison
That is not "applying creativity".
Trying to find the best settings to make a copy as close to original as possible is not "creativity".
Also, your analogy fails on another level, as phone books are a collection of non-copyrightable facts. You could at worst copyright the format you use to present your list (font, colors, layout and other embellishments), but you cannot copyright the data itself. (Although there are other ways to "protect" data, it is not the subject of copyright.)
The closest analogy to the case presented in the article is taking a photo of a painting. You have to make settings, both environmental and technical, to take the photo with optimal lighting, contrast, focus and whatever else makes a good photo. But it has already been judged that those don't count as "creative" choices when the goal is to make a close or exact reproduction.
On the post: The Curious Case Of The Bogus CC License On A 3D Scan Of A 3000-Year-Old Bust Of Nefertiti
You fail to get the point of copyright.
What you're doing, even with different scans on different settings, is not "your expression". You're still trying to capture something as close to possible to the original. A technical process trying to replicate a non-copyrightable work is not copyrightable in itself, even if it's not the copy is imperfect.
There have been judgments on this matter already.
It might be different if you deliberately mess with the settings to create a new item inspired from the original, like an 8-bit color version with a blocky Lego-style structure. But that is clearly not what we're talking about here. This is even less "creative" than taking a photo of a painting (which I think was the subject of one the judgment I mentioned above.)
On the post: The Curious Case Of The Bogus CC License On A 3D Scan Of A 3000-Year-Old Bust Of Nefertiti
Definition of "public domain"
This kind of behavior will continue as long as there is no clear definition for and active enforcement of the public domain. Under the current culture of "everything must be owned", public domain is just "leftovers" when property rights expire, hence the negative image of works of art "falling into public domain".
Copyright law should be rewritten to explicitly mention that the goal of any particular work is to move to public domain after a finite duration, along with redefining "finite duration".
As a side note, a duration that is extended by 20 years every 20 years is not "finite". At worst, the date of the move to public domain should be fixed at the time of the creation of the work. Retroactively extending the duration of these rights should have been forbidden a long time ago. There is no added incentive to create any given work of art by adding duration to it when it's already created.
Back to the main point: it's important to clearly define public domain, not as a "default status when rights have expired", but as a clear "collective ownership by the public". This would particularly allow standing to sue for anyone when a work is misappropriated, like in this case when a museum pretends it has the right to assign a CC licence to the 3D model of a public domain item.
On the post: 'Give Til It Hurts,' Says The NYPD To City Residents While Racking Up A Half-Billion In Lawsuit Settlements In Two Years
Re: 'Not my money, not my problem.'
Actually, there are good arguments in favor of police immunity. However, there is a balance to strike that is very far from being achieved here.
On the one hand, you don't want suspects to sue policemen and hold them personally liable anytime a conviction is not obtained.
On the other hand, you definitely want to hold cops personally responsible when they are breaking the law themselves, regardless of their good or bad faith belief that a crime was committed.
Currently the balance is so heavily stacked in favor of immunity / public responsibility that cops have no incentive to follow the law and policies that apply to them. Given the situation, only the morally best individuals will follow procedure. Everyone else knows that they don't need to, that their hierarchy and unions and ultimately tax payers will cover for anything they do.
On the post: Photographer's Bullshit Arrest By A Dallas Transit Cop Nets Him A $345,000 Settlement
Re: Re:
(Then again, it didn't work in this case. Progress?)
On the post: Photographer's Bullshit Arrest By A Dallas Transit Cop Nets Him A $345,000 Settlement
Re:
My first thought exactly.
How is it that the very people charged with enforcing the law are the last ones legally expected to know anything about it?
On the post: Masnick's Impossibility Theorem: Content Moderation At Scale Is Impossible To Do Well
Relevant xkcd:
Is it a bird?
On the post: Federal Judge Asks DEA To Explain Why All 179 Of Its Stash House Sting Targets Are Minorities
These are the problems here. Not the statistical spread of "criminals" caught this way, but the very fact that the LEOs never bothered to find actual criminals, but fabricated both the criminal and the circumstances of the crime itself.
Why bother looking for existing criminals that you can't easily locate when you can just make one yourself?
I feel sorry for the public when the judges seeming can't or won't resist such practices from law enforcement. This idea of looking at statistical groups won't solve the basic issue that the crimes have been manufactured by officers.
"I don't see a problem with jailing people for imaginary crimes as long as you jail them proportionally."
Riiiight...
On the post: Needless Trademark Spat In Canada At Least Has Exactly As Polite Ending As You'd Expect
Re: Re:
Sorry, patents. Stupid autocomplete. :D
On the post: Giant Publisher Macmillan Goes To War Against Libraries
Re: Re: Bradbury?
Seems like that LA library went over Farenheit 451.
On the post: Impeachment Hearings Highlight More Trump Phone OPSEC Failures
He is bad at security in general.
He was giving a press conference a few weeks ago to present his "new and improved border wall", and started discussing how they are "wired" and all.
When asking one of his officials to give more details about the security features, he had to be told that it would be a bad idea.
Add to this the guests at his golf resort, who can simply pay to access him and some of his international counterparts, listening in as he's loudly talking foreign affairs over "the most beautiful chocolate cake", and this latest reveal is not so new or surprising.
All of this is several levels of stupid that we've never seen in a US president.
On the post: Elsevier Gets Sci-Hub And LibGen Blocked In Austria, Thereby Promoting The Use Of VPNs And Tor In The Country
That was a vicious cycle, though a pretty fragile one.
Scientists are recognized by the number of papers they submit for peer-review in well-known journals. Elsevier owns several such journals. Hence Elsevier had a solid position as gatekeeper.
On the post: Needless Trademark Spat In Canada At Least Has Exactly As Polite Ending As You'd Expect
And that's nice and dandy, but it serves to entrench that "trademark = ownership of a word", where there might be no merit to it. Tons of trademark are granted without merit (as happens with parents too), so we can't let this go to easily.
On the post: Universal Music Claims Copyright Over Newly Public Domain 'Yes! We Have No Bananas'
Re: Re: Re: Re:
That is the big flaw of copyright law.
In theory, public domain works belong to the public, so anyone should be able to sue when works are illegitimately claimed.
In practice, judges have interpreted public domain works as belonging to nobody, hence no one has standing to sue in such a case.
There are several problems with this interpretation, of course. And we can only hope that this will be either explicitly fixed in law, or re-interpreted by a different court, at worst leading to the Supreme Court to fix a split.
On the post: Lawsuit: An Officer's BS Claims About 'Odor Of Marijuana' Led To 14 SWAT Team Members Pointing Guns At Our Kids
Well, this affidavit excerpt doesn't state that the detective did knock. Only that he approached the house with the intent to knock.
I can only assume the smell of marijuana was so overwhelming he couldn't make it to the door. /s
That's technically not a lie. Then again, when your only defense is "that's technically not a lie", you're on pretty shaky grounds.
On the post: Cloudflare Explains What It Takes To Slay A Patent Troll
naming
There was a case where people debated semantics like here.
The judge went something like this:
So they can play on words, but if they match the legal definition of a law firm, judges will treat them as such.
On the post: CEO Of Security Company Behind Unorthodox Penetration Tests Wants To Know Why His Employees Are Still Being Criminally Charged
Re: Re: Re: Re: The court case
Ok, I reread both articles.
My mistake. It's indeed a county courthouse, though it seems to fall under the authority of the state. I might be wrong about the level of autonomy of county versus state.
So, either state has authority over county, in which case the case is null because the researchers had proper authorization... or they didn't, in which case the state made the mistake of authorizing an operation it didn't have authority to. Still doesn't seem like a mistake on the researchers' side. The county sheriff even had confirmation of the whole story. He just wants to change someone for... something? And he knows the individuals are easier targets than the state.
On the post: CEO Of Security Company Behind Unorthodox Penetration Tests Wants To Know Why His Employees Are Still Being Criminally Charged
Re: Re: The court case
Going by this logic, the state deputies that arrived first should be arrested too. They are not invited, and are not county agents.
More seriously, this building is used for official state business, and who "paid" for the building doesn't matter. It is only fitting that the state can invite anyone they need to do their state business, including validating their security.
If not, anyone could technically be considered trespassing arbitrarily, including the judges, lawyers and parties to suits being judged in this courthouse. I'm pretty sure that's not how the law works.
Finally, the researchers had proof that they were invited in by someone who, by all appearances, had authority over the premise. More so than a case of murder by cop, I would say that "good faith exception" should apply here. They did everything right, except that they were tricked into thinking that state judicial authorities had authority over a building used for official state judicial business. Ah yes, how could anyone make such a rookie mistake?
On the post: Cops Now Using Warrants To Gain Access To DNA Services' Entire Databases
A quick reminder on how DNA is not 100% reliable evidence should be mentioned somewhere. There are multiple cases of DNA "evidence" turning out to point to completely unrelated individuals.
Between cases where the DNA was deposited by the police or lab workers, or even the manufacturer of the DNA collection tools... cases where the DNA was too broken and/or limited in quantity for properly targeted matches... and lots of other problems.
DNA should only be used once you already have a suspect, and even then with great caution, and definitely not to find a suspect in the first place. (DNA matching tends to return enough false positives that it's unreliable for this purpose.). But of course, that's not the opinion of some law enforcement officers who need someone to pin a crime on more than the actual perpetrator.
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