I'm going to disagree with you here. Adaptation or a new arrangement, if you prefer is almost as difficult as coming up with something "new".
Western scales and notes being what they are means there's a finite way of arranging them that results in something wholly original. Given how many rock riffs are based on and "stolen from" (often note by note) from old bluesmen and country artists and the few other major sources of early rock and the somewhat large number of sources (The Police and reggae, for example). Don't forget black church/sacred music that formed the basis of R&B.
The Boss is only doing what every other composer/songwriter has done before him in his theft from "The Animals" who undountedly got the riffs from elsewhere. That's how music creativity works. Think of the number of European folk songs hijacked for the great symphony's of the 19th Century.
I doubt that MJ and Springsteen weren't sued is because of their power and popularity, a hard argument to make when George Harrison was.
Your analogy falls apart when you compare it to someone in Photoshop recasting the background of one kind of wallpaper then spends time going through all the adjustments you suggest (and far more) to create his own wallpaper from that single background. It takes a highly skilled and artistic user of PS to do that AND get his copy to line up perfectly and, preferably, invisibly along any possible seams the person hanging the wallpaper may create. Suddenly your quickie copy of the background turns into quite the task, doesn't it? One requiring the eye of a skilled and trained visual artist.
I'm not a big fan of rap, hip-hop and what have we and the next time I hear autotune I'm gonna scream BUT there is skill and talent used to remix bass lines and other sampling that goes into a rap or hip-hop song long before it's released. It's become an art in and of itself.
As I've said before you can hear some or a lot of remix going on in Beatles songs that Sir George Martin produced and all of that was done on 8,16 or 24 track analog tape open reel tape.
It's the norm in music, always has been and always will be unless the copyright extremists get their way and then we'll have some awfully stale sounds parading around as music while the creativity of music starts to entropy.
Somehow, as evil as they are, I can't even see the RIAA wanting that to happen though I admit to having my doubts about it from time to time.
If you read the apology/story about why they retracted the story you'll see there were a few signs that something was very wrong here. And more than enough reason to spike the story before airing it as reportage, for example Daisy's refusal to give TLA his translator's phone number.
Ira Glass states outright that he should have spiked the story right then and there in his explanation of why the story has been retracted.
"This American Life staffers asked Daisey for this interpreter's contact information. Daisey told them her real name was Anna, not Cathy as he says in his monologue, and he said that the cell phone number he had for her didn't work any more. He said he had no way to reach her."
Which was an outright like yet they put it on air anyway.
I do feel for TLA, they had what seemed like a juicy story and went ahead with it even though they couldn't even verify anything through his translator which isn't asking much. Good editorial judgement got run over by enthusiasm for a juicy story. It happens, with more regularity than most of us want to think about.
Quite frankly this pub should be left alone. There's absolutely no doubt that no one is going to confuse the pub and the movie so what's the issue here?
If they're really hot on licensing the pub I'd say $0 per year in perpetuity is quite enough.
And you miss the point that Mike is a commentator not a reporter and this site has never pretended to be a source of news or journalism but simply commentary.
In rereading Mike's piece on what This American Life aired I'm guessing you missed the parts where people expressed doubt about what Daisey had to say and that the Chinese workers were still hugely better off than they were before even if it was true.
TAL knew before airing the program that Daisey is a performance artist and everything about his background and never took the proper time to fact check what he said in the piece before airing it. That is TAL's fault as Ira Glass admits.
Mike just wrote a commentary on the story, not the story itself.
As for "new business model" reporters or journalism there's nothing of the sort going on here. What happened on TAL happens on network news and local newscasts very frequently and always has. At least in my lifetime.
So your grade here is a -3/10 and only that high because you seem to know the difference between story teller and reporter, though you lose points because you don't seem to know what a commentator is.
In the sense here, Leigh, I think he's talking about brand as a recognized and trusted person working in journalism. Other than there's not much I disagree with in his post or your analysis of it.
Regrettably the decline of journalism in print and broadcast, particularly print, began ages ago big chains got larger, independent papers disappeared and all the papers in a chain essentially started to look and read like any other. It wasn't just Newscorp but all the others out there who began to economize to pay off the acquisition costs of the papers they'd already bought.
It's sad to think of how many good journalists and editors were "laid off" during this process and even sadder when I remember how much local coverage has been lost in the process.
This isn't to say there's not good reporters out there. What it does say is that there's something wrong when every fresh J-school grad gets his or her own byline to every story they write, no matter how poorly, the day they start.
It's sad to think of the lack of differing viewpoints on the editorial sections of a lot of papers and in the columnists the papers employ.
At least partly as a result of the 7/24 news cycle now journalists are almost always at the bottom of the pile of respected professions/trades when the polls are taken. Often tied with politicians. Not surprising when I think of how much the reporter/journalist and the politicians depend on each other now. One as a news source the other as a way to get their views out. If they're of the same political and economic bias as that particular paper.
Unbiased is, was and always has been a pipe-dream. All news outlets have a bias. I'd be a whole lot happier if they just admitted to it rather than denied it all the time.
I don't know what journalism will be in 10 years. It will certainly be different than what it is now. If that is accompanied by the death of Newscorp and others I, for one, won't mourn that. If the J-school grads have to prove themselves in places on the Web that may not exist yet I won't mourn that either. If a few have to work for free for HuffPo for a bit, well that's just too bad. They learn their craft, get their names out there and can move on. At worst it's an unpaid internship.
Perhaps I'll listen to and read "news" again. Perhaps the days of cut and paste will have ended and there will be something new out there to discover.
What I'm very certain about is that it won't be the newspaper as we now know it. As for TV news/sensationalism I stopped taking that seriously years ago. And I used to work in radio and television news gathering and broadcast. Way back when when there was still some journalism going on. Some reportage. It's opinion now, carefully or not so carefully hidden but it's opinion.
I think Mike is more concerned with the fact that this ruling clearly states, as you say, once again the difference between secondary and primary liability and once again spells it out.
Newspapers and other media companies have been trying to say the opposite which is what created Righthaven in the first place. The ruling simply, as you say, spells it out simply and plainly. Hopefully simply and plainly enough for those in the "content" industry can understand.
"The intellectual base of the Copyleft is pretty flimsy, and we need to do a better job of pointing that out to the public." is Attaway regarding the holy grail of copyright education.
Except that he's wrong, of course. The Free Software Foundation says this is free software: http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-sw.html and notice, Mr Attaway that it says nothing at all about what you consider piracy not does it encourage it. It encourages sharing and creativity free from what it calls proprietary restraints which seems to be what the RIAA and MPAA are all about.
If Mr Attaway would bother to read the GPL he might discover that copyright isn't attacked in it, the code is not placed in the public domain though there are restrictions in converting it to a proprietary product. I fact copyright is expressly contained in the GPL.
Copyleft is a philosophy expressed in the GPL and by FSF which has little or nothing to do with "piracy" however the "content" industry wants to define that (which appears to be surprisingly elastic). And it's not the same as the Creative Commons licenses.
If you're going to "educate" people, Mr Attaway of the MPAA I suggest you start with educating yourself, TAM and Bob first.
Then I suggest you find you how much software covered by the GPL has been used to generate to pretty special effects in your films, the 3D effects and so much else. Not to mention other areas of your member companies where FOSS (Free and Open Source Software) is used. But hey, you think you have another great word to toss around and redefine at your pleasure. Guess what? You don't.
Sadly, even for the concept of National Security, the National Security card gets played so often and so abusively that when the phrase is heard the first impulse is to assign it to the liar bin alongside the flyers and come ons to get a shiny new credit card because you've magically pre-qualified.
I can see the very rare case where it makes sense. Counteracting that is the FBI's well earned reputation of going on fishing expeditions must because they seem to want to. I'm not just picking on the FBI here as the RCMP has a similar well earned reputation.
Even if you use the standard ratio that one middlingly paid full time job supports three other minimum wage jobs you're left with a number just over 750,000 jobs which may or may not be full time jobs just as Hollywood's number of 270,000 is a mixture of full and part time jobs.
The rest of the numbers invite ridicule all by themselves it's just that Reid does a much better job than most at it by using the numbers against themselves.
Remember Mark Twain's saying that "numbers don't lie but liars can figure". which is exactly what's happening here.
Keep in mind that in the early days of the GWB administration they went on a campaign to attempt to shut down the porn industry which led to PayPal and some credit card companies to refuse to process transactions that might potentially involve some of the things contained in Miller. One of the sites I dealt with at the time, renderotica.com, got hit by that. This is an art site, poser and related 3D art, no real human beings but it was caught none the less.
The point being that, whether you like the art on renderotica or not it got caught in a wide net cast by the Bush administration and then by the payment processors they were putting pressure on.
Personally I don't care where censorship comes from it bothers me and it's almost always used for a political agenda rather than a business one.
As the developer points out while what he created may not have been nonsense the documents the lawyers drew up were and that is the basis that Yahoo is using to sue Facebook.
It's not like this wasn't predicted right from the start of the silliness of software patents or that "minor" little details like prior art and all the rest of the requirements to actually get a patent would be lost in the shuffle.
With the USPTO mistaking the number of patents issued with productivity the situation immediately got worse.
It would be nice if someone, somewhere put the entire notion of patents for software to sleep for a few decades or more.
You know as someone who has read and re-read LoTR and the Hobbit more times that I can count over the past 40 years I have to tell you that I can't see Tolkien being overly concerned about some of the characters selling grog. Sam, you need to remember was part of a pub operation in The Shire.
As for franchising out the name if the owners of the place haven't done that after two decades they're not about to now.
This is pure bullying on the same level as the IOC trying to force Olympia Pizza in Vancouver to change it's name and logo lest someone confuse a well known pizza joint with the Olympics. No one is about to confuse this little pub with Hobbitt/LoTR official stuff so I fail to see what the problem is about.
Re: The tarnishing is on his other foot the one not in his mouth
I'd like to say your post made some sense but to twist Mike's words into some anti-Semitic tirade.
You try to make a link between validity and the idea that "non practicing" entities have historically been the source of most patents -- a point I'm semi-inclined to agree with -- until we run into the problem of the company filing the lawsuits here has the classic foot print of nonpracticing entity, hidden by shell company, hidden by another entity, hidden by another shell company and so on. The classic patent troll.
Take into account that USC had pledged not to lease/sell/license the patents to such an operation. And by extension Shoah.
The criticism is a bad business decision and then trying to wriggle out of it with the usual legal PR smoke screen.
Secondary arguments and tangents about how Facebook steals privacy, something it's users most often freely consent to, allegations about Google doing the same don't change that.
For me I want to know more about what's going on here.
Mike's also been a financial supporter of Shoah so if he's disappointed by this he has every right and obligation to write about it as he has without being accused of antisemitism.
"Ahh, it's a little hard to explain. You have to go back and look at the history of the internet, of people paid to do nothing (working at universities), and students with a lot of spare time and access to resources."
If you really go back you'll find that most of the specifications for the internet and the money to pay to implement and test the initial outlay came from the US Defense Department and other "investment" including the requirement that the Internet be able to route around damage came from the same location. In anticipation of a nuclear exchange, of course, but that was part of the requirement.
So as well as people working at universities (doing nothing, eh?), there were people at the Pentagon working on it, students and others working on it.
The computer science DNA of the time was to share darned near everything. AFAIK no one actually got the code that ran IBM's heavy iron other than IBM but the concepts and peripheral code was shared widely. The current notion of copyrighted code that you don't share had to wait for the arrival of microcomputers such as the Altair for which a start-up named Microsoft supplied a version of the BASIC programming language which, of course, they copied from someone else and the days of what we now call "closed source" began in earnest.
Development of the Internet continued using what we now call "open source" in parallel with the computer revolution and became publicly usable with developments such as the Web and half decent search engines.
No email isn't perfect. But I don't know what is. But if you code I'm sure the people who work on email will be more than happy to take your help working towards the optimum solution. And yes, it just works. But you can criticize or jump and help.
"Can you imagine the computer revolution if we had all waited for Linux to be usable by anyone else other than total geeks? Oh, wait, it still hasn't passed that stage!"
Linux passed that stage years ago. You could try installing a modern distro, say Ubuntu, Red Hat, SUSE, Mint or Mandriva and you'd probably be shocked. Geekdom is no longer required. But that would probably be too much work.
I suspect music lessons would help YOU more. Influencing means that an musician often studies what did work for those s/he is influenced by, copying, rehearsing, copying some more, rehearsing some more and then going on to do your own work different from the "influencers" as a performer or song writer while hoping you don't end up copying a 5 or 6 note riff and end up getting sued for it. As in what happened with "My Sweet Lord".
Every musician goes through that, indeed music lessons are all about copying as the music you get to play is always other people's because you aren't there yet to come up with something of your own.
In this case the song's a cover, licensed and paid for at the time so who cares?
That and you miss the point that why should be be entitled to a welfare scheme called copyright because he copied a song, legally, and made a few changes to it to hide the fact that it's a Beatles song when other professions, crafts and trades aren't entitled to that kind of thing.
Okay, he had a hit and good on him. That doesn't change that he doesn't understand the public domain or what it means. He gets a dribble of an income from COPYING (legally in the world of copyright and licensing) from someone else. So does Paul McCartney and Yoko Ono representing John Lennon's estate. Not that they'll notice it.
Again, perhaps some music lessons would help you, too. More, I suspect that they'd help Mike.
I've been using the web since the early to mid 90s and, to be perfectly honest I don't recall a whole passel of mind-expanding information resource or exchange back then, It was out there but you really had to look and you had to get by all those vanity web sites that suddenly appeared with pictures of person it belonged to with their dog or cat or significant other at some beach or other.
What you're looking for is still there on the InterWebs, still difficult to find at times and buried under the commercialism you complain about but still there. At least the Web is two way cable TV if you want to use that analogy.
I first heard that analogy somewhere around 1997, actually with the rise of JavaScript and Java in an attempt to bring on Web 2.0 (may you forever cursed for that phrase Tim O'Reilly) in before its time. So interactivity was limited to waiting for some applet or other to download at 48.8KBps and swearing at it when it did.
Personally I dodge as much of it as I can when I'm poking around and move on after a popup or two.
There's more chaff to winnow out but there's more grain, too. And so what if Joe and Jane Sixpack can wander around Amazon or EBay to buy what they want between BBQs? Because I'm a techie doesn't make me better than them just, perhaps, more selective. Not to mention that digs at the "working class" get tiring after a while.
I think we can both agree that there was less of a fuss about infringement back then but it was coming and soon that bit of nirvana would get caught up with the silliness of SOPA/PIPA/ACTA/TPP.
Just as MacArthur seems to long for the good old days of the 1950s, 60s and 70s we can't turn the clock back in the Internet either or start it again. Just as "the money grubbing bastards from hell" want to make this a carbon copy of what they're used to we can't start over in the hopes they won't find us. They will. (I absolutely guarantee you that the porn industry will find the "new" internet the day the lights go on!)
At least the way things are now "we the people" get to beat the "money grubbing from hell" at their own game every now at then witness PIPA/SOPA and with some luck ACTA in the EU.
On the post: Bruce Springsteen, Another Pirate Remixer!
Re: Re: Re: Re: Pablo Picasso Quote
On the post: Bruce Springsteen, Another Pirate Remixer!
Re: Re: Re: Re: Re:
Western scales and notes being what they are means there's a finite way of arranging them that results in something wholly original. Given how many rock riffs are based on and "stolen from" (often note by note) from old bluesmen and country artists and the few other major sources of early rock and the somewhat large number of sources (The Police and reggae, for example). Don't forget black church/sacred music that formed the basis of R&B.
The Boss is only doing what every other composer/songwriter has done before him in his theft from "The Animals" who undountedly got the riffs from elsewhere. That's how music creativity works. Think of the number of European folk songs hijacked for the great symphony's of the 19th Century.
I doubt that MJ and Springsteen weren't sued is because of their power and popularity, a hard argument to make when George Harrison was.
Your analogy falls apart when you compare it to someone in Photoshop recasting the background of one kind of wallpaper then spends time going through all the adjustments you suggest (and far more) to create his own wallpaper from that single background. It takes a highly skilled and artistic user of PS to do that AND get his copy to line up perfectly and, preferably, invisibly along any possible seams the person hanging the wallpaper may create. Suddenly your quickie copy of the background turns into quite the task, doesn't it? One requiring the eye of a skilled and trained visual artist.
I'm not a big fan of rap, hip-hop and what have we and the next time I hear autotune I'm gonna scream BUT there is skill and talent used to remix bass lines and other sampling that goes into a rap or hip-hop song long before it's released. It's become an art in and of itself.
As I've said before you can hear some or a lot of remix going on in Beatles songs that Sir George Martin produced and all of that was done on 8,16 or 24 track analog tape open reel tape.
It's the norm in music, always has been and always will be unless the copyright extremists get their way and then we'll have some awfully stale sounds parading around as music while the creativity of music starts to entropy.
Somehow, as evil as they are, I can't even see the RIAA wanting that to happen though I admit to having my doubts about it from time to time.
On the post: This American Life Retracts Entire Episode About Apple Factories After Mike Daisey Admits To Fabricating Parts Of The Story
Re: Re: Re: Re: Re:
Ira Glass states outright that he should have spiked the story right then and there in his explanation of why the story has been retracted.
"This American Life staffers asked Daisey for this interpreter's contact information. Daisey told them her real name was Anna, not Cathy as he says in his monologue, and he said that the cell phone number he had for her didn't work any more. He said he had no way to reach her."
Which was an outright like yet they put it on air anyway.
http://www.thisamericanlife.org/blog/2012/03/retracting-mr-daisey-and-the-apple-factory
I do feel for TLA, they had what seemed like a juicy story and went ahead with it even though they couldn't even verify anything through his translator which isn't asking much. Good editorial judgement got run over by enthusiasm for a juicy story. It happens, with more regularity than most of us want to think about.
On the post: UK Pub 'The Hobbit' Offered License In Attempt To Stem PR Disaster
If they're really hot on licensing the pub I'd say $0 per year in perpetuity is quite enough.
On the post: This American Life Retracts Entire Episode About Apple Factories After Mike Daisey Admits To Fabricating Parts Of The Story
Re: Re: Re:
In rereading Mike's piece on what This American Life aired I'm guessing you missed the parts where people expressed doubt about what Daisey had to say and that the Chinese workers were still hugely better off than they were before even if it was true.
TAL knew before airing the program that Daisey is a performance artist and everything about his background and never took the proper time to fact check what he said in the piece before airing it. That is TAL's fault as Ira Glass admits.
Mike just wrote a commentary on the story, not the story itself.
As for "new business model" reporters or journalism there's nothing of the sort going on here. What happened on TAL happens on network news and local newscasts very frequently and always has. At least in my lifetime.
So your grade here is a -3/10 and only that high because you seem to know the difference between story teller and reporter, though you lose points because you don't seem to know what a commentator is.
On the post: Journalism Opportunities Aren't Drying Up, They Are Just Changing
Regrettably the decline of journalism in print and broadcast, particularly print, began ages ago big chains got larger, independent papers disappeared and all the papers in a chain essentially started to look and read like any other. It wasn't just Newscorp but all the others out there who began to economize to pay off the acquisition costs of the papers they'd already bought.
It's sad to think of how many good journalists and editors were "laid off" during this process and even sadder when I remember how much local coverage has been lost in the process.
This isn't to say there's not good reporters out there. What it does say is that there's something wrong when every fresh J-school grad gets his or her own byline to every story they write, no matter how poorly, the day they start.
It's sad to think of the lack of differing viewpoints on the editorial sections of a lot of papers and in the columnists the papers employ.
At least partly as a result of the 7/24 news cycle now journalists are almost always at the bottom of the pile of respected professions/trades when the polls are taken. Often tied with politicians. Not surprising when I think of how much the reporter/journalist and the politicians depend on each other now. One as a news source the other as a way to get their views out. If they're of the same political and economic bias as that particular paper.
Unbiased is, was and always has been a pipe-dream. All news outlets have a bias. I'd be a whole lot happier if they just admitted to it rather than denied it all the time.
I don't know what journalism will be in 10 years. It will certainly be different than what it is now. If that is accompanied by the death of Newscorp and others I, for one, won't mourn that. If the J-school grads have to prove themselves in places on the Web that may not exist yet I won't mourn that either. If a few have to work for free for HuffPo for a bit, well that's just too bad. They learn their craft, get their names out there and can move on. At worst it's an unpaid internship.
Perhaps I'll listen to and read "news" again. Perhaps the days of cut and paste will have ended and there will be something new out there to discover.
What I'm very certain about is that it won't be the newspaper as we now know it. As for TV news/sensationalism I stopped taking that seriously years ago. And I used to work in radio and television news gathering and broadcast. Way back when when there was still some journalism going on. Some reportage. It's opinion now, carefully or not so carefully hidden but it's opinion.
Sigh. I just don't care about that anymore.
On the post: New Ruling In Old Righthaven Case Makes Two Important Points: Protecting Fair Use And Secondary Liability
Re: Re:
Newspapers and other media companies have been trying to say the opposite which is what created Righthaven in the first place. The ruling simply, as you say, spells it out simply and plainly. Hopefully simply and plainly enough for those in the "content" industry can understand.
On the post: Copying Leads To Competition, Competition Leads To Innovation
Re:
On the post: MPAA Exec: Only We Can Make Content That People Want
Speaking of misnformation
Except that he's wrong, of course. The Free Software Foundation says this is free software: http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-sw.html and notice, Mr Attaway that it says nothing at all about what you consider piracy not does it encourage it. It encourages sharing and creativity free from what it calls proprietary restraints which seems to be what the RIAA and MPAA are all about.
If Mr Attaway would bother to read the GPL he might discover that copyright isn't attacked in it, the code is not placed in the public domain though there are restrictions in converting it to a proprietary product. I fact copyright is expressly contained in the GPL.
Copyleft is a philosophy expressed in the GPL and by FSF which has little or nothing to do with "piracy" however the "content" industry wants to define that (which appears to be surprisingly elastic). And it's not the same as the Creative Commons licenses.
If you're going to "educate" people, Mr Attaway of the MPAA I suggest you start with educating yourself, TAM and Bob first.
Then I suggest you find you how much software covered by the GPL has been used to generate to pretty special effects in your films, the 3D effects and so much else. Not to mention other areas of your member companies where FOSS (Free and Open Source Software) is used. But hey, you think you have another great word to toss around and redefine at your pleasure. Guess what? You don't.
On the post: Unknown Tech Company Fighting Back Against FBI's National Security Letter Gag Order
I can see the very rare case where it makes sense. Counteracting that is the FBI's well earned reputation of going on fishing expeditions must because they seem to want to. I'm not just picking on the FBI here as the RCMP has a similar well earned reputation.
On the post: When Entertainment Industry Numbers Are More Suited To Comedy Than Analysis
Re:
On the post: When Entertainment Industry Numbers Are More Suited To Comedy Than Analysis
Re:
The rest of the numbers invite ridicule all by themselves it's just that Reid does a much better job than most at it by using the numbers against themselves.
Remember Mark Twain's saying that "numbers don't lie but liars can figure". which is exactly what's happening here.
On the post: Authors Can Sleep Easy Now; Paypal Reverses Its Censorship Decision
Re: Re: I'm not sure Paypal did anything wrong.
The point being that, whether you like the art on renderotica or not it got caught in a wide net cast by the Bush administration and then by the payment processors they were putting pressure on.
Personally I don't care where censorship comes from it bothers me and it's almost always used for a political agenda rather than a business one.
On the post: Former Yahoo Employee Regrets How Yahoo Patented His Work
It's not like this wasn't predicted right from the start of the silliness of software patents or that "minor" little details like prior art and all the rest of the requirements to actually get a patent would be lost in the shuffle.
With the USPTO mistaking the number of patents issued with productivity the situation immediately got worse.
It would be nice if someone, somewhere put the entire notion of patents for software to sleep for a few decades or more.
On the post: Decades-Old UK Pub 'The Hobbit' Threatened With Legal Action For Infringing On Hobbit IP
Re:
As for franchising out the name if the owners of the place haven't done that after two decades they're not about to now.
This is pure bullying on the same level as the IOC trying to force Olympia Pizza in Vancouver to change it's name and logo lest someone confuse a well known pizza joint with the Olympics. No one is about to confuse this little pub with Hobbitt/LoTR official stuff so I fail to see what the problem is about.
On the post: Holocaust History Preserver Shoah Foundation's Patents Being Used To Sue Google, Facebook, Hulu, Netflix, Amazon
Re: Re: Trolling for Shoah
If it was a different subject, say SOPA/PIPA I'd say Vic Kley is trolling for the so-called "content" industry.
Oh well, maybe the sharks today are hungry
On the post: Holocaust History Preserver Shoah Foundation's Patents Being Used To Sue Google, Facebook, Hulu, Netflix, Amazon
Re: The tarnishing is on his other foot the one not in his mouth
You try to make a link between validity and the idea that "non practicing" entities have historically been the source of most patents -- a point I'm semi-inclined to agree with -- until we run into the problem of the company filing the lawsuits here has the classic foot print of nonpracticing entity, hidden by shell company, hidden by another entity, hidden by another shell company and so on. The classic patent troll.
Take into account that USC had pledged not to lease/sell/license the patents to such an operation. And by extension Shoah.
The criticism is a bad business decision and then trying to wriggle out of it with the usual legal PR smoke screen.
Secondary arguments and tangents about how Facebook steals privacy, something it's users most often freely consent to, allegations about Google doing the same don't change that.
For me I want to know more about what's going on here.
Mike's also been a financial supporter of Shoah so if he's disappointed by this he has every right and obligation to write about it as he has without being accused of antisemitism.
On the post: Celebrating 20 Years Of Patent-Free Email Attachments
Re: Re: Re:
If you really go back you'll find that most of the specifications for the internet and the money to pay to implement and test the initial outlay came from the US Defense Department and other "investment" including the requirement that the Internet be able to route around damage came from the same location. In anticipation of a nuclear exchange, of course, but that was part of the requirement.
So as well as people working at universities (doing nothing, eh?), there were people at the Pentagon working on it, students and others working on it.
The computer science DNA of the time was to share darned near everything. AFAIK no one actually got the code that ran IBM's heavy iron other than IBM but the concepts and peripheral code was shared widely. The current notion of copyrighted code that you don't share had to wait for the arrival of microcomputers such as the Altair for which a start-up named Microsoft supplied a version of the BASIC programming language which, of course, they copied from someone else and the days of what we now call "closed source" began in earnest.
Development of the Internet continued using what we now call "open source" in parallel with the computer revolution and became publicly usable with developments such as the Web and half decent search engines.
No email isn't perfect. But I don't know what is. But if you code I'm sure the people who work on email will be more than happy to take your help working towards the optimum solution. And yes, it just works. But you can criticize or jump and help.
"Can you imagine the computer revolution if we had all waited for Linux to be usable by anyone else other than total geeks? Oh, wait, it still hasn't passed that stage!"
Linux passed that stage years ago. You could try installing a modern distro, say Ubuntu, Red Hat, SUSE, Mint or Mandriva and you'd probably be shocked. Geekdom is no longer required. But that would probably be too much work.
On the post: Kiwi Musician Says Public Domain Only Exists So You Can 'Rip Off Dead People's Works'
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Every musician goes through that, indeed music lessons are all about copying as the music you get to play is always other people's because you aren't there yet to come up with something of your own.
In this case the song's a cover, licensed and paid for at the time so who cares?
That and you miss the point that why should be be entitled to a welfare scheme called copyright because he copied a song, legally, and made a few changes to it to hide the fact that it's a Beatles song when other professions, crafts and trades aren't entitled to that kind of thing.
Okay, he had a hit and good on him. That doesn't change that he doesn't understand the public domain or what it means. He gets a dribble of an income from COPYING (legally in the world of copyright and licensing) from someone else. So does Paul McCartney and Yoko Ono representing John Lennon's estate. Not that they'll notice it.
Again, perhaps some music lessons would help you, too. More, I suspect that they'd help Mike.
On the post: Harper's Publisher Presents The Platonic Ideal Specimen Of The 'I'm An Old Fogey Elitist Anti-Internet Luddite' Columns
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What you're looking for is still there on the InterWebs, still difficult to find at times and buried under the commercialism you complain about but still there. At least the Web is two way cable TV if you want to use that analogy.
I first heard that analogy somewhere around 1997, actually with the rise of JavaScript and Java in an attempt to bring on Web 2.0 (may you forever cursed for that phrase Tim O'Reilly) in before its time. So interactivity was limited to waiting for some applet or other to download at 48.8KBps and swearing at it when it did.
Personally I dodge as much of it as I can when I'm poking around and move on after a popup or two.
There's more chaff to winnow out but there's more grain, too. And so what if Joe and Jane Sixpack can wander around Amazon or EBay to buy what they want between BBQs? Because I'm a techie doesn't make me better than them just, perhaps, more selective. Not to mention that digs at the "working class" get tiring after a while.
I think we can both agree that there was less of a fuss about infringement back then but it was coming and soon that bit of nirvana would get caught up with the silliness of SOPA/PIPA/ACTA/TPP.
Just as MacArthur seems to long for the good old days of the 1950s, 60s and 70s we can't turn the clock back in the Internet either or start it again. Just as "the money grubbing bastards from hell" want to make this a carbon copy of what they're used to we can't start over in the hopes they won't find us. They will. (I absolutely guarantee you that the porn industry will find the "new" internet the day the lights go on!)
At least the way things are now "we the people" get to beat the "money grubbing from hell" at their own game every now at then witness PIPA/SOPA and with some luck ACTA in the EU.
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