Property:Quote
Jump to navigation
Jump to search
text from a referenced item
"Only an automaton!"
Dean is right.
Larry Lawyer, do you think they could negotiate a stay of execution if they change the name of the site to avoid copyright infringement?
Maybe Opera could commit suicide more effectively with poison, a dagger, garotte, cannon ball or elephant from Aida sitting on them. Ya think? Nah! +
"To be or not to be" isn't the question anymore. By whatever means, this site is back by popular demand. +
"continuous heavy traffic or data sessions" almost assuredly means "running a popular HTTP or KaZaa server to the point that we notice it and want to shut you down". +
2
'''Update 4''': Democratic aides continue to push back against Cantor's account, telling NBC's Luke Russert that Cantor was rude at the end of the meeting, and Obama ended it. +, Cantor said Obama walked-out "angrily" after he offered to support two separate debt ceiling votes – a proposal Obama had repeatedly said he would veto. +
At least actions such as may help educate the public that enforcement of copyright--as copyright is currently legislated--is in many cases more immoral than the act of infringement. +
Bad customer service recently prompted me to look at DSL modems and what I found surprised me. It looks like the cheap consumer-grade DSL modems already support 8Mbps.
I'd be surprised if the CLECs and ILECs all bought their DSLAMs 5 years ago; I'll bet that many COs have equipment that supports more than the 1.5M/128k combo that is typical in the US.
In other words, DSL is already where it took Ethernet years to get - the slow stuff isn't cheaper and will soon become unavailable. (Try to find a 10Mbps-only interface for a PC. The 10/100 cards are $10 and most new PCs come with that built-in.)
Yes, there may not be enough (day-time peak) bandwidth from the CO on, but we're already to the point where bandwidth is limited more by biz-model fiction than by technology.
BTW - One tiny ISP, Cyberonic, is reselling WorldCom's 1.5/768 service for $50/month (or $40 with a long-term contract), complete with a static IP. +
2
But even the president knows he can't solve the fiscal crisis by helping himself to bigger and bigger chunks of the income of America's most successful people. +
FYI: Met Fan Site To Be Restored
http://www.andante.com/article/article.cfm?id=19432 +
I didn't believe this until I went to the "archived" version of the site. That 70 years of history has been put together by an individual out their love of an institution is a profound thing worthy of support, not the cutting off of air supply.
Apparently, there is no such things as "common sense" when it comes to the use of a so-called trademark law. While the name "Metropolitan Opera" might be a trademark, there is nothing legally to prevent me from saying the words as many times as I wish on a webpage. It saddens me no end to see that MetManiac has felt obliged to comply with the outrageous demands of the New York Opera Company. I wish that they had the wherewithal to fight this.
I truly fear that this is simply another episode of many more to come. And thus, our history disappears... +
I guess one point of the figures is more to say that beauty is in the eye of the beholder, i.e. while a very small percentage of works may still be "profitable" (something one could also question in the age of Internet distribution), why should that keep the other 97% out of the public's hands? The public (especially researchers, academics, students, etc) may well find those more valuable in terms of information about our national history and cultural heritage than the 2.3% still available.
As for the film #s, they are certainly speculative. Still, how many films from 1927-1946 are really available at Blockbuster or NetFlix? 50? 100? I can't imagine more than that. 50 or 100 out of more than 30,000 still seems like a large price to pay for such a small return to the public. +
I thought only in Germany they use bad marketing for phones, but "nice" to see we are "not alone" - happy new year 2004 from Germany. +
Larry,
I was at Judge Posner's speech with Declan, and you're right that Posner didn't praise the challenge on the merits, or suggest how he would rule in such a case if it had come before him. However, Judge Posner did leave the impression that he was sympathetic with the challenge from a policy standpoint. (In fact, several points in his talk seemed to echo your recent work.) I gather that's what Declan was trying to report. +
No big deal, but 2002-56=1946. Important to remember if you're, say, planning on bringing a few favors to the online victory party. +
Personally I like the first suggestion. It reminds me of Gary Larson's story regarding the Jane Goodall cartoon. (Two chimps in a tree: one says to the other while picking something off his back, "Another blonde hair, you've been hanging around that Jane Goodall tramp again!" or something like that. The Jane Goodall Institute either threatened to sue, or did sue. Eventually, either the lady herself or someone else with a brain, heard about the whole debacle and immediately stopped the suit. The end result? They paid Larson for the rights to print his cartoon on THEIR t-shirts and posters! A wonderful about-face!! +
Quite simple: don't use the name of the place. Refer to "an Opera house in Manhattan" or something. But the list of presentations is history, everyone should be able to register it. +
Speaking as a professional marketing manager, and someone who has been messing around on the 'net for ages, the Met and their lawyers are insane! Developing and building such a site is an expensive, time-consuming proposition. If they wanted to build it themselves it would run them thousands of dollars easily - and wouldn't be as good. Why shut it down? Sponsor it, co-opt it, drive traffic to it, feed it and it will feed you...are they deranged, stupid or just petty? This is a great resource, throwing it away only hurts themselves.
Is it possible to add "common-sense provision" to existing copyright law? +
Surely the concern of AOL/TW is not about books - and probably there aren't a lot of book publishers who would be worried about losing the 1976 extension either. I would imagine that the concern is all about movies. I think it is a serious weakness in the figures that the authors simply *assume* that the availability of old movies is the same as that of old books - so that about 97% of the movies of the relevant period would not be available. I doubt that - though replace "available" by "worth watching" and I would concur.
I suppose one could use as a surrogate for Books in Print some of the thicker movie guides in print - the ones that rate thousands of movies, for video renters or late-night-TV watchers. If the film is listed in one of these books, probably its author has seen it, or knows someone who has seen it, in the past 10 or 15 years - so it's probaby still available.
Is it another problem with the stats that percentage availability does not address value? Maybe only 3% of the old movies are available, but they include Gone with the Wind, Wizard of Oz, etc etc - big earners still. Likewise the books include the Great Gatsby, much of Hemingway, etc.
One can legitimately argue that the authors and even - more to the point - the publishers, including broadcasters, have had their rewards, and it's the public's turn. I think that's a very good argument. I just don't think that the figures are all that significant.
BTW how would one get these numbers before the Justices anyway? Can one file supplementary briefs after oral argument? +
Surely to protect the trademarks, all you have to do is ask the owner of the side to use capital letters where appopriate and perhaps put up a notice saying that " is a registered trademark which is the property of . This site has is independent of them." If this is not the case, why is it not the case? +
Thanks David. As the Barbie Liberation Organization once made Killer G.I. Joe say, "Math is hard!"
For those interested, I re-ran the numbers for 1927-1946 and they're actually even better.
Between 1927-1946, 187,280 books were published in the U.S. Only 4,267 are available in 2002 from publishers, or 2.3% of the total published in those years. This means that over 97% of the U.S. book copyrights that would be "affected" by striking down the 1976 retroactive extension are commercially dormant. +
The Japanese installed a lot of ISDN (predecessor to ADSL) too. The ADSL standard variant for Japan (called 'annex C') is a gross hack because of the need not to interfere with all the ISDN lines. (The small number of people with ISDN elsewhere will have to switch to ADSL) +
The NY Mets did the same thing with their fan sites. +
The trademark dilution issue may be real, "forcing" the opera houses' hands just as Disney is forced to go after day care facilities that use their characters on the walls without permission (or maybe they are just evil?). But it would seem some sort of extended protections of the sort already granted to news agencies would make sense. Why should a non-commercial use of that trademark really constitute dilution? Granted, it becomes more common language if that mark is used, say, for any opera, but using the name of the opera house in reference to that opera house is hardly dilution; if anything, it is the opposite.
Refering to that specific opera house only with that name would appear to strengthen the specificity of that trademark (or whatever the legal term would be).
So I'm not even sure how this constitutes trademark dilution if it is allowed to continue, regardless of whether, practically, it is stupid for the lawyers to go after fans. +
There is a way around this: a desktop website that runs on a local CMS (his site is data driven and not just a collection of static pages). The "package" of functionality could be distributed via P2P. If there is damage, route around it. +
This analysis is problematic because the methodology of determining which works from each year is still "in print" has to be done through tedious human analysis. ISBN numbers only began to be assigned in the 1970s (as SBNs) and I believe it wasn't a widespread practice until the 1980s. This means that titles in print from before the 1970s have to be looked at individually and with author names to determine if any instanciation of the work in question is still in print today.
This doesn't reduce the value of the analysis, but where is the methodology so we can determine how they handled the overlap (or lack thereof)? +
This is OUTRAGEOUS. People should write [mailto:JVolpe@mail.metopera.org Volpe] and complain. +
This is a pervasive problem. All kinds of institutions, groups, and businesses (or more specifically their lawyers) are progressively making it illegal to publish information ABOUT them via various trademark and copyright laws. Who exactly thinks this is a smart idea (besides the lawyers who are paid to enact such nonsense I mean)? My art site occasionally gets similar threatening letters because it mentions artists, galleries, and museums. Very strange and very sad.
--Brian +
We obtained the list of books currently available via Books In Print at www.bowker.com. Using their electronic database, you can look for books in print by year of publication. Since we did the search in 2002, we were able to see how many works from a give year were still available. +
We've revised the analysis to correct for the error. Thanks for flagging it. +
Well, it worked for Fox vis-a-vis The Simpsons. Not that Homer is struggling with the same popularity problems that opera has, but still, it's a page straight out of the Fox playbook. +
Wowow has lots of American shows: Sex and the City, Felicity, CSI, Friends, Third Watch, Dawson's Creek, The Sopranos (currently in reruns), South Park... Press the "bilingual" button on your remote control and enjoy the original language track. +
Yes, it's open for DSL but you must participate in the phone company's monopoly. Sadly, DSL in Japan still requires you to pay NTT (the national phone monopoly) the base rate for the residential phone line (about $700 flat fee plus monthlies and per minute charges on every call irregardless of distance) or the rental of a line. For those of us who decide not to pay it and go wireless, we need to buy "Type 2 DSL" which includes a monopoly fee of about $20/mo additional to NTT for which you receive nothing in return.
It's better than one company offering DSL but not quite free of the bell-heads yet. +
You wrote "They now offer 12 mbs (yes, I mean 12 mps)". That has at least one important typo. Do you mean "Mbps"? +
eAccess is no longer the company to watch in ADSL in Japan. about a year ago it relinquished the role of being a market innovator to Yahoo Japan, which is offering combination IP telephony, wireless LAN access and 12Mbps ADSL +
if as you say, a large portion of old literature(50+ years old) is not commercially exploited, why doesnt someone in a country outside america try and put these up on the internet, if someone does hold the rights to that piece of work and wantsto enforce it that person can.
he can inform the webmaster and the webmaster shall remove the piece. Kind of works on the principle that copyright protection is not granted on creation but on request. It might be against the law, but with the law in this case making very little sense, an innovative attempt at trying to expose its fallacies is worth a shot.
--krishna +