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Comment Re:Bah. This was the correct decision. (Score 2) 380

This is no different than if a current document protected by copyright were passed off as a public domain document by a third person. The onus on assessing the right to copy lies with the person making the copy. This is not a problem particular to this law, but with the entire copyright system as a whole. The problem of acquiring the rights to copywritten documents that have been abandoned is in fact pointed to in the dissenting opinion.

The law in fact allowed for the continued use of material that had been used before the law had been passed until being informed by the rights holder of the new status.

Logo's are protected by trademark law, not copyright law, so are a completely separate issue. And Disney's retelling of the stories of Snow White, Pocahontas and Cinderella are not exact copies, so would also be a separate issue.

Comment Re:Bah. This was the correct decision. (Score 1) 380

Perhaps you don't understand the difference between unlicensed public domain content and licensed copyright content. Licensed copyright content, such as the GPL, use copyright to enforce the terms of the license, ie that you can continue to copy it in perpetuity. It is an agreement between you and the author.

Public domain does not have or require any such agreements. There is no limit to copying, so there is no necessity to come to any sort of agreement between you and the author. So the ability to copy is dictated solely by law (or lack thereof) and not any sort of license agreement. It just happens that there is now a law that limits your ability to copy some works that used to have no such law protecting them.

tl;dr Laws trumps Licenses

(ps. I actually agree with the dissenting opinion of the court.)

Comment Re:Poor analysis - its film not the camera itself (Score 2) 309

The Wikipedia article (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adobe_Photoshop) shows that the file format has been documented (http://www.adobe.com/devnet-apps/photoshop/fileformatashtml/) As to why it doesn't use some sort of XMLish format, this thing was created in the early 90's, before XML based file formats were in vogue and computers were much less powerful.

Comment Re:Opt-in is not an option (Score 1) 284

If you eliminate the service by regulation you are only creating a facade of privacy. (And the same argument can be used for regulating security.) The only way that you can truly eliminate the privacy risk is through technology. (And not just an opt-out tag which is just a form of regulation, albeit self regulation.) As long as you have a wireless beacon sending out a unique identifier, there is no way to control what is done with that information. You can pretend to make laws that say "Thou shalt not collect information from your surroundings and remember where you collected it," but in the end the information is out there and someone will collect it. If it's not Google telling you very publicly about it, it is the government or the "bad guys" doing it secretly.

Comment Re:Copyrights aren't property (Score 1) 349

In the United States the Constitution gives this right:
Article I Section 8:
"To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries;"

The idea behind this being that the public can give up rights to created works and allow the author to have exclusive rights for a while, with the end goal of having more works available to the public (domain). The problem comes when people no longer understand what the point behind copyright law and mutilate it into "it means it is the authors property forever." Should it be theirs forever? Does it really encourage an author to write more books if their grandchildren can collect a royalty long after their death?

Comment I did this with Rogers (Score 1) 270

I did this a couple weekends so far with Rogers. I bought the SIM card off of eBay for about $5 shipped. The guy activated it for me for an extra $5, which gave it an initial credit of $10. I used the $7 week pass for data. It's limits are lower than what you were hoping for, but was sufficient for my couple of days in Toronto. I tried to add airtime with a US credit card and it didn't work, but buying a prepaid airtime card at a convenience store in Canada worked just fine. But, as others have pointed out, make sure there is coverage where you are going before you commit to a carrier. And let the seller know you need a micro SIM for the iPhone/iPad. The eBay listing I bought it from did not list microSIM, but the seller was happy to send the microSIM I needed for my iPhone.

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