Guess again.

Trademarks only exist so long as they serve as a source identifier for marked goods or services. That is, LEVI'S is a trademark because pants with that mark on them can only come from Levi Strauss & Co. But BLUE JEANS is not a trademark (for pants) because pants with that mark on them could come from anywhere.

Once Steamboat Willie hits the public domain, everyone is entitled to make copies of it. This means that a good which has MICKEY MOUSE in it can come from anywhere. And so MICKEY MOUSE cannot function as a trademark, at least for animated films. Further, everyone will be entitled to make new movies which are derivative of Steamboat Willie, if only in that they also feature the Mickey Mouse character (though without any of the changes he's had since 1928). So new animated films will appear as well.

You could still presumably have those novelty ice cream bars that carried the MICKEY MOUSE trademark, or those mouse eared party balloons, but that's probably little consolation to Disney.

This all basically dates back to the interaction of a patent and a trademark case: when shredded wheat was invented, it was patented and sold under the SHREDDED WHEAT trademark. Eventually the patent expired and competitors began selling the same product using the same mark, and the Supreme Court found they had every right to do so, since SHREDDED WHEAT was the name of the product that could now come from anywhere.

Also there was a more recent case in which the Supreme Court again pointed out that trademarks are not a substitute for copyright, and cannot be used to get around the constitutionally required time limits on the duration of copyrights or patents.

(And ironically, meanwhile, there is some reason to think that Steamboat Willie is already in the public domain, due to the specific requirements of the copyright law that applied at the time it was originally released. But the question has never been properly settled, AFAIK.)

Meh. It works both ways. Authors who wanted to write a sequel to a movie would just have to wait for a little while before they'd have their chance.

And in any case, I don't think that your scenario with the movies is terribly likely. Movie studios like to have exclusivity. If no one had jumped on, say, Cryptonomicon rapidly, and then it turned into a waiting game, having two different big budget adaptations of it at the same time would piss off both studios involved. This means they'll have to either develop original stories (which is fine; copyright is all about increasing quantity) or they'll have to take chances and act early in order to avoid getting screwed. Or they'll collude, but we got two rival attack-on-DC movies last year, so I don't think they're doing that so much.

They're not. Movie rights for books, unless the book is a best seller by a big name author, usually amount to very little money in the grand scheme of things. Certainly well, well under a million dollars for ordinary books. The catering budget is probably a bigger expense.

So? I'm sure that some serious lovers of opera dislike the idea of having The Barber of Seville or The Valkyrie used in Bugs Bunny cartoons. If you don't like it, don't listen to it. But don't go telling the rest of us what to do.

Well, the point of copyright is to have works created and published which otherwise wouldn't've been, and to have them in the public domain as fully and quickly as possible. The goal is to promote the progress of science, that is, knowledge.

If the source code is granted copyright protection, it ought to be published so that people can learn from it, and so that when it enters the public domain (or prior, if an applicable exception to copyright applies) it can be modified by anyone who wants to modify it, just as any public domain work may be modified.

Just as patents and trade secrets cannot apply for the same invention, we should not allow trade secrets and copyrights to apply for the same work. If someone wants to keep a program secret, then fine, but why does it benefit the public to grant a copyright on a secret program?

As for piracy of the published source, that would still be illegal, just as pirating a published novel is illegal. Every sort of work under the sun has to deal with this except for software; why should software be treated differently?

I guess I do, technically.

First, copyright protects expressions of ideas, but not the underlying ideas themselves. E.g. anyone can make a game about a woman who hunts for treasure by raiding tombs and shooting endangered wildlife. But you can't just outright copy Tomb Raider's code, art assets, and so forth.

Second, the reason for granting copyrights isn't so that people can profit from their works, but so that the public profits from having more works created and published than otherwise would've been, and in the public domain as much as possible, as soon as possible. That copyrights may have economic value which can provide a profit for authors is a side effect, a means to an end. It's not the actual point, though.

I don't have an objection to copyright generally, however, provided that it produces a better outcome for the public than if we didn't have copyright.

And coincidentally, 15 years is the maximum duration that copyrights should last, according to the only proper study of economic incentives surrounding copyright of which I am aware.

We could use some more research on this, but it sounds okay to me.

If you can crack it apart, then you can just bury the graphite in the empty coal mines and oil wells, if there's no better use for it.

But this is so energy intensive that's it's not likely to happen anytime soon.

As for a limnic eruption, that just gets CO2 out of solution from water. It doesn't get it off the planet. Earth's gravity is too strong for that.

The oxygen in the CO2 is atmospheric oxygen, not fossil oxygen. I'd just as soon not get rid of it.

Assuming that you're talking about the $150,000 maximum on statutory damages for copyright infringement, no, you're wrong.

Statutory damages are calculated per work, not per infringement. The number of infringements might perhaps have some bearing on the amount of damages which is just, between the minimum and maximum. But there is only one award, no matter how many separate infringements of that work there are, at least in the same case.

The relevant statute is 17 USC 504(c)(1).

Well, the pressing need to leave 1885 immediately was caused by the threat of Buford Tannen killing one of them. But since he was arrested and in custody before the train was stolen, there was time to abort the train stealing plan and to come up with something else. And there's no other time pressure: after all, they've got a time machine. There is the usual problem of being in the past and perhaps changing something, but the effects on the future of putting together a small steam engine for the DeLorean are probably less than that of stealing the whole train.

No, only the time circuits and the flux capacitor needed over a GW of electricity in order to function. The car's actual engine was an ordinary internal combustion engine that output a little less than 100 KW.

(Come to think of it, stealing a steam train seems unnecessarily complicated and history-altering. Surely it would've been easier for Doc Brown to put together an electrically heated steam engine to get the DeLorean moving. Oh well, sensible ideas rarely make for exciting movies.)

Well, the particular method they're using involves breaking the law in a way that deprives local government of revenues and where they seem to be getting away with it, even though ordinary people never would.

Plus, what's wrong with providing better public transportation, which reduces even more traffic and is more environmentally friendly? (Buses are really not that great compared with electrified rail) Let Google help finance improvements and expansions of the subway system. It'll benefit their workers too, but not just their workers, which I think is part of the issue.

Well, my understanding is that there's a fairly steep ticket for vehicles that park or stand in bus stops. The number I saw was something like $250. In that case, given that there's plenty of evidence that the bus drivers broke the law, the city should pursue that money which they're apparently just leaving on the table. $250 per stop per bus per day for however long these buses have been in service could be quite a lot! And why should the bus companies be allowed to get away with breaking the law just because they did so a lot and if left alone would continue doing so in the future? That doesn't make much sense.

And if they decided to use private stops in a legal manner, well, that's fine. In fact, that's what they should've been doing from the start. And if the local government needs private bus related revenue, it can always tax private bus stops.

Of course, the best solution would be for the companies to not use private buses, and to instead contribute toward improved public mass transit. There are five BART lines that could be extended to cover the South Bay from both sides, probably with a big junction at San Jose. Muni Metro could be expanded to cover more of San Francisco, with attention paid to transfers to and from BART, and the VTA light rail can be dramatically expanded, also with an eye toward BART transfers.

And a better, simplified, unified ticketing system would help too -- assuming they don't all just get merged into one big new transit authority, which might be a sensible idea.

Plus this gets even more cars off the road than private buses do, has the advantage of being fairer, since everyone can ride, and would provide local jobs for constructing and maintaining the system. It'll cost more, but a lot of the companies for whom the bus services are being run have loads of cash and would benefit from it; they can afford to contribute a fair amount and to support the increased government spending and taxes for the rest.

Yes. But many years later, I got an SE/30 and maxed out the RAM, just to have finally done it. Fortunately it didn't cost too much on eBay.

Well, IIRC, the only reason that A/UX even existed was because the US government had a requirement of POSIX compatibility for all computer purchases, even if the actual people and departments who wanted to buy the machines and use them had no intention of ever taking advantage of that.

The Monkey was something they used for debugging. You can read about it here: http://www.folklore.org/StoryV...