One of the big issues is that is (currently, in the vast majority of cases) a civil matter. The two parties involved pay for it.

If it's criminal, your tax dollars are going to be increasingly used to pay for copyright enforcement that the copyright owner doesn't want to pay for. If they don't want to pay for it, why should I? Why should you?

Unfortunately, it's hard for people to do it. Copyright litigation is very risky, as fair use is vaguely defined. Although I'd say that 4 paragraphs is fair use, the statutes don't really set the limits. The law/case law says you should consider X,Y, and Z but aren't real definitive about where the line is drawn.

And lawyers are expensive. It's $200+/hr for a lawyer (roughly) and you're going to potentially need hundreds of hours to litigate a case in court. If it's a few thousand to make the issue go away, that sounds pretty good when you weigh the relative costs.

yeah, the "arrest" requirement is way to arbitrary. You can be arrested for just about anything, then never be charged.

Problem with requiring a company controlled portal to run the game is the industry has proven multiple times that they're all too quick to kill off network infrastructure required to play the game.

It also means that you have to have an operational network connection to run the game.

Basically, the decision said that a company can enforce regional pricing and distribution structures through a (broad) interpretation of copyright laws.

Omega has various pricing depending on region. Overseas they were cheap and expensive in the US. CostCo bought them from a low priced region overseas and imported them to the USA. The ruling was they couldnt do that as it violated the copyright, despite the fact they were legally purchased overseas.

So you have sit on the product that includes a similar feature for 11 years?!?

For 11 years, you have no way of knowing if it's valid and the fact that it wasn't granted "quickly" would normally be a dead giveaway that it's crap. It's a completely unworkable system.

I would argue that it is mostly large corporations that decided "long time back that the work of their [subjects] hands should go to those of their own choosing --- and have never truly signed on to the notion that the artist should be compelled to surrender his work to the public domain."

Unfortunately, for the vast majority of the populus, the issue of copyright has not really mattered to them in their daily lives. Especially before the internet, they copied (for personal use) and nobody had any way of knowing about it.

The large corporations are HIGHLY motivated to push for protectionist copyright policies though, so they end up winning out. You end up with this situation a lot in politics, a significant portion of general populution do care about minor issues but don't have the time/energy to do anything about them.

I don't buy that. In every single other industry people work and create until the day they retire or die. What is so special about musicians and authors?

Bad idea.

It will result in everything green lighted. A "green" stamp means that the USPTO is effectively done with it. Move on to the next.

A "red" stamp means that the inventor can come back with changes, questions, etc. It doesn't kill it. That process can drag on another year or more. The USPTO also puts together some reason for it being rejected. It is a lot more work and is drawn out.

It's 1 per day for copyright holders (specifically the USCG on behalf of a copyright holder). They process many more for law enforcement which eats up time and is significantly more important.

I'm sure they were also worried about person X coming and demanding 100 immediate lookups for copyright issues, then person A, then person B coming and doing the same. It's also likely the system is not centralized and the ISP has near zero business incentive to comply.

Since it's for a subpeona, they really need to manually verify it as well. The cost for getting it wrong is quite high from a PR standpoint. It shouldn't be 100% automated.

Tape is one of the best long term and reliable storage methods. As long as it doesn't burn (which kills any memory type), it's more stable in most situations than the modern memory devices. Remember, it has be stable in salt water, in high impact, humid environments, dry environments, wide temperature ranges, take electrical shock, etc.

People just think it sucks b/c it's old school and clunky.

It's not about the quality of the degree or that all liberal arts schools are crap.

It's that nobody gives a shit about your liberal arts portion of the education (beyond maybe the ability to communicate which isn't only available via liberal arts).

They care that you can do CS work (in my example). They don't care about the history class you took, or the psychology, or the native american culture, or the sociology, or whatever...they care about whether you know the skills that directly relate to what they want you to do. In a technical field, it's technical knowledge that is important.

Some of their statements are way off. Liberal arts is not the reason you go to university, unless you want to be a writer. If you get a liberal arts (sort of) degree in a technical field you are woefully underprepared. An employer in a technical field wants you to be able to communicate, but other than that they could care less about other non-technical stuff. If you're a programmer, they want you to program and not sound like an idiot when you talk in front of people/with people.

The focus on research is a valid

whenever the senate states you must use XYZ product as a critical subcomponent in a large engineering project before it's started, you know there are going to be problems.

Exactly, start looking at the major databases that do exist.

Journal articles are easily searchable, even by Google Scholar if you want a decent, use anywhere search engine. Get the authors/institutions from the papers, not by randomly searching school webpages.

After you locate an interesting person, determine how that department does it's admissions. Some admit students then let them find advisors. Some pair up advisors and students at admission time. It depends on the school and on department.

Be sure to find out if the potential advisor is a douche too. Nothing makes grad school worse than an advisor who is a pain in the ass. When I was still in school, those of us who get along well with our advisors generally liked the entire experience while those that didn't were constantly unhappy and hated it.