Heh. They put him in the "Open Source Development" category. He's going to just love that...

The mafia style tactics were probably a reference to the sad case of Karen Silkwood, a whistleblower in the nuclear industry who had died under mysterious circumstances only a few years earlier.

People who care about the iWatch functionality will buy iWatches

Well, shit. That's what I wrote in my head. So much for proofreading.

I can't understand the fuss, since the iWatch and a Swiss watch are two different markets.

Mostly. However, there's going to be a large intersection in the people who buy a $device in that price range mostly to show off how much money they have, and the iWatch is probably going to own that market.

People who care about Swiss watches aren't going to buy an iWatch. People who care about the functionality of an iWatch probably aren't going to buy an iWatch. But people who want an excuse to flash an expensive piece of wristwear are going to buy a gold iWatch and set their phone to send a notification to the watch every few minutes so everyone can see them checking their wrist.

Death/mass violence threats are not a political correctness issue. They are a criminal issue.

Sure. And if speech crosses the line to become a real criminal matter, then by all means treat it as a criminal matter.

That doesn't change the fact that in 99.99% (or more) cases the motivation is to get a rise out of society rather than the aggression or hatred the parent post was blaming.

At the same time, institutions hyper-sensitivity where even perfectly innocent and reasonable behaviour gets perceived as a threat ("OMG! Someone's walking towards the art department carrying something in a long bag! Call 911!") and the complete lack of sanctions for gross over-reactions has basically turned trolling into an instant denial of service.

There's gotta be a balance. Right now, the way things are structured, we're letting the trolls run the show and just reacting. Poorly.

I don't object to references to raping my daughter and leaving her in a bloody pile in a ditch because it's politically incorrect.

No, but you also don't issue a press release saying how the entire community is just aghast at the whole business and how you're going to host a conference to talk about "healing", do you?

If they said something sufficiently heinous, you might try to track the fucker down and kick his ass (i.e. how "talking shit" was generally handled up until around the 70's), or perhaps something like Curt Schilling. In other words, a response based on going directly after the perpetrator. Direct threats are something for law enforcement to handle.

A "politically correct" response, on the other hand, is rooted in the idea that all we need is a bit more education and a lot more censorship.

Education will probably work in the very long run, unless it's so ridiculously heavy-handed that it becomes parody and propaganda. Censorship will work for a short while until the next mole pops its head up. The gaps in between the short and long term is where the trolls live.

I don't know what the ideal solution to trolls is, but I'm positive that ineffective hand-wringing isn't it, nor is trying to engage them in healing dialogue.

I'm pretty sure that effective, but not excessive, discipline where they can be caught is one necessary aspect (we tend to fail pretty badly as "not excessive" when discipline actually happens). Having society be just generally more resilient to offensive (and particularly anonymous) speech is absolutely critical.

But monopods are still allowed, right?

...an anonymous way for people to let out the aggressions and hatreds that they already had, and are just afraid to announce...

I doubt it.

Most of them are just trolls. You know, bored assholes who've learned exactly which buttons to press to get the most reaction out of society.

That being said, the root of the problem is the same; political correctness is fundamentally just a way to tell the trolls which buttons are the best.

Well, I'm a copyright lawyer, so I doubt I'm "completely and totally ignorant of the law." Have you considered the possibility that your analysis is wrong?

Just thought I'd mention it, since you did make a rather broad statement suggesting that works cannot enter the public domain unless deliberately placed there by the copyright holder. While copyright holders can put works into the public domain, it's not true that that is the only way for works to enter the public domain.

"Um, no. That would not be the scenes a faire doctrine."

The scenes a faire doctrine, which I don't have to google for, thanks, permits people to copy without fear of infringement, stock elements from works, which are typical, if not indispensible, for works that have a particular setting, genre, theme, etc.

In this case, where you have a show about teenagers fighting monsters with martial arts and giant robots, it would not infringe if you had a five person team, each member of which had personalities as described above, and where the members of the team were color-coded. It's simply expected of the genre, and therefore fair game, even if you copied it from another copyrighted work.

Now if the specific thing you copied was a very detailed example, and you kept all the details, you might then have a problem. So it depends on how much Power Rangers embellished on this standard device, if they did, and if so, how much of that embellishment, if any, was used in this case.

If you disagree as to my explanation, please feel free to actually say what you think the scenes a faire doctrine is.

I didn't say Disney's Peter Pan. I was talking about JM Barrie's Peter Pan, which Disney's Peter Pan is based on.

A new version of Peter Pan, based on Barrie's, could still tarnish the character well enough (if done right, and if widely published) so as to harm Disney's Peter Pan merely by association. But it would be lawful to do this. Disney's copyright on their version of Peter Pan does not extend to stopping other people from making their own derivatives of Barrie's work, even if they're very unwholesome derivatives.

Spock in Amok Time is good Spock, just rageful and murderous. Evil Spock (with a goatee -- that's how you can tell he's evil) was from episode 33, "Mirror, Mirror."

Time shifting is typically something that the end-user does. Tivo, like Sony before it (The original time shifting lawsuit was against Sony for their Betamax), merely makes the machine. So long as there is at least a potential lawful use for the recording function of the machine, they can go on making them. The Supreme Court found that at least some time shifting would be fair, and that was enough.

Space shifting is another example, the original case was against Diamond for their Rio MP3 players, but Apple's iPod relied on it, as did basically everyone else.

No, the purpose of the use for time shifting, while not precisely commercial, is to simply use the work in the way that an ordinary user, who did not time shift, would use it. It's not strongly against fair use, but it certainly doesn't weigh for it in the way that an educational or transformative use would. At best it is a wash.

It does.

(Though the question of parodying a mark directly is different from parodying a work which happens to contain a mark. Parodying Star Wars, which includes X-Wings, and the Millennium Falcon, and Lightsabers, and so on is different from parodying the Star Wars logo all by itself)

Also, remember that trademarks are inferior to, and cannot be used as a substitute for, copyrights. And that trademarks themselves are subject to various limitations to allow for certain types of unauthorized use.

Peter Pan is in the public domain in the US. You can absolutely have Peter Pan promoting drug use ('fairy dust' can be the street name; a side effect might be paranoid hallucinations of ticking crocodiles, etc.), and publish it widely enough to detract from Disney's ability to keep Peter Pan a wholesome character that they can make tons of money off.

Go nuts.

But because people can ignore that -- In fact, I'm confident that there are bad porn versions of Peter Pan floating around -- it doesn't really detract from the original, or from the Disney movies, unless you allow it to. It's up to you, the audience member.