I follow a simple rule: as soon as somebody uses the term "fiat currency", i stop paying attention to them just like i stop paying attention to people who use terms like "libs" or "personal lord and savior."

Double Bullshit, karma-whore.

Of course, there are plenty of problems for which excel is not suitable, such as when the data sets get too large. However, for quite a few other real world problems, it is far more than adequate. Anyway, this is slashdot so note how this was sold as an "Excel error" when clearly it was an operator error.

forgive me for responding to an AC, but what an absolutely dumb response you wrote.

there are clear standards for 'fair use'. You can read about them at
http://fairuse.stanford.edu/Copyright_and_Fair_Use_Overview/chapter9/9-b.html

your "you want your stuff public" argument is bullshit. everything in a bookstore, movie theater, etc is "public." This doesn't automatically give the right for others to republish those things, in their entirety, for profit, as google does. your claim of "absolute control" is bullshit. i never claimed there should be - i specifically referenced fair use, which is the mechanism by which creators and rightsholders dont have "absolute control."

However, I contend that what google is doing is pretty much as close as you get to "absolute thievery" - total republishing for money. so, this in my view is not some trivial marginal case at the limits of fair use. in many ways, as far as the sites are concerned, its probably about as infringing as you can get.

or, if not, i'd like to hear some argument why not without the special pleading legally nonsensical "you want your stuff public?" casuistic schtick.

and what's more (to reply to my own post), google's profitability is FAR from irrelevant.

http://fairuse.stanford.edu/Copyright_and_Fair_Use_Overview/chapter9/9-b.html

great. but i'm not talking about the snippets. i'm talking about the mechanism in google and elsewhere where you can see essentially complete copies of the webpages. have you even read the original article? moreover, do you think i can make such a reasoned objection (which you may or may not agree with) without knowing how search engines work?

No, there is nothing whatsoever in my post in which I claim or insinuate that slashdot is illegal. Google republishes as much as the entirety of websites for profit and without commentary.

Read this page:

http://fairuse.stanford.edu/Copyright_and_Fair_Use_Overview/chapter9/9-b.html

Slashdot takes small portions of articles for the purpose of commentary, review, and education (and/or journalism). Its use generally have little to no effect upon the potential market. the amounts quoted are modest.

completely different from the google cacheing/republishing situation.

your "posted publicly" claim is bullshit. there is no theory in copyright law in which public performance, publishing, or aviailability somehow invalidate copyright. just because you hear a song on the bus doesn't mean that it's in the public domain or that you can therefore makes CDs of it and start selling it.

"Fair use" is about the recipient (a.k.a. the user, the buyer, the reseller and such terms), and other second and possibly third parties, holding some limits on therights holder's ability to enforce copyright under certain circumstances. Saying Google's actions pass "no test of fair use whatsoever" because they might be opposed by the rights holder, or even cause some objectively verifiable problems for the rights holder, is like saying 'innocent until proven guilty' should be abolished because it doesn't help the state get convictions.

There is a clear four-pronged test of what constitutes fair use in the USA. Please explain to me how google's cachng of entire websites for profit is consistent with any of these. In fact, it very much violates two of them. You've written a long paragraph based on apparently your belief that "fair use" is some abstract concept. it isn't. Read the wikipedia page or wherever you need to go to learn about Fair Use 101 and get back to me.

    If your only goal is that the copyright holder be able to act without checks and balances

I never said or insinuated anything remotely like this. Shame on you for suggesting something like this. In fact, quite the opposite--I explicitly referred to fair use, which is a "check and balance" (though that's a horrible word choice) on the use of works.

"Cacheing" in double quotes because I contend it's actually republishing, or at least that the differences between the two are negligible.

You've written a lot of legalistic sounding bullshit without actually having any real understanding of what Fair Use is, it seems.

The Berne treaty has no bearing here. I am specifically asking about the legal theory, perfesser, under which you claim it is legal for google to do what it does - republish the content of entire websites for money without the creator's permission.. inside the USA, if you prefer to keep the discussion simple.

So, you are all for copyright as long as it has no teeth whatsoever and is just some purely symbolic aetherial concept, have I got that right? Also, you effectively favor it only for large entities that can take the time to patrol.. you know.. the whole internet.

copyright without enforcement is like talking about a god or ghost who has no effect on the real world. it's a violation of occam's razor and an absurdity.

did you even read my post?

caching is not linking, for one.

for fuck's sake these idiot ACs today.

"Don't post your information publicly if you don't want search engines to find it."

Irrelevant.

"Copyright holders have always had the burden of protecting their work."

Bollocks. Try opening "hawguy's house of CD-R copy musc" on a street corner The police will shut you down without any intervention from the rightsholders as you are engaging in criminal copyright infringement.

Your "should theaters" argument here is braindead. The correct question should be "should cinemas that consistently play movies that they have no rights to to paying customers be shut down?" and the answer is clearly yes.

I've read two spectacularly poor responses to my post so far. Yours was slightly less stupid than the previous one, but I nevertheless shudder of what awaits me below.

No, it most certainly is NOT like "quoting a portion of a book for book review." It is an extraordinarily large "portion" (often the whole thing) and there is no "review."

As far as "people should be thankful.." I've covered that.

You've not made a single fucking argument. And I'm using the f word because your "basically equivalent" statement is so spectacularly weak it shows you didn't even put a second of thought into writing your post.

Look - I know many of you are *philosophically* opposed to copyright. Fine. Whatever.

But put that aside for a moment and take it as a given that copyright exists. I really struggle understanding how it is legal, other than 'google has expensive lawyers' that one private entity can take the contents of another website, store them, and then essentially re-publish them for money (google is largely advertiser supported, even if the adverts dont necessarily directly appear on the cached page). This is especially true when you see here that google's actions can directly reputationally harm one of those whose site is is "caching."

Really, under what theory is this remotely consistent with copyright as we understand it? It passes no test of "fair use" whatsoever.

Notice that my comments aren't in any way related to whether the google caching is useful from a user's standpoint. Of course it is or can be. But, from a copyright standpoint, I have a lot of sympathy with righsholders.

Note also that the argument that "getting your stuff copied" should be an opt-out situation (as in "well, you can always put a robots.txt" or "you can always do steps x y and z") i find weak. this is what in essence we have with the DMCA and youtube - and you see it takes all of an instant from the time that any given video is taken down to the time that it's up again in some other form Rightsholders have to have *full time* people involved in policing sites like youtube.. something just isnt right about that.

If google is indeed providing a useful service to company/site x/y/z, then company x/y/z should be able to welcome such caching by an opt-in robots.txt. the current situation, given how copyright law actually exists in most jurisdiction, is perverse.

So, on your planet where market forces of supply and demand don't work, does gravity make things fall upward or what exactly do we have going on here?

" If legislation is passed that makes it more expensive for companies to operate, prices go up."

If prices go up and users still pay equally, then any economist will tell you either...
- prices were too low before and/or
- the companies have excessive market power

in either case, the items we're talking about here are expensive enough that it isnt the case of adobe artifically cheapening their price to keep out competitors. does adobe have excessive market power? you tell me: GiMP and other such tools are avialable for free. sounds to me like that they made a good product people want, despite there being cheap alternatives.

let's be clear what you are saying: you are saying that the developer must provide EXTRAORDINARY value (life long updates on a $5-$10 product?) for you to consider not pirating it. Behold, the entitled snowflake consumer.

Subby: don't listen to this and other snowflakes that will permeate this thread and mark me 'troll.'. You'll get a lot of advice here which amounts to not much more than you subsidizing their greed and limitless expectation.

You'll also get crapola "sage advice" like "Trying to deter piracy with DRM is a losing battle" here on slashdot. It gets "+5 insightful", but it's not. Sure, everything will get hacked, but the dirty little secret is DRM works. DRM works because it reduces the RATE of piracy. Behold the PS3. People DESPERATELY tried to hack it for years with great rewards to the cracker, but it wasnt cracked until many years after the fact, and even then it was more trouble than it was worth. I refer you again to the dictum "don't listen to the snowflakes." They will try to mislead you and in fact are doing so on this thread.

This is what I suggest:

1. charge a fair price for your product. compete on quality, not price.
2. NOTHING is unhackable, but use mechanisms that will lead to you getting a good income stream. the better known appstores are a good start. Far from perfect, but you'll reach plenty of honest people too.
3. if you want to sell it yourself (or if the product demands it), make the product 'phone home' regularly to validate its license. make it part of your license that the app MUST phone home every so often and cannot be blocked by firewall, etc. You'll get longwinded speeches here and elsewhere from customers who claim they would buy but for your evil, crazy DRM, but, again, ignore the snowflakes.
4. make regular updates. if you're particularly fussed, find out how your stuff is hacked, make it conditional that users must have current version for benefit X, and work against any hacks found. or, don't bother. I honestly think it's pretty much ethically perfectly fair to retaliate against those who pirate your stuff, but we don't and you shouldn't (oh, here come the responses!).
5. have a thick skin when it comes to entitled snowflakes and the Tech Profits and Futurists who will tell you that DRM is dead, that you should sell T-Shirts but give your app away, that you should FOSS it and live off of the sweet dew of reputation, or any other such idealistic crapola.

/ yes, this is a voice of relatively successful experience talking here.

how, exactly, is shagg's comment "insightful?"

1. the idea that "file sharing is already legal" is a meaningless statement. it's like saying that "driving a car is legal." yes, it's legal on roads for licensed drivers. it is not legal to drive through a busy shopping mall a la blues brothers.

2. 'file sharing' and 'copyright infringment' are not the same thing. who said they are? however, in the USA, "sharing" of copyrighted music and film, for example, for all but a very limited set of exceptions as defined in fair use and as the vast majority of 'file transactions' in practice are, is very much are copyright infringement.

i fail to see anything 'insightful' in shagg's comments. at best he's shooting down linguistic strawmen of his own creation - at worst, he's flat our wrong.