If you want to exclude files matching a certain pattern in their path, wouldn't use just use something like "-not -path '*/excluded_path'"? I do that to exclude certain file extensions (but with -not -name '*.extensions'). According to the man page, prune determines whether to descend into directories at all, which is a different issue.

But yeah, find is kind of a fscked up command on the whole... doesn't really work how you think it should :-)

It uses a few methods - blank screen detection is one of them ( I think the default), since there are usually a few black frames at the start of a commercial break. Scene change detection is another. You can tweak which methods it uses. In my experience, it gets it right about 85% of time. When it doesn't, the 30-second skip works wonders :-)

Fast tracking is different from executive orders. Fast track (now called trade promotion authority) allows the president to negotiate a trade treaty in advance, then present the entire package to Congress in a take-it-or-leave-it fashion. This prevents trade negotiation from getting bogged down in Congress - without fast tracking, every senator is going to want a tariff on whatever their state happens to produce.

Fast track really isn't relevant to ACTA for two reasons. First, as I pointed out elsewhere, it's being negotiated as an executive agreement, so it doesn't require Congressional approval anyway. The flip side of this is that it is supposed to "color within the lines" (as a USTR rep put it) of existing US law, but without seeing the agreement, we just have to take the administration's word (along with that of other colorful characters, such as the MPAA and PhRMA) that this is true. Oh, and some of the few public interest group people who have gotten to see draft texts (under NDAs) have specifically said in their opinion, it would go beyond current US law.

Second, fast track authority expired a while ago (I believe in 2007), and Obama is unlikely to get it back anytime soon. Protectionist sentiment in the US is strong right now, and free trade is not high on Obama's agenda anyway (see, e.g., the tariff on Chinese tires).

One of the (many) problems with ACTA from the US perspective is that it's not being negotiated as a treaty, which would then require ratification by the Senate before becoming law. It's being negotiated as an "executive agreement", which requires zero Congressional oversight. Ostensibly this also means that it cannot go beyond the bounds of existing US law, and of course the USTR et al. all assure us that it doesn't, but without seeing the text, there is no way to know if that's actually true or not.

Another point - from my own perspective, one of the main problems with ACTA is not necessarily its effect on the US, but rather on other countries. At least in the US we already have well-established fair use provisions and other protections (safe harbor, counter notification, etc.), however that is not always the case elsewhere. If ACTA exports all the draconian features of our IP laws without any of the protections, it has the effect of screwing over everyone else. ACTA is currently being negotiated mostly among OECD countries (they could never have pushed it through WIPO, there is too much opposition from the G77), but when it's finally established, we can expect it to become a requirement for anyone who wants to sign a free-trade agreement with the US.

Sure, it might look like that this decade. But, as you know, China's population is about four (or more?) times the size of the US's, and China's economy is still developing. Read up on the history IP piracy in the U.S. - when our economy was in its infancy, we essentially promoted piracy from abroad (there's a reason it took us so long to sign on to Berne). Dickens complained about how his works were being sold in the US and he never saw a penny.

The first example I could quickly find would be something like this. It's a state government website, and its terms of use claim copyright on what is public, state-produced work that is publicly and freely available. However, the terms also deny you the right to redistribute the work.

In this case it looks like a boilerplate template... not sure off the top of my head if a state has ever invoked copyright law to stop redistribution of public records, but it's entirely possible.

By definition? No. The whole point is that the context of the work and the employment situation determines whether it will be a work for hire. There are likely some times when lesson plans could be considered works for hire, and other times when they wouldn't be.

Also, since public schools are are managed at the state and local level, even if you could obtain the material freely under public records laws, etc., you would not necessarily have the right to redistribute (by selling) the material freely - that is a separate right under copyright law, and would vary by state.

Care to point out which areas of law you think I'm wrong about (and specify your sources)? I didn't weigh in on the specific issue of whether the teachers' lesson plans would be considered works for hire, because I don't know the relevant precedents, and because it might vary by situation (as you note, factors such as whether you used your employer's resources, and whether you did it in "off hours" come into play).

My main point was that the OP's statement is completely misleading. Under no circumstances should anyone who considers themselves a normal employee (as opposed to a contractor) ever assume that works created in the course of their employment belong to them. You must, must, must get clarification on that point, either in your employment contract or from your own legal counsel. It's foolish and dangerous to assume that just because your contract doesn't say anything about ownership of copyright, that you automatically get it.

Some teachers are given "planning hours" during the school day, so it could be easily argued in court that creating a lesson plan used school resources (time) and was part of the normal course of employment, and thus they are works for hire. They may not be hired specifically to make lesson plans, but making lesson plans is (well, ideally, should be) part of teaching. If you are hired as a secretary, you may not specifically have been hired to write copy for a brochure, but if you were told to do so, the product would still be a work for hire.

There are two different provisions. Look at 17 USC Sec 203. If your work was made after 1978, you have a five year period beginning 35 years after transferring the copyright to decide to terminate the transfer and retain rights to the work.

If, as you claim, this five year period was put in place for the sake of people who had assigned copyrights before the duration of protection was changed in the 1976 Act, they would not have included the right of termination for works made after 1978. Since the provision applies to works not yet made, it's not changing deals that were already struck.

The section 304 bit (works made before 1978) uses your logic, but if I remember my legislative history correctly, the section 203 part was at least nominally designed to offer creators better bargaining power against publishers.

It's not expiration of copyright, it's a provision in copyright law that allows creators who have assigned their work to a publisher (or label, etc.) to take it back after a set period of time. It was designed to give creators some leverage against publishers - i.e., they wouldn't have to assign their work forever just to get it published. From the article:

Where did you read that? Federal IP law preempts state law almost entirely. Occasionally in suits you'll see lawyers invoke state common law to add insult to injury. Also, no, if rights are not explicitly spelled out in the contract, it means nothing. If you are simply an "employee" (as opposed to a contractor), the default is that your work is "work for hire", and it belongs to your employer. This is long-settled doctrine. The question revolves around your type of employment, but your employment contract doesn't necessarily have to say anything about copyrights, and your boss can still own your work.

That's simply not true. The employment contract doesn't need to explicitly mention anything about ownership of creative works. If you are simply an "employee" as opposed to an independent contractor, your work falls under the work for hire doctrine, and your employer owns the copyright.

No, it's not cut and dry. See, for example, the Community for Creative Non-Violence. And the "default" would depend on whether you're an employee or a contractor. If you're a coder who's been hired as a salaried member for some company and that's your full time job, the "default" is probably that you're an employee and you're creating works for hire, so ownership rests with your employer, full stop.

That said, at least at the university level, the culture is that works by professors are not works for hire. I'm not sure if there really is a sound legal basis for that (probably depends on their employment contract), but any university who tried to assert ownership over professors' work would find itself being attacked on all sides.

Exactly. In another post, I mentioned that I wonder how this would have gone down had Psystar done something like like - maybe provided a special "first boot" CD along with some legalize that said, "By running this CD, you are authorizing us to adapt on your behalf the unmodified copy of OS X on your machine so that it properly works with your computer system."

Read carefully the full section, and you'll see that while it allows for the creation for "adaptations", it explicitly disallows resale of those adaptations if you don't have permission from the copyright holder:

While the end result may be the same, disallowing the latter prevents Psystar from selling fully functional, turn-it-on-and-it-works machines. If the law forces the purchaser to perform the final step of modifying the software, that is a relatively large disadvantage in the marketplace.

I have to wonder, if Psystar sold its machines with a special "first boot" CD that made the necessary modifications to the OS X installation, and had purchasers run that CD only after buying the machine... that sounds like it'd get around the letter of the law, but I suspect Apple's lawyers would creatively find some way to stop that, too.