Actually the Zunes are backhanded gifts for our diplomats to hand out when they want to insult another country's leaders. Kind of like buying someone a really ugly sweater.

Not a regulatory violation, a civil law violation.

This is already illegal under copyright law. From what I gather from the article, the "news" is that the bill seeks to criminalize unlicensed public performance of a copyrighted work. The summary is totally misleading. Also, giving "credit" in a YouTube video is irrelevant to whether it's licensed or not. Actually I'm surprised more of these aren't scooped up by YouTube's content filtering system right now.

As for fair use, it'd be a tough case to make, but I guess in theory you could argue that... tough because you typically use the whole song, but that's mitigated by the fact that it's non-commercial use, and hardly a replacement - people don't listen to YouTube lip-syncs instead of the original...

I think criminalization of unauthorized public performance is probably a bad idea in general, even if not applied to lip-syncing kids... but don't let the summary fool you, this isn't suddenly making things that are currently legal illegal.

Well, Berne Convention (and Paris Convention) compliance are required by TRIPs, so denouncing either one would involve violating or denouncing TRIPs - and as TRIPs is a crucial part of WTO membership, we would probably also have to leave the WTO, or face enormous retaliatory trade sanctions for non-compliance. None of that is going to happen, and in reality leaving tho WTO is probably not in the best interests of the country.

Mod this up. We don't have the flexibility to alter our domestic law in this manner any more. But, as parent suggests, we could implement some kind of utility model system, aka "petty patents" that are shorter. Whether we can do it and grant them within a reasonable time is a different question...

Eh, 35 on the open parts of New York Avenue is pretty weak... also, leaving work-zone speed restrictions up when the work has been finished for weeks... and $125 is the minimum fine... yeah, people speed, but I don't wish tickets on most of them.

I was wondering the same thing, but I'd guess it's because iCloud requires iTunes or something, and the new version of iTunes doesn't support XP.

On the other hand, I know a lot of people who would say they are competent in the use of Word and Excel, but wouldn't know how to set tab stops, have never used styles, and probably aren't comfortable with formulae more complex than averages or autosum. Just because someone thinks they know how to use a program doesn't mean they actually do.

Typing is another thing. I am eternally grateful for a touch-typing class I had my freshman year of high school (even though several years later I retrained myself to use Dvorak - I probably would never have done that had I not known how to touch type in the first place). Despite its usefulness, I meet very few people who can actually touch-type.

But that's just it - there are exceptions to warrantless searches on grounds such as public safety and worker safety... e.g., health inspections, nursing home inspections, OSHA compliance, etc.

Extending those kinds of warrantless searches to look for potential copyright infringement is not in the same vein. Where is the pressing public necessity that justifies the encroachment on the 4th Amendment? To me, it just sounds like the copyright industries want the taxpayer-funded police to act as their own private security force. What if every industry took that approach? Why not have warrantless searches of research labs in order to make sure there is no patent infringement going on?

There is no hard and fast rule about what is and is not fair use. Multiple copies for classroom use in the context of teaching are explicitly mentioned in the statue. As other posters have noted, this is more of an issue for small graduate courses - undergraduates typically use a textbook. In some cases works are out of print. Finally, in academic publishing, this is hardly about authors making money - academics don't write academic books to make money, they do it to advance their fields and their own careers.

Fair use explicitly includes the possibility of multiple copies for classroom use in the context of teaching.

The point of copyright is not making people pay for things, it is public benefit. We tend to forget that, but in Fox Film Corp. v. Doyal, SCOTUS put it well: "The sole interest of the United States and the primary object in conferring the monopoly lie in the general benefits derived by the public from the labors of authors.”

"Multiple copies for classroom use" is not license for copy shops to duplicate textbooks next to campus, or even course packets. But if as a professor or teaching assistant, I want to photocopy a chapter from a seminal text for my class of 20 students, I am well within my rights.

Hell, there are some books that aren't even in print anymore... used copies are not only outrageously expensive, there simple aren't enough to go around. Sure, I can place it on two hour reserve at the library... or, I can use the Xerox machine in the manner in which it was intended.

I have an old original version of the Apple TV (came with a stripped down version of Tiger, I believe, rather than iOS). Cracked it open, replaced the hard drive with a larger one, used atv-bootloader to create a bootable USB disk, and installed LinHES (MythTV distro based on Arch). It was a PITA to do, but it's working reasonably well now. Cool little machine - the original had both HDMI and component out, new one is just HDMI, and doesn't have a standard USB port, I think.

I don't really get your point. You link to an explicitly Republican website with a report form 1996 extolling the virtues of the Reagan tax cuts. (FYI, Reagan's one of Reagan's "tax cuts" offset the lowering of income taxes with a major increase in corporate taxes).

The other thing is, the chunks you have quoted from the report tell us nothing since they do not include any information about how income distribution has changed over time. A reduction in upper tax brackets followed by an increase in tax receipts from upper income taxpayers doesn't mean one was caused by the other - that is a classic post hoc, ergo propter hoc fallacy. In fact, the concentration of of wealth in just the top 1% of households increased significantly from 1983 to 1995 (source)

I'm not saying undoing all of Reagan's tax policy would solve all our problems, but lifting a chunk out of a Republican memo doesn't really tell us anything, either.

This is certainly true now that Netflix is big into streaming, but I'm not sure that it was true when they were only doing mail delivery. I don't know Netflix history that well, but I do know that Redbox ran into a lot of opposition from studios precisely because they did not have licensing agreements - they would purchase DVDs off the shelf and stick them in vending machines. Under US copyright law, that is allowed (contrast with CDs or software, where it is not allowed). I would bet Netflix did not have licensing agreements with studios when it was just doing mail order delivery.

Probably the only reason the studios were willing to strike streaming license agreements with Netflix was because of its prior success with mail order delivery - they weren't getting as big a chunk of that cash as they wanted, and knew they couldn't ignore Netflix anymore.

That is very true. I've been using three for four or five years now, and I have always used two graphics cards to drive them.