Um, not that it's usually worthwhile to respond to Anonymous Cowards, but what the hell are you talking about, "pirated material"? The guy specifically licensed the photos to be used for "non-commercial" purposes. My question was whether my site, as described, qualified as "non-commercial" or not, under the terms of the license he used for the photos. If my site is "non-commercial," then if I were to use it, it would NOT be "pirated," because it would be an authorized use. If you wish to take the position that ANY ads makes a page "commercial," then say so directly and tell Creative Commons to incorporate that express statement in their license terms. If you read the link I posted, you'll see that even the CC researchers understand that their license terms are vague in this area. Sheesh...

See this discussion about the varied understandings of the term "non-commercial" as used by Creative Commons:

While it would take a more focused and exhaustive study to conclude that these seemingly fortunate attitudinal differences are correct, strong, and global, they do hint at rules of thumb for licensors releasing works under NC licenses and licensees using works released under NC licenses — licensors should expect some uses of their works that would not meet the most stringently conservative definition of noncommercial, and licensees who are uncertain of whether their use is noncommercial should find a work to use that does unambiguously allow commercial use

BoingBoing MAY be violating the terms of the license. But they may not be. The actual legal language of this particular clause of the Creative Commons license is fairly ambiguous, to my reading.

Here's the relevant definition (from CC ver. 3):

You may not exercise any of the rights granted to You in Section 3 above in any manner that is primarily intended for or directed toward commercial advantage or private monetary compensation. The exchange of the Work for other copyrighted works by means of digital file-sharing or otherwise shall not be considered to be intended for or directed toward commercial advantage or private monetary compensation, provided there is no payment of any monetary compensation in con-nection with the exchange of copyrighted works.

Is the use of the photo to illustrate a story "primarily intended for or directed toward commercial advantage"? My own blog has ads on it, but those ads have never paid me enough to even meet the expenses of hosting the blog. Would I be using the image for "commercial advantage" if I posted it on my blog?

Worse, the phrase "commercial use" has a fairly standard meaning in photography law, as the use of the image basically in an advertisement. Thus, when the National Enquirer runs a photo of some celebrity, that use is an "editorial" use rather than a "commercial" use; it illustrates the editorial story. They still have to pay the photographer ("non-commercial use" by itself is hardly enough to allow a copyright violation), but they don't have to pay the subjects of the photo anything... even though the whole point of running the photo is to sell more copies of the Enquirer, a for-profit organization. But if they wanted to use the very same photo in an ad for, say, a watch company advertising in the Enquirer, then that ad would be a "commercial use" of the photo, and they would have to have the permission of the subjects of the photo to use it for that purpose. Media companies are VERY familiar with that distinction, so if they see a "non-commercial use only" clause, then they will automatically assume that just means that you can't use it in an actual ad.

So when the CC non-commercial clause is used, does that mean "commercial" versus "editorial" as the law has defined those concepts in an important area of photography law? Or does it mean something entirely different? The definition should be MUCH more clear. As a lawyer, I wouldn't have a problem representing BoingBoing here, and I'm sure the vagueness of the clause would at the VERY least allow them to get off with only paying a nominal charge for the use of the images, and may very well result in them not having to pay a dime.

Go rant at Lawrence Lessig and the lawyers who drew up the Creative Commons license for not writing clearer license terms.

Dura-cell is PEOPLE! (said in best Charlton Heston voice)

At heart, the synchronization rights comes from the basic copyright itself. The copyright holder has the statutory legal right to prohibit or authorize any particular use of the song. However, the copyright statute itself does not distinguish between whether the music is copied by itself or synchronized with a motion picture. Both are equally prohibited without the consent of the copyright holder.

Over the years, as publishers tried to maximize their earnings and simplify licensing procedures, they created the idea of synchronization rights, and wrote those into their licensing agreements. So, for example, anybody who pays appropriate fees to a licensing agency such as BMI or ASCAP is buying the right to play the songs they are licensed to provide, but when you read the fine print, you will see that the publisher/owner of the copyright is licensing, through ASCAP to you, only the right to play the song itself in your bar or wherever, not the right to do anything else with it. The license is carefully written to not grant you the license to do other things with the music, such as uploading it, redistributing it to others, or synchronizing it with a motion picture and using it for that purpose. To do that, they sell you a different license which DOES include the synchronization rights, but doesn't include stuff in the ASCAP license.

Well, actually I use the earphones AND lock the keyboard. The top button does not hang up the call when the earphones are in use. You are correct, though, that the top button does hang up the call when the earphones aren't plugged in. My other workaround is just pressing the home key and opening Notes or some other simple, quiet app; that way it doesn't really matter if any keys are pressed.

The antenna issue hasn't bothered me a bit. But this problem affects me every day. Since I got my iPhone, I haven't had one day where at least one call wasn't accidentally disconnected, muted, or interrupted by touchtones as my ear hit various buttons on the keypad. There are a couple of workarounds (use the earphones, or lock the keyboard), but those take time to establish at the beginning of the call.

My bet is that this can be fixed with a simple software update, but I really don't see how Apple could possibly not have found this issue in their testing. Some reports I've seen suggest that the problem goes away if you put it in a case of some sort, so maybe Apple only tested it with those silly cases that made it look like a 3G when they sent it out in the wild for testing, and the case kept it from having the problem.

And it seems to me that they could combine the proximity sensor input with the accelerometer and gyroscope inputs. When you hold the phone within a certain range of angles AND the proximity sensor reads X, then turn off the touchscreen.

Well, the other way to look at it is that they used private e-mail to avoid violating the law prohibiting use of public e-mail accounts for conducting political business. Most folks who work for the White House have, for example, 2 cell phones. One is paid for by the taxpayer and is used when conducting official government business. The other is paid for by the party or by a campaign committee and is used when conducting political business which the government employee, by law, must do in their "private" time and using private, not government, resources.

Since the law expressly allows federal employees at that level to remain involved with the political process, so long as they don't use public resources to do so, I don't see how they can function without having a separate e-mail account just as they have a separate cell phone. The only legal issue is whether they are using that separate e-mail account properly for political business, or whether they are improperly using it to conduct official government business, which would be a violation of the law for circumventing the archiving and disclosure laws.

And yes, I took the same position with the last President as I do with this one, even though I really don't care for the current President.

I was always fond of "chaotic neutral" alignment, myself...

That's fine, but.... would you say the same thing if they were releasing the names of people who had signed a petition IN FAVOR of gay marriage, in response to a public records request from Fred "God Hates Fags" Phelps? How about a list of people signing a petition in favor of maintaing or increasing abortion rights?

I think the names are and should be public, but that has nothing to do with the issue for or against which they were campaigning. I'd say the same thing about petitions for any subject at all, not just those who are campaigning "to take away other peoples' rights." And, I recognize that we have a secret ballot for a reason, because sometimes there are those willing to do violence to accomplish political ends, and the safest way to protect our political rights from them is to ensure that they can't identify those who would vote them out of power.

I understand that line of argument. But it's not what my comment was addressing. The post by LabmdaWolf to which I replied was lamenting the change from the prior California system to the current open primary system. The prior California system was not the system you describe, but the classic party primary, then general election, first-past-the-post election. Had LamdaWolf complained that the new primary system doesn't make matters any better for the third parties, that might be a legitimate complaint. But LamdaWolf's actual complaint was that the new system was itself worse for third parties than the previous system, and that's not true.

It is simply not the case now that in the previous California system there was any common, regular, or even (to the best of my knowledge) once-in-a-blue-moon practice, in elections for state and national offices, for "moderate" third parties to be chosen in preference over extremists from the two major parties. The third party candidates were not, as a practical matter, viable before, and they remain, as a practical matter, not viable now. Changing the form of the election to the open primary did not change that.

Well, you omit 2 crucial facts about California. First, none of those 3rd parties getting onto the "general election" ballot had any chance of winning to begin with, correct? Second, ALL of those 3rd parties can participate equally in the new primary election, a non-partisan primary which results in the 2 highest vote getters, regardless of party, going to the general election.

Thus, if a 3rd party has sufficient support to have any chance of prevailing in the general election, it must certainly have sufficient support to come in first or second in the primary election, yes? Or are you seriously arguing that a 3rd party might be able to garner 51% of the vote when running against the 2 major party candidates, but can't manage to get about 30% of the people to vote for it in a wide-open primary election?

Not to go all insensitive clod on you, but.... When I was a kid, a member of my immediate family passed away. The newspaper printed the obituary and noted (against my dad's instructions) that the funeral would be in another town, in a distant part of the state. When we returned home several days later, we found that burglars had broken into the house while we were gone. Eventually it was confirmed that the burglars had read the obituaries, saw we would be out of town, and used that information to decide to rob us. So, there are very GOOD reasons for people who are doing nothing wrong to also not want the world at large to know their location.

I think AT&T is the main problem, not Apple. But what ticks me off is this happened LAST TIME, when they rolled out the 3G. Do their network people not plan ahead for such things? What's IS Apple's fault, though, is the fact that I have to keep re-entering my cell phone account information (cell #, billing zip, and last 4 of SSN) EVERY SINGLE TIME. The Apple page ought to be smart enough to queue that information and let the computers keep trying AT&T, then getting back to me once it finally has the information from the AT&T servers it needs for me to tell it what plan I want to select, etc. Seriously, it would have been nice if you could have pre-applied for the pre-application, so that they could have selected a much smaller database which could handle the load, and Apple could have already had on their servers the data they need about my account to process my freaking order.

Says who? Prove it. What tax dollars, how many, and to whom? There was a lot of companies in the late 90s went belly up and declared bankruptcy after laying a lot of fiber across the country. I'm not aware of them receiving any subsidies. And I'm sure not aware of any cell phone companies receiving significant subsidies. I seem to recall that most of the airwave frequencies used by cell phones was auctioned off by the federal government, so there's not even a "subsidy" there.